I was reading about things that have a significant influence on student outcomes, and I came across something rather interesting in the late Robert Slavin's blog.
While he was complaining about John Hattie's awful methodology, he off-handedly mentioned:
> If you are familiar with the What Works Clearinghouse (2007), or our own Best-Evidence Syntheses or Evidence for ESSA, you will know that individual studies, except for studies of one-to-one tutoring, almost never have effect sizes as large as +0.40, Hattie’s “hinge point.” This is because WWC, BEE, and Evidence for ESSA all very carefully screen individual studies. We require control groups, controls for pretests, minimum sample sizes and durations, and measures independent of the treatments. Hattie applies no such standards, and in fact proclaims that they are not necessary.
There's something very important in there - the value of one-on-one tutoring.
One of the interesting things about homeschooling is that it doesn't produce massively worse outcomes than traditional schooling; homeschooled students seem to come out about as well or slightly ahead of traditionally schooled students.
This seems to imply that trained teachers are almost useless, having virtually no impact at all on student performance.
However, if one-on-one tutoring has a very large effect size (greater than 0.4 standard deviations), then this might explain why these untrained teachers do so well - homeschooled students may indeed have much worse teachers, but because the advantage of having a one-on-one tutor is so large, it "cancels out".
It would be interesting to see what effect totally untrained teachers would have in the classroom, but it feels like no one is willing to run that experiment.
One question is how much teacher training has to do with becoming better at one-on-one instruction, and how much has to do with managing a classroom or grades or special needs kids or any of the other stuff that most homeschooling parents don't have to deal with?
People who think the Tetragrammaton was pronounced Yehowah rather than Yahweh: How comes it's hallelujah and Elijah rather than hallelujeho and Elijeh?
People who think the Tetragrammaton was pronounced Yahweh rather than Yehowah: How comes it's Yehoshua and Yehoḥanan rather than Yahshua and Yahḥanan?
It's not cheaper. Indeed, it's way more expensive than planting a field of corn and harvesting it. But it's more efficient in its use of energy, in a strict kJ in/out sense. However, since the corn can use the kJ raining down from the sky each day, while the chemical plant would (typically) need to burn fossil fuels to get its kJ, it's not clear the increased efficiency is of any use.
I mean, photosynthesis *is* making carbohydrate from CO2, but if doing it in a chemical plant is less expensive (and the same goes for everything else we need food for), then it probably winds up as fields of solar panels supplying reactors in the cities - the reactors are in the cities because transporting electricity is cheaper than transporting the products.
not sure those "fields of solar panels" would not turn out to be much more land-wasting and less energy-efficient over-all than "traditional" highly-efficient agro-business-"fields of gold". - With nuclear-fission ("power too cheap to meter") and a global population of 89 billion, those reactors for sugars/fats and probably proteins will be found in any mayor district of whatever that world-spreading town will be called.
I mean, if it's literally just carbohydrates, then you take out the staple calorie crops - rice in particular is very low in everything except calories; all the rest have at least some vitamins, although they're not necessarily good sources - and that's it (this is still a huge deal).
These days shelled white rice and white flour are carbohydrates only (starch). But traditional crops had way more nutrients and vitamins: whole grains rice, wheat etc. Wheat contains a whole lot of proteins - up to 20% (called gluten or wheat glue), lots of grains/seeds contain a whole lot of fats or oils. Parboiled rice is pressure cooked before shelling which presses the nutrients from the shell into the core. And so on
Peru's electricity is 220 volts, 60 hz, and Chile's electricity is 220 volts, 50 hz. How much of a problem does this pose to interoperability of electrical devices from one country to the other? A 10 hz difference doesn't sound like much.
Putting the political factors aside, how technically difficult would it be for one of the countries to adopt the other's electrical standard (Peru throttles down by 10 hz or Chile goes up by 10 hz)?
It doesn't seem to me to pose any problem for the end user. Almost nothing depends on the frequency of the AC. I suppose long ago there might have been some devices with clocks that would use the line frequency for timing, but I suspect those days are long gone, with the ubiquity of crystal-controlled oscillators.
However, the technical challenges for electricity generation and transmission are nontrivial. It's quite important, as you might imagine, for different sources and sinks of electrical voltage to have their voltage and phase matched up when they combine -- if you combined two AC voltages 180° out of phase, for example, then they would just cancel and the net result would be a reduction in power in the combined current. So the voltage and phase of all the power generators and transmission circuits has to be synchronized within a few tenths of a Hz:
The main interoperability problems will be with devices that incorporate clocks or timers. A digital clock made for 60Hz will run slow on 50Hz. Most computers, laptops, cellphones etc don't care about frequency. Anything with an AC motor will run slower, but most appliances have DC motors which shouldn't be affected.
When I was a kid my family moved from the US (110/60) to a country that had 220/50, and we took a number of household appliances and electronics with us. We could use transformers to step up the voltage, and pretty much everything worked fine - except we had no way to change the frequency, so anything with a clock (the VHS player) was always slow.
I am not sure if this is really related to your question, but 3-phase AC motor speeds depend on the frequency. So a motor running at 1800 RPM on 60 Hz will run at 1500 RPM on 50 Hz. Engineers plan for this based on the expected power supply frequency.
Most electronic devices (computers, TVs, phone chargers, etc) don’t care.
Turns out our special young sun is calming down and fits way more socially in at home, in school and at the grandparents home by taking SSRI every morning. Before he was starting to get engry some days every 10 Minutes over minor things. He is just taking taking half of my dose (5mg, 30kg weight) of escitaliprame and we didn't get a prescription for him after half a year of talking and testing with a local state-owned hospital specialized in psychiatry of kids and teenagers. The doctors just are trying to play safe for themselves and leaning not a millimeter out of the window by conducting a 4-week long test with a given SSRI medication. They told us the rules in our country demand a year long talk and behavioural therapy as a first step and a SSRI only as the sexond, parallel step. This would mean year long stress for the sun and us parents.
So now the question for us parents is: how can we go forward an legalize his medication without getting sued by a doctor following strictly the books.
In our country there is 1 SSRI prescribable for kids from an age of 8. We heard there should exist some children's doctors doing prescribing of SSRI. But how to find, approach and talk with them?
"What do doctors know, ho-ho-ho, I'll just share my prescription with my young child, going by guess and by God, and if it makes his liver explode, so what? You can't get any child quieter than a dead child!"
Ah, you sir, are the fuckhead. Marcel is a loving and kind parent who is trying to thread a course through a very imperfect world.
Have you, Deiseach, ever been prescribed a psychoactive drug. If so, you may already know what I'm about to tell you. Doctors are prescribing these powerful drugs "by guess and by God". "Let's try Wellbutrin for six weeks and see how it goes."
What age is the child? Escitalopram is not prescribed for those under the age of 12 years. There has been a safety study done on dosing children ages 7-11:
"On March 19, 2009, escitalopram was approved for the treatment of MDD in adolescents 12 to 17 years old. Safety and effectiveness have been established in adolescents 12 to 17 years old for the treatment of MDD. Maintenance efficacy is supported from extrapolation of data from adult studies along with comparisons with racemic citalopram pharmacokinetic parameters in adults and adolescents. Safety and effectiveness have not been established in pediatric patients
less than 12 years old with MDD. Safety and effectiveness have not been established in pediatric patients less than 18 years of age with GAD. Adverse events were generally similar to those observed in adults."
There are side effects:
"Lexapro is not approved for use in children in adolescents. When taken by pediatric populations, side effects can include: increased thirst, muscle twitching, nose bleeds, difficult urination, heavy menstrual periods, and slowed growth rate. For children or adolescents treated with Lexapro, your physician should check vital statistics and evaluate height and weight. If any problems are found, your doctor may recommend discontinuing treatment."
And there seems to be only one drug licenced to treat anxiety in children 7 years of age and older:
"For childhood anxiety disorders, only one medication, duloxetine, has received FDA approval and can be prescribed “on label” for children 7 years of age and older with generalized anxiety disorder."
Granted, Marcel doesn't live in the USA so his home country may allow any and every kind of medication, but I'm betting it has *some* restrictions around who can give medication to children and what kind.
Escitalopram is for major depressive disorder and anxiety. This does not sound like what Marcel is describing: "angry every day every ten minutes over minor things". The doctors they were attending advised against drugging up the kid until after a year of other interventions had not worked.
But our friend here knows better, and now the kid is sedated into a state of docility, he's not a problem at home, in school, or at granny's house. Previous generations used to achieve the same effect with opium or alcohol for children.
"Loving and kind parents trying to thread a course through a very imperfect world" kept the charlatans peddling Miracle Mineral Solution/Supplement in business by ignoring what the medical professionals were telling them about their children with autism, and when the force-feeding their kids with chlorine dioxide resulted in the kids vomiting up bloody shreds of their digestive systems, the parents were convinced these were the "worms" alleged to cause autism and were convinced the treatment was working. Being "loving and kind" did not prevent them from doing severe harm to their children.
So yeah: he's a fuckhead for ignoring the doctors, you're a fuckhead for apologia for harming kids under the guise of "but the parents love them".
All the prescribing of anti-depressants for children is assumed to be done on medical advice and under medical supervision. Even for ordinary ailments, you are not supposed to share your prescription medication with another adult, or give them tablets you have not finished taking. "It works okay for me, so it must be okay for my kid" is *not* a good rule of thumb, and we would heavily censure any father who decided that a glass of whiskey or XXX porn videos were okay for their young kid. I'm on a rake of medications, if I had young kids I sure as hell would not decide "well this might help them with their own problems" and start sharing my prescriptions.
I would think your main legal risk is whatever exists in your country that functions as a child welfare agency. Most would probably have significant concerns about you sharing your psychiatric meds with your kid on your own initiative, without a doctor's prescription, especially if there is some specific statute laying down conditions for child use of that particular medication. In most US states the child welfare agencies are a nightmare with which to deal, and once you come to their attention it's very hard to escape completely, so I would not do this except under conditions of great need.
Thanks for your perspective. That's exactly our situation. Guidelines are pretty first world-like strict for medication of kids. But all that is with the background of 1) normal average circumstances 2) the idea that doing something actively which later could turn out bad with 1% chance is perceived as 10x worse as just doing nothing and bad things happen with 10% chance.
Till late 50's, early 60's lots of children were treated very badly in this countty - like some protectionless groups of adults as well. So now we have the opposite situation. Lots of professionell personal is very reluctant to lean out to much of the window just to play safe (for them). My wife is a teacher in a private school for special teenagers with ADHS, Autism, Asperger and more who were kicked out of public schools. She tells a lot if heart breaking stories how these kids suffered because just nobody tried the obvious, started to connect with these kids and just ask, what's up. Just today a teenage boy, who is doing nothing in school since months each lesson told her, that he's woken up every morning at 4:30am by his shift working parenrs, then sitting in front of the TV till 8am, staring at the wall in school till 4pm and being awake till 11pm in the night. This boy foreseeable will be a totally different 2.0 version of himself after just sleeping full 8 hours a couple of days.
I am sure this is the right place to pose a question. If one takes the entire span of years that the universe has been around, whatever billion figure that is and were to reframe that period of time as a 24 hour day, then what would the average human lifespan correspond to as fractions of seconds?
I was musing that there might be some sort of analogy made between that and subatomic particles.
It appears that a typo has survived on one of the Hoover Dam's towers without ever being commented on (at least on the internet). Is the person who asked the question correct that this is a typo?
I like the gracious sentiment of the inscription. I learned something about early English verb suffixes and I bookmarked an interesting spot on Stack Exchange. Many thanks Mr... uh Anonymous.
So the progression over time would be "we buildeth" --> "we builden" --> "we build"? Still seems like the Hoover dam inscription is just an error, then.
I’m sure this isn’t an original observation, but -
lmao AI learned how to do art (clip+Some GAN, TADNE, etc) before it learned to code and learned to operate mechanical moving robots. Take that ... everyone’s guesses about that beforehand
For some definitions of "art" all that an AI had to do was create a visual medium of any kind, based on any inputs. I enjoy some art, but the field as a whole is way too easy to gimmick because what we call art can vary so much without good explanation (to a layman at least). Asking an AI to create a masterpiece Rembrandt-level painting without copying Rembrandt would be more interesting than this (https://www.cnn.com/style/article/artificial-intelligence-ai-art/index.html) which apparently involved taking actual pictures of famous paintings as part of the AI programming. As a real painting of a real thing, it's terrible. The eyes and face are all messed up, the coloring is off, etc. As "art" it can be considered good as some kind of abstract thing.
Try to write some code where you fudge the instructions because that's more interesting, and you'll see why it took AI much longer to be able to do it.
but I grabbed https://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Power-Chinas-Twenty-first-Century-ebook/dp/B00BH0VU4W/ from scholars stage, and it looks a bit to be what you want -“ Through a series of lively and absorbing portraits of iconic modern Chinese leaders and thinkers, two of today’s foremost specialists on China provide a panoramic narrative of this country’s rise to preeminence that is at once analytical and personal. How did a nation, after a long and painful period of dynastic decline, intellectual upheaval, foreign occupation, civil war, and revolution, manage to burst forth onto the world stage with such an impressive run of hyperdevelopment and wealth creation—culminating in the extraordinary dynamism of China today?
Scholars stage is also a china related blog, not really economic though
Ronald Coase's final book, coauthored with Ning Wang, is _How China Became Capitalist_ and very interesting. There is a long review of it up on my web page:
The book that made me emotionally grok the opening of the Chinese recovery was "A Chinese Life" by Li Kunwu. It covers Li's experiences growing up in China from 1955 to about 2005. He includes several revealing vignettes about how ordinary Chinese people navigated the change from planned economy to open economy: how some got rich, and others couldn't handle losing the "iron ricebowl" they were promised and were unsuited to the life of an entrepreneur. It doesn't have much in the way of statistics, but it gives an excellent emotional understanding of how much life changed for poor and middle class Chinese.
palladium mag for articles on China, although they’re not very central / comprehensive, they have a unique approach - just fun to read IMO
For the economic development, I’ve heard how Asia works, although it’s about all of Asia and I haven’t read it and it seems like the sort of unifying large scale book that’ll miss a lot
not really the best person to answer this one tbh, but in case that’s interesting
>The human race will run out of time before it runs out of space to develop.
Not with any significant growth rate, it won't (and I'm not seeing fertility staying below 2 forever, at least not without draconian state intervention; subcultures with high fertility and high retention exist (see: Amish), and once you get to biological immortality and removing menopause, the "I want a million babies" people start being a very much non-negligible contribution as well). 0.1% growth for a million years is a multiplier of 1.1 * 10^434, which is absurdly greater than the amount of matter within a million lightyears (or indeed the observable universe).
The big exception is if FTL is possible - more specifically, if you can use FTL to go to a place for the first time (as opposed to, say, FTL wormholes that have to be tugged places at STL). Estimates for the size of the actual universe are incredibly variable due to our inability to directly observe it, but the larger guesses such as "10^10^10^122" and "infinite" would definitely give us more Lebensraum than we could use.
In terms of birth rate - i would recommend anyone here, especially long time posters who are smart and very skilled, have lots of kids - but I’m just not sure what LP happen in the future as technology evolved and radically changes more, so idk about future predictions of childbearing rates at all
Also consider sperm donation, although I think personally raising children has a large effect that isn’t seen in the heckin twin studies because nobody actually does it properly
But I say that because despite adopting some goals that would heavily increase local birth rate, it seems like the smart folks still are adopting them less than the, well, not, and that seems to hold within most groups I can think of. But I’m not even sure the effect of that will be that great, because again social stuff and technology effects continue to change and accelerate and we respond to them late often
You might find some interest in a very old piece of mine, in which I tried to estimate whether the net externalities from having one more child were positive or negative and concluded that the results were so uncertain that I could not sign the sum.
That was back when the thread of population played the same role in the popular discourse that climate does now, the looming threat that all the experts knew was hanging over us. What happened since then was the precise opposite of the predictions — population in poor countries continued to grow, calories per capita in poor countries went up instead of down, poverty in poor countries went down instead of up.
It is always possible that the predictions were correct, just off by fifty years or so — but the fact that the predictions were made with confidence should be a reason to lower one's faith in both the arguments and the people who made them.
>>I suggest imagining that your readers are the prospective parents thinking of a third child, and to address the motives that are important to them.<<
I'm not trying to convince parents they should not have a third child. Fertility is declining rapidly already (everywhere but Africa). With many persons having one or no child, there is certainly space for some to have three.
The suggestion to try to imagine my readers more clearly is right on.
I find the article itself to be high in speculation and low on grounded fact. It covers a lot of topics that may or may not be related, especially with the 10 billion humans living in space and the paragraphs after that. I would recommend sticking to your basic points about the need for a limit on the numbers of humans and determining what the correct number is or should be.
Right now your article is a bit weak on justification for reducing the number of people, and your proposed means is already in effect. You don't suggest any alternatives to peaking at 9.7 billion (which you argue is far too high) and gradually decreasing from there. The timetable, according to your article, for when that will happen is also far too late to achieve the necessary corrections you mention in your opening paragraphs. After reading it, I find myself unsure what you are suggesting (other than very speculative space habitats we couldn't possibly work on now). Lowering our population actually makes it much harder to achieve space colonization. We would never be able to spread out even in our own solar system with a reproductive rate below replacement. We would need to be far above replacement, actually. Without any intervening changes, you go from a current bad situation to colonizing all of existence. Other than speculating about the future, what is the purpose of your article?
Some other notes -
You mention growing technology, a steady state economy, and growing to 10+ billion people living in space. A steady state economy doesn't fit at all with the other two. Any meaningful technological growth will expand the economy. A steady state economy will not permit expansion into space (or people can starve as you transition resources to moving other people into space, which makes the problem mentioned above about not enough people even worse).
>>I would recommend sticking to your basic points about the need for a limit on the numbers of humans and determining what the correct number is or should be.<<
I think I will break out the space part to a separate article with a link. That would give me room to expand on the optimum population part. People interested in space exploration can follow the link.
>>I find the article itself to be high in speculation and low on grounded fact. <<
Could you give me some examples? Which parts are most speculative?
>>Right now your article is a bit weak on justification for reducing the number of people, and your proposed means is already in effect. <<
What is your personal opinion? Do you think 8-10 billion is sustainable indefinitely? I would like to reference some experts who agree with that if you know of some.
If you believe 8-10 B is NOT sustainable, what facts convince you of this?
>>You don't suggest any alternatives to peaking at 9.7 billion (which you argue is far too high) and gradually decreasing from there.<<
There is no acceptable alternative. A world wide pandemic is not reducing the population. Nuclear war would work. If we abandon the common assumption that the population of Africa is certain to triple, the peak could happen sooner and decline faster. Perhaps I should say that.
>>The timetable, according to your article, for when that will happen is also far too late to achieve the necessary corrections you mention in your opening paragraphs.<<
I believe it's going to be very rough but the human race will survive.
I'm saying:
* We need to reduce the Earth's population.
* The population is already too large which will cause great suffering.
* The population will begin shrinking in this century.
* The population will shrink for centuries.
* Eventually the Earth will be such a pleasant place that the population will stop shrinking.
Which statements do you disagree with?
>>After reading it, I find myself unsure what you are suggesting<<
I think that things will go better if we understand what is going on. For example some (many?) people will be alarmed when the population starts to fall and try to prevent the fall. In fact this is exactly what we need.
I can work on clarifying why I am writing and what I am suggesting.
The history of humanity is filled with people saying that there are too many people, followed by periods of rapid population growth when things worked just fine. Malthus was wrong on all of his specific predictions, so I feel the need to question his underlying assumptions. Intuitively he made sense, but he was flat out wrong.
I don't know if 10 billion is too many, or if the number is actually much larger or much smaller. By physical space, we could fit far more people. Something I heard on SSC a few years back was a comment that we could colonize inhospitable parts of Earth, like deserts and Antarctica, far easier than living in space stations or even on Mars. If we could make a sustainable space station for 20 million people, we could easily find a way to live where nobody lives right now, and have the benefit of easier travel and plentiful oxygen. If we can grow crops in space, we can grow crops in the Sahara.
I'm neutral on whether we should allow populations to decline on their own, and adamantly against trying to force them down. Declining populations have many medium term (50-100 years) effects on economies and family life, which are non-negligible problems. 300 years of declining population would create some very weird and disturbing situations, and I think an actively declining population could easily lead to wars, resource scarcity, and massive social adjustments that would be hard to predict. That they are happening naturally without overt government coercion may be reason to leave it alone, but places like South Korea are going to struggle immensely over the next few generations if they lose half their population per generation. The younger generations will be burdened with caring for the older, with even fewer people to help below that. Infrastructure will go into disrepair and eventually collapse, including infrastructure we currently consider essential. Not that these are unsolvable issues, but I want to be clear that population decline is not an automatic good. We could easily see a weakened South Korea get conquered by a North Korea with high birth rates after a few generations. Right now North Korea is in no shape to do anything, but we're talking about a pretty radical change.
"Indefinitely" is a tough word, because it implies a steady state, which we've rarely had and certainly not in modern times. Could we find ways to sustain 10 billion or more people on Earth with reasonable qualify of life? I certainly think it's quite possible, especially over the 300 year timeframe you are talking about. And I do believe the population will need to level off at some point, as there really will come a point when it's not possible for the planet to hold more people. For all I really know that point might be 40 billion people, with most of them living in underwater colonies or in the sky like the Jetsons, or something else we never thought about.
My response here is very speculative, but I think in the same way that your article is speculative. You gesture at lots of possibilities, and cite people who say that those things may/will happen, but the scientific justification for your view feels weak, and based heavily on Malthusian thinking.
I generally disagree with * points 1, 2, and 5, with some uncertainty on 3 and 4. Not that it's impossible that you are right, just that I am at least skeptical.
If you added a section (perhaps instead of your spacefaring section) that offered some thoughts on how to deal with a declining population and accept it, that would be a pretty solid ending to your article. Right now countries are looking at the population crunch (think Social Security in the US, and how it's funded - like pretty much all programs to care for the elderly) and how difficult it will be to handle those problems in the timeframe we're talking about. The reason a country or individual might push back is due to those concerns. Who wants to live in a country with 80 million retired people and 20 million kids being supported by 40 million working people?
I'm not sure I'm following your question or it's purpose, so feel free to elaborate as needed. In regards to #3 and #4, China losing population would certainly be a contributing factor in my thinking. My skepticism about those two points is more in line with "non-Western" countries having growing populations now. It's easy to draw a straight line from current trends and make a prediction, it's much harder to predict second-order effects. Maybe a declining 1st World population encourages other countries to increase population such that there is no overall decline. As I said, I'm quite uncertain about that, but open to the possibility. If that were true, it would affect our planning and what we recommend for people to do. If, for instance, 3rd World countries would see population increases that play off of declines in the 1st World, but would naturally reduce population growth if the 1st World held steady, then I would argue that we should encourage growth in the 1st World, where there is already abundant infrastructure and the means to care for these people, rather than encourage growth in the 3rd World and spend enormous amounts of money and time tearing down excess infrastructure in one part of the world to move it to another. Of course, if there's no relationship on overall population, then encouraging growth in the 1st World could end up being a bad idea.
Let's go all the way back to one of my basic assumptions: that we don't want a slowly dying natural world which I equate with a rate of extictions above the background rate.
Now I could be completely wrong about that perhaps the majority of humans don't care about extinctions.
Rate of extinctions above background rate doesn't equal "slowly-dying natural world". Nature isn't analogous to a person where you can talk about "how healthy" the person is and where sufficient unhealth results in total death; ecosystems can be thrown into chaos, but there are almost always winners as well as losers.
There are obvious scenarios - possibly-anthropogenic scenarios, even - in which the natural world would be destroyed. #1 is humanity reaching Kardashev 1+ and consuming all the light that powers nature (there are some things that wouldn't immediately die from lack of energy, like submarine-volcano ecosystems, but it's not obvious whether those could survive in the long-term without sun-powered life recycling nutrients and in any case that's a much-reduced biosphere). #2 is a true Runaway Greenhouse, in which the temperature goes up to 500 degrees, the water boils off into space, all organic matter on the surface burns and the planet becomes essentially a copy of Venus with sulphuric acid clouds - evolution has constraints (e.g. you can't evolve to not use DNA/RNA/proteins) that do not permit survival in those temperatures or in nearly-pure sulphuric acid. But these are specific apocalyptic scenarios with an obvious nonsurvivable criterion, not a vague "the environment being stretched beyond what it can bear".
Mass extinctions have happened a lot of times before; they change the distribution of species and in the short-term the number of species, but the actual amount of living matter on the planet changes only for the briefest instant - Moloch doesn't leave pennies lying on the ground.
I find the link to extinctions in 1800 somewhat dubious, as that's the timeframe where we starting cataloging species. Prior to that we didn't have a systematic approach, so it's much harder to estimate how many species were actually dying out (especially in places Europeans wouldn't have had access). We now discover far more species going extinct, and surmise that humans have some/most/all to do with it, but that may be less true than we think - we could just be that much better at cataloging. We have also discovered tens of thousands of species that went extinct before humans existed - how many more went extinct and didn't leave any records behind? The more we study the more species we find that went extinct without any human help. I don't trust that our understanding of "background rate of extinction" is accurate.
Putting that aside, I am concerned on some levels with human encroachment on animal habitats, and definitely believe that humans can have a devastating effect on certain ecosystems. I think that most people have moderate levels of concern about animal extinctions, but correctly recognize that there isn't much we can do about it and maybe not a lot that humans are doing to cause it. Some specific examples, like African elephants, are directly attributable to humans. Random insect/bird/rodent no one has ever seen #0192881 probably isn't. I have a real problem with people killing elephants. I don't actually care about random insects dying out. Maybe I should, but I leave the burden of proof on those that say I should. Too many of those species die for me to know anything about them all, and it's a tall ask that I try.
The idea that we have a "slowly dying world" does not appear to me to be correct. Overall there are many more square miles of land where there are few to no humans than there are of tightly clustered humans. Those tight clusters of urbanization seem overwhelming to people in them or close to them, but they represent a pretty small portion of the planet. A quick Google shows 3% of the surface is urbanized. Which means 97% isn't, including almost all of the oceans. Sure, human waste shows up all across the Pacific, but it's more of a perceived blight than an actual devastation. Go visit some truly rural areas, and you can find land that hasn't seen a human in years, with almost no human interaction. It's quite liberating. Or check out Chernobyl, which within my lifetime was a busy industrial center, a nuclear disaster, and is now a wildlife refuge full of nature. Nature isn't so weak or beaten as many want to claim.
>>Random insect/bird/rodent no one has ever seen #0192881 probably isn't. I have a real problem with people killing elephants. I don't actually care about random insects dying out. Maybe I should, but I leave the burden of proof on those that say I should. Too many of those species die for me to know anything about them all, and it's a tall ask that I try.<<
Even before I read your response I was considering focussing on mammals as a proxy for the natural world that I am concerned about. (Because as you explain, we can relate to mammals much better than insects.)
For example I could ask the reader: would you care if a thousand years from now there was only a dozen species of mammals left in the wild on Earth?
Or ... One Billion Americans by Matthew Ysglesias. if you want to not have industrial society (and its future), a billion is high. If you want technology, what’s wrong with today, we can just use even more of the planet and make even more peeps
Why not nature AND humans? As a human I'm very much in favor of that. The question is: What would an American Bison think? When there were some 30 million bisons in North America in 1400, were they pining for humans? Or were they quite satisfied to exist without them indefinitely,?
And since I have no way of knowing whether a bison can contemplate near extinction at the hands of humans or certain extinction from a comet impact, the question is more like: What would a bison with a human brain think?
Contemplating this question as Peter/Bison Advocate, I would need to know what kind of humans are we talking about? Humans that would shoot bison from a passing train in order to crush native peoples? Or humans that would set aside vast areas of the continent so that bison and many other species could survive and also be prepared to protect the planet from a comet strike?
I (Peter/Bison Advocate) could embrace the presence of the latter type of human.
>A world fertility rate of 1.4 would result in 1 billion persons on Earth around the year 2300.
I'm pretty sure all of the problems related to resource extraction and pollution will be solved by 2100 and be well on the way by much sooner than that. There are much easier ways to solve these problems than depopulating the world.
It would also be worthwhile keeping one foot in reality while thinking up ideas to solve problems.
When you say "the technology is there" do you imagine the solution is easy? If it easy, one would expect to happen quickly. Certainly within a decade. You don't expect that, do you? Because you recognize that there is a lot more involved than just technology.
I'm thinking the planet will begin to cool sometime in the 22nd century because of a shrinking population. Do you expect cooling sooner? When?
> One might reasonably demand to know: of what use are humans to nature?
I don't see why this is reasonable. "nature" is an abstract concept, like "life" or "evolution" or "welfare"; it doesn't exist as an entity in reality and so cannot have feelings. Perhaps you mean animals, like hens and foxes. Perhaps these have feelings, but in nature their existence is usually meagre, and one will eagerly kill the other without a second thought. Humans are animals too, and they sometimes kill each other as well, but at least they have the potential to make lasting truces. This is one reason to keep humans around. Another is our unusual ability to make discoveries, so that perhaps one day we will scientifically unravel the Hard Problem of Consciousness. A third reason is that if you decide not to keep humans around, they're not going to take kindly to your decision and the resulting animosity will be unproductive.
Which leads me point out that even if 2 billion is better than 7 or 10, it's going to be ridiculously hard to get everyone on board with a depopulation plan.
Luckily I don't think depopulation is necessary. First, let's talk energy: we can do 100% clean energy, lower pollution and stop global warming, no problem. Especially if we accept nuclear energy: it consumes very little land for the electricity produced, and all the waste produced in a plant's lifetime can easily fit on the site of the power plant itself. Moreover, long-lived waste (which is mostly plutonium) is nuclear fuel that can be burned to produce much shorter-lived waste. Nuclear energy was once affordable (http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter9.html) and could be affordable again if we chose to make it so, even without new technology. But by using new technology, the outlook is even better. Using Molten Salt Reactors, today's ultra-high safety standards can be achieved at a much lower cost (and with more legibility: how the safety works in an MSR is easier to understand than in a traditional reactor with its more complex and often probabilistic set of safety systems.)
I also find the possibility of Enhanced Geothermal Systems interesting because they can use some of the same technology as unconventional oil and gas drilling, making them a smart thing to include in a clean energy transition plan.
Second, food. Much of Earth's land area grows crops to feed animals that humans eat. Plant-based meat (and lab-grown meat) should require dramatically less land. I expect that switching over to this new meat supply will allow Earth to sustainably accommodate 10 billion humans at the same level of food consumption seen in the developed world. In addition, there are now various greenhouse and vertical-farming techniques that could increase Earth's carrying capacity even further.
Third, housing and other buildings. Not that much of Earth's land area is consumed (as a percent) for buildings for Earth's 7 billion humans, so I don't expect 10 billion to be a problem either.
I am optimistic that we can switch to sustainable living as time goes on. The trick to it is convincing people to work in reasonable ways toward that goal; e.g. carbon taxes have been really hard to pass in some places. But see Ted Halstead presenting a Republican vision for a "viral" carbon fee & dividend that naturally tends to spread to other nations via economic pressure: https://www.ted.com/talks/ted_halstead_a_climate_solution_where_all_sides_can_win
On the other hand, I don't see how space travel can be sustainable within a few centuries, due to the need for inefficient rockets, because it's so darn hard to build anything more efficient. But of course, maybe there will be a breeakthrough. Regardless, a few of us could still visit other star systems within a few centuries, but only a few. Also, there's a good chance AGIs will visit other stars before we do, or kill us all, or both.
>>But see Ted Halstead presenting a Republican vision for a "viral" carbon fee & dividend that naturally tends to spread to other nations via economic pressure:
"On the other hand, I don't see how space travel can be sustainable within a few centuries, due to the need for inefficient rockets, because it's so darn hard to build anything more efficient. "
A space elevator is much more efficient and should be doable with possible improvements in the relevant technology, mostly a much stronger cable than we can now make.
Like you I am very much a proponent of new reactor designs. I should sympathize with the anti-nuke folks since I was one myself. I can identify two turning points for me. One was when a pro-nuke friend clued me in to pebble bed reactors which exhaust the radioactivity in each "pebble". Another was Chernobyl or rather the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone which turned out to be a nature preserve. I should mention a third which is the growing doubts about the "linear no threshold" model of radioactivity impacts.
Pebble beds are interesting and I don't know a lot about them, but what do you mean about "exhausting radioactivity"? I don't think there's any way not to end up with used fuel that is significantly radioactive for 500 years or more. [edit: not sure, 400 years-ish may be doable]
The key pieces of information for me about Chernobyl were that
(1) the reactor had design "flaws" that don't exist in *any* western reactor (I put "flaws" is in quotes because the most important flaws appear to be intentional decisions to achieve low cost, though some flaws were just bad engineering I guess),
(2) the 4000 or 9000 deaths referred to in two key studies are upper limits on cancer cases for all the decades after Chernobyl assuming the linear no-threshold, so actually it's a small disaster compared to the Banqiao Dam disaster, which in turn is a very small disaster compared to the ordinary air-pollution deaths we get from burning coal.
(3) Plus there's the recent paper concluding that relocation was unjustified for 75% of nearby residents, IIRC (and virtually all residents around Fukushima)
I haven't been able to work out if scientists are close to a consensus about linear no-threshold; depending on my search queries on Google scholar I've been able to get lots of papers saying LNT is dead, or else a mix of "LNT" and "no LNT" papers. Regardless, there's a great 1990 book by the late Bernard Cohen: http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/BOOK.html
As the book notes, it doesn't make that much difference if LNT is true because of how small the risks are to begin with.
David, I have no interest in discussing PBRs at this level of detail. I said:
>>One was when a pro-nuke friend clued me in to pebble bed reactors which exhaust the radioactivity in each "pebble".<<
Try to forget I said that. Try this instead:
One turning point was when a pro-nuke friend clued me in to pebble bed reactors which cannot melt down and create nuclear waste that if safe and simple to store.
If you want to pick at that sentence, please don't do it with me.
The irony here is that PBRs were not even the main point in my re-evaluation of nuclear power. The point then and now is that I realized my opposition to nuclear power was focused on a single design (pressurized water reactor) that is essentially 80 years old. (Research began during WW II.) I was ignorant of the many new possibilities: PBRs, thorium reactors, traveling-wave reactors, molten salt reactors, small modular reactors, etc.
At some point I realized I had discounted the power of technological development. I was acting as if humanity had encountered an unsolvable problem.
It's sad that the nuclear power problem became so convoluted and lost along a development and deployment pathway that is so frustrating (particularly in the US).
Now if you want to talk about Universal Basic Income in excruciating detail, I'm your man.
What was eye-opening for me about the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is that so many animals are thriving including 100 rare species. Thriving much better than before the reactor explosion. This means that the presence of humans is more toxic than the presence of radioactivity (for wild animals).
This realization launched two independent lines of thought for me.
1) The negative effects of radioactivity are greatly overstated.
2) For wild animals to thrive, one must remove most humans.
There are exceptions of course. Coyotes are adapting to the presence of humans. However it would seem that less desirable wild animals (like Norway rats, pigeons, and grackles) are best at adapting.
>what do you mean about "exhausting radioactivity"?
>>In most stationary pebble-bed reactor designs, fuel replacement is continuous. Instead of shutting down for weeks to replace fuel rods, pebbles are placed in a bin-shaped reactor. A pebble is recycled from the bottom to the top about ten times over a few years, and tested each time it is removed. When it is expended, it is removed to the nuclear-waste area, and a new pebble inserted.<<
As long as there is useful radioactivity left, a pebble continues to be recycled into the reactor. "Exhausting radioactivity" may be overstating the case. I'm sure used up pebbles would still set off a geiger counter. But the level of radioactivity would be much lower. Presumably spent pebbles would no longer be capable of criticality which would make on-site storage simple.
The problem is that there isn't really any such thing as "useful radioactivity". Well, not in the power-generating context, at least. What is useful is nuclear potential energy, of fissile isotopes. That's not the same thing as radioactivity; the most useful fissile isotopes for power generation are only weakly radioactive.
But extracting the useful nuclear potential energy, results in a whole lot of *useless* radioactivity. Isotopes that are *not* fissile, but are still intensely radioactive. Which, as David Piepgrass notes, you can't turn off. Nor can you run it through your reactor for a few more cycles and turn it into useful energy. It's just going to sit around for years to millennia gumming up the works and doing damage to any thing or any one in the vicinity.
There is no sort of nuclear fission power plant that doesn't produce some very intensely, dangerously radioactive waste that you're going to deal with. Saying "well, burn it again until we get out all the energy and it's harmless!", is like saying we should take a pile of arsenic-laden ash from a coal powerplant and burn it again; it just doesn't work that way.
That doesn't mean that nuclear fission power can't be used safely. It can, and it's an essential part of any realistic plan to address global warming. But you'll damage the credibility of that argument if you try to handwave away the waste-disposal problem by saying pebble bed reactors will just burn it all up.
>>But extracting the useful nuclear potential energy, results in a whole lot of *useless* radioactivity. Isotopes that are *not* fissile, but are still intensely radioactive. Which, as David Piepgrass notes, you can't turn off. Nor can you run it through your reactor for a few more cycles and turn it into useful energy.<<
John, do you disagree with this statement?
>One turning point was when a pro-nuke friend clued me in to pebble bed reactors which cannot melt down and create nuclear waste that is safe and simple to store.
By "safe" I mean the hot isotopes are safely bound within the removed pebbles (chemically isolated from the environment) and the fissile potential of the pebbles has been reduced to the point that you can store them in close proximity to each other. Both of these attributes make the spent pebbles simple to store. No pools needed. They are of course quite radioactive which must be allowed for.
I am quite aware that Uranium and Plutonium are only weakly radioactive. Radioactivity is inversely related to half-life.
Uranium-235 700,000,000 years
Uranium-238 4,500,000,000 years
Plutonium-239 24,100 years
Strontium-90 30 years
Cesium-137 30 years
And decaying isotopes in active pebbles would indeed contribute to the heat being generated in a PBR.
Please note that the phrase "full burnup" came from the DOE, not me.
I said:
>My basic conception that the "pebbles" pass through the reactor multiple times until the fission potential is depleted is correct.
I am hoping that ignoring true main points while picking on unimportant but imprecisely-stated details is the exception rather than the norm in this forum. And the next time I discourse with you and David I will assume that this is a hostile process and I must watch my words.
2. In spent (or partially spent) fuel, the overwhelming majority of radioactivity comes from fission products (the new elements created by splitting atoms). Since pebble beds are a kind of solid-fuel reactor, the fission products stay within the pebbles.
3. The radioactivity can't be turned off, you just have to wait a few years for it to become less extreme, and then about 500 years for the fission product radioactivity to die down to levels below uranium ore.
4. Unless the reactor is designed to (i) burn waste, or (ii) be refueled exclusively from thorium, its spent fuel will always have substantial levels of plutonium isotopes, the isotopes people complain will be radioactive for 10,000+ years. I expect that, typically, bebble beds are neither waste burners nor thorium breeders.
This is non-obvious, as the pebbles are covered in graphite, just what you don't want for the purpose of avoiding criticality. Graphite enables fission; it's basically having part of the reactor merged with the fuel. It certainly lowers the fuel density though; one document tells me "each fresh fuel pebble contains only 9 grams of low enriched uranium in a spherical fuel pebble having a mass of 200 grams" (https://inldigitallibrary.inl.gov/sites/sti/sti/4374060.pdf)... that's under 1 gram of U-235 fuel at 9.6% enrichment. The same document states that spent fuel still has 2.5% enrichment (so, 0.225 grams), much higher than natural uranium (0.7%). But maybe they only take the fuel out when it's no longer possible to achieve criticality. It is also stated that spent fuel will have 0.154 grams of plutonium. The radioactivity-per-unit-mass will be lower than conventional fuel mainly because it will have dramatically more graphite than anything else.
>>The reactor continuously refuels by adding fresh pebbles daily in at the top, as older ones are discharged from the bottom of the core. Each pebble remains in the core for a little more than three years and are circulated through the core up to six times to achieve full burnup. The spent fuel is then placed directly into dry casks and stored on-site—without the need for interim or active cooling.<<
I never represented myself as an expert on reactors of any kind. My basic conception that the "pebbles" pass through the reactor multiple times until the fission potential is depleted is correct.
David, thank you for your extensive comments! I mean to address one point at a time.
>>"nature" is an abstract concept, <<
By "nature" I mean "the natural world" and by that I mean everything living on our planet excluding humans and things created by humans. In my mind that is a physical concept (has a mass).
Is that acceptably clear? Do I need to remove further ambiguity? What would be a better term for this?
So when I write:
> One might reasonably demand to know: of what use are humans to nature?
What I mean is:
What's wrong with an Earth (living planet) with no humans on it?
Well, to me it can only be the life that matters, particularly consciousnesses; no one worries about "harming Mars" if we move in there. The relative importance of different life forms is arguable and different people have different opinions, so you should probably design your writing for these different audiences.
There are also people who seem to think Earth itself is valuable quite apart from the life forms on it, so that even if there were no animals whatsoever it would still "matter" somehow. But people don't come right out and say it that way, they only imply it, so I wonder if they haven't actually thought through the matter. As a child I wondered if the sun - compared to which Earth is nothing - was in hellish pain because it burned so hot. One must assume that nonliving things feel nothing and value nothing, otherwise life on Earth is far too small to matter in the scheme of things.
I am somewhat agnostic about which life forms matter. I think consciousnesses are of key importance, but we don't really know what consciousnesses are, so we can't figure out how conscious animals are. I also think avoiding suffering is super important, and I think the wilderness is filled with suffering, which humans may someday reduce. So this is ultimately the value humans offer to other life forms: someday we may reduce their suffering. And since we are also life, we can be of value to ourselves.
There is no life in nearby space and alien life in our galaxy probably constitutes a very small percentage. This is why I see space as the answer to human expansion. We can grow our numbers in space practically without limit without impacting any living thing.
Note that global farmland per capita has fallen by 50% in the past 50 years, and the trend continues downward. It doesn't seem at all unlikely that another 50% more humans can be fed without much change at all in total amount of cropland, given a few decades of time for adjustment and technology improvement.
If we double CO2 concentration, as the IPCC projects by the end of the century, that will raise the yield of most crops by about 30% (less for maize and sugar cane), which feeds almost 30% more humans from the same land with the same agricultural technology.
Well, sure, but it won't last. We can reasonably assume that green plants drive atmospheric CO2 as close to zero as they can without starving themselves, after all, they took it from 99% of the atmosphere to 300ppm ha ha. They probably have ancient epigenetic mechanisms for using CO2 more aggressively when there is more around. How long it takes them to recapture the extra CO2 is an interesting question, though. Decades? Centuries? Millenia?
And let us hope they don't overshoot, the way they did during the "Snowball Earth" era. Having the entire planet ice over would be a much bigger problem for human society than even the worst nightmares of the IPCC in the warming direction.
I used the verb "needs" in my first sentence advisedly. It's certainly not likely that increasing agricultural efficiency is anywhere cost-free, so people will only do it if the alternatives -- including simply clearing virgin land -- are more expensive, either naturally or through regulatory action to solve tragedies of the commons.
I don't think *knowledge* was the problem on the way up. I think it's a question of decision and will. And...governments are only as strong as their popular support, so what I'm asking is: if you have a world of enormous wild area and far less people -- indeed, even more so than long ago because we also imagine the people are much more concentrated in sophisticated cities -- that is, we imagine that, for example, the State of California is essentially wilderness except for a few dozen square miles around LA and SF -- why would there be strong *popular support* for putting strong legal frameworks around preserving wilderness, the environment, et cetera?
I think there probably wouldn't be. People would say -- as they said long ago -- why bother? Look! There's like infinity redwoods, why are you fussing if I want to chop down a few to improve my sight lines?
Hmm. History argues against you. We were much *less* careful about pollution, wildlife preservation, natural spaces, et cetera, when there *were* 1 billion of us. Not, I think, because we were stupider, but because the issue seemd much less urgent. Why would we behave differently on the way down below 1 billion than we did on the way up above it?
We are at 8bn now. So 10bn is a 25% increase in 80 years. In the last 80 years population grew 400%. Of course a lot of that new population will be getting richer.
In “things you read on the internet maybe aren’t true”, apparently the study showing that modern posture makes little protrusions on the back of your head grow more was weak -
“Nature Scientific Reports”, with the most articles of any journal, passing Plos One in the past, not exactly the highest quality standards lol. Not all nature brand journals are the same as Nature!
Yay science! Meanwhile, serious and accomplished work goes in quantum and bio and chem and materials and thousands more, but nobody cares about that (other than the entire world economy depending on it). One strange attitude I’ve seen around here and on adjacent Twitter stuff is that “university and science research is all bad and irrelevant”, and I don’t wanna sound like I’m supporting that. Lots isn’t, lots is, but do be suspicious (and if you aren’t, and don’t understand the thing more than superficially, you may not be getting anything out of the article / headline!
‘Horns’ are growing on young people’s skulls. Phone use is to blame, research suggests” headline at the time, although in the reduced form of “more force in those tendons makes the bones a hit bigger” as opposed to the “this shows satan is working through phones” that the article appeals to. But even the reduced form is questionable...
The tweeter messed up his currency conversion, but even 638USD (for the gloss white Skullpot) is surprisingly inexpensive for a luxury-market novelty toilet.
I'm blowing through several ~$10 kindle books a week. It seems silly not to sign up for kindle unlimited at $10 a month to feed my reading habit. Is there some down side. (Besides not 'owning' the books.)
Ironically, one of the first books to "disappear" in this way was Orwell's 1984, but that was because it has an ambiguous copyright status and they weren't 100% sure they had the rights to it.
Kindle unlimited is mostly self published genre fiction. If that's what you enjoy reading, it's a great deal. If you prefer nonfiction or literary fiction, there isn't much there and you will have to wade through a lot of crap, especially since Amazon's search algorithm isn't the best.
I try to go this route. If I really want to read it and the wait time for an available copy is more than a couple weeks I usually cave and buy either a paper and ink or ebook from Amazon.
Pre COVID I was checking the used book stores in town. Been a while since I’ve done that.
I haven’t really looked at the selection of ‘Unlimited’ books in a while. It seems like there were too many gaps in their selection the last time I checked.
You sound like you have a bit too much faith in your intuition that a little bit of virus has just gotta help the immune system stay in shape. Might be good to add some more info to your mental mix.
Google search results are really bothering me. Is it my imagination or have they shifted in the last year or two toward generic low-information mainstream sources?
I googled "Wind Catching Systems" and I get page after page of "Company Says Own Technology Will Be Great!". I didn't even know there *were* this many news outlets interested in bland, uncritical reporting. You'd think that someone out there would at least call a competitor or a wind energy expert.
Not to mention those really annoying "quick replies" that seem to have become more and more toxic: I search for X, I get a list of "why is X so bad?" / "what is the problem with X?".
Yep. I now find duckduckgo better. Which is bewildering.
There was some blog post on how to make Google search great again in the rationalist sphere recently. But I didn't find any of the solutions convincing.
I don't think you're imagining it. Between that and over-generalizing my very specific search terms, it's annoyingly difficult to find anything useful, i.e. either academic or informal forum discussions, in the field of e.g. health advice on a specific common health issue or child-raising issue (or the overlap of the two). To say nothing of the political topics.
yeah it’s incredibly annoying, a search engine that made a (mediocre) attempt at fixing it a week or two ago became the tenth most upvoted hackernews post of all time lol
It shows only old school text style websites which usually isn’t what you want and does exact sub string style searches (“candy pie recipe” doesn’t match “recipe for pie with candy”)
It's well known Google search isn't what it used to be. It's not entirely their fault, it's hard to deliver to users what they want when every site wants their results to always be at the top for everybody. It's like if anyone discovered a strategy to always beat the stock market, everyone else would copy their strategy and it would stop working. The more useful Google search is to users, the more important it is for websites to try to game the algorithm. Google has to thread the needle of informing websites how to present information for their site crawlers while not revealing to them exactly how page ranks are determined.
Also they have to deliver search results that are the sort of sites that would carry AdSense instead of PDFs written by an expert in the field that your question is about.
So I checked the weather for tomorrow in Zürich, and it's apparently supposed to rain quite a lot tomorrow at 17:00 onwards. Do we have a backup plan place to meet, some bar or something with outdoor seats, in case the prophesized thunderstorm does come, or do we just hang out in the grass field anyway?
Yep, I've just looked it up too and doesn't look good. I would suggest meeting at the spot anyway, otherwise some of us will arrive there and others at the new place. But then we should definitely move elsewhere.
I thought I'd float my situation here on ACX because I figure the commenting body here includes a high proportion of level-headed, reasonably successful people, which does not describe me very well at the moment. It's a bit like the outsider exercise from The Scout Mindset, but with actual outsiders.
I am that much-derided creature of caricature, a 40-year-old NEET. Single, of course, with a nearly blank resume. I have a generalist undergraduate degree in biology from twenty years ago and some brief and equally ancient lab tech experience (flow cytometry, PCR/electrophoresis, ELISAs). I dabbled in programming long ago (hobbyist stuff in C) to no great result. I have survived so far through extreme frugality, odd jobs, a lot of family assistance. I've never been on the (Canadian) dole.
Among my few advantages I count decent health and strength, fair (if not world-beating) intelligence, and relative freedom to move anywhere if needed. I'm not afraid or ashamed of manual labour, but obviously time will not be not my friend on this front for very long.
I would like to get out of my current pattern and do something useful and rewarding with my remaining years. However, if the sober assessment is that I'm through at this point, it would be useful to hear that, too.
Where would you start if you were me? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
You've gotten a good deal of "learn to code" advice. I want to second that, it's what I do and provides me and my family with a lovely middle-class life.
I'm going to suggest an alternative I haven't seen. Try driving trucks. My BiL drives for Cisco (big food distributor) and he told me the last time I saw him that they're desperate for help. They were (at the time) offering salaries in excess of 60k, even if the applicant didn't have a commercial license, just to get people in the door and train them. He's regularly been called and offered double or triple his regular pay to work his days off.
Coding is a relatively easy way into the middle class, and a pleasant way to make a living. My sister's husband works much harder than I do. But he also out-earns me. If coding doesn't suit, it's another option.
It's also the sort of job that people who've been shifting from shitty job to shitty job tend to end up in as a ladder out, so your worry about your resumé is probably less applicable, though I think @Byrel Mitchell's idea should cover you there regardless.
With all the interaction following your initial post I still don't get why you went into 20 years of your actual past and only now want to change your life style. I am personally a big fan of the 'Motivation beats everything else in the long run' hypothesis. Therefore as the person interviewing you would want to understand your change if motivation besides you demonstrating some real capabilities I would need. In my case interviewing is only a first screening but doing real work for one day is a way better measure how one will perform. And I definitely would hire you for a low paying short term internship without prior experience and would hire you for better paid work later if I would see motivation, grit and results.
Along the “learn to code” line of thinking, just wanted to suggest something. My company (industrial equipment manufacturer) really struggles to find competent senior electrical control panel designers and PLC programmers, such that we have to pay them more than people with standard engineering degrees. I believe the certifications take only 1-2 years. You could get a junior level job for about $60-70k with that certification, and if you do well, make over $100k in 5-8 years or so. If interested, you want to look for places that teach Allen Bradley PLC programming in the RSLogix 5000 software.
I believe this is also significantly easier to learn than standard computer programming.
"However, if the sober assessment is that I'm through at this point, it would be useful to hear that, too"
I don't think that's the case at all. I think you'd be surprised at how uneven most people's careers are and they mostly do fine. A commenter below mentioned that many women are unemployed for the 20 years that they are the primary caregivers to their children, and many of them are able to re-enter the workforce. Add to that the many people have spent years mastering skills that became obsolete; some of these adapt to the changes in their field but many do not and spend /decades/ in limbo afterwards. I'll bet that if you took a random sample of people and examined their career trajectories you'd find that most people only really put in a one solid decade of continuous work, and spend the rest of the time thrashing around and making do. I throw that out there as a challenge for the statistically sophisticated among the ACX readership to confirm or disconfirm, but it's my impression. If I'm right you can catch up to the average person with ease - you've got five years to train yourself up for whatever you want to do with your 'solid decade' and to maneuver yourself into position to get started, and you can still retire at 55 if you're good at whatever you eventually decide to do! I sincerely wish you well.
But I would also throw out the idea of becoming a skilled craftsman if you think you might have the aptitude for it. Jobs like HVAC repair, plumber, auto mechanic, electrician, etc all pay pretty well and at least in the USA certifications can be gained cheaply through community college. Once certified I doubt there would be any barriers to entry because of age or other experience.
You described where you are, but it is not completely clear to me how or why you got there.
For example, why don't you apply for some biology-related job near to where you live? (Are there no such jobs near you? Did you apply but never passed the interview? Any idea why? Or do you just hate the idea of working 40 hours a week?) Similar question for programming; what exactly is "no great result in C"? (Are you unable to write a program that calculated the Fibonacci numbers? Or are you able to do so, but it is not enough to pass any interview?)
More details could help you get a more relevant answer.
From certain perspective, your current situation also has some advantages. For example, I (also in my 40s) have a full-time job and two kids, so it is difficult for me to find time and energy to learn new things. If you have no job, no kids, and your family is used to provide you assistance, then if you choose a new thing you want to study, you could probably give it 8 hours a day, which means that in a month or two you could learn a lot!
The question is whether you should learn something biology-related or programming-related; the latter seems more profitable for an average smart person, but you seem to already know a lot about the former. Or maybe both of them, like try learning some bioinformatics? Download some open-source biochemistry apps and learn how to use them? At the same time, do some free courses on both biology and informatics, to refresh the fundamentals.
Being extremely frugal means that if you get a job, but keep your current spending habits, you could save a lot of money.
> You described where you are, but it is not completely clear to me how or why you got there. (...) More details could help you get a more relevant answer.
Understandable. I went for an extreme summary because this already felt a bit like fishing for free counselling, so I did not want to create the impression that I expect an elaborate, highly personalised reply.
As to applying for lab tech/coding jobs - the basic answer in both cases is my lack of relevant experience. The experience I can demonstrate is laughably old - decades old, as I mentioned. Of course I can write a few lines to generate the Fibonacci series, but every other applicant can do that (and perhaps optimise a little better than I) and has probably worked on at least an open-source project recently, and holds a certification if not a comp sci degree. Same, maybe more so given lower demand, for laboratory technician positions. (I'm not so crazy as to fantasise about reentering the proper academic track.) Like most people who have been out of employment (ad hoc gigs aside) for a long time, I just don't think I'm competitive.
However, if you think that those lines are realistic to pursue even from behind the eight-ball (and you seem surprised that I have not done so), that's encouraging. And your suggestions for learning and skill recovery are quite helpful. Thank you for responding.
> As to applying for lab tech/coding jobs - the basic answer in both cases is my lack of relevant experience.
Not sure whether to understand this as "and that's why I don't bother applying" or "and that's why I didn't get a job, despite applying at dozen different companies". If it's the latter, yeah, that sucks.
But if it's the former, I suggest to give it a try. Some companies are desperate. Some companies pay so little that no one with decent skills would take the position -- which means that there will be little competition; a small salary is better than nothing (which is what you have now); and anyway just treat the job as a stepping stone towards something better (spend one year there, then apply somewhere else with recent experience on your CV).
In my experience, the job market is completely random. There are smart people working for low salary. There are stupid people working for high salary. There are companies that recognize and require expertise. There are companies that are obviously incompetent and willing to hire anyone who is not disgusted by their incompetence. There are companies that would fire Einstein. There is a company that will hire you. There is no justice in this world... but in this specific situation, it may work in your favor.
If you're not totally against programming again, I would recommend finding out, what languages are sought after and learn one of them. An encouraging anecdote, although from a different part of the world may be a friend of mine, who immigrated to Germany from Bosnia. His education is worthless here (although he went to university at home) and he was unemployed for some time, living from the pay-cheque of his wife who has a job here. Eventually he decided to become a programer, selftaught himself PHP in about a year, got himself a certificate to prove it and was hired on his --I think-- third application for about the median income in Germany. Maybe using PHP is a German problem (I really don't like the language, but he doesn't mind it) but I guess, people who can do programming of web-related stuff are always and everywhere in high demand. He is 38 I think and his German is not stellar, so maybe his language skills and age sum roughly up to your age as job market hindrance.
> If you're not totally against programming again, I would recommend finding out, what languages are sought after and learn one of them.
Thanks, and your anecdote is indeed heartening. I used to think "learn to code" was something of a humorous cliché, but between yours and Viliam's replies perhaps there's something to it.
I'll admit I keep circling back to the problem of the extended hiatus in activity. In some ways, it looks worse than if it had been a prison term. At least in that case, everything is perfectly clear and accounted for.
You just need a good narrative to explain that gap. Your resume is actually better (once you get a certification or two, etc.) than a standard fresh-out-of-college resume with equivalent experience (zero) just because its *different*. Their stack of applications has 20 functionally indistinguishable newbie applications. YOUR application stands out, which makes you way more likely to catch someone's eye and get you an interview.
At the interview, they'll ask you about your career path. You're interesting; not many people take that path, so why did you? Why not stay in mostly dead-end jobs?
You need a one paragraph story to tell. An elevator pitch. I'd suggest something like 'Well, things were going all right for me at the time. My jobs didn't pay great, but without a family, I didn't need much. Buuut, as I got older, I realized that my prospects for ever retiring were pretty grim if I kept on my current path. So I looked around, and got some advice from friends with better jobs, and they suggested I learn to code. I started studying X and Y, and took some certifications, and now I'm ready to actually start practicing. Your company was interesting because Z-that's-specific-to-their-open-position.'
As a note of encouragement: consider that 95% of people who work odd jobs NEVER take the step you're considering taking: making a life change at 40 to work in higher paying jobs. Most of them could; almost none do.
It's a mark in your favor that you're changing your life around to do something new and with a notable learning curve.
I think "learn to code" has become a meme because of how frequently it's recommended. Some people got tired of hearing it. But I suspect it keeps getting repeated precisely because of what good advice it is.
> I'll admit I keep circling back to the problem of the extended hiatus in activity. In some ways, it looks worse than if it had been a prison term.
After my friend got hired more or less immediatly I changed my mind on that (previously thinking similar to you on such things) and guess that a substantial part of your fear here is just in your head.
Imagine you are a woman entering the workforce after having kids. You aren't, but some do get back jobs in their old careers and it should in principle not be too much of a stretch to think that an employer would be interested in you too.
I strongly recommend doing some personal research into the Five Factor model of personality (Big Five, OCEAN) as a means of self-improvement. I am also a NEET, and I have found this to be a wildly useful, if somewhat difficult to grasp and slow to work tool.
I also recommend these websites. None are explicitly listed as self-improvement, but a framework is easy to piece together from them.
Big Five plus facets as a framework for self-improvement (as opposed to mere diagnosis) sounds fascinating. I'll have a dive into it and see what I arrive at on my own, but if you'll spare a hint - is your basic strategy to find your own deficiencies in the traits predictive of success and try to intentionally develop compensating habits?
Practical habits, but emotional habits too. I'm trying to actually change what I'm feeling at any given moment, and aiming mostly for what the Facet page refers to as Positive traits.
I wouldn't necessarily assume that 40 is nearing the end for manual labour. I live in a rural farming community and the number of people in their 70's who continue to farm is amazing. And if depression is part of your mix then being productive outside and having to use your body is always going to be beneficial.
If you want a suggestion as to where to start I would suggest aiming to family help in the same way as state help - ie you're better off without it. I guess you know that about state help because you mention it. There's something quite empowering about relinquishing the charity of others, tho' it's not without its difficulties.
Whenever I start to feel depressed I get my chainsaw, go out into the woods and cut a few trees down. If you're in Canada I'm guessing there's plenty of opportunity to do that sort of thing.
The tough oldsters you mention may have had the extra advantage of lifelong conditioning, but I'm not ruling out the possibility of something physical - I've just seen that kind of labour take a significant toll on people past a certain age. One fallback I'm considering is a job at an Amazon warehouse. Not quite lumberjacking or farming, but a fair bit of stowing and humping. The downside is that it offers no upward trajectory of any kind, not even the most modest. Perhaps I should reconcile to that, but I am not sure that I fully have.
And yes, I agree with you about relying on others. It is not something I am proud of. I could offer some mitigating factors, but the present goal is very much to end that state of affairs decisively.
No-one is ever fully through. I realise that sounds like a platitude, but I mean it as an entirely empirical statement. People can contribute to society up until their deaths
My advise having been through long periods of unemployment myself is apply for very basic entry level jobs (bar work, call centre, data entry, etc). Even if they suck it gets you into the habit of doing a job, and means that if you are applying to jobs you can demonstrate you are capable of turning up and being minimally competent, which is a lot of what the job interview process is screening for, as they want to avoid people who will be disruptive or need to be replaced immediately.
Also I don't know how it works in Canada, but see about getting assessed for depression. As your situation sounds like that of a lot of people with undiagnosed mental health issues.
> Also I don't know how it works in Canada, but see about getting assessed for depression. As your situation sounds like that of a lot of people with undiagnosed mental health issues.
I suspect a depression inventory would flag me, but I don't think I'm depressed. Just very drawn back in all areas of life as a somewhat rational response to my circumstances.
You're right that habit reclamation is important, though. I may be overestimating how easy it will be to adapt to an ordinary work routine after a very long time away.
I have a couple of thoughts but first let me tell you that I am considerably older than you and have a been around the block in terms of careers. I’ve been up down and sideways. I appreciate your dilemma.
My first thought is actually your screen name, Treplev. Are you referring to the character in the seagull? If so, and given how you are describing your current life, I don’t think it’s a useful way to think of yourself and that’s hard to avoid if you make it your name.
I am a firm believer in the old adage, “as you think so you become”.
My second thought is I don’t know what you’re interested in. Is there anything you want to do? In the most general terms...
What could be a relationship with the world that engages you, Putting compensation completely aside for the moment.
In the meantime, I think getting any job at all would be helpful. It will give you less time to wear a rut in your brain.
My son worked very briefly at an Amazon warehouse ( I think he lasted two days. ) But another young man that he was friends with started working there at the same time and was very quickly promoted off the floor and into a management position so I wouldn’t be so sure that there is no way up in that world.
This is a paper-and-pencil game with so much depth of strategy and intensity of betrayal that it could have taken down a gaming company. The owner had no idea of what he invented until 17 employees started playing it, and...
He's come to the conclusion that he needs to think about leaving people feeling good as well as getting them engaged. The inventor of Neptune's Pride (a game with some of the same characteristics, but apparently not quite the same purity of effect) says he has trouble marketing it because no one wants to play it twice, but he doesn't have qualms.
I was wanting to post this, but hesitant because this is scary but fascinating. Then I concluded that the maker thought is was safe enough to post about the game and its results, and I didn't need to be more protective than that.
It doesn't sound like a particularly complex game. Do you know of an actual computer implementation anywhere, perchance online (I'm picturing something like generals.io)? The name is so generic I found lots of other unrelated things.
I've played Diplomacy three times in my life: every game was engrossing and infuriating. I still own it, but I have resolved never to play it again. It makes people upset: you don't feel good about winning. And it takes forever to play, you really have to set aside a day for it. The third time I played I realized I was losing a day and everybody was mad at the end, winner included.
It is well that Diplomacy is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it. But it is engrossing, *usually* in a good way, and a win is a reward unlike any other game I've played. But what I have to do to earn that reward, is not virtuous, and so I play rarely.
Playing never would allow vital skills to atrophy, or at least I don't want to find a non-game manner in which to exercise those skills.
Subterfuge is another game like this, on your phone, with a single round taking about two weeks (with only intermittent engagement of course). I found it very good, but it sucked me in and ended up occupying my thoughts and being time consuming. It's also inspired by Neptune's Pride.
There are a lot of games that are kniwn for ruining friendships - Diplomacy is the most famous, but any game that allows arbitrary targeted interaction has the potential for politics and treachery. It sounds like they accidentally made a game that was entirely politics - handing your action points to another player you trusted was much more effective than playing for yourself alongside them, so the most important thing was who you supported.
So, not an entirely unheard of thing, but it's always fascinating when it happens.
Diplomacy can be bad - but I've successfully played that multiple times without ruining any friendships. (Though there's one friend who we decided wouldn't be invited to future games of it)
... but the Game of Thrones board game? Forget that one. I played it twice and both times it ended in pretty bad feelings all around. (Incidentally this was back in 2010: so this was like my first experience with the franchise)
Otherwise, we really haven't had many issues with board games causing rifts in friendships.
Oh man, the Game of Thrones board game. It is a very interesting game from the world of "American style" board games, which means it is about expressing the flavor of Game of Thrones as accurately as possible, not about precisely designed mechanics.
And it really succeeds at that. Most characters of the first three books or so appear, you can play all the houses and they get their own flavor, you get constant shifting alliances and permanent backstabbing, etc.
But on the other hand, everything in this game is so painfully slow. You have to constantly negotiate your alliances, which means you may be making deals for half an hour before you make a move. Then you place action markers on the map, and doing this for just one turn involves endless calculations about in what order you can possibly resolve your actions, and the game theoretical implications of it.
After that, you have to resolve battles, which means calculating some simple buffs and debuffs, while then thinking about the game theoretical implications of what character card you will play and constantly asking your opponent what character cards are in their deck, because that's open information. At least in 2021, the other players can play with their phones during this phase.
And then you reiterate those phases 9 times, before it's finally over. The last time I played it, everyone voted to just end the game after turn six, and to never touch it again.
I own the game and have played it a few times. It's a lot of fun, but your description is pretty accurate. The last time we played it we were at my parent's for Christmas and my mom got upset at all the arguing and cancelled the game.
It grows in prominence until it takes over the player's life; much of the draw is not due to the game per se, but is because of the political machinations of the players involved.
Sounds more like just a group of people that took a game too seriously, which could be for any number of reasons specific to those people, rather than the game itself having spooky effects.
I'm finishing an experiment on the value of code prototyping this week.
Would love any research about the value or lackthereof of prototyping.
The experiment was to do the first 50 problems in project euler, randomly starting in either a dynamically typed language, Python, or a statically typed language, Rust; finding a solution, then translating that solution to the other language, and determining whether the starting language affected time to develop a solution.
+1 to what alec said about Project Euler not being a great choice for this, as IME, the harder part of many Project Euler problems is figuring out the algorithm and the solution may be trivial.
Instead, perhaps consider Advent of Code - (https://adventofcode.com/) - it's a set of 25 two-part problems, one a day, every December. They start off very trivial and get pretty tricky by the end. If you pick a year, that'd give you 50 problems and only the last few generally get into the "requires a very specific algorithm" territory like Project Euler.
(Heads up, 2019 was kind of weird, every other problem was based on 'IntCode' a basically simplified assembly language interpreter that you built up over the first few days - so those problems weren't as 'independent' as other years, they basically assumed you were building an intcode library as you went)
I remember IntCode being rewarding to implement in Rust, as the instruction decoder could be moved to a library and remain mostly unchanged from one day to the next, while each daily challenge could just reuse that functionality. This isn't really an argument in favour of statically typed languages as you can have libraries in Python and other dynamic languages too.
One thought is that I'm not sure how good a set of problems project Euler is if you're trying to generalize this to "regular" software development. Project Euler, leetcode, etc. are very different kinds of problems than "regular", more practical software engineering.
Let's say we figure out artificial wombs and cloning without health issues for people. Do you think a lot of people will opt to clone themselves in addition to or instead of having regular children from sexual reproduction, and then raise their clone as their child or children?
Well I wouldn't. The whole point of sexual reproduction is to mix it up a bit, throw in a little hybrid vigor, get some improvement over your own DNA. Who'd want to invest all that time and energy only to see the younger version go through the exact same struggles and cope with the same shortcomings? Depressing.
What I think is much more likely is people starting to mix 'n' match genetics, taking a little DNA here, buying a little premium there, snipping out a little bad stuff from the heritage there, so that kids get born with about 18 different genetic parents.
I'd be tempted. I like me, I know how to get along with me, I know my weaknesses and strengths. Why not have a kid that I can raise with that kind of insight and understanding? My daughter is a lot like me in many ways, and each time I recognize myself in her it delights me.
Also, I know that genetically at least I turned out pretty good: no disorders, generally healthy. Every time my wife and I decide to try for another kid I'm fairly stressed they might have a major disorder of some kind. Cloning would remove that fear.
I'd do it, but only to fulfill my lifelong dream of meeting another person like me. It might also be popular for the risk reduction that comes from using genes that are already known to work (assuming mutations can be minimized).
I think there would be at least a small number of wealthy individuals, perhaps high in narcissism, who would gladly make an army of themselves. They could do away with all that tedious sexual reproduction business, which doesn't even guarantee that half your genes are passed on.
If the cloning process is scalable and the clones can make viable clones of themselves, the population quickly grows. Assuming the group manages to maintain internal harmony, it can become a powerful society that would never have to worry about recruiting and given no genetic distance they might keep internal conflict to a minimum. Given enough time it would could effectively become a new species, as evolution marches on for the remainder of humanity but the group maintains the same genes.
If strong AI worries you given the possibility of endless iterative growth of its intelligence, then the possibility of runaway cloning should also worry you.
Firstly I am sure there would be a good chunk of people interested, especially if it became more socially normalised.
Barriers might include
- joint genetics is one of the things tying parents together in the job of raising a child. Whilst some people obviously adopt, a lot of people want to raise their own child.
- You’re in love! You want to see what happens when you mix something from two such wonderful people!
- The family dynamics might be hard to navigate. If your parents fall out there’s going to be more spillover… “You’re just like your father!” Is now a slam-dunk. If your mum hates your dad, maybe she hates you too. Meanwhile, a badly behaving child is a perfect indictment of the parent’s genetic code. “I didn’t realise how selfish you were until I saw little Peter grabbing all the toys.” A weaponised version of “he gets that from you, honey”.
- The scope for parental disapproval and childish recriminations just got weirder too. “At your age, I was launching my own business - what’s stopping you?” And “if I’m fat and lazy it’s down to you - if you’d given me some love and encouragement maybe I’d be doing as well as you!”
Things in favour:
- maybe you get even higher investment from the genetic parent? Especially if you’re a single parent
- or maybe you’re in love! You both agree some mini-mes would be just perfect!
- Your child is (maybe) going to be less of a mystery to you.
- it’s not like “normal” families have uniformly great family dynamics
- You could be avoiding the risk of genetic disease or family troubles on your partner’s side - or on yours. Maybe one of you suffers from depression. Or maybe both of you are perfect…. But one of you has a family full of mean, rage-filled, chaotic and murderous relatives.
You also get the problem that you need to be an adult to reproduce, but not to be cloned. If a couple who can no longer have children decide to clone their existing five year old, it would be awkward to say that the five year old is now a mother or father. You could have some kind of age threshhold (if the age difference is at least 13 years they are a parent, otherwise a sibling), but anything like that will be arbitrary.
There are also the problems of how inheritance and a bunch of other things work if you clone someone after they are dead (possible now, but much easier with cloning), and what happens if you use cloning to give someone offspring secretly or against their wishes (which is also possible now but far easier with cloning).
Sharing this info about covid booster shots, written by a friend elsewhere - she "follows several epidemiologists pretty religiously". Interesting that she cites a source that is also on substack.
* Moderna is in its own booster approval process and that is taking longer. Johnson & Johnson is also working on a booster and is also slower in process.
* A big hypothesis about maybe why Moderna is slightly more effective is that the Moderna second doses were given one week longer after the first shots than the Pfizer ones. Ideally probably we would all have had even more time between doses. But the longer the wait, the harder to get people to come back for dose 2 at all. And the intervals used were the ones that had been used in the clinical trials, so it was the best info we had at the time.
* There have been some studies about mixing and matching vaccine brands and types, and it is definitely possible that there could be advantages, but we aren’t likely to have enough data and have it vetted enough soon enough for that to be relevant for people seeking a booster in the next few months. One of the really promising things is the mixing of one dose each between the adenovirus vector vaccines (J&J, AstraZeneca) and the mRNA ones (Pfizer, Moderna). But that has so far not been studied nearly enough yet for the FDA and CDC to consider it for recommendation. I think there’s some data from Canada and the UK on AZ/Pfizer mix and match, but we don’t have AZ here at all.
* Some people have gone and done mix and match on their own recognizance, and generally had to be willing to lie to vaccine distributors in order to do it, but there haven’t been reports of awful things happening. It also doesn’t make a lot of sense that there might be any really big safety risks, but there is just not enough data to be sure. So nobody is actively recommending going rogue and mixing and matching, but if they were, it would likely be mixing types.
* Even though there’s enough people booster data for Pfizer that this was approved, there was a lot of debate. People who got Moderna or J&J don’t need to be freaking out that their vaccines are going to stop working and regret not getting Pfizer. Boosters will come for those too, and in the meantime, most of us are just hitting the very earliest part of the window in which immunity might start to fade a little.
* A lot of the pro booster data shows that the ideal window for boosters is 6-8 months after your second shot, at least for Pfizer. I know I literally just hit my 6 month mark a couple days ago. I plan to wait another several weeks at least before getting a booster (as a younger but multiply co-morbiditied person). This is the similar logic to why it’s possible the second Pfizer shot was a little early compared to Moderna and might account for the slightly different effectiveness.
* Hope that’s helpful. The single best comprehensive source I rely on is Your Local Epidemiologist, https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/ (and on Facebook, and she has a near-daily email newsletter). She has a whole chart tracking things about each vaccine and where it is in terms of research on effectiveness, boosters, etc.
I'm currently in the middle of an 8 week gap between Pfizer shots. Most New Zealanders are on a 6 week gap, should making for an interesting experiment.
If the Flat Earth conspiracy theory was true, what's the minimum number of people who would have to be in on it? I.e., how many people's jobs depend on knowing the shape of the earth?
It is widely reported that the sun sets at a slightly later at the top of a building than at the bottom. People are recommending that other people witness this phenomenon for themselves by riding the high-speed elevator at the Burj Khalifa, but I hear there's a simpler trick: if you're quick, and lying on the shoreline, you can see the sun set twice by standing up the instant the sun goes under the horizon.
This is normally explained by the curvature of the Earth, but I heard there was a flat earth hypothesis about light being dragged down by gravity... might that help explain the effect somehow? I don't see how.
I don't really understand how that would prove curvature. Even if you were looking off the corner of a flat surface, you'd still see a deeper angle over the edge from altitude wouldn't you?
Yeah, good point. However, if the Earth is flat (ignoring the part about gravity bending light rays), the sun should be setting below a mountain range thousands of miles away, whereas if the Earth is round, it's setting below a horizon that is much closer. Because of this difference in distance, it should be easier to witness the double sunset if the earth is round than if it is flat.
Lots of people in the prairie provinces of Canada (including myself) have dealt with the Dominion Land Survey (DLS) system, which divides these provinces into square plots of land with an area of about one square mile.
The system needs a few "correction lines" to deal with the curvature of the Earth, so anyone who is in a position to notice if their land does not have a square shape, or is not about one square mile in size, would have to be brought in on the conspiracy.
Another relevant question is when the conspiracy started. Wikipedia reports that the DLS "survey was begun in 1871", and of course it has been common knowledge for at least hundreds of years that the Earth is round. So, this conspiracy would be quite the intergenerational feat.
This is very true still. On a clear day the wheelhouse of a large cargo ship will be visible for a long time before the hull, and at night you can often see the Masthead Lights before the Sidelights (which must be mounted lower).
Nah, just because someone told me when I was a kid that the horizon exists because of the curvature of the earth (and not because of some optical illusion), that doesn't make me a part of the conspiracy; it just makes me duped.
Because of the vertical variation of density in the atmosphere, a horizontal beam of light is refracted downward. The beam curvature is actually pretty substantial, 1/3 as large as the curvature of the Earth. This is why the average length of a day is more than 12 hours, for example, as the Sun's apparent position near the horizon is higher than its actual position.
Well, what if the Earth were flat? Because of refraction, the Earth would appear to be bowl-shaped. You'd be able to look above the horizontal and see distant features. The effect would be largest on an airplane, as distant features would appear to be higher than the airplane. The only limitations would be light attenuation (smog, etc.) and distortions caused by variations in the vertical density gradient. Mirages would be really impressive!
I'd love to work with someone to produce a Google Earth-type visualization or VR of what things would really look like if the Earth were flat. I think it would be educational and damn interesting. Let me know if you know someone...
All meteorologists and oceanographers, who (pretend to) understand that tropical winds and currents are fundamentally different from midlatitude winds and currents because of the different vertical projection of the Earth's axis of rotation.
Anyone involved in developing GPS applications, or satellite TV or phone service, anyone involved in radio or TV communication, all navigators (air or sea) and pilots, anyone involved in commercial shipping planning, all sailors, air crews, and radio operators. Probably anyone who is aware that it's a different solar time (meaning the Sun is in a different location in the sky) at the same wall clock time at different places on the Earth, so anybody who deals in international business, or makes phone calls more than one timezone away. Anybody who deals in timezones, for that matter. Anybody involved in spaceflight, or who might see photos of the Earth from orbit, or even very high altitude.
I'm sort of hard-pressed to think of people who could be safely left *out* of the conspiracy, honestly. You'd probably have to be some kind of recluse.
Wait, if there's no flat-Earth explanation for the time zones then it becomes basically everyone. Even if you never fly to a different time zone, just having online friends abroad means somebody has to lie.
There is a flat earth explanation for time zones, the belief is that the Earth is a disc with the north pole in the center, Antarctica around the rim, and the equator is a circle halfway from the north pole to the rim. The sun sits somewhere above the equator and moves along it. So it's day in the places the Sun is closer to.
This doesn't explain why sunsets look the way they do (i.e. you can see half of the sun clearly above the horizon, instead of seeing the whole sun get smaller and smaller), though I recall seeing a video once apparently demonstrating that if you put a certain kind of filter in front of a light source, as you move it away it ends up looking more like a sunset, and so maybe the atmosphere is acting like that filter.
How does that work? I don't see how the disk explains how I can call my mother on the other coast and have her tell me it's night where she is while it's still light where I am. I don't see how you can explain that with a flat Earth.
Still not getting it. My mother can still see stars that are the size of the Sun when they are fifty light-years away, and it has nothing to do with their physical diameter, it's a question of how much energy they put out. If the Sun -- whatever size it is -- puts out enough energy to heat and light the land as it does at noon, then it's going to be clearly visible even if it moves a billion miles away at midnight (but is still not hidden by some large physical object, like the Earth itself).
Why would seeing photos of the Earth from orbit require one to be in on the hypothetical conspiracy? The hypothetical is that those photos are faked, which requires anyone *taking* such photos to be in on it, but not everyone seeing them.
I'd think at least every pilot and sailor. Then you probably need everyone running pilot/sailor training to be in on it too. Definitely all military leaders. Then also all analysts at all intelligence agencies, since they'd intercept communications all the time. Also all the different governments need to have an agreement going on where none of them spill the beans. Seems like it has to be hundreds of thousands.
The more sophisticated versions of Flat Earth I've heard have a flat spherical disc with the North Pole at the centre and the South Pole at the edge, combined with a weird non-Euclidean spacetime effect that distorts spacetime as you get closer to the edge, meaning that (for instance) the quickest route from Sydney to Santiago is across the southern Pacific (ie right around the edge of the disc) because spacetime is distorted that way. Essentially it behaves exactly like a sphere, but it's flat. I'm not sure what the explanation for why you can see different stars depending on your latitude but I'm sure they've thought up some weird optical distortion that could cause that too.
In these sophisticated versions, you can easily be a commercial pilot flying around the world without ever noticing that it's flat (due to optical and spacetime distortions) unless you happen to fly over the South Pole. But no airline routes go close to the South Pole.
The only people who would actually notice the Earth being flat, then, are astronauts and the people who visit the Amundsen-Scott base at the "South Pole" (ie the edge of the world). No surprise, then, that the only people who are allowed to visit these places are carefully chosen by the US or Russian governments.
Huh, interesting, I've never heard of the spacetime warping explanation for flight times.
But yeah, at a certain point I feel like that line of reasoning makes this a non-conspiracy. Like if a flat earther goes to the south pole and doesn't see the edge and is like "well there must be some weird effect where I'm being teleported from one part of the edge to the opposite part that prevents me from seeing it"
"So.... in terms of anything any person could observe, the Earth appears exactly like a sphere? It's just 'deep down' not really a sphere?"
> Is there a practical difference between a flat earth with space warps to make it look round and a round earth?
I don't think there's even a *theoretical* difference -- there's a coordinate transform mapping one to the other, and general relativity says it doesn't matter which coordinates you use. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow_Earth#Concave_Hollow_Earths, last three paragraphs.)
I'd say that "flat spherical disc combined with a weird non-Euclidean spacetime effect" is just a misuse of the word "flat".
This seems like as good a place as any to discuss the new Apple TV series Foundation.
I've been wanting to see a Foundation adaptation for years. I never bought the idea that it was "unfilmable", as long as you're willing to embrace the idea that you're basically doing an anthology series. Asimov's books provide a bare bones outline of a plot and characters, which the writers are free to flesh out and adapt however they see fit. In the right hands, it could be really good, a sweeping TV epic unlike anything that has been done before.
Unfortunately, while I've only watched the first episode of the TV series it seems to fall flat. The first problem is the characters; rather than fleshing out Asimov's characters (who are really just cardboard cutouts who travel the galaxy explaining the plot to each other) it seems like the TV producers just gave the characters a variety of different races and sexes and left it at that. Somehow the character have even less to them. This one is a brilliant mathematician, this one is also a brilliant mathematician, this one is a discount bin Commodus, and the other one is nothing at all. Every scene plays out in the most obvious possible way, with characters intoning the most obvious possible things ("Mother, I'm going away, I'll miss you" "Don't go then" "No, I must!") in the least creative way.
The production design and world building is another huge missed opportunity. They could have done weird and wonderful things, the decadence of a vast, ancient, and incredibly high-tech galactic empire could be filled with all sorts of wonderful architecture, spaceships and costumes, but it all just looks like stuff we've seen before; generic spaceship, generic palace, generic city. There's no sense that there's a vast and interesting galactic empire out there, so there's no real reason to care if it falls. All we see of the Empire is the Emperor, and he's a dick.
As I can't see it without signing up for yet another streaming service, it's nice to know I'm not missing anything. A pity, as Foundation was my gateway dose to SF.
I'm trying to find a comment I remember seeing on ACX a while back. It was about memory, and what we know about how it physically works.
I remember talk of experiments that narrowed it down to a specific brain region, and certain types of cells that were probably involved...it was a long post and Google isn't helping me out. Do any of you remember what I'm talking about?
In general, if it's about specific brain region then you could try to google for "hippocampus". It would be hard not to mention that if you talk about the brain regions of memory formation. Or possibly "amygdala" if it was specifically about fear-/emotion-related memories.
The Google tip is true, but unlike the original SSC, google does not index substack comments. I have already had to abandon searches for several comments because of this, whereas it would have been guaranteed that I would have eventually found them on the old website, on this website it is simply impossible. In my opinion, this makes the open threads far less valuable.
I think you look perfectly ordinary (as in I'd display the normal amount of jealous behaviour if you were around my girl, not the hot-guy level or the ugly-guy level), but if you want to feel better about the way you look, I'd suggest you start lifting weights and ask a stylish friend or acquaintance for advice re clothing and styling. Both of these can make a huge difference for how you look and how you feel about how you look.
Your wife is quite a bit older than me, but I'd swipe right.
Your fur appears sleek and adequately groomed, and your whiskers are striking and might even be rakish with a little styling. Black and white is a classic combination as well. I don't think you have any grounds for doubting yourself 😁
I'm amused that people are replying as though you have asked a question that there is an objective answer to. I also chuckled at the sysadmin server room comment because, well, yeah.
Nonetheless, I have a subjective opinion which I am happy to share. I like your long hair. I like that it's graying. I think you have a wonderful, open face and a bright smile. I like your dimples.
Your wife is hot in a tank top. Your wife is hot in a cowl neck sweater. Your wife is hot with her hair down, or pulled back, with earrings or without. I may be overdoing this, so I'll leave it there.
You are a handsome couple. If I had to determine based solely on these pictures, I would say I like you both.
Astral Codex Ten turned into amihotornot so slowly I hardly noticed.
You're old, so you don't have to be good-looking, you just have to look respectable instead. With sensible short hair you'd look like a respectable professor of engineering, but with a pony tail you look like a sysadmin who hasn't left the server room since 1993.
I think you look great. You have a cute smile and good hair. Besides, being insecure is more unattractive than being unattractive, and you can fix that. Accept your wife's compliments, play into them, it's fun.
Well, I’m a heterosexual guy too so I understand the gazing reflex. Just try not to be conspicuous about it. Maybe get yourself a pair of glacier sunglasses for those first few warm days of summer when you have to remain nonchalant and oblivious when attractive women walk in front of your car at a stoplight. Buck up fella, you can do this.
Seeing you looking at other women makes her feel bad. This may manifest (or be rationalized) as believing that you don't think she's attractive, but there's no point arguing with that part. It just makes her feel bad.
I'd rate you both a 4 adjusted for age. Like, within one standard deviation below the mean. You look like an average small town older couple who don't care much about fashion or looks. You could probably get up to 7 or so with better care of your skin, better clothes/body routines, better haircuts, etc.
I wouldn't say there's much of a looks mismatch. Your wife is prettier and cuter than you are but not significantly more attractive. This is normal: in most couples women are prettier/cuter than their partners because modern masculinity doesn't emphasize those traits.
I'm pretty sure what's happening is your wife is going, "I'm attracted to men and find you attractive by these standards." And you're going, "I'm attracted to women and by the standards of what I find attractive I'm not all that attractive!" You're right but your wife wouldn't be attracted to herself or a woman like her.
Not as good-looking as your cat. But I don't think that your wife is lying to you. So you are definitely wrong. You were probably an ugly kid and have never been able to grow into your later age hotness.
You're an average looking dude, and in good shape. Your wife is a knock-out. Tell her thank you and be glad of her good opinion, you don't need a second one.
Just yesterday I've read an interview with the CEO of Kühne+Nagel, an international freight+logistics company.
He estimates that sea trade will stay impacted at least until the Chinese New Year (beginning of February), but that it will normalize by summer or autumn 2022. For air transports, it might take longer since a lot of freight is transported in the belly of standard passenger flights, and that might take longer to normalize.
But he also puts the effects a bit into perspective. Transport does not take sooo much longer than before, roughly two weeks longer between China and US and 4-5 days longer between China and EU. But the prices are much higher (demand is on record-high and supply is way below normal). He expects little effect on high-price freight, but that we might see "less cheap Chinese plastic bowls" in the Christmas stores.
The interview is in the magazine "DER SPIEGEL", but it's paywalled and in German, so no link...
Everything is always both a transient adjustment and here to stay, unfortunately.
You're not going to fill the hole from shipping things abroad with American labor unless prices rise in real terms. That doesn't seem to be happening yet.
If you really think supply chains are that messed up you could always become an importer/exporter or go into logistics part time. If they're messed up there's money to be made.
Sorry, I have a COVID question. I hear a lot of vaccinated people adamantly proclaiming that they "won't hang out with an unvaccinated person," cancelling plans when they find out someone in the group is unvaccinated, etc. Is there any personal or public health rationale for this, or is it just moralizing? FWIW I am vaccinated.
It gives people an incentive to get vaccinated that relates to their personal life not to government or scientific authority figures. Most people who aren't vaccinated aren't hardcore antivaxxers, so mild social pressure like not being able to hang out with friends or family is an effective way of changing their behavior. If you care about someone then the ethically correct thing to do is try and encourage them to get vaccinated, and it benefits the wider population
From my perspective, I am okay with meeting everyone outdoors, and no one indoors, and this simple rule does not require me to discriminate. But if for any reason I would have to spend time with someone indoors, I would hate any additional risk -- and an unvaccinated person poses an extra risk.
The sad thing about covid -- at least for libertarian-ish people -- is that what other people do matters much more than what you do. You get a vaccine? Great, your risk of infection is divided by ten, and your risk of grave health conseqences maybe by hundred. You can also wear a mask, avoid shopping, avoid meeting people indoors, or maybe avoid meeting people completely. That further reduces the risk. Unless you spend the rest of your life in a bunker, it's not zero.
Now compare the risk of getting covid with risk of e.g. getting ebola. You use zero precautions against ebola, and your chance to get it is close to zero regardless. Isn't that awesome? And the only reason for that is the fact that other people are not bringing ebola near you. Yes, what other people do has much greater impact on your health than what you do. If there is a parallel Everett branch where people in the West took covid seriously and eradicated it, in that parallel world they now do not have to wear masks or keep distances from each other, and yet their risk is smaller than ours.
So, I reduced my risk by getting the vaccine, and I can further reduce it by avoiding unvaccinated people. Just because I reduced the risk tenfold doesn't mean I will skip the opportunity to reduce it tenfold again, if all that it costs me is hanging out with person X instead of person Y. (And given that the person Y deserves it, I won't even feel bad about neglecting them.)
This is a general case of Libertarian's not having a good response to externalities. The benefits to getting vaccinated are partially external to the person vaccinated -- they will be less likely to infect someone else -- but the costs are all internalized. For a Utilitarian in the meeting case, it means that they should avoid the meeting based on the a) good that will accrue to both you and the other person, a) the risk of becoming infected and transmitting that infection to others and c) the risk of infecting the other person and the people he will transmit the infection to. The risks of course are specific to the ages of the persons and the closeness/duration of contact.
That only applies to libertarians who are utilitarians. Most people aren't utilitarians, and libertarians are not an exception. But, OK, ;ots of people at least use consequentialism as a trade pidgin for ethical debates with the outgroup, and libertarians have to do that more than most.
The consequentialist libertarian response to externalities is, A: most "externalities" are wannabe authoritarians wanting an excuse to claim good-guy status as they boss people around, and they've heard "externality" is a power word that can do that. B: most *legitimate* externalities can be supported quantitatively, with actual math, which is a thing you have to do to make consequentialism, but aren't because that's too much work.
So, from a consequentialist libertarian point of view, any claim of "externality" that doesn't include math comes with a high prior of being either completely bogus or valid but too small to be worth bothering about because look how the person raising the issue didn't think it was worth bothering to show their work or even link to someone else who showed their work. The small minority of "externality" arguments that do come with math, we should have first a values discussion and then a mathematical discussion based on our (hopefully shared) values. Or maybe the other way around if the math looks dodgy.
The math behind the calculation of the harm fromCO2 accumulation in the atmosphere is not inconsequential.
Concerning vaccinations, a good reason to refuse would be that the harm I cause others is less than the excess harm the vaccine causes me. But That's not the reason I hear. It is just that its a personal decision, implying that no one else is involved.
The burden of proof, and of doing the math however "not inconsequential", is on the person claiming that the externality justifies overriding someone else's personal decision.
I'm trying to clarify if the opposition to an presumed externality response (vaccine mandate, tax on net CO2) is based on cost benefit analysis. Is there any point at this stage of the discussion in estimating costs and risks?
As a utilitarian you also would have to consider the good that could be accrued through meeting with them. Perhaps you could make the argument that it usually wouldn’t outweigh the risks, but if, for example, your friends parents had died and they needed someone to talk to, that could change the calculus
No one has a good response to externalities. Most people who think they have a good response think it is “in principle, the government could fix it.” In practice, mostly they won't.
Does this count as economics or politics? I might be breaking the rules. Or am I responding to a violation?
The market operates on an foundation of law and property rights. The existence of externalities is as much (more?) a failure of this foundation as it is of the market. Externalities result when someone takes a shortcut in applying the law, or worse, in defining it, and people adjust their behavior accordingly. Externalities harm persons. The law is supposed to prohibit persons from harming each other, whether pursuing profit or anything else. What should market participants do about it, once the law is in place?
Maybe I am misframing the whole thing. Maybe Thomas just meant, we all know what we wish the outcome would be, and the market fails to get us there. In retrospect, yes, we frequently have good insight into what we wish would have happened and could have happened. And we always can imagine a slightly benign government delivering that. And sometimes we might even agree well enough that the government actually delivers.
> No one has a good response to externalities. Most people who think they have a good response think it is “in principle, the government could fix it.”
In various cases governments have passed policies to compensate for specific negative externalities. For carbon we have what looks like an effective policy, carbon fee + dividend + border adjustment, as explained by the late Ted Halstead representing a Republican group: https://www.ted.com/talks/ted_halstead_a_climate_solution_where_all_sides_can_win
So it's not that there is no good response, it's that there's a huge voting bloc believing there is no problem worth solving. It could be framed as a problem of politics, or a problem of epistemology.
As for positive externalities... I don't have a good answer to that, but at least government funding for scientific research still has broad support.
Was this intended to contradict something that I wrote?
Perhaps we “have” what looks to some like an effective policy. But we have not implemented it, nor can we confidently state that it will be effective. Nor is it clear what sort of effectiveness would be chosen by the “best” means of aggregating the preferences and interests of everyone, nor what the method is. If we are lucky, we might get “good enough.”
You cite a good response to a specific problem. But it is not an instance of a general method for dealing well with externalities, and in fact provides an example of failure to deal with them adequately.
Yes, problems of policy and epistemology are rarely separate.
I think you are viewing things from a different angle. If a huge bloc believes there is no problem to solve, that is not necessarily an externality. If they all think there is a problem, and are collectively willing to expend resources sufficient to solve it, but cannot coordinate their activities to accomplish it, that is an externality. They could use markets, contracts, or government policies to achieve coordination, but they fail for whatever reason.
The problem you seem to be describing, where many people are disregarding evidence that should concern them, is certainly a problem, but not one of externality, is it? Maybe the members of one group want the others to expend more effort on examining evidence? I don’t think that is an externality, just a disagreement.
Is there an externality every time we could accomplish something collectively but lack a reliable method to allocate the responsibilities for making it happen?
Markets ought to view removal of externalities as a profit opportunity. An entrepreneur could in principle glean a surplus from the difference between benefit and cost. That is why it isn’t completely unfair to call them market failures. But if what prevents entrepreneurs from addressing the problem is a bogus property ruling or chilling regulatory policy, it would be just as fair to call them policy failures.
It seems to me that because a completely voluntary contract cannot stop a negative externality (particularly any form of air and water pollution; there are always some who won't sign the anti-pollution contract), strongly libertarian types tend to deny the very existence of (specific) negative externalities.
Therefore I like to go around defiantly saying how externalities are real and can be solved with government policies. Yes, these people may block action from being taken, but that's why I write messages like I did in the first place. I hold out hope that my efforts to spread the "externalities are real" message puts some kind of dent in the "externalities aren't real" mindset and makes helpful policies more likely to pass.
Yes. An externality is the absence of a market. In principle all the people who might become infected by unvaccinated people and all the unvaccinated people would bargain over the price to be paid by the former to the latter. But the transactions costs are too great. The next best thing would for the government to create a pseudo market taxing the vaccine beneficiaries to pay enough of the unvaccinated to get vaccinated or taxing the unvaccinated enough to reduce spread optimally. And its downhill from there landing pretty soon on coercion of the unvaccinated (a kind of tax in kind).
>In principle all the people who might become infected by unvaccinated people and all the unvaccinated people would bargain over the price to be paid by the former to the latter. But the transactions costs are too great.
Or the cost might not outweigh the benefit.
>The next best thing would for the government to create a pseudo market taxing the vaccine beneficiaries to pay enough of the unvaccinated to get vaccinated or taxing the unvaccinated enough to reduce spread optimally.
Or we could use an assurance contract. But I doubt anyone wants to pay much to be one of the payers, and few want to be among the payees. I am vaccinated. I did it without being pressured. But if I knew then what I know now, I doubt I would have gone ahead with it. The benefit looks too small (at the moment) and I am too contrarian. I gambled and lost.
>And its downhill from there landing pretty soon on coercion of the unvaccinated (a kind of tax in kind).
Yes, though there are a few scenic views we might want to visit on the way down.
If everyone has an absolute right to safety from viruses, then holdouts are violating that right and should not be paid to do their duty. If everyone has a right to say no to medical care, then coercers are violating. Either way, it has nothing to do with a market. It has to do with what norms and principles we think are fundamental.
The libertarian solution is that private cities can do whatever they want. Some private cities will ban unvaccinated people from entry, and all the people who don't want to come in contact with unvaccinated people can go and live there. Other private cities will allow non-vaccinated people, and all the non-vaccinated people can go live there.
If its good for cities, why not countries? Or neighborhoods? Or city blocks? Or my house?
Our economy is too integrated to have no goods crossing borders, whatever border you name. I guess we could try to keep people from doing so. I'm not sure how "no people, just goods" would work, but I never would have imagined that things would work out the way they have in the past 2 years, so no shock there.
I'm curious, how do they treat people who have had COVID but not the vaccine? (If you have any examples of those to hand, of course.) Are they treating them as "immune, just by a different route" or as "not vaccinated"? A lot of public discourse seems to at least tacitly do the latter, whereas from my current understanding of the medical requirements, the former would make more sense.
Such people are unvaccinated in the literal sense "not having taken a vaccine." Probably they should be treated like the vaccinated if they have a record of their positive test but, you know, politics.
It is my understanding that actual infection confers better protection because your body learns to identify and fight more than just the spike protein, which is the only thing the vaccines induce immunity to.
I personally got COVID in January, got vaccinated (J&J) in June, and then got Delta in July. Even with my previous immunities Delta was far more uncomfortable than my first COVID bout.
I doubt that there is very much certainty about whether a recovered COVID person can become re-infected and infectious more or less than a vaccinated person. Administratively, it's a lot easier to determine vaccinates/non/vaccinated status than recovered status, so it makes sense to me to treat even the recovered COVIS person as not-vaccinated. But if exceptions are to be made, I guess proven recovery is as good or better than other reasons, so as policy I'd lean toward not requiring the vaccination. I am not sure I'd want to make it a Constitutional right as the Zweig case would do.
I don't know that we've settled on consensus for whether natural immunity is much weaker than, much stronger than, or about the same as artificial; you can make plausible-sounding cases for both. (Plausible-sounding to me, anyway; I'm not an immunologist.)
On the subject of it being easier to prove your vaccination status, I do wish there were a way for me to go somewhere, get an antibody count, and have that get recorded as the official "proof of vaccination" (in my case the antibodies would only be from the vaccine, as far as I know). Instead, when I was recently getting a Covid test, I was told "we can do antigen, we can do PCR but it won't come back for 5 days, but your insurance won't pay for the antibody test because you've been vaccinated."
If you wanted to be sure about any individual, you'd have to take it on a case by case basis in terms of what they were losing or risking when they got sick, and how they responded to, say, the flu vaccine before. Someone with an immunocompromised grandmother they care for is probably more justified being worried about this, for instance.
Flip side is someone who lives alone, works remotely and is 20-35ish; they are at very little risk of anything, really. Not only but particularly when vaccinated. If that same person, say, didn't care about, like, flu shots or whatever before the pandemic you have to break them out into two separate sub-groups:
1. People who have only recently begun to notice the small-to-tiny chance they will be significantly hurt by covid and rationally decided this little risk, which they just now became aware of as a downside of sickness in general, was enough to damage social situations for
2. People who are moralizing and establishing social dominance at the expense of others
3. People who are KelseyPipering, which is a thing she claims happens where she very, very much cares about an issue in a very strong, sincere way but only because it's on the news a lot and she's susceptible to that.
All that to say you sort of have to break it out on a case-by-case basis. My prior is most people who do this kind of thing are just signaling blue tribe allegiance unless they have a pretty good reason why not, but I'm pretty red-tribe so that should come with a pretty big grain of salt.
Hard to tell the motive. There IS some greater risk of infection from an unvaccinated person, so it could be self protective. But the person may also be trying to create an incentive/send a message to the unvaccinated person to "do the right thing."
Personally, I'm vaccinated, but what with the new variants and the natural decay of immunity, my vaccination is about 50% effective by now (at best). Until I get a booster shot, I'm going to avoid unvaccinated people unless absolutely necessary. Sorry, them's the breaks.
Shouldn't you also be avoiding even vaccinated people if your vaccination effectiveness is this low? My understanding as of this point was vaccinated people could still spread the disease nearly as well as unvaccinated people, and the primary use of the vaccination was to avoid serious covid symptoms, not infection or spread.
Yeah, I try to do social distancing regardless of vaccination status. While I understand vaccinated people can pass along the disease, I and the Zvi think it's BS that the FDA/CDC is acting as if vaccines don't help reduce the spread - I'd be surprised if they ever officially made that claim, but they're acting as if it were true (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3hjMFGdnBLrzfaQJr/covid-9-23-there-is-a-war-1).
Vaccine reduces viral load, and reduces shed commensurately. Delta offsets this quite a bit, but two vaccinated people who take reasonable precautions can hang out pretty safely.
Huh, i have incorrect info then. Which i can't find the source of anymore actually, so i'm quite willing to abandon it. Do you have a source for your claim? Not required, obviously, burden-of-proof is on me, but i'd be interested!
(scroll down until you see it, or search for "Virological and serological kinetics of SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant vaccine-breakthrough infections: a multi-center cohort study", which will also link you to the study). I think your information (that breakthrough cases were just as bad as any other kind of case) was the consensus as of e.g. earlier this summer.
oh no, i wasn't asking about breakthrough infections. I agree, i think that is well established now that vaccines reduce their severity no matter what. I was specifically asking about transmissibility and spread. If you're a carrier (be it asymptomatic or not), does you being vaccinated reduce the odds others in proximity to you catch it?
Immune system doesn't work like a muscle, ie getting stronger with exercise and weaker with none. Vaccinations are basically a way of giving our immune system an order to build a big chunk of immunity-against-covid "muscle," and then the chunk just sits there ready for action, without weakening if it doesn't get any exercise. And anyhow, even though the virus is still afloat people who exercise reasonable caution (masks, social distancing etc.) are probably logging days or weeks at a time without significant exposure to the virus to give covid immunity a workout.
That is good news (if true), but, sadly, there are still all these new variants to worry about (and they will continue popping up for the foreseeable future).
Yeah, can't wait to get to Omega variant. After that, we can start giving the variants corny first names, as we do with hurricanes. Covid Chuck. Covid Doreen.
Fair enough. I'm interested in what goal avoiding unvaccinated helps achieve. Is your concern that with decay of immunity, you are at risk of severe disease? Or are you more concerned with trying to avoid contracting COVID at all? Are you eschewing most or all public gatherings where there's a risk of coming into contact with an unvaccinated person, or just those where you know someone is unvaccinated?
For me, continued personal behavioral precautions against Covid are motivated by concern about contributing to further spread. I expect I'm well-protected against serious illness, but much less protected against a minor but contagious infection. This is both a general precaution against contributing to community spread and a specific precaution against the risk of infecting people I have unavoidable contact with who can't or won't get vaccinated.
Unvaccinated status is both a risk factor in itself for exposing me to covid and a proxy for not taking other risk-mitigation precautions.
ISTM that getting everyone to take a rapid covid test just before meeting would be much more effective as a way to avoid being exposed to covid than only meeting with vaccinated people.
Same here: preventing spread is my main concern. There's a very small chance of hospitalization, too.
It's akin to the risk of a child darting out in front of my car which I also try to avoid by always being ready to slam on the brakes. Maybe I'll never ever need to slam on the brakes, but I prefer to be ready, given that being ready isn't difficult and doesn't cost much. (Also I get to work from home, I like working from home, and I lack friends, so this is all extra easy for me.)
I don't get why you'd be worried about contributing to further spread, since won't everyone who is not vaccinated eventually get covid anyway? Encouraging spread could actually be a good thing, for the same reason we have chicken pox parties for kids.
> won't everyone who is not vaccinated eventually get covid anyway?
Will they, or is this just something that people on the internet like to repeat? It might be true that I'll get it eventually, but I'm still going to try to avoid it for as long as possible. Maybe it will die out before it gets to me, or maybe Delta will get replaced by a faster spreading but less harmful variant.
> for the same reason we have chicken pox parties for kids
Nowadays we have a vaccine for chickenpox and only about 10% of kids who are vaccinated ever get it, so there's really no reason to have chickenpox parties since it just increases the chance of getting exposed. However, some anti-vax communities do still have chickenpox parties since they expect the kids to get it eventually. It's probably hurting the vaccinated kids though when that 10% get infected after a chickenpox party. So I suppose the analogy does hold up.
My guesstimate is that 60-80% of people who aren't vaccinated will catch Covid eventually. Which is not a good risk, but is still significantly less than 100%.
There's also a matter of buying time. For people like my not-quite-four-year-old daughter who will probably be eligible in a few months when the 2-12 year old vaccine trial data comes in, for vaccine-skeptical adults to change their minds (most won't, sadly, but some might), and for treatment protocols to continue to improve.
Is there a level of case prevalence where you'd be happy to hang out with unvaccinated people again? What are the chances it will be a permanent thing?
> Is your concern that with decay of immunity, you are at risk of severe disease? Or are you more concerned with trying to avoid contracting COVID at all?
One kind of implies the other, so, yes.
> Are you eschewing most or all public gatherings where there's a risk of coming into contact with an unvaccinated person...
Yes and no. I think that public gatherings in an open outdoors space are an acceptable risk; gatherings in large indoor spaces with a few people, most (or all) of whom are wearing masks are likewise an acceptable risk. But I wouldn't attend a private gathering in someone's kitchen with an unvaccinated person.
But that's just my personal risk calculus; I'm not claiming that it's a "one size fits all" policy.
This seems like an interesting community from which to seek advice. So here I am, asking for it.
I'm almost 40. I'm a software engineer with a very mixed outlook on my career. I taught myself to program as a young teen making games on the TI-83 calculator. I pursued physics in college, doing undergraduate level research in computational quantum physics. I felt like I had an epiphany that I didn't want to work on fundamental science, but something that impacted people more directly and more quickly. I thought about law and achieved a 99th percentile score on the LSAT, but never pursued it. I ended up getting a job in software because it was a skillset I had.
I spent my 20s half unemployed, reading philosophy and comic books and writing some small video games and some small short fiction. I only worked when I had to, and I never really loved it. Web applications were fun for a while, but they became boring quickly. I had children and got married, and focused on making sure I had health insurance. I learned mobile development and worked in iOS for a while. I did some small stints in management. It's always been a bit lackluster and halfhearted, although I'm fairly good at it, and at faking the enthusiasm, so it comes as a surprise to people when I express deep ennui and existential anxiety.
I've been diagnosed with major recurrent depressive disorder and dysthymia; "double dip depression." I tested borderline adult ADHD, but didn't quite meet the diagnostic threshold. I've been in therapy for 1.5 years cumulatively and was on SSRIs for 6 years. My childhood was loving but involved charity, food stamps, and the health department.
I've experimented with psilocybin and LSD about a dozen times. I've had passing but now decades-long recurring dilettante-level interests and practices with western ritual magick, aikido, tai chi, tarot, Buddhism, Taoism, and philosophy. I have some nascent belief that enlightenment is the birthright of all conscious beings, and that it's what I want my life to be about. I've also had recurring fantasies of supporting myself as a lifestyle-level tech entrepreneur, a comic book writer, a fiction author, or a philosopher.
I went off of SSRIs 15 months ago; my wife left me 12 months ago. We now split custody and I now have a lot more free time than I used to. I don't have many friends in general, and almost none in the small town where I live.
I spend my days working 8 hours — or rather, working for a few and staring at the screen wishing I was doing anything else for the rest — and often becoming severely anxious and depressed about it. I work out more and eat better, and that's helped with depression significantly.
I don't like programming for others as a career. I want my life to be about a personal relationship with God. I have school aged children, and a mortgage for a house they enjoy living in. I don't know how to support a life without just doing this career that I've generally struggled with for 20 years.
And part of me knows that is a misplaced anxiety, that it's something else instead. The obvious culprit is mental health. The desires to live off of entrepreneurship, writing, or another form of art seem like standard pipe dreams that I didn't grow out of in my 20s. Having my marriage fall apart recently, it's in some ways understandable that I'd go back to the mentality I had before that relationship.
But there's some truth to what I want, too. I want a life about my personal relationship with God. I want enough material success to live healthily, but not by sacrificing so much time in an arena that so drains me mentally. I want to create things that are more meaningful and healthy and bring joy to others. And I'm smart and capable, even if I lack in discipline and focus.
Hi am replying to you here about a different comment but because the email link between my phone and sub stack seems to be useless I just decided to do it here. It is in reference to the word sacrifice. I understand you now and the sense in which you are using it. I would think a very profound sense of peace and fulfillment would come from that.
Become a roadie. We can discuss more once some tour brings you to Prague, I'll be among local crew stagehands, enjoying meaningful break from the depressing stuff like web app backends or Linux server salt mines.
What does having life be about your personal relationship with God look like? Like do you have any interest in being a priest or pastor or otherwise entering into religious service? Or does that not really matter because it involves other people, you just care about you and God?
I probably shouldn't have written capital-G God — I don't think there are many outward avenues for expressing myself through religious work in the way that I'm attracted to it.
I'm not against involving other people, but I don't have a faith that's particularly... faith based. It's more of a direct personal experience. I think there can be fellowship in what I'm seeking, but only perhaps guru/master type experience that's analogous to priesthood but seems distinct in that it's after attainment, not after education.
I've (idly) thought about going into psychology and helping others as a therapist.
For a great number of people, myself included, it quite definitely does! Not by huge amounts, but i certainly get a feeling of fulfillment from my job. Creating something and seeing it built, finished, and used by others.
Yeah, right now I'm at a point where my career (also software engineering) is only ~mildly personally fulfilling, buts it's definitely the most fulfilling thing in my life by a lot.
Yeah. Funnily, I also code for others for a living like OP, and I get some fulfillment from it, for the same reasons you describe, but I get more fun (let's table fulfillment) from other stuff.
Except for being religious, you are the poster child for smart upper middle class ennui. I can relate.
Forget the advice about MDMA, that's like having a slice of cheesecake to treat a broken leg. You're sitting in a chair staring at screens for 8-16 hours a day. That is a completely unnatural way to live and it is no surprise at all that you are bored and anxious.
You need to lift a heavy load (figuratively, and maybe literally). I suggest a career change to something physical, possibly dangerous, NOT fully sedentary. If you don't want to take that step, there are programs in NZ designed specifically to help both the unemployed and depressed, or bored and anxious people like yourself, do tough, challenging physical things. It's called Outward Bound here in NZ and I suggest you google it and find a similar option wherever you live.
If you're looking for something church related, I'm sure there are missions and charitable things where you can do physical labor to help others.
When I was in high school and took the career placement exams, my highest ranking choice was construction worker, followed by several other outdoor vocations. But I was valedictorian and that seemed silly at the time. In hindsight, I think there was some wisdom there that I didn't know to pay attention to.
I completely agree with you that staring at a screen for so long is anti-human and anti-life. I've been working on fitness as a method of getting my body moving more. The years at a desk gave me a bit of weight and significant lower back pain. The weight is now gone, but the pain still slows me down. Yoga has helped. I think your suggestions are wise, but I'm taking baby steps with my body.
The US version of Outward Bound might be a bit different. It’s been around since the 60’s. The camps are different depending on the local but basically they are rugged outdoor camps with adventure type activities. The one I’m familiar with locally is near Ely Minnesota, next to the US Boundary Waters Canoe Area. They are big on teaching white water kayaking at that one.
The US Outward Bound camps are geared toward adolescents though. Is the NZ version similar but for adults?
The NZ one is geared for teens, adults, businesses, and professionals (as a leadership development thing). A buddy of mine was offered a free Outward Bound course when he went on unemployment in his 20s, and got to go on a two week sailing adventure.
Re what you want - what makes you laugh? do you laugh? when, where, under what circumstances do you feel light and energized?
Re psilocybin and LSD - when you "experimented", was it casual/recreational? or did you trip with a trusted guide? have you considered MDMA? it may not be suitable for you, but there's a ton of research out there to look at.
And for a weird thing: I inadvertently pasted something here, so I quickly deleted it, then I thought perhaps it was important to leave it. Here it is:
the voices never tell you the truth (not sure where this came from)
emptying of selfhood allows the soul to attach to the true reality, the divine nothingness (Francoise Bourzat in conversation with Sam Harris)
What makes me laugh? What a great question, thank you. I've started believing a little bit in the idea that the purpose of life is to grow the complexity of life, and in the microcosm the path to follow is that which makes you feel more alive. I take your questions as pointing in that direction.
I feel most light and energized, even to the point of laughter, reading and thinking about the works of someone who has flirted with enlightenment. In seeing the beauty and joy of life itself — in art, in music, in movement, in intimate emotional connection with another person. In work, it's in collaborative problem solving and teamwork, and occasionally seeing through a problem to the elegant structure underneath it. The laughter comes mostly with the aha moments associated with all of the above; the humor-tickle feeling of making a connection that wasn't there before.
My psychedelic usage has been casual but intentional. I've never tripped with a guide, but I usually set an intention for the trip, write out a prayer and then read it aloud in the come up, surround myself with sacred books, and generally ritualize it a little bit. I hadn't been considering MDMA, although I've heard it's been useful in therapeutic settings especially for processing and re-encoding traumatic memories. I'll see what I can find on it these days.
Regarding your happy pasting accident, just for fun, I interpret both as about the ego — arguably the latter quote is what I'm after, in its entirety!
Re what makes you feel light and energized - I resonate with all of that :)
Re MDMA - listen to Lex Fridman podcast #202 with Rick Doblin, psychedelics researcher and founder/ED of MAPS.org
Re happy pasting - yes, most definitely about the ego. You can find the Harris/Bourzat conversation in the Waking Up app. In addition or alternatively, Bourzat’s book Consciousness Medicine may be of interest.
Ian - I have just discovered that I was in error in my initial reply to you wrt the happy pasting accident. I'm listening/reading a lot on this subject and will often type out something that sparks my attention without attribution because it's just for me and I don't much care where it came from. But since you commented that the latter quote "is what I'm after, in it's entirety!", I wanted to make this correction.
The quote came from Brian Muraresku paraphrasing Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, ""the emptying of selfhood allows the soul to attach to true reality" and in Kabbalism the true reality is what's called "the divine nothingness", Ayin (Hebrew)"
This is from Lex Fridman podcast #211 - Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychdelics. Muraresku is the author of The Immortality Key.
My recommendation about the Harris/Bourzat conversation and her book stands, it's just not where that quote came from :) She also has a website francoisebourzat.com. She's made a three-level online course that I suspect I will eventually enroll in after I've digested her book.
I'm hoping my error and determination that you not be mislead (by me!) gives you a chuckle ;-)
I’ll second the MDMA recommendation. It may not be right for you but it helps a lot of people gain insight into themselves without any emotional discomfort. Do your homework first of course.
You mentioned that you used SSRIs for 6 years, and then you stopped. Why? Asking just in case the best advice is "start taking SSRIs again".
Seems like you love learning, but hate working. You tried many different things, but seems like you have no long-term interests. Your spiritual desire, if I may put it so bluntly, is to be rich without having to work. No offense meant, I can easily empathise with all of this.
First of all, I would advise to spend more time with people. And when I say people, I mean offline, because being online means being with a computer alone. Humans are good for many things, for example they can help you focus on things (by talking about them), provide positive reinforcement for the things you do, or just generally distract you from your depressive inner talk.
Second, put your life in order: get enough sleep, exercise, eat healthy meals (maybe learn to cook), keep your job until you get a better offer. If you can't work for 8 hours... okay, let me tell you a secret: most programmers can't. If you watch them closely, many work for maybe 4-6 hours a day, then they read something, watch videos, chat with their colleagues, or take a walk. If you work from home, buy headphones that allow you to walk away from the computer, so that you don't have to keep sitting while chatting with a colleague. Make breaks at work, use them to exercise, or cook, or do the dishes.
Third, find something meaningful and start actually doing it, in your free time. Talk to people about it, offline.
About SSRIs, I came to feel three things. First, I felt like I needed them less as I felt that I was generally less depressed and understood my psyche better than I did originally, and could manage symptoms with diet and exercise and psychedelics. Second, I developed a growing sense that they were numbing me to my emotions in a way that I didn't like; I felt less connected to my children in particular. Third, I started doubting what my depression was and what I should do to treat it. Is it best fixed chemically, or with lifestyle changes? I have had a hard time believing that 13% of US adults are innately depressed enough to need medicated, but that there is something else going on societally that can perhaps be mitigated in other ways. That's the train of thought that I'm still exploring now.
No offense taken; I appreciate your candor. You bring up good points to introspect on. I don't think I want to be rich (by western standards) with or without work. Although I don't want to work, in the chip-on-my-shoulder entitlement antiwork sense of building something for someone else for a wage so that I can keep a roof over my head. I do deeply want to spend time contributing to the health, well being, and joy of my fellow man.
I agree with the rest of your advice, thank you. I am struggling with the in person, offline connection aspect of life. That's an area I will be focusing on.
Also, if you spend too much time at computer screen, you may want to buy a standing desk. Or just put some box on the top of you desk, and the computer on the top of it.
I did this at home, and for the first month or two my legs felt tired, then my body adapted. My back stopped hurting. It is much easier for me to leave the computer and do some small task and then return back, because standing up was a psychological barrier. Also, if I am thinking, I can walk in front of the desk.
> Is it best fixed chemically, or with lifestyle changes?
Do whatever works for you, but do something that works. I had a friend who was depressed, took some pills, felt better. Then she decided that she does not want to "become dependent on pills", so she stopped taking them. A week later she killed herself. So in my opinion, lifestyle change really is better than pills, but staying alive is hundred times more important than the difference between pills and yoga.
There are probably some non-profit organizations trying to improve the world in your proximity, you could visit them and ask whether they need some help. First as a volunteer, but as you get experience and contacts, maybe a job opportunity will appear. As a side effect, you will meet new people, and they will probably be nicer than average (otherwise they would not work for a non-profit).
I've been at a standing desk for about 9 years, fortunately. I stood 40 hours a week for most of them, but then I actually developed back pain, and now I sit and stand throughout the day. I may not be standing properly.
I'm sorry to hear about your friend. I will keep her story in mind if I start to slip back down that hole, and will rethink SSRIs if necessary.
FWIW I have found that depression is best approached as something to be listened to rather than “fixed”.
Re offline connection - I too struggle with that and have set an intention to focus on it … feels a bit like cliff diving without a wing suit though :)
You want to create things and you have free time... so, create things?
I don't get what's stopping you. Make stuff. Show it to people. Then make more stuff. If people like it, they'll give you money. If they don't, fuck 'em and keep making stuff.
My advice would be to keep your current job and not drastically change that. You will lose too much and regret it in the future.
"I spend my days working 8 hours — or rather, working for a few and staring at the screen wishing I was doing anything else for the rest"
I'll interpret this to mean that the few hours you do work is enough to keep you employed and you are not worried about getting fired. This sounds great to me. Just work 3 or 4 hours and then stop. Treat your job like a temporary activity. Spend just enough time on it to not get fired. Then go out in the world and work on what you want - reading spiritual texts, attending meet ups, praying, hiking, sitting in a coffee shop, etc.
Structure your day to help you get done what you have to get done as quickly as possible. Then move on to other things you like more. I recommend Cal Newport's writings, specifically deep work and so good they can't ignore you. On his podcast he often answers questions from people that are in a very similar situation to you.
I just read the synopses and have added those books to my list. They look like the could be helpful.
I am not overly anxious about losing my job soon, but I am very new there (< 3 months) and have additional anxiety due to frequent job hopping; itself a symptom of the struggles I'm reaching out about here. I haven't yet felt empowered to leave the office or Slack channels or work on other things, which has led to the staring. But that's self imposed and maladaptive, so I think I should work on my internal reaction to it and just spend that time more wisely.
And you give good advice: I am definitely not going to quit my job or try to change that anytime soon. Despite being in software for almost 20 years I'm only now stable with a small emergency fund and no retirement or investments. Leaving behind a steady income sounds disastrous.
I'm trying to explore what it means to figure out what I want and work slowly but carefully toward it.
If you live in a small, Christian-oriented town, learn a bit about the more mystical branches of Christianity and then post on FB or Meetup or wherever that you want to start a study group about it. You'll have to lead the study group at first, which is why I suggested learning more about it first. Other people who are interested in mysticism will be helpful on your journey, even if they're not that bright or well-read. And you'll have some social interaction. Offer to host on Sunday afternoons, provide some basic noshes, tell them they can park the kids in front of the TV (showing dumb Christian cartoons if necessary) so they don't need childcare.
I did something similar for awhile (though not regarding mysticism) and it helped move me along. It's scary and my social anxiety almost killed me at first, but it worked out well.
That is an interesting idea, thank you. I've read about some of the Christian mystics and feel kinship there, although I think their original writings sit still unread on my bookshelf. I had largely written off my local Christian community, but I think that was shortsighted.
If you're after more modern Christian mystics, you might try reading some of Anthony DeMello's work, if you haven't come across it. He's a Jesuit priest who sounds a lot more like a Buddhist monk, and it's all rather beautiful.
Yeah, it depends on who is around. A number of people will be interested in the topic but, like you, uninterested in a mainstream church service. And you might get a few weirdos. Life is full of risks. But it could work out.
Thanks for sharing. I can relate to a lot of what you're describing, only I'm 10 years younger and so far unmarried and childless (though I am almost 9 years into a serious relationship). Could you clarify what you mean by "God"? Based the dilettante-level interests you listed, I was imagining a more vague form of spiritual searching, either deistic or atheistic. But the way you talk about having a *personal* relationship with capital-G God sounds more like Christianity or something. In any case, it might be worth trying to get involved with a spiritual community and forming a relationship with a monk or priest of rabbi or whatever. Not sure how much you think therapy has benefitted you in the past, but to me this would basically be another form of therapy, only the "therapist" might relate to you better when they share your spiritual outlook. In general, I think maintaining good relationships and feeling like a part of any community is spiritually nourishing.
You also say you have a mixed outlook on your career. What are the upsides, aside from it merely providing for you and your children?
Your instincts about it being a more vague form of spiritual searching are close; I confused the issue with the capital G. I want the enlightenment experience: direct experience of reality, an existence outside of mind, innate understanding of non-duality, a persistence sense of compassion and wholeness, and the lighthearted childlike expression I've seen described and sense in reading a rare few spiritual teachers. I don't believe in a capital G intelligence, but I feel a profound mystery underlying reality that draws me in. I don't expect to understand it, but I expect to experience it more directly than I (and I hypothesize most) do in everyday life.
I'm looking for a spiritual group with which I feel I fit in. It's been difficult so far, especially in person, as I live in a Christian area. More generally, I'm a weird mix of rational and mystic. I don't think it's unique, but I have a hard time finding it. I tend to be too rational for a lot of new age woo, but too interested in the unseen for some science-minded circles. Some of that is perhaps my contrarian nature, which I'm working on.
Upsides to my career... that is a good question that I've been trying to look at rationally and compassionately. I do enjoy building software from scratch, by and large. Going from 0 to 1 out of my imagination alone is a satisfying experience. I enjoy the problem solving aspects of programming, but I enjoy them like puzzles: fun at first, but I can only do a little bit of sudoku before it's boring again. I enjoy the aesthetics and creativity of a well crafted solution. I also enjoy collaborating with talented peers in an egalitarian fashion, working together to create something lovely. I think I like small projects, toys, experiments, MVPs, creation, and the early days more than I like maintenance, corporate work, task lists, hierarchies, and structure.
I swung to staunch materialist rationalist for most of my adult life after rejecting the fundamentalist Christianity I was raised in. Five years ago, I had a mystical experience that culminated in what I learned later was identified as a spiritual awakening that included the non-dual insights. I had not been seeking this experience - it was completely unbidden and totally upended my understanding of the world (including paranormal and other mystical phenomena.) It was not drug-induced and I went to doctors and a psychiatrist to see if there was some physiological or psychological explanation. It was my neurologist at Kaiser who told me "What you have experienced is how shaman get made." This sent me on an exploration of this world I had otherwise known nothing about, and spent the next few years reading everything I could on the subject.
For the first year, I considered becoming a monk and devoting myself to contemplation. The second year, I experienced a Dark Night of The Soul that made me feel powerless and depressed which finally forced a sort of surrender to it. Gradually, I came out of it and after a strange series of what I can only call unlikely miracles, I started to feel a quiet low-level bliss that has remained to this day.
I've spoken to zen priests who have sought an awakening experience for decades and never had it. I've met people who, like me, spontaneously had one and were baffled by it. Some people have sparked one through psychedelic drug use. Most never get one. There appear to be some common threads (like having been a seeker) that can set the conditions, but I haven't found any definitive consensus, except that it finds you rather than you find it.
I didn't end up becoming a monk. None of the organized religions resonated for me, although Buddhism comes closest to practical life advice (awakened and unawakened alike.) In hindsight, the experience was exactly what I needed when I needed it, but I didn't understand that until later. Your asking these questions does set the conditions, it seems, and if those conditions ripen, you will find what you are looking for.
For a month or so, I had been having a series of what may have been ecstatic seizures that presented as mystical experiences. I could tell when one was coming on because I would start to feel incredibly blissful (like on MDMA) and would fall into a calm, meditative state. And I would start writing and, then, because I couldn't write fast enough, narrating into an audio recorder a stream of concepts and ideas that flooded my brain but did not feel they were coming from me, almost like I was channeling them from somewhere else.
The only hallucination I had was this vision that suddenly appeared of a black background, like the darkest night sky, with a lattice of pinhole lights floating like stars in front of me. I became aware of a strong Presence of what I sensed was surely the Source Consciousness of the Universe. Filled with wonder, I thought “There is Something rather than nothing!” I felt linked to it and to everything else in the Universe, and became aware that everything is connected and we are all One. I recoiled a bit because my first reaction was that I didn’t like this reality, that I celebrated the differences in people and did not like that we weren’t distinct beings with unique personalities. Nonetheless, the pervading insight of Oneness felt true. I did not sense a personality in this Consciousness or any particular feeling radiating from it except a strong and interwoven connectedness. For a few moments, I was no longer me but part of everything. Then the vision disappeared.
I've since found two semi-public people in the last decade who had eerily similar experiences:
The spiritual teacher Adyashanti also described his awakening with a black background and a lattice of pinhole lights in one of his books.
How many others are there like us? How common is this particular awakening description or having some sort of channeling along with it? Jacob Bohme in the 14th century reported a stream of cosmic insights after he had an experience. So did the sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick in 1974.
The experience completely challenged my materialist view of the Universe. I had been squarely in the Hitchens/Harris/Dennett/Dawkins camp of nothing supernatural or paranormal, no God, no spiritual entities, but this of course made me re-think everything. In my materialist atheist days, I would have dismissed an account like this or attributed it to some sort of mental delusion, but I couldn't so easily dismiss my own experience and therefore have been more open to considering the actuality of this phenomenon.
Thank you for sharing your story. I appreciate especially your remarks on how some people search their whole lives for an experience like yours, and some like you have them spontaneously and are baffled!
> I started to feel a quiet low-level bliss that has remained to this day.
I'm very happy for you. I think that description might be why I'm drawn to this area. Perhaps because of my depression — or whatever it is that I am that makes it so that I experience the world that way — the appeal of enlightenment's end of suffering holds a strong draw.
I have felt that same sense of Oneness directly while on a heroic dose of shrooms. I don't know what it "means", but I sense and believe that it is describing something fundamental about reality. I actually base this belief not just on the squishy subjective experience of cosmic consciousness while on psychedelics (for me), but also on the "interconnectedness" of all beings, ecosystems, matter, etc. I put "interconnectedness" in quotes because I think in our ordinary dualistic state of mind we see the spider and fly as separate but connected, but it's really one spider-fly system, which extends out infinitely to encompass all beings.
Your lattice vision is fascinating. I'm sure you've run across it in the years since, especially since you mention Buddhism, but it reminds me deeply of Indra's Net.
I'm also interested in your channeling experience. I have not personally experienced anything close to that, but western magickal tradition has practitioners who experience states of consciousness in which similar things happen. Austin Osman Spare was known for automatic writing, and Aleister Crowley's Book of the Law was dictated to him by an external presence.
How do you view your notes and records after the fact, in a more common state of mind?
While nothing like that has happened to me, it reminds me of one of my favorite movies: Being John Malkovich. Seen it? It has an interesting concept that several consciousnesses can live in a single mind.
But I have a hypothesis that, since the brain is what bestows intelligence and personality, consciousnesses may be all the same, and because of this, many consciousnesses could occupy the same mind while being completely unaware of one another—each would experience qualia separately and separately be aware of its own awareness, but since all the experiences are the same, it's like an echo chamber; there is no way for any single conscious to be aware that the others exist.
Unfortunately, your experience doesn't have embedded within it proof that any consciousnesses are connected except via ordinary matter. The first explanation that jumps to my mind for your experience is that your brain could have multiple "points of view" that, for some reason, are normally isolated from each other. One of these "points of view" ordinarily has control over your speech and actions while one is suppressed (like in Being John Malcovich). And then for some reason the wall came down temporarily, and the main speech-controller merged with this other point of view. And maybe the sense of the "Source Consciousness of the Universe" was an illusion created by chemicals released before or during that experience.
(I note further that the two ideas in the two paragraphs above are actually separate; one idea, the other, both, or neither could be true, and admittedly, "neither" is the most likely.)
I wonder if there are researchers out there interested in doing brain scans / fMRIs on people like yourself. Ever looked into that? Perhaps there's a chance that there's something different in your brain structure that is possible to detect even without simultaneously having a spiritual experience. If nothing else, perhaps the Qualia Research Institute is collecting stories like this.
> I enjoy the aesthetics and creativity of a well crafted solution. I also enjoy collaborating with talented peers in an egalitarian fashion, working together to create something lovely.
I am a software developer and I feel the same way. I've been honing my skills for decades and writing free software for many years.
> I don't believe in a capital G intelligence
Oh? I interpreted "personal relationship with God" as specifically Christian.
I used to be Christian and part of my continuing faith was the recognition that I had a "soul". But ultimately I recognized that my unshakeable impression of having a consciousness/qualia (1) doesn't imply Jesus is the Savior of the World, or that an eternal being commanded the Israelites to commit mass murder ("not to let a soul remain alive"), etc. and (2) doesn't even prove that I am immortal (as souls are assumed to be). Since prayer never worked for me, the remaining proof was mainly in the form of some stories shared orally and some old "holy" books, a couple of which, I learned, were written by a fraudster, and the evidence of the fraud only survived because the book was written recently (see cesletter.org).
I recommend scientific skepticism. I've learned that the world is full of liars and bullshitters and you have to avoid being roped in by them. Most of all, avoid believing anything important based on what a single person or small group (whether it's Andrew Wakefield or some spiritual guru) says. [edit: it's not the size of the group that matters actually... some nasty groups are, or once were, very large... what matters is the methodology they use to decide what to believe.]
There's a misconception that certain "mystic" ideas are somehow outside the bounds of science even though they can be investigated scientifically, e.g. mind powers or soothsaying. But of course, such ideas can be tested experimentally, have been tested, and available evidence indicates they don't work. Scientists would have been *delighted* to report the existence of telekinesis, ghosts and prophecy if evidence supported it. So, then, what would the justification be in believing any such things?
Now, personally I don't do anything "spiritual"... I never quite understood what that meant. But in rationalist circles a lot of people seem to have interest in meditation, because it seems to have real effects even if we don't understand them very well. So I guess it makes sense that some people around ACX have an interest in Buddhism. What do you think of that sort of thing, Ian?
I've read some of Less Wrong over the years, although I don't think I've made it through the totality of the link you sent.
Logic, rationality, and science resonate with me highly. As do practices that are perhaps not scientifically well understood but are known to have real effects. I also agree with you not to believe anything based on what a single person says, unless that person is me. My practice nurtures only beliefs that come about through my experience. I may mislead myself, but if so it comes about honestly through what I have sensed directly.
I have no well formed "beliefs" I suppose. A Bayesian approach is right for me, with strong priors on materialism. But where I tend to differ from the other people in my life who have sent me Less Wrong links is that I find existence itself pretty damned mysterious, and I've had experiences of states of consciousness which seem to pierce through some veil of common consciousness. I don't take those experiences to be making any concrete claims about reality; but they do inspire me to want to spend more of my time closer to them and less of my time in my current mind state.
I think I'm in roughly the same boat spiritually. Maybe it's not a unique perspective, but it's certainly hard finding a community built around it. Honestly the closest thing I've found is a group chat with 3 of my good friends, but I do sometimes feel like I'm missing something that was present when I was a churchgoing Catholic. I can't advise you there, but I can commiserate with you.
It might depend on your financial situation, but another thing to consider would be transitioning to more contract-based work. That would hopefully avoid all the administrative, bureaucratic parts of the job you hate while also switching things up occasionally so you don't get bored staying on the same task. I'm not a doctor, but it also might be worth getting re-evaluated for ADHD. Maybe actually *try* to get the diagnosis, just to see if the treatment does anything for you? It sounds like you have a problematic inability to maintain interest in things for very long, which is a pretty hallmark feature of ADHD. Whether or not you formally meet the criteria, it's possible that medication would help, and without it, you might continue to lose interest in *whatever* you decide to do. But again, I'm not a doctor.
I'm glad to know that there are kindred spirits out there!
I will re-consider going on Adderall. It might be worth a few months of experimentation to see if it changes my attention span and focus. You are right that I have some of the hallmark features of ADHD; the flip side of hyperfocus is probably how I've managed to be successful at work to the degree I have (micro project level, not macro career level). I am wary of long term drugs and repeating the experience I had with SSRIs where I came to feel that they blunted my emotional responses, but that is not necessarily a well founded fear for these stimulants.
Wouldn't necessarily have to be Adderall, though that's probably the default drug you'd be given were you to be diagnosed. You could also try Strattera, Vyvanse, Ritalin, etc., depending on specifics that you'd discuss with the prescriber. I'm not trying to reduce your problems to chemicals, but it can be like flipping a switch for some people, so like I said, maybe worth a try. Best of luck on your road ahead, wherever it leads you. ✌️
Figure out how to make some friends, in person, in the town where you live. A lot of smart people - me included - struggle with the idea that friends have to be smart too, or like all the same stuff you like. They don't - it just has to be someone you can talk to or do something with. Talk with the other parents at your kids' school, set up a playdate or two, and let the kids play while you chat with the parents. Say hi to your neighbors. Figure out where your desires and preferences can best mesh with those around you. If you're interested in a personal connection with God, you're going to have a lot easier time of it in small town America if you try to do that through a local church than if you're trying to be a Taoist all by your lonesome with nobody to talk to about it.
With kids and responsibilities, you just don't have the freedom to quit everything and go do something else. You've got a decent job, so I'd focus on minimizing your stress in the job and how much focus the job needs and spending the rest of your time on a hobby, preferably one that you could potentially do with friends. If you're working 2 hours a day, and that amount of work is OK with your bosses, then do something you like for 6 hours instead of staring at the screen.
1. Make sure you're sleeping enough, without aids. You should be well slept enough that if you lie down in a dark room in the middle of the day, you won't fall asleep. Practice good sleep hygiene: always sleep in your bed, don't read in bed, particularly electronic devices. If you don't fall asleep after 10 minutes, get up and do something boring until you're tired, then go back to bed. Don't take caffeine in the afternoon, and if you're having trouble, don't take alcohol either.
2. Get some level of daily exercise. Specifics don't matter too much, it matters more that you enjoy it enough to do it every day. I did really well for a while with this: https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/e4/exercise.html But walking around the neighborhood, lifting weights, jogging, playing a sport, etc. are all fine too.
For example, you say you want to "support myself as a fiction author" or "live off of writing". So write a short story. Look around for a writers group in your town or nearby (https://writersrelief.com/writing-groups-for-writers/), show up, and bring a draft of your story. Talk to folks about it. You'll quickly find out if you actually enjoy writing or if it's just a fantasy of avoiding the kind of work you're doing now.
Thanks for your thoughtful comments. I think this is in line with the path I need to take. I need to generate hypothetical futures and perform small, concrete experiments to test how well they align with who I am and what I want and how much is frivolous fantasy.
And I do need to figure out how to make more friends in person. That's been a persistent struggle in adulthood that I made worse by moving around a lot, but mitigated through the marriage. I've always been the personality type to prefer fewer but more intimate friends, but I think I need to cast a wide net at this stage in my life. Going through the divorce process and trying to adjust my life during the pandemic hasn't done me any favors socially. Sometimes I wonder how much of my current unease is due to simply having been alone in a room for far too much time in the last 18 months.
You're right also on sleep, eating, and exercise. I've made big strides there in the last few years, but I need to double down.
I would advise you to get really, really sure about what you want. Then once you're sure plan out making severe cuts and changes in your life and make sure you're as sure as you thought. Then execute.
For example: You want your life to be about your relationship with God. Well, God is in rural Mississippi and Sub-Saharan Africa as much as God is in an expensive trendy apartment. With twenty years experience you should be able to find a six figure remote job and move to somewhere where that's a lot of money. That will give you a lot more time and financial space.
That is a complicated situation. I wish medical science could come up with a solution for what ails you. SSRIs seemed so promising for a while but the initial glitter seems to have worn off. Have you tried working with a therapist?
I did therapy for about 6 months when I started SSRIs many years ago, and I'm about 9 months into another bout of it that I initiated when I fell into a deep hole after my wife left.
I think my mental health is... okay. I've started to believe my depression more like what the author posits in Lost Connections: that it's symptomatic of my life, environment, and our modern society, rather than something innate in my brain chemistry.
So now my focus is... what do I need to do to create the right environment for myself? What sort of work can I do that is energizing rather than draining? What questions about reality do I need to better understand?
I was about to say that given the complexity of your situation, it's quite impossible to give you advice. And then I realized that it's entirely possible to give you advice, but it's highly improbable that it will be accurate advice.
So here goes my (most likely terrible, but possibly brilliant) advice:
Change everything in your life and do everything differently. And I mean REALLY differently. If you move, don't move to another small town, but to a megacity on the other side of the globe. Get the weirdest job you can imagine. Hire a full time (24hr/day) physical trainer to kick your ass and motivate you. Allow yourself only 3 hours per day of work screen time and no leisure screen time. CHANGE EVERYTHING!
But what about his kids? You can't just abandon them and move across the world. (I mean, you CAN, but leaving behind all love and responsibility to get closer to God seems counterproductive.)
Ha! Thank you for your stab at advice, sincerely. I appreciate it. :)
Having children does constrain the solution space something fierce. That's a choice, not an absolute reality — I could leave them behind, but I will not. Unfortunately it means I'm stuck in this small town for the foreseeable future.
Oh, being a good father to my children is a source of great joy to me — present, loving — even if it's only as best I can. It's a sacrifice I make willingly.
If investing 1 year in yourself can improve the quality of your child-rearing 20% over the following 9 years, it's a good investment. If it improves the quality of your child-rearing 200% over the following 9 years, it's a no-brainer.
I have difficulty imagining that a person in your situation can also be a very positive presence as a parent. I'm not saying that you are not, or that it is impossible -- just that I have difficulty imagining it.
Children require regular food as well as a safe place to live. Having both of those and a sad father is better than not having them and dad being less sad.
Depends on which God, I suppose :-) That said, there's always the clergy. I don't quite know how it works, but perhaps it might be possible to become a priest of some sort, while retaining the ability to support one's kids.
Probably not that God, I don't think. Personal rather than organized, esoteric rather than exoteric, hermitic rather than monastic. My interest is less "God" than the direct experience of reality as I understand enlightenment, although I find the term useful sometimes.
You might try looking up Ch'an Buddhism, and see if there are any groups in your area. It all depends very much on the group though. Even if there isn't one, the literature and practices might be useful.
I know you said "personal" and "hermitic", but don't underestimate the potential of being in a group of like-minded people all aiming in a similar direction. Especially if you haven't been in anything of the sort before. (Although there are potential hazards there, too.)
Russians among us probably remember the popular game show-turned-team game "Chto? Gde? Kogda?".
The best description I can come up with is that it's a game of competitive brainstorming - teams are given one minute to figure out a question that often relies both on trivia knowledge and figuring out a logic puzzle - kinda like the logic crossword in the Guardian.
It started as a Russian TV game show (afaik) and then spun off into dozens of leagues of Russians across the world. I really enjoyed, as a teen, playing both in the youth league organized by my school (where I was captain of our team "Two by Two") and the "adults" Tel Aviv league (where I would join one of a few teams).
What always bugged me while I was playing was that there is no reason it would be limited to Russian - except that Russians are already familiar with it and for others there's a cultural barrier. But it's a barrier worth overcoming because I think the game can be enjoyed by many people.
I also tried to look recently at whether there's an active league near me and could only find a website with a last post in 2013. The Tel Aviv league is still active though, but I fear the global phenomenon may be dying.
- Does anyone know of active ChGK leagues in the US, and specifically in the Boston area?
- Is there something similar to this game in other languages?
- Does anyone know of ongoing efforts to revive the game, in Russian or in other languages?
- Any thoughts on chances/worthwhileness/barriers to reviving it in English? I have some access to a large amount of young nerds (being at MIT) but also I suck at social organizing.
From my experience, in any large enough (>~500 people) European office of a FAANG-like company there are enough Russians to find some people who are either ready to play or are playing already. Not sure if there's such an office with enough Russians in Boston (there is a Google office in Cambridge IIRC, but I don't think it's too large) though.
I've run it in English ~12 times, all of them within university math departments. The requirement to write the questions down is the killer - you have to make a PowerPoint of your questions for a newbie audience. Also it takes a long while to choose appropriate questions from db.chgk.info, as the bulk of the material depends on Russian/Soviet-specific knowledge or Russian wordplay that doesn't translate well.
That's really interesting. Can you tell more how you started it? Did it end because interest dissipated or too hard to keep it up? Do you have any specific advice for jumpstarting this kind of thing in an American university? (e.g. how to draw students who've never heard about it into this kind of thing)
Sorry for the delay. I ran it through math clubs, but any sufficiently nerdy cohort should be easy to draw into it. It's not very hard to sustain if you have the patience to keep translating - my most recent iteration lived until Covid hit.
It's the BBC, so of course not, it's only on the radio when they broadcast a particular season 😀 This is the TV and radio public broadcasting station that had a cash cow in "Dr. Who" but for years never exploited it to the full because, well, it's a kid's show isn't it and besides, it's SF, it's rather a grubby genre? And several Directors General hoped it would quietly die. Then again, seeing the results when it went progressive and they milked it for modern appeal, I'm not enthused either: benign neglect might have been better!
1. Boston had this: http://boston.chgk.info/ It looks defunct, but it's possible that the contact email is still around and can offer advice. (Unless you're them, of course.) It also had this http://www.mit.edu/activities/kbh/cgk/, which looks even more dead. (But, again, the contact email might be alive.)
2. The US also has this: 60sec.online. (It's not US-only, but it exists in the US.) Currently, a lot of it is online. I live in Minnesota but have been playing with my mother's team in Cleveland (my mother is not the captain, but she is in Cleveland and played in person before it went online); there was a fully-remote team from Toronto in the league. I would be potentially interested in splitting off into a separate team, contact me (lastname at gmail) if you want to go this route.
3. The closest I've seen here in Minnesota in person was trivia nights, but they're much more about knowing things than about being able to think them up.
My dad has a Polish friend and we spent a couple of weeks with him driving around with his GPS. Could understand ~50-70% of it if spoken slowly, repetitively and in a very predictable context.
An example question, from "easy mode", answer below (these questions are designed for group brainstorming over a minute, and tend to be harder for one person alone):
Q: In a certain TV episode, the border between one country and another passes right between a fourth and fifth. What are the two characters sitting across the border doing?
.
.
.
A: "Cynlvat purff".
Explanation: Gur obeqre orgjrra pbhagevrf cnffrf evtug orgjrra gur sbhegu naq svsgu ubevmbagnyf bs n purff obneq, naq gur punenpgref ner cynlvat npebff v
Anyone have a book recommendation for naval history? Ideally something fairly high-level and broad, rather than, e.g. getting bogged down in the specifics of individual battles and battleships.
I've started watching some videos on the Drachinifel YouTube channel, and find the high-level interesting, but as for the point-by-point description of how many tonnage of displacement X ship had and how many 13 inch primary guns it carried, less so.
Two books by Robert K. Massie: Castles of Steel and Dreadnought. Neither is a general history, but both are superb accounts of the rise of the battleship in the 19th and early 20th centuries and the impact of these new vessels on global history.
Patrick O'Brian's books are exciting reads and provide a fairly authentic insight to naval battles and naval life at the end of the Eighteenth century. However, they are novels rather than history.
Are you interested in naval history as in ships and battles or naval history in terms of shipping, logistics, and trade? I know almost nothing about the former but a lot about the latter. But that kind of material history is really dry if you're not interested in the economy, organizational politics, and technology.
Alfred Thayer Mahan’s “The Influence of Sea Power upon History” is a classic, but limited to the age of sail. It was very influential in its time and contributed to the naval arms of race of the early 20th century that drove a wedge between Germany and the UK and was thus a major (if unstated) casus belli for WWI.
Here's my idea for an ideal city street: Both sides of the street should be lined with three-story townhouses. Each townhouse's first floor is a shopfront that is zoned for retail only, and the second and third floors are zoned residential. A townhouse can't be subdivided, meaning a townhouse's owner owns all three stories. Additionally, there is a covenant that says each owner must use the townhouse as his primary residence.
By forcing owners to live in their own townhouses (or to at least spend most of the year there), they have direct stakes in ensuring the quality of life of the neighborhood is good. Also, since they own the first floor retail spaces, they have control over what types of businesses can be there. There's also wouldn't be any wonky banking influences over how much rent an owner would charge, meaning owners could raise or lower rents at will.
Note that an owner could rent out some of the rooms in the upper two floors of his townhouse to other people if he wanted, allowing flexibility over the neighborhood's population density.
Put a strip club on the first floor, good soundproofing and the second and have a nice place up on the top floor. Congrats, you've just ruined the neighborhood.
I think the main problem of urban design is how to simultaneously have walkable neighbourhoods _and_ quarter-acre blocks _and_ be able to get from anywhere in the city to anywhere else within twenty minutes. I believe these can all be solved simultaneously, at least as long as you don't try to cram more than a million people into one city (so I think all cities should be bonsai-ed and green-belted when they reach one million).
As compared to what? This is far denser than the construction in most of say, Berkeley, which has 11,000 people per square mile despite 49 percent of it being zoned single family residential.
It's not going to be as dense as Manhattan, but it's still going to be a lot denser than many other cities I think.
Ha! I'm sure you're right, but from my perspective I was like "both sides of the street are nothing but three story townhouses? How dense!" I'm jus' a country boy who doesn't know how city folk abide having their homes all crowded up against each other with no breathin' room.
That sounds like way too much commercial/retail space for the population density, I can't imagine there being a shop for every two residences, unless you're imagining this as specific to a certain centralized neighborhoods with a bunch of residential area surrounding them.
Yep, "corner stores" exist for a reason. This is way too much commercial space. Also, the first floor of a townhouse is too small for efficient commercial uses. You can get around this by building larger buildings, with condos on top, but then you weaken that sense of ownership you're going for.
Townhouse neighborhoods can be great, but you can't have retail on every block. The most that townhouse density can support is a corner store every few blocks and a high street about half-a-mile away. The high street can be closer if it has more residential density as well (i.e. mid-rise 5-storey apartments on top of retail space), but then the apartment renters are half your neighborhood. Not coincidentally, this setup pretty much describes my neighborhood, which I love. But I rent one of the apartments and there is some tension between the "transients" and the homeowners.
Also worth noting, in my neighborhood almost half of the commercial space is vacant, and was even before COVID. Online shopping has further reduced the amount of commercial space this neighborhood can sustain.
Yes. Oakland has required mixed use retail in our city center and even before COVID it was just way too many retail spaces. A lot of these new retail spaces, maybe even a majority, are empty. It's sad.
Well, depending on the price I'd be tempted to leave the first story vacant. Quality of life around not having a retail location below me would be tempting. If it were priced high enough to discourage that, it would eliminate a whole lot of people from being able to afford it in the first place. If you want an UMC community that's great but if you want socioeconomic diversity, it's not going to fly.
Similarly, it would disincentivize high traffic / noisy locations that may be needed. Pizzerias, grocery stores, day care etc. would have one hell of a time for example, and I'm guessing a lot of other services would find it more difficult except from those who were more money sensitive.
Is there anyone (apart from city planners) who _actually_ wants socioeconomic diversity?
I'm happiest when I live in a place where everybody is at my socioeconomic level. Seeing people who are substantially poorer _or_ richer than me makes me feel bad. I imagine that people poorer and richer than me feel the same way.
Lack of socioeconomic diversity leads to ghettos. I get that you might not want certain people anywhere close to you, but having them all in one place is even worse.
I prefer being around people who are a bit poorer than me. It makes me feel rich and successful. I wouldn't want to be around slummy people, obviously, but being around people who make half of what I do is quite nice.
When I hear "diversity" I think of all these inner cities where only the upper middle class can afford an apartment but the streets are littered with homeless people and other antisocial elements – quite diverse and the worst of both worlds IMO. I much prefer living somewhere regular people can afford but poor people are at a distance.
Barcelona city center contains _nothing_ but buildings 7ish floors tall with commercial spaces of various kinds taking the entire ground floor. People like it quite much, judging by rent prices.
I just had a call with her today where she asked me lots of questions about what I want in a relationship, and now I wait for her to ping me with a potential match.
I have a bunch of questions about clinical trials. Like: how do I go about entering one? How do I track which ones are available, other than checking clinicaltrials.gov every day? How do clinical trials get their participants, especially if they target a sample of people who started exhibiting symptom x less than 72 hours ago?
Context: I experienced sudden sensorineural hearing loss on my right ear 8 years ago and lost about 80% of my hearing, which didn't critically impact my functioning as I had good hearing on my left, but as of three weeks ago the same thing happened to my left, taking about 40% of my good hearing. In both cases no one has any clue what could have caused it and there is no effective treatment available.
However, there is a drug called FX-322 currently in phase 2 clinical trials that appears to be effective at inducing hair cell regeneration in the cochlea, significantly mitigating extended high range hearing loss. As I understand it, pharmaceutical companies spend billions of dollars on getting new drugs through clinical trials and so lock them down under patent. This process can take a decade or more before the drug actually comes to market. As a result, my only hope of getting this treatment is by entering a clinical trial that tests it, because the pharmaceutical company will not sell it to anyone and no doctor will give it to anyone, for fear of getting sued in both cases. Hence my question.
Can you elaborate? The study in Otology & Neurology looked promising. The measure of 'word recognition in noise' is not, I imagine, the most stable measure, but it does show improvement.
You might consider reaching out to the company directly and asking them to keep you updated. A big pain-point for most human trials is recruitment, especially for uncommon diseases/syndromes, so I would imagine that if you qualify the researchers would be very interested in keeping in touch with you.
Thanks for the tip, but hearing loss is not so uncommon that researchers would have trouble finding participants. Given how FX-322 is the first thing that seems to do anything at all against long-term SSNHL I'm sure there is no shortage of people wanting to get in on that.
You might be surprised, lots of these studies are looking for patients with a particular history to increase the chance set the study shows that their drug is effective, which makes recruitment more complicated than you might think. To draw an analogy to a different part of the clinical trials world; there is no shortage of patients with depression and anxiety, but some trials specifically want patients that have never been tried on any medication, or maybe not a particular class of medications, or that don't have any comorbidities... You can see where I'm going with this.
I don't see why the same idea wouldn't also apply to this study. Maybe they want people who lost their hearing in a specific way, or at a specific time in their life, or who have hearing preserved in a specific part of the aural spectrum. Seems like it's worth a shot at least, no?
The weather is going to be so surprisingly nice that some people cancelled on coming to the meetup, but if you don't have better plans, consider coming :)
I flew home last March because of Covid worries just before I was scheduled to give a talk in Ljubljana, a city I have never visited and wanted to. I plan to go next time I do a speaking trip in Europe, sometime soon if Covid continues to die down.
What’s the state of the art in IQ testing these days?
The last time I checked (fair disclosure - decades ago) it was a multiple choice pen and paper test that produced a single number that was supposed to represent an individuals intelligence.
I think WAIS is what is typically used by psychologists. It produces a four-dimensional score and a two-dimensional score as well as the one-dimensional score. I wish more sociological research would focus on the subscores tho.
I took one ~15 years ago, and from what I remember it was going through some tests alone (pen and paper) and some with a specialist. This produced a number (the IQ) that was divided into a few numbers (verbal IQ, logic IQ, things like that).
It doesn't have to be pen and paper. I took an IQ test and I don't think I used pen and paper at all. You can use all sorts of different test items to get someone's IQ.This is called the indifference of the indicator. From chapter 7 of In The Know by Russel T. Warne:
"The fact that the CAS, CAM, DIT, NALS, TOFHLA, and many more tests all measure intelligence is more evidence for the indifference of the indicator. This was a concept that Charles Spearman (1927, pp. 197–198) proposed (see Chapter 1). Today, the evidence is overwhelming that he was right that any task that requires cognitive effort or work measures g, regardless of the task appearance (Cucina & Howardson, 2017; Jensen, 1998). It is because of the indifference of the indicator that scores on different tests are positively correlated – they all measure intelligence. In fact, tasks don’t even have to appear on an intelligence test for people to use their intelligence to respond (Gordon, 1997; Gottfredson, 1997b; Lubinski & Humphreys, 1997)."
Are you interested in traditional IQ? Or more modern variations that try to test native intelligence like the Wonderlic? I have a lot more info on the latter than the former.
Regarding how widely they are used: lots of schools require the WISC or WPPSI.
Armed forces also usually have their own tests and systematically administer them to recruits.
I'd say they are somewhat accurate. IQ is in fact the best predictor of many life outcomes (income, likelihood to commit a crime, get addicted, divorced, have a child out of wedlock, etc., even number of papers published, number of citations, and so on). It may not be a great predictor, but it is better that, say, SES of the parents.
I've taken an IQ test. I don't believe that I used any paper and pencil. It was administered to me mostly verbally. I remember that I rearranged blocks, repeated numbers back and explained concepts to the administrator.
Intelligence is reduced to one number because factor analysis results in one general factor for intelligence g. All cognitively demanding tasks are "g loaded" to some extent. This didn't have to be the case. It could have been that you had 2, 3, 4 or more factors. But the reality is that doing really well on one cognitively demanding task is an indication of doing well on other cognitively demanding tasks. The precise content of the tests doesn't matter so much because you can get g from any tasks. This is called the "indifference of the indicator"
You seem skeptical. If you don't know much about the subject, I recommend Warne's book _In the Know: Debunking 35 Myths about Human Intelligence_. It's very easy to read and covers a lot of misunderstandings about IQ. In particular, It has a passage on multiple intelligence (spoiler: it's bunk).
(On the other hand, I don't recommend it to people looking for more specific cutting edge research; there is nothing at all on the cognitive rationality test or similar subjects for example.)
"Despite its popularity in the education establishment, Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences has fundamental theoretical problems that make it incoherent, untestable, and unable to generate predictions. Moreover, empirical evidence is overwhelming that different cognitive abilities are not independent of one another and that a general mental ability– g – exists. I agree with Hunt (2011, p. 119), who stated that “ there is virtually no objective evidence for the theory” of multiple intelligences. Perhaps because the theory of multiple intelligences and its creator are so identified with one another, it has become impossible to avoid criticizing Howard Gardner’s behavior regarding the theory. I disapprove of Gardner’s resistance to testing his theory and his blasé dismissal of unfavorable evidence, both of which are not how scientists should behave with regard to their theories. One final quote encapsulates his attitude well:
>And even if at the end of the day, the bad guys [who advocate for a general intelligence] turn out to be more correct scientifically than I am, life is short. And we have to make choices about how we spend our time, and that’s where I think the multiple intelligences way of thinking about things will continue to be useful, even if the scientific evidence isn’t supportive. (Gardner, 2009, 0:45:11–0:45:32)
I suppose that if a person wants to make studying multiple intelligences theory their pastime, then there is no harm in that. (Most hobbies don’t have a scientific basis.) But the theory of multiple intelligences lacks empirical support and a coherent theoretical foundation. Therefore, in situations where it could impact people’s lives – like in education and in scientific research – it should be completely abandoned."
I offer you a deal. I take you to an isolated cabin with no technology and give you a stack of white paper. I will give you a week to write whatever you want on the paper but it has to be completely from your memory with no help from anyone else. Whatever you write down on that paper, you will never forget again.
Assuming I could have a bit of time to study before going there, I’d probably pay up to a thousand dollars (about 5% of my annual income).
I’d write down a bunch of math proofs. I’m fairly confident that as long as I could remember the basic statements I could rederive most things I need, and honestly not having to ever look that stuff up again would definitely accrue a lifetime value to make it worthwhile.
My multiplication table would expand to 20×20 or more, and I would easily determine the day of the week for any date without needing to do Conway-style calculations. I would never again need a password manager.
I wouldn't take it and wouldn't pay for it. If I can already write it for memory, I can already remember it. I also think that this would be some kind of mental prison for my future self. That might be because I'm still relatively young (~25), and my views on that might evolve with time. My grandmother had Alzheimer's. If I ever start having symptoms, I might be ready to pay a lot and would write about my memories and the memories of the people important for me.
It does, but it doesn't bother me. What I use often, I remember. If anything, it's a good argument to write about the things you care about, but you can always read what you wrote, you don't need something as strict as "never forget it".
I would add more details: I would split memories into two parts, data and feelings. These are not hard categories, but they are helpful when talking about memory. Data is, well, data. X is Y, this person was born on this day, JavaScript == operator follows this algorithm, stuff like that. You can easily write it somewhere and preserve it. Memory about feelings is more like "I was in this state of mind when that happened", the feeling evoked by a song, wind in your hair, water on your skin, noises, sensations. Those usually decays over time, in a "I feel more distanced and detached from the moment when it happened, and it's harder with time to imagine that I was here". A bit like getting more and more detached from your own emotions, remembering that you felt them, what they felt like, but being unable to experience it. It's like trying to remember the taste of something. You can "see" it, but you're not really experiencing it like when it is in your mouth.
Having said all that, these "feelings" memories might be worth preserving, but since I already can't really preserve them by writing about them, I don't know how that would work with your mechanism.
I think knowing a lot of information is kind of pointless. I think schooling is largely a waste of student's time. I thought this thought experiment might be interesting. People don't seem to think: "wow, this is an awesome opportunity. I have tons of information in my head that I could forget. I would love to spend hours making sure I'll never ever forget it and that will benefit me" I don't think that remembering much info is very useful and I think people see that in certain contexts but forget it in others.
Yeah a lot of people should probably leave the internet behind.
Reading the internet and this blog isn't a good use of your time if you're trying to learn new stuff that will have a payoff in the future. But I think people stick around because it's fun to read this stuff and they like learning. That's a good reason to read.
I check the drawer of the bedside table for a Bible.
More seriously, I don't quite get the usefulness of this and likely wouldn't pay for it. If I can memorize things easily enough to be sure I'm writing them down correctly in the cabin, then I mostly don't need the service the cabin is providing; and if I'm in any doubt that my memorization is good, then there's a severe risk that I err in what I write down in the cabin, and a falsehood is stuck in my head forever. This only becomes attractive at all if you add in access to textbooks or other reference sources.
The best uses I can think of are creative exercises. Bucket lists; jokes to tell at parties; poetry, which I'll later make fun of myself for thinking it was any good; a plan/outline for a book or other creative work; things like that. Those things are difficult to "get wrong", which is good, because I would really worry that this would present a risk of permanently damaging myself by writing down something mistaken. As other people have mentioned, most of that is just as easy to do on paper or a note-taking app.
I would move between writing 'Morning Pages' and a piece of fiction. This October I'll be paying £300 for six days where I'll be doing just that (writing) in a room/garden AND my meals will be provided. This is Northern Ireland, it rains a lot; I'll have a room, a bathroom, and technology in pretty countryside. Good value. To be able to remember what I'd written? Highly unlikely and not overly desirable as I'd have a copy.
You'd have to pay me a fair amount - it sounds substantially more miserable than a week of work, so definitely in excess of my wage (seeing that it would use up vacation).
My memory is pretty sticky. I might pay to offload a bunch of trivia that’s only good for solving the NYT crossword. Though there was that time in 2002 when I couldn’t remember Cameron Diaz’s name and I had to go over to the copier and ask Shellie… ;)
isn’t this just paper? you can pick up the stack later if you want. What’s being remembered anyway? The words? The thing being remembered? Something else?
The trick is that you have to have it in your current memory, short-term or long-term, although you are allowed to take as long as you want to recall it.
I would load a lot of trivia into it. It sounds fun but not necessarily economically valuable.
I probably wouldn't write anything, but I would do it for the food if it's really that good, assuming the cabin is comfortable (heat, shower, etc.), and that I can bring my kids and wife.
How does this thing work ? Let's say I write down the line, "my knowledge of 8th-grade algebra". Do I remember 8th-grade algebra forever, or do I just remember that one line ?
To maximize this thought experiment's usefulness, you may want to change # 2 to "What % of your net worth" because otherwise this will be skewed by the wealth of your respondents. A single mother may have wonderful memories to save but only be able to spare $20-30 while a rich guy who is only marginally interested may be willing to pay big money because why not.
Lots of people have negative net worth, and some have net worth close to 0 (so they might be willing to pay five million percent or whatever), so I think that would produce weird results.
I dunno, is there any reason to believe that such a renormalization would be a good idea? Like, I don't think that my valuation of things scales linearly with my income.
I would definitely use the "unforgettable paper" on reflections and personal memories, as they are precious, fallible with age, and everything else is accessible once I'm outside.
While I was just recently lamenting the loss of some memories, I'm still more likely to spend the week writing about the future rather than the past. I wonder if there's a natural dichotomy between people - future-centric versus past-centric.
In regards to 2. Everything I write these days is already recorded, so it's hard for me to put much value on this.
hey Andy, can you do a write up on why you run a counterfeiting business, what it’s like, what the risks are, how you get the bills, how are they used ... etc. the more detail and complexity and inside info the better?
I can tell you that my wife was pregnant in March 2021, right before the vaccine was starting to roll out to the general population. We both tried to research what the medical experts were recommending, for or against vaccinating pregnant women. What we found was basically what you're heard from the existing replies to your question...basically, no one would actually recommend it because the data wasn't there to be confidently for it. But they didn't have any strong reason to say that pregnant women should avoid the vaccine either.
So yes, the reason you were not aware that there was ambiguity is because you didn't do research "back when", which is understandable. I would not have done that research if I wasn't in a situation that warranted it.
I don't think anyone ever thought there was any theoretical reason to avoid the vaccine during pregnancy. Almost nothing crosses from the mother's blood to the infant except small molecules (which neither mRNA nor protein vaccine components are), for the obvious reason that this crossing has to be tightly monitored to prevent mother and child immune systems from fighting with each other. But you never know with various small-molecule adjuvants that are often given with vaccines, although these are generally considered safe on their own or in other circumstances. Nevertheless, people of the regulatory or medical bent have the thalidomide story in the back of their heads, which revolved around *assuming* because there was no obvious mechanism there was no need to specifically test in pregnant women, so I doubt any of them would be full-throatedly enthusiastic for fear of the unknowns.
And obviously recruiting pregnant women for any kind of trial is difficult. "Want to participate in an experimental drug/vaccine trial to see if your baby comes out normal or with two heads? Wait don't hang up. Hello?" So the data comes in slooowly.
Hm, at least enough DNA from the unborn is passing I to the blood stream of the mother that in these days a simple blood test can find a lot if DNA defects of the unborn like Down syndrome.
(I don’t know what I’m talking about, like at all, and this is just bored speculation, take vaccine)
it’s plausible I guess that maybe the immune system triggering from the vaccine might interact with specific stages or things in pregnancy such that people who get the vaccine at n to n+2 days of pregnancy in some specific stage have a .5% increased risk of miscarriage or something. But if something like that is true a lot less than the equivalent from actually getting Covid!
And if I remember correctly, the mRNA vaccines don’t have adjuvants - the delivery and spike protein is enough. I looked again at ingredients from here - https://www.hackensackmeridianhealth.org/HealthU/2021/01/11/a-simple-breakdown-of-the-ingredients-in-the-covid-vaccines/ - don’t see any adjuvants in either mRNA and only possibly the 2-hydroxypropyl-β-cyclodextrin (HBCD) is an adjuvant but i think it’s just an excipients. The ingredients list really isn’t that long for any of them,, but like you said maybe something happens with one of the unusual small ones
Sure, it's the immune system, so anything is possible. But I think our instincts here mislead us. We have some vague sense that pregnant women are "more vulnerable," and in the primitive hunter-gather situation, that is 100% true -- they are much more likely to fall off a cliff or be eaten by a predator than non-pregnant women. But are they "more vulnerable" to infections and disease? It's hard to see why they would be. Being physically awkward because you've got a big belly wouldn't seem to relate to fighting bacteria. But our instincts are not formed to deal with the microscopic world, so we apply the wrong assumptions to it, we vaguely equate the risk of coronaviruses (or vaccines) to tigers, and they are not at all the same.
People also worry about enhanced danger to the baby, and it's certainly true that Nature is ruthless in her preference for mother's life over baby's -- if there's any kind of detectable and serious threat to mother, Nature will abort that little life without hesitation.
But on the other hand, Nature builds this big complex wall between mother and baby in utero -- the largest organ the baby constructs during gestation is the placenta, and the entire purpose of that 15% or so of the baby's mass is to manage the interaction between mother and baby, such that baby gets the molecules it needs *but* mother's immune system is held at bay, since otherwise baby appears to mama's immune system as just a 5-pound tumor or bacterial colony or other terrible invader that needs to be killed as aggressively as possible.
So a priori you would expect what happens on either side of the placenta, immunology-wise, to stay there. That can't be the *whole* story of course -- e.g. we know fetal protein ends up in the mother's blood, and vice versa -- but it's a reasonable default starting idea.
But of course, it's also immunology, so by definition almost anything that seems reasonable at first will turn out to be wrong, or inadequate.
No, the mRNA vaccines don't have any deliberate adjuvants, because apparently the mRNA itself is highly provocative to the immune system. As well it might be! Hard to imagine any more clear sign of alien invasion by viruses than weird mRNA floating around ha ha. This is one reason I kind of like the mRNA vaccines more than the traditional varieties (that do depend on an immune-stimulating adjuvant). They seem more..."natural" for lack of a better word. They are more accurately simulating the natural process of immune stimulation, which one would think is kicked off by the presence of weirdo RNA or DNA. And we know there are very robust mechanisms for dealing viciously with alien RNA within the cell (indeed the major success of the mRNA vaccines was designing slightly unnatural RNA that lasted more than 2 seconds inside your typical cell). You have to wonder a little bit about some combination of alien compounds that make your immune system sit up and howl at the Moon when even 0.1 mL is injected under the skin (although only a little bit, they've all been well tested).
>But are they "more vulnerable" to infections and disease? It's hard to see why they would be.
Two possible reasons that present themselves to a layman:
1) Immune system is weaker when calorie-starved; pregnant women are shunting a large portion of their calories to the baby.
2) Babies aren't detected and destroyed by the immune system; the signalling required to avoid that could be detrimental to immunity against other things. Less sure about this one.
Well (2) is the big question. We know there is more than just the placental barrier going on, to hold mother's immune system at bay, but I think knowledge of exactly what's going on is still pretty primitive. I know people are deeply fascinated by it, because the advantages of knowing how to turn on and off the immune system are obvious and manifold.
The starvation think is also equally fascinating. We do know immune function is compromised when you're starving, but on the other hand there is the provocative work by Valter Longo at USC which has gotten so much press, that starvation *followed by* refeeding rebuilds the immune system stronger than it was before.
We also know pregnancy confers resistance to certain kinds of cancers, which you'd think would have something to do with the immune system, but who knows? In terms of understanding the human immune system, a profoundly important subject, I feel like we are at where chemistry was in the 1550s, boiling down horse piss and looking for the Philosopher's Stone.
The most commonly known (read: not commonly known) one is probably listeriosis.
The most plausible explanation I have heard for this is, that the baby actively suppresses the immune system of the mother much like a parasite would, in order not to be treated like that 5 pound tumor.
But regarding vaccines, that would rather imply the possibility that a pregnant women might respond weakly to a vaccine (as in be protected less by it) and not that the vaccine could damage the child.
(Of course this is different for live vaccines, but there are none for Covid up to now).
I put that badly. What I should have said is that our evolved behaviors are not well-adapted to deal with modern *information* about the microscopic world. That is, we don't react to our knowledge born of electron miscroscopes and genetic sequencing very well, because we don't have any evolved instincts for how to react to that information, and when we just copy over instincts that evolved for a different class of threats, it doesn't necessarily work well.
This isn’t an answer to your question, but sickness and even mild forms of many viruses during pregnancy are associated with preterm birth and complications. Something to be aware of! Was a story about how during the pandemic there were fewer preterms than usual, and how that maybe was due to lower rates of all respiratory viruses
I was in charge of coordinating vaccines where I work, and several pregnant women turned in notes from their doctor telling them to not get vaccinated while pregnant. This was back in the early spring, so the vaccines were just getting distribution outside of the medical field, and a lot of doctors were being cautious. I haven't had much opportunity to ask pregnant or nursing women if they have gotten any updated advice since then. The last I heard was early summer (June) that at least one area doctor was still telling pregnant women to wait.
The short version is that originally when the vaccines got emergency approval for general use, there was no firm data from human trial on the safety of the vaccines during pregnancy, but there was no reason theoretical reason to expect it to cause problems, and no signs of elevated risks had show up in trials on pregnant animals. Weighed against the known elevated risks to pregnant women of severe illness from Covid, the balance of potential risks seemed strongly in favor of vaccinating pregnant women as long as Covid was actively circulating.
Much more recently, an analysis of vaccine registry data from pregnant women suggests no danger to the vaccine, but that's preliminary with a very low sample size, and that data analysis was brand new when the article I linked was published (June 2021).
I was reading about things that have a significant influence on student outcomes, and I came across something rather interesting in the late Robert Slavin's blog.
While he was complaining about John Hattie's awful methodology, he off-handedly mentioned:
> If you are familiar with the What Works Clearinghouse (2007), or our own Best-Evidence Syntheses or Evidence for ESSA, you will know that individual studies, except for studies of one-to-one tutoring, almost never have effect sizes as large as +0.40, Hattie’s “hinge point.” This is because WWC, BEE, and Evidence for ESSA all very carefully screen individual studies. We require control groups, controls for pretests, minimum sample sizes and durations, and measures independent of the treatments. Hattie applies no such standards, and in fact proclaims that they are not necessary.
There's something very important in there - the value of one-on-one tutoring.
One of the interesting things about homeschooling is that it doesn't produce massively worse outcomes than traditional schooling; homeschooled students seem to come out about as well or slightly ahead of traditionally schooled students.
This seems to imply that trained teachers are almost useless, having virtually no impact at all on student performance.
However, if one-on-one tutoring has a very large effect size (greater than 0.4 standard deviations), then this might explain why these untrained teachers do so well - homeschooled students may indeed have much worse teachers, but because the advantage of having a one-on-one tutor is so large, it "cancels out".
It would be interesting to see what effect totally untrained teachers would have in the classroom, but it feels like no one is willing to run that experiment.
One question is how much teacher training has to do with becoming better at one-on-one instruction, and how much has to do with managing a classroom or grades or special needs kids or any of the other stuff that most homeschooling parents don't have to deal with?
People who think the Tetragrammaton was pronounced Yehowah rather than Yahweh: How comes it's hallelujah and Elijah rather than hallelujeho and Elijeh?
People who think the Tetragrammaton was pronounced Yahweh rather than Yehowah: How comes it's Yehoshua and Yehoḥanan rather than Yahshua and Yahḥanan?
Obviously it is a quantum superposition of both names.
https://interestingengineering.com/its-official-scientists-synthesized-starch-from-co2-in-a-world-first
If it's cheaper to make carbohydrates from CO2 than to use photosynthesis, what does food production end up looking like?
It's not cheaper. Indeed, it's way more expensive than planting a field of corn and harvesting it. But it's more efficient in its use of energy, in a strict kJ in/out sense. However, since the corn can use the kJ raining down from the sky each day, while the chemical plant would (typically) need to burn fossil fuels to get its kJ, it's not clear the increased efficiency is of any use.
I mean, photosynthesis *is* making carbohydrate from CO2, but if doing it in a chemical plant is less expensive (and the same goes for everything else we need food for), then it probably winds up as fields of solar panels supplying reactors in the cities - the reactors are in the cities because transporting electricity is cheaper than transporting the products.
not sure those "fields of solar panels" would not turn out to be much more land-wasting and less energy-efficient over-all than "traditional" highly-efficient agro-business-"fields of gold". - With nuclear-fission ("power too cheap to meter") and a global population of 89 billion, those reactors for sugars/fats and probably proteins will be found in any mayor district of whatever that world-spreading town will be called.
I was thinking that people can't just live on carbohydrates, so there will still be some sort of agriculture. But what?
I mean, if it's literally just carbohydrates, then you take out the staple calorie crops - rice in particular is very low in everything except calories; all the rest have at least some vitamins, although they're not necessarily good sources - and that's it (this is still a huge deal).
These days shelled white rice and white flour are carbohydrates only (starch). But traditional crops had way more nutrients and vitamins: whole grains rice, wheat etc. Wheat contains a whole lot of proteins - up to 20% (called gluten or wheat glue), lots of grains/seeds contain a whole lot of fats or oils. Parboiled rice is pressure cooked before shelling which presses the nutrients from the shell into the core. And so on
Peru's electricity is 220 volts, 60 hz, and Chile's electricity is 220 volts, 50 hz. How much of a problem does this pose to interoperability of electrical devices from one country to the other? A 10 hz difference doesn't sound like much.
Putting the political factors aside, how technically difficult would it be for one of the countries to adopt the other's electrical standard (Peru throttles down by 10 hz or Chile goes up by 10 hz)?
It doesn't seem to me to pose any problem for the end user. Almost nothing depends on the frequency of the AC. I suppose long ago there might have been some devices with clocks that would use the line frequency for timing, but I suspect those days are long gone, with the ubiquity of crystal-controlled oscillators.
However, the technical challenges for electricity generation and transmission are nontrivial. It's quite important, as you might imagine, for different sources and sinks of electrical voltage to have their voltage and phase matched up when they combine -- if you combined two AC voltages 180° out of phase, for example, then they would just cancel and the net result would be a reduction in power in the combined current. So the voltage and phase of all the power generators and transmission circuits has to be synchronized within a few tenths of a Hz:
https://electrical-engineering-portal.com/preparing-to-synchronize-a-generator-to-the-grid
The main interoperability problems will be with devices that incorporate clocks or timers. A digital clock made for 60Hz will run slow on 50Hz. Most computers, laptops, cellphones etc don't care about frequency. Anything with an AC motor will run slower, but most appliances have DC motors which shouldn't be affected.
When I was a kid my family moved from the US (110/60) to a country that had 220/50, and we took a number of household appliances and electronics with us. We could use transformers to step up the voltage, and pretty much everything worked fine - except we had no way to change the frequency, so anything with a clock (the VHS player) was always slow.
It's gets even better in Japan - one 50 Hz grid and one 60 Hz grid.
I am not sure if this is really related to your question, but 3-phase AC motor speeds depend on the frequency. So a motor running at 1800 RPM on 60 Hz will run at 1500 RPM on 50 Hz. Engineers plan for this based on the expected power supply frequency.
Most electronic devices (computers, TVs, phone chargers, etc) don’t care.
Turns out our special young sun is calming down and fits way more socially in at home, in school and at the grandparents home by taking SSRI every morning. Before he was starting to get engry some days every 10 Minutes over minor things. He is just taking taking half of my dose (5mg, 30kg weight) of escitaliprame and we didn't get a prescription for him after half a year of talking and testing with a local state-owned hospital specialized in psychiatry of kids and teenagers. The doctors just are trying to play safe for themselves and leaning not a millimeter out of the window by conducting a 4-week long test with a given SSRI medication. They told us the rules in our country demand a year long talk and behavioural therapy as a first step and a SSRI only as the sexond, parallel step. This would mean year long stress for the sun and us parents.
So now the question for us parents is: how can we go forward an legalize his medication without getting sued by a doctor following strictly the books.
In our country there is 1 SSRI prescribable for kids from an age of 8. We heard there should exist some children's doctors doing prescribing of SSRI. But how to find, approach and talk with them?
Now, this is going to sound the teeniest bit harsh, but whatever.
You, my dear sir, are a fuckhead.
Sure, it's way more convenient to have your kid docile and drugged-up, that's the same rationale as Victorian dosing of infants with opium:
https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/the-addictive-history-of-medicine-opium-the-poor-childs-nurse/
"What do doctors know, ho-ho-ho, I'll just share my prescription with my young child, going by guess and by God, and if it makes his liver explode, so what? You can't get any child quieter than a dead child!"
Ah, you sir, are the fuckhead. Marcel is a loving and kind parent who is trying to thread a course through a very imperfect world.
Have you, Deiseach, ever been prescribed a psychoactive drug. If so, you may already know what I'm about to tell you. Doctors are prescribing these powerful drugs "by guess and by God". "Let's try Wellbutrin for six weeks and see how it goes."
FYI.
What age is the child? Escitalopram is not prescribed for those under the age of 12 years. There has been a safety study done on dosing children ages 7-11:
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/results/NCT01198795
but this has not shifted the recommendation on age to give children anti-depressants:
https://www.fda.gov/media/116420/download
"On March 19, 2009, escitalopram was approved for the treatment of MDD in adolescents 12 to 17 years old. Safety and effectiveness have been established in adolescents 12 to 17 years old for the treatment of MDD. Maintenance efficacy is supported from extrapolation of data from adult studies along with comparisons with racemic citalopram pharmacokinetic parameters in adults and adolescents. Safety and effectiveness have not been established in pediatric patients
less than 12 years old with MDD. Safety and effectiveness have not been established in pediatric patients less than 18 years of age with GAD. Adverse events were generally similar to those observed in adults."
There are side effects:
"Lexapro is not approved for use in children in adolescents. When taken by pediatric populations, side effects can include: increased thirst, muscle twitching, nose bleeds, difficult urination, heavy menstrual periods, and slowed growth rate. For children or adolescents treated with Lexapro, your physician should check vital statistics and evaluate height and weight. If any problems are found, your doctor may recommend discontinuing treatment."
And there seems to be only one drug licenced to treat anxiety in children 7 years of age and older:
"For childhood anxiety disorders, only one medication, duloxetine, has received FDA approval and can be prescribed “on label” for children 7 years of age and older with generalized anxiety disorder."
Granted, Marcel doesn't live in the USA so his home country may allow any and every kind of medication, but I'm betting it has *some* restrictions around who can give medication to children and what kind.
Escitalopram is for major depressive disorder and anxiety. This does not sound like what Marcel is describing: "angry every day every ten minutes over minor things". The doctors they were attending advised against drugging up the kid until after a year of other interventions had not worked.
But our friend here knows better, and now the kid is sedated into a state of docility, he's not a problem at home, in school, or at granny's house. Previous generations used to achieve the same effect with opium or alcohol for children.
"Loving and kind parents trying to thread a course through a very imperfect world" kept the charlatans peddling Miracle Mineral Solution/Supplement in business by ignoring what the medical professionals were telling them about their children with autism, and when the force-feeding their kids with chlorine dioxide resulted in the kids vomiting up bloody shreds of their digestive systems, the parents were convinced these were the "worms" alleged to cause autism and were convinced the treatment was working. Being "loving and kind" did not prevent them from doing severe harm to their children.
https://www.autism.org/dangerous-miracle-mineral-solution/
So yeah: he's a fuckhead for ignoring the doctors, you're a fuckhead for apologia for harming kids under the guise of "but the parents love them".
All the prescribing of anti-depressants for children is assumed to be done on medical advice and under medical supervision. Even for ordinary ailments, you are not supposed to share your prescription medication with another adult, or give them tablets you have not finished taking. "It works okay for me, so it must be okay for my kid" is *not* a good rule of thumb, and we would heavily censure any father who decided that a glass of whiskey or XXX porn videos were okay for their young kid. I'm on a rake of medications, if I had young kids I sure as hell would not decide "well this might help them with their own problems" and start sharing my prescriptions.
I would think your main legal risk is whatever exists in your country that functions as a child welfare agency. Most would probably have significant concerns about you sharing your psychiatric meds with your kid on your own initiative, without a doctor's prescription, especially if there is some specific statute laying down conditions for child use of that particular medication. In most US states the child welfare agencies are a nightmare with which to deal, and once you come to their attention it's very hard to escape completely, so I would not do this except under conditions of great need.
Thanks for your perspective. That's exactly our situation. Guidelines are pretty first world-like strict for medication of kids. But all that is with the background of 1) normal average circumstances 2) the idea that doing something actively which later could turn out bad with 1% chance is perceived as 10x worse as just doing nothing and bad things happen with 10% chance.
Till late 50's, early 60's lots of children were treated very badly in this countty - like some protectionless groups of adults as well. So now we have the opposite situation. Lots of professionell personal is very reluctant to lean out to much of the window just to play safe (for them). My wife is a teacher in a private school for special teenagers with ADHS, Autism, Asperger and more who were kicked out of public schools. She tells a lot if heart breaking stories how these kids suffered because just nobody tried the obvious, started to connect with these kids and just ask, what's up. Just today a teenage boy, who is doing nothing in school since months each lesson told her, that he's woken up every morning at 4:30am by his shift working parenrs, then sitting in front of the TV till 8am, staring at the wall in school till 4pm and being awake till 11pm in the night. This boy foreseeable will be a totally different 2.0 version of himself after just sleeping full 8 hours a couple of days.
Just a random example.
I think you have identified the key perspective (avoiding the attention of any child welfare agency) in addition to avoiding any harm to the child.
When I began reading your post I thought the subject was sun spots and solar minimums!
In which country do you reside?
Do doctors sue people?
No, doctors don't sue here. They might inform a child welfare agency or the police instead
Sorry, foreign language, auto correction intervening, no chance of correcting a post afterwards... 'Our son' was meant indeed.
It didn't take long for me to figure that out!
I thought the same lmao
That sounds like something to ask a lawyer. Sorry do be of no further help.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/impossible-particle-discovery-adds-key-piece-to-the-strong-force-puzzle-20210927/
I love this:
“ a double-charmed tetra-quark.”
It’s Shakespearean.
More Joyce than Shakespeare.
and more like Finnegans Wake than Ulysses
I am sure this is the right place to pose a question. If one takes the entire span of years that the universe has been around, whatever billion figure that is and were to reframe that period of time as a 24 hour day, then what would the average human lifespan correspond to as fractions of seconds?
I was musing that there might be some sort of analogy made between that and subatomic particles.
What fraction of the age of the universe is one day?
1 ÷ 14,000,000,000 * 365
A human life in seconds = 70*365*24*60*60
Human life in seconds as fraction of universe:
70*365*24*60*60/(14,000,000,000*365) =
0.000432 seconds
.432 milliseconds
Or if the universe is analogized to one year, an 80-year lifespan would be 0.18 seconds.
(80/13'800'000'000 * 365*24*60*60)
Or if the universe is analogized to Central Park NYC, an 80-year lifespan would be 20 square centimeters.
(80/13'800'000'000 * 3'410'000 m³ * 100^2)
Here’s Danny Glover’s take on that in “Grand Canyon”
One man’s life? That’s too small to even have a name.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=D3JmqDsnfbw
But what does it work out to in numbers?
Using the numbers from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_universe
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Variation_over_time
it's about 0.46 milliseconds.
Cool. Thanks.
Its longer than I might’ve guessed.
Yeah that’s a pretty good scene.
I saw this question on the English Stack Exchange and find it surprising that there are no answers:
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/572885/is-eth-as-in-the-verb-buildeth-always-the-singular-is-this-inscription-a
It appears that a typo has survived on one of the Hoover Dam's towers without ever being commented on (at least on the internet). Is the person who asked the question correct that this is a typo?
I like the gracious sentiment of the inscription. I learned something about early English verb suffixes and I bookmarked an interesting spot on Stack Exchange. Many thanks Mr... uh Anonymous.
Who was that masked man?
Yes. The suffix indicates third-person singular.
So the progression over time would be "we buildeth" --> "we builden" --> "we build"? Still seems like the Hoover dam inscription is just an error, then.
I’m sure this isn’t an original observation, but -
lmao AI learned how to do art (clip+Some GAN, TADNE, etc) before it learned to code and learned to operate mechanical moving robots. Take that ... everyone’s guesses about that beforehand
For some definitions of "art" all that an AI had to do was create a visual medium of any kind, based on any inputs. I enjoy some art, but the field as a whole is way too easy to gimmick because what we call art can vary so much without good explanation (to a layman at least). Asking an AI to create a masterpiece Rembrandt-level painting without copying Rembrandt would be more interesting than this (https://www.cnn.com/style/article/artificial-intelligence-ai-art/index.html) which apparently involved taking actual pictures of famous paintings as part of the AI programming. As a real painting of a real thing, it's terrible. The eyes and face are all messed up, the coloring is off, etc. As "art" it can be considered good as some kind of abstract thing.
Try to write some code where you fudge the instructions because that's more interesting, and you'll see why it took AI much longer to be able to do it.
How worried should I be about possible Natural Gas shortages this winter?
My instinct is that this easily could be "as bad as COVID" in terms of life disruption.
Where do you live?
Can anyone recommend book/blogs on the Chinese economy?
I'm interested especially in the historical transition to a more open economy
Thank for all the suggestions. I'll have a look at them
Not to recommend another book I haven’t read.....
but I grabbed https://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Power-Chinas-Twenty-first-Century-ebook/dp/B00BH0VU4W/ from scholars stage, and it looks a bit to be what you want -“ Through a series of lively and absorbing portraits of iconic modern Chinese leaders and thinkers, two of today’s foremost specialists on China provide a panoramic narrative of this country’s rise to preeminence that is at once analytical and personal. How did a nation, after a long and painful period of dynastic decline, intellectual upheaval, foreign occupation, civil war, and revolution, manage to burst forth onto the world stage with such an impressive run of hyperdevelopment and wealth creation—culminating in the extraordinary dynamism of China today?
Scholars stage is also a china related blog, not really economic though
Ronald Coase's final book, coauthored with Ning Wang, is _How China Became Capitalist_ and very interesting. There is a long review of it up on my web page:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Academic.html
(search for "A Very Coasian Revolution")
The book that made me emotionally grok the opening of the Chinese recovery was "A Chinese Life" by Li Kunwu. It covers Li's experiences growing up in China from 1955 to about 2005. He includes several revealing vignettes about how ordinary Chinese people navigated the change from planned economy to open economy: how some got rich, and others couldn't handle losing the "iron ricebowl" they were promised and were unsuited to the life of an entrepreneur. It doesn't have much in the way of statistics, but it gives an excellent emotional understanding of how much life changed for poor and middle class Chinese.
https://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Life-Philippe-Otie/dp/1906838550
Sorry, autocorrect changed "opening of China's economy" to "the Chinese recovery".
palladium mag for articles on China, although they’re not very central / comprehensive, they have a unique approach - just fun to read IMO
For the economic development, I’ve heard how Asia works, although it’s about all of Asia and I haven’t read it and it seems like the sort of unifying large scale book that’ll miss a lot
not really the best person to answer this one tbh, but in case that’s interesting
the book is “how Asia works”
Too short notice for me to join in Madrid last weekend. Any plans to repeat soon?
The Solution to Many Problems: One Billion Persons on Earth
[Revised & expanded September 2021]
Author: Peter Rodes Robinson
How many humans are too many?
...
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vM6FRpKebtTTlQYBUWsan06x_gxLP9XjZTaGyNH2GLk/
I would love to get feedback on this article: positive, negative, picky, useful...
Whatever.
>The human race will run out of time before it runs out of space to develop.
Not with any significant growth rate, it won't (and I'm not seeing fertility staying below 2 forever, at least not without draconian state intervention; subcultures with high fertility and high retention exist (see: Amish), and once you get to biological immortality and removing menopause, the "I want a million babies" people start being a very much non-negligible contribution as well). 0.1% growth for a million years is a multiplier of 1.1 * 10^434, which is absurdly greater than the amount of matter within a million lightyears (or indeed the observable universe).
The big exception is if FTL is possible - more specifically, if you can use FTL to go to a place for the first time (as opposed to, say, FTL wormholes that have to be tugged places at STL). Estimates for the size of the actual universe are incredibly variable due to our inability to directly observe it, but the larger guesses such as "10^10^10^122" and "infinite" would definitely give us more Lebensraum than we could use.
In terms of birth rate - i would recommend anyone here, especially long time posters who are smart and very skilled, have lots of kids - but I’m just not sure what LP happen in the future as technology evolved and radically changes more, so idk about future predictions of childbearing rates at all
Also consider sperm donation, although I think personally raising children has a large effect that isn’t seen in the heckin twin studies because nobody actually does it properly
But I say that because despite adopting some goals that would heavily increase local birth rate, it seems like the smart folks still are adopting them less than the, well, not, and that seems to hold within most groups I can think of. But I’m not even sure the effect of that will be that great, because again social stuff and technology effects continue to change and accelerate and we respond to them late often
You might find some interest in a very old piece of mine, in which I tried to estimate whether the net externalities from having one more child were positive or negative and concluded that the results were so uncertain that I could not sign the sum.
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Laissez-Faire_In_Popn/L_F_in_Population.html
That was back when the thread of population played the same role in the popular discourse that climate does now, the looming threat that all the experts knew was hanging over us. What happened since then was the precise opposite of the predictions — population in poor countries continued to grow, calories per capita in poor countries went up instead of down, poverty in poor countries went down instead of up.
It is always possible that the predictions were correct, just off by fifty years or so — but the fact that the predictions were made with confidence should be a reason to lower one's faith in both the arguments and the people who made them.
This is great! Setious critiques. Thanks to everyone who responded. I will be taking one point at a time.
I suggest imagining that your readers are the prospective parents thinking of a third child, and to address the motives that are important to them.
>>I suggest imagining that your readers are the prospective parents thinking of a third child, and to address the motives that are important to them.<<
I'm not trying to convince parents they should not have a third child. Fertility is declining rapidly already (everywhere but Africa). With many persons having one or no child, there is certainly space for some to have three.
The suggestion to try to imagine my readers more clearly is right on.
I find the article itself to be high in speculation and low on grounded fact. It covers a lot of topics that may or may not be related, especially with the 10 billion humans living in space and the paragraphs after that. I would recommend sticking to your basic points about the need for a limit on the numbers of humans and determining what the correct number is or should be.
Right now your article is a bit weak on justification for reducing the number of people, and your proposed means is already in effect. You don't suggest any alternatives to peaking at 9.7 billion (which you argue is far too high) and gradually decreasing from there. The timetable, according to your article, for when that will happen is also far too late to achieve the necessary corrections you mention in your opening paragraphs. After reading it, I find myself unsure what you are suggesting (other than very speculative space habitats we couldn't possibly work on now). Lowering our population actually makes it much harder to achieve space colonization. We would never be able to spread out even in our own solar system with a reproductive rate below replacement. We would need to be far above replacement, actually. Without any intervening changes, you go from a current bad situation to colonizing all of existence. Other than speculating about the future, what is the purpose of your article?
Some other notes -
You mention growing technology, a steady state economy, and growing to 10+ billion people living in space. A steady state economy doesn't fit at all with the other two. Any meaningful technological growth will expand the economy. A steady state economy will not permit expansion into space (or people can starve as you transition resources to moving other people into space, which makes the problem mentioned above about not enough people even worse).
>>I would recommend sticking to your basic points about the need for a limit on the numbers of humans and determining what the correct number is or should be.<<
I think I will break out the space part to a separate article with a link. That would give me room to expand on the optimum population part. People interested in space exploration can follow the link.
Thank you for your comments.
>>I find the article itself to be high in speculation and low on grounded fact. <<
Could you give me some examples? Which parts are most speculative?
>>Right now your article is a bit weak on justification for reducing the number of people, and your proposed means is already in effect. <<
What is your personal opinion? Do you think 8-10 billion is sustainable indefinitely? I would like to reference some experts who agree with that if you know of some.
If you believe 8-10 B is NOT sustainable, what facts convince you of this?
>>You don't suggest any alternatives to peaking at 9.7 billion (which you argue is far too high) and gradually decreasing from there.<<
There is no acceptable alternative. A world wide pandemic is not reducing the population. Nuclear war would work. If we abandon the common assumption that the population of Africa is certain to triple, the peak could happen sooner and decline faster. Perhaps I should say that.
>>The timetable, according to your article, for when that will happen is also far too late to achieve the necessary corrections you mention in your opening paragraphs.<<
I believe it's going to be very rough but the human race will survive.
I'm saying:
* We need to reduce the Earth's population.
* The population is already too large which will cause great suffering.
* The population will begin shrinking in this century.
* The population will shrink for centuries.
* Eventually the Earth will be such a pleasant place that the population will stop shrinking.
Which statements do you disagree with?
>>After reading it, I find myself unsure what you are suggesting<<
I think that things will go better if we understand what is going on. For example some (many?) people will be alarmed when the population starts to fall and try to prevent the fall. In fact this is exactly what we need.
I can work on clarifying why I am writing and what I am suggesting.
[More points to come.]
The history of humanity is filled with people saying that there are too many people, followed by periods of rapid population growth when things worked just fine. Malthus was wrong on all of his specific predictions, so I feel the need to question his underlying assumptions. Intuitively he made sense, but he was flat out wrong.
I don't know if 10 billion is too many, or if the number is actually much larger or much smaller. By physical space, we could fit far more people. Something I heard on SSC a few years back was a comment that we could colonize inhospitable parts of Earth, like deserts and Antarctica, far easier than living in space stations or even on Mars. If we could make a sustainable space station for 20 million people, we could easily find a way to live where nobody lives right now, and have the benefit of easier travel and plentiful oxygen. If we can grow crops in space, we can grow crops in the Sahara.
I'm neutral on whether we should allow populations to decline on their own, and adamantly against trying to force them down. Declining populations have many medium term (50-100 years) effects on economies and family life, which are non-negligible problems. 300 years of declining population would create some very weird and disturbing situations, and I think an actively declining population could easily lead to wars, resource scarcity, and massive social adjustments that would be hard to predict. That they are happening naturally without overt government coercion may be reason to leave it alone, but places like South Korea are going to struggle immensely over the next few generations if they lose half their population per generation. The younger generations will be burdened with caring for the older, with even fewer people to help below that. Infrastructure will go into disrepair and eventually collapse, including infrastructure we currently consider essential. Not that these are unsolvable issues, but I want to be clear that population decline is not an automatic good. We could easily see a weakened South Korea get conquered by a North Korea with high birth rates after a few generations. Right now North Korea is in no shape to do anything, but we're talking about a pretty radical change.
"Indefinitely" is a tough word, because it implies a steady state, which we've rarely had and certainly not in modern times. Could we find ways to sustain 10 billion or more people on Earth with reasonable qualify of life? I certainly think it's quite possible, especially over the 300 year timeframe you are talking about. And I do believe the population will need to level off at some point, as there really will come a point when it's not possible for the planet to hold more people. For all I really know that point might be 40 billion people, with most of them living in underwater colonies or in the sky like the Jetsons, or something else we never thought about.
My response here is very speculative, but I think in the same way that your article is speculative. You gesture at lots of possibilities, and cite people who say that those things may/will happen, but the scientific justification for your view feels weak, and based heavily on Malthusian thinking.
I generally disagree with * points 1, 2, and 5, with some uncertainty on 3 and 4. Not that it's impossible that you are right, just that I am at least skeptical.
If you added a section (perhaps instead of your spacefaring section) that offered some thoughts on how to deal with a declining population and accept it, that would be a pretty solid ending to your article. Right now countries are looking at the population crunch (think Social Security in the US, and how it's funded - like pretty much all programs to care for the elderly) and how difficult it will be to handle those problems in the timeframe we're talking about. The reason a country or individual might push back is due to those concerns. Who wants to live in a country with 80 million retired people and 20 million kids being supported by 40 million working people?
>>I generally disagree with * points 1, 2, and 5, with some uncertainty on 3 and 4<<
If the population size in China is falling within ten years, would that have an effect on your expectations?
I'm not sure I'm following your question or it's purpose, so feel free to elaborate as needed. In regards to #3 and #4, China losing population would certainly be a contributing factor in my thinking. My skepticism about those two points is more in line with "non-Western" countries having growing populations now. It's easy to draw a straight line from current trends and make a prediction, it's much harder to predict second-order effects. Maybe a declining 1st World population encourages other countries to increase population such that there is no overall decline. As I said, I'm quite uncertain about that, but open to the possibility. If that were true, it would affect our planning and what we recommend for people to do. If, for instance, 3rd World countries would see population increases that play off of declines in the 1st World, but would naturally reduce population growth if the 1st World held steady, then I would argue that we should encourage growth in the 1st World, where there is already abundant infrastructure and the means to care for these people, rather than encourage growth in the 3rd World and spend enormous amounts of money and time tearing down excess infrastructure in one part of the world to move it to another. Of course, if there's no relationship on overall population, then encouraging growth in the 1st World could end up being a bad idea.
Let's go all the way back to one of my basic assumptions: that we don't want a slowly dying natural world which I equate with a rate of extictions above the background rate.
Now I could be completely wrong about that perhaps the majority of humans don't care about extinctions.
Where do you land?
Rate of extinctions above background rate doesn't equal "slowly-dying natural world". Nature isn't analogous to a person where you can talk about "how healthy" the person is and where sufficient unhealth results in total death; ecosystems can be thrown into chaos, but there are almost always winners as well as losers.
There are obvious scenarios - possibly-anthropogenic scenarios, even - in which the natural world would be destroyed. #1 is humanity reaching Kardashev 1+ and consuming all the light that powers nature (there are some things that wouldn't immediately die from lack of energy, like submarine-volcano ecosystems, but it's not obvious whether those could survive in the long-term without sun-powered life recycling nutrients and in any case that's a much-reduced biosphere). #2 is a true Runaway Greenhouse, in which the temperature goes up to 500 degrees, the water boils off into space, all organic matter on the surface burns and the planet becomes essentially a copy of Venus with sulphuric acid clouds - evolution has constraints (e.g. you can't evolve to not use DNA/RNA/proteins) that do not permit survival in those temperatures or in nearly-pure sulphuric acid. But these are specific apocalyptic scenarios with an obvious nonsurvivable criterion, not a vague "the environment being stretched beyond what it can bear".
Mass extinctions have happened a lot of times before; they change the distribution of species and in the short-term the number of species, but the actual amount of living matter on the planet changes only for the briefest instant - Moloch doesn't leave pennies lying on the ground.
I find the link to extinctions in 1800 somewhat dubious, as that's the timeframe where we starting cataloging species. Prior to that we didn't have a systematic approach, so it's much harder to estimate how many species were actually dying out (especially in places Europeans wouldn't have had access). We now discover far more species going extinct, and surmise that humans have some/most/all to do with it, but that may be less true than we think - we could just be that much better at cataloging. We have also discovered tens of thousands of species that went extinct before humans existed - how many more went extinct and didn't leave any records behind? The more we study the more species we find that went extinct without any human help. I don't trust that our understanding of "background rate of extinction" is accurate.
Putting that aside, I am concerned on some levels with human encroachment on animal habitats, and definitely believe that humans can have a devastating effect on certain ecosystems. I think that most people have moderate levels of concern about animal extinctions, but correctly recognize that there isn't much we can do about it and maybe not a lot that humans are doing to cause it. Some specific examples, like African elephants, are directly attributable to humans. Random insect/bird/rodent no one has ever seen #0192881 probably isn't. I have a real problem with people killing elephants. I don't actually care about random insects dying out. Maybe I should, but I leave the burden of proof on those that say I should. Too many of those species die for me to know anything about them all, and it's a tall ask that I try.
The idea that we have a "slowly dying world" does not appear to me to be correct. Overall there are many more square miles of land where there are few to no humans than there are of tightly clustered humans. Those tight clusters of urbanization seem overwhelming to people in them or close to them, but they represent a pretty small portion of the planet. A quick Google shows 3% of the surface is urbanized. Which means 97% isn't, including almost all of the oceans. Sure, human waste shows up all across the Pacific, but it's more of a perceived blight than an actual devastation. Go visit some truly rural areas, and you can find land that hasn't seen a human in years, with almost no human interaction. It's quite liberating. Or check out Chernobyl, which within my lifetime was a busy industrial center, a nuclear disaster, and is now a wildlife refuge full of nature. Nature isn't so weak or beaten as many want to claim.
We’re Living Through One of the Most Explosive Extinction Episodes Ever https://nyti.ms/3AX7JVV
>>Random insect/bird/rodent no one has ever seen #0192881 probably isn't. I have a real problem with people killing elephants. I don't actually care about random insects dying out. Maybe I should, but I leave the burden of proof on those that say I should. Too many of those species die for me to know anything about them all, and it's a tall ask that I try.<<
Even before I read your response I was considering focussing on mammals as a proxy for the natural world that I am concerned about. (Because as you explain, we can relate to mammals much better than insects.)
For example I could ask the reader: would you care if a thousand years from now there was only a dozen species of mammals left in the wild on Earth?
Or ... One Billion Americans by Matthew Ysglesias. if you want to not have industrial society (and its future), a billion is high. If you want technology, what’s wrong with today, we can just use even more of the planet and make even more peeps
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/21449512/matt-yglesias-one-billion-americans
Por-que no los dos?
Why not nature AND humans? As a human I'm very much in favor of that. The question is: What would an American Bison think? When there were some 30 million bisons in North America in 1400, were they pining for humans? Or were they quite satisfied to exist without them indefinitely,?
And since I have no way of knowing whether a bison can contemplate near extinction at the hands of humans or certain extinction from a comet impact, the question is more like: What would a bison with a human brain think?
Contemplating this question as Peter/Bison Advocate, I would need to know what kind of humans are we talking about? Humans that would shoot bison from a passing train in order to crush native peoples? Or humans that would set aside vast areas of the continent so that bison and many other species could survive and also be prepared to protect the planet from a comet strike?
I (Peter/Bison Advocate) could embrace the presence of the latter type of human.
https://www.flatcreekinn.com/bison-americas-mammal/
I read Lambert as joking "why not 1 billion humans AND 1 billion Americans"
I would like to hear more from both posters (los dos)!
>A world fertility rate of 1.4 would result in 1 billion persons on Earth around the year 2300.
I'm pretty sure all of the problems related to resource extraction and pollution will be solved by 2100 and be well on the way by much sooner than that. There are much easier ways to solve these problems than depopulating the world.
It would also be worthwhile keeping one foot in reality while thinking up ideas to solve problems.
>>It would also be worthwhile keeping one foot in reality while thinking up ideas to solve problems.<<
Which part do you think is unreal? Do you dispute that fertility rates are falling rapidly?
>>I'm pretty sure all of the problems related to resource extraction and pollution will be solved by 2100<<
Have you expounded on this idea where I could read more detail? Or can you reference some other authors.
Presumably that would include reversing global warming. What approximate year do you expect that to happen?
Reversing global warming is a political problem. The technology is there.
When you say "the technology is there" do you imagine the solution is easy? If it easy, one would expect to happen quickly. Certainly within a decade. You don't expect that, do you? Because you recognize that there is a lot more involved than just technology.
I'm thinking the planet will begin to cool sometime in the 22nd century because of a shrinking population. Do you expect cooling sooner? When?
Same with building a space habitat. I expect habitats within a thousand years. When do you expect the Earth will begin to cool?
I don’t expect habitats at all, or I can’t give a date. The technology for renewables is there. Wind alone can provide 18 times more electricity than we need. (Source IEA https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/offshore-wind-technical-potential-and-electricity-demand-2018 )
> One might reasonably demand to know: of what use are humans to nature?
I don't see why this is reasonable. "nature" is an abstract concept, like "life" or "evolution" or "welfare"; it doesn't exist as an entity in reality and so cannot have feelings. Perhaps you mean animals, like hens and foxes. Perhaps these have feelings, but in nature their existence is usually meagre, and one will eagerly kill the other without a second thought. Humans are animals too, and they sometimes kill each other as well, but at least they have the potential to make lasting truces. This is one reason to keep humans around. Another is our unusual ability to make discoveries, so that perhaps one day we will scientifically unravel the Hard Problem of Consciousness. A third reason is that if you decide not to keep humans around, they're not going to take kindly to your decision and the resulting animosity will be unproductive.
Which leads me point out that even if 2 billion is better than 7 or 10, it's going to be ridiculously hard to get everyone on board with a depopulation plan.
Luckily I don't think depopulation is necessary. First, let's talk energy: we can do 100% clean energy, lower pollution and stop global warming, no problem. Especially if we accept nuclear energy: it consumes very little land for the electricity produced, and all the waste produced in a plant's lifetime can easily fit on the site of the power plant itself. Moreover, long-lived waste (which is mostly plutonium) is nuclear fuel that can be burned to produce much shorter-lived waste. Nuclear energy was once affordable (http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter9.html) and could be affordable again if we chose to make it so, even without new technology. But by using new technology, the outlook is even better. Using Molten Salt Reactors, today's ultra-high safety standards can be achieved at a much lower cost (and with more legibility: how the safety works in an MSR is easier to understand than in a traditional reactor with its more complex and often probabilistic set of safety systems.)
I also find the possibility of Enhanced Geothermal Systems interesting because they can use some of the same technology as unconventional oil and gas drilling, making them a smart thing to include in a clean energy transition plan.
Second, food. Much of Earth's land area grows crops to feed animals that humans eat. Plant-based meat (and lab-grown meat) should require dramatically less land. I expect that switching over to this new meat supply will allow Earth to sustainably accommodate 10 billion humans at the same level of food consumption seen in the developed world. In addition, there are now various greenhouse and vertical-farming techniques that could increase Earth's carrying capacity even further.
Third, housing and other buildings. Not that much of Earth's land area is consumed (as a percent) for buildings for Earth's 7 billion humans, so I don't expect 10 billion to be a problem either.
I am optimistic that we can switch to sustainable living as time goes on. The trick to it is convincing people to work in reasonable ways toward that goal; e.g. carbon taxes have been really hard to pass in some places. But see Ted Halstead presenting a Republican vision for a "viral" carbon fee & dividend that naturally tends to spread to other nations via economic pressure: https://www.ted.com/talks/ted_halstead_a_climate_solution_where_all_sides_can_win
On the other hand, I don't see how space travel can be sustainable within a few centuries, due to the need for inefficient rockets, because it's so darn hard to build anything more efficient. But of course, maybe there will be a breeakthrough. Regardless, a few of us could still visit other star systems within a few centuries, but only a few. Also, there's a good chance AGIs will visit other stars before we do, or kill us all, or both.
>>But see Ted Halstead presenting a Republican vision for a "viral" carbon fee & dividend that naturally tends to spread to other nations via economic pressure:
https://www.ted.com/talks/ted_halstead_a_climate_solution_where_all_sides_can_win<<
Great talk. Easy to agree with because I've already endorsed three of the four planks:
(H) HUMAN BEHAVIOR CHANGE (8)
* A serious carbon tax with the proceeds devoted to universal basic income
* Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism
https://tinyurl.com/HowStopAGW
I also endorse the final plank: Regulatory Rollback. I always prefer using market mechanisms to regulations.
"On the other hand, I don't see how space travel can be sustainable within a few centuries, due to the need for inefficient rockets, because it's so darn hard to build anything more efficient. "
A space elevator is much more efficient and should be doable with possible improvements in the relevant technology, mostly a much stronger cable than we can now make.
I think space habitats and space elevators go hand in hand. Not soon though: 1000 year timeframe.
Like you I am very much a proponent of new reactor designs. I should sympathize with the anti-nuke folks since I was one myself. I can identify two turning points for me. One was when a pro-nuke friend clued me in to pebble bed reactors which exhaust the radioactivity in each "pebble". Another was Chernobyl or rather the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone which turned out to be a nature preserve. I should mention a third which is the growing doubts about the "linear no threshold" model of radioactivity impacts.
Pebble beds are interesting and I don't know a lot about them, but what do you mean about "exhausting radioactivity"? I don't think there's any way not to end up with used fuel that is significantly radioactive for 500 years or more. [edit: not sure, 400 years-ish may be doable]
The key pieces of information for me about Chernobyl were that
(1) the reactor had design "flaws" that don't exist in *any* western reactor (I put "flaws" is in quotes because the most important flaws appear to be intentional decisions to achieve low cost, though some flaws were just bad engineering I guess),
(2) the 4000 or 9000 deaths referred to in two key studies are upper limits on cancer cases for all the decades after Chernobyl assuming the linear no-threshold, so actually it's a small disaster compared to the Banqiao Dam disaster, which in turn is a very small disaster compared to the ordinary air-pollution deaths we get from burning coal.
(3) Plus there's the recent paper concluding that relocation was unjustified for 75% of nearby residents, IIRC (and virtually all residents around Fukushima)
I haven't been able to work out if scientists are close to a consensus about linear no-threshold; depending on my search queries on Google scholar I've been able to get lots of papers saying LNT is dead, or else a mix of "LNT" and "no LNT" papers. Regardless, there's a great 1990 book by the late Bernard Cohen: http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/BOOK.html
As the book notes, it doesn't make that much difference if LNT is true because of how small the risks are to begin with.
David, I have no interest in discussing PBRs at this level of detail. I said:
>>One was when a pro-nuke friend clued me in to pebble bed reactors which exhaust the radioactivity in each "pebble".<<
Try to forget I said that. Try this instead:
One turning point was when a pro-nuke friend clued me in to pebble bed reactors which cannot melt down and create nuclear waste that if safe and simple to store.
If you want to pick at that sentence, please don't do it with me.
The irony here is that PBRs were not even the main point in my re-evaluation of nuclear power. The point then and now is that I realized my opposition to nuclear power was focused on a single design (pressurized water reactor) that is essentially 80 years old. (Research began during WW II.) I was ignorant of the many new possibilities: PBRs, thorium reactors, traveling-wave reactors, molten salt reactors, small modular reactors, etc.
At some point I realized I had discounted the power of technological development. I was acting as if humanity had encountered an unsolvable problem.
It's sad that the nuclear power problem became so convoluted and lost along a development and deployment pathway that is so frustrating (particularly in the US).
Now if you want to talk about Universal Basic Income in excruciating detail, I'm your man.
Tinyurl.com/UBIMD
What was eye-opening for me about the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is that so many animals are thriving including 100 rare species. Thriving much better than before the reactor explosion. This means that the presence of humans is more toxic than the presence of radioactivity (for wild animals).
https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/how-chernobyl-has-become-unexpected-haven-wildlife
https://www.downtoearth.org.in/interviews/wildlife-biodiversity/-the-difference-between-chernobyl-and-fukushima-wildlife-is-the-wolf-is-extinct-in-japan--75899
https://www.npr.org/2011/03/17/134627793/chernobyl-a-quiet-wilderness-teeming-with-life
This realization launched two independent lines of thought for me.
1) The negative effects of radioactivity are greatly overstated.
2) For wild animals to thrive, one must remove most humans.
There are exceptions of course. Coyotes are adapting to the presence of humans. However it would seem that less desirable wild animals (like Norway rats, pigeons, and grackles) are best at adapting.
>what do you mean about "exhausting radioactivity"?
>>In most stationary pebble-bed reactor designs, fuel replacement is continuous. Instead of shutting down for weeks to replace fuel rods, pebbles are placed in a bin-shaped reactor. A pebble is recycled from the bottom to the top about ten times over a few years, and tested each time it is removed. When it is expended, it is removed to the nuclear-waste area, and a new pebble inserted.<<
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble-bed_reactor
As long as there is useful radioactivity left, a pebble continues to be recycled into the reactor. "Exhausting radioactivity" may be overstating the case. I'm sure used up pebbles would still set off a geiger counter. But the level of radioactivity would be much lower. Presumably spent pebbles would no longer be capable of criticality which would make on-site storage simple.
The problem is that there isn't really any such thing as "useful radioactivity". Well, not in the power-generating context, at least. What is useful is nuclear potential energy, of fissile isotopes. That's not the same thing as radioactivity; the most useful fissile isotopes for power generation are only weakly radioactive.
But extracting the useful nuclear potential energy, results in a whole lot of *useless* radioactivity. Isotopes that are *not* fissile, but are still intensely radioactive. Which, as David Piepgrass notes, you can't turn off. Nor can you run it through your reactor for a few more cycles and turn it into useful energy. It's just going to sit around for years to millennia gumming up the works and doing damage to any thing or any one in the vicinity.
There is no sort of nuclear fission power plant that doesn't produce some very intensely, dangerously radioactive waste that you're going to deal with. Saying "well, burn it again until we get out all the energy and it's harmless!", is like saying we should take a pile of arsenic-laden ash from a coal powerplant and burn it again; it just doesn't work that way.
That doesn't mean that nuclear fission power can't be used safely. It can, and it's an essential part of any realistic plan to address global warming. But you'll damage the credibility of that argument if you try to handwave away the waste-disposal problem by saying pebble bed reactors will just burn it all up.
>>But extracting the useful nuclear potential energy, results in a whole lot of *useless* radioactivity. Isotopes that are *not* fissile, but are still intensely radioactive. Which, as David Piepgrass notes, you can't turn off. Nor can you run it through your reactor for a few more cycles and turn it into useful energy.<<
John, do you disagree with this statement?
>One turning point was when a pro-nuke friend clued me in to pebble bed reactors which cannot melt down and create nuclear waste that is safe and simple to store.
By "safe" I mean the hot isotopes are safely bound within the removed pebbles (chemically isolated from the environment) and the fissile potential of the pebbles has been reduced to the point that you can store them in close proximity to each other. Both of these attributes make the spent pebbles simple to store. No pools needed. They are of course quite radioactive which must be allowed for.
I am quite aware that Uranium and Plutonium are only weakly radioactive. Radioactivity is inversely related to half-life.
Uranium-235 700,000,000 years
Uranium-238 4,500,000,000 years
Plutonium-239 24,100 years
Strontium-90 30 years
Cesium-137 30 years
And decaying isotopes in active pebbles would indeed contribute to the heat being generated in a PBR.
Please note that the phrase "full burnup" came from the DOE, not me.
I said:
>My basic conception that the "pebbles" pass through the reactor multiple times until the fission potential is depleted is correct.
I am hoping that ignoring true main points while picking on unimportant but imprecisely-stated details is the exception rather than the norm in this forum. And the next time I discourse with you and David I will assume that this is a hostile process and I must watch my words.
I think you're confused about some terminology.
1. Fresh fuel is only slightly radioactive.
2. In spent (or partially spent) fuel, the overwhelming majority of radioactivity comes from fission products (the new elements created by splitting atoms). Since pebble beds are a kind of solid-fuel reactor, the fission products stay within the pebbles.
3. The radioactivity can't be turned off, you just have to wait a few years for it to become less extreme, and then about 500 years for the fission product radioactivity to die down to levels below uranium ore.
4. Unless the reactor is designed to (i) burn waste, or (ii) be refueled exclusively from thorium, its spent fuel will always have substantial levels of plutonium isotopes, the isotopes people complain will be radioactive for 10,000+ years. I expect that, typically, bebble beds are neither waste burners nor thorium breeders.
I'm no expert in solid-fuel designs, but Google tells me the waste storage for pebbles has some nice characteristics (https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA365756).
This is non-obvious, as the pebbles are covered in graphite, just what you don't want for the purpose of avoiding criticality. Graphite enables fission; it's basically having part of the reactor merged with the fuel. It certainly lowers the fuel density though; one document tells me "each fresh fuel pebble contains only 9 grams of low enriched uranium in a spherical fuel pebble having a mass of 200 grams" (https://inldigitallibrary.inl.gov/sites/sti/sti/4374060.pdf)... that's under 1 gram of U-235 fuel at 9.6% enrichment. The same document states that spent fuel still has 2.5% enrichment (so, 0.225 grams), much higher than natural uranium (0.7%). But maybe they only take the fuel out when it's no longer possible to achieve criticality. It is also stated that spent fuel will have 0.154 grams of plutonium. The radioactivity-per-unit-mass will be lower than conventional fuel mainly because it will have dramatically more graphite than anything else.
>>The reactor continuously refuels by adding fresh pebbles daily in at the top, as older ones are discharged from the bottom of the core. Each pebble remains in the core for a little more than three years and are circulated through the core up to six times to achieve full burnup. The spent fuel is then placed directly into dry casks and stored on-site—without the need for interim or active cooling.<<
https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/x-energy-developing-pebble-bed-reactor-they-say-cant-melt-down
"Full burnup".
Are you going to argue with that terminology?
I never represented myself as an expert on reactors of any kind. My basic conception that the "pebbles" pass through the reactor multiple times until the fission potential is depleted is correct.
David, thank you for your extensive comments! I mean to address one point at a time.
>>"nature" is an abstract concept, <<
By "nature" I mean "the natural world" and by that I mean everything living on our planet excluding humans and things created by humans. In my mind that is a physical concept (has a mass).
Is that acceptably clear? Do I need to remove further ambiguity? What would be a better term for this?
So when I write:
> One might reasonably demand to know: of what use are humans to nature?
What I mean is:
What's wrong with an Earth (living planet) with no humans on it?
How would you answer that question?
Well, to me it can only be the life that matters, particularly consciousnesses; no one worries about "harming Mars" if we move in there. The relative importance of different life forms is arguable and different people have different opinions, so you should probably design your writing for these different audiences.
There are also people who seem to think Earth itself is valuable quite apart from the life forms on it, so that even if there were no animals whatsoever it would still "matter" somehow. But people don't come right out and say it that way, they only imply it, so I wonder if they haven't actually thought through the matter. As a child I wondered if the sun - compared to which Earth is nothing - was in hellish pain because it burned so hot. One must assume that nonliving things feel nothing and value nothing, otherwise life on Earth is far too small to matter in the scheme of things.
I am somewhat agnostic about which life forms matter. I think consciousnesses are of key importance, but we don't really know what consciousnesses are, so we can't figure out how conscious animals are. I also think avoiding suffering is super important, and I think the wilderness is filled with suffering, which humans may someday reduce. So this is ultimately the value humans offer to other life forms: someday we may reduce their suffering. And since we are also life, we can be of value to ourselves.
There is no life in nearby space and alien life in our galaxy probably constitutes a very small percentage. This is why I see space as the answer to human expansion. We can grow our numbers in space practically without limit without impacting any living thing.
It's not obvious any more land needs to be devoted to crops to have 10 billion humans:
http://www.fao.org/sustainability/news/detail/en/c/1274219/
Note that global farmland per capita has fallen by 50% in the past 50 years, and the trend continues downward. It doesn't seem at all unlikely that another 50% more humans can be fed without much change at all in total amount of cropland, given a few decades of time for adjustment and technology improvement.
If we double CO2 concentration, as the IPCC projects by the end of the century, that will raise the yield of most crops by about 30% (less for maize and sugar cane), which feeds almost 30% more humans from the same land with the same agricultural technology.
Well, sure, but it won't last. We can reasonably assume that green plants drive atmospheric CO2 as close to zero as they can without starving themselves, after all, they took it from 99% of the atmosphere to 300ppm ha ha. They probably have ancient epigenetic mechanisms for using CO2 more aggressively when there is more around. How long it takes them to recapture the extra CO2 is an interesting question, though. Decades? Centuries? Millenia?
And let us hope they don't overshoot, the way they did during the "Snowball Earth" era. Having the entire planet ice over would be a much bigger problem for human society than even the worst nightmares of the IPCC in the warming direction.
https://www.foodnavigator.com/Article/2020/11/04/Climate-change-will-offset-CO2-crop-yield-gains-We-need-to-breed-and-engineer-future-proof-crops
Would be nice if you are correct that increased CO2 would be a net gain for crops because the concentration is certainly going up.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/agricultural-area-per-capita
Why is there economic pressure to cut rainforest?
I used the verb "needs" in my first sentence advisedly. It's certainly not likely that increasing agricultural efficiency is anywhere cost-free, so people will only do it if the alternatives -- including simply clearing virgin land -- are more expensive, either naturally or through regulatory action to solve tragedies of the commons.
>Why would we behave differently on the way down below 1 billion than we did on the way up above it?
Because we know a lot more now and we are much more urban and because we have stronger governments.
I don't think *knowledge* was the problem on the way up. I think it's a question of decision and will. And...governments are only as strong as their popular support, so what I'm asking is: if you have a world of enormous wild area and far less people -- indeed, even more so than long ago because we also imagine the people are much more concentrated in sophisticated cities -- that is, we imagine that, for example, the State of California is essentially wilderness except for a few dozen square miles around LA and SF -- why would there be strong *popular support* for putting strong legal frameworks around preserving wilderness, the environment, et cetera?
I think there probably wouldn't be. People would say -- as they said long ago -- why bother? Look! There's like infinity redwoods, why are you fussing if I want to chop down a few to improve my sight lines?
My basic thesis is that in a world with one billion persons setting aside vast undisturbed (or rehabilitated) natural areas would be easy to agree on.
Hmm. History argues against you. We were much *less* careful about pollution, wildlife preservation, natural spaces, et cetera, when there *were* 1 billion of us. Not, I think, because we were stupider, but because the issue seemd much less urgent. Why would we behave differently on the way down below 1 billion than we did on the way up above it?
We are at 8bn now. So 10bn is a 25% increase in 80 years. In the last 80 years population grew 400%. Of course a lot of that new population will be getting richer.
In “things you read on the internet maybe aren’t true”, apparently the study showing that modern posture makes little protrusions on the back of your head grow more was weak -
https://retractionwatch.com/2019/09/18/text-neck-aka-horns-paper-earns-corrections/#more-116135
“Nature Scientific Reports”, with the most articles of any journal, passing Plos One in the past, not exactly the highest quality standards lol. Not all nature brand journals are the same as Nature!
Yay science! Meanwhile, serious and accomplished work goes in quantum and bio and chem and materials and thousands more, but nobody cares about that (other than the entire world economy depending on it). One strange attitude I’ve seen around here and on adjacent Twitter stuff is that “university and science research is all bad and irrelevant”, and I don’t wanna sound like I’m supporting that. Lots isn’t, lots is, but do be suspicious (and if you aren’t, and don’t understand the thing more than superficially, you may not be getting anything out of the article / headline!
Ugh. Hate how Nature confuses the public by having a low-quality journal named after their high-quality journal.
*writes down cranial exoxtosis on the list of things that are benignly weird about my body*
I sort of believed the “ Mix
‘Horns’ are growing on young people’s skulls. Phone use is to blame, research suggests” headline at the time, although in the reduced form of “more force in those tendons makes the bones a hit bigger” as opposed to the “this shows satan is working through phones” that the article appeals to. But even the reduced form is questionable...
Something just a little off the "Wither Art?" discussion....
Skull toilets!
How long until there are cheap knockoffs for the mass market?
https://twitter.com/rob_sheridan/status/1440404606589145094
This is amazing, thanks for posting!
The tweeter messed up his currency conversion, but even 638USD (for the gloss white Skullpot) is surprisingly inexpensive for a luxury-market novelty toilet.
The Porcelain Skull Throne!
I'm blowing through several ~$10 kindle books a week. It seems silly not to sign up for kindle unlimited at $10 a month to feed my reading habit. Is there some down side. (Besides not 'owning' the books.)
The books disappear when Amazon wants them to, and the Kindle reports everything you read and highlight to them.
Ironically, one of the first books to "disappear" in this way was Orwell's 1984, but that was because it has an ambiguous copyright status and they weren't 100% sure they had the rights to it.
libgen or archive dot org will get you probably half of them for free
if you use kindle unlimited you can absolutely rip the books and get PDFs or whatever
I mean depends a lot oh what you’re reading
Kindle unlimited is mostly self published genre fiction. If that's what you enjoy reading, it's a great deal. If you prefer nonfiction or literary fiction, there isn't much there and you will have to wade through a lot of crap, especially since Amazon's search algorithm isn't the best.
I try to go this route. If I really want to read it and the wait time for an available copy is more than a couple weeks I usually cave and buy either a paper and ink or ebook from Amazon.
Pre COVID I was checking the used book stores in town. Been a while since I’ve done that.
I haven’t really looked at the selection of ‘Unlimited’ books in a while. It seems like there were too many gaps in their selection the last time I checked.
You sound like you have a bit too much faith in your intuition that a little bit of virus has just gotta help the immune system stay in shape. Might be good to add some more info to your mental mix.
Google search results are really bothering me. Is it my imagination or have they shifted in the last year or two toward generic low-information mainstream sources?
I googled "Wind Catching Systems" and I get page after page of "Company Says Own Technology Will Be Great!". I didn't even know there *were* this many news outlets interested in bland, uncritical reporting. You'd think that someone out there would at least call a competitor or a wind energy expert.
I use startpage.com for Google, it's an anonymous proxy and removes big parts of this bubble.
Not to mention those really annoying "quick replies" that seem to have become more and more toxic: I search for X, I get a list of "why is X so bad?" / "what is the problem with X?".
Yep. I now find duckduckgo better. Which is bewildering.
There was some blog post on how to make Google search great again in the rationalist sphere recently. But I didn't find any of the solutions convincing.
I don't think you're imagining it. Between that and over-generalizing my very specific search terms, it's annoyingly difficult to find anything useful, i.e. either academic or informal forum discussions, in the field of e.g. health advice on a specific common health issue or child-raising issue (or the overlap of the two). To say nothing of the political topics.
yeah it’s incredibly annoying, a search engine that made a (mediocre) attempt at fixing it a week or two ago became the tenth most upvoted hackernews post of all time lol
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28550764
It shows only old school text style websites which usually isn’t what you want and does exact sub string style searches (“candy pie recipe” doesn’t match “recipe for pie with candy”)
It's well known Google search isn't what it used to be. It's not entirely their fault, it's hard to deliver to users what they want when every site wants their results to always be at the top for everybody. It's like if anyone discovered a strategy to always beat the stock market, everyone else would copy their strategy and it would stop working. The more useful Google search is to users, the more important it is for websites to try to game the algorithm. Google has to thread the needle of informing websites how to present information for their site crawlers while not revealing to them exactly how page ranks are determined.
Also they have to deliver search results that are the sort of sites that would carry AdSense instead of PDFs written by an expert in the field that your question is about.
So I checked the weather for tomorrow in Zürich, and it's apparently supposed to rain quite a lot tomorrow at 17:00 onwards. Do we have a backup plan place to meet, some bar or something with outdoor seats, in case the prophesized thunderstorm does come, or do we just hang out in the grass field anyway?
Weather was really nice yesterday afternoon. I missed the meetup. How/where can I get the info before the next one?
Email ssczurich at gmx dot ch and ask to be added to the mailing list, I think.
Yep, I've just looked it up too and doesn't look good. I would suggest meeting at the spot anyway, otherwise some of us will arrive there and others at the new place. But then we should definitely move elsewhere.
Yes, we will meet at the designated spot.
I thought I'd float my situation here on ACX because I figure the commenting body here includes a high proportion of level-headed, reasonably successful people, which does not describe me very well at the moment. It's a bit like the outsider exercise from The Scout Mindset, but with actual outsiders.
I am that much-derided creature of caricature, a 40-year-old NEET. Single, of course, with a nearly blank resume. I have a generalist undergraduate degree in biology from twenty years ago and some brief and equally ancient lab tech experience (flow cytometry, PCR/electrophoresis, ELISAs). I dabbled in programming long ago (hobbyist stuff in C) to no great result. I have survived so far through extreme frugality, odd jobs, a lot of family assistance. I've never been on the (Canadian) dole.
Among my few advantages I count decent health and strength, fair (if not world-beating) intelligence, and relative freedom to move anywhere if needed. I'm not afraid or ashamed of manual labour, but obviously time will not be not my friend on this front for very long.
I would like to get out of my current pattern and do something useful and rewarding with my remaining years. However, if the sober assessment is that I'm through at this point, it would be useful to hear that, too.
Where would you start if you were me? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
You've gotten a good deal of "learn to code" advice. I want to second that, it's what I do and provides me and my family with a lovely middle-class life.
I'm going to suggest an alternative I haven't seen. Try driving trucks. My BiL drives for Cisco (big food distributor) and he told me the last time I saw him that they're desperate for help. They were (at the time) offering salaries in excess of 60k, even if the applicant didn't have a commercial license, just to get people in the door and train them. He's regularly been called and offered double or triple his regular pay to work his days off.
Coding is a relatively easy way into the middle class, and a pleasant way to make a living. My sister's husband works much harder than I do. But he also out-earns me. If coding doesn't suit, it's another option.
It's also the sort of job that people who've been shifting from shitty job to shitty job tend to end up in as a ladder out, so your worry about your resumé is probably less applicable, though I think @Byrel Mitchell's idea should cover you there regardless.
Good luck.
With all the interaction following your initial post I still don't get why you went into 20 years of your actual past and only now want to change your life style. I am personally a big fan of the 'Motivation beats everything else in the long run' hypothesis. Therefore as the person interviewing you would want to understand your change if motivation besides you demonstrating some real capabilities I would need. In my case interviewing is only a first screening but doing real work for one day is a way better measure how one will perform. And I definitely would hire you for a low paying short term internship without prior experience and would hire you for better paid work later if I would see motivation, grit and results.
Along the “learn to code” line of thinking, just wanted to suggest something. My company (industrial equipment manufacturer) really struggles to find competent senior electrical control panel designers and PLC programmers, such that we have to pay them more than people with standard engineering degrees. I believe the certifications take only 1-2 years. You could get a junior level job for about $60-70k with that certification, and if you do well, make over $100k in 5-8 years or so. If interested, you want to look for places that teach Allen Bradley PLC programming in the RSLogix 5000 software.
I believe this is also significantly easier to learn than standard computer programming.
"However, if the sober assessment is that I'm through at this point, it would be useful to hear that, too"
I don't think that's the case at all. I think you'd be surprised at how uneven most people's careers are and they mostly do fine. A commenter below mentioned that many women are unemployed for the 20 years that they are the primary caregivers to their children, and many of them are able to re-enter the workforce. Add to that the many people have spent years mastering skills that became obsolete; some of these adapt to the changes in their field but many do not and spend /decades/ in limbo afterwards. I'll bet that if you took a random sample of people and examined their career trajectories you'd find that most people only really put in a one solid decade of continuous work, and spend the rest of the time thrashing around and making do. I throw that out there as a challenge for the statistically sophisticated among the ACX readership to confirm or disconfirm, but it's my impression. If I'm right you can catch up to the average person with ease - you've got five years to train yourself up for whatever you want to do with your 'solid decade' and to maneuver yourself into position to get started, and you can still retire at 55 if you're good at whatever you eventually decide to do! I sincerely wish you well.
The programing routes are probably good advice.
But I would also throw out the idea of becoming a skilled craftsman if you think you might have the aptitude for it. Jobs like HVAC repair, plumber, auto mechanic, electrician, etc all pay pretty well and at least in the USA certifications can be gained cheaply through community college. Once certified I doubt there would be any barriers to entry because of age or other experience.
You described where you are, but it is not completely clear to me how or why you got there.
For example, why don't you apply for some biology-related job near to where you live? (Are there no such jobs near you? Did you apply but never passed the interview? Any idea why? Or do you just hate the idea of working 40 hours a week?) Similar question for programming; what exactly is "no great result in C"? (Are you unable to write a program that calculated the Fibonacci numbers? Or are you able to do so, but it is not enough to pass any interview?)
More details could help you get a more relevant answer.
From certain perspective, your current situation also has some advantages. For example, I (also in my 40s) have a full-time job and two kids, so it is difficult for me to find time and energy to learn new things. If you have no job, no kids, and your family is used to provide you assistance, then if you choose a new thing you want to study, you could probably give it 8 hours a day, which means that in a month or two you could learn a lot!
The question is whether you should learn something biology-related or programming-related; the latter seems more profitable for an average smart person, but you seem to already know a lot about the former. Or maybe both of them, like try learning some bioinformatics? Download some open-source biochemistry apps and learn how to use them? At the same time, do some free courses on both biology and informatics, to refresh the fundamentals.
Being extremely frugal means that if you get a job, but keep your current spending habits, you could save a lot of money.
> You described where you are, but it is not completely clear to me how or why you got there. (...) More details could help you get a more relevant answer.
Understandable. I went for an extreme summary because this already felt a bit like fishing for free counselling, so I did not want to create the impression that I expect an elaborate, highly personalised reply.
As to applying for lab tech/coding jobs - the basic answer in both cases is my lack of relevant experience. The experience I can demonstrate is laughably old - decades old, as I mentioned. Of course I can write a few lines to generate the Fibonacci series, but every other applicant can do that (and perhaps optimise a little better than I) and has probably worked on at least an open-source project recently, and holds a certification if not a comp sci degree. Same, maybe more so given lower demand, for laboratory technician positions. (I'm not so crazy as to fantasise about reentering the proper academic track.) Like most people who have been out of employment (ad hoc gigs aside) for a long time, I just don't think I'm competitive.
However, if you think that those lines are realistic to pursue even from behind the eight-ball (and you seem surprised that I have not done so), that's encouraging. And your suggestions for learning and skill recovery are quite helpful. Thank you for responding.
> As to applying for lab tech/coding jobs - the basic answer in both cases is my lack of relevant experience.
Not sure whether to understand this as "and that's why I don't bother applying" or "and that's why I didn't get a job, despite applying at dozen different companies". If it's the latter, yeah, that sucks.
But if it's the former, I suggest to give it a try. Some companies are desperate. Some companies pay so little that no one with decent skills would take the position -- which means that there will be little competition; a small salary is better than nothing (which is what you have now); and anyway just treat the job as a stepping stone towards something better (spend one year there, then apply somewhere else with recent experience on your CV).
In my experience, the job market is completely random. There are smart people working for low salary. There are stupid people working for high salary. There are companies that recognize and require expertise. There are companies that are obviously incompetent and willing to hire anyone who is not disgusted by their incompetence. There are companies that would fire Einstein. There is a company that will hire you. There is no justice in this world... but in this specific situation, it may work in your favor.
Good insight. Companies reflect the people inside.
>Same, maybe more so given lower demand, for laboratory technician positions.
I've seen very high demand for lab tech positions recently, mainly due to COVID stuff.
> but every other applicant can do that
https://imranontech.com/2007/01/24/using-fizzbuzz-to-find-developers-who-grok-coding/
If you're not totally against programming again, I would recommend finding out, what languages are sought after and learn one of them. An encouraging anecdote, although from a different part of the world may be a friend of mine, who immigrated to Germany from Bosnia. His education is worthless here (although he went to university at home) and he was unemployed for some time, living from the pay-cheque of his wife who has a job here. Eventually he decided to become a programer, selftaught himself PHP in about a year, got himself a certificate to prove it and was hired on his --I think-- third application for about the median income in Germany. Maybe using PHP is a German problem (I really don't like the language, but he doesn't mind it) but I guess, people who can do programming of web-related stuff are always and everywhere in high demand. He is 38 I think and his German is not stellar, so maybe his language skills and age sum roughly up to your age as job market hindrance.
> If you're not totally against programming again, I would recommend finding out, what languages are sought after and learn one of them.
Thanks, and your anecdote is indeed heartening. I used to think "learn to code" was something of a humorous cliché, but between yours and Viliam's replies perhaps there's something to it.
I'll admit I keep circling back to the problem of the extended hiatus in activity. In some ways, it looks worse than if it had been a prison term. At least in that case, everything is perfectly clear and accounted for.
You just need a good narrative to explain that gap. Your resume is actually better (once you get a certification or two, etc.) than a standard fresh-out-of-college resume with equivalent experience (zero) just because its *different*. Their stack of applications has 20 functionally indistinguishable newbie applications. YOUR application stands out, which makes you way more likely to catch someone's eye and get you an interview.
At the interview, they'll ask you about your career path. You're interesting; not many people take that path, so why did you? Why not stay in mostly dead-end jobs?
You need a one paragraph story to tell. An elevator pitch. I'd suggest something like 'Well, things were going all right for me at the time. My jobs didn't pay great, but without a family, I didn't need much. Buuut, as I got older, I realized that my prospects for ever retiring were pretty grim if I kept on my current path. So I looked around, and got some advice from friends with better jobs, and they suggested I learn to code. I started studying X and Y, and took some certifications, and now I'm ready to actually start practicing. Your company was interesting because Z-that's-specific-to-their-open-position.'
As a note of encouragement: consider that 95% of people who work odd jobs NEVER take the step you're considering taking: making a life change at 40 to work in higher paying jobs. Most of them could; almost none do.
It's a mark in your favor that you're changing your life around to do something new and with a notable learning curve.
I think "learn to code" has become a meme because of how frequently it's recommended. Some people got tired of hearing it. But I suspect it keeps getting repeated precisely because of what good advice it is.
> I'll admit I keep circling back to the problem of the extended hiatus in activity. In some ways, it looks worse than if it had been a prison term.
After my friend got hired more or less immediatly I changed my mind on that (previously thinking similar to you on such things) and guess that a substantial part of your fear here is just in your head.
Imagine you are a woman entering the workforce after having kids. You aren't, but some do get back jobs in their old careers and it should in principle not be too much of a stretch to think that an employer would be interested in you too.
I strongly recommend doing some personal research into the Five Factor model of personality (Big Five, OCEAN) as a means of self-improvement. I am also a NEET, and I have found this to be a wildly useful, if somewhat difficult to grasp and slow to work tool.
I also recommend these websites. None are explicitly listed as self-improvement, but a framework is easy to piece together from them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facet_(psychology)
https://www.acer.org/files/NEO_PI-3_Interp_Rpt_Sample_Report.pdf
http://www.personal.psu.edu/faculty/j/5/j5j/papers/JRP2014.pdf
Big Five plus facets as a framework for self-improvement (as opposed to mere diagnosis) sounds fascinating. I'll have a dive into it and see what I arrive at on my own, but if you'll spare a hint - is your basic strategy to find your own deficiencies in the traits predictive of success and try to intentionally develop compensating habits?
Thank you for your reply and solidarity.
Practical habits, but emotional habits too. I'm trying to actually change what I'm feeling at any given moment, and aiming mostly for what the Facet page refers to as Positive traits.
I wouldn't necessarily assume that 40 is nearing the end for manual labour. I live in a rural farming community and the number of people in their 70's who continue to farm is amazing. And if depression is part of your mix then being productive outside and having to use your body is always going to be beneficial.
If you want a suggestion as to where to start I would suggest aiming to family help in the same way as state help - ie you're better off without it. I guess you know that about state help because you mention it. There's something quite empowering about relinquishing the charity of others, tho' it's not without its difficulties.
Whenever I start to feel depressed I get my chainsaw, go out into the woods and cut a few trees down. If you're in Canada I'm guessing there's plenty of opportunity to do that sort of thing.
Good luck.
Thanks. Chainsaw therapy might just do it.
The tough oldsters you mention may have had the extra advantage of lifelong conditioning, but I'm not ruling out the possibility of something physical - I've just seen that kind of labour take a significant toll on people past a certain age. One fallback I'm considering is a job at an Amazon warehouse. Not quite lumberjacking or farming, but a fair bit of stowing and humping. The downside is that it offers no upward trajectory of any kind, not even the most modest. Perhaps I should reconcile to that, but I am not sure that I fully have.
And yes, I agree with you about relying on others. It is not something I am proud of. I could offer some mitigating factors, but the present goal is very much to end that state of affairs decisively.
No-one is ever fully through. I realise that sounds like a platitude, but I mean it as an entirely empirical statement. People can contribute to society up until their deaths
My advise having been through long periods of unemployment myself is apply for very basic entry level jobs (bar work, call centre, data entry, etc). Even if they suck it gets you into the habit of doing a job, and means that if you are applying to jobs you can demonstrate you are capable of turning up and being minimally competent, which is a lot of what the job interview process is screening for, as they want to avoid people who will be disruptive or need to be replaced immediately.
Also I don't know how it works in Canada, but see about getting assessed for depression. As your situation sounds like that of a lot of people with undiagnosed mental health issues.
> Also I don't know how it works in Canada, but see about getting assessed for depression. As your situation sounds like that of a lot of people with undiagnosed mental health issues.
I suspect a depression inventory would flag me, but I don't think I'm depressed. Just very drawn back in all areas of life as a somewhat rational response to my circumstances.
You're right that habit reclamation is important, though. I may be overestimating how easy it will be to adapt to an ordinary work routine after a very long time away.
Thank you for your response.
I have a couple of thoughts but first let me tell you that I am considerably older than you and have a been around the block in terms of careers. I’ve been up down and sideways. I appreciate your dilemma.
My first thought is actually your screen name, Treplev. Are you referring to the character in the seagull? If so, and given how you are describing your current life, I don’t think it’s a useful way to think of yourself and that’s hard to avoid if you make it your name.
I am a firm believer in the old adage, “as you think so you become”.
My second thought is I don’t know what you’re interested in. Is there anything you want to do? In the most general terms...
What could be a relationship with the world that engages you, Putting compensation completely aside for the moment.
In the meantime, I think getting any job at all would be helpful. It will give you less time to wear a rut in your brain.
My son worked very briefly at an Amazon warehouse ( I think he lasted two days. ) But another young man that he was friends with started working there at the same time and was very quickly promoted off the floor and into a management position so I wouldn’t be so sure that there is no way up in that world.
A memetic hazard.
This is a paper-and-pencil game with so much depth of strategy and intensity of betrayal that it could have taken down a gaming company. The owner had no idea of what he invented until 17 employees started playing it, and...
He's come to the conclusion that he needs to think about leaving people feeling good as well as getting them engaged. The inventor of Neptune's Pride (a game with some of the same characteristics, but apparently not quite the same purity of effect) says he has trouble marketing it because no one wants to play it twice, but he doesn't have qualms.
I was wanting to post this, but hesitant because this is scary but fascinating. Then I concluded that the maker thought is was safe enough to post about the game and its results, and I didn't need to be more protective than that.
Text: https://www.engadget.com/2013-04-01-tank-tactics-the-prototype-that-almost-ruined-halfbrick.html
15 minute version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOYbR-Q_4Hs
1 hour version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9WMNuyjm4w
It doesn't sound like a particularly complex game. Do you know of an actual computer implementation anywhere, perchance online (I'm picturing something like generals.io)? The name is so generic I found lots of other unrelated things.
*sigh*
Try adding halfbrick to your search terms. Or have a nice little talk with your survival instincts.
Sounds like Diplomacy.
Diplomacy apparently isn't as engrossing or destructive.
I've played Diplomacy three times in my life: every game was engrossing and infuriating. I still own it, but I have resolved never to play it again. It makes people upset: you don't feel good about winning. And it takes forever to play, you really have to set aside a day for it. The third time I played I realized I was losing a day and everybody was mad at the end, winner included.
It is well that Diplomacy is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it. But it is engrossing, *usually* in a good way, and a win is a reward unlike any other game I've played. But what I have to do to earn that reward, is not virtuous, and so I play rarely.
Playing never would allow vital skills to atrophy, or at least I don't want to find a non-game manner in which to exercise those skills.
At least we have a good enough memetic immune system to fight this one off. Fortunately, the ill effects show up quickly.
Subterfuge is another game like this, on your phone, with a single round taking about two weeks (with only intermittent engagement of course). I found it very good, but it sucked me in and ended up occupying my thoughts and being time consuming. It's also inspired by Neptune's Pride.
There are a lot of games that are kniwn for ruining friendships - Diplomacy is the most famous, but any game that allows arbitrary targeted interaction has the potential for politics and treachery. It sounds like they accidentally made a game that was entirely politics - handing your action points to another player you trusted was much more effective than playing for yourself alongside them, so the most important thing was who you supported.
So, not an entirely unheard of thing, but it's always fascinating when it happens.
Diplomacy can be bad - but I've successfully played that multiple times without ruining any friendships. (Though there's one friend who we decided wouldn't be invited to future games of it)
... but the Game of Thrones board game? Forget that one. I played it twice and both times it ended in pretty bad feelings all around. (Incidentally this was back in 2010: so this was like my first experience with the franchise)
Otherwise, we really haven't had many issues with board games causing rifts in friendships.
Oh man, the Game of Thrones board game. It is a very interesting game from the world of "American style" board games, which means it is about expressing the flavor of Game of Thrones as accurately as possible, not about precisely designed mechanics.
And it really succeeds at that. Most characters of the first three books or so appear, you can play all the houses and they get their own flavor, you get constant shifting alliances and permanent backstabbing, etc.
But on the other hand, everything in this game is so painfully slow. You have to constantly negotiate your alliances, which means you may be making deals for half an hour before you make a move. Then you place action markers on the map, and doing this for just one turn involves endless calculations about in what order you can possibly resolve your actions, and the game theoretical implications of it.
After that, you have to resolve battles, which means calculating some simple buffs and debuffs, while then thinking about the game theoretical implications of what character card you will play and constantly asking your opponent what character cards are in their deck, because that's open information. At least in 2021, the other players can play with their phones during this phase.
And then you reiterate those phases 9 times, before it's finally over. The last time I played it, everyone voted to just end the game after turn six, and to never touch it again.
If only the actual series had also ended after round/season 6...
I own the game and have played it a few times. It's a lot of fun, but your description is pretty accurate. The last time we played it we were at my parent's for Christmas and my mom got upset at all the arguing and cancelled the game.
This looks like a real-life version of the HPMOR traitors subplot. I'd hope that I would have enough sense to quit this game after the first round.
The same could be said of EVE Online.
I'm not familiar, in what way?
Actually now that i think about it this accurately describes how pubg, lol and similar games make me feel.
It grows in prominence until it takes over the player's life; much of the draw is not due to the game per se, but is because of the political machinations of the players involved.
Sounds more like just a group of people that took a game too seriously, which could be for any number of reasons specific to those people, rather than the game itself having spooky effects.
I'm finishing an experiment on the value of code prototyping this week.
Would love any research about the value or lackthereof of prototyping.
The experiment was to do the first 50 problems in project euler, randomly starting in either a dynamically typed language, Python, or a statically typed language, Rust; finding a solution, then translating that solution to the other language, and determining whether the starting language affected time to develop a solution.
+1 to what alec said about Project Euler not being a great choice for this, as IME, the harder part of many Project Euler problems is figuring out the algorithm and the solution may be trivial.
Instead, perhaps consider Advent of Code - (https://adventofcode.com/) - it's a set of 25 two-part problems, one a day, every December. They start off very trivial and get pretty tricky by the end. If you pick a year, that'd give you 50 problems and only the last few generally get into the "requires a very specific algorithm" territory like Project Euler.
(Heads up, 2019 was kind of weird, every other problem was based on 'IntCode' a basically simplified assembly language interpreter that you built up over the first few days - so those problems weren't as 'independent' as other years, they basically assumed you were building an intcode library as you went)
I remember IntCode being rewarding to implement in Rust, as the instruction decoder could be moved to a library and remain mostly unchanged from one day to the next, while each daily challenge could just reuse that functionality. This isn't really an argument in favour of statically typed languages as you can have libraries in Python and other dynamic languages too.
One thought is that I'm not sure how good a set of problems project Euler is if you're trying to generalize this to "regular" software development. Project Euler, leetcode, etc. are very different kinds of problems than "regular", more practical software engineering.
Let's say we figure out artificial wombs and cloning without health issues for people. Do you think a lot of people will opt to clone themselves in addition to or instead of having regular children from sexual reproduction, and then raise their clone as their child or children?
Well I wouldn't. The whole point of sexual reproduction is to mix it up a bit, throw in a little hybrid vigor, get some improvement over your own DNA. Who'd want to invest all that time and energy only to see the younger version go through the exact same struggles and cope with the same shortcomings? Depressing.
What I think is much more likely is people starting to mix 'n' match genetics, taking a little DNA here, buying a little premium there, snipping out a little bad stuff from the heritage there, so that kids get born with about 18 different genetic parents.
I'd be tempted. I like me, I know how to get along with me, I know my weaknesses and strengths. Why not have a kid that I can raise with that kind of insight and understanding? My daughter is a lot like me in many ways, and each time I recognize myself in her it delights me.
Also, I know that genetically at least I turned out pretty good: no disorders, generally healthy. Every time my wife and I decide to try for another kid I'm fairly stressed they might have a major disorder of some kind. Cloning would remove that fear.
I'd do it, but only to fulfill my lifelong dream of meeting another person like me. It might also be popular for the risk reduction that comes from using genes that are already known to work (assuming mutations can be minimized).
I think there would be at least a small number of wealthy individuals, perhaps high in narcissism, who would gladly make an army of themselves. They could do away with all that tedious sexual reproduction business, which doesn't even guarantee that half your genes are passed on.
If the cloning process is scalable and the clones can make viable clones of themselves, the population quickly grows. Assuming the group manages to maintain internal harmony, it can become a powerful society that would never have to worry about recruiting and given no genetic distance they might keep internal conflict to a minimum. Given enough time it would could effectively become a new species, as evolution marches on for the remainder of humanity but the group maintains the same genes.
If strong AI worries you given the possibility of endless iterative growth of its intelligence, then the possibility of runaway cloning should also worry you.
Or the society of clones could elect to change their genes with each generation to improve themselves.
How likely are clones of someone like that to be able to get along with each other?
What does "a lot" mean? It's a big world, and hundreds of thousands or low millions are a small percentage, but still a lot of people.
My bet would be for somewhat eccentric choice, but not an extremely rare one.
No. It will be too tempting to mix your genes with someone else who has better genes, thus making a kid who is theoretically better than you.
Firstly I am sure there would be a good chunk of people interested, especially if it became more socially normalised.
Barriers might include
- joint genetics is one of the things tying parents together in the job of raising a child. Whilst some people obviously adopt, a lot of people want to raise their own child.
- You’re in love! You want to see what happens when you mix something from two such wonderful people!
- The family dynamics might be hard to navigate. If your parents fall out there’s going to be more spillover… “You’re just like your father!” Is now a slam-dunk. If your mum hates your dad, maybe she hates you too. Meanwhile, a badly behaving child is a perfect indictment of the parent’s genetic code. “I didn’t realise how selfish you were until I saw little Peter grabbing all the toys.” A weaponised version of “he gets that from you, honey”.
- The scope for parental disapproval and childish recriminations just got weirder too. “At your age, I was launching my own business - what’s stopping you?” And “if I’m fat and lazy it’s down to you - if you’d given me some love and encouragement maybe I’d be doing as well as you!”
Things in favour:
- maybe you get even higher investment from the genetic parent? Especially if you’re a single parent
- or maybe you’re in love! You both agree some mini-mes would be just perfect!
- Your child is (maybe) going to be less of a mystery to you.
- it’s not like “normal” families have uniformly great family dynamics
- You could be avoiding the risk of genetic disease or family troubles on your partner’s side - or on yours. Maybe one of you suffers from depression. Or maybe both of you are perfect…. But one of you has a family full of mean, rage-filled, chaotic and murderous relatives.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-09-03
You also get the problem that you need to be an adult to reproduce, but not to be cloned. If a couple who can no longer have children decide to clone their existing five year old, it would be awkward to say that the five year old is now a mother or father. You could have some kind of age threshhold (if the age difference is at least 13 years they are a parent, otherwise a sibling), but anything like that will be arbitrary.
There are also the problems of how inheritance and a bunch of other things work if you clone someone after they are dead (possible now, but much easier with cloning), and what happens if you use cloning to give someone offspring secretly or against their wishes (which is also possible now but far easier with cloning).
Sharing this info about covid booster shots, written by a friend elsewhere - she "follows several epidemiologists pretty religiously". Interesting that she cites a source that is also on substack.
* Moderna is in its own booster approval process and that is taking longer. Johnson & Johnson is also working on a booster and is also slower in process.
* A big hypothesis about maybe why Moderna is slightly more effective is that the Moderna second doses were given one week longer after the first shots than the Pfizer ones. Ideally probably we would all have had even more time between doses. But the longer the wait, the harder to get people to come back for dose 2 at all. And the intervals used were the ones that had been used in the clinical trials, so it was the best info we had at the time.
* There have been some studies about mixing and matching vaccine brands and types, and it is definitely possible that there could be advantages, but we aren’t likely to have enough data and have it vetted enough soon enough for that to be relevant for people seeking a booster in the next few months. One of the really promising things is the mixing of one dose each between the adenovirus vector vaccines (J&J, AstraZeneca) and the mRNA ones (Pfizer, Moderna). But that has so far not been studied nearly enough yet for the FDA and CDC to consider it for recommendation. I think there’s some data from Canada and the UK on AZ/Pfizer mix and match, but we don’t have AZ here at all.
* Some people have gone and done mix and match on their own recognizance, and generally had to be willing to lie to vaccine distributors in order to do it, but there haven’t been reports of awful things happening. It also doesn’t make a lot of sense that there might be any really big safety risks, but there is just not enough data to be sure. So nobody is actively recommending going rogue and mixing and matching, but if they were, it would likely be mixing types.
* Even though there’s enough people booster data for Pfizer that this was approved, there was a lot of debate. People who got Moderna or J&J don’t need to be freaking out that their vaccines are going to stop working and regret not getting Pfizer. Boosters will come for those too, and in the meantime, most of us are just hitting the very earliest part of the window in which immunity might start to fade a little.
* A lot of the pro booster data shows that the ideal window for boosters is 6-8 months after your second shot, at least for Pfizer. I know I literally just hit my 6 month mark a couple days ago. I plan to wait another several weeks at least before getting a booster (as a younger but multiply co-morbiditied person). This is the similar logic to why it’s possible the second Pfizer shot was a little early compared to Moderna and might account for the slightly different effectiveness.
* Hope that’s helpful. The single best comprehensive source I rely on is Your Local Epidemiologist, https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/ (and on Facebook, and she has a near-daily email newsletter). She has a whole chart tracking things about each vaccine and where it is in terms of research on effectiveness, boosters, etc.
I'm currently in the middle of an 8 week gap between Pfizer shots. Most New Zealanders are on a 6 week gap, should making for an interesting experiment.
If the Flat Earth conspiracy theory was true, what's the minimum number of people who would have to be in on it? I.e., how many people's jobs depend on knowing the shape of the earth?
100 million people. To the closest order of magnitude.
It is widely reported that the sun sets at a slightly later at the top of a building than at the bottom. People are recommending that other people witness this phenomenon for themselves by riding the high-speed elevator at the Burj Khalifa, but I hear there's a simpler trick: if you're quick, and lying on the shoreline, you can see the sun set twice by standing up the instant the sun goes under the horizon.
This is normally explained by the curvature of the Earth, but I heard there was a flat earth hypothesis about light being dragged down by gravity... might that help explain the effect somehow? I don't see how.
I don't really understand how that would prove curvature. Even if you were looking off the corner of a flat surface, you'd still see a deeper angle over the edge from altitude wouldn't you?
Yeah, good point. However, if the Earth is flat (ignoring the part about gravity bending light rays), the sun should be setting below a mountain range thousands of miles away, whereas if the Earth is round, it's setting below a horizon that is much closer. Because of this difference in distance, it should be easier to witness the double sunset if the earth is round than if it is flat.
Hold on a second though... if the sun did go below the horizon on flat Earth, time zones wouldn't work; if would be night everywhere at once.
Lots of people in the prairie provinces of Canada (including myself) have dealt with the Dominion Land Survey (DLS) system, which divides these provinces into square plots of land with an area of about one square mile.
The system needs a few "correction lines" to deal with the curvature of the Earth, so anyone who is in a position to notice if their land does not have a square shape, or is not about one square mile in size, would have to be brought in on the conspiracy.
Another relevant question is when the conspiracy started. Wikipedia reports that the DLS "survey was begun in 1871", and of course it has been common knowledge for at least hundreds of years that the Earth is round. So, this conspiracy would be quite the intergenerational feat.
I would have to be in on it. I sailed around the world.
Everybody who has been on a plane or looked at the horizon, as well.
Or lived in a harbor. They say that in the days of masted ships, you could see the mast coming over the horizon before the hull.
This is very true still. On a clear day the wheelhouse of a large cargo ship will be visible for a long time before the hull, and at night you can often see the Masthead Lights before the Sidelights (which must be mounted lower).
Nah, just because someone told me when I was a kid that the horizon exists because of the curvature of the earth (and not because of some optical illusion), that doesn't make me a part of the conspiracy; it just makes me duped.
That reminds me...
Because of the vertical variation of density in the atmosphere, a horizontal beam of light is refracted downward. The beam curvature is actually pretty substantial, 1/3 as large as the curvature of the Earth. This is why the average length of a day is more than 12 hours, for example, as the Sun's apparent position near the horizon is higher than its actual position.
Well, what if the Earth were flat? Because of refraction, the Earth would appear to be bowl-shaped. You'd be able to look above the horizontal and see distant features. The effect would be largest on an airplane, as distant features would appear to be higher than the airplane. The only limitations would be light attenuation (smog, etc.) and distortions caused by variations in the vertical density gradient. Mirages would be really impressive!
I'd love to work with someone to produce a Google Earth-type visualization or VR of what things would really look like if the Earth were flat. I think it would be educational and damn interesting. Let me know if you know someone...
All meteorologists and oceanographers, who (pretend to) understand that tropical winds and currents are fundamentally different from midlatitude winds and currents because of the different vertical projection of the Earth's axis of rotation.
Anyone involved in developing GPS applications, or satellite TV or phone service, anyone involved in radio or TV communication, all navigators (air or sea) and pilots, anyone involved in commercial shipping planning, all sailors, air crews, and radio operators. Probably anyone who is aware that it's a different solar time (meaning the Sun is in a different location in the sky) at the same wall clock time at different places on the Earth, so anybody who deals in international business, or makes phone calls more than one timezone away. Anybody who deals in timezones, for that matter. Anybody involved in spaceflight, or who might see photos of the Earth from orbit, or even very high altitude.
I'm sort of hard-pressed to think of people who could be safely left *out* of the conspiracy, honestly. You'd probably have to be some kind of recluse.
Wait, if there's no flat-Earth explanation for the time zones then it becomes basically everyone. Even if you never fly to a different time zone, just having online friends abroad means somebody has to lie.
There is a flat earth explanation for time zones, the belief is that the Earth is a disc with the north pole in the center, Antarctica around the rim, and the equator is a circle halfway from the north pole to the rim. The sun sits somewhere above the equator and moves along it. So it's day in the places the Sun is closer to.
This doesn't explain why sunsets look the way they do (i.e. you can see half of the sun clearly above the horizon, instead of seeing the whole sun get smaller and smaller), though I recall seeing a video once apparently demonstrating that if you put a certain kind of filter in front of a light source, as you move it away it ends up looking more like a sunset, and so maybe the atmosphere is acting like that filter.
How does that work? I don't see how the disk explains how I can call my mother on the other coast and have her tell me it's night where she is while it's still light where I am. I don't see how you can explain that with a flat Earth.
Because the sun is far away from her but still close to you. In this model the sun is much smaller/closer to the Earth.
Google "flat earth sun gif".
Still not getting it. My mother can still see stars that are the size of the Sun when they are fifty light-years away, and it has nothing to do with their physical diameter, it's a question of how much energy they put out. If the Sun -- whatever size it is -- puts out enough energy to heat and light the land as it does at noon, then it's going to be clearly visible even if it moves a billion miles away at midnight (but is still not hidden by some large physical object, like the Earth itself).
Why would seeing photos of the Earth from orbit require one to be in on the hypothetical conspiracy? The hypothetical is that those photos are faked, which requires anyone *taking* such photos to be in on it, but not everyone seeing them.
I'd think at least every pilot and sailor. Then you probably need everyone running pilot/sailor training to be in on it too. Definitely all military leaders. Then also all analysts at all intelligence agencies, since they'd intercept communications all the time. Also all the different governments need to have an agreement going on where none of them spill the beans. Seems like it has to be hundreds of thousands.
The more sophisticated versions of Flat Earth I've heard have a flat spherical disc with the North Pole at the centre and the South Pole at the edge, combined with a weird non-Euclidean spacetime effect that distorts spacetime as you get closer to the edge, meaning that (for instance) the quickest route from Sydney to Santiago is across the southern Pacific (ie right around the edge of the disc) because spacetime is distorted that way. Essentially it behaves exactly like a sphere, but it's flat. I'm not sure what the explanation for why you can see different stars depending on your latitude but I'm sure they've thought up some weird optical distortion that could cause that too.
In these sophisticated versions, you can easily be a commercial pilot flying around the world without ever noticing that it's flat (due to optical and spacetime distortions) unless you happen to fly over the South Pole. But no airline routes go close to the South Pole.
The only people who would actually notice the Earth being flat, then, are astronauts and the people who visit the Amundsen-Scott base at the "South Pole" (ie the edge of the world). No surprise, then, that the only people who are allowed to visit these places are carefully chosen by the US or Russian governments.
If the earth is flat how thick is it?And what’s on the bottom side, coasters?😆
It’s discs all the way down.
As long as it doesn’t leave scratches on the floor…
Who cares?
Only the Illuminati know.
Huh, interesting, I've never heard of the spacetime warping explanation for flight times.
But yeah, at a certain point I feel like that line of reasoning makes this a non-conspiracy. Like if a flat earther goes to the south pole and doesn't see the edge and is like "well there must be some weird effect where I'm being teleported from one part of the edge to the opposite part that prevents me from seeing it"
"So.... in terms of anything any person could observe, the Earth appears exactly like a sphere? It's just 'deep down' not really a sphere?"
Well then it must be a fifth dimensional flat earth which is entirely reasonable
Is there a practical difference between a flat earth with space warps to make it look round and a round earth?
Is there an explanation for why a space warped flat earth would exist? Aliens?
Wouldn’t every other planet have to be flat for this to work?
Don’t tell me We’re the only flight planet in the universe. That would be so embarrassing
Flat…
> Is there a practical difference between a flat earth with space warps to make it look round and a round earth?
I don't think there's even a *theoretical* difference -- there's a coordinate transform mapping one to the other, and general relativity says it doesn't matter which coordinates you use. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow_Earth#Concave_Hollow_Earths, last three paragraphs.)
I'd say that "flat spherical disc combined with a weird non-Euclidean spacetime effect" is just a misuse of the word "flat".
Okay wikipedia says there are 290,000 airline pilots total, so I'm revising my estimate to at least single digit millions.
This seems like as good a place as any to discuss the new Apple TV series Foundation.
I've been wanting to see a Foundation adaptation for years. I never bought the idea that it was "unfilmable", as long as you're willing to embrace the idea that you're basically doing an anthology series. Asimov's books provide a bare bones outline of a plot and characters, which the writers are free to flesh out and adapt however they see fit. In the right hands, it could be really good, a sweeping TV epic unlike anything that has been done before.
Unfortunately, while I've only watched the first episode of the TV series it seems to fall flat. The first problem is the characters; rather than fleshing out Asimov's characters (who are really just cardboard cutouts who travel the galaxy explaining the plot to each other) it seems like the TV producers just gave the characters a variety of different races and sexes and left it at that. Somehow the character have even less to them. This one is a brilliant mathematician, this one is also a brilliant mathematician, this one is a discount bin Commodus, and the other one is nothing at all. Every scene plays out in the most obvious possible way, with characters intoning the most obvious possible things ("Mother, I'm going away, I'll miss you" "Don't go then" "No, I must!") in the least creative way.
The production design and world building is another huge missed opportunity. They could have done weird and wonderful things, the decadence of a vast, ancient, and incredibly high-tech galactic empire could be filled with all sorts of wonderful architecture, spaceships and costumes, but it all just looks like stuff we've seen before; generic spaceship, generic palace, generic city. There's no sense that there's a vast and interesting galactic empire out there, so there's no real reason to care if it falls. All we see of the Empire is the Emperor, and he's a dick.
Such a missed opportunity.
I couldn’t agree with you more. I felt like I was watching the Hallmark card version of science fiction. Huge disappointment to me
As I can't see it without signing up for yet another streaming service, it's nice to know I'm not missing anything. A pity, as Foundation was my gateway dose to SF.
You could pirate it.
I'm trying to find a comment I remember seeing on ACX a while back. It was about memory, and what we know about how it physically works.
I remember talk of experiments that narrowed it down to a specific brain region, and certain types of cells that were probably involved...it was a long post and Google isn't helping me out. Do any of you remember what I'm talking about?
I don't remember any such comments, but perhaps it was a comment in this article?
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/sleep-is-the-mate-of-death
In general, if it's about specific brain region then you could try to google for "hippocampus". It would be hard not to mention that if you talk about the brain regions of memory formation. Or possibly "amygdala" if it was specifically about fear-/emotion-related memories.
If you add "site:https://astralcodexten.substack.com" to your search query then Google only shows you results from ACX.
Good luck!
The Google tip is true, but unlike the original SSC, google does not index substack comments. I have already had to abandon searches for several comments because of this, whereas it would have been guaranteed that I would have eventually found them on the old website, on this website it is simply impossible. In my opinion, this makes the open threads far less valuable.
[i]google does not index substack comments.[/i]
OMG, I hadn't noticed yet. That is terrible news.
I don't have a comment, but I'd like to know if you find it.
My wife thinks I'm good-looking. I think I'm not. Who is wrong? I'm the guy in these photos, she's the gal: https://www.flickr.com/photos/187626661@N07
Obvs plenty of room for "You're butt-ugly" comments, but y'know, I already think I am, so ... save your breath.
Bonus question for extra credit: is my wife good-looking?
Neither one of you are bad looking, and the basic rule to follow is your wife is always right so stick with good looking
Your assessment is correct: you are not good-looking, however neither are you bad-looking. You're average.
Your wife is a step up from you, maybe even two. Well done.
In men behavior is more important than looks in determining attractiveness, this might be what your wife is subconsciously thinking.
I think you look perfectly ordinary (as in I'd display the normal amount of jealous behaviour if you were around my girl, not the hot-guy level or the ugly-guy level), but if you want to feel better about the way you look, I'd suggest you start lifting weights and ask a stylish friend or acquaintance for advice re clothing and styling. Both of these can make a huge difference for how you look and how you feel about how you look.
Your wife is quite a bit older than me, but I'd swipe right.
Yes. For your age.
I think you are good-looking. (I'm not sexually attracted to males, which might be important.) I guess I would say you look like a good person.
Your fur appears sleek and adequately groomed, and your whiskers are striking and might even be rakish with a little styling. Black and white is a classic combination as well. I don't think you have any grounds for doubting yourself 😁
You are be especially funny today, Deiseach! :)
I'm amused that people are replying as though you have asked a question that there is an objective answer to. I also chuckled at the sysadmin server room comment because, well, yeah.
Nonetheless, I have a subjective opinion which I am happy to share. I like your long hair. I like that it's graying. I think you have a wonderful, open face and a bright smile. I like your dimples.
Your wife is hot in a tank top. Your wife is hot in a cowl neck sweater. Your wife is hot with her hair down, or pulled back, with earrings or without. I may be overdoing this, so I'll leave it there.
You are a handsome couple. If I had to determine based solely on these pictures, I would say I like you both.
Both of you look purrrfect...
https://www.flickr.com/photos/187626661@N07/51490493198/in/photostream/
Astral Codex Ten turned into amihotornot so slowly I hardly noticed.
You're old, so you don't have to be good-looking, you just have to look respectable instead. With sensible short hair you'd look like a respectable professor of engineering, but with a pony tail you look like a sysadmin who hasn't left the server room since 1993.
I think you look great. You have a cute smile and good hair. Besides, being insecure is more unattractive than being unattractive, and you can fix that. Accept your wife's compliments, play into them, it's fun.
Come on, Russ. You look just fine. If your wife thinks you are attractive, what more do you need?
I need her to believe that I think she's attractive even if I look at other women!
Do you also comment as well as look? If so, knock it off.
The only solution to that one is a bucket on your head every time you step outside your front door. Sorry mate, that's how it goes 😁
Well, I’m a heterosexual guy too so I understand the gazing reflex. Just try not to be conspicuous about it. Maybe get yourself a pair of glacier sunglasses for those first few warm days of summer when you have to remain nonchalant and oblivious when attractive women walk in front of your car at a stoplight. Buck up fella, you can do this.
Then see to it :)
Seeing you looking at other women makes her feel bad. This may manifest (or be rationalized) as believing that you don't think she's attractive, but there's no point arguing with that part. It just makes her feel bad.
I'd rate you both a 4 adjusted for age. Like, within one standard deviation below the mean. You look like an average small town older couple who don't care much about fashion or looks. You could probably get up to 7 or so with better care of your skin, better clothes/body routines, better haircuts, etc.
I wouldn't say there's much of a looks mismatch. Your wife is prettier and cuter than you are but not significantly more attractive. This is normal: in most couples women are prettier/cuter than their partners because modern masculinity doesn't emphasize those traits.
I'm pretty sure what's happening is your wife is going, "I'm attracted to men and find you attractive by these standards." And you're going, "I'm attracted to women and by the standards of what I find attractive I'm not all that attractive!" You're right but your wife wouldn't be attracted to herself or a woman like her.
Spot on. You look like fine people, and aren't going to be winning any beauty pageants. You look well-matched as a couple.
Neither of them are a 4 adjusted for age. They aren’t obese for one. That puts them above much if not most of the population at their age.
Fwiw, I live in a part of the country where beauty is hugely important so my standards might be skewed.
South Dakota? I always shave carefully and use a little extra Vitalis on my hair if I’m gonna to drive over that way.
South Dakota? Sir, you have revealed yourself to be a complete philistine whose sense of fashion is worse than a muddy pig's. I am from NORTH Dakota.
Not as good-looking as your cat. But I don't think that your wife is lying to you. So you are definitely wrong. You were probably an ugly kid and have never been able to grow into your later age hotness.
You're an average looking dude, and in good shape. Your wife is a knock-out. Tell her thank you and be glad of her good opinion, you don't need a second one.
Your cat is cute, your wife is hot and my wife tells me a similar lie.
How old are you?
Old enough to let you guess.
I would say you're average but maybe above some because you're not overweight. Your wife is attractive.
Looks like supply chains are buggered. How much of is is a transient adjustment and how much is here to stay. And what should we do about it?
Half baked thoughts:
Amazon might do well out of this, in a 'you don't have to outrun the bear, only the other people with you' kind of way.
I bet self driving trucks are looking a lot more attractive.
Maybe I should go into small-scale CNC or additive manufacture, to fill the hole left by shipping things from China.
Self-driving trucks are fine, but someone has to load and unload them. It kind of turns into a last-mile problem.
Just yesterday I've read an interview with the CEO of Kühne+Nagel, an international freight+logistics company.
He estimates that sea trade will stay impacted at least until the Chinese New Year (beginning of February), but that it will normalize by summer or autumn 2022. For air transports, it might take longer since a lot of freight is transported in the belly of standard passenger flights, and that might take longer to normalize.
But he also puts the effects a bit into perspective. Transport does not take sooo much longer than before, roughly two weeks longer between China and US and 4-5 days longer between China and EU. But the prices are much higher (demand is on record-high and supply is way below normal). He expects little effect on high-price freight, but that we might see "less cheap Chinese plastic bowls" in the Christmas stores.
The interview is in the magazine "DER SPIEGEL", but it's paywalled and in German, so no link...
Everything is always both a transient adjustment and here to stay, unfortunately.
You're not going to fill the hole from shipping things abroad with American labor unless prices rise in real terms. That doesn't seem to be happening yet.
If you really think supply chains are that messed up you could always become an importer/exporter or go into logistics part time. If they're messed up there's money to be made.
Meetups have been added in Bangkok (October 2nd) and Ljubljana (September 25th, aka tomorrow)! See the spreadsheet for details.
This week on De Novo: is Corning going to completely mess up my research?
https://denovo.substack.com/p/the-cornucopia-runs-empty
Why coat PTFE in collagen? Google didn’t have any answers. The cells grow inside the collagen and don’t attach to the PTFE maybe?
The cells attach to the collagen. PTFE is just an inert support.
As a scaffold for growing tissues, it looks like.
Sorry, I have a COVID question. I hear a lot of vaccinated people adamantly proclaiming that they "won't hang out with an unvaccinated person," cancelling plans when they find out someone in the group is unvaccinated, etc. Is there any personal or public health rationale for this, or is it just moralizing? FWIW I am vaccinated.
It gives people an incentive to get vaccinated that relates to their personal life not to government or scientific authority figures. Most people who aren't vaccinated aren't hardcore antivaxxers, so mild social pressure like not being able to hang out with friends or family is an effective way of changing their behavior. If you care about someone then the ethically correct thing to do is try and encourage them to get vaccinated, and it benefits the wider population
Aka nudging
From my perspective, I am okay with meeting everyone outdoors, and no one indoors, and this simple rule does not require me to discriminate. But if for any reason I would have to spend time with someone indoors, I would hate any additional risk -- and an unvaccinated person poses an extra risk.
The sad thing about covid -- at least for libertarian-ish people -- is that what other people do matters much more than what you do. You get a vaccine? Great, your risk of infection is divided by ten, and your risk of grave health conseqences maybe by hundred. You can also wear a mask, avoid shopping, avoid meeting people indoors, or maybe avoid meeting people completely. That further reduces the risk. Unless you spend the rest of your life in a bunker, it's not zero.
Now compare the risk of getting covid with risk of e.g. getting ebola. You use zero precautions against ebola, and your chance to get it is close to zero regardless. Isn't that awesome? And the only reason for that is the fact that other people are not bringing ebola near you. Yes, what other people do has much greater impact on your health than what you do. If there is a parallel Everett branch where people in the West took covid seriously and eradicated it, in that parallel world they now do not have to wear masks or keep distances from each other, and yet their risk is smaller than ours.
So, I reduced my risk by getting the vaccine, and I can further reduce it by avoiding unvaccinated people. Just because I reduced the risk tenfold doesn't mean I will skip the opportunity to reduce it tenfold again, if all that it costs me is hanging out with person X instead of person Y. (And given that the person Y deserves it, I won't even feel bad about neglecting them.)
This is a general case of Libertarian's not having a good response to externalities. The benefits to getting vaccinated are partially external to the person vaccinated -- they will be less likely to infect someone else -- but the costs are all internalized. For a Utilitarian in the meeting case, it means that they should avoid the meeting based on the a) good that will accrue to both you and the other person, a) the risk of becoming infected and transmitting that infection to others and c) the risk of infecting the other person and the people he will transmit the infection to. The risks of course are specific to the ages of the persons and the closeness/duration of contact.
That only applies to libertarians who are utilitarians. Most people aren't utilitarians, and libertarians are not an exception. But, OK, ;ots of people at least use consequentialism as a trade pidgin for ethical debates with the outgroup, and libertarians have to do that more than most.
The consequentialist libertarian response to externalities is, A: most "externalities" are wannabe authoritarians wanting an excuse to claim good-guy status as they boss people around, and they've heard "externality" is a power word that can do that. B: most *legitimate* externalities can be supported quantitatively, with actual math, which is a thing you have to do to make consequentialism, but aren't because that's too much work.
So, from a consequentialist libertarian point of view, any claim of "externality" that doesn't include math comes with a high prior of being either completely bogus or valid but too small to be worth bothering about because look how the person raising the issue didn't think it was worth bothering to show their work or even link to someone else who showed their work. The small minority of "externality" arguments that do come with math, we should have first a values discussion and then a mathematical discussion based on our (hopefully shared) values. Or maybe the other way around if the math looks dodgy.
The math behind the calculation of the harm fromCO2 accumulation in the atmosphere is not inconsequential.
Concerning vaccinations, a good reason to refuse would be that the harm I cause others is less than the excess harm the vaccine causes me. But That's not the reason I hear. It is just that its a personal decision, implying that no one else is involved.
The burden of proof, and of doing the math however "not inconsequential", is on the person claiming that the externality justifies overriding someone else's personal decision.
I'm trying to clarify if the opposition to an presumed externality response (vaccine mandate, tax on net CO2) is based on cost benefit analysis. Is there any point at this stage of the discussion in estimating costs and risks?
As a utilitarian you also would have to consider the good that could be accrued through meeting with them. Perhaps you could make the argument that it usually wouldn’t outweigh the risks, but if, for example, your friends parents had died and they needed someone to talk to, that could change the calculus
No one has a good response to externalities. Most people who think they have a good response think it is “in principle, the government could fix it.” In practice, mostly they won't.
Does this count as economics or politics? I might be breaking the rules. Or am I responding to a violation?
The market operates on an foundation of law and property rights. The existence of externalities is as much (more?) a failure of this foundation as it is of the market. Externalities result when someone takes a shortcut in applying the law, or worse, in defining it, and people adjust their behavior accordingly. Externalities harm persons. The law is supposed to prohibit persons from harming each other, whether pursuing profit or anything else. What should market participants do about it, once the law is in place?
Maybe I am misframing the whole thing. Maybe Thomas just meant, we all know what we wish the outcome would be, and the market fails to get us there. In retrospect, yes, we frequently have good insight into what we wish would have happened and could have happened. And we always can imagine a slightly benign government delivering that. And sometimes we might even agree well enough that the government actually delivers.
> No one has a good response to externalities. Most people who think they have a good response think it is “in principle, the government could fix it.”
In various cases governments have passed policies to compensate for specific negative externalities. For carbon we have what looks like an effective policy, carbon fee + dividend + border adjustment, as explained by the late Ted Halstead representing a Republican group: https://www.ted.com/talks/ted_halstead_a_climate_solution_where_all_sides_can_win
So it's not that there is no good response, it's that there's a huge voting bloc believing there is no problem worth solving. It could be framed as a problem of politics, or a problem of epistemology.
As for positive externalities... I don't have a good answer to that, but at least government funding for scientific research still has broad support.
Was this intended to contradict something that I wrote?
Perhaps we “have” what looks to some like an effective policy. But we have not implemented it, nor can we confidently state that it will be effective. Nor is it clear what sort of effectiveness would be chosen by the “best” means of aggregating the preferences and interests of everyone, nor what the method is. If we are lucky, we might get “good enough.”
You cite a good response to a specific problem. But it is not an instance of a general method for dealing well with externalities, and in fact provides an example of failure to deal with them adequately.
Yes, problems of policy and epistemology are rarely separate.
I think you are viewing things from a different angle. If a huge bloc believes there is no problem to solve, that is not necessarily an externality. If they all think there is a problem, and are collectively willing to expend resources sufficient to solve it, but cannot coordinate their activities to accomplish it, that is an externality. They could use markets, contracts, or government policies to achieve coordination, but they fail for whatever reason.
The problem you seem to be describing, where many people are disregarding evidence that should concern them, is certainly a problem, but not one of externality, is it? Maybe the members of one group want the others to expend more effort on examining evidence? I don’t think that is an externality, just a disagreement.
Is there an externality every time we could accomplish something collectively but lack a reliable method to allocate the responsibilities for making it happen?
Markets ought to view removal of externalities as a profit opportunity. An entrepreneur could in principle glean a surplus from the difference between benefit and cost. That is why it isn’t completely unfair to call them market failures. But if what prevents entrepreneurs from addressing the problem is a bogus property ruling or chilling regulatory policy, it would be just as fair to call them policy failures.
It seems to me that because a completely voluntary contract cannot stop a negative externality (particularly any form of air and water pollution; there are always some who won't sign the anti-pollution contract), strongly libertarian types tend to deny the very existence of (specific) negative externalities.
Therefore I like to go around defiantly saying how externalities are real and can be solved with government policies. Yes, these people may block action from being taken, but that's why I write messages like I did in the first place. I hold out hope that my efforts to spread the "externalities are real" message puts some kind of dent in the "externalities aren't real" mindset and makes helpful policies more likely to pass.
Yes. An externality is the absence of a market. In principle all the people who might become infected by unvaccinated people and all the unvaccinated people would bargain over the price to be paid by the former to the latter. But the transactions costs are too great. The next best thing would for the government to create a pseudo market taxing the vaccine beneficiaries to pay enough of the unvaccinated to get vaccinated or taxing the unvaccinated enough to reduce spread optimally. And its downhill from there landing pretty soon on coercion of the unvaccinated (a kind of tax in kind).
>An externality is the absence of a market.
Close enough.
>In principle all the people who might become infected by unvaccinated people and all the unvaccinated people would bargain over the price to be paid by the former to the latter. But the transactions costs are too great.
Or the cost might not outweigh the benefit.
>The next best thing would for the government to create a pseudo market taxing the vaccine beneficiaries to pay enough of the unvaccinated to get vaccinated or taxing the unvaccinated enough to reduce spread optimally.
Or we could use an assurance contract. But I doubt anyone wants to pay much to be one of the payers, and few want to be among the payees. I am vaccinated. I did it without being pressured. But if I knew then what I know now, I doubt I would have gone ahead with it. The benefit looks too small (at the moment) and I am too contrarian. I gambled and lost.
>And its downhill from there landing pretty soon on coercion of the unvaccinated (a kind of tax in kind).
Yes, though there are a few scenic views we might want to visit on the way down.
If everyone has an absolute right to safety from viruses, then holdouts are violating that right and should not be paid to do their duty. If everyone has a right to say no to medical care, then coercers are violating. Either way, it has nothing to do with a market. It has to do with what norms and principles we think are fundamental.
The libertarian solution is that private cities can do whatever they want. Some private cities will ban unvaccinated people from entry, and all the people who don't want to come in contact with unvaccinated people can go and live there. Other private cities will allow non-vaccinated people, and all the non-vaccinated people can go live there.
If its good for cities, why not countries? Or neighborhoods? Or city blocks? Or my house?
Our economy is too integrated to have no goods crossing borders, whatever border you name. I guess we could try to keep people from doing so. I'm not sure how "no people, just goods" would work, but I never would have imagined that things would work out the way they have in the past 2 years, so no shock there.
I'm curious, how do they treat people who have had COVID but not the vaccine? (If you have any examples of those to hand, of course.) Are they treating them as "immune, just by a different route" or as "not vaccinated"? A lot of public discourse seems to at least tacitly do the latter, whereas from my current understanding of the medical requirements, the former would make more sense.
Such people are unvaccinated in the literal sense "not having taken a vaccine." Probably they should be treated like the vaccinated if they have a record of their positive test but, you know, politics.
If you've had the Delta variant the most current data suggests you have much better protection than any vaccine can give you.
Because the vaccines were optimized for Alpha?
Optimised for the original Wuhan strain, which contrary to popular belief isn't alpha, it doesn't have a Greek letter.
Alpha is the variant originated or was first identified in the UK in September 2020.
https://www.science.org/content/article/having-sars-cov-2-once-confers-much-greater-immunity-vaccine-vaccination-remains-vital
It is my understanding that actual infection confers better protection because your body learns to identify and fight more than just the spike protein, which is the only thing the vaccines induce immunity to.
I personally got COVID in January, got vaccinated (J&J) in June, and then got Delta in July. Even with my previous immunities Delta was far more uncomfortable than my first COVID bout.
I doubt that there is very much certainty about whether a recovered COVID person can become re-infected and infectious more or less than a vaccinated person. Administratively, it's a lot easier to determine vaccinates/non/vaccinated status than recovered status, so it makes sense to me to treat even the recovered COVIS person as not-vaccinated. But if exceptions are to be made, I guess proven recovery is as good or better than other reasons, so as policy I'd lean toward not requiring the vaccination. I am not sure I'd want to make it a Constitutional right as the Zweig case would do.
I don't know that we've settled on consensus for whether natural immunity is much weaker than, much stronger than, or about the same as artificial; you can make plausible-sounding cases for both. (Plausible-sounding to me, anyway; I'm not an immunologist.)
On the subject of it being easier to prove your vaccination status, I do wish there were a way for me to go somewhere, get an antibody count, and have that get recorded as the official "proof of vaccination" (in my case the antibodies would only be from the vaccine, as far as I know). Instead, when I was recently getting a Covid test, I was told "we can do antigen, we can do PCR but it won't come back for 5 days, but your insurance won't pay for the antibody test because you've been vaccinated."
Funny, I had repeated <1 hr turn around tests for entry into films at a film festival recently in CO.
The people I have in mind consider the previously infected “unvaccinated.”
Are they worried about infecting the unvaccinated?
We ought to be, vaccinated or unvaccinated, just the latter more so.
If you wanted to be sure about any individual, you'd have to take it on a case by case basis in terms of what they were losing or risking when they got sick, and how they responded to, say, the flu vaccine before. Someone with an immunocompromised grandmother they care for is probably more justified being worried about this, for instance.
Flip side is someone who lives alone, works remotely and is 20-35ish; they are at very little risk of anything, really. Not only but particularly when vaccinated. If that same person, say, didn't care about, like, flu shots or whatever before the pandemic you have to break them out into two separate sub-groups:
1. People who have only recently begun to notice the small-to-tiny chance they will be significantly hurt by covid and rationally decided this little risk, which they just now became aware of as a downside of sickness in general, was enough to damage social situations for
2. People who are moralizing and establishing social dominance at the expense of others
3. People who are KelseyPipering, which is a thing she claims happens where she very, very much cares about an issue in a very strong, sincere way but only because it's on the news a lot and she's susceptible to that.
All that to say you sort of have to break it out on a case-by-case basis. My prior is most people who do this kind of thing are just signaling blue tribe allegiance unless they have a pretty good reason why not, but I'm pretty red-tribe so that should come with a pretty big grain of salt.
Hard to tell the motive. There IS some greater risk of infection from an unvaccinated person, so it could be self protective. But the person may also be trying to create an incentive/send a message to the unvaccinated person to "do the right thing."
Personally, I'm vaccinated, but what with the new variants and the natural decay of immunity, my vaccination is about 50% effective by now (at best). Until I get a booster shot, I'm going to avoid unvaccinated people unless absolutely necessary. Sorry, them's the breaks.
Shouldn't you also be avoiding even vaccinated people if your vaccination effectiveness is this low? My understanding as of this point was vaccinated people could still spread the disease nearly as well as unvaccinated people, and the primary use of the vaccination was to avoid serious covid symptoms, not infection or spread.
Yeah, I try to do social distancing regardless of vaccination status. While I understand vaccinated people can pass along the disease, I and the Zvi think it's BS that the FDA/CDC is acting as if vaccines don't help reduce the spread - I'd be surprised if they ever officially made that claim, but they're acting as if it were true (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3hjMFGdnBLrzfaQJr/covid-9-23-there-is-a-war-1).
This is not true.
Vaccine reduces viral load, and reduces shed commensurately. Delta offsets this quite a bit, but two vaccinated people who take reasonable precautions can hang out pretty safely.
Huh, i have incorrect info then. Which i can't find the source of anymore actually, so i'm quite willing to abandon it. Do you have a source for your claim? Not required, obviously, burden-of-proof is on me, but i'd be interested!
I think the relevant plot is e.g. cited here:
https://www.cdc.gov/library/covid19/08132021_covidupdate.html
(scroll down until you see it, or search for "Virological and serological kinetics of SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant vaccine-breakthrough infections: a multi-center cohort study", which will also link you to the study). I think your information (that breakthrough cases were just as bad as any other kind of case) was the consensus as of e.g. earlier this summer.
oh no, i wasn't asking about breakthrough infections. I agree, i think that is well established now that vaccines reduce their severity no matter what. I was specifically asking about transmissibility and spread. If you're a carrier (be it asymptomatic or not), does you being vaccinated reduce the odds others in proximity to you catch it?
It's not so clear that immunity is decaying, at least not over the relatively brief time frame for which we have info:
https://insidemedicine.bulletin.com/226394082799259/
Why would immunity decay if the virus is still afloat? Seems to me that if your immune system is being exercised, it's going to stay active.
Immune system doesn't work like a muscle, ie getting stronger with exercise and weaker with none. Vaccinations are basically a way of giving our immune system an order to build a big chunk of immunity-against-covid "muscle," and then the chunk just sits there ready for action, without weakening if it doesn't get any exercise. And anyhow, even though the virus is still afloat people who exercise reasonable caution (masks, social distancing etc.) are probably logging days or weeks at a time without significant exposure to the virus to give covid immunity a workout.
That is good news (if true), but, sadly, there are still all these new variants to worry about (and they will continue popping up for the foreseeable future).
Yeah, can't wait to get to Omega variant. After that, we can start giving the variants corny first names, as we do with hurricanes. Covid Chuck. Covid Doreen.
Fair enough. I'm interested in what goal avoiding unvaccinated helps achieve. Is your concern that with decay of immunity, you are at risk of severe disease? Or are you more concerned with trying to avoid contracting COVID at all? Are you eschewing most or all public gatherings where there's a risk of coming into contact with an unvaccinated person, or just those where you know someone is unvaccinated?
For me, continued personal behavioral precautions against Covid are motivated by concern about contributing to further spread. I expect I'm well-protected against serious illness, but much less protected against a minor but contagious infection. This is both a general precaution against contributing to community spread and a specific precaution against the risk of infecting people I have unavoidable contact with who can't or won't get vaccinated.
Unvaccinated status is both a risk factor in itself for exposing me to covid and a proxy for not taking other risk-mitigation precautions.
ISTM that getting everyone to take a rapid covid test just before meeting would be much more effective as a way to avoid being exposed to covid than only meeting with vaccinated people.
Same here: preventing spread is my main concern. There's a very small chance of hospitalization, too.
It's akin to the risk of a child darting out in front of my car which I also try to avoid by always being ready to slam on the brakes. Maybe I'll never ever need to slam on the brakes, but I prefer to be ready, given that being ready isn't difficult and doesn't cost much. (Also I get to work from home, I like working from home, and I lack friends, so this is all extra easy for me.)
I don't get why you'd be worried about contributing to further spread, since won't everyone who is not vaccinated eventually get covid anyway? Encouraging spread could actually be a good thing, for the same reason we have chicken pox parties for kids.
> won't everyone who is not vaccinated eventually get covid anyway?
Will they, or is this just something that people on the internet like to repeat? It might be true that I'll get it eventually, but I'm still going to try to avoid it for as long as possible. Maybe it will die out before it gets to me, or maybe Delta will get replaced by a faster spreading but less harmful variant.
> for the same reason we have chicken pox parties for kids
Nowadays we have a vaccine for chickenpox and only about 10% of kids who are vaccinated ever get it, so there's really no reason to have chickenpox parties since it just increases the chance of getting exposed. However, some anti-vax communities do still have chickenpox parties since they expect the kids to get it eventually. It's probably hurting the vaccinated kids though when that 10% get infected after a chickenpox party. So I suppose the analogy does hold up.
The chickenpox vaccine is not used for children in the UK for interesting reasons, though the jury is still out on whether it is better to not vaccinate: https://patient.info/news-and-features/should-your-child-have-the-chickenpox-vaccine
My guesstimate is that 60-80% of people who aren't vaccinated will catch Covid eventually. Which is not a good risk, but is still significantly less than 100%.
There's also a matter of buying time. For people like my not-quite-four-year-old daughter who will probably be eligible in a few months when the 2-12 year old vaccine trial data comes in, for vaccine-skeptical adults to change their minds (most won't, sadly, but some might), and for treatment protocols to continue to improve.
Is there a level of case prevalence where you'd be happy to hang out with unvaccinated people again? What are the chances it will be a permanent thing?
> Is your concern that with decay of immunity, you are at risk of severe disease? Or are you more concerned with trying to avoid contracting COVID at all?
One kind of implies the other, so, yes.
> Are you eschewing most or all public gatherings where there's a risk of coming into contact with an unvaccinated person...
Yes and no. I think that public gatherings in an open outdoors space are an acceptable risk; gatherings in large indoor spaces with a few people, most (or all) of whom are wearing masks are likewise an acceptable risk. But I wouldn't attend a private gathering in someone's kitchen with an unvaccinated person.
But that's just my personal risk calculus; I'm not claiming that it's a "one size fits all" policy.
This seems like an interesting community from which to seek advice. So here I am, asking for it.
I'm almost 40. I'm a software engineer with a very mixed outlook on my career. I taught myself to program as a young teen making games on the TI-83 calculator. I pursued physics in college, doing undergraduate level research in computational quantum physics. I felt like I had an epiphany that I didn't want to work on fundamental science, but something that impacted people more directly and more quickly. I thought about law and achieved a 99th percentile score on the LSAT, but never pursued it. I ended up getting a job in software because it was a skillset I had.
I spent my 20s half unemployed, reading philosophy and comic books and writing some small video games and some small short fiction. I only worked when I had to, and I never really loved it. Web applications were fun for a while, but they became boring quickly. I had children and got married, and focused on making sure I had health insurance. I learned mobile development and worked in iOS for a while. I did some small stints in management. It's always been a bit lackluster and halfhearted, although I'm fairly good at it, and at faking the enthusiasm, so it comes as a surprise to people when I express deep ennui and existential anxiety.
I've been diagnosed with major recurrent depressive disorder and dysthymia; "double dip depression." I tested borderline adult ADHD, but didn't quite meet the diagnostic threshold. I've been in therapy for 1.5 years cumulatively and was on SSRIs for 6 years. My childhood was loving but involved charity, food stamps, and the health department.
I've experimented with psilocybin and LSD about a dozen times. I've had passing but now decades-long recurring dilettante-level interests and practices with western ritual magick, aikido, tai chi, tarot, Buddhism, Taoism, and philosophy. I have some nascent belief that enlightenment is the birthright of all conscious beings, and that it's what I want my life to be about. I've also had recurring fantasies of supporting myself as a lifestyle-level tech entrepreneur, a comic book writer, a fiction author, or a philosopher.
I went off of SSRIs 15 months ago; my wife left me 12 months ago. We now split custody and I now have a lot more free time than I used to. I don't have many friends in general, and almost none in the small town where I live.
I spend my days working 8 hours — or rather, working for a few and staring at the screen wishing I was doing anything else for the rest — and often becoming severely anxious and depressed about it. I work out more and eat better, and that's helped with depression significantly.
I don't like programming for others as a career. I want my life to be about a personal relationship with God. I have school aged children, and a mortgage for a house they enjoy living in. I don't know how to support a life without just doing this career that I've generally struggled with for 20 years.
And part of me knows that is a misplaced anxiety, that it's something else instead. The obvious culprit is mental health. The desires to live off of entrepreneurship, writing, or another form of art seem like standard pipe dreams that I didn't grow out of in my 20s. Having my marriage fall apart recently, it's in some ways understandable that I'd go back to the mentality I had before that relationship.
But there's some truth to what I want, too. I want a life about my personal relationship with God. I want enough material success to live healthily, but not by sacrificing so much time in an arena that so drains me mentally. I want to create things that are more meaningful and healthy and bring joy to others. And I'm smart and capable, even if I lack in discipline and focus.
What would you advise me?
Very late reply. But to me it sounds like you need to find a nice church to join. That could help you on many levels.
Hi am replying to you here about a different comment but because the email link between my phone and sub stack seems to be useless I just decided to do it here. It is in reference to the word sacrifice. I understand you now and the sense in which you are using it. I would think a very profound sense of peace and fulfillment would come from that.
All good.
Become a roadie. We can discuss more once some tour brings you to Prague, I'll be among local crew stagehands, enjoying meaningful break from the depressing stuff like web app backends or Linux server salt mines.
What does having life be about your personal relationship with God look like? Like do you have any interest in being a priest or pastor or otherwise entering into religious service? Or does that not really matter because it involves other people, you just care about you and God?
I probably shouldn't have written capital-G God — I don't think there are many outward avenues for expressing myself through religious work in the way that I'm attracted to it.
I'm not against involving other people, but I don't have a faith that's particularly... faith based. It's more of a direct personal experience. I think there can be fellowship in what I'm seeking, but only perhaps guru/master type experience that's analogous to priesthood but seems distinct in that it's after attainment, not after education.
I've (idly) thought about going into psychology and helping others as a therapist.
> I don't like programming for others as a career.
Not really important. Work is work, fulfillment does not come from it. Have you read The Last Psychiatrist? Seems like he could help you.
You could also try what I just realized is my reinvention of the incubation ritual (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incubation_(ritual)):
https://squarecircle.substack.com/p/to-die-before-you-die
>Work is work, fulfillment does not come from it.
For a great number of people, myself included, it quite definitely does! Not by huge amounts, but i certainly get a feeling of fulfillment from my job. Creating something and seeing it built, finished, and used by others.
Yeah, right now I'm at a point where my career (also software engineering) is only ~mildly personally fulfilling, buts it's definitely the most fulfilling thing in my life by a lot.
Yeah. Funnily, I also code for others for a living like OP, and I get some fulfillment from it, for the same reasons you describe, but I get more fun (let's table fulfillment) from other stuff.
I grew up with role models who had difficult relationships with work. Feeling like it "should" be fulfilling is something I struggle with.
I haven't read The Last Psychiatrist. The blog that's the first Google hit? Are there specific posts that you recommend?
Yeah, try these on:
https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/09/real_men_want_to_drink_guinnes.html
https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/06/amy_schumer_offers_you_a_look.html
https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2010/11/a_generational_pathology.html
Except for being religious, you are the poster child for smart upper middle class ennui. I can relate.
Forget the advice about MDMA, that's like having a slice of cheesecake to treat a broken leg. You're sitting in a chair staring at screens for 8-16 hours a day. That is a completely unnatural way to live and it is no surprise at all that you are bored and anxious.
You need to lift a heavy load (figuratively, and maybe literally). I suggest a career change to something physical, possibly dangerous, NOT fully sedentary. If you don't want to take that step, there are programs in NZ designed specifically to help both the unemployed and depressed, or bored and anxious people like yourself, do tough, challenging physical things. It's called Outward Bound here in NZ and I suggest you google it and find a similar option wherever you live.
If you're looking for something church related, I'm sure there are missions and charitable things where you can do physical labor to help others.
When I was in high school and took the career placement exams, my highest ranking choice was construction worker, followed by several other outdoor vocations. But I was valedictorian and that seemed silly at the time. In hindsight, I think there was some wisdom there that I didn't know to pay attention to.
I completely agree with you that staring at a screen for so long is anti-human and anti-life. I've been working on fitness as a method of getting my body moving more. The years at a desk gave me a bit of weight and significant lower back pain. The weight is now gone, but the pain still slows me down. Yoga has helped. I think your suggestions are wise, but I'm taking baby steps with my body.
The US version of Outward Bound might be a bit different. It’s been around since the 60’s. The camps are different depending on the local but basically they are rugged outdoor camps with adventure type activities. The one I’m familiar with locally is near Ely Minnesota, next to the US Boundary Waters Canoe Area. They are big on teaching white water kayaking at that one.
The US Outward Bound camps are geared toward adolescents though. Is the NZ version similar but for adults?
The NZ one is geared for teens, adults, businesses, and professionals (as a leadership development thing). A buddy of mine was offered a free Outward Bound course when he went on unemployment in his 20s, and got to go on a two week sailing adventure.
Re what you want - what makes you laugh? do you laugh? when, where, under what circumstances do you feel light and energized?
Re psilocybin and LSD - when you "experimented", was it casual/recreational? or did you trip with a trusted guide? have you considered MDMA? it may not be suitable for you, but there's a ton of research out there to look at.
And for a weird thing: I inadvertently pasted something here, so I quickly deleted it, then I thought perhaps it was important to leave it. Here it is:
the voices never tell you the truth (not sure where this came from)
emptying of selfhood allows the soul to attach to the true reality, the divine nothingness (Francoise Bourzat in conversation with Sam Harris)
What makes me laugh? What a great question, thank you. I've started believing a little bit in the idea that the purpose of life is to grow the complexity of life, and in the microcosm the path to follow is that which makes you feel more alive. I take your questions as pointing in that direction.
I feel most light and energized, even to the point of laughter, reading and thinking about the works of someone who has flirted with enlightenment. In seeing the beauty and joy of life itself — in art, in music, in movement, in intimate emotional connection with another person. In work, it's in collaborative problem solving and teamwork, and occasionally seeing through a problem to the elegant structure underneath it. The laughter comes mostly with the aha moments associated with all of the above; the humor-tickle feeling of making a connection that wasn't there before.
My psychedelic usage has been casual but intentional. I've never tripped with a guide, but I usually set an intention for the trip, write out a prayer and then read it aloud in the come up, surround myself with sacred books, and generally ritualize it a little bit. I hadn't been considering MDMA, although I've heard it's been useful in therapeutic settings especially for processing and re-encoding traumatic memories. I'll see what I can find on it these days.
Regarding your happy pasting accident, just for fun, I interpret both as about the ego — arguably the latter quote is what I'm after, in its entirety!
Re what makes you feel light and energized - I resonate with all of that :)
Re MDMA - listen to Lex Fridman podcast #202 with Rick Doblin, psychedelics researcher and founder/ED of MAPS.org
Re happy pasting - yes, most definitely about the ego. You can find the Harris/Bourzat conversation in the Waking Up app. In addition or alternatively, Bourzat’s book Consciousness Medicine may be of interest.
I've been following MAPS for a few years — I will give that podcast a listen, thank you! & I've added that book to my list.
Ian - I have just discovered that I was in error in my initial reply to you wrt the happy pasting accident. I'm listening/reading a lot on this subject and will often type out something that sparks my attention without attribution because it's just for me and I don't much care where it came from. But since you commented that the latter quote "is what I'm after, in it's entirety!", I wanted to make this correction.
The quote came from Brian Muraresku paraphrasing Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, ""the emptying of selfhood allows the soul to attach to true reality" and in Kabbalism the true reality is what's called "the divine nothingness", Ayin (Hebrew)"
This is from Lex Fridman podcast #211 - Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychdelics. Muraresku is the author of The Immortality Key.
My recommendation about the Harris/Bourzat conversation and her book stands, it's just not where that quote came from :) She also has a website francoisebourzat.com. She's made a three-level online course that I suspect I will eventually enroll in after I've digested her book.
I'm hoping my error and determination that you not be mislead (by me!) gives you a chuckle ;-)
Your determinism does give me a chuckle! And thank you, sincerely! :)
What draws you to this subject? & is the Kabbalism angle a coincidence, or something you come to traditionally, or via western magick, or...?
Are there other communities you would recommend around all of these topics?
I’ll second the MDMA recommendation. It may not be right for you but it helps a lot of people gain insight into themselves without any emotional discomfort. Do your homework first of course.
You mentioned that you used SSRIs for 6 years, and then you stopped. Why? Asking just in case the best advice is "start taking SSRIs again".
Seems like you love learning, but hate working. You tried many different things, but seems like you have no long-term interests. Your spiritual desire, if I may put it so bluntly, is to be rich without having to work. No offense meant, I can easily empathise with all of this.
First of all, I would advise to spend more time with people. And when I say people, I mean offline, because being online means being with a computer alone. Humans are good for many things, for example they can help you focus on things (by talking about them), provide positive reinforcement for the things you do, or just generally distract you from your depressive inner talk.
Second, put your life in order: get enough sleep, exercise, eat healthy meals (maybe learn to cook), keep your job until you get a better offer. If you can't work for 8 hours... okay, let me tell you a secret: most programmers can't. If you watch them closely, many work for maybe 4-6 hours a day, then they read something, watch videos, chat with their colleagues, or take a walk. If you work from home, buy headphones that allow you to walk away from the computer, so that you don't have to keep sitting while chatting with a colleague. Make breaks at work, use them to exercise, or cook, or do the dishes.
Third, find something meaningful and start actually doing it, in your free time. Talk to people about it, offline.
About SSRIs, I came to feel three things. First, I felt like I needed them less as I felt that I was generally less depressed and understood my psyche better than I did originally, and could manage symptoms with diet and exercise and psychedelics. Second, I developed a growing sense that they were numbing me to my emotions in a way that I didn't like; I felt less connected to my children in particular. Third, I started doubting what my depression was and what I should do to treat it. Is it best fixed chemically, or with lifestyle changes? I have had a hard time believing that 13% of US adults are innately depressed enough to need medicated, but that there is something else going on societally that can perhaps be mitigated in other ways. That's the train of thought that I'm still exploring now.
No offense taken; I appreciate your candor. You bring up good points to introspect on. I don't think I want to be rich (by western standards) with or without work. Although I don't want to work, in the chip-on-my-shoulder entitlement antiwork sense of building something for someone else for a wage so that I can keep a roof over my head. I do deeply want to spend time contributing to the health, well being, and joy of my fellow man.
I agree with the rest of your advice, thank you. I am struggling with the in person, offline connection aspect of life. That's an area I will be focusing on.
Also, if you spend too much time at computer screen, you may want to buy a standing desk. Or just put some box on the top of you desk, and the computer on the top of it.
I did this at home, and for the first month or two my legs felt tired, then my body adapted. My back stopped hurting. It is much easier for me to leave the computer and do some small task and then return back, because standing up was a psychological barrier. Also, if I am thinking, I can walk in front of the desk.
> Is it best fixed chemically, or with lifestyle changes?
Do whatever works for you, but do something that works. I had a friend who was depressed, took some pills, felt better. Then she decided that she does not want to "become dependent on pills", so she stopped taking them. A week later she killed herself. So in my opinion, lifestyle change really is better than pills, but staying alive is hundred times more important than the difference between pills and yoga.
There are probably some non-profit organizations trying to improve the world in your proximity, you could visit them and ask whether they need some help. First as a volunteer, but as you get experience and contacts, maybe a job opportunity will appear. As a side effect, you will meet new people, and they will probably be nicer than average (otherwise they would not work for a non-profit).
I've been at a standing desk for about 9 years, fortunately. I stood 40 hours a week for most of them, but then I actually developed back pain, and now I sit and stand throughout the day. I may not be standing properly.
I'm sorry to hear about your friend. I will keep her story in mind if I start to slip back down that hole, and will rethink SSRIs if necessary.
FWIW I have found that depression is best approached as something to be listened to rather than “fixed”.
Re offline connection - I too struggle with that and have set an intention to focus on it … feels a bit like cliff diving without a wing suit though :)
You want to create things and you have free time... so, create things?
I don't get what's stopping you. Make stuff. Show it to people. Then make more stuff. If people like it, they'll give you money. If they don't, fuck 'em and keep making stuff.
My advice would be to keep your current job and not drastically change that. You will lose too much and regret it in the future.
"I spend my days working 8 hours — or rather, working for a few and staring at the screen wishing I was doing anything else for the rest"
I'll interpret this to mean that the few hours you do work is enough to keep you employed and you are not worried about getting fired. This sounds great to me. Just work 3 or 4 hours and then stop. Treat your job like a temporary activity. Spend just enough time on it to not get fired. Then go out in the world and work on what you want - reading spiritual texts, attending meet ups, praying, hiking, sitting in a coffee shop, etc.
Structure your day to help you get done what you have to get done as quickly as possible. Then move on to other things you like more. I recommend Cal Newport's writings, specifically deep work and so good they can't ignore you. On his podcast he often answers questions from people that are in a very similar situation to you.
I just read the synopses and have added those books to my list. They look like the could be helpful.
I am not overly anxious about losing my job soon, but I am very new there (< 3 months) and have additional anxiety due to frequent job hopping; itself a symptom of the struggles I'm reaching out about here. I haven't yet felt empowered to leave the office or Slack channels or work on other things, which has led to the staring. But that's self imposed and maladaptive, so I think I should work on my internal reaction to it and just spend that time more wisely.
And you give good advice: I am definitely not going to quit my job or try to change that anytime soon. Despite being in software for almost 20 years I'm only now stable with a small emergency fund and no retirement or investments. Leaving behind a steady income sounds disastrous.
I'm trying to explore what it means to figure out what I want and work slowly but carefully toward it.
If you live in a small, Christian-oriented town, learn a bit about the more mystical branches of Christianity and then post on FB or Meetup or wherever that you want to start a study group about it. You'll have to lead the study group at first, which is why I suggested learning more about it first. Other people who are interested in mysticism will be helpful on your journey, even if they're not that bright or well-read. And you'll have some social interaction. Offer to host on Sunday afternoons, provide some basic noshes, tell them they can park the kids in front of the TV (showing dumb Christian cartoons if necessary) so they don't need childcare.
I did something similar for awhile (though not regarding mysticism) and it helped move me along. It's scary and my social anxiety almost killed me at first, but it worked out well.
That is an interesting idea, thank you. I've read about some of the Christian mystics and feel kinship there, although I think their original writings sit still unread on my bookshelf. I had largely written off my local Christian community, but I think that was shortsighted.
If you're after more modern Christian mystics, you might try reading some of Anthony DeMello's work, if you haven't come across it. He's a Jesuit priest who sounds a lot more like a Buddhist monk, and it's all rather beautiful.
He looks like a wonderful recommendation, thank you. I will read him.
Yeah, it depends on who is around. A number of people will be interested in the topic but, like you, uninterested in a mainstream church service. And you might get a few weirdos. Life is full of risks. But it could work out.
Thanks for sharing. I can relate to a lot of what you're describing, only I'm 10 years younger and so far unmarried and childless (though I am almost 9 years into a serious relationship). Could you clarify what you mean by "God"? Based the dilettante-level interests you listed, I was imagining a more vague form of spiritual searching, either deistic or atheistic. But the way you talk about having a *personal* relationship with capital-G God sounds more like Christianity or something. In any case, it might be worth trying to get involved with a spiritual community and forming a relationship with a monk or priest of rabbi or whatever. Not sure how much you think therapy has benefitted you in the past, but to me this would basically be another form of therapy, only the "therapist" might relate to you better when they share your spiritual outlook. In general, I think maintaining good relationships and feeling like a part of any community is spiritually nourishing.
You also say you have a mixed outlook on your career. What are the upsides, aside from it merely providing for you and your children?
Your instincts about it being a more vague form of spiritual searching are close; I confused the issue with the capital G. I want the enlightenment experience: direct experience of reality, an existence outside of mind, innate understanding of non-duality, a persistence sense of compassion and wholeness, and the lighthearted childlike expression I've seen described and sense in reading a rare few spiritual teachers. I don't believe in a capital G intelligence, but I feel a profound mystery underlying reality that draws me in. I don't expect to understand it, but I expect to experience it more directly than I (and I hypothesize most) do in everyday life.
I'm looking for a spiritual group with which I feel I fit in. It's been difficult so far, especially in person, as I live in a Christian area. More generally, I'm a weird mix of rational and mystic. I don't think it's unique, but I have a hard time finding it. I tend to be too rational for a lot of new age woo, but too interested in the unseen for some science-minded circles. Some of that is perhaps my contrarian nature, which I'm working on.
Upsides to my career... that is a good question that I've been trying to look at rationally and compassionately. I do enjoy building software from scratch, by and large. Going from 0 to 1 out of my imagination alone is a satisfying experience. I enjoy the problem solving aspects of programming, but I enjoy them like puzzles: fun at first, but I can only do a little bit of sudoku before it's boring again. I enjoy the aesthetics and creativity of a well crafted solution. I also enjoy collaborating with talented peers in an egalitarian fashion, working together to create something lovely. I think I like small projects, toys, experiments, MVPs, creation, and the early days more than I like maintenance, corporate work, task lists, hierarchies, and structure.
I swung to staunch materialist rationalist for most of my adult life after rejecting the fundamentalist Christianity I was raised in. Five years ago, I had a mystical experience that culminated in what I learned later was identified as a spiritual awakening that included the non-dual insights. I had not been seeking this experience - it was completely unbidden and totally upended my understanding of the world (including paranormal and other mystical phenomena.) It was not drug-induced and I went to doctors and a psychiatrist to see if there was some physiological or psychological explanation. It was my neurologist at Kaiser who told me "What you have experienced is how shaman get made." This sent me on an exploration of this world I had otherwise known nothing about, and spent the next few years reading everything I could on the subject.
For the first year, I considered becoming a monk and devoting myself to contemplation. The second year, I experienced a Dark Night of The Soul that made me feel powerless and depressed which finally forced a sort of surrender to it. Gradually, I came out of it and after a strange series of what I can only call unlikely miracles, I started to feel a quiet low-level bliss that has remained to this day.
I've spoken to zen priests who have sought an awakening experience for decades and never had it. I've met people who, like me, spontaneously had one and were baffled by it. Some people have sparked one through psychedelic drug use. Most never get one. There appear to be some common threads (like having been a seeker) that can set the conditions, but I haven't found any definitive consensus, except that it finds you rather than you find it.
I didn't end up becoming a monk. None of the organized religions resonated for me, although Buddhism comes closest to practical life advice (awakened and unawakened alike.) In hindsight, the experience was exactly what I needed when I needed it, but I didn't understand that until later. Your asking these questions does set the conditions, it seems, and if those conditions ripen, you will find what you are looking for.
That's interesting. Would you mind describing the experience and which beliefs it challenged?
For a month or so, I had been having a series of what may have been ecstatic seizures that presented as mystical experiences. I could tell when one was coming on because I would start to feel incredibly blissful (like on MDMA) and would fall into a calm, meditative state. And I would start writing and, then, because I couldn't write fast enough, narrating into an audio recorder a stream of concepts and ideas that flooded my brain but did not feel they were coming from me, almost like I was channeling them from somewhere else.
The only hallucination I had was this vision that suddenly appeared of a black background, like the darkest night sky, with a lattice of pinhole lights floating like stars in front of me. I became aware of a strong Presence of what I sensed was surely the Source Consciousness of the Universe. Filled with wonder, I thought “There is Something rather than nothing!” I felt linked to it and to everything else in the Universe, and became aware that everything is connected and we are all One. I recoiled a bit because my first reaction was that I didn’t like this reality, that I celebrated the differences in people and did not like that we weren’t distinct beings with unique personalities. Nonetheless, the pervading insight of Oneness felt true. I did not sense a personality in this Consciousness or any particular feeling radiating from it except a strong and interwoven connectedness. For a few moments, I was no longer me but part of everything. Then the vision disappeared.
I've since found two semi-public people in the last decade who had eerily similar experiences:
https://thegrayescape.com/about-natalie/
The spiritual teacher Adyashanti also described his awakening with a black background and a lattice of pinhole lights in one of his books.
How many others are there like us? How common is this particular awakening description or having some sort of channeling along with it? Jacob Bohme in the 14th century reported a stream of cosmic insights after he had an experience. So did the sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick in 1974.
The experience completely challenged my materialist view of the Universe. I had been squarely in the Hitchens/Harris/Dennett/Dawkins camp of nothing supernatural or paranormal, no God, no spiritual entities, but this of course made me re-think everything. In my materialist atheist days, I would have dismissed an account like this or attributed it to some sort of mental delusion, but I couldn't so easily dismiss my own experience and therefore have been more open to considering the actuality of this phenomenon.
Thank you for sharing your story. I appreciate especially your remarks on how some people search their whole lives for an experience like yours, and some like you have them spontaneously and are baffled!
> I started to feel a quiet low-level bliss that has remained to this day.
I'm very happy for you. I think that description might be why I'm drawn to this area. Perhaps because of my depression — or whatever it is that I am that makes it so that I experience the world that way — the appeal of enlightenment's end of suffering holds a strong draw.
I have felt that same sense of Oneness directly while on a heroic dose of shrooms. I don't know what it "means", but I sense and believe that it is describing something fundamental about reality. I actually base this belief not just on the squishy subjective experience of cosmic consciousness while on psychedelics (for me), but also on the "interconnectedness" of all beings, ecosystems, matter, etc. I put "interconnectedness" in quotes because I think in our ordinary dualistic state of mind we see the spider and fly as separate but connected, but it's really one spider-fly system, which extends out infinitely to encompass all beings.
Your lattice vision is fascinating. I'm sure you've run across it in the years since, especially since you mention Buddhism, but it reminds me deeply of Indra's Net.
I'm also interested in your channeling experience. I have not personally experienced anything close to that, but western magickal tradition has practitioners who experience states of consciousness in which similar things happen. Austin Osman Spare was known for automatic writing, and Aleister Crowley's Book of the Law was dictated to him by an external presence.
How do you view your notes and records after the fact, in a more common state of mind?
While nothing like that has happened to me, it reminds me of one of my favorite movies: Being John Malkovich. Seen it? It has an interesting concept that several consciousnesses can live in a single mind.
But I have a hypothesis that, since the brain is what bestows intelligence and personality, consciousnesses may be all the same, and because of this, many consciousnesses could occupy the same mind while being completely unaware of one another—each would experience qualia separately and separately be aware of its own awareness, but since all the experiences are the same, it's like an echo chamber; there is no way for any single conscious to be aware that the others exist.
Unfortunately, your experience doesn't have embedded within it proof that any consciousnesses are connected except via ordinary matter. The first explanation that jumps to my mind for your experience is that your brain could have multiple "points of view" that, for some reason, are normally isolated from each other. One of these "points of view" ordinarily has control over your speech and actions while one is suppressed (like in Being John Malcovich). And then for some reason the wall came down temporarily, and the main speech-controller merged with this other point of view. And maybe the sense of the "Source Consciousness of the Universe" was an illusion created by chemicals released before or during that experience.
(I note further that the two ideas in the two paragraphs above are actually separate; one idea, the other, both, or neither could be true, and admittedly, "neither" is the most likely.)
I wonder if there are researchers out there interested in doing brain scans / fMRIs on people like yourself. Ever looked into that? Perhaps there's a chance that there's something different in your brain structure that is possible to detect even without simultaneously having a spiritual experience. If nothing else, perhaps the Qualia Research Institute is collecting stories like this.
> I enjoy the aesthetics and creativity of a well crafted solution. I also enjoy collaborating with talented peers in an egalitarian fashion, working together to create something lovely.
I am a software developer and I feel the same way. I've been honing my skills for decades and writing free software for many years.
> I don't believe in a capital G intelligence
Oh? I interpreted "personal relationship with God" as specifically Christian.
I used to be Christian and part of my continuing faith was the recognition that I had a "soul". But ultimately I recognized that my unshakeable impression of having a consciousness/qualia (1) doesn't imply Jesus is the Savior of the World, or that an eternal being commanded the Israelites to commit mass murder ("not to let a soul remain alive"), etc. and (2) doesn't even prove that I am immortal (as souls are assumed to be). Since prayer never worked for me, the remaining proof was mainly in the form of some stories shared orally and some old "holy" books, a couple of which, I learned, were written by a fraudster, and the evidence of the fraud only survived because the book was written recently (see cesletter.org).
I recommend scientific skepticism. I've learned that the world is full of liars and bullshitters and you have to avoid being roped in by them. Most of all, avoid believing anything important based on what a single person or small group (whether it's Andrew Wakefield or some spiritual guru) says. [edit: it's not the size of the group that matters actually... some nasty groups are, or once were, very large... what matters is the methodology they use to decide what to believe.]
There's a misconception that certain "mystic" ideas are somehow outside the bounds of science even though they can be investigated scientifically, e.g. mind powers or soothsaying. But of course, such ideas can be tested experimentally, have been tested, and available evidence indicates they don't work. Scientists would have been *delighted* to report the existence of telekinesis, ghosts and prophecy if evidence supported it. So, then, what would the justification be in believing any such things?
Another misconception: that it's appropriate to choose beliefs. Have you read "the sequences"? https://www.lesswrong.com/rationality
Now, personally I don't do anything "spiritual"... I never quite understood what that meant. But in rationalist circles a lot of people seem to have interest in meditation, because it seems to have real effects even if we don't understand them very well. So I guess it makes sense that some people around ACX have an interest in Buddhism. What do you think of that sort of thing, Ian?
I've read some of Less Wrong over the years, although I don't think I've made it through the totality of the link you sent.
Logic, rationality, and science resonate with me highly. As do practices that are perhaps not scientifically well understood but are known to have real effects. I also agree with you not to believe anything based on what a single person says, unless that person is me. My practice nurtures only beliefs that come about through my experience. I may mislead myself, but if so it comes about honestly through what I have sensed directly.
I have no well formed "beliefs" I suppose. A Bayesian approach is right for me, with strong priors on materialism. But where I tend to differ from the other people in my life who have sent me Less Wrong links is that I find existence itself pretty damned mysterious, and I've had experiences of states of consciousness which seem to pierce through some veil of common consciousness. I don't take those experiences to be making any concrete claims about reality; but they do inspire me to want to spend more of my time closer to them and less of my time in my current mind state.
I think I'm in roughly the same boat spiritually. Maybe it's not a unique perspective, but it's certainly hard finding a community built around it. Honestly the closest thing I've found is a group chat with 3 of my good friends, but I do sometimes feel like I'm missing something that was present when I was a churchgoing Catholic. I can't advise you there, but I can commiserate with you.
It might depend on your financial situation, but another thing to consider would be transitioning to more contract-based work. That would hopefully avoid all the administrative, bureaucratic parts of the job you hate while also switching things up occasionally so you don't get bored staying on the same task. I'm not a doctor, but it also might be worth getting re-evaluated for ADHD. Maybe actually *try* to get the diagnosis, just to see if the treatment does anything for you? It sounds like you have a problematic inability to maintain interest in things for very long, which is a pretty hallmark feature of ADHD. Whether or not you formally meet the criteria, it's possible that medication would help, and without it, you might continue to lose interest in *whatever* you decide to do. But again, I'm not a doctor.
I'm glad to know that there are kindred spirits out there!
I will re-consider going on Adderall. It might be worth a few months of experimentation to see if it changes my attention span and focus. You are right that I have some of the hallmark features of ADHD; the flip side of hyperfocus is probably how I've managed to be successful at work to the degree I have (micro project level, not macro career level). I am wary of long term drugs and repeating the experience I had with SSRIs where I came to feel that they blunted my emotional responses, but that is not necessarily a well founded fear for these stimulants.
Wouldn't necessarily have to be Adderall, though that's probably the default drug you'd be given were you to be diagnosed. You could also try Strattera, Vyvanse, Ritalin, etc., depending on specifics that you'd discuss with the prescriber. I'm not trying to reduce your problems to chemicals, but it can be like flipping a switch for some people, so like I said, maybe worth a try. Best of luck on your road ahead, wherever it leads you. ✌️
The Nine-Sided Circle is a Sufi group that might suit you. A lot of the work is aimed at getting to non-dual awareness.
https://ninesidedcircle.com/
I've always wanted to sit down to a Sufi study group. Thank you for the link!
It's possible to be a full participant online, though they're hoping to do more in person as COVID restrictions lift.
Figure out how to make some friends, in person, in the town where you live. A lot of smart people - me included - struggle with the idea that friends have to be smart too, or like all the same stuff you like. They don't - it just has to be someone you can talk to or do something with. Talk with the other parents at your kids' school, set up a playdate or two, and let the kids play while you chat with the parents. Say hi to your neighbors. Figure out where your desires and preferences can best mesh with those around you. If you're interested in a personal connection with God, you're going to have a lot easier time of it in small town America if you try to do that through a local church than if you're trying to be a Taoist all by your lonesome with nobody to talk to about it.
With kids and responsibilities, you just don't have the freedom to quit everything and go do something else. You've got a decent job, so I'd focus on minimizing your stress in the job and how much focus the job needs and spending the rest of your time on a hobby, preferably one that you could potentially do with friends. If you're working 2 hours a day, and that amount of work is OK with your bosses, then do something you like for 6 hours instead of staring at the screen.
Other, really basic suggestions:
1. Make sure you're sleeping enough, without aids. You should be well slept enough that if you lie down in a dark room in the middle of the day, you won't fall asleep. Practice good sleep hygiene: always sleep in your bed, don't read in bed, particularly electronic devices. If you don't fall asleep after 10 minutes, get up and do something boring until you're tired, then go back to bed. Don't take caffeine in the afternoon, and if you're having trouble, don't take alcohol either.
2. Get some level of daily exercise. Specifics don't matter too much, it matters more that you enjoy it enough to do it every day. I did really well for a while with this: https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/e4/exercise.html But walking around the neighborhood, lifting weights, jogging, playing a sport, etc. are all fine too.
For example, you say you want to "support myself as a fiction author" or "live off of writing". So write a short story. Look around for a writers group in your town or nearby (https://writersrelief.com/writing-groups-for-writers/), show up, and bring a draft of your story. Talk to folks about it. You'll quickly find out if you actually enjoy writing or if it's just a fantasy of avoiding the kind of work you're doing now.
Thanks for your thoughtful comments. I think this is in line with the path I need to take. I need to generate hypothetical futures and perform small, concrete experiments to test how well they align with who I am and what I want and how much is frivolous fantasy.
And I do need to figure out how to make more friends in person. That's been a persistent struggle in adulthood that I made worse by moving around a lot, but mitigated through the marriage. I've always been the personality type to prefer fewer but more intimate friends, but I think I need to cast a wide net at this stage in my life. Going through the divorce process and trying to adjust my life during the pandemic hasn't done me any favors socially. Sometimes I wonder how much of my current unease is due to simply having been alone in a room for far too much time in the last 18 months.
You're right also on sleep, eating, and exercise. I've made big strides there in the last few years, but I need to double down.
I would advise you to get really, really sure about what you want. Then once you're sure plan out making severe cuts and changes in your life and make sure you're as sure as you thought. Then execute.
For example: You want your life to be about your relationship with God. Well, God is in rural Mississippi and Sub-Saharan Africa as much as God is in an expensive trendy apartment. With twenty years experience you should be able to find a six figure remote job and move to somewhere where that's a lot of money. That will give you a lot more time and financial space.
Finding certainty is a challenge for me, but a good thing to focus on. Thank you.
One of my favorite sayings: "If you don't know where you're sailing, all winds are bad."
That is a complicated situation. I wish medical science could come up with a solution for what ails you. SSRIs seemed so promising for a while but the initial glitter seems to have worn off. Have you tried working with a therapist?
I did therapy for about 6 months when I started SSRIs many years ago, and I'm about 9 months into another bout of it that I initiated when I fell into a deep hole after my wife left.
I think my mental health is... okay. I've started to believe my depression more like what the author posits in Lost Connections: that it's symptomatic of my life, environment, and our modern society, rather than something innate in my brain chemistry.
So now my focus is... what do I need to do to create the right environment for myself? What sort of work can I do that is energizing rather than draining? What questions about reality do I need to better understand?
I was about to say that given the complexity of your situation, it's quite impossible to give you advice. And then I realized that it's entirely possible to give you advice, but it's highly improbable that it will be accurate advice.
So here goes my (most likely terrible, but possibly brilliant) advice:
Change everything in your life and do everything differently. And I mean REALLY differently. If you move, don't move to another small town, but to a megacity on the other side of the globe. Get the weirdest job you can imagine. Hire a full time (24hr/day) physical trainer to kick your ass and motivate you. Allow yourself only 3 hours per day of work screen time and no leisure screen time. CHANGE EVERYTHING!
But what about his kids? You can't just abandon them and move across the world. (I mean, you CAN, but leaving behind all love and responsibility to get closer to God seems counterproductive.)
Hopefully they can get enough love and support from the mom until dad 2.0 returns.
Ha! Thank you for your stab at advice, sincerely. I appreciate it. :)
Having children does constrain the solution space something fierce. That's a choice, not an absolute reality — I could leave them behind, but I will not. Unfortunately it means I'm stuck in this small town for the foreseeable future.
>That's a choice, not an absolute reality — I could leave them behind, but I will not.
It is a choice, so can you make it a positive one, rather than a resigned one?
“The voluntary affirmation of the obligatory.” - Otto Rank.
Oh, being a good father to my children is a source of great joy to me — present, loving — even if it's only as best I can. It's a sacrifice I make willingly.
If investing 1 year in yourself can improve the quality of your child-rearing 20% over the following 9 years, it's a good investment. If it improves the quality of your child-rearing 200% over the following 9 years, it's a no-brainer.
I have difficulty imagining that a person in your situation can also be a very positive presence as a parent. I'm not saying that you are not, or that it is impossible -- just that I have difficulty imagining it.
Children require regular food as well as a safe place to live. Having both of those and a sad father is better than not having them and dad being less sad.
Depends on which God, I suppose :-) That said, there's always the clergy. I don't quite know how it works, but perhaps it might be possible to become a priest of some sort, while retaining the ability to support one's kids.
Probably not that God, I don't think. Personal rather than organized, esoteric rather than exoteric, hermitic rather than monastic. My interest is less "God" than the direct experience of reality as I understand enlightenment, although I find the term useful sometimes.
Wow, you do sound like a kindred spirit. :-)
You might try looking up Ch'an Buddhism, and see if there are any groups in your area. It all depends very much on the group though. Even if there isn't one, the literature and practices might be useful.
I know you said "personal" and "hermitic", but don't underestimate the potential of being in a group of like-minded people all aiming in a similar direction. Especially if you haven't been in anything of the sort before. (Although there are potential hazards there, too.)
What? Where? When?
Russians among us probably remember the popular game show-turned-team game "Chto? Gde? Kogda?".
The best description I can come up with is that it's a game of competitive brainstorming - teams are given one minute to figure out a question that often relies both on trivia knowledge and figuring out a logic puzzle - kinda like the logic crossword in the Guardian.
It started as a Russian TV game show (afaik) and then spun off into dozens of leagues of Russians across the world. I really enjoyed, as a teen, playing both in the youth league organized by my school (where I was captain of our team "Two by Two") and the "adults" Tel Aviv league (where I would join one of a few teams).
What always bugged me while I was playing was that there is no reason it would be limited to Russian - except that Russians are already familiar with it and for others there's a cultural barrier. But it's a barrier worth overcoming because I think the game can be enjoyed by many people.
I also tried to look recently at whether there's an active league near me and could only find a website with a last post in 2013. The Tel Aviv league is still active though, but I fear the global phenomenon may be dying.
- Does anyone know of active ChGK leagues in the US, and specifically in the Boston area?
- Is there something similar to this game in other languages?
- Does anyone know of ongoing efforts to revive the game, in Russian or in other languages?
- Any thoughts on chances/worthwhileness/barriers to reviving it in English? I have some access to a large amount of young nerds (being at MIT) but also I suck at social organizing.
From my experience, in any large enough (>~500 people) European office of a FAANG-like company there are enough Russians to find some people who are either ready to play or are playing already. Not sure if there's such an office with enough Russians in Boston (there is a Google office in Cambridge IIRC, but I don't think it's too large) though.
I've run it in English ~12 times, all of them within university math departments. The requirement to write the questions down is the killer - you have to make a PowerPoint of your questions for a newbie audience. Also it takes a long while to choose appropriate questions from db.chgk.info, as the bulk of the material depends on Russian/Soviet-specific knowledge or Russian wordplay that doesn't translate well.
That's really interesting. Can you tell more how you started it? Did it end because interest dissipated or too hard to keep it up? Do you have any specific advice for jumpstarting this kind of thing in an American university? (e.g. how to draw students who've never heard about it into this kind of thing)
Sorry for the delay. I ran it through math clubs, but any sufficiently nerdy cohort should be easy to draw into it. It's not very hard to sustain if you have the patience to keep translating - my most recent iteration lived until Covid hit.
Sounds something like the Round Britain quiz on BBC radio:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round_Britain_Quiz
I haven't listened to it in years and this is the modern version of it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3X6wquygyM
This is a sample of the ones I would have listened to:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHSFmICaKb8
This looks exactly like my favorite ChGK questions, thanks! Any idea if it expanded beyond the radio show?
It's the BBC, so of course not, it's only on the radio when they broadcast a particular season 😀 This is the TV and radio public broadcasting station that had a cash cow in "Dr. Who" but for years never exploited it to the full because, well, it's a kid's show isn't it and besides, it's SF, it's rather a grubby genre? And several Directors General hoped it would quietly die. Then again, seeing the results when it went progressive and they milked it for modern appeal, I'm not enthused either: benign neglect might have been better!
1. Boston had this: http://boston.chgk.info/ It looks defunct, but it's possible that the contact email is still around and can offer advice. (Unless you're them, of course.) It also had this http://www.mit.edu/activities/kbh/cgk/, which looks even more dead. (But, again, the contact email might be alive.)
2. The US also has this: 60sec.online. (It's not US-only, but it exists in the US.) Currently, a lot of it is online. I live in Minnesota but have been playing with my mother's team in Cleveland (my mother is not the captain, but she is in Cleveland and played in person before it went online); there was a fully-remote team from Toronto in the league. I would be potentially interested in splitting off into a separate team, contact me (lastname at gmail) if you want to go this route.
3. The closest I've seen here in Minnesota in person was trivia nights, but they're much more about knowing things than about being able to think them up.
вы говорите по-русски елена?
Да; мои родители (и я) переехали в США из Санкт-Петербурга, когда мне было 12 лет.
Ah, the White Nights. I remember them from Homer AK.
Interesting, "Chto? Gde? Kogda?" is almost like Polish. "Kto, gdzie, kiedy?"
I wonder how much Russian I could understand.
My dad has a Polish friend and we spent a couple of weeks with him driving around with his GPS. Could understand ~50-70% of it if spoken slowly, repetitively and in a very predictable context.
Anyway this seems like quite a fun game.
An example question, from "easy mode", answer below (these questions are designed for group brainstorming over a minute, and tend to be harder for one person alone):
Q: In a certain TV episode, the border between one country and another passes right between a fourth and fifth. What are the two characters sitting across the border doing?
.
.
.
A: "Cynlvat purff".
Explanation: Gur obeqre orgjrra pbhagevrf cnffrf evtug orgjrra gur sbhegu naq svsgu ubevmbagnyf bs n purff obneq, naq gur punenpgref ner cynlvat npebff v
Anyone have a book recommendation for naval history? Ideally something fairly high-level and broad, rather than, e.g. getting bogged down in the specifics of individual battles and battleships.
I've started watching some videos on the Drachinifel YouTube channel, and find the high-level interesting, but as for the point-by-point description of how many tonnage of displacement X ship had and how many 13 inch primary guns it carried, less so.
Two books by Robert K. Massie: Castles of Steel and Dreadnought. Neither is a general history, but both are superb accounts of the rise of the battleship in the 19th and early 20th centuries and the impact of these new vessels on global history.
Patrick O'Brian's books are exciting reads and provide a fairly authentic insight to naval battles and naval life at the end of the Eighteenth century. However, they are novels rather than history.
Fully concur. There is a lot of history in them even though thay are novels. O’Brian did a lot of research.
Hornblower is good as well.
Somewhat specific to an era, but arguably the golden age of naval warfare.
Are you interested in naval history as in ships and battles or naval history in terms of shipping, logistics, and trade? I know almost nothing about the former but a lot about the latter. But that kind of material history is really dry if you're not interested in the economy, organizational politics, and technology.
I think I'm mostly interested in the developments of ships as a technology (and the resulting impacts on the economics and military).
Alfred Thayer Mahan’s “The Influence of Sea Power upon History” is a classic, but limited to the age of sail. It was very influential in its time and contributed to the naval arms of race of the early 20th century that drove a wedge between Germany and the UK and was thus a major (if unstated) casus belli for WWI.
I was going to recommend this.
I liked Teddy Roosevelt's naval history of the war of 1812.
Shattered Sword is the all time best re. The battle of midway, and Kaigun is good for the pacific war in general
Sea Power: a naval history is co written by Nimitz, but it s DRRRRRRRYYYYYYYYY
Come, Bean (or Cassander in a pinch)! I summon thee!
Here's my idea for an ideal city street: Both sides of the street should be lined with three-story townhouses. Each townhouse's first floor is a shopfront that is zoned for retail only, and the second and third floors are zoned residential. A townhouse can't be subdivided, meaning a townhouse's owner owns all three stories. Additionally, there is a covenant that says each owner must use the townhouse as his primary residence.
By forcing owners to live in their own townhouses (or to at least spend most of the year there), they have direct stakes in ensuring the quality of life of the neighborhood is good. Also, since they own the first floor retail spaces, they have control over what types of businesses can be there. There's also wouldn't be any wonky banking influences over how much rent an owner would charge, meaning owners could raise or lower rents at will.
Note that an owner could rent out some of the rooms in the upper two floors of his townhouse to other people if he wanted, allowing flexibility over the neighborhood's population density.
What could go wrong?
I like medium density too, but I also like the lower prices found in bigger stores. Could I live in a two-storey house on top of a wal-mart?
If I'm rich enough to be investing in commercial real estate, I'm not going to want to live on a busy shopping street, those are noisy.
What problem are you trying to solve?
Put a strip club on the first floor, good soundproofing and the second and have a nice place up on the top floor. Congrats, you've just ruined the neighborhood.
This system is way too easy to defect from.
In addition to the retail issues you're talking about this would hugely encourage sprawl. It's not very dense.
I don't see density as desirable.
I think the main problem of urban design is how to simultaneously have walkable neighbourhoods _and_ quarter-acre blocks _and_ be able to get from anywhere in the city to anywhere else within twenty minutes. I believe these can all be solved simultaneously, at least as long as you don't try to cram more than a million people into one city (so I think all cities should be bonsai-ed and green-belted when they reach one million).
As compared to what? This is far denser than the construction in most of say, Berkeley, which has 11,000 people per square mile despite 49 percent of it being zoned single family residential.
It's not going to be as dense as Manhattan, but it's still going to be a lot denser than many other cities I think.
Ha! I'm sure you're right, but from my perspective I was like "both sides of the street are nothing but three story townhouses? How dense!" I'm jus' a country boy who doesn't know how city folk abide having their homes all crowded up against each other with no breathin' room.
That sounds like way too much commercial/retail space for the population density, I can't imagine there being a shop for every two residences, unless you're imagining this as specific to a certain centralized neighborhoods with a bunch of residential area surrounding them.
One main road of commercial ground floor + flats on upper floors in the middle of a suburban area isn't uncommon in the UK.
Yep, "corner stores" exist for a reason. This is way too much commercial space. Also, the first floor of a townhouse is too small for efficient commercial uses. You can get around this by building larger buildings, with condos on top, but then you weaken that sense of ownership you're going for.
Townhouse neighborhoods can be great, but you can't have retail on every block. The most that townhouse density can support is a corner store every few blocks and a high street about half-a-mile away. The high street can be closer if it has more residential density as well (i.e. mid-rise 5-storey apartments on top of retail space), but then the apartment renters are half your neighborhood. Not coincidentally, this setup pretty much describes my neighborhood, which I love. But I rent one of the apartments and there is some tension between the "transients" and the homeowners.
Also worth noting, in my neighborhood almost half of the commercial space is vacant, and was even before COVID. Online shopping has further reduced the amount of commercial space this neighborhood can sustain.
Yes. Oakland has required mixed use retail in our city center and even before COVID it was just way too many retail spaces. A lot of these new retail spaces, maybe even a majority, are empty. It's sad.
Well, depending on the price I'd be tempted to leave the first story vacant. Quality of life around not having a retail location below me would be tempting. If it were priced high enough to discourage that, it would eliminate a whole lot of people from being able to afford it in the first place. If you want an UMC community that's great but if you want socioeconomic diversity, it's not going to fly.
Similarly, it would disincentivize high traffic / noisy locations that may be needed. Pizzerias, grocery stores, day care etc. would have one hell of a time for example, and I'm guessing a lot of other services would find it more difficult except from those who were more money sensitive.
You'd have plenty of demand for Starbucks though.
Is there anyone (apart from city planners) who _actually_ wants socioeconomic diversity?
I'm happiest when I live in a place where everybody is at my socioeconomic level. Seeing people who are substantially poorer _or_ richer than me makes me feel bad. I imagine that people poorer and richer than me feel the same way.
Lack of socioeconomic diversity leads to ghettos. I get that you might not want certain people anywhere close to you, but having them all in one place is even worse.
I prefer being around people who are a bit poorer than me. It makes me feel rich and successful. I wouldn't want to be around slummy people, obviously, but being around people who make half of what I do is quite nice.
When I hear "diversity" I think of all these inner cities where only the upper middle class can afford an apartment but the streets are littered with homeless people and other antisocial elements – quite diverse and the worst of both worlds IMO. I much prefer living somewhere regular people can afford but poor people are at a distance.
Barcelona city center contains _nothing_ but buildings 7ish floors tall with commercial spaces of various kinds taking the entire ground floor. People like it quite much, judging by rent prices.
Those who signed up for the Rationalist matchmaker, how did it go? Did anything come of it?
I just had a call with her today where she asked me lots of questions about what I want in a relationship, and now I wait for her to ping me with a potential match.
I didn't hear back.
I have a bunch of questions about clinical trials. Like: how do I go about entering one? How do I track which ones are available, other than checking clinicaltrials.gov every day? How do clinical trials get their participants, especially if they target a sample of people who started exhibiting symptom x less than 72 hours ago?
Context: I experienced sudden sensorineural hearing loss on my right ear 8 years ago and lost about 80% of my hearing, which didn't critically impact my functioning as I had good hearing on my left, but as of three weeks ago the same thing happened to my left, taking about 40% of my good hearing. In both cases no one has any clue what could have caused it and there is no effective treatment available.
However, there is a drug called FX-322 currently in phase 2 clinical trials that appears to be effective at inducing hair cell regeneration in the cochlea, significantly mitigating extended high range hearing loss. As I understand it, pharmaceutical companies spend billions of dollars on getting new drugs through clinical trials and so lock them down under patent. This process can take a decade or more before the drug actually comes to market. As a result, my only hope of getting this treatment is by entering a clinical trial that tests it, because the pharmaceutical company will not sell it to anyone and no doctor will give it to anyone, for fear of getting sued in both cases. Hence my question.
> In both cases no one has any clue what could have caused it
My speculation: sudden hearing loss is usually due to a viral infection. (CMV is often the culprit.)
Unfortunately it's probably too late to do anything about it.
There is not strong evidence that FX-322 works, which is why Frequency Therapeutic's stock is getting dumped on.
Can you elaborate? The study in Otology & Neurology looked promising. The measure of 'word recognition in noise' is not, I imagine, the most stable measure, but it does show improvement.
You might consider reaching out to the company directly and asking them to keep you updated. A big pain-point for most human trials is recruitment, especially for uncommon diseases/syndromes, so I would imagine that if you qualify the researchers would be very interested in keeping in touch with you.
Thanks for the tip, but hearing loss is not so uncommon that researchers would have trouble finding participants. Given how FX-322 is the first thing that seems to do anything at all against long-term SSNHL I'm sure there is no shortage of people wanting to get in on that.
You might be surprised, lots of these studies are looking for patients with a particular history to increase the chance set the study shows that their drug is effective, which makes recruitment more complicated than you might think. To draw an analogy to a different part of the clinical trials world; there is no shortage of patients with depression and anxiety, but some trials specifically want patients that have never been tried on any medication, or maybe not a particular class of medications, or that don't have any comorbidities... You can see where I'm going with this.
I don't see why the same idea wouldn't also apply to this study. Maybe they want people who lost their hearing in a specific way, or at a specific time in their life, or who have hearing preserved in a specific part of the aural spectrum. Seems like it's worth a shot at least, no?
An interesting meditation I wound up developing (as far as I can tell):
To Die Before You Die
https://squarecircle.substack.com/p/to-die-before-you-die
I want to once again promote the meetup in Ljubljana, Slovenia, happening tomorrow: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/G5gufXwuHhJuoDoLi/ljubljana-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021
The weather is going to be so surprisingly nice that some people cancelled on coming to the meetup, but if you don't have better plans, consider coming :)
I flew home last March because of Covid worries just before I was scheduled to give a talk in Ljubljana, a city I have never visited and wanted to. I plan to go next time I do a speaking trip in Europe, sometime soon if Covid continues to die down.
Ah yes, I was registered for that event, was sad to see it moved to Zoom. Let's hope it continues to die down :)
What’s the state of the art in IQ testing these days?
The last time I checked (fair disclosure - decades ago) it was a multiple choice pen and paper test that produced a single number that was supposed to represent an individuals intelligence.
Is this still the case?
I'm not interested in state of the art, but I'd like to know if there's a free (but reasonably calibrated) IQ test I can take.
I found a site that turned my SAT scores into ~IQ's.
I think WAIS is what is typically used by psychologists. It produces a four-dimensional score and a two-dimensional score as well as the one-dimensional score. I wish more sociological research would focus on the subscores tho.
I took one ~15 years ago, and from what I remember it was going through some tests alone (pen and paper) and some with a specialist. This produced a number (the IQ) that was divided into a few numbers (verbal IQ, logic IQ, things like that).
I wrote a brief essay on IQ if anyone is interested: https://parrhesia.substack.com/p/why-intelligence-matters
It doesn't have to be pen and paper. I took an IQ test and I don't think I used pen and paper at all. You can use all sorts of different test items to get someone's IQ.This is called the indifference of the indicator. From chapter 7 of In The Know by Russel T. Warne:
"The fact that the CAS, CAM, DIT, NALS, TOFHLA, and many more tests all measure intelligence is more evidence for the indifference of the indicator. This was a concept that Charles Spearman (1927, pp. 197–198) proposed (see Chapter 1). Today, the evidence is overwhelming that he was right that any task that requires cognitive effort or work measures g, regardless of the task appearance (Cucina & Howardson, 2017; Jensen, 1998). It is because of the indifference of the indicator that scores on different tests are positively correlated – they all measure intelligence. In fact, tasks don’t even have to appear on an intelligence test for people to use their intelligence to respond (Gordon, 1997; Gottfredson, 1997b; Lubinski & Humphreys, 1997)."
Here is a discussion from Arthur Jensen, one of the most important researchers on cognitive ability about the theory of multiple intelligences: https://twitter.com/IvesParrhesia/status/1422769510260617220
Are you interested in traditional IQ? Or more modern variations that try to test native intelligence like the Wonderlic? I have a lot more info on the latter than the former.
More modern variations. And some sense of how widely they are used.
And especially from anyone who has either administered these tests, or taken them - how useful and accurate do you think they are?
A quick blurb on Wonderlic would be interesting.
There’s also a theory of multiple intelligences, which also seems interesting.
Regarding how widely they are used: lots of schools require the WISC or WPPSI.
Armed forces also usually have their own tests and systematically administer them to recruits.
I'd say they are somewhat accurate. IQ is in fact the best predictor of many life outcomes (income, likelihood to commit a crime, get addicted, divorced, have a child out of wedlock, etc., even number of papers published, number of citations, and so on). It may not be a great predictor, but it is better that, say, SES of the parents.
Linda Gottfredson has an illuminating graphic in an essay entitled "The General Intelligence Factor" (https://wps.prenhall.com/wps/media/objects/803/822654/psychplace/genintell/genintell.html)
--------------------------
Bottom 5% chance of dropping out of HS: 55%
Top 5% chance of dropping out of HS: ~0%
Bottom 5% chance of poverty: 30%
Top 5% chance of poverty: ~2%
Bottom 5% chance of chronic welfare recipient: 31%
Top 5% chance of chronic welfare recipient: ~0%
Amazing graph, thanks for the link. Gottfredson is one of the names that always come up in this context. She's great.
Correlations don't always get the point across so well. I think that graphic is handy.
I've taken an IQ test. I don't believe that I used any paper and pencil. It was administered to me mostly verbally. I remember that I rearranged blocks, repeated numbers back and explained concepts to the administrator.
Intelligence is reduced to one number because factor analysis results in one general factor for intelligence g. All cognitively demanding tasks are "g loaded" to some extent. This didn't have to be the case. It could have been that you had 2, 3, 4 or more factors. But the reality is that doing really well on one cognitively demanding task is an indication of doing well on other cognitively demanding tasks. The precise content of the tests doesn't matter so much because you can get g from any tasks. This is called the "indifference of the indicator"
Here is a discussion from Arthur Jensen, one of the most important researchers on cognitive ability about the theory of multiple intelligences: https://twitter.com/IvesParrhesia/status/1422769510260617220
You seem skeptical. If you don't know much about the subject, I recommend Warne's book _In the Know: Debunking 35 Myths about Human Intelligence_. It's very easy to read and covers a lot of misunderstandings about IQ. In particular, It has a passage on multiple intelligence (spoiler: it's bunk).
(On the other hand, I don't recommend it to people looking for more specific cutting edge research; there is nothing at all on the cognitive rationality test or similar subjects for example.)
It has a whole chapter.
Conclusion of Chapter 5 from In The Know:
"Despite its popularity in the education establishment, Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences has fundamental theoretical problems that make it incoherent, untestable, and unable to generate predictions. Moreover, empirical evidence is overwhelming that different cognitive abilities are not independent of one another and that a general mental ability– g – exists. I agree with Hunt (2011, p. 119), who stated that “ there is virtually no objective evidence for the theory” of multiple intelligences. Perhaps because the theory of multiple intelligences and its creator are so identified with one another, it has become impossible to avoid criticizing Howard Gardner’s behavior regarding the theory. I disapprove of Gardner’s resistance to testing his theory and his blasé dismissal of unfavorable evidence, both of which are not how scientists should behave with regard to their theories. One final quote encapsulates his attitude well:
>And even if at the end of the day, the bad guys [who advocate for a general intelligence] turn out to be more correct scientifically than I am, life is short. And we have to make choices about how we spend our time, and that’s where I think the multiple intelligences way of thinking about things will continue to be useful, even if the scientific evidence isn’t supportive. (Gardner, 2009, 0:45:11–0:45:32)
I suppose that if a person wants to make studying multiple intelligences theory their pastime, then there is no harm in that. (Most hobbies don’t have a scientific basis.) But the theory of multiple intelligences lacks empirical support and a coherent theoretical foundation. Therefore, in situations where it could impact people’s lives – like in education and in scientific research – it should be completely abandoned."
Thanks, I remembered Warne mentioned it, I didn't remember he had a whole chapter on it!
I offer you a deal. I take you to an isolated cabin with no technology and give you a stack of white paper. I will give you a week to write whatever you want on the paper but it has to be completely from your memory with no help from anyone else. Whatever you write down on that paper, you will never forget again.
1. What would you write?
2. How much would you pay for this opportunity?
The rent on the cabin, my food, and halvsies on the paper.
Assuming I could have a bit of time to study before going there, I’d probably pay up to a thousand dollars (about 5% of my annual income).
I’d write down a bunch of math proofs. I’m fairly confident that as long as I could remember the basic statements I could rederive most things I need, and honestly not having to ever look that stuff up again would definitely accrue a lifetime value to make it worthwhile.
I also wonder if you couldn’t get an employer to pay for such a training if you worked in industry
All my current passwords and a very long random string I can use in the future
My multiplication table would expand to 20×20 or more, and I would easily determine the day of the week for any date without needing to do Conway-style calculations. I would never again need a password manager.
Do you really need to multiply two digit numbers that much that 1x*1y=100 + 10(x+y) + xy is bad? And for dates surely an app is enough
Good answers!
I wouldn't take it and wouldn't pay for it. If I can already write it for memory, I can already remember it. I also think that this would be some kind of mental prison for my future self. That might be because I'm still relatively young (~25), and my views on that might evolve with time. My grandmother had Alzheimer's. If I ever start having symptoms, I might be ready to pay a lot and would write about my memories and the memories of the people important for me.
>If I can already write it for memory, I can already remember it.
Don't you think memories decay overtime though?
It does, but it doesn't bother me. What I use often, I remember. If anything, it's a good argument to write about the things you care about, but you can always read what you wrote, you don't need something as strict as "never forget it".
I would add more details: I would split memories into two parts, data and feelings. These are not hard categories, but they are helpful when talking about memory. Data is, well, data. X is Y, this person was born on this day, JavaScript == operator follows this algorithm, stuff like that. You can easily write it somewhere and preserve it. Memory about feelings is more like "I was in this state of mind when that happened", the feeling evoked by a song, wind in your hair, water on your skin, noises, sensations. Those usually decays over time, in a "I feel more distanced and detached from the moment when it happened, and it's harder with time to imagine that I was here". A bit like getting more and more detached from your own emotions, remembering that you felt them, what they felt like, but being unable to experience it. It's like trying to remember the taste of something. You can "see" it, but you're not really experiencing it like when it is in your mouth.
Having said all that, these "feelings" memories might be worth preserving, but since I already can't really preserve them by writing about them, I don't know how that would work with your mechanism.
I don’t mean to throw shade here, but can’t we just keep a journal? Seems like it would accomplish the same thing.
I think knowing a lot of information is kind of pointless. I think schooling is largely a waste of student's time. I thought this thought experiment might be interesting. People don't seem to think: "wow, this is an awesome opportunity. I have tons of information in my head that I could forget. I would love to spend hours making sure I'll never ever forget it and that will benefit me" I don't think that remembering much info is very useful and I think people see that in certain contexts but forget it in others.
yeah it’s all much more complex than just “remembering long lists of characters”
Even knowing complex information or processes isn't very useful unless it's for a job or something.
for limited senses of “useful”. If that was universally true, we should all leave the blog and most of the internet behind
Yeah a lot of people should probably leave the internet behind.
Reading the internet and this blog isn't a good use of your time if you're trying to learn new stuff that will have a payoff in the future. But I think people stick around because it's fun to read this stuff and they like learning. That's a good reason to read.
I check the drawer of the bedside table for a Bible.
More seriously, I don't quite get the usefulness of this and likely wouldn't pay for it. If I can memorize things easily enough to be sure I'm writing them down correctly in the cabin, then I mostly don't need the service the cabin is providing; and if I'm in any doubt that my memorization is good, then there's a severe risk that I err in what I write down in the cabin, and a falsehood is stuck in my head forever. This only becomes attractive at all if you add in access to textbooks or other reference sources.
The best uses I can think of are creative exercises. Bucket lists; jokes to tell at parties; poetry, which I'll later make fun of myself for thinking it was any good; a plan/outline for a book or other creative work; things like that. Those things are difficult to "get wrong", which is good, because I would really worry that this would present a risk of permanently damaging myself by writing down something mistaken. As other people have mentioned, most of that is just as easy to do on paper or a note-taking app.
I would move between writing 'Morning Pages' and a piece of fiction. This October I'll be paying £300 for six days where I'll be doing just that (writing) in a room/garden AND my meals will be provided. This is Northern Ireland, it rains a lot; I'll have a room, a bathroom, and technology in pretty countryside. Good value. To be able to remember what I'd written? Highly unlikely and not overly desirable as I'd have a copy.
You'd have to pay me a fair amount - it sounds substantially more miserable than a week of work, so definitely in excess of my wage (seeing that it would use up vacation).
My memory is pretty sticky. I might pay to offload a bunch of trivia that’s only good for solving the NYT crossword. Though there was that time in 2002 when I couldn’t remember Cameron Diaz’s name and I had to go over to the copier and ask Shellie… ;)
isn’t this just paper? you can pick up the stack later if you want. What’s being remembered anyway? The words? The thing being remembered? Something else?
It's a perfect mnemonic with instant recall.
The trick is that you have to have it in your current memory, short-term or long-term, although you are allowed to take as long as you want to recall it.
I would load a lot of trivia into it. It sounds fun but not necessarily economically valuable.
Is there food in the cabin ?
Yeah and it's very yummy.
1. What would you write?
2. How much would you pay for this opportunity?
Can I eat the paper?
I probably wouldn't write anything, but I would do it for the food if it's really that good, assuming the cabin is comfortable (heat, shower, etc.), and that I can bring my kids and wife.
How does this thing work ? Let's say I write down the line, "my knowledge of 8th-grade algebra". Do I remember 8th-grade algebra forever, or do I just remember that one line ?
you remember the line.
Then how is that magic cabin any different than just a pad of paper, or maybe a tape recorder ?
To maximize this thought experiment's usefulness, you may want to change # 2 to "What % of your net worth" because otherwise this will be skewed by the wealth of your respondents. A single mother may have wonderful memories to save but only be able to spare $20-30 while a rich guy who is only marginally interested may be willing to pay big money because why not.
father of eleven?
Mostly in awe. How?
They tend to come one at a time =D
Lots of people have negative net worth, and some have net worth close to 0 (so they might be willing to pay five million percent or whatever), so I think that would produce weird results.
Percent of after-tax income, then.
I dunno, is there any reason to believe that such a renormalization would be a good idea? Like, I don't think that my valuation of things scales linearly with my income.
I just think there will be a lot of noise if you don't try to normalize it somehow.
Perhaps MAX [% of net worth, % of income, 100%] or a similar function would be useful. Or maybe not who knows.
I would definitely use the "unforgettable paper" on reflections and personal memories, as they are precious, fallible with age, and everything else is accessible once I'm outside.
Not sure how much I would pay for it.
While I was just recently lamenting the loss of some memories, I'm still more likely to spend the week writing about the future rather than the past. I wonder if there's a natural dichotomy between people - future-centric versus past-centric.
In regards to 2. Everything I write these days is already recorded, so it's hard for me to put much value on this.
hey Andy, can you do a write up on why you run a counterfeiting business, what it’s like, what the risks are, how you get the bills, how are they used ... etc. the more detail and complexity and inside info the better?
Maybe that’ll convince some of us to buy...
I can tell you that my wife was pregnant in March 2021, right before the vaccine was starting to roll out to the general population. We both tried to research what the medical experts were recommending, for or against vaccinating pregnant women. What we found was basically what you're heard from the existing replies to your question...basically, no one would actually recommend it because the data wasn't there to be confidently for it. But they didn't have any strong reason to say that pregnant women should avoid the vaccine either.
So yes, the reason you were not aware that there was ambiguity is because you didn't do research "back when", which is understandable. I would not have done that research if I wasn't in a situation that warranted it.
I don't think anyone ever thought there was any theoretical reason to avoid the vaccine during pregnancy. Almost nothing crosses from the mother's blood to the infant except small molecules (which neither mRNA nor protein vaccine components are), for the obvious reason that this crossing has to be tightly monitored to prevent mother and child immune systems from fighting with each other. But you never know with various small-molecule adjuvants that are often given with vaccines, although these are generally considered safe on their own or in other circumstances. Nevertheless, people of the regulatory or medical bent have the thalidomide story in the back of their heads, which revolved around *assuming* because there was no obvious mechanism there was no need to specifically test in pregnant women, so I doubt any of them would be full-throatedly enthusiastic for fear of the unknowns.
And obviously recruiting pregnant women for any kind of trial is difficult. "Want to participate in an experimental drug/vaccine trial to see if your baby comes out normal or with two heads? Wait don't hang up. Hello?" So the data comes in slooowly.
Hm, at least enough DNA from the unborn is passing I to the blood stream of the mother that in these days a simple blood test can find a lot if DNA defects of the unborn like Down syndrome.
(I don’t know what I’m talking about, like at all, and this is just bored speculation, take vaccine)
it’s plausible I guess that maybe the immune system triggering from the vaccine might interact with specific stages or things in pregnancy such that people who get the vaccine at n to n+2 days of pregnancy in some specific stage have a .5% increased risk of miscarriage or something. But if something like that is true a lot less than the equivalent from actually getting Covid!
And if I remember correctly, the mRNA vaccines don’t have adjuvants - the delivery and spike protein is enough. I looked again at ingredients from here - https://www.hackensackmeridianhealth.org/HealthU/2021/01/11/a-simple-breakdown-of-the-ingredients-in-the-covid-vaccines/ - don’t see any adjuvants in either mRNA and only possibly the 2-hydroxypropyl-β-cyclodextrin (HBCD) is an adjuvant but i think it’s just an excipients. The ingredients list really isn’t that long for any of them,, but like you said maybe something happens with one of the unusual small ones
Sure, it's the immune system, so anything is possible. But I think our instincts here mislead us. We have some vague sense that pregnant women are "more vulnerable," and in the primitive hunter-gather situation, that is 100% true -- they are much more likely to fall off a cliff or be eaten by a predator than non-pregnant women. But are they "more vulnerable" to infections and disease? It's hard to see why they would be. Being physically awkward because you've got a big belly wouldn't seem to relate to fighting bacteria. But our instincts are not formed to deal with the microscopic world, so we apply the wrong assumptions to it, we vaguely equate the risk of coronaviruses (or vaccines) to tigers, and they are not at all the same.
People also worry about enhanced danger to the baby, and it's certainly true that Nature is ruthless in her preference for mother's life over baby's -- if there's any kind of detectable and serious threat to mother, Nature will abort that little life without hesitation.
But on the other hand, Nature builds this big complex wall between mother and baby in utero -- the largest organ the baby constructs during gestation is the placenta, and the entire purpose of that 15% or so of the baby's mass is to manage the interaction between mother and baby, such that baby gets the molecules it needs *but* mother's immune system is held at bay, since otherwise baby appears to mama's immune system as just a 5-pound tumor or bacterial colony or other terrible invader that needs to be killed as aggressively as possible.
So a priori you would expect what happens on either side of the placenta, immunology-wise, to stay there. That can't be the *whole* story of course -- e.g. we know fetal protein ends up in the mother's blood, and vice versa -- but it's a reasonable default starting idea.
But of course, it's also immunology, so by definition almost anything that seems reasonable at first will turn out to be wrong, or inadequate.
No, the mRNA vaccines don't have any deliberate adjuvants, because apparently the mRNA itself is highly provocative to the immune system. As well it might be! Hard to imagine any more clear sign of alien invasion by viruses than weird mRNA floating around ha ha. This is one reason I kind of like the mRNA vaccines more than the traditional varieties (that do depend on an immune-stimulating adjuvant). They seem more..."natural" for lack of a better word. They are more accurately simulating the natural process of immune stimulation, which one would think is kicked off by the presence of weirdo RNA or DNA. And we know there are very robust mechanisms for dealing viciously with alien RNA within the cell (indeed the major success of the mRNA vaccines was designing slightly unnatural RNA that lasted more than 2 seconds inside your typical cell). You have to wonder a little bit about some combination of alien compounds that make your immune system sit up and howl at the Moon when even 0.1 mL is injected under the skin (although only a little bit, they've all been well tested).
>But are they "more vulnerable" to infections and disease? It's hard to see why they would be.
Two possible reasons that present themselves to a layman:
1) Immune system is weaker when calorie-starved; pregnant women are shunting a large portion of their calories to the baby.
2) Babies aren't detected and destroyed by the immune system; the signalling required to avoid that could be detrimental to immunity against other things. Less sure about this one.
Well (2) is the big question. We know there is more than just the placental barrier going on, to hold mother's immune system at bay, but I think knowledge of exactly what's going on is still pretty primitive. I know people are deeply fascinated by it, because the advantages of knowing how to turn on and off the immune system are obvious and manifold.
The starvation think is also equally fascinating. We do know immune function is compromised when you're starving, but on the other hand there is the provocative work by Valter Longo at USC which has gotten so much press, that starvation *followed by* refeeding rebuilds the immune system stronger than it was before.
We also know pregnancy confers resistance to certain kinds of cancers, which you'd think would have something to do with the immune system, but who knows? In terms of understanding the human immune system, a profoundly important subject, I feel like we are at where chemistry was in the 1550s, boiling down horse piss and looking for the Philosopher's Stone.
> But are they "more vulnerable" to infections and disease?
The answer is yes, as far as I can tell:
https://www.google.de/search?q=are%20pregnant%20women%20more%20susceptible%20to%20disease
The most commonly known (read: not commonly known) one is probably listeriosis.
The most plausible explanation I have heard for this is, that the baby actively suppresses the immune system of the mother much like a parasite would, in order not to be treated like that 5 pound tumor.
But regarding vaccines, that would rather imply the possibility that a pregnant women might respond weakly to a vaccine (as in be protected less by it) and not that the vaccine could damage the child.
(Of course this is different for live vaccines, but there are none for Covid up to now).
I put that badly. What I should have said is that our evolved behaviors are not well-adapted to deal with modern *information* about the microscopic world. That is, we don't react to our knowledge born of electron miscroscopes and genetic sequencing very well, because we don't have any evolved instincts for how to react to that information, and when we just copy over instincts that evolved for a different class of threats, it doesn't necessarily work well.
This isn’t an answer to your question, but sickness and even mild forms of many viruses during pregnancy are associated with preterm birth and complications. Something to be aware of! Was a story about how during the pandemic there were fewer preterms than usual, and how that maybe was due to lower rates of all respiratory viruses
I was in charge of coordinating vaccines where I work, and several pregnant women turned in notes from their doctor telling them to not get vaccinated while pregnant. This was back in the early spring, so the vaccines were just getting distribution outside of the medical field, and a lot of doctors were being cautious. I haven't had much opportunity to ask pregnant or nursing women if they have gotten any updated advice since then. The last I heard was early summer (June) that at least one area doctor was still telling pregnant women to wait.
This article (New England Journal of Medicine) has a good overview:
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2107070
The short version is that originally when the vaccines got emergency approval for general use, there was no firm data from human trial on the safety of the vaccines during pregnancy, but there was no reason theoretical reason to expect it to cause problems, and no signs of elevated risks had show up in trials on pregnant animals. Weighed against the known elevated risks to pregnant women of severe illness from Covid, the balance of potential risks seemed strongly in favor of vaccinating pregnant women as long as Covid was actively circulating.
Much more recently, an analysis of vaccine registry data from pregnant women suggests no danger to the vaccine, but that's preliminary with a very low sample size, and that data analysis was brand new when the article I linked was published (June 2021).