Does anyone know of an ethnographic study of how street gangs work? I want to understand things like how many people are involved in retail drug sales, how do the adult members interact with the juveniles, what's the level of involvement of different members, do people have specialized jobs?
US: 'An economic analysis of a drug-selling gang's finances' (https://www.jstor.org/stable/2586895). There's a summary of this research in the book 'Freakonomics'.
I administer a rapid covid testing program at my workplace. Several dozen people, relatively close quarters, lots of exposure to the general public. Currently we have everyone doing nasal swab rapid tests every day at home before work, but there are some new preprints suggesting (with uneven quality, as befits anything based on *data* from the last couple of weeks!) that saliva samples are more sensitive, at least early on. The study design here for example https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.22.21268246v1.full.pdf is small n and not exactly comparable to typical nasal or oral rapid test sample collection, but does anyone have an opinion on this? I'm not sure how far to update. I know there were earlier papers or at least preprints about saliva, and SalivaDirect is a thing, but I don't know to apply that in the rapid-testing-for-omicron contest.
I don't know the current state of the debate, but I am pretty certain that the place of highest viral load differs strongly from person to person. So for some people the saliva sample works better than the nasal swab, and for others it's the other way round. This is one of the reasons why rapid tests are not 100% reliable: you might simply search in the wrong place. (PCR tests are so much more sensitive that you still find the virus even if you search in the wrong place.)
Comparing nasal vs. saliva tests still makes sense, but it is only a statistical question, i.e., how often does option A work better than B, and vice versa? My understanding was that nasal swab are usually more reliable than saliva, and that this is because viral load is usually higher in the deep parts of the nose. But saliva samples do work in principle; e.g., lollipop tests are used on a large scale in schools in some countries, and they work reasonably well. And test kits have very different qualities, so I would think that a good saliva test kit easily beats a bad nasal swab test kit.
But I didn't follow recent updates, so all this may be outdated. And for omicron, we have good reason to believe that those old heuristics don't work well anymore. Omicron seems to be more adapted to upper respiratory tissue than older variants, which would favor saliva tests.
Either way, I would not focus on the question nasal vs. saliva, but rather on using a test kit that got good test results from independent agencies. (NOT the percentage that sellers advertise with - those are basically made up.) For example, here is an extensive list from the German Paul-Ehrlich-Institut:
Note that this list only contains tests that *passed* the minimum requirements, so if you don't want to work through the numbers, you might consider all tests from that list as "good".
I'm reading The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle, but I have a hard time trusting it based on the wild social science studies it cites. E.g:
# Kindergartners are better at a spaghetti tower building challenge than college students.
# "Belonging cues" (like eye contact and communication patterns) are better predictors of group performance than any other factor (including IQ of group members).
# Subjects work 50% longer on a solitary puzzle if they, early in the experiment, are given a note with not-actually-helpful information from a fictional previous subject.
# If you ask a stranger "I'm so sorry about the rain. Can I borrow your phone?", you are 422% more likely to get a yes than if you just ask "Can I borrow your phone?"
# Patients admitted after suicide attempts are 50% less likely to be readmitted if they get postcards with well-wishes from the hospital.
This is just the first 25 pages. My bullshit sensor is going crazy: all of this can't all replicate, right? Is this book worth reading?
You're probably right to suspect that some of these won't replicate, but they seem individually plausible to me. (Except for the phone one for the reason existential-vertigo points out.)
I very much doubt that Kindergarners are better at any task than college students, unless the task is "run around in circles the longest." And even then, probably not.
I was reading Zvi's summary of his Omicron model, and I found that his recommendations contradict a lot of what Scott has posted on ACX:
1. He recommends that we take Vitamin D as a preventative measure against Covid. Scott of course said that he doesn't believe in this recommendation
2. He thinks taking Merck's pill is mostly bad as it will help the virus mutate more, and that it shouldn't have been approved by the CDC. Scott of course has been haranguing the CDC to approve drugs faster, etc. Of course the argument can be made that in the cost-benefit analysis, consumption of Merck's pill is the rational thing to do or something. I haven't done such a cost-benefit analysis myself. But the overall impression that I got on reading Scott's writing was that the CDC should speed up approvals.
Seeing as Scott is an influential writer who is now *clearly* influencing public policy, I wonder if he'd like to address these points. In case he's wrong about his recommendations, it might result in hundreds and thousands of preventable deaths. Of course every attempt at understanding and prediction carries with it some chance of being wrong. However, addressing views that run counter to one's own is what any good Rationalist should do anyway.
Zvi agrees with Scott that the CDC (and FDA) should in general approve drugs faster; Zvi just thinks the Merck pill in particular shouldn't have been approved.
If a rapid covid antigen test shows positive results in under 1 minute is this indicative of a higher viral load than a test that takes 15 minutes to show a positive?
I just saw the Matrix Resurrections and thought it was awful. Probably the worst of the franchise.
It got me thinking: Is there any way the second and third movies (Reloaded and Revolutions) could have been fixed so that they were at least 90% as good as the first movie? If yes, then what specific things should have been different?
Resurrections was a reboot that couldn't reboot -- they included a new Neo (Bugs), a new Trinity (Lexy) and their team (including a reskinned Morpheus), plus a new villain (the Analyst) and a reskinned Agent Smith. But they were relegated to second fiddle as the old Neo and Trinity were still around. The film was so consciously up-its-own-butt self-aware that I assume this was intended as a statement on something.
As for Reloaded and Revolutions... no, probably not.
The new heroes seemed like just someone whose role is to be slaughtered at a convenient moment, to show the viewer that the situation is getting serious, and to motivate (the old) Neo to assume his final form and avenge them.
This did not happen (which was nice, because unexpected), but it prevented me from paying much attention to the new heroes.
I liked the plots of the second and third movies and a lot of the moments and visuals, but they had pretty big problems with pacing. The core sin seemed to be attempting to top the first movie by setting up hideously expensive action sequences, then padding the scenes in question well beyond what was optimal for storytelling purposes in an effort to "get their money's worth" from the sets and props (for practical effects) or the 3D assets (for CGI effects). Biting the bullet and shortening things like the freeway chase scene, the Burly Brawl, and the Zion rave would improve the sequels considerably.
It's George Lucas syndrome, where no one was willing to tell the directors "no."
The fight with Smith early in the second movie opened with Smith using his unbeatable superweapon [1] off the bat. And Neo resists it. And Neo is superman, so the rest of the fight scene is completely uninteresting from a plot perspective.
I have an unpopular opinion: I liked the 2nd and 3rd movies. The action and special effects didn't age well, but they were good for early 2000s. They fleshed out more of the world, explained more how the machines set up the construct from the inside, really made some of the programs (like the oracle, keymaker, vampires, and ghost-dudes) be interesting side-characters and villains. The scene-by-scene action made sense (as long as you agreed that they had to make it to a landline to escape, most of the characters' actions made sense), which is more than you can say about a lot of action/thriller movies.
I think why people didn't like them has to do with expectations. The first movie was light action and heavy mindfuck, and the other two were light/non-mindfucks and just heavy action, and so there was a bit of genre-switching going on. So if you go into 2 and 3 waiting for your mind to be blown, that was just never going to happen.
I think if you wanted to make the 2nd or 3rd one better (and this actually applies to the 4th one too), they would have had to lean all the way into the simulation hypothesis: reveal that the "real world" is ALSO a simulation, and that they have no idea how many levels deep they are. This would also have explained why Neo seems to have some slightly magical powers in the real world. I think this would have been pretty hard to do, convincingly, but it's the only way they could have kept the magic of the first one alive.
Another problem was that the "mindfuckery" of the second and third movies missed the mark because it was too hard to understand the theme of each film. The first movie's mindfuck was very simple and easy to understand: Reality is an illusion. The second was...something...about "causality," and the third was some schlock about "free will."
The 2nd and 3rd did have mindfucks, like Neo's ability to control the Matrix being a general superpower to control all machines. And people hated the additional mindfuck, because they feel it invalidated the first one. (I was fine with it, though.)
Well, no, because it didn't make sense. That's actually what I'm referring to by the "magical powers" Neo seemed to have. I think that only would have made sense if that layer were a simulation also.
Note that every single one of Neo's real-world powers involves machines - and not just machines in general, but The Machines who set up the Matrix and the One in the first place. His blind sight can't see Trinity or Bane or the Zionist ship, but it *can* see Smith (a program), as well as the power plant and Machine City.
The obvious explanation is that the One - who is, after all, a cyborg, like every other human born into the Matrix - is given some degree of access to the machines' IFF/C&C network, presumably in order to help rebuild and "defend" Zion while restarting it.
We thought Neo's superpower was his ability to be awesome in the matrix. But his actual superpower is that he's a technopath, which manifested itself in the matrix as being awesome in it.
Exactly! Either he should have continued to only have powers in the simulation, or they should have revealed the real world is a simulation as well, but they didn't do either. And it would have been a good reveal: what do you do with the people who can't handle the simulation? Give them a new simulation, one where they're rebels who have figured it all out. It can also fix the fact that using human batteries makes no scientific sense: if the human battery story was just another lie then you can come up with a better reason that all of humanity is living in a simulation. Heck, you could even have it that the machine are in a simulation as well and don't know it and some unknown power has imprisoned them and humanity both, but that's getting a little silly.
But then again, that would have have muddled the original Gnostic theme of overcoming an imprisoning lie to find true reality. If the true reality is also an imprisoning lie, then you can't really escape: every time you think you've escaped you can't be sure you're not just in another lie. It turns the theme from a Gnostic one to a Nihilistic one.
That's one thing I really liked about the new movie, was that Neo could not be sure whether he was going crazy or was in a false reality. How could he be? It was a good look at how you can be paralyzed by the fact that you can't directly determine what is real and what isn't. The rest of the movie was pretty meh, but the Neo simulation sequence was pretty good.
(the main thing I think they could have done to fix the sequels was to make the architect scene better. As it is it's a bit confusing: I know on my first watch through I didn't really understand the implications of what he was saying.)
>It turns the theme from a Gnostic one to a Nihilistic one.
But that would actually be an interesting move, cinematically! The best sequels (imo) are the ones that completely change your perspective on the original works.
I agree about the new one, the gaslighting of Neo was the only good part of the movie.
The problem is that the first film is basically a self-contained story, Neo goes through an entire hero's journey.
The best bet would have been to properly set the series up as a trilogy in the first place, to stretch the premise of the first film out into at least two, with a conclusion that combines some of the events of the second two movies into one.
Re-watching the original movie, the pacing strikes me as extremely fast, we barely get to experience Neo living his blue-pilled existence before the red pill is dropped on us, so it feels like there was a lot of untapped potential to work with there. I could see a pretty interesting 60+ minutes spent developing Neo as a character and gradually getting hints that he's living in something called "The Matrix" until his first real encounters with Trinity/Morpheus/Agent Smith. But I imagine that slower burn might not resulted in as successful of a first movie, even if the trilogy was better for it.
I agree. They should have not made any "sequels," though additional movies set in the Matrix universe featuring different characters than there were in the first film could have been cool (the Animatrix did this is short film format).
As a child, I was told that 15% was a standard tip, and 20% was for exceptional service. Lately, I've seen these amounts creeping upward, with 15% often being the minimum selectable option for online ordering. This would make sense if food prices are increasing more slowly than general inflation, but do we have any data suggesting this is the case? If not, what's going on?
I think food has gotten cheaper relative to the "average" good. But my intuition is that *restaraunts* have gotten more expensive (after adjusting for inflation of course). Hmm...
20% as the standard tip is becoming common because of changes in beliefs about the morality of tipping based industries for workers who aren't in the top 5% of service workers or so.
On ranked-choice vs approval voting: I buy the argument that there are more ways to "spoil" a RCV election than an approval election, and you can be more "strategic" with RCV (lying about preferences to get your preferred candidate elected). But it doesn't change the fact that if I think the thing you're being asked to do with approval voting is nonsensical. "Mark yes for all candidates you approve of and no for the rest." Approve of compared to what? I would rather vote for any candidate on the presidential ballot last year than vote for a dog to be president, should I check all the boxes? But there's one I would like more than the others, maybe I should only check that one? It's just not clear what you're even "supposed" to do! It seems that approval voting discourages strategic voting in the technical sense (lying about your preferences) in large part by shifting your strategy to where you draw the line of vote/no vote. As far as I can see there's no honest, non-strategic way to answer that question. I personally wouldn't know what to do if presented with an approval-voting ballot.
Versus with RCV (and even FPTP) there's a pretty clear interpretation of what you're "supposed" to do: write down your candidates in the order you'd prefer seeing them elected (or mark your favorite for FPTP). You don't force people to strategically decide a cutoff, which again I think is an underspecified task. Having clear instructions for non-strategic voters is a dealbreaker for any voting system in my view.
If given an approval ballot, just mark "Yes" on any candidates that would make you happy if they were elected. And mark "No" for all the candidates that would make you sad if they were elected.
This is provably non-optimal; if your cutoff for approval is not between the candidates with serious chances of victory then your voting power is nullified.
(All voting systems except random ballot have some sort of tactical voting, but approval's tactical voting problem is one of the more obvious. IRV has scenarios in which voting tactically is indicated, but they're quite narrow and voters don't generally have enough information to notice they're in such a situation.)
And in the jurisdictions that have adopted it, the elections seem to have turned out fine. Voters were able to decide who they approved of, and the outcomes seemed in line with voter preferences.
AV is not some mysterious hypothetical system that has hidden doomsday scenarios we need to theorize about... it has been implemented with no issues in some moderately large cities.
I don’t disagree with your analysis, but just in case you are presented with an approval ballot, this is the “strategic” vote that makes the most sense to me:
Guess who the two most likely candidates to win are. If this is a local election, good luck, but if it’s a national election you should be able to consult polling data.
Then, vote for the better of those two candidates, as well as any candidates you think are better than that candidate.
This strategy is optimal in many cases, but it’s also a good strategy for society to coordinate around, because if everyone does this, we elect the cordorcet winner when one exists.
Several years ago I was working on a fantasy world strategy/simulation that while it didn't simplify the military aspects brough the focus and attention and mechanical complexity of the other parts of the simulation up to parity. I sometimes refer to the type of game I am trying to make as a DIP game. Diplomacy|Intrigue|Politics. This is because that is what differentiates it from existing games. Whether we are talking about Paradox, Matrix, Slitherine, or purely independent games of a similar type. 4X, Grand Strategy, Political Sim(think Democracy 2-4).
As of earlier this month I am back to working on it after doing various things as well as just slacking off during the pandemic. I expect to have either release or EA on Steam/GoG/Epic/Other around early December next year.
My secondary focus is on a sort of verisimilitude where you feel much more like a politician or potentate that engages in politics rather than a god king or a hive mind. The game has both characters with more detail than CK2-3 and populations with more detail tha Vicky/Imperator. Both of these entities have an Ideology that indicates how they think the world should be organized. They also have Opinions, a numerical variable, based on various modifiers, about each other character and population they are aware of.
This, should, feel much more like a real leader trying to get things done. Opinion functions like political capital to be expended in order to do things you want to do. Start an unpopular war and get war exhaustion and ideology penalties and expend resources you could have expended for other purposes. Start a popular war and gain Opinion boosts from Ideology and if your populace hates the people you are fighting or likes that you are freeing people they like from tyranny.
Maybe you want to integrate a major minority population group from conquered lands. You can allow them to serve in government jobs/bureaucracy for a boost. But you may upset others who previously had access to that privilege. Pass various edicts/laws to give them rights, similar to Imperator but more detailed and with more options. Yes Imperator is, at least until Vicky 3 comes out, the most interesting as far as population based gameplay among Paradox games. While there isn't an overarching yes/no on immigration or w/e many policies affect parts of what we call immigration in modern societies. This game is a fantasy game so it isn't quite based on the same conflicts.
You also have to manage important/powerful characters. Flattery, bribes, titles, intimidation. I made a large effort to expand from what 4X and Grand Strategy games do with Intrigue. The Conspiracy system allows you to build up human and material capital to pursue anything from a small plot to murder another character to an "Ancient Conspiracy". A decades to millennia long secret organization to topple or usurp and empire. Essentially the Conspiracy panel/menu allows you to connect what in other games would be totally discrete actions that build up to a single greater purpose.
Many of you might be familiar with the Plot and Secrets menus from Ck2-3. But here you can do far more. You can promise land or titles or money or resources. Trade favors like military assistance, share intel from your personal "Intelligence Network", and do other stuff. The regular Diplomacy menu allows you to promise things as part of treaties but that is a little simpler and treaties are generally public. A given Conspiracy generates a Secret(you can find the 2014-2015 Axioms Of Dominion wiki which describes secrets and ideologies and all these other mechanics here: https://axioms-of-dominion.fandom.com/wiki/Axioms_Of_Dominion_Wiki) for each action of the Conspiracy and connects them in a unique way. That is the penalty for the superior organizational power of Conspiracies. Members of Conspiracies can induct others, in part or in whole, as part of their efforts to complete their parts of the overall project.
Axioms is primarily a fun video game where you can actually, compared to false claims of games in the past, feel like a character in GoT or some other media based on politics. I'm really trying to give an experience that even a modern day politician can relate to. "Why don't they just do [thing the person speaking wants]!" Because they have a complex consituency with competing and sometimes contradictory desires.
Consider the Biden BBB Bill. You have to add something to appease one Senator but it pisses off another Senator. Can you weaken the provision or add some pork to please both? Putting in a lot of long-time goals of disparate groups can gain support until you run into your very own Joe Manchin. Axioms should provide a ton of situations similar to that. Although discrete actions such as Flattering or Reasoning or even casting a literal magic mind fudgery spell will obviously not be comparable to how that works in real life. But at a higher level I think it should feel pretty close. The internal politics simulation isn't quite complex enough to have legislation and legislatures and such, at least in most cases. There's no "voting" system per se. But something like Greek democracy is pretty close to possible. And Treaties and to some degree Conspiracies function similar to how real life domestic legislation functions at a high level.
Additionally a polity can adopt a standardized "Charter" to create a governing system similar to the HRE. You can create individualized vassal contracts, I think maybe CK3 added this?, but vassals will be aware of who has a better deal, although they may also know why. Both characters and populations will have an increased opinion of "governments" that are less centralized. Triumvirates vs Dictatorships vs Councils/Parliaments, etc. There's a somewhat fixed opinion bonus, modified by ideology, as you dilute power. Of course the cost is getting all the relevant deciders on board for major group actions.
I've sketched out a way for the AI to use these mechanics, perhaps not quite to the level a player could thought process wise, such that the AI could organically form an HRE-esque superstate. A lot of this relies on the scale. I'm trying to get performance to the point that a 40000 province map can work on decently recent modern PC setups. Most people might have to make do with ~4000-8000 and perhaps a little less variety in AI political organization. I personally expect that I might need to upgrade to 32gigs of RAM to get bigger maps working.
I'm curious if a lot of ACX people play more complicated strategy games, vs Civ/Endless/GalCiv stuff.
This sounds very interesting to me, though these days I seldom have time to learn new complex strategy games -- I got into CK3 but only because it's similar enough to CK2 which I've played off and on since launch.
In this vein, one interesting and somewhat forgotten game that I grew up playing is the old Koei title, Genghis Khan 2. These days it has basically been superseded by the CK games (which are a far more complex simulation) but I do think it had some unique mechanics for depicting the fact that "no man rules alone" and for trying to make large empires increasingly unmanageable (something CK tries to do but doesn't really succeed at, and EU4 doesn't really even attempt).
I know there are some mods for CK2 that try to get this balance better, though I haven't tried them.
If you haven't read it, I'd also suggest taking a look at "The Dictator's Handbook", which is a very fun and fast read about these sorts of power dynamics.
I'm pretty strongly considering some kind of AP system ala GK2 and Star Dynasties. I'd have liked to do some sort of timer system but it is hard to code and people are motivated to cheat to get around it.
I'm planning to write a couple more posts on substack about unique stuff in Axioms but the trouble is that because the systems are so interconnected, which is great for gameplay, it is hard to really detail much about a given system in isolation. If you read the only post currently up, about my version of "Unrest" you'll see what I mean.
CK2 isn't really saveable, for my purposes, by mods. You'd just be overloading events and decisions so much. Tons of mods are already at that point. Same for EU4 really. M&T Pop Overhaul did about as much as you can do with EU4 and it is pretty clunky.
Well I've subscribed to your Substack. This all makes sense to me, I'll be curious what you come up with.
It sounds like you're making a product that will be a niche within a niche, but that's fine. Part of the promise of CK2, and what kept me coming back to it, is that it feels like a game where my empire can collapse and I can be reduced to a single county somewhere and yet the game isn't over and in fact has just gotten *more* interesting. So I'd love to see more games that play this way.
But I get the sense most players aren't like me, they love blobbing and get upset when they aren't blobbing. And the truth is I don't mind blobbing to some degree, but when I look back at all of my great games of CK2, the ones with really interesting stories, they all featured some sort of massive imperial collapse.
I should dig up some old blog posts about the Cinnamon Wars or the dragon worshipping place with stolen draconic attributes. Or one of the HRE-esque examples if you like imperial collapse.
Since your the only sub might as well pander and do a post on Charters and Ancient Conspiracies as it applies to big polities.
Especially seeing as my GUI library is shitting itself after a version upgrades. Turns out 5 years gives a lot of time for problems to build up.
There are *a lot* of claims in this podcast about the vaccines, the FDA, the relative harm of the variants, the comparative safety of mRNA vaccines compared to traditional vaccines, the suspected number of deaths in response to vaccination, etc.
Is there any detailed analysis and refutation or support of these claims from anyone in the rationalist community? I don't see anything (besides some allusions in 2 or 3 comments) on here, and nothing on Zvi's site.
There was a recent episode of the generally sane Zubin Damania's podcast that broke most of McCullough's points down in detail. He is broadly sympathetic to heterodox ideas but very critical of these arguments in particular.
Zvi seems to be getting annoyed with the entire Bret Weinstein orbit and just ignoring them for understandable reasons.
Can you help me understand these "understandable" reasons? I believe you have them, but the content-free dunk on McCullough with no substantiation that GBergeron's pulling isn't helpful to anyone who's trying to do any sense-making of this situation as a layperson.
Looks like this might be the podcast you're recommending?
That's right. Always awkward finding and copying links on mobile. Broadly, the loosely affiliated set I'm referring to have collectively been a quite predictable Gish gallop of reflexive meta-contrarianism, basically amounting to just inverting whatever the mainstream narrative happens to be, with a variety of incidental justifications. This rarely contributes new or interesting information. I'm generally all for amplifying weird long-tail ideas, just in this case the signal-to-noise ratio has been trash.
* are you narrowly looking at COVID related arguments with this set, or literally everything these people say?
Part of why I ask is I really enjoyed Bret and his wife Heather’s recent book. There are a couple of points they make in it that go a bit extreme for me but on the whole, the case they make for looking at life through an evolutionary biology lens and the insights it brings is a really solid and compelling one.
Your reply here, completely respectfully, is hard to read as to whether it’s just a smear/sneer job that says “don’t bother with those people” or whether there are specifics here (people, claims, videos) that don’t hold up and are common enough to cast doubt on their general credibility.
Specifically Covid. I think Bret and Heather are otherwise at least interesting, if sometimes interestingly wrong, and the pandemic has somehow broken their brains. Their new book looks great. Hopefully they're back to normal a year from now. They were of course prone to uncritical metacontrarianism before, but it was much more likely to produce something worth thinking about pre-pandemic (and even early on in 2020 -- they were pretty open-minded before the vaccine epoch).
I'm not very invested in this argument here, but if you look at the last year or so of pandemic-related podcast guests (Geert Vanden Bossche, Robert Malone, Pierre Kory, Peter McCullough, Tess Lawrie...) there's a common thread of having had interesting and potentially really helpful contrarian ideas that haven't panned out in the face of accumulating evidence, and then just digging in hard and repeating themselves. It's good that someone was worrying about potential long-tail vaccine risks and standing up for long-shot therapeutics with some promising early evidence (and fluvoxamine, at least, seems to have worked out!), but those need to be held loosely and subject to Bayesian updating as new evidence appears, and that just doesn't seem to be happening.
Scott and Zvi, for example, have done a much better job of updating and even completely changing their minds as new information appears.
EDIT: I had meant to explain that what's been particularly frustrating about 2021!Bret Weinstein is that he doesn't apply the same healthy skepticism to contrarian pandemic folks as he does to everything else. There's a strong element of https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/ that gets old quickly.
I don’t follow their podcast so thank you for mentioning that that’s where the questionable science is going down.
If I had to make my own guess - I wonder if it’s the “trust us, we’re the science” attitude that they’re reacting to, lining up with a point they stress multiple times in their book: that hubris in the face of hypernovelty is dangerous. I believe that, under the crank theories, the real concerns boil down to “why aren’t we being more deliberate in the approach here” combined with something approaching Scott’s Pascalian medicine argument and “sticking with medications that we understand the safety profile of.” A lot of the panic seems to stem from what could result from spreading the spike protein excessively through our bodies, and not inherently being anti-vaccines, just anti-the-particular-mechanism-and-potential-dangers-of-this-vaccine.
That is a thing that happens. It seems like the experience of being right *once* about something where the mainstream was wrong creates a lifetime reflexive second-option bias in some folks, without any further connection to facts, evidence, logic, etc. etc. The worthwhile thinkers are just *incidentally* heterodox without making it their entire schtick.
I agree that the experience of being right (and being famous for being right) can make one overconfident (and wanting to experience the high again). Not sure about the mainsteam/heterodox distinction, though.
It seems like some people go "mainstream -> heterodox -> crackpot", but some other people go directly "mainstream -> crackpot". Could it be that the latter option is actually the natural progression, and the former is an exception when the first overconfident non-mainstream idea accidentally happens to be correct?
It's one big reason I'd like a larger heterodox community, so that they can help each other understand that being lucky once doesn't they're lucky forever.
Or, even better, if our discourse were diverse enough that we didn't need to create a group called "heterodox" because that's what everyone is.
I think a better question is what are the most significant 1 or 2 claims that he is most confident in, and can these be refuted? A detailed analysis/refutation of *all* the claims sounds like succumbing to a Gish Gallop.
If these 1 or 2 stand up, then perhaps a deeper dive is warranted. Maybe it turns out he is right about everything, I don't know, haven't listened to the podcast; but this in general is how I would go about it.
The two that stick out the most for me, personally, were:
* The claim that the incidence rate for vaccine safety prior to COVID, as measured in deaths attributable directly to vaccination, was something like 180 deaths over 270 million vaccinations. And that the count currently w/r/t the COVID vaccines (or perhaps specifically the mRNA vaccines) is something close to 10x-50x higher than that, based, lowest-case, on VAERS data (and then depending on whatever level of VAERS underreporting you suspect to reach the higher tier)
* The claim that no medical school or other medical... consortium? (like the AMA) has produced, to date, a recommended protocol for treatment of COVID prior to hospitalization, extending out to a general claim or theme of his argument that all the medical establishment's eggs seem to be in the vaccination basket, more or less, and that any of the evidence for (insert your favorite non-vaccine treatment type here) or any protocol to use such in order to prevent hospitalizations, reduce spread, flatten curves, and save the world aren't being seriously considered or turned into meaningful action plans that can be given to equip doctors with more tools.
The latter one seems particularly salient to Scott given the recent posts re: fluvoxamine and Pascalian medicine.
(Edited to add: no idea which particular claims Dr. McCullough himself is most confident in. Might not be those two.)
> The claim that no medical school or other medical... consortium? (like the AMA) has produced, to date, a recommended protocol for treatment of COVID prior to hospitalization,
Thank you! Do you have anything in regards to the other claim about vaccine safety / comparative # of deaths from COVID vaccinations versus prior types of vaccinations?
I finally watched the Black Panther 2018 movie. (Spoilers follow.)
As a superhero action movie, I have no objection. It's fun, and it makes about as much sense as any other superhero movie, which is perfectly okay.
As a political message that doesn't even try to be subtle... when the important characters talked about difficult life of their "brothers" in USA, it was quite hypocritical from the *in-universe* perspective, in my opinion.
Hypocritical, as in: nowhere in the movie they show any concern about the well-being of their "brothers" *in Africa*; some of which are living right next to them. They probably see the poor people right out of their windows in the skyscrapers made invisible by superior technology. They keep observing them for decades or maybe centuries (not sure how long is the history of the fictional Wakanda), and they are quite okay with the quality-of-life difference.
It's only learning about mistreatment of black people *in USA* that causes the political upheaval that is the plot of the story. Which is also kinda weird, because - depending on how long Wakanda exists - why weren't they more concerned about, you know, *slavery* in USA, in the past. (Did Wakanda perhaps participate in the slave trade, and thus gained the capital to build their empire? Because having magical unobtainium is nice, but if you aren't *selling* it, it does not really explain all the wealth and modern technology.) What exactly is so special about today?
Of course, the out-universe explanation is that the movie is made today (which makes today so special), and the target audience are Americans (which makes America so special, and the rest of the world so morally irrelevant). Of course.
But it is fun to imagine a Straussian reading of the movie, as containing *two* political messages: one quite blunt, the other subtle. The Straussian reading is that no matter how much people talk about the race, wealth actually matters much more. (Even the people saying "Black Lives Matter" are ultimately talking about *American* blacks. No one needs to say it explicitly; yet everyone clearly understands that the hashtag is not about de-worming Africa.) The fictional Wakanda is a rich country; it is natural that the inhabitants only care about what happens in other rich countries. It is embarrassing for the wealthy Wakandians living incognito in USA to be treated as second-class citizens. The poverty they see out of their skyscrapers is not relevant, because they are never forced to interact with it, unless they choose to.
Therefore, I also approve of Black Panther as a subversive movie. The hidden message is that rich people need to be treated with respect, regardless of their race. Wakanda may not exist in the real world, but there are many important and wealthy people outside of USA, and we all together must strive to make their visits in USA as pleasant as possible.
From my review of Black Panther, shortly after seeing it:
Black Panther does one thing well, pats itself on the back, then doubles down on Disney's Marvel's tradition of tediously status-quo gender, age, and class relations.
Spoilers, though this is mostly about the troubling implications of the movie's world-building:
In Wakanda, the position of absolute monarch* is decided by either direct inheritance or by the challenge of ritual melee and/or hand-to-hand combat. Furthermore, only the family members of the five tribal leaders are eligible to challenge for the monarchy.
Let's stop right there.
That's in the text of the movie. There is no disputing these are the conditions under which Wakanda operates. In fact, these conditions inform the major plot points of the movie.
Wakanda's system of government inherently privileges young, physically fit men of the ruling class who've had the luxury of dedicated and extensive combat training.
Anyone older than about 35, anyone who isn't in the outlier territory of peak human athletic fitness, virtually all women, everyone who doesn't have the resources to dedicate 10+ hours a day to combat training, and everyone outside of certain bloodlines is barred from the ability to achieve leadership.
Let's just pause and examine that absurdity. Imagine if German Chancellors, British and Japanese Prime Minsters, American Presidents, et al were *LITERALLY* elevated to lifetime absolute dictatorship via the MMA Octagon, one that operates without weight classes and only for certain powerful families.
Seriously consider that, for a moment.
Yeah. Wakanda's system of government is *objectively* ageist, ableist, misogynist, and accessible only to the literal ruling classes.
Even worse, though, is that the movie doesn't attempt to dismantle Wakanda's obsolete and toxic system of government, nor even work within that system to egalitarian ends.
Instead, when Killmonger legally challenges for and is believed to have legally achieved absolute monarchy and then very legally orders his army to war, rather than having one of the female protagonists legally challenge for and achieve absolute monarchy under the provisions of the law, the surviving female members of Wakanda's ruling family LITERALLY RUN TO A DIFFERENT MAN TO LITERALLY BEG HIM, ***LITERALLY ON THEIR KNEES(!!!)*** TO CHALLENGE FOR THE RIGHT TO LITERALLY RULE OVER THEM.
Stop.
That's what happened.
This movie could have pulled the *epic* twist of casually discarding the 18th male protagonist in the Marvel's unbroken streak by letting T'Challa die and having one of the (infinitely more interesting) female leads step up to assume Queen-and-Black-Panthership, but it didn't.
"Yeah, but in the original comic book the character is a man and the fans..."
Shut the fuck up.
Be pissed. This movie is one step forward and three huge steps back.
* (Side bar: Is it even believable that any technologically advanced, educated, and professedly egalitarian human civilization would operate as an absolute monarchy? That's its own essay, but I would argue no. Proof: All of human history up until now, where the remaining absolute monarchies are Brunei and Oman.)
> It's in a comic book universe, so it's optimized for hand-to-hand combat.
White comic book heroes do lots of hand-to-hand violence, too. Yet the society they live in (unless it is an obvious dystopia) is usually more civilized than "whoever is best at punching other people becomes the absolute dictator".
Wakanda seems like designed by (and for) people who try to appear woke, yet can't overcome even their most basic racial prejudices.
"Hey, imagine this utopia for black people, which is like super rich and super technologically advanced, but was hidden in Africa until recently..."
"Sounds interesting. Please tell me more about how the society works! Like, what is their political system? How do they make the important decisions on national scale?"
"Well, they are blacks, so... uhm... probably using physical violence..."
A large theme in many runs of Black Panther, the comic is that Wakanda's culture is backwards and barbarian and they need to "catch up" (aka become another neoliberal free-market-capitalist American-culture-dominated two-party democracy with some degree of corruption, because that's what the American audience sees as the natural state of Man with everything else being some weird and slightly malicious deviation) because of a vaguely-Whig-history argument of "times have changed".
I will counterpoint that Wakanda attained massive technological advancement and material prosperity (the latter is less obvious in the movie, but even though they've failed to annihilate poverty the poor of Wakanda benefit from a largesse from the ruling class that means they essentially live like upper-middle-class Americans in clay housing) under their system of tribal elder governance and ritual duels. There's no reason to believe that their prosperity and social order aren't intertwined, such that if they decided to become a "civilized nation" corporate raiders and incompetent/corrupt bureaucrats wouldn't immediately plunder their land for all it has and leave the people significantly worse off.
On the meta level: Black Panther was a character made by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby as part of a push in the '70's to appeal to the black audience for comic books by putting Black superheroes on the shelves. The two characters that came out of this were a noble king from a neo-tribal-futuristic society (combining Jack Kirby's love of blending ancient culture and futuristic technology with the pan-African movements happening at that time) and Luke Cage, Hero for Hire, a super-powered jive-talking bad mother with a good heart but flexible morals ripped straight from the reel of a blaxploitation film. You could argue that both of these characters are immensely offensive to the point where you'd want to disinter the corpses of Lee and Kirby to try them for hate crimes, but they were, and still are, popular among their target demographic and I don't feel like trying to lecture black people about how something they like is actually racist towards them.
Having WMDs under control of a fightocracy is insane and any current or previous king should have implemented controls on that.
Like, instead of the law being "the king gets to order the army to invade other countries," make the law that "the king may not send any vehicles out to conquer other countries."
And yet this apparently was never a problem until Killmonger couped- quite possibly because this is a Marvel comic, which are fantasy stories that run off of the inherent assumption that nations have moral character and the True King would never abuse his power. Fantasy, like all fiction except for extremely dry and bleak dramas about depressed writers living in the Bay Area, does not hold up to "rationality" (here meaning "the persistent insistence that fantastical stories must slavishly cleave to 21st-century Bay Area-culture conceptions of how the world works"). In the real world, basically every single superhero in the US would either be shackled to a federal bureaucracy and used as tools to enforce realpolitik interests instead of protecting the populace or be declared an enemy of the state with kill-on-sight orders. Not even Worm, which this community tends to uphold as the One Rational Superhero Story, actually does this.
My point is that there are some real low expectations here about what an African utopia would look like: One where a powerful black woman - a literal queen - would sink to her knees to beg a man to challenge the legal succession of the absolute monarchy.
That people aren't outraged about that scene astonishes me to this day.
Thanks. When people haven't seen anything positive about themselves, they'll accept pretty mediocre stuff.
What amazes me is that Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog, which is a sympathetic account from the murderer's point of view of a young woman who's killed for the crime of being pretty in public.
I don't think I've seen *any* pushback from the woke side.
Huh? Dr. Horrible is certainly not a hero, but that’s a very misleading description of the plot.
*Spoilers* Penny is tragic and very much unintentional collateral damage in an attack targeted against Captain Hammer, and killing her pretty much removes Dr. horrible’s last bit of humanity.
From a Doylist perspective, the shrapnel "randomly" killed Penny rather than any of the dozens of other potential victims because Whedon needed to remove Dr. Horrible's last bit of humanity. Only Penny had that power. and she had that power because she looked pretty in a laundromat.
Since when is Wakanda "professedly egalitarian"? My question was whether the commoners were even aware of the battle at the end, or was it purely the nobles fighting each other?
Actually, you're right. The king's guard are all women, and while they're depicted as being capable and fierce warriors, none of them are eligible for leadership due to their bloodlines, even if they're better fighters than the men of the ruling families.
I thought a number of your questions were answered in the film? First, Wakanda is ancient. It’s basically Black Atlantis. So, yes, they did indeed sit by throughout slavery. This is explained as a deliberate policy of isolation on the logic that their technology was too powerful to be released into the world. Basically, the world might be going to shit, but it will be even worse if we try to play world police and add vibranium to the mix.
Now, perhaps this is flawed logic, but then, whether that logic is flawed is the central conflict of the movie. In any case, it doesn’t seem totally unreasonable that a powerful ruling dynasty could sustain isolation as a policy for a long time.
There seems to have always been a minority faction in favor of non-isolation, and that’s where Killmonger (and his father) come from.
As for “why care about brothers in America instead of the poverty you see from your front door”. Well, Killmonger’s concern for black brothers in the US and elsewhere seems to be a nationalistic case, as much as materialistic one. That is, he cares more about self determination for a pan-African race rather than ending poverty per se.
I don’t agree with this logic, but it’s not like “race based nationalism” is a position without real-world parallels.
The weird one is that after the main events of the film, we see T’Challa going out and engaging in seemingly materialistic support of the black diaspora, but NOT apparently attempting to engage in the nationalism of Killmonger. And that DOES raise the question “why not help the even poorer people just outside your stealth bubble first” although the film does not say explicitly that they aren’t also being helped. But it is an American movie for mostly American audiences.
Gurgaon is a city in India. It doesn't have a municipal government, but it seems to be about as good or bad as the rest of India.
There's an interesting bit of stationary bandit theory-- bribery is less expensive because there's only one agency to bribe instead of several each collecting bribes for the same thing.
Oh dear. I see your point--it would be hilarious & fascinating. But I'm a little afraid of putting myself (and others) into a situation where they have to mentally navigate the Unsong AU constantly!!
Also, sadly, I fear it may make telepathy not seem OP! (just because on muds usually there's a mechanism for sending chats to someone not in the same "room," and we get used to that norm. But then, this doesn't have to folow THAT convention.)
Sorry do people still play MUDs seriously? Why not just have a text/icon browser game in the style of Warring Factions or something? If you aren't doing a Minecraft style server based game. Just seems like there's no reason to play MUDs specifically.
I think of people as having a lot of temporal reach these days. Old things might not be extremely popular, or not for long, but it's more likely that they'll have a small fan base keeping them going indefinitely.
This is why I'm annoyed with The Truman Show and Permutation City-- both have fans completely abandoning something that fascinated them.
Sure... maybe it's just nostalgia for many pleasant hours I spent on those over a decade ago.
But yes, some still do! A Wheel of Time mud I used to play seems to be reviving! (Unsurprisingly, perhaps!) They now have a discord, and I logged on and saw character-names I haven't seen in years.
Looked into "Warring Factions." (I don't "keep up on" lots of game stuff! Clearly.) It seems to me it fits a different niche? More like massively-multiplayer Civ, I would guess? (tho that could be a very rough approximation.)
Oh, very neat! t̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶a̶c̶t̶u̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶f̶i̶t̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶o̶r̶i̶g̶i̶n̶a̶l̶ ̶u̶s̶e̶-̶c̶a̶s̶e̶ ̶i̶ ̶h̶a̶d̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶m̶i̶n̶d̶!̶, ermmm... what I meant to say is, thank you for sharing this--I didn't know this specific thing existed / the name for it!!
(If i make one and get like at least 20-50 people, would you like me to invite you?)
Perhaps "text based MMORPG" would be clearer to those too young to remember MUDs. (Whereas I tend to think of MMORPGs as large, commercialized, graphical MUDs.
I am trying to apply EA principle in other instances like solar panel installations. Does it make sense to install solar panels in your house at high north latitude or invest to install it in other places. Does anybody here have experience to model whether there is much difference in environmental impact considering location? I am assuming tropical countries may lead to more energy production per panel; how much pollution does it offset e.g. does it replace energy production from an natural oil power plant vs coal plant etc.
I did some undergrad research modeling solar installation costs and efficiencies around the world.
>Does anybody here have experience to model whether there is much difference in environmental impact considering location?
Power transmission (moving electricity from one place to another) requires expensive infrastructure and incurs losses per mile. People already live all over the place, and they have energy demands in all of those places. If the goal is lowering emissions, you need to replace a consumed kilowatt-hour generated from fossil fuels with a kilowatt-hour generated from clean energy. Due to the aforementioned transmission losses, no you can't put all the panels in Colombia and run wires all the way to Alaska, you'd lose all the power heating the mostly-aluminum transmission lines. Per-mile transmission losses are always going to be higher than the losses due to having a slightly worse solar azimuth angle, ideally you'd always colocate power generation.
This is offset by logistic issues. Like it might be cheaper to set up a large solar farm on some empty land 1 mile away than to install them directly on the roof of a factory or warehouse, just because it's literally easier to do construction work in an empty field than a rooftop. If we would wave a magic wand and put solar panels on the roof of every home, that would be excellent for efficiency and real estate costs (the real estate would basically be free) but in reality every house would be a custom job and the labor would get really expensive, it's a lot easier to copy/paste the same solar farm on an empty patch of land somewhere.
But if you're looking for the most cost-effective-in-dollars way to prevent a kilogram of CO2 from being emitted, it might make sense to focus on lower latitudes before higher latitudes, but again you have to take logistic costs into account. Panama is a lower latitude than California, so panels there will offset more kilowatt-hours of fossil fuel energy, but is it cheaper to get 10,000 solar panels in California or Panama? It's not a simple problem, you'd have to do the supply-chain research and math.
I am new to this community and I read a few older posts related to underweighting of sensatory input vs priors in depression and this gave me a thought. Reduction in neurotransmitters and lethargy/fatigue associated with depression might lead the brain to become more efficient in its working to conserve energy. I suspect processing sensory inputs may be more computational intensive (given how much of our brain is devoted to visual processing) This may be leading to higher weightage towards priors. My own experiences during depression episodes makes me suspect my brain just works slower and facing difficulty in learning new things. which has always made me skeptical of the depressed people are more creative theory.
Their might be a genetic component towards how much we value priors in our decision making. I noticed that there seem to be a lot of people who have suffered depression in this community than the proportion in general population. This might be people who are analytic and value prior naturally are drawn to the rationalist community.
A question for others who suffer from serious depression/panic attacks - I want to know if my below experience is a common strategy or this is totally weird? Whenever I hit my worst point and seem to collapse; I feel a rush of warm loving in my brain - like a mother loving and comforting me. I suspect this is a kind of fail safe mechanism triggering in my brain - oxytocin levels rising to reduce my stress levels.
"higher weightage towards priors" - I would expect that to lead to less creativity. "depressed people are more creative theory" - I would expect manic people to be more creative.
The study authors performed 44 autopsies and found that covid RNA was present in many different tissues and in many anatomical locations, even in subjects who had mild or asymptomatic covid cases. They also found that covid was found long after infection- as far as 230 days post-infection in one case. The authors conclude that "Our data prove that SARS-CoV-2 causes systemic infection and can persist in the body for months."
It's unclear to me if this is a cause of long covid, since the authors note that they didn't see significant inflammation outside the respiratory system. I'm pretty ill-equipped to make sense of the article in general, since my degree is in a different sort of biology. I'd appreciate it if someone with a stronger understanding of immunology could take a look.
I would appreciate some knowledgeable input about this too. My main questions:
(1) Is this finding a one-off, or has other research found similar?
(2) If you find viral RNA fragments in a part of the body, does that mean that part was actually *infected* by the virus, or could the mRNA have ended up there via some other process (say some live virus arrived there, but could not enter the cells that make up that part so just "died" and left its "bones"? or, virus remained in the parts of the body that it had infected, broke down, and then RNA fragments of it got carried around to other parts of the body via circulation.
(3) How unusual is it for a virus to leave RNA fragments in many parts of the body after the infection ends? Is Covid unusual in this respect, or is this just what you find left behind in bodies after many kinds of viral infection?
(4) How ominous is the finding of Covid RNA in the brain, on a scale of "Ehh" to "Parkinson's here were come"?
What's the benefit of tax farming here? As I understand it, the main motivations for historical tax farming were:
1. Lack of state capacity to collect taxes directly, so contracting with a private third party with local knowledge and their own enforcement resources allowed collecting taxes more thoroughly.
2. Lack of sovereign credit via a banking system or bond market, so sale of rights to collect future tax revenue was one of the few ways available to finance a fiscal deficit.
Neither of these are much of a problem in a modern first-world context, especially for land taxes where there's a central registry of who owns what, usually maintained by the same agencies that administer land taxes.
Although I suppose if you squint hard enough, aspects of the current system of private landlords is an awful lot like Georgism plus tax farming. Especially in Britain, where very-long-term "ground rent" leases are a common form of land tenure.
This is for a fiction project. The government of the city in question does not permit private ownership of land and extracts a land value tax on leased land. I'm wondering if tax farming is practical in that situation - I want a character in that fiction to be a publican.
This is the weekly visible open thread. Odd-numbered open threads will be no-politics, even-numbered threads will be politics-allowed. This one is even-numbered, so go wild—or post about whatever else you want.
Hey Scott! How do you conduct your research for articles? Do you usually start with primary sources and scientific articles, or by getting a feel for the consensus among well-respected experts? What helps you develop new insights or come at a known problem from a new direction?
Judging from the mess he made of his writings on Paxlovid and fluvoxamine, He does his "research" on twitter, random, equally uninformed blogs, and his housemate's writing on Vox.
I'm hearing rumors and anecdotes that Omicron is evading rapid antigen tests due to being less prevalent in the upper respiratory tract, leading to tests that only swab the patient's nose being less effective. E.g.;
I'm cautious about this because there was also a separate trend of claims that Omicron evaded rapid tests altogether, which turned out not to be true (people tried artificial samples with various titrations of Delta and Omicron against rapid tests, and they showed roughly equal response to each.) But here there's a reasonably plausible mechanism, given the repeated studies that Omicron preferentially replicates in the bronchi.
If anyone is still looking at this slightly stale open thread, I'd appreciate people's thoughts;
- Is this for real? Was this a thing people were saying pre-Omicron? Have any formal trials been done on whether Omicron is evading nasal swabs in particular?
- Would this also effect PCR tests, or should their enhanced sensitivity be enough to catch the virus in a nasal swab regardless?
- Afaik, almost all testing done at present is via nasal swabbing alone. Would this mean that we're undercounting Omicron cases? Significantly?
So, The Zvi, citing aforemetioned Michael Mina, attempted to integrate apparent findings if this kind into his model. Apparently his current line is that tests are not very effective on day 1 of infection, which was always the case, but difference is that people are now infectious on day 1, which with previous variants they were not. Seems plausible (section headed "Test Sensitivity") https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-204/comments#comment-4194542
Various rapid tests have, um, variable, reliability, regardless of omicron, so that is the source of your anecdotes. Also, we, where "we" means basically any relevant country perhaps except Denmark, are indeed significantly undercounting omicron cases, for other reasons.
There is no reason to think that omicron has lower levels of "detectability". I mean, there is an absolute shitload of detected omicron cases in Britain, Denmark, and (probably also) France, higher than in any previous wave. And a lot of hospital admissions in Britain with omicron are people who are in a hospital for other reasons and were detected as positive during their stay.
Here is The Zvi with the same conclusion: "All rapid and PCR tests detect Omicron. I include this because I know of people who aren’t confident on that and are freaking out a bit." https://thezvi.substack.com/p/omicron-my-current-model
abstract says this about their tests of 7 antigen tests comparing their sensitivity with Omicron to that with earlier variants: "Overall, we have found a tendency towards lower sensitivity for Omicron compared to pre-VOC SARS-CoV-2 and the other VOCs across tests."
You can probably update them more than slightly I'm pretty sure there are a number of lines of research and observation pointing to antigen tests being less good when used to detect Omicron. I've been seeing stuff here and there for a couple days, but just grabbed a couple things that where quick and easy to find.
I don't find Zvi as good a source of info about things like changes in the accuracy of texts with new variants. His sweet spot is the epidemiological stats, and predictions based on them. He's a numbers and patterns and odds genius (former Magic prodigy), but just a regular intelligent guy when it comes to Covid-adjacent matters and factoids related to them.
Dr. Michael Mina, who was one of the big promoters of frequent antigen tests as a means of managing the epidemic, had a thread on Twitter about Omicron and antigen tests a couple days ago. I could only read a little bit of it, because I opted out of Twitter 6 mos. ago so it only shows me snippets. But I *think* what he was saying was that Omicron ramps up so fast that the transition from non-contagious to contagious levels of the virus happens over a shorter period of time. So with a slower-moving variant, the odds that somebody testing negative on an antigen test will be positive 12 hrs later are just lower than they are with Omicron. If that's the situation, then it seems like the way to think about antigen testing is that it used to be that a negative antigen test meant that you were probably non-contagious for the rest of the day -- now it means you're probably non-contagious for the next few hours.
Somebody who knows for sure -- can you post the real deal?
Yep. It would mean current estimates of R and of severity are off, and on net it would be good news since it would at least put an upper bound on the possible magnitude of the disaster.
But I am not putting much stock into it until more evidence emerges.
A stray thought on Georgism that has suddenly appeared to me: why does not it imply that we should tax owning matter? As far as I understood, under georgism, an owner of an iron mine does not own the iron ore they have mined - the ore is owned by the whole population, and the money that the owner gets for selling the ore is not the price of the ore, but payment for the service for extracting it from the Earth, which is considerably lower. But consider the person who has bought the ore. Owning this ore is fair in the sense that they have payed for the labour of extracting it, but unfair in the sense that component of the ore which was not produced by labour - the actual existence of iron atoms - is still owned by the country population and should be taxed. And even after they process it into steel, and use it to build a skyscraper, there is still a component to those materials and things that do have not involved labour - the existence of the matter in the first place. So under those considerations, a skyscraper should actually be taxed heavier than a parking lot. And, well, owning a spoon should also be slightly taxed. Probably this could reduce consumerism or something, I don't know. (I am not actually sure this would be a good policy, just playing with the ideas and trying to look at georgism from different angles)
This is the era of sophisticated financialization and economics.
So what is the difference, really, between taxing something forever vs a larger up-front tax equivalent to the net present value of future receipts? (And if the government can't see this, Goldman Sachs will surely help out with a suitable swap contract.)
We shouldn't expect an ongoing matter-tax to be functionally different from a suitably set once-and-for-all resource extraction tax. The latter exists (in places). It is also going to be just vastly more efficient to manage.
If you expect something to change hands frequently, taxing it forever or up-front seems to be a huge difference, as taxes are always paid by the current owner. Otherwise, we can get to a point where it gives you negative money to mine iron ore, as taxes of of all future people using the iron are brought down on the owner of the mine, and when summed up become higher than the price the ore can be sold at.
What I'm trying to say is that, in my opinion, it is not generalisable. For example: improvements to land are explicitly not taxed under Georgism; land is taxed, resources in that land that have never been worked by man are taxed, but once you work something it is no longer taxable merely for existing.
If you want to stick with philosophy I'd recommend considering the question of reclaimed land.
I still do not see the difference. If you improve the land, you are still taxed for its initial value, rather than exempted from the taxes you had for the unimproved land. So by analogy, if you are taxed for owning iron ore, improving it (for example by making it into steel) would not exempt you from the taxes on the iron atoms it consists on. The tax will stay the same, not disappear. I seems to agree with the spirit of Georgism, if not with the letter.
I don't follow. Under Georgism, whoever owns the land that the ore was mined from would pay tax on the value of the land (which includes the value of the unmined ore). Taxing the refined iron would be taxing the same thing twice.
And the value of the ore land would decrease as ore is removed from it, so the mine owner is not going to be forced to keep paying taxes on the mined iron either.
I was thinking about a tax per kilogram of a chemical element, so that a kilogram of platinum would be taxed more than a kilogram of sand, which is silicon plus oxygen. And additional to that, a tax on potential energy stored in chemical bonds, so that a kilogram of oil would be taxed more than carbon dioxide.
I see two problems with this approach. First is that I am not sure how it behaves around nuclear plants, where we convert chemical elements into each other. The second is diamonds, as we have to tax graphite at the same rate as diamonds. And if we burn a diamond, does it mean we get extremely taxable carbon dioxide? So maybe it would make sense to simply tax an item at a fraction of cost of natural resources needed to produce an identical item in the cheapest way possible.
Anyway, there seem to be many possible approaches to that question, and answering it in earnest would take some economics research papers and experiments.
As for garbage dumps, we people usually do not demand only they can use their garbage, so do not claim any exclusive rights for it, so they do not own it and no taxes are applicable. (Forbidding disowning garbage and making them pay taxes for owning it would be a powerful way to stimulate recycling, as well as recycling research, but for it to work one would need to solve many problems like people sending garbage abroad or recycling it into something that does not legally classify as garbage and throwing away that. And totally forbidding to revoke ownership claim on things, only selling and buying them, seems like it would create a host of its own problems)
>As for garbage dumps, we people usually do not demand only they can use their garbage, so do not claim any exclusive rights for it, so they do not own it and no taxes are applicable.
Fair enough. On the other hand, though, allowing people to disown things creates new questions. For example, if a farmer wants to reduce their taxes, can they disown any property interest in everything but the top two feet of soil on their land? This means that anyone can dig for ore or oil below their farm, but the cost of extracting that ore might be so high that it's not practical for anyone to try.
Those problems seem inherent to the default Georgism. Should a person be able to disown (in order not to pay taxes for) a blank piece of land in the forest in the middle of nowhere they have no use for and which they inherited from their grandfather? Probably yes. But then, can a farmer disown a small square of land in the middle of their farm, without providing any conventional means of getting there, so that they do not pay taxes on that land, do not own it de jure, but own it de facto because no one can get to that small square of land without trespassing on the farmers territory?
Other nasty tricks: if you do buy iron ore, the first thing you do with it is to turn it into a more refined form, which means throwing away two third of the atoms. You're hugely increasing the value while throwing away half the mass into the atmosphere. Do you still have to pay tax on the value of those oxygen atoms you threw away?
As far as I understand, under Georgism you pay those heavy taxes for exclusive rights of ownership, as exclusive right of ownership denies other citizens their rights of using what you own. So i think that if you no longer demand that only you can use the oxygen you have released, you are not eligible for paying the taxes for that oxygen. But if you collect the oxygen in a bottle and demand no one else can use it without your permission, you are eligible for the tax.
I think it would have to be a flat tax per kilogram to be Georgist in spirit.
It turns out the average plot of land is really heavy. I think rock is something like 3 tons per cubic meter and water is 1, and soil is somewhere in between, and I would think that owning a plot of land involves owning all the rock and soil to somewhere more than a meter of depth (though maybe I'm wrong about that?). So probably, the amount of tax levied on one kilogram of matter would be so small that it just isn't worth administering.
(I think the garbage dump would be no more taxed than any hill.)
My guess is that the price of the ore that goes into building the skyscraper is going to turn out to be negligible compared to the price of the land that the skyscraper is on. Thus, leaving off this bit of the tax is not going to be very distortionary, and it's going to make it a lot easier to administer the tax.
Apparently the median acre in Arizona sells for $4,000 (https://azbigmedia.com/real-estate/arizona-no-1-for-most-affordable-land-in-u-s/). I'm not exactly sure what percentage of land value would be an appropriate land value tax, but let's say it's at most $400 per acre per year. One acre is about 4,000 square meters, so this tax is about $0.10 per square meter per year. Let's be very conservative and claim you only own one meter of the ground under your land. At 3 tons per square meter, that means that the tax on matter would be at most $0.03 per ton per year, and probably less, assuming that the value of land is not only the value of the matter, but also has some positive contribution of its location.
I believe a car is at most one or two tons, it looks like a house is about 200 tons (https://whatthingsweigh.com/how-much-does-a-house-weigh/), and most other objects that individuals own are much lighter (other than land). So on a flat, per-kg tax, it looks like most people would add less than about $7 a year in taxes, which is why I think this would be negligible.
(For corporations that own really heavy objects like freight trains or skyscrapers or container ships, my guess is that even these things will add up to negligible amounts of tax compared to the land value of their headquarters. Only if you own a *huge* amount of really low value per weight stuff like ore would this add up to much.)
First, as I have written above, I was not thinking about it in terms of flat taxes per kilogram, because taxing 1kg of dirt the same way as 1kg of diamonds seems unreasonable. So a skyscraper, with its steel for structural support, copper for wiring, would probably get high matter tax under this scheme, compared to the relatively low land it occupies.
Second, lots of people live in apartments in apartment blocks. Under your calculations, 100m^2 apartment would cost 10$ per year, plus something for surrounding city infrastructure, minus something for owning not the land with the sheer vertical dimension but only some cubic meters in the air. 10$ plus or minus something per year also seems like something negligible, but it does not invalidate Georgism, it just means that those people and not the main reason the Georgist taxes are introduced.
The Georgist position seems to be that nobody has a right to claim ownership of any particular piece of land, since they didn't create that land, and grabbing hold of a plot of virgin land and establishing a claim on it has no real force except that of custom. The land belongs to the people, so why should one rich person make a profit out of owning land?
Which as you say leads on to the fact that nobody can claim ownership of land, not even the people as a whole, since they did not create the land (perhaps there would be exceptions such as Dutch land reclamation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_reclamation_in_the_Netherlands)
So if we can tax land, we can tax the materials extracted from that land. And why not tax vegetables and crops and flowers grown on the land, livestock raised on that land, and so on up to taxing the spoons in your cutlery drawer? Every step along the way has not been creation of new items, it has merely been development of pre-existing matter and charging for the use of it.
"Dear citizens, we have introduce window tax, which is absolutely necessary to compensate for the opportunity costs of the silicon it consists of not being used to build computer chips"
> The Georgist position seems to be that nobody has a right to claim ownership of any particular piece of land, since they didn't create that land, and grabbing hold of a plot of virgin land and establishing a claim on it has no real force except that of custom. The land belongs to the people, so why should one rich person make a profit out of owning land?
What does the Georgist position have to say about international relations? Surely the sovereignty of nations over land is no less arbitrary (and usually a lot more arbitrary) than the ownership of individuals of land?
In principle I agree - for scarce resources like rare metals or oil (or more generally for common goods like polluting the atmosphere through the release of green house gases!) a tax might make sense at least theoretically and could be argued for analogously to a land tax.
One caveat though: Many natural resources are abundant for all practical purposes and mostly limited by our capacity to extract them. If I buy a wooden desk, the matter in the wood has been taken from the environment. But in practice, carbon is abundant enough, that it doesn't really matter. The wood itself comes from a tree that needs time to grow on ground somewhere - taxing the ground should be enough from a Georgist perspective as far as I understand. Even for iron, I would assume (but happy to be corrected) that the major limiting factor is not the availability of iron deposits, but the cost of mining/refining it.
Your intuition is correct to a certain extent here - no humans have 'created' iron ore, and to be sure a good chunk of the value of iron lies in the ore itself, and not just in the labour and capital put into processing it.
1) A lot of countries already recognise this, and apply additional royalty taxes to extractive industries. This is based on the twinned reasoning that these industries are often unduly profitable due to the amount of 'unearned' value intrinsic in the materials, the underground materials don't move so there's a certain tolerance to taxation, and also that given that these materials were found in the earth of the country, they in a sense belongs to all citizens of that country.
2) However, in most cases nowadays, actually getting those resources out of the earth and processed is still a heckuva lot of work, and if often beyond the capabilities of the host government or local landowners. If you do nothing to the ore, the ore is broadly worthless. However, if the owner of a decrepit plot of land in a city does nothing, it could still easily double in value if, say, a subway stop was built nearby.
This is a difference of degree rather than of kind to me - land is much more clearly and obvious valuable with fairly minimal work (as a proportion of the land value).
> If you do nothing to the ore, the ore is broadly worthless.
I have just googled the price of iron ore, as it changes with time, and seems its price can easily double or even quintiple without you doing anything to your iron ore at all. (The problem here is that the price can fall as easily, and does so equally often. After all, mathematical expectation of price change is about zero due to efficient market hypothesis). I'd also be surprised if land price does not also follow this stochastic pattern of rises and falls, so a chance of land plot doubling in value is offset by a chance of the value being halved. It's not that I am trying to argue against georgism here, it's that I am not (yet) convinced that positive expected value of land price change is a valid reason for accepting georgism.
I actually don't particularly think the land price *change* is a particularly important bit of Georgism, just that it's an efficient thing to tax.
And a bit of a quibble with your point above: The price you are looking at is for ore that has been mined and processed (the iron is generally only a small amount of total earth moved), i.e., that's already had quite a lot of the hard work done on it.
Each attention head contributes to generating a new representation for the inputs within a given layer. Presumably each head is tuned to extract certain kinds of information from the input. If the information it's tuned to extract isn't present, then it would be helpful for it to be able to output a null signal.
This null signal would correspond to an output of all zeros. One simple way to generate such an output is to put all of the attentional weight on a particular token, and make that token's associated value vector have norm ≈0. And because we would like to be able to do this reliably for any input, it would be helpful for this particular token to be one that is always present. The [SEP] and [CLS] tokens fit this bill, and therefore this is the approach learned by architectures like BERT. (For more info see here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.10102)
As for whether it "ends" the attention: no. Based on the phrasing of the question my guess is your understanding of the inner-workings of these models is a bit hazy, and unfortunately to explain what's going on here you need to really understand what the attention mechanism does, and how it fits into the overall architecture. For a good explainer, I strongly recommend The Illustrated Transformer: https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-transformer/
The short answer is that within each layer of the network the input is re-encoded 8 different ways, one per attention head. These 8 different encodings are then glued together and passed through some other transformations to create the new input for the next layer. As long as least one of the 8 attention heads in that layer is emitting something other than the all-zero null signal, there will be some meaningful new encoding to pass on to the next layer. So nothing "ends".
As for moving my writing to Substack, I'm just getting started, and Medium is a good platform for attracting new readers. If I ever get a large enough following that I can rely on people to seek out my Substack on their own, then I would consider moving over.
Hi all! I’ve been doing some research on STI prevalence / transmission rates to inform my own policy on when to ask partners to get tested. I’m considering writing up my findings for anyone else interested. I imagine this’d be about 20 pages plus lots of citations (with a shorter summary to start). I’m not a doctor, but I’m pretty thorough. Three questions:
1) Would there be interest in reading this?
2) Are there any particular questions / topics you would most want addressed in such a document?
3) Does anyone know of existing good resources that do this? I’ve seen a couple shorter attempts at discussing STI risks numerically, but wasn’t impressed by their thoroughness. (For example, they didn’t mention the fact that HIV is more likely* to transmit in the first few weeks of having it, due to high viral load at the beginning of infection.)
Yup, thanks! Not quite as thorough as I was hoping for, and uses some questionable logic like comparing lifetime car accident and per-year syphilis transmission likelihoods.
One big question that made me very wary of casual sex in my 20s was the prevalence/transmissibility of herpes, both genital and oral (from what I've read the biggest distinguishing factor between them is their level of stigmatization).
The numbers I've seen indicate something like 50% of the US adult population has one of these, and supposedly it's so virulent that it sheds even when there are no visible symptoms, yet somehow everyone I know claims not to have it? On the one hand I know that it often presents asymptomatically, but I know multiple people, including myself, who specifically requested HSV screens which came back negative.
I've had something like 15 partners over the years and assuming even a 10% transmission rate the chance of not having gotten it across all of those encounters is (1-0.5*0.1)^15 ~ 47%, i.e. more likely to have gotten it than not. How is it possible that everyone I know keeps miraculously winding up on the right side of this coin toss?
My understanding is that the biggest confound here is age. 50% of the US adult population having it does not imply that the probability of each of your partners having it was 50%. It's mostly old people. Since you can only treat it, the percentage of the population that has it can only increase with age. This is the same with HPV.
If you continue your promiscuity well into your 50s and 60s, I'd estimate your probability of getting it to be well over 50%.
What I've heard is that most STD tests don't even bother checking for HSV, because the viral load is usually low enough that it is undetectable.
Although interestingly, the CDC says that the reason they don't recommend testing for HSV is because there's "no evidence" that people who test positive change their behavior in any way.
Yes that's true, that's why I said I've specifically requested it in the past, as has my partner.
The reason I heard why they don't normally test for it is because it's very hard to distinguish HSV-2 (strain most associated with genital herpes) from HSV-1 (strain most associated with oral herpes), and so many people are HSV-1 carriers that it would lead a lot of people to freak out for no reason.
However my read on the situation is different, namely that if the two strains are so similar to be nearly indistinguishable, then it's appropriate to be freaked out at the idea of catching *either* of them.
Dan Savage & others have suggested that maybe we should all just relax about genital herpes. His point is that the stigma of having herpes is by far the worst thing about having the virus. According to him, outbreaks of actual sores in people infected with the virus do not occur very frequently, and after the initial outbreak later ones are much milder and do not cause a great deal of discomfort. Also, according to Savage, people not having a current outbreak are unlikely to pass the virus on to partners. I have not checked to see whether what he said about symptom severity and contagiousness over the life span is accurate. But if it is correct, maybe having genital herpes isn't such a big deal?
Yep, I would agree that the stigma is the worst part of genital herpes. Unfortunately, the stigma (and corresponding difficulty finding future sex partners) is a big deal for some, so we'd all need to agree as a society not to care - easier said than done.
and especially Vermillion for a very detailed walkthrough. I only recently found out that apparently I was not getting email notifications about comment responses, and started checking my older questions for threads under them.
Even if the first AGI's values and goals are aligned with humanity's, isn't it just a matter of time before someone somewhere else builds an AGI that is misaligned? It's like nuclear power plants. As hard as you try to build them to be safe, eventually there will be a meltdown somewhere.
If we really thought evil AI was coming and wanted to stop it, we could track computer chips and stop them from being concentrated in any place, and also control the manufacture of chips. Fabs are really hard to build and very easy to disrupt.
We already had this discussion 50 years ago with respect to nuclear weapons. "Sure, let's say the United States, United Kingdom, and France are responsible stewards, and the USSR and China are at least rational, but isn't it only a matter of time before a Rogue State™ gets its hands on one and then all hell breaks loose?"
Here we are 76 years after Trinity and it hasn't happened yet. Apparently the juxtaposition of sufficient intelligence to build a very complex device and sufficient irrationality to do it carelessly and/or irresponsibly is rarer than we thought.
Yeah that doesn't bug me any more than the Soviets having 20,000 warheads aimed at me in the 1980s. I wouldn't say I'm *happy* about it -- hard to see how anyone could be "comfortable," as you put it, with anyone at all anywhere having a nuke -- or that matter a gun, or the ability to drive while drunk on freeways I frequent -- but as existential anxieties go this one is way down the list.
Is it? That's a curious point of view. So, the first iPhone was introduced in 2007. You're saying if in 2050, say, a mere 43 years after its introduction, we were to attempt to draw conclusions about the general long-term response of humans to the introduction of the smartphone -- that would be rashly premature?
There's a humor thread somewhere down, with Russian jokes characterized as "dark, cynical". Czech humor is the same - even the sample joke is originally a Czech one, plundered by Russian army in 1805 - so I love these things very much, of course.
I didn't realize getting the flu did so much to increase stroke and heart attack risk.
The article mentions ventilation and filtration improvements to limit covid, but doesn't mention researching better treatments for people who get sick.
I have no idea what the author means by ""fairly robust death reporting in the US". In general, autopsies aren't done, and I don't know whether a full autopsy is needed to identify flu deaths.
To be fair, I don't think an autopsy could tell whether a heart attack or stroke which was an aftereffect of flu could be easily identified by any means.
Yeah I always wonder about that when I hear about long covid. Is it worse than "long flu" or "long [other virus]"? I've had full-blown flu 5 or 6 times in my life, and after most bouts I didn't feel fully back to normal for several months -- had low energy, exercising made me feel woozy and sick, was more prone to headaches, had a lingering cough, etc. So I guess I had "long flu"? Though at the time I just thought damn, I guess it takes a long time to bounce back from the flu.
Do you have any info or informed intuitions about how big a deal "long covid" is? My spontaneous reaction to people talking about the ghastly, heartbreaking, horrible, widespread, etc. effects of "long covid" is to feel skeptical and irritated. But I can't tell whether that reaction is informed by a valid intuition or just prejudice and crankiness.
I tend to believe things, especially people's accounts of pain, so that's another bias.
My impression is that serious long covid exists, but that doesn't say how common it is. Nor do we have any idea what's going to happen five or ten years out. It could be that a lot of people recover fully, or a lot of people continue suffering serious damage, or that a lot of people get sick with a covid analog of shingles. Or all three.
The disappearance of classified threads leaves me no other place to post this, and I'm getting desperate - please delete if inappropriate.
I made a game about reasoning and fallacies, and I feel like smart, educated people interested in that or adjacent fields (logic, psychology, epistomology, statistics, ethics, plus debating and teaching) are the natural target audience, and this suggests to me that ACX is a place that might appreciate it.
That's not possible on Kickstarter, but I have a family member ready to jump in if necessary, though I expect to be able to do without. This close to the funding sum is a point where I consider proof of profitability to having been brought forward - I wouldn't want to sit on a stack of unsaleable games sitting in my living room, but I don't think that's going to happen.
Pledged at the €50 level. Looking forward to coming up with a card that reflects the sort of discussions I have with my kids - “Argument from hurt feelings” or “Argument from personal incredulity” spring to mind.
Question to the AC10 hive mind: is there a way to meaningfully test the following long shot theory?
*Observation:* the vaccine denier movement seems to have brought up a wave of seriously irrational behaviour in disturbingly large numbers of people, especially in persons one would normally have considered to be more or less reasonable. In my circle of friends alone, a significant number of persons has gone off the rails in a manner that I would never have considered to be possible: with even some university-educated persons of good professional standing now believing random shit from the internet, if it just confirms their more or less bizarre pre-held convictions. Now one's own experience is of course strongly biased - but I have now heard similar stories from too many other friends that didn't got down the rabbit hole themselves to dismiss this as pure chance anymore.
*Theory:* in German, if everyone freaks out at the same time for non-obvious reasons, there is the flippant saying "es muss etwas im Trinkwasser sein" - "there has to be some contamination in the drinking water". And at first glance, that sort of thing is of course far too long a shot to be even remotely considered as a root cause of all this irrationality.
But what if there is, in fact, something in the environment right now that is causing an increased incidence of irrational behaviour in a susceptible part of the population?
What if we are seeing a version 2.0 of the low-level lead contamination that arguably caused a spike in aggressive behaviour across many nations (the "lead-crime hypothesis", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead–crime_hypothesis).
Candidates for this would be ubiquitous chemicals that are fairly new to the environment, for instance some new plastic softening agent that has only been applied on an industrial scale in the past 15 years or so (to replace PCBs, which are deemed harmful). Not that I am actually saying that a plastic softener is to blame here - absolutely not. I'm just using those as an example of "ubiquitous to the point no one even realises that they are there anymore", and "fairly new to the environment".
*Question:* are there any statistical techniques that could be meaningfully employed to search for correlations that might uncover such a long shot chemical agent? Or is this something that would remain buried in statistical noise, even if something of the sort is playing a role?
I think Covid-induced isolation and concomitant increase in time spent spelunking internet rabbit-holes does a good job of exciting my common-sense reasoning based on anecdotal evidence.
Personally, my preferred rabbit-hole is the authoritarian drift of the right wing of American politics. My brain tells me this is a once-in-centuries crisis, and I am becoming addicted to websites, blogs, and podcasts that share and reinforce that view. However, I have friends - smart, educated people - who tell me emphatically that yes, it's a problem, but hey the GOP has been drifting in that direction for decades; this is neither surprising nor is it the only issue worth fretting about - we still have to focus on inequality, climate change, the Singularity and so on.
So am I pretty much right, or am I just another victim of the outrage industrial complex?
So when a bunch of smart people believe things you disagree with, as a good Bayesian, you... update AWAY from that opinion and even more towards your current beliefs?
So if everyone agrees with you, your beliefs remain the same, and if everyone disagrees with you... everyone must have gone crazy and you're DEFINITELY right!
My preferred theory is that any increase in irrationality is more likely to be directly due to stress created by fear of covid, lock downs, job losses, fear of job losses, etc. etc..
I base this in part on my observations of 9/11. I was a mailing list moderator at the time, and a lot of previously reasonable posters went off the rails at that time. The most noticeable (to me) manifestation was trollish behavior. (Lots of picking fights, losing tempers after minor provocation, etc.)
I saw a similar pattern among my coworkers in 2020, once we were mostly working from home - and we were among the least stressed, being still employed, with our business booming because of lockdowns.
But in response to your question - there are techniques that can look at exposure to compound A, or compound B. But a fishing expedition for pollutants for which exposure might have changed recently enough for results to show up in the covid context? Well, if you test 20, you'll have one result on average that's statistically significant at the .05 level, without there being any real effect.
It would also be expensive. You need differential measures of exposure, not just "more of this in 2020 than 2000". I.e. you need a level of detail like "x% more of this in Washington than Poughkeepsie", or "y % more of this in fire fighters than in office workers" - for every single pollutant you care to test.
What about your friends' behavior strikes you as "irrational" other than "doesn't agree with my reasoning?" Or even let us stipulate "doesn't agree with good reasoning".
Human beings are very social animals, and even more so in this highly specialized highly interconnected social structure in which we live today. Individual prosperity is very strongly tied to your interactions with the greater society around you, and those interactions had better be positive -- if they are negative you can be crushed: driven from polite society, at least, and at worst lose your job, your ability to enjoy a peaceable life, or even be hounded to death. It has happened many times.
COVID is not the Black Death. It kills relatively rarely. So for almost everybody, the danger of your expressed attitudes being out of step with some social demographic or other is much greater than the danger of the virus itself. And the *rational* approach for the individual is to minimize his danger from social feedback, even if it raises the (much smaller) danger from the virus. That this requires occasionally adopting atittudes or saying things which, taken in isolation, are bananas, is nothing special. Historically speaking, people do it constantly.
Disagreement would not in itself worry me: that is natural, and in nuanced form probably more common than agreement anyway, in any reasonably heterogeneous group of friends or acquaintances.
The worrying behaviour patterns are in the direction of refusal to engage in any sort of meaningful exchange of information, paired with a total refusal to reflect on most things they are shown, in relation to the topic at hand. While at the same time uncritically accepting increasingly tall stories from more and more unlikely sources - sources these same people would have laughed at just a few years ago.
In short, behaviour patterns that you can also see when someone falls under the spell of a cult: all information that does not fit the pre-conceived worldview is simply ignored, while outsiders are bombarded with boilerplate propaganda material that would not stand up to even cursory scrutiny by a reasonably lucid mind.
To wit, I am not talking about e.g. having discussions about the origin of Covid: where the other party considers the lab leak theory (which I personally see as most likely, on balance) to be improbable. This is the sort of thing one can have a rational debate about, which in the absence of hard information on either side will eventually lead to an impasse. If it was a good debate, though, both sides will have learned something - hopefully, that is.
I'm talking about being sent, over and over again, the same horseshit from Telegram about e.g. there literally being microchips in the vaccines. Sent by people who have university degrees. And who still end up believing this utter garbage. And who are totally deaf to any explanations (from a computer science professor like myself, no less) that "microchips" simply don't come in sizes where they can be inserted into a vaccine without anyone being able to see them. That they don't come in such sizes for reasons of basic physics - this is not something you can have a debate about, if you insist on believing that, you are simply a cretin.
Seeing people you once considered to be rational go down that sort of rabbit hole is scary.
I don't believe you that you are interacting eith people who seriously believe covid vaccines contain microchips. I think you are actively spreading weakman mininformation. Making a meta conspiracy theory effectively. People with actual vaccines concerns never mention microchips to me, in person or online. There is a lot of frustration that the pro vaccine totalitarians are immune to discussion of data and ethics and always fall back on conspiracy theories and accusations of lacking empathy for others.
I think you are a active misinformation agent based on your spreading of the microchip conspiracy theory alone.
I see we are the entire world. In my area the microchip thing has caught on like wildfire, as it feeds into the already-prevalent conspiracy theories about "the Mark of the Beast".
You should know that this pro-vax "microchips" obsession is a coordinated attempt to re-center the discussion about vaccine safety away from the actual myocarditis and blood clot numbers. It's a [Weak Man](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/) that few, if none, actually believe. I've observed a lot of anti-vax and vaccine hesitant discussion online and nothing like microchips are ever mentioned - just actual science. A new study shows that the vaccine is far more likely to cause myocarditis than COVID for young men. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.23.21268276v1.full.pdf
I was visiting relatives for the holidays. My anti-vaccine relatives gave microchips (and the vaccines passports being the mark of the beast) as their reason for not getting the vaccine, not anything else.
Is their concern that the current vaccine secretly has microchips in it, or that microchips are closer down the slippery slope than anyone wants to admit? Because there's a Swedish company that has been manufacturing such chips for years and is now promoting them as a sort of vaccine passport solution.
This has been passed around in the last few days, though many have been aware of it for a while.
Many on the anti-vaxx side have seen "yesterday's conspiracy theory" become "today's truth" with a regularity that is not appreciated by their condescending pro-vaxx family members. It wasn't too long ago that the ideas of extended lockdowns or perpetual boosters or any kind of vaccine passport were pooh-poohed by the conventional wisdom. The question to many anti-vaxxers is not if but when microchips sneak through the Overton window.
The hazards for pro-vaxxers are not just understanding how this kind of message creep affects the anti-vaxxers as confirming their concerns, but being able to filter and address separately myriad different concerns about this vaccine campaign and not just take what you see as the most outlandish of all their fears and tag the whole lot, some of which is far more grounded today, as "beep beep boop microchips."
> The newest breakthrough in ensuring schizophrenic people take their medication (a hard problem!) is bundling the pills with an ingestable computer chip that transmits data from the patient’s stomach. It’s a bold plan, somewhat complicated by the fact that one of the most common symptoms of schizophrenia is the paranoid fear that somebody has implanted a chip in your body to monitor you. Can you imagine being a schizophrenic guy who has to explain to your new doctor that your old doctor put computer chips in your pills to monitor you? Yikes.
I am not talking about someone bringing up the indeed somewhat concerning statistics about vaccine side effects. And trying to tar all those who are skeptical with a wide brush, by making it all about microchips instead.
No, I am talking about people literally believing the microchip thing itself.
*That* is what has me worried - that this is not a red herring, but that there are actual persons out there who seriously believe this. Because someone on Telegram said so. If I hadn't experienced this first hand, I would have considered that an urban legend. But no, unfortunately this is a thing, with some.
I have theories. One of them is that it's not just the internet, it's people not getting enough sleep because of time spent on the internet.
Another is that there are prescription drugs (statins? steroids?) which are emotionally dysregulating, with effects that a lot of people don't notice in themselves.
Americans also have the saying "it must be something in the water", though I think usually it's for a place where people have weird ideas than for a moment when a bunch of people suddenly get weird ideas.
But as others say, it seems clear that the proximate cause of the weird ideas is stuff they see on the internet, and the patterns of how people see things on the internet have changed very quickly over the past ten years (e.g., smartphones and social media), so I would think the default hypothesis for the underlying cause is that it's more likely to be related to these changes in the behavior of the internet. I would only want to postulate an environmental cause if there was some sort of environmental correlate of these effects that leads them not to follow other expected patterns.
I don't think people reactions demand an extraordinary explanation, like low-level pollutants or other environmental causes (not to rule out those, but i would look more at stuff like obesity/men infertility/maybe unusual docility rather than covid reactions).
We have here a crisis, managed at national or even international level by governments and more or less opaque experts groups, which constantly make new intrusive rules since 2 years. In this context, it would be surprising if conspiracy theories were not in overdrive, anyone already convinced that conspirations exist will put covid crisis at the top of his list, before 9/11 or anything. Even people previously immune will start to question what happens if the measures hit them especially bad (nothing makes you a rebel like an unjust punition), or if they notice too many inconsistencies or paradox in the official set of measures and assorted justifications... And man, after almost 2 years, you need to be blind not to see so many of those, they pile quicker and quicker. Because it's a new disease so it's science as it unroll , because epidemiology is not in great state (which surprised me, i though it was relatively simple), and because decision takers were often really incompetent and extremely comfortable lying even for short term gains.
At this point, in my circle, people still mostly comply, but only the extremely conformist still trust authorities (governement, media, even health professionnals). And they seems to trust by default, because they look mostly confused when i tell about my distrust, while they were quick to jump to authority defense one year ago...
I do not know if this will persist, but covid has tremendously decreased trust in western countries, making them more like many other places (where trust in the authorities is low anyway). It is, by many aspects, similar to global warming, but worse. No wonder it trigger the same kind of reactions, only stronger...
So what happen when many people do not trust authorities and the story being told (about covid and how they should react to it)? They try to come with story of their own, piecing one together from infos gathered where they can (and downgrading infos from official source, because it's not trusted anymore). People will piece mostly irrational stories together, because most people are not great at this, and also because their infos are not great. Internat just means they have more infos (good or bad), but I guess you would have roughly the same distrust from official sources / conspiracy theories if the infos where gathered at the pub only.
The internet is a fairly new factor that is making a lot of people crazy. Crazy people gets an easy way to spread crazy information. Crazy people who would previously have been isolated find each other and forms crazy subcultures.
Covid anti-vax craziness seems strongly corelated with being right wing and is therefore unlikely to be caused by chemicals.
Another explanation: There's latent potential to irrationality in all of us, but it's being activated only by intense movements. I've heard this about the Trump years, too, that many previously normal people completely jumped headfirst into the rabbit hole. If so many others do it, there's something to it, right? So, sometimes there's an insanity du jour, and some times are more peaceful. There doesn't need to be something in the water to have periodic effects, rise and fall of movements, and I think this is what this is - a movement. Some people are swept up, others are not. Who is and who isn't maybe doesn't depend so much on the susceptibility to idiocy, and maybe more on the emotional needs a movement can meet. Like with cults.
Another explanation: The common cause of a rise in irrationality is covid itself, or rather, the isolation, worry, the non-stop incidence reports on the news. For many people, life changed a lot. It might even be the disconnect between the immediate perceived danger and the supposed danger on the news. 1% of a population dying is a huge deal, especially if they take up space in hospitals beforehand, but it's not actually a huge deal for everyone else, especially as the highest risks are born by the old and sick, populations that are more isolated, less likely to be working, more likely to be institutionalized beforehand. Some people will say "so what", because the messaging is "if this gets out of control we're having an apocalypse" and they think it's not a proper apocalypse unless 90% are dead and there's zombies, anarchy and whole cities devoid of life.
I was going to say something along these lines -- there are lots of people who have a tendency towards paranoia in the normal range for personality traits. When you add a lot of chronic stress to people, it can make those tendencies more extreme. So you add ongoing unpredictable health threat plus increased daily grind plus signs of incompetence in authorities plus social isolation and it's basically a perfect storm.
*Observation:* the vaccine advocacy movement seems to have brought up a wave of seriously irrational behaviour in disturbingly large numbers of people, especially in persons one would normally have considered to be more or less reasonable. In my circle of friends alone, a significant number of persons has gone off the rails in a manner that I would never have considered to be possible: with even some university-educated persons of good professional standing now believing random shit from the internet, if it just confirms their more or less bizarre pre-held convictions. Now one's own experience is of course strongly biased - but I have now heard similar stories from too many other friends that didn't got down the rabbit hole themselves to dismiss this as pure chance anymore.
Things along the lines of:
Being vaccinated makes you immune to covid.
Being unvaccinated means you are nesr certain to die.
Long covid will debiltate you and make you a de facto cripple if you do, somehow, manage to survive.
Ignoring different vaccination rates and severity of cobid variants in different populations (discriminated by age, sex, obesity, etc)
Being completely unable to consider vaccination and covid hospitalisation data recording methodologies (whether different or not, what they might skew in resulting data, etc).
What *I* have seen is that in person discussion these points along are enough to dismiss me as an anti vaxxer idiot, as I am obviously not compassionate enough to do the right thing, etc.
I have had people calling for the deaths of those who don't obey lockdowns and get vaccinated far more than I have come across people believing random shit from the internet.
From my point of view it is the people who are pro covid vaccination, pro lockdowns, etc who have completely lost it.
For another example, If I discuss mask effacacy with others I often get shown papers with models of droplet spread, reduction in that, etc. Raising the point that these are models, and that, as far as I am currently aware, no significant evidence exists to show masks have a non negligible effect in anything other than the most elderly populations at reducing covid spread in practice labels me as an idiot, ignorant, lacking common sense, among other less pleasant things.
I think what is in the water is effecting *you* and those like you. Those in this community, who I think have an utterly warped sense of reasonable risk concerning covid, to an extent It makes me seriously question everything else written by them - e.g. I won't be renewing my astral codex subscription because I don't trust scotts judgement anymore. Not that he is the most deranged, but when following through I see a completely different, alien even, way of drawing conclusions from data. I am struggling to go through and re-examine *everything* I may have unwittingly internalised from reading SSC and the adjacent "rationalist" since it's inception that is just plain nonsense.
I look at ONS (I am in the UK) covid data and historical death/hospitalisation norms from e.g..flu, etc and the reported rates ofnlong covid, etc and conclude that covid is barely noticeable. A nothing. Not worth worrying about *at all* for almost everyone. I just do not comprehend how others look at the same data and conclude there is any reasonable danger of harm, death, hospitalisation, or even overwhelming hospitals. I speak to doctors and they tell me the opposite, then I look up the data for their hospital and it does not match ehat they are saying.
It seems like the whole world is in a mass psychotic episode to me. It makes me wonder if so many people walked around before *without* seriously being aware of what risks they faced in their day to day life at all, and the awareness of th mild covid risk has sent them into a fear driven panic for the last 2 years.
I totally understand you and I feel similarly about a mass psychotic episode. I can understand that most people are not interested in exploring things deeper but I am disappointed in those who call themselves rationalists.
In Scott's defence, I see that he is able to modify his beliefs according to the evidence. When pandemic started I quickly formed my model based on my learning that covid is so similar to other cold viruses (but the one we haven't had any exposure yet therefore it is so severe in elderly at the first exposure) that it will mostly likely follow the same path. In the last article Scott has fully described this model with even more graphs than I can follow.
But these 2 years were not easy and zero covid policy has been very damaging for all of us.
Masks may have some impact in specific conditions but as London has been overtaken by omicron, possibly 10% people infected by now, it is hard to see any effect whatsoever. Maybe masks help but covid is like a stream which you try to block at some place and the water will rise until it overflows again. Similarly about testing which the UK does very actively and many people are lamenting that the US does not do enough testing. It may reduce the spread at some places for some time but ultimately it won't help and the wave will come anyway.
You raise a fair point that Scott does update. It is a failure of smearing my wider disappointment, and sometimes revulsion, of the wider rationalist community over Scott too.
I am still surprised how much resistance is against the idea of covid as an endemic disease. Someone posted a link on MR that most scientists supported this idea already in January 2021 (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00396-2). Until now I didn't even know about the scientific concensus because if you read mostly rationalist forums you get an impression that most consider it a fringe idea. Even Zvi writings on covid are confusing about this point because he thinks that there is great chance that covid cases will diminish forever after Feb 2022.
I'm sorry you've encountered such hostility for what seems like honest/sincere questioning.
I consider my (Bristol UK) group of friends to be pretty left wing and very concerned about covid (although not to the point where I could describe them as fearful or panicked), but they've all been interested to hear what I've had to say in terms of how policy doesn't seem to be particularly influenced by evidence; that masks are a much smaller deal than they're made out to be; that long covid could be mostly psychosomatic, and so on. Perhaps because it can be framed as a complaint about our government being incompetent, which doesn't set off people's outgroup alarms.
I am also of theow agreeableness demeanor that makes hostility seem justified as my responses to it have not been particularly good either, so I must shoulder my share of blame for it too I suppose. I'm not particularly left wong by UK standards and I find it impossible to hide this, so talking to any left leaning people makes such anti government solidarity very difficult, even if I am actually critizing the government. Outgroup alarms are a big problem, and I notice them triggered in myself.much more easily over the last 2 years. For example I am now primed to suspect a lack of honest discussion from peope who have been taking covid seriously, because of the overlap In my experience with nutcases (I still haven't knowingly met an actual vaccines cause autism and have microchips 5g traditional antivaccer in my life so their nutness isn't something I have experience of).
>no significant evidence exists to show masks have a non negligible effect in anything other than the most elderly populations at reducing covid spread in practice labels me as an idiot, ignorant, lacking common sense, among other less pleasant things.
There's a lack of real-world evidence because it was called "unethical" to conduct trials. But there's an extremely strong mechanistic case for masks working, just like there is for parachutes protecting skydivers.
On your other points regarding COVID deaths/hospitalizations being "barely noticeable", I don't have time to respond right now, but trust me, they're definitely noticeable.
> There's a lack of real-world evidence because it was called "unethical" to conduct trials.
Has someone tried?
This is the thing I keep on bringing up, but we deliberately infect people with the flu to test flu vaccines. We should absolutely be testing mask use to see how it works with the flu.
Studies seem to repeatedly find effect sizes around 10-30% reduction in covid cases when enough people are masking in public spaces. Some people might consider that negligible, but this much reduction saves more lives than preventing one 9/11 per month.
Not all deaths are equal. Comparing deaths from agency to events that aren't from agency ignores the way that people care about things.
Also, we could save a 9/11 every month in traffic deaths by limiting cars to 40mph, but that's considered not worth the infringement on people's ability to move around.
That feels like it's the optimum level for toxiplasma of rage. Big enough that it's worth doing, but small enough that mask critics can argue that it does nothing.
Just like covid itself - somewhere around 1% fatality when averaged across all age groups, concentrated in those with somewhat lower life expectance already, and therefore big enough to be worth doing a lot for, but small enough that critics can argue it's negligible.
Indeed, it seems that one of the worst features of Covid is how it hits the sweet spot of being bad enough to be legitimately concerned about, but not being easily demonstrably bad enough that you can convince everyone that this is really the case.
I suppose this turns on how one defines noticeable or significant. Covid will likely turn out to be the 3rd leading cause of death in the U.S. for 2020 and 2021, after heart disease and cancer. Heart disease and cancer are usually close numbers, with the usual third-leading cause of death -- accidents -- coming in far behind, at less than a third of cancer.
Covid will far surpass accidents and come in closer to cancer in terms of deaths per year. Flu and pneumonia together come in at 9th on the list of mortality causes (not all pneumonia comes from flu, so flu deaths are lower than this total) and together are fewer than a tenth of cancer deaths.
To my mind, a brand new cause of death that jumps to the third highest cause of death is way more than noticeable. That it is killing vulnerable groups of people at higher rates strikes me as irrelevant to how significant or not it is, particularly since it's highly contagious and spreads readily through family and social groups. If you're not individually as vulnerable, you are connected in some way to people who are.
I have no particular animosity towards people who choose not to get vaccinated. I do have trouble wrapping my head around this particular reasoning though.
Well it's simply that the measures against covid have many negative effects on those required for the continued existence of human society, while covid has few. Covid kills those not needed, on average, for the future.
Then layer on the opportunistic totalitarianism, done to save those not needed, and the future looks even less rosy.
That's the crux of it.
To me, imposing restrictions and harms on the young and healthy for the sick and old is extremely selfish, very harmful, and outright wrong, morally speaking.
I have trouble wrapping my head around how sacrificing the useful to save the old is anything other than the kind of thinking that societies practicing human sacrifice would have indulged in.
Utilitarianism, somebody says “let’s kill the elderly for an extra percentage point of gdp growth” and I remember why treating people as means to an end is wrong.
"Covid kills those not needed, on average, for the future."
I find it funny that you condemn totalitarianism while talking like someone out of Logan's Run. Your argument is ALSO human sacrifice if we want to be hyperbolic- although I'm certain you'd frame it differently: perhaps a noble and patriotic sacrifice by the elderly for future generations?
I'll just cut to the quick- do you believe that "surplus population" would be disposed of in an ideal world? Once you're too old, or too sickly, or too crippled to be "useful", you should be wheeled off to the euthanasia clinic?
Ditto on that last sentence. The number of people whose argument seems to boil down to "who cares, it's just some old people, they probably would have just died anyways" frankly shocks me. I was always aware, of course, that I tended towards the more empathetic end of the scale, but now... well, now I think I appreciate more that those shock videos of people in China lying critically-injured on the side of the road and people just walking by while trying to avoid stepping in the blood probably aren't just an outlier created by a lack of Good Samaritan laws in China. I have marginally more respect for COVID denialists- they're ignorant, misinformed, or grifting, but they aren't just laying "the lives of the vulnerable simply don't matter to me" down on the line like that.
Causing harm to the future to save the present may soothe your empathetic instincts, but I doubt it makes a more resilient society and people more likely to continue existing into the future. I would, somewhat negatively, call it a selfish obedience to transient emotions at the cost of future wellbeing.
This! And doubly so because I'm in my 60s, and thus one of those old people whose death doesn't matter to some quantity of people who nonetheless appear to expect me (everyone) to prioritize their welfare.
I've read about non-specific effects of vaccines recently (https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200915-the-mystery-of-why-some-vaccines-are-doubly-beneficial). According to that, there is benefit in training your immune system with vaccines beyond immunity against that specific illness, but also in training with illnesses themselves ("those who have been naturally infected by pathogens like measles, and lived, have better long-term survival prospects than those who were never infected"). This is something I have heard anti-vaxxers say in person, and always assumed it's either untrue or the effect is not worth the suffering of illness.
Now I'm curious whether my current strategy of avoiding any infection, not just corona, isn't doing my immune system a disservice. I'm staying away from people that have a cold even when they tested negative for Covid. My brother brought his two children to our parent's wedding this summer and I was furious when I found out that's where I got the cold from that robbed me of my only week this year. He knew they were sniffling, he brought them anyway.
His point is that if he can't bring sniffling kids, he can't bring them anywhere about half the time, because they are midly sick basically constantly. His wife, as well as a friend, both of whom are kindergardners, say that the first couple of years in the job, you are basically mildly sick all the time, and then your immune system steps up and you only rarely get the bugs the kids freely trade.
Is my policy of isolation (covid aside) a bad one? Should I be more willing to go through the headaches, the fatigue, the fever and the sore throat of common colds, for some sort of beneficial side-effect of a well-trained immune system? I've always considered coming to work or visiting friends while sick a form of physical assault (I'm in Germany, we all have insurance and sick days etc here). Opinions?
A few years back, I started a spreadsheet to track my daily symptoms, because I wanted to figure out how many days a year I was experiencing cold symptoms. It turns out I started this on Jan. 1, 2020, and I had about 10 days of symptoms in two different spells in the first 60 days of that year. Since then, I don't think I've had any symptoms of any sort caused by an infection, other than a day of food poisoning this summer.
However, I've noticed what *feels* like an increase in allergic reactions. I can't be sure, since I wasn't tracking symptoms before these past two years. Now it turns out there were also some oddities in Texas weather these years (we had very mild springs and summers, and a very unusual freeze in the winter), so even if there has been an increase in my allergy symptoms, it could just be a difference in plant behavior and not a difference in my immune system not having many infections to fight. However, the hygiene hypothesis has been a popular idea in some form or other: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis
This makes me wonder whether there would be some good way to get "exercise" for my immune system, and whether that's the sort of thing that might have some sort of benefit (either reducing allergies or otherwise). And if this would be a good thing, it would be helpful to know how much of this benefit can come from getting vaccines to fight rather than actual infections. We know that working out in a gym doesn't help your fitness as much as living a strenuous lifestyle, but it's good enough to be a preferred substitute for many modern people. Maybe aiming to keep infections near zero, but getting lots of vaccines to keep your immune system in check, would be a similar tradeoff.
I had pretty bad cold symptoms around January 2020 and have been virtually sniffle-free since. I've noticed worse eczema/psoriasis-type symptoms in that time span, however.
Did you detail what your cold symptoms were? I didn't keep records, but it seemed to me I would get colds with the same symptoms three or four times, and then move on to a different cold.
The one I had over New Year's 2019-20 was mainly coughing and feeling sick. The one I had in late February had sore throat, wet cough, and significant fever for one day. I think both lasted for a week or two (hard to tell with the first one, because it had started some time before I started my spreadsheet). I had a negative covid antibody test in May, so it's unlikely that either of these was covid.
Looking back on those dates at the beginning, I see that I was a bit less detailed in recording symptoms then than I became later, after months of pandemic paranoia.
I was hoping to discover whether there were patterns like the one you mention, but the pandemic lifestyle has blocked any of them (though perhaps it revealed patterns that had been there all along in allergies, that I might have been attributing to colds in the past).
I don't know this for sure, maybe an immunologist could weigh in -- my impression is that it's exposure in childhood that matters the most in terms of training the immune system, rather than year-in-year-out exposure as an adult. I would be surprised if less illness for a few years in adulthood is that significant across the lifespan.
Not sure if here are mother's and father's of girls reading. If so I would like to hear your thoughts about your way of preparing, teaching, educating your soon teenage girl(s) about the potential bad sides if sexuality. I was listening to David Buss discussing parts of his new book about sexual differences in mating strategies https://www.jordanharbinger.com/david-buss-when-men-behave-badly/ (full show notes at the bottom of the long page)
Starting at roughly 21:14 minutes it's about 'womans signaling of being open for a one night stand's and resulting potential situations and confounding variables a girl or woman could get a victim of sexual violence. Sexy dressing seems to be an important factor. They make sure that everybody should be allowed to wear what he or she likes in an ideal world and don't want to conduct victim blaming. But the real world is like it is.
Do you have any advice, book, video, how to balance the right of ones daughter to dress sexy, dance sexy, have fun - and scaring her about the ultra dangerous men in the world?
That will imbue her with the posture that repels predators.
Or at least, it works for me. My longtime friends have a joking observation that shitty heterosexual men are naturally "allergic" to me.
And it's true. I've had dozens of shitty men drift through my various social circles; neighbors, friends of friends, boyfriends of friends, etc. Men who were later revealed to hit their girlfriends, to physically molest women too intoxicated to consent, who were arrested for kiddie porn, who drove drunk, who skipped out on rent owed to mutual friends, and so on.
Even the most voracious pussy-seekers (if you'll excuse the crude expression) among them actively avoided me. Not a single one of them *ever* made a sexual advance on me, despite approaching every woman in the social group, their workplace, online, etc.
These men edged around me socially the way adult grizzly bears edge around a wolverine in the wild, on pure instinctive desire not to be injured during a fight. Often literally; they'd move out of the way to let me pass, or leave a crowded room if it was clear I was settling in for a while.
I'm 5'2". I'm obviously cis female, I wear my hair long, I dress in traditionally feminine clothes which sometimes show my figure and skin, depending on the weather. Personal taste varies, but there's nothing freakish about my appearance that would repel a huge majority of men. On the contrary, I've dated some very good-looking and fit guys.
So why do the human predators instantly dislike me?
I think it has a lot to do with frequently fighting with my brother - usually physically - in our childhood. I wanted to be left alone; he wanted to engage. We were peers in these fights; close enough together in age that neither of us were capable of physically or emotionally dominating the other, which created a state of constant conflict. Every provocation of his required swift and decisive retaliation by me, for the sake of maintaining personal honor. We fought daily for over a decade, until he was sent to boarding school.
It's very hard to be conditioned to comply with male entitlement while waging a personal war of equals against a male peer.
It's even harder to be conditioned to comply with male entitlement while feeling overwhelming righteous contempt for a misbehaving male peer.
I think it's the latter that repels predatory men.
I'm genuinely not afraid of them, because I did a lot of physical fighting as a child and I routinely carry a deadly weapon as an adult. I genuinely believe that I'm absolutely entitled to judge male behavior according to my personal standards, to express my judgment and contempt, and even to humiliate and shun when the situation calls for it. I don't spend all day pondering how to express my sense of moral superiority over shitty men, but the sense of DNA-deep entitlement certainly reflexively comes out in my expression, posture, eye contact, and tone of voice, every day, all the time, and predatory dudes pick up on it as feeling aggressively "wrong" in a woman. There's an aura of wolverine over the make-up and curls and dresses, and who wants to risk injury to take down a wolverine?
It's so much easier to find a nice, soft, juicy, injured bunny rabbit.
Don't raise your daughters to be bunny rabbits. If they don't have a sibling to fight, get them into martial arts classes. Teach them that hitting, maiming, and even killing aren't always wrong; indeed, there are times when doing physical injury to stop a predator is a righteous act and a moral mandate, and *of course* they should be the ones to judge that moment.
If you imbue them with that sense of entitlement of true personal autonomy, how they dance and what they wear won't matter, be it in a college frat party or a kink club. The predators will keep themselves away.
Thanks for your very fascinating insights. There is a younger brother indeed. But he is over 3 years younger and she could dominate him until recently. But we as parents don't want out kids to physically fight besides just playing games. But material arts might be an option - not that I'm sure if training in fighting will not increase the chance to get her drawn into fights instead of preventing a dangerous situation early.
I wouldn't worry about martial arts (including firearm handling) motivating your daughter to seek fights. It's not like Karate Kid; generally, any competent and reputable instructor will teach judgment under stress and self-discipline along with the punching (or whatever). Kicking someone's ass when you're extremely proficient at a martial art can result in enhanced criminal penalties if it isn't clear self-defense. So avoiding fights isn't good for other people, it's good for *YOU.*
If you do think she'd be interested in classes, I'd recommend Brazilian Jujitsu / MMA and/or Krav Maga for useful real-world applications.
BJJ has the advantage of being about skill overcoming brawn (that's the point of it) and Krav Maga isn't a sport at all - it's about fighting for your life and doing it as efficiently (and dirty) as possible.
Karate and the other more traditional martial arts have evolved into highly ritualistic sports rather than practical fighting systems. At this point, I'd say "don't bother."
But BJJ/MMA/Krav would be good for making your daughter confident she can (and should!) *really* injure a man if she ever really needs to.
Let's see how it unfolds. Right now she likes programming - my earlier money earning daily activity but never ever was showing it to her, she started to get curious by herself and is still the driving force if I help her on request. Her second interest is music and her dancing course - which is part of the problem I see. There they are taught how to imitate best all the sexy moves of skinny, sexy, nearly naked women you see in mainstream pop music videos since years. Not that I would like to stop doing this - it's great pleasure and joy for her. Nearly the only physical activity she really likes a lot. But I'm the type of person who usually sees issues long before they unfold and long before the typical person. So I want to be us preparwd with some good strategies for the next years. My wife started some research in her own circles and got some really useful feedback as well like starting to reflect about signaling of clothes regarding age and intentions, about the different motivations behind actions, asf
Don't put your daughter in BJJ. They're the only people on the planet who think you can safely choke somebody out multiple times a day for training purposes, with no risk of brain damage.
"If you imbue them with that sense of entitlement of true personal autonomy, how they dance and what they wear won't matter, be it in a college frat party or a kink club. The predators will keep themselves away."
This is absolutely not true. Some of them will take that as a challenge, or a spice. You just got lucky. Lots of people get lucky, but this is still insanely bad and destructive advice. You're 5' 2", there's no posture or personality that can compensate for that if you physically fight a male peer.
Good grief, do you not know what the word "peer" means?
I went out of my way to point out that my brother and I were physical peers as *children*, and fighting in *childhood*, with a *childhood peer,* serves me to this day.
Because of course I don't intend to physically fight predatory men who are larger than me as an adult! That's why I carry a pistol and have gone through extensive training to use it appropriately. That's why I feel *entitled* to carry a pistol and use it appropriately. Just as I fought to win with my brother in childhood, I will fight to win over an attacker as an adult.
My point was that childhood conditioning can create an attitude that naturally repels predators, because predators are attracted to *prey,* the more vulnerable, the better. If girls and women sincerely believe they aren't prey, they will behave like they aren't prey, and acquaintance-based* predators will leave them alone.
(*Because yes of course someone could lay in wait around a wall and crack me in the head with a baseball bat I never see coming. But that wasn't germane to discussing how to make *daughters* safer from frat bros.)
All of these elaborations make your advice worse, not better.
If you define "peer" that narrowly, this advice only works if applied early, and continued up to age 12 (which is when, statistically, boys begin to surpass girls physically). Marc says his daughter is a "soon teenage girl", so the suggestion is pretty much too late for him to use – unless you intend to have her beat up younger boys, which comes with a whole host of moral issues of its own. I also find the idea that this will imbue her with the "posture to repel" boys her own age or older highly dubious.
"That's why I carry a pistol and have gone through extensive training to use it appropriately. That's why I feel *entitled* to carry a pistol and use it appropriately."
This is your *actual plan*? Marc's daughter should carry a pistol to a frat party? She should blow a guy's face off with a .38 Special if he gets handsy? And this will produce the conditioning which will cause guys to not try anything in the first place? Even by American standards, that's one of the most American things I've ever heard.
It's also fraught with extreme problems, like: is it even possible to walk around armed on a college campus today? What happens to this plan if you're drunk or roofied, or if you were totally fine with the half-naked makeouts and only decided you weren't onboard anymore when he wants to go further? Is it morally defensible to shoot somebody, even over being raped? Can the average young woman of our time bring herself to shoot somebody under *any* circumstances? Is Marc's daughter *actually ever going to obey* advice to consistently carry a snub-nose in her purse with her everywhere? An automatic in her garter, maybe? Isn't it better to just stay home from the party instead? These are only a small selection of issues that spring immediately to mind.
I'm sorry, but the Saotome/Jones School of Anything-Goes Self-Defense leaves something to be desired. I don't think I can endorse your curriculum.
Okay, despite your thing about the pistol being something you actually said, I'm willing to take this at face value, so let's get down to the bare metal then: childhood conditioning cannot create an attitude that naturally repels predators. That's a silly claim. Whether you try using guns or krav maga, it won't work.
Her attitude towards these things is the result of everything in her life, not one specific interaction with you, or a book or article you pass on. It's an aphorism that a woman's relationship with her father forms her expectations for how she can expect every other man in her life to treat her, so you can set her up for success by treating her with kindness and respect. Trust her in age appropriate "dangerous" scenarios (sleepovers, unsupervised time with friends, staying home alone, going on dates), but always remind her that you are there for her if she needs to be picked up or feels unsafe for any reason. Teach her bodily autonomy from a young age--eg, if she doesn't want to hug you, tell her that it's her body and it's OK if she doesn't want to. Teach her to deal with uncomfortable situations rather than rescuing her superman-style by calling her friends' parents or the teachers. Someone who is generally happy and has a good self esteem will be able to navigate the world of dating more easily than someone who isn't. Let her practice asserting herself when the stakes are low, and she'll be able to do it when you aren't there.
It's a memoir by a woman who I'd say was under the influence of toxic masculinity and low-quality feminism, thought that hard drinking and casual sex was the way to be a strong person. She didn't phrase it that way, this is my summary of what she described.
She thought that she'd age out of irresponsible behavior as she got into her thirties, but it didn't happen. Eventually, she gets into AA and gets sober.
Interestingly, the real cure happened when it hit her that that drinking made her weaker, not stronger. The desire to drink, or possibly the desire to drink excessively, went away. This might be generally important if core issues are more common than we realize.
She also came to the conclusion that her emotionally abusive mother and her emotionally distant father were fundamental causes, with the father doing more damage.
This doesn't mean I think good relationships with parents are the solution, I think good advice is also important. However, I think good relationships with parents help people to know when things are going wrong.
An annoying thing I'm starting to realise is that my children are going to be stuck forever with three parents, the third one being a complete blithering idiot called Society. I can do my best to instil good values in my children, but then Society gets its turn too, and it will instil a bunch of complete rubbish.
I'm well-intentioned and work hard, but Society is flashy and well-funded. I'm doing my best, but this is my first time around, whereas Society's messaging is carefully optimised and A/B tested against millions. I'm working with my kid's best interests in mind, but Society has a billion different agendas for my kids, most of which involve either selling them something or recruiting them to be used as a weapon against some other part of Society. And Society has a bunch of different, persuasive-sounding "Why your parents are dumb old-fashioned and terrible if they disagree with our message" stories, whereas I struggle to articulate what I'm saying right now at a level a child can understand.
This comment stuck with me, enough to save it and respond the better part of a year later.
I suspect most parents have felt this way on multiple occasions, though rarely expressed so clearly. Sometimes it can seem like a miracle that children don't universally develop into semi-helpless, functionally-wireheaded pseudo-citizens.
Despite all the disadvantages you enumerated, as a parent you have disproportionate influence on your children. You have spent years proving your commitment to their happiness and well-being, you've embedded your values in tens of thousands of concrete acts. Of course, some of those acts have been mistakes, and you're up against other, deeper challenges, like a child's need to differentiate him- or her-self. But contrary to expectations, I'd say the dedicated parent has very good odds.
If you 1) think that Society's influence on children is an inherent danger to your children you aren't willing to tolerate, and 2) believe it's impossible to compete with Society, then I'd advise moving to a remote area of the country and raising any children you have on a compound with as little exposure to Society as possible. This is probably not very feasible and a losing strategy in an entirely different way, but it's the most humane option given those two premises.
I'd advise teaching your kid how to think critically and then actually be ready to give good arguments to them about why they should listen- that's what my parents did, and although N=1 there it's probably a good way to make sure a child respects you when they become an adult.
that transcript was a very good read, it has some things i never knew and will have to look up the background on. a lot of it makes quite a lot of sense. i will have to read this book as well
I will tell my daughter the following the best I can, little by little:
1. Humans are both social and physical creatures, made in nature.
2. When two persons separate themselves from the crowd, society ends and nature starts. Society no longer decides what will happen and not. The strongest individual decides. If he chooses to play by the rules of society, no one will notice. That happens most of the times. But not always.
3. Adult males are much stronger than females. If males are 50 percent stronger than females, that doesn't mean that the male decides 50 percent more than the female if they spend time alone. It means that the male can decide 100 percent what will happen there and then, if the female wants to live.
4. That means if a female decides to spend time alone together with a male, she has given him the power to make every decision. For that reason, it is unwise of a female to spend time alone with a male whose decisions she might not like.
I will also recommend the book Date-onomics by John Birger to all my children when they are old enough to understand it.
Hmm, when I was a young woman, I once physically ejected a young man from my dormitory room, when his idea of what we would do in private exceeded what I wanted to do with him in private.
Averages are not individuals. Many young men are not very fit, and some young women are fitter than some of the men they might date.
My take away from point 3 would be that a young woman should do some combination of: get in shape, learn martial arts, acquire and learn to use strength-equalizing weaponry, and selectively hang out with puny and unhealthy males - at least in private. (Bonus - that nerd who lives online and works in tech probably makes pots of money; excellent husband material, if you don't mind his workaholism.)
Well Tove, there were many years where you were much physically stronger than your daughter. Maybe you still are. Do YOU get your way 100% of the time with your daughter? When she was, let's say, 10 years old, did YOU resort to physical coercion to force her to eat brussels sprouts, watch less TV, clean up her room, practice her violin? I mean, you were probably strong enough to literally hold her down and stuff those brussels sprouts into her mouth. And even if you weren't, you could have forced her to eat them by smacking her around, right? But I'm guessing you didn't do that. So why are you assuming that a man, alone with a woman, is going to resort to physical coercion to get his way about various things?
Tove is her daughter's mother, presumably. We can take for granted that she's invested in her daughter's well-being for natural reasons (and also by implication from the fact that she wants to explain reality to her). Thus, most of the nuclear option is off the table – Tove doesn't want to hurt her daughter, or to see her get hurt, so smacking her around or force feeding just won't happen. This gave her daughter some manoeuvering room to use various strategies to push her will.
That being said, it's absolutely true that parents *can* treat their children this way, and some (abusive) parents do. It's also notable that even with kind and well-intentioned parents, the relative powerlessness of a child is obvious to the child. I myself remember using strategies as a kid to evade this kind of issue – for example, after a certain age I never explained myself when asked why I was angry about something or refused to do something, since I knew that the grown-ups would just explain why I was wrong – that is, invalidate my feelings and desires to enforce their will. In other words, it's perfectly accurate to say that a parent *can* decide to get his way 100% of the time with his kids. It is in fact unwise for a small child to spend time alone around a parent whose decisions he might not like. Small children just can't act on this knowledge, if they have it.
I think you didn't read that section the right way. Tove isn't saying that ALL social dynamics break down outside of the public eye- simply that, outside of the public eye, the option to NOT obey social niceties becomes a lot more viable (in the short-to-medium-term, at least). That's how I read it.
Your formulation is far more reasonable than what I took Tove to mean, but I can't see any particular reason to take what Tove said the way you took it. Here's one reason I take Tove's view to be more extreme than the more moderate interpretation you give: They say it's unwise for a female to spend time alone with a male whose decisions she might not like. Tove's statement suggests that Tove sees it as not just possible but actually fairly likely that a man, alone with a woman, will override the woman's wishes -- and will override them over some important matter, and will override them in a way that is very undesirable for the woman to experience. Tove sounds like they think that when the option not to obey social niceties becomes more viable in the short term, then social niceties are quite likely to be completely disregarded.
My comment to Tove about their treatment of their daughter was also intended to remind Tove that there are a lot of things besides being in the public eye that keep a person from violently coercing someone weaker to do what the want: affection; compassion; moral and religious beliefs; fear of medium- and long-term consequences of violently coercing someone.
"My comment to Tove about their treatment of their daughter was also intended to remind Tove that there are a lot of things besides being in the public eye that keep a person from violently coercing someone weaker to do what the want: affection; compassion; moral and religious beliefs; fear of medium- and long-term consequences of violently coercing someone."
Yes, that is exactly what I wanted to say. For a female to safely spend time alone with a male, she needs to make sure that the male in question doesn't want to use violence to get his way. Most males don't, for the reasons you mentioned above. Still, every female without exceptional skills in martial arts needs to evaluate whether a certain male is guided by such reasons or not.
Skill at assertiveness, stark refusal to accept to minor boundary violations, and willingnesss to be seen as an unpleasant person are also useful, and if energetically deployed may forestall the need for martial arts.
I kind of took what he was saying as a hard-sell/scared-straight pitch. I can definitely see how it could be read the way you take it- I'm just not sure that was the intention behind it.
Just remembering that I red some posts of a young journalist in an online magazine - a woman in her early twenties - about her life and her dating experiences in another country's largest city and capital. She seemed very self reflected for such a young person - and cool. But in the images I saw a young, inexperienced, girl searching for warmth, a young man to have a real relationship and understanding with, the meaning of life. On the images she was quite often showing a lot of skin in accordance with the current fashion. An intelligent, young, innocent looking girl in a huge city. In a couple of posts she was complaining about men driving by, looking back at her, giving compliments, trying to start something with her, maybe getting her into the bed. I've found that strange with our pre-teenage daughter in mind. Then suddenly, the young journalist was posting about a super bad experience where she visited a 'good friend' - who then pushed her into having sex with him - she writes she wasn't able to say something, to stop it, she was just baffled. Since then she seems traumatized. I was thinking that I was not surprised to read this.
And another angle-- I'm not sure how to do this, but don't teach her to be reflexively compliant. Compliance can be framed as "nice", a trait suitable for girls.
I'm not sure whether the world has changed enough that this is no longer a problem.
My parents did that, but I found it a confusing mixed message and a bit of an insult. Did they think I was going to drink? That was illegal!
(That said, I was the only one of my peers who held off on drinking until I was of legal age, and I did catch a lot of shit for it. I hope I can figure out how to pass on that particular trait to my kids.)
Good point. My mother used to tell the story when her father was trying to bring her and her sister back home from a dancing event. When my mother recognized her father's car approaching she jumped with her youger sister into the side ditch and hid from their father till he drove back home.
Second that you came across great in the post. I don't have a recent book and all the older ones obviously didn't work that great.
As someone who was a teen daughter (and now is middleaged)...we have no more right to pretend -via dress, posture, dance - that we are up for sleeping with any man in the room without someone taking us at our word, no more than we have the right to go up repeatedly and cuddle a half grown tiger without getting mauled at some point.
It *is* fun to have a bunch of grown, older men be willing to heed our slightest whim and listen to our endless nattering. That's great fun.
But they aren't doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, they are making an evolutionary-biased investment on the expectation/possibility of an eventual payoff. There is no moral obligation for any particular woman to pay out, but there's also no grounds for us women to act like ignorant children about the foundation of the interaction.
It took me quite a while to understand that people have motivations that I don't, and to stop using the typical mind fallacy. That helped.
"we have no more right to pretend -via dress, posture, dance - that we are up for sleeping with any man in the room without someone taking us at our word, no more than we have the right to go up repeatedly and cuddle a half grown tiger without getting mauled at some point."
I don't see where rights come into it, but I agree that it shows a lack of common sense to pretend that one is up for "sleeping with," [by which you actually mean "copulating with," right?] every man in the room without one of the men believing that's actually the case. But then you slide right past the matter of the rights of the individuals involved once the misunderstanding has developed: The man has rather understandably concluded that the woman wants to copulate with him, but in fact she does not. Is your view that the man now has the right to force intercourse on her, and the woman has no right to cry foul if he does? If so, what are your grounds for thinking that? Do you believe that (1) once a man has a boner he has become the equivalent of a tiger — a being unable to understand the important differences between a person and a piece of meat? Or do you believe that (2) denying Boner Man the consummation he craves is such an act of cruelty that that a just and humane society cannot allow such things to happen?
My life experience does not support either (1) or (2). A Boner Man is still aware that the female before him is a human being, with rights, feelings, preferences and an inner life. He may wish he was dealing with a walking, talking sex doll, but he knows he is not. And Boner Man is able to endure sexual frustration and disappointment, surviving to copulate another day. Given that, I’d like to suggest a reverse version of your statement about the rights that lewdly flirting women don’t have:
*Men have no right to pretend that lose access to all humanity and self-control when they are sexually aroused. Those who do pretend that should be sent to the zoo, where they belong.*
Well, I don't have any more to add without knowing more about what rights you think a woman does and doesn't have, and what consequences should follow violations of rights. She doesn't have the right to dress sexy and play-act sexual interest in men. But she does have the right not to be raped. OK . . .
Well, since she does not have the right to dress sexy and play-act sexual interest in men,
-Can you clarify why she does not have this right? Whose rights is she violating, who is she harming, what principle of justice is she defying?
And
-what punishment should society administer for her committing this act?
I recommend that you re-read the original comment, where I stated that (in short paraphrase) a person does not have the right to do X and not expect negative outcome Y. In your reading, you seem to have missed the part where the lack of right is contingent not on doing X, but on doing X without having negative outcome Y.
It is not a matter of justice, human or divine. It is not a thing which needs legislation against - not anti-dancing laws, not sumptuary laws regarding the wear of lace or satin, not curfews.
What is required, I think, is a clear-headed recognition that there is no teacher or principal or mayor or 'society' that is going to be able to keep water from going downhill.
And adult women need to quit play-acting in public in front of strangers. It's infantile and demeaning to do so, much less to assume that "I didn't really mean it" carries weight because, well, we're women, and get cut all sorts of slack for being unserious and emotional.
Men have different responsibilities, about which I have a large stack of opinions. But that's not the topic here.
OK, I'm now clear that you're saying something in the form of a person doesn't have the right to do X and not expect Y. I think it's maybe your talk about "rights" that's getting in the way of our understanding each other. Are you sure you're actually talking about *rights* here? It makes sense to talk about people having or not having a right to do something, but does it really make sense to say they don't have *a right* to expect something? Usually in everyday conversation when somebody says you don't have a right to expect something, they just mean that it's not *right* to expect it -- it means your expectation is wrong, but not in the moral sense, but just in the sense of "incorrect."
So if you're saying that a woman who play-acts wanting to sleep with all the men in the room is making a mistake is she believes that none of the men are going to believe that she actually wants to have sex with them, then I do not disagree at all with what you're saying. It would indeed show a major lack of common sense to think none of the men are going to mistake her play-acting for real desire and sexual availability.
But it seems like you're packing some other ideas in there too. For instance you seem to be saying that for a woman to play-act sexual interest to a bunch of man is a mistake equivalent to playing with and cuddling a full grown tiger and expecting not to get hurt. In what what are they equivalent? Are you saying both things are equally stupid and dangerous? Surely you don't think they are! Playing with the tiger is way more dangerous, right? It's going to lead muchmore quickly and surely to severe injury. A much more comparable example would be playing with a skunk and expecting not to get sprayed -- or being sullen, oppositional and lazy at work and expecting not to get fired -- or driving on ice and expecting not to skid. So why did that tiger wander into the argument? My sense is that that it came readily to mind for you because of the idea that's out there in some people's minds that once men are aroused, they are beasts driven by instinct alone, and cannot be expected to restrain themselves from forcibly taking what they want -- therefore, it is the woman's responsibility not to trigger them into beast mode. You certainly did not say anything like that -- but the comparison you make between outrageous lewd flirting with men and cuddly play with tigers certainly does suggest you see the situations as similar. Your line about how nothing can keep water from going downhill also suggests that you view male rapiness etc. as a sort of law of nature -- not something it makes sense to question, challenge or change. Regrading that, I do not agree.
Still another thing that's folded into your argument is your personal aversion to women play-acting in public. As a matter of fact, I often (but not always) find that spectacle kind of disturbing too. But you go from identifying a certain kind of behavior as unpleasant for you to making generalizations about women should do. Really? You think you get to do that?
Overall it seems like you are very clear that you just hate seeing women play-act promiscuous sexiness, and are trying to make several cases at once against women doing that, but none is really fully developed, and the bunch of them don't hang together very well.
"As someone who was a teen daughter (and now is middleaged)...we have no more right to pretend -via dress, posture, dance - that we are up for sleeping with any man in the room without someone taking us at our word, no more than we have the right to go up repeatedly and cuddle a half grown tiger without getting mauled at some point."
Camille Paglia used this analogy 35-40 years ago: you have an *absolute, rock-solid right* under the law to leave a wallet full of cash on a park bench, and have it still be there next week when you come to pick it up. This is your unambiguous legal right with respect to your property. There is no real question about this, justice is on your side. But every sane person will still call you a complete imbecile if you actually do it, and really expect the wallet to be there. People will assume you must have secretly wanted it to get stolen, since it's so incredibly transparent what will actually happen. Going to a night club in a tight dress (alone, or with people incapable or unwilling to protect you) and getting drunk is exactly like this.
Yes. I've had complete strangers return my wallet, with everything intact. I've walked drunk acquaintances home/called an Uber. I won $100 in Lotto, too. *shrugs* often the world is more wonderful than we give it credit for.
Sure. Absolutely. I've never been on the dropping end, but I've returned more dropped money than I can immediately call to mind over the years. I've babysat drunk strangers until they got their shit sufficiently together to get in a cab and go home. I don't think anybody's ever suggested it'll happen *every time*.
But, still, if I found out about somebody doing the wallet thing *on purpose*, I'd think he was incredibly dumb and asking to get robbed.
Same thing. You do it habitually, it's just a matter of time. Act accordingly, and *take responsibility* for your choice.
>we have no more right to pretend -via dress, posture, dance - that we are up for sleeping with any man in the room without someone taking us at our word
This makes no sense to me. I enjoyed dancing in my early twenties and never did I have the desire to sleep with any of the men also dancing in my vicinity. In fact, I never once did, I had no sex until I was married. To declare that the default is sleeping around and that a woman has to prove she's not interested in engaging in that default is insane to me, an abdication to the worst parts of the sexual revolution.
"we have no more right to pretend -via dress, posture, dance - that we are up for sleeping with any man in the room without someone taking us at our word, no more than we have the right to go up repeatedly and cuddle a half grown tiger without getting mauled at some point."
It's exactly about the point of the podcast about David Buss' book and I was asking: there seems to be a deep misunderstanding between men and women about their evolutionary inner workings regarding mating behaviour, attraction, signaling, relationships etc.
Buss and the woman posting the cited passage want to warn sexually naive women that men are or can be like young tigers. And it's not that a woman needs to prove that she doesn't want to have casual sex. Most men in north western countries in these days have civilized their 250 Million years of sexual evolution. But over a full woman's life thereay be close encounters with millions of men. If only one is misunderstanding ambiguous things like tight cloths, sexy dancing, showing much skin as sexual signaling and takes action - then this woman has a lifetime experience of sexual abuse. So it's about not being naive as a woman.
I'm fine with promoting awareness among women about the threats young men can present to them. I refuse to act like it's not my right to go anywhere and do anything and be unmolested. Sure, that doesn't mean I am going to be left alone, in fact, I won't be. They are violating my right to be unviolated when they don't leave me alone, however, a right which I very much have and cannot lose by any behavior of mine.
Edit: Men are not tigers, they are not ruled solely by biological instinct. They are humans and can control their behavior if not their thoughts. If you all are genuinely arguing men cannot stop themselves from rape, we should as a society treat them like tigers, and not allow them to walk around freely. Who lets tigers roam the streets unchecked?
"They are violating my right to be unviolated when they don't leave me alone, however, a right which I very much have and cannot lose by any behavior of mine."
Yeah, but the point is they *will* violate it. Quibbling about whether you're morally or legally in the right when they do is completely irrelevant to that fact, and you'll never convince the predatory men to lay off by arguing with nerds on a nerd blog. You have the *right* according to the law to be left alone, but in practice, you *will not be* consistently left alone and as such *must as a practical fact* take responsibility for protecting yourself, whether you like it or not, or else consciously take the risk of putting yourself in danger and accept the consequences.
"we should as a society treat them like tigers, and not allow them to walk around freely"
We should, as a society? Do you realize that the people you're asking to enforce a curfew on all men in this scenario *are in fact men*? If you think you're going to successfully get us to agree to oppress the shit out of ourselves because you refuse to take normal sensible precautions about engaging in objectively risky behavior, you've got another think coming. Respectfully, *you're* going to have to take responsibility for protecting yourself, instead.
"We should, as a society? Do you realize that the people you're asking to enforce a curfew on all men in this scenario *are in fact men*? If you think you're going to successfully get us to agree to oppress the shit out of ourselves because you refuse to take normal sensible precautions about engaging in objectively risky behavior, you've got another think coming."
A significant plurality, if not outright majority, of men are quite firmly in favour of shouldering most of the burden of controlling ourselves when it comes to sexual behaviour, even in the face of such galling provocations as... exposed ankles, bare midriffs, and swaying hips. Self-control and personal responsibility are masculine virtues even by the most conservative of norms.
Perhaps you ought to factor that into your political calculations.
Interesting, I think it's extremely important to lay out who has the right to what even as you acknowledge that reality falls short of that right being respected. I find it to be crucial in my understanding of my sense of self that I do not exist to be violated, that I have every right to freedom from fear, that I have the right to be treated with dignity, and aberrations from such treatment while perhaps frequent, are not in any sense of the word, deserved.
> normal sensible precautions
I am imagining you living in a neighborhood overrun by tigers, and your response being anything other than "Let's kill these animals so that I can go back to walking the streets freely and without fear." But it's you, I believe, who think men are tigers. I don't. I think they can control themselves, and shouldn't be treated like dangerous animals, even as I recognize that many of them will refuse to act on their ability for self control.
It all depends on what you think "normal" should be. It seems you think that male freedom to walk freely should never be abridged even as you declare their inability to control themselves. I find this very odd.
>>>"that a woman has to prove that she's not interested...is insane to me"
Welcome to men, whose brains are not like ordinary humans.
(To be fair, it's not so much "I think that woman is into sleeping with me" as it is a sort of constant "I hope that woman is interested in sleeping with me, better to check and see if she is.")
Also, caucasian America females who have not traveled outside their bubbles or the country have no idea how well behaved our men are. (AA and Latino men are much more direct and in-your-face, but are nothing on mideast guys.)
I'm not white nor have I never traveled outside the US. My experiences in the Middle East and Latin America align with your description although I'm not sure why you are lumping in African American men with other foreign, non-American men. I also disagree that this default expectation of sex is something innate in men. I think it's cultural. It used to be that a woman had to prove she was going to break away from a norm of no sex, now she has to prove she is going to break away from a norm of casual sex. I think it's an insane norm and I refuse to act like it should be accepted.
No, not culture. Hormones, testosterone. Listen to David Buss in the mentioned podcast about this exact topic https://www.jordanharbinger.com/david-buss-when-men-behave-badly/. Money quote: A 85 year old man feels tortured by his brain because it wants to evaluate each and every woman he passes by for intercourse qualities. He cannot change this.
What do his thoughts have to do with his actions? If he can't control his brain that's too bad for him, and I genuinely feel sorry for him, but his lack of self control over his thoughts doesn't give him license to touch me.
>>>I'm not sure why you are lumping in African American men with other foreign, non-American men.
1) Personal experience. 2) Personal experience of friends & relatives. 3) Popular culture 4) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_QtAbBDkWc 5) US DOJ crime stats (note: most of what we as women view as obnoxious is not at all actionable and is completely legal) but the rape/assault rates are an indicative of the relative cultural sexual aggressiveness.)
>>>It used to be that a woman had to prove she was going to break away from a norm of no sex, now she has to prove she is going to break away from a norm of casual sex.
I disagree. I don't think that it was ever the case that women met with resistance *from perspective male partners* when they indicated that they were up for casual sex. From broader society, including married women who didn't want casual sex to be widely approved of, yes.
I don't know about insane. I don't think it's helpful to the community as a whole.
My husband is black. I don't have an objection to noticing black men are more open about sex. I object strongly to grouping them with non-American men, as if white men are the standard bearer for what it means to be American.
I'm not sure why you think I said that women indicating they were up for casual sex met with resistance from men. I said that the default assumption used to be no casual sex, and that a woman would have to prove she was up for something else, while now the default is casual sex. I'm fine with describing the change in default as unhelpful.
Thanks for your clear words! Now we only need to find a good way and balance to not frighten her to death of men but make the reality conscious to her.
For me, it was a class on wilderness survival that helped me figure some of this out.
The instructor talked about how animals (horses, sheep, cattle) on the open range will 'drift' before a strong wind, always moving so that their tails were towards the wind. It's possible, the man said, to force a ridden horse to move directly into the wind, but if one attempts to ride at right angles to a strong wind, the horse will shift until it is once more moving before the wind. In the same way, people who are lost in the mountains or forest will move downhill, unless they are extremely focused on staying up on the slope or crest of the hill. It's not anything planned, it's just an unconscious constant impulse. He had us practice it, and sure enough, we all ended up drifting downslope.
A great number of things that we-as-humans do are unconscious like that - watch young kids (either gender) react to babies, and note how even young gals tote around dolls. The impulse to "take care of things with big eyes and big heads" is written very, very very deep in the genome, and it's a good thing, cause it's how our grandmas got grandbabies.
As humans we can't erase these impulses, even though as individuals we express them in different ways. But as reasoning beings we need to be aware of them just as we are aware of optical illusions, of bad decisionmaking when we are stressed, exhausted or drunk, of how we don't need to eat every gram of sugar or fat that we come across. We can work against these impulses, but like gravity, they are always there.
Why do you assume your daughter lacks a self preservation instinct?
Also, the effectiveness of any influence you want to exert will be based on how much she trusts your judgment. Between her entering teen years, and you coming off like in this post, I'd estimate that trust to be either close to zero or negative - as in she'd do what you forbid just to spite you.
Girls are socialized in a lot of really counter-productive ways which often make them reluctant to stand up for themselves or defend themselves. They are also sometimes taught ideologies which make them fail to see threats as threats. I needed to be explicitly taught what the dangers are and also what are good strategies for dealing with them, and I don't think I'm unusual in that by any means.
This is a common recommendation but I think every young woman should be encouraged to read "The Gift of Fear." It's not primarily targeted at the issues Marc is thinking about, but it has a way of opening one's eyes to a new way of viewing the world. It repeatedly encourages women to notice the stupid voice in their head saying, "Just ignore that, I'm sure he's harmless, don't be a bitch," and then recognize that that voice is not their friend. And that's an *extremely* important message for young women to get.
The reason I'm asking here after bringing this topic up with my wife is exactly to not fall into the traps you are mentioning. Our impression is that our kids are trusting a lot into their parents guidance and wisdom. We try to let them understand the world with the support of their parents life experiences and views.
I asume it's similar with many if not most parents in Scott's community of unusual humans.
So we parents are really unsure how to balance precaution with freedom in this special case. Like most commenters here I'd like to predict the future by actively forming it. So we want or girl to feel free of expressing herself, make good and bad experiences as well etc. But we want to give her the tools at hand to navigate around potentially really harmful events. Life is to short and valuable in our opinion that each individual doesn't need to know all possible cruelty happening in the world by first hand experience. Neighbors lost their 10 years old boy this year while he was skiing with friends of his parents otside the ski slope and fall 100 meters off a cliff. He was a daily schoolmate of our kids. Everybody was so sad. Sometimes there is a fine line between giving freedom and behaving irresponsible and careless.
Even accepting your premise, the goal would be to be hitched to a good protector, and *not* be hitched to some guy who will get her pregnant and leave.
"I can't even comprehend a universe where a daughter doesn't respect her father."
I hope you realize that's a limit of your imagination, not a limit of the universe.
My mother was emotionally dominant in my family, and I have trouble believing people who say their father was dominant. That's just my lack of imagination, though.
When I was a young woman, anything I wore was sexy, alluring, and "asking for it" to a certain demographic. If they can determine that a person is a nubile young woman, not extraordinarily ugly, they become aroused, thus proving to themselves that she's dressing to display her sexuality, and thus available.
A girl *might* be able to be non-provocative if she successfully costumed herself as an old woman, which might be possible in an area that practiced extreme Moslem dress customs (face veiling etc.). Or if she happens to have the kind of body, and voice, that can pass for male, and did so.
But failing either of those, to certain Dicks-with-legs, and some of their female enablers, she's "asking for it" and "deserved whatever happened".
I very much doubt this has really changed, in spite of the Me Too movement, and the concept of "rape culture". At best, the proportion men of this type has reduced somewhat.
Sexual assault from total strangers is extremely unlikely in any case, and like you say, what you wear is far from the most important risk factor. Advice of the kind of not to walk dark alleys late at night is more relevant here, and being careful with drugs/drinking obviously.
You are talking utter nonsense. Creepy evil men are EXACTLY the problem. Sexy dancing and dressing hurts nobody. Sexual Assault is an evil violent act. The problem is the assaulters, not the women. How about we treat humans like actual people instead of rape-bots programmed to assault a woman the moment she acts like anything other than an oppressed house wife?
The truth is simple. Women (and men) are free to wear whatever they want, and should not be told otherwise. Men (and women) who view this as an invitation to harass and assault are the problem, and should not be told otherwise. That's it. Story ends. Roll credits. We don't need to go back to square one.
We just need to make sure everyone knows that it is always, without exception or caveat, ALWAYS the assaulter who is the problem and never not even a tiny bit ever the victim. Unfortunately, your brand of lies are a common evil in the world, but at least you're a dying breed.
If you tell people what *should* be, without a strong side order of what *actually is*, a lot of people who could have avoided harm will instead be badly hurt. And you can piously blame that on the other people, the "creepy evil men" or whatever, who didn't do what you told them they should do, but they still did that and innocent people still got badly hurt in ways that could have been prevented by giving them useful advice rather than idealistic platitudes.
The anger you feel about mixed-gender wrestling is alien to me, as a straight guy who has trained judo with plenty of women over the years. I find it quite automatic to compartmentalise training partners as not-subjects-for-sexual-consideration.
Obviously sexual abuse in martial arts does happen, but it's not clear to me that its incidence is higher than anywhere else. And it would be a shame if an interested young woman had to deny herself such a pursuit simply out of fear of bodily contact with men.
>>>I find it quite automatic to compartmentalise training partners as not-subjects-for-sexual-consideration
I share your concern that otherwise interested women would opt out of martial arts - I have found it extremely useful on multiple levels.
I do note that my current senior instructor (who teaches in partnership with his wife) is pretty firm on female students always wearing a gi top in class. He says that he's perfectly ok working with gals in gi tops, but knows himself enough to know that he gets distracted and gets unwelcome impulses if we're walking around with the girls bouncing in the breeze, particularly if there is any upper body grappling. I myself welcome the honesty with which he broached the topic, and that he trusted myself and the other female student he had pulled aside to talk to about this to understand where he was coming from.
So, rash guards, for example, are out of the question? That's an unusual point of view, and quite outside of my experience.
On the one hand, better this kind of honesty than something unfortunate happening down the road.
On the other hand, without overly disparaging this man whom I have not met, I take a dim view of his shifting the responsibility for his impulses to his female students, instead of developing the requisite self-discipline. It leads me to wonder what else is he incapable of controlling - the intensity of his sparring, perhaps?
I think, possibly, you might be letting us off a little too easy. Yes, there are certain vestigial biological imperatives rattling around at the back of everyone's mind, but they're not an adequate excuse for bad behaviour. Standard acculturation is more than enough for the vast majority of adult straight men to work alongside attractive women, strike up comfortable platonic friendships with women, read sexual signals mostly accurately, and in sexually charged social situations to back off when told 'no'.
The question then becomes identifying and avoiding the dangerous minority. But I don't think forswearing all enjoyable things in life that involve mixed company (even including flirting and feeling sexy, as a young adult) is a worthwhile or fair strategy.
Wrestling, BJJ, and MMA aren't strictly my bailiwick, but I don't share your skepticism of women getting into combat sports. Sure, we can rabbit on about sex-based athletic ceilings, and pound for pound men being more effective, and all the rest, but why shouldn't everyone make the best of the body they have?
And that term, 'brothel', is very harsh. If some hormone-deluged fifteen-year-old gets flustered because he realises while rolling that his partner has curves, that's not the end of the world. Civilisation will survive. And one could argue that well-supervised non-sexual body contact with the opposite sex (particularly combined with an ethos of self-mastery and self-control) is useful conditioning for teenagers.
By your own measure, you're permitting this woman to be "whored out" with your silence and contributing to that "madhouse world" that causes you to fly into near-fury. I'd take this as a sign that you need to analyze whether your visceral reaction comes from moral intuition or some other feeling- or, alternatively, whether your choice to remain silent is genuinely moral by the standards you set for others (as we should generally strive for moral consistency). As it is, you seem by your own admission to be a bit hypocritical with your morality, which isn't good either from a rationality or a psychological perspective.
Elements of the humor: Unexpectedness. But not randomly unexpected, right? -- because it's sort of ripping the scab off the fact that none of us love Tiny Tim as much as Dickens wants us too, because Tiny Tim's kinda sappy.
And we all already know that about ourselves, but it's a treat to hear that I know that about myself too. And to be invited to acknowledge that you feel that way too. Ha.
I’m not sure how sappy Tiny Tim is but Oscar Wilde said of the very sentimental death of Little Nell in the Old Curiosity Shop, that it would take a heart of stone not to laugh.
But that’s the thing. Did the Crachit family eat a big Turkey or a small goose on that Christmas Day? Was the ghost of Christmas present showing the near future or was it just some kind of hallucination? I think it’s the actual next day, but by showing Scrooge that day the day changed, or the timeline split.
I think it’s the first example of timeline splitting in literature, although of course A Christmas Carol isn’t seen as sci fi.
I always thought of it as the ghost of Christmas present showing Scrooge what things would be like without his intervention. So, an alternative universe if you like
“Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point,” said Scrooge, “answer me one question. Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only?”
Still the Ghost pointed downward to the grave by which it stood.
“Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead,” said Scrooge. “But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me!”
The Spirit was immovable as ever.
Scrooge crept towards it, trembling as he went; and following the finger, read upon the stone of the neglected grave his own name, Ebenezer Scrooge.
“Spirit!” he cried, tight clutching at its robe, “hear me! I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I must have been but for this intercourse. Why show me this, if I am past all hope!”
For the first time the hand appeared to shake.
“Good Spirit,” he pursued, as down upon the ground he fell before it: “Your nature intercedes for me, and pities me. Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you have shown me, by an altered life!”
The kind hand trembled.
“I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach. Oh, tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone!”
In his agony, he caught the spectral hand. It sought to free itself, but he was strong in his entreaty, and detained it. The Spirit, stronger yet, repulsed him.
Holding up his hands in a last prayer to have his fate reversed, he saw an alteration in the Phantom’s hood and dress. It shrunk, collapsed, and dwindled down into a bedpost.
Yes! and the bedpost was his own. The bed was his own, the room was his own. Best and happiest of all, the Time before him was his own, to make amends in!
“I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future!” Scrooge repeated, as he scrambled out of bed. “The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. Oh Jacob Marley! Heaven, and the Christmas Time be praised for this! I say it on my knees, old Jacob; on my knees!”
He was so fluttered and so glowing with his good intentions, that his broken voice would scarcely answer to his call. He had been sobbing violently in his conflict with the Spirit, and his face was wet with tears.
“They are not torn down,” cried Scrooge, folding one of his bed-curtains in his arms, “they are not torn down, rings and all. They are here—I am here—the shadows of the things that would have been, may be dispelled. They will be. I know they will!”
So the Christmas Past was what was, and couldn't be changed. Christmas Future was what was to come, if he didn't change. Christmas Present was the nearest one, and that was changed when Scrooge decided to change. The Crachits would have had the small goose, but Scrooge bought the big turkey and sent it round early on Christmas Day: thinking about it, I'm going to split the difference - they had *both*. The goose was already prepared for cooking, so eating that for their dinner and then cooking the turkey for the next days' meals would be good housekeeping. The goose was small enough to be eaten without left-overs, and cooking the big turkey would have taken longer, so by the time it was cooked, they could have had some of it for supper and kept the rest for the next day.
Has any of you guys heard of any data about whether the immunity after COVID vaccine boosters decays any less quickly than after the primary vaccination cycle? In Turkey and in the Emirates several million people had been boosted by July, so they might probably kinda sorta be able to tell by now.
"Booster protection against symptomatic illness caused by the Omicron variant dropped by up to 25% within 10 weeks, new real-world data found — though it's not yet clear whether everyone may need further doses in 2022.
The UK Health Security Agency said protection against symptomatic COVID-19 caused by the variant dropped from 70% to 45% after a Pfizer booster for those initially vaccinated with the shot developed by Pfizer with BioNTech.
In the same analysis published on Thursday, the agency found the effectiveness of Moderna's booster paired with two doses of the Pfizer vaccine held at 70% to 75% for up to nine weeks, though not many people in the study received this regimen, which could affect the accuracy of the finding."
Article goes on to say that Israeli findings are similar.
The premise of your question is faulty. The antibodies from the Pfizer shot aren't completely ineffective, just much less so. The booster raises the amount of the antibodies enough to counter their diminished effectiveness against Omicron vs Covid Classic.
I wasn't saying antibodies from prior vaccines were ineffective.
I was saying *antibody treatments* like Rengeron's stuff. Those seem to be near-useless against Omicron (although they can be re-formulated for Omicron).
A good source of general info about covid, immunization, etc is Your Local Epidemiologist, on Substack. She seems to have no axes to grind, & to be smart, honest and clear.
I've been asking my above question on various places, including Zvi's, and haven't gotten a response. (You have given me the most engagement, so thanks.) I'm not really feeling up to paying $5 to have my question ignored again.
I can't remember whether she's addressed it directly. If she hasn't, she's addressed matters adjacent to it. And her posts include links to data sets and research papers, so you can look further into something if you have further questions.
You can read her posts themselves for free. Paying just gets you access to the comments. But even if you got a paid subscription, it's unlikely you'd get an answer to this question if you posted it in comments. Jetelina does answer a few questions from readers, but not many, and the comments that follow her blog are rarely dialogs among readers, and even when they are they are not the sort of informed exchanges that (sometimes) happen here. I am suggesting that you read Jetelina's posts because they will either answer your question, or give you a decent sense of what the likely answer is, or put you in a position to figure out the answer with half an hour or so of online searching and reading.
Regarding your question about covid & immunity, I'm in the position of having a decent sense of what the likely answer is, but I have retired from posting what I know about covid here on ACX. In this currently thread, which has an exceptionally high level of incivility, I've put up 2 posts in which I was not at all claiming to be an expert, just trying to give someone a lead, get jumped on by someone who was playing gotcha, and who had no info to contribute, just some spit to spray in my face while they yelled.
My speculation with no evidence behind it: recency. If you just had a strong immune reaction, your immune system is still highly on guard. That drops over time, because your immune system cannot permanently be highly on guard for everything. Having extra guards helps even if they are looking for the wrong intruders.
If that speculation is correct, we should see similar, somewhat smaller effects from a recent 1st or 2nd dose, not just from a recent 3rd dose. If anyone is researching that, I would love a link.
Why exactly raising hospital capacity in response to COVID waves is currently universally treated as a complete, absolute impossibility?
The calls to "flatten the curve" in March 2020 were explicitly based on the idea that while the curve is being flattened, this buys time to increase healthcare capacity. In fact, when you check out the wikipedia article "Flattening the curve", it does say in the very second paragraph: "A complementary measure is to increase health care capacity, to "raise the line".[4] As described in an article in The Nation, "preventing a health care system from being overwhelmed requires a society to do two things: 'flatten the curve'—that is, slow the rate of infection so there aren't too many cases that need hospitalization at one time—and 'raise the line'—that is, boost the hospital system's capacity to treat large numbers of patients."". And there is a nice friendly animation of the curve flattening that includes the words "increase healthcare capacity".
Nowadays though if you try to mention increasing healthcare capacity and specifically the number of ICU beds, which has always been the main issue, you always get the canned response: "this is impossible because we don't have enough personnel and it takes many years to train new ICU personnel".
But why was it widely seen as possible in March 2020? The issue wasn't really any different back then, it still was about ICU beds. Well, at first there was of course some inordinate attention to ventilators (which soon turned out not to be a big deal) but presumably you still need ICU personnel to operate these ventilators, so this does not change anything.
Here in Finland there are apparently some 250-300 ICU beds in the country of 5.5 million, and in March 2020 our health authorities claimed that this could reasonably be spun up to 1000 beds at least, and probably more. Nowadays apparently 50 ICU beds used by COVID patients is dire enough that wide-ranging restrictions for vaccinated and unvaccinated alike began again. I understand that "1000 beds" number applies when much if not most of other healthcare is winded down, just to weather the crisis. But if we're having a crisis again, why doesn't this logic apply anymore? Surely with most of the country vaccinated we still won't need anywhere close to 1000 beds, but having such a limit at 50, in a Nordic country which is widely seen as one of the most successful and functional countries in the world, sounds really rather ridiculous.
Apparently over these two years hospital capacity was in fact downsized in at least some places (at least not in Finland though), and vaccine mandates caused some nurses to quit some other places. I don't believe either of these can be a huge factor. I don't, however, understand, why no one tried, you know, PAYING COVID personnel consistently and significantly more, like 2x more than you'd normally get paid in the same position. Surely at the very least there must be a significant number of people trained as ICU nurses who are employed elsewhere, but could return to ICUs with large enough material stimulus. It's not like governments were shy about getting in debt over these two years.
But even that aside, what exactly makes it a complete, absolute impossibility to train new personnel to treat this one, specific illness under known, specific protocols? I've seem claims that it takes 5+ years to train an ICU nurse. This much time is enough to get a university degree, and getting a university degree also presupposes you need to learn to do research by yourself, write papers etc. None of that is necessary for nurses.
I find it extremely hard to believe that in 2 years it is not possible to train people who could do useful work in COVID ICUs. Admittedly with how the pandemic developed it would have been difficult for anyone in spring 2020 to predict we would actually need that; the first wave went down to near-zero in much of the world by summer and many thought (including me) that was it; then we were waiting for approval and then rollout of vaccines, and many thought (including me) that when enough people are vaccinated, this would be it. By now it seems clear that unless we're really lucky and Omicron wave is the last one (and at this point I don't really believe it anymore), this is going continue for years and we do in fact need to expand healthcare capacity. (Actually some hospitals here in Finland indeed announced that they are going to do that, if not by especially much and not especially quickly.)
But even so, why would it be impossible to train people in some months to at least help in ICUs? Sure, they wouldn't be fully capable but surely there must be some jobs to do that demand time and effort but don't require THAT much experience and knowledge. Sure, the standard of care would be reduced and more people might not survive ICU, but isn't that a crisis? If ICUs are really overflowing the standard of care would be reduced anyway.
Basically what I would really like to see is some description/timetable of which particular procedures some example COVID patients underwent while in ICU, and/or which particular procedures some example ICU nurses did over a few working days in COVID ICU. As detailed as possible, with precise notes which kind of knowledge you need to do every particular procedure. Surely even if really nothing can be done, such transparency would at least answer questions for people like me. Right now we're basically told: "these people are wizards, they are doing wizard jobs, you don't and can't understand anything about wizard jobs, no one else can ever be taught to do wizard jobs (in any meaningful timeframe at least) and everything we do is meant to make sure wizards are not overloaded in their jobs, otherwise an untold catastrophe will happen". (I also have an issue with treating overloaded ICUs as an untold catastrophe, but that's perhaps an another subject to discuss.)
What you described in the last paragraphs was actually implemented, to a limited extent, in Finland. I (a physician in an very unrelated field) attended a short training for treating respiratory failure associated with covid-19 in March 2020. Together with the simultaneous short-lived enactment of the “emergency law” (enabling something akin to military mobilization for medical personnel) and curtailment of elective treatment, we could have (theoretically) flooded hospitals with “conscripted” doctors and nurses (as well as senior students in those fields) to administer care. While this would have undoubtedly resulted in masses of lethal blunders prior to these personnel learning the ropes, it would probably have been preferable to people going without care at all. Of course, this theoretical extra capacity ended up not being needed in Finland in 2020 (and I think that at least my specialty should be kept well away from ICU patients in all but the most catastrophic of situations :) However, if things got bad enough, we could of course do the same, and this would be much less expensive than adding a large number of “real” ICU personnel to be kept in reserve.
So, why are we not doing this (or something similar) currently? While I agree with you that the rationale for the newest round of restrictions is questionable, I can think of at least two potential reasons why a more long-term approach to increasing ICU capacity hasn’t been adopted as an alternative to restrictions (and vaccine booster campaigns):
1) Increasing ICU capacity is a linear process, spreading disease an exponential one. In a (thankfully) counterfactual world where this variant were as severe as the previous variants with significant immune-escape properties, doubling the ICU capacity (a monumental and expensive task) would only delay the need for restrictions by 2-3 days (current estimate for the doubling time of omicron), ceteris paribus.
2) The economic basis for avoiding lockdowns via having covid run through a population and treating the most badly affected in ICU may be dubious. Like with many other severe illnesses, it is not as though you jump up from the hospital bed and return to your everyday life once the acute illness has passed; according to Finnish statistics, about 40 percent of those treated in ICU for covid hadn’t be able to return to work after three months, and many require extensive and costly rehabilitation. Some of those treated in ordinary wards also end up (at least anecdotally) with long sick leaves. Add in potential breathless media stories about overloaded hospitals, and people would curtail their use of services etc. to some extent even without any restrictions (though I understand that the relative financial effects of this and restrictions are contentious among economists).
I'm a respiratory therapist--and a new one, at that--not a nurse. But I do have some perspective on this. I'm just not sure how to approach this question.
On the one hand, no, I wouldn't try training half-nurses for the ICU. Half of an ICU nurse is basically a nurse from another part of the hospital, who is honestly pretty well tits on a bull where ICU stuff is concerned. It's not a matter of mastering a list of discrete tasks (though there are a lot of specialized aptitudes like starting PICC lines) so much as being able to recognize and handle a number of weird problems that might come up. A nurse from the stepdown area can recognize basic issues, but will very likely panic if somebody codes because stepdown nurses just aren't used to dealing with stuff like that.
I speak from experience here; I got called to a code blue in the orthopedic floor a couple of weeks ago, and it took me a while (like over a full minute) to get there. They still hadn't gotten a bag-valve mask to begin oxygenating the patient by the time I arrived. Just one nurse pushing on the chest while the others looked anxious. Crash cart wasn't opened, and I'm not even sure if anybody was keeping time. Basic how-to-run-a-code stuff wasn't getting done. Because they were ortho nurses, and their job was to keep the patient alive and reasonably mobile while PT did their thing, not to address crises. Just for one example.
So yeah, you could get a quick-and-dirty nurse sub without the experience, but she'd be little more than a tech, good for wiping butts and checking blood sugar. If things went pear-shaped she'd be more of a liability than anything else; she wouldn't likely recognize the danger signs and when the code happened she'd be one more body hanging out in the room gawking uselessly.
At the same time, however, I have to say that I think you're asking the wrong question anyway. It would be politically impossible to implement any such change in the short term, at least in the US. You know how in the Middle Ages every profession had guilds, who fixed prices and discouraged new competitors and otherwise jacked up the market? Something similar obtains in American healthcare, at least for RTs like me, and I'm pretty sure the situation is if anything worse for nurses because there are a lot more of them and they make more money. My profession has three different governing bodies plus a different certification board for every state but Alaska, and your odds of getting any change in standards past them (to say nothing of sundry other bureaucracies like the various Medicare goblins) can be expressed by the mathematical formula [((Jack*Squat)^2)/(self-interest*fear of change)].
Basically, the first congressperson you persuade to take up your cause will have the airwaves flooded with ads along the lines of "Senator Wilberforce wants to lower standards of care for the healthcare professionals keeping your loved ones alive, against the advice of this terrifying list of professional organizations. Senator Wilberforce doesn't care if your grandmother lives. Shame on you, Senator Wilberforce!"
It's tempting to say "so we need to get those rent-seekers out of the way," but the hell of it is, somebody needs to give advice about healthcare, and if you got rid of the professional organizations I'm afraid that would leave the field to people like the aforementioned Medicare Goblins--J. Co. and the other hardcore bureaucratic parasites. Who probably are the single most useless set of people in American healthcare, and I say that inclusive of the Medicare fraudsters they're supposed to be guarding against. Doctors and nurses, unlike medieval shoemakers, really do need to have a major say in how their profession is regulated.
And I'm going to leave it at that, because if I tried to come up with an actual solution for our jacked-up system it'd be too long to post. Also, I do have to sleep at some point tonight.
I just don’t think the incentives exist to raise ICU capacity. Capacity markets generally exist as a regulatory requirement, like in energy and banking.
Business operators are more than capable of sorting out all the mechanics when the incentives exist.
Because the government isn’t good at changing regulation dynamically. Because healthcare regulation is really hard to change.
Are those insufficient explanations? I just don’t see the capacity issue as something that gets solved by analyzing and micromanaging each friction point of bringing additional capacity online. Healthcare operators know how to do this. They just aren’t incentivized and we shouldn’t expect any industry stakeholder to spend money on resources that will decrease utilization and ultimately compress margins.
Kenny's claims below that in March 2020 we were overly optimistic about how we could increase staffing. But I would like to add a second reason why we don't increase ICU capacity.
In March 2020 we were overly pessimistic about medical development. At the time governments did not think we could have vaccines out so fast. So now if you're going to flatten the curve people are going to use that time to get more people vaccinated, or start rolling out the new antivirals, rather than try to build another emergency hospital.
I think all along the issue has always been staffing. In March 2020, people thought that maybe staffing could be increased by a big hiring initiative. But by March 2021, it had become clear that employers of *all* sorts were having staffing issues (the "great resignation" as they call it now) and medical facilities were having *additional* problems due to burnout.
If the pandemic had triggered a period of mass unemployment where people were generally having a hard time finding work, and were actively looking for it, the way the 2008 financial crisis did, then staffing up medical facilities might have been as easy as adding a few tens of billions to hospital budgets in one of the big relief bills. But since the bigger economic effect of the pandemic has turned out to be a *tightening* of the labor market, this seems harder.
Yes, the bottleneck seems to be the number of nurses, and it's part of a much bigger problem, the one that medical staff are kind of overloaded and new specialists are not being educated fast enough, even if there wasn't a pandemic. There are a couple of things to do that anyone can think of in a few seconds, e.g. 1) pay the nurses and doctors twice as much, and 2) accept more immigrant specialists, or, as you said, 3) shorten the time of preparing some specific specialists like ICU nurses.
1) would help best in the long run, and here in Estonia I find it almost inevitable, as half of our family doctors are over 60 and we'll just run out of doctors if nothing drastic is done soon (I don't know if it's this bad in Finland or not). This will have a hard limit at some point because many people just don't have the right type of neurology to become doctors/nurses, no matter how much you pay them, but I don't know if it's a problem, maybe the limit is so high that it won't matter. 2) Can be difficult because these cold and dark countries aren't awfully attractive to immigrants, and 3) ... the problem with this may be ossified bureaucracies? If some agent tries to shorten the study period of some specific medical specialists they will meet fierce opposition by other agents who don't want to lower the standards for something as dangerous as medical staff.
A few thoughts from a student nurse. It doesn't literally take 5 years to train a competent ICU nurse. Some hospitals will hire new grad nurses (nurses straight out of their BSN or MSN program) into the ICU. Formal training is usually a few months, and the nurse usually isn't considered totally up to speed for about a year. However, the training is very resource intensive and specifically requires ICU nurses, therefore it is hard to do if all the ICU nurses are desperately needed caring for patients. The way you train a nurse is basically by having one experienced nurse and one new nurse split the normal patient load for one nurse. New nurse does as much as possible supervised by experienced nurse. After a few months of this (called preceptorship) the new nurse is allowed to take her own patients. During this independent but new period she will be asking a lot of questions and taking up time of experienced nurses.
I know of some hospitals which had experienced non-ICU nurses help out in the ICU. They didn't take on a patient assignment, but took on less specialized tasks like helping to prone patients, take blood sugars, whatever. This strategy expands the capacity of ICU nurses (might allow them to safely take 2-3 vs 1-2 patients) but hospitals also don't have a ton of extra non-ICU nurses floating around. Also, as a note to the commenter from Finland, nurses in the US are generally required to have a university degree to work in acute care. The reasoning behind that is that nurses need to be able to interpret research to inform their own precinct and educate patients - I don't fully agree with the requirement, but it is what it is
I think private prisons is a bad idea. But if you have private prisons, they should be paid based on how well they rehabilitate the prisoners. So the longer a released prisoner goes without committing any crime or dying, the more money the prison gets. Maybe with a maximum of 10 years or something.
The reason the prison doesn't get money if the prisoner dies, is otherwise the prison would have an incentive to make their prisoners unhealthy, so that the prisoners would die instead of committing crimes.
Private prisons are an excellent example of a "moral hazard" - a financial incentive to lock people up: what could possibly go wrong? Thinking up ways to make private prisons something other than a moral hazard might be an interesting intellectual exercise, but it kinda seems like thinking up ways to make genocide ethical. Unless reliably inflicting capital punishment on insufficiently ethical judges and prosecutors is part of the package, I don't see it working in the real world.
I mean, being a prison guard has to be a pretty thankless and depressing job. And I’m sure it’s quite a fine line to walk sometimes when you’re trying to make sure the inmates don’t kill each other, or you, and you don’t want to use excessive force but you’re dealing with people who often have a history of erratic behavior, violence and bad decisions. Unions have a way of correcting some legitimate injustices while causing others, but I do think private prisons are a worse and more clear-cut moral hazard than prison guard unions
"Lobbying efforts and campaign contributions by the CCPOA have helped secure passage of numerous legislative bills favorable to union members, including bills that increase prison terms, member pay, and enforce current drug laws. The CCPOA takes the position that correctional officers perform an essential public service that work in great danger, and strives for a safer California."
This is making a bold assumption about the point of prisons. The government runs public prisons which don't seem to optimize for rehabilitation, so why would it want private prisons that do?
Bryan Caplan instead though that private prisons should be chosen by the prisoners themselves, like vouchers for schooling. I thought there was an obvious problem in that prisons would be incentivized to be so lax as to permit gang leaders to still run their gangs from prison, traffic in drugs etc. Robin Hanson's idea of letting insurance companies punish their own clients is a more sensible version of that.
Mark Kleiman similarly proposed that schools be evaluated on how much their students commit crime, thus incentivizing them not to release their kids before adults get back to work (however much this might make the faculty's commute worse). I'm skeptical of "rehabilitation", but one imagines there's more scope for molding children than adults.
If I am choosing which prison to go to, the one where there aren't gangs and I'm unlikely to die will be the primary criterion.
Like when choosing food, the primary criterion is that it's not poison. That is, it's such an important criterion that it will become a floor that every prison meets instantly.
I'm guessing you're unrepresentative of prisoners. Members of gangs are far more likely to go to prison. And the death rate in prison is already very low, they have on-site hospitals after all. https://www.econlib.org/archives/2007/10/crime_fiction_v.html
To pick it up from a slightly different angle, criminal gangs are incentivized to coerce prisoners to "chose" prisons where the gangs are allowed to operate.
1) The private company would be incentivised to cover up crimes by ex-prisoners,
2) Ex-prisoners would be incentivised to blackmail the private company for payments when released to avoid them committing crime (maybe this is a good thing!).
Another question. Is rehabilitation actually real? I get the impression that since most crime is committed by young men, the secret is to lock them up until they are past the age of peak criminality (mid 30s or so) and then let them out (tariff permitting). The reduced reoffending rate is just a reflection of the lower crime rate of the older male cohort.
Mind you, your idea would at least force a company to put their money at stake on testing rehabilitation strategies so we could see if any actually do anything.
Worse, the private company would be incentivised to arrange for the conviction of a bunch of innocents, because the class of person least likely to reoffend is someone who never offended in the first place.
This is not a big problem if the private prison is not a monopoly: framing people is an awful lot of work to go to if the system only sends you 20% of the prisoners you create.
I'm looking for something and maybe someone here can tell me where to find it
It's sort of a site dedicated to explaining what rent is, with little graphics of squares of land with apple trees on it. I probably found it on Reddit
No. But there used to be, and maybe still is, a Reddit sub devoted to questions like yours. People who remembered just the barest details about a children's book or certain kind of candy or whatever would post what they remembered, hoping somebody could help them identify the thing. Often someone on the sub was actually able to do it.
At least there is something deeply spiritual about humour. Looks lost in much of Islam and Christianity but seems more alive among jews and maybe buddhists. I wonder about Hinduism. Some sadhus look real funny.
I would highly recommend the book Inside Jokes by Hurley, Dennett, and Adams. Yes, that Dennett. There are a lot of theories of humor but this book went way deeper to explain not just what it is (that you know when you see it) but _why_ such a weird thing exists.
This book's concept would seem to be of great interest to this audience because not only is there a "rational" component to humor, it is a key cornerstone of rational thinking. In a nutshell, humor is based on the positive brain chemistry feedback mechanisms humans (at least) evolved for rewarding "getting the joke" which is equivalent to suddenly correcting a big misunderstanding about the world. Note that there's an important caveat that the "valence" must not be tragic or personally awful for the experiencer. So humor really is mostly about other people's problems or your minor problems that exercise your ability to get a new perspective on things.
Anyway, don't judge a book by my stupid recap - check it out. And interesting to people who like music, this book's thinking is based on another extremely good book that talks about _why_ we might possibly like music. Turns out similar reasons. That book is Sweet Anticipation by David Huron. Both of these books are very good.
The Quote Investigator says - "QI has found no substantive evidence that Mark Twain employed this amphibian simile. Citations show that both E. B. White and André Maurois did use this striking analogy, but the data indicated that E. B. White together with his wife Katharine S. White were the likely originators"
It makes you wanna play with stuff that you are not predicting well but which are harmless enough (or unavoidable) so that you won't end up really bad just for playing with them.
I should’ve phrased that statement differently. I completely understand the benefits of humor. Like I said, the last exit before the highway of despair or
Can you recommend me an article on different ethics systems?
Currently utilitarian ethics makes "most sense" to me, however it has some glaring holes in it. It would be nice to have something to lean onto in ambiguous situations, and to be self-consistent in this, hence my search for different possibilities in this area.
Michael Huemer's _Ethical Intuitionism_ was very influential to me. I've written a lot through the intuitionist perspective on ethics here.
Ethical intuitionism is meta-ethical position about how you know ethical truths. It isn't going to give you a bunch of rules. I think there are prima facie duties as Dana discusses below and prima facie rights and decent moral heuristics.
Any one sentence ethical system is going to be able to be exploited to reach some seemingly absurd conclusion.
The ethical theory my students are most likely to find plausible in practice is that of W. D. Ross, who basically offers a hybrid between deontology and consequentialism. He does think we have a duty to maximize good consequences, but he also thinks there are other moral duties. So he argues for a short list of fundamental "prima facie" moral duties, which will sometimes conflict with one another in practice, at which point we have to use our judgment to decide which duties should take priority. So it doesn't work as an algorithm for telling you what to do the way utilitarianism in principle does, but it's a lot more plausible. See https://iep.utm.edu/ross-wd/
The deontology-consequentialism theory I'd be interested in goes like this:
Obviously, the greatest good for the greatest number is a good goal. But as mere humans acting with incomplete information and imperfect rationality, we can't possibly predict the consequences of any given action with perfect fidelity. So instead we need a manageable set of rules, or moral heuristics, which have themselves been optimised to produce something approximating the greatest good for the greatest number when applied consistently. So we have deontological means in the service of consequentialist ends.
One resource I often recommend to people is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It aims to be readable by an undergraduate, though definitely a lot of articles get to more of a graduate level. Articles don't usually aim to get you to fully understand all the debates, but they do aim to give you a sense of what the big debates are, so you can look further into them with all the citations given.
You might start with the entry on consequentialism (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consequentialism/), which is the family of ethical theories that utilitarianism is the most straightforward member of. This article shows that there are a lot more options than you might expect for a moral theory of this sort. (Is it positive feelings that should be maximized, or satisfied desires, or some list of objective goods for people, perhaps including things like rights? Should we aim to actually maximize them, or maximize them on expectation? Is it individual acts that should be evaluated, or rules, or policies, or other sorts of tendencies?)
The two other classical big-picture alternatives to consequentialism are deontology (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-deontological/) and virtue ethics (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/). I personally have trouble being motivated by any conception of ethics that isn't consequentialist, though I suspect that there is a good theory out there on which virtues are evaluated in a consequentialist way.
The Kantian idea that deontological morality is a consequence of the fundamental idea of rationality is very neat (i.e., rationality requires acting in a way that you judge to be effective; to judge that a particular motive is effectively realized by a particular act is to make some sort of universal judgment; thus, you can't judge that a particular motive is effectively realized by a particular act unless it would still be effective if all rational beings had that sort of connection between motive and act; thus, you should only will an act if you could consistently will that all rational beings acted that way, i.e., Kant's categorial imperative) and I think it would somehow fundamentally be the same as the conception of rationality popular in the "rationalist" community on blogs like this one, if Kant had only had the concept of an algorithm or a Turing machine.
Late in life, Derek Parfit had the idea that consequentialism, Kantian deontology, and contractarian political philosophy were somehow all "climbing the same mountain on different faces" to aim at the same unified ethical/political theory. There's something appealing about this idea, even though the theories we have still look very different.
Thank you very much for this comment. I'm excited about all the new reading material I've got :-D If I have anything more interesting to say once I do process all of this, I'll come back and add it to this comment.
For now, let me just say that this idea of "scaling the same mountain" sounds very intriguing. In maths it often so happens that someone realizes that entities from very different branches of study have some commonalities and that they are all just concrete examples of some more abstract idea. I wonder whether it's possible we will see similar connections among seemingly different ideas in philosophy as well.
Have you considered why you might need to have a system of ethics in the first place?
It seems similar to those people asking what is the best diet - what should I eat?
In both cases I see people who have lost something - in one case, the understanding of what to eat; in the other, the understanding of how to behave.
My cat, my chickens and my neighbour the farmer seem to have no problem with these questions - none of them have lost the understanding of what to eat or how to behave so they do not ask themselves questions concerning 'Should'.
To the riposte that the questioners are looking for systems that are somehow 'better' than intuition or conscience, I see instead people eating dessicated chemical portions that are as far from food as one could possibly imagine. And not being able to behave in everyday life without offering up detailed analyses of the Trolley problem and beset with constant worries over whether they have their 'Shoulds' correct.
I sort of understand where you're coming from, but I disagree with the idea that in all cases the "natural" and "intuitive" thing is the right thing to do. This is a rationalist blog, after all, so we all know how the biological systems in our brain are evolutionary fitted to a wholly different kind of world than the one we live in right now. And the whole point of rationalism (in my view, anyway) is to examine these intuitive reflexes with conscious thought, and sometimes try to steer them in a more rational direction.
Speaking of food, my brain definitely thinks that sugary and fatty foods are the best thing in the world. Should I trust him? Should I not look for a 'better' system on how to eat?
Fair points, though don't see it as universal that removed from our ancestral environment everyone seeks excessive fat and sugar. Many people don't. And the rationalist project seems to me particularly ill-suited to solving that problem.
I don't mean to be gratuitously provocative but I sometimes want to check how many unexamined assumptions underpin rationalism generally.
I think this is actually a great way to illustrate where the two of you have common ground: your diet intuition fails because you have been removed from the ancestral environment, where seeking as much sugar and fat as possible *was* a great idea. Likewise our erstwhile, intuitive philosophical systems fail to satisfy modern man because modern man's world is far too complex for them. It turns out that when your hours are no longer constantly spent defending your tribe from predators and trying not to starve, the "why?" quickly creeps in.
As I understand it, we have great intuitions (either inborn or learned in young age) about good behavior in small groups of agents, but if you have to make decisions in very large groups, our intuitions stop giving good results, since large groups have totally different properties. So here we need something external to help us make good decisions.
I have two cats. They both get the same cat food (Virbac, which I buy at the vet), except one also gets 1 cat treat every day – the other one doesn't like any kind of treats; I've tried lots of different types. We never give them any of our own food. One – the one that gets the treat – is normal weight, the other one is overweight.
This makes me think (new thought to me) that I suspect having a system is impossible - for similar reasons to Godels Incompleteness Theorem. The boundary is fractal and any system will have some circumstances it acts in a destructive way.
So my view is that it isn’t about having a codified system, but about understanding people and the word well enough to have the instinct to take good quality decisions and support others in the complexity and pleasure and pain of this life as best as we can.
(Although thinking about and discussing systems is probably good brain training for getting better at it)
Assuming that people's intuitions are not inherently contradictory (big assumption, I know), their intuitions are encoded in the finite structures of their brain so there must be at least one set of rules that satisfies them, even if those rules are just "We scanned your brain and transcribed every intuition you have."
There's a thing that comes up here in medicine-related posts, where if you pick a random medication and look at the studies it'll tend to look really convincingly good even if we know it does nothing (like homeopathy), because of various forms of selection bias, and the conclusion there is that we should be much more skeptical than we think we should be of things that came to our attention in ways that involved selection bias.
I think this should apply to a lot of covid stuff (mainly long covid, but also things like breakthrough cases, the utility of lockdowns/NPIs in areas with available vaccines). Long covid isn't the reason covid originally came to our attention, so we should be extremely skeptical of studies claiming it exists any more than homeopathy does. There's some mildly convincing-looking studies, sure, but we'd expect that even if it's completely made up.
(I also think we should have a strong bias against NPIs in areas with available vaccines, for similar reasons)
I looked at the NICE guidelines (https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/ng188) and they note that all studies so far have a very serious risk of bias. As for certainty of evidence they mostly write: “..the expert panel concluded that there is not enough evidence to give an evidence-based recommendation, but the panel still regards it as important to give a recommendation by consensus.”
I agree that the case about long covid syndrome seems very weak. Probably it is what happens after any severe or moderate respiratory infection. Obviously, some people take longer time to recover from all the damage caused by virus. But we can only guess how widespread it is and how many people are affected. My personal experience is that people who had had covid (mild or moderate illness) looked completely fine, they hadn't really changed in what they could do at their work or leisure.
Maybe our society demands people to work hard immediately after recovery from any illness. We should give more slack and more time for rehabilitation and gradual return to work, let's say, allowing initially to work 2-3 hours per day and receive partial benefits while they still have some health problems. Then after the review by the doctor they could increase working hours etc. Instead of this all or nothing attitude which is very common in many companies.
I'm playing with the notion that being competently benevolent is a talent like being good at music, and perhaps we should view it as something we shouldn't talk as though we expect everyone to be good at it.
On the other hand, some cultures are better than others at having widely distributed ability at music, but again, it would be worth looking at how it happens.
This is part of the Early Modern arguments for democracy and capitalism. Instead of trying to design a system that works perfectly when good people run it, we should design a system that incentivizes selfish people to act in the public good.
Perhaps the clearest statement of this argument is in the first chapter of Spinoza's Political Treatise (if you Google this, I'm not referencing his more famous Theological-Political Treatise).
What does being incompetently benevolent look like? Seems like there are a lot of ways to be incompetent at benevolence. You could be bad at recognizing who is going to get real benefit from your benevolence -- or what's the most effective way to be benevolent in a given situation (give cash? give information? express affection and sympathy?) -- or you could be good at making the right call about the 2 things I just mentioned, but bad at implementing your call (they need help changing the tire and you don't know how to work the jack).
Yeah, I meant competence and benevolence. I guess I'm somewhat captivated by the idea that there might be a talent that combines them into something qualitatively distinct. Your comparison with music brings to mind a person who is capable, perhaps nearly at a glance, of gauging the suffering and human need in a particular situation and seeing the broad outlines of the most efficient solutions.
Benevolence, to me, requires a component of selflessness, which also seems to be the limiting factor. So it reduces to the question of what makes one selfish as opposed to selfless, and how intrinsic/talent-like that is.
I think that talent is a multiplier on the speed of skill improvement, so its presence by itself doesn't guarantee skill in case of insufficient training/practice. If some (sub)cultures value a skill more than others, there will be more skilled people there, even if we hold the base rate of talent constant. As an aside, it seems to me that there's a general issue with the mainstream culture's overemphasis of talent and underemphasis of skill.
Some companies have stopped their production of fertilizer. The reason is that petroleum gas is currently expensive, which is the basis of ammonia, which is the basis for fertilizer. So production of fertilizer is no longer profitable for some of the big players. Fertilizer is already expensive right now, and in some regions, this reduces the amount of food that we can expect to be harvested in next year's spring and summer quite drastically.
Does anybody know the scope of this? My standard newspapers are very concerned and worry about famines next year. But it is a topic where it's easy to get the order of magnitude wrong, and I don't trust them to have a good overview.
Should we expect that there are some local famines in a few places in the developing world, but no more than that, and that it can be mitigated by redistribution of food, because it is globally negligible?
Or should we expect that that there is a global food shortage? If so, how bad will it be? E.g., will it "only" affect the poorest developing countries, or also industrialized ones?
Thanks, I did. WTI/Brent is not so informative, because fertilizer depends on natural gas, not on oil. But the last time gas prices increased sharply (actually higher than now) was 2007/2008, where it doubled within a year. Fertilizer prices almost tripled within a year, which is roughly the same as now.
The result was rather a food price crisis than a food crisis. Food production per capita dipped only slightly (but for the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union). But food prices rose by 50% in half a year.
The effects in poor countries were massive. Wikipedia discusses more than a dozen countries with food riots. Middle-class countries like Russia, Brazil, India, Mexico had to react (or felt like they had to) with export bans and food price freezing, but could prevent large-scale riots. High-income countries were apparently not very affected. (Except politically. It basically put an end to the idea of biofuels. And the US food banks got into acute crises.)
So I would expect a similar situation in 2022. As a wealthy person in a first-world country, I will probably hardly notice a difference. But globally it might become ugly.
You don't have to make fertilizer out of methane, it's just the cheapest option (Haber-Bosch process).
I'd be extremely concerned if I was living in Bangladesh, I wouldn't be concerned at all in a developed country - though food will certainly get more expensive. As an EU citizen I'm considering stockpiling as a cost saving measure and in general not being a chump, exchanging fiat (currently a hot potato and getting hotter by the minute) for nonperishable food (predicted to get more expensive b/c fertilizer and energy costs).
Natural gas should get cheaper - the current price spike is transient, assuming there's a decent stock of fertilizer there can be a minor drop in supply but nothing catastrophic.
Natgas futures already did get cheaper (LNG tankers from US underway etc.), but it's just three weeks low. Long term outlook still doesn't look too good - not enough investment in hydrocarbons exploration and general EU/US unwillingness to accept reality means very high prices are here to stay.
There has been recent discussion on ACX about the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the United States. Some believe that the FDA is overly precautious due to an asymmetry in the incentives they have or just the structure of the bureaucracy. I think these criticisms are reasonable and we should probably move toward better cost-benefit analysis. I think many people would want an FDA that approves a drug only if the amount of medical benefit after approval exceeds the possible downsides.
I am sympathetic to this view, but I think we should probably go beyond cost-benefit analysis and be inclined to approve even when it causes harms which likely exceed the benefits of approval. My reasoning is that it is much worse to prevent someone from helping themselves than to allow someone to hurt themselves. Denying access to life saving medication is worse than giving access to dangerous medication, even if both result in premature death. I will use a thought experiment from my article [1]:
"Now, imagine a nice guy named Peter who helps his elderly neighbor Betty to make sure she gets her medication when she needed it and doesn't overdose. If Peter ceased helping Betty with her medication, that would be bad. However, it would be worse if Peter were to steal his neighbors medication and withhold it form her. It would be worse even if the probability of her coming into harms way on account of either the lack of medication or inability to properly take her medication was exactly the same."
I don’t understand why the two tiered system hasn’t gotten more traction. There would be level 1 drugs which only passed Phase 1 trials and are legalized but not endorsed, and insurance won’t pay for it. Then there would be level 2 drugs which go through the current approval process.
And what about people whose objections are that the FDA is *too* permissive with giving approval? Like my exchange of views with Peregrine Journal, where there are a few "I've Got A Science/Medical Qualification" people posting tweets that the FDA giving even qualifed approval to molnupirivir is the worst thing ever, since this is actually a dangerous, mutation-causing drug that is probably going to create and spread mutant versions of Covid.
Is that akin to "Peter stole Betty's medication" or more "Peter put poison into Betty's medication"?
For everyone claiming the FDA is too cautious, there is someone else claiming the FDA is too reckless. And they have studies to back up their demands too, and they'd claim that you have no right to risk *their* health by taking something which may "cause harms which likely exceed the benefits of approval".
I think molnupiravir is an unusual case, where there is some non-ridiculous worry (in this case, the formation of a novel covid variant) that improperly regulated use of the medication might actually cause significant harms to individuals other than the one who used the medication.
Someone could have a very extreme view of the sort Parrhesia mentions while still thinking that there's an important role for the FDA to ensure that medications won't cause significant third-party harms.
It's probably the same Bayesian vs classical thinking, at its core. FDA isn't even trying to gauge if approving a drug would have a positive or negative effect overall, because that's just not the way the individuals involved think.
You can see it even in your comment: you compare expected benefits (suggests expected utility) with the possible downsides (maybe not worst case scenario, but no longer expected utility). I agree with your point, btw.
I'm working on an article right now that deals, in part, with formatted jokes, I.E. jokes as they might exist in a jokebook, where they could be memorized and retold with or without embellishments, ranging from knock-knocks to more complex dirty jokes and the like.
If you have a joke that you tell or like, it might end up being helpful to me if you told me what the joke was (a link is fine, if you don't want to type it out) and specifically *why you think the joke works*.
For full disclosure, I have pretty strong prior beliefs on this and I might end up using what you say as an example of what I disagree with. Not that I can't be convinced, but that's a strong possibility on this particular subject, so bear that in mind in your time-investing choices.
Edited to add: For the sake of Scott's sanity, probably for the best if we keep it pretty tame, especially as it relates to racial humor, which I'd just as soon take a miss on here.
Some of my best jokes are Bulgarian. Fun fact - there's a museum of humor in Gabrovo.
So Petur's wife is tired of him going into town and staying out all night drinking with his buddies. She warns him that if he does it one more time she's going to take a rolling pin upside his head. Petur is unhappy, but comes up with a plan. He knows she's fond of eating snails, so he suggests going into town to buy some snails for her. She's reluctant, but gives in to her love for snails, while also warning him to remember the rolling pin. He goes to town and buys a bag of snails, and is on the way home when he runs into his buddies and of course... Next morning he's approaching the house and remembers the rolling pin, then he has an idea. He dumps the snails out onto the porch and lines them all up facing the door. Then he opens the door, and there she is with the rolling pin in her hand. He turns to the snails and says "Come on guys, we're almost there."
Works because of exaggeration/implausibility, and also stereotypes.
Did your version of this joke mysteriously include a guy going golfing and hitting a hole-in-one? For some reason mine did, and the frog is in the hole when he goes to get the ball out. It's completely weird as a setup and I've never thought about it before.
Haven't heard the hole-in-one version. That does seem like a pretty random setup, but I suppose it could add some humor just by upping the random absurdity quotient? To your original point of "why I think it works" - like most of the jokes that actually make me laugh, it's like you're humming along down a well-worn path when there's an abrupt left turn and you find yourself somewhere much much different than what you were expecting. And it's not awesome unexpected goodness, nor horrible unexpected awfulness, but just like "uh, wait, what?" or maybe "ok, wait, no?" The more absurd and inherently silly it is, the better. Kind of like you expected to come off the playground slide and hit the usual patch of sandy dirt, but instead you find yourself dizzy and waist-deep in a pool of sparkly jello.
I have a collection of economics jokes. Their value is making an economic point but they also need to be funny. Here are two suited to a general audience:
Jose had robbed a bank in Texas and fled south across the Rio Grande with the Texas Rangers in hot pursuit. They caught up with him in a town in Old Mexico, only to discover that Jose spoke no English and none of the pursuers spoke any Spanish. They drafted one of the locals – the school teacher – to act as a translator.
“Tell Jose that he must tell us where he has hidden the loot from the bank robbery.”
“The gringos say to ask where you have hidden the loot.”
“Tell the gringos I will never tell them.”
“Jose says he will never tell you.”
The Rangers pull out their six-guns, cock them, and point them at Jose.
“Tell Jose if he does not tell us where he has hidden the loot, we will kill him.”
“The gringos say if you do not tell them where you have hidden the loot they will kill you.”
Jose begins to tremble with fear.
“I buried it by the old oak tree on the other side of the bridge.”
“Jose says he is not afraid to die.”
---
The zoo director noticed that one of the elephants was coughing. So he decided to add vodka to this elephant's bucket of water. The next morning that elephant was completely healthy, but the other three elephants began to cough.
Why does the mermaid wear sea shells? She outgrew her B shells. Works because of the punniness and a little bit of naughty.
An old man and an old woman are sitting on a park bench, and the man notices the woman keeps looking at him. Finally he asks her why she keeps looking at him and she says "You look like my 3rd husband." He asks "How many times have you been married?" She says "Twice". Works because of the unexpected twist.
Q. How many surrealists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A. Mañana!
This joke was told to me years ago by a co-worker who said "I knew you were the only person here who'd get it".
The version you'll find online has "A fish" as the punchline, but I think "mañana" works better.
EDIT: Handbooks of jokes and jest books go back a long way, one example is the Tudor "A Hundred Merry Tales" which made me laugh when Eamonn Duffy quoted samples of jokes in his "The Stripping of the Altars":
"And quite apart from pastoral realism, many clergy were slapdash or negligent. The jest-book 'A Hundred Merry Tales' has a joke about a priest hearing confessions on Ash Wednesday with a massive hangover as a result of Shrove Tuesday junketing. He falls asleep in the midst of one woman's confession that she had stolen a pot, and in disgust she gets up and goes away. The next woman in the queue kneels down and begins with the conventional opening request for blessing. “Benedicite”, at which the priest wakes confused and exclaims, “What, art thou now at ‘benedicite’ again! Tell me what didst thou when thou hadst stolen the pot.”
A salesman rings a doorbell and a 10 year old boy in a bra and panties, holding a glass of bourbon in one hand and a cigar in the other opens the door.
My husband lived in Russia from 1985-87, and he brought back a whole treasure trove of Russian jokes, which are all characterized by dark, cynical humor. Here’s a typical example:
A peasant is plowing his field and sees an old bottle. Thinking it might be valuable, he polishes it, and out pops a genie! “Thank you for rescuing me from my prison,” the genie says. “As a reward, I will grant you one wish.”
The peasant thinks for a second and then says, “Well, my neighbor has four cows, and I only have three. Genie, I want you to KILL two of my neighbor’s cows!”
The Irishman finds a bottle on the beach and pulls the cork. A genie bursts out.
The Jeannie says
I’ve been trapped in that bottle for 3000 years and the first 2000 of it I swore I cut the eyes out of the first man I saw. The last thousand years I calmed down and started to think that I would grant three wishes to anyone who would let me out of this bottle.
So, you’re the lucky fellow. I will grant you three wishes.
The Irishman thinks for a moment and says, “it’s fierce hot today, I wouldn’t mind a bottle of Guinness”
The Jeannie snaps his fingers and a bottle of Guinness appears in the Irishmans hand. He takes a long pull on it and then notices that the bottle is still full.
Jesus, he says, would you look at that?
Jeannie says, that’s a bottomless bottle of Guinness I’ve given you
you can drink and drink and you will never get to the bottom.
The Irishman takes another long pull on the bottle and looks at it with great satisfaction.
Right! Says the genie. What about your next two wishes?
There's a 17th century poem in Irish called "Women of the Three Cows" about a peasant woman who is very proud and haughty because she has three cows to her neighbour's two. 19th century poet/author James Clarence Mangan did a (free) translation of it:
"This ballad, which is of a homely cast, was intended as a rebuke to the saucy pride of a woman in humble life, who assumed airs of consequence from being the possessor of three cows. Its author's name is unknown, but its age can be determined, from the language, as belonging in the early part of the seventeenth century. That it was formerly very popular in Munster, may be concluded from the fact that the phrase, Easy, oh, woman of the three cows! has become a saying in that province, on any occasion upon which it is desirable to lower the pretensions of a boastful or consequential person."
T H E W O M A N O F T H R E E C O W S
O, Woman of Three Cows, agragh! don't let your tongue thus rattle!
O, don't be saucy, don't be stiff, because you may have cattle.
I have seen -- and, here's my hand to you, I only say what's true --
A many a one with twice your stock not half so proud as you.
Good luck to you, don't scorn the poor, and don't be their despiser,
For worldly wealth soon melts away, and cheats the very miser,
And Death soon strips the proudest wealth from haughty human brows;
Then don't be stiff, and don't be proud, good Woman of Three Cows!
See where Momonia's heroes lie, proud Owen More's descendants,
'Tis they that won the glorious name, and had the grand attendants!
If they were forced to bow to Fate, as every mortal bows,
Can you be proud, can you be stiff, my Woman of Three Cows!
The brave sons of the Lord of Clare, they left the land to mourning;
Movrone! for they were banished, with no hope of their returning --
Who knows in what abodes of want those youths were driven to house?
Yet you can give yourself these airs, O, Woman of Three Cows!
O, think of Donnell of the Ships, the Chief whom nothing daunted --
See how he fell in distant Spain, unchronicled, unchanted!
He sleeps, the great O'Sullivan, where thunder cannot rouse --
Then, ask yourself, should you be proud, good Woman of Three Cows!
O'Ruark, Maguire, those souls of fire, whose names are shrined in story --
Think how their high achievements once made Erin's greatest glory --
Yet now their bones lie mouldering under weeds and cypress boughs,
And so, for all your pride, will yours, O, Woman of Three Cows!
The O'Carrolls also, famed when Fame was only for the boldest,
Rest in forgotten sepulchres with Erin's best and oldest;
Yet who so great as they of yore in battle or carouse?
Just think of that, and hide your head, good Woman of Three Cows!
Your neighbour's poor, and you it seems are big with vain ideas,
Because, inagh! you've got three cows, one more, I see, than she has.
That tongue of yours wags more at times than Charity allows,
But, if you are strong, be merciful, great Woman of Three Cows!
THE SUMMING UP
Now, there you go! You still, of course, keep up your scornful bearing,
And I'm too poor to hinder you; but, by the cloak I'm wearing,
If I had but four cows myself, even though you were my spouse,
I'd thwack you well to cure your pride, my Woman of Three Cows!
I am to some soft extent going to end up arguing *against* this as a total explanation, if that makes sense. But I'm not sure how well my arguments will work against Russian jokes; it's a whole other system with weird rules I only partially comprehend.
There's a guy that's trying to predict horse races results. He doesn't really know how to do that, so he calls his friend, a mathematician. The mathematician works on it for a week, and calls him back, saying that it's impossible for him to do. But he knows a software engineer that might be able to do something.
So the guy calls the software engineer, and explain him what he's trying to do. The software engineer tells him that he might be able to do something. A week later, he calls back the guy, and tells him: "I have a working simulation, but it takes a month to complete for a single race.". The guy tells him that it's not going to work, as he needs the results very fast. The software engineer says that he can't do anything better, but he knows a physicist that might be able to do something.
The guy calls the physicist, and again explain what he's trying to do. The physicist says that he'll work on it. An hour later, the physicist calls the guy back, telling him that he solved the problem. The guy is very surprised, since both people before failed, and asks him how he did it. The physicist starts his explanation: "So let's assume a horse and its rider are a perfect sphere"
I know a version of this joke that involves an economist, a laborer, and a mechanical engineer stranded on a desert island with three cans of beans and no can opener.
Desert island jokes are an endless source of mirth
The quick version is the engineer and the labor are both devise ways of opening their cans with materials at hand. The economist sits on the beach and says
(works due to the childishness of the penultimate line. The phrasing is very like that of a two year old, which is amusing when in the mouth of an older person as soon as they realise what they have said.)
The most basic reason this is funny is "Take it to the zoo." can be interpreted as take it to be exhibited or take it as a guest of the zoo, and the man misunderstood. If people laugh it demonstrates they are intelligent enough to get the right interpretation.
The second reason it is funny is that the man is stupid. Humor is usually funnier if someone is suffering or inferior.
The third reason it is funny is because of the absurdity of a penguin visiting a zoo and going to a cinema. When people laugh at absurdity they demonstrate that they are intelligent enough to understand that's now how reality usually works.
"He liked that a lot." can be interpreted two ways. The first is that the man is wrong, the penguin doesn't particular like visiting the zoo. This is funny because the man is too stupid to interpret the penguin's emotions. The other interpretation is that the penguin really did like visiting the zoo (and maybe also will really like going to the movies.) This is funny because it is absurd.
And a story about humans, penguins, and intelligent care.
There were people knitting sweater for penguins who'd been exposed to oil leaks. The penguins need to be washed, and then warmed up. Given time, their oil coating recovers.
Knitter are a subspecies of human whose first thought when hearing of a disaster is "What can I knit for that?"
So, adorable little sweaters, including for sports teams.
Problem: having a sweater put on is traumatic for the penguin. The right thing is putting the penguin under a heat lamp.
Triumph of the human spirit!
It turns out that the sweaters can be put on plush penguins, which are sold to raise money for penguin rescue.
I know this joke but I know it differently. In my version the penguin shows up and the worKer is instructed by his boss to take the penguin to the zoo and he hands the fellow $10. At the end of the day the worker returns with the penguin and a balloon tied to the penguins wing.
When confronted by his boss the worker says I took the penguin to the zoo but we had money left over so we went to the amusement park
This isn't a joke, it's just simple mockery. An actual punchline would be "Two: one to screw in the lightbulb, and another to explain to everyone why this joke is sexist." Still not a very good one though.
I'm sure it gets laughs, but the punchline is that you're doing an impression of a prickly feminist. It subverts expectations in that it doesn't follow the lightbulb joke template but there's nothing particularly witty about that. I'm sure you recognize the difference between this and the parking space joke.
I'm trying to think of another example. Like: What did the traitor say to the hangman? (Trump impression) "You are fake noose." There's a pun in there, but there's no joke, and there's nothing to laugh at if you don't know about Trump or, in your case, the stereotypical feminist. The parking space joke, however, still works regardless of who you replace the Irishman with.
I just saw a new (from earlier this month) entry on the Mistakes page:
> 41: (12/6/21) In my 2014 review of The Two Income Trap, I suggested Elizabeth Warren was smart and good. Subsequent events have conclusively revealed her to be dumb and bad. ACX regrets the error.
This prompted significant curiosity among people on my Discord server about what this means and what prompted it. Scott, would you be up for elaborating?
Isn't it a joke based on what newspapers and other media do? First they lionise/criticise a prominent politician or public figure, then when said figure does something they approve of/condemn, they come out with another piece the reverse of what they first said. "Private Eye" magazine frequently has a section like this in their humour section, where it runs "In common with all other newspapers/TV stations/magazines, we said X Y was a dangerous nutcase with headlines like 'XY is dangerous nutcase' but now given their actions in relations to Covid, we apologise and instead realise that 'XY is the only person who can save us all!'"
The humour being that the media will turn on a sixpence to hound XY again, should that be a better strategy to sell more papers or get more views. In short, that it is not based on reasoned examination of views but personal bias: we thought XY was good when they did something we liked, now we think they're dreadful because they've changed positions.
Scott is being too hard on himself. It should be possible to approve of a book written by a smart and/or good 51-year-old without being embarrassed by the author's subsequent intellectual or moral decline.
It's also a question of audience and medium. In writing Two Income Trap, Warren was writing for an audience of people interested in reading quasi-scholarly books about socioeconomic issues, and the book form both allowed more sophisticated arguments and required more care for arguments to survive the sustained attention of the reader across 255 pages.
Now, she's a Senator in a safely blue state, and her audience is the marginal Democratic presidential primary voter or the marginal progressive activist donor, and her usual media are tweets, sound bites, and Facebook image+quote memes built around the former.
Without defending Warren too much since I had a terrible experience with her and her staff during the campaign as far as competence: It isn't that inflation is *just* corporations being greedy. It is that a significant percentage of companies are raising prices well above what inflation should account for.
Isn't prices rising more (in some industries, less in others) than inflation should account for whatever happens when one thing becomes relatively more or less expensive compared to another? Given that inflation is the average rate at which prices are rising and that something being below average implies something else being above.
If the only reason they didn't raise prices as much earlier is that they didn't have the opportunity to do so, then they were just as greedy before, and haven't become greedier. Then the cause of inflation is whatever factor has given them the opportunity that they didn't have before, rather than greed.
There are indirect contributions, too. The US trucking industry's dire state (which contributes to supply chain effects on inflation) is largely due to the exercise of corporate greed in the wake of deregulation.
Ditto on this. I personally dislike Elizabeth Warren, but a brief perusal of the most recent headlines shows that, beyond some horn-locking with Elon Musk over taxes, she hasn't done anything particularly outrageous as of late- at least, that I could find.
I mean in 2020 she ran an unbelievably dumb presidential campaign. When Bernie dropped the ball she had a good chance to be the main Biden competitor and she did a bunch of stupid BS instead.
Does anyone know of an ethnographic study of how street gangs work? I want to understand things like how many people are involved in retail drug sales, how do the adult members interact with the juveniles, what's the level of involvement of different members, do people have specialized jobs?
US: 'An economic analysis of a drug-selling gang's finances' (https://www.jstor.org/stable/2586895). There's a summary of this research in the book 'Freakonomics'.
Less relevant, but interesting:
El Salvador: Review of several books (https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/05/13/ms-13-el-salvador-lost-everything-beast/).
US: 'Gang Membership and Adherence to the “Code of the Street”' (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07418825.2012.684432). For context, maybe read this article, which isn't specifically about gangs (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/05/the-code-of-the-streets/306601/).
Thanks!
Does anyone understand how continuous kilns used for brickmaking work? I just discovered them, but the webpages devoted to them are too confusing.
This is the best source I've found so far: https://civilengineering-softstudies.com/40-drying-burning-of-bricks-continuous-intermittent-bulls-trench-kiln-hoffmans-kiln.html
I administer a rapid covid testing program at my workplace. Several dozen people, relatively close quarters, lots of exposure to the general public. Currently we have everyone doing nasal swab rapid tests every day at home before work, but there are some new preprints suggesting (with uneven quality, as befits anything based on *data* from the last couple of weeks!) that saliva samples are more sensitive, at least early on. The study design here for example https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.22.21268246v1.full.pdf is small n and not exactly comparable to typical nasal or oral rapid test sample collection, but does anyone have an opinion on this? I'm not sure how far to update. I know there were earlier papers or at least preprints about saliva, and SalivaDirect is a thing, but I don't know to apply that in the rapid-testing-for-omicron contest.
I don't know the current state of the debate, but I am pretty certain that the place of highest viral load differs strongly from person to person. So for some people the saliva sample works better than the nasal swab, and for others it's the other way round. This is one of the reasons why rapid tests are not 100% reliable: you might simply search in the wrong place. (PCR tests are so much more sensitive that you still find the virus even if you search in the wrong place.)
Comparing nasal vs. saliva tests still makes sense, but it is only a statistical question, i.e., how often does option A work better than B, and vice versa? My understanding was that nasal swab are usually more reliable than saliva, and that this is because viral load is usually higher in the deep parts of the nose. But saliva samples do work in principle; e.g., lollipop tests are used on a large scale in schools in some countries, and they work reasonably well. And test kits have very different qualities, so I would think that a good saliva test kit easily beats a bad nasal swab test kit.
But I didn't follow recent updates, so all this may be outdated. And for omicron, we have good reason to believe that those old heuristics don't work well anymore. Omicron seems to be more adapted to upper respiratory tissue than older variants, which would favor saliva tests.
Either way, I would not focus on the question nasal vs. saliva, but rather on using a test kit that got good test results from independent agencies. (NOT the percentage that sellers advertise with - those are basically made up.) For example, here is an extensive list from the German Paul-Ehrlich-Institut:
https://www.pei.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/newsroom/dossiers/evaluierung-sensitivitaet-sars-cov-2-antigentests.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=69
Note that this list only contains tests that *passed* the minimum requirements, so if you don't want to work through the numbers, you might consider all tests from that list as "good".
Thanks for your kind words! I am glad that I could help!
I'm reading The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle, but I have a hard time trusting it based on the wild social science studies it cites. E.g:
# Kindergartners are better at a spaghetti tower building challenge than college students.
# "Belonging cues" (like eye contact and communication patterns) are better predictors of group performance than any other factor (including IQ of group members).
# Subjects work 50% longer on a solitary puzzle if they, early in the experiment, are given a note with not-actually-helpful information from a fictional previous subject.
# If you ask a stranger "I'm so sorry about the rain. Can I borrow your phone?", you are 422% more likely to get a yes than if you just ask "Can I borrow your phone?"
# Patients admitted after suicide attempts are 50% less likely to be readmitted if they get postcards with well-wishes from the hospital.
This is just the first 25 pages. My bullshit sensor is going crazy: all of this can't all replicate, right? Is this book worth reading?
You're probably right to suspect that some of these won't replicate, but they seem individually plausible to me. (Except for the phone one for the reason existential-vertigo points out.)
I'm pretty sure this phone experiment is a redo of a much more popular Xerox experiment: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brain-wise/201310/the-power-the-word-because-get-people-do-stuff
PS. I think it's important to note: Coyle says one asks for a phone during the rain on a train station. Not exactly a safe space to lend a phone.
What does "422% more likely" even mean here? Do people really get a <20% hit rate on "can I borrow your phone?"?!
I very much doubt that Kindergarners are better at any task than college students, unless the task is "run around in circles the longest." And even then, probably not.
I was reading Zvi's summary of his Omicron model, and I found that his recommendations contradict a lot of what Scott has posted on ACX:
1. He recommends that we take Vitamin D as a preventative measure against Covid. Scott of course said that he doesn't believe in this recommendation
2. He thinks taking Merck's pill is mostly bad as it will help the virus mutate more, and that it shouldn't have been approved by the CDC. Scott of course has been haranguing the CDC to approve drugs faster, etc. Of course the argument can be made that in the cost-benefit analysis, consumption of Merck's pill is the rational thing to do or something. I haven't done such a cost-benefit analysis myself. But the overall impression that I got on reading Scott's writing was that the CDC should speed up approvals.
Seeing as Scott is an influential writer who is now *clearly* influencing public policy, I wonder if he'd like to address these points. In case he's wrong about his recommendations, it might result in hundreds and thousands of preventable deaths. Of course every attempt at understanding and prediction carries with it some chance of being wrong. However, addressing views that run counter to one's own is what any good Rationalist should do anyway.
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/omicron-my-current-model
Zvi agrees with Scott that the CDC (and FDA) should in general approve drugs faster; Zvi just thinks the Merck pill in particular shouldn't have been approved.
Scott has said that Vitamin D probably doesn't work, meaning the chances are less than 50%.
But he's also said it's cheap and has low side-effects so even if it's only like 25% likely to help, you should probably do it.
If a rapid covid antigen test shows positive results in under 1 minute is this indicative of a higher viral load than a test that takes 15 minutes to show a positive?
I just saw the Matrix Resurrections and thought it was awful. Probably the worst of the franchise.
It got me thinking: Is there any way the second and third movies (Reloaded and Revolutions) could have been fixed so that they were at least 90% as good as the first movie? If yes, then what specific things should have been different?
Resurrections was a reboot that couldn't reboot -- they included a new Neo (Bugs), a new Trinity (Lexy) and their team (including a reskinned Morpheus), plus a new villain (the Analyst) and a reskinned Agent Smith. But they were relegated to second fiddle as the old Neo and Trinity were still around. The film was so consciously up-its-own-butt self-aware that I assume this was intended as a statement on something.
As for Reloaded and Revolutions... no, probably not.
The new heroes seemed like just someone whose role is to be slaughtered at a convenient moment, to show the viewer that the situation is getting serious, and to motivate (the old) Neo to assume his final form and avenge them.
This did not happen (which was nice, because unexpected), but it prevented me from paying much attention to the new heroes.
I liked the plots of the second and third movies and a lot of the moments and visuals, but they had pretty big problems with pacing. The core sin seemed to be attempting to top the first movie by setting up hideously expensive action sequences, then padding the scenes in question well beyond what was optimal for storytelling purposes in an effort to "get their money's worth" from the sets and props (for practical effects) or the 3D assets (for CGI effects). Biting the bullet and shortening things like the freeway chase scene, the Burly Brawl, and the Zion rave would improve the sequels considerably.
It's George Lucas syndrome, where no one was willing to tell the directors "no."
The fight with Smith early in the second movie opened with Smith using his unbeatable superweapon [1] off the bat. And Neo resists it. And Neo is superman, so the rest of the fight scene is completely uninteresting from a plot perspective.
[1] taking over a host
I have an unpopular opinion: I liked the 2nd and 3rd movies. The action and special effects didn't age well, but they were good for early 2000s. They fleshed out more of the world, explained more how the machines set up the construct from the inside, really made some of the programs (like the oracle, keymaker, vampires, and ghost-dudes) be interesting side-characters and villains. The scene-by-scene action made sense (as long as you agreed that they had to make it to a landline to escape, most of the characters' actions made sense), which is more than you can say about a lot of action/thriller movies.
I think why people didn't like them has to do with expectations. The first movie was light action and heavy mindfuck, and the other two were light/non-mindfucks and just heavy action, and so there was a bit of genre-switching going on. So if you go into 2 and 3 waiting for your mind to be blown, that was just never going to happen.
I think if you wanted to make the 2nd or 3rd one better (and this actually applies to the 4th one too), they would have had to lean all the way into the simulation hypothesis: reveal that the "real world" is ALSO a simulation, and that they have no idea how many levels deep they are. This would also have explained why Neo seems to have some slightly magical powers in the real world. I think this would have been pretty hard to do, convincingly, but it's the only way they could have kept the magic of the first one alive.
Same opinion here, I liked the 2nd and 3rd movies a lot better than the first.
Another problem was that the "mindfuckery" of the second and third movies missed the mark because it was too hard to understand the theme of each film. The first movie's mindfuck was very simple and easy to understand: Reality is an illusion. The second was...something...about "causality," and the third was some schlock about "free will."
The 2nd and 3rd did have mindfucks, like Neo's ability to control the Matrix being a general superpower to control all machines. And people hated the additional mindfuck, because they feel it invalidated the first one. (I was fine with it, though.)
Well, no, because it didn't make sense. That's actually what I'm referring to by the "magical powers" Neo seemed to have. I think that only would have made sense if that layer were a simulation also.
Note that every single one of Neo's real-world powers involves machines - and not just machines in general, but The Machines who set up the Matrix and the One in the first place. His blind sight can't see Trinity or Bane or the Zionist ship, but it *can* see Smith (a program), as well as the power plant and Machine City.
The obvious explanation is that the One - who is, after all, a cyborg, like every other human born into the Matrix - is given some degree of access to the machines' IFF/C&C network, presumably in order to help rebuild and "defend" Zion while restarting it.
Hmm, this is a compelling argument, I'll have to rewatch some time.
We thought Neo's superpower was his ability to be awesome in the matrix. But his actual superpower is that he's a technopath, which manifested itself in the matrix as being awesome in it.
Exactly! Either he should have continued to only have powers in the simulation, or they should have revealed the real world is a simulation as well, but they didn't do either. And it would have been a good reveal: what do you do with the people who can't handle the simulation? Give them a new simulation, one where they're rebels who have figured it all out. It can also fix the fact that using human batteries makes no scientific sense: if the human battery story was just another lie then you can come up with a better reason that all of humanity is living in a simulation. Heck, you could even have it that the machine are in a simulation as well and don't know it and some unknown power has imprisoned them and humanity both, but that's getting a little silly.
But then again, that would have have muddled the original Gnostic theme of overcoming an imprisoning lie to find true reality. If the true reality is also an imprisoning lie, then you can't really escape: every time you think you've escaped you can't be sure you're not just in another lie. It turns the theme from a Gnostic one to a Nihilistic one.
That's one thing I really liked about the new movie, was that Neo could not be sure whether he was going crazy or was in a false reality. How could he be? It was a good look at how you can be paralyzed by the fact that you can't directly determine what is real and what isn't. The rest of the movie was pretty meh, but the Neo simulation sequence was pretty good.
(the main thing I think they could have done to fix the sequels was to make the architect scene better. As it is it's a bit confusing: I know on my first watch through I didn't really understand the implications of what he was saying.)
>It turns the theme from a Gnostic one to a Nihilistic one.
But that would actually be an interesting move, cinematically! The best sequels (imo) are the ones that completely change your perspective on the original works.
I agree about the new one, the gaslighting of Neo was the only good part of the movie.
The problem is that the first film is basically a self-contained story, Neo goes through an entire hero's journey.
The best bet would have been to properly set the series up as a trilogy in the first place, to stretch the premise of the first film out into at least two, with a conclusion that combines some of the events of the second two movies into one.
Re-watching the original movie, the pacing strikes me as extremely fast, we barely get to experience Neo living his blue-pilled existence before the red pill is dropped on us, so it feels like there was a lot of untapped potential to work with there. I could see a pretty interesting 60+ minutes spent developing Neo as a character and gradually getting hints that he's living in something called "The Matrix" until his first real encounters with Trinity/Morpheus/Agent Smith. But I imagine that slower burn might not resulted in as successful of a first movie, even if the trilogy was better for it.
I agree. They should have not made any "sequels," though additional movies set in the Matrix universe featuring different characters than there were in the first film could have been cool (the Animatrix did this is short film format).
Tipping inflation:
As a child, I was told that 15% was a standard tip, and 20% was for exceptional service. Lately, I've seen these amounts creeping upward, with 15% often being the minimum selectable option for online ordering. This would make sense if food prices are increasing more slowly than general inflation, but do we have any data suggesting this is the case? If not, what's going on?
I’ve done 20% ish for a long time (15% seems fine too). What does annoy me is:
1) an inflated tipping expectation for takeout (why would I pay the same for “throw the food in a box” that I do for table service or home delivery?)
2) delivery apps calculating the 20% on the bill AFTER adding their stupid fees. No, I tip on the food bill, not the extra $10 GrubHub tacks on.
I think food has gotten cheaper relative to the "average" good. But my intuition is that *restaraunts* have gotten more expensive (after adjusting for inflation of course). Hmm...
20% as the standard tip is becoming common because of changes in beliefs about the morality of tipping based industries for workers who aren't in the top 5% of service workers or so.
Mr Pink doesn’t believe in tipping.
https://www.google.com/search?q=reservoir+dogs+tipping&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:bbfedda0,vid:4fbwwlHPtRM,st:0
I remember 10% being the standard so either I'm old or I was in a different sub-culture, but yeah now 15% is the bare minimum.
On ranked-choice vs approval voting: I buy the argument that there are more ways to "spoil" a RCV election than an approval election, and you can be more "strategic" with RCV (lying about preferences to get your preferred candidate elected). But it doesn't change the fact that if I think the thing you're being asked to do with approval voting is nonsensical. "Mark yes for all candidates you approve of and no for the rest." Approve of compared to what? I would rather vote for any candidate on the presidential ballot last year than vote for a dog to be president, should I check all the boxes? But there's one I would like more than the others, maybe I should only check that one? It's just not clear what you're even "supposed" to do! It seems that approval voting discourages strategic voting in the technical sense (lying about your preferences) in large part by shifting your strategy to where you draw the line of vote/no vote. As far as I can see there's no honest, non-strategic way to answer that question. I personally wouldn't know what to do if presented with an approval-voting ballot.
Versus with RCV (and even FPTP) there's a pretty clear interpretation of what you're "supposed" to do: write down your candidates in the order you'd prefer seeing them elected (or mark your favorite for FPTP). You don't force people to strategically decide a cutoff, which again I think is an underspecified task. Having clear instructions for non-strategic voters is a dealbreaker for any voting system in my view.
If given an approval ballot, just mark "Yes" on any candidates that would make you happy if they were elected. And mark "No" for all the candidates that would make you sad if they were elected.
This is provably non-optimal; if your cutoff for approval is not between the candidates with serious chances of victory then your voting power is nullified.
(All voting systems except random ballot have some sort of tactical voting, but approval's tactical voting problem is one of the more obvious. IRV has scenarios in which voting tactically is indicated, but they're quite narrow and voters don't generally have enough information to notice they're in such a situation.)
In general, people have no trouble responding to approval questions, see for example all of the approval polls: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/
And in the jurisdictions that have adopted it, the elections seem to have turned out fine. Voters were able to decide who they approved of, and the outcomes seemed in line with voter preferences.
AV is not some mysterious hypothetical system that has hidden doomsday scenarios we need to theorize about... it has been implemented with no issues in some moderately large cities.
I don’t disagree with your analysis, but just in case you are presented with an approval ballot, this is the “strategic” vote that makes the most sense to me:
Guess who the two most likely candidates to win are. If this is a local election, good luck, but if it’s a national election you should be able to consult polling data.
Then, vote for the better of those two candidates, as well as any candidates you think are better than that candidate.
This strategy is optimal in many cases, but it’s also a good strategy for society to coordinate around, because if everyone does this, we elect the cordorcet winner when one exists.
Several years ago I was working on a fantasy world strategy/simulation that while it didn't simplify the military aspects brough the focus and attention and mechanical complexity of the other parts of the simulation up to parity. I sometimes refer to the type of game I am trying to make as a DIP game. Diplomacy|Intrigue|Politics. This is because that is what differentiates it from existing games. Whether we are talking about Paradox, Matrix, Slitherine, or purely independent games of a similar type. 4X, Grand Strategy, Political Sim(think Democracy 2-4).
As of earlier this month I am back to working on it after doing various things as well as just slacking off during the pandemic. I expect to have either release or EA on Steam/GoG/Epic/Other around early December next year.
My secondary focus is on a sort of verisimilitude where you feel much more like a politician or potentate that engages in politics rather than a god king or a hive mind. The game has both characters with more detail than CK2-3 and populations with more detail tha Vicky/Imperator. Both of these entities have an Ideology that indicates how they think the world should be organized. They also have Opinions, a numerical variable, based on various modifiers, about each other character and population they are aware of.
This, should, feel much more like a real leader trying to get things done. Opinion functions like political capital to be expended in order to do things you want to do. Start an unpopular war and get war exhaustion and ideology penalties and expend resources you could have expended for other purposes. Start a popular war and gain Opinion boosts from Ideology and if your populace hates the people you are fighting or likes that you are freeing people they like from tyranny.
Maybe you want to integrate a major minority population group from conquered lands. You can allow them to serve in government jobs/bureaucracy for a boost. But you may upset others who previously had access to that privilege. Pass various edicts/laws to give them rights, similar to Imperator but more detailed and with more options. Yes Imperator is, at least until Vicky 3 comes out, the most interesting as far as population based gameplay among Paradox games. While there isn't an overarching yes/no on immigration or w/e many policies affect parts of what we call immigration in modern societies. This game is a fantasy game so it isn't quite based on the same conflicts.
You also have to manage important/powerful characters. Flattery, bribes, titles, intimidation. I made a large effort to expand from what 4X and Grand Strategy games do with Intrigue. The Conspiracy system allows you to build up human and material capital to pursue anything from a small plot to murder another character to an "Ancient Conspiracy". A decades to millennia long secret organization to topple or usurp and empire. Essentially the Conspiracy panel/menu allows you to connect what in other games would be totally discrete actions that build up to a single greater purpose.
Many of you might be familiar with the Plot and Secrets menus from Ck2-3. But here you can do far more. You can promise land or titles or money or resources. Trade favors like military assistance, share intel from your personal "Intelligence Network", and do other stuff. The regular Diplomacy menu allows you to promise things as part of treaties but that is a little simpler and treaties are generally public. A given Conspiracy generates a Secret(you can find the 2014-2015 Axioms Of Dominion wiki which describes secrets and ideologies and all these other mechanics here: https://axioms-of-dominion.fandom.com/wiki/Axioms_Of_Dominion_Wiki) for each action of the Conspiracy and connects them in a unique way. That is the penalty for the superior organizational power of Conspiracies. Members of Conspiracies can induct others, in part or in whole, as part of their efforts to complete their parts of the overall project.
Axioms is primarily a fun video game where you can actually, compared to false claims of games in the past, feel like a character in GoT or some other media based on politics. I'm really trying to give an experience that even a modern day politician can relate to. "Why don't they just do [thing the person speaking wants]!" Because they have a complex consituency with competing and sometimes contradictory desires.
Consider the Biden BBB Bill. You have to add something to appease one Senator but it pisses off another Senator. Can you weaken the provision or add some pork to please both? Putting in a lot of long-time goals of disparate groups can gain support until you run into your very own Joe Manchin. Axioms should provide a ton of situations similar to that. Although discrete actions such as Flattering or Reasoning or even casting a literal magic mind fudgery spell will obviously not be comparable to how that works in real life. But at a higher level I think it should feel pretty close. The internal politics simulation isn't quite complex enough to have legislation and legislatures and such, at least in most cases. There's no "voting" system per se. But something like Greek democracy is pretty close to possible. And Treaties and to some degree Conspiracies function similar to how real life domestic legislation functions at a high level.
Additionally a polity can adopt a standardized "Charter" to create a governing system similar to the HRE. You can create individualized vassal contracts, I think maybe CK3 added this?, but vassals will be aware of who has a better deal, although they may also know why. Both characters and populations will have an increased opinion of "governments" that are less centralized. Triumvirates vs Dictatorships vs Councils/Parliaments, etc. There's a somewhat fixed opinion bonus, modified by ideology, as you dilute power. Of course the cost is getting all the relevant deciders on board for major group actions.
I've sketched out a way for the AI to use these mechanics, perhaps not quite to the level a player could thought process wise, such that the AI could organically form an HRE-esque superstate. A lot of this relies on the scale. I'm trying to get performance to the point that a 40000 province map can work on decently recent modern PC setups. Most people might have to make do with ~4000-8000 and perhaps a little less variety in AI political organization. I personally expect that I might need to upgrade to 32gigs of RAM to get bigger maps working.
I'm curious if a lot of ACX people play more complicated strategy games, vs Civ/Endless/GalCiv stuff.
This sounds very interesting to me, though these days I seldom have time to learn new complex strategy games -- I got into CK3 but only because it's similar enough to CK2 which I've played off and on since launch.
In this vein, one interesting and somewhat forgotten game that I grew up playing is the old Koei title, Genghis Khan 2. These days it has basically been superseded by the CK games (which are a far more complex simulation) but I do think it had some unique mechanics for depicting the fact that "no man rules alone" and for trying to make large empires increasingly unmanageable (something CK tries to do but doesn't really succeed at, and EU4 doesn't really even attempt).
I know there are some mods for CK2 that try to get this balance better, though I haven't tried them.
If you haven't read it, I'd also suggest taking a look at "The Dictator's Handbook", which is a very fun and fast read about these sorts of power dynamics.
I'm pretty strongly considering some kind of AP system ala GK2 and Star Dynasties. I'd have liked to do some sort of timer system but it is hard to code and people are motivated to cheat to get around it.
I'm planning to write a couple more posts on substack about unique stuff in Axioms but the trouble is that because the systems are so interconnected, which is great for gameplay, it is hard to really detail much about a given system in isolation. If you read the only post currently up, about my version of "Unrest" you'll see what I mean.
CK2 isn't really saveable, for my purposes, by mods. You'd just be overloading events and decisions so much. Tons of mods are already at that point. Same for EU4 really. M&T Pop Overhaul did about as much as you can do with EU4 and it is pretty clunky.
Well I've subscribed to your Substack. This all makes sense to me, I'll be curious what you come up with.
It sounds like you're making a product that will be a niche within a niche, but that's fine. Part of the promise of CK2, and what kept me coming back to it, is that it feels like a game where my empire can collapse and I can be reduced to a single county somewhere and yet the game isn't over and in fact has just gotten *more* interesting. So I'd love to see more games that play this way.
But I get the sense most players aren't like me, they love blobbing and get upset when they aren't blobbing. And the truth is I don't mind blobbing to some degree, but when I look back at all of my great games of CK2, the ones with really interesting stories, they all featured some sort of massive imperial collapse.
I should dig up some old blog posts about the Cinnamon Wars or the dragon worshipping place with stolen draconic attributes. Or one of the HRE-esque examples if you like imperial collapse.
Since your the only sub might as well pander and do a post on Charters and Ancient Conspiracies as it applies to big polities.
Especially seeing as my GUI library is shitting itself after a version upgrades. Turns out 5 years gives a lot of time for problems to build up.
Last night I listened to the Joe Rogan podcast with Dr. Peter McCullough.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/0aZte37vtFTkYT7b0b04Qz
There are *a lot* of claims in this podcast about the vaccines, the FDA, the relative harm of the variants, the comparative safety of mRNA vaccines compared to traditional vaccines, the suspected number of deaths in response to vaccination, etc.
Is there any detailed analysis and refutation or support of these claims from anyone in the rationalist community? I don't see anything (besides some allusions in 2 or 3 comments) on here, and nothing on Zvi's site.
There was a recent episode of the generally sane Zubin Damania's podcast that broke most of McCullough's points down in detail. He is broadly sympathetic to heterodox ideas but very critical of these arguments in particular.
Zvi seems to be getting annoyed with the entire Bret Weinstein orbit and just ignoring them for understandable reasons.
Can you help me understand these "understandable" reasons? I believe you have them, but the content-free dunk on McCullough with no substantiation that GBergeron's pulling isn't helpful to anyone who's trying to do any sense-making of this situation as a layperson.
Looks like this might be the podcast you're recommending?
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-joe-rogan-dr-peter-mccullough-interview-explained/id1218431966?i=1000545319182
I'll give it a listen. Thanks!
That's right. Always awkward finding and copying links on mobile. Broadly, the loosely affiliated set I'm referring to have collectively been a quite predictable Gish gallop of reflexive meta-contrarianism, basically amounting to just inverting whatever the mainstream narrative happens to be, with a variety of incidental justifications. This rarely contributes new or interesting information. I'm generally all for amplifying weird long-tail ideas, just in this case the signal-to-noise ratio has been trash.
Can you help me understand:
* who is the loosely affiliated set?
* are you narrowly looking at COVID related arguments with this set, or literally everything these people say?
Part of why I ask is I really enjoyed Bret and his wife Heather’s recent book. There are a couple of points they make in it that go a bit extreme for me but on the whole, the case they make for looking at life through an evolutionary biology lens and the insights it brings is a really solid and compelling one.
Your reply here, completely respectfully, is hard to read as to whether it’s just a smear/sneer job that says “don’t bother with those people” or whether there are specifics here (people, claims, videos) that don’t hold up and are common enough to cast doubt on their general credibility.
Specifically Covid. I think Bret and Heather are otherwise at least interesting, if sometimes interestingly wrong, and the pandemic has somehow broken their brains. Their new book looks great. Hopefully they're back to normal a year from now. They were of course prone to uncritical metacontrarianism before, but it was much more likely to produce something worth thinking about pre-pandemic (and even early on in 2020 -- they were pretty open-minded before the vaccine epoch).
I'm not very invested in this argument here, but if you look at the last year or so of pandemic-related podcast guests (Geert Vanden Bossche, Robert Malone, Pierre Kory, Peter McCullough, Tess Lawrie...) there's a common thread of having had interesting and potentially really helpful contrarian ideas that haven't panned out in the face of accumulating evidence, and then just digging in hard and repeating themselves. It's good that someone was worrying about potential long-tail vaccine risks and standing up for long-shot therapeutics with some promising early evidence (and fluvoxamine, at least, seems to have worked out!), but those need to be held loosely and subject to Bayesian updating as new evidence appears, and that just doesn't seem to be happening.
Scott and Zvi, for example, have done a much better job of updating and even completely changing their minds as new information appears.
EDIT: I had meant to explain that what's been particularly frustrating about 2021!Bret Weinstein is that he doesn't apply the same healthy skepticism to contrarian pandemic folks as he does to everything else. There's a strong element of https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/ that gets old quickly.
Thank you for the thorough reply!
I don’t follow their podcast so thank you for mentioning that that’s where the questionable science is going down.
If I had to make my own guess - I wonder if it’s the “trust us, we’re the science” attitude that they’re reacting to, lining up with a point they stress multiple times in their book: that hubris in the face of hypernovelty is dangerous. I believe that, under the crank theories, the real concerns boil down to “why aren’t we being more deliberate in the approach here” combined with something approaching Scott’s Pascalian medicine argument and “sticking with medications that we understand the safety profile of.” A lot of the panic seems to stem from what could result from spreading the spike protein excessively through our bodies, and not inherently being anti-vaccines, just anti-the-particular-mechanism-and-potential-dangers-of-this-vaccine.
It's a shame that heterodox thinkers have a strong tendency to become insane.
That is a thing that happens. It seems like the experience of being right *once* about something where the mainstream was wrong creates a lifetime reflexive second-option bias in some folks, without any further connection to facts, evidence, logic, etc. etc. The worthwhile thinkers are just *incidentally* heterodox without making it their entire schtick.
I agree that the experience of being right (and being famous for being right) can make one overconfident (and wanting to experience the high again). Not sure about the mainsteam/heterodox distinction, though.
It seems like some people go "mainstream -> heterodox -> crackpot", but some other people go directly "mainstream -> crackpot". Could it be that the latter option is actually the natural progression, and the former is an exception when the first overconfident non-mainstream idea accidentally happens to be correct?
See also: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-03-21
It's one big reason I'd like a larger heterodox community, so that they can help each other understand that being lucky once doesn't they're lucky forever.
Or, even better, if our discourse were diverse enough that we didn't need to create a group called "heterodox" because that's what everyone is.
i’m a taco. Last night I listened to the Joe Rogan podcast with Dr. Peter McCullough.
Sounds about right.
Do you have literally anything more to offer to a fruitful discussion?
Any fruitful discussion ended with "Dr. Peter McCullough."
I'm not so sure. Sure looks to me like he, and me, are trying to start a conversation, and you're not.
I think a better question is what are the most significant 1 or 2 claims that he is most confident in, and can these be refuted? A detailed analysis/refutation of *all* the claims sounds like succumbing to a Gish Gallop.
If these 1 or 2 stand up, then perhaps a deeper dive is warranted. Maybe it turns out he is right about everything, I don't know, haven't listened to the podcast; but this in general is how I would go about it.
The two that stick out the most for me, personally, were:
* The claim that the incidence rate for vaccine safety prior to COVID, as measured in deaths attributable directly to vaccination, was something like 180 deaths over 270 million vaccinations. And that the count currently w/r/t the COVID vaccines (or perhaps specifically the mRNA vaccines) is something close to 10x-50x higher than that, based, lowest-case, on VAERS data (and then depending on whatever level of VAERS underreporting you suspect to reach the higher tier)
* The claim that no medical school or other medical... consortium? (like the AMA) has produced, to date, a recommended protocol for treatment of COVID prior to hospitalization, extending out to a general claim or theme of his argument that all the medical establishment's eggs seem to be in the vaccination basket, more or less, and that any of the evidence for (insert your favorite non-vaccine treatment type here) or any protocol to use such in order to prevent hospitalizations, reduce spread, flatten curves, and save the world aren't being seriously considered or turned into meaningful action plans that can be given to equip doctors with more tools.
The latter one seems particularly salient to Scott given the recent posts re: fluvoxamine and Pascalian medicine.
(Edited to add: no idea which particular claims Dr. McCullough himself is most confident in. Might not be those two.)
> The claim that no medical school or other medical... consortium? (like the AMA) has produced, to date, a recommended protocol for treatment of COVID prior to hospitalization,
Hell, jstr has posted one here on ACX:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC7833340/figure/fig1/
That's from the NIH. It's almost a year old, so there are probably better things since then, but "no one has published anything like this" fails.
Thank you! Do you have anything in regards to the other claim about vaccine safety / comparative # of deaths from COVID vaccinations versus prior types of vaccinations?
Can you help me understand why this protocol, being from the NIH, is not “mainstream?”
I finally watched the Black Panther 2018 movie. (Spoilers follow.)
As a superhero action movie, I have no objection. It's fun, and it makes about as much sense as any other superhero movie, which is perfectly okay.
As a political message that doesn't even try to be subtle... when the important characters talked about difficult life of their "brothers" in USA, it was quite hypocritical from the *in-universe* perspective, in my opinion.
Hypocritical, as in: nowhere in the movie they show any concern about the well-being of their "brothers" *in Africa*; some of which are living right next to them. They probably see the poor people right out of their windows in the skyscrapers made invisible by superior technology. They keep observing them for decades or maybe centuries (not sure how long is the history of the fictional Wakanda), and they are quite okay with the quality-of-life difference.
It's only learning about mistreatment of black people *in USA* that causes the political upheaval that is the plot of the story. Which is also kinda weird, because - depending on how long Wakanda exists - why weren't they more concerned about, you know, *slavery* in USA, in the past. (Did Wakanda perhaps participate in the slave trade, and thus gained the capital to build their empire? Because having magical unobtainium is nice, but if you aren't *selling* it, it does not really explain all the wealth and modern technology.) What exactly is so special about today?
Of course, the out-universe explanation is that the movie is made today (which makes today so special), and the target audience are Americans (which makes America so special, and the rest of the world so morally irrelevant). Of course.
But it is fun to imagine a Straussian reading of the movie, as containing *two* political messages: one quite blunt, the other subtle. The Straussian reading is that no matter how much people talk about the race, wealth actually matters much more. (Even the people saying "Black Lives Matter" are ultimately talking about *American* blacks. No one needs to say it explicitly; yet everyone clearly understands that the hashtag is not about de-worming Africa.) The fictional Wakanda is a rich country; it is natural that the inhabitants only care about what happens in other rich countries. It is embarrassing for the wealthy Wakandians living incognito in USA to be treated as second-class citizens. The poverty they see out of their skyscrapers is not relevant, because they are never forced to interact with it, unless they choose to.
Therefore, I also approve of Black Panther as a subversive movie. The hidden message is that rich people need to be treated with respect, regardless of their race. Wakanda may not exist in the real world, but there are many important and wealthy people outside of USA, and we all together must strive to make their visits in USA as pleasant as possible.
From my review of Black Panther, shortly after seeing it:
Black Panther does one thing well, pats itself on the back, then doubles down on Disney's Marvel's tradition of tediously status-quo gender, age, and class relations.
Spoilers, though this is mostly about the troubling implications of the movie's world-building:
In Wakanda, the position of absolute monarch* is decided by either direct inheritance or by the challenge of ritual melee and/or hand-to-hand combat. Furthermore, only the family members of the five tribal leaders are eligible to challenge for the monarchy.
Let's stop right there.
That's in the text of the movie. There is no disputing these are the conditions under which Wakanda operates. In fact, these conditions inform the major plot points of the movie.
Wakanda's system of government inherently privileges young, physically fit men of the ruling class who've had the luxury of dedicated and extensive combat training.
Anyone older than about 35, anyone who isn't in the outlier territory of peak human athletic fitness, virtually all women, everyone who doesn't have the resources to dedicate 10+ hours a day to combat training, and everyone outside of certain bloodlines is barred from the ability to achieve leadership.
Let's just pause and examine that absurdity. Imagine if German Chancellors, British and Japanese Prime Minsters, American Presidents, et al were *LITERALLY* elevated to lifetime absolute dictatorship via the MMA Octagon, one that operates without weight classes and only for certain powerful families.
Seriously consider that, for a moment.
Yeah. Wakanda's system of government is *objectively* ageist, ableist, misogynist, and accessible only to the literal ruling classes.
Even worse, though, is that the movie doesn't attempt to dismantle Wakanda's obsolete and toxic system of government, nor even work within that system to egalitarian ends.
Instead, when Killmonger legally challenges for and is believed to have legally achieved absolute monarchy and then very legally orders his army to war, rather than having one of the female protagonists legally challenge for and achieve absolute monarchy under the provisions of the law, the surviving female members of Wakanda's ruling family LITERALLY RUN TO A DIFFERENT MAN TO LITERALLY BEG HIM, ***LITERALLY ON THEIR KNEES(!!!)*** TO CHALLENGE FOR THE RIGHT TO LITERALLY RULE OVER THEM.
Stop.
That's what happened.
This movie could have pulled the *epic* twist of casually discarding the 18th male protagonist in the Marvel's unbroken streak by letting T'Challa die and having one of the (infinitely more interesting) female leads step up to assume Queen-and-Black-Panthership, but it didn't.
"Yeah, but in the original comic book the character is a man and the fans..."
Shut the fuck up.
Be pissed. This movie is one step forward and three huge steps back.
* (Side bar: Is it even believable that any technologically advanced, educated, and professedly egalitarian human civilization would operate as an absolute monarchy? That's its own essay, but I would argue no. Proof: All of human history up until now, where the remaining absolute monarchies are Brunei and Oman.)
Wakanda isn't utopian, it's a pleasure for people who want to imagine Africans as not just successful, but *highly* successful.
It's in a comic book universe, so it's optimized for hand-to-hand combat.
> It's in a comic book universe, so it's optimized for hand-to-hand combat.
White comic book heroes do lots of hand-to-hand violence, too. Yet the society they live in (unless it is an obvious dystopia) is usually more civilized than "whoever is best at punching other people becomes the absolute dictator".
Wakanda seems like designed by (and for) people who try to appear woke, yet can't overcome even their most basic racial prejudices.
"Hey, imagine this utopia for black people, which is like super rich and super technologically advanced, but was hidden in Africa until recently..."
"Sounds interesting. Please tell me more about how the society works! Like, what is their political system? How do they make the important decisions on national scale?"
"Well, they are blacks, so... uhm... probably using physical violence..."
A large theme in many runs of Black Panther, the comic is that Wakanda's culture is backwards and barbarian and they need to "catch up" (aka become another neoliberal free-market-capitalist American-culture-dominated two-party democracy with some degree of corruption, because that's what the American audience sees as the natural state of Man with everything else being some weird and slightly malicious deviation) because of a vaguely-Whig-history argument of "times have changed".
I will counterpoint that Wakanda attained massive technological advancement and material prosperity (the latter is less obvious in the movie, but even though they've failed to annihilate poverty the poor of Wakanda benefit from a largesse from the ruling class that means they essentially live like upper-middle-class Americans in clay housing) under their system of tribal elder governance and ritual duels. There's no reason to believe that their prosperity and social order aren't intertwined, such that if they decided to become a "civilized nation" corporate raiders and incompetent/corrupt bureaucrats wouldn't immediately plunder their land for all it has and leave the people significantly worse off.
On the meta level: Black Panther was a character made by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby as part of a push in the '70's to appeal to the black audience for comic books by putting Black superheroes on the shelves. The two characters that came out of this were a noble king from a neo-tribal-futuristic society (combining Jack Kirby's love of blending ancient culture and futuristic technology with the pan-African movements happening at that time) and Luke Cage, Hero for Hire, a super-powered jive-talking bad mother with a good heart but flexible morals ripped straight from the reel of a blaxploitation film. You could argue that both of these characters are immensely offensive to the point where you'd want to disinter the corpses of Lee and Kirby to try them for hate crimes, but they were, and still are, popular among their target demographic and I don't feel like trying to lecture black people about how something they like is actually racist towards them.
Having WMDs under control of a fightocracy is insane and any current or previous king should have implemented controls on that.
Like, instead of the law being "the king gets to order the army to invade other countries," make the law that "the king may not send any vehicles out to conquer other countries."
And yet this apparently was never a problem until Killmonger couped- quite possibly because this is a Marvel comic, which are fantasy stories that run off of the inherent assumption that nations have moral character and the True King would never abuse his power. Fantasy, like all fiction except for extremely dry and bleak dramas about depressed writers living in the Bay Area, does not hold up to "rationality" (here meaning "the persistent insistence that fantastical stories must slavishly cleave to 21st-century Bay Area-culture conceptions of how the world works"). In the real world, basically every single superhero in the US would either be shackled to a federal bureaucracy and used as tools to enforce realpolitik interests instead of protecting the populace or be declared an enemy of the state with kill-on-sight orders. Not even Worm, which this community tends to uphold as the One Rational Superhero Story, actually does this.
I assumed the method of choosing rulers in Wakanda was based on older comics, but I don't really know.
I certainly saw an authorial intent to depict Wakanda as a utopia, and so did a lot of the audience:
"A Brief History of Wakanda, Black Panther’s Fictional Utopia" - https://www.vulture.com/2018/02/black-panthers-wakanda-explained.html
"Why Black Panther’s Wakanda Is the Black Utopia We’ve Been Waiting For"
https://www.yesmagazine.org/democracy/2018/02/07/why-black-panthers-wakanda-is-the-black-utopia-weve-been-waiting-for
"Black Panther’s Wakanda is a transportation utopia with a dash of reality"
https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/23/17044448/black-panther-wakanda-maglev-train-hyperloop-transportation
"The Wonder of Wakanda: How This Black Utopian Space Is a Game Changer for Artists and Audiences"
https://www.theroot.com/the-wonder-of-wakanda-how-this-black-utopian-space-is-1822938854
"Black Panther: A Modern Utopia, A Modern Critique"
https://blogs.bsu.edu/dlr/2018/11/04/black-panther-a-modern-utopia-a-modern-critique/
"'Black Panther' Displays a Utopia Seeking to Close the Polarization Gap"
https://www.themantle.com/arts-and-culture/black-panther-displays-utopia-seeking-close-polarization-gap
"Let Us Have Wakanda! The Black Utopia"
https://sistabrutha.com/black-panther-let-us-have-wakanda-the-black-utopia/
etc.
My point is that there are some real low expectations here about what an African utopia would look like: One where a powerful black woman - a literal queen - would sink to her knees to beg a man to challenge the legal succession of the absolute monarchy.
That people aren't outraged about that scene astonishes me to this day.
Thanks. When people haven't seen anything positive about themselves, they'll accept pretty mediocre stuff.
What amazes me is that Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog, which is a sympathetic account from the murderer's point of view of a young woman who's killed for the crime of being pretty in public.
I don't think I've seen *any* pushback from the woke side.
Huh? Dr. Horrible is certainly not a hero, but that’s a very misleading description of the plot.
*Spoilers* Penny is tragic and very much unintentional collateral damage in an attack targeted against Captain Hammer, and killing her pretty much removes Dr. horrible’s last bit of humanity.
From a Doylist perspective, the shrapnel "randomly" killed Penny rather than any of the dozens of other potential victims because Whedon needed to remove Dr. Horrible's last bit of humanity. Only Penny had that power. and she had that power because she looked pretty in a laundromat.
Since when is Wakanda "professedly egalitarian"? My question was whether the commoners were even aware of the battle at the end, or was it purely the nobles fighting each other?
Actually, you're right. The king's guard are all women, and while they're depicted as being capable and fierce warriors, none of them are eligible for leadership due to their bloodlines, even if they're better fighters than the men of the ruling families.
Nothing egalitarian about that whatsoever.
I'm not sure how much that 'logic' is part of the objective function for writing the script.
I thought a number of your questions were answered in the film? First, Wakanda is ancient. It’s basically Black Atlantis. So, yes, they did indeed sit by throughout slavery. This is explained as a deliberate policy of isolation on the logic that their technology was too powerful to be released into the world. Basically, the world might be going to shit, but it will be even worse if we try to play world police and add vibranium to the mix.
Now, perhaps this is flawed logic, but then, whether that logic is flawed is the central conflict of the movie. In any case, it doesn’t seem totally unreasonable that a powerful ruling dynasty could sustain isolation as a policy for a long time.
There seems to have always been a minority faction in favor of non-isolation, and that’s where Killmonger (and his father) come from.
As for “why care about brothers in America instead of the poverty you see from your front door”. Well, Killmonger’s concern for black brothers in the US and elsewhere seems to be a nationalistic case, as much as materialistic one. That is, he cares more about self determination for a pan-African race rather than ending poverty per se.
I don’t agree with this logic, but it’s not like “race based nationalism” is a position without real-world parallels.
The weird one is that after the main events of the film, we see T’Challa going out and engaging in seemingly materialistic support of the black diaspora, but NOT apparently attempting to engage in the nationalism of Killmonger. And that DOES raise the question “why not help the even poorer people just outside your stealth bubble first” although the film does not say explicitly that they aren’t also being helped. But it is an American movie for mostly American audiences.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD0bR7JXI6k&ab_channel=PolyMatterzzz
Gurgaon is a city in India. It doesn't have a municipal government, but it seems to be about as good or bad as the rest of India.
There's an interesting bit of stationary bandit theory-- bribery is less expensive because there's only one agency to bribe instead of several each collecting bribes for the same thing.
Okay, ACX people: Text-based mud for ACX and/or datasecretlox and/or ACX-adjacent people!
What would it be like?
Asking for a friend--go!!
I think you could just base it in the world of Unsong. That seems like the low hanging fruit here.
Oh dear. I see your point--it would be hilarious & fascinating. But I'm a little afraid of putting myself (and others) into a situation where they have to mentally navigate the Unsong AU constantly!!
Also, sadly, I fear it may make telepathy not seem OP! (just because on muds usually there's a mechanism for sending chats to someone not in the same "room," and we get used to that norm. But then, this doesn't have to folow THAT convention.)
Sorry do people still play MUDs seriously? Why not just have a text/icon browser game in the style of Warring Factions or something? If you aren't doing a Minecraft style server based game. Just seems like there's no reason to play MUDs specifically.
I think of people as having a lot of temporal reach these days. Old things might not be extremely popular, or not for long, but it's more likely that they'll have a small fan base keeping them going indefinitely.
This is why I'm annoyed with The Truman Show and Permutation City-- both have fans completely abandoning something that fascinated them.
Sure... maybe it's just nostalgia for many pleasant hours I spent on those over a decade ago.
But yes, some still do! A Wheel of Time mud I used to play seems to be reviving! (Unsurprisingly, perhaps!) They now have a discord, and I logged on and saw character-names I haven't seen in years.
Looked into "Warring Factions." (I don't "keep up on" lots of game stuff! Clearly.) It seems to me it fits a different niche? More like massively-multiplayer Civ, I would guess? (tho that could be a very rough approximation.)
I met my wife on what was basically a MUD, called a Talker. (Oh, there's a perfect wikipedia article about it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talker )
It might have lost out to Discords, which would be a shame, because you can really create a nice community.
Oh, very neat! t̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶a̶c̶t̶u̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶f̶i̶t̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶o̶r̶i̶g̶i̶n̶a̶l̶ ̶u̶s̶e̶-̶c̶a̶s̶e̶ ̶i̶ ̶h̶a̶d̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶m̶i̶n̶d̶!̶, ermmm... what I meant to say is, thank you for sharing this--I didn't know this specific thing existed / the name for it!!
(If i make one and get like at least 20-50 people, would you like me to invite you?)
It sounds fun but I probably don't have time for another thing. Sorry, but thank you!
WTF is text-based mud? (asking for a friend)
Perhaps "text based MMORPG" would be clearer to those too young to remember MUDs. (Whereas I tend to think of MMORPGs as large, commercialized, graphical MUDs.
> (Whereas I tend to think of MMORPGs as large, commercialized, graphical MUDs.)
:> reasonable.
Mud is a Multi-User-Dungeon. A roleplaying game with independent actors changing the conditions of the gameworld.
t.y. for answering!
I am trying to apply EA principle in other instances like solar panel installations. Does it make sense to install solar panels in your house at high north latitude or invest to install it in other places. Does anybody here have experience to model whether there is much difference in environmental impact considering location? I am assuming tropical countries may lead to more energy production per panel; how much pollution does it offset e.g. does it replace energy production from an natural oil power plant vs coal plant etc.
I did some undergrad research modeling solar installation costs and efficiencies around the world.
>Does anybody here have experience to model whether there is much difference in environmental impact considering location?
Power transmission (moving electricity from one place to another) requires expensive infrastructure and incurs losses per mile. People already live all over the place, and they have energy demands in all of those places. If the goal is lowering emissions, you need to replace a consumed kilowatt-hour generated from fossil fuels with a kilowatt-hour generated from clean energy. Due to the aforementioned transmission losses, no you can't put all the panels in Colombia and run wires all the way to Alaska, you'd lose all the power heating the mostly-aluminum transmission lines. Per-mile transmission losses are always going to be higher than the losses due to having a slightly worse solar azimuth angle, ideally you'd always colocate power generation.
This is offset by logistic issues. Like it might be cheaper to set up a large solar farm on some empty land 1 mile away than to install them directly on the roof of a factory or warehouse, just because it's literally easier to do construction work in an empty field than a rooftop. If we would wave a magic wand and put solar panels on the roof of every home, that would be excellent for efficiency and real estate costs (the real estate would basically be free) but in reality every house would be a custom job and the labor would get really expensive, it's a lot easier to copy/paste the same solar farm on an empty patch of land somewhere.
But if you're looking for the most cost-effective-in-dollars way to prevent a kilogram of CO2 from being emitted, it might make sense to focus on lower latitudes before higher latitudes, but again you have to take logistic costs into account. Panama is a lower latitude than California, so panels there will offset more kilowatt-hours of fossil fuel energy, but is it cheaper to get 10,000 solar panels in California or Panama? It's not a simple problem, you'd have to do the supply-chain research and math.
I am new to this community and I read a few older posts related to underweighting of sensatory input vs priors in depression and this gave me a thought. Reduction in neurotransmitters and lethargy/fatigue associated with depression might lead the brain to become more efficient in its working to conserve energy. I suspect processing sensory inputs may be more computational intensive (given how much of our brain is devoted to visual processing) This may be leading to higher weightage towards priors. My own experiences during depression episodes makes me suspect my brain just works slower and facing difficulty in learning new things. which has always made me skeptical of the depressed people are more creative theory.
Their might be a genetic component towards how much we value priors in our decision making. I noticed that there seem to be a lot of people who have suffered depression in this community than the proportion in general population. This might be people who are analytic and value prior naturally are drawn to the rationalist community.
A question for others who suffer from serious depression/panic attacks - I want to know if my below experience is a common strategy or this is totally weird? Whenever I hit my worst point and seem to collapse; I feel a rush of warm loving in my brain - like a mother loving and comforting me. I suspect this is a kind of fail safe mechanism triggering in my brain - oxytocin levels rising to reduce my stress levels.
"higher weightage towards priors" - I would expect that to lead to less creativity. "depressed people are more creative theory" - I would expect manic people to be more creative.
A recent preprint: SARS-CoV-2 infection and persistence throughout the human body and brain (https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1139035/v1)
The study authors performed 44 autopsies and found that covid RNA was present in many different tissues and in many anatomical locations, even in subjects who had mild or asymptomatic covid cases. They also found that covid was found long after infection- as far as 230 days post-infection in one case. The authors conclude that "Our data prove that SARS-CoV-2 causes systemic infection and can persist in the body for months."
It's unclear to me if this is a cause of long covid, since the authors note that they didn't see significant inflammation outside the respiratory system. I'm pretty ill-equipped to make sense of the article in general, since my degree is in a different sort of biology. I'd appreciate it if someone with a stronger understanding of immunology could take a look.
I would appreciate some knowledgeable input about this too. My main questions:
(1) Is this finding a one-off, or has other research found similar?
(2) If you find viral RNA fragments in a part of the body, does that mean that part was actually *infected* by the virus, or could the mRNA have ended up there via some other process (say some live virus arrived there, but could not enter the cells that make up that part so just "died" and left its "bones"? or, virus remained in the parts of the body that it had infected, broke down, and then RNA fragments of it got carried around to other parts of the body via circulation.
(3) How unusual is it for a virus to leave RNA fragments in many parts of the body after the infection ends? Is Covid unusual in this respect, or is this just what you find left behind in bodies after many kinds of viral infection?
(4) How ominous is the finding of Covid RNA in the brain, on a scale of "Ehh" to "Parkinson's here were come"?
I have the same questions. Commenting to follow in case anyone knows.
I recall a similar autopsy-based work from a ~ year ago that found spike protein in neural tissue, suggesting it can cross the blood brain barrier.
Is it possible for a state that implements Georgist land value tax policies to also implement tax farming without causing a complete fiasco?
What's the benefit of tax farming here? As I understand it, the main motivations for historical tax farming were:
1. Lack of state capacity to collect taxes directly, so contracting with a private third party with local knowledge and their own enforcement resources allowed collecting taxes more thoroughly.
2. Lack of sovereign credit via a banking system or bond market, so sale of rights to collect future tax revenue was one of the few ways available to finance a fiscal deficit.
Neither of these are much of a problem in a modern first-world context, especially for land taxes where there's a central registry of who owns what, usually maintained by the same agencies that administer land taxes.
Although I suppose if you squint hard enough, aspects of the current system of private landlords is an awful lot like Georgism plus tax farming. Especially in Britain, where very-long-term "ground rent" leases are a common form of land tenure.
This is for a fiction project. The government of the city in question does not permit private ownership of land and extracts a land value tax on leased land. I'm wondering if tax farming is practical in that situation - I want a character in that fiction to be a publican.
Are we still doing the even/odd thing about whether politics is allowed?
Yes.
This is the weekly visible open thread. Odd-numbered open threads will be no-politics, even-numbered threads will be politics-allowed. This one is even-numbered, so go wild—or post about whatever else you want.
Hey Scott! How do you conduct your research for articles? Do you usually start with primary sources and scientific articles, or by getting a feel for the consensus among well-respected experts? What helps you develop new insights or come at a known problem from a new direction?
Judging from the mess he made of his writings on Paxlovid and fluvoxamine, He does his "research" on twitter, random, equally uninformed blogs, and his housemate's writing on Vox.
*I
I'm hearing rumors and anecdotes that Omicron is evading rapid antigen tests due to being less prevalent in the upper respiratory tract, leading to tests that only swab the patient's nose being less effective. E.g.;
https://twitter.com/JennyRohn/status/1475410068019585027
I'm cautious about this because there was also a separate trend of claims that Omicron evaded rapid tests altogether, which turned out not to be true (people tried artificial samples with various titrations of Delta and Omicron against rapid tests, and they showed roughly equal response to each.) But here there's a reasonably plausible mechanism, given the repeated studies that Omicron preferentially replicates in the bronchi.
If anyone is still looking at this slightly stale open thread, I'd appreciate people's thoughts;
- Is this for real? Was this a thing people were saying pre-Omicron? Have any formal trials been done on whether Omicron is evading nasal swabs in particular?
- Would this also effect PCR tests, or should their enhanced sensitivity be enough to catch the virus in a nasal swab regardless?
- Afaik, almost all testing done at present is via nasal swabbing alone. Would this mean that we're undercounting Omicron cases? Significantly?
So, The Zvi, citing aforemetioned Michael Mina, attempted to integrate apparent findings if this kind into his model. Apparently his current line is that tests are not very effective on day 1 of infection, which was always the case, but difference is that people are now infectious on day 1, which with previous variants they were not. Seems plausible (section headed "Test Sensitivity") https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-204/comments#comment-4194542
Various rapid tests have, um, variable, reliability, regardless of omicron, so that is the source of your anecdotes. Also, we, where "we" means basically any relevant country perhaps except Denmark, are indeed significantly undercounting omicron cases, for other reasons.
There is no reason to think that omicron has lower levels of "detectability". I mean, there is an absolute shitload of detected omicron cases in Britain, Denmark, and (probably also) France, higher than in any previous wave. And a lot of hospital admissions in Britain with omicron are people who are in a hospital for other reasons and were detected as positive during their stay.
Here is The Zvi with the same conclusion: "All rapid and PCR tests detect Omicron. I include this because I know of people who aren’t confident on that and are freaking out a bit." https://thezvi.substack.com/p/omicron-my-current-model
I'm pretty sure you're wrong about this:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.18.21268018v1
abstract says this about their tests of 7 antigen tests comparing their sensitivity with Omicron to that with earlier variants: "Overall, we have found a tendency towards lower sensitivity for Omicron compared to pre-VOC SARS-CoV-2 and the other VOCs across tests."
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.22.21268246v1
abstract sats Omicron is not well-detected by nasal swabs. You have to use throat saliva to get a sample that allows the test to have good sensitivity
People write misleading abstracts and conclusions quite frequently. I would look at their data and draw your own conclusions.
Interesting. I guess I have to update my priors slightly, but only slightly, because "beware a man with one study".
You can probably update them more than slightly I'm pretty sure there are a number of lines of research and observation pointing to antigen tests being less good when used to detect Omicron. I've been seeing stuff here and there for a couple days, but just grabbed a couple things that where quick and easy to find.
I don't find Zvi as good a source of info about things like changes in the accuracy of texts with new variants. His sweet spot is the epidemiological stats, and predictions based on them. He's a numbers and patterns and odds genius (former Magic prodigy), but just a regular intelligent guy when it comes to Covid-adjacent matters and factoids related to them.
Dr. Michael Mina, who was one of the big promoters of frequent antigen tests as a means of managing the epidemic, had a thread on Twitter about Omicron and antigen tests a couple days ago. I could only read a little bit of it, because I opted out of Twitter 6 mos. ago so it only shows me snippets. But I *think* what he was saying was that Omicron ramps up so fast that the transition from non-contagious to contagious levels of the virus happens over a shorter period of time. So with a slower-moving variant, the odds that somebody testing negative on an antigen test will be positive 12 hrs later are just lower than they are with Omicron. If that's the situation, then it seems like the way to think about antigen testing is that it used to be that a negative antigen test meant that you were probably non-contagious for the rest of the day -- now it means you're probably non-contagious for the next few hours.
Somebody who knows for sure -- can you post the real deal?
Half remembered snippets of a twitter thread, a veracious source.
*I
What does "*I" mean?
He is accusing the other person of projecting.
Yep. It would mean current estimates of R and of severity are off, and on net it would be good news since it would at least put an upper bound on the possible magnitude of the disaster.
But I am not putting much stock into it until more evidence emerges.
A stray thought on Georgism that has suddenly appeared to me: why does not it imply that we should tax owning matter? As far as I understood, under georgism, an owner of an iron mine does not own the iron ore they have mined - the ore is owned by the whole population, and the money that the owner gets for selling the ore is not the price of the ore, but payment for the service for extracting it from the Earth, which is considerably lower. But consider the person who has bought the ore. Owning this ore is fair in the sense that they have payed for the labour of extracting it, but unfair in the sense that component of the ore which was not produced by labour - the actual existence of iron atoms - is still owned by the country population and should be taxed. And even after they process it into steel, and use it to build a skyscraper, there is still a component to those materials and things that do have not involved labour - the existence of the matter in the first place. So under those considerations, a skyscraper should actually be taxed heavier than a parking lot. And, well, owning a spoon should also be slightly taxed. Probably this could reduce consumerism or something, I don't know. (I am not actually sure this would be a good policy, just playing with the ideas and trying to look at georgism from different angles)
This is the era of sophisticated financialization and economics.
So what is the difference, really, between taxing something forever vs a larger up-front tax equivalent to the net present value of future receipts? (And if the government can't see this, Goldman Sachs will surely help out with a suitable swap contract.)
We shouldn't expect an ongoing matter-tax to be functionally different from a suitably set once-and-for-all resource extraction tax. The latter exists (in places). It is also going to be just vastly more efficient to manage.
If you expect something to change hands frequently, taxing it forever or up-front seems to be a huge difference, as taxes are always paid by the current owner. Otherwise, we can get to a point where it gives you negative money to mine iron ore, as taxes of of all future people using the iron are brought down on the owner of the mine, and when summed up become higher than the price the ore can be sold at.
Once it has been removed from the land it is no longer under Georgism. Putting it back in or on the land doesn't make it Georgist again.
Sure - what I am talking about is not Georgism, but my attempts of generalization of Georgism.
What I'm trying to say is that, in my opinion, it is not generalisable. For example: improvements to land are explicitly not taxed under Georgism; land is taxed, resources in that land that have never been worked by man are taxed, but once you work something it is no longer taxable merely for existing.
If you want to stick with philosophy I'd recommend considering the question of reclaimed land.
I still do not see the difference. If you improve the land, you are still taxed for its initial value, rather than exempted from the taxes you had for the unimproved land. So by analogy, if you are taxed for owning iron ore, improving it (for example by making it into steel) would not exempt you from the taxes on the iron atoms it consists on. The tax will stay the same, not disappear. I seems to agree with the spirit of Georgism, if not with the letter.
I don't follow. Under Georgism, whoever owns the land that the ore was mined from would pay tax on the value of the land (which includes the value of the unmined ore). Taxing the refined iron would be taxing the same thing twice.
And the value of the ore land would decrease as ore is removed from it, so the mine owner is not going to be forced to keep paying taxes on the mined iron either.
>why does not it imply that we should tax owning matter?
Are you thinking of a flat tax per kilogram, or a tax based on the value of the matter?
If it's the first, it seems weird that a garbage dump would be the most taxed entity.
If it's the second, won't that discourage people from turning matter into more valuable forms of matter?
I was thinking about a tax per kilogram of a chemical element, so that a kilogram of platinum would be taxed more than a kilogram of sand, which is silicon plus oxygen. And additional to that, a tax on potential energy stored in chemical bonds, so that a kilogram of oil would be taxed more than carbon dioxide.
I see two problems with this approach. First is that I am not sure how it behaves around nuclear plants, where we convert chemical elements into each other. The second is diamonds, as we have to tax graphite at the same rate as diamonds. And if we burn a diamond, does it mean we get extremely taxable carbon dioxide? So maybe it would make sense to simply tax an item at a fraction of cost of natural resources needed to produce an identical item in the cheapest way possible.
Anyway, there seem to be many possible approaches to that question, and answering it in earnest would take some economics research papers and experiments.
As for garbage dumps, we people usually do not demand only they can use their garbage, so do not claim any exclusive rights for it, so they do not own it and no taxes are applicable. (Forbidding disowning garbage and making them pay taxes for owning it would be a powerful way to stimulate recycling, as well as recycling research, but for it to work one would need to solve many problems like people sending garbage abroad or recycling it into something that does not legally classify as garbage and throwing away that. And totally forbidding to revoke ownership claim on things, only selling and buying them, seems like it would create a host of its own problems)
>As for garbage dumps, we people usually do not demand only they can use their garbage, so do not claim any exclusive rights for it, so they do not own it and no taxes are applicable.
Fair enough. On the other hand, though, allowing people to disown things creates new questions. For example, if a farmer wants to reduce their taxes, can they disown any property interest in everything but the top two feet of soil on their land? This means that anyone can dig for ore or oil below their farm, but the cost of extracting that ore might be so high that it's not practical for anyone to try.
Those problems seem inherent to the default Georgism. Should a person be able to disown (in order not to pay taxes for) a blank piece of land in the forest in the middle of nowhere they have no use for and which they inherited from their grandfather? Probably yes. But then, can a farmer disown a small square of land in the middle of their farm, without providing any conventional means of getting there, so that they do not pay taxes on that land, do not own it de jure, but own it de facto because no one can get to that small square of land without trespassing on the farmers territory?
Other nasty tricks: if you do buy iron ore, the first thing you do with it is to turn it into a more refined form, which means throwing away two third of the atoms. You're hugely increasing the value while throwing away half the mass into the atmosphere. Do you still have to pay tax on the value of those oxygen atoms you threw away?
As far as I understand, under Georgism you pay those heavy taxes for exclusive rights of ownership, as exclusive right of ownership denies other citizens their rights of using what you own. So i think that if you no longer demand that only you can use the oxygen you have released, you are not eligible for paying the taxes for that oxygen. But if you collect the oxygen in a bottle and demand no one else can use it without your permission, you are eligible for the tax.
I think it would have to be a flat tax per kilogram to be Georgist in spirit.
It turns out the average plot of land is really heavy. I think rock is something like 3 tons per cubic meter and water is 1, and soil is somewhere in between, and I would think that owning a plot of land involves owning all the rock and soil to somewhere more than a meter of depth (though maybe I'm wrong about that?). So probably, the amount of tax levied on one kilogram of matter would be so small that it just isn't worth administering.
(I think the garbage dump would be no more taxed than any hill.)
My guess is that the price of the ore that goes into building the skyscraper is going to turn out to be negligible compared to the price of the land that the skyscraper is on. Thus, leaving off this bit of the tax is not going to be very distortionary, and it's going to make it a lot easier to administer the tax.
I am not sure it would be negligible. It would be interesting to dig up the numbers.
Apparently the median acre in Arizona sells for $4,000 (https://azbigmedia.com/real-estate/arizona-no-1-for-most-affordable-land-in-u-s/). I'm not exactly sure what percentage of land value would be an appropriate land value tax, but let's say it's at most $400 per acre per year. One acre is about 4,000 square meters, so this tax is about $0.10 per square meter per year. Let's be very conservative and claim you only own one meter of the ground under your land. At 3 tons per square meter, that means that the tax on matter would be at most $0.03 per ton per year, and probably less, assuming that the value of land is not only the value of the matter, but also has some positive contribution of its location.
I believe a car is at most one or two tons, it looks like a house is about 200 tons (https://whatthingsweigh.com/how-much-does-a-house-weigh/), and most other objects that individuals own are much lighter (other than land). So on a flat, per-kg tax, it looks like most people would add less than about $7 a year in taxes, which is why I think this would be negligible.
(For corporations that own really heavy objects like freight trains or skyscrapers or container ships, my guess is that even these things will add up to negligible amounts of tax compared to the land value of their headquarters. Only if you own a *huge* amount of really low value per weight stuff like ore would this add up to much.)
Thanks for the numbers! Two thoughts about that:
First, as I have written above, I was not thinking about it in terms of flat taxes per kilogram, because taxing 1kg of dirt the same way as 1kg of diamonds seems unreasonable. So a skyscraper, with its steel for structural support, copper for wiring, would probably get high matter tax under this scheme, compared to the relatively low land it occupies.
Second, lots of people live in apartments in apartment blocks. Under your calculations, 100m^2 apartment would cost 10$ per year, plus something for surrounding city infrastructure, minus something for owning not the land with the sheer vertical dimension but only some cubic meters in the air. 10$ plus or minus something per year also seems like something negligible, but it does not invalidate Georgism, it just means that those people and not the main reason the Georgist taxes are introduced.
I agree that this is an interesting idea. I wonder if anyone has…
...and Robin Hanson has already written half a dozen articles on the idea
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2019/01/fine-grain-futarchy-zoning-via-harberger-taxes.html
I do not see the connection between what I have said and the article. The article is concerned with land rather than matter.
If you're going to tax spoons, then it sounds like you're going back to the window tax:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_tax
The Georgist position seems to be that nobody has a right to claim ownership of any particular piece of land, since they didn't create that land, and grabbing hold of a plot of virgin land and establishing a claim on it has no real force except that of custom. The land belongs to the people, so why should one rich person make a profit out of owning land?
Which as you say leads on to the fact that nobody can claim ownership of land, not even the people as a whole, since they did not create the land (perhaps there would be exceptions such as Dutch land reclamation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_reclamation_in_the_Netherlands)
So if we can tax land, we can tax the materials extracted from that land. And why not tax vegetables and crops and flowers grown on the land, livestock raised on that land, and so on up to taxing the spoons in your cutlery drawer? Every step along the way has not been creation of new items, it has merely been development of pre-existing matter and charging for the use of it.
"Dear citizens, we have introduce window tax, which is absolutely necessary to compensate for the opportunity costs of the silicon it consists of not being used to build computer chips"
> The Georgist position seems to be that nobody has a right to claim ownership of any particular piece of land, since they didn't create that land, and grabbing hold of a plot of virgin land and establishing a claim on it has no real force except that of custom. The land belongs to the people, so why should one rich person make a profit out of owning land?
What does the Georgist position have to say about international relations? Surely the sovereignty of nations over land is no less arbitrary (and usually a lot more arbitrary) than the ownership of individuals of land?
In principle I agree - for scarce resources like rare metals or oil (or more generally for common goods like polluting the atmosphere through the release of green house gases!) a tax might make sense at least theoretically and could be argued for analogously to a land tax.
One caveat though: Many natural resources are abundant for all practical purposes and mostly limited by our capacity to extract them. If I buy a wooden desk, the matter in the wood has been taken from the environment. But in practice, carbon is abundant enough, that it doesn't really matter. The wood itself comes from a tree that needs time to grow on ground somewhere - taxing the ground should be enough from a Georgist perspective as far as I understand. Even for iron, I would assume (but happy to be corrected) that the major limiting factor is not the availability of iron deposits, but the cost of mining/refining it.
Your intuition is correct to a certain extent here - no humans have 'created' iron ore, and to be sure a good chunk of the value of iron lies in the ore itself, and not just in the labour and capital put into processing it.
1) A lot of countries already recognise this, and apply additional royalty taxes to extractive industries. This is based on the twinned reasoning that these industries are often unduly profitable due to the amount of 'unearned' value intrinsic in the materials, the underground materials don't move so there's a certain tolerance to taxation, and also that given that these materials were found in the earth of the country, they in a sense belongs to all citizens of that country.
2) However, in most cases nowadays, actually getting those resources out of the earth and processed is still a heckuva lot of work, and if often beyond the capabilities of the host government or local landowners. If you do nothing to the ore, the ore is broadly worthless. However, if the owner of a decrepit plot of land in a city does nothing, it could still easily double in value if, say, a subway stop was built nearby.
This is a difference of degree rather than of kind to me - land is much more clearly and obvious valuable with fairly minimal work (as a proportion of the land value).
> If you do nothing to the ore, the ore is broadly worthless.
I have just googled the price of iron ore, as it changes with time, and seems its price can easily double or even quintiple without you doing anything to your iron ore at all. (The problem here is that the price can fall as easily, and does so equally often. After all, mathematical expectation of price change is about zero due to efficient market hypothesis). I'd also be surprised if land price does not also follow this stochastic pattern of rises and falls, so a chance of land plot doubling in value is offset by a chance of the value being halved. It's not that I am trying to argue against georgism here, it's that I am not (yet) convinced that positive expected value of land price change is a valid reason for accepting georgism.
I actually don't particularly think the land price *change* is a particularly important bit of Georgism, just that it's an efficient thing to tax.
And a bit of a quibble with your point above: The price you are looking at is for ore that has been mined and processed (the iron is generally only a small amount of total earth moved), i.e., that's already had quite a lot of the hard work done on it.
I recently wrote an article about what large language models like BERT are actually looking at when they process text. Tldr it's much stupider than you'd expect https://towardsdatascience.com/what-does-transformer-self-attention-actually-look-at-5318df114ac0
What’s your view on the purpose of using those two tokens as a “no-op”? Does it “end” their attention?
You plan on moving your blog to Substack by any chance?
Each attention head contributes to generating a new representation for the inputs within a given layer. Presumably each head is tuned to extract certain kinds of information from the input. If the information it's tuned to extract isn't present, then it would be helpful for it to be able to output a null signal.
This null signal would correspond to an output of all zeros. One simple way to generate such an output is to put all of the attentional weight on a particular token, and make that token's associated value vector have norm ≈0. And because we would like to be able to do this reliably for any input, it would be helpful for this particular token to be one that is always present. The [SEP] and [CLS] tokens fit this bill, and therefore this is the approach learned by architectures like BERT. (For more info see here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.10102)
As for whether it "ends" the attention: no. Based on the phrasing of the question my guess is your understanding of the inner-workings of these models is a bit hazy, and unfortunately to explain what's going on here you need to really understand what the attention mechanism does, and how it fits into the overall architecture. For a good explainer, I strongly recommend The Illustrated Transformer: https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-transformer/
The short answer is that within each layer of the network the input is re-encoded 8 different ways, one per attention head. These 8 different encodings are then glued together and passed through some other transformations to create the new input for the next layer. As long as least one of the 8 attention heads in that layer is emitting something other than the all-zero null signal, there will be some meaningful new encoding to pass on to the next layer. So nothing "ends".
As for moving my writing to Substack, I'm just getting started, and Medium is a good platform for attracting new readers. If I ever get a large enough following that I can rely on people to seek out my Substack on their own, then I would consider moving over.
Hi all! I’ve been doing some research on STI prevalence / transmission rates to inform my own policy on when to ask partners to get tested. I’m considering writing up my findings for anyone else interested. I imagine this’d be about 20 pages plus lots of citations (with a shorter summary to start). I’m not a doctor, but I’m pretty thorough. Three questions:
1) Would there be interest in reading this?
2) Are there any particular questions / topics you would most want addressed in such a document?
3) Does anyone know of existing good resources that do this? I’ve seen a couple shorter attempts at discussing STI risks numerically, but wasn’t impressed by their thoroughness. (For example, they didn’t mention the fact that HIV is more likely* to transmit in the first few weeks of having it, due to high viral load at the beginning of infection.)
*up to 26x according to https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3130067/
https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2015/04/30/std-statistics/
Thanks, this is excellent!
You saw https://markmanson.net/std-guide?
Yup, thanks! Not quite as thorough as I was hoping for, and uses some questionable logic like comparing lifetime car accident and per-year syphilis transmission likelihoods.
Looking forward to yours. Manson's is the one I've been referring people to. Make sure to post on the SlateStarCodex subreddit when it's done!
One big question that made me very wary of casual sex in my 20s was the prevalence/transmissibility of herpes, both genital and oral (from what I've read the biggest distinguishing factor between them is their level of stigmatization).
The numbers I've seen indicate something like 50% of the US adult population has one of these, and supposedly it's so virulent that it sheds even when there are no visible symptoms, yet somehow everyone I know claims not to have it? On the one hand I know that it often presents asymptomatically, but I know multiple people, including myself, who specifically requested HSV screens which came back negative.
I've had something like 15 partners over the years and assuming even a 10% transmission rate the chance of not having gotten it across all of those encounters is (1-0.5*0.1)^15 ~ 47%, i.e. more likely to have gotten it than not. How is it possible that everyone I know keeps miraculously winding up on the right side of this coin toss?
My understanding is that the biggest confound here is age. 50% of the US adult population having it does not imply that the probability of each of your partners having it was 50%. It's mostly old people. Since you can only treat it, the percentage of the population that has it can only increase with age. This is the same with HPV.
If you continue your promiscuity well into your 50s and 60s, I'd estimate your probability of getting it to be well over 50%.
You may be interested in my writing on HSV: https://denovo.substack.com/p/answering-your-burning-questions
Awesome, thank you!
What I've heard is that most STD tests don't even bother checking for HSV, because the viral load is usually low enough that it is undetectable.
Although interestingly, the CDC says that the reason they don't recommend testing for HSV is because there's "no evidence" that people who test positive change their behavior in any way.
https://www.cdc.gov/std/herpes/screening.htm
Yes that's true, that's why I said I've specifically requested it in the past, as has my partner.
The reason I heard why they don't normally test for it is because it's very hard to distinguish HSV-2 (strain most associated with genital herpes) from HSV-1 (strain most associated with oral herpes), and so many people are HSV-1 carriers that it would lead a lot of people to freak out for no reason.
However my read on the situation is different, namely that if the two strains are so similar to be nearly indistinguishable, then it's appropriate to be freaked out at the idea of catching *either* of them.
Thanks! Will be sure to address this in the writeup, but here's my understanding for now:
Oral/HSV1: I would guess this is just luck. I can name 3 good friends who have it, and there are probably more who I don't know about.
Genital/HSV2: only about 12% of people have this one, and your odds are better if you're male and/or white (source: https://www.cdc.gov/std/herpes/stdfact-herpes-detailed.htm). Probably the rates are even lower if you are in high-income social circles. The per-act transmission rate is between 0.1% and 3% depending on protection and male-to-female or female-to-male (source: https://www.healio.com/news/infectious-disease/20160102/risk-for-hsv2-transmission-using-condoms-associated-with-gender) but of course, you may have had multiple interactions with some of those partners.
tl;dr your odds of not having it are probably much better than 47% for HSV2.
Dan Savage & others have suggested that maybe we should all just relax about genital herpes. His point is that the stigma of having herpes is by far the worst thing about having the virus. According to him, outbreaks of actual sores in people infected with the virus do not occur very frequently, and after the initial outbreak later ones are much milder and do not cause a great deal of discomfort. Also, according to Savage, people not having a current outbreak are unlikely to pass the virus on to partners. I have not checked to see whether what he said about symptom severity and contagiousness over the life span is accurate. But if it is correct, maybe having genital herpes isn't such a big deal?
Yep, I would agree that the stigma is the worst part of genital herpes. Unfortunately, the stigma (and corresponding difficulty finding future sex partners) is a big deal for some, so we'd all need to agree as a society not to care - easier said than done.
Not to take away from your post, but it is possible (albeit rarer) to contract HSV-1 genitally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genital_herpes?wprov=sfla1
I want to thank everyone who responded to this question in an earlier open thread:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-165/comment/1610069
and especially Vermillion for a very detailed walkthrough. I only recently found out that apparently I was not getting email notifications about comment responses, and started checking my older questions for threads under them.
You're very welcome! Glad to hear it helped
Even if the first AGI's values and goals are aligned with humanity's, isn't it just a matter of time before someone somewhere else builds an AGI that is misaligned? It's like nuclear power plants. As hard as you try to build them to be safe, eventually there will be a meltdown somewhere.
If we really thought evil AI was coming and wanted to stop it, we could track computer chips and stop them from being concentrated in any place, and also control the manufacture of chips. Fabs are really hard to build and very easy to disrupt.
We already had this discussion 50 years ago with respect to nuclear weapons. "Sure, let's say the United States, United Kingdom, and France are responsible stewards, and the USSR and China are at least rational, but isn't it only a matter of time before a Rogue State™ gets its hands on one and then all hell breaks loose?"
Here we are 76 years after Trinity and it hasn't happened yet. Apparently the juxtaposition of sufficient intelligence to build a very complex device and sufficient irrationality to do it carelessly and/or irresponsibly is rarer than we thought.
Are you comfortable that Pakistan and North Korea both have nuclear weapons?
I don’t know anything about AGI but nuclear weapons are certainly in the hands of rogue states and that is not ideal
Yeah that doesn't bug me any more than the Soviets having 20,000 warheads aimed at me in the 1980s. I wouldn't say I'm *happy* about it -- hard to see how anyone could be "comfortable," as you put it, with anyone at all anywhere having a nuke -- or that matter a gun, or the ability to drive while drunk on freeways I frequent -- but as existential anxieties go this one is way down the list.
76 years is a very short time interval to draw such conclusion, in my opinion.
But I hope you are right...
Is it? That's a curious point of view. So, the first iPhone was introduced in 2007. You're saying if in 2050, say, a mere 43 years after its introduction, we were to attempt to draw conclusions about the general long-term response of humans to the introduction of the smartphone -- that would be rashly premature?
No, not for a phone. Yes for a once off chance of destroying humankind.
I think the idea is that the first AI will become powerful enough that it can stop any misaligned AIs from arising.
The big assumption there is that the effort and/or means of ensuring the system's stability are not inherently 'misaligned'.
Some of my recent writing at De Novo:
https://denovo.substack.com/p/now-hiring-for-oogenesis
The job position is still open, please apply if you think you'd be a good fit!
https://denovo.substack.com/p/hhv67-mostly-harmless
HHV6 and HHV7 are common, but mostly harmless herpesviruses. HHV6 is interesting because it can integrate into germline cells and be inherited.
https://denovo.substack.com/p/the-12-waves-of-covid
A COVID carol.
Carol is brilliant! Just in case, you know the Scrubs version, right?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQo1zD6nKRc
There's a humor thread somewhere down, with Russian jokes characterized as "dark, cynical". Czech humor is the same - even the sample joke is originally a Czech one, plundered by Russian army in 1805 - so I love these things very much, of course.
No, I didn't know the scrubs version, but thanks, it's great!
https://theair.substack.com/p/what-if-the-flu-isnt-just-the-flu
I didn't realize getting the flu did so much to increase stroke and heart attack risk.
The article mentions ventilation and filtration improvements to limit covid, but doesn't mention researching better treatments for people who get sick.
I have no idea what the author means by ""fairly robust death reporting in the US". In general, autopsies aren't done, and I don't know whether a full autopsy is needed to identify flu deaths.
To be fair, I don't think an autopsy could tell whether a heart attack or stroke which was an aftereffect of flu could be easily identified by any means.
https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/1705948-overview
Very few autopsies are done, I believe because money isn't allocated for them. We know less than we should about what kills people.
Yeah I always wonder about that when I hear about long covid. Is it worse than "long flu" or "long [other virus]"? I've had full-blown flu 5 or 6 times in my life, and after most bouts I didn't feel fully back to normal for several months -- had low energy, exercising made me feel woozy and sick, was more prone to headaches, had a lingering cough, etc. So I guess I had "long flu"? Though at the time I just thought damn, I guess it takes a long time to bounce back from the flu.
It seems to have more serious symptoms. It looks like a variety of sickness might be aftereffects of various viruses.
This isn't the same as saying that most people don't recover eventually.
Do you have any info or informed intuitions about how big a deal "long covid" is? My spontaneous reaction to people talking about the ghastly, heartbreaking, horrible, widespread, etc. effects of "long covid" is to feel skeptical and irritated. But I can't tell whether that reaction is informed by a valid intuition or just prejudice and crankiness.
I tend to believe things, especially people's accounts of pain, so that's another bias.
My impression is that serious long covid exists, but that doesn't say how common it is. Nor do we have any idea what's going to happen five or ten years out. It could be that a lot of people recover fully, or a lot of people continue suffering serious damage, or that a lot of people get sick with a covid analog of shingles. Or all three.
Yeah, influenza is worse than people realize, and society doesn't take it seriously enough.
The disappearance of classified threads leaves me no other place to post this, and I'm getting desperate - please delete if inappropriate.
I made a game about reasoning and fallacies, and I feel like smart, educated people interested in that or adjacent fields (logic, psychology, epistomology, statistics, ethics, plus debating and teaching) are the natural target audience, and this suggests to me that ACX is a place that might appreciate it.
There's only three days left to fund it on kickstarter, and it's going to be close - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/fallacy/fallacy-the-game
Can you just fund the last $200 if it comes to that? Sorry, I don't know how kickstarter works.
That's not possible on Kickstarter, but I have a family member ready to jump in if necessary, though I expect to be able to do without. This close to the funding sum is a point where I consider proof of profitability to having been brought forward - I wouldn't want to sit on a stack of unsaleable games sitting in my living room, but I don't think that's going to happen.
Pledged at the €50 level. Looking forward to coming up with a card that reflects the sort of discussions I have with my kids - “Argument from hurt feelings” or “Argument from personal incredulity” spring to mind.
Thank you so much! Both of these are already cards, kinda! See https://fallacygame.com/150dpi/3A.png and https://fallacygame.com/150dpi/14D.png! You'll definitely receive a list of existing cards so you can be more specific or find something unique!
Pledged. Good luck!
Looks great. Thanks for sharing.
Question to the AC10 hive mind: is there a way to meaningfully test the following long shot theory?
*Observation:* the vaccine denier movement seems to have brought up a wave of seriously irrational behaviour in disturbingly large numbers of people, especially in persons one would normally have considered to be more or less reasonable. In my circle of friends alone, a significant number of persons has gone off the rails in a manner that I would never have considered to be possible: with even some university-educated persons of good professional standing now believing random shit from the internet, if it just confirms their more or less bizarre pre-held convictions. Now one's own experience is of course strongly biased - but I have now heard similar stories from too many other friends that didn't got down the rabbit hole themselves to dismiss this as pure chance anymore.
*Theory:* in German, if everyone freaks out at the same time for non-obvious reasons, there is the flippant saying "es muss etwas im Trinkwasser sein" - "there has to be some contamination in the drinking water". And at first glance, that sort of thing is of course far too long a shot to be even remotely considered as a root cause of all this irrationality.
But what if there is, in fact, something in the environment right now that is causing an increased incidence of irrational behaviour in a susceptible part of the population?
What if we are seeing a version 2.0 of the low-level lead contamination that arguably caused a spike in aggressive behaviour across many nations (the "lead-crime hypothesis", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead–crime_hypothesis).
Candidates for this would be ubiquitous chemicals that are fairly new to the environment, for instance some new plastic softening agent that has only been applied on an industrial scale in the past 15 years or so (to replace PCBs, which are deemed harmful). Not that I am actually saying that a plastic softener is to blame here - absolutely not. I'm just using those as an example of "ubiquitous to the point no one even realises that they are there anymore", and "fairly new to the environment".
*Question:* are there any statistical techniques that could be meaningfully employed to search for correlations that might uncover such a long shot chemical agent? Or is this something that would remain buried in statistical noise, even if something of the sort is playing a role?
I think Covid-induced isolation and concomitant increase in time spent spelunking internet rabbit-holes does a good job of exciting my common-sense reasoning based on anecdotal evidence.
Personally, my preferred rabbit-hole is the authoritarian drift of the right wing of American politics. My brain tells me this is a once-in-centuries crisis, and I am becoming addicted to websites, blogs, and podcasts that share and reinforce that view. However, I have friends - smart, educated people - who tell me emphatically that yes, it's a problem, but hey the GOP has been drifting in that direction for decades; this is neither surprising nor is it the only issue worth fretting about - we still have to focus on inequality, climate change, the Singularity and so on.
So am I pretty much right, or am I just another victim of the outrage industrial complex?
So when a bunch of smart people believe things you disagree with, as a good Bayesian, you... update AWAY from that opinion and even more towards your current beliefs?
So if everyone agrees with you, your beliefs remain the same, and if everyone disagrees with you... everyone must have gone crazy and you're DEFINITELY right!
My preferred theory is that any increase in irrationality is more likely to be directly due to stress created by fear of covid, lock downs, job losses, fear of job losses, etc. etc..
I base this in part on my observations of 9/11. I was a mailing list moderator at the time, and a lot of previously reasonable posters went off the rails at that time. The most noticeable (to me) manifestation was trollish behavior. (Lots of picking fights, losing tempers after minor provocation, etc.)
I saw a similar pattern among my coworkers in 2020, once we were mostly working from home - and we were among the least stressed, being still employed, with our business booming because of lockdowns.
But in response to your question - there are techniques that can look at exposure to compound A, or compound B. But a fishing expedition for pollutants for which exposure might have changed recently enough for results to show up in the covid context? Well, if you test 20, you'll have one result on average that's statistically significant at the .05 level, without there being any real effect.
It would also be expensive. You need differential measures of exposure, not just "more of this in 2020 than 2000". I.e. you need a level of detail like "x% more of this in Washington than Poughkeepsie", or "y % more of this in fire fighters than in office workers" - for every single pollutant you care to test.
What about your friends' behavior strikes you as "irrational" other than "doesn't agree with my reasoning?" Or even let us stipulate "doesn't agree with good reasoning".
Human beings are very social animals, and even more so in this highly specialized highly interconnected social structure in which we live today. Individual prosperity is very strongly tied to your interactions with the greater society around you, and those interactions had better be positive -- if they are negative you can be crushed: driven from polite society, at least, and at worst lose your job, your ability to enjoy a peaceable life, or even be hounded to death. It has happened many times.
COVID is not the Black Death. It kills relatively rarely. So for almost everybody, the danger of your expressed attitudes being out of step with some social demographic or other is much greater than the danger of the virus itself. And the *rational* approach for the individual is to minimize his danger from social feedback, even if it raises the (much smaller) danger from the virus. That this requires occasionally adopting atittudes or saying things which, taken in isolation, are bananas, is nothing special. Historically speaking, people do it constantly.
Disagreement would not in itself worry me: that is natural, and in nuanced form probably more common than agreement anyway, in any reasonably heterogeneous group of friends or acquaintances.
The worrying behaviour patterns are in the direction of refusal to engage in any sort of meaningful exchange of information, paired with a total refusal to reflect on most things they are shown, in relation to the topic at hand. While at the same time uncritically accepting increasingly tall stories from more and more unlikely sources - sources these same people would have laughed at just a few years ago.
In short, behaviour patterns that you can also see when someone falls under the spell of a cult: all information that does not fit the pre-conceived worldview is simply ignored, while outsiders are bombarded with boilerplate propaganda material that would not stand up to even cursory scrutiny by a reasonably lucid mind.
To wit, I am not talking about e.g. having discussions about the origin of Covid: where the other party considers the lab leak theory (which I personally see as most likely, on balance) to be improbable. This is the sort of thing one can have a rational debate about, which in the absence of hard information on either side will eventually lead to an impasse. If it was a good debate, though, both sides will have learned something - hopefully, that is.
I'm talking about being sent, over and over again, the same horseshit from Telegram about e.g. there literally being microchips in the vaccines. Sent by people who have university degrees. And who still end up believing this utter garbage. And who are totally deaf to any explanations (from a computer science professor like myself, no less) that "microchips" simply don't come in sizes where they can be inserted into a vaccine without anyone being able to see them. That they don't come in such sizes for reasons of basic physics - this is not something you can have a debate about, if you insist on believing that, you are simply a cretin.
Seeing people you once considered to be rational go down that sort of rabbit hole is scary.
I don't believe you that you are interacting eith people who seriously believe covid vaccines contain microchips. I think you are actively spreading weakman mininformation. Making a meta conspiracy theory effectively. People with actual vaccines concerns never mention microchips to me, in person or online. There is a lot of frustration that the pro vaccine totalitarians are immune to discussion of data and ethics and always fall back on conspiracy theories and accusations of lacking empathy for others.
I think you are a active misinformation agent based on your spreading of the microchip conspiracy theory alone.
Priors are fascinating. To put another way, what bubble you're in has a lot to do with what you think is plausible.
Information that complies with our priors: totally believable!
Information that conflicts with your priors: made-up bullshit
I see we are the entire world. In my area the microchip thing has caught on like wildfire, as it feeds into the already-prevalent conspiracy theories about "the Mark of the Beast".
"microchips"
You should know that this pro-vax "microchips" obsession is a coordinated attempt to re-center the discussion about vaccine safety away from the actual myocarditis and blood clot numbers. It's a [Weak Man](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/) that few, if none, actually believe. I've observed a lot of anti-vax and vaccine hesitant discussion online and nothing like microchips are ever mentioned - just actual science. A new study shows that the vaccine is far more likely to cause myocarditis than COVID for young men. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.23.21268276v1.full.pdf
I was visiting relatives for the holidays. My anti-vaccine relatives gave microchips (and the vaccines passports being the mark of the beast) as their reason for not getting the vaccine, not anything else.
Is their concern that the current vaccine secretly has microchips in it, or that microchips are closer down the slippery slope than anyone wants to admit? Because there's a Swedish company that has been manufacturing such chips for years and is now promoting them as a sort of vaccine passport solution.
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/technology/2021/12/coronavirus-swedish-company-urged-to-read-the-room-after-unveiling-vaccine-pass-microchips.html
This has been passed around in the last few days, though many have been aware of it for a while.
Many on the anti-vaxx side have seen "yesterday's conspiracy theory" become "today's truth" with a regularity that is not appreciated by their condescending pro-vaxx family members. It wasn't too long ago that the ideas of extended lockdowns or perpetual boosters or any kind of vaccine passport were pooh-poohed by the conventional wisdom. The question to many anti-vaxxers is not if but when microchips sneak through the Overton window.
The hazards for pro-vaxxers are not just understanding how this kind of message creep affects the anti-vaxxers as confirming their concerns, but being able to filter and address separately myriad different concerns about this vaccine campaign and not just take what you see as the most outlandish of all their fears and tag the whole lot, some of which is far more grounded today, as "beep beep boop microchips."
> The newest breakthrough in ensuring schizophrenic people take their medication (a hard problem!) is bundling the pills with an ingestable computer chip that transmits data from the patient’s stomach. It’s a bold plan, somewhat complicated by the fact that one of the most common symptoms of schizophrenia is the paranoid fear that somebody has implanted a chip in your body to monitor you. Can you imagine being a schizophrenic guy who has to explain to your new doctor that your old doctor put computer chips in your pills to monitor you? Yikes.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/27/highlights-from-my-notes-from-another-psychiatry-conference/
Why do you think it's a coordinated attempt?
I am not talking about someone bringing up the indeed somewhat concerning statistics about vaccine side effects. And trying to tar all those who are skeptical with a wide brush, by making it all about microchips instead.
No, I am talking about people literally believing the microchip thing itself.
*That* is what has me worried - that this is not a red herring, but that there are actual persons out there who seriously believe this. Because someone on Telegram said so. If I hadn't experienced this first hand, I would have considered that an urban legend. But no, unfortunately this is a thing, with some.
I have theories. One of them is that it's not just the internet, it's people not getting enough sleep because of time spent on the internet.
Another is that there are prescription drugs (statins? steroids?) which are emotionally dysregulating, with effects that a lot of people don't notice in themselves.
Americans also have the saying "it must be something in the water", though I think usually it's for a place where people have weird ideas than for a moment when a bunch of people suddenly get weird ideas.
But as others say, it seems clear that the proximate cause of the weird ideas is stuff they see on the internet, and the patterns of how people see things on the internet have changed very quickly over the past ten years (e.g., smartphones and social media), so I would think the default hypothesis for the underlying cause is that it's more likely to be related to these changes in the behavior of the internet. I would only want to postulate an environmental cause if there was some sort of environmental correlate of these effects that leads them not to follow other expected patterns.
I don't think people reactions demand an extraordinary explanation, like low-level pollutants or other environmental causes (not to rule out those, but i would look more at stuff like obesity/men infertility/maybe unusual docility rather than covid reactions).
We have here a crisis, managed at national or even international level by governments and more or less opaque experts groups, which constantly make new intrusive rules since 2 years. In this context, it would be surprising if conspiracy theories were not in overdrive, anyone already convinced that conspirations exist will put covid crisis at the top of his list, before 9/11 or anything. Even people previously immune will start to question what happens if the measures hit them especially bad (nothing makes you a rebel like an unjust punition), or if they notice too many inconsistencies or paradox in the official set of measures and assorted justifications... And man, after almost 2 years, you need to be blind not to see so many of those, they pile quicker and quicker. Because it's a new disease so it's science as it unroll , because epidemiology is not in great state (which surprised me, i though it was relatively simple), and because decision takers were often really incompetent and extremely comfortable lying even for short term gains.
At this point, in my circle, people still mostly comply, but only the extremely conformist still trust authorities (governement, media, even health professionnals). And they seems to trust by default, because they look mostly confused when i tell about my distrust, while they were quick to jump to authority defense one year ago...
I do not know if this will persist, but covid has tremendously decreased trust in western countries, making them more like many other places (where trust in the authorities is low anyway). It is, by many aspects, similar to global warming, but worse. No wonder it trigger the same kind of reactions, only stronger...
So what happen when many people do not trust authorities and the story being told (about covid and how they should react to it)? They try to come with story of their own, piecing one together from infos gathered where they can (and downgrading infos from official source, because it's not trusted anymore). People will piece mostly irrational stories together, because most people are not great at this, and also because their infos are not great. Internat just means they have more infos (good or bad), but I guess you would have roughly the same distrust from official sources / conspiracy theories if the infos where gathered at the pub only.
The internet is a fairly new factor that is making a lot of people crazy. Crazy people gets an easy way to spread crazy information. Crazy people who would previously have been isolated find each other and forms crazy subcultures.
Covid anti-vax craziness seems strongly corelated with being right wing and is therefore unlikely to be caused by chemicals.
Our perhaps such people have looked at the risk profile for covid and decided that it just isn't worth getting the vaccine.
Another explanation: There's latent potential to irrationality in all of us, but it's being activated only by intense movements. I've heard this about the Trump years, too, that many previously normal people completely jumped headfirst into the rabbit hole. If so many others do it, there's something to it, right? So, sometimes there's an insanity du jour, and some times are more peaceful. There doesn't need to be something in the water to have periodic effects, rise and fall of movements, and I think this is what this is - a movement. Some people are swept up, others are not. Who is and who isn't maybe doesn't depend so much on the susceptibility to idiocy, and maybe more on the emotional needs a movement can meet. Like with cults.
Another explanation: The common cause of a rise in irrationality is covid itself, or rather, the isolation, worry, the non-stop incidence reports on the news. For many people, life changed a lot. It might even be the disconnect between the immediate perceived danger and the supposed danger on the news. 1% of a population dying is a huge deal, especially if they take up space in hospitals beforehand, but it's not actually a huge deal for everyone else, especially as the highest risks are born by the old and sick, populations that are more isolated, less likely to be working, more likely to be institutionalized beforehand. Some people will say "so what", because the messaging is "if this gets out of control we're having an apocalypse" and they think it's not a proper apocalypse unless 90% are dead and there's zombies, anarchy and whole cities devoid of life.
I was going to say something along these lines -- there are lots of people who have a tendency towards paranoia in the normal range for personality traits. When you add a lot of chronic stress to people, it can make those tendencies more extreme. So you add ongoing unpredictable health threat plus increased daily grind plus signs of incompetence in authorities plus social isolation and it's basically a perfect storm.
Very well-put, for both explanations. Thanks
Ryan's comment below is an excellent example of the disconnect I mean.
*Observation:* the vaccine advocacy movement seems to have brought up a wave of seriously irrational behaviour in disturbingly large numbers of people, especially in persons one would normally have considered to be more or less reasonable. In my circle of friends alone, a significant number of persons has gone off the rails in a manner that I would never have considered to be possible: with even some university-educated persons of good professional standing now believing random shit from the internet, if it just confirms their more or less bizarre pre-held convictions. Now one's own experience is of course strongly biased - but I have now heard similar stories from too many other friends that didn't got down the rabbit hole themselves to dismiss this as pure chance anymore.
Things along the lines of:
Being vaccinated makes you immune to covid.
Being unvaccinated means you are nesr certain to die.
Long covid will debiltate you and make you a de facto cripple if you do, somehow, manage to survive.
Ignoring different vaccination rates and severity of cobid variants in different populations (discriminated by age, sex, obesity, etc)
Being completely unable to consider vaccination and covid hospitalisation data recording methodologies (whether different or not, what they might skew in resulting data, etc).
What *I* have seen is that in person discussion these points along are enough to dismiss me as an anti vaxxer idiot, as I am obviously not compassionate enough to do the right thing, etc.
I have had people calling for the deaths of those who don't obey lockdowns and get vaccinated far more than I have come across people believing random shit from the internet.
From my point of view it is the people who are pro covid vaccination, pro lockdowns, etc who have completely lost it.
For another example, If I discuss mask effacacy with others I often get shown papers with models of droplet spread, reduction in that, etc. Raising the point that these are models, and that, as far as I am currently aware, no significant evidence exists to show masks have a non negligible effect in anything other than the most elderly populations at reducing covid spread in practice labels me as an idiot, ignorant, lacking common sense, among other less pleasant things.
I think what is in the water is effecting *you* and those like you. Those in this community, who I think have an utterly warped sense of reasonable risk concerning covid, to an extent It makes me seriously question everything else written by them - e.g. I won't be renewing my astral codex subscription because I don't trust scotts judgement anymore. Not that he is the most deranged, but when following through I see a completely different, alien even, way of drawing conclusions from data. I am struggling to go through and re-examine *everything* I may have unwittingly internalised from reading SSC and the adjacent "rationalist" since it's inception that is just plain nonsense.
I look at ONS (I am in the UK) covid data and historical death/hospitalisation norms from e.g..flu, etc and the reported rates ofnlong covid, etc and conclude that covid is barely noticeable. A nothing. Not worth worrying about *at all* for almost everyone. I just do not comprehend how others look at the same data and conclude there is any reasonable danger of harm, death, hospitalisation, or even overwhelming hospitals. I speak to doctors and they tell me the opposite, then I look up the data for their hospital and it does not match ehat they are saying.
It seems like the whole world is in a mass psychotic episode to me. It makes me wonder if so many people walked around before *without* seriously being aware of what risks they faced in their day to day life at all, and the awareness of th mild covid risk has sent them into a fear driven panic for the last 2 years.
Hear, hear. Thank you!
I totally understand you and I feel similarly about a mass psychotic episode. I can understand that most people are not interested in exploring things deeper but I am disappointed in those who call themselves rationalists.
In Scott's defence, I see that he is able to modify his beliefs according to the evidence. When pandemic started I quickly formed my model based on my learning that covid is so similar to other cold viruses (but the one we haven't had any exposure yet therefore it is so severe in elderly at the first exposure) that it will mostly likely follow the same path. In the last article Scott has fully described this model with even more graphs than I can follow.
But these 2 years were not easy and zero covid policy has been very damaging for all of us.
Masks may have some impact in specific conditions but as London has been overtaken by omicron, possibly 10% people infected by now, it is hard to see any effect whatsoever. Maybe masks help but covid is like a stream which you try to block at some place and the water will rise until it overflows again. Similarly about testing which the UK does very actively and many people are lamenting that the US does not do enough testing. It may reduce the spread at some places for some time but ultimately it won't help and the wave will come anyway.
You raise a fair point that Scott does update. It is a failure of smearing my wider disappointment, and sometimes revulsion, of the wider rationalist community over Scott too.
I am still surprised how much resistance is against the idea of covid as an endemic disease. Someone posted a link on MR that most scientists supported this idea already in January 2021 (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00396-2). Until now I didn't even know about the scientific concensus because if you read mostly rationalist forums you get an impression that most consider it a fringe idea. Even Zvi writings on covid are confusing about this point because he thinks that there is great chance that covid cases will diminish forever after Feb 2022.
I'm sorry you've encountered such hostility for what seems like honest/sincere questioning.
I consider my (Bristol UK) group of friends to be pretty left wing and very concerned about covid (although not to the point where I could describe them as fearful or panicked), but they've all been interested to hear what I've had to say in terms of how policy doesn't seem to be particularly influenced by evidence; that masks are a much smaller deal than they're made out to be; that long covid could be mostly psychosomatic, and so on. Perhaps because it can be framed as a complaint about our government being incompetent, which doesn't set off people's outgroup alarms.
I am also of theow agreeableness demeanor that makes hostility seem justified as my responses to it have not been particularly good either, so I must shoulder my share of blame for it too I suppose. I'm not particularly left wong by UK standards and I find it impossible to hide this, so talking to any left leaning people makes such anti government solidarity very difficult, even if I am actually critizing the government. Outgroup alarms are a big problem, and I notice them triggered in myself.much more easily over the last 2 years. For example I am now primed to suspect a lack of honest discussion from peope who have been taking covid seriously, because of the overlap In my experience with nutcases (I still haven't knowingly met an actual vaccines cause autism and have microchips 5g traditional antivaccer in my life so their nutness isn't something I have experience of).
>no significant evidence exists to show masks have a non negligible effect in anything other than the most elderly populations at reducing covid spread in practice labels me as an idiot, ignorant, lacking common sense, among other less pleasant things.
There's a lack of real-world evidence because it was called "unethical" to conduct trials. But there's an extremely strong mechanistic case for masks working, just like there is for parachutes protecting skydivers.
On your other points regarding COVID deaths/hospitalizations being "barely noticeable", I don't have time to respond right now, but trust me, they're definitely noticeable.
> There's a lack of real-world evidence because it was called "unethical" to conduct trials.
Has someone tried?
This is the thing I keep on bringing up, but we deliberately infect people with the flu to test flu vaccines. We should absolutely be testing mask use to see how it works with the flu.
Studies seem to repeatedly find effect sizes around 10-30% reduction in covid cases when enough people are masking in public spaces. Some people might consider that negligible, but this much reduction saves more lives than preventing one 9/11 per month.
Not all deaths are equal. Comparing deaths from agency to events that aren't from agency ignores the way that people care about things.
Also, we could save a 9/11 every month in traffic deaths by limiting cars to 40mph, but that's considered not worth the infringement on people's ability to move around.
That feels like it's the optimum level for toxiplasma of rage. Big enough that it's worth doing, but small enough that mask critics can argue that it does nothing.
Just like covid itself - somewhere around 1% fatality when averaged across all age groups, concentrated in those with somewhat lower life expectance already, and therefore big enough to be worth doing a lot for, but small enough that critics can argue it's negligible.
Indeed, it seems that one of the worst features of Covid is how it hits the sweet spot of being bad enough to be legitimately concerned about, but not being easily demonstrably bad enough that you can convince everyone that this is really the case.
When I look at total deaths I see cpvid adding 10%, almost overwhelmingly in already vulnerable categories. To me this is barely noticeable.
I suppose this turns on how one defines noticeable or significant. Covid will likely turn out to be the 3rd leading cause of death in the U.S. for 2020 and 2021, after heart disease and cancer. Heart disease and cancer are usually close numbers, with the usual third-leading cause of death -- accidents -- coming in far behind, at less than a third of cancer.
Covid will far surpass accidents and come in closer to cancer in terms of deaths per year. Flu and pneumonia together come in at 9th on the list of mortality causes (not all pneumonia comes from flu, so flu deaths are lower than this total) and together are fewer than a tenth of cancer deaths.
To my mind, a brand new cause of death that jumps to the third highest cause of death is way more than noticeable. That it is killing vulnerable groups of people at higher rates strikes me as irrelevant to how significant or not it is, particularly since it's highly contagious and spreads readily through family and social groups. If you're not individually as vulnerable, you are connected in some way to people who are.
I have no particular animosity towards people who choose not to get vaccinated. I do have trouble wrapping my head around this particular reasoning though.
Well it's simply that the measures against covid have many negative effects on those required for the continued existence of human society, while covid has few. Covid kills those not needed, on average, for the future.
Then layer on the opportunistic totalitarianism, done to save those not needed, and the future looks even less rosy.
That's the crux of it.
To me, imposing restrictions and harms on the young and healthy for the sick and old is extremely selfish, very harmful, and outright wrong, morally speaking.
I have trouble wrapping my head around how sacrificing the useful to save the old is anything other than the kind of thinking that societies practicing human sacrifice would have indulged in.
Man, every time I start to warm up to
Utilitarianism, somebody says “let’s kill the elderly for an extra percentage point of gdp growth” and I remember why treating people as means to an end is wrong.
"Covid kills those not needed, on average, for the future."
I find it funny that you condemn totalitarianism while talking like someone out of Logan's Run. Your argument is ALSO human sacrifice if we want to be hyperbolic- although I'm certain you'd frame it differently: perhaps a noble and patriotic sacrifice by the elderly for future generations?
I'll just cut to the quick- do you believe that "surplus population" would be disposed of in an ideal world? Once you're too old, or too sickly, or too crippled to be "useful", you should be wheeled off to the euthanasia clinic?
Ditto on that last sentence. The number of people whose argument seems to boil down to "who cares, it's just some old people, they probably would have just died anyways" frankly shocks me. I was always aware, of course, that I tended towards the more empathetic end of the scale, but now... well, now I think I appreciate more that those shock videos of people in China lying critically-injured on the side of the road and people just walking by while trying to avoid stepping in the blood probably aren't just an outlier created by a lack of Good Samaritan laws in China. I have marginally more respect for COVID denialists- they're ignorant, misinformed, or grifting, but they aren't just laying "the lives of the vulnerable simply don't matter to me" down on the line like that.
Causing harm to the future to save the present may soothe your empathetic instincts, but I doubt it makes a more resilient society and people more likely to continue existing into the future. I would, somewhat negatively, call it a selfish obedience to transient emotions at the cost of future wellbeing.
This! And doubly so because I'm in my 60s, and thus one of those old people whose death doesn't matter to some quantity of people who nonetheless appear to expect me (everyone) to prioritize their welfare.
I've read about non-specific effects of vaccines recently (https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200915-the-mystery-of-why-some-vaccines-are-doubly-beneficial). According to that, there is benefit in training your immune system with vaccines beyond immunity against that specific illness, but also in training with illnesses themselves ("those who have been naturally infected by pathogens like measles, and lived, have better long-term survival prospects than those who were never infected"). This is something I have heard anti-vaxxers say in person, and always assumed it's either untrue or the effect is not worth the suffering of illness.
Now I'm curious whether my current strategy of avoiding any infection, not just corona, isn't doing my immune system a disservice. I'm staying away from people that have a cold even when they tested negative for Covid. My brother brought his two children to our parent's wedding this summer and I was furious when I found out that's where I got the cold from that robbed me of my only week this year. He knew they were sniffling, he brought them anyway.
His point is that if he can't bring sniffling kids, he can't bring them anywhere about half the time, because they are midly sick basically constantly. His wife, as well as a friend, both of whom are kindergardners, say that the first couple of years in the job, you are basically mildly sick all the time, and then your immune system steps up and you only rarely get the bugs the kids freely trade.
Is my policy of isolation (covid aside) a bad one? Should I be more willing to go through the headaches, the fatigue, the fever and the sore throat of common colds, for some sort of beneficial side-effect of a well-trained immune system? I've always considered coming to work or visiting friends while sick a form of physical assault (I'm in Germany, we all have insurance and sick days etc here). Opinions?
A few years back, I started a spreadsheet to track my daily symptoms, because I wanted to figure out how many days a year I was experiencing cold symptoms. It turns out I started this on Jan. 1, 2020, and I had about 10 days of symptoms in two different spells in the first 60 days of that year. Since then, I don't think I've had any symptoms of any sort caused by an infection, other than a day of food poisoning this summer.
However, I've noticed what *feels* like an increase in allergic reactions. I can't be sure, since I wasn't tracking symptoms before these past two years. Now it turns out there were also some oddities in Texas weather these years (we had very mild springs and summers, and a very unusual freeze in the winter), so even if there has been an increase in my allergy symptoms, it could just be a difference in plant behavior and not a difference in my immune system not having many infections to fight. However, the hygiene hypothesis has been a popular idea in some form or other: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis
This makes me wonder whether there would be some good way to get "exercise" for my immune system, and whether that's the sort of thing that might have some sort of benefit (either reducing allergies or otherwise). And if this would be a good thing, it would be helpful to know how much of this benefit can come from getting vaccines to fight rather than actual infections. We know that working out in a gym doesn't help your fitness as much as living a strenuous lifestyle, but it's good enough to be a preferred substitute for many modern people. Maybe aiming to keep infections near zero, but getting lots of vaccines to keep your immune system in check, would be a similar tradeoff.
I had pretty bad cold symptoms around January 2020 and have been virtually sniffle-free since. I've noticed worse eczema/psoriasis-type symptoms in that time span, however.
I appreciate your keeping records.
Did you detail what your cold symptoms were? I didn't keep records, but it seemed to me I would get colds with the same symptoms three or four times, and then move on to a different cold.
The one I had over New Year's 2019-20 was mainly coughing and feeling sick. The one I had in late February had sore throat, wet cough, and significant fever for one day. I think both lasted for a week or two (hard to tell with the first one, because it had started some time before I started my spreadsheet). I had a negative covid antibody test in May, so it's unlikely that either of these was covid.
Looking back on those dates at the beginning, I see that I was a bit less detailed in recording symptoms then than I became later, after months of pandemic paranoia.
I was hoping to discover whether there were patterns like the one you mention, but the pandemic lifestyle has blocked any of them (though perhaps it revealed patterns that had been there all along in allergies, that I might have been attributing to colds in the past).
I don't know this for sure, maybe an immunologist could weigh in -- my impression is that it's exposure in childhood that matters the most in terms of training the immune system, rather than year-in-year-out exposure as an adult. I would be surprised if less illness for a few years in adulthood is that significant across the lifespan.
Not sure if here are mother's and father's of girls reading. If so I would like to hear your thoughts about your way of preparing, teaching, educating your soon teenage girl(s) about the potential bad sides if sexuality. I was listening to David Buss discussing parts of his new book about sexual differences in mating strategies https://www.jordanharbinger.com/david-buss-when-men-behave-badly/ (full show notes at the bottom of the long page)
Starting at roughly 21:14 minutes it's about 'womans signaling of being open for a one night stand's and resulting potential situations and confounding variables a girl or woman could get a victim of sexual violence. Sexy dressing seems to be an important factor. They make sure that everybody should be allowed to wear what he or she likes in an ideal world and don't want to conduct victim blaming. But the real world is like it is.
Do you have any advice, book, video, how to balance the right of ones daughter to dress sexy, dance sexy, have fun - and scaring her about the ultra dangerous men in the world?
Have your daughter physically fight male peers.
That will imbue her with the posture that repels predators.
Or at least, it works for me. My longtime friends have a joking observation that shitty heterosexual men are naturally "allergic" to me.
And it's true. I've had dozens of shitty men drift through my various social circles; neighbors, friends of friends, boyfriends of friends, etc. Men who were later revealed to hit their girlfriends, to physically molest women too intoxicated to consent, who were arrested for kiddie porn, who drove drunk, who skipped out on rent owed to mutual friends, and so on.
Even the most voracious pussy-seekers (if you'll excuse the crude expression) among them actively avoided me. Not a single one of them *ever* made a sexual advance on me, despite approaching every woman in the social group, their workplace, online, etc.
These men edged around me socially the way adult grizzly bears edge around a wolverine in the wild, on pure instinctive desire not to be injured during a fight. Often literally; they'd move out of the way to let me pass, or leave a crowded room if it was clear I was settling in for a while.
I'm 5'2". I'm obviously cis female, I wear my hair long, I dress in traditionally feminine clothes which sometimes show my figure and skin, depending on the weather. Personal taste varies, but there's nothing freakish about my appearance that would repel a huge majority of men. On the contrary, I've dated some very good-looking and fit guys.
So why do the human predators instantly dislike me?
I think it has a lot to do with frequently fighting with my brother - usually physically - in our childhood. I wanted to be left alone; he wanted to engage. We were peers in these fights; close enough together in age that neither of us were capable of physically or emotionally dominating the other, which created a state of constant conflict. Every provocation of his required swift and decisive retaliation by me, for the sake of maintaining personal honor. We fought daily for over a decade, until he was sent to boarding school.
It's very hard to be conditioned to comply with male entitlement while waging a personal war of equals against a male peer.
It's even harder to be conditioned to comply with male entitlement while feeling overwhelming righteous contempt for a misbehaving male peer.
I think it's the latter that repels predatory men.
I'm genuinely not afraid of them, because I did a lot of physical fighting as a child and I routinely carry a deadly weapon as an adult. I genuinely believe that I'm absolutely entitled to judge male behavior according to my personal standards, to express my judgment and contempt, and even to humiliate and shun when the situation calls for it. I don't spend all day pondering how to express my sense of moral superiority over shitty men, but the sense of DNA-deep entitlement certainly reflexively comes out in my expression, posture, eye contact, and tone of voice, every day, all the time, and predatory dudes pick up on it as feeling aggressively "wrong" in a woman. There's an aura of wolverine over the make-up and curls and dresses, and who wants to risk injury to take down a wolverine?
It's so much easier to find a nice, soft, juicy, injured bunny rabbit.
Don't raise your daughters to be bunny rabbits. If they don't have a sibling to fight, get them into martial arts classes. Teach them that hitting, maiming, and even killing aren't always wrong; indeed, there are times when doing physical injury to stop a predator is a righteous act and a moral mandate, and *of course* they should be the ones to judge that moment.
If you imbue them with that sense of entitlement of true personal autonomy, how they dance and what they wear won't matter, be it in a college frat party or a kink club. The predators will keep themselves away.
Thanks for your very fascinating insights. There is a younger brother indeed. But he is over 3 years younger and she could dominate him until recently. But we as parents don't want out kids to physically fight besides just playing games. But material arts might be an option - not that I'm sure if training in fighting will not increase the chance to get her drawn into fights instead of preventing a dangerous situation early.
I wouldn't worry about martial arts (including firearm handling) motivating your daughter to seek fights. It's not like Karate Kid; generally, any competent and reputable instructor will teach judgment under stress and self-discipline along with the punching (or whatever). Kicking someone's ass when you're extremely proficient at a martial art can result in enhanced criminal penalties if it isn't clear self-defense. So avoiding fights isn't good for other people, it's good for *YOU.*
If you do think she'd be interested in classes, I'd recommend Brazilian Jujitsu / MMA and/or Krav Maga for useful real-world applications.
BJJ has the advantage of being about skill overcoming brawn (that's the point of it) and Krav Maga isn't a sport at all - it's about fighting for your life and doing it as efficiently (and dirty) as possible.
Karate and the other more traditional martial arts have evolved into highly ritualistic sports rather than practical fighting systems. At this point, I'd say "don't bother."
But BJJ/MMA/Krav would be good for making your daughter confident she can (and should!) *really* injure a man if she ever really needs to.
Let's see how it unfolds. Right now she likes programming - my earlier money earning daily activity but never ever was showing it to her, she started to get curious by herself and is still the driving force if I help her on request. Her second interest is music and her dancing course - which is part of the problem I see. There they are taught how to imitate best all the sexy moves of skinny, sexy, nearly naked women you see in mainstream pop music videos since years. Not that I would like to stop doing this - it's great pleasure and joy for her. Nearly the only physical activity she really likes a lot. But I'm the type of person who usually sees issues long before they unfold and long before the typical person. So I want to be us preparwd with some good strategies for the next years. My wife started some research in her own circles and got some really useful feedback as well like starting to reflect about signaling of clothes regarding age and intentions, about the different motivations behind actions, asf
Don't put your daughter in BJJ. They're the only people on the planet who think you can safely choke somebody out multiple times a day for training purposes, with no risk of brain damage.
Good to know
"Have your daughter physically fight male peers."
Are you out of your goddamned mind?
"If you imbue them with that sense of entitlement of true personal autonomy, how they dance and what they wear won't matter, be it in a college frat party or a kink club. The predators will keep themselves away."
This is absolutely not true. Some of them will take that as a challenge, or a spice. You just got lucky. Lots of people get lucky, but this is still insanely bad and destructive advice. You're 5' 2", there's no posture or personality that can compensate for that if you physically fight a male peer.
Good grief, do you not know what the word "peer" means?
I went out of my way to point out that my brother and I were physical peers as *children*, and fighting in *childhood*, with a *childhood peer,* serves me to this day.
Because of course I don't intend to physically fight predatory men who are larger than me as an adult! That's why I carry a pistol and have gone through extensive training to use it appropriately. That's why I feel *entitled* to carry a pistol and use it appropriately. Just as I fought to win with my brother in childhood, I will fight to win over an attacker as an adult.
My point was that childhood conditioning can create an attitude that naturally repels predators, because predators are attracted to *prey,* the more vulnerable, the better. If girls and women sincerely believe they aren't prey, they will behave like they aren't prey, and acquaintance-based* predators will leave them alone.
(*Because yes of course someone could lay in wait around a wall and crack me in the head with a baseball bat I never see coming. But that wasn't germane to discussing how to make *daughters* safer from frat bros.)
All of these elaborations make your advice worse, not better.
If you define "peer" that narrowly, this advice only works if applied early, and continued up to age 12 (which is when, statistically, boys begin to surpass girls physically). Marc says his daughter is a "soon teenage girl", so the suggestion is pretty much too late for him to use – unless you intend to have her beat up younger boys, which comes with a whole host of moral issues of its own. I also find the idea that this will imbue her with the "posture to repel" boys her own age or older highly dubious.
"That's why I carry a pistol and have gone through extensive training to use it appropriately. That's why I feel *entitled* to carry a pistol and use it appropriately."
This is your *actual plan*? Marc's daughter should carry a pistol to a frat party? She should blow a guy's face off with a .38 Special if he gets handsy? And this will produce the conditioning which will cause guys to not try anything in the first place? Even by American standards, that's one of the most American things I've ever heard.
It's also fraught with extreme problems, like: is it even possible to walk around armed on a college campus today? What happens to this plan if you're drunk or roofied, or if you were totally fine with the half-naked makeouts and only decided you weren't onboard anymore when he wants to go further? Is it morally defensible to shoot somebody, even over being raped? Can the average young woman of our time bring herself to shoot somebody under *any* circumstances? Is Marc's daughter *actually ever going to obey* advice to consistently carry a snub-nose in her purse with her everywhere? An automatic in her garter, maybe? Isn't it better to just stay home from the party instead? These are only a small selection of issues that spring immediately to mind.
I'm sorry, but the Saotome/Jones School of Anything-Goes Self-Defense leaves something to be desired. I don't think I can endorse your curriculum.
You're doing an awful lot of straw-manning here, friend. See my comment to Marc about martial arts classes his daughter could take.
Okay, despite your thing about the pistol being something you actually said, I'm willing to take this at face value, so let's get down to the bare metal then: childhood conditioning cannot create an attitude that naturally repels predators. That's a silly claim. Whether you try using guns or krav maga, it won't work.
Speaking as a relatively young woman and mother:
Her attitude towards these things is the result of everything in her life, not one specific interaction with you, or a book or article you pass on. It's an aphorism that a woman's relationship with her father forms her expectations for how she can expect every other man in her life to treat her, so you can set her up for success by treating her with kindness and respect. Trust her in age appropriate "dangerous" scenarios (sleepovers, unsupervised time with friends, staying home alone, going on dates), but always remind her that you are there for her if she needs to be picked up or feels unsafe for any reason. Teach her bodily autonomy from a young age--eg, if she doesn't want to hug you, tell her that it's her body and it's OK if she doesn't want to. Teach her to deal with uncomfortable situations rather than rescuing her superman-style by calling her friends' parents or the teachers. Someone who is generally happy and has a good self esteem will be able to navigate the world of dating more easily than someone who isn't. Let her practice asserting herself when the stakes are low, and she'll be able to do it when you aren't there.
https://www.amazon.com/Blackout-Remembering-Things-Drank-Forget/dp/1455554588
Possibly of interest: Blackout by Susan Hepola.
It's a memoir by a woman who I'd say was under the influence of toxic masculinity and low-quality feminism, thought that hard drinking and casual sex was the way to be a strong person. She didn't phrase it that way, this is my summary of what she described.
She thought that she'd age out of irresponsible behavior as she got into her thirties, but it didn't happen. Eventually, she gets into AA and gets sober.
Interestingly, the real cure happened when it hit her that that drinking made her weaker, not stronger. The desire to drink, or possibly the desire to drink excessively, went away. This might be generally important if core issues are more common than we realize.
She also came to the conclusion that her emotionally abusive mother and her emotionally distant father were fundamental causes, with the father doing more damage.
This doesn't mean I think good relationships with parents are the solution, I think good advice is also important. However, I think good relationships with parents help people to know when things are going wrong.
An annoying thing I'm starting to realise is that my children are going to be stuck forever with three parents, the third one being a complete blithering idiot called Society. I can do my best to instil good values in my children, but then Society gets its turn too, and it will instil a bunch of complete rubbish.
I'm well-intentioned and work hard, but Society is flashy and well-funded. I'm doing my best, but this is my first time around, whereas Society's messaging is carefully optimised and A/B tested against millions. I'm working with my kid's best interests in mind, but Society has a billion different agendas for my kids, most of which involve either selling them something or recruiting them to be used as a weapon against some other part of Society. And Society has a bunch of different, persuasive-sounding "Why your parents are dumb old-fashioned and terrible if they disagree with our message" stories, whereas I struggle to articulate what I'm saying right now at a level a child can understand.
I have no idea how to navigate this.
This comment stuck with me, enough to save it and respond the better part of a year later.
I suspect most parents have felt this way on multiple occasions, though rarely expressed so clearly. Sometimes it can seem like a miracle that children don't universally develop into semi-helpless, functionally-wireheaded pseudo-citizens.
Despite all the disadvantages you enumerated, as a parent you have disproportionate influence on your children. You have spent years proving your commitment to their happiness and well-being, you've embedded your values in tens of thousands of concrete acts. Of course, some of those acts have been mistakes, and you're up against other, deeper challenges, like a child's need to differentiate him- or her-self. But contrary to expectations, I'd say the dedicated parent has very good odds.
I don't have any particular additional response to make, but wanted you to know I appreciate your nine-months-later reply.
If you 1) think that Society's influence on children is an inherent danger to your children you aren't willing to tolerate, and 2) believe it's impossible to compete with Society, then I'd advise moving to a remote area of the country and raising any children you have on a compound with as little exposure to Society as possible. This is probably not very feasible and a losing strategy in an entirely different way, but it's the most humane option given those two premises.
I'd advise teaching your kid how to think critically and then actually be ready to give good arguments to them about why they should listen- that's what my parents did, and although N=1 there it's probably a good way to make sure a child respects you when they become an adult.
Interesting point of view, of phrasing a complex situation not atypical since higher social animals exists.
that transcript was a very good read, it has some things i never knew and will have to look up the background on. a lot of it makes quite a lot of sense. i will have to read this book as well
Same ony side.
I will tell my daughter the following the best I can, little by little:
1. Humans are both social and physical creatures, made in nature.
2. When two persons separate themselves from the crowd, society ends and nature starts. Society no longer decides what will happen and not. The strongest individual decides. If he chooses to play by the rules of society, no one will notice. That happens most of the times. But not always.
3. Adult males are much stronger than females. If males are 50 percent stronger than females, that doesn't mean that the male decides 50 percent more than the female if they spend time alone. It means that the male can decide 100 percent what will happen there and then, if the female wants to live.
4. That means if a female decides to spend time alone together with a male, she has given him the power to make every decision. For that reason, it is unwise of a female to spend time alone with a male whose decisions she might not like.
I will also recommend the book Date-onomics by John Birger to all my children when they are old enough to understand it.
Hmm, when I was a young woman, I once physically ejected a young man from my dormitory room, when his idea of what we would do in private exceeded what I wanted to do with him in private.
Averages are not individuals. Many young men are not very fit, and some young women are fitter than some of the men they might date.
My take away from point 3 would be that a young woman should do some combination of: get in shape, learn martial arts, acquire and learn to use strength-equalizing weaponry, and selectively hang out with puny and unhealthy males - at least in private. (Bonus - that nerd who lives online and works in tech probably makes pots of money; excellent husband material, if you don't mind his workaholism.)
> If he chooses to play by the rules of society, no one will notice. That happens most of the times.
Well Tove, there were many years where you were much physically stronger than your daughter. Maybe you still are. Do YOU get your way 100% of the time with your daughter? When she was, let's say, 10 years old, did YOU resort to physical coercion to force her to eat brussels sprouts, watch less TV, clean up her room, practice her violin? I mean, you were probably strong enough to literally hold her down and stuff those brussels sprouts into her mouth. And even if you weren't, you could have forced her to eat them by smacking her around, right? But I'm guessing you didn't do that. So why are you assuming that a man, alone with a woman, is going to resort to physical coercion to get his way about various things?
Tove is her daughter's mother, presumably. We can take for granted that she's invested in her daughter's well-being for natural reasons (and also by implication from the fact that she wants to explain reality to her). Thus, most of the nuclear option is off the table – Tove doesn't want to hurt her daughter, or to see her get hurt, so smacking her around or force feeding just won't happen. This gave her daughter some manoeuvering room to use various strategies to push her will.
That being said, it's absolutely true that parents *can* treat their children this way, and some (abusive) parents do. It's also notable that even with kind and well-intentioned parents, the relative powerlessness of a child is obvious to the child. I myself remember using strategies as a kid to evade this kind of issue – for example, after a certain age I never explained myself when asked why I was angry about something or refused to do something, since I knew that the grown-ups would just explain why I was wrong – that is, invalidate my feelings and desires to enforce their will. In other words, it's perfectly accurate to say that a parent *can* decide to get his way 100% of the time with his kids. It is in fact unwise for a small child to spend time alone around a parent whose decisions he might not like. Small children just can't act on this knowledge, if they have it.
I think you didn't read that section the right way. Tove isn't saying that ALL social dynamics break down outside of the public eye- simply that, outside of the public eye, the option to NOT obey social niceties becomes a lot more viable (in the short-to-medium-term, at least). That's how I read it.
Your formulation is far more reasonable than what I took Tove to mean, but I can't see any particular reason to take what Tove said the way you took it. Here's one reason I take Tove's view to be more extreme than the more moderate interpretation you give: They say it's unwise for a female to spend time alone with a male whose decisions she might not like. Tove's statement suggests that Tove sees it as not just possible but actually fairly likely that a man, alone with a woman, will override the woman's wishes -- and will override them over some important matter, and will override them in a way that is very undesirable for the woman to experience. Tove sounds like they think that when the option not to obey social niceties becomes more viable in the short term, then social niceties are quite likely to be completely disregarded.
My comment to Tove about their treatment of their daughter was also intended to remind Tove that there are a lot of things besides being in the public eye that keep a person from violently coercing someone weaker to do what the want: affection; compassion; moral and religious beliefs; fear of medium- and long-term consequences of violently coercing someone.
"My comment to Tove about their treatment of their daughter was also intended to remind Tove that there are a lot of things besides being in the public eye that keep a person from violently coercing someone weaker to do what the want: affection; compassion; moral and religious beliefs; fear of medium- and long-term consequences of violently coercing someone."
Yes, that is exactly what I wanted to say. For a female to safely spend time alone with a male, she needs to make sure that the male in question doesn't want to use violence to get his way. Most males don't, for the reasons you mentioned above. Still, every female without exceptional skills in martial arts needs to evaluate whether a certain male is guided by such reasons or not.
Skill at assertiveness, stark refusal to accept to minor boundary violations, and willingnesss to be seen as an unpleasant person are also useful, and if energetically deployed may forestall the need for martial arts.
How would one make sure of not being subject to violence, as distinct from improving the odds?
I kind of took what he was saying as a hard-sell/scared-straight pitch. I can definitely see how it could be read the way you take it- I'm just not sure that was the intention behind it.
Just remembering that I red some posts of a young journalist in an online magazine - a woman in her early twenties - about her life and her dating experiences in another country's largest city and capital. She seemed very self reflected for such a young person - and cool. But in the images I saw a young, inexperienced, girl searching for warmth, a young man to have a real relationship and understanding with, the meaning of life. On the images she was quite often showing a lot of skin in accordance with the current fashion. An intelligent, young, innocent looking girl in a huge city. In a couple of posts she was complaining about men driving by, looking back at her, giving compliments, trying to start something with her, maybe getting her into the bed. I've found that strange with our pre-teenage daughter in mind. Then suddenly, the young journalist was posting about a super bad experience where she visited a 'good friend' - who then pushed her into having sex with him - she writes she wasn't able to say something, to stop it, she was just baffled. Since then she seems traumatized. I was thinking that I was not surprised to read this.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned being careful about drinking and drugs.
I've seen gratitude for parents who offer a ride home with no criticism.
And another angle-- I'm not sure how to do this, but don't teach her to be reflexively compliant. Compliance can be framed as "nice", a trait suitable for girls.
I'm not sure whether the world has changed enough that this is no longer a problem.
My parents did that, but I found it a confusing mixed message and a bit of an insult. Did they think I was going to drink? That was illegal!
(That said, I was the only one of my peers who held off on drinking until I was of legal age, and I did catch a lot of shit for it. I hope I can figure out how to pass on that particular trait to my kids.)
Good point. My mother used to tell the story when her father was trying to bring her and her sister back home from a dancing event. When my mother recognized her father's car approaching she jumped with her youger sister into the side ditch and hid from their father till he drove back home.
Second that you came across great in the post. I don't have a recent book and all the older ones obviously didn't work that great.
As someone who was a teen daughter (and now is middleaged)...we have no more right to pretend -via dress, posture, dance - that we are up for sleeping with any man in the room without someone taking us at our word, no more than we have the right to go up repeatedly and cuddle a half grown tiger without getting mauled at some point.
It *is* fun to have a bunch of grown, older men be willing to heed our slightest whim and listen to our endless nattering. That's great fun.
But they aren't doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, they are making an evolutionary-biased investment on the expectation/possibility of an eventual payoff. There is no moral obligation for any particular woman to pay out, but there's also no grounds for us women to act like ignorant children about the foundation of the interaction.
It took me quite a while to understand that people have motivations that I don't, and to stop using the typical mind fallacy. That helped.
"we have no more right to pretend -via dress, posture, dance - that we are up for sleeping with any man in the room without someone taking us at our word, no more than we have the right to go up repeatedly and cuddle a half grown tiger without getting mauled at some point."
I don't see where rights come into it, but I agree that it shows a lack of common sense to pretend that one is up for "sleeping with," [by which you actually mean "copulating with," right?] every man in the room without one of the men believing that's actually the case. But then you slide right past the matter of the rights of the individuals involved once the misunderstanding has developed: The man has rather understandably concluded that the woman wants to copulate with him, but in fact she does not. Is your view that the man now has the right to force intercourse on her, and the woman has no right to cry foul if he does? If so, what are your grounds for thinking that? Do you believe that (1) once a man has a boner he has become the equivalent of a tiger — a being unable to understand the important differences between a person and a piece of meat? Or do you believe that (2) denying Boner Man the consummation he craves is such an act of cruelty that that a just and humane society cannot allow such things to happen?
My life experience does not support either (1) or (2). A Boner Man is still aware that the female before him is a human being, with rights, feelings, preferences and an inner life. He may wish he was dealing with a walking, talking sex doll, but he knows he is not. And Boner Man is able to endure sexual frustration and disappointment, surviving to copulate another day. Given that, I’d like to suggest a reverse version of your statement about the rights that lewdly flirting women don’t have:
*Men have no right to pretend that lose access to all humanity and self-control when they are sexually aroused. Those who do pretend that should be sent to the zoo, where they belong.*
>>>Is your view that the man now has the right to force intercourse on her, and the woman has no right to cry foul if he does?
No. Do you care to reconsider your reply to me in light of this new information?
Well, I don't have any more to add without knowing more about what rights you think a woman does and doesn't have, and what consequences should follow violations of rights. She doesn't have the right to dress sexy and play-act sexual interest in men. But she does have the right not to be raped. OK . . .
Well, since she does not have the right to dress sexy and play-act sexual interest in men,
-Can you clarify why she does not have this right? Whose rights is she violating, who is she harming, what principle of justice is she defying?
And
-what punishment should society administer for her committing this act?
I recommend that you re-read the original comment, where I stated that (in short paraphrase) a person does not have the right to do X and not expect negative outcome Y. In your reading, you seem to have missed the part where the lack of right is contingent not on doing X, but on doing X without having negative outcome Y.
It is not a matter of justice, human or divine. It is not a thing which needs legislation against - not anti-dancing laws, not sumptuary laws regarding the wear of lace or satin, not curfews.
What is required, I think, is a clear-headed recognition that there is no teacher or principal or mayor or 'society' that is going to be able to keep water from going downhill.
And adult women need to quit play-acting in public in front of strangers. It's infantile and demeaning to do so, much less to assume that "I didn't really mean it" carries weight because, well, we're women, and get cut all sorts of slack for being unserious and emotional.
Men have different responsibilities, about which I have a large stack of opinions. But that's not the topic here.
OK, I'm now clear that you're saying something in the form of a person doesn't have the right to do X and not expect Y. I think it's maybe your talk about "rights" that's getting in the way of our understanding each other. Are you sure you're actually talking about *rights* here? It makes sense to talk about people having or not having a right to do something, but does it really make sense to say they don't have *a right* to expect something? Usually in everyday conversation when somebody says you don't have a right to expect something, they just mean that it's not *right* to expect it -- it means your expectation is wrong, but not in the moral sense, but just in the sense of "incorrect."
So if you're saying that a woman who play-acts wanting to sleep with all the men in the room is making a mistake is she believes that none of the men are going to believe that she actually wants to have sex with them, then I do not disagree at all with what you're saying. It would indeed show a major lack of common sense to think none of the men are going to mistake her play-acting for real desire and sexual availability.
But it seems like you're packing some other ideas in there too. For instance you seem to be saying that for a woman to play-act sexual interest to a bunch of man is a mistake equivalent to playing with and cuddling a full grown tiger and expecting not to get hurt. In what what are they equivalent? Are you saying both things are equally stupid and dangerous? Surely you don't think they are! Playing with the tiger is way more dangerous, right? It's going to lead muchmore quickly and surely to severe injury. A much more comparable example would be playing with a skunk and expecting not to get sprayed -- or being sullen, oppositional and lazy at work and expecting not to get fired -- or driving on ice and expecting not to skid. So why did that tiger wander into the argument? My sense is that that it came readily to mind for you because of the idea that's out there in some people's minds that once men are aroused, they are beasts driven by instinct alone, and cannot be expected to restrain themselves from forcibly taking what they want -- therefore, it is the woman's responsibility not to trigger them into beast mode. You certainly did not say anything like that -- but the comparison you make between outrageous lewd flirting with men and cuddly play with tigers certainly does suggest you see the situations as similar. Your line about how nothing can keep water from going downhill also suggests that you view male rapiness etc. as a sort of law of nature -- not something it makes sense to question, challenge or change. Regrading that, I do not agree.
Still another thing that's folded into your argument is your personal aversion to women play-acting in public. As a matter of fact, I often (but not always) find that spectacle kind of disturbing too. But you go from identifying a certain kind of behavior as unpleasant for you to making generalizations about women should do. Really? You think you get to do that?
Overall it seems like you are very clear that you just hate seeing women play-act promiscuous sexiness, and are trying to make several cases at once against women doing that, but none is really fully developed, and the bunch of them don't hang together very well.
"As someone who was a teen daughter (and now is middleaged)...we have no more right to pretend -via dress, posture, dance - that we are up for sleeping with any man in the room without someone taking us at our word, no more than we have the right to go up repeatedly and cuddle a half grown tiger without getting mauled at some point."
Camille Paglia used this analogy 35-40 years ago: you have an *absolute, rock-solid right* under the law to leave a wallet full of cash on a park bench, and have it still be there next week when you come to pick it up. This is your unambiguous legal right with respect to your property. There is no real question about this, justice is on your side. But every sane person will still call you a complete imbecile if you actually do it, and really expect the wallet to be there. People will assume you must have secretly wanted it to get stolen, since it's so incredibly transparent what will actually happen. Going to a night club in a tight dress (alone, or with people incapable or unwilling to protect you) and getting drunk is exactly like this.
Good analogy!
Yes. I've had complete strangers return my wallet, with everything intact. I've walked drunk acquaintances home/called an Uber. I won $100 in Lotto, too. *shrugs* often the world is more wonderful than we give it credit for.
Sure. Absolutely. I've never been on the dropping end, but I've returned more dropped money than I can immediately call to mind over the years. I've babysat drunk strangers until they got their shit sufficiently together to get in a cab and go home. I don't think anybody's ever suggested it'll happen *every time*.
But, still, if I found out about somebody doing the wallet thing *on purpose*, I'd think he was incredibly dumb and asking to get robbed.
Same thing. You do it habitually, it's just a matter of time. Act accordingly, and *take responsibility* for your choice.
>we have no more right to pretend -via dress, posture, dance - that we are up for sleeping with any man in the room without someone taking us at our word
This makes no sense to me. I enjoyed dancing in my early twenties and never did I have the desire to sleep with any of the men also dancing in my vicinity. In fact, I never once did, I had no sex until I was married. To declare that the default is sleeping around and that a woman has to prove she's not interested in engaging in that default is insane to me, an abdication to the worst parts of the sexual revolution.
Huge misunderstanding:
"we have no more right to pretend -via dress, posture, dance - that we are up for sleeping with any man in the room without someone taking us at our word, no more than we have the right to go up repeatedly and cuddle a half grown tiger without getting mauled at some point."
It's exactly about the point of the podcast about David Buss' book and I was asking: there seems to be a deep misunderstanding between men and women about their evolutionary inner workings regarding mating behaviour, attraction, signaling, relationships etc.
Buss and the woman posting the cited passage want to warn sexually naive women that men are or can be like young tigers. And it's not that a woman needs to prove that she doesn't want to have casual sex. Most men in north western countries in these days have civilized their 250 Million years of sexual evolution. But over a full woman's life thereay be close encounters with millions of men. If only one is misunderstanding ambiguous things like tight cloths, sexy dancing, showing much skin as sexual signaling and takes action - then this woman has a lifetime experience of sexual abuse. So it's about not being naive as a woman.
I'm fine with promoting awareness among women about the threats young men can present to them. I refuse to act like it's not my right to go anywhere and do anything and be unmolested. Sure, that doesn't mean I am going to be left alone, in fact, I won't be. They are violating my right to be unviolated when they don't leave me alone, however, a right which I very much have and cannot lose by any behavior of mine.
Edit: Men are not tigers, they are not ruled solely by biological instinct. They are humans and can control their behavior if not their thoughts. If you all are genuinely arguing men cannot stop themselves from rape, we should as a society treat them like tigers, and not allow them to walk around freely. Who lets tigers roam the streets unchecked?
"They are violating my right to be unviolated when they don't leave me alone, however, a right which I very much have and cannot lose by any behavior of mine."
Yeah, but the point is they *will* violate it. Quibbling about whether you're morally or legally in the right when they do is completely irrelevant to that fact, and you'll never convince the predatory men to lay off by arguing with nerds on a nerd blog. You have the *right* according to the law to be left alone, but in practice, you *will not be* consistently left alone and as such *must as a practical fact* take responsibility for protecting yourself, whether you like it or not, or else consciously take the risk of putting yourself in danger and accept the consequences.
"we should as a society treat them like tigers, and not allow them to walk around freely"
We should, as a society? Do you realize that the people you're asking to enforce a curfew on all men in this scenario *are in fact men*? If you think you're going to successfully get us to agree to oppress the shit out of ourselves because you refuse to take normal sensible precautions about engaging in objectively risky behavior, you've got another think coming. Respectfully, *you're* going to have to take responsibility for protecting yourself, instead.
"We should, as a society? Do you realize that the people you're asking to enforce a curfew on all men in this scenario *are in fact men*? If you think you're going to successfully get us to agree to oppress the shit out of ourselves because you refuse to take normal sensible precautions about engaging in objectively risky behavior, you've got another think coming."
A significant plurality, if not outright majority, of men are quite firmly in favour of shouldering most of the burden of controlling ourselves when it comes to sexual behaviour, even in the face of such galling provocations as... exposed ankles, bare midriffs, and swaying hips. Self-control and personal responsibility are masculine virtues even by the most conservative of norms.
Perhaps you ought to factor that into your political calculations.
Interesting, I think it's extremely important to lay out who has the right to what even as you acknowledge that reality falls short of that right being respected. I find it to be crucial in my understanding of my sense of self that I do not exist to be violated, that I have every right to freedom from fear, that I have the right to be treated with dignity, and aberrations from such treatment while perhaps frequent, are not in any sense of the word, deserved.
> normal sensible precautions
I am imagining you living in a neighborhood overrun by tigers, and your response being anything other than "Let's kill these animals so that I can go back to walking the streets freely and without fear." But it's you, I believe, who think men are tigers. I don't. I think they can control themselves, and shouldn't be treated like dangerous animals, even as I recognize that many of them will refuse to act on their ability for self control.
It all depends on what you think "normal" should be. It seems you think that male freedom to walk freely should never be abridged even as you declare their inability to control themselves. I find this very odd.
>>>"that a woman has to prove that she's not interested...is insane to me"
Welcome to men, whose brains are not like ordinary humans.
(To be fair, it's not so much "I think that woman is into sleeping with me" as it is a sort of constant "I hope that woman is interested in sleeping with me, better to check and see if she is.")
Also, caucasian America females who have not traveled outside their bubbles or the country have no idea how well behaved our men are. (AA and Latino men are much more direct and in-your-face, but are nothing on mideast guys.)
I'm not white nor have I never traveled outside the US. My experiences in the Middle East and Latin America align with your description although I'm not sure why you are lumping in African American men with other foreign, non-American men. I also disagree that this default expectation of sex is something innate in men. I think it's cultural. It used to be that a woman had to prove she was going to break away from a norm of no sex, now she has to prove she is going to break away from a norm of casual sex. I think it's an insane norm and I refuse to act like it should be accepted.
No, not culture. Hormones, testosterone. Listen to David Buss in the mentioned podcast about this exact topic https://www.jordanharbinger.com/david-buss-when-men-behave-badly/. Money quote: A 85 year old man feels tortured by his brain because it wants to evaluate each and every woman he passes by for intercourse qualities. He cannot change this.
What do his thoughts have to do with his actions? If he can't control his brain that's too bad for him, and I genuinely feel sorry for him, but his lack of self control over his thoughts doesn't give him license to touch me.
>>>I'm not sure why you are lumping in African American men with other foreign, non-American men.
1) Personal experience. 2) Personal experience of friends & relatives. 3) Popular culture 4) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_QtAbBDkWc 5) US DOJ crime stats (note: most of what we as women view as obnoxious is not at all actionable and is completely legal) but the rape/assault rates are an indicative of the relative cultural sexual aggressiveness.)
>>>It used to be that a woman had to prove she was going to break away from a norm of no sex, now she has to prove she is going to break away from a norm of casual sex.
I disagree. I don't think that it was ever the case that women met with resistance *from perspective male partners* when they indicated that they were up for casual sex. From broader society, including married women who didn't want casual sex to be widely approved of, yes.
I don't know about insane. I don't think it's helpful to the community as a whole.
My husband is black. I don't have an objection to noticing black men are more open about sex. I object strongly to grouping them with non-American men, as if white men are the standard bearer for what it means to be American.
I'm not sure why you think I said that women indicating they were up for casual sex met with resistance from men. I said that the default assumption used to be no casual sex, and that a woman would have to prove she was up for something else, while now the default is casual sex. I'm fine with describing the change in default as unhelpful.
Thanks for your clear words! Now we only need to find a good way and balance to not frighten her to death of men but make the reality conscious to her.
For me, it was a class on wilderness survival that helped me figure some of this out.
The instructor talked about how animals (horses, sheep, cattle) on the open range will 'drift' before a strong wind, always moving so that their tails were towards the wind. It's possible, the man said, to force a ridden horse to move directly into the wind, but if one attempts to ride at right angles to a strong wind, the horse will shift until it is once more moving before the wind. In the same way, people who are lost in the mountains or forest will move downhill, unless they are extremely focused on staying up on the slope or crest of the hill. It's not anything planned, it's just an unconscious constant impulse. He had us practice it, and sure enough, we all ended up drifting downslope.
A great number of things that we-as-humans do are unconscious like that - watch young kids (either gender) react to babies, and note how even young gals tote around dolls. The impulse to "take care of things with big eyes and big heads" is written very, very very deep in the genome, and it's a good thing, cause it's how our grandmas got grandbabies.
As humans we can't erase these impulses, even though as individuals we express them in different ways. But as reasoning beings we need to be aware of them just as we are aware of optical illusions, of bad decisionmaking when we are stressed, exhausted or drunk, of how we don't need to eat every gram of sugar or fat that we come across. We can work against these impulses, but like gravity, they are always there.
Why do you assume your daughter lacks a self preservation instinct?
Also, the effectiveness of any influence you want to exert will be based on how much she trusts your judgment. Between her entering teen years, and you coming off like in this post, I'd estimate that trust to be either close to zero or negative - as in she'd do what you forbid just to spite you.
Girls are socialized in a lot of really counter-productive ways which often make them reluctant to stand up for themselves or defend themselves. They are also sometimes taught ideologies which make them fail to see threats as threats. I needed to be explicitly taught what the dangers are and also what are good strategies for dealing with them, and I don't think I'm unusual in that by any means.
This is a common recommendation but I think every young woman should be encouraged to read "The Gift of Fear." It's not primarily targeted at the issues Marc is thinking about, but it has a way of opening one's eyes to a new way of viewing the world. It repeatedly encourages women to notice the stupid voice in their head saying, "Just ignore that, I'm sure he's harmless, don't be a bitch," and then recognize that that voice is not their friend. And that's an *extremely* important message for young women to get.
The reason I'm asking here after bringing this topic up with my wife is exactly to not fall into the traps you are mentioning. Our impression is that our kids are trusting a lot into their parents guidance and wisdom. We try to let them understand the world with the support of their parents life experiences and views.
I asume it's similar with many if not most parents in Scott's community of unusual humans.
So we parents are really unsure how to balance precaution with freedom in this special case. Like most commenters here I'd like to predict the future by actively forming it. So we want or girl to feel free of expressing herself, make good and bad experiences as well etc. But we want to give her the tools at hand to navigate around potentially really harmful events. Life is to short and valuable in our opinion that each individual doesn't need to know all possible cruelty happening in the world by first hand experience. Neighbors lost their 10 years old boy this year while he was skiing with friends of his parents otside the ski slope and fall 100 meters off a cliff. He was a daily schoolmate of our kids. Everybody was so sad. Sometimes there is a fine line between giving freedom and behaving irresponsible and careless.
He came off great in the comment.
Even accepting your premise, the goal would be to be hitched to a good protector, and *not* be hitched to some guy who will get her pregnant and leave.
"I can't even comprehend a universe where a daughter doesn't respect her father."
I hope you realize that's a limit of your imagination, not a limit of the universe.
My mother was emotionally dominant in my family, and I have trouble believing people who say their father was dominant. That's just my lack of imagination, though.
When I was a young woman, anything I wore was sexy, alluring, and "asking for it" to a certain demographic. If they can determine that a person is a nubile young woman, not extraordinarily ugly, they become aroused, thus proving to themselves that she's dressing to display her sexuality, and thus available.
A girl *might* be able to be non-provocative if she successfully costumed herself as an old woman, which might be possible in an area that practiced extreme Moslem dress customs (face veiling etc.). Or if she happens to have the kind of body, and voice, that can pass for male, and did so.
But failing either of those, to certain Dicks-with-legs, and some of their female enablers, she's "asking for it" and "deserved whatever happened".
I very much doubt this has really changed, in spite of the Me Too movement, and the concept of "rape culture". At best, the proportion men of this type has reduced somewhat.
Sexual assault from total strangers is extremely unlikely in any case, and like you say, what you wear is far from the most important risk factor. Advice of the kind of not to walk dark alleys late at night is more relevant here, and being careful with drugs/drinking obviously.
You are talking utter nonsense. Creepy evil men are EXACTLY the problem. Sexy dancing and dressing hurts nobody. Sexual Assault is an evil violent act. The problem is the assaulters, not the women. How about we treat humans like actual people instead of rape-bots programmed to assault a woman the moment she acts like anything other than an oppressed house wife?
Hey Chaz: I say tell 'em to dress sexy but carry a big stick --- also to speak right up to anyone who tells them to pipe down.
The truth is simple. Women (and men) are free to wear whatever they want, and should not be told otherwise. Men (and women) who view this as an invitation to harass and assault are the problem, and should not be told otherwise. That's it. Story ends. Roll credits. We don't need to go back to square one.
We just need to make sure everyone knows that it is always, without exception or caveat, ALWAYS the assaulter who is the problem and never not even a tiny bit ever the victim. Unfortunately, your brand of lies are a common evil in the world, but at least you're a dying breed.
If you tell people what *should* be, without a strong side order of what *actually is*, a lot of people who could have avoided harm will instead be badly hurt. And you can piously blame that on the other people, the "creepy evil men" or whatever, who didn't do what you told them they should do, but they still did that and innocent people still got badly hurt in ways that could have been prevented by giving them useful advice rather than idealistic platitudes.
The anger you feel about mixed-gender wrestling is alien to me, as a straight guy who has trained judo with plenty of women over the years. I find it quite automatic to compartmentalise training partners as not-subjects-for-sexual-consideration.
Obviously sexual abuse in martial arts does happen, but it's not clear to me that its incidence is higher than anywhere else. And it would be a shame if an interested young woman had to deny herself such a pursuit simply out of fear of bodily contact with men.
>>>I find it quite automatic to compartmentalise training partners as not-subjects-for-sexual-consideration
I share your concern that otherwise interested women would opt out of martial arts - I have found it extremely useful on multiple levels.
I do note that my current senior instructor (who teaches in partnership with his wife) is pretty firm on female students always wearing a gi top in class. He says that he's perfectly ok working with gals in gi tops, but knows himself enough to know that he gets distracted and gets unwelcome impulses if we're walking around with the girls bouncing in the breeze, particularly if there is any upper body grappling. I myself welcome the honesty with which he broached the topic, and that he trusted myself and the other female student he had pulled aside to talk to about this to understand where he was coming from.
So, rash guards, for example, are out of the question? That's an unusual point of view, and quite outside of my experience.
On the one hand, better this kind of honesty than something unfortunate happening down the road.
On the other hand, without overly disparaging this man whom I have not met, I take a dim view of his shifting the responsibility for his impulses to his female students, instead of developing the requisite self-discipline. It leads me to wonder what else is he incapable of controlling - the intensity of his sparring, perhaps?
I think, possibly, you might be letting us off a little too easy. Yes, there are certain vestigial biological imperatives rattling around at the back of everyone's mind, but they're not an adequate excuse for bad behaviour. Standard acculturation is more than enough for the vast majority of adult straight men to work alongside attractive women, strike up comfortable platonic friendships with women, read sexual signals mostly accurately, and in sexually charged social situations to back off when told 'no'.
The question then becomes identifying and avoiding the dangerous minority. But I don't think forswearing all enjoyable things in life that involve mixed company (even including flirting and feeling sexy, as a young adult) is a worthwhile or fair strategy.
Wrestling, BJJ, and MMA aren't strictly my bailiwick, but I don't share your skepticism of women getting into combat sports. Sure, we can rabbit on about sex-based athletic ceilings, and pound for pound men being more effective, and all the rest, but why shouldn't everyone make the best of the body they have?
And that term, 'brothel', is very harsh. If some hormone-deluged fifteen-year-old gets flustered because he realises while rolling that his partner has curves, that's not the end of the world. Civilisation will survive. And one could argue that well-supervised non-sexual body contact with the opposite sex (particularly combined with an ethos of self-mastery and self-control) is useful conditioning for teenagers.
By your own measure, you're permitting this woman to be "whored out" with your silence and contributing to that "madhouse world" that causes you to fly into near-fury. I'd take this as a sign that you need to analyze whether your visceral reaction comes from moral intuition or some other feeling- or, alternatively, whether your choice to remain silent is genuinely moral by the standards you set for others (as we should generally strive for moral consistency). As it is, you seem by your own admission to be a bit hypocritical with your morality, which isn't good either from a rationality or a psychological perspective.
Speaking of Christmas and A Christmas Carol, which we weren’t - what did the Cratchit family have for dinner on Christmas Day?
Tiny Tim?
Ha..
Elements of the humor: Unexpectedness. But not randomly unexpected, right? -- because it's sort of ripping the scab off the fact that none of us love Tiny Tim as much as Dickens wants us too, because Tiny Tim's kinda sappy.
And we all already know that about ourselves, but it's a treat to hear that I know that about myself too. And to be invited to acknowledge that you feel that way too. Ha.
I’m not sure how sappy Tiny Tim is but Oscar Wilde said of the very sentimental death of Little Nell in the Old Curiosity Shop, that it would take a heart of stone not to laugh.
It was a goose bought by Scrooge.
He bought them a turkey.
Quite right. My mistake.
But that’s the thing. Did the Crachit family eat a big Turkey or a small goose on that Christmas Day? Was the ghost of Christmas present showing the near future or was it just some kind of hallucination? I think it’s the actual next day, but by showing Scrooge that day the day changed, or the timeline split.
I think it’s the first example of timeline splitting in literature, although of course A Christmas Carol isn’t seen as sci fi.
I always thought of it as the ghost of Christmas present showing Scrooge what things would be like without his intervention. So, an alternative universe if you like
“Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point,” said Scrooge, “answer me one question. Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only?”
Still the Ghost pointed downward to the grave by which it stood.
“Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead,” said Scrooge. “But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me!”
The Spirit was immovable as ever.
Scrooge crept towards it, trembling as he went; and following the finger, read upon the stone of the neglected grave his own name, Ebenezer Scrooge.
“Spirit!” he cried, tight clutching at its robe, “hear me! I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I must have been but for this intercourse. Why show me this, if I am past all hope!”
For the first time the hand appeared to shake.
“Good Spirit,” he pursued, as down upon the ground he fell before it: “Your nature intercedes for me, and pities me. Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you have shown me, by an altered life!”
The kind hand trembled.
“I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach. Oh, tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone!”
In his agony, he caught the spectral hand. It sought to free itself, but he was strong in his entreaty, and detained it. The Spirit, stronger yet, repulsed him.
Holding up his hands in a last prayer to have his fate reversed, he saw an alteration in the Phantom’s hood and dress. It shrunk, collapsed, and dwindled down into a bedpost.
Yes! and the bedpost was his own. The bed was his own, the room was his own. Best and happiest of all, the Time before him was his own, to make amends in!
“I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future!” Scrooge repeated, as he scrambled out of bed. “The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. Oh Jacob Marley! Heaven, and the Christmas Time be praised for this! I say it on my knees, old Jacob; on my knees!”
He was so fluttered and so glowing with his good intentions, that his broken voice would scarcely answer to his call. He had been sobbing violently in his conflict with the Spirit, and his face was wet with tears.
“They are not torn down,” cried Scrooge, folding one of his bed-curtains in his arms, “they are not torn down, rings and all. They are here—I am here—the shadows of the things that would have been, may be dispelled. They will be. I know they will!”
So the Christmas Past was what was, and couldn't be changed. Christmas Future was what was to come, if he didn't change. Christmas Present was the nearest one, and that was changed when Scrooge decided to change. The Crachits would have had the small goose, but Scrooge bought the big turkey and sent it round early on Christmas Day: thinking about it, I'm going to split the difference - they had *both*. The goose was already prepared for cooking, so eating that for their dinner and then cooking the turkey for the next days' meals would be good housekeeping. The goose was small enough to be eaten without left-overs, and cooking the big turkey would have taken longer, so by the time it was cooked, they could have had some of it for supper and kept the rest for the next day.
Has any of you guys heard of any data about whether the immunity after COVID vaccine boosters decays any less quickly than after the primary vaccination cycle? In Turkey and in the Emirates several million people had been boosted by July, so they might probably kinda sorta be able to tell by now.
From an article at Business Insider, https://www.businessinsider.com/how-long-does-booster-protection-omicron-covid-last-study-2021-12?utm_source=reddit.com
"Booster protection against symptomatic illness caused by the Omicron variant dropped by up to 25% within 10 weeks, new real-world data found — though it's not yet clear whether everyone may need further doses in 2022.
The UK Health Security Agency said protection against symptomatic COVID-19 caused by the variant dropped from 70% to 45% after a Pfizer booster for those initially vaccinated with the shot developed by Pfizer with BioNTech.
In the same analysis published on Thursday, the agency found the effectiveness of Moderna's booster paired with two doses of the Pfizer vaccine held at 70% to 75% for up to nine weeks, though not many people in the study received this regimen, which could affect the accuracy of the finding."
Article goes on to say that Israeli findings are similar.
Help me understand:
If antibody treatments made for prior variants aren't any good against Omicron, why do antibodies from the booster help?
The premise of your question is faulty. The antibodies from the Pfizer shot aren't completely ineffective, just much less so. The booster raises the amount of the antibodies enough to counter their diminished effectiveness against Omicron vs Covid Classic.
https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-detail/pfizer-and-biontech-provide-update-omicron-variant
I wasn't saying antibodies from prior vaccines were ineffective.
I was saying *antibody treatments* like Rengeron's stuff. Those seem to be near-useless against Omicron (although they can be re-formulated for Omicron).
A good source of general info about covid, immunization, etc is Your Local Epidemiologist, on Substack. She seems to have no axes to grind, & to be smart, honest and clear.
Has she addressed this?
I've been asking my above question on various places, including Zvi's, and haven't gotten a response. (You have given me the most engagement, so thanks.) I'm not really feeling up to paying $5 to have my question ignored again.
I can't remember whether she's addressed it directly. If she hasn't, she's addressed matters adjacent to it. And her posts include links to data sets and research papers, so you can look further into something if you have further questions.
You can read her posts themselves for free. Paying just gets you access to the comments. But even if you got a paid subscription, it's unlikely you'd get an answer to this question if you posted it in comments. Jetelina does answer a few questions from readers, but not many, and the comments that follow her blog are rarely dialogs among readers, and even when they are they are not the sort of informed exchanges that (sometimes) happen here. I am suggesting that you read Jetelina's posts because they will either answer your question, or give you a decent sense of what the likely answer is, or put you in a position to figure out the answer with half an hour or so of online searching and reading.
Regarding your question about covid & immunity, I'm in the position of having a decent sense of what the likely answer is, but I have retired from posting what I know about covid here on ACX. In this currently thread, which has an exceptionally high level of incivility, I've put up 2 posts in which I was not at all claiming to be an expert, just trying to give someone a lead, get jumped on by someone who was playing gotcha, and who had no info to contribute, just some spit to spray in my face while they yelled.
My speculation with no evidence behind it: recency. If you just had a strong immune reaction, your immune system is still highly on guard. That drops over time, because your immune system cannot permanently be highly on guard for everything. Having extra guards helps even if they are looking for the wrong intruders.
If that speculation is correct, we should see similar, somewhat smaller effects from a recent 1st or 2nd dose, not just from a recent 3rd dose. If anyone is researching that, I would love a link.
Why exactly raising hospital capacity in response to COVID waves is currently universally treated as a complete, absolute impossibility?
The calls to "flatten the curve" in March 2020 were explicitly based on the idea that while the curve is being flattened, this buys time to increase healthcare capacity. In fact, when you check out the wikipedia article "Flattening the curve", it does say in the very second paragraph: "A complementary measure is to increase health care capacity, to "raise the line".[4] As described in an article in The Nation, "preventing a health care system from being overwhelmed requires a society to do two things: 'flatten the curve'—that is, slow the rate of infection so there aren't too many cases that need hospitalization at one time—and 'raise the line'—that is, boost the hospital system's capacity to treat large numbers of patients."". And there is a nice friendly animation of the curve flattening that includes the words "increase healthcare capacity".
Nowadays though if you try to mention increasing healthcare capacity and specifically the number of ICU beds, which has always been the main issue, you always get the canned response: "this is impossible because we don't have enough personnel and it takes many years to train new ICU personnel".
But why was it widely seen as possible in March 2020? The issue wasn't really any different back then, it still was about ICU beds. Well, at first there was of course some inordinate attention to ventilators (which soon turned out not to be a big deal) but presumably you still need ICU personnel to operate these ventilators, so this does not change anything.
Here in Finland there are apparently some 250-300 ICU beds in the country of 5.5 million, and in March 2020 our health authorities claimed that this could reasonably be spun up to 1000 beds at least, and probably more. Nowadays apparently 50 ICU beds used by COVID patients is dire enough that wide-ranging restrictions for vaccinated and unvaccinated alike began again. I understand that "1000 beds" number applies when much if not most of other healthcare is winded down, just to weather the crisis. But if we're having a crisis again, why doesn't this logic apply anymore? Surely with most of the country vaccinated we still won't need anywhere close to 1000 beds, but having such a limit at 50, in a Nordic country which is widely seen as one of the most successful and functional countries in the world, sounds really rather ridiculous.
Apparently over these two years hospital capacity was in fact downsized in at least some places (at least not in Finland though), and vaccine mandates caused some nurses to quit some other places. I don't believe either of these can be a huge factor. I don't, however, understand, why no one tried, you know, PAYING COVID personnel consistently and significantly more, like 2x more than you'd normally get paid in the same position. Surely at the very least there must be a significant number of people trained as ICU nurses who are employed elsewhere, but could return to ICUs with large enough material stimulus. It's not like governments were shy about getting in debt over these two years.
But even that aside, what exactly makes it a complete, absolute impossibility to train new personnel to treat this one, specific illness under known, specific protocols? I've seem claims that it takes 5+ years to train an ICU nurse. This much time is enough to get a university degree, and getting a university degree also presupposes you need to learn to do research by yourself, write papers etc. None of that is necessary for nurses.
I find it extremely hard to believe that in 2 years it is not possible to train people who could do useful work in COVID ICUs. Admittedly with how the pandemic developed it would have been difficult for anyone in spring 2020 to predict we would actually need that; the first wave went down to near-zero in much of the world by summer and many thought (including me) that was it; then we were waiting for approval and then rollout of vaccines, and many thought (including me) that when enough people are vaccinated, this would be it. By now it seems clear that unless we're really lucky and Omicron wave is the last one (and at this point I don't really believe it anymore), this is going continue for years and we do in fact need to expand healthcare capacity. (Actually some hospitals here in Finland indeed announced that they are going to do that, if not by especially much and not especially quickly.)
But even so, why would it be impossible to train people in some months to at least help in ICUs? Sure, they wouldn't be fully capable but surely there must be some jobs to do that demand time and effort but don't require THAT much experience and knowledge. Sure, the standard of care would be reduced and more people might not survive ICU, but isn't that a crisis? If ICUs are really overflowing the standard of care would be reduced anyway.
Basically what I would really like to see is some description/timetable of which particular procedures some example COVID patients underwent while in ICU, and/or which particular procedures some example ICU nurses did over a few working days in COVID ICU. As detailed as possible, with precise notes which kind of knowledge you need to do every particular procedure. Surely even if really nothing can be done, such transparency would at least answer questions for people like me. Right now we're basically told: "these people are wizards, they are doing wizard jobs, you don't and can't understand anything about wizard jobs, no one else can ever be taught to do wizard jobs (in any meaningful timeframe at least) and everything we do is meant to make sure wizards are not overloaded in their jobs, otherwise an untold catastrophe will happen". (I also have an issue with treating overloaded ICUs as an untold catastrophe, but that's perhaps an another subject to discuss.)
What you described in the last paragraphs was actually implemented, to a limited extent, in Finland. I (a physician in an very unrelated field) attended a short training for treating respiratory failure associated with covid-19 in March 2020. Together with the simultaneous short-lived enactment of the “emergency law” (enabling something akin to military mobilization for medical personnel) and curtailment of elective treatment, we could have (theoretically) flooded hospitals with “conscripted” doctors and nurses (as well as senior students in those fields) to administer care. While this would have undoubtedly resulted in masses of lethal blunders prior to these personnel learning the ropes, it would probably have been preferable to people going without care at all. Of course, this theoretical extra capacity ended up not being needed in Finland in 2020 (and I think that at least my specialty should be kept well away from ICU patients in all but the most catastrophic of situations :) However, if things got bad enough, we could of course do the same, and this would be much less expensive than adding a large number of “real” ICU personnel to be kept in reserve.
So, why are we not doing this (or something similar) currently? While I agree with you that the rationale for the newest round of restrictions is questionable, I can think of at least two potential reasons why a more long-term approach to increasing ICU capacity hasn’t been adopted as an alternative to restrictions (and vaccine booster campaigns):
1) Increasing ICU capacity is a linear process, spreading disease an exponential one. In a (thankfully) counterfactual world where this variant were as severe as the previous variants with significant immune-escape properties, doubling the ICU capacity (a monumental and expensive task) would only delay the need for restrictions by 2-3 days (current estimate for the doubling time of omicron), ceteris paribus.
2) The economic basis for avoiding lockdowns via having covid run through a population and treating the most badly affected in ICU may be dubious. Like with many other severe illnesses, it is not as though you jump up from the hospital bed and return to your everyday life once the acute illness has passed; according to Finnish statistics, about 40 percent of those treated in ICU for covid hadn’t be able to return to work after three months, and many require extensive and costly rehabilitation. Some of those treated in ordinary wards also end up (at least anecdotally) with long sick leaves. Add in potential breathless media stories about overloaded hospitals, and people would curtail their use of services etc. to some extent even without any restrictions (though I understand that the relative financial effects of this and restrictions are contentious among economists).
I'm a respiratory therapist--and a new one, at that--not a nurse. But I do have some perspective on this. I'm just not sure how to approach this question.
On the one hand, no, I wouldn't try training half-nurses for the ICU. Half of an ICU nurse is basically a nurse from another part of the hospital, who is honestly pretty well tits on a bull where ICU stuff is concerned. It's not a matter of mastering a list of discrete tasks (though there are a lot of specialized aptitudes like starting PICC lines) so much as being able to recognize and handle a number of weird problems that might come up. A nurse from the stepdown area can recognize basic issues, but will very likely panic if somebody codes because stepdown nurses just aren't used to dealing with stuff like that.
I speak from experience here; I got called to a code blue in the orthopedic floor a couple of weeks ago, and it took me a while (like over a full minute) to get there. They still hadn't gotten a bag-valve mask to begin oxygenating the patient by the time I arrived. Just one nurse pushing on the chest while the others looked anxious. Crash cart wasn't opened, and I'm not even sure if anybody was keeping time. Basic how-to-run-a-code stuff wasn't getting done. Because they were ortho nurses, and their job was to keep the patient alive and reasonably mobile while PT did their thing, not to address crises. Just for one example.
So yeah, you could get a quick-and-dirty nurse sub without the experience, but she'd be little more than a tech, good for wiping butts and checking blood sugar. If things went pear-shaped she'd be more of a liability than anything else; she wouldn't likely recognize the danger signs and when the code happened she'd be one more body hanging out in the room gawking uselessly.
At the same time, however, I have to say that I think you're asking the wrong question anyway. It would be politically impossible to implement any such change in the short term, at least in the US. You know how in the Middle Ages every profession had guilds, who fixed prices and discouraged new competitors and otherwise jacked up the market? Something similar obtains in American healthcare, at least for RTs like me, and I'm pretty sure the situation is if anything worse for nurses because there are a lot more of them and they make more money. My profession has three different governing bodies plus a different certification board for every state but Alaska, and your odds of getting any change in standards past them (to say nothing of sundry other bureaucracies like the various Medicare goblins) can be expressed by the mathematical formula [((Jack*Squat)^2)/(self-interest*fear of change)].
Basically, the first congressperson you persuade to take up your cause will have the airwaves flooded with ads along the lines of "Senator Wilberforce wants to lower standards of care for the healthcare professionals keeping your loved ones alive, against the advice of this terrifying list of professional organizations. Senator Wilberforce doesn't care if your grandmother lives. Shame on you, Senator Wilberforce!"
It's tempting to say "so we need to get those rent-seekers out of the way," but the hell of it is, somebody needs to give advice about healthcare, and if you got rid of the professional organizations I'm afraid that would leave the field to people like the aforementioned Medicare Goblins--J. Co. and the other hardcore bureaucratic parasites. Who probably are the single most useless set of people in American healthcare, and I say that inclusive of the Medicare fraudsters they're supposed to be guarding against. Doctors and nurses, unlike medieval shoemakers, really do need to have a major say in how their profession is regulated.
And I'm going to leave it at that, because if I tried to come up with an actual solution for our jacked-up system it'd be too long to post. Also, I do have to sleep at some point tonight.
I just don’t think the incentives exist to raise ICU capacity. Capacity markets generally exist as a regulatory requirement, like in energy and banking.
Business operators are more than capable of sorting out all the mechanics when the incentives exist.
What does the phrase “pushes the question back” mean?
The capacity markets that I’m aware of are mandated by regulation.
Because the government isn’t good at changing regulation dynamically. Because healthcare regulation is really hard to change.
Are those insufficient explanations? I just don’t see the capacity issue as something that gets solved by analyzing and micromanaging each friction point of bringing additional capacity online. Healthcare operators know how to do this. They just aren’t incentivized and we shouldn’t expect any industry stakeholder to spend money on resources that will decrease utilization and ultimately compress margins.
Kenny's claims below that in March 2020 we were overly optimistic about how we could increase staffing. But I would like to add a second reason why we don't increase ICU capacity.
In March 2020 we were overly pessimistic about medical development. At the time governments did not think we could have vaccines out so fast. So now if you're going to flatten the curve people are going to use that time to get more people vaccinated, or start rolling out the new antivirals, rather than try to build another emergency hospital.
I think all along the issue has always been staffing. In March 2020, people thought that maybe staffing could be increased by a big hiring initiative. But by March 2021, it had become clear that employers of *all* sorts were having staffing issues (the "great resignation" as they call it now) and medical facilities were having *additional* problems due to burnout.
If the pandemic had triggered a period of mass unemployment where people were generally having a hard time finding work, and were actively looking for it, the way the 2008 financial crisis did, then staffing up medical facilities might have been as easy as adding a few tens of billions to hospital budgets in one of the big relief bills. But since the bigger economic effect of the pandemic has turned out to be a *tightening* of the labor market, this seems harder.
My exact thoughts, well put. Especially the Wizards metaphor. I'd love to see this discussion leak into the political sphere.
Seconded
Yes, the bottleneck seems to be the number of nurses, and it's part of a much bigger problem, the one that medical staff are kind of overloaded and new specialists are not being educated fast enough, even if there wasn't a pandemic. There are a couple of things to do that anyone can think of in a few seconds, e.g. 1) pay the nurses and doctors twice as much, and 2) accept more immigrant specialists, or, as you said, 3) shorten the time of preparing some specific specialists like ICU nurses.
1) would help best in the long run, and here in Estonia I find it almost inevitable, as half of our family doctors are over 60 and we'll just run out of doctors if nothing drastic is done soon (I don't know if it's this bad in Finland or not). This will have a hard limit at some point because many people just don't have the right type of neurology to become doctors/nurses, no matter how much you pay them, but I don't know if it's a problem, maybe the limit is so high that it won't matter. 2) Can be difficult because these cold and dark countries aren't awfully attractive to immigrants, and 3) ... the problem with this may be ossified bureaucracies? If some agent tries to shorten the study period of some specific medical specialists they will meet fierce opposition by other agents who don't want to lower the standards for something as dangerous as medical staff.
A few thoughts from a student nurse. It doesn't literally take 5 years to train a competent ICU nurse. Some hospitals will hire new grad nurses (nurses straight out of their BSN or MSN program) into the ICU. Formal training is usually a few months, and the nurse usually isn't considered totally up to speed for about a year. However, the training is very resource intensive and specifically requires ICU nurses, therefore it is hard to do if all the ICU nurses are desperately needed caring for patients. The way you train a nurse is basically by having one experienced nurse and one new nurse split the normal patient load for one nurse. New nurse does as much as possible supervised by experienced nurse. After a few months of this (called preceptorship) the new nurse is allowed to take her own patients. During this independent but new period she will be asking a lot of questions and taking up time of experienced nurses.
I know of some hospitals which had experienced non-ICU nurses help out in the ICU. They didn't take on a patient assignment, but took on less specialized tasks like helping to prone patients, take blood sugars, whatever. This strategy expands the capacity of ICU nurses (might allow them to safely take 2-3 vs 1-2 patients) but hospitals also don't have a ton of extra non-ICU nurses floating around. Also, as a note to the commenter from Finland, nurses in the US are generally required to have a university degree to work in acute care. The reasoning behind that is that nurses need to be able to interpret research to inform their own precinct and educate patients - I don't fully agree with the requirement, but it is what it is
I think private prisons is a bad idea. But if you have private prisons, they should be paid based on how well they rehabilitate the prisoners. So the longer a released prisoner goes without committing any crime or dying, the more money the prison gets. Maybe with a maximum of 10 years or something.
The reason the prison doesn't get money if the prisoner dies, is otherwise the prison would have an incentive to make their prisoners unhealthy, so that the prisoners would die instead of committing crimes.
Private prisons are an excellent example of a "moral hazard" - a financial incentive to lock people up: what could possibly go wrong? Thinking up ways to make private prisons something other than a moral hazard might be an interesting intellectual exercise, but it kinda seems like thinking up ways to make genocide ethical. Unless reliably inflicting capital punishment on insufficiently ethical judges and prosecutors is part of the package, I don't see it working in the real world.
It's an incentive to lock people up and deprive them.
There's the same moral hazard for prison guard unions.
I mean, being a prison guard has to be a pretty thankless and depressing job. And I’m sure it’s quite a fine line to walk sometimes when you’re trying to make sure the inmates don’t kill each other, or you, and you don’t want to use excessive force but you’re dealing with people who often have a history of erratic behavior, violence and bad decisions. Unions have a way of correcting some legitimate injustices while causing others, but I do think private prisons are a worse and more clear-cut moral hazard than prison guard unions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Correctional_Peace_Officers_Association#Political_activity
"Lobbying efforts and campaign contributions by the CCPOA have helped secure passage of numerous legislative bills favorable to union members, including bills that increase prison terms, member pay, and enforce current drug laws. The CCPOA takes the position that correctional officers perform an essential public service that work in great danger, and strives for a safer California."
I wasn't speaking hypothetically.
This is making a bold assumption about the point of prisons. The government runs public prisons which don't seem to optimize for rehabilitation, so why would it want private prisons that do?
I am talking about what people ought to do, not what they are currently doing.
Anyway some governments try to optimize for rehabilitation.
Bryan Caplan instead though that private prisons should be chosen by the prisoners themselves, like vouchers for schooling. I thought there was an obvious problem in that prisons would be incentivized to be so lax as to permit gang leaders to still run their gangs from prison, traffic in drugs etc. Robin Hanson's idea of letting insurance companies punish their own clients is a more sensible version of that.
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2019/09/who-vouches-for-you.html
Mark Kleiman similarly proposed that schools be evaluated on how much their students commit crime, thus incentivizing them not to release their kids before adults get back to work (however much this might make the faculty's commute worse). I'm skeptical of "rehabilitation", but one imagines there's more scope for molding children than adults.
If I am choosing which prison to go to, the one where there aren't gangs and I'm unlikely to die will be the primary criterion.
Like when choosing food, the primary criterion is that it's not poison. That is, it's such an important criterion that it will become a floor that every prison meets instantly.
I'm guessing you're unrepresentative of prisoners. Members of gangs are far more likely to go to prison. And the death rate in prison is already very low, they have on-site hospitals after all. https://www.econlib.org/archives/2007/10/crime_fiction_v.html
To pick it up from a slightly different angle, criminal gangs are incentivized to coerce prisoners to "chose" prisons where the gangs are allowed to operate.
Other perverse incentives:
1) The private company would be incentivised to cover up crimes by ex-prisoners,
2) Ex-prisoners would be incentivised to blackmail the private company for payments when released to avoid them committing crime (maybe this is a good thing!).
Another question. Is rehabilitation actually real? I get the impression that since most crime is committed by young men, the secret is to lock them up until they are past the age of peak criminality (mid 30s or so) and then let them out (tariff permitting). The reduced reoffending rate is just a reflection of the lower crime rate of the older male cohort.
Mind you, your idea would at least force a company to put their money at stake on testing rehabilitation strategies so we could see if any actually do anything.
Worse, the private company would be incentivised to arrange for the conviction of a bunch of innocents, because the class of person least likely to reoffend is someone who never offended in the first place.
This is not a big problem if the private prison is not a monopoly: framing people is an awful lot of work to go to if the system only sends you 20% of the prisoners you create.
I'm looking for something and maybe someone here can tell me where to find it
It's sort of a site dedicated to explaining what rent is, with little graphics of squares of land with apple trees on it. I probably found it on Reddit
Does it ring a bell with anyone?
Remembered the name of the sub where you solicit help finding lost things on the internet: https://www.reddit.com/r/HelpMeFind/
No. But there used to be, and maybe still is, a Reddit sub devoted to questions like yours. People who remembered just the barest details about a children's book or certain kind of candy or whatever would post what they remembered, hoping somebody could help them identify the thing. Often someone on the sub was actually able to do it.
Now if only we could remember the name of that sub...
Found the sub! See above
Is there anything rational about humor?
I tend to think of it as the last exit before the highway to despair.
At least there is something deeply spiritual about humour. Looks lost in much of Islam and Christianity but seems more alive among jews and maybe buddhists. I wonder about Hinduism. Some sadhus look real funny.
I would highly recommend the book Inside Jokes by Hurley, Dennett, and Adams. Yes, that Dennett. There are a lot of theories of humor but this book went way deeper to explain not just what it is (that you know when you see it) but _why_ such a weird thing exists.
This book's concept would seem to be of great interest to this audience because not only is there a "rational" component to humor, it is a key cornerstone of rational thinking. In a nutshell, humor is based on the positive brain chemistry feedback mechanisms humans (at least) evolved for rewarding "getting the joke" which is equivalent to suddenly correcting a big misunderstanding about the world. Note that there's an important caveat that the "valence" must not be tragic or personally awful for the experiencer. So humor really is mostly about other people's problems or your minor problems that exercise your ability to get a new perspective on things.
Anyway, don't judge a book by my stupid recap - check it out. And interesting to people who like music, this book's thinking is based on another extremely good book that talks about _why_ we might possibly like music. Turns out similar reasons. That book is Sweet Anticipation by David Huron. Both of these books are very good.
Second the recommendation for Inside Jokes — not only for the analysis and insight, but for some funny jokes!
Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process. ~ maybe Mark Twain maybe someone else
The Quote Investigator says - "QI has found no substantive evidence that Mark Twain employed this amphibian simile. Citations show that both E. B. White and André Maurois did use this striking analogy, but the data indicated that E. B. White together with his wife Katharine S. White were the likely originators"
exactly
"Humor is the salt of life, if you're well salted, you stay fresh for a long time."
It makes you wanna play with stuff that you are not predicting well but which are harmless enough (or unavoidable) so that you won't end up really bad just for playing with them.
It incentives learning and belief updating (as it couples surprise with value)
What a nice concise way to put it!
A way of maintaining sanity in the face of the hideousness of consciousness? That is as good an explanation as any I have heard.
Maybe our host would know of any correlation between a sense of humour and pathological despair.
I should’ve phrased that statement differently. I completely understand the benefits of humor. Like I said, the last exit before the highway of despair or
Can you recommend me an article on different ethics systems?
Currently utilitarian ethics makes "most sense" to me, however it has some glaring holes in it. It would be nice to have something to lean onto in ambiguous situations, and to be self-consistent in this, hence my search for different possibilities in this area.
I liked "Moral - ihre Natur, ihre Dynamik und ihr Schatten" by Norbert Bischof. Theres no english translation AFAIK, sadly.
Michael Huemer's _Ethical Intuitionism_ was very influential to me. I've written a lot through the intuitionist perspective on ethics here.
Ethical intuitionism is meta-ethical position about how you know ethical truths. It isn't going to give you a bunch of rules. I think there are prima facie duties as Dana discusses below and prima facie rights and decent moral heuristics.
Any one sentence ethical system is going to be able to be exploited to reach some seemingly absurd conclusion.
The ethical theory my students are most likely to find plausible in practice is that of W. D. Ross, who basically offers a hybrid between deontology and consequentialism. He does think we have a duty to maximize good consequences, but he also thinks there are other moral duties. So he argues for a short list of fundamental "prima facie" moral duties, which will sometimes conflict with one another in practice, at which point we have to use our judgment to decide which duties should take priority. So it doesn't work as an algorithm for telling you what to do the way utilitarianism in principle does, but it's a lot more plausible. See https://iep.utm.edu/ross-wd/
I find this theory the most convincing. I learned it from Huemer though. They're similar.
The deontology-consequentialism theory I'd be interested in goes like this:
Obviously, the greatest good for the greatest number is a good goal. But as mere humans acting with incomplete information and imperfect rationality, we can't possibly predict the consequences of any given action with perfect fidelity. So instead we need a manageable set of rules, or moral heuristics, which have themselves been optimised to produce something approximating the greatest good for the greatest number when applied consistently. So we have deontological means in the service of consequentialist ends.
Is there a name for this particular position?
Rule utilitarianism, but that reduces to pure utilitarianism. It's just an implementation detail.
Rule utilitarianism.
One resource I often recommend to people is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It aims to be readable by an undergraduate, though definitely a lot of articles get to more of a graduate level. Articles don't usually aim to get you to fully understand all the debates, but they do aim to give you a sense of what the big debates are, so you can look further into them with all the citations given.
You might start with the entry on consequentialism (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consequentialism/), which is the family of ethical theories that utilitarianism is the most straightforward member of. This article shows that there are a lot more options than you might expect for a moral theory of this sort. (Is it positive feelings that should be maximized, or satisfied desires, or some list of objective goods for people, perhaps including things like rights? Should we aim to actually maximize them, or maximize them on expectation? Is it individual acts that should be evaluated, or rules, or policies, or other sorts of tendencies?)
The two other classical big-picture alternatives to consequentialism are deontology (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-deontological/) and virtue ethics (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/). I personally have trouble being motivated by any conception of ethics that isn't consequentialist, though I suspect that there is a good theory out there on which virtues are evaluated in a consequentialist way.
The Kantian idea that deontological morality is a consequence of the fundamental idea of rationality is very neat (i.e., rationality requires acting in a way that you judge to be effective; to judge that a particular motive is effectively realized by a particular act is to make some sort of universal judgment; thus, you can't judge that a particular motive is effectively realized by a particular act unless it would still be effective if all rational beings had that sort of connection between motive and act; thus, you should only will an act if you could consistently will that all rational beings acted that way, i.e., Kant's categorial imperative) and I think it would somehow fundamentally be the same as the conception of rationality popular in the "rationalist" community on blogs like this one, if Kant had only had the concept of an algorithm or a Turing machine.
Late in life, Derek Parfit had the idea that consequentialism, Kantian deontology, and contractarian political philosophy were somehow all "climbing the same mountain on different faces" to aim at the same unified ethical/political theory. There's something appealing about this idea, even though the theories we have still look very different.
Thank you very much for this comment. I'm excited about all the new reading material I've got :-D If I have anything more interesting to say once I do process all of this, I'll come back and add it to this comment.
For now, let me just say that this idea of "scaling the same mountain" sounds very intriguing. In maths it often so happens that someone realizes that entities from very different branches of study have some commonalities and that they are all just concrete examples of some more abstract idea. I wonder whether it's possible we will see similar connections among seemingly different ideas in philosophy as well.
Have you considered why you might need to have a system of ethics in the first place?
It seems similar to those people asking what is the best diet - what should I eat?
In both cases I see people who have lost something - in one case, the understanding of what to eat; in the other, the understanding of how to behave.
My cat, my chickens and my neighbour the farmer seem to have no problem with these questions - none of them have lost the understanding of what to eat or how to behave so they do not ask themselves questions concerning 'Should'.
To the riposte that the questioners are looking for systems that are somehow 'better' than intuition or conscience, I see instead people eating dessicated chemical portions that are as far from food as one could possibly imagine. And not being able to behave in everyday life without offering up detailed analyses of the Trolley problem and beset with constant worries over whether they have their 'Shoulds' correct.
I sort of understand where you're coming from, but I disagree with the idea that in all cases the "natural" and "intuitive" thing is the right thing to do. This is a rationalist blog, after all, so we all know how the biological systems in our brain are evolutionary fitted to a wholly different kind of world than the one we live in right now. And the whole point of rationalism (in my view, anyway) is to examine these intuitive reflexes with conscious thought, and sometimes try to steer them in a more rational direction.
Speaking of food, my brain definitely thinks that sugary and fatty foods are the best thing in the world. Should I trust him? Should I not look for a 'better' system on how to eat?
Fair points, though don't see it as universal that removed from our ancestral environment everyone seeks excessive fat and sugar. Many people don't. And the rationalist project seems to me particularly ill-suited to solving that problem.
I don't mean to be gratuitously provocative but I sometimes want to check how many unexamined assumptions underpin rationalism generally.
I think this is actually a great way to illustrate where the two of you have common ground: your diet intuition fails because you have been removed from the ancestral environment, where seeking as much sugar and fat as possible *was* a great idea. Likewise our erstwhile, intuitive philosophical systems fail to satisfy modern man because modern man's world is far too complex for them. It turns out that when your hours are no longer constantly spent defending your tribe from predators and trying not to starve, the "why?" quickly creeps in.
Exactly my point!
As I understand it, we have great intuitions (either inborn or learned in young age) about good behavior in small groups of agents, but if you have to make decisions in very large groups, our intuitions stop giving good results, since large groups have totally different properties. So here we need something external to help us make good decisions.
I assume overweight cats are a purely theoretical construct, then.
Assume a spherical cat.
that's more on the human than the cat, with minimal outliers
I have two cats. They both get the same cat food (Virbac, which I buy at the vet), except one also gets 1 cat treat every day – the other one doesn't like any kind of treats; I've tried lots of different types. We never give them any of our own food. One – the one that gets the treat – is normal weight, the other one is overweight.
Even squirrels get chubby if they are given enough junk eat.
https://www.twincities.com/2021/12/21/squirrels-of-st-paul-mears-park-force-subtler-holiday-lighting-display/
This makes me think (new thought to me) that I suspect having a system is impossible - for similar reasons to Godels Incompleteness Theorem. The boundary is fractal and any system will have some circumstances it acts in a destructive way.
So my view is that it isn’t about having a codified system, but about understanding people and the word well enough to have the instinct to take good quality decisions and support others in the complexity and pleasure and pain of this life as best as we can.
(Although thinking about and discussing systems is probably good brain training for getting better at it)
Assuming that people's intuitions are not inherently contradictory (big assumption, I know), their intuitions are encoded in the finite structures of their brain so there must be at least one set of rules that satisfies them, even if those rules are just "We scanned your brain and transcribed every intuition you have."
There's a thing that comes up here in medicine-related posts, where if you pick a random medication and look at the studies it'll tend to look really convincingly good even if we know it does nothing (like homeopathy), because of various forms of selection bias, and the conclusion there is that we should be much more skeptical than we think we should be of things that came to our attention in ways that involved selection bias.
I think this should apply to a lot of covid stuff (mainly long covid, but also things like breakthrough cases, the utility of lockdowns/NPIs in areas with available vaccines). Long covid isn't the reason covid originally came to our attention, so we should be extremely skeptical of studies claiming it exists any more than homeopathy does. There's some mildly convincing-looking studies, sure, but we'd expect that even if it's completely made up.
(I also think we should have a strong bias against NPIs in areas with available vaccines, for similar reasons)
I looked at the NICE guidelines (https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/ng188) and they note that all studies so far have a very serious risk of bias. As for certainty of evidence they mostly write: “..the expert panel concluded that there is not enough evidence to give an evidence-based recommendation, but the panel still regards it as important to give a recommendation by consensus.”
I agree that the case about long covid syndrome seems very weak. Probably it is what happens after any severe or moderate respiratory infection. Obviously, some people take longer time to recover from all the damage caused by virus. But we can only guess how widespread it is and how many people are affected. My personal experience is that people who had had covid (mild or moderate illness) looked completely fine, they hadn't really changed in what they could do at their work or leisure.
Maybe our society demands people to work hard immediately after recovery from any illness. We should give more slack and more time for rehabilitation and gradual return to work, let's say, allowing initially to work 2-3 hours per day and receive partial benefits while they still have some health problems. Then after the review by the doctor they could increase working hours etc. Instead of this all or nothing attitude which is very common in many companies.
That name though.
Paging Scott for analysis of kabbalistic implications and whether we should wake Merlin post haste.
Thank you to those people who have been signing up to my substack. It is much appreciated.
However, to be absolutely clear, it is not guaranteed that I will ever publish anything. And even then, you might prefer that I hadn't...
But thank you anyway :)
I'm playing with the notion that being competently benevolent is a talent like being good at music, and perhaps we should view it as something we shouldn't talk as though we expect everyone to be good at it.
On the other hand, some cultures are better than others at having widely distributed ability at music, but again, it would be worth looking at how it happens.
This is part of the Early Modern arguments for democracy and capitalism. Instead of trying to design a system that works perfectly when good people run it, we should design a system that incentivizes selfish people to act in the public good.
Perhaps the clearest statement of this argument is in the first chapter of Spinoza's Political Treatise (if you Google this, I'm not referencing his more famous Theological-Political Treatise).
What does being incompetently benevolent look like? Seems like there are a lot of ways to be incompetent at benevolence. You could be bad at recognizing who is going to get real benefit from your benevolence -- or what's the most effective way to be benevolent in a given situation (give cash? give information? express affection and sympathy?) -- or you could be good at making the right call about the 2 things I just mentioned, but bad at implementing your call (they need help changing the tire and you don't know how to work the jack).
Does there exist a particular quality of competent benevolence that is distinct from the sum of its two independent parts?
I'm not sure what you mean by the two independent parts.
There are people who want to help but don't have good judgement about what's needed.
Yeah, I meant competence and benevolence. I guess I'm somewhat captivated by the idea that there might be a talent that combines them into something qualitatively distinct. Your comparison with music brings to mind a person who is capable, perhaps nearly at a glance, of gauging the suffering and human need in a particular situation and seeing the broad outlines of the most efficient solutions.
Benevolence, to me, requires a component of selflessness, which also seems to be the limiting factor. So it reduces to the question of what makes one selfish as opposed to selfless, and how intrinsic/talent-like that is.
From my limited knowledge, this sounds like what Calvin was pointing towards with his idea of "the elect".
I think that talent is a multiplier on the speed of skill improvement, so its presence by itself doesn't guarantee skill in case of insufficient training/practice. If some (sub)cultures value a skill more than others, there will be more skilled people there, even if we hold the base rate of talent constant. As an aside, it seems to me that there's a general issue with the mainstream culture's overemphasis of talent and underemphasis of skill.
Some companies have stopped their production of fertilizer. The reason is that petroleum gas is currently expensive, which is the basis of ammonia, which is the basis for fertilizer. So production of fertilizer is no longer profitable for some of the big players. Fertilizer is already expensive right now, and in some regions, this reduces the amount of food that we can expect to be harvested in next year's spring and summer quite drastically.
Does anybody know the scope of this? My standard newspapers are very concerned and worry about famines next year. But it is a topic where it's easy to get the order of magnitude wrong, and I don't trust them to have a good overview.
Should we expect that there are some local famines in a few places in the developing world, but no more than that, and that it can be mitigated by redistribution of food, because it is globally negligible?
Or should we expect that that there is a global food shortage? If so, how bad will it be? E.g., will it "only" affect the poorest developing countries, or also industrialized ones?
Maybe look at final food output during the aughts when WTI was consistently above 100.
Thanks, I did. WTI/Brent is not so informative, because fertilizer depends on natural gas, not on oil. But the last time gas prices increased sharply (actually higher than now) was 2007/2008, where it doubled within a year. Fertilizer prices almost tripled within a year, which is roughly the same as now.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fertilizer-price-index?country=~OWID_WRL
https://ycharts.com/indicators/fertilizers_index_world_bank
The result was rather a food price crisis than a food crisis. Food production per capita dipped only slightly (but for the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union). But food prices rose by 50% in half a year.
The effects in poor countries were massive. Wikipedia discusses more than a dozen countries with food riots. Middle-class countries like Russia, Brazil, India, Mexico had to react (or felt like they had to) with export bans and food price freezing, but could prevent large-scale riots. High-income countries were apparently not very affected. (Except politically. It basically put an end to the idea of biofuels. And the US food banks got into acute crises.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007%E2%80%932008_world_food_price_crisis
So I would expect a similar situation in 2022. As a wealthy person in a first-world country, I will probably hardly notice a difference. But globally it might become ugly.
What's WTI?
West Texas Intermediate (oil) but I meant to say Brent
Brent was over 100 for a few years: https://www.macrotrends.net/2480/brent-crude-oil-prices-10-year-daily-chart
You don't have to make fertilizer out of methane, it's just the cheapest option (Haber-Bosch process).
I'd be extremely concerned if I was living in Bangladesh, I wouldn't be concerned at all in a developed country - though food will certainly get more expensive. As an EU citizen I'm considering stockpiling as a cost saving measure and in general not being a chump, exchanging fiat (currently a hot potato and getting hotter by the minute) for nonperishable food (predicted to get more expensive b/c fertilizer and energy costs).
Natural gas should get cheaper - the current price spike is transient, assuming there's a decent stock of fertilizer there can be a minor drop in supply but nothing catastrophic.
Natgas futures already did get cheaper (LNG tankers from US underway etc.), but it's just three weeks low. Long term outlook still doesn't look too good - not enough investment in hydrocarbons exploration and general EU/US unwillingness to accept reality means very high prices are here to stay.
There has been recent discussion on ACX about the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the United States. Some believe that the FDA is overly precautious due to an asymmetry in the incentives they have or just the structure of the bureaucracy. I think these criticisms are reasonable and we should probably move toward better cost-benefit analysis. I think many people would want an FDA that approves a drug only if the amount of medical benefit after approval exceeds the possible downsides.
I am sympathetic to this view, but I think we should probably go beyond cost-benefit analysis and be inclined to approve even when it causes harms which likely exceed the benefits of approval. My reasoning is that it is much worse to prevent someone from helping themselves than to allow someone to hurt themselves. Denying access to life saving medication is worse than giving access to dangerous medication, even if both result in premature death. I will use a thought experiment from my article [1]:
"Now, imagine a nice guy named Peter who helps his elderly neighbor Betty to make sure she gets her medication when she needed it and doesn't overdose. If Peter ceased helping Betty with her medication, that would be bad. However, it would be worse if Peter were to steal his neighbors medication and withhold it form her. It would be worse even if the probability of her coming into harms way on account of either the lack of medication or inability to properly take her medication was exactly the same."
[1] https://parrhesia.substack.com/p/witholding
I don’t understand why the two tiered system hasn’t gotten more traction. There would be level 1 drugs which only passed Phase 1 trials and are legalized but not endorsed, and insurance won’t pay for it. Then there would be level 2 drugs which go through the current approval process.
And what about people whose objections are that the FDA is *too* permissive with giving approval? Like my exchange of views with Peregrine Journal, where there are a few "I've Got A Science/Medical Qualification" people posting tweets that the FDA giving even qualifed approval to molnupirivir is the worst thing ever, since this is actually a dangerous, mutation-causing drug that is probably going to create and spread mutant versions of Covid.
Is that akin to "Peter stole Betty's medication" or more "Peter put poison into Betty's medication"?
For everyone claiming the FDA is too cautious, there is someone else claiming the FDA is too reckless. And they have studies to back up their demands too, and they'd claim that you have no right to risk *their* health by taking something which may "cause harms which likely exceed the benefits of approval".
I think molnupiravir is an unusual case, where there is some non-ridiculous worry (in this case, the formation of a novel covid variant) that improperly regulated use of the medication might actually cause significant harms to individuals other than the one who used the medication.
Someone could have a very extreme view of the sort Parrhesia mentions while still thinking that there's an important role for the FDA to ensure that medications won't cause significant third-party harms.
No way that's ever going to happen because of Copenhagen ethics (https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/). See also: why the entire field of bioethics is a joke.
It's probably the same Bayesian vs classical thinking, at its core. FDA isn't even trying to gauge if approving a drug would have a positive or negative effect overall, because that's just not the way the individuals involved think.
You can see it even in your comment: you compare expected benefits (suggests expected utility) with the possible downsides (maybe not worst case scenario, but no longer expected utility). I agree with your point, btw.
On the subject of formatted jokes:
I'm working on an article right now that deals, in part, with formatted jokes, I.E. jokes as they might exist in a jokebook, where they could be memorized and retold with or without embellishments, ranging from knock-knocks to more complex dirty jokes and the like.
If you have a joke that you tell or like, it might end up being helpful to me if you told me what the joke was (a link is fine, if you don't want to type it out) and specifically *why you think the joke works*.
For full disclosure, I have pretty strong prior beliefs on this and I might end up using what you say as an example of what I disagree with. Not that I can't be convinced, but that's a strong possibility on this particular subject, so bear that in mind in your time-investing choices.
Edited to add: For the sake of Scott's sanity, probably for the best if we keep it pretty tame, especially as it relates to racial humor, which I'd just as soon take a miss on here.
Some of my best jokes are Bulgarian. Fun fact - there's a museum of humor in Gabrovo.
So Petur's wife is tired of him going into town and staying out all night drinking with his buddies. She warns him that if he does it one more time she's going to take a rolling pin upside his head. Petur is unhappy, but comes up with a plan. He knows she's fond of eating snails, so he suggests going into town to buy some snails for her. She's reluctant, but gives in to her love for snails, while also warning him to remember the rolling pin. He goes to town and buys a bag of snails, and is on the way home when he runs into his buddies and of course... Next morning he's approaching the house and remembers the rolling pin, then he has an idea. He dumps the snails out onto the porch and lines them all up facing the door. Then he opens the door, and there she is with the rolling pin in her hand. He turns to the snails and says "Come on guys, we're almost there."
Works because of exaggeration/implausibility, and also stereotypes.
“I’m not really a frog: kiss me and break the spell - I’ll be a beautiful princess again and we can live happily ever after!”
Guy puts the frog in his coat pocket and keeps walking.
(Muffled frog voice) “Hey! Didn’t you hear what I said?!”
Guy takes the frog out: “Honestly, lady, at this point in my life, I’d rather have a talking frog.”
Did your version of this joke mysteriously include a guy going golfing and hitting a hole-in-one? For some reason mine did, and the frog is in the hole when he goes to get the ball out. It's completely weird as a setup and I've never thought about it before.
Haven't heard the hole-in-one version. That does seem like a pretty random setup, but I suppose it could add some humor just by upping the random absurdity quotient? To your original point of "why I think it works" - like most of the jokes that actually make me laugh, it's like you're humming along down a well-worn path when there's an abrupt left turn and you find yourself somewhere much much different than what you were expecting. And it's not awesome unexpected goodness, nor horrible unexpected awfulness, but just like "uh, wait, what?" or maybe "ok, wait, no?" The more absurd and inherently silly it is, the better. Kind of like you expected to come off the playground slide and hit the usual patch of sandy dirt, but instead you find yourself dizzy and waist-deep in a pool of sparkly jello.
Do you mind if I quote part of this in the thing I'm doing? I can attribute (or not!) if you like.
Feel free to quote, no need to attribute, but go ahead and attribute if you would prefer to for some reason - I don't mind either way :-)
I have a collection of economics jokes. Their value is making an economic point but they also need to be funny. Here are two suited to a general audience:
Jose had robbed a bank in Texas and fled south across the Rio Grande with the Texas Rangers in hot pursuit. They caught up with him in a town in Old Mexico, only to discover that Jose spoke no English and none of the pursuers spoke any Spanish. They drafted one of the locals – the school teacher – to act as a translator.
“Tell Jose that he must tell us where he has hidden the loot from the bank robbery.”
“The gringos say to ask where you have hidden the loot.”
“Tell the gringos I will never tell them.”
“Jose says he will never tell you.”
The Rangers pull out their six-guns, cock them, and point them at Jose.
“Tell Jose if he does not tell us where he has hidden the loot, we will kill him.”
“The gringos say if you do not tell them where you have hidden the loot they will kill you.”
Jose begins to tremble with fear.
“I buried it by the old oak tree on the other side of the bridge.”
“Jose says he is not afraid to die.”
---
The zoo director noticed that one of the elephants was coughing. So he decided to add vodka to this elephant's bucket of water. The next morning that elephant was completely healthy, but the other three elephants began to cough.
These, especially the second, actually remind me a lot of what I think of as jokes in the Russian format:
Did you hear Mitya won the Moscow Police ticket-writing contest? The prize was a portable stop sign.
Why does the mermaid wear sea shells? She outgrew her B shells. Works because of the punniness and a little bit of naughty.
An old man and an old woman are sitting on a park bench, and the man notices the woman keeps looking at him. Finally he asks her why she keeps looking at him and she says "You look like my 3rd husband." He asks "How many times have you been married?" She says "Twice". Works because of the unexpected twist.
Nice joke
Reminds me of the two guys being chased by a bear. Similar mechanism
When I was 13 years old I had an English master who instructed us all very severely,
That a gentleman never explains his jokes
Q. How many surrealists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A. Mañana!
This joke was told to me years ago by a co-worker who said "I knew you were the only person here who'd get it".
The version you'll find online has "A fish" as the punchline, but I think "mañana" works better.
EDIT: Handbooks of jokes and jest books go back a long way, one example is the Tudor "A Hundred Merry Tales" which made me laugh when Eamonn Duffy quoted samples of jokes in his "The Stripping of the Altars":
"And quite apart from pastoral realism, many clergy were slapdash or negligent. The jest-book 'A Hundred Merry Tales' has a joke about a priest hearing confessions on Ash Wednesday with a massive hangover as a result of Shrove Tuesday junketing. He falls asleep in the midst of one woman's confession that she had stolen a pot, and in disgust she gets up and goes away. The next woman in the queue kneels down and begins with the conventional opening request for blessing. “Benedicite”, at which the priest wakes confused and exclaims, “What, art thou now at ‘benedicite’ again! Tell me what didst thou when thou hadst stolen the pot.”
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hundred-Merry-Tales-Shakespeare-Jest/dp/1910075086?
The version I know is, "Two. One to hold the giraffe, and the other to fill the bathtub with brightly painted machine tools."
As for mañana, it's the answer to "How do you keep a turkey in suspense?"
A salesman rings a doorbell and a 10 year old boy in a bra and panties, holding a glass of bourbon in one hand and a cigar in the other opens the door.
Salesman: Are your parents home?
10 year old boy: What the f*ck do you think?
A man goes to a doctor wearing a hat. He refuses to remove his hat until he is alone with the doctor.
He takes off his hat and there is a frog growing out of the top of his head.
The doctor says when did this start?
And the frog says, about a month ago
it started off as a wart on my bottom
That’s good
My husband lived in Russia from 1985-87, and he brought back a whole treasure trove of Russian jokes, which are all characterized by dark, cynical humor. Here’s a typical example:
A peasant is plowing his field and sees an old bottle. Thinking it might be valuable, he polishes it, and out pops a genie! “Thank you for rescuing me from my prison,” the genie says. “As a reward, I will grant you one wish.”
The peasant thinks for a second and then says, “Well, my neighbor has four cows, and I only have three. Genie, I want you to KILL two of my neighbor’s cows!”
There is an Irish version of this joke.
The Irishman finds a bottle on the beach and pulls the cork. A genie bursts out.
The Jeannie says
I’ve been trapped in that bottle for 3000 years and the first 2000 of it I swore I cut the eyes out of the first man I saw. The last thousand years I calmed down and started to think that I would grant three wishes to anyone who would let me out of this bottle.
So, you’re the lucky fellow. I will grant you three wishes.
The Irishman thinks for a moment and says, “it’s fierce hot today, I wouldn’t mind a bottle of Guinness”
The Jeannie snaps his fingers and a bottle of Guinness appears in the Irishmans hand. He takes a long pull on it and then notices that the bottle is still full.
Jesus, he says, would you look at that?
Jeannie says, that’s a bottomless bottle of Guinness I’ve given you
you can drink and drink and you will never get to the bottom.
The Irishman takes another long pull on the bottle and looks at it with great satisfaction.
Right! Says the genie. What about your next two wishes?
I want two more of these, says the Irishman
Two men are stranded in the ocean on a rowboat and come across a floating bottle with a cork.
They open it and out pops a genie who gives them one wish.
"I wish the entire ocean was Guinness!" the first man blurts out.
The genie snaps his fingers, turning the ocean turns to Guinness. Then the genie vanishes.
"You idiot! Now we have to piss in the boat!"
Perfectly reasonable. He plans to sell the other two.
Excellent
Never thought of that.
Not really the same joke.
Same premise
And actually quite similar in they both deal with a rather delusional relationship to plenty
There is another one that involves a writer, a film director, and a producer, who are stranded on a desert island and find a genie in a bottle.
Similar theme
There's a 17th century poem in Irish called "Women of the Three Cows" about a peasant woman who is very proud and haughty because she has three cows to her neighbour's two. 19th century poet/author James Clarence Mangan did a (free) translation of it:
"This ballad, which is of a homely cast, was intended as a rebuke to the saucy pride of a woman in humble life, who assumed airs of consequence from being the possessor of three cows. Its author's name is unknown, but its age can be determined, from the language, as belonging in the early part of the seventeenth century. That it was formerly very popular in Munster, may be concluded from the fact that the phrase, Easy, oh, woman of the three cows! has become a saying in that province, on any occasion upon which it is desirable to lower the pretensions of a boastful or consequential person."
T H E W O M A N O F T H R E E C O W S
O, Woman of Three Cows, agragh! don't let your tongue thus rattle!
O, don't be saucy, don't be stiff, because you may have cattle.
I have seen -- and, here's my hand to you, I only say what's true --
A many a one with twice your stock not half so proud as you.
Good luck to you, don't scorn the poor, and don't be their despiser,
For worldly wealth soon melts away, and cheats the very miser,
And Death soon strips the proudest wealth from haughty human brows;
Then don't be stiff, and don't be proud, good Woman of Three Cows!
See where Momonia's heroes lie, proud Owen More's descendants,
'Tis they that won the glorious name, and had the grand attendants!
If they were forced to bow to Fate, as every mortal bows,
Can you be proud, can you be stiff, my Woman of Three Cows!
The brave sons of the Lord of Clare, they left the land to mourning;
Movrone! for they were banished, with no hope of their returning --
Who knows in what abodes of want those youths were driven to house?
Yet you can give yourself these airs, O, Woman of Three Cows!
O, think of Donnell of the Ships, the Chief whom nothing daunted --
See how he fell in distant Spain, unchronicled, unchanted!
He sleeps, the great O'Sullivan, where thunder cannot rouse --
Then, ask yourself, should you be proud, good Woman of Three Cows!
O'Ruark, Maguire, those souls of fire, whose names are shrined in story --
Think how their high achievements once made Erin's greatest glory --
Yet now their bones lie mouldering under weeds and cypress boughs,
And so, for all your pride, will yours, O, Woman of Three Cows!
The O'Carrolls also, famed when Fame was only for the boldest,
Rest in forgotten sepulchres with Erin's best and oldest;
Yet who so great as they of yore in battle or carouse?
Just think of that, and hide your head, good Woman of Three Cows!
Your neighbour's poor, and you it seems are big with vain ideas,
Because, inagh! you've got three cows, one more, I see, than she has.
That tongue of yours wags more at times than Charity allows,
But, if you are strong, be merciful, great Woman of Three Cows!
THE SUMMING UP
Now, there you go! You still, of course, keep up your scornful bearing,
And I'm too poor to hinder you; but, by the cloak I'm wearing,
If I had but four cows myself, even though you were my spouse,
I'd thwack you well to cure your pride, my Woman of Three Cows!
I think jokes like this are funny because they reveal uncomfortable truths about us that we’d prefer to keep hidden from ourselves.
I am to some soft extent going to end up arguing *against* this as a total explanation, if that makes sense. But I'm not sure how well my arguments will work against Russian jokes; it's a whole other system with weird rules I only partially comprehend.
There's a guy that's trying to predict horse races results. He doesn't really know how to do that, so he calls his friend, a mathematician. The mathematician works on it for a week, and calls him back, saying that it's impossible for him to do. But he knows a software engineer that might be able to do something.
So the guy calls the software engineer, and explain him what he's trying to do. The software engineer tells him that he might be able to do something. A week later, he calls back the guy, and tells him: "I have a working simulation, but it takes a month to complete for a single race.". The guy tells him that it's not going to work, as he needs the results very fast. The software engineer says that he can't do anything better, but he knows a physicist that might be able to do something.
The guy calls the physicist, and again explain what he's trying to do. The physicist says that he'll work on it. An hour later, the physicist calls the guy back, telling him that he solved the problem. The guy is very surprised, since both people before failed, and asks him how he did it. The physicist starts his explanation: "So let's assume a horse and its rider are a perfect sphere"
I know a version of this joke that involves an economist, a laborer, and a mechanical engineer stranded on a desert island with three cans of beans and no can opener.
Desert island jokes are an endless source of mirth
Goooo on!?
The quick version is the engineer and the labor are both devise ways of opening their cans with materials at hand. The economist sits on the beach and says
Assume a can opener.
"a perfect sphere in a vacuum" if you please. Let's not overcomplicate things.
Knock knock.
Who's there?
Dunnap.
Dunnap who?
What? In your pants?
(works due to the childishness of the penultimate line. The phrasing is very like that of a two year old, which is amusing when in the mouth of an older person as soon as they realise what they have said.)
A man with a penguin walks up to a policeman. The man says "I found this penguin. What should I do?"
The policeman says "Take it to the zoo."
The next day the policeman sees the man, who stills has the penguin. The policeman says "Didn't I tell you to take the penguin to the zoo?"
The man says "Yeah, he liked that a lot. Today we're going to the movies."
**********************************************************************************
The most basic reason this is funny is "Take it to the zoo." can be interpreted as take it to be exhibited or take it as a guest of the zoo, and the man misunderstood. If people laugh it demonstrates they are intelligent enough to get the right interpretation.
The second reason it is funny is that the man is stupid. Humor is usually funnier if someone is suffering or inferior.
The third reason it is funny is because of the absurdity of a penguin visiting a zoo and going to a cinema. When people laugh at absurdity they demonstrate that they are intelligent enough to understand that's now how reality usually works.
"He liked that a lot." can be interpreted two ways. The first is that the man is wrong, the penguin doesn't particular like visiting the zoo. This is funny because the man is too stupid to interpret the penguin's emotions. The other interpretation is that the penguin really did like visiting the zoo (and maybe also will really like going to the movies.) This is funny because it is absurd.
I think there's also an element of penguins being intrinsically amusing.
I have a theory that things which are clearly part of a category but don't resemble the typical member of the category are funny.
Why penguins are bad pets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADIjOYYS0Bc&ab_channel=Clint%27sReptiles
Not a joke, just a thoughtful overview with some humor.
And a story about humans, penguins, and intelligent care.
There were people knitting sweater for penguins who'd been exposed to oil leaks. The penguins need to be washed, and then warmed up. Given time, their oil coating recovers.
Knitter are a subspecies of human whose first thought when hearing of a disaster is "What can I knit for that?"
So, adorable little sweaters, including for sports teams.
Problem: having a sweater put on is traumatic for the penguin. The right thing is putting the penguin under a heat lamp.
Triumph of the human spirit!
It turns out that the sweaters can be put on plush penguins, which are sold to raise money for penguin rescue.
That checks out- penguins, ducks, and ostriches are all much funnier than the average bird.
I know this joke but I know it differently. In my version the penguin shows up and the worKer is instructed by his boss to take the penguin to the zoo and he hands the fellow $10. At the end of the day the worker returns with the penguin and a balloon tied to the penguins wing.
When confronted by his boss the worker says I took the penguin to the zoo but we had money left over so we went to the amusement park
There are so many jokes built around linguistic misunderstandings
Watch for falling rocks.
Why get married? Find someone you hate, and buy them a house.
Do you know the one about the pig with the wooden leg?
I hate that one. I like dark humor, but that one is just sickening.
I know worse ones. A persons limit of dark humor always ends with sickening
Yeah, and limiting case for scatological jokes is also disgust. And puns evoke groans. Humor is somehow leveraging pain.
Im not a fan of scatalogical humor
I think so - the one where the big saved them from a fire, or similar?
Yeah, that’s the bare bones of it. But you can make it pretty funny
Yeah, that's a solid joke; I've always liked it a lot.
The whole trick of that joke is how well you can impersonate the owner of the pig
Do you know the one about the Irishman who is looking for a parking spot in midtown Manhattan at 12 noon?
Does he go to the bank?
I’m Irish by the way so I can suck this one up
And have you ever seen the aristocrats?
Bob Saget's version had me crying with laughter. "And now he's humping her retina . . ."
I've not seen the whole film but I'm familiar with the joke/concept. I'm not sure if I'm going to get as far as anti-jokes on this article, FWIW.
I get it. I know a few other really good ones but I don’t think I would care to post them on the Internet in this day and age.
"I have a joke."
Other guy: "Yeah?"
Me: "it's a knock-knock joke, you start."
Other guy: "knock knock."
Me: "who's there?"
It works (if the hearer is naive to it) by the inversion of expectation. Very clean.
Edit: no embellishment required but the delivery has to be pitched correctly. If done right, always gets a laugh the first time.
This raises an interesting question about how I feel about jokes.
Who gets the laugh?
It’s never hard to get someone to laugh at their own embarrassment.
For me the best jokes are always the ones where my first impulse is to cry but then I have to laugh.
How many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: that’s really not funny.
This isn't a joke, it's just simple mockery. An actual punchline would be "Two: one to screw in the lightbulb, and another to explain to everyone why this joke is sexist." Still not a very good one though.
I guess if you want to turn a joke into a morality play
It totally depends on the presentation. I’ve had very good luck with it. I agree that it dies on the page.
I'm sure it gets laughs, but the punchline is that you're doing an impression of a prickly feminist. It subverts expectations in that it doesn't follow the lightbulb joke template but there's nothing particularly witty about that. I'm sure you recognize the difference between this and the parking space joke.
I'm trying to think of another example. Like: What did the traitor say to the hangman? (Trump impression) "You are fake noose." There's a pun in there, but there's no joke, and there's nothing to laugh at if you don't know about Trump or, in your case, the stereotypical feminist. The parking space joke, however, still works regardless of who you replace the Irishman with.
Thank you.
I apologize if that joke offended.
I just saw a new (from earlier this month) entry on the Mistakes page:
> 41: (12/6/21) In my 2014 review of The Two Income Trap, I suggested Elizabeth Warren was smart and good. Subsequent events have conclusively revealed her to be dumb and bad. ACX regrets the error.
This prompted significant curiosity among people on my Discord server about what this means and what prompted it. Scott, would you be up for elaborating?
I can no longer find the Mistakes page. Where is it, and can it be moved to a more prominent position on the main page?
On the main page, top right corner, there's a little down arrow. Click that and you'll find a link to the mistakes page.
And yes, it's irritatingly hard to find..
Isn't it a joke based on what newspapers and other media do? First they lionise/criticise a prominent politician or public figure, then when said figure does something they approve of/condemn, they come out with another piece the reverse of what they first said. "Private Eye" magazine frequently has a section like this in their humour section, where it runs "In common with all other newspapers/TV stations/magazines, we said X Y was a dangerous nutcase with headlines like 'XY is dangerous nutcase' but now given their actions in relations to Covid, we apologise and instead realise that 'XY is the only person who can save us all!'"
The humour being that the media will turn on a sixpence to hound XY again, should that be a better strategy to sell more papers or get more views. In short, that it is not based on reasoned examination of views but personal bias: we thought XY was good when they did something we liked, now we think they're dreadful because they've changed positions.
Scott is being too hard on himself. It should be possible to approve of a book written by a smart and/or good 51-year-old without being embarrassed by the author's subsequent intellectual or moral decline.
It's also a question of audience and medium. In writing Two Income Trap, Warren was writing for an audience of people interested in reading quasi-scholarly books about socioeconomic issues, and the book form both allowed more sophisticated arguments and required more care for arguments to survive the sustained attention of the reader across 255 pages.
Now, she's a Senator in a safely blue state, and her audience is the marginal Democratic presidential primary voter or the marginal progressive activist donor, and her usual media are tweets, sound bites, and Facebook image+quote memes built around the former.
Scott's reason below, of course, but perhaps also because it was an irresistible opportunity to be amusing?
Lots of things over the course of years, but the latest is her "inflation is just caused by corporations being greedy" campaign.
Without defending Warren too much since I had a terrible experience with her and her staff during the campaign as far as competence: It isn't that inflation is *just* corporations being greedy. It is that a significant percentage of companies are raising prices well above what inflation should account for.
Isn't prices rising more (in some industries, less in others) than inflation should account for whatever happens when one thing becomes relatively more or less expensive compared to another? Given that inflation is the average rate at which prices are rising and that something being below average implies something else being above.
Wouldn't corporations be maximally greedy already? What would cause coordinated increases on account of greed?
Opportunity
If the only reason they didn't raise prices as much earlier is that they didn't have the opportunity to do so, then they were just as greedy before, and haven't become greedier. Then the cause of inflation is whatever factor has given them the opportunity that they didn't have before, rather than greed.
That would only show that greed isn't a sufficient cause for price rises, not that it isn't a cause at all.
There are indirect contributions, too. The US trucking industry's dire state (which contributes to supply chain effects on inflation) is largely due to the exercise of corporate greed in the wake of deregulation.
What indicated to you that she was smart in the first place?
I think there are several reasons to decide that Elizabeth Warren is dumb at this point
I wonder if it's the scotus court-packing. I know ACX posts have taken a dim(putting it mildly) view of that.
Ditto on this. I personally dislike Elizabeth Warren, but a brief perusal of the most recent headlines shows that, beyond some horn-locking with Elon Musk over taxes, she hasn't done anything particularly outrageous as of late- at least, that I could find.
Warren went from a policy wonk to a populist.
I mean in 2020 she ran an unbelievably dumb presidential campaign. When Bernie dropped the ball she had a good chance to be the main Biden competitor and she did a bunch of stupid BS instead.
Give her time. I am sure she will come through
My casual impression is she is just a second rate populist trying to compete with a master