Any recommendations for informative and topical Discord servers other than the one this substack links to? I've given it a chance but it's become quite clear that Scott is hardly ever involved and the people actually administering the server do their best to come off as pompous losers.
Here is an amusing article looking at the carbon footprint of buying something on Amazon.com -- along the same lines as AstralCodexTen's attempt to quantify carbon costs earlier this year. With math!
Is there a reason the comments in the classified thread are for paying subscribers only? I'd love to reply to someone requesting comments, but not so much I'm going to pay for the privilege... Perhaps shilling for comments should be done in open threads if not everyone can post in the classifieds.
I came here with exactly the same question. Reading DinoNerd's response to you I strongly disagree. If (DinoNerd) you think the reason is because 'Scott likes money' I hope that's because you were half-awake etc. Has Scott given you any impression like that in the decade and a half he's been a public blogger? At all?
My guess is that it is a simple error. Annoying, for sure, but no more than that.
Yeah, judging from both Scott's general preference for open (but respectful) commenting, and his uhh "inexperience" in digital matters, AND Substack's general weirdness, I'm guessing mistake as well. But what do I know? Perhaps he explained this in a pay-only post? (I'm only half-kidding with that last one. The cynicism is more directed at awkward monetization leaps, and not at Scott in particular.
I presume the reason is that Scott likes money, and hopes people will pay for the privilege of classifieds, who wouldn't subscribe otherwise - rather than reacting as I currently am, by feeling extremely annoyed and considering dropping the blog entirely.
I'm also wondering how many things that should have been on a classifieds thread will appear on the next open thread, more-or-less thinly described.
Note to Scott, FWIW, I'm furious primarily because your intro to the thread, which I received by mail, did not tell me that I was excluded from posting, and only allowed to see the thread so I could be advertised to/at by your subscribers. I headed straight to the thread, barely awake, and tried to post something I've been wanting to ask for/about almost since the last/first such thread.
I will not, of course, read the subscribers-only classifieds thread, now that I know I'm excluded from posting. That would both make me even angrier, and reward this decision.
After finishing Unsong recently and thinking about Greta Thunberg today, it occurred to me that she seems to have the "somebody has to and no one else will" mindset
I don't think the mindset is pretty rare, although it's probably quite rare to be famous and have this mindset as a well known "quirk". Reporting bias strikes again!
1) You answered a question on polyamory. There is a book I can recommend that makes a good case against it (IIRC in one of the last chapters). It is called "Cheap Sex" by Mark Regnerus.
He argues with a market model: People differ a lot in how attractive they are to others (a fact similar to how people differ a lot in money-making ability).
If you allow them to acquire a lot of partners (or money), inequality arises, which can lead to different levels of power and/or self-esteem etc.
This is why we level out income inequality on the labour market (with different tax levels for poor and rich people). In that picture, "mandated" monogamy can be seen as levelling out inequality in attractiveness.
On the mating market, the effects of inequality are even worse than on the financial one, since potential partners are a finite resource, and money/wealth is not necessarily.
Not Scott, but I don't quite understand the argument. If we start from the premise that the analogy is correct then:
The rising tide lifts all boats - If people have more satisfying relationships (or are richer) then is it really that much of a negative that some people have a lot more relationships/wealth than others?
Can't divide by zero - Right now you could say people have one relationship or zero. The difference between them seems much more important than the difference between 1 and 4.
And then there's the problem with the analogy. In a money situation if I have a dollar, you don't (ignoring the rising tide bit). But in a relationship situation, my relationship is with another person. I have increased the supply of relationships.
The unspoken premise is that "polyamory" will in practice exhibit a gender imbalance, and be de facto polygamy, which will in turn leave a surplus of single men for whom there are *no* available women to date.
Thank you for making the premise explicit. I would only add that it might not necessarily be restricted to single men, but also to (unattractive) single women.
I'm not sure if I understand your question correctly. I will simply rephrase the argument: By nature, the distribution between men and women is (roughly) balanced: ~50% men, ~50% women.
So if we assume homosexuals are same in number of males & females, we further assume heterosexual men and women do want to stay single in equal rates, then eventually, for every partner-seeking male heterosexual, there is exactly one partner-seeking female heterosexual.
This is different when we allow polyamory(gamy/andry).
Yes, I very much agree this should be resolved empirical. "Cheap sex" comes with a lot of data, mostly from the US in the last 60 years. Although admittedly, the US hasn't become fully polyamorous by now, it has become much "more polyamorous" than around 1960: It turned from life-long or decades-long monogamy (in marriages) to serial monogamy for sometimes only weeks. Also, casual sex (thus, with multiple partners within a short-timeframe) is much more common.
This all correlates with the number of singles going up, with first marriages starting later than before etc.
Given this big picture, one can argue that "polyamorous factors" might lead to the things I described in the first post.
"Steve was preoccupied with the nature and quality of his own thinking. He expected so much of himself and worked hard to think with a rare vitality, elegance and discipline. His rigor and tenacity set a dizzyingly high bar. When he could not think satisfactorily he would complain in the same way I would complain about my knees.
As thoughts grew into ideas, however tentative, however fragile, he recognized that this was hallowed ground. He had such a deep understanding and reverence for the creative process. He understood creating should be afforded rare respect—not only when the ideas were good or the circumstances convenient.
Ideas are fragile. If they were resolved, they would not be ideas, they would be products. It takes determined effort not to be consumed by the problems of a new idea. Problems are easy to articulate and understand, and they take the oxygen. Steve focused on the actual ideas, however partial and unlikely."
So I saw this youtube channel about car dependent suburbia vs how most European countries build things, and it really resonates with me. I can't help but wonder how much this contributes to America's problems, from income inequality, to obesity, to political polarization. :/
I've written about this before (already plugged something else in this thread so find it yourself), but I think it's worthwhile to think about the downsides as well, and the walkability movement is very reluctant to a single real tradeoff so you sort of have to go looking for those yourself.
One of the first things I'd consider is that the US has an awful lot of walkable neighborhoods in which nobody wants to live - we don't call them ghettos anymore usually, but they line up in a lot of ways with what walkability asks for. The difference between them and walkable neighborhoods is sometimes just money; for nice shops, you have to have people who can shop at said nice shops; for nicely maintained and manicured surroundings, you need money. Ditto low crime.
The other thing I'd consider is why we wanted roads that let people go places quickly in the first place; being able to move goods faster is a plus. Being able to pick from more employers is a plus. Being able to have more choices between various kinds of vendors is a plus. You can massage that a little with public transit, but A. There's a lot of cities that doesn't work and B. You then have to actually use public transit; it's not like other things where you can shunt the costs off to other people, since walkability is necessarily inversely correlated with drivability.
Grain of salt, because there's people who very strongly disagree with me on all these points. But without actually considering the actual utility benefits of drivability, you are only going to get half the picture.
This is a bit of a straw man argument. The more nuanced arguments from the "walkability" side are not that everything HAS to be walkable, just that current regulations, zone, government expenditures, etc prohibit or punish attempts at making walkable cities in the way they were prior to WW2.
The current development patterns are rather artificial because they are not just responses to consumer demand. They are the result of decades of decisions taken by non consumers. Yes, many people do want to live in the suburbs or a gated community, these people should have that opportunity and do. But if that's not what you want you either have to have lots of money (usually) or compromise (like the undesirable neighborhoods you mention).
The issue with pure walkability is that people don't want to walk very far, so you need immense density & wealth to make it work. That pretty much excludes suburbia.
Research from The Netherlands shows that for trips up to 1 km, a lot of people walk (35% of trips), although cycling is a bit more popular (45%). Still, 1 in 5 trips of that distance are still done by car. Then from 1-5 km, willingness to walk is minimal, while 50% of trips are done by bike vs 40% by car.
Note that the relatively high car usage for short trips may in part be due to combined trips, like dropping off the kids at school/day care before going to work.
Also, these statistics are for the whole country, while urban regions obviously have less car use.
I think that cyclability is a much smarter goal. With cargo bikes, a bunch of people even make it work with kids & medium size shopping trips, although plenty of Dutch people prefer the convenience of a car for those things.
Of course, it does require making choices that most Americans may not be culturally OK with, like having more smaller shops, rather than fewer big shops. In The Netherlands, there are a lot of supermarkets that are small by American standards, but they tend to be much closer to people's homes.
There's a lot of talk about Europe being poorer than the US, or about how things cost so much there. At least some of that comes from taxes, but could some of it come from the costs of walkability? Smaller shops so less economy of scale. Less freedom to choose a job so less productivity.
I have lived off of a major city street for a year and three blocks from the highway for two years in my city and loved it, so I can see why walkability has its fans, but my living situation also dictated my work and shopping situations. What if the pressure to switch to walkability ends up costing more than we expect?
The density thing always stands out to me as a sort of cultural/SES litmus test. In the low SES life, density means people steal your stuff and you listen to people fighting all the time. Sometimes I look at pictures of walkable neighborhoods like the one at :15 in the video above and go "shit, that's a lot of people; I'd get murdered there". I'm academically aware these are all rich Europeans and that wouldn't happen really, but it just looks so miserable anyway.
Is this a particularly good video you've seen, or are you just getting into the ideas? Your post makes it sound like this subject is somewhat new to you -- and if so, the exciting world of Transit Twitter awaits! You, too, can get furious about placard abuse in New York City even though you don't even live there!
there are many examples of urban areas in European cities that were designed for cars but have been turned back into bike and pedestrian first areas. I am talking 6 lane boulevards turned into bike and walking paths with a 2 land slow road. It can be done to developments after WW2, it just requires a lot more effort and buy in from whole cities.
Probably a lot to obesity. New York City dwellers don't lack access to the same type of junk food and cheap processed food that most of America has, but their obesity rate is half that of the national average. A big part of that is likely that they spend much more time on their feet walking to places and standing in transit.
Mmm. I've been about 20 pounds overweight, consistently, all of my life... Except for about two months when I worked part time at a bookstore and bicycled there and back twice a week. XD
Cities in general have lower obesity rates, seemingly regardless of sprawl. LA is famous for everyone having to drive and it has about the same obesity rate as NYC. (Which is still an astounding 21% -- and I don't mean "astounding" as a judgment upon individuals, since I achieved BMI-qualified obesity during the pandemic.)
This all started in the forties and fifties though, well before those were huge issues. I'd argue the opposite, building everything for cars, and furthermore restricting affordable housing options makes all of those problems worse - it makes it much easier to slide into homelessness, drug addiction, and mental illness, and much harder to escape from any of those things.
I think you have to quantify how it made those things worse. The positioning of walkability in general is something like "everything, literally everything benefits from walkability", but as a for instance "can't drive as far from my house to work" means your choices are more restricted on the housing you can select, which makes prices higher, not lower, and makes your income relative to the housing lower, not higher. A person who can drive 30 miles to work has access to cheaper housing and better paying work, on average, than someone who can't.
Housing density is more intrinsically a part of the walkability plank than the drivability plank and solves some of these problems, but if you really wanted to optimize for "affordable housing" you'd want something like "freeways freaking everywhere, and also density".
Housing affordability is largely a problem of legacy urban-planning.
Modern cities with beltways have a great remedy for the problem of affordable housing: Build one or two loops of highway around the city, and put all of your workplaces along that highway. Then everybody with a car can drive from way out in the suburbs to work pretty quickly; and you don't even need ultra-high-density skyscrapers. The main problem with the solution is that some people still live and work in the city's center, instead of leaving it to become a dead space where nobody goes on account of the difficulty of building highways through it. When it does become a dead space, e.g., in parts of Baltimore, government agencies can't resist the temptation to take advantage of that cheap dead space by putting subsidized housing projects there.
Solution #2 is, build a new city somewhere without any rivers or waterfronts. The only problem is that all old big cities were built on rivers and waterfronts.
That doesn't make any sense from the perspective of Austin (the city-center issue). Is that the exception that makes the rule or is that city just not far enough along in its growth to see that issue?
My impression was that the ideas for both special and general relativity were "in the air" so to speak. Poincare or Lorentz or somebody else would have gotten special relativity. Electromagnetism kind of cries out for special relativity. I don't think that's just hindsight bias. I mean, Electromagnetism was Einstein's explicit motivation, after all. His paper describing special relativity is literally titled "On the electrodynamics of moving bodies."
As for general relativity, the story goes that Einstein had the physical insights for general relativity right away after understanding special relativity, but spent about a decade trying to get the correct formulation. The bottleneck was Einstein having to learn differential geometry. In this he was aided by contemporary mathematicians. David Hilbert famously convinced Einstein to resume his search for a generally covariant formulation, which Einstein had abandoned, and even wrote down the general relativity field equations himself around the same time as Einstein, probably independently, but the internet now tells me there is controversy on this. This is all to say that without Einstein the pieces would have all been there, if not all with one person.
Special Relativity, 10-30 years, General Relativity 50 years on up to infinity, meaning relativity in an accelerated reference frame might eventually have been formulated completely differently than via a curved but classical spacetime.
Einstein was working at a time when it was still reasonably acceptable to formulate a theory of fundamental physics that wasn't quantum, I doubt anyone would've tried to do so for the rest of the 20th century had no one figured out GR before 1925. Also, while SR is required to understand any high energy physics which involves particle annihilation or creation (which is pretty much all of high-energy physics from 1930 onward), GR is required for hardly anything other than cosmology, exotic astrophysics, and perhaps very precise timekeeping, so the pressure to produce GR (or an equivalent) would've been far lower.
That actually sounds pretty reasonable to me, though I'm not sure GR has a serious chance of not being figured out. Something akin to GR would have popped out of QFT when people got to spin 2 and looked at what qualities the classical (quantum->classical) limit would have to have - it would not have taken very long for people to realize by analogy to electromagnetism that *if* a spin 2 theory was workable it would be gravity in the classical limit, and once you realize that it's pretty straightforward to get to a weak field approximation of GR, etc. IIRC Feynman actually went through this whole exercise and with only a bit of hand-waving showed that Einstein's Lagrangian "pops out" as a pretty natural consequence of patching up a spin 2 quantum theory's classical limit.
Now, as to whether Feynman *actually* would have noticed this, it's really hard to say. Normal physicists wouldn't be familiar with curved spacetime math at all if it wasn't for GR, so it might have taken quite some time.
Related question: are there any other theories/ laws that might never have been discovered without one individual?
We usually think of science as standing on the shoulders of giants, but GR seems a bit different in its dependence on rationalism (rather than empiricism) and creativity
I agree; it's difficult for me to imagine a world where every GPS satellite has a rather extreme bias correction built into it and all the engineers and scientists in the world go "well that's weird", and never try to figure out why.
That falls under "very precise timekeeping." But it's entirely possible that the corrections necessary would have been derived phenomenologically anyway. In fact, I'm not they aren't -- it's not clear to me that in the actual engineering they do GR calculations (which would be pretty damn hairy anyway), instead of just measuring stuff and fitting to some empirical curve.
While for actual GPS they probably just use engineering rules of thumb, it would clearly be an anomaly to a society that didn't have GR, so GR would be investigated shortly afterwards and it or an analogous theory created.
I'm doubtful. There's a ton of stuff where there's weird tiny anomalies in practical engineering use, and people mostly figure it's some real-world complication not present in the pristine theory, or some little exception corner that theory will eventually fill in, or the result of not doing your math to the 30th decimal point, or just a mistake somewhere or other. I think you really need something a lot bigger than the tiny corrections to Newton needed for GPS to light a fire under theorists.
I mean, how many people work on quantum gravity *today*? Even though we *know* it's got a major problem because it's classical?
The clocks on board the GPS satellites tick faster by 45 microseconds every day. Light travels 14 km in 45 microseconds, so the GPS system would be inaccurate by 14 km after just one day. That's not a weird tiny anomaly. It's a gigantic, jaw dropping, absolutely absurd level of error in a system that should be accurate to within a meter.
Engineers are perfectly willing to use empirical rules of thumb for which no underlying theoretical basis is known, and scientists are perfectly willing to look at what engineers are doing and say "yeah, that clearly works but we're not touching it with a ten-foot pole in any reference frame".
I agree. I mean, it wasn't exactly modern scientific theory, but look how long the Ptolemaic system was used to predict the movement of stars even though it had epicycles in it. The philosophers all believed the stars moved in perfect circles, but anyone having to actually track the stars threw in Ptolemy's epicycles because if you didn't you'd be off a bit. And all through those 2,000 years or so everybody was just like "Yeah, obviously epicycles aren't REAL, they're just something we have to do to make our fancy tables that predict star location accurate."
Hi everyone! I've written a piece on why I think it's very unlikely that voting-intention polls are intentionally biased by pollsters. Quite a bit of it is unique to the Australian context (in particular my analysis showing there is no overall skew in Australian polling), but much of it has fairly wide applicability (e.g. the incentives of everyone in the polls-pseph-media complex, and the difficulty of using biased polling to influence voting intention).
I'd be interested in hearing counterarguments for why a pollster might intentionally attempt to produce a skewed voting-intention poll, even taking into account the factors I mention in my piece.
How much emphasis are you putting on "intentionally"? My rough assumption was that for each side there are a bunch of pollsters who consistently skew results towards that side, and are thus preferred by the people on that side, but the biases motivating any given pollster are probably unconscious.
Hmmmmm. I'll admit I didn't adequately define pollster (I'm referring to reputable pollsters who conduct public, non-partisan polls) and I conflate two types of pollster bias in my piece mentioned above:
1. A pollster intentionally shifting their poll to fit a narrative or to serve a particular person/group's agenda. e.g. a pollster gets Labor +1, but either intentionally picks a weighting frame such that Labor +5.
2. A pollster knowing that a particular polling/modelling methodology will produce skewed results but continues using it. e.g. a pollster knows that face-to-face interviews tend to skew Labor +2 on average compared to other interview methods, but continues conducting face-to-face polls anyway.
I don't argue against unintentional bias or unconscious bias. I'm more taking aim at people like this:
Basically I'm targeting the "(poll) is biased because it was conducted for (media company which I believe is biased)" hypothesis, which is quite in vogue among large segments of Australian social media.
I can't actually find the original post on Kolmogorov complexity on your blog (even if I Google search "anjel blog kolmogorov complexity"!). It would be useful to link to the original post in your mistake post. Also useful would be to have an index of your posts. (I'm legitimately interested in reading the original post, btw).
Unfortunately the original post is gone and was not crawled by search engines. This blog is brand new and I'm starting off by posting some mistakes I hope not to repeat in future!
Man, it’s killing me that you’re so ‘close’ to me (I’m in Belgium) but you’re not passing here. Is there a way to come say hi to your group house or something if I ever pass by SF?
If they can resolve the political stability issues, then yes.
I remember reading that the dirt in much of Libya's desert areas is so hard and compacted that you can drop rail tracks directly on to it, without the need for sleepers or subgrade.
Libya was in civil war for most of the past decade. Civil war may return, for a short while or a long while. What are the chances of that? What are the operational costs for a railroad that passes through territory held by rival armed groups? How much lower are the railroad's benefits if usage falls sharply?
This is not going to be an easy cost-benefit analysis.
Seeing all those railways in Egypt and Tunisia makes one thing that if they were connected via Libya then you'd have a way for people in those two economies to shuttle back and forth and, I dunno, do economic stuff?
Yes, along the north shore between Egypt and Tunisia. Maybe with a side route down to Sabha. The vast majority of Libya is barren and occupied by nobody or almost nobody. Likewise its immediate borders in every direction are almost barren. There are two or three areas that are fertile centered (roughly) on Tripoli and Benghazi. (The debatable third is in the southwest.)
Railroads are faster, and a more convenient way for people to travel. because most of the population of Libya lives by the coast, a railway going along the coast would be suitable.
The question was about a freight railroad network, not a passenger railroad network. There might conceivably be a niche for freight that's too heavy for air travel or eighteen-wheelers but too expensive or perishable for ships, but it's pretty marginal.
Nice point, which I'd put simply as "it feels good to be good at something". On a side note, I'm a big fan of gradually ascending difficulty systems like the 'madness' one you describe. Slay the Spire does this really well with its ascensions. These work really well for rougelike games where each run is short; I wonder how/if they'd work in other contexts.
I think I go a step further, but it helps that I'm religious when doing so; I think there's something abstractly good about doing good things well.
There's an old Catholic story about a street busker/juggler who gets converted and becomes a monk, but he's not educated like the other monks and has a limited amount he can offer. This goes on for years, and at some point the main monk (abbot?) comes into the chapel and there's this guy, juggling for a statue of the virgin; he's about to stop the guy when he looks up and the virgin is crying.
I'm not Catholic, but that sort of gets at a little bit of what I'm talking about - I'm not sure that the world's best doorknob-polisher isn't doing something abstractly good in his pursuit of excellence, even if nobody notices and it doesn't matter in a practical sense.
As for slay the spire: I love that game. I haven't been able to beat ascension 20 because I'm lame, but I have a lot of hours logged on that game and I think it's a masterpiece.
"Barnaby faints from exhaustion, and as he does, the statue of the Virgin comes to life! Glowing and radiant, she descends from her niche to wipe the sweat from his face and cradle him in her arms. The monks, stunned and speechless, immediately regret their ways and see Barnaby as a true saint and holy man of God.
The story of the juggler can teach us a valuable lesson about simplicity and the idea that everyone has something to share. Our talents and our gifts, whatever they may be, are important and worthy — especially the ones that may sometimes get overlooked! It seems that miracles tend to favor those who are humble and true to themselves, and the juggler is a testament to that."
I didn't know the story existed in many versions, or that it was old. The version I remembered just had the Virgin wiping the sweat off the juggler's face.
I like Roguelikes a lot for this reason. Though there's another reason too: Roguelikes take variable investment really well. I can take it very seriously and probably have to in order to win. Or I can take it completely non-seriously and die in hilarious ways. Because the games are made to be disposable (you're going to die often so you restart a lot) it doesn't matter. I can even try switching between them if I want to.
Likewise the games don't feel a need to be fair which creates a sense verisimilitude. Most games feel the need to telegraph the game so you have a chance at winning. Roguelikes don't and that's much more true to life and survival situations imo.
Yeah, in my life now, where I may not have a lot of time or mental energy *but* sometimes have hours and hours and a fire in my heart... a roguelike is the perfect style of game. Hop on for five minutes or feverishly mash buttons for the entire Saturday!
There's also a feeling of incremental progress that's really nice, although maybe this is more a feature of "roguelites". Hades is a great example of this, as well as my favorite game of all time: 60 hours in and every run still gets me a little more skilled, the protagonist a little more powerful or customized to my playstyle(s), the story a little closer to being revealed, bonus features a little closer to being unlocked...
(And it doesn't hurt that I love the story and characters in that game so much. Just... one... more... run... Must... seduce... Aphrodite...)
There is something funny about a roguelike that starts you out with any amount of plot - "this is who you are and why you are important" and then immediately one-shots you with a skeleton mage or something.
I've been trying my hand at some inflation analysis on the Australian side of the Pacific, attempting to understand where inflation is going to go and why. Much of it is applicable to the American experience, and I'd be interested in people's thoughts.
I wonder if some amount of inflation has transferred over to house prices. So inflation might be higher than official figures suggest, albeit not at alarming levels overall (in specific though house price inflation is alarming).
It's possible. Inflation did account for rent (which has amusingly, gone backwards in our biggest cities thanks to lockdown), but actual house-buying prices, I'm not sure. It would be clouded by the fact that the government gave a housebuying subsidy, which was promptly followed by Melbourne house prices hitting an average of a million AUD. Not many people are buying houses on the regular, though, so it doesn't make its way into the CPI, and most people don't really feel it as an "inflation" effect so much as a "real estate bubble/issue". Soaring housing prices are a problem in most of Australia's big cities.
Some of you may remember my Orwell review from the contest, which I'm still amazed got promoted up to 2nd by reader voting. For my follow up I've taken a look at a roughly Orwell-adjacent book: Ryszard Kapuscinski's 'The Emperor'. It's basically a collection of stories from courtiers who served in the royal court of Haile Selassie, emperor of Ethiopia from 1930-1974.
I found it to be an incredible piece of journalism, mostly because Kapuscinski basically gets to act as a time traveler, a fly on the wall in a medieval court. The courtiers he speaks with are the last of a dying race, and they know it--the sense that it's deeply wrong for a bombastic, Kafkaesque royal court to go on existing into the 1970s is everywhere in the text, and creates a uniquely dramatic, and sometimes even comedic, tension. I haven't been able to stop thinking about it, mainly because I see the royal court structure as something emerging everywhere that people are competing for status and resources without recourse to violence.
This seems to be an extreme case of courtly life: the courtiers are regularly explicitly ranked and there seems to be no other way of gaining status in the country except through the king. (This second point strikes me as probably false: surely the church had status, at least.)
I am a bit skeptical that the court life described here is representative of power for most of human history. What other non-court systems existed in pre-modern times? "Court" meaning a group of people whose power derives for their status, which is inherited and granted by a single individual. It is possible to have a technocratic/bureaucratic monarchy (Singapore today) or a monarchy with a powerless court and powerful bureaucracy (Louis XIV). Parliaments / Senates provide an alternative elite structure with different sources of power or status (England, Roman Empire). Republics are also more common than usually thought, at least in Europe (most Italian and German cities from about 1100-1800). Having non-political sources of power or status in society, most often religious or business, reduces the power of courts or at least creates competition between them. Stateless societies are also less likely to have courts.
Good points. In the review, I try to distinguish between formally established courts and a 'courtly mode' that humans are inclined to slip into whenever there are status gaps and socially determined paths towards access to resources. So even if there is no actual 'court', the patterns of courtly life are still determining the bulk of the decision-making that the state does. That said, I wouldn't want to put a number on what percentage of pre-modern states could be said to have real 'courts'. I guess what's most interesting to me is how well Selassie's court mirrors what I know of the earliest states, such as the city of Ur, Egypt, Mesopotamia, etc.
That said, I think you're right about the non-political sources of power reducing the strength of the court. That the incentive behind rulers like Selassie or Xi limiting or at least slowing the growth of the commercial classes is that competitiveness is pretty well established.
Ryszard Kapuscinski was a Polish Communist who was known to fabricate facts. His book, 'The Emperor', was published four years after a Communist government backed by Moscow overthrew Haile Selassie. All his reporting was done by traveling to the country after the Communists took power. You should thus read "The Emperor" as a work of fiction meant to propagandize for Marxism-Leninism and to support a Communist regime that created mass famine and killed hundreds of thousands of people.
In other words, you've read propaganda that for some reason often goes reported as fact.
I don't intend any of this as a defense of Ethopia's Imperial regime. I have no idea if it was good or bad. From what I know it was mostly not great. But Kapuscinski is not an accurate source.
That's what I gathered. Even though at certain times in his life he toed the party line to keep his rare position as a foreign correspondent for the Soviet State, he was anything but a propagandist.
I looked into this interpretation of the book while writing the review, and I probably should've addressed it more directly.
From what I've read of the scholarship on Kapuscinski, he gets small factual details wrong, and there are issues in translation, but not nearly enough to declare the book an open and shut case of propagandism for the Soviet Union. Especially in light of the rest of his works, which similarly focus on the details of African political life in various countries. What's interesting is I actually never came upon your version of the argument against Kapuscinski; instead I've seen 'The Emperor' labeled as a veiled criticism against the Soviet Union.
I don't doubt that his and his patron's choices of subjects were motivated by a desire to cast communism in a positive light. But it doesn't follow that because of a few minor factual errors (the most often repeated being about the number of bookstores in Addis Ababa) the book shouldn't be treated as a valuable record of court life in Ethiopia. Unless you sincerely believe that Kapuscinski just made it all up. But I've not found evidence that would justify that, nor anything approaching consensus in the scholarship as to Kapuscinski's truthfulness.
How do you interpret the fact that Kapuscinski never talked to a courtier who was not under arrest by a Communist dictatorship as an interpretation of Ethiopian court life? It seems to me you must go a long, long distance to see him as anything but a biased, propagandist source. But perhaps I am wrong on this.
I'm aware of this criticism as well. Certainly Kapuscinski is a creature of the 1970's and 1980's (though pre-Gorbachev) consensus. I'm curious, though. Acknowledging he is not a good torchbearer for the original Leninist (or Stalinist) vision, do you think he accurately represents a Communist vision? Or is he too corrupted by political needs to portray an accurate vision?
I enjoyed your review very much. Here's some of my thoughts:
On a the court being very much like high school: I've heard this sort of things before, but I really can't relate. I think the fault of understanding is in myself: I was just totally oblivious to my high school's social fabric. I had my friends, and sometimes we hung out. I didn't know who was popular and who wasn't, nor was I aware of any cliques or social status politicking. The fact is I was completely uninterested in making new friends or going to parties. The friends I did make were serendipitous, people of similar interests that I happened to become familiar with enough for a relationship to form. Mostly in high school I was focused on doing as little work as possible while still getting A's, and spending all my free time reading books.
You wrote:
>"What does seem clear, a bit shockingly, is that for all of Kapucinski’s courtier’s gushing about the Emperor’s genius and divine stateliness, the loyalty of any given courtier seems to have been bought rather expensively with riches, and opportunities for extracting riches from Ethiopia’s starving populous of mostly farmers.
>"...And it’s not as if Selassie is likely to have come up with the above philosophy himself…it strikes me as an expression of ideas of previous Emperors, who saw the art of rule as the art of exploitation, of optimizing for the most efficient extraction of value from a static amount of labor and resources.
This is political rule as an extreme sport, where the leader seeks to extract as much as possible for himself and his cronies through the vehicle of the state, carefully toeing the line that if crossed might push the general populous or military towards violent revolution. I guess we can think of Selassie as a relatively adept sportsman…he lasted forty-four years, accumulated hundreds of millions in offshore bank accounts, and is still regarded as a hero by many, and even a god by some. "
I don't think Selassie was particularly unique in this case: this is the nature of all authoritarian rulers. It comes down to the basic practical mechanics of being an ruler. No ruler can rule alone: he needs loyal men to extract wealth, run the army, administrate, etc. And those men's loyalty must be bought, either with money directly or positions that allow them to extract wealth. And if you don't buy off those men then you leave yourself open for someone else to outbid you, and to take control themselves. Think of it this way: imagine the extracted wealth of the country was $100. Successful Despots will take $20 for themselves, spend $70 buying the loyalty of generals, ministers, and aristocrats, and maybe spend the last $10 on the people. If a liberal reformer comes by wanting to improve the lot of the people, he might keep $5 for himself and spend an extra $15 on the people: but he doesn't dare reduce the $70 buying loyalty a single cent, or else someone will come along and outbid him. Indeed, the wise despot will be hesitant to reduce his own share of the cut: after all, he may need that money rather suddenly someday to head off a coup attempt. You might think that laying up $100s of millions while your people starve is a sign of abject greed, but those millions are security against sudden political shifts (and make it more likely you can escape with your life if worse comes to worse). That's the way ruling works, whether you're a dictator or an emperor. And remember, all those head men that the king is buying off can't rule alone either: they're buying off the smaller men below them, with money and promotions and positions where they can extract wealth themselves. That means you really need to squeeze the peasants if you want to keep yourself in a secure position.
The fine Youtuber CPG Grey lays it out well in this video:
Interesting thoughts. I found myself agreeing with your thoughts and Grey's video as I read the book, but then there are quite a few examples of undemocratic authoritarian rule that actually did manage to effectively limit corruption and extract taxes without peasant-stomping so ruthless as to actually cause near constant famine and all-encompassing stagnation in the development of education, infrastructure, etc.
I guess I find that historical examples ranging from the Roman Empire to some medieval monarchies, even to modern Singapore stand as proof that authoritarian rule isn't merely a blind and inevitable march towards rampant corruption and state extractivism--that there are ways to retain legitimacy for long stretches beside the naked cronyism of Selassie, Qaddafi, Mugabe, etc.
The Roman Empire had slavery. When you have slaves as a subzero stage of wealth-producing, you can just whip *them* a little harder without having to tax the (free) "poor peasants" to death.
This doesn't really fit with the way the Roman Empire practiced slavery, the way it proceeded (e.g. the people often had *better* living standards in periods with *less* slavery), or the reasons usually given for its success under, say, Augustus or Trajan.
Plenty of other countries and states had slavery, but few gained the comparatively high living standard of Rome.
If I had to point the finger at the main reason for Roman prosperity, it would be the enormous single market centered around the Mediterranean, a very navigable sea even with antique shipbuilding technology.
IIRC, one important reason for Roman prosperity is that the empire was being built during an unprecedented warm climatic period in the Mediterranean area, which allowed for greater crop yields in many places.
Erusian will no doubt correct this if it is off-base. And he sees it.
Possibly also that they had concrete. As I understand it, concrete normally takes a lot of heat to make an ingredient, but Rome had some handy geology.
Of course, no amount of handy geology is helpful unless you've got a social organization which can take advantage of it.
The heat to which you may refer is preparing lime from limestone in a limekiln, but I don't think the Romans were exempt from that, as Roman concrete contains lime also. Supposedly the secret to the durability of Roman concrete (especially in seawater) is the admixture of volcanic ash, which in the neighborhood of Rome contains a certain mineral which over time reacts with seawater to add considerable tensile strength to concrete. The main reason it wasn't more widely duplicated later is probably just the relative rarity of handy volcanic ash.
I'm not sure: I think if you have any kind of authoritarian rule at all it's going to be mostly cronyism. Perhaps the medieval monarchies and Roman empire were just better at it. (I think Singapore is different because it's wealth doesn't come from agriculture but from business and industry, which needs to be managed differently to keep the wealth coming). Do we have any reason to think Ehtiopia was any more famine prone or stagnant than, say, Medieval France?
We do, but I haven't gone into it quite enough to say to what degree. But Ethiopia's geography does seem to isolate it and make agricultural improvements difficult to implement.
On the off chance you find me fascinating I'm currently trying to form an identity for a blog. If you let me know what you find fascinating about me that'll help me to decide what I focus on. Also happy to answer specific questions.
many users have twitters or blogs or Reddits, with years back of personal content. Usernames aren’t always the same so it may take some digging
Some may find that a bit intrusive, but it’s invisible, and it’s very fun to go through random strangers’ lives on their Reddit histories for instance (never done that with anyone here tho)
I am curious, is there some republicanism in Sweden?
Or perhaps more generally, how citizens of a country whose image is so intertwined with social democracy and social justice reconcile this with the fact Sweden is still a hereditary monarchy?
"Republikanska Föreningen" is an association for Swedish republicanism. It has about 8500 members and if you keep up with the news you'd expect to read an article or two from them a year. So the issue is part of the debate in the weakest sence.
The Left party also unexpectedly wants to abolish the monarchy.
In polls, about 60% of Swedes favor monarchy and about 20% disfavor it. Favor has been declining slowly for a long time. I personally expect that current Crown Princess Victoria will be the last monarch, and that monarchy will be abolished as her reign ends (unless singularity comes before that etc.).
Not Swedish, but I live in a liberal constitutional monarchy with a similar situation. Monarchy, in it's constitutional form, is not antithetical to democracy and social justice - in fact, I would argue that (perhaps ironically) a democracy is enhanced by their presence as a component of a state. By being unelected and hereditary, you avoid tainting their position as the enabler of government by popular or corrupted choice. That is, nobody has ever had to run a campaign against them, or be upset their candidate was not chosen - consider in an elected head of state, where a significant portion of the population has vilified their guy's opponent. When people vote, they become invested in one candidate succeeding and another not succeeding. Monarchs exist as an impartial third party which legitimizes the government of the day - their role in enabling that has no need for representation (and adding representation here is constitutionally dangerous potentially!).
To your social justice point, the monarchy is able to champion or provide patronage to causes which are electorally unfeasible to complement the majority-rules government which can champion electorally popular causes. They also avoid getting caught up in tribal politicking which can sometimes be driven by more hateful agendas. The royal family don't belong to a group that is adversarial to other groups, they are secure in their position - even appointed heads of state struggle with that, let alone elected.
Selection being stable means they don't need to desire the job to the point of struggling, promising or buying their way to the top like their elected counterparts, which often selects for negative attitudes towards positions of hierarchy and breeds anxieties about their personal security when elected (after all, if you had to fight to get where you are, wouldn't you be wary of your opponents?).
The issue of merit comes up a lot in elected vs hereditary discussions, but I don't think the person of the monarch matters as much as the institution in a figurehead monarchy - it's okay if the King isn't some visionary if he doesn't hold any real power.
(Sorry for the unsolicited ramble! I just find a lot of people are quick to assume that because monarchy is an older and unelected institution it is somehow unhealthy, and wanted to be a voice of dissent on that point - I personally think that while far from perfect, they are underrated in the constitutional toolbox, and love talking about them!)
Those are interesting points. But I think this is more about the head of state being different from the head of government. A lot of countries have this without being a monarchy.
In Germany, the head of state ("president") is also a purely representative office, and the elected candidate is usually someone who is well-respected from all political factions. Even though it's often an ex-politician, they interpret their office as transcending over political partisanship.
Since they are well-respected, they can sometimes bring political topics on the agenda. The speech from 1997 is quite famous, where the president Roman Herzog warned that Germany needs reforms, and that all political and social actors need to get going ("Durch Deutschland muss ein Ruck gehen"). Or after the 2017 elections, when parties did not find together for a coalition, the president expressed his opinion that the two biggest parties owe it to Germany to form a coalition, even if they are not happy about it. Which they did.
I am not so familiar with the nordic monarchies, but I think the monarchs play a similar role: they mostly stay out of daily business, but when they get heard, they act as a non-partisan voice. Also in the UK, the royals have played a similar role in the past (e.g., by staying in London during WW2), though at present the queen stays very much out of politics.
The idea that Republics are necessarily more democratic, or more just, or happier, or more prosperous than Constitutional Monarchies is so obviously contradicted by observation that I find it hard to believe that sentient beings can hold it.
Warning: this is the kind of comment (insulting to people with an idea without explaining why the idea is wrong) that is likely to get you banned if you continue.
There is almost no republicanism in Sweden. Instead there is a live and let live mentality. Some people like to read about the royal family in magazines and others like to ignore them. There are so many people in Sweden other than the royal family who get quite a lot of money from the state for doing nothing. Why would we be annoyed with the royals more than other social cases? The royals are just ordinary, rather incompetent people.
While I don’t mind long comments that are interesting, and technically detailed and in depth and complex ones are some of my favorites on SSC (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-september/comments#comment-2988501 I loved and probably didn’t get enough attention, and the less interesting but more inflammatory neighbors to the top on racism and to the bottom on obesity (my bad...) got many comments) (and if you like those do check out datasecretslox.com - a SSC adjacent forum with lots of in depth posts - and TheMotte also has lots of great in depth technical and historical stuff if you can wade through and ignore culture politics waves)
... a bit off track. Anyway, I find that substack doesn’t collapse the parent comment when you collapse children, and doesn’t have a way to, incredibly annoying for just browsing the comments. So I have to scroll over twenty paragraphs to get past it! Annoying. And while I’m complaining, the fact that when you click an email reply link it doesn’t take you to the right place 8 of 10 times is annoying too. As is the fact that if you accidentally minimize a parent comment while typing a reply, very easy because clicking on a side line minimizes and they’re omnipresent, your comment disappears! And edit button of course. And it should really handle deeply nested comment threads better. Smh.
Did someone read this? There’s now an “expand full comments” thing that minimizes super long comments. Annoyingly though, 4/5 places I’ve seen it so far it was on a comment maybe two lines longer than the max length, lol. I’d still prefer being able to totally minimize but it’s maybe better (can’t tell tbh)
I had to search what that image was, and of course (duh!) it's the Golem of Prague. I have to say, though, that for public art images on these posts, Barcelona still has Prague beaten 😀
I don't think I made a post on Barcelona - which piece of art are you thinking of? Was it the Madrid one with the bear and the strawberry tree (that I thought looked like a bear causing a mushroom cloud)?
Fantastic article about retired greyhound racing dogs who become living blood donors. Is life as a living blood bag for dogs whose owners can afford expensive pet surgeries a life worth living?
Your post caused me to look up YouTube videos of greyhounds running in slow motion, which was entertaining and interesting.
Good question regarding whether that is a life worth living. I assume it largely depends on how much blood is drawn... do they live as normal pets with the occasional draw, or are they kept on the edge of death to maximize product output?
In any case, given the state of factory farming, this doesn’t seem like the lowest hanging fruit for animal welfare. Dogs typically get more than their fair share of sympathy already.
I believe the amount of blood drawn relative to size at any one time is similar to that for a human. Greyhounds have more blood for their body weight than other dogs, and that blood is richer in red blood cells and oxygen, so you can remove quite a bit without it becoming detrimental to the dog.
There was a somewhat acerbic exchange about Guardians Against Pandemic on the 9/18 Open Thread 190, mainly having to do with "they say they're non-partisan, but they use ActBlue for funding, how the hell is this possible?!" This was a convincing enough argument to e.g. make me withdraw my donation to them (to their credit: they were prompt and polite about refunding it) until they explain themselves. Attempts to get them to explain themselves seem to run into the wall of "We will have a Q&A on October 12, please just ask us then," with a side of "yes we realize, but right now it makes the most sense to press Democrats because it's their Congress, but we expect to press Republicans e.g. next year and will use WinRed then."
Two questions:
1. Is it plausible for a single organization to use ActBlue and WinRed (simultaneously or alternating between them)? I'm known to be naive about this, to the point of believing ActBlue when it says it allows "progressive" but not "Democratic" organizations; I was mocked for believing this in the previous thread (perhaps deservedly, though I will point out that no actual counterexamples ever materialized).
2. Is anyone planning to attend their Q&A, and if so, could I ask them to report on what they hear? (I don't think I'll be able to make it, the time between when the toddler comes home from daycare and when the toddler goes to bed is pretty hectic for me.) If you don't want to report in public, I can give you my email -- I honestly just want to know what they have to say.
"yes we realize, but right now it makes the most sense to press Democrats because it's their Congress"
Given the at-present kerfuffle in Congress between those of the Democratic Party who want a moderately progressive budget and those who want a very progressive budget,
do they really think that their little push will go anywhere if they alternate between "who's got the talking stick" like this? This is one of those things where you *need* cross-party buy-in because you *need* all hands at the pump, else it's going to sink unnoticed amongst all the other groups and causes and lobbies waving and jumping up and down for attention.
I don't think it's necessarily partisan bias at work here, I do think it's a lack of "maybe I don't have a 140 IQ but I've worked in the sausage factory and I know how the product is made" experienced types.
I was just listening to a news story about the financial industry pushing hard for in person meetings to make deals. There's a belief that the deals are better in some sense when people have a more accurate idea of each other's emotional/physiological reactions.
We might have a chance to find out what difference personal presence makes to deals. Logically, it seems like it should be zero-sum. People push each other differently, but it seems unlikely that, say, lenders or borrowers would generally do better or worse in person rather than at a distance.
It's conceivable that some institutions might have accidentally selected for people who are better at zoom/phone/email and others have selected for people who are better in person.
I think the main difference has little to do with actual quality of deal-making and much more to do with the personal preferences of the individuals involved. Certainly the financial industry has not slowed down during the pandemic; if anything, far more large and medium-sized financial deals have been signed by any measure in the 2020-2021 period than possibly any other period in recent financial history, except possibly 2006-2007; we're in a major boom here without face-to-face meetings. If the industry were genuinely unsure whether their transactions were "good" because of a lack of face-to-face meetings, it seems that we should see more hesitance to sign up and close deals and we'd see a dip in deal activity instead. What I think is going on instead is that finance has historically rewarded the most gregarious, extroverted personalities for decades if not centuries, and so of course people with those personalities lead the industry. Those people in turn are personally unhappy about not being able to do deals in person, and they either misinterpret this unhappiness with their personal situation to something that is wrong in the industry itself or they are eager to get back to the field where they have a personal advantage. Either way, we should take this perspective with a great deal of skepticism.
I suggest this has very little to do with some kind of Glengarry Glen Ross style 'always be closing' attempt to gain advantage, and much more to do with the ability of all participants to be more certain there's a meeting of minds.
When parties to a contract leave the set-up with different ideas, even different emotional impressions, of the nature of the deal, it is often a prelude to very expensive business failures. "But I thought we meant....!" So it is really *really* important, the larger and more complex a deal you are making, that everyone leave the meeting with as close to an identical viewpoint as possible on what was agreed to (and what was not).
Of course this requires assessing the emotional temperature of people. Of course it requires being aware of nonverbal cue and tics, of smiles or frowns, fidgets or engagement, tone of voice (beyond the miserable bandwidith of VoIP), et cetera. So yes if it's a big big deal you want everyone in the room looking at each other directly. Not because one party is hoping to crush the other, but because it's very much in the interests of both parties to avoid any hint of misunderstanding.
In practice what happens is the principals and investment bank get together in person and hammer out the major deal points they can all feel good about. Then a 2 to 10 page letter of intent gets sent to the CPAs, financial analysts, and lawyers to work out all the details, which end up being hundreds of pages of terms and disclosures and analysis, and when that happens it turns out there's LOTS of terms the main guys didn't discuss or agree on, so it's an ongoing negotiation where the stronger party with more leverage asserts it and the weaker party makes concessions as they get more invested in the processed, so long as the stronger party doesn't push so hard that they walk away. It's not uncommon for there to be a few crisis points where the deal is about the fall apart because the parties don't agree some terms, and at that point the investment banker deal guys will swoop in and use all their social skills to try to save it. Once an LOI is signed, they only get paid if the deal closes, and if it closes, they get paid a lot, so their main role is to be the intermediary and smoother-over to get it to closing. I'm not saying there's no need for that personal touch, though honestly it depends on the personalities of the people involved...in some cases, I would say the least interaction, the better.
That said, as Llew mentioned, 2021 has seen more M&A deal flow that ever -- it's a tsunami, and the vast majority of them have been happening entirely electronically and frankly I think it's worked just fine. I've worked on some deals that have gone remarkably quickly, smoothly, and efficiently with literally no interactions other than email and a few phone calls, not even Zooms. The ones with more Zooms have taken longer, had more personality conflicts, and more time wasting. I also haven't seen a single deal fall through this year, which usually there's at least one per year. To my mind, you never truly know what people agree on til it's in writing, since in person conversations often have the more dominant personalities overpowering others and making them pretend to agree to things they don't really, once it's in writing, and people are more prone to gloss over details in person -- writing is so much more specific. So the more that is done in writing, the more efficient the process -- again, from my perspective. Obviously people whose skills lie in the interpersonal arena will prefer that method of doing business, and from their perspective, they're the ones making it all happen and nothing would even occur without them.
I will say, without question, I've worked in M&A for 15 years and a hundred deals, and the deals that have problems AFTER closing and where the parties end up in disputes a year or two later, are far are more likely to be the "in person" heavy deals with less nerds going through with a fine-tooth comb and more CEOs/bigwigs just getting together and deciding that they're all on the same page, they don't need to worry much about the paperwork because they "trust" each other, and just ramming the deal through quickly with little interest in what the documents say.
When they are referring to "making deals", they are simply talking about multi million or billion dollar transactions where the parties at issue can choose among many different financial institutions, and the deal guys' entire job is to leverage their personal network, social skills, and glad-handing skills to be the ones chosen -- for a huge commission if they get the deal. Of course they want in-person because that's literally their whole skill set. Once they get that two-page LOI signed, they hand it off to the army of nerds behind computers who do the actual work of getting it done (I am one of those people so I know how this works). These people are basically just like real estate agents, just working on deals that involve the buying, selling, and financing of billion dollar companies, not buildings.
Also, don't forget that "the financial industry" has massive investments in commercial real estate and basically own all of the office towers in this country. Don't think for a second that they're not pushing in-person because they're trying to protect those investments. I have dealt with a few commercial landlords recently, and I assure you, they are all *terrified*, though they are doing their absolute best to hide and that pretend all is well and normal.
I find that in person deals STRONGLY favor people with dominant personalities.
If you get someone in front of you, you can more effectively mislead them, or buffalo them into doing something dumb. These talents seem to be 90% of what makes one c-level dipshit more useful than another.
I'm you classic tech autist, so I've been in a couple of these meetings when I was younger just to stand behind whoever was listening to the sales person and repeat the same question 30 times until we get an answer, because I'm not socialized enough to be embarrassed about it.
Yeah, face-to-face selling works on socialisation about being polite and not giving an outright refusal, and the salesperson/marketer being charming and hard-sell enough to first get you to agree "sure, this sounds like a great product/service" and secondly then push you on "well you already agreed it could be a benefit, why aren't you signing up for it?"
I'm another of the autism-spectrum types who *hates* the hard sell, won't buy something unless I've had time to think about it, and if you push me for "yes" answer right this minute, I'll walk out instead of buying 😀 And like you, in work I'm the one who does the "yeah, but - " part and will happily tell the guy who has just spent twenty minutes doing a presentation to sell sell sell the service to us, "That was great, but we need to think about it, we'll get back to you on this".
If you buy a new car in the US they are going to try to sell you an ‘extended warranty’. I’ve made a practice of saying loudly and plainly up front that any attempt to sell me a service contract or extra special rust prevention undercoating will queer the deal. It’s worked for me so far.
I went through a significant interaction with a financial institution several months ago. Most of the interaction was over phone, or by email... until the time came for finalization of signatures. Certain forms needed to be filled out in-person, with pen-on-paper, in a way that could be certified by a licensed notary. The bank contracted the services of a notary, who came to me and helped me through the process of signing the papers for the deal.
Is this a counter-example?
Possibly, or possibly not... the interaction was significant to me, in that it involved a mortgage on my house. It may not have been significant in the same way to any individual at the bank, but it did involve a large amount of money.
The procedure didn't involve any negotiation or deal-making. I submitted a request for a refinance, had a short chat with the mortgage broker, filled out forms, and waited for the underwriting process to finish. Once that was done, I decided that the new mortgage would be a good financial decision, and scheduled a date to sign the necessary papers.
What kind of financial negotiations did the news story give as examples?
If we can more accurately understand how the other party feels about what is on offer, we can more accurately craft a deal that both sides can approve and at least be content with. I interview potential employees a lot, and find that in person is far superior to remote. You get a much better sense of how they feel and catch body language and other subtle cues. For instance, if you mention a benefit or pay rate, or a job requirement (start or end times, number of hours, overtime) you can get an intuitive sense of if they are happy, neutral, or upset pretty easily in person. On a video call you might catch something or you might not.
Interestingly, people who are more in tune with such a process (such as a person who routinely conducts interviews, supervises employees, and is comfortable with video calls) is able to present those cues better. Something about being remote seems to cause people to emote less in the first place, in addition to being harder to see when they do.
I think like Andrew says, I don't know why we'd expect this to be zero-sum. By having parties learn more about each other, deals that otherwise wouldn't have happened might, or vice versa.
Reminds me of Paul atreides saying he couldn't negotiate with someone he can't see. I didn't realize we had so many bene geseret trained bankers.
If all the same deals were done on different terms it would be zero sum, but if a different set of deals were done with more net surplus that would be a net gain. That would be the expected outcome if both sides learned more about each deal, by learning more about the counterparty of the deal
The best negotiator I ever worked with was a guy who almost never spoke. He had a weird personality and was perfectly comfortable just sitting in silence, staring at you for minutes on end. It would completely unnerve people, no one ever knew what he was thinking, and people would just start babbling or negotiating against themselves just to break the silence. I worked on his team and people always thought I knew what he was thinking and could translate for him, but no, he was like that with everyone, on his "side" and the "other side" -- no one really knew him. He was great at what he did though, and got better terms for his clients than anyone else I ever saw, just by keeping his mouth shut and being mysterious.
I'm concerned that my next-door neighbor is sliding into the grip of a paranoid/delusional disorder during the isolation of the pandemic. Their recent nearly-unprompted disclosures to me about their background and habits strongly suggest to me that what I'm seeing is the worsening of a mental disease that will likely proceed to derail their life.
Neighbor, as an immigrant to the US from another country, tells me that they are a publicly-unacknowledged child of a deceased political leader in a third country, whose heirs/assigns have been working, so far unsuccessfully, to achieve neighbor's desired repatriation to said third country, in association with various improbably-associated US federal agencies. This by itself, while far-fetched, did not strike me as conclusively out-of-touch -- stranger things have been known to happen, though why I in particular would be informed of them I can't begin to suppose.
However, neighbor then proceeded to explain/demonstrate how they have been undertaking, with increasing frequency, an admittedly dangerous and disfiguring self-treatment for a self-diagnosed disorder which would, if present, be acutely life-threatening -- but for which I was unable to persuade them to seek professional medical attention. I intend to provide them with resources about how they may still be able to get access to affordable medical care in our area, in combination with interpreter services if needed, despite their complex immigration situation.
Either of these things in isolation would be unusual, but presenting together, in someone who appears to have minimal social support, it seems indicative of some kind of mental break. I never knew this neighbor well enough before the pandemic to tell just how unusual the current beliefs and behavior are for them, but it's pretty damn unusual absolutely, especially for someone otherwise put-together enough to have obtained a graduate STEM degree in the not-to-distant past. If the stuff I'm hearing here is somehow the product of a sound mind, I'd at least expect a degree of self-awareness about how nuts it must *sound* to an uninitiated observer, but I'm not picking up any such self-awareness.
I don't really know how to proceed here, if it's even my place to do anything. I'm just getting the impression that all this bizarre stuff has been unloaded on me because neighbor has no one else to tell -- as far as I know, they're currently NEET (as am I for the time being, I'm not one to judge) and have no family in this country, and maybe no friends either.
I figure worst cases of inaction are that neighbor ends up deported to illiberal homeland when the "special arrangement" they believe has been worked out on their behalf to let them overstay their visa turns out to be a fantasy, or they die of self-diagnosed disease which they may actually have because they wouldn't seek treatment, or they die of complications of their dangerous and increasingly intense self-treatments. And the worst cases of action are that neighbor ends up entangled in some low-income social services labyrinth and involuntarily committed as a danger to themselves, while getting no real effective treatment, or neighbor decides that I am part of some conspiracy with agents from illiberal home country and cuts my brake lines or something. Knows where I live, you know?
I can't think of any really good best-case outcomes no matter what I might do, so I guess maybe I should just try to leave the situation alone. I may even be wrong about the implausible background, and foreign agents from third country really are lending them support, and will soon provide some new plan of action for the repatriation -- it's not like I have a better idea of how they've been paying their rent for the past couple of years. I've been in neighbor's residence, and it's a lot tidier than mine, and it's not like they're outright talking to themselves, AFAIK. "Taking care of things ourselves is just how we always did it back home" is sort of a reasonable explanation for the self-diagnosis and self-treatment, and it's possible they have good reasons to avoid contact with medical professionals. But on the whole, that feels like rationalizations for not sticking my neck out. My best guess is that this person is on a crash course with reality, and there may be nobody else to potentially help them off it. I'll at least try to see if there's anyone else they trust who they might be able to talk to about any of this with, but I have a sinking feeling that there isn't.
Tentative advice: Are there other, less dangerous alternative treatments you could recommend? I don't think the odds of this being accepted are high, but it isn't likely to have much of a downside.
You are in a tough place, as you seem to be the one person your neighbour trusts to tell you all this. But honestly, it sounds like schizophrenic off their meds (or maybe never on them in the first place). I think you are right about the mental problems, and that maybe the best you can do in this situation, if they won't approach medical services themselves, is try and inform social services about them, then leave it alone.
If they are going to crash, you can't stop them as you're not family, spouse, or otherwise have any authority over them to intervene more decisively and you are running the risk that they will see you as part of the conspiracy or whatever.
I don’t think the US has a social services to notify. None that I’m aware of at any rate. The only thing I can think of in this country is talking to law enforcement. But if no crime has been committed there is really nothing they can do.
There was a fairly recent incident in an exurb of Minneapolis where a disturbed individual that the police were ‘aware of’ entered a clinic shooting a pistol killing one person.
Minneapolis itself has an upcoming referendum that would create a department of public safety.
Part of the idea is that there would be trained staff to handle mental health crises. Unfortunately the gist of what fits on a ballot looks like the goal is just to get rid of police.
In fact the referendum does actually call for replacing the police department with this proposed department of public safety.
This could be a worthwhile experiment with a carefully considered, nuanced plan. Unfortunately it doesn’t appear to be either carefully considered or nuanced.
As things stand now I expect most voters to see this as just crazy liberals trying to defund the police.
I live across the river I Saint Paul so I won’t be voting on this. If I were, the plan is so sketchy I would be a hard no.
Maybe this depends on your location, and the reputation of the local "social services". I don't think it is bad advice, but I would be extremely uncomfortable initiating that process without being extremely familiar and comfortable with what that process is in my specific area, *and* being pretty certain that there were real psychological symptoms (as opposed to, say, a guy who was exaggerating his story to make it sound better or a guy who isn't real familiar with government branches and doesn't discern between Generic Bureaucracy X and the CIA).
I agree it sounds concerning, but I would be hesitant to meddle unless I had high confidence in the outcome of that meddling or I was going to be willing to remain involved as an advocate for the guy throughout any subsequent proceedings (as it sounds like he may not have anyone else to advocate for his best interests or explain anything about his situation, although maybe I misunderstood and he does have a friend/family network nearby).
I think the local "social services" are reasonably good here (well-off college town in left-coast area) but I'm not intimately familiar with them.
I am pretty confident that what I'm seeing is not an attempt to exaggerate a story to sound better -- neighbor is otherwise about as humble and low-key as possible. It seems like a genuine confession of difficulties. I do get the sense that they're actively struggling to make sense of the rest of their life in light of this possibly-new delusional-seeming narrative about their origins. I also take it that any family links in the old country are considered unreliable now because they're not the neighbor's "real family" and are probably considered to have been complicit in taking them away from the "real family".
But yeah, by own situation is pretty precarious right now and I definitely don't have the bandwidth to spare on being this person's continued advocate (if I'm even going to be able to continue living here as their neighbor).
Rereading this it maybe wasn't totally clear the way I phrased it, the person (potentially) doing the exaggerating is the neighbor, not the the OP of this thread.
I don't have any particularly good advice, but just wanted to send some empathy and care. I'm in a not-entirely-dissimilar situation (although it's with someone very close to me rather than an acquaintance), and have struggled to figure out what to do. Right now I'm trying to just be a stable, easily-available resource for them if/when they want help. But ya it feels super shitty either way :/
Also, afaik, self-burning like that is actually a common self-harm thing (akin to cutting). Not sure if that changes any calculus, but felt worth saying.
Yeah, I suppose it could be self-harm with some more directly self-harming motive, but it's presented to me as serious (paranoid-seeming, to me) fear that failure to do painful operation diligently enough will result in death by disease.
> However, neighbor then proceeded to explain/demonstrate how they have been undertaking, with increasing frequency, an admittedly dangerous and disfiguring self-treatment for a self-diagnosed disorder which would, if present, be acutely life-threatening -- but for which I was unable to persuade them to seek professional medical attention.
Were you being vague here to protect your neighbor's privacy?
I ask because it's difficult to help with a cost-benefit analysis of your potential intervention without knowing the exact circumstances. There could be a lot of cultural and/or medical stuff going on there that would make a big difference in the analysis and/or advice ACX readers might provide.
There might already be enough details here that your neighbor would recognize himself if he read your comment, so unless you have reason to believe he frequents the board, providing more information about him and the specific behavior you're seeing might elicit specific and useful responses.
Trying to be as vague as possible for privacy though I have no reason to believe they read this board, but self-treatment involves repeated third-degree burns to fairly small areas at a time, possibly to significant depth. I've been shown some of the burns and they seem to heal well, but leave significant scars. Most recent treatment looks like it could have easily resulted in blindness if it had gone awry.
Also, my apologies for assuming your neighbor's gender in my first reply! I guess my unconscious bias is STEM degree + immigrant from illiberal homeland + preoccupation with a powerful political parental figure = male.
But you didn't identify them as male, so I shouldn't have, either.
FWIW after rereading your comment, the "improbably associated U.S. agencies" your neighbor claims are working on their behalf is the detail that tips me, personally, out of an agnostic "stranger things have happened" stance into, "yeah, this person is becoming disconnected from reality."
I don't have any actionable suggestions for how to help them get reconnected, because it's virtually impossible to impose mental heathcare on someone in the U.S. unless they're ostentatiously posing a physical threat to themselves or others. Thousands of people with symptoms far more severe than your neighbor's are going untreated because our system says that even when a symptom of a disease is the inability to participate in medical and mental healthcare, sufferers should determine how much care they receive.
So if it helps with your peace of mind: there's nothing you actually *can* do to meaningfully help your neighbor unless their behavior becomes physically dangerous to a degree that law enforcement / professionals would be obligated to get involved.
And because there's literally nothing you can meaningfully do, I think you can ethically minimize your involvement in this and not be as available to your neighbor. That's not what you asked about, but I think it's important to bring up. You shouldn't feel obligated to invest a lot of time in attempting to improve a situation you can't possibly meaningfully influence.
I agree that these improbable U.S. agencies are an especially solid ring on the crazy-bells.
What you say makes sense, I suppose there's not much I could realistically do beyond further suggesting that they seek medical attention for the supposed disease they're trying to self-treat.
Before these revelations, I was asking neighbor if they were interested in adopting a stray animal I found recently, and they are, but I think now the best I can do for the animal instead is to take it to a shelter where it might eventually find a stable home with stable people.
Note that the self-harm behavior you describe is a *classic* case of a danger to themselves, and they probably are eligible for being involuntarily committed in most jurisdictions in the US.
I'm not at all sure that's morally better than letting them crash and burn; that's a hard call, and its your call to make. But if you go to your local social services, and tell them that your neighbor seems to be some sort of psychotic and is self-harming with 3rd degree burns, you probably can arrange for that to happen and for them to get some involuntary help.
You can express concern, you can offer leads to potential support/care, and you can take care of yourself by acknowledging how little you can do and sorting out how much of a support you yourself want to be in terms of listening.
It's really hard to witness people suffering close-up and day after day. That your neighbor's situation has affected you enough to share it here speaks to the depth of your own empathy.
If this person says to you at any point they are imminently about to kill themselves or harm someone else, you can call 911. Short of that, non-suicidal self-injury is pretty common and people living independently with serious delusions is also not so uncommon. Various social service agencies have no particular mandate relative to an adult that way.
Thanks for the details! For me, they were useful because they weren't what I first assumed, so it changes my thinking slightly, especially if it's the Black Salve Gerry Quinn mentioned below.
You mentioned your neighbor has a STEM degree, but also that they might need subsidized medical care or end up in a low-income medical care situation. Is your neighbor working? If not, do you have a sense of why not?
I read of Black Salve ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_salve ) in another context recently. Is that it? It seems to be a relatively common alternative treatment for skin cancer, which was widely used in the past.
I liked this a whole bunch while I was going through it, but right when Lafferty would’ve started introducing characters and complications, the writer just ended things. But that's a nitpick. More than anything I'm delighted to see someone getting the master's tools out. I grinned so hard at "But when time itself is the task, it is a defect to finish ahead of time." Felt like something he'd have written.
Do people know about R. A. Lafferty here? Is this something people talk about here? Man, maybe I started posting on the right day.
There's me, at least. I wouldn't be surprised if there are more Lafferty fans.
"Slow Tuesday Night" seemed delightfully whimsical when I read it in the 60s, and more more prescient since. Things definitely move faster.
There's a Lafferty facebook group on facebook, and it has a one-day gathering in June, with presentations. The gathering as been remote because of the pandemic, so getting to New Jersey isn't a requirement any more.
Insofar as "rationalists" can be considered a kind of community one can speak of broadly (I think they can be, loosely, speaking as someone who does not consider themselves part of said community!), do they on the whole have better, or more correct, views on aesthetics?
There are a whole host of reasons I wouldn't identify as a rationalist, but one part of it, when examining my own internal sense of identity, does seem to be a *deep* discrepancy in how we approach aesthetics, and the areas where aesthetics bleeds into ethics & meaning more generally. I simply find the views of most rationalists totally lacking in these areas, and that makes being more genial to their whole project harder.
I also recognize this is a pretty vague question, and I'd have to think more to make it more precise, so I'm just tossing it out there, hoping it spurs discussion. (I'm also aware that to whatever questions re: aesthetics there are, a lot of rationalists will probably say that the positions on these questions aren't truth-apt, or they'll be error theorists, or whatever.)
I don't think aesthetic views can be said to correct unless aesthetic objectivism is true. I think aesthetics are ultimately subjective, though philosophers are pretty evenly split on this matter (https://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl). Even if aesthetic objectivism is false, maybe some views can be *better* than others in some sense of the word "better". It's unsatisfying when someone can't justify at all why they find something beautiful -- probably rationalists are better at this. Aesthetic views can also be judged on the matter of 'good taste' -- do rationalists tend to have good taste?
A data point: It's been my experience that many software engineers, industrial designers, and other rational folk have job-threateningly strong opinions about the design of their project. They freely describe designs as "ugly". They may even defend their preferred designs as "beautiful", but beautiful for explicit reasons. Apple products are often considered beautiful but for good reasons. Moves in chess or Go can be considered beautiful and the height of rationalism.
Isn't aestheics ineffable? That's probably the prerequisite answer to have. There was a striking story in Ellison's "Again, Dangerous Visions" anthology called "Eye of the Beholder" in which a nerdy type discovers a mathematical algorithm for aesthetic beauty, in this case of sculpture. It doesn't end well, of course, since it was written in the 70s, but if aesthetics were readily amenable to rationality then perhaps it could be programmed. That would certainly lead to a different world.
As someone who's messed around a lot with CLIP+VQGAN notebooks, if you ask CLIP to make something "beautiful", it does sort of understand what you mean, and will generate images accordingly- and I'm sure DALL-E will have much better results in that regard.
I think the algorithm for aesthetic beauty may just be machine learning.
On that point I think I disagree. Machine learning is just very fancy pattern recognition, so a machine learning algorithm, given enough training data, can learn to recognize what someone else labels "beautiful," and that can be handy, and even practical if you have some way of Monte-Carloing your way around the aesthetic space until your ML algorithm tells you to stop. (So it would probably wok for the very restrictive space of human face shapes, say.)
But if the space is high dimensional, which doesn't seem unlikely if we are talking about genuine art, architecture, music, and the like, that your ML algorithm can recognize your optimum (but tell you zip about how to get there, or even head in the right direction) doesn't seem super useful.
What's your view of aesthetics, and what do you think is the rationalist view on aesthetics? I haven't heard much discussion of aesthetics among rationalists (and the post by Scott about modern art didn't express strong opinions), so I honestly don't know.
Honestly, aesthetics are one of the main reasons I like the rationalist community. There's something incredibly beautiful to me about a genuinely good-faith argument. The sort of argument where the person making it is really trying, as hard as they can, to get at the truth. Not the set of truths that support their position, or the truths that convey the social image they want to associated with, or those that are satisfying emotionally. Not the truth that's good enough for everyday practical purposes- but the real thing, as close as they can get to it.
It's hard to write like that- we're wired to use communication for social competition, and while an ordinary argument can be as simple as repeating a time-tested line, a genuinely good-faith one requires the hard work of honest contemplation. I think that sacrifice is part of what makes it beautiful to me.
It shows up when a writer includes points that weaken their central thesis- not to disprove them, but to show honest uncertainty. It can include points made by people who the writer is opposed to politically or morally- not to emphasize the difference between them and the writer, but because they might be right. It's the sort of argument where the writer will thank you for proving them wrong- not grudgingly, but with sincerity.
It's a generous, idealistic kind of argumentation, and there's a lot of beauty in that. Though I don't think you can ground morality in aesthetics, I do think there's a moral principle that underlies that beauty- and it's one I think our culture is too quick to ignore or dismiss.
I'm not always very good at representing that ideal myself, but at its best, the Rationalist community sometimes does, and that's a lot of why I find it attractive.
Honestly, the only views on aesthetics I'd say are totally worthless are "They don't mater" because they clearly do, and "Stuff used to be better!" Because it clearly wasn't.
I will say that lots of rationalists I've met haven't really interrogated their sensibilities and influential they are to their judgment; but what are you gonna do. It's even wishy-washyer than rationality, which is already washy as fuck
You’re probably right. But that’s more of a “crisis of meaning and will of the modern world, last man” issue than “rationalist”. The “aesthetic appreciators” or more accurately those who heavily lean into it on the internet generally the far right people. And they certainly are better at it! Old paintings and classic statues are awesome. And folk and classical are the only two great genres. And yes, that sort of thing has deep and strong connections to what sorts of things one believes and thinks and does.
I'm considering getting LASIK in the near future. My myopia is quite mild, to the point that I don't bother wearing glasses at home or in the office, only while driving or while needing to look somewhere far away.
I've read a little too deeply into LASIK horror stories online though, and I'm a little worried that I could turn my "mild-myopia-barely-even-need-glasses" into something much worse.
My questions are thus:
Do the risks of LASIK scale to the severity of the myopia before the operation, or are they essentially flat per-surgery, no matter how intense the surgery is?
Are different clinics riskier than others, or is it usually a flat risk no matter which I go to?
Do you have any advice in evaluating clinics? (individual clinics certainly wouldn't advertise a high complication rate)
Any other advice or stories would be much appreciated too!
The risks of LASIK are primarily based on the surgeon's competence and the quality of the aftercare. They do not scale significantly with the severity of the vision defects being corrected.
Serious risks come in two major categories. First is blatant error by the surgeon during the procedure, most commonly in the form of applying the wrong amount or pattern of correction to your cornea. This is very rare, as there are several layers of safeguard against this at any competent practice: repeatedly confirming your identity, surgeon cross-checking the planned correction with their assistants immediately before surgery while you're in the room, and I think modern laser equipment suites also includes sensors that sanity check the planned correction pattern.
Second category is flap complications. LASIK involves cutting a flap into the cornea and then using the laser to resurface the layer cornea under the flap, then reseating the flap over it. The purpose of the flap is to improve healing by minimizing damage to the exposed surface of the eye. The big risk, though, is if the flap is disturbed out of position before it heals enough to hold itself firmly in place barring major trauma. It's also possible for an incompetent surgeon to damage the flap during the procedure itself.
By far the best mitigation, apart from selecting an experienced and reputable surgeon, is to follow the aftercare instructions scrupulously. Especially the standard recommendation to sleep as soon as you can for as long as you can immediately following the procedure, or at least to spend most of the remainder of the day of the procedure lying down with your eyes closed (I recommend queuing up some audiobooks or podcasts to listen too): sleep facilitates healing in general, and lying down with your eyes closed maximally protects the flaps during the most vulnerable several hours of the recovery. You should also have a series of aftercare exams to screen for complications for prompt correction or mitigation, and you should have some medications prescribed for the recovery (numbing drops and prophylactic antibiotics).
Risk of flap complications is also mitigated by opting for "bladeless" or "all-laser" LASIK, where the flap is cut by a second laser instead of by a manually-operated microkeratome blade. This is a bit more expensive, but it removes an opportunity for human error, and the laser cut creates a slightly textured surface inside the flap that is thought to help hold the flap in place as it heals.
Another factor is flap orientation. There are two standards for where to put the "hinge" of the flap, with different risks for each. The more common last I checked was "superior" flaps, where the hinge is at the top of the eye. This helps keep the flap in place during early healing, since the action of blinking will push the flap back into place if it's slightly misaligned. The alternative is "nasal" falls, where the hinge is on the sides of the eyes facing the bridge of your nose. This does a worse job of keeping the flap in position, but reduces the much more common minor side effect of dry eyes following the procedure since it severs fewer of the nerves in the cornea.
You can eliminate the risk of flap complications entirely by opting for PRK instead of LASIK. This is an older variant of the procedure where there's no flap and the same laser as LASIK is used to recontuour the outer surface of the cornea instead. Other advantages are that PRK is cheaper (fewer steps to the procedure), doesn't have dry eye as a common complication (since cutting nerves during flap creation is what causes the dry eyes), and more people are good candidates for the procedure (people with very thin corneas can't/shouldn't get LASIK because there isn't enough material to work with for both the flap and the recontuouring). The big downside is a much slower recovery with more risk of infection, since the vision correction surgery is burned into the exposed surface of the eye and because the protective outer layer of the eye (the epithelium) needs to regrow. It usually takes a day or less to heal enough to get good vision after LASIK, but takes 5-7 after PRK. In both cases, your vision keeps improving for weeks or months after the procedure, but you're most of the way there a lot faster after LASIK.
- Everyone I've talked to who had it (n=3) said it's the best thing ever; they're all in my age group (20s) and had it done relatively recently. It's apparently less worthwhile the older you get, as you'll end up with presbyopia later anyways.
- I went with a clinic that a friend recommended (LaserVue in SF). Spent some time looking at Yelp ratings too. The clinic quoted me something like 60% chance of 20/15 vision, 90% 20/20, 98% 20/30. You can shop around too (I didn't bother because as a rule, I hate dealing with the medical industry; but this LASIK clinic provided a very customer-friendly experience)
- My clinic offered a free initial consultation, which is an hour of putting you through various machines and "can you read this line for me" tests; if you go through with it, it's a total of 5 visits to the clinic: Consultation, second check, operation, post-operation check, one week follow up.
- My options were LASIK and SMILE, a newer surgery method with some slight benefits. LASIK was quoted at $6200, SMILE at $7200, but they offered to price-match my friend's LASIK operation at $4770, which is what I went with.
- I was unconcerned about the procedure before signing up, got a little nervous/jittery on the operation day. But the operation itself was ridiculously fast (5 min), almost kind of anticlimactic. I suppose "anticlimactic" is exactly what you want out of surgeries, though.
- I spent the rest of the day after surgery with my eyes closed at home, listening to audiobooks and conversing with friends. The next day my vision was great and I went in to go to work; no pain, but still dryness, which I'm managing with eyedrops.
- My night vision has the "halos" problem, basically seeing all light sources as if they were streetlights in fog. I don't drive anyways and it's supposed to improve with time.
Overall, I'm quite happy I went through with it! More than complication risk, I was more concerned about getting my logistical ducks in a row (finding time to schedule these, not wearing contacts for the requisite months beforehand).
One thing you might consider is that, as you age, you will inevitably develop presbyopia, or the loss of visual accomodation. This is the reason that older people with "normal" vision require reading glasses. If your LASIK operation is successful, your eyesight will "freeze" more and more at being clear only at long distances, and you, too, will require glasses for any reading or close work. If you are myopic your eyesight will freeze at roughly the furthest distance you can see clearly. If your vision is not too bad this may actually be more convenient than only being able to see clearly at long distances.
I personally am somewhat myopic, and old enough to have loss of accomodation. I think I am happier being able to read and do close work without glasses while requiring them for longer distance vision. Your preferences may differ, but it is worth thinking about.
There are replacement lenses for cataract that claim to provide some accomodation, but they are relatively expensive and experimental. Perhaps by the time you develop cataracts they will be ready for prime time, which would be a fine thing. Currently I believe that most cataract patients have their lenses adjusted to provide good vision at infinity, meaning that reading glasses are required. I have also heard that in some cases one eye is adjusted to provide good distance vision, and one closer vision, with some loss of depth perception. I don't know how one would decide whether that was a livable arrangement pre-surgery.
Important advice I almost didn’t get before my surgery: If you do any kind of grappling or martial art or combat sport, do NOT get traditional LASIK. The flap will heal weaker, and if that tears from an eye poke, it’s permanent damage. Instead, get PRK, where they scrape away a small layer instead of cutting a flap, and then that layer regrows while you wear the bandage contact. It takes longer to heal and you’ll need about a week of support while you can’t see well, but then you’ll be good to go. The USAF only does PRK for their pilots for similar reasons.
1.) No. There's a day or two of intense pain during recovery and about a month where your eyes have noticeable marks and sensitivity. After that I've been more or less fine.
2.) No. You're conscious the entire time.
3.) Basically the first two days were really, really bad. They give you some sedatives but you're out of commission. After that there were a few months of more or less constant sunglasses due to light sensitivity. Even at night. No pain or other issues though. I think there were some halos but they went away. After that I haven't noticed anything different other than improved vision.
Is your vision perfect now, or just good enough you don't need glasses? And how do they keep your eyeball from wiggling around while they cut it up if they don't put you under?
- Everything I've heard from my father is that LASIK is a super safe operation
Of course, there's always bad outcomes for somebody, and I know such a person.
A friend of mine had a bad but not catastrophic experience with LASIK. Basically what LASIK does is they slice your cornea so that it folds away, laser the surface, then lay the corneal flap back down. Then they put a big hard contact lens on to keep everything in place while it heals. Later someone will remove this big hard contact lens. However, if the doctor removing it makes a mistake they can cause a tear or tiny wrinkles to develop which will then heal in place, permanently. This can cause permanent "ghosting" in your vision, which can be particularly bad at night. This happened to my friend and they can basically no longer drive at night any more because of it. The sad part is they were happy to wear glasses for the rest of their life before, but had a lot of pressure from a relative to go get the surgery and now they regret it. Their daytime vision isn't destroyed or anything, and it was only in one eye, but it's always a bummer to accumulate permanent damage you can't do anything about.
One thing I *CAN* say from observing my Dad's practice ... if you live long enough, you *will* get cataracts. It's not a question of it, but of when. And when you get cataracts, if you want to be able to see well again (or even at all, in extreme cases), you'll need to get the internal lens in your eye replaced. My Dad specialized in cataract surgery and it's made tremendous leaps and bounds in the last 30 years, it's absolutely incredible, and the outcomes are generally quite good.
So one way to look at it is, if you're squeamish about LASIK, if you have a good quality of life now and just want to wait until you naturally develop cataracts, when you inevitably *need* that cataract surgery anyway, they can then make sure to try to correct any deficiencies in your vision at the same time (and if you haven't previously had LASIK, the math is a bit easier for them to calibrate what kind of lens to put in). That way you're reducing the number of times you take a risk on getting a botched eye surgery in your life from two to one.
That said, LASIK statistically is supposed to be super safe. I have to just admit to myself that one super salient anecdote with my friend has totally ruined my emotional ability to feel that way about it even though I know the statistics.
My grandpa wore thick glasses his whole life: then when he was 80 years old he needed cataract surgery and they fixed him up. No more glasses at 80: we all had a good laugh, told him he was doing things backwards. You’re supposed to get worse eyesight when you’re older, not better! It was weird to think that he had better eyesight at 80 then at 25.
Yup, this is a super common experience with modern cataract surgery; even crazier it's outpatient these days!
Of course whether you put off LASIK because cataract surgery will fix it anyway depends on a) how squeamish you are about LASIK, and b) how long you have to wait. If you're 50 or 60 already cataract surgery might not be too far away; if you're 20 it's gonna be a pretty long time.
Is there anybody who is NOT a crypto coin/blockchain enthusiast talking about “web3” ? In my circles at least it seems entirely confined to that world, whereas back with Web 2.0 that phenomenon seems to have had much wider buy in. By contrast “web3” seems entirely relegated to this subgroup. Just me or is this how it looks for other people too?
The first involves a suite of open source technologies that make it easier for a user to control their own online data (TLDR everyone has their own private database and 3rd parties can request access to specific parts of it).
The second is a slow burning concept to replace the Web as the primary user interface to the Internet with a global persistant 3d environment.
For what it's worth I'm not at all a crypto/blockchain enthusiast and I haven't heard much of anything about "web3". And I work in web development so even if I'm not super cutting edge it's something I'm reasonably likely to have come across.
web3 is not a design philosophy like Web 2.0. Web3 is a collection of JavaScript libraries that allow easy interaction with Ethereum nodes. (And by analogy some other nodes.) It's important for making blockchain a more practical technology for average internet applications. So yes, everyone interested in it is into crypto because that's what it's about.
There’s web3.js , yes, but I keep hearing people talk about “web3” as a phenomenon - often invoking terms like “the decentralized web”. Is the name not meant to position itself as a successor to Web 2.0? Because most people I see using it seem to mean it that way. This article is a typical example:
The article you're quoting agrees that web3 is about using blockchain in web app development:
> Instead, web3 applications either run on blockchains, decentralized networks of many peer to peer nodes (servers), or a combination of the two that forms a cryptoeconomic protocol. These apps are often referred to as dapps (decentralized apps), and you will see that term used often in the web3 space.
Web3.js is specifically ethereum but the term's grown from there. (Or maybe it was vice versa? I don't know.) But yeah, that's what it means.
Yeah that’s basically what I was asking. It seems “web3” whether you mean the movement or the specific libraries means “the future of the web is blockchain powered?”
My other question is just how much traction this vision has amongst rank and file web developers. Seems kinda limited from where I’m standing, but maybe someone else knows more.
It's big among the blockchain movement who are increasingly focusing on finding practical, common person applications for the technology. I haven't really seen much buy in from the other side. A bit but not a ton.
Less wrong post I stumbled across from Roko (now far right) from ten years ago. Less wrong was more fun back then, lol. Posting just because it’s so absurd it’s funny
I wasn't around in those days but did remember reading about the basilisk controversy and always wondered:
I was raised fundamentalist Christian. The basilisk sounded a lot like the Christian God who planned to torment you in Hell forever and ever for not "believing" in Him so I was kind of surprised at all the people who were freaked out by the concept. Was that ever addressed?
My view on that is that the audience was a lot of people who were raised secular/non-Christian, had not encountered such a problem before as insiders not outsiders, and had a high proportion of people with scrupulosity. They had never before had to personally reject the notion of Hell as something that could ever apply to themselves.
So when they got hit with something they could believe in, or fit into their mental model of possibility in the real world, putting that on top of high tendency to worry about failing to do one's best and feeling personally responsible left some of them open to "this is the kind of thing I accept could happen, I already feel I am not doing enough, so I could be one of the victims of the basilisk!" and obsessing over that leads to extreme reactions.
I can see how he came up with the basilisk because he seems to think people are more fragile than mist on a mirror.
"Hey, consider that in an infinite universe of infinitely repeating combinations of matter, there are going to be multiple copies of you! Isn't that breaking your mind right now?"
No, actually. The reason being, I have not as yet ever bitten into a hamster bar, and if I do poke this spoon on the desk before me into my eye, I certainly *will* undergo consequences for my actions. Conversely, if the instance of 'me' in universe No. 99, 999 does it/has done it/is going to do it, it doesn't affect me in the slightest, as the only instance of 'me' I am experiencing right now is this one here typing all this out.
Now, if in our infinite wotsit, what Me No. 99, 999 does have an effect on me, and what I do does have an effect on No. 102,325 and so forth, then I *would* care. But since nothing of that sort has occurred (so far as I know, unless we take dreams to be signals from those other worlds), then it makes no difference to me, the same way that some action that the 'me' of five years from now (if I am still alive) has no effect on the 'me' of now (even if that future me in one sense already has taken that action).
It's a nice thought experiment, but to actually worry that "Oh no, Me No. 1,325.987 ate thee slices of hamster cake, I am going to put on an extra two pounds!", well then, you are somebody so delicately constituted, I don't know how you actually do live in this world.
Looked it up and read it online and it's a fantastic story, classic Bester: clever. funny, and with a sting in the tail.
I don't know if the anecdote about Boltzmann is true, but it should be. Another thing that occurred to me was that Hassel never contemplated that every time he walked in and saw his red-haired wife in the arms of another man, that it might be down to *his* personality traits: he likes red-haired women, so he marries a red-haired woman. That is, his wife is a different woman every time, but Hassel's personality is such that the wife will always have an affair due to an unhappy marriage.
But I suppose Bester's ending means that she is indeed the same woman, and it's a very clever ending, one I don't remember reading before.
I don't know, I suspect not, as Boltzmann was supposedly a very successful and popular lecturer. I thought the story was interesting in this context mostly because of its rather avant-garde take on the issue of identity and how it might relate to your thoughts on the existence of "other yous."
It was definitely a unique take on time travel, and the central idea that each of us lives in a small, contained, individual bubble of time and so we can only affect our own lives, we can't change the past or future or present for anyone else, and if we try to change things we'll only end up affecting ourselves was very interesting notion.
I think it reinforces my feeling that even if other versions of 'me' exist in other worlds, anything I do won't affect them and anything they do won't affect me. Me in another world wins the lottery? Nothing to do with my life. Me in this world breaks my arm? Nothing to do with them.
So it undercuts the 'brain-melting' idea that 'whoa there are millions or billions of 'me' out there, nothing I do is meaningful because it has no consequences in reality since every decision I could make is going to be made whether I chose A, B or C or whether I decided not to do something' - any decisions I make are meaningful *to this version of me* because they *do* have consequences here. I can't say "it doesn't matter if I don't get a job, because some version of me will win the lottery", it very much matters to this version of me. If I hurt people or kill people or commit a crime, it matters.
I've never found the idea brain-melting anyway. I suppose I'm just never been impressed by my own uniqueness. Of course my inner experience tells me I'm unique, on account of I don't seem to be able to be anybody else (from the inside), so obviously I fiercely defend my existence -- it wouldn't console me in the slightest on the eve of my execution to be told a clone of myself, fully up to date with all my memories, would be awakened the following morning.
But as far as cold rational observation suggests, I doubt I'm especially unique as far as anything important to the rest of the world goes, in the same way that we tend to think most horses or rats are interchangeable for practical purposes. If you told me already there were 6 other schmos among the world's 7 billion who look and for all practical purposes act just like me, I wouldn't really be surprised.
Something I was thinking about in the context of the TV adaptation of Foundation: how many generations before race ceases to exist?
Or, to go with something a bit more quantifiable, how many generations before less than one percent of the human population can trace more than half their ancestors to a single racial group (with "racial group" defined in some vaguely-reasonable way so that there's circa ten races in the world right now)?
Absent any novel strong force that prevents different races from interbreeding, we should expect that eventually there'll be no identifiable racial groups left and everyone will be one brownish race. I'd say it should certainly happen on the timescale of Foundation (25,000 years in the future) but will it already have happed on the timescale of, say, Star Trek (300 years in the future)?
Races will probably never cease to exist, though the proportion of what we would today consider mixed-race people will be higher in the future. Medical immortality will probably exist sometime in the next century, and people of "pure" race will take advantage of it. Self-cloning will also keep some number of pure race people alive indefinitely.
Human genetic engineering will also cause a scrambling of physical traits that we today associate with specific races. For example, once it becomes cheap to do so, large numbers of nonwhite parents will engineer their unborn children to have traits like blonde hair and blue or green eyes.
300 years from now, substantial numbers of pure race people will still be walking around, alongside many people with mixed racial heritage.
I'm pretty sure we would find other ways to distinguish between groups that would map in a general way to our concept of race, which would be visually identifiable and immutable. It may not actually track with skin color, but perhaps facial features, hair color, or other characteristics which our descendants will use to identify people as humans have for their whole history.
Chances are very high that skin color would be one of the markers, even if the specifics (i.e. Black and White) are not identified or called the same. For instance, Irish used to be considered a separate "race" from Anglo-Saxons. There were plenty of features, some of which were immutable, that people found to separate themselves other than White (freckles, red hair, extra pale skin).
>>>(with "racial group" defined in some vaguely-reasonable way so that there's circa ten races in the world right now)?
What is the 'vaguely reasonable way to get ~10 races/ancestry groups now, instead of the traditional & supported by current science of genomics 3 to 5? (If we don't know your definitions I don't think we can answer the question.)
Having said that, I think your suppositions that non-novel forces are insufficient to allow for maintenance of physically distinct groups (along side mixtures of different proportions) is not accurate. Also Razib Khan (substack: unsupervised learning) did just cover this, and the answer is that our genes are complicated but are not limitless in possible outcomes.
Current genomics doesn't support "3 to 5" racial groups or, indeed, the notion of "race" — in the sense of distinct, unifying genetic identities — at all.
"Ancestry" — in the sense that geographically co-located people may well share related subsets of paths through which their genomes have been inherited — is a different matter
I don't understand your reply. First you say that there aren't races - groups of people who share common ancestors (and gene subset combinations) that (ancestors and gene subsets) are (nearly entirely) not shared with other groups of people in the recent (15-70k years)...and then you say there are. Can you please explain this contradiction?
One of the minor things I found implausible in C.J.Cherry's (very good) _Foreigner_ series was that the human populations, very far in our future (they had interstellar space flight and colonization at least two hundred years before the story is happening), still have recognizably black and Caucasian individuals.
The way it works in the short run is that you get children with a mix of various racial characteristics, not people with medium brown skin and somewhat wavy dark hair.
If the pattern continues, there were continue to be some people who look like what we would call black or white, but they'll be pretty rare.
Mating continues to assort by many factors, so maybe we’ll get new races as old ones merge! (Not for the first time)
Of course this ignores whatever technology stuff happens in even another 70 years, which ... probably will matter as much or more relative to current trends. I don’t think predictions from current things matter.
What do you mean by that? 23andme traces 100% of my ancestry to the same racial group, and the same is true for most people who identify with that racial group.
I haven't had my genome checked, but some relatives have, and all my ancestry is eastern European. It's kind of boring compared to the people who have ancestry from three continents, but there it is.
I've heard a complaint that the ancestry descriptions assume that the racial makeup of a place in the past is the same as it is now. I'm not sure how that plays into the accuracy of ancestry descriptions.
I really don't understand that complaint. I mean, if I find out I'm 100% Udmurt, I'm still gonna be 100% Udmurt even if it turns out that the Udmurts used to live in the Tarim Basin and Udmurtia used to be populated by Nganasans.
I think that royalty can do that, the best example is probably the Japanese Emperor. He can trace his lineage quite far back and it's all Japanese people from a few prestigious families, who were highly unlikely to marry gaijin even before the isolationist period.
An aborigine would definitely be “mixed” at most 3k ish generations back, and probably a lot later as it only takes one outsider breeding in the right place. Same for the others
Melvin was talking about "more than half their ancestors" not "it only takes one outsider" -- and I think that even if you raise the threshold to "more than 95% of their ancestors" there still are plenty of people who wouldn't be "mixed".
I feel like I'm increasingly seeing the word "gross" to describe something that the speaker finds reprehensible. I can't decide if it's a good thing -- because I actually think it's true to reality to link moral/ethical failings with disgust -- or a bad thing, because it's an opportunity to lazily replace argument with emotional appeals. Thoughts? Here's an example of what I'm seeing:
I think it's an oversimplification of an argument, and therefore reduces communication. The most recent major example I can think of is when homosexuality was dismissed primarily as "gross" instead of through any kind of coherent or reasoned argument. If the basis of your argument is the visceral reaction, you will convince those who already agree with you and not convince anyone else, though people may feign agreement to avoid the label. If there's a sincere attempt to argue in favor of the "gross" idea/thing, then more sophisticated arguments will be needed than just continuing to call it "gross."
I feel like "gross" has been used this way since at least the 1980s—but maybe this usage became less popular for a while, so it feels new(ish) to those who weren't around, or not in the right subculture(s), at the time. Or am I misremembering?
Words and phrases are always slowly morphing in their meaning and overall feel. There was a time centuries ago when "stink" just meant "odor," not necessarily a bad odor. The phrase "for free" used to be amusing, because everyone recognized it as silly and nonsensical (because "free" means "for nothing" so "for free" is sort of a redundant meaningless condensation of the 2). But if you're not part of the group that's most energetically involved in the morphing , it just feels like Other People are Misusing the Term.
Judging by its cognates (both German and Scandinavian), it would seem that "stink" has had its current meaning at least since Proto-Germanic, which was millennia ago.
I mean, I don't think it's a good or bad thing in and of itself, though you could argue that it's potentially a symptom of a bad thing.
>because I actually think it's true to reality to link moral/ethical failings with disgust
That's the rub, though. Emotions are a more basic and unconscious level of cognition than reasoning, so the arrow of causation there usually isn't "perceived moral failure" -> "disgust", but rather "disgust" -> "perceived moral failure" which essentially abdicates any kind of ethical reasoning.
You could argue that the blending of language signals such an abdication, but it should be remembered that at any time a large chunk of humanity is in that mode so I'm not sure how much of a degradation one can actually read from this.
Admittedly not the most recent example, but the first easily-searchable one that came to mind. And, it's certainly not just synonymous with "bad." "That earthquake was pretty gross," and "I bombed that exam, it was pretty gross" would be very odd things to say.
While there is indeed the moral conception around it, the technical meaning is as follows:
"Gross
Great; culpable; general; absolute. A thing in gross exists in its own right, and not as an appendage to another thing. Before or without diminution or deduction. Whole; entire; total; as in the gross sum, amount, weight—as opposed to net. Not adjusted or reduced by deductions or subtractions.
Out of all measure; beyond allowance; flagrant; shameful; as a gross dereliction of duty, a gross injustice, gross carelessness or Negligence. Such conduct as is not to be excused.
West's Encyclopedia of American Law, edition 2. Copyright 2008 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved."
Compare it with this partial definition:
"What is COMPARATIVE NEGLIGENCE?
That doctrine in the law of negligence by which the negligence of the parties is compared, in the degrees of “slight,” “ordinary,” and “gross” negligence"
So I think Labouchere's amendment was meant in the sense of "greater, more severe" rather than "disgusting":
I'd like to catch up on old Slate Star Codex posts, but I hate reading off a screen. What is the most efficient way to print out all old SSC posts (with figures, without comments)?
Has anyone here or on lesswrong written a review, or have a good review to recommend, on the book "The Tycoons: How Rockefeller, Gould, Carnegie and Morgan invented the American supereconomy"?
I’ve picked up two beliefs that are popular in my circles:
1. Gain-of-function research is dangerous and not worth the risk. Our civilization is not competent enough to do this safely, and we probably won’t learn much from it anyway.
2. We should pursue nuclear energy more aggressively. Safety concerns are overblown - our civilization is competent enough to avoid having another Chernobyl. With experience, we could learn a lot about improving our reactor designs.
Contra Edward Scizorhands, I am definitely NOT of the view that we should pursue nuclear energy more aggressively—though mainly because the long term costs seem really high compared to, say renewables+storage—but I concur with him that you are not being inconsistent in recognising that the worst-case results from GoF research are much more catastrophic than the worst-case results from pursuing nuclear energy. (At least: given that we already have nuclear weapons. It might have been better to have not pursued nuclear technology at all in the first place if we would thereby have avoided the nuclear arms race during which we, I think it is not unfair to say, only just barely managed to avoid completely annihilating ourselves.)
Not least because, as others point out, we seem to still be taking the risks of nuclear energy vastly more seriously that the risks of GoF research, even AFTER COVID-19.
The arms race arguably has led to the longest period of peace between major powers in perhaps all of human history. Prior to the invention of nuclear weapons, major European powers seemed to go to war with each other several times a century, going back to the collapse of the Roman Empire. We've now gone ~75 years without a major world power warring against another, despite multiple times when such a war seemed likely (US v. USSR alone almost certainly would have resulted in several major wars between 1945 and 1990).
Considering the massive loss of life in WWI and WWII, hot wars between major powers in the years since would have likely caused hundreds of millions of deaths. Of course, this is all hypothetical so we can't say for certain, but I believe that building nuclear weapons has turned out to be a force for good that would have justified itself even factoring in the possibility that we could have used them in earnest.
Suppose that you found out that in 90% of possible worlds, humanity is reduced to a tiny band of struggling survivors by this year because of a full-scale nuclear war in the late 20th century. Would that change your mind about nuclear weapons being "a force for good"? Would it make a difference if it were 99.9%? 1%?
I think it's better to have major world power wars every 10 years that kill 10% of the population than a major world power war every 100 years that kills 100% of the population.
Two things. First, "use them in earnest" does not necessarily mean that humanity is reduced to a tiny band of struggling survivors. We used them in earnest during WWII to similar effect of non-nuclear fire bombing. We could have used them quite extensively with many cities destroyed and not reached the level you are speaking of. Second, I was also referring to the fear and threat of using them that was a big deal during the Cold War. In some ways, that nagging fear of their use is probably a big part of why we never did have a full scale nuclear war.
In your scenario, we have literally destroyed ourselves through the use of nuclear weapons. That is, of course, far worse than a conventional war using non-nuclear weapons. It would be nearly impossible for us to use conventional weapons to reduce humanity to such a diminished state, so therefore it is automatically worse if looking at your scenario verses conventional war.
The more realistic scenario is a nuclear war that destroyed a significant percentage of humanity, but not civilization destroying where humanity may cease to exist. That becomes a more straightforward numbers game, weighing X% of Y lives lost under each scenario. Throwing in a scenario where humanity is pretty much gone is like including infinity, which always does weird things to the math.
Warfare went proxy, so you had wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan funded by the superpowers but often fought by the proxies. We'd have to include those casualties for a fair comparison.
Absolutely. Some quick searches put the number of dead at something like five to eight million, almost all Korean, Afghani, and Vietnamese (not USSR or US). Most of those were civilian deaths. WWII included 20 million military deaths and well over 40 million civilian deaths. Though neither is good, major powers directly confronting each other clearly results in order of magnitude more deaths. I am confident to say that even a non-nuclear WWIII would have resulted in far more deaths than WWII, so preventing it saved even more lives.
An interesting perspective, and not one without merit. But—as awful as it sounds—I think it's better for our species to take high-probability but comparatively(!) minor losses from even awful global-scale conventional conflicts than risk accidentally wiping ourselves out completely in a nuclear shooting war. There were just too many close calls (and absurd things like the Soviets building a dead hand system and then, just as Dr. Strangelove predicted, failing to tell the Americans about it.)
But maybe this is the legacy of having seen _If You Love This Planet_ at the age of eight, and having a "War of the Worlds" moment a year or so later when I was listening to the CBC one Saturday morning and—presumably as part of a radio drama, though I was not aware of it at the time—they announced that the Soviets had launched an all-out nuclear attack and that we would all be dead in four minutes time.
So yes: I'm quite glad that neither I nor basically anyone I've ever known has been killed in a war. But I'm genuinely horrified at how close we came to _all_ being killed in a war—and more so every year as previously-secret close calls come to light.
I respect that. I would certainly agree that my opinion about nuclear weapons is HIGHLY influenced by the fact that we did not cause global extinction with them, despite coming close. If we had a few limited nuclear wars with less death than a non-nuclear WWIII, I don't know that I would be here praising the invention of nuclear weapons, even if many fewer lives were lost than a full conventional war. Hindsight is my friend on this one, but given the benefit of hindsight I think nuclear weapons turned out to be a pretty strong force for good.
I'd say so, yes. And also repeating the same mistake people made about nuclear power in the 70s, id est it's new and vaguely related (and least linguistically) to something dreadful (nuclear weapons in the case of nuclear reactors, and deadly pandemics in the case of viruses), so it must be much more dangerous than it seems.
And in 50 years, when let us say the Chinese know how to engineer viruses that fix Down's or a genetic tendency to early heart disease and we have to buy that medical care from them, trading quite a large number of hours of our labor like we're Guatemalans, 'cause we have nothing equivalently marvelous to trade, it will be even clearer that the future doesn't belong to those unwilling to take some risks.
There's a big difference between GOF and viral therapy research. Messing around with coronavirus or influenza or ebola won't cure your cancer. Very careful modifications to HIV (starting by making it non-contagious) might.
How do you know? If the place from which come revolutionary new scientific insights were that predictable, we could put scientific discovery on a timeline and a budget, predict exactly when the next breakthrough will happen, and all the suits in Management and Marketing would cry smugly "I KNEW it!"
Penicillin was discovered completely accidentally, and probably in no small part because Fleming was a somewhat careless lab worker and allowed his bacteria culture to become contaminated. He wasn't looking for an antibiotic. Becquerel discovered radioactivity entirely by accident, in the process of trying to prove his (incorrect) theory that X-rays were a phosphorescent phenomenon. Nuclear fission, arguably the most potent mid-20th century discovery, was almost missed -- both Fermi and Curie, the most prestigious nuclear labs of the day, missed it because they failed to test for heavy daughter nuclides, it not occuring to anybody (aside from Ida Noddack who everybody ignored) they might be there. It was only by the repeated failure of Hahn to separate the "radium" they knew had to be there from the barium that was just a purification reactant that caused Lise Meitner to eventually rethink things. And if she hadn't been bored and lonely from being a refugee from the Nazis in Sweden (and maybe trying to re-connect to Hahn, on whom she may have had a major crush) maybe she might've had more interesting things to think about, or written it off to lab error.
Goodness, yes. We already know HPV causes cancer, for example. But I was driving at the value of fundamental research. Researching viruses tells us tons of useful things about the chemistry of life at the most fundamental level, it's learning the assembler code of how it's done. It has *already* had tremendous payoffs -- what we learned about basic immunology in the two decades of trying to contain AIDS has probably played no small part in the immunotherapy renassiance in which we have the good fortune to live. It would hardly be surprising if the culture or nation who masters this stuff fastest is the one that dominates the 22nd and later centuries.
Chernobyl was an atom bomb factory that did double duty as an electric power plant, and it was the specifically weapon-making functionality that resulted in the accident being as horrific as it was. Pursuing nuclear energy specifically for its blowing-stuff-up capability has a number of unique risks, of which "maybe your atom bomb factory will catch fire and burn down" is not the largest.
For nuclear power plants that aren't also atom bomb factories, Fukushima isn't the worst possible case, but it's the worst we've seen in several thousand reactor-years of experience and it is illustrative of the sort of risk we are taking with nuclear energy.
COVID-19 is at least illustrative of the sort of risk we are taking with gain-of-function research, and is probably 10-20 kiloFukushimas worth of catastrophe, or maybe one kiloChernobyl if you insist on a side order of atomic bombs with your electricity.
Also, nuclear energy powers the equivalent of a couple dozen world-class megacities with zero carbon footprint, whereas gain-of-function research provides jobs for a few research institutes' worth of virologists and mumble something something practical benefits.
So, no, there's nothing inconsistent with saying that nuclear energy is worth the risk whereas gain-of-function research isn't. I'm open to the possibility that they're *both* worth the risk, but I do want to hear some specifics about the benefit of the one with the viruses. Also, probably don't put either one literally inside a major city, and see about putting the virology labs on the Moon at the soonest practical opportunity.
That said, while I can't speak to your circles specifically, I think the criteria most people are going to use is "does it remind me of that scary catastrophe story I remember seeing on CNN/Facebook/whatever?", in which case, meh, your news and social media feeds are going to be filled with scary catastrophe stories no matter what.
(A comment-of-the-month nominee right here....has several LOL lines, for me anyway, of which "maybe one kiloChernobyl if you insist on a side order of atomic bombs with your electricity" might be my favorite.)
To operate as a breeder reactor as well as a power plant, and in particular a "produce lots of extra plutonium" breeder rather than "generate new fuel about as fast as we burn it", the RMBK had to use either heavy water or graphite as a moderator - ordinary water absorbs too many neutrons. Heavy water is expensive, graphite is cheap, and so the structure that absolutely must not burn down was made in large part of glorified high-grade coal.
Using ordinary water as a coolant but not a moderator gave the reactor a positive void coefficient, meaning if coolant starts to boil the reactor starts producing more nuclear energy (because the water that was absorbing some neutrons now isn't, and those neutrons find interesting new things to do). The problem with less coolant resulting in more energy should be obvious. And it's possible to design around that, but it isn't easy and the early Soviet nuclear engineers didn't do that.
And if you want to breed *weapons grade* plutonium, you have to swap out fuel rods every month or so. But opening up a robust primary and secondary containment structure to get at the inside of a nuclear reactor, takes a month or so. Very inconvenient. So the RMBK-1000 gets a containment vessel with heavy steel and concrete walls, but a light easy-access roof for the overhead cranes. You can even open it up and swap out fuel rods while the reactor is running.
People did stupid things at Chernobyl, which ultimately started the coolant boiling. That should have been about the end of it - if your coolant is also your moderator, boiling it off stops the reaction and you just have to deal with the residual decay heat. But in an RMBK, boiling the coolant increases the reaction rate, in this case faster than it could be controlled. Superheated steam reaches graphite, and by the water-gas shift produces hydrogen gas.
Which is explosive over a broad range with air. Exploding hydrogen + high-pressure steam blows off the easy-access roof and lets in air, which meets more hot graphite, and the whole thing burns to the ground like the pile of coal it basically is. Except, coal with a couple hundred tons of uranium, plutonium, and even more unpleasant radioactive nastiness mixed in.
Something very similar had happened, fortunately on a smaller scale, at the Windscale plutonium production facility in England in 1957. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire And the US Hanford facility was designed with the understanding that, yeah, that's a thing that can happen but we've got contingency plans to evacuate a thirty-mile radius so let's get on with it.
It's not a matter of ignorant commie peons being unable to handle nuclear technology, it's a matter of using nuclear reactors to make atom bombs being a particularly dangerous combination.
Using the same reactors to generate electricity and so putting them close to a major city is just an extra layer of bad. If you want to build a nuclear reactor near a city, then you want to make it out of metal and water and absolutely nothing resembling coal, use your moderator as your coolant, and wrap the whole thing top to bottom in meters-thick steel and reinforced concrete.
Personally I'm quite convinced of the safety of modern HTGR designs. "Passive safety" is _the_ buzzword in the nuke community right now, and all the modern htgr designs are designed for that. Namely, with more advanced graphite and shaped so that fresh air can't be continually pulled into the core during DLOC.
Not saying it's the best design, but it's plenty safe.
> see about putting the virology labs on the Moon at the soonest practical opportunity
We can't already put them on the Moon, but I think we can and *should* put them in places like Svalbard or Antartica if we want to continue doing GoF research at all.
To do a direct comparison, there are several important things to consider:
- How bad is the catastrophe? There are multiple orders of magnitude between disease escape vs nuclear meltdown.
- What is the benefit? Nuclear power is a great way to reduce the risk of climate change. I don't know any benefit from gain of function research of comparable magnitude.
- How much have we learned from the catastrophes that have happened? There have been significant international efforts to learn from the catastrophes. (e.g. https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/Pub913e_web.pdf) The WHO investigations into the origins of Covid are nothing like these INSAG reports. One sign of civilizational incompetence for gain-of-function research is that we aren't learning how to improve biosafety labs.
The only part I'd object to is "our civilization is competent enough to avoid having another Chernobyl". Maybe we are, maybe we aren't. I doubt anyone will make exactly the same mistake again, but if the opportunity to screw up exists then someone will take it.
I wouldn't have thought anyone was dumb enough to store a giant pile of 2700 tons of ammonium nitrate in a warehouse in the middle of Beirut either, but these things happen.
Assuming Covid was caused by gain-of-function research gone wrong, what's the total death toll? How does that compare to the total death toll in the history of nuclear power?
The 5000-50,000 estimates, aside from being dubious, result from multiplying a large population by a tiny increased risk of cancer per person. I don't find that as terrifying as COVID infecting someone and killing them by destroying their lungs.
Yeah, that was my point. Seems like the gain from nuclear power is probably a lot bigger than anything we may have realized from gain-of-function research, AFAIK.
I vaguely agree, but I'm a fan of the second belief, so I'm going to be biased.
We have a base rate of nuclear power accidents over the past 50 years. We know the expected damages from accidents. We should expect that accident rate to decrease as we get more experience and learn from each error.
On the other hand, we cannot see biolab leaks, or even know with any degree of certainty when they happen and what went wrong.
I just can't believe people keep making the cognitive error in your second paragraph. Nassim Taleb wrote a famous whole book on this error! The Black Swan looks quite affordable on Amazon right now....
We do not know the base rate of nuclear power accidents- they are not something that's evenly or smoothly distributed. We do not know the 'expected damage' from accidents. We also did not know the base rate of financial crashes, spectacular terrorist attacks, or deadly pandemics, etc. They are not something that's plotted on a regular distribution. They are tail risks that occur rarely, but to absolutely devastating effect. I'm not even as so much anti-nuclear as anti-this cognitive error of 'oh this devastating tail risk can be plotted on a normal distribution'
Even if the probability distribution of nuclear power accident size is nice and well-behaved, not something crazy like an exponential-transformed Cauchy distribution (that has a name, right, where the logarithm of your random variable is Cauchy-distributed? Do its first and second moments converge?) we don't have enough samples to estimate it with much confidence. Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, and that's pretty much it. We know we can keep nuclear accidents down to one every few thousand reactor years, but three data points is not enough to make very firm conclusions on how bad they are.
It might depend a lot on how future society develops. We know Chernobyl was much worse than it needed to be for reasons entirely extrinsic to the reactor itself, having everything to do with how the society around it was organized. We also know that a double-digit percentage of US voters are convinced that the covid vaccine is a plot to poison them by a conspiracy of pedophiles who sacrifice children to harvest their adrenochrome. Giving such a society a nuclear power plant is like giving a machete to a monkey.
The issue is that it is a false equivalency. Financial crashes, terrorist attacks or deadly pandemics are something that spread globally. They are something that spread within a complex system and have a very high cap on the amount of damage that they can cause.
But nuclear reactors are not a global web. So if one goes wrong, it does not 'infect' all the others. And the damage that one reactor going wrong can do, is quite limited.
If we have to discuss each other's cognitive errors, I think you may be committing scope neglect.
Chernobyl was quite close to the maximum possible badness of a nuclear reactor accident i.e. about 30% of the volatile fission products were dumped into the ecosystem. From some perspectives, it might reach "absolutely devastating" - but while that basically maxes out how bad you can *describe* something as, it does not max out the possible badness of an arbitrary event. A Chernobyl every 10 years - you yourself said "rarely" - would be a tragedy but ultimately a minor inconvenience to a typical human being.
The maximum possible badness of biotechnology accidents is the destruction of the Earth's ecosystem in its entirety, and the maximum possible badness specifically of engineering human pathogens is ~99.9% of humanity killed (a parasite will essentially always go extinct before its host), which by definition is maximally bad for a typical human being.
> If we have to discuss each other's cognitive errors, I think you may be committing scope neglect.
I take it as part of the point of commenting here: to discuss apparent flaws in each other's reasoning, so long as it's done dispassionately.
> A Chernobyl every 10 years - you yourself said "rarely" - would be a tragedy but ultimately a minor inconvenience to a typical human being.
Just the phrase "A Chernobyl every 10 years" spurs me to think. How frequently would Chernobyl-scale disasters have to take place for you to change your mind about nuclear power? Yearly?
What are the estimates one uses to compare the costs of Chernobyl-scale disasters with the costs of the climate change? (This is far from my field, explaining my ignorance of where to start.)
Calculating fatalities from Chernobyl and from global warming are both hard, because Chernobyl's kills are almost all from cancer (which can't easily be attributed to Chernobyl because there's a high base rate and because nobody knows the dose-response curve at very low radiation doses) and because almost everything from global warming *can* be dealt with nonfatally (primarily by moving home) but the question is how much *will* be in developing countries.
In terms of displacements it's easier. About 117,000 people had to be evacuated from the Chernobyl exclusion zone; most of the land area of Bangladesh is likely to go underwater due to global-warming-related sea level rise (timeframe strongly dependent on future emissions and on what happens in West Antarctica, but probably somewhere within the next couple of centuries) so most of its (currently) 161 million population will need to be moved at some point to higher ground (presumably outside Bangladesh). The amount of the world's population within a couple of metres of sea level is much larger than that, but that's mostly in coastal cities which can conceivably be protected with dikes (particularly in richer countries e.g. Europe/North America/Australia).
With monetary costs I don't even know where to start; I'm no economist and global warming in particular is tricky to estimate.
Note also that global warming is not what I was comparing Chernobyl to in my previous post in this chain.
A nuclear power plant has a certain amount of energy contained within it. It's not physically possible for, say, a nuclear power plant to blow up the Earth. It's not even possible for it to experience a nuclear explosion in the style of an atomic bomb. I'm comfortable with only worrying about risks that are physically possible.
There's been a sort of continuous murmur of speculation that there *was* a prompt criticality incident during Chernobyl, based in part on isotope patterns in the fallout, and to a lesser extent on the challenge it's always been to explain *both* explosions, only one of which can be easily attributed to H2. There's also the strange report of the nearby fisherman who reported (before they snuffed it) a "blue flash" a the time of the first explosion, which is an occasional signature of prompt criticality excursions. Still seems a little unlikely, but a fascinating possibility.
SL-1 and K-431 also went prompt-critical. Should be noted that moderated prompt-critical is still substantially slower (and thus achieves less reaction before blowing itself apart) than fast prompt-critical - all nuclear bombs use fast neutrons for this reason (one of the most important insights of the Manhattan Project).
Sure, but the idea is that the excursion at Chernobyl was enough to cause the first explosion and blow a stream of radionuclides into the stratosphere. Impressive, if true.
Not sure I understand what you mean by "moderated" prompt critical. The whole point of "prompt" critical is that you're critical with just the fast neutrons, you don't need the decay neutrons. Can you explain what you mean further?
Um, they're pretty predictable, actually. There's plenty of theory about what radioactivity does to the environment and to people, and we have one RL example in the form of Chernobyl (which was a full meltdown with the core open to the atmosphere for days afterward). Wind patterns are tricky to predict in advance and can affect local damage (within clearly-defined bounds), but that's about it.
You might like 'Drawing on the artist within' by Betty Edwards. It contains several lessons and exercises to work through to engage the students' 'aesthetic sense'.
My references are not more modern than the 18th century, so take that with all caution; Hogarth's "The Analysis of Beauty", particularly his theory of the Line of Beauty, an s-shaped curve:
As a similar tech guy, but better with stuff than math: Just do shit. Make a bunch of garbage. Eventually you'll run out of new mistakes to make and large numbers your way into something good.
Also, I find that thinking subtractively helps, if that makes sense. In tech, I'm usually thinking about adding/changing stuff. With more artistic shit, I think about what I can take away without damaging the intended effect.
I've tried classes and they didn't teach me anything. On the other hand, being able to watch an expert work helped lots.
The fact that you're asking such a weird, pointed, discipline-spanning question--it kind of predisposes me to think you'd make a good artist. But the answer is definitely no. If someone could even begin to nail down a predictive, unifying theory of aesthetics, that'd be one of the greatest advances in the history of thought. I can't think of anyone who seriously believed they'd come up with such a thing, and I doubt it's possible. (Maybe the closest would be the archaic philosophers who thought they'd universalized meaning, like John Wilkins or Ramon Llull.)
Most beginner artists get led around by their inhibitions and self-censoring impulses. There's this powerful impulse not to carry out your ideas for fear that they'll suck. But the flow state you're looking for is pretty much a form of play, which is orthogonal to considerations of sucking. It's just the thing that kids do, and then lose, and then spend ridiculous amounts of time reacquiring if they want to be artists. I'm coming from a position of writing poetry and fiction, calling that art, but I think the principle is basically the same. You want your play to become so powerful--not good, powerful--that it bends other people's reality. That's something that you can attain through practice, but it's not something you can learn through studying a system.
If what I'm saying about flow and play strikes a chord for you, I can't recommend Lynda Barry's work highly enough. She makes these deceptively simple comic strip-memoir-collage pieces that really dig into the phenomenology of creativity. Her book "What It Is" is more about writing, "Picture This" is more about drawing, but they're both directly about what you're asking.
Color theory is as close to an actual science of aesthetics as I can think of. Choosing the right colors can be an enormous challenge, even for artists. Understanding color theory can help you avoid the problem of "these colors looked nice separately but they look terrible once I put them together". I'd suggest reading about color theory and paying attention to the color schema of art you find appealing.
Examples of how color theory actually helps:
-Complimentary color fields appear brighter to our eyes when they are adjacent. This means, if you create a necklace with brilliant blue and brilliant orange beads, they will look so brilliant it risks becoming garish and overstimulating. If you want to feature those two colors together, you can alternatively string brilliant orange beads alongside blue-grey beads. The orange beads will make the blue-grey beads appear more blue, and the blue-grey beads will make the orange beads look brighter.
-Shadows are more colorful than you expect. Try zooming in on the shadows in a photograph. You'll see a lot of greens, blues, purples in those shadows. If you study how the colors of shadows pair with the colors of objects in the light, you can come up with some nice color combinations that give a sense of foreground and background that feels natural without resorting to boring grey tones. This concept is helpful in crafts as well as painting etc.
-Depending on your medium, it might be helpful for you to learn how to mix or layer colors.
Study study study study. Just look and appreciate lots of good looking stuff. And really bask in it and enjoy every detail and part. Practice practice practice practice. And, yes, copy copy copy copy. Maybe do so across multiple mediums as you get better.
No, there isn’t a science, and if there was it wouldn’t work.
I should clarify - there are absolutely “sciences” for each individual artwork, as in common sets of skills and ideas to learn. But they aren’t organized around set theory or computation like math is, there are a many different theories with different goals and ideas, and there’s no unifying rationalized factor that is unitary like scimathtech
My advice would be to copy things you like. This (I believe) is a huge, widely misunderstood aspect of all the arts. Everything Is A Remix, as Kirby Ferguson put it (check out his film of that name if you haven’t). Nobody quite knows what makes something beautiful, so everyone learns by copying things they admire
In a drawing class years ago we were doing an exercise where we drew the model in a single long line, never lifting our pencil from the paper. Instructor said, "feel that line, blowing off the end of the pencil . . ." That's not science, but it was very helpful.
Art courses usually work their way through the elements and principles of design, with activities working with arranging each element and principle, or pairs thereof. For instance, value and contrast -- depending on the kind of course, students might work with these through shaded still life drawing (I recommend charcoal; it's faster), with different lighting arrangements.
I can't think of a book on this off the top of my head -- art teachers just universally teach them, but there are plenty of short videos about them. My current favorite visual arts resource for adults is New Masters Academy video courses, which focus more on realism and classicism.
_Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain_ was very popular for a while. It taught how to actually see shapes and angles and light and dark rather than simplified geometrical versions, which is what people tend to start with.
_Zen and the Art of Seeing_ teaches much the same thing, but from a more mystic point of view.
_How to See Color and Paint It_ is very good about seeing the specificity of color-- again, it's tempting to assume a thing "is" a color, but what you actually see involves a lot of highlights and shadows and reflected color from nearby things.
Also, there's no such thing as grey, brown, black, and white. Well, maybe there's some high tech true black now, but for ordinary things, the duller colors are muted hues, and a slightly blueish gray isn't the same thing as a slightly greenish or purplish gray.
Reading _How to See Color_ puts me in an altered state for a few days when I see color in much more detail.
Also (I think it's in this book, but it might be in _Why Blue and Yellow Don't Make Green_), while it's possible to get a true yellow pigment, reds and blues are a little warm or a little cool. You can get a nice purple from a cool red and a cool blue, but if you mix a warm red or blue with a cool red or blue, you get mud.
There must be resources about how to create images of imaginary things, but I don't know what they are.
I don't know what your situation for buying books is, but both of them have exercises-- you might find that you're getting a decent amount of fun for your money.
The last open thread had a discussion about the relative merits of Imperial vs metric units.
One North American unit of measure not covered was the ‘ton of refrigeration.’ It reaches new heights of impracticality IMO.
It is defined as the rate of heat transfer that results in the freezing or melting of 1 short ton (2,000 lb; 907 kg) of pure ice at 0 °C (32 °F) in 24 hours.
I did some work modeling heat transfer in custom air conditioning units in the 1990’s. The idea was to predict the performance of a massive AC unit before it was actually manufactured and sent to a lab. Think of cooling the Twin Cities Mall of America. They were one of our clients.
The Application and Design Engineers I was working with loved to throw the term “tons of cooling” around.
My least favourite heavily-used unit is the kilowatt-hour. You've taken a perfectly good unit of energy (kJ), divided it by one unit of time (seconds) and then multiplied it by another unit of time (hours) to get a different unit of energy.
I don't understand why battery capacity is often displayed as electric charge (whether it's mAh, Ah, or even coulombs), rather than as energy (kJ or Wh).
Because it makes it easy to figure out roughly how long it can supply a given current, or how fast it will charge, et cetera. The only missing part that turns mA*h into an energy is the voltage of the battery, since V*A*s = J. But the voltage of the battery is something that isn't interesting in general, and if you forced people to look it up to figure out how long a given battery will last it would be annoying. So it's folded into the measurement of capacity, which is better stated as "mA-h at such-and-such a voltage."
It's not unlike the fact that we quote weight in kg even though weight is properly measured in newtons. Since we're almost always working in Earth's gravity field, we just automatically assume multiplication or division by 9.8 m/s^2 whenever necessary.
If the battery is powering a circuit through a linear regulator, or it's an almost-constant-voltage battery driving a resistive load, mAh is what counts. OTOH buck/boost converters have been commonplace and cheap longer than rechargeable batteries have!
It's probably an artifact of how the battery capacity numbers tend to be used, beyond the most basic "bigger number = more capacity" level.
If you have a device that uses 100 mA of current at 12 volts, and you're powering it with a 12v 2 Ah (2000 mAh) battery, then it's trivial to calculate that it'll use up a full charge in 10 hours. If you have an 86.4 kJ battery, however, you need to do a little more math.
Either way, you need to specify the voltage of both the battery and the device, since they need to match: undervolt a device's power supply too much and it won't work, and overvolt it too much and you risk frying it.
Why is the device's consumption expressed in (milli)amperes rather than watts then? For consumer devices it's usually expressed in watts in my experience.
You indeed need to know both in many situations, but specifying power (or, for battery capacity, energy) and voltage instead of current (or charge) and voltage makes more sense to me. If I just want to compare the energy cost of two devices, it's enough to know their power usage. And if I remember the approximate power usage of a device, it's enough to know the energy capacity of a battery to know how long it can power the device.
If it's something like a microcontroller, it can't very well have a buck/boost converter built into it, because that involves an inductor, which won't fit inside the chip package. (Normally.) So there's a lot of microcontrollers and other chips that are happy to run on 1.8 volts or 5.5 volts or anything in between, but that will use almost exactly the same current to do the same job regardless of what voltage it's at. If you power it at 5.5 volts, it's burning 4 of those volts in an internal linear regulator.
I'm not saying it's not stupid. Joules are what I care about too: is this thing 8000 picojoules per instruction or 40? But the datasheet gives mA/MHz, so I gotta suck it up. Thank god for units(1).
I've usually seen amps or mA for DC-powered devices, and for power tools. I see watts more for desktop computers and small appliances.
I suspect it's a matter of convenience and convention: if the voltage is known (and it almost always is), then knowing the current will tell you the power and vice versa. If heat output is a major design factor, either because getting rid of waste heat is a problem (computers, incandescent or halogen light bulbs, etc) or because heat output is the point of the device (microwaves, space heaters, etc), then wattage makes sense because heat output can also be measured in watts. Otherwise, I think from an electrical engineering perspective things tend to be specced in terms of voltage and current, not voltage and power.
I'm not sure what's going on with power tools. For a lot of those, mechanical power output is a major design consideration, but at least in the US that seems to generally be specified in terms of horsepower instead of watts, while power input is specified in terms of a combination of amps and volts.
Your make the same mistake that metric puritans suffer from - they ignore actual human uses of measurement systems. The KWH, while mathematically convoluted, is very useful for thinking about how much an actual appliance is going to cost to run.
One problem with kWh is that (around here) electricity prices are shown in kWh, but natural gas prices are shown in MJ, making it harder to compare their cost.
This shows the problem with not using the same unit everywhere. Of course we could standardize to use kWh as the measure of energy everywhere, but that would likely come with its own problems.
What are "metric puritans" and can you give examples of what you think is wrong with them?
Metric units are fine for scientific use and even engineering, but Imperial measures are generally easier for day to day human use. It makes sense for people to be conversant in both systems, but there are people who seem to see Imperial measures as some sort of untidy throwback to be eradicated rather than a set of rational measures that many people like to use.
Why are imperial units easier to use day-to-day? As a Hungarian, I've grown up using metric units for day-to-day use, and there is nothing inconvenient about them. Indeed, imperial units sound much less convenient as their conversion factors aren't powers of 10.
Now I easily believe that the transition from one system of units to another is inconvenient, and imperial units are easier *for people who have grown up using imperial units*. However, this doesn't make imperial units better in a general sense, and the transition benefits the subsequent generations. I'm glad that my ancestors have made the transition from whatever customary units were in use here to metric units.
Because imperial units are based around highly composite numbers, which makes fractional parts easy to compute in your head. For example, 1 ft = 12 in, so 1/2 ft = 6 in, 1/3 ft = 4 in, 1/4 ft = 3 in, 1/6 ft = 2 in, 3/4 ft = 9 in, 2/3 ft = 8 in, and so on. Try doing that in your head with meters. Since 10 is only divisible evenly by 2 and 5 (and who ever needs 5ths?) you almost never end up with even numbers of a smaller unit when you divide, which means you end up trying to do long division in your head, or needing to reach for a calculator. Conventional units were invented at a time when people needed to do almost all measurement math in their heads.
I use SI entirely in my professional life, but I also do carpentry at home, and English units are much easier. I can mentally divide a 7 ft board into 3rds in a snap (7 x 12 in / 3 = 7 x 4 in = 28 in). If I had to work in meters all the time I'd have to have a calculator handy all the time.
Good question, the answer is basically because they evolved to cover typical human transactions. An imperial pound, for example, was the weight of a loaf of bread sufficient for an adult man for a day. A foot is an obvious example of a length derived from a familiar object which sections human scale objects more conveniently than a metre - which is simply too long. (Note that rulers are typically sold in 30cm lengths i.e. 1 foot.)
As for arithmetic, you will note that imperial units are often based on highly composite numbers to make mental arithmetic *easier*.
The same is true of pre-decimal currencies. A British pound was 240 pennies as that is a highly composite number. A decimal pound cannot be divided by many human-typical factors, like 3 or 6 or 8.
The same is true of the old Hungarian Gulden which was based on 60 Kruezer - again 60 is a highly composite number, and so superior for dividing and mental arithmetic.
It is not a coincidence that the Babylonians divided a circle into 360 degrees either. That too is a highly composite number.
Once you understand the logic of older units, you will realise that they make a lot of sense.
To hesitantly come to the defense of this admittedly bizarre unit, I'd like to point out we have a lot of household appliances that use some fraction or low integers of a kilowatt of power. And an hour is a much more convenient unit of time than seconds for tracking something which you use on a daily basis for any extended length of time. So if I run a 1.5 kW heater for 4 hours a day, I use 6kWh of energy. Which costs me about $0.60 dollars. You can't get much more convenient than that. I would argue it certainly is more convenient than saying that I use 1.5 kJ*4 hr*3600 s/hr = 21.6 MJ of energy.
“ At press time, sources had toppled their chairs and fled from the room after Campbell had begun describing acre’s etymological origin from the proto-Germanic word for field.”
The original definition of a furlong is "one furrow long" = the approximate distance an ox can pull a plow before needing to take a short rest, which is when you turn the plow.
Media is becoming increasingly addictive and entertaining. A lot of people are addicted to their own form of media whether it be Netflix, twitter, video games, reddit or a forum for ACX readers. I think things will only get more addicting. It will become harder and harder to not get sucked into entertainment and focus on the task at hand.
Will the highly successful people of the future be not only smart but extremely conscientious about not getting addicted to media?
I think they won't be that conscientious about avoiding it: I think they will have preferences that common forms of media are bad at satisfying.
To analogize it to another domain: people who don't like sugar or eating in general are less likely to end up obese, regardless of their conscientiousness.
Agreed. If it's easier to have more fun now than in the past, and people are therefore more likely to choose to have more fun, who's to say that they're wrong?
Take other people's judgments out of it. Plenty of people will report they really would like to stop playing video games, or watching pornography, or spending eight hours a day on social media, but they haven't been able to and feel they can't. People supply the word addiction to describe being in this situation all the time, without being prompted or scolded by others. Not everyone who has a serious addiction retains the distinction between "what they want" and "what the addiction compels them to do"--lots of people with addictions don't want to stop. But if the environment has a new behavioral affordance, and people start saying "I want to stop and I can't" about it, my suspicion goes way up that something in the addiction-compulsion neighborhood is afoot. It goes up further if I can plausibly spell out how the architecture of those affordances--variable reinforcement of small rewards, constant novelty--could interact with reward-learning mechanisms and produce repeat behaviors whether or not it's a good idea, the central problem of all addictions.
I wrote some code this morning, which was great, and then I wasted most of the day getting flamed by a certain social group by advocating an opinion I knew they'd reject. This is not intelligent behavior.
Videogames and shows are much like social media: "the only winning move is not to play". ACX reading is the major outlier in your list of addictive content.
I assume perhaps incorrectly that rationalist == making correct decisions to succeed at an otherwise difficult task. For hedonism you probably needn't think too far beyond the grubby details of hand on genitalia.
Then they will probably not achieve the high level of success (in whatever field of endeavor) implied by OP's comment. To the OP point, highly successful people in the future will be much the same as highly successful people in the present: they will define success for some endeavor, then ruthlessly prune everything which does not contribute to that success. Otherwise, they'll get beaten by people who are more relentless. Whether or not this mode of life is morally commendable or even conducive to human flourishing is a separate issue.
Psychologically addictive is not a fake thing. Stopping smoking is not terribly difficult. The physical withdrawal is not much worse than coffee. Staying stopped is far more problematic.
There's a lot more worldbuilding and fascination with worldbuilding than there used to be. There used to just be Tolkien, and now there's an amazing amount.
Admittedly, not everyone is interested in world-building.
My impression is that sports are no more addictive than they used to be, and maybe a little less.
Whatever you're fascinated by, it's easier to find other people who are fascinated by it.
There's access to more media. In ancient days, you could watch I Love Lucy when your television station broadcasted it. Now you can go over every show whenever you feel like it.
Back then you didn't have all of that in your pocket. Okay, maybe a Walkman can fit in a large pocket, but not everyone had one on them 24/7 like we do with smartphones today. It's hard to be truly bored nowadays. And our attention is controlled much more efficiently by sophisticated algorithms today than it was in the 80s. I'd say media is getting much more addicting, almost beyond a doubt.
Consider advancement of the art in the realm of videogame design alone: enthusiastic wargamers and tabletop RPG fans (I do not judge or even critique their competence at programming) gave way to college-trained specialists; a ruleset made by one person over some days is superseded by one created by a team of engineers regularly testing and tweaking their product. As everything technical about videogames is self-evidently progressing, we would completely expect the brain goodfeel effect loops of videogames to advance as well. You shouldn't need a study from credentialed experts to tell you something you can both perceive and reasonably explain.
Nope, not on me. I could probably go find some, but so could you. And then we could probably both find papers arguing the opposite. It's a really hard question to answer using uncontrolled observational studies. I can't imagine any formal papers would be convincing enough to override my convictions based on my daily experience today versus memories of my daily experience in 2001. And sure, memory is fairly unreliable, but only to an extent.
Before the pervasiveness of mirrors, did people have out-of-body experiences where they "saw themselves?" The phenomena of seeing yourself from the ceiling probably takes your self-image and divorces it from positional data, as would happen in a dream. But if you have no visual concept of the self, doing so seems impossible.
In Maupassant's Bel-Ami, there's a very good passage where the narcissistic protagonist sees himself in a full length mirror for the first time. He seems to be almost out of body, where he doesn't recognise the handsome man as himself at first.
My guess is yes, on account of the fact that out-of-body experiences have been initiated in an epilepsy patient by stimulating the right angular gyrus. https://www.nature.com/articles/419269a
The running theory seems to be that out-of-body experiences result from the brain's failure to integrate the sensory information we normally use to balance and position ourselves in space.
Also, people can still sense and identify with their own bodies without ever seeing themselves in a mirror. I suppose they just have to guess what they look like. I'd be curious to know how someone who's never seen herself in a mirror imagines herself.
No, not often. You need still, deep water or still, shallow water and ideal lighting conditions for that. Nature usually isn't that obliging. Though it would be interesting to study early records of e.g. Native American tribes in West Virginia, where there is no standing water at all, and see if there are any interesting psychological consequences from never or almost never seeing your own face.
And even when looking into still water you will be looking straight down which distorts your face strangely (try it with a mirror, it gets worse as you get older).
But do you have any *evidence* that the marks you have transmitted to my screen have meaning? Or is that just an *assumption* you've made due to your intellectual *flaccidity*?
I don't think people here are intellectual flaccid and I have never said that. However, I do think people here are mostly biased against Marxist thought and haven't really done the reading required to be able to understand leftist thought in general.
Pretty sure he’s serious, to a significant extent. His Reddit account is: https://ii.reddit.com/user/MarxBroshevik (spotted in sneerclub a while ago). He seems to genuinely know and care about Marxism and related history and literature as that account demonstrates.
Wasn't there some chatbot that presented itself as some Ukrainian preteen learning English, and slipped by a Turing test that way? Seems like if you present your AI as being someone as disagreeable as possible, not having to conform to human subtleties makes passing a Turing test a lot easier. Seems kind of related to Poe's Law.
Just a fun whimsical thing I found about Dungeons and Dragons. For most objects listed in the store, their price can be estimated within a factor of 2 error by looking it up on amazon and converting $10->1 gold piece
I could believe that for mundane items, but I don't think it could be right for most weapons, could it? Functional swords are pretty expensive these days.
Functional swords are a couple hundred dollars these days if you don't mind having them stamped e.g. "Made in the Philippines". Seems to fit the pattern.
Depends on the sword. A good one might cost a bit but several years back I was looking for a sword for a Halloween costume and realized that I could get a real one for just $10. It's cheap and not particularly sharp and I don't know how far I would trust in in a fight but on the other hand modern steel is probably better than what a lot of medieval weaponry was made of.
I haven't played for a couple years, but afaik that's never really been a thing. Magic items are rare enough that most people would go their whole lives without having one. It'd be like looking at the hardware store for a particle accelerator, if someone had to spend an appreciable part of their life essence to build a particle accelerator.
I mean, most people will never own a sailboat, but you can look at catalogues and go into stores for them.
I feel like in 3.5 at least, it was pretty normal to assume you could either buy or commission magic items in a sufficiently large city - the game seemed balanced around that, giving you suggested gold per level rather than magic items per level as it is now. Of course, it always depends on your setting and GM, ymmv.
Current version core rules are you can't really buy magic items from a catalogue or emporium, harder to find than that. This would be for mundane items
Yeah, the "prices" given for magic items are a vague guidelines for negotiating what for anyone but a PC adventurer will be once-in-many-lifetimes transactions that involve an exciting adventure just getting buyer and seller in the same room, or for creating high-level characters ex nihilo where the DM and/or rulebook says "now chose X GP-equivalent of Neat Stuff for your character"
Well, yes, particularly the absurd 1/10 lb gold pieces of OD&D. A realistic medieval "gold piece" would be the proto-Italian Florin, at 3.5 grams or 0.11 troy oz. Still about $200 at today's prices.
If you don't like Florins, the competing Northern European gold coin of the age was the Guilder, of similar weight. But you already knew William Goldman had a sense of humor.
For utilitarians: Is there really any justification for tax money being spent on things like fine arts, libraries, local parks, national parks, etc. when it is still relatively inexpensive to save lives in the developing world? Do you support redirecting all of that money toward saving lives?
If you were a perfect utilitarian, then yes, if you believe that feeding the hungry is more important than having symphonies, you would stop funding symphonies in order to have more money to feed the hungry. But this is your own belief; Jeremy Bentham isn't standing behind you with a gun making you believe it. If you think feeding the hungry is more important than listening to symphonies, why would you be listening to symphonies instead of feeding the hungry in the first place?
Furthermore, utilitarianism has nothing specifically against symphonies - in fact, symphonies probably make a lot of people happy and make the world a better place. People just bring that up as a hot-button issue in order to sound scary. There are a thousand things you might want to consider devoting to feeding the hungry before you start worrying about symphonies. The money spent on plasma TVs, alcohol, and stealth bombers would all be up there.
I think if we ever got a world utilitarian enough that we genuinely had to worry about losing symphonies, we would have a world utilitarian enough that we wouldn't. By which I mean that if every government and private individual in the world who might fund a symphony was suddenly a perfect utilitarian dedicated to solving the world hunger issue among other things, their efforts in other spheres would be able to solve the world hunger issue long before any symphonies had to be touched.
Efficient charity is a big issue for utilitarians, but remember that if you're doing it right, each step you take towards consequentialism should result in greater satisfaction of your own moral goals and a better world by your own standards.
I don't particularly see how it responds to the question. "I think if we ever got a world utilitarian enough that we genuinely had to worry about losing symphonies, we would have a world utilitarian enough that we wouldn't" is a response to something else.
The question is: Is there really any justification for tax money being spent on things like fine arts, libraries, local parks, national parks, etc. when it is still relatively inexpensive to save lives in the developing world? Do you support redirecting all of that money toward saving lives?
My response, even as a non-utilitarian would just be: No. Yes.
Replace "symphonies" with "things like fine arts, libraries, local parks, national parks, etc." and it will be the answer to this question.
If we are talking about spherical example in the vacuum where we can either save lives or make fine art than we should save lives. But it's important to understand how artificial and improbable this scenario is.
First of all, because there are probably other things I would divert that money from before those nice things - things like military or advertising.
Second of all, because government spending doesn't really work on a simple this-or-that budget the way you imply - 'Anything we can do, we can afford.'
These utilitarians you speak of, they’re still human beings are they not?
A proposal like this seems perfectly suited for automata, but if you actually want to keep moving this sort of zero sum utilitarian agenda forward with these humans, it will be necessary to satisfy needs that are non materialistically squishy.
Let's say you have a choice between what you can send to Yemen for humanitarian relief. You can send medical supplies and food or you can send artwork. Imagine they have are heavily lacking in art in Yemen, which would you send?
""Bread and Roses" is a political slogan as well as the name of an associated poem and song. It originated from a speech given by American women's suffrage activist Helen Todd; a line in that speech about "bread for all, and roses too" inspired the title of the poem Bread and Roses by James Oppenheim. The poem was first published in The American Magazine in December 1911, with the attribution line "'Bread for all, and Roses, too'—a slogan of the women in the West." The poem has been translated into other languages and has been set to music by at least three composers.
The phrase is commonly associated with the successful textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, between January and March 1912, now often referred to as the "Bread and Roses strike". The slogan pairing bread and roses, appealing for both fair wages and dignified conditions, found resonance as transcending "the sometimes tedious struggles for marginal economic advances" in the "light of labor struggles as based on striving for dignity and respect", as Robert J. S. Ross wrote in 2013."
“ Is there really any justification for tax money being spent on things like fine arts, libraries, local parks, national parks, etc. when it is still relatively inexpensive to save lives in the developing world?”
If we didn’t have fine arts, libraries and parks we would be a less happy a most likely less productive society.
Let’s just consider one of these things, libraries. If the country became less literate how long would it be before we didn’t have the knowledge to produce life saving exports?
Our happy and well recreated citizens are the ones that have the time and energy to dream and think of new solutions to old problems.
A country living with monkish austerity would have more income to alleviate suffering for a while. But I doubt our life saving innovations and productivity enhancements would come with the same frequency they do now.
Apparently the US was importing pride flags and modern art teachers into Afghanistan as late as Summer 2021, so I guess you got your real life answer.
My answer would be that if they had the survival supplies they needed, we would want to send them quality of life supplies in addition or instead. Hierarchy of needs and all that.
Not to say that "art" in the modern western sense would increase the qualify of life in Yemen. We were stupid to send modern art concepts to Afghanistan.
What's your "non-utilitarian" justification for tax money being spent on fine arts, etc.? How can you decide how much money to spend on them without utility theory?
I don't think you understand what utilitarianism is. "Utility" doesn't mean anything like "useful for preserving life", or "productive of material artifacts", or anything like that. The original example that Bentham gave of something that provided "utility" was happiness. So all those things have utility. Anything that someone wants, has utility.
I don't get this accusation that I've gotten before that I don't get utilitarianism. Typically, utilitarianism tells us that the correct choice to make is the one that maximizes utility. So, we go about making comparisons to make the correct choice. Usually people see preventing unnecessary deaths for a few thousand bucks as one of the best ways to increase utility in the world. Just because anything somebody wants has utility doesn't mean it is the correct thing to fund. Comparisons must be made.
My argument is basically that a good utilitarian should spend $0 on arts and parks while people die premature deaths which could've been prevented for not very much money.
If there was a trolley and it was going to kill ten people or destroy a park worth $35,200 (11 * $3200, rough equivalent of a life saved) are you going to pick the park? How many human lives is a park worth?
The trolley problem is just an illustrative example of fundamental utilitarian principles. It helps to explain the theory in a vacuum, but I wonder whether it does more harm than good. In the real world, consequences are manifold and mostly indirect. Which kinda sucks, and makes the practice of utilitarianism difficult, but that's reality. Like it or not.
Indeed. But that still raises the question of whether spending on arts, parks, libraries, etc. actually results in enough happiness per dollar to justify those dollars not instead being spent on programs to alleviate extreme suffering such as starvation and neglected tropical diseases. Art can improve one's wellbeing. But so can food and medicine.
In the extreme case, if totally suspending tax funding for these things fully eliminated art and parks from society, I would not think it the utilitarian thing to do. In my experience, such things, art in particular, are some of the greatest joys in life. Living without them would be a dreary life filled with nothing but joyless toil for survival. Of course, that isn't actually the case, and plenty of art will be produced regardless of tax expenditure.
My answer would be this: I don't know enough about the effects of tax money going to such things to have much confidence in either extreme, and I suspect *some* level of art spending is the optimal utilitarian thing to do. I think the utilitarian thing to do in this situation would be to focus your time and mental energy on more predictably consequential issues instead.
>In the extreme case, if totally suspending tax funding for these things fully eliminated art and parks from society, I would not think it the utilitarian thing to do. In my experience, such things, art in particular, are some of the greatest joys in life
If I have a slider scale from $0 - $1 trillion of tax payer money. If you put the slider at 1 trillion it all goes to art, none to saving people. If you put it at 0 it all goes to saving people, none to art. Where would you put the slider roughly? I would put it at 0 because even the last few dollars of art funding are still not more valuable than human lives. I don't see why this isn't more agreed upon.
As should have been abundantly clear from my above comment, I'm not well enough informed about the effects of tax expenditure on arts and the utilitarian value it produces to have any sort of confident answer to exactly where the slider should go. I think it's probable there would be significant negative emergent consequences of making it literally $0, but I do think it should be quite low (which it already is), and it would probably be worth making it incrementally lower until any sufficiently bad consequence of lowering it were made apparent.
My main point, however, is that utilitarians should prioritize enacting changes with more obviously significant improvements to wellbeing. I personally don't find it worth getting into the nitty-gritty of these edge-case thought experiments. Interesting as they may be to you, they waste time and mental energy and are distractions from the more achievable goals of utilitarianism.
You probably don't see why this isn't more agreed upon because you aren't willing to engage with the full depth of consideration that good utilitarianism demands. It seems that you'd rather rashly assert that the answer from first approximation is correct and say your job is done.
"You probably don't see why this isn't more agreed upon because you aren't willing to engage with the full depth of consideration that good utilitarianism demands. It seems that you'd rather rashly assert that the answer from first approximation is correct and say your job is done."
I'm willing to engage and talk about what the correct answer is. I want to hear people's perspective. I have made my position clear but I haven't said my job is done.
Okay, well I hope you're less certain of your initial assertion now. I've stated reasons that I think are sufficient to make a reasonable person acknowledge that the answer isn't as straightforward as "tax expenditure on arts, parks, libraries, etc. should be literally $0, and that answer is sufficiently obvious that it makes me wonder why most utilitarians don't plainly agree with it". You talk about a "correct answer" here as if you expect to find a utilitarian who will argue that it's $487 or $1,202,567 or something. It would be foolish to try establishing confidence in an answer as specific as that. I think my answer of "low but not $0, and probably worth making incrementally lower until any negative consequences become obvious" was a pretty good one. I also already stated my reason for believing that to be a superior answer to "literally $0" above.
And I don't care to go any further down this rabbit hole than that, as per my explanations above.
And that doesn't just mean things. Friendship has utility. World peace has utility. All that "utilitarianism" really means is that you're going to try to find some principled way of deciding, for instance, how much to spend on national parks, how much to spend on art, how much to spend on medical research, and how much to spend on tanks. This requires devising a function that can tell you whether 2 national parks, 3 BBC channels, $40 billion per year on cancer research, and 1,700 new tanks is better or worse than 1 national park, 5 BBC channels, $60 billion on cancer research, and 1,000 new tanks.
If, for any possible number of different "goods", you have a way of deciding which is better, that means you have a utility function, and that means you're a utilitarian. If you're not a utilitarian, that means there are different possible sets of goods which you can't decide between.
I wanted to make the point that human lives, form a utility perspective, are much more valuable than parks.
As an example: If you value 1 acre of grass for children to play on more than 10 children's lives, I think your utility function is off. Would you agree with that?
And if I said "yes", you'd reply by saying that we could save 10 lives in Africa for the cost of a 1-acre public park?
The problem is that your question contains some embedded wrong assumptions:
- that all children everywhere should have the same value in our utility function, regardless of time, place, and circumstances
- that every acre of grass everywhere should have the same value to us
If these assumptions were true, then obviously we should spend ALL of our money buying things for Africans, and nothing at all in the USA. (Fun "fact": Most of the poverty in the world today (well, approximately 50%, by certain monetary measures which are really hard to interpret) is in Africa. This is mostly due to the spectacular--not /complete/, but spectacular compared to world history--job that Asia and Central and South America have done at reducing poverty over the past 40 years.)
(There's an interesting short-story thought-experiment about this problem called "The Salvation of Zachary Baumkletterer", which permanently traumatized me when I was maybe 8 years old.)
Non-utilitarian ethical systems typically assume a Platonist ontology, in which the value of anything (or anyone!) is a fixed, eternal constant determined by its Platonic category, without regard to context. Platonists call people who take context into account in morality "relativists", and imply that's a bad thing.
Platonists hate the idea of placing numeric values on things at all. That's why, AFAIK, literally every culture and every intellectual, everywhere in the world and throughout history, which/who has held a Platonic ontology, has also hated money, the free market, utilitarian ethics, and the middle class. Most also hate democracy, which is a simple free-market system applied to politics; merchants and trade; and liberty for all. These things are highly correlated because they all reinforce each other. This entire matrix of liberty, money, free markets, utilitarianism, democracy, science, and social mobility is the "system" which Marxists say is too strong to ever be taken down by peaceful means. It is too strong to be easily taken down only because these things are so obviously good to people who want freedom from repression more than they want to repress themselves and others.
So Platonists object to the very idea of even placing numeric values on things. What you're supposed to do, they say, is to rank every kind of being and thing and value on a Great Chain of Being, from the greatest (God) down to the least (evil, or the non-existence of Good), and always give the greater things precedence over the lesser things, without regard to number. (This is not coincidentally the philosophical justification for absolute monarchy and centralized government.) So you're not supposed to say that a $2 billion airplane is worth more than the life of its pilot, or that a million acres of rainforest is worth more than the life of a child, or that the suffering of 9 billion chickens outweighs the nutritional preferences of 300 million humans.
Yet, in practice, we must say things like this every time we make a law or draw up a budget. This is one reason why the US government always shuts down in budget season.
If you wish to be consistent with such a Platonic value system, you must recognize that future children, even children in the distant future, must have as great a value as today's children, with the consequence that we should spend all of our resources on developing space travel and populating the galaxy. We must then kill everyone who can't contribute to this effort (or rather, let them starve, as killing them would also waste resources), as they are just wasting resources which, if directed towards space colonization, would save many more lives than the number of such lives destroyed.
(Now philosophers will want to start arguing about potential vs. existing lives; but not in any sensible, quantified or probabilistic way, so we should ignore them until they can learn to speak quantitatively.)
The utilitarian framework forces people to recognize how they REALLY VALUE things. We in fact do NOT value the children of Africans we don't know as highly as our own children, AND THIS IS FINE. This is how humans must behave in order to survive! It's also the only method that works--for complex and perhaps not-entirely-understood-or-admitted reasons, the more a place needs foreign aid, and the farther away it is from the donors, the more inefficient aid dollars are there.
This is how life works, and always has, for all species. We call this "particularist" ethics, a nomenclature that I think comes from Confucianism. The ancient Chinese debate between Confucianists and Mohists covers this topic perhaps better than Western philosophy has. It's a subject Westerners have mostly been silent on because of the repressive power of Plato and his heirs: Christianity, Hegelianism, communism, universalism, Nazism, and now "Social Justice".
Non-particularist ethics are evolutionarily unstable: they favor the survival of all other cultures over the survival over cultures with non-particularist ethics, and so destroy themselves. We see this in Western culture today, which is struggling everywhere to annihilate itself as a direct result of the dominance of non-particularist ethics.
But particularist ethics have also become a problem in modern times, because as states have grown larger and richer, and technology more powerful, they've become more like gods, making decisions that affect the entire world. INDIVIDUALS should have particularist ethics, but the United States shouldn't (or so I think; this is a value judgement) behave quite so selfishly, because at present it's more powerful than any other state. A belief in the power of the free market to do good should also entail a belief that, in the absence of threats to the survival of a free market, no one player in the market should become too powerful. (That "in the absence of threats" clause complicates things today.)
All existing ethical systems are far from being capable of dealing with this situation, because humans are still unwilling to confront some fundamental convenient lies embedded in their proclaimed morals, just as all existing ethical systems are hopelessly far from capable of dealing with the ethical problems of how to treat non-humans.
We also value things and people relative to the present circumstances. In the year 30,000 BCE, when humans were still in danger of extinction, and grasslands might have been more abundant (not sure; ice age), we would value children far more than we should now if it's true, as many people claim, that the world-wide over-abundance of children is endangering the entire human species.
So for at least these two reasons, questions like "Is a human child worth more than a thousand acres of rainforest?", or, "Is a human child worth more than a human adult?" (apparently so, given that these comparative-value questions always involve human /children/), are ill-posed. Utilitarianism doesn't solve the problem, but it exposes its ill-posed nature, so we can at least begin to think usefully about it.
depends where the acre of grass was to be honest. I’m not sure that there’s any city with so little park space that the marginal acre is worth 10 lives, but I could imagine in some sense the “last acre of grass” being worth it.
Is your position that the art expenditure would generate enough tax money back that it could be used to save the monetary equivalent of that many lives and then some more?
Cutting funding from all those would cause the populace to vote out the utilitarian party which would mean more dead children in the long term, therefore an utilitarian party should hide their power level until a populace is willing to stop sacrificing children for parks (every 10 second a child dies from nutritional deficiencies)
But you do need parks. You can cram all the children into cages in concrete boxes and feed them nutritionally balanced gruel and potable clean water and vaccinate them and put them on treadmills for an hour's exercise every day, and that is definitely keeping them alive. You can fit many concrete boxes where the parks used to be.
But a park with grass and trees to run around in and play games in is better for them than a treadmill and a large cage.
1) The Machiavellian answer: your average Joe is not a utilitarian and would need to be kept happy with bread and circuses in a first world country so you could continue to extract money from them to save lives.
2) The Hedonist answer: Enjoying life is important too, and this should at least contribute to our being interested in fine arts
3) The Artist Answer: Maybe fine arts provide some deep insight/structure to life/importance to society that is important to maintain.
I believe 1 and 2, and am somewhat dubious of 3 but consider it mildly plausible
I often wonder how many people's libertarianism boils down to anti-authority personality traits of the "don't tell me what to do" sub-type. I don't mean to invalidate anyone. Some of my best friends are libertarians. But they also happen to be fiercely anti-authority. Sampling error?
The difference between 'I don't want to be told what to do' and 'I don't want anyone to tell anyone else what to do' is surprisingly revealing. I think a lot of right libertarians tack in the former direction.
I think this is why I befriend libertarians. I'm also a pretty independent person, one who "marches to the beat of her own drum" as my mother would say. So while I tend toward more cooperation than my libertarian friends, I don't arbitrarily experience any respect for authority (I do respect expertise when it's well demonstrated, but that's slightly different), and I'm only inclined to do what other people say when I agree with the reasons for doing... or when the circumstances don't allow me to defect.
I don't think libertarian affinity can be explained with genetics, it's just an accidental blind spot in reasoning that has led them to believe that individualism, freedom of association, property rights, etc, are possible without automatically infringing on other's freedom.
that seems like a total lack of actual understanding of where they’re coming from - “we value the institutions and practices that have enabled men to, through their own benefit and will, make the modern world what it is”
Is the west not very individualist today? Is there not great freedom of association? Strong property rights? Businesses are given quite a lot of room to do as they please and grow - and use that!
I’m not libertarian but cmon that’s super uncharitable and wrong
I don't know if it's uncharitable or not, but I characterise libertarians as people who have falsely tied the concept of freedom, rights etc. to markets. Only a small subset of left-libertarians are anti-authority, pro-freedom people who understand that these concepts are inherently undermined by capital. Those kinds of libertarians make sense to me. Just my opinion.
Falsely? The principle behind free markets is that it's better for everyone to take individual preferences into account when making economic decisions. The principle behind democracy is that it's better for everyone to take individual preferences into account when making economic decisions.
Markets automatically follow when people have the freedom to trade things.
While I, as a libertarian, believe that it can be justified to limit that freedom to prevent exploitation, which will result in more freedom across the board (standard "your right to swing your fist ends at my face"), the exact cutoffs are obviously controversial.
> people who have falsely tied the concept of freedom, rights etc. to markets
that seems like everyone? Anti capitalists believe that, left and right wing. Libertarians believe it. Center leftists believe that markets and freedom of business needs to be somewhat restricted. Libertarians are for it
And one of the arguments libertarians make is markets go well if the govt refrains from many classes of interventions that might distort prices or harm innovation or restrict useful contracts and transactions. And most agree with that whatever team you’re on.
> Anti capitalists believe that, left and right wing.
Wait, do we?
Academically, markets and prices provide useful information to everyone, but capitalism Goodhartises much of that information all to hell.
If anything, most leftists want at least a heavily managed economy, with the things that matter (freedom, rights, welfare) cordonned off from the compulsions and temptations of markets. Kropotkinite left-anarchists consider the abolition of money to be one of their win conditions.
Ordinary libertarian-minded people who equate markets with freedom, 'see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires'. They want an economic hierarchy to exist and they want the freedom to potentially ascend it. The left wants to tear down or mitigate the amplitude of hierarchies and is willing to accept a hit to innovation, mutually beneficial trade, etc., to do that.
The anti-capitalist far right reveres hierarchies, but free markets establish the wrong kind.
leftists tend to identify the “unrestrained libertarian freedoms of corporations and capitalists” as often bad and need to be managed, which suggest they’re still seen as related
Libertarians are opposed to coercion and control. I think there is a genetic predisposition to not want to be controlled and probably a genetic predisposition toward not wanting to control other people with force. What exactly do you mean by leader of their own troop?
Private property is a derivative. The underlying is state violence. But the state ideally should have a monopoly on violence. Economics says that a monopoly will produce less at a higher price. In the presence of the state if I should choose to engage in violence it should cost me more than in a stateless world. I will probably see less violence where there exists a state than where one does not. Ideally. If I don't want to be controlled by random others I'll need recourse to law. Hopefully a well thought out system of law. And law will require coercion. And it will cost. So taxes.
The state is supposed to be producing rights protection and dispute settlement. If I accept your monopoly argument, it follows that it will protect rights and settle disputes less well at a higher price than the sort of competitive legal system that libertarian anarchists propose.
The thing being "sold" by the state monopoly is protection. You are talking about committing an act of violence costing you more money. The cost imposed on you is whatever the state decides it wants. A private law society could decide to punish you more or less. I think you're a bit confused on that unless I'm misunderstanding. In that case, you'll have to explain yourself more clearly.
Sorry for being unclear. His monopoly argument is cutting the wrong way.
See David Friedman's comment:
"The state is supposed to be producing rights protection and dispute settlement. If I accept your monopoly argument, it follows that it will protect rights and settle disputes less well at a higher price than the sort of competitive legal system that libertarian anarchists propose."
Nelson seems to be making a monopoly argument about the cost of crime rather than the cost of protection. The state decides how much to punish, so that argument doesn't make sense.
Are there important institutions that you think could "never be built today"? For instance, I think without historical precedence, something like the public library system could never be built today. Imagine the lobbying backlash you would get if you proposed using public funds to buy books and infinitely lend them if such an institution didn't already exist.
Are there institutions being built today that might become harder to build in the future that we should pay special attention too?
Something like the interstate highway system would never be able to seize, interfere with, or diminish the value of so much private property. Each mile would delayed for decades underneath a dozen lawsuits.
we have a public library system that was built today - sci hub and libgen. Also the internet. They work great! And even without them there’s still like kindle unlimited and individual paper sharing.
Like why don’t the lobbyists just ban libgen and sci hub? One bill making it illegal, punishable by $50k/day of fines per ISP to serve traffic to libgen IPs would be enough. It’d evolve but the law could too.
It's a tough call. The public library system, the Interstate Highway system, and the Internet, most certainly could not be built today... in the USA. In China or Europe, they very well might have been.
Yeah, maybe that form would arise cause there is a lot of body modification for aesthetic reasons. I doubt people would do it to babies or young girls though.
A ‘single payer’ healthcare system in the US. Our privatized system is too big to fail now. You won’t get past the lobbying. I believe it would take a post war recovery period when there is a high population need for the US to implement something like that.
I think some modern internet infrastructure will be looked back on as being near-impossible to make at a later age in history—possibly the wide use of open-source digital building blocks?
What makes you say that? Plenty of companies are absolutely pumping money into GNU/Linux development, the vast majority of contributions to big open-source projects are corporate in nature.
Why specifically do you think that will change in the future?
why aren't there any big-name rationalist politicians? You'd think politics would be an excellent testing ground for a lot of our theories, with the potential to make a significant difference if you genuinely believe you have insights others may not have, but yet that currently seems surprisingly unexplored in rationalist spaces (although plenty of rationalists hold very strong views on a wide variety of political subjects, you rarely see that acted on in the context of playing the *current* political system, rather than dreaming of what one might do in a rationalist-ruled world)
There's a long list of of institutions to march through before that point. The way to get a rat into office isn't to decide to run for office. It's to become a politics professor.
There probably are plenty, they just don't go around actively identifying themselves as "rationalists" because it would come off as supercilious or cringey. I generally avoid the term myself.
People were asking this five years ago and “there are no successful rationalists” seems to have been commonly believed. This shows why the question is bad - it takes a long time for good ideas and actions to compound and build good success.
If "big-name rationalists" ran for political office, then there would be some. Even "little-name" rationalists could run and become more prominent through the campaign. Are you interested?
That said, "rationalists" tend to correlate with not having certain social personality traits useful for politicians. And they are very likely to make a "gaffe" by accidentally telling the truth. So even if there were rationalist politicans, they may well not get elected.
I lived in the district for a time of the first openly atheist congressman, which was Pete Stark (and yes, in the Bay area...). That happened in 2007. How long before we get a, dare I say, openly rationalist congressman?
Part of being rationalist is being honest and analytical. If you apply these skills to the current political system, you are likely going to say something socially undesirable that is reasonable and fall behind. Politicians do a lot of conforming, lying, flip-flopping and staying within the bounds of acceptable discourse.
This isn’t true, for what it’s worth. Gov Jerry Brown was a student of Girard. Amy Klobuchar writes decent legal analysis. Josh Hawley wrote for Thiel’s Stanford paper (not super relevant but still cool). Warren wrote “the two income trap”. Many politicians are smart and capable.
To further evidence it’s falsity, see above: Dominic Cummings, politician, rationalist!
And see the massive list of accomplished politicians for all of history - all of the founders, ancient politicians, even many very accomplished 19th century ones.
Rationalism to me does not imply absolute honesty in all domains. There are many instrumental reasons a rationalist might lie, and accomplishing political goals is one of them. But importantly, a good rationalist would also try to understand the consequences of their lying to the fullest and appreciate the complexity of the decision to lie in a given situation.
Talking about this stuff makes people trust rationalists less though. You have to wonder if it is an effective strategy to openly talk about willingly being dishonest.
I sincerely doubt that's true to any significant degree. For one, pretty much everyone accepts that lying is appropriate sometimes for the greater good. Secondly, I'd say like 95% of people don't know of rationalists as a community or have a mental conception of them enough to matter here. You aren't wrong that it's worth considering, but the alternative to me would seem to be obviously worse. Lying about the fact that rationalists lie, so that rationalists themselves are confused about what it means to be a rationalist and lose the ability to coordinate their actions. If rationalists were a widely known group, and if it was widely known that they all pretty much supported lying in specific circumstances, then you might have a point. But probably not even then, since that would still apply to almost any other group.
This just makes me think back to "Rationality as the Art of Winning"! It's not obvious to me that a good rationalist (even one who's also a good person) should be honest at the expense of wider utility - and presumably a sufficiently good rationalist politician would be able to do more good by winning than by honourably losing (otherwise what's the advantage of all that supposed analytical power).
The way I see it (and feel free to show me utterly wrong) the only indispensable honesty in a rationalist is within their own thoughts, not their outward words or actions - as those should just be logical conclusions of their (utilitarian-ish) goals and the means available to them. So the only scenario in which a rationalist politician wouldn't be justified in strategically withholding information is (as far as I can see) if current politicians are already maximising the utility that can be gained from politics; which seems doubtful...
I guess you would have to avoid the rationalists followers explaining to the opposition that "Yes, my favorite politician is lying but it is because she employs dishonesty to reach her goals and that is okay"
Presumably, a good rationalist politician might maximize his strategic advantages by not disclosing they are a rationalist? Why give opponents information for free? It's not like the word "rationalist" will earn anyone lots of votes...
The example of Dominic Cummings supports this. Whenever talked about specifically rationalist-flavoured things (like trying to find and hire superforecasters, and trying to bring 'cognitive technologies' into government) he just made himself look weird to most people, and cemented an image of an untrustworthy Rasputin speaking in suspicious eldritch tongues.
There's that UK guy. Also, when probably something on the order of, what, maybe aggressively one person in 70,000 or so is a rationalist (ie, 100k rationalists worldwide, which seems like an overestimate), you'd have to be pretty strongly overrepresented in order to expect to find such a pol.
Toby Fox is very good at making music - that I will certainly affirm.
However, while I have not played Deltarune and cannot meaningfully comment on it, I am firmly convinced that Undertale was no timeless masterpiece. It went viral because it made a popular political jab - violent video games are evil - in an anvil-on-head fashion at pretty much the perfect time both for indie games and, in the wake of GamerGate, "games that hate gamers". The gameplay is irritating (I actually somewhat like shmups, but as shmups - not as 5-second interrupts), the basic philosophical idea had been done and in a more nuanced way (although therefore necessarily less LCD) by other games like Iji and Postal 2 (the devs specifically designed Postal 2 to be possible to complete without doing anything criminal or killing anyone, with "real-world" actions like running for a police officer when attacked actually working, and you get the title of "Jesus" for avoiding killing; there are real moral choices in that game, it just doesn't drop an anvil on you for choosing "wrongly"), and the graphics are certainly functional (I only really criticise game graphics for being Dwarf Fortress/NetHack-tier incomprehensible) but hardly exceptional. I suppose the comedy might be good from some point of view that is not mine, and I know most "comedies" don't have me laughing, so I won't breathe fire on that. But yeah, I really think Undertale is very much a timed rather than timeless piece.
>I also don't think it's fair to characterize Undertale as a "game that hates gamers".
Level-grinding in Undertale (a stereotype of "playing like a gamer") leads to the Genocide Route. There are several parts to that route which I would characterise as "Toby Fox hates you".
1) the deliberate tedium of many parts of that route. The attack command in fights is deliberately boring, the encounter rate on the Genocide Route is drastically reduced forcing a very, very long walkabout, except when you've completed depopulating an area (i.e. encounters are no longer helpful) in which case it goes back to normal, and then of course there's the "just wait" thing with Sans and with Chara post-game (with Sans calling attention to it and saying you'll get bored).
2) the deliberate attempt to cheat the player of any sense of accomplishment. All your stats (including the Genocide-Route-only items) are irrelevant against the final boss, because he ignores your defences and has a nonstandard HP bar. There are also a bunch of people that the game simply doesn't allow you to kill, and it calls attention to that fact several times.
3) Flowey, Sans and Chara breaking the fourth wall to mock/guilt-trip the player (not the player character).
4) The game sabotages itself, permanently, upon completing a Genocide Route, ruining the best ending on any further playthroughs. In some versions this cannot be reversed even with hacking because of cloud backups. This one is particularly unforgivable; Toby Fox literally takes away part of his game because he doesn't like how you played it.
>I'd say its success is better understood as part of the larger wave of successful independent retrogames
I did mention that as being part of it. But I don't think it's all of it. I did neglect to mention the anti-racist angle - which again, is done clumsily enough that it's more of an inversion (à la Cameron's Avatar) than anything else - but that's again a trite political jab (though more at fantasy than at videogames, unlike the pseudo-Jack-Thompson bit).
>TobyFox has explained quite plainly in interview that with Undertale he wanted to question the underlying morality of traditional JRPGs, where you just kill scores of interchangeable enemies to get stronger, and this question was inspired by a few JRPGs he had played that tried to do thing differently, such as Earthbound (where enemies "come back to their senses" instead of dying) or Shin Megami Tensei (where you can negotiate with enemies to avoid fighting them).
>I don't see how this qualifies as an attack on gamers.
"Questioning the morality of" X and "attacking" X are mostly just euphemism vs. dysphemism for the same thing; I'm not really seeing how your line is in opposition to mine.
>I don't think I can take this argument seriously.
I'm not really sure how you expect me to respond to this.
I absolutely agree with all of this, Toby Fox is indeed a creative genius. More broadly speaking, I do theorize that the one of the reasons contemporary fine arts has less popular appeal is because the finest creative minds are more drawn towards video games, web design, film music and other related fields rather than traditional media such as painting or sculpture.
Any recommendations for informative and topical Discord servers other than the one this substack links to? I've given it a chance but it's become quite clear that Scott is hardly ever involved and the people actually administering the server do their best to come off as pompous losers.
Here is an amusing article looking at the carbon footprint of buying something on Amazon.com -- along the same lines as AstralCodexTen's attempt to quantify carbon costs earlier this year. With math!
https://hwfo.substack.com/p/bezos-is-the-greenest-man-alive
Is there a reason the comments in the classified thread are for paying subscribers only? I'd love to reply to someone requesting comments, but not so much I'm going to pay for the privilege... Perhaps shilling for comments should be done in open threads if not everyone can post in the classifieds.
I came here with exactly the same question. Reading DinoNerd's response to you I strongly disagree. If (DinoNerd) you think the reason is because 'Scott likes money' I hope that's because you were half-awake etc. Has Scott given you any impression like that in the decade and a half he's been a public blogger? At all?
My guess is that it is a simple error. Annoying, for sure, but no more than that.
I hope it's just an error too. I'm always at my grouchiest pre-coffee, and positive explanations may not even occur to me. (E.g. today.)
Yeah, judging from both Scott's general preference for open (but respectful) commenting, and his uhh "inexperience" in digital matters, AND Substack's general weirdness, I'm guessing mistake as well. But what do I know? Perhaps he explained this in a pay-only post? (I'm only half-kidding with that last one. The cynicism is more directed at awkward monetization leaps, and not at Scott in particular.
I presume the reason is that Scott likes money, and hopes people will pay for the privilege of classifieds, who wouldn't subscribe otherwise - rather than reacting as I currently am, by feeling extremely annoyed and considering dropping the blog entirely.
I'm also wondering how many things that should have been on a classifieds thread will appear on the next open thread, more-or-less thinly described.
Note to Scott, FWIW, I'm furious primarily because your intro to the thread, which I received by mail, did not tell me that I was excluded from posting, and only allowed to see the thread so I could be advertised to/at by your subscribers. I headed straight to the thread, barely awake, and tried to post something I've been wanting to ask for/about almost since the last/first such thread.
I will not, of course, read the subscribers-only classifieds thread, now that I know I'm excluded from posting. That would both make me even angrier, and reward this decision.
s/thinly described/thinly disguised/
After finishing Unsong recently and thinking about Greta Thunberg today, it occurred to me that she seems to have the "somebody has to and no one else will" mindset
I don't think the mindset is pretty rare, although it's probably quite rare to be famous and have this mindset as a well known "quirk". Reporting bias strikes again!
Hi Scott, I want to follow up on 2 things:
1) You answered a question on polyamory. There is a book I can recommend that makes a good case against it (IIRC in one of the last chapters). It is called "Cheap Sex" by Mark Regnerus.
https://www.amazon.de/Cheap-Sex-Transformation-Marriage-Monogamy/dp/0190673613
He argues with a market model: People differ a lot in how attractive they are to others (a fact similar to how people differ a lot in money-making ability).
If you allow them to acquire a lot of partners (or money), inequality arises, which can lead to different levels of power and/or self-esteem etc.
This is why we level out income inequality on the labour market (with different tax levels for poor and rich people). In that picture, "mandated" monogamy can be seen as levelling out inequality in attractiveness.
On the mating market, the effects of inequality are even worse than on the financial one, since potential partners are a finite resource, and money/wealth is not necessarily.
Here is a 10min clip that sums it up:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO1ifNaNABY
2) I was talking about the Yes/No debate framework. You asked for the
subreddit, here it is:
https://www.reddit.com/r/YesNoDebate/
I already ran a few debates, both in person and online, and here I
summarized the feedback:
https://yesnodebate.org/blog/insights/
And the debates's rules are here:
https://yesnodebate.org/
So far, I hope you will enjoy your trip to Berlin – hope you take the train, not the bus, see here why ;)
https://www.seat61.com/trains-and-routes/berlin-to-prague-by-train.htm
Not Scott, but I don't quite understand the argument. If we start from the premise that the analogy is correct then:
The rising tide lifts all boats - If people have more satisfying relationships (or are richer) then is it really that much of a negative that some people have a lot more relationships/wealth than others?
Can't divide by zero - Right now you could say people have one relationship or zero. The difference between them seems much more important than the difference between 1 and 4.
And then there's the problem with the analogy. In a money situation if I have a dollar, you don't (ignoring the rising tide bit). But in a relationship situation, my relationship is with another person. I have increased the supply of relationships.
The unspoken premise is that "polyamory" will in practice exhibit a gender imbalance, and be de facto polygamy, which will in turn leave a surplus of single men for whom there are *no* available women to date.
Thank you for making the premise explicit. I would only add that it might not necessarily be restricted to single men, but also to (unattractive) single women.
I'm not sure if I understand your question correctly. I will simply rephrase the argument: By nature, the distribution between men and women is (roughly) balanced: ~50% men, ~50% women.
So if we assume homosexuals are same in number of males & females, we further assume heterosexual men and women do want to stay single in equal rates, then eventually, for every partner-seeking male heterosexual, there is exactly one partner-seeking female heterosexual.
This is different when we allow polyamory(gamy/andry).
Premises seem better spoken. And that seems like an empirical question.
Yes, I very much agree this should be resolved empirical. "Cheap sex" comes with a lot of data, mostly from the US in the last 60 years. Although admittedly, the US hasn't become fully polyamorous by now, it has become much "more polyamorous" than around 1960: It turned from life-long or decades-long monogamy (in marriages) to serial monogamy for sometimes only weeks. Also, casual sex (thus, with multiple partners within a short-timeframe) is much more common.
This all correlates with the number of singles going up, with first marriages starting later than before etc.
Given this big picture, one can argue that "polyamorous factors" might lead to the things I described in the first post.
Anyone know whether payments from youtube/patreon/substack are tracked as part of the economy?
Well, we have some payment information from Twitch now, as part of the recent leak...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/jony-ive-steve-jobs-memories-10th-anniversary-11633354769?
"Steve was preoccupied with the nature and quality of his own thinking. He expected so much of himself and worked hard to think with a rare vitality, elegance and discipline. His rigor and tenacity set a dizzyingly high bar. When he could not think satisfactorily he would complain in the same way I would complain about my knees.
As thoughts grew into ideas, however tentative, however fragile, he recognized that this was hallowed ground. He had such a deep understanding and reverence for the creative process. He understood creating should be afforded rare respect—not only when the ideas were good or the circumstances convenient.
Ideas are fragile. If they were resolved, they would not be ideas, they would be products. It takes determined effort not to be consumed by the problems of a new idea. Problems are easy to articulate and understand, and they take the oxygen. Steve focused on the actual ideas, however partial and unlikely."
So I saw this youtube channel about car dependent suburbia vs how most European countries build things, and it really resonates with me. I can't help but wonder how much this contributes to America's problems, from income inequality, to obesity, to political polarization. :/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnKIVX968PQ
I've written about this before (already plugged something else in this thread so find it yourself), but I think it's worthwhile to think about the downsides as well, and the walkability movement is very reluctant to a single real tradeoff so you sort of have to go looking for those yourself.
One of the first things I'd consider is that the US has an awful lot of walkable neighborhoods in which nobody wants to live - we don't call them ghettos anymore usually, but they line up in a lot of ways with what walkability asks for. The difference between them and walkable neighborhoods is sometimes just money; for nice shops, you have to have people who can shop at said nice shops; for nicely maintained and manicured surroundings, you need money. Ditto low crime.
The other thing I'd consider is why we wanted roads that let people go places quickly in the first place; being able to move goods faster is a plus. Being able to pick from more employers is a plus. Being able to have more choices between various kinds of vendors is a plus. You can massage that a little with public transit, but A. There's a lot of cities that doesn't work and B. You then have to actually use public transit; it's not like other things where you can shunt the costs off to other people, since walkability is necessarily inversely correlated with drivability.
Grain of salt, because there's people who very strongly disagree with me on all these points. But without actually considering the actual utility benefits of drivability, you are only going to get half the picture.
This is a bit of a straw man argument. The more nuanced arguments from the "walkability" side are not that everything HAS to be walkable, just that current regulations, zone, government expenditures, etc prohibit or punish attempts at making walkable cities in the way they were prior to WW2.
The current development patterns are rather artificial because they are not just responses to consumer demand. They are the result of decades of decisions taken by non consumers. Yes, many people do want to live in the suburbs or a gated community, these people should have that opportunity and do. But if that's not what you want you either have to have lots of money (usually) or compromise (like the undesirable neighborhoods you mention).
The issue with pure walkability is that people don't want to walk very far, so you need immense density & wealth to make it work. That pretty much excludes suburbia.
Research from The Netherlands shows that for trips up to 1 km, a lot of people walk (35% of trips), although cycling is a bit more popular (45%). Still, 1 in 5 trips of that distance are still done by car. Then from 1-5 km, willingness to walk is minimal, while 50% of trips are done by bike vs 40% by car.
Note that the relatively high car usage for short trips may in part be due to combined trips, like dropping off the kids at school/day care before going to work.
Also, these statistics are for the whole country, while urban regions obviously have less car use.
I think that cyclability is a much smarter goal. With cargo bikes, a bunch of people even make it work with kids & medium size shopping trips, although plenty of Dutch people prefer the convenience of a car for those things.
Of course, it does require making choices that most Americans may not be culturally OK with, like having more smaller shops, rather than fewer big shops. In The Netherlands, there are a lot of supermarkets that are small by American standards, but they tend to be much closer to people's homes.
There's a lot of talk about Europe being poorer than the US, or about how things cost so much there. At least some of that comes from taxes, but could some of it come from the costs of walkability? Smaller shops so less economy of scale. Less freedom to choose a job so less productivity.
I have lived off of a major city street for a year and three blocks from the highway for two years in my city and loved it, so I can see why walkability has its fans, but my living situation also dictated my work and shopping situations. What if the pressure to switch to walkability ends up costing more than we expect?
The density thing always stands out to me as a sort of cultural/SES litmus test. In the low SES life, density means people steal your stuff and you listen to people fighting all the time. Sometimes I look at pictures of walkable neighborhoods like the one at :15 in the video above and go "shit, that's a lot of people; I'd get murdered there". I'm academically aware these are all rich Europeans and that wouldn't happen really, but it just looks so miserable anyway.
Is this a particularly good video you've seen, or are you just getting into the ideas? Your post makes it sound like this subject is somewhat new to you -- and if so, the exciting world of Transit Twitter awaits! You, too, can get furious about placard abuse in New York City even though you don't even live there!
Oh this is all new to me. But I don't use twitter, so unless the same thing can be found on Mastodon, I'm going to have to pass. ;)
The most liveable districts in European cities were built before cars were a thing.
I picked my apartment specifically because of how car-hostile the surroundings are, I can get everywhere I want to on foot or bike.
there are many examples of urban areas in European cities that were designed for cars but have been turned back into bike and pedestrian first areas. I am talking 6 lane boulevards turned into bike and walking paths with a 2 land slow road. It can be done to developments after WW2, it just requires a lot more effort and buy in from whole cities.
Probably a lot to obesity. New York City dwellers don't lack access to the same type of junk food and cheap processed food that most of America has, but their obesity rate is half that of the national average. A big part of that is likely that they spend much more time on their feet walking to places and standing in transit.
Mmm. I've been about 20 pounds overweight, consistently, all of my life... Except for about two months when I worked part time at a bookstore and bicycled there and back twice a week. XD
Cities in general have lower obesity rates, seemingly regardless of sprawl. LA is famous for everyone having to drive and it has about the same obesity rate as NYC. (Which is still an astounding 21% -- and I don't mean "astounding" as a judgment upon individuals, since I achieved BMI-qualified obesity during the pandemic.)
Congratulations on your early vaccine!
This all started in the forties and fifties though, well before those were huge issues. I'd argue the opposite, building everything for cars, and furthermore restricting affordable housing options makes all of those problems worse - it makes it much easier to slide into homelessness, drug addiction, and mental illness, and much harder to escape from any of those things.
I think you have to quantify how it made those things worse. The positioning of walkability in general is something like "everything, literally everything benefits from walkability", but as a for instance "can't drive as far from my house to work" means your choices are more restricted on the housing you can select, which makes prices higher, not lower, and makes your income relative to the housing lower, not higher. A person who can drive 30 miles to work has access to cheaper housing and better paying work, on average, than someone who can't.
Housing density is more intrinsically a part of the walkability plank than the drivability plank and solves some of these problems, but if you really wanted to optimize for "affordable housing" you'd want something like "freeways freaking everywhere, and also density".
Housing affordability is largely a problem of legacy urban-planning.
Modern cities with beltways have a great remedy for the problem of affordable housing: Build one or two loops of highway around the city, and put all of your workplaces along that highway. Then everybody with a car can drive from way out in the suburbs to work pretty quickly; and you don't even need ultra-high-density skyscrapers. The main problem with the solution is that some people still live and work in the city's center, instead of leaving it to become a dead space where nobody goes on account of the difficulty of building highways through it. When it does become a dead space, e.g., in parts of Baltimore, government agencies can't resist the temptation to take advantage of that cheap dead space by putting subsidized housing projects there.
Solution #2 is, build a new city somewhere without any rivers or waterfronts. The only problem is that all old big cities were built on rivers and waterfronts.
That doesn't make any sense from the perspective of Austin (the city-center issue). Is that the exception that makes the rule or is that city just not far enough along in its growth to see that issue?
I have no idea. I've only been there once or twice.
Had Einstein never been born, how long would it have been before someone else discovered the Theory of Relativity?
My impression was that the ideas for both special and general relativity were "in the air" so to speak. Poincare or Lorentz or somebody else would have gotten special relativity. Electromagnetism kind of cries out for special relativity. I don't think that's just hindsight bias. I mean, Electromagnetism was Einstein's explicit motivation, after all. His paper describing special relativity is literally titled "On the electrodynamics of moving bodies."
As for general relativity, the story goes that Einstein had the physical insights for general relativity right away after understanding special relativity, but spent about a decade trying to get the correct formulation. The bottleneck was Einstein having to learn differential geometry. In this he was aided by contemporary mathematicians. David Hilbert famously convinced Einstein to resume his search for a generally covariant formulation, which Einstein had abandoned, and even wrote down the general relativity field equations himself around the same time as Einstein, probably independently, but the internet now tells me there is controversy on this. This is all to say that without Einstein the pieces would have all been there, if not all with one person.
Special Relativity, 10-30 years, General Relativity 50 years on up to infinity, meaning relativity in an accelerated reference frame might eventually have been formulated completely differently than via a curved but classical spacetime.
Einstein was working at a time when it was still reasonably acceptable to formulate a theory of fundamental physics that wasn't quantum, I doubt anyone would've tried to do so for the rest of the 20th century had no one figured out GR before 1925. Also, while SR is required to understand any high energy physics which involves particle annihilation or creation (which is pretty much all of high-energy physics from 1930 onward), GR is required for hardly anything other than cosmology, exotic astrophysics, and perhaps very precise timekeeping, so the pressure to produce GR (or an equivalent) would've been far lower.
That actually sounds pretty reasonable to me, though I'm not sure GR has a serious chance of not being figured out. Something akin to GR would have popped out of QFT when people got to spin 2 and looked at what qualities the classical (quantum->classical) limit would have to have - it would not have taken very long for people to realize by analogy to electromagnetism that *if* a spin 2 theory was workable it would be gravity in the classical limit, and once you realize that it's pretty straightforward to get to a weak field approximation of GR, etc. IIRC Feynman actually went through this whole exercise and with only a bit of hand-waving showed that Einstein's Lagrangian "pops out" as a pretty natural consequence of patching up a spin 2 quantum theory's classical limit.
Now, as to whether Feynman *actually* would have noticed this, it's really hard to say. Normal physicists wouldn't be familiar with curved spacetime math at all if it wasn't for GR, so it might have taken quite some time.
Related question: are there any other theories/ laws that might never have been discovered without one individual?
We usually think of science as standing on the shoulders of giants, but GR seems a bit different in its dependence on rationalism (rather than empiricism) and creativity
What about GPS, I was under the impression that the invention of GPS would have compelled General Relativity whether we wanted it or not.
I agree; it's difficult for me to imagine a world where every GPS satellite has a rather extreme bias correction built into it and all the engineers and scientists in the world go "well that's weird", and never try to figure out why.
That falls under "very precise timekeeping." But it's entirely possible that the corrections necessary would have been derived phenomenologically anyway. In fact, I'm not they aren't -- it's not clear to me that in the actual engineering they do GR calculations (which would be pretty damn hairy anyway), instead of just measuring stuff and fitting to some empirical curve.
While for actual GPS they probably just use engineering rules of thumb, it would clearly be an anomaly to a society that didn't have GR, so GR would be investigated shortly afterwards and it or an analogous theory created.
I'm doubtful. There's a ton of stuff where there's weird tiny anomalies in practical engineering use, and people mostly figure it's some real-world complication not present in the pristine theory, or some little exception corner that theory will eventually fill in, or the result of not doing your math to the 30th decimal point, or just a mistake somewhere or other. I think you really need something a lot bigger than the tiny corrections to Newton needed for GPS to light a fire under theorists.
I mean, how many people work on quantum gravity *today*? Even though we *know* it's got a major problem because it's classical?
The clocks on board the GPS satellites tick faster by 45 microseconds every day. Light travels 14 km in 45 microseconds, so the GPS system would be inaccurate by 14 km after just one day. That's not a weird tiny anomaly. It's a gigantic, jaw dropping, absolutely absurd level of error in a system that should be accurate to within a meter.
Engineers are perfectly willing to use empirical rules of thumb for which no underlying theoretical basis is known, and scientists are perfectly willing to look at what engineers are doing and say "yeah, that clearly works but we're not touching it with a ten-foot pole in any reference frame".
I agree. I mean, it wasn't exactly modern scientific theory, but look how long the Ptolemaic system was used to predict the movement of stars even though it had epicycles in it. The philosophers all believed the stars moved in perfect circles, but anyone having to actually track the stars threw in Ptolemy's epicycles because if you didn't you'd be off a bit. And all through those 2,000 years or so everybody was just like "Yeah, obviously epicycles aren't REAL, they're just something we have to do to make our fancy tables that predict star location accurate."
Alternatively, what if Maxwell had lived 20 years longer?
Hi everyone! I've written a piece on why I think it's very unlikely that voting-intention polls are intentionally biased by pollsters. Quite a bit of it is unique to the Australian context (in particular my analysis showing there is no overall skew in Australian polling), but much of it has fairly wide applicability (e.g. the incentives of everyone in the polls-pseph-media complex, and the difficulty of using biased polling to influence voting intention).
https://armariuminterreta.site/2021/09/27/poll-conspiracy-theories-dont-make-sense/
I'd be interested in hearing counterarguments for why a pollster might intentionally attempt to produce a skewed voting-intention poll, even taking into account the factors I mention in my piece.
How much emphasis are you putting on "intentionally"? My rough assumption was that for each side there are a bunch of pollsters who consistently skew results towards that side, and are thus preferred by the people on that side, but the biases motivating any given pollster are probably unconscious.
Hmmmmm. I'll admit I didn't adequately define pollster (I'm referring to reputable pollsters who conduct public, non-partisan polls) and I conflate two types of pollster bias in my piece mentioned above:
1. A pollster intentionally shifting their poll to fit a narrative or to serve a particular person/group's agenda. e.g. a pollster gets Labor +1, but either intentionally picks a weighting frame such that Labor +5.
2. A pollster knowing that a particular polling/modelling methodology will produce skewed results but continues using it. e.g. a pollster knows that face-to-face interviews tend to skew Labor +2 on average compared to other interview methods, but continues conducting face-to-face polls anyway.
I don't argue against unintentional bias or unconscious bias. I'm more taking aim at people like this:
https://twitter.com/the_LoungeFly/status/1444633703645265922
https://twitter.com/dragonsaerie/status/1444632108694081537
https://twitter.com/BobWithers4/status/1444613652322009094
https://twitter.com/allisonBeDemure/status/1444614740483842049
Basically I'm targeting the "(poll) is biased because it was conducted for (media company which I believe is biased)" hypothesis, which is quite in vogue among large segments of Australian social media.
https://anjel.blog/?p=58
https://anjel.blog/?p=56
I would welcome any comment about these two short blog posts on mistakes I have made in the past.
I can't actually find the original post on Kolmogorov complexity on your blog (even if I Google search "anjel blog kolmogorov complexity"!). It would be useful to link to the original post in your mistake post. Also useful would be to have an index of your posts. (I'm legitimately interested in reading the original post, btw).
Unfortunately the original post is gone and was not crawled by search engines. This blog is brand new and I'm starting off by posting some mistakes I hope not to repeat in future!
Is there some place on the internet where free (as in beer) substacks are collected and indexed by topic?
Man, it’s killing me that you’re so ‘close’ to me (I’m in Belgium) but you’re not passing here. Is there a way to come say hi to your group house or something if I ever pass by SF?
*passing through here
Would it make economic sense for Libya to build a freight railroad network? Assume it costs $2 million per mile. How should any network be laid out?
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Africa_railway_map_gauge.jpg
If they can resolve the political stability issues, then yes.
I remember reading that the dirt in much of Libya's desert areas is so hard and compacted that you can drop rail tracks directly on to it, without the need for sleepers or subgrade.
Libya was in civil war for most of the past decade. Civil war may return, for a short while or a long while. What are the chances of that? What are the operational costs for a railroad that passes through territory held by rival armed groups? How much lower are the railroad's benefits if usage falls sharply?
This is not going to be an easy cost-benefit analysis.
Seeing all those railways in Egypt and Tunisia makes one thing that if they were connected via Libya then you'd have a way for people in those two economies to shuttle back and forth and, I dunno, do economic stuff?
Yes, along the north shore between Egypt and Tunisia. Maybe with a side route down to Sabha. The vast majority of Libya is barren and occupied by nobody or almost nobody. Likewise its immediate borders in every direction are almost barren. There are two or three areas that are fertile centered (roughly) on Tripoli and Benghazi. (The debatable third is in the southwest.)
For shipping freight along the shore, wouldn't actual ships be cheaper than railroad shipping?
Railroads are faster, and a more convenient way for people to travel. because most of the population of Libya lives by the coast, a railway going along the coast would be suitable.
The question was about a freight railroad network, not a passenger railroad network. There might conceivably be a niche for freight that's too heavy for air travel or eighteen-wheelers but too expensive or perishable for ships, but it's pretty marginal.
Scott, is there anything one can do for you to make the meetup a more (likely) pleasant experience?
Rare non-political article from me:
https://residentcontrarian.substack.com/p/on-unbeatable-video-games
Nice point, which I'd put simply as "it feels good to be good at something". On a side note, I'm a big fan of gradually ascending difficulty systems like the 'madness' one you describe. Slay the Spire does this really well with its ascensions. These work really well for rougelike games where each run is short; I wonder how/if they'd work in other contexts.
I think I go a step further, but it helps that I'm religious when doing so; I think there's something abstractly good about doing good things well.
There's an old Catholic story about a street busker/juggler who gets converted and becomes a monk, but he's not educated like the other monks and has a limited amount he can offer. This goes on for years, and at some point the main monk (abbot?) comes into the chapel and there's this guy, juggling for a statue of the virgin; he's about to stop the guy when he looks up and the virgin is crying.
I'm not Catholic, but that sort of gets at a little bit of what I'm talking about - I'm not sure that the world's best doorknob-polisher isn't doing something abstractly good in his pursuit of excellence, even if nobody notices and it doesn't matter in a practical sense.
As for slay the spire: I love that game. I haven't been able to beat ascension 20 because I'm lame, but I have a lot of hours logged on that game and I think it's a masterpiece.
https://udayton.edu/blogs/marianlibrary/2019-01-14-the-juggler-of-our-lady.php
"Barnaby faints from exhaustion, and as he does, the statue of the Virgin comes to life! Glowing and radiant, she descends from her niche to wipe the sweat from his face and cradle him in her arms. The monks, stunned and speechless, immediately regret their ways and see Barnaby as a true saint and holy man of God.
The story of the juggler can teach us a valuable lesson about simplicity and the idea that everyone has something to share. Our talents and our gifts, whatever they may be, are important and worthy — especially the ones that may sometimes get overlooked! It seems that miracles tend to favor those who are humble and true to themselves, and the juggler is a testament to that."
I didn't know the story existed in many versions, or that it was old. The version I remembered just had the Virgin wiping the sweat off the juggler's face.
I like Roguelikes a lot for this reason. Though there's another reason too: Roguelikes take variable investment really well. I can take it very seriously and probably have to in order to win. Or I can take it completely non-seriously and die in hilarious ways. Because the games are made to be disposable (you're going to die often so you restart a lot) it doesn't matter. I can even try switching between them if I want to.
Likewise the games don't feel a need to be fair which creates a sense verisimilitude. Most games feel the need to telegraph the game so you have a chance at winning. Roguelikes don't and that's much more true to life and survival situations imo.
Yeah, in my life now, where I may not have a lot of time or mental energy *but* sometimes have hours and hours and a fire in my heart... a roguelike is the perfect style of game. Hop on for five minutes or feverishly mash buttons for the entire Saturday!
There's also a feeling of incremental progress that's really nice, although maybe this is more a feature of "roguelites". Hades is a great example of this, as well as my favorite game of all time: 60 hours in and every run still gets me a little more skilled, the protagonist a little more powerful or customized to my playstyle(s), the story a little closer to being revealed, bonus features a little closer to being unlocked...
(And it doesn't hurt that I love the story and characters in that game so much. Just... one... more... run... Must... seduce... Aphrodite...)
There is something funny about a roguelike that starts you out with any amount of plot - "this is who you are and why you are important" and then immediately one-shots you with a skeleton mage or something.
I enjoyed reading this.
Thanks!
I've been trying my hand at some inflation analysis on the Australian side of the Pacific, attempting to understand where inflation is going to go and why. Much of it is applicable to the American experience, and I'd be interested in people's thoughts.
https://armariuminterreta.site/2021/10/01/pandemic-economics-ii/
I wonder if some amount of inflation has transferred over to house prices. So inflation might be higher than official figures suggest, albeit not at alarming levels overall (in specific though house price inflation is alarming).
It's possible. Inflation did account for rent (which has amusingly, gone backwards in our biggest cities thanks to lockdown), but actual house-buying prices, I'm not sure. It would be clouded by the fact that the government gave a housebuying subsidy, which was promptly followed by Melbourne house prices hitting an average of a million AUD. Not many people are buying houses on the regular, though, so it doesn't make its way into the CPI, and most people don't really feel it as an "inflation" effect so much as a "real estate bubble/issue". Soaring housing prices are a problem in most of Australia's big cities.
Some of you may remember my Orwell review from the contest, which I'm still amazed got promoted up to 2nd by reader voting. For my follow up I've taken a look at a roughly Orwell-adjacent book: Ryszard Kapuscinski's 'The Emperor'. It's basically a collection of stories from courtiers who served in the royal court of Haile Selassie, emperor of Ethiopia from 1930-1974.
I found it to be an incredible piece of journalism, mostly because Kapuscinski basically gets to act as a time traveler, a fly on the wall in a medieval court. The courtiers he speaks with are the last of a dying race, and they know it--the sense that it's deeply wrong for a bombastic, Kafkaesque royal court to go on existing into the 1970s is everywhere in the text, and creates a uniquely dramatic, and sometimes even comedic, tension. I haven't been able to stop thinking about it, mainly because I see the royal court structure as something emerging everywhere that people are competing for status and resources without recourse to violence.
You can read my write-up here if you're interested: https://whimsi.substack.com/p/book-review-the-emperor
I’m subbed to your stack, and really enjoyed this!
Thanks!
An entertaining and thought provoking review !
This seems to be an extreme case of courtly life: the courtiers are regularly explicitly ranked and there seems to be no other way of gaining status in the country except through the king. (This second point strikes me as probably false: surely the church had status, at least.)
I am a bit skeptical that the court life described here is representative of power for most of human history. What other non-court systems existed in pre-modern times? "Court" meaning a group of people whose power derives for their status, which is inherited and granted by a single individual. It is possible to have a technocratic/bureaucratic monarchy (Singapore today) or a monarchy with a powerless court and powerful bureaucracy (Louis XIV). Parliaments / Senates provide an alternative elite structure with different sources of power or status (England, Roman Empire). Republics are also more common than usually thought, at least in Europe (most Italian and German cities from about 1100-1800). Having non-political sources of power or status in society, most often religious or business, reduces the power of courts or at least creates competition between them. Stateless societies are also less likely to have courts.
Good points. In the review, I try to distinguish between formally established courts and a 'courtly mode' that humans are inclined to slip into whenever there are status gaps and socially determined paths towards access to resources. So even if there is no actual 'court', the patterns of courtly life are still determining the bulk of the decision-making that the state does. That said, I wouldn't want to put a number on what percentage of pre-modern states could be said to have real 'courts'. I guess what's most interesting to me is how well Selassie's court mirrors what I know of the earliest states, such as the city of Ur, Egypt, Mesopotamia, etc.
That said, I think you're right about the non-political sources of power reducing the strength of the court. That the incentive behind rulers like Selassie or Xi limiting or at least slowing the growth of the commercial classes is that competitiveness is pretty well established.
Ryszard Kapuscinski was a Polish Communist who was known to fabricate facts. His book, 'The Emperor', was published four years after a Communist government backed by Moscow overthrew Haile Selassie. All his reporting was done by traveling to the country after the Communists took power. You should thus read "The Emperor" as a work of fiction meant to propagandize for Marxism-Leninism and to support a Communist regime that created mass famine and killed hundreds of thousands of people.
In other words, you've read propaganda that for some reason often goes reported as fact.
I don't intend any of this as a defense of Ethopia's Imperial regime. I have no idea if it was good or bad. From what I know it was mostly not great. But Kapuscinski is not an accurate source.
Kapuściński was fired from his post because he supported Solidarność / Solidarity (the anticommunist resistance).
Commie-hunting is pretty much our national pastime for the last three decades, and Kapuściński was never considered one.
That's what I gathered. Even though at certain times in his life he toed the party line to keep his rare position as a foreign correspondent for the Soviet State, he was anything but a propagandist.
I looked into this interpretation of the book while writing the review, and I probably should've addressed it more directly.
From what I've read of the scholarship on Kapuscinski, he gets small factual details wrong, and there are issues in translation, but not nearly enough to declare the book an open and shut case of propagandism for the Soviet Union. Especially in light of the rest of his works, which similarly focus on the details of African political life in various countries. What's interesting is I actually never came upon your version of the argument against Kapuscinski; instead I've seen 'The Emperor' labeled as a veiled criticism against the Soviet Union.
I don't doubt that his and his patron's choices of subjects were motivated by a desire to cast communism in a positive light. But it doesn't follow that because of a few minor factual errors (the most often repeated being about the number of bookstores in Addis Ababa) the book shouldn't be treated as a valuable record of court life in Ethiopia. Unless you sincerely believe that Kapuscinski just made it all up. But I've not found evidence that would justify that, nor anything approaching consensus in the scholarship as to Kapuscinski's truthfulness.
How do you interpret the fact that Kapuscinski never talked to a courtier who was not under arrest by a Communist dictatorship as an interpretation of Ethiopian court life? It seems to me you must go a long, long distance to see him as anything but a biased, propagandist source. But perhaps I am wrong on this.
Can you send me your sources on this? I wasn't able to find detailed information on the exact writing and recording processes Kapuscinski used.
One of the big problems with Kapuscinski is actually that he's too liberal and not Leninist enough.
I'm aware of this criticism as well. Certainly Kapuscinski is a creature of the 1970's and 1980's (though pre-Gorbachev) consensus. I'm curious, though. Acknowledging he is not a good torchbearer for the original Leninist (or Stalinist) vision, do you think he accurately represents a Communist vision? Or is he too corrupted by political needs to portray an accurate vision?
According to this article https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/lies-damned-lies-and-politics-20120816-249ku.html , by the early 80s he had serious misgivings and refused to write for solidarity publications.
I enjoyed your review very much. Here's some of my thoughts:
On a the court being very much like high school: I've heard this sort of things before, but I really can't relate. I think the fault of understanding is in myself: I was just totally oblivious to my high school's social fabric. I had my friends, and sometimes we hung out. I didn't know who was popular and who wasn't, nor was I aware of any cliques or social status politicking. The fact is I was completely uninterested in making new friends or going to parties. The friends I did make were serendipitous, people of similar interests that I happened to become familiar with enough for a relationship to form. Mostly in high school I was focused on doing as little work as possible while still getting A's, and spending all my free time reading books.
You wrote:
>"What does seem clear, a bit shockingly, is that for all of Kapucinski’s courtier’s gushing about the Emperor’s genius and divine stateliness, the loyalty of any given courtier seems to have been bought rather expensively with riches, and opportunities for extracting riches from Ethiopia’s starving populous of mostly farmers.
>"...And it’s not as if Selassie is likely to have come up with the above philosophy himself…it strikes me as an expression of ideas of previous Emperors, who saw the art of rule as the art of exploitation, of optimizing for the most efficient extraction of value from a static amount of labor and resources.
This is political rule as an extreme sport, where the leader seeks to extract as much as possible for himself and his cronies through the vehicle of the state, carefully toeing the line that if crossed might push the general populous or military towards violent revolution. I guess we can think of Selassie as a relatively adept sportsman…he lasted forty-four years, accumulated hundreds of millions in offshore bank accounts, and is still regarded as a hero by many, and even a god by some. "
I don't think Selassie was particularly unique in this case: this is the nature of all authoritarian rulers. It comes down to the basic practical mechanics of being an ruler. No ruler can rule alone: he needs loyal men to extract wealth, run the army, administrate, etc. And those men's loyalty must be bought, either with money directly or positions that allow them to extract wealth. And if you don't buy off those men then you leave yourself open for someone else to outbid you, and to take control themselves. Think of it this way: imagine the extracted wealth of the country was $100. Successful Despots will take $20 for themselves, spend $70 buying the loyalty of generals, ministers, and aristocrats, and maybe spend the last $10 on the people. If a liberal reformer comes by wanting to improve the lot of the people, he might keep $5 for himself and spend an extra $15 on the people: but he doesn't dare reduce the $70 buying loyalty a single cent, or else someone will come along and outbid him. Indeed, the wise despot will be hesitant to reduce his own share of the cut: after all, he may need that money rather suddenly someday to head off a coup attempt. You might think that laying up $100s of millions while your people starve is a sign of abject greed, but those millions are security against sudden political shifts (and make it more likely you can escape with your life if worse comes to worse). That's the way ruling works, whether you're a dictator or an emperor. And remember, all those head men that the king is buying off can't rule alone either: they're buying off the smaller men below them, with money and promotions and positions where they can extract wealth themselves. That means you really need to squeeze the peasants if you want to keep yourself in a secure position.
The fine Youtuber CPG Grey lays it out well in this video:
https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs
Interesting thoughts. I found myself agreeing with your thoughts and Grey's video as I read the book, but then there are quite a few examples of undemocratic authoritarian rule that actually did manage to effectively limit corruption and extract taxes without peasant-stomping so ruthless as to actually cause near constant famine and all-encompassing stagnation in the development of education, infrastructure, etc.
I guess I find that historical examples ranging from the Roman Empire to some medieval monarchies, even to modern Singapore stand as proof that authoritarian rule isn't merely a blind and inevitable march towards rampant corruption and state extractivism--that there are ways to retain legitimacy for long stretches beside the naked cronyism of Selassie, Qaddafi, Mugabe, etc.
The Roman Empire had slavery. When you have slaves as a subzero stage of wealth-producing, you can just whip *them* a little harder without having to tax the (free) "poor peasants" to death.
This doesn't really fit with the way the Roman Empire practiced slavery, the way it proceeded (e.g. the people often had *better* living standards in periods with *less* slavery), or the reasons usually given for its success under, say, Augustus or Trajan.
Plenty of other countries and states had slavery, but few gained the comparatively high living standard of Rome.
If I had to point the finger at the main reason for Roman prosperity, it would be the enormous single market centered around the Mediterranean, a very navigable sea even with antique shipbuilding technology.
IIRC, one important reason for Roman prosperity is that the empire was being built during an unprecedented warm climatic period in the Mediterranean area, which allowed for greater crop yields in many places.
Erusian will no doubt correct this if it is off-base. And he sees it.
Possibly also that they had concrete. As I understand it, concrete normally takes a lot of heat to make an ingredient, but Rome had some handy geology.
Of course, no amount of handy geology is helpful unless you've got a social organization which can take advantage of it.
The heat to which you may refer is preparing lime from limestone in a limekiln, but I don't think the Romans were exempt from that, as Roman concrete contains lime also. Supposedly the secret to the durability of Roman concrete (especially in seawater) is the admixture of volcanic ash, which in the neighborhood of Rome contains a certain mineral which over time reacts with seawater to add considerable tensile strength to concrete. The main reason it wasn't more widely duplicated later is probably just the relative rarity of handy volcanic ash.
I'm not sure: I think if you have any kind of authoritarian rule at all it's going to be mostly cronyism. Perhaps the medieval monarchies and Roman empire were just better at it. (I think Singapore is different because it's wealth doesn't come from agriculture but from business and industry, which needs to be managed differently to keep the wealth coming). Do we have any reason to think Ehtiopia was any more famine prone or stagnant than, say, Medieval France?
We do, but I haven't gone into it quite enough to say to what degree. But Ethiopia's geography does seem to isolate it and make agricultural improvements difficult to implement.
I wish there was a non-intrusive way to find out more about my favorite ACX commenters. Some of you people are soooo fascinating.
Presumably I am one of your favorite commenters. IRL I am getting better at chess.
On the off chance you find me fascinating I'm currently trying to form an identity for a blog. If you let me know what you find fascinating about me that'll help me to decide what I focus on. Also happy to answer specific questions.
many users have twitters or blogs or Reddits, with years back of personal content. Usernames aren’t always the same so it may take some digging
Some may find that a bit intrusive, but it’s invisible, and it’s very fun to go through random strangers’ lives on their Reddit histories for instance (never done that with anyone here tho)
Or just ask, lol, seems easier
I am curious, is there some republicanism in Sweden?
Or perhaps more generally, how citizens of a country whose image is so intertwined with social democracy and social justice reconcile this with the fact Sweden is still a hereditary monarchy?
Also I am looking forward to Prague meetup.
"Republikanska Föreningen" is an association for Swedish republicanism. It has about 8500 members and if you keep up with the news you'd expect to read an article or two from them a year. So the issue is part of the debate in the weakest sence.
The Left party also unexpectedly wants to abolish the monarchy.
In polls, about 60% of Swedes favor monarchy and about 20% disfavor it. Favor has been declining slowly for a long time. I personally expect that current Crown Princess Victoria will be the last monarch, and that monarchy will be abolished as her reign ends (unless singularity comes before that etc.).
+1
Not Swedish, but I live in a liberal constitutional monarchy with a similar situation. Monarchy, in it's constitutional form, is not antithetical to democracy and social justice - in fact, I would argue that (perhaps ironically) a democracy is enhanced by their presence as a component of a state. By being unelected and hereditary, you avoid tainting their position as the enabler of government by popular or corrupted choice. That is, nobody has ever had to run a campaign against them, or be upset their candidate was not chosen - consider in an elected head of state, where a significant portion of the population has vilified their guy's opponent. When people vote, they become invested in one candidate succeeding and another not succeeding. Monarchs exist as an impartial third party which legitimizes the government of the day - their role in enabling that has no need for representation (and adding representation here is constitutionally dangerous potentially!).
To your social justice point, the monarchy is able to champion or provide patronage to causes which are electorally unfeasible to complement the majority-rules government which can champion electorally popular causes. They also avoid getting caught up in tribal politicking which can sometimes be driven by more hateful agendas. The royal family don't belong to a group that is adversarial to other groups, they are secure in their position - even appointed heads of state struggle with that, let alone elected.
Selection being stable means they don't need to desire the job to the point of struggling, promising or buying their way to the top like their elected counterparts, which often selects for negative attitudes towards positions of hierarchy and breeds anxieties about their personal security when elected (after all, if you had to fight to get where you are, wouldn't you be wary of your opponents?).
The issue of merit comes up a lot in elected vs hereditary discussions, but I don't think the person of the monarch matters as much as the institution in a figurehead monarchy - it's okay if the King isn't some visionary if he doesn't hold any real power.
(Sorry for the unsolicited ramble! I just find a lot of people are quick to assume that because monarchy is an older and unelected institution it is somehow unhealthy, and wanted to be a voice of dissent on that point - I personally think that while far from perfect, they are underrated in the constitutional toolbox, and love talking about them!)
"They also avoid getting caught up in tribal politicking"
Queen Elizabeth perhaps, but my impression of the second and third generation is that they get involved in fashionable tribal issues.
Henry VIII played a role in the tribal conflicts associated with religion. al-Mamun was a central figure in the Mutazilite/Ashirite controversy.
Of course, those were rulers with real power.
Those are interesting points. But I think this is more about the head of state being different from the head of government. A lot of countries have this without being a monarchy.
In Germany, the head of state ("president") is also a purely representative office, and the elected candidate is usually someone who is well-respected from all political factions. Even though it's often an ex-politician, they interpret their office as transcending over political partisanship.
Since they are well-respected, they can sometimes bring political topics on the agenda. The speech from 1997 is quite famous, where the president Roman Herzog warned that Germany needs reforms, and that all political and social actors need to get going ("Durch Deutschland muss ein Ruck gehen"). Or after the 2017 elections, when parties did not find together for a coalition, the president expressed his opinion that the two biggest parties owe it to Germany to form a coalition, even if they are not happy about it. Which they did.
I am not so familiar with the nordic monarchies, but I think the monarchs play a similar role: they mostly stay out of daily business, but when they get heard, they act as a non-partisan voice. Also in the UK, the royals have played a similar role in the past (e.g., by staying in London during WW2), though at present the queen stays very much out of politics.
The idea that Republics are necessarily more democratic, or more just, or happier, or more prosperous than Constitutional Monarchies is so obviously contradicted by observation that I find it hard to believe that sentient beings can hold it.
Warning: this is the kind of comment (insulting to people with an idea without explaining why the idea is wrong) that is likely to get you banned if you continue.
Noted.
I am aware that Swedish kingship is largely ceremonial job, and he most definitely does not actually govern the country, of course. But still.
There is almost no republicanism in Sweden. Instead there is a live and let live mentality. Some people like to read about the royal family in magazines and others like to ignore them. There are so many people in Sweden other than the royal family who get quite a lot of money from the state for doing nothing. Why would we be annoyed with the royals more than other social cases? The royals are just ordinary, rather incompetent people.
While I don’t mind long comments that are interesting, and technically detailed and in depth and complex ones are some of my favorites on SSC (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-september/comments#comment-2988501 I loved and probably didn’t get enough attention, and the less interesting but more inflammatory neighbors to the top on racism and to the bottom on obesity (my bad...) got many comments) (and if you like those do check out datasecretslox.com - a SSC adjacent forum with lots of in depth posts - and TheMotte also has lots of great in depth technical and historical stuff if you can wade through and ignore culture politics waves)
... a bit off track. Anyway, I find that substack doesn’t collapse the parent comment when you collapse children, and doesn’t have a way to, incredibly annoying for just browsing the comments. So I have to scroll over twenty paragraphs to get past it! Annoying. And while I’m complaining, the fact that when you click an email reply link it doesn’t take you to the right place 8 of 10 times is annoying too. As is the fact that if you accidentally minimize a parent comment while typing a reply, very easy because clicking on a side line minimizes and they’re omnipresent, your comment disappears! And edit button of course. And it should really handle deeply nested comment threads better. Smh.
Well, your complaint worked! I opened up this thread today and was surprised to discover that parent comments can now be collapsed too!
Did someone read this? There’s now an “expand full comments” thing that minimizes super long comments. Annoyingly though, 4/5 places I’ve seen it so far it was on a comment maybe two lines longer than the max length, lol. I’d still prefer being able to totally minimize but it’s maybe better (can’t tell tbh)
Ironically I actually liked the default maximized thing, just with ability to minimize. UI UX stuff is just hard isn’t it
Don’t want to all complain! Here’s a little thing that, if bookmarked, will jump to the right comment when you use it
javascript:(document.querySelector(decodeURIComponent('.comment.selected'))).scrollIntoView()
One probably could make an extension that does this for you
I had to search what that image was, and of course (duh!) it's the Golem of Prague. I have to say, though, that for public art images on these posts, Barcelona still has Prague beaten 😀
I don't think I made a post on Barcelona - which piece of art are you thinking of? Was it the Madrid one with the bear and the strawberry tree (that I thought looked like a bear causing a mushroom cloud)?
No that's Zheleznogorsk-26 you're thinking of.
They're coming into flower now are the strawberry trees.
The one where you were talking about visiting Barcelona - "Learn Spanish with ACX"?
Fantastic article about retired greyhound racing dogs who become living blood donors. Is life as a living blood bag for dogs whose owners can afford expensive pet surgeries a life worth living?
https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/67/bolman.php
Your post caused me to look up YouTube videos of greyhounds running in slow motion, which was entertaining and interesting.
Good question regarding whether that is a life worth living. I assume it largely depends on how much blood is drawn... do they live as normal pets with the occasional draw, or are they kept on the edge of death to maximize product output?
In any case, given the state of factory farming, this doesn’t seem like the lowest hanging fruit for animal welfare. Dogs typically get more than their fair share of sympathy already.
I believe the amount of blood drawn relative to size at any one time is similar to that for a human. Greyhounds have more blood for their body weight than other dogs, and that blood is richer in red blood cells and oxygen, so you can remove quite a bit without it becoming detrimental to the dog.
There was a somewhat acerbic exchange about Guardians Against Pandemic on the 9/18 Open Thread 190, mainly having to do with "they say they're non-partisan, but they use ActBlue for funding, how the hell is this possible?!" This was a convincing enough argument to e.g. make me withdraw my donation to them (to their credit: they were prompt and polite about refunding it) until they explain themselves. Attempts to get them to explain themselves seem to run into the wall of "We will have a Q&A on October 12, please just ask us then," with a side of "yes we realize, but right now it makes the most sense to press Democrats because it's their Congress, but we expect to press Republicans e.g. next year and will use WinRed then."
Two questions:
1. Is it plausible for a single organization to use ActBlue and WinRed (simultaneously or alternating between them)? I'm known to be naive about this, to the point of believing ActBlue when it says it allows "progressive" but not "Democratic" organizations; I was mocked for believing this in the previous thread (perhaps deservedly, though I will point out that no actual counterexamples ever materialized).
2. Is anyone planning to attend their Q&A, and if so, could I ask them to report on what they hear? (I don't think I'll be able to make it, the time between when the toddler comes home from daycare and when the toddler goes to bed is pretty hectic for me.) If you don't want to report in public, I can give you my email -- I honestly just want to know what they have to say.
"yes we realize, but right now it makes the most sense to press Democrats because it's their Congress"
Given the at-present kerfuffle in Congress between those of the Democratic Party who want a moderately progressive budget and those who want a very progressive budget,
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/us/democrats-delay-vote-on-infrastructure-plan-as-progressives-fail-to-agree-on-deal-1.4688625
do they really think that their little push will go anywhere if they alternate between "who's got the talking stick" like this? This is one of those things where you *need* cross-party buy-in because you *need* all hands at the pump, else it's going to sink unnoticed amongst all the other groups and causes and lobbies waving and jumping up and down for attention.
I don't think it's necessarily partisan bias at work here, I do think it's a lack of "maybe I don't have a 140 IQ but I've worked in the sausage factory and I know how the product is made" experienced types.
I was just listening to a news story about the financial industry pushing hard for in person meetings to make deals. There's a belief that the deals are better in some sense when people have a more accurate idea of each other's emotional/physiological reactions.
We might have a chance to find out what difference personal presence makes to deals. Logically, it seems like it should be zero-sum. People push each other differently, but it seems unlikely that, say, lenders or borrowers would generally do better or worse in person rather than at a distance.
It's conceivable that some institutions might have accidentally selected for people who are better at zoom/phone/email and others have selected for people who are better in person.
I think the main difference has little to do with actual quality of deal-making and much more to do with the personal preferences of the individuals involved. Certainly the financial industry has not slowed down during the pandemic; if anything, far more large and medium-sized financial deals have been signed by any measure in the 2020-2021 period than possibly any other period in recent financial history, except possibly 2006-2007; we're in a major boom here without face-to-face meetings. If the industry were genuinely unsure whether their transactions were "good" because of a lack of face-to-face meetings, it seems that we should see more hesitance to sign up and close deals and we'd see a dip in deal activity instead. What I think is going on instead is that finance has historically rewarded the most gregarious, extroverted personalities for decades if not centuries, and so of course people with those personalities lead the industry. Those people in turn are personally unhappy about not being able to do deals in person, and they either misinterpret this unhappiness with their personal situation to something that is wrong in the industry itself or they are eager to get back to the field where they have a personal advantage. Either way, we should take this perspective with a great deal of skepticism.
I suggest this has very little to do with some kind of Glengarry Glen Ross style 'always be closing' attempt to gain advantage, and much more to do with the ability of all participants to be more certain there's a meeting of minds.
When parties to a contract leave the set-up with different ideas, even different emotional impressions, of the nature of the deal, it is often a prelude to very expensive business failures. "But I thought we meant....!" So it is really *really* important, the larger and more complex a deal you are making, that everyone leave the meeting with as close to an identical viewpoint as possible on what was agreed to (and what was not).
Of course this requires assessing the emotional temperature of people. Of course it requires being aware of nonverbal cue and tics, of smiles or frowns, fidgets or engagement, tone of voice (beyond the miserable bandwidith of VoIP), et cetera. So yes if it's a big big deal you want everyone in the room looking at each other directly. Not because one party is hoping to crush the other, but because it's very much in the interests of both parties to avoid any hint of misunderstanding.
It's interesting to contrast your reply with KateDog's-- you've got mistake theory and she's got conflict theory.
As a habitual split-the-differencer, I wonder whether you both might be right, and it varies among organizations and industries.
Surely. But my read on the difference is that it's probably just glass-half-full versus glass-half-empty perspective.
In practice what happens is the principals and investment bank get together in person and hammer out the major deal points they can all feel good about. Then a 2 to 10 page letter of intent gets sent to the CPAs, financial analysts, and lawyers to work out all the details, which end up being hundreds of pages of terms and disclosures and analysis, and when that happens it turns out there's LOTS of terms the main guys didn't discuss or agree on, so it's an ongoing negotiation where the stronger party with more leverage asserts it and the weaker party makes concessions as they get more invested in the processed, so long as the stronger party doesn't push so hard that they walk away. It's not uncommon for there to be a few crisis points where the deal is about the fall apart because the parties don't agree some terms, and at that point the investment banker deal guys will swoop in and use all their social skills to try to save it. Once an LOI is signed, they only get paid if the deal closes, and if it closes, they get paid a lot, so their main role is to be the intermediary and smoother-over to get it to closing. I'm not saying there's no need for that personal touch, though honestly it depends on the personalities of the people involved...in some cases, I would say the least interaction, the better.
That said, as Llew mentioned, 2021 has seen more M&A deal flow that ever -- it's a tsunami, and the vast majority of them have been happening entirely electronically and frankly I think it's worked just fine. I've worked on some deals that have gone remarkably quickly, smoothly, and efficiently with literally no interactions other than email and a few phone calls, not even Zooms. The ones with more Zooms have taken longer, had more personality conflicts, and more time wasting. I also haven't seen a single deal fall through this year, which usually there's at least one per year. To my mind, you never truly know what people agree on til it's in writing, since in person conversations often have the more dominant personalities overpowering others and making them pretend to agree to things they don't really, once it's in writing, and people are more prone to gloss over details in person -- writing is so much more specific. So the more that is done in writing, the more efficient the process -- again, from my perspective. Obviously people whose skills lie in the interpersonal arena will prefer that method of doing business, and from their perspective, they're the ones making it all happen and nothing would even occur without them.
I will say, without question, I've worked in M&A for 15 years and a hundred deals, and the deals that have problems AFTER closing and where the parties end up in disputes a year or two later, are far are more likely to be the "in person" heavy deals with less nerds going through with a fine-tooth comb and more CEOs/bigwigs just getting together and deciding that they're all on the same page, they don't need to worry much about the paperwork because they "trust" each other, and just ramming the deal through quickly with little interest in what the documents say.
When they are referring to "making deals", they are simply talking about multi million or billion dollar transactions where the parties at issue can choose among many different financial institutions, and the deal guys' entire job is to leverage their personal network, social skills, and glad-handing skills to be the ones chosen -- for a huge commission if they get the deal. Of course they want in-person because that's literally their whole skill set. Once they get that two-page LOI signed, they hand it off to the army of nerds behind computers who do the actual work of getting it done (I am one of those people so I know how this works). These people are basically just like real estate agents, just working on deals that involve the buying, selling, and financing of billion dollar companies, not buildings.
Also, don't forget that "the financial industry" has massive investments in commercial real estate and basically own all of the office towers in this country. Don't think for a second that they're not pushing in-person because they're trying to protect those investments. I have dealt with a few commercial landlords recently, and I assure you, they are all *terrified*, though they are doing their absolute best to hide and that pretend all is well and normal.
I find that in person deals STRONGLY favor people with dominant personalities.
If you get someone in front of you, you can more effectively mislead them, or buffalo them into doing something dumb. These talents seem to be 90% of what makes one c-level dipshit more useful than another.
I'm you classic tech autist, so I've been in a couple of these meetings when I was younger just to stand behind whoever was listening to the sales person and repeat the same question 30 times until we get an answer, because I'm not socialized enough to be embarrassed about it.
Yeah, face-to-face selling works on socialisation about being polite and not giving an outright refusal, and the salesperson/marketer being charming and hard-sell enough to first get you to agree "sure, this sounds like a great product/service" and secondly then push you on "well you already agreed it could be a benefit, why aren't you signing up for it?"
I'm another of the autism-spectrum types who *hates* the hard sell, won't buy something unless I've had time to think about it, and if you push me for "yes" answer right this minute, I'll walk out instead of buying 😀 And like you, in work I'm the one who does the "yeah, but - " part and will happily tell the guy who has just spent twenty minutes doing a presentation to sell sell sell the service to us, "That was great, but we need to think about it, we'll get back to you on this".
If you buy a new car in the US they are going to try to sell you an ‘extended warranty’. I’ve made a practice of saying loudly and plainly up front that any attempt to sell me a service contract or extra special rust prevention undercoating will queer the deal. It’s worked for me so far.
I went through a significant interaction with a financial institution several months ago. Most of the interaction was over phone, or by email... until the time came for finalization of signatures. Certain forms needed to be filled out in-person, with pen-on-paper, in a way that could be certified by a licensed notary. The bank contracted the services of a notary, who came to me and helped me through the process of signing the papers for the deal.
Is this a counter-example?
Possibly, or possibly not... the interaction was significant to me, in that it involved a mortgage on my house. It may not have been significant in the same way to any individual at the bank, but it did involve a large amount of money.
The procedure didn't involve any negotiation or deal-making. I submitted a request for a refinance, had a short chat with the mortgage broker, filled out forms, and waited for the underwriting process to finish. Once that was done, I decided that the new mortgage would be a good financial decision, and scheduled a date to sign the necessary papers.
What kind of financial negotiations did the news story give as examples?
If we can more accurately understand how the other party feels about what is on offer, we can more accurately craft a deal that both sides can approve and at least be content with. I interview potential employees a lot, and find that in person is far superior to remote. You get a much better sense of how they feel and catch body language and other subtle cues. For instance, if you mention a benefit or pay rate, or a job requirement (start or end times, number of hours, overtime) you can get an intuitive sense of if they are happy, neutral, or upset pretty easily in person. On a video call you might catch something or you might not.
Interestingly, people who are more in tune with such a process (such as a person who routinely conducts interviews, supervises employees, and is comfortable with video calls) is able to present those cues better. Something about being remote seems to cause people to emote less in the first place, in addition to being harder to see when they do.
That's a good point. I was assuming hostile bargaining.
I think like Andrew says, I don't know why we'd expect this to be zero-sum. By having parties learn more about each other, deals that otherwise wouldn't have happened might, or vice versa.
One additional possibility is that more and better deals get made because people are spending less time and personal energy on travel.
Reminds me of Paul atreides saying he couldn't negotiate with someone he can't see. I didn't realize we had so many bene geseret trained bankers.
If all the same deals were done on different terms it would be zero sum, but if a different set of deals were done with more net surplus that would be a net gain. That would be the expected outcome if both sides learned more about each deal, by learning more about the counterparty of the deal
The best negotiator I ever worked with was a guy who almost never spoke. He had a weird personality and was perfectly comfortable just sitting in silence, staring at you for minutes on end. It would completely unnerve people, no one ever knew what he was thinking, and people would just start babbling or negotiating against themselves just to break the silence. I worked on his team and people always thought I knew what he was thinking and could translate for him, but no, he was like that with everyone, on his "side" and the "other side" -- no one really knew him. He was great at what he did though, and got better terms for his clients than anyone else I ever saw, just by keeping his mouth shut and being mysterious.
I'm concerned that my next-door neighbor is sliding into the grip of a paranoid/delusional disorder during the isolation of the pandemic. Their recent nearly-unprompted disclosures to me about their background and habits strongly suggest to me that what I'm seeing is the worsening of a mental disease that will likely proceed to derail their life.
Neighbor, as an immigrant to the US from another country, tells me that they are a publicly-unacknowledged child of a deceased political leader in a third country, whose heirs/assigns have been working, so far unsuccessfully, to achieve neighbor's desired repatriation to said third country, in association with various improbably-associated US federal agencies. This by itself, while far-fetched, did not strike me as conclusively out-of-touch -- stranger things have been known to happen, though why I in particular would be informed of them I can't begin to suppose.
However, neighbor then proceeded to explain/demonstrate how they have been undertaking, with increasing frequency, an admittedly dangerous and disfiguring self-treatment for a self-diagnosed disorder which would, if present, be acutely life-threatening -- but for which I was unable to persuade them to seek professional medical attention. I intend to provide them with resources about how they may still be able to get access to affordable medical care in our area, in combination with interpreter services if needed, despite their complex immigration situation.
Either of these things in isolation would be unusual, but presenting together, in someone who appears to have minimal social support, it seems indicative of some kind of mental break. I never knew this neighbor well enough before the pandemic to tell just how unusual the current beliefs and behavior are for them, but it's pretty damn unusual absolutely, especially for someone otherwise put-together enough to have obtained a graduate STEM degree in the not-to-distant past. If the stuff I'm hearing here is somehow the product of a sound mind, I'd at least expect a degree of self-awareness about how nuts it must *sound* to an uninitiated observer, but I'm not picking up any such self-awareness.
I don't really know how to proceed here, if it's even my place to do anything. I'm just getting the impression that all this bizarre stuff has been unloaded on me because neighbor has no one else to tell -- as far as I know, they're currently NEET (as am I for the time being, I'm not one to judge) and have no family in this country, and maybe no friends either.
I figure worst cases of inaction are that neighbor ends up deported to illiberal homeland when the "special arrangement" they believe has been worked out on their behalf to let them overstay their visa turns out to be a fantasy, or they die of self-diagnosed disease which they may actually have because they wouldn't seek treatment, or they die of complications of their dangerous and increasingly intense self-treatments. And the worst cases of action are that neighbor ends up entangled in some low-income social services labyrinth and involuntarily committed as a danger to themselves, while getting no real effective treatment, or neighbor decides that I am part of some conspiracy with agents from illiberal home country and cuts my brake lines or something. Knows where I live, you know?
I can't think of any really good best-case outcomes no matter what I might do, so I guess maybe I should just try to leave the situation alone. I may even be wrong about the implausible background, and foreign agents from third country really are lending them support, and will soon provide some new plan of action for the repatriation -- it's not like I have a better idea of how they've been paying their rent for the past couple of years. I've been in neighbor's residence, and it's a lot tidier than mine, and it's not like they're outright talking to themselves, AFAIK. "Taking care of things ourselves is just how we always did it back home" is sort of a reasonable explanation for the self-diagnosis and self-treatment, and it's possible they have good reasons to avoid contact with medical professionals. But on the whole, that feels like rationalizations for not sticking my neck out. My best guess is that this person is on a crash course with reality, and there may be nobody else to potentially help them off it. I'll at least try to see if there's anyone else they trust who they might be able to talk to about any of this with, but I have a sinking feeling that there isn't.
Tentative advice: Are there other, less dangerous alternative treatments you could recommend? I don't think the odds of this being accepted are high, but it isn't likely to have much of a downside.
You are in a tough place, as you seem to be the one person your neighbour trusts to tell you all this. But honestly, it sounds like schizophrenic off their meds (or maybe never on them in the first place). I think you are right about the mental problems, and that maybe the best you can do in this situation, if they won't approach medical services themselves, is try and inform social services about them, then leave it alone.
If they are going to crash, you can't stop them as you're not family, spouse, or otherwise have any authority over them to intervene more decisively and you are running the risk that they will see you as part of the conspiracy or whatever.
I don’t think the US has a social services to notify. None that I’m aware of at any rate. The only thing I can think of in this country is talking to law enforcement. But if no crime has been committed there is really nothing they can do.
There was a fairly recent incident in an exurb of Minneapolis where a disturbed individual that the police were ‘aware of’ entered a clinic shooting a pistol killing one person.
Minneapolis itself has an upcoming referendum that would create a department of public safety.
Part of the idea is that there would be trained staff to handle mental health crises. Unfortunately the gist of what fits on a ballot looks like the goal is just to get rid of police.
In fact the referendum does actually call for replacing the police department with this proposed department of public safety.
This could be a worthwhile experiment with a carefully considered, nuanced plan. Unfortunately it doesn’t appear to be either carefully considered or nuanced.
As things stand now I expect most voters to see this as just crazy liberals trying to defund the police.
I live across the river I Saint Paul so I won’t be voting on this. If I were, the plan is so sketchy I would be a hard no.
Maybe this depends on your location, and the reputation of the local "social services". I don't think it is bad advice, but I would be extremely uncomfortable initiating that process without being extremely familiar and comfortable with what that process is in my specific area, *and* being pretty certain that there were real psychological symptoms (as opposed to, say, a guy who was exaggerating his story to make it sound better or a guy who isn't real familiar with government branches and doesn't discern between Generic Bureaucracy X and the CIA).
I agree it sounds concerning, but I would be hesitant to meddle unless I had high confidence in the outcome of that meddling or I was going to be willing to remain involved as an advocate for the guy throughout any subsequent proceedings (as it sounds like he may not have anyone else to advocate for his best interests or explain anything about his situation, although maybe I misunderstood and he does have a friend/family network nearby).
I think the local "social services" are reasonably good here (well-off college town in left-coast area) but I'm not intimately familiar with them.
I am pretty confident that what I'm seeing is not an attempt to exaggerate a story to sound better -- neighbor is otherwise about as humble and low-key as possible. It seems like a genuine confession of difficulties. I do get the sense that they're actively struggling to make sense of the rest of their life in light of this possibly-new delusional-seeming narrative about their origins. I also take it that any family links in the old country are considered unreliable now because they're not the neighbor's "real family" and are probably considered to have been complicit in taking them away from the "real family".
But yeah, by own situation is pretty precarious right now and I definitely don't have the bandwidth to spare on being this person's continued advocate (if I'm even going to be able to continue living here as their neighbor).
Rereading this it maybe wasn't totally clear the way I phrased it, the person (potentially) doing the exaggerating is the neighbor, not the the OP of this thread.
I don't have any particularly good advice, but just wanted to send some empathy and care. I'm in a not-entirely-dissimilar situation (although it's with someone very close to me rather than an acquaintance), and have struggled to figure out what to do. Right now I'm trying to just be a stable, easily-available resource for them if/when they want help. But ya it feels super shitty either way :/
Also, afaik, self-burning like that is actually a common self-harm thing (akin to cutting). Not sure if that changes any calculus, but felt worth saying.
Yeah, I suppose it could be self-harm with some more directly self-harming motive, but it's presented to me as serious (paranoid-seeming, to me) fear that failure to do painful operation diligently enough will result in death by disease.
> However, neighbor then proceeded to explain/demonstrate how they have been undertaking, with increasing frequency, an admittedly dangerous and disfiguring self-treatment for a self-diagnosed disorder which would, if present, be acutely life-threatening -- but for which I was unable to persuade them to seek professional medical attention.
Were you being vague here to protect your neighbor's privacy?
I ask because it's difficult to help with a cost-benefit analysis of your potential intervention without knowing the exact circumstances. There could be a lot of cultural and/or medical stuff going on there that would make a big difference in the analysis and/or advice ACX readers might provide.
There might already be enough details here that your neighbor would recognize himself if he read your comment, so unless you have reason to believe he frequents the board, providing more information about him and the specific behavior you're seeing might elicit specific and useful responses.
Trying to be as vague as possible for privacy though I have no reason to believe they read this board, but self-treatment involves repeated third-degree burns to fairly small areas at a time, possibly to significant depth. I've been shown some of the burns and they seem to heal well, but leave significant scars. Most recent treatment looks like it could have easily resulted in blindness if it had gone awry.
Also, my apologies for assuming your neighbor's gender in my first reply! I guess my unconscious bias is STEM degree + immigrant from illiberal homeland + preoccupation with a powerful political parental figure = male.
But you didn't identify them as male, so I shouldn't have, either.
FWIW after rereading your comment, the "improbably associated U.S. agencies" your neighbor claims are working on their behalf is the detail that tips me, personally, out of an agnostic "stranger things have happened" stance into, "yeah, this person is becoming disconnected from reality."
I don't have any actionable suggestions for how to help them get reconnected, because it's virtually impossible to impose mental heathcare on someone in the U.S. unless they're ostentatiously posing a physical threat to themselves or others. Thousands of people with symptoms far more severe than your neighbor's are going untreated because our system says that even when a symptom of a disease is the inability to participate in medical and mental healthcare, sufferers should determine how much care they receive.
So if it helps with your peace of mind: there's nothing you actually *can* do to meaningfully help your neighbor unless their behavior becomes physically dangerous to a degree that law enforcement / professionals would be obligated to get involved.
And because there's literally nothing you can meaningfully do, I think you can ethically minimize your involvement in this and not be as available to your neighbor. That's not what you asked about, but I think it's important to bring up. You shouldn't feel obligated to invest a lot of time in attempting to improve a situation you can't possibly meaningfully influence.
I agree that these improbable U.S. agencies are an especially solid ring on the crazy-bells.
What you say makes sense, I suppose there's not much I could realistically do beyond further suggesting that they seek medical attention for the supposed disease they're trying to self-treat.
Before these revelations, I was asking neighbor if they were interested in adopting a stray animal I found recently, and they are, but I think now the best I can do for the animal instead is to take it to a shelter where it might eventually find a stable home with stable people.
Note that the self-harm behavior you describe is a *classic* case of a danger to themselves, and they probably are eligible for being involuntarily committed in most jurisdictions in the US.
I'm not at all sure that's morally better than letting them crash and burn; that's a hard call, and its your call to make. But if you go to your local social services, and tell them that your neighbor seems to be some sort of psychotic and is self-harming with 3rd degree burns, you probably can arrange for that to happen and for them to get some involuntary help.
I'm with Christina on this.
You can express concern, you can offer leads to potential support/care, and you can take care of yourself by acknowledging how little you can do and sorting out how much of a support you yourself want to be in terms of listening.
It's really hard to witness people suffering close-up and day after day. That your neighbor's situation has affected you enough to share it here speaks to the depth of your own empathy.
If this person says to you at any point they are imminently about to kill themselves or harm someone else, you can call 911. Short of that, non-suicidal self-injury is pretty common and people living independently with serious delusions is also not so uncommon. Various social service agencies have no particular mandate relative to an adult that way.
Thanks for replying too! You put it better than I did.
Thanks for the details! For me, they were useful because they weren't what I first assumed, so it changes my thinking slightly, especially if it's the Black Salve Gerry Quinn mentioned below.
You mentioned your neighbor has a STEM degree, but also that they might need subsidized medical care or end up in a low-income medical care situation. Is your neighbor working? If not, do you have a sense of why not?
I read of Black Salve ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_salve ) in another context recently. Is that it? It seems to be a relatively common alternative treatment for skin cancer, which was widely used in the past.
https://www.sciphijournal.org/index.php/2021/09/30/read-only/
A bit of fun with a very hypothetical huge increase of intelligence.
Inspired by Lafferty's "Slow Tuesday Night".
https://www.baen.com/Chapters/9781618249203/9781618249203___2.htm
I liked this a whole bunch while I was going through it, but right when Lafferty would’ve started introducing characters and complications, the writer just ended things. But that's a nitpick. More than anything I'm delighted to see someone getting the master's tools out. I grinned so hard at "But when time itself is the task, it is a defect to finish ahead of time." Felt like something he'd have written.
Do people know about R. A. Lafferty here? Is this something people talk about here? Man, maybe I started posting on the right day.
Yes, I read stories of his years ago and fell for his unique style and madcap inventiveness.
There's me, at least. I wouldn't be surprised if there are more Lafferty fans.
"Slow Tuesday Night" seemed delightfully whimsical when I read it in the 60s, and more more prescient since. Things definitely move faster.
There's a Lafferty facebook group on facebook, and it has a one-day gathering in June, with presentations. The gathering as been remote because of the pandemic, so getting to New Jersey isn't a requirement any more.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/eastoflaughter
Big Lafferty fan here.
Insofar as "rationalists" can be considered a kind of community one can speak of broadly (I think they can be, loosely, speaking as someone who does not consider themselves part of said community!), do they on the whole have better, or more correct, views on aesthetics?
There are a whole host of reasons I wouldn't identify as a rationalist, but one part of it, when examining my own internal sense of identity, does seem to be a *deep* discrepancy in how we approach aesthetics, and the areas where aesthetics bleeds into ethics & meaning more generally. I simply find the views of most rationalists totally lacking in these areas, and that makes being more genial to their whole project harder.
I also recognize this is a pretty vague question, and I'd have to think more to make it more precise, so I'm just tossing it out there, hoping it spurs discussion. (I'm also aware that to whatever questions re: aesthetics there are, a lot of rationalists will probably say that the positions on these questions aren't truth-apt, or they'll be error theorists, or whatever.)
I don't think aesthetic views can be said to correct unless aesthetic objectivism is true. I think aesthetics are ultimately subjective, though philosophers are pretty evenly split on this matter (https://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl). Even if aesthetic objectivism is false, maybe some views can be *better* than others in some sense of the word "better". It's unsatisfying when someone can't justify at all why they find something beautiful -- probably rationalists are better at this. Aesthetic views can also be judged on the matter of 'good taste' -- do rationalists tend to have good taste?
A data point: It's been my experience that many software engineers, industrial designers, and other rational folk have job-threateningly strong opinions about the design of their project. They freely describe designs as "ugly". They may even defend their preferred designs as "beautiful", but beautiful for explicit reasons. Apple products are often considered beautiful but for good reasons. Moves in chess or Go can be considered beautiful and the height of rationalism.
Isn't aestheics ineffable? That's probably the prerequisite answer to have. There was a striking story in Ellison's "Again, Dangerous Visions" anthology called "Eye of the Beholder" in which a nerdy type discovers a mathematical algorithm for aesthetic beauty, in this case of sculpture. It doesn't end well, of course, since it was written in the 70s, but if aesthetics were readily amenable to rationality then perhaps it could be programmed. That would certainly lead to a different world.
As someone who's messed around a lot with CLIP+VQGAN notebooks, if you ask CLIP to make something "beautiful", it does sort of understand what you mean, and will generate images accordingly- and I'm sure DALL-E will have much better results in that regard.
I think the algorithm for aesthetic beauty may just be machine learning.
On that point I think I disagree. Machine learning is just very fancy pattern recognition, so a machine learning algorithm, given enough training data, can learn to recognize what someone else labels "beautiful," and that can be handy, and even practical if you have some way of Monte-Carloing your way around the aesthetic space until your ML algorithm tells you to stop. (So it would probably wok for the very restrictive space of human face shapes, say.)
But if the space is high dimensional, which doesn't seem unlikely if we are talking about genuine art, architecture, music, and the like, that your ML algorithm can recognize your optimum (but tell you zip about how to get there, or even head in the right direction) doesn't seem super useful.
top on artstation | rendered on Unreal Engine
What's your view of aesthetics, and what do you think is the rationalist view on aesthetics? I haven't heard much discussion of aesthetics among rationalists (and the post by Scott about modern art didn't express strong opinions), so I honestly don't know.
Can you give an example where your personal sense of aesthetics differes from the aesthetics of rational community?
Honestly, aesthetics are one of the main reasons I like the rationalist community. There's something incredibly beautiful to me about a genuinely good-faith argument. The sort of argument where the person making it is really trying, as hard as they can, to get at the truth. Not the set of truths that support their position, or the truths that convey the social image they want to associated with, or those that are satisfying emotionally. Not the truth that's good enough for everyday practical purposes- but the real thing, as close as they can get to it.
It's hard to write like that- we're wired to use communication for social competition, and while an ordinary argument can be as simple as repeating a time-tested line, a genuinely good-faith one requires the hard work of honest contemplation. I think that sacrifice is part of what makes it beautiful to me.
It shows up when a writer includes points that weaken their central thesis- not to disprove them, but to show honest uncertainty. It can include points made by people who the writer is opposed to politically or morally- not to emphasize the difference between them and the writer, but because they might be right. It's the sort of argument where the writer will thank you for proving them wrong- not grudgingly, but with sincerity.
It's a generous, idealistic kind of argumentation, and there's a lot of beauty in that. Though I don't think you can ground morality in aesthetics, I do think there's a moral principle that underlies that beauty- and it's one I think our culture is too quick to ignore or dismiss.
I'm not always very good at representing that ideal myself, but at its best, the Rationalist community sometimes does, and that's a lot of why I find it attractive.
Honestly, the only views on aesthetics I'd say are totally worthless are "They don't mater" because they clearly do, and "Stuff used to be better!" Because it clearly wasn't.
I will say that lots of rationalists I've met haven't really interrogated their sensibilities and influential they are to their judgment; but what are you gonna do. It's even wishy-washyer than rationality, which is already washy as fuck
You’re probably right. But that’s more of a “crisis of meaning and will of the modern world, last man” issue than “rationalist”. The “aesthetic appreciators” or more accurately those who heavily lean into it on the internet generally the far right people. And they certainly are better at it! Old paintings and classic statues are awesome. And folk and classical are the only two great genres. And yes, that sort of thing has deep and strong connections to what sorts of things one believes and thinks and does.
I.e. I can’t really say rationalists have worse views on aesthetics than any other group I can think of
I'm considering getting LASIK in the near future. My myopia is quite mild, to the point that I don't bother wearing glasses at home or in the office, only while driving or while needing to look somewhere far away.
I've read a little too deeply into LASIK horror stories online though, and I'm a little worried that I could turn my "mild-myopia-barely-even-need-glasses" into something much worse.
My questions are thus:
Do the risks of LASIK scale to the severity of the myopia before the operation, or are they essentially flat per-surgery, no matter how intense the surgery is?
Are different clinics riskier than others, or is it usually a flat risk no matter which I go to?
Do you have any advice in evaluating clinics? (individual clinics certainly wouldn't advertise a high complication rate)
Any other advice or stories would be much appreciated too!
The risks of LASIK are primarily based on the surgeon's competence and the quality of the aftercare. They do not scale significantly with the severity of the vision defects being corrected.
Serious risks come in two major categories. First is blatant error by the surgeon during the procedure, most commonly in the form of applying the wrong amount or pattern of correction to your cornea. This is very rare, as there are several layers of safeguard against this at any competent practice: repeatedly confirming your identity, surgeon cross-checking the planned correction with their assistants immediately before surgery while you're in the room, and I think modern laser equipment suites also includes sensors that sanity check the planned correction pattern.
Second category is flap complications. LASIK involves cutting a flap into the cornea and then using the laser to resurface the layer cornea under the flap, then reseating the flap over it. The purpose of the flap is to improve healing by minimizing damage to the exposed surface of the eye. The big risk, though, is if the flap is disturbed out of position before it heals enough to hold itself firmly in place barring major trauma. It's also possible for an incompetent surgeon to damage the flap during the procedure itself.
By far the best mitigation, apart from selecting an experienced and reputable surgeon, is to follow the aftercare instructions scrupulously. Especially the standard recommendation to sleep as soon as you can for as long as you can immediately following the procedure, or at least to spend most of the remainder of the day of the procedure lying down with your eyes closed (I recommend queuing up some audiobooks or podcasts to listen too): sleep facilitates healing in general, and lying down with your eyes closed maximally protects the flaps during the most vulnerable several hours of the recovery. You should also have a series of aftercare exams to screen for complications for prompt correction or mitigation, and you should have some medications prescribed for the recovery (numbing drops and prophylactic antibiotics).
Risk of flap complications is also mitigated by opting for "bladeless" or "all-laser" LASIK, where the flap is cut by a second laser instead of by a manually-operated microkeratome blade. This is a bit more expensive, but it removes an opportunity for human error, and the laser cut creates a slightly textured surface inside the flap that is thought to help hold the flap in place as it heals.
Another factor is flap orientation. There are two standards for where to put the "hinge" of the flap, with different risks for each. The more common last I checked was "superior" flaps, where the hinge is at the top of the eye. This helps keep the flap in place during early healing, since the action of blinking will push the flap back into place if it's slightly misaligned. The alternative is "nasal" falls, where the hinge is on the sides of the eyes facing the bridge of your nose. This does a worse job of keeping the flap in position, but reduces the much more common minor side effect of dry eyes following the procedure since it severs fewer of the nerves in the cornea.
You can eliminate the risk of flap complications entirely by opting for PRK instead of LASIK. This is an older variant of the procedure where there's no flap and the same laser as LASIK is used to recontuour the outer surface of the cornea instead. Other advantages are that PRK is cheaper (fewer steps to the procedure), doesn't have dry eye as a common complication (since cutting nerves during flap creation is what causes the dry eyes), and more people are good candidates for the procedure (people with very thin corneas can't/shouldn't get LASIK because there isn't enough material to work with for both the flap and the recontuouring). The big downside is a much slower recovery with more risk of infection, since the vision correction surgery is burned into the exposed surface of the eye and because the protective outer layer of the eye (the epithelium) needs to regrow. It usually takes a day or less to heal enough to get good vision after LASIK, but takes 5-7 after PRK. In both cases, your vision keeps improving for weeks or months after the procedure, but you're most of the way there a lot faster after LASIK.
I just got LASIK earlier this week!
- Everyone I've talked to who had it (n=3) said it's the best thing ever; they're all in my age group (20s) and had it done relatively recently. It's apparently less worthwhile the older you get, as you'll end up with presbyopia later anyways.
- I went with a clinic that a friend recommended (LaserVue in SF). Spent some time looking at Yelp ratings too. The clinic quoted me something like 60% chance of 20/15 vision, 90% 20/20, 98% 20/30. You can shop around too (I didn't bother because as a rule, I hate dealing with the medical industry; but this LASIK clinic provided a very customer-friendly experience)
- My clinic offered a free initial consultation, which is an hour of putting you through various machines and "can you read this line for me" tests; if you go through with it, it's a total of 5 visits to the clinic: Consultation, second check, operation, post-operation check, one week follow up.
- My options were LASIK and SMILE, a newer surgery method with some slight benefits. LASIK was quoted at $6200, SMILE at $7200, but they offered to price-match my friend's LASIK operation at $4770, which is what I went with.
- I was unconcerned about the procedure before signing up, got a little nervous/jittery on the operation day. But the operation itself was ridiculously fast (5 min), almost kind of anticlimactic. I suppose "anticlimactic" is exactly what you want out of surgeries, though.
- I spent the rest of the day after surgery with my eyes closed at home, listening to audiobooks and conversing with friends. The next day my vision was great and I went in to go to work; no pain, but still dryness, which I'm managing with eyedrops.
- My night vision has the "halos" problem, basically seeing all light sources as if they were streetlights in fog. I don't drive anyways and it's supposed to improve with time.
Overall, I'm quite happy I went through with it! More than complication risk, I was more concerned about getting my logistical ducks in a row (finding time to schedule these, not wearing contacts for the requisite months beforehand).
One thing you might consider is that, as you age, you will inevitably develop presbyopia, or the loss of visual accomodation. This is the reason that older people with "normal" vision require reading glasses. If your LASIK operation is successful, your eyesight will "freeze" more and more at being clear only at long distances, and you, too, will require glasses for any reading or close work. If you are myopic your eyesight will freeze at roughly the furthest distance you can see clearly. If your vision is not too bad this may actually be more convenient than only being able to see clearly at long distances.
I personally am somewhat myopic, and old enough to have loss of accomodation. I think I am happier being able to read and do close work without glasses while requiring them for longer distance vision. Your preferences may differ, but it is worth thinking about.
There are replacement lenses for cataract that claim to provide some accomodation, but they are relatively expensive and experimental. Perhaps by the time you develop cataracts they will be ready for prime time, which would be a fine thing. Currently I believe that most cataract patients have their lenses adjusted to provide good vision at infinity, meaning that reading glasses are required. I have also heard that in some cases one eye is adjusted to provide good distance vision, and one closer vision, with some loss of depth perception. I don't know how one would decide whether that was a livable arrangement pre-surgery.
Important advice I almost didn’t get before my surgery: If you do any kind of grappling or martial art or combat sport, do NOT get traditional LASIK. The flap will heal weaker, and if that tears from an eye poke, it’s permanent damage. Instead, get PRK, where they scrape away a small layer instead of cutting a flap, and then that layer regrows while you wear the bandage contact. It takes longer to heal and you’ll need about a week of support while you can’t see well, but then you’ll be good to go. The USAF only does PRK for their pilots for similar reasons.
I've gotten LASIK. I don't have any wider domain knowledge other than that but feel free to ask me anything.
Do your eyes still work)
Yes
Hooray!
More seriously, did you have any problems with the procedure? Do they put you under? What was the healing process like?
1.) No. There's a day or two of intense pain during recovery and about a month where your eyes have noticeable marks and sensitivity. After that I've been more or less fine.
2.) No. You're conscious the entire time.
3.) Basically the first two days were really, really bad. They give you some sedatives but you're out of commission. After that there were a few months of more or less constant sunglasses due to light sensitivity. Even at night. No pain or other issues though. I think there were some halos but they went away. After that I haven't noticed anything different other than improved vision.
Is your vision perfect now, or just good enough you don't need glasses? And how do they keep your eyeball from wiggling around while they cut it up if they don't put you under?
Some anecdata:
- My father is an Opthalmologist / eye surgeon
- Everything I've heard from my father is that LASIK is a super safe operation
Of course, there's always bad outcomes for somebody, and I know such a person.
A friend of mine had a bad but not catastrophic experience with LASIK. Basically what LASIK does is they slice your cornea so that it folds away, laser the surface, then lay the corneal flap back down. Then they put a big hard contact lens on to keep everything in place while it heals. Later someone will remove this big hard contact lens. However, if the doctor removing it makes a mistake they can cause a tear or tiny wrinkles to develop which will then heal in place, permanently. This can cause permanent "ghosting" in your vision, which can be particularly bad at night. This happened to my friend and they can basically no longer drive at night any more because of it. The sad part is they were happy to wear glasses for the rest of their life before, but had a lot of pressure from a relative to go get the surgery and now they regret it. Their daytime vision isn't destroyed or anything, and it was only in one eye, but it's always a bummer to accumulate permanent damage you can't do anything about.
One thing I *CAN* say from observing my Dad's practice ... if you live long enough, you *will* get cataracts. It's not a question of it, but of when. And when you get cataracts, if you want to be able to see well again (or even at all, in extreme cases), you'll need to get the internal lens in your eye replaced. My Dad specialized in cataract surgery and it's made tremendous leaps and bounds in the last 30 years, it's absolutely incredible, and the outcomes are generally quite good.
So one way to look at it is, if you're squeamish about LASIK, if you have a good quality of life now and just want to wait until you naturally develop cataracts, when you inevitably *need* that cataract surgery anyway, they can then make sure to try to correct any deficiencies in your vision at the same time (and if you haven't previously had LASIK, the math is a bit easier for them to calibrate what kind of lens to put in). That way you're reducing the number of times you take a risk on getting a botched eye surgery in your life from two to one.
That said, LASIK statistically is supposed to be super safe. I have to just admit to myself that one super salient anecdote with my friend has totally ruined my emotional ability to feel that way about it even though I know the statistics.
My grandpa wore thick glasses his whole life: then when he was 80 years old he needed cataract surgery and they fixed him up. No more glasses at 80: we all had a good laugh, told him he was doing things backwards. You’re supposed to get worse eyesight when you’re older, not better! It was weird to think that he had better eyesight at 80 then at 25.
Yup, this is a super common experience with modern cataract surgery; even crazier it's outpatient these days!
Of course whether you put off LASIK because cataract surgery will fix it anyway depends on a) how squeamish you are about LASIK, and b) how long you have to wait. If you're 50 or 60 already cataract surgery might not be too far away; if you're 20 it's gonna be a pretty long time.
And of course I misspelled Ophthalmologist with no edit button.... sorry dad.
Is there anybody who is NOT a crypto coin/blockchain enthusiast talking about “web3” ? In my circles at least it seems entirely confined to that world, whereas back with Web 2.0 that phenomenon seems to have had much wider buy in. By contrast “web3” seems entirely relegated to this subgroup. Just me or is this how it looks for other people too?
Yes. In my organisation Web3 discussions focus on two main areas. 1) Personal Data Stores (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_data_service),
2) Metaverse. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaverse)
The first involves a suite of open source technologies that make it easier for a user to control their own online data (TLDR everyone has their own private database and 3rd parties can request access to specific parts of it).
The second is a slow burning concept to replace the Web as the primary user interface to the Internet with a global persistant 3d environment.
For what it's worth I'm not at all a crypto/blockchain enthusiast and I haven't heard much of anything about "web3". And I work in web development so even if I'm not super cutting edge it's something I'm reasonably likely to have come across.
This is the pattern I’ve observed so far too - my non crypto web dev friends haven’t even heard of it. Wondering how widely that holds up.
web3 is not a design philosophy like Web 2.0. Web3 is a collection of JavaScript libraries that allow easy interaction with Ethereum nodes. (And by analogy some other nodes.) It's important for making blockchain a more practical technology for average internet applications. So yes, everyone interested in it is into crypto because that's what it's about.
There’s web3.js , yes, but I keep hearing people talk about “web3” as a phenomenon - often invoking terms like “the decentralized web”. Is the name not meant to position itself as a successor to Web 2.0? Because most people I see using it seem to mean it that way. This article is a typical example:
www.freecodecamp.org/news/what-is-web3
The article you're quoting agrees that web3 is about using blockchain in web app development:
> Instead, web3 applications either run on blockchains, decentralized networks of many peer to peer nodes (servers), or a combination of the two that forms a cryptoeconomic protocol. These apps are often referred to as dapps (decentralized apps), and you will see that term used often in the web3 space.
Web3.js is specifically ethereum but the term's grown from there. (Or maybe it was vice versa? I don't know.) But yeah, that's what it means.
Yeah that’s basically what I was asking. It seems “web3” whether you mean the movement or the specific libraries means “the future of the web is blockchain powered?”
My other question is just how much traction this vision has amongst rank and file web developers. Seems kinda limited from where I’m standing, but maybe someone else knows more.
It's big among the blockchain movement who are increasingly focusing on finding practical, common person applications for the technology. I haven't really seen much buy in from the other side. A bit but not a ton.
Are you involved in blockchain stuff yourself at all? Or just an observer?
Less wrong post I stumbled across from Roko (now far right) from ten years ago. Less wrong was more fun back then, lol. Posting just because it’s so absurd it’s funny
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SkXLrDXyHeekqgbFg/shock-level-5-big-worlds-and-modal-realism
I can see how he came up with the basilisk
I wasn't around in those days but did remember reading about the basilisk controversy and always wondered:
I was raised fundamentalist Christian. The basilisk sounded a lot like the Christian God who planned to torment you in Hell forever and ever for not "believing" in Him so I was kind of surprised at all the people who were freaked out by the concept. Was that ever addressed?
My view on that is that the audience was a lot of people who were raised secular/non-Christian, had not encountered such a problem before as insiders not outsiders, and had a high proportion of people with scrupulosity. They had never before had to personally reject the notion of Hell as something that could ever apply to themselves.
So when they got hit with something they could believe in, or fit into their mental model of possibility in the real world, putting that on top of high tendency to worry about failing to do one's best and feeling personally responsible left some of them open to "this is the kind of thing I accept could happen, I already feel I am not doing enough, so I could be one of the victims of the basilisk!" and obsessing over that leads to extreme reactions.
Only got through the first 20% before I got fed up with the the cosmology woo.
I can see how he came up with the basilisk because he seems to think people are more fragile than mist on a mirror.
"Hey, consider that in an infinite universe of infinitely repeating combinations of matter, there are going to be multiple copies of you! Isn't that breaking your mind right now?"
No, actually. The reason being, I have not as yet ever bitten into a hamster bar, and if I do poke this spoon on the desk before me into my eye, I certainly *will* undergo consequences for my actions. Conversely, if the instance of 'me' in universe No. 99, 999 does it/has done it/is going to do it, it doesn't affect me in the slightest, as the only instance of 'me' I am experiencing right now is this one here typing all this out.
Now, if in our infinite wotsit, what Me No. 99, 999 does have an effect on me, and what I do does have an effect on No. 102,325 and so forth, then I *would* care. But since nothing of that sort has occurred (so far as I know, unless we take dreams to be signals from those other worlds), then it makes no difference to me, the same way that some action that the 'me' of five years from now (if I am still alive) has no effect on the 'me' of now (even if that future me in one sense already has taken that action).
It's a nice thought experiment, but to actually worry that "Oh no, Me No. 1,325.987 ate thee slices of hamster cake, I am going to put on an extra two pounds!", well then, you are somebody so delicately constituted, I don't know how you actually do live in this world.
I hope you have read "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed" by Alfred Bester.
Looked it up and read it online and it's a fantastic story, classic Bester: clever. funny, and with a sting in the tail.
I don't know if the anecdote about Boltzmann is true, but it should be. Another thing that occurred to me was that Hassel never contemplated that every time he walked in and saw his red-haired wife in the arms of another man, that it might be down to *his* personality traits: he likes red-haired women, so he marries a red-haired woman. That is, his wife is a different woman every time, but Hassel's personality is such that the wife will always have an affair due to an unhappy marriage.
But I suppose Bester's ending means that she is indeed the same woman, and it's a very clever ending, one I don't remember reading before.
I don't know, I suspect not, as Boltzmann was supposedly a very successful and popular lecturer. I thought the story was interesting in this context mostly because of its rather avant-garde take on the issue of identity and how it might relate to your thoughts on the existence of "other yous."
It was definitely a unique take on time travel, and the central idea that each of us lives in a small, contained, individual bubble of time and so we can only affect our own lives, we can't change the past or future or present for anyone else, and if we try to change things we'll only end up affecting ourselves was very interesting notion.
I think it reinforces my feeling that even if other versions of 'me' exist in other worlds, anything I do won't affect them and anything they do won't affect me. Me in another world wins the lottery? Nothing to do with my life. Me in this world breaks my arm? Nothing to do with them.
So it undercuts the 'brain-melting' idea that 'whoa there are millions or billions of 'me' out there, nothing I do is meaningful because it has no consequences in reality since every decision I could make is going to be made whether I chose A, B or C or whether I decided not to do something' - any decisions I make are meaningful *to this version of me* because they *do* have consequences here. I can't say "it doesn't matter if I don't get a job, because some version of me will win the lottery", it very much matters to this version of me. If I hurt people or kill people or commit a crime, it matters.
The story is also emotionally resonant-- something about the consequences of rage.
I've never found the idea brain-melting anyway. I suppose I'm just never been impressed by my own uniqueness. Of course my inner experience tells me I'm unique, on account of I don't seem to be able to be anybody else (from the inside), so obviously I fiercely defend my existence -- it wouldn't console me in the slightest on the eve of my execution to be told a clone of myself, fully up to date with all my memories, would be awakened the following morning.
But as far as cold rational observation suggests, I doubt I'm especially unique as far as anything important to the rest of the world goes, in the same way that we tend to think most horses or rats are interchangeable for practical purposes. If you told me already there were 6 other schmos among the world's 7 billion who look and for all practical purposes act just like me, I wouldn't really be surprised.
Luckily, Me No. 2,564,128 does know how to spell "three slices" in the above so nobody need ever know I made a mistake! 😉
Something I was thinking about in the context of the TV adaptation of Foundation: how many generations before race ceases to exist?
Or, to go with something a bit more quantifiable, how many generations before less than one percent of the human population can trace more than half their ancestors to a single racial group (with "racial group" defined in some vaguely-reasonable way so that there's circa ten races in the world right now)?
Absent any novel strong force that prevents different races from interbreeding, we should expect that eventually there'll be no identifiable racial groups left and everyone will be one brownish race. I'd say it should certainly happen on the timescale of Foundation (25,000 years in the future) but will it already have happed on the timescale of, say, Star Trek (300 years in the future)?
Races will probably never cease to exist, though the proportion of what we would today consider mixed-race people will be higher in the future. Medical immortality will probably exist sometime in the next century, and people of "pure" race will take advantage of it. Self-cloning will also keep some number of pure race people alive indefinitely.
Human genetic engineering will also cause a scrambling of physical traits that we today associate with specific races. For example, once it becomes cheap to do so, large numbers of nonwhite parents will engineer their unborn children to have traits like blonde hair and blue or green eyes.
300 years from now, substantial numbers of pure race people will still be walking around, alongside many people with mixed racial heritage.
What I expect is that there will be bioengineering and divisions based on how people are modified.
I'm pretty sure we would find other ways to distinguish between groups that would map in a general way to our concept of race, which would be visually identifiable and immutable. It may not actually track with skin color, but perhaps facial features, hair color, or other characteristics which our descendants will use to identify people as humans have for their whole history.
Chances are very high that skin color would be one of the markers, even if the specifics (i.e. Black and White) are not identified or called the same. For instance, Irish used to be considered a separate "race" from Anglo-Saxons. There were plenty of features, some of which were immutable, that people found to separate themselves other than White (freckles, red hair, extra pale skin).
>>>(with "racial group" defined in some vaguely-reasonable way so that there's circa ten races in the world right now)?
What is the 'vaguely reasonable way to get ~10 races/ancestry groups now, instead of the traditional & supported by current science of genomics 3 to 5? (If we don't know your definitions I don't think we can answer the question.)
Having said that, I think your suppositions that non-novel forces are insufficient to allow for maintenance of physically distinct groups (along side mixtures of different proportions) is not accurate. Also Razib Khan (substack: unsupervised learning) did just cover this, and the answer is that our genes are complicated but are not limitless in possible outcomes.
Current genomics doesn't support "3 to 5" racial groups or, indeed, the notion of "race" — in the sense of distinct, unifying genetic identities — at all.
"Ancestry" — in the sense that geographically co-located people may well share related subsets of paths through which their genomes have been inherited — is a different matter
I don't understand your reply. First you say that there aren't races - groups of people who share common ancestors (and gene subset combinations) that (ancestors and gene subsets) are (nearly entirely) not shared with other groups of people in the recent (15-70k years)...and then you say there are. Can you please explain this contradiction?
I don't think I said what you think I said, not least because you're conflating "race" and "ancestry".
Probably best to start with the "Race vs Ancestry" section at the start of
https://unlockinglifescode.org/connections/featured-articles/ancestry-vs-race-implications-society
Why is India not already racially homogeneous?
Forever. Genes are heterogenous, we're never gonna get the idyllic 55% tan Conan the Barbarian future we so desire.
One of the minor things I found implausible in C.J.Cherry's (very good) _Foreigner_ series was that the human populations, very far in our future (they had interstellar space flight and colonization at least two hundred years before the story is happening), still have recognizably black and Caucasian individuals.
The way it works in the short run is that you get children with a mix of various racial characteristics, not people with medium brown skin and somewhat wavy dark hair.
If the pattern continues, there were continue to be some people who look like what we would call black or white, but they'll be pretty rare.
Present day human populations are already hybrids of more ancient populations.
True, but for most of history the hybridization was *much* more geographically limited.
Mating continues to assort by many factors, so maybe we’ll get new races as old ones merge! (Not for the first time)
Of course this ignores whatever technology stuff happens in even another 70 years, which ... probably will matter as much or more relative to current trends. I don’t think predictions from current things matter.
What do you mean by that? 23andme traces 100% of my ancestry to the same racial group, and the same is true for most people who identify with that racial group.
I haven't had my genome checked, but some relatives have, and all my ancestry is eastern European. It's kind of boring compared to the people who have ancestry from three continents, but there it is.
I've heard a complaint that the ancestry descriptions assume that the racial makeup of a place in the past is the same as it is now. I'm not sure how that plays into the accuracy of ancestry descriptions.
I really don't understand that complaint. I mean, if I find out I'm 100% Udmurt, I'm still gonna be 100% Udmurt even if it turns out that the Udmurts used to live in the Tarim Basin and Udmurtia used to be populated by Nganasans.
It's one thing to feel connected to people, and another to feel connected to the history of a place.
I think that royalty can do that, the best example is probably the Japanese Emperor. He can trace his lineage quite far back and it's all Japanese people from a few prestigious families, who were highly unlikely to marry gaijin even before the isolationist period.
I think you are mistaken. Consider a pure blooded Australian aborigine. Or Maori. Or African pygmy.
The Māori seem like the weakest link here, given that they hadn't settled Aotearoa when the Vikings reached Vinland.
An aborigine would definitely be “mixed” at most 3k ish generations back, and probably a lot later as it only takes one outsider breeding in the right place. Same for the others
Melvin was talking about "more than half their ancestors" not "it only takes one outsider" -- and I think that even if you raise the threshold to "more than 95% of their ancestors" there still are plenty of people who wouldn't be "mixed".
I feel like I'm increasingly seeing the word "gross" to describe something that the speaker finds reprehensible. I can't decide if it's a good thing -- because I actually think it's true to reality to link moral/ethical failings with disgust -- or a bad thing, because it's an opportunity to lazily replace argument with emotional appeals. Thoughts? Here's an example of what I'm seeing:
https://twitter.com/roddreher/status/1304416594265870336?lang=en
I imagine folks in Grosse Point Michigan aren’t thrilled by the shift in meaning.
I think it's an oversimplification of an argument, and therefore reduces communication. The most recent major example I can think of is when homosexuality was dismissed primarily as "gross" instead of through any kind of coherent or reasoned argument. If the basis of your argument is the visceral reaction, you will convince those who already agree with you and not convince anyone else, though people may feign agreement to avoid the label. If there's a sincere attempt to argue in favor of the "gross" idea/thing, then more sophisticated arguments will be needed than just continuing to call it "gross."
It's frustrating when people try to use gross as an argument, or when they assert that something is objectively gross.
I feel like "gross" has been used this way since at least the 1980s—but maybe this usage became less popular for a while, so it feels new(ish) to those who weren't around, or not in the right subculture(s), at the time. Or am I misremembering?
Words and phrases are always slowly morphing in their meaning and overall feel. There was a time centuries ago when "stink" just meant "odor," not necessarily a bad odor. The phrase "for free" used to be amusing, because everyone recognized it as silly and nonsensical (because "free" means "for nothing" so "for free" is sort of a redundant meaningless condensation of the 2). But if you're not part of the group that's most energetically involved in the morphing , it just feels like Other People are Misusing the Term.
Judging by its cognates (both German and Scandinavian), it would seem that "stink" has had its current meaning at least since Proto-Germanic, which was millennia ago.
I mean, I don't think it's a good or bad thing in and of itself, though you could argue that it's potentially a symptom of a bad thing.
>because I actually think it's true to reality to link moral/ethical failings with disgust
That's the rub, though. Emotions are a more basic and unconscious level of cognition than reasoning, so the arrow of causation there usually isn't "perceived moral failure" -> "disgust", but rather "disgust" -> "perceived moral failure" which essentially abdicates any kind of ethical reasoning.
You could argue that the blending of language signals such an abdication, but it should be remembered that at any time a large chunk of humanity is in that mode so I'm not sure how much of a degradation one can actually read from this.
Tweet from 2020? Gross seems like a universal term to refer to bad stuff. Idk if it matters
Admittedly not the most recent example, but the first easily-searchable one that came to mind. And, it's certainly not just synonymous with "bad." "That earthquake was pretty gross," and "I bombed that exam, it was pretty gross" would be very odd things to say.
While there is indeed the moral conception around it, the technical meaning is as follows:
"Gross
Great; culpable; general; absolute. A thing in gross exists in its own right, and not as an appendage to another thing. Before or without diminution or deduction. Whole; entire; total; as in the gross sum, amount, weight—as opposed to net. Not adjusted or reduced by deductions or subtractions.
Out of all measure; beyond allowance; flagrant; shameful; as a gross dereliction of duty, a gross injustice, gross carelessness or Negligence. Such conduct as is not to be excused.
West's Encyclopedia of American Law, edition 2. Copyright 2008 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved."
Compare it with this partial definition:
"What is COMPARATIVE NEGLIGENCE?
That doctrine in the law of negligence by which the negligence of the parties is compared, in the degrees of “slight,” “ordinary,” and “gross” negligence"
So I think Labouchere's amendment was meant in the sense of "greater, more severe" rather than "disgusting":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labouchere_Amendment
I'd like to catch up on old Slate Star Codex posts, but I hate reading off a screen. What is the most efficient way to print out all old SSC posts (with figures, without comments)?
Thanks!
Has anyone here or on lesswrong written a review, or have a good review to recommend, on the book "The Tycoons: How Rockefeller, Gould, Carnegie and Morgan invented the American supereconomy"?
https://www.amazon.com/Tycoons-Carnegie-Rockefeller-Invented-Supereconomy/dp/0805075992
That looks like an interesting book. I might just read it and write a review.
If there's anything in particular you would like me to focus on, let me know. (Email: thechaostician@gmail.com)
$500 awaits someone who does?
I wonder if the graders would notice if you grabbed a proper book review and just changed some of the vocabulary lol
I’ve picked up two beliefs that are popular in my circles:
1. Gain-of-function research is dangerous and not worth the risk. Our civilization is not competent enough to do this safely, and we probably won’t learn much from it anyway.
2. We should pursue nuclear energy more aggressively. Safety concerns are overblown - our civilization is competent enough to avoid having another Chernobyl. With experience, we could learn a lot about improving our reactor designs.
Am I being inconsistent or is this ok?
This is ok. Biology is a lot more complicated and unpredictable than physics.
Contra Edward Scizorhands, I am definitely NOT of the view that we should pursue nuclear energy more aggressively—though mainly because the long term costs seem really high compared to, say renewables+storage—but I concur with him that you are not being inconsistent in recognising that the worst-case results from GoF research are much more catastrophic than the worst-case results from pursuing nuclear energy. (At least: given that we already have nuclear weapons. It might have been better to have not pursued nuclear technology at all in the first place if we would thereby have avoided the nuclear arms race during which we, I think it is not unfair to say, only just barely managed to avoid completely annihilating ourselves.)
Not least because, as others point out, we seem to still be taking the risks of nuclear energy vastly more seriously that the risks of GoF research, even AFTER COVID-19.
The arms race arguably has led to the longest period of peace between major powers in perhaps all of human history. Prior to the invention of nuclear weapons, major European powers seemed to go to war with each other several times a century, going back to the collapse of the Roman Empire. We've now gone ~75 years without a major world power warring against another, despite multiple times when such a war seemed likely (US v. USSR alone almost certainly would have resulted in several major wars between 1945 and 1990).
Considering the massive loss of life in WWI and WWII, hot wars between major powers in the years since would have likely caused hundreds of millions of deaths. Of course, this is all hypothetical so we can't say for certain, but I believe that building nuclear weapons has turned out to be a force for good that would have justified itself even factoring in the possibility that we could have used them in earnest.
Suppose that you found out that in 90% of possible worlds, humanity is reduced to a tiny band of struggling survivors by this year because of a full-scale nuclear war in the late 20th century. Would that change your mind about nuclear weapons being "a force for good"? Would it make a difference if it were 99.9%? 1%?
I think it's better to have major world power wars every 10 years that kill 10% of the population than a major world power war every 100 years that kills 100% of the population.
In a hypothetical situation where I am wrong, I guess I would be wrong.
How would you "factor in the possibility that we could have used them in earnest", if not in the way I was asking about?
Two things. First, "use them in earnest" does not necessarily mean that humanity is reduced to a tiny band of struggling survivors. We used them in earnest during WWII to similar effect of non-nuclear fire bombing. We could have used them quite extensively with many cities destroyed and not reached the level you are speaking of. Second, I was also referring to the fear and threat of using them that was a big deal during the Cold War. In some ways, that nagging fear of their use is probably a big part of why we never did have a full scale nuclear war.
In your scenario, we have literally destroyed ourselves through the use of nuclear weapons. That is, of course, far worse than a conventional war using non-nuclear weapons. It would be nearly impossible for us to use conventional weapons to reduce humanity to such a diminished state, so therefore it is automatically worse if looking at your scenario verses conventional war.
The more realistic scenario is a nuclear war that destroyed a significant percentage of humanity, but not civilization destroying where humanity may cease to exist. That becomes a more straightforward numbers game, weighing X% of Y lives lost under each scenario. Throwing in a scenario where humanity is pretty much gone is like including infinity, which always does weird things to the math.
Warfare went proxy, so you had wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan funded by the superpowers but often fought by the proxies. We'd have to include those casualties for a fair comparison.
Absolutely. Some quick searches put the number of dead at something like five to eight million, almost all Korean, Afghani, and Vietnamese (not USSR or US). Most of those were civilian deaths. WWII included 20 million military deaths and well over 40 million civilian deaths. Though neither is good, major powers directly confronting each other clearly results in order of magnitude more deaths. I am confident to say that even a non-nuclear WWIII would have resulted in far more deaths than WWII, so preventing it saved even more lives.
Yup. Turns out MAD totally works. Who knew?
An interesting perspective, and not one without merit. But—as awful as it sounds—I think it's better for our species to take high-probability but comparatively(!) minor losses from even awful global-scale conventional conflicts than risk accidentally wiping ourselves out completely in a nuclear shooting war. There were just too many close calls (and absurd things like the Soviets building a dead hand system and then, just as Dr. Strangelove predicted, failing to tell the Americans about it.)
But maybe this is the legacy of having seen _If You Love This Planet_ at the age of eight, and having a "War of the Worlds" moment a year or so later when I was listening to the CBC one Saturday morning and—presumably as part of a radio drama, though I was not aware of it at the time—they announced that the Soviets had launched an all-out nuclear attack and that we would all be dead in four minutes time.
So yes: I'm quite glad that neither I nor basically anyone I've ever known has been killed in a war. But I'm genuinely horrified at how close we came to _all_ being killed in a war—and more so every year as previously-secret close calls come to light.
I respect that. I would certainly agree that my opinion about nuclear weapons is HIGHLY influenced by the fact that we did not cause global extinction with them, despite coming close. If we had a few limited nuclear wars with less death than a non-nuclear WWIII, I don't know that I would be here praising the invention of nuclear weapons, even if many fewer lives were lost than a full conventional war. Hindsight is my friend on this one, but given the benefit of hindsight I think nuclear weapons turned out to be a pretty strong force for good.
I'd say so, yes. And also repeating the same mistake people made about nuclear power in the 70s, id est it's new and vaguely related (and least linguistically) to something dreadful (nuclear weapons in the case of nuclear reactors, and deadly pandemics in the case of viruses), so it must be much more dangerous than it seems.
And in 50 years, when let us say the Chinese know how to engineer viruses that fix Down's or a genetic tendency to early heart disease and we have to buy that medical care from them, trading quite a large number of hours of our labor like we're Guatemalans, 'cause we have nothing equivalently marvelous to trade, it will be even clearer that the future doesn't belong to those unwilling to take some risks.
There's a big difference between GOF and viral therapy research. Messing around with coronavirus or influenza or ebola won't cure your cancer. Very careful modifications to HIV (starting by making it non-contagious) might.
How do you know? If the place from which come revolutionary new scientific insights were that predictable, we could put scientific discovery on a timeline and a budget, predict exactly when the next breakthrough will happen, and all the suits in Management and Marketing would cry smugly "I KNEW it!"
Penicillin was discovered completely accidentally, and probably in no small part because Fleming was a somewhat careless lab worker and allowed his bacteria culture to become contaminated. He wasn't looking for an antibiotic. Becquerel discovered radioactivity entirely by accident, in the process of trying to prove his (incorrect) theory that X-rays were a phosphorescent phenomenon. Nuclear fission, arguably the most potent mid-20th century discovery, was almost missed -- both Fermi and Curie, the most prestigious nuclear labs of the day, missed it because they failed to test for heavy daughter nuclides, it not occuring to anybody (aside from Ida Noddack who everybody ignored) they might be there. It was only by the repeated failure of Hahn to separate the "radium" they knew had to be there from the barium that was just a purification reactant that caused Lise Meitner to eventually rethink things. And if she hadn't been bored and lonely from being a refugee from the Nazis in Sweden (and maybe trying to re-connect to Hahn, on whom she may have had a major crush) maybe she might've had more interesting things to think about, or written it off to lab error.
It's at least conceivable that having a better biome means being less likely to get cancer.
Goodness, yes. We already know HPV causes cancer, for example. But I was driving at the value of fundamental research. Researching viruses tells us tons of useful things about the chemistry of life at the most fundamental level, it's learning the assembler code of how it's done. It has *already* had tremendous payoffs -- what we learned about basic immunology in the two decades of trying to contain AIDS has probably played no small part in the immunotherapy renassiance in which we have the good fortune to live. It would hardly be surprising if the culture or nation who masters this stuff fastest is the one that dominates the 22nd and later centuries.
Chernobyl was an atom bomb factory that did double duty as an electric power plant, and it was the specifically weapon-making functionality that resulted in the accident being as horrific as it was. Pursuing nuclear energy specifically for its blowing-stuff-up capability has a number of unique risks, of which "maybe your atom bomb factory will catch fire and burn down" is not the largest.
For nuclear power plants that aren't also atom bomb factories, Fukushima isn't the worst possible case, but it's the worst we've seen in several thousand reactor-years of experience and it is illustrative of the sort of risk we are taking with nuclear energy.
COVID-19 is at least illustrative of the sort of risk we are taking with gain-of-function research, and is probably 10-20 kiloFukushimas worth of catastrophe, or maybe one kiloChernobyl if you insist on a side order of atomic bombs with your electricity.
Also, nuclear energy powers the equivalent of a couple dozen world-class megacities with zero carbon footprint, whereas gain-of-function research provides jobs for a few research institutes' worth of virologists and mumble something something practical benefits.
So, no, there's nothing inconsistent with saying that nuclear energy is worth the risk whereas gain-of-function research isn't. I'm open to the possibility that they're *both* worth the risk, but I do want to hear some specifics about the benefit of the one with the viruses. Also, probably don't put either one literally inside a major city, and see about putting the virology labs on the Moon at the soonest practical opportunity.
That said, while I can't speak to your circles specifically, I think the criteria most people are going to use is "does it remind me of that scary catastrophe story I remember seeing on CNN/Facebook/whatever?", in which case, meh, your news and social media feeds are going to be filled with scary catastrophe stories no matter what.
(A comment-of-the-month nominee right here....has several LOL lines, for me anyway, of which "maybe one kiloChernobyl if you insist on a side order of atomic bombs with your electricity" might be my favorite.)
> Chernobyl was an atom bomb factory that did double duty as an electric power plant
Could you point me to where I can learn more about this? It's not something I've heard before, and a quick Google search is coming up short.
The wikipedia article on the RMBK-1000 reactor is a pretty good place to start, actually. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK
The short version:
To operate as a breeder reactor as well as a power plant, and in particular a "produce lots of extra plutonium" breeder rather than "generate new fuel about as fast as we burn it", the RMBK had to use either heavy water or graphite as a moderator - ordinary water absorbs too many neutrons. Heavy water is expensive, graphite is cheap, and so the structure that absolutely must not burn down was made in large part of glorified high-grade coal.
Using ordinary water as a coolant but not a moderator gave the reactor a positive void coefficient, meaning if coolant starts to boil the reactor starts producing more nuclear energy (because the water that was absorbing some neutrons now isn't, and those neutrons find interesting new things to do). The problem with less coolant resulting in more energy should be obvious. And it's possible to design around that, but it isn't easy and the early Soviet nuclear engineers didn't do that.
And if you want to breed *weapons grade* plutonium, you have to swap out fuel rods every month or so. But opening up a robust primary and secondary containment structure to get at the inside of a nuclear reactor, takes a month or so. Very inconvenient. So the RMBK-1000 gets a containment vessel with heavy steel and concrete walls, but a light easy-access roof for the overhead cranes. You can even open it up and swap out fuel rods while the reactor is running.
People did stupid things at Chernobyl, which ultimately started the coolant boiling. That should have been about the end of it - if your coolant is also your moderator, boiling it off stops the reaction and you just have to deal with the residual decay heat. But in an RMBK, boiling the coolant increases the reaction rate, in this case faster than it could be controlled. Superheated steam reaches graphite, and by the water-gas shift produces hydrogen gas.
Which is explosive over a broad range with air. Exploding hydrogen + high-pressure steam blows off the easy-access roof and lets in air, which meets more hot graphite, and the whole thing burns to the ground like the pile of coal it basically is. Except, coal with a couple hundred tons of uranium, plutonium, and even more unpleasant radioactive nastiness mixed in.
Something very similar had happened, fortunately on a smaller scale, at the Windscale plutonium production facility in England in 1957. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire And the US Hanford facility was designed with the understanding that, yeah, that's a thing that can happen but we've got contingency plans to evacuate a thirty-mile radius so let's get on with it.
It's not a matter of ignorant commie peons being unable to handle nuclear technology, it's a matter of using nuclear reactors to make atom bombs being a particularly dangerous combination.
Using the same reactors to generate electricity and so putting them close to a major city is just an extra layer of bad. If you want to build a nuclear reactor near a city, then you want to make it out of metal and water and absolutely nothing resembling coal, use your moderator as your coolant, and wrap the whole thing top to bottom in meters-thick steel and reinforced concrete.
Personally I'm quite convinced of the safety of modern HTGR designs. "Passive safety" is _the_ buzzword in the nuke community right now, and all the modern htgr designs are designed for that. Namely, with more advanced graphite and shaped so that fresh air can't be continually pulled into the core during DLOC.
Not saying it's the best design, but it's plenty safe.
> see about putting the virology labs on the Moon at the soonest practical opportunity
We can't already put them on the Moon, but I think we can and *should* put them in places like Svalbard or Antartica if we want to continue doing GoF research at all.
To do a direct comparison, there are several important things to consider:
- How bad is the catastrophe? There are multiple orders of magnitude between disease escape vs nuclear meltdown.
- What is the benefit? Nuclear power is a great way to reduce the risk of climate change. I don't know any benefit from gain of function research of comparable magnitude.
- How much have we learned from the catastrophes that have happened? There have been significant international efforts to learn from the catastrophes. (e.g. https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/Pub913e_web.pdf) The WHO investigations into the origins of Covid are nothing like these INSAG reports. One sign of civilizational incompetence for gain-of-function research is that we aren't learning how to improve biosafety labs.
The only part I'd object to is "our civilization is competent enough to avoid having another Chernobyl". Maybe we are, maybe we aren't. I doubt anyone will make exactly the same mistake again, but if the opportunity to screw up exists then someone will take it.
I wouldn't have thought anyone was dumb enough to store a giant pile of 2700 tons of ammonium nitrate in a warehouse in the middle of Beirut either, but these things happen.
No, you're not inconsistent. GOF research is orders-of-magnitude worse in potential risks than nuclear power plants.
Assuming Covid was caused by gain-of-function research gone wrong, what's the total death toll? How does that compare to the total death toll in the history of nuclear power?
Covid has killed 2-3 orders of magnitude more people than Chernobyl. ~5,000,000 vs ~5,000-50,000.
The 5000-50,000 estimates, aside from being dubious, result from multiplying a large population by a tiny increased risk of cancer per person. I don't find that as terrifying as COVID infecting someone and killing them by destroying their lungs.
And they don't even try to subtract the extra deaths from coal pollution if Chernobyl hadn't been built in the first place.
Yeah, that was my point. Seems like the gain from nuclear power is probably a lot bigger than anything we may have realized from gain-of-function research, AFAIK.
I vaguely agree, but I'm a fan of the second belief, so I'm going to be biased.
We have a base rate of nuclear power accidents over the past 50 years. We know the expected damages from accidents. We should expect that accident rate to decrease as we get more experience and learn from each error.
On the other hand, we cannot see biolab leaks, or even know with any degree of certainty when they happen and what went wrong.
I just can't believe people keep making the cognitive error in your second paragraph. Nassim Taleb wrote a famous whole book on this error! The Black Swan looks quite affordable on Amazon right now....
We do not know the base rate of nuclear power accidents- they are not something that's evenly or smoothly distributed. We do not know the 'expected damage' from accidents. We also did not know the base rate of financial crashes, spectacular terrorist attacks, or deadly pandemics, etc. They are not something that's plotted on a regular distribution. They are tail risks that occur rarely, but to absolutely devastating effect. I'm not even as so much anti-nuclear as anti-this cognitive error of 'oh this devastating tail risk can be plotted on a normal distribution'
Even if the probability distribution of nuclear power accident size is nice and well-behaved, not something crazy like an exponential-transformed Cauchy distribution (that has a name, right, where the logarithm of your random variable is Cauchy-distributed? Do its first and second moments converge?) we don't have enough samples to estimate it with much confidence. Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, and that's pretty much it. We know we can keep nuclear accidents down to one every few thousand reactor years, but three data points is not enough to make very firm conclusions on how bad they are.
It might depend a lot on how future society develops. We know Chernobyl was much worse than it needed to be for reasons entirely extrinsic to the reactor itself, having everything to do with how the society around it was organized. We also know that a double-digit percentage of US voters are convinced that the covid vaccine is a plot to poison them by a conspiracy of pedophiles who sacrifice children to harvest their adrenochrome. Giving such a society a nuclear power plant is like giving a machete to a monkey.
The issue is that it is a false equivalency. Financial crashes, terrorist attacks or deadly pandemics are something that spread globally. They are something that spread within a complex system and have a very high cap on the amount of damage that they can cause.
But nuclear reactors are not a global web. So if one goes wrong, it does not 'infect' all the others. And the damage that one reactor going wrong can do, is quite limited.
I think terrorist attacks are more like nuclear reactor accidents than pandemics, except in the case of terrorist bioweapon pandemics.
If we have to discuss each other's cognitive errors, I think you may be committing scope neglect.
Chernobyl was quite close to the maximum possible badness of a nuclear reactor accident i.e. about 30% of the volatile fission products were dumped into the ecosystem. From some perspectives, it might reach "absolutely devastating" - but while that basically maxes out how bad you can *describe* something as, it does not max out the possible badness of an arbitrary event. A Chernobyl every 10 years - you yourself said "rarely" - would be a tragedy but ultimately a minor inconvenience to a typical human being.
The maximum possible badness of biotechnology accidents is the destruction of the Earth's ecosystem in its entirety, and the maximum possible badness specifically of engineering human pathogens is ~99.9% of humanity killed (a parasite will essentially always go extinct before its host), which by definition is maximally bad for a typical human being.
> If we have to discuss each other's cognitive errors, I think you may be committing scope neglect.
I take it as part of the point of commenting here: to discuss apparent flaws in each other's reasoning, so long as it's done dispassionately.
> A Chernobyl every 10 years - you yourself said "rarely" - would be a tragedy but ultimately a minor inconvenience to a typical human being.
Just the phrase "A Chernobyl every 10 years" spurs me to think. How frequently would Chernobyl-scale disasters have to take place for you to change your mind about nuclear power? Yearly?
What are the estimates one uses to compare the costs of Chernobyl-scale disasters with the costs of the climate change? (This is far from my field, explaining my ignorance of where to start.)
Calculating fatalities from Chernobyl and from global warming are both hard, because Chernobyl's kills are almost all from cancer (which can't easily be attributed to Chernobyl because there's a high base rate and because nobody knows the dose-response curve at very low radiation doses) and because almost everything from global warming *can* be dealt with nonfatally (primarily by moving home) but the question is how much *will* be in developing countries.
In terms of displacements it's easier. About 117,000 people had to be evacuated from the Chernobyl exclusion zone; most of the land area of Bangladesh is likely to go underwater due to global-warming-related sea level rise (timeframe strongly dependent on future emissions and on what happens in West Antarctica, but probably somewhere within the next couple of centuries) so most of its (currently) 161 million population will need to be moved at some point to higher ground (presumably outside Bangladesh). The amount of the world's population within a couple of metres of sea level is much larger than that, but that's mostly in coastal cities which can conceivably be protected with dikes (particularly in richer countries e.g. Europe/North America/Australia).
With monetary costs I don't even know where to start; I'm no economist and global warming in particular is tricky to estimate.
Note also that global warming is not what I was comparing Chernobyl to in my previous post in this chain.
A nuclear power plant has a certain amount of energy contained within it. It's not physically possible for, say, a nuclear power plant to blow up the Earth. It's not even possible for it to experience a nuclear explosion in the style of an atomic bomb. I'm comfortable with only worrying about risks that are physically possible.
There's been a sort of continuous murmur of speculation that there *was* a prompt criticality incident during Chernobyl, based in part on isotope patterns in the fallout, and to a lesser extent on the challenge it's always been to explain *both* explosions, only one of which can be easily attributed to H2. There's also the strange report of the nearby fisherman who reported (before they snuffed it) a "blue flash" a the time of the first explosion, which is an occasional signature of prompt criticality excursions. Still seems a little unlikely, but a fascinating possibility.
SL-1 and K-431 also went prompt-critical. Should be noted that moderated prompt-critical is still substantially slower (and thus achieves less reaction before blowing itself apart) than fast prompt-critical - all nuclear bombs use fast neutrons for this reason (one of the most important insights of the Manhattan Project).
Sure, but the idea is that the excursion at Chernobyl was enough to cause the first explosion and blow a stream of radionuclides into the stratosphere. Impressive, if true.
Not sure I understand what you mean by "moderated" prompt critical. The whole point of "prompt" critical is that you're critical with just the fast neutrons, you don't need the decay neutrons. Can you explain what you mean further?
A core meltdown would dump a large amount of radiation both locally and into the atmosphere, with some pretty unpredictable results
Um, they're pretty predictable, actually. There's plenty of theory about what radioactivity does to the environment and to people, and we have one RL example in the form of Chernobyl (which was a full meltdown with the core open to the atmosphere for days afterward). Wind patterns are tricky to predict in advance and can affect local damage (within clearly-defined bounds), but that's about it.
A priori, no. These two things can be different levels or risk and reward.
So, I'm a tech guy. Good with math and stuff. Not good with art. Well, I love viewing art. But I don't have a lot of skill in *making* art.
Lately I've been doing some "crafts". I find that I don't have a good sense for how to plan for something that will "look good".
Basically: is there a "science of aesthetics" that I can learn? If so can anyone recommend a book (or whatever) that might cater to me?
You might like 'Drawing on the artist within' by Betty Edwards. It contains several lessons and exercises to work through to engage the students' 'aesthetic sense'.
Thanks all, for all the thoughtful (and helpful!) responses!
My references are not more modern than the 18th century, so take that with all caution; Hogarth's "The Analysis of Beauty", particularly his theory of the Line of Beauty, an s-shaped curve:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Analysis_of_Beauty
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_of_beauty
Look into generative art: https://www.artnome.com/news/2018/8/8/why-love-generative-art
As a similar tech guy, but better with stuff than math: Just do shit. Make a bunch of garbage. Eventually you'll run out of new mistakes to make and large numbers your way into something good.
Also, I find that thinking subtractively helps, if that makes sense. In tech, I'm usually thinking about adding/changing stuff. With more artistic shit, I think about what I can take away without damaging the intended effect.
I've tried classes and they didn't teach me anything. On the other hand, being able to watch an expert work helped lots.
Art history 101 and 102 may be a helpful start.
The fact that you're asking such a weird, pointed, discipline-spanning question--it kind of predisposes me to think you'd make a good artist. But the answer is definitely no. If someone could even begin to nail down a predictive, unifying theory of aesthetics, that'd be one of the greatest advances in the history of thought. I can't think of anyone who seriously believed they'd come up with such a thing, and I doubt it's possible. (Maybe the closest would be the archaic philosophers who thought they'd universalized meaning, like John Wilkins or Ramon Llull.)
Most beginner artists get led around by their inhibitions and self-censoring impulses. There's this powerful impulse not to carry out your ideas for fear that they'll suck. But the flow state you're looking for is pretty much a form of play, which is orthogonal to considerations of sucking. It's just the thing that kids do, and then lose, and then spend ridiculous amounts of time reacquiring if they want to be artists. I'm coming from a position of writing poetry and fiction, calling that art, but I think the principle is basically the same. You want your play to become so powerful--not good, powerful--that it bends other people's reality. That's something that you can attain through practice, but it's not something you can learn through studying a system.
If what I'm saying about flow and play strikes a chord for you, I can't recommend Lynda Barry's work highly enough. She makes these deceptively simple comic strip-memoir-collage pieces that really dig into the phenomenology of creativity. Her book "What It Is" is more about writing, "Picture This" is more about drawing, but they're both directly about what you're asking.
>You want your play to become so powerful--not good, powerful--that it bends other people's reality.
Well said. Couldn't agree more.
Color theory is as close to an actual science of aesthetics as I can think of. Choosing the right colors can be an enormous challenge, even for artists. Understanding color theory can help you avoid the problem of "these colors looked nice separately but they look terrible once I put them together". I'd suggest reading about color theory and paying attention to the color schema of art you find appealing.
Examples of how color theory actually helps:
-Complimentary color fields appear brighter to our eyes when they are adjacent. This means, if you create a necklace with brilliant blue and brilliant orange beads, they will look so brilliant it risks becoming garish and overstimulating. If you want to feature those two colors together, you can alternatively string brilliant orange beads alongside blue-grey beads. The orange beads will make the blue-grey beads appear more blue, and the blue-grey beads will make the orange beads look brighter.
-Shadows are more colorful than you expect. Try zooming in on the shadows in a photograph. You'll see a lot of greens, blues, purples in those shadows. If you study how the colors of shadows pair with the colors of objects in the light, you can come up with some nice color combinations that give a sense of foreground and background that feels natural without resorting to boring grey tones. This concept is helpful in crafts as well as painting etc.
-Depending on your medium, it might be helpful for you to learn how to mix or layer colors.
I would recommend that you go to a museum. Their original stated purpose was to inspire, and I find them to do this.
I've been meaning to go to the V&A museum of design for this reason.
Study study study study. Just look and appreciate lots of good looking stuff. And really bask in it and enjoy every detail and part. Practice practice practice practice. And, yes, copy copy copy copy. Maybe do so across multiple mediums as you get better.
No, there isn’t a science, and if there was it wouldn’t work.
I should clarify - there are absolutely “sciences” for each individual artwork, as in common sets of skills and ideas to learn. But they aren’t organized around set theory or computation like math is, there are a many different theories with different goals and ideas, and there’s no unifying rationalized factor that is unitary like scimathtech
My advice would be to copy things you like. This (I believe) is a huge, widely misunderstood aspect of all the arts. Everything Is A Remix, as Kirby Ferguson put it (check out his film of that name if you haven’t). Nobody quite knows what makes something beautiful, so everyone learns by copying things they admire
Seconded. I just mentioned Lynda Barry downstream. She has a lot of insight about why kids trace pictures they like.
Try taking a simple class on drawing. There’s a bunch of vocabulary that’s useful.
In a drawing class years ago we were doing an exercise where we drew the model in a single long line, never lifting our pencil from the paper. Instructor said, "feel that line, blowing off the end of the pencil . . ." That's not science, but it was very helpful.
Art courses usually work their way through the elements and principles of design, with activities working with arranging each element and principle, or pairs thereof. For instance, value and contrast -- depending on the kind of course, students might work with these through shaded still life drawing (I recommend charcoal; it's faster), with different lighting arrangements.
I can't think of a book on this off the top of my head -- art teachers just universally teach them, but there are plenty of short videos about them. My current favorite visual arts resource for adults is New Masters Academy video courses, which focus more on realism and classicism.
_Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain_ was very popular for a while. It taught how to actually see shapes and angles and light and dark rather than simplified geometrical versions, which is what people tend to start with.
_Zen and the Art of Seeing_ teaches much the same thing, but from a more mystic point of view.
_How to See Color and Paint It_ is very good about seeing the specificity of color-- again, it's tempting to assume a thing "is" a color, but what you actually see involves a lot of highlights and shadows and reflected color from nearby things.
Also, there's no such thing as grey, brown, black, and white. Well, maybe there's some high tech true black now, but for ordinary things, the duller colors are muted hues, and a slightly blueish gray isn't the same thing as a slightly greenish or purplish gray.
Reading _How to See Color_ puts me in an altered state for a few days when I see color in much more detail.
Also (I think it's in this book, but it might be in _Why Blue and Yellow Don't Make Green_), while it's possible to get a true yellow pigment, reds and blues are a little warm or a little cool. You can get a nice purple from a cool red and a cool blue, but if you mix a warm red or blue with a cool red or blue, you get mud.
There must be resources about how to create images of imaginary things, but I don't know what they are.
if I had to pick two of these to read, which should I do
_Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain_ unless you really like Zen-- if you really like Zen, go with _Zen and the Art of Seeing_.
I think _How to See Color and Paint It_ would be more useful.
I don't know what your situation for buying books is, but both of them have exercises-- you might find that you're getting a decent amount of fun for your money.
The last open thread had a discussion about the relative merits of Imperial vs metric units.
One North American unit of measure not covered was the ‘ton of refrigeration.’ It reaches new heights of impracticality IMO.
It is defined as the rate of heat transfer that results in the freezing or melting of 1 short ton (2,000 lb; 907 kg) of pure ice at 0 °C (32 °F) in 24 hours.
I did some work modeling heat transfer in custom air conditioning units in the 1990’s. The idea was to predict the performance of a massive AC unit before it was actually manufactured and sent to a lab. Think of cooling the Twin Cities Mall of America. They were one of our clients.
The Application and Design Engineers I was working with loved to throw the term “tons of cooling” around.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ton_of_refrigeration
It's very practical if you have daily ice delivery.
My least favourite heavily-used unit is the kilowatt-hour. You've taken a perfectly good unit of energy (kJ), divided it by one unit of time (seconds) and then multiplied it by another unit of time (hours) to get a different unit of energy.
Older North Americans will probably remember Reddy KiloWatt cartoon spokesman for the electric industry.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddy_Kilowatt
Myself, I'm annoyed that batteries continue to be measured in mAh even now that the "m" is usually preceded by a four-digit number
I don't understand why battery capacity is often displayed as electric charge (whether it's mAh, Ah, or even coulombs), rather than as energy (kJ or Wh).
Because it makes it easy to figure out roughly how long it can supply a given current, or how fast it will charge, et cetera. The only missing part that turns mA*h into an energy is the voltage of the battery, since V*A*s = J. But the voltage of the battery is something that isn't interesting in general, and if you forced people to look it up to figure out how long a given battery will last it would be annoying. So it's folded into the measurement of capacity, which is better stated as "mA-h at such-and-such a voltage."
It's not unlike the fact that we quote weight in kg even though weight is properly measured in newtons. Since we're almost always working in Earth's gravity field, we just automatically assume multiplication or division by 9.8 m/s^2 whenever necessary.
If the battery is powering a circuit through a linear regulator, or it's an almost-constant-voltage battery driving a resistive load, mAh is what counts. OTOH buck/boost converters have been commonplace and cheap longer than rechargeable batteries have!
It's probably an artifact of how the battery capacity numbers tend to be used, beyond the most basic "bigger number = more capacity" level.
If you have a device that uses 100 mA of current at 12 volts, and you're powering it with a 12v 2 Ah (2000 mAh) battery, then it's trivial to calculate that it'll use up a full charge in 10 hours. If you have an 86.4 kJ battery, however, you need to do a little more math.
Either way, you need to specify the voltage of both the battery and the device, since they need to match: undervolt a device's power supply too much and it won't work, and overvolt it too much and you risk frying it.
Why is the device's consumption expressed in (milli)amperes rather than watts then? For consumer devices it's usually expressed in watts in my experience.
You indeed need to know both in many situations, but specifying power (or, for battery capacity, energy) and voltage instead of current (or charge) and voltage makes more sense to me. If I just want to compare the energy cost of two devices, it's enough to know their power usage. And if I remember the approximate power usage of a device, it's enough to know the energy capacity of a battery to know how long it can power the device.
If it's something like a microcontroller, it can't very well have a buck/boost converter built into it, because that involves an inductor, which won't fit inside the chip package. (Normally.) So there's a lot of microcontrollers and other chips that are happy to run on 1.8 volts or 5.5 volts or anything in between, but that will use almost exactly the same current to do the same job regardless of what voltage it's at. If you power it at 5.5 volts, it's burning 4 of those volts in an internal linear regulator.
I'm not saying it's not stupid. Joules are what I care about too: is this thing 8000 picojoules per instruction or 40? But the datasheet gives mA/MHz, so I gotta suck it up. Thank god for units(1).
I've usually seen amps or mA for DC-powered devices, and for power tools. I see watts more for desktop computers and small appliances.
I suspect it's a matter of convenience and convention: if the voltage is known (and it almost always is), then knowing the current will tell you the power and vice versa. If heat output is a major design factor, either because getting rid of waste heat is a problem (computers, incandescent or halogen light bulbs, etc) or because heat output is the point of the device (microwaves, space heaters, etc), then wattage makes sense because heat output can also be measured in watts. Otherwise, I think from an electrical engineering perspective things tend to be specced in terms of voltage and current, not voltage and power.
I'm not sure what's going on with power tools. For a lot of those, mechanical power output is a major design consideration, but at least in the US that seems to generally be specified in terms of horsepower instead of watts, while power input is specified in terms of a combination of amps and volts.
Your make the same mistake that metric puritans suffer from - they ignore actual human uses of measurement systems. The KWH, while mathematically convoluted, is very useful for thinking about how much an actual appliance is going to cost to run.
One problem with kWh is that (around here) electricity prices are shown in kWh, but natural gas prices are shown in MJ, making it harder to compare their cost.
This shows the problem with not using the same unit everywhere. Of course we could standardize to use kWh as the measure of energy everywhere, but that would likely come with its own problems.
What are "metric puritans" and can you give examples of what you think is wrong with them?
One example of a 'metric puritan' would be the European Union. See https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/mar/15/1 for more.
Metric units are fine for scientific use and even engineering, but Imperial measures are generally easier for day to day human use. It makes sense for people to be conversant in both systems, but there are people who seem to see Imperial measures as some sort of untidy throwback to be eradicated rather than a set of rational measures that many people like to use.
Why are imperial units easier to use day-to-day? As a Hungarian, I've grown up using metric units for day-to-day use, and there is nothing inconvenient about them. Indeed, imperial units sound much less convenient as their conversion factors aren't powers of 10.
Now I easily believe that the transition from one system of units to another is inconvenient, and imperial units are easier *for people who have grown up using imperial units*. However, this doesn't make imperial units better in a general sense, and the transition benefits the subsequent generations. I'm glad that my ancestors have made the transition from whatever customary units were in use here to metric units.
Because imperial units are based around highly composite numbers, which makes fractional parts easy to compute in your head. For example, 1 ft = 12 in, so 1/2 ft = 6 in, 1/3 ft = 4 in, 1/4 ft = 3 in, 1/6 ft = 2 in, 3/4 ft = 9 in, 2/3 ft = 8 in, and so on. Try doing that in your head with meters. Since 10 is only divisible evenly by 2 and 5 (and who ever needs 5ths?) you almost never end up with even numbers of a smaller unit when you divide, which means you end up trying to do long division in your head, or needing to reach for a calculator. Conventional units were invented at a time when people needed to do almost all measurement math in their heads.
I use SI entirely in my professional life, but I also do carpentry at home, and English units are much easier. I can mentally divide a 7 ft board into 3rds in a snap (7 x 12 in / 3 = 7 x 4 in = 28 in). If I had to work in meters all the time I'd have to have a calculator handy all the time.
Good question, the answer is basically because they evolved to cover typical human transactions. An imperial pound, for example, was the weight of a loaf of bread sufficient for an adult man for a day. A foot is an obvious example of a length derived from a familiar object which sections human scale objects more conveniently than a metre - which is simply too long. (Note that rulers are typically sold in 30cm lengths i.e. 1 foot.)
As for arithmetic, you will note that imperial units are often based on highly composite numbers to make mental arithmetic *easier*.
The same is true of pre-decimal currencies. A British pound was 240 pennies as that is a highly composite number. A decimal pound cannot be divided by many human-typical factors, like 3 or 6 or 8.
The same is true of the old Hungarian Gulden which was based on 60 Kruezer - again 60 is a highly composite number, and so superior for dividing and mental arithmetic.
It is not a coincidence that the Babylonians divided a circle into 360 degrees either. That too is a highly composite number.
Once you understand the logic of older units, you will realise that they make a lot of sense.
To hesitantly come to the defense of this admittedly bizarre unit, I'd like to point out we have a lot of household appliances that use some fraction or low integers of a kilowatt of power. And an hour is a much more convenient unit of time than seconds for tracking something which you use on a daily basis for any extended length of time. So if I run a 1.5 kW heater for 4 hours a day, I use 6kWh of energy. Which costs me about $0.60 dollars. You can't get much more convenient than that. I would argue it certainly is more convenient than saying that I use 1.5 kJ*4 hr*3600 s/hr = 21.6 MJ of energy.
Yeah, people often don't know how many kiloseconds they run their heaters per megasecond.
Yes, it's just 3.6 MJ.
And then there is kWh/year, which is kJ/s*h/year ≈ 0.114 W.
From The Onion article titled “Freak Actually Knows How Big an Acre is”
[The term acre] come from the amount of land one farmer and one ox could plow in a single day,
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theonion.com/freak-actually-knows-how-big-an-acre-is-1847253085/amp
“ At press time, sources had toppled their chairs and fled from the room after Campbell had begun describing acre’s etymological origin from the proto-Germanic word for field.”
And the Irish word "bóthar" for "road", literally meaning "cow-path", and measured as the width of two cows, so one had room to pass the other.
The original definition of a furlong is "one furrow long" = the approximate distance an ox can pull a plow before needing to take a short rest, which is when you turn the plow.
I’ve seen the Finish version of baseball so somehow this doesn’t surprise me.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pesäpallo
Media is becoming increasingly addictive and entertaining. A lot of people are addicted to their own form of media whether it be Netflix, twitter, video games, reddit or a forum for ACX readers. I think things will only get more addicting. It will become harder and harder to not get sucked into entertainment and focus on the task at hand.
Will the highly successful people of the future be not only smart but extremely conscientious about not getting addicted to media?
Paul Graham wrote about this a decade ago: http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
I think they won't be that conscientious about avoiding it: I think they will have preferences that common forms of media are bad at satisfying.
To analogize it to another domain: people who don't like sugar or eating in general are less likely to end up obese, regardless of their conscientiousness.
I don’t think addiction is the right metaphor. You could argue (in a not useful way) that Elon musk is addicted to success and work.
Agreed. If it's easier to have more fun now than in the past, and people are therefore more likely to choose to have more fun, who's to say that they're wrong?
Take other people's judgments out of it. Plenty of people will report they really would like to stop playing video games, or watching pornography, or spending eight hours a day on social media, but they haven't been able to and feel they can't. People supply the word addiction to describe being in this situation all the time, without being prompted or scolded by others. Not everyone who has a serious addiction retains the distinction between "what they want" and "what the addiction compels them to do"--lots of people with addictions don't want to stop. But if the environment has a new behavioral affordance, and people start saying "I want to stop and I can't" about it, my suspicion goes way up that something in the addiction-compulsion neighborhood is afoot. It goes up further if I can plausibly spell out how the architecture of those affordances--variable reinforcement of small rewards, constant novelty--could interact with reward-learning mechanisms and produce repeat behaviors whether or not it's a good idea, the central problem of all addictions.
I wrote some code this morning, which was great, and then I wasted most of the day getting flamed by a certain social group by advocating an opinion I knew they'd reject. This is not intelligent behavior.
Videogames and shows are much like social media: "the only winning move is not to play". ACX reading is the major outlier in your list of addictive content.
That makes some very strong assumptions about what your goals are. If your goal is to have fun then usually playing is a great move.
I assume perhaps incorrectly that rationalist == making correct decisions to succeed at an otherwise difficult task. For hedonism you probably needn't think too far beyond the grubby details of hand on genitalia.
I imagine the majority would like to strike some balance between the two.
Then they will probably not achieve the high level of success (in whatever field of endeavor) implied by OP's comment. To the OP point, highly successful people in the future will be much the same as highly successful people in the present: they will define success for some endeavor, then ruthlessly prune everything which does not contribute to that success. Otherwise, they'll get beaten by people who are more relentless. Whether or not this mode of life is morally commendable or even conducive to human flourishing is a separate issue.
Fair enough.
"Addictive" is a tricky word- in this case it mostly just seems to mean "people like it but I think they shouldn't."
Psychologically addictive is not a fake thing. Stopping smoking is not terribly difficult. The physical withdrawal is not much worse than coffee. Staying stopped is far more problematic.
There's a lot more worldbuilding and fascination with worldbuilding than there used to be. There used to just be Tolkien, and now there's an amazing amount.
Admittedly, not everyone is interested in world-building.
My impression is that sports are no more addictive than they used to be, and maybe a little less.
Whatever you're fascinated by, it's easier to find other people who are fascinated by it.
There's access to more media. In ancient days, you could watch I Love Lucy when your television station broadcasted it. Now you can go over every show whenever you feel like it.
Back then you didn't have all of that in your pocket. Okay, maybe a Walkman can fit in a large pocket, but not everyone had one on them 24/7 like we do with smartphones today. It's hard to be truly bored nowadays. And our attention is controlled much more efficiently by sophisticated algorithms today than it was in the 80s. I'd say media is getting much more addicting, almost beyond a doubt.
Consider advancement of the art in the realm of videogame design alone: enthusiastic wargamers and tabletop RPG fans (I do not judge or even critique their competence at programming) gave way to college-trained specialists; a ruleset made by one person over some days is superseded by one created by a team of engineers regularly testing and tweaking their product. As everything technical about videogames is self-evidently progressing, we would completely expect the brain goodfeel effect loops of videogames to advance as well. You shouldn't need a study from credentialed experts to tell you something you can both perceive and reasonably explain.
Nope, not on me. I could probably go find some, but so could you. And then we could probably both find papers arguing the opposite. It's a really hard question to answer using uncontrolled observational studies. I can't imagine any formal papers would be convincing enough to override my convictions based on my daily experience today versus memories of my daily experience in 2001. And sure, memory is fairly unreliable, but only to an extent.
Ah I see. You're all good man. I was just a bit confused by it lol. Thanks for clarifying.
Before the pervasiveness of mirrors, did people have out-of-body experiences where they "saw themselves?" The phenomena of seeing yourself from the ceiling probably takes your self-image and divorces it from positional data, as would happen in a dream. But if you have no visual concept of the self, doing so seems impossible.
In the handful of out of body experiences that I have had, I have only ever seen my body, never my face.
In Maupassant's Bel-Ami, there's a very good passage where the narcissistic protagonist sees himself in a full length mirror for the first time. He seems to be almost out of body, where he doesn't recognise the handsome man as himself at first.
My guess is yes, on account of the fact that out-of-body experiences have been initiated in an epilepsy patient by stimulating the right angular gyrus. https://www.nature.com/articles/419269a
The running theory seems to be that out-of-body experiences result from the brain's failure to integrate the sensory information we normally use to balance and position ourselves in space.
Also, people can still sense and identify with their own bodies without ever seeing themselves in a mirror. I suppose they just have to guess what they look like. I'd be curious to know how someone who's never seen herself in a mirror imagines herself.
People probably saw their reflection in water often, no?
Relevant: "The importance of seeing yourself" https://kottke.org/16/11/the-importance-of-seeing-yourself-clearly
No, not often. You need still, deep water or still, shallow water and ideal lighting conditions for that. Nature usually isn't that obliging. Though it would be interesting to study early records of e.g. Native American tribes in West Virginia, where there is no standing water at all, and see if there are any interesting psychological consequences from never or almost never seeing your own face.
And even when looking into still water you will be looking straight down which distorts your face strangely (try it with a mirror, it gets worse as you get older).
Hot take: Marxbro isn't banned so Scott can jack up the engagement numbers.
But do you have any *evidence* that the marks you have transmitted to my screen have meaning? Or is that just an *assumption* you've made due to your intellectual *flaccidity*?
I don't think people here are intellectual flaccid and I have never said that. However, I do think people here are mostly biased against Marxist thought and haven't really done the reading required to be able to understand leftist thought in general.
There gotta be at least one person to chuck molotovs into the hugbox, right?
I would *love* to see how a prediction market for whether he's a troll or not shakes out.
If you read my interactions here you'll notice that it's mostly other people being rude towards and trolling me.
I agree. But I may be suffering from a chronic underdog bias.
Pretty sure he’s serious, to a significant extent. His Reddit account is: https://ii.reddit.com/user/MarxBroshevik (spotted in sneerclub a while ago). He seems to genuinely know and care about Marxism and related history and literature as that account demonstrates.
how would you even resolve that?
Sodium pentathal?
Well, ok. If we can start kidnapping and drugging people for prediction markets, I'm gonna start somewhere else.
Scott's success is built on the back of Marxbro. Scott should be compensating him for his labor.
But that would be slavery.
Wasn't there some chatbot that presented itself as some Ukrainian preteen learning English, and slipped by a Turing test that way? Seems like if you present your AI as being someone as disagreeable as possible, not having to conform to human subtleties makes passing a Turing test a lot easier. Seems kind of related to Poe's Law.
Just a fun whimsical thing I found about Dungeons and Dragons. For most objects listed in the store, their price can be estimated within a factor of 2 error by looking it up on amazon and converting $10->1 gold piece
I could believe that for mundane items, but I don't think it could be right for most weapons, could it? Functional swords are pretty expensive these days.
I found functional longswords for around $200 which fits. Weapons aren’t cheap in D&D, so I think you’ll still get decent estimates
Functional swords are a couple hundred dollars these days if you don't mind having them stamped e.g. "Made in the Philippines". Seems to fit the pattern.
Depends on the sword. A good one might cost a bit but several years back I was looking for a sword for a Halloween costume and realized that I could get a real one for just $10. It's cheap and not particularly sharp and I don't know how far I would trust in in a fight but on the other hand modern steel is probably better than what a lot of medieval weaponry was made of.
wouldn't D&D shops have stuff like Broadsword+2 or wand of annihilation? Can you get that at amazon?
I haven't played for a couple years, but afaik that's never really been a thing. Magic items are rare enough that most people would go their whole lives without having one. It'd be like looking at the hardware store for a particle accelerator, if someone had to spend an appreciable part of their life essence to build a particle accelerator.
Xanathar's Guide to Everything includes rules for buying magic items.
I mean, most people will never own a sailboat, but you can look at catalogues and go into stores for them.
I feel like in 3.5 at least, it was pretty normal to assume you could either buy or commission magic items in a sufficiently large city - the game seemed balanced around that, giving you suggested gold per level rather than magic items per level as it is now. Of course, it always depends on your setting and GM, ymmv.
Current version core rules are you can't really buy magic items from a catalogue or emporium, harder to find than that. This would be for mundane items
Yeah, the "prices" given for magic items are a vague guidelines for negotiating what for anyone but a PC adventurer will be once-in-many-lifetimes transactions that involve an exciting adventure just getting buyer and seller in the same room, or for creating high-level characters ex nihilo where the DM and/or rulebook says "now chose X GP-equivalent of Neat Stuff for your character"
You need Amazon Prime.
The Players Handbook doesn’t list prices for most magic items, so it’s not examined from either side I guess
Well, yes, particularly the absurd 1/10 lb gold pieces of OD&D. A realistic medieval "gold piece" would be the proto-Italian Florin, at 3.5 grams or 0.11 troy oz. Still about $200 at today's prices.
If you don't like Florins, the competing Northern European gold coin of the age was the Guilder, of similar weight. But you already knew William Goldman had a sense of humor.
For utilitarians: Is there really any justification for tax money being spent on things like fine arts, libraries, local parks, national parks, etc. when it is still relatively inexpensive to save lives in the developing world? Do you support redirecting all of that money toward saving lives?
From Consequentialism FAQ:
If you were a perfect utilitarian, then yes, if you believe that feeding the hungry is more important than having symphonies, you would stop funding symphonies in order to have more money to feed the hungry. But this is your own belief; Jeremy Bentham isn't standing behind you with a gun making you believe it. If you think feeding the hungry is more important than listening to symphonies, why would you be listening to symphonies instead of feeding the hungry in the first place?
Furthermore, utilitarianism has nothing specifically against symphonies - in fact, symphonies probably make a lot of people happy and make the world a better place. People just bring that up as a hot-button issue in order to sound scary. There are a thousand things you might want to consider devoting to feeding the hungry before you start worrying about symphonies. The money spent on plasma TVs, alcohol, and stealth bombers would all be up there.
I think if we ever got a world utilitarian enough that we genuinely had to worry about losing symphonies, we would have a world utilitarian enough that we wouldn't. By which I mean that if every government and private individual in the world who might fund a symphony was suddenly a perfect utilitarian dedicated to solving the world hunger issue among other things, their efforts in other spheres would be able to solve the world hunger issue long before any symphonies had to be touched.
Efficient charity is a big issue for utilitarians, but remember that if you're doing it right, each step you take towards consequentialism should result in greater satisfaction of your own moral goals and a better world by your own standards.
I don't particularly see how it responds to the question. "I think if we ever got a world utilitarian enough that we genuinely had to worry about losing symphonies, we would have a world utilitarian enough that we wouldn't" is a response to something else.
The question is: Is there really any justification for tax money being spent on things like fine arts, libraries, local parks, national parks, etc. when it is still relatively inexpensive to save lives in the developing world? Do you support redirecting all of that money toward saving lives?
My response, even as a non-utilitarian would just be: No. Yes.
Replace "symphonies" with "things like fine arts, libraries, local parks, national parks, etc." and it will be the answer to this question.
If we are talking about spherical example in the vacuum where we can either save lives or make fine art than we should save lives. But it's important to understand how artificial and improbable this scenario is.
False dichotomy.
First of all, because there are probably other things I would divert that money from before those nice things - things like military or advertising.
Second of all, because government spending doesn't really work on a simple this-or-that budget the way you imply - 'Anything we can do, we can afford.'
Imagine government spending works like that and those are your two options (art or saving lives) which would you pick?
EA claims to be talent constrained, not money constrained. So neither is justified!
These utilitarians you speak of, they’re still human beings are they not?
A proposal like this seems perfectly suited for automata, but if you actually want to keep moving this sort of zero sum utilitarian agenda forward with these humans, it will be necessary to satisfy needs that are non materialistically squishy.
Like having reasons to remain alive at all.
Let's say you have a choice between what you can send to Yemen for humanitarian relief. You can send medical supplies and food or you can send artwork. Imagine they have are heavily lacking in art in Yemen, which would you send?
Bread and Roses. Both are important:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_Roses
""Bread and Roses" is a political slogan as well as the name of an associated poem and song. It originated from a speech given by American women's suffrage activist Helen Todd; a line in that speech about "bread for all, and roses too" inspired the title of the poem Bread and Roses by James Oppenheim. The poem was first published in The American Magazine in December 1911, with the attribution line "'Bread for all, and Roses, too'—a slogan of the women in the West." The poem has been translated into other languages and has been set to music by at least three composers.
The phrase is commonly associated with the successful textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, between January and March 1912, now often referred to as the "Bread and Roses strike". The slogan pairing bread and roses, appealing for both fair wages and dignified conditions, found resonance as transcending "the sometimes tedious struggles for marginal economic advances" in the "light of labor struggles as based on striving for dignity and respect", as Robert J. S. Ross wrote in 2013."
I would send them medical supplies and food.
This wasn’t your original question though.
“ Is there really any justification for tax money being spent on things like fine arts, libraries, local parks, national parks, etc. when it is still relatively inexpensive to save lives in the developing world?”
If we didn’t have fine arts, libraries and parks we would be a less happy a most likely less productive society.
Let’s just consider one of these things, libraries. If the country became less literate how long would it be before we didn’t have the knowledge to produce life saving exports?
Our happy and well recreated citizens are the ones that have the time and energy to dream and think of new solutions to old problems.
A country living with monkish austerity would have more income to alleviate suffering for a while. But I doubt our life saving innovations and productivity enhancements would come with the same frequency they do now.
Apparently the US was importing pride flags and modern art teachers into Afghanistan as late as Summer 2021, so I guess you got your real life answer.
My answer would be that if they had the survival supplies they needed, we would want to send them quality of life supplies in addition or instead. Hierarchy of needs and all that.
Not to say that "art" in the modern western sense would increase the qualify of life in Yemen. We were stupid to send modern art concepts to Afghanistan.
What's your "non-utilitarian" justification for tax money being spent on fine arts, etc.? How can you decide how much money to spend on them without utility theory?
I don't think you understand what utilitarianism is. "Utility" doesn't mean anything like "useful for preserving life", or "productive of material artifacts", or anything like that. The original example that Bentham gave of something that provided "utility" was happiness. So all those things have utility. Anything that someone wants, has utility.
I don't get this accusation that I've gotten before that I don't get utilitarianism. Typically, utilitarianism tells us that the correct choice to make is the one that maximizes utility. So, we go about making comparisons to make the correct choice. Usually people see preventing unnecessary deaths for a few thousand bucks as one of the best ways to increase utility in the world. Just because anything somebody wants has utility doesn't mean it is the correct thing to fund. Comparisons must be made.
My argument is basically that a good utilitarian should spend $0 on arts and parks while people die premature deaths which could've been prevented for not very much money.
If there was a trolley and it was going to kill ten people or destroy a park worth $35,200 (11 * $3200, rough equivalent of a life saved) are you going to pick the park? How many human lives is a park worth?
The trolley problem is just an illustrative example of fundamental utilitarian principles. It helps to explain the theory in a vacuum, but I wonder whether it does more harm than good. In the real world, consequences are manifold and mostly indirect. Which kinda sucks, and makes the practice of utilitarianism difficult, but that's reality. Like it or not.
Yes, consequences are manifold. We have to talk about scenarios to reason about what correct choices are in other scenarios and test moral principles.
Indeed. But that still raises the question of whether spending on arts, parks, libraries, etc. actually results in enough happiness per dollar to justify those dollars not instead being spent on programs to alleviate extreme suffering such as starvation and neglected tropical diseases. Art can improve one's wellbeing. But so can food and medicine.
In the extreme case, if totally suspending tax funding for these things fully eliminated art and parks from society, I would not think it the utilitarian thing to do. In my experience, such things, art in particular, are some of the greatest joys in life. Living without them would be a dreary life filled with nothing but joyless toil for survival. Of course, that isn't actually the case, and plenty of art will be produced regardless of tax expenditure.
My answer would be this: I don't know enough about the effects of tax money going to such things to have much confidence in either extreme, and I suspect *some* level of art spending is the optimal utilitarian thing to do. I think the utilitarian thing to do in this situation would be to focus your time and mental energy on more predictably consequential issues instead.
>In the extreme case, if totally suspending tax funding for these things fully eliminated art and parks from society, I would not think it the utilitarian thing to do. In my experience, such things, art in particular, are some of the greatest joys in life
If I have a slider scale from $0 - $1 trillion of tax payer money. If you put the slider at 1 trillion it all goes to art, none to saving people. If you put it at 0 it all goes to saving people, none to art. Where would you put the slider roughly? I would put it at 0 because even the last few dollars of art funding are still not more valuable than human lives. I don't see why this isn't more agreed upon.
As should have been abundantly clear from my above comment, I'm not well enough informed about the effects of tax expenditure on arts and the utilitarian value it produces to have any sort of confident answer to exactly where the slider should go. I think it's probable there would be significant negative emergent consequences of making it literally $0, but I do think it should be quite low (which it already is), and it would probably be worth making it incrementally lower until any sufficiently bad consequence of lowering it were made apparent.
My main point, however, is that utilitarians should prioritize enacting changes with more obviously significant improvements to wellbeing. I personally don't find it worth getting into the nitty-gritty of these edge-case thought experiments. Interesting as they may be to you, they waste time and mental energy and are distractions from the more achievable goals of utilitarianism.
You probably don't see why this isn't more agreed upon because you aren't willing to engage with the full depth of consideration that good utilitarianism demands. It seems that you'd rather rashly assert that the answer from first approximation is correct and say your job is done.
"You probably don't see why this isn't more agreed upon because you aren't willing to engage with the full depth of consideration that good utilitarianism demands. It seems that you'd rather rashly assert that the answer from first approximation is correct and say your job is done."
I'm willing to engage and talk about what the correct answer is. I want to hear people's perspective. I have made my position clear but I haven't said my job is done.
Okay, well I hope you're less certain of your initial assertion now. I've stated reasons that I think are sufficient to make a reasonable person acknowledge that the answer isn't as straightforward as "tax expenditure on arts, parks, libraries, etc. should be literally $0, and that answer is sufficiently obvious that it makes me wonder why most utilitarians don't plainly agree with it". You talk about a "correct answer" here as if you expect to find a utilitarian who will argue that it's $487 or $1,202,567 or something. It would be foolish to try establishing confidence in an answer as specific as that. I think my answer of "low but not $0, and probably worth making incrementally lower until any negative consequences become obvious" was a pretty good one. I also already stated my reason for believing that to be a superior answer to "literally $0" above.
And I don't care to go any further down this rabbit hole than that, as per my explanations above.
And that doesn't just mean things. Friendship has utility. World peace has utility. All that "utilitarianism" really means is that you're going to try to find some principled way of deciding, for instance, how much to spend on national parks, how much to spend on art, how much to spend on medical research, and how much to spend on tanks. This requires devising a function that can tell you whether 2 national parks, 3 BBC channels, $40 billion per year on cancer research, and 1,700 new tanks is better or worse than 1 national park, 5 BBC channels, $60 billion on cancer research, and 1,000 new tanks.
If, for any possible number of different "goods", you have a way of deciding which is better, that means you have a utility function, and that means you're a utilitarian. If you're not a utilitarian, that means there are different possible sets of goods which you can't decide between.
I wanted to make the point that human lives, form a utility perspective, are much more valuable than parks.
As an example: If you value 1 acre of grass for children to play on more than 10 children's lives, I think your utility function is off. Would you agree with that?
And if I said "yes", you'd reply by saying that we could save 10 lives in Africa for the cost of a 1-acre public park?
The problem is that your question contains some embedded wrong assumptions:
- that all children everywhere should have the same value in our utility function, regardless of time, place, and circumstances
- that every acre of grass everywhere should have the same value to us
If these assumptions were true, then obviously we should spend ALL of our money buying things for Africans, and nothing at all in the USA. (Fun "fact": Most of the poverty in the world today (well, approximately 50%, by certain monetary measures which are really hard to interpret) is in Africa. This is mostly due to the spectacular--not /complete/, but spectacular compared to world history--job that Asia and Central and South America have done at reducing poverty over the past 40 years.)
(There's an interesting short-story thought-experiment about this problem called "The Salvation of Zachary Baumkletterer", which permanently traumatized me when I was maybe 8 years old.)
Non-utilitarian ethical systems typically assume a Platonist ontology, in which the value of anything (or anyone!) is a fixed, eternal constant determined by its Platonic category, without regard to context. Platonists call people who take context into account in morality "relativists", and imply that's a bad thing.
Platonists hate the idea of placing numeric values on things at all. That's why, AFAIK, literally every culture and every intellectual, everywhere in the world and throughout history, which/who has held a Platonic ontology, has also hated money, the free market, utilitarian ethics, and the middle class. Most also hate democracy, which is a simple free-market system applied to politics; merchants and trade; and liberty for all. These things are highly correlated because they all reinforce each other. This entire matrix of liberty, money, free markets, utilitarianism, democracy, science, and social mobility is the "system" which Marxists say is too strong to ever be taken down by peaceful means. It is too strong to be easily taken down only because these things are so obviously good to people who want freedom from repression more than they want to repress themselves and others.
So Platonists object to the very idea of even placing numeric values on things. What you're supposed to do, they say, is to rank every kind of being and thing and value on a Great Chain of Being, from the greatest (God) down to the least (evil, or the non-existence of Good), and always give the greater things precedence over the lesser things, without regard to number. (This is not coincidentally the philosophical justification for absolute monarchy and centralized government.) So you're not supposed to say that a $2 billion airplane is worth more than the life of its pilot, or that a million acres of rainforest is worth more than the life of a child, or that the suffering of 9 billion chickens outweighs the nutritional preferences of 300 million humans.
Yet, in practice, we must say things like this every time we make a law or draw up a budget. This is one reason why the US government always shuts down in budget season.
If you wish to be consistent with such a Platonic value system, you must recognize that future children, even children in the distant future, must have as great a value as today's children, with the consequence that we should spend all of our resources on developing space travel and populating the galaxy. We must then kill everyone who can't contribute to this effort (or rather, let them starve, as killing them would also waste resources), as they are just wasting resources which, if directed towards space colonization, would save many more lives than the number of such lives destroyed.
(Now philosophers will want to start arguing about potential vs. existing lives; but not in any sensible, quantified or probabilistic way, so we should ignore them until they can learn to speak quantitatively.)
The utilitarian framework forces people to recognize how they REALLY VALUE things. We in fact do NOT value the children of Africans we don't know as highly as our own children, AND THIS IS FINE. This is how humans must behave in order to survive! It's also the only method that works--for complex and perhaps not-entirely-understood-or-admitted reasons, the more a place needs foreign aid, and the farther away it is from the donors, the more inefficient aid dollars are there.
This is how life works, and always has, for all species. We call this "particularist" ethics, a nomenclature that I think comes from Confucianism. The ancient Chinese debate between Confucianists and Mohists covers this topic perhaps better than Western philosophy has. It's a subject Westerners have mostly been silent on because of the repressive power of Plato and his heirs: Christianity, Hegelianism, communism, universalism, Nazism, and now "Social Justice".
Non-particularist ethics are evolutionarily unstable: they favor the survival of all other cultures over the survival over cultures with non-particularist ethics, and so destroy themselves. We see this in Western culture today, which is struggling everywhere to annihilate itself as a direct result of the dominance of non-particularist ethics.
But particularist ethics have also become a problem in modern times, because as states have grown larger and richer, and technology more powerful, they've become more like gods, making decisions that affect the entire world. INDIVIDUALS should have particularist ethics, but the United States shouldn't (or so I think; this is a value judgement) behave quite so selfishly, because at present it's more powerful than any other state. A belief in the power of the free market to do good should also entail a belief that, in the absence of threats to the survival of a free market, no one player in the market should become too powerful. (That "in the absence of threats" clause complicates things today.)
All existing ethical systems are far from being capable of dealing with this situation, because humans are still unwilling to confront some fundamental convenient lies embedded in their proclaimed morals, just as all existing ethical systems are hopelessly far from capable of dealing with the ethical problems of how to treat non-humans.
We also value things and people relative to the present circumstances. In the year 30,000 BCE, when humans were still in danger of extinction, and grasslands might have been more abundant (not sure; ice age), we would value children far more than we should now if it's true, as many people claim, that the world-wide over-abundance of children is endangering the entire human species.
So for at least these two reasons, questions like "Is a human child worth more than a thousand acres of rainforest?", or, "Is a human child worth more than a human adult?" (apparently so, given that these comparative-value questions always involve human /children/), are ill-posed. Utilitarianism doesn't solve the problem, but it exposes its ill-posed nature, so we can at least begin to think usefully about it.
Little to add, here, but thanks very much for writing a concise summary of what my ethics seem to be growing towards.
depends where the acre of grass was to be honest. I’m not sure that there’s any city with so little park space that the marginal acre is worth 10 lives, but I could imagine in some sense the “last acre of grass” being worth it.
Maybe the money spent on art doesn’t just disappear but flows through the economy and is taxed.
Is your position that the art expenditure would generate enough tax money back that it could be used to save the monetary equivalent of that many lives and then some more?
No, or I don’t know. But you said *all* of the money.
Is your position that SOME of the art expenditure would generate enough tax to save the monetary equivalent of that many lives and then some more?
No, or I don’t know. But you said *all* of the money.
I didn't say all that time. I said some.
Cutting funding from all those would cause the populace to vote out the utilitarian party which would mean more dead children in the long term, therefore an utilitarian party should hide their power level until a populace is willing to stop sacrificing children for parks (every 10 second a child dies from nutritional deficiencies)
But you do need parks. You can cram all the children into cages in concrete boxes and feed them nutritionally balanced gruel and potable clean water and vaccinate them and put them on treadmills for an hour's exercise every day, and that is definitely keeping them alive. You can fit many concrete boxes where the parks used to be.
But a park with grass and trees to run around in and play games in is better for them than a treadmill and a large cage.
If you were king, would you divert the money?
I don't think so. I'm very conformist, weak and cowardly and mostly just cry amidst my wealth.
Have a good night! Hopefully I can forget this topic soon.
The leader we deserve.
1) The Machiavellian answer: your average Joe is not a utilitarian and would need to be kept happy with bread and circuses in a first world country so you could continue to extract money from them to save lives.
2) The Hedonist answer: Enjoying life is important too, and this should at least contribute to our being interested in fine arts
3) The Artist Answer: Maybe fine arts provide some deep insight/structure to life/importance to society that is important to maintain.
I believe 1 and 2, and am somewhat dubious of 3 but consider it mildly plausible
Is it plausible that libertarianism is an artifact of some people having a genetic predisposition to wanting to be the leader of their own troop?
I get the impression the ancestral evolutionary environment had a LOT more room for sovereigns.
Maybe I'm too cynical, but 100%. Never met a librarian I would elect dictator.
How many people have you met that you would elect dictator?
I often wonder how many people's libertarianism boils down to anti-authority personality traits of the "don't tell me what to do" sub-type. I don't mean to invalidate anyone. Some of my best friends are libertarians. But they also happen to be fiercely anti-authority. Sampling error?
The difference between 'I don't want to be told what to do' and 'I don't want anyone to tell anyone else what to do' is surprisingly revealing. I think a lot of right libertarians tack in the former direction.
Hard agree. That's why you can be libertarian politically, but authoritarian personally.
Data point of one. I am a libertarian and really hate being told what to do. I am just a really independent person and always have been.
This is also a trait that runs in my family though I am the only one who calls themselves a libertarian.
I think this is why I befriend libertarians. I'm also a pretty independent person, one who "marches to the beat of her own drum" as my mother would say. So while I tend toward more cooperation than my libertarian friends, I don't arbitrarily experience any respect for authority (I do respect expertise when it's well demonstrated, but that's slightly different), and I'm only inclined to do what other people say when I agree with the reasons for doing... or when the circumstances don't allow me to defect.
Also, that’s a good trait!
This seems much more accurate than all the other claims. See thiel!
I don't think libertarian affinity can be explained with genetics, it's just an accidental blind spot in reasoning that has led them to believe that individualism, freedom of association, property rights, etc, are possible without automatically infringing on other's freedom.
that seems like a total lack of actual understanding of where they’re coming from - “we value the institutions and practices that have enabled men to, through their own benefit and will, make the modern world what it is”
Is the west not very individualist today? Is there not great freedom of association? Strong property rights? Businesses are given quite a lot of room to do as they please and grow - and use that!
I’m not libertarian but cmon that’s super uncharitable and wrong
I don't know if it's uncharitable or not, but I characterise libertarians as people who have falsely tied the concept of freedom, rights etc. to markets. Only a small subset of left-libertarians are anti-authority, pro-freedom people who understand that these concepts are inherently undermined by capital. Those kinds of libertarians make sense to me. Just my opinion.
Falsely? The principle behind free markets is that it's better for everyone to take individual preferences into account when making economic decisions. The principle behind democracy is that it's better for everyone to take individual preferences into account when making economic decisions.
Markets automatically follow when people have the freedom to trade things.
While I, as a libertarian, believe that it can be justified to limit that freedom to prevent exploitation, which will result in more freedom across the board (standard "your right to swing your fist ends at my face"), the exact cutoffs are obviously controversial.
> people who have falsely tied the concept of freedom, rights etc. to markets
that seems like everyone? Anti capitalists believe that, left and right wing. Libertarians believe it. Center leftists believe that markets and freedom of business needs to be somewhat restricted. Libertarians are for it
And one of the arguments libertarians make is markets go well if the govt refrains from many classes of interventions that might distort prices or harm innovation or restrict useful contracts and transactions. And most agree with that whatever team you’re on.
> Anti capitalists believe that, left and right wing.
Wait, do we?
Academically, markets and prices provide useful information to everyone, but capitalism Goodhartises much of that information all to hell.
If anything, most leftists want at least a heavily managed economy, with the things that matter (freedom, rights, welfare) cordonned off from the compulsions and temptations of markets. Kropotkinite left-anarchists consider the abolition of money to be one of their win conditions.
Ordinary libertarian-minded people who equate markets with freedom, 'see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires'. They want an economic hierarchy to exist and they want the freedom to potentially ascend it. The left wants to tear down or mitigate the amplitude of hierarchies and is willing to accept a hit to innovation, mutually beneficial trade, etc., to do that.
The anti-capitalist far right reveres hierarchies, but free markets establish the wrong kind.
leftists tend to identify the “unrestrained libertarian freedoms of corporations and capitalists” as often bad and need to be managed, which suggest they’re still seen as related
1) Soviet’s and Nazis and China have lots of leaders but no libertarians
2) libertarians claim to not want coercion
3) politics is just really complicated
4) mid hierarchy power still exists and is desired even w/o libertarianism
5) large societies may have existed far In the last, although with wayyyy stronger local power
so no
I think of libertarians as just having a very low group identity, and I don't think it's genetic.
As every other aspect of human behaviour, group identity is probably a mix of genetic and environmental factors.
Libertarians are opposed to coercion and control. I think there is a genetic predisposition to not want to be controlled and probably a genetic predisposition toward not wanting to control other people with force. What exactly do you mean by leader of their own troop?
Libertarians want to be controlled by an untrammelled market, the inevitable result of libertarianism is feudalism.
A genetic disposition for libertarians or for everybody?
Everyone has genetic predispositions for personality traits and ideologies.
Yes. But that’s not answering my specific question.
Libertarians have that particular trait more than others.
Private property is a derivative. The underlying is state violence. But the state ideally should have a monopoly on violence. Economics says that a monopoly will produce less at a higher price. In the presence of the state if I should choose to engage in violence it should cost me more than in a stateless world. I will probably see less violence where there exists a state than where one does not. Ideally. If I don't want to be controlled by random others I'll need recourse to law. Hopefully a well thought out system of law. And law will require coercion. And it will cost. So taxes.
The state is supposed to be producing rights protection and dispute settlement. If I accept your monopoly argument, it follows that it will protect rights and settle disputes less well at a higher price than the sort of competitive legal system that libertarian anarchists propose.
Bitcoin enforces property rights (for a certain kind of property) with no violence necessary:)
Doesn't count for much if it doesn't work for food, shelter, medicine, or any kind of productive capital.
The thing being "sold" by the state monopoly is protection. You are talking about committing an act of violence costing you more money. The cost imposed on you is whatever the state decides it wants. A private law society could decide to punish you more or less. I think you're a bit confused on that unless I'm misunderstanding. In that case, you'll have to explain yourself more clearly.
It’s funny you call him unclear because a lot of your sentences don’t seem to gell. At least, not for me.
Sorry for being unclear. His monopoly argument is cutting the wrong way.
See David Friedman's comment:
"The state is supposed to be producing rights protection and dispute settlement. If I accept your monopoly argument, it follows that it will protect rights and settle disputes less well at a higher price than the sort of competitive legal system that libertarian anarchists propose."
Nelson seems to be making a monopoly argument about the cost of crime rather than the cost of protection. The state decides how much to punish, so that argument doesn't make sense.
Mega thread on Gadamer and hermeneutics
https://mobile.twitter.com/ZoharAtkins/status/1442147987484971012
If you don’t mind - how & why did you apply for the Tyler cowed fellowship?
Are there important institutions that you think could "never be built today"? For instance, I think without historical precedence, something like the public library system could never be built today. Imagine the lobbying backlash you would get if you proposed using public funds to buy books and infinitely lend them if such an institution didn't already exist.
Are there institutions being built today that might become harder to build in the future that we should pay special attention too?
Something like the interstate highway system would never be able to seize, interfere with, or diminish the value of so much private property. Each mile would delayed for decades underneath a dozen lawsuits.
Pretty much all of them.
we have a public library system that was built today - sci hub and libgen. Also the internet. They work great! And even without them there’s still like kindle unlimited and individual paper sharing.
Like why don’t the lobbyists just ban libgen and sci hub? One bill making it illegal, punishable by $50k/day of fines per ISP to serve traffic to libgen IPs would be enough. It’d evolve but the law could too.
It's a tough call. The public library system, the Interstate Highway system, and the Internet, most certainly could not be built today... in the USA. In China or Europe, they very well might have been.
I don't think genital cutting would be very popular if people wanted to start doing it for the first time in the year 2021.
Increasing numbers of women are getting labioplasty though.
Yeah, maybe that form would arise cause there is a lot of body modification for aesthetic reasons. I doubt people would do it to babies or young girls though.
Religious/ritual signalling is a *very* different beast from labioplasty.
Good grief, that never occurred to me.
A ‘single payer’ healthcare system in the US. Our privatized system is too big to fail now. You won’t get past the lobbying. I believe it would take a post war recovery period when there is a high population need for the US to implement something like that.
senate
I think some modern internet infrastructure will be looked back on as being near-impossible to make at a later age in history—possibly the wide use of open-source digital building blocks?
Even something as simple as HTTP would be a seen as a privacy nightmare nowadays.
What makes you say that? Plenty of companies are absolutely pumping money into GNU/Linux development, the vast majority of contributions to big open-source projects are corporate in nature.
Why specifically do you think that will change in the future?
why aren't there any big-name rationalist politicians? You'd think politics would be an excellent testing ground for a lot of our theories, with the potential to make a significant difference if you genuinely believe you have insights others may not have, but yet that currently seems surprisingly unexplored in rationalist spaces (although plenty of rationalists hold very strong views on a wide variety of political subjects, you rarely see that acted on in the context of playing the *current* political system, rather than dreaming of what one might do in a rationalist-ruled world)
There's a long list of of institutions to march through before that point. The way to get a rat into office isn't to decide to run for office. It's to become a politics professor.
There probably are plenty, they just don't go around actively identifying themselves as "rationalists" because it would come off as supercilious or cringey. I generally avoid the term myself.
We're nerds. Politicians have to be popular first and foremost.
Rationalists would be a good fit for the beauracrats that politicians hire, but for all we know there are some.
There literally are. Dominic Cummings loves Yud. Tech billionaires are also often rationalist adjacent. And EA adjacent. Moskowitx and his wife.
People were asking this five years ago and “there are no successful rationalists” seems to have been commonly believed. This shows why the question is bad - it takes a long time for good ideas and actions to compound and build good success.
If "big-name rationalists" ran for political office, then there would be some. Even "little-name" rationalists could run and become more prominent through the campaign. Are you interested?
That said, "rationalists" tend to correlate with not having certain social personality traits useful for politicians. And they are very likely to make a "gaffe" by accidentally telling the truth. So even if there were rationalist politicans, they may well not get elected.
Where would an openly rationalist politician get their start? San Francisco?
I lived in the district for a time of the first openly atheist congressman, which was Pete Stark (and yes, in the Bay area...). That happened in 2007. How long before we get a, dare I say, openly rationalist congressman?
Part of being rationalist is being honest and analytical. If you apply these skills to the current political system, you are likely going to say something socially undesirable that is reasonable and fall behind. Politicians do a lot of conforming, lying, flip-flopping and staying within the bounds of acceptable discourse.
Why do people say Cummings is a rationalist? Has he ever publicly identified as such? Or are people just assuming based on something?
He’s also referenced Yud many times, quite positively
He's referenced SSC a few times on his blog:
https://dominiccummings.com/tag/scott-alexander/
This isn’t true, for what it’s worth. Gov Jerry Brown was a student of Girard. Amy Klobuchar writes decent legal analysis. Josh Hawley wrote for Thiel’s Stanford paper (not super relevant but still cool). Warren wrote “the two income trap”. Many politicians are smart and capable.
To further evidence it’s falsity, see above: Dominic Cummings, politician, rationalist!
And see the massive list of accomplished politicians for all of history - all of the founders, ancient politicians, even many very accomplished 19th century ones.
Also plenty of active rationalists conform and lie
Agreed. And I would even say most politicians are smart and capable.
I think Yitz might really be asking “why aren’t there any big-named politicians who are value-aligned with me?”
What just looks to us like non-rational behavior may very well be rational from most politicians perspective.
Rationalism to me does not imply absolute honesty in all domains. There are many instrumental reasons a rationalist might lie, and accomplishing political goals is one of them. But importantly, a good rationalist would also try to understand the consequences of their lying to the fullest and appreciate the complexity of the decision to lie in a given situation.
Talking about this stuff makes people trust rationalists less though. You have to wonder if it is an effective strategy to openly talk about willingly being dishonest.
I sincerely doubt that's true to any significant degree. For one, pretty much everyone accepts that lying is appropriate sometimes for the greater good. Secondly, I'd say like 95% of people don't know of rationalists as a community or have a mental conception of them enough to matter here. You aren't wrong that it's worth considering, but the alternative to me would seem to be obviously worse. Lying about the fact that rationalists lie, so that rationalists themselves are confused about what it means to be a rationalist and lose the ability to coordinate their actions. If rationalists were a widely known group, and if it was widely known that they all pretty much supported lying in specific circumstances, then you might have a point. But probably not even then, since that would still apply to almost any other group.
This just makes me think back to "Rationality as the Art of Winning"! It's not obvious to me that a good rationalist (even one who's also a good person) should be honest at the expense of wider utility - and presumably a sufficiently good rationalist politician would be able to do more good by winning than by honourably losing (otherwise what's the advantage of all that supposed analytical power).
The way I see it (and feel free to show me utterly wrong) the only indispensable honesty in a rationalist is within their own thoughts, not their outward words or actions - as those should just be logical conclusions of their (utilitarian-ish) goals and the means available to them. So the only scenario in which a rationalist politician wouldn't be justified in strategically withholding information is (as far as I can see) if current politicians are already maximising the utility that can be gained from politics; which seems doubtful...
I guess you would have to avoid the rationalists followers explaining to the opposition that "Yes, my favorite politician is lying but it is because she employs dishonesty to reach her goals and that is okay"
Hardly a novelty in modern political discourse! :P
(Seriously though, if they do it right, there will be no rationalist followers who are aware of their rationalist dimension)
Presumably, a good rationalist politician might maximize his strategic advantages by not disclosing they are a rationalist? Why give opponents information for free? It's not like the word "rationalist" will earn anyone lots of votes...
The example of Dominic Cummings supports this. Whenever talked about specifically rationalist-flavoured things (like trying to find and hire superforecasters, and trying to bring 'cognitive technologies' into government) he just made himself look weird to most people, and cemented an image of an untrustworthy Rasputin speaking in suspicious eldritch tongues.
A bit like Eliezer Yudkowsky in Hogwarts, really.
There's that UK guy. Also, when probably something on the order of, what, maybe aggressively one person in 70,000 or so is a rationalist (ie, 100k rationalists worldwide, which seems like an overestimate), you'd have to be pretty strongly overrepresented in order to expect to find such a pol.
I wonder about calling the list of in-person gatherings a “spreadsheet” during COVID… ;)
+5 Funny
Bad juju. Gotta rename that shit quick.
Good one!
lol
I can’t find a groan emoji big enough for this one.
Toby Fox is very good at making music - that I will certainly affirm.
However, while I have not played Deltarune and cannot meaningfully comment on it, I am firmly convinced that Undertale was no timeless masterpiece. It went viral because it made a popular political jab - violent video games are evil - in an anvil-on-head fashion at pretty much the perfect time both for indie games and, in the wake of GamerGate, "games that hate gamers". The gameplay is irritating (I actually somewhat like shmups, but as shmups - not as 5-second interrupts), the basic philosophical idea had been done and in a more nuanced way (although therefore necessarily less LCD) by other games like Iji and Postal 2 (the devs specifically designed Postal 2 to be possible to complete without doing anything criminal or killing anyone, with "real-world" actions like running for a police officer when attacked actually working, and you get the title of "Jesus" for avoiding killing; there are real moral choices in that game, it just doesn't drop an anvil on you for choosing "wrongly"), and the graphics are certainly functional (I only really criticise game graphics for being Dwarf Fortress/NetHack-tier incomprehensible) but hardly exceptional. I suppose the comedy might be good from some point of view that is not mine, and I know most "comedies" don't have me laughing, so I won't breathe fire on that. But yeah, I really think Undertale is very much a timed rather than timeless piece.
>I also don't think it's fair to characterize Undertale as a "game that hates gamers".
Level-grinding in Undertale (a stereotype of "playing like a gamer") leads to the Genocide Route. There are several parts to that route which I would characterise as "Toby Fox hates you".
1) the deliberate tedium of many parts of that route. The attack command in fights is deliberately boring, the encounter rate on the Genocide Route is drastically reduced forcing a very, very long walkabout, except when you've completed depopulating an area (i.e. encounters are no longer helpful) in which case it goes back to normal, and then of course there's the "just wait" thing with Sans and with Chara post-game (with Sans calling attention to it and saying you'll get bored).
2) the deliberate attempt to cheat the player of any sense of accomplishment. All your stats (including the Genocide-Route-only items) are irrelevant against the final boss, because he ignores your defences and has a nonstandard HP bar. There are also a bunch of people that the game simply doesn't allow you to kill, and it calls attention to that fact several times.
3) Flowey, Sans and Chara breaking the fourth wall to mock/guilt-trip the player (not the player character).
4) The game sabotages itself, permanently, upon completing a Genocide Route, ruining the best ending on any further playthroughs. In some versions this cannot be reversed even with hacking because of cloud backups. This one is particularly unforgivable; Toby Fox literally takes away part of his game because he doesn't like how you played it.
>I'd say its success is better understood as part of the larger wave of successful independent retrogames
I did mention that as being part of it. But I don't think it's all of it. I did neglect to mention the anti-racist angle - which again, is done clumsily enough that it's more of an inversion (à la Cameron's Avatar) than anything else - but that's again a trite political jab (though more at fantasy than at videogames, unlike the pseudo-Jack-Thompson bit).
>TobyFox has explained quite plainly in interview that with Undertale he wanted to question the underlying morality of traditional JRPGs, where you just kill scores of interchangeable enemies to get stronger, and this question was inspired by a few JRPGs he had played that tried to do thing differently, such as Earthbound (where enemies "come back to their senses" instead of dying) or Shin Megami Tensei (where you can negotiate with enemies to avoid fighting them).
>I don't see how this qualifies as an attack on gamers.
"Questioning the morality of" X and "attacking" X are mostly just euphemism vs. dysphemism for the same thing; I'm not really seeing how your line is in opposition to mine.
>I don't think I can take this argument seriously.
I'm not really sure how you expect me to respond to this.
Agreed. He is some sort of freak interactive medium artist; it's totally insane that Undertale was his first swing at his first pro game.
I absolutely agree with all of this, Toby Fox is indeed a creative genius. More broadly speaking, I do theorize that the one of the reasons contemporary fine arts has less popular appeal is because the finest creative minds are more drawn towards video games, web design, film music and other related fields rather than traditional media such as painting or sculpture.
This concept is the core theme of the most recent season of Mythic Quest on AppleTV+.