Biological racial differences which I believe are uncontroversially true include:
Skin color and other obvious stuff.
Certain blood types are more common among certain races than others.
There's an ethnic group, whose name I have unfortunately forgotten, who are extraordinarily good at holding their breath under the sea. This is partly through experience but partly genetic.
Native Tibetans can handle high altitude better than Tibetans with non-native ancestry. The gene responsible appears to have come from Denisovans.
Natives of the Andes mountains have bigger lungs than other people, and thicker eyelids (the latter protect their eyes from the cold).
Inuit react to cold differently than other people; they get increased blood flow to cold extremities instead of reduced blood flow.
> There's an ethnic group, whose name I have unfortunately forgotten, who are extraordinarily good at holding their breath under the sea. This is partly through experience but partly genetic.
Bajau. Even the non-divers have significantly enlarged spleens compared to other Indonesian groups, and the theory is that it contributes to a significantly stronger oxygenation effect from the dive response.
I would say if the argument is that IQ differences have modest to zero effects on economic outcomes, or are swamped by other factors, this argument can be taken seriously (provided what it says is accurate), but if the argument is that racial IQ differences do not exist at all, nothing in this list of recitals, even taken at face value, says boo about that. All they say is that race is not the *only* factor to influence measured IQ, which, duh.
" White and black americans raised abroad on military bases show no IQ disparities."
If this is true, it's very interesting. It does suggest that whatever genetic differences there might be are swamped by environmental influences and we should look at what's going on there.
Well, except you have a tremendous selection bias in that the parents are all members of the military, right? They're not at all a representative sampling of the population.
I've emailed as below regarding this lassie. God alone knows what, if anything, will be the outcome but at least they should be aware this is going on:
"Substack is a place for independent writing. We host and celebrate a diverse range of thought and discussion. The following guidelines outline what is and is not acceptable on Substack. We have the exclusive right to interpret and enforce these guidelines, although we may consult outside experts, research, and industry best practices in doing so. If you encounter content that may be in breach of these guidelines or have any questions about them, you can email us at tos@substackinc.com."
I'd also recommend "Understand", which I recently saw recommended here, tried, and really liked, so I want to signal-boost the original recommendation for it. "Understand" is even more about testing hypotheses and questioning assumptions. It's a rule-guessing game, like the board game Zendo or even Mao, and it's like the 2-4-6 task in that you could come up with a rule that fits the data but the actual rule might be broader. (It has *extremely* basic graphics, though, which make Baba's graphics look like an AAA title by comparison.)
I have about 70 hours in Baba Is You and I'm not even close to completing it. I did all the puzzles on the overworld map but then THAT happened (you know what I mean) and I've been stumped by Parade ever since.
I haven't read the book, but, in general, I personally find the arguments against inequity in and of itself to be rather weak. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's no problem at all, but it's such a lesser problem compared to doing anything at all to alleviate the current level of poverty in the world as to not be worth worrying about until the entire planet is at a level approaching current western standards.
If there is a solution that is, _at a bare minimum_ as good at decreasing raw poverty/improving standard of living, and _also_ decreases inequality, then great, I'm open to it (although probably skeptical). But I've never heard one. Every solution I've heard that decreases inequality usually has the side effect of decreasing the rate of improvement in poverty as well (that's not to say it makes poverty _worse_ or even stops the improvement, just slows it down). That's simply an unacceptable tradeoff at this point.
So when I hear something like "a win-win solution" isn't acceptable because it increases inequality, it just makes me wonder what better, realistic, actionable proposals people have to continue to increase standard of living while not increasing inequality. I'm not convinced that such a thing exists.
“The very poorest today live far better than the ‘middle class’ of the dark ages.”
Is that true? Obviously it depends upon the definitions of “middle class” and “very poorest.
To phrase it another way. Take the living conditions of someone at the 1st percentile of wealth today. How far back in history would you have to go before the median human was worse off than that modern-day 1st percentile person?
Simple life expectancy (i.e. mean lifetime from birth) in the pre-modern period is highly deceptive because infant mortality was very high and dying at 0-1 drags down the average quite a lot. A better proxy for quality of life is life expectancy given that one survived infancy; infant mortality is tragic and all, but a human who died at 6 months can't be said to really have had a quality of life.
OTOH, its highly not-deceptive. My grandfathr had 11 siblings born, and 3 reach draft age. Every family he knew as a kid in his small town had an infant death. This was not that atypical.
My kids don't know anyone who has had a sibling die. This is not that atypical.
Poverty can be, typically has been, and needs to be, defined in absolute terms. It is only in absolute terms that we are doing better on poverty then we ever have before. Your assertion 'Poverty on an absolute scale becomes meaningless. The very poorest today live far better than the "middle class" of the dark ages.' may be true in rich Nations, but is very far from true in poor ones. You are also incorrect that basing a definition on a relative statistic will automatically reduce inequality along with reducing poverty. The relative statistic simply becomes a moving target. Dangerously unstable's viewpoint on the other hand, is much more aligned with what I think of as correct. The absolute level of living conditions in the world at the low end is still so low that we should entirely ignore all distributional concerns (inequity) in attempting to raise it in a sustainable way. It doesn't matter if the rich get richer as long as most of the poor get rich enough, and economic growth and trade are fantastic vehicles for this kind of movement
What I was trying to suggest is that if you have two possible options, one that decreases poverty by 0.5, but increases inequality by 2, and one that decreases poverty by 0.4 and decreases inequality by 0.1, then the first option is by far the better one. Not because inequality isn't a problem at all, but it's such a lesser problem that it should _only_ be addressed on the margins after first dealing with poverty. Any solution that deals with inequality while making solving poverty slower is a bad solution.
But that's an entirely different choice. That's "decrease poverty by 1, lower inequality by 1" vs "decrease poverty by 100, lower inequality by 50". My decision criteria is the same in this scenario: Take whichever option is best for the poorest, who cares what the effects on inequality are.
> Not because inequality isn't a problem at all, but it's such a lesser problem that it should _only_ be addressed on the margins after first dealing with poverty.
I think this is too simplistic. Maybe you could make this case if everyone were perfectly rational, but if your lower class citizens will get very angry at you for spending money to alleviate foreign poverty when they could really use that help, then you'll lose your political power and your ability to help either of them.
I think there's considerable evidence that inequality really is fueling civil dissatisfaction, and possibly even civil unrest, so we're living in a very real case this question is pertinent.
I mean, that's an instrumental disagreement - you're saying that his first policy won't in practice achieve the 0.5 arbitrary units reduction that's promised, not disagreeing that it wouldn't be better if it did.
Disagreeing with the real world applicability of someone's thought experiment is very distinct from disagreeing with the evaluation of the thought experiment itself.
How are you evaluating "better"? Seems like the context implies "outcome" given the talk of quantifiable units, i.e some form of consequentialism. Under this framework you simply cannot divorce the "real world applicability" from its judgment as "better" or "worse", because it's real world applicability is exactly the criterion by which we evaluate "better" and "worse".
Thus, if second order negative effects overwhelm the first-order positive effects you were hoping for, then it's not in any sense "better" in such a framework.
If we lived in some alternate world in which these negative second order effects didn't exist, eg. the world in which everyone is perfectly rational as I mentioned, then that judgment would likely yield a different result.
I think that's a bad metric of poverty. I think that "how are the worst-off doing on an absolute scale" is clearly what matters. If you were one of the poorest people in the world, would you rather have someone give you a thousand bucks, or learn that Jeff Bezos lost a billion dollars in a fire?
So you agree that it's no help if Bezos has LESS money (even though that would reduce inequality), only if the poor have MORE money (which reduces absolute poverty). So why care about relative rather than absolute poverty?
Well yeah, if Bezos paid a billion dollars to the poor that would obviously help the poor. But there are more realistic ways that he could lose that money without helping the poor. For instance, the government taxes him an extra billion and uses that additional revenue to build a shiny new aircraft carrier.
And yeah inflation and so forth is a thing but since global trade is also a thing you can in fact transfer wealth to poor people successfully.
My point is, the quality of a poor person's life does not *directly, intrinsically* depend on the quality of the richest person, or the median person's life.
"My point is, the quality of a poor person's life does not *directly, intrinsically* depend on the quality of the richest person, or the median person's life. "
In a world where political lobbying isn't a thing and rich people have as much control over goverments as poor ones that would be true.
In a world where the only way to accure status is to participate in effective charities as much as possible that would be true.
First, an ambiguity: when we say that inequality is (or isn't) bad, do we mean "it's bad to increase inequality by TRANSFERING resources from the poor to the rich" or do we mean "it's bad increase inequality by giving additional resources to the already-rich, even if they're free resources from nowhere and the alternative is to destroy them?"
Obviously, the case against inequality is much easier in the first interpretation than in the second.
In general, I'd contend that small amounts of inequality might be neutral or even good, but that there exists some amount of inequality above which more is bad.
In the first scenario, I'd say it's bad for both economic reasons (money can't flow well when one guy is hoarding it all) and also for political reasons (extreme power imbalance means the powerful can dictate self-serving rules and ignore fairness).
In the second scenario, I'd say it's bad ONLY for political reasons and not (directly) for economic ones. (And the threshold at which it becomes bad-overall might be higher.)
In my estimation, the fundamental difficulty with raw capitalism is that it increases wealth concentration over time with no limit. Any stable system must have zero net change over the long term. Thus, you need to add some additional rule that will negate the long-term wealth concentration, or else the economy will *eventually* break.
That "*eventually*" may be similar to how we talk about the sun going nova or the heat death of the universe. Sure, we can envision it, and we can surmise that it's likely long before the heat death of the universe, but that doesn't mean it's soon (or even true, in the sense of people in 2021 looking towards a knowable future).
I think of the early communists and their desire to redistribute wealth in the 19th century. If we had redistributed wealth then, and slowed or stopped growth (which they considered fine, as standards of living were high enough by their local metrics to make that worthwhile to them), then the world would have missed out on orders of magnitude more absolute wealth, of which much has been passed down to even the poorest people on earth, and certainly the middle poor of that time who are now the middle class.
Most of the wealth growth in the wealthiest people on earth has been from the increase of stock prices, not from goods they own and consume. If Amazon's stock goes up, Jeff Bezos will get money that would otherwise have to be destroyed to keep it from him.
There is the difference between "envy", which makes people unhappy and begrudging, and "emulation", which inspires people to strive so that they too may be successful.
We should do away with envy, because it is bad for everyone, and we should leave emulation alone. Emulation involves admiration and respect, envy provokes hatred.
Oh I dunno, envy has its uses. As in "if THAT asshole can succeed at this, I ought to be able to do at least 5x better." Which is to say, the observation of a useful prototype example need not be accompanied by admiration.
If you live in a democratic society, or really any society where many people have some access to power to shape the future of society, then inequality at one stage tends to lead to future harms. If you can have a very strictly electoral power system, where financial and other forms of power don’t enable you to steer policy more than just your single vote, then this is less of a problem.
Aren't you leaving out the possibility that unequal access to power results in significantly better outcomes because those with greater access actually exercise the power better? Consider the extrreme case: we disallow access to power entirely for children under the age of 12, which means there are no Constitutional Amendments restricting bedtime to after 11PM on schooldays. Probably a good thing.
Id est, the assumption that equal access to power is an optimal choice bears examination. It may be empirically somewhat true, mostly true, or mostly false.
Well sure discarding the idea that unequal access to power is better than equal without any investigations would be unreasonable. Thankfully, we had quite some of such regimes throughout the history, experienced all their supperiority and ended up with democracies nevertheless.
Now with all our previous knowledge, it is an extraordinary claim that unequal access to power is better. You are free to state its case if you wish, but by default it is reasonable to assume it to be false.
Actually, no, and indeed the Founders were profoundly concerned with this problem. Their survey of history -- and a modern survey would not reach especially different conclusions -- is that democracies were inherently unstable and usually devolved sooner or later to tyrannies or chaos, precisely because they devolved power onto too many people who were incompetent or careless with its exercise.
That is why the Founders set up quite a number of undemocratic institutions in American government, including the Senate, the Electoral College, the Presidency itself, the separation of powers, the Bill of Rights, all the "checks and balances," et cetera.
So if any part of your evidence consists of the stability or longevity or functionality of the American government, it is argument that in no small part is *against* the democratic ideal.
Yes. But I'm also leaving out the possibility that poverty is more good for the soul than it is bad for the body.
My general assumption is that if there is something that is universally good, then most groups of people will be more able to recognize it than not, and so greater participating in government will increase the probability that government accepts that universal good. The issues where political power distribution matters (other than just distribute it as widely as possible) are ones where there is a conflict of interest between different groups.
Hmm. But your general assumption is flatly contradicted by all kinds of relatively obvious historical examples, such as whether eating tons of sugar is good or bad for you, whether vaccines are useful or not, whether invading Russia will or won't work, whether smoking is good or bad for you, whether seat belts and/or airbags will or won't save lives, and if we want to go back far enough whether invisible life forms or bad humors cause disease.
Id est, the majority is predictably right only in extremely obvious cases ("murder as a way to solve a parking place dispute is wrong," "theft as a career is a bad choice," "you have to get permission before you initiate sex.") But extremely obvious cases are also those in which the *need* for government is a priori minimal, since social consensus and its pressures and for that matter individual conscience will normally do most (or even nearly all) of the work.
Where you *need* government is in precisely those areas where social consensus is lacking, or hard to form. Exactly those areas where what is universally good is difficult to discern. So if that's your argument for democracy, it suffers from strong internal logical contradictions.
A much better argument is the principal agent problem, by the way, which doesn't suffer from this weakness.
Another way to frame it: if you have such confidence in the discernment of the majority, why do we need a Bill of Rights? Isn't the good judgment of the majority sufficient?
Not to put words in Scott's mouth, but my guess is that he meant it in the absolute sense. Just because the standard has never been higher in aggregate doesn't mean you can't do a lot of good by further pushing up the bottom of the distribution.
Well, the easiest way to help the global poor relatively, if you're genuinely not concerned about absolute povery, is simply to make the rich poorer. That will reduce the relative gap without changing the poor's absolute standard of living.
And of course it's pretty easy to make rich people poorer. Just start a war, or institute some ruinous regulatory/tax regime, push pr0n to everybody's iPhone, whatever.
It's hardly a strawman if it made you think more carefully about your goals. I see people throw around the term "inequity" or "rich-poor divide" and just sort of assume it's obvious why that might be a bad thing, because wouldn't it all be nicer if we were all rich?
But it seems to me that's not thinking things through clearly, or betrays an ignorance of human psychology, because if we *were* all equally rich, what it would *feel* like is that we were all equally *poor*.
The psychological feeling of "I'm rich" absolutely relies on seeing other people who are manifestly poorer. That's why a knight of AD 1600 could feel rich even though on an absolute basis he's poorer in material goods (and health, opportunity, education, et cetera) than residents of an LA barrio circa 2021. He can look around him at the AD 1600 mud-hut shtetl and see that everyone else is much poorer, so he feels rich. But if we compelled your average lower middle class LA human of 2021 to live in a stone house without running water or heat, wear poorly-sewn burlap without nice soft cotton undies, eat poorly cooked and sometimes half rotten food (although plenty of it), and do entirely without any kind of health care, and be entertained only by shoddy local singers -- the daily existence of the knight of 1600 -- our modern human would feel wretched and poor, compared to the other 2021 LA inhabitants around him, enjoying nice clothes free of vermin, cable TV, central heat and flush toilets.
So while it's 100% clear what it means to reduce absolute poverty, to give people more food, leisure time, access to education and healthcare, et cetera, what it means to reduce relative poverty, or the "rich-poor gap", is considerably fraught. If we made the rich poorer, would that actually make the poor feel richer? It very well might. Does that make it a social good? Hmm. What if we made the poor richer without making the rich richer, for example by redirecting all the extra income of the rich to the benefit of the poor? Would the poor like that? Would the rich? It's not clear, since how one feels about the fairness of life isn't *just* a question of wealth. It has a lot to do with whether and how wealth is connected to effort -- with whether your effort is attached to results, or effort has no relationship to results.
Even if we take your default suggestion, which is to take from the rich and give to the poor, clearly we can't do that all the way until equality, because they we'll all feel poor -- so where do we stop? What is the least functional rich-poor divide, where at least some people get to feel rich, instead of everyone feeling poor? Or is it even possible that a larger rich-poor divide would be better? We need some criterion for the optimal difference.
And then again, many people have argued that to see "the rich" and "the poor" as static immutable classes is a mistake: many people are poor and then become rich, and some other people who were rich become poor. So if you are transferring wealth from rich to poor you could easily end up being *more* cruel than if you didn't: say Peter starts off life poor, but by working hard and saving he becomes rich later in life -- but then you come along and take away all his gains by force and give them to Paul, who is young and starting out and poor just like Peter was. How is this a plus for either? Peter doesn't receive any reward for his efforts, and Paul has nothing for which to strive, and both feel that the connection between effort and results is broken, that it is *not possible* to improve one's situation by your own effort, you just have to hope the majority wants to make you better off. Sounds rather discouraging, if you ask me. I'd hate to have my material well-being depend completely on what some Congressional subcommittee thinks it should be. I like to think I can affect it by own efforts.
I don't have any easy peasy answers to any of these questions, but I woudl rather suggest they need deep pondering before one gets into the practicality of changing rich-poor divisions.
Well, fair enough, and I don't disagree with anything you said in any big important way. I think what I might say, however, is that it might be a mistake to focus on *just* the top-line number, the disparity in wealth and income between rich and poor.
We might need to dig deeper, to look at thinks like social mobility and opportunity: how easy is it to *become* rich, if you start out poor? Societies with high mobility and plentiful opportunity (e.g. low barriers to entrepreneurship, good access to education or capital) might be preferable -- and generally happier -- than societies with low mobility and fewer paths to wealth, even if the rich-poor gap is larger.
That is, psychological people often value their future prospects higher than their present situation (at least when they are young, and they have more life ahead of them than behind them). If I am poor *but* I see a plausible path to wealth, I may be happier and more satisfied than if I am merely lower middle class -- but feel like I'll be locked into that forever.
A side benefit of shifting the focus this way is that we can pick out things that are pretty much unambiguous goods -- like breaking down pointless barriers to social mobility, improving access to education and capital -- and get those done with the confidence that if we do, we will have improved life for the poor whether or not the rich-poor divide closes, or by how much it does.
So for example if I was Bill Gates and needed to get rid of $100 billion so I didn't have to leave it to my ne'er-do-well offspring (or whatever his reason is), I would look at investments that improve opportunities, things that let people leverage whatever energy and smarts they already have. Educational access and basic public health measures are obvious targets, and of course the Gates people are heavily into both. When I was a kid I was very influenced by E. F. Schumacher's "Small is Beautiful" book and I thought that a lot of attention should be focussed on appropriate assistance to the poor (and Third World). LIke the old "give a man a fish / teach him to fish" parable. So if I were Gates I'd try to get the opinion of a lot of people who hard worked long and hard in poor scruffy places and see what would really work to improve opportunity, in the long run, without wasting money just trying to change short-term outcomes.
" But if we compelled your average lower middle class LA human of 2021 to live in a stone house without running water or heat, wear poorly-sewn burlap without nice soft cotton undies, eat poorly cooked and sometimes half rotten food (although plenty of it), and do entirely without any kind of health care, and be entertained only by shoddy local singers -- the daily existence of the knight of 1600"
AHEM. A late 16th century/early 17th century knight would *not* have been wearing "poorly-sewn burlap" unless he was engaging in religious mortification and wearing a hair shirt.
No, they didn't have cotton. What they did have was linen, wool, velvet and silk:
Knights would be gentry, and could be quite well-off (of course, always depending what part of the country they lived in, their land holdings, etc.) Some of those 'stone houses' even had windows made of glass!
While modern living conditions are far superior to those of even the recent past, you're falling into the opposite error of "the past was all mud, shit, and poverty".
Yes, imagine: they didn't have cable TV to fill them in on the latest tragedy in the life of Jazz Jennings, they had to make do with this for entertainment:
OK OK, it was an Internet post, and I didn't want to use the space and time to write a careful exegesis. I shall go say four Haily Marys as penance, all right?
Your analogy needs work. Besides the fact that no knight would wear burlap, and the year 1600 didn't involve much in the way of knights and mud huts anyway, one of the big differences there is that the knight would feel himself grossly diminished, not by a loss of *social* respect or status, but of concrete property and the attendant power. A properly medieval knight would have *at least* been the landlord of everyone in the square mile surrounding his house, and probably more or less owned the actual people. So in your hypothetical barrio, for him to be transported with his standard of living intact, he'd have to also wield the power of rent and taxation over everyone around him, or his material circumstances have been palpably reduced.
Of course this undermines your whole example since it means by extension that he would only be going without a fridge and running water for exactly as long as it took him to learn those things even existed and any of his tenants had them, but even if we handwave that away somehow it's still a crucial distinction. He would feel wretched and poor because you'd robbed him of like 95% of his belongings, not mainly because his stone house suddenly looked shabby next to the neighbor's.
I guess you're not getting the point, since all the things you emphasize about how a knight would feel "rich" -- his power over others -- are exactly *my* point, that it is only the existence of the surrounding peasants that make the knight feel "rich." If *everyone* in the village lived exactly as the knight did, and he had no excess power over anyone, he wouldn't feel rich any more. Feeling rich *always* requires someone else who is clearly poorer than you. That's the idea.
No, I'm afraid I'm going to have to insist that *you're* the one missing *my* point. What I'm saying is that the knight doesn't feel poor due to relative comparison, he feels poor because *you took away almost all of his possessions*.
Maybe it's easier for you to understand my point if we envision him back in the middle ages, circa 1100 AD when there were classical knights. You take away all his rights to rent and power over the local peasants – imagine making the peasants themselves vanish if you like. All remaining peasants nearby and indeed in Europe still have the same even lower standard of living, but the knight now feels poor anyway because *he lost most of his worldly goods including all of his capital and revenues*. This has nothing to do with *relative* poverty. Since your example of moving him forward in time involves the same massive loss of property, you're begging the question by assuming that it's the flush toilets that make the knight feel poor in the barrio.
It's like saying "imagine that you turned Jeff Bezos into a homeless bum and threw him out into the streets of San Fransisco in a stinky jacket. Now he feels poor, *because he compares himself unfavorably to the middle class*!" It's not at all the comparison that will get to him, probably it doesn't even occur to Bezos to make it. What makes him mad is that a malevolent genie turned him into a bum – it's a comparison to his own former state, not to others, that makes him feel impoverished.
And, possibly in that case also the concrete absolute poverty. But you see what I'm saying this time, I hope. You can't just make someone vastly poorer in *absolute* terms and then claim the poverty sensation is caused by his observation of his *relative* poverty.
Alas, here am I, a knight in 1600, with only these shoddy local musicians to entertain me, instead of watching Oprah Winfrey interview Meghan Markle on cable TV:
Giridharadas is a progressive hack. You can expect his positions to be half baked economic progressivism and that he'll never say anything that would make the Cambridge set uncomfortable. I do think the progressives are right on some issues. But Giridharadas is mostly a crowd follower rather than a thought leader.
Anyway, like most of his work on subjects I know something about, he's not all that well read on the literature. It's out of step with actual consensus of experts except in places where experts agree with progressive politics.
His central argument on development that I've seen is basically that economic exchange is (at best) mutually beneficial. It's not likely the first world will trade with the third world if that trade makes the first world worse off. Even if the third world is completely free, they too will at best only trade when it's beneficial to them. Therefore any trade will lead to both nations getting richer. But because the first world is already richer it will not solve inequality.
To which I'd reply, firstly, yes, raising standards in the third world will help the first world be wealthier. But that's a good thing! Also, he doesn't sufficiently account for how a little extra money disproportionately helps poor nations. South Korea went from being the poorest nation on earth to being half as wealthy as the US. It also made the US wealthier in the process. But who really got the bigger benefit? Yes, Americans got good electronics and kpop and maybe their consumption went up more than South Korea's in simple dollar terms. But South Korea went from being extremely poor to a first world economy. In terms of day to day life the South Koreans have seen a much bigger improvement in living standards and HDI and all that.
Of course the South Koreans get credit. Though it's worth noting they had American help, including American credit and technology transfers and cheap loans. That help was much more beneficial than any amount of charity.
Also: We're talking about Giridharadas, not Scott. Giridharadas is not giving out grants. He wants to fundamentally change global capitalism to some form of socialism, remove the billionaire class, etc etc.
To respond to your thought experiment: I'd say you do get moral credit for making mutually beneficial trades. What matters is how much you help the poor, not how much you sacrifice to help them.
Also: A more accurate metaphor is your neighbor has no food and you have extra food. But you like your neighbor because both of you hate your constantly drunk third neighbor. Who's also a dangerous bear. So you give the neighbor some food (and guns). But you also help them set up a business so they can trade with you so they don't need charity anymore. You give them free money to help. They become rich. You get the fruits of their labor. Their house becomes very nice though yours gets even nicer.
Then someone who follows the same politics as the drunk bear wanders over and says, "Don't you realize how unfair it is that your house is nicer than their house? Yes, you used to live in a hovel and now have a very nice house. But their house is even nicer! Don't you see how that's exploitative? Yes, you might be much richer. But you'll never be as rich as them!"
> Surely you don't think that making fair trades gives you some moral credit for charity?
I think it gives you some moral credit. I think if it improves the person's life then it gives you moral credit for improving their lives. And I think if charity doesn't improve their lives it doesn't give you moral credit.
I guess I'd say I don't think charity inherently gives you moral credit. I think improving the lot of the less fortunate does. And it does regardless of whether you turn a profit. Though, of course, it's evil to make their lives worse for profit.
> I think the part of Giridharadas's argument that resonated with me was the part that tickled the utilitarian part of my brain, where the marginal value of an extra dollar for a billionaire is very little, but it's very high for the global poor.
I agree. But notice how that actually cuts AGAINST his argument. His argument is that the consensual trade will only exist where both sides will profit. But if that dollar of profit is worth more to the poorer person then they're benefiting MORE than the rich person by the mutually beneficial trade. He never goes there because... well, it would undercut his entire argument.
> I think Giridharadas's argument is that "let's help the poor but not by giving them money" is a bit of a charade.
Yeah, that's not his point. Giridharadas is an anti-capitalist who talks about eliminating the billionaire class and all that. I'd agree if what you said was his only point. I don't necessarily think giving them money directly works. But things like cheap debt and purchase credits like the Marshal Plan seem to work well.
> But I agree that he comes off in that breathless-progressive-canyoubelievethisshit kind of way that's very off putting.
Yeah, he is rather insufferable in his personal style.
Giving money to poor people directly, or through giving them basic supplies like food and medicine, undercuts the local economy and destroys the poor country's ability to sustain themselves. They can become dependent on the external source of money, never being able to take the step towards building their own local industries, skills, and actually defeating poverty. For instance, a steady source of cheap external food (not to mention free) undercuts local farmers, destroying any market for their goods and therefore forcing them out of business. It's not even a choice whether to keep working, because they will not have the cash to buy farming tools and other necessities, because there is no market for their food any longer.
Just giving poor people money is often a huge mistake. You should instead invest in local industries in poor countries that encourage people to learn skills in order to obtain the local jobs and will actually improve their economy. This can only work if the jobs produced are actually profitable, which only works at scale by requiring them to pay back loans originally made. This creates positive pressure to improve the political stability of the country (you can't get investments in an unstable environment), as well as the economic wellbeing.
This has the side effect of making 1st world people richer, but I consider that just fine, if the 3rd world countries actually improve.
I think that's up to his discretion -- as he wrote in the last post:
"...I will read the form and talk with smart people who seem like they might have good opinions. If you are a leading candidate, I might or might not email you asking for more information, or try to arrange a short call with you."
I don't want to completely ban advertising on open threads, but please don't do it every week. I don't want to set a limit, because if you're consistently doing it at exactly the limit I still think that's breaking the Open Thread spirit.
While his content is often interesting, I think it also does break the Open Thread spirit that Zohar Atkins usually doesn't respond to discussions of the articles he posts.
Also, if anyone is interested in partnering with me for a biomedical grant application, please let me know! metacelsus@protonmail.com I'm working at full capacity on the gametogenesis project but I could provide some advice to you about other things.
The way the question is worded implies "gametes" (i.e. both egg and sperm) were derived in vitro. Likely only one of the two (probably the egg) will be.
Bc eggs are very expensive to get naturally (surgery+$20,000 for a dozen ish), and also have a shorter reproductively viable shelf life (so 40 y old women who want a baby often can’t use their own eggs any more). Sperm on the other hand is competitively cheap to source ($500) and lasts as long as a typical person might wish to have a child.
Very cool. I've almost escaped academia, so not in the market, but excited to see how it turns out.
Is there a way that you can let us know a little more about your lab / PI's expertise and capabilities without immediately doxxing yourself? In my PhD I made a huge mistake by taking on an ambitious thesis project which my lab and PI were enthusiastic about but also poorly equipped to help with, meaning I spent almost the entire time working without a net so to speak. It's a somewhat common mistake so it would be good to know that you have the support you'd need for a project like this.
An edit feature would be great. I give my comment an eyeball proof before I hit post.
If something slips by and it’s particularly embarrassing I might copy it locally, delete the post, paste it back and edit by it before I hit post again.
I do that regularly. Sometimes I think of a better way to say something later on.
This time when I pressed the Reply box it did exactly what I wsnted. Lots of times it doesn't, and I have to go hunting for the appropriate point in the thread to post my reply.
YES! I often delete comments and repost them to make minor corrections. Very sub-optimal. I suspect it's a deliberate policy; editing later can make the thread confusing.
They're not "emulating." They are a newsletter company, and comments are an also-ran, and they never really anticipated how to properly implement it.
At this point, either it's too hard to manage both their back-end API and front-end UI teams, or their database is built in some insane way that UPDATE does not exist.
Can you imagine how much of a mess it would be if you tried to figure out what people actually said, if there was an edit button? 200,000 people share or like a post, and it now says something completely different, or gets sold as advertisement "Drink Pepsi!"
Also we have no italics, no links, no images, and very limited formatting. It's like a 1990s website. And it DELETES WHITESPACE. A pet peeve of mine. If I put whitespace in, it's because I WANT that whitespace.
You're probably using the ACX Tweaks browser extension and forgot about installing it. Unfortunately, it can't be used on mobile browsers. (I'ms still salty about Firefox disabling most of the its mobile extensions last year.)
Hear hear. From what I've seen on the previous open thread, one vector of change could be to exploit a security vulnerability to side-load your comment-editing code; then, and only then, will Substack take notice.
Something I've been thinking of with regard to aphantasia: we talk of visual aphantasia, that is, the inability to recreate visual images in your mind, but what about the aphantasia of other senses? Are there people with auditory aphantasia, who have no inner monologue and never get songs stuck in their head? How about for touch, taste and smell?
As for me, I think I have mild visual aphantasia; things I imagine are low in detail and complexity. However, I don't find these limitations in sound and touch: I can play a song in my head from beginning to end in a way that comes pretty close to the real thing, and I can similarly recall the texture of a peach or a lychee. My representations of taste and smell are less vivid though, and I have to try very hard to conjure an accurate memory of the complete sensation.
Is this typical, or do your senses also vary in their level of representational detail? Note that I'm not talking about sensory impairments like anosmia here, this is purely on whether you can imagine things as well as you experience them.
I can imagine smells fairly strongly. So that does seem to be something with some variability. I'm imagining the smell of fresh baked chocolate chip cookies right now. Not as good as the real smell, but definitely as vivid as anything else I imagine.
How many instruments can you play in your head simultaneously when you imagine music? When I do that, I can get only the main melody and maybe percussion,, but when I listen to the song I notice that I missed many quieter instruments like bass, winds etc.
I would agree that for me the taste and smell sensations are the hardest to recall. Perhaps that's because we don't have a good system to classify these sensations? For vision we have wavelenghts and RBG, for audio we have low and high frequencies and rhythm, for touch we have roughness and temperature, for taste we have... five taste model? Which is kinda BS because there are tons of different receptor types on the tongue, I don't see how it would describe the taste of an onion for example. And for smells we just have to compare the smell to other smells we've smelled before. When we invent the way to put all smells on a diagram, I expect our ability to recall smells to greatly improve.
When I hear music in my head it’s like the orchestra is down the corridor, behind a large mostly sound proofed door, and all the instruments are muffled anyway.
The music I play back in my head isn't separated by instruments. Even if I try I can't 'hear' them separately, the best I can do is imagine what the vocals sound like without the instrumentals. Of course, if there's an instrument within a song that I hadn't noticed, then obviously it won't show up in my memory of it either, but the totality of the song's sound is what plays in my head. I could guess what instruments show up in it by examining that memory, but I'm not a musician and I don't play any instruments, so it would be pure guesswork.
I guess then you could say that your audial imagination is low on detail and complexity similar to your visual imagination, right? Maybe it's just more vivid for you?
I don't think so, because even if I can't commit the different instruments to memory separately, I can still hear what they sound like all together. I also feel like I can precisely identify the different notes, or in the absence of musical training, at least match them to e.g. a piano key. With some effort I can count out the rhythm and identify the time signature, if it's not too arcane. The detail is all there, it's just so wrapped up together that I have no control over the experience except 'pressing play' on a particular song.
I feel like the phenomenon of perfect pitch (or more precisely, it's absence) is a really interesting part of auditory imagination/recall... I do not have perfect pitch, but I often *feel* like I can remember/vividly hear in my "mind's ear" how a song sounds like perfectly- when in actuality, what I'm imagining is playing at a basically random pitch... I find the (to use a probably terrible metaphor) combination of the vivid and precise seeming memory/imagination and obviously objectively very lossy memory storage really interesting...
Yeah, that's why I was hedging that. I don't know whether I have perfect pitch or not, but I certainly have a strong sense of what notes a song has, accurate or not.
I have the impression that I can hear at least 3 and often 4 instruments or voices in my head at one time, but I suspect I'm doing fine-grained time-slicing. Mozart could reportedly reproduce scores precisely after one hearing. I don't know how many instruments there were on these occasions, but probably at least 6.
Maybe other people don't love "Hotel California" (5 guitars, 1 bass, 2 keyboards, 2 drum sets), songs by Kansas, or barbershop quartet, because they can't hold enough parts in their head.
But I suspect I have visual aphantasia. If I could draw, I'd never be able to draw anyone's face from memory. I can recognize them, after many exposures, but can never recall them.
I have the impression of hearing an exact reproduction of a musical recording in my head, and of remembering the human voices in complete detail; yet if I try to recall details like the frequency of a singer's vibrato I'll get it wrong. I seem to hear the complete chord progressions, yet sometimes can't figure them out from memory. Also, my memory will be missing parts if there are more than 3 or 4 parts playing at once, and it will be shifted up or down in pitch. I don't remember anything about the stereo mix (whether each instrument is positioned to left or right) unless it's a blatant left-right alternation.
A guitar chord with 4-6 notes doesn't take up 4-6 parts worth of memory. It seems to be a "chunk".
At this moment I'm listening to the opening of Bohemian Rhapsody, and it's all I can do to pick out 3 vocal parts, even though I have a score that says there are 4 parts. It's really difficult to pick out the vocal parts in Queen. Google tells me (https://www.mothermercury.be/en/queens-vocal-harmony-the-key-to-their-sound/) this is because they overdubbed multiple recordings of each voice.
You're in good company. Keith Jarrett believed no one could hear more than two lines at the same time. And there's research in neuroscience that indicates we have no more than two spheres of attention.
Now that doesn't mean that people can imagine a string section. Playing a Dm6 "sound". But there's a good chance that no one alive can add some inner voices to that bass and melody.
Well, as an illustrative example, I can explain how I, a very bad composer, do it.
I do melody and bass first. Then the overall harmony. Then I take the non-melody or bass voices and create lines in them. I listen for any clashes and adjust accordingly.
So basically, 2 at a time + debugging.
I'm sure genius composers can write out a score basically at will. But I'd say that's vast experience and knowledge of both formal and informal rules.
I hear about two instruments at once plus some percussion (or vocal + an instrument), with fairly accurate timbre. It often *feels richer* than that, as a proper recording would, but I can never distinguish a chord of more than two notes ... even if I'm hearing it live. Chords merely seem "richer". How about you?
Yeah, I can't imagine tastes, smells or touches at all, same as I can't imagine visual images or sounds. I don't think its super rare since I recall seeing a few people mention that it was the same for them.
It's rare enough that experiences typical to phantasics - the concept of the mind's eye, and earworms - are commonly thought to be universal, when they are in fact not.
My aphantasia is, as best I can determine, complete. I can't hold a scene in my mind, I can't hear my wife's voice unless there is air moving around by my ears, I can't imagine the taste of Dr Pepper unless I'm fattening myself up. And I'm well positioned to be certain about all of this, because I remember being "phantasic" as a child. That form of imagination faded away sometime between 15 and 25.
(I get along just fine as an engineer, and can play the piano with skill appropriate for the duration which I've studied.)
Yes, I know I like the taste, and I know the things I like about the taste. And I associate drinking it with good times. But I can't taste it again in my mind.
Similarly, I can describe my wife's appearance, but I can't see her in my mind, or whatever, without looking at her.
If you can remember and recall the taste of your favorite foods at any time, why would you eat them instead of just drinking Soylent while recalling the taste of the superior food?
The memory is less pleasurable than the experience I guess.
Though my tastes aren’t very refined. A peanut butter sandwich serves as a meal for me at least a dozen time a week so I guess Soylent would work about as well in my case.
That brings me to my next question: is it hard for you to keep things in working memory? Neuroscientists describe some of the mechanisms of working memory maintenance as the visuo-spatial sketchpad, and the phonological loop. Obviously the first one is out of the question, but I hadn't thought about whether aphantasics also lack the latter.
The usual (slightly anachronistic) example is to read a number out of the phone book and keep it in your mind as you walk over to the phone to dial it. Most people rehearse this mentally by 'speaking' the numbers in their mind, holding on to the imagined sound of them rather than their numeric representation. Although it takes effort, this is a way of remembering a ten-digit number for a minute or longer, without actually memorizing it. Is this something you can do, or do you need to speak out loud for it to work?
I don't feel like it's any harder to hold things in memory than it is for anyone around me. I certainly think I can maintain a list of technical details for a project in my head better than most of my coworkers, but that's probably similar to chess masters holding board positions better than novices, rather than a fundamentally superior working memory. I practice my skills more than most.
I can, if I choose, "say" things to myself in my head, but there's no hearing, or sense of acoustics. It's just, thinking the series of words. When I say things to myself, there are no acoustic properties to it.
If I wanted to try and remember a phone number in that situation, I'd read over it a few times and think the numbers. Maybe say them, if I was feeling chatty. I seem to do ok.
That's fascinating. I would have thought that saying things mentally *must* be accompanied by a sensory representation of some kind, either acoustic, graphical or pictoral. This has a bunch of implications for the concept of working memory. Thanks for sharing.
I'm curious, how does this affect your life (other than internally)? Are there situations where you'd act differently than other people? Tasks that you'd struggle with?
I'm curious whether aphantasia inhibits some performance-enhancing mental tactics, like visualization exercises that athletes often do. Are any top-level athletes aphantasiacs?
Auditory: almost eidetic. Occasionally able to convince myself I'm hearing things that aren't really there.
Visual: decent. Very clear for a flash, then mediocre if I focus on it.
Touch: poor to middling, depending on the sensation. Decent on e.g. the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Poor on e.g. the feeling of an ice cube on the back of ny hand.
Smell & taste: nonexistent.
Proprioception: pretty good, actually. Equivalent to visual.
Vestibular: maybe kinda?
Emotional: interesting question. Is it possible to remember feeling am emotion without conjuring the actual experience of the emotion? For example: I could make myself experience sadness right now, but I can't picture what sadness feels like, and it feels like if I could picture it I would just be experiencing it.
I consider emotions to be internal, not external sensations. Given that you can experience genuine emotion without any external stimulus just by remembering something that evokes that emotion, I don't think you can consider them equivalent to the senses. Like, I can tell you "think of a sad memory" to make you feel sad, but there's nothing about that sequence of words that's sad by itself. The process that generates the emotion is entirely internal. So no, you cannot imagine feeling an emotion while not really feeling it.
Proprioception and vestibular senses seem strange to include. They're indistinguishable from visual representations for me: if I imagine how it feels for my body to be in a certain position, it automatically takes the form of a picture of how that position looks. These senses are too far from consciousness for me to be able to bring them into imagination. I can imagine the feeling of dizziness but that's it.
Do you really not know what it feels like to hold your arm out in front of you, even if you're paying careful attention to the sensations as you hold it out? I find that's not at all far from consciousness. If nothing else, can fully imagine what it would feel like to flex a bicep?
As to vestibular, I tried to imagine what the orientation of lying down felt like and failed completely. I then tried dizziness and got a vanishing ghost.
Like I said, if I try, I just get a visual image. The sensation is extremely hard to conjure in isolation. If you hadn't mentioned it I wouldn't have thought to count it among imaginable senses.
There must be something you commonly pick up without looking, or where you wouldn't be able to see your fingers wrapped round the object.
For example, maybe you look at a screen while moving your hand from a keyboard to a mouse. Can you remember the sensation of doing that - as in how you hold your hand at just the right grasp shape before you even touch the mouse?
Really like that you added proprioception and vestibular! Ace.
I've one friend who is *very* good at copying physical actions (e.g. from YouTube videos of complex skills) and I have a hypothesis that he has a good proprioception imagination.
Thinking about it I (almost aphantasic) can "remember" (even years later) the feeling of holding my fingers together at just a certain distance to throw a pot. And likewise I can imagine the feeling of picking something up, and how far apart my fingers are. Not well, but something is there.
Most people don't always look when they're doing every day activities like picking up an object, so that's a good place to start thinking about whether you have imagined proprioception.
So, when I read about this stuff my own experience seems to be an undescribed middle ground: I can *recall* senses, and combine them in new ways, but I find it impossible to imagine a sight I have never seen, and even something as simple as recolouring a known object requires effort.
When I was a child I watched very little TV and read a lot of books, and I would dream in the form of text descriptions; as an adult I've consumed plenty of media so my mind has a substantial bank of visual and auditory memories to pull from - crucially, including plenty of fantasy material - but touch taste and smell are still very limited in comparison.
This matches my experience when reading books. I can read a page-long description of how a character looks but it will utterly fail to produce a complete image, and I tend to imagine them as the most similar character I know from a visual medium, and if there isn't one, I don't have a mental image of them at all.
Same thing with me, also for reading fancy restaurant menus that describe each dish. It’s often helpful because I factually know things about what I like to eat, but I definitely can’t imagine it very well based on a description.
Yes - people's use of senses in their mind varies *hugely*.
Whether used for planning the future, imagining fictional things now, or remembering the past, different people do each to different levels of quality, speed and frequency and with different techniques, perspectives and so on.
How the mind's eye is used for particular practical things like navigating in a city, or doing maths also varies.
From talking to people, these capabilities vary as much as how we use any other skill.
I'm visually aphantasic but I can imagine sound and touch pretty well. With sound, I can hear a reasonable reproduction of a song or a person's voice (I can't pick out individual instruments or anything but I think that's just because I'm not musical enough; I couldn't do that when listening to the actual song either), and with touch I can create unpleasant or pleasurable sensations without any external stimulus.
I have all-senses aphantasia and no inner voice. Anecdotally, the incidence of other-senses aphantasia seems higher among (vision) aphantasiacs than the general population. As the preceding sentences make clear, we should develop terms for the other senses' analogues of aphanasia.
Here's a brief post with some links to read more: https://aphantasia.com/discussion-question/visual-or-all-senses/ . I've read some of the research from the UNSW group they refer to. This group and their collaborators are doing the only work I've found trying to rigorously measure aphantasia's physical and psychological correlates. (If you find others, please let me know!)
Visual: decent usually and in some rare cases extremely detailed and vivid
Auditory: decent only sometimes, but usually pretty weak
Touch: weak
Smell: nonexistent
Taste: maybe a tiny bit
Now I'm wondering whether there is a correlation between people's level of taste/smell aphantasia and people's level of appetite/urge to eat food/weight.
I imagine that if you can viscerally imagine how tasty and pleasurable eating a piece of food would be you'd be more motivated to get up and actually do it?
Anecdotally, one reason for me having struggled to gain weight is not being particularly motivated to eat. Whereas a friend of mine who told me he can imagine the smell of food easily has the opposite problem. Guess I'll have to do some more surveying and get more data points :)
Excellent question. Although it's difficult for me to imagine a taste or smell in isolation, I actually find it quite easy to check whether I have an appetite for a particular food. For example, when I was trying to decide what to have for dinner yesterday, I thought of several options that did not appeal to me before arriving at the thing that immediately made me think "Yes, that's exactly what I want." I'm pretty sure I had a flash of imagined taste just then, so either the capacity to imagine it is there, but weak, or I'm using the wrong mindset and I should be thinking "would I want to eat this right now?" instead of "what does this taste like?"
Actually, that makes me think of the starvation response as described in The Hungry Brain. Would starvation-induced food obsession result in a heightened ability to imagine tastes?
Worth knowing that there are two fundamentally different sorts of inner voices.
Most common ones (most people's main inner voice) are "articulatory" which means they use the part of the brain which is just before speaking. So they feel like they're your own voice, and don't particularly have an accent or tone - it's just like you're about to speak.
The other type of inner voice is "auditory mind's eye" - so they're more like visual imagination, but auditory imagination. These can vary in accent and tone, and sound different according to what / whose voice it is. I think some people have one as their default inner voice, other people have them of friends or family or famous people and use them for all sorts of different purposes.
Assuming that I have an accurate map of what you normies' mysterious non-sensing sensing is like, I think that I have near-total aphantasia in all senses except sound, and the sound is mostly limited to speech, like conversations amongst slightly differing versions of my actual voice. I'm also a poetry lover, and I perceive the structures of sound and sense abstractly, such that I almost never like to hear a great poem read aloud.
The main attraction to the biosynthesis of psilocybin in yeast is ease of purification as pharmas would require the isolated compounds. Purification of the active compounds from whole mushrooms is time consuming and costly and likely not very amenable to scaling up (otherwise pharma companies would already be doing this). Hence, currently, pharma companies synthesise these compounds de-novo. Again, this is a costly process that requires some expensive precursors. Moreover, the most well-optimised synthetic approach currently available is patented by COMPASS.
Of course, for home use I'd agree with you that a simple mushroom grow would definitely be the best approach.
It occurred to me that my comment might have been one of the interesting ones, so I turned my comment into a 'grant application.' I didn't ask for money though, I just asked you to consider the idea in my comment.
I expect that it is because people preparing decent or great applications will take more time to plan and submit something than people submitting cryptocurrency perpetual motion machine doing bleeding-edge AI research social handling self-actualization in novel psychological way buzzword buzzword buzzword synergy buzzword for double-win.
Yes, this is the paper Metacelsus is referencing. Understandably, they don't give much away with regards to specific genomic sequences so a lot of reverse engineering would be needed.
Awesome idea and the Milne paper should be able to reverse engineered relatively easy. The psilocybe cubensis genome is available here: https://mycocosm.jgi.doe.gov/pages/search-for-genes.jsf?organism=Psicub1_1 and the author's give the optimised P450 reductase sequence in the paper's supps. I'm not a yeast microbiologist so I'm unsure on the specifics but from a cursory glance it seems that the CEN.PK113-7D differs significantly (>20,000 SNPs) from plain old baker's yeast. Can't find an obvious supplier for this strain so someone would likely need to obtain a 'gift' from another researcher if they were planning on reverse engineering the Milne paper 1:1. This strain also is engineered specifically for protein biosynthesis so I doubt you would get remotely comparable yields from anything less specialised. The EasyCloneMulti vectors used for transformation are all available from Addgene.
For Addgene, you need to have institutional access to order plasmids; same goes for most bio-suppliers. I can't imagine someone would embark on this project without already working in microbiology and owning accounts with addgene, oligo suppliers & sequencing providers.
The transformations outlined in the Milne paper are not simple by any means and one would need to be in possession of a large amount of microbiology lab equipment to even begin embarking on the project.
Besides, as outlined in other comments here, if someone wants psilocybin for recreational use they would just grow mushrooms. It is not difficult to get large yields and FAR more cost-effective.
> Another ethical concern is that von Neumann wouldn't consent and it is unethical to take someone's DNA.
Is it? Maybe when they're alive, sure, because that can actually impact their life, ie. tying them to crimes, affecting their health insurance, etc. I'm not sure that that extends beyond death.
"Another ethical concern is that von Neumann wouldn't consent and it is unethical to take someone's DNA."
John von Neumann doesn't exist any more. "He" doesn't own his DNA because he isn't a thing any more. Perhaps we can say that his DNA belongs to his estate and we need permission from them first.
Although I'm concerned that this might be some kind of ethical bait-and-switch.
Imagine if Scott had written about a plan to rob banks and donate the money to charity, or a plan to rape highly intelligent women and impregnate them with genius babies.
We _could_ then talk about how these actions might be correct from a utilitarian perspective. But I think it's more likely that we would just be shocked and horrified.
This is especially so, since, as long as you're cloning people, you could just choose to clone people who have been proven to live happy lives, instead of living lives of terror.
I think you are looking at "rape" too literally. I believe the idea is that they are unwilling to have those babies (or enough of them to meet the demands of the project) and therefore some number of them are forced to do it, even just giving up their eggs if they don't want to.
Okay, but how about just creating geniuses who *don't* have existential terror?
(This is the #1 mistake of non-consequentialists criticizing consequentialists: a real consequentialist looks for ways to *avoid* the bad consequences posited by the non-consequentialist.)
Depends on what kind of existential terror? Was it just the fear of inevitable death? If so, having 20k of them would be *fantastic*, they can distribute all the biomedical problems between themselves and solve aging.
Also, von Neuman would know about both world wars. Possibly a clone would have less existential terror in a stably peaceful world, if such can be arranged.
Do we know whether existential terror has a genetic basis? It might be plausible, but do we *know*?
I just read his Wiki page. He was raised in a secular Jewish family, spent his life as an agnostic but made a deathbed conversion to Catholicism.
The power of the eternal damnation meme seized him near death. Even if there was a small possibility of RC dogma being correct he wanted to play it safe. He went the route of Pascal’s wager.
Suppose we have a technology enabling us to perfectly measure the hedonic tone of subjective experience, providing a single numerical score. It accounts for many nuances, such as the logarithmic nature of happiness and suffering. You can adjust temporal resolution (quantifying hedonic tone by seconds, hours, years, lifetime) and the scale (specific individual, demographic group, nation, humanity).
1. What findings would most people (including decisive circles) find most surprising?
2. Based on these surprising findings, what kind of:
a) individual life choices,
b) systemic interventions would you likely promote?
I vaguely assume we want to discover the hidden pits of undeserved, intense suffering (to minimize them), and currently unknown, cost-effective ways to promote wholesome forms of happiness.
I'm not going to venture a guess at what the results of hedonic scoring would be, but I don't think it would change my or most people's life choices.
At the moment, people advocating certain life choices tend to equivocate between "this lifestyle is morally right" and "this lifestyle makes you happy". If there were a quantitative way to find who is actually happiest and sort them by income/diet/exercise level/number of partners/whatever, then I would expect lifestyle discourse to bifurcate along whether the hedonometer results supported their case. Half of the pundits would start churning out "Studies show happier people eat pork!" articles, the other half would pivot to "There's more to life than hedonism!" arguments.
As for systemic interventions, the most important field of research would be to find out where exactly are the lower and upper limits of the hedonic treadmill. Happiness is hugely non-linear with living conditions, so moving people into treadmill-territory on the low end and out of it on the high end (if a high end exists) would improve well-being more on net than clearing out all of humanity's hidden suffering pits.
I think the current major disagreements are in two forms. The simple ones are "Things I like are different from things other people like", which prevents universal solutions and means all advice is terrible for some of the audience. The more debatable ones are where people disagree on the correct time preference scale, which this proposal would make starkly clear but not resolve - do you optimise for lifetime happiness and assume the machine can predict the world of 40 years from now well enough to be accurate about your retirement, or do you optimise for your immediate happiness?
i thought i'd share a selection of blog posts that i've written during the last four months. i did this four months ago too but lots has happened since then!
The Devastating Power and Heartbreaking Pain of Truly Changing Minds -- quoting the conclusion which also works as a kind of abstract: "The processes involved in changing one's mind are unusually stark when it comes to Latter-day Saints changing their minds about their religion. This is because various social, cultural and psychological factors incentivise members to keep believing that the Church is true even as information readily available online makes a compelling argument that it isn't. Some Latter-day Saints overcome these forces and reach the latter conclusion anyway. This is a difficult, disorienting and painful undertaking. But it is also somehow beautiful, and I suppose what I find so beautiful about it is that it is the scout, the doubter, the truth-seeker, an underdog here if there ever was one, who wins out despite it all."
The American Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation Makes No Sense -- i describe the difference between the British and American styles of quotation mark punctuation and argue that the former is superiour. this one for some reason ended up with an order of magnitude more views than my second most read post ...
Utilitarianism Expressed in Julia -- i explore some common variants of utilitarianism by implementing them in the programming language julia, with an eye towards population ethics and the repugnant conclusion.
Why Does the Western Left Worry More about Local Poverty than Global Poverty? -- i argue that the western left, to which i belong, should (to some extent) prioritise cross-border poverty over within-border poverty, for instance via cash transfer programs, because income gaps are larger between countries than within countries.
Some Books that Have Influenced Me during the Past Decade -- i briefly describe five books that have been important to me during the past ten years. they are tamarisk row, war and peace, the world as will and representation, edge of irony and inventing the future, which in a roundabout way brought me to slate star codex two years ago.
Oh wow putting the punctuation outside the quotes for sentence fragments is standard across the pond? I've been doing that for years out of pure spite! Thanks for putting the weight of the Queen's English behind my typography.
I'm strongly opposed to the British style, mostly on aesthetic grounds. Those periods, stranded from the preceding word by the quotation marks floating far above them, look disgusting with all that empty space around them.
Sometimes my fellow Americans disgust me. You talk of freedom, but them you enslave your punctuation! The poor full stop, imprisoned within the quotation marks, chained to a phrase he does not know and has no wish to be a part of. And what for? Simply some empty notion of "aesthetics".
As a programmer, I think opening & closing syntactical markers should permit statements to be parsed recursively and that punctuation for something outside quote-markers should not be inside said markers.
Precisely! Sometimes the text you're quoting contains punctuation, and thus it is inside the quote, and sometimes you're adding it yourself, and it lives outside the quote.
I'm bothered by both styles, because both styles are willfully wrong. What you want is an understanding that punctuation within and outside of the quotation marks have no relationship with each other whatsoever.
So say we have the following quotation:
*I wish I was in nebraska.*
The period here has meaning; it shows that we captured the full sentence, or at least its ending. There are cases where leaving it out robs us of information. Likewise, periods are useful in ending sentences; they do so definitively. So the three examples are:
US: I was talking to Dave, and he said "I wish I was in Nebraska."
Britain: I was talking to Dave, and he said "I wish I was in Nebraska".
Correct: I was talking to Dave, and he said "I wish I was in Nebraska.".
In the last, we know that we captured the end of Dave's sentence, and that our own is over. We are unused to it so it "looks ugly", but it does its job and wouldn't look ugly if we hadn't let ourselves get used to weird rules that don't make sense for what we are trying to do.
this was brought up a lot in comments on the post, especially by programmers, and i do mention it in a footnote. i will say that the second period does usually seem redundant to me, and it looks ... weird, so i'm fine sticking with the british. but i agree the third example is the most logical one.
(beyond fact that programmers would for quite obvious reasons prefer consistent rules that make sense, in programming losing or adding even a single sign will have dramatic results - up to catastrophic data loss and getting even worse)
I'm British and a copy editor, and your "Britain" example isn't right, because "I wish I was in Nebraska"[*] is a complete sentence, so the full stop comes inside the quotes in British usage.
(It marks the end of the sentence Dave spoke, and then the containing sentence doesn't add its own additional full stop. I agree that this is illogical in a sense, and that's the point of the sentence you've labelled "correct", but I'm just commenting on the misreporting of how British usage works.)
([*]Or "I wish I were in Nebraska" - but that's a separate debate.)
Where the pond difference comes into play is where the thing in the quotes is a word or short phrase that isn't a complete sentence, like:
Britain: We use the spelling "colour".
US: We use the spelling "color."
The same applies to the comma after the quoted "correct" in my parenthesis above.
I don't think so, if you aren't willing to tolerate some level of ambiguity. I don't think there's a good argument that the system I want isn't functionally better; most arguments I've seen against it seem to boil it down to being "ugly", which I mostly read as "But I'm not used to that one!"
> On January 1st 2050, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will endorse a less literal interpretation of its founding texts and history, including the Book of Mormon, e.g. allowing that the Book of Mormon doesn’t describe real peoples, migrations, wars etc. ⇒ 60%
Wow! As a former LDS member (still technically on the books) this is hard to believe. I expect issues like those you raised (see also cesletter.org) will instead cause a largely silent evaporative cooling effect, where members will simply leave after figuring out the church is false, leaving behind more and more members who lack a truthseeking drive but still preach "truth" and "honesty" with great seriousness. When I left, I was unwilling to make a fuss in church about issues like this... so I presented the evidence to no one, while some would (I assume) only discuss evidence privately with their bishop.
So I wonder what leads you to this prediction. In particular, how the heck could the leadership make this fundamental shift without causing people to leave the church? One thing comes to mind: I suppose they will do it without mentioning that they are now accepting historical records in which, for example, Joseph Smith's first vision only includes one celestial being. Still, what an awkward shift. It reminds me of my dad's shift from "Santa Claus is real" to "Santa Claus is real in your heart", if not quite as drastic. Such a shift seems not as simple as what (my third-hand recollection says) happened with polygamy, where the Lord simply Reveals that we should no longer practice plural marriage (which could be tied into Utah's statehood as explanation).
There were presentations at my church about how the Book of Mormon is supported by archaeological records. Needless to say, only one side of the debate was there to argue, and in hindsight, I assume the person was omitting and/or misrepresenting to reach the necessary conclusion, though at the time I was listening because I wanted to believe, and besides, I didn't know of anyone making the case for "archaeology contradicts Book of Mormon". But at the time I didn't believe I could actually research these things. Even now... I don't know how to do serious historical research, and in practice I just look at whatever Google turns up with. Bishops can always tell doubters "well, don't believe everything you read on the internet" which, after all, is a good point.
So I think the church will largely let evaporative cooling do its thing, leaving behind three kinds of churchgoers: (1) those who have heard evidence Joseph Smith was a fraud and invent excuses to ignore the evidence, which they use if anyone asks, (2) those who have heard the evidence and try not to think about it but maybe pray about it once in a blue moon, and worry about what it might mean that God didn't provide a counterargument, (3) those who have not heard the evidence and so cannot be bothered by it.
As I mentioned in OT 197.5, my wife and I are having our first child in a couple months. Looking for your best parenting advice. (Thanks to those of you who replied on the first thread!)
You should read them too! It's just *sensible*, and looking for baby (and, for that matter, puppy) advice is such a minefield. The Oster books are great for babies, it's just unfortunate that I've yet to find an equivalently good one for dogs.
Just a nitpick, Emily Oster is much more lax about alcohol during pregnancy than the experts in fetal alcohol syndrome recommend. The reason is that Emily Oster mostly looks at studies where the damage is severe, but FAS experts point out that there is lots of other damage that cannot be measured so easily (see this for example: https://depts.washington.edu/fasdpn/pdfs/astley-oster2013.pdf)
That PDF says only "of 2550 children with FAS in our clinic, 1/14 of their mothers report drinking no more than one drink per day during pregnancy". It does not even make reference of the question actually of interest, namely, "of mothers who drink one drink per day during pregnancy, how many have FAS [or other negative outcomes]?"
Now, it's possible that number is higher than Oster represents, but the fact that this author does not even consider the question makes me somewhat skeptical that they are going to be doing a good job reasoning about risk.
At a lot of hospitals, they take you to a little room and make you watch a video on not shaking your kids before they let your leave with the new human you made. And you are going to watch this hastily made bullshit and go "Wait, do they think I do meth? I don't do meth. I'm not going to shake my kids. This is dumb."
A few weeks later, you are going to be on your third night of 3 hours or less sleep, and the kid's going to be screaming. They are dry, and fed, and burped, and being held in a warm nice room and still screaming. They've been screaming for hours and hours, and they aren't stopping, and you are never going to ever sleep again because of this little shit.
And then pick them up and realize, oh, hell, that's when people shake them. You've built this mental model where only a crazy, drugged up loser would ever even think of shaking them and not updated for what it's like to be heavily sleep deprived and have an apparently malicious kid trying to make it worse and succeeding.
Which isn't to say you will shake them; you probably won't. It's to warn you of stuff like that - your mental model is telling you that you have a 0% chance of being abusive in a bunch of ways you have a >0% chance of being abusive in. It's a good thing to be aware of beforehand, rather than to be made aware of during the test.
The other thing to consider is that basically all parenting books that aren't explicitly religious are written from a left-wing perspective, by a person who is extremely likely to be a dyed-in-the-wool doesn't-know-theres-any-other-viewpoints straight-ballot left person. That's not necessarily bad - it has to be written from some viewpoint, after all - but it's something to keep in mind. The main thing I remember about them from reading several a million years ago is a fetishization of pain avoidance, for instance.
From a raw numbers perspective, you are probably right about the authorial biases of parenting books (although excluding religious ones from the count seems somewhat cheating given the overlap of general conservativsm and religiousness). But I don't think that Emily Oster or Bryan Caplan are even _close_ to as left leaning as you describe and their books on parenting are probably the only ones I've even _heard_ of from the past decade or so (although I probably won't have kids for another few years so I'm not actively looking). And I know that Russ Roberts has been considering/working on a book on parenting (sort of more on why one _should_ become a parent, but close enough) and it's a common theme on his podcast.
I guess my point is that it's not very hard to find non-religious, non left wing parenting books and other media if that's what one is looking for.
To be fair and agree with you a bit - I'm like easily 14 years out of date here. And it was a limited sample size; I didn't know about Oster until I looked her up here. Caplan in particular probably wasn't active in the parenting book game until I was out of it. So particularly with those two, but even generally I'm certainly falsifiable/potentially wrong here.
I think we actually agree on the bit about excluding conservative books? I wasn't trying to be tricky; I was just saying that most of those are going to be conservative, most others aren't.
I regret listening to *any* of Caplan's ideas on parenting, to the extent that if I saw him dying on the street, I would lecture him about he was wrong rather than calling an ambulance.
In a way it's my fault for listening to a joker who had no business writing a parenting book.
What they tell parents here is basically "if you are on the point of physical abuse, put the baby in another room and close the door and let it scream for ten minutes". Like, that won't win you parent of the year awards but it's way better than shaking them.
None of our babies were quite as bad as your experience. It's not because of any great parenting on our end, we just got easier babies. They also never spat up much or showed signs of digestive issues, and I wonder if that's related.
My hope for anyone is that they never get to that point. But I got close enough that it really worried me, and it wasn't even realistically that close; I thought I had literally no chance of ever doing that. I sort of made the decision to take the hit and seem like a bad child abuser type if that was what happened to warn people about that; I think it's often a much worse/more demanding period of time than is advertised.
Yeah every now and then we have these pro vs. anti-homeschooling discussions on ACX and I think "it's hard enough to get my oldest dressed for school in the morning, I'm supposed to teach her all day"? And she's been this way since at least two. Fortunately she seems to be the type who can get with the program in institutional settings and obey adults who aren't us.
Related advice: it's hard to plan out their lives too much before you know them. My oldest would be a terrible homeschooling candidate, other peoples' kids are suited to homeschooling but not regular school. Don't get fixed ideas.
Your position on parenting books is very important, even though it is a little out of date. Parenting books often revolve around ideas about parenting that are popular in some kind of social group. I actually think categorizing them as "leftist" or "religious" can be confusing sometimes, a better categorization is by the ideas.
I think there are two streaks that definitely exist in parenting books. One is the "attachment parenting" streak, which stresses the mother always catering 110% to the need of the child. Is this what you mean by "pain avoidance"? It's kind of weird, because even though this parenting style is very "nice", is has a big conservative reception, as it highlights the role of the nurturing mother over everything else. So you often get much talk about the "bond between mother and child" and such things in those books. But you can also spin the idea in a more modern liberal direction, when you stress that "this is the natural way, this is the way ancient tribes do it".
The other streak is the anti-authoritarian one, which is focused on "letting kids develop themselves". There, you find ideas that say that most or all attempts to interfere in your kids life are bad in one way or another. This is the pedagogy that is often associated with the hippie generation. But it's funny, Bryan Caplan also is quite anti-authoritarian, because he is so much anti schools, and he says that most parental interventions have no or a small effect.
Both those schools of thought are highly dependent on the families background. If a mother is economically and logistically able to do all the things attachment parenting demands, it's probably good for the child, since children very generally thrive on interactions. But it has the enormous cost that the mother cannot to much else, so she needs a husband who provides a large income.
Anti-authoritarian parenting is dependent on the parents being unshakeably middle class. Because there is less of an attempt to influence what the kids are learning, the kids are much more dependent on learning things through socialization. Which works great if the parents and their friends are successful intellectuals, but less so in most other cases.
I wonder if your last observation about pain avoidance is why so many Gen Z kids have such high anxiety. Their Gen X parents read those "pain avoidance" books back in the 80's and 90's and shielded their kids from unpleasant or uncomfortable experiences, denying them the opportunity to develop resilience.
You can't shape their personality that much but you really do need to keep them alive. The most dangerous points are when they've just increased in mobility (started rolling, started climbing, started walking) etc.
Also, when they do start crawling, they can move a lot faster than you expect, so they can get into the dangerous stuff fast. Childproof everything before little fingers can start poking at it.
Be advised that children can learn to climb before they learn to walk. So make sure that your gates go all the way to the ceiling. It's easy to say "no infant could possibly scale this waist-high gate !". It's also easy to be wrong.
Advice that I was given that I found helpful: for the first year or two, almost everything is a phase that lasts a couple of weeks. So if they suddenly stop sleeping at night or start doing this or that irritating thing, just think of something less pleasant that you've tolerated for more than two weeks in your life. Also, breastfeeding can often be very difficult or impossible, there's no way to predict it, so support her as much as you can and if it doesn't work out (as it didn't for my wife), be cool with formula and make sure she knows that your not judging her.
For what it's worth, my personal advice based on a number of kids, the oldest just turned 30:
1. Don't worry about being smart for quite some time. The early years of parenting don't require any brilliant decisions, you mostly just need to do what's relatively obvious (which your kid is programmed to tell you unmistakably.) If you make silly mistakes they are generally harmless in the long run, as babies are physically and psychologically a lot tougher than they look. If you leave the baby in its own poo for a while because you space out checking the diaper, it doesn't mean the poor kid will need psychotherapy when he's an adult. Shrug it off and move on.
2. Along those same lines, be chill with your wife. If she doesn't do something you think is a good idea, or even which you have mutually agreed is a good idea, shrug it off and move on. It's way more important that you preserve mutual sympathy and support than that every decision is made well and executed well since, as I'm asserting that most decisions in the tender years are either darn obvious or not very important. There's plenty of time to have a long intellectual struggle over the right thing to do when the kid hits the college years and wants to do something or other one or both of you feel is outrageous and stupid.
3. Interact with your kid as much as possible. Talk to him when you're changing his diaper. Muse out loud about your thoughts as you're washing up. Tell him jokes, tell him why you're sad or angry when you are, tell him what the two of you are about to do next, and why. He won't respond initially and for while *but* babies take everything in. They are gigantic sensory sponges, and all this interaction matters to them. They will acquire emotional tone very early, and words long before you realize it. If you interact with them as much as you can, you convey very important basic things, such as (1) you (the baby) are important to me, and (2) the world (at least at this age) is a rational place with rules and patterns you (the baby) can deduce, and you also give him the valuable raw material that he needs to start making sense of what his senses are telling him. Consistency is very important, too, since the hard part of the baby deducing the patterns of life is that there are so many, and they overlap chaotically. So every consistent pattern you show him helps him start to make sense of things faster. If you always pick him up and put him in the same place to change his diaper, and say the same things in the same tone, it helps him start to figure out the patterns in his sensory experience.
4. Hopefully you already know that babies need to feel physically secure, and early on that requires being wrapped up or held quite firmly. It will seem weirdly contradictory to take a baby flailing around and yelling and wrap him firmly up in a blanket, but that's actually what they want. And similarly, hold the kid in your arms as much as you can, because that physical contact makes him feel secure and safe. He will get to know you very fast (although not as fast as his mother of course), and recognize your smell and touch, and these things will make him feel safe.
5. I will say never deliberately let him cry it out, but also recognize that sometimes they really do just need to cry and yell for a while, and sometimes there is fuck all you can do about it. (And sometimes the ways in which you *can* put a stop to it, e.g. by giving him sugar or not making him stay in the crib when it's bedtime, aren't good in the long run.) Don't punish him by isolating him, but also don't beat yourself up because you can't make him be more reasonable. Just wait it out, however it works best for the two of you, and by and by it will get better. He won't remember these outbursts, and for your own mental health it's best if you emulate his good example by cultivating a short memory for them.
6. Never forget that although what he wants and feels is profoundly important, *you* are the parent, and it's your peculiar burden to have to make decisions on his behalf. Be thoughtful and sensitive and never hesitate to adapt to circumstances, but when you make a decision be definite and implacable about it. A baby, and a child, needs firm structure to feel secure, to believe that the universe is a place that can be managed by reason and effort. It is often a father's special role to provide that structure. Gnaw at your entrails and indulge in self-doubt as much as you like in private, or with your wife, but when your kid needs you to be in command, don't let him down by abdicating.
7. Take a lot of photos. When he's 16 or 25 or 40 you will look at them and they will have more meaning than any other possession.
Awesome writeup. I'm the father of two boys, the oldest now 29, and wouldn't change a word of that.
I will add a word to point 7 though, and that word is "video". My two kids are 19 years apart and a big difference turned out to be the fact that nowadays we all have video cameras in our pockets. I take lots of still photos too of course but little video clips can be a whole other level of gold.
One of my happiest memories of the early years with my daughter is of reading some of the Captain Underpants books to her when she was 5 or so. We were both laughing so hard we were completely incapacitated, flopped together on the couch just roaring. Before I had her I pictured reading her the finest classics of children's literature, and in fact I did do some of that. But the truth is, Captain Underpants was our favorite. Try not to hang on too hard to the way you think it's going to be, and enjoy the way it actually is.
Congrats, less advice book and more 'awe-inspiring' but I highly recommend Alison Gopnik's the Gardener and the Carpenter. Not a parent yet but its changed my view on a lot of things unrelated to children, family, and 'love'.
Here’s my 2 cents as far as parenting advice is concerned: you’ll find that a lot of parenting is improvising. In a way, there’s really no such things as grownups. Everyone’s kinda making it up as they go along.
My experience consists of raising one boy who’s currently 16. His whole life, we’ve regularly gotten effusive compliments from other grownups (teachers, parents of his friends) on what a great kid he is. Most of that is just him being his excellent self, but here’s a few suggestions on things that seemed to work well.
We only had “the one big rule”: Don’t Get Hurt. Too many people have too many rules for their kids. (He’s always had empathy, so we never had to state the complementary rule “Don’t Hurt Other People”. Suggesting “that might hurt so-and-so’s feelings” was enough.)
Get in the habit of carrying a handkerchief: it’s super-useful when they’re really little.
Our kid talked early and often, but he could understand speech and use a few basic sign-language moves for a couple months before he started speaking; the signs for “more” and “all done” are especially useful. The sooner they can consciously communicate, the better.
Good manners will take you a long way, and they don’t cost much; bad manners can get real expensive real quick. If you practice good manners at home (just simple old-fashioned stuff like saying please and thank you to your significant other for every little thing, for example) your kid will soak that up, imitate it without even thinking about it, and get more cooperation and extra respect from most other people with very little conscious effort for the rest of his or her life.
Only say no when you really mean it, and always explain why. None of this “because I said so” bullshit. If you don’t mean “absolutely not, that’s a flipping horrible idea and here’s why” then don’t say no. Say “not today” or “maybe, if we have time” or “I’d rather you didn’t, because,” etc.
Don’t bullshit your kids - I mean, believing in Santa is kind of a fun game (and the eventual disillusionment gets them used to the idea that mythological-sounding stories probably aren’t really true) but, in general, give them as much of an honest answer as you think they can handle, for any question they ask. If it’s something you don’t want to explain, you can explain that (i.e. “oh, that’s a gross joke about sex - I’d rather not go into the details, ok?”)
Praise and thanks are best when immediate and specific (“thanks for helping clean up for the party - yeah, stuffing most of your toys into the closet totally works. That was a good call.”)
Correction should be mild and certain, and involve a dialogue, not a lecture: “we left the party and you’re going home to have a time-out because you bit that kid. Oh, you bit him because he was holding you down while that other kid punched you? Ok, that’s a pretty good self-defense move; I can see why you did that. No, we’re not going back to the party now. I mean, a party where you get into a situation like that, that’s not a good party. Well, I’m sorry you didn’t get to have cake, but there will be other birthday parties.” Time-outs were 1 minute for every year of age: hardly ever had to use them, never after he turned 6.
When possible, let them have a turn calling the shots. “Do you want this for lunch, or that?” “What do you think we should draw?” Kids have so little control over their own lives, and they need all the practice they can get making decisions. The sooner and more often you can allow them to exercise some control, the better. “Do you want to go on this ride, or that one? Or maybe that other one first?” (Pro tip: it’s also a great sneaky way to steer them away from stuff, by not listing options you don’t want them to choose while giving them something else to think about and a gratifying feeling of agency.) Prioritize giving them your attention and being patient. They will want to tell you about all sorts of things you may have little interest in, and it is a pain in the neck when you have to get up in the middle of the night and change the sheets because they wet the bed. Patience and empathy are essential virtues here.
You will have occasion to apologize to your kid: I recommend short, simple, direct, slightly on the formal side but sincere. “I’m sorry mommy and I were squabbling; I’m sure that was no fun for you. People just step on each other’s toes sometimes - I think we’re all settled down now. But I’m sorry you had to listen to us yelling.” (Still happily married, btw!) Hope this helps - everyone’s got their own row to hoe, YMMV, etc.
Thanks - best of luck to you! I was pleasantly surprised to see so many comments I agreed with in this sub-thread; looks like we’ve got more than a few pretty decent parents in the ACX crowd :-)
One more story about understanding language before speaking.
I was with a little girl and her mother and the girl seemed to be having trouble getting the pieces out of a wooden frame silhouette puzzle. She didn't seem to be talking so I said to her mother something about turning the puzzle upside down, and the girl did it.
My wife and I are also expecting, so we've been reading through parenting literature. I recommend Raising Self-Reliant Children in a Self-Indulgent World. It's been the standout so far. The authors clearly understand children, but more importantly they understand people. For early childhood, I would recommend The Continuum Method. It's weird and intense, but has stuck with me longer and deeper than most other books. Even if not taken as scripture, you may find some valuable takeaways therein.
My wife and I are in the same boat so I'm gonna go ahead and draft off of all this excellent parenting advice, thank you everyone!
While I'm at it, as far as I can tell a lot of baby gear (strollers for instance) is built to withstand bombardment from space, so check for used options before buying new. Car seats have an expiration date though, so get one that was made in the last 2-3 years, and it should be good till ~2025 then
Here's a summary of what I think has worked for me:
The big points are 0-2:
0a: Everyone has parenting advice. Not everyone has children, and not everyone has been a good parent, so take every bit of advice (including this) with the appropriate salt.
0b: A lot of how kids turn out ends up being genetics. So, do the best you can, and understand that your kid isn't perfectly moldable clay. They may end up doing things you don't like, no matter what you do.
1. Children are people too. A good heuristic for "how should I treat a child" is "how would I treat an adult" - with the caveat that the adult might be from a foreign country, and amnesiac, and have poor emotional self-control.
1a. When you make a decision or want to set an expectation, explain what it is, and why you're doing it, and try to respond to questions. Avoid the temptation to say "because I say so". "Because I say so" translates as "because this is a basic norm of decent human behavior, or, there's some complex situational circumstance. Either way, I can't articulate or can't be bothered to articulate what that is for you". You wouldn't "because I say so" to a peer adult.
1b. If your child is trying to get your attention politely, *respond to them*. Adults have this magic ability to tune out children, and so many times I've witnessed a child go from "excuse me...excuse me....mom....mom...mom...momomomom", until someone exasperatedly yells "WHAT". You wouldn't tune out and ignore a peer adult.
1c. The flip side of this is, it's reasonable to expect good behavior. If you've politely asked a child to stop doing something, and perhaps even explained why, then if they've failed to respond to that, it's reasonable to consider it a disciplinary issue.
2. Sacrifice. One of your most important jobs now is to raise a productive & self-actualized future member of society. At times, this will be inconvenient.
2a. You might be trying to get out the door for a dinner reservation, and your child is of an age where they're supposed to dress themselves, but they haven't done so. You _could_ physically dress them, you _could_ go out the door with them improperly dressed. I'd instead say you might need to pause, discipline, and spend 10-20 minutes dealing with the issue, and be late for or miss your appointment.
2b. You might be shopping, and your child starts throwing a tantrum wanting a candy you've refused. You _could_ give in to their tantrum. I'd instead recommend pausing your shopping, taking them outside, and dealing with them until they've calmed down.
Other good things to know:
3. Discipline
3a. The important things are immediacy and consistency. If you've said something is unacceptable behavior, and you catch them doing it, try to respond every time, right away. This is tiring, and this is inconvenient, but it's important. Part of the childhood process is exploring, and this means exploring boundaries and pushing.
3b. I like to discipline by a quick checklist of:
* what you did was unacceptable
* here's what specifically you did that was unacceptable
* here's why it's unacceptable
* here's the consequence
This doesn't need to be a lecture, and usually shouldn't be. A sentence each is often fine.
3c. Spanking - it's a big CW issue for some. Personally, I've managed to raise a fairly obedient and well-behaved son, without ever using corporeal punishment. I think that when it's done *correctly*, it's not significantly more effective than other disciplinary consequences, and when it's done incorrectly, it becomes counterproductive or even abusive. If you choose to spank, I'd recommend having a personal rule of the parent needing to take a deep breath, count to 5, and not spank in anger. Overall I'd recommend against it, though.
3d. Consequences that work. Here's what I recall working for me:
* 2~3 years: choices in false dilemmas. i.e., "I don't want to take a bath". "You can walk to the bathroom, or I can carry you to the bathroom, what do you choose". This is surprisingly effective, until they start to figure out that the dilemma is false.
* 4~5 years: time-outs. After explaining the reason for the consequence, they have to stand still in a quiet room for 30-120 seconds while a parent supervises. After the quiet time, they need to repeat back *why* they had the time-out. If they become rebellious, the time-out might last longer, maybe even 10-20 minutes overall, and this might be inconvenient for the parent - see point #2.
* 6~7 years: long-term rewards. A sticker chart for good behavior, and bad behavior results in losing a sticker.
4. Other advice
4a. Let them fail. It's oh-so-very tempting to step in and help a child who's failing at some simple task, repeatedly. Let them learn how to do it. There was a twitter kerfluffle over some guy who made his daughter teach herself how to use a can opener. The internet wanted to cancel him, but I think there's an important strategy in there for parents.
4b. Push them to try new things. Not just what you're interested, but what they're interested in.
4c. Let them help out with household chores, and expect them to help out with household chores. (cooking, cleaning, etc.). Early on this will be inconvenient, and more effort than just doing it yourself - see point #2 above. Early on, this will probably be a pair activity, rather than a "here's your responsibilities" activity.
4d. When reasonable, set an expectation that they clean up their own messes.
4e. In general, as much as possible, try to let them feel the direct consequences of their own actions, or at least an attenuated version of them. If they're running recklessly, they may fall & get hurt. If they eat carelessly, they may have to clean a mess. If they're wildly bouncing and they hit you, exaggeratedly show your pain.
There’s an 80% chance your keys are in the chest of drawers, and a 20% chance they are on the table in the other room. There are 4 compartments in the chest. After opening 3 of them what are the odds?
1:1 (i.e. 50%) odds between being on the table and in the remaining drawer. (Assuming that you didn't find the keys in any of the drawers you opened.) The argument is that the initial odds are 4:1. Considering individual drawers in the chest gives 1:1:1:1:1. Opening 3 drawers and finding no key eliminates 3 of these cases, leaving 1:1.
No, it's 50/50. Each of the five locations had an equal likelihood, and after checking three of them, the remaining two still have an equal likelihood. It doesn't matter that four of the locations happen to be in the same piece of furniture.
> Each of the five locations had an equal likelihood
I think that's technically an assumption that isn't specified by the problem, namely, that all drawers are equally likely, but you could have a history of placing keys in the first drawer you opened 60% of the time, or the last drawer 60% of the time. This would bias the chest below or above 50% after opening 3 drawers.
I think the problem is actually underspecified for an exact solution unless you constrain it with additional assumptions.
Only way I can figure that it would be 80% is if the person opening the drawers knows where the keys are and is under orders to open three empty drawers. But you specified in your reply to Pycea that the person opening the drawers doesn't know where the keys are.
If you've opened the drawers randomly, then it's 50%. If you didn't open the drawers randomly, then it depends on the probabilities of the keys being in particular drawers.
You could get 80% if you open the first three drawers, but the keys are always in the 4th drawer whenever they're in the chest of drawers.
I think this depends a bit on how the problem is set up. If the keys are randomly distributed between the four drawers and the table, then after opening the three drawers, your odds should be 50/50. However, if they were randomly placed, then someone who knew where they were opened three drawers that they knew were empty, the odds would be 80/20 still. (The second scenario here being more like the Monty Hall problem.)
I don’t think its monty hall. I think it’s anti monty hall in some ways. In Monty hall you get information about what was opened by (as you said) somebody who knew which drawers are empty. Here it’s just you. Do you gain information as you open the drawers?
(I have an opinion on the answer but I don’t claim to have the definitive answer. In fact I saw this as a tweet and there was sting disagreement).
The relation to the Monty Hall problem is that Monty reveals information by opening a door, given that the door is guaranteed to be a loss.
The crux of this problem depends on how the keys are distributed within the chest of drawers, as well as how you choose which drawers to look in. For example, if the method of hiding and the method by which you look in drawers is uncorrelated, e.g. at least one is uniformly random, then the odds are 50/50. However, if for some reason your first three drawers are guaranteed to be empty, then the odds remain 80/20.
But it can also be anything else. If the keys being in the chest of drawers are always in the top drawer, and you always check top to bottom, then the odds of them being on the table after the checks is 100%.
So they're equally likely to be in any of the drawers? That wasn't stated in the original problem and was not what I first thought since it's a bit unrealistic (usually most people try to put things in the same places consistently).
If I'm rational, and I make a handful of other plausible assumptions, it's probably /less/ than 50/50 - most people are more likely to have put the keys in some draws than others, and will open draws in order of how likely to contain keys, so the last draw is probably less likely to contain the keys than the table is.
Generally speaking, you're not supposed to think that way about questions like this, because you could spend forever thinking of realistic reasons the math would be off in various ways.
I just deleted a few comments because I'm dumb: help me out here.
Does it matter that we are arbitrarily considering each drawer a "location" of it's own, while considering the table also arbitrarily to be one location, just because we can check that location quicker? Imagine I had to check the table through a toilet paper tube one spot at a time; does that change the math?
I don't think that's a significant factor. The problem could be done in reverse:
Say that there's an 80% chance that the keys are on the table, and a 20% chance they're in the chest of drawers. You've searched 75% of the table, and have not found the keys, what are the odds they're on the table?
The answer remains the same. Odds of it being on a quarter of the table are 80%, divide by 4 because the keys are randomly distributed between quarters, and you have a 20% of it being on any given quarter. 3/4 have been searched, so the odds of it being on the table are effectively dropped by 60 percentage points. That leaves equal odds between quarter 4 of the table (20% originally) and the chest (also 20% originally), which comes out to 50% each.
You didn't specify the prior distribution among the drawers. "80% chance of being in the chest" could mean "20% chance for each drawer" or it could mean "80% chance for the top-left drawer, because that's the only drawer you ever use, and 0% for the other three". Those would give different answers for the posterior probability distribution.
But if you assume a uniform prior probability distribution among the drawers then you started with 5 locations all at 20% probability, and the fact that you gave them different verbal descriptions has no impact on the math.
Like many probability problems, it depends on subtleties of the wording. As stated, I think the answer is 50/50, but I think (not completely sure) you could make it 80/20 if it's stated that the keys are guaranteed to be in one specific drawer if they're in the chest at all (but you don't know which).
More concretely, you could say that you're at your friend's house and he's asked you to find his keys, and he's told you there's an 80% chance they're in the chest and a 20% chance they're on the table (maybe this is even externally determined, like he has one day off work per week but it's not always the same day, and he puts them on the table on his days off), and he knows which drawer he keeps them in but you don't.
...I'm actually not sure now whether, in this framing of the problem, you opening three empty drawers that never had a chance of containing keys is as irrelevant as you looking under the bed, or if it's Bayesian evidence for the keys not being in the chest.
In that one it's evidence against being in the chest, since you have no idea which of the drawers is the key one. Your friend absently looking through irrelevant drawers to get out something else won't update on the location of his keys, though., because he does know which drawer matters.
I actually don’t have an answer for this. I just saw it on Twitter. My first thought was 50-50. However, and this may be the wording of the question, here’s the nub - does the nature of the question imply that there’s an 80% chance regardless? Read the first line again.
Let’s say you’ve asked your housemate for his car keys. He has agreed. He says there’s an 80% chance they are in the drawers in the front room, and a 20% chance they are on the table in the back of the house. Depends how he came in. You go look. After opening three of the drawers the last one is stuck. Do you cut your losses here and don’t bother prying it open until you check the back room? Or try it first. What are the odds now?
If you called him and tell him the lower right drawer is stuck is he likely to say “that’s where I put it if it is in that room”?
The wording that I saw on twitter was different: “you believe that there is an 80% chance […] how do you update your belief ?”. Implying that your belief is not necessarily correct in the first place.
* If you start out with a strong prior, you should update it very little with subsequent observations, so you should remain with a 79% belief after checking the first drawers
* If you start out with a weak prior, you should update it a lot, and your belief should be down to 51% before checking the last drawer.
I don’t think I saw that version. However you are right - the trapped prior here might stick at 80% if you trust yourself, or your wife, or whomever told you it was 80% chance of being in the chest of drawers regardless of how many drawers you have opened.
In this example you've got five hiding spots (four drawers and a table), and the hiding spots are all nice and discrete and equally likely to hold the hidden keys. I'd like to piggyback on your question and ask about hiding from the other direction: when you want to hide something, how do you decide where the best hiding spot is? if I gave you a map of a maze and asked you to rank the cells in the map as hiding spots, how would you do it? How would you tackle the problem of assigning a hiding value to each square? To each dead end?
With a maze, the most important thing to do is to make sure it's not accessible by the "always turn left" rule; basically anywhere in the centre is good, but maximising the number of choices along the way is probably ideal, to give as many chances for people to get lost as possible.
For a more mundane small object in a house, go for the most inaccessible location; if someone needs to pry up floorboards to find it it's staying hidden for a long time (unless it stinks or makes noise, I guess)
Or opening and closing the compartment leaves marks.
I'm very fond of a bit in a Lawrence Watt-Evans novel where the character finds the path through a maze because it's the path that's not dusty. Who's going to keep the whole thing swept?
Its clear (to me, a fool) that the odds remain the same: you have not finished checking the chest of drawers, and we know there's an 80% chance they're in the chest of drawers. Given that you've checked 3/4 of the chest and haven't found it, then there is an 80% chance it's in the final drawer.
I mean, there are several obvious methods: starting WWIII (both in terms of much existing infrastructure being destroyed by EMP and by location in cities, and in terms of the fallout making computers more expensive in the future due to soft errors), somehow arranging for a Carrington Event every year, or just a treaty banning neural networks worldwide on pain of invasion (specifically neural nets; neural nets are how I would program if I wanted to accidentally build Skynet, since they're notoriously opaque).
I'm not sure how to accomplish any of these, though, and the first couple have some rather-major downsides. If anyone has a plan for the last one I'd suggest putting in an application.
As Gunflint said, electromagnetic pulse. Basically, nukes generate an extremely-powerful radio squawk that can damage electronics with a line-of-sight to the explosion. It is considered highly likely that in the case of a full-scale nuclear war, high-altitude nuclear detonations would be used for wide-area destruction of infrastructure (high-altitude gives longer range before the horizon blocks it).
That's because radio below a certain frequency bounces off the ionosphere[1]. But the ionosphere is not going to reflect sufficient power to much of anything to potential antennas over the horizon.[2]
--------------------
[1] We're not going to talk about ground waves in the AM spectrum, OK? Just to simplify things.
[2] Personally I don't believe in dangerous EMPs anyway, though. It's "nuclear winter" kind of hype, I think. The only known emprical case (during Starfish Prime) was very mild and happened in lighting circuitry which was so brain dead it could and probably was knocked out by lightning all the time. I've never seen a convincing tgheoretical argument that a high-altitude EMP would be dangerous to actually extant modern electronic circuitry.
>That's because radio below a certain frequency bounces off the ionosphere[1]. But the ionosphere is not going to reflect sufficient power to much of anything to potential antennas over the horizon.[2]
Also, the ionosphere is what's generating the squawk in the first place.
>The only known emprical case (during Starfish Prime) was very mild and happened in lighting circuitry which was so brain dead it could and probably was knocked out by lightning all the time.
Starfish Prime was quite a long way from Hawaii, though, and silicon chips while existent were not yet widespread. I agree that most electric circuits are resilient vs. EMP, but semiconductor devices are quite fragile. Also, you see military people worrying about EMP, whereas it was mostly civilians talking about nuclear winter AIUI.
I think the cheapest and least disruptive approach would be to hype the hell out of AI, and persuade people that it can do in the short run much more than is at all plausible. Previous "AI winters" have been theorized to result from the disillusionment (by e.g. granting agencies) with overpromise/underdeliver, so anything you can do to magnify present overpromising will hasten the approach of a new AI Ice Age.
That's brilliant. Blowing $1-2 billion in investor's money totally qualifes as "really bad" and would sour people (particularly those with money and interest in AI) for a long time. If you create the company please let me know and I shall get in on the ground floor and hope to ride the elevator to near the top, where I will sell to a greater fool.
#1 I personally wouldn't make a bet. It's too politicized and the current situation already seems nonsensical to me, so I can't pretend to understand how society will continue to react.
#2 is entirely dependent on individual risk tolerances. I personally would go back to acting the exact same as I did pre-pandemic with the booster. Others might not.
#3, I doubt there is good evidence yet, but the prior should probably be that it will wane at approximately the same rate as the original dose.
at the risk of agreeing almost completely with Dangerously:
1: IMO, the only reason it hasn't in the US is cause of politicization. I predict that it'll die down in about another 8 months, but that's kind of a wild guess.
2: Is anyone you know and see on a regular basis immunocompromised or very old? If not, you're almost certainly good going back to life as usual. If so, maybe get tested a few days before each time you see them. If that's not possible, or you see them daily, keep your mask on in stores, don't go out to eat, and don't go to concerts and such.
3: Difficult to say. Many childhood vaccines require a single booster but after that give immunity for ~ the rest of your life. The flu vaccine needs a new dose every year.
1. In some sense, I think never. But there will be a point where the way it enters as a significant factor is just like the post-9/11 significant factors in travel planning (wear shoes that are easy to remove, don’t count on your friends meeting you at the gate, etc). This is likely a couple years off. (I type this from an airplane getting ready to take off for my first international trip - I have never had anxiety about successfully making an international trip before this one, which had all sorts of rules that I must get a COVID test at most 72 hours before arrival, but must have results at least 4 hours before takeoff. Fortunately it came through, but I was worried.)
2. I pay attention to local case counts. Other than following local laws, my current policy if case counts are above 20 per 100,000 per day is to avoid indoor public spaces and mask in them; if case counts are below 20/100,000 then I don’t particularly worry except in spaces like gyms.
3. Probably same as the original. I’m looking forward to Moderna making the new annual flu vaccine, which will also be a COVID booster and rsv vaccine.
In the US, in many places, it already has receded to the background. If one were to visit Austin or parts of Idaho, there is little going on in the foreground that suggests COVID-19 is a factor in daily life.
That said, I think the question is more general and targeted at a more risk-balanced individuals.
Assuming a reasonably healthy adult, usually coming into contact with other healthy immunized 12+ year old's (of various ages, including elderly, but not generally ill or health-compromised folks), the booster at least initially provides nearly 10x reduction in (population-level) COVID-19 incidences, severe disease, and deaths, compared to the 2-shot mRNA vaccine regiment.
The factor-reduction in infection rates seems very strong with the booster, and I want to say that rational behavior would lead me to think that getting a booster should result in simply stopping other personal precautions (perhaps keep those that are worthy of retaining in general, like better hand washing habits, masking when showing respiratory symptoms, and so on).
That said, the rate of transmission within the US seems very high. On its own, it doesn't default the argument above, but higher rates of transmission provide an opportunity for the virus to mutate. I don't know enough about this subject, but I have a generalized fear that variants like Mu, or newer variants like Mu that emanate from Delta, may result due to higher transmission in US and elsewhere. That, in turn, could pierce the shield provided even by boosters - and we wouldn't know it happened until after its happened. So this is a fear based argument about unknown unknowns.
So where does it end for me? I'm optimistic about Pfizers Paxlovid. If this gets authorized in the US in 1Q of '22, it would ease my stress personally and I'd relax. With booster, I'd leverage home-testing + fall back onto Paxlovid if the unlikely breakthrough happened (and hope that avoids any possibility of long-COVID) .
I don't think anybody knows just yet whether shot #3 has 4-5 mo durability (just like shot #2), or whether its durability will be different (more, or less) than before. It's unknown at this time - nobody has good guesses yet.
1. Twenty years after 9/11 and Richard Reid, most Americans are still taking their shoes off every time they go through airport security, and there's almost no constituency for changing that. Things like actual lockdowns and border closures will go away pretty quickly, but the minor annoyances and rituals are going to stick around for a long time.
2. Be careful not to do anything that will frighten the sort of people who still think it is important that we take off our shoes every time we go through airport security, because they are powerful and can hurt you and now they're even more frightened of viruses than terrorists. That may require going masked in public. Otherwise, if you're fully vaccinated, take about the same precautions you would have taken w/re the flu in 2018. That's going to depend on whether you or anyone in your immediate family is particularly frail.
3. Blood antibody levels will probably wane in about 2-3 months, and that will cause people who ought to know better to say that the boosters are failing. Lasting immunity comes from lymphocytes, which are much harder to measure but likely to stick around for years.
Re lymphocytes, as long as transmission levels remain high, we’ll continue optimizing for NAb’s over humoral immunity, and continue taking precautions against breakthrough infections. During this period we’d want high NAb’s and so we measure boosters (and waning) based on NAb’s right now, and not based on t-cell mediated immunity like we’d do normally.
It’s reasonable to wonder if this is sustainable beyond perhaps one more round of booster 6 months down the road. At some point we have to grapple with base rate being high if that’s where we end up, and ask ourselves what life/normal will look like then.
I still think that once paxlovid comes to market, the dynamics of daily life would change (ie relax) a great deal.
Before the covid19 pandemic, did anyone wear face masks in shops and on mass transport while in countries with high tuberculosis rates?
Would this be a wise practice to adopt, regardless of covid19, when in areas with high TB rates? If not, why not?
Before you respond that the comparison is weak because TB is mostly spread by coughing, not breathing, note this recent study: "we conclude that breathing contributes more than 90% of the daily aerosolised M. tuberculosis – regardless of how often a person coughs." (https://theconversation.com/new-study-shows-that-normal-breathing-is-a-major-spreader-of-tb-170656). I am ignorant of what any and all other TB studies say, so I can't weigh this study's potential significance against them.
Comparison with TB is even more relevant if we remember that TB has a vaccine which is not very effective. Some countries used to vaccinate all kids against TB but gradually they stopped doing it and now only risk groups get the vaccine against TB. Unless we discover more effective vaccines, it should happen with covid vaccines as well. Getting a booster jab every 6 months for the population with very low risk is not sustainable whereas it makes all sense to vaccinate risk population.
As someone who thought "public transport must've caused the NYC breakout," lots of public transport has long ago fixed the problem of airborne diseases by having excellent ventilation.
Last even thread I posted my ideas about helping Haiti. I got a little feedback which I appreciate. I also learned about TheMotte and posted there which was an interesting experience.
Right now I have a question. Are you concerned about Haiti? Do you think about Haiti?
I believe we are watching the rapid disintegration of a somewhat modern state. The US and most of the world seem to be saying to Haiti: "You are on your own."
The response of the Dominican Republic (where I live) is to close the border tighter and to stop providing medical care to Haitians.
To be quite honest, I don't think about Haiti, because thinking about terrible things that I have no power to affect makes me sad. For similar reasons I try to limit how much I think about Afghanistan or Alzhimer's disease.
My grandma's currently...eh I don't know what the nice word is. With cancer you say "fighting it" but there's really only one way Alzheimers ends. For now!
I live with a Haitian family in the Dominican Republic and most of my friends here are Haitian. I can tell you they are very worried about what is going on. You can see that I don't have the option to not think about Haiti.
Want to make clear, not at all trying to say that I don't care about Haiti. I very much hope your friends and family stay safe and well. What I was trying to get at is, I (like many others I suspect) often avoid thinking about painful things as a coping mechanism. However I do think that one ought to think about them at least sometimes. To that end, I'm planning on going to bed soon but I will take a look at your proposal some time this week, at a glance looks like an interesting idea!
I took a look at your proposal, and I admire your concern and effort. Not much to usefully say (aside from good luck), but these things do occur to me randomly:
1. The US has a terrible record of attention span, and many people have been betrayed when we abruptly change our mind, as we do. Both the French and the Brits have much better records as imperialists, and the British in particular seem to have actually succeeded as much as anyone has in "nation building" if we look at the heirs of Empire. So maybe what you want is for the US to *bankroll* the operation but have it run by the Brits. Wouldn't let the UN touch anything though.
2. It's a disasteful thought, but maybe you'd be better off identifying the most powerful gang and legitimizing them, helping them consolidate their power and become in effect a local government. They have all the advantage in terms of experience and local knowledge, and incentive to legitimize themselves might be sufficient to get them to adopt less brutal methods. The key goal here seems to be security, both for the sake of attracting tourist dollars and improving the ablity of the local legit economy to flourish. If you achieve the security through a gang transitioning to a government, it may not matter, practically, distasteful as it might be ethically, and it might be cheaper and faster by a lot.
I generally have the feeling that nations that were, in the past, british colonies have faired better on HDI-type measures than those that were colonized by other European countries. I'm wondering if anyone has done research or written books on this topic. I would like to check my hunch against the empirical evidence.
Yes, I think about Haiti and I'm concerned about it. Probably because it's closer to my backyard, metaphorically speaking. But the idea the US has said "you're on your own" is ridiculously wrong. The US gives like half a billion dollars in aid to Haiti, something like 80% of all money Haiti receives. It's helped Haiti negotiate debt relief. It directly feeds something like a fifth of Haitians. It's even given them trade privileges. The US is the one who bought most of the corona vaccines Haiti is receiving. There are reasons to criticize the American attitude as somewhat imperialist. But the idea it's ignoring Haiti is just wrong.
From what I've heard of your plan it's basically recolonizing Haiti temporarily in a specific department. The US actually has some track record of this: occupying Caribbean countries, building infrastructure, and leaving. But this is problematic for numerous reasons and politically infeasible these days anyway. Also, you shouldn't expect the country to welcome it voluntarily. The plan seems like it could benefit from you getting a masters in international development or something. If you're really serious about it then you have a good shot of influencing US policy. But you'd need to do the work first.
> The current Haitian solution is that the gangs are in charge. I wonder who thinks this is a promising avenue.
The gangs, of course. Haiti has a problem with rapacious elites today as it did in the past.
> By that I mean US officials have indicated there would be no intervention. That it would be a "Haitian solution."
So to be clear you define "on their own" as anything that doesn't put foreign boots on the ground? You do realize the Haitians themselves have said they don't want that?
All in all I'll read your full proposal if I have time. But to be honest from the summary it looks hopelessly naive both to how stabilization and development happen and how foreign intervention works. I can see you're passionate about the subject. I'd suggest you take some courses in Peace Theory or International Development or some similar discipline to get a better idea.
The part where a foreign country takes over part of another country and then runs it through an administration that is not part of country's own state.
What is going on in Haiti is awful, as is what is going on in Belarus, Lebanon, Ethiopia, and a few other parts of the world right now. Is the situation in Haiti that much worse than a decade ago, or a few other points in the past few decades? Lebanon and Ethiopia are places where there has been very clear backsliding in recent years.
What is there to do, exactly? We've given the country billions of dollars. If we play any more an active role in the administration of the country we get accused of neo-colonialism.
Either accept that you need the white man to babysit you, or just work things out on your own (your own including half a billion dollars a year).
The US isn't going to take the country over for various reasons, and doesn't really have a good track record in running colonies, protectorates, and other extraterritorial possessions all that well in any case. Half measures aren't going to cut it and will likely make it worse. So... yeah, Haiti is on its own. The Dominican Republic's response seems rational; unlike the US, the DR not only doesn't have the will or the expertise but also doesn't have the resources, and preventing getting dragged into it themselves is their best option.
Given the recent US conservative interest in Hungary + recent coverage on this blog, I figured it might be interesting to post occasional news items, which people can use to test/train their intuitions.
Here's one: on Thursday, the government has set a price cap for petrol. The cap is about $1.50 per liter, about 8% decrease from current prices. Petrol tax is left unchanged; typical wholesaler profit margins on petrol are 4%, typical retailer margins are around 2-3%, so gas station owners will now lose money on selling gasoline to their customers. To avoid the obvious consequences, to new regulation forbids closing gas stations or not selling petrol. If the owner does either of those, the gas station is taken away from them and given to another company (selected by the minister of commerce) to operate for the next three months.
At first I wondered whether there is a meaningful difference *for the owner* between closing the station and having it taken away. But I suppose the difference is that when you close the station, you can sell the remaining property, and use the money to start some other business. The current law effectively takes your property away, or rather gives you a choice between having your property taken away immediately or producing loss every month and hoping that the situation will change before the accumulated loss exceeds the original value of your property.
And of course the point is that only the government knows how long the current law will exist, and they can adapt based on your choice. So if most owners choose to keep their property and hope the law goes away, the law will stay forever, and the population will be happy that the government actually made the petrol cheap. On the other hand, if most owners give up their property, I would expect the government to repeal the law. Either way, the current owners will be blamed for making the stupid choice.
If gas stations are expected to actually operate at a loss, I'm curious if there would be any takers to run them for "the next three months" or if the bottom just drops out at that point and the government has a real mess on their hands when nobody can even get petrol.
Most likely the gas station owners will try to get the law changed or revoked before they go under, possibly by explaining how dumb the law is. If gas prices continue to go up, no law in the world will keep prices low while there is still product available. I'm curious if this is an intermediary step towards government takeover of gas stations? Given the anti-socialist stance of the current government, that seems like a non-option, but many seem to think Orban would change his stance at a moment's notice if he thought a new stance would serve his purposes better.
Orbán might be anti-socialist in words but not averse to the occasional government takeover, or handover to friendly oligarchs. The former happened for example to the recycling sector or more recently to infertility clinics, the latter to the entire tobacco and alcohol retail industry or to casinos.
There are no price caps on wholesalers. The government can reassign the station to another (temporary) owner if gas is unavailable for more than 48 hours in total in any seven-day period. In theory IRS agents will verify availability around the country, although it's hard to believe they could pull off the logistics.
This is in reply to the several people talking about the stations necessarily going under, but I'm putting it here so I don't have to pick one. It's worth remembering that gas stations make very little margin on the actual gas. Not nothing, but not much. Rather, gas stations are convenience stores that also have gas pumps. They make their money selling the stuff inside the store. I don't know what the margins look like, but it's possible that the losses due to gasoline might not be bad enough to run all or even most of the gas stations out of business. Gas would just end up being a loss leader for the convenience store. They could also make people come into to buy gas at the counter, and then require at least a X dollar purchase. People might not even mind, since they're getting cheaper gas.
Reminds me of the weird gas station near where I live which is significantly cheaper than anywhere else, but only takes cash. The convenience-store part is very small, but does contain an ATM (which I assume charges an exorbitant fee for withdrawals that goes, directly or indirectly, to the people who own the gas station). The station also has many more pumps in the same space than most others, no canopy, and is squeezed into a little wedge of land at an intersection.
This also explains the common practice in parts of continental Europe where gas stations charge you about 50 cents to use their bathrooms, but then give you a voucher for the same amount. This can be used for buying stuff at the convenience store, but not for gas.
Make one Von Neumann brain clone, and stick it in a rocket and send it out with a job of building more of itself. At some point you'll hit 20,000 of them as they spread over the galaxy.
I am a physician planning the thesis for my data science masters I'm currently studying at Harvard. I'm interested in a lot of the topics Scott writes about.
Are there any readers who are academics or know of academics in Boston (particularly Harvard, MIT or BU) working in:
- perceptual control theory / predictive coding (particularly in applications in psychiatry)
- psychedelic assisted psychotherapy (particularly ketamine research for chronic pain, depression and relaxing priors)
- effective altruist aligned research (eg. how to effectively promote altruistic memes within cognitive science / psychology)?
I'm looking to start a 6-month quantitative research project as soon as possible, and basically looking for a decent dataset to do some exploration and analysis on. I'm particularly interested in machine learning, and would like to learn more about NLP and network analysis although not restricted to those topics.
Today I was again frustrated by a blog post by Razib Khan that mentioned a paper that came out just last month, because of course I can't access it. This happens a lot: Bloggers want to talk about the hot new paper that just came out, but unless the paper was in Nature or Science, even most universities won't have that paper online for 6 months to 1 year, because the "everything but the last year" and the "everything but the last 6 months" tiers of online journal subscriptions are substantially less expensive than the "everything" tier.
While I /intend/ to look up the paper in 6 months, when I'll have access to it, past performance says P(I will remember) =~ 1 / (1 + # of papers I have ever planned to read later). So the brief mention of it isn't useful to me.
What do you you all think: Should bloggers talk about the latest papers that came out, or should they wait for 6 months or 1 year, until those papers are more accessible?
I think that unless either
a) the paper is open-access or published in an extremely popular journal (Nature / Science / JAMA / PNAS), or
b) it's ground-breaking (P = NP) or widely-discussed and/or political (the latest IPCC report (that's open-access; just pretend it wasn't)), or
c) the blog discusses it in enough detail that you don't need to read the paper,
then I'd rather bloggers write up their views, then post them 6 months later, when people have some chance of reading the paper themselves.
That would detract from the "hot off the press" excitement, but I think that kind of short-attention-span buzz is mostly bad for science anyway. The actual scientific value to me of a paper published this week is no greater than that of a paper published a year ago. If a paper won't still be worth talking about in a year, it probably isn't worth talking about today.
New accessions at Sci-Hub have been halted since January this year while Elsevier's lawsuit against Alexandra Elbakyan is pending in the High Court of New Delhi (court records: https://delhihighcourt.nic.in/dhc_case_status_oj_list.asp?pno=1019626). Practically no papers published in 2021 are accessible through Sci-Hub.
They uploaded most of the 2021 stuff a few months ago. I'm not sure if they have not halted uploads *again*, or if they are just buggy. The past month I've noticed that a *lot* of links are just not working with the prefix method, even though if you query the database directly with the DOI, it'll pop up. And the coverage of Nature is patchy, but so is the coverage through my university proxy, so I suspect publishers may be engaged in more shenanigans in how to optimally screw university libraries and SH/LG's proxy coverage isn't keeping up.
Heh, you're right! It must have been made available quite recently because I remember checking a month or two ago and there wasn't anything. Nature articles are now available up to the beginning of September (by DOI, didn't bother to check prefix method), and there is a bunch of new torrents.
Sci-Hub.tf appears to be an automatically translated clone of the Sci-Hub website with Alexandra Elbakyan's name removed and a different BTC wallet substituted (compare with Sci-Hub.se). The DNS registration information is different and it serves articles via cloudflare (quite ballsy). I don't know if they're phishers or well-intentioned, but removing the name of the creator is dishonest. Don't feed them.
Why would it? Most papers are only of mild interest to most scientists, and you don't even know about it until you read it in a journal, or (more likely) read it because some other paper in which you are more interested noted it as a reference. In either case, the interest in reading the paper doesn't even get generated until it's in print.
The exceptions are people who are in the field and doing work closely related to the paper, so the interest is high the moment it hits a preprint server, or you hear about it at a conference. This will always be a very small subset of the total research audience.
Oh well yeah. (Sheepish grin.) I've been known to be...slow...about getting back to people about papers I wrote a long time ago. Helping to lower the courtesy quotient myself, alas.
This is a real and recognized problem, for which there are several possible workarounds:
1. Many papers are published as an open-access pre-print, such as on Biorxiv, or have been put up by the original authors on ResearchGate.
2. Many other papers are up on Sci-Hub and other science piracy websites.
3. If you know someone with institutional access to a lot of journals, or a place like here where such people congregate, you can post the DOI number of the paper and ask for a PDF.
All of these are a little hacky, because the scientific publishing system is fundamentally broken. In the current era of electronic communication, scientific journals are an active impediment to peer review rather than a facilitator of it: the primary purpose they play now is to give legible but deeply-flawed metrics to grant agencies and universities so that they can make their funding, hiring and promotion decisions with a false aura of objectivity. Most journals barely even edit the manuscripts: look at the sheer number of typos in a typical Nature or Science article and tell me that they've been edited.
Are these peer reviewed by the time they are being reviewed? Another pet peeve of mine is when a brand new study that hasn't even gone through peer review gets talked about in the press as if it answers some major topic, but we never hear about it again. I assume that something came up during peer review and it actually doesn't say what the science journalists thought (not a surprise even if it had been peer reviewed) and everyone just moves on.
I've been wanting a service which follows up news stories for more recent news on the subject.
I've been told this would be quite difficult. For what it's worth, Google News can't keep from duplicating news stories on the same refresh of the page.
A reply to all of the replies: I'm not asking how I could try to get a recently-published paper. We're all more-or-less aware of how easy or difficult it is to get a copy of recent publications. We're mostly ignorant of how much everyone prefers discussing brand new papers rather than 6-month old papers. I, for one, don't care at all whether a paper is 1 day old or 1 year old. Please interpret this question as asking how important it is to you that blog posts discuss brand-new papers rather than papers older than 6 months or 1 year, not as asking how to get brand-new papers.
Have you heard of how journalists have an incentive to rush their story to publication so as not to get scooped? Presumably research-based bloggers feel a similar motivation. So it seems like there is an incentive to not wait those 6 months.
In your original post, you mention the problem of remembering to access the journal article once it becomes available in your institution's database 6 months later. I recommend creating a bookmarks sub-folder. In it, bookmark your institution's database's access link to the journal in question, with the typical delay period (e.g. 6 months) added to the journal title. Below that bookmark, bookmark each article you are waiting to access (on the paywalled website), with expected availability date as part of the bookmark title. This is the easiest method that I've come up with for not forgetting to go access some article that someone discussed.
I reckon bloggers should just attach the whole paper to their article and dare Elsevier to try and sure them; maybe big name bloggers can't afford the risk but most blogs are going to fly beneath the radar and the journals sure as hell don't deserve the revenue.
A blogger may well fly beneath the radar of Elsevier, but not beneath the radar of other bloggers who bear a grudge, personal or partisan. Those rival bloggers might notify Elsevier.
It is better to cross no lines in terms of legality when you are publishing anything.
What's interesting to me it's taken as a given that AGI will act rationally. But rational doesn't preclude negative behaviors. I suppose you could create an AGI that acts altruistically. But what if it focuses its altruism in a direction that negatively affects subgroups of humans while benefiting others? And I certainly wouldn't want let an AGI have access to Defense Systems. But would we be smart enough to prevent it from getting into them? Maybe these questions have already been addressed by the rationalist community? If so, got any links for me?
What you seem to be gesturing around is the fact that it's difficult to define precisely what you want an AI to do, without leaving the door open for it to do something in service of your stated goal that's actually really bad. This is usually called the "Alignment Problem" and is pretty much the core of GAI safety research. You can start reading about it here: https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/ai
EY was always going on about building CEV (Coherent Extrapolated Volition) into AGIs. To my mind EY's underlying assumptions about CEV are overly idealistic — i.e. if humans all made rational choices, we'd all think the same way, and we'd all share the same goals (and people could all join hands together and sing Kumbaya <#snarkasm>). It all sounds absurd to me, but then again I'm not a Great Mind of AI.
I think that to be fair one must note that that essay is dated 2004 - EY would have written it when he was in his early 20s, at least 17 years ago. I think he has since disavowed most or all of it (can't remember where I saw him say so, though)? When he first wrote it, nearly nobody had yet done any high-quality thinking on the topic (that I have ever heard of): most people didn't yet realize there was even a problem, let alone be in a position to start publicly exploring possible solutions.
I made the same point as beowulf888, and related points about the incoherence of CEV and of Eliezer's idealistic and symbolic model of values, many times on LessWrong, in posts like "Human values differ as much as values can differ" (2010), "Only humans can have human values" (2010), "Values vs. parameters" (2011), "Human errors, human values" (2011), and "The human problem" (2010). I don't think EY ever responded to any of them.
Nor would most of the LW community admit that their "friendly AI" project relies on there being a single set of values which is either objectively correct, or else is "human nature" and hence shared by all humans (except, of course, for the stupid ones who don't agree with us, even though that turns out to be nearly all of them). Nor would they admit that maybe human nature, if such a thing exists, isn't so great a thing that we should force it onto the rest of the universe for all time. IIRC, those posts were upvoted much less, on average, than my other posts; and the comments mostly argued against the posts.
Phil: I'll take a look at these. Thanks for sharing.
I notice the same sorts of behaviors in the virology/molecular biology community as what you're describing the AGI community — viz. a tendency to minimize the significance of the potential risks of their research. For instance, there's a reluctance in (at least some of the virology community) to admit that GoF research may potentially be dangerous. "Well, we're responsible scientists. We take precautions! We don't need any regulation!" But everyone agrees that the Kawaoka and Fouchier went over the line with their 2011 experiments to make H5N1 more transmissible — except that until some naysayers started making a stink about it — Kawaoka and Fouchier were considered responsible scientists. And there's still a resistance to the idea that, yes, maybe there ought to be stricter oversight these experiments.
Anyway, call me Luddite, but I think it would be very unwise AGI systems command and control responsibilities over critical infrastructure. My understanding (correct me if I'm wrong) is that one can't really "debug" why an AI manifests an unexpected behavior — i.e. one can't halt the program in a middle of a run state to look at the registers, so to speak.
"He supported development of the hydrogen bomb and was reported to have advocated a preventive nuclear strike to destroy the Soviet Union’s nascent nuclear capability circa 1950. "
"Was reported" implies that there is only second-hand evidence. And "to destroy the Soviet Union's nascent nuclear capability" may mean that he was recommending an attack on Soviet nuclear facilities — whatever exist in 1950 — perhaps a reactor.
Does anyone here have more detailed information on what he is supposed to have recommended and what the evidence is that he recommended it?
Depending on your view of just how bad the Soviet Empire was, you may argue that it would have been worth it to have killed millions in 1950 to end or significantly weaken it.
Regardless of the facts of Von Neumann's life, isn't the major danger of superintelligence in the following region of the space of ideas: advocating mass sacrifice for massive benefit?
When the benefit is long in the future, and the sacrifice is right here right now, it's easy to make an emotional argument against the sacrifice, but from a rational perspective shouldn't we be less time-sensitive?
Both von Neumann and Teller had reputations for being quite hawkish. Luckily Wikipedia insists on references...
During a Senate committee hearing he described his political ideology as "violently anti-communist, and much more militaristic than the norm". He was quoted in 1950 remarking, "If you say why not bomb [the Soviets] tomorrow, I say, why not today? If you say today at five o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?"
Blair, Clay, Jr. (February 25, 1957). "Passing of a Great Mind". Life. pp. 89–104.
In 1950 if it would've worked (about which I'm a little dubious) I would have supported that, too. As long as Stalin was alive, the probability of a nuclear World War III was far too high. I have read assertions that he (Stalin) was planning on a new war no latter than about 1955-57. We (or more precisely millions of Central Europeans) are unbelievably lucky he snuffed it in '53.
Suppose that the US had even a small chance of preventing the Soviet Union from developing nuclear weapons for a long enough time for the USSR to have a regime change--say, 1 in 10. Suppose that if we didn't do this, the odds of a global nuclear war involving thousands of warheads, and killling /hundreds/ of millions of people, would be at least 2 to 1--an estimate few people would have disputed during the period 1950-1980. Then if our goal were to minimize the expected number of innocent people killed, regardless of how bad communism is, the obvious rational decision would have been to make the pre-emptive strike.
Maybe the odds of a global nuclear war were much, much lower than anybody thought.
If so, that needs to be explained. Certainly no one at the time had any evidence that they should trust in the charity and reasonableness of the existing governments and soldiers to prevent such a war.
So I think a question which would better reflect your true objection would be, "Doesn't rational thinking require abandoning virtue ethics for utilitarian ethics, meaning that rationality is bad?"
BTW, a 1979 report by the Office of Technology Assessment, "The Effects of Nuclear War" (https://ota.fas.org/reports/7906.pdf), predicted that a Soviet "counterforce attack" (one limited to military targets) would kill 2 to 20 million Americans within the first 30 days.
It reported on 3 prior studies estimating how many Americans would be killed right away by a Soviet attack on US military and economic targets (p. 95-96): 110-165 million (DOD), 122 million (DCPA, assuming only half of warheads were ground-burst), and 76-131 million (DCPA). Assuming that people were evacuated from all cities gave much lower estimates, which I'm not reporting because I don't think it's currently possible to evacuate millions of people from a city in less than a few days.
These figures all seemed surprisingly low at the time. Most people seemed to think then that literally everyone in the US, if not everyone in the world, would die if there were such a nuclear attack.
But full scale nuclear war would be civilization ending, with regression below ancient levels. As we already lost low-level medieval/ancient technology except rare cases and modern one would fail due to billions of deaths and collapse of infrastructure.
If you think global nuclear war would entail human extinction, a fun but bad explanation is the anthropic principal. The weird thing about evaluating the probability of extinction events is that someone needs to be around to do the evaluating. If you accept something like many-worlds (or a simulation argument, etc), even if there was a 99/100 chance of humanity going extinct, the only world where we can look back on the prediction is the one where it didn't happen.
I don’t think the anthropic principal is bad in any way, just that it’s not all that illuminating for your specific question. It not a good evaluation criteria for predictive accuracy because the same argument applies to all end of the world predictions. So you can’t really use it as evidence that the prediction was accurate. It may at least tells you to not outright reject the prediction, but that’s always the case with looking at a single prediction’s outcome.
That's an admirably precise answer. I don't think people do or even could use the anthropic principle to compare different possible causes of the end of the world, though. It would come up in something like the Fermi paradox, to choose between the view that life is so likely that we should see millions of alien civilizations, and the view that it's so unlikely that the expected number of planets with intelligent life should be zero. The anthropic principle can be used to adjust the prior of the second view, but not the first; so it would suggest that on observing only ourselves in the universe, the second view is more likely.
So I think its goodness or badness is application-specific, and depends on the math.
(BTW, I don't think global nuclear war would result in human extinction.)
Back in my LessWrong days, I made the point that, if the SIAI were right in thinking that they would be justified in programming an AI to forcibly take over the world in order to prevent a war between AIs, or between AIs and humans, then by the same reasoning the US should be trying to take over the world to prevent Russia or China from gaining enough power to take over the world. I think the parallels are obvious; either no one should try to build a "FAI" to take over the world, or the US should have tried to conquer the world in the 1990s. But I don't recall anyone agreeing with me.
What I'm saying is, anyone who thinks it's good to build a "FAI" that has "conquer the world" as step 1 on its to-do list, because that will prevent a horrible war, should also think it would have been good for the US to nuke Russia in 1950 to prevent a horrible war.
I am reading Jonathan Rauch's: "The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth". Lots of interesting discussion on the availability of accurate information. He praises Wikipedia as a well vetted source for example. What I found interesting was reading about the techniques of Steve Bannon and Donald Trump in winning either elections or the approval of the electorate. He described it as "Flooding the zone with shit". I was reminded about Campaigns Inc an early political analyst company founded by McMasters and Baxter in the 1920s. In both her book
"These Truths" and an article in the New Yorker called the "Lie Factory" she described how when consulting McMasters and Baxter won 70 of 75 attempts! They promoted the same idea by "flooding the zone with shit" as well.Their version for example used unrelated quotes from Upton Sinclair's books that made him look bad pasted on the front page of the Los Angeles newspaper every day for six weeks. Below I have copied and pasted from Rauch's book and Lepore's New Yorker article. It seemed to me the same technique used 100 years ago continues to work today. Here's the quotes.
From : "Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth"
" A good way to think about such attacks is as environmental. They attack not just individual people or facts but the whole information space. In a famous remark to the journalist Michael Lewis in 2018, Steve Bannon, the Breitbart News chairman who went on to become a senior strategist for candidate Trump and then President Trump, said this: “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” Flood the zone with shit: although the formulation is crude, there could be no more concise and accurate summation of what modern information warfare is all about. All communities, and especially the reality-based community, rely on networks of trust to decide what is and is not true. People need to know whom they are talking to, whether that person is credible, which institutions confer credibility, and so on. Every aspect of trust and credibility is degraded when the zone is flooded with shit.
From "The Lie Factory" article:
Then they wrote an Opposition Plan of Campaign, to anticipate the moves made against them. Every campaign needs a theme. Keep it simple. Rhyming’s good. (“For Jimmy and me, vote ‘yes’ on 3.”) Never explain anything. “The more you have to explain,” Whitaker said, “the more difficult it is to win support.” Say the same thing over and over again. “We assume we have to get a voter’s attention seven times to make a sale,” Whitaker said. Subtlety is your enemy. “Words that lean on the mind are no good,” according to Baxter. “They must dent it.” Simplify, simplify, simplify. “A wall goes up,” Whitaker warned, “when you try to make Mr. and Mrs. Average American Citizen work or think.”
I forgot to enter the author of both "These Truths" and "The Lie Factory" was Jill Lepore. She is on the faculty at Harvard and is a staff writer at the New Yorker
Here's a more complete quote from "The Lie Factory" about the campaign against Upton Sinclair.
"Like most California Republicans, Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter, who were the publicists for the California League Against Sinclairism, were horrified at the prospect of Sinclair in the governor’s office.* They had to work fast. They were hired just two months before the election by George Hatfield, the candidate for lieutenant governor on a Republican ticket headed by the incumbent governor, Frank Merriam, but, mostly, they were hired to destroy Sinclair. They began by locking themselves in a room for three days with everything he had ever written. “Upton was beaten,” Whitaker later said, “because he had written books.” And, so, those boxes in the L.A. Times:
SINCLAIR ON MARRIAGE:
The sanctity of marriage. . . . I have had such a belief . . . I have it no longer.
The excerpt, as Sinclair explained in “How I Got Licked,” was taken from a passage in his 1911 novel, “Love’s Pilgrimage,” in which one character writes a heartbroken letter to a man having an affair with his wife. (The novel, which Sinclair later found greatly embarrassing, is an autobiographical account of his disastrous first marriage, which ended in 1912 when, citing his wife’s adultery, he divorced her; he married his second wife in 1913; their marriage lasted until her death, in 1961.) “Sure, those quotations were irrelevant,” Baxter later said. “But we had one objective: to keep him from becoming Governor.' "
I'd be wary of any grand theory of politics that hinges on one's political opponents just happening to be evil people who can only win by deliberately flooding the media with disinformation. I'm not saying this doesn't happen, but from your summary it sounds like Jill's books might be more focused on making Trump look evil and his supporters look stupid than actually developing an accurate theory.
Ha! That's interesting. Many of the posters were in sync with what Rauch is saying in "Constitution of Knowledge". Some of the comments had quotes also in the book like "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth gets his boots on" Rauch certainly has done a ton of research for this book and I am finding it a bit enlightening, but I might suggest I am easily enlightened :)
Sorry about the confusing writing on my part. Rauch is what I am reading and Lepore is another well known author I have read recently. Rauch is an exponent of fallibilism which he feels was also promoted by the John Locke and then the founding fathers as they wrote the constitution. Fallibilism is where you are never certain you are entirely correct only on the path towards truth. The only way to improve your certainty is to benefit from interacting with other people with diverse opinions. Common philosopgy in the sciences as well (see Karl Popper).The idea of branches of government forces individuals to persuade others and to enter into debate or discussion which many times can be an education for both sides. It certainly has worked well for a few hundred years. The Trump references are some of the more obvious examples of bypassing the process by communicating to the public without any fact checking occurring and convince by repeating the "shit" over and over again until it seems real. Democrats have certainly done same. He does point out that the fact checking has improved dramatically since the 2016 election. I just found it interesting that Lepore's article about McMasters and Baxter pointed to the same "Flood it with Shit" technique occurring almost 100 years ago.
McMasters and Baxter were SUPER successful hammering the American public or "Flooding the zone with shit". When consulting candidates they won 70 or 75 times over many many years. Sound like a pretty effective if not grand theory of politics. No need for your opponents to be evil either. I recall they helped Eisenhauer beat Stevenson and certainly Upton Sinclair was not a disreputable character either. This quote says a lot about the process” Say the same thing over and over again. “We assume we have to get a voter’s attention seven times to make a sale,” Whitaker said"
"All communities, and especially the reality-based community, rely on networks of trust to decide what is and is not true."
Can anyone explain to me who or what "the reality-based community" is? Because if it just means "people like us" or "the people on our side", then it's nothing more than a flattering label to stroke your vanity: "*we're* smart, we're in touch with reality, that other lot are all crazy and liars".
It's an expression I often see and I find it irritating: we are all living in the same world, and unless you believe this is a simulation, then we're all reality-based.
Rauch describes "reality based community" to be those admitting they could be wrong, but continue to use research or discussion with others of diverse opinions to focus on heading in the direction of truth. As opposed to believing something based on intuition or to multiple exposure. Rauch feels proper journalists in particular are trained to seriously test or review before publishing and then if a mistake is a made a retraction should be made.
"Rauch describes "reality based community" to be those admitting they could be wrong, but continue to use research or discussion with others of diverse opinions to focus on heading in the direction of truth."
So nobody who endorses the mainstream model of transsexualism then? I have to doubt that Rauch means to exclude them.
"Rauch feels proper journalists in particular are trained to seriously test or review before publishing"
That strikes me as astonishingly naïve, enough to throw out any prior assessment of his accuracy.
Of course there is a lot more to Rauch's discussion in the book. In the current chapter I am reading he brings John Stewart Mill into the discussion. Similarly Mill emphasizes the importance of free speech and questioning your certainty of what you believe to true. The Nazis (at least the ones in charge)for example were very certain of what they were doing and weren't considering they could be wrong. Jacob Brownowski in the Ascent of Man series has an episode with his depiction of the Nazis while standing in a concentration camp. Why could you not have considering you were wrong was his cry to end the episode.
Here's a link to the Brownowski Ascent of Man episode I mentioned. It's a terrific series, but this really short excerpt makes the point for considering you could be wrong on anything you believe in a dramatic way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltjI3BXKBgY
Rauch says exactly that. The 2016 election was the early exposure to Russian bots and others on Twitter and Facebook. That made a pretty big mess of things. Currently both Twitter and Facebook have programs for fact checking in place and is much more difficult to "flood the zone with shot" through either of them.
Their "fact checkers" are not really checking facts. Twitter and Facebook could easily eliminate all bots by requiring all accounts to register with id, even if that identity is not disclosed. Bots instantly solved.
I'm any case, that wasn't my point. Journalists have been very clearly biased and partisan for decades. The bigger the platform, the more disconnected from reality, by and large. Mainstream press is itself "flooded with shot", so the claim that all or most journalists are credible fact checkers just doesn't pass muster.
After this discussion I am reminded of Daniel Kahneman's System one and System two. Not being certain correlates with System two with less intuition and more rational thought.
Here's the first place in the book Rauch uses "reality-based community". He describes his learning curve when starting out as a journalist many years ago.
"Facts were gathered from interviews and sources; analysis was checked with experts; every sentence was edited, copy-edited, and often fact-checked; tipsters suggested story ideas, sources waved me off bad leads, and challenges to my claims percolated in conversations within the newsroom and outside of it. The sense of having joined something much greater than myself, and of swearing allegiance to the exacting standards of a great tradition, made the enterprise of journalism appealing and compelling to me even on the days when the practice of journalism seemed grinding and routine (which was often). There were some things, I learned, that we—we, as professionals—do: prize accuracy; seek a comment from a person before publishing something about her; prefer on-record information; consult multiple sources with varied viewpoints; abjure jargon, long-windedness, extravagance, and opinion (except in sports writing, which seemed to require all of the above). There were other things, I learned, that we do not do: pay for information, accept gifts from sources, betray confidentiality, tolerate meddling from the ad department. As a young journalist, I was being rebuilt, reshaped, into a worker ant in humanity’s hive-mind, humans’ most important and beneficent creation. Without realizing it at the time, I was being inducted into a community, the reality-based community—the same community into which Socrates was inducting Theaetetus so long ago. I was learning the Constitution of Knowledge."
Rauch, Jonathan. The Constitution of Knowledge (pp. 13-14). Brookings Institution Press. Kindle Edition.
So, 2021. On the one hand, it might have been a bad idea to use the phrase. On the other hand, I think the first use may have mostly been forgotten, and I can hope that his description of it being a process of seeking truth rather than a stable description of a group will catch on.
Upon hearing of "flooding the zone with shit" I've seen it in the real world so many times. Whether liberals or conservatives do it, and they do it a lot, it is basically creating a background noise of "well, if so many people are *thinking it*, there must be something there." Even for things that are obviously manufactured.
Does it actually work? Or is the "flooding the zone with shit" meme just so much flooding the zone with shit? I have seen umpty arguments along the lines of "such-and-such deception is the reason for political outcome X which I dislike, because I am confident if everyone saw through the deception as easily as I do, the outcome would be Not X." Unless this argument is advanced by a very unusually well-informed or smart person (who would have some exogenous reason to believe himself capable of much better bullshit detection than average), I have to wonder if this is actually just a line of self-soothing fantasy which helps a person avoid coming to grips with a harsh reality that his viewpoint may not be nearly as universal as he wishes it were.
The most recent example is the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, where lots of people were convinced KR killed two black people. None of the American news stories *said* this, but there was enough repeating that he was a "white supremacist" that people figured he must've killed some black people if everyone is talking about it.
I don't feel happy that I didn't get taken in; I'm wondering what other things I'm still deep in shit about.
The example of Hillary Clinton running a child prostitution ring out of a pizza parlor in Washington DC had to to have been flooded to some zone or another as a one time exposure couldn't be enough to be convinced that something so preposterous actually happened. Some guy went to the pizza place and fired a weapon as I recall. He could not have been convinced with diligent research! He heard it over and over from multiple sources IMHO.
Population being generally bad at bs detection is an argument in favour of lots of bs being spreaded.
As for how comes this specific person managed to reveal a scheme that other people didn't, there is a much easier explanation than the person being a genius - political bias. People are much better at spotting bs, promoted by their outgroup and my worse when it's their ingroup responsible.
If one wants to notice right wing bs - listening to moderate left's critique seems to be a good idea, and vice versa. And to notice centrists bs, the best bet is probably checking out what radicals on both ends of the spectrum have to say.
At the risk of smearing the metaphor too thin, I don't think anyone - Bannon, Trump, or whoever else - would have been able to flood the zone if it weren't already substantially filled. "Experts" (read: the credentialed) may have been able to mask the stench for a time, but at the cost of getting it all over themselves.
Thought I'd save this for an even-numbered thread, since it's political, and the comments may get heated. "What if Xi Jinping just isn't that competent?" by Noah Smith.
I'd have to agree that Xi's political moves seem clumsy. But then again he may see no reason for finesse since he's got such thorough control of the levers of power. Or it may just be Dictator Dunning-Kruger effect—which we've seen over and over again among totalitarians, bot right and left.
From the Xi quote below, he certainly seems proud of his deep understanding of politics. It's almost as if he's compensating for what his family went through during the Cultural Revolution.
"People who have little contact with power, who are far from it, always see these things as mysterious and novel. But what I see is not just the superficial things: the power, the flowers, the glory, the applause. I see the bullpens [Red Guard detention centers] and how people can blow hot and cold. I understand politics on a deeper level." —Xi Jinping
As an aside, I'm not sure why Noah Smith thinks Putin is a competent dictator. And there are several places where it's clear he hasn't spent any time in China.
Putin displays the same overall behaviors as Xi. The only difference is that Putin doesn't have a vast Party apparat to rely on to do his bidding as Xi does. In fact, Putin sending assassins overseas to knock off people he perceives as enemies seems like a Kim Jong-un move. Xi is a bit more circumspect in that regard in that he has his enemies kidnapped. Out of sight out of mind. No unpleasant bodies to for the media to express outrage and horror over.
Please tell me whey you think Putin is better, smarter, or more politically adept than Xi?
Most of his tenure hasn't consisted of assassination attempts (although those do appear to have been successful). Like Noah Smith said, he took over a country that was doing terribly and over a longer tenure than Xi and has thus weathered more problems than him. However, if you look in the comments on Smith's post you'll see I don't entirely agree with his perspective on Xi.
Not directly on topic, but I find it fascinating that Xi rules with a claim to be the successor of Mao, but he seems to have completed the transition from left wing to right wing, certainly on social matters, and possibly on economic ones as well.
Depends on what you criteria you judge his competency.
Noah seems to be mostly judging Xi by his ability to achieve goals western politicians have. Goals like enhancing economic wellbeing (for all), protecting the nation, and providing nice lives for the citizens. I think western politicians only pursue these goals because democracy does a reasonable job of thrusting these goals upon politicians.
I think Xi is an autocrat without any illusions about it. His goals are to maintain power, expand his power, and use his power to funnel wealth to himself and those who keep him in power. From that point of view, the opening and closing sections of the article are glowing endorsement of his competency. Likewise many of the issues Noah brings up as criticisms become endorsements when you view Xi as having autocrat's goals.
Agreed. Xi also sees himself an actor in the larger historical context of China. He has stated that he regards himself as a "good emperor". Good emperor's were not necessarily good for the people. Good emperors imposed their will on their subjects to expand the power of the empire. Good emperors are considered to be the ones who expanded the boundaries of the empire and to strengthen it against incursions from outsiders. By Xi's thinking Mao was a "good emperor". It's a theme that crosses ideological lines in China. The lessons that the Chinese take from their history is that China falls apart without a strong central government. And having lived and worked in China, I strongly suspect that would happen if the CCP weren't there.
A question is whether XI can provide stable improvements even for Han Chinese (I wouldn't say he cares about anyone else) or whether he's riding for a fall.
Considering that CCP has its tentacles into everything important in China, I doubt if any external forces will be able to depose Xi. Unlike a command and control economy, the post-Mao CCP has let the economy mostly do its own thing. It's just that there are always party members on the boards, and they get jobs for their kids in management. So the CCP has a lot influence at all levels of society. Although there's a lot of 香脂 ("fragrant grease"— i.e. bribery) involved in business deals, the leadership is less of a kleptocracy than say Russia. If Xi starts rocking the boats of the CCP's rank and file, a competitor might come to the fore to unseat him. But right now the ones who are dissatisfied are keeping their heads down — or in prison on corruption charges awaiting to become organ donors.
Why don't online dating profiles include letters of reference?
A big problem in dating is identifying bad actors. For those who have a letter of reference from an ex, it seems like this would be a valuable signal. But nobody does this!
If you were online-dating and you saw a profile with a link to a letter of reference from an ex, would that make you more or less interested in the profile? (Assuming the letter said good things.)
I'm not interested in dating, but if somebody was weird enough to do that, I'd be slightly more interested. The best evidence, of course, would be a prediction market on a measurable outcome.
What exactly is the incentive for the ex to write this letter? I would think that the most relationships don't end with the partners each thinking that the other is a terrific person.
I guess much of the value of including it would be as a rare signal: because most of the time you don’t end up in that situation, if you *are* able to credibly claim that your exes think you’re a terrific person that’s a good, selective indicator of your quality.
No it isn't. If you're that great on paper, but your exes are still your exes, there's clearly a hidden personality or other flaw monumental enough to outweigh all that other shit, as a matter of demonstrable practical fact.
There are reasons to break up that don't have to do with any personal flaws. For example a relationship turning long distance because of external reasons and both realizing that it is not going to work out like that in the long term, even though the relationship would have gone on happily if it had stayed in-person.
I'd certainly give my ex a glowing letter of recommendation.
Yeah this exactly describes my experience, and I'd definitely give the ex who introduced me to this community a very positive letter (and I suspect I'd get a similar one from her)
There can be a difference in preferences, like one person desires to move to another country, the other wants to stay at home. One person wants kids right now, the other wants them 10 years later. Etc.
Also, sometimes people leave their partner because they are trading them for a better partner... but that doesn't necessarily mean there was something horribly wrong with the old one; they may still be the second best choice.
How about if, while writing the recommendation letter, the ex decides "Hey, she/he was really great, why did we break up at all, let's try this again?" and they get back together?
Not at all! To each his own, I say, and besides if you are going after all the Ms. Spock types I experience less competition for the hot-tempered hot-blooded Irish redheads. Win-win.
I’ve oftener wished hookup sites would allow people to post reviews. But it quickly becomes clear that these reviews would have far worse problems than typical Amazon reviews.
I think relationship recommendation letters would have similar difficulties. It’s very hard to verify their authenticity, particularly in the cases where the letter or review would be most valuable.
"I’ve oftener wished hookup sites would allow people to post reviews."
Oh, gosh. I'm imagining one of these now, and oh boy.
"Sharon: total slag. Up for anything and gagging for it. 10/10 but for the love of God get round to your nearest STD clinic immediately afterwards - Kevin".
"Kevin: neither shower nor grower. Lied about everything, including his name. Do not touch with a ten-foot barge pole. Complete waste of my night - Sharon".
One thing I liked about Friendster was the testimonials from friends. Not reviews exactly, but more endorsements. If Friendster hadn't have imploded, this would have been great for dating applications.
OkCupid did this a long time ago. You can't allow negative references because that's a vector for abuse, and the number of positive references somebody has probably just measures how extroverted they are.
Aside from the many implementation issue others have mentioned, this would drastically exacerbate inequalities in sexual access - how exactly is a virgin meant to get any without a past relationship to vouch for him?
It seems apparent that people with stronger immune systems have much harsher responses to vaccines. Does this apply to regular illness as well? Is the guy who gets really sick but bounces back in a day healthier than a guy who has a low-grade cold for three weeks that kinda sucks but never gets *really* bad? Or is a binary "immune system good/bad" not applicable here at all? Is there any relevant research here to dive into?
I recommend against "strong immune system". If it wasn't clear enough already, COVID has emphasized that people need well-calibrated immune systems-- strong enough to do the work, but not so over-powered that it turns against the person. (Could this be a good analogy for governments?)
One might think that the law enforcement branch of government is the part most directly analogous to the immune system. Police brutality, and the associated societal pathologies it leads to, would then be analogous to autoimmune disease. (It's less obvious how other related things like the military, border control, the court system, etc. fit into this analogy.)
I like the analogy! Physical borders are your skin and airports are your mouth and digestive tract - if things are going through your skin something's gone horribly wrong, while your gut is meant to input some things but to be selective about what it allows into your blood and what gets excreted back out.
There's no clear correlation between a response to an antigen and the strength of someone's immune system. Someone can have a strong reaction to a vaccine, yet not build up the necessary antibodies to protect against infection. Likewise, someone who has no reaction to a vaccine may develop high antibody titers.
It's the Terrain Theory folks who have contaminated the conversation about immunity with their talk of "strong immune systems". Everyone's immune response varies to different antigens — it may be related to one's genetically inherited HLA profiles. There may be other genes that play a role. But it's difficult to characterize what a "strong immune system" is as long as it hasn't been compromised with drugs or infections like HIV.
That's very interesting. I can believe that there are people who have immune systems which don't react effectively to much of anything, and people who have immune systems which are generally overreactive so that they get a bunch of autoimmune diseases.
I wasn't aware of the hugger-mugger in the middle.
So a vaccine is a *simulation* of an infection. A good vaccine is enough like the infection to help a lot of people, but it's not a perfect simulation.
I've always felt I had a mediocre immune system. I catch every cold and never have reactions to vaccines, which leads me to believe my immune system is not fast-acting but maybe gets around to it when it gets a chance. Interestingly, no reactions to my two Pfizer shots, but a compressed and intense reaction to the J&J booster I just did. My immune system was able to rally enough anti-bodies in that six months before the booster to show that J&J vector virus who was boss, it seems.
An open-source 3d-printable perpetual motion machine could solve global poverty. Also, ruin the environment by dramatically increasing the global warming.
Perpetual motion machines pretty much by definition don't have waste heat, so they don't increase the amount of thermal energy in the world.
Speaking of which, my favorite perpetual motion machine is this:
1. Diodes are well known to only pass current in one direction (true enough).
2. If you heat a diode, or any electrical element, the motion of electrons will accelerate -- you will get currents. Problem being, the currents flow randomly in all directions, so no net voltage.
3. So we take a bunch of diodes, wire them up in series, and through the whole mess into the Pacific Ocean. The heat creates electrical currents, which the diodes rectify, so we sit happily on shore and put our DC voltage to work.
4. In order to recirculate the energy (so the Pacific Ocean doesn't eventually freeze) we use the ocean to cool our motors and electronics, so the energy returns to the ocean as heat.
So far as we know, the universe as a whole is not a *perpetual* motion machine, at least if the motion in which you're interested in can do work. It certainly has a big, big spring, which will take a long, long time to wind down. But not forever.
My wife works for the scientific crowdfunding website experiment.com. She frequently talks to me about some of the submissions they get (all of which go through a review process before being approved for posting), so I can only imagine the types of submissions you are getting. I hope you have a good team to help.
I was considering applying for a grant but what I need are collaborators not money. I’m building a tool to better visualize balance sheets, within the “money view” perspective within banking and finance. The goal is to make it accessible for educational purposes.
Looking for 1-2 people interested in helping build it. I’ve gotten started using d3 but open to alternatives
I'm not Boston based, but I would be interested if you're still looking. I have some background in both corporate finance and development. Get in touch at vxxj20034@relay.firefox.com
There's a program called Backpack Buddies that has spread by word of mouth throughout the country. Volunteers get together to pack weekly backpacks to give to food insecure school kids on Fridays. The kids return the backpacks after the weekend. As far as I know, BB is completely grassroots, no central organization I can find. A grant worthy project might be to hire someone to do a case study on how BB started, how it spread, why it spread, and how other grassroots programs might replicate its success. Apologies if this case study already exists. But if it does, it's not readily findable, at least not by me.
"Anything that might lead to 20,000 clones of John von Neumann" I pay 20,000 people to change their name to John Von Neumann, which will make them really good scientists since they wouldn't want to let down their namesake. Any takers?
Here is my grant proposal for an impact on the global poor: Mass production of a simple combustion engine vehicle, similar to the consumer niche a Ford Model-T filled at the beginning of the 20th Century. Supply
chain logistics are probably one of the greatest hurdles to overcome in a developing country. Cars increase demand for roads and their supporting industries.
The Tata Nano was an attempt to do this ~10-15 years ago in India that ran into a ton of problems that I think would be pretty common in any developing nation. The three biggest ones, as I remember, were:
- Any simple "world car" is going to be competing with cars that are the sum of all learning, production-cost-amortization, etc. in the history of automobiles. The Nano was a remarkably _interesting_ car, especially if you like cars, but it wasn't competing with more expensive new cars, it was competing with used cars as well as the old-new cars that are dominant in a lot of developing countries. (The big one at the time was the "Maruti 800," a 1979 Suzuki kei car that remained in production there until 2010.)
Those cars were very cheap because they'd been around so long, which also gave them a lot of goodwill and a lot of credibility.
- Those Maruti-type cars also were just "regular cars" to people. A big problem Tata ran into is that people saw their Nano—this incredible feat of engineering, hugely expensive, brand-new and in its own strange way cutting-edge—as a car for poor people. People in India felt that way! Even though the competition was motorcycles and literal cars from the 70s and 80s, people didn't really want to be seen driving "the incredible and affordable developing market car." They also were seen as less reliable and safe because some of the cost-cutting and "clean-sheet" measures made them very unfamiliar and unusual to people who were used to regular cars like us, just very old ones.
(To some extent that's also just the inevitable result of creating something with a lot of attention focused on it—obviously the cars built on 1979 bones weren't safe either, but every incident with a Nano was a huge story.)
- Even if you are well-funded and doing something that the entire world thinks is cool, if you're in a developing nation you are going to have developing-nation problems in terms of government dysfunction, factionalism, etc., not to mention the infrastructure issues you're trying to fix. All the states competed to give Tata land to build their huge new-Model-T factory, one of them won and used eminent domain, and opposition parties (and the people whose land was taken) caused such massive blowback that they ended up having to move all their plans and delay the car.
Today the best-selling car in India is the... "Maruti Alto 800," a more modern (than the 1979 800) but still very conventional little hatchback. I think you see the same sort of issues with the old OLPC project, where they tried to make a very weird purpose-built laptop for the developing world's kids but it turns out that you can't really compete with capitalism just blasting out cheap laptops of the type that everyone else is already using, no matter how perfect in theory your features are for your specific market.
If you _were_ to do something like this, I think an ICE would be a bad idea too. It's perhaps the case that electric cars are too expensive for the developing world right this second, but it's going to take you five years at least to design and build this thing, and the market for ICE cars will continue to be filled by used and dated cars from the west and the far east in the meantime. Even setting aside the pollution aspects (very important in developing countries driving very old cars, though), electric car infrastructure is in many ways easier to build if you're starting from scratch, since solar and batteries are getting cheaper every year and you could even charge them with a portable diesel generator if you wanted. No point in building gas stations if you can just skip that part.
The single biggest failure point of big altruistic projects is that the person pushing the project never once asks the people at the other end what they think. This is more or less the thesis of "seeing like a state", but for charity work.
If you want a high-impact project that isn't just meant to be rammed down people's throats from above, then I'd strongly suggest actually talking to a diverse set of people on the ground (note: including local researchers but excluding expats from your country, or foreigners working at local NGOs) about what would actually help. And even then, be aware that people lie to others and themselves about what they want and what they are willing to trade for it.
Given how cheaply second hand foreign cars could be bought and maintained with low cost labor in India, I think Indian production was only made possible by trade barriers which made automobiles much more expensive in India than they could have been. The government's view seems to have been that India was too poor for second hand cars so had to have new ones.
You have to build the infrastructure to match the cars. Making cheap little cars is going to lead to a traffic disaster. I moved to Madagascar in 2009. They had a coup and then started importing a lot of cars and in about 5 years the traffic was disastrous and these cars didn't seem to solve a lot of problems.
A Model-T could be built in a barn or garage. After all, they competed with horse and buggy, so there is a lower hurdle for getting the infrastructure up and running.
Well, there's the historical risks for anything on the blockchain - that someone might take all your money by fraud or hacking, with no way to reverse it because blockchains are immutable and have no central authority to appeal to. The DAO (the first token of this type) got hacked and they literally had to fork the blockchain to get people's money back.
A DAO meant to fight climate change has the extra difficulty that it's using the most energy-expensive means of exchange on the planet to do so, which might be a good reason to doubt its environmental impact.
That's the argument against blockchain stuff in general. Now I'm going to dig into the docs and see what this scheme specifically is doing:
It seems like the goal is to create a coin that's minted by buying carbon credits. If someone has a carbon capture project (verified by a third party), they can mint a coin called "Toucan." If you buy and lock up one ton's worth of Toucan (called a "BCT"), you create a Klima coin. And the Klima coin does... nothing? You hold it and hope it goes to the moon? It lets you vote on what the DAO does?
Frankly, I'm not sure what the point of this all is. I don't see why someone would buy this to offset carbon instead of buying the Toucans or the offsets directly, and I don't see why someone would use Klima as a medium of exchange, or how you'd turn a profit off of trading them.
Thanks! I understand the risks intrinsic to blockchain.
As to the goal of the project though, it seems quite clever, at least in theory.
I think the point is that Klima’s attractive staking APY is supposed to encourage you to buy carbon credits and lock them in the DAO treasury, thus ideally driving the price of carbon up in the wider economy. The staking rate is covered by the income the DAO earns from holding all liquidity in the sushiswap BCT/USDC and KLIMA/BCT pools. It does this buy selling new klima at a discount to those who loan LP tokens over time. The ultimate goal, apart from driving the price of carbon up, is to create a kind of non-USD pegged stable coin backed by the price of carbon. This should create a cycle; the price of carbon goes up, so does the price of Klima, thus Klima is more attractive to bond and stake, further carbon price increases, and so on.
As to the environmental concerns, the project runs on Polygon, not the ETH mainnet.
An idea for something altruistic to do: Charity jewelry.
People like jewelry because it is expensive. If a guy gives expensive jewelry to a woman it proves (sort of) that he loves her. And people can wear expensive jewelry to show off how rich they are. But mining gold and diamonds is bad for the environment, so currently jewelry is harmful.
But instead of making jewelry from expensive stuff, you can make it from cheap stuff (plastic or some cheap metal) and still sell it for a high prize. How will men prove their love by giving jewelry from cheap material? How will people show off how rich they are? Because when the jewelry is bought the sale is registered on a website anyone can read. It says who bought the jewelry, how much it cost and optionally who they bought it for.
Also there are some symbols on the jewelry that shows how expensive it is. A ring with one heart costs ten dollars. Two hearts: a hundred dollars. Three hearts: a thousand dollars. And so on.
And the money the company makes off the jewelry goes to charity.
One can try to shift public opinion so people think wearing charity jewelry is moral and wearing gold/diamond is immoral. The prize of gold and diamonds will drop as fewer people wear it. Then even people who don’t care about the morality of wearing gold and diamonds will not want to wear it anymore because it is cheap.
(One advantage of this jewelry is it’s worthless to a thief, since the thief’s name isn’t registered on the website.)
It doesn't have to be just jewelry. It could be things you hang on a wall like a painting. Or you can have things to decorate a car with. Somebody can show off that they would rather drive a cheap car and give money to charity, than drive an expensive car. Public opinion could shift to thinking driving an expensive car is immoral.
You can have a place that is like a bar, except instead of men buying drinks for women, they donate to charity for them. (I doubt this last part will be popular.)
You might enjoy reading Scott’s writing about the fictional society he created, which has a similar concept of necklace beads that are proof of different levels of charitable donations. Here is the specific page (out of a couple different pages detailing different aspects of the society) which covers the charity beads:
Hadn't seen that. It was similar, but with my system you don't need police to stop people from wearing fake charity jewelry, since you can look on the website to see if they are cheating. And you don't need priests, but you probably need a big advertisement campaign to make the jewelry popular.
If you don't need to look on the website, you won't. You'll only do that if you know or suspect Jane is lying about her expensive charity jewellery, and that's only if you know Jane in some way. Some stranger you pass in the street? You won't know or care if their rainbow-plastic-beads are fake or real charity virtue signalling.
People will look it up out of envy and suspicion, and it only takes one gossip to see you on the street flexing counterfeits. Look at the Scandinavian tax records: people love looking up their neighbors and acquaintances and seeing how much they report making and if they seem to be a bit too unprosperous on paper compared to their social media photos...
Naturally, of course, everyone donating to charity does so purely out of the goodness of their heart. It's only the rotters faking virtue which need worry about neddlesome nellies checking the register, and let ridicule be their condign reward!
This would only work if the very rich take it up as a trendy signal. The kind of people who are so rich, everyone knows they are only wearing plastic and costume jewellery as a hilarious jape. Like the Freak Dinners of the early 20th century; I came across this in a 1914 collection of Chesterton's Father Brown stories but they seem to have been real stunts:
"It appeared to be an extract from one of the pinkest of American Society papers, and ran as follows: "Society's brightest widower is once more on the Freak Dinner stunt. All our exclusive citizens will recall the Perambulator Parade Dinner, in which Last-Trick Todd, at his palatial home at Pilgrim's Pond, caused so many of our prominent debutantes to look even younger than their years. Equally elegant and more miscellaneous and large-hearted in social outlook was Last-Trick's show the year previous, the popular Cannibal Crush Lunch, at which the confections handed round were sarcastically moulded in the forms of human arms and legs, and during which more than one of our gayest mental gymnasts was heard offering to eat his partner. The witticism which will inspire this evening is as yet in Mr Todd's pretty reticent intellect, or locked in the jewelled bosoms of our city's gayest leaders; but there is talk of a pretty parody of the simple manners and customs at the other end of Society's scale."
A latter-day term, arising out of the examples set by American millionaires to outdo all previous attempts in the way of sumptuous banquets. There have been dinners costing £100 per head. To please the eye, champagne has been made to flow wastefully from a fountain. The name is, however, more correctly applied to the scenic embellishments, as when the banqueting-chamber of the Gaiety Restaurant was converted into a South African mining tent, and real Kaffirs were the waiters, to remind the diners of the mode by which they had acquired their wealth."
So plastic jewellery worn by the rich in the vein of dressing up as paupers for a slum freak dinner.
People who are not rich will tend to hang on to buying gold and diamonds for those they want to show great attachment, because being poor/relatively poor, they've had to wear cheap jewellery and now, if they can save up to buy something expensive, they're not going to buy cruddy plastic, they want the things that have been signifiers of status and value for centuries.
Ivy Getty can wear ha-ha-only-joking plastic jewellery and have it noted as a wonderful, wonderful charitable idea. Jane Smith wearing plastic jewellery is "yeah, so what? cheap is all she can afford", and she won't get the opportunity to explain that no, this is *expensive* cruddy jewellery for charity. Rich people can afford gold and diamonds, so deliberately wearing cheap tat draws attention and the society pages will be happy to run stories on the charity initiative involved. Ordinary people are just that - ordinary.
Also, if this becomes mainstream enough, then there will be knockoff fake 'expensive cheap tat for charity', just as there is a market in knockoff/fake high fashion handbags and watches, because who is going to be checking a website every five minutes to see if Jane is wearing the expensive cheap plastic or the cheap cheap plastic jewellery?
Scott, I think you may be underestimating the amount of good these grants can do simply by giving people permission to be ambitious. In my view, there are a lot of interesting projects out there that just need a small amount of activation energy to unlock months or years of hard work. For most of these the constraint may be much more psychological than financial.
I wouldn't be surprised if you can make a meaningful impact by sending some of these applicants a note saying "I can't fund this, but it looks interesting and I'm excited to see what you can do, please keep me updated". Certainly $500-1k could end up buying much more impact than you'd expect.
Speaking from personal experience, even getting a *followup question* from TC after submitting an Emergent Ventures application was shockingly motivational, even though I never heard back after that. "Wow, TC didn't throw my silly idea into the reject pile immediately." Two years later I'm *still* working on that startup.
This affects two of the categories/questions you mentioned:
1. People looking for a "stamp of approval". First, I don't think you're actually staking any meaningful amount of reputation on this. And second, I'd bet most of the impact would be on the applicant themselves rather than their friends/potential colleagues.
2. The "engineer at google who won't self-fund it". As you point out, obviously this is not a financial constraint. Could you respond with something like: "this looks great, I'm setting aside $1k for you, to be unlocked after you send me a progress update 90 days from now."
Anyway, this is a great initiative and glad you're doing it!
Agreed and then some. While I've no project worth putting on the back of a napkin at the moment, the idea that good people will fund sociopolitically beneficial things (as opposed to just exponentially profitable things) is motivating all by itself.
I wonder if people who experience frequent vivid, lucid dreams are more inclined to believe it's possible that life is just a dream. If you can experience a world of lush detail full of characters and plots while sleeping and write it off as mere imagination upon waking, why give so much credence to waking life as a higher reality?
The biggest difference between dreams and waking life are that dreams usually have big continuity problems. One moment you're in The Batmobile getting it on with Wonder Woman and the next moment you are at a supper club on the moon sitting next to Keith Richards; the next you are in a press conference getting asked hardball questions by your Little League coach from 20 years ago--and you are unable to explain how one event led to the next or why you missed the ground ball.
But here's the thing: usually you only recognize the continuity problems in a dream after you wake. So who's to say we aren't going through waking life missing all sorts of continuity problems? We know, in fact, that we are, in things such as our field of vision, where are brain fills in missing pieces of scenery, but there are also big gaps in continuity we don't notice? Like maybe math isn't real, it just seems to make sense because our brains are enjoying pretending that math is a thing that works.
Other than frequent continuity problems, how else is waking life different from the nocturnal dream world?
> I've been surprised by real life a lot, never in a dream.
Really? Happens all the time to me. Arguably, lucid dreaming is surprising, ie. suddenly realizing you're in a dream is surprising. Maybe you have some different qualitative criterion for "surprise" than I do.
I haven't had nightmares since I was about 6 years old. But when I was little, a magical dream being helped to protect me from my nightly nightmares. I haven't encountered the being since then, but I'm convinced it was entity that was external to my own consciousness who helped me.
One time I dreamt that Homer Simpson was my father, and then I worked out that the age difference between Homer and me was too small, he could not be my father, so I must be dreaming. Then I woke up.
I don't think I've worked out a problem that had any practical usefulness in the waking world.
When I say I suddenly know things, I mean like I suddenly knew that Homer Simpson was my father. Nobody in the dream told me that. That sort of knowledge happens very often in my dreams. I'm guessing that happens in other people's dreams too?
Yes. Even though a house in my dreams may look nothing like the house my grandmother lived in, I always know it's my grandmother's house. And there are cities that I identify as LA, Paris, and Hong Kong—though they look nothing like those cities.
I've thought that some dream experiences are tagged and the tag is felt as real even though the experience isn't there.
You dream you're reading the best book in the world, but when you wake up, you don't remember anything about the book. There isn't even a feeling of rapidly fading inaccessible memory.
My guess is that the great book tag was activated and you were trusting the feeling that went with the tag.
the response to solipsism my dad gave me when I was a kid: I know I could never come up with the Art of Fugue (or so many other artistic and intellectual achievements) myself, but when I'm awake in a world with other people I can experience it
In dreams, many people have no sense of touch or smell (exercise: try to describe the texture of something you touched in a dream). I don't even hear in dreams.
I don't have a sense of taste in dreams, but I think I could develop one. I've learned how to read simple sentences in dreams. That was a great accomplishment for me, because I'd often dream of going into bookstores, but I was unable to read what was in the books. I found that tremendously frustrating, but my dreaming mind seemed to be hyper-dyslexic. The printed words would just swirl around. The turning point came a few years ago when I driving up to my dream Nova Scotia, and I came to a stop sign on a country road. I realized I could read the word S T O P on the sign. I woke up elated. Since then I've been able to train myself to read at about a 2nd Grade level in my dreams — i.e. simple sentences with simple one-syllable words. So I'm visiting the children's sections of bookstores in my dreams now.
As for scent, I wouldn't have said I had a sense of smell in my dreams, but I was having one of my adventure dreams where I tease a T. Rex and let it chase me. The T. Rex in my last adventure dream had an overpowering urine-musk smell. When I woke (laughing at the adventure I had just had), I realized that my door from my bedroom to my back porch was cracked open. And I had received a visitation from the neighborhood possum (who must weigh in at least 20 lbs) and the T. Rex I was smelling in my dreams was actually the possum's BO.
Dreaming is not only one of my major recreational activities, but I see my dreaming consciousness to be as important as my waking consciousness — and I spend as much energy cultivating my life in dreams as I do in waking consciousness. The dreaming world that I inhabit may not have the overt consistency of the waking world, but I've noticed that my dreaming world has a geography and it has landmarks (whose shapes might change) but which I can consistently recognize as the same landmarks from dream to dream.
If you are an active dreamer, and someone close to you is also an active dreamer, I suggest you attempt to dream about each other. See if what correspondences show up between your dreams. Having done this with another active dreamer it gave me a renewed belief in ESP.
And, yes, I encounter continuity issues in waking life, as well. They're just subtler than what I encounter in my dreaming life.
Could anyone pick some really easy low-hanging fruits for the new paradigm in obesity epidemic research ("something's poisoning our drinking water"), such as measuring lithium (or other stuff) contents in drinking water and food plants and correlate that with local obesity numbers? It would be cheap too. https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-part-i-mysteries/
Can you clarify your stance on funding ideas that are for or linked-to a for-profit startup idea? If the startup has some altruistic motives or otherwise fits one of the "proposals I need more of" categories, are you more interested in funding it? What if it comes with a promise to also do some altruistic activity (e.g.: give away the product for free to certain groups, or give discounts to all ACX readers, or do peer-reviewed research) if funding is given?
Lots of capital chasing relatively few promising projects? That's the Bay Area of the past ~5 years, all right.
I do think a $1000 grant from Scott is worth considerably more than $1000 of software engineer self-funding in a couple of ways-- a) creating feelings of obligation to produce a deliverable and b) as an "advance on one's self-confidence" (I think that's a Tyler Cowen saying?). But Scott doesn't seem confident that he can manufacture either a) or b) efficiently enough for that to be a viable model.
To flip the script a little: Scott seems to have a fairly clear idea of what kinds of questions could use answering, plus access to a talent pool from whom $1000 and the chance to be involved in ACX would buy quite a bit of potentially-high-quality research. Why not spend 5% of the grant budget to commission a dozen MMTYWTK-style investigations of promising topics?
It's not just the Bay Area - we live in an age with much more money than ideas. I spent some time over the past year looking at fintechs (from an acquisition angle) and it is just painful to see how much money is chasing not-particularly-original-or-profitable ideas.
I have a lot of crazy ideas I'd like to try, but they'd require a lot more than $1000, or even $250,000. For example, I'd like to try building a charter city out in the wilderness, built with a mix of new tech and traditional ideas. But I'm pretty sure that would require more like $250 MILLION, and wouldn't actually make money.
The smaller ideas I can do myself without funding. $1000 isn't going to help me write a book or an app. But the motivational and advertising effect of "winning a prize" is still big. Prizes usually don't come with a clause of "we will only give this to you if you absolutely need the prize money to keep on doing your work" because that's almost never true for creative prize-winners.
The way he's structured this, it seems like the only people who could win are smart, hard-working, poor young people in 3rd world countries who want to study engineering so they can immigrate to the US. Nothing wrong with that of course.
In SSC comments (or even earlier, or on Reddit..?), somebody mentioned a story about a CS student who literally couldn't understand the for loop. The comment author had spent 50 (?) hours with the student doing 1-to-1 instruction and it still didn't help.
I have nothing for you, but I felt compelled to say that I sometimes use while instead of for because I screw up the for(x=x;x<x;x+-) declaration so often
That seems like a very different category of issue, since presumably you understand the intent of a for-loop well enough to implement it as a while loop.
Could someone point me to a fact check or refutation of this article? Basic claim is that heart attacks among pro sports players are way up since large scale vaccination went into effect. What is the alternate explanation?
1) The author dismisses reporting bias out of hand, but I'm sure why he's so confident. The list includes everything from high-school athletes to amateur Belgian football players to (recently) retired NFL players. Apparently he's comparing this to the previous 20 years of such events, but I'm not sure where the data from the previous 20 years comes from. (Maybe it's described in more detail behind the paywall?) But I would expect many people in a category this large die or have non-fatal cardiac events every year without making the news.
2) He also categorically dismisses the idea that Covid itself could have anything to do with this, since the athletes were "all" tested at the time (has he verified this for everyone from the high school athletes to the amateur Belgians? maybe, but I'm not sure). But more relevantly, even if this were the case, that doesn't rule out covid as a cause unless you're sure these people *never* had covid previously. Otherwise, an equally compelling interpretation is that having contracted covid increases one's susceptibility to heart attacks. But this idea is not considered, with no explanation as to why.
It's possible there are answers to these objections behind the paywall. But the part I saw just looks like a lot of hand-waving with very little solidly backing it up.
It seems like a good null hypothesis for all of these things is that whatever harm a vaccine gives you is equally likely from a COVID infection. Not that this will always be the case, but if you can’t show a significant difference here, I’m skeptical.
I believe that the most interesting and matching ideas are yet to be submitted. Doesn't a good submission take at least a few days to prepare? It's been what, two days? On the contrary, I would expect the least worked-on submissions at this moment! That is not a thing people want to rush, generally. So yeah, good luck to anyone still working on theirs. I would be working on mine, too, if I applied.
Until we wait for a few weeks, this is also my default explanation. Good proposals take a long time to write! We've only a few days, and assuming these people have jobs otherwise, just two days on the weekend definitely isn't enough.
I don't think it's reluctance so much as the author forgetting to include it. Sometimes being too familiar with an idea makes it harder to explain because you forget that the reader doesn't already know the central point.
i think i disagree with you there. the point he makes is that homosexuality isnt a problem for evolutionary theory, as many people imagine, rather it's part of how it works. to put it unpleasantly, these are the people we'd rather didn't reproduce.
i think this is what makes it so uncomfortable/ it's one thing to recognise that one isn't at the top of pile in terms of sexual desirability, because you still have a fair chance of finding a mate. but when your undesirabiltity becomes formalised like this?
I don't see that in the article at all. He's saying that certain behavioral genes that make a man more attractive to women will occasionally have the side effect of making a man gay. So, far from rooting out gay genes, sexual selection favors them.
>the point he makes is that homosexuality isnt a problem for evolutionary theory, as many people imagine, rather it's part of how it works. to put it unpleasantly, these are the people we'd rather didn't reproduce.
You're assigning teleology to evolution. Evolution doesn't have an overseer who prunes those who shouldn't reproduce. Evolution is stupid, selfish and wasteful (every forest is a grand monument to nature failing the Prisoners' Dilemma; if plants could all agree to not grow tall they'd be far more efficient, but tall plants shade short ones).
It's true that in a hunter-gatherer world male homosexuality is only *weakly* selected against (and thus can be an acceptable occasional side-effect of normally-positive genes), because most of your long-term genetic contribution comes down to "does the tribe survive" and male homosexuality doesn't decrease the overall reproductive rate of the tribe (though it still somewhat-dilutes your share of that tribe's success). But genes that make you unlikely to reproduce, *after* you eat all that food uselessly growing up? No.
(Evolution *does* favour *other tribe members* being predisposed to kill off those who are a net negative to the tribe, of course.)
Giving it another read, he *does* come out and say it.
""In other words," he writes, "selection for the aesthetic, pro-social personality features that females preferred in their mates also contributed, incidentally, to the evolution of broader male sexual desires, including male same-sex preferences and behavior.""
It's been discussed many times already, among others by E. O. Wilson. The problem with this hypothesis is that by Hamilton's rule, in order to maintain an altruistic allele of this kind in a population, the reproductive benefit to relatives divided by the genetic relatedness coefficient must be larger than the disadvantage. Greg Cochran makes the point that since (a) male homosexuality confers a 100% disadvantage and (b) the relatedness coefficient is at most 0.5, the reproductive advantage a gay allele would have to confer on women (+2 offspring surviving to reproduce) is completely implausible in a population under the Malthusian limit, which was of course the case for 99.9% of humanity's existence. [https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/04/16/hamilton-rules-ok/]
The article we're discussing doesn't claim that the male gay genes improve women's reproductive success; rather it claims that the gene typically makes a straight man more attractive to women, and occasionally makes a man gay. If the actual gay effect is rare enough, and/or enough gay men sleep with women despite their preference, it could still be an overall advantage.
Six of one, half a dozen of the other. The applicability of Hamilton's rule does not depend on which sex is getting a reproductive advantage, only on its size and relatedness of those who benefit to those who bear the reproductive cost. The genetic relatedness coefficient of a man to himself is 1, twice as large as it can be to other people (unless they're his identical twins). This reduces the size of the advantage to unaffected carriers required to balance the disadvantage and helps your side of the argument, but not by much. Modern US data given by Wikipedia says ~4% of men are gay. The fraction of carriers, though, must be significantly larger than this number in order to be compatible with the rather low level of MZ twin concordance for gayness (see e.g. doi:10.1007/s10508-008-9386-1 for a sample of ~1500 Swedish twins). The MZ/DZ concordance numbers are compatible with a polygenic additive model, but are much too low for a single-gene explanation, where concordance is usually close to perfect. They are also much lower than those for adult height and IQ, and lower than those for psychiatric disorders and even some infectious diseases like tuberculosis and ulcers [https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/04/21/biological-determinism/], and this is partly why Cochran wonders if the causative agent is something other than genetics.
Invent a standardized test of rationality and do a blind-randomized-crossover study of several nootropics’ effect on those test scores. And another longitudinal cohort study on how the test scores predict life outcomes independently of IQ. Why not? I am not really the right person to do this though, as I am not an expert in rationality or nootropics. (I keep putting off finishing the sequences in favor of playing TF2 and I feel bad about it)
SSRIs and bruxism: I recently started SSRIs for moderate depression and anxiety (12 days ago). Escitalopram 10mg during dinner in that case. 4-5 days after I started the treatment, my teeth started to hurt when I chewed during the day. Also, I had small sudden teeth clenching movements (a bit like when you take MDMA for people familiar). ~8 days after I started the treatment, my jaw started to feel tired during the day.
For now, I've switched to taking the SSRIs in the morning rather than during dinner, and I'll see how the situation evolves. If the situation doesn't improve after a week, I'll probably try a magnesium supplement. If that still doesn't help, I'm not sure what to do. Lifestyle interventions would probably help, but considering I ended up taking SSRIs instead of making those in the first place, I'm not sure if it's a realistic expectation for myself.
I've searched a bit online, and found one study about it (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5914744/), but the only data was about the absolute rate of bruxism, and not SSRI-induced bruxism: "The overall prevalence of bruxism was higher in the antidepressant group compared to the control group (24.3% vs 15.3%, p = 0.002)". There's also https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26536018/ (I can't see the full text), which says "The prevalence of bruxism was significantly higher in the antidepressant group (24.3%) than in the control group (15.3%). The incidence of antidepressant-induced bruxism was 14.0%.". If I'm reading correctly, this would mean that antidepressant-induced bruxism in people using antidepressants is 24.3% * 14.0% = 3.4%.
I'd be interested in any advice on how to deal with bruxism and the experience of people that had bruxism following an SSRI treatment.
Yes, I've experienced the same - as you say, very reminiscent of MDMA. I've found that it lessened with time, but it's worth getting a proper mouthguard (one that's moulded to your teeth) to wear at night if your teeth are hurting during the day.
Do you know any success stories of people who managed to get in touch with (ultra-)high-net-worth individuals, earned their appreciation through establishing a mutually genuine, friendly relationship, and then obtained funds sufficient for securing e.g. a middle-class income for the lifetime (e.g. $2M)? If so, what were the decisive factors and common themes underlying these dynamics?
Bonus points for the situations where it happened online, and the recipient came from the "unappealing" demographic (e.g. an introverted working-class nerd rather than a charismatic salesman type).
When you say "obtain[ing] funds sufficient for securing e.g. a middle-class income for the lifetime (e.g. $2M)" are you talking about something more along the lines of an investment in a startup or are you talking about something more along the lines of a sugar baby or mistress arrangement?
Generally speaking, wealthy people don't randomly hand out millions of dollars to strangers. So what's the actual pitch here: what would you be offering in exchange for the $2M plus tax that you're asking for?
"Do you know any success stories of people who managed to get in touch with (ultra-)high-net-worth individuals, earned their appreciation through establishing a mutually genuine, friendly relationship, and then obtained funds sufficient for securing e.g. a middle-class income for the lifetime (e.g. $2M)?"
Sorry, but I'm laughing about this because I was complaining about the slavering coverage Vanity Fair gave to Ivy Getty's wedding (nothing against the girl, she has enough family dosh to have her very own fairytale wedding if she wants one, but the tone was so boot-licking even for a society pages fluff-piece it annoyed me), and you need to be Gavin Newsom, governor of California, whose very good family friend is Gordon Getty:
First, have your dad work for the Getty oil company. This makes connections.
Second, get the very rich family friend to invest in your own businesses. Hint: butter 'em up by naming these after the opera said friend wrote.
"Newsom and his investors created the company PlumpJack Associates L.P. on May 14, 1991. The group started the PlumpJack Winery in 1992 with the financial help of his family friend Gordon Getty. PlumpJack was the name of an opera written by Getty, who invested in 10 of Newsom's 11 businesses. Getty told the San Francisco Chronicle that he treated Newsom like a son and invested in his first business venture because of that relationship. According to Getty, later business investments were because of "the success of the first."
Third, decide to go into politics because the Health and Safety regulations cheesed you off:
"One of Newsom's early interactions with government occurred when Newsom resisted the San Francisco Health Department requirement to install a sink at his PlumpJack wine store. The Health Department argued that wine was a food and required the store to install a $27,000 sink in the carpeted wine shop on the grounds that the shop needed the sink for a mop. When Newsom was later appointed supervisor, he told the San Francisco Examiner: "That's the kind of bureaucratic malaise I'm going to be working through."
Fourth, hook up with the kind of local political big-wig known for rewarding associates with plum jobs:
"Newsom's first political experience came when he volunteered for Willie Brown's successful campaign for mayor in 1995. Newsom hosted a private fundraiser at his PlumpJack Café. Brown appointed Newsom to a vacant seat on the Parking and Traffic Commission in 1996, and he was later elected president of the commission. Brown appointed him to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors seat vacated by Kevin Shelley in 1997. At the time, he was the youngest member of San Francisco's board of supervisors."
Fourth, always remember to be grateful to the well-heeled family friend backing you all the way, even if that means turning up for his grand-daughter's big wedding while other stories wonder how come you have gone missing in public since the recall election?
And that is how, while you may only have a piddling personal fortune of a mere $20 million as against your patron's share of $2 billion, you can manage to eke out a middle-class income for your lifetime 🤣
I'm not quite qualified enough to do this, but what would be really cool if anyone has the capacity would be a setup modeling Biocurious outside of the San Francisco area. Maybe a setup to help high school kids make therapeutic phage and explore its ramifications? Of course "someone should do x" is kindof a cheap statement, I suppose. The original Biocurious has several highly credentialed volunteers.
While conducting this is also above my level, now that there's polygenic testing a long-term study of its effectiveness on something like socioeconomic status would be interesting. Though I don't imagine these grants are large enough to get a p value for something like that. But if there's a shortage of good applications it might be something to consider. Especially since such a study might be less funded from other sources due to social rather than technical issues.
I'm thinking about writing a blog, updated roughly monthly with deep-dive articles at the intersection of finance, infrastructure, and the environment. Topics would include:
- Short-term harm vs long-term benefits of energy infrastructure expansion, with case studies in hydropower and copper/lithium mining
- Nuclear's niche (or lack thereof) in a world of cheaper renewables
- How to think about the time value of money in the context of finite resources
- Should rich countries build more roads?
- Private vs public ownership series [transport infrastructure / utilities / energy transmission]
My questions for you are:
1) Are you aware of someone already doing something like this? I think it would be useful to exist, but don't want to replicate it if someone's already done basically the same thing.
2) I'm not looking for necessarily mass adoption (these will be long-form and wonkish), but would this be interesting to people, or is it *too* niche? I won't be seeking subscriptions, I'm financially comfortable.
I have an interest in the subjects you mention, but I don't think that's particularly important. What matters to me is whether you have interesting, thought-provoking or novel things to say, which leads me to my substantive point which is that I'm only interested in writing which exists, not that which is imagined or possible or part of some plausible future universe.
I don't mean to be harsh, but it strikes me that someone asking if they they are going to be stepping on someone elses toes by writing something, is likely to be making sure that the status quo continues. And the status quo is your blog not existing.
There are people who write blogs and those who do not. The characteristic of those who write blogs is that they have overcome all the hurdles that prevent the writing (and publishing) from happening. And some of those hurdles are worrying about all the negative reactions that other people may have, including disinterest. And sometimes the slightly bizarre worry that other people may be writing about the same kinds of things...
Take the plunge. Jump. Leap.
If some people like it and give you positive feedback, so much the better.
It does sound like you're hovering near the last hurdle or two......... Leap!
Thanks! Don't worry, not interpreted as harsh. I'm not concerned about stepping on toes (no one owns this stuff!) but more about wasting time by replicating existing work. I haven't found any though (at least not publicly available), and I suspect I may have a relatively unusual insider viewpoint. We'll see if it's ready for the next classified post!
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I’d be interested in proposals to restore public trust in science and modern medicine. Like having science communicators, public health experts or historians go to rural Alabama to talk about immunology, the history of infectious diseases etc.
There are excellent science communicators (Kurzgesagt, Veritasium), but the only people who consume them are the people who are already pretty well versed in science.
This would work if the problem is that rural people are stupid and lack relevant knowledge. That is not the only reason we have lost trust in modern medicine.
I think it also aims to address the problem that rural people lack social familiarity with people who spend their time thinking about and working with science and medicine.
Let's put this the other way: how about funding a bunch of rural Alabamans to come lecture science communicators and public health experts?
No? Why not? Because the experts are The Experts and what do a bunch of rednecks know? Exactly the point.
Trust is the problem, and it won't be solved by having a bunch of blow-ins from the Big City come and lecture the quaint natives. The quaint natives already realise quite well the Big City slickers think they're a bunch of dumb rubes. What you need is (1) local knowledge - can you find people respected in the community? what about the local doctors? and (2) two-way communication: *ask* the rural Alabamans why they don't trust "science and modern medicine", treat them like reasonable people not dumb hicks what all walk around barefoot and chewing on straws and never heard of soap and water.
I'm a culchie myself, I'm familiar with the attitude of the Big City set about how we all need to be enlightened. Being talked down to, even if you are poor and ignorant, even if it's with the best intentions, is unpleasant. And people are not so dumb they can't tell you are talking down to them.
To quote again from "The Napoleon of Notting Hill":
"The Senor will forgive me," said the President. "May I ask the Senor how, under ordinary circumstances, he catches a wild horse?"
"I never catch a wild horse," replied Barker, with dignity.
"Precisely," said the other; "and there ends your absorption of the talents. That is what I complain of your cosmopolitanism. When you say you want all peoples to unite, you really mean that you want all peoples to unite to learn the tricks of your people. If the Bedouin Arab does not know how to read, some English missionary or schoolmaster must be sent to teach him to read, but no one ever says, 'This schoolmaster does not know how to ride on a camel; let us pay a Bedouin to teach him.' You say your civilization will include all talents. Will it? Do you really mean to say that at the moment when the Esquimaux has learnt to vote for a County Council, you will have learnt to spear a walrus? I recur to the example I gave. In Nicaragua we had a way of catching wild horses by lassoing the fore-feet which was supposed to be the best in South America. If you are going to include all the talents, go and do it. If not, permit me to say, what I have always said, that something went from the world when Nicaragua was civilized."
As I understand it, there are two issues. One is that even if a tree is free, it requires money to cover its effects. Who pays for the tree if it needs to be pruned or eventually cut down and hauled away? Who levels the sidewalk if a tree is tearing it up?
The other issue is a generalized mistrust from a previous round where the city destroyed trees in poor neighborhoods to make surveillance easier. Who knows what the city is up to this time?
I have no idea how you would make a trustworthy and easily trusted institution to pay for maintaining trees.
Using local primary care physicians and an interactive dialogue format are great suggestions. In fact one of the persons I cited are well known for teaching by taking interactive physics experiments to the public and engaging with them. And I did not mean to suggest that only professional science communicators should be used for this project.
Also to clarify, I’m not advancing the idea that scientists and and our Western institutions have an absolute monopoly on objective truth. My scope is I think more modest that you are interpreting - addressing small misconceptions that are clearly misconceptions, and have a clear negative effect on the world.
The problem isn't that nobody has heard this stuff before. It's that they don't trust these people, and flying them in from the big city to lecture people does nothing to build that trust. The ruralites know these people look down on them and consider them a bunch of hicks, and regardless of how true that is, nobody is going to trust people who look down on them.
I don’t this is quite true. I have an anti-Vax relative who believed that the Covid vaccines would cause cross reactivity to syncytin thus causing miscarriages. I explained to them how protein sequences work, that they are akin to strings of letters and that by random chance any two long sequences will have short segments in common, however we can do statistical tests to figure out how much is more than random chance. They were floored that he had never heard this before. Was it enough to convince him completely? No, because he had a hundred other misconceptions that would take a novel to address. But it was still at least clear progress.
I agree that looking on down on people doesn’t help. Dialogue and clear discourse does. Possibly. But at minimum it’s worth a shot no?
To some extent you're replying to one stereotype with another, though. Just as the hicks from the sticks aren't, in fact, all hicks, it's also the case that the snotty patronizing eggheads from the city aren't, in fact, all snotty and patronizing. Some of them -- me, for example, ha ha -- may actually have originally hailed from the sticks and be quite sympatico.
Anyway, there's a decent germ of truth in the argument that *any* time you get people who are normally widely separated, geographically and culturally, in close proximity, talking, things improve. This is the general argument for desegregation, after all, and it's pretty good. It's isolation from real people in some group that allows cartoon stereotypes of the group to take shape and be given more credence than they should.
Not that I'm dismissing your concern, not at all -- you would absolutely need to try not to have lecturer types. But I'm just saying there's a reasonable presumption that getting real people from Tribe A to talk to real people from Tribe B, rather than relying on stories or caricatures third hand, will tend to improve things, all else being equal.
At least part of the problem is that reputable sources of scientific information, such as Fauci, are willing to engage in virtuous lying, telling people what they want them to believe rather than what is true. I mention Fauci because he admitted doing so, not in those words, in a NYT interview, but I think the pattern is pretty common.
I mean that’s not really true. Trump got booed at his own rally for suggesting that maybe his supporters should consider getting vaccinated. And most anti vaxxers have moved on from hydroxychloroquine to ivermectin which Trump has never talked about.
"I have already committed to throwing money at things, including unlikely-to-work-but-could-be-cool things. But if I have to stake my reputation on it then I’ll be looking it over with a fine-toothed comb and being super-conservative."
It would be interesting to see a "Reputation as an Exhaustible Resource" post, along the lines of https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/11/sacred-principles-as-exhaustible-resources/. The ubiquity of Letters of Rec in academia and various jobs could provide a lot of fodder for such a post. I imagine that relatively few people are in the position Scott describes here where reputational stakes are actually a tighter constraint than money, at least some of the time, but tell me if I'm wrong.
Where can I find a relatively objective restrospective on what actually happened in "Russiagate"? In other words, what did the Trump campaign actually do, what did the MSM make up, where were they right/wrong, ditto for right wing media. And it'd be great to get some sort of objective explanation on the recent developments.
Am I asking for the impossible here? I didn't follow this very closely (and I'm not sure I'd be better informed if I had) and it's a little frustrating to still not be able to separate rhetoric & exaggerations from reality.
This sounds extremely difficult to find. You’re not going to get a neutral summary from msnbc/nytimes or Glenn Greenwald or Fox News. I don’t know if any academic historians or political scientists are tackling it yet.
> My sense is that all sides -- from Greenewald to Maddow
Not to pick on you, but note that this is a spectrum that focuses exclusively on *reporting*. It's at least one large step away from the primary actors, and largely orthogonal to the legal proceedings (which IMO, I find more valuable). Keep in mind what dimensions you seek to understand, and how your view of them is shaped by your ability to survey them.
The overwhelming majority of discussion on the topic was and still is attempts to wield it as a tool in pre-existing political argument. The best technique to cut through that IME is to be scrupulously consistent in dissolving ambiguous definitions and collective nouns. What the "MSM" said about "the Trump campaign's" actions in "Russiagate" and whether or not it was true is not a question about facts, but asking what Wolf Blitzer reported on 2018-11-15 on CNN about Roger Stone's communications with Randy Credico is something that can have an answer.
I'll second BadAtChess's suggestion of starting with the Mueller Report - not because it offers anything like a *comprehensive* record of events, but because it is excels at keeping a concrete focus on actors, actions, and legal standards and serves as a good foundation for further reading and analysis. As an example, here's a bit from page 2:
>In evaluating whether evidence about collective action of multiple individuals constituted a crime, we applied the framework of conspiracy law, not the concept of “collusion.” In so doing, the Office recognized that the word “collud[e]” was used in communications with the Acting Attorney General confirming certain aspects of the investigation’s scope and that the term has frequently been invoked in public reporting about the investigation. But collusion is not a specific offense or theory of liability found in the United States Code, nor is it a term of art in federal criminal law. For those reasons, the Office’s focus in analyzing questions of joint criminal liability was on conspiracy as defined in federal law.
People can have valid differences of opinion regarding whether or not criminal conspiracy was the correct standard for an investigation. But you definitely trust that anyone debating whether or not something 'counts as "collusion"' isn't doing enough to keep their eye on the ball!
Now that you have brought it to my attention, that is actually super rough. I actually have very little confidence in any source I have seen on it, and have about 51% confidence in my conclusions.
I have synthesized a view from all the various arguments for/against I have seen, which is:
1. Some shit did indeed go down, involving information changing hands in an legally questionable way.
2. There is no (known) smoking gun (like bugging the watergate)
3. There is still enough bullshit that has resulted in persecution/confession that any Democrat would have crashed and burned, but due to the cohesion of the Republican party, the fact that Trump never pretended not to be an asshole, and the aforementioned lack of smoking gun; it just kinda rolled off the party.
4. The main thing it proved to me is that Republicans (Or democrats if you are a republican for some reason, I guess) are utterly untrustworthy, and that meaningful collaboration is impossible. IE, if there was a video of Mitch McConnel/Nancy Pelosi recreationally strangling puppies while ballot stuffing and disenfranchising black/evangelical people, Republicans/Democrats would still vote for them and the senate would just elect not to prosecute or censure them in any way.
There is considerable confusion in the US regarding whether "natural immunity" is better or worse than vaccine-induced immunity. To be clear, I understand that it's better to get vaccinated than to go out and catch Covid. But given that somebody already had Covid, are they better or worse protected from future infection than somebody who got vaccinated? This has serious policy implications.
An Israeli study found one thing; the CDC claimed the opposite.
It occured to me that it's worthwhile looking to see what the scientific consensus is *outside* the US. This issue is hopelessly politicized in the US; maybe scientists in other countries can make a more dispassionate assessment.
I don’t think there is a consensus. I’ve seen many results of each type. My thinking right now is that it’s similar order of magnitude but it probably depends a lot on the details of the infection, while the vaccine is controlled dosage.
I would probably endorse something a little tighter than that - I would say we have good evidence that both reduce risk of infection by somewhere between 60 and 90% for somewhere between 6 and 24 months. But yes, it's all very noisy (though we can be pretty confident that neither one is reducing risk by 99%, and both are doing more than 30%).
How it should be, though I had to read the addendum twice to realize it wasn't coming out in favor of raping reporters. Perhaps I have spent too long in America.
Even the "how it should be" is a bit overoptimistic since even careful research can turn out to be wrong.
Is anyone seriously working on geothermal? From a sustainable energy viewpoint, there is a massive amount of energy just a few miles beneath the surface. There's all this focus on bringing back fission, pioneering fusion ('30 years in the future'), or getting solar/wind/tidal energy to scale and then figuring out the energy storage problem. Yet a functional local geothermal plant seems to check all the boxes of what we want for a long-term energy supply solution.
My understanding is that most places the heat is too far from the surface for geothermal to make sense, but how much of that is just the engineering problem of digging holes deep into the ground? After all, the heat is down there no matter where you are on the Earth's surface. I see amazing work pioneering new drilling techniques to extract oil, but less focus on drilling for heat. Why isn't that something that could replace a large percent of our energy generation from other sources? Would you characterize this as a 'hard-but-solvable engineering challenge', versus 'first principles make this a practical impossibility'?
I don't even think you need to go that far. From what I know (which might be wrong), even a *house* can get a pretty-efficient climate system if it digs down 20 feet or so and uses that as a heat exchange.
It really feels like a $20 bill on the sidewalk no one is bothering with.
That just totally calls for the back of the envelope: Wikipedia says the total internal energy flow is 47 TW which works out to 92 mW/m^2 on average. Thus if you've got 1/4 acre = 1000 m^2 you might hope to have internal-heat-of-the-Earth rights to about 92W of heat flowing up. Hmm. That doesn't sound promising. Maybe you really have to be somewhere special, like Yellowstone.
Could you translate that into effective temperatures?
It seems to me that a reliable flow of 50F air would take the edge off of a lot of cold weather, and just need some modest supplementation, and if there's enough 50F air it would eliminate the need for air conditioning.
This isn't all of human energy use, but it's not nothing.
Sure, and that's why people build out of adobe in the desert, a honking big thermal mass helps transfer some of the nighttime cool to the daytime.
But the problem I'm pointing out isn't the temperature, it's the rate of energy flow. In terms of your thought, having air available at 50F isn't enough, you need a sufficient flow rate of the 50F air available to match or exceed the rate at which heat is flowing into your house from the hot outside.
I'm not sure that's the right back of the envelope analysis. The Earth is covered with lots of insulating material (that's how it can be much warmer a couple of thousand feet down than at the surface), by drilling down to hotter areas and pumping a working fluid through a loop we are speeding up the cooling of the Earth's core in extracting energy from that gradient so getting (at least locally) a much higher energy flow rate. The question is more how quickly will it cool the local rock and how fast heat will conduct in to the working area from below or adjacent areas to replace the energy removed.
But in the house case going 20ft down you aren't really using any power from the Earth, you're just using the ground as a big heat resevoir to even out the temperature differences between night/day and summer/winter.
I think you're just emphasizing it *is* a back of the envelope calculation, and maybe if we break out the protactors and pocket protectors we can do better. Undoubtably. But the order of magnitude estimate is pretty discouraging. I'm pretty skeptical that drilling down ~1/50 of the thickness of the top insulating layer -- I'm assuming a 1km borehole is about the limit for economical plants -- is going to change that number by two orders of magnitude, which is what I'd guess you need for something workable.
However, it is quite different from the promised revolutionary big geothermal energy (usually just "geothermal energy") where you dig deep enough to extract energy from hot rocks.
I am not too good with physics to run any numbers.
I'd like to find more info on that too. I know that in my country (America's Hat) there's one company working on this (www.eavor.com) but I don't know how to locate others. I understand that in North America, geothermal plants are probably only feasible in some western states and provinces because in other locations, the heat tends to be more than 8 kilometers down. Dunno how close to the surface it must be before it is economical.
I think its generally unlikely that adding an additional user of a specialized technology will make that specialized technology more expensive in the longterm. Maybe I'm too techno-optimist, but I feel like having more consumers of a high tech good will lower the price of the good after the initial demand shock subsides.
I think that this might not be as true for low tech goods like lumber, where I think we're closer to the frontier of cheaply generating the good.
Reading this-- and another argument that I'll keep private-- seems to have increased my ability to interpret statements. All too often, disagreements are about differing interpretations of claims, and sometimes actually misreadings.
In this case, Michael Pollan said to not eat things your grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. This is actually a fairly bad dictum for a variety of reasons, but the thing that hit me after reading a lot of comments was that Pollan was *not* saying to eat the way your grandmother did.
However, there was a lot of educational bad temper, and I found out more than I knew about how badly (both quantity and quality) a lot of people were eating possibly less than a century ago, mostly in the US and England. There are also some interesting bean recipes.
Some things wrong with the Pollan dictum: "your grandmother" is distressingly vague, considering the range of eras because of the range of ages of readers.
I don't think either of my grandmothers would have recognized sushi as food, but it's good stuff.
TastyKakes were well within the range of my grandmothers, and they're pretty processed, though I admit I don't have the earlier recipe.
Maybe Pollan meant to not eat ingredients/processes your grandmother wouldn't have recognized as food. Maybe Pringles?
Probably of interest here, there's some discussion from people whose hunger and/or satiety signals are extremely unreliable.
More education-- "things" are part of processes. "Food" doesn't just happen, it needs to be produced, delivered, and prepared. (See also medical care and vaccines.)
I forgot to mention, someone mentioned a rumor that Aldi was getting rid of some of its North American stores. People got upset. I checked, and if anything, Aldi's (a cheap but good supermarket chain) is opening more stores in North America.
Not sure of I should trust the metafilter commentariat less, my perceptions of groups being intelligent less, or people less.
Of all the web sites I regularly visit, Metafilter has the lowest signal to noise ratio. But I keep going back because once in a blue moon there's a link to something good. I've learned to avoid the comments, but made the mistake of reading them when they had a thing about the Scott Alexander/NYT ado and was thoroughly appalled.
I think that having sushi fail Pollan's test there is an uncharitable strict interpretation of hist statement. Sushi is usually composed of some combination of Rice, fish, and vegetables. All three of those are things that your grandmother would almost certainly recognize as food. The fact that the method of cooking (or lack thereof) and combinations is new isn't enough to fail the test (in my opinion).
This isn't to say that I don't agree with the rest of your argument about lack of specificity in his statement, but I think what he was trying to say was "eat things where the base ingredients are things that humans have always considered food".
The problem is that "base ingredients" is also vague and poorly defined. Is High Fructose Corn syrup the base ingredient? Or is the _corn_ the base ingredient? The first likely wouldn't be recognized as food but the second obviously would.
It's one of those situations where the rule is, as you point out, incredibly poorly formulated, but the intent behind it is also relatively obvious and not that hard to follow.
Kohn and Abeles both managed to survive Nazi occupation and Kohn, always the wide-eyed idealist, remained in post-war Czechoslovakia while Abeles ran to the USA as fast as he could. As an old guy, Kohn gets a permit to visit his daughter, who married to US, goes around New York, sightseeing and happens to run into Abeles. They talk a lot about life and making it in the America and then Abeles asks:
"And how's the old country these days?"
"Well, you remember Einstein's old Albert, with that relativity of his?"
"Sure"
"It's very relative as well. As a country? Nothing much. But as a concentration camp? Five stars!"
My grandmother constantly tells the story of a time as a girl when they tried to make a cake using some cake mix and the result was so thin, hard and inedible that they threw it out the door like a frisbee.
The vagueness of the criterion made me immediately want to abstract over all the cultural/temporal differences. Not "your grandmother", but anyone's grandmother. Or indeed anyone who was responsible for feeding a family in a food culture unaffected by ill-defined industrialisation of food production. I was surprised by how many people in the thread read it totally literally.
While I agree with some of these criticisms of Michael Pollan's writings, I also found 2 of his other books to be excellent - The Botany of Desire and This Is Your Mind On Plants.
Just to add a little heat to the inequality issue, the US government is richer than just about anything else. Rich enough to impose highly destructive sanctions and hardly notice. Rich enough for wars against small countries to hurt just a little, Rich enough for the war on drugs and mass incarceration to be sort of affordable.
And yet, people who want to reduce inequality want the US government to have *more* money, presumably on the assumption that the people who want to reduce inequality will decide how its spent.
People who want more equality want goverments to spend their budget in a specific, inequality reducing way. Taxes and increasing govermental budget are obviously the means to this end not the end itself. If the same end could be realistically achieved by redestributing the money in the budget, without a need to increase taxes, inequality concerned crowd wouldn't demand taxes increase for its own sake.
If you look at the record, you'll see that taxes not going to the problems we want is *their* fault.
Similarly, I'm not convinced that the inequality (inequity?) crowd would cease demanding tax increases (on the wealthy, however defined) if the existing budget were redistributed such that inequality were reduced.
But after the video of George Floyd dying under Derek Chauvin’s knee became public, urging protesters to go home would probably have made matters worse.
At that point it became a matter of choosing the least bad options to minimize physical and social damage.
I would love to see a blog post listing some of the cooler perpetual motion proposals -- with critique hidden behind spoiler tags, so that people could work out the puzzles for themselves.
"The questions I most often had after reading people’s applications were “why would this be good?”, “why isn’t this a for-profit startup?”, “but what actual, concrete things are you going to do?”...."
Oh boy that took me back; I was a program officer at a mid-sized grantmaking foundation for several years ending a decade ago. It was a good experience overall and I learned a lot. But I did also come to see why so many of my peers on foundation staffs were so desperate to find ways to reduce the amount of useless grant proposals without also depressing the flow of decent ones worth considering....some folks who otherwise loved their work had gotten downright wild-eyed about that particular conundrum.
Anyway here's a friendly offer: be happy to volunteer some time to help you with that time-consuming initial sorting of wheat from chaff. Not sure how exactly, we could brainstorm a bit maybe. Anyway it is a process that I have professional experience on both sides of and maybe a bit of that could be useful to you?
Related to the recent Whither Tartaria post, my reply (featured in the comments follow up) and the general YIMBY movement: I voted against the city council representatives and mayor of the suburb I live in outside of Detroit last week, and they won anyway. These elections are held in the off, off year, as basically the only thing on the ballot to depress turnout and give the incumbents a huge advantage, and they ran mostly on a platform of restrictions and hardline zoning powers. I see a diffuse benefit, concentrated harm to making zoning more permissive here, exacerbated by the relatively low population to begin with, making it hard to get the kind of sweeping change I really desire. Worse than that, the state statute that permits zoning in general and city master plans in particular seems to be more restrictive than similar things in neighboring states. Does anyone know of any kind of concentrated YIMBY movement outside of the like 4 or 5 biggest metros in the country? What about in-depth discussions of land use policy on a state by state basis?
I recently read Donald Hoffman's The Case Against Reality. Hoffman makes insane-sounding claims, yet I find the hypothesis hard to reject outright.
His basic hypothesis is that our perceptions aren't showing us anything close to the "truth" of objective reality because having useful perceptions will, in a Darwinian sense, outcompete true perceptions almost every time. On the surface that doesn't sound like such a revolutionary idea; what is revolutionary are the extremes to which he takes the idea.
I generally think of the difference between perception and reality thusly: we perceive the color blue whereas the reality is my eye collides with a frequency of light waves my brain interprets as blue. Blue is the perception; the frequency of light waves the reality.
Hoffman goes WAY beyond this. To him, the light waves themselves are merely the next layer of the onion. After all, we used our powers of perception to perceive the existence of light waves, and our perceptions not only aren't interested in truth, but are fatally allergic to it for Darwinian reasons. So light waves are an illusion, time and space are an illusion (Hoffman uses quantum behavior as Exhibit A of our inability to perceive whatever it is that is actually going on in objective reality), and hence nobody is going to make any progress in figuring out what gives birth to qualia if we continue to believe in silly things like neurons and brains, since they are 3D objects in space and time, mere illusions of our perceptions and therefore implausible.
Whereas Hoffman's hypothesis that "perception attuned to Darwinian fitness" > "perception attuned to reality" is strong enough as to be almost tautological, where he loses me is in his examples that mean to show that fit perception is rarely aligned with truth perception. His typical example is of a resource, let's call it "water", which one needs a moderate amount of to stay fit. Both not enough of it and too much of it will kill you. Now assume an organism has simple binary perception of this resource, water. It can perceive water as red or blue. Now assume water appears in nature in varying quantities probabilistically according to a normal curve. If the binary perception system registered "red" for not much water and "blue" for a lot of water, such perception would be true but not useful, because survival is about getting a moderate amount of water. Consuming water while perceiving it as red or blue could lead to underconsumption or overconsumption of water. OTOH, a perception system which reads "red" for too little water, "blue" for a moderate amount of water and "red" again for a great deal of water would be less true, in the sense that the organism would be bad at gauging whether a little or a ton of water exists, yet more useful because the point is simply to discover whether a moderate amount of water exists.
I think the problems with that model are obvious. Like, what is the analogy here with a real-world situation? If we are actually talking about a resource like water or food, we don't need to perceive a moderate amount of it, we only need to perceive whether we are still hungry or thirsty while consuming it. That's a simple binary perception. I tried to come up with some better analogies for Hoffman's model than he uses in the book yet can't.
This sounds like Plantiga’s Evolutionary Argument against naturalism. Which is the sort of argument I used to love dissecting, and now I find utterly uninteresting, because it’s the sort of argument that is only persuasive to people who already agree with the conclusion.
In one sense I find this assertion uncontroversially true, even obvious. For example, if you observe sufficiently stupid animals, it's clear that if you (as a large potentially dangerous animal) stop moving long enough, you pretty much stop existing as far as they are concerned. They have learned movement = danger, and they are just incapable of comprehending that something that wants to eat them can discipline itself to not try to, for a while, in order to improve its ultimate odds. Their brains just aren't sophisticated enough. Then there's the issue of human memory, which we know isn't stored byte-for-byte, pixel-by-pixel: we store "key frames" and reconstitute it on demand from certain assumptions and emotional overtones, which leads to the problem of eyewitness testimony that is wrong, the Rashomon effect, the "artificial" memories for which Elizabeth Loftus is (justly) famous for exploring, and so forth.
All very fascinating stuff, and if that's basically what he's saying -- that we are in some ways hobbled by the nature of our sensory perception, which has been ruthlessly tuned for survival instead of getting at the truth -- I don't find this uncontroversial.
But arguing that this means we *can't* get to the truth, or normally don't, is a bridge too far for me. I can appreciate evolutionary efficiency, but it seems a reasonable axiom one would need to persuasively rebut that the closer sensory perception mimics actual reality, the better the survival advantage. The examples he cites (and those I am citing) are all about approximating reality for the sake of speed or reduced expense in processing and storage, more or less the brain making an MP3 instead of a FLAC of reality. Fair enough: but surely the more sophisticated the organism (= has more energy to burn) the *less* it needs to approximate reality for the sake of saving energy and time, and the more the advantage of a better approximation makes itself felt. Field mice may indeed economize on their visual processing circuitry, because they have a very short lifetime and, what the hell, it's easier to replace a mouse eaten by a clever hawk with another mouse than build a better mouse that is smart enough to not be fooled by the hawk. For humans, who are very expensive on a per-zygote basis, this is not a good tradeoff -- so we are built much, much smarter.
For his argument to work, we would need to conclude that the distortion of reality is in some axis *not* related to mere approximation or lowering the fidelity for the purposes of efficiency in processing or storage, so that even as processing and storage resources increased (as we go from mice to humans, say) the distortions did *not* diminish. Nothing in what you've quoted so far says squat about this, so I'd say that argument remains unmade, and it's a pretty important one.
One would also need to argue that humans being cannot use their reason to overcome the distortion of the senses, and this, too, seems challenging. Blind people can learn to build mental 3D models of the world. Mathematicians can develop instinctual apperceptions about the behavior of wholly unnatural things, like 5-dimensional spheres or something, with enough practice and thought. I would say after decades working with it, I have pretty sound instincts about the predictions of (non-relativistic) quantum mechanics, so it no longer feels counter-intuitive and strange to me. Where is the argument that reason cannot work its way around the limitation of the senses?
I know someone who's serious about hobby sward-fighting, and he's said that humans fail to notice sufficiently nonchalant movement. He's also serious about meditation (Sufi) and the like, and says it's difficult to be sufficiently nonchalant to do this reliably. He's working on it.
As for your larger point, I think the rational angle isn't whether human perceptions are completely reliable. The important question is what they're unreliable about, and by how much. And what they're reliable, or pretty reliable about.
I see no reason to believe there *aren't* large realms we're missing out on.
Dont' quite agree. I think the point is whether, with care and exertion, rationality can compensate for whatever inaccuracies or shortcuts exist in perception. Id est, in your example, could someone be trained to *not* fail to notice nonchalant movement? For the case of field mice, probably not. For the case of humans, evidently yes. So that points *toward* my conclusion, and away from Hoffman's.
You might be overestimating our capacity compared to the complexity of the universe.
For example, we're said to be able to keep 7 =/- 4 things in mind. I suspect that "thing" isn't well-defined. Still, what if there are situations which take keeping 100 factors in mind? Maybe there's only so far you can get with abstraction and computers.
Also, for this argument, is there a difference between a few very highly trained specialists and what people in general can do?
>The examples he cites (and those I am citing) are all about approximating reality for the sake of speed or reduced expense in processing and storage, more or less the brain making an MP3 instead of a FLAC of reality.
I didn't mention it above, but one of Hoffman's strongest arguments is: say we live in 100-dimensional universe. It makes sense that we data-compress that into a 3D visual field in order to quickly navigate it. He argues we likely don't live in a 3D universe by quoting a bunch of physicists and cosmologists who argue we likely don't.
He also invokes the Holographic Principle, which, according to Leonard Susskind says "The 3D world of ordinary experience--the universe filled with galaxies, stars, planets, houses, boulders, and people--is a hologram, an image of reality coded on a distant 2D surface". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle
Among Hoffman's bizarre claims is that he finds it suspicious that so many things we perceive visually, such as the bodies of animals including ourselves, are symmetrical. If we exist in a (>3)D universe are we likely symmetrical?
Hoffman argues something like this (as best I understand it): our visual perception does this neat trick where it data-compresses this N-dimensional universe into only 2D dimension, and then, for the sake of error-correction, maps this 2D image onto a 3D image. That could explain why we perceive the body of a lion as symmetric. We can more quickly recognize it if it displays symmetry.
Hoffman's central metaphor is that what we perceive as real-world objects are much like icons on your computer desktop. The icon of a file on your desktop gives you quick, relevant information about the file, but it tells you nothing about the details inside the file.
To paraphrase Woody Allen: what you perceive as a lion looks nothing like a "real lion", but it has the head of a lion and the body of a lion.
It's all mind-blowing and hard to believe, yet OTOH, if we really are in a 100-dimensional universe is it so implausible we have data-compressed our perceptions of it into a more workable 3-dimensions?
Organisms tend to have minor asymmetries, but we aren't sharp enough to see them, if that matters.
We know there's a lot about the physical universe that we can only perceive indirectly.
He might be right about what I'm imagining as wildly shifting stuff which is part of our universe that we aren't seeing.
I wonder if there's something as big as an aesthetic sense that we don't have. Yet? Ever?
Or if there's something as important as mathematics that we're missing out on.
It may help that I grew up with sf from the 50's or so which had more wild speculation of that sort. Stranger in a Strange Land may have been a last gasp.
> Among Hoffman's bizarre claims is that he finds it suspicious that so many things we perceive visually, such as the bodies of animals including ourselves, are symmetrical. If we exist in a (>3)D universe are we likely symmetrical?
Maybe I'm approaching this at the wrong level of abstraction, but one of the most elegant successes of the 20th century was Noether's Theorem stating that every conservation law implies a physical symmetry and vice versa: there's a century of physics in the details, but the conservation of energy is the symmetry of past and future, the conservation of rotation is the symmetry of left and right, the conservation of momentum is the symmetry of forward and backward, etc.
Symmetry is, if not *quite* fundamental, very easy to produce in any defined physical space.
One thing I should have made clear from the start is that Hoffman's ultimate interest is in the discovery of consciousness. I buried the lede there.
He suggests that if we want to understand consciousness/qualia, we need to throw out 20th century physics. We shouldn't try to understand the brain because the brain is a perceptual construct, not reality.
20th century physics is useful for understanding the universe our perceptions have constructed, but not for understanding true reality. There's a bit of Plato's Cave here. Hoffman equates a subatomic particle to a pixel on a screen. It may be a fundamental building block of the video game we are playing, but it tells us nothing about how the software behind it works.
Ah. Well, if he's going to pose qualia as incompatible with modern physics, I'm perfectly comfortable with the eliminative materialist side of that fork. Predictive power has a grounded honesty the search for "true reality" lacks.
I don't think one needs to choose sides of the fork. Hoffman doesn't argue against using physics for physical purposes. To use his video game analogy, if we want to play the video game better, we should use strategies and tactics that are rooted in that video game universe (i.e., our best understanding of physics).
OTOH, if we want to figure out the source code of the game, or something close to it, we need to abandon the game.
I think next Open Thread I will try as best I can to explain Hoffman's hypothesis about consciousness itself.
> Among Hoffman's bizarre claims is that he finds it suspicious that so many things we perceive visually, such as the bodies of animals including ourselves, are symmetrical. If we exist in a (>3)D universe are we likely symmetrical?
That is silly. Shapes of animals are evolved under heavy pressure
- symmetry is highly useful in many cases (try to walk on legs of uneven length). With birds pressure is even greater
- there is high pressure in beauty/mating/sex preferences toward bodies that demonstrate high fitness, symmetry is often one of important criteria here
> Hoffman's central metaphor is that what we perceive as real-world objects are much like icons on your computer desktop. The icon of a file on your desktop gives you quick, relevant information about the file, but it tells you nothing about the details inside the file.
> He argues we likely don't live in a 3D universe by quoting a bunch of physicists and cosmologists who argue we likely don't.
For start: is he quoting ones that describe tiny dimensions unrelevant to daily life and detectable only by galaxy-sized* particle accelerators? AKA string theory. If yes then it is not relevant at all and display of incompetence and/or being misleading.
*maybe solar-system sized?
Also, I can easily quote ten times more that presented argued that God exists. Including priest who was first to formalize Big Bang as theory - which was initially widely disliked due to being nice match to "God created world".
And likely more an be found that presented Perpetum Mobile machines.
"It's all mind-blowing and hard to believe, yet OTOH, if we really are in a 100-dimensional universe is it so implausible we have data-compressed our perceptions of it into a more workable 3-dimensions? "
I might be missing something because it seems to me that Hoffman's bizarre claims are either obviously true or just silly, depending on how you interprete them.
Very clearly, we are not perceiving all the properties of reality, we are perceiving only a small part of it. Even without the (quite hypothetical) 100 dimensions, we are not perceiving anything really small, or nothing outside a narrow spectrum of wavelength, we are blind to magnetic fields, etc. But, evolution shaped us to have a good perception (ie a perception that matches reality) of the things that are relevant for us.
Yes, when, we see a real-world object like a lion, we do not have acess to the details within (what are the biochemical characteristics of its cells for example) but we have quite a good grasp of the relevant features (teeths and claws!).
I like the magnetic fields point. We have absolutely no senses capable of detecting magnetic fields directly, because detecting them gave us no survival advantage (one assumes). But of course, we discovered they exist, and developed methods of detecting them (my phone has one) -- using our reasoning powers. The fact that we developmed the technology to detect magnetic fields despite their making no impression at all on our senses is a pretty powerful argument that we are by no means limited to what our senses show us.
You have to understand how far Hoffman takes his distrust of our perceptions. Whatever powers of indirect observation we may have, whatever tools we use, still rely on our eyes to observe measurements. Our tools of measurement are themselves illusions.
Could we have detected magnetic fields if we were blind, deaf and had no sense of touch, taste or smell? If not, then we have used our perceptions to detect magnetic fields.
His ideas are way, way out there. That's why the book is interesting. Also why I point out he has a PHD from MIT. He may be crazy, but he isn't an idiot or lacking in education.
Haven't read the book and won't touch the discussion on reality, just a mandatory remainder that being smart and educated tends to make the crazies more capable of rationalizing their nonsense and easier for them to sell it or obfuscate.
Sure. A universe with 3 (space) dimensions has definite types of physics, and if there were more dimensions there would be quite different physics, and whether we could see those dimensions or not it wouldn't matter, because we could tell from the physics that they were there. An easy example is that long-range forces (like gravity or electric and magnetic fields) would not fall off in magnitude as the square of the distance.
An analogy: if the world is 2 dimensional, living things cannot have an alimentary canal because it cuts them in half. If you lived in Flatland, and nevertheless observed that animals ate and pooped, you could conclude there were more than 2 dimensions, whether or not you could see them.
If there *were* more than 3 dimensions, we could tell because the physics would be different, in ways that are easy to calculate. It isn't. So they're not there. (I'm excepting compactified dimensions that are used in string theory because I don't think that changes the main point.)
The Holographic Principle strikes me as a red herring in this context, because it's not saying our perceptions are *wrong* merely that they are limited in a way with no practical consequence. Even if we directly perceived the source of the hologram, it wouldn't change how we use that information because by assumption the Holographic Principle doesn't create any difference in the local physics.
Sorry, forgot about the other point: things are symmetric because space is symmetric, e.g. because space is isotropic ("looks the same in all directions") the natural shape of objects is spherical. It sounds like he's got the physical reasoning here backwards: it takes something special to have a symmetry *different from* the underlying space. Physics students are taught this early in their careers: you never get a manifestation that differs from the symmetry of your matrix without some special reason.
In fact, organisms need special tricks and techniques to *not* be spherically symmetric, and how this occurs is often an interesting question to developmental biologists. One of the key proteins involved here is, I am not kidding, named sonic hedgehog.
It would be at least good enough for science fiction if there are multi-dimensional extensions for microbes and cells-- there's a lot about living things we don't understand.
Upon cursory evaluation, it seems like the thesis of this book might be an all time great steel man. The problem is that it’s steel manning the classically edge lord position of “what if when I see red, the color I see as red is what you see as green”.
It’s a question of asymmetric perception that Kant works around by appealing to the common construction of our sense organs. The problem is that even if it’s true it’s not clear that it could ever be sussed out of reality - it is the truths that are inexpressible in the axiomatic systems we have available per Gödel.
"His basic hypothesis is that our perceptions aren't showing us anything close to the "truth" of objective reality because having useful perceptions will, in a Darwinian sense, outcompete true perceptions almost every time."
It certainly seems correct to me that our perceptions are useful simplified models of reality, not reality itself. However, it seems to me very unlikely that a useful model can generally be divorced from objective reality.
There are some examples where evolution seems to have favored a perception which is not the best possible match for reality. For example if a prey animal is trying to detect a predator in a noisy background, it will be useful to overdetect predators, because of the asymetric costs of wrongly detecting an imaginary predator versus failing to detect a real one. Same things for reproduction, male penguins are for example famous for sometimes trying to mate with dead females. But even in these types of cases, the model is just a bit of from reality, it is not that different from it.
Note that prey animals want to overdetect predators, but not by too much. The prey animal still needs mellow time for digestion and reproduction. The goal is to be right enough in both directions, not to be a nervous wreck.
>It certainly seems correct to me that our perceptions are useful simplified models of reality, not reality itself. However, it seems to me very unlikely that a useful model can generally be divorced from objective reality.
If I was younger, I would ask a grant for creating DIY microbiology kits for home use. I remember how people including myself used to do wet photography at home, basically turning bedroom into a photo lab. It was fun, and practical thing at the same time. There are still rare people doing it as a hobby but it is no longer the same when everyone with a mobile home can make much better photos at every instant.
Microbiology DIY at home is something that many people wound enjoy. It could increase interest in science for young people and a lot of fun for everyone. But this is more challenging than a photo lab. Obviously safety issues are much more challenging and regulations could be another obstacle. Even something trivial as sterilizing a streaking wire with a naked flame is something I would try to avoid at home. Maybe it can be done with a special closed electric device where you insert a wire and take it out. And how to avoid most poisonous chemicals and still be able to do cool things with it?
The available DIY microbiology kits for sale are only for schools and they are not really meant to be used at home. Many things would need to be carefully adapted to turn it into a hobby that is as available as photography once was.
There are already many people doing essentially DIY microbiology for very practical ends - cultivating mushrooms (psychedelic or gourmet).
If anything the requirements for sterility are higher than with actual microbio, since bacteria have comparable generation times while funghi get outcompeted if you mess up even slightly.
Also, if sterilizing something with a naked flame is a safety hazard for a person, they should stick to knitting or video games.
I'm curious if you distinguish between "communication" and training. For instance projects that are lecture or blog like, spreading information, vs projects that teach people skills or broaden thoughts.
For instance the 4th bullet point was:
Improve the academic, governmental, and decision-making institutions that work on these other causes.
The second type of project described above fits that bullet point. Would a project that trained people to think in politically/socially effective ways qualify? In my experience a lot of people both on the volunteer/hobby side and the professional side in politics don't really understand policy but much more importantly they don't understand process or know how to weigh political trade offs.
This produces the pretty large, pretty loud, and pretty lame Jimmy Dore/FTV style politics, and infected a large section of very active left wing people during the last 2 presidential primaries. It also impacts things like the DSA or Sunrise Movement heavily. It seems to me that something that provided people an experience somewhat like actually being in charge of policy decisions and dealing with nearly random, very chaotic systems fits the last two bullet points well and the 1st and second at least tangentially. You'd also be able to sneak in process thought training at the lower and grass roots levels which would improve things as people move up in the political sphere.
There have always been clinically-relevant questions I've wanted to explore with fervor, and work responsibilities tend to get in the way wrt time.
For example, the relationship between signalling from the enteric nervous system (ENS) and chronic bowel disease.
If our ENS attempts to communicate with the CNS, but the impetus is ignored, does the ENS repeat the signal until the problem is addressed? If so, does the repeat ignoring of the signal and persistent state of ENS activity result in chronic bowel disease over time?
My hope is to write about this over time on Substack, and that others with knowledge in the respective fields can chime in. I think it's an idea worth pursuing.
In general, there are probably worthy projects in using micro-organisms to help with recycling, or, for the nervous, replicating and improving evolved enzymes.
Meanwhile, this is a political thread, and I really dislike that they blame capitalism even though it's only capitalists working on that particular bacteria and enzyme.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS9PWzkUG2s This guy had a go at culturing the bacteria that break down polystyrene. IIRC it turned out that the metabolic products were kind of toxic.
Right now he's working on carbon sequestration by combining the genes for spider silk and calcareousness and sticking them in a yeast. So you can grow fibres in a bioreactor and throw them into the sea where they become weird chalk.
I've started doing daily pushups. To prevent my musculature from getting uneven, is there another type of daily workout I should do to grow the upper body muscle groups that pushups neglect? I don't have any workout machines and only four dumbbells.
I find rows a must. Pushups work the chest so you want to balance it out with rows, and they also make you look great (back muscles are what makes you look big) and improve your posture. You can start with the dumbbells but they are probably too light, so you'd want to get heavier ones or move to inverted rows. Inverted rows are hard to do without a bar, but a bar can be improvised. I've seen instructions online on how to do rows with a sheet fitted in a closed door, but I don't know it works well. Best thing would be to build your own bar, or to start frequenting your nearest outdoor gym.
I find table rows like that to be super uncomfortable, but to each their own. Maybe grabbing the sides is better, I haven't tried that. Finding/getting a bar is worth it IMO.
Curls would work the biceps (you're working the triceps), and overhead presses would work the delts and lats, to complement your work on the pecs. You can do both with dumbbells -- in fact, that would work better than with machines. Just be sure you have good technique so you don't cause injury.
It seems that someone should do a controlled, random, double-blind test of masks.
Put 100 people into a dorm, wearing masks whose effects are unknown to the participants and study organizers, but knowable after the fact. Maybe something that looks like it *could* be a N95, but varies from useless to actual N95.
Purposefully infect some of them with the flu (because we can treat the flu easily), then see what happens.
Repeat. Then repeat again. Do it in a few different patterns: maybe different strength masks for everyone in each group, or maybe each test is with a different strength of mask, maybe the infected people purposefully get weaker/stronger masks to test that hypothesis.
This might be expensive, but the benefits will accrue to literally billions of people in the short-term, and it will add to our long-standing knowledge.
The type of virus matters, since some airborne viruses spread readily via aerosols while others require large droplets to spread. Influenza, which IIRC is more towards the large droplet end of the spectrum, is not going to be a great proxy for something like measles that spreads extremely readily by aerosols.
For that matter, the hard part of uncertainty over how much mask-wearing slows transmission of a novel viral pandemic seems to be figuring out the details of how that particular virus spreads in terms of droplet size, etc, rather than the mechanics of what size of droplet gets filtered out by various types of masks.
I would start with influenza simply because it's easily understood, easy to treat, and we can learn the baseline of how to run these studies for things that are more dangerous.
Right now I suspect we don't even know the right way to run these experiments, so we'd be learning that as we go.
I'm a computational biologist with many years experience. I have some half-baked ideas for something biomedical related, but almost anything would require at least some wetlab facilities, at least a nice sample refrigerator. Also probably best to have a collaborator with more biological knowledge than myself (physics degree). Anybody out there want to collaborate (I'm open to other ideas too)? Either this round of grants or next.
What would be the expected cost and return on teaching Scott to be much better at math? I recall he said once he wasn't a fan and that he didn't think he could significantly improve.
What the hell is going on with Rivian? They're an electric car company that just IPOed, hit a market cap of $140 billion USD (third-biggest car manufacturer in the world after Tesla and Toyota), and have produced less than 200 vehicles.
Specific questions:
Why on Earth does the market think a company this small is worth more than Ford, GM and Chrysler?
Why did the market pick Rivian in particular to go nuts over when there are many tiny EV companies to choose from?
== Convince Scott that AI research is a good idea ==
“Everything we love about civilization is a product of intelligence, so amplifying our human intelligence with artificial intelligence has the potential of helping civilization flourish like never before" – Max Tegmark, President of the Future of Life Institute
Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is one of the hottest fields in research right now, despite still being in its infancy. Even the relatively crude AI systems that exist today are turning science fiction into unremarkable facts of life at an ever-increasing pace. Future developments in AI hold the promise of bringing about never-before imagined prosperity, lifting billions out of poverty, ending disease, and so on. Almost any problem in the world today could be solved more effectively with the assistance of improved computer systems.
Scott Alexander is a popular and influential blogger who writes about everything from books he has read to model cities on his blog, Astral Codex Ten. His blog is particularly popular among people in the tech industry, and thus, he is in the position to exert a disproportionate influence over the future course of AI development or lack thereof.
Unfortunately, Scott has expressed skepticism and antipathy towards AI research. For example, he recently wrote "I think AI might be bad, and I hope it comes as late as possible so we have more time to prepare. If you have proposals to hinder the advance of cutting-edge AI research, send them to me!"
Given his position, convincing Scott that AI research is a good idea and one that should be promoted in his writing seems like a high-leverage, yet underappreciated opportunity to improve the state of the world.
Fortunately, his writings also reveal a promising avenue to accomplish this persuasion with minimal investment of funds. In particular, Scott is a huge fan of prediction markets, such as PredictIt and Polymarket, and puts great store in the "predictions" that emerge from them.
Therefore, convincing Scott of the beneficence and importance of AI research should be a simple matter of convincing PredictIt and Polymarket to open markets along the lines of "Is AI research a good idea?", and then using the grant funds to buy as many "yes" shares as possible.
Thanks to the illiquidity of the markets and the lack of any connection to sports or hot button political topics, there should be few if any external punters buying "no" votes, and thus relatively small amounts of money will cause the markets to display a strong prediction that AI research is a good idea. Additionally, the use of "chained prediction markets" is a promising avenue to further reduce the risk of hostile interference in the markets.
Furthermore, this proposal is being submitted for funding by Scott himself. As he will be invested in the project, he will have a strong subconscious desire to see it succeed, which will magnify the persuasiveness of our investments in the prediction markets and improve the odds of success.
FAQ
-- Why isn’t this a for-profit startup? --
Although the benefits of advances in AI will be immense, it is unlikely that a startup will be able to capture them, particularly a "meta level" startup that is focused on improving the state of AI research via online influencers rather than engaging in such research itself.
Additionally, getting Scott to fund the project will make him more invested in its success, and thus making it much more likely to succeed.
-- If you care so much about this and you’re a software engineer at Google and it only costs $1000 why haven’t you just funded it yourself? --
I posted below about the cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman's book "The Case Against Reality", which is an attempt to understand the nature of consciousness/qualia. This post is an aside about it. (I will likely make another post about that book next OT.)
Hoffman mentions in passing how stroke victims who lose the left hemisphere of their brain lose their capacity for speech, EXCEPT for their ability to use vulgar language. This fucking fascinates me. I've long been fascinated by vulgar language and how it is that people are genuinely offended by words because they are taught that they are supposed to be offended when they hear them. Why does language work this way? I don't mean someone being offended by, say, the word "cocksucker" because they have some woke theory that it's meant to offend homosexuals, so they act offended if they hear the word because they think it is morally wrong to imply sucking a penis is a bad thing. I mean people who are viscerally offended when they hear "Fuck you" "You cocksucker" or whatever. Because people do often become viscerally offended when they hear vulgar language, in every language (so I understand). How is this possible?
Vulgar language tends to be 2 things:
1) Slang for bodily fluids or sex acts
2) At least mildly insensible
I used to think 1 was the key, but after hearing that what I presume is a more primitive part of the brain can cuss but not speak, now I think 2 is clearly the key.
My guess is that vulgar language was our first language as humans. People say it was grunts but I think our pre-historic ancestors were going around calling each other asshats and faggots and pricks and pussies before they could say anything else. It makes sense that our first speech, as humans or pre-humans, would be words of aggression.
When a dog barks at a stranger isn't it basically saying "Fuck You Fuck You Fuck You Fuck You"?
My guess is that when we cuss these days we reach for that insensible part of the brain but the reason it comes out as slang words about intimate subjects that are part of the language--as opposed to insensible aggressive grunts--is because we can only speak inside of our language not outside of it.
A while back I looked up swear words in different language on Wikipedia, and there's a lot of variation by language.
IIRC:
Japanese doesn't have profanity. They have ways of expressing the things we express with profanity, but there's no notion of certain words being offensive.
In Dutch, names of diseases are profanity. So, like, if a guy cuts you off in traffic, instead of accusing him of sucking cocks, you accuse him of having cancer. Doctors have to use euphemisms.
In pre-Christian Latin, there was no religious profanity. Also, anatomy books were full of swear words because some body parts didn't have any other name. Modern Italian, on the other hand, has religious profanity much worse than ours, e. g., "God is a pig." This particular example is illegal in Italy but people still say it.
That's interesting that Japanese doesn't have profanity. Perhaps it is such a formal culture that offense is more easily taken in other ways, subverting the need for offensive spoken words?
Vulgar language directed, in a serious fashion, at _you_ in particular means the speaker does not respect you and is not afraid to show it. Getting upset, up to the point of violence, can be warranted to rectify this.
There's also an aesthetic objection that excessive swearing gives the discussion/company/place a very disagreeable underclass / social pathology vibe. Hence the need to use profanity strategically, or not at all.
Where can I learn the basics about nutrition? Book or website is fine. I just want to know the basics of what each nutrient is for and how much of them I need.
Anyone else stressed/depressed about Yudkowsky’s recent prediction of 85% chance of AGI in the next 50 years, and his assertion that basically none of the research being done right now is likely to lead to actual alignment?
Link below, but I’d suggest not reading it if you’re stressed/triggered by this stuff.
50 years is not a long time. To me this implies that (assuming you buy into this model) you should drop everything you’re doing and desperately attempt to stop or slow down AI research by (almost) any means necessary. (Except for AI safety research.) But I don’t like where that train of thought leads.
Personally I think the "alignment problem" is impossible and that AGI is inevitable and that there's nothing to worry about.
Yudkowskianism is a bit like demanding that Henry Ford solve global warming and drunken drivers and urban decay and so on before he builds the Model T. Every technology has had positive and negative effects, and there's no real way to forsee or prevent them.
But I am 100% confident that humanity will endure as it always has. The real mistake of the Yudkowskians is thinking that AI is an x-risk.
Why the alignment problem is impossible - on a theoretical level because of the halting problem, Lob's Thereom, etc. On a practical level, because the problem is ill defined in the first place. There's no such thing as human values, merely values that particular humans have, and humans will always disagree with each other about what they want.
Why AI is not an x-risk - the real question is why do you think it is an x-risk? The entire argument is basically God of the Gaps. There is no evidence that one can just trivially take over the world, and everything we know about the world in every discipline argues strongly against it.
FOOMism is basically just crappy scifi wish fulfillment, and whenever you point out anything in the stories that is not physically or economically plausible, they'll just go "well maybe everything we know is wrong and the AI will invent new laws of physics because it's just that awesome".
After a few rounds of that, the entire argument is just "and then a miracle occurs", and there's nothing worth even debating in the first place. I mean it's theoretically possible that magic is real and we're one wand waving teenager away from world domination, but that threat doesn't exactly keep me up at night, and the FOOMers don't even have the decency to recognize that that's what they're doing.
Unbounded FOOM doesn't make a lot of sense, but a more bounded intelligence explosion does. Specifically, current state-of-the-art of AI is neural nets and it's highly unlikely those are anywhere near maximally efficient. So at the point where you get a neural net good enough to write a non-neural-net AGI, you do get a discontinuity in capabilities.
Moreover, FOOM is not necessary for AGI to be an X-risk. Let us merely assume that an AGI is developed that's mildly superior to peak human in all cognitive domains while costing less to build and run, and that it is capable of running robots that are mildly superior to peak human in all physical domains (except self-healing; don't really need that) while costing less to build and run.
1) A business run by (forks of) this AGI with no human employees would be more effective than one run by humans, regardless of the industry.
2) A country which did not discriminate against use of this AGI (e.g. by using tax/welfare to prop up humans, or simply banning the AGI) would have a faster-growing economy and more-effective military than one which did.
3) Thus, two-tiered Traveller's Dilemma winding up inevitably at "humanity sacrificed on the altar of Moloch", unless there is an international agreement to nuke anyone who defects.
4) AGI is easy to hide (compared to e.g. nukes), so such an agreement would be nearly impossible to enforce.
"discontinuity in capabilities" != instantly take over the world. "discontinuities in capabilities" happen all the time and noone notices or cares.
Also, that's one of the most ambitious "merely"s I'm ever seen. Mother nature is an incredible designer. AIs that far outclass humans and revolutionize technology are likely to exist for decades at least before we manage to beat biology in efficiency across the board. And even then, the most plausible route towards "more efficient than humans" is that humans start modifying their own structure.
In any case, that's well beyond the point where anything can be forseen,.
Also a lot of writing about AI from the LW camp seems utterly divorced from reality. It's more like a SF fanfic community than a serious attempt to predict how various scenarios might unfold.
I completely agree with your comments! There is a tradition running through the writing of Yudkowsky and the Less Wrong crowd where thought experiments are the main way of thinking. This is completely fine and gets you awesome philosophical ideas and great literature, but combined with the mission statement that Rationalism is about creating a superior way of thinking about the real world, you end up with many bizarre discussions.
The core problem with those thought experiments is that they rely on assumptions that either contradict basic mathematic facts, or which imply the desired results trivially. The first assumptions gets us questions like "What happens when AI does the impossible?", with the answer being "Everything, because ex falso quodlibet". The second assumptions get us questions like "Will exponentially growing AI build AI that grows even faster?". Which is a pointless question, as it is utterly unconcerned with the question whether exponentially growing AI is even possible. For those concerned, it is very likely impossible. Roko's Basilisk is a thought experiment from this category.
In such discussions, it shows that Yudkowsky and most Rationalists lack serious training in mathematics, logic, or computer science. A basic fallacy of self taught programmers is that because some things are easy in Python, everything is. But many classical theorems from Computer Science are about what is impossible, or what is prohibitively hard to compute.
Yudkowsky more or less admits that his knowledge comes from hard scifi novels and popular science books. This certainly explains why he is such a great essayist, who writes on the level of Roland Barthes and Michel de Montaigne. But it also explains why Yudkowsky, in the end, always privileges the figurative argument over the mathematical one. This can be seen in texts such as Sequence S, "Quantum Physics and Many Worlds", which starts out fine with a discussion of some quantum experiments, which then develops into a witty, but sloppy discussion of Bayes Theorem, and ends up with the conclusion that the Many Worlds Hypothesis is probably correct, because it fits Yudkowsky's mathematical aesthetics.
It really irks me that Yudkowsky can sell this thinking as rigorous or rational, when all he does is beat the same drum of Bayes theorem, being a genius and not knowing rigorous mathematics. The only AI doomsday Yudkowsky should fear is the one where MIRI runs out of money, and he looks in the mirror and sees just a middle aged man.
The year is 2031, and the U.S. and China are at war. Russia stays neutral, but also takes advantage of the opportunity to examine the two combatants' military technology by sending a small flotilla of salvage ships and floating dry docks to the Pacific Ocean and South China Sea to raise the wrecks of recently sunken U.S. and Chinese ships, and transport them to Russia.
How do America and China react? Aside from diplomatic protests, unilateral sanctions, and military strikes against the Russian ships or Russia itself, can they do anything to stop the operation?
Apart from asking nicely, economic persuasion and both sides' overwhelming ability to obliterate anybody who tries, we're powerless to prevent such a thing from happening.
In Mathew 7:3-7:4, Jesus says: "Why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but fail to notice the beam in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while there is still a beam in your own eye?"
I've contemplated these passages, and my question is: what the hell was wrong with people's eyes back then?
If there is a multiverse, how frequently are new universes created? I assume I would need to specify that question within a set amount of space or atoms. Has someone done this calculation? Like are there X many new universes per Y atoms over Z period of time?
What's the reason for the bell curve of male intelligence being different to the female one, eg the male one being overrepresented at the extremes? I couldn't find anything that properly explains it with google.
It is not clear that this is actually true; the evidence is far from conclusive. However, the postulated mechanism is that (some) genes that make a major contribution to intelligence are on the X chromosome; men get one of those and if it's a high-IQ or low-IQ chromosome that's what they get, women express the phenotypic average of two X chromosomes and so have fewer extremes. The postulated evolutionary advantage for this (and thus for the IQ-relevant genes winding up on the X chromosome) is that having a low IQ brings a substantial risk of having zero surviving children (because e.g. you ate the wrong mushroom before you were old enough to have any), and there needs to be a really good upside to balance that risk before you start rolling the dice on high IQ variance. For women, the upside is maybe 6-8 surviving children, for a man it's dozens to hundreds. Or if you go for the absolute highest dubious historical claims, 69 for a woman, ~3000 for a man.
But, again, all of this is mostly speculation and little evidence.
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I agree with this person, whoever they are.
Biological racial differences which I believe are uncontroversially true include:
Skin color and other obvious stuff.
Certain blood types are more common among certain races than others.
There's an ethnic group, whose name I have unfortunately forgotten, who are extraordinarily good at holding their breath under the sea. This is partly through experience but partly genetic.
Native Tibetans can handle high altitude better than Tibetans with non-native ancestry. The gene responsible appears to have come from Denisovans.
Natives of the Andes mountains have bigger lungs than other people, and thicker eyelids (the latter protect their eyes from the cold).
Inuit react to cold differently than other people; they get increased blood flow to cold extremities instead of reduced blood flow.
> There's an ethnic group, whose name I have unfortunately forgotten, who are extraordinarily good at holding their breath under the sea. This is partly through experience but partly genetic.
Bajau. Even the non-divers have significantly enlarged spleens compared to other Indonesian groups, and the theory is that it contributes to a significantly stronger oxygenation effect from the dive response.
I would say if the argument is that IQ differences have modest to zero effects on economic outcomes, or are swamped by other factors, this argument can be taken seriously (provided what it says is accurate), but if the argument is that racial IQ differences do not exist at all, nothing in this list of recitals, even taken at face value, says boo about that. All they say is that race is not the *only* factor to influence measured IQ, which, duh.
" White and black americans raised abroad on military bases show no IQ disparities."
If this is true, it's very interesting. It does suggest that whatever genetic differences there might be are swamped by environmental influences and we should look at what's going on there.
Well, except you have a tremendous selection bias in that the parents are all members of the military, right? They're not at all a representative sampling of the population.
Hi Paula! What can you tell us about opiates?
being photographed in the NUDE) is better than any opiate
I've emailed as below regarding this lassie. God alone knows what, if anything, will be the outcome but at least they should be aware this is going on:
"Substack is a place for independent writing. We host and celebrate a diverse range of thought and discussion. The following guidelines outline what is and is not acceptable on Substack. We have the exclusive right to interpret and enforce these guidelines, although we may consult outside experts, research, and industry best practices in doing so. If you encounter content that may be in breach of these guidelines or have any questions about them, you can email us at tos@substackinc.com."
What's more, I'm pretty sure they're a bot, since they posted three different comments on two different posts within seconds.
Who wants to see nude photos of a robot?
#6, #8, or T-900? But I'm guessing our Paula is an inferior model.
Seconding the recommendation.
I'd also recommend "Understand", which I recently saw recommended here, tried, and really liked, so I want to signal-boost the original recommendation for it. "Understand" is even more about testing hypotheses and questioning assumptions. It's a rule-guessing game, like the board game Zendo or even Mao, and it's like the 2-4-6 task in that you could come up with a rule that fits the data but the actual rule might be broader. (It has *extremely* basic graphics, though, which make Baba's graphics look like an AAA title by comparison.)
I have about 70 hours in Baba Is You and I'm not even close to completing it. I did all the puzzles on the overworld map but then THAT happened (you know what I mean) and I've been stumped by Parade ever since.
I haven't read the book, but, in general, I personally find the arguments against inequity in and of itself to be rather weak. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's no problem at all, but it's such a lesser problem compared to doing anything at all to alleviate the current level of poverty in the world as to not be worth worrying about until the entire planet is at a level approaching current western standards.
If there is a solution that is, _at a bare minimum_ as good at decreasing raw poverty/improving standard of living, and _also_ decreases inequality, then great, I'm open to it (although probably skeptical). But I've never heard one. Every solution I've heard that decreases inequality usually has the side effect of decreasing the rate of improvement in poverty as well (that's not to say it makes poverty _worse_ or even stops the improvement, just slows it down). That's simply an unacceptable tradeoff at this point.
So when I hear something like "a win-win solution" isn't acceptable because it increases inequality, it just makes me wonder what better, realistic, actionable proposals people have to continue to increase standard of living while not increasing inequality. I'm not convinced that such a thing exists.
It can be defined absolutely at a given moment in time, even if a later generation might redefine it upward.
“The very poorest today live far better than the ‘middle class’ of the dark ages.”
Is that true? Obviously it depends upon the definitions of “middle class” and “very poorest.
To phrase it another way. Take the living conditions of someone at the 1st percentile of wealth today. How far back in history would you have to go before the median human was worse off than that modern-day 1st percentile person?
Simple life expectancy (i.e. mean lifetime from birth) in the pre-modern period is highly deceptive because infant mortality was very high and dying at 0-1 drags down the average quite a lot. A better proxy for quality of life is life expectancy given that one survived infancy; infant mortality is tragic and all, but a human who died at 6 months can't be said to really have had a quality of life.
OTOH, its highly not-deceptive. My grandfathr had 11 siblings born, and 3 reach draft age. Every family he knew as a kid in his small town had an infant death. This was not that atypical.
My kids don't know anyone who has had a sibling die. This is not that atypical.
What's CAR?
It highly depends on what you measure and value.
Some things are much better accessible (access to information), some are vastly less accessible (land).
Some serious risks disappeared, some probably disappeared, some appeared.
Also, it depends on location and what you mean by "dark ages".
But for example, how many people in your country starved within last year? How many people you know died of starvation, in childbirth?
Poverty can be, typically has been, and needs to be, defined in absolute terms. It is only in absolute terms that we are doing better on poverty then we ever have before. Your assertion 'Poverty on an absolute scale becomes meaningless. The very poorest today live far better than the "middle class" of the dark ages.' may be true in rich Nations, but is very far from true in poor ones. You are also incorrect that basing a definition on a relative statistic will automatically reduce inequality along with reducing poverty. The relative statistic simply becomes a moving target. Dangerously unstable's viewpoint on the other hand, is much more aligned with what I think of as correct. The absolute level of living conditions in the world at the low end is still so low that we should entirely ignore all distributional concerns (inequity) in attempting to raise it in a sustainable way. It doesn't matter if the rich get richer as long as most of the poor get rich enough, and economic growth and trade are fantastic vehicles for this kind of movement
What I was trying to suggest is that if you have two possible options, one that decreases poverty by 0.5, but increases inequality by 2, and one that decreases poverty by 0.4 and decreases inequality by 0.1, then the first option is by far the better one. Not because inequality isn't a problem at all, but it's such a lesser problem that it should _only_ be addressed on the margins after first dealing with poverty. Any solution that deals with inequality while making solving poverty slower is a bad solution.
But that's an entirely different choice. That's "decrease poverty by 1, lower inequality by 1" vs "decrease poverty by 100, lower inequality by 50". My decision criteria is the same in this scenario: Take whichever option is best for the poorest, who cares what the effects on inequality are.
> Not because inequality isn't a problem at all, but it's such a lesser problem that it should _only_ be addressed on the margins after first dealing with poverty.
I think this is too simplistic. Maybe you could make this case if everyone were perfectly rational, but if your lower class citizens will get very angry at you for spending money to alleviate foreign poverty when they could really use that help, then you'll lose your political power and your ability to help either of them.
I think there's considerable evidence that inequality really is fueling civil dissatisfaction, and possibly even civil unrest, so we're living in a very real case this question is pertinent.
I mean, that's an instrumental disagreement - you're saying that his first policy won't in practice achieve the 0.5 arbitrary units reduction that's promised, not disagreeing that it wouldn't be better if it did.
Disagreeing with the real world applicability of someone's thought experiment is very distinct from disagreeing with the evaluation of the thought experiment itself.
How are you evaluating "better"? Seems like the context implies "outcome" given the talk of quantifiable units, i.e some form of consequentialism. Under this framework you simply cannot divorce the "real world applicability" from its judgment as "better" or "worse", because it's real world applicability is exactly the criterion by which we evaluate "better" and "worse".
Thus, if second order negative effects overwhelm the first-order positive effects you were hoping for, then it's not in any sense "better" in such a framework.
If we lived in some alternate world in which these negative second order effects didn't exist, eg. the world in which everyone is perfectly rational as I mentioned, then that judgment would likely yield a different result.
Poverty is certainly a problem to be fixed, but why is inequality a problem ?
I think that's a bad metric of poverty. I think that "how are the worst-off doing on an absolute scale" is clearly what matters. If you were one of the poorest people in the world, would you rather have someone give you a thousand bucks, or learn that Jeff Bezos lost a billion dollars in a fire?
So you agree that it's no help if Bezos has LESS money (even though that would reduce inequality), only if the poor have MORE money (which reduces absolute poverty). So why care about relative rather than absolute poverty?
Well yeah, if Bezos paid a billion dollars to the poor that would obviously help the poor. But there are more realistic ways that he could lose that money without helping the poor. For instance, the government taxes him an extra billion and uses that additional revenue to build a shiny new aircraft carrier.
And yeah inflation and so forth is a thing but since global trade is also a thing you can in fact transfer wealth to poor people successfully.
My point is, the quality of a poor person's life does not *directly, intrinsically* depend on the quality of the richest person, or the median person's life.
"My point is, the quality of a poor person's life does not *directly, intrinsically* depend on the quality of the richest person, or the median person's life. "
In a world where political lobbying isn't a thing and rich people have as much control over goverments as poor ones that would be true.
In a world where the only way to accure status is to participate in effective charities as much as possible that would be true.
in our world, however, it's less so.
Why not distance from the mean (or median) to the richest person?
First, an ambiguity: when we say that inequality is (or isn't) bad, do we mean "it's bad to increase inequality by TRANSFERING resources from the poor to the rich" or do we mean "it's bad increase inequality by giving additional resources to the already-rich, even if they're free resources from nowhere and the alternative is to destroy them?"
Obviously, the case against inequality is much easier in the first interpretation than in the second.
In general, I'd contend that small amounts of inequality might be neutral or even good, but that there exists some amount of inequality above which more is bad.
In the first scenario, I'd say it's bad for both economic reasons (money can't flow well when one guy is hoarding it all) and also for political reasons (extreme power imbalance means the powerful can dictate self-serving rules and ignore fairness).
In the second scenario, I'd say it's bad ONLY for political reasons and not (directly) for economic ones. (And the threshold at which it becomes bad-overall might be higher.)
In my estimation, the fundamental difficulty with raw capitalism is that it increases wealth concentration over time with no limit. Any stable system must have zero net change over the long term. Thus, you need to add some additional rule that will negate the long-term wealth concentration, or else the economy will *eventually* break.
That "*eventually*" may be similar to how we talk about the sun going nova or the heat death of the universe. Sure, we can envision it, and we can surmise that it's likely long before the heat death of the universe, but that doesn't mean it's soon (or even true, in the sense of people in 2021 looking towards a knowable future).
I think of the early communists and their desire to redistribute wealth in the 19th century. If we had redistributed wealth then, and slowed or stopped growth (which they considered fine, as standards of living were high enough by their local metrics to make that worthwhile to them), then the world would have missed out on orders of magnitude more absolute wealth, of which much has been passed down to even the poorest people on earth, and certainly the middle poor of that time who are now the middle class.
Most of the wealth growth in the wealthiest people on earth has been from the increase of stock prices, not from goods they own and consume. If Amazon's stock goes up, Jeff Bezos will get money that would otherwise have to be destroyed to keep it from him.
Envy is not a disreputable sin that should be ignored when in good society. It's a legitimate emotion that has been selected for by evolution.
When people are envious, they are unhappy, i.e. they have lower utility.
Your solutions to that are threefold:
* convince people that they should not be envious (Libertarians have tried this route for several years. Their results have been … poor)
* make it so that people are not envious (tranhumanism ? kill social media ?)
* fix inequality
There is the difference between "envy", which makes people unhappy and begrudging, and "emulation", which inspires people to strive so that they too may be successful.
We should do away with envy, because it is bad for everyone, and we should leave emulation alone. Emulation involves admiration and respect, envy provokes hatred.
Oh I dunno, envy has its uses. As in "if THAT asshole can succeed at this, I ought to be able to do at least 5x better." Which is to say, the observation of a useful prototype example need not be accompanied by admiration.
If you live in a democratic society, or really any society where many people have some access to power to shape the future of society, then inequality at one stage tends to lead to future harms. If you can have a very strictly electoral power system, where financial and other forms of power don’t enable you to steer policy more than just your single vote, then this is less of a problem.
Aren't you leaving out the possibility that unequal access to power results in significantly better outcomes because those with greater access actually exercise the power better? Consider the extrreme case: we disallow access to power entirely for children under the age of 12, which means there are no Constitutional Amendments restricting bedtime to after 11PM on schooldays. Probably a good thing.
Id est, the assumption that equal access to power is an optimal choice bears examination. It may be empirically somewhat true, mostly true, or mostly false.
Well sure discarding the idea that unequal access to power is better than equal without any investigations would be unreasonable. Thankfully, we had quite some of such regimes throughout the history, experienced all their supperiority and ended up with democracies nevertheless.
Now with all our previous knowledge, it is an extraordinary claim that unequal access to power is better. You are free to state its case if you wish, but by default it is reasonable to assume it to be false.
Actually, no, and indeed the Founders were profoundly concerned with this problem. Their survey of history -- and a modern survey would not reach especially different conclusions -- is that democracies were inherently unstable and usually devolved sooner or later to tyrannies or chaos, precisely because they devolved power onto too many people who were incompetent or careless with its exercise.
That is why the Founders set up quite a number of undemocratic institutions in American government, including the Senate, the Electoral College, the Presidency itself, the separation of powers, the Bill of Rights, all the "checks and balances," et cetera.
So if any part of your evidence consists of the stability or longevity or functionality of the American government, it is argument that in no small part is *against* the democratic ideal.
Yes. But I'm also leaving out the possibility that poverty is more good for the soul than it is bad for the body.
My general assumption is that if there is something that is universally good, then most groups of people will be more able to recognize it than not, and so greater participating in government will increase the probability that government accepts that universal good. The issues where political power distribution matters (other than just distribute it as widely as possible) are ones where there is a conflict of interest between different groups.
Hmm. But your general assumption is flatly contradicted by all kinds of relatively obvious historical examples, such as whether eating tons of sugar is good or bad for you, whether vaccines are useful or not, whether invading Russia will or won't work, whether smoking is good or bad for you, whether seat belts and/or airbags will or won't save lives, and if we want to go back far enough whether invisible life forms or bad humors cause disease.
Id est, the majority is predictably right only in extremely obvious cases ("murder as a way to solve a parking place dispute is wrong," "theft as a career is a bad choice," "you have to get permission before you initiate sex.") But extremely obvious cases are also those in which the *need* for government is a priori minimal, since social consensus and its pressures and for that matter individual conscience will normally do most (or even nearly all) of the work.
Where you *need* government is in precisely those areas where social consensus is lacking, or hard to form. Exactly those areas where what is universally good is difficult to discern. So if that's your argument for democracy, it suffers from strong internal logical contradictions.
A much better argument is the principal agent problem, by the way, which doesn't suffer from this weakness.
Another way to frame it: if you have such confidence in the discernment of the majority, why do we need a Bill of Rights? Isn't the good judgment of the majority sufficient?
Not to put words in Scott's mouth, but my guess is that he meant it in the absolute sense. Just because the standard has never been higher in aggregate doesn't mean you can't do a lot of good by further pushing up the bottom of the distribution.
Well, the easiest way to help the global poor relatively, if you're genuinely not concerned about absolute povery, is simply to make the rich poorer. That will reduce the relative gap without changing the poor's absolute standard of living.
And of course it's pretty easy to make rich people poorer. Just start a war, or institute some ruinous regulatory/tax regime, push pr0n to everybody's iPhone, whatever.
It's hardly a strawman if it made you think more carefully about your goals. I see people throw around the term "inequity" or "rich-poor divide" and just sort of assume it's obvious why that might be a bad thing, because wouldn't it all be nicer if we were all rich?
But it seems to me that's not thinking things through clearly, or betrays an ignorance of human psychology, because if we *were* all equally rich, what it would *feel* like is that we were all equally *poor*.
The psychological feeling of "I'm rich" absolutely relies on seeing other people who are manifestly poorer. That's why a knight of AD 1600 could feel rich even though on an absolute basis he's poorer in material goods (and health, opportunity, education, et cetera) than residents of an LA barrio circa 2021. He can look around him at the AD 1600 mud-hut shtetl and see that everyone else is much poorer, so he feels rich. But if we compelled your average lower middle class LA human of 2021 to live in a stone house without running water or heat, wear poorly-sewn burlap without nice soft cotton undies, eat poorly cooked and sometimes half rotten food (although plenty of it), and do entirely without any kind of health care, and be entertained only by shoddy local singers -- the daily existence of the knight of 1600 -- our modern human would feel wretched and poor, compared to the other 2021 LA inhabitants around him, enjoying nice clothes free of vermin, cable TV, central heat and flush toilets.
So while it's 100% clear what it means to reduce absolute poverty, to give people more food, leisure time, access to education and healthcare, et cetera, what it means to reduce relative poverty, or the "rich-poor gap", is considerably fraught. If we made the rich poorer, would that actually make the poor feel richer? It very well might. Does that make it a social good? Hmm. What if we made the poor richer without making the rich richer, for example by redirecting all the extra income of the rich to the benefit of the poor? Would the poor like that? Would the rich? It's not clear, since how one feels about the fairness of life isn't *just* a question of wealth. It has a lot to do with whether and how wealth is connected to effort -- with whether your effort is attached to results, or effort has no relationship to results.
Even if we take your default suggestion, which is to take from the rich and give to the poor, clearly we can't do that all the way until equality, because they we'll all feel poor -- so where do we stop? What is the least functional rich-poor divide, where at least some people get to feel rich, instead of everyone feeling poor? Or is it even possible that a larger rich-poor divide would be better? We need some criterion for the optimal difference.
And then again, many people have argued that to see "the rich" and "the poor" as static immutable classes is a mistake: many people are poor and then become rich, and some other people who were rich become poor. So if you are transferring wealth from rich to poor you could easily end up being *more* cruel than if you didn't: say Peter starts off life poor, but by working hard and saving he becomes rich later in life -- but then you come along and take away all his gains by force and give them to Paul, who is young and starting out and poor just like Peter was. How is this a plus for either? Peter doesn't receive any reward for his efforts, and Paul has nothing for which to strive, and both feel that the connection between effort and results is broken, that it is *not possible* to improve one's situation by your own effort, you just have to hope the majority wants to make you better off. Sounds rather discouraging, if you ask me. I'd hate to have my material well-being depend completely on what some Congressional subcommittee thinks it should be. I like to think I can affect it by own efforts.
I don't have any easy peasy answers to any of these questions, but I woudl rather suggest they need deep pondering before one gets into the practicality of changing rich-poor divisions.
Well, fair enough, and I don't disagree with anything you said in any big important way. I think what I might say, however, is that it might be a mistake to focus on *just* the top-line number, the disparity in wealth and income between rich and poor.
We might need to dig deeper, to look at thinks like social mobility and opportunity: how easy is it to *become* rich, if you start out poor? Societies with high mobility and plentiful opportunity (e.g. low barriers to entrepreneurship, good access to education or capital) might be preferable -- and generally happier -- than societies with low mobility and fewer paths to wealth, even if the rich-poor gap is larger.
That is, psychological people often value their future prospects higher than their present situation (at least when they are young, and they have more life ahead of them than behind them). If I am poor *but* I see a plausible path to wealth, I may be happier and more satisfied than if I am merely lower middle class -- but feel like I'll be locked into that forever.
A side benefit of shifting the focus this way is that we can pick out things that are pretty much unambiguous goods -- like breaking down pointless barriers to social mobility, improving access to education and capital -- and get those done with the confidence that if we do, we will have improved life for the poor whether or not the rich-poor divide closes, or by how much it does.
So for example if I was Bill Gates and needed to get rid of $100 billion so I didn't have to leave it to my ne'er-do-well offspring (or whatever his reason is), I would look at investments that improve opportunities, things that let people leverage whatever energy and smarts they already have. Educational access and basic public health measures are obvious targets, and of course the Gates people are heavily into both. When I was a kid I was very influenced by E. F. Schumacher's "Small is Beautiful" book and I thought that a lot of attention should be focussed on appropriate assistance to the poor (and Third World). LIke the old "give a man a fish / teach him to fish" parable. So if I were Gates I'd try to get the opinion of a lot of people who hard worked long and hard in poor scruffy places and see what would really work to improve opportunity, in the long run, without wasting money just trying to change short-term outcomes.
" But if we compelled your average lower middle class LA human of 2021 to live in a stone house without running water or heat, wear poorly-sewn burlap without nice soft cotton undies, eat poorly cooked and sometimes half rotten food (although plenty of it), and do entirely without any kind of health care, and be entertained only by shoddy local singers -- the daily existence of the knight of 1600"
AHEM. A late 16th century/early 17th century knight would *not* have been wearing "poorly-sewn burlap" unless he was engaging in religious mortification and wearing a hair shirt.
No, they didn't have cotton. What they did have was linen, wool, velvet and silk:
https://www.thehistoricalfabricstore.com/periodfabricguide
Elizabethan knight wearing his best poorly-sewn burlap outfit:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/Sir_Walter_Ralegh_by_%27H%27_monogrammist.jpg
Knights would be gentry, and could be quite well-off (of course, always depending what part of the country they lived in, their land holdings, etc.) Some of those 'stone houses' even had windows made of glass!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/z3tdhv4/revision/1
While modern living conditions are far superior to those of even the recent past, you're falling into the opposite error of "the past was all mud, shit, and poverty".
Yes, imagine: they didn't have cable TV to fill them in on the latest tragedy in the life of Jazz Jennings, they had to make do with this for entertainment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmH1nZSGIyY
OK OK, it was an Internet post, and I didn't want to use the space and time to write a careful exegesis. I shall go say four Haily Marys as penance, all right?
Go and listen to Jordi Savall for one minute and I will forgive you 😁
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqVMiIq8LHo
You should know by now there are amateur historians hanging round here on the street corners, looking to beat up innocent passers-by!
Your analogy needs work. Besides the fact that no knight would wear burlap, and the year 1600 didn't involve much in the way of knights and mud huts anyway, one of the big differences there is that the knight would feel himself grossly diminished, not by a loss of *social* respect or status, but of concrete property and the attendant power. A properly medieval knight would have *at least* been the landlord of everyone in the square mile surrounding his house, and probably more or less owned the actual people. So in your hypothetical barrio, for him to be transported with his standard of living intact, he'd have to also wield the power of rent and taxation over everyone around him, or his material circumstances have been palpably reduced.
Of course this undermines your whole example since it means by extension that he would only be going without a fridge and running water for exactly as long as it took him to learn those things even existed and any of his tenants had them, but even if we handwave that away somehow it's still a crucial distinction. He would feel wretched and poor because you'd robbed him of like 95% of his belongings, not mainly because his stone house suddenly looked shabby next to the neighbor's.
I guess you're not getting the point, since all the things you emphasize about how a knight would feel "rich" -- his power over others -- are exactly *my* point, that it is only the existence of the surrounding peasants that make the knight feel "rich." If *everyone* in the village lived exactly as the knight did, and he had no excess power over anyone, he wouldn't feel rich any more. Feeling rich *always* requires someone else who is clearly poorer than you. That's the idea.
No, I'm afraid I'm going to have to insist that *you're* the one missing *my* point. What I'm saying is that the knight doesn't feel poor due to relative comparison, he feels poor because *you took away almost all of his possessions*.
Maybe it's easier for you to understand my point if we envision him back in the middle ages, circa 1100 AD when there were classical knights. You take away all his rights to rent and power over the local peasants – imagine making the peasants themselves vanish if you like. All remaining peasants nearby and indeed in Europe still have the same even lower standard of living, but the knight now feels poor anyway because *he lost most of his worldly goods including all of his capital and revenues*. This has nothing to do with *relative* poverty. Since your example of moving him forward in time involves the same massive loss of property, you're begging the question by assuming that it's the flush toilets that make the knight feel poor in the barrio.
It's like saying "imagine that you turned Jeff Bezos into a homeless bum and threw him out into the streets of San Fransisco in a stinky jacket. Now he feels poor, *because he compares himself unfavorably to the middle class*!" It's not at all the comparison that will get to him, probably it doesn't even occur to Bezos to make it. What makes him mad is that a malevolent genie turned him into a bum – it's a comparison to his own former state, not to others, that makes him feel impoverished.
And, possibly in that case also the concrete absolute poverty. But you see what I'm saying this time, I hope. You can't just make someone vastly poorer in *absolute* terms and then claim the poverty sensation is caused by his observation of his *relative* poverty.
As for the poorly-cooked and half-rotten food, brother let me introduce you to Tasting History:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsaGKqPZnGp_7N80hcHySGQ
Try some Farts of Portingale:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luz_AqzDkKI&list=PLIkaZtzr9JDmY5Jfc26AzrVtlzuign5Lc&index=15
Alas, here am I, a knight in 1600, with only these shoddy local musicians to entertain me, instead of watching Oprah Winfrey interview Meghan Markle on cable TV:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoK8eTqHzak
Living in my wretched stone house
https://www.mansionglobal.com/articles/historic-tudor-manor-house-in-dorset-england-lists-for-7-5-million-200842
instead of a lower middle-class neighbourhood in Los Angeles:
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/5750-5th-Ave-Los-Angeles-CA-90043/20564185_zpid/
Wearing poorly-sewn burlap:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EclnDbgVAAA_CwQ.jpg
Eating poorly-cooked, half-rotten food:
https://www.elizabethi.org/contents/food/
https://thetudortravelguide.com/2019/08/31/elizabethan-recipes/
Indeed, what a wretched, deprived life I live! 😁
Giridharadas is a progressive hack. You can expect his positions to be half baked economic progressivism and that he'll never say anything that would make the Cambridge set uncomfortable. I do think the progressives are right on some issues. But Giridharadas is mostly a crowd follower rather than a thought leader.
Anyway, like most of his work on subjects I know something about, he's not all that well read on the literature. It's out of step with actual consensus of experts except in places where experts agree with progressive politics.
His central argument on development that I've seen is basically that economic exchange is (at best) mutually beneficial. It's not likely the first world will trade with the third world if that trade makes the first world worse off. Even if the third world is completely free, they too will at best only trade when it's beneficial to them. Therefore any trade will lead to both nations getting richer. But because the first world is already richer it will not solve inequality.
To which I'd reply, firstly, yes, raising standards in the third world will help the first world be wealthier. But that's a good thing! Also, he doesn't sufficiently account for how a little extra money disproportionately helps poor nations. South Korea went from being the poorest nation on earth to being half as wealthy as the US. It also made the US wealthier in the process. But who really got the bigger benefit? Yes, Americans got good electronics and kpop and maybe their consumption went up more than South Korea's in simple dollar terms. But South Korea went from being extremely poor to a first world economy. In terms of day to day life the South Koreans have seen a much bigger improvement in living standards and HDI and all that.
Of course the South Koreans get credit. Though it's worth noting they had American help, including American credit and technology transfers and cheap loans. That help was much more beneficial than any amount of charity.
Also: We're talking about Giridharadas, not Scott. Giridharadas is not giving out grants. He wants to fundamentally change global capitalism to some form of socialism, remove the billionaire class, etc etc.
To respond to your thought experiment: I'd say you do get moral credit for making mutually beneficial trades. What matters is how much you help the poor, not how much you sacrifice to help them.
Also: A more accurate metaphor is your neighbor has no food and you have extra food. But you like your neighbor because both of you hate your constantly drunk third neighbor. Who's also a dangerous bear. So you give the neighbor some food (and guns). But you also help them set up a business so they can trade with you so they don't need charity anymore. You give them free money to help. They become rich. You get the fruits of their labor. Their house becomes very nice though yours gets even nicer.
Then someone who follows the same politics as the drunk bear wanders over and says, "Don't you realize how unfair it is that your house is nicer than their house? Yes, you used to live in a hovel and now have a very nice house. But their house is even nicer! Don't you see how that's exploitative? Yes, you might be much richer. But you'll never be as rich as them!"
> Surely you don't think that making fair trades gives you some moral credit for charity?
I think it gives you some moral credit. I think if it improves the person's life then it gives you moral credit for improving their lives. And I think if charity doesn't improve their lives it doesn't give you moral credit.
I guess I'd say I don't think charity inherently gives you moral credit. I think improving the lot of the less fortunate does. And it does regardless of whether you turn a profit. Though, of course, it's evil to make their lives worse for profit.
> I think the part of Giridharadas's argument that resonated with me was the part that tickled the utilitarian part of my brain, where the marginal value of an extra dollar for a billionaire is very little, but it's very high for the global poor.
I agree. But notice how that actually cuts AGAINST his argument. His argument is that the consensual trade will only exist where both sides will profit. But if that dollar of profit is worth more to the poorer person then they're benefiting MORE than the rich person by the mutually beneficial trade. He never goes there because... well, it would undercut his entire argument.
> I think Giridharadas's argument is that "let's help the poor but not by giving them money" is a bit of a charade.
Yeah, that's not his point. Giridharadas is an anti-capitalist who talks about eliminating the billionaire class and all that. I'd agree if what you said was his only point. I don't necessarily think giving them money directly works. But things like cheap debt and purchase credits like the Marshal Plan seem to work well.
> But I agree that he comes off in that breathless-progressive-canyoubelievethisshit kind of way that's very off putting.
Yeah, he is rather insufferable in his personal style.
Giving money to poor people directly, or through giving them basic supplies like food and medicine, undercuts the local economy and destroys the poor country's ability to sustain themselves. They can become dependent on the external source of money, never being able to take the step towards building their own local industries, skills, and actually defeating poverty. For instance, a steady source of cheap external food (not to mention free) undercuts local farmers, destroying any market for their goods and therefore forcing them out of business. It's not even a choice whether to keep working, because they will not have the cash to buy farming tools and other necessities, because there is no market for their food any longer.
Just giving poor people money is often a huge mistake. You should instead invest in local industries in poor countries that encourage people to learn skills in order to obtain the local jobs and will actually improve their economy. This can only work if the jobs produced are actually profitable, which only works at scale by requiring them to pay back loans originally made. This creates positive pressure to improve the political stability of the country (you can't get investments in an unstable environment), as well as the economic wellbeing.
This has the side effect of making 1st world people richer, but I consider that just fine, if the 3rd world countries actually improve.
I think that's up to his discretion -- as he wrote in the last post:
"...I will read the form and talk with smart people who seem like they might have good opinions. If you are a leading candidate, I might or might not email you asking for more information, or try to arrange a short call with you."
In any case, all the best!
Going by the list of Scott's questions:
* why would this be good?
* why isn’t this a for-profit startup?
* but what actual, concrete things are you going to do?
I love that one she is subscribed to Bari Weiss and Fisted by Foucault
100 tweets about Foucault https://mobile.twitter.com/ZoharAtkins/status/1458799775898382344
I don't want to completely ban advertising on open threads, but please don't do it every week. I don't want to set a limit, because if you're consistently doing it at exactly the limit I still think that's breaking the Open Thread spirit.
Please just ban him, already. It's at the point that I'm considering setting up an adblock filter pointed just at him.
It’s too bad because his substack really is interesting. But the advertising was supposed to be just for the classified threads.
If someone is interested in his substack, they can *subscribe* and get notifications directly. No need to use ACX comment section as an RSS feed.
Indeed.
If you do, can you share the rule? Maybe also this sex spam account that for some unfathomable reason is still not banned.
While his content is often interesting, I think it also does break the Open Thread spirit that Zohar Atkins usually doesn't respond to discussions of the articles he posts.
I really liked that but I think you should also write it as a blog. Tweeting is constrictive and limits your argument to 240 characters.
(Or do both i suppose, if you want to gain a Twitter audience).
I second that. Blogs > twitter
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2014/11/22/blogs-twitter/
Speaking of biomedical research:
I am currently looking to recruit a lab tech (or undergrad assistant) to help with *in vitro* gametogenesis research. The lab is in Boston. For more, see here: https://denovo.substack.com/p/come-work-with-me-on-oogenesis
Also, if anyone is interested in partnering with me for a biomedical grant application, please let me know! metacelsus@protonmail.com I'm working at full capacity on the gametogenesis project but I could provide some advice to you about other things.
This entirely depends on regulatory factors. Scientifically I think it could be done in 2030.
Does it ? China doesn't particularly care about regulatory factors elsewhere in the world...
The way the question is worded implies "gametes" (i.e. both egg and sperm) were derived in vitro. Likely only one of the two (probably the egg) will be.
Sperm ~2 years after eggs, the reason being that there's a lot higher incentive to do eggs so more people are working on it.
I'd love to know a little bit more about why there is a higher incentive to do eggs, if you could elaborate.
Bc eggs are very expensive to get naturally (surgery+$20,000 for a dozen ish), and also have a shorter reproductively viable shelf life (so 40 y old women who want a baby often can’t use their own eggs any more). Sperm on the other hand is competitively cheap to source ($500) and lasts as long as a typical person might wish to have a child.
Very cool. I've almost escaped academia, so not in the market, but excited to see how it turns out.
Is there a way that you can let us know a little more about your lab / PI's expertise and capabilities without immediately doxxing yourself? In my PhD I made a huge mistake by taking on an ambitious thesis project which my lab and PI were enthusiastic about but also poorly equipped to help with, meaning I spent almost the entire time working without a net so to speak. It's a somewhat common mistake so it would be good to know that you have the support you'd need for a project like this.
Substack really needs an "edit comment" feature. I tried to make *in vitro* italics, messed it up, and now I can't change it.
Furthermore I think this leads to people deleting their comments instead of correcting minor mistakes.
An edit feature would be great. I give my comment an eyeball proof before I hit post.
If something slips by and it’s particularly embarrassing I might copy it locally, delete the post, paste it back and edit by it before I hit post again.
I find preparing posts here to be a PITA.
Took a moment to get the acronym.
Yeah if you want to post more than a couple sentences it pays to pre type it in a text editor and actually read through it before you comment.
I do that regularly. Sometimes I think of a better way to say something later on.
This time when I pressed the Reply box it did exactly what I wsnted. Lots of times it doesn't, and I have to go hunting for the appropriate point in the thread to post my reply.
+1
YES! I often delete comments and repost them to make minor corrections. Very sub-optimal. I suspect it's a deliberate policy; editing later can make the thread confusing.
Maybe they are emulating twitter, which famously still doesn't have an edit button after all these years.
Despite all the negative press covfefe
They're not "emulating." They are a newsletter company, and comments are an also-ran, and they never really anticipated how to properly implement it.
At this point, either it's too hard to manage both their back-end API and front-end UI teams, or their database is built in some insane way that UPDATE does not exist.
Can you imagine how much of a mess it would be if you tried to figure out what people actually said, if there was an edit button? 200,000 people share or like a post, and it now says something completely different, or gets sold as advertisement "Drink Pepsi!"
You give a window to edit, and mark the comment as having been edited, and disallow editing if a comment has gotten a certain number of likes.
This isn't the first place that ever thought about editing comments. We can use what's worked in other systems.
Facebook even includes a public edit history.
Also we have no italics, no links, no images, and very limited formatting. It's like a 1990s website. And it DELETES WHITESPACE. A pet peeve of mine. If I put whitespace in, it's because I WANT that whitespace.
We do have *italics*, but I think we get them with asterisks.
As I recall, we don't have <b>html</b>, but let's check.
Yes, we have italics with asterisks.
Now, let's test unicode from yaytext.com
𝙐𝙣𝙞𝙘𝙤𝙙𝙚 𝙩𝙚𝙨𝙩
Yaytext.com is very useful if you happen to want some formatting on facebook.
I don't see italics. I see asterisks around the word "italics". Do you see italics?
I see italics in the original of this comment:
"We do have italics, but I think we get them with asterisks.
As I recall, we don't have <b>html</b>, but let's check."
I'm using a chrome browser with Windows 10, if that helps.
I'm also using chrome with Windows 10, but I don't see any italics in that comment.
Maybe you see italics because you're using the ACX Tweaks extension?
We don't natively have italics, but Pycea's front-end implements markdown.
(I need to do the same for my front-end, but as far as I know I'm the only one who uses it.)
where do I get that frontend?
https://github.com/Pycea/ACX-tweaks
You're probably using the ACX Tweaks browser extension and forgot about installing it. Unfortunately, it can't be used on mobile browsers. (I'ms still salty about Firefox disabling most of the its mobile extensions last year.)
Hmm.. I know he said he doesn't want more social media proposals, but I wonder if he'd take a proposal for a substack replacement...
Yeah, any sort of formatting would be great.
Hear hear. From what I've seen on the previous open thread, one vector of change could be to exploit a security vulnerability to side-load your comment-editing code; then, and only then, will Substack take notice.
Something I've been thinking of with regard to aphantasia: we talk of visual aphantasia, that is, the inability to recreate visual images in your mind, but what about the aphantasia of other senses? Are there people with auditory aphantasia, who have no inner monologue and never get songs stuck in their head? How about for touch, taste and smell?
As for me, I think I have mild visual aphantasia; things I imagine are low in detail and complexity. However, I don't find these limitations in sound and touch: I can play a song in my head from beginning to end in a way that comes pretty close to the real thing, and I can similarly recall the texture of a peach or a lychee. My representations of taste and smell are less vivid though, and I have to try very hard to conjure an accurate memory of the complete sensation.
Is this typical, or do your senses also vary in their level of representational detail? Note that I'm not talking about sensory impairments like anosmia here, this is purely on whether you can imagine things as well as you experience them.
people not having inner monologue is like the ultimate internet viral factoid
I feel like once every two months i see someone discovering it and freaking out on some comment section
I can't imagine smells (and I don't think I ever dream of smells either), though I can imagine all other senses just fine.
Yeah, I cannot remember smells either, though smells can kick off other memories.
I can imagine smells fairly strongly. So that does seem to be something with some variability. I'm imagining the smell of fresh baked chocolate chip cookies right now. Not as good as the real smell, but definitely as vivid as anything else I imagine.
How many instruments can you play in your head simultaneously when you imagine music? When I do that, I can get only the main melody and maybe percussion,, but when I listen to the song I notice that I missed many quieter instruments like bass, winds etc.
I would agree that for me the taste and smell sensations are the hardest to recall. Perhaps that's because we don't have a good system to classify these sensations? For vision we have wavelenghts and RBG, for audio we have low and high frequencies and rhythm, for touch we have roughness and temperature, for taste we have... five taste model? Which is kinda BS because there are tons of different receptor types on the tongue, I don't see how it would describe the taste of an onion for example. And for smells we just have to compare the smell to other smells we've smelled before. When we invent the way to put all smells on a diagram, I expect our ability to recall smells to greatly improve.
When I hear music in my head it’s like the orchestra is down the corridor, behind a large mostly sound proofed door, and all the instruments are muffled anyway.
The music I play back in my head isn't separated by instruments. Even if I try I can't 'hear' them separately, the best I can do is imagine what the vocals sound like without the instrumentals. Of course, if there's an instrument within a song that I hadn't noticed, then obviously it won't show up in my memory of it either, but the totality of the song's sound is what plays in my head. I could guess what instruments show up in it by examining that memory, but I'm not a musician and I don't play any instruments, so it would be pure guesswork.
I guess then you could say that your audial imagination is low on detail and complexity similar to your visual imagination, right? Maybe it's just more vivid for you?
I don't think so, because even if I can't commit the different instruments to memory separately, I can still hear what they sound like all together. I also feel like I can precisely identify the different notes, or in the absence of musical training, at least match them to e.g. a piano key. With some effort I can count out the rhythm and identify the time signature, if it's not too arcane. The detail is all there, it's just so wrapped up together that I have no control over the experience except 'pressing play' on a particular song.
I feel like the phenomenon of perfect pitch (or more precisely, it's absence) is a really interesting part of auditory imagination/recall... I do not have perfect pitch, but I often *feel* like I can remember/vividly hear in my "mind's ear" how a song sounds like perfectly- when in actuality, what I'm imagining is playing at a basically random pitch... I find the (to use a probably terrible metaphor) combination of the vivid and precise seeming memory/imagination and obviously objectively very lossy memory storage really interesting...
Yeah, that's why I was hedging that. I don't know whether I have perfect pitch or not, but I certainly have a strong sense of what notes a song has, accurate or not.
I have the impression that I can hear at least 3 and often 4 instruments or voices in my head at one time, but I suspect I'm doing fine-grained time-slicing. Mozart could reportedly reproduce scores precisely after one hearing. I don't know how many instruments there were on these occasions, but probably at least 6.
Maybe other people don't love "Hotel California" (5 guitars, 1 bass, 2 keyboards, 2 drum sets), songs by Kansas, or barbershop quartet, because they can't hold enough parts in their head.
But I suspect I have visual aphantasia. If I could draw, I'd never be able to draw anyone's face from memory. I can recognize them, after many exposures, but can never recall them.
I have the impression of hearing an exact reproduction of a musical recording in my head, and of remembering the human voices in complete detail; yet if I try to recall details like the frequency of a singer's vibrato I'll get it wrong. I seem to hear the complete chord progressions, yet sometimes can't figure them out from memory. Also, my memory will be missing parts if there are more than 3 or 4 parts playing at once, and it will be shifted up or down in pitch. I don't remember anything about the stereo mix (whether each instrument is positioned to left or right) unless it's a blatant left-right alternation.
A guitar chord with 4-6 notes doesn't take up 4-6 parts worth of memory. It seems to be a "chunk".
At this moment I'm listening to the opening of Bohemian Rhapsody, and it's all I can do to pick out 3 vocal parts, even though I have a score that says there are 4 parts. It's really difficult to pick out the vocal parts in Queen. Google tells me (https://www.mothermercury.be/en/queens-vocal-harmony-the-key-to-their-sound/) this is because they overdubbed multiple recordings of each voice.
You're in good company. Keith Jarrett believed no one could hear more than two lines at the same time. And there's research in neuroscience that indicates we have no more than two spheres of attention.
Now that doesn't mean that people can imagine a string section. Playing a Dm6 "sound". But there's a good chance that no one alive can add some inner voices to that bass and melody.
How do people compose many-parts music? 2 parts at a time? On general principles? Or maybe the theory isn't right for everyone.
Well, as an illustrative example, I can explain how I, a very bad composer, do it.
I do melody and bass first. Then the overall harmony. Then I take the non-melody or bass voices and create lines in them. I listen for any clashes and adjust accordingly.
So basically, 2 at a time + debugging.
I'm sure genius composers can write out a score basically at will. But I'd say that's vast experience and knowledge of both formal and informal rules.
I can hear perfect music in my head when I am in the process of falling asleep. (And I've only noticed this when I get woken up while falling asleep.)
I hear about two instruments at once plus some percussion (or vocal + an instrument), with fairly accurate timbre. It often *feels richer* than that, as a proper recording would, but I can never distinguish a chord of more than two notes ... even if I'm hearing it live. Chords merely seem "richer". How about you?
Yeah, I can't imagine tastes, smells or touches at all, same as I can't imagine visual images or sounds. I don't think its super rare since I recall seeing a few people mention that it was the same for them.
It's rare enough that experiences typical to phantasics - the concept of the mind's eye, and earworms - are commonly thought to be universal, when they are in fact not.
Do you ever experience tastes, smells, or touch in your dreams?
I have a lot of trouble imagining taste or smell, and certain other sensations like pain. But touch is one I feel like I’m pretty good at imagining.
My aphantasia is, as best I can determine, complete. I can't hold a scene in my mind, I can't hear my wife's voice unless there is air moving around by my ears, I can't imagine the taste of Dr Pepper unless I'm fattening myself up. And I'm well positioned to be certain about all of this, because I remember being "phantasic" as a child. That form of imagination faded away sometime between 15 and 25.
(I get along just fine as an engineer, and can play the piano with skill appropriate for the duration which I've studied.)
Why do you still reach for a Doctor Pepper if you can’t remember how it tastes? Do you just remember it tastes good?
Yes, I know I like the taste, and I know the things I like about the taste. And I associate drinking it with good times. But I can't taste it again in my mind.
Similarly, I can describe my wife's appearance, but I can't see her in my mind, or whatever, without looking at her.
If you can remember and recall the taste of your favorite foods at any time, why would you eat them instead of just drinking Soylent while recalling the taste of the superior food?
The memory is less pleasurable than the experience I guess.
Though my tastes aren’t very refined. A peanut butter sandwich serves as a meal for me at least a dozen time a week so I guess Soylent would work about as well in my case.
Is it like a brand-new-surprise each time you drink it?
That brings me to my next question: is it hard for you to keep things in working memory? Neuroscientists describe some of the mechanisms of working memory maintenance as the visuo-spatial sketchpad, and the phonological loop. Obviously the first one is out of the question, but I hadn't thought about whether aphantasics also lack the latter.
The usual (slightly anachronistic) example is to read a number out of the phone book and keep it in your mind as you walk over to the phone to dial it. Most people rehearse this mentally by 'speaking' the numbers in their mind, holding on to the imagined sound of them rather than their numeric representation. Although it takes effort, this is a way of remembering a ten-digit number for a minute or longer, without actually memorizing it. Is this something you can do, or do you need to speak out loud for it to work?
I don't feel like it's any harder to hold things in memory than it is for anyone around me. I certainly think I can maintain a list of technical details for a project in my head better than most of my coworkers, but that's probably similar to chess masters holding board positions better than novices, rather than a fundamentally superior working memory. I practice my skills more than most.
I can, if I choose, "say" things to myself in my head, but there's no hearing, or sense of acoustics. It's just, thinking the series of words. When I say things to myself, there are no acoustic properties to it.
If I wanted to try and remember a phone number in that situation, I'd read over it a few times and think the numbers. Maybe say them, if I was feeling chatty. I seem to do ok.
That's fascinating. I would have thought that saying things mentally *must* be accompanied by a sensory representation of some kind, either acoustic, graphical or pictoral. This has a bunch of implications for the concept of working memory. Thanks for sharing.
I'm quite hypophantasic (nearly aphantasic), and I similarly "say" things to myself in my head.
I describe this in a post above, but that is using my "articulatory" inner voice - which is to say I think as if I'm about to speak.
For short term memory, intuitively it seems likely this is just as good as using an "auditory" inner voice.
I'm curious, how does this affect your life (other than internally)? Are there situations where you'd act differently than other people? Tasks that you'd struggle with?
I'm curious whether aphantasia inhibits some performance-enhancing mental tactics, like visualization exercises that athletes often do. Are any top-level athletes aphantasiacs?
Whether such mental tactics matter for top-level athletes seems dubious to me, so my hypothesis would be yes.
I think you're underestimating how effective and integral visualization is to elite athletic performance:
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/23/sports/olympics/olympians-use-imagery-as-mental-training.html
Auditory: almost eidetic. Occasionally able to convince myself I'm hearing things that aren't really there.
Visual: decent. Very clear for a flash, then mediocre if I focus on it.
Touch: poor to middling, depending on the sensation. Decent on e.g. the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Poor on e.g. the feeling of an ice cube on the back of ny hand.
Smell & taste: nonexistent.
Proprioception: pretty good, actually. Equivalent to visual.
Vestibular: maybe kinda?
Emotional: interesting question. Is it possible to remember feeling am emotion without conjuring the actual experience of the emotion? For example: I could make myself experience sadness right now, but I can't picture what sadness feels like, and it feels like if I could picture it I would just be experiencing it.
I consider emotions to be internal, not external sensations. Given that you can experience genuine emotion without any external stimulus just by remembering something that evokes that emotion, I don't think you can consider them equivalent to the senses. Like, I can tell you "think of a sad memory" to make you feel sad, but there's nothing about that sequence of words that's sad by itself. The process that generates the emotion is entirely internal. So no, you cannot imagine feeling an emotion while not really feeling it.
Proprioception and vestibular senses seem strange to include. They're indistinguishable from visual representations for me: if I imagine how it feels for my body to be in a certain position, it automatically takes the form of a picture of how that position looks. These senses are too far from consciousness for me to be able to bring them into imagination. I can imagine the feeling of dizziness but that's it.
Do you really not know what it feels like to hold your arm out in front of you, even if you're paying careful attention to the sensations as you hold it out? I find that's not at all far from consciousness. If nothing else, can fully imagine what it would feel like to flex a bicep?
As to vestibular, I tried to imagine what the orientation of lying down felt like and failed completely. I then tried dizziness and got a vanishing ghost.
Like I said, if I try, I just get a visual image. The sensation is extremely hard to conjure in isolation. If you hadn't mentioned it I wouldn't have thought to count it among imaginable senses.
There must be something you commonly pick up without looking, or where you wouldn't be able to see your fingers wrapped round the object.
For example, maybe you look at a screen while moving your hand from a keyboard to a mouse. Can you remember the sensation of doing that - as in how you hold your hand at just the right grasp shape before you even touch the mouse?
Nope. It's so automatic that it doesn't enter into my consciousness.
Really like that you added proprioception and vestibular! Ace.
I've one friend who is *very* good at copying physical actions (e.g. from YouTube videos of complex skills) and I have a hypothesis that he has a good proprioception imagination.
Thinking about it I (almost aphantasic) can "remember" (even years later) the feeling of holding my fingers together at just a certain distance to throw a pot. And likewise I can imagine the feeling of picking something up, and how far apart my fingers are. Not well, but something is there.
Most people don't always look when they're doing every day activities like picking up an object, so that's a good place to start thinking about whether you have imagined proprioception.
So, when I read about this stuff my own experience seems to be an undescribed middle ground: I can *recall* senses, and combine them in new ways, but I find it impossible to imagine a sight I have never seen, and even something as simple as recolouring a known object requires effort.
When I was a child I watched very little TV and read a lot of books, and I would dream in the form of text descriptions; as an adult I've consumed plenty of media so my mind has a substantial bank of visual and auditory memories to pull from - crucially, including plenty of fantasy material - but touch taste and smell are still very limited in comparison.
This matches my experience when reading books. I can read a page-long description of how a character looks but it will utterly fail to produce a complete image, and I tend to imagine them as the most similar character I know from a visual medium, and if there isn't one, I don't have a mental image of them at all.
Same thing with me, also for reading fancy restaurant menus that describe each dish. It’s often helpful because I factually know things about what I like to eat, but I definitely can’t imagine it very well based on a description.
I can't imagine people in books in detail, but in general I think the movie is getting them wrong.
Yes - people's use of senses in their mind varies *hugely*.
Whether used for planning the future, imagining fictional things now, or remembering the past, different people do each to different levels of quality, speed and frequency and with different techniques, perspectives and so on.
How the mind's eye is used for particular practical things like navigating in a city, or doing maths also varies.
From talking to people, these capabilities vary as much as how we use any other skill.
I'm visually aphantasic but I can imagine sound and touch pretty well. With sound, I can hear a reasonable reproduction of a song or a person's voice (I can't pick out individual instruments or anything but I think that's just because I'm not musical enough; I couldn't do that when listening to the actual song either), and with touch I can create unpleasant or pleasurable sensations without any external stimulus.
I have all-senses aphantasia and no inner voice. Anecdotally, the incidence of other-senses aphantasia seems higher among (vision) aphantasiacs than the general population. As the preceding sentences make clear, we should develop terms for the other senses' analogues of aphanasia.
Here's a brief post with some links to read more: https://aphantasia.com/discussion-question/visual-or-all-senses/ . I've read some of the research from the UNSW group they refer to. This group and their collaborators are doing the only work I've found trying to rigorously measure aphantasia's physical and psychological correlates. (If you find others, please let me know!)
Visual: decent usually and in some rare cases extremely detailed and vivid
Auditory: decent only sometimes, but usually pretty weak
Touch: weak
Smell: nonexistent
Taste: maybe a tiny bit
Now I'm wondering whether there is a correlation between people's level of taste/smell aphantasia and people's level of appetite/urge to eat food/weight.
I imagine that if you can viscerally imagine how tasty and pleasurable eating a piece of food would be you'd be more motivated to get up and actually do it?
Anecdotally, one reason for me having struggled to gain weight is not being particularly motivated to eat. Whereas a friend of mine who told me he can imagine the smell of food easily has the opposite problem. Guess I'll have to do some more surveying and get more data points :)
Excellent question. Although it's difficult for me to imagine a taste or smell in isolation, I actually find it quite easy to check whether I have an appetite for a particular food. For example, when I was trying to decide what to have for dinner yesterday, I thought of several options that did not appeal to me before arriving at the thing that immediately made me think "Yes, that's exactly what I want." I'm pretty sure I had a flash of imagined taste just then, so either the capacity to imagine it is there, but weak, or I'm using the wrong mindset and I should be thinking "would I want to eat this right now?" instead of "what does this taste like?"
Actually, that makes me think of the starvation response as described in The Hungry Brain. Would starvation-induced food obsession result in a heightened ability to imagine tastes?
Worth knowing that there are two fundamentally different sorts of inner voices.
Most common ones (most people's main inner voice) are "articulatory" which means they use the part of the brain which is just before speaking. So they feel like they're your own voice, and don't particularly have an accent or tone - it's just like you're about to speak.
The other type of inner voice is "auditory mind's eye" - so they're more like visual imagination, but auditory imagination. These can vary in accent and tone, and sound different according to what / whose voice it is. I think some people have one as their default inner voice, other people have them of friends or family or famous people and use them for all sorts of different purposes.
Assuming that I have an accurate map of what you normies' mysterious non-sensing sensing is like, I think that I have near-total aphantasia in all senses except sound, and the sound is mostly limited to speech, like conversations amongst slightly differing versions of my actual voice. I'm also a poetry lover, and I perceive the structures of sound and sense abstractly, such that I almost never like to hear a great poem read aloud.
My brain has the same limitations as yours, cool. I hear everybody's different.
i just started reading this great new blog, https://goodoptics.wordpress.com! i think everyone should check it out
Thanks for shilling my blog, I am humbled by your support.
Be honest: Did you write the last sentence of your first blog post before anything else on the blog?
I did not, it just came to me as I was finishing up the post about Darwin and theodicy.
I also support Good Optics and have added them to my blogroll.
Idea for a "biomedical" grant that couldn't be funded by other sources: Developing (and maybe distributing?) strains of yeast that make psychedelics.
Cost would probably be below $10000.
Whether or not this is a good idea is up to Scott.
Did you mean novel compounds or just like psilocybin for example?
DMT and psilocin would likely be the easiest targets.
Novel compounds would cost way more.
Well, but there are easy-to-cultivate mushrooms that already do quite a good job of making psilocybin.
This is why I asked, but I guess this would make it even easier. I wonder how high of a yield you could get relative to mushrooms with a low budget.
: ) https://twitter.com/psyched64127644/status/1385997483839459331
The main attraction to the biosynthesis of psilocybin in yeast is ease of purification as pharmas would require the isolated compounds. Purification of the active compounds from whole mushrooms is time consuming and costly and likely not very amenable to scaling up (otherwise pharma companies would already be doing this). Hence, currently, pharma companies synthesise these compounds de-novo. Again, this is a costly process that requires some expensive precursors. Moreover, the most well-optimised synthetic approach currently available is patented by COMPASS.
Of course, for home use I'd agree with you that a simple mushroom grow would definitely be the best approach.
So far there have been about 100x more interesting ideas in the comments section than in the grant applications people actually send me.
The thing is, I'm not convinced that more people tripping (likely on DMT or psilocin, those are easiest) is good on net.
Still, it might undercut cartels.
I wouldn’t have guessed cartels would bother with psychedelics.
This guy agrees with you: https://twitter.com/Evolving_Moloch/status/1457066808079306752
It occurred to me that my comment might have been one of the interesting ones, so I turned my comment into a 'grant application.' I didn't ask for money though, I just asked you to consider the idea in my comment.
Just to be clear, I think funding the idea in my application is a good idea, but I'm not the right person to actually do it.
I expect that it is because people preparing decent or great applications will take more time to plan and submit something than people submitting cryptocurrency perpetual motion machine doing bleeding-edge AI research social handling self-actualization in novel psychological way buzzword buzzword buzzword synergy buzzword for double-win.
Maybe it's because the grant applications are restricted to what is reasonably achievable, but the commenters can just go wild :-)
Awesomely enough, it's already been done!
Metabolic engineering of Saccharomyces cerevisiae for the de novo production of psilocybin and related tryptamine derivatives
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7232020/
Yes, this is the paper Metacelsus is referencing. Understandably, they don't give much away with regards to specific genomic sequences so a lot of reverse engineering would be needed.
It’s fun to see the 1957, Robert G. Wasson Life magazine article cited here.
I find that many papers pertaining to psychadelic research like including some historical/cultural tidbits. Always make for a more enjoyable read!
Awesome idea and the Milne paper should be able to reverse engineered relatively easy. The psilocybe cubensis genome is available here: https://mycocosm.jgi.doe.gov/pages/search-for-genes.jsf?organism=Psicub1_1 and the author's give the optimised P450 reductase sequence in the paper's supps. I'm not a yeast microbiologist so I'm unsure on the specifics but from a cursory glance it seems that the CEN.PK113-7D differs significantly (>20,000 SNPs) from plain old baker's yeast. Can't find an obvious supplier for this strain so someone would likely need to obtain a 'gift' from another researcher if they were planning on reverse engineering the Milne paper 1:1. This strain also is engineered specifically for protein biosynthesis so I doubt you would get remotely comparable yields from anything less specialised. The EasyCloneMulti vectors used for transformation are all available from Addgene.
But don't you need to show credentials?
For Addgene, you need to have institutional access to order plasmids; same goes for most bio-suppliers. I can't imagine someone would embark on this project without already working in microbiology and owning accounts with addgene, oligo suppliers & sequencing providers.
Really you can't imagine why someone would want to manufacture illegal drugs without an institutional background?
Want to? Sure. Able to? Unlikely.
The transformations outlined in the Milne paper are not simple by any means and one would need to be in possession of a large amount of microbiology lab equipment to even begin embarking on the project.
Besides, as outlined in other comments here, if someone wants psilocybin for recreational use they would just grow mushrooms. It is not difficult to get large yields and FAR more cost-effective.
Supposedly John von Neumann had some pretty bad existential terror. I'm not sure how you think it's ethical to take that and multiply it by 20,000.
"If you say why not bomb [the Soviets] tomorrow, I say, why not today? If you say today at five o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?"
I bet that, depending on their upbringing, you could raise 100 von Neumanns and get 101 different opinions on the ethics of cloning.
Have you read "The Nurture Assumption"?
No, this comment was mostly in jest.
> Another ethical concern is that von Neumann wouldn't consent and it is unethical to take someone's DNA.
Is it? Maybe when they're alive, sure, because that can actually impact their life, ie. tying them to crimes, affecting their health insurance, etc. I'm not sure that that extends beyond death.
To anyone who would like to resurrect me after I'm dead: thanks in advance.
"Another ethical concern is that von Neumann wouldn't consent and it is unethical to take someone's DNA."
John von Neumann doesn't exist any more. "He" doesn't own his DNA because he isn't a thing any more. Perhaps we can say that his DNA belongs to his estate and we need permission from them first.
Modern medical ethics are the rule for now, and they'll absolutely refuse to clone someone who didn't consent to it.
Oh, yeah, that's a good point.
Although I'm concerned that this might be some kind of ethical bait-and-switch.
Imagine if Scott had written about a plan to rob banks and donate the money to charity, or a plan to rape highly intelligent women and impregnate them with genius babies.
We _could_ then talk about how these actions might be correct from a utilitarian perspective. But I think it's more likely that we would just be shocked and horrified.
This is especially so, since, as long as you're cloning people, you could just choose to clone people who have been proven to live happy lives, instead of living lives of terror.
Second example seems like a false dilemma. Just offer to pay them for their eggs and implant them in a surrogate.
I think you are looking at "rape" too literally. I believe the idea is that they are unwilling to have those babies (or enough of them to meet the demands of the project) and therefore some number of them are forced to do it, even just giving up their eggs if they don't want to.
Okay, but how about just creating geniuses who *don't* have existential terror?
(This is the #1 mistake of non-consequentialists criticizing consequentialists: a real consequentialist looks for ways to *avoid* the bad consequences posited by the non-consequentialist.)
Depends on what kind of existential terror? Was it just the fear of inevitable death? If so, having 20k of them would be *fantastic*, they can distribute all the biomedical problems between themselves and solve aging.
Well, solving aging just delays the inevitable.
Perhaps we could have the clones' amygdalas surgically removed as babies, so they are biologically incapable of experiencing fear.
Also, von Neuman would know about both world wars. Possibly a clone would have less existential terror in a stably peaceful world, if such can be arranged.
Do we know whether existential terror has a genetic basis? It might be plausible, but do we *know*?
He died in 1957. Do we have his DNA stored somewhere?
Assuming he wasn't cremated, DNA in bones lasts quite a while
Can't you get DNA from hair?
Not much chance of finding his blood in an insect embedded in amber ala jurassic park. ;)
These thought experiments take some weird turns, don’t they?
I think someone mentioned he was Catholic. If so, probably not cremated.
I just read his Wiki page. He was raised in a secular Jewish family, spent his life as an agnostic but made a deathbed conversion to Catholicism.
The power of the eternal damnation meme seized him near death. Even if there was a small possibility of RC dogma being correct he wanted to play it safe. He went the route of Pascal’s wager.
Such a game theorist.
We can only hope that God loves human weirdness and variety.
What kind of existential terror? Strong enough that they preferred to not exist?
I would assume that serious existential terror is standard for a self aware person, which does not make their life not worth living.
Just raise them all Catholic, it seemed to help him near his death so a strong dose from birth might even him out terror wise.
Suppose we have a technology enabling us to perfectly measure the hedonic tone of subjective experience, providing a single numerical score. It accounts for many nuances, such as the logarithmic nature of happiness and suffering. You can adjust temporal resolution (quantifying hedonic tone by seconds, hours, years, lifetime) and the scale (specific individual, demographic group, nation, humanity).
1. What findings would most people (including decisive circles) find most surprising?
2. Based on these surprising findings, what kind of:
a) individual life choices,
b) systemic interventions would you likely promote?
I vaguely assume we want to discover the hidden pits of undeserved, intense suffering (to minimize them), and currently unknown, cost-effective ways to promote wholesome forms of happiness.
I'm not going to venture a guess at what the results of hedonic scoring would be, but I don't think it would change my or most people's life choices.
At the moment, people advocating certain life choices tend to equivocate between "this lifestyle is morally right" and "this lifestyle makes you happy". If there were a quantitative way to find who is actually happiest and sort them by income/diet/exercise level/number of partners/whatever, then I would expect lifestyle discourse to bifurcate along whether the hedonometer results supported their case. Half of the pundits would start churning out "Studies show happier people eat pork!" articles, the other half would pivot to "There's more to life than hedonism!" arguments.
As for systemic interventions, the most important field of research would be to find out where exactly are the lower and upper limits of the hedonic treadmill. Happiness is hugely non-linear with living conditions, so moving people into treadmill-territory on the low end and out of it on the high end (if a high end exists) would improve well-being more on net than clearing out all of humanity's hidden suffering pits.
I think the current major disagreements are in two forms. The simple ones are "Things I like are different from things other people like", which prevents universal solutions and means all advice is terrible for some of the audience. The more debatable ones are where people disagree on the correct time preference scale, which this proposal would make starkly clear but not resolve - do you optimise for lifetime happiness and assume the machine can predict the world of 40 years from now well enough to be accurate about your retirement, or do you optimise for your immediate happiness?
i thought i'd share a selection of blog posts that i've written during the last four months. i did this four months ago too but lots has happened since then!
The Devastating Power and Heartbreaking Pain of Truly Changing Minds -- quoting the conclusion which also works as a kind of abstract: "The processes involved in changing one's mind are unusually stark when it comes to Latter-day Saints changing their minds about their religion. This is because various social, cultural and psychological factors incentivise members to keep believing that the Church is true even as information readily available online makes a compelling argument that it isn't. Some Latter-day Saints overcome these forces and reach the latter conclusion anyway. This is a difficult, disorienting and painful undertaking. But it is also somehow beautiful, and I suppose what I find so beautiful about it is that it is the scout, the doubter, the truth-seeker, an underdog here if there ever was one, who wins out despite it all."
=> https://www.erichgrunewald.com/posts/the-devastating-power-and-heartbreaking-pain-of-truly-changing-minds/
The American Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation Makes No Sense -- i describe the difference between the British and American styles of quotation mark punctuation and argue that the former is superiour. this one for some reason ended up with an order of magnitude more views than my second most read post ...
=> https://www.erichgrunewald.com/posts/the-american-style-of-quotation-mark-punctuation-makes-no-sense/
Utilitarianism Expressed in Julia -- i explore some common variants of utilitarianism by implementing them in the programming language julia, with an eye towards population ethics and the repugnant conclusion.
=> https://www.erichgrunewald.com/posts/utilitarianism-expressed-in-julia/
Why Does the Western Left Worry More about Local Poverty than Global Poverty? -- i argue that the western left, to which i belong, should (to some extent) prioritise cross-border poverty over within-border poverty, for instance via cash transfer programs, because income gaps are larger between countries than within countries.
=> https://www.erichgrunewald.com/posts/why-does-the-western-left-worry-more-about-local-poverty-than-global-poverty/
Some Books that Have Influenced Me during the Past Decade -- i briefly describe five books that have been important to me during the past ten years. they are tamarisk row, war and peace, the world as will and representation, edge of irony and inventing the future, which in a roundabout way brought me to slate star codex two years ago.
=> https://www.erichgrunewald.com/posts/some-books-that-have-influenced-me-during-the-past-decade/
Oh wow putting the punctuation outside the quotes for sentence fragments is standard across the pond? I've been doing that for years out of pure spite! Thanks for putting the weight of the Queen's English behind my typography.
I'm strongly opposed to the British style, mostly on aesthetic grounds. Those periods, stranded from the preceding word by the quotation marks floating far above them, look disgusting with all that empty space around them.
Sometimes my fellow Americans disgust me. You talk of freedom, but them you enslave your punctuation! The poor full stop, imprisoned within the quotation marks, chained to a phrase he does not know and has no wish to be a part of. And what for? Simply some empty notion of "aesthetics".
As a programmer, I think opening & closing syntactical markers should permit statements to be parsed recursively and that punctuation for something outside quote-markers should not be inside said markers.
Precisely! Sometimes the text you're quoting contains punctuation, and thus it is inside the quote, and sometimes you're adding it yourself, and it lives outside the quote.
KM I agree with you, goddammit.
Then just stack the period and the quotes, there empty space solved. We can add some unicode stacking characters and call it a day.
I'm bothered by both styles, because both styles are willfully wrong. What you want is an understanding that punctuation within and outside of the quotation marks have no relationship with each other whatsoever.
So say we have the following quotation:
*I wish I was in nebraska.*
The period here has meaning; it shows that we captured the full sentence, or at least its ending. There are cases where leaving it out robs us of information. Likewise, periods are useful in ending sentences; they do so definitively. So the three examples are:
US: I was talking to Dave, and he said "I wish I was in Nebraska."
Britain: I was talking to Dave, and he said "I wish I was in Nebraska".
Correct: I was talking to Dave, and he said "I wish I was in Nebraska.".
In the last, we know that we captured the end of Dave's sentence, and that our own is over. We are unused to it so it "looks ugly", but it does its job and wouldn't look ugly if we hadn't let ourselves get used to weird rules that don't make sense for what we are trying to do.
We don't "get used to" weird rules, we bond with them, as we do with the conjugations of irregular verbs.
I believe rules accumulate constituencies, though I probably underestimate the pull of being used to things.
There are also people who gain advantages from knowing the rules.
this was brought up a lot in comments on the post, especially by programmers, and i do mention it in a footnote. i will say that the second period does usually seem redundant to me, and it looks ... weird, so i'm fine sticking with the british. but i agree the third example is the most logical one.
https://www.outpost9.com/reference/jargon/jargon_6.html "Hacker Writing Style" is highly relevant and good explanation.
(beyond fact that programmers would for quite obvious reasons prefer consistent rules that make sense, in programming losing or adding even a single sign will have dramatic results - up to catastrophic data loss and getting even worse)
I'm British and a copy editor, and your "Britain" example isn't right, because "I wish I was in Nebraska"[*] is a complete sentence, so the full stop comes inside the quotes in British usage.
(It marks the end of the sentence Dave spoke, and then the containing sentence doesn't add its own additional full stop. I agree that this is illogical in a sense, and that's the point of the sentence you've labelled "correct", but I'm just commenting on the misreporting of how British usage works.)
([*]Or "I wish I were in Nebraska" - but that's a separate debate.)
Where the pond difference comes into play is where the thing in the quotes is a word or short phrase that isn't a complete sentence, like:
Britain: We use the spelling "colour".
US: We use the spelling "color."
The same applies to the comma after the quoted "correct" in my parenthesis above.
Nitpick: I'm pretty sure U.S. usage is
I was talking to Dave, and he said, "I wish I was in Nebraska."
Note comma after "said".
I've been known to use the two-period format, but I seem to be a little tired of being weird, so sometimes I give in and use standard American format.
However, it's especially annoying if the quote ends with a question mark.
I was talking to Dave, and he said "What's standard punctuation format?"
Ow. Ow-ow-ow.
A sentence should end with a period.
Is there any good alternative to "I was talking to Dave, and he said "What's standard punctuation format?"."
I don't think so, if you aren't willing to tolerate some level of ambiguity. I don't think there's a good argument that the system I want isn't functionally better; most arguments I've seen against it seem to boil it down to being "ugly", which I mostly read as "But I'm not used to that one!"
Why did I have that last quote mark?
We just want "Is there any good alternative to "I was talking to Dave, and he said "What's standard punctuation format?"."
*Now* it belongs.
"I wish I *were* in Nebraska."
How do you know? Was you there when I talked to Dave?
Give 'em hell, Exilarch.
I'm a non-native English speaker, and the American punctuation style for quotes was indeed a source of much confusion.
> On January 1st 2050, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will endorse a less literal interpretation of its founding texts and history, including the Book of Mormon, e.g. allowing that the Book of Mormon doesn’t describe real peoples, migrations, wars etc. ⇒ 60%
Wow! As a former LDS member (still technically on the books) this is hard to believe. I expect issues like those you raised (see also cesletter.org) will instead cause a largely silent evaporative cooling effect, where members will simply leave after figuring out the church is false, leaving behind more and more members who lack a truthseeking drive but still preach "truth" and "honesty" with great seriousness. When I left, I was unwilling to make a fuss in church about issues like this... so I presented the evidence to no one, while some would (I assume) only discuss evidence privately with their bishop.
So I wonder what leads you to this prediction. In particular, how the heck could the leadership make this fundamental shift without causing people to leave the church? One thing comes to mind: I suppose they will do it without mentioning that they are now accepting historical records in which, for example, Joseph Smith's first vision only includes one celestial being. Still, what an awkward shift. It reminds me of my dad's shift from "Santa Claus is real" to "Santa Claus is real in your heart", if not quite as drastic. Such a shift seems not as simple as what (my third-hand recollection says) happened with polygamy, where the Lord simply Reveals that we should no longer practice plural marriage (which could be tied into Utah's statehood as explanation).
There were presentations at my church about how the Book of Mormon is supported by archaeological records. Needless to say, only one side of the debate was there to argue, and in hindsight, I assume the person was omitting and/or misrepresenting to reach the necessary conclusion, though at the time I was listening because I wanted to believe, and besides, I didn't know of anyone making the case for "archaeology contradicts Book of Mormon". But at the time I didn't believe I could actually research these things. Even now... I don't know how to do serious historical research, and in practice I just look at whatever Google turns up with. Bishops can always tell doubters "well, don't believe everything you read on the internet" which, after all, is a good point.
So I think the church will largely let evaporative cooling do its thing, leaving behind three kinds of churchgoers: (1) those who have heard evidence Joseph Smith was a fraud and invent excuses to ignore the evidence, which they use if anyone asks, (2) those who have heard the evidence and try not to think about it but maybe pray about it once in a blue moon, and worry about what it might mean that God didn't provide a counterargument, (3) those who have not heard the evidence and so cannot be bothered by it.
Hinder the development of AI? Roko's Basilisk will see this.
As I mentioned in OT 197.5, my wife and I are having our first child in a couple months. Looking for your best parenting advice. (Thanks to those of you who replied on the first thread!)
Congratulations! If you haven't read the Emily Oster parenting books, I recommend them.
Thanks Scott! My wife read the Emily Oster books this summer and found them very useful.
You should read them too! It's just *sensible*, and looking for baby (and, for that matter, puppy) advice is such a minefield. The Oster books are great for babies, it's just unfortunate that I've yet to find an equivalently good one for dogs.
Just a nitpick, Emily Oster is much more lax about alcohol during pregnancy than the experts in fetal alcohol syndrome recommend. The reason is that Emily Oster mostly looks at studies where the damage is severe, but FAS experts point out that there is lots of other damage that cannot be measured so easily (see this for example: https://depts.washington.edu/fasdpn/pdfs/astley-oster2013.pdf)
That PDF says only "of 2550 children with FAS in our clinic, 1/14 of their mothers report drinking no more than one drink per day during pregnancy". It does not even make reference of the question actually of interest, namely, "of mothers who drink one drink per day during pregnancy, how many have FAS [or other negative outcomes]?"
Now, it's possible that number is higher than Oster represents, but the fact that this author does not even consider the question makes me somewhat skeptical that they are going to be doing a good job reasoning about risk.
Also, self reported number about alcohol consumption - after child was harmed - are not going to be 100% truthful.
It is entirely possible that 1/14 of mother was blatantly lying, not remembering or otherwise confused.
Also, one drink per every day during pregnancy seems awfully high to me.
Something I share with all soon-to-be parents:
At a lot of hospitals, they take you to a little room and make you watch a video on not shaking your kids before they let your leave with the new human you made. And you are going to watch this hastily made bullshit and go "Wait, do they think I do meth? I don't do meth. I'm not going to shake my kids. This is dumb."
A few weeks later, you are going to be on your third night of 3 hours or less sleep, and the kid's going to be screaming. They are dry, and fed, and burped, and being held in a warm nice room and still screaming. They've been screaming for hours and hours, and they aren't stopping, and you are never going to ever sleep again because of this little shit.
And then pick them up and realize, oh, hell, that's when people shake them. You've built this mental model where only a crazy, drugged up loser would ever even think of shaking them and not updated for what it's like to be heavily sleep deprived and have an apparently malicious kid trying to make it worse and succeeding.
Which isn't to say you will shake them; you probably won't. It's to warn you of stuff like that - your mental model is telling you that you have a 0% chance of being abusive in a bunch of ways you have a >0% chance of being abusive in. It's a good thing to be aware of beforehand, rather than to be made aware of during the test.
The other thing to consider is that basically all parenting books that aren't explicitly religious are written from a left-wing perspective, by a person who is extremely likely to be a dyed-in-the-wool doesn't-know-theres-any-other-viewpoints straight-ballot left person. That's not necessarily bad - it has to be written from some viewpoint, after all - but it's something to keep in mind. The main thing I remember about them from reading several a million years ago is a fetishization of pain avoidance, for instance.
From a raw numbers perspective, you are probably right about the authorial biases of parenting books (although excluding religious ones from the count seems somewhat cheating given the overlap of general conservativsm and religiousness). But I don't think that Emily Oster or Bryan Caplan are even _close_ to as left leaning as you describe and their books on parenting are probably the only ones I've even _heard_ of from the past decade or so (although I probably won't have kids for another few years so I'm not actively looking). And I know that Russ Roberts has been considering/working on a book on parenting (sort of more on why one _should_ become a parent, but close enough) and it's a common theme on his podcast.
I guess my point is that it's not very hard to find non-religious, non left wing parenting books and other media if that's what one is looking for.
Donald Knuth is a Lutheran, but my understanding is that most of his books (with one exception) aren't religious at all.
Yeah, but God doesn't have that much to say about programming in the Bible.
To be fair and agree with you a bit - I'm like easily 14 years out of date here. And it was a limited sample size; I didn't know about Oster until I looked her up here. Caplan in particular probably wasn't active in the parenting book game until I was out of it. So particularly with those two, but even generally I'm certainly falsifiable/potentially wrong here.
I think we actually agree on the bit about excluding conservative books? I wasn't trying to be tricky; I was just saying that most of those are going to be conservative, most others aren't.
I regret listening to *any* of Caplan's ideas on parenting, to the extent that if I saw him dying on the street, I would lecture him about he was wrong rather than calling an ambulance.
In a way it's my fault for listening to a joker who had no business writing a parenting book.
Now I'm curious to hear about your experiences that you regret.
That parents have little effort so trying to push them (or be any kind of Tiger Mom) is just wasted effort that annoys both you and the kid.
No. The truth is that it's better to make your kid's childhood unpleasant (in a first world sense) if it means improving their future outcomes.
So your kids wound up with bad outcomes as adults?
What they tell parents here is basically "if you are on the point of physical abuse, put the baby in another room and close the door and let it scream for ten minutes". Like, that won't win you parent of the year awards but it's way better than shaking them.
None of our babies were quite as bad as your experience. It's not because of any great parenting on our end, we just got easier babies. They also never spat up much or showed signs of digestive issues, and I wonder if that's related.
My hope for anyone is that they never get to that point. But I got close enough that it really worried me, and it wasn't even realistically that close; I thought I had literally no chance of ever doing that. I sort of made the decision to take the hit and seem like a bad child abuser type if that was what happened to warn people about that; I think it's often a much worse/more demanding period of time than is advertised.
I've had a harder time with them as they get older and capable of active defiance. Still never hit but come close.
You need a lot of self control to *not* kill a 3 years old.
Yeah every now and then we have these pro vs. anti-homeschooling discussions on ACX and I think "it's hard enough to get my oldest dressed for school in the morning, I'm supposed to teach her all day"? And she's been this way since at least two. Fortunately she seems to be the type who can get with the program in institutional settings and obey adults who aren't us.
Related advice: it's hard to plan out their lives too much before you know them. My oldest would be a terrible homeschooling candidate, other peoples' kids are suited to homeschooling but not regular school. Don't get fixed ideas.
Your position on parenting books is very important, even though it is a little out of date. Parenting books often revolve around ideas about parenting that are popular in some kind of social group. I actually think categorizing them as "leftist" or "religious" can be confusing sometimes, a better categorization is by the ideas.
I think there are two streaks that definitely exist in parenting books. One is the "attachment parenting" streak, which stresses the mother always catering 110% to the need of the child. Is this what you mean by "pain avoidance"? It's kind of weird, because even though this parenting style is very "nice", is has a big conservative reception, as it highlights the role of the nurturing mother over everything else. So you often get much talk about the "bond between mother and child" and such things in those books. But you can also spin the idea in a more modern liberal direction, when you stress that "this is the natural way, this is the way ancient tribes do it".
The other streak is the anti-authoritarian one, which is focused on "letting kids develop themselves". There, you find ideas that say that most or all attempts to interfere in your kids life are bad in one way or another. This is the pedagogy that is often associated with the hippie generation. But it's funny, Bryan Caplan also is quite anti-authoritarian, because he is so much anti schools, and he says that most parental interventions have no or a small effect.
Both those schools of thought are highly dependent on the families background. If a mother is economically and logistically able to do all the things attachment parenting demands, it's probably good for the child, since children very generally thrive on interactions. But it has the enormous cost that the mother cannot to much else, so she needs a husband who provides a large income.
Anti-authoritarian parenting is dependent on the parents being unshakeably middle class. Because there is less of an attempt to influence what the kids are learning, the kids are much more dependent on learning things through socialization. Which works great if the parents and their friends are successful intellectuals, but less so in most other cases.
My mother cheerfully told me that there would be nights when I wanted to wad the baby up into a little ball and bounce it out the window.
I wonder if your last observation about pain avoidance is why so many Gen Z kids have such high anxiety. Their Gen X parents read those "pain avoidance" books back in the 80's and 90's and shielded their kids from unpleasant or uncomfortable experiences, denying them the opportunity to develop resilience.
You can't shape their personality that much but you really do need to keep them alive. The most dangerous points are when they've just increased in mobility (started rolling, started climbing, started walking) etc.
Also, when they do start crawling, they can move a lot faster than you expect, so they can get into the dangerous stuff fast. Childproof everything before little fingers can start poking at it.
Be advised that children can learn to climb before they learn to walk. So make sure that your gates go all the way to the ceiling. It's easy to say "no infant could possibly scale this waist-high gate !". It's also easy to be wrong.
Advice that I was given that I found helpful: for the first year or two, almost everything is a phase that lasts a couple of weeks. So if they suddenly stop sleeping at night or start doing this or that irritating thing, just think of something less pleasant that you've tolerated for more than two weeks in your life. Also, breastfeeding can often be very difficult or impossible, there's no way to predict it, so support her as much as you can and if it doesn't work out (as it didn't for my wife), be cool with formula and make sure she knows that your not judging her.
* You're
Don't you know it's rude to correct people's spelling/grammar on the internet? ;-)
Sandra Boynton books are fun for babies and adults.
For what it's worth, my personal advice based on a number of kids, the oldest just turned 30:
1. Don't worry about being smart for quite some time. The early years of parenting don't require any brilliant decisions, you mostly just need to do what's relatively obvious (which your kid is programmed to tell you unmistakably.) If you make silly mistakes they are generally harmless in the long run, as babies are physically and psychologically a lot tougher than they look. If you leave the baby in its own poo for a while because you space out checking the diaper, it doesn't mean the poor kid will need psychotherapy when he's an adult. Shrug it off and move on.
2. Along those same lines, be chill with your wife. If she doesn't do something you think is a good idea, or even which you have mutually agreed is a good idea, shrug it off and move on. It's way more important that you preserve mutual sympathy and support than that every decision is made well and executed well since, as I'm asserting that most decisions in the tender years are either darn obvious or not very important. There's plenty of time to have a long intellectual struggle over the right thing to do when the kid hits the college years and wants to do something or other one or both of you feel is outrageous and stupid.
3. Interact with your kid as much as possible. Talk to him when you're changing his diaper. Muse out loud about your thoughts as you're washing up. Tell him jokes, tell him why you're sad or angry when you are, tell him what the two of you are about to do next, and why. He won't respond initially and for while *but* babies take everything in. They are gigantic sensory sponges, and all this interaction matters to them. They will acquire emotional tone very early, and words long before you realize it. If you interact with them as much as you can, you convey very important basic things, such as (1) you (the baby) are important to me, and (2) the world (at least at this age) is a rational place with rules and patterns you (the baby) can deduce, and you also give him the valuable raw material that he needs to start making sense of what his senses are telling him. Consistency is very important, too, since the hard part of the baby deducing the patterns of life is that there are so many, and they overlap chaotically. So every consistent pattern you show him helps him start to make sense of things faster. If you always pick him up and put him in the same place to change his diaper, and say the same things in the same tone, it helps him start to figure out the patterns in his sensory experience.
4. Hopefully you already know that babies need to feel physically secure, and early on that requires being wrapped up or held quite firmly. It will seem weirdly contradictory to take a baby flailing around and yelling and wrap him firmly up in a blanket, but that's actually what they want. And similarly, hold the kid in your arms as much as you can, because that physical contact makes him feel secure and safe. He will get to know you very fast (although not as fast as his mother of course), and recognize your smell and touch, and these things will make him feel safe.
5. I will say never deliberately let him cry it out, but also recognize that sometimes they really do just need to cry and yell for a while, and sometimes there is fuck all you can do about it. (And sometimes the ways in which you *can* put a stop to it, e.g. by giving him sugar or not making him stay in the crib when it's bedtime, aren't good in the long run.) Don't punish him by isolating him, but also don't beat yourself up because you can't make him be more reasonable. Just wait it out, however it works best for the two of you, and by and by it will get better. He won't remember these outbursts, and for your own mental health it's best if you emulate his good example by cultivating a short memory for them.
6. Never forget that although what he wants and feels is profoundly important, *you* are the parent, and it's your peculiar burden to have to make decisions on his behalf. Be thoughtful and sensitive and never hesitate to adapt to circumstances, but when you make a decision be definite and implacable about it. A baby, and a child, needs firm structure to feel secure, to believe that the universe is a place that can be managed by reason and effort. It is often a father's special role to provide that structure. Gnaw at your entrails and indulge in self-doubt as much as you like in private, or with your wife, but when your kid needs you to be in command, don't let him down by abdicating.
7. Take a lot of photos. When he's 16 or 25 or 40 you will look at them and they will have more meaning than any other possession.
This is lovely - thank you.
Awesome writeup. I'm the father of two boys, the oldest now 29, and wouldn't change a word of that.
I will add a word to point 7 though, and that word is "video". My two kids are 19 years apart and a big difference turned out to be the fact that nowadays we all have video cameras in our pockets. I take lots of still photos too of course but little video clips can be a whole other level of gold.
One of my happiest memories of the early years with my daughter is of reading some of the Captain Underpants books to her when she was 5 or so. We were both laughing so hard we were completely incapacitated, flopped together on the couch just roaring. Before I had her I pictured reading her the finest classics of children's literature, and in fact I did do some of that. But the truth is, Captain Underpants was our favorite. Try not to hang on too hard to the way you think it's going to be, and enjoy the way it actually is.
Congrats, less advice book and more 'awe-inspiring' but I highly recommend Alison Gopnik's the Gardener and the Carpenter. Not a parent yet but its changed my view on a lot of things unrelated to children, family, and 'love'.
Here’s my 2 cents as far as parenting advice is concerned: you’ll find that a lot of parenting is improvising. In a way, there’s really no such things as grownups. Everyone’s kinda making it up as they go along.
My experience consists of raising one boy who’s currently 16. His whole life, we’ve regularly gotten effusive compliments from other grownups (teachers, parents of his friends) on what a great kid he is. Most of that is just him being his excellent self, but here’s a few suggestions on things that seemed to work well.
We only had “the one big rule”: Don’t Get Hurt. Too many people have too many rules for their kids. (He’s always had empathy, so we never had to state the complementary rule “Don’t Hurt Other People”. Suggesting “that might hurt so-and-so’s feelings” was enough.)
Get in the habit of carrying a handkerchief: it’s super-useful when they’re really little.
Our kid talked early and often, but he could understand speech and use a few basic sign-language moves for a couple months before he started speaking; the signs for “more” and “all done” are especially useful. The sooner they can consciously communicate, the better.
Good manners will take you a long way, and they don’t cost much; bad manners can get real expensive real quick. If you practice good manners at home (just simple old-fashioned stuff like saying please and thank you to your significant other for every little thing, for example) your kid will soak that up, imitate it without even thinking about it, and get more cooperation and extra respect from most other people with very little conscious effort for the rest of his or her life.
Only say no when you really mean it, and always explain why. None of this “because I said so” bullshit. If you don’t mean “absolutely not, that’s a flipping horrible idea and here’s why” then don’t say no. Say “not today” or “maybe, if we have time” or “I’d rather you didn’t, because,” etc.
Don’t bullshit your kids - I mean, believing in Santa is kind of a fun game (and the eventual disillusionment gets them used to the idea that mythological-sounding stories probably aren’t really true) but, in general, give them as much of an honest answer as you think they can handle, for any question they ask. If it’s something you don’t want to explain, you can explain that (i.e. “oh, that’s a gross joke about sex - I’d rather not go into the details, ok?”)
Praise and thanks are best when immediate and specific (“thanks for helping clean up for the party - yeah, stuffing most of your toys into the closet totally works. That was a good call.”)
Correction should be mild and certain, and involve a dialogue, not a lecture: “we left the party and you’re going home to have a time-out because you bit that kid. Oh, you bit him because he was holding you down while that other kid punched you? Ok, that’s a pretty good self-defense move; I can see why you did that. No, we’re not going back to the party now. I mean, a party where you get into a situation like that, that’s not a good party. Well, I’m sorry you didn’t get to have cake, but there will be other birthday parties.” Time-outs were 1 minute for every year of age: hardly ever had to use them, never after he turned 6.
When possible, let them have a turn calling the shots. “Do you want this for lunch, or that?” “What do you think we should draw?” Kids have so little control over their own lives, and they need all the practice they can get making decisions. The sooner and more often you can allow them to exercise some control, the better. “Do you want to go on this ride, or that one? Or maybe that other one first?” (Pro tip: it’s also a great sneaky way to steer them away from stuff, by not listing options you don’t want them to choose while giving them something else to think about and a gratifying feeling of agency.) Prioritize giving them your attention and being patient. They will want to tell you about all sorts of things you may have little interest in, and it is a pain in the neck when you have to get up in the middle of the night and change the sheets because they wet the bed. Patience and empathy are essential virtues here.
You will have occasion to apologize to your kid: I recommend short, simple, direct, slightly on the formal side but sincere. “I’m sorry mommy and I were squabbling; I’m sure that was no fun for you. People just step on each other’s toes sometimes - I think we’re all settled down now. But I’m sorry you had to listen to us yelling.” (Still happily married, btw!) Hope this helps - everyone’s got their own row to hoe, YMMV, etc.
Thanks - best of luck to you! I was pleasantly surprised to see so many comments I agreed with in this sub-thread; looks like we’ve got more than a few pretty decent parents in the ACX crowd :-)
One more story about understanding language before speaking.
I was with a little girl and her mother and the girl seemed to be having trouble getting the pieces out of a wooden frame silhouette puzzle. She didn't seem to be talking so I said to her mother something about turning the puzzle upside down, and the girl did it.
My wife and I are also expecting, so we've been reading through parenting literature. I recommend Raising Self-Reliant Children in a Self-Indulgent World. It's been the standout so far. The authors clearly understand children, but more importantly they understand people. For early childhood, I would recommend The Continuum Method. It's weird and intense, but has stuck with me longer and deeper than most other books. Even if not taken as scripture, you may find some valuable takeaways therein.
My wife and I are in the same boat so I'm gonna go ahead and draft off of all this excellent parenting advice, thank you everyone!
While I'm at it, as far as I can tell a lot of baby gear (strollers for instance) is built to withstand bombardment from space, so check for used options before buying new. Car seats have an expiration date though, so get one that was made in the last 2-3 years, and it should be good till ~2025 then
have a loop running in your head that says 'how can I make my wife's life easier?' and then DO THOSE THINGS without her having to ask you to do them
Here's a summary of what I think has worked for me:
The big points are 0-2:
0a: Everyone has parenting advice. Not everyone has children, and not everyone has been a good parent, so take every bit of advice (including this) with the appropriate salt.
0b: A lot of how kids turn out ends up being genetics. So, do the best you can, and understand that your kid isn't perfectly moldable clay. They may end up doing things you don't like, no matter what you do.
1. Children are people too. A good heuristic for "how should I treat a child" is "how would I treat an adult" - with the caveat that the adult might be from a foreign country, and amnesiac, and have poor emotional self-control.
1a. When you make a decision or want to set an expectation, explain what it is, and why you're doing it, and try to respond to questions. Avoid the temptation to say "because I say so". "Because I say so" translates as "because this is a basic norm of decent human behavior, or, there's some complex situational circumstance. Either way, I can't articulate or can't be bothered to articulate what that is for you". You wouldn't "because I say so" to a peer adult.
1b. If your child is trying to get your attention politely, *respond to them*. Adults have this magic ability to tune out children, and so many times I've witnessed a child go from "excuse me...excuse me....mom....mom...mom...momomomom", until someone exasperatedly yells "WHAT". You wouldn't tune out and ignore a peer adult.
1c. The flip side of this is, it's reasonable to expect good behavior. If you've politely asked a child to stop doing something, and perhaps even explained why, then if they've failed to respond to that, it's reasonable to consider it a disciplinary issue.
2. Sacrifice. One of your most important jobs now is to raise a productive & self-actualized future member of society. At times, this will be inconvenient.
2a. You might be trying to get out the door for a dinner reservation, and your child is of an age where they're supposed to dress themselves, but they haven't done so. You _could_ physically dress them, you _could_ go out the door with them improperly dressed. I'd instead say you might need to pause, discipline, and spend 10-20 minutes dealing with the issue, and be late for or miss your appointment.
2b. You might be shopping, and your child starts throwing a tantrum wanting a candy you've refused. You _could_ give in to their tantrum. I'd instead recommend pausing your shopping, taking them outside, and dealing with them until they've calmed down.
Other good things to know:
3. Discipline
3a. The important things are immediacy and consistency. If you've said something is unacceptable behavior, and you catch them doing it, try to respond every time, right away. This is tiring, and this is inconvenient, but it's important. Part of the childhood process is exploring, and this means exploring boundaries and pushing.
3b. I like to discipline by a quick checklist of:
* what you did was unacceptable
* here's what specifically you did that was unacceptable
* here's why it's unacceptable
* here's the consequence
This doesn't need to be a lecture, and usually shouldn't be. A sentence each is often fine.
3c. Spanking - it's a big CW issue for some. Personally, I've managed to raise a fairly obedient and well-behaved son, without ever using corporeal punishment. I think that when it's done *correctly*, it's not significantly more effective than other disciplinary consequences, and when it's done incorrectly, it becomes counterproductive or even abusive. If you choose to spank, I'd recommend having a personal rule of the parent needing to take a deep breath, count to 5, and not spank in anger. Overall I'd recommend against it, though.
3d. Consequences that work. Here's what I recall working for me:
* 2~3 years: choices in false dilemmas. i.e., "I don't want to take a bath". "You can walk to the bathroom, or I can carry you to the bathroom, what do you choose". This is surprisingly effective, until they start to figure out that the dilemma is false.
* 4~5 years: time-outs. After explaining the reason for the consequence, they have to stand still in a quiet room for 30-120 seconds while a parent supervises. After the quiet time, they need to repeat back *why* they had the time-out. If they become rebellious, the time-out might last longer, maybe even 10-20 minutes overall, and this might be inconvenient for the parent - see point #2.
* 6~7 years: long-term rewards. A sticker chart for good behavior, and bad behavior results in losing a sticker.
4. Other advice
4a. Let them fail. It's oh-so-very tempting to step in and help a child who's failing at some simple task, repeatedly. Let them learn how to do it. There was a twitter kerfluffle over some guy who made his daughter teach herself how to use a can opener. The internet wanted to cancel him, but I think there's an important strategy in there for parents.
4b. Push them to try new things. Not just what you're interested, but what they're interested in.
4c. Let them help out with household chores, and expect them to help out with household chores. (cooking, cleaning, etc.). Early on this will be inconvenient, and more effort than just doing it yourself - see point #2 above. Early on, this will probably be a pair activity, rather than a "here's your responsibilities" activity.
4d. When reasonable, set an expectation that they clean up their own messes.
4e. In general, as much as possible, try to let them feel the direct consequences of their own actions, or at least an attenuated version of them. If they're running recklessly, they may fall & get hurt. If they eat carelessly, they may have to clean a mess. If they're wildly bouncing and they hit you, exaggeratedly show your pain.
Idea for a grant application, free to a good home: execute one of Luisa Rodriguez's suggested research directions on the recoverability of civilizational collapse (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GsjmufaebreiaivF7/what-is-the-likelihood-that-civilizational-collapse-would#Other_research_directions) and use the money to hire expert consultants and buy camping supplies
There’s an 80% chance your keys are in the chest of drawers, and a 20% chance they are on the table in the other room. There are 4 compartments in the chest. After opening 3 of them what are the odds?
1:1 (i.e. 50%) odds between being on the table and in the remaining drawer. (Assuming that you didn't find the keys in any of the drawers you opened.) The argument is that the initial odds are 4:1. Considering individual drawers in the chest gives 1:1:1:1:1. Opening 3 drawers and finding no key eliminates 3 of these cases, leaving 1:1.
Well that’s the more obvious solution. Could it still be 80%?
No, it's 50/50. Each of the five locations had an equal likelihood, and after checking three of them, the remaining two still have an equal likelihood. It doesn't matter that four of the locations happen to be in the same piece of furniture.
> Each of the five locations had an equal likelihood
I think that's technically an assumption that isn't specified by the problem, namely, that all drawers are equally likely, but you could have a history of placing keys in the first drawer you opened 60% of the time, or the last drawer 60% of the time. This would bias the chest below or above 50% after opening 3 drawers.
I think the problem is actually underspecified for an exact solution unless you constrain it with additional assumptions.
Only way I can figure that it would be 80% is if the person opening the drawers knows where the keys are and is under orders to open three empty drawers. But you specified in your reply to Pycea that the person opening the drawers doesn't know where the keys are.
If you've opened the drawers randomly, then it's 50%. If you didn't open the drawers randomly, then it depends on the probabilities of the keys being in particular drawers.
You could get 80% if you open the first three drawers, but the keys are always in the 4th drawer whenever they're in the chest of drawers.
You always find it where you look last.
I think this depends a bit on how the problem is set up. If the keys are randomly distributed between the four drawers and the table, then after opening the three drawers, your odds should be 50/50. However, if they were randomly placed, then someone who knew where they were opened three drawers that they knew were empty, the odds would be 80/20 still. (The second scenario here being more like the Monty Hall problem.)
I don’t think its monty hall. I think it’s anti monty hall in some ways. In Monty hall you get information about what was opened by (as you said) somebody who knew which drawers are empty. Here it’s just you. Do you gain information as you open the drawers?
(I have an opinion on the answer but I don’t claim to have the definitive answer. In fact I saw this as a tweet and there was sting disagreement).
I’ll post my own belief tomorrow.
The relation to the Monty Hall problem is that Monty reveals information by opening a door, given that the door is guaranteed to be a loss.
The crux of this problem depends on how the keys are distributed within the chest of drawers, as well as how you choose which drawers to look in. For example, if the method of hiding and the method by which you look in drawers is uncorrelated, e.g. at least one is uniformly random, then the odds are 50/50. However, if for some reason your first three drawers are guaranteed to be empty, then the odds remain 80/20.
But it can also be anything else. If the keys being in the chest of drawers are always in the top drawer, and you always check top to bottom, then the odds of them being on the table after the checks is 100%.
Well let’s not add other criteria about which drawers the keys are more likely to be in. That way lies madness.
So they're equally likely to be in any of the drawers? That wasn't stated in the original problem and was not what I first thought since it's a bit unrealistic (usually most people try to put things in the same places consistently).
Where did you come across this? Assuming a uniform random distribution, I'm pretty sure the only answer is 50/50.
If I'm rational, and I make a handful of other plausible assumptions, it's probably /less/ than 50/50 - most people are more likely to have put the keys in some draws than others, and will open draws in order of how likely to contain keys, so the last draw is probably less likely to contain the keys than the table is.
Generally speaking, you're not supposed to think that way about questions like this, because you could spend forever thinking of realistic reasons the math would be off in various ways.
If one of the three drawers opened contained the keys, then there is a 0% chance it's elsewhere :)
My immediate reaction is 80%, but ultimately I think it’s a poorly defined problem. It’s a bit like the boy or girl paradox: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy_or_Girl_paradox
Assuming you mean that there *was* an 80% chance that they were in the chest of drawers before I started opening drawers:
~30% on the table in the other room
~30% in the unopened drawer in the chest
~30% in the drawer that I just opened and I'm looking right at them
~10% they were in one of the first two drawers and for some reason I kept opening drawers
Adjust the first three values based on the actual value of that last "~10%"
I just deleted a few comments because I'm dumb: help me out here.
Does it matter that we are arbitrarily considering each drawer a "location" of it's own, while considering the table also arbitrarily to be one location, just because we can check that location quicker? Imagine I had to check the table through a toilet paper tube one spot at a time; does that change the math?
I don't think that's a significant factor. The problem could be done in reverse:
Say that there's an 80% chance that the keys are on the table, and a 20% chance they're in the chest of drawers. You've searched 75% of the table, and have not found the keys, what are the odds they're on the table?
The answer remains the same. Odds of it being on a quarter of the table are 80%, divide by 4 because the keys are randomly distributed between quarters, and you have a 20% of it being on any given quarter. 3/4 have been searched, so the odds of it being on the table are effectively dropped by 60 percentage points. That leaves equal odds between quarter 4 of the table (20% originally) and the chest (also 20% originally), which comes out to 50% each.
You didn't specify the prior distribution among the drawers. "80% chance of being in the chest" could mean "20% chance for each drawer" or it could mean "80% chance for the top-left drawer, because that's the only drawer you ever use, and 0% for the other three". Those would give different answers for the posterior probability distribution.
But if you assume a uniform prior probability distribution among the drawers then you started with 5 locations all at 20% probability, and the fact that you gave them different verbal descriptions has no impact on the math.
Like many probability problems, it depends on subtleties of the wording. As stated, I think the answer is 50/50, but I think (not completely sure) you could make it 80/20 if it's stated that the keys are guaranteed to be in one specific drawer if they're in the chest at all (but you don't know which).
More concretely, you could say that you're at your friend's house and he's asked you to find his keys, and he's told you there's an 80% chance they're in the chest and a 20% chance they're on the table (maybe this is even externally determined, like he has one day off work per week but it's not always the same day, and he puts them on the table on his days off), and he knows which drawer he keeps them in but you don't.
...I'm actually not sure now whether, in this framing of the problem, you opening three empty drawers that never had a chance of containing keys is as irrelevant as you looking under the bed, or if it's Bayesian evidence for the keys not being in the chest.
In that one it's evidence against being in the chest, since you have no idea which of the drawers is the key one. Your friend absently looking through irrelevant drawers to get out something else won't update on the location of his keys, though., because he does know which drawer matters.
I actually don’t have an answer for this. I just saw it on Twitter. My first thought was 50-50. However, and this may be the wording of the question, here’s the nub - does the nature of the question imply that there’s an 80% chance regardless? Read the first line again.
Let’s say you’ve asked your housemate for his car keys. He has agreed. He says there’s an 80% chance they are in the drawers in the front room, and a 20% chance they are on the table in the back of the house. Depends how he came in. You go look. After opening three of the drawers the last one is stuck. Do you cut your losses here and don’t bother prying it open until you check the back room? Or try it first. What are the odds now?
If you called him and tell him the lower right drawer is stuck is he likely to say “that’s where I put it if it is in that room”?
The wording that I saw on twitter was different: “you believe that there is an 80% chance […] how do you update your belief ?”. Implying that your belief is not necessarily correct in the first place.
* If you start out with a strong prior, you should update it very little with subsequent observations, so you should remain with a 79% belief after checking the first drawers
* If you start out with a weak prior, you should update it a lot, and your belief should be down to 51% before checking the last drawer.
I don’t think I saw that version. However you are right - the trapped prior here might stick at 80% if you trust yourself, or your wife, or whomever told you it was 80% chance of being in the chest of drawers regardless of how many drawers you have opened.
"here’s the nub"
The rub. A nub is a small stump. In the context of this idiom, a rub is a point of friction, a sticking-point.
Naw. https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/nub
Your keys are always in the last place you look, so I'd look on the table first.
In this example you've got five hiding spots (four drawers and a table), and the hiding spots are all nice and discrete and equally likely to hold the hidden keys. I'd like to piggyback on your question and ask about hiding from the other direction: when you want to hide something, how do you decide where the best hiding spot is? if I gave you a map of a maze and asked you to rank the cells in the map as hiding spots, how would you do it? How would you tackle the problem of assigning a hiding value to each square? To each dead end?
With a maze, the most important thing to do is to make sure it's not accessible by the "always turn left" rule; basically anywhere in the centre is good, but maximising the number of choices along the way is probably ideal, to give as many chances for people to get lost as possible.
For a more mundane small object in a house, go for the most inaccessible location; if someone needs to pry up floorboards to find it it's staying hidden for a long time (unless it stinks or makes noise, I guess)
Or opening and closing the compartment leaves marks.
I'm very fond of a bit in a Lawrence Watt-Evans novel where the character finds the path through a maze because it's the path that's not dusty. Who's going to keep the whole thing swept?
Its clear (to me, a fool) that the odds remain the same: you have not finished checking the chest of drawers, and we know there's an 80% chance they're in the chest of drawers. Given that you've checked 3/4 of the chest and haven't found it, then there is an 80% chance it's in the final drawer.
It's one of those riddles that delights in being unclear in the formulation.
Your answer is completely within bounds of the problem as stated. The problem is, so are a lot of other solutions.
Does anyone else have any interest in potentially volunteering time to an ACX Grant project?
I'd be interested, although in-person time would be tricky since I live in Australia.
For the right grant and time commitment, yeah I could be interested
Yeah
> If you have proposals to hinder the advance of cutting-edge AI research, send them to me!
LOL!
I mean, there are several obvious methods: starting WWIII (both in terms of much existing infrastructure being destroyed by EMP and by location in cities, and in terms of the fallout making computers more expensive in the future due to soft errors), somehow arranging for a Carrington Event every year, or just a treaty banning neural networks worldwide on pain of invasion (specifically neural nets; neural nets are how I would program if I wanted to accidentally build Skynet, since they're notoriously opaque).
I'm not sure how to accomplish any of these, though, and the first couple have some rather-major downsides. If anyone has a plan for the last one I'd suggest putting in an application.
What's EMP?
Electromagnetic pulse
As Gunflint said, electromagnetic pulse. Basically, nukes generate an extremely-powerful radio squawk that can damage electronics with a line-of-sight to the explosion. It is considered highly likely that in the case of a full-scale nuclear war, high-altitude nuclear detonations would be used for wide-area destruction of infrastructure (high-altitude gives longer range before the horizon blocks it).
It needs line of sight? An ordinary radio can pick up the signal without line of sight to the transmitter.
That's because radio below a certain frequency bounces off the ionosphere[1]. But the ionosphere is not going to reflect sufficient power to much of anything to potential antennas over the horizon.[2]
--------------------
[1] We're not going to talk about ground waves in the AM spectrum, OK? Just to simplify things.
[2] Personally I don't believe in dangerous EMPs anyway, though. It's "nuclear winter" kind of hype, I think. The only known emprical case (during Starfish Prime) was very mild and happened in lighting circuitry which was so brain dead it could and probably was knocked out by lightning all the time. I've never seen a convincing tgheoretical argument that a high-altitude EMP would be dangerous to actually extant modern electronic circuitry.
>That's because radio below a certain frequency bounces off the ionosphere[1]. But the ionosphere is not going to reflect sufficient power to much of anything to potential antennas over the horizon.[2]
Also, the ionosphere is what's generating the squawk in the first place.
>The only known emprical case (during Starfish Prime) was very mild and happened in lighting circuitry which was so brain dead it could and probably was knocked out by lightning all the time.
Starfish Prime was quite a long way from Hawaii, though, and silicon chips while existent were not yet widespread. I agree that most electric circuits are resilient vs. EMP, but semiconductor devices are quite fragile. Also, you see military people worrying about EMP, whereas it was mostly civilians talking about nuclear winter AIUI.
I think the cheapest and least disruptive approach would be to hype the hell out of AI, and persuade people that it can do in the short run much more than is at all plausible. Previous "AI winters" have been theorized to result from the disillusionment (by e.g. granting agencies) with overpromise/underdeliver, so anything you can do to magnify present overpromising will hasten the approach of a new AI Ice Age.
Interesting.
I've also thought the same, but in terms of running a scam business to practically overhype the AI (in Nikola company style)
Alternatively, you can do something very bad with AI so that it might serve as a warning shot, although this is a bad option for many reasons
That's brilliant. Blowing $1-2 billion in investor's money totally qualifes as "really bad" and would sour people (particularly those with money and interest in AI) for a long time. If you create the company please let me know and I shall get in on the ground floor and hope to ride the elevator to near the top, where I will sell to a greater fool.
1. If you were to bet, when will covid recede into the background without it being a significant factor in decisions like travel?
2. What are the precautions to be taking now, after the booster?
3. When is the booster going to wane? Do we know anything?
#1 I personally wouldn't make a bet. It's too politicized and the current situation already seems nonsensical to me, so I can't pretend to understand how society will continue to react.
#2 is entirely dependent on individual risk tolerances. I personally would go back to acting the exact same as I did pre-pandemic with the booster. Others might not.
#3, I doubt there is good evidence yet, but the prior should probably be that it will wane at approximately the same rate as the original dose.
at the risk of agreeing almost completely with Dangerously:
1: IMO, the only reason it hasn't in the US is cause of politicization. I predict that it'll die down in about another 8 months, but that's kind of a wild guess.
2: Is anyone you know and see on a regular basis immunocompromised or very old? If not, you're almost certainly good going back to life as usual. If so, maybe get tested a few days before each time you see them. If that's not possible, or you see them daily, keep your mask on in stores, don't go out to eat, and don't go to concerts and such.
3: Difficult to say. Many childhood vaccines require a single booster but after that give immunity for ~ the rest of your life. The flu vaccine needs a new dose every year.
There's no bright line between foreground and background. I suppose we could draw one at 'less significant than the flu'.
I'm living life more or less as normal now, except with a mask on when in shops.
1. When all the people currently adults die off, and the next generation grows up with it. Same way most social change is normalized.
2. None.
3. No idea. More importantly, don't care, assuming covid boosters becoming like flu shots at worst.
1. In some sense, I think never. But there will be a point where the way it enters as a significant factor is just like the post-9/11 significant factors in travel planning (wear shoes that are easy to remove, don’t count on your friends meeting you at the gate, etc). This is likely a couple years off. (I type this from an airplane getting ready to take off for my first international trip - I have never had anxiety about successfully making an international trip before this one, which had all sorts of rules that I must get a COVID test at most 72 hours before arrival, but must have results at least 4 hours before takeoff. Fortunately it came through, but I was worried.)
2. I pay attention to local case counts. Other than following local laws, my current policy if case counts are above 20 per 100,000 per day is to avoid indoor public spaces and mask in them; if case counts are below 20/100,000 then I don’t particularly worry except in spaces like gyms.
3. Probably same as the original. I’m looking forward to Moderna making the new annual flu vaccine, which will also be a COVID booster and rsv vaccine.
In the US, in many places, it already has receded to the background. If one were to visit Austin or parts of Idaho, there is little going on in the foreground that suggests COVID-19 is a factor in daily life.
That said, I think the question is more general and targeted at a more risk-balanced individuals.
Assuming a reasonably healthy adult, usually coming into contact with other healthy immunized 12+ year old's (of various ages, including elderly, but not generally ill or health-compromised folks), the booster at least initially provides nearly 10x reduction in (population-level) COVID-19 incidences, severe disease, and deaths, compared to the 2-shot mRNA vaccine regiment.
See https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2114255, and https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.07.21264626v1.full-text
The factor-reduction in infection rates seems very strong with the booster, and I want to say that rational behavior would lead me to think that getting a booster should result in simply stopping other personal precautions (perhaps keep those that are worthy of retaining in general, like better hand washing habits, masking when showing respiratory symptoms, and so on).
That said, the rate of transmission within the US seems very high. On its own, it doesn't default the argument above, but higher rates of transmission provide an opportunity for the virus to mutate. I don't know enough about this subject, but I have a generalized fear that variants like Mu, or newer variants like Mu that emanate from Delta, may result due to higher transmission in US and elsewhere. That, in turn, could pierce the shield provided even by boosters - and we wouldn't know it happened until after its happened. So this is a fear based argument about unknown unknowns.
So where does it end for me? I'm optimistic about Pfizers Paxlovid. If this gets authorized in the US in 1Q of '22, it would ease my stress personally and I'd relax. With booster, I'd leverage home-testing + fall back onto Paxlovid if the unlikely breakthrough happened (and hope that avoids any possibility of long-COVID) .
I don't think anybody knows just yet whether shot #3 has 4-5 mo durability (just like shot #2), or whether its durability will be different (more, or less) than before. It's unknown at this time - nobody has good guesses yet.
Re: FDA approval of Paxlovid, and in the same vein as Scott's recent writings on the FDA, see: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/11/the-paxlovid-paradox.html
1. Twenty years after 9/11 and Richard Reid, most Americans are still taking their shoes off every time they go through airport security, and there's almost no constituency for changing that. Things like actual lockdowns and border closures will go away pretty quickly, but the minor annoyances and rituals are going to stick around for a long time.
2. Be careful not to do anything that will frighten the sort of people who still think it is important that we take off our shoes every time we go through airport security, because they are powerful and can hurt you and now they're even more frightened of viruses than terrorists. That may require going masked in public. Otherwise, if you're fully vaccinated, take about the same precautions you would have taken w/re the flu in 2018. That's going to depend on whether you or anyone in your immediate family is particularly frail.
3. Blood antibody levels will probably wane in about 2-3 months, and that will cause people who ought to know better to say that the boosters are failing. Lasting immunity comes from lymphocytes, which are much harder to measure but likely to stick around for years.
Re lymphocytes, as long as transmission levels remain high, we’ll continue optimizing for NAb’s over humoral immunity, and continue taking precautions against breakthrough infections. During this period we’d want high NAb’s and so we measure boosters (and waning) based on NAb’s right now, and not based on t-cell mediated immunity like we’d do normally.
It’s reasonable to wonder if this is sustainable beyond perhaps one more round of booster 6 months down the road. At some point we have to grapple with base rate being high if that’s where we end up, and ask ourselves what life/normal will look like then.
I still think that once paxlovid comes to market, the dynamics of daily life would change (ie relax) a great deal.
Hit send too soon :/ meant to type “…NAb’s over t-cell immunity…”
#1 reminds me of something that's been on my mind since I saw an NYT article (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/19/health/tuberculosis-transmission-aerosols.html) a few weeks ago.
Before the covid19 pandemic, did anyone wear face masks in shops and on mass transport while in countries with high tuberculosis rates?
Would this be a wise practice to adopt, regardless of covid19, when in areas with high TB rates? If not, why not?
Before you respond that the comparison is weak because TB is mostly spread by coughing, not breathing, note this recent study: "we conclude that breathing contributes more than 90% of the daily aerosolised M. tuberculosis – regardless of how often a person coughs." (https://theconversation.com/new-study-shows-that-normal-breathing-is-a-major-spreader-of-tb-170656). I am ignorant of what any and all other TB studies say, so I can't weigh this study's potential significance against them.
Comparison with TB is even more relevant if we remember that TB has a vaccine which is not very effective. Some countries used to vaccinate all kids against TB but gradually they stopped doing it and now only risk groups get the vaccine against TB. Unless we discover more effective vaccines, it should happen with covid vaccines as well. Getting a booster jab every 6 months for the population with very low risk is not sustainable whereas it makes all sense to vaccinate risk population.
As someone who thought "public transport must've caused the NYC breakout," lots of public transport has long ago fixed the problem of airborne diseases by having excellent ventilation.
Last even thread I posted my ideas about helping Haiti. I got a little feedback which I appreciate. I also learned about TheMotte and posted there which was an interesting experience.
Right now I have a question. Are you concerned about Haiti? Do you think about Haiti?
I believe we are watching the rapid disintegration of a somewhat modern state. The US and most of the world seem to be saying to Haiti: "You are on your own."
The response of the Dominican Republic (where I live) is to close the border tighter and to stop providing medical care to Haitians.
What are your thoughts (if you have any)?
To be quite honest, I don't think about Haiti, because thinking about terrible things that I have no power to affect makes me sad. For similar reasons I try to limit how much I think about Afghanistan or Alzhimer's disease.
well actually I'm studying bioinformatics so I do think about that last one a bit more frequently
My mother died with Alzheimer's disease.
My grandma's currently...eh I don't know what the nice word is. With cancer you say "fighting it" but there's really only one way Alzheimers ends. For now!
My mother died knowing who all her loved ones were. I consider that better than many other possibilities.
Thank you for your reply.
I live with a Haitian family in the Dominican Republic and most of my friends here are Haitian. I can tell you they are very worried about what is going on. You can see that I don't have the option to not think about Haiti.
My thinking has led to this:
TinyURL.com/HaitiZSS
Hey Peter,
Want to make clear, not at all trying to say that I don't care about Haiti. I very much hope your friends and family stay safe and well. What I was trying to get at is, I (like many others I suspect) often avoid thinking about painful things as a coping mechanism. However I do think that one ought to think about them at least sometimes. To that end, I'm planning on going to bed soon but I will take a look at your proposal some time this week, at a glance looks like an interesting idea!
I understood perfectly what you were saying and I do the same thing in regards to these appeals about hunger in Africa.
I take care of the people around me as best I can.
Any feedback you have for me will be considered very seriously.
I took a look at your proposal, and I admire your concern and effort. Not much to usefully say (aside from good luck), but these things do occur to me randomly:
1. The US has a terrible record of attention span, and many people have been betrayed when we abruptly change our mind, as we do. Both the French and the Brits have much better records as imperialists, and the British in particular seem to have actually succeeded as much as anyone has in "nation building" if we look at the heirs of Empire. So maybe what you want is for the US to *bankroll* the operation but have it run by the Brits. Wouldn't let the UN touch anything though.
2. It's a disasteful thought, but maybe you'd be better off identifying the most powerful gang and legitimizing them, helping them consolidate their power and become in effect a local government. They have all the advantage in terms of experience and local knowledge, and incentive to legitimize themselves might be sufficient to get them to adopt less brutal methods. The key goal here seems to be security, both for the sake of attracting tourist dollars and improving the ablity of the local legit economy to flourish. If you achieve the security through a gang transitioning to a government, it may not matter, practically, distasteful as it might be ethically, and it might be cheaper and faster by a lot.
Thanks, Carl. You are "thinking outside of the box"!
> better off identifying the most powerful gang and legitimizing them, helping them consolidate their power and become in effect a local government.
That would be "Barbecue", the leader of the G9 coalition. He seems to be going in that direction.
Bbq would make a severely autocratic leader, of course.
> Both the French and the Brits have much better records as imperialists
There is centuries old bad blood between Haiti and the French. That would complicate things.
Two reasons why I think the US can't escape this job.
1) We have the most motivation because of the refugee pressure.
2) We have one million plus Haitian-Americans to draw on for personnel.
I generally have the feeling that nations that were, in the past, british colonies have faired better on HDI-type measures than those that were colonized by other European countries. I'm wondering if anyone has done research or written books on this topic. I would like to check my hunch against the empirical evidence.
Yes, I think about Haiti and I'm concerned about it. Probably because it's closer to my backyard, metaphorically speaking. But the idea the US has said "you're on your own" is ridiculously wrong. The US gives like half a billion dollars in aid to Haiti, something like 80% of all money Haiti receives. It's helped Haiti negotiate debt relief. It directly feeds something like a fifth of Haitians. It's even given them trade privileges. The US is the one who bought most of the corona vaccines Haiti is receiving. There are reasons to criticize the American attitude as somewhat imperialist. But the idea it's ignoring Haiti is just wrong.
From what I've heard of your plan it's basically recolonizing Haiti temporarily in a specific department. The US actually has some track record of this: occupying Caribbean countries, building infrastructure, and leaving. But this is problematic for numerous reasons and politically infeasible these days anyway. Also, you shouldn't expect the country to welcome it voluntarily. The plan seems like it could benefit from you getting a masters in international development or something. If you're really serious about it then you have a good shot of influencing US policy. But you'd need to do the work first.
https://theglobalamericans.org/2021/10/adrift-us-haiti-policy/
https://www.wlrn.org/commentary/2021-11-04/the-u-s-and-the-world-must-step-into-haiti-not-just-for-the-kidnappings-but-for-the-kids
> Yes, I think about Haiti and I'm concerned about it. Probably because it's closer to my backyard, metaphorically speaking.
I would love to hear your ideas.
> But the idea the US has said "you're on your own" is ridiculously wrong.
By that I mean US officials have indicated there would be no intervention. That it would be a "Haitian solution."
The current Haitian solution is that the gangs are in charge. I wonder who thinks this is a promising avenue.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/10/31/haiti-descends-into-chaos-yet-world-continues-look-away/
If you would be so good as to assist me with your thinking, please read MY WORDS and respond.
TinyURL.com/HaitiZSS
> The current Haitian solution is that the gangs are in charge. I wonder who thinks this is a promising avenue.
The gangs, of course. Haiti has a problem with rapacious elites today as it did in the past.
> By that I mean US officials have indicated there would be no intervention. That it would be a "Haitian solution."
So to be clear you define "on their own" as anything that doesn't put foreign boots on the ground? You do realize the Haitians themselves have said they don't want that?
All in all I'll read your full proposal if I have time. But to be honest from the summary it looks hopelessly naive both to how stabilization and development happen and how foreign intervention works. I can see you're passionate about the subject. I'd suggest you take some courses in Peace Theory or International Development or some similar discipline to get a better idea.
I would be most interested to know which parts of the plan sound like "recolonizing".
The part where a foreign country takes over part of another country and then runs it through an administration that is not part of country's own state.
Please quote that part.
"The US would provide a small military force which would back up the Haitian police in Sud."
If you don't understand this I suggest you go read Max Weber.
It appears you are saying that a small force which only appears when called on by the Police is equivalent to "takes over the country".
What is going on in Haiti is awful, as is what is going on in Belarus, Lebanon, Ethiopia, and a few other parts of the world right now. Is the situation in Haiti that much worse than a decade ago, or a few other points in the past few decades? Lebanon and Ethiopia are places where there has been very clear backsliding in recent years.
There is no functioning government in Haiti and the gangs are in charge. That is worse.
Haiti is much closer to the US than Lebanon and Ethiopia.
I'm interested to know on what moral calculus you base your idea that proximity = obligation
I'm saying proximity = motivation.
Haiti is a mess in our backyard. Ignoring it does not mean we are insulated from the effects.
What is there to do, exactly? We've given the country billions of dollars. If we play any more an active role in the administration of the country we get accused of neo-colonialism.
Either accept that you need the white man to babysit you, or just work things out on your own (your own including half a billion dollars a year).
The US isn't going to take the country over for various reasons, and doesn't really have a good track record in running colonies, protectorates, and other extraterritorial possessions all that well in any case. Half measures aren't going to cut it and will likely make it worse. So... yeah, Haiti is on its own. The Dominican Republic's response seems rational; unlike the US, the DR not only doesn't have the will or the expertise but also doesn't have the resources, and preventing getting dragged into it themselves is their best option.
Given the recent US conservative interest in Hungary + recent coverage on this blog, I figured it might be interesting to post occasional news items, which people can use to test/train their intuitions.
Here's one: on Thursday, the government has set a price cap for petrol. The cap is about $1.50 per liter, about 8% decrease from current prices. Petrol tax is left unchanged; typical wholesaler profit margins on petrol are 4%, typical retailer margins are around 2-3%, so gas station owners will now lose money on selling gasoline to their customers. To avoid the obvious consequences, to new regulation forbids closing gas stations or not selling petrol. If the owner does either of those, the gas station is taken away from them and given to another company (selected by the minister of commerce) to operate for the next three months.
(News article in Hungarian: https://www.portfolio.hu/gazdasag/20211112/uzemanyagar-befagyasztas-minden-amit-tudni-kell-a-benzin-es-a-gazolaj-aranak-csokkenteserol-510524 )
Wow. A proclivity to shoot the messenger (in this case prices) is a good reason to expect authoritarian style governments to not work.
Should I assume that the outcome is petrol stations getting arson?
I'm wondering what's the cheapest thing you can blend with gasoline and not cause the customer's engine to immediately seize up.
Methanol. Currently about $1.25/gallon I think.
At first I wondered whether there is a meaningful difference *for the owner* between closing the station and having it taken away. But I suppose the difference is that when you close the station, you can sell the remaining property, and use the money to start some other business. The current law effectively takes your property away, or rather gives you a choice between having your property taken away immediately or producing loss every month and hoping that the situation will change before the accumulated loss exceeds the original value of your property.
And of course the point is that only the government knows how long the current law will exist, and they can adapt based on your choice. So if most owners choose to keep their property and hope the law goes away, the law will stay forever, and the population will be happy that the government actually made the petrol cheap. On the other hand, if most owners give up their property, I would expect the government to repeal the law. Either way, the current owners will be blamed for making the stupid choice.
If gas stations are expected to actually operate at a loss, I'm curious if there would be any takers to run them for "the next three months" or if the bottom just drops out at that point and the government has a real mess on their hands when nobody can even get petrol.
Most likely the gas station owners will try to get the law changed or revoked before they go under, possibly by explaining how dumb the law is. If gas prices continue to go up, no law in the world will keep prices low while there is still product available. I'm curious if this is an intermediary step towards government takeover of gas stations? Given the anti-socialist stance of the current government, that seems like a non-option, but many seem to think Orban would change his stance at a moment's notice if he thought a new stance would serve his purposes better.
Orbán might be anti-socialist in words but not averse to the occasional government takeover, or handover to friendly oligarchs. The former happened for example to the recycling sector or more recently to infertility clinics, the latter to the entire tobacco and alcohol retail industry or to casinos.
What are the laws about accidentally running out of gas?
Will the wholesalers have any price caps put in place?
There are no price caps on wholesalers. The government can reassign the station to another (temporary) owner if gas is unavailable for more than 48 hours in total in any seven-day period. In theory IRS agents will verify availability around the country, although it's hard to believe they could pull off the logistics.
This is in reply to the several people talking about the stations necessarily going under, but I'm putting it here so I don't have to pick one. It's worth remembering that gas stations make very little margin on the actual gas. Not nothing, but not much. Rather, gas stations are convenience stores that also have gas pumps. They make their money selling the stuff inside the store. I don't know what the margins look like, but it's possible that the losses due to gasoline might not be bad enough to run all or even most of the gas stations out of business. Gas would just end up being a loss leader for the convenience store. They could also make people come into to buy gas at the counter, and then require at least a X dollar purchase. People might not even mind, since they're getting cheaper gas.
Reminds me of the weird gas station near where I live which is significantly cheaper than anywhere else, but only takes cash. The convenience-store part is very small, but does contain an ATM (which I assume charges an exorbitant fee for withdrawals that goes, directly or indirectly, to the people who own the gas station). The station also has many more pumps in the same space than most others, no canopy, and is squeezed into a little wedge of land at an intersection.
This also explains the common practice in parts of continental Europe where gas stations charge you about 50 cents to use their bathrooms, but then give you a voucher for the same amount. This can be used for buying stuff at the convenience store, but not for gas.
"Anything that might lead to 20,000 clones of John von Neumann" - would that make it a "Von Neumann machine"?
You makin me groan here Daniel. :)
Make one Von Neumann brain clone, and stick it in a rocket and send it out with a job of building more of itself. At some point you'll hit 20,000 of them as they spread over the galaxy.
A Von Neumann Von Neumann probe, if you will.
Hi guys :)
I am a physician planning the thesis for my data science masters I'm currently studying at Harvard. I'm interested in a lot of the topics Scott writes about.
Are there any readers who are academics or know of academics in Boston (particularly Harvard, MIT or BU) working in:
- perceptual control theory / predictive coding (particularly in applications in psychiatry)
- psychedelic assisted psychotherapy (particularly ketamine research for chronic pain, depression and relaxing priors)
- effective altruist aligned research (eg. how to effectively promote altruistic memes within cognitive science / psychology)?
I'm looking to start a 6-month quantitative research project as soon as possible, and basically looking for a decent dataset to do some exploration and analysis on. I'm particularly interested in machine learning, and would like to learn more about NLP and network analysis although not restricted to those topics.
Any help or suggestions are much appreciated!
https://eahub.org/groups/ probably has a Harvard group
Scott, wondering if you saw this and if it prompted any reconsideration of prior views:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2785832
Saw it, saw some people I trust say it was bad, still haven't had time to look into it closely. Thanks for bringing it up.
Is there a way to print out our submission form entry at submission? I don't think so, but having submitted, figured I would ask the question.
Today I was again frustrated by a blog post by Razib Khan that mentioned a paper that came out just last month, because of course I can't access it. This happens a lot: Bloggers want to talk about the hot new paper that just came out, but unless the paper was in Nature or Science, even most universities won't have that paper online for 6 months to 1 year, because the "everything but the last year" and the "everything but the last 6 months" tiers of online journal subscriptions are substantially less expensive than the "everything" tier.
While I /intend/ to look up the paper in 6 months, when I'll have access to it, past performance says P(I will remember) =~ 1 / (1 + # of papers I have ever planned to read later). So the brief mention of it isn't useful to me.
What do you you all think: Should bloggers talk about the latest papers that came out, or should they wait for 6 months or 1 year, until those papers are more accessible?
I think that unless either
a) the paper is open-access or published in an extremely popular journal (Nature / Science / JAMA / PNAS), or
b) it's ground-breaking (P = NP) or widely-discussed and/or political (the latest IPCC report (that's open-access; just pretend it wasn't)), or
c) the blog discusses it in enough detail that you don't need to read the paper,
then I'd rather bloggers write up their views, then post them 6 months later, when people have some chance of reading the paper themselves.
That would detract from the "hot off the press" excitement, but I think that kind of short-attention-span buzz is mostly bad for science anyway. The actual scientific value to me of a paper published this week is no greater than that of a paper published a year ago. If a paper won't still be worth talking about in a year, it probably isn't worth talking about today.
sci-hub.tf and r/scholar didn't have it?
This was my first thought as well.
I checked sci-hub.se and didn't find it.
Is there a reason the authors wouldn't send it to you if you asked them directly?
I could try that, and I used to write to authors routinely before I had other options available. But it took time, and most authors never responded.
New accessions at Sci-Hub have been halted since January this year while Elsevier's lawsuit against Alexandra Elbakyan is pending in the High Court of New Delhi (court records: https://delhihighcourt.nic.in/dhc_case_status_oj_list.asp?pno=1019626). Practically no papers published in 2021 are accessible through Sci-Hub.
They uploaded most of the 2021 stuff a few months ago. I'm not sure if they have not halted uploads *again*, or if they are just buggy. The past month I've noticed that a *lot* of links are just not working with the prefix method, even though if you query the database directly with the DOI, it'll pop up. And the coverage of Nature is patchy, but so is the coverage through my university proxy, so I suspect publishers may be engaged in more shenanigans in how to optimally screw university libraries and SH/LG's proxy coverage isn't keeping up.
Heh, you're right! It must have been made available quite recently because I remember checking a month or two ago and there wasn't anything. Nature articles are now available up to the beginning of September (by DOI, didn't bother to check prefix method), and there is a bunch of new torrents.
Sci-Hub.tf appears to be an automatically translated clone of the Sci-Hub website with Alexandra Elbakyan's name removed and a different BTC wallet substituted (compare with Sci-Hub.se). The DNS registration information is different and it serves articles via cloudflare (quite ballsy). I don't know if they're phishers or well-intentioned, but removing the name of the creator is dishonest. Don't feed them.
Thanks for noticing this. I retract my recommendation and instead suggest people go to whatever sci-hub site Alexandra controls.
Closed-access journals delenda est.
Why can't you just write to the authors and ask them to e-mail you a reprint? Most authors are delighted by the request, and the journal doesn't care.
A good strategy now, but probably a bad strategy if it gets used a lot.
Why would it? Most papers are only of mild interest to most scientists, and you don't even know about it until you read it in a journal, or (more likely) read it because some other paper in which you are more interested noted it as a reference. In either case, the interest in reading the paper doesn't even get generated until it's in print.
The exceptions are people who are in the field and doing work closely related to the paper, so the interest is high the moment it hits a preprint server, or you hear about it at a conference. This will always be a very small subset of the total research audience.
Why? The negatives would be mostly for authors, right? But it makes powerful signal that also they can sue that closed-access journals are a problem.
I was thinking in terms of busy people being asked to do something uninteresting repeatedly.
I could try that, and I used to write to authors routinely before I had other options available. But it took time, and most authors never responded.
Huh. I guess I'm surprised, most people I write to are very happy with the interest and send something right away. Courtesy is dying, I guess :(
I probably had a lower success rate than you'd have asking for brand-new papers.
Oh well yeah. (Sheepish grin.) I've been known to be...slow...about getting back to people about papers I wrote a long time ago. Helping to lower the courtesy quotient myself, alas.
This is a real and recognized problem, for which there are several possible workarounds:
1. Many papers are published as an open-access pre-print, such as on Biorxiv, or have been put up by the original authors on ResearchGate.
2. Many other papers are up on Sci-Hub and other science piracy websites.
3. If you know someone with institutional access to a lot of journals, or a place like here where such people congregate, you can post the DOI number of the paper and ask for a PDF.
All of these are a little hacky, because the scientific publishing system is fundamentally broken. In the current era of electronic communication, scientific journals are an active impediment to peer review rather than a facilitator of it: the primary purpose they play now is to give legible but deeply-flawed metrics to grant agencies and universities so that they can make their funding, hiring and promotion decisions with a false aura of objectivity. Most journals barely even edit the manuscripts: look at the sheer number of typos in a typical Nature or Science article and tell me that they've been edited.
Are these peer reviewed by the time they are being reviewed? Another pet peeve of mine is when a brand new study that hasn't even gone through peer review gets talked about in the press as if it answers some major topic, but we never hear about it again. I assume that something came up during peer review and it actually doesn't say what the science journalists thought (not a surprise even if it had been peer reviewed) and everyone just moves on.
I've been wanting a service which follows up news stories for more recent news on the subject.
I've been told this would be quite difficult. For what it's worth, Google News can't keep from duplicating news stories on the same refresh of the page.
A reply to all of the replies: I'm not asking how I could try to get a recently-published paper. We're all more-or-less aware of how easy or difficult it is to get a copy of recent publications. We're mostly ignorant of how much everyone prefers discussing brand new papers rather than 6-month old papers. I, for one, don't care at all whether a paper is 1 day old or 1 year old. Please interpret this question as asking how important it is to you that blog posts discuss brand-new papers rather than papers older than 6 months or 1 year, not as asking how to get brand-new papers.
Have you heard of how journalists have an incentive to rush their story to publication so as not to get scooped? Presumably research-based bloggers feel a similar motivation. So it seems like there is an incentive to not wait those 6 months.
In your original post, you mention the problem of remembering to access the journal article once it becomes available in your institution's database 6 months later. I recommend creating a bookmarks sub-folder. In it, bookmark your institution's database's access link to the journal in question, with the typical delay period (e.g. 6 months) added to the journal title. Below that bookmark, bookmark each article you are waiting to access (on the paywalled website), with expected availability date as part of the bookmark title. This is the easiest method that I've come up with for not forgetting to go access some article that someone discussed.
I reckon bloggers should just attach the whole paper to their article and dare Elsevier to try and sure them; maybe big name bloggers can't afford the risk but most blogs are going to fly beneath the radar and the journals sure as hell don't deserve the revenue.
edit: *sue them
A blogger may well fly beneath the radar of Elsevier, but not beneath the radar of other bloggers who bear a grudge, personal or partisan. Those rival bloggers might notify Elsevier.
It is better to cross no lines in terms of legality when you are publishing anything.
Didn't Von Neumann advocate for preemptively nuking the Soviet Union, potentially killing millions of civilians?
Why would you want to see more Von Neumann-type minds if you are also concerned about the risks of AGI?
What's interesting to me it's taken as a given that AGI will act rationally. But rational doesn't preclude negative behaviors. I suppose you could create an AGI that acts altruistically. But what if it focuses its altruism in a direction that negatively affects subgroups of humans while benefiting others? And I certainly wouldn't want let an AGI have access to Defense Systems. But would we be smart enough to prevent it from getting into them? Maybe these questions have already been addressed by the rationalist community? If so, got any links for me?
What you seem to be gesturing around is the fact that it's difficult to define precisely what you want an AI to do, without leaving the door open for it to do something in service of your stated goal that's actually really bad. This is usually called the "Alignment Problem" and is pretty much the core of GAI safety research. You can start reading about it here: https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/ai
EY was always going on about building CEV (Coherent Extrapolated Volition) into AGIs. To my mind EY's underlying assumptions about CEV are overly idealistic — i.e. if humans all made rational choices, we'd all think the same way, and we'd all share the same goals (and people could all join hands together and sing Kumbaya <#snarkasm>). It all sounds absurd to me, but then again I'm not a Great Mind of AI.
https://intelligence.org/files/CEV.pdf
I think that to be fair one must note that that essay is dated 2004 - EY would have written it when he was in his early 20s, at least 17 years ago. I think he has since disavowed most or all of it (can't remember where I saw him say so, though)? When he first wrote it, nearly nobody had yet done any high-quality thinking on the topic (that I have ever heard of): most people didn't yet realize there was even a problem, let alone be in a position to start publicly exploring possible solutions.
I made the same point as beowulf888, and related points about the incoherence of CEV and of Eliezer's idealistic and symbolic model of values, many times on LessWrong, in posts like "Human values differ as much as values can differ" (2010), "Only humans can have human values" (2010), "Values vs. parameters" (2011), "Human errors, human values" (2011), and "The human problem" (2010). I don't think EY ever responded to any of them.
Nor would most of the LW community admit that their "friendly AI" project relies on there being a single set of values which is either objectively correct, or else is "human nature" and hence shared by all humans (except, of course, for the stupid ones who don't agree with us, even though that turns out to be nearly all of them). Nor would they admit that maybe human nature, if such a thing exists, isn't so great a thing that we should force it onto the rest of the universe for all time. IIRC, those posts were upvoted much less, on average, than my other posts; and the comments mostly argued against the posts.
In googling for these posts, I found that I summarized many of my objections to FAI and CEV in a post to AIAlignmentForum.org in 2012, "Holden's Objection 1: Friendliness is dangerous" ( https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/mSktD7oj6C2zxj3KC/holden-s-objection-1-friendliness-is-dangerous ). The post has no upvotes or downvotes, and no comments; so I don't know if anybody ever read it.
Phil: I'll take a look at these. Thanks for sharing.
I notice the same sorts of behaviors in the virology/molecular biology community as what you're describing the AGI community — viz. a tendency to minimize the significance of the potential risks of their research. For instance, there's a reluctance in (at least some of the virology community) to admit that GoF research may potentially be dangerous. "Well, we're responsible scientists. We take precautions! We don't need any regulation!" But everyone agrees that the Kawaoka and Fouchier went over the line with their 2011 experiments to make H5N1 more transmissible — except that until some naysayers started making a stink about it — Kawaoka and Fouchier were considered responsible scientists. And there's still a resistance to the idea that, yes, maybe there ought to be stricter oversight these experiments.
Anyway, call me Luddite, but I think it would be very unwise AGI systems command and control responsibilities over critical infrastructure. My understanding (correct me if I'm wrong) is that one can't really "debug" why an AI manifests an unexpected behavior — i.e. one can't halt the program in a middle of a run state to look at the registers, so to speak.
Hey, at least they let you post. Nowadays, anyone saying anything even slightly skeptical about AI risk will get insta-banned.
It's a joke: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft#Von_Neumann_probes
What is the evidence? What I found was:
"He supported development of the hydrogen bomb and was reported to have advocated a preventive nuclear strike to destroy the Soviet Union’s nascent nuclear capability circa 1950. "
"Was reported" implies that there is only second-hand evidence. And "to destroy the Soviet Union's nascent nuclear capability" may mean that he was recommending an attack on Soviet nuclear facilities — whatever exist in 1950 — perhaps a reactor.
Does anyone here have more detailed information on what he is supposed to have recommended and what the evidence is that he recommended it?
Depending on your view of just how bad the Soviet Empire was, you may argue that it would have been worth it to have killed millions in 1950 to end or significantly weaken it.
Regardless of the facts of Von Neumann's life, isn't the major danger of superintelligence in the following region of the space of ideas: advocating mass sacrifice for massive benefit?
When the benefit is long in the future, and the sacrifice is right here right now, it's easy to make an emotional argument against the sacrifice, but from a rational perspective shouldn't we be less time-sensitive?
There's a problem with knowing outcomes, especially long-distant outcomes.
There's a problem with knowing anything, even that which is witnessed first-hand. It's a given that decisions are made under uncertainty.
Both von Neumann and Teller had reputations for being quite hawkish. Luckily Wikipedia insists on references...
During a Senate committee hearing he described his political ideology as "violently anti-communist, and much more militaristic than the norm". He was quoted in 1950 remarking, "If you say why not bomb [the Soviets] tomorrow, I say, why not today? If you say today at five o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?"
Blair, Clay, Jr. (February 25, 1957). "Passing of a Great Mind". Life. pp. 89–104.
In 1950 if it would've worked (about which I'm a little dubious) I would have supported that, too. As long as Stalin was alive, the probability of a nuclear World War III was far too high. I have read assertions that he (Stalin) was planning on a new war no latter than about 1955-57. We (or more precisely millions of Central Europeans) are unbelievably lucky he snuffed it in '53.
Suppose that the US had even a small chance of preventing the Soviet Union from developing nuclear weapons for a long enough time for the USSR to have a regime change--say, 1 in 10. Suppose that if we didn't do this, the odds of a global nuclear war involving thousands of warheads, and killling /hundreds/ of millions of people, would be at least 2 to 1--an estimate few people would have disputed during the period 1950-1980. Then if our goal were to minimize the expected number of innocent people killed, regardless of how bad communism is, the obvious rational decision would have been to make the pre-emptive strike.
Maybe the odds of a global nuclear war were much, much lower than anybody thought.
If so, that needs to be explained. Certainly no one at the time had any evidence that they should trust in the charity and reasonableness of the existing governments and soldiers to prevent such a war.
So I think a question which would better reflect your true objection would be, "Doesn't rational thinking require abandoning virtue ethics for utilitarian ethics, meaning that rationality is bad?"
BTW, a 1979 report by the Office of Technology Assessment, "The Effects of Nuclear War" (https://ota.fas.org/reports/7906.pdf), predicted that a Soviet "counterforce attack" (one limited to military targets) would kill 2 to 20 million Americans within the first 30 days.
It reported on 3 prior studies estimating how many Americans would be killed right away by a Soviet attack on US military and economic targets (p. 95-96): 110-165 million (DOD), 122 million (DCPA, assuming only half of warheads were ground-burst), and 76-131 million (DCPA). Assuming that people were evacuated from all cities gave much lower estimates, which I'm not reporting because I don't think it's currently possible to evacuate millions of people from a city in less than a few days.
These figures all seemed surprisingly low at the time. Most people seemed to think then that literally everyone in the US, if not everyone in the world, would die if there were such a nuclear attack.
Nuclear war is not a serious extinction risk.
But full scale nuclear war would be civilization ending, with regression below ancient levels. As we already lost low-level medieval/ancient technology except rare cases and modern one would fail due to billions of deaths and collapse of infrastructure.
> If so, that needs to be explained
If you think global nuclear war would entail human extinction, a fun but bad explanation is the anthropic principal. The weird thing about evaluating the probability of extinction events is that someone needs to be around to do the evaluating. If you accept something like many-worlds (or a simulation argument, etc), even if there was a 99/100 chance of humanity going extinct, the only world where we can look back on the prediction is the one where it didn't happen.
What do you mean by calling the anthropic principal "bad"? You seem to accept the entire argument; so you don't seem to mean that it's incorrect.
I don’t think the anthropic principal is bad in any way, just that it’s not all that illuminating for your specific question. It not a good evaluation criteria for predictive accuracy because the same argument applies to all end of the world predictions. So you can’t really use it as evidence that the prediction was accurate. It may at least tells you to not outright reject the prediction, but that’s always the case with looking at a single prediction’s outcome.
That's an admirably precise answer. I don't think people do or even could use the anthropic principle to compare different possible causes of the end of the world, though. It would come up in something like the Fermi paradox, to choose between the view that life is so likely that we should see millions of alien civilizations, and the view that it's so unlikely that the expected number of planets with intelligent life should be zero. The anthropic principle can be used to adjust the prior of the second view, but not the first; so it would suggest that on observing only ourselves in the universe, the second view is more likely.
So I think its goodness or badness is application-specific, and depends on the math.
(BTW, I don't think global nuclear war would result in human extinction.)
Back in my LessWrong days, I made the point that, if the SIAI were right in thinking that they would be justified in programming an AI to forcibly take over the world in order to prevent a war between AIs, or between AIs and humans, then by the same reasoning the US should be trying to take over the world to prevent Russia or China from gaining enough power to take over the world. I think the parallels are obvious; either no one should try to build a "FAI" to take over the world, or the US should have tried to conquer the world in the 1990s. But I don't recall anyone agreeing with me.
What I'm saying is, anyone who thinks it's good to build a "FAI" that has "conquer the world" as step 1 on its to-do list, because that will prevent a horrible war, should also think it would have been good for the US to nuke Russia in 1950 to prevent a horrible war.
I am reading Jonathan Rauch's: "The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth". Lots of interesting discussion on the availability of accurate information. He praises Wikipedia as a well vetted source for example. What I found interesting was reading about the techniques of Steve Bannon and Donald Trump in winning either elections or the approval of the electorate. He described it as "Flooding the zone with shit". I was reminded about Campaigns Inc an early political analyst company founded by McMasters and Baxter in the 1920s. In both her book
"These Truths" and an article in the New Yorker called the "Lie Factory" she described how when consulting McMasters and Baxter won 70 of 75 attempts! They promoted the same idea by "flooding the zone with shit" as well.Their version for example used unrelated quotes from Upton Sinclair's books that made him look bad pasted on the front page of the Los Angeles newspaper every day for six weeks. Below I have copied and pasted from Rauch's book and Lepore's New Yorker article. It seemed to me the same technique used 100 years ago continues to work today. Here's the quotes.
From : "Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth"
" A good way to think about such attacks is as environmental. They attack not just individual people or facts but the whole information space. In a famous remark to the journalist Michael Lewis in 2018, Steve Bannon, the Breitbart News chairman who went on to become a senior strategist for candidate Trump and then President Trump, said this: “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” Flood the zone with shit: although the formulation is crude, there could be no more concise and accurate summation of what modern information warfare is all about. All communities, and especially the reality-based community, rely on networks of trust to decide what is and is not true. People need to know whom they are talking to, whether that person is credible, which institutions confer credibility, and so on. Every aspect of trust and credibility is degraded when the zone is flooded with shit.
From "The Lie Factory" article:
Then they wrote an Opposition Plan of Campaign, to anticipate the moves made against them. Every campaign needs a theme. Keep it simple. Rhyming’s good. (“For Jimmy and me, vote ‘yes’ on 3.”) Never explain anything. “The more you have to explain,” Whitaker said, “the more difficult it is to win support.” Say the same thing over and over again. “We assume we have to get a voter’s attention seven times to make a sale,” Whitaker said. Subtlety is your enemy. “Words that lean on the mind are no good,” according to Baxter. “They must dent it.” Simplify, simplify, simplify. “A wall goes up,” Whitaker warned, “when you try to make Mr. and Mrs. Average American Citizen work or think.”
--
I forgot to enter the author of both "These Truths" and "The Lie Factory" was Jill Lepore. She is on the faculty at Harvard and is a staff writer at the New Yorker
Here's a more complete quote from "The Lie Factory" about the campaign against Upton Sinclair.
"Like most California Republicans, Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter, who were the publicists for the California League Against Sinclairism, were horrified at the prospect of Sinclair in the governor’s office.* They had to work fast. They were hired just two months before the election by George Hatfield, the candidate for lieutenant governor on a Republican ticket headed by the incumbent governor, Frank Merriam, but, mostly, they were hired to destroy Sinclair. They began by locking themselves in a room for three days with everything he had ever written. “Upton was beaten,” Whitaker later said, “because he had written books.” And, so, those boxes in the L.A. Times:
SINCLAIR ON MARRIAGE:
The sanctity of marriage. . . . I have had such a belief . . . I have it no longer.
The excerpt, as Sinclair explained in “How I Got Licked,” was taken from a passage in his 1911 novel, “Love’s Pilgrimage,” in which one character writes a heartbroken letter to a man having an affair with his wife. (The novel, which Sinclair later found greatly embarrassing, is an autobiographical account of his disastrous first marriage, which ended in 1912 when, citing his wife’s adultery, he divorced her; he married his second wife in 1913; their marriage lasted until her death, in 1961.) “Sure, those quotations were irrelevant,” Baxter later said. “But we had one objective: to keep him from becoming Governor.' "
I'd be wary of any grand theory of politics that hinges on one's political opponents just happening to be evil people who can only win by deliberately flooding the media with disinformation. I'm not saying this doesn't happen, but from your summary it sounds like Jill's books might be more focused on making Trump look evil and his supporters look stupid than actually developing an accurate theory.
The idea seems related to this: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/01/28/bullshit-asymmetry-principle/
Ha! That's interesting. Many of the posters were in sync with what Rauch is saying in "Constitution of Knowledge". Some of the comments had quotes also in the book like "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth gets his boots on" Rauch certainly has done a ton of research for this book and I am finding it a bit enlightening, but I might suggest I am easily enlightened :)
I just came across this yesterday from the South China Morning Post...
"China’s internet police losing man-versus-machine duel on social media"
- Hordes of bot accounts using clever dodging tactics are causing burnout among human censors, police investigative paper finds
- Authorities may respond by raising a counter-army of automated accounts or even an AI-driven public opinion leader
Nice tie-in with the AI discussion above, and the Xi thread that I started (IIDSSM).
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3155920/chinas-internet-police-losing-man-versus-machine-duel-social
Sorry about the confusing writing on my part. Rauch is what I am reading and Lepore is another well known author I have read recently. Rauch is an exponent of fallibilism which he feels was also promoted by the John Locke and then the founding fathers as they wrote the constitution. Fallibilism is where you are never certain you are entirely correct only on the path towards truth. The only way to improve your certainty is to benefit from interacting with other people with diverse opinions. Common philosopgy in the sciences as well (see Karl Popper).The idea of branches of government forces individuals to persuade others and to enter into debate or discussion which many times can be an education for both sides. It certainly has worked well for a few hundred years. The Trump references are some of the more obvious examples of bypassing the process by communicating to the public without any fact checking occurring and convince by repeating the "shit" over and over again until it seems real. Democrats have certainly done same. He does point out that the fact checking has improved dramatically since the 2016 election. I just found it interesting that Lepore's article about McMasters and Baxter pointed to the same "Flood it with Shit" technique occurring almost 100 years ago.
McMasters and Baxter were SUPER successful hammering the American public or "Flooding the zone with shit". When consulting candidates they won 70 or 75 times over many many years. Sound like a pretty effective if not grand theory of politics. No need for your opponents to be evil either. I recall they helped Eisenhauer beat Stevenson and certainly Upton Sinclair was not a disreputable character either. This quote says a lot about the process” Say the same thing over and over again. “We assume we have to get a voter’s attention seven times to make a sale,” Whitaker said"
"All communities, and especially the reality-based community, rely on networks of trust to decide what is and is not true."
Can anyone explain to me who or what "the reality-based community" is? Because if it just means "people like us" or "the people on our side", then it's nothing more than a flattering label to stroke your vanity: "*we're* smart, we're in touch with reality, that other lot are all crazy and liars".
It's an expression I often see and I find it irritating: we are all living in the same world, and unless you believe this is a simulation, then we're all reality-based.
Rauch describes "reality based community" to be those admitting they could be wrong, but continue to use research or discussion with others of diverse opinions to focus on heading in the direction of truth. As opposed to believing something based on intuition or to multiple exposure. Rauch feels proper journalists in particular are trained to seriously test or review before publishing and then if a mistake is a made a retraction should be made.
"Rauch describes "reality based community" to be those admitting they could be wrong, but continue to use research or discussion with others of diverse opinions to focus on heading in the direction of truth."
So nobody who endorses the mainstream model of transsexualism then? I have to doubt that Rauch means to exclude them.
"Rauch feels proper journalists in particular are trained to seriously test or review before publishing"
That strikes me as astonishingly naïve, enough to throw out any prior assessment of his accuracy.
Of course there is a lot more to Rauch's discussion in the book. In the current chapter I am reading he brings John Stewart Mill into the discussion. Similarly Mill emphasizes the importance of free speech and questioning your certainty of what you believe to true. The Nazis (at least the ones in charge)for example were very certain of what they were doing and weren't considering they could be wrong. Jacob Brownowski in the Ascent of Man series has an episode with his depiction of the Nazis while standing in a concentration camp. Why could you not have considering you were wrong was his cry to end the episode.
Here's a link to the Brownowski Ascent of Man episode I mentioned. It's a terrific series, but this really short excerpt makes the point for considering you could be wrong on anything you believe in a dramatic way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltjI3BXKBgY
> That strikes me as astonishingly naïve, enough to throw out any prior assessment of his accuracy.
Seriously. The last 10 years of journalism driven by social media has featured an avalanche of falsifications of that premise.
Rauch says exactly that. The 2016 election was the early exposure to Russian bots and others on Twitter and Facebook. That made a pretty big mess of things. Currently both Twitter and Facebook have programs for fact checking in place and is much more difficult to "flood the zone with shot" through either of them.
Their "fact checkers" are not really checking facts. Twitter and Facebook could easily eliminate all bots by requiring all accounts to register with id, even if that identity is not disclosed. Bots instantly solved.
I'm any case, that wasn't my point. Journalists have been very clearly biased and partisan for decades. The bigger the platform, the more disconnected from reality, by and large. Mainstream press is itself "flooded with shot", so the claim that all or most journalists are credible fact checkers just doesn't pass muster.
It's unfortunate to use "reality-based community" to refer to people who are rational. For a while, it was self-congratulation for liberals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community
I agree! Not sure why Rauch is using "reality-based community" He probably explains further in the book. Will have to do some searching.
After this discussion I am reminded of Daniel Kahneman's System one and System two. Not being certain correlates with System two with less intuition and more rational thought.
Here's the first place in the book Rauch uses "reality-based community". He describes his learning curve when starting out as a journalist many years ago.
"Facts were gathered from interviews and sources; analysis was checked with experts; every sentence was edited, copy-edited, and often fact-checked; tipsters suggested story ideas, sources waved me off bad leads, and challenges to my claims percolated in conversations within the newsroom and outside of it. The sense of having joined something much greater than myself, and of swearing allegiance to the exacting standards of a great tradition, made the enterprise of journalism appealing and compelling to me even on the days when the practice of journalism seemed grinding and routine (which was often). There were some things, I learned, that we—we, as professionals—do: prize accuracy; seek a comment from a person before publishing something about her; prefer on-record information; consult multiple sources with varied viewpoints; abjure jargon, long-windedness, extravagance, and opinion (except in sports writing, which seemed to require all of the above). There were other things, I learned, that we do not do: pay for information, accept gifts from sources, betray confidentiality, tolerate meddling from the ad department. As a young journalist, I was being rebuilt, reshaped, into a worker ant in humanity’s hive-mind, humans’ most important and beneficent creation. Without realizing it at the time, I was being inducted into a community, the reality-based community—the same community into which Socrates was inducting Theaetetus so long ago. I was learning the Constitution of Knowledge."
Rauch, Jonathan. The Constitution of Knowledge (pp. 13-14). Brookings Institution Press. Kindle Edition.
So, 2021. On the one hand, it might have been a bad idea to use the phrase. On the other hand, I think the first use may have mostly been forgotten, and I can hope that his description of it being a process of seeking truth rather than a stable description of a group will catch on.
Upon hearing of "flooding the zone with shit" I've seen it in the real world so many times. Whether liberals or conservatives do it, and they do it a lot, it is basically creating a background noise of "well, if so many people are *thinking it*, there must be something there." Even for things that are obviously manufactured.
Does it actually work? Or is the "flooding the zone with shit" meme just so much flooding the zone with shit? I have seen umpty arguments along the lines of "such-and-such deception is the reason for political outcome X which I dislike, because I am confident if everyone saw through the deception as easily as I do, the outcome would be Not X." Unless this argument is advanced by a very unusually well-informed or smart person (who would have some exogenous reason to believe himself capable of much better bullshit detection than average), I have to wonder if this is actually just a line of self-soothing fantasy which helps a person avoid coming to grips with a harsh reality that his viewpoint may not be nearly as universal as he wishes it were.
The most recent example is the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, where lots of people were convinced KR killed two black people. None of the American news stories *said* this, but there was enough repeating that he was a "white supremacist" that people figured he must've killed some black people if everyone is talking about it.
I don't feel happy that I didn't get taken in; I'm wondering what other things I'm still deep in shit about.
The example of Hillary Clinton running a child prostitution ring out of a pizza parlor in Washington DC had to to have been flooded to some zone or another as a one time exposure couldn't be enough to be convinced that something so preposterous actually happened. Some guy went to the pizza place and fired a weapon as I recall. He could not have been convinced with diligent research! He heard it over and over from multiple sources IMHO.
Population being generally bad at bs detection is an argument in favour of lots of bs being spreaded.
As for how comes this specific person managed to reveal a scheme that other people didn't, there is a much easier explanation than the person being a genius - political bias. People are much better at spotting bs, promoted by their outgroup and my worse when it's their ingroup responsible.
If one wants to notice right wing bs - listening to moderate left's critique seems to be a good idea, and vice versa. And to notice centrists bs, the best bet is probably checking out what radicals on both ends of the spectrum have to say.
At the risk of smearing the metaphor too thin, I don't think anyone - Bannon, Trump, or whoever else - would have been able to flood the zone if it weren't already substantially filled. "Experts" (read: the credentialed) may have been able to mask the stench for a time, but at the cost of getting it all over themselves.
Thought I'd save this for an even-numbered thread, since it's political, and the comments may get heated. "What if Xi Jinping just isn't that competent?" by Noah Smith.
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/what-if-xi-jinping-just-isnt-that
I'd have to agree that Xi's political moves seem clumsy. But then again he may see no reason for finesse since he's got such thorough control of the levers of power. Or it may just be Dictator Dunning-Kruger effect—which we've seen over and over again among totalitarians, bot right and left.
From the Xi quote below, he certainly seems proud of his deep understanding of politics. It's almost as if he's compensating for what his family went through during the Cultural Revolution.
"People who have little contact with power, who are far from it, always see these things as mysterious and novel. But what I see is not just the superficial things: the power, the flowers, the glory, the applause. I see the bullpens [Red Guard detention centers] and how people can blow hot and cold. I understand politics on a deeper level." —Xi Jinping
As an aside, I'm not sure why Noah Smith thinks Putin is a competent dictator. And there are several places where it's clear he hasn't spent any time in China.
He's comparing Russia now to Russia BEFORE Putin took over. https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/what-if-xi-jinping-just-isnt-that/comment/3528315
As I said, I find that opinion that to be bizarre. He's been far from a competent leader.
How so?
Putin displays the same overall behaviors as Xi. The only difference is that Putin doesn't have a vast Party apparat to rely on to do his bidding as Xi does. In fact, Putin sending assassins overseas to knock off people he perceives as enemies seems like a Kim Jong-un move. Xi is a bit more circumspect in that regard in that he has his enemies kidnapped. Out of sight out of mind. No unpleasant bodies to for the media to express outrage and horror over.
Please tell me whey you think Putin is better, smarter, or more politically adept than Xi?
Most of his tenure hasn't consisted of assassination attempts (although those do appear to have been successful). Like Noah Smith said, he took over a country that was doing terribly and over a longer tenure than Xi and has thus weathered more problems than him. However, if you look in the comments on Smith's post you'll see I don't entirely agree with his perspective on Xi.
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/what-if-xi-jinping-just-isnt-that/comment/3594823
Not directly on topic, but I find it fascinating that Xi rules with a claim to be the successor of Mao, but he seems to have completed the transition from left wing to right wing, certainly on social matters, and possibly on economic ones as well.
Depends on what you criteria you judge his competency.
Noah seems to be mostly judging Xi by his ability to achieve goals western politicians have. Goals like enhancing economic wellbeing (for all), protecting the nation, and providing nice lives for the citizens. I think western politicians only pursue these goals because democracy does a reasonable job of thrusting these goals upon politicians.
I think Xi is an autocrat without any illusions about it. His goals are to maintain power, expand his power, and use his power to funnel wealth to himself and those who keep him in power. From that point of view, the opening and closing sections of the article are glowing endorsement of his competency. Likewise many of the issues Noah brings up as criticisms become endorsements when you view Xi as having autocrat's goals.
Agreed. Xi also sees himself an actor in the larger historical context of China. He has stated that he regards himself as a "good emperor". Good emperor's were not necessarily good for the people. Good emperors imposed their will on their subjects to expand the power of the empire. Good emperors are considered to be the ones who expanded the boundaries of the empire and to strengthen it against incursions from outsiders. By Xi's thinking Mao was a "good emperor". It's a theme that crosses ideological lines in China. The lessons that the Chinese take from their history is that China falls apart without a strong central government. And having lived and worked in China, I strongly suspect that would happen if the CCP weren't there.
A question is whether XI can provide stable improvements even for Han Chinese (I wouldn't say he cares about anyone else) or whether he's riding for a fall.
Considering that CCP has its tentacles into everything important in China, I doubt if any external forces will be able to depose Xi. Unlike a command and control economy, the post-Mao CCP has let the economy mostly do its own thing. It's just that there are always party members on the boards, and they get jobs for their kids in management. So the CCP has a lot influence at all levels of society. Although there's a lot of 香脂 ("fragrant grease"— i.e. bribery) involved in business deals, the leadership is less of a kleptocracy than say Russia. If Xi starts rocking the boats of the CCP's rank and file, a competitor might come to the fore to unseat him. But right now the ones who are dissatisfied are keeping their heads down — or in prison on corruption charges awaiting to become organ donors.
Why don't online dating profiles include letters of reference?
A big problem in dating is identifying bad actors. For those who have a letter of reference from an ex, it seems like this would be a valuable signal. But nobody does this!
If you were online-dating and you saw a profile with a link to a letter of reference from an ex, would that make you more or less interested in the profile? (Assuming the letter said good things.)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=u4UygIXn-28
I'm not interested in dating, but if somebody was weird enough to do that, I'd be slightly more interested. The best evidence, of course, would be a prediction market on a measurable outcome.
What exactly is the incentive for the ex to write this letter? I would think that the most relationships don't end with the partners each thinking that the other is a terrific person.
I guess much of the value of including it would be as a rare signal: because most of the time you don’t end up in that situation, if you *are* able to credibly claim that your exes think you’re a terrific person that’s a good, selective indicator of your quality.
No it isn't. If you're that great on paper, but your exes are still your exes, there's clearly a hidden personality or other flaw monumental enough to outweigh all that other shit, as a matter of demonstrable practical fact.
There are reasons to break up that don't have to do with any personal flaws. For example a relationship turning long distance because of external reasons and both realizing that it is not going to work out like that in the long term, even though the relationship would have gone on happily if it had stayed in-person.
I'd certainly give my ex a glowing letter of recommendation.
Yeah this exactly describes my experience, and I'd definitely give the ex who introduced me to this community a very positive letter (and I suspect I'd get a similar one from her)
There can be a difference in preferences, like one person desires to move to another country, the other wants to stay at home. One person wants kids right now, the other wants them 10 years later. Etc.
Also, sometimes people leave their partner because they are trading them for a better partner... but that doesn't necessarily mean there was something horribly wrong with the old one; they may still be the second best choice.
How about if, while writing the recommendation letter, the ex decides "Hey, she/he was really great, why did we break up at all, let's try this again?" and they get back together?
Sounds like a movie plot. The movie may already exist
.
Less. Getting along that well with an ex suggests a fairly cool and cerebral relationship style, which, meh.
More. Getting along that well with an ex suggests a fairly cool and cerebral relationship style, which, yay!
(Sorry Carl Pham, not trying to make fun of your reply, just felt fun to contrast our different points of view that way.)
Not at all! To each his own, I say, and besides if you are going after all the Ms. Spock types I experience less competition for the hot-tempered hot-blooded Irish redheads. Win-win.
Indeed!
I'd be concerned that the letter of reference was forged.
A new application for blockchain tech, ha ha
I’ve oftener wished hookup sites would allow people to post reviews. But it quickly becomes clear that these reviews would have far worse problems than typical Amazon reviews.
I think relationship recommendation letters would have similar difficulties. It’s very hard to verify their authenticity, particularly in the cases where the letter or review would be most valuable.
"I’ve oftener wished hookup sites would allow people to post reviews."
Oh, gosh. I'm imagining one of these now, and oh boy.
"Sharon: total slag. Up for anything and gagging for it. 10/10 but for the love of God get round to your nearest STD clinic immediately afterwards - Kevin".
"Kevin: neither shower nor grower. Lied about everything, including his name. Do not touch with a ten-foot barge pole. Complete waste of my night - Sharon".
Anyone with an ounce of creative writing ability could have a *lot* of fun with this
This has been done, and led to more than one scandal at universities.
One thing I liked about Friendster was the testimonials from friends. Not reviews exactly, but more endorsements. If Friendster hadn't have imploded, this would have been great for dating applications.
OkCupid did this a long time ago. You can't allow negative references because that's a vector for abuse, and the number of positive references somebody has probably just measures how extroverted they are.
Aside from the many implementation issue others have mentioned, this would drastically exacerbate inequalities in sexual access - how exactly is a virgin meant to get any without a past relationship to vouch for him?
Tell the truth.
Perhaps not the same, but ebay (and amazon, I think) has a new vendor listing to explain the lack of reviews.
It's an interesting challenge to distinguish a genuinely new person/vendor vs. someone who's just trying to get away from a bad record.
How do you have intuitions on immune health?
It seems apparent that people with stronger immune systems have much harsher responses to vaccines. Does this apply to regular illness as well? Is the guy who gets really sick but bounces back in a day healthier than a guy who has a low-grade cold for three weeks that kinda sucks but never gets *really* bad? Or is a binary "immune system good/bad" not applicable here at all? Is there any relevant research here to dive into?
I recommend against "strong immune system". If it wasn't clear enough already, COVID has emphasized that people need well-calibrated immune systems-- strong enough to do the work, but not so over-powered that it turns against the person. (Could this be a good analogy for governments?)
One might think that the law enforcement branch of government is the part most directly analogous to the immune system. Police brutality, and the associated societal pathologies it leads to, would then be analogous to autoimmune disease. (It's less obvious how other related things like the military, border control, the court system, etc. fit into this analogy.)
I like the analogy! Physical borders are your skin and airports are your mouth and digestive tract - if things are going through your skin something's gone horribly wrong, while your gut is meant to input some things but to be selective about what it allows into your blood and what gets excreted back out.
There's no clear correlation between a response to an antigen and the strength of someone's immune system. Someone can have a strong reaction to a vaccine, yet not build up the necessary antibodies to protect against infection. Likewise, someone who has no reaction to a vaccine may develop high antibody titers.
It's the Terrain Theory folks who have contaminated the conversation about immunity with their talk of "strong immune systems". Everyone's immune response varies to different antigens — it may be related to one's genetically inherited HLA profiles. There may be other genes that play a role. But it's difficult to characterize what a "strong immune system" is as long as it hasn't been compromised with drugs or infections like HIV.
That's very interesting. I can believe that there are people who have immune systems which don't react effectively to much of anything, and people who have immune systems which are generally overreactive so that they get a bunch of autoimmune diseases.
I wasn't aware of the hugger-mugger in the middle.
So a vaccine is a *simulation* of an infection. A good vaccine is enough like the infection to help a lot of people, but it's not a perfect simulation.
I've always felt I had a mediocre immune system. I catch every cold and never have reactions to vaccines, which leads me to believe my immune system is not fast-acting but maybe gets around to it when it gets a chance. Interestingly, no reactions to my two Pfizer shots, but a compressed and intense reaction to the J&J booster I just did. My immune system was able to rally enough anti-bodies in that six months before the booster to show that J&J vector virus who was boss, it seems.
Can you tell us what perpetual motion machines were proposed? I really want to know.
Aha, you're trying to steal their ideas for limitless free energy, aren't you? I'm onto you!
An open-source 3d-printable perpetual motion machine could solve global poverty. Also, ruin the environment by dramatically increasing the global warming.
Perpetual motion machines pretty much by definition don't have waste heat, so they don't increase the amount of thermal energy in the world.
Speaking of which, my favorite perpetual motion machine is this:
1. Diodes are well known to only pass current in one direction (true enough).
2. If you heat a diode, or any electrical element, the motion of electrons will accelerate -- you will get currents. Problem being, the currents flow randomly in all directions, so no net voltage.
3. So we take a bunch of diodes, wire them up in series, and through the whole mess into the Pacific Ocean. The heat creates electrical currents, which the diodes rectify, so we sit happily on shore and put our DC voltage to work.
4. In order to recirculate the energy (so the Pacific Ocean doesn't eventually freeze) we use the ocean to cool our motors and electronics, so the energy returns to the ocean as heat.
See "The Seebeck Effect."
I have a great idea for a perpetual motion machine: simply obtain one universe, and start it with a bang.
So far as we know, the universe as a whole is not a *perpetual* motion machine, at least if the motion in which you're interested in can do work. It certainly has a big, big spring, which will take a long, long time to wind down. But not forever.
My wife works for the scientific crowdfunding website experiment.com. She frequently talks to me about some of the submissions they get (all of which go through a review process before being approved for posting), so I can only imagine the types of submissions you are getting. I hope you have a good team to help.
Request for collaborators!
I was considering applying for a grant but what I need are collaborators not money. I’m building a tool to better visualize balance sheets, within the “money view” perspective within banking and finance. The goal is to make it accessible for educational purposes.
Looking for 1-2 people interested in helping build it. I’ve gotten started using d3 but open to alternatives
Boston based as a nice to have!
I'm interested. Looks like Substack doesn't have a DM mechanism, drop me a line at jacob@mailinator.com
I'm not Boston based, but I would be interested if you're still looking. I have some background in both corporate finance and development. Get in touch at vxxj20034@relay.firefox.com
There's a program called Backpack Buddies that has spread by word of mouth throughout the country. Volunteers get together to pack weekly backpacks to give to food insecure school kids on Fridays. The kids return the backpacks after the weekend. As far as I know, BB is completely grassroots, no central organization I can find. A grant worthy project might be to hire someone to do a case study on how BB started, how it spread, why it spread, and how other grassroots programs might replicate its success. Apologies if this case study already exists. But if it does, it's not readily findable, at least not by me.
"Anything that might lead to 20,000 clones of John von Neumann" I pay 20,000 people to change their name to John Von Neumann, which will make them really good scientists since they wouldn't want to let down their namesake. Any takers?
Here is my grant proposal for an impact on the global poor: Mass production of a simple combustion engine vehicle, similar to the consumer niche a Ford Model-T filled at the beginning of the 20th Century. Supply
chain logistics are probably one of the greatest hurdles to overcome in a developing country. Cars increase demand for roads and their supporting industries.
Why isn’t this a for-profit startup?
The Tata Nano was an attempt to do this ~10-15 years ago in India that ran into a ton of problems that I think would be pretty common in any developing nation. The three biggest ones, as I remember, were:
- Any simple "world car" is going to be competing with cars that are the sum of all learning, production-cost-amortization, etc. in the history of automobiles. The Nano was a remarkably _interesting_ car, especially if you like cars, but it wasn't competing with more expensive new cars, it was competing with used cars as well as the old-new cars that are dominant in a lot of developing countries. (The big one at the time was the "Maruti 800," a 1979 Suzuki kei car that remained in production there until 2010.)
Those cars were very cheap because they'd been around so long, which also gave them a lot of goodwill and a lot of credibility.
- Those Maruti-type cars also were just "regular cars" to people. A big problem Tata ran into is that people saw their Nano—this incredible feat of engineering, hugely expensive, brand-new and in its own strange way cutting-edge—as a car for poor people. People in India felt that way! Even though the competition was motorcycles and literal cars from the 70s and 80s, people didn't really want to be seen driving "the incredible and affordable developing market car." They also were seen as less reliable and safe because some of the cost-cutting and "clean-sheet" measures made them very unfamiliar and unusual to people who were used to regular cars like us, just very old ones.
(To some extent that's also just the inevitable result of creating something with a lot of attention focused on it—obviously the cars built on 1979 bones weren't safe either, but every incident with a Nano was a huge story.)
- Even if you are well-funded and doing something that the entire world thinks is cool, if you're in a developing nation you are going to have developing-nation problems in terms of government dysfunction, factionalism, etc., not to mention the infrastructure issues you're trying to fix. All the states competed to give Tata land to build their huge new-Model-T factory, one of them won and used eminent domain, and opposition parties (and the people whose land was taken) caused such massive blowback that they ended up having to move all their plans and delay the car.
Today the best-selling car in India is the... "Maruti Alto 800," a more modern (than the 1979 800) but still very conventional little hatchback. I think you see the same sort of issues with the old OLPC project, where they tried to make a very weird purpose-built laptop for the developing world's kids but it turns out that you can't really compete with capitalism just blasting out cheap laptops of the type that everyone else is already using, no matter how perfect in theory your features are for your specific market.
If you _were_ to do something like this, I think an ICE would be a bad idea too. It's perhaps the case that electric cars are too expensive for the developing world right this second, but it's going to take you five years at least to design and build this thing, and the market for ICE cars will continue to be filled by used and dated cars from the west and the far east in the meantime. Even setting aside the pollution aspects (very important in developing countries driving very old cars, though), electric car infrastructure is in many ways easier to build if you're starting from scratch, since solar and batteries are getting cheaper every year and you could even charge them with a portable diesel generator if you wanted. No point in building gas stations if you can just skip that part.
Agreed.
The single biggest failure point of big altruistic projects is that the person pushing the project never once asks the people at the other end what they think. This is more or less the thesis of "seeing like a state", but for charity work.
If you want a high-impact project that isn't just meant to be rammed down people's throats from above, then I'd strongly suggest actually talking to a diverse set of people on the ground (note: including local researchers but excluding expats from your country, or foreigners working at local NGOs) about what would actually help. And even then, be aware that people lie to others and themselves about what they want and what they are willing to trade for it.
Given how cheaply second hand foreign cars could be bought and maintained with low cost labor in India, I think Indian production was only made possible by trade barriers which made automobiles much more expensive in India than they could have been. The government's view seems to have been that India was too poor for second hand cars so had to have new ones.
In 1908 a Model-T costed $300 USD. Adjusted for inflation that's around $9000 USD. What do cars cost now in India?
Quite bit less than that. List price for a new base model Maruti Suzuki Alto 800 is Rs. 3.15 lakh, which is about US$4200.
Thank you
You have to build the infrastructure to match the cars. Making cheap little cars is going to lead to a traffic disaster. I moved to Madagascar in 2009. They had a coup and then started importing a lot of cars and in about 5 years the traffic was disastrous and these cars didn't seem to solve a lot of problems.
A Model-T could be built in a barn or garage. After all, they competed with horse and buggy, so there is a lower hurdle for getting the infrastructure up and running.
I was referring to the snarling traffic caused by too many cars and too few lanes and roads and parking
https://www.oxdelivers.com/truck this one is electric though.
What’s a good reason not to invest in https://www.klimadao.finance/? Having read the docs, it seems to check out. I’d appreciate some skeptics…
Spam is generally best ignored?
Well, there's the historical risks for anything on the blockchain - that someone might take all your money by fraud or hacking, with no way to reverse it because blockchains are immutable and have no central authority to appeal to. The DAO (the first token of this type) got hacked and they literally had to fork the blockchain to get people's money back.
A DAO meant to fight climate change has the extra difficulty that it's using the most energy-expensive means of exchange on the planet to do so, which might be a good reason to doubt its environmental impact.
That's the argument against blockchain stuff in general. Now I'm going to dig into the docs and see what this scheme specifically is doing:
It seems like the goal is to create a coin that's minted by buying carbon credits. If someone has a carbon capture project (verified by a third party), they can mint a coin called "Toucan." If you buy and lock up one ton's worth of Toucan (called a "BCT"), you create a Klima coin. And the Klima coin does... nothing? You hold it and hope it goes to the moon? It lets you vote on what the DAO does?
Frankly, I'm not sure what the point of this all is. I don't see why someone would buy this to offset carbon instead of buying the Toucans or the offsets directly, and I don't see why someone would use Klima as a medium of exchange, or how you'd turn a profit off of trading them.
Thanks! I understand the risks intrinsic to blockchain.
As to the goal of the project though, it seems quite clever, at least in theory.
I think the point is that Klima’s attractive staking APY is supposed to encourage you to buy carbon credits and lock them in the DAO treasury, thus ideally driving the price of carbon up in the wider economy. The staking rate is covered by the income the DAO earns from holding all liquidity in the sushiswap BCT/USDC and KLIMA/BCT pools. It does this buy selling new klima at a discount to those who loan LP tokens over time. The ultimate goal, apart from driving the price of carbon up, is to create a kind of non-USD pegged stable coin backed by the price of carbon. This should create a cycle; the price of carbon goes up, so does the price of Klima, thus Klima is more attractive to bond and stake, further carbon price increases, and so on.
As to the environmental concerns, the project runs on Polygon, not the ETH mainnet.
An idea for something altruistic to do: Charity jewelry.
People like jewelry because it is expensive. If a guy gives expensive jewelry to a woman it proves (sort of) that he loves her. And people can wear expensive jewelry to show off how rich they are. But mining gold and diamonds is bad for the environment, so currently jewelry is harmful.
But instead of making jewelry from expensive stuff, you can make it from cheap stuff (plastic or some cheap metal) and still sell it for a high prize. How will men prove their love by giving jewelry from cheap material? How will people show off how rich they are? Because when the jewelry is bought the sale is registered on a website anyone can read. It says who bought the jewelry, how much it cost and optionally who they bought it for.
Also there are some symbols on the jewelry that shows how expensive it is. A ring with one heart costs ten dollars. Two hearts: a hundred dollars. Three hearts: a thousand dollars. And so on.
And the money the company makes off the jewelry goes to charity.
One can try to shift public opinion so people think wearing charity jewelry is moral and wearing gold/diamond is immoral. The prize of gold and diamonds will drop as fewer people wear it. Then even people who don’t care about the morality of wearing gold and diamonds will not want to wear it anymore because it is cheap.
(One advantage of this jewelry is it’s worthless to a thief, since the thief’s name isn’t registered on the website.)
It doesn't have to be just jewelry. It could be things you hang on a wall like a painting. Or you can have things to decorate a car with. Somebody can show off that they would rather drive a cheap car and give money to charity, than drive an expensive car. Public opinion could shift to thinking driving an expensive car is immoral.
You can have a place that is like a bar, except instead of men buying drinks for women, they donate to charity for them. (I doubt this last part will be popular.)
You might enjoy reading Scott’s writing about the fictional society he created, which has a similar concept of necklace beads that are proof of different levels of charitable donations. Here is the specific page (out of a couple different pages detailing different aspects of the society) which covers the charity beads:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/11/raikoth-symbolic-beads/
Hadn't seen that. It was similar, but with my system you don't need police to stop people from wearing fake charity jewelry, since you can look on the website to see if they are cheating. And you don't need priests, but you probably need a big advertisement campaign to make the jewelry popular.
If you don't need to look on the website, you won't. You'll only do that if you know or suspect Jane is lying about her expensive charity jewellery, and that's only if you know Jane in some way. Some stranger you pass in the street? You won't know or care if their rainbow-plastic-beads are fake or real charity virtue signalling.
People will look it up out of envy and suspicion, and it only takes one gossip to see you on the street flexing counterfeits. Look at the Scandinavian tax records: people love looking up their neighbors and acquaintances and seeing how much they report making and if they seem to be a bit too unprosperous on paper compared to their social media photos...
"Envy and suspicion" are not exactly the emotions one would hope to evoke in a charitable context 😁
Naturally, of course, everyone donating to charity does so purely out of the goodness of their heart. It's only the rotters faking virtue which need worry about neddlesome nellies checking the register, and let ridicule be their condign reward!
This would only work if the very rich take it up as a trendy signal. The kind of people who are so rich, everyone knows they are only wearing plastic and costume jewellery as a hilarious jape. Like the Freak Dinners of the early 20th century; I came across this in a 1914 collection of Chesterton's Father Brown stories but they seem to have been real stunts:
"It appeared to be an extract from one of the pinkest of American Society papers, and ran as follows: "Society's brightest widower is once more on the Freak Dinner stunt. All our exclusive citizens will recall the Perambulator Parade Dinner, in which Last-Trick Todd, at his palatial home at Pilgrim's Pond, caused so many of our prominent debutantes to look even younger than their years. Equally elegant and more miscellaneous and large-hearted in social outlook was Last-Trick's show the year previous, the popular Cannibal Crush Lunch, at which the confections handed round were sarcastically moulded in the forms of human arms and legs, and during which more than one of our gayest mental gymnasts was heard offering to eat his partner. The witticism which will inspire this evening is as yet in Mr Todd's pretty reticent intellect, or locked in the jewelled bosoms of our city's gayest leaders; but there is talk of a pretty parody of the simple manners and customs at the other end of Society's scale."
From Definitions:
https://www.definitions.net/definition/freak+dinner
"Freak Dinner
A latter-day term, arising out of the examples set by American millionaires to outdo all previous attempts in the way of sumptuous banquets. There have been dinners costing £100 per head. To please the eye, champagne has been made to flow wastefully from a fountain. The name is, however, more correctly applied to the scenic embellishments, as when the banqueting-chamber of the Gaiety Restaurant was converted into a South African mining tent, and real Kaffirs were the waiters, to remind the diners of the mode by which they had acquired their wealth."
So plastic jewellery worn by the rich in the vein of dressing up as paupers for a slum freak dinner.
People who are not rich will tend to hang on to buying gold and diamonds for those they want to show great attachment, because being poor/relatively poor, they've had to wear cheap jewellery and now, if they can save up to buy something expensive, they're not going to buy cruddy plastic, they want the things that have been signifiers of status and value for centuries.
Ivy Getty can wear ha-ha-only-joking plastic jewellery and have it noted as a wonderful, wonderful charitable idea. Jane Smith wearing plastic jewellery is "yeah, so what? cheap is all she can afford", and she won't get the opportunity to explain that no, this is *expensive* cruddy jewellery for charity. Rich people can afford gold and diamonds, so deliberately wearing cheap tat draws attention and the society pages will be happy to run stories on the charity initiative involved. Ordinary people are just that - ordinary.
Also, if this becomes mainstream enough, then there will be knockoff fake 'expensive cheap tat for charity', just as there is a market in knockoff/fake high fashion handbags and watches, because who is going to be checking a website every five minutes to see if Jane is wearing the expensive cheap plastic or the cheap cheap plastic jewellery?
Scott, I think you may be underestimating the amount of good these grants can do simply by giving people permission to be ambitious. In my view, there are a lot of interesting projects out there that just need a small amount of activation energy to unlock months or years of hard work. For most of these the constraint may be much more psychological than financial.
I wouldn't be surprised if you can make a meaningful impact by sending some of these applicants a note saying "I can't fund this, but it looks interesting and I'm excited to see what you can do, please keep me updated". Certainly $500-1k could end up buying much more impact than you'd expect.
Speaking from personal experience, even getting a *followup question* from TC after submitting an Emergent Ventures application was shockingly motivational, even though I never heard back after that. "Wow, TC didn't throw my silly idea into the reject pile immediately." Two years later I'm *still* working on that startup.
You've probably seen Tyler's writing about this: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/10/high-return-activity-raising-others-aspirations.html
This affects two of the categories/questions you mentioned:
1. People looking for a "stamp of approval". First, I don't think you're actually staking any meaningful amount of reputation on this. And second, I'd bet most of the impact would be on the applicant themselves rather than their friends/potential colleagues.
2. The "engineer at google who won't self-fund it". As you point out, obviously this is not a financial constraint. Could you respond with something like: "this looks great, I'm setting aside $1k for you, to be unlocked after you send me a progress update 90 days from now."
Anyway, this is a great initiative and glad you're doing it!
Agreed and then some. While I've no project worth putting on the back of a napkin at the moment, the idea that good people will fund sociopolitically beneficial things (as opposed to just exponentially profitable things) is motivating all by itself.
+1, external confirmation that idea looks interesting can be very useful and motivating
I wonder if people who experience frequent vivid, lucid dreams are more inclined to believe it's possible that life is just a dream. If you can experience a world of lush detail full of characters and plots while sleeping and write it off as mere imagination upon waking, why give so much credence to waking life as a higher reality?
The biggest difference between dreams and waking life are that dreams usually have big continuity problems. One moment you're in The Batmobile getting it on with Wonder Woman and the next moment you are at a supper club on the moon sitting next to Keith Richards; the next you are in a press conference getting asked hardball questions by your Little League coach from 20 years ago--and you are unable to explain how one event led to the next or why you missed the ground ball.
But here's the thing: usually you only recognize the continuity problems in a dream after you wake. So who's to say we aren't going through waking life missing all sorts of continuity problems? We know, in fact, that we are, in things such as our field of vision, where are brain fills in missing pieces of scenery, but there are also big gaps in continuity we don't notice? Like maybe math isn't real, it just seems to make sense because our brains are enjoying pretending that math is a thing that works.
Other than frequent continuity problems, how else is waking life different from the nocturnal dream world?
You get surprised. I've been surprised by real life a lot, never in a dream.
> I've been surprised by real life a lot, never in a dream.
Really? Happens all the time to me. Arguably, lucid dreaming is surprising, ie. suddenly realizing you're in a dream is surprising. Maybe you have some different qualitative criterion for "surprise" than I do.
I get startled surprised in nightmares frequently. Usually wakes me.
I haven't had nightmares since I was about 6 years old. But when I was little, a magical dream being helped to protect me from my nightly nightmares. I haven't encountered the being since then, but I'm convinced it was entity that was external to my own consciousness who helped me.
In dreams I often suddenly know things.
Know things as in the waking world? Or know things that only apply to your dreaming world?
Only apply to the dreaming world.
You never solved a problem in your dreams?
One time I dreamt that Homer Simpson was my father, and then I worked out that the age difference between Homer and me was too small, he could not be my father, so I must be dreaming. Then I woke up.
I don't think I've worked out a problem that had any practical usefulness in the waking world.
When I say I suddenly know things, I mean like I suddenly knew that Homer Simpson was my father. Nobody in the dream told me that. That sort of knowledge happens very often in my dreams. I'm guessing that happens in other people's dreams too?
This kind of sudden realization happens to me quite a bit.
Yes. Even though a house in my dreams may look nothing like the house my grandmother lived in, I always know it's my grandmother's house. And there are cities that I identify as LA, Paris, and Hong Kong—though they look nothing like those cities.
I've thought that some dream experiences are tagged and the tag is felt as real even though the experience isn't there.
You dream you're reading the best book in the world, but when you wake up, you don't remember anything about the book. There isn't even a feeling of rapidly fading inaccessible memory.
My guess is that the great book tag was activated and you were trusting the feeling that went with the tag.
the response to solipsism my dad gave me when I was a kid: I know I could never come up with the Art of Fugue (or so many other artistic and intellectual achievements) myself, but when I'm awake in a world with other people I can experience it
That was how I felt about Goedel, Escher, Bach.
In dreams, many people have no sense of touch or smell (exercise: try to describe the texture of something you touched in a dream). I don't even hear in dreams.
Interesting. I will experiment with those things because I'm not sure.
I don't have a sense of taste in dreams, but I think I could develop one. I've learned how to read simple sentences in dreams. That was a great accomplishment for me, because I'd often dream of going into bookstores, but I was unable to read what was in the books. I found that tremendously frustrating, but my dreaming mind seemed to be hyper-dyslexic. The printed words would just swirl around. The turning point came a few years ago when I driving up to my dream Nova Scotia, and I came to a stop sign on a country road. I realized I could read the word S T O P on the sign. I woke up elated. Since then I've been able to train myself to read at about a 2nd Grade level in my dreams — i.e. simple sentences with simple one-syllable words. So I'm visiting the children's sections of bookstores in my dreams now.
As for scent, I wouldn't have said I had a sense of smell in my dreams, but I was having one of my adventure dreams where I tease a T. Rex and let it chase me. The T. Rex in my last adventure dream had an overpowering urine-musk smell. When I woke (laughing at the adventure I had just had), I realized that my door from my bedroom to my back porch was cracked open. And I had received a visitation from the neighborhood possum (who must weigh in at least 20 lbs) and the T. Rex I was smelling in my dreams was actually the possum's BO.
Dreaming is not only one of my major recreational activities, but I see my dreaming consciousness to be as important as my waking consciousness — and I spend as much energy cultivating my life in dreams as I do in waking consciousness. The dreaming world that I inhabit may not have the overt consistency of the waking world, but I've noticed that my dreaming world has a geography and it has landmarks (whose shapes might change) but which I can consistently recognize as the same landmarks from dream to dream.
If you are an active dreamer, and someone close to you is also an active dreamer, I suggest you attempt to dream about each other. See if what correspondences show up between your dreams. Having done this with another active dreamer it gave me a renewed belief in ESP.
And, yes, I encounter continuity issues in waking life, as well. They're just subtler than what I encounter in my dreaming life.
Thank you for posting your comment!
Could anyone pick some really easy low-hanging fruits for the new paradigm in obesity epidemic research ("something's poisoning our drinking water"), such as measuring lithium (or other stuff) contents in drinking water and food plants and correlate that with local obesity numbers? It would be cheap too. https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-part-i-mysteries/
This is not a new paradigm but a silly idea unspported by data!
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6miu9BsKdoAi72nkL/a-contamination-theory-of-the-obesity-epidemic?commentId=9gMgjDQ5xgbxe8aLd
Haha whoops, I think I just submitted a proposal that might fall under a three categories of things you need less of.
Does your perpetual motion machine run on the blockchain?
Hey Scott,
Can you clarify your stance on funding ideas that are for or linked-to a for-profit startup idea? If the startup has some altruistic motives or otherwise fits one of the "proposals I need more of" categories, are you more interested in funding it? What if it comes with a promise to also do some altruistic activity (e.g.: give away the product for free to certain groups, or give discounts to all ACX readers, or do peer-reviewed research) if funding is given?
Lots of capital chasing relatively few promising projects? That's the Bay Area of the past ~5 years, all right.
I do think a $1000 grant from Scott is worth considerably more than $1000 of software engineer self-funding in a couple of ways-- a) creating feelings of obligation to produce a deliverable and b) as an "advance on one's self-confidence" (I think that's a Tyler Cowen saying?). But Scott doesn't seem confident that he can manufacture either a) or b) efficiently enough for that to be a viable model.
To flip the script a little: Scott seems to have a fairly clear idea of what kinds of questions could use answering, plus access to a talent pool from whom $1000 and the chance to be involved in ACX would buy quite a bit of potentially-high-quality research. Why not spend 5% of the grant budget to commission a dozen MMTYWTK-style investigations of promising topics?
It's not just the Bay Area - we live in an age with much more money than ideas. I spent some time over the past year looking at fintechs (from an acquisition angle) and it is just painful to see how much money is chasing not-particularly-original-or-profitable ideas.
Yeah, this.
I have a lot of crazy ideas I'd like to try, but they'd require a lot more than $1000, or even $250,000. For example, I'd like to try building a charter city out in the wilderness, built with a mix of new tech and traditional ideas. But I'm pretty sure that would require more like $250 MILLION, and wouldn't actually make money.
The smaller ideas I can do myself without funding. $1000 isn't going to help me write a book or an app. But the motivational and advertising effect of "winning a prize" is still big. Prizes usually don't come with a clause of "we will only give this to you if you absolutely need the prize money to keep on doing your work" because that's almost never true for creative prize-winners.
The way he's structured this, it seems like the only people who could win are smart, hard-working, poor young people in 3rd world countries who want to study engineering so they can immigrate to the US. Nothing wrong with that of course.
In SSC comments (or even earlier, or on Reddit..?), somebody mentioned a story about a CS student who literally couldn't understand the for loop. The comment author had spent 50 (?) hours with the student doing 1-to-1 instruction and it still didn't help.
Does anybody remember this story?
I would also be curious about this or similar stories.
I have nothing for you, but I felt compelled to say that I sometimes use while instead of for because I screw up the for(x=x;x<x;x+-) declaration so often
That seems like a very different category of issue, since presumably you understand the intent of a for-loop well enough to implement it as a while loop.
That seems weird to me. I mean installing an IDE is harder than understanding a loop. It's up their with the walking/breathing/chewing gum procedure.
While() is the simplest programming logic you can possibly implement; even asyer to grock than an if, imo.
It's just
base case condition
while(some condition){
STUFF
something that could effect the condition
}
Could someone point me to a fact check or refutation of this article? Basic claim is that heart attacks among pro sports players are way up since large scale vaccination went into effect. What is the alternate explanation?
https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/over-a-60x-increase-in-serious-adverse
Just my first impressions after reading, but:
1) The author dismisses reporting bias out of hand, but I'm sure why he's so confident. The list includes everything from high-school athletes to amateur Belgian football players to (recently) retired NFL players. Apparently he's comparing this to the previous 20 years of such events, but I'm not sure where the data from the previous 20 years comes from. (Maybe it's described in more detail behind the paywall?) But I would expect many people in a category this large die or have non-fatal cardiac events every year without making the news.
2) He also categorically dismisses the idea that Covid itself could have anything to do with this, since the athletes were "all" tested at the time (has he verified this for everyone from the high school athletes to the amateur Belgians? maybe, but I'm not sure). But more relevantly, even if this were the case, that doesn't rule out covid as a cause unless you're sure these people *never* had covid previously. Otherwise, an equally compelling interpretation is that having contracted covid increases one's susceptibility to heart attacks. But this idea is not considered, with no explanation as to why.
It's possible there are answers to these objections behind the paywall. But the part I saw just looks like a lot of hand-waving with very little solidly backing it up.
It seems like a good null hypothesis for all of these things is that whatever harm a vaccine gives you is equally likely from a COVID infection. Not that this will always be the case, but if you can’t show a significant difference here, I’m skeptical.
1) rigorous statistical analysis or didn't happen
2) If athletes were unable to train at normal intensities during lockdown, I'd not be surprised that they are at a greater risk as they ramp back up.
> None of these players had COVID at the time of the event since they are all tested.
Testing is not instant cure. They could be tested with covid detected.
(maybe I missed something but bolded part makes no sense and does not encourage to read entire text)
I looked further with claims like "20% jump in teen deaths among vaccinated"
Without:
- source
- statistics of death rate among unvaccinated (though in such comparison excluding ones with preexisting illness would be helpful)
Overall: garbage level of statistics, actually posting images of unsourced tweets as sources.
I believe that the most interesting and matching ideas are yet to be submitted. Doesn't a good submission take at least a few days to prepare? It's been what, two days? On the contrary, I would expect the least worked-on submissions at this moment! That is not a thing people want to rush, generally. So yeah, good luck to anyone still working on theirs. I would be working on mine, too, if I applied.
Until we wait for a few weeks, this is also my default explanation. Good proposals take a long time to write! We've only a few days, and assuming these people have jobs otherwise, just two days on the weekend definitely isn't enough.
Is this news to anyone? https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnfarrell/2017/05/07/how-sexual-selection-drove-the-emergence-of-homosexuality/?sh=2f46eadc5f84 Chuck in some queer theory / constructionism and I reckon that’s mostly it.
I *think* this article is saying male homosexuality is a side effect of genes that improve reproductive fitness, but it doesn't come out and say it.
Why the reluctance, do you think? What are the consequences of this becoming more widely considered?
I don't think it's reluctance so much as the author forgetting to include it. Sometimes being too familiar with an idea makes it harder to explain because you forget that the reader doesn't already know the central point.
i think i disagree with you there. the point he makes is that homosexuality isnt a problem for evolutionary theory, as many people imagine, rather it's part of how it works. to put it unpleasantly, these are the people we'd rather didn't reproduce.
i think this is what makes it so uncomfortable/ it's one thing to recognise that one isn't at the top of pile in terms of sexual desirability, because you still have a fair chance of finding a mate. but when your undesirabiltity becomes formalised like this?
i also think it ties in with trans identities too
I don't see that in the article at all. He's saying that certain behavioral genes that make a man more attractive to women will occasionally have the side effect of making a man gay. So, far from rooting out gay genes, sexual selection favors them.
I read the opposite; that selection pressure favors factors that produce homosexuality.
>the point he makes is that homosexuality isnt a problem for evolutionary theory, as many people imagine, rather it's part of how it works. to put it unpleasantly, these are the people we'd rather didn't reproduce.
You're assigning teleology to evolution. Evolution doesn't have an overseer who prunes those who shouldn't reproduce. Evolution is stupid, selfish and wasteful (every forest is a grand monument to nature failing the Prisoners' Dilemma; if plants could all agree to not grow tall they'd be far more efficient, but tall plants shade short ones).
It's true that in a hunter-gatherer world male homosexuality is only *weakly* selected against (and thus can be an acceptable occasional side-effect of normally-positive genes), because most of your long-term genetic contribution comes down to "does the tribe survive" and male homosexuality doesn't decrease the overall reproductive rate of the tribe (though it still somewhat-dilutes your share of that tribe's success). But genes that make you unlikely to reproduce, *after* you eat all that food uselessly growing up? No.
(Evolution *does* favour *other tribe members* being predisposed to kill off those who are a net negative to the tribe, of course.)
yeah, i'm saying the homosexual 'identity' is exactly that
Giving it another read, he *does* come out and say it.
""In other words," he writes, "selection for the aesthetic, pro-social personality features that females preferred in their mates also contributed, incidentally, to the evolution of broader male sexual desires, including male same-sex preferences and behavior.""
It's been discussed many times already, among others by E. O. Wilson. The problem with this hypothesis is that by Hamilton's rule, in order to maintain an altruistic allele of this kind in a population, the reproductive benefit to relatives divided by the genetic relatedness coefficient must be larger than the disadvantage. Greg Cochran makes the point that since (a) male homosexuality confers a 100% disadvantage and (b) the relatedness coefficient is at most 0.5, the reproductive advantage a gay allele would have to confer on women (+2 offspring surviving to reproduce) is completely implausible in a population under the Malthusian limit, which was of course the case for 99.9% of humanity's existence. [https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/04/16/hamilton-rules-ok/]
The article we're discussing doesn't claim that the male gay genes improve women's reproductive success; rather it claims that the gene typically makes a straight man more attractive to women, and occasionally makes a man gay. If the actual gay effect is rare enough, and/or enough gay men sleep with women despite their preference, it could still be an overall advantage.
Six of one, half a dozen of the other. The applicability of Hamilton's rule does not depend on which sex is getting a reproductive advantage, only on its size and relatedness of those who benefit to those who bear the reproductive cost. The genetic relatedness coefficient of a man to himself is 1, twice as large as it can be to other people (unless they're his identical twins). This reduces the size of the advantage to unaffected carriers required to balance the disadvantage and helps your side of the argument, but not by much. Modern US data given by Wikipedia says ~4% of men are gay. The fraction of carriers, though, must be significantly larger than this number in order to be compatible with the rather low level of MZ twin concordance for gayness (see e.g. doi:10.1007/s10508-008-9386-1 for a sample of ~1500 Swedish twins). The MZ/DZ concordance numbers are compatible with a polygenic additive model, but are much too low for a single-gene explanation, where concordance is usually close to perfect. They are also much lower than those for adult height and IQ, and lower than those for psychiatric disorders and even some infectious diseases like tuberculosis and ulcers [https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/04/21/biological-determinism/], and this is partly why Cochran wonders if the causative agent is something other than genetics.
Invent a standardized test of rationality and do a blind-randomized-crossover study of several nootropics’ effect on those test scores. And another longitudinal cohort study on how the test scores predict life outcomes independently of IQ. Why not? I am not really the right person to do this though, as I am not an expert in rationality or nootropics. (I keep putting off finishing the sequences in favor of playing TF2 and I feel bad about it)
SSRIs and bruxism: I recently started SSRIs for moderate depression and anxiety (12 days ago). Escitalopram 10mg during dinner in that case. 4-5 days after I started the treatment, my teeth started to hurt when I chewed during the day. Also, I had small sudden teeth clenching movements (a bit like when you take MDMA for people familiar). ~8 days after I started the treatment, my jaw started to feel tired during the day.
For now, I've switched to taking the SSRIs in the morning rather than during dinner, and I'll see how the situation evolves. If the situation doesn't improve after a week, I'll probably try a magnesium supplement. If that still doesn't help, I'm not sure what to do. Lifestyle interventions would probably help, but considering I ended up taking SSRIs instead of making those in the first place, I'm not sure if it's a realistic expectation for myself.
I've searched a bit online, and found one study about it (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5914744/), but the only data was about the absolute rate of bruxism, and not SSRI-induced bruxism: "The overall prevalence of bruxism was higher in the antidepressant group compared to the control group (24.3% vs 15.3%, p = 0.002)". There's also https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26536018/ (I can't see the full text), which says "The prevalence of bruxism was significantly higher in the antidepressant group (24.3%) than in the control group (15.3%). The incidence of antidepressant-induced bruxism was 14.0%.". If I'm reading correctly, this would mean that antidepressant-induced bruxism in people using antidepressants is 24.3% * 14.0% = 3.4%.
I'd be interested in any advice on how to deal with bruxism and the experience of people that had bruxism following an SSRI treatment.
Yes, I've experienced the same - as you say, very reminiscent of MDMA. I've found that it lessened with time, but it's worth getting a proper mouthguard (one that's moulded to your teeth) to wear at night if your teeth are hurting during the day.
Do you know any success stories of people who managed to get in touch with (ultra-)high-net-worth individuals, earned their appreciation through establishing a mutually genuine, friendly relationship, and then obtained funds sufficient for securing e.g. a middle-class income for the lifetime (e.g. $2M)? If so, what were the decisive factors and common themes underlying these dynamics?
Bonus points for the situations where it happened online, and the recipient came from the "unappealing" demographic (e.g. an introverted working-class nerd rather than a charismatic salesman type).
When you say "obtain[ing] funds sufficient for securing e.g. a middle-class income for the lifetime (e.g. $2M)" are you talking about something more along the lines of an investment in a startup or are you talking about something more along the lines of a sugar baby or mistress arrangement?
Generally speaking, wealthy people don't randomly hand out millions of dollars to strangers. So what's the actual pitch here: what would you be offering in exchange for the $2M plus tax that you're asking for?
"Do you know any success stories of people who managed to get in touch with (ultra-)high-net-worth individuals, earned their appreciation through establishing a mutually genuine, friendly relationship, and then obtained funds sufficient for securing e.g. a middle-class income for the lifetime (e.g. $2M)?"
Sorry, but I'm laughing about this because I was complaining about the slavering coverage Vanity Fair gave to Ivy Getty's wedding (nothing against the girl, she has enough family dosh to have her very own fairytale wedding if she wants one, but the tone was so boot-licking even for a society pages fluff-piece it annoyed me), and you need to be Gavin Newsom, governor of California, whose very good family friend is Gordon Getty:
First, have your dad work for the Getty oil company. This makes connections.
Second, get the very rich family friend to invest in your own businesses. Hint: butter 'em up by naming these after the opera said friend wrote.
"Newsom and his investors created the company PlumpJack Associates L.P. on May 14, 1991. The group started the PlumpJack Winery in 1992 with the financial help of his family friend Gordon Getty. PlumpJack was the name of an opera written by Getty, who invested in 10 of Newsom's 11 businesses. Getty told the San Francisco Chronicle that he treated Newsom like a son and invested in his first business venture because of that relationship. According to Getty, later business investments were because of "the success of the first."
Third, decide to go into politics because the Health and Safety regulations cheesed you off:
"One of Newsom's early interactions with government occurred when Newsom resisted the San Francisco Health Department requirement to install a sink at his PlumpJack wine store. The Health Department argued that wine was a food and required the store to install a $27,000 sink in the carpeted wine shop on the grounds that the shop needed the sink for a mop. When Newsom was later appointed supervisor, he told the San Francisco Examiner: "That's the kind of bureaucratic malaise I'm going to be working through."
Fourth, hook up with the kind of local political big-wig known for rewarding associates with plum jobs:
"Newsom's first political experience came when he volunteered for Willie Brown's successful campaign for mayor in 1995. Newsom hosted a private fundraiser at his PlumpJack Café. Brown appointed Newsom to a vacant seat on the Parking and Traffic Commission in 1996, and he was later elected president of the commission. Brown appointed him to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors seat vacated by Kevin Shelley in 1997. At the time, he was the youngest member of San Francisco's board of supervisors."
Fourth, always remember to be grateful to the well-heeled family friend backing you all the way, even if that means turning up for his grand-daughter's big wedding while other stories wonder how come you have gone missing in public since the recall election?
https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-pol-ca-gavin-newsom-san-francisco-money/
https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/11/09/about-that-lavish-getty-wedding-where-gavin-newsom-returned-to-the-spotlight/
And that is how, while you may only have a piddling personal fortune of a mere $20 million as against your patron's share of $2 billion, you can manage to eke out a middle-class income for your lifetime 🤣
I'm not quite qualified enough to do this, but what would be really cool if anyone has the capacity would be a setup modeling Biocurious outside of the San Francisco area. Maybe a setup to help high school kids make therapeutic phage and explore its ramifications? Of course "someone should do x" is kindof a cheap statement, I suppose. The original Biocurious has several highly credentialed volunteers.
While conducting this is also above my level, now that there's polygenic testing a long-term study of its effectiveness on something like socioeconomic status would be interesting. Though I don't imagine these grants are large enough to get a p value for something like that. But if there's a shortage of good applications it might be something to consider. Especially since such a study might be less funded from other sources due to social rather than technical issues.
I'm thinking about writing a blog, updated roughly monthly with deep-dive articles at the intersection of finance, infrastructure, and the environment. Topics would include:
- Short-term harm vs long-term benefits of energy infrastructure expansion, with case studies in hydropower and copper/lithium mining
- Nuclear's niche (or lack thereof) in a world of cheaper renewables
- How to think about the time value of money in the context of finite resources
- Should rich countries build more roads?
- Private vs public ownership series [transport infrastructure / utilities / energy transmission]
My questions for you are:
1) Are you aware of someone already doing something like this? I think it would be useful to exist, but don't want to replicate it if someone's already done basically the same thing.
2) I'm not looking for necessarily mass adoption (these will be long-form and wonkish), but would this be interesting to people, or is it *too* niche? I won't be seeking subscriptions, I'm financially comfortable.
I have an interest in the subjects you mention, but I don't think that's particularly important. What matters to me is whether you have interesting, thought-provoking or novel things to say, which leads me to my substantive point which is that I'm only interested in writing which exists, not that which is imagined or possible or part of some plausible future universe.
I don't mean to be harsh, but it strikes me that someone asking if they they are going to be stepping on someone elses toes by writing something, is likely to be making sure that the status quo continues. And the status quo is your blog not existing.
There are people who write blogs and those who do not. The characteristic of those who write blogs is that they have overcome all the hurdles that prevent the writing (and publishing) from happening. And some of those hurdles are worrying about all the negative reactions that other people may have, including disinterest. And sometimes the slightly bizarre worry that other people may be writing about the same kinds of things...
Take the plunge. Jump. Leap.
If some people like it and give you positive feedback, so much the better.
It does sound like you're hovering near the last hurdle or two......... Leap!
Thanks! Don't worry, not interpreted as harsh. I'm not concerned about stepping on toes (no one owns this stuff!) but more about wasting time by replicating existing work. I haven't found any though (at least not publicly available), and I suspect I may have a relatively unusual insider viewpoint. We'll see if it's ready for the next classified post!
Splendid. I'll read it if you publish it!
I see there are spam comments on substack now (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-198/comment/3627168 until it gets deleted). How do we flag them?
Not very easily, or at least I couldn't find much; they seem to be letting it up to the owner of the relevant substack to report/block offenders.
But you can send an email to this address:
https://substack.com/content
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I’d be interested in proposals to restore public trust in science and modern medicine. Like having science communicators, public health experts or historians go to rural Alabama to talk about immunology, the history of infectious diseases etc.
There are excellent science communicators (Kurzgesagt, Veritasium), but the only people who consume them are the people who are already pretty well versed in science.
This would work if the problem is that rural people are stupid and lack relevant knowledge. That is not the only reason we have lost trust in modern medicine.
I think it also aims to address the problem that rural people lack social familiarity with people who spend their time thinking about and working with science and medicine.
I mean, you say that but...
But what, exactly? This kind of vague insinuation is way less helpful... if you disagree, I would like to hear why (in good faith)
Let's put this the other way: how about funding a bunch of rural Alabamans to come lecture science communicators and public health experts?
No? Why not? Because the experts are The Experts and what do a bunch of rednecks know? Exactly the point.
Trust is the problem, and it won't be solved by having a bunch of blow-ins from the Big City come and lecture the quaint natives. The quaint natives already realise quite well the Big City slickers think they're a bunch of dumb rubes. What you need is (1) local knowledge - can you find people respected in the community? what about the local doctors? and (2) two-way communication: *ask* the rural Alabamans why they don't trust "science and modern medicine", treat them like reasonable people not dumb hicks what all walk around barefoot and chewing on straws and never heard of soap and water.
I'm a culchie myself, I'm familiar with the attitude of the Big City set about how we all need to be enlightened. Being talked down to, even if you are poor and ignorant, even if it's with the best intentions, is unpleasant. And people are not so dumb they can't tell you are talking down to them.
To quote again from "The Napoleon of Notting Hill":
"The Senor will forgive me," said the President. "May I ask the Senor how, under ordinary circumstances, he catches a wild horse?"
"I never catch a wild horse," replied Barker, with dignity.
"Precisely," said the other; "and there ends your absorption of the talents. That is what I complain of your cosmopolitanism. When you say you want all peoples to unite, you really mean that you want all peoples to unite to learn the tricks of your people. If the Bedouin Arab does not know how to read, some English missionary or schoolmaster must be sent to teach him to read, but no one ever says, 'This schoolmaster does not know how to ride on a camel; let us pay a Bedouin to teach him.' You say your civilization will include all talents. Will it? Do you really mean to say that at the moment when the Esquimaux has learnt to vote for a County Council, you will have learnt to spear a walrus? I recur to the example I gave. In Nicaragua we had a way of catching wild horses by lassoing the fore-feet which was supposed to be the best in South America. If you are going to include all the talents, go and do it. If not, permit me to say, what I have always said, that something went from the world when Nicaragua was civilized."
Here's some recent real world mistrust-- people in Detroit tend to not want free trees from the city.
https://www.metafilter.com/193252/Why-Detroit-Residents-Pushed-Back-Against-Tree-Planting
As I understand it, there are two issues. One is that even if a tree is free, it requires money to cover its effects. Who pays for the tree if it needs to be pruned or eventually cut down and hauled away? Who levels the sidewalk if a tree is tearing it up?
The other issue is a generalized mistrust from a previous round where the city destroyed trees in poor neighborhoods to make surveillance easier. Who knows what the city is up to this time?
I have no idea how you would make a trustworthy and easily trusted institution to pay for maintaining trees.
Using local primary care physicians and an interactive dialogue format are great suggestions. In fact one of the persons I cited are well known for teaching by taking interactive physics experiments to the public and engaging with them. And I did not mean to suggest that only professional science communicators should be used for this project.
Also to clarify, I’m not advancing the idea that scientists and and our Western institutions have an absolute monopoly on objective truth. My scope is I think more modest that you are interpreting - addressing small misconceptions that are clearly misconceptions, and have a clear negative effect on the world.
Why would you expect this to work?
The problem isn't that nobody has heard this stuff before. It's that they don't trust these people, and flying them in from the big city to lecture people does nothing to build that trust. The ruralites know these people look down on them and consider them a bunch of hicks, and regardless of how true that is, nobody is going to trust people who look down on them.
I don’t this is quite true. I have an anti-Vax relative who believed that the Covid vaccines would cause cross reactivity to syncytin thus causing miscarriages. I explained to them how protein sequences work, that they are akin to strings of letters and that by random chance any two long sequences will have short segments in common, however we can do statistical tests to figure out how much is more than random chance. They were floored that he had never heard this before. Was it enough to convince him completely? No, because he had a hundred other misconceptions that would take a novel to address. But it was still at least clear progress.
I agree that looking on down on people doesn’t help. Dialogue and clear discourse does. Possibly. But at minimum it’s worth a shot no?
To some extent you're replying to one stereotype with another, though. Just as the hicks from the sticks aren't, in fact, all hicks, it's also the case that the snotty patronizing eggheads from the city aren't, in fact, all snotty and patronizing. Some of them -- me, for example, ha ha -- may actually have originally hailed from the sticks and be quite sympatico.
Anyway, there's a decent germ of truth in the argument that *any* time you get people who are normally widely separated, geographically and culturally, in close proximity, talking, things improve. This is the general argument for desegregation, after all, and it's pretty good. It's isolation from real people in some group that allows cartoon stereotypes of the group to take shape and be given more credence than they should.
Not that I'm dismissing your concern, not at all -- you would absolutely need to try not to have lecturer types. But I'm just saying there's a reasonable presumption that getting real people from Tribe A to talk to real people from Tribe B, rather than relying on stories or caricatures third hand, will tend to improve things, all else being equal.
At least part of the problem is that reputable sources of scientific information, such as Fauci, are willing to engage in virtuous lying, telling people what they want them to believe rather than what is true. I mention Fauci because he admitted doing so, not in those words, in a NYT interview, but I think the pattern is pretty common.
My discussion of that case:
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2021/01/fauci-lying-greyhound-racing-and-trump.html
I find interesting that people find reasons to doubt Fauci, but no reasons to doubt Trump et al.
Are those really the same people? And are the people who really both doubt Fauci but not Trump really that interesting to consider?
I don't know about interesting, but I think there are a lot of them.
I mean that’s not really true. Trump got booed at his own rally for suggesting that maybe his supporters should consider getting vaccinated. And most anti vaxxers have moved on from hydroxychloroquine to ivermectin which Trump has never talked about.
What do you mean "restore?"
"I have already committed to throwing money at things, including unlikely-to-work-but-could-be-cool things. But if I have to stake my reputation on it then I’ll be looking it over with a fine-toothed comb and being super-conservative."
It would be interesting to see a "Reputation as an Exhaustible Resource" post, along the lines of https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/11/sacred-principles-as-exhaustible-resources/. The ubiquity of Letters of Rec in academia and various jobs could provide a lot of fodder for such a post. I imagine that relatively few people are in the position Scott describes here where reputational stakes are actually a tighter constraint than money, at least some of the time, but tell me if I'm wrong.
Where can I find a relatively objective restrospective on what actually happened in "Russiagate"? In other words, what did the Trump campaign actually do, what did the MSM make up, where were they right/wrong, ditto for right wing media. And it'd be great to get some sort of objective explanation on the recent developments.
Am I asking for the impossible here? I didn't follow this very closely (and I'm not sure I'd be better informed if I had) and it's a little frustrating to still not be able to separate rhetoric & exaggerations from reality.
This sounds extremely difficult to find. You’re not going to get a neutral summary from msnbc/nytimes or Glenn Greenwald or Fox News. I don’t know if any academic historians or political scientists are tackling it yet.
It doesn't help that I wouldn't trust historians to be neutral either. :)
Are you a GRRMartin fan? He thought it was all filtered through people's minds, with no omniscient observer.
Nancy: I'm not sure what you mean. (No, I'm not a GRRM fan.)
Amazingly conveniently, I was just listening to a video with GRRM explaining why he doesn't use an omniscient observer.
https://youtu.be/PH31spKQ0Ls?t=135
Why not The Mueller Report itself?
My sense is that all sides -- from Greenewald to Maddow -- basically claimed the report vindicated their stance, so it presumably is even-handed?
> My sense is that all sides -- from Greenewald to Maddow
Not to pick on you, but note that this is a spectrum that focuses exclusively on *reporting*. It's at least one large step away from the primary actors, and largely orthogonal to the legal proceedings (which IMO, I find more valuable). Keep in mind what dimensions you seek to understand, and how your view of them is shaped by your ability to survey them.
The overwhelming majority of discussion on the topic was and still is attempts to wield it as a tool in pre-existing political argument. The best technique to cut through that IME is to be scrupulously consistent in dissolving ambiguous definitions and collective nouns. What the "MSM" said about "the Trump campaign's" actions in "Russiagate" and whether or not it was true is not a question about facts, but asking what Wolf Blitzer reported on 2018-11-15 on CNN about Roger Stone's communications with Randy Credico is something that can have an answer.
I'll second BadAtChess's suggestion of starting with the Mueller Report - not because it offers anything like a *comprehensive* record of events, but because it is excels at keeping a concrete focus on actors, actions, and legal standards and serves as a good foundation for further reading and analysis. As an example, here's a bit from page 2:
>In evaluating whether evidence about collective action of multiple individuals constituted a crime, we applied the framework of conspiracy law, not the concept of “collusion.” In so doing, the Office recognized that the word “collud[e]” was used in communications with the Acting Attorney General confirming certain aspects of the investigation’s scope and that the term has frequently been invoked in public reporting about the investigation. But collusion is not a specific offense or theory of liability found in the United States Code, nor is it a term of art in federal criminal law. For those reasons, the Office’s focus in analyzing questions of joint criminal liability was on conspiracy as defined in federal law.
People can have valid differences of opinion regarding whether or not criminal conspiracy was the correct standard for an investigation. But you definitely trust that anyone debating whether or not something 'counts as "collusion"' isn't doing enough to keep their eye on the ball!
Now that you have brought it to my attention, that is actually super rough. I actually have very little confidence in any source I have seen on it, and have about 51% confidence in my conclusions.
I have synthesized a view from all the various arguments for/against I have seen, which is:
1. Some shit did indeed go down, involving information changing hands in an legally questionable way.
2. There is no (known) smoking gun (like bugging the watergate)
3. There is still enough bullshit that has resulted in persecution/confession that any Democrat would have crashed and burned, but due to the cohesion of the Republican party, the fact that Trump never pretended not to be an asshole, and the aforementioned lack of smoking gun; it just kinda rolled off the party.
4. The main thing it proved to me is that Republicans (Or democrats if you are a republican for some reason, I guess) are utterly untrustworthy, and that meaningful collaboration is impossible. IE, if there was a video of Mitch McConnel/Nancy Pelosi recreationally strangling puppies while ballot stuffing and disenfranchising black/evangelical people, Republicans/Democrats would still vote for them and the senate would just elect not to prosecute or censure them in any way.
There is considerable confusion in the US regarding whether "natural immunity" is better or worse than vaccine-induced immunity. To be clear, I understand that it's better to get vaccinated than to go out and catch Covid. But given that somebody already had Covid, are they better or worse protected from future infection than somebody who got vaccinated? This has serious policy implications.
An Israeli study found one thing; the CDC claimed the opposite.
It occured to me that it's worthwhile looking to see what the scientific consensus is *outside* the US. This issue is hopelessly politicized in the US; maybe scientists in other countries can make a more dispassionate assessment.
Does anyone know what the ex-US consensus is?
I don’t think there is a consensus. I’ve seen many results of each type. My thinking right now is that it’s similar order of magnitude but it probably depends a lot on the details of the infection, while the vaccine is controlled dosage.
Worth keeping in mind here that 10% and 90% are the same order of magnitude.
I would probably endorse something a little tighter than that - I would say we have good evidence that both reduce risk of infection by somewhere between 60 and 90% for somewhere between 6 and 24 months. But yes, it's all very noisy (though we can be pretty confident that neither one is reducing risk by 99%, and both are doing more than 30%).
Is there a name for the following phenomenon?
Scientists: Skub could reach 30 in the next century.
Media: SKUB TO REACH RECORD LEVELS, SCIENTISTS SAY
Scientists: Skub will reach 35 in the next century.
Media: SKUB TO GROW AT UNPRECEDENTED RATES
Scientists: Actually, Skub will only top out at 32
Media:
Scientists: Skub could hit 34
Media: SKUB ESTIMATES EVEN BIGGER THAN PREVIOUSLY THOUGHT, SAY SCIENTISTS
Dunno if it has a name, but it has an SMBC:
https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1623
How it should be, though I had to read the addendum twice to realize it wasn't coming out in favor of raping reporters. Perhaps I have spent too long in America.
Even the "how it should be" is a bit overoptimistic since even careful research can turn out to be wrong.
I like that SMBC, but my issue was that the scientists went from 30 -> 35 -> 32 -> 34, but the media expressed it as a constant increase.
Oh well on the scale of journalistic malpractice, that one's fairly mild. A mild horsewhipping is all that's deserved, probably.
Is anyone seriously working on geothermal? From a sustainable energy viewpoint, there is a massive amount of energy just a few miles beneath the surface. There's all this focus on bringing back fission, pioneering fusion ('30 years in the future'), or getting solar/wind/tidal energy to scale and then figuring out the energy storage problem. Yet a functional local geothermal plant seems to check all the boxes of what we want for a long-term energy supply solution.
My understanding is that most places the heat is too far from the surface for geothermal to make sense, but how much of that is just the engineering problem of digging holes deep into the ground? After all, the heat is down there no matter where you are on the Earth's surface. I see amazing work pioneering new drilling techniques to extract oil, but less focus on drilling for heat. Why isn't that something that could replace a large percent of our energy generation from other sources? Would you characterize this as a 'hard-but-solvable engineering challenge', versus 'first principles make this a practical impossibility'?
I don't even think you need to go that far. From what I know (which might be wrong), even a *house* can get a pretty-efficient climate system if it digs down 20 feet or so and uses that as a heat exchange.
It really feels like a $20 bill on the sidewalk no one is bothering with.
Maybe this? https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2020/10/21/21515461/renewable-energy-geothermal-egs-ags-supercritical
(Although I seem to remember someone bitching that the flowrate of 30 TW from the core was obviously stupid.)
That just totally calls for the back of the envelope: Wikipedia says the total internal energy flow is 47 TW which works out to 92 mW/m^2 on average. Thus if you've got 1/4 acre = 1000 m^2 you might hope to have internal-heat-of-the-Earth rights to about 92W of heat flowing up. Hmm. That doesn't sound promising. Maybe you really have to be somewhere special, like Yellowstone.
Could you translate that into effective temperatures?
It seems to me that a reliable flow of 50F air would take the edge off of a lot of cold weather, and just need some modest supplementation, and if there's enough 50F air it would eliminate the need for air conditioning.
This isn't all of human energy use, but it's not nothing.
Sure, and that's why people build out of adobe in the desert, a honking big thermal mass helps transfer some of the nighttime cool to the daytime.
But the problem I'm pointing out isn't the temperature, it's the rate of energy flow. In terms of your thought, having air available at 50F isn't enough, you need a sufficient flow rate of the 50F air available to match or exceed the rate at which heat is flowing into your house from the hot outside.
It certainly needs to be quantified. Air availability matters.
I don't know how well this one worked out.
https://www.friendscentercorp.org/green-building-quaker-values/friends-centers-green-building/geothermal-heating-and-cooling/
I'm not sure that's the right back of the envelope analysis. The Earth is covered with lots of insulating material (that's how it can be much warmer a couple of thousand feet down than at the surface), by drilling down to hotter areas and pumping a working fluid through a loop we are speeding up the cooling of the Earth's core in extracting energy from that gradient so getting (at least locally) a much higher energy flow rate. The question is more how quickly will it cool the local rock and how fast heat will conduct in to the working area from below or adjacent areas to replace the energy removed.
But in the house case going 20ft down you aren't really using any power from the Earth, you're just using the ground as a big heat resevoir to even out the temperature differences between night/day and summer/winter.
I think you're just emphasizing it *is* a back of the envelope calculation, and maybe if we break out the protactors and pocket protectors we can do better. Undoubtably. But the order of magnitude estimate is pretty discouraging. I'm pretty skeptical that drilling down ~1/50 of the thickness of the top insulating layer -- I'm assuming a 1km borehole is about the limit for economical plants -- is going to change that number by two orders of magnitude, which is what I'd guess you need for something workable.
Many people here (including my uncle) today have a ground source heat pump (also confusingly called geothermal heat pump). I hear it is very nice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_source_heat_pump
However, it is quite different from the promised revolutionary big geothermal energy (usually just "geothermal energy") where you dig deep enough to extract energy from hot rocks.
I am not too good with physics to run any numbers.
In Germany we do have some areas that are well suited to the use of geothermical energy. Munich is one prominent example:
https://www.thinkgeoenergy.com/munich-targeting-geothermal-district-heating-for-560000-households/amp/
Austin Vernon has a really nice write-up on the current barriers to widespread adoption of geothermal: https://austinvernon.site/blog/drillingplan.html
I'd like to find more info on that too. I know that in my country (America's Hat) there's one company working on this (www.eavor.com) but I don't know how to locate others. I understand that in North America, geothermal plants are probably only feasible in some western states and provinces because in other locations, the heat tends to be more than 8 kilometers down. Dunno how close to the surface it must be before it is economical.
What if my strategy to hinder progress in AI capabilities relies on making crypto an even bigger deal, so that the it hogs all the GPUs?
(side note, I get that this is a joke)
I think its generally unlikely that adding an additional user of a specialized technology will make that specialized technology more expensive in the longterm. Maybe I'm too techno-optimist, but I feel like having more consumers of a high tech good will lower the price of the good after the initial demand shock subsides.
I think that this might not be as true for low tech goods like lumber, where I think we're closer to the frontier of cheaply generating the good.
https://www.metafilter.com/193262/The-Fallacy-of-Eating-the-Way-Your-Great-Grandmother-Ate
Reading this-- and another argument that I'll keep private-- seems to have increased my ability to interpret statements. All too often, disagreements are about differing interpretations of claims, and sometimes actually misreadings.
In this case, Michael Pollan said to not eat things your grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. This is actually a fairly bad dictum for a variety of reasons, but the thing that hit me after reading a lot of comments was that Pollan was *not* saying to eat the way your grandmother did.
However, there was a lot of educational bad temper, and I found out more than I knew about how badly (both quantity and quality) a lot of people were eating possibly less than a century ago, mostly in the US and England. There are also some interesting bean recipes.
Some things wrong with the Pollan dictum: "your grandmother" is distressingly vague, considering the range of eras because of the range of ages of readers.
I don't think either of my grandmothers would have recognized sushi as food, but it's good stuff.
TastyKakes were well within the range of my grandmothers, and they're pretty processed, though I admit I don't have the earlier recipe.
Maybe Pollan meant to not eat ingredients/processes your grandmother wouldn't have recognized as food. Maybe Pringles?
Probably of interest here, there's some discussion from people whose hunger and/or satiety signals are extremely unreliable.
More education-- "things" are part of processes. "Food" doesn't just happen, it needs to be produced, delivered, and prepared. (See also medical care and vaccines.)
I forgot to mention, someone mentioned a rumor that Aldi was getting rid of some of its North American stores. People got upset. I checked, and if anything, Aldi's (a cheap but good supermarket chain) is opening more stores in North America.
Not sure of I should trust the metafilter commentariat less, my perceptions of groups being intelligent less, or people less.
Of all the web sites I regularly visit, Metafilter has the lowest signal to noise ratio. But I keep going back because once in a blue moon there's a link to something good. I've learned to avoid the comments, but made the mistake of reading them when they had a thing about the Scott Alexander/NYT ado and was thoroughly appalled.
What are the web sites you like?
Metafilter was especially awful about Scott, though there were some people defending him to some extent.
Here is #1, obviously. I also like another substack - https://tedgioia.substack.com/ for music stuff. Also good for music (and other stuff) is Lindsay Marshall's Weblog http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/bifurcated/rivets/
Others I recommend - https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/
Arts & Letters Daily - https://aldaily.com/
Science stuff - https://phys.org
News aggregator with snark and up-front bias - https://www.fark.com/
Thank you.
I think that having sushi fail Pollan's test there is an uncharitable strict interpretation of hist statement. Sushi is usually composed of some combination of Rice, fish, and vegetables. All three of those are things that your grandmother would almost certainly recognize as food. The fact that the method of cooking (or lack thereof) and combinations is new isn't enough to fail the test (in my opinion).
This isn't to say that I don't agree with the rest of your argument about lack of specificity in his statement, but I think what he was trying to say was "eat things where the base ingredients are things that humans have always considered food".
The problem is that "base ingredients" is also vague and poorly defined. Is High Fructose Corn syrup the base ingredient? Or is the _corn_ the base ingredient? The first likely wouldn't be recognized as food but the second obviously would.
It's one of those situations where the rule is, as you point out, incredibly poorly formulated, but the intent behind it is also relatively obvious and not that hard to follow.
Also, I prefer his other rule: not too much, mostly plants.
You may have a point that it was uncharitable, I'm not sure how much charity was owed.
In any case, I'm not sure my grandmothers would have recognized seaweed as food.
My grandmother once needed to use up some angel delight and some pastry so she blind-baked an angel delight pie. It was actually quite tasty.
I'm going to go all Thomas Sowell on you and say "Compared to what?"
Kohn and Abeles both managed to survive Nazi occupation and Kohn, always the wide-eyed idealist, remained in post-war Czechoslovakia while Abeles ran to the USA as fast as he could. As an old guy, Kohn gets a permit to visit his daughter, who married to US, goes around New York, sightseeing and happens to run into Abeles. They talk a lot about life and making it in the America and then Abeles asks:
"And how's the old country these days?"
"Well, you remember Einstein's old Albert, with that relativity of his?"
"Sure"
"It's very relative as well. As a country? Nothing much. But as a concentration camp? Five stars!"
My grandmother constantly tells the story of a time as a girl when they tried to make a cake using some cake mix and the result was so thin, hard and inedible that they threw it out the door like a frisbee.
The meaning of "your (great-)grandmother" derailed the hell out of that thread.
The vagueness of the criterion made me immediately want to abstract over all the cultural/temporal differences. Not "your grandmother", but anyone's grandmother. Or indeed anyone who was responsible for feeding a family in a food culture unaffected by ill-defined industrialisation of food production. I was surprised by how many people in the thread read it totally literally.
Derailed? That discussion was heading in a wild variety of directions.
While I agree with some of these criticisms of Michael Pollan's writings, I also found 2 of his other books to be excellent - The Botany of Desire and This Is Your Mind On Plants.
I liked his _Second Nature_, but then he became less interesting. I might check out _This Is Your Mind on Plants_.
Just to add a little heat to the inequality issue, the US government is richer than just about anything else. Rich enough to impose highly destructive sanctions and hardly notice. Rich enough for wars against small countries to hurt just a little, Rich enough for the war on drugs and mass incarceration to be sort of affordable.
And yet, people who want to reduce inequality want the US government to have *more* money, presumably on the assumption that the people who want to reduce inequality will decide how its spent.
Aren't you making a strawman here?
People who want more equality want goverments to spend their budget in a specific, inequality reducing way. Taxes and increasing govermental budget are obviously the means to this end not the end itself. If the same end could be realistically achieved by redestributing the money in the budget, without a need to increase taxes, inequality concerned crowd wouldn't demand taxes increase for its own sake.
If you look at the record, you'll see that taxes won't necessarily go to the programs you want.
If you look at the record, you'll see that taxes not going to the problems we want is *their* fault.
Similarly, I'm not convinced that the inequality (inequity?) crowd would cease demanding tax increases (on the wealthy, however defined) if the existing budget were redistributed such that inequality were reduced.
Were there any prominent Democrats who explicitly and consistently urged the 2020 BLM protesters to go home because of the pandemic?
No, not that I saw.
But after the video of George Floyd dying under Derek Chauvin’s knee became public, urging protesters to go home would probably have made matters worse.
At that point it became a matter of choosing the least bad options to minimize physical and social damage.
> Perpetual motion machines (yes, really)
I would love to see a blog post listing some of the cooler perpetual motion proposals -- with critique hidden behind spoiler tags, so that people could work out the puzzles for themselves.
So would I! It seems like a fun exercise, and would help build intuition about entropy.
Only if they are perpetual motion machines of the second kind.
"The questions I most often had after reading people’s applications were “why would this be good?”, “why isn’t this a for-profit startup?”, “but what actual, concrete things are you going to do?”...."
Oh boy that took me back; I was a program officer at a mid-sized grantmaking foundation for several years ending a decade ago. It was a good experience overall and I learned a lot. But I did also come to see why so many of my peers on foundation staffs were so desperate to find ways to reduce the amount of useless grant proposals without also depressing the flow of decent ones worth considering....some folks who otherwise loved their work had gotten downright wild-eyed about that particular conundrum.
Anyway here's a friendly offer: be happy to volunteer some time to help you with that time-consuming initial sorting of wheat from chaff. Not sure how exactly, we could brainstorm a bit maybe. Anyway it is a process that I have professional experience on both sides of and maybe a bit of that could be useful to you?
Related to the recent Whither Tartaria post, my reply (featured in the comments follow up) and the general YIMBY movement: I voted against the city council representatives and mayor of the suburb I live in outside of Detroit last week, and they won anyway. These elections are held in the off, off year, as basically the only thing on the ballot to depress turnout and give the incumbents a huge advantage, and they ran mostly on a platform of restrictions and hardline zoning powers. I see a diffuse benefit, concentrated harm to making zoning more permissive here, exacerbated by the relatively low population to begin with, making it hard to get the kind of sweeping change I really desire. Worse than that, the state statute that permits zoning in general and city master plans in particular seems to be more restrictive than similar things in neighboring states. Does anyone know of any kind of concentrated YIMBY movement outside of the like 4 or 5 biggest metros in the country? What about in-depth discussions of land use policy on a state by state basis?
I recently read Donald Hoffman's The Case Against Reality. Hoffman makes insane-sounding claims, yet I find the hypothesis hard to reject outright.
His basic hypothesis is that our perceptions aren't showing us anything close to the "truth" of objective reality because having useful perceptions will, in a Darwinian sense, outcompete true perceptions almost every time. On the surface that doesn't sound like such a revolutionary idea; what is revolutionary are the extremes to which he takes the idea.
I generally think of the difference between perception and reality thusly: we perceive the color blue whereas the reality is my eye collides with a frequency of light waves my brain interprets as blue. Blue is the perception; the frequency of light waves the reality.
Hoffman goes WAY beyond this. To him, the light waves themselves are merely the next layer of the onion. After all, we used our powers of perception to perceive the existence of light waves, and our perceptions not only aren't interested in truth, but are fatally allergic to it for Darwinian reasons. So light waves are an illusion, time and space are an illusion (Hoffman uses quantum behavior as Exhibit A of our inability to perceive whatever it is that is actually going on in objective reality), and hence nobody is going to make any progress in figuring out what gives birth to qualia if we continue to believe in silly things like neurons and brains, since they are 3D objects in space and time, mere illusions of our perceptions and therefore implausible.
Whereas Hoffman's hypothesis that "perception attuned to Darwinian fitness" > "perception attuned to reality" is strong enough as to be almost tautological, where he loses me is in his examples that mean to show that fit perception is rarely aligned with truth perception. His typical example is of a resource, let's call it "water", which one needs a moderate amount of to stay fit. Both not enough of it and too much of it will kill you. Now assume an organism has simple binary perception of this resource, water. It can perceive water as red or blue. Now assume water appears in nature in varying quantities probabilistically according to a normal curve. If the binary perception system registered "red" for not much water and "blue" for a lot of water, such perception would be true but not useful, because survival is about getting a moderate amount of water. Consuming water while perceiving it as red or blue could lead to underconsumption or overconsumption of water. OTOH, a perception system which reads "red" for too little water, "blue" for a moderate amount of water and "red" again for a great deal of water would be less true, in the sense that the organism would be bad at gauging whether a little or a ton of water exists, yet more useful because the point is simply to discover whether a moderate amount of water exists.
I think the problems with that model are obvious. Like, what is the analogy here with a real-world situation? If we are actually talking about a resource like water or food, we don't need to perceive a moderate amount of it, we only need to perceive whether we are still hungry or thirsty while consuming it. That's a simple binary perception. I tried to come up with some better analogies for Hoffman's model than he uses in the book yet can't.
Just want to add that Donald Hoffmann is a Cognitive Science professor at UofC at Irvine with a PHD from MIT, not some New Age autodidact.
That further lowers my opinion of professors.
This sounds like Plantiga’s Evolutionary Argument against naturalism. Which is the sort of argument I used to love dissecting, and now I find utterly uninteresting, because it’s the sort of argument that is only persuasive to people who already agree with the conclusion.
In one sense I find this assertion uncontroversially true, even obvious. For example, if you observe sufficiently stupid animals, it's clear that if you (as a large potentially dangerous animal) stop moving long enough, you pretty much stop existing as far as they are concerned. They have learned movement = danger, and they are just incapable of comprehending that something that wants to eat them can discipline itself to not try to, for a while, in order to improve its ultimate odds. Their brains just aren't sophisticated enough. Then there's the issue of human memory, which we know isn't stored byte-for-byte, pixel-by-pixel: we store "key frames" and reconstitute it on demand from certain assumptions and emotional overtones, which leads to the problem of eyewitness testimony that is wrong, the Rashomon effect, the "artificial" memories for which Elizabeth Loftus is (justly) famous for exploring, and so forth.
All very fascinating stuff, and if that's basically what he's saying -- that we are in some ways hobbled by the nature of our sensory perception, which has been ruthlessly tuned for survival instead of getting at the truth -- I don't find this uncontroversial.
But arguing that this means we *can't* get to the truth, or normally don't, is a bridge too far for me. I can appreciate evolutionary efficiency, but it seems a reasonable axiom one would need to persuasively rebut that the closer sensory perception mimics actual reality, the better the survival advantage. The examples he cites (and those I am citing) are all about approximating reality for the sake of speed or reduced expense in processing and storage, more or less the brain making an MP3 instead of a FLAC of reality. Fair enough: but surely the more sophisticated the organism (= has more energy to burn) the *less* it needs to approximate reality for the sake of saving energy and time, and the more the advantage of a better approximation makes itself felt. Field mice may indeed economize on their visual processing circuitry, because they have a very short lifetime and, what the hell, it's easier to replace a mouse eaten by a clever hawk with another mouse than build a better mouse that is smart enough to not be fooled by the hawk. For humans, who are very expensive on a per-zygote basis, this is not a good tradeoff -- so we are built much, much smarter.
For his argument to work, we would need to conclude that the distortion of reality is in some axis *not* related to mere approximation or lowering the fidelity for the purposes of efficiency in processing or storage, so that even as processing and storage resources increased (as we go from mice to humans, say) the distortions did *not* diminish. Nothing in what you've quoted so far says squat about this, so I'd say that argument remains unmade, and it's a pretty important one.
One would also need to argue that humans being cannot use their reason to overcome the distortion of the senses, and this, too, seems challenging. Blind people can learn to build mental 3D models of the world. Mathematicians can develop instinctual apperceptions about the behavior of wholly unnatural things, like 5-dimensional spheres or something, with enough practice and thought. I would say after decades working with it, I have pretty sound instincts about the predictions of (non-relativistic) quantum mechanics, so it no longer feels counter-intuitive and strange to me. Where is the argument that reason cannot work its way around the limitation of the senses?
I know someone who's serious about hobby sward-fighting, and he's said that humans fail to notice sufficiently nonchalant movement. He's also serious about meditation (Sufi) and the like, and says it's difficult to be sufficiently nonchalant to do this reliably. He's working on it.
As for your larger point, I think the rational angle isn't whether human perceptions are completely reliable. The important question is what they're unreliable about, and by how much. And what they're reliable, or pretty reliable about.
I see no reason to believe there *aren't* large realms we're missing out on.
Dont' quite agree. I think the point is whether, with care and exertion, rationality can compensate for whatever inaccuracies or shortcuts exist in perception. Id est, in your example, could someone be trained to *not* fail to notice nonchalant movement? For the case of field mice, probably not. For the case of humans, evidently yes. So that points *toward* my conclusion, and away from Hoffman's.
You might be overestimating our capacity compared to the complexity of the universe.
For example, we're said to be able to keep 7 =/- 4 things in mind. I suspect that "thing" isn't well-defined. Still, what if there are situations which take keeping 100 factors in mind? Maybe there's only so far you can get with abstraction and computers.
Also, for this argument, is there a difference between a few very highly trained specialists and what people in general can do?
>The examples he cites (and those I am citing) are all about approximating reality for the sake of speed or reduced expense in processing and storage, more or less the brain making an MP3 instead of a FLAC of reality.
I didn't mention it above, but one of Hoffman's strongest arguments is: say we live in 100-dimensional universe. It makes sense that we data-compress that into a 3D visual field in order to quickly navigate it. He argues we likely don't live in a 3D universe by quoting a bunch of physicists and cosmologists who argue we likely don't.
He also invokes the Holographic Principle, which, according to Leonard Susskind says "The 3D world of ordinary experience--the universe filled with galaxies, stars, planets, houses, boulders, and people--is a hologram, an image of reality coded on a distant 2D surface". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle
Among Hoffman's bizarre claims is that he finds it suspicious that so many things we perceive visually, such as the bodies of animals including ourselves, are symmetrical. If we exist in a (>3)D universe are we likely symmetrical?
Hoffman argues something like this (as best I understand it): our visual perception does this neat trick where it data-compresses this N-dimensional universe into only 2D dimension, and then, for the sake of error-correction, maps this 2D image onto a 3D image. That could explain why we perceive the body of a lion as symmetric. We can more quickly recognize it if it displays symmetry.
Hoffman's central metaphor is that what we perceive as real-world objects are much like icons on your computer desktop. The icon of a file on your desktop gives you quick, relevant information about the file, but it tells you nothing about the details inside the file.
To paraphrase Woody Allen: what you perceive as a lion looks nothing like a "real lion", but it has the head of a lion and the body of a lion.
It's all mind-blowing and hard to believe, yet OTOH, if we really are in a 100-dimensional universe is it so implausible we have data-compressed our perceptions of it into a more workable 3-dimensions?
Organisms tend to have minor asymmetries, but we aren't sharp enough to see them, if that matters.
We know there's a lot about the physical universe that we can only perceive indirectly.
He might be right about what I'm imagining as wildly shifting stuff which is part of our universe that we aren't seeing.
I wonder if there's something as big as an aesthetic sense that we don't have. Yet? Ever?
Or if there's something as important as mathematics that we're missing out on.
It may help that I grew up with sf from the 50's or so which had more wild speculation of that sort. Stranger in a Strange Land may have been a last gasp.
> Among Hoffman's bizarre claims is that he finds it suspicious that so many things we perceive visually, such as the bodies of animals including ourselves, are symmetrical. If we exist in a (>3)D universe are we likely symmetrical?
Maybe I'm approaching this at the wrong level of abstraction, but one of the most elegant successes of the 20th century was Noether's Theorem stating that every conservation law implies a physical symmetry and vice versa: there's a century of physics in the details, but the conservation of energy is the symmetry of past and future, the conservation of rotation is the symmetry of left and right, the conservation of momentum is the symmetry of forward and backward, etc.
Symmetry is, if not *quite* fundamental, very easy to produce in any defined physical space.
One thing I should have made clear from the start is that Hoffman's ultimate interest is in the discovery of consciousness. I buried the lede there.
He suggests that if we want to understand consciousness/qualia, we need to throw out 20th century physics. We shouldn't try to understand the brain because the brain is a perceptual construct, not reality.
20th century physics is useful for understanding the universe our perceptions have constructed, but not for understanding true reality. There's a bit of Plato's Cave here. Hoffman equates a subatomic particle to a pixel on a screen. It may be a fundamental building block of the video game we are playing, but it tells us nothing about how the software behind it works.
Ah. Well, if he's going to pose qualia as incompatible with modern physics, I'm perfectly comfortable with the eliminative materialist side of that fork. Predictive power has a grounded honesty the search for "true reality" lacks.
I don't think one needs to choose sides of the fork. Hoffman doesn't argue against using physics for physical purposes. To use his video game analogy, if we want to play the video game better, we should use strategies and tactics that are rooted in that video game universe (i.e., our best understanding of physics).
OTOH, if we want to figure out the source code of the game, or something close to it, we need to abandon the game.
I think next Open Thread I will try as best I can to explain Hoffman's hypothesis about consciousness itself.
> Among Hoffman's bizarre claims is that he finds it suspicious that so many things we perceive visually, such as the bodies of animals including ourselves, are symmetrical. If we exist in a (>3)D universe are we likely symmetrical?
That is silly. Shapes of animals are evolved under heavy pressure
- symmetry is highly useful in many cases (try to walk on legs of uneven length). With birds pressure is even greater
- there is high pressure in beauty/mating/sex preferences toward bodies that demonstrate high fitness, symmetry is often one of important criteria here
To be fair, I'm probably not doing his argument re symmetry justice. I didn't really understand it.
> Hoffman's central metaphor is that what we perceive as real-world objects are much like icons on your computer desktop. The icon of a file on your desktop gives you quick, relevant information about the file, but it tells you nothing about the details inside the file.
In some much less powerful ways it is true.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Deep_Field or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_blood_cell#/media/File:SEM_blood_cells.jpg etc etc. We perceive directly tiny part of the world.
> He argues we likely don't live in a 3D universe by quoting a bunch of physicists and cosmologists who argue we likely don't.
For start: is he quoting ones that describe tiny dimensions unrelevant to daily life and detectable only by galaxy-sized* particle accelerators? AKA string theory. If yes then it is not relevant at all and display of incompetence and/or being misleading.
*maybe solar-system sized?
Also, I can easily quote ten times more that presented argued that God exists. Including priest who was first to formalize Big Bang as theory - which was initially widely disliked due to being nice match to "God created world".
And likely more an be found that presented Perpetum Mobile machines.
"It's all mind-blowing and hard to believe, yet OTOH, if we really are in a 100-dimensional universe is it so implausible we have data-compressed our perceptions of it into a more workable 3-dimensions? "
I might be missing something because it seems to me that Hoffman's bizarre claims are either obviously true or just silly, depending on how you interprete them.
Very clearly, we are not perceiving all the properties of reality, we are perceiving only a small part of it. Even without the (quite hypothetical) 100 dimensions, we are not perceiving anything really small, or nothing outside a narrow spectrum of wavelength, we are blind to magnetic fields, etc. But, evolution shaped us to have a good perception (ie a perception that matches reality) of the things that are relevant for us.
Yes, when, we see a real-world object like a lion, we do not have acess to the details within (what are the biochemical characteristics of its cells for example) but we have quite a good grasp of the relevant features (teeths and claws!).
I like the magnetic fields point. We have absolutely no senses capable of detecting magnetic fields directly, because detecting them gave us no survival advantage (one assumes). But of course, we discovered they exist, and developed methods of detecting them (my phone has one) -- using our reasoning powers. The fact that we developmed the technology to detect magnetic fields despite their making no impression at all on our senses is a pretty powerful argument that we are by no means limited to what our senses show us.
You have to understand how far Hoffman takes his distrust of our perceptions. Whatever powers of indirect observation we may have, whatever tools we use, still rely on our eyes to observe measurements. Our tools of measurement are themselves illusions.
Could we have detected magnetic fields if we were blind, deaf and had no sense of touch, taste or smell? If not, then we have used our perceptions to detect magnetic fields.
His ideas are way, way out there. That's why the book is interesting. Also why I point out he has a PHD from MIT. He may be crazy, but he isn't an idiot or lacking in education.
Haven't read the book and won't touch the discussion on reality, just a mandatory remainder that being smart and educated tends to make the crazies more capable of rationalizing their nonsense and easier for them to sell it or obfuscate.
Sure. A universe with 3 (space) dimensions has definite types of physics, and if there were more dimensions there would be quite different physics, and whether we could see those dimensions or not it wouldn't matter, because we could tell from the physics that they were there. An easy example is that long-range forces (like gravity or electric and magnetic fields) would not fall off in magnitude as the square of the distance.
An analogy: if the world is 2 dimensional, living things cannot have an alimentary canal because it cuts them in half. If you lived in Flatland, and nevertheless observed that animals ate and pooped, you could conclude there were more than 2 dimensions, whether or not you could see them.
If there *were* more than 3 dimensions, we could tell because the physics would be different, in ways that are easy to calculate. It isn't. So they're not there. (I'm excepting compactified dimensions that are used in string theory because I don't think that changes the main point.)
The Holographic Principle strikes me as a red herring in this context, because it's not saying our perceptions are *wrong* merely that they are limited in a way with no practical consequence. Even if we directly perceived the source of the hologram, it wouldn't change how we use that information because by assumption the Holographic Principle doesn't create any difference in the local physics.
Sorry, forgot about the other point: things are symmetric because space is symmetric, e.g. because space is isotropic ("looks the same in all directions") the natural shape of objects is spherical. It sounds like he's got the physical reasoning here backwards: it takes something special to have a symmetry *different from* the underlying space. Physics students are taught this early in their careers: you never get a manifestation that differs from the symmetry of your matrix without some special reason.
In fact, organisms need special tricks and techniques to *not* be spherically symmetric, and how this occurs is often an interesting question to developmental biologists. One of the key proteins involved here is, I am not kidding, named sonic hedgehog.
It would be at least good enough for science fiction if there are multi-dimensional extensions for microbes and cells-- there's a lot about living things we don't understand.
Upon cursory evaluation, it seems like the thesis of this book might be an all time great steel man. The problem is that it’s steel manning the classically edge lord position of “what if when I see red, the color I see as red is what you see as green”.
It’s a question of asymmetric perception that Kant works around by appealing to the common construction of our sense organs. The problem is that even if it’s true it’s not clear that it could ever be sussed out of reality - it is the truths that are inexpressible in the axiomatic systems we have available per Gödel.
"His basic hypothesis is that our perceptions aren't showing us anything close to the "truth" of objective reality because having useful perceptions will, in a Darwinian sense, outcompete true perceptions almost every time."
It certainly seems correct to me that our perceptions are useful simplified models of reality, not reality itself. However, it seems to me very unlikely that a useful model can generally be divorced from objective reality.
There are some examples where evolution seems to have favored a perception which is not the best possible match for reality. For example if a prey animal is trying to detect a predator in a noisy background, it will be useful to overdetect predators, because of the asymetric costs of wrongly detecting an imaginary predator versus failing to detect a real one. Same things for reproduction, male penguins are for example famous for sometimes trying to mate with dead females. But even in these types of cases, the model is just a bit of from reality, it is not that different from it.
Note that prey animals want to overdetect predators, but not by too much. The prey animal still needs mellow time for digestion and reproduction. The goal is to be right enough in both directions, not to be a nervous wreck.
Also, escape is energy consuming which also easily can be deadly.
>It certainly seems correct to me that our perceptions are useful simplified models of reality, not reality itself. However, it seems to me very unlikely that a useful model can generally be divorced from objective reality.
See my lengthy response to Carl below.
Assuming I am allowed to post a 2nd time, I'd like to recommend this Bollywood movie "Guru", and share this interesting review of it.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/05/guru.html
If I was younger, I would ask a grant for creating DIY microbiology kits for home use. I remember how people including myself used to do wet photography at home, basically turning bedroom into a photo lab. It was fun, and practical thing at the same time. There are still rare people doing it as a hobby but it is no longer the same when everyone with a mobile home can make much better photos at every instant.
Microbiology DIY at home is something that many people wound enjoy. It could increase interest in science for young people and a lot of fun for everyone. But this is more challenging than a photo lab. Obviously safety issues are much more challenging and regulations could be another obstacle. Even something trivial as sterilizing a streaking wire with a naked flame is something I would try to avoid at home. Maybe it can be done with a special closed electric device where you insert a wire and take it out. And how to avoid most poisonous chemicals and still be able to do cool things with it?
The available DIY microbiology kits for sale are only for schools and they are not really meant to be used at home. Many things would need to be carefully adapted to turn it into a hobby that is as available as photography once was.
There are already many people doing essentially DIY microbiology for very practical ends - cultivating mushrooms (psychedelic or gourmet).
If anything the requirements for sterility are higher than with actual microbio, since bacteria have comparable generation times while funghi get outcompeted if you mess up even slightly.
Also, if sterilizing something with a naked flame is a safety hazard for a person, they should stick to knitting or video games.
I'm curious if you distinguish between "communication" and training. For instance projects that are lecture or blog like, spreading information, vs projects that teach people skills or broaden thoughts.
For instance the 4th bullet point was:
Improve the academic, governmental, and decision-making institutions that work on these other causes.
The second type of project described above fits that bullet point. Would a project that trained people to think in politically/socially effective ways qualify? In my experience a lot of people both on the volunteer/hobby side and the professional side in politics don't really understand policy but much more importantly they don't understand process or know how to weigh political trade offs.
This produces the pretty large, pretty loud, and pretty lame Jimmy Dore/FTV style politics, and infected a large section of very active left wing people during the last 2 presidential primaries. It also impacts things like the DSA or Sunrise Movement heavily. It seems to me that something that provided people an experience somewhat like actually being in charge of policy decisions and dealing with nearly random, very chaotic systems fits the last two bullet points well and the 1st and second at least tangentially. You'd also be able to sneak in process thought training at the lower and grass roots levels which would improve things as people move up in the political sphere.
Would caffeine be a scheduled drug had it, instead of being widely consumed for centuries, been first synthesized in a 20th century lab?
1985? Might slip by till the less hysterical times. 1925? CAFFEINE, NOT EVEN ONCE!
There have always been clinically-relevant questions I've wanted to explore with fervor, and work responsibilities tend to get in the way wrt time.
For example, the relationship between signalling from the enteric nervous system (ENS) and chronic bowel disease.
If our ENS attempts to communicate with the CNS, but the impetus is ignored, does the ENS repeat the signal until the problem is addressed? If so, does the repeat ignoring of the signal and persistent state of ENS activity result in chronic bowel disease over time?
My hope is to write about this over time on Substack, and that others with knowledge in the respective fields can chime in. I think it's an idea worth pursuing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtZs-MPFcHo&ab_channel=JustHaveaThink
In general, there are probably worthy projects in using micro-organisms to help with recycling, or, for the nervous, replicating and improving evolved enzymes.
Meanwhile, this is a political thread, and I really dislike that they blame capitalism even though it's only capitalists working on that particular bacteria and enzyme.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS9PWzkUG2s This guy had a go at culturing the bacteria that break down polystyrene. IIRC it turned out that the metabolic products were kind of toxic.
Right now he's working on carbon sequestration by combining the genes for spider silk and calcareousness and sticking them in a yeast. So you can grow fibres in a bioreactor and throw them into the sea where they become weird chalk.
Anyone have recommendations for the most cost effective charities for global warming? Givewell has no real suggestions, and, this Vox article: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/12/2/20976180/climate-change-best-charities-effective-philanthropy doesn't have a lot of details about how they made their choices, and, their top choices don't really have strong evidence for their impact.
I've started doing daily pushups. To prevent my musculature from getting uneven, is there another type of daily workout I should do to grow the upper body muscle groups that pushups neglect? I don't have any workout machines and only four dumbbells.
I find rows a must. Pushups work the chest so you want to balance it out with rows, and they also make you look great (back muscles are what makes you look big) and improve your posture. You can start with the dumbbells but they are probably too light, so you'd want to get heavier ones or move to inverted rows. Inverted rows are hard to do without a bar, but a bar can be improvised. I've seen instructions online on how to do rows with a sheet fitted in a closed door, but I don't know it works well. Best thing would be to build your own bar, or to start frequenting your nearest outdoor gym.
The recommended routine of r/bodyweightfitness is good inspo even though it's more involved than what you are looking for: https://www.reddit.com/r/bodyweightfitness/wiki/kb/recommended_routine
Table rows are great and pretty much a reverse pushup. https://youtu.be/iH18IrHexlo though I grab the side of my dining room table.
I find table rows like that to be super uncomfortable, but to each their own. Maybe grabbing the sides is better, I haven't tried that. Finding/getting a bar is worth it IMO.
Curls would work the biceps (you're working the triceps), and overhead presses would work the delts and lats, to complement your work on the pecs. You can do both with dumbbells -- in fact, that would work better than with machines. Just be sure you have good technique so you don't cause injury.
It seems that someone should do a controlled, random, double-blind test of masks.
Put 100 people into a dorm, wearing masks whose effects are unknown to the participants and study organizers, but knowable after the fact. Maybe something that looks like it *could* be a N95, but varies from useless to actual N95.
Purposefully infect some of them with the flu (because we can treat the flu easily), then see what happens.
Repeat. Then repeat again. Do it in a few different patterns: maybe different strength masks for everyone in each group, or maybe each test is with a different strength of mask, maybe the infected people purposefully get weaker/stronger masks to test that hypothesis.
This might be expensive, but the benefits will accrue to literally billions of people in the short-term, and it will add to our long-standing knowledge.
The type of virus matters, since some airborne viruses spread readily via aerosols while others require large droplets to spread. Influenza, which IIRC is more towards the large droplet end of the spectrum, is not going to be a great proxy for something like measles that spreads extremely readily by aerosols.
For that matter, the hard part of uncertainty over how much mask-wearing slows transmission of a novel viral pandemic seems to be figuring out the details of how that particular virus spreads in terms of droplet size, etc, rather than the mechanics of what size of droplet gets filtered out by various types of masks.
I would start with influenza simply because it's easily understood, easy to treat, and we can learn the baseline of how to run these studies for things that are more dangerous.
Right now I suspect we don't even know the right way to run these experiments, so we'd be learning that as we go.
I'm a computational biologist with many years experience. I have some half-baked ideas for something biomedical related, but almost anything would require at least some wetlab facilities, at least a nice sample refrigerator. Also probably best to have a collaborator with more biological knowledge than myself (physics degree). Anybody out there want to collaborate (I'm open to other ideas too)? Either this round of grants or next.
>High-impact, concrete proposals to help the global poor
Is taking the money and donating it to givewell a viable project?
What would be the expected cost and return on teaching Scott to be much better at math? I recall he said once he wasn't a fan and that he didn't think he could significantly improve.
What the hell is going on with Rivian? They're an electric car company that just IPOed, hit a market cap of $140 billion USD (third-biggest car manufacturer in the world after Tesla and Toyota), and have produced less than 200 vehicles.
Specific questions:
Why on Earth does the market think a company this small is worth more than Ford, GM and Chrysler?
Why did the market pick Rivian in particular to go nuts over when there are many tiny EV companies to choose from?
Here's my grant proposal:
== Convince Scott that AI research is a good idea ==
“Everything we love about civilization is a product of intelligence, so amplifying our human intelligence with artificial intelligence has the potential of helping civilization flourish like never before" – Max Tegmark, President of the Future of Life Institute
Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is one of the hottest fields in research right now, despite still being in its infancy. Even the relatively crude AI systems that exist today are turning science fiction into unremarkable facts of life at an ever-increasing pace. Future developments in AI hold the promise of bringing about never-before imagined prosperity, lifting billions out of poverty, ending disease, and so on. Almost any problem in the world today could be solved more effectively with the assistance of improved computer systems.
Scott Alexander is a popular and influential blogger who writes about everything from books he has read to model cities on his blog, Astral Codex Ten. His blog is particularly popular among people in the tech industry, and thus, he is in the position to exert a disproportionate influence over the future course of AI development or lack thereof.
Unfortunately, Scott has expressed skepticism and antipathy towards AI research. For example, he recently wrote "I think AI might be bad, and I hope it comes as late as possible so we have more time to prepare. If you have proposals to hinder the advance of cutting-edge AI research, send them to me!"
Given his position, convincing Scott that AI research is a good idea and one that should be promoted in his writing seems like a high-leverage, yet underappreciated opportunity to improve the state of the world.
Fortunately, his writings also reveal a promising avenue to accomplish this persuasion with minimal investment of funds. In particular, Scott is a huge fan of prediction markets, such as PredictIt and Polymarket, and puts great store in the "predictions" that emerge from them.
Therefore, convincing Scott of the beneficence and importance of AI research should be a simple matter of convincing PredictIt and Polymarket to open markets along the lines of "Is AI research a good idea?", and then using the grant funds to buy as many "yes" shares as possible.
Thanks to the illiquidity of the markets and the lack of any connection to sports or hot button political topics, there should be few if any external punters buying "no" votes, and thus relatively small amounts of money will cause the markets to display a strong prediction that AI research is a good idea. Additionally, the use of "chained prediction markets" is a promising avenue to further reduce the risk of hostile interference in the markets.
Furthermore, this proposal is being submitted for funding by Scott himself. As he will be invested in the project, he will have a strong subconscious desire to see it succeed, which will magnify the persuasiveness of our investments in the prediction markets and improve the odds of success.
FAQ
-- Why isn’t this a for-profit startup? --
Although the benefits of advances in AI will be immense, it is unlikely that a startup will be able to capture them, particularly a "meta level" startup that is focused on improving the state of AI research via online influencers rather than engaging in such research itself.
Additionally, getting Scott to fund the project will make him more invested in its success, and thus making it much more likely to succeed.
-- If you care so much about this and you’re a software engineer at Google and it only costs $1000 why haven’t you just funded it yourself? --
see above
I posted below about the cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman's book "The Case Against Reality", which is an attempt to understand the nature of consciousness/qualia. This post is an aside about it. (I will likely make another post about that book next OT.)
Hoffman mentions in passing how stroke victims who lose the left hemisphere of their brain lose their capacity for speech, EXCEPT for their ability to use vulgar language. This fucking fascinates me. I've long been fascinated by vulgar language and how it is that people are genuinely offended by words because they are taught that they are supposed to be offended when they hear them. Why does language work this way? I don't mean someone being offended by, say, the word "cocksucker" because they have some woke theory that it's meant to offend homosexuals, so they act offended if they hear the word because they think it is morally wrong to imply sucking a penis is a bad thing. I mean people who are viscerally offended when they hear "Fuck you" "You cocksucker" or whatever. Because people do often become viscerally offended when they hear vulgar language, in every language (so I understand). How is this possible?
Vulgar language tends to be 2 things:
1) Slang for bodily fluids or sex acts
2) At least mildly insensible
I used to think 1 was the key, but after hearing that what I presume is a more primitive part of the brain can cuss but not speak, now I think 2 is clearly the key.
My guess is that vulgar language was our first language as humans. People say it was grunts but I think our pre-historic ancestors were going around calling each other asshats and faggots and pricks and pussies before they could say anything else. It makes sense that our first speech, as humans or pre-humans, would be words of aggression.
When a dog barks at a stranger isn't it basically saying "Fuck You Fuck You Fuck You Fuck You"?
My guess is that when we cuss these days we reach for that insensible part of the brain but the reason it comes out as slang words about intimate subjects that are part of the language--as opposed to insensible aggressive grunts--is because we can only speak inside of our language not outside of it.
No?
I learned how to cuss when I was about twelve-- I grew up in a non-cussing family.
My impression is that cussing is a different process than the rest of language, just by how it feels.
I also think cussing is more direct? visceral? than the rest of language, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's related to taking power.
A little something extra: There are two implied fallacies.
"I use formal language, so I must be right."
"I use informal/cussing language, so I must be right and/or sincere."
A while back I looked up swear words in different language on Wikipedia, and there's a lot of variation by language.
IIRC:
Japanese doesn't have profanity. They have ways of expressing the things we express with profanity, but there's no notion of certain words being offensive.
In Dutch, names of diseases are profanity. So, like, if a guy cuts you off in traffic, instead of accusing him of sucking cocks, you accuse him of having cancer. Doctors have to use euphemisms.
In pre-Christian Latin, there was no religious profanity. Also, anatomy books were full of swear words because some body parts didn't have any other name. Modern Italian, on the other hand, has religious profanity much worse than ours, e. g., "God is a pig." This particular example is illegal in Italy but people still say it.
That's interesting that Japanese doesn't have profanity. Perhaps it is such a formal culture that offense is more easily taken in other ways, subverting the need for offensive spoken words?
> Japanese doesn't have profanity.
What about kuso?
Vulgar language directed, in a serious fashion, at _you_ in particular means the speaker does not respect you and is not afraid to show it. Getting upset, up to the point of violence, can be warranted to rectify this.
There's also an aesthetic objection that excessive swearing gives the discussion/company/place a very disagreeable underclass / social pathology vibe. Hence the need to use profanity strategically, or not at all.
So as with everything, it's about status plays.
Where can I learn the basics about nutrition? Book or website is fine. I just want to know the basics of what each nutrient is for and how much of them I need.
[Content warning: discussion of AI doomsday]
Anyone else stressed/depressed about Yudkowsky’s recent prediction of 85% chance of AGI in the next 50 years, and his assertion that basically none of the research being done right now is likely to lead to actual alignment?
Link below, but I’d suggest not reading it if you’re stressed/triggered by this stuff.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CpvyhFy9WvCNsifkY/discussion-with-eliezer-yudkowsky-on-agi-interventions
50 years is not a long time. To me this implies that (assuming you buy into this model) you should drop everything you’re doing and desperately attempt to stop or slow down AI research by (almost) any means necessary. (Except for AI safety research.) But I don’t like where that train of thought leads.
Personally I think the "alignment problem" is impossible and that AGI is inevitable and that there's nothing to worry about.
Yudkowskianism is a bit like demanding that Henry Ford solve global warming and drunken drivers and urban decay and so on before he builds the Model T. Every technology has had positive and negative effects, and there's no real way to forsee or prevent them.
But I am 100% confident that humanity will endure as it always has. The real mistake of the Yudkowskians is thinking that AI is an x-risk.
Could you elaborate on why you think the alignment problem is impossible but also think AI isn't an x-risk?
Why the alignment problem is impossible - on a theoretical level because of the halting problem, Lob's Thereom, etc. On a practical level, because the problem is ill defined in the first place. There's no such thing as human values, merely values that particular humans have, and humans will always disagree with each other about what they want.
Why AI is not an x-risk - the real question is why do you think it is an x-risk? The entire argument is basically God of the Gaps. There is no evidence that one can just trivially take over the world, and everything we know about the world in every discipline argues strongly against it.
FOOMism is basically just crappy scifi wish fulfillment, and whenever you point out anything in the stories that is not physically or economically plausible, they'll just go "well maybe everything we know is wrong and the AI will invent new laws of physics because it's just that awesome".
After a few rounds of that, the entire argument is just "and then a miracle occurs", and there's nothing worth even debating in the first place. I mean it's theoretically possible that magic is real and we're one wand waving teenager away from world domination, but that threat doesn't exactly keep me up at night, and the FOOMers don't even have the decency to recognize that that's what they're doing.
I think you're weak-manning a bit.
Unbounded FOOM doesn't make a lot of sense, but a more bounded intelligence explosion does. Specifically, current state-of-the-art of AI is neural nets and it's highly unlikely those are anywhere near maximally efficient. So at the point where you get a neural net good enough to write a non-neural-net AGI, you do get a discontinuity in capabilities.
Moreover, FOOM is not necessary for AGI to be an X-risk. Let us merely assume that an AGI is developed that's mildly superior to peak human in all cognitive domains while costing less to build and run, and that it is capable of running robots that are mildly superior to peak human in all physical domains (except self-healing; don't really need that) while costing less to build and run.
1) A business run by (forks of) this AGI with no human employees would be more effective than one run by humans, regardless of the industry.
2) A country which did not discriminate against use of this AGI (e.g. by using tax/welfare to prop up humans, or simply banning the AGI) would have a faster-growing economy and more-effective military than one which did.
3) Thus, two-tiered Traveller's Dilemma winding up inevitably at "humanity sacrificed on the altar of Moloch", unless there is an international agreement to nuke anyone who defects.
4) AGI is easy to hide (compared to e.g. nukes), so such an agreement would be nearly impossible to enforce.
"discontinuity in capabilities" != instantly take over the world. "discontinuities in capabilities" happen all the time and noone notices or cares.
Also, that's one of the most ambitious "merely"s I'm ever seen. Mother nature is an incredible designer. AIs that far outclass humans and revolutionize technology are likely to exist for decades at least before we manage to beat biology in efficiency across the board. And even then, the most plausible route towards "more efficient than humans" is that humans start modifying their own structure.
In any case, that's well beyond the point where anything can be forseen,.
Also a lot of writing about AI from the LW camp seems utterly divorced from reality. It's more like a SF fanfic community than a serious attempt to predict how various scenarios might unfold.
I completely agree with your comments! There is a tradition running through the writing of Yudkowsky and the Less Wrong crowd where thought experiments are the main way of thinking. This is completely fine and gets you awesome philosophical ideas and great literature, but combined with the mission statement that Rationalism is about creating a superior way of thinking about the real world, you end up with many bizarre discussions.
The core problem with those thought experiments is that they rely on assumptions that either contradict basic mathematic facts, or which imply the desired results trivially. The first assumptions gets us questions like "What happens when AI does the impossible?", with the answer being "Everything, because ex falso quodlibet". The second assumptions get us questions like "Will exponentially growing AI build AI that grows even faster?". Which is a pointless question, as it is utterly unconcerned with the question whether exponentially growing AI is even possible. For those concerned, it is very likely impossible. Roko's Basilisk is a thought experiment from this category.
In such discussions, it shows that Yudkowsky and most Rationalists lack serious training in mathematics, logic, or computer science. A basic fallacy of self taught programmers is that because some things are easy in Python, everything is. But many classical theorems from Computer Science are about what is impossible, or what is prohibitively hard to compute.
Yudkowsky more or less admits that his knowledge comes from hard scifi novels and popular science books. This certainly explains why he is such a great essayist, who writes on the level of Roland Barthes and Michel de Montaigne. But it also explains why Yudkowsky, in the end, always privileges the figurative argument over the mathematical one. This can be seen in texts such as Sequence S, "Quantum Physics and Many Worlds", which starts out fine with a discussion of some quantum experiments, which then develops into a witty, but sloppy discussion of Bayes Theorem, and ends up with the conclusion that the Many Worlds Hypothesis is probably correct, because it fits Yudkowsky's mathematical aesthetics.
It really irks me that Yudkowsky can sell this thinking as rigorous or rational, when all he does is beat the same drum of Bayes theorem, being a genius and not knowing rigorous mathematics. The only AI doomsday Yudkowsky should fear is the one where MIRI runs out of money, and he looks in the mirror and sees just a middle aged man.
Harsh, but fair.
The year is 2031, and the U.S. and China are at war. Russia stays neutral, but also takes advantage of the opportunity to examine the two combatants' military technology by sending a small flotilla of salvage ships and floating dry docks to the Pacific Ocean and South China Sea to raise the wrecks of recently sunken U.S. and Chinese ships, and transport them to Russia.
How do America and China react? Aside from diplomatic protests, unilateral sanctions, and military strikes against the Russian ships or Russia itself, can they do anything to stop the operation?
Apart from asking nicely, economic persuasion and both sides' overwhelming ability to obliterate anybody who tries, we're powerless to prevent such a thing from happening.
It seems the illustrious PaulaFox's demographic isn't just ACX fans, but the general Libertarian crowd as well: https://reason.com/2021/11/18/brickbat-just-gathering-information/?comments=true#comment-9216062
It feels weird to see the same spam in so many places. I thought this problem was figured out 10 years ago.
In Mathew 7:3-7:4, Jesus says: "Why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but fail to notice the beam in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while there is still a beam in your own eye?"
I've contemplated these passages, and my question is: what the hell was wrong with people's eyes back then?
If there is a multiverse, how frequently are new universes created? I assume I would need to specify that question within a set amount of space or atoms. Has someone done this calculation? Like are there X many new universes per Y atoms over Z period of time?
What's the reason for the bell curve of male intelligence being different to the female one, eg the male one being overrepresented at the extremes? I couldn't find anything that properly explains it with google.
It is not clear that this is actually true; the evidence is far from conclusive. However, the postulated mechanism is that (some) genes that make a major contribution to intelligence are on the X chromosome; men get one of those and if it's a high-IQ or low-IQ chromosome that's what they get, women express the phenotypic average of two X chromosomes and so have fewer extremes. The postulated evolutionary advantage for this (and thus for the IQ-relevant genes winding up on the X chromosome) is that having a low IQ brings a substantial risk of having zero surviving children (because e.g. you ate the wrong mushroom before you were old enough to have any), and there needs to be a really good upside to balance that risk before you start rolling the dice on high IQ variance. For women, the upside is maybe 6-8 surviving children, for a man it's dozens to hundreds. Or if you go for the absolute highest dubious historical claims, 69 for a woman, ~3000 for a man.
But, again, all of this is mostly speculation and little evidence.
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Veri good