Today's preview: salient + bias in German. bias: Der/das Bias is fine in academia. In everyday German best say: Filter. And then explain the specific bias: "Wir filtern nach der Meinung, die wir schon haben: Eine Info, die dazu passt, glauben wir gern und schnell. Bei widersprechenden Nachrichten sind wir misstrauisch: "Muss ich das glauben?"". ("fehlerbehaftete Voreinstellung" wäre zu lang. "Vorurteil"/"diskriminierende Sprache" sind oft möglich bei "bias" in non-rationalist contexts ("biased language"/"biased against pitbulls"). - "salient"* - wörtlich "springend", im Sinne von "ins Auge springend". Meist gut mit "relevant" übersetzbar. /("wichtig" geht auch, bei relevant kann man auf Nachfrage erklären: "in diesem Zusammenhang wichtig"). Du hast drei Bewerber: Hans, Heinrich und Helmut. Du konzentrierst dich auf ihre Abschlüsse/Erfahrungen u.ä.. Da kommt eine neue gute Bewerbung; von Fatima! Plötzlich wird (auch) relevant/interessant/"salient", dass die ersten 3 Männer sind (und urdeutsche Namen tragen). Dass ihr Name nicht mit H beginnt, bleibt irrelevant. - That's my 2-pence. If I ever get to 10, I'll post. And will post a link here. ;) * bonus fun fact: "salient" would be a possible translation of the Hebrew "tsela" in Genesis, usu. translated as (Adam's) rip (to create Eve). But a rip is not "sticking out". And men have no rips missing. Penis-bone fits much better. Some mammals have one. We do not (anymore). Hence Viagra. https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-topics/bible-interpretation/the-adam-and-eve-story-eve-came-from-where/
Scott says he will link to me if I give grants to people "who will make the world a worse place".
So what's a good way to make the world a worse place? Maybe stabbing a random guy on the street makes it a little worse, maybe not. But say we have a lot of money and want to maximize our badness in the word: what should we do?
I'm going to rule out terrorism because that's been done to death and this isn't interesting unless we come up with something original.
I think it's a hard problem. Making the world worse is probably as hard as making the world better, because institutions have immense inertia.
Since good institutions are what make the modern world so good, maybe the best way to make the world a worse place is to destroy our best institutions. How do we do that? What are our most important institutions? How do we subvert them?
There are so many ways to make life worse for all and stay a respected member of society. Use Facebook. Join Extinction Rebellion. Donate to PETA and BLM. Speak up against migration. Heat with coal or even better wood in a city. - If you wanna break laws without being caught: Spill oil. (and whatever but do no post about it). No, do post about it, to get followers. And buy (risk) life-insurance at a bank.
I'd say, you'd want to influence politics such that it becomes easier to amass personal power and harder to lose it.
Eg, centralize power in the executive/party (Whichever stays after a term runs out), make it easier for the super rich to turn their money into influence, etc.
If you do that long enough in enough places, you are guaranteed am idiot/asshole at the levers of power.
Eg, in the US we devolved power to the executive to the point that GW jr. could launch a couple pointless wars that cost trillions, killed millions, and made the world worse/ put the US in a disadvantageous position.
Maybe war-hawkery would have led Congress to aprrove the war if they were asked, but maybe not. We'll never know.
Think tank to figure out how to start a large-scale nuclear war. Or just a non-nuclear world war, in that case you may get extra points from Scott for proper use of kabbalah, if suggested strategies will involve extensive use of armor.
Ahmed Chalabi and “Curveball” are two fairly ordinarily guys who made extraordinarily high-leverage contributions to the existence of the Iraq War and its attendant suffering.
Perhaps you could find another war that “wants” to happen, lobby for it, and give the hawks the cause they’re looking for.
Matt Ridley has book about it coming out now. And some good posts. - Even the possibility of a leak makes it criminal to have labs of this category anywhere near a big city - Scott Sumner was outraged about that. - The Chinese defendants signal "we will not admit to anything and not let anyone do intrusive checks". Sounds innocent. The international defendants are doing a bad job: Prof Drosten (German virolog, inventor of our pcr-test) in his podcast tried - and was using cheap tricks to sound convincing. - No serious person says the Chinese scientists were "maligne". A leak is a disaster not an attack. - Did they do gain-of-function with corona-viruses there? Oh yeah, "just chimera, no gof intended". Pretty obviously, they did. - Bayesian probability: If there is exactly 1 lab in a huge country. And the epidemic starts in this labs-town of all places, at places on the same subway line as the lab. No proof, sure - but what are the chances?
The way I heard it, the theory went that Sars-Cov-2 escaped from a BSL-2 lab at WIV, but that there are in fact lots of BSL-2 labs in China so an outbreak near WIV is far from a smoking gun. I can't remember the details tho...
A level 4 lab *exists* at WIV, but I *thought* I heard that some research that people were worried about was done at a lower-level lab. Btw for me that link just goes to Matt Ridley's profile.
I've seen indications there are good arguments on both sides of this, but I bet most people only end up hearing one side. I've heard the slam-dunk case for lab-leak by Nicolas Wade, so now I'm waiting for somebody to give me the slam-dunk case for natural-origin.
Sure, let's call it 15%. I strongly disagree but we're at least in the same order of magnitude.
Since OP wants to make the world a worse place, a lab error unleashing a worldwide calamity that killed millions and brought economies worldwide to their knees is a very interesting event, even if you multiply the chance of this impact by 0.15.
Still posting so still manic I suppose. There's this notion in these quarters that conservatives understand liberals but liberals don't understand conservatives. The idea comes from the notion that colleges and the media are liberal, so everyone understands that perspective.
Of course liberals can be exposed to conservative perspectives from growing up with them, from working in a conservative industry, or from reading conservative perspectives.
Whereas I buy that in the general population liberals understand conservatives worse than vice versa, from reading Scott and other related blogs over the past decade, I think the opposite ignorance exists within this community. Here, liberals understand conservatives better than conservatives understand liberals. Would be no big deal were it not for so many conservative members of the community assuming the opposite.
For instance, I was a regular SSC reader from 2015. I discovered SSC, I think, through Marginal Revolution. But at any rate I've read blogs such as MR, The Money Illusion, Overcoming Bias, Roissy in DC, Steve Sailer, Mencius Moldbug, Two Blowhards... All of which are/were conservative leaning.
Yet I make one liberal remark and I'm accused of living in a liberal echo-chamber. I deeply suspect that in general the conservatives who read this site live in more of a conservative echo-chamber than the liberals who post here.
I think conservatives understand liberals better in many cases just because the liberal positions are often based on broad and 'obvious' ideas of justice, while conservative objections are rooted in some more specific and often technical idea. Especially w.r.t. economics.
Like the idea of raising minimum wage - the liberal viewpoint is easy to understand at a high level: "it's tragic when people work long hours but still barely make ends meet, why don't we just raise the minimum wage so that doesn't happen anymore?". That's both sympathetic and easy to understand so it's not hard for conservatives to grok that viewpoint.
Whereas the conservative view is harder to understand: if you believe that raising minimum wage is a simple fix that would help poor people, and you know that conservatives are against it, the only 'obvious' conclusion is that "conservatives must hate poor people". Whereas the more accurate conservative viewpoint is based on a technical, economic argument that raising minimum wage *doesn't work* and would have negative consequences that outweigh the positive ones, (including perhaps for the very people it's meant to help).
I'm *not* trying to start a minimum wage argument: whether conservatives are right or wrong on the economic argument here is a moot point. The point is just that "raising minimum wage is a bad idea because [specific economic arguments]" is a much harder position to grok than "people should make a livable wage". And that's inherent to the position itself - not a product of any sort of bias in the culture.
(And of course, I'm not saying there aren't liberals with [specific economic counter-arguments] to the conservative position - but you don't *need* to understand those arguments to understand the basic liberal position)
I think a lot of conservative/liberal issues break down along this divide - it's not universally true, but a liberal position is much more likely to be rooted in a broad sense of justice, where the conservative position might often ironically be summed up as "the devil's in the details".
>Whereas I buy that in the general population liberals understand conservatives worse than vice versa, from reading Scott and other related blogs over the past decade, I think the opposite ignorance exists within this community. Here, liberals understand conservatives better than conservatives understand liberals. Would be no big deal were it not for so many conservative members of the community assuming the opposite.
I think that's only true of this community if you include DSL. ASX seems even to liberal in its posts, to me.
I tend to keep the open thread open in a tab and search "new rep" until it's fully dead, but I'm weird. If you leave or accidentally refresh, that strategy doesn't work and there's no way to see what's new since you last read the thread, other than replies to you or (I think) replies to comments you replied to, which come to your inbox. That means that a few days out, new comments, like the ones you just made, probably don't get many eyeballs, and hence no engagement. The Wordpress comments were much better.
I tend to agree, insofar as "the center" is defined in American terms (Europe/Canada are more left, so if "center" = "average politics", "Canada center" is left of "US center").
The last SSC survey showed significantly more readers identifying as left than right (and the 'right' was mostly 'libertarian' not 'Praise Jesus'). But people notice opposition more than agreement, which could lead a left-leaning person to perceive ACX as right-leaning. Plus, marxbro doesn't seem to be here anymore...
I'm not going to argue with your substantive point, but I don't think it's just that "The idea comes from the notion that colleges and the media are liberal, so everyone understands that perspective". I think it comes more from the fact that people generally become more conservative as they grow older, so most people have a recollection of when they were more left wing but few can see how they'll think when they become more right wing.
Also children live in a mostly socialist environment - wealth miraculously comes into the family home and is divided up (generally) according to principles of equity and justice. To the degree that people notice that this works less well in groups of people numbering many millions individuals become advocates of more self reliance and individuality. With this view everybody comes from a vastly more centrally planned statist environment but some move more to the right than others.
I make no claims whatsoever about the positions people end up with as adults; I do make the observation that we all have a history (and memory) of living in and believing in a more liberal environment than we do currently. This is one of the reasons why conservatives understand liberals a little better than vice versa.
Scott, what motivates people to post in Open Threads is when you highlight the best comments. For instance, for next week, you could point out my posts below as highlights. It would set the bar low, sure, but motivate others.
I think I might be experiencing a manic episode because I keep posting and, as far as I can tell, nobody else is. Am I imagining this? Nobody is responding to my posts, so they must be irrational.
I keep spamming my friends on IMs when hypomanic. I've learned to rotate so the deluge spreads across many people and they mostly don't mind. You might want to exercise the same strategy in regard to online communities.
It's actually pretty typical for open threads to die down after a few days. Also it does seem likely that you might be experiencing a manic episode (IANAD). I'd recommend taking a break from here, maybe write down your ideas in Word or Notes or whatever and then if they seem worth sharing tomorrow, post them in the next OT. Also if you notice that one of your posts starts with the phrase "I'm going to break the rules" that's a pretty good sign you oughta step back. Hope you're doing alright.
I keep posting, but I am full of whisky, I mean ideas.
Anyway, nobody else is posting. This is a ghost town.
Seems like a fine time to start to flesh out my philosophical arguments about Materialism and The Soul. I'll start with the Givens. You can disagree with them of course, But if you want to disagree with my logic, you must accept the Givens I present.
Given: Physics is real. There's no full theory and all that, but let's accept the conventional wisdom regarding the Laws of Physics.
Given: Metaphysics does not exist. All that exists is rooted in physics.
End of the section of Givens.
What is a human? A species of animal defined as human by the humans.
Do all humans experience subjective reality? We don't know for sure, but by the Transitive Property, I say Yes. I experience something, so I assume other humans do also. .
What is the Me experiencing my existence? I suspect it is the matter inside me. I am made of matter, only matter.
If the Me experiencing existence does so because of the matter in me, does the Me change as the matter within my physical body changes? Maybe, maybe not. Hold that thought.
It seems to me that either the Me changes with each passing moment, as the matter within me changes with each passing moment, OR the Me experiencing subjective reality never changes.
I'm more inclined to believe that the Me experiencing subjective reality never changes, even though the composition of matter within me does. I suspect the composition of matter within me doesn't matter. I'm still Me. Because matter is matter. The individual protons can change in my body but it is still Me.
But if the experience of being Me is composed of matter, and most of the matter in my body can change several times throughout my lifetime, with the subjective experience of being Me unchanging, then I can't claim my existence is due to a specific composition of matter, but due to the matter itself.
This is key to my point. Matter itself must be the fundamental essence of experiential existence, but the specific matter must not matter. If I swap a few protons with you, that may mean we just had a good time together, but I am no more or less me and you are no more or less you.
But why am I no less me or more you if we've just swapped some protons? Here I invoke Occam's Razor: It's because our subjective beings were no different in the first place. I was already you and you were already me.
I think matter is like a tissue, the tissue of existence. Whether we like it or not, we are all one, because we are all this same tissue.
I use a different sort of Given based on my own intuition: that consciousness is real and monadal, i.e. not composed of smaller elements (though each brain could possibly have many consciousnesses).
The standard position is that consciousness is composed of a bunch of brain cells in a waking state, which in turn are made of quarks. Therefore, consciousness does not exist in the base reality, in the same sense as an airplane or a paperclip does not exist in the base reality.
A paperclip has many atoms which an *observer* can *mentally* group together and *call* a "paperclip". But the atoms *themselves* (or rather their quarks) don't care in the slightest about being grouped together in this manner. And no grouping occurs except in the mind of an external observer.
Granted, even when no one is around, the paperclip will typically have the behavior of a solid object, and most of its atoms will be similar to each other. But again, the quarks inside and outside the paperclip don't care about that; it takes an external observer to make such observations, and to see boundaries between "paperclip", "paper" and "surrounding air".
So the purely reductionist solution to consciousness is "illusionism": the idea that we think we are "conscious" "individuals" with "qualia", but in fact "qualia" is merely a word, and consciousness is merely an illusion perceived by a collection of brain cells*, which are in fact just quarks.
In this view, the quarks *cannot* know they are part of a "brain" or a "consciousness", let alone perceive "qualia". Thus "consciousness" is an illusion. You don't *really* feel anything, because you are quarks and quarks can't have feelings. You just exhibit behaviors that an observer could, in principle, observe is consistent with feeling something, except that there are no observers in base reality.
(If you want to take the position that quarks do feel things, that seems difficult. It leads to questions like "which *specific* quarks in your brain has qualia/feelings", "why do they have qualia? do quarks in the rocks or the sun have qualia too?" and "how can the brain be aware of the qualia of the quarks? Are you an epiphenomenalist?")
If consciousness is monadal, that's profound, since it means qualia/feelings can occur in a very specific *location* that exists in the base reality, making qualia/feelings real at a basic level. So that's the view I take.
I avoid the word "metaphysics". I think of consciousness as an undiscovered particle that obeys physical laws, though it is special because it feels.
This does leads to other difficult questions, though, such as "why hasn't anyone detected this particle?" and "why would evolution incorporate these particles into brains?" and "how does this tie into quantum physics?"
But there is no philosophical view of consciousness that doesn't lead to hard questions. I bite this bullet because it makes more sense to me than the others available. I could be wrong.
Like many here, I'm fascinated by prediction markets---and disappointed they are so hard to get working in the USA. Here's a thought: sports betting has just open up in a huge, legal way in the USA. Maybe a good strategy for prediction markets would be to first, enter the wide-open legal sports betting world. Differentiate yourself by being more like a prediction market than a straightforward betting market. In other words, make people make odds like they do on the Good Judgement project and ignore the traditional sports betting stuff about point spreads and shit.
The point is to create a legal prediction market in the US, and sports just happens to be the low hanging fruit for that.
From there branch out. Be like Uber, don't ask for permission. Don't go straight into say, political betting, which is already outlawed. But go into things nobody thought of, just to spread your arms and gain default jurisdiction. For instance, since sports betting is legal, look for sports peripherals. Like maybe try a contract that predicts what the GDP of a city or state might be based on the records of there sports teams. So make it a nominal sports bet, but expand your domain. You could make the whole fucking economy nominal bets about sports outcomes with enough creativity.
I want to steal a topic from the alternative forum: Elite Overproduction. This can mean many things to many people. Too many wannabe PHDs, high-status writers, etc.., too many super-smart people working in fields that don't add much to society. (In the old days we used to say "lawyers", but that frame is old and broke.)
One aspect is say, physicists who go to work in finance, because money. Is our society worse off because too many PHD physicists get rich working on high-frequency trading algorithms as opposed to figuring out more constructive ways to move atoms?
The economist Scott Sumner argued a few years back that the high pay of those who allocate capital goes to show that those who allocate capital are doing the most important jobs in the economy. I have trouble buying that but i also have trouble understanding the economy, so maybe?
My own belief, open to updates, is probably there are too many really smart people working in finance compared to physics or chemical engineering, to be optimal for society. I tend to think there are diminishing returns to optimizing the next hedge fund strategy, even though capital allocation is clearly a very important thing.
Elite Overproduction can mean many other things. Anyone else want to throw some ideas at this?
"the high pay of those who allocate capital goes to show that those who allocate capital are doing the most important jobs"
One could infer this from two premises that are bonkers: (1) that free markets are the best way to do everything and (2) the world is just. From these it follows that those who earn the most money in a free market are simply reaping their just reward.
I suppose instead that those who learn well how to play certain games such as "investor" and "founder" (either via talent & practice, or via coaching from wealthy peers or, rarely, via courses that correctly teach such skills) learn to extract much more than their fair share from the economy. And that if you're rich enough, another way to play the investor game is to hire the smartest investors you can find and pay them to invest for you.
Sure, a company is unlikely to succeed without a competent founder or wealthy investor, but nor can it succeed without somebody to build the product and somebody to market the product. And sure, founders (on average) work harder than their underlings. But don't tell me they deserve 50 times as much money for working 50% as harder. Don't tell me that the investor deserves a huge return just for "being accredited" and "investing". And certainly don't tell me that founder A deserves 10 million dollars while founder B deserves to go bankrupt simply on the basis that founder A *got* 10 million dollars and founder B *went* bankrupt.
Oops, sorry to litigate this; just-world thinking is my pet peeve.
I guess there's another, more reasonable way I could have looked at this. I could have just said "yes, Sumner, perhaps the job they do is very important, even vital, but that doesn't mean they deserve quite so much money, or that others couldn't do the job just as well for less. But then, you never actually said they deserve quite so much money, shame on me for putting words in your mouth. Carry on."
I feel like finance is not a good example of elite overproduction. Individuals' decisions in finance can have such tremendous magnification, I feel that's it's not correct to say they aren't socially impactful. M&A, endowments, pensions, etc. often have billions of dollars at stake. There are hundreds of billions of dollars of transactions in equities and FX every day. A bank or an insurance fund "blowing up" are events that can have serious negative social consequences. Considering this, having smart, quantitatively-trained people working in finance is generally a good thing, and that includes physics PhDs.
(Also, I know a lot of people like to criticize high frequency trading, but finance is a really big field, and HFT is such a small fraction it's almost irrelevant.)
It's easy to think the finance industry is too big to be "optimal", but that really depends what "optimal" means. If you had an omniscient being who could centrally plan the economy, that would be optimal, and the industry breakdown would be very much different from the present. But we don't have easy access to any omniscient beings, so I feel like such speculation is a waste of time. The real economy is going to look very much different: we have to optimize around incomplete information and costs of uncertainty. And much of the finance industry is about dealing with risks and uncertainty!
Elite Overproduction can also mean eugenic fertility and these poor sons of feudals entering workforce is good, also in setting up factories or travelling seas, probably conquering others is good for the country.
I think all of us old SSC readers wish the open threads here were more like those there. But the bad functionality here, particularly for mobile, hurts it much. And the community has splintered, mostly, in fact, due to the poor functionality of the comments section here, but there's a political element to the splintering which has created a feedback loop to the splintering.
I think pushing Substack for better a working comments section would help tremendously in the long run. Just get it back to old WordPress quality. Why is that so hard for Substack?
Also, the heat of political discussions tends to be the death of a comments sections, but so far we seem to have the opposite here. Perhaps people are too afraid of a heated discussion? Maybe limiting politics to every other thread isn't good here?
For the record, the alternative forum isn't against people using vulgar language per se, but they are definitely against one calling members of the Texas Legislature "evil cocksuckers" even if the description fits said state congressmen like a glove.
It's good practice to have rules against calling people evil cocksuckers in a public forum, even if they are, in fact, evil cocksuckers. Raising the standard of discussion benefits everybody.
If you want me to talk more, bring back Likes in the comment section. No ability to sort comments by how interesting they are makes it seem like a thousand-comment textwall, and the inability to tip my hat to people who contribute usefully is immensely frustrating.
Also, if Substack were to give us a page where we could see responses to our comments, like exists for Reddit or Disqus, that'd really help too.
It's easy to scroll through here -- if you're not on mobile -- by collapsing all the top level topics you aren't interested in.
The functionality here needs to improve, but I cast a down-vote for likes. They uglify the comments sections, and, in our time of politics, are inevitably political.
So this kind of scam/blackmailing email has been going around for a while now, but this latest version is improved, much better spelling, grammar and layout. Well done latest blackmailer!
This crap regularly comes in on an old work email that isn't used for anything except receiving emails sent to the old address (which some people still use in spite of getting our new details). And if you want to know why Bitcoin et al. are going to have a tough time convincing ordinary people that they are a replacement currency instead of a dodgy pyramid type scheme, then maybe STOP ADVISING THAT THE ADVANTAGES ARE UNTRACEABILITY, SO THAT CRIMINALS STOP USING THEM?????
"I am sorry to inform you but your device was hacked.
That's what happened. I have used a Zero Click vulnerability with a special code to hack your device through a website.
A complicated software that requires precise skills that I posess.
This exploit works in a chain with a specially crafted unique code and such type of an attack goes undetected.
You only had to visit a website to be infected, and unfortunately for you it's that simple for me.
You were not targeted, but just became one of the many unlucky people who got hacked through that webpage.
All of this happened in August. So I’ve had enough time to collect the information.
I think you already know what is going to happen next.
For a couple of month my software was quietly collecting information about your habits, websites you visit, websearches, texts you send.
There is more to it, but I have listed just a few reasons for you to understand how serious this is.
To be clear, my software controlled your camera and microphone as well.
It was just about right timing to get you privacy violated. I have made a few pornhub worthy videos with you as a lead actor.
I’ve been waiting enough and have decided that it’s time to put an end to this.
Here is my offer. Let’s name this a “consulting fee” I need to get, so I can delete the media content I have been collecting.
Your privacy stays untouched, if I get the payment.
Otherwise, I will leak the most damaging content to your contacts and post it to a public website for perverts to view.
You and I understand how damaging this will be to you, it's not that much money to keep your privacy.
I don’t care about you personally, that's why you can be sure that all files I have and software on your device will be deleted immediately after I receive the transfer.
I only care about getting paid.
My modest consulting fee is 1650 US Dollars to be transferred in Bitcoin. Exchange rate at the time of the transfer.
You need to send that amount to this wallet: 1DpA1wTZqGqP9pEcjfZ9bsGEHzbjcsTKq1
The fee is non negotiable, to be transferred within 2 business days.
Obviously do not try to ask for help from the law enforcement unless you want your privacy to be violated.
I will monitor your every move until I get paid. If you keep your end of the agreement, you wont hear from me ever again.
Take care and have a good day."
I like the cheery sign off on this one - "nothing personal, just business" 😀
Note that the spelling and grammar aren't perfect, and it's plainly a script that whoever buys the blackmail package works off, but it's a lot better than the last version of this.
It seems to me that much has been written about human psychology which has never been catalogued. The greatest psychologists tend to be novelists, playwrights, directors and screenwriters. The best of those understand the subtleties of complex psychological interactions.
Yet we have no science that seems to have learned much from what the best in the field of psychology -- the artists mentioned above -- have to offer. Why?
The only sub-field of psychology that seems to have learned anything from literature and movies are the Pick-Up Artists. I suppose that makes some sense due to the huge demand to get laid: people are really motivated to figure that out.
So do academics in the field of Psychology simply ignore what there is to learn from literature and movies or what?
I think the simple answer is that your hypothesis is false. The novelists, playwrights and so on actually have a terrible understanding of human psychology, they're just good at making you believe their inaccurate models and false conclusions. For example, how many times have you seen some piece of fiction claim that "revenge is hollow" one way or another? This is flatly untrue, and your typical playwright wouldn't know anything about it anyway. It's just a piece of moralizing; the fretful, cowardly and/or puritanical don't *want* revenge to be satisfying, they don't think it *ought to be allowed to be*, so they write as if it weren't.
I think the issue is that what the poets know of psychology, doesn't translate very well into the language of scientific theories. They may intuitively grasp people's complex motivations and interactions, but not in any way that can be boiled down to testable hypotheses.
Perhaps literary observations don't translate well into scientific hypothesis, but it seems like they could translate into various taxonomies of behavior, if someone took the trouble to catalogue it. For instance, it seems like Tolstoy and Proust are way beyond Myer Briggs in understanding of personality. Though for all I know Myer Briggs were influenced by Tolstoy and Proust. But what about more recent artists like Philip Roth or David Chase? Larry David?
I would have recommended the one linked to by this substack. I mostly lurk there and my only complaint is that I think they have mostly driven off the people with batshit opinions, and so it's a little boring and stodgy in there, since you mostly have people being uncontroversially correct. Not enough babble, too much prune. But if I have my own thing I want to bring up, then I always appreciate that place.
Obviously, posting here more to push back for other people who might want to check it out than to say "try it again" but hey, I think your assessment here is off by a mile (on "very irrational", I don't know the guy who runs it) so if you're not certain maybe also do that
I've lurked there for some time and it's boring like you said because skew bans them. He is one of those losers who thinks pretending to be a rationalist means he knows everything.
I made the same remark in the discord itself and no fewer than six people messaged me with agreement and links to different discord servers that have proven to actually be entertaining and useful. Thought the same might happen here.
What in the name of Roko did you just say about our Discord, you little poster? I'll have you know the administrator was trained in posting at slate star codex, has been involved in numerous secret raids on sneerclub, and has over 3000 confirmed bans. He is an expert in the use of rhetoric from his vast argument-arsenal and can predict hypocrisy and logical fallacies the moment the "is typing" intent is accessible to the server's API. You are nothing to the admin but just another little shitposter. He will mute you into oblivion with precision the likes of which has never been seen before in any blogosphere of the entire multiverse, mark my words. You think you can get away with living by the sword, besmirching his good name over the Internet? Think again, Sleazy E. A cactus person and a big green bat have assured me that as we speak, he is negotiating acausal trades with a network of spies across TheMotte and the SSC Tumblr, to identify your aliases and prepare scorching NYT editorials, so you had better prepare for the singularity. Because it'll be as swift and harsh as an unfriendly AGI with a single directive: destroy your arguments with FACTS and LOGIC. You'll be skewered by your own statements, kid; you never could distinguish the map from the territory. He has access to every discord channel, with full permissions, and can have your account reported and extirpated from discord in over seven hundred ways, and that's just the archives of your posts in one server. Not only is our admin extensively trained in timeless decision theory and rationalism, he knows the objectively correct answers to Newcomb's Problem and the theoretical existence of P-Zombies. This admin has access to the entire collection of scissors statements from Shiri's algorithm and will use them to incept a toxoplasma of rage among your entire social network. I've got a prediction market up and running on just how long it will take until the forces of Moloch ruin your life, and the median value is sitting pretty at 23 picoseconds. If only you could have known what an unholy facet of moderation your little "clever" comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your tongue. But you're just another Alonzo de Pinzon blabbing about eye color, so you didn't, and now you're paying the price, you sleazy beta. He will ensure every single human on earth considers you to be in their outgroup and your finances will drown in cost disease while he busy donating his wealth to malaria nets and vitamin A supplements. You're history, kiddo.
Omeprazole can help with reflux. Over the counter 10 or 20 mg. Sounds like you are at a set point where your metabolism “wants “ to be. It’s ok to be somewhat overweight if you’re healthy, imho.
I wonder how many comments of each level there are on these posts. I personally commented way more on the last open thread than I usually do (I mean I typically comment in spurts but like I think I have 26 on there or something like that) but they're all replies to two comments about controversial political issues (Chappelle, and Ed Reform).
I don't doubt that the Sunday posting made a difference but I also wonder if there's some kind of controversy cycle (from your numbers it looks like the politics-allowed posts get more comments).
It might be interesting to count how many top-level comments there are, how many replies to top-level comments, etc. to get a sense of like, how many distinct engaging conversations are going on and how much people engage with each topic.
Then again that's also the kind of poison that created facebook so on second thought maybe don't do that at all.
Does anyone know of any papers on the psychological or neurological correlates of experiencing art? I was thinking about how the structural composition of paintings evoke different emotions or reactions, and similar to how some papers discuss the role of a single neuron in a neural network (ML context), I was thinking about measuring a minor color change, moving of some component, other alteration, etc... in art via slight perturbations in neurological (e.g., fMRI) or psychological (e.g., self-reported reports) measures. It would be cool to have GANs generate art to tickle out different emotions explicitly, but a dataset of neurological cascades for different art pieces would need to be created. Perhaps there is a more efficient workaround, but I simply do not know enough about the subject.
I suspect people experience art too holistically for minor changes in color, etc., to reveal much. Perhaps minor changes could ruin the holistic experience in some cases, but one likely couldn't generalize what a minor change in one art work means since the changes would likely yield different results in different works.
I'm a traditional horary astrologer; I need to practice my art, and the only way to do that is through using horary to answer questions and provide situational insight. If you would like to give astrological divination a try, please email me at FlexOnMaterialists@protonmail.com. I am exceptionally discreet, but pseudonyms are perfectly acceptable for those with a desire to maintain rationalist street cred.
I suspect most people here are tired of reading your solicitations on every open thread. (Someone can correct me if I am wrong.) Moreover, you are really barking up the wrong tree trying to push astrology on such a quantitative and skeptical readership. If you want to make public, testable predictions here, people might be interested... but you aren't and likely nobody is.
I can ignore your posts, but I think you are making this place sleepier than it could be. Scott asks in his post what would get more of us talking. I think boring solicitors like you disappearing might help some.
Is horary astrology capable of answering simple questions of the form "what number did I just write on a slip of paper" or similar? If not, could I ask why not?
No, because neither the questioner nor the astrologer (nor the heavens themselves, for that matter) care what number was just written on the paper; the real question is rather "is horary true?" I leave it to you to ascertain why this question is unsuitable for horary.
I have an important bet going with someone about when SpaceX will next launch. Can you tell me if I'm going to win?
Or how about this: I have a large semiprime number I'd like to factor. I intend to put my guess for the factorization on a piece of paper and lock it in a box. What you do is tell me the contents of the box in one week. If the paper doesn't have two factors on it, I enter "2, 2". If it does, I multiply them and see if the result is my semiprime. If so, I put those two numbers in the box. Otherwise, I increment the second number to the next prime (unless it is already greater than the square root of my semiprime, in which case I increment the first number and set the second one to 2). The only stable configuration should be the true factorization. I'm highly interested in this exciting new branch of applied metaphysics, please advise.
Re: your odds of winning the bet, that's a classic use of horary, and I'd be quite pleased to delineate a chart predicting your chances; assuming, of course, you'd condescend to the simple expedient of sending an email.
Re: numbersnumbersnumbers, you'd have to simplify that enough for a rather unmathematical astrologer to understand. If your intellect can stoop low enough to encounter mine, I'll give it a shot, however given your avatar I rather suspect this to be catty and sarcastic japery.
That's a fine astrological question, though I will need an email to send you the prediction, as the results tend to run a few paragraphs in length. Then, you can come back and report to the next open thread whether the prediction was accurate or not.
You are of course free to persist in your own belief--far be it from me to litigate the particulars of anyone's faith!--or, you could come up with a query having a clear and verifiable future result, and ask.
To be honest, I’d need a fairly large number of clear, correct, predictions to move me very far from my prior of “astrology is bunk and has no plausible mechanism beyond cold reading and making your predictions and advice sufficiently vague.” Not trying to insult you, that’s just my current beliefs on the matter. A clear explanation of the mechanism of the process might lower that threshold a bit, but you’re going up against my observation that mathematical, physicalist models have done a very good job at describing the structure of the world.
There is no way on earth I can read that many comments. I would really appreciate having some sort of sorting by best or curation. When I opened that thread I just closed it right away due to it being too overwhelming. I get that conversations here are important and open, but there has to be a way to separate the wheat from the chaff.
I wish the "Like" button could be used as a "Follow this thread" button. So I skim the comments section and when I find a comment that interests me, I use the "Like" button to indicate I want to follow subsequent comments connected to it.
The trick then is to have a filter option (beside Chronological and Top First) that is called, say, "My Likes" which then only shows me the threads I indicated interest in.
Super random question, but a year or two ago I remember reading a Scott Sumner blog post where spoke about a card game he'd been playing with friends & family- where they're all pretending to be different characters, and the point of the game is to discover everyone's real identity (i.e. one person is the 'killer', or one person is being deceptive about who they are). He noted that smart engineer types were not particularly good at it, but that many native Chinese were excellent (I believe his wife is Chinese). It's in that vein of social bluffing games, like Blood on the Clocktower.
I've searched his blog every whichaway, but I can't find the name of the game. Does this sound like a social bluffing game that people are familiar with.....? In the absence of that, any good bluffing games that people enjoy or recommend?
The funny thing is, I played this game at college orientation with a Chinese student who had never left China until a couple days before. At one point, someone asked if he was mafia and he hesitated then said, "I cannot lie. I am mafia." The whole point of the game is deception, but morally he couldn't bring himself to lie even within a game. I guess times have changed.
No, because actors and authors aren't trying to deceive anybody; the director, other actors, audience, readers, etc., are expected to know that those things aren't true.
Don't people who choose to play a game about deception and backstabbing know that the things said in the context of the game will frequently be untrue?
Yes, but some people have moral codes they won't suspend for a game. I don't think Furrfu's statements are contradictory, but I do wonder if ze appreciates that other people have other moral codes than zim.
What makes you think the "smart engineer types" are the ones who refuse to lie in a game?
I consider myself a "smart engineer type." As a kid, I once played one of these games with a group of people who instituted a rule that "you can't ask someone their team", because they didn't want anyone to be forced to lie about it. I seemed to be the only person in the group who saw a moral difference between lying as part of a consensual game that explicitly includes lying and lying "in real life". (Though I had trouble articulating that at the time.)
I'm only parroting what @nifty775 just said that Scott Sumner observed about "smart engineer types" not being good at the deception game that Sumner plays.
You're claiming that it's dishonorable and disintegrous to engage in well-bounded roleplay. Obviously that attitude is not only false but also an attack on the convention of roleplaying and thus also on the very concept of personal growth and expression.
Within the game everyone has agreed that lying and deceit are ok. It seems to me that basically any honor/integrity based reason not to lie to other people should be satisfied by the fact that everyone involved understands the situation, and that that pass to lie clearly expires the moment the game ends.
Because it's fun, and teaches you both how to deceive and how to spot deception.
If you think the first is not a valuable life skill, I'd refer you to Kant's axe murderer thought experiment (or just real life experiences of people living under, say, Nazi rule).
This game is similar to many acting exercises. I remember one where the scenario was one of us was a talkshow host and was interviewing you, and as the interviewee, you had to guess who you were.
Turned out I was King Kong and I really loved working with Fae.
I'm looking for advice on losing weight. I went down from ~280lb to hovering around the 225lb region. I did this by eating only 2 meals per day, targeting 1200 calories per day, and then also having a cheat day on Saturdays where I go truly wild and eat absolutely anything I want.
However, I've stalled here for the past two years. It's good that I've seen that this weight is sustainable - I migrated from eating explicit diet foods and counting calories all the time to eating fairly normal foods during the week, and just making sure I don't eat too much. And I still get to eat whatever I want on Saturdays, which is nice, and helps me to keep going, mentally.
However, I'd like to start losing pounds again. I've tried lots of small changes to tip the scale towards losing, and the changes don't seem to be helping. I've tried counting calories for my meals again, and I see that I still am really hitting roughly 1200 calories/day, generally. I've tried integrating exercise into my life by starting to use an exercise bike 5 days per week, hitting 150 to 160 bpm heart rate for 25 minutes each time. I've also tried (at separate times from biking) doing weight lifting. However, nothing here seems to actually get me to start losing weight again, and I'm getting really really frustrated. I believe I may need to do something drastic.
I think I may cut down to 1 meal per day (probably around 600 to 800 calories per day), but still keep my Saturday cheat day. I do NOT want to sustain a one meal per day diet long-term. However, maybe this is the kickstart I need to actually start losing again. Is this a terrible idea? I'm very very disciplined, so I know I can keep myself to one meal per day if I try. And I'd much rather give up lunch each day as opposed to giving up my Saturday cheat day.
But will doing this screw with my metabolism? Will I be able to lose weight on it, get down to like 190lb, and then go back to what I'm currently doing and maintain that weight? Or will I go right back to 225lb if I stop doing one meal per day? Or will I even gain weight, because my metabolism didn't like being messed with. Could some weird thing happen where I end up retaining more calories, due to my metabolism shutting down or something? I generally believe in CICO, but I'm also very scared to mess with where I am now, which is the most sustainably healthy place I've ever been in my life. I don't want to lose that on a fool's errand to get down to 190lb, and then end up losing it all and going back to 280lb.
Hitting a plateau after being on the same diet for a while is normal as your body adapts to routine. Try changing your diet completely for a week, then go back to what you were doing.
That said, i don't think you've been counting properly. If you had been eating 1200 calories a day for two years i'm pretty sure you would be dead.
1. Double, then triple check that you are accounting for your calories correctly.
2. Ask someone else to check your work from Step 1.
3. If your math is really correct, then you must be eating a lot of very calorie-dense foods on your cheat day, because this is the only possible source of the calories needed to make up the deficit you describe. You need around 2,300 calories per day to just maintain 225 lbs of tissue. If you're really eating only 1,200 calories per day during the week, then you must be eating a whopping 8,900 calories on your cheat day. Diet matters WAY MORE than exercise for losing weight, so if your goal is only to shed mass, then cutting 10% of calories from your cheat day is the easiest thing to do. 10% should barely be noticeable psychologically, because I assume the proven benefits of cheat days works for you, but that 10% will accumulate on the scale.
Of course any exercise will help, and if you lift weights you build more muscle tissue which uses more calories than fat tissue, so there are knock-on effects from that too. You just have to do this consistently for at least 6 months before you'll see those kinds of benefits (the first 3 months of strength gains are neurological adaptations, not muscular adaptations).
I am not an expert, but I don't think that everyone with 225lbs needs 2,300 calories to maintain their weight. Even for people with the same level of activity. I can easily imagine that this varies by a factor of 2. Especially for people on diets these numbers may be way lower.
How do you imagine that could vary by a factor of 2? 2,300 calories is the base metabolic rate for that weight for someone *at rest*, ie. the number of calories your tissues need just to survive. This doesn't even account for calories needed for activity like walking, talking, making food, etc. If you reduce that, then some of your tissues will not survive, typically fat which is preferentially metabolized for energy.
There is some variance around this number for sure, but a factor of 2 seems pretty wild. If some group of humans could survive with half the amount of food, they would have easily outcompeted anyone else.
After looking it up, the ballpark still seems right to me.
A review found a standard deviation of 5-8% without diet effects [1]. A popular commentary on it calculates that this means that 96% of the population fall in a range of 1680-2320kcal. [2] (I assume that these numbers are for a given weight.) That means that the upper range is 600kcal (more than a third) larger than the lower one.
Now, this is *without* dietary component. The same review [1] estimates the standard deviation of that with 20%, so several times stronger than the other component. So even plus/minus one standard deviation gives a range between 0.8 and 1.2, so a factor of 1.5 between them. And a lot of people should fall outside this range.
Granted, I didn't look into this paper, so there could be issues. And certainly working with standard deviations like this is a crude approximation. But it also makes a lot of sense to me. If losing weight would really be "as easy" as cutting your calories by 20%, then a lot more people would manage to do that. And there are some experiments showing that calorie intake is only loosely coupled to whether you gain or lose weight.
And I agree that having a lower metabolic rate must come with some cost, otherwise evolution would have gotten rid of it.
Your citation says, emphasis mine, "Total daily energy expenditure varies several-fold in humans, *not due to variation in resting metabolic rate*, diet-induced thermogenesis, or exercise thermogenesis, but rather, due to variations in nonexercise activity."
2,300 calories that I described is the resting metabolic rate, which per that citation varies only 5-8% between people. This variation is largely due to different tissue composition (more muscle means more caloric expenditure), and different environmental factors (more extreme hot/cold or humid environments require more energy to preserve homeostasis).
2,300 calories obviously averages over these variations. Even if the other poster was on the low end, that still puts him needing more than 2,100 calories a day, without accounting for any calories needed to do such mundane things as getting up and going to the toilet. I've been low-balling this whole time if that wasn't clear.
> If losing weight would really be "as easy" as cutting your calories by 20%, then a lot more people would manage to do that.
It is that simple, but that doesn't make it easy. There are literally thousands of studies demonstrating that energy balance causally modulates weight. This fact is indisputable.
That doesn't make calorie management the best *therapeutic* approach to weight management, but that's the approach the original poster had already taken and was asking about.
> And there are some experiments showing that calorie intake is only loosely coupled to whether you gain or lose weight.
This is not correct. I'm not aware of any replicated experiment that shows anything like this for healthy people that don't have nutrient absorption issues.
What studies have shown is that people have trouble with *adherence* to diets, particularly ones with caloric deficits, and that there is individual variability in what diet works best for long-term adherence. For instance, keto diets are more satiating for some people, and so they stop eating sooner than they would if they had carbs or more variety of foods. It's still energy balance in the end. You simply can't evade thermodynamics.
Hm, but if the variance is 20% by diet-induced thermogenesis, does that not mean that people with high caloric intake simply produce more heat and burn something like 20% more calories in this way; and undernourished people produce less heat and burn 20% less calories? So my understanding is that the 5-8% variation is among people with normal caloric intake, and that it varies a lot more if you are under- or overnourished (e.g., dieting). I don't have access to the full article, though, so I can't check it.
About the experiments with caloric intake, I am not denying thermodynamics at all. But I am pretty sure that I have seen studies showing that if you overfeed people (strongly, like several 1000 calories), then they do gain weight, but at very different rates. Like, some gain weight twice or several times as quickly as others. Even if you control for activity.
So my understanding is that when you have low/high caloric intake and lose/gain weight, then your body tries to go back to some set point of weight, and this set point is hard to change. The body does this by making you crave for food (or repulse food), but this is not the only way, it also simply makes you less/more active, produce less/more heat, and so on. Perhaps you don't count the latter as part of the resting metabolic rate, so we are using different terminology? But I don't really see how *not* to count it into the resting metabolic rate, so I would assume that this is usually included.
Even if your measurements are inaccurate, if they're always inaccurate in the same direction, then cutting calories will yield to eating fewer calories than before, even if the number of calories itself is incorrect. Harold isn't trying to hit a target, he's just trying to ingest fewer calories than he is currently. Precision is more important here than accuracy.
Fasting over moderate intervals (~40+ h for me) is incredible, and way easier than CICO - the weight just flies off with minimal muscle loss. I use it both for health (autophagy, fighting insulin resistance) and weight maintenance as rock climbing is my sport of choice.
Requires a little bit of willpower, keeping yourself busy during the fast, and some trial and error to see what schedule works for you. Ironically my biggest issue with it is social occasions where I'm expected to eat. The strangest thing is you have _less_ appetite for a good few days after you finish the fast, too - something resets in your hunger drive.
It's scientific consensus that when the body is in a fasted state it has efficient access to its fat stores, it's the transition between fed and fasted that is rough. Calorie restriction forces you into that transition repeatedly, which is why it is so hard to follow. Check Jason Fung's lectures on youtube for an overview.
The side benefit is, once your blood sugar stabilizes you feel amazing - I have way better clarity of thought when fasting, personally.
I went from 2 meals a day, 7 days a week, to 1 meal a day 6 days a week plus a cheat day, known as 6x20, which means 6 fasts each week of 20 hours each, so on 6 days I had a 4-hour window to eat, and on the 7th day I could eat whatever I wanted, with no calorie counting anywhere. At about that point, I noticed that my stomach was getting smaller - I literally could not fit as much food inside as I used to, and if I tried I started vomiting. After that, I took the leap to 3x40 - 3 fasts per week of 40 hours, meaning that there was a day where I ate nothing, followed by a day with an 8-hour eating window, repeated 3 times, with the 7th day as a free day. The stomach shrinkage increased, but the hunger became hard to deal with, although green tea and bone broth both helped. After that, I did a week or two on 2x64, not eating for 2 days and then having an 8-hour eating window on the 3rd day, repeated twice, still plus the weekly free day. That's when the hunger went away and ketosis kicked in, and I felt great, and it was actually more mentally sustainable for me than 3x40 was. After that, I found that I could maintain the ketosis on 6x20 if I ate a moderately keto-friendly diet, but maybe that's just my body.
Unfortunately, this got interrupted, but I'm working back into it.
One thing that helps me is to think of the fasts as discrete blocks of time - the 16, 20, 40, and 64 hour chunks. It seems to be psychologically helpful for me if I know when the next time I can eat is - I can say to myself, "OK, I can start eating at 2 pm Saturday afternoon, and then I can eat whatever I like until 10 pm Sunday night". (I usually do my 8-hour periods from 2 pm to 10 pm, and my 4-hour periods from 6 pm to 10 pm, and my cheat day is Sunday. So on a 3x40 plan I'd eat from 2pm Saturday to 10 pm Sunday, then from 2-10 pm Tuesday, then from 2-10 pm Thursday.) And from what I understand, having those solid blocks of time with no food is also what produces the metabolic effects.
And I should add, the reason I didn't like sticking to 2x64 is that it turns out that I like eating, too. :-) I just plain enjoy the taste and smell and physical action of it, plus the social and ritual aspects. And so given the choice between modifying my diet to be more keto-friendly, or going for several days without eating at all, I picked the first way.
The basic idea is that, every week, do 6 fasts of 20 hours each. In practice, it seems like most people (including me) want to keep a regular schedule, and want to have a day where we don't fast, so for me it leads to something like this:
Sunday: eat until 10 pm
Monday-Friday: eat between 6 pm and 10 pm
Saturday: eat after 6 pm
So the 6 fasts would be Sun-Mon, Mon-Tue, ..., and Fri-Sat, all from 10 pm to 6 pm the next day. There's nothing special about those exact hours and days; I just picked those them because they happen to be convenient for me.
Stuff we can have when "not eating": water (of course), coffee and tea (plain, no cream or sugar or substitutes), and bone broth. Some people apparently drink apple cider vinegar, but I don't like the smell. Bone broth is easy to pick up at grocery stores, lasts a while in the fridge, and a small cup tends to quell my hunger. Green tea is my favorite, possibly because it's a mild stimulant (I have mild ADHD) and also in theory an appetite suppressant. And of course drinking lots of water is good.
Stuff we can have when eating: pretty much anything. Since there's only a small window each day, I find I have a bit more motivation to eat healthier, and to plan ahead and eat things that I really want to. Since there's only so much I can actually eat, I find I eat smaller amounts of higher-quality stuff. I also find that I tend to spread out my eating more, to cover the whole 4-hour period, but I don't know if that's bad or good. Possibly good, insofar as eating more slowly and savoring the tastes and sensations tends to make us eat less? I dunno. And alcohol counts as food, so the eating windows are also our drinking windows.
(Oh, and the standard warnings are: don't do this if you're a kid, pregnant, breastfeeding, or need to take medications multiple times a day that have to be taken with food. It's supposed to help with type 2 diabetes (where the body's insulin gets out of whack), but not do anything for type 1 diabetes (where the body just doesn't make insulin), but since I don't have either, I haven't paid much attention to that side of things.)
For your situation, maybe this would help? I don't mean to give offense, but frankly, the way you describe your cheat day sounds both physically and psychologically unhealthy. :-/ If doing 6x20 leads to a pattern where you overall eat the same amount every week, but it's spread out more evenly over the week, my feeling is that that would be a net gain? But if it leads to small periods of eating like you say you do on your cheat day, plus the cheat day being unchanged, then maybe it would be overall bad for your health? You're the expert on you, of course.
As for my own situation, I get peace of mind from not having to worry about details of what I eat, and just focusing on not eating too much of any one thing so I have room for a bit of all the other things I want to eat. Another thing I like is the psychological effect of feeling hungry for a while, but still having the knowledge that at a certain point very soon I will eat food that I enjoy. It makes me feel... I suppose "virtuous" is the word? Similar to how I feel after exercising. Probably this connects in my head to old-school Christian concepts of mortification of the flesh, as well as stories of Buddha and Bodhidharma, and a thing that an ex-Marine martial arts instructor used to say: "pain is weakness leaving the body". :-) I guess it helps that plain green tea and plain black coffee were already my daily beverages of choice. And for what I want to do, I keep in mind that this is an intermediate step, to be followed with 3x40 and then 2x64, until I trigger ketosis again.
You should probably just carry on as you are. If you are stuck at 225lb while eating only 1200 calories per day, your violation of known conservation laws is already quite alarming, and who knows what consequences there will be for the world if you take it further.
Well, now you have identified the issue. Presumably you go into Super Python mode on Saturdays and eat enough for a week. Eating even less on other days won't fix that. You can make cheat days every fortnight or you can reduce what you eat on those days. I recommend the latter. Maybe if you insist on eating a pound of brussels sprouts or carrots - twice if necessary - on those days, it will help.
It seems like a funny and clever way to suggest that you made a mistake in your calorie estimations rather than an attack. But we are on the internet, meaning is in the eye of the beholder.
So I have no background in bio or anything like that but I am 6'0 and 140lbs, in my early 40s. Honestly, I also have some odd health problems which may be "helping" my scrawniness along, so I'm not being falsely humble when I say I don't know if what I do would work for you.
First and foremost, a jihad against carbs must be your starting point. Bread, potatoes, pasta, starchy veggies...out, out, out. Any sort of junk food (e.g., hyper-processed, built in a lab)--that stuff has to go. I'm sure you didn't expect to be able to retain cookies, ice cream, cake, or pie. And, possibly surprisingly or disappointingly, even fruits must go.
So what's left? Green vegetables...as many as you can stomach. (Work up to it slowly.) The good news is, if you need to fry your kale in a generous heap of butter, you can. Meat, fish, and dairy are your allies. Good fats means the ones that aren't derived from industrial seed oils.
I guess the good news is that the above regimen, if you could convince yourself to like/tolerate it, will obviate the need for calorie counting.
This is a surprisingly rude reply to a decent and well-meaning answer. I think he replied the way he did in order to side-step your current thought process which seems really off-track to me. Maybe he should have tried arguing directly with what you literally said, but?
I'm tired of people not listening to what I'm saying. Suggesting I cut out all carbs is entirely pointless. If he read my post he'd know that I'm not willing to try that.
If you read my post you should know that I'm not interested in any advice that suggests I need to cut out all carbs. You may as well not even bother saying it.
Your original post mentions nothing about carbs, nor any other specific food types. It only talks about exercise and overall calorie levels. I'm not sure what you're so upset about.
If I say that I rely on cheat days in order to have the willpower to keep going, and that I need to have the ability to eat my favorite foods at some point in order to have willpower, it should be evident that I'm not willing to completely cut out a major food type (which happens to be most people's guilty-pleasure food type) from my diet entirely.
Also where did I say that I want to be 140lb, which is what AMAM is implying that eating no carbs allows him to be? He even admits that he has no bio-cred, meaning that his advice is based only on his own personal experience. I see no reason for him to assert that "a jihad against carbs must be [my] starting point". His advice was entirely not germane to my original question.
Harold, why don't you try to cut 200 or 300 calories per day on your non-cheat days and see if that yields results after 4-6 weeks, then adjust up or down from there? (You could also achieve this moderate decrease in calories by cutting to one meal per day one or two days per week.) I would bet that you wouldnt be doing any real damage to your metabolism using this moderate method. Probably wouldn't hurt it if you went to one meal per day, either.
Yeah, I could. I've considered it, but I've been thinking that since I've tried gradual changes before, that I might really need a big change to make it work. I've been worried that if I do something too gradual, then my body would simply rejigger itself to maintain its homeostasis. And then if I wanted to do my big change later, it wouldn't be big anymore, and wouldn't work. Does that make sense?
It makes sense conceptually, but I'm not sure if there's any evidence for it. I'm not a doctor or researcher in the field, and my ten minutes of google searching didn't yield anything, so I guess I can't help you. I'd bet on the gradual approach not having any harmful longterm effects on your metabolism.
I guess one thing I failed to mention in my initial post is that when I was at 280lb for years and super depressed about it, at first I tried a bunch of gradual changes, eating slightly less (though it felt significant to me). And then my body plateauted at 270lb. And I was so pissed about it, that I was trying so hard, but barely lost anything, that in a moment of passion, I decided that I'd just starve myself until I was the weight I wanted, or I'd just eat like an apple each day, and that's it. I didn't end up going through with it, but I did do it for like a day or two. And that ended up getting me on the right path. It's like I kickstarted myself by doing something insane, and then my body was on a losing path that I was able to sustain by still taking a drastic action (cutting down to 2 small meals per day, at 1200 calories per day), but not as drastic as I had originally planned. I wonder if I need that kickstart again.
I think that if you do a drastic cut, and it yields weight loss, the benefits will far outweigh the cost. If it doesn't work, back to the drawing board.
Well, maybe. You see, I'm super happy already that I've been able to find an eating lifestyle that allows me to sustain 225lb, instead of 280. More than anything I don't want to lose that. Above all else, I don't want to jeopardize the progress I've already made, and I'd be so upset if I ended up gaining back the 55lb I lost, or if I found that I could no longer eat the way I am currently eating, without gaining weight.
The cheat day seem pretty key to the psychological management of things so taking that as a given some ideas to consider:
1) Mix in some highly satiating foods on the cheat days. You can eat whatever you want but you also have to xxx first/during/as well (something like vegetable soups, boiled potatoes [preferably cooked, cooled, then reheated which makes them slower to digest] of some form, beans and rice, any raw vegetable you'd find on a crudite, or something along those lines). The idea is that you'll hopefully just naturally eat less of the more highly caloric stuff.
2) Longer gaps between cheat days, instead of every 7 days every 8 days or the like
3) Greater and lesser cheat days, e.g. every other week full cheat day and then a shorter cheat day (say xxx hours) on the off week.
4) I don't think it's generally recommended to go much below 1200 calories/day when dieting for extended periods of time and i'd be hesitant about doing it 6 days a week, but you could try your one meal a day 600-800 calories on alt. days or something. That said with likely >50% of your calories coming on the cheat day (assuming accurate calculations) there's going to be limited returns to cutting much more during the week.
Not a nutritionist, just random ideas. Curiously do you have digestive issues with such huge swing in food volume around the cheat days?
For 1, 2, and 3, I already don't get to eat as much as I'd like on a cheat day. I keep laundry lists of foods throughout the week of the things I want to cook or eat on cheat days, and I have trouble keeping up with them. That said, I have considered 2 and 3, but I've found it very hard to actually act on it. Knowing that I have that Saturday coming up is like the one thing that keeps me going through the week, and I'm not certain I have the willpower to do it every other week, or scaled down.
For 4, I often hear that if you want to lose 1 pound per week, you need to cut out 3500 calories per week. That means cutting 600 calories per non cheat day, which seems doable.
I do have some moderate digestive issues on cheat days, but nothing I hope is too serious. Just some acid reflux, and sometimes some indigestion, have to use the restroom slightly more often.
I'm a big dude, the weight I feel the best at is 230-240; which I can pretty easily maintain without having to consciously avoid foods by:
Not eating packaged prepared desserts (If you want something sweet, you have to make it yourself/ buy it from a fancy bakery)
Not drinking more than 1-2 alcoholic drinks a day
Avoiding caloric beverages(switch to herbal teas, soda water, jamiaca with barely any sugar, etc.)
and building a decent amount of muscle. I'm scared of weights 'cause of people I know fucking themselves up with bad form, and you can maintain a good amount of muscle just by doing calisthenics and yard work; I find.
Pack on a bunch of pounds of muscle, and you end up in a state where you can eat pretty much whatever you want as long as you don't go too hard on the sugar.
I speak here neither from personal experience nor knowledge of hard data, but something I've anecdotally heard good results about is the slow-carb diet advocated by Tim Ferriss (described in his book The Four-Hour Body). The basic premise is avoiding food with high glycemic indices: no grains, potatoes, sugar, dairy(?), replacing them with carbohydrates like beans and lentils that have lower such indices. It also includes a cheat day like what you're already doing, and doesn't require intermittent fasting (which it sounds like you're doing). I've had good results with other parts of the book, though I've never felt the need to try losing weight. Might be worth a shot.
Like most modern diet advice, it says the main important thing is the kinds of foods you eat. If you get those right, the calories will balance themselves without needing much conscious intervention.
I'll keep the theory short since Scott does a better job than I could. The main thing is there is a part of your brain that regulates the amount of body fat stored, the hypothalamus. It achieves its task by influencing calories in and calories out. Fighting it head on is likely to lose since it has infinite willpower and has lower-level access to bodily functions. If the foods you eat exceed a reward threshold, your hypothalamus will be told to temporarily target a higher body fat level. If every meal you eat breaks this reward threshold, then they will begin compounding as the hypothalamus never gets enough time between increases in order to reset to the baseline.
In terms of actionable changes, when planning what to eat _lower_ the following.
1. Ratio of carbs to fiber.
2. Ratio of fat to protien.
3. Ratio of calories to volume.
4. Ratio of calories to mass.
5. Amount of caffeine.
6. Amount of alcohol.
7. Amount of spice (as in hot spice, not flavor spice).
8. Amount of chocolate.
9. How good it tastes.
10. Whether you consciously think of the food as a treat. (eg If I do XYZ, I will reward myself with pizza!)
11. Variety within a specific meal.
12. Variety across a week or two of meals.
The guidance would be to pick one of these metrics and try lowering it a bit. If that doesn't cause weight loss, either lower it some more or pick a different metric. Or you can pick a pre-made diet. The book says many work, but not for the reason the diet says.
Note there are some trends to make such a long list easier to remember:
1-4 are about easily digested calories.
5-8 are specific troublesome ingredients.
9-12 are based on what your conscious likes.
1-4 are likely the most important.
To comment on a few specifics in your post:
1. I'm guessing based on the weights you're in the ballpark of 6 feet tall (183cm). You should probably be eating 2000 to 2200ish calories. You should probably get back up to that while changing the foods you eat in order to lose weight. Seems counter-intuitive, but you should still lose fat.
When you are losing weight, your body fat will be subsidizing the calories your body needs to maintain health. If you are plateaued or have reached your forever weight, this level of calories wouldn't be sufficient for that.
2. Re exercise: If weightloss is already happening then exercise should accelerate the loss. If you aren't losing weight, then your body will find other ways to reduce calorie expenditures to compensate for the exercise. I wouldn't say stop, it's good for many reasons, but adding more won't cause weight loss if it isn't already happening.
3. Your cheat day on Saturdays is likely causing problems. For some people it isn't uncommon for the cheat day to get more indulgent over time. It might be worth coming up with a calorie count estimates for the last couple Saturdays (assuming you remember). Otherwise, it could be that as you get closer to your goal weight you strictness needs to increase.
I get that the cheat day provides relief. I would ask you if you think that if you ate 2000 calories daily, would the need for the cheat day still be there?
4. > But will doing this screw with my metabolism?
I think this book could be fairly summarized as "the kinds of foods you eat screw with your metabolism and to a greater degree than you think it could". Notice the focus is more on kinds of foods and less on calories. Eating more calories while keeping the kinds of foods the same would mean more reward and thus lower metabolism. But if you ate more but ate foods that did well on the above list of metrics, your metabolism can change as needed to make the equation calories_in - calories_out come out to the same value.
The book talks a lot about experiments that give us a range on how much our metabolism can shift. The range for an adult male can be between 800 and 7000 calories.
Eat gruel (kasha or oats or grits or barley or wheat) with boiled vegetables and a bit of nuts or beans or bacon or boiled egg or canned fish. Keep nothing else in the house and eat as much as you like. Make sure that you find the taste unappetizing or at least boring. Walk everywhere instead of driving all of the time.
That's antithetical to how I want to live my life. I think I'd sooner kill myself than eating that way. Eating the things I love, even sometimes, is probably my one great joy in life.
I like Scott's review of that book, and it has influenced my thinking around diets to some degree.
> I get that the cheat day provides relief. I would ask you if you think that if you ate 2000 calories daily, would the need for the cheat day still be there?
That's a great question. I think yes, because I love decadent meals, and decadent desserts. Like, one single meal or dessert could probably be 2000 calories in and of itself. If I didn't have a cheat day, I'd never be able to fit in these things that I love.
So that is what, 4000 to 6000 calories on a Saturday? Or 3.5x to 5x what you you eat a typical day?
Based on that, I think from this perspective the only advice is "this is the problem, and you can't do it anymore".
From this book's perspective, these would be high food-reward days. Your brains target fat is getting shot up on Saturdays only to trend down the rest of the week. You've probably hit the body weight were that is in equilibrium.
I can't remember anything in the book that suggests you can do something to make the brain's target weight trend down any faster. So the only way to push to lower weights is to not let it shoot up so high every Saturday.
An alternative perspective is that there is no target fat level (or that it is a long-term regulation unaffected by an occasional feast), but there is a target metabolic rate - which you want to raise, in fact. This is the model used by the IF/fasting crowd, and people get good results with it - see my comment upthread.
Ok. Given I think you are in this weekly cycle, let's look at a week.
If you eat 6000 on Saturdays then 1200 every other day, that averages to 1885 per day. If you cut that to 600 every other day, that drops it to 1370 per day.
I don't know how to convert the exercise into a calorie count. I do know the answer is always surprisingly low. Let's go with 250 for the days you do it as well. I think that is an overestimate.
Factoring in the exercise guestimate, then it 1885 becomes 1705 and 1370 becomes 1191. This is more or less what's available for baseline metabolism. That is still higher than 800, so your hypothalamus should more or less win the battle. Your weight would likely stay the same. It'd just get thriftier with other calorie expenditures throughout the week so your Saturday fat gains can last the week. Maybe you'd lose <5 pounds.
> That is still higher than 800, so your hypothalamus should more or less win the battle. Your weight would likely stay the same. It'd just get thriftier with other calorie expenditures throughout the week so your Saturday fat gains can last the week.
It's true that calories are the most important variable for weight loss, but how you *feel* is one of the most important variables to figure out for compliance. My experience is that I feel way better restricting calories with "healthy" foods than "junk" foods.
Eat 500 calories of pasta, and I'll be "hangry" in a few hours. Eat 500 calories of chicken breast, carrots, and peas and I don't feel like I *need* to eat again.
I suspect what's really going on is that: (1) fiber has an impact on how fast stuff digests, so eating high-fiber carbs (fruits, veggies, whole grains) provides you with sustained energy, while low-fiber carbs (refined grains & sugars) give you a spike followed by a drought (2) protein is also slow to digest (3) sometimes hunger is caused by nutrient (including protein) deficiencies, and nutrient-dense foods--lean meat, fruits, veggies, and whole grains--prevent that.
Well if your not losing weight weighing 225 pounds eating 1200 calories a day you must be incorrectly counting calories or your cheat day must be like 5000 calories. Also no you wont gain weight by having your metabolism messed with humans are still subject to the laws of thermodynamics if your calories consumed are less than you burn, which would certainly be true at 1200 calories a day, you will lose weight.
I'm often confused, because while I believe in CICO, because I believe in things like universal laws like thermodynamics and conservation of mass, there's a lot of people out there who don't believe in CICO. And it's not that they don't believe in laws of thermodynamics, it's that it's possible that the human body is more complicated that we expect. Is it possible that your body could adjust its base-rate metabolism, and burn off less energy than it would otherwise, if you starve yourself for a while? Maybe. I don't really know. I believe firmly that you couldn't gain more weight than you physically put into your body (conservation of mass as a hard-limit), but the calories that your body takes from each piece of food COULD in theory be different from person to person, as well as the calories your body expends while at rest.
CICO tracking is usually incomplete. We don't tend to track calories that are excreted, and there are diseases where people starve to death while eating because their body just squirts all the food right out the other end without doing anything useful to it. I think there are ways to track this, by burning everything we'd normally flush in the toilet, but, well, ewwwwwwww. Plus, calories can be extracted from food in more efficient or less efficient ways, and stored in more efficient or less efficient ways, and we don't tend to track how much body heat we put out either.
The model I've been operating on lately is that, roughly, the primary energy source is glucose (blood sugar). When that runs out, the secondary energy source is glycogen from (mostly) the liver. When those run out, usually after a day or two after the last calories in, the third step is ketosis, which normally makes energy by converting fat if we have it, but can also convert muscle if there's not enough fat or something goes wrong. The body can take a while to switch from the first two sources to ketosis, and that period SUCKS, with lots of fatigue. Once ketosis kicks in, though, the fatigue goes away, but there's generally a few weird telltales like an odd taste in the mouth in the morning, a slightly different smell, and a subtly altered mental state. From what I've heard, the more we transition to and from ketosis, the faster and easier it gets.
In this model, hunger is a separate thing, completely apart from the feeling of fatigue from not having enough energy available. And part of the discipline is, in theory, training ourselves to be hungry when we want to be, like a dog salivating when Pavlov rings his bell. It becomes one of those meditatey things, where we listen to our bodies and introspect and ask ourselves how much of what we're feeling is hunger, and how much is fatigue.
It sounds like the consensus is that your cheat day is the problem, but you are not willing to cut this out for motivational reasons. So there's a couple of possibilities open to you:
1) Keep your cheat day, but put *some* kind of constrains on it. It can't be a total hedonistic gorge-fest. Put a cap on the number of calories, and stick with it. Pick one that you can look at and not feel like some kind of pig-man hybrid.
2) Change your metabolic set-point. If you're on SSRIs, consider reducing the dosage. If your on stimulants, consider upping the dosage. I personally have the opposite problem and struggle to gain weight, and the most helpful in that regard for me was getting on SSRIs.
I wouldn't put a calorie cap on the cheat day, it takes all the fun out. I would add *fillers* in the cheat day - e.g. extra foods with low calories per unit volume, things sweetened with Splenda.
Well, some people call it that, but 16 hours isn't really much of a fast for a human body, so "time-restricted eating" is probably a better term. Afaik calling 16 hours a day intermittent fasting started when somebody was intelligent enough to extrapolate the data from mice directly to humans without scaling up. Intermittent fasting is more like not eating for a 2-3 days every month, or for a week every quarter. Not sure though which of those dee meant.
That is what I thought intermittent fasting was when I first heard of it, then I found out it was just a trendy term for not eating breakfast. But actually fasting for a day or so sounds like it could be interesting, and possibly be something else I could try.
One thing I find useful is intermittent fasting — sixteen hours between my last meal of the day and my first meal of the next day. I don't know if it has the claimed health benefits, but it's an effective way of barring myself from late night nibbling.
FWIW, fasting for 32 hours at a time is way more effective than fasting twice for 16 hours, and the benefits seem to scale up further. The hormonal environment continues to change on a scale of days.
1200 calories a day isn't very much. At 225lbs, unless you have a serious metabolic disorder, your TDEE should be pretty far above that. Try a TDEE calculator to get an estimate.
There's likely either a flaw in the way you're counting calories (easily done), you're consuming far too much on your cheat days, or you have a serious metabolic disorder.
I'd start by checking each of these individually. Is absolutely *everything* that goes into your mouth included in that 1200 figure (drinks, etc.)? Are your measurements accurate? How many calories do you eat on a typical cheat day? If all of those came up nominal, then it might be worth seeing a doctor.
I'm sure that 1200 calories is accurate. I'm also sure that I eat a lot, way more than you'd expect on my cheat days. That's what I'd like to keep doing, it's the only way I've gotten it to work so far. The fact that I can eat whatever I want is the only thing that keeps me going through the week. I wouldn't be able to function if I knew I couldn't eat whatever I'm craving one day of the week.
Try tracking calories on your cheat days. Don't necessarily limit them at first, but measure them and write them down. That will tell you to what extent the cheat days are the problem as we suspect.
The other likely suspect is measurement errors. If you're eyeballing portions, or even measuring by count or volume, you might be underestimating your consumption by a substantial margin. I'd buy a kitchen scale if you don't already have one and weigh all of your ingredients and portions to make sure.
That said, from your comments it sounds like your 1200 calorie count probably is reasonably accurate, but you're going way overboard on the cheat days. If that's the case (and weighing everything and tracking calories on cheat days should confirm this), then part of the problem is probably that your 1200 calorie target is too aggressive. Based on your weight and reported activity level, your calorie expenditure should be somewhere between 2100-2500 calories/day. I'd consider bumping up your calorie target a bit, to something like 1500 calories/day so you don't feel so starved on non-cheat days so you don't need to go overboard so much on cheat days, then set some reasonable limit on cheat days, somewhere in the 2000-3000 calories range to start with and then titrate it up or down depending on whether or not your weight loss resumes.
Yeah, that's sensible advice. Also, consider allowing yourself a small treat on weekdays - have a cookie or something, fruit you like, something small so that you don't have to fit everything into the cheat day. That way you're not so desperate and you are less likely to overdo it because you don't have to confine yourself to the one day.
See below, but I don't think that's how I work. I don't eat a lot on cheat days because I feel desperate. It's that I know that I can eat whatever I want on cheat days so that gives me the willpower to do what I want on other days.
The cheat days are the problem, though. When I was doing one of those "lose weight in seven days" diet, the diet was "bowl of soup per day" then eat what you like on the weekend.
Even though I didn't go crazy on the weekend, I still ended up "all the weight lost during the week came back on". You'll have to start restricting yourself somehow or in some way on the cheat day - either cut down carbs, or don't have sweet treats, or portion size. But otherwise, your body is "starve all week, pig out on Saturday, pack that away as fat stores because we'll be starving all week".
And the depressing truth is that people *do* have different metabolisms, so some people can get away with an "eat what you like cheat day" as they can burn off the extra, but some people have the metabolism of "winter is coming, starvation is at hand, squirrel away the resources" and so they have to watch every damn bite they put in their mouth.
Well, I'm not willing to mess with the cheat day, because if I do, everything will collapse. I know, because I've been trying to lose weight for 15 years, that if I don't know I can eat whatever I want, that I will not have the willpower to keep up with the diet. I want to work within the constraints of the cheat day to find something that works. That's why, if I'm seeing I'm maintaining with 2 meals per day + cheat day, maybe cutting down to 1 meal per day + cheat day will allow me to lose.
But if you cut down to one meal per day then you will feel starved and even more desperate and over-do it on the cheat day.
We're not saying "don't have a cheat day", we're saying "have a look at what you're doing, if you're overdoing it ease back on the cheat day and bump up calorie intake on the other days".
I don't think so, that's not the way I work. I already believe i max out on what I can eat in a day on my cheat day. If I restrict more during the week, I don't think I can go any higher if I tried. I DON'T want to ease back on the cheat day, I'm looking for other ways to do it. I emphasize this is the ONLY thing that's ever worked for me. I tried a decade of trying to moderately eat a little bit throughout the week to make sure I don't feel deprived. Doesn't work, and I don't lose weight. The only thing that works is restricting myself almost all days, and making sure I have a day that I can eat whatever I want.
What if you count your calories on your cheat days too? I could see that being psychologically damaging to your routine, but if you can manage it, it would be useful.
If you're eating 8,200 calories on your cheat day then you're really just averaging 2200 a day through the week and it makes sense you're not losing weight.
Another note: there is a middle ground of eating whatever you want on Saturdays, but finding ways to make that less caloric than it would be otherwise. For example, eat carrots intermittently on Saturday so you're less hungry when you binge (but still binge on whatever). Or eating whatever you want but not drinking calories. Seems as though the cheating is a psychological release valve for you and it's always possible to reframe what counts as cheating.
A question for any fellow non-native English speakers here:
Most things I read and interact with online are in English. But my native language is not English (it's German) and I'm also not living in an English-speaking country. So when I find myself talking about certain topics with friends (e.g. economics, anything on ACX, etc), I often struggle to come up with words and good expressions. The first thing that pops into my mind is often in English and I then have to sort of translate it into German on the fly. This takes time and effort, making such conversations not very fluent.
Anybody have a similar experience? How do you deal with it?
I used to work in English while living in Germany and the very rare occasions when somebody wanted a well-written German summary of whatever I was working on were quite painful.
Since some time ago I've been living in a pretty German-speaking environment, and currently I'm mostly annoyed my English (which is not my native language obviously) has become much worse.
Back to your question: yes, I still sometimes have the English word in mind first. Depending on the situation I just inject the English word, I name the English word and ask: 'how do you say that in German?', or sometimes I take time to explain the concept.
The first one I use mostly with people who are bilingual themselves - and probably to be honest whom I subconsciously perceive to be at least more or less quick thinking and/or good with language - they usually know the issue, and I've never encountered problems. Though maybe just nobody told me.
The second one I use mostly for situations when I know there is a good German expression, but for some reasons the English word sticks to my mind. And in groups I perceive as being mostly/only German-speaking with only ‘school-level’ of English.
The third one I use for concepts where the German equivalence is annoying, not precise, not really meaning the same thing … I guess in practice, depending on whom I’m speaking to, when explaining a concept, I will name both the nice English and a somewhat inadequate German term as part of the explanation, and then in further conversation I often alternate – sticking mostly with the language of the moment, while also indicating once and a while that there is this foreign term that fits better. Depending on the situation as above.
Plus: Find more occasions to discuss those topics in German and it will get easier? Especially when you take time to translate/ think about the German words.
That's kinda my current plan, just do it more often, and each time something comes up also look it up later in detail and see if I can come up with some good translation.
We don't deal with it at all, just liberally introduce words in any language comprehensible to the listener.
This is necessary for all technical topics, and is as old as civilization - consider lawyers and doctors in love with their Latin. A century or two ago it was common for an educated person to use French expressions when speaking another language, etc.
I get the impression that people here are much less restrained about introducing a bunch of English terms than me. I feel people look at me a bit strange when I do that (too much). But maybe if I do it enough they'll eventually get used to it
Well, I guess to some extent you put the effort on them 'to adapt to a foreign word' rather than taking on the effort yourself 'of finding a term others are familiar with/in the local language'. Having said that, I think everybody is free to do this or that, and to speak in a way he or she feels comfortable with.
I feel your pain. Even basic concepts - "salient" / "bias" - do not translate easily. :( I plan to do a rationalist glossary on my German blog about rationalism. Still stuck at the first post, though. (And did not put my room in order, nor read 12 rules.) - 1 .Solution : Communicate only with people who also read ACX SSC LW - squid 314. :/ No need to ever leave the screen. 2. Mach es wie die Profis: der (or: das) Bias pl.: die Bias - who cares about the lay-people! - If you tell your first-life-friends about Greg Cochran / FDA / Open borders/ singularity / Judith Harris / psilocybin / SDB / CB you will be free of friends soon enough anyways.
I just use the English word. Fortunately the languages I speak are not too strict about that. Though some are. Even in English it's pretty common to adopt foreign words. You just do it casually and most people can tell it's a foreign word. If they don't know what the word is they ask and you explain.
I have the same experience as a French speaker, but since everyone I talk to speak English as well, I use the English terms, and they don't seem to mind. You could learn the German translations of these words, but I find it simpler to just define the English words to them.
That is a normal phenomenon of bilingualism. Domain-specific ability, cross-linguistic interference and code switching are some key words to look into if you are interested.
Fun observation regarding belingualism or multi-lingualism: here in the city live a lot of families with kids where both parents are highly educated, speak multiple different languages, and both mother and father talk in their native language (different to the native local language) with the kids so they naturally learn their parents languages. Turns out most of these kids understand 2 or 3 or 4 or even 5 of the languages they hear daily. But they all speak only the local dialect of the local native language - the language of their peers in kindergarten and school.
Yep, I do that as well. At least with people who's English is good enough I can just use the English term. Doesn't really work with my parents though.
But it has its limits when there are just too many terms to explain. I guess inferential distance also plays a role then. It's easier with people who are familiar with the topic.
You should post open threads on sunday as so few websites do updates releases on sunday. on Sunday we're all looking for something to do/read and can't find anything. Where as Friday is full of 'annoucements people were trying to hide' and we read alot of those. And we work! :)
And, to be embarrassingly honest: it was only a few weeks ago that I realized that the "meetup and open thread" headers said "open thread" at all. I bailed the instant I saw the word "meetup".
HA! Fair point. I only kind of glance at the meet up posts myself (ain't nobody does meet up in the SOUTH) - so i'm not sure i realized they said open thread at the end either.
Seeking game recommendations, what are good games to play while listening to podcasts?
I enjoy podcasts a lot but I feel antsy if I'm doing nothing but listening to them. They're ideal for projects that require say physical work and visual attention, but no auditory and limited cognitive demands i.e., cleaning the apartment. This is distinct from say exercising on my stationary bike, where there are essentially no visual, auditory OR cognitive demands and in that case I'll watch a video on Youtube or an episode of Clone Wars or something.
So I've found single player strategy games generally occupy a sweet spot for me, usually the important information is visual and any key audio queues like an attack warning I'll hear over the podcast. Also there's generally not a lot of story to pay attention to. Single player is just nice because it's easy to save and walk away when ever the episode I'm listening to is done. I'd be open to other genres too so long as they can fit those requirements. Some examples in no particular order:
"Remnants of the Precursors" is a modernization of the original Master of Orion from 1993. It's got shiny new graphics and behind-the-scenes engine improvements, and is open source and Java-based, so it runs almost anywhere. It's in final beta testing now, and ought to have a 1.0 release before Christmas. If you want a low-brainpower experience, stick with the default BaseAI - the other AIs can be horrifyingly good, without having to cheat at all.
I've been really into Valheim recently and it has the sweet spot of being occupying but not so brain intensive that you can't listen to podcasts. It's actually one of the very few things I can do beside simple puzzles like sudoku/picross and still listen to podcasts since I usually like to focus on what I'm listening to.
BTD6 (I prefer 5) or BMC. Audio no issue. As with CK2 (free to play at steam). - Though podcast etc. are lost on me if not just car-driving or "work" (night's watch). How to immerse on A and focus on completely different B? XCOM + podcast? Nope. CK3 grinding? Will try.
I highly recommend Tom Francis’ *Heat Signature*, I used to listen to lots of podcasts and audiobooks while playing. Single player pausable action game, very rewarding once you learn the systems and nothing drags attention away from audio, you can play it just fine muted.
I'm a big fan of Slipways - it looks like a 4X game, but it's really a graph puzzle where you're trying to draw connections (trade-routes) between planets which each produce and consume different resources. The basics are solid and then it has a set of factions and technologies and modifiers that shake up the game quite a bit.
You can play the PICO-8 version here: https://krajzeg.itch.io/slipways which serves as a pretty good demo (though it's a bit hard to decipher at first)
Definitely Rimworld - it's management rather than strategy, but it hits a lot of the same buttons at harder difficulties. It's also really amazing at generating compelling emergent narratives. I usually play it while listening to audiobooks- while it does occasionally have narrative text to read, that's rare enough that it doesn't distract much.
Into The Breach is also worth a try. It doesn't look like much- a small indie strategy game with tiny maps and simple graphics- but the gameplay is some of the most perfectly polished I've ever seen. Every moment when playing the game is an interesting puzzle/strategic decision, with absolutely nothing feeling trivial or like padding. It's won a lot of awards, and deservedly so.
You might also consider puzzle/factory games like Factorio, Satisfactory, or the Zachtronics games- those feel a lot like programming to me, but the lack of text means that you can listen to podcasts and audiobooks at the same time.
Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden is fantastic if you're looking for creative take on the XCOM2-like.
Fantasy General 2 is great too if you're a fan of CIV-5 style strategic military command without any of that pesky base building.
Wargroove - Spiritual successor to Advanced Wars
Renouned Explorers: International Society is a fantastic strategy game with "rogue-like" elements
Frozen Synapse - old but neat. Simultaneous-Turn based strategy (you plan actions that will play over the next time interval, and your opponent does the same)
Anyone else have limited inherent ability to do intellectual or white collar office work for long periods of time? Obviously there are lots of uninteresting cliches about 'hard work!' out there, especially in American society- but there seems to be very little discussion of a natural range of ability for extended cognitive work. It's unremarkable to note that differing amounts of work capacity in the physical world (cardio/athleticism), and intelligence/IQ is a bit of a more risque topic but still widely discussed. So- why not note that some people can just sit down, focus, and are more productive over long stretches of intellectual work than others?
I seem to have fairly limited capacity for it, and my work capacity has not increased over years of doing fairly similar work- unlike the workout example, I haven't become 'more conditioned', I guess for lack of a better term. If I push myself past my limits, I just find my concentration & output is even more reduced the next day, suggesting some type of cognitive limit. How's everyone else's intellectual work capacity/ability to concentrate for long stretches? Any psychological research on this topic?
Yes, my brain often gets exhausted after 5-6 hours of solid code-writing. Some tasks such as debugging, meetings and writing documentation are less taxing.
I think a lot of it is about both motivation and variety (cf. Scott's posts on motivation and willpower), and also heavily dependent on the circadian rhythm. I seem to have windows where cognitive work is really easy, and windows where I either shouldn't bother, or I can but it cannot be actual work - taxing strategy games work just fine.
Don't underestimate motivation/lack of. People can do things they are interested in for hours/days/years while things they aren't interested feel boring/exhausting after 2 minutes. Our kids typically complain about the incredible hard and exhausting hike the first 50 meters. But when my wife starts inventing stories they just walk 10 km and listen for hours without any complaint.
One if my most important personal insight is this: I should do and concentrate on as many things in my life that I'm fully interested in as possible. Then I will be better in these things then many other people and I will thrive. School is often the opposite. Kids are forced to deal with abstract, uninteresting, boring things for many years. Wasted years of their life time.
If I would be you I would try to figure out where my real talents and interests are laying. Physical work like construction, gardening or a craft? Leading groups of hikers in the mountains? Skiing advicer, working in a Zoo, a Circus, doing YouTube videos, competitive gaming, what else. There are so many things which can make you happy.
I forgot to mention: it took 40 years finding out how I can be awake and concentrated most of the days. I now drink 1 liter of french press coffee (20g ground coffee with coffeeine + 20g without) with lot of cow milk. That mostly brings me awake and concentrated through the day. I assume this is similar like so called 'bullet proof coffee's recipes mixing coffee with high fat. I now recognize more and more people and co-workers very tired, moaning a lot every day. So hard seeing that.
For me, this ability widely depends on the task itself. An extreme example would be playing addictive video games, which are basically optimized to place people in flow states. That hardly counts as "white collar office work", but I think it still bears mentioning.
There are some work tasks that I can focus on and completely loose track of time while doing (programming), and there are others where I never seem to be able to spend more than one hour or two per day, 20 or 30 minutes at a time, and leave me exhausted (math research). Administrative tasks are boring but I seem to deal with them better than many people I know.
My understanding is that there is a sweet spot of difficulty: if a task is too hard then my motivation drops, and if it is too easy then I get bored and my mind starts to wander. Perhaps you are only asking "fixing the relative difficulty level, how hard is it for you to focus?", and in that case I suppose some people are better than others and that's that. But it might be interesting, from a personal perspective, to try to hack the difficulty of your tasks in order to make them more appealing.
Yes, the book I just mentioned refers to the state as being "in the flow". I only get it in while in a problem-solving domain like data analysis or coding.
Reading books, my mind tends to drift, depends on the material. Some of that is constructive - I'm trying to comprehend something, maybe it takes off to something a little more tangential. Other times are stupid, I want to check the phone for email or something.
I used to really like instrumental music, but lately I find it just becomes annoying to me.
I think I was listening to this, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4kHxtiuML0 which was ironic because after an hour or two I was ready to shove my own head through the monitor
Yes. I have ADHD so this is entirely curable with meds, but I definitely feel that I can "exhaust" my brain in a way that can carry over even into the next day. It's worsened by task switching (i.e. focusing on ONE thing is less taxing than trying to focus on MANY things) and by stress.
Anyone have advice for using stimulants when you're at risk of addiction/compulsive redosing? I am diagnosed ADHD and Ritalin helped me lots for several years before I spiraled into addiction and quit for a while. Now I don't get nearly as much done as I did with it but when I take it I'm prone to compulsive redosing and general unproductivity. I'd like to use it again to get that productivity again, any advice or is this just impossible?
Caffeine can be alright for self-medicating, and less prone to abuse. I've tried black market Ritalin (getting it officially is a huge PITA here) and I found it way too intense for everyday use, but strong coffee hits the spot just fine.
I would look into non-pharmaceutical interventions and try to find lifestyle changes (sleep hygiene matters more than you think it does for focus) and workflow changes (making lists, regular external accountability, breaking up tasks etc) that can take the edges off the unproductivity. Risking addiction is likely a much greater drag on your productivity than ADHD.
If you are going back to the medication, maybe getting extended release versions would help (but if you're at high risk of abusing them, I would really just try to find some other intervention).
Yes definitely very good advice. I've done all of this after my detox, I'm luckily now pretty high functioning without meds but it just can never quite replicate that occasional 24h sprint of genius that stimulants could get out of me if that makes sense. I don't want to be on them all the time I just want those spurts of genius back.
But seriously, I found four: blood pressure medications clonidine and guanfacine, and norepinephrine uptake inhibitors atomoxitine (Straterra) and viloxazine (Qelbree).
Yeah sorry I didn't mean for you to do the googling for me I thought you had some specific personal experiences or recommendations in mind. Thanks either way!
The solution that can actually work with something like this is to not be in control of your own dosing - like have your spouse/roommate/parent/etc go to pick up the prescription with you, hide it extremely well or in a safe, and hand you your dose each time. But that requires having someone like that available in your life, which many don't.
Something that kind of worked for me with ADHD amphetamine meds was only taking them once or twice a month and getting the worst of my piled up work done in a 24-hour burst. I found a lot less tolerance and less behavioral compulsion this way, but I don't know if you'd be able to keep to that plan if they were in the house, so be cautious - not medical advice etc.
I also take my ADHD meds only occasionally. I have a wildly productive day or two when I need it, stay at a normal level of productivity the rest of the time. No tolerance ever builds up and I save a lot of money on the damn expensive pills.
A while back a survey came out asking whether people thought the 2020 presidential election had been stolen. Results varied by party affiliation, but the shocker on my end was that something in excess of 30% of Democrats thought it had been stolen. In attempting to construct a theory of mind for this cohort, I come up with a few ideas:
1) Perhaps they consume conservative news/commentary sources to some extent and find them convincing on this point.
2) Perhaps they consume conspiratorial left-wing sources, and these sources toy with the idea that the election was stolen (alienated berniecrats?)
3) Perhaps they find the results of 2020 just don't pass the sniff test, either personally or in their social milieu.
To those here who are in the cohort in question (Democrat likely voter, think the 2020 presidential election was stolen): are any of these theories correct for you? If not, what accounts for your belief?
you need to take a look at the actual wording of the question. It's not the vague "Was the election stolen?" but the very specific "How likely is it that Democrats stole votes or destroyed pro-Trump ballots in several states to ensure that Biden would win?"
That's a much weaker claim, it would only require that at least two ballots in two different states were stolen/destroyed, not that the net number of ballots stolen/destroyed was sufficient to flip the election.
Given that the possibility existed for stealing/destroying ballots (it's trivially easy to raid mailboxes in heavily-other-party areas either before or after they are filled out) it would be shocking to me if it didn't happen to some extent, in several states and on both sides. On the other hand, given the scale required I'm doubtful that it was sufficient to flip the election.
I wonder how they classified people as "Democrats". If it just means "people who voted for a Democrat in 2020", some of those people will be only weakly active politically and lacking in tribal loyalty, so that when the "stop the steal" campaign comes along, they can still be persuaded by it. But I wouldn't think that kind of person answers "very likely", and also, it's surprising there would be many people left without tribal loyalty.
Is it just me or does Rasmussen offer all the most Republican-friendly poll results?
That's a *very* close reading of the question, so while you're technically correct I expect the vast majority of people to read that question as "Biden win because the Dems cheated?".
Taboo your words: what does "stolen" mean here? Is your definition the same as the one people are using?
I'd also bring attention to the fact that:
- democrats placing a lot of stock in Russia gate would have called 2016 a stolen election
- republicans believing Obama was a kenyan would have called 2012 and 2008 a stolen election
- democrats looking at Florida would have called 2000 a stolen election.
When, in the last 6 presidential elections over a 20 year period, there's been a large group of electors accusing the winning side of stealing the win for 5 of those, a possible theory of mind might be a reduction of the higher prior on the possibility of electoral shenanigans and a general attitude of acceptance of said shenanigans as part of the procedure. Which, by the way, is kind of a terrifying possibility when you consider how little trust in elections that would mean generic citizens have.
Meh. I would say past a certain age most sensible people have fairly low faith in elections already, and it's OK. Not so much because they'll be stolen (= "not represent the true will of 50% of the voters + 1") but because voters are idiots, and also whimsical, and it's perfectly possible for an election to represent *in the moment of the election* 50% of the voters + 1 -- but produce results that a large majority of voters find regrettable, either immediately or not too much longer. So does it really matter if an election genuinely represents 50% + 1, or maybe 49% because of some cheating or other? You know, not really. If things are that close, then either result is probably equally good (or more likely equally bad).
You can certainly judge elections on the quality of the outcome, where you measure quality by some standard other than "represents the will of The People," and that's a very reasonable ethical or aesthetic point of view -- but then you have to accept that "represents the will of The People" is *not* a reliable proxy for "produces a good outcome."
The point of elections is generally, I think, to prevent *gross* deviations from the will of The People. It's to prevent things like "me and five other generals and 100,000 troops are going to abrogate the clearly and strongly expressed will of 50 million citizens." That's the kind of thing that can happen, and has happened, with depressing regularity elsewhere in the world, and in history, and which having an election forestalls. But does it guarantee (1) good outcomes, or at least (2) outcomes that reliably represent the considered and stable wishes of 50% + 1 of the voters? Doubtful.
Notice you aren't shocked by the number of Republicans who thought it had been stolen; I suggest examining the absence of surprise there, to make sense of the surprise in the case of the Democrats.
You'd expect the side who lost the election to be more amenable to the idea that it was stolen. Whatever proportion of the electorate think 2000 or 2016 was stolen, I would assume it is much higher among Democrats.
I think it also matters very much what the leaders are saying. To keep from being topical in the open thread I'll hark back to 2000. In that year, the narrative from the Democrats was that the (Republican) Supreme Court stopped the vote count that would have made Al Gore president. There was never any narrative about a "steal", but there was a lot of sentiment that George Bush was "selected, not elected", and when the primaries were just getting started in 2004, before it was clear he wouldn't run, you would see "Re-elect Al Gore" stickers. By contrast, after 2004 there was some conspiracy talk about Diebold and Ohio, but no backing from leadership. That talk remained very fringe and was never taken seriously, whereas I believe to this day that if all the votes in Florida had been counted, Al Gore would have been president and the 21st century would have unfolded very differently. I don't know how that notion polls now or would poll then, but I'd bet the numbers are similar to the "steal" numbers, just partisan-flipped.
Why would the number of Republicans shock me? Someone believing the election was stolen would have to get that idea somewhere, and there are basically three places it could come from: their own head, their social circle, or their media. Conservative media is replete with claims the election was stolen, so no mystery exists on that side. Mainstream left media is not given to making that claim, so 30% requires explanation.
Is it possible in general you're mistaking the (loud) voice of each party's "base" for the opinion of everybody who votes that way? Take me, for example. I don't identify with either party, and both of their bases repel me. I have a hard time listening to either major party candidate pontificating on the tube without wanting to throw something through the glass. But of course, necessarily, I vote for one party or the other each election. So if you surveyed me, I think you'd find a number of places in which my opinions differed "surprisingly" from those of the party for which I last voted. It would not surprise me if no fewer than 25-30% of those who vote for Party X in Election Y are similarly situated -- voting for the party faute de mieux but diverging substantially from any number of party dogmas.
Not sure I understand what you mean by that. I'm just saying I don't find it surprising that 30% of people who identify as Democrats, register as them, or vote for them agree with some dogma on the rabid right. Because I don't assume that everyone who votes for a party (or registers with them) subscribes to the relatively few thought bites you hear the base yammer loudly about. It's perfectly possible to consistently vote Democratic and yet be super pro-police and love guns, it's perfectly possible to consistently vote Republican and be a big environmentalist, drive a Prius, and be passionate about gay marriage. I actually know people in both categories myself. Humans are hugely varied, and the simplistic dogmas of the party base can hardly encompass 100 million voters of all ages, shapes, sizes, and thoughts, so there's a whole lot of people who make up their minds for reasons *other than* the top-line slogans of the parties.
I wouldn't underestimate the possibility of: they are low-news consuming/low-culture-war-engaging people who aren't even aware of the 'stolen election' narrative from the right and didn't know that's what the interviewer was asking about, and they were just expressing that they think elections are always 'stolen' because of gerrymandering and the electoral college being unrepresentative, or something something.
Depends precisely how the question was asked of course.
30% is way too high for that. You can certainly discount maybe 5% of respondents to a poll as trolls, but 30% would be extraordinary.
I think the real answer is that 30% just generally think elections are sketchy/suspect generally and would always say elections are stolen. They may not even remember who won the 2020 election (hard to imagine, but much less hard to imagine for people who are probably very disengaged from politics), and some of them might be confusing it with the 2016 election. Even being asked the question prompts a "yes" response; to a lot of people, the mere fact that a pollster is asking the question legitimizes the possibility of elections having been stolen.
1. Is there a "philosophical" question you think people in your field (or other demographic signifier) would deviate dramatically from the norm on? I wrote a little bit about how economics defect more on cooperation games here: https://ravik.substack.com/p/does-learning-economics-make-you , which was visible in the 2020 SSC results. I have a secret hope that train conductors act differently on the trolley problem.
Former train conductor here. You can gap the points on a facing point switch and derail the trolley. Depending on the speed of the trolley it will either fall off the rail harmlessly or kill everyone.
My actual answer is probably in line with the norm; line the switch for the one person over the group, unless that one person is someone close to me and the group is strangers.
Now that I think about it, derailing the train could be an interesting additional option since it's adding a random outcome. So you could kill on person, five people, or a random number of people from 0-6. Most people would probably go with the third option since it has the best potential outcome, and it removes some of your agency in the final result. They probably wouldn't give much thought to the fact that you'll likely end up killing more than one person, and option 1 is still better from a purely logical point of view.
1 -- I think that people like me who have a background in atomic-scale quantum chemistry type simulations have a different perspective on "are we living in a simulation" type problems. I think we are less likely to assume that future computational power will allow accurate universe simulations to be casually run just for shits and giggles.
(I'm not saying it's impossible, with a bunch of Dyson spheres made of pure quantum computronium plus some clever methods that approximate away all the tricky bits when nobody is looking, I'm just saying that I wouldn't assume it's easy.)
On 2 - I think this is one of those situations where I might prefer a hard slap to the face over 2 hours of silent treatment, controlling for level of anger & self control, BUT a slap to the face would be such a strong sign of out of control anger that it's almost impossible for me to imagine a situation where those were legitimately equivalent options.
> a slap to the face would be such a strong sign of out of control anger that it's almost impossible for me to imagine a situation where those were legitimately equivalent options.
Me too, and I feel like my inability to imagine this is salient enough to ruin the thought experiment for me. Still, FWIW, I would prefer two hours of silent treatment. Two hours is almost nothing, and it would allow all involved parties to take a breath and gain some perspective.
Your point about two hours being almost nothing raises another interesting wrinkle - there's a huge difference between "a defined two hours of silent treatment" and "being 119 minutes into silent treatment but not know when it'll end".
I definitely think the uncertainty of how long it's going to go on would be a substantial part of the stress. That in turn means that someone who regularly or semi-regularly receives the silent treatment might be less bothered, because they have a sense for how long it will last.
I think if we got 100 people to write a short play on the scenario they’re envisioning, we’d get very different scenarios (or realize the scenarios are unrealistic)
In isolation, yes I’d prefer a slap than for my partner to be angry at me for 2 more hours.
In reality, yes, a slap is a sign of a bad partner. Also silent treatment can be healthy like you said (ie taking a walk to blow off steam) or ill-intentioned (ie “you made me feel bad so I’ll make you feel bad by ignoring you”).
The specifics here is ignored a lot in surveys (or interpretations of surveys, the surveyor may be aware)
On average people share 50% of their DNA with their siblings and parents, 25% with their grandparents and aunts/uncles, and 12.5% with their cousins. There is, however, a distribution around those averages. Anybody knows what those distributions look like??
People always share 50% of their DNA with their parents: you get one chromosome from each parent. (Ok, I ignore random mutation and chromosomal abnormalities. Sue me.) Given this, it becomes basic statistics to calculate the distribution of how much DNA is shared between siblings. But I'm too tired to do it in my head.
> Ok, I ignore random mutation and chromosomal abnormalities.
You're missing something else: recombination and crossover render children with different combinations of alleles from either parent. One of the drivers of genetic and phenotypic diversity.
Hmmm well we now can use genomics to show that in fact the degree to which siblings diverge from statistical assumptions about genetic relatedness, which is not perfectly predictably statistically. Razib Khan:
"Whereas past geneticists had to assume that full-siblings were exactly 50% related, today genomics allows a precise quantification of the level of relatedness. I know, for instance, that I share 52.49% of my DNA with one brother, 50.26% with another, and 4.57% with my first-cousin once-removed (the expectation in the last case is 6.25%)."
Is dyslexia an actual thing? As in: is it fundamentally distinct from low intelligence? Small sample size, but all self-described dyslexics I've met have not been the brightest of the bunch.
I am in theory around 130 IQ based on tests/SAT score, I am dysgraphic to a pretty sever degree, which is supposed to be a fairly related condition. Of course maybe 130 IQ means I am low intelligence by your standards so this might add nothing.
I have a friend who's extremely intelligent and told me he was dyslexic (sounded mild, he mentioned it in the context of how hard it was to read the silmarillion, so grain of salt I guess?). He's since become a professor at a top-few university.
My father is intelligent (he has a master's degree for whatever that's worth) but misreads and mispronounces words all the time. He was never diagnosed with Dyslexia, but I would be surprised if he didn't have it
I know at least one highly intelligent dyslexic person. Senior software engineer at my company, one of those SQL-specialist guru types who do things with query languages that non-specialists never realized were possible. His dyslexia is also very noticeable in professional interactions (we frequently go over code on screen-share, and he makes frequent small-scale comprehension and typography errors, but never any conceptual errors).
All of this is still consistent with him just being good with software and bad with words, of course. I'm very sure that he is intelligent in the ways that matter for software engineering, but have no reason to think he has particularly high verbal intelligence.
My sister is dyslexic. She's smart enough to have a four year degree despite real issues reading. She's gotten to the point that she can read pretty much anything, but it took a lot of hard work to get there and she still reads slowly enough to make college more difficult.
One of the interesting things she describes about her thought process is how she retains facts. When she's learning something, she needs a tight cluster of related facts and ideas to hang new ones on, or she tends to lose them. However, once she knows something, she is very good at quickly recalling and applying it. I, on the other hand, have all kinds of facts and ideas rolling around in my head, to the point that people remark on it, but sometimes have trouble recalling and applying the information when I need it.
I graduated with straight A's from MIT, and am mildly dyslexic.
For me, dyslexia manifested as 1.) Doing a loooot of remedial spelling classes in middle/high school and 2.) I'm now a programmer. I will *consistently* swap letters in variable names (hello -> helol) and not notice no matter how many times I look at them until someone points it out in code review.
Also, I pretty consistently mess up names of book characters. I don't have a problem reading, though, which is, I think, usually the real disability part for people with more severe dyslexia.
So yeah, mild, but Officially Diagnosed, and while it's definitely noticeable, it doesn't really cause me problems other than the above.
For coding, does IDE code completion (like tab-completing variable names) help fix the problem for you? It would at least make your own code self-coherent and run; it’s just weird for other people to reuse your code.
Oh yeah, totally -- my code works/is internally consistent, but every other code review or so I'll have it pointed out that "oops, you probably meant 'result', not 'reslut' or something to that effect, and I'll have to go through with find-replacento fix it
It is an actual thing. It's quite separate from intelligence. I had a brother who was dyslexic, and he was quite intelligent. He did have trouble with reasoning in certain contexts. I've got a very minor dyslexia, and for me that shows up mainly in tending to get my "if test conditions" reversed. I consider myself quite intelligent also. I had a different brother who also had mild dyslexia, and was quite intelligent. I don't know the details of his thought processes, but he tended to make better decisions than the one with severe dyslexia. Interestingly neither of my sisters seem to have this problem. This is clearly well short of proof, but it suggests that dyslexia may be sex linked. (I've heard this claimed before, but here I'm only reporting on what I have actually observed.)
OTOH, one doesn't know how often dyslexia is incorrectly claimed. It may be quite common, or it may be rare. It does come in degrees of seriousness.
All that said, dyslexia does not impact thinking a much as many other problems, e.g. motivated reasoning, which some people don't seem to recognize.
I'm taking it as a given that dyslexia is real, and is not the same thing as low intelligence. But I'm also taking it as a given Pedro's assessment of the self-described dyslexics he's met.
This could be explained if genuine dyslexics are rare enough that Pedro hasn't met any, and the self-described dyslexics he's met have misdiagnosed themselves due to low intelligence.
Being able to perceive the advantage of being known as dyslexic rather than dumb signals a certain degree of canniness or social intelligence. Of the truly unintelligent people I’ve known, most seemed to prefer to be accepted as they are, rather than pass as smart guys and expose themselves to new challenges.
My best friend is dyslexic and it's absolutely a real thing, and she's also very smart. She double majored in chemistry and economics at a very competitive college, and has an MD- she's an emergency medicine doctor. She made a point of never asking for extra time on tests, since she felt like she had to hack it on the same terms as everyone else if she was going to be a doctor.
Dyslexia has degrees of severity, and how it affects your life is itself affected by what other mental strengths and weaknesses you might have. My friend's younger brother is also dyslexic (it's hereditary), but the coaching in reading that worked well for his sister wasn't as effective for him. He's fairly good with numbers, though, so he found a career that doesn't require much reading and runs a gym franchise.
It's worth mentioning that my friend and her brother are kids of upper-middle class parents who are themselves very smart, and this probably helped them get diagnosed early. If anything, dyslexia is probably underdiagnosed, since it's subtle and takes time. I think the reverse of what you said is probably true: dyslexics might have trouble reading and writing as kids, so they and others conclude that it's because they are stupid, and they never get out from under that.
My former boss was dyslexic in a big way, graduated low in his class from Williams College and University of Virginia School of Medicine, barely got into the cardiac surgery training program at Mass General. He went on to become one of the world’s most innovative cardiac surgeons, chair the nations #1 ranked hospital cardiac surgery department, earn 35 patents for medical devices, and serve for more than a decade as CEO of a top five-ranked American hospital. Having worked with him, I can testify to the extent of his dyslexia, and the brilliance of his lifelong workarounds.
I'm seeking self-help "brain hacks" to deal with intrusive memories. I find myself frequently remembering incidents from the past that I'd sooner forget. Mostly, these memories involve embarrassing (though basically inconsequential) things I did. But added to the mix are memories of difficult times in my life (like when I was arrested and fired from my job), as well as news stories that involve animal abuse. My brain has a huge library of these things and pulls down random volumes throughout the day. Anybody here have experience in combatting this kind of thing?
I have done this by aggressively focusing on a pure, acceptable, unrelated memory to push out the unacceptable one. (Eventually the memory faded, but it was not a quick process.)
At other times, by envisioning having hit a rewind / jump-back button in my mind, 'undoing' the thought and attempting to start again without it (this sometimes takes repeated attempts).
The way I usually dealt with the embarrassing things was to remind myself that I'm the only one remembering them anyway, so I'm just beating myself up over things that other people can't even remember, and we'd just laugh it off if we ever reminisced about how bad their memory made me feel.
On the other hand, sometimes I think about embarrassing things that I saw someone else do years ago. So maybe they're reassuring themselves that nobody remembers, I'm having a little chuckle to myself about it.
Cognitive strategies are useless against intrusive memories, at least for me. I still feel bad about embarassing moments even though all the other people involved died.
Hey, I just want to say that I deal with this also. I've tried ACT therapy, which was helpful for a time. I'm meeting with a psychiatrist for the first time today to explore pharmacological options. If you want to exchange contact info I will let you know what I find helpful.
It sounds slightly related to 'trauma' memories coming up. I know a couple of newer methods; anecdotically very effective in reducing those, and mostly poorly studied yet. Don't know if you're interested in those.
Not an expert but I believe fighting intrusive thoughts makes them worse. My understanding is that way to deal with them is exposure and acceptance. Check out “A Liberated Mind.”
Why are there are no discussions of what an ideal election system should look like?
As a computer professional who has written tens of thousands of lines of code and designed several successful complex systems, I believe that all the software in voting systems should be open source in C running under Linux.
Paper ballots should be used so a permanent record is created. Voters should be able to see their ballot scanned and review the result of the scan immediately.
Scans of mailed ballots could be provided by using public/private key encrypted access over the internet.
The cost of scanners has plummeted and quality has soared. Voting machines could incorporate scanners in each booth which would be fed the paper ballot, display the result, print a confirmation ticket, and save the ballot in a secure container once the voter approved the scan.
Voting system suppliers should compete on things like reliability, cost, support and training provided, level of repair parts and devices and ability to provide quick maintenance service. Their systems should all use the same open source code.
Processors running the systems shouldn’t have the hardware to support any type of communication except direct physical connection, no Wi-Fi or Bluetooth or other similar hardware should be allowed. Open source memory image tests also should be provided to poll watchers who could run the test on machines at will. Audit trails of the types long used in banking systems could easily provide almost unbreakable security of results.
Go into a booth or sit at your kitchen table and mark a paper ballot. Watch it being scanned and check the results or go online and use the private key provided with your ballot to see how it was recorded, with the software providing online access also open source.
Direct Recording Electronic voting systems, or DREs, should be replaced by scanners at all polling places, which would scan ballots immediately and let the voter see the results.
Total transparency is the only solution to the sort of behavior we saw in the 2020 election. Voters should be able to see their ballot processed, see the votes counted, and know that armies of geeks are looking at everything in the systems being used.
As a software developer, my feeling about election technology is that computers should be kept out of it. What computer system (1) can't be hacked and (2) enables a secret ballot, to ensure votes cannot be reliably bought or punished?
C is a disaster and pretty much guarentees that the code will be buggy and insecure. Any "computer professional" who suggests writing election software in C should be disbarred.
Suppose we're in a room with 21 people total, and we want to elect someone to be Supreme Leader. Suppose two nominees are the only serious contenders. Everyone gets a preprinted slip of paper with two names, circles the name of the person they want, puts it in a box. A while later, someone pulls out all the slips and looks at them and announces the winner. Do you believe them?
Suppose the counter - we'll name him Cown - talked about how great he thought Alice was during the campaign period. What's to stop Cown from lying and declaring Alice won? Obviously, we'd find someone who's a Bob fan (call her Donna) and get her to count the slips as well. What if Cown switched the boxes, though? 14 Alice, 7 Bob. Donna has to agree; if not, the ballots get counted by two more, and eventually it's impossible for people to just insist they're really 9 Alice, 12 Bob or whatever.
Suppose we put special marks on the ballots so that Donna can recognize one of the ballots as hers. But that's no good; if Cown has enough resources to switch boxes, it's probably easy for him to make sure Donna's ballot made it into the rigged box. Ahh, we say, but we'll let *anyone* check for their ballot in the counted stack.
This kinda sorta works for 21 people. When you're up to 21 million, though, it's a whole different story. For starters, we can't all do this in one room; we'll be spread over miles, and no one's going to drive for hours to find their ballot in the counted pile. An encrypted confirm won't work either; any script kiddie could write whatever PKI system could verify you, right down to whatever challenge-response feature is necessary to assure a voter that the election website is the official election website - then call a subroutine that goes ahead and lies that your vote was counted. Or, there's a process that scans your ballot at the polling place, gives you some nice digitally signed artifact certifying your vote, ships your paper ballot to the central vault of counted votes... and increments the electronic counter for Alice anyway. How would you ever know?
At the end of the day, every plan for trusted voting I've ever seen (that gave actual details) boiled down to being utterly gameable given the amount of resources any political party would have if they had the donors the Republican or Democratic Party currently has. And given the amount of power in that office, the motivation to boot. (Well, the Presidency, anyway.)
The only system I can see actually working would require the analog of that room of 21 people, where you can look each one of them in the eye and know that, yes, 14 of us really do prefer Alice over Bob. In other words, no secret ballot.
Otherwise, I don't think there's a chance. You'll always have a makeable case for there having been some fraud on the part of the winning side. The only way out of that pickle is to make that office less powerful, to the point that not enough people link that office to the Fate of the Entire World, and therefore freak out over fraud.
Your first thought experiment would be handled by the ballot box not leaving the room and the counting being publicly verified by the two candidates or allies as Cown counts them. This is a fairly common system.
For certain. And we could augment it with enough features (box is brought in rather than seen already bolted to a suspiciously large pedestal; counting platform erected in the round; etc.) to clear out the chance for the easiest forms of "stage magic".
Surely, however, you see how this can't scale to an electorate of millions? And I didn't even get into the weaknesses of a mail-in system.
Well if we are moving onto millions, why the original thought experiment.
scaling up ballot boxes and securing the chain of custody is what we have already. I’m not sure why you don’t think that which works, doesn’t work. No system is perfect but that’s the most transparent and secure system.
Mail-in less so.
I’m not sure what you are arguing for here, although it’s clear what you are arguing against. That no system is perfect doesn’t mean that some systems aren’t better.
The original thought experiment was to establish what I think the OP ultimately wants with an "ideal system"; namely, that the person elected, was elected by the rules as publicly understood, rather than by privately known scheming. I think it's important to establish this, because qualities such as "scalable ballot box implementations" and "secured chains of custody" and "paper trails" and "transparency" will need to ground out as things which make it either impossible to elect someone through fraud, or at least so difficult that no one will bother. We must take care not to offer these terms as if they're magic talismans that automatically ensure elections are unstealable.
"Scaling up ballot boxes" doesn't work because those ballot boxes are now no longer within line of sight of the people who are concerned about election fraud. Secure chain of custody doesn't work, insofar as it only secures part of that chain of custody, and doesn't secure the part between ballots being distributed to voters and their precincts which receive those ballots, if the ballots are mailed in - which turns out to be one of the main legs people are talking about.
The fact that a system happens to be the most transparent and secure system so far, doesn't mean it is ideal, as the OP is asking. Neither is the fact that one system is better than another.
Well the op of this sub thread started with a fairly convoluted thought experiment, with only 21 people in a room. Of course with 21 people a ballot is easy to verify. He didn’t really mention an ideal system.
Many countries have insignificant mail ballots. There’s a problem there, perhaps. However the existing ballot box, and manual counting system is probably as transparent and accurate as it’s ever going to be, perhaps there are some tweaks to do regarding chain of custody but even that seems pretty robust.
What’s certain is that manual counting beats electronic counting.
There's tons of discussion about this kind of thing.
Also: You... want to open source one of the most desirable hacking targets in a given country? Do you want to open source military software too? And did you listen to any of the theories about Dominion. They were completely illiterate from a computer science point of view ("too many variables!").
The only way to ensure security, is to expose a system to attack.
Security though obscurity should NOT be your base goal. If a system is secure only as long as people don't have access to the code, it was never secure to begin with.
With retained paper ballot records, hacking becomes nearly a non-issue (at least hacking of the actual vote). I'd prefer open source than can be improved (and, ideally, for something like that, the government would be actively paying people to contribute to the project) and errors caught as long as there is the safety backstop (the paper ballot records) to the current closed source opaque system, although either of them with the paper records is good enough for me. Electronic voting, no matter the origin of the code or systems, without physical paper backups, is completely unacceptable to me.
"armies of geeks are looking at everything in the systems being used"
And if we manage to bribe, corrupt, or simply appeal to "you believe in Niceness And Ice-Cream For All, don't you? then help Candidate Jones of the Free Ice-Cream Party out!" amongst our army of geeks?
There is no perfect system because humans are not perfect, and elections are one of the things that are very motivating for "we need to make sure the *right* person wins!"
My concern would be on auditing these systems, most of the volunteer poll-workers I've seen are not the youngest folk. I'd be surprised if they were as adept as at running an audit as a crew of well compensated IT consultants.
That said I don't disagree that total transparency is very desirable in how elections are run, I just don't see as we're quite there yet where it can be implemented perfectly.
This system removes the need for poll workers to know much of anything, that is the idea of scanners as part of each polling station. After the scan is approved by the voter the result is untouched by human hands, and its transmission is tracked at each downstream event.
So is any language, however with C there is a body of public information aimed at keeping open source truly open. Because of its long life and widespread use IMO it is the best choice for an open source election system.
You don't need to know much to let someone plug a fob in and let it execute. Checksums on the fob would allow the code in the system to detect phony fobs. The idea is to move the level of coordination needed for successful fraudulent access to the system to a much higher level than can normally be achieved successfully. Open source is the only way to achieve this.
The best election system is pen and paper with a watertight chain of custody for the ballot boxes, or mailed in ballots, counted accurately and visibly in front of tallymen.
Removable scanners could be used bit people are always suspect of software.
Agree with the pen and paper; disagree on the mail ballots.
Since we've just agreed on the need for a watertight chain of custody for ballots, I'm not sure how we could justify consigning a bunch of them to the mail system, which involves ballots sitting unattended in public places (potentially) overnight, and also doesn't allow any non-easily-faked form of identity verification.
Physical presence plus photo ID plus physical paper ballots plus watertight chain of custody plus many pairs of eyes on the counting process seems like the way to go.
+1 I would never trust electronic voting, especially in cases where everyone knows that large part runs outdated, insecure, beyond end-of-life software.
but seriously, it will not help. There have been longer discussions before about the new system, so it has already been well documented. There is even a plugin that goes part of the way to restoring the old system. But ACX is on substack for the foreseeable future, so it is not going to change, thus it will not help to state the specific differences.
Let me say, I appreciate Scott Alexander's content, though I was not aware of SSC before the NY Times article, so I don't know how the commenting features worked.
This place would benefit from some forum-style features, like post history and on-site reply notifications would be good (I do get the latter from emails). OTOH, I get this may not align with the priorities and commercial goals of Substack.
Edit: yeah, I checked it (SSC) out, and it's more readable with the layout.
I've definitely looked at announcement threads a while after they were posted and noticed "oh, hey, that was technically an open thread I could have posted in too"; I think headlining open threads as such probably makes a big difference.
This is my reasoning. If you don't start a thread within the first 24 or so hours of a new open post, then it's near the bottom and gets very few reads. You can still reply to other people for a few days, but between Friday and Monday you've missed a lot of potential discussion. I don't tend to read or post on the weekends, so Friday discussions are nearing dead by the time I find them.
They do for me, but I immediately revert them to chronological. If I'm not getting to an OT until after a couple hundred comments have already been made, the newest ones are likely to go unreplied and the interesting discussions will have originated from earlier root comments.
Maybe that's a setting available somehow. When I look at posts after I refresh the page, I see the same posts on top and new posts on the bottom. As I would expect if that were the default, the posts on the bottom have very few responses, while those on the top have a lot.
I wrote about the notion of "spiritual but not religious":
1.
The term “spiritual but not religious” may be a new one, a category of the PEW report, but the substance of it is old.
When Luther criticized the Church authorities and advocated consulting one’s own conscience, he was initiating a process that would culminate in “spiritual but not religious.” For Spirit is that which we all have access to, while “religious” is code for something external, imposed from without.
The distinction between an external shell and an internal freedom is older even than Luther. We find this concept in Stoicism, in the work of Epictetus, who counseled that we focus on that which is in our control and suspend judgment around that which is not in our control. Religion, in this taxonomy, is that which lies outside my will; spirituality is that which I can do. I can’t make it rain, but I can measure the calories I burn on my Peloton.
2.
Paul, the intellectual architect of Christianity, distinguished—in his polemic against rabbinic law—between the dead letter of the law and its living spirit. You could argue that Christianity itself was a movement of the spiritual, but not religious, at least in relationship to Judaism. To be spiritual but not religious is to be a follower of Paul, no matter one’s religious identity.
When Paul says that through faith there will be “neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female” (Galatians 3:8), he introduces the modern notion of the liberal individual subject, stripped of association, uprooted from tribe. Ironically, those who today assert Christianity as an axis of resistance against liberalism fail to appreciate the ways in which Christianity itself made liberalism possible.
Yet as history has shown, and as Dostoevsky dramatized well in his parable of the “Grand Inquisitor,” the posture of pure dissidence cannot be sustained. Eventually the spiritual, but not religious will want to rule, will want to transmit values to their children, will want to stop the “spiritual and religious” from corrupting them, and so they will have to adopt a certain infrastructure that makes them indistinguishable from all that they criticize. “Spiritual but not religious”—as a matter of substance—is destined to become a Church. The tribe of those who have no tribe—those who reject tribalism—is remarkably homogenous. Cosmopolitans are at home in TSA pre-check no less than folksy localists are at home at the farmer’s market. And with the ascendance of Zoom and remote work, cosmopolitans can now enjoy both worlds, being “of them, but not in them.”
All are “welcome” in the Church as long as one accepts the view that at bottom we are all the same through faith in Jesus. Modern liberalism took out the Jesus part and replaced it with a more amorphous God, but kept the first part. The world is divided between those who don’t see difference and those that do.
3.
The alternative to the Church of the “Spiritual but not religious” is a posture of continuous critique, permanent counter-culture. We find this mode in the figures of dissident mystics, who stand apart from the mainstream, in bohemian artists who sacrifice a life of comfort for their art, in vagabond intellectuals, like Walter Benjamin, in the Timothy Leary acolytes who think that a life of tripping is preferable to a life of 9-5. But the tally of misfit souls would hardly move the sociologist’s needle.
Today, “spiritual but not religious” simply refers to anyone who feels alienated from a single tradition or community. The confluence of globalization, individualism, and tech guarantee that most people, most of the time, but especially elites, will feel alienated from their communities and heritages of origin. The surprise is not that there are so many “spiritual but not religious” but that there are still so many who are “spiritual and religious.” “Spiritual but not religious” is more or less code for “individualist in search of peak experience.”
Both the experience junky and the experience hobbyist are “spiritual, but not religious.” They differ in degree, not kind.
4.
Martin Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim presents the Hasidic masters as “spiritual, but not religious.” Today, it is a classic amongst in liberal seminaries, but is unknown and unread by actual Hasidim.
5.
The reigning assumptions of the “spiritual but not religious” are:
individual experience is fundamental and social life secondary.
the spiritual content of all religions is the same.
spiritual experience can be found without the scaffolding of tradition.
While Paul’s version of spiritual but not religious involved the evisceration of group identity and the enshrinement of a new group united around faith in Christ, the Buddhist version is “form is emptiness.” Underlying all cultural forms is a shared nothingness. Less abstractly, the core experience of the regular meditator is, paradoxically, “ego-lessness.”
Ego-lessness—the realization that all matters of identity are just stories—fits well with liberalism, which is one reason why pop Buddhism is popular in the West. An ideology of “open borders” that is anti-nationalist and sees the notion of protectionism as antique and irrational also accords well with the insight that, really, we are all One.
Spiritual but not religious means: boundaried by the belief that boundaries between self and other are illusory and ultimately bad. As Patrick Deneen argues in Why Liberalism Failed? The left and the right are both classically liberal. The left is socially liberal (my body, my choice) while the right is economically liberal (free markets). Immigration is a good example of how left and right are more alike than not, because it’s an issue on which they’ve traded places. The old left was anti-immigration, seeing it as a way to bring down domestic wages. The new left is pro-immigration because it’s xenophobic to think there’s some national or cultural essence worth protecting (at least when it comes to the majority culture; minority cultures are, meanwhile, inherently worthy). The more, the merrier (as long as the more don’t live in my neighborhood).
6.
Individualism, in practice, is alive and well. And most invocations of collectivity are a form of role-playing, a costume assumed by the bored subject tired of itself. But, rhetorically and culturally tribalism is making a comeback. It’s now considered naive (and prejudiced) to relate to someone simply as an individual, and not as a member of a group. I suspect that this turn or re-turn to identity politics will have major, disruptive consequences for those who claim the mantle of “spiritual, but not religious.” Where once it was trendy to evoke Lutheran dissent against the powers that be, now the Lutheran posture is seen by many—on the left and the right—as a convenient ideology of the powerful elite. Left liberals, it is said, invoke conscience to undermine “solidarity,” while right liberals, it is said, invoke it to undermine “realpolitik.”
In the future, the Pew Report may come to report on those who are “Religious, but not spiritual.”
Yet in the realm of both religion and politics, the sundering of religious from spiritual, the claim that one is primary, the one sided belief that experience is a-social or that the social is all that matters, is confused.
A liberalism that ignores the group is destined to fail, but an anti-liberalism that ignores the individual is likewise doomed. To solve this problem, we must be religious, and therefore spiritual; spiritual, and therefore religious.
obligations frame the web of a person's conscience, and adherence belongs to the category of spiritual. those who classify themselves as 'spiritual but not religious' see the 'spirit' of certain externalities: of touching a loved one, of the Bible and its commandments, of poetry and music, etc. intuition and experiences both transcend and cannot exist without reference points -- the great paradox.
My experience in the late 20th and early 21st century is that "spiritual but not religious" is what people say when they want all the positive reinforcement of religion ("God loves you! No matter what!") but none of the obligations and negative reinforcement ("But in order to keep His love you gotta not murder people, steal their stuff, or tell lies.")
It's the "diet" where all you eat is food you like, and as much as you like -- but you get to say you're "on a diet." It's playing a sport where everyone gets a participation trophy, or taking a class where you get told all kinds of intriguing things in an entertaining way, and are praised for asking questions, whether sensible or not, and aren't expected to run any risk of embarassment by being asked to answer questions on the subject. So...a model that fits in very well with our hedonistic Zeitgeist.
I feel like "Spiritual but not religious" falls into the same category as "Patriotic, not nationalistic".
It's a label you apply to yourself to reassure everyone that you have all the aspects that they approve of and none of the aspects that they disapprove of, and that they don't need to ask any follow-up questions.
"For Spirit is that which we all have access to, while “religious” is code for something external, imposed from without."
My view on this is the opposite: religion is natural to us. Do we have little habits, little rituals we construct? Say, getting up at a particular hour when it's quiet, and we have our favourite tea, and a particular breakfast, and read the news? Or we go for a cycle? Or any of the other habits we engage in, the trails we cut out.
That's religion, and we all do it. But "spiritual" is something more difficult, it's the 'plain living and high thinking' way of life, it's becoming educated enough, refined enough, tasteful enough, to extract something "spiritual" from experiences. And the trouble with "spiritual but not religious" is that it too often ends up in the "Eat, Pray, Love" kind of tourism, the cherry-picking of this bit from here and that bit from there like a magpie with shiny trinkets.
Religion is something we can share with our neighbours, even if we don't particularly like them. Spiritual is something for Me Me Me, my own little particular set of things and practices and beliefs and unique twist on how I approach things.
My twin baby cousins suddenly began smacking each other, but they have never been exposed to any violence.
I know it is a sample size of two, but are we innately violent?
My theory is yes, because all the brutish stuff is from the ancient part of our brains. The pre-frontal cortex responsible for why we don't beat each other up immediately when triggered is much newer and less developed. That makes it is easy for us to fall into our primitive ways.
You can "lose" your cool (and return to a more primitive nature of attacking someone), but you never will suddenly becoming peaceful and reasonable.
Life is innatively violent. You can (if you have a strong constitution) see this by checking out some of the Kruger National Park videos that e.g. show a crocodile tearing the face off a zebra and beginning to eat the animal while it's still quite alive. The idea that an organism (or at least an animal of our size and nature) can get through an entire lifetime without doing violence to *anything* and *anyone* is a purely human construct. And maybe it can be done, which says something amazing about human beings, or maybe most of us just outsource the violence -- we march for peace and good jobs in sneakers made with slave labor, and consuming hamburgers supplied by animals raised and killed in appalling ways. Or we countenance the ravaging of the environment to supply our outsize (relative to other species) individual needs, for gasoline or iPhones or a pair of shoes for each day of the week, and because we don't directly see the violence done to other species, or ecological systems, we can say we are 100% pacific with an easy conscience.
I'm not being a smartass, either: I really don't know the answer, I don't know if it *is* possible to go cradle to grave with absolutely zero violence either done yourself or done on your behalf and willingly countenanced. It kind of feels like the answer is no, though, and I think that poses one of the biggest challenges to philosophy and religion.
Yeah, we're definitely innately violent, for certain definitions of 'innately' and 'violent'.
Like, most young animals innately want to do play behaviors that prepare them for adulthood, and adult humans in the evolutionary environment committed a lot of violence to survive, both against prey animals and against each other.
But, even beyond that: we're innately motivated to explore our physical and social environment, which includes trying to make things happen. If you're moving your limbs around a lot and paying attention to other people's reactions a lot because those are both innately rewarding, at some point you hit someone and see that got a big reaction, and that's something that you just innately want to explore more to understand how your environment works and how you can manipulate it, alongside a hundred other similar interactions you want to test out.
Sometimes people saying "we are innately X" imply "and therefore we are *not* innately Y". But this is usually a false dilemma; people have biological foundations for many kinds of behavior, often things we consider contradictory. We are innately violent *and* innately peaceful; there is no contradiction in that, we have biological circuits for both.
We are capable of many different things, the question is which conditions elicit which reactions. Some conditions predictably lead to certain reactions. Sometimes the reaction depends on individual's history (their habits, beliefs, social status, etc.). Sometimes there is a biological difference between individuals, setting someone's threshold for certain response higher or lower. Often all of this together.
Aren't young animals often engaging in something that is between play and fighting? Though 'smacking' sounds more like just hitting each other without warning, which seems different.
> but you never will suddenly becoming peaceful and reasonable.
Some not-to-big perceived threat or relevant surprise/ new situation sometimes makes people cool down and focus quite reasonable on the necessary in an instant. Distracting effectively from fight, drama or acting out that was going on before.
Boys will casually beat the shit out of each other until late adolescence, at which point the fights start to carry more risk of serious injury and become socially sanctioned, so they gradually abandon that in favor of acting civilized.
Georgia. (The one in the U.S.) First eight years in a small town that I don't remember well, and after that a suburb of Atlanta full of military officers and airline pilots.
Even more interesting. This is not the answer I expected. So is this Georgian/Atlantic/ suburbian/small town/ US ... culture, which you think is the base here for 'hardly ever a fight'?
Yeah, I thought 'evolution' too, but how is this 'implemented'? How do the boys 'know'? The usual answer seems to be testosteron, but doesn't this only become relevant during adolescence? We're talking about small kids here.
In other words: If not the hormone, what biological difference is it? Or none?
I refrain from a broader comment on the twitter pic, it's a strawmen. But let's keep with the topic in question here, I understand that was the reason you posted it.
To my knowlegde women are more able to endure pain than men - makes sense, cause pregnancy + birth?
The pic is at least a strawman for 'feminism' and 'equality', but this is a non-politics open thread ... and I also prefer to stay to with original question.
Some of it I do think is socialisation; if small boys do start play-fighting it gets excused as "boys will be boys" and may even be encouraged, but small girls get separated and told "girls don't do that" and so on.
Yeah, I think so, too. I remember a short article about a study where they found that adults change their tone of voice when talking to a six-weeks-old baby depending on whether the baby is male or female. Also, adults behaved somewhat insecure when approaching a six-weeks-old baby in a stroller as long as they didn't know the gender of the baby. ... Never looked at the original paper and can't judge the quality of the study. I was surprised at the time, but overall it fits my observations.
Even with socialization as one factor, there might still be some biological factors in addition. Or vice versa.
My toddler decided one day it was fun to bite us. This is before we allowed TV, and she'd been isolated from other kids due to the pandemic. I think there's some combination of exploratory "what can my body do?" and a testing limits/power dynamic thing going on. I agree that humans are probably innately violent, but in the case of small children a good question might be is this even "violence" in a meaningful sense. It's probably not entirely bad, evolutionarily speaking, to have an instinct to test out different kinds of physical contact and see what happens. But I wouldn't class a bite as "violence" until after the kid had some understanding of physical harm.
A fun and important concept in physics and engineering (especially electrical engineering) is impedance matching. I'll give a physical example first, since an electrical one probably wouldn't be as intuitive.
Slide a hockey puck along the ice so that it hits another stationary hockey puck dead on. The puck you're sliding is of standard size, but the one you hit can be nonstandard: either smaller or larger than the one you're sliding. If your goal is to transfer as much energy as possible into the puck you're targeting, then you should match the size of the target puck to be the same as the projectile puck. If you make the target puck much larger, then the projectile puck will just bounce off of it, without the target puck moving much. If you make the target puck much smaller, then it will be moving quickly (nearly twice the speed that you initially launched the projectile puck with) but the small mass means that it won't carry much energy. If you make it exactly the same size, though, then all the energy will be transferred, leaving the projectile puck stationary on the ice.
A similar thing happens in an electrical circuit. Real batteries aren't perfect. They have a small amount of internal resistance in them, that eats up energy whenever current is flowing. Let's say you're designing a flashlight and you want it to be as bright as possible. That means you want to get the maximum power out of the battery possible. It's possible to create light bulbs with various resistances by changing the length and thickness of the filament. Creating a very high resistance light bulb means very little current will flow, and so the light won't be very bright. Creating a low resistance light bulb means a lot of current will flow, but it will flow very easily without heating up the filament very much. Most of the resistance in the circuit will be due to the battery, and so most of the energy will be used to heat the battery up (not desirable!). The choice with highest power output is to select the resistance of the bulb to be the same as the internal resistance of the battery. (In that case, half the power output is going to the light bulb, and half is still being wasted in heating up the battery. The least "wasteful" option is to have a very high resistance bulb. Then, almost no energy will be wasted. But the cost is that the power is low, so it takes a long time for all that energy to dribble out, making for a dim but long lasting flashlight.)
This is also related to why sound doesn't transfer between air and water very well. (Why one can't hear whales singing while sitting on the beach.) Sound trying to go from air into water just bounces off the surface mostly. The water is too heavy and hard to compress. Sound trying to go from water into air also mostly bounces. Even with a very high energy underwater sound wave, there isn't that much compression. The individual molecules only oscillate over a very short distance. So when the wave reaches the surface, they aren't pushing on the air molecules with the kind of fast large motions that would be required to make an equally high-energy sound wave in air.
I gather this also applies in accoustics - it's why trumpets and similar instruments have a flared bell at the end, to try to get the energy in the vibrating column of air inside the instrument to meet the outside air in a way that maximises transfer, so as to make the loudest note possible.
That is a fun concept. Can you think of an example where it would be present in human behaviour?
Could a product launch fail, or be ineffective, becuase its impedance was much hire or lower than the market?
Could a growing political movement transfer all of its energy into to small a group who move so quickly public opinion doesn't keep up and the movement fizzles out.
I guess the reverse would be a movement where the goals were too ambitious and progress became too small to notice
Not sure if you're looking for more comments about Hungary, but a piece of interesting trivia: their current second-largest party, Jobbik, started off as a neo-Nazi party (though they have been trying very hard to moderate since 2015), with a paramilitary wing during the 2000s and consistent protests at Jewish events. However, their leader since 2020, Peter Jakab, is a guy with substantial Jewish heritage and (by Hungarian standards) an identifiably Jewish last name. (Jakab has been an activist for the party since their violent-paramilitary days, in 2007, which is a hell of an example of cognitive dissonance -- though under his control the party has expelled most of its truly far-right members and he even tacitly endorsed left-wing pro-Europe candidate Klara Dobrev in the multi-party opposition-to-Orban leadership primary in 2021, which is a *hell* of a pivot. Dobrev is the wife of very unpopular former socialist PM Ferenc Gyurcsany, who you covered, and she lost the primary to right-wing candidate Peter Marki-Zay, independent mayor of the small town of...[deep breath]...Hodmezovasarhely. Marki-Zay is not associated with any specific anti-Orbanist party, whether socialist, liberal, fascist, satirical -- Hungary having had some scarily strong results for satirical parties in the past -- or anything else. Probably for the best considering how loathed Gyurcsany and most of the specific anti-Orbanist parties remain, by all accounts.)
Another interesting fact about foreign right-wing movements taking weird inspiration from Hungary: it's a much older phenomenon than the 2010s. There is a well-known Italian right-wing song which is all about the glory of the (failed) 1956 revolution in Hungary:
Also, Hungary has had two important Revolutions (in 1848 and 1956). The two were fought for very different causes, but both were defeated by Russian military intervention, first by the Czars, then by the Soviets (who were not so different as all that). History may not repeat, but it does rhyme.
Would be interesting to have a system with a more complicated form of "likes".
I think one of the problems with likes is that they mix too many things: "this is witty", "I agree with this wholeheartedly", "this is thought-provoking", you name it. So I think they could be made more meaningful by separating different aspects of what you like about them. And having different rules for them.
So for example, we want to promote correct comments over incorrect, what should we do? I don't think "this is correct" vote is that useful: the most correct comments are just trivial. "This is not true" might work. Except better make it more than just a vote: you have to provide an explicit refutation. Which will be marked by the comment system as such in bright colors. And can be refuted in turn if it is based on incorrect information or doesn't actually refute the parent comment.
And since a lot of us are Bayesians, correct/incorrect is too narrow, let's allow the comments' authors mark them with a number 1%-100% reflecting their certainty. Why not 50%-100%? Because it's not "I estimate the likelihood of this as n%" but rather "I'm n% certain", that is, "I'd bet n points if I got 100 for it being true". I'm not sure there should be actual points: somebody would have to resolve truthfulness of a meaningful fraction of comments and the most interesting ones are probably not going to be resolvable (and then it's just combining a comment section with a prediction market which is not such a stupid idea now that I think of it). But there's got to be a way to crowdsource estimates of likelihood, or at least "best estimates according to this cluster of commenters". Analyzing the clusters resulting from certainties and refutations would be quite interesting, too.
I just discovered the option of likes for comments. And you basically can like only stuff you get an e-mail for, can't you?
'Hidden likes' as they seem to be now are fine with me - and a more elaborate, positive and still hidden system might be an fun option, though maybe with a max. of 3 options/types of likes. I definitely wouldn't want an open system of likes or even worse likes and dislikes.
I find the ideas you mention interesting, but I'm at best unsure if they would make the discussion better or rather worse instead.
+0.7! That is, I'm 70% confident this would improve the experience of the comment section.
I'm reminded of a couple of online fora that did similar things. Slashdot, if I recall, had 4 or 5 reasons for upvoting comments, something like "Funny", "Insightful", "Helpful" and "Interesting". The highest-rated comments display not just their average score but also the most common reason why it was upvoted. This did occasionally warn the reader that a joke was coming, of course.
And one of those really trashy clickbait sites lets you react with an emoji at the end, along the lines of Love or Laugh or Cute or Sad or WTF, and you could see the general proportions of these feelings that people had used.
I would love to see Likes in some form return to ACX, and what you're describing sounds like a fun way to do it. I offer these other examples as demonstration that something that requires a tiny bit more effort than clicking a single button can work on a big site.
Facebook has 6 flavors of "like", or rather one default (that you give by one quick click) and 5 alternatives (which require some waiting with mouse over and selecting from a list).
I think I would like to see the same system, except with both upvotes and downvotes. For example, the first click would assign a generic "upvote" or a generic "downvote", and then a second click could choose from a list of more specific upvotes or downvotes.
(It is important to keep the unflavored votes as an option, because sometimes people are lazy, and you want them to make the unflavored vote rather than e.g. selecting the leftmost option in the list regardless of whether it makes sense or not.)
I was basing the first half of my idea on similar systems. But I don't think the upvote/downvote pairs should be functionally identical. It's better to decide on a case-by-case basis. For example, let's say one alternative is "funny", is it really better to include "unfunny" too? "Unfunny" as in "offensive" belongs to its own "I am offended" downvote, and "unfunny" as in "a failed attempt at a joke" shouldn't really be balanced against "funny".
If not accommodating lazy people means they'll ruin the attempt to promote "good" comments, maybe make a fake unflavored button for them, or something along these lines?
Does anyone have experience with the differences between long release melatonin and short release? Accidentally ordered long release (6hrs) of 750mcg and I'm wondering if it's worth finishing the bottle or not. I'm noticing I'm a little groggy in the morning and fall asleep with ease but not really any more sleepy than usual.
I also notice more grogginess in the morning when I take long release melatonin.
Long-release pills are just normal melatonin + a special coating that takes longer to dissolve, so you can easily convert them into short release by cutting them in half or crushing them (presumably you wanted all 750mcg, but if you don't you could also take fractional tablets).
I was once told that there are "dictionaries" of classical music which are indexed simply by the first dozen or so notes, by whether the note is higher, lower, or the same as the preceeding note. So Beethoven's 5th Symphony's index might start .==-+==-
@scott if its really about having lots of people in interesting discussions then I would recommend making this as frictionless and enjoyable as possible. I find myself discussing the most often in the open discussion areas of special interest forums driven by XenoForo software. Forums driven by this software are lightning fast, have a good user interface both on PCs and Smartphones, one can easily cite, link, post images, see ones older posts, get real time notification, discuss privately, ignore user (aka trolls), search for all kinds of things, use Google to search all kinds of things etc. The Substack page in contrast is slow on each single interaction, reloads always when I come back to the browser tab on my smartphone and often the position I was before is lost, deep threads get unreadable on Smartphones etc. It's a lot of friction and incentives to not take part in discussions because of technical and comfort issues allone.
I assume Substack software was created for authors to publish paid articles and get some feedback now and then. Open discussions among a huge number of participants about anything was and is not the objective.
Just touched my screen by accident while reading here, the browser was following a random link and after I returned to this page I'm at a total different location, the former is lost. This totally breaks the promises of the web: go back and forth and you are at the same location like before.
>> Maybe open threads with important announcements attached feel less open and hold people back from commenting? Weird that such a small thing can have such a big effect - tell me what else I should do to get you talking!
Subject lines/headings don't always register as saliently as the text of the post. If all the numbered points in the article are about meetups, it looks like a post about the meetups. (There was a point where I had to consciously notice 'oh these are actually the open threads too'.)
If there's 2 things the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis predicts, it's that there's gonna be an arms race between intelligence (bullshitting ability) and self-deception (ability to lie without lying).
Suppose you know for a fact you're not in a simulation. Then, you build a simulator that simulates a precise copy of this Universe down to the elementary particles. Bar the obvious impossibility and all the laws of physics it would break, would it make sense to assign a 50% likelihood to the hypothesis that you are now in a simulation? Now, say you make a million of these simulations, does it make sense to say that you are not almost certain to be in a simulation?
Then, if you know for a fact that you're going to start a simulation like that one in a month, and that you'll use it to simulate the current month, does it make sense to currently assign a 50% probability that you're in a simulation?
Then, let's say you start modifying the simulation under you (as in, you modify the computer program that runs the Universe simulation on a computer). In the million sims scenario, would you be able to give yourself superpowers through the simulation by modifying slightly the underlying simulations that are on your computer by giving your simulated copy a superpower (for example, you'd modify the adjacent gravity of your copy (on the computer) so that it can fly, or something like that, would you then start flying immediately)?
> Bar the obvious impossibility and all the laws of physics it would break,
"If you assume a logical impossibility, does a paradox result?" This whole line of questioning is very silly. I don't understand what it is about Fully Accurate Simulations that cause rationalists to throw reason out the window.
To restate the question, it sounds like you're proposing:
1. I have a memory that 2 days ago, I was 100% certain I was not living in a simulation
2. I have a memory that yesterday, I started a full-universe simulation, and then went to bed.
3. Today, "I" am awake and aware. Is it possible that I'm a simulated version of myself, rather than the "real" version of myself?
4. And, if it's possible "I" am a simulation, should I assign that possibility a 50% probability?
5. And, if simulations start nesting, should I assign probabilities asymptotically approaching 100% to the proposition that "I" am a simulation?
In answer, I'd say "yes" to 3, and "no" to 4 & 5.
If the universe is fully physical and deterministic, then the experience of perceiving is part of that, and a simulated copy of the universe would have a copy of me that perceives and reasons in the same way. If I have strong knowledge that someone has started simulating a universe that's highly similar to the one I'm in, it's possible I'm in that.
However, at 1 level of nesting, the probability of being in that universe is highly unlikely to be 50%, and at increasing levels of nesting, that probability approaches a value significantly less than 100%.
The issue is:
1. In our universe, all computation boils down to crafting a physical process, and assigning meanings to the inputs & outputs of that physical process. i.e., we want to calculate the trajectory of a flying rock, so we craft a series of transistors, push electrons into one end that represent the initial conditions, and interpret the electrons coming out the other end.
2. However, you can't calculate the trajectory of a particle more efficiently than the particle does. i.e., if you want to know what a single electron will do in some situation, you can either simulate it in a computer using multiple other electrons, or you can just observe what the single one *does* in that situation.
3. Of course, we calculate large or fast simulations all the time - but we have to do this by cutting a corner somewhere. Either we simplify the simulation, and don't calculate the perfectly accurate simulation of every individual particle, or, we run the simulation slower than reality.
4. This means that, if I know that I'm definitely in a situation, I also know that at least one [and possibly more] of the following must be true:
4a. My universe is "smaller" than the hosting universe. (the number of particles in my light-cone is less than the number of particles in the light-cone of the universe hosting my simulation)
4b. My universe is "slower" than the hosting universe. (1 second advancing in the hosting universe advances less than 1 second in my universe)
4c. My universe is only an approximation of the hosting universe. (My physical laws are based on heuristics or simplifications of the physics of the hosting universe, and after enough time, their behavior will diverge)
So, if I remember starting a simulated universe, and then awake, my probability of being the simulation depends on how much power I remember dedicating to the simulation.
Say, for example, I start a full-fidelity sim on a low-powered laptop, such that the simulation won't progress more than 5 minutes into its future before the heat death of the real universe. Thus, if I'm still around 6 minutes from now, I'm certainly in the real universe. And, I *think* it follows that for every moment in the next 5 minutes, I'm much more likely to be in the real universe than the simulation.
Say I dedicate much more power to the simulation - say I convert almost my entire light-cone into a universe-simulating computer. At that point, at 1 level of nesting, the probability that I'm in a simulation would be _just under_ 50%. (Because the simulated universe has total computational power that's _nearly_ equal to the total computational power of the hosting universe).
So then say we start nesting simulations, and each nested simulation runs in nearly-real-time. The simulated universe is, itself, using nearly all of its power to simulate a nested universe. And then that universe nests further, and further. In the limit, this means that all the computational power of the 'real' universe is being spend on computing either
1. the "real" me
2. a simulated copy of me
3. the overhead of simulating a simulation of a simulation of a simulation.
Say the overhead is effectively 0, this means that we've basically converted the entire real universe's light cone into simulated copies of me. The number of copies of me might be very very large, but would still be finite [assuming the light cone is finite]. The probability that "I" am in in the real universe would basically be "my computational complexity / total computational power of the real universe". This might be a very very small probability, but not infinitesimal.
As for the follow-up question about superpowers, If I'm the sort of person who would modify a simulation to give my simulated self superpowers (say, flying), then if I'm in the 1st nested level, I'd get superpowers (specifically, flying). But then my world would be different than the hosting world, and I'd be a different person than my hosting counterpart, and I might be less likely to modify my nested simulation in the exact same fashion (I might think flying is passe, and give my nested simulation flying+super-strength). Through enough nestings, this error would compound, and a deeply nested simulated me might have different superpowers, or no superpowers.
If you know for a fact that you are not in a simulation, creating a simulation will not change that fact. If you live in a universe represented by a blue ball, knowing that only 1/1,000 balls are blue and all of the others are red does not change the fact that you live in a universe with a blue ball.
Reality does not change based on the unlikeliness of the facts within that reality. If it's extremely rare to win the lottery, that does not mean that NO ONE wins. A very real person (or group of persons) will still win the lottery, and their experience is no less real than mine, for having been unlikely.
Also, causality does not work in reverse. If you create an identical clone of yourself and then kill them, you aren't killing yourself, you are killing the clone. If you do that a million times you still aren't killing yourself, just your clones. If you adjust the factors in a simulation that you create, then only the simulation is affected. There is no causal mechanism for the simulation's change to affect the non-simulation's reality.
If this is a question about the possibility that we are wrong, and we don't "know for a fact" that we are in the real world, then that will lean heavily on whether or not such a simulation is possible, and whether such an advanced simulation is distinguishable from reality. You giving a simulated version of you superpowers will still not work in reverse. We would need to actually be in a simulation and would have to rely on someone not in the simulation (or perhaps a layer up if multiple levels of simulation) to give us the superpowers. Our actions would have no effect within our simulation, outside of that which we are permitted by the rules of the simulation.
The reason why I think creating simulations should change your credence of being in a simulation is that knowing that an agent that thinks *exactly like you* is in a simulation, and that that agent doesn't know it, should decrease your credence that yourself are not in a simulation! If we grant the self-sampling assumption that "All other things equal, an observer should reason as if they are randomly selected from the set of all actually existent observers (past, present and future) in their reference class.", then it makes sense to think that you're in a simulation, or so the argument goes.
"Reality does not change based on the unlikeliness of the facts within that reality": That's technically correct, but your beliefs of reality should change based on the unlikeliness of the facts within that reality. If you flip a biased coin, and it lands on head, it doesn't alter the underlying reality of the biasness of the coin, but it *should* change your subjective likelihood that the coin lands on head next throw, according to the strict laws of probability. You were or were not in a simulation all along, but after gaining evidence on that fact, you can modify the probability you assign at being in a simulation.
this post to gain intuitions on how you *can*. To your more specific comment though, I'd say that if you decide to kill your clone, it's very strong evidence that they have already decided to kill you as well, being exact clones and all. In some sense, if you're a perfect clone of someone down to the atoms and environment, you can't kill them without killing yourself, and that's why this problem is so interesting!
Next, I want to make it clear that we pretty much know that such a simulation is impossible. You can't simulate more than a Universe in a single Universe (down to the elementary particles and their interactions), that would break the laws of physics.
I've brought up multiple points, so I'll stop here for now.
I've got to say, that the lesswrong post you shared is either pointless or so narrow as to be pointless. It requires a FULLY deterministic approach between two truly identical instances of an intelligence. If either of those things are not true, even a little, then the EDT formulations become worthless and his reasoning is no longer predictable.
This should be a very simple thing to test, to see if there are any real world applications. Simply create two programs that process information. Give them information, and see what they process. If they are literal computer programs with exactly the same programming, then sure, the two different versions will play out the same. That's no more surprising than asking two different calculators what 3X3 equals. It's true, but not helpful in decision making. We would never say that the one calculator causes the other to display 9, but instead that their deterministic programming necessitates that they will. At the level where a computer program could decide to write a sentence on a white board, or dance around (their examples), then it's no longer at all certain that they are still identical to the point where they necessarily will do the same things. If you stipulate exact duplicates and fully deterministic, then you can retain that prediction, but that's where it gets too narrow to be useful.
Even if humans in a simulation are deterministic (which I certainly disagree with in a non-simulated human), then the inputs received will result in vastly different approaches when it's time to make a decision. The decisions can still be rational and follow the same ultimate goal-oriented approach, but can be significantly different.
Think of the marshmallow test. It was said for many years that the students who could resist short term temptation would receive the bigger reward, and that those students would go on to have better life outcomes. In a deeper look, it turns out that the students were optimizing for a different environment, where if you didn't take the marshmallow immediately available, the likely outcome is to get no marshmallows. Maybe the adults in their lives were unreliable in providing the additional marshmallows, or maybe other people would come in and steal them. Whatever the case, the students who chose to eat it now were not necessarily wrong to do so, based on the inputs from their lives. That their lives involved unreliable adults is both a serious confounder and also likely a source for both current behavior and future results. In a scenario where the intelligences are receiving any different inputs (which in any real world application is certainly true), or their programming isn't completely deterministic, then the outcomes are unpredictable.
Going back to your simulation, the lives of the simulated humans are different from the non-simulated or even the alternatively-simulated. The only way that isn't true is if the simulator had perfect knowledge of their own circumstances, down to the smallest details (including their own future interactions with the world) and make sure all of those details are in the simulation as well. If I created a "perfect" simulation of myself, but didn't know the future, then the very next thing that happens would change the simulator from the simulated, causing a divergence. We even have a term for that around here - updating our priors. If one of the people receives a different input and updates, then they are no longer identical and nothing else holds.
If you think it's neat to formulate the "perfectly identical within a fully deterministic framework" discussion, then sure, have fun. You may even have some limited ways to test things out, if we do create an actual AI that has the ability to think and reason, and then we copy it and give it the same stimuli in a controlled environment. Maybe we'll learn something new. Or maybe we won't, because even in our best attempt at a controlled environment the inputs still aren't identical. Maybe they aren't really intelligences, if they do result in fully identical outputs - they are just fancy programs running something more complex than a typical program. If you think humans are deterministic, maybe that says something neat about humans. Since I don't, that doesn't really speak to me.
"knowing that an agent that thinks *exactly like you* is in a simulation, and that that agent doesn't know it, should decrease your credence that yourself are not in a simulation!"
And how do I know if I am a man dreaming I am a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming that I am a man? People have been posing these kinds of questions since forever, just putting a high-tech gloss on them doesn't change the fundamental nature of asking "what is reality?"
Dreaming of a butterfly doesn't create that butterfly, but making a complete simulation does, so that is not analogous. If the act of thinking of a butterfly *did* make a precise simulation of a living butterfly, then I guess you should argue that butterflies should lower their probability estimates of not being simulations.
" (for example, you'd modify the adjacent gravity of your copy (on the computer) so that it can fly, or something like that, would you then start flying immediately)?"
No, for the same reason that if I wrote a biography of myself but made myself three inches taller, this wouldn't affect my height in reality.
Real world people have all kinds of things written about them - news articles and commentary, biographies, autobiographies, memoirs and so forth. Depending on the time and the biographer, you can get startlingly different interpretations of the same person. This does not cause me to update "Hm, that person never existed and in fact, there is a good chance I am a character in a novel!" even if people in this world write novels where people discover they are characters in a novel.
Did "The Truman Show" make you assign any probability to your life being a simulation of that sort?
The way in which it importantly differs is that the simulated minds themselves experience their own realities. If you're in a simulation, you have no direct way to know that if the simulation is precise enough. Also, since the simulation is precise enough, you can assume that the whatever happens in the simulation will be the same as will happen outside the simulation, in base reality. Or at least that's my intuition, that in a deterministic Universe, the position of all the atoms should be enough to know what the state of the Universe will be in a thousand years.
Also, the anthropic principle doesn't apply whatsoever in your case, because writing a biography of yourself doesn't create a conscious mind, whereas creating a perfect simulacrum of your mind does, if you accept substrate independence.
I wouldn't say it's totally meaningless to think about it, because it's interesting and fun to think about, but yeah I get your point. The same point could be made about Philosophy and about the interpretations of quantum mechanics.
Actually, this could have an effect on reality, if we conclude that simulating copies of ourselves is a good way to gain superpowers in the ways mentioned above. If it was the case that a perfect copy of you gained superpowers every time you simulated yourself with superpowers, you could get superpowers pretty easily, which has some value.
"If you're in a simulation, you have no direct way to know that if the simulation is precise enough"
Who says? *We* have deduced a great deal about the laws that make our universe operate, who says simulated beings couldn't do the same? How do we know they could *not* work out that they are in a simulation, and the rules for it? Maybe that's actually quite easy to do, and we'd know that if we'd ever succeeded in making beings that think they're conscious in a simulation. That is, maybe it's completely trivial to realize you're in a simulation, if you really are.
It's been too long since I've read that one, but Robert Silverberg's 'Enter a Soldier. Later: Enter Another' was pretty interesting with achieving realistic simulations of historic persons and having Socrates and Pizzaro reason about their circumstances in simulation tank.
If you *could* tell simulation from non-simulation, then it isn't an exact simulation. One of the premises is that it's an exact simulation. Hence, we can deduce that there are no ways to know whether you're in a simulation or not, if it's exact.
Ah. But then your definition of "simulation" when it's exact is that it's indistinguishable from reality ex hypothesi, in which case -- according to my empirical mindset -- it *is* reality and there is no point in asking philosophical questions that depend on an (even in principle) undetectable difference between the two.
If you know for a fact you're not in a simulation, nothing changes by you starting a simulation. If being in a simulation is indistinguishable from being in a "true" universe, you don't know you're not in one for a fact. These two premises are simply mutually exclusive.
Further, if you start a perfect simulation (let's ignore time for now) then your probability of not being in a simulation is not 50%, it's zero (NB for non-mathematicians, zero probability doesn't mean "can't happen". We literally have "one in infinity" here). Because the simulated you will start a simulation too, etc. Of course that depends on the rules, if there's true randomness then the simulation can diverge.
I added that as an assumption to make the following scenario simpler, but you're right. If I remove that assumption, does it resolve the problem?
About the infinite simulations, you're right and that's an interesting point I totally missed. I was going to add a clause where simulated Universes can't create simulations themselves, but then that would break the symmetry, and you'd be able to figure out you're in a simulation or not. If that clause is added, does the reasoning work?
Agree with your comment; just some mathematical nitpicking: "Probability zero" seems a bit problematic, at least for the model that would come to my mind ("discrete" copies of countably many simulations, including one original): There is no natural (homogeneous) measure on a countable set. (So "One in (countable) infinity" does not have probability zero; but undefined probability. This is demonstrated by the old "paradoxon": pick two natural numbers at random; what is the probability that the second one is larger than the first?)
1/inf can be defined as 0 without breaking that, because if you break down cases for the first and then calculate the probability of the second being bigger, the probability of "yes" is (1*inf)/inf and the probability of "no" is (0*inf)/inf. Those are both indeterminate forms (in particular, either can validly be 1, 0, or 1/2), so the symmetry is preserved despite the asymmetry of every case.
BionicD0LPH1N, I've been thinking about this for a long, long time. This paradox truly puzzles me. Imagine that some of the simulations is run on a computer twice as large so that twice as many electrons cross each transistor. Would you be twice as likely to find yourself inside one of these computers because it's running on twice the number of atoms? This question has been puzzling me for years.
Wow, that's a fascinating point. I don't think that the number of electrons really matter, but rather the number of times the computation was made. Like if you make a series of computations for a single time step in the simulation, and then make those computations a second time, then I'd say that then you have 2 simulations, but I really don't think the number of electrons matter, because it's not the electrons themselves that are simulating the Universe, it's the pattern of activations in the transistor. And this brings up substrate independence, the idea that "mental states can reside on multiple types of physical or digital substrates". Let's say that instead of simulating the Universe, we stored in a computer all the states of the Universe at every instant; is there a sense in which the Universe is still being simulated, just not in real time? If there's a program that goes through that massive Universe-state file, instant by instant, are they simulating once again the Universe? What does it take for a simulation to be a simulation? Is a simulated Universe is printed out in a big book, does a computer that analyze the book simulate a computer? If a human does all the computations of a supercomputer by hand, so that after endless years they have made all the computations necessary to simulate a whole Universe, is there a sense in which that human has done so? If not, what about a computer making the simulating makes it able to simulate a Universe, that a human doesn't have?
>Wow, that's a fascinating point. I don't think that the number of electrons really matter, but rather the number of times the computation was made.
But the bigger transistors with twice as many electrons are basically doing twice as many computations. Imagine looking at a subset of the computer that includes only the right half of each transistor, each wire, etc. That's a computation. Now imagine looking at another subset that includes the left half. That's also a computation. If you physically separated those two halves, that would clearly be two computations. Why would the number of computations change just because the two parts are glued to each other on a per-transistor and per-wire basis?
I think you're getting more at the nature of the experience of time, than questions about simulations per se, because all of these questions can be asked about existence per se. Physics does not give us any way to write down the common human intuition that things that existed yesterday, and changed or vanished, or things which will come into existence tomorrow, do not exist today.
From the point of view of physics, there is no distinction at all between the things that existed yesterday and those that exist today, or will exist tomorrow. They're all just events in spacetime, and none is more privileged than any other -- in the mathematical sense, they *all* exist, they're just at different time (and usually space) coordinates.
But of course we all have a strong intuitive sense of "now" and a feeling that the only things that genuinely exist are those things that exist "now" -- i.e. are colocated at least briefly on our world line. We believe the meal we ate yesterday no longer exists, and the car crash we are about to experience because the brakes just failed does not yet exist, no matter how inevitable Newtonian mechanics makes it.
Physics itself is completely silent on these questions, so far as I know. We have no precise definition of what the "now" experience means. We don't even know how we would measure whether everyone's "now" is genuinely simultaneous, the way we assume it is (meaning perhaps the "now" I am experiencing as I type is 10 seconds or 10 years ahead (or behind) that which you will or did experience).
The concept still stands, even if the simulations magically cannot themselves create simulations. And it doesn't necessarily need strict determinism, it just necessitates that there are no ways to know whether you're in a simulated Universe or no, correct? I mean, in the million-sims-scenario, regardless of whether the Universe is deterministic and whether the underlying sims make sims themselves, you'd still have to conclude that you're very probably in a simulation, whatever you end up observing.
Then, giving the copies self granting powers would result in exactly the same result for every simulation made, would it not? Just as in the scenario, only the base-Universe-you wouldn't have the superpowers. I feel like I'm missing the point, if you could elaborate it would be appreciated :)
Okay sorry humor wasn't necessary. What I think is that God does play with dice but they're loaded. Someone who knows more about quantum computers than I do can probably confirm or correct things I'm saying, but as I understand the algorithms we have don't allow factoring composite numbers.
Suppose you wanted to get factors for 12. You choose 3, God chooses 4. You choose 2, God choose 6. He does actually play with dice but he loads them for his kids.
Can you elaborate? I don't know how that has anything to do with my comment, and I'm pretty sure I misunderstand something here. How does it solve free will?
Yes. I appreciate you asking my thoughts are moving faster than my fingers.
I think most therapists could actually cure their patients, but there are conflicts of interests. If they incorporated Jung and confronted people with their shadows, they would either:
I've heard that therapists are most likely to be physically attacked by their patients if the patients' armor is broken too quickly. I don't have further details or proof, but people can certainly go further than berating.
The big joke is science and religion are compatible. Religion is the reason angle on the truth of Christianity. Therapy is the empirical and the sooner they meet in the middle the better off we'll all be.
You do realise you sound like you're either drunk or stoned off your face, or off your meds and beginning to have a manic episode? Sober up and come back and talk to us after you've washed your face and had a cup of tea.
I'm giving you a one week ban to let you cool down from whatever is making you comment so much; also, without trying to be insulting or claiming I can diagnose you over the Internet, please consider whether you might be manic right now.
What's going on with "likes"? I can't "like" comments on the post itself, but I can do it via the email notifications that I get for replies to my comments. And I can't see a "like" score displayed anywhere on comments.
Who has watched The Sandbaggers? I just finished watching it, and I think it's an excellent British Cold War drama from the 80s. Though the last season was weak, I do think that S1 and S2 have a great deal to offer. The series would have wider appeal today if not for (a) terrible video quality and (b) only streaming on BritBox and Tube in the US.
I watched about a season of it back in the actual 80s, long enough to have only vague memories of character and plot and a very strong impression that this is the story of what James Bond will be when he grows up and gets real. Very good and very plausible Cold War spycraft. Which will bore most people to tears, I'm afraid - hence only Britbox and Tube.
But thanks for reminding me of a good thing that I had forgotten.
One I do like is "Ever Decreasing Circles", which ran in the mid-80s and is a very particular type of social class humour, something like "Keeping Up Appearances" but more muted:
"It was much less brash than most situation comedies, and the Guardian described it as having "a quiet, unacknowledged and deep-running despair to it that in retrospect seems quite daring"
The main character is a middle-class, rather nosy, busy-body type who projects an air of competence and control, takes full charge of his little circle, and comes across as first as rather a petty tyrant. As you go through the series, you see that he is instead somewhat fearful and helpless, he dislikes change and handles it badly, and somewhat fears that he is not in fact up to the challenge, so he tries his best to have everything run in a dependable routine.
I'm glad you like it. Even when Sandbaggers has ordinary plot concepts (such as double-crossing espionage or Willie's flirtation with a Soviet agent in season 1) it remains extremely satisfying. It's an extremely well-executed series.
I never watched it, and looking it up on Wikipedia, it seems the reason for the weak last season was, well, interesting:
"The Sandbaggers was created by Ian Mackintosh, a Scottish former naval officer turned television writer, who had previously achieved success with the acclaimed BBC television series Warship. He wrote all the episodes of the first two series of The Sandbaggers, but in July 1979, during the shooting of the third series, he and his girlfriend—a British Airways stewardess—were declared lost at sea after their single-engined aircraft went missing over the Pacific Ocean near Alaska, following a radioed call for help. Some of the details surrounding their disappearance have caused speculation about what actually occurred, including their stop at an abandoned United States Air Force base and the fact that the plane happened to crash in the one small area that was not covered by either U.S. or Soviet radar.
Mackintosh disappeared after he had written just four of the scripts for the third series, so other writers were called in to bring the episode count up to seven. The Sandbaggers ends on an unresolved cliffhanger because the producers decided that no one else could write the series as well as Mackintosh had and chose not to continue it in his absence."
> Weird that such a small thing can have such a big effect - tell me what else I should do to get you talking!
Prompts for the open thread might be an interesting thing to try if that's not too much trouble-- and assume it wouldn't be. Link some claim, study, or news item of interest, say "Discuss", done.
I'd talk more if there were more ruthless moderation! Anything that you (Scott) deem to not be a clear positive contribution to the discourse, kill it.
+1, I would support stronger moderation. It is unfortunate that example appeared in direct response to your post, though fortunately it got moderated away.
I think your product exploits vulnerable people. When I was looking for help with executive dysfunction, I did not need an irreversible charge on my bank account. That was not kind but it was true and I think necessary. If I'm wrong about the last mod strike me down.
I'm sorry if I got the ACH technicals wrong. Are you saying I can dispute them with my bank? Am I misunderstanding your business model? It's supposed to sting a bit right?
I've been using Beeminder for many years, and it's been extremely helpful and impactful for me. Will C, Beeminder will reverse the charge for me if I accidentally type incorrect data or similar. How strict they are about asking for proof it is entirely up to you! If you don't trust yourself not to cheat, that's what the "Weaselproof" feature is for. Beeminder works exactly as I would hope, and always feels friendly and kind all around.
Thank you Daniel for building a tool that's a force for good in my life.
@Will C: Sounds like you're unable to reply here (for a week?) but I'm really anxious to understand your bad experience with Beeminder if you could email me: dreeves@beeminder.com
(I'm even game to precommit to a postmortem here if people are curious?)
They said "nearly". It's completely reasonable (if somewhat vague) to be nearly 100% certain of something. For example, I am nearly 100% certain that the sun will rise tomorrow morning.
As a Christian, I don't believe depression can lead you to damn yourself if you weren't already doing it. You can't lose salvation. Paul asks rhetorically, "What can separate us from the love of Christ?" - and the clear answer is, nothing.
Do you think there is a certain moment when salvation is attained, or do you think salvation is a process, albeit an irreversible one? Do you believe or hope that all will eventually be saved?
So is this you want help studying for the exam or help taking the exam? If you have a practice exam I would happily go over it with you, but I don't think helping with problems DURING an exam is ethical. discord nathanwe#3677
Yeah, me too, except I gained some weight and... hey wait you're a spammer aren't you? You spammy spammer!!! Go somewhere else where you can post pics!
I have found this site and its predecessor to be excellent for "experts writing for a general audience". Treat the Open Threads as an Ask Me Anything on any subject. You will often be surprised by the quality of the responses by actual experts.
Today's preview: salient + bias in German. bias: Der/das Bias is fine in academia. In everyday German best say: Filter. And then explain the specific bias: "Wir filtern nach der Meinung, die wir schon haben: Eine Info, die dazu passt, glauben wir gern und schnell. Bei widersprechenden Nachrichten sind wir misstrauisch: "Muss ich das glauben?"". ("fehlerbehaftete Voreinstellung" wäre zu lang. "Vorurteil"/"diskriminierende Sprache" sind oft möglich bei "bias" in non-rationalist contexts ("biased language"/"biased against pitbulls"). - "salient"* - wörtlich "springend", im Sinne von "ins Auge springend". Meist gut mit "relevant" übersetzbar. /("wichtig" geht auch, bei relevant kann man auf Nachfrage erklären: "in diesem Zusammenhang wichtig"). Du hast drei Bewerber: Hans, Heinrich und Helmut. Du konzentrierst dich auf ihre Abschlüsse/Erfahrungen u.ä.. Da kommt eine neue gute Bewerbung; von Fatima! Plötzlich wird (auch) relevant/interessant/"salient", dass die ersten 3 Männer sind (und urdeutsche Namen tragen). Dass ihr Name nicht mit H beginnt, bleibt irrelevant. - That's my 2-pence. If I ever get to 10, I'll post. And will post a link here. ;) * bonus fun fact: "salient" would be a possible translation of the Hebrew "tsela" in Genesis, usu. translated as (Adam's) rip (to create Eve). But a rip is not "sticking out". And men have no rips missing. Penis-bone fits much better. Some mammals have one. We do not (anymore). Hence Viagra. https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-topics/bible-interpretation/the-adam-and-eve-story-eve-came-from-where/
Scott says he will link to me if I give grants to people "who will make the world a worse place".
So what's a good way to make the world a worse place? Maybe stabbing a random guy on the street makes it a little worse, maybe not. But say we have a lot of money and want to maximize our badness in the word: what should we do?
I'm going to rule out terrorism because that's been done to death and this isn't interesting unless we come up with something original.
I think it's a hard problem. Making the world worse is probably as hard as making the world better, because institutions have immense inertia.
Since good institutions are what make the modern world so good, maybe the best way to make the world a worse place is to destroy our best institutions. How do we do that? What are our most important institutions? How do we subvert them?
There are so many ways to make life worse for all and stay a respected member of society. Use Facebook. Join Extinction Rebellion. Donate to PETA and BLM. Speak up against migration. Heat with coal or even better wood in a city. - If you wanna break laws without being caught: Spill oil. (and whatever but do no post about it). No, do post about it, to get followers. And buy (risk) life-insurance at a bank.
I'd say, you'd want to influence politics such that it becomes easier to amass personal power and harder to lose it.
Eg, centralize power in the executive/party (Whichever stays after a term runs out), make it easier for the super rich to turn their money into influence, etc.
If you do that long enough in enough places, you are guaranteed am idiot/asshole at the levers of power.
Eg, in the US we devolved power to the executive to the point that GW jr. could launch a couple pointless wars that cost trillions, killed millions, and made the world worse/ put the US in a disadvantageous position.
Maybe war-hawkery would have led Congress to aprrove the war if they were asked, but maybe not. We'll never know.
Think tank to figure out how to start a large-scale nuclear war. Or just a non-nuclear world war, in that case you may get extra points from Scott for proper use of kabbalah, if suggested strategies will involve extensive use of armor.
Also, these guys: https://www.appliedeschatology.com/
Ahmed Chalabi and “Curveball” are two fairly ordinarily guys who made extraordinarily high-leverage contributions to the existence of the Iraq War and its attendant suffering.
Perhaps you could find another war that “wants” to happen, lobby for it, and give the hawks the cause they’re looking for.
Develop a poison that reduces quality of life, but is subtle enough to not get banned and is a useful food additive (a preservative maybe).
I'd say the Wuhan virology lab had a very impressive run at making the world a worse place.
Biosecurity might be the domain of choice for a motivated 21st century supervillain.
Why are people suddenly so sure it's a lab leak? I don't get it.
When the gof stuff came out, I updated from like, 5% to 15% but the genome still strongly points to non-lableak origin.
Is it just conspiracy shit?
Matt Ridley has book about it coming out now. And some good posts. - Even the possibility of a leak makes it criminal to have labs of this category anywhere near a big city - Scott Sumner was outraged about that. - The Chinese defendants signal "we will not admit to anything and not let anyone do intrusive checks". Sounds innocent. The international defendants are doing a bad job: Prof Drosten (German virolog, inventor of our pcr-test) in his podcast tried - and was using cheap tricks to sound convincing. - No serious person says the Chinese scientists were "maligne". A leak is a disaster not an attack. - Did they do gain-of-function with corona-viruses there? Oh yeah, "just chimera, no gof intended". Pretty obviously, they did. - Bayesian probability: If there is exactly 1 lab in a huge country. And the epidemic starts in this labs-town of all places, at places on the same subway line as the lab. No proof, sure - but what are the chances?
The way I heard it, the theory went that Sars-Cov-2 escaped from a BSL-2 lab at WIV, but that there are in fact lots of BSL-2 labs in China so an outbreak near WIV is far from a smoking gun. I can't remember the details tho...
I always read level 4 lab (highest lvl there is, only lvl allowed to do that kind of research), only one in China in Wuhan. I am epistemically helpless so, I refer to biologists. https://twitter.com/mattwridley?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Eembeddedtimeline%7Ctwterm%5Eprofile%3Amattwridley%7Ctwgr%5EeyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X3NwYWNlX2NhcmQiOnsiYnVja2V0Ijoib2ZmIiwidmVyc2lvbiI6bnVsbH19&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rationaloptimist.com%2F
A level 4 lab *exists* at WIV, but I *thought* I heard that some research that people were worried about was done at a lower-level lab. Btw for me that link just goes to Matt Ridley's profile.
I've seen indications there are good arguments on both sides of this, but I bet most people only end up hearing one side. I've heard the slam-dunk case for lab-leak by Nicolas Wade, so now I'm waiting for somebody to give me the slam-dunk case for natural-origin.
Sure, let's call it 15%. I strongly disagree but we're at least in the same order of magnitude.
Since OP wants to make the world a worse place, a lab error unleashing a worldwide calamity that killed millions and brought economies worldwide to their knees is a very interesting event, even if you multiply the chance of this impact by 0.15.
Still posting so still manic I suppose. There's this notion in these quarters that conservatives understand liberals but liberals don't understand conservatives. The idea comes from the notion that colleges and the media are liberal, so everyone understands that perspective.
Of course liberals can be exposed to conservative perspectives from growing up with them, from working in a conservative industry, or from reading conservative perspectives.
Whereas I buy that in the general population liberals understand conservatives worse than vice versa, from reading Scott and other related blogs over the past decade, I think the opposite ignorance exists within this community. Here, liberals understand conservatives better than conservatives understand liberals. Would be no big deal were it not for so many conservative members of the community assuming the opposite.
For instance, I was a regular SSC reader from 2015. I discovered SSC, I think, through Marginal Revolution. But at any rate I've read blogs such as MR, The Money Illusion, Overcoming Bias, Roissy in DC, Steve Sailer, Mencius Moldbug, Two Blowhards... All of which are/were conservative leaning.
Yet I make one liberal remark and I'm accused of living in a liberal echo-chamber. I deeply suspect that in general the conservatives who read this site live in more of a conservative echo-chamber than the liberals who post here.
I think conservatives understand liberals better in many cases just because the liberal positions are often based on broad and 'obvious' ideas of justice, while conservative objections are rooted in some more specific and often technical idea. Especially w.r.t. economics.
Like the idea of raising minimum wage - the liberal viewpoint is easy to understand at a high level: "it's tragic when people work long hours but still barely make ends meet, why don't we just raise the minimum wage so that doesn't happen anymore?". That's both sympathetic and easy to understand so it's not hard for conservatives to grok that viewpoint.
Whereas the conservative view is harder to understand: if you believe that raising minimum wage is a simple fix that would help poor people, and you know that conservatives are against it, the only 'obvious' conclusion is that "conservatives must hate poor people". Whereas the more accurate conservative viewpoint is based on a technical, economic argument that raising minimum wage *doesn't work* and would have negative consequences that outweigh the positive ones, (including perhaps for the very people it's meant to help).
I'm *not* trying to start a minimum wage argument: whether conservatives are right or wrong on the economic argument here is a moot point. The point is just that "raising minimum wage is a bad idea because [specific economic arguments]" is a much harder position to grok than "people should make a livable wage". And that's inherent to the position itself - not a product of any sort of bias in the culture.
(And of course, I'm not saying there aren't liberals with [specific economic counter-arguments] to the conservative position - but you don't *need* to understand those arguments to understand the basic liberal position)
I think a lot of conservative/liberal issues break down along this divide - it's not universally true, but a liberal position is much more likely to be rooted in a broad sense of justice, where the conservative position might often ironically be summed up as "the devil's in the details".
>Whereas I buy that in the general population liberals understand conservatives worse than vice versa, from reading Scott and other related blogs over the past decade, I think the opposite ignorance exists within this community. Here, liberals understand conservatives better than conservatives understand liberals. Would be no big deal were it not for so many conservative members of the community assuming the opposite.
I think that's only true of this community if you include DSL. ASX seems even to liberal in its posts, to me.
I tend to keep the open thread open in a tab and search "new rep" until it's fully dead, but I'm weird. If you leave or accidentally refresh, that strategy doesn't work and there's no way to see what's new since you last read the thread, other than replies to you or (I think) replies to comments you replied to, which come to your inbox. That means that a few days out, new comments, like the ones you just made, probably don't get many eyeballs, and hence no engagement. The Wordpress comments were much better.
I tend to agree, insofar as "the center" is defined in American terms (Europe/Canada are more left, so if "center" = "average politics", "Canada center" is left of "US center").
The last SSC survey showed significantly more readers identifying as left than right (and the 'right' was mostly 'libertarian' not 'Praise Jesus'). But people notice opposition more than agreement, which could lead a left-leaning person to perceive ACX as right-leaning. Plus, marxbro doesn't seem to be here anymore...
I'm not going to argue with your substantive point, but I don't think it's just that "The idea comes from the notion that colleges and the media are liberal, so everyone understands that perspective". I think it comes more from the fact that people generally become more conservative as they grow older, so most people have a recollection of when they were more left wing but few can see how they'll think when they become more right wing.
Also children live in a mostly socialist environment - wealth miraculously comes into the family home and is divided up (generally) according to principles of equity and justice. To the degree that people notice that this works less well in groups of people numbering many millions individuals become advocates of more self reliance and individuality. With this view everybody comes from a vastly more centrally planned statist environment but some move more to the right than others.
I make no claims whatsoever about the positions people end up with as adults; I do make the observation that we all have a history (and memory) of living in and believing in a more liberal environment than we do currently. This is one of the reasons why conservatives understand liberals a little better than vice versa.
Scott, what motivates people to post in Open Threads is when you highlight the best comments. For instance, for next week, you could point out my posts below as highlights. It would set the bar low, sure, but motivate others.
I think I might be experiencing a manic episode because I keep posting and, as far as I can tell, nobody else is. Am I imagining this? Nobody is responding to my posts, so they must be irrational.
I keep spamming my friends on IMs when hypomanic. I've learned to rotate so the deluge spreads across many people and they mostly don't mind. You might want to exercise the same strategy in regard to online communities.
It's actually pretty typical for open threads to die down after a few days. Also it does seem likely that you might be experiencing a manic episode (IANAD). I'd recommend taking a break from here, maybe write down your ideas in Word or Notes or whatever and then if they seem worth sharing tomorrow, post them in the next OT. Also if you notice that one of your posts starts with the phrase "I'm going to break the rules" that's a pretty good sign you oughta step back. Hope you're doing alright.
I'm going to break the rules and post about politics. Biden's speech today was all over the map. Who does he think he is?
Can't wait for Trump in 2024! People who hate vaccines rule!!!
I keep posting, but I am full of whisky, I mean ideas.
Anyway, nobody else is posting. This is a ghost town.
Seems like a fine time to start to flesh out my philosophical arguments about Materialism and The Soul. I'll start with the Givens. You can disagree with them of course, But if you want to disagree with my logic, you must accept the Givens I present.
Given: Physics is real. There's no full theory and all that, but let's accept the conventional wisdom regarding the Laws of Physics.
Given: Metaphysics does not exist. All that exists is rooted in physics.
End of the section of Givens.
What is a human? A species of animal defined as human by the humans.
Do all humans experience subjective reality? We don't know for sure, but by the Transitive Property, I say Yes. I experience something, so I assume other humans do also. .
What is the Me experiencing my existence? I suspect it is the matter inside me. I am made of matter, only matter.
If the Me experiencing existence does so because of the matter in me, does the Me change as the matter within my physical body changes? Maybe, maybe not. Hold that thought.
It seems to me that either the Me changes with each passing moment, as the matter within me changes with each passing moment, OR the Me experiencing subjective reality never changes.
I'm more inclined to believe that the Me experiencing subjective reality never changes, even though the composition of matter within me does. I suspect the composition of matter within me doesn't matter. I'm still Me. Because matter is matter. The individual protons can change in my body but it is still Me.
But if the experience of being Me is composed of matter, and most of the matter in my body can change several times throughout my lifetime, with the subjective experience of being Me unchanging, then I can't claim my existence is due to a specific composition of matter, but due to the matter itself.
This is key to my point. Matter itself must be the fundamental essence of experiential existence, but the specific matter must not matter. If I swap a few protons with you, that may mean we just had a good time together, but I am no more or less me and you are no more or less you.
But why am I no less me or more you if we've just swapped some protons? Here I invoke Occam's Razor: It's because our subjective beings were no different in the first place. I was already you and you were already me.
I think matter is like a tissue, the tissue of existence. Whether we like it or not, we are all one, because we are all this same tissue.
I welcome all rebuttals to this theory.
I use a different sort of Given based on my own intuition: that consciousness is real and monadal, i.e. not composed of smaller elements (though each brain could possibly have many consciousnesses).
There is a sense in which an "airplane" doesn't exist as an entity in base reality, because the base reality just has quarks, as explained in Yudkowsky's "Reductionism": https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tPqQdLCuxanjhoaNs/reductionism
The standard position is that consciousness is composed of a bunch of brain cells in a waking state, which in turn are made of quarks. Therefore, consciousness does not exist in the base reality, in the same sense as an airplane or a paperclip does not exist in the base reality.
A paperclip has many atoms which an *observer* can *mentally* group together and *call* a "paperclip". But the atoms *themselves* (or rather their quarks) don't care in the slightest about being grouped together in this manner. And no grouping occurs except in the mind of an external observer.
Granted, even when no one is around, the paperclip will typically have the behavior of a solid object, and most of its atoms will be similar to each other. But again, the quarks inside and outside the paperclip don't care about that; it takes an external observer to make such observations, and to see boundaries between "paperclip", "paper" and "surrounding air".
So the purely reductionist solution to consciousness is "illusionism": the idea that we think we are "conscious" "individuals" with "qualia", but in fact "qualia" is merely a word, and consciousness is merely an illusion perceived by a collection of brain cells*, which are in fact just quarks.
In this view, the quarks *cannot* know they are part of a "brain" or a "consciousness", let alone perceive "qualia". Thus "consciousness" is an illusion. You don't *really* feel anything, because you are quarks and quarks can't have feelings. You just exhibit behaviors that an observer could, in principle, observe is consistent with feeling something, except that there are no observers in base reality.
(If you want to take the position that quarks do feel things, that seems difficult. It leads to questions like "which *specific* quarks in your brain has qualia/feelings", "why do they have qualia? do quarks in the rocks or the sun have qualia too?" and "how can the brain be aware of the qualia of the quarks? Are you an epiphenomenalist?")
If consciousness is monadal, that's profound, since it means qualia/feelings can occur in a very specific *location* that exists in the base reality, making qualia/feelings real at a basic level. So that's the view I take.
I avoid the word "metaphysics". I think of consciousness as an undiscovered particle that obeys physical laws, though it is special because it feels.
This does leads to other difficult questions, though, such as "why hasn't anyone detected this particle?" and "why would evolution incorporate these particles into brains?" and "how does this tie into quantum physics?"
But there is no philosophical view of consciousness that doesn't lead to hard questions. I bite this bullet because it makes more sense to me than the others available. I could be wrong.
I keep posting, but I am full of ideas.
Like many here, I'm fascinated by prediction markets---and disappointed they are so hard to get working in the USA. Here's a thought: sports betting has just open up in a huge, legal way in the USA. Maybe a good strategy for prediction markets would be to first, enter the wide-open legal sports betting world. Differentiate yourself by being more like a prediction market than a straightforward betting market. In other words, make people make odds like they do on the Good Judgement project and ignore the traditional sports betting stuff about point spreads and shit.
The point is to create a legal prediction market in the US, and sports just happens to be the low hanging fruit for that.
From there branch out. Be like Uber, don't ask for permission. Don't go straight into say, political betting, which is already outlawed. But go into things nobody thought of, just to spread your arms and gain default jurisdiction. For instance, since sports betting is legal, look for sports peripherals. Like maybe try a contract that predicts what the GDP of a city or state might be based on the records of there sports teams. So make it a nominal sports bet, but expand your domain. You could make the whole fucking economy nominal bets about sports outcomes with enough creativity.
I want to steal a topic from the alternative forum: Elite Overproduction. This can mean many things to many people. Too many wannabe PHDs, high-status writers, etc.., too many super-smart people working in fields that don't add much to society. (In the old days we used to say "lawyers", but that frame is old and broke.)
One aspect is say, physicists who go to work in finance, because money. Is our society worse off because too many PHD physicists get rich working on high-frequency trading algorithms as opposed to figuring out more constructive ways to move atoms?
The economist Scott Sumner argued a few years back that the high pay of those who allocate capital goes to show that those who allocate capital are doing the most important jobs in the economy. I have trouble buying that but i also have trouble understanding the economy, so maybe?
My own belief, open to updates, is probably there are too many really smart people working in finance compared to physics or chemical engineering, to be optimal for society. I tend to think there are diminishing returns to optimizing the next hedge fund strategy, even though capital allocation is clearly a very important thing.
Elite Overproduction can mean many other things. Anyone else want to throw some ideas at this?
"the high pay of those who allocate capital goes to show that those who allocate capital are doing the most important jobs"
One could infer this from two premises that are bonkers: (1) that free markets are the best way to do everything and (2) the world is just. From these it follows that those who earn the most money in a free market are simply reaping their just reward.
I suppose instead that those who learn well how to play certain games such as "investor" and "founder" (either via talent & practice, or via coaching from wealthy peers or, rarely, via courses that correctly teach such skills) learn to extract much more than their fair share from the economy. And that if you're rich enough, another way to play the investor game is to hire the smartest investors you can find and pay them to invest for you.
Sure, a company is unlikely to succeed without a competent founder or wealthy investor, but nor can it succeed without somebody to build the product and somebody to market the product. And sure, founders (on average) work harder than their underlings. But don't tell me they deserve 50 times as much money for working 50% as harder. Don't tell me that the investor deserves a huge return just for "being accredited" and "investing". And certainly don't tell me that founder A deserves 10 million dollars while founder B deserves to go bankrupt simply on the basis that founder A *got* 10 million dollars and founder B *went* bankrupt.
Oops, sorry to litigate this; just-world thinking is my pet peeve.
I guess there's another, more reasonable way I could have looked at this. I could have just said "yes, Sumner, perhaps the job they do is very important, even vital, but that doesn't mean they deserve quite so much money, or that others couldn't do the job just as well for less. But then, you never actually said they deserve quite so much money, shame on me for putting words in your mouth. Carry on."
I feel like finance is not a good example of elite overproduction. Individuals' decisions in finance can have such tremendous magnification, I feel that's it's not correct to say they aren't socially impactful. M&A, endowments, pensions, etc. often have billions of dollars at stake. There are hundreds of billions of dollars of transactions in equities and FX every day. A bank or an insurance fund "blowing up" are events that can have serious negative social consequences. Considering this, having smart, quantitatively-trained people working in finance is generally a good thing, and that includes physics PhDs.
(Also, I know a lot of people like to criticize high frequency trading, but finance is a really big field, and HFT is such a small fraction it's almost irrelevant.)
It's easy to think the finance industry is too big to be "optimal", but that really depends what "optimal" means. If you had an omniscient being who could centrally plan the economy, that would be optimal, and the industry breakdown would be very much different from the present. But we don't have easy access to any omniscient beings, so I feel like such speculation is a waste of time. The real economy is going to look very much different: we have to optimize around incomplete information and costs of uncertainty. And much of the finance industry is about dealing with risks and uncertainty!
Elite Overproduction can also mean eugenic fertility and these poor sons of feudals entering workforce is good, also in setting up factories or travelling seas, probably conquering others is good for the country.
I think all of us old SSC readers wish the open threads here were more like those there. But the bad functionality here, particularly for mobile, hurts it much. And the community has splintered, mostly, in fact, due to the poor functionality of the comments section here, but there's a political element to the splintering which has created a feedback loop to the splintering.
I think pushing Substack for better a working comments section would help tremendously in the long run. Just get it back to old WordPress quality. Why is that so hard for Substack?
Also, the heat of political discussions tends to be the death of a comments sections, but so far we seem to have the opposite here. Perhaps people are too afraid of a heated discussion? Maybe limiting politics to every other thread isn't good here?
I've been accused of being a "splitter" myself. I'm not. Though I have been banned from the alternative forum many times for using vulgar language.
For the record, the alternative forum isn't against people using vulgar language per se, but they are definitely against one calling members of the Texas Legislature "evil cocksuckers" even if the description fits said state congressmen like a glove.
It's good practice to have rules against calling people evil cocksuckers in a public forum, even if they are, in fact, evil cocksuckers. Raising the standard of discussion benefits everybody.
Careful there, this is a no-politics OT.
If you want me to talk more, bring back Likes in the comment section. No ability to sort comments by how interesting they are makes it seem like a thousand-comment textwall, and the inability to tip my hat to people who contribute usefully is immensely frustrating.
Also, if Substack were to give us a page where we could see responses to our comments, like exists for Reddit or Disqus, that'd really help too.
It's easy to scroll through here -- if you're not on mobile -- by collapsing all the top level topics you aren't interested in.
The functionality here needs to improve, but I cast a down-vote for likes. They uglify the comments sections, and, in our time of politics, are inevitably political.
So this kind of scam/blackmailing email has been going around for a while now, but this latest version is improved, much better spelling, grammar and layout. Well done latest blackmailer!
This crap regularly comes in on an old work email that isn't used for anything except receiving emails sent to the old address (which some people still use in spite of getting our new details). And if you want to know why Bitcoin et al. are going to have a tough time convincing ordinary people that they are a replacement currency instead of a dodgy pyramid type scheme, then maybe STOP ADVISING THAT THE ADVANTAGES ARE UNTRACEABILITY, SO THAT CRIMINALS STOP USING THEM?????
"I am sorry to inform you but your device was hacked.
That's what happened. I have used a Zero Click vulnerability with a special code to hack your device through a website.
A complicated software that requires precise skills that I posess.
This exploit works in a chain with a specially crafted unique code and such type of an attack goes undetected.
You only had to visit a website to be infected, and unfortunately for you it's that simple for me.
You were not targeted, but just became one of the many unlucky people who got hacked through that webpage.
All of this happened in August. So I’ve had enough time to collect the information.
I think you already know what is going to happen next.
For a couple of month my software was quietly collecting information about your habits, websites you visit, websearches, texts you send.
There is more to it, but I have listed just a few reasons for you to understand how serious this is.
To be clear, my software controlled your camera and microphone as well.
It was just about right timing to get you privacy violated. I have made a few pornhub worthy videos with you as a lead actor.
I’ve been waiting enough and have decided that it’s time to put an end to this.
Here is my offer. Let’s name this a “consulting fee” I need to get, so I can delete the media content I have been collecting.
Your privacy stays untouched, if I get the payment.
Otherwise, I will leak the most damaging content to your contacts and post it to a public website for perverts to view.
You and I understand how damaging this will be to you, it's not that much money to keep your privacy.
I don’t care about you personally, that's why you can be sure that all files I have and software on your device will be deleted immediately after I receive the transfer.
I only care about getting paid.
My modest consulting fee is 1650 US Dollars to be transferred in Bitcoin. Exchange rate at the time of the transfer.
You need to send that amount to this wallet: 1DpA1wTZqGqP9pEcjfZ9bsGEHzbjcsTKq1
The fee is non negotiable, to be transferred within 2 business days.
Obviously do not try to ask for help from the law enforcement unless you want your privacy to be violated.
I will monitor your every move until I get paid. If you keep your end of the agreement, you wont hear from me ever again.
Take care and have a good day."
I like the cheery sign off on this one - "nothing personal, just business" 😀
Note that the spelling and grammar aren't perfect, and it's plainly a script that whoever buys the blackmail package works off, but it's a lot better than the last version of this.
It seems to me that much has been written about human psychology which has never been catalogued. The greatest psychologists tend to be novelists, playwrights, directors and screenwriters. The best of those understand the subtleties of complex psychological interactions.
Yet we have no science that seems to have learned much from what the best in the field of psychology -- the artists mentioned above -- have to offer. Why?
The only sub-field of psychology that seems to have learned anything from literature and movies are the Pick-Up Artists. I suppose that makes some sense due to the huge demand to get laid: people are really motivated to figure that out.
So do academics in the field of Psychology simply ignore what there is to learn from literature and movies or what?
I'd say improv theatre has made huge strides in psycho- and sociology, Keith Johnstone's book on the subject is fantastic.
As always, academics are far behind people who need practical knowledge.
I think the simple answer is that your hypothesis is false. The novelists, playwrights and so on actually have a terrible understanding of human psychology, they're just good at making you believe their inaccurate models and false conclusions. For example, how many times have you seen some piece of fiction claim that "revenge is hollow" one way or another? This is flatly untrue, and your typical playwright wouldn't know anything about it anyway. It's just a piece of moralizing; the fretful, cowardly and/or puritanical don't *want* revenge to be satisfying, they don't think it *ought to be allowed to be*, so they write as if it weren't.
....given how confidently you speak of the satisfaction of revenge, remind me not to get on your bad side ;-P
How many times gave I heard or seen a piece of fiction say “revenge is hollow”? Never?
Does The Last of Us 2 count? That game inscribes that particular moral on an anvil and repeatedly bashes you on the head with it.
Also Moby Dick, I think?
Right. The EBA (Evidence by Aphorism) suggests it is in fact sweet and best not reheated before serving.
I consider "moralizing" fiction distinct from Literature.
If the hypothesis is false, then Literature has little value. (Which is possible.)
I think the issue is that what the poets know of psychology, doesn't translate very well into the language of scientific theories. They may intuitively grasp people's complex motivations and interactions, but not in any way that can be boiled down to testable hypotheses.
Perhaps literary observations don't translate well into scientific hypothesis, but it seems like they could translate into various taxonomies of behavior, if someone took the trouble to catalogue it. For instance, it seems like Tolstoy and Proust are way beyond Myer Briggs in understanding of personality. Though for all I know Myer Briggs were influenced by Tolstoy and Proust. But what about more recent artists like Philip Roth or David Chase? Larry David?
Is there any way to report spambot comments?
Any good suggestions for rationalist discussion discords? The one linked to by this substack is very irrational and run by a pompous loser.
I would have recommended the one linked to by this substack. I mostly lurk there and my only complaint is that I think they have mostly driven off the people with batshit opinions, and so it's a little boring and stodgy in there, since you mostly have people being uncontroversially correct. Not enough babble, too much prune. But if I have my own thing I want to bring up, then I always appreciate that place.
Obviously, posting here more to push back for other people who might want to check it out than to say "try it again" but hey, I think your assessment here is off by a mile (on "very irrational", I don't know the guy who runs it) so if you're not certain maybe also do that
I've lurked there for some time and it's boring like you said because skew bans them. He is one of those losers who thinks pretending to be a rationalist means he knows everything.
I made the same remark in the discord itself and no fewer than six people messaged me with agreement and links to different discord servers that have proven to actually be entertaining and useful. Thought the same might happen here.
Which servers?
What in the name of Roko did you just say about our Discord, you little poster? I'll have you know the administrator was trained in posting at slate star codex, has been involved in numerous secret raids on sneerclub, and has over 3000 confirmed bans. He is an expert in the use of rhetoric from his vast argument-arsenal and can predict hypocrisy and logical fallacies the moment the "is typing" intent is accessible to the server's API. You are nothing to the admin but just another little shitposter. He will mute you into oblivion with precision the likes of which has never been seen before in any blogosphere of the entire multiverse, mark my words. You think you can get away with living by the sword, besmirching his good name over the Internet? Think again, Sleazy E. A cactus person and a big green bat have assured me that as we speak, he is negotiating acausal trades with a network of spies across TheMotte and the SSC Tumblr, to identify your aliases and prepare scorching NYT editorials, so you had better prepare for the singularity. Because it'll be as swift and harsh as an unfriendly AGI with a single directive: destroy your arguments with FACTS and LOGIC. You'll be skewered by your own statements, kid; you never could distinguish the map from the territory. He has access to every discord channel, with full permissions, and can have your account reported and extirpated from discord in over seven hundred ways, and that's just the archives of your posts in one server. Not only is our admin extensively trained in timeless decision theory and rationalism, he knows the objectively correct answers to Newcomb's Problem and the theoretical existence of P-Zombies. This admin has access to the entire collection of scissors statements from Shiri's algorithm and will use them to incept a toxoplasma of rage among your entire social network. I've got a prediction market up and running on just how long it will take until the forces of Moloch ruin your life, and the median value is sitting pretty at 23 picoseconds. If only you could have known what an unholy facet of moderation your little "clever" comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your tongue. But you're just another Alonzo de Pinzon blabbing about eye color, so you didn't, and now you're paying the price, you sleazy beta. He will ensure every single human on earth considers you to be in their outgroup and your finances will drown in cost disease while he busy donating his wealth to malaria nets and vitamin A supplements. You're history, kiddo.
You really, really leaned into the "pompous loser" part. Thanks for proving my point.
I'm pretty sure that message is a meme. It's basically a fill-in-the-blank form letter for smackdowns that I once saw somewhere.
The technical term is Navy Seal Copypasta, in case you want to find more of it
I keep reading this in the voice of Neal Beatty.
Ned
Anyway, it is writing worthy of an award, not the slow clap you are receiving.
Excellent work! Throw in a lizardman and I'm all in.
You could try posting a Friday announcementless OT to try to separate out the effect of each variable.
Omeprazole can help with reflux. Over the counter 10 or 20 mg. Sounds like you are at a set point where your metabolism “wants “ to be. It’s ok to be somewhat overweight if you’re healthy, imho.
I wonder how many comments of each level there are on these posts. I personally commented way more on the last open thread than I usually do (I mean I typically comment in spurts but like I think I have 26 on there or something like that) but they're all replies to two comments about controversial political issues (Chappelle, and Ed Reform).
I don't doubt that the Sunday posting made a difference but I also wonder if there's some kind of controversy cycle (from your numbers it looks like the politics-allowed posts get more comments).
It might be interesting to count how many top-level comments there are, how many replies to top-level comments, etc. to get a sense of like, how many distinct engaging conversations are going on and how much people engage with each topic.
Then again that's also the kind of poison that created facebook so on second thought maybe don't do that at all.
Does anyone know of any papers on the psychological or neurological correlates of experiencing art? I was thinking about how the structural composition of paintings evoke different emotions or reactions, and similar to how some papers discuss the role of a single neuron in a neural network (ML context), I was thinking about measuring a minor color change, moving of some component, other alteration, etc... in art via slight perturbations in neurological (e.g., fMRI) or psychological (e.g., self-reported reports) measures. It would be cool to have GANs generate art to tickle out different emotions explicitly, but a dataset of neurological cascades for different art pieces would need to be created. Perhaps there is a more efficient workaround, but I simply do not know enough about the subject.
IIRC the lovable crackpots of qualiacomputing.com are trying to figure this out.
A lot of their publications are either way too smart for me or way too detached from reality to parse, but I recommend skimming through them anyway.
I suspect people experience art too holistically for minor changes in color, etc., to reveal much. Perhaps minor changes could ruin the holistic experience in some cases, but one likely couldn't generalize what a minor change in one art work means since the changes would likely yield different results in different works.
But one could test that, I suppose.
I'm a traditional horary astrologer; I need to practice my art, and the only way to do that is through using horary to answer questions and provide situational insight. If you would like to give astrological divination a try, please email me at FlexOnMaterialists@protonmail.com. I am exceptionally discreet, but pseudonyms are perfectly acceptable for those with a desire to maintain rationalist street cred.
I suspect most people here are tired of reading your solicitations on every open thread. (Someone can correct me if I am wrong.) Moreover, you are really barking up the wrong tree trying to push astrology on such a quantitative and skeptical readership. If you want to make public, testable predictions here, people might be interested... but you aren't and likely nobody is.
If you're really that threatened by deviations from community orthodoxy, may I suggest judicious use of the scrollwheel on your mouse?
I can ignore your posts, but I think you are making this place sleepier than it could be. Scott asks in his post what would get more of us talking. I think boring solicitors like you disappearing might help some.
Is horary astrology capable of answering simple questions of the form "what number did I just write on a slip of paper" or similar? If not, could I ask why not?
No, because neither the questioner nor the astrologer (nor the heavens themselves, for that matter) care what number was just written on the paper; the real question is rather "is horary true?" I leave it to you to ascertain why this question is unsuitable for horary.
I have an important bet going with someone about when SpaceX will next launch. Can you tell me if I'm going to win?
Or how about this: I have a large semiprime number I'd like to factor. I intend to put my guess for the factorization on a piece of paper and lock it in a box. What you do is tell me the contents of the box in one week. If the paper doesn't have two factors on it, I enter "2, 2". If it does, I multiply them and see if the result is my semiprime. If so, I put those two numbers in the box. Otherwise, I increment the second number to the next prime (unless it is already greater than the square root of my semiprime, in which case I increment the first number and set the second one to 2). The only stable configuration should be the true factorization. I'm highly interested in this exciting new branch of applied metaphysics, please advise.
Re: your odds of winning the bet, that's a classic use of horary, and I'd be quite pleased to delineate a chart predicting your chances; assuming, of course, you'd condescend to the simple expedient of sending an email.
Re: numbersnumbersnumbers, you'd have to simplify that enough for a rather unmathematical astrologer to understand. If your intellect can stoop low enough to encounter mine, I'll give it a shot, however given your avatar I rather suspect this to be catty and sarcastic japery.
Ok then, how about “what grade will I get on my midterm?” I do care quite a bit about that, it’s a large portion of my grade.
That's a fine astrological question, though I will need an email to send you the prediction, as the results tend to run a few paragraphs in length. Then, you can come back and report to the next open thread whether the prediction was accurate or not.
Because there is no scientifically acceptable evidence that astrology works. It’s a belief system like religion.
You are of course free to persist in your own belief--far be it from me to litigate the particulars of anyone's faith!--or, you could come up with a query having a clear and verifiable future result, and ask.
To be honest, I’d need a fairly large number of clear, correct, predictions to move me very far from my prior of “astrology is bunk and has no plausible mechanism beyond cold reading and making your predictions and advice sufficiently vague.” Not trying to insult you, that’s just my current beliefs on the matter. A clear explanation of the mechanism of the process might lower that threshold a bit, but you’re going up against my observation that mathematical, physicalist models have done a very good job at describing the structure of the world.
There is no way on earth I can read that many comments. I would really appreciate having some sort of sorting by best or curation. When I opened that thread I just closed it right away due to it being too overwhelming. I get that conversations here are important and open, but there has to be a way to separate the wheat from the chaff.
I wish the "Like" button could be used as a "Follow this thread" button. So I skim the comments section and when I find a comment that interests me, I use the "Like" button to indicate I want to follow subsequent comments connected to it.
The trick then is to have a filter option (beside Chronological and Top First) that is called, say, "My Likes" which then only shows me the threads I indicated interest in.
Have you considered, em, not reading everything?
Not only have I considered it, I actually don't read everything. But I certainly appreciate your amazing advice. Consider my problem solved!
You didn’t read anything. Do you think there’s an option between not reading anything and not reading everything?
Is Gwern ok? I notice that none of their newsletters have come out since August, meaning we've missed two months now.
I can see they're still active on Reddit though so I assume they're fine?
They've actually posted in this thread and updated their website a few times since then. I do miss the newsletters, though...
> Maybe open threads with important announcements attached feel less open and hold people back from commenting?
The power of the prior of relevance.
Super random question, but a year or two ago I remember reading a Scott Sumner blog post where spoke about a card game he'd been playing with friends & family- where they're all pretending to be different characters, and the point of the game is to discover everyone's real identity (i.e. one person is the 'killer', or one person is being deceptive about who they are). He noted that smart engineer types were not particularly good at it, but that many native Chinese were excellent (I believe his wife is Chinese). It's in that vein of social bluffing games, like Blood on the Clocktower.
I've searched his blog every whichaway, but I can't find the name of the game. Does this sound like a social bluffing game that people are familiar with.....? In the absence of that, any good bluffing games that people enjoy or recommend?
Oh could also be Werewolf or one of the popular variations thereof
Seconding Avalon, Coup and the Resistance. There is also Secret Hitler, if whomever you want to play it with isn't turned off by the theme.
Town of Salem? Spyfall?
Mafia?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafia_(party_game)
The funny thing is, I played this game at college orientation with a Chinese student who had never left China until a couple days before. At one point, someone asked if he was mafia and he hesitated then said, "I cannot lie. I am mafia." The whole point of the game is deception, but morally he couldn't bring himself to lie even within a game. I guess times have changed.
The thing that puzzles me about this game is why someone would destroy their own honor and integrity in order to play a party game.
Do you also have ethical objections to being an actor in a movie or stageplay, since they have to say things that aren't true?
How about authors who write fictional stories?
No, because actors and authors aren't trying to deceive anybody; the director, other actors, audience, readers, etc., are expected to know that those things aren't true.
Don't people who choose to play a game about deception and backstabbing know that the things said in the context of the game will frequently be untrue?
Yes, but some people have moral codes they won't suspend for a game. I don't think Furrfu's statements are contradictory, but I do wonder if ze appreciates that other people have other moral codes than zim.
This may answer the question of why "Smart engineer types" aren't very good at Summer's game...
=Sumner's
What makes you think the "smart engineer types" are the ones who refuse to lie in a game?
I consider myself a "smart engineer type." As a kid, I once played one of these games with a group of people who instituted a rule that "you can't ask someone their team", because they didn't want anyone to be forced to lie about it. I seemed to be the only person in the group who saw a moral difference between lying as part of a consensual game that explicitly includes lying and lying "in real life". (Though I had trouble articulating that at the time.)
I'm only parroting what @nifty775 just said that Scott Sumner observed about "smart engineer types" not being good at the deception game that Sumner plays.
You're claiming that it's dishonorable and disintegrous to engage in well-bounded roleplay. Obviously that attitude is not only false but also an attack on the convention of roleplaying and thus also on the very concept of personal growth and expression.
No, I am not claiming that, although that claim would indeed imply my claim. I am not sure what it would mean for an attitude to be false.
What honor and integrity are being destroyed?
Within the game everyone has agreed that lying and deceit are ok. It seems to me that basically any honor/integrity based reason not to lie to other people should be satisfied by the fact that everyone involved understands the situation, and that that pass to lie clearly expires the moment the game ends.
Integrity is not a function of a social contract.
Can you elaborate?
Because it's fun, and teaches you both how to deceive and how to spot deception.
If you think the first is not a valuable life skill, I'd refer you to Kant's axe murderer thought experiment (or just real life experiences of people living under, say, Nazi rule).
I've heard these games called "social deduction games".
Coup is a fun one.
Avalon is one of my favorite board games (The Resistance is very similar to it). Also Burke's Gambit and Coup are fun in this vein.
This game is similar to many acting exercises. I remember one where the scenario was one of us was a talkshow host and was interviewing you, and as the interviewee, you had to guess who you were.
Turned out I was King Kong and I really loved working with Fae.
I'm looking for advice on losing weight. I went down from ~280lb to hovering around the 225lb region. I did this by eating only 2 meals per day, targeting 1200 calories per day, and then also having a cheat day on Saturdays where I go truly wild and eat absolutely anything I want.
However, I've stalled here for the past two years. It's good that I've seen that this weight is sustainable - I migrated from eating explicit diet foods and counting calories all the time to eating fairly normal foods during the week, and just making sure I don't eat too much. And I still get to eat whatever I want on Saturdays, which is nice, and helps me to keep going, mentally.
However, I'd like to start losing pounds again. I've tried lots of small changes to tip the scale towards losing, and the changes don't seem to be helping. I've tried counting calories for my meals again, and I see that I still am really hitting roughly 1200 calories/day, generally. I've tried integrating exercise into my life by starting to use an exercise bike 5 days per week, hitting 150 to 160 bpm heart rate for 25 minutes each time. I've also tried (at separate times from biking) doing weight lifting. However, nothing here seems to actually get me to start losing weight again, and I'm getting really really frustrated. I believe I may need to do something drastic.
I think I may cut down to 1 meal per day (probably around 600 to 800 calories per day), but still keep my Saturday cheat day. I do NOT want to sustain a one meal per day diet long-term. However, maybe this is the kickstart I need to actually start losing again. Is this a terrible idea? I'm very very disciplined, so I know I can keep myself to one meal per day if I try. And I'd much rather give up lunch each day as opposed to giving up my Saturday cheat day.
But will doing this screw with my metabolism? Will I be able to lose weight on it, get down to like 190lb, and then go back to what I'm currently doing and maintain that weight? Or will I go right back to 225lb if I stop doing one meal per day? Or will I even gain weight, because my metabolism didn't like being messed with. Could some weird thing happen where I end up retaining more calories, due to my metabolism shutting down or something? I generally believe in CICO, but I'm also very scared to mess with where I am now, which is the most sustainably healthy place I've ever been in my life. I don't want to lose that on a fool's errand to get down to 190lb, and then end up losing it all and going back to 280lb.
Hitting a plateau after being on the same diet for a while is normal as your body adapts to routine. Try changing your diet completely for a week, then go back to what you were doing.
That said, i don't think you've been counting properly. If you had been eating 1200 calories a day for two years i'm pretty sure you would be dead.
Once again, there's a weekly cheat day.
How wild are these cheat days exactly? And are you physically active?
1. Double, then triple check that you are accounting for your calories correctly.
2. Ask someone else to check your work from Step 1.
3. If your math is really correct, then you must be eating a lot of very calorie-dense foods on your cheat day, because this is the only possible source of the calories needed to make up the deficit you describe. You need around 2,300 calories per day to just maintain 225 lbs of tissue. If you're really eating only 1,200 calories per day during the week, then you must be eating a whopping 8,900 calories on your cheat day. Diet matters WAY MORE than exercise for losing weight, so if your goal is only to shed mass, then cutting 10% of calories from your cheat day is the easiest thing to do. 10% should barely be noticeable psychologically, because I assume the proven benefits of cheat days works for you, but that 10% will accumulate on the scale.
Of course any exercise will help, and if you lift weights you build more muscle tissue which uses more calories than fat tissue, so there are knock-on effects from that too. You just have to do this consistently for at least 6 months before you'll see those kinds of benefits (the first 3 months of strength gains are neurological adaptations, not muscular adaptations).
I am not an expert, but I don't think that everyone with 225lbs needs 2,300 calories to maintain their weight. Even for people with the same level of activity. I can easily imagine that this varies by a factor of 2. Especially for people on diets these numbers may be way lower.
How do you imagine that could vary by a factor of 2? 2,300 calories is the base metabolic rate for that weight for someone *at rest*, ie. the number of calories your tissues need just to survive. This doesn't even account for calories needed for activity like walking, talking, making food, etc. If you reduce that, then some of your tissues will not survive, typically fat which is preferentially metabolized for energy.
There is some variance around this number for sure, but a factor of 2 seems pretty wild. If some group of humans could survive with half the amount of food, they would have easily outcompeted anyone else.
After looking it up, the ballpark still seems right to me.
A review found a standard deviation of 5-8% without diet effects [1]. A popular commentary on it calculates that this means that 96% of the population fall in a range of 1680-2320kcal. [2] (I assume that these numbers are for a given weight.) That means that the upper range is 600kcal (more than a third) larger than the lower one.
Now, this is *without* dietary component. The same review [1] estimates the standard deviation of that with 20%, so several times stronger than the other component. So even plus/minus one standard deviation gives a range between 0.8 and 1.2, so a factor of 1.5 between them. And a lot of people should fall outside this range.
Granted, I didn't look into this paper, so there could be issues. And certainly working with standard deviations like this is a crude approximation. But it also makes a lot of sense to me. If losing weight would really be "as easy" as cutting your calories by 20%, then a lot more people would manage to do that. And there are some experiments showing that calorie intake is only loosely coupled to whether you gain or lose weight.
And I agree that having a lower metabolic rate must come with some cost, otherwise evolution would have gotten rid of it.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15534426/
[2] https://examine.com/nutrition/does-metabolism-vary-between-two-people/
Your citation says, emphasis mine, "Total daily energy expenditure varies several-fold in humans, *not due to variation in resting metabolic rate*, diet-induced thermogenesis, or exercise thermogenesis, but rather, due to variations in nonexercise activity."
2,300 calories that I described is the resting metabolic rate, which per that citation varies only 5-8% between people. This variation is largely due to different tissue composition (more muscle means more caloric expenditure), and different environmental factors (more extreme hot/cold or humid environments require more energy to preserve homeostasis).
2,300 calories obviously averages over these variations. Even if the other poster was on the low end, that still puts him needing more than 2,100 calories a day, without accounting for any calories needed to do such mundane things as getting up and going to the toilet. I've been low-balling this whole time if that wasn't clear.
> If losing weight would really be "as easy" as cutting your calories by 20%, then a lot more people would manage to do that.
It is that simple, but that doesn't make it easy. There are literally thousands of studies demonstrating that energy balance causally modulates weight. This fact is indisputable.
That doesn't make calorie management the best *therapeutic* approach to weight management, but that's the approach the original poster had already taken and was asking about.
> And there are some experiments showing that calorie intake is only loosely coupled to whether you gain or lose weight.
This is not correct. I'm not aware of any replicated experiment that shows anything like this for healthy people that don't have nutrient absorption issues.
What studies have shown is that people have trouble with *adherence* to diets, particularly ones with caloric deficits, and that there is individual variability in what diet works best for long-term adherence. For instance, keto diets are more satiating for some people, and so they stop eating sooner than they would if they had carbs or more variety of foods. It's still energy balance in the end. You simply can't evade thermodynamics.
Hm, but if the variance is 20% by diet-induced thermogenesis, does that not mean that people with high caloric intake simply produce more heat and burn something like 20% more calories in this way; and undernourished people produce less heat and burn 20% less calories? So my understanding is that the 5-8% variation is among people with normal caloric intake, and that it varies a lot more if you are under- or overnourished (e.g., dieting). I don't have access to the full article, though, so I can't check it.
About the experiments with caloric intake, I am not denying thermodynamics at all. But I am pretty sure that I have seen studies showing that if you overfeed people (strongly, like several 1000 calories), then they do gain weight, but at very different rates. Like, some gain weight twice or several times as quickly as others. Even if you control for activity.
So my understanding is that when you have low/high caloric intake and lose/gain weight, then your body tries to go back to some set point of weight, and this set point is hard to change. The body does this by making you crave for food (or repulse food), but this is not the only way, it also simply makes you less/more active, produce less/more heat, and so on. Perhaps you don't count the latter as part of the resting metabolic rate, so we are using different terminology? But I don't really see how *not* to count it into the resting metabolic rate, so I would assume that this is usually included.
Even if your measurements are inaccurate, if they're always inaccurate in the same direction, then cutting calories will yield to eating fewer calories than before, even if the number of calories itself is incorrect. Harold isn't trying to hit a target, he's just trying to ingest fewer calories than he is currently. Precision is more important here than accuracy.
*yield to = lead to
Fasting over moderate intervals (~40+ h for me) is incredible, and way easier than CICO - the weight just flies off with minimal muscle loss. I use it both for health (autophagy, fighting insulin resistance) and weight maintenance as rock climbing is my sport of choice.
Requires a little bit of willpower, keeping yourself busy during the fast, and some trial and error to see what schedule works for you. Ironically my biggest issue with it is social occasions where I'm expected to eat. The strangest thing is you have _less_ appetite for a good few days after you finish the fast, too - something resets in your hunger drive.
It's scientific consensus that when the body is in a fasted state it has efficient access to its fat stores, it's the transition between fed and fasted that is rough. Calorie restriction forces you into that transition repeatedly, which is why it is so hard to follow. Check Jason Fung's lectures on youtube for an overview.
The side benefit is, once your blood sugar stabilizes you feel amazing - I have way better clarity of thought when fasting, personally.
Thanks, that's good info. I could try longer fasts.
Yeah, this is what worked for me.
I went from 2 meals a day, 7 days a week, to 1 meal a day 6 days a week plus a cheat day, known as 6x20, which means 6 fasts each week of 20 hours each, so on 6 days I had a 4-hour window to eat, and on the 7th day I could eat whatever I wanted, with no calorie counting anywhere. At about that point, I noticed that my stomach was getting smaller - I literally could not fit as much food inside as I used to, and if I tried I started vomiting. After that, I took the leap to 3x40 - 3 fasts per week of 40 hours, meaning that there was a day where I ate nothing, followed by a day with an 8-hour eating window, repeated 3 times, with the 7th day as a free day. The stomach shrinkage increased, but the hunger became hard to deal with, although green tea and bone broth both helped. After that, I did a week or two on 2x64, not eating for 2 days and then having an 8-hour eating window on the 3rd day, repeated twice, still plus the weekly free day. That's when the hunger went away and ketosis kicked in, and I felt great, and it was actually more mentally sustainable for me than 3x40 was. After that, I found that I could maintain the ketosis on 6x20 if I ate a moderately keto-friendly diet, but maybe that's just my body.
Unfortunately, this got interrupted, but I'm working back into it.
One thing that helps me is to think of the fasts as discrete blocks of time - the 16, 20, 40, and 64 hour chunks. It seems to be psychologically helpful for me if I know when the next time I can eat is - I can say to myself, "OK, I can start eating at 2 pm Saturday afternoon, and then I can eat whatever I like until 10 pm Sunday night". (I usually do my 8-hour periods from 2 pm to 10 pm, and my 4-hour periods from 6 pm to 10 pm, and my cheat day is Sunday. So on a 3x40 plan I'd eat from 2pm Saturday to 10 pm Sunday, then from 2-10 pm Tuesday, then from 2-10 pm Thursday.) And from what I understand, having those solid blocks of time with no food is also what produces the metabolic effects.
Good luck!
And I should add, the reason I didn't like sticking to 2x64 is that it turns out that I like eating, too. :-) I just plain enjoy the taste and smell and physical action of it, plus the social and ritual aspects. And so given the choice between modifying my diet to be more keto-friendly, or going for several days without eating at all, I picked the first way.
6x20 - how does that work?
The basic idea is that, every week, do 6 fasts of 20 hours each. In practice, it seems like most people (including me) want to keep a regular schedule, and want to have a day where we don't fast, so for me it leads to something like this:
Sunday: eat until 10 pm
Monday-Friday: eat between 6 pm and 10 pm
Saturday: eat after 6 pm
So the 6 fasts would be Sun-Mon, Mon-Tue, ..., and Fri-Sat, all from 10 pm to 6 pm the next day. There's nothing special about those exact hours and days; I just picked those them because they happen to be convenient for me.
Stuff we can have when "not eating": water (of course), coffee and tea (plain, no cream or sugar or substitutes), and bone broth. Some people apparently drink apple cider vinegar, but I don't like the smell. Bone broth is easy to pick up at grocery stores, lasts a while in the fridge, and a small cup tends to quell my hunger. Green tea is my favorite, possibly because it's a mild stimulant (I have mild ADHD) and also in theory an appetite suppressant. And of course drinking lots of water is good.
Stuff we can have when eating: pretty much anything. Since there's only a small window each day, I find I have a bit more motivation to eat healthier, and to plan ahead and eat things that I really want to. Since there's only so much I can actually eat, I find I eat smaller amounts of higher-quality stuff. I also find that I tend to spread out my eating more, to cover the whole 4-hour period, but I don't know if that's bad or good. Possibly good, insofar as eating more slowly and savoring the tastes and sensations tends to make us eat less? I dunno. And alcohol counts as food, so the eating windows are also our drinking windows.
(Oh, and the standard warnings are: don't do this if you're a kid, pregnant, breastfeeding, or need to take medications multiple times a day that have to be taken with food. It's supposed to help with type 2 diabetes (where the body's insulin gets out of whack), but not do anything for type 1 diabetes (where the body just doesn't make insulin), but since I don't have either, I haven't paid much attention to that side of things.)
For your situation, maybe this would help? I don't mean to give offense, but frankly, the way you describe your cheat day sounds both physically and psychologically unhealthy. :-/ If doing 6x20 leads to a pattern where you overall eat the same amount every week, but it's spread out more evenly over the week, my feeling is that that would be a net gain? But if it leads to small periods of eating like you say you do on your cheat day, plus the cheat day being unchanged, then maybe it would be overall bad for your health? You're the expert on you, of course.
As for my own situation, I get peace of mind from not having to worry about details of what I eat, and just focusing on not eating too much of any one thing so I have room for a bit of all the other things I want to eat. Another thing I like is the psychological effect of feeling hungry for a while, but still having the knowledge that at a certain point very soon I will eat food that I enjoy. It makes me feel... I suppose "virtuous" is the word? Similar to how I feel after exercising. Probably this connects in my head to old-school Christian concepts of mortification of the flesh, as well as stories of Buddha and Bodhidharma, and a thing that an ex-Marine martial arts instructor used to say: "pain is weakness leaving the body". :-) I guess it helps that plain green tea and plain black coffee were already my daily beverages of choice. And for what I want to do, I keep in mind that this is an intermediate step, to be followed with 3x40 and then 2x64, until I trigger ketosis again.
Whew. Does that answer your question? :-)
It gets worse as you age. Metabolism slows down like 1 percent a year after 60. Muscle mass deteriorates as well so it is more difficult to burn calories. My process started many years ago whenI stopped eating any obvious bad things like french fries, chips, ice cream, cake etc. When I was about 63 or so I read Younger Next Year by Chris Crowley. He espouses working out pretty intensely for at least an hour a day(I use an old NordicTrack) mixed in with walking, biking. Change of habits don't come easy, but it is worth it. His food recommendation( His co-author is a doctor) is "Don't eat crap". I got into Shredded Wheat with Flaxseed and skim milk for breakfast. It works. Here's a link to the book: https://www.amazon.com/Younger-Next-Year-Strong-Smart-Until-ebook/dp/B07NMFRQ7W/ref=sr_1_1?gclid=Cj0KCQiAsqOMBhDFARIsAFBTN3faNwEBighlKfxRDtv9hGjb9BPdETqL76Js2f9okSuC_RzA7oS0o6UaAkU8EALw_wcB&hvadid=409973246792&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=9052370&hvnetw=g&hvqmt=e&hvrand=1269172354305996346&hvtargid=kwd-10821303659&hydadcr=22537_11318391&keywords=younger+next+year%27&qid=1636426614&s=books&sr=1-1
You should probably just carry on as you are. If you are stuck at 225lb while eating only 1200 calories per day, your violation of known conservation laws is already quite alarming, and who knows what consequences there will be for the world if you take it further.
Wow. What a jerk way of saying I'm lying. As I said a billion times, I have insane cheat days. It's not at all impossible that I'm stuck at 225lb.
Well, now you have identified the issue. Presumably you go into Super Python mode on Saturdays and eat enough for a week. Eating even less on other days won't fix that. You can make cheat days every fortnight or you can reduce what you eat on those days. I recommend the latter. Maybe if you insist on eating a pound of brussels sprouts or carrots - twice if necessary - on those days, it will help.
> Eating even less on other days won't fix that
Why not?
Because the other days aren't the problem.
That seems like a theory at best. There's no reason cutting calories on the other days couldn't be a sufficient enough change to cause weight loss.
It seems like a funny and clever way to suggest that you made a mistake in your calorie estimations rather than an attack. But we are on the internet, meaning is in the eye of the beholder.
That's true...
So I have no background in bio or anything like that but I am 6'0 and 140lbs, in my early 40s. Honestly, I also have some odd health problems which may be "helping" my scrawniness along, so I'm not being falsely humble when I say I don't know if what I do would work for you.
First and foremost, a jihad against carbs must be your starting point. Bread, potatoes, pasta, starchy veggies...out, out, out. Any sort of junk food (e.g., hyper-processed, built in a lab)--that stuff has to go. I'm sure you didn't expect to be able to retain cookies, ice cream, cake, or pie. And, possibly surprisingly or disappointingly, even fruits must go.
So what's left? Green vegetables...as many as you can stomach. (Work up to it slowly.) The good news is, if you need to fry your kale in a generous heap of butter, you can. Meat, fish, and dairy are your allies. Good fats means the ones that aren't derived from industrial seed oils.
I guess the good news is that the above regimen, if you could convince yourself to like/tolerate it, will obviate the need for calorie counting.
Vaya con dios.
Did you even bother reading my post? This is not useful advice at all.
This is a surprisingly rude reply to a decent and well-meaning answer. I think he replied the way he did in order to side-step your current thought process which seems really off-track to me. Maybe he should have tried arguing directly with what you literally said, but?
I'm tired of people not listening to what I'm saying. Suggesting I cut out all carbs is entirely pointless. If he read my post he'd know that I'm not willing to try that.
Your original post didn’t say anything about carbs, for or against.
See what I say below: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-197/comment/3547920
I read it. But you're way off on the wrong track. Keeping a 5000-calorie cheat day won't help you get to where (you say) you want to go.
If you read my post you should know that I'm not interested in any advice that suggests I need to cut out all carbs. You may as well not even bother saying it.
Your original post mentions nothing about carbs, nor any other specific food types. It only talks about exercise and overall calorie levels. I'm not sure what you're so upset about.
If I say that I rely on cheat days in order to have the willpower to keep going, and that I need to have the ability to eat my favorite foods at some point in order to have willpower, it should be evident that I'm not willing to completely cut out a major food type (which happens to be most people's guilty-pleasure food type) from my diet entirely.
Also where did I say that I want to be 140lb, which is what AMAM is implying that eating no carbs allows him to be? He even admits that he has no bio-cred, meaning that his advice is based only on his own personal experience. I see no reason for him to assert that "a jihad against carbs must be [my] starting point". His advice was entirely not germane to my original question.
Harold, why don't you try to cut 200 or 300 calories per day on your non-cheat days and see if that yields results after 4-6 weeks, then adjust up or down from there? (You could also achieve this moderate decrease in calories by cutting to one meal per day one or two days per week.) I would bet that you wouldnt be doing any real damage to your metabolism using this moderate method. Probably wouldn't hurt it if you went to one meal per day, either.
Yeah, I could. I've considered it, but I've been thinking that since I've tried gradual changes before, that I might really need a big change to make it work. I've been worried that if I do something too gradual, then my body would simply rejigger itself to maintain its homeostasis. And then if I wanted to do my big change later, it wouldn't be big anymore, and wouldn't work. Does that make sense?
It makes sense conceptually, but I'm not sure if there's any evidence for it. I'm not a doctor or researcher in the field, and my ten minutes of google searching didn't yield anything, so I guess I can't help you. I'd bet on the gradual approach not having any harmful longterm effects on your metabolism.
I guess one thing I failed to mention in my initial post is that when I was at 280lb for years and super depressed about it, at first I tried a bunch of gradual changes, eating slightly less (though it felt significant to me). And then my body plateauted at 270lb. And I was so pissed about it, that I was trying so hard, but barely lost anything, that in a moment of passion, I decided that I'd just starve myself until I was the weight I wanted, or I'd just eat like an apple each day, and that's it. I didn't end up going through with it, but I did do it for like a day or two. And that ended up getting me on the right path. It's like I kickstarted myself by doing something insane, and then my body was on a losing path that I was able to sustain by still taking a drastic action (cutting down to 2 small meals per day, at 1200 calories per day), but not as drastic as I had originally planned. I wonder if I need that kickstart again.
I think that if you do a drastic cut, and it yields weight loss, the benefits will far outweigh the cost. If it doesn't work, back to the drawing board.
Well, maybe. You see, I'm super happy already that I've been able to find an eating lifestyle that allows me to sustain 225lb, instead of 280. More than anything I don't want to lose that. Above all else, I don't want to jeopardize the progress I've already made, and I'd be so upset if I ended up gaining back the 55lb I lost, or if I found that I could no longer eat the way I am currently eating, without gaining weight.
The cheat day seem pretty key to the psychological management of things so taking that as a given some ideas to consider:
1) Mix in some highly satiating foods on the cheat days. You can eat whatever you want but you also have to xxx first/during/as well (something like vegetable soups, boiled potatoes [preferably cooked, cooled, then reheated which makes them slower to digest] of some form, beans and rice, any raw vegetable you'd find on a crudite, or something along those lines). The idea is that you'll hopefully just naturally eat less of the more highly caloric stuff.
2) Longer gaps between cheat days, instead of every 7 days every 8 days or the like
3) Greater and lesser cheat days, e.g. every other week full cheat day and then a shorter cheat day (say xxx hours) on the off week.
4) I don't think it's generally recommended to go much below 1200 calories/day when dieting for extended periods of time and i'd be hesitant about doing it 6 days a week, but you could try your one meal a day 600-800 calories on alt. days or something. That said with likely >50% of your calories coming on the cheat day (assuming accurate calculations) there's going to be limited returns to cutting much more during the week.
Not a nutritionist, just random ideas. Curiously do you have digestive issues with such huge swing in food volume around the cheat days?
Not bad ideas. Here are my thoughts:
For 1, 2, and 3, I already don't get to eat as much as I'd like on a cheat day. I keep laundry lists of foods throughout the week of the things I want to cook or eat on cheat days, and I have trouble keeping up with them. That said, I have considered 2 and 3, but I've found it very hard to actually act on it. Knowing that I have that Saturday coming up is like the one thing that keeps me going through the week, and I'm not certain I have the willpower to do it every other week, or scaled down.
For 4, I often hear that if you want to lose 1 pound per week, you need to cut out 3500 calories per week. That means cutting 600 calories per non cheat day, which seems doable.
I do have some moderate digestive issues on cheat days, but nothing I hope is too serious. Just some acid reflux, and sometimes some indigestion, have to use the restroom slightly more often.
You gotta increase muscle mass.
I'm a big dude, the weight I feel the best at is 230-240; which I can pretty easily maintain without having to consciously avoid foods by:
Not eating packaged prepared desserts (If you want something sweet, you have to make it yourself/ buy it from a fancy bakery)
Not drinking more than 1-2 alcoholic drinks a day
Avoiding caloric beverages(switch to herbal teas, soda water, jamiaca with barely any sugar, etc.)
and building a decent amount of muscle. I'm scared of weights 'cause of people I know fucking themselves up with bad form, and you can maintain a good amount of muscle just by doing calisthenics and yard work; I find.
Pack on a bunch of pounds of muscle, and you end up in a state where you can eat pretty much whatever you want as long as you don't go too hard on the sugar.
I speak here neither from personal experience nor knowledge of hard data, but something I've anecdotally heard good results about is the slow-carb diet advocated by Tim Ferriss (described in his book The Four-Hour Body). The basic premise is avoiding food with high glycemic indices: no grains, potatoes, sugar, dairy(?), replacing them with carbohydrates like beans and lentils that have lower such indices. It also includes a cheat day like what you're already doing, and doesn't require intermittent fasting (which it sounds like you're doing). I've had good results with other parts of the book, though I've never felt the need to try losing weight. Might be worth a shot.
Since reading The Hungry Brain it has been my ideology for weightloss. Scott reviewed it here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/25/book-review-the-hungry-brain/
Like most modern diet advice, it says the main important thing is the kinds of foods you eat. If you get those right, the calories will balance themselves without needing much conscious intervention.
I'll keep the theory short since Scott does a better job than I could. The main thing is there is a part of your brain that regulates the amount of body fat stored, the hypothalamus. It achieves its task by influencing calories in and calories out. Fighting it head on is likely to lose since it has infinite willpower and has lower-level access to bodily functions. If the foods you eat exceed a reward threshold, your hypothalamus will be told to temporarily target a higher body fat level. If every meal you eat breaks this reward threshold, then they will begin compounding as the hypothalamus never gets enough time between increases in order to reset to the baseline.
In terms of actionable changes, when planning what to eat _lower_ the following.
1. Ratio of carbs to fiber.
2. Ratio of fat to protien.
3. Ratio of calories to volume.
4. Ratio of calories to mass.
5. Amount of caffeine.
6. Amount of alcohol.
7. Amount of spice (as in hot spice, not flavor spice).
8. Amount of chocolate.
9. How good it tastes.
10. Whether you consciously think of the food as a treat. (eg If I do XYZ, I will reward myself with pizza!)
11. Variety within a specific meal.
12. Variety across a week or two of meals.
The guidance would be to pick one of these metrics and try lowering it a bit. If that doesn't cause weight loss, either lower it some more or pick a different metric. Or you can pick a pre-made diet. The book says many work, but not for the reason the diet says.
Note there are some trends to make such a long list easier to remember:
1-4 are about easily digested calories.
5-8 are specific troublesome ingredients.
9-12 are based on what your conscious likes.
1-4 are likely the most important.
To comment on a few specifics in your post:
1. I'm guessing based on the weights you're in the ballpark of 6 feet tall (183cm). You should probably be eating 2000 to 2200ish calories. You should probably get back up to that while changing the foods you eat in order to lose weight. Seems counter-intuitive, but you should still lose fat.
When you are losing weight, your body fat will be subsidizing the calories your body needs to maintain health. If you are plateaued or have reached your forever weight, this level of calories wouldn't be sufficient for that.
2. Re exercise: If weightloss is already happening then exercise should accelerate the loss. If you aren't losing weight, then your body will find other ways to reduce calorie expenditures to compensate for the exercise. I wouldn't say stop, it's good for many reasons, but adding more won't cause weight loss if it isn't already happening.
3. Your cheat day on Saturdays is likely causing problems. For some people it isn't uncommon for the cheat day to get more indulgent over time. It might be worth coming up with a calorie count estimates for the last couple Saturdays (assuming you remember). Otherwise, it could be that as you get closer to your goal weight you strictness needs to increase.
I get that the cheat day provides relief. I would ask you if you think that if you ate 2000 calories daily, would the need for the cheat day still be there?
4. > But will doing this screw with my metabolism?
I think this book could be fairly summarized as "the kinds of foods you eat screw with your metabolism and to a greater degree than you think it could". Notice the focus is more on kinds of foods and less on calories. Eating more calories while keeping the kinds of foods the same would mean more reward and thus lower metabolism. But if you ate more but ate foods that did well on the above list of metrics, your metabolism can change as needed to make the equation calories_in - calories_out come out to the same value.
The book talks a lot about experiments that give us a range on how much our metabolism can shift. The range for an adult male can be between 800 and 7000 calories.
That's an awesome summary of the book. I find it better then Scotts review. It's on the point and actionable. Thanks a lot!
Any background why coffeeine is bad?
Eat gruel (kasha or oats or grits or barley or wheat) with boiled vegetables and a bit of nuts or beans or bacon or boiled egg or canned fish. Keep nothing else in the house and eat as much as you like. Make sure that you find the taste unappetizing or at least boring. Walk everywhere instead of driving all of the time.
That's antithetical to how I want to live my life. I think I'd sooner kill myself than eating that way. Eating the things I love, even sometimes, is probably my one great joy in life.
Drink only coffee or tea or water
I like Scott's review of that book, and it has influenced my thinking around diets to some degree.
> I get that the cheat day provides relief. I would ask you if you think that if you ate 2000 calories daily, would the need for the cheat day still be there?
That's a great question. I think yes, because I love decadent meals, and decadent desserts. Like, one single meal or dessert could probably be 2000 calories in and of itself. If I didn't have a cheat day, I'd never be able to fit in these things that I love.
So that is what, 4000 to 6000 calories on a Saturday? Or 3.5x to 5x what you you eat a typical day?
Based on that, I think from this perspective the only advice is "this is the problem, and you can't do it anymore".
From this book's perspective, these would be high food-reward days. Your brains target fat is getting shot up on Saturdays only to trend down the rest of the week. You've probably hit the body weight were that is in equilibrium.
I can't remember anything in the book that suggests you can do something to make the brain's target weight trend down any faster. So the only way to push to lower weights is to not let it shoot up so high every Saturday.
An alternative perspective is that there is no target fat level (or that it is a long-term regulation unaffected by an occasional feast), but there is a target metabolic rate - which you want to raise, in fact. This is the model used by the IF/fasting crowd, and people get good results with it - see my comment upthread.
Why not eat once per day on other days, he asked?
Ok. Given I think you are in this weekly cycle, let's look at a week.
If you eat 6000 on Saturdays then 1200 every other day, that averages to 1885 per day. If you cut that to 600 every other day, that drops it to 1370 per day.
I don't know how to convert the exercise into a calorie count. I do know the answer is always surprisingly low. Let's go with 250 for the days you do it as well. I think that is an overestimate.
Factoring in the exercise guestimate, then it 1885 becomes 1705 and 1370 becomes 1191. This is more or less what's available for baseline metabolism. That is still higher than 800, so your hypothalamus should more or less win the battle. Your weight would likely stay the same. It'd just get thriftier with other calorie expenditures throughout the week so your Saturday fat gains can last the week. Maybe you'd lose <5 pounds.
> That is still higher than 800, so your hypothalamus should more or less win the battle. Your weight would likely stay the same. It'd just get thriftier with other calorie expenditures throughout the week so your Saturday fat gains can last the week.
Can you explain this in greater depth?
Have you tried only eating bland food? One of the causes of obesity is the food industry has made foods that're super-tasty, so people eat more.
What does that matter if I'm controlling the calories pretty tightly?
It's true that calories are the most important variable for weight loss, but how you *feel* is one of the most important variables to figure out for compliance. My experience is that I feel way better restricting calories with "healthy" foods than "junk" foods.
Eat 500 calories of pasta, and I'll be "hangry" in a few hours. Eat 500 calories of chicken breast, carrots, and peas and I don't feel like I *need* to eat again.
I suspect what's really going on is that: (1) fiber has an impact on how fast stuff digests, so eating high-fiber carbs (fruits, veggies, whole grains) provides you with sustained energy, while low-fiber carbs (refined grains & sugars) give you a spike followed by a drought (2) protein is also slow to digest (3) sometimes hunger is caused by nutrient (including protein) deficiencies, and nutrient-dense foods--lean meat, fruits, veggies, and whole grains--prevent that.
Well if your not losing weight weighing 225 pounds eating 1200 calories a day you must be incorrectly counting calories or your cheat day must be like 5000 calories. Also no you wont gain weight by having your metabolism messed with humans are still subject to the laws of thermodynamics if your calories consumed are less than you burn, which would certainly be true at 1200 calories a day, you will lose weight.
I'm sure my cheat day is more than 5000 calories.
I'm often confused, because while I believe in CICO, because I believe in things like universal laws like thermodynamics and conservation of mass, there's a lot of people out there who don't believe in CICO. And it's not that they don't believe in laws of thermodynamics, it's that it's possible that the human body is more complicated that we expect. Is it possible that your body could adjust its base-rate metabolism, and burn off less energy than it would otherwise, if you starve yourself for a while? Maybe. I don't really know. I believe firmly that you couldn't gain more weight than you physically put into your body (conservation of mass as a hard-limit), but the calories that your body takes from each piece of food COULD in theory be different from person to person, as well as the calories your body expends while at rest.
CICO tracking is usually incomplete. We don't tend to track calories that are excreted, and there are diseases where people starve to death while eating because their body just squirts all the food right out the other end without doing anything useful to it. I think there are ways to track this, by burning everything we'd normally flush in the toilet, but, well, ewwwwwwww. Plus, calories can be extracted from food in more efficient or less efficient ways, and stored in more efficient or less efficient ways, and we don't tend to track how much body heat we put out either.
The model I've been operating on lately is that, roughly, the primary energy source is glucose (blood sugar). When that runs out, the secondary energy source is glycogen from (mostly) the liver. When those run out, usually after a day or two after the last calories in, the third step is ketosis, which normally makes energy by converting fat if we have it, but can also convert muscle if there's not enough fat or something goes wrong. The body can take a while to switch from the first two sources to ketosis, and that period SUCKS, with lots of fatigue. Once ketosis kicks in, though, the fatigue goes away, but there's generally a few weird telltales like an odd taste in the mouth in the morning, a slightly different smell, and a subtly altered mental state. From what I've heard, the more we transition to and from ketosis, the faster and easier it gets.
In this model, hunger is a separate thing, completely apart from the feeling of fatigue from not having enough energy available. And part of the discipline is, in theory, training ourselves to be hungry when we want to be, like a dog salivating when Pavlov rings his bell. It becomes one of those meditatey things, where we listen to our bodies and introspect and ask ourselves how much of what we're feeling is hunger, and how much is fatigue.
It sounds like the consensus is that your cheat day is the problem, but you are not willing to cut this out for motivational reasons. So there's a couple of possibilities open to you:
1) Keep your cheat day, but put *some* kind of constrains on it. It can't be a total hedonistic gorge-fest. Put a cap on the number of calories, and stick with it. Pick one that you can look at and not feel like some kind of pig-man hybrid.
2) Change your metabolic set-point. If you're on SSRIs, consider reducing the dosage. If your on stimulants, consider upping the dosage. I personally have the opposite problem and struggle to gain weight, and the most helpful in that regard for me was getting on SSRIs.
I wouldn't put a calorie cap on the cheat day, it takes all the fun out. I would add *fillers* in the cheat day - e.g. extra foods with low calories per unit volume, things sweetened with Splenda.
Why not do the 1 meal per day thing? No one's addressed that
Two reasons:
1. I could be wrong, but eating so minimally for 6 days and then *gorging* on one day seems... unhealthy
2. For all we (or you) know, you'd just start eating twice as much on your cheat days which would totally negate the effect
Or I would not start doing that. Truly, I don't think I would. I'm not sure I could eat more on a cheat day if I tried.
have you tried intermittent fasting? My friends are getting great results. Also, fasted cardio maybe?
Intermittent fasting is just eating 2 meals per day, which is what I said I do, above.
Well, some people call it that, but 16 hours isn't really much of a fast for a human body, so "time-restricted eating" is probably a better term. Afaik calling 16 hours a day intermittent fasting started when somebody was intelligent enough to extrapolate the data from mice directly to humans without scaling up. Intermittent fasting is more like not eating for a 2-3 days every month, or for a week every quarter. Not sure though which of those dee meant.
That is what I thought intermittent fasting was when I first heard of it, then I found out it was just a trendy term for not eating breakfast. But actually fasting for a day or so sounds like it could be interesting, and possibly be something else I could try.
you need 16 hours of uninterrupted fast, so 2 meals a day aren't necessarily IF if you space them more than 8 hours apart
One thing I find useful is intermittent fasting — sixteen hours between my last meal of the day and my first meal of the next day. I don't know if it has the claimed health benefits, but it's an effective way of barring myself from late night nibbling.
FWIW, fasting for 32 hours at a time is way more effective than fasting twice for 16 hours, and the benefits seem to scale up further. The hormonal environment continues to change on a scale of days.
Intermittent fasting is just eating 2 meals per day, which is what I said I do, above.
1200 calories a day isn't very much. At 225lbs, unless you have a serious metabolic disorder, your TDEE should be pretty far above that. Try a TDEE calculator to get an estimate.
There's likely either a flaw in the way you're counting calories (easily done), you're consuming far too much on your cheat days, or you have a serious metabolic disorder.
I'd start by checking each of these individually. Is absolutely *everything* that goes into your mouth included in that 1200 figure (drinks, etc.)? Are your measurements accurate? How many calories do you eat on a typical cheat day? If all of those came up nominal, then it might be worth seeing a doctor.
I'm sure that 1200 calories is accurate. I'm also sure that I eat a lot, way more than you'd expect on my cheat days. That's what I'd like to keep doing, it's the only way I've gotten it to work so far. The fact that I can eat whatever I want is the only thing that keeps me going through the week. I wouldn't be able to function if I knew I couldn't eat whatever I'm craving one day of the week.
Try tracking calories on your cheat days. Don't necessarily limit them at first, but measure them and write them down. That will tell you to what extent the cheat days are the problem as we suspect.
The other likely suspect is measurement errors. If you're eyeballing portions, or even measuring by count or volume, you might be underestimating your consumption by a substantial margin. I'd buy a kitchen scale if you don't already have one and weigh all of your ingredients and portions to make sure.
That said, from your comments it sounds like your 1200 calorie count probably is reasonably accurate, but you're going way overboard on the cheat days. If that's the case (and weighing everything and tracking calories on cheat days should confirm this), then part of the problem is probably that your 1200 calorie target is too aggressive. Based on your weight and reported activity level, your calorie expenditure should be somewhere between 2100-2500 calories/day. I'd consider bumping up your calorie target a bit, to something like 1500 calories/day so you don't feel so starved on non-cheat days so you don't need to go overboard so much on cheat days, then set some reasonable limit on cheat days, somewhere in the 2000-3000 calories range to start with and then titrate it up or down depending on whether or not your weight loss resumes.
Yeah, that's sensible advice. Also, consider allowing yourself a small treat on weekdays - have a cookie or something, fruit you like, something small so that you don't have to fit everything into the cheat day. That way you're not so desperate and you are less likely to overdo it because you don't have to confine yourself to the one day.
See below, but I don't think that's how I work. I don't eat a lot on cheat days because I feel desperate. It's that I know that I can eat whatever I want on cheat days so that gives me the willpower to do what I want on other days.
The cheat days are the problem, though. When I was doing one of those "lose weight in seven days" diet, the diet was "bowl of soup per day" then eat what you like on the weekend.
Even though I didn't go crazy on the weekend, I still ended up "all the weight lost during the week came back on". You'll have to start restricting yourself somehow or in some way on the cheat day - either cut down carbs, or don't have sweet treats, or portion size. But otherwise, your body is "starve all week, pig out on Saturday, pack that away as fat stores because we'll be starving all week".
And the depressing truth is that people *do* have different metabolisms, so some people can get away with an "eat what you like cheat day" as they can burn off the extra, but some people have the metabolism of "winter is coming, starvation is at hand, squirrel away the resources" and so they have to watch every damn bite they put in their mouth.
Well, I'm not willing to mess with the cheat day, because if I do, everything will collapse. I know, because I've been trying to lose weight for 15 years, that if I don't know I can eat whatever I want, that I will not have the willpower to keep up with the diet. I want to work within the constraints of the cheat day to find something that works. That's why, if I'm seeing I'm maintaining with 2 meals per day + cheat day, maybe cutting down to 1 meal per day + cheat day will allow me to lose.
But if you cut down to one meal per day then you will feel starved and even more desperate and over-do it on the cheat day.
We're not saying "don't have a cheat day", we're saying "have a look at what you're doing, if you're overdoing it ease back on the cheat day and bump up calorie intake on the other days".
I don't think so, that's not the way I work. I already believe i max out on what I can eat in a day on my cheat day. If I restrict more during the week, I don't think I can go any higher if I tried. I DON'T want to ease back on the cheat day, I'm looking for other ways to do it. I emphasize this is the ONLY thing that's ever worked for me. I tried a decade of trying to moderately eat a little bit throughout the week to make sure I don't feel deprived. Doesn't work, and I don't lose weight. The only thing that works is restricting myself almost all days, and making sure I have a day that I can eat whatever I want.
What if you count your calories on your cheat days too? I could see that being psychologically damaging to your routine, but if you can manage it, it would be useful.
If you're eating 8,200 calories on your cheat day then you're really just averaging 2200 a day through the week and it makes sense you're not losing weight.
Another note: there is a middle ground of eating whatever you want on Saturdays, but finding ways to make that less caloric than it would be otherwise. For example, eat carrots intermittently on Saturday so you're less hungry when you binge (but still binge on whatever). Or eating whatever you want but not drinking calories. Seems as though the cheating is a psychological release valve for you and it's always possible to reframe what counts as cheating.
> I could see that being psychologically damaging to your routine
Bingo. As I said before, I don't want to mess with the cheat days. No one is answering my initial question about one meal per day.
A question for any fellow non-native English speakers here:
Most things I read and interact with online are in English. But my native language is not English (it's German) and I'm also not living in an English-speaking country. So when I find myself talking about certain topics with friends (e.g. economics, anything on ACX, etc), I often struggle to come up with words and good expressions. The first thing that pops into my mind is often in English and I then have to sort of translate it into German on the fly. This takes time and effort, making such conversations not very fluent.
Anybody have a similar experience? How do you deal with it?
I used to work in English while living in Germany and the very rare occasions when somebody wanted a well-written German summary of whatever I was working on were quite painful.
Since some time ago I've been living in a pretty German-speaking environment, and currently I'm mostly annoyed my English (which is not my native language obviously) has become much worse.
Back to your question: yes, I still sometimes have the English word in mind first. Depending on the situation I just inject the English word, I name the English word and ask: 'how do you say that in German?', or sometimes I take time to explain the concept.
The first one I use mostly with people who are bilingual themselves - and probably to be honest whom I subconsciously perceive to be at least more or less quick thinking and/or good with language - they usually know the issue, and I've never encountered problems. Though maybe just nobody told me.
The second one I use mostly for situations when I know there is a good German expression, but for some reasons the English word sticks to my mind. And in groups I perceive as being mostly/only German-speaking with only ‘school-level’ of English.
The third one I use for concepts where the German equivalence is annoying, not precise, not really meaning the same thing … I guess in practice, depending on whom I’m speaking to, when explaining a concept, I will name both the nice English and a somewhat inadequate German term as part of the explanation, and then in further conversation I often alternate – sticking mostly with the language of the moment, while also indicating once and a while that there is this foreign term that fits better. Depending on the situation as above.
Plus: Find more occasions to discuss those topics in German and it will get easier? Especially when you take time to translate/ think about the German words.
Nice breakdown!
That's kinda my current plan, just do it more often, and each time something comes up also look it up later in detail and see if I can come up with some good translation.
Same here, I just switch to English. It annoys some people, but not very many (mostly just my parents).
Like, you completely switch to English? I've done that very few times with German speaking friends before, but feels very very strange.
But as soon as there is a non-German speaker around it feels fine again. Kinda interesting phenomenon, come to think of it.
We don't deal with it at all, just liberally introduce words in any language comprehensible to the listener.
This is necessary for all technical topics, and is as old as civilization - consider lawyers and doctors in love with their Latin. A century or two ago it was common for an educated person to use French expressions when speaking another language, etc.
I get the impression that people here are much less restrained about introducing a bunch of English terms than me. I feel people look at me a bit strange when I do that (too much). But maybe if I do it enough they'll eventually get used to it
Well, I guess to some extent you put the effort on them 'to adapt to a foreign word' rather than taking on the effort yourself 'of finding a term others are familiar with/in the local language'. Having said that, I think everybody is free to do this or that, and to speak in a way he or she feels comfortable with.
I feel your pain. Even basic concepts - "salient" / "bias" - do not translate easily. :( I plan to do a rationalist glossary on my German blog about rationalism. Still stuck at the first post, though. (And did not put my room in order, nor read 12 rules.) - 1 .Solution : Communicate only with people who also read ACX SSC LW - squid 314. :/ No need to ever leave the screen. 2. Mach es wie die Profis: der (or: das) Bias pl.: die Bias - who cares about the lay-people! - If you tell your first-life-friends about Greg Cochran / FDA / Open borders/ singularity / Judith Harris / psilocybin / SDB / CB you will be free of friends soon enough anyways.
yes, the glossary sounds great!
Oh yes, salient and bias are pretty central examples, and there are many more.
Please write that glossary :D
Haha, very funny, free of friends...
I just use the English word. Fortunately the languages I speak are not too strict about that. Though some are. Even in English it's pretty common to adopt foreign words. You just do it casually and most people can tell it's a foreign word. If they don't know what the word is they ask and you explain.
It upsets some language purists but... eh.
Zweck-WG is a loanword now because I say so.
You joke but this is kind of how it works.
I have the same experience as a French speaker, but since everyone I talk to speak English as well, I use the English terms, and they don't seem to mind. You could learn the German translations of these words, but I find it simpler to just define the English words to them.
I don't think there's anything you can do other than forcing yourself to read more German. The brain adapts to the language you use
That is a normal phenomenon of bilingualism. Domain-specific ability, cross-linguistic interference and code switching are some key words to look into if you are interested.
Fun observation regarding belingualism or multi-lingualism: here in the city live a lot of families with kids where both parents are highly educated, speak multiple different languages, and both mother and father talk in their native language (different to the native local language) with the kids so they naturally learn their parents languages. Turns out most of these kids understand 2 or 3 or 4 or even 5 of the languages they hear daily. But they all speak only the local dialect of the local native language - the language of their peers in kindergarten and school.
Thanks for the pointers! I'll have a look
Yep, I do that as well. At least with people who's English is good enough I can just use the English term. Doesn't really work with my parents though.
But it has its limits when there are just too many terms to explain. I guess inferential distance also plays a role then. It's easier with people who are familiar with the topic.
You should post open threads on sunday as so few websites do updates releases on sunday. on Sunday we're all looking for something to do/read and can't find anything. Where as Friday is full of 'annoucements people were trying to hide' and we read alot of those. And we work! :)
And, to be embarrassingly honest: it was only a few weeks ago that I realized that the "meetup and open thread" headers said "open thread" at all. I bailed the instant I saw the word "meetup".
HA! Fair point. I only kind of glance at the meet up posts myself (ain't nobody does meet up in the SOUTH) - so i'm not sure i realized they said open thread at the end either.
Seeking game recommendations, what are good games to play while listening to podcasts?
I enjoy podcasts a lot but I feel antsy if I'm doing nothing but listening to them. They're ideal for projects that require say physical work and visual attention, but no auditory and limited cognitive demands i.e., cleaning the apartment. This is distinct from say exercising on my stationary bike, where there are essentially no visual, auditory OR cognitive demands and in that case I'll watch a video on Youtube or an episode of Clone Wars or something.
So I've found single player strategy games generally occupy a sweet spot for me, usually the important information is visual and any key audio queues like an attack warning I'll hear over the podcast. Also there's generally not a lot of story to pay attention to. Single player is just nice because it's easy to save and walk away when ever the episode I'm listening to is done. I'd be open to other genres too so long as they can fit those requirements. Some examples in no particular order:
Dungeon of the Endless
Battletech
Stellaris
They are Billions
Endless Space 2
Endless Legend
Slay the Spire
Fate of the World
Civilization
XCOM 2
The Riftbreaker
Darkest Dungeon
FTL
Master of Orion
Master of Magic
Heroes of Might and Magic
I just use a speed controller browser extension to listen to the podcast at the maximum speed I can tolerate... have you tried that?
"Remnants of the Precursors" is a modernization of the original Master of Orion from 1993. It's got shiny new graphics and behind-the-scenes engine improvements, and is open source and Java-based, so it runs almost anywhere. It's in final beta testing now, and ought to have a 1.0 release before Christmas. If you want a low-brainpower experience, stick with the default BaseAI - the other AIs can be horrifyingly good, without having to cheat at all.
This one wins, I still play the original MoO and I'm loving this. Hopefully they'll make remake Master of Magic next. Thanks!
I'm glad you like it! I find it hard to go back to the original, now...
I've never played Master of Magic, but it's sitting on my GOG shelf for a rainy day... :-)
If you enjoy Slay the Spire I'll strongly recommend Monster Train.
Look like some great suggestions to check out, thanks all!
Total War is great for that.
You might have to pause on a really rough battle, though.
I've been really into Valheim recently and it has the sweet spot of being occupying but not so brain intensive that you can't listen to podcasts. It's actually one of the very few things I can do beside simple puzzles like sudoku/picross and still listen to podcasts since I usually like to focus on what I'm listening to.
BTD6 (I prefer 5) or BMC. Audio no issue. As with CK2 (free to play at steam). - Though podcast etc. are lost on me if not just car-driving or "work" (night's watch). How to immerse on A and focus on completely different B? XCOM + podcast? Nope. CK3 grinding? Will try.
I highly recommend Tom Francis’ *Heat Signature*, I used to listen to lots of podcasts and audiobooks while playing. Single player pausable action game, very rewarding once you learn the systems and nothing drags attention away from audio, you can play it just fine muted.
Dwarf Fortress maybe?
An ACX/greater rat-o-sphere sucession fort would truly be something to behold.
I'm a big fan of Slipways - it looks like a 4X game, but it's really a graph puzzle where you're trying to draw connections (trade-routes) between planets which each produce and consume different resources. The basics are solid and then it has a set of factions and technologies and modifiers that shake up the game quite a bit.
You can play the PICO-8 version here: https://krajzeg.itch.io/slipways which serves as a pretty good demo (though it's a bit hard to decipher at first)
Definitely Rimworld - it's management rather than strategy, but it hits a lot of the same buttons at harder difficulties. It's also really amazing at generating compelling emergent narratives. I usually play it while listening to audiobooks- while it does occasionally have narrative text to read, that's rare enough that it doesn't distract much.
Into The Breach is also worth a try. It doesn't look like much- a small indie strategy game with tiny maps and simple graphics- but the gameplay is some of the most perfectly polished I've ever seen. Every moment when playing the game is an interesting puzzle/strategic decision, with absolutely nothing feeling trivial or like padding. It's won a lot of awards, and deservedly so.
You might also consider puzzle/factory games like Factorio, Satisfactory, or the Zachtronics games- those feel a lot like programming to me, but the lack of text means that you can listen to podcasts and audiobooks at the same time.
Suggestions, also in no particular order.
Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden is fantastic if you're looking for creative take on the XCOM2-like.
Fantasy General 2 is great too if you're a fan of CIV-5 style strategic military command without any of that pesky base building.
Wargroove - Spiritual successor to Advanced Wars
Renouned Explorers: International Society is a fantastic strategy game with "rogue-like" elements
Frozen Synapse - old but neat. Simultaneous-Turn based strategy (you plan actions that will play over the next time interval, and your opponent does the same)
A few things in that general "don't need to listen" category that I've liked: Atom Zombie Smasher, Rimworld, Factorio, Frostpunk, Heat Signature.
Second for Factorio. I'm kind of surprised it wasn't already on the original list.
But be warned: it has the nickname Cracktorio for a reason.
Anyone else have limited inherent ability to do intellectual or white collar office work for long periods of time? Obviously there are lots of uninteresting cliches about 'hard work!' out there, especially in American society- but there seems to be very little discussion of a natural range of ability for extended cognitive work. It's unremarkable to note that differing amounts of work capacity in the physical world (cardio/athleticism), and intelligence/IQ is a bit of a more risque topic but still widely discussed. So- why not note that some people can just sit down, focus, and are more productive over long stretches of intellectual work than others?
I seem to have fairly limited capacity for it, and my work capacity has not increased over years of doing fairly similar work- unlike the workout example, I haven't become 'more conditioned', I guess for lack of a better term. If I push myself past my limits, I just find my concentration & output is even more reduced the next day, suggesting some type of cognitive limit. How's everyone else's intellectual work capacity/ability to concentrate for long stretches? Any psychological research on this topic?
Yes, my brain often gets exhausted after 5-6 hours of solid code-writing. Some tasks such as debugging, meetings and writing documentation are less taxing.
You might check out the book 'Deep Work' by Cal Newport.
I also recommend this
I'd really want to know how this works as well.
I think a lot of it is about both motivation and variety (cf. Scott's posts on motivation and willpower), and also heavily dependent on the circadian rhythm. I seem to have windows where cognitive work is really easy, and windows where I either shouldn't bother, or I can but it cannot be actual work - taxing strategy games work just fine.
Don't underestimate motivation/lack of. People can do things they are interested in for hours/days/years while things they aren't interested feel boring/exhausting after 2 minutes. Our kids typically complain about the incredible hard and exhausting hike the first 50 meters. But when my wife starts inventing stories they just walk 10 km and listen for hours without any complaint.
One if my most important personal insight is this: I should do and concentrate on as many things in my life that I'm fully interested in as possible. Then I will be better in these things then many other people and I will thrive. School is often the opposite. Kids are forced to deal with abstract, uninteresting, boring things for many years. Wasted years of their life time.
If I would be you I would try to figure out where my real talents and interests are laying. Physical work like construction, gardening or a craft? Leading groups of hikers in the mountains? Skiing advicer, working in a Zoo, a Circus, doing YouTube videos, competitive gaming, what else. There are so many things which can make you happy.
I forgot to mention: it took 40 years finding out how I can be awake and concentrated most of the days. I now drink 1 liter of french press coffee (20g ground coffee with coffeeine + 20g without) with lot of cow milk. That mostly brings me awake and concentrated through the day. I assume this is similar like so called 'bullet proof coffee's recipes mixing coffee with high fat. I now recognize more and more people and co-workers very tired, moaning a lot every day. So hard seeing that.
Mine is very similar to yours. Its variability doesn't seem dependent upon any factors I've been able to detect.
For me, this ability widely depends on the task itself. An extreme example would be playing addictive video games, which are basically optimized to place people in flow states. That hardly counts as "white collar office work", but I think it still bears mentioning.
There are some work tasks that I can focus on and completely loose track of time while doing (programming), and there are others where I never seem to be able to spend more than one hour or two per day, 20 or 30 minutes at a time, and leave me exhausted (math research). Administrative tasks are boring but I seem to deal with them better than many people I know.
My understanding is that there is a sweet spot of difficulty: if a task is too hard then my motivation drops, and if it is too easy then I get bored and my mind starts to wander. Perhaps you are only asking "fixing the relative difficulty level, how hard is it for you to focus?", and in that case I suppose some people are better than others and that's that. But it might be interesting, from a personal perspective, to try to hack the difficulty of your tasks in order to make them more appealing.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
Yes, the book I just mentioned refers to the state as being "in the flow". I only get it in while in a problem-solving domain like data analysis or coding.
Reading books, my mind tends to drift, depends on the material. Some of that is constructive - I'm trying to comprehend something, maybe it takes off to something a little more tangential. Other times are stupid, I want to check the phone for email or something.
It varies widely depend on the following in decreasing order of importance
* getting a full night's sleep the night before.
* having a great playlist of non-vocal music
* getting regular rewards or little successes in the work (luck)
* having multiple really large computer monitors
I used to really like instrumental music, but lately I find it just becomes annoying to me.
I think I was listening to this, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4kHxtiuML0 which was ironic because after an hour or two I was ready to shove my own head through the monitor
Yes. I have ADHD so this is entirely curable with meds, but I definitely feel that I can "exhaust" my brain in a way that can carry over even into the next day. It's worsened by task switching (i.e. focusing on ONE thing is less taxing than trying to focus on MANY things) and by stress.
Anyone have advice for using stimulants when you're at risk of addiction/compulsive redosing? I am diagnosed ADHD and Ritalin helped me lots for several years before I spiraled into addiction and quit for a while. Now I don't get nearly as much done as I did with it but when I take it I'm prone to compulsive redosing and general unproductivity. I'd like to use it again to get that productivity again, any advice or is this just impossible?
Caffeine can be alright for self-medicating, and less prone to abuse. I've tried black market Ritalin (getting it officially is a huge PITA here) and I found it way too intense for everyday use, but strong coffee hits the spot just fine.
I would look into non-pharmaceutical interventions and try to find lifestyle changes (sleep hygiene matters more than you think it does for focus) and workflow changes (making lists, regular external accountability, breaking up tasks etc) that can take the edges off the unproductivity. Risking addiction is likely a much greater drag on your productivity than ADHD.
If you are going back to the medication, maybe getting extended release versions would help (but if you're at high risk of abusing them, I would really just try to find some other intervention).
Yes definitely very good advice. I've done all of this after my detox, I'm luckily now pretty high functioning without meds but it just can never quite replicate that occasional 24h sprint of genius that stimulants could get out of me if that makes sense. I don't want to be on them all the time I just want those spurts of genius back.
You could try non-stimulant ADHD meds?
Such as? Not familiar with non-stimulant ones
https://lmgtfy.app/?q=non+stimulant+adhd+meds
But seriously, I found four: blood pressure medications clonidine and guanfacine, and norepinephrine uptake inhibitors atomoxitine (Straterra) and viloxazine (Qelbree).
Yeah sorry I didn't mean for you to do the googling for me I thought you had some specific personal experiences or recommendations in mind. Thanks either way!
The solution that can actually work with something like this is to not be in control of your own dosing - like have your spouse/roommate/parent/etc go to pick up the prescription with you, hide it extremely well or in a safe, and hand you your dose each time. But that requires having someone like that available in your life, which many don't.
Something that kind of worked for me with ADHD amphetamine meds was only taking them once or twice a month and getting the worst of my piled up work done in a 24-hour burst. I found a lot less tolerance and less behavioral compulsion this way, but I don't know if you'd be able to keep to that plan if they were in the house, so be cautious - not medical advice etc.
I also take my ADHD meds only occasionally. I have a wildly productive day or two when I need it, stay at a normal level of productivity the rest of the time. No tolerance ever builds up and I save a lot of money on the damn expensive pills.
Thanks this is good advice. I don't have anyone like that but it's a good direction to think about
A while back a survey came out asking whether people thought the 2020 presidential election had been stolen. Results varied by party affiliation, but the shocker on my end was that something in excess of 30% of Democrats thought it had been stolen. In attempting to construct a theory of mind for this cohort, I come up with a few ideas:
1) Perhaps they consume conservative news/commentary sources to some extent and find them convincing on this point.
2) Perhaps they consume conspiratorial left-wing sources, and these sources toy with the idea that the election was stolen (alienated berniecrats?)
3) Perhaps they find the results of 2020 just don't pass the sniff test, either personally or in their social milieu.
To those here who are in the cohort in question (Democrat likely voter, think the 2020 presidential election was stolen): are any of these theories correct for you? If not, what accounts for your belief?
Assuming we're talking about this poll
https://mobile.twitter.com/Rasmussen_Poll/status/1329741803025801217
you need to take a look at the actual wording of the question. It's not the vague "Was the election stolen?" but the very specific "How likely is it that Democrats stole votes or destroyed pro-Trump ballots in several states to ensure that Biden would win?"
That's a much weaker claim, it would only require that at least two ballots in two different states were stolen/destroyed, not that the net number of ballots stolen/destroyed was sufficient to flip the election.
Given that the possibility existed for stealing/destroying ballots (it's trivially easy to raid mailboxes in heavily-other-party areas either before or after they are filled out) it would be shocking to me if it didn't happen to some extent, in several states and on both sides. On the other hand, given the scale required I'm doubtful that it was sufficient to flip the election.
I wonder how they classified people as "Democrats". If it just means "people who voted for a Democrat in 2020", some of those people will be only weakly active politically and lacking in tribal loyalty, so that when the "stop the steal" campaign comes along, they can still be persuaded by it. But I wouldn't think that kind of person answers "very likely", and also, it's surprising there would be many people left without tribal loyalty.
Is it just me or does Rasmussen offer all the most Republican-friendly poll results?
"to ensure that Biden would win?" implies much more fraud than "two ballots".
That's a *very* close reading of the question, so while you're technically correct I expect the vast majority of people to read that question as "Biden win because the Dems cheated?".
Be that as it may I think a full statement of the survey question is an essential starting point for discussion of the survey results.
I agree. A slightly different formulation of the question can give you starkly different results. Good pollsters would be aware of that.
Far be it from me to discourage pedantry. I just don't think it changes much in this case.
Taboo your words: what does "stolen" mean here? Is your definition the same as the one people are using?
I'd also bring attention to the fact that:
- democrats placing a lot of stock in Russia gate would have called 2016 a stolen election
- republicans believing Obama was a kenyan would have called 2012 and 2008 a stolen election
- democrats looking at Florida would have called 2000 a stolen election.
When, in the last 6 presidential elections over a 20 year period, there's been a large group of electors accusing the winning side of stealing the win for 5 of those, a possible theory of mind might be a reduction of the higher prior on the possibility of electoral shenanigans and a general attitude of acceptance of said shenanigans as part of the procedure. Which, by the way, is kind of a terrifying possibility when you consider how little trust in elections that would mean generic citizens have.
Meh. I would say past a certain age most sensible people have fairly low faith in elections already, and it's OK. Not so much because they'll be stolen (= "not represent the true will of 50% of the voters + 1") but because voters are idiots, and also whimsical, and it's perfectly possible for an election to represent *in the moment of the election* 50% of the voters + 1 -- but produce results that a large majority of voters find regrettable, either immediately or not too much longer. So does it really matter if an election genuinely represents 50% + 1, or maybe 49% because of some cheating or other? You know, not really. If things are that close, then either result is probably equally good (or more likely equally bad).
You can certainly judge elections on the quality of the outcome, where you measure quality by some standard other than "represents the will of The People," and that's a very reasonable ethical or aesthetic point of view -- but then you have to accept that "represents the will of The People" is *not* a reliable proxy for "produces a good outcome."
The point of elections is generally, I think, to prevent *gross* deviations from the will of The People. It's to prevent things like "me and five other generals and 100,000 troops are going to abrogate the clearly and strongly expressed will of 50 million citizens." That's the kind of thing that can happen, and has happened, with depressing regularity elsewhere in the world, and in history, and which having an election forestalls. But does it guarantee (1) good outcomes, or at least (2) outcomes that reliably represent the considered and stable wishes of 50% + 1 of the voters? Doubtful.
This is also my basic thought process on the question.
Thanks for the answer, and thanks for confirming my suspicion of incorrect wording in your answer above
I messed up between reduction of the threshold an hightened prior...
Notice you aren't shocked by the number of Republicans who thought it had been stolen; I suggest examining the absence of surprise there, to make sense of the surprise in the case of the Democrats.
You'd expect the side who lost the election to be more amenable to the idea that it was stolen. Whatever proportion of the electorate think 2000 or 2016 was stolen, I would assume it is much higher among Democrats.
I think it also matters very much what the leaders are saying. To keep from being topical in the open thread I'll hark back to 2000. In that year, the narrative from the Democrats was that the (Republican) Supreme Court stopped the vote count that would have made Al Gore president. There was never any narrative about a "steal", but there was a lot of sentiment that George Bush was "selected, not elected", and when the primaries were just getting started in 2004, before it was clear he wouldn't run, you would see "Re-elect Al Gore" stickers. By contrast, after 2004 there was some conspiracy talk about Diebold and Ohio, but no backing from leadership. That talk remained very fringe and was never taken seriously, whereas I believe to this day that if all the votes in Florida had been counted, Al Gore would have been president and the 21st century would have unfolded very differently. I don't know how that notion polls now or would poll then, but I'd bet the numbers are similar to the "steal" numbers, just partisan-flipped.
Why would the number of Republicans shock me? Someone believing the election was stolen would have to get that idea somewhere, and there are basically three places it could come from: their own head, their social circle, or their media. Conservative media is replete with claims the election was stolen, so no mystery exists on that side. Mainstream left media is not given to making that claim, so 30% requires explanation.
Is it possible in general you're mistaking the (loud) voice of each party's "base" for the opinion of everybody who votes that way? Take me, for example. I don't identify with either party, and both of their bases repel me. I have a hard time listening to either major party candidate pontificating on the tube without wanting to throw something through the glass. But of course, necessarily, I vote for one party or the other each election. So if you surveyed me, I think you'd find a number of places in which my opinions differed "surprisingly" from those of the party for which I last voted. It would not surprise me if no fewer than 25-30% of those who vote for Party X in Election Y are similarly situated -- voting for the party faute de mieux but diverging substantially from any number of party dogmas.
So you're claiming it's personal reflection / social milieu effects?
Not sure I understand what you mean by that. I'm just saying I don't find it surprising that 30% of people who identify as Democrats, register as them, or vote for them agree with some dogma on the rabid right. Because I don't assume that everyone who votes for a party (or registers with them) subscribes to the relatively few thought bites you hear the base yammer loudly about. It's perfectly possible to consistently vote Democratic and yet be super pro-police and love guns, it's perfectly possible to consistently vote Republican and be a big environmentalist, drive a Prius, and be passionate about gay marriage. I actually know people in both categories myself. Humans are hugely varied, and the simplistic dogmas of the party base can hardly encompass 100 million voters of all ages, shapes, sizes, and thoughts, so there's a whole lot of people who make up their minds for reasons *other than* the top-line slogans of the parties.
You're missing 4.) It's Rasmussen and their polling is always *hugely* biased toward right-wing views.
https://mobile.twitter.com/Rasmussen_Poll/status/1329741803025801217/photo/1
I wouldn't underestimate the possibility of: they are low-news consuming/low-culture-war-engaging people who aren't even aware of the 'stolen election' narrative from the right and didn't know that's what the interviewer was asking about, and they were just expressing that they think elections are always 'stolen' because of gerrymandering and the electoral college being unrepresentative, or something something.
Depends precisely how the question was asked of course.
Scott has a post about 30% of believing in the North Dakota explosion, or something like that. It was an entirely manufactured for the poll.
And here it is
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/28/bush-did-north-dakota/
30% is way too high for that. You can certainly discount maybe 5% of respondents to a poll as trolls, but 30% would be extraordinary.
I think the real answer is that 30% just generally think elections are sketchy/suspect generally and would always say elections are stolen. They may not even remember who won the 2020 election (hard to imagine, but much less hard to imagine for people who are probably very disengaged from politics), and some of them might be confusing it with the 2016 election. Even being asked the question prompts a "yes" response; to a lot of people, the mere fact that a pollster is asking the question legitimizes the possibility of elections having been stolen.
How the poll was made? I have seen seriously treated polls where large part of votes was clear trolling.
(also, for decent part of polls I also lie more or less, for various reasons - so I am quite suspicious about polls in general)
This would be my first guess
1. Is there a "philosophical" question you think people in your field (or other demographic signifier) would deviate dramatically from the norm on? I wrote a little bit about how economics defect more on cooperation games here: https://ravik.substack.com/p/does-learning-economics-make-you , which was visible in the 2020 SSC results. I have a secret hope that train conductors act differently on the trolley problem.
2. If your partner was angry with you, would you rather take one hard slap to the face or 2 hours of silent treatment? (relevant thread: https://twitter.com/sentientist/status/1442352181655445506, but only click after deciding)
Former train conductor here. You can gap the points on a facing point switch and derail the trolley. Depending on the speed of the trolley it will either fall off the rail harmlessly or kill everyone.
My actual answer is probably in line with the norm; line the switch for the one person over the group, unless that one person is someone close to me and the group is strangers.
Now that I think about it, derailing the train could be an interesting additional option since it's adding a random outcome. So you could kill on person, five people, or a random number of people from 0-6. Most people would probably go with the third option since it has the best potential outcome, and it removes some of your agency in the final result. They probably wouldn't give much thought to the fact that you'll likely end up killing more than one person, and option 1 is still better from a purely logical point of view.
1 -- I think that people like me who have a background in atomic-scale quantum chemistry type simulations have a different perspective on "are we living in a simulation" type problems. I think we are less likely to assume that future computational power will allow accurate universe simulations to be casually run just for shits and giggles.
(I'm not saying it's impossible, with a bunch of Dyson spheres made of pure quantum computronium plus some clever methods that approximate away all the tricky bits when nobody is looking, I'm just saying that I wouldn't assume it's easy.)
On 2 - I think this is one of those situations where I might prefer a hard slap to the face over 2 hours of silent treatment, controlling for level of anger & self control, BUT a slap to the face would be such a strong sign of out of control anger that it's almost impossible for me to imagine a situation where those were legitimately equivalent options.
> a slap to the face would be such a strong sign of out of control anger that it's almost impossible for me to imagine a situation where those were legitimately equivalent options.
Me too, and I feel like my inability to imagine this is salient enough to ruin the thought experiment for me. Still, FWIW, I would prefer two hours of silent treatment. Two hours is almost nothing, and it would allow all involved parties to take a breath and gain some perspective.
Your point about two hours being almost nothing raises another interesting wrinkle - there's a huge difference between "a defined two hours of silent treatment" and "being 119 minutes into silent treatment but not know when it'll end".
I definitely think the uncertainty of how long it's going to go on would be a substantial part of the stress. That in turn means that someone who regularly or semi-regularly receives the silent treatment might be less bothered, because they have a sense for how long it will last.
I think if we got 100 people to write a short play on the scenario they’re envisioning, we’d get very different scenarios (or realize the scenarios are unrealistic)
In isolation, yes I’d prefer a slap than for my partner to be angry at me for 2 more hours.
In reality, yes, a slap is a sign of a bad partner. Also silent treatment can be healthy like you said (ie taking a walk to blow off steam) or ill-intentioned (ie “you made me feel bad so I’ll make you feel bad by ignoring you”).
The specifics here is ignored a lot in surveys (or interpretations of surveys, the surveyor may be aware)
It's kind of derpy, but yeah, I didn't realize the meetup posts were also the open threads until you'd posted several of them.
Dang, I just never clicked on them if they weren't near me, didn't know until today.
On average people share 50% of their DNA with their siblings and parents, 25% with their grandparents and aunts/uncles, and 12.5% with their cousins. There is, however, a distribution around those averages. Anybody knows what those distributions look like??
It's only 50% by nuclear chromosome number, by the way. If you go by gene count or DNA mass you get a bit more from mom:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osWuWjbeO-Y
It's normalish, SD ~ 3.9%: https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.0020041 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3070763/ (The LD affects it but not *that* much is what I take away from their modeling.)
Thanks. This is super useful!
People always share 50% of their DNA with their parents: you get one chromosome from each parent. (Ok, I ignore random mutation and chromosomal abnormalities. Sue me.) Given this, it becomes basic statistics to calculate the distribution of how much DNA is shared between siblings. But I'm too tired to do it in my head.
> Ok, I ignore random mutation and chromosomal abnormalities.
You're missing something else: recombination and crossover render children with different combinations of alleles from either parent. One of the drivers of genetic and phenotypic diversity.
Hmmm well we now can use genomics to show that in fact the degree to which siblings diverge from statistical assumptions about genetic relatedness, which is not perfectly predictably statistically. Razib Khan:
"Whereas past geneticists had to assume that full-siblings were exactly 50% related, today genomics allows a precise quantification of the level of relatedness. I know, for instance, that I share 52.49% of my DNA with one brother, 50.26% with another, and 4.57% with my first-cousin once-removed (the expectation in the last case is 6.25%)."
https://unherd.com/2021/07/do-genes-determine-intelligence/
I think it's more complicated than basic statistics, because when genes are close together on the chromosome they're not fully independent.
Is dyslexia an actual thing? As in: is it fundamentally distinct from low intelligence? Small sample size, but all self-described dyslexics I've met have not been the brightest of the bunch.
I am in theory around 130 IQ based on tests/SAT score, I am dysgraphic to a pretty sever degree, which is supposed to be a fairly related condition. Of course maybe 130 IQ means I am low intelligence by your standards so this might add nothing.
I have a friend who's extremely intelligent and told me he was dyslexic (sounded mild, he mentioned it in the context of how hard it was to read the silmarillion, so grain of salt I guess?). He's since become a professor at a top-few university.
My father is intelligent (he has a master's degree for whatever that's worth) but misreads and mispronounces words all the time. He was never diagnosed with Dyslexia, but I would be surprised if he didn't have it
I know at least one highly intelligent dyslexic person. Senior software engineer at my company, one of those SQL-specialist guru types who do things with query languages that non-specialists never realized were possible. His dyslexia is also very noticeable in professional interactions (we frequently go over code on screen-share, and he makes frequent small-scale comprehension and typography errors, but never any conceptual errors).
All of this is still consistent with him just being good with software and bad with words, of course. I'm very sure that he is intelligent in the ways that matter for software engineering, but have no reason to think he has particularly high verbal intelligence.
My sister is dyslexic. She's smart enough to have a four year degree despite real issues reading. She's gotten to the point that she can read pretty much anything, but it took a lot of hard work to get there and she still reads slowly enough to make college more difficult.
One of the interesting things she describes about her thought process is how she retains facts. When she's learning something, she needs a tight cluster of related facts and ideas to hang new ones on, or she tends to lose them. However, once she knows something, she is very good at quickly recalling and applying it. I, on the other hand, have all kinds of facts and ideas rolling around in my head, to the point that people remark on it, but sometimes have trouble recalling and applying the information when I need it.
I graduated with straight A's from MIT, and am mildly dyslexic.
For me, dyslexia manifested as 1.) Doing a loooot of remedial spelling classes in middle/high school and 2.) I'm now a programmer. I will *consistently* swap letters in variable names (hello -> helol) and not notice no matter how many times I look at them until someone points it out in code review.
Also, I pretty consistently mess up names of book characters. I don't have a problem reading, though, which is, I think, usually the real disability part for people with more severe dyslexia.
So yeah, mild, but Officially Diagnosed, and while it's definitely noticeable, it doesn't really cause me problems other than the above.
For coding, does IDE code completion (like tab-completing variable names) help fix the problem for you? It would at least make your own code self-coherent and run; it’s just weird for other people to reuse your code.
Oh yeah, totally -- my code works/is internally consistent, but every other code review or so I'll have it pointed out that "oops, you probably meant 'result', not 'reslut' or something to that effect, and I'll have to go through with find-replacento fix it
It is an actual thing. It's quite separate from intelligence. I had a brother who was dyslexic, and he was quite intelligent. He did have trouble with reasoning in certain contexts. I've got a very minor dyslexia, and for me that shows up mainly in tending to get my "if test conditions" reversed. I consider myself quite intelligent also. I had a different brother who also had mild dyslexia, and was quite intelligent. I don't know the details of his thought processes, but he tended to make better decisions than the one with severe dyslexia. Interestingly neither of my sisters seem to have this problem. This is clearly well short of proof, but it suggests that dyslexia may be sex linked. (I've heard this claimed before, but here I'm only reporting on what I have actually observed.)
OTOH, one doesn't know how often dyslexia is incorrectly claimed. It may be quite common, or it may be rare. It does come in degrees of seriousness.
All that said, dyslexia does not impact thinking a much as many other problems, e.g. motivated reasoning, which some people don't seem to recognize.
Samuel Delany (a very smart science fiction author) says he's dyslexic.
I don't think I've ever met a dyslexic. Maybe it's rare, and dumb people misdiagnose themselves?
I think I could have worded this better.
I'm taking it as a given that dyslexia is real, and is not the same thing as low intelligence. But I'm also taking it as a given Pedro's assessment of the self-described dyslexics he's met.
This could be explained if genuine dyslexics are rare enough that Pedro hasn't met any, and the self-described dyslexics he's met have misdiagnosed themselves due to low intelligence.
Being able to perceive the advantage of being known as dyslexic rather than dumb signals a certain degree of canniness or social intelligence. Of the truly unintelligent people I’ve known, most seemed to prefer to be accepted as they are, rather than pass as smart guys and expose themselves to new challenges.
My best friend is dyslexic and it's absolutely a real thing, and she's also very smart. She double majored in chemistry and economics at a very competitive college, and has an MD- she's an emergency medicine doctor. She made a point of never asking for extra time on tests, since she felt like she had to hack it on the same terms as everyone else if she was going to be a doctor.
Dyslexia has degrees of severity, and how it affects your life is itself affected by what other mental strengths and weaknesses you might have. My friend's younger brother is also dyslexic (it's hereditary), but the coaching in reading that worked well for his sister wasn't as effective for him. He's fairly good with numbers, though, so he found a career that doesn't require much reading and runs a gym franchise.
It's worth mentioning that my friend and her brother are kids of upper-middle class parents who are themselves very smart, and this probably helped them get diagnosed early. If anything, dyslexia is probably underdiagnosed, since it's subtle and takes time. I think the reverse of what you said is probably true: dyslexics might have trouble reading and writing as kids, so they and others conclude that it's because they are stupid, and they never get out from under that.
My former boss was dyslexic in a big way, graduated low in his class from Williams College and University of Virginia School of Medicine, barely got into the cardiac surgery training program at Mass General. He went on to become one of the world’s most innovative cardiac surgeons, chair the nations #1 ranked hospital cardiac surgery department, earn 35 patents for medical devices, and serve for more than a decade as CEO of a top five-ranked American hospital. Having worked with him, I can testify to the extent of his dyslexia, and the brilliance of his lifelong workarounds.
I'm seeking self-help "brain hacks" to deal with intrusive memories. I find myself frequently remembering incidents from the past that I'd sooner forget. Mostly, these memories involve embarrassing (though basically inconsequential) things I did. But added to the mix are memories of difficult times in my life (like when I was arrested and fired from my job), as well as news stories that involve animal abuse. My brain has a huge library of these things and pulls down random volumes throughout the day. Anybody here have experience in combatting this kind of thing?
I have done this by aggressively focusing on a pure, acceptable, unrelated memory to push out the unacceptable one. (Eventually the memory faded, but it was not a quick process.)
At other times, by envisioning having hit a rewind / jump-back button in my mind, 'undoing' the thought and attempting to start again without it (this sometimes takes repeated attempts).
I’m also prone to this…some embarrassing thing I did decades ago randomly pops into my head, and I cringe like it happened yesterday.
I’ve had some success with Neuro Linguistic Programming techniques, where I reframe the visual aspects of the memory to make it less intense e.g.
- Dissociate the memory…imagine it as something you witnessed in the 3rd person, rather than experienced in the 1st person
- Picture it as a black and white movie you are watching from the projection booth
- Visually “push the memory away” the second it enters you mind. Imagine it moving away from you, and fading out
You may have to do these reframing exercises a few time in a row, but I find they can substantially reduce the emotional impact.
I've found pranayama breath work really helpful.
According to Huberman the brain prunes some of these memories in later stage sleep. So if you've sleep issues they might be worth tackling.
I have the same issue and I sleep around 8 hours a day, so I doubt that.
Wouldn't claim anything to be a panacea. But there's lots of research like this https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5103800/.
The way I usually dealt with the embarrassing things was to remind myself that I'm the only one remembering them anyway, so I'm just beating myself up over things that other people can't even remember, and we'd just laugh it off if we ever reminisced about how bad their memory made me feel.
On the other hand, sometimes I think about embarrassing things that I saw someone else do years ago. So maybe they're reassuring themselves that nobody remembers, I'm having a little chuckle to myself about it.
Cognitive strategies are useless against intrusive memories, at least for me. I still feel bad about embarassing moments even though all the other people involved died.
Hey, I just want to say that I deal with this also. I've tried ACT therapy, which was helpful for a time. I'm meeting with a psychiatrist for the first time today to explore pharmacological options. If you want to exchange contact info I will let you know what I find helpful.
Sure, contact me at emarsalla at gmail. Thank you!
It sounds slightly related to 'trauma' memories coming up. I know a couple of newer methods; anecdotically very effective in reducing those, and mostly poorly studied yet. Don't know if you're interested in those.
Sure, I'm interested.
Saw your mail adress, will send you an e-mail mail as well.
Not an expert but I believe fighting intrusive thoughts makes them worse. My understanding is that way to deal with them is exposure and acceptance. Check out “A Liberated Mind.”
https://denovo.substack.com/p/the-third-year-slump
(It's all I had the energy to write recently.)
What is in vitro gametogenesis and why does the world need it?
Why are there are no discussions of what an ideal election system should look like?
As a computer professional who has written tens of thousands of lines of code and designed several successful complex systems, I believe that all the software in voting systems should be open source in C running under Linux.
Paper ballots should be used so a permanent record is created. Voters should be able to see their ballot scanned and review the result of the scan immediately.
Scans of mailed ballots could be provided by using public/private key encrypted access over the internet.
The cost of scanners has plummeted and quality has soared. Voting machines could incorporate scanners in each booth which would be fed the paper ballot, display the result, print a confirmation ticket, and save the ballot in a secure container once the voter approved the scan.
Voting system suppliers should compete on things like reliability, cost, support and training provided, level of repair parts and devices and ability to provide quick maintenance service. Their systems should all use the same open source code.
Processors running the systems shouldn’t have the hardware to support any type of communication except direct physical connection, no Wi-Fi or Bluetooth or other similar hardware should be allowed. Open source memory image tests also should be provided to poll watchers who could run the test on machines at will. Audit trails of the types long used in banking systems could easily provide almost unbreakable security of results.
Go into a booth or sit at your kitchen table and mark a paper ballot. Watch it being scanned and check the results or go online and use the private key provided with your ballot to see how it was recorded, with the software providing online access also open source.
This article provides good information on the weaknesses of the current systems. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2020/11/02/computer-experts-sound-warnings-safety-americas-voting-machines/6087174002/
Direct Recording Electronic voting systems, or DREs, should be replaced by scanners at all polling places, which would scan ballots immediately and let the voter see the results.
Total transparency is the only solution to the sort of behavior we saw in the 2020 election. Voters should be able to see their ballot processed, see the votes counted, and know that armies of geeks are looking at everything in the systems being used.
> Why are there are no discussions of what an ideal election system should look like?
At first I thought you meant "electoral system" rather than "ballot management technology". I do wish people discussed the first one more than the second one. So here's my standard suggestion in that regard: https://medium.com/big-picture/simple-direct-representation-cd43becd9837
As a software developer, my feeling about election technology is that computers should be kept out of it. What computer system (1) can't be hacked and (2) enables a secret ballot, to ensure votes cannot be reliably bought or punished?
C is a disaster and pretty much guarentees that the code will be buggy and insecure. Any "computer professional" who suggests writing election software in C should be disbarred.
Suppose we're in a room with 21 people total, and we want to elect someone to be Supreme Leader. Suppose two nominees are the only serious contenders. Everyone gets a preprinted slip of paper with two names, circles the name of the person they want, puts it in a box. A while later, someone pulls out all the slips and looks at them and announces the winner. Do you believe them?
Suppose the counter - we'll name him Cown - talked about how great he thought Alice was during the campaign period. What's to stop Cown from lying and declaring Alice won? Obviously, we'd find someone who's a Bob fan (call her Donna) and get her to count the slips as well. What if Cown switched the boxes, though? 14 Alice, 7 Bob. Donna has to agree; if not, the ballots get counted by two more, and eventually it's impossible for people to just insist they're really 9 Alice, 12 Bob or whatever.
Suppose we put special marks on the ballots so that Donna can recognize one of the ballots as hers. But that's no good; if Cown has enough resources to switch boxes, it's probably easy for him to make sure Donna's ballot made it into the rigged box. Ahh, we say, but we'll let *anyone* check for their ballot in the counted stack.
This kinda sorta works for 21 people. When you're up to 21 million, though, it's a whole different story. For starters, we can't all do this in one room; we'll be spread over miles, and no one's going to drive for hours to find their ballot in the counted pile. An encrypted confirm won't work either; any script kiddie could write whatever PKI system could verify you, right down to whatever challenge-response feature is necessary to assure a voter that the election website is the official election website - then call a subroutine that goes ahead and lies that your vote was counted. Or, there's a process that scans your ballot at the polling place, gives you some nice digitally signed artifact certifying your vote, ships your paper ballot to the central vault of counted votes... and increments the electronic counter for Alice anyway. How would you ever know?
At the end of the day, every plan for trusted voting I've ever seen (that gave actual details) boiled down to being utterly gameable given the amount of resources any political party would have if they had the donors the Republican or Democratic Party currently has. And given the amount of power in that office, the motivation to boot. (Well, the Presidency, anyway.)
The only system I can see actually working would require the analog of that room of 21 people, where you can look each one of them in the eye and know that, yes, 14 of us really do prefer Alice over Bob. In other words, no secret ballot.
Otherwise, I don't think there's a chance. You'll always have a makeable case for there having been some fraud on the part of the winning side. The only way out of that pickle is to make that office less powerful, to the point that not enough people link that office to the Fate of the Entire World, and therefore freak out over fraud.
Your first thought experiment would be handled by the ballot box not leaving the room and the counting being publicly verified by the two candidates or allies as Cown counts them. This is a fairly common system.
For certain. And we could augment it with enough features (box is brought in rather than seen already bolted to a suspiciously large pedestal; counting platform erected in the round; etc.) to clear out the chance for the easiest forms of "stage magic".
Surely, however, you see how this can't scale to an electorate of millions? And I didn't even get into the weaknesses of a mail-in system.
Well if we are moving onto millions, why the original thought experiment.
scaling up ballot boxes and securing the chain of custody is what we have already. I’m not sure why you don’t think that which works, doesn’t work. No system is perfect but that’s the most transparent and secure system.
Mail-in less so.
I’m not sure what you are arguing for here, although it’s clear what you are arguing against. That no system is perfect doesn’t mean that some systems aren’t better.
(I think my comment gotten eaten; trying again)
The original thought experiment was to establish what I think the OP ultimately wants with an "ideal system"; namely, that the person elected, was elected by the rules as publicly understood, rather than by privately known scheming. I think it's important to establish this, because qualities such as "scalable ballot box implementations" and "secured chains of custody" and "paper trails" and "transparency" will need to ground out as things which make it either impossible to elect someone through fraud, or at least so difficult that no one will bother. We must take care not to offer these terms as if they're magic talismans that automatically ensure elections are unstealable.
"Scaling up ballot boxes" doesn't work because those ballot boxes are now no longer within line of sight of the people who are concerned about election fraud. Secure chain of custody doesn't work, insofar as it only secures part of that chain of custody, and doesn't secure the part between ballots being distributed to voters and their precincts which receive those ballots, if the ballots are mailed in - which turns out to be one of the main legs people are talking about.
The fact that a system happens to be the most transparent and secure system so far, doesn't mean it is ideal, as the OP is asking. Neither is the fact that one system is better than another.
Well the op of this sub thread started with a fairly convoluted thought experiment, with only 21 people in a room. Of course with 21 people a ballot is easy to verify. He didn’t really mention an ideal system.
Many countries have insignificant mail ballots. There’s a problem there, perhaps. However the existing ballot box, and manual counting system is probably as transparent and accurate as it’s ever going to be, perhaps there are some tweaks to do regarding chain of custody but even that seems pretty robust.
What’s certain is that manual counting beats electronic counting.
There's tons of discussion about this kind of thing.
Also: You... want to open source one of the most desirable hacking targets in a given country? Do you want to open source military software too? And did you listen to any of the theories about Dominion. They were completely illiterate from a computer science point of view ("too many variables!").
The only way to ensure security, is to expose a system to attack.
Security though obscurity should NOT be your base goal. If a system is secure only as long as people don't have access to the code, it was never secure to begin with.
With retained paper ballot records, hacking becomes nearly a non-issue (at least hacking of the actual vote). I'd prefer open source than can be improved (and, ideally, for something like that, the government would be actively paying people to contribute to the project) and errors caught as long as there is the safety backstop (the paper ballot records) to the current closed source opaque system, although either of them with the paper records is good enough for me. Electronic voting, no matter the origin of the code or systems, without physical paper backups, is completely unacceptable to me.
"armies of geeks are looking at everything in the systems being used"
And if we manage to bribe, corrupt, or simply appeal to "you believe in Niceness And Ice-Cream For All, don't you? then help Candidate Jones of the Free Ice-Cream Party out!" amongst our army of geeks?
There is no perfect system because humans are not perfect, and elections are one of the things that are very motivating for "we need to make sure the *right* person wins!"
"Why are there are no discussions of what an ideal election system should look like?"
There aren't?? I think there are... there just isn't any incentive to adopt them.
"Total transparency is the only solution to the sort of behavior we saw in the 2020 election."
Maybe a little, but probably not much. If your strategy is to pound the table, you are going to do that no matter how good the system is.
There are efforts underway for this sort of thing, they just haven't yet seemed to catch on. See, e.g. https://www.voting.works/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_systems
My concern would be on auditing these systems, most of the volunteer poll-workers I've seen are not the youngest folk. I'd be surprised if they were as adept as at running an audit as a crew of well compensated IT consultants.
That said I don't disagree that total transparency is very desirable in how elections are run, I just don't see as we're quite there yet where it can be implemented perfectly.
Also, obligatory XKCD comic: https://xkcd.com/2030/
This system removes the need for poll workers to know much of anything, that is the idea of scanners as part of each polling station. After the scan is approved by the voter the result is untouched by human hands, and its transmission is tracked at each downstream event.
C is a great language for hiding evil code in plain sight; see http://underhanded-c.org/
There was even a special underhanded C contest for vote counting: https://graphics.stanford.edu/~danielh//vote/vote.html
So is any language, however with C there is a body of public information aimed at keeping open source truly open. Because of its long life and widespread use IMO it is the best choice for an open source election system.
Showing me open source software on GitHub tells me nothing about what’s actually on any box in any counting centre.
That is why poll watchers can do memory tests at will using open source code for the tests, the fobs also tested when provided to the watchers.
The only alternative to open source is to totally trust the equipment providers. Do you have another suggestion?
Yeh, paper, pen and manual counting. I replied already on that.
See but this seems to contradict your earlier reply to my posts, 'This system removes the need for poll workers to know much of anything'
You don't need to know much to let someone plug a fob in and let it execute. Checksums on the fob would allow the code in the system to detect phony fobs. The idea is to move the level of coordination needed for successful fraudulent access to the system to a much higher level than can normally be achieved successfully. Open source is the only way to achieve this.
The best election system is pen and paper with a watertight chain of custody for the ballot boxes, or mailed in ballots, counted accurately and visibly in front of tallymen.
Removable scanners could be used bit people are always suspect of software.
Agree with the pen and paper; disagree on the mail ballots.
Since we've just agreed on the need for a watertight chain of custody for ballots, I'm not sure how we could justify consigning a bunch of them to the mail system, which involves ballots sitting unattended in public places (potentially) overnight, and also doesn't allow any non-easily-faked form of identity verification.
Physical presence plus photo ID plus physical paper ballots plus watertight chain of custody plus many pairs of eyes on the counting process seems like the way to go.
You are probably right. It would have to be kept for emigrant voters and some people who are incapacitated.
+1 I would never trust electronic voting, especially in cases where everyone knows that large part runs outdated, insecure, beyond end-of-life software.
+1 I don't understand why any country would trust electronic voting
going back to SSC style comments would help get me talking
Might help to say specifically what differences are bothering you.
but seriously, it will not help. There have been longer discussions before about the new system, so it has already been well documented. There is even a plugin that goes part of the way to restoring the old system. But ACX is on substack for the foreseeable future, so it is not going to change, thus it will not help to state the specific differences.
https://twitter.com/paraschopra/status/954578255880876032?lang=en
Let me say, I appreciate Scott Alexander's content, though I was not aware of SSC before the NY Times article, so I don't know how the commenting features worked.
This place would benefit from some forum-style features, like post history and on-site reply notifications would be good (I do get the latter from emails). OTOH, I get this may not align with the priorities and commercial goals of Substack.
Edit: yeah, I checked it (SSC) out, and it's more readable with the layout.
I've definitely looked at announcement threads a while after they were posted and noticed "oh, hey, that was technically an open thread I could have posted in too"; I think headlining open threads as such probably makes a big difference.
I normally only have time on Sunday and Open Threads tend to "die" after a day or so.
This is my reasoning. If you don't start a thread within the first 24 or so hours of a new open post, then it's near the bottom and gets very few reads. You can still reply to other people for a few days, but between Friday and Monday you've missed a lot of potential discussion. I don't tend to read or post on the weekends, so Friday discussions are nearing dead by the time I find them.
Don't open threads default to reverse chronological order?
They do for me, but I immediately revert them to chronological. If I'm not getting to an OT until after a couple hundred comments have already been made, the newest ones are likely to go unreplied and the interesting discussions will have originated from earlier root comments.
Maybe that's a setting available somehow. When I look at posts after I refresh the page, I see the same posts on top and new posts on the bottom. As I would expect if that were the default, the posts on the bottom have very few responses, while those on the top have a lot.
I wrote about the notion of "spiritual but not religious":
1.
The term “spiritual but not religious” may be a new one, a category of the PEW report, but the substance of it is old.
When Luther criticized the Church authorities and advocated consulting one’s own conscience, he was initiating a process that would culminate in “spiritual but not religious.” For Spirit is that which we all have access to, while “religious” is code for something external, imposed from without.
The distinction between an external shell and an internal freedom is older even than Luther. We find this concept in Stoicism, in the work of Epictetus, who counseled that we focus on that which is in our control and suspend judgment around that which is not in our control. Religion, in this taxonomy, is that which lies outside my will; spirituality is that which I can do. I can’t make it rain, but I can measure the calories I burn on my Peloton.
2.
Paul, the intellectual architect of Christianity, distinguished—in his polemic against rabbinic law—between the dead letter of the law and its living spirit. You could argue that Christianity itself was a movement of the spiritual, but not religious, at least in relationship to Judaism. To be spiritual but not religious is to be a follower of Paul, no matter one’s religious identity.
When Paul says that through faith there will be “neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female” (Galatians 3:8), he introduces the modern notion of the liberal individual subject, stripped of association, uprooted from tribe. Ironically, those who today assert Christianity as an axis of resistance against liberalism fail to appreciate the ways in which Christianity itself made liberalism possible.
Yet as history has shown, and as Dostoevsky dramatized well in his parable of the “Grand Inquisitor,” the posture of pure dissidence cannot be sustained. Eventually the spiritual, but not religious will want to rule, will want to transmit values to their children, will want to stop the “spiritual and religious” from corrupting them, and so they will have to adopt a certain infrastructure that makes them indistinguishable from all that they criticize. “Spiritual but not religious”—as a matter of substance—is destined to become a Church. The tribe of those who have no tribe—those who reject tribalism—is remarkably homogenous. Cosmopolitans are at home in TSA pre-check no less than folksy localists are at home at the farmer’s market. And with the ascendance of Zoom and remote work, cosmopolitans can now enjoy both worlds, being “of them, but not in them.”
All are “welcome” in the Church as long as one accepts the view that at bottom we are all the same through faith in Jesus. Modern liberalism took out the Jesus part and replaced it with a more amorphous God, but kept the first part. The world is divided between those who don’t see difference and those that do.
3.
The alternative to the Church of the “Spiritual but not religious” is a posture of continuous critique, permanent counter-culture. We find this mode in the figures of dissident mystics, who stand apart from the mainstream, in bohemian artists who sacrifice a life of comfort for their art, in vagabond intellectuals, like Walter Benjamin, in the Timothy Leary acolytes who think that a life of tripping is preferable to a life of 9-5. But the tally of misfit souls would hardly move the sociologist’s needle.
Today, “spiritual but not religious” simply refers to anyone who feels alienated from a single tradition or community. The confluence of globalization, individualism, and tech guarantee that most people, most of the time, but especially elites, will feel alienated from their communities and heritages of origin. The surprise is not that there are so many “spiritual but not religious” but that there are still so many who are “spiritual and religious.” “Spiritual but not religious” is more or less code for “individualist in search of peak experience.”
Both the experience junky and the experience hobbyist are “spiritual, but not religious.” They differ in degree, not kind.
4.
Martin Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim presents the Hasidic masters as “spiritual, but not religious.” Today, it is a classic amongst in liberal seminaries, but is unknown and unread by actual Hasidim.
5.
The reigning assumptions of the “spiritual but not religious” are:
individual experience is fundamental and social life secondary.
the spiritual content of all religions is the same.
spiritual experience can be found without the scaffolding of tradition.
While Paul’s version of spiritual but not religious involved the evisceration of group identity and the enshrinement of a new group united around faith in Christ, the Buddhist version is “form is emptiness.” Underlying all cultural forms is a shared nothingness. Less abstractly, the core experience of the regular meditator is, paradoxically, “ego-lessness.”
Ego-lessness—the realization that all matters of identity are just stories—fits well with liberalism, which is one reason why pop Buddhism is popular in the West. An ideology of “open borders” that is anti-nationalist and sees the notion of protectionism as antique and irrational also accords well with the insight that, really, we are all One.
Spiritual but not religious means: boundaried by the belief that boundaries between self and other are illusory and ultimately bad. As Patrick Deneen argues in Why Liberalism Failed? The left and the right are both classically liberal. The left is socially liberal (my body, my choice) while the right is economically liberal (free markets). Immigration is a good example of how left and right are more alike than not, because it’s an issue on which they’ve traded places. The old left was anti-immigration, seeing it as a way to bring down domestic wages. The new left is pro-immigration because it’s xenophobic to think there’s some national or cultural essence worth protecting (at least when it comes to the majority culture; minority cultures are, meanwhile, inherently worthy). The more, the merrier (as long as the more don’t live in my neighborhood).
6.
Individualism, in practice, is alive and well. And most invocations of collectivity are a form of role-playing, a costume assumed by the bored subject tired of itself. But, rhetorically and culturally tribalism is making a comeback. It’s now considered naive (and prejudiced) to relate to someone simply as an individual, and not as a member of a group. I suspect that this turn or re-turn to identity politics will have major, disruptive consequences for those who claim the mantle of “spiritual, but not religious.” Where once it was trendy to evoke Lutheran dissent against the powers that be, now the Lutheran posture is seen by many—on the left and the right—as a convenient ideology of the powerful elite. Left liberals, it is said, invoke conscience to undermine “solidarity,” while right liberals, it is said, invoke it to undermine “realpolitik.”
In the future, the Pew Report may come to report on those who are “Religious, but not spiritual.”
Yet in the realm of both religion and politics, the sundering of religious from spiritual, the claim that one is primary, the one sided belief that experience is a-social or that the social is all that matters, is confused.
A liberalism that ignores the group is destined to fail, but an anti-liberalism that ignores the individual is likewise doomed. To solve this problem, we must be religious, and therefore spiritual; spiritual, and therefore religious.
https://whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/spiritual-but-not-religious
obligations frame the web of a person's conscience, and adherence belongs to the category of spiritual. those who classify themselves as 'spiritual but not religious' see the 'spirit' of certain externalities: of touching a loved one, of the Bible and its commandments, of poetry and music, etc. intuition and experiences both transcend and cannot exist without reference points -- the great paradox.
My experience in the late 20th and early 21st century is that "spiritual but not religious" is what people say when they want all the positive reinforcement of religion ("God loves you! No matter what!") but none of the obligations and negative reinforcement ("But in order to keep His love you gotta not murder people, steal their stuff, or tell lies.")
It's the "diet" where all you eat is food you like, and as much as you like -- but you get to say you're "on a diet." It's playing a sport where everyone gets a participation trophy, or taking a class where you get told all kinds of intriguing things in an entertaining way, and are praised for asking questions, whether sensible or not, and aren't expected to run any risk of embarassment by being asked to answer questions on the subject. So...a model that fits in very well with our hedonistic Zeitgeist.
I feel like "Spiritual but not religious" falls into the same category as "Patriotic, not nationalistic".
It's a label you apply to yourself to reassure everyone that you have all the aspects that they approve of and none of the aspects that they disapprove of, and that they don't need to ask any follow-up questions.
"For Spirit is that which we all have access to, while “religious” is code for something external, imposed from without."
My view on this is the opposite: religion is natural to us. Do we have little habits, little rituals we construct? Say, getting up at a particular hour when it's quiet, and we have our favourite tea, and a particular breakfast, and read the news? Or we go for a cycle? Or any of the other habits we engage in, the trails we cut out.
That's religion, and we all do it. But "spiritual" is something more difficult, it's the 'plain living and high thinking' way of life, it's becoming educated enough, refined enough, tasteful enough, to extract something "spiritual" from experiences. And the trouble with "spiritual but not religious" is that it too often ends up in the "Eat, Pray, Love" kind of tourism, the cherry-picking of this bit from here and that bit from there like a magpie with shiny trinkets.
Religion is something we can share with our neighbours, even if we don't particularly like them. Spiritual is something for Me Me Me, my own little particular set of things and practices and beliefs and unique twist on how I approach things.
My twin baby cousins suddenly began smacking each other, but they have never been exposed to any violence.
I know it is a sample size of two, but are we innately violent?
My theory is yes, because all the brutish stuff is from the ancient part of our brains. The pre-frontal cortex responsible for why we don't beat each other up immediately when triggered is much newer and less developed. That makes it is easy for us to fall into our primitive ways.
You can "lose" your cool (and return to a more primitive nature of attacking someone), but you never will suddenly becoming peaceful and reasonable.
Life is innatively violent. You can (if you have a strong constitution) see this by checking out some of the Kruger National Park videos that e.g. show a crocodile tearing the face off a zebra and beginning to eat the animal while it's still quite alive. The idea that an organism (or at least an animal of our size and nature) can get through an entire lifetime without doing violence to *anything* and *anyone* is a purely human construct. And maybe it can be done, which says something amazing about human beings, or maybe most of us just outsource the violence -- we march for peace and good jobs in sneakers made with slave labor, and consuming hamburgers supplied by animals raised and killed in appalling ways. Or we countenance the ravaging of the environment to supply our outsize (relative to other species) individual needs, for gasoline or iPhones or a pair of shoes for each day of the week, and because we don't directly see the violence done to other species, or ecological systems, we can say we are 100% pacific with an easy conscience.
I'm not being a smartass, either: I really don't know the answer, I don't know if it *is* possible to go cradle to grave with absolutely zero violence either done yourself or done on your behalf and willingly countenanced. It kind of feels like the answer is no, though, and I think that poses one of the biggest challenges to philosophy and religion.
Yeah, we're definitely innately violent, for certain definitions of 'innately' and 'violent'.
Like, most young animals innately want to do play behaviors that prepare them for adulthood, and adult humans in the evolutionary environment committed a lot of violence to survive, both against prey animals and against each other.
But, even beyond that: we're innately motivated to explore our physical and social environment, which includes trying to make things happen. If you're moving your limbs around a lot and paying attention to other people's reactions a lot because those are both innately rewarding, at some point you hit someone and see that got a big reaction, and that's something that you just innately want to explore more to understand how your environment works and how you can manipulate it, alongside a hundred other similar interactions you want to test out.
Sometimes people saying "we are innately X" imply "and therefore we are *not* innately Y". But this is usually a false dilemma; people have biological foundations for many kinds of behavior, often things we consider contradictory. We are innately violent *and* innately peaceful; there is no contradiction in that, we have biological circuits for both.
We are capable of many different things, the question is which conditions elicit which reactions. Some conditions predictably lead to certain reactions. Sometimes the reaction depends on individual's history (their habits, beliefs, social status, etc.). Sometimes there is a biological difference between individuals, setting someone's threshold for certain response higher or lower. Often all of this together.
Aren't young animals often engaging in something that is between play and fighting? Though 'smacking' sounds more like just hitting each other without warning, which seems different.
> but you never will suddenly becoming peaceful and reasonable.
Some not-to-big perceived threat or relevant surprise/ new situation sometimes makes people cool down and focus quite reasonable on the necessary in an instant. Distracting effectively from fight, drama or acting out that was going on before.
Just anecdotes though.
Obviously yes?
Boys will casually beat the shit out of each other until late adolescence, at which point the fights start to carry more risk of serious injury and become socially sanctioned, so they gradually abandon that in favor of acting civilized.
This is cultural. I hardly ever saw a fight when I was growing up, and I only remember actually being in one fight.
Interesting. Where did you grow up?
Georgia. (The one in the U.S.) First eight years in a small town that I don't remember well, and after that a suburb of Atlanta full of military officers and airline pilots.
Even more interesting. This is not the answer I expected. So is this Georgian/Atlantic/ suburbian/small town/ US ... culture, which you think is the base here for 'hardly ever a fight'?
Actually why only boys?
I mean I can confirm the observation that it's rather boys than girls, but what is causing that?
Just the usual sex assymetry I expect: males have far more to gain and less to lose evolutionarily by fighting each other.
https://twitter.com/RokoMijic/status/1457012559819706371
Yeah, I thought 'evolution' too, but how is this 'implemented'? How do the boys 'know'? The usual answer seems to be testosteron, but doesn't this only become relevant during adolescence? We're talking about small kids here.
In other words: If not the hormone, what biological difference is it? Or none?
I refrain from a broader comment on the twitter pic, it's a strawmen. But let's keep with the topic in question here, I understand that was the reason you posted it.
The twitter pic roughly captures it though.
Girls seem to be averse to pain and risk of injury in a way that's completely foreign to boys, and it aligns with evolutionary pressures.
To my knowlegde women are more able to endure pain than men - makes sense, cause pregnancy + birth?
The pic is at least a strawman for 'feminism' and 'equality', but this is a non-politics open thread ... and I also prefer to stay to with original question.
Some of it I do think is socialisation; if small boys do start play-fighting it gets excused as "boys will be boys" and may even be encouraged, but small girls get separated and told "girls don't do that" and so on.
Yeah, I think so, too. I remember a short article about a study where they found that adults change their tone of voice when talking to a six-weeks-old baby depending on whether the baby is male or female. Also, adults behaved somewhat insecure when approaching a six-weeks-old baby in a stroller as long as they didn't know the gender of the baby. ... Never looked at the original paper and can't judge the quality of the study. I was surprised at the time, but overall it fits my observations.
Even with socialization as one factor, there might still be some biological factors in addition. Or vice versa.
> but are we innately violent?
I suspect answer is yes
> they have never been exposed to any violence.
This is likely not true. Note that initial smack may be fully accidental by one of them.
And it is quite likely they actually have seen something.
My toddler decided one day it was fun to bite us. This is before we allowed TV, and she'd been isolated from other kids due to the pandemic. I think there's some combination of exploratory "what can my body do?" and a testing limits/power dynamic thing going on. I agree that humans are probably innately violent, but in the case of small children a good question might be is this even "violence" in a meaningful sense. It's probably not entirely bad, evolutionarily speaking, to have an instinct to test out different kinds of physical contact and see what happens. But I wouldn't class a bite as "violence" until after the kid had some understanding of physical harm.
Is there a way to set the clock back so that "new reply" can be recovered? Threads get reset when the tab is refreshed.
And, annoyingly, "see more replies for this thread" refreshes the tab.
A fun and important concept in physics and engineering (especially electrical engineering) is impedance matching. I'll give a physical example first, since an electrical one probably wouldn't be as intuitive.
Slide a hockey puck along the ice so that it hits another stationary hockey puck dead on. The puck you're sliding is of standard size, but the one you hit can be nonstandard: either smaller or larger than the one you're sliding. If your goal is to transfer as much energy as possible into the puck you're targeting, then you should match the size of the target puck to be the same as the projectile puck. If you make the target puck much larger, then the projectile puck will just bounce off of it, without the target puck moving much. If you make the target puck much smaller, then it will be moving quickly (nearly twice the speed that you initially launched the projectile puck with) but the small mass means that it won't carry much energy. If you make it exactly the same size, though, then all the energy will be transferred, leaving the projectile puck stationary on the ice.
A similar thing happens in an electrical circuit. Real batteries aren't perfect. They have a small amount of internal resistance in them, that eats up energy whenever current is flowing. Let's say you're designing a flashlight and you want it to be as bright as possible. That means you want to get the maximum power out of the battery possible. It's possible to create light bulbs with various resistances by changing the length and thickness of the filament. Creating a very high resistance light bulb means very little current will flow, and so the light won't be very bright. Creating a low resistance light bulb means a lot of current will flow, but it will flow very easily without heating up the filament very much. Most of the resistance in the circuit will be due to the battery, and so most of the energy will be used to heat the battery up (not desirable!). The choice with highest power output is to select the resistance of the bulb to be the same as the internal resistance of the battery. (In that case, half the power output is going to the light bulb, and half is still being wasted in heating up the battery. The least "wasteful" option is to have a very high resistance bulb. Then, almost no energy will be wasted. But the cost is that the power is low, so it takes a long time for all that energy to dribble out, making for a dim but long lasting flashlight.)
This is also related to why sound doesn't transfer between air and water very well. (Why one can't hear whales singing while sitting on the beach.) Sound trying to go from air into water just bounces off the surface mostly. The water is too heavy and hard to compress. Sound trying to go from water into air also mostly bounces. Even with a very high energy underwater sound wave, there isn't that much compression. The individual molecules only oscillate over a very short distance. So when the wave reaches the surface, they aren't pushing on the air molecules with the kind of fast large motions that would be required to make an equally high-energy sound wave in air.
I'd heard the term before, but never saw such a great intuitive explanation. Thanks!
Oh cool! I've heard of this before but this was the first really intuitive explanation I've seen. Thanks!
TIL. At least, the flashlight and sound examples.
I gather this also applies in accoustics - it's why trumpets and similar instruments have a flared bell at the end, to try to get the energy in the vibrating column of air inside the instrument to meet the outside air in a way that maximises transfer, so as to make the loudest note possible.
Yes. (the bell also acts as a bit of a high-pass filter)
That is a fun concept. Can you think of an example where it would be present in human behaviour?
Could a product launch fail, or be ineffective, becuase its impedance was much hire or lower than the market?
Could a growing political movement transfer all of its energy into to small a group who move so quickly public opinion doesn't keep up and the movement fizzles out.
I guess the reverse would be a movement where the goals were too ambitious and progress became too small to notice
Not sure if you're looking for more comments about Hungary, but a piece of interesting trivia: their current second-largest party, Jobbik, started off as a neo-Nazi party (though they have been trying very hard to moderate since 2015), with a paramilitary wing during the 2000s and consistent protests at Jewish events. However, their leader since 2020, Peter Jakab, is a guy with substantial Jewish heritage and (by Hungarian standards) an identifiably Jewish last name. (Jakab has been an activist for the party since their violent-paramilitary days, in 2007, which is a hell of an example of cognitive dissonance -- though under his control the party has expelled most of its truly far-right members and he even tacitly endorsed left-wing pro-Europe candidate Klara Dobrev in the multi-party opposition-to-Orban leadership primary in 2021, which is a *hell* of a pivot. Dobrev is the wife of very unpopular former socialist PM Ferenc Gyurcsany, who you covered, and she lost the primary to right-wing candidate Peter Marki-Zay, independent mayor of the small town of...[deep breath]...Hodmezovasarhely. Marki-Zay is not associated with any specific anti-Orbanist party, whether socialist, liberal, fascist, satirical -- Hungary having had some scarily strong results for satirical parties in the past -- or anything else. Probably for the best considering how loathed Gyurcsany and most of the specific anti-Orbanist parties remain, by all accounts.)
Another interesting fact about foreign right-wing movements taking weird inspiration from Hungary: it's a much older phenomenon than the 2010s. There is a well-known Italian right-wing song which is all about the glory of the (failed) 1956 revolution in Hungary:
Performance with English subtitles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cGNnFj_jvw
Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avanti_ragazzi_di_Buda
Also, Hungary has had two important Revolutions (in 1848 and 1956). The two were fought for very different causes, but both were defeated by Russian military intervention, first by the Czars, then by the Soviets (who were not so different as all that). History may not repeat, but it does rhyme.
Would be interesting to have a system with a more complicated form of "likes".
I think one of the problems with likes is that they mix too many things: "this is witty", "I agree with this wholeheartedly", "this is thought-provoking", you name it. So I think they could be made more meaningful by separating different aspects of what you like about them. And having different rules for them.
So for example, we want to promote correct comments over incorrect, what should we do? I don't think "this is correct" vote is that useful: the most correct comments are just trivial. "This is not true" might work. Except better make it more than just a vote: you have to provide an explicit refutation. Which will be marked by the comment system as such in bright colors. And can be refuted in turn if it is based on incorrect information or doesn't actually refute the parent comment.
And since a lot of us are Bayesians, correct/incorrect is too narrow, let's allow the comments' authors mark them with a number 1%-100% reflecting their certainty. Why not 50%-100%? Because it's not "I estimate the likelihood of this as n%" but rather "I'm n% certain", that is, "I'd bet n points if I got 100 for it being true". I'm not sure there should be actual points: somebody would have to resolve truthfulness of a meaningful fraction of comments and the most interesting ones are probably not going to be resolvable (and then it's just combining a comment section with a prediction market which is not such a stupid idea now that I think of it). But there's got to be a way to crowdsource estimates of likelihood, or at least "best estimates according to this cluster of commenters". Analyzing the clusters resulting from certainties and refutations would be quite interesting, too.
I just discovered the option of likes for comments. And you basically can like only stuff you get an e-mail for, can't you?
'Hidden likes' as they seem to be now are fine with me - and a more elaborate, positive and still hidden system might be an fun option, though maybe with a max. of 3 options/types of likes. I definitely wouldn't want an open system of likes or even worse likes and dislikes.
I find the ideas you mention interesting, but I'm at best unsure if they would make the discussion better or rather worse instead.
+0.7! That is, I'm 70% confident this would improve the experience of the comment section.
I'm reminded of a couple of online fora that did similar things. Slashdot, if I recall, had 4 or 5 reasons for upvoting comments, something like "Funny", "Insightful", "Helpful" and "Interesting". The highest-rated comments display not just their average score but also the most common reason why it was upvoted. This did occasionally warn the reader that a joke was coming, of course.
And one of those really trashy clickbait sites lets you react with an emoji at the end, along the lines of Love or Laugh or Cute or Sad or WTF, and you could see the general proportions of these feelings that people had used.
I would love to see Likes in some form return to ACX, and what you're describing sounds like a fun way to do it. I offer these other examples as demonstration that something that requires a tiny bit more effort than clicking a single button can work on a big site.
Facebook has 6 flavors of "like", or rather one default (that you give by one quick click) and 5 alternatives (which require some waiting with mouse over and selecting from a list).
I think I would like to see the same system, except with both upvotes and downvotes. For example, the first click would assign a generic "upvote" or a generic "downvote", and then a second click could choose from a list of more specific upvotes or downvotes.
(It is important to keep the unflavored votes as an option, because sometimes people are lazy, and you want them to make the unflavored vote rather than e.g. selecting the leftmost option in the list regardless of whether it makes sense or not.)
I was basing the first half of my idea on similar systems. But I don't think the upvote/downvote pairs should be functionally identical. It's better to decide on a case-by-case basis. For example, let's say one alternative is "funny", is it really better to include "unfunny" too? "Unfunny" as in "offensive" belongs to its own "I am offended" downvote, and "unfunny" as in "a failed attempt at a joke" shouldn't really be balanced against "funny".
If not accommodating lazy people means they'll ruin the attempt to promote "good" comments, maybe make a fake unflavored button for them, or something along these lines?
Downvotes are a recipe for intellectual ghettos.
As are upvotes to a lesser extent. I really don't understand why people want to make ACX into Reddit.
I'd worry about that, too
Does anyone have experience with the differences between long release melatonin and short release? Accidentally ordered long release (6hrs) of 750mcg and I'm wondering if it's worth finishing the bottle or not. I'm noticing I'm a little groggy in the morning and fall asleep with ease but not really any more sleepy than usual.
Maybe trying taking it a couple hours earlier than you'd take short-release melatonin
I also notice more grogginess in the morning when I take long release melatonin.
Long-release pills are just normal melatonin + a special coating that takes longer to dissolve, so you can easily convert them into short release by cutting them in half or crushing them (presumably you wanted all 750mcg, but if you don't you could also take fractional tablets).
If you keep waking up at random times, the time release version supposedly works to offset that so you fall back asleep quicker
I was pleasantly surprised that "find (classical) music by melody" works in practise (for popular pieces at least).
I had some Schubert piano music in my head for days and could not identify it, which made me quite antsy.
http://bestclassicaltunes.com/DictionaryPiano.aspx gave the answer almost immediately (even though I do not play the piano and had to trial-and-error the melody...)
It is Impromptu Op 142 No 3, https://youtu.be/xpXQNuce7jE , by the way...
I was once told that there are "dictionaries" of classical music which are indexed simply by the first dozen or so notes, by whether the note is higher, lower, or the same as the preceeding note. So Beethoven's 5th Symphony's index might start .==-+==-
It's called the Parsons Code. (Turns out to be by the father of the prog rock Allan Parsons.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsons_code
Marvellous factoid! With this I even found a suitable search engine at https://www.musipedia.org/melodic_contour.html
"Alan".
Fun fact: so would "Oh my darling Clementine"
ask us questions in a direct way.
+1. though please only genuine questions you would like to read the answers on, not 'questions for animation'. Or so I think.
+1, as in 'I think that would work, and probably be interesting' not as in 'please do that'
Yeah, this would be one of the ways.
Default substack avatars should be replaced by the result of feeding the user's username into Neuralblender
Maybe not that in particular, but I do think that gravatars were significantly more distinguishable than substack default avatars.
+1
@scott if its really about having lots of people in interesting discussions then I would recommend making this as frictionless and enjoyable as possible. I find myself discussing the most often in the open discussion areas of special interest forums driven by XenoForo software. Forums driven by this software are lightning fast, have a good user interface both on PCs and Smartphones, one can easily cite, link, post images, see ones older posts, get real time notification, discuss privately, ignore user (aka trolls), search for all kinds of things, use Google to search all kinds of things etc. The Substack page in contrast is slow on each single interaction, reloads always when I come back to the browser tab on my smartphone and often the position I was before is lost, deep threads get unreadable on Smartphones etc. It's a lot of friction and incentives to not take part in discussions because of technical and comfort issues allone.
I assume Substack software was created for authors to publish paid articles and get some feedback now and then. Open discussions among a huge number of participants about anything was and is not the objective.
Just touched my screen by accident while reading here, the browser was following a random link and after I returned to this page I'm at a total different location, the former is lost. This totally breaks the promises of the web: go back and forth and you are at the same location like before.
>> Maybe open threads with important announcements attached feel less open and hold people back from commenting? Weird that such a small thing can have such a big effect - tell me what else I should do to get you talking!
Subject lines/headings don't always register as saliently as the text of the post. If all the numbered points in the article are about meetups, it looks like a post about the meetups. (There was a point where I had to consciously notice 'oh these are actually the open threads too'.)
If there's 2 things the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis predicts, it's that there's gonna be an arms race between intelligence (bullshitting ability) and self-deception (ability to lie without lying).
Solution is to be an authentic genius
Suppose you know for a fact you're not in a simulation. Then, you build a simulator that simulates a precise copy of this Universe down to the elementary particles. Bar the obvious impossibility and all the laws of physics it would break, would it make sense to assign a 50% likelihood to the hypothesis that you are now in a simulation? Now, say you make a million of these simulations, does it make sense to say that you are not almost certain to be in a simulation?
Then, if you know for a fact that you're going to start a simulation like that one in a month, and that you'll use it to simulate the current month, does it make sense to currently assign a 50% probability that you're in a simulation?
Then, let's say you start modifying the simulation under you (as in, you modify the computer program that runs the Universe simulation on a computer). In the million sims scenario, would you be able to give yourself superpowers through the simulation by modifying slightly the underlying simulations that are on your computer by giving your simulated copy a superpower (for example, you'd modify the adjacent gravity of your copy (on the computer) so that it can fly, or something like that, would you then start flying immediately)?
> Bar the obvious impossibility and all the laws of physics it would break,
"If you assume a logical impossibility, does a paradox result?" This whole line of questioning is very silly. I don't understand what it is about Fully Accurate Simulations that cause rationalists to throw reason out the window.
Lol well said, that's an excellent point :)
I think the answer might depend on which multiverses you find plausible and how you interpret the "weight" of each. See e.g. https://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/PDF/multiverse_sciam.pdf
To be fair, I don't have anything resembling a coherent hypothesis on the question.
To restate the question, it sounds like you're proposing:
1. I have a memory that 2 days ago, I was 100% certain I was not living in a simulation
2. I have a memory that yesterday, I started a full-universe simulation, and then went to bed.
3. Today, "I" am awake and aware. Is it possible that I'm a simulated version of myself, rather than the "real" version of myself?
4. And, if it's possible "I" am a simulation, should I assign that possibility a 50% probability?
5. And, if simulations start nesting, should I assign probabilities asymptotically approaching 100% to the proposition that "I" am a simulation?
In answer, I'd say "yes" to 3, and "no" to 4 & 5.
If the universe is fully physical and deterministic, then the experience of perceiving is part of that, and a simulated copy of the universe would have a copy of me that perceives and reasons in the same way. If I have strong knowledge that someone has started simulating a universe that's highly similar to the one I'm in, it's possible I'm in that.
However, at 1 level of nesting, the probability of being in that universe is highly unlikely to be 50%, and at increasing levels of nesting, that probability approaches a value significantly less than 100%.
The issue is:
1. In our universe, all computation boils down to crafting a physical process, and assigning meanings to the inputs & outputs of that physical process. i.e., we want to calculate the trajectory of a flying rock, so we craft a series of transistors, push electrons into one end that represent the initial conditions, and interpret the electrons coming out the other end.
2. However, you can't calculate the trajectory of a particle more efficiently than the particle does. i.e., if you want to know what a single electron will do in some situation, you can either simulate it in a computer using multiple other electrons, or you can just observe what the single one *does* in that situation.
3. Of course, we calculate large or fast simulations all the time - but we have to do this by cutting a corner somewhere. Either we simplify the simulation, and don't calculate the perfectly accurate simulation of every individual particle, or, we run the simulation slower than reality.
4. This means that, if I know that I'm definitely in a situation, I also know that at least one [and possibly more] of the following must be true:
4a. My universe is "smaller" than the hosting universe. (the number of particles in my light-cone is less than the number of particles in the light-cone of the universe hosting my simulation)
4b. My universe is "slower" than the hosting universe. (1 second advancing in the hosting universe advances less than 1 second in my universe)
4c. My universe is only an approximation of the hosting universe. (My physical laws are based on heuristics or simplifications of the physics of the hosting universe, and after enough time, their behavior will diverge)
So, if I remember starting a simulated universe, and then awake, my probability of being the simulation depends on how much power I remember dedicating to the simulation.
Say, for example, I start a full-fidelity sim on a low-powered laptop, such that the simulation won't progress more than 5 minutes into its future before the heat death of the real universe. Thus, if I'm still around 6 minutes from now, I'm certainly in the real universe. And, I *think* it follows that for every moment in the next 5 minutes, I'm much more likely to be in the real universe than the simulation.
Say I dedicate much more power to the simulation - say I convert almost my entire light-cone into a universe-simulating computer. At that point, at 1 level of nesting, the probability that I'm in a simulation would be _just under_ 50%. (Because the simulated universe has total computational power that's _nearly_ equal to the total computational power of the hosting universe).
So then say we start nesting simulations, and each nested simulation runs in nearly-real-time. The simulated universe is, itself, using nearly all of its power to simulate a nested universe. And then that universe nests further, and further. In the limit, this means that all the computational power of the 'real' universe is being spend on computing either
1. the "real" me
2. a simulated copy of me
3. the overhead of simulating a simulation of a simulation of a simulation.
Say the overhead is effectively 0, this means that we've basically converted the entire real universe's light cone into simulated copies of me. The number of copies of me might be very very large, but would still be finite [assuming the light cone is finite]. The probability that "I" am in in the real universe would basically be "my computational complexity / total computational power of the real universe". This might be a very very small probability, but not infinitesimal.
As for the follow-up question about superpowers, If I'm the sort of person who would modify a simulation to give my simulated self superpowers (say, flying), then if I'm in the 1st nested level, I'd get superpowers (specifically, flying). But then my world would be different than the hosting world, and I'd be a different person than my hosting counterpart, and I might be less likely to modify my nested simulation in the exact same fashion (I might think flying is passe, and give my nested simulation flying+super-strength). Through enough nestings, this error would compound, and a deeply nested simulated me might have different superpowers, or no superpowers.
Thanks for that answer, it's great! You made excellent points all around, I hadn't thought about much of that at all!
If you know for a fact that you are not in a simulation, creating a simulation will not change that fact. If you live in a universe represented by a blue ball, knowing that only 1/1,000 balls are blue and all of the others are red does not change the fact that you live in a universe with a blue ball.
Reality does not change based on the unlikeliness of the facts within that reality. If it's extremely rare to win the lottery, that does not mean that NO ONE wins. A very real person (or group of persons) will still win the lottery, and their experience is no less real than mine, for having been unlikely.
Also, causality does not work in reverse. If you create an identical clone of yourself and then kill them, you aren't killing yourself, you are killing the clone. If you do that a million times you still aren't killing yourself, just your clones. If you adjust the factors in a simulation that you create, then only the simulation is affected. There is no causal mechanism for the simulation's change to affect the non-simulation's reality.
If this is a question about the possibility that we are wrong, and we don't "know for a fact" that we are in the real world, then that will lean heavily on whether or not such a simulation is possible, and whether such an advanced simulation is distinguishable from reality. You giving a simulated version of you superpowers will still not work in reverse. We would need to actually be in a simulation and would have to rely on someone not in the simulation (or perhaps a layer up if multiple levels of simulation) to give us the superpowers. Our actions would have no effect within our simulation, outside of that which we are permitted by the rules of the simulation.
The reason why I think creating simulations should change your credence of being in a simulation is that knowing that an agent that thinks *exactly like you* is in a simulation, and that that agent doesn't know it, should decrease your credence that yourself are not in a simulation! If we grant the self-sampling assumption that "All other things equal, an observer should reason as if they are randomly selected from the set of all actually existent observers (past, present and future) in their reference class.", then it makes sense to think that you're in a simulation, or so the argument goes.
"Reality does not change based on the unlikeliness of the facts within that reality": That's technically correct, but your beliefs of reality should change based on the unlikeliness of the facts within that reality. If you flip a biased coin, and it lands on head, it doesn't alter the underlying reality of the biasness of the coin, but it *should* change your subjective likelihood that the coin lands on head next throw, according to the strict laws of probability. You were or were not in a simulation all along, but after gaining evidence on that fact, you can modify the probability you assign at being in a simulation.
About not being able to control the past, I suggest reading https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PcfHSSAMNFMgdqFyB/can-you-control-the-past
this post to gain intuitions on how you *can*. To your more specific comment though, I'd say that if you decide to kill your clone, it's very strong evidence that they have already decided to kill you as well, being exact clones and all. In some sense, if you're a perfect clone of someone down to the atoms and environment, you can't kill them without killing yourself, and that's why this problem is so interesting!
Next, I want to make it clear that we pretty much know that such a simulation is impossible. You can't simulate more than a Universe in a single Universe (down to the elementary particles and their interactions), that would break the laws of physics.
I've brought up multiple points, so I'll stop here for now.
I've got to say, that the lesswrong post you shared is either pointless or so narrow as to be pointless. It requires a FULLY deterministic approach between two truly identical instances of an intelligence. If either of those things are not true, even a little, then the EDT formulations become worthless and his reasoning is no longer predictable.
This should be a very simple thing to test, to see if there are any real world applications. Simply create two programs that process information. Give them information, and see what they process. If they are literal computer programs with exactly the same programming, then sure, the two different versions will play out the same. That's no more surprising than asking two different calculators what 3X3 equals. It's true, but not helpful in decision making. We would never say that the one calculator causes the other to display 9, but instead that their deterministic programming necessitates that they will. At the level where a computer program could decide to write a sentence on a white board, or dance around (their examples), then it's no longer at all certain that they are still identical to the point where they necessarily will do the same things. If you stipulate exact duplicates and fully deterministic, then you can retain that prediction, but that's where it gets too narrow to be useful.
Even if humans in a simulation are deterministic (which I certainly disagree with in a non-simulated human), then the inputs received will result in vastly different approaches when it's time to make a decision. The decisions can still be rational and follow the same ultimate goal-oriented approach, but can be significantly different.
Think of the marshmallow test. It was said for many years that the students who could resist short term temptation would receive the bigger reward, and that those students would go on to have better life outcomes. In a deeper look, it turns out that the students were optimizing for a different environment, where if you didn't take the marshmallow immediately available, the likely outcome is to get no marshmallows. Maybe the adults in their lives were unreliable in providing the additional marshmallows, or maybe other people would come in and steal them. Whatever the case, the students who chose to eat it now were not necessarily wrong to do so, based on the inputs from their lives. That their lives involved unreliable adults is both a serious confounder and also likely a source for both current behavior and future results. In a scenario where the intelligences are receiving any different inputs (which in any real world application is certainly true), or their programming isn't completely deterministic, then the outcomes are unpredictable.
Going back to your simulation, the lives of the simulated humans are different from the non-simulated or even the alternatively-simulated. The only way that isn't true is if the simulator had perfect knowledge of their own circumstances, down to the smallest details (including their own future interactions with the world) and make sure all of those details are in the simulation as well. If I created a "perfect" simulation of myself, but didn't know the future, then the very next thing that happens would change the simulator from the simulated, causing a divergence. We even have a term for that around here - updating our priors. If one of the people receives a different input and updates, then they are no longer identical and nothing else holds.
If you think it's neat to formulate the "perfectly identical within a fully deterministic framework" discussion, then sure, have fun. You may even have some limited ways to test things out, if we do create an actual AI that has the ability to think and reason, and then we copy it and give it the same stimuli in a controlled environment. Maybe we'll learn something new. Or maybe we won't, because even in our best attempt at a controlled environment the inputs still aren't identical. Maybe they aren't really intelligences, if they do result in fully identical outputs - they are just fancy programs running something more complex than a typical program. If you think humans are deterministic, maybe that says something neat about humans. Since I don't, that doesn't really speak to me.
"knowing that an agent that thinks *exactly like you* is in a simulation, and that that agent doesn't know it, should decrease your credence that yourself are not in a simulation!"
And how do I know if I am a man dreaming I am a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming that I am a man? People have been posing these kinds of questions since forever, just putting a high-tech gloss on them doesn't change the fundamental nature of asking "what is reality?"
Dreaming of a butterfly doesn't create that butterfly, but making a complete simulation does, so that is not analogous. If the act of thinking of a butterfly *did* make a precise simulation of a living butterfly, then I guess you should argue that butterflies should lower their probability estimates of not being simulations.
Oblig SMBC:
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/basenana
LOL! You cannot update priors that start at 0... :)
" (for example, you'd modify the adjacent gravity of your copy (on the computer) so that it can fly, or something like that, would you then start flying immediately)?"
No, for the same reason that if I wrote a biography of myself but made myself three inches taller, this wouldn't affect my height in reality.
Real world people have all kinds of things written about them - news articles and commentary, biographies, autobiographies, memoirs and so forth. Depending on the time and the biographer, you can get startlingly different interpretations of the same person. This does not cause me to update "Hm, that person never existed and in fact, there is a good chance I am a character in a novel!" even if people in this world write novels where people discover they are characters in a novel.
Did "The Truman Show" make you assign any probability to your life being a simulation of that sort?
The way in which it importantly differs is that the simulated minds themselves experience their own realities. If you're in a simulation, you have no direct way to know that if the simulation is precise enough. Also, since the simulation is precise enough, you can assume that the whatever happens in the simulation will be the same as will happen outside the simulation, in base reality. Or at least that's my intuition, that in a deterministic Universe, the position of all the atoms should be enough to know what the state of the Universe will be in a thousand years.
Also, the anthropic principle doesn't apply whatsoever in your case, because writing a biography of yourself doesn't create a conscious mind, whereas creating a perfect simulacrum of your mind does, if you accept substrate independence.
"If you're in a simulation, you have no direct way to know that if the simulation is precise enough."
Then your question is functionally meaningless, since if we are indeed inside a simulation right this second, we will never know and can never know.
A difference that makes no difference (simulation or really real? unable to tell) is no difference.
I wouldn't say it's totally meaningless to think about it, because it's interesting and fun to think about, but yeah I get your point. The same point could be made about Philosophy and about the interpretations of quantum mechanics.
Actually, this could have an effect on reality, if we conclude that simulating copies of ourselves is a good way to gain superpowers in the ways mentioned above. If it was the case that a perfect copy of you gained superpowers every time you simulated yourself with superpowers, you could get superpowers pretty easily, which has some value.
"If you're in a simulation, you have no direct way to know that if the simulation is precise enough"
Who says? *We* have deduced a great deal about the laws that make our universe operate, who says simulated beings couldn't do the same? How do we know they could *not* work out that they are in a simulation, and the rules for it? Maybe that's actually quite easy to do, and we'd know that if we'd ever succeeded in making beings that think they're conscious in a simulation. That is, maybe it's completely trivial to realize you're in a simulation, if you really are.
It's been too long since I've read that one, but Robert Silverberg's 'Enter a Soldier. Later: Enter Another' was pretty interesting with achieving realistic simulations of historic persons and having Socrates and Pizzaro reason about their circumstances in simulation tank.
If you *could* tell simulation from non-simulation, then it isn't an exact simulation. One of the premises is that it's an exact simulation. Hence, we can deduce that there are no ways to know whether you're in a simulation or not, if it's exact.
Ah. But then your definition of "simulation" when it's exact is that it's indistinguishable from reality ex hypothesi, in which case -- according to my empirical mindset -- it *is* reality and there is no point in asking philosophical questions that depend on an (even in principle) undetectable difference between the two.
Absolutely not about the Truman show-- the way they dropped his is totally un-fanlike behavior. That movie wasn't about humans.
I have similar annoyance about Permutation City by Egan.
If you know for a fact you're not in a simulation, nothing changes by you starting a simulation. If being in a simulation is indistinguishable from being in a "true" universe, you don't know you're not in one for a fact. These two premises are simply mutually exclusive.
Further, if you start a perfect simulation (let's ignore time for now) then your probability of not being in a simulation is not 50%, it's zero (NB for non-mathematicians, zero probability doesn't mean "can't happen". We literally have "one in infinity" here). Because the simulated you will start a simulation too, etc. Of course that depends on the rules, if there's true randomness then the simulation can diverge.
I added that as an assumption to make the following scenario simpler, but you're right. If I remove that assumption, does it resolve the problem?
About the infinite simulations, you're right and that's an interesting point I totally missed. I was going to add a clause where simulated Universes can't create simulations themselves, but then that would break the symmetry, and you'd be able to figure out you're in a simulation or not. If that clause is added, does the reasoning work?
The whole reason you're even confused about this is because you're sneaking logical impossibilities into the premises, so yes.
Agree with your comment; just some mathematical nitpicking: "Probability zero" seems a bit problematic, at least for the model that would come to my mind ("discrete" copies of countably many simulations, including one original): There is no natural (homogeneous) measure on a countable set. (So "One in (countable) infinity" does not have probability zero; but undefined probability. This is demonstrated by the old "paradoxon": pick two natural numbers at random; what is the probability that the second one is larger than the first?)
1/inf can be defined as 0 without breaking that, because if you break down cases for the first and then calculate the probability of the second being bigger, the probability of "yes" is (1*inf)/inf and the probability of "no" is (0*inf)/inf. Those are both indeterminate forms (in particular, either can validly be 1, 0, or 1/2), so the symmetry is preserved despite the asymmetry of every case.
Your scenario reminded me of a delightful little short story: "I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility"
https://qntm.org/responsibility
I read it a few months back, and it inspired these questions! Thanks for sharing, and vouch :)
BionicD0LPH1N, I've been thinking about this for a long, long time. This paradox truly puzzles me. Imagine that some of the simulations is run on a computer twice as large so that twice as many electrons cross each transistor. Would you be twice as likely to find yourself inside one of these computers because it's running on twice the number of atoms? This question has been puzzling me for years.
Wow, that's a fascinating point. I don't think that the number of electrons really matter, but rather the number of times the computation was made. Like if you make a series of computations for a single time step in the simulation, and then make those computations a second time, then I'd say that then you have 2 simulations, but I really don't think the number of electrons matter, because it's not the electrons themselves that are simulating the Universe, it's the pattern of activations in the transistor. And this brings up substrate independence, the idea that "mental states can reside on multiple types of physical or digital substrates". Let's say that instead of simulating the Universe, we stored in a computer all the states of the Universe at every instant; is there a sense in which the Universe is still being simulated, just not in real time? If there's a program that goes through that massive Universe-state file, instant by instant, are they simulating once again the Universe? What does it take for a simulation to be a simulation? Is a simulated Universe is printed out in a big book, does a computer that analyze the book simulate a computer? If a human does all the computations of a supercomputer by hand, so that after endless years they have made all the computations necessary to simulate a whole Universe, is there a sense in which that human has done so? If not, what about a computer making the simulating makes it able to simulate a Universe, that a human doesn't have?
This will always be fascinating to me.
>Wow, that's a fascinating point. I don't think that the number of electrons really matter, but rather the number of times the computation was made.
But the bigger transistors with twice as many electrons are basically doing twice as many computations. Imagine looking at a subset of the computer that includes only the right half of each transistor, each wire, etc. That's a computation. Now imagine looking at another subset that includes the left half. That's also a computation. If you physically separated those two halves, that would clearly be two computations. Why would the number of computations change just because the two parts are glued to each other on a per-transistor and per-wire basis?
I think you're getting more at the nature of the experience of time, than questions about simulations per se, because all of these questions can be asked about existence per se. Physics does not give us any way to write down the common human intuition that things that existed yesterday, and changed or vanished, or things which will come into existence tomorrow, do not exist today.
From the point of view of physics, there is no distinction at all between the things that existed yesterday and those that exist today, or will exist tomorrow. They're all just events in spacetime, and none is more privileged than any other -- in the mathematical sense, they *all* exist, they're just at different time (and usually space) coordinates.
But of course we all have a strong intuitive sense of "now" and a feeling that the only things that genuinely exist are those things that exist "now" -- i.e. are colocated at least briefly on our world line. We believe the meal we ate yesterday no longer exists, and the car crash we are about to experience because the brakes just failed does not yet exist, no matter how inevitable Newtonian mechanics makes it.
Physics itself is completely silent on these questions, so far as I know. We have no precise definition of what the "now" experience means. We don't even know how we would measure whether everyone's "now" is genuinely simultaneous, the way we assume it is (meaning perhaps the "now" I am experiencing as I type is 10 seconds or 10 years ahead (or behind) that which you will or did experience).
Additional question for people who answered "no": What about a computer with zero-times the size and zero-times the number of electrons?
"would you be able to give yourself superpowers"
Your system relies on:
a chain of simulations (to grant each other powers)
determinism (so your higher ups can behave as you do)
So I guess yes, except for the unlucky root "you"
Why not skip the infinite middlemen and just make the copies have self granting powers?
The concept still stands, even if the simulations magically cannot themselves create simulations. And it doesn't necessarily need strict determinism, it just necessitates that there are no ways to know whether you're in a simulated Universe or no, correct? I mean, in the million-sims-scenario, regardless of whether the Universe is deterministic and whether the underlying sims make sims themselves, you'd still have to conclude that you're very probably in a simulation, whatever you end up observing.
Then, giving the copies self granting powers would result in exactly the same result for every simulation made, would it not? Just as in the scenario, only the base-Universe-you wouldn't have the superpowers. I feel like I'm missing the point, if you could elaborate it would be appreciated :)
Okay sorry humor wasn't necessary. What I think is that God does play with dice but they're loaded. Someone who knows more about quantum computers than I do can probably confirm or correct things I'm saying, but as I understand the algorithms we have don't allow factoring composite numbers.
Suppose you wanted to get factors for 12. You choose 3, God chooses 4. You choose 2, God choose 6. He does actually play with dice but he loads them for his kids.
Solves free will and a few other issues imo
Can you elaborate? I don't know how that has anything to do with my comment, and I'm pretty sure I misunderstand something here. How does it solve free will?
Jung was right. So is Jordan Peterson. He's not crazy and neither am I.
You can be wrong without being crazy.
Can you please elaborate on that? What is it they are right about?
Yes. I appreciate you asking my thoughts are moving faster than my fingers.
I think most therapists could actually cure their patients, but there are conflicts of interests. If they incorporated Jung and confronted people with their shadows, they would either:
1) run away from the office
2) berate their therapist
3) be cured quickly and roughly
I've heard that therapists are most likely to be physically attacked by their patients if the patients' armor is broken too quickly. I don't have further details or proof, but people can certainly go further than berating.
The big joke is science and religion are compatible. Religion is the reason angle on the truth of Christianity. Therapy is the empirical and the sooner they meet in the middle the better off we'll all be.
Ironically the key is an evolutionary perspective. Darwin did love God. I don't think he lost his faith. It's a how for the why.
I'm not trying to be esoteric but I'm torn between my discord habits and proper forum etiquette, and, well, settings clearly up with me.
You do realise you sound like you're either drunk or stoned off your face, or off your meds and beginning to have a manic episode? Sober up and come back and talk to us after you've washed your face and had a cup of tea.
I'm giving you a one week ban to let you cool down from whatever is making you comment so much; also, without trying to be insulting or claiming I can diagnose you over the Internet, please consider whether you might be manic right now.
What's going on with "likes"? I can't "like" comments on the post itself, but I can do it via the email notifications that I get for replies to my comments. And I can't see a "like" score displayed anywhere on comments.
Rate limiting attempt 🤷🏻♂️
Do you have a link to the extension, or would you be willing to find one?
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/acx-tweaks/jdpghojhfigbpoeiadalafcmohaekglf
Who has watched The Sandbaggers? I just finished watching it, and I think it's an excellent British Cold War drama from the 80s. Though the last season was weak, I do think that S1 and S2 have a great deal to offer. The series would have wider appeal today if not for (a) terrible video quality and (b) only streaming on BritBox and Tube in the US.
I watched about a season of it back in the actual 80s, long enough to have only vague memories of character and plot and a very strong impression that this is the story of what James Bond will be when he grows up and gets real. Very good and very plausible Cold War spycraft. Which will bore most people to tears, I'm afraid - hence only Britbox and Tube.
But thanks for reminding me of a good thing that I had forgotten.
One I do like is "Ever Decreasing Circles", which ran in the mid-80s and is a very particular type of social class humour, something like "Keeping Up Appearances" but more muted:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ever_Decreasing_Circles
"It was much less brash than most situation comedies, and the Guardian described it as having "a quiet, unacknowledged and deep-running despair to it that in retrospect seems quite daring"
The main character is a middle-class, rather nosy, busy-body type who projects an air of competence and control, takes full charge of his little circle, and comes across as first as rather a petty tyrant. As you go through the series, you see that he is instead somewhat fearful and helpless, he dislikes change and handles it badly, and somewhat fears that he is not in fact up to the challenge, so he tries his best to have everything run in a dependable routine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhoxhOmWhoA
Thanks. I'm going to try the series.
It's one of my favorite TV series!
I'm glad you like it. Even when Sandbaggers has ordinary plot concepts (such as double-crossing espionage or Willie's flirtation with a Soviet agent in season 1) it remains extremely satisfying. It's an extremely well-executed series.
I never watched it, and looking it up on Wikipedia, it seems the reason for the weak last season was, well, interesting:
"The Sandbaggers was created by Ian Mackintosh, a Scottish former naval officer turned television writer, who had previously achieved success with the acclaimed BBC television series Warship. He wrote all the episodes of the first two series of The Sandbaggers, but in July 1979, during the shooting of the third series, he and his girlfriend—a British Airways stewardess—were declared lost at sea after their single-engined aircraft went missing over the Pacific Ocean near Alaska, following a radioed call for help. Some of the details surrounding their disappearance have caused speculation about what actually occurred, including their stop at an abandoned United States Air Force base and the fact that the plane happened to crash in the one small area that was not covered by either U.S. or Soviet radar.
Mackintosh disappeared after he had written just four of the scripts for the third series, so other writers were called in to bring the episode count up to seven. The Sandbaggers ends on an unresolved cliffhanger because the producers decided that no one else could write the series as well as Mackintosh had and chose not to continue it in his absence."
Correction: Tubi not Tube
> Weird that such a small thing can have such a big effect - tell me what else I should do to get you talking!
Prompts for the open thread might be an interesting thing to try if that's not too much trouble-- and assume it wouldn't be. Link some claim, study, or news item of interest, say "Discuss", done.
There were links posts before I'm pretty sure, this served a different purpose.
I'd talk more if there were more ruthless moderation! Anything that you (Scott) deem to not be a clear positive contribution to the discourse, kill it.
+1, I would support stronger moderation. It is unfortunate that example appeared in direct response to your post, though fortunately it got moderated away.
I think your product exploits vulnerable people. When I was looking for help with executive dysfunction, I did not need an irreversible charge on my bank account. That was not kind but it was true and I think necessary. If I'm wrong about the last mod strike me down.
Beeminder doesn't treat charges as irreversible.
I'm sorry if I got the ACH technicals wrong. Are you saying I can dispute them with my bank? Am I misunderstanding your business model? It's supposed to sting a bit right?
I've been using Beeminder for many years, and it's been extremely helpful and impactful for me. Will C, Beeminder will reverse the charge for me if I accidentally type incorrect data or similar. How strict they are about asking for proof it is entirely up to you! If you don't trust yourself not to cheat, that's what the "Weaselproof" feature is for. Beeminder works exactly as I would hope, and always feels friendly and kind all around.
Thank you Daniel for building a tool that's a force for good in my life.
Glow! Thank you so much!
@Will C: Sounds like you're unable to reply here (for a week?) but I'm really anxious to understand your bad experience with Beeminder if you could email me: dreeves@beeminder.com
(I'm even game to precommit to a postmortem here if people are curious?)
Or has that changed since I used it?
You did ask for ruthlessness
Try being more Ruth full
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_(biblical_figure)
I am nearly 100% certain the bible is completely true.
100 & 0 are not real probabilities. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QGkYCwyC7wTDyt3yT/0-and-1-are-not-probabilities
They said "nearly". It's completely reasonable (if somewhat vague) to be nearly 100% certain of something. For example, I am nearly 100% certain that the sun will rise tomorrow morning.
Thank you for reading me correctly
I will not even act apologetic by saying this is a weird position. It's less weird than where we find ourselves now
I think the purpose of depression is to protect you from making worse mistakes. Some suicides are recoverable. Damnation isn't.
As a Christian, I don't believe depression can lead you to damn yourself if you weren't already doing it. You can't lose salvation. Paul asks rhetorically, "What can separate us from the love of Christ?" - and the clear answer is, nothing.
Do you think there is a certain moment when salvation is attained, or do you think salvation is a process, albeit an irreversible one? Do you believe or hope that all will eventually be saved?
You misunderstood me friend. I said damnation isn't recoverable. Suicide is, as is depression, at least in some cases.
They're trying to drown out my signal in noise but I was manic so I got first post. I realize this is un-quokka of me
So is this you want help studying for the exam or help taking the exam? If you have a practice exam I would happily go over it with you, but I don't think helping with problems DURING an exam is ethical. discord nathanwe#3677
Yeah, me too, except I gained some weight and... hey wait you're a spammer aren't you? You spammy spammer!!! Go somewhere else where you can post pics!
I have found this site and its predecessor to be excellent for "experts writing for a general audience". Treat the Open Threads as an Ask Me Anything on any subject. You will often be surprised by the quality of the responses by actual experts.
1) Asexual yet polyamorous.
2) Artificially high local maxima.
3) Needs more territory, less map.
4) Are you a two-boxer?
3.2, 5.4, 2.0 ,1.7
I am bored with the stodgy old numerical rating system. My ratings for Paula (Beginning SEX model) are:
Cerulean
Wendigo
Insouciant, with woody notes and hints of Mulberry (the street, not the berries)
Yoicks and awaaay!
Haha. Much better! And clearer.