While reading How The West Was Won on SSC (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-194-londonoxford-meetups) I thought: In what sense do egalitarian gender norms work better, and what is the evidence of that? Maybe it's a successfully-spreading meme, but so are infinity false religions. It seems to contribute to unsustainably-low levels of fertility in a lot of countries, and there doesn't seem to be any evidence that women are happier now than many decades ago when gender norms were less-egalitarian in the US -- surveys say the contrary.
Egalitarian gender norms are an adaptation to a contemporary capitalist society, just as, say, patriarchal gender norms were an adaptation to a then-contemporary feudal society. (In short, things changed. Patriarchal households tied to land were long phased out in favor of small, mobile nuclear families. Technology freed women from housework, most people from hard labor, and rising demand for white-collar and care work opened a lot of job opportunities for women. Society probably still needed the war - men going to fight, women replacing them as laborers, phasing out of domestic service - to give up the old entrenched norms. But once the floodgates were open, switching to the new local maximum was inevitable.)
You may be assuming and expecting some kind of linear march of progress rather than opportunistic adaptation here, but I don't think that was ever the point. The new norms are not supposed to be universally better, it's not important whether they work better for the individuals (well, it is important for the individuals, but their preferences are just one of many inputs to the system), and they'd not even be the first or the most pressing example of unsustainability in modern society (cough, climate, cough), nor the only cause for it (eg. when it comes to low fertility, at least urbanization and precarity seem to be more important culprits). From that point of view, the "evidence" for their superiority is simply tautological - they spread and supplanted earlier norms, QED.
Before ~1920, upper middle class women had servants to do the work. After ~1960, they had electric appliances instead. So there were only a few decades where they had a lot of work to do.
The article is only stating that the collection of values normally associated with "western society" are not inherently "western". So each "meme" as you call it, only needs to outcompete its absence/opposite in order to arise and spread across cultures and become a permanent fixture of the dominant western-culture-sphere, over the course of several centuries.
With medicine, literally "just working" to cure people is how scientific medicine outcompeted traditional/folk medicine.
Egalitarian gender norms need only "work" in the sense that they spread and maintain hold on societies more strongly than the "traditional" gender norms they replaced. As for why egalitarianism would spread and maintain hold - well, democracy spread, which gives various groups far more concrete power to push for and defend equal rights and stuff.
Since falling fertility rates haven't actually reduced them below replacement until long after "western culture" solidified into its current shape, it's not a factor in the rise of egalitarianism to its "fundamental part of western culture" status. Likewise, happiness surveys aren't really relevant to the formation of the western societal shape either - I imagine industrialization would have been quite miserable for the people manning the factories. (I won't get into my objections about trying to apply generation happiness surveys to women's equality movements instead of the myriad other technological/societal paradigm shifts occurring in the same decades and centuries, as well as the whole matter with the hedonic treadmill and I can't even find rich data that would say less-egalitarian generations were "happier" or "sadder".)
I'm interested in making a distinction between "superiority at spreading itself" and "superiority at producing utility". What is the evidence of the latter?
Seconding Friedman here: just proclaiming this kind of vagary without elaboration looks an awful lot like some kind of attempt at chucking a political bomb into a room and running.
Any recommendations for good and relevant discord discussion servers? The one linked to from this substack is run by pompous losers and has nothing to do with Scott or the blog.
I keep reading all these "principled stances" against getting vaccinated within this community, mainly on Data Secret Lox.. There's this new thing where they compare themselves to Muhammad Ali, because Ali took a principled stance against the Vietnam War.
I get that there are some anti-vaxxers ("niggers", according to their own sense of victimhood, going by the Muhammad Ali analogy) who are smart and have looked at stats and discovered that things aren't quite as cut and dry as the broadcast news presents it.
I don't think the typical anti-vaxxer is someone who understand stats and who has looked at the numbers. I think the typical one is more like Kyrie Irving of the Celtics, former Flat Earther, who never saw a conspiracy theory he didn't like.
I don't think anyone on DSL has compared themselves to Muhammad Ali, and I can't find any such instance in a general search or a thorough look through the main COVID-related threads. Perhaps you have a citation you'd like to share on that. But I'm very confident that no one on DSL has referred to themselves, or anyone else, using the N-word in this context. You are tilting at straw men, putting words in your opponents' mouths that you have chosen to make them look foolish or arrogant, and you should be ashamed to do that in any remotely rational discussion forum.
Also, with your snide little attack coming so soon after those of "JohnS" (no relation) and "Sleazy E", I can't help wondering if I'm not seeing the start of an attempt to divide the SSC diaspora into the Good and Virtuous Liberals of ACX and the Damn Dirty Conservatives of DSL and Discord. Please don't do that. I'm rather tired of having the few places I can feel at home and speak my mind be deliberately marginalized, or having myself made unwelcome in them or being insulted for participating in them. And I will probably react poorly to having that happen here. This is Scott's forum; if he wants to isolate it from DSL he can, and if he wants the denizens of DSL to stay away he need only ask. From him, I'll take that as a polite request. From you lot, I'll take it as an attack.
You have my reasons for posting the above backwards. First, my post which mentions DSL came before not after the others around it which you mention.
Second, my intention was to post about how "anti-vaxxers comparing themselves to Muhammad Ali is a growing meme within the anti-vax movement" after seeing the above-linked Charles Barkley clip in which he addresses the Ali comparison directly. The comparison started with anti-vaxxers hailing Kyrie Irving as a hero for refusing to get vaxxed even though the Brooklynn Nets won't let him play unless he does.
Then I remembered the Ali comparison is also being made by anti-vaxxers on DSL, although they don't bother to mention Kyrie Irving.
The payoff of my above post is the Charles Barkley clip. Watch it.
The exchange I saw about it is on the thread "Oct 11 Links: Things Happen, in the World" on Oct 13, 10:29:37 pm.
One person is telling the other how they should refine the Ali paraphrase in their caption to make the "anti-vaxxer" analogy with "n-word" punchier.
You can argue it is only one person who is making the analogy in earnest while the other is merely offering editing advice. Perhaps my OP is unfair in making it sound like there's a bunch of anti-vaxxers on DSL who
are comparing themselves to Ali, when it is perhaps just one. (Note that nobody there challenges him in making the analogy, even though it appears as a caption on every comment he makes.)
It would be an incredible coincidence if the Ali comparison on the DSL Covid Skeptic Thread (again, in the poster's caption) sprung into being independent of the Ali-Kyrie meme being shared by anti-vaxxers on social media.
I enjoyed watching Charles Barkley rip into how ludicrous it is for anyone to compare themselves to Ali.
My opinion of DSL is it has its Good, Bad and Ugly to it. I've participated on it plenty, not always constructively. I'm under a current self-ban because the abortion topic got me a bit heated, but I'll likely post there in the future at some point.
There are some posters there I dislike, not all of whom are right-wingers, but on the whole there's more I like than dislike. I do agree with John S that the mods are quicker to ban those on the left than those on the right. A simple explanation for that could be this: since the majority of DSL members are (seemingly) on the right, and since mods tend to only ban posts that have been reported, if people overall are more likely to report a post that they find politically or culturally disagreeable, but each member is unlikely to report posts at a high rate, then the mere fact of the right outnumbering the left means posts by those on the left are more likely to be reported.
I thought the last post which I got banned for, which happened to be a response to you, although I meant nothing personal in it, wasn't particularly fair. True, I used a significant amount of vulgar language and was clearly angry, but I also had a legitimate point to make and made it. It wasn't kind, but it was necessary and true. I was heated because, for one, the subject was whether abortion should be legal, which tends to be a fraught topic, and, yes, I felt beset by right-wing social conservatives who had many crass things to say about The Texas Abortion Ban in a strong tone of shadenfreude.
Sorry for my inability to write coherently. The sentence: "I thought the last post which I got banned for, which happened to be a response to you, although I meant nothing personal in it, wasn't particularly fair." should read "I thought the last banning I got wasn't particularly fair."
"I don't think anyone on DSL has compared themselves to Muhammad Ali, and I can't find any such instance in a general search or a thorough look through the main COVID-related threads."
One user there has a caption "No Taliban ever called me an anti-vaxxer", which is obviously an allusion to Ali's famous statement about the Viet Cong (can google "no viet cong ever called me").
DSL is what it is - 8chan where the users have college degrees. As an example, last week some posters were throwing around homophobic slurs like it was another day at the office.
"which is obviously an allusion to Ali's famous statement about the Viet Cong"
Stealing a good line from someone isn't comparing himself to that someone. One of my most quoted lines is modeled on a line by Bertrand Russell. I wasn't comparing myself to Russell.
Thank you for making it clear that it was DSL you were slandering. Your initial statement about it was wildly false. Either you are deliberately lying or your own views are so biased that you consider any forum that permits people to say things that outrage you as being hard right.
David, I was a regular poster there until Scott opened this page, and I second @JohnS's characterization as hard right. (I don't know about 8chan, but that's because I'm too old/lame to know what the chans are(were?)) I peak in from time to time when things get slow over here, and it's certainly gone further in that direction since I was a regular. Probably a number of people like me left when this place opened.
Do you define "hard right" as permitting hard right speech, consisting mostly of hard right speech, or forbidding anything inconsistent with hard right speech? DSL fits the first definition but neither of the others.
Also, does the "hard" in hard right mean "views extreme enough to be held by only a small minority of people right of center" or do you have a much broader definition? I wouldn't, for example, describe someone opposed to legal abortion and gun control as "hard right" on that basis, but it's clearly a right of center position.
I think it seems like mostly, or at least the plurality. More than the views and whether or not they're hard right, for me, is the sneering contempt for the left that's frequently on display and never called out, at least by the mods, at least when I was there a lot.
@Cassander pushed back on me about this right before I left, saying that if I saw stuff like that I should report it. Thing is, I had *just* reported something along those line, and it was the left poster who was banned, not the right. If memory serves I called attention to that and my comment to him was that we couldn't report *him*, he was the moderator.*
Now, none of this is to say that there's anything wrong with any of that. I was (and am) happy to acknowledge Scott's right to his reign of terror and I'm happy to acknowledge @Cassander's right to his. These are their establishments, I'm a guest, and if I'm not happy with the atmosphere I can leave. I found DSL a congenial enough place to visit while Scott was dark, and I still visit from time to time. But I don't think there's any question that it's a rightwing place maintained and moderated by rightwing folks. I'm surprised to see you argue otherwise, to be honest.
*to close the circle, he said that I could and should report him if I thought he was out of line and the other mods would look, but that just seems silly to me
No, I don't generally lie, and there's no reason for me to do so. The vast majority of people on that board are rightwing, and there are extreme threads and doomposting about race and other social issues. It's an echo chamber, and the mods are constantly on the warpath against the few left-leaning posters there.
I can believe that you don't deliberately lie, but an alternative is that your definition of "hard right" covers almost everything that disagrees with current left of center orthodoxy. Let me test that:
Is anyone who believes that some of the m/f employment differences are due to innate differences, such as a tighter IQ distribution for women, hard right?
Is anyone who disapproves of attempts to cancel people for having at some point in the past said something now considered wrong to say hard right?
Is anyone who views the modern academic world as largely an ideological monoculture with considerable pressure on both students and faculty not to disagree with left of center orthodoxy hard right?
Is anybody who thinks climate change should not be expected to produce a catastrophe hard right?
I can probably think of more, but those should do it.
You're cherry-picking specific viewpoints. I've seen posters in there advocating for laws against sodomy, most are anti-choice, explain away 1/6 with whataboutisms, try to leverage HBD (dubiously) on policy proposals, and make other posts that clearly identify their rightist tendencies. And my original post was a warning (emphasis) that those are the kind of views that are generally allowed there, not that they should be illegal or anything.
> Is anyone who disapproves of attempts to cancel people for having at some point in the past said something now considered wrong to say hard right?
That forum is as "cancel culture" as it gets, as far as their banning policies. #irony The right would be cancelling anyone they could if given the chance, as another poster pointed out with examples.
> Is anyone who views the modern academic world as largely an ideological monoculture with considerable pressure on both students and faculty not to disagree with left of center orthodoxy hard right?
Making the assumption that the "monoculture" extends across all personnel and disciplines is unrealistic, and is probably driven by anecdata. Those on the right would be significantly more likely to hold this view than others, though I see plenty of centrists who are critical of speech codes/etc in universities, i.e. milder and more rational expressions of the sentiment.
> Is anybody who thinks climate change should not be expected to produce a catastrophe hard right?
Just looking around, there does seem to be greater resistance (in polls) among republicans to climate change policy. If anyone thinks that CC won't eventually affect and produce new migration patterns, they've got their head in the sand, imo.
Can you define what you mean by "extreme"? Many posters on DSL are skeptical of current orthodoxies, in particular things like cancellation. Does that qualify?
I'm vaccinated and pro vaccines in general but I'm also against forcing others into vaccination regardless of their reasoning. I don't think it has to be a purely probability or stats based reason. It is simply enough for me that I value personal agency about one's own body above the collective. There are also confounding problems with requiring or mandating vaccination since some people will choose not to be vaccinated because they are wary of anything that is being forced upon them. Is that strictly rational? Nope. But that doesn't mean I believe I have the right to force a vaccination for someone. Generally I find that the approach of sharing why I am vaccinated is a better place to start a conversation with someone who is not vaccinated.
There are a number of different criticisms of the vaccine mandates by different people on different bases. The simplest is that, on the best available (Israeli) evidence, previous infection provides more protection than vaccination, hence there is no justification for requiring someone previously infected to be vaccinated.
Beyond that, the effect of vaccination on death rates is clear, on infection rates is not. We have just been discussing, and in various ways criticizing, an article that found no relation between vaccination rates and infection rates in cross county or international data. That's a puzzle. One possible explanation is that the protection provided by vaccination after a few months is weak enough to be balanced by the fact that people are less cautious after they have been vaccinated, resulting in little effect on infection rate. I don't know if that explanation is true, but there is clearly a puzzle, and its solution is relevant to whether vaccine mandates are justified on other than paternalistic grounds.
1. (in specific) COVID isn't as deadly as Typhoid (Disclaimer: I don't personally know whether or not this is true) and refusing to get vaccinated isn't the same as being an asymptomatic carrier- you're essentially making a slippery-slope argument here.
2. (in general) Caving to this violation of personal freedom and choice creates a dangerous precedent that the government can assume control over our own bodies in the name of public health, which has the potential to be abused. You can argue this is ALSO a slippery-slope argument, given the already-extant vaccine mandates, but this is the argument I frequently see.
I think it could be summarized by saying "always err on the side of not forcing people to do something." That does leave situations where we need to discuss particulars, like rates of infection, severity of the disease/sickness, and so on.
Typhoid Mary can and should be fired from her kitchen job. She was apparently unwilling to clean herself in any way, despite multiple attempts to ask her to do so and the fact that she was a cook, directly touching people's food. I'm not a fan of locking her away for the rest of her life, but despite being told repeatedly that she was infecting people with a deadly disease, she continued to do so without taking any precautions or informing her employers of the issue. I'm pretty sure she would run into several laws that would result in significant jail time based on at least indifference to the harm she was causing, and quite possibly intentional inflection of harm. Firing her is the better approach, or even barring her from working in certain industries - food service being her preferred job and obviously a problem.
A general mandate on penalty of being barred from society, to everyone, is asking too much. A specific mandate for specific reasons - as you say, medical personnel, makes a lot more sense.
Even within that, I think that there should be room for discussion about the specific efficacy of what's being required. Otherwise we could end up in a situation where a very small benefit is mandated even if it has fairly large complications. Right now, it looks like the vaccine is more likely to cause health complications in small children (5-11) than it is to reduce COVID problems in their age group. That is almost entirely because children in that age group have extremely low risk from COVID, which means the very small risk of complications from the vaccine are comparable and probably greater than what's trying to be avoided by using the vaccine in the first place. For that reason, I am completely against mandated vaccines for small children, and anyone who thinks we should be forcing it are flat out wrong to do so. Similarly, young adults who are not vaccinated are less likely to get sick or spread the disease than older adults who are vaccinated. I get why that may be a tricky thing to navigate, but there's a lot to be said for not forcing a 20-year-old in a non-medical field to get vaccinated. I am especially unsympathetic to the group who would also refuse to accept previous infection as an alternative (yes, I do understand that proof and documentation may be more difficult, but we're talking about forcing someone to undergo medical treatment they don't want to get, that's a very high bar for me).
On their website, Harvard brags about having a 98% graduation rate. This means that a Harvard acceptance letter signals an at least 98% chance of having whatever intellectual qualities are signaled by a Harvard diploma (I suppose it also signals being able to fund a Harvard education, I have no idea how many people turn down an acceptance letter for lack of tuition money). Under the signaling theory of education, does it represent a market failure that acceptance letters are not treated as nearly equivalent to degrees?
I'm surprised that as little as 2% fail to graduate, just for medical reasons. This is just an estimate though. Any thoughts about the proportion likely to resign because of illness or injury?
I guess it depends what we think the degree is signalling. If what it's supposed to signal is having learned a bunch of stuff, or having made a bunch of professional and social connections, or just have been willing to work hard at doing what you're told for four years, the acceptance letter wouldn't signal any of those I think.
With a 98% graduation rate, the letter absolutely does signal willingness to work hard; I agree that it doesn't imply the subject matter knowledge or, more importantly, the social network that 4 years at Harvard gives you. (More important because the subject matter knowledge gained at Harvard isn't much different from that at any number of less prestigious universities, implying that the premium of a Harvard degree relates to the thing it is uniquely good at, the network.)
Whether a 98% graduation rate signals willingness to work hard depends on whether you have to work hard to graduate. My guess is that the logic goes the other way around. If the graduation rate is 98% that means you don't have to be willing to work hard to graduate, because it is very unlikely that their selection mechanism is so good that no more than 2% of the students either are or at some point become unwilling to work hard.
I graduated and didn't work hard, with the exception of one or two classes, and I think they were ones I could have avoided if necessary. But that was a long time ago.
I would like to see the exact claim about their graduation rate. 98% seems particularly high, if we're measuring the number of people who attended in the first year, and subsequently graduated. 98% seems more in line with the number of people who got passing grades on their final year courses. Of course, if you don't intend to pass the final year, you might as well drop out early. So it would be natural that only 2% of people in the final year would fail. If this is correct, then a harvard degree still has high signalling value, over a mere acceptance letter. First because it shows that you are able to stick to something for 4 years, what is important to employers. Second, because many people who dropped out did so because they wouldn't have been able to graduate had they tried.
I did a little poking around online, and it sound like they're using the standard "graduation rate" metric: the percentage of "first time, first year" freshmen who graduate within six years of matriculation to a four-year program.
The standard explanation is that Harvard aggressively selects both on the basis of academic preparedness and aptitude and on the basis of strong signals that the applicant has a aggressively overachieving temperament. Even so, 98% seems startlingly high: over the course of 4-6 years, I'd expect more than 2% of even the most rigorously vetted student body to drop out for various reasons (health crisis, sudden change in financial or family situation, deciding to drop out to found Microsoft, etc).
I suspect it also involves a certain amount of willingness to compromise on Harvard's part - generous leave policies, accepting transfer credits when necessary, etc.
Just a note that we are having a realspace South Bay SSC/ACX/DSL meetup this Sunday. We had them pretty regularly before the pandemic, then stopped, then had one a few months ago, then stopped because infection rates were going up. They have now come down, to about a third of their peak in Santa Clara County, so we decided to do another one. For details:
Surprisal party: a party where you invite someone over and everyone tries to keep them slightly on edge, so that they continually don't know what to expect.
If Elon Musk turned $10 billion worth of his Tesla shares into U.S. dollars, and then he secretly burned all the money and never told anyone about it, what effect would his action have on the economy and on the dollar's value?
Very similar question: what happens when someone has money they never spend? Say a billionaire just never spends most of their money. How does this affect the economy? Does it make other people poorer because they're hoarding the money? Does it make other people richer through deflation?
In general, billionaires have enormous amounts of assets but relatively little actual money. So it depends what you mean by "never spends most of their money".
If it means they keep reinvesting profits in their businesses, it makes the businesses' other shareholders, employees, and suppliers better off, and in most cases it makes the customers better off as well. There are also second-order effects, both positive and negative, but in a well functioning market it should be net positive unless there are large uncontrolled externalities (pollution, etc) tipping the scale.
For a billionaire to instead cash out and buy massive yachts and other consumption assets would be a boon to the luxury shipbuilding industry and its employees and suppliers, but would bid productive capacity away from building consumption or capital goods for others, and sould be a net negative relative to reinvesting because reinvesting expands the total ability of the economy to produce goods and services while consumption does not.
If you mean the billionaire let's the productive capacity underlying their assets stand idle, then that's a substantial loss to the rest of society, because less productive capacity in use means less can be produced.
If you mean they suddenly sell all their assets, build a big pile of cash, and swim in it like Scrooge McDuck, then that's probably going to be a net negative in the short term. The sell-off would bid down asset prices in general, discouraging investment and crowding out investment in new production. In the long run, the deflationary effects would mitigate most of the negatives. The final cost would probably be about the cost of printing the money in the pile (about 5 cents per bill, IIRC) as consumption spending, plus the second-order effects of the short-term disruption from the sell-off.
"No man is poor who can do what he likes to do once in a while! And I like to dive around in my money like a porpoise! And burrow through it like a gopher! And Toss it up and let it hit me on the head!" -S. McDuck
Richer through deflation. The person earned those dollars through providing goods and services (or someone did at some point in the past). They are now voluntarily destroying the chance to redeem those dollars for goods and services. They basically did the work/provided the service to earn the money for free.
Hoarding money an only make people poorer through opportunity costs. That is, the only way someone having a billion dollars stuffed under their mattress makes you poorer is through the fact the money could be better deployed. Unless we're in some extreme scenario where the person is a terrorist whose blown up the US government's ability to print new bills and hoarded literally all the dollars in a cave.
Money needs to flow through or be invested the economy to make the economy work. If we all saved to the best of our ability then the economy would retract or collapse, and in fact overall savings might decline. This is the paradox of thrift.
A Keynesian I see. You're arguing to the extreme. An extreme I specifically mentioned. If everyone in the world saved 100% of their money, sure. If one specific person burned a billion dollars it would be different in two ways. Firstly, it wouldn't be anywhere near all the money in circulation. Secondly, they wouldn't be saving it to spend later but would actually be deflating the currency by removing even the future ability to spend.
Basically, the person is destroying their own ability to consume. This is suboptimal since investing it would be better. But it wouldn't actually make you poorer other than the sense that society as a whole gets richer when wealth is gained by anyone. It'd make you richer by increasing the value of your dollars, if slightly. Unless that's your point: I'm assuming we see dollars as a slightly depreciating asset but you could argue we should instead be discounting from the stock market rate.
I’m not anything. Most economics is ideological, the worst being libertarianism or Austrian. It’s all a cargo cult. Nor is the paradox of thrift (one of the few things that’s true and obvious).
However it’s pretty clear to me that one man’s consumption is another man’s income.
That statement itself implies you'r is ideological, though no more or less ideological than an Austrian. (Libertarianism isn't an economic system to begin with.)
What do you think about Says Law then?
Since you think stimulating consumption is the main driver of economic growth, can you imagine a hypothetical economy where consumption is minimized in exchange for high investment and most people are employed on that basis? (As has actually happened.)
There are currently about $2,000 billion worth of physical US dollars in circulation. Assuming nobody noticed Elon's money-bonfire, and assuming the banking industry is running as close to the reserve-ratio limit as it feels comfortable so the supply of higher-order money (M1, M2, and M3) is reduced proportionately, the gross fiscal result would be 0.5% deflation over the dollar economy.
If so, that's *probably* enough to be noticed over normal inflationary noise, meaning the Treasury prints an extra $10 billion in cash next year, sells it to bankers who have noticed and are hurting from the shortage, and collects $10G in seigniorage for the US government. Which reduces the US national debt by a whopping 0.037%
Meanwhile, the bit where Elon sells $10 billion in TSLA will *definitely* be noticed, and will probably cause a lot of people to reason, "Elon is dumping Tesla - he must know something we don't!", and then go watch the last act of "Trading Places" to see how much fun that would be.
The destruction of the money would mean very little. The government controls how many dollars are in the economy, so if you destroy enough dollars to make a difference, they'll just make more.
It's roughly equivalent if the government notices the plume of money-smoke and prints another $10B to compensate. If they never notice or never print replacement money, it's very roughly equivalent to a ~$10B gift to everyone on Earth in proportion to how many US dollars they have at the time.
Imagine two governments. Government A collects taxes, literal green paper, which it puts in literal buckets, and then uses the money it has collected to spend on fiscal outlays.
Government B claims to be following the system, but after they collect the taxes, they go burn them in secret, print an equal amount of new money, and spend the newly printed money.
I fail to see any meaningful distinction between how those two systems work in practice, so I would guess that in the grand scheme of things you're right. However, if you had a government that spend it "tax" dollars on one set of priorities, and its "print" dollars on another set for some arbitrary reason, then I could imagine a scenario where, due to the governments own methods for allocating money.
For example, if a government spend most of its "tax revenues" on, say, redistributing wealth to lower-income people, but spend most of its "money printing" revenues on just sort of goosing the banking system, I could imagine that you'd have very different effects between destroying money and paying taxes. Those effects wouldn't come from any fundamental difference between taxation and money destruction -- they would be an artifact of the government's arbitrary spending choices.
I think the effect would not be due to the destruction of the money, as such, but rather knock-on effects from Musk dumping $10 billion worth of shares onto the market. Some people would panic over "does this mean Tesla, etc. are all going bust?" and there would be more panic selling. Some people would take the opportunity to buy up all the now-cheaper shares, expecting the panic to be short-lived and the real value to bounce back. Lots of speculation over possible factory closures, job losses, etc.
As to "burning a whole stack of money", the KLF/K Foundation did this back in 1994:
The sixth IPCC report is now out. I have looked over all of it and read some bits of interest to me.
One issue that has been discussed here is drought. The fourth report claimed that climate change was increasing it, the fifth retracted that claim. The sixth has a nice map dividing the world into forty-five regions. In fifteen of them, it shows drought increasing, in one decreasing. In only two of the fifteen does it show moderate confidence of human contribution to the increase.
So at the moment, if you accept what that map shows, the claim that climate change has increased drought is true but not very true, supported for two out of forty-five regions. One of the two is the western North America, where many of us live.
There is, however, a serious problem with the report. They are defining drought by soil moisture. But one of the effects of increased CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, mentioned in the report, is a decreased need of plants for water. If the amount of water in the soil decreases by ten percent and the amount of water needed by the plants by twenty percent drought has increased by their definition, decreased by the measure relevant to us — how well plants grow.
The report does not provide the information that would be needed to redraw the map defining drought by plant growth instead of soil moisture, but it does report, with strong confidence, that over the past two or three decades global plant growth has increased. That suggests that average drought has decreased, the opposite of what the IPCC report shows.
> If the amount of water in the soil decreases by ten percent and the amount of water needed by the plants by twenty percent
OK, so I was going to write an annoyed (and annoying) response that you just gave some hypothetical numbers instead of looking for the real values. But then I tried looking for the real values and it’s annoyingly hard to find any clear numbers, so please accept my counter-factual apology.
It’s ridiculous, I just read an entire meta-analysis about the effect of enhanced CO2 concentrations to plant’s drought response, that managed to *never* mention *how much* those concentrations were enhanced.
(To be fair, they talked in terms of effect sizes, which I guess would be appropriate to compare different kinds of experiments, since it’s a meta-analysis after all. But they *did* use percentages to about how much water was removed, so I’m still angry at them.)
That said, what number I saw in a few studies seemed to be about doubling CO2 concentrations. And IIUC, the current CO2 concentration increase (relative to pre-industrial times) is about an order of magnitude lower.
But now that I think about it, even if your thought-experiment numbers happened to be the right ones, I’m not sure your criticism is fair. If the soil was half as humid (or ten times less humid) in an area for a long time, it doesn’t seem wrong to say “there’s a drought”, even if there plants grow more for any other reason.
I agree that just “counting droughts” is not the only thing we need to decide if climate is getting better or worse, but their definition of “drought” doesn’t seem unreasonable, even if there are other reasonable definitions, and it does seem relevant, even if other definitions might be relevant as well.
+1 on your overall comment. DF hypothetically has a point depending on what the numbers are *but* one does need actual numbers for the argument to be relevant. Alas I haven't seen any estimates for these numbers either. (Then again, drought was never my main concern re: AGW).
> I just read an entire meta-analysis about the effect of enhanced CO2 concentrations to plant’s drought response, that managed to *never* mention *how much* those concentrations were enhanced.
> the current CO2 concentration increase (relative to pre-industrial times) is about an order of magnitude lower.
Pre-industrial CO2 is about 280ppm and we're at 415ppm. So actually we're almost halfway to doubling CO2 on a linear scale — more if you add effects of methane etc., or if you use a logarithmic scale; it's fair to do both of those, just don't forget to subtract the effects of anthropogenic aerosols and adjust for land-use changes ;).
> even if there plants grow more for any other reason.
Sorry, bad phrasing there. I meant something like “even if plants there grow more for other reasons, like CO2 concentrations rising”.
In other words, just because plants grow more because CO2 is rising (or because of extra fertilizer, or changing which plants grow where, or genetic engineering, or shining more light on them using orbital mirrors or whatever) doesn’t have anything to do with *drought*.
> There is, however, a serious problem with the report. They are defining drought by soil moisture.
You dropped a few adjectives. The map on page 12 specifically and explicitly deals with "agricultural and ecological drought", with the former being heavily driven by soil moisture. Chapter 8 might have more of what you're looking for, but for a start here's the simple version from the glossary of terms:
> Drought:
A period of abnormally dry weather long enough to cause a serious hydrological imbalance. Drought is a relative term (see Box 3-3), therefore any discussion in terms of precipitation deficit must refer to the particular precipitation-related activity that is under discussion. For example, shortage of precipitation during the growing season impinges on crop production or ecosystem function in general (due to soil moisture drought, also termed agricultural drought), and during the runoff and percolation season primarily affects water supplies (hydrological drought). Storage changes in soil moisture and groundwater are also affected by increases in actual evapotranspiration in addition to reductions in precipitation. A period with an abnormal precipitation deficit is defined as a meteorological drought. A megadrought is a very lengthy and pervasive drought, lasting much longer than normal, usually a decade or more.
The figure you posted is from the main report, every page of which has: "Do Not Cite, Quote or Distribute." The map I have posted (elsewhere) is from the summary for policy makers, which does not have that restriction.
I am not sure what your point is. As I said, on that map they were defining drought by soil moisture. It is true that less soil moisture, below some point, leads to less crop production, all else held equal.
But all else is not held equal, because CO2 concentration is increasing and it is well established that that reduces the water requirements for plants. Did you find anything in the report which included that in their conclusions about drought? I didn't. Do you agree that it has to be included if drought is to provide the information we want to know if crops or other plants will grow badly? Do you disagree with my conclusion that the map overstates drought, considered in terms of effect on plants, by its choice of definition?
I didn't suggest that they were misrepresenting drought by their definition but that their definition was the wrong one for their purposes for a reason they should have been aware of, since the reduction in water use is discussed in a slightly different context elsewhere in the full report.
> As I said, on that map they were defining drought by soil moisture.
And as I said, that is a misleading erasure of specificity. They are explicitly discussing *agricultural and ecological drought* - it's in bold for Christ's sake, and the discussion reiterates "this type of drought" - which incorporate soil moisture, water balance, and certain atmospheric criteria. More details are available in Chapter 8; FAQ 8.3 on page 8-121 might be a good start.
> But all else is not held equal, because CO2 concentration is increasing and it is well established that that reduces the water requirements for plants. Did you find anything in the report which included that in their conclusions about drought? I didn't.
Look at the upper-right corner of the figure I linked. Yes, it's safe to say it comes up.
>Do you agree that it has to be included if drought is to provide the information we want to know if crops or other plants will grow badly? Do you disagree with my conclusion that the map overstates drought, considered in terms of effect on plants, by its choice of definition?
>I didn't suggest that they were misrepresenting drought by their definition but that their definition was the wrong one for their purposes for a reason they should have been aware of, since the reduction in water use is discussed in a slightly different context elsewhere in the full report.
Drought isn't about plants. It's about water. Even agricultural drought is about how agriculture interact with hydrology, rather than fixating on plants themselves as the end metric. There are any number of climatic impacts that affect plant growth, and it is not the responsibility of any particular measure to give you the combination you desire. "[M]y conclusion that the map overstates drought, considered in terms of effect on plants, by its choice of definition" isn't a meaningful critique.
>The figure you posted is from the main report, every page of which has: "Do Not Cite, Quote or Distribute." The map I have posted (elsewhere) is from the summary for policy makers, which does not have that restriction.
"The report is better and interesting, but it's almost 4000 pages, so as a practical matter you glance over most of it and read bits of particular interest to you." You did pick this topic for discussion because it is of particular interest to you, yes? If you were first confining yourself to the 41-page policymaker summary, you have an odd way of making that clear.
“They are explicitly discussing *agricultural and ecological drought*”
Yes. And the argument I am making is about how one ought to define agricultural and ecological drought — by the effect on plants not by the amount of water in the soil. The latter is used as a proxy for the former and I have pointed out why, by itself, it is a poor proxy.
“Look at the upper-right corner of the figure I linked. Yes, it's safe to say it comes up.”
It comes up as something that affects plant growth and water efficiency. I already said that they recognized the effect in the report. On the figure that feeds into evapotransportation which affects soil moisture — using less water leaves more in the soil. Nowhere on that figure is there any suggestion that, because CO2 increases water efficiency, plants can grow in less moist soil, hence the definition of agricultural drought ought to take account of that effect.
Are you claiming that either that figure or something else in the report does make that point, or are you disagreeing with the claim that greater water use efficiency means a plant can grow in less moist soil?
You disagree with my claim that agricultural and ecological drought ought to be defined by the effect on plants. The report is supposed to be telling people things that matter to them. We don’t eat soil moisture, nor do other animals.
Two possibilities:
1. It did not occur to the authors of the Summary that the need of plants for water was relevant to drought in the sense important for agriculture and ecology. That seems unlikely, since the report mentions the effect of CO2 on water efficiency, but not impossible.
2. It did occur to them and they chose to use a definition of drought which they knew would overstate it so far as what mattered to people in order to make the effects of climate change look worse than their models implied. That would fit other features of the Summary.
“If you were first confining yourself to the 41-page policymaker summary, you have an odd way of making that clear.”
I was not confining myself to the summary, I was avoiding actual quotes from the rest of the report after noticing that the report said not to do them. You either did not notice or chose to ignore the restriction. I have webbed the drought map on my blog and FB because it was in the summary, have not webbed things from the rest of the report, merely commented on them.
> And the argument I am making is about how one ought to define agricultural and ecological drought — by the effect on plants not by the amount of water in the soil.
I find your argument thoroughly unconvincing, and any proposition that takes it as a given can be dismissed out of hand. That's going to result in me eliding a few lines of your comment, but if you think there is a part I ought to revisit feel free to let me know and I can give it more attention.
>The latter is used as a proxy for the former and I have pointed out why, by itself, it is a poor proxy.
Its use as a "proxy" is downstream of the data as presented, which is properly taken as a single influencing factor. Your assertion that it is "poor" appears to begin and end with the fact that it does not already incorporate your preferred *other* influencing factor - while explicitly refusing to quantify said influence, mind. This might be understandable if you thought soil moisture and atmospheric CO2 were literally the only two ecological factors influencing plant growth, but we'll get to that in a moment.
> The report is supposed to be telling people things that matter to them. We don’t eat soil moisture, nor do other animals.
Dismissible out of hand on the substance as per above, but I do want to call out how indefensible the "nor other animals" bit is as a rhetorical flourish. Including it while ignoring that *plants* do indeed eat soil moisture seems to imply either that humans don't eat plants or - my preferred read - that you think the report ought to be prepared as though it will be read by non-human animals. It's a cute image, to be sure.
> Two possibilities:
Nice false dichotomy. Here's mine:
1. It did not occur to you that the influence of anthropogenic aerosols on sunlight was relevant to drought in the sense important for agriculture and ecology. That seems unlikely, since Scott specifically brought up global dimming in a post on climate change less than a week before your root comment, but not impossible.
2. It did occur to you and you chose a definition of drought which you knew would overlook the exclusion in order to make a narrow definition look worse than a full examination of the models would imply. That would fit other features of your comments.
The obvious resolution is that, while not denying their impact on the relevant policymaker goals†, aerosols were not relevant to the specific metric you wanted to discuss. I'll leave the extrapolation to a similar dichotomy as an exercise for the reader.
† They're discussed a few times in the Summary and extensively in Chapter █ of the IPCC report, for the interested.
> You either did not notice or chose to ignore the restriction.
Certainly, I chose to ignore it much as I would be perfectly comfortable citing research preprints when not doing formal work. Do you hold that the proper ethical line here is that it is fine to direct people to read the additional chapters, but one is obligated to ignore their specific contents when discussing the report? Does that even extend to tables and figures that bear the same label, but are explicitly referenced in the text of the Summary itself?
If so: I'll be happy to give you my email address if you please CC me on your message to the IPCC informing them that they were forbidden by order of the IPCC from citing or distributing the IPCC report in the IPCC Summary on the IPCC website.
" Do you hold that the proper ethical line here is that it is fine to direct people to read the additional chapters, but one is obligated to ignore their specific contents when discussing the report?"
I think it is courteous not to quote text whose authors have asked you not to quote it.
It did not occur to me that sunlight dimming was relevant, and I do not know whether it is important enough so that it should have been included. Perhaps it is. I think there is a serious problem with an approach that shows many areas of increasing drought, only one of decreasing, for a period over which global plant growth was increasing.
Apparently you do not.
Plants are important to us primarily because they feed both us and other animals, some of which we eat or make use of in other ways. People worry about drought not because they are afraid the ground will be too dry under them but because they are afraid crops won't grow. It is deceptive to tell people "drought is increasing" when, so far as you know, the ability of the environment to support plant growth is increasing.
I have not read an IPCC report. Is it worth the effort to make the attempt?
I have heard that the "Summary for Policymakers" is typically more sensationalist than would be suggested by the research which makes up the bulk of the report. Can you comment?
My take is that the SPM accurately reflects the findings of the rest of the report, which accurately reflects the scientific research. But there is an entire side of the political spectrum devoted to slogans like "IPCC Is Alarmist". Given that the consensus of humans-causing-global-warming is "only" 88%-97% (https://dpiepgrass.medium.com/scrutinizing-the-consensus-numbers-70faf9200a0c), and given that over 100,000 scientific papers have been written on climate change, the absolute number of peer-reviewed papers opposed to the consensus is quite large, more than enough for a persuasive Small-World Fallacy (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/StxoR4EqAYB3duRjK/trust-and-the-small-world-fallacy).
I think the summary tries to present information in ways that make climate change seem scary. They tell you that the proportion of level 4 and level 5 Tropical cyclones (aka hurricanes) is increasing, don't tell you (but the report does) that the total number of tropical cyclones is projected to decrease. The proportion of high end ones is increasing because there will be fewer low end ones. The models are ambiguous as to whether the number of high end cyclones is increasing a little, decreasing a little, or staying about the same.
The report is better and interesting, but it's almost 4000 pages, so as a practical matter you glance over most of it and read bits of particular interest to you.
I find your views on climate change very interesting and very different to mine. Do you only comment here, or do you have a blog where I can read in more detail?
I have a blog. One of the things I have commented on over the years is climate, but there are many others. The blog, Ideas, is: http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/
You can use the search window at the top left to search for terms such as "climate" or "warming." My basic view is that climate change has positive and negative effects and we do not know whether the net is positive or negative. That was also my view of population growth about fifty years ago, when it occupied the same cultural niche, the ongoing catastrophe that something drastic had to be done about, that climate change occupies now.
Cheers. I've been reading your comments over the last couple of open threads. It's a viewpoint I've never seen before, but you seem to have the arguments to back it up.
> does report, with strong confidence, that over the past two or three decades global plant growth has increased. That suggests that average drought has decreased, the opposite of what the IPCC report shows
It does not necessarily is so simple
1) it is possible that plan growth is fueled by nonrenewable water - for example melting glaciers can provide temporary increase of water amount. We continue to pump water out of aquifers, at scale far larger than replenishment.
2) Dams store massive amount of water, to the point that large scale dam building projects are taken in consideration when modelling sea level. And for example Lake Mead has very low water levels, failing for a long time. Large reservoirs used for irrigation can cushion such drought and delay effects.
3) It is entirely possible that some areas are greener (say, plants instead of glacier) while total drought area increases
4) plan type could change despite drought (say, forest instead of wetland)
"If the amount of water in the soil decreases by ten percent and the amount of water needed by the plants by twenty percent"
Sure, but are those close to the correct numbers? It would seem that the effect could be large enough to offset this particular effect of reduced soil moisture, or it might not be. The conclusion we draw depends heavily on whether this is in fact the case, and not at all on whether it plausibly could be given certain assumptions.
I don't see how global plant growth increasing necessarily suggests that average drought has decreased. Drought is a local phenomenon, and it's perfectly possible for drought to be increasing in some areas while plant growth increases substantially in others. As with the first point, we can't draw a conclusion without knowing the actual number.
One might also wonder if drought has any other important local consequences unrelated to global plant growth, e.g. on fish or other aquatic life, on dams and reservoirs, hydropower, and so on.
At best, one might be able to conclude that decreased rainfall or increased evaporation in certain areas is offset to some degree by reduced moisture requirements in plants, with no apparent certainty about the degree, and no apparent effect on any other systems affected by soil moisture or the upstream causes of reduced soil moisture.
"Sure, but are those close to the correct numbers?"
I don't know. My point was to show why what the IPCC was doing gave the wrong answer, not what the right answer is.
They are defining drought by soil moisture, not dam level or streamflow or ... . The only relevance of that that I can see is for plant growth. I note as a definition of drought:
1 : a period of dryness especially when prolonged
specifically : one that causes extensive damage to crops or prevents their successful growth
I agree that we don't know for sure whether drought is increasing or decreasing. But the IPCC shows increasing in fifteen regions, decreasing in one. If that is correct, one would expect global vegetation to be declining, although one can, as you say, imagine circumstances in which it wasn't.
Do you disagree with the claim that if global vegetation has been increasing for the past twenty or thirty years that is evidence — not proof, but evidence — that drought has on the average been declining? Do you disagree with the claim that what the IPCC is measuring does not tell us where drought is increasing or decreasing, if drought is defined by its effect on plant growth?
I think the focus on crops misses some of the picture - for the record, my preferred source of English definitions (wiktionary) makes no reference to crops. There are large areas of California where crops are not grown, but drought is increasing (as measured by rainfall vs historical norms), which has the substantial negative effect of increased wildfire risk.
I'm not your interlocutor, but I would agree that increase in vegetation growth is, as you say, evidence but not proof that globally drought may be declining. However, I would say it's weak evidence. From my perspective, drought should be relatively simple to measure, ie, rainfall vs historical average, and both soil moisture content and global vegetation growth are simply lagging indicators.
The IPCC isn't measuring drought by rainfall, which is expected to increase with climate change, with more heavy rains, but by soil moisture. I can't see why that would be important other than the effect on plants, including both crop yield and vulnerability to fire. Why do you want to use a definition of drought that isn't relevant to us instead of one that is?
I had the impression that “drought” means a general lack of humidity, not of rainfall. For example, it doesn’t sound right to me to say that a swamp is experiencing drought as long as it doesn’t get any less wet, even if there is no rain at all for decades.
It doesn’t even need to be a swamp: if a large area is lush with life due to plentiful water (maybe there are springs, or it’s a river delta or something), and the humidity does not decrease over time, I don’t think I’d ask about rainfall before deciding it not suffering drought.
Conversely, if rainfall did not decrease in an area, but the humidity available for life reduced a lot (maybe the flow of a river reduced a lot), then I might call it a drought.
I’m not a native English speaker, so I’m only halfheartedly contradicting you, but looking at a couple of sources they seem to agree that rainfall is not the central element of droughts, but something like “is life negatively affected by less water than usual for the area”.
"We developed the world’s first solar powered reverse osmosis without batteries. The best thing: it works 24 hours a day."
Why those qualifiers? What is the advantage over a simple system of solar desal? Working 24 hours a day is a worthless gimick. Why not just use the morning solar for desal and the afternoon solar for other purposes? Much more efficient than this. Batteries are expensive. Using them to power desal at night is ridiculous. But using any power storage to power desal at night is equally ridiculous.
Why aren't simple things like solar+desal widely used? Why aren't solar and desal used alone much more widely? Not for any reasons this addresses.
My guess is that it has a small segment of the market that it makes sense for. A brief scan of the website suggests that it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to install, putting it well out of reach for most homes/small businesses. At the same time, solar + waste energy + waves can only feasibly most so much seawater without a huge footprint. So this likely doesn't scale as well as just pumping water does.
Within their niche, this does seem like a good approach.
Some IQ thoughts (Not a humble brag, I swear): I'm taking advantage of covid distance learning to get a cs degree, and have some observations.
I don't buy any text books, I don't study, and I play videogames during lectures.
I still usually get As, and in my non-math classes I am disappointed by a less than 99% correct assignment.
I've been put into groups with people that also get A's, and in each case but one, I do all the work because it's been faster for me to just finish the assignment than try to explain what is going on to my group mates.
I have all A's for my classes other than discreet mathematics so far (In college, I didn't give a shit during highschool), and I repeat: I have never studied at all, even once (except for discreet mathematics, holy shit.). I have 0 hours studying on the clock.
This has made me even more of a socialist.
It's bullshit that some people can just be born strong, social, or smart; and reap rewards for something they didn't earn and that can't be learned, and Grades are a dumb way of rating performance.
There are people in my classes who have way lower grades than me that I KNOW could perform at my level or better, they just do badly in school.
I'm not sure how to square this circle. Every day, it becomes clearer to me that nobody deserves anything, and any success you have is a product of your history or your capacity; and if your capacity is determined by your genes and upbringing, you didn't actually earn it and have no reason to be more proud of being smart than a trust fund kid has of being rich.
I have to disagree with your deterministic model of success: I'm "smart" (very high innate ability to memorize information and work out logic problems at speed: never have had an IQ test nor do I intend to, so I can't give a precise quantification) and I ended up struggling in college due to an inability to focus on anything I wasn't interested in (I ended up dropping out after earning an Associate's, but that was only semi-related). Meanwhile, people who were "lower-spec" than me but who either had a genuine passion for the subject in question or were far better-disciplined would routinely smoke me in terms of grading or GPA.
Of course, you could argue that their passion or their discipline were the results of things outside of their control and start arguing about formative experiences in early childhood, outside pressure from parents, unconscious processes, etc., but I don't think you're interested in proving too much and arguing free will out of existence and leaving us in a hard-deterministic universe where nobody can actually make meaningful choices or create an actual change, because that ends up undercutting the whole POINT of the rationalist project: you can't improve your ability to think better and create better outcomes if everything was decided from the moment of the Big Bang.
Note that you may have massive problems once you encounter something where
- you must study
- you are not interested in it
- raw ability and lecture-while-gaming is not sufficient
it is quite common that talented people can coast and then crash into wall when at age of 2X or 3X they actually need to work on something for the first time in their life.
> no reason to be more proud of being smart than a trust fund kid has of being rich
Being proud just of being smart is as reasonable as being proud of being tall.
Though if you actually use it in some good way then it is 100% fine to be proud of it.
Hopefully you plan to actually use your abilities for something useful/amusing/productive/creative and not spending all your time on gaming.
I keep hearing that, but I have like, 5 classes left and none of them are math.
Unless I go back for some program where I need to do original work, it just isn't gonna happen.
RE. Studying: I can do it; I'm actually really good at it.
I've had to do it for work, IE, I taught myself how to diagnose and fix circuit boards and simple electronics over a weakened; because the control boards used in industrial ovens use 1980's technology that they charge new car prices to replace, so you need to learn how to test capacitors and relays and eproms in self defense.
It's just that school is structured such that you usually don't need to. You'll notice the class where I had to try more than 0 was the one where the test questions weren't reformulations of the answers.
You are definitely right about passion, though. I didn't have any in highschool; now I do have it and stuff is WAY easier.
You have a piece of information about your talent respective to the rest of students in your online class and to the difficulty of the curriculum your class is following.
However, a word of warning before you leap into conclusions how awesome you are relative to CS students in general. You also should consider at least two possibilities,
1) Your online CS class is not necessarily representative of a regular CS class.
2) The curriculum may be purposefully made a bit easy at this stage because of arcane reasons only the department heads are partial to. Difficulty curve may step up sooner or later. If it never does, there is a chance you really are top tier, but there also are some legit institutions that pump out graduates with CS diplomas that are nevertheless almost useless (because students were not expected to do anything difficult to graduate).
No, this is a legit State Public 4 -6 year degree with a good reputation; they've just moved to all online during COVID lockdown; so I had a chance to take a bunch of classes without fucking my schedule.
Note that a lot of institutions dramatically changed the difficulty of their courses specifically as part of moving all online during Covid.
Also, bluntly, I have a very low opinion of American undergraduate degrees; I did a 6 month exchange at one of the UC campuses and got all A's despite being so sick I was bedridden for half the semester and literally attended no classes between week 4 and the final exam (and, needless to say, did no studying either). By contrast, in my courses in Australia I actually had to pay attention in class and do some work.
Grad school also steps the difficulty up dramatically, if you do want to feel challenged
Welcome to realizing that the just-world hypothesis is wrong! Lots of people don't get what they deserve, and lots of others don't deserve what they get. You just have to play the best hand you can with the cards you're dealt and try your best to be good to others along the way.
Enjoy your talent. Be grateful for it, look for and appreciate the unique opportunities it affords you. I want to live in a world where people like you put their gifts to use rather than being cowed by guilt into self sabotage. I guarantee you'll have plenty of opportunities to help others along the way, and, if it makes you feel any better, I can also guarantee that you'll also encounter plenty of hardship and difficulty of one form or another before your time on this earth is up.
Axioms! My Christian upbringing and time in a Costa-Rica in a non-electrified area caring sacks of coffee up and down a hill for $1 an hour, in this case.
RE: Christian upbringing: how exactly do you square that with the reality that dismantling capitalism will involve violating the commandments against theft, murder, and covetousness at a bare minimum, and will definitely end up breaking the Law of Love? The "completely bloodless and loving overthrow of capitalism" through any method save the long march through the institutions is a pipe dream, and further up you seem to imply that you see the long march/reformist approach as "just being a capitalist" and "treating the symptoms".
If I thought that history was over, I wouldn't argue for the reformist approach, which I see as the option compatible with a strong axiomatic belief in the value and dignity of human life. I am specifically referring to the other primary mode of socialist/communist thought, which is the revolutionary approach and has generally led to very bad outcomes every time it has been implemented in ways that cannot be dismissed by claiming it was caused by capitalist sabotage. As a key point in reference to the faith, every single communist revolution of note was actively hostile and destructive towards Christianity as a subset of active hostility towards all religion, organized or not.
That's why I can't square the circle. The current system seems so monolithic and all encompassing that it crushed and subsumes all criticism, which leaves violent destruction as the only way out.
But, history shows that revolution is risky as fuck!
Is it worth the risk vs. trying to induce enough empathy in your average capitalist to, eg, appropriating 0.01% of their wealth to feed hungry children in their own country?
Thinking in terms of what people "deserve" is not very useful. What IS useful is working out what produces the best outcomes (partially subjective but still meaningful) while having universally agreed upon 'human rights' as constraints on how we achieve these outcomes (i.e. its not right to kill or sterilize low IQ people to make the country smarter).
The reason we should allow the talented to be wealthier than other people is because talented people are the economic engine of a country (if you thinks its actually workers, well I would simply point to the multitude of poor countries with low average IQ but millions of workers and no shortage of them) and if you do not allow them to have better outcomes than the average person, they lose the incentive to be as productive as they can be. No, really. Why would anyone work 80 hour weeks if they didn't get anything out of it? Why would they take on stressful, high-responsibility jobs that their lives revolve around if they don't get to be richer than other people?
You can say they should work hard for the benefit of the rest of society or, worse, humanity in general, but its plainly delusional to think this would work. It can work in actual communities of a few hundred people with which people identify, but it starts to break down once you get much bigger than that. 330 million strangers spread across a vast landmass whose only universal point of similarity with you is literally that that they reside within the same borders as you? Forget about it.
We need a market economy that permits a certain degree of inequality in order to maximise the productivity of those with the most capacity. This is good for everyone. Cry about inequality all you want, but most of the technological progress of the past 100+ years that has made life relatively safe and comfortable today for the vast majority of people in developed countries in a way that would be incomprehensible for people at any earlier point in history has come out of the US, and it seems unlikely this would have been possible without a market economy in which inequality was tolerated.
And to help those without talent, we have a robust social safety net that helps those in need without trying to tear down those who are talented and productive. So universal healthcare, probably a UBI of some kind, public housing etc. Basically ensuring people have what they need to get buy and not face gross economic insecurity etc. But if someone is going to complain about wealth inequality *per se*, I have less time for that. If you're able to get by comfortably but are lower income and are just mad that people have more money than you because they don't "deserve" it, I mean, who cares. Honestly.
One wrinkle is of course the financial industry in which vast numbers of wealthy people are created but the actual value creation is not strictly evident. But this is better remedied with policy aimed at reforming the financial industry rather than a blanket 'heavy taxes on all high income earners" approach.
Another concerns reproduction and immigration. It's one thing to say that people should be provided with what they need to get by. But if low IQ people are having more children than high IQ people (they are), then this is going to slowly make things worse for everyone and more unequal. I'm not saying we force people not to have kids, but it's something we need to be mindful of and at the very least poor people having children should be somewhat stigmatized.
Immigration is similar in that if you bring in low-IQ immigrants they're inevitably going to on aggregate be economically worse of than the existing population and be a net fiscal burden. You may think that its a worthy cause for wealthy countries to support these people, but obviously we can only support so many of them, especially with an expanded social safety net. If we bring in 100 million immigrants between now and the end of the century (this figure is probably far too low, especially since UBI and healthcare would likely increase the number of immigrants), think of how much it would cost to provide just these people with UBI and healthcare (on top of all other government spending). Once they're all here, if we say it costs 30k per person for these policies, that's 3 trillion dollars a year. Plus if they have have kids at a higher than replacement rate, this figure will quickly grow. And its expected that automation will destroy vast swathes of jobs over the next century, so the idea that they're all going to get decent jobs and pay enough taxes to cover these expenditures if absurd.
Which is to say that, best outcomes is subjective. You may think that hundreds of millions of immigrants living better lives is more important than current americans maintaining their standard of living is a better social outcomes, others may not. Though of course, its hard to imagine that america remains as productive and innovative in such circumstances which is arguably more impactful on humanity's wellbeing.
"The reason we should allow the talented to be wealthier than other people (...)"
There is nothing about socialism that would preclude talented people from becoming wealthier than others.
"is because talented people are the economic engine of a country"
Cynically, but realistically: the economic engine of the country is, roughly, its military power.
"if you thinks its actually workers, well I would simply point to the multitude of poor countries with low average IQ but millions of workers and no shortage of them"
This example boils down to people with less means to contribute not being able to contribute as much as people with more means, directly supporting Nah's point, except not even addressing innate differences, only circumstantial ones. And directly negating yours, as it makes it clear that what those countries lack is not talented people to provide them with those means, because statistically, there's plenty of talented people among them, they just lack said means as much as everyone else around them.
"if they don't get to be richer than other people"
I guess this is where I point out that hardly anyone wants to get rich as a terminal goal. Rather, they're aiming for whatever brings them self-fulfillment. The current money-mediated social system is specifically structured such that in many cases financial wealth is the easiest, or even necessary, way of obtaining it, and in that context it makes sense to equate riches with success or fulfillment in this context. You just shouldn't carry that assumption to reasoning about other social systems.
"We need a market economy that permits a certain degree of inequality"
Again, there's nothing about socialism that precludes any of that. (There's a pretty specific set of things socialism opposes, which can be roughly described as market and property relations being imposed onto areas of social life where they don't belong. If you think e.g. absentee property or wage labor are necessary components of "market economy", fine, but you'll need to argue for them directly, as they're not implied even by the strictest definitions of the term.)
"(...) in order to maximise the productivity of those with the most capacity."
On the other hand, most socialists would reject your assumption that market economy, much less the current capitalist society, "maximizes the productivity of those with the most capacity". The basis for this is empirical - talented people appear to be most productive when freed from immediate economic pressures.
(Historically, arguments for economic pressures had little to do with encouraging the talented. They were mostly about disciplining the workers, forcing them to work 80 hour weeks in order not to starve. You're not hearing them anymore, mostly because the outcome of implementing labor rights has proven them false, which subsequently allowed humanity to disregard them as fundamentally evil. There are also other kinds of arguments, saying that one particular skill of running a business is so important to the economy it needs to be rewarded as much as possible. I find them to be self-serving, cyclical reasoning, but at least they're not immediately wrong about what the actually existing markets actually facilitate and reward.)
I like a lot of what you say here, but I want to pick this piece out to disagree about.
"Cynically, but realistically: the economic engine of the country is, roughly, its military power"
I don't think this is true unless you're actively using your military to loot, or at least, to maintain an extractive empire. In the current age, I think most militaries are pure cost. Necessary maybe, but not the productive engine that makes other things possible.
You honestly don't see any connection at all between "working 80 hour weeks" and "smart people not having kids"?
I think the people deriving most value are those getting the 'smart creative talented' ones to work the 80 hour weeks for them, being productive and creating more wealth than the talents will be awarded. Jeff Bezos probably has many smart, creative, talented people working for him, nonetheless, he's the one with the multi-billion valuation.
There needs to be a balance. 'You can work yourself into the grave but you'll get rich' is not it. And there is a balance in the economic engine between the creative and the workers; say your smart talent creates a wonderful new piece of software. Great, are they now also going to go off to the fabrication line and work on assembling the chips for the hardware this software will run on? The various parts of the body need each other:
"14 For the body does not consist of one member but of many. 15 If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. 16 And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. 17 If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? 18 But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. 19 If all were a single member, where would the body be? 20 As it is, there are many parts, yet one body.
21 The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” 22 On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, 23 and on those parts of the body that we think less honorable we bestow the greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, 24 which our more presentable parts do not require. But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, 25 that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. 26 If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together."
"Why would anyone work 80 hour weeks if they didn't get anything out of it? Why would they take on stressful, high-responsibility jobs that their lives revolve around if they don't get to be richer than other people?"
I believe, quite seriously, that someone like Elon Musk would just as happily thrive in the role of a high-ranking commissar, provided he was given sufficient resources, freedom of concept and action, and public recognition for his efforts. And perhaps Thiel, too - consider his ideas on the monopoly. Past a certain point of comfort, money is a) status score-keeping, b) a signal that you know what you're doing, and c) stored energy to do the big things you find interesting. Even if you believe that a societal shift away from individual incentive is utopian, it's at least worth questioning whether the first two, at least, need to come in the form of the same stuff we use to buy bread.
I appreciate technological development as much as the next man, but all the evergreened pharma patents and mindfulness app start-ups in the world don't mean very much to humanity's well-being if they are created by the few for the few. And however promising future absolute quality-of-life increases might be, it remains the case that present inequality and suffering matter. A lot. I think, in a laudable effort to ward off hyperbolic discounting, rationalists often overexpect future utility, which is to say fail to adjust sufficiently for the elusiveness of the two birds in the bush.
Besides, there's at least a non-zero chance that the current best practices for rapid technology generation represent a local, not absolute, maximum. They're one answer to a coordination problem that could, potentially, be solved in other ways.
And that's the more benign alternative: if especially efficient (for any reason: stronger, more clever, more active) people have no means to earn more resources than the average within societal constraints (which hopefully channel their efforts to productive activities that benefit everybody), they could of course be lazy and do the bare minimum, but they can also spend their efforts finding ways to earn more by crossing societal constraints, and hurt most other peoples doing so...One of the typical way to do that is to gain control of the society, and decide what exactly those constraints are...
The traditional answer (but you already knew that) is to try our damnedest to promote some degree of identification with society at large and shift away from individual metrics when it comes to both performance and reward.
The idea that we're going to get the talented in society to treat 330 million increasingly diverse strangers spread across a vast landmass, with whom they share literally nothing consistently in common with other than just the fact they reside within the same borders, as a community is, sorry to say, entirely delusional.
Why the 330 million and the US-centric scope? Every human society, on some level, has to contend with these questions. Even going by your... rather debatable notions of international IQ distribution, surely you can spare a thought for the 450 million Europeans and 1.7 billion East Asians?
Anyway, the gradual shift toward a more eusocial model doesn't depend on actual fondness for other individuals in one's society. It does depend on a cultural change in which individual status-seeking is diminished, following a collective realisation similar to Nah's: that success from an advantageous position is not a good enough measure of merit. And I think people you describe as 'talented' are most capable of that kind of introspection.
The idea that economic incentives are the only kind of incentive is a very narrow and distinctly capitalist view. Look at how many people get PhDs and go into academia, when going into industry would be vastly more profitable. Look at how many people build and maintain vital open-source software for no monetary compensation. Look at how many artists continue to produce society-defining art but are still poor.
Social and moral incentives have proven to be very effective.
I think you could make a good argument that Star Wars was the last generation's defining art, and that the MCU is this generation's. It depends on how society-defining is . . . er, defined.
Are you able to quantify how many artists are producing "society-defining" art for little money? How much open-source software is being produced compared to for-profit software? Academics get into academia for a variety of reasons, some of which may be less monetary, but still related (for instance good work hours, institutional prestige, future earnings, etc.).
If some relatively small percent of work gets done without a profit, and a strong majority gets done with a profit, I'm not sure you're making much of a point. There have always been volunteers to do work they enjoy, but modern society absolutely depends on people doing jobs that are far too taxing, difficult, or unappealing to be done on a voluntary basis for long. I can't imagine too many business owners would be doing so on a voluntary basis, though I am open to data that shows otherwise.
I would suggest that economic systems should not generally be set up based on who deserves what. I agree that you and I are no more deserving than most other people.
Instead, we should set up systems that product the best results, especially for people at the bottom, and focus on that as the key outcome rather than perceived justice.
Results-wise, Denmark-style free markets + very strong social safety nets seems like a good combo. The fact that most scientific and technological progress came out of the US in the past ~80 years is probably worth paying attention to as well.
OK, you are smart and dissatisfied with some of the obvious problems of the economy (food waste vs hungry people). However, there are economic models that aim to prevent the abuses of both Capitalism (oppression by capital) and of Socialism (oppression by the state). You might want to spend some time looking into those alternatives.
I bet that there are plenty of others too. It would be a great shame for the lessons of the 20th Century to be wasted on another bout of state socialism.
"I agree, but it's hard for me to imagine getting from Here to There with the current capitalist system intact."
Is it though? Isn't Denmark running basically the same system as us, just with higher levels of taxes and safety net programs? I mean, really, cut the military expenditure by 75% and we could probably get most of the way there and *cut* taxes.
Military spending is a bugbear; yes, the US spends far more than most on its military, but in absolute terms almost all of US spending is on Welfare and Healthcare. The way to free up money is to become much, much more efficient with how the current budget is spent - if the healthcare costs of the USA were the same per capita as those of Western Europe, they could provide universal healthcare for the whole population for far less than is currently being spent on Medicare
>in absolute terms almost all of US spending is on Welfare and Healthcare
Most I'll give you, but it's something like 60%, which is a fair distance from what I'd term almost all.
>if the healthcare costs of the USA were the same per capita as those of Western Europe
Yep. We (collectively) have a very strong attachment to rationing our healthcare by income level and paying the bureaucrats who stand between us and our doctors privately. In the short term that's likely to get worse, not better, at least, IMO.
Be honest with me: What are the probabilities you give to the current elites cutting military expenditures VS. systemic collapse followed by violent revolution?
I give it 60/40
Maybe once all the boomers shuffle off this mortal coil.
I mean, I think the likelihoods are something like: status quo but a bit worse 90 / the status quo but a bit better 8 / spending and taxes shifted to sufficiently generous social safety net 1.9 / systemic collapse and socialist revolution .1. And honestly, the latter two are probably high. I just don't see any reason not to expect things to go along mostly like they've been.
I expect Republican rule, most of it unitary, from 2022 to 2032 or 36, depending on events. As to the politics of the generation that follows, that's far enough out that I wouldn't venture to predict.
The problem is, where's your system collapse? Do you *really* expect that? Things here are shitty if you're poor, and unnecessarily so. But that's been true for a long time, and is probably slowly getting better, not worse. Now, we can expect that to reverse through the 2020s, but how dramatically? The working class are increasingly a Republican constituency. There's a limit to how much you can crap on your voters before they'll get sick of you, so if they go too far they'll lose office. I expect to see moderate withdrawing of the social safety net, slowly enough that it's not widely noticed, until the next big switch.
And maybe the next generation will be ready to make it match the rest of the first world. Probably not. You never go broke in America bagging on poor folk. But you never know.
Nah, I don't expect the system to collapse; but I think reform is just about as unlikely.
Re unitary republican rule: Maybe I'm on that hopium shit, but that seems unlikely. Trump was a massive win for us leftys there, it turned lots of centrists into culture-warriors.
The problem is that you cannot neatly separate a system from the people that make up that system. Introducing the exact same policies to Somalia probably won't make somalia a good country. It will probably improve it, but a country is more than just its policies.
Sorry, edit: AF was not aimed at youngsters initially, though the school curriculum does often include it. Gulag Archipelago is not YA literature in any sense, and is more or less autobiographical.
I'm very curious where marxbro1917 is coming from, and what is the story of someone who reads ACX and is an unreconstructed Marxist-Leninist.
I recommended Animal Farm as a gentle introduction before taking on The Gulag Archipelago as I didn't know if his tolerance for horror was as high as that of a Marxist.
Given my experience of capitalism includes people doing back breaking labor for rates of pay that allowed to purchase approximately One (1) pair of shoes every 2.5 years, as long as they grew most of their non-staple calories themselves and built their own houses, I think I'm good.
I mean, If we're comparing "Horrors of X economic system", Let's add the famines in India and Bangladesh, The 4 million deaths a year from India alone, and a couple decades of the triangle trade.
Yeah..... if that is the measure of nastiness that you are used to, then you are not ready to read about the crimes of the USSR in The Gulag Archipelago.
Is it? The balance of probability says I'm not gonna make enough money to solve world hunger.
The best I could hope for is to be a Bill Gates, and shovel sand on a fire that need state action to extinguish. Good job on polio though, Bill. Shame about the rest of it.
Bill Gates has probably done more good for the developing world that the entire US Government, and by implication more than every US political activist. More good not just because his spending was far better targeted, but also because it's actually on the same monetary scale as US foreign aid - if you get rich enough you can very directly change the world.
Medicine developed with state backing, regulated by the state, using financial infrastructure maintained by the state, across communication networks created by the state, using money he could only acquire due to the state maintaining a safe marketplace and enforcing IP law.
The fact that Bill Gates did as well as he did is to his credit; but the fact he did better than the US is not an accomplishment, it is an accusation of incompetency and callousness against the public.
Does gender have predictive power when controlling for biological sex?
I.e., there is the [gender continuum test](https://programs.clearerthinking.org/gender_continuum_test.html) that found a bunch of questions that all correlate with some biological sex. If someone takes this test, I choose a bunch of questions at random and they show me their answers, I can then predict their remaining answers with (slightly) above accuracy random because [the answers I have] correlate with [their biological sex] which correlates with [their remaining answers].
However, say they tell me their biological sex first, and then I get a bunch of answers. Do they help me to further predict the remaining answers? If e.g. a cis woman gives unusually male-like answers on two questions, is she more likely to give unusually male answers to the remaining questions?
I've never heard anyone give an explicit answer to this question, which seems kind of weird. This has to have been studied. (Also I assume the answer is yes.)
So I'd think, but not be sure, that the answer would be yes based on two different factors:
1) There seems to be decent anecdotal data that taking testosterone increases the rate of sexual thoughts for trans men. So I'd expect that a trans man would score more "male like" on this test than a cis woman.
2) I'd expect socialization to have an impact on the reported personal characteristics. So I'd expect a 45 year old trans woman who transitioned at 15 and has presented as a woman for 2/3rds of their life to have picked up a non-zero amount of female socialization and to score differently than a cis man.
I don't think that test is particularly predictive, and the reason is because of the questions about sex. When I saw them, I knew they were going by research that "men think about sex X times per minute" and this is the kind of question that is very easy to game. They even admit this is the big difference question:
"The largest difference we found in average personality was on the trait "Sex-Focused", which was based on these two questions:
I often have sexual thoughts when I meet an attractive looking person.
I do not think about sex that often."
The test reminded me of the BEM one, which is now showing its age from the 70s. I was able to fool the test into "we can make a strong prediction about your gender" by choosing the "this is the stereotypical male response" to particular questions, and what do you know:
"Based on your answers to the personality questions....
Our machine learning model predicts that you have a:
93.37% chance of being Male
6.63% chance of being Female"
Unlike the time when I answered it honestly, and it could only give a weak guess at my gender.
So, depending how many people are honestly answering versus those like me taking it a second time and seeing if we can steer it to "male" or "female" by the stereotypical questions, I wouldn't bet the house on this, or the underlying theories.
If you lie on the test you get an inaccurate result. That doesn't mean it isn't predictive. If the test predicted my age based on my birth year, I could easily game the system to make myself look older or younger, but that doesn't mean you can't predict my age based on my true birth year.
The point is that it *is* possible to lie on the test, because the questions are so tilted towards "answer X and we'll put you down as a girl".
That's not helping towards predictive power. If there is a test which doesn't rely on the equivalent of "tell us you're a girl and we'll then conclude you are a girl", then it is better.
Are there cults that are open about being cults? As in, openly "we think being a cult member is the ideal state to be in, sign up for brainwashing today"?
Obviously, this is not how to make the most money as a cult leader, but it seems more ethical and there's a degree of plausibility to the hypothesis.
Both "cult" and "brainwashing" tend to have negative connotations. There are a ton of alternate words that people use to describe both of them that they seem quite open about, but don't take on the extra baggage.
Several posts on ACX have spoken quite positively about the value of meditation and some vaguely Buddhist mental exercises. Self-help programs of many varieties, including both religious and non-religious, offer to change your perspective on life.
"Cult" is a funnier word, as it actually has both positive and negative definitions (in this context). We also use the term "cult classic" to describe movies that are popular with a subset of the population, and mean that as a very positive term. I've seen some pretty normal and mainstream churches described as cults by people not in them. They may claim definition one as accurate (the figure being God/Jesus), and two would be accurate just because it's an outside perspective, if you look at the "strange" instead of "sinister" part.
Cult - Noun
a system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object.
a relatively small group of people having religious beliefs or practices regarded by others as strange or sinister.
a misplaced or excessive admiration for a particular person or thing.
Calling something a cult classic or saying it has a cult following is or was at least originally tongue-in-cheek, though: suggesting that something deservedly impopular nevertheless had a following of brainwashed fanatics, more or less.
Sure, I would agree with that. Obviously the term has morphed though, and I've even seen it used to refer to people following well made and popular, rather than just campy. They're probably leaning on the "excessive admiration" from the third definition, which actual fans would consider a positive.
During my first visit to an alcohol rehab about 30 years ago, I complained bitterly that they were trying to brainwash me - 12 step/AA ideology. One of the counsellors berated me with "When I first got into rehab my brain needed washing.... because it was full of shit!"
The comment? In a sense, yes. At least over a period of time I realised that my habitual thinking was really screwy, which I suppose is what the counsellor meant. However I never got over the feeling that AA was a bit too cult-like for me.
Funnily enough many years later another counsellor (I took decades to get sober..) who observed my reluctance to go to AA meetings said "Look Anteros, AA meetings are mad places full of mad people saying mad things, but every so often you will hear just what you need to hear to stay sober". That had a bigger impact on me than the 'brainwashing comment' and allowed me to put up with going to meetings long enough to establish some less screwy thought patterns.
I don't believe in brainwashing. It's a pretty extraordinary claim that "cults" have sinister mind-control powers, when the evidence is consistent with them just persuading people.
Do you mean in the sense of "advertising being a cult will drastically reduce recruitment", or "cult brainwashing doesn't work if you know it's cult brainwashing"?
I've heard that most cosmologists believe the universe is fated to expand forever, because the rate at which it is expanding keeps going up. However, how can we be sure that the rate of the universe's expansion won't plateau someday, or even become negative?
After all, do we understand what is controlling the rate of the universe's expansion? Is there anything preventing it from sharply slowing down in 1 million years? Hasn't it changed in the past?
As mentioned by others, if the cosmological constant/dark energy doesn't change, then it's pretty clear the expansion will continue, eventually becoming exponential growth. Already dark energy dominates, and since it isn't diluted by further expansion, it'll just dominate even more in the future (since matter +normal energy will get diluted)
The idea that dark energy could change and stop driving expansion isn't too farfetched though. In the suspected "inflationary" period pre-Big Bang, the universe was have been rapidly expanding due to an extra strong dark energy-like field. This dark energy-like thing decayed into normal energy (aka the Big Bang), which later cooled into matter, and expansion slowed dramatically. I'm not up-to-date on current particle hypotheses of dark energy, but it seems like that could be an option for our current dark energy.
Practically speaking though, I'm guessing even if our current dark energy decayed, it'd be a very long time before expansion could possibly stall + recollapse. If we don't have anything like dark energy, then the average density of space is the only thing that matters, but dark energy-driven expansion drives the density towards the threshold density between collapse + infinite expansion. So even if we were too dense (leading to collapse sans-dark energy), we'd only be the tiniest fraction overdense, and it'd take a very long time for that tiny extra bit of density to slow + reverse the universe's increasingly faster expansion.
(Sorry I don't have hard numbers; typing on my phone and I left the field after my PhD a few years back)
AIUI we wouldn't be able to observe it if it did decay, since this would be associated with a change in the laws of physics (which would kill us) and would probably propagate at FTL.
(Probably the most interesting consequence of this is that false vacuum collapse due to high-energy physics experiments can't be a Great Filter; it can't explain the Great Silence in our past light-cone because if anyone had done this in our past light-cone it would have destroyed us too. Destroying one's home planet with such experiments is *not* ruled out, though.)
> Destroying one's home planet with such experiments is *not* ruled out
It is worth noting that current ones appear to be fully save. Natural super-high-energy-particles, of higher energy than what LHC produced were striking Earth for billions of years.
> The Oh-My-God particle's energy was estimated as (3.2±0.9)×1020 eV, or 51±14 J.
for a single particle!
> this gives 7.5×1014 eV, roughly 60 times the collision energy of the Large Hadron Collider.
> Assuming it was a proton, this particle traveled at 0.9999999999999999999999951 of the speed of light, its Lorentz factor was 3.2×1011 and its rapidity was 27.1. At this speed, if a photon were travelling with the particle, it would take over 215,000 years for the photon to gain a 1 cm lead as seen from the Earth's reference frame. Due to special relativity, the relativistic time dilation experienced by a proton traveling at this speed would be extreme. If the proton originated from a distance of 1.5 billion light years, it would take approximately 1.71 days from the reference frame of the proton to travel that distance.
Note the large difference between the total energy of the particle and the *available* energy after accounting for conservation of momentum (the 10^14 vs. 10^20 number). I agree that the LHC is safe, but the OMG only proves it safe by a factor of 60, not the 25 million the raw OMG energy would suggest. Going higher than detected Earth-bound available energies in an Earth-bound facility would IMO be imprudent, though I'd be fine with space-based experiments for the above reason (and also because cosmic-ray/cosmic-ray collisions occasionally occur in space naturally with much higher available energies).
Asking since you seem to know what you’re talking about: why would one use the OMG particle as a reference, instead of stuff like supernovae and neutron star collisions? Isn’t it guaranteed that there would be much higher-energy particle collisions in that kind of chaos?
(I mean, I get why OMG is relevant for turning Earth into a black-hole, but I’m not clear why it would be relevant to false vacuum collapse.)
> In the suspected "inflationary" period pre-Big Bang, the universe was have been rapidly expanding due to an extra strong dark energy-like field. This dark energy-like thing decayed into normal energy (aka the Big Bang), which later cooled into matter, and expansion slowed dramatically.
It boils down to a balance between the matter/energy density in the universe and the cosmological constant. In the case of our universe, we are well into the 'expand forever at increasing rates' scenario, since the matter/energy density isn't nearly enough to cause a recollapse.
I don't know if there's something 'preventing it from sharply slowing down in 1 million years', there's just no reason to suppose that would happen (and lots of good reasons to suppose our current model of the universe is true). This modern picture of cosmology is well-explained by Scott Aaronson here https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec20.html , and you can also try David Tong's cosmology lecture notes for a more in depth look (with math).
Sorry, but we *know* that our current model of the universe is incorrect. Quantum theory and relativity disagree in places. But we have no good idea of what to replace them with. They're both completely accurate in any place where we can check them. (I have a friend who believes that the answer is that continuity is incorrect and the universe is basically discrete and finite. But he's never been able to do the math. Still, maybe he's right, and that would avoid the disagreements.)
Predictions about the expansion of the universe are based on the assumption that gravity works the way we think it does. If it doesn't, or if some day it starts working differently, then anything could happen.
FWIW I've been buying ceramic knives. They are fragile, and thus essentially disposable; and of course you cannot use them to pry or scoop out anything. However, while they do last, they work really well; and you can sharpen them with a diamond whetstone, in a pinch.
Yes and no. You are lumping a lot of categories together.
WRT EDC knives like lockbacks or smaller fixed blade knives, where the focus is on utility, you want 1) reliable construction and 2) a good steel. You can find that at $40-$60 or so. Going above that will continue to get you quality improvememnts if you go up in price to a $200 benchmade, but its a very, very small improvememnt compared to cost.
WRT a cooking knives, you very much may get $400 worth of utility out of a $400 knife. But probably not. You can find a Tojiro DP Byuto with VG-10 steel for under $100. That's a very, very servicable knife that will last you lifetime. But it won't turn heads like a $400 custom made Blue #2 steel clad in stainless made bespoke with an ebony and horn handle. You may find an ergonomic difference in the more expensive knives too. I sure do, though I don't own any that cost more than $100.
Once you get above $60 for a lock back or $100 for a kitchen knive, you are buying art. Functional art, to be sure, but art none the less. When you consider it like that, you should answer it the same way as you ask if art is a scam.
Dollar store knives, though, you should avoid unless your goal is to get very, very good as sharpening very, very soft steel which is not a difficult task. They will dull very quickly, take a new edge that's wicked sharp very quickly, and rinse and repeat.
Because if you buy cheap tat, you get cheap tat. I'm not into knives, so unless you're a professional chef or very serious about collecting knives, really expensive ones aren't worth it, but neither is "buy something that will fall apart after six months".
Why not just sharpen a piece of balsa wood and use that to cut? Because balsa wood is a crappy material for making knives; it's very hard to sharpen to a decent edge, and if you ever managed to get it sharp then it would go blunt almost immediately.
Cheap knives are the same deal on a microscopic scale. Expensive knives are expensive because they've gone through a bunch of complicated treatment to make them better able to obtain and maintain a sharp edge. You'd need a metallurgist to tell you the exact details, but different steels vary considerably in their properties.
The following are my ratings as an obsessive hobbyist:
A dollar store knife has a value of -1 (They usually dont have a full tang/are not stiff and are unsafe to use, and cannot be easily resharpened);
A cheap knifeblock set with 10-20$ knives are at a 60 (They sometimes have a weak tang and usually don't hold an edge very well, but they aren't actually dangerous to use),
A Victorinox 40 dollar chefs knife as at an 85,
A global 70$ knife is at a 90,
A Wuthsof fancy but not artisan knife at 250$ is a 95,
And the most expensive blade handforged by blind stylite monks after 30 years of meditation for $2,000,000 is a 99.
Once you get above the global, you are paying for owning tool that is also an art object, for a slightly better edge and edge retention, and for comfort. You'll notice half of those things are subjective; I actually preferred my 40$ victrinox to my 250$ wuthsorf and gave it to a friend on his wedding; Where upon he found it much more comfortable than HIS previous knife.
The sweet spot is pegged at the Fibrox line at around 40$, IMO.
Beyond a certain price point, I think there's also a disutility since you become averse to actually using your super-expensive knife to cut anything because of the risk of it getting scratched up or damaged somehow. You end up having to buy a cheaper knife to do actual, everyday cutting.
I love my expensive ass knife. It stays very sharp with just a slight touch up on the butcher's steel, handles well, and looks great. If you love cooking, it's pretty cheap for something you're going to use (possibly multiple times) every day.
Then again, a lot of professionals just use a Victorinox for like 40 quid and get by fine.
Depends on what you mean by worth it. They do tend to be superior at holding their edge, higher quality, better looking. The question is: do you need that? Most people don't. Dollar Store knives are probably cutting on quality but your basic Target knife block is probably adequate for your needs.
But then again, a Toyota is a perfectly good car for most people. Doesn't mean there isn't a market for Lamborghinis.
I reckon the formula for "worth it" looks something like:
(How many times you use it) * (Satisfaction difference between a good one and a lousy one) / (Price difference between a good one and a lousy one)
Assuming you cook regularly you'll get thousands of uses out of your chef's knife, the satisfaction difference is noticeable, and the price difference is just a hundred bucks or so (between a dollar store knife and a Wüsthof or something) making it one of the best value for money minor luxuries you can buy.
Of course, the real answer is whether you value the resources you have to spend to buy it more than the alternatives you can do with the money. But your method is certainly more quantifiable.
I'm still reeling over that essay about how Leverage was allegedly a cult-like cult. There are some specific points that give it a true Manson Family feel:
"People (not everyone, but definitely a lot of us) genuinely thought we were going to take over the US government.
One of my supervisors would regularly talk about this as a daunting but inevitable strategic reality (“obviously we’ll do it, and succeed, but seems hard”). Another supervisor bemoaned with some (performative?) unease the necessity of theories about violence and military skill, because they just couldn’t see any other way we’d get to world takeover level."
Similar revolutionary claims are made on the Less Wrong post:
"The stated purpose of the group was to discover more theories of human behavior and civilization by "theorizing", while building power, and then literally take over US and/or global governance (the vibe was "take over the world"). The purpose of gaining global power was to lead to better coordination and better outcomes for humanity."
If this were a right-wing group wouldn't that alleged goal to "literally take over the US", "(a lot of us) genuinely thought we were going to take over the US government" warrant an investigation by, um, the US government?
Then add to this already creepy story that (Leverage cult-leader) Geoff Anders just last month was one of Tyler Cowen's Emergent Ventures winners? (Jeffrey Epstein vibes.) (Does Emergent Ventures do any vetting or do well-connected Silicon Valley types simply connect themselves to such awards?)
It's quite plausible that their plan for "taking over the government" was to become such talented and coordinated thinkfluencers that they'd be invited to tell the government what to do about everything important, a la Peter and Valentine Wiggin but probably with some of them having high-level executive positions (radical versions of Sir Humphrey Appleby) and others wielding gigabucks of cash from their capitalist ventures. It is not wholly implausible that the "violence and military skill" part was looking forward to the point where they got to order the US Army around and would have to grok how to do that well to spread their influence over the rest of the world.
Meh. If I were working for the relevant part of the actual US Government, I'd consider it worth investigating them. Briefly, then having a good laugh as I closed the file and moved on to something important.
I had a little bit of contact with them and this is definitely true. Think the way neoliberal economists "took over the government", not the way militia men want to take over the government.
Oh I agree it would be a waste of time for the gubment to investigate them.
What disturbs me most is the (alleged) cult leader winning an Emergent Ventures Award only a month ago. Why did this (alleged) psychopath win such an award?
Granted, mistakes are easily made. But what seems freakish is this. I've never ever before recognized the names of any Emergent Ventures awards winners. I do read about them because it seemed like a good project. So the very first one I ever recognize, I recognize because he is a (alleged) cult leader psychopath (alleged).
Why is that? Coincidence? I only hear about the one who is a psychopath? I guess that makes sense, now that I type it: psychopaths are more interesting than non-psychopaths.
Still, it's sad in more ways than one. You got real victims here. You got another case study in Why to Be Cynical. And you got a fucking prick winning a Tyler Cowen Emergent Ventures award, which is also a reason to be cynical about the Emergent Ventures project.
Not to mention the general cynicism it should spread through the rationalist community -- and it should spread cynicism through the rationalist community. Here is a man who (allegedly) took advantage of the idealism of others, much like Charles Manson did.
> What disturbs me most is the (alleged) cult leader winning an Emergent Ventures Award only a month ago. Why did this (alleged) psychopath win such an award?
It is entirely possible that they consider being psychopath with history of effective exploitation, successful (at time of awarding it) cover up as a welcome quality.
In businesspeak it could be something like "building highly efficient and dedicated human resources".
> the mission is to jumpstart high-risk, high-reward ideas that advance prosperity, opportunity, and wellbeing
Note the "high-risk". This is an instance of the VC mindset that it's better to fund 9 phonies than to miss out on 1 unicorn. It's not a Nobel prize. From the list of grantees so far, https://marginalrevolution.com/?s=cohort+emergent , I recognize 5 names; my guess is that lots of them have turned out to be duds and sometimes even frauds.
Sometimes on a website, I'll see that work wrap breaks words along syllable marks. Like
Mr Smith was ac-
cused of robbery
I look at the source, and "accused" is one word.
When did browsers get this power? Does it have a built-in dictionary that says when to split words? Is there a style-sheet option to let the browser do it that way?
This is a quantum mechanics ---> free will post. I'd definitely forgive you for skipping it. The usual quantum mechanics - free will connection is "maybe free choice is a currently-unknown-to-physics "control" that "people" have over whether certain electrons in their brain are spin-up or spin down, and their bodies' behaviours flow out of that". I am not going to make that connection. This idea has definitely been articulated before
1) ASSUME the many worlds interpretation is true
2) ASSUME the following bit of psychology: people *love* looking back at their past decisions and saying that they define them. Like, "I'm just not the kind of person who would have left them lying by the side of the road". To me this seems very likely to be true, indeed it is exactly how people talk about their own morality.
3) ASSUME that, in a person's brain that, when they are in a state of genuine indecision about something, it is possible for their eventual decision to be influenced by quantum phenomena (eg again whether some bunch of electrons a certain sodium channel are spin-up or spin-down).
(I know 3 is a bit of a stretch (though note I'm not saying anything about microtubules!). For what it is worth I am a structural biologist who has studied quantum mechanics and neuroscience and I'd guess that this is true. If it isn't, this is only of theoretical interest but that's not nothing)
Putting this all together, we get that you can have two Everett branches containing, say, Alice1 and Alice2, looking back at a choice she made and saying "the decision I made about what to major in at college that day really defines me as a person", and in one branch she majored in philosophy and in the other she majored in physics.
Note how both Alices are, in some sense, correct. They could really become quite different people from one another.
It came down to what we could call a very trivial little random fluctuation. Consider the instant AFTER the fluctuation happened in Alice1's head, but BEFORE she became aware of anything different from what Alice2 would be experiencing. In this instant we could scarcely say they were very different people, because the difference between them is something that "they" have no "control" over.
But on the other hand, they are going to become different people, and they really did have something going on that distinguishes a decision they made. Which sounds like free will to me.
Even in this extremely shaky set of assumptions, everything that happens fundamentally has its root in microscopic brain processes over which it is logically incoherent to say anyone has "control" over. When Alice thinks "the decision I made about what to major in at college that day really defines me as a person", where does this thought come from? She couldn't have consciously created this thought, because that would mean she would have to think about a thought before she's thought about it and so on.
Despite the invocation of a bunch of spooky quantum stuff, at the end of the day you're still left with the fundamental issue with free will that exists for all its formulations because a supposedly instrumental thought has necessarily arisen from non-conscious brain processes that cannot logically be said to be under conscious control.
I think I'm using a formulation of "free will" that you find unsatisfying. It seems reasonable to me to say that a person is the set of decisions and compulsions that lead to what they are. In that sense "you" do cause your thoughts (because if you had a different history your brain would be set up to think different things).
I just want to point out that quantum indeterminacy is compatible with this.
I don't really see what's the argument here. What's the need for Everett (or QM really) at all? Even with only one branch, it'll still be true that there are subtle microscopic aspects of the state of the world which will grow into macroscopic phenomena in the future. But how is this free will? Isn't it also a little funny to try to extract free will from one of the few versions of QM that is actually 100% deterministic?
The part about human consciousness and the nature of a person’s soul is remarkable. When a quantum physics theorist starts citing The Upanishads he has my undivided attention.
Even if humans went extinct, wouldn't the big piles of rock and concrete we've created to build breakwaters like the one shown in the video survive for thousands of years? As long as the Great Pyramids?
It'd depend heavily on the exact location, but overall probably not. We have to do significant work on the jetties at the mouth of the Columbia River between Washington and Oregon every few decades, because even though the rocks are the size of large cars wave action still moves them around and the jetty slowly sinks beneath the waves.
IQ is pretty explicitly designed to measure the component of intelligence that can't be trained, generally known as "fluid intelligence". There's also (IIRC the name) "crystallised intelligence", which is basically a fancy word for knowledge, and that is absolutely something you can train. Every fact you learn, every technique you practice until it's second nature, those are adding to your pool of crystallised intelligence. An analogy - referencing Newton's famous quote about standing on the shoulders of giants, crystallised knowledge is climbing the giants that are our forefathers, fluid intelligence is the ability to stretch tall and see that little bit further than those who came before us.
Not sure really. But lots of things seem to be like this. We have a large window to improve muscular size, but a much smaller window for bone density, tendon strength, cartilage integrity. Our liver can regenerate, but plenty of key internal comments can't. It's just the way it is.
We can increase it in a sense, by removing things that are known to decrease it. E.g. by removing stress, getting more sleep, etc. Fairly mundane things. But if you think about how the baseline for humans through history was of being constantly sick, malnutrited, thirsty and tired then the alternative seems more remarkable
It's a pretty general problem that making something stronger is much easier than making it smarter.
Getting stronger is a matter of more of the same. Just keep adding more muscle fibers in parallel with what you already have. More meat equals more power.
Getting _smarter_ is a lot trickier. The human brain is a bunch of crazy jerry-rigged software running on some crazy jerry-rigged hardware, and it's a wonder that it works at all. It is totally unclear what you could do to "just make it smarter". Even if the skull could grow, you can't just "add more neurons" to an already-built brain, you would need to find something useful for them to do.
Whether you can make someone smarter is very much a mater of how you define smarter. You obviously couldn't pass that multivariate calculus class in kindergarten. A chess master can walk by a chess board and say, "mate in 4" without breaking a sweat. IQ tests are just designed very intentionally to measure something that is very difficult to train.
G is apparently incredibly valuable, it seems a bit surprising to me that it's a trait where the easily available maximum is established at (presumably before) birth. Maybe I'm just too used to growth mindset.
I realize brains can't get larger, but as I understand it, they can improve connections.
How much is known about the physiological basis of intelligence?
I think it's a shame so much work has gone into trying to figure out what people can't improve mentally as compared to what they can improve.
Countless intelligence researchers have spent the best part of the past 100 years looking for ways to increase g. It's only through thousands of studies that we can even know with such certainty that it cannot meaningfully be done (for people without obvious deleterious factors in their lives).
The capacities of different body parts is probably an interesting subject.
Skin and muscle heal much more easily than connective tissue. Connective tissue that heals better is on my list for improved bodies, but as I understand it, the difference is vascularization, and I don't know if it's feasible for connective tissue to have better vascularization.
If connective tissue healed better, would there be less reason to redesign knees?
I thought spleens regenerate (I was wrong, probably had them confused with livers), but....
"Unlike some other organs, like the liver, the spleen does not grow back (regenerate) after it is removed. Up to 30% of people have a second spleen (called an accessory spleen). These are usually very small, but may grow and function when the main spleen is removed."
That's pretty cool. I'll put backup mini-organs on my list.
Livers do regenerate.
"Liver regeneration is the process by which the liver is able to replace lost liver tissue from growth from the remaining tissue. The liver is the only visceral organ that possesses the capacity to regenerate. The liver can regenerate after either surgical removal or chemical injury."
Why just livers? Does it help that livers don't have as much structure as some other organs?
My thoughts are that IQ is a measure of your ability to solve new problems. This might be like a measure of ones ability to lift weights with previously unused muscles. If the IQ test contained the kinds of problems for which learned methods were effective at finding solutions, then IQ tests results would improve as examinees learned additional tools (calculus, statistics). IQ tests appear to be intentionally designed to avoid that.
The simplest way to think about IQ is that it's a nervous system performance benchmark, like how we benchmark cars and computers and parts thereof. An intelligence test is just a test suite for that kind of thing.
They are built to avoid that because they try to measure more elementary things, like working memory capacity (~RAM). Measuring mathematical skill would be just that: Measuring a learned skill, not testing intelligence, per se. The elementary tests themselves are subject to practice effects already: Jensen recounts a working memory stressing subtest where people are asked to repeat the last N letters/numbers they were told. Without practice, most people were firmly under ten. But practice can improve performance on that one subtest to a monstrous degree: By applying strategies people can commit 70 things into memory instead of the normal 7.
The joke is that this increases the test score, but makes that task a worse measure of intelligence (there are many reasons you can score high on a test, and intelligence tests are premised on the fact that you score high because of high g. If you score high because of practice and not g, that task ceases to be a good bit of measuring tape).
This is why people are encouraged to not practice intelligence tests.
No. IQ is a measure of your ability to reproduce culturally approved norms of problem solutions. That's what it was designed for. (It was designed to, among other things, give backing to preventing migrants from legal entry.)
AFAIK there is no valid "measure of your ability to solve new problems" that doesn't make strong assumptions about what those problems will be. This may be related to the "no free lunch" theorum. If it is, then such a measure may well be impossible.
This is complete nonsense. You don't know the first thing about psychometrics.
It's truly bizarre that your asinine assertion that it was created to "keep migrants out" coincides with the test giving the highest scores to jews and north-east asian populations i.e. foreign groups.
IQ arose from the scientific study of human intelligence. It is empirically robust and has around a century of experimental validation. Your unfounded assertions are just a form of pathetic hand-waving so you can dismiss science that contradicts your worldview.
An ideologue ... well, yes, about puntured evolution. Otherwise you need to substantiate your claim. A liar? No, I don't think so. I'd rather trust him than those I don't know personally, and more than some of them. Or you could provide evidence I could check, but facts count and opinions don't count.
FWIW, even WRT punctuted evolution much of the time he's being clear. Sometimes wrong, but that's different from being a liar.
He ignored every point I had made in my comment and instead hijacked the conversation to pretend as if I was blind to the ways that IQ has been, or might be, used to political ends against minorities. I am very sympathetic to those views. However, nobody in the conversation was discussing that.
Maybe he was triggered. Maybe he is an a**. Either way, it seemed worth bringing it to his attention how he was being perceived by his own allies on that topic.
"what they believe" is complete nonsense with no basis in science. This wasn't a good faith declaration of their reasoned view point, it was a pathetic, flailing dismissal of established scientific theory. Instead of engaging with the actual empirical evidence of intelligence research, they have essentially just smeared it as being racist and think this assertion is sufficient to dismiss all the evidence for it. It's the opposite of good faith and it is indeed Ch Hi acting like the a** here.
I would welcome debate about specific methodological failings in intelligence research supported with the appropriate literature. This wasn't it. He is telling an unscientific lie about intelligence research in order to not have to engage with the science.
"What they believe is complete nonsense" is a strong statement here, or anywhere. FWIW, I see two statements in the post you were reacting to. One is that IQ is a method to reproduce culturally approved norms, which I disagree with since I've read of some studies which consistently falsify this (though with the replication crisis, etc., that's not necessarily final). The second is that it was developed in part for racist or xenophobic ends, which sounds totally plausible to me (most early 20th century ideas were in one way or another), though I don't know the facts here and don't have time to research them now.
I think the first statement pattern-matches to lazy and currently trendy postmodern ideas, but that doesn't necessarily make it false or implausible. So I see two statements, one of which is totally plausible to me and the other of which sounds a bit lazy and which is contradicted by some twin studies, but which, if you hadn't read the same sources I did seems plausible enough. Where do you get from there to bad faith?
I'm writing this because I get annoyed by dogmatic overuse of "the discourse" as much as the next person, but that doesn't mean that you can dismiss anything that sounds "discourse-y" as bad faith or even necessarily false. In this case, I'm seeing a very ad-hominem pile-on on someone who made some statements that are not offensive to anyone and that for all I know that person believes. This is a Sith (or "conflict-theorist") thing to do and I don't want that in my online spaces.
Wait, people can't increase their IQ? I have a hard time believing that. So someone who's not a fluent English speaker and never done a math question or word riddle in their life would score the same as a native English speaker who does math questions and riddles as a hobby?
When people say that IQ can't be increased, they're implicitly and specifically talking about people in developed countries who do not face severe deleterious life factors like malnourishment, childhood disease or trauma, lack of education growing up etc.
In e.g. the US, these factors are experienced by a tiny fraction of the population and so do not explain nearly any of the observed variation in IQ.
Intelligence researchers have been trying to find ways of increasing actual IQ for as long as IQ as existed as a concept (I use actual IQ to mean genuine cognitive ability, rather than score on an IQ test which can be improved with practice but the actual cognitive ability won't increase). Doing math problems and riddles does not improve your general intelligence. It may make you better at math problems and riddles, but it won't meaningfully improve your e.g. pattern completion skills. The central principle of intelligence research is that intelligence is general. A person's performance on all cognitively demanding traits is somewhat correlated, and this correlation is captured in something known as the general intelligence factor. IQ is a way of measuring the general intelligence factor. For something to improve your intelligence, it needs to improve your ability to do any cognitively demanding tasks. And provided the person isn't starving or never went to school etc., there's not really anything that will increase intelligence generally.
And language does not matter as long you do a test in your native language. Which is precisely why people in china doing chinese language IQ tests score so highly.
OK, so then compare someone who's almost illiterate (because they went to 5 years of school in total) to someone with 16 years of schooling.
I'm not sure what Mark Roulo's interpretation is. "g" seems to mean something like "the innate component of people's ability to understand the world". But if so, it makes no sense to ask why people can't increase g with practice, because by definition, it's the innate component! On the other hand, if the question is why people's ability to understand the world can't be improved, the answer is that it can--by education, exposure, and experience.
I think a better definition of g is that it's the common factor in different cognitive tests. The aim is to get a precise definition that corresponds to what we think of as intelligence. To what extent g is innate, or, rather, how various genetic and environmental factors affect it, is an empirical matter.
"OK, so then compare someone who's almost illiterate (because they went to 5 years of school in total) to someone with 16 years of schooling."
There are tests designed to assume no literacy.
One example is repeating back digit sequences. Smarter people tend to be able to repeat back longer digit sequences (one can adjust to symbols an illiterate person is familiar with ...)
Better seems to be *reverse* sequence repeat back: Given a sequence, repeat it back in reverse order.
Note, however, that both of these are something one can get better at with practice. If you take folks who have been trained to do this, then the results won't correlate very well with the thing that intelligence researchers are trying to investigate.
"I'm not sure what Mark Roulo's interpretation is.... On the other hand, if the question is why people's ability to understand the world can't be improved, the answer is that it can--by education, exposure, and experience."
Point of order: I'm not trying to offer *MY* interpretation. I'm trying to describe my understanding of how intelligence researchers approach this.
But ... a reasonable outcome is that smarter people (more 'g') can be trained to a higher degree than folks who aren't as smart. Lower IQ (lower 'g') folks can learn, but below a certain level they won't be able to learn/understand, say, quantum mechanics. Much like some folks will never be able to bench press 400 pounds.
This highly favors people than do sort-of-such thing already. It is one of tiny components of my work (programming, especially while debugging) and something that I would likely never use if I would be a hunter in a jungle.
You can eg. give jungle hunters a sequence of animals - that should be familiar enough culturally - and you'll definitely see the usual normal distribution amongst those tribespeople of ones who can remember long sequences flawlessly and ones who get muddled relatively quickly
I think the charitable interpretation of the original question is something like "why is there a significant component of general cognitive ability that is innate and fixed, but general physical ability seems to be mostly malleable and trainable".
I think the answer to that interpretation is what was mentioned in Mark's comment and the subsequent thread - that actually, there is a significant innate/fixed component of general physical ability as well.
That's one possible interpretation, but I think it's a lot more obvious that there's an innate component of physical ability than that there's an innate component of mental ability.
But we don't need to do exegesis because the Goddess Herself is right here. @Nancy Lebovitz what did you mean?
IQ tests are specifically designed to be difficult to improve your score on, since they're meant to measure something inherent. Designers actively try to minimize the effects of study.
Interesting, but its worth noting that this should already be reflected in heritability estimates. If this effect is robust, it means that if everyone went to university then heritability would simply be even higher than it already is.
My biggest question with this study is that since college pre-selects for above average intelligence in the first place, are the results actually robust and generalizable across the population? Intuitively, it seems likely that somebody with an IQ of 115 is going to find college more intellectually stimulating than someone with an IQ of 85 who can't even understand what the lecturer is talking about much of the time (or does very non-intellectually demanding courses). Flicking through this study quickly, I see the authors write:
"Furthermore, because the policies used as instruments typically increased educational duration only for the subset of individuals who would otherwise have attended school at the preexisting minimum compulsory level, this design should be interpreted as producing a “local average treatment effect” that might not generalize across the full educational range (Morgan & Winship, 2015, p. 305)."
A large component of expressible strength -- specifically the ability to exert force against load -- comes directly from central nervous system efficiency.
When you first start lifting weights, you get stronger extremely quickly. An untrained healthy male in his 20s can easily add 100+ pounds to his squat in the first 1-2 months of training. His muscles will not get bigger! That increase in strength came from training his nervous system to more efficiently command the muscles he already had.
I assume that you *can* increase your IQ (where IQ is defined as “a single numerical score based on a multiple choice IQ test”), by learning how to game that particular type of test.
Simple strategies such as knowing when to guess and when to spend time getting a correct answer instead of moving on to more questions could measurably increase scores, I would think.
When we say increase IQ, we really mean 'increase general intelligence factor as approximated by result on an IQ test'. Essentially, learning to game IQ tests doesn't make you any smarter, it just makes you better at the test. This isn't a criticism of IQ testing in general though because most people don't game IQ tests and so gaming the test does not explain a meaningful amount of observed variance in IQ. And if did, it would simply mean IQ would lose its predictive ability, which it hasn't.
A crude analogy to strength may be something like the deadlift (bending down and lifting a loaded barbell off the ground). If you can lift a maximum of 100kg, but then you switch to using weight plates with 50% greater diameter, you now have to lift the weight a distance of a few inches less than before. This makes the lift easer, so now you can lift 110kg instead of 100kg. Have your muscles actually become any stronger? Of course not. But as long as most people are using the smaller diameter weight plates, max deadlift weight is still a good measure of somebody's strength.
"I assume that you *can* increase your IQ (where IQ is defined as “a single numerical score based on a multiple choice IQ test”), by learning how to game that particular type of test. Simple strategies such as knowing when to guess and when to spend time getting a correct answer instead of moving on to more questions could measurably increase scores, I would think. "
For conversations such as this I tend to assume that the author means 'g' rather than a specific result from a specific IQ test.
But, yes, IQ tests *can* be gamed so if Nancy does mean *that* then there is a 2nd reason why her premise is incorrect.
But I'm pretty sure she means 'g', not gaming a test.
If you're given a test item, there are many reasons you can be good at it. You can be good at it for reasons that are unique to that item or for reasons that are shared with some other items. There can be multiple shared reasons shared with different item sets.
Intelligence is and isn't your score on the test. What I mean is, if you keep piling on items, the item-based specifics wash out for the most part. As I keep adding items, the universal influence of general intelligence is a larger and larger part of why you do well. It's like if I asked you a whole bunch of questions about everything under the Sun.
The giant pile of questions includes things like "do you bonk your head at doorframes", "do you have an easy time reaching things on high shelves", "do you (physically) look up/down at most women", "do you (physically) look up/down at most men", "are you good at basketball" etc.
We would find that your answer to any one of those questions would mean you're likely to answer the other ones affirmatively. Why?
All of them tap into your height. You might often wear platform shoes, which cause bonks, but those won't make you better at basketball. You might be good at jumping, which helps reaching stuff on shelves and at basketball, but won't really show up as bonking or looking down at people and so on.
When we analyze your answers to the pile, those answers form clusters and we can then use a method called factor analysis to list out the shared reasons for why you'd answer a question in a certain way or perform on a task in a certain way. With the example questions, we'd turn out with a factor that represents your height.
In studies of personality questionnaires, we find that individual answers cluster together into narrower traits like sociability, talkativeness, irritability and worry-proneness which then sum up into broader domains like extraversion and neuroticism.
The remarkable thing in intelligence is that there is one general factor that plays a part in just about all tasks that measure mental ability. Not to the same degree by any means - general intelligence is only a small part of why people do well on some tasks, and a huge part in others. But its pervasiveness is insane. For example, for a trait often said to measure academic ability, it correlates with weird things like pitch disrimination ability and average reaction time.
The purpose of an intelligence test is to get a measure of that trait. A physical quality like height, but one we can't actually see. Test items are good as long as you answer them the way you do because of your level on the trait being measured.
If you train at a question type, you can absolutely get a higher score (for example remembering digits you've been told: Most people remember a max of about 7 or so with no practice, if you practice you can remember dozens), and you will concretely be a more capable person. But that's like wearing platform shoes: You're better at reaching stuff on shelves, but the stuff on shelves question just became a worse measure of your height. You're succeeding at the task because of your training, not because of the innate trait the test is trying to measure, and actually sabotaging the test's ability to do its job properly.
There's a reason researchers don't really like people having practice on the tests. Practice makes people more skillful, but it makes the researchers' measuring stick less accurate.
"I’ve only recently been introduced to ‘g’, via a question in a previous open thread, and am still pretty fuzzy on the concept.
I did a bit of reading, but it was not clear to me how ‘g’ is measured. Can you elaborate, or link me to a good explanation?"
Intelligence is very difficult to measure directly. It isn't like height or weight.
The idea here is that 'g' is the thing we really care about. Smarts. Intelligence
IQ tests are basically proxies for 'g.' But because they are proxies they are gameable in a way that measuring height and weight ususally aren't.
So we measure with IQ tests and better IQ tests correlate better with 'g' and also are harder to game. But motivated folks can usually game any IQ test to some extent or another.
But getting better at an IQ test doesn't mean you get better at the real things we want smart people for
Well, how do we know that you can't increase your 'g'? We know that years of education are correlated with IQ, why can this not partly be because more education on average gives you more 'g', rather than just making you better at IQ tests or being a survivorship bias.
If you wanted to look into whether years of education increase IQ, then one plausible way to test that would be twin studies -- you've got two identical twins, one went to college, the other didn't. Twin studies have been very discouraging for those who think IQ is more on the malleable end.
"g" is basically the thing that IQ tests are trying to measure - it's your ability to perform well on cognitive tasks in general, independent of factors that might lead to outperformance on a specific task (such as learning how to game it). People will often use the terms IQ and g factor interchangeably.
From Wikipedia: "It is a variable that summarizes positive correlations among different cognitive tasks, reflecting the fact that an individual's performance on one type of cognitive task tends to be comparable to that person's performance on other kinds of cognitive tasks. The g factor typically accounts for 40 to 50 percent of the between-individual performance differences on a given cognitive test, and composite scores ("IQ scores") based on many tests are frequently regarded as estimates of individuals' standing on the g factor."
I'd guess the energy used by brains has been small enough compared to the variance in how much brain power is needed that there hasn't been enough to gain from being born with half a brain and then growing the other half only if needed – whereas developing maximum muscle strength regardless of need has been likely to lead to starvation.
Say you could get by with half your brain, and by doing so you would save 250 kcal per day. The Internet says that this is equivalent to around 20 kg of muscle mass, which coincidentally appears to be the amount of muscle mass a man can hope to gain through exercise. So it would seem that, for human males, the energy savings from having half a brain would be around the same as from not being strong. So I'd say that either (A) having a big brain has been pretty consistently good for fitness or (B) a mutation that gives people half a brain unless they need more just never happened to arise (at least since the rise of big brains, which is way after the rise of big muscles).
I think size isn't the only factor - your brain definitely uses more energy when you're actively using it than eg. when you're watching TV on the couch; naively, I'd expect brain endurance to be a trainable thing, but to my knowledge IQ tests focus more on your peak power than whether you tail off multiple hours in (I could be wrong on this and would be fascinated to learn of studies eg. giving long IQ tests in variable order to see if people tend to perform worse at later subtests)
You can, sort-of, in a roundabout way, increase your height. Children who eat regularly balanced diet of nutritious food and don't get seriously sick (+ enjoy other benefits provided by the Age of Plenty) are taller adults when they grow up than children with same genotype who have more limited dietary options and less access to modern antibiotics (I don't believe you don't have to be explicitly malnourished for the effect to be visible).
Doesn't the same thing apply to intelligence? Children who eat well and avoid various hazards wind up more intelligent, on average. Perhaps that just means they reach their full potential - but that same argument seems to me to apply to height.
"Any theories about why people are generally able to increase their strength, but not their IQ?"
This may be the wrong question.
If strength doesn't map ti IQ, but instead maps to "learned skill" then there is no mystery. Folks can get better/stronger just like they can learn to do things better.
There is, however, an upper limit to each for any given person.
If IQ maps to "physical potential" then there may be nothing to explain.
I agree with Mark on this. Based my experience lifting weights and observing friends who lift, I think the physical analog of IQ is not strength, but rather something like "capacity to build muscle". Anyone can increase their strength through lifting (which is literally strength training), but people vary pretty widely based on 1) the _rate_ at which they put on new muscle mass, and 2) the _maximum_ muscle mass which is achievable with a given level of commitment.
There is some interesting research on this topic, e.g. https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/75/6/1012/4689430 and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8450591/. I think the current view is that your ability to gain muscle in response to strength training correlates roughly with the size your skeletal frame. So you can get a pretty good sense of your muscular potential by just measuring your wrist and ankle circumferences - thicker means more potential.
You can't really know your potential without trying. Your starting muscle mass and your bone size correlate with your max potential muscle, but there's still plenty of variance. A lot of jacked guys started out skinny, but turned out to be high responders to training.
FWIW My skinny guy getting strong experience. In high school I was 6' even and weighed 120 pounds, so pretty effen skinny. Broad shoulder but what they call small boned.
I worked as a 'gandydancer' for a number of years in an iron mine right out of high school. Ripping old railroad track and building new track by hand with 9 pound spike maul. I was also running about 30 miles a week for cardio.
At what my fittest I weighed 185, negligible fat and was pretty cut with good muscle definition but never got 'big' in the body builder sense.
I didn't ever achieve extraordinary muscle mass but I had a great endurance and adequate strength to more than keep up with the beefy guys. Plus good technique played a large part in doing what looked like a brute strength job.
I think I would have had to take some weird hormone supplement to to get 'jacked'.
To add to what MB said, another factor holding you back was probably getting a calorie surplus. Muscles grow best when you've got a substantial calorie surplus. Long distance running and being lean are both counterproductive for getting the sort of surplus you want.
Note that even bodybuilders don't stay lean year round--they'll do bulking phases where they let themselves gain fat so they can build more muscle, and later lose the fat (and try to keep the muscle) when it's time for a show.
No idea what I'm talking about here, so ignore at your leisure, but I think there is a difference between "muscle gained in the gym/using Not At All Dodgy Supplements" and "muscle built by physical work".
So I imagine you might have been able to get the gym-body muscle if you followed that regimen of eating, working out, and Taking Little Helpers, but working manual labour job demanded different muscle and strength use and hence the way it was built up.
I think in order to get muscular in the bodybuilder sense, you do have to follow some kind of lifting regimen, or at least consistently do things that stress all of the different muscle groups for low repetitions.
People like yourself that become strong through manual labor will often not look as muscular as those who lift because their "training" is focused on a more limited set of functional movement patterns. There's no doubt the work you were doing required a lot of strength, but did you naturally perform any motions similar to a bench press? If not, then there's no reason to expect your pectoral muscles to be as large as someone who specifically trains pressing movements.
The number of reps also makes a difference - bodybuilders disagree on exactly how many reps are optimal for muscle growth, but almost everyone agrees that <20 reps is the relevant range. But if you're doing work for a living, you're necessarily going to be performing functional movements far more than 20 times, which is great for building muscular endurance but tends not to produce as much hypertrophy (muscle size growth).
I would lean towards yes. Being "skinny" is mostly a function of your diet and (lack of) prior training, and doesn't have much bearing on muscular potential.
You could also use the wrist circumference method on yourself. Measure around the narrowest part (so below the base of the hand, but before your forearm starts to widen). Below 6.5" is small frame, 6.5" to 7.5" is medium, and above 7.5" is large.
Of course, if you are interested in getting jacked, I would try to do so regardless of this estimate. Personally I am team "small frame", but I've still managed to get pretty muscular by most people's standards without spending an inordinate amount of time in the gym. Almost anyone can become muscular with patience and consistency - your genetic potential is really only relevant if you are interested in competitive lifting or bodybuilding.
"So you can get a pretty good sense of your muscular potential by just measuring your wrist and ankle circumferences - thicker means more potential. "
Looking down at my wrist size and thinking back to my experience lifting weights in college ... pieces are starting to fit :-)
Thanks!
[I was able to get "stronger" to a point, but adding muscle mass was amazingly slow. I noted it at the time, and just figured that I was someone who added muscle mass slowly. Tiny wrists doesn't 'explain' it, but does provide a proxy for maybe the underlying reason.]
To add some detail, I graduated college weighing something like 145 pounds and bench pressing 220 (I could never manage 225, darn it). I'd been lifting for all four years (and started freshman year with a dorm friend). After four year I'd like to think that my nervous system had been improved :-)
And I've read about body builders who put on muscle mass a lot faster then I was. I hope that this wasn't mostly due to steroids? Though maybe it was...
And I figured that I should have been able to put on more muscle and bench 225+. And maybe with better training (or a nutritionist or something) I could have.
But the lifting didn't seem to be leading to much muscle gain.
I think genetics probably played some role in your experience, but without knowing the details it's hard to say how much. For most people who struggle to gain muscle at the speed they'd like, diet is a much bigger factor than genetics. Many people, particularly those like yourself who are naturally "skinny", will not eat enough food to support a heavy lifting regimen unless they make it a point to do so. And of course, there are many other people whose natural inclination is to consume more food than they need - in their case the challenge is not building muscle but rather doing so without gaining fat alongside it.
I've heard bodybuilders say that bodybuilding is 80% nutrition and 20% training. I think this is an exaggeration, or perhaps only applies to people who actually compete. But I do think that it's at least 50% what you eat, and that applies even if your goal is basically just to look "jacked" in an everyday sense.
My partner and I are trying to have a baby, which got me wondering about the state of embryo selection and other type of existing genetic manipulation that may improve my child's health outcomes.
Does anyone have any experience with such technologies? Where should I be looking at if I wanted to find out more about the current commercial applications?
Are you both yourselves in reasonably good health? Are either of you at an age that increases risk (having children later in life)? Is there anything in your families' backgrounds of hereditary disorders or health problems?
If not, then just eat, exercise and live healthily, take supplements like folic acid, be in general good health and don't worry too much. You can make things a lot worse by meddling - for instance, if you want embryo selection, then that means putting the potential mother through IVF procedures like hyperovulation which are not fun:
We are both in our mid-30s in good health and physical shape, and with no important health issues to speak off. That said, we have had trouble conceiving so we are going with start with IVF.
If there's no obvious genetic worries, don't mess with the embryo if you don't have to. It carries risks, and if you are having trouble conceiving these risks become much more amplified, especially if either of you has shifted your ideal identity towards being a parent. My suggestion would be to limit intervention to the relatively-low-risk screenings available for serious genetic disorders.
Basically, the question to ask is the normal risk-benefit one, but to realise the risk includes something happening to a healthy child due to medical intervention and the fact you have to live with that for the rest of your lives (especially if only one of you wants the procedure). If you feel you are low on chances to have a child, that is an especially important factor to consider: a child with slightly higher health risks is still likely to be a better option than a real risk of no child at all.
Note this is based on personal experience of almost the same situation and the decisions we made. It worked out for us and we got two healthy kids. Hopefully things work out well for you as well.
Also speaking from an IVF experience that eventually yielded a child, I strongly agree with the advice to mess with the embryo as little as medically necessary to maximize the odds of successful conception. And… best of luck to you. IVF is a wretched process.
I’m referring to procedures like ICSI (sperm selection/injection), cryogenically freezing embryos rather than “fresh” transfer to the uterus, and extracting embryo cells for a genetic test. These are all common practice and there is good reason to do them. But if you have trouble conceiving, you are fighting low probabilities of IVF success. Every interference with the embryo needs to be weighed in terms of whether it will increase or decrease the probability of successful pregnancy.
One thing that is fueling China's "lying flat" social movement is burnout over having to work very long hours. The "9-9-6" work week, which amounts to 72 hours, is a notorious national phenomenon.
If China's government somehow mandated that no one, with a small number of exceptions, could work more than 50 hours per week, what would be the effect on the country's economy, living standards, and on the other factors that the "lying flat" people complain about?
I suspect that it might backfire, and that "9-9-6" is propping the country up.
If they mandated that very little would happen. China has a lot of safety and workers rights laws on paper they aren't meaningfully enforced already. Due to a combination of indifference, corruption and lack of state capacity.
One of the paradoxes of authoritarian countries is thet often the actual degree of their control over the economy and society is pretty limited. Draconian policies are often a reaction to that difficulty of enforcement.
Working 72 hours per week is simply not efficient long term (it may be for short crunch time, with enough time to rest afterwards). The British in WW2 found out that increasing work hours (from 48/week to ~70) actually harmed productivity after a few months and they went back to 48-56. And I suspect the British workers in WW2 were about as motivated as you can expect to get:
In the Chicago meetups I've attended with the current group it's normally 100% male... except when Scott Alexander or Robin Hanson was scheduled to be there, resulting in a much larger attendance than usual.
Not sure this is appropriate from an open thread, but since we've recently discussed climate-related decision making.
Is there any way for a retail investor to invest in carbon-capture technology companies _today_?
Refining a little bit my rationale: I expect no significant international coordination to happen around preventing release of CO2 &co, and I expect that eventually (barring the technological singularity from happening) that eventually the only course of action for reducing significant climate change effects, if they start to inconvenience first world political elite, is to mandate CO2&co removal.
Thus, my question on whether there's any way to do some early investing in companies working in this area, other then maybe becoming an icelandic citizen?
Our current most effective carbon capture is growing trees and cutting them down. So invest in sustainable forestry businesses. (Not ones that cut down virgin forest but ones that replant and manage over the long term)
Do you have a specific business/org in mind? A (_very_) quick google search didn't turn up anything directly investable by a retail investor, but I'll do more extensive searches some other time.
You could invest in Weyerhaeuser. They own or manage over 40,000 square miles (100,000+ square km) of timberland. Growing up in rural Western Washington it seemed that every tree covered hill was either federal land or Weyerhaeuser land. They clear cut, replant, let the trees grow 20-40 years (depends on the species) and then start from the beginning. The wood is pretty much entirely used for lumbar, so that carbon is good and captured for a while. They're on the New York Stock Exchange.
There are startups in this area, but it's quite difficult to invest in them. You can sometimes invest in companies that own the funds that in turn invest in climate-related startups. One example is Alphabet (Google's parent) - they own Google Ventures and Google Capital that in turn invest in climate-tech and renewable energy companies, e.g. Dandelion Energy, or meat / dairy substitutes like Impossible Foods and Ripple Foods.
Google X has worked on similar things in the past but it wasn't economical then: https://x.company/projects/foghorn/ But the people and research and knowledge are probably still there.
That being said, investing into GOOG to try and capture something like this gives you a comparatively small exposure to climate-related stuff and a massive exposure to Alphabet's existing businesses, so it might not be what you're after if you want something high-risk / high-reward.
Heh, my "move to Iceland" was (mostly) in jest. I mentioned that because carbfix is owned by Reykjavik Energy, which in turn (AFAICT) is owned by the Reykjavik municipality itself.
You are offered a pill that would make you immune to aging and all diseases, but would also severely hinder your long-term memory, so that it'd be hard for you to keep memories for longer than one month. Don't count on future medicine and technology to fix it.
Would you take it? Would your answer change if instead of a month it was one week, or one year?
I'll take it and have scientists research how I can be immune to basically all disease or supply antigents for hard to treat disease. in this sense how long I can remember is irrelevant
similar to a minor plot point in the comic:" strong female protagonist"
I already have a memory like a colander, having one that meant I forgot everything after a month would be no use to me at all (for a start, I'd have to be constantly re-learning how to do my job, which means my employer would eventually get fed-up and gently boot me out the door while they replace me with someone who can remember the procedures for the 'quarterly mandated returns to government' paperwork).
I do think the minimum memory retention period would need to be a year, and longer if you could get it. Otherwise, you're the equivalent of a 200 year old Alzheimer's patient, and I don't think anyone imagines that would be a fun experience.
I noticed you said "immune to aging and all diseases". By that do you mean immortal, or amortal? That is, do you become impossible to kill, or does it only remove the inevitability of death?
I meant immune to aging, flu, cancer, HIV, dementia, Alzheimer etc. Complete invincibility would have possible disturbing consequences that distract from the dilemma's spirit.
Definitely not, especially as presented with the one month memory leak. If the memory leak were very minor, as in, 1) hard to gain new skills but not impossible, 2) can still learn about and build relationships with new people, but maybe struggle to learn new names of casual acquaintances, 3) can remember what you did and where you were (not Memento), even if the details were fuzzy - then it would be much more palatable. A full memory wipe or even reasonably close to that would be a nightmare scenario. I would hate to live when I can't remember what I'm living for. Even if I retain my current plans for life, I don't want to be doing the same things for the next XX years because I can't remember new plans. Obviously the longer the timeframe of memory loss the better, but unless it's something like 10 years (I could maybe haggle closer to five), I think it would be more problem than solution.
Separate from your thought experiment, I happen to think living forever would be terrible in ways that would be non-intuitive, such that we would often accept the pill to live forever even without a memory problem, but should not. Renewal and replacement of the population helps keep us fresh as a people, and removes old stagnation. Children with parents who never age and die would struggle to transition to adulthood, for instance. As we watch our parents age and become less capable, we are encouraged to step up and become more responsible. As a simple example, at some point often long before they die, parents stop hosting Thanksgiving and Christmas and it transitions to the next generation. Now the new generation has to learn how to cook a turkey (or name your other tradition they take over). If your parents are young and healthy forever, maybe you delay adulthood for indefinite periods of time. That's very bad for the individuals and also very bad for society. We also become more jaded, set in our ways, and cynical as time goes on. A population made up significantly of young-looking old people who can't become adults and are still growing cynical sounds like Sci-Fi Dystopia fodder. Add in the memory loss, and that sounds like a slow motion apocalypse.
Let's be hardcore about this. If people generally become more capable as they get older (or at least don't become less capable), needing to transition to full adulthood might not happen to most people, and be pretty rare in general.
Transitioning to adulthood is not a single event, but a long series of events over many years. Getting a starter job, getting a better job, getting a career, getting married, having kids, renting and then buying a house, selling and buying a different house, raising little kids, then bigger kids, then teenagers, etc. etc.
We may ask our parents for advice, especially in the early stages of each part. I've noticed that I ask my parents less and less for advice as they age and show frailty. I watched my dad do the same thing with his parents. At some point the equilibrium can even switch, where the kids are making decision for the parents, including when the parents are becoming physically or mentally incapable of handling all of the normal adult responsibilities.
Markers of adulthood can be a lot of different things, but could include strength, good household budgeting, getting kids to some number of weekly activities (or them going off to college/life), achieving a certain title or status at work, buying a big house, whatever. As I achieve those things and sometimes even surpass my dad, I feel more capable. As I feel more capable, I feel more like an adult, and less in his shadow. As he declines into retirement and old age, the equilibrium is switching and he needs me to take care of things. The last time we were visiting, my dad asked me to move some heavy boxes for him. Mentally that's a very different relationship and experience from even 5-10 years ago, when he could have easily (maybe more easily than me) just taken care of that himself. It encourages me to step up, take responsibility, and prepare to be the lead in the family.
If he would never decline, there's a definite psychological effect where I would not take those final steps to supplant him, but very likely always remain a little lower status in my own mind.
I can only say that I don't think that fits my or my wife's experience. I would feel just as adult if my parents were still alive, and she would if her father was.
I think you're overestimating the trouble here. For many people in the modern day, the process of transitioning to adulthood has a lot less to do with your parents dying or becoming disabled, and a lot more to do with moving out and establishing your own household and traditions. Yes, your parents no longer being the default host can encourage you to learn how to cook a turkey, but so can living on the other side of the country from your parents and not wanting to fly, or waking up one morning and going "wow, I really want turkey", or deciding that the relatives who own dining rooms large enough to fit everyone will rotate who hosts family thanksgiving, or deciding that your gay commune where no one talks to their parents will hold family thanksgiving.
Practically it seems unlikely that there will suddenly be an immortality pill, and more likely that over the next few centuries we'll continue making improvements to healthcare that extend life a little bit at a time. People will adapt.
"Practically it seems unlikely that there will suddenly be an immortality pill, and more likely that over the next few centuries we'll continue making improvements to healthcare that extend life a little bit at a time."
I don't know about an immortality pill, but I think it is likely that sometime in the next century, probably too late for me, we will learn how to prevent aging.
I don't see why we would be able to prevent human bodies from aging when we can't prevent (say) my car from aging. My car has hundreds of different systems, and every one of them gets worn out with age and use. I can't see why the human body, which is more complex and more squishy, wouldn't be the same.
When your car gets damaged, it doesn't heal. People do; your body has elaborate self-repair machinery. It built itself from a single fertilized cell, with the outside world supporting it and providing inputs but not doing the actual building. It continues to create new cells.
The design information for your body is present in every cell, hence massively redundant, so can't get lost — if some of it gets scrambled by mutation, take a majority vote of a hundred cells and you are back with original DNA.
So I don't see any reason why, once we figure out why bits of the system eventually break down, we can't stop them from doing so.
Sure, people will adapt, and I agree that a lot of these steps to grow up happen even while parents are potentially young and healthy. I was using Thanksgiving turkey as a small example of a bigger situation. Imagine the CEO of [large corporation] or [family business] never retiring. You can imagine the same for every level of the business, but it's clearer when it's the person at the top. They can't retire if they're going to live indefinitely, so nobody moves up into their position. That prevents a chain reaction of people moving up in companies, so moving up is far harder. People may stay in "entry" positions for decades, due to low turnover. Endemic unemployment in younger people means they can't get the experience they need to get early jobs and move out of their parents house. Birth rates crater, and people feel locked into the same positions forever, creating a stagnant society where class becomes inevitable and people rarely change their station.
I think the point about lack of retirement is significant. But I think it's also not *as* significant as you suggest. Within an organization, there's often some amount of turnover in leadership positions even without anyone leaving - as new people come in and develop more years of experience, their skills are recognized and they are put in charge of things that other people had been doing, who in turn move on to new roles.
There probably is a tendency for executive leader types to stay on past when it would be helpful to rotate out - that's why it's a good thing that the US President, and most state Governors, have term limits. (Chicago and Boston probably could have benefited from term limits for their mayors.)
It might be that all positions have less turnover than would be ideal, when people don't retire due to age. But if everyone's thinking about things on a longer timescale anyway, perhaps the optimal turnover period would in fact be longer. I think it's a bit hard to say.
One other thing whose implications are hard to work out is the issue of whether populations would be growing, or whether birth rate would drop, and whether the society would eventually reach a new steady state - at which point there would likely be a large generation of people from the beginning of the process, as well as a long stretch of smaller generations from the transition period.
Space and space travel is the one area I think may be significantly helped by immortal stagnant people. You can learn the skills you need to work on a generation ship, without the need to actually make it support generations. You just have the same skilled people on a ship for a long long time. What they do when they arrive might be a pretty significant issue, but if they don't become infertile they at least have time to adjust once they do get there.
I think what age people stabilize at would make a big difference, though I grant we don't know what someone who has centuries of good health would be like.
Still, if people stabilize at 20, or 40, or 60 could matter. The eternal 20 year olds are more likely to get bored and want to try something new.
You didn't bring up what would probably be the worst possible effect-- political leaders who don't die, so the hierarchy is very stable and unlikely to get new ideas.
On another hand, the best possibility is getting people who have much more opportunity to learn and become more skillful. This doesn't show up in science fiction because it would be too hard to write.
That’s a feature, not a bug. Immortality would become intolerable with long-term memories. But seeing the world with fresh eyes every month would make a hedonistic life indefinitely enjoyable
There are two problems with that outlook. One is sustainability. Having immortals who lack the ability to work productively is a serious problem. Secondly, and to me more importantly, is about meaning in life. If you can't remember what you're doing, how much meaning does your life have? Hedonism sounds fun, but it lacks lasting value. If worthless hedonism of this variety holds value, we could already approximate it through IV heroin. Just hook people up to powerful drugs and let them lay in hospital beds, "enjoying" their euphoria.
If I'm not wrong, every time a memory is accessed it is rewritten. Extending this to my scenario, anything that you think about more than once a month should be safe, including your life's meaning.
Well, immortals aren’t sustainable with or without memories - things get pretty Malthusian pretty quick if nobody dies, I bet. As for “meaning,” it’s very much in the eye of the beholder. I can’t remember what I’m doing half the time anyway, but enjoying life seems meaningful enough, and does not require any heroin.
No, I hope to die without to much money going to medical stuff and leave my assets to my heirs. I would buy a little white pill that allowed me to 'off myself' with little pain.
Severe hindrance could use a little more clarification.
If we're talking a complete prior memory wipe after a month, no. The quality of life of each of my sequential twin brothers thus created would collapse given their inability to draw on life-long education and maintain long-term relationships.
If we're talking the inability to form new long-term memories (but keeping the rough memory-state at the time of pill-ingestion), maybe once I retire and establish some staid, ovine routine. Then the monthly self-addressed orientation session won't run into too many hours. :)
That said, I wonder how much the answer would change for someone more committed to biological essentialism (IQ is highly heritable/cultural-load-independent/dispositive of human worth, passing on one's 'high quality' genes is a moral good, etc.) than I am. They might find the potential ability to procreate forever rather appealing.
In the context of the recent post on architecture, it's pretty funny that the London meetup is in the most hatefully brutalistic anti-human location that exists in that city.
Could interested people take a look at this paper, which looks at the prevalence of MDD pre- and post- COVID? The result that COVID has caused a lot of MDD is not all that surprising to me, nor is the pretty interesting finding that the mental health effects of COVID have absolutely swamped the physical health effects.
However, Table 1 has the authors look for explanations for what is causing the MDD. If I'm reading the table right (and I may very well not be), both the daily number of reported cases and lockdowns (as measured by decreasing human mobility) significantly increase the number of MDD cases, but the daily number of reported cases increases MDD by an order of magnitude more than lockdowns. This seems sort of logical based on Figure 3 - countries which I intuitively think of as being 'lockdown lite' have a lot of MDD increase, countries which I think of as being 'lockdown heavy' have minimal MDD increase.
I find this result really surprising and counterintuitive - it suggests that the first order result of lockdown is to cause MDD (for obvious reasons) but the second order result is to prevent MDD by preventing cases which somehow prevent MDD. I can tell a couple of 'just so' stories for why this should be the case (maybe the media hypes up case numbers which causes anxiety), but I certainly didn't predict it before reading this paper. In fact, I think the consensus was that there was a pretty direct tradeoff between mental health in lockdown and physical health in non-lockdown.
I wish the authors had worked harder at looking at the lockdown vs no-lockdown comparison - for example there's going to be an obvious correlation between a rising number of cases and the issuing of lockdown orders. But previously I thought there was almost no question at all that lockdown was net utility-negative (due to the mental health impact) whereas now I think I might have been quite seriously wrong for the past couple of years!
I am looking for ancient sources on "primitive" thinking. How did people describe and think of the inner lives of non-states people, the rural, the uneducated, the foreign, especially the hunter-gatherer societies. I'm basically looking for anthropology sometime BCE, though I'll take sources up to the Middle Ages, too.
If you are willing to accept medieval, you might find the Icelandic sagas useful. There is a bit in the Jomviking saga that describes an experiment to see if consciousness is in the head or the body. The experiment is proposed by someone about to have his head cut off who wants to produce some useful information from the process — also to demonstrate how unafraid he is of death.
That is fascinating, I will check that out! I'm not hung up on the specific era, right now I'm just hoping for sources I wouldn't find on my own. This definitely qualifies.
It's the execution scene near the end of the saga. The Jomvikings, who are famous for their courage, have been captured, and their captors decide to kill them one by one to see if they are really that brave.
Essentially they are always described by a set of topoi unfortunately. Most descriptions, even strangely by actual eyewitnesses, are filtered through the literary expectations of their time. There's a reason why the Scythians (a group who politically seem to have disappeared before the third century BC) were still being discussed as contemporary history by fourth and fifth-century writers, which is that if you wanted to talk about Steppe-dwelling barbarians you used the classical Scythians as a model (and that's the Scythians from classical texts, not the real Scythians...).
Archaeology and linguistics can tell you more about the people who lived in these places, but the issue there is that most of the world still views these as telling us about ethnicity (like, your political identity must be defined by your wife's choice of cooking pots) so you are probably limited to a broad base of studies actually telling you about lived experience to areas of north-west Europe and the Mediterranean littoral, and possibly the Americas.
I am interested in the phenomenological qualities of introspection in pre-modern societies. Thinking, feeling, perception, in particular perception of thought, but at the moment I'm trying to broaden the stuff I look at to figure out where to look next. Texts that talk about social life and day-to-day interactions help get there, stuff that talks about cooking pots doesn't (though they're probably not unrelated).
It would be better to begin with Pitirim Sorokin's /Social and Cultural Dynamics/, the 1957 condensed one-volume edition, which is not specifically about introspection, but is about identifying common patterns of cultural thinking. Beware that Sorokin was brilliant, but raving mad with an ingrained Russian Orthodox hatred of sensual pleasure, and of modernity. So all his views are tainted by his desire to associate everything he doesn't like with "sensuality". At times this leads him to ridiculous errors, like categorizing modern art as "sensual".
Oh, there's a book by Julian Jaynes, /The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind/, which I haven't read, but which sounds completely nuts.
It argues that the Achaeans at the time of homer weren't yet conscious, and also that primitive groups have a lot of visions and hallucinations (I expect Jaynes says this is because they're still developing consciousness). This might be the book which points out that Homer rarely mentions colors. That observation would be more interesting if not for the fact that Homer rarely makes any visual descriptions at all, of anything. Perhaps there really was a Homer, who really was blind. But more likely, this is just because idealistic cultures like the Geometric-era Greeks think abstractly rather than visually. (I'm using the word "idealistic" as a synonym for Pitirim Sorokin's "ideational".) (The Geometric era is not the era in which geometry was developed, but in which art used geometric patterns.)
That is one major aspect there of pre-modern introspection, actually; more helpful than Jaynes' stuff. There is one pattern of pre-modern thinking which is associated with art made with repetitive, geometric, non-representational patterns, as in Geometric Greece. We also often find tribal groups in which men make representational religious art, and women make decorative geometric art. I suspect that representational art usually begins with ritual magic or religion, but don't know.
It's not the main jist of the text, but Orality and Literacy by Walter J. Ong delves into this topic from the perspective of the impact of communication methods on what kind of things people communicate about and value. Warning, it's *not* an easy read, but I got a lot of out it in terms of understanding how a medium of communication can have impacts far beyond the obvious (it's obvious that printing makes it easy to have lots of books, but less obvious that non-print societies tend to rely heavily on stereotype to aid memorisation, or that values in an oral society are more likely to be other-driven rather than self-driven ('what will they think of me' rather than 'what will I/God think of me'.)
You're not interested in what the primitive people themselves said? There are many collections of stories, myths, and histories. Most of them were first written down in recent times, and only in translation. That initial translation may have stripped away some of the descriptions that would suggest subjective qualia, which might not translate well.
If your definition of "primitive" is tech level, you should be able to get the same information from 19th and 20th century anthropological studies. I doubt that primitive thinking differs more between 1 BCE and 2000 CE than between Africa and South America.
I got modern sources covered, or rather, know some basics and know where I can find more. I am absolutely interested in what primitive people themselves said, but you mention the problems with that yourself - the oral tradition and the problems of translation strips a lot of telling details and might alter the text especially in the places that interest me most. I'm not discounting them as sources, but they're not what I'm looking for at this point.
If you're not restricting yourself to European sources, you might find some cursory material in Chinese histories - the Book of Han and Later Book of Han, in particular which contain several volumes on the customs of 'barbarian' peoples.
Tacitus should be discounted: his Germanica is more about Rome than it is about it's subjects. And therein lies a major problem: attempting to record the thinking and beliefs of others systematically is a modern (perhaps modernist) project. No ancient writer wrote to do this so much as to use the others to further the purpose of their writing.
To get to the first one has to wade through the second, mostly, to "subtract" it from the descriptions and look for surprises, and whether those converge with what we suspect through other means (contemporary pre-modern societies, for example). At this point I don't know enough about anything to say with confidence what I'm looking for, I just want more reading to enable me to ask better questions. As the things I want to read are usually found in the margins if at all I thought asking here is a good way to narrow it down, so I don't have to wade through hundreds of pages of war, war and more war with none of the margins I hope for.
I do agree with your point in general - these ethnographies by ancient writers, even when they don't assist in some unrelated rhetorical purpose, tend to be primitive and sub-analytical by our standards. But perhaps illustrating that is part of DasKlaus's project.
I'm reasonably sure that it's a Hollywood (or maybe even theater) term later adopted by the corporate world to sound cool. Hollywood producers were talking about their actors as "the talent" long before HR drones started.
We do have a bias toward a fixed mindset in our culture iirc (not sure how the replication crisis changed this, if at all).
My guess is that it's just convention. It's the same reason companies use any sort of business speak, let's circle back, connect about that offline, in the loop, bandwidth, etc. They all serve some function, but why any particular phrase is used over another that communicates the same is largely historical contingency.
Moving to the bay area (SF) soon. Reading books about bay area and startup culture at the moment. Just finishing Chaos Monkeys, recently finished Uncanny Valley. I also opened the Phoenix Project: I was amused to discover a book so dedicated to corporate-speak and stock and straw-men characters could exist (not a recommendation).
What perspectives on bay area/tech culture have you heard/read that stuck with you?
I would not describe "The Phoenix Project" as a story about startup culture, so perhaps that's why you were disappointed. It is a book in the style of Eli Goldratt's "The Goal" in which a business concept is illustrated through a contrived series of set pieces. The purpose is to illustrate the concepts. I can't apologize for the corporate-speak. :-)
Really enjoying "Midnight Mass" so far. What's fascinating about it is how much it feels like a Stephen King horror story - if you told me that it was adapted from a Stephen King short story or novella and I didn't know any better, I'd believe you.
Speaking of which, I'm going to re-read "The Shining" again this month. It used to be my favorite King novel, although it's been supplanted by "Pet Sematary" ("Shining" definitely has the better film adaptation, though).
Mike Flanagan already has two king adaptations: Gerald's Game & Doctor Sleep. I like Flanagan's movies, but not his miniseries (including the monologue-heavy Midnight Mass).
Here is a game. Me and my math and CS friends haven’t figured out an optimal strategy yet, so I present it to you.
5 players sit at a table in a circle. They are free to coordinate strategies before the game begins (knowing the rules), but no information can be given once the game begins.
At the start of the game, each player rolls 5 fair, six-sided dice (so there are currently 25 dice in play). They keep the dice the rolled hidden from the other players.
They then select one of their five dice and remove it from play (it’s been destroyed).
They then pass their four remaining dice to the player on their left.
They then remove a dice, pass, remove a dice, pass, and remove a dice so that each player has one dice if front of them.
All 5 remaining dice are then revealed, and ordered in ascending order. The players win if they have produced a 5 length straight (either 1,2,3,4,5 or 2,3,4,5,6) from their remaining dice.
I've achieved a ~22% win rate using the following approach:
Every size-N hand of dice deterministically specifies the default die to remove next using the hash-like algorithm "sum the dice mod N, then remove the die at the resulting index in sorted order". By iterating this until N=1 algorithm players can also learn what die a hand will end up with by default; call this the "expected result".
In the first round, players know which value (mod 5) they've pre-committed to target and try to remove a die to make the expected result match that value. In subsequent rounds, players remove the default die *unless* the hand's expected value is one they've already seen, in which case they try to alter it.
Clearly this algorithm leaves some value on the table (e.g. preferring to remove dice that maximizing downstream players' range of options, or trying to "correct" for a missed target value in subsequent hands) but I'm not sure if that's just a few percentage points or 50+% as Mystik's experiment suggests.
How do you think people would do if the strategy was:
- each position starts with 2 consecutive target numbers (someone is 1 or 2, next person is 2 or 3, etc.).
- all players try to keep both of the targeted sequences possible
- sometime before the end of the game, each player chooses between their two targets based on what's possible given the numbers they've previously passed downstream
1. Randomization doesn't help. Suppose you define some randomized strategy that requires at most B random bits. Then the probability of winning is: sum from x=0 to 2^B-1 (1/2^B * Prob[winning | random bits = x]). But clearly there must be some value of x which equals or exceeds this average probability, so deterministically setting random bits = x gives you a deterministic strategy that is at least as good.
2. Passing information seems unlikely to help. When I receive a hand from the player to my right, I have already seen everything they had seen when sending the message (plus my starting hand!) except the dice that player removed. So it would only be useful if the dice you throw out continue to affect your strategy going forward, even though you are making that choice partly to send information... Not sure how to prove this but I'd be very surprised.
So just to post a little of the analysis of this problem that I’ve done/seen when I had people play this.
The strategy of “each hand gets a specific number” (1/6 is treated as a duplicate) has an 11% winrate”
Random choice has a 3% win rate
A sort of averaging strategy (count the dice of each type you’ve seen, remove the most prevalent one) has an 8.5% winrate.
Here’s why I said that I haven’t found an optimal strategy: I gave 5 people this game. 3 times they ran the “assigned hand” strategy and failed. The other three times they just “winged it” and much to my shock they succeeded 3/3. This suggests to me that the optimal strategy must have a decently high probability (if it’s around 10% that was a 1/1000 occurrence, which seems less likely than a higher winrate existing)
As an added note, one of the players was trying to do something clever by intentionally removing options so that he’d know what the next person was doing (ie given 1,1,2 he would remove the two so he knew a one must exist)
It's important to note that by the end of the game, each player has had all the dice pass through his hands exactly once. So the general class of strategy I'm thinking of is that each player is assigned to a number N, and it's his job to try to make sure there's no more than one N in play.
So some simple starting rules would be:
1. If you're the 3-spotter, and you've already seen a 3, then try to remove all the other 3s.
2. If you're downstream of the 3-spotter, you don't remove the first 3 that has been through the 3-spotter's hands, but you should remove any subsequent 3s that have been through his hands.
3. How do you prioritise between removing "your" number, and removing numbers that upstream players may have missed? I don't think there's a simple strategy here, you need to do a big probabilistic calculation at every single step based on the information that you currently know.
Maybe I'm missing an insight that makes this all easier, but I really think that the optimal strategy involves hideous amounts of probabilistic calculation at every timestep.
Intriguing. It's a bit like a multi-player-co-operative Nim, in that you're trying to remove a number such that the next player can remove a number such that [...] the final player can end up with the number you (collectively) want.
I think the answer is going to involve encoding in some way, as that's usually the answer to these puzzles where you have to communicate something with very little information being passed (e.g. hat puzzles, or the one where you flip one coin on a chessboard and your accomplice only sees the flipped state).
On the first round, given most rolls (I think 15/16 of the time), everyone could force the hand they pass to be their choice of odd or even. Can we go further than that? How often can we constrain it modulo 3? Over 4 die-removal rounds, how far can we go towards constraining player N's final die to be N? We obviously can't guarantee it, because they might not have had that in their starting hand, but we can remove dice that aren't N, so that we can win *if* we had the required dice in the starting hands at all (where player 1 could have either 1 or 6).
Can we find some property of the total dice in circulation that (ideally) is isomorphic to "contains a straight", or (failing that) has strong overlap with it, and then at each step we can alter our hands to preserve or select for that property?
(I think in my previous comment I was on the right lines with the odd/even amd mod-3 parts, but "constrain player N's die to be N" is going to be suboptimal, because there are way more possible starting configurations that contain a straight *somewhere* than ones that contain a straight in that exact position)
If I understand the rules correctly I believe this game would benefit from Hanabi or bridge style play. That is, don't take actions that make sense take actions that communicate. I would start by placing each players dice in a line. Consider the leftmost to be 1 and the rightmost to be 5. Pass all dice maintaing the order and maintaining any gaps from removed dice.
The number of pips on the dice removed is used to signal all other players something. Exactly what it should signal might get a bit complex. But for example, removing a dice with N pips could mean to discard the dice closest to position N for the first two rounds and preserve the dice closest to position N for the remaining rounds. You can then build more complex conventions on top of this basic convention. (For example, what does it mean when the two previous players tell you to preserve different dice?)
If signals via things like gaps in the dice might be allowed, the problem needs more definition. What is then not allowed? Can I pass four dice in a square? Can I have gaps of varying sizes? Can I make a tower?
no, that would be against the rules. when dice are passed, and you can assume the order is somehow randomized so no information can be passed that way.
I'm pretty sure the removed dice aren't public, so you can't use them to communicate. You could use the passed dice to communicate, but only in one direction.
I started with a trivial baseline. Let's decide for each player in advance which number we want them to end up with, either 2, 3, 4, 5 or (1 or 6). Then at each removal point, we know which player will end up with this hand, so we remove any dice they won't want.
There's just under a 12% chance that every hand includes the pre-chosen target number.
I think there might be a variant of this that works pretty well in saving lost hands. The strategy works as you've described assuming the target numbers are in their hands. If one is missing, though, you change the target for that hand to be the next higher number that is present (wrapping around if needed). Then for the next hand you receive you try to make it the missing target from this hand, otherwise you let it stay as its current target and move on trying to correct using next next hand etc. If you also prioritize deleting dice in the same direction (i.e. delete the next larger dice than the target, wrapping around if needed - the idea being that you delete possible smaller alternative targets as late as possible, so a later player can use it to correct an otherwise lost hand) then I think you may be able to save a bunch of lost hands. I'll have to think about it more tomorrow.
Ah, that sounds good - start with each hand having a target number, increasing to the right. Passing hands to the left, anyone who sees a hand that can't make its target switches its target to the least number greater than its previous target that it can in fact make, and moves down by one the target of each hand between its previous target and its new target. Whenever anyone sees a hand, they remove a duplicate if possible, and otherwise whichever number is least likely to ever become that hand's new target under this procedure. (That probably means the least number greater than its current target.)
Whoops. I accidentally counted five hands with one target number plus one with two. Of course there are four hands with one target number. So the odds are closer to 18%.
The most promising way to do better than chance here is to send a clear signal of what number(s) a "hand" of dice ought to end up as. So for example you shouldn't destroy either half of a pair of the same number unless you've already seen a pair of that number. Similarly you can follow a pattern of imbalancing hands based on parity: if you have 3 odds and 2 evens prefer to remove one of the evens to indicate that the hand should end up odd, and vice versa.
Still seems hard to win consistently-- once around is just not a lot of information being propagated. If you had, say, 10 dice per player it might be possible to devise a more reliable strategy.
I don't think information can move in a direction meaningfully. So once the game starts you can't really communicate "destroy that 3 and keep the 6, we already have 2,3,4,5".
1s and 6s are not as valuable but I'm not sure it makes that big a difference, I honestly think the best thing might be to just assign to each of the 5 rolls a value (2,3,4,5, and (1/6 whichever)) and make sure you only cull everything else from that 'hand'.
FWIW I coded this up in python and this strategy wins ~5.5% of the time, compared to random play which wins ~1.5% of the time. I'll play with it some more.
I get around 10% for this strategy and around 3% for random play.
Random play should be equivalent to just rolling five dice, for which I also got 3% by simulating directly. It's also amenable to calculation - for each target sequence (1-5 or 2-6), the first die has 5 helpful rolls, then 4, 3, 2 and 1. So the overall probability of random success is 2 * (5*4*3*2*1) / (6*6*6*6*6) = 3.086%
I suggest that your simulation might have a bug, although probably not as embarrassing a bug as when I published results based on giving everyone six dice (see above).
I don't think this works very well. In the first few rounds you'll hit an "unambiguous" case 1 a lot (which strikes me as making better progress than chance), but later on you'll just remove stuff at random.
My gut feeling is that each player has to have a different priority ordering for what to remove, such that on average, the same number of each values are removed. You probably also need to make up your mind beforehand and hard-remove either all the 1's or 6's.
Traditional horary astrologer here: send me your query and I will use the tools of the astrological tradition to give an answer. My email is FlexOnMaterialists@protonmail.com. This is a free service; I am quite discreet.
Currently your offer seems as spam or some weird plot to steal people's private data.
If you want to look more credible you should make some public predictions. For instance, Scott makes predictions every year. If you manage to get better score than him then it will be something interesting.
Alternatively, you can just make a couple of hedge funds to go broke with your predictive power, earn lots of money and buy all the private data you desire.
I would unironically be interested in a study that actually took a serious look at whether astrology had any value as a predictive tool. Currently, most (maybe all) of the scientific arguments against astrology are based in deductive reasoning: "We don't know of any mechanism by which the positions of the planets and stars could affect people's personalities or the events in their lives, therefore astrology is wrong." But I've yet to hear of any study that actually proves astrology wrong through inductive reasoning, by providing statistical proof that astrological predictions tend to be false. And if the study was truly being conducted in good faith, then it would have to take the predictions of detailed individual birth charts into account, not just those one-size-fits-all sun sign horoscopes you see in newspapers. (I understand that the sheer vagueness of many astrological predictions could make this difficult, but I think there are ways that dedicated researchers could account for that or work around it.)
For the record, I don't believe in astrology, but in the interest of scientific inquiry, I do think its claims should actually be *tested*, rather than summarily dismissed because they don't fit in with our current cosmological worldview.
I've found divination to function quite well with pseudonyms; the worldview which professes belief in spiritual realities isn't much troubled by human-level obfuscations. As to the rest, why, I'm sure plenty of astrologers use their art for attaining wealth, just like some very smart people use their intelligence as a tool for ensuring material comfort. However, speaking from within the worldview that participates in spiritual realities, what I hope to gain by this is far more precious than any sum of money.
Is what you hope to gain more precious than any amount of human lives as well? You do understand that you can use money to do good, right? It's especially true if you are not interested in material comfort as you can spend literally all of your wealth to charity.
If, for some reason, you do not value saving human lives more than blowing minds of materialists, you do realize that it would be so much more mindblowing to constantly win the market via your predictions? It would actually change people's mind regarding astrology, mine included.
This is a good response--I'm quite pleased to be confronted by counterarguments from within the esoteric/magical worldview. You are of course quite correct about money: it can and possibly "ought" to be used to ameliorate suffering. In the modern occult community, there's still some amount of disagreement regarding the pursuit of money through both magical and mundane means. I think this is partly due to cultural remnants of Christian moral theology and partly the infuriatingly high preponderance of charlatanry present among occultists. All of which is to say there are many accomplished contemporary occultists whose "service to man" consists of teaching or instructing while living at or near the poverty line. I'd imagine even the most effective of altruists must acknowledge that not everyone can be a banker or a lawyer. Rather like the virtuous materialist who donates time with the knowledge that his skills will never earn a seven-figure salary, we all do what we can.
As for beating the market, I would invite you to do a quick web search for "the four words of the magus" or "the four virtues of the sphinx", in particular the fourth and final virtue.
I'm glad that we can find a common ground here. I wouldn't call it an esoteric argument, of course. Preventing the suffering of other human beings seems to be part of somewhat-universal human values. Acting on ones beliefs is supposed to be a universal thing as well. If I believe magic is real, I'll try to use magic to achieve my goals. Likewise, If I believe materialistic science is real, I'll try to use science to achieve my goals.
The fourth virtues of the sphinx, is an example of a similar adaptation. It's a seemingly virtuous reason not to actually act on your beliefs in magic. But as you seem to understand, if you are a real magic user, not a charlatan, acting on your beliefs can only benefit you. A belief that correspond to reality only benefits from being tested and doesn't need a justification against it.
Again, you seem to understand it. That's why you propose your magical services to materialists, expecting your astrological divination to actually work and change their minds. The problem is that you can only get extremely weak evidiences in favour of astrology that way, which won't really challenge all the accumulated counterevidience. However, consistently winning the market via astrological divination would be a strong enough evidience in favour of astrology and it would also allow to prevent lots of human suffering.
I totally agree, that people can just do their own best to benefit the humanity. But that's the point, the accomplished occultists in your example aren't doing their best if they just teach their art to other people and neither them, nor their pupils actually use this knowledge to massively improve the world. If astrology is true it's a huge power that can saves countless lives. Not using it for this is wasting its potential.
This is why I favor divination--you ask your question, you get an answer, hopefully one which proves correct. Like all human endeavor, neither divination nor magic is infallible, though I have had very few misses with horary.
Re: the sphinx's virtues, the last one is "to be silent", a good general principle where magic is concerned. Also: if you were predicting market fluctuations through esoteric means, I trust you'd be sensible enough to not let it be known. Since we're both arguing in good faith, I'd be pleased to continue our chat via email if you'd like; you know how to reach me.
I don’t follow philosophy so this is more curiosity than a serious proposal. Couldn’t one turn Singer’s “drowning child” thought experiment around to make something like the opposite point based on the same intuition?
Suppose you’re walking to work and you see a drowning child. Doing a quick cost/benefit analysis—which, despite the speed with which you make it, you are confident is correct—you calculate that if you ignore this child and proceed to work, you will earn sufficient extra income to save three malnourished children in the third world. So you decide to ignore the child’s weakening cries for help and proceed to the office, knowing that you will add your marginal income for the time saved to charity. (Assume you’re paid by the hour, or paid piecemeal for your labor or something.)
The lesson: A universalist mindset with regard to altruism can lead one to become a moral monster who will ignore the particularized suffering in one’s direct experience.
I’m not saying that the latter thought experiment is better than Singer’s original. It just seems interesting to me that the intuitive (and obviously correct) imperative to save a drowning child could seemingly lead to opposite lessons depending on the choice made by the passerby. Singer wants to use the reader’s moral imperative to save the child as a hook to support the “universalist” approach, whereas many would probably view the “universalist” passerby walking past the drowning child to earn money for eleemosynary contributions to motivate the opposite moral approach.
(To the extent there is any value in this reverse-Singer thought experiment, I’m sure it has undoubtedly been presented much better by others in things I haven’t read. As noted, I don’t know philosophy.)
It's weird to me that in the utilitarian world view, the moral responsibility of impoverished children falls entirely on wealthy foreigners and not the people creating them. Where's the moral judgement for those birthing children with a reasonable chance of dying? This is the root cause, and so we should strike at the root.
And is saving these children necessarily the best utilitarian outcome? Maybe you literally define it in that way, but what if we use aggregate wellbeing instead? Seems to me that some children dying could improve overall wellbeing in impoverished countries, because if there's one thing these places need its not 'more people'. And if this prevents them growing up to have children with a high probability of suffering and dying themselves, then this moves the balance further in favour of this. Focusing only on number of people who die is some kind of naïve utilitarianism.
And of course, the natural implication of such a thought experiment is open borders. If the US had open borders, it would lead to a MINIMUM of hundreds of millions of immigrants by the end of the century, with the existing american population/its descendants becoming a minority by that time. This would be absolutely devastating to the country and would almost assuredly means the US stops being a scientific/technological powerhouse which would have profound consequences for the world. It could also very likely result in civil conflict, which would have profoundly negative consequences too. And of course, if the US does this but nowhere else does, countries like China will quickly become the dominant world powers and you're going to have a hard time arguing that this is going to have positive utilitarian outcomes. And so again, more naive utilitarianism.
I think you have a few misunderstandings. I'll quote and commentate:
> It's weird to me that in the utilitarian world view, the moral responsibility of impoverished children falls entirely on wealthy foreigners and not the people creating them.
We're not dealing in assigning moral responsiblity; we're asking "What can *I* do to have the greatest positive impact?" Finding out what other people could be doing isn't interesting, unless you're in the business of communications, marketing, influencing, etc.
As far as what any of us could do, one option is donating money to save somebody's life. You could argue that another option is influencing those people to just not have children. Or yet another option would be to intentionally let the children die because the outcome will actually be better in the end.
To be honest I haven't done an analysis to weigh these options. GiveWell and the community in general recommends the first option, but I don't know how deep anybody has gone to consider the others.
Still my intuition is definitely that the first option is the most cost effective and best in the long run. My hand-wavy thought process is:
1) Getting people to stop having children would require a pretty significant public influence campaign. In another country, with less access to contraception, when it's already a seemingly-impossible task to get people to stop having kids over here where we actually have condoms and birth control? That seems very challenging and expensive. Even getting a reasonable cost-benefit analysis in the first place seems quite daunting. How much value can a marginal dollar have on this front? I don't know, but I'm not convinced it outcompetes the cost of saving a life.
2) Letting a child die of malaria vs stopping the death of malaria: Even if you're not sold on the value of saving the life itself, there is suffering to consider. I imagine malaria is an unpleasant way to die, but maybe more importantly there is the child's family and community. They all suffer and grieve at the loss. So that's what we have to weigh. Could you estimate the positive value of having one fewer person growing up and taking resources, etc? Maybe we can come up with that analysis, but offhand it doesn't feel convincing that it would outweight the suffering caused by the illness and the subsequent grief.
So I don't know if my reasoining is correct, but it seems to me you need a lot more thinking and analysis to come up with some alternatives that plausibly compete with the suffering-mitigation you get from just saving a life.
As far as open borders, I don't really have any comments on that. I'm not aware if it's really the natural implication of these thought experiements or not, and I'm not familiar enough with what the results of open borders would be to argue one way or the other.
I have a somewhat different question. Suppose there's a fire, and you have time to either pull out a kid or a big expensive painting, but not both. You're an utilitarian and you do not particularly value this painting, but to others it's still worth a lot more than the cost of saving a human life. However, you do not own it and are not guaranteed any rewards if you save it, so "by saving this painting I'll get enough money to personally save many children" doesn't work. Is there still an utilitarian reasoning for saving the painting? What if it's not a painting but an MRI machine?
If you're really productive enough to save three malnourished children in the time it takes you to pull one kid out of a pond, you shouldn't be wasting your time thinking about philosophical problems. Back to work with you!
Sure, you could make that calculation, but it'll never come out this way in real life.
I won't get much work done after seeing a child die. I might not sleep for a while, costing me way more in the end. Unless I am an actual psychopath, my feelings matter and are part of the equation.
If I tell someone or someone sees me, I'll lose status, maybe even my job. In some places, it is also illegal not to help.
Second-order consequences should also be considered. If someone sees me walking by and loses faith in humanity, thinking if I don't step in, they don't need to, either, or I keep advocating for this calculation and people start hating EA for it ... that might cause harm.
Thing is, you can always construct an example like this, but you need quite a lot of contrieved asterisks to make it work, and in the real world you don't calculate on the spot: you base your principles off calculations, and rely on the principles for quick decisions.
Maybe it takes an hour to save the child and figure out how to change clothes, but then you feel high for days because you just saved a child, so your productivity is fantastic which more than compensates for the time lost, and it could also be that people like you more because you did a local good deed and you're smiling more now, and so your life goes better in other ways too.
I think Singer and other hardcore utilitarians may actually agree with the conclusion... provided that your extra time in the office will actually marginally save more children per time unit than rescuing the drowning child.
So, if we say saving a life with money costs about $3000, and rescuing the drowning child will take up an hour from your work, AND you happen to make $3000 per hour, all of which you will optimally donate, then I'm sure plenty of people would agree you can go ahead and pass that child.
Note that a version of this is already heavily endorsed in the EA community. It's usually suggestex that one should donate to the poor in other nations, ie "pass up" the less fortunate right there in your own country, because doing so is usually more effective.
We've argued a version of this on here before: don't donate *now*, because the value of your money will be more in the future, so work and earn and put aside and then in ten/twenty/in your will years time, you can save more lives.
That works as a calculation but in reality yeah, it means you walk past the drowning child because "in ten years time I will save three drowning children".
It only takes a minute to save the child, whereas saving a life with effective charities is estimated to cost some thousands of dollars. You'd have to be Bill Gates for the "not save the child" option to make sense even superficially. Even Bill Gates, though, could face major negative social consequences if people found out what he failed to do. That's on top of major negative emotional consequences (see DasKlaus's answer).
There's a natural discount rate to saving drowning children though, if we assume that children we save now will go on to, on average, save a tiny fraction of drowning children of their own in the next few years. If one believes that human lives are usually on net positive (as one has to in order to think that saving them is good, as a utilitarian), then it does make sense to save some number of fewer lives now than rather than slightly more lives in the future. The question is just how that calculation works out.
What if that child is from an ethnic minority population (I use ethnic minority mostly because its an immediately obvious fact about something) with a net negative fiscal impact (costs the government more on average than they pay in taxes)? The money they cost the government could save multiple lives, so is it still worth saving them? The fact that any money saved would in actuality probably not be used to save lives is a wrinkle, admittedly, but suppose it wasn't.
Do you believe there are populations with a net negative fiscal impact? I could believe that there are a non-trivial number of people that have more direct government spending on them than the total amount of taxes they pay over their life, but I suspect that a lot of this disappears when you notice how much economic activity the existence of this person causes elsewhere, and the net growth produced in all the businesses serving this population all pay taxes as well.
I think most utilitarians think that we shouldn't pay particular attention to funds just because they come to or from the government. It's only if someone's life is a net negative *overall* that it wouldn't be worth saving their life. There probably are some people whose lives are net negative overall, but there probably aren't many.
"but I suspect that a lot of this disappears when you notice how much economic activity the existence of this person causes elsewhere"
Maybe if you think the money would otherwise end up in a vault somewhere, but this is CLEARLY not true. The money would end up somewhere else in the economy and probably more productively than buying consumer goods (which is *not* the basis of economic growth).
In term of taxes, basically you're saying that the government effectively gives these people money, they go spend it on stuff and a fraction of this spending ends up as taxes, and somehow this leads to the government having more money. Obviously this cannot be the case.
Plus, none of this factors in the tremendous direct and indirect costs of crime which are disproportionately committed by poorer people, and unlike with the impact of spending, there's no reason to expect that crime would still exist if these people didn't.
"There probably are some people whose lives are net negative overall, but there probably aren't many."
I disagree. Factoring in the opportunity costs of the money they receive from the government, its probably tens of millions of such people.
They may well accept it. But it still seems that Singer’s initial thought experiment presupposes that we’re supposed to take it as self-evident that we should stop and save the child in front of us. To the extent that the response to the modified hypothetical involves a rejection of that presupposition it seems to me like it is undermining the original argument. Or maybe not—what the hell do I know.
I went and double checked Singer's explanation here [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86Q71s4Sz9k), so it's fresh in my mind. He says that he came up with the shallow pond analogy because it is "closer to home", meaning he likely chose that example because it's conveniently intuitive for people to understand, not necessarily because it *ought* to be the most salient.
Then again, I could plausibly see an argument like, for example: If you encourage someone to feel unmoved at the sight of a drowning child, it may be difficult to do that without negatively impacting their altruistic motivations altogether (like maybe you're likely to become the sort of person who doesn't care about sufferent at all, if you've become the sort of person who doesn't feel particularly strong emotion at witnissing suffering first hand).
My immediate problem with this (not counting visceral feels about walking past a drowning child) is that your confidence that ["you will earn sufficient extra income to save three malnourished children in the third world" and those children will definitely be saved directly as a result of your action and they would definitely die if you did take the time to save the child in front of you] can't reasonably be great enough to make this decision (I guess ignoring any ambiguity about whether the child is actually drowing and not playing or similar).
But if you had that confidence and didn't just stay a bit later at work that day to make up for the time spent saving the child you'd be a monster anyway.
If you notice you try to get out of an uncomfortable moral dilemma by coming up with ways why the solution you don't like is actually the bad one, you can always adjust the conditions so that it doesn't work. In this case, okay, you're uncomfortable with ambiguity and you'd rather be certain to save one kid even if the expected number of children saved is greater in "keep walking" case. Just add some uncertainty to you actually saving the drowning child - maybe they're far enough away that you're not sure you'll be there in time anyway.
Of course there’s always workarounds you can build in to deal with inessential issues not directly related to the core intuition of a thought experiment. The office closes to all employees at 5:00 sharp every day, and the work cannot be done remotely. Similarly, for purposes of a thought experiment, I think we can stipulate away the risks that the child may not really be drowning, or that the cost/benefit analysis may be in error.
In thought experiments we can, but in real life we can't, which is why I think utilitarian thought experiments are a bad guide to making actual ethical decisions in the real world.
Thinking about situations where everything is certain leads you to build up intuitions that are bad. It's better to think about ethical decisions as always being covered in a massive fuzz of uncertainty about actual future consequences. If you think about trolley problems where everything is foggy and you're not quite sure which track has more people on it or whether they can get out of the way in time, then you'll develop much better intuitions for real world decisions.
Also strongly agree. You can create a thought experiment that says literally anything. For instance, you could stipulate that saving the drowning child will directly kill 48 million people. Or you could stipulate that going to work would kill all the people on earth. By stipulating such unintuitive barriers, you create a world where the stipulations matter far more than the normal parameters of life. Of course you save that drowning child, because you have the best information that you can make an actual positive difference in that moment. You can explain to your boss while you're late, or get another job, or work some other time. If you stipulate away all of those alternatives, you're just intentionally creating an impossible situation.
"What if being a good person actually made you a bad person?" - Well then I guess we need to rethink life!
Strongly agree with this - utilitarianism is one of those rare ideas that works better in practice than it does in theory. We're not actually trying to optimise most of the time in real life - we're just trying to do a little bit better than yesterday. The focus on corner cases and moral dilemmas elides the fact that the vast majority of people could make a material difference to the good with pretty minimal effort, and very few people are in the situation of optimising at the margins.
Good to see someone else who isn't dismissing The End of History just because we've had a few rough years. Personally, I strongly suspect that Fukuyama will be proven right in the end, even if it takes another 50-100 years.
Interesting article by Oliver Traldi at Arc Digital on ”Virtue signalling” and progressive culture (also relevant for the public perception/discussion of effective altruism): ”Dorland, at least in my imagining, thought the etiquette of a progressive writers’ group would be logical, just like a child might expect the English language to be logical. But she was wrong. You get praise for doing good not when you do good but when you do something that makes other people feel that they are good. Nothing points one out as a rube so quickly as this, as failing to realize that it’s all just a game; and that’s what the term “virtue signaling” is really meant to capture. Every hick, like me, makes the same mistake. We get to these prestigious social circles and can’t tell the salad fork from the steak knife or whatever, and we think: “Wow, there are so many rules in this society. They must care a lot about following them.” But that isn't right. It’s only the rube who cares about following the rules, in the end, and thus we’re the only ones who are surprised when different rules apply to different people. What the smart set cares about is making the rules.” https://www.arcdigital.media/p/my-kidney-for-your-approval
They start out sympathizing more with Larson, but come to realize that Dorland hadn't behaved badly, and part of the problem with understanding what happened was a New York Times article which somewhat misrepresented the situation.
The kidney donator seemed somewhat attention-seeking and narcissistic. But, okay, if we have do pay a little more attention to people who *donate kidneys*, okay, sounds like a good trade for society to make. Let assholes donate kidneys for public approval.
And plagiarism is just plagiarism. Someone who was sitting at the cool kids' table thought she could shit-talk the misfit into shutting up.
When it comes to virtue signaling it’s not what you do, it’s HOW you do what you do. And we learned that means displaying the appropriate amount of modesty regarding your voluntary organ donation, or risk getting dragged to hell.
I feel like this is a noncentral example of "virtue signalling". Usually when the term is used, the person using it doesn't actually agree that the thing being signalled is truly virtuous. That's why "piety signalling" is usually a more descriptive term, I think.
Here I think most people would agree that donating a kidney is actually virtuous, but we cringe at the obviously approval-seeking reasons for which it seems to have been done.
Like Traldi said, actually donating a kidney is an unusually costly, and thus honest, signal. That's what makes it "noncentral" compared to the rampant examples of relatively cheap talk usually dubbed "signalling".
I thought "virtue-signaling" was more performative than functional, rather than inauthentic? That is, they may in fact truly hold some version of the belief, but find it easier to post on Twitter than spend time at a soup kitchen (or whatever).
Of course, the more widespread and central to your social circle the virtue is considered, the more you may signal your acceptance of it, even if it is inauthentic.
Livestreaming musical events seems like it will only be a more common thing in the future, and the progression toward this has been drastically accelerated by the pandemic. Yet AFAICT there isn't an integrated idiot-proof DIY livestreaming device on the market; instead you have to enlist the expensive services of specialized engineers.
Why is this? Surely it can't be that technically difficult to integrate a decent camera and a couple of good microphones in a camcorder-ish box controlled by an app on one's phone, with the software to do a straightforward "here is the website you go to to view this livestream, login/buy this ticket/whatever to see it" kind of thing. Or can it? Is there complexity I'm missing here, or is the market too small, or is this coming and just not ready yet, or is it actually available already?
If you already have a decent audio and video recording setup, there are now services like StreamYard - streamyard.com - that do make the streaming part pretty easy.
But it sounds like you're looking for an integrated device that has everything: mics, camera, streaming capabilities. This is difficult, since the ideal miking and camera setup varies a lot between different performers/groups and spaces. If you want multicamera switching, that multiplies the complexity.
That said, a Zoom Q2n-4K connected via USB to your laptop running StreamYard or your phone running YouTube Live is pretty close to what you're looking for, and the quality probably wouldn't be half bad.
Seems like that'd be easy enough for local bands and other small-scale events. Another commenter mentioned church services already doing this. But bigger acts want bigger production, and that typically requires multiple cameras and people operating those cameras and deciding which ones to switch between. Not to mention all the sound engineers and SFX operators who work on shows like that. But I think you're right that there's an untapped market for the local bands and stuff. Low production is probably better than nothing, and isn't good enough to detract from in-person ticket sales.
Small churches without a deep bench of technical skills have livestreamed all their stuff over the past year. Not always perfectly, but with enough ease, and it goes straight to YouTube.
Maybe for some acts, but for the most part I doubt it. Livestreaming really doesn't capture the experience of being at a concert at all, even with good production. For large acts or small. Lots of my favorite bands and festivals livestream their shows, often for free, and I would never consider that a substitute to actually going. Just something I would do if it's out of town or sold out or something and I didn't have much else to do. I can't imagine livestreaming productions improving to a point where that would change.
I think it's because all of those things individually are difficult, require expertise in different domains, and none of them are all that valuable on their own. The best information on this market space probably comes from camgirls, because it's basically the same problem. One of them probably has a blog post that contains an answer to your question.
My guess is that it's like photography: Having professional-grade equipment isn't enough to make a professional-grade picture. You also need professional-grade skills.
London meetup location has changed. It's been updated in the comments to the lesswrong event sign-up, and people who've signed up were emailed with the new location.
Apologies, was asleep. You've already found the details and sent out the correction now I'm back. I was being deliberately fuzzy in case there was a further change I wasn't aware of yet and you were, or because it was 3am. Thank you for announcing the change!
My initial reaction to this is "only a Sith deals in absolutes." Yes, it is technically true that allowing free speech to anyone who disagrees with you is "assisting the enemy" in a very broad and general sense, but politics is not a zero-sum game, and you can often profit more by allowing people to politely disagree with you than declaring war on every person who is to the left or right of the party line, because enforcing your chosen order has costs.
(Especially if what the correct order is is difficult or impossible to know, as is the case with religion.)
Given that he's a Nazi sympathizer, I imagine he relished the idea of paying those costs, but I don't think it's foolish or self-deluding for a liberal to say "we're going to set up as big a tent as possible so that we can get on with the business of building a society instead of stabbing each other over the precise details of transubstantiation."
(Not to say that the liberal order is perfect, infinitely tolerant, or immune to corruption. But it's definitely not *fake* either.)
Oh I think I'm reading Schmidt differently to you guys. He has many interesting observations about the law and who gets to be the judge etc.
But my fundamental worry is that I think he says you can have a polarised democracy or everyone agreeing all of the time and then you've done away with democracy, and that's what Hannah Arendt would call totalitarianism.
And everyone thinks if only we could be more "rational" or "Bayesian" then we could all just agree in everything. And then Carl Schmidt is lurking in the wings whispering, look here I have just the rational dictator you have been looking for.
The idea that free speech gives assistance to the enemy has been taken up by some people as following from Popper, although they misrepresent what he actually said about the "Paradox of Tolerance": https://twitter.com/TeaGeeGeePea/status/1367869888157646850
I remember many years a philosopher friend sent me a paper by Charlotte mouffe on Carl Schmidt. I thought he's a Nazi, how hard is this going to be to refute. Turns out I think far too highly of my own thinking skills.
Abbie, honey, are you going to be a doormat all your life? Dump that cheating mothersucker and get your life back! And don't listen to that Lauren strumpet, "oh Dr. Wale got my husband back for me" - yeah, right, she was the one having the affair with Dr. Wale in the first place!
Hello Abbie! I am in need of powerful magic. Some of my favorite blogs are being overrun with spam. Does DR. WALE have a powerful spell that will cause spammer's fingers to fall off?
Would you like to be charged with assault, kidnapping, and possibly rape? Because that's what getting your husband back by casting spells amounts to, if it actually worked.
I find this rather unsurprising, but quite interesting. There seem to be, roughly speaking, two "gothic clusters" spanning all kinds of culture (music, literature, painting, video games). One is the dystopian urban kind you're crosscutting (I guess I could add the Thief games to the list, which however veer into the second cluster). The other is the Tolkienesque mystic kind that covers much of folk/filk music, pastoral painting, fantasy literature and of course the vaguely medieval school of RPGs. These two clusters are interwoven much more closely than one might expect from their descriptions -- or at least there is a significant correlation between the fanbases. (Witness the presence of mechanical constructs in sword and sorcery RPGs and the popularity of electrogoth/folk crossover in Germany.)
Incidentally, I wasn't aware that LIMBO had a successor. GOG time!
So I've actually installed it yesterday and started it. Wow, this certainly does feel like a worthy successor to LIMBO. Not the sort of game that keeps me glued to the keyboard until I finish it (good, seeing how much I have on my plate right now), but something I'll keep coming back to again and again until it's over (I assume they have made it longer than LIMBO).
That's a very interesting question, and I wish we could data-mine Amazon customer ratings to get some cross-media data. There is the 2008 Netflix competition data, which is entirely movies, but would be useful for finding such sets. In fact you can just read the papers generated, or the archived competition forum, and look for examples of constructed features, and each of those features should describe such a set.
But a cautionary note on thinking in terms of sets: The most-interesting result to me of the Netflix competition is that human pre-processing of the data always made the results worse. For instance, many people found genre tags for the movies in the data, and added those human-given genre tags as data. But adding those genre tags to a good machine learning method always made the results worse instead of better. This was true even though the best ML method was just running PCA on the data (Simon Funk's algorithm [a pseudonym], a brilliant way to do PCA fast on sparse data that is now one of my favorite techniques), meaning the final prediction was just a sum of predictors on different (orthogonal) dimensions, possibly run thru a sigmoid function--which means that it wasn't very context-sensitive. That is, we can't say the computer did better than humans because it was able to take feature interactions into consideration; it didn't. [Even making the constructed dimensions orthogonal turned out not to help; non-orthogonal dimensions worked just as well or better if you had at least 30 of them.]
Apparently, once a machine reaches some threshold of competence at category judgement, human category judgement data is worse to it than noise. The human data correlates with the signal, so it's better than nothing if you have no ML; but in an irregular enough way that it can't be averaged out like noise, and so distorts the truer signal picked up by ML. At least, that's my guess.
PCA, rather than making binary yes/no category-membership decisions, computes a degree-of-membership function, which is the projection of each movie's data vector onto each principal component (dimension, feature) of the new basis space. (The new basis space is the set of vectors in M dimensions which PCA constructs and then uses to re-describe the data set instead of the data's original N dimensions, where M << N). I think that human binary decision-making is the problem; it throws away most of the data. So, whatever you do with your sets, don't use a boolean set-membership function.
If we set a computer with a big graphics card loose on the example you gave, it would quickly home in on the color palette, which is largely black, gray, white, red. But that's a very incomplete account of the set.
I'm also looking at cultural correlates, but across domains, like what preferences in art go with what kinds of religious beliefs. But I haven't got any quantified data other than text; and I haven't done anything with that yet. I think a computer would again quickly home in on the color palette; people who believe in spirits, do math in integers, and make Boolean category judgements, are more likely to like bright, bold, primary colors (plus gold; "shiny" is more salient to them), often without shading; while people who like machines and real numbers are more likely to prefer color gradations.
("Salient" might be the wrong word, but religious artists went to more expense to make things shiny. Also, spiritualists dislike brown, which is the "anti-primary" color--your brain's way of saying "I don't know what color this is.")
BTW, I noticed that all the colors I hallucinated seemed to be one of the 3 primary subtractive colors (cyan, magenta and yellow), or the 3 1:1 secondary combinations of those primaries, and maybe the 6 tertiary colors between one primary and one secondary, but I'm not sure about that.
If it's just those 6 primaries and secondaries, plus white and black, that means that these hallucinations are caused by something that stimulates cells corresponding to primary subtractive colors, where a single "pixel" in the visual field may have 0, 1, 2, or 3 of the primaries activated, all at the same intensity. Perhaps this "all at the same intensity" part is due to the stimulation being caused by large-scale brain waves.
But also, sometimes, while my eyes were closed, I'd "see" patterns with the different colors ringed around them, arrayed in discrete lines separated by emptiness, in a rainbow-like pattern, almost as if they'd been diffracted around it. That's puzzling, since no optics were involved.
Good question. I wasn't counting gray as a color, but I wondered if I should when I commented. I can't recall seeing "dingy" gray, but I think I could differentiate black things from black background, so I may have seen shades of black.
Gray and brown are both very uncommon in primitive and ancient art, except when made out of gray or brown materials.
I apologize for being pedantic, but red, green and blue are also very uncommon in primitive and ancient art, except when made out of red, green and blue materials.
While reading How The West Was Won on SSC (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-194-londonoxford-meetups) I thought: In what sense do egalitarian gender norms work better, and what is the evidence of that? Maybe it's a successfully-spreading meme, but so are infinity false religions. It seems to contribute to unsustainably-low levels of fertility in a lot of countries, and there doesn't seem to be any evidence that women are happier now than many decades ago when gender norms were less-egalitarian in the US -- surveys say the contrary.
Egalitarian gender norms are an adaptation to a contemporary capitalist society, just as, say, patriarchal gender norms were an adaptation to a then-contemporary feudal society. (In short, things changed. Patriarchal households tied to land were long phased out in favor of small, mobile nuclear families. Technology freed women from housework, most people from hard labor, and rising demand for white-collar and care work opened a lot of job opportunities for women. Society probably still needed the war - men going to fight, women replacing them as laborers, phasing out of domestic service - to give up the old entrenched norms. But once the floodgates were open, switching to the new local maximum was inevitable.)
You may be assuming and expecting some kind of linear march of progress rather than opportunistic adaptation here, but I don't think that was ever the point. The new norms are not supposed to be universally better, it's not important whether they work better for the individuals (well, it is important for the individuals, but their preferences are just one of many inputs to the system), and they'd not even be the first or the most pressing example of unsustainability in modern society (cough, climate, cough), nor the only cause for it (eg. when it comes to low fertility, at least urbanization and precarity seem to be more important culprits). From that point of view, the "evidence" for their superiority is simply tautological - they spread and supplanted earlier norms, QED.
Not only is there less housework to do, but lower child mortality means less pressure for women to produce large numbers of children.
Before ~1920, upper middle class women had servants to do the work. After ~1960, they had electric appliances instead. So there were only a few decades where they had a lot of work to do.
Not everyone is upper middle class.
I think you meant to link https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/25/how-the-west-was-won/
The article is only stating that the collection of values normally associated with "western society" are not inherently "western". So each "meme" as you call it, only needs to outcompete its absence/opposite in order to arise and spread across cultures and become a permanent fixture of the dominant western-culture-sphere, over the course of several centuries.
With medicine, literally "just working" to cure people is how scientific medicine outcompeted traditional/folk medicine.
Egalitarian gender norms need only "work" in the sense that they spread and maintain hold on societies more strongly than the "traditional" gender norms they replaced. As for why egalitarianism would spread and maintain hold - well, democracy spread, which gives various groups far more concrete power to push for and defend equal rights and stuff.
Since falling fertility rates haven't actually reduced them below replacement until long after "western culture" solidified into its current shape, it's not a factor in the rise of egalitarianism to its "fundamental part of western culture" status. Likewise, happiness surveys aren't really relevant to the formation of the western societal shape either - I imagine industrialization would have been quite miserable for the people manning the factories. (I won't get into my objections about trying to apply generation happiness surveys to women's equality movements instead of the myriad other technological/societal paradigm shifts occurring in the same decades and centuries, as well as the whole matter with the hedonic treadmill and I can't even find rich data that would say less-egalitarian generations were "happier" or "sadder".)
I'm interested in making a distinction between "superiority at spreading itself" and "superiority at producing utility". What is the evidence of the latter?
Some advice: that forum that is linked from the main page is for the hard right only, and the mods intend to keep it that way.
Seconding Friedman here: just proclaiming this kind of vagary without elaboration looks an awful lot like some kind of attempt at chucking a political bomb into a room and running.
What forum are you talking about?
Any recommendations for good and relevant discord discussion servers? The one linked to from this substack is run by pompous losers and has nothing to do with Scott or the blog.
I keep reading all these "principled stances" against getting vaccinated within this community, mainly on Data Secret Lox.. There's this new thing where they compare themselves to Muhammad Ali, because Ali took a principled stance against the Vietnam War.
I get that there are some anti-vaxxers ("niggers", according to their own sense of victimhood, going by the Muhammad Ali analogy) who are smart and have looked at stats and discovered that things aren't quite as cut and dry as the broadcast news presents it.
I don't think the typical anti-vaxxer is someone who understand stats and who has looked at the numbers. I think the typical one is more like Kyrie Irving of the Celtics, former Flat Earther, who never saw a conspiracy theory he didn't like.
If this great clip from Charles Barkley doesn't convince the Flat Earther/Anti-vaxxers, I don't know what will: https://twitter.com/JimmyTraina/status/1450627000234823681
I don't think anyone on DSL has compared themselves to Muhammad Ali, and I can't find any such instance in a general search or a thorough look through the main COVID-related threads. Perhaps you have a citation you'd like to share on that. But I'm very confident that no one on DSL has referred to themselves, or anyone else, using the N-word in this context. You are tilting at straw men, putting words in your opponents' mouths that you have chosen to make them look foolish or arrogant, and you should be ashamed to do that in any remotely rational discussion forum.
Also, with your snide little attack coming so soon after those of "JohnS" (no relation) and "Sleazy E", I can't help wondering if I'm not seeing the start of an attempt to divide the SSC diaspora into the Good and Virtuous Liberals of ACX and the Damn Dirty Conservatives of DSL and Discord. Please don't do that. I'm rather tired of having the few places I can feel at home and speak my mind be deliberately marginalized, or having myself made unwelcome in them or being insulted for participating in them. And I will probably react poorly to having that happen here. This is Scott's forum; if he wants to isolate it from DSL he can, and if he wants the denizens of DSL to stay away he need only ask. From him, I'll take that as a polite request. From you lot, I'll take it as an attack.
You have my reasons for posting the above backwards. First, my post which mentions DSL came before not after the others around it which you mention.
Second, my intention was to post about how "anti-vaxxers comparing themselves to Muhammad Ali is a growing meme within the anti-vax movement" after seeing the above-linked Charles Barkley clip in which he addresses the Ali comparison directly. The comparison started with anti-vaxxers hailing Kyrie Irving as a hero for refusing to get vaxxed even though the Brooklynn Nets won't let him play unless he does.
Then I remembered the Ali comparison is also being made by anti-vaxxers on DSL, although they don't bother to mention Kyrie Irving.
The payoff of my above post is the Charles Barkley clip. Watch it.
>Then I remembered the Ali comparison is also being made by anti-vaxxers on DSL
Name two.
The exchange I saw about it is on the thread "Oct 11 Links: Things Happen, in the World" on Oct 13, 10:29:37 pm.
One person is telling the other how they should refine the Ali paraphrase in their caption to make the "anti-vaxxer" analogy with "n-word" punchier.
You can argue it is only one person who is making the analogy in earnest while the other is merely offering editing advice. Perhaps my OP is unfair in making it sound like there's a bunch of anti-vaxxers on DSL who
are comparing themselves to Ali, when it is perhaps just one. (Note that nobody there challenges him in making the analogy, even though it appears as a caption on every comment he makes.)
My larger point is that comparing Kyrie Irving to Ali is highly memed on social media: https://twitter.com/brokentraditi0n/status/1448345956618022914
It would be an incredible coincidence if the Ali comparison on the DSL Covid Skeptic Thread (again, in the poster's caption) sprung into being independent of the Ali-Kyrie meme being shared by anti-vaxxers on social media.
I enjoyed watching Charles Barkley rip into how ludicrous it is for anyone to compare themselves to Ali.
My opinion of DSL is it has its Good, Bad and Ugly to it. I've participated on it plenty, not always constructively. I'm under a current self-ban because the abortion topic got me a bit heated, but I'll likely post there in the future at some point.
There are some posters there I dislike, not all of whom are right-wingers, but on the whole there's more I like than dislike. I do agree with John S that the mods are quicker to ban those on the left than those on the right. A simple explanation for that could be this: since the majority of DSL members are (seemingly) on the right, and since mods tend to only ban posts that have been reported, if people overall are more likely to report a post that they find politically or culturally disagreeable, but each member is unlikely to report posts at a high rate, then the mere fact of the right outnumbering the left means posts by those on the left are more likely to be reported.
I thought the last post which I got banned for, which happened to be a response to you, although I meant nothing personal in it, wasn't particularly fair. True, I used a significant amount of vulgar language and was clearly angry, but I also had a legitimate point to make and made it. It wasn't kind, but it was necessary and true. I was heated because, for one, the subject was whether abortion should be legal, which tends to be a fraught topic, and, yes, I felt beset by right-wing social conservatives who had many crass things to say about The Texas Abortion Ban in a strong tone of shadenfreude.
Sorry for my inability to write coherently. The sentence: "I thought the last post which I got banned for, which happened to be a response to you, although I meant nothing personal in it, wasn't particularly fair." should read "I thought the last banning I got wasn't particularly fair."
Correction: I said above that my last ban was a response to you, but I double checked and it turns out it was to someone else.
"I don't think anyone on DSL has compared themselves to Muhammad Ali, and I can't find any such instance in a general search or a thorough look through the main COVID-related threads."
One user there has a caption "No Taliban ever called me an anti-vaxxer", which is obviously an allusion to Ali's famous statement about the Viet Cong (can google "no viet cong ever called me").
DSL is what it is - 8chan where the users have college degrees. As an example, last week some posters were throwing around homophobic slurs like it was another day at the office.
This sounds an awful lot like the kind of out-of-context guilt by association that tarred SSC.
"which is obviously an allusion to Ali's famous statement about the Viet Cong"
Stealing a good line from someone isn't comparing himself to that someone. One of my most quoted lines is modeled on a line by Bertrand Russell. I wasn't comparing myself to Russell.
Thank you for making it clear that it was DSL you were slandering. Your initial statement about it was wildly false. Either you are deliberately lying or your own views are so biased that you consider any forum that permits people to say things that outrage you as being hard right.
David, I was a regular poster there until Scott opened this page, and I second @JohnS's characterization as hard right. (I don't know about 8chan, but that's because I'm too old/lame to know what the chans are(were?)) I peak in from time to time when things get slow over here, and it's certainly gone further in that direction since I was a regular. Probably a number of people like me left when this place opened.
Do you define "hard right" as permitting hard right speech, consisting mostly of hard right speech, or forbidding anything inconsistent with hard right speech? DSL fits the first definition but neither of the others.
Also, does the "hard" in hard right mean "views extreme enough to be held by only a small minority of people right of center" or do you have a much broader definition? I wouldn't, for example, describe someone opposed to legal abortion and gun control as "hard right" on that basis, but it's clearly a right of center position.
I think it seems like mostly, or at least the plurality. More than the views and whether or not they're hard right, for me, is the sneering contempt for the left that's frequently on display and never called out, at least by the mods, at least when I was there a lot.
@Cassander pushed back on me about this right before I left, saying that if I saw stuff like that I should report it. Thing is, I had *just* reported something along those line, and it was the left poster who was banned, not the right. If memory serves I called attention to that and my comment to him was that we couldn't report *him*, he was the moderator.*
Now, none of this is to say that there's anything wrong with any of that. I was (and am) happy to acknowledge Scott's right to his reign of terror and I'm happy to acknowledge @Cassander's right to his. These are their establishments, I'm a guest, and if I'm not happy with the atmosphere I can leave. I found DSL a congenial enough place to visit while Scott was dark, and I still visit from time to time. But I don't think there's any question that it's a rightwing place maintained and moderated by rightwing folks. I'm surprised to see you argue otherwise, to be honest.
*to close the circle, he said that I could and should report him if I thought he was out of line and the other mods would look, but that just seems silly to me
No, I don't generally lie, and there's no reason for me to do so. The vast majority of people on that board are rightwing, and there are extreme threads and doomposting about race and other social issues. It's an echo chamber, and the mods are constantly on the warpath against the few left-leaning posters there.
I can believe that you don't deliberately lie, but an alternative is that your definition of "hard right" covers almost everything that disagrees with current left of center orthodoxy. Let me test that:
Is anyone who believes that some of the m/f employment differences are due to innate differences, such as a tighter IQ distribution for women, hard right?
Is anyone who disapproves of attempts to cancel people for having at some point in the past said something now considered wrong to say hard right?
Is anyone who views the modern academic world as largely an ideological monoculture with considerable pressure on both students and faculty not to disagree with left of center orthodoxy hard right?
Is anybody who thinks climate change should not be expected to produce a catastrophe hard right?
I can probably think of more, but those should do it.
You're cherry-picking specific viewpoints. I've seen posters in there advocating for laws against sodomy, most are anti-choice, explain away 1/6 with whataboutisms, try to leverage HBD (dubiously) on policy proposals, and make other posts that clearly identify their rightist tendencies. And my original post was a warning (emphasis) that those are the kind of views that are generally allowed there, not that they should be illegal or anything.
> Is anyone who disapproves of attempts to cancel people for having at some point in the past said something now considered wrong to say hard right?
That forum is as "cancel culture" as it gets, as far as their banning policies. #irony The right would be cancelling anyone they could if given the chance, as another poster pointed out with examples.
> Is anyone who views the modern academic world as largely an ideological monoculture with considerable pressure on both students and faculty not to disagree with left of center orthodoxy hard right?
Making the assumption that the "monoculture" extends across all personnel and disciplines is unrealistic, and is probably driven by anecdata. Those on the right would be significantly more likely to hold this view than others, though I see plenty of centrists who are critical of speech codes/etc in universities, i.e. milder and more rational expressions of the sentiment.
> Is anybody who thinks climate change should not be expected to produce a catastrophe hard right?
Just looking around, there does seem to be greater resistance (in polls) among republicans to climate change policy. If anyone thinks that CC won't eventually affect and produce new migration patterns, they've got their head in the sand, imo.
I think taking evidence from that board is bound to produce outliers, tbh. Most of the posters are extreme, and they tend to influence one another.
Can you define what you mean by "extreme"? Many posters on DSL are skeptical of current orthodoxies, in particular things like cancellation. Does that qualify?
"I ain't got no quarrel with them coronaviruses" won't work, since (unlike the Viet Cong) the coronaviruses are in your neighborhood.
I'm vaccinated and pro vaccines in general but I'm also against forcing others into vaccination regardless of their reasoning. I don't think it has to be a purely probability or stats based reason. It is simply enough for me that I value personal agency about one's own body above the collective. There are also confounding problems with requiring or mandating vaccination since some people will choose not to be vaccinated because they are wary of anything that is being forced upon them. Is that strictly rational? Nope. But that doesn't mean I believe I have the right to force a vaccination for someone. Generally I find that the approach of sharing why I am vaccinated is a better place to start a conversation with someone who is not vaccinated.
There are a number of different criticisms of the vaccine mandates by different people on different bases. The simplest is that, on the best available (Israeli) evidence, previous infection provides more protection than vaccination, hence there is no justification for requiring someone previously infected to be vaccinated.
Beyond that, the effect of vaccination on death rates is clear, on infection rates is not. We have just been discussing, and in various ways criticizing, an article that found no relation between vaccination rates and infection rates in cross county or international data. That's a puzzle. One possible explanation is that the protection provided by vaccination after a few months is weak enough to be balanced by the fact that people are less cautious after they have been vaccinated, resulting in little effect on infection rate. I don't know if that explanation is true, but there is clearly a puzzle, and its solution is relevant to whether vaccine mandates are justified on other than paternalistic grounds.
The counterargument is along the lines of:
1. (in specific) COVID isn't as deadly as Typhoid (Disclaimer: I don't personally know whether or not this is true) and refusing to get vaccinated isn't the same as being an asymptomatic carrier- you're essentially making a slippery-slope argument here.
2. (in general) Caving to this violation of personal freedom and choice creates a dangerous precedent that the government can assume control over our own bodies in the name of public health, which has the potential to be abused. You can argue this is ALSO a slippery-slope argument, given the already-extant vaccine mandates, but this is the argument I frequently see.
I think it could be summarized by saying "always err on the side of not forcing people to do something." That does leave situations where we need to discuss particulars, like rates of infection, severity of the disease/sickness, and so on.
Typhoid Mary can and should be fired from her kitchen job. She was apparently unwilling to clean herself in any way, despite multiple attempts to ask her to do so and the fact that she was a cook, directly touching people's food. I'm not a fan of locking her away for the rest of her life, but despite being told repeatedly that she was infecting people with a deadly disease, she continued to do so without taking any precautions or informing her employers of the issue. I'm pretty sure she would run into several laws that would result in significant jail time based on at least indifference to the harm she was causing, and quite possibly intentional inflection of harm. Firing her is the better approach, or even barring her from working in certain industries - food service being her preferred job and obviously a problem.
A general mandate on penalty of being barred from society, to everyone, is asking too much. A specific mandate for specific reasons - as you say, medical personnel, makes a lot more sense.
Even within that, I think that there should be room for discussion about the specific efficacy of what's being required. Otherwise we could end up in a situation where a very small benefit is mandated even if it has fairly large complications. Right now, it looks like the vaccine is more likely to cause health complications in small children (5-11) than it is to reduce COVID problems in their age group. That is almost entirely because children in that age group have extremely low risk from COVID, which means the very small risk of complications from the vaccine are comparable and probably greater than what's trying to be avoided by using the vaccine in the first place. For that reason, I am completely against mandated vaccines for small children, and anyone who thinks we should be forcing it are flat out wrong to do so. Similarly, young adults who are not vaccinated are less likely to get sick or spread the disease than older adults who are vaccinated. I get why that may be a tricky thing to navigate, but there's a lot to be said for not forcing a 20-year-old in a non-medical field to get vaccinated. I am especially unsympathetic to the group who would also refuse to accept previous infection as an alternative (yes, I do understand that proof and documentation may be more difficult, but we're talking about forcing someone to undergo medical treatment they don't want to get, that's a very high bar for me).
On their website, Harvard brags about having a 98% graduation rate. This means that a Harvard acceptance letter signals an at least 98% chance of having whatever intellectual qualities are signaled by a Harvard diploma (I suppose it also signals being able to fund a Harvard education, I have no idea how many people turn down an acceptance letter for lack of tuition money). Under the signaling theory of education, does it represent a market failure that acceptance letters are not treated as nearly equivalent to degrees?
I'm surprised that as little as 2% fail to graduate, just for medical reasons. This is just an estimate though. Any thoughts about the proportion likely to resign because of illness or injury?
I guess it depends what we think the degree is signalling. If what it's supposed to signal is having learned a bunch of stuff, or having made a bunch of professional and social connections, or just have been willing to work hard at doing what you're told for four years, the acceptance letter wouldn't signal any of those I think.
With a 98% graduation rate, the letter absolutely does signal willingness to work hard; I agree that it doesn't imply the subject matter knowledge or, more importantly, the social network that 4 years at Harvard gives you. (More important because the subject matter knowledge gained at Harvard isn't much different from that at any number of less prestigious universities, implying that the premium of a Harvard degree relates to the thing it is uniquely good at, the network.)
Whether a 98% graduation rate signals willingness to work hard depends on whether you have to work hard to graduate. My guess is that the logic goes the other way around. If the graduation rate is 98% that means you don't have to be willing to work hard to graduate, because it is very unlikely that their selection mechanism is so good that no more than 2% of the students either are or at some point become unwilling to work hard.
I graduated and didn't work hard, with the exception of one or two classes, and I think they were ones I could have avoided if necessary. But that was a long time ago.
To clarify, did you graduate from Harvard?
Yes. In 1965.
I would like to see the exact claim about their graduation rate. 98% seems particularly high, if we're measuring the number of people who attended in the first year, and subsequently graduated. 98% seems more in line with the number of people who got passing grades on their final year courses. Of course, if you don't intend to pass the final year, you might as well drop out early. So it would be natural that only 2% of people in the final year would fail. If this is correct, then a harvard degree still has high signalling value, over a mere acceptance letter. First because it shows that you are able to stick to something for 4 years, what is important to employers. Second, because many people who dropped out did so because they wouldn't have been able to graduate had they tried.
I did a little poking around online, and it sound like they're using the standard "graduation rate" metric: the percentage of "first time, first year" freshmen who graduate within six years of matriculation to a four-year program.
The standard explanation is that Harvard aggressively selects both on the basis of academic preparedness and aptitude and on the basis of strong signals that the applicant has a aggressively overachieving temperament. Even so, 98% seems startlingly high: over the course of 4-6 years, I'd expect more than 2% of even the most rigorously vetted student body to drop out for various reasons (health crisis, sudden change in financial or family situation, deciding to drop out to found Microsoft, etc).
I suspect it also involves a certain amount of willingness to compromise on Harvard's part - generous leave policies, accepting transfer credits when necessary, etc.
Just a note that we are having a realspace South Bay SSC/ACX/DSL meetup this Sunday. We had them pretty regularly before the pandemic, then stopped, then had one a few months ago, then stopped because infection rates were going up. They have now come down, to about a third of their peak in Santa Clara County, so we decided to do another one. For details:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/SSC%20Meetups%20announcement.html
Surprisal party: a party where you invite someone over and everyone tries to keep them slightly on edge, so that they continually don't know what to expect.
Could invite a ‘blanket party’ in retaliation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanket_party
If Elon Musk turned $10 billion worth of his Tesla shares into U.S. dollars, and then he secretly burned all the money and never told anyone about it, what effect would his action have on the economy and on the dollar's value?
Very similar question: what happens when someone has money they never spend? Say a billionaire just never spends most of their money. How does this affect the economy? Does it make other people poorer because they're hoarding the money? Does it make other people richer through deflation?
In general, billionaires have enormous amounts of assets but relatively little actual money. So it depends what you mean by "never spends most of their money".
If it means they keep reinvesting profits in their businesses, it makes the businesses' other shareholders, employees, and suppliers better off, and in most cases it makes the customers better off as well. There are also second-order effects, both positive and negative, but in a well functioning market it should be net positive unless there are large uncontrolled externalities (pollution, etc) tipping the scale.
For a billionaire to instead cash out and buy massive yachts and other consumption assets would be a boon to the luxury shipbuilding industry and its employees and suppliers, but would bid productive capacity away from building consumption or capital goods for others, and sould be a net negative relative to reinvesting because reinvesting expands the total ability of the economy to produce goods and services while consumption does not.
If you mean the billionaire let's the productive capacity underlying their assets stand idle, then that's a substantial loss to the rest of society, because less productive capacity in use means less can be produced.
If you mean they suddenly sell all their assets, build a big pile of cash, and swim in it like Scrooge McDuck, then that's probably going to be a net negative in the short term. The sell-off would bid down asset prices in general, discouraging investment and crowding out investment in new production. In the long run, the deflationary effects would mitigate most of the negatives. The final cost would probably be about the cost of printing the money in the pile (about 5 cents per bill, IIRC) as consumption spending, plus the second-order effects of the short-term disruption from the sell-off.
https://live.staticflickr.com/8008/7412969740_453a9c7a7e_b.jpg
"No man is poor who can do what he likes to do once in a while! And I like to dive around in my money like a porpoise! And burrow through it like a gopher! And Toss it up and let it hit me on the head!" -S. McDuck
Richer through deflation. The person earned those dollars through providing goods and services (or someone did at some point in the past). They are now voluntarily destroying the chance to redeem those dollars for goods and services. They basically did the work/provided the service to earn the money for free.
Hoarding money an only make people poorer through opportunity costs. That is, the only way someone having a billion dollars stuffed under their mattress makes you poorer is through the fact the money could be better deployed. Unless we're in some extreme scenario where the person is a terrorist whose blown up the US government's ability to print new bills and hoarded literally all the dollars in a cave.
Money needs to flow through or be invested the economy to make the economy work. If we all saved to the best of our ability then the economy would retract or collapse, and in fact overall savings might decline. This is the paradox of thrift.
A Keynesian I see. You're arguing to the extreme. An extreme I specifically mentioned. If everyone in the world saved 100% of their money, sure. If one specific person burned a billion dollars it would be different in two ways. Firstly, it wouldn't be anywhere near all the money in circulation. Secondly, they wouldn't be saving it to spend later but would actually be deflating the currency by removing even the future ability to spend.
Basically, the person is destroying their own ability to consume. This is suboptimal since investing it would be better. But it wouldn't actually make you poorer other than the sense that society as a whole gets richer when wealth is gained by anyone. It'd make you richer by increasing the value of your dollars, if slightly. Unless that's your point: I'm assuming we see dollars as a slightly depreciating asset but you could argue we should instead be discounting from the stock market rate.
I’m not anything. Most economics is ideological, the worst being libertarianism or Austrian. It’s all a cargo cult. Nor is the paradox of thrift (one of the few things that’s true and obvious).
However it’s pretty clear to me that one man’s consumption is another man’s income.
That statement itself implies you'r is ideological, though no more or less ideological than an Austrian. (Libertarianism isn't an economic system to begin with.)
What do you think about Says Law then?
Since you think stimulating consumption is the main driver of economic growth, can you imagine a hypothetical economy where consumption is minimized in exchange for high investment and most people are employed on that basis? (As has actually happened.)
It makes people poorer. Money is like manure, its only good if you spread it around
There are currently about $2,000 billion worth of physical US dollars in circulation. Assuming nobody noticed Elon's money-bonfire, and assuming the banking industry is running as close to the reserve-ratio limit as it feels comfortable so the supply of higher-order money (M1, M2, and M3) is reduced proportionately, the gross fiscal result would be 0.5% deflation over the dollar economy.
If so, that's *probably* enough to be noticed over normal inflationary noise, meaning the Treasury prints an extra $10 billion in cash next year, sells it to bankers who have noticed and are hurting from the shortage, and collects $10G in seigniorage for the US government. Which reduces the US national debt by a whopping 0.037%
Meanwhile, the bit where Elon sells $10 billion in TSLA will *definitely* be noticed, and will probably cause a lot of people to reason, "Elon is dumping Tesla - he must know something we don't!", and then go watch the last act of "Trading Places" to see how much fun that would be.
Gotta get some of those FCOJ futures
The destruction of the money would mean very little. The government controls how many dollars are in the economy, so if you destroy enough dollars to make a difference, they'll just make more.
My (probably oversimplified) understanding is that burning $10B is roughly equivalent to voluntarily paying an extra $10B in taxes.
It's roughly equivalent if the government notices the plume of money-smoke and prints another $10B to compensate. If they never notice or never print replacement money, it's very roughly equivalent to a ~$10B gift to everyone on Earth in proportion to how many US dollars they have at the time.
Imagine two governments. Government A collects taxes, literal green paper, which it puts in literal buckets, and then uses the money it has collected to spend on fiscal outlays.
Government B claims to be following the system, but after they collect the taxes, they go burn them in secret, print an equal amount of new money, and spend the newly printed money.
I fail to see any meaningful distinction between how those two systems work in practice, so I would guess that in the grand scheme of things you're right. However, if you had a government that spend it "tax" dollars on one set of priorities, and its "print" dollars on another set for some arbitrary reason, then I could imagine a scenario where, due to the governments own methods for allocating money.
For example, if a government spend most of its "tax revenues" on, say, redistributing wealth to lower-income people, but spend most of its "money printing" revenues on just sort of goosing the banking system, I could imagine that you'd have very different effects between destroying money and paying taxes. Those effects wouldn't come from any fundamental difference between taxation and money destruction -- they would be an artifact of the government's arbitrary spending choices.
I think the effect would not be due to the destruction of the money, as such, but rather knock-on effects from Musk dumping $10 billion worth of shares onto the market. Some people would panic over "does this mean Tesla, etc. are all going bust?" and there would be more panic selling. Some people would take the opportunity to buy up all the now-cheaper shares, expecting the panic to be short-lived and the real value to bounce back. Lots of speculation over possible factory closures, job losses, etc.
As to "burning a whole stack of money", the KLF/K Foundation did this back in 1994:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Foundation_Burn_a_Million_Quid
Okay, talking of The KLF is making me all nostalgic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XP5oHL3zBDg&t=1s
The sixth IPCC report is now out. I have looked over all of it and read some bits of interest to me.
One issue that has been discussed here is drought. The fourth report claimed that climate change was increasing it, the fifth retracted that claim. The sixth has a nice map dividing the world into forty-five regions. In fifteen of them, it shows drought increasing, in one decreasing. In only two of the fifteen does it show moderate confidence of human contribution to the increase.
So at the moment, if you accept what that map shows, the claim that climate change has increased drought is true but not very true, supported for two out of forty-five regions. One of the two is the western North America, where many of us live.
There is, however, a serious problem with the report. They are defining drought by soil moisture. But one of the effects of increased CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, mentioned in the report, is a decreased need of plants for water. If the amount of water in the soil decreases by ten percent and the amount of water needed by the plants by twenty percent drought has increased by their definition, decreased by the measure relevant to us — how well plants grow.
The report does not provide the information that would be needed to redraw the map defining drought by plant growth instead of soil moisture, but it does report, with strong confidence, that over the past two or three decades global plant growth has increased. That suggests that average drought has decreased, the opposite of what the IPCC report shows.
> If the amount of water in the soil decreases by ten percent and the amount of water needed by the plants by twenty percent
OK, so I was going to write an annoyed (and annoying) response that you just gave some hypothetical numbers instead of looking for the real values. But then I tried looking for the real values and it’s annoyingly hard to find any clear numbers, so please accept my counter-factual apology.
It’s ridiculous, I just read an entire meta-analysis about the effect of enhanced CO2 concentrations to plant’s drought response, that managed to *never* mention *how much* those concentrations were enhanced.
(To be fair, they talked in terms of effect sizes, which I guess would be appropriate to compare different kinds of experiments, since it’s a meta-analysis after all. But they *did* use percentages to about how much water was removed, so I’m still angry at them.)
That said, what number I saw in a few studies seemed to be about doubling CO2 concentrations. And IIUC, the current CO2 concentration increase (relative to pre-industrial times) is about an order of magnitude lower.
But now that I think about it, even if your thought-experiment numbers happened to be the right ones, I’m not sure your criticism is fair. If the soil was half as humid (or ten times less humid) in an area for a long time, it doesn’t seem wrong to say “there’s a drought”, even if there plants grow more for any other reason.
I agree that just “counting droughts” is not the only thing we need to decide if climate is getting better or worse, but their definition of “drought” doesn’t seem unreasonable, even if there are other reasonable definitions, and it does seem relevant, even if other definitions might be relevant as well.
+1 on your overall comment. DF hypothetically has a point depending on what the numbers are *but* one does need actual numbers for the argument to be relevant. Alas I haven't seen any estimates for these numbers either. (Then again, drought was never my main concern re: AGW).
> I just read an entire meta-analysis about the effect of enhanced CO2 concentrations to plant’s drought response, that managed to *never* mention *how much* those concentrations were enhanced.
Maybe because "everyone knows" you just look at the Keeling Curve or the Law Dome CO2 data. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ghgs-lawdome-2000yr-CO2-asof2010.svg (Or "historical CO2 levels" in Google images & pick the shortest time frame)
> the current CO2 concentration increase (relative to pre-industrial times) is about an order of magnitude lower.
Pre-industrial CO2 is about 280ppm and we're at 415ppm. So actually we're almost halfway to doubling CO2 on a linear scale — more if you add effects of methane etc., or if you use a logarithmic scale; it's fair to do both of those, just don't forget to subtract the effects of anthropogenic aerosols and adjust for land-use changes ;).
> even if there plants grow more for any other reason.
Sorry, bad phrasing there. I meant something like “even if plants there grow more for other reasons, like CO2 concentrations rising”.
In other words, just because plants grow more because CO2 is rising (or because of extra fertilizer, or changing which plants grow where, or genetic engineering, or shining more light on them using orbital mirrors or whatever) doesn’t have anything to do with *drought*.
> There is, however, a serious problem with the report. They are defining drought by soil moisture.
You dropped a few adjectives. The map on page 12 specifically and explicitly deals with "agricultural and ecological drought", with the former being heavily driven by soil moisture. Chapter 8 might have more of what you're looking for, but for a start here's the simple version from the glossary of terms:
> Drought:
A period of abnormally dry weather long enough to cause a serious hydrological imbalance. Drought is a relative term (see Box 3-3), therefore any discussion in terms of precipitation deficit must refer to the particular precipitation-related activity that is under discussion. For example, shortage of precipitation during the growing season impinges on crop production or ecosystem function in general (due to soil moisture drought, also termed agricultural drought), and during the runoff and percolation season primarily affects water supplies (hydrological drought). Storage changes in soil moisture and groundwater are also affected by increases in actual evapotranspiration in addition to reductions in precipitation. A period with an abnormal precipitation deficit is defined as a meteorological drought. A megadrought is a very lengthy and pervasive drought, lasting much longer than normal, usually a decade or more.
And here's Figure 8.6 snipped for convenience:
https://imgur.com/a/a1P76I4
The figure you posted is from the main report, every page of which has: "Do Not Cite, Quote or Distribute." The map I have posted (elsewhere) is from the summary for policy makers, which does not have that restriction.
I am not sure what your point is. As I said, on that map they were defining drought by soil moisture. It is true that less soil moisture, below some point, leads to less crop production, all else held equal.
But all else is not held equal, because CO2 concentration is increasing and it is well established that that reduces the water requirements for plants. Did you find anything in the report which included that in their conclusions about drought? I didn't. Do you agree that it has to be included if drought is to provide the information we want to know if crops or other plants will grow badly? Do you disagree with my conclusion that the map overstates drought, considered in terms of effect on plants, by its choice of definition?
I didn't suggest that they were misrepresenting drought by their definition but that their definition was the wrong one for their purposes for a reason they should have been aware of, since the reduction in water use is discussed in a slightly different context elsewhere in the full report.
> As I said, on that map they were defining drought by soil moisture.
And as I said, that is a misleading erasure of specificity. They are explicitly discussing *agricultural and ecological drought* - it's in bold for Christ's sake, and the discussion reiterates "this type of drought" - which incorporate soil moisture, water balance, and certain atmospheric criteria. More details are available in Chapter 8; FAQ 8.3 on page 8-121 might be a good start.
> But all else is not held equal, because CO2 concentration is increasing and it is well established that that reduces the water requirements for plants. Did you find anything in the report which included that in their conclusions about drought? I didn't.
Look at the upper-right corner of the figure I linked. Yes, it's safe to say it comes up.
>Do you agree that it has to be included if drought is to provide the information we want to know if crops or other plants will grow badly? Do you disagree with my conclusion that the map overstates drought, considered in terms of effect on plants, by its choice of definition?
>I didn't suggest that they were misrepresenting drought by their definition but that their definition was the wrong one for their purposes for a reason they should have been aware of, since the reduction in water use is discussed in a slightly different context elsewhere in the full report.
Drought isn't about plants. It's about water. Even agricultural drought is about how agriculture interact with hydrology, rather than fixating on plants themselves as the end metric. There are any number of climatic impacts that affect plant growth, and it is not the responsibility of any particular measure to give you the combination you desire. "[M]y conclusion that the map overstates drought, considered in terms of effect on plants, by its choice of definition" isn't a meaningful critique.
>The figure you posted is from the main report, every page of which has: "Do Not Cite, Quote or Distribute." The map I have posted (elsewhere) is from the summary for policy makers, which does not have that restriction.
"The report is better and interesting, but it's almost 4000 pages, so as a practical matter you glance over most of it and read bits of particular interest to you." You did pick this topic for discussion because it is of particular interest to you, yes? If you were first confining yourself to the 41-page policymaker summary, you have an odd way of making that clear.
“They are explicitly discussing *agricultural and ecological drought*”
Yes. And the argument I am making is about how one ought to define agricultural and ecological drought — by the effect on plants not by the amount of water in the soil. The latter is used as a proxy for the former and I have pointed out why, by itself, it is a poor proxy.
“Look at the upper-right corner of the figure I linked. Yes, it's safe to say it comes up.”
It comes up as something that affects plant growth and water efficiency. I already said that they recognized the effect in the report. On the figure that feeds into evapotransportation which affects soil moisture — using less water leaves more in the soil. Nowhere on that figure is there any suggestion that, because CO2 increases water efficiency, plants can grow in less moist soil, hence the definition of agricultural drought ought to take account of that effect.
Are you claiming that either that figure or something else in the report does make that point, or are you disagreeing with the claim that greater water use efficiency means a plant can grow in less moist soil?
You disagree with my claim that agricultural and ecological drought ought to be defined by the effect on plants. The report is supposed to be telling people things that matter to them. We don’t eat soil moisture, nor do other animals.
Two possibilities:
1. It did not occur to the authors of the Summary that the need of plants for water was relevant to drought in the sense important for agriculture and ecology. That seems unlikely, since the report mentions the effect of CO2 on water efficiency, but not impossible.
2. It did occur to them and they chose to use a definition of drought which they knew would overstate it so far as what mattered to people in order to make the effects of climate change look worse than their models implied. That would fit other features of the Summary.
“If you were first confining yourself to the 41-page policymaker summary, you have an odd way of making that clear.”
I was not confining myself to the summary, I was avoiding actual quotes from the rest of the report after noticing that the report said not to do them. You either did not notice or chose to ignore the restriction. I have webbed the drought map on my blog and FB because it was in the summary, have not webbed things from the rest of the report, merely commented on them.
> And the argument I am making is about how one ought to define agricultural and ecological drought — by the effect on plants not by the amount of water in the soil.
I find your argument thoroughly unconvincing, and any proposition that takes it as a given can be dismissed out of hand. That's going to result in me eliding a few lines of your comment, but if you think there is a part I ought to revisit feel free to let me know and I can give it more attention.
>The latter is used as a proxy for the former and I have pointed out why, by itself, it is a poor proxy.
Its use as a "proxy" is downstream of the data as presented, which is properly taken as a single influencing factor. Your assertion that it is "poor" appears to begin and end with the fact that it does not already incorporate your preferred *other* influencing factor - while explicitly refusing to quantify said influence, mind. This might be understandable if you thought soil moisture and atmospheric CO2 were literally the only two ecological factors influencing plant growth, but we'll get to that in a moment.
> The report is supposed to be telling people things that matter to them. We don’t eat soil moisture, nor do other animals.
Dismissible out of hand on the substance as per above, but I do want to call out how indefensible the "nor other animals" bit is as a rhetorical flourish. Including it while ignoring that *plants* do indeed eat soil moisture seems to imply either that humans don't eat plants or - my preferred read - that you think the report ought to be prepared as though it will be read by non-human animals. It's a cute image, to be sure.
> Two possibilities:
Nice false dichotomy. Here's mine:
1. It did not occur to you that the influence of anthropogenic aerosols on sunlight was relevant to drought in the sense important for agriculture and ecology. That seems unlikely, since Scott specifically brought up global dimming in a post on climate change less than a week before your root comment, but not impossible.
2. It did occur to you and you chose a definition of drought which you knew would overlook the exclusion in order to make a narrow definition look worse than a full examination of the models would imply. That would fit other features of your comments.
The obvious resolution is that, while not denying their impact on the relevant policymaker goals†, aerosols were not relevant to the specific metric you wanted to discuss. I'll leave the extrapolation to a similar dichotomy as an exercise for the reader.
† They're discussed a few times in the Summary and extensively in Chapter █ of the IPCC report, for the interested.
> You either did not notice or chose to ignore the restriction.
Certainly, I chose to ignore it much as I would be perfectly comfortable citing research preprints when not doing formal work. Do you hold that the proper ethical line here is that it is fine to direct people to read the additional chapters, but one is obligated to ignore their specific contents when discussing the report? Does that even extend to tables and figures that bear the same label, but are explicitly referenced in the text of the Summary itself?
If so: I'll be happy to give you my email address if you please CC me on your message to the IPCC informing them that they were forbidden by order of the IPCC from citing or distributing the IPCC report in the IPCC Summary on the IPCC website.
" Do you hold that the proper ethical line here is that it is fine to direct people to read the additional chapters, but one is obligated to ignore their specific contents when discussing the report?"
I think it is courteous not to quote text whose authors have asked you not to quote it.
It did not occur to me that sunlight dimming was relevant, and I do not know whether it is important enough so that it should have been included. Perhaps it is. I think there is a serious problem with an approach that shows many areas of increasing drought, only one of decreasing, for a period over which global plant growth was increasing.
Apparently you do not.
Plants are important to us primarily because they feed both us and other animals, some of which we eat or make use of in other ways. People worry about drought not because they are afraid the ground will be too dry under them but because they are afraid crops won't grow. It is deceptive to tell people "drought is increasing" when, so far as you know, the ability of the environment to support plant growth is increasing.
I have not read an IPCC report. Is it worth the effort to make the attempt?
I have heard that the "Summary for Policymakers" is typically more sensationalist than would be suggested by the research which makes up the bulk of the report. Can you comment?
My take is that the SPM accurately reflects the findings of the rest of the report, which accurately reflects the scientific research. But there is an entire side of the political spectrum devoted to slogans like "IPCC Is Alarmist". Given that the consensus of humans-causing-global-warming is "only" 88%-97% (https://dpiepgrass.medium.com/scrutinizing-the-consensus-numbers-70faf9200a0c), and given that over 100,000 scientific papers have been written on climate change, the absolute number of peer-reviewed papers opposed to the consensus is quite large, more than enough for a persuasive Small-World Fallacy (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/StxoR4EqAYB3duRjK/trust-and-the-small-world-fallacy).
I think the summary tries to present information in ways that make climate change seem scary. They tell you that the proportion of level 4 and level 5 Tropical cyclones (aka hurricanes) is increasing, don't tell you (but the report does) that the total number of tropical cyclones is projected to decrease. The proportion of high end ones is increasing because there will be fewer low end ones. The models are ambiguous as to whether the number of high end cyclones is increasing a little, decreasing a little, or staying about the same.
The report is better and interesting, but it's almost 4000 pages, so as a practical matter you glance over most of it and read bits of particular interest to you.
The timing matters. If there's less rain for an extended period before there's enough added CO2 to reduce plants' need for water, there's a problem.
They are describing the current drought level. The CO2 is already there — that is presumably why the planet has greened.
I find your views on climate change very interesting and very different to mine. Do you only comment here, or do you have a blog where I can read in more detail?
I have a blog. One of the things I have commented on over the years is climate, but there are many others. The blog, Ideas, is: http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/
You can use the search window at the top left to search for terms such as "climate" or "warming." My basic view is that climate change has positive and negative effects and we do not know whether the net is positive or negative. That was also my view of population growth about fifty years ago, when it occupied the same cultural niche, the ongoing catastrophe that something drastic had to be done about, that climate change occupies now.
Cheers. I've been reading your comments over the last couple of open threads. It's a viewpoint I've never seen before, but you seem to have the arguments to back it up.
> does report, with strong confidence, that over the past two or three decades global plant growth has increased. That suggests that average drought has decreased, the opposite of what the IPCC report shows
It does not necessarily is so simple
1) it is possible that plan growth is fueled by nonrenewable water - for example melting glaciers can provide temporary increase of water amount. We continue to pump water out of aquifers, at scale far larger than replenishment.
2) Dams store massive amount of water, to the point that large scale dam building projects are taken in consideration when modelling sea level. And for example Lake Mead has very low water levels, failing for a long time. Large reservoirs used for irrigation can cushion such drought and delay effects.
3) It is entirely possible that some areas are greener (say, plants instead of glacier) while total drought area increases
4) plan type could change despite drought (say, forest instead of wetland)
"If the amount of water in the soil decreases by ten percent and the amount of water needed by the plants by twenty percent"
Sure, but are those close to the correct numbers? It would seem that the effect could be large enough to offset this particular effect of reduced soil moisture, or it might not be. The conclusion we draw depends heavily on whether this is in fact the case, and not at all on whether it plausibly could be given certain assumptions.
I don't see how global plant growth increasing necessarily suggests that average drought has decreased. Drought is a local phenomenon, and it's perfectly possible for drought to be increasing in some areas while plant growth increases substantially in others. As with the first point, we can't draw a conclusion without knowing the actual number.
One might also wonder if drought has any other important local consequences unrelated to global plant growth, e.g. on fish or other aquatic life, on dams and reservoirs, hydropower, and so on.
At best, one might be able to conclude that decreased rainfall or increased evaporation in certain areas is offset to some degree by reduced moisture requirements in plants, with no apparent certainty about the degree, and no apparent effect on any other systems affected by soil moisture or the upstream causes of reduced soil moisture.
"Sure, but are those close to the correct numbers?"
I don't know. My point was to show why what the IPCC was doing gave the wrong answer, not what the right answer is.
They are defining drought by soil moisture, not dam level or streamflow or ... . The only relevance of that that I can see is for plant growth. I note as a definition of drought:
1 : a period of dryness especially when prolonged
specifically : one that causes extensive damage to crops or prevents their successful growth
I agree that we don't know for sure whether drought is increasing or decreasing. But the IPCC shows increasing in fifteen regions, decreasing in one. If that is correct, one would expect global vegetation to be declining, although one can, as you say, imagine circumstances in which it wasn't.
Do you disagree with the claim that if global vegetation has been increasing for the past twenty or thirty years that is evidence — not proof, but evidence — that drought has on the average been declining? Do you disagree with the claim that what the IPCC is measuring does not tell us where drought is increasing or decreasing, if drought is defined by its effect on plant growth?
I think the focus on crops misses some of the picture - for the record, my preferred source of English definitions (wiktionary) makes no reference to crops. There are large areas of California where crops are not grown, but drought is increasing (as measured by rainfall vs historical norms), which has the substantial negative effect of increased wildfire risk.
I'm not your interlocutor, but I would agree that increase in vegetation growth is, as you say, evidence but not proof that globally drought may be declining. However, I would say it's weak evidence. From my perspective, drought should be relatively simple to measure, ie, rainfall vs historical average, and both soil moisture content and global vegetation growth are simply lagging indicators.
The IPCC isn't measuring drought by rainfall, which is expected to increase with climate change, with more heavy rains, but by soil moisture. I can't see why that would be important other than the effect on plants, including both crop yield and vulnerability to fire. Why do you want to use a definition of drought that isn't relevant to us instead of one that is?
I had the impression that “drought” means a general lack of humidity, not of rainfall. For example, it doesn’t sound right to me to say that a swamp is experiencing drought as long as it doesn’t get any less wet, even if there is no rain at all for decades.
It doesn’t even need to be a swamp: if a large area is lush with life due to plentiful water (maybe there are springs, or it’s a river delta or something), and the humidity does not decrease over time, I don’t think I’d ask about rainfall before deciding it not suffering drought.
Conversely, if rainfall did not decrease in an area, but the humidity available for life reduced a lot (maybe the flow of a river reduced a lot), then I might call it a drought.
I’m not a native English speaker, so I’m only halfheartedly contradicting you, but looking at a couple of sources they seem to agree that rainfall is not the central element of droughts, but something like “is life negatively affected by less water than usual for the area”.
Any criticisms of this gravity-based desalination system? Why isn't the design widely used?
https://www.elementalwatermakers.com/solutions/solar-desalination-gravity/
What is the point?
"We developed the world’s first solar powered reverse osmosis without batteries. The best thing: it works 24 hours a day."
Why those qualifiers? What is the advantage over a simple system of solar desal? Working 24 hours a day is a worthless gimick. Why not just use the morning solar for desal and the afternoon solar for other purposes? Much more efficient than this. Batteries are expensive. Using them to power desal at night is ridiculous. But using any power storage to power desal at night is equally ridiculous.
Why aren't simple things like solar+desal widely used? Why aren't solar and desal used alone much more widely? Not for any reasons this addresses.
Looks more or less isomorphic to renewable power + pumped hydro storage + reverse osmosis.
Might be decent if there's 90m tall cliffs or you're on a a pointy volcanic island. Less so for a big flat delta or the Maldives.
My guess is that it has a small segment of the market that it makes sense for. A brief scan of the website suggests that it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to install, putting it well out of reach for most homes/small businesses. At the same time, solar + waste energy + waves can only feasibly most so much seawater without a huge footprint. So this likely doesn't scale as well as just pumping water does.
Within their niche, this does seem like a good approach.
Some IQ thoughts (Not a humble brag, I swear): I'm taking advantage of covid distance learning to get a cs degree, and have some observations.
I don't buy any text books, I don't study, and I play videogames during lectures.
I still usually get As, and in my non-math classes I am disappointed by a less than 99% correct assignment.
I've been put into groups with people that also get A's, and in each case but one, I do all the work because it's been faster for me to just finish the assignment than try to explain what is going on to my group mates.
I have all A's for my classes other than discreet mathematics so far (In college, I didn't give a shit during highschool), and I repeat: I have never studied at all, even once (except for discreet mathematics, holy shit.). I have 0 hours studying on the clock.
This has made me even more of a socialist.
It's bullshit that some people can just be born strong, social, or smart; and reap rewards for something they didn't earn and that can't be learned, and Grades are a dumb way of rating performance.
There are people in my classes who have way lower grades than me that I KNOW could perform at my level or better, they just do badly in school.
I'm not sure how to square this circle. Every day, it becomes clearer to me that nobody deserves anything, and any success you have is a product of your history or your capacity; and if your capacity is determined by your genes and upbringing, you didn't actually earn it and have no reason to be more proud of being smart than a trust fund kid has of being rich.
I have to disagree with your deterministic model of success: I'm "smart" (very high innate ability to memorize information and work out logic problems at speed: never have had an IQ test nor do I intend to, so I can't give a precise quantification) and I ended up struggling in college due to an inability to focus on anything I wasn't interested in (I ended up dropping out after earning an Associate's, but that was only semi-related). Meanwhile, people who were "lower-spec" than me but who either had a genuine passion for the subject in question or were far better-disciplined would routinely smoke me in terms of grading or GPA.
Of course, you could argue that their passion or their discipline were the results of things outside of their control and start arguing about formative experiences in early childhood, outside pressure from parents, unconscious processes, etc., but I don't think you're interested in proving too much and arguing free will out of existence and leaving us in a hard-deterministic universe where nobody can actually make meaningful choices or create an actual change, because that ends up undercutting the whole POINT of the rationalist project: you can't improve your ability to think better and create better outcomes if everything was decided from the moment of the Big Bang.
> I have 0 hours studying on the clock.
Note that you may have massive problems once you encounter something where
- you must study
- you are not interested in it
- raw ability and lecture-while-gaming is not sufficient
it is quite common that talented people can coast and then crash into wall when at age of 2X or 3X they actually need to work on something for the first time in their life.
> no reason to be more proud of being smart than a trust fund kid has of being rich
Being proud just of being smart is as reasonable as being proud of being tall.
Though if you actually use it in some good way then it is 100% fine to be proud of it.
Hopefully you plan to actually use your abilities for something useful/amusing/productive/creative and not spending all your time on gaming.
I keep hearing that, but I have like, 5 classes left and none of them are math.
Unless I go back for some program where I need to do original work, it just isn't gonna happen.
RE. Studying: I can do it; I'm actually really good at it.
I've had to do it for work, IE, I taught myself how to diagnose and fix circuit boards and simple electronics over a weakened; because the control boards used in industrial ovens use 1980's technology that they charge new car prices to replace, so you need to learn how to test capacitors and relays and eproms in self defense.
It's just that school is structured such that you usually don't need to. You'll notice the class where I had to try more than 0 was the one where the test questions weren't reformulations of the answers.
You are definitely right about passion, though. I didn't have any in highschool; now I do have it and stuff is WAY easier.
This 100% happened to me, and it was definitely a painful lesson.
You have a piece of information about your talent respective to the rest of students in your online class and to the difficulty of the curriculum your class is following.
However, a word of warning before you leap into conclusions how awesome you are relative to CS students in general. You also should consider at least two possibilities,
1) Your online CS class is not necessarily representative of a regular CS class.
2) The curriculum may be purposefully made a bit easy at this stage because of arcane reasons only the department heads are partial to. Difficulty curve may step up sooner or later. If it never does, there is a chance you really are top tier, but there also are some legit institutions that pump out graduates with CS diplomas that are nevertheless almost useless (because students were not expected to do anything difficult to graduate).
No, this is a legit State Public 4 -6 year degree with a good reputation; they've just moved to all online during COVID lockdown; so I had a chance to take a bunch of classes without fucking my schedule.
Note that a lot of institutions dramatically changed the difficulty of their courses specifically as part of moving all online during Covid.
Also, bluntly, I have a very low opinion of American undergraduate degrees; I did a 6 month exchange at one of the UC campuses and got all A's despite being so sick I was bedridden for half the semester and literally attended no classes between week 4 and the final exam (and, needless to say, did no studying either). By contrast, in my courses in Australia I actually had to pay attention in class and do some work.
Grad school also steps the difficulty up dramatically, if you do want to feel challenged
Welcome to realizing that the just-world hypothesis is wrong! Lots of people don't get what they deserve, and lots of others don't deserve what they get. You just have to play the best hand you can with the cards you're dealt and try your best to be good to others along the way.
Enjoy your talent. Be grateful for it, look for and appreciate the unique opportunities it affords you. I want to live in a world where people like you put their gifts to use rather than being cowed by guilt into self sabotage. I guarantee you'll have plenty of opportunities to help others along the way, and, if it makes you feel any better, I can also guarantee that you'll also encounter plenty of hardship and difficulty of one form or another before your time on this earth is up.
Deciding who 'deserves' what is to make a moral choice. On what do you base that moral choice?
Axioms! My Christian upbringing and time in a Costa-Rica in a non-electrified area caring sacks of coffee up and down a hill for $1 an hour, in this case.
RE: Christian upbringing: how exactly do you square that with the reality that dismantling capitalism will involve violating the commandments against theft, murder, and covetousness at a bare minimum, and will definitely end up breaking the Law of Love? The "completely bloodless and loving overthrow of capitalism" through any method save the long march through the institutions is a pipe dream, and further up you seem to imply that you see the long march/reformist approach as "just being a capitalist" and "treating the symptoms".
Capitalism already does all that shit; we just don't notice it because it's "normal" for people to go hungry while food rots on the shelves.
Maybe I'm the idiot but It seems likely that history is not, in fact, over.
If I thought that history was over, I wouldn't argue for the reformist approach, which I see as the option compatible with a strong axiomatic belief in the value and dignity of human life. I am specifically referring to the other primary mode of socialist/communist thought, which is the revolutionary approach and has generally led to very bad outcomes every time it has been implemented in ways that cannot be dismissed by claiming it was caused by capitalist sabotage. As a key point in reference to the faith, every single communist revolution of note was actively hostile and destructive towards Christianity as a subset of active hostility towards all religion, organized or not.
True.
That's why I can't square the circle. The current system seems so monolithic and all encompassing that it crushed and subsumes all criticism, which leaves violent destruction as the only way out.
But, history shows that revolution is risky as fuck!
Is it worth the risk vs. trying to induce enough empathy in your average capitalist to, eg, appropriating 0.01% of their wealth to feed hungry children in their own country?
Thinking in terms of what people "deserve" is not very useful. What IS useful is working out what produces the best outcomes (partially subjective but still meaningful) while having universally agreed upon 'human rights' as constraints on how we achieve these outcomes (i.e. its not right to kill or sterilize low IQ people to make the country smarter).
The reason we should allow the talented to be wealthier than other people is because talented people are the economic engine of a country (if you thinks its actually workers, well I would simply point to the multitude of poor countries with low average IQ but millions of workers and no shortage of them) and if you do not allow them to have better outcomes than the average person, they lose the incentive to be as productive as they can be. No, really. Why would anyone work 80 hour weeks if they didn't get anything out of it? Why would they take on stressful, high-responsibility jobs that their lives revolve around if they don't get to be richer than other people?
You can say they should work hard for the benefit of the rest of society or, worse, humanity in general, but its plainly delusional to think this would work. It can work in actual communities of a few hundred people with which people identify, but it starts to break down once you get much bigger than that. 330 million strangers spread across a vast landmass whose only universal point of similarity with you is literally that that they reside within the same borders as you? Forget about it.
We need a market economy that permits a certain degree of inequality in order to maximise the productivity of those with the most capacity. This is good for everyone. Cry about inequality all you want, but most of the technological progress of the past 100+ years that has made life relatively safe and comfortable today for the vast majority of people in developed countries in a way that would be incomprehensible for people at any earlier point in history has come out of the US, and it seems unlikely this would have been possible without a market economy in which inequality was tolerated.
And to help those without talent, we have a robust social safety net that helps those in need without trying to tear down those who are talented and productive. So universal healthcare, probably a UBI of some kind, public housing etc. Basically ensuring people have what they need to get buy and not face gross economic insecurity etc. But if someone is going to complain about wealth inequality *per se*, I have less time for that. If you're able to get by comfortably but are lower income and are just mad that people have more money than you because they don't "deserve" it, I mean, who cares. Honestly.
One wrinkle is of course the financial industry in which vast numbers of wealthy people are created but the actual value creation is not strictly evident. But this is better remedied with policy aimed at reforming the financial industry rather than a blanket 'heavy taxes on all high income earners" approach.
Another concerns reproduction and immigration. It's one thing to say that people should be provided with what they need to get by. But if low IQ people are having more children than high IQ people (they are), then this is going to slowly make things worse for everyone and more unequal. I'm not saying we force people not to have kids, but it's something we need to be mindful of and at the very least poor people having children should be somewhat stigmatized.
Immigration is similar in that if you bring in low-IQ immigrants they're inevitably going to on aggregate be economically worse of than the existing population and be a net fiscal burden. You may think that its a worthy cause for wealthy countries to support these people, but obviously we can only support so many of them, especially with an expanded social safety net. If we bring in 100 million immigrants between now and the end of the century (this figure is probably far too low, especially since UBI and healthcare would likely increase the number of immigrants), think of how much it would cost to provide just these people with UBI and healthcare (on top of all other government spending). Once they're all here, if we say it costs 30k per person for these policies, that's 3 trillion dollars a year. Plus if they have have kids at a higher than replacement rate, this figure will quickly grow. And its expected that automation will destroy vast swathes of jobs over the next century, so the idea that they're all going to get decent jobs and pay enough taxes to cover these expenditures if absurd.
Which is to say that, best outcomes is subjective. You may think that hundreds of millions of immigrants living better lives is more important than current americans maintaining their standard of living is a better social outcomes, others may not. Though of course, its hard to imagine that america remains as productive and innovative in such circumstances which is arguably more impactful on humanity's wellbeing.
"The reason we should allow the talented to be wealthier than other people (...)"
There is nothing about socialism that would preclude talented people from becoming wealthier than others.
"is because talented people are the economic engine of a country"
Cynically, but realistically: the economic engine of the country is, roughly, its military power.
"if you thinks its actually workers, well I would simply point to the multitude of poor countries with low average IQ but millions of workers and no shortage of them"
This example boils down to people with less means to contribute not being able to contribute as much as people with more means, directly supporting Nah's point, except not even addressing innate differences, only circumstantial ones. And directly negating yours, as it makes it clear that what those countries lack is not talented people to provide them with those means, because statistically, there's plenty of talented people among them, they just lack said means as much as everyone else around them.
"if they don't get to be richer than other people"
I guess this is where I point out that hardly anyone wants to get rich as a terminal goal. Rather, they're aiming for whatever brings them self-fulfillment. The current money-mediated social system is specifically structured such that in many cases financial wealth is the easiest, or even necessary, way of obtaining it, and in that context it makes sense to equate riches with success or fulfillment in this context. You just shouldn't carry that assumption to reasoning about other social systems.
"We need a market economy that permits a certain degree of inequality"
Again, there's nothing about socialism that precludes any of that. (There's a pretty specific set of things socialism opposes, which can be roughly described as market and property relations being imposed onto areas of social life where they don't belong. If you think e.g. absentee property or wage labor are necessary components of "market economy", fine, but you'll need to argue for them directly, as they're not implied even by the strictest definitions of the term.)
"(...) in order to maximise the productivity of those with the most capacity."
On the other hand, most socialists would reject your assumption that market economy, much less the current capitalist society, "maximizes the productivity of those with the most capacity". The basis for this is empirical - talented people appear to be most productive when freed from immediate economic pressures.
(Historically, arguments for economic pressures had little to do with encouraging the talented. They were mostly about disciplining the workers, forcing them to work 80 hour weeks in order not to starve. You're not hearing them anymore, mostly because the outcome of implementing labor rights has proven them false, which subsequently allowed humanity to disregard them as fundamentally evil. There are also other kinds of arguments, saying that one particular skill of running a business is so important to the economy it needs to be rewarded as much as possible. I find them to be self-serving, cyclical reasoning, but at least they're not immediately wrong about what the actually existing markets actually facilitate and reward.)
I like a lot of what you say here, but I want to pick this piece out to disagree about.
"Cynically, but realistically: the economic engine of the country is, roughly, its military power"
I don't think this is true unless you're actively using your military to loot, or at least, to maintain an extractive empire. In the current age, I think most militaries are pure cost. Necessary maybe, but not the productive engine that makes other things possible.
You honestly don't see any connection at all between "working 80 hour weeks" and "smart people not having kids"?
I think the people deriving most value are those getting the 'smart creative talented' ones to work the 80 hour weeks for them, being productive and creating more wealth than the talents will be awarded. Jeff Bezos probably has many smart, creative, talented people working for him, nonetheless, he's the one with the multi-billion valuation.
There needs to be a balance. 'You can work yourself into the grave but you'll get rich' is not it. And there is a balance in the economic engine between the creative and the workers; say your smart talent creates a wonderful new piece of software. Great, are they now also going to go off to the fabrication line and work on assembling the chips for the hardware this software will run on? The various parts of the body need each other:
"14 For the body does not consist of one member but of many. 15 If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. 16 And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. 17 If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? 18 But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. 19 If all were a single member, where would the body be? 20 As it is, there are many parts, yet one body.
21 The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” 22 On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, 23 and on those parts of the body that we think less honorable we bestow the greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, 24 which our more presentable parts do not require. But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, 25 that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. 26 If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together."
"Why would anyone work 80 hour weeks if they didn't get anything out of it? Why would they take on stressful, high-responsibility jobs that their lives revolve around if they don't get to be richer than other people?"
I believe, quite seriously, that someone like Elon Musk would just as happily thrive in the role of a high-ranking commissar, provided he was given sufficient resources, freedom of concept and action, and public recognition for his efforts. And perhaps Thiel, too - consider his ideas on the monopoly. Past a certain point of comfort, money is a) status score-keeping, b) a signal that you know what you're doing, and c) stored energy to do the big things you find interesting. Even if you believe that a societal shift away from individual incentive is utopian, it's at least worth questioning whether the first two, at least, need to come in the form of the same stuff we use to buy bread.
I appreciate technological development as much as the next man, but all the evergreened pharma patents and mindfulness app start-ups in the world don't mean very much to humanity's well-being if they are created by the few for the few. And however promising future absolute quality-of-life increases might be, it remains the case that present inequality and suffering matter. A lot. I think, in a laudable effort to ward off hyperbolic discounting, rationalists often overexpect future utility, which is to say fail to adjust sufficiently for the elusiveness of the two birds in the bush.
Besides, there's at least a non-zero chance that the current best practices for rapid technology generation represent a local, not absolute, maximum. They're one answer to a coordination problem that could, potentially, be solved in other ways.
And that's the more benign alternative: if especially efficient (for any reason: stronger, more clever, more active) people have no means to earn more resources than the average within societal constraints (which hopefully channel their efforts to productive activities that benefit everybody), they could of course be lazy and do the bare minimum, but they can also spend their efforts finding ways to earn more by crossing societal constraints, and hurt most other peoples doing so...One of the typical way to do that is to gain control of the society, and decide what exactly those constraints are...
"I'm not sure how to square this circle."
The traditional answer (but you already knew that) is to try our damnedest to promote some degree of identification with society at large and shift away from individual metrics when it comes to both performance and reward.
The idea that we're going to get the talented in society to treat 330 million increasingly diverse strangers spread across a vast landmass, with whom they share literally nothing consistently in common with other than just the fact they reside within the same borders, as a community is, sorry to say, entirely delusional.
We were able to do that when the population was ~165 million; why is it delusional to think it could be done with 330 million?
This model only works if you assume humans are actually Homo Economicus. We are Homo Sapiens.
Why the 330 million and the US-centric scope? Every human society, on some level, has to contend with these questions. Even going by your... rather debatable notions of international IQ distribution, surely you can spare a thought for the 450 million Europeans and 1.7 billion East Asians?
Anyway, the gradual shift toward a more eusocial model doesn't depend on actual fondness for other individuals in one's society. It does depend on a cultural change in which individual status-seeking is diminished, following a collective realisation similar to Nah's: that success from an advantageous position is not a good enough measure of merit. And I think people you describe as 'talented' are most capable of that kind of introspection.
The idea that economic incentives are the only kind of incentive is a very narrow and distinctly capitalist view. Look at how many people get PhDs and go into academia, when going into industry would be vastly more profitable. Look at how many people build and maintain vital open-source software for no monetary compensation. Look at how many artists continue to produce society-defining art but are still poor.
Social and moral incentives have proven to be very effective.
"Look at how many artists continue to produce society-defining art but are still poor."
Zero. The problem is the opposite, artists creating shoddy junk and still getting as rich as Nazis.
In fact, when was the last time society-defining art was even created at all? Da Vinci?
I think you could make a good argument that Star Wars was the last generation's defining art, and that the MCU is this generation's. It depends on how society-defining is . . . er, defined.
Are you able to quantify how many artists are producing "society-defining" art for little money? How much open-source software is being produced compared to for-profit software? Academics get into academia for a variety of reasons, some of which may be less monetary, but still related (for instance good work hours, institutional prestige, future earnings, etc.).
If some relatively small percent of work gets done without a profit, and a strong majority gets done with a profit, I'm not sure you're making much of a point. There have always been volunteers to do work they enjoy, but modern society absolutely depends on people doing jobs that are far too taxing, difficult, or unappealing to be done on a voluntary basis for long. I can't imagine too many business owners would be doing so on a voluntary basis, though I am open to data that shows otherwise.
"How much open-source software is being produced compared to for-profit software?"
Evaluating this would be further complicated by the fact that much open-source software is produced by for-profit entities.
I would suggest that economic systems should not generally be set up based on who deserves what. I agree that you and I are no more deserving than most other people.
Instead, we should set up systems that product the best results, especially for people at the bottom, and focus on that as the key outcome rather than perceived justice.
Results-wise, Denmark-style free markets + very strong social safety nets seems like a good combo. The fact that most scientific and technological progress came out of the US in the past ~80 years is probably worth paying attention to as well.
I agree, but it's hard for me to imagine getting from Here to There with the current capitalist system intact.
The most convincing argument I've seen for a particular system is market socialism with really intense workplace democracy.
Re innovation: I wonder how much of that has to do with the "free market", given how much if that innovation had nothing to do with it.
The market does seem good at finding efficiencies, but less good about inventing new shit.
I propose free market + UBI + funding for "open engineering" in order to make the market system more efficient and help it "invent new shit": https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3jdcjwjpeqyFZkk9M/we-need-a-career-path-for-invention?commentId=btEJ8RcJPgj5xQxjo
OK, you are smart and dissatisfied with some of the obvious problems of the economy (food waste vs hungry people). However, there are economic models that aim to prevent the abuses of both Capitalism (oppression by capital) and of Socialism (oppression by the state). You might want to spend some time looking into those alternatives.
The first is the Co-operative Movement (https://www.co-op.ac.uk/co-operative-values-and-principles, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_co-operative_movement)
The second is Distributism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism).
I bet that there are plenty of others too. It would be a great shame for the lessons of the 20th Century to be wasted on another bout of state socialism.
"I agree, but it's hard for me to imagine getting from Here to There with the current capitalist system intact."
Is it though? Isn't Denmark running basically the same system as us, just with higher levels of taxes and safety net programs? I mean, really, cut the military expenditure by 75% and we could probably get most of the way there and *cut* taxes.
Military spending is a bugbear; yes, the US spends far more than most on its military, but in absolute terms almost all of US spending is on Welfare and Healthcare. The way to free up money is to become much, much more efficient with how the current budget is spent - if the healthcare costs of the USA were the same per capita as those of Western Europe, they could provide universal healthcare for the whole population for far less than is currently being spent on Medicare
>in absolute terms almost all of US spending is on Welfare and Healthcare
Most I'll give you, but it's something like 60%, which is a fair distance from what I'd term almost all.
>if the healthcare costs of the USA were the same per capita as those of Western Europe
Yep. We (collectively) have a very strong attachment to rationing our healthcare by income level and paying the bureaucrats who stand between us and our doctors privately. In the short term that's likely to get worse, not better, at least, IMO.
Be honest with me: What are the probabilities you give to the current elites cutting military expenditures VS. systemic collapse followed by violent revolution?
I give it 60/40
Maybe once all the boomers shuffle off this mortal coil.
I mean, I think the likelihoods are something like: status quo but a bit worse 90 / the status quo but a bit better 8 / spending and taxes shifted to sufficiently generous social safety net 1.9 / systemic collapse and socialist revolution .1. And honestly, the latter two are probably high. I just don't see any reason not to expect things to go along mostly like they've been.
I expect Republican rule, most of it unitary, from 2022 to 2032 or 36, depending on events. As to the politics of the generation that follows, that's far enough out that I wouldn't venture to predict.
The problem is, where's your system collapse? Do you *really* expect that? Things here are shitty if you're poor, and unnecessarily so. But that's been true for a long time, and is probably slowly getting better, not worse. Now, we can expect that to reverse through the 2020s, but how dramatically? The working class are increasingly a Republican constituency. There's a limit to how much you can crap on your voters before they'll get sick of you, so if they go too far they'll lose office. I expect to see moderate withdrawing of the social safety net, slowly enough that it's not widely noticed, until the next big switch.
And maybe the next generation will be ready to make it match the rest of the first world. Probably not. You never go broke in America bagging on poor folk. But you never know.
Nah, I don't expect the system to collapse; but I think reform is just about as unlikely.
Re unitary republican rule: Maybe I'm on that hopium shit, but that seems unlikely. Trump was a massive win for us leftys there, it turned lots of centrists into culture-warriors.
It definitely radicalized the hell out of me,
The problem is that you cannot neatly separate a system from the people that make up that system. Introducing the exact same policies to Somalia probably won't make somalia a good country. It will probably improve it, but a country is more than just its policies.
And don't forget to add Animal Farm and The Gulag Archipelago to your reading list so that you can see how your scheme will inevitably end up.
Sorry, edit: AF was not aimed at youngsters initially, though the school curriculum does often include it. Gulag Archipelago is not YA literature in any sense, and is more or less autobiographical.
I'm very curious where marxbro1917 is coming from, and what is the story of someone who reads ACX and is an unreconstructed Marxist-Leninist.
I recommended Animal Farm as a gentle introduction before taking on The Gulag Archipelago as I didn't know if his tolerance for horror was as high as that of a Marxist.
Given my experience of capitalism includes people doing back breaking labor for rates of pay that allowed to purchase approximately One (1) pair of shoes every 2.5 years, as long as they grew most of their non-staple calories themselves and built their own houses, I think I'm good.
I mean, If we're comparing "Horrors of X economic system", Let's add the famines in India and Bangladesh, The 4 million deaths a year from India alone, and a couple decades of the triangle trade.
Yeah..... if that is the measure of nastiness that you are used to, then you are not ready to read about the crimes of the USSR in The Gulag Archipelago.
Nah has stated that he is approaching his political philosophy from a Christian perspective, so I expect that he cleaves to John 8:32.
I mean, no. Then I would be a capitalist treating the symptoms instead of the problem.
Is it? The balance of probability says I'm not gonna make enough money to solve world hunger.
The best I could hope for is to be a Bill Gates, and shovel sand on a fire that need state action to extinguish. Good job on polio though, Bill. Shame about the rest of it.
Bill Gates has probably done more good for the developing world that the entire US Government, and by implication more than every US political activist. More good not just because his spending was far better targeted, but also because it's actually on the same monetary scale as US foreign aid - if you get rich enough you can very directly change the world.
With what, exactly?
Medicine developed with state backing, regulated by the state, using financial infrastructure maintained by the state, across communication networks created by the state, using money he could only acquire due to the state maintaining a safe marketplace and enforcing IP law.
The fact that Bill Gates did as well as he did is to his credit; but the fact he did better than the US is not an accomplishment, it is an accusation of incompetency and callousness against the public.
Your right. Nothing has ever gotten better, and no government has ever solved a problem.
Pay no attention to your senses, you have ideology; which is much better.
And if you are an ancap, you even get to pretend it's not ideology! Bonus!
Oxford meet up was great but I had to leave early and forgot to sign up for notifications about future meet-ups in the area. Who should I email?
Email ssc[at]sambrown[dot]eu!
Does gender have predictive power when controlling for biological sex?
I.e., there is the [gender continuum test](https://programs.clearerthinking.org/gender_continuum_test.html) that found a bunch of questions that all correlate with some biological sex. If someone takes this test, I choose a bunch of questions at random and they show me their answers, I can then predict their remaining answers with (slightly) above accuracy random because [the answers I have] correlate with [their biological sex] which correlates with [their remaining answers].
However, say they tell me their biological sex first, and then I get a bunch of answers. Do they help me to further predict the remaining answers? If e.g. a cis woman gives unusually male-like answers on two questions, is she more likely to give unusually male answers to the remaining questions?
I've never heard anyone give an explicit answer to this question, which seems kind of weird. This has to have been studied. (Also I assume the answer is yes.)
So I'd think, but not be sure, that the answer would be yes based on two different factors:
1) There seems to be decent anecdotal data that taking testosterone increases the rate of sexual thoughts for trans men. So I'd expect that a trans man would score more "male like" on this test than a cis woman.
2) I'd expect socialization to have an impact on the reported personal characteristics. So I'd expect a 45 year old trans woman who transitioned at 15 and has presented as a woman for 2/3rds of their life to have picked up a non-zero amount of female socialization and to score differently than a cis man.
I don't think that test is particularly predictive, and the reason is because of the questions about sex. When I saw them, I knew they were going by research that "men think about sex X times per minute" and this is the kind of question that is very easy to game. They even admit this is the big difference question:
"The largest difference we found in average personality was on the trait "Sex-Focused", which was based on these two questions:
I often have sexual thoughts when I meet an attractive looking person.
I do not think about sex that often."
The test reminded me of the BEM one, which is now showing its age from the 70s. I was able to fool the test into "we can make a strong prediction about your gender" by choosing the "this is the stereotypical male response" to particular questions, and what do you know:
"Based on your answers to the personality questions....
Our machine learning model predicts that you have a:
93.37% chance of being Male
6.63% chance of being Female"
Unlike the time when I answered it honestly, and it could only give a weak guess at my gender.
So, depending how many people are honestly answering versus those like me taking it a second time and seeing if we can steer it to "male" or "female" by the stereotypical questions, I wouldn't bet the house on this, or the underlying theories.
If you lie on the test you get an inaccurate result. That doesn't mean it isn't predictive. If the test predicted my age based on my birth year, I could easily game the system to make myself look older or younger, but that doesn't mean you can't predict my age based on my true birth year.
The point is that it *is* possible to lie on the test, because the questions are so tilted towards "answer X and we'll put you down as a girl".
That's not helping towards predictive power. If there is a test which doesn't rely on the equivalent of "tell us you're a girl and we'll then conclude you are a girl", then it is better.
Are there cults that are open about being cults? As in, openly "we think being a cult member is the ideal state to be in, sign up for brainwashing today"?
Obviously, this is not how to make the most money as a cult leader, but it seems more ethical and there's a degree of plausibility to the hypothesis.
Both "cult" and "brainwashing" tend to have negative connotations. There are a ton of alternate words that people use to describe both of them that they seem quite open about, but don't take on the extra baggage.
Several posts on ACX have spoken quite positively about the value of meditation and some vaguely Buddhist mental exercises. Self-help programs of many varieties, including both religious and non-religious, offer to change your perspective on life.
"Cult" is a funnier word, as it actually has both positive and negative definitions (in this context). We also use the term "cult classic" to describe movies that are popular with a subset of the population, and mean that as a very positive term. I've seen some pretty normal and mainstream churches described as cults by people not in them. They may claim definition one as accurate (the figure being God/Jesus), and two would be accurate just because it's an outside perspective, if you look at the "strange" instead of "sinister" part.
Cult - Noun
a system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object.
a relatively small group of people having religious beliefs or practices regarded by others as strange or sinister.
a misplaced or excessive admiration for a particular person or thing.
Calling something a cult classic or saying it has a cult following is or was at least originally tongue-in-cheek, though: suggesting that something deservedly impopular nevertheless had a following of brainwashed fanatics, more or less.
Sure, I would agree with that. Obviously the term has morphed though, and I've even seen it used to refer to people following well made and popular, rather than just campy. They're probably leaning on the "excessive admiration" from the third definition, which actual fans would consider a positive.
I wonder about this. For all the negative connotations of "Sex Cult", I feel like if you actually advertised as a Sex Cult you'd pack the pews.
True but misleading. You would pack the pews *with guys*, but unless it's a gay sex cult that's worse than useless.
During my first visit to an alcohol rehab about 30 years ago, I complained bitterly that they were trying to brainwash me - 12 step/AA ideology. One of the counsellors berated me with "When I first got into rehab my brain needed washing.... because it was full of shit!"
For good or ill, that has stayed with me.
On it’s face it sure looks like malarkey. Did it work for you?
The comment? In a sense, yes. At least over a period of time I realised that my habitual thinking was really screwy, which I suppose is what the counsellor meant. However I never got over the feeling that AA was a bit too cult-like for me.
Funnily enough many years later another counsellor (I took decades to get sober..) who observed my reluctance to go to AA meetings said "Look Anteros, AA meetings are mad places full of mad people saying mad things, but every so often you will hear just what you need to hear to stay sober". That had a bigger impact on me than the 'brainwashing comment' and allowed me to put up with going to meetings long enough to establish some less screwy thought patterns.
> suggesting that most of the people who are in a cult really wanted to be there.
And / or suggesting that only a small subset of people are affected by the indoctrination, which I think is different from "wanted to be there".
I don't believe in brainwashing. It's a pretty extraordinary claim that "cults" have sinister mind-control powers, when the evidence is consistent with them just persuading people.
Maybe some cults believe this under-the-hood, but saying it like that out loud would counteract the desired effect.
Do you mean in the sense of "advertising being a cult will drastically reduce recruitment", or "cult brainwashing doesn't work if you know it's cult brainwashing"?
I've heard that most cosmologists believe the universe is fated to expand forever, because the rate at which it is expanding keeps going up. However, how can we be sure that the rate of the universe's expansion won't plateau someday, or even become negative?
After all, do we understand what is controlling the rate of the universe's expansion? Is there anything preventing it from sharply slowing down in 1 million years? Hasn't it changed in the past?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_of_the_universe
As mentioned by others, if the cosmological constant/dark energy doesn't change, then it's pretty clear the expansion will continue, eventually becoming exponential growth. Already dark energy dominates, and since it isn't diluted by further expansion, it'll just dominate even more in the future (since matter +normal energy will get diluted)
The idea that dark energy could change and stop driving expansion isn't too farfetched though. In the suspected "inflationary" period pre-Big Bang, the universe was have been rapidly expanding due to an extra strong dark energy-like field. This dark energy-like thing decayed into normal energy (aka the Big Bang), which later cooled into matter, and expansion slowed dramatically. I'm not up-to-date on current particle hypotheses of dark energy, but it seems like that could be an option for our current dark energy.
Practically speaking though, I'm guessing even if our current dark energy decayed, it'd be a very long time before expansion could possibly stall + recollapse. If we don't have anything like dark energy, then the average density of space is the only thing that matters, but dark energy-driven expansion drives the density towards the threshold density between collapse + infinite expansion. So even if we were too dense (leading to collapse sans-dark energy), we'd only be the tiniest fraction overdense, and it'd take a very long time for that tiny extra bit of density to slow + reverse the universe's increasingly faster expansion.
(Sorry I don't have hard numbers; typing on my phone and I left the field after my PhD a few years back)
AIUI we wouldn't be able to observe it if it did decay, since this would be associated with a change in the laws of physics (which would kill us) and would probably propagate at FTL.
(Probably the most interesting consequence of this is that false vacuum collapse due to high-energy physics experiments can't be a Great Filter; it can't explain the Great Silence in our past light-cone because if anyone had done this in our past light-cone it would have destroyed us too. Destroying one's home planet with such experiments is *not* ruled out, though.)
> Destroying one's home planet with such experiments is *not* ruled out
It is worth noting that current ones appear to be fully save. Natural super-high-energy-particles, of higher energy than what LHC produced were striking Earth for billions of years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh-My-God_particle
> The Oh-My-God particle's energy was estimated as (3.2±0.9)×1020 eV, or 51±14 J.
for a single particle!
> this gives 7.5×1014 eV, roughly 60 times the collision energy of the Large Hadron Collider.
> Assuming it was a proton, this particle traveled at 0.9999999999999999999999951 of the speed of light, its Lorentz factor was 3.2×1011 and its rapidity was 27.1. At this speed, if a photon were travelling with the particle, it would take over 215,000 years for the photon to gain a 1 cm lead as seen from the Earth's reference frame. Due to special relativity, the relativistic time dilation experienced by a proton traveling at this speed would be extreme. If the proton originated from a distance of 1.5 billion light years, it would take approximately 1.71 days from the reference frame of the proton to travel that distance.
Note the large difference between the total energy of the particle and the *available* energy after accounting for conservation of momentum (the 10^14 vs. 10^20 number). I agree that the LHC is safe, but the OMG only proves it safe by a factor of 60, not the 25 million the raw OMG energy would suggest. Going higher than detected Earth-bound available energies in an Earth-bound facility would IMO be imprudent, though I'd be fine with space-based experiments for the above reason (and also because cosmic-ray/cosmic-ray collisions occasionally occur in space naturally with much higher available energies).
Asking since you seem to know what you’re talking about: why would one use the OMG particle as a reference, instead of stuff like supernovae and neutron star collisions? Isn’t it guaranteed that there would be much higher-energy particle collisions in that kind of chaos?
(I mean, I get why OMG is relevant for turning Earth into a black-hole, but I’m not clear why it would be relevant to false vacuum collapse.)
> I agree that the LHC is safe, but the OMG only proves it safe by a factor of 60, not the 25 million the raw OMG energy would suggest.
Yep, that is why I quoted 60 times, not "20 million times".
Though it was just one of recorded, likely within billions years far greater hit us.
10 ^ 20, not 1020 - and 10 ^ 14 not 1014. Stupid substack.
> In the suspected "inflationary" period pre-Big Bang, the universe was have been rapidly expanding due to an extra strong dark energy-like field. This dark energy-like thing decayed into normal energy (aka the Big Bang), which later cooled into matter, and expansion slowed dramatically.
I thought that inflationary period was after Big Bang - see https://wmap.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/bb_cosmo_infl.html
(BTW, if this theory matches reality then this expansion ~10^26 times is one of the most awesome things happening on a mind-numbing scale)
It boils down to a balance between the matter/energy density in the universe and the cosmological constant. In the case of our universe, we are well into the 'expand forever at increasing rates' scenario, since the matter/energy density isn't nearly enough to cause a recollapse.
I don't know if there's something 'preventing it from sharply slowing down in 1 million years', there's just no reason to suppose that would happen (and lots of good reasons to suppose our current model of the universe is true). This modern picture of cosmology is well-explained by Scott Aaronson here https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec20.html , and you can also try David Tong's cosmology lecture notes for a more in depth look (with math).
Sorry, but we *know* that our current model of the universe is incorrect. Quantum theory and relativity disagree in places. But we have no good idea of what to replace them with. They're both completely accurate in any place where we can check them. (I have a friend who believes that the answer is that continuity is incorrect and the universe is basically discrete and finite. But he's never been able to do the math. Still, maybe he's right, and that would avoid the disagreements.)
Predictions about the expansion of the universe are based on the assumption that gravity works the way we think it does. If it doesn't, or if some day it starts working differently, then anything could happen.
Are "designer knives" and very expensive knives worth it? I'm talking about things like $200+ lockback blades and hand-made chef knives from Japan.
The whole knife industry seems like a scam. It's just a sharp strip of metal!
Why not just buy kitchen knives from the Dollar Store and sharpen them until they can cut through paper edgewise?
FWIW I've been buying ceramic knives. They are fragile, and thus essentially disposable; and of course you cannot use them to pry or scoop out anything. However, while they do last, they work really well; and you can sharpen them with a diamond whetstone, in a pinch.
Yes and no. You are lumping a lot of categories together.
WRT EDC knives like lockbacks or smaller fixed blade knives, where the focus is on utility, you want 1) reliable construction and 2) a good steel. You can find that at $40-$60 or so. Going above that will continue to get you quality improvememnts if you go up in price to a $200 benchmade, but its a very, very small improvememnt compared to cost.
WRT a cooking knives, you very much may get $400 worth of utility out of a $400 knife. But probably not. You can find a Tojiro DP Byuto with VG-10 steel for under $100. That's a very, very servicable knife that will last you lifetime. But it won't turn heads like a $400 custom made Blue #2 steel clad in stainless made bespoke with an ebony and horn handle. You may find an ergonomic difference in the more expensive knives too. I sure do, though I don't own any that cost more than $100.
Once you get above $60 for a lock back or $100 for a kitchen knive, you are buying art. Functional art, to be sure, but art none the less. When you consider it like that, you should answer it the same way as you ask if art is a scam.
Dollar store knives, though, you should avoid unless your goal is to get very, very good as sharpening very, very soft steel which is not a difficult task. They will dull very quickly, take a new edge that's wicked sharp very quickly, and rinse and repeat.
There's a fundamental difference between using knives one a day vs using them consistently for 6 hours a day in a busy restaurant
Because if you buy cheap tat, you get cheap tat. I'm not into knives, so unless you're a professional chef or very serious about collecting knives, really expensive ones aren't worth it, but neither is "buy something that will fall apart after six months".
Dollar store knives are a waste of money, ironically.
They are flimsy, don't hold an edge, and are dangerous to use IMO.
Spend a bit more and get a Victorinox. They are 40 bucks, hold an edge as well as anything, and are god damn indestructible.
Why not just sharpen a piece of balsa wood and use that to cut? Because balsa wood is a crappy material for making knives; it's very hard to sharpen to a decent edge, and if you ever managed to get it sharp then it would go blunt almost immediately.
Cheap knives are the same deal on a microscopic scale. Expensive knives are expensive because they've gone through a bunch of complicated treatment to make them better able to obtain and maintain a sharp edge. You'd need a metallurgist to tell you the exact details, but different steels vary considerably in their properties.
But is 200$ or 2000$ actually noticeable better than 40$ knife?
Law of diminishing returns. Improvements to quality are logarithmic with cost.
It is not some general foolproof law. Is it applying to knives specifically?
Yes.
The following are my ratings as an obsessive hobbyist:
A dollar store knife has a value of -1 (They usually dont have a full tang/are not stiff and are unsafe to use, and cannot be easily resharpened);
A cheap knifeblock set with 10-20$ knives are at a 60 (They sometimes have a weak tang and usually don't hold an edge very well, but they aren't actually dangerous to use),
A Victorinox 40 dollar chefs knife as at an 85,
A global 70$ knife is at a 90,
A Wuthsof fancy but not artisan knife at 250$ is a 95,
And the most expensive blade handforged by blind stylite monks after 30 years of meditation for $2,000,000 is a 99.
Once you get above the global, you are paying for owning tool that is also an art object, for a slightly better edge and edge retention, and for comfort. You'll notice half of those things are subjective; I actually preferred my 40$ victrinox to my 250$ wuthsorf and gave it to a friend on his wedding; Where upon he found it much more comfortable than HIS previous knife.
The sweet spot is pegged at the Fibrox line at around 40$, IMO.
Beyond a certain price point, I think there's also a disutility since you become averse to actually using your super-expensive knife to cut anything because of the risk of it getting scratched up or damaged somehow. You end up having to buy a cheaper knife to do actual, everyday cutting.
I love my expensive ass knife. It stays very sharp with just a slight touch up on the butcher's steel, handles well, and looks great. If you love cooking, it's pretty cheap for something you're going to use (possibly multiple times) every day.
Then again, a lot of professionals just use a Victorinox for like 40 quid and get by fine.
Depends on what you mean by worth it. They do tend to be superior at holding their edge, higher quality, better looking. The question is: do you need that? Most people don't. Dollar Store knives are probably cutting on quality but your basic Target knife block is probably adequate for your needs.
But then again, a Toyota is a perfectly good car for most people. Doesn't mean there isn't a market for Lamborghinis.
I reckon the formula for "worth it" looks something like:
(How many times you use it) * (Satisfaction difference between a good one and a lousy one) / (Price difference between a good one and a lousy one)
Assuming you cook regularly you'll get thousands of uses out of your chef's knife, the satisfaction difference is noticeable, and the price difference is just a hundred bucks or so (between a dollar store knife and a Wüsthof or something) making it one of the best value for money minor luxuries you can buy.
Of course, the real answer is whether you value the resources you have to spend to buy it more than the alternatives you can do with the money. But your method is certainly more quantifiable.
I'm still reeling over that essay about how Leverage was allegedly a cult-like cult. There are some specific points that give it a true Manson Family feel:
"People (not everyone, but definitely a lot of us) genuinely thought we were going to take over the US government.
One of my supervisors would regularly talk about this as a daunting but inevitable strategic reality (“obviously we’ll do it, and succeed, but seems hard”). Another supervisor bemoaned with some (performative?) unease the necessity of theories about violence and military skill, because they just couldn’t see any other way we’d get to world takeover level."
Similar revolutionary claims are made on the Less Wrong post:
"The stated purpose of the group was to discover more theories of human behavior and civilization by "theorizing", while building power, and then literally take over US and/or global governance (the vibe was "take over the world"). The purpose of gaining global power was to lead to better coordination and better outcomes for humanity."
If this were a right-wing group wouldn't that alleged goal to "literally take over the US", "(a lot of us) genuinely thought we were going to take over the US government" warrant an investigation by, um, the US government?
Then add to this already creepy story that (Leverage cult-leader) Geoff Anders just last month was one of Tyler Cowen's Emergent Ventures winners? (Jeffrey Epstein vibes.) (Does Emergent Ventures do any vetting or do well-connected Silicon Valley types simply connect themselves to such awards?)
"I'm still reeling over that essay about how Leverage was allegedly a cult-like cult"
I'm not. LW/MIRI always seemed cultish to me, especially when EY was directly involved.
They probably *were* investigated by the US government. The FBI famously had a file on Gary Gygax, so it's hard to imagine they skip the actual cults.
It's quite plausible that their plan for "taking over the government" was to become such talented and coordinated thinkfluencers that they'd be invited to tell the government what to do about everything important, a la Peter and Valentine Wiggin but probably with some of them having high-level executive positions (radical versions of Sir Humphrey Appleby) and others wielding gigabucks of cash from their capitalist ventures. It is not wholly implausible that the "violence and military skill" part was looking forward to the point where they got to order the US Army around and would have to grok how to do that well to spread their influence over the rest of the world.
Meh. If I were working for the relevant part of the actual US Government, I'd consider it worth investigating them. Briefly, then having a good laugh as I closed the file and moved on to something important.
I had a little bit of contact with them and this is definitely true. Think the way neoliberal economists "took over the government", not the way militia men want to take over the government.
Look at the "early version of Leverage's Plan" at https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qYbqX3jX4JnTtHA5f/leverage-research-reviewing-the-basic-facts?commentId=8goitqWAZfEmEDrBT if you want to know more - I think this was from the very early days and they'd probably be very embarrassed by it now, but there's definitely some continuity of thought.
Oh I agree it would be a waste of time for the gubment to investigate them.
What disturbs me most is the (alleged) cult leader winning an Emergent Ventures Award only a month ago. Why did this (alleged) psychopath win such an award?
Granted, mistakes are easily made. But what seems freakish is this. I've never ever before recognized the names of any Emergent Ventures awards winners. I do read about them because it seemed like a good project. So the very first one I ever recognize, I recognize because he is a (alleged) cult leader psychopath (alleged).
Why is that? Coincidence? I only hear about the one who is a psychopath? I guess that makes sense, now that I type it: psychopaths are more interesting than non-psychopaths.
Still, it's sad in more ways than one. You got real victims here. You got another case study in Why to Be Cynical. And you got a fucking prick winning a Tyler Cowen Emergent Ventures award, which is also a reason to be cynical about the Emergent Ventures project.
Not to mention the general cynicism it should spread through the rationalist community -- and it should spread cynicism through the rationalist community. Here is a man who (allegedly) took advantage of the idealism of others, much like Charles Manson did.
> What disturbs me most is the (alleged) cult leader winning an Emergent Ventures Award only a month ago. Why did this (alleged) psychopath win such an award?
It is entirely possible that they consider being psychopath with history of effective exploitation, successful (at time of awarding it) cover up as a welcome quality.
In businesspeak it could be something like "building highly efficient and dedicated human resources".
From the description of Emergent Ventures:
> the mission is to jumpstart high-risk, high-reward ideas that advance prosperity, opportunity, and wellbeing
Note the "high-risk". This is an instance of the VC mindset that it's better to fund 9 phonies than to miss out on 1 unicorn. It's not a Nobel prize. From the list of grantees so far, https://marginalrevolution.com/?s=cohort+emergent , I recognize 5 names; my guess is that lots of them have turned out to be duds and sometimes even frauds.
Sometimes on a website, I'll see that work wrap breaks words along syllable marks. Like
Mr Smith was ac-
cused of robbery
I look at the source, and "accused" is one word.
When did browsers get this power? Does it have a built-in dictionary that says when to split words? Is there a style-sheet option to let the browser do it that way?
It might be a CSS thing.
https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css3_pr_word-wrap.asp
That set me on the right path. It's called "hyphens", but you need the "lang" property set for it to work
https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css3_pr_hyphens.asp
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Global_attributes/lang
Cool
This is a quantum mechanics ---> free will post. I'd definitely forgive you for skipping it. The usual quantum mechanics - free will connection is "maybe free choice is a currently-unknown-to-physics "control" that "people" have over whether certain electrons in their brain are spin-up or spin down, and their bodies' behaviours flow out of that". I am not going to make that connection. This idea has definitely been articulated before
1) ASSUME the many worlds interpretation is true
2) ASSUME the following bit of psychology: people *love* looking back at their past decisions and saying that they define them. Like, "I'm just not the kind of person who would have left them lying by the side of the road". To me this seems very likely to be true, indeed it is exactly how people talk about their own morality.
3) ASSUME that, in a person's brain that, when they are in a state of genuine indecision about something, it is possible for their eventual decision to be influenced by quantum phenomena (eg again whether some bunch of electrons a certain sodium channel are spin-up or spin-down).
(I know 3 is a bit of a stretch (though note I'm not saying anything about microtubules!). For what it is worth I am a structural biologist who has studied quantum mechanics and neuroscience and I'd guess that this is true. If it isn't, this is only of theoretical interest but that's not nothing)
Putting this all together, we get that you can have two Everett branches containing, say, Alice1 and Alice2, looking back at a choice she made and saying "the decision I made about what to major in at college that day really defines me as a person", and in one branch she majored in philosophy and in the other she majored in physics.
Note how both Alices are, in some sense, correct. They could really become quite different people from one another.
It came down to what we could call a very trivial little random fluctuation. Consider the instant AFTER the fluctuation happened in Alice1's head, but BEFORE she became aware of anything different from what Alice2 would be experiencing. In this instant we could scarcely say they were very different people, because the difference between them is something that "they" have no "control" over.
But on the other hand, they are going to become different people, and they really did have something going on that distinguishes a decision they made. Which sounds like free will to me.
Even in this extremely shaky set of assumptions, everything that happens fundamentally has its root in microscopic brain processes over which it is logically incoherent to say anyone has "control" over. When Alice thinks "the decision I made about what to major in at college that day really defines me as a person", where does this thought come from? She couldn't have consciously created this thought, because that would mean she would have to think about a thought before she's thought about it and so on.
Despite the invocation of a bunch of spooky quantum stuff, at the end of the day you're still left with the fundamental issue with free will that exists for all its formulations because a supposedly instrumental thought has necessarily arisen from non-conscious brain processes that cannot logically be said to be under conscious control.
I think I'm using a formulation of "free will" that you find unsatisfying. It seems reasonable to me to say that a person is the set of decisions and compulsions that lead to what they are. In that sense "you" do cause your thoughts (because if you had a different history your brain would be set up to think different things).
I just want to point out that quantum indeterminacy is compatible with this.
I don't really see what's the argument here. What's the need for Everett (or QM really) at all? Even with only one branch, it'll still be true that there are subtle microscopic aspects of the state of the world which will grow into macroscopic phenomena in the future. But how is this free will? Isn't it also a little funny to try to extract free will from one of the few versions of QM that is actually 100% deterministic?
Can we assume a can opener?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assume_a_can_opener
The way your question was set up reminded me of the old economist’s gag.
Im still trying to wrap my mind around Schrodinger’s “What is Life” so I’m not qualified to give you a serious answer.
Or indeed, What Is Love? 😁
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEXWRTEbj1I
I enjoyed that.
Some tunes are classics!
Schrodinger's " What is Life" (and there was another essay in my book) are great!
The part about human consciousness and the nature of a person’s soul is remarkable. When a quantum physics theorist starts citing The Upanishads he has my undivided attention.
Even if humans went extinct, wouldn't the big piles of rock and concrete we've created to build breakwaters like the one shown in the video survive for thousands of years? As long as the Great Pyramids?
https://youtu.be/L7tqaG6b7qY
If they were going to last thousands of years, we'd make smaller, cheaper ones instead.
Hell, parts of the South and East coasts of England aren't expected to last thousands of years.
It'd depend heavily on the exact location, but overall probably not. We have to do significant work on the jetties at the mouth of the Columbia River between Washington and Oregon every few decades, because even though the rocks are the size of large cars wave action still moves them around and the jetty slowly sinks beneath the waves.
Probably should have put more info in the original, but: https://www.nwp.usace.army.mil/jetties/
Any theories about why people are generally able to increase their strength, but not their IQ?
IQ is pretty explicitly designed to measure the component of intelligence that can't be trained, generally known as "fluid intelligence". There's also (IIRC the name) "crystallised intelligence", which is basically a fancy word for knowledge, and that is absolutely something you can train. Every fact you learn, every technique you practice until it's second nature, those are adding to your pool of crystallised intelligence. An analogy - referencing Newton's famous quote about standing on the shoulders of giants, crystallised knowledge is climbing the giants that are our forefathers, fluid intelligence is the ability to stretch tall and see that little bit further than those who came before us.
Not sure really. But lots of things seem to be like this. We have a large window to improve muscular size, but a much smaller window for bone density, tendon strength, cartilage integrity. Our liver can regenerate, but plenty of key internal comments can't. It's just the way it is.
We can increase it in a sense, by removing things that are known to decrease it. E.g. by removing stress, getting more sleep, etc. Fairly mundane things. But if you think about how the baseline for humans through history was of being constantly sick, malnutrited, thirsty and tired then the alternative seems more remarkable
It's a pretty general problem that making something stronger is much easier than making it smarter.
Getting stronger is a matter of more of the same. Just keep adding more muscle fibers in parallel with what you already have. More meat equals more power.
Getting _smarter_ is a lot trickier. The human brain is a bunch of crazy jerry-rigged software running on some crazy jerry-rigged hardware, and it's a wonder that it works at all. It is totally unclear what you could do to "just make it smarter". Even if the skull could grow, you can't just "add more neurons" to an already-built brain, you would need to find something useful for them to do.
Whether you can make someone smarter is very much a mater of how you define smarter. You obviously couldn't pass that multivariate calculus class in kindergarten. A chess master can walk by a chess board and say, "mate in 4" without breaking a sweat. IQ tests are just designed very intentionally to measure something that is very difficult to train.
G is apparently incredibly valuable, it seems a bit surprising to me that it's a trait where the easily available maximum is established at (presumably before) birth. Maybe I'm just too used to growth mindset.
I realize brains can't get larger, but as I understand it, they can improve connections.
How much is known about the physiological basis of intelligence?
I think it's a shame so much work has gone into trying to figure out what people can't improve mentally as compared to what they can improve.
Countless intelligence researchers have spent the best part of the past 100 years looking for ways to increase g. It's only through thousands of studies that we can even know with such certainty that it cannot meaningfully be done (for people without obvious deleterious factors in their lives).
Understanding the neurobiology of g is in its infancy but the research is being done: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2019.00044/full
"Countless intelligence researchers have spent the best part of the past 100 years looking for ways to increase g."
I'd missed out on that. What I've been seeing is people arguing about g.
The capacities of different body parts is probably an interesting subject.
Skin and muscle heal much more easily than connective tissue. Connective tissue that heals better is on my list for improved bodies, but as I understand it, the difference is vascularization, and I don't know if it's feasible for connective tissue to have better vascularization.
If connective tissue healed better, would there be less reason to redesign knees?
I thought spleens regenerate (I was wrong, probably had them confused with livers), but....
"Unlike some other organs, like the liver, the spleen does not grow back (regenerate) after it is removed. Up to 30% of people have a second spleen (called an accessory spleen). These are usually very small, but may grow and function when the main spleen is removed."
That's pretty cool. I'll put backup mini-organs on my list.
Livers do regenerate.
"Liver regeneration is the process by which the liver is able to replace lost liver tissue from growth from the remaining tissue. The liver is the only visceral organ that possesses the capacity to regenerate. The liver can regenerate after either surgical removal or chemical injury."
Why just livers? Does it help that livers don't have as much structure as some other organs?
Useless point of trivia: blood technically counts as connective tissue.
"Connective tissue arises in the mesenchym" is the college version of "the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell".
There's no sort of growing brain size, but you can grow/build muscle mass by exercise.
(as much as volume has some correlation with IQ.)
My thoughts are that IQ is a measure of your ability to solve new problems. This might be like a measure of ones ability to lift weights with previously unused muscles. If the IQ test contained the kinds of problems for which learned methods were effective at finding solutions, then IQ tests results would improve as examinees learned additional tools (calculus, statistics). IQ tests appear to be intentionally designed to avoid that.
The simplest way to think about IQ is that it's a nervous system performance benchmark, like how we benchmark cars and computers and parts thereof. An intelligence test is just a test suite for that kind of thing.
They are built to avoid that because they try to measure more elementary things, like working memory capacity (~RAM). Measuring mathematical skill would be just that: Measuring a learned skill, not testing intelligence, per se. The elementary tests themselves are subject to practice effects already: Jensen recounts a working memory stressing subtest where people are asked to repeat the last N letters/numbers they were told. Without practice, most people were firmly under ten. But practice can improve performance on that one subtest to a monstrous degree: By applying strategies people can commit 70 things into memory instead of the normal 7.
The joke is that this increases the test score, but makes that task a worse measure of intelligence (there are many reasons you can score high on a test, and intelligence tests are premised on the fact that you score high because of high g. If you score high because of practice and not g, that task ceases to be a good bit of measuring tape).
This is why people are encouraged to not practice intelligence tests.
No. IQ is a measure of your ability to reproduce culturally approved norms of problem solutions. That's what it was designed for. (It was designed to, among other things, give backing to preventing migrants from legal entry.)
AFAIK there is no valid "measure of your ability to solve new problems" that doesn't make strong assumptions about what those problems will be. This may be related to the "no free lunch" theorum. If it is, then such a measure may well be impossible.
This is complete nonsense. You don't know the first thing about psychometrics.
It's truly bizarre that your asinine assertion that it was created to "keep migrants out" coincides with the test giving the highest scores to jews and north-east asian populations i.e. foreign groups.
IQ arose from the scientific study of human intelligence. It is empirically robust and has around a century of experimental validation. Your unfounded assertions are just a form of pathetic hand-waving so you can dismiss science that contradicts your worldview.
Read "The Mismeasurement of Man" by S. J. Gould
Gould is an ideologue and a liar. His work can't be trusted and is evidence only for what he thinks should be the case, not what is.
An ideologue ... well, yes, about puntured evolution. Otherwise you need to substantiate your claim. A liar? No, I don't think so. I'd rather trust him than those I don't know personally, and more than some of them. Or you could provide evidence I could check, but facts count and opinions don't count.
FWIW, even WRT punctuted evolution much of the time he's being clear. Sometimes wrong, but that's different from being a liar.
Now I see what you guys mean about people from my side of the aisle acting like a**es...
This seems unprovoked. Ch Hi was not attacking you ad hominem, and seems to have said what they believe. Who is acting like an a** here?
He ignored every point I had made in my comment and instead hijacked the conversation to pretend as if I was blind to the ways that IQ has been, or might be, used to political ends against minorities. I am very sympathetic to those views. However, nobody in the conversation was discussing that.
Maybe he was triggered. Maybe he is an a**. Either way, it seemed worth bringing it to his attention how he was being perceived by his own allies on that topic.
"what they believe" is complete nonsense with no basis in science. This wasn't a good faith declaration of their reasoned view point, it was a pathetic, flailing dismissal of established scientific theory. Instead of engaging with the actual empirical evidence of intelligence research, they have essentially just smeared it as being racist and think this assertion is sufficient to dismiss all the evidence for it. It's the opposite of good faith and it is indeed Ch Hi acting like the a** here.
I would welcome debate about specific methodological failings in intelligence research supported with the appropriate literature. This wasn't it. He is telling an unscientific lie about intelligence research in order to not have to engage with the science.
"What they believe is complete nonsense" is a strong statement here, or anywhere. FWIW, I see two statements in the post you were reacting to. One is that IQ is a method to reproduce culturally approved norms, which I disagree with since I've read of some studies which consistently falsify this (though with the replication crisis, etc., that's not necessarily final). The second is that it was developed in part for racist or xenophobic ends, which sounds totally plausible to me (most early 20th century ideas were in one way or another), though I don't know the facts here and don't have time to research them now.
I think the first statement pattern-matches to lazy and currently trendy postmodern ideas, but that doesn't necessarily make it false or implausible. So I see two statements, one of which is totally plausible to me and the other of which sounds a bit lazy and which is contradicted by some twin studies, but which, if you hadn't read the same sources I did seems plausible enough. Where do you get from there to bad faith?
I'm writing this because I get annoyed by dogmatic overuse of "the discourse" as much as the next person, but that doesn't mean that you can dismiss anything that sounds "discourse-y" as bad faith or even necessarily false. In this case, I'm seeing a very ad-hominem pile-on on someone who made some statements that are not offensive to anyone and that for all I know that person believes. This is a Sith (or "conflict-theorist") thing to do and I don't want that in my online spaces.
Wait, people can't increase their IQ? I have a hard time believing that. So someone who's not a fluent English speaker and never done a math question or word riddle in their life would score the same as a native English speaker who does math questions and riddles as a hobby?
When people say that IQ can't be increased, they're implicitly and specifically talking about people in developed countries who do not face severe deleterious life factors like malnourishment, childhood disease or trauma, lack of education growing up etc.
In e.g. the US, these factors are experienced by a tiny fraction of the population and so do not explain nearly any of the observed variation in IQ.
Intelligence researchers have been trying to find ways of increasing actual IQ for as long as IQ as existed as a concept (I use actual IQ to mean genuine cognitive ability, rather than score on an IQ test which can be improved with practice but the actual cognitive ability won't increase). Doing math problems and riddles does not improve your general intelligence. It may make you better at math problems and riddles, but it won't meaningfully improve your e.g. pattern completion skills. The central principle of intelligence research is that intelligence is general. A person's performance on all cognitively demanding traits is somewhat correlated, and this correlation is captured in something known as the general intelligence factor. IQ is a way of measuring the general intelligence factor. For something to improve your intelligence, it needs to improve your ability to do any cognitively demanding tasks. And provided the person isn't starving or never went to school etc., there's not really anything that will increase intelligence generally.
And language does not matter as long you do a test in your native language. Which is precisely why people in china doing chinese language IQ tests score so highly.
I wonder whether people can learn to get better at remembering to apply their existing abilities.
For example, when faced with a multi-level marketing opportunity, can a person learn to remember that it doesn't make mathematical sense?
People typically take the test in their native language. Also, I think charity would require Mark Roulo's interpretation of the question.
OK, so then compare someone who's almost illiterate (because they went to 5 years of school in total) to someone with 16 years of schooling.
I'm not sure what Mark Roulo's interpretation is. "g" seems to mean something like "the innate component of people's ability to understand the world". But if so, it makes no sense to ask why people can't increase g with practice, because by definition, it's the innate component! On the other hand, if the question is why people's ability to understand the world can't be improved, the answer is that it can--by education, exposure, and experience.
I think a better definition of g is that it's the common factor in different cognitive tests. The aim is to get a precise definition that corresponds to what we think of as intelligence. To what extent g is innate, or, rather, how various genetic and environmental factors affect it, is an empirical matter.
"OK, so then compare someone who's almost illiterate (because they went to 5 years of school in total) to someone with 16 years of schooling."
There are tests designed to assume no literacy.
One example is repeating back digit sequences. Smarter people tend to be able to repeat back longer digit sequences (one can adjust to symbols an illiterate person is familiar with ...)
Better seems to be *reverse* sequence repeat back: Given a sequence, repeat it back in reverse order.
Note, however, that both of these are something one can get better at with practice. If you take folks who have been trained to do this, then the results won't correlate very well with the thing that intelligence researchers are trying to investigate.
"I'm not sure what Mark Roulo's interpretation is.... On the other hand, if the question is why people's ability to understand the world can't be improved, the answer is that it can--by education, exposure, and experience."
Point of order: I'm not trying to offer *MY* interpretation. I'm trying to describe my understanding of how intelligence researchers approach this.
But ... a reasonable outcome is that smarter people (more 'g') can be trained to a higher degree than folks who aren't as smart. Lower IQ (lower 'g') folks can learn, but below a certain level they won't be able to learn/understand, say, quantum mechanics. Much like some folks will never be able to bench press 400 pounds.
> There are tests designed to assume no literacy.
I am dubious is it fully succesful.
> One example is repeating back digit sequences.
This highly favors people than do sort-of-such thing already. It is one of tiny components of my work (programming, especially while debugging) and something that I would likely never use if I would be a hunter in a jungle.
You can eg. give jungle hunters a sequence of animals - that should be familiar enough culturally - and you'll definitely see the usual normal distribution amongst those tribespeople of ones who can remember long sequences flawlessly and ones who get muddled relatively quickly
I think the charitable interpretation of the original question is something like "why is there a significant component of general cognitive ability that is innate and fixed, but general physical ability seems to be mostly malleable and trainable".
I think the answer to that interpretation is what was mentioned in Mark's comment and the subsequent thread - that actually, there is a significant innate/fixed component of general physical ability as well.
That's one possible interpretation, but I think it's a lot more obvious that there's an innate component of physical ability than that there's an innate component of mental ability.
But we don't need to do exegesis because the Goddess Herself is right here. @Nancy Lebovitz what did you mean?
IQ tests are specifically designed to be difficult to improve your score on, since they're meant to measure something inherent. Designers actively try to minimize the effects of study.
Even so, there's evidence that going to university will increase your IQ somewhat. For example: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/06/180621112004.htm
Interesting, but its worth noting that this should already be reflected in heritability estimates. If this effect is robust, it means that if everyone went to university then heritability would simply be even higher than it already is.
My biggest question with this study is that since college pre-selects for above average intelligence in the first place, are the results actually robust and generalizable across the population? Intuitively, it seems likely that somebody with an IQ of 115 is going to find college more intellectually stimulating than someone with an IQ of 85 who can't even understand what the lecturer is talking about much of the time (or does very non-intellectually demanding courses). Flicking through this study quickly, I see the authors write:
"Furthermore, because the policies used as instruments typically increased educational duration only for the subset of individuals who would otherwise have attended school at the preexisting minimum compulsory level, this design should be interpreted as producing a “local average treatment effect” that might not generalize across the full educational range (Morgan & Winship, 2015, p. 305)."
Muscles getting stronger is fundamentally different from the nervous system getting more efficient.
A large component of expressible strength -- specifically the ability to exert force against load -- comes directly from central nervous system efficiency.
When you first start lifting weights, you get stronger extremely quickly. An untrained healthy male in his 20s can easily add 100+ pounds to his squat in the first 1-2 months of training. His muscles will not get bigger! That increase in strength came from training his nervous system to more efficiently command the muscles he already had.
I assume that you *can* increase your IQ (where IQ is defined as “a single numerical score based on a multiple choice IQ test”), by learning how to game that particular type of test.
Simple strategies such as knowing when to guess and when to spend time getting a correct answer instead of moving on to more questions could measurably increase scores, I would think.
When we say increase IQ, we really mean 'increase general intelligence factor as approximated by result on an IQ test'. Essentially, learning to game IQ tests doesn't make you any smarter, it just makes you better at the test. This isn't a criticism of IQ testing in general though because most people don't game IQ tests and so gaming the test does not explain a meaningful amount of observed variance in IQ. And if did, it would simply mean IQ would lose its predictive ability, which it hasn't.
A crude analogy to strength may be something like the deadlift (bending down and lifting a loaded barbell off the ground). If you can lift a maximum of 100kg, but then you switch to using weight plates with 50% greater diameter, you now have to lift the weight a distance of a few inches less than before. This makes the lift easer, so now you can lift 110kg instead of 100kg. Have your muscles actually become any stronger? Of course not. But as long as most people are using the smaller diameter weight plates, max deadlift weight is still a good measure of somebody's strength.
"I assume that you *can* increase your IQ (where IQ is defined as “a single numerical score based on a multiple choice IQ test”), by learning how to game that particular type of test. Simple strategies such as knowing when to guess and when to spend time getting a correct answer instead of moving on to more questions could measurably increase scores, I would think. "
For conversations such as this I tend to assume that the author means 'g' rather than a specific result from a specific IQ test.
But, yes, IQ tests *can* be gamed so if Nancy does mean *that* then there is a 2nd reason why her premise is incorrect.
But I'm pretty sure she means 'g', not gaming a test.
You could well be right about Nancy’s intent - maybe she will clarify.
I’ve only recently been introduced to ‘g’, via a question in a previous open thread, and am still pretty fuzzy on the concept.
I did a bit of reading, but it was not clear to me how ‘g’ is measured. Can you elaborate, or link me to a good explanation?
If you're given a test item, there are many reasons you can be good at it. You can be good at it for reasons that are unique to that item or for reasons that are shared with some other items. There can be multiple shared reasons shared with different item sets.
Intelligence is and isn't your score on the test. What I mean is, if you keep piling on items, the item-based specifics wash out for the most part. As I keep adding items, the universal influence of general intelligence is a larger and larger part of why you do well. It's like if I asked you a whole bunch of questions about everything under the Sun.
The giant pile of questions includes things like "do you bonk your head at doorframes", "do you have an easy time reaching things on high shelves", "do you (physically) look up/down at most women", "do you (physically) look up/down at most men", "are you good at basketball" etc.
We would find that your answer to any one of those questions would mean you're likely to answer the other ones affirmatively. Why?
All of them tap into your height. You might often wear platform shoes, which cause bonks, but those won't make you better at basketball. You might be good at jumping, which helps reaching stuff on shelves and at basketball, but won't really show up as bonking or looking down at people and so on.
When we analyze your answers to the pile, those answers form clusters and we can then use a method called factor analysis to list out the shared reasons for why you'd answer a question in a certain way or perform on a task in a certain way. With the example questions, we'd turn out with a factor that represents your height.
In studies of personality questionnaires, we find that individual answers cluster together into narrower traits like sociability, talkativeness, irritability and worry-proneness which then sum up into broader domains like extraversion and neuroticism.
The remarkable thing in intelligence is that there is one general factor that plays a part in just about all tasks that measure mental ability. Not to the same degree by any means - general intelligence is only a small part of why people do well on some tasks, and a huge part in others. But its pervasiveness is insane. For example, for a trait often said to measure academic ability, it correlates with weird things like pitch disrimination ability and average reaction time.
The purpose of an intelligence test is to get a measure of that trait. A physical quality like height, but one we can't actually see. Test items are good as long as you answer them the way you do because of your level on the trait being measured.
If you train at a question type, you can absolutely get a higher score (for example remembering digits you've been told: Most people remember a max of about 7 or so with no practice, if you practice you can remember dozens), and you will concretely be a more capable person. But that's like wearing platform shoes: You're better at reaching stuff on shelves, but the stuff on shelves question just became a worse measure of your height. You're succeeding at the task because of your training, not because of the innate trait the test is trying to measure, and actually sabotaging the test's ability to do its job properly.
There's a reason researchers don't really like people having practice on the tests. Practice makes people more skillful, but it makes the researchers' measuring stick less accurate.
"I’ve only recently been introduced to ‘g’, via a question in a previous open thread, and am still pretty fuzzy on the concept.
I did a bit of reading, but it was not clear to me how ‘g’ is measured. Can you elaborate, or link me to a good explanation?"
Intelligence is very difficult to measure directly. It isn't like height or weight.
The idea here is that 'g' is the thing we really care about. Smarts. Intelligence
IQ tests are basically proxies for 'g.' But because they are proxies they are gameable in a way that measuring height and weight ususally aren't.
So we measure with IQ tests and better IQ tests correlate better with 'g' and also are harder to game. But motivated folks can usually game any IQ test to some extent or another.
But getting better at an IQ test doesn't mean you get better at the real things we want smart people for
Well, how do we know that you can't increase your 'g'? We know that years of education are correlated with IQ, why can this not partly be because more education on average gives you more 'g', rather than just making you better at IQ tests or being a survivorship bias.
If you wanted to look into whether years of education increase IQ, then one plausible way to test that would be twin studies -- you've got two identical twins, one went to college, the other didn't. Twin studies have been very discouraging for those who think IQ is more on the malleable end.
"g" is basically the thing that IQ tests are trying to measure - it's your ability to perform well on cognitive tasks in general, independent of factors that might lead to outperformance on a specific task (such as learning how to game it). People will often use the terms IQ and g factor interchangeably.
From Wikipedia: "It is a variable that summarizes positive correlations among different cognitive tasks, reflecting the fact that an individual's performance on one type of cognitive task tends to be comparable to that person's performance on other kinds of cognitive tasks. The g factor typically accounts for 40 to 50 percent of the between-individual performance differences on a given cognitive test, and composite scores ("IQ scores") based on many tests are frequently regarded as estimates of individuals' standing on the g factor."
I'd guess the energy used by brains has been small enough compared to the variance in how much brain power is needed that there hasn't been enough to gain from being born with half a brain and then growing the other half only if needed – whereas developing maximum muscle strength regardless of need has been likely to lead to starvation.
My understanding is that the brain uses a lot of energy. A quick google finds the claim that the brain is 2% of body mass, 20% of energy.
Say you could get by with half your brain, and by doing so you would save 250 kcal per day. The Internet says that this is equivalent to around 20 kg of muscle mass, which coincidentally appears to be the amount of muscle mass a man can hope to gain through exercise. So it would seem that, for human males, the energy savings from having half a brain would be around the same as from not being strong. So I'd say that either (A) having a big brain has been pretty consistently good for fitness or (B) a mutation that gives people half a brain unless they need more just never happened to arise (at least since the rise of big brains, which is way after the rise of big muscles).
I think size isn't the only factor - your brain definitely uses more energy when you're actively using it than eg. when you're watching TV on the couch; naively, I'd expect brain endurance to be a trainable thing, but to my knowledge IQ tests focus more on your peak power than whether you tail off multiple hours in (I could be wrong on this and would be fascinated to learn of studies eg. giving long IQ tests in variable order to see if people tend to perform worse at later subtests)
I'm confused: I can increase my strength but not my height. Why would the ability to change one trait imply the ability to change another?
You can, sort-of, in a roundabout way, increase your height. Children who eat regularly balanced diet of nutritious food and don't get seriously sick (+ enjoy other benefits provided by the Age of Plenty) are taller adults when they grow up than children with same genotype who have more limited dietary options and less access to modern antibiotics (I don't believe you don't have to be explicitly malnourished for the effect to be visible).
Doesn't the same thing apply to intelligence? Children who eat well and avoid various hazards wind up more intelligent, on average. Perhaps that just means they reach their full potential - but that same argument seems to me to apply to height.
+1
+1
"Any theories about why people are generally able to increase their strength, but not their IQ?"
This may be the wrong question.
If strength doesn't map ti IQ, but instead maps to "learned skill" then there is no mystery. Folks can get better/stronger just like they can learn to do things better.
There is, however, an upper limit to each for any given person.
If IQ maps to "physical potential" then there may be nothing to explain.
I agree with Mark on this. Based my experience lifting weights and observing friends who lift, I think the physical analog of IQ is not strength, but rather something like "capacity to build muscle". Anyone can increase their strength through lifting (which is literally strength training), but people vary pretty widely based on 1) the _rate_ at which they put on new muscle mass, and 2) the _maximum_ muscle mass which is achievable with a given level of commitment.
There is some interesting research on this topic, e.g. https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/75/6/1012/4689430 and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8450591/. I think the current view is that your ability to gain muscle in response to strength training correlates roughly with the size your skeletal frame. So you can get a pretty good sense of your muscular potential by just measuring your wrist and ankle circumferences - thicker means more potential.
I'm kind of skinny but i have a big skeleton and broad shoulders. Could I get absoultely jacked?
You can't really know your potential without trying. Your starting muscle mass and your bone size correlate with your max potential muscle, but there's still plenty of variance. A lot of jacked guys started out skinny, but turned out to be high responders to training.
FWIW My skinny guy getting strong experience. In high school I was 6' even and weighed 120 pounds, so pretty effen skinny. Broad shoulder but what they call small boned.
I worked as a 'gandydancer' for a number of years in an iron mine right out of high school. Ripping old railroad track and building new track by hand with 9 pound spike maul. I was also running about 30 miles a week for cardio.
At what my fittest I weighed 185, negligible fat and was pretty cut with good muscle definition but never got 'big' in the body builder sense.
I didn't ever achieve extraordinary muscle mass but I had a great endurance and adequate strength to more than keep up with the beefy guys. Plus good technique played a large part in doing what looked like a brute strength job.
I think I would have had to take some weird hormone supplement to to get 'jacked'.
To add to what MB said, another factor holding you back was probably getting a calorie surplus. Muscles grow best when you've got a substantial calorie surplus. Long distance running and being lean are both counterproductive for getting the sort of surplus you want.
Note that even bodybuilders don't stay lean year round--they'll do bulking phases where they let themselves gain fat so they can build more muscle, and later lose the fat (and try to keep the muscle) when it's time for a show.
No idea what I'm talking about here, so ignore at your leisure, but I think there is a difference between "muscle gained in the gym/using Not At All Dodgy Supplements" and "muscle built by physical work".
So I imagine you might have been able to get the gym-body muscle if you followed that regimen of eating, working out, and Taking Little Helpers, but working manual labour job demanded different muscle and strength use and hence the way it was built up.
I think in order to get muscular in the bodybuilder sense, you do have to follow some kind of lifting regimen, or at least consistently do things that stress all of the different muscle groups for low repetitions.
People like yourself that become strong through manual labor will often not look as muscular as those who lift because their "training" is focused on a more limited set of functional movement patterns. There's no doubt the work you were doing required a lot of strength, but did you naturally perform any motions similar to a bench press? If not, then there's no reason to expect your pectoral muscles to be as large as someone who specifically trains pressing movements.
The number of reps also makes a difference - bodybuilders disagree on exactly how many reps are optimal for muscle growth, but almost everyone agrees that <20 reps is the relevant range. But if you're doing work for a living, you're necessarily going to be performing functional movements far more than 20 times, which is great for building muscular endurance but tends not to produce as much hypertrophy (muscle size growth).
I would lean towards yes. Being "skinny" is mostly a function of your diet and (lack of) prior training, and doesn't have much bearing on muscular potential.
You could also use the wrist circumference method on yourself. Measure around the narrowest part (so below the base of the hand, but before your forearm starts to widen). Below 6.5" is small frame, 6.5" to 7.5" is medium, and above 7.5" is large.
Of course, if you are interested in getting jacked, I would try to do so regardless of this estimate. Personally I am team "small frame", but I've still managed to get pretty muscular by most people's standards without spending an inordinate amount of time in the gym. Almost anyone can become muscular with patience and consistency - your genetic potential is really only relevant if you are interested in competitive lifting or bodybuilding.
"So you can get a pretty good sense of your muscular potential by just measuring your wrist and ankle circumferences - thicker means more potential. "
Looking down at my wrist size and thinking back to my experience lifting weights in college ... pieces are starting to fit :-)
Thanks!
[I was able to get "stronger" to a point, but adding muscle mass was amazingly slow. I noted it at the time, and just figured that I was someone who added muscle mass slowly. Tiny wrists doesn't 'explain' it, but does provide a proxy for maybe the underlying reason.]
At first you gain strength through improving the nervous system. Only after your body has picked that low-hanging fruit do you start to put on muscle.
To add some detail, I graduated college weighing something like 145 pounds and bench pressing 220 (I could never manage 225, darn it). I'd been lifting for all four years (and started freshman year with a dorm friend). After four year I'd like to think that my nervous system had been improved :-)
And I've read about body builders who put on muscle mass a lot faster then I was. I hope that this wasn't mostly due to steroids? Though maybe it was...
And I figured that I should have been able to put on more muscle and bench 225+. And maybe with better training (or a nutritionist or something) I could have.
But the lifting didn't seem to be leading to much muscle gain.
It was roids, yeah.
I think genetics probably played some role in your experience, but without knowing the details it's hard to say how much. For most people who struggle to gain muscle at the speed they'd like, diet is a much bigger factor than genetics. Many people, particularly those like yourself who are naturally "skinny", will not eat enough food to support a heavy lifting regimen unless they make it a point to do so. And of course, there are many other people whose natural inclination is to consume more food than they need - in their case the challenge is not building muscle but rather doing so without gaining fat alongside it.
I've heard bodybuilders say that bodybuilding is 80% nutrition and 20% training. I think this is an exaggeration, or perhaps only applies to people who actually compete. But I do think that it's at least 50% what you eat, and that applies even if your goal is basically just to look "jacked" in an everyday sense.
My partner and I are trying to have a baby, which got me wondering about the state of embryo selection and other type of existing genetic manipulation that may improve my child's health outcomes.
Does anyone have any experience with such technologies? Where should I be looking at if I wanted to find out more about the current commercial applications?
Check out https://www.orchidhealth.com/embryo !
Are you both yourselves in reasonably good health? Are either of you at an age that increases risk (having children later in life)? Is there anything in your families' backgrounds of hereditary disorders or health problems?
If not, then just eat, exercise and live healthily, take supplements like folic acid, be in general good health and don't worry too much. You can make things a lot worse by meddling - for instance, if you want embryo selection, then that means putting the potential mother through IVF procedures like hyperovulation which are not fun:
https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/in-vitro-fertilization/about/pac-20384716
We are both in our mid-30s in good health and physical shape, and with no important health issues to speak off. That said, we have had trouble conceiving so we are going with start with IVF.
If there's no obvious genetic worries, don't mess with the embryo if you don't have to. It carries risks, and if you are having trouble conceiving these risks become much more amplified, especially if either of you has shifted your ideal identity towards being a parent. My suggestion would be to limit intervention to the relatively-low-risk screenings available for serious genetic disorders.
Basically, the question to ask is the normal risk-benefit one, but to realise the risk includes something happening to a healthy child due to medical intervention and the fact you have to live with that for the rest of your lives (especially if only one of you wants the procedure). If you feel you are low on chances to have a child, that is an especially important factor to consider: a child with slightly higher health risks is still likely to be a better option than a real risk of no child at all.
Note this is based on personal experience of almost the same situation and the decisions we made. It worked out for us and we got two healthy kids. Hopefully things work out well for you as well.
Also speaking from an IVF experience that eventually yielded a child, I strongly agree with the advice to mess with the embryo as little as medically necessary to maximize the odds of successful conception. And… best of luck to you. IVF is a wretched process.
I’m referring to procedures like ICSI (sperm selection/injection), cryogenically freezing embryos rather than “fresh” transfer to the uterus, and extracting embryo cells for a genetic test. These are all common practice and there is good reason to do them. But if you have trouble conceiving, you are fighting low probabilities of IVF success. Every interference with the embryo needs to be weighed in terms of whether it will increase or decrease the probability of successful pregnancy.
One thing that is fueling China's "lying flat" social movement is burnout over having to work very long hours. The "9-9-6" work week, which amounts to 72 hours, is a notorious national phenomenon.
If China's government somehow mandated that no one, with a small number of exceptions, could work more than 50 hours per week, what would be the effect on the country's economy, living standards, and on the other factors that the "lying flat" people complain about?
I suspect that it might backfire, and that "9-9-6" is propping the country up.
They could start by making 996 the upper limit, I have heard that there are many jobs that have longer hours.
If they mandated that very little would happen. China has a lot of safety and workers rights laws on paper they aren't meaningfully enforced already. Due to a combination of indifference, corruption and lack of state capacity.
One of the paradoxes of authoritarian countries is thet often the actual degree of their control over the economy and society is pretty limited. Draconian policies are often a reaction to that difficulty of enforcement.
Working 72 hours per week is simply not efficient long term (it may be for short crunch time, with enough time to rest afterwards). The British in WW2 found out that increasing work hours (from 48/week to ~70) actually harmed productivity after a few months and they went back to 48-56. And I suspect the British workers in WW2 were about as motivated as you can expect to get:
https://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/document.php?id=cqresrre1942111600#H2_3
For those who have been to the meetups, what is the gender ratio?
Huh - my impression from 3-4 Seattle meetups at The Territory was that it skewed male, but not noticeably so. Felt like 60%-ish?
But I'm pretty used to being in male-skewing spaces and wouldn't normally take note of it.
The overall ratio across meetups (N=133) is 85% male. 35% of meetups (47/133) were 100% male.
At the South Bay meetups we host, something like 10:1 male to female. Not counting the hosts.
In the Chicago meetups I've attended with the current group it's normally 100% male... except when Scott Alexander or Robin Hanson was scheduled to be there, resulting in a much larger attendance than usual.
Every rationalish meetup I've been to has skewed male, I imagine the ACX meetups will be no different. The 2020 SSC reader survey https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/20/ssc-survey-results-2020/ puts the community at ~85% cis male.
:( Thanks for trying though!
Not sure this is appropriate from an open thread, but since we've recently discussed climate-related decision making.
Is there any way for a retail investor to invest in carbon-capture technology companies _today_?
Refining a little bit my rationale: I expect no significant international coordination to happen around preventing release of CO2 &co, and I expect that eventually (barring the technological singularity from happening) that eventually the only course of action for reducing significant climate change effects, if they start to inconvenience first world political elite, is to mandate CO2&co removal.
Thus, my question on whether there's any way to do some early investing in companies working in this area, other then maybe becoming an icelandic citizen?
Our current most effective carbon capture is growing trees and cutting them down. So invest in sustainable forestry businesses. (Not ones that cut down virgin forest but ones that replant and manage over the long term)
Do you have a specific business/org in mind? A (_very_) quick google search didn't turn up anything directly investable by a retail investor, but I'll do more extensive searches some other time.
You could invest in Weyerhaeuser. They own or manage over 40,000 square miles (100,000+ square km) of timberland. Growing up in rural Western Washington it seemed that every tree covered hill was either federal land or Weyerhaeuser land. They clear cut, replant, let the trees grow 20-40 years (depends on the species) and then start from the beginning. The wood is pretty much entirely used for lumbar, so that carbon is good and captured for a while. They're on the New York Stock Exchange.
Thanks!
There are startups in this area, but it's quite difficult to invest in them. You can sometimes invest in companies that own the funds that in turn invest in climate-related startups. One example is Alphabet (Google's parent) - they own Google Ventures and Google Capital that in turn invest in climate-tech and renewable energy companies, e.g. Dandelion Energy, or meat / dairy substitutes like Impossible Foods and Ripple Foods.
Alphabet is also a good choice because Google is apparently working on carbon capture directly: https://google.github.io/energystrategies/?state=WzEsMSwxLDEsMCwwLDAsMCwxLDFd#:~:text=sequestering%20carbon%20from%20fossil%20fuels
Google X has worked on similar things in the past but it wasn't economical then: https://x.company/projects/foghorn/ But the people and research and knowledge are probably still there.
That being said, investing into GOOG to try and capture something like this gives you a comparatively small exposure to climate-related stuff and a massive exposure to Alphabet's existing businesses, so it might not be what you're after if you want something high-risk / high-reward.
Investing directly and avoiding a megacorp/megafund was exactly the aim of my question, but thank you for the specific info!
Heh, my "move to Iceland" was (mostly) in jest. I mentioned that because carbfix is owned by Reykjavik Energy, which in turn (AFAICT) is owned by the Reykjavik municipality itself.
North of Peace River?
Say more words.
She’s raising 8 kids on farm. Probably not a lot of time for more words.
You are offered a pill that would make you immune to aging and all diseases, but would also severely hinder your long-term memory, so that it'd be hard for you to keep memories for longer than one month. Don't count on future medicine and technology to fix it.
Would you take it? Would your answer change if instead of a month it was one week, or one year?
I'll take it and have scientists research how I can be immune to basically all disease or supply antigents for hard to treat disease. in this sense how long I can remember is irrelevant
similar to a minor plot point in the comic:" strong female protagonist"
I already have a memory like a colander, having one that meant I forgot everything after a month would be no use to me at all (for a start, I'd have to be constantly re-learning how to do my job, which means my employer would eventually get fed-up and gently boot me out the door while they replace me with someone who can remember the procedures for the 'quarterly mandated returns to government' paperwork).
I do think the minimum memory retention period would need to be a year, and longer if you could get it. Otherwise, you're the equivalent of a 200 year old Alzheimer's patient, and I don't think anyone imagines that would be a fun experience.
I noticed you said "immune to aging and all diseases". By that do you mean immortal, or amortal? That is, do you become impossible to kill, or does it only remove the inevitability of death?
I meant immune to aging, flu, cancer, HIV, dementia, Alzheimer etc. Complete invincibility would have possible disturbing consequences that distract from the dilemma's spirit.
Do not take.
The only way it would be worthwhile is amortality.
Presumably the latter.
I'm assuming it isn't a complete memory wipe at the end of the time period, it's that the older memories go away.
Definitely not, especially as presented with the one month memory leak. If the memory leak were very minor, as in, 1) hard to gain new skills but not impossible, 2) can still learn about and build relationships with new people, but maybe struggle to learn new names of casual acquaintances, 3) can remember what you did and where you were (not Memento), even if the details were fuzzy - then it would be much more palatable. A full memory wipe or even reasonably close to that would be a nightmare scenario. I would hate to live when I can't remember what I'm living for. Even if I retain my current plans for life, I don't want to be doing the same things for the next XX years because I can't remember new plans. Obviously the longer the timeframe of memory loss the better, but unless it's something like 10 years (I could maybe haggle closer to five), I think it would be more problem than solution.
Separate from your thought experiment, I happen to think living forever would be terrible in ways that would be non-intuitive, such that we would often accept the pill to live forever even without a memory problem, but should not. Renewal and replacement of the population helps keep us fresh as a people, and removes old stagnation. Children with parents who never age and die would struggle to transition to adulthood, for instance. As we watch our parents age and become less capable, we are encouraged to step up and become more responsible. As a simple example, at some point often long before they die, parents stop hosting Thanksgiving and Christmas and it transitions to the next generation. Now the new generation has to learn how to cook a turkey (or name your other tradition they take over). If your parents are young and healthy forever, maybe you delay adulthood for indefinite periods of time. That's very bad for the individuals and also very bad for society. We also become more jaded, set in our ways, and cynical as time goes on. A population made up significantly of young-looking old people who can't become adults and are still growing cynical sounds like Sci-Fi Dystopia fodder. Add in the memory loss, and that sounds like a slow motion apocalypse.
Let's be hardcore about this. If people generally become more capable as they get older (or at least don't become less capable), needing to transition to full adulthood might not happen to most people, and be pretty rare in general.
"Children with parents who never age and die would struggle to transition to adulthood, for instance. "
Both my wife and I transitioned to adulthood long before our parents "aged and died" if "aged" means more than "got older."
Transitioning to adulthood is not a single event, but a long series of events over many years. Getting a starter job, getting a better job, getting a career, getting married, having kids, renting and then buying a house, selling and buying a different house, raising little kids, then bigger kids, then teenagers, etc. etc.
We may ask our parents for advice, especially in the early stages of each part. I've noticed that I ask my parents less and less for advice as they age and show frailty. I watched my dad do the same thing with his parents. At some point the equilibrium can even switch, where the kids are making decision for the parents, including when the parents are becoming physically or mentally incapable of handling all of the normal adult responsibilities.
Markers of adulthood can be a lot of different things, but could include strength, good household budgeting, getting kids to some number of weekly activities (or them going off to college/life), achieving a certain title or status at work, buying a big house, whatever. As I achieve those things and sometimes even surpass my dad, I feel more capable. As I feel more capable, I feel more like an adult, and less in his shadow. As he declines into retirement and old age, the equilibrium is switching and he needs me to take care of things. The last time we were visiting, my dad asked me to move some heavy boxes for him. Mentally that's a very different relationship and experience from even 5-10 years ago, when he could have easily (maybe more easily than me) just taken care of that himself. It encourages me to step up, take responsibility, and prepare to be the lead in the family.
If he would never decline, there's a definite psychological effect where I would not take those final steps to supplant him, but very likely always remain a little lower status in my own mind.
I can only say that I don't think that fits my or my wife's experience. I would feel just as adult if my parents were still alive, and she would if her father was.
I think you're overestimating the trouble here. For many people in the modern day, the process of transitioning to adulthood has a lot less to do with your parents dying or becoming disabled, and a lot more to do with moving out and establishing your own household and traditions. Yes, your parents no longer being the default host can encourage you to learn how to cook a turkey, but so can living on the other side of the country from your parents and not wanting to fly, or waking up one morning and going "wow, I really want turkey", or deciding that the relatives who own dining rooms large enough to fit everyone will rotate who hosts family thanksgiving, or deciding that your gay commune where no one talks to their parents will hold family thanksgiving.
Practically it seems unlikely that there will suddenly be an immortality pill, and more likely that over the next few centuries we'll continue making improvements to healthcare that extend life a little bit at a time. People will adapt.
"Practically it seems unlikely that there will suddenly be an immortality pill, and more likely that over the next few centuries we'll continue making improvements to healthcare that extend life a little bit at a time."
I don't know about an immortality pill, but I think it is likely that sometime in the next century, probably too late for me, we will learn how to prevent aging.
I don't see why we would be able to prevent human bodies from aging when we can't prevent (say) my car from aging. My car has hundreds of different systems, and every one of them gets worn out with age and use. I can't see why the human body, which is more complex and more squishy, wouldn't be the same.
When your car gets damaged, it doesn't heal. People do; your body has elaborate self-repair machinery. It built itself from a single fertilized cell, with the outside world supporting it and providing inputs but not doing the actual building. It continues to create new cells.
The design information for your body is present in every cell, hence massively redundant, so can't get lost — if some of it gets scrambled by mutation, take a majority vote of a hundred cells and you are back with original DNA.
So I don't see any reason why, once we figure out why bits of the system eventually break down, we can't stop them from doing so.
Sure, people will adapt, and I agree that a lot of these steps to grow up happen even while parents are potentially young and healthy. I was using Thanksgiving turkey as a small example of a bigger situation. Imagine the CEO of [large corporation] or [family business] never retiring. You can imagine the same for every level of the business, but it's clearer when it's the person at the top. They can't retire if they're going to live indefinitely, so nobody moves up into their position. That prevents a chain reaction of people moving up in companies, so moving up is far harder. People may stay in "entry" positions for decades, due to low turnover. Endemic unemployment in younger people means they can't get the experience they need to get early jobs and move out of their parents house. Birth rates crater, and people feel locked into the same positions forever, creating a stagnant society where class becomes inevitable and people rarely change their station.
I think the point about lack of retirement is significant. But I think it's also not *as* significant as you suggest. Within an organization, there's often some amount of turnover in leadership positions even without anyone leaving - as new people come in and develop more years of experience, their skills are recognized and they are put in charge of things that other people had been doing, who in turn move on to new roles.
There probably is a tendency for executive leader types to stay on past when it would be helpful to rotate out - that's why it's a good thing that the US President, and most state Governors, have term limits. (Chicago and Boston probably could have benefited from term limits for their mayors.)
It might be that all positions have less turnover than would be ideal, when people don't retire due to age. But if everyone's thinking about things on a longer timescale anyway, perhaps the optimal turnover period would in fact be longer. I think it's a bit hard to say.
One other thing whose implications are hard to work out is the issue of whether populations would be growing, or whether birth rate would drop, and whether the society would eventually reach a new steady state - at which point there would likely be a large generation of people from the beginning of the process, as well as a long stretch of smaller generations from the transition period.
I'm hoping later generations will start new institutions and then make *them* stagnate.
And, of course, we can hope that having a chance to start new things and get authority/responsibility will be an incentive to get into space.
Space and space travel is the one area I think may be significantly helped by immortal stagnant people. You can learn the skills you need to work on a generation ship, without the need to actually make it support generations. You just have the same skilled people on a ship for a long long time. What they do when they arrive might be a pretty significant issue, but if they don't become infertile they at least have time to adjust once they do get there.
I think what age people stabilize at would make a big difference, though I grant we don't know what someone who has centuries of good health would be like.
Still, if people stabilize at 20, or 40, or 60 could matter. The eternal 20 year olds are more likely to get bored and want to try something new.
You didn't bring up what would probably be the worst possible effect-- political leaders who don't die, so the hierarchy is very stable and unlikely to get new ideas.
On another hand, the best possibility is getting people who have much more opportunity to learn and become more skillful. This doesn't show up in science fiction because it would be too hard to write.
That’s a feature, not a bug. Immortality would become intolerable with long-term memories. But seeing the world with fresh eyes every month would make a hedonistic life indefinitely enjoyable
There are two problems with that outlook. One is sustainability. Having immortals who lack the ability to work productively is a serious problem. Secondly, and to me more importantly, is about meaning in life. If you can't remember what you're doing, how much meaning does your life have? Hedonism sounds fun, but it lacks lasting value. If worthless hedonism of this variety holds value, we could already approximate it through IV heroin. Just hook people up to powerful drugs and let them lay in hospital beds, "enjoying" their euphoria.
If I'm not wrong, every time a memory is accessed it is rewritten. Extending this to my scenario, anything that you think about more than once a month should be safe, including your life's meaning.
Well, immortals aren’t sustainable with or without memories - things get pretty Malthusian pretty quick if nobody dies, I bet. As for “meaning,” it’s very much in the eye of the beholder. I can’t remember what I’m doing half the time anyway, but enjoying life seems meaningful enough, and does not require any heroin.
There's a Robert Reed story about people who take a long time to realize they don't age because the death rate from conflict is so high.
No, I hope to die without to much money going to medical stuff and leave my assets to my heirs. I would buy a little white pill that allowed me to 'off myself' with little pain.
Severe hindrance could use a little more clarification.
If we're talking a complete prior memory wipe after a month, no. The quality of life of each of my sequential twin brothers thus created would collapse given their inability to draw on life-long education and maintain long-term relationships.
If we're talking the inability to form new long-term memories (but keeping the rough memory-state at the time of pill-ingestion), maybe once I retire and establish some staid, ovine routine. Then the monthly self-addressed orientation session won't run into too many hours. :)
That said, I wonder how much the answer would change for someone more committed to biological essentialism (IQ is highly heritable/cultural-load-independent/dispositive of human worth, passing on one's 'high quality' genes is a moral good, etc.) than I am. They might find the potential ability to procreate forever rather appealing.
Maybe if it was ten years.
Also, would it extend memory for people with dementia?
I didn't consider it. But if it does, then for people with dementia the dilemma either disappears or becomes a different one.
In the context of the recent post on architecture, it's pretty funny that the London meetup is in the most hatefully brutalistic anti-human location that exists in that city.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02143-7/fulltext
Could interested people take a look at this paper, which looks at the prevalence of MDD pre- and post- COVID? The result that COVID has caused a lot of MDD is not all that surprising to me, nor is the pretty interesting finding that the mental health effects of COVID have absolutely swamped the physical health effects.
However, Table 1 has the authors look for explanations for what is causing the MDD. If I'm reading the table right (and I may very well not be), both the daily number of reported cases and lockdowns (as measured by decreasing human mobility) significantly increase the number of MDD cases, but the daily number of reported cases increases MDD by an order of magnitude more than lockdowns. This seems sort of logical based on Figure 3 - countries which I intuitively think of as being 'lockdown lite' have a lot of MDD increase, countries which I think of as being 'lockdown heavy' have minimal MDD increase.
I find this result really surprising and counterintuitive - it suggests that the first order result of lockdown is to cause MDD (for obvious reasons) but the second order result is to prevent MDD by preventing cases which somehow prevent MDD. I can tell a couple of 'just so' stories for why this should be the case (maybe the media hypes up case numbers which causes anxiety), but I certainly didn't predict it before reading this paper. In fact, I think the consensus was that there was a pretty direct tradeoff between mental health in lockdown and physical health in non-lockdown.
I wish the authors had worked harder at looking at the lockdown vs no-lockdown comparison - for example there's going to be an obvious correlation between a rising number of cases and the issuing of lockdown orders. But previously I thought there was almost no question at all that lockdown was net utility-negative (due to the mental health impact) whereas now I think I might have been quite seriously wrong for the past couple of years!
For those who are wondering, "MDD" here means "major depressive disorder".
Thank you.
I am looking for ancient sources on "primitive" thinking. How did people describe and think of the inner lives of non-states people, the rural, the uneducated, the foreign, especially the hunter-gatherer societies. I'm basically looking for anthropology sometime BCE, though I'll take sources up to the Middle Ages, too.
If you are willing to accept medieval, you might find the Icelandic sagas useful. There is a bit in the Jomviking saga that describes an experiment to see if consciousness is in the head or the body. The experiment is proposed by someone about to have his head cut off who wants to produce some useful information from the process — also to demonstrate how unafraid he is of death.
That is fascinating, I will check that out! I'm not hung up on the specific era, right now I'm just hoping for sources I wouldn't find on my own. This definitely qualifies.
It's the execution scene near the end of the saga. The Jomvikings, who are famous for their courage, have been captured, and their captors decide to kill them one by one to see if they are really that brave.
Essentially they are always described by a set of topoi unfortunately. Most descriptions, even strangely by actual eyewitnesses, are filtered through the literary expectations of their time. There's a reason why the Scythians (a group who politically seem to have disappeared before the third century BC) were still being discussed as contemporary history by fourth and fifth-century writers, which is that if you wanted to talk about Steppe-dwelling barbarians you used the classical Scythians as a model (and that's the Scythians from classical texts, not the real Scythians...).
Archaeology and linguistics can tell you more about the people who lived in these places, but the issue there is that most of the world still views these as telling us about ethnicity (like, your political identity must be defined by your wife's choice of cooking pots) so you are probably limited to a broad base of studies actually telling you about lived experience to areas of north-west Europe and the Mediterranean littoral, and possibly the Americas.
Are you more interested in what "primitive" thinking was actually like, or in what pre-modern people thought it was like?
I am interested in the phenomenological qualities of introspection in pre-modern societies. Thinking, feeling, perception, in particular perception of thought, but at the moment I'm trying to broaden the stuff I look at to figure out where to look next. Texts that talk about social life and day-to-day interactions help get there, stuff that talks about cooking pots doesn't (though they're probably not unrelated).
It would be better to begin with Pitirim Sorokin's /Social and Cultural Dynamics/, the 1957 condensed one-volume edition, which is not specifically about introspection, but is about identifying common patterns of cultural thinking. Beware that Sorokin was brilliant, but raving mad with an ingrained Russian Orthodox hatred of sensual pleasure, and of modernity. So all his views are tainted by his desire to associate everything he doesn't like with "sensuality". At times this leads him to ridiculous errors, like categorizing modern art as "sensual".
Oh, there's a book by Julian Jaynes, /The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind/, which I haven't read, but which sounds completely nuts.
It argues that the Achaeans at the time of homer weren't yet conscious, and also that primitive groups have a lot of visions and hallucinations (I expect Jaynes says this is because they're still developing consciousness). This might be the book which points out that Homer rarely mentions colors. That observation would be more interesting if not for the fact that Homer rarely makes any visual descriptions at all, of anything. Perhaps there really was a Homer, who really was blind. But more likely, this is just because idealistic cultures like the Geometric-era Greeks think abstractly rather than visually. (I'm using the word "idealistic" as a synonym for Pitirim Sorokin's "ideational".) (The Geometric era is not the era in which geometry was developed, but in which art used geometric patterns.)
That is one major aspect there of pre-modern introspection, actually; more helpful than Jaynes' stuff. There is one pattern of pre-modern thinking which is associated with art made with repetitive, geometric, non-representational patterns, as in Geometric Greece. We also often find tribal groups in which men make representational religious art, and women make decorative geometric art. I suspect that representational art usually begins with ritual magic or religion, but don't know.
It's not the main jist of the text, but Orality and Literacy by Walter J. Ong delves into this topic from the perspective of the impact of communication methods on what kind of things people communicate about and value. Warning, it's *not* an easy read, but I got a lot of out it in terms of understanding how a medium of communication can have impacts far beyond the obvious (it's obvious that printing makes it easy to have lots of books, but less obvious that non-print societies tend to rely heavily on stereotype to aid memorisation, or that values in an oral society are more likely to be other-driven rather than self-driven ('what will they think of me' rather than 'what will I/God think of me'.)
That looks super interesting, thanks!
You might like Julius Ceasar's firsthand account of the conquest of Gaul.
You're not interested in what the primitive people themselves said? There are many collections of stories, myths, and histories. Most of them were first written down in recent times, and only in translation. That initial translation may have stripped away some of the descriptions that would suggest subjective qualia, which might not translate well.
If your definition of "primitive" is tech level, you should be able to get the same information from 19th and 20th century anthropological studies. I doubt that primitive thinking differs more between 1 BCE and 2000 CE than between Africa and South America.
I got modern sources covered, or rather, know some basics and know where I can find more. I am absolutely interested in what primitive people themselves said, but you mention the problems with that yourself - the oral tradition and the problems of translation strips a lot of telling details and might alter the text especially in the places that interest me most. I'm not discounting them as sources, but they're not what I'm looking for at this point.
<i>Tales of the Barbarians: Ethnography and Empire in the Roman West</i> by Greg Woolf might be a good starting point for what you're seeking.
Diodorus Siculus, the first few books, could be handy. See here ( https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Diodorus_Siculus/3B*.html ) for a representative sample. Also Tacitus's <i>Germania</i>.
If you're not restricting yourself to European sources, you might find some cursory material in Chinese histories - the Book of Han and Later Book of Han, in particular which contain several volumes on the customs of 'barbarian' peoples.
Tacitus should be discounted: his Germanica is more about Rome than it is about it's subjects. And therein lies a major problem: attempting to record the thinking and beliefs of others systematically is a modern (perhaps modernist) project. No ancient writer wrote to do this so much as to use the others to further the purpose of their writing.
But we still don't know if the OP is interested in facts about barbarians, or classical perceptions of barbarians.
To get to the first one has to wade through the second, mostly, to "subtract" it from the descriptions and look for surprises, and whether those converge with what we suspect through other means (contemporary pre-modern societies, for example). At this point I don't know enough about anything to say with confidence what I'm looking for, I just want more reading to enable me to ask better questions. As the things I want to read are usually found in the margins if at all I thought asking here is a good way to narrow it down, so I don't have to wade through hundreds of pages of war, war and more war with none of the margins I hope for.
Are we referring to the same text?
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/7524/pg7524-images.html#link2H_4_0002
I do agree with your point in general - these ethnographies by ancient writers, even when they don't assist in some unrelated rhetorical purpose, tend to be primitive and sub-analytical by our standards. But perhaps illustrating that is part of DasKlaus's project.
Herodotus is full of this sort of thing.
"how to attract and retain talent"
"head of talent"
Why do businesses consistently refer to their (usually highly educated) workforce as "talent"? Instead of you know... "skill" or something
I'm reasonably sure that it's a Hollywood (or maybe even theater) term later adopted by the corporate world to sound cool. Hollywood producers were talking about their actors as "the talent" long before HR drones started.
We do have a bias toward a fixed mindset in our culture iirc (not sure how the replication crisis changed this, if at all).
My guess is that it's just convention. It's the same reason companies use any sort of business speak, let's circle back, connect about that offline, in the loop, bandwidth, etc. They all serve some function, but why any particular phrase is used over another that communicates the same is largely historical contingency.
Head of skill implies they're responsible for training, instead of finding people who are already trained.
+1
Moving to the bay area (SF) soon. Reading books about bay area and startup culture at the moment. Just finishing Chaos Monkeys, recently finished Uncanny Valley. I also opened the Phoenix Project: I was amused to discover a book so dedicated to corporate-speak and stock and straw-men characters could exist (not a recommendation).
What perspectives on bay area/tech culture have you heard/read that stuck with you?
I would not describe "The Phoenix Project" as a story about startup culture, so perhaps that's why you were disappointed. It is a book in the style of Eli Goldratt's "The Goal" in which a business concept is illustrated through a contrived series of set pieces. The purpose is to illustrate the concepts. I can't apologize for the corporate-speak. :-)
Really enjoying "Midnight Mass" so far. What's fascinating about it is how much it feels like a Stephen King horror story - if you told me that it was adapted from a Stephen King short story or novella and I didn't know any better, I'd believe you.
Speaking of which, I'm going to re-read "The Shining" again this month. It used to be my favorite King novel, although it's been supplanted by "Pet Sematary" ("Shining" definitely has the better film adaptation, though).
Mike Flanagan already has two king adaptations: Gerald's Game & Doctor Sleep. I like Flanagan's movies, but not his miniseries (including the monologue-heavy Midnight Mass).
The shining .... Not according to Stephen King it doesn't :-)
He got to do his own TV adaptation of that.
Here is a game. Me and my math and CS friends haven’t figured out an optimal strategy yet, so I present it to you.
5 players sit at a table in a circle. They are free to coordinate strategies before the game begins (knowing the rules), but no information can be given once the game begins.
At the start of the game, each player rolls 5 fair, six-sided dice (so there are currently 25 dice in play). They keep the dice the rolled hidden from the other players.
They then select one of their five dice and remove it from play (it’s been destroyed).
They then pass their four remaining dice to the player on their left.
They then remove a dice, pass, remove a dice, pass, and remove a dice so that each player has one dice if front of them.
All 5 remaining dice are then revealed, and ordered in ascending order. The players win if they have produced a 5 length straight (either 1,2,3,4,5 or 2,3,4,5,6) from their remaining dice.
I've achieved a ~22% win rate using the following approach:
Every size-N hand of dice deterministically specifies the default die to remove next using the hash-like algorithm "sum the dice mod N, then remove the die at the resulting index in sorted order". By iterating this until N=1 algorithm players can also learn what die a hand will end up with by default; call this the "expected result".
In the first round, players know which value (mod 5) they've pre-committed to target and try to remove a die to make the expected result match that value. In subsequent rounds, players remove the default die *unless* the hand's expected value is one they've already seen, in which case they try to alter it.
Clearly this algorithm leaves some value on the table (e.g. preferring to remove dice that maximizing downstream players' range of options, or trying to "correct" for a missed target value in subsequent hands) but I'm not sure if that's just a few percentage points or 50+% as Mystik's experiment suggests.
How do you think people would do if the strategy was:
- each position starts with 2 consecutive target numbers (someone is 1 or 2, next person is 2 or 3, etc.).
- all players try to keep both of the targeted sequences possible
- sometime before the end of the game, each player chooses between their two targets based on what's possible given the numbers they've previously passed downstream
Two observations:
1. Randomization doesn't help. Suppose you define some randomized strategy that requires at most B random bits. Then the probability of winning is: sum from x=0 to 2^B-1 (1/2^B * Prob[winning | random bits = x]). But clearly there must be some value of x which equals or exceeds this average probability, so deterministically setting random bits = x gives you a deterministic strategy that is at least as good.
2. Passing information seems unlikely to help. When I receive a hand from the player to my right, I have already seen everything they had seen when sending the message (plus my starting hand!) except the dice that player removed. So it would only be useful if the dice you throw out continue to affect your strategy going forward, even though you are making that choice partly to send information... Not sure how to prove this but I'd be very surprised.
So just to post a little of the analysis of this problem that I’ve done/seen when I had people play this.
The strategy of “each hand gets a specific number” (1/6 is treated as a duplicate) has an 11% winrate”
Random choice has a 3% win rate
A sort of averaging strategy (count the dice of each type you’ve seen, remove the most prevalent one) has an 8.5% winrate.
Here’s why I said that I haven’t found an optimal strategy: I gave 5 people this game. 3 times they ran the “assigned hand” strategy and failed. The other three times they just “winged it” and much to my shock they succeeded 3/3. This suggests to me that the optimal strategy must have a decently high probability (if it’s around 10% that was a 1/1000 occurrence, which seems less likely than a higher winrate existing)
As an added note, one of the players was trying to do something clever by intentionally removing options so that he’d know what the next person was doing (ie given 1,1,2 he would remove the two so he knew a one must exist)
It's important to note that by the end of the game, each player has had all the dice pass through his hands exactly once. So the general class of strategy I'm thinking of is that each player is assigned to a number N, and it's his job to try to make sure there's no more than one N in play.
So some simple starting rules would be:
1. If you're the 3-spotter, and you've already seen a 3, then try to remove all the other 3s.
2. If you're downstream of the 3-spotter, you don't remove the first 3 that has been through the 3-spotter's hands, but you should remove any subsequent 3s that have been through his hands.
3. How do you prioritise between removing "your" number, and removing numbers that upstream players may have missed? I don't think there's a simple strategy here, you need to do a big probabilistic calculation at every single step based on the information that you currently know.
Maybe I'm missing an insight that makes this all easier, but I really think that the optimal strategy involves hideous amounts of probabilistic calculation at every timestep.
Intriguing. It's a bit like a multi-player-co-operative Nim, in that you're trying to remove a number such that the next player can remove a number such that [...] the final player can end up with the number you (collectively) want.
I think the answer is going to involve encoding in some way, as that's usually the answer to these puzzles where you have to communicate something with very little information being passed (e.g. hat puzzles, or the one where you flip one coin on a chessboard and your accomplice only sees the flipped state).
On the first round, given most rolls (I think 15/16 of the time), everyone could force the hand they pass to be their choice of odd or even. Can we go further than that? How often can we constrain it modulo 3? Over 4 die-removal rounds, how far can we go towards constraining player N's final die to be N? We obviously can't guarantee it, because they might not have had that in their starting hand, but we can remove dice that aren't N, so that we can win *if* we had the required dice in the starting hands at all (where player 1 could have either 1 or 6).
Can we find some property of the total dice in circulation that (ideally) is isomorphic to "contains a straight", or (failing that) has strong overlap with it, and then at each step we can alter our hands to preserve or select for that property?
(I think in my previous comment I was on the right lines with the odd/even amd mod-3 parts, but "constrain player N's die to be N" is going to be suboptimal, because there are way more possible starting configurations that contain a straight *somewhere* than ones that contain a straight in that exact position)
If I understand the rules correctly I believe this game would benefit from Hanabi or bridge style play. That is, don't take actions that make sense take actions that communicate. I would start by placing each players dice in a line. Consider the leftmost to be 1 and the rightmost to be 5. Pass all dice maintaing the order and maintaining any gaps from removed dice.
The number of pips on the dice removed is used to signal all other players something. Exactly what it should signal might get a bit complex. But for example, removing a dice with N pips could mean to discard the dice closest to position N for the first two rounds and preserve the dice closest to position N for the remaining rounds. You can then build more complex conventions on top of this basic convention. (For example, what does it mean when the two previous players tell you to preserve different dice?)
If signals via things like gaps in the dice might be allowed, the problem needs more definition. What is then not allowed? Can I pass four dice in a square? Can I have gaps of varying sizes? Can I make a tower?
no, that would be against the rules. when dice are passed, and you can assume the order is somehow randomized so no information can be passed that way.
I'm pretty sure the removed dice aren't public, so you can't use them to communicate. You could use the passed dice to communicate, but only in one direction.
Correct
I started with a trivial baseline. Let's decide for each player in advance which number we want them to end up with, either 2, 3, 4, 5 or (1 or 6). Then at each removal point, we know which player will end up with this hand, so we remove any dice they won't want.
There's just under a 12% chance that every hand includes the pre-chosen target number.
I think there might be a variant of this that works pretty well in saving lost hands. The strategy works as you've described assuming the target numbers are in their hands. If one is missing, though, you change the target for that hand to be the next higher number that is present (wrapping around if needed). Then for the next hand you receive you try to make it the missing target from this hand, otherwise you let it stay as its current target and move on trying to correct using next next hand etc. If you also prioritize deleting dice in the same direction (i.e. delete the next larger dice than the target, wrapping around if needed - the idea being that you delete possible smaller alternative targets as late as possible, so a later player can use it to correct an otherwise lost hand) then I think you may be able to save a bunch of lost hands. I'll have to think about it more tomorrow.
Ah, that sounds good - start with each hand having a target number, increasing to the right. Passing hands to the left, anyone who sees a hand that can't make its target switches its target to the least number greater than its previous target that it can in fact make, and moves down by one the target of each hand between its previous target and its new target. Whenever anyone sees a hand, they remove a duplicate if possible, and otherwise whichever number is least likely to ever become that hand's new target under this procedure. (That probably means the least number greater than its current target.)
This is a good baseline. I calculate the chance of winning as (1-(5/6)^5)^4*(1-(4/6)^5) ~= 11%
Whoops. I accidentally counted five hands with one target number plus one with two. Of course there are four hands with one target number. So the odds are closer to 18%.
Ignore all of this. I mis-read the number of dice and rolled six each.
Amusingly, this brings the result back to around 11%.
The most promising way to do better than chance here is to send a clear signal of what number(s) a "hand" of dice ought to end up as. So for example you shouldn't destroy either half of a pair of the same number unless you've already seen a pair of that number. Similarly you can follow a pattern of imbalancing hands based on parity: if you have 3 odds and 2 evens prefer to remove one of the evens to indicate that the hand should end up odd, and vice versa.
Still seems hard to win consistently-- once around is just not a lot of information being propagated. If you had, say, 10 dice per player it might be possible to devise a more reliable strategy.
I don't think information can move in a direction meaningfully. So once the game starts you can't really communicate "destroy that 3 and keep the 6, we already have 2,3,4,5".
1s and 6s are not as valuable but I'm not sure it makes that big a difference, I honestly think the best thing might be to just assign to each of the 5 rolls a value (2,3,4,5, and (1/6 whichever)) and make sure you only cull everything else from that 'hand'.
My first thought is:
1) if you see a duplicate of something you've seen before remove it.
2) otherwise remove a 1 or a 6
3) otherwise remove something at random.
FWIW I coded this up in python and this strategy wins ~5.5% of the time, compared to random play which wins ~1.5% of the time. I'll play with it some more.
I get around 10% for this strategy and around 3% for random play.
Random play should be equivalent to just rolling five dice, for which I also got 3% by simulating directly. It's also amenable to calculation - for each target sequence (1-5 or 2-6), the first die has 5 helpful rolls, then 4, 3, 2 and 1. So the overall probability of random success is 2 * (5*4*3*2*1) / (6*6*6*6*6) = 3.086%
I suggest that your simulation might have a bug, although probably not as embarrassing a bug as when I published results based on giving everyone six dice (see above).
You're right I did have a bug and both values should be double like you say.
I don't think this works very well. In the first few rounds you'll hit an "unambiguous" case 1 a lot (which strikes me as making better progress than chance), but later on you'll just remove stuff at random.
My gut feeling is that each player has to have a different priority ordering for what to remove, such that on average, the same number of each values are removed. You probably also need to make up your mind beforehand and hard-remove either all the 1's or 6's.
Traditional horary astrologer here: send me your query and I will use the tools of the astrological tradition to give an answer. My email is FlexOnMaterialists@protonmail.com. This is a free service; I am quite discreet.
Currently your offer seems as spam or some weird plot to steal people's private data.
If you want to look more credible you should make some public predictions. For instance, Scott makes predictions every year. If you manage to get better score than him then it will be something interesting.
Alternatively, you can just make a couple of hedge funds to go broke with your predictive power, earn lots of money and buy all the private data you desire.
I would unironically be interested in a study that actually took a serious look at whether astrology had any value as a predictive tool. Currently, most (maybe all) of the scientific arguments against astrology are based in deductive reasoning: "We don't know of any mechanism by which the positions of the planets and stars could affect people's personalities or the events in their lives, therefore astrology is wrong." But I've yet to hear of any study that actually proves astrology wrong through inductive reasoning, by providing statistical proof that astrological predictions tend to be false. And if the study was truly being conducted in good faith, then it would have to take the predictions of detailed individual birth charts into account, not just those one-size-fits-all sun sign horoscopes you see in newspapers. (I understand that the sheer vagueness of many astrological predictions could make this difficult, but I think there are ways that dedicated researchers could account for that or work around it.)
For the record, I don't believe in astrology, but in the interest of scientific inquiry, I do think its claims should actually be *tested*, rather than summarily dismissed because they don't fit in with our current cosmological worldview.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrology_and_science#Tests_of_astrology
I've found divination to function quite well with pseudonyms; the worldview which professes belief in spiritual realities isn't much troubled by human-level obfuscations. As to the rest, why, I'm sure plenty of astrologers use their art for attaining wealth, just like some very smart people use their intelligence as a tool for ensuring material comfort. However, speaking from within the worldview that participates in spiritual realities, what I hope to gain by this is far more precious than any sum of money.
Is what you hope to gain more precious than any amount of human lives as well? You do understand that you can use money to do good, right? It's especially true if you are not interested in material comfort as you can spend literally all of your wealth to charity.
If, for some reason, you do not value saving human lives more than blowing minds of materialists, you do realize that it would be so much more mindblowing to constantly win the market via your predictions? It would actually change people's mind regarding astrology, mine included.
This is a good response--I'm quite pleased to be confronted by counterarguments from within the esoteric/magical worldview. You are of course quite correct about money: it can and possibly "ought" to be used to ameliorate suffering. In the modern occult community, there's still some amount of disagreement regarding the pursuit of money through both magical and mundane means. I think this is partly due to cultural remnants of Christian moral theology and partly the infuriatingly high preponderance of charlatanry present among occultists. All of which is to say there are many accomplished contemporary occultists whose "service to man" consists of teaching or instructing while living at or near the poverty line. I'd imagine even the most effective of altruists must acknowledge that not everyone can be a banker or a lawyer. Rather like the virtuous materialist who donates time with the knowledge that his skills will never earn a seven-figure salary, we all do what we can.
As for beating the market, I would invite you to do a quick web search for "the four words of the magus" or "the four virtues of the sphinx", in particular the fourth and final virtue.
I'm glad that we can find a common ground here. I wouldn't call it an esoteric argument, of course. Preventing the suffering of other human beings seems to be part of somewhat-universal human values. Acting on ones beliefs is supposed to be a universal thing as well. If I believe magic is real, I'll try to use magic to achieve my goals. Likewise, If I believe materialistic science is real, I'll try to use science to achieve my goals.
However, it's more assosiated with rationality. Lots of belief systems develloped some adaptations against being challanged by reality. Think about how religions may claim to be non-disprovable, even despite what's writen in their sacred texts. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fAuWLS7RKWD2npBFR/religion-s-claim-to-be-non-disprovable
The fourth virtues of the sphinx, is an example of a similar adaptation. It's a seemingly virtuous reason not to actually act on your beliefs in magic. But as you seem to understand, if you are a real magic user, not a charlatan, acting on your beliefs can only benefit you. A belief that correspond to reality only benefits from being tested and doesn't need a justification against it.
Again, you seem to understand it. That's why you propose your magical services to materialists, expecting your astrological divination to actually work and change their minds. The problem is that you can only get extremely weak evidiences in favour of astrology that way, which won't really challenge all the accumulated counterevidience. However, consistently winning the market via astrological divination would be a strong enough evidience in favour of astrology and it would also allow to prevent lots of human suffering.
I totally agree, that people can just do their own best to benefit the humanity. But that's the point, the accomplished occultists in your example aren't doing their best if they just teach their art to other people and neither them, nor their pupils actually use this knowledge to massively improve the world. If astrology is true it's a huge power that can saves countless lives. Not using it for this is wasting its potential.
This is why I favor divination--you ask your question, you get an answer, hopefully one which proves correct. Like all human endeavor, neither divination nor magic is infallible, though I have had very few misses with horary.
Re: the sphinx's virtues, the last one is "to be silent", a good general principle where magic is concerned. Also: if you were predicting market fluctuations through esoteric means, I trust you'd be sensible enough to not let it be known. Since we're both arguing in good faith, I'd be pleased to continue our chat via email if you'd like; you know how to reach me.
Did you forget the "\s" at the end of that?
This isn't their first visit; they're unironically an astrologer hanging out in rat-adjacent circles.
Which I'm frankly impressed by, it's like going right into the lion's den
I don't have anything more to add that's meets the true/nice/necessary rule, though.
I'll graciously accept this most backhanded of compliments; thank you!
I don’t follow philosophy so this is more curiosity than a serious proposal. Couldn’t one turn Singer’s “drowning child” thought experiment around to make something like the opposite point based on the same intuition?
Suppose you’re walking to work and you see a drowning child. Doing a quick cost/benefit analysis—which, despite the speed with which you make it, you are confident is correct—you calculate that if you ignore this child and proceed to work, you will earn sufficient extra income to save three malnourished children in the third world. So you decide to ignore the child’s weakening cries for help and proceed to the office, knowing that you will add your marginal income for the time saved to charity. (Assume you’re paid by the hour, or paid piecemeal for your labor or something.)
The lesson: A universalist mindset with regard to altruism can lead one to become a moral monster who will ignore the particularized suffering in one’s direct experience.
I’m not saying that the latter thought experiment is better than Singer’s original. It just seems interesting to me that the intuitive (and obviously correct) imperative to save a drowning child could seemingly lead to opposite lessons depending on the choice made by the passerby. Singer wants to use the reader’s moral imperative to save the child as a hook to support the “universalist” approach, whereas many would probably view the “universalist” passerby walking past the drowning child to earn money for eleemosynary contributions to motivate the opposite moral approach.
(To the extent there is any value in this reverse-Singer thought experiment, I’m sure it has undoubtedly been presented much better by others in things I haven’t read. As noted, I don’t know philosophy.)
It's weird to me that in the utilitarian world view, the moral responsibility of impoverished children falls entirely on wealthy foreigners and not the people creating them. Where's the moral judgement for those birthing children with a reasonable chance of dying? This is the root cause, and so we should strike at the root.
And is saving these children necessarily the best utilitarian outcome? Maybe you literally define it in that way, but what if we use aggregate wellbeing instead? Seems to me that some children dying could improve overall wellbeing in impoverished countries, because if there's one thing these places need its not 'more people'. And if this prevents them growing up to have children with a high probability of suffering and dying themselves, then this moves the balance further in favour of this. Focusing only on number of people who die is some kind of naïve utilitarianism.
And of course, the natural implication of such a thought experiment is open borders. If the US had open borders, it would lead to a MINIMUM of hundreds of millions of immigrants by the end of the century, with the existing american population/its descendants becoming a minority by that time. This would be absolutely devastating to the country and would almost assuredly means the US stops being a scientific/technological powerhouse which would have profound consequences for the world. It could also very likely result in civil conflict, which would have profoundly negative consequences too. And of course, if the US does this but nowhere else does, countries like China will quickly become the dominant world powers and you're going to have a hard time arguing that this is going to have positive utilitarian outcomes. And so again, more naive utilitarianism.
I think you have a few misunderstandings. I'll quote and commentate:
> It's weird to me that in the utilitarian world view, the moral responsibility of impoverished children falls entirely on wealthy foreigners and not the people creating them.
We're not dealing in assigning moral responsiblity; we're asking "What can *I* do to have the greatest positive impact?" Finding out what other people could be doing isn't interesting, unless you're in the business of communications, marketing, influencing, etc.
As far as what any of us could do, one option is donating money to save somebody's life. You could argue that another option is influencing those people to just not have children. Or yet another option would be to intentionally let the children die because the outcome will actually be better in the end.
To be honest I haven't done an analysis to weigh these options. GiveWell and the community in general recommends the first option, but I don't know how deep anybody has gone to consider the others.
Still my intuition is definitely that the first option is the most cost effective and best in the long run. My hand-wavy thought process is:
1) Getting people to stop having children would require a pretty significant public influence campaign. In another country, with less access to contraception, when it's already a seemingly-impossible task to get people to stop having kids over here where we actually have condoms and birth control? That seems very challenging and expensive. Even getting a reasonable cost-benefit analysis in the first place seems quite daunting. How much value can a marginal dollar have on this front? I don't know, but I'm not convinced it outcompetes the cost of saving a life.
2) Letting a child die of malaria vs stopping the death of malaria: Even if you're not sold on the value of saving the life itself, there is suffering to consider. I imagine malaria is an unpleasant way to die, but maybe more importantly there is the child's family and community. They all suffer and grieve at the loss. So that's what we have to weigh. Could you estimate the positive value of having one fewer person growing up and taking resources, etc? Maybe we can come up with that analysis, but offhand it doesn't feel convincing that it would outweight the suffering caused by the illness and the subsequent grief.
So I don't know if my reasoining is correct, but it seems to me you need a lot more thinking and analysis to come up with some alternatives that plausibly compete with the suffering-mitigation you get from just saving a life.
As far as open borders, I don't really have any comments on that. I'm not aware if it's really the natural implication of these thought experiements or not, and I'm not familiar enough with what the results of open borders would be to argue one way or the other.
I have a somewhat different question. Suppose there's a fire, and you have time to either pull out a kid or a big expensive painting, but not both. You're an utilitarian and you do not particularly value this painting, but to others it's still worth a lot more than the cost of saving a human life. However, you do not own it and are not guaranteed any rewards if you save it, so "by saving this painting I'll get enough money to personally save many children" doesn't work. Is there still an utilitarian reasoning for saving the painting? What if it's not a painting but an MRI machine?
If you're really productive enough to save three malnourished children in the time it takes you to pull one kid out of a pond, you shouldn't be wasting your time thinking about philosophical problems. Back to work with you!
Sure, you could make that calculation, but it'll never come out this way in real life.
I won't get much work done after seeing a child die. I might not sleep for a while, costing me way more in the end. Unless I am an actual psychopath, my feelings matter and are part of the equation.
If I tell someone or someone sees me, I'll lose status, maybe even my job. In some places, it is also illegal not to help.
Second-order consequences should also be considered. If someone sees me walking by and loses faith in humanity, thinking if I don't step in, they don't need to, either, or I keep advocating for this calculation and people start hating EA for it ... that might cause harm.
Thing is, you can always construct an example like this, but you need quite a lot of contrieved asterisks to make it work, and in the real world you don't calculate on the spot: you base your principles off calculations, and rely on the principles for quick decisions.
Also, it only takes a minute to save the child.
Maybe it takes an hour to save the child and figure out how to change clothes, but then you feel high for days because you just saved a child, so your productivity is fantastic which more than compensates for the time lost, and it could also be that people like you more because you did a local good deed and you're smiling more now, and so your life goes better in other ways too.
So, the scenario doesn't really work.
I think Singer and other hardcore utilitarians may actually agree with the conclusion... provided that your extra time in the office will actually marginally save more children per time unit than rescuing the drowning child.
So, if we say saving a life with money costs about $3000, and rescuing the drowning child will take up an hour from your work, AND you happen to make $3000 per hour, all of which you will optimally donate, then I'm sure plenty of people would agree you can go ahead and pass that child.
Note that a version of this is already heavily endorsed in the EA community. It's usually suggestex that one should donate to the poor in other nations, ie "pass up" the less fortunate right there in your own country, because doing so is usually more effective.
We've argued a version of this on here before: don't donate *now*, because the value of your money will be more in the future, so work and earn and put aside and then in ten/twenty/in your will years time, you can save more lives.
That works as a calculation but in reality yeah, it means you walk past the drowning child because "in ten years time I will save three drowning children".
It only takes a minute to save the child, whereas saving a life with effective charities is estimated to cost some thousands of dollars. You'd have to be Bill Gates for the "not save the child" option to make sense even superficially. Even Bill Gates, though, could face major negative social consequences if people found out what he failed to do. That's on top of major negative emotional consequences (see DasKlaus's answer).
There's a natural discount rate to saving drowning children though, if we assume that children we save now will go on to, on average, save a tiny fraction of drowning children of their own in the next few years. If one believes that human lives are usually on net positive (as one has to in order to think that saving them is good, as a utilitarian), then it does make sense to save some number of fewer lives now than rather than slightly more lives in the future. The question is just how that calculation works out.
What if that child is from an ethnic minority population (I use ethnic minority mostly because its an immediately obvious fact about something) with a net negative fiscal impact (costs the government more on average than they pay in taxes)? The money they cost the government could save multiple lives, so is it still worth saving them? The fact that any money saved would in actuality probably not be used to save lives is a wrinkle, admittedly, but suppose it wasn't.
Do you believe there are populations with a net negative fiscal impact? I could believe that there are a non-trivial number of people that have more direct government spending on them than the total amount of taxes they pay over their life, but I suspect that a lot of this disappears when you notice how much economic activity the existence of this person causes elsewhere, and the net growth produced in all the businesses serving this population all pay taxes as well.
I think most utilitarians think that we shouldn't pay particular attention to funds just because they come to or from the government. It's only if someone's life is a net negative *overall* that it wouldn't be worth saving their life. There probably are some people whose lives are net negative overall, but there probably aren't many.
"Do you believe there are populations with a net negative fiscal impact?"
https://thealternativehypothesis.org/index.php/2020/03/19/fiscal-impact-by-race-in-2018/
"but I suspect that a lot of this disappears when you notice how much economic activity the existence of this person causes elsewhere"
Maybe if you think the money would otherwise end up in a vault somewhere, but this is CLEARLY not true. The money would end up somewhere else in the economy and probably more productively than buying consumer goods (which is *not* the basis of economic growth).
In term of taxes, basically you're saying that the government effectively gives these people money, they go spend it on stuff and a fraction of this spending ends up as taxes, and somehow this leads to the government having more money. Obviously this cannot be the case.
Plus, none of this factors in the tremendous direct and indirect costs of crime which are disproportionately committed by poorer people, and unlike with the impact of spending, there's no reason to expect that crime would still exist if these people didn't.
"There probably are some people whose lives are net negative overall, but there probably aren't many."
I disagree. Factoring in the opportunity costs of the money they receive from the government, its probably tens of millions of such people.
They may well accept it. But it still seems that Singer’s initial thought experiment presupposes that we’re supposed to take it as self-evident that we should stop and save the child in front of us. To the extent that the response to the modified hypothetical involves a rejection of that presupposition it seems to me like it is undermining the original argument. Or maybe not—what the hell do I know.
A little bit of Yes and No, I think.
I went and double checked Singer's explanation here [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86Q71s4Sz9k), so it's fresh in my mind. He says that he came up with the shallow pond analogy because it is "closer to home", meaning he likely chose that example because it's conveniently intuitive for people to understand, not necessarily because it *ought* to be the most salient.
Then again, I could plausibly see an argument like, for example: If you encourage someone to feel unmoved at the sight of a drowning child, it may be difficult to do that without negatively impacting their altruistic motivations altogether (like maybe you're likely to become the sort of person who doesn't care about sufferent at all, if you've become the sort of person who doesn't feel particularly strong emotion at witnissing suffering first hand).
why are you wasting time walking to work? sleep in your car so can work more!
My immediate problem with this (not counting visceral feels about walking past a drowning child) is that your confidence that ["you will earn sufficient extra income to save three malnourished children in the third world" and those children will definitely be saved directly as a result of your action and they would definitely die if you did take the time to save the child in front of you] can't reasonably be great enough to make this decision (I guess ignoring any ambiguity about whether the child is actually drowing and not playing or similar).
But if you had that confidence and didn't just stay a bit later at work that day to make up for the time spent saving the child you'd be a monster anyway.
If you notice you try to get out of an uncomfortable moral dilemma by coming up with ways why the solution you don't like is actually the bad one, you can always adjust the conditions so that it doesn't work. In this case, okay, you're uncomfortable with ambiguity and you'd rather be certain to save one kid even if the expected number of children saved is greater in "keep walking" case. Just add some uncertainty to you actually saving the drowning child - maybe they're far enough away that you're not sure you'll be there in time anyway.
Of course there’s always workarounds you can build in to deal with inessential issues not directly related to the core intuition of a thought experiment. The office closes to all employees at 5:00 sharp every day, and the work cannot be done remotely. Similarly, for purposes of a thought experiment, I think we can stipulate away the risks that the child may not really be drowning, or that the cost/benefit analysis may be in error.
In thought experiments we can, but in real life we can't, which is why I think utilitarian thought experiments are a bad guide to making actual ethical decisions in the real world.
Thinking about situations where everything is certain leads you to build up intuitions that are bad. It's better to think about ethical decisions as always being covered in a massive fuzz of uncertainty about actual future consequences. If you think about trolley problems where everything is foggy and you're not quite sure which track has more people on it or whether they can get out of the way in time, then you'll develop much better intuitions for real world decisions.
Also strongly agree. You can create a thought experiment that says literally anything. For instance, you could stipulate that saving the drowning child will directly kill 48 million people. Or you could stipulate that going to work would kill all the people on earth. By stipulating such unintuitive barriers, you create a world where the stipulations matter far more than the normal parameters of life. Of course you save that drowning child, because you have the best information that you can make an actual positive difference in that moment. You can explain to your boss while you're late, or get another job, or work some other time. If you stipulate away all of those alternatives, you're just intentionally creating an impossible situation.
"What if being a good person actually made you a bad person?" - Well then I guess we need to rethink life!
Strongly agree with this - utilitarianism is one of those rare ideas that works better in practice than it does in theory. We're not actually trying to optimise most of the time in real life - we're just trying to do a little bit better than yesterday. The focus on corner cases and moral dilemmas elides the fact that the vast majority of people could make a material difference to the good with pretty minimal effort, and very few people are in the situation of optimising at the margins.
The Schmitt thread pairs well with this smaller one on Fukuyama and the End of History https://mobile.twitter.com/ZoharAtkins/status/1446549049725890566
Good to see someone else who isn't dismissing The End of History just because we've had a few rough years. Personally, I strongly suspect that Fukuyama will be proven right in the end, even if it takes another 50-100 years.
Interesting article by Oliver Traldi at Arc Digital on ”Virtue signalling” and progressive culture (also relevant for the public perception/discussion of effective altruism): ”Dorland, at least in my imagining, thought the etiquette of a progressive writers’ group would be logical, just like a child might expect the English language to be logical. But she was wrong. You get praise for doing good not when you do good but when you do something that makes other people feel that they are good. Nothing points one out as a rube so quickly as this, as failing to realize that it’s all just a game; and that’s what the term “virtue signaling” is really meant to capture. Every hick, like me, makes the same mistake. We get to these prestigious social circles and can’t tell the salad fork from the steak knife or whatever, and we think: “Wow, there are so many rules in this society. They must care a lot about following them.” But that isn't right. It’s only the rube who cares about following the rules, in the end, and thus we’re the only ones who are surprised when different rules apply to different people. What the smart set cares about is making the rules.” https://www.arcdigital.media/p/my-kidney-for-your-approval
Long discussion in a progressive space.
https://www.metafilter.com/192846/Do-writers-not-care-about-my-kidney-donation
They start out sympathizing more with Larson, but come to realize that Dorland hadn't behaved badly, and part of the problem with understanding what happened was a New York Times article which somewhat misrepresented the situation.
The kidney donator seemed somewhat attention-seeking and narcissistic. But, okay, if we have do pay a little more attention to people who *donate kidneys*, okay, sounds like a good trade for society to make. Let assholes donate kidneys for public approval.
And plagiarism is just plagiarism. Someone who was sitting at the cool kids' table thought she could shit-talk the misfit into shutting up.
Actually, she only set up a small facebook group for emotional support and didn't harass people for attention.
When it comes to virtue signaling it’s not what you do, it’s HOW you do what you do. And we learned that means displaying the appropriate amount of modesty regarding your voluntary organ donation, or risk getting dragged to hell.
I feel like this is a noncentral example of "virtue signalling". Usually when the term is used, the person using it doesn't actually agree that the thing being signalled is truly virtuous. That's why "piety signalling" is usually a more descriptive term, I think.
Here I think most people would agree that donating a kidney is actually virtuous, but we cringe at the obviously approval-seeking reasons for which it seems to have been done.
Like Traldi said, actually donating a kidney is an unusually costly, and thus honest, signal. That's what makes it "noncentral" compared to the rampant examples of relatively cheap talk usually dubbed "signalling".
I thought "virtue-signaling" was more performative than functional, rather than inauthentic? That is, they may in fact truly hold some version of the belief, but find it easier to post on Twitter than spend time at a soup kitchen (or whatever).
Of course, the more widespread and central to your social circle the virtue is considered, the more you may signal your acceptance of it, even if it is inauthentic.
Livestreaming musical events seems like it will only be a more common thing in the future, and the progression toward this has been drastically accelerated by the pandemic. Yet AFAICT there isn't an integrated idiot-proof DIY livestreaming device on the market; instead you have to enlist the expensive services of specialized engineers.
Why is this? Surely it can't be that technically difficult to integrate a decent camera and a couple of good microphones in a camcorder-ish box controlled by an app on one's phone, with the software to do a straightforward "here is the website you go to to view this livestream, login/buy this ticket/whatever to see it" kind of thing. Or can it? Is there complexity I'm missing here, or is the market too small, or is this coming and just not ready yet, or is it actually available already?
If you already have a decent audio and video recording setup, there are now services like StreamYard - streamyard.com - that do make the streaming part pretty easy.
But it sounds like you're looking for an integrated device that has everything: mics, camera, streaming capabilities. This is difficult, since the ideal miking and camera setup varies a lot between different performers/groups and spaces. If you want multicamera switching, that multiplies the complexity.
That said, a Zoom Q2n-4K connected via USB to your laptop running StreamYard or your phone running YouTube Live is pretty close to what you're looking for, and the quality probably wouldn't be half bad.
Seems like that'd be easy enough for local bands and other small-scale events. Another commenter mentioned church services already doing this. But bigger acts want bigger production, and that typically requires multiple cameras and people operating those cameras and deciding which ones to switch between. Not to mention all the sound engineers and SFX operators who work on shows like that. But I think you're right that there's an untapped market for the local bands and stuff. Low production is probably better than nothing, and isn't good enough to detract from in-person ticket sales.
Small churches without a deep bench of technical skills have livestreamed all their stuff over the past year. Not always perfectly, but with enough ease, and it goes straight to YouTube.
Livestreaming music events seems like it might detract from how many people might want to 'pay for the experience'. Just a thought.
On the other hand, it can attract fans who can't make the trip.
Maybe for some acts, but for the most part I doubt it. Livestreaming really doesn't capture the experience of being at a concert at all, even with good production. For large acts or small. Lots of my favorite bands and festivals livestream their shows, often for free, and I would never consider that a substitute to actually going. Just something I would do if it's out of town or sold out or something and I didn't have much else to do. I can't imagine livestreaming productions improving to a point where that would change.
I think it's because all of those things individually are difficult, require expertise in different domains, and none of them are all that valuable on their own. The best information on this market space probably comes from camgirls, because it's basically the same problem. One of them probably has a blog post that contains an answer to your question.
My guess is that it's like photography: Having professional-grade equipment isn't enough to make a professional-grade picture. You also need professional-grade skills.
And particularly for music you'll need professional-grade audio engineers to capture the sound properly.
London meetup location has changed. It's been updated in the comments to the lesswrong event sign-up, and people who've signed up were emailed with the new location.
Has it changed to the place I said above, or has it changed to a different place? If the latter, what is the new place?
Apologies, was asleep. You've already found the details and sent out the correction now I'm back. I was being deliberately fuzzy in case there was a further change I wasn't aware of yet and you were, or because it was 3am. Thank you for announcing the change!
100 tweets on Carl Schmitt: https://mobile.twitter.com/ZoharAtkins/status/1447933332831019010
My initial reaction to this is "only a Sith deals in absolutes." Yes, it is technically true that allowing free speech to anyone who disagrees with you is "assisting the enemy" in a very broad and general sense, but politics is not a zero-sum game, and you can often profit more by allowing people to politely disagree with you than declaring war on every person who is to the left or right of the party line, because enforcing your chosen order has costs.
(Especially if what the correct order is is difficult or impossible to know, as is the case with religion.)
Given that he's a Nazi sympathizer, I imagine he relished the idea of paying those costs, but I don't think it's foolish or self-deluding for a liberal to say "we're going to set up as big a tent as possible so that we can get on with the business of building a society instead of stabbing each other over the precise details of transubstantiation."
(Not to say that the liberal order is perfect, infinitely tolerant, or immune to corruption. But it's definitely not *fake* either.)
> politics is not a zero-sum game
Citation Needed.
Politics these days is at least performatively about who gets to control what everybody is required or banned from doing.
Oh I think I'm reading Schmidt differently to you guys. He has many interesting observations about the law and who gets to be the judge etc.
But my fundamental worry is that I think he says you can have a polarised democracy or everyone agreeing all of the time and then you've done away with democracy, and that's what Hannah Arendt would call totalitarianism.
And everyone thinks if only we could be more "rational" or "Bayesian" then we could all just agree in everything. And then Carl Schmidt is lurking in the wings whispering, look here I have just the rational dictator you have been looking for.
He genuinely does terrify me in so many ways ... For some strange reason in my head Hannah Arendt is superman and he is kryptonite.
The idea that free speech gives assistance to the enemy has been taken up by some people as following from Popper, although they misrepresent what he actually said about the "Paradox of Tolerance": https://twitter.com/TeaGeeGeePea/status/1367869888157646850
I remember many years a philosopher friend sent me a paper by Charlotte mouffe on Carl Schmidt. I thought he's a Nazi, how hard is this going to be to refute. Turns out I think far too highly of my own thinking skills.
Any chance you could collect these in your substack ...
What if it's been longer than 24 hours?
Abbie, honey, are you going to be a doormat all your life? Dump that cheating mothersucker and get your life back! And don't listen to that Lauren strumpet, "oh Dr. Wale got my husband back for me" - yeah, right, she was the one having the affair with Dr. Wale in the first place!
Damn, we really need that report button.
Not as long as we have Deiseach.
G(andalf)PT-3???
Scott has been getting spell caster spam for 8 years:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/11/26/a-letter-i-will-probably-send-to-the-fda/#comment-22009
The algorithm has decided we need magical assistance to maintain our romantic relationships.
's not lookin good my dudes
Hello Abbie! I am in need of powerful magic. Some of my favorite blogs are being overrun with spam. Does DR. WALE have a powerful spell that will cause spammer's fingers to fall off?
Would you like to be charged with assault, kidnapping, and possibly rape? Because that's what getting your husband back by casting spells amounts to, if it actually worked.
I think you should work on improving your spell-ing.
This is a spam bot, right? I hope no conscious person is advertising literal spell casting on this blog.
On the contrary, this is placebomancy in its fullest 12-dimensional form
I find this rather unsurprising, but quite interesting. There seem to be, roughly speaking, two "gothic clusters" spanning all kinds of culture (music, literature, painting, video games). One is the dystopian urban kind you're crosscutting (I guess I could add the Thief games to the list, which however veer into the second cluster). The other is the Tolkienesque mystic kind that covers much of folk/filk music, pastoral painting, fantasy literature and of course the vaguely medieval school of RPGs. These two clusters are interwoven much more closely than one might expect from their descriptions -- or at least there is a significant correlation between the fanbases. (Witness the presence of mechanical constructs in sword and sorcery RPGs and the popularity of electrogoth/folk crossover in Germany.)
Incidentally, I wasn't aware that LIMBO had a successor. GOG time!
Inside is a bizarre and excellent experience. Definitely check it out!
So I've actually installed it yesterday and started it. Wow, this certainly does feel like a worthy successor to LIMBO. Not the sort of game that keeps me glued to the keyboard until I finish it (good, seeing how much I have on my plate right now), but something I'll keep coming back to again and again until it's over (I assume they have made it longer than LIMBO).
That's a very interesting question, and I wish we could data-mine Amazon customer ratings to get some cross-media data. There is the 2008 Netflix competition data, which is entirely movies, but would be useful for finding such sets. In fact you can just read the papers generated, or the archived competition forum, and look for examples of constructed features, and each of those features should describe such a set.
But a cautionary note on thinking in terms of sets: The most-interesting result to me of the Netflix competition is that human pre-processing of the data always made the results worse. For instance, many people found genre tags for the movies in the data, and added those human-given genre tags as data. But adding those genre tags to a good machine learning method always made the results worse instead of better. This was true even though the best ML method was just running PCA on the data (Simon Funk's algorithm [a pseudonym], a brilliant way to do PCA fast on sparse data that is now one of my favorite techniques), meaning the final prediction was just a sum of predictors on different (orthogonal) dimensions, possibly run thru a sigmoid function--which means that it wasn't very context-sensitive. That is, we can't say the computer did better than humans because it was able to take feature interactions into consideration; it didn't. [Even making the constructed dimensions orthogonal turned out not to help; non-orthogonal dimensions worked just as well or better if you had at least 30 of them.]
Apparently, once a machine reaches some threshold of competence at category judgement, human category judgement data is worse to it than noise. The human data correlates with the signal, so it's better than nothing if you have no ML; but in an irregular enough way that it can't be averaged out like noise, and so distorts the truer signal picked up by ML. At least, that's my guess.
PCA, rather than making binary yes/no category-membership decisions, computes a degree-of-membership function, which is the projection of each movie's data vector onto each principal component (dimension, feature) of the new basis space. (The new basis space is the set of vectors in M dimensions which PCA constructs and then uses to re-describe the data set instead of the data's original N dimensions, where M << N). I think that human binary decision-making is the problem; it throws away most of the data. So, whatever you do with your sets, don't use a boolean set-membership function.
If we set a computer with a big graphics card loose on the example you gave, it would quickly home in on the color palette, which is largely black, gray, white, red. But that's a very incomplete account of the set.
I'm also looking at cultural correlates, but across domains, like what preferences in art go with what kinds of religious beliefs. But I haven't got any quantified data other than text; and I haven't done anything with that yet. I think a computer would again quickly home in on the color palette; people who believe in spirits, do math in integers, and make Boolean category judgements, are more likely to like bright, bold, primary colors (plus gold; "shiny" is more salient to them), often without shading; while people who like machines and real numbers are more likely to prefer color gradations.
("Salient" might be the wrong word, but religious artists went to more expense to make things shiny. Also, spiritualists dislike brown, which is the "anti-primary" color--your brain's way of saying "I don't know what color this is.")
Also note brown is the only color that never appears in LSD hallucinations, at least not in my experience.
So gray but not brown?
BTW, I noticed that all the colors I hallucinated seemed to be one of the 3 primary subtractive colors (cyan, magenta and yellow), or the 3 1:1 secondary combinations of those primaries, and maybe the 6 tertiary colors between one primary and one secondary, but I'm not sure about that.
If it's just those 6 primaries and secondaries, plus white and black, that means that these hallucinations are caused by something that stimulates cells corresponding to primary subtractive colors, where a single "pixel" in the visual field may have 0, 1, 2, or 3 of the primaries activated, all at the same intensity. Perhaps this "all at the same intensity" part is due to the stimulation being caused by large-scale brain waves.
But also, sometimes, while my eyes were closed, I'd "see" patterns with the different colors ringed around them, arrayed in discrete lines separated by emptiness, in a rainbow-like pattern, almost as if they'd been diffracted around it. That's puzzling, since no optics were involved.
Good question. I wasn't counting gray as a color, but I wondered if I should when I commented. I can't recall seeing "dingy" gray, but I think I could differentiate black things from black background, so I may have seen shades of black.
Gray and brown are both very uncommon in primitive and ancient art, except when made out of gray or brown materials.
Google "spiritual art" or "psychedelic art" to see what I'm talking about. Here's a particularly trippy example, which seems to move even now as I look at it: https://render.fineartamerica.com/images/rendered/default/print/8/5/break/images/artworkimages/medium/1/psychedelic-art-pd.jpg
I apologize for being pedantic, but red, green and blue are also very uncommon in primitive and ancient art, except when made out of red, green and blue materials.
Thanks. I'm pretty sure it's not really moving.