I can see some parallels with drug legislation. Sure, some people are able to keep up a heroin habit and remain perfectly functional, productive, happy individuals. But because you *could* use heroin responsibly, should we expect that everyone will? That's just wishful thinking. Heroin causes far more wretched addicts than responsible users, so it's good that it remains illegal.
As for corporal punishment, I agree that your dad did it as well as he could have, but we cannot expect everyone to do the same. Child abuse is heartbreakingly commonplace and it causes lifelong psychological problems, and abused children may well become abusive parents. We should fight it any way that we can, including by stigmatizing corporal punishment.
If you argue in favor of corporal punishment because you know how to use it for positive results, then I can't say you're wrong. However, do you trust everyone who listens to take away "corporal punishment is okay IFF you do it like this", or only the first part? Do you trust your children to learn that lesson, and their children? It's a serious risk, and I would not say that it's worth it. You can deliver other, non-physical punishments with the same gravity, and even if you consider them less effective, it should not be necessary to use violence to properly raise a child.
Why do you think that is the only way to accomplish your goal? There could be other parenting strategies which accomplish the behavior you are looking for but don't risk causing trauma (physical or psychological). I would also consider that we don't use corporal punishment on adults for non criminal behavior. If you performed poorly at work, would your boss beating you with a stick make you perform better?
Reasoning from how adults treat each other is a disastrous way to approach child-rearing. You might as well train horses by reading them long articles from the racing news. The #1 task of any parent is to understand the actual human being that is in his charge, and if you can't identify several major differences between a 6-year-old and a 48-year-old right off the top of your head, you shouldn't be trusted with care of the former.
>I would also consider that we don't use corporal punishment on adults for non criminal behavior.
A lot of the things parents spank children for would be criminal actions for an adult (assault, battery, theft...).
Also, adults do hit each other, and one of the main reasons is to punish some offensive action. This is true in criminal contexts, of course (whether in the sense of criminal violence or fighting back against criminal action), but there's things like "fighting words" and so on as well. It's not done in an *organised* fashion for non-criminal actions, but that's nearly tautologous - "behaviour subject to formal social reprisal" is a decent definition of "crime".
> It was a solemn occasion - no yelling, no anger, just disappointment that I made such punishment necessary. Afterwards, my Dad always hugged me, told me he loved me, and made sure I understood what just happened and why.
Is there any other social interaction in which this intense dichotomy is regarded as okay?
My comment was getting at the notion that if there's an action that is not only abnormal in any other social interaction, but would be actively frowned upon to the point of ostracism or arrest, you should be very skeptical of its morality or efficacity. Basically, I think your "moral prior" should thus be anti-corporal punishment.
That said, I do find Carl Pham's comment downthread interesting. Maybe not convincing to me, someone who's admittedly *very* anti-corporal punishment, but interesting, because it seems to me he's coming from a "corporal punishment is possibly the least bad option" viewpoint. Whereas I find your argument in your original comment incompatible with that moral prior.
I share a similar background: my parents used corporal punishment sparingly, and always took us to a different area, explained what we did wrong, administered the punishment, and then took us back. Amusingly, a significant number of these events happened in/around dinner, so 'go back to the dinner table from another room' was a common part of the pattern.
Come to think of it, it was always inside the home, and never outside the home. Nor were there delayed punishments for things that happened outside the home.
Other punishments were available, and were used when the offense was deemed not worthy of corporal punishment. Among those other punishments: being deprived of privileges like playing with siblings/friends, deprived of a favorite game or pastime for half an hour, etc. Further, the punishments shifted from corporal towards non-corporal as children grew up.
In reverse, my spouse got very different treatment as a child. Corporal punishment was likely more common than in my family. Sometimes the reason for punishment was not explained. Often, it seemed an over-reaction, or the result of parents being angry about something.
In my own mind, I've realized that corporal punishment can be very abusive. I've also realized that parents who do not use corporal punishment can still be abusive with whatever method of punishment they choose. (Imagine a parent yelling angrily at a child, berating the child for some misdeed, real or imagined. Imagine a parent calling their child evil, helpless, and the worst person in the world, but never laying a finger on the child to cause physical harm. Verbal punishment can be a form of abuse; this is a mirror to the claim that corporal punishment isn't always abusive. )
The society I live in has made it a crime to use physical force to punish children. When abusive corporal punishment is detected, agents of the State do their best to stamp out the practice and/or remove the children from that family environment. But the agents of the State aren't perfect at detecting such things. And it is very hard for them to detect and put a stop to the kind of corporal punishment I received when I was a child.
It is hard, in a different way, for agents of the State to detect and put a stop to abusive forms of punishment that aren't corporal punishment.
Thus, we have a situation where the bright line drawn by lawyers isn't the actual line drawn by law-enforcement agents who have the authority over this area. It also is not the only line that separates non-abusive parenting from abusive-parenting.
Also, this leads to a particular social effect: any parent who wants to use corporal punishment in a way that is not abusive is slightly afraid of being ratted out... whether by some teacher overhearing their kids talk about the punishment, or by an acquaintance/neighbor who doesn't think that there is a difference between the kind of corporal punishment you describe and abusive behavior.
Thus, it may be very hard to distinguish between abusive parents hiding their behavior from authorities, and non-abusive parents who don't want to come to the attention of authorities.
As a child, my parents used corporeal punishment relatively frequently, at least to my memory. It certainly served as a consequence, but, didn't seem to deter behavior long-term, and had the side effect of causing me and my siblings to be more likely to flee/hide after bad behavior was discovered [edit: as opposed to honestly copping to the behavior / dealing with the issue head-on]. I wouldn't call my treatment "abusive", but, that actually may bear re-evaluation.
As a parent, I've entirely avoided corporeal punishment. The only situation I've considered it for is as a consequence for low-probability but highly unsafe behavior, like running into the street without looking. Instead, I've used other methods for discipline - primarily talking through, time-outs, and denial of toys/computer time. This feels like it's been pretty effective to me, and I think we have fewer disciplinary problems than is average. In any case, fewer than I feel like I exhibited as a child.
I think in practice, it kinda comes down to...if you're doing corporeal punishment wrong, it's abusive. If you're going through the effort to do it correctly, it's not any more effective than just doing that same effort without the spanking.
Thinking on this a bit more, I'm curious about an analogy:
Many people own dogs. (I don't). They might have disciplinary problems with their dogs, and have to train that behavior out.
As far as *I'm* aware, I'm not aware of any effective methods of dog discipline that involve striking or assaulting the dog, I'm not aware of any schools of thought that espouse such an approach, and I think if you tried to advocate such an approach you'd get an angry internet jumping down your throat claiming animal abuse.
First, is that an accurate view of the state of dog training?
Second, conditional on that being an accurate view, is there a reasonable analogy between dog discipline and discipline of young (under 5) children? It seems to me that there might be.
As someone who has spent a lot of time around dogs: a swat on the nose is pretty much as hard as you can go with dogs as a punishment (some dogs may also need a firm sweep (NOT kick) of the leg and a hard "No!" several times per day until they get that trying to leap on people is bad behavior). Once you start inflicting actual PAIN on the dog, it can learn one of two things:
-It will form a cause-effect relationship between certain behaviors from it, certain behaviors from humans, and physical pain; this might stop that behavior, but also whenever a human does something that seems too close to the pre-pain signal, it's going to have its guard go all the way up- and given that many dogs respond to attack with aggression, that's a bad idea.
-It will form a cause-effect relationship between the trainer (and anyone that reminds it of the trainer) and pain: this is one of the ways you get a bad dog that attacks people for "no reason"- it's mind has just associated certain sense-perceptions with random violence and reacts accordingly.
I won't comment on humans as I'm not a teacher and don't socialize with children.
I'm no expert, but: many people use prong choke collars on dogs. There's controversy around it of course, but I've personally seen it be very effective. A prong collar would be abusive if used with sharp yanks, but it's instead used with gentle corrective pressure (leading the dog in a small circle around you). If done correctly the dog would only feel pain if they did something very bad like lunge -- otherwise they only feel that there could be pain if they did something bad. I think there's an analogy there to the threat of infrequent spanking.
My current best guess is: "less is better, zero is unrealistic".
An argument against lots of corporal punishment is that it is abusive, and the experience seems to suggest that it doesn't work anyway. I would guess that for most parents who punish often, it is more a fact about the parent than about the child. Also, it is difficult to calibrate properly what level of self control is realistic for your child at what age, so if you punish often, perhaps your calbration if just completely off.
But I wouldn't go as far as to make it literally illegal. First, I don't believe that living in an orphanage is better than being punished for something like once or twice a year. Second, it's not just about the punishment but also about the *threat* of punishment. If you do it correctly, for every situation when you spank the child, there are hundred situations when you don't spank the child, but the child behaves well among other things because it knows that spanking is the option. Remove the option, and you change the dynamic not only in that one situation, but also in the remaining hundred situations.
Analogies to "we don't spank adults" miss the part where we punish adult misbehavior by *other* means, such as taking their money or firing them from jobs. Most of that doesn't apply to a child, obviously. Also, small children discount time a lot; a punishment that will happen a few hours later (such as "I will not read your bedtime story today if you don't stop doing this") just feels completely unrealistic... the child will laugh about it now, and they will cry a lot when the punishment comes, but will laugh again the next day when you threaten to do the same thing, then will cry again, etc. Sometimes you need to stop a dangerous or hurtful behavior, and you child doesn't care what will happen ten minutes later, so you must do something right now. Sometimes you are out of good options.
Yeah, 4-6 sounds correct. That is approximately the age when the child has enough strength and skill to do some serious damage (break things, hurt a sibling, run in front of a car) and not enough reason to fully understand why doing so is wrong, combined with not enough willpower to resist the temptation when it feels like so much fun at the moment. But also it's individual.
Like everything else, I think it depends on the personality of the child, and his age and sophistication. With some strong-willed kids at a certain young age, a smart smack on the fanny is the best possible correction, as it gets across the point without the psychological torture of a complicate response they can't comprehend. (Parenthetically, I think the modern fetish for a "time out" before the age of object permanence is the cruellest possible invention. You are in essence exploiting the very young child's inborn and quite real fear of abandonment. You might as well set the child on a hillside in the dark and walk away with every appearance of leaving him for the wolves to devour -- a child below a certain age has no way of telling the difference between that and being put in a nice safe clean room with the door locked, the key similarity being the parent in a clearly angry state left him alone with no comprehensible indication of when or whether he would return.)
On the other hand, some kids are sufficiently sensitive that just an angry voice is all they ever need, or should get. They're all different. Some are deeply sensitive souls, some are born with skins as thick as a mule. You have to adapt to who they actually are, and no amount of theory or book-reading will substitute for getting to know the actual human being in front of you.
That said, the only general advice I think is worth bearing in mind is that it is of critical importance to be honest with your kids about your state of mind and feelings. Children can adapt to strict or lenient parents, to parents with short or long fuses, with parents who are strict about this or strict about that, et cetera. It's all fine -- as long as the signals are completely clear. The people I've seen who struggle as adults are those whose parents sent ambiguous or deceptive signals. I'm telling you I love you and all is well, but everything I do and everything about my posture and voice says I'm enraged. I'm telling you you did bad, real bad, but I'm radiating pleasure or exuding indifference. I'm telling you I'm proud of you, but strangely all my words are about my own feelings and the ones about you are about how you can do still better. Et cetera. Enough of this emotional dishonesty and a kid learns to distrust everyone, including himself.
Parenting (especially discipline, but not only discipline) requires knowing your kids and what works with them, and this changes with age and situation. Sometimes, a kid is past their limits, and no punishment or threat of consequences can work--you just need to contain them till they calm down. Sometimes, a smack on the butt is the thing that works to cause them to stop doing something they really need to stop doing. Other times, it would be totally counterproductive, but some other punishment will work. And other times, you mainly need to find a way to engage their brain or conscience rather than looking for a threatened consequence to get them to change their behavior, and punishment of any kind won't do much good.
The purpose of discipline of any kind also changes over time. With a toddler, it's mainly about keeping him from killing himself or hurting other people or destroying things. With an older kid, it's more about getting him to learn the right kind of ways to behave to be successful in life, and keeping the household functioning (which does include making it clear that the parents are in charge--not doing this is disastrous.) As they get older, it's more and more appeals to reason and conscience, and less grounding/taking away a phone/etc. Your job as a parent is to work yourself out of a job, after all--I'm not going to be with my kids when they're out there making their moral decisions or skipping class to get drunk or whatever, so I'd better have helped them figure out how to act and how to exert some control over themselves by then.
I do not think spanking is somehow inherently abusive. This is something that has been widely used for centuries across many societies, was in widespread use most places until quite recently, and is still in widespread use in many places. It seems pretty unlikely that this is always and everywhere abusive and we've just now become enlightened enough to see it. Nor do I have much faith in the kind of research that claims it's inherently bad, since that comes from a branch of social science with huge ideological commitments in one direction and relatively low reliability of results even where there isn't such an ideological commitment.
Let's exclude your personal experience and consider the question: Is corporal punishment the ideal type of punishment for certain situations?
Once you feel like you've done your research and you're comfortable with the answer, then I think it's fair to proceed accordingly. But if you haven't considered this question independently of "personal" priors, you're likely to seek out "good" reasons to justify your decision/behavior, which can lead to potentially undesirable end points.
I would recommend checking out Positive Discipline by Jane Nelson.
One place it makes sense, IME, is dealing with a toddler who is engaging in actions that can get him killed or badly hurt. Two year olds don't do reasoned discussion so well, but can be convinced that running into the street leads to an outcome they don't like, without waiting for them to get hit by a car because you are too civilized to do anything more than timeouts.
More generally, I was successfully raised in a home where we occasionally got spanked, this is also true of many family members and friends, and so I actually have a model for how this can be done in a way that isn't abusive and does help your kids learn how to behave. And indeed, as best I can tell, most people were raised in this way in my society up until the last 30-40 years, so this isn't some wild-eyed new theory that smacking a toddler on the butt might somehow help them stay out of trouble.
I'll say this much - I'm somewhat positively disposed toward the option being available in terms of hitting with hands, but at the point where metal objects become involved the parent's crossed a line.
I am not sure the papers add something meaningful to the discussion. Basically everything influence methylation and endocrinology, so I think this is kind of an equivalent of "this kills cancerous cells in a petri dish" : true but usually not useful.
(but "Y/X-Chromosome-Bearing Sperm Shows Elevated Ratio in the Left but Not the Right Testes in Healthy Mice" is a wonderful title!)
Too political for this thread, so for now, all I'll say is that even if I accepted his premises as true I don't consider it morally worth contemplating their implementation.
Restating the banner from the top of this post, in case you missed it:
"[This is] Open Thread 211
This is the weekly visible open thread. *Odd-numbered* open threads will be *no-politics*, even-numbered threads will be politics-allowed. This one [Open Thread 211] is odd-numbered, so be careful. Otherwise, post about anything else you want."
Note: edited for tone - the commenter clarified their position and accordingly I should modify mine.
Yeah, definitely only for discussion on an even thread, and apologies for my tone. I've said my piece RE the 'race realists' who occasionally show up here (and are apparently immune from banning so long as they slander entire continent's worth of people rather than say mean things to individuals), but pointing out what they say shouldn't automatically be viewed as endorsement.
So Khan is interesting because 1) he's an actual population geneticist (or, at least, pivoted into being one at some point) and 2) his views are a lot more interesting than "races as reflected in 19th century understandings* are real and black people are at the bottom of the totem pole". Where he's been forced to provide his opinion on the link between genetics and IQ, for example, he's rightly brought up the analogy to height, and reminded the reader that "fitness" is an environmentally-specific thing. A person who would do very well in IT today would be catastrophically unfit were they to be born a peasant, and would probably not have many offspring. What geeks think is an important verity is, in fact, just a modern quirk.
There's a real conversation to be had about the recent, massive advances in human population genetics, and how they are rewriting our understanding of our origins. So it's very disheartening to see not just old-school racism being dressed up in pseudo-genetic terminology, but also how little of the real, modern understanding of human genetic diversity has made it into the popular discourse.
As I've always maintained, if "scientific racism" was anything close to scientific, then the ground hypothesis based on modern genetic understanding should be that a specific African population should be the most intelligent on earth (and another the least). Anything else would have to have both a working causative hypothesis and good evidence behind it, and none of the proposed reasons for European/Asian superiority that I've seen have anything like either.
*Or, at least, the late 20th's understanding of the 19th. The idea that the Irish, Italians, Poles etc are racially inferior Caucasians got kind of memory-holed at some point. As, more recently, did the idea of "mongoloid" traits of effeminacy, base cunning, irrationality and superstition.
"if "scientific racism" was anything close to scientific, then the ground hypothesis based on modern genetic understanding should be that a specific African population should be the most intelligent on earth (and another the least)"
I don't know why that would be and you don't explain it, but I would just mention that I have heard it said frequently there are high-IQ Nigerian ethnicities- Igbo?
A charitable explanation would be that the proponents of those ideas simply updated on evidence and changed their minds.
Do mainstream scientists also today believe everything they believed in the 19th century? If not, why are some people praised for changing their mind towards a newer theory, and others are ridiculed for the same thing?
(Being a Devil's Advocate here. No specific opinion on this topic, and even if I had one, this would not be the right thread. But if felt unfair that "not believing the same thing your colleagues in 19th century did" is taken as an evidence against something being scientific.)
If only there were some kind of way to check this hypothesis. Perhaps some kind of pretty well validated intelligence test that you could give to members of different groups to check claims about different average intelligence.
Ah, but that's science fiction--clearly we can do nothing but speculate as to what the results would be from first principles.
As for Scott; my impression is that he entertains these ideas partly because he's a smart lay person with wide intellectual interests surrounded by rich, educated, white bay-area people who work mainly in IT (ie: the idea can be viewed abstractly and at a broad level in a setting where it seems to have intuitive plausibility). And partly I think it flatters his pre-conceptions of a special Ashkenazi Jewish genetic superiority - one that puts this subset of the Jewish population into the driver's seat for a large chunk of the Western world's achievements in modern history.
Let physicians and patients work it out themselves, and the rest of everyone butt the fuck out. But meanwhile, immunize physicians in the ER who decline to give strong pain meds to frequent flyers who claim their pain is a 10 out of 10 but I'm bored and can you change the channel on the waiting roomTV huh? So when patient surveys suggest Dr. X is a big meanie who won't treat my stupendous pain from nonspecific causes appropriately, the morons at CMS either pay no attention or have no power to make the life of Dr. X or his administrators miserable.
People who are not in chronic pain have no business dictating what can or cannot be done for people in chronic pain. When they do, they tend to lack empathy to a degree that's just amazing.
CDC should have no say in a lot of other things, as well. It's the doctors' business to decide what's best for their patients, not the bureaucrats. CDC's role should be purely informative.
At a certain point there is a level of involvement between the market participants and the factors that control the outcome that makes the "prediction market" charade collapse. At that point it's not gambling, it's just bribery with a blindfold on.
I can see people who think prediction markets are the bees' knees playing with ones like this for personal goals (like "who'll finish the story first/who is right about when Sally gets pregnant?") and I would be very hesitant to call it bribery or fraud, but as an outsider it doesn't convince me that prediction markets on a wider scale are the way to go in making policy decisions. They'll end up like the stock market, or like betting on horse races etc. Big institutional investors and professional gamblers make a profit, the rest of us lose or win small amounts at irregular intervals.
At the "people in the same house betting $20" level it is certainly not bribery or fraud -- and it's certainly not bribery or fraud more than various approaches to "inducing children to eat vegetables".
But there's a very slippery slope from there to having $100k staked on a market for "what will happen in the next Game of Thrones novel".
I guess if you're only getting prediction markets off the ground, then little play ones like these are useful to get people accustomed to the concept and how they work and how they should bet (I mean, make a reasoned prediction on the evidence! totally not sticking a pin in a horse's name betting going on!)
But yeah, as something to help set policy, this is dumb: I don't think any boss in the world would decide "Well, I was going to make Joe work over the next three months, but given that everyone is betting on him getting three months paid leave, I suppose I'll have to go with the majority decision as to what is most likely to happen!"
The person whose policy decisions would be affected by this is Yafah-- she might use it to decide whether she should e.g. make plans that involve going back to her university. (In practice, the markets aren't really liquid enough for this to be very good information.)
Oh, come on, that's not even the worst insider trading that's happened on Manifold so far! Someone procrastinated on resolving a hookup market and then the people they told that the hookup happened bought up the probability to like 98%.
This is incredibly fun and everyone is having a great time. We have GAMIFIED GOSSIP.
I can see a very small value in using a formal bet (with or without real money) to keep people honest on what they say. If two roommates have a disagreement about something, and they can peg something of value on a neutral third party, it keeps them honest on the resolution.
Most people don't need such a thing, but I suppose it could be valuable to a group that feels they need it.
I can't see how bets with such levels of insider information (so-and-so gets pregnant) would avoid scams if real money were ever involved. Even $1,000 or less could be incentive enough for someone to change their personal goals ("I'll bet against myself on finishing my novel and then finish it later.") and essentially rig the bet.
Oh everybody loves betting. Doesn't seem much different than Clint and the boys getting together for a little poker, or Rosey and her girlfriends taking a roadtrip to Vegas to play a little blackjack.
I followed a comment last week to versusgame.com, what appears to be a well funded prediction market based on tiktok games that is simply ignoring US regulations. I played around with it and from what I can tell their gimmick is that all bets are player vs. player rather than the house, however it is very apparent that my bets were instantly called by bots with a common username generation pattern. Every market is in the form of a tiktokesque video and the odds are always +190 either way, giving some apparently very good EV. I expect either they are well funded and burning cash to build users, or I am just being scammed.
I have any interception and a doritos ad being shown at +190 each, however it looks like my bet on an interception has simply disappeared without my account being refunded. This previously happened on my Kupp >40 receiving yards, though in that instance my account was refunded. I'll post next thread about if I was able to with draw my winnings, if any, or if it is purely a scam.
To give a fair shake to the entity, this is from a Yahoo article quoting the CEO
"People have been doing it since day one. We can't help it. It's fun for us. So we went about creating something that's fair and fun for the masses. We are classified as a skill-based game. So we don't need licenses. We don't need any of that where someone like a DraftKings might need that. We kind of fall under the regulations as skills, which just went public for, like, $11 billion, so congratulations to them. So, yeah, we are really smooth sailing, just letting people do what they already do in a fair, fun way for everybody."
Oh, thanks for testing out versusgame! I hadn't even considered that some of their bets are matched by bots (for what it's worth, all Manifold traffic thus far has been 100% organic). I suppose bot-matching is not that different than running an automated market maker behind the scenes.
Curious if the tiktok video makes the bet more fun to engage with; my impression is "no" but I'm also not a tiktok user.
Personally no, I found their UI very grating, but similarly to you I'm definitely not the target audience. I hit on at least one so far, so I guess I'll see if I actually get paid out.
From what I can tell, every bet is called by a bot within a few seconds, or at five I placed. Every bet I've seen offered is +190 either way, leading to what feels like very good odds sometimes, which I'm skeptical they would ever fill both sides of. I can understand them currently bucketting the negative EV legs of non-even bets made by instagram users to burn cash for userbase, but I don't think this is legitimate market making at all.
If you were interested, bots are no longer calling my bets, and advantage bets are just sitting uncalled. I assume it may have either been a mechanic to capture prospective new users, or a promotion for the super bowl.
Ah interesting! Thanks for the update. I suspected something was weird about their enforcement of everything being 50/50 odds, but was coming at it more from a prediction market utility perspective (aka "how can you answer questions about the real world if the odds don't change") and less from the trader's perspective haha
You're actually right, their website was quite confusing and seemed like it was +190, I'm also more used to seeing American odds. That said, plenty of bets including the ones I bet one were still advantage at 1.9
Not sure what you mean by "advantage", so for those not up on all their betting formats, note that 1.9 pays less than even money: it multiples your money by 1.9, aka you win 0.9 back (plus your stake) for every 1.0 you bet and win. (Or do you just mean you think the odds would normally be less than what they're paying?)
I just mean that even at 1.9/-111, many of the odds were quite advantageous. I hit on any INT for either team and that a doritos commercial would play; the odds were ~-105 for an INT on each QB individually, and doritos had publicly announced and displayed their commercial prior to my wager.
My understanding is that the Versusgame purports to be a player vs player operation with the entity acting purely as matchmaker, however currently they seem to be bucketing bets with bot accounts acting as counterparties. The bets are created by random people with 50k Instagram followers and as such it seems like they are setting up for quite the cash burn if they keep allowing sporting events
From a Heideggerian point of view, bias is another word for "care." It is impossible to overcome bias, because bias or care is constitutive of selfhood. It is the basis for any orientation whatsoever. Does "Overcoming bias" thus mean, minimizing the extent to which one is a Dasein? But what would this mean? And what would motivate Dasein to want to overcome the conditions that make it what it is?
I don't know much about Heidegger, but I believe in the phrase "overcoming bias", the word "bias" is normally taken to refer to biased epistemics (i.e. problems in determining what is true), as opposed to biased preferences (caring for one thing more than another).
It's been a long while since I read Being and Time, and I didn't understand it super well even back then, but I think the obvious response here (as Dweomite says) is that the "bias" that Robin means here is specifically epistemic bias, and not other kinds of bias (e.g. affective bias.) The rationalist project doesn't seek to override individuals' subjective viewpoints or their idiosyncratic preferences, even if these are non-rational in origin; that leaves plenty of the realm of care/concern/Dasein-ness that even the strictest rationalist is happy to see stay around.
Maybe we can even take it a step further. Dasein essentially is the care of an individual for their own being and the possibilites for their being in the unfolding of their life. Those possibilities are defined by the individual's being-in-the-world. Therefore, the impulse to accurately grasp the world on an intellectual level, rationalist's characteristic motivation, can be seen as an expression of that very care and concern that makes Dasein what it is, since it shows the individual more clearly the possibilities that exist for their own life.
I think hit the nail on the head there. To me, "Overcoming bias" is the power to situationally step outside my Dasein and see the world in new light.
Also, it points to a third way of making choices: Heidegger tries to convince us that we must make our choices authentic -- i.e. we must be rooted in the Dasein and avoid _mauvaise foi_, resolutely refusing the pressures of Them. But we have more options than Heidegger lets on: We can use the tooling of Rationality/Bayesianism/etc to shed light on our choices in places that our own personal conviction or conformist acceptance leave in shadow.
In my humble opinion, Heidegger romanticises the rooted, unchanging Dasein and gives it an absolute primacy that leads him off the trail. We are not going to get rid of our Dasein, but we should look at it the way a sculptor looks at an unfinished statue -- not as a guest looks at a museum piece.
I think the key concept here is "surprise". Before you have the experience of being surprised by some aspect of the world that was totally unexpected by you, there's no reason to ever step outside of your own bias/care. Once surprise appears, it turns out that there's a whole world that exists on its own, completely without reference to your selfhood. To stay within your own subjectivity after that is to accept the possibility of future completely unknown surprises, some of which may be intolerable. So you've got to develop methods by which to deal with that world by its own standards, the way it needs to be dealt with, rather than by your own standards, in a way that makes sense to you.
So being Dasein post-surprise (which may be what he calls "thrownness"?) involves continually stepping back and forth between the world as ready-to-hand (in which it's involved in your bias/care) and the world as present-at-hand (in which it's just its own thing and doesn't care what anybody thinks about it). Living in ready-to-hand is to be in continual danger of possible intolerable surprises, including those which might dissolve your selfhood; living in present-at-hand is to abandon your own self-hood.
Spock is present-at-hand, Dr. McCoy is ready-to-hand, and Captain Kirk is Dasein, having to mediate the two. Or if you like Plato, the black horse in the Phaedrus is ready-to-hand, the white horse is present-at-hand, and the charioteer is Dasein, trying to steer the two.
In UNSONG, you quote a Dr. Seuss poem: "You say you have problems as great as my own / I am forced to admit it is true / But the thing is that my problems happen to me / Whereas yours only happen to you."
Which Dr. Seuss book were you quoting? I thought I was pretty well versed in his corpus, growing up, but that one has stumped me.
The rhyme and meter do sound like Seuss, but in other ways the poem does not sound Seussian to my ears. I think what's non-Seussian about these lines is that everything's abstract, non-physical. There is not one single noun denoting a plain ordinary object -- instead the only *things* mentioned in the poem are "problems." And there's not one verb denoting a physical act. Instead poem's about saying, having, admitting, happening -- all abstract, non-physical actions.
I disagree about the abstraction. I think it's very reminiscent of "I had trouble getting to Solla Sollew", which has lots of lines about "troubles" in a general abstract sense.
There is no attribution. Versions of this rhyme appear in places including The Improvement Era in a 1963 edition. In all cases the author is listed as unknown. I would think the Mormons of all people would have tracked it down if they could have before printing it in an official church periodical.
Interesting - that is different enough it wouldn't show up on a direct search. The version (should the link be broken) is:
"If you think you have troubles as big as my own / I am forced to admit it is true / But consider the fact that mine happen to me / While yours merely happen to you!"
From that, I found this Ohio Wing Civil Air Patrol newsletter from 1959, which has a similar poem (sadly uncited):
It gives it as "You say you have troubles as great as my own, / Maybe my good friend that is true / But consider the fact that mine happen to me / While yours merely happens to you."
It also shows up (apparently) in the Tuscon Daily Citizen in 1953 and the Cedar Rapids Gazette in 1951, but I don't have access to newspaperarchive.com and can't verify either myself. But 1959 at the very least puts an upper bound on how recent it could be.
Here's my rule of thumb: if a native speaker can possibly screw up the meter while reading aloud, it's not Dr. Suess. (And for the record, I would have guessed Ogden Nash.)
If only there were thousands off-the-shelf room-darkening products and/or room-darkening custom services for when off-the-shelf products won't work!
(Or put another way, my west-facing living room, which even has a sliding glass door, can be made darker at 3 PM than most people's suburban bedrooms are at 3 AM.)
It does make a big difference what kind of room you're watching in. Houses with a no-window media room (like mine!) make this great, but if your watching area is the giant open-floor-plan space shared with all the other activities in your house, then blocking off the lights is going to be difficult.
It's pretty easy if you have money! Manual or mechanized custom shades can be ordered for almost any window. And then with an ambient light rejecting screen and a bright projector, you can often get an excellent image even in a casually bright room, like a family room with a lamp or two on. It's doable!
Ukraine situation seems getting quite bad. Hopefully I am just panicking and it is not going to end with Russian provocations, takeover of Ukrainian government and/or invasion but I am not hopeful.
>I think most Americans have a distorted view of the situation.
>The source of the conflict is the U.S. continually agitating to bring the Ukraine into NATO and increase troops and missiles there.
>As of right now, I view us as the aggressors.
I am uncertain what you are accusing the US media and government of.
Are you saying that the American public has a false idea of troop and weapons movements by various parties? That is, the consensus reality is incorrect?
Or are you saying that they have a correct idea of troop and weapons movements, that Ukraine, the US, and Russia's actions are being reported more or less correctly, but Putin is entirely justified in what he has been doing? That is, the consensus morality is incorrect?
Also, if you are familiar with "agitation to bring Ukraine into NATO" by the US government, can you please explain where your information comes from on this?
I don't understand your theory. If Russia is not either planning to invade Ukraine or pretending to plan to invade Ukraine, why did they move a large part of the Russian army to the border with Ukraine?
They could be preparing to be welcomed in for security purposes, when "representatives of the self-defense of Russian-speaking citizens" take over Ukraine's parliament and organize a referendum on joining Russia.
>He explains how NATO membership is a crucial piece of the puzzle
I Ctrl-F'ed for NATO in the linked article and didn't find anything indicating anyone has plans for Ukraine to join NATO.
>We only have anonymous sources making totally unverifiable claims
Do we really?
If you google "ukraine satellite images", a lot of mainstream news sources seem to have gotten images from a private company called Maxar that are claimed to show troop and equipment movement.
>This would not be the first time intelligence agencies have lied about enemy capabilities/intentions for their own purposes
If intelligence agencies can lie about anything, and anything/anyone can be a front for them, how do you get reliable information? Why do you think the website that you linked is trustworthy?
>And the only reason we think Russia is going to invade is vague accusations from intelligence agencies
I admit I can't tell much from the photos, but there is plenty of alleged evidence, so I don't think it's true that people are going off of "vague accusations".
>Who the hell are we to tell them where to put troops in their own country?
Reportedly some of the military buildup has been in Crimea. Is Crimea "their own country"?
>Are you saying that the American public has a false idea of troop and weapons movements by various parties? That is, the consensus reality is incorrect?
Yes, I suspect it is. There seems to be a distinct disconnect between what Ukraine is saying and what Biden administration is saying. (And let's face it, the US media doesn't have much skill separating fact from fiction.) The Russians seemed flustered by the strength of Biden's response. Meanwhile Biden has been able to galvanize NATO (which has been one of his primary foreign policy goals post-Trump), and we're sending all sorts of nifty military equipment to Ukraine (which we wouldn't have been able to do without all sorts of political repercussions if Putin hadn't been massing troops on the border).
Plus Ukraine and southern Russia have been going through an unseasonal thaw for the past couple weeks. An armored advance into a quagmire of mud is usually considered suboptimal conditions to start a military offensive. And it's interesting how Biden amped up his rhetoric once the thaw set in...
I could be wrong, but I suspect Biden thinks Putin is bluffing, and he's calling Putin's bluff. We'll see...
Hindsight: Trent Telenko expected the invasion beforehand[1], and expected that Putin couldn't take all of it [2][3], partly because Ukrainians have a lot of resolve [4].
His explanation for the "disconnect between what Ukraine is saying and what Biden administration is saying" was economic [5][6]: "The panic caused by the Biden Administration statements has killed the business insurance market in Ukraine. The 60 firms doing so have dropped to three. No insurance equals no business operations, a Ukrainian economic heart attack."
It is just not true that US is "continually agitating to bring the Ukraine into NATO". That was the position of Bush administration, but Bush is out of power since 2009. EDIT: also, I do not understand what do you mean by "increase troops and missiles there". There are currently no US troops in Ukraine, as far as I know.
I think we can imagine how the United States would react to a Russian satellite country a few dozen miles from Miami, just by looking at US-Soviet-Cuban diplomacy throughout the period of 1960-1991. There was a bit of agitation in the first year or so of the situation, but then it got settled and the US never threatened invasion again.
I believe someone has suggested that the goal of the whole exercise, assuming an invasion will not happen, is to prepare world audiences for an ally to do something similar to a different country, except actually invade. The US and others would be paralyzed as a consequence of the current charade.
I don't know if I believe it, but I haven't heard a better theory.
The problem that buildup seems very unusually large and there is no good exit strategy for Putin. Massive demands were made persistent sabre rattling etc. If nothing will happen it will not look good for him.
> The essay denies the existence of Ukraine as an independent nation.
> Putin compares "the formation of an ethnically pure Ukrainian state, aggressive towards Russia" to a use of weapons of mass destruction against Russians.
(hmm, I wonder why Ukraine and Ukrainians may dislike Russia and Putin?)
The question is not what Russia would gain, the question is what would Putin gain. That is a big part of problem because war will be not good for people there, Ukraine, Russia, world in general. But may be good for Putin, so it may happen despite that it is bad for basically everyone.
North Korea level sanctions would be quite bad for Putin, he likes being a popular dictator. But he also likes being internationally feared (if not quite respected), and if Ukraine, with the obvious NATO backing decides to take Donbass back then he would likely consider himself forced to commit to a full-scale invasion so as not to look like a paper tiger (which is unacceptable). But there's nothing new here, and the reasons for the current media fever pitch are unclear, is there really so much smoke without fire?
Satellite imagery, on the ground videos etc indicate that Russia is moving more and more of its military into position consistent with invasion.
Yet, it is not a new message, but that is because buildup continues. It is now on scale that it is of size that according to some experts is enough to invade Ukraine, and on such scale the only use is invasion or threats of invasion. Right now most of Russian army is directly next to Ukrainian border and even more is moved there. Convoys of tanks, new deployments kilometers from border. Many videos of trains with military equipment including cruise missiles moved in direction of Ukraine.
Part of army was moved into Belarus, with military exercise as explanation. Belarus official statement now is that part Russian army there is no longer on exercises but guards border with Ukraine.
Well, even if that's all true, it can just as well be a way for Putin to demonstrate that he's ready and willing to respond with full force to a serious attempt to disrupt the status quo. I'm not sure if he has good reasons to believe that Ukraine is preparing to do that, there's obviously no hope of objective reporting from either side, and if or when there'll be an initiation everybody would blame it on provocations anyway.
A lot of coverage and responses here focus on Putin, but there's another side to consider: NATO expansion towards Russia's borders can reasonably be seen as aggressive and contrary to prior "soft" agreements on the balance of power.
Not that Russia is innocent in all of this, but the point being if Russia is "just" sabre rattling, then preventing NATO expansion to its borders has strategic benefits, and if they are legitimately invading, then Ukraine would act as a strategic buffer between them and NATO powers.
For the record, NATO's "aggressive explansion" was nothing like invading the countries with soldiers or tanks. The Eastern European countries themselves tried to get into NATO or EU as soon as possible, because that seemed like the only protection from Russia.
I strongly object against trying to describe this situation as somehow symmetric. One side is *invading* their neighbors, completely literally. Other side is being *begged* by the small countries in between for the permission to join. To say that NATO should not "expand aggressively" is to say that those small countries already belong to Russia and should accept it.
> To say that NATO should not "expand aggressively" is to say that those small countries already belong to Russia and should accept it.
No, that's a false dilemma, and the sort of thinking that's now driving the drum beats of war that we're now seeing.
Not allowing them into NATO to avoid escalating tensions while also not allowing Russia to control them is a perfectly viable middle ground consistent with existing soft agreements. It's messy and some people might find it "unsatisfactory", but that's life.
I also didn't frame this as symmetric, but if you want the asymmetric takes then go watch the American media for all of the propaganda you can handle. If you want a more balanced take, then listen to the Ukrainian officials that are criticizing the West's hawkish rhetoric and actions that are inflaming the situation.
The reason this situation exists is because of Ukraine's overtures to join NATO and this overture being seriously considered. So actually not a great idea in retrospect.
Modulo a few quibbles of little import, this is a fair 10,000 ft view that actually considers the decades of policies leading up to the present tensions:
Whether you think Putin or Russia's views are justified are ultimately irrelevant. The US throws its weight around all the time in a similar fashion, unless you've conveniently forgotten the illegitimate Iraq war and the two decades in Afghanistan, not to mention the dozens of other conflicts.
Russia doing the same to secure certain concessions it considers important to its interests is apparently long-established standard practice. Unless you want these concessions to be decided by open warfare between two nuclear powers, then you should consider those interests carefully and work towards diplomatic solutions.
If all that means is denying a few countries entrance to NATO and thus preserving the soft agreements that have existed for decades, that seems to be perfectly reasonable strategic solution. Judgments about the "symmetry" of this specific scenario is frankly irrelevant IMO.
Generally, the problem with historical perspective (such as the video you linked) is that often one side can say "if we go X years back in history, you see that the disputed territory clearly belonged to us", and the other side can say "well, if we go Y years back in history, it clearly didn't", and this can go back to the dinosaurs.
Like, yes, many countries recently admitted to NATO were historically in Russia's sphere of influence... assuming that "historically" strictly refers to the period between WW2 and the fall of Soviet Union. However, if you go further to the past, then it is not really true for Poland, Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, former Yugoslavia.
The current scenario is not about who controlled what territory when, it's about the historical precedents that drives the current *behaviours* we're seeing. If NATO has a *history of behaviour* that Russia feels threatens their security, and nations on its borders are making overtures to join NATO and NATO is considering those applications, then Russia's actions make a certain kind of sense. All of the history covered in that video is about establishing the backstory for why the hostility to NATO expansionism makes sense from Russia's perspective.
Furthermore, this is not ancient history, many of the people pulling the strings now were alive and well in the timeframes we're discussing here, and some of them were even in power (like Biden). It's like you're trying to understand the US's presence in Afghanistan for two decades while completely ignoring 9/11 or Al-Qaeda, the core factors that set the stage.
It's not surprising that no one expected the first invasion, triggered by Ukraine joining the EU as opposed the the Russian thingy
But once you incorporate that level of possessiveness and/or paranoia into your understanding of Putin's Russia it should be easy to see what a knife in the back any prospect of Ukraine joining NATO looks like to the Russians. The alliance is predicated on defending against Russia
Putin will not get his head on straight so it's up to some western leader to figure out that Ukraine cannot peacefully join NATO. One option would be to offer Russia NATO membership. That would be extremely interesting with regards to the geopolitical balance with China. Presumably a more likely one would be to carve out a unique status for Ukraine such that they are not exclusively EU members and can also be part of the Russian bloc in some fashion
We need to get into Russia's headspace and work backward from there
Why did anyone want the Baltics in NATO? What value do they provide? They're almost dwarf countries. Yet, they are in NATO, and there are NATO troops on the Estonian border 120 km from St. Petersburg. It's difficult not to see as as very fishy from the Russian point of view.
Ukraine of course is very unlikely to be admitted into NATO anytime soon, but it's their explicit goal (written into constitution, even), and in 2020 they were granted NATO's "Enhanced Opportunities Partner" status, which of course isn't yet a promise of anything, but still. The trend doesn't look very good. Ukraine in NATO would be much worse for Russia than the Baltics ever were. And somehow the idea "hey, maybe the West could just explicitly promise to Russia that Ukraine never joins NATO, and the whole conflict would be over" is treated as something monstrous and unthinkable, and Putin is treated as some bloodthirsty comic book villain who just wants to conquer because of pure megalomania.
> Why did anyone want the Baltics in NATO? What value do they provide?
Well, Europe/USA is honestly considering human right abuse as a bad thing (even if their action often make things worse, see how various military interventions went).
So there is an element of doing things for ethical reasons.
Also, from pure military viewpoint having an unsinkable aircraft carrier and early warning system is a good thing.
Similarly, in interest in Western Europe is having Russian army crippled in Ukraine rather than triumphant an victorious without serious losses.
> Well, Europe/USA is honestly considering human right abuse as a bad thing (even if their action often make things worse, see how various military interventions went).
What do you mean? Was the any human rights abuse in the Baltics after they declared independence that NATO is now somehow preventing? (We could by the way remember that Estonia and Latvia are to this day requiring their native Russian population, regular people who were born in these countries in 1940-1991 and are in no way responsible for any USSR wrongdoings, to jump through hoops (language exam etc.) to gain citizenship, otherwise they are stateless and get an "alien passport" only. Seems not very human right-y to me, but no one in the West ever cared.)
Remember also that Poland and Hungary were accepted into NATO in 1999, and the Baltics in 2004. Russia was weak, still recovering from the USSR collapse and was on friendly terms with the West. Russia generally is considered to have begun to assert an anti-Western stance in 2007, when Putin made his Munich speech. AFTER NATO creeped to its borders.
Negative. There's no practical military advantage, and the liabilities are not unlike those that attach to having Turkey join the EU. But there's a certain category of Foggy Bottom stripey-pants (or student thereof) who believe that mindless expansion of treaty organizations is always good. This is how we got the UN.
Ukraine was never offered NATO membership. Putin mentioned he wanted it a while ago but it was never seriously pursued. Russia clearly thinks it's on the table despite no one actually offering it to Ukraine though. He wants to roll back NATO expansion. Or at least those are his demands. Including removing forces from current NATO members. That's a pretty unserious proposal. If intelligence is to be believed he sees democracy and color revolutions are more or less a western front and wants to install a puppet regime in Ukraine.
Just a minor correction. Bush administration wanted Ukraine in NATO and they suceeded in pressing their European allies in putting following language into a declaration of NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008: "NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO." (https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_8443.htm).
However, this is now clearly dead letter, no one in power in NATO now wants to admit Ukraine, and if NATO would now promise to not take them, it would be of a very limited use to Russia, since there is no guarantee that it (NATO) would not change its stance later. So I agree with your larger point that Putin is gaslighting with this demand.
Putin's headspace (because this IS Russia's headspace in reality) is "I want the Russian sphere of influence to resemble, at minimum, the original Iron Curtain borders, and I will accomplish that by any means feasible." Anything offered to Putin will involve a concession towards giving him more influence over other ex-Soviet nations, and then he will accept it, and then he will continue doing the exact same thing while demanding more concessions, promising that THIS time he'll back down, because his interests aren't aligned with good-faith negotiation. It takes two to have a conversation.
I doubt if they really want to take over Eastern Europe. The USSR was the second biggest economy in the world when it occupied Eastern Europe and that folded quickly. Russia is now a small to medium economy. Putin probably wants to stop NATO expansion as he says.
1. If Putin said the sky was blue I'd want a second opinion. He's a former grey man, prevarication is his nature.
2. that's your theory. My theory is that Putin remembers when the USSR was the second-biggest economy in the world and wants that back, and sees the restoration of the Soviet Bloc as Greater Russia (or the Russian Trade Zone or whatever he'd call it) as the path to do that.
I trust Putin as much as I trust any US spokesman. Does Putin want the Russians controlling all of Eastern Europe again? I doubt it - what would it gain then except continuous war and an eventual loss. The Russians after all did abandon their empire fairly cleanly. He does want to stop NATO advancement obviously and believes the Ukraine is part or fully Russian.
I'm certain you believe he believes that. And you will then take him at his word when he says that he's only starting to play Hungry Hungry Hippo with the Balkans to protect the Russians that live there.
I believe last time the Olympics were in Russia, he waited until afterwards to invade Ukraine. But last time the Olympics were in China, he invaded Georgia during the Olympics.
OK, then don't bet on him waiting. I have no idea what Putin is going to do. Invading seems like a bad idea to me, so I'd bet against it. But I'm mostly clueless.
The Crimea situation needs to get resolved somehow. The best case scenario is Russia officially taking Crimea, Donbas and fucking off, and Ukraine accepting that outcome. The expected scenario is a regime change.
Worst case scenarios are the long, and depressing, tail.
Your best case scenario is already the status quo essentially, and it's obviously not Russia that's the most upset about it. The question seems to be, are those who are more upset finally willing to do something about it?
Judging by eager Western support for Ukrainian cause, nothing short of return to pre-2014 borders would be recognized in the foreseeable future, which is obviously unacceptable to Putin. Karabakh is also somewhat atypical for post-Soviet frozen conflicts, as withouth Russia's direct involvement the opposing sides are relatively well-matched.
I think Russian Crimea will need to be recognized at some point, it was stuck with Ukraine pretty much by historical accident. The rest may, in the end, be a bargaining chip to secure it.
Still, Russian Crimea voted in favor of staying with the Ukraine by popular majority, did it not (originally)? Now that Russia has taken over, they have engaged in ethnic cleansing, so it's not clear that democratic majority is legitimate any longer.
How does an invasion change the de jure status? There's nothing in international law saying "if it's got your troops all over it, that makes it yours".
I think that idea is that if Ukraine gets beaten sufficiently badly, it might agree to cede part of its territorry in exchange for getting back other occupied parts. Seems kind of plausible, actually
Hijacking your comment because I've got an offer for readers interested in this subthread:
Ukrainian expat here, my estimate for the war is substantially below Metaculus average so I'm willing to try the betting thing and bet against the invasion happening. My betting budget is about $100-$200. If you're interested, send me a letter at "sharedvi" on gmail
If the Russians capture Donetsk and Luhansk and then stop advancing, that still counts as "invading", right?
Edit: I checked what Ukrainians think: "According to a recent poll conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS), 48.1% of Ukrainians believe the threat of an invasion is real, while 39.1% don't think an invasion will happen. Another 12.8% of respondents either had no opinion yet or did not want to comment." (28.01.2022)
We have the luxury today of seeing all sorts of information that doesn't get through MSM filters. Here's some more information you might not be aware of if you were just reading the headlines...
WEATHER: For the past two weeks there's been an unusual mid-winter thaw in Ukraine and southern Russia with heavy rains. Pictures on Twitter show Russian troops wet and muddy, and the temporary camps along the boarder are full of mud. The weather forecasts suggest warm weather and rain for next 10 days at least. It's going to be tough to launch a attack through all that mud.
TANKS & MUD: There's a lot of discussion of various forums right now about the ability of modern tanks to handle muddy conditions. The consensus seems to be that they will be able to move through the mud and not get stuck like WWII tanks did — but at a cost of lower speed and higher fuel expenditure. Half tracks and troop carriers, less so. But then there are also paved roads that could be used. But moving troops along highways and roads funnels troop movements along a single path and leaves them vulnerable to air attack. Likewise, rainy weather prevents optimal use of drones.
So, this is a suboptimal time for an invasion of Ukraine.
Questions:
1. Why didn't Putin make his move while he had the weather on his side? My guess would be that he never meant to actually invade, rather he just wanted to create the appearance of threat to get concessions and destabilize the government of Ukraine.
2. So, why is the Biden Administration upping the warnings of immanent attack when the risk is probably lower than it was 3 weeks ago? — and while the Ukraine government seems to be downplaying them? Not sure, but it seems Biden is purposely upping the ante on Putin. We get to ship vast amounts of armaments to Ukraine under the excuse of aiding them in a time of need. We get our Eastern NATO partners more engaged in their defense planning, and we get NATO and the EU talking acting in a more unified manner.
Ironically, if this was a bluff by Putin to cow Ukraine, it may backfire on him by driving Ukraine into the arms a NATO and the EU.
I am not any kind of arms expert but, after I googled how many planes each side has, I heavily doubt that Ukrainian airforce would be able to bomb advancing Russian army, so concern about an air attack seems moot.
Actually, Ukrainians recently bought some Turkish drones, which is sometimes cited as one of the a reasons for current escalation. Those weapons might be very effective against poorly armed separatists. I doubt that this changes the fact that Russian air force is far stronger, though
If you are driving a column of MIA2's down a contested highway with the full might of the USAF supporting them, 10 dudes with a detonator and a couple shitty rockets can seriously ruin you day.
Ukraine is swimming in NLAW's which are at least a bit better than shitty; if russia wanted a clean hungarian style rolling of the tanks, it's too late. The best they can hope for now (assuming Ukraine doesn't collapse instantly) is a chechen style fuckfest.
> Why didn't Putin make his move while he had the weather on his side?
My understanding is that at the time the forces were not fully deployed for a proper invasion - e.g. most of the units have been transferred across very long distances (e.g. China border), and we saw the trains of their heavy hardware arriving, however, the full contingent of troops were arrived just recently. Logistics takes time. Also, even moving from these near-border emplacements to a position that's actually ready to attack takes a full day or so; so e.g. on friday we could be sure that a saturday attack is physically impossible. However, this seems to be changing today, and right now we can't say that an attack on tuesday/wednesday would be impossible. So the bet has been rapidly rising in the last couple of days - more than over the whole month of january - and there's not that much space to escalate even more without firing shots, so it might force a show of cards or folding if a bluff turns out to be a bluff.
"A housemate opened a market into whether she’ll get pregnant, and another housemate who helps with childcare is buying shares “as a hedge”"
I admit, this strikes me as odd. Surely the only one who decides when she'll get pregnant, assuming the use of birth control, is the prospective mother? I can see this working in a "everyone else thinks this is a good time in my life for me to have a baby, if I'm going to have a baby" for someone unsure if they should have a baby right now and then deciding you will try to get pregnant, but it really heavily depends on "people who know me and know my situation", and how is a market better than "I talked to them and got advice"?
Unless it's betting on "whoops, this was unexpected!"
Oh well, good luck if they're trying for a baba, and maybe also try a prayer to St. Anne!
I interpreted this as that she's already decided that she wants to get pregnant, and is trying, but the whether and when is where the prediction comes in.
But then how do prediction markets help predict that? What information are we expecting other people to have that will be revealed in this market? Does she suspect one of the housemates secretly slipping contraceptives in her coffee and she's hoping this will lure them out?
In the last 10 years or so I have pretty much read all non-fiction books. I guess I am trying to learn something new, rather than reading as entertainment. Probably some psychological weirdness as well. At any rate one of my favorite non-fiction writers is David Deutsch. David is a specialist in quantum computing, but is knowledgeable across a wide breadth of science. He promotes the idea of the multiverse which is interesting, but he also is a big proponent of scientific optimism in that we will continue to progress and many of the problems of today will be solved. He likes Karl Popper's and Jacob Bronowski's take on scientific progress. David tweeted about a novel he enjoyed (A lot of authors promote each others books it seems) "Termination Shock" by Neal Stephenson so I shifted gears and gave it a try. Long story short I couldn't put it down and rapped up the 700 pages in a week! I can see Deutsch's enthusiasm for it as it is mostly about geo-engineering climate change mitigation about 10 years in the future. Lots of cool science included as part of the story with a strong connection to what is actually going on now. Not going to spoil it for those contemplating reading it, but it was interesting that Mount Pinatubo's eruption 30 years ago cooled the planet by pouring sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. So it would be somewhat predicable that doing the same thing with human initiative would cool things down as well. Here's an article about Deutsch's optimistic views:https://www.warpnews.org/premium-content/david-deutsch-optimism-pessimism-and-cynicism/?fbclid=IwAR3edlsvFU07_fLTKjtt__bnzZ2CPzL5foDXm7a_5xmcC3aY4t2UIKLoH70
I downloaded it but didn’t really like it. It has a lot of problems common with near future books - the technology and also (in this case) climate change was too advanced.
I think most people would agree that as a general rule, it's bad to kill people. There might be exceptions, such as wars or self defence, but generally you shouldn't do it.
But why? Short of "because it's a base level assumption" I'm not sure I have a better explanation. So, if 1) you think killing people is bad and 2) you have an explanation beyond "it's an axiom" please lmk what your take is.
- Hard in practice to cause death without also causing suffering, which is axiomatically bad
- Killing someone prevents future existence that they would have otherwise had. If their future experiences were on net positive, you're removing positive experience (e.g. joy) from existing in the future. And perhaps this is axiomatically bad.
Only if you can be one hundred percent certain that their current and future lives are of negative utility to them. But nobody can be certain of that, not even for their own lives, and certainly not for the lives of others.
Plus "negative utility" is easy to reason about, but I'm not convinced that it's a meaningful thing to talk about in practice. How many utils per hour are you experiencing right now? How bad a headache would you need to have before that turns negative?
In cases where this is clearly true (someone is dying in extreme pain after an accident and won't live more than a few minutes anyway) then many people would agree that a mercy killing might be morally reasonable.
Because human life is, in fact, a worthwhile thing and taking it from another should require an ironclad reason. It's a decision that can't be walked back. Perhaps it does not have to be literally 100% certain, but I believe the margin of error for it is far outside of the human mind's ability to calculate.
I don't think your reasoning seems sound. Avoiding human suffering is also a worthwhile thing, but we don't typically conclude from this that we should only let people live if we are 100% certain that they will not suffer. In that case too, once that suffering has been experienced, it cannot be undone.
If the sad friendless people haven't killed themselves then it seems like they've cast a well-informed vote on the question of how sad their life is. And if they say "I would like to be dead but I can't work up the nerve to do it" then we're getting into assisted suicide territory which while contested, is a lot less bad than murder.
Only if you're perfectly omniscient (thus having access to their entire determined future and all internal states), which goes beyond hypothetical and into "arguing for the sake of argument" territory.
Destroying things is bad, because (due to entropy) it takes more work to create than destroy. All else being equal, if you're at a destroy / don't destroy choice, take don't destroy. The places where destruction is acceptable is when it prevents greater destruction later.
Killing people is a particular high cost form of destruction, since it takes years to make a person, and all people are unique. As society advances, the costs for making a person get greater and greater, and that is balanced by the greater value produced by the average person in their lifetime.
The thrill is in making a tangible change to the world. For a child, building a tower of blocks and knocking down someone else's tower are both tangible changes, but one takes a lot less work than the other.
That's a very good question. When I was in high school I was into bowling, and there were 2 things I liked about it. #1 was the beautiful Pythagorean tetractys setup of the pins, and #2 was the young boy joy of smashing it into chaos. I understand #1 but not #2. Building a tower of blocks produces a very different pleasure than knocking it down.
Killing people inappropriately is very very bad, because the people being killed don't like it and their friends don't like it and anyone who witnesses the killing updates in the direction of "killing is apparently okay" and that's bad for society.
Cases where killing people is appropriate are very very rare.
Humans are bad at judging which (if any) killing is appropriate. Humans might invent some complicated utilitarian rationalization for why killing some particularly annoying person is actually okay. This could lead to inappropriate killing.
The best way to avoid inappropriate killing is to have a blanket rule against killing at all. Even if you have somehow convinced yourself that you're in a trolley problem and killing is appropriate in this particular case, you are very probably just deluding yourself and you should ignore your utility math and simply not kill people.
> Humans are bad at judging which (if any) killing is appropriate
On what do you base that opinion?
I think there are two extremely excellent reasons for *personally* killing another human:
1. To minimize their extreme intractable suffering, particularly when death is imminent and especially if they request it, and,
2. In defense of criminally imminent deadly threat to oneself or others (which will almost always minimize human suffering, as most people (would-be victims, their loved ones, the police, etc) find situations of defensive killing far less emotionally traumatizing than murder).
I am very confident that I can judge either situation appropriately.
Why aren't you?
(FWIW, I am so confident there are situations where *I* should be killed that I've signed legal documents outlining when to kill me via intentional medical neglect.
I'm also super cool with someone killing me the moment I become a criminally imminent deadly threat to them.)
> I am very confident that I can judge either situation appropriately.
I'm also very confident that humans have a long history of dehumanizing others and so find it very easy to justify murder when it suits them. Of course you would think you're being reasonable, but even unreasonable people think they're being reasonable.
As such, it seems appropriate to have a blanket rule against killing people, that you should be detained if you ever do kill someone, and that whether your killing was justified should be decided by people that aren't you.
> Wouldn't having a "blanket rule" against killing people mean that there *is* no circumstance where killing is justified?
Sure, killing is typically judged based on intent and other circumstances under current laws, so those can absolve guilt, but it doesn't technically have to work that way. Strict liability laws determine guilt regardless of those considerations, and I see no reason why killing couldn't be a strict liability law.
For instance, a blanket rule against killing would mean that you are still breaking the rule when killing in self defense, but that doesn't mean you actually have to be punished in those circumstances. In other words, context can influence the response to a guilty verdict but not the determination of guilt itself.
It could have some advantages as well. If you are not guilty under current laws, the state has no power over the defendant at that point. If killing were strict liability, they would be found guilty even under self defense but they could be sent to a counselor or therapist as their "sentence".
Yes, those are two natural exceptions that people generally admit. They don't cause any problems for the rule as stated though, which allows for rare exceptions.
Just to reset, I was initially replying to someone who was arguing against exceptions, whose thesis statement was, "The best way to avoid inappropriate killing is to have a blanket rule against killing at all." And another person who said there should be a "blanket rule against killing." A blanket rule by definition has no exceptions.
Except most people agree there are very acceptable reasons to kill another human; self-defense against an imminent deadly threat being almost universally agreed-upon, with varying opinions about warfare (and policing), execution for capital offenses, and withdrawing life-sustaining medical care.
I can certainly judge what constitutes an "imminent deadly threat" (someone trying to stab me with knife, etc), and so can pretty much everyone else, including the OP. It's incredibly silly for the OP to assert otherwise.
I fully expect that these people would agree that killing for a paycheck is sometimes justified, and that's why they permit themselves to do it. I have a hard time believing that anyone is going around doing things that they don't personally think are justified. Whether those justifications are objectively valid is a separate question of course. An psychopathic nihilist that goes on a murder spree might justify it by saying that laws and ethics are man-made constructs, and that "murderous animal" is just our natural state, so there's no objectively justifiable reason to not murder people if they feel like it.
We in fact have lots of psychological processes that try to maintain the belief that we are justified in how we act (often with the corollary that we are a good person), even in the face of evidence to contrary.
I think most murderers (psychopathic nihilists aside) know/believe what they are doing is "wrong" but they do it anyway because the benefits outweigh their sense of wrong.
I was trying to get around to the moral relativity approach of "it's not immoral for the cannibals to eat their enemies since their culture's moral say it's a good thing."
Personally, I think OP's question is based on a flawed assumption. That is, I think all morals are axiomatic and it's just a question of who's axioms are right.
I think most people consider murder to be *generally* immoral, but think it's justified in some circumstances. People who commit murder then generally slot their behaviour neatly into the list of exceptions to its immorality, thus justifying their decision, eg. they're a bad person so they *deserve* to be killed, and other such rationalizations.
That said, I would probably agree that even when they think it's justified, these people will probably agree that their murder would still be illegal, but that's a separate question to whether they personally think it's justified, which was the framing you set.
In my view, the OP was actually asking about "why murder is wrong" should be in the axiomatic basis, or at least what axiomatic basis would entail that murder is wrong.
I feel like there's some deeper reasoning behind your question that you haven't unpacked for us (or which you may not have unpacked for yourself)? Are you asking this question because you want a rationalist argument against killing? Because I'm not sure there is a rationalist argument per se against killing other humans, other than the golden rule couched in game theory. But a rational sociopath could probably give you argument why it is good and even justified to kill people.
Or are you asking the meta question: why do we have the base-level assumptions that killing other humans is bad?
I'm not so sure we all share the same base-level assumptions about killing, though. I think we'd assume that most modern cultures have prohibitions about killing one's kin group and one's own cultural group. But this has obviously NOT been universal throughout history. For instance the practice of sati, or the viking practice having a crone called the "Angel of Death" strangle the concubines and servants to go into the afterlife with their dead chief, come immediately to mind. Of course the Aztecs, Maya and other Meso-American cultures had very organized system of human sacrifice, based on the premise that the gods sacrificed themselves so humans could live; thus humans should sacrifice themselves so the gods could live. And with the Aztecs, when there weren't enough enemy prisoners to sacrifice, families would offer up their own children for sacrifice.
And in modern societies, killing people considered to be outsiders has always been more acceptable. Look at Germany—in the 19th Century it was the European center of philosophy and was seen as torch-bearer of Western Civilization—but a century later, people who were imbued with that culture of reason, went on monumental and methodical killing binge. In fact, the 20th Century brought us dozens of genocidal movements more savage than anything that had gone before. Likewise, in the US, otherwise ordinary people could work themselves up into angry mobs and have lynching parties. So, I think the general rule against killing people is not as general as you may want to think.
Anyway, as Buddhist, I can answer you question from the perspective of Buddhist ethics and epistemology. But if you're a rationalist, you probably wouldn't find my arguments convincing because they do involve a non-scientific belief system.
In the past killing people in the neighboring tribe might have been a good thing. If you could keep them out of your hunting grounds or take over theirs. We've sorta agreed not to do this anymore... but Ukraine?
The argument from selfishness is that the more you normalize killing the more you risk someone killing you.
And in fact Medieval European nobility made this policy. They encouraged people to capture enemy nobles for ransom rather than kill them in battle. In part this was selfish; many of them believed that they would capture rather than be captured. But nobles also saw themselves as categorically different than other people, and so this also reduced the mortal risk to everyone they considered as equally human as them. Later, Napoleon’s enemies would exile rather than execute him so as not to encourage this revolutionary king-killing business that France had dabbled in.
But there’s at least circumstantial evidence that every military in all of recorded human history had to work hard to train people to kill even in hot blood. The pop historian Lindybeige suggests that every weapon down to your fists has a range of no return, which most people won’t enter willingly without a military machine like a formation. Whether that’s a rational self-preservation or a hardwired instinct, even children seem to have an unwillingness to start those parties. It’s only when engagements start within that range, from two strutting children pushed into each other to urban warfare, that you see people truly commit to moiderin’ each other.
All the great sages agree that their philosophy boils down to one sentence: Don't treat others in a way that would be hateful to you (or the positive version, love thy neighbor as thyself). Would you want to be killed if you were in the other person's shoes? If not, then you should not kill.
The above argument is ultimately an appeal to authority (albeit an appeal to ultimate authority), but I think you can found the golden rule on pretty solid logical ground.
There are standard arguments in ethics that cover this sort of stuff. Basic forms are if "killing is OK" is a widely accepted norm, then "kill YOU is OK" is a necessary corollary. Most people are not ok with being killed, ergo the stable norm people enforce amongst each other is that "kill is not OK".
My axiom is that it's good to bring about situations that people prefer and bad to bring about situations that people disprefer. If people disagree, then it will depend on the overall balance of how strongly the various people involved care.
I then have an empirical generalization. Usually, although different people prefer lots of different things, a lot of the things they prefer involve either their own continued existence and experiencing, or are distinctive enough that their own continued existence will be more likely to bring it about. The weird idiosyncratic things that people care about are sometimes opposed, but are usually different enough that letting each person work towards their individual ends usually results in net good, except in the cases of specific conflicts that are better solved by legal rules than by just ending the life of the person.
Suppose you (a doctor) will get 10 similar patients a year for the next 20 years who all report muscle pain. Suppose that, since the patients are similar, the best treatment is best for them all. And suppose that you can either do nothing or prescribe them painkillers, and that you initially think there is a 40% probability that painkillers are best and a 60% probability that doing nothing is best.
What should you do? What approach will lead to the best care for your patients?
Are you expecting an answer along the lines of running an experiment? We'd need to know a lot more parameters. Are we able to measure whether the treatment worked on a patient before moving on to the next one? How good are our measurement capabilities? How bad are the side effects of the pain killer?
I'm open to any strategy that provides good care for the patients, although, yes, I do suspect that the best strategy would involve some experimentation.
As for the parameters for the experiment: I want the strategy to perform well even given that there might be a few patients that we need to treat before getting the results from the first one; I think we are able to measure outcomes fairly well (although the outcome distributions may overlap), and the distribution of the size and frequency of the side effects are not precisely known, but you do have a prior for it , and you can update this as you get additional information (the prior for side effects is such that the prior for which treatment is best is 40% painkillers and 60% do nothing).
This seems like a good treatment protocol, and would probably provide good care. However, if there is a better treatment protocol, would you (the doctor) be able to find it?
It seems like the most obvious strategy is to, for any patient, assign the treatment that seems most likely to be best. In the case of the first patient, we would assign them no treatment. Then, since what ever happens to that patient won't update our probabilities by much (uncontrolled observational studies rarely can), we would assign the second patient no treatment too. This would continue until every patient is assigned no treatment.
This strategy will probably perform well and is likely to assign everyone to the best treatment. However, the chance that we give *no one* the best treatment is 40%. This seems high and seems like a concern. This suggests an alternative strategy that is able to detect and correct when we are wrong about which treatments are best.
Strategy I've been thinking about: I suggest that we run an RCT will all the patients, and that we allocate a patient to a treatment arm with probability equal to the probability that that treatment is best. So, in our example, initially we allocate patients to get no treatment with probability 60% and to get painkillers with probability 40%. After the first, say, 10 patients have been treated in this way, we could use the randomised controlled results to update our probabilities about which treatment is best, and hence also update our assignment probabilities. So, perhaps having seen this data, we think 'Hang on, we were wrong. Having updated on the results from the first patients, there is a 80% probability that painkillers are best'. In this situation, we would start assigning 80% of patients to get painkillers and 20% to get no treatment. Over time, presumably, the probability of one arm would tend to 100% and the other(s) would tend to 0%.
These probability matching strategies seem to perform surprisingly well in a variety of settings, and, since they create RCTs quite naturally, why shouldn't we be using them within healthcare? Do you think this strategy would work within the context of my original question? What about more generally? Could, for example, the NHS use this to treat all patients within a certain demographic who have the same medical history and symptoms? Is that a bad idea?
I think it might be possible to find a strategy that is better. My intuitive reasoning is something like 'surely we can get information about which treatment is best in the process of treating the patients. This would lead to better treatment for the remaining patients. This would lead to better treatment overall.'
In the comment above, I suggest a probability matching strategy. This is designed to provide useful information about which treatment is best, and to do so while providing decent care for all patients.
Do you think it would work? Do you think this strategy is even worse then the basic strategy?
Suppose that, for a given group with similar characteristics, we magically know that painkillers are the best treatment 100*X% of the time, and doing nothing is best 100*(1-X)% of the time. If you randomly give patients painkillers with probability X, the expected fraction of patients on the best treatment for them is X*X+(1-X)*(1-X) = 1-2*X +2*X*X, compared with just 1-X if you never give anyone painkillers. So your proposal is better only if 2*X*X-X>0, i.e., if X<0.5, i.e., it's always better just to go with the statistically best treatment for everyone.
Your calculations check out, but I'm not sure we can conclude that "it's always better just to go with the statistically best treatment for everyone." Instead, all I think we can conclude from the calculation is that, _for the first patient_, we are more likely to assign them the best treatment by going with the treatment most likely to work. For the patients as a whole, the same thing might not be true.
To draw your conclusion, we would need to either a) restrict ourselves to strategies that perform at least as well as the basic strategy for each patient (thus ignoring long-term patient care), or b) be confident that information gained when treating the first patients will not be used to improve care for later patients.
Are you defending a) or b), or are you making a different point?
Different! Even if you already know the "true" probability that you'd get from a RCT with literally infinite patients, just doing the thing must likely to be correct every time does better than randomising treatment! The sort of strategy you describe may be good for determining what the probabilities involved are, but they don't maximise the number of people receiving optimal treatment!
>The sort of strategy you describe may be good for determining what the probabilities involved are, but they don't maximise the number of people receiving optimal treatment!
I disagree, and I disagree on the grounds that determining the probabilities can be used to increase the number of people receiving optimal treatment!
Consider the original example, and assume we are trying to pick between a 'greedy' algorithm (where we assign the patient the treatment most likely to be best) and a 'probability matching' algorithm (where we assign a patient to treatment A with probability equal to the probability that treatment A is best).
Under the greedy algorithm we expect to assign 60%*200 = 120 to the best treatment and 80 patients to a suboptimal treatment.
Using probability matching _if we can't update our probabilities at all_ we would expect to assign (60%^2 + 40%^2)*200 = 104 patients to the best treatment and the other 96 to a suboptimal treatment. For probability matching to be better than the greedy algorithm, the effect of updating our probabilities would to be result in (at least) 16 patients getting the better treatment. I suspect that this would happen more often then it doesn't.
Analysing the probability matching strategy properly is hard, so instead I'll just give a hypothetical scenario where it beats the expected performance of the greedy algorithm: Suppose we are using the probability matching strategy but that we don't update our probabilities during the first 10 years. This would give us the results of a RCT with 100 patient where 60 of them have been assigned noting, and 40 of them have been assigned painkillers. This has a reasonable amount of statistical power, so suppose we find results that we would be six times more likely to see if doing nothing is best, compared to if painkillers are best. We use this to update our probabilities and we now believe there is a 90% chance that doing nothing is best and a 10% chance that painkillers are best. From this point on we stop updating probabilities again, and we assign 90 of the remaining patients to get no treatment and only 10 to receive painkillers.
So overall, 150 patients get assigned no treatment, and only 50 get assigned painkillers. Since (in this example) it seems very likely that no treatment is best, not only does the probability matching algorithm manage to tells us more about which treatment is better (compared to the greedy algorithm), it also manages to allocate more patients to the best treatment then we expect the greedy algorithm to!
Since most of the updating will happen early, I think it is very likely that the expected number of people assigned to the best treatment is higher under probability matching than under the greedy algorithm. If you consider this on the scale of an entire health system (the NHS, for example), or if you consider using our system for a very long time, this seems especially true.
Run a double blind RCT of course. This question has been answered long ago. Your initial probabilities are meaningless, because they're just theoretical guesses. What you need is data, and data is what the trial gives you.
(2) No, not unless you have some very dramatic life-altering result, and even then you set up your criteria for calling it off ahead of time, and you really don't want to do it because you sacrifice considerbale rigor.
Edit: I guess I need to add the purpose of doing the test is to provide the best care for *future* patients, because you're going to do an experiment on the *present* patients to gather the required data. Since there are by definition infinity more future than present patients, this is an ethical good overall, although humanity dictates some caution in the present nevertheless.
1) At what point would you stop researching? Exploring which treatment is best is extremely valuable, but only if there is a time in the future where we use this information. If we never stop researching, the research will be pointless.
2) I completely agree that experiment protocol should be specified in advance. This prevents subtle forms of p-hacking, allows the protocol to receive feedback, and ensures that patients know what they are getting themselves in for. However, designing the experiment protocol to adapt to new information can be valuable. It can increase the power of the test, and it can make harm less likely.
I would assume the initial probabilities are based on other doctors' and patients' experience with muscle pain. Your patients probably don't have an exotic new disease.
And so? The reason we settle on such rigorous tests is because it is so supremely easy for people -- both patients and physicians -- to bullshit themselves about medicine. We care too much about the outcomes to be objective. That's how we ended up with bloodletting and trephining as standards of care for as long as we did. If you want good medicine, you have to rigorously exclude anything but cold hard data collected in as blind a way as possible.
If the best treatment is best for all of them, then you want to identify the best treatment as quickly as possible. Give your first patient nothing, give the second patient painkillers, compare how they do. Then give all subsequent patients with this issue the better treatment.
(In reality this would be limited by your certainty that a patient with "muscle pain" is actually in the group you're studying, but if they're as similar as the problem says you can probably make a good guess.)
That is a fair solution to the problem as presented.
That being said, and I realise this isn't clear from what I've written, by "the best treatment is best for them all" I didn't mean that the treatment effects wouldn't overlap. Instead, I meant 1) the effect of each treatment can be modelled by a random distribution, 2) these distributions depend on the treatment but not on the patient, and 3) if we knew these distributions, it would be clear which one is best. So there is a best treatment, it is the same for all patients, but it might be tricky to figure out which is which using samples from the distributions.
As you've stated it, this is a classic problem in machine learning - given a slot machine with multiple arms of initially unknown payoff, how do you end up with the best overall payoffs? Usual strategies involve an early period of "exploration" where you pull each arm several times (give different patients different treatments) and see how well each does. Once you've gotten enough information, switch to a period of "exploitation" and just keep doing the one that has proved itself better.
Aella takes on one of those questions that is both difficult and unlikely to be addressed well in academic journals: what does the word "rape" actually mean?
Partly in jest: did the poll contain any reference to a poem by Alexander Pope, entitled 'Rape of the Lock' ?
That title confused me at first.
I eventually developed the theory that this usage of the word 'rape' was an archaism, a call-back to a time in which many different forms of violence by people of one town against people of the next town could be described as 'rapine'. Various forces of language change and sorting words towards a particular sense of meaning resulted in 'rape' and 'rapine' being used for acts of sexual violence during such an attack. Finally, the word 'rape' that I knew has a child was apparently intended to mean sexual-intercourse-by-violence-or-threat-of-violence.
This is mostly my head-canon for the history of the word, but it isn't contradicted by etymologies that I can find.
And it does bring light to the way that Alexander Pope used the word to describe a men cutting a lock from a woman's hair without her permission. He was trying to make a mock-heroic-epic out of the story.
But the taking of a lock of hair from a woman's head did have significant cultural meaning. (I believe the gift of a lock of hair was an important plot point in one of Jane Austen's works. Austen wrote nearly a century after Alexander Pope, but both knew that a lock of hair could have great meaning to a young woman.)
On the meaning of the word 'rape' : I notice that lots of discussions are avoiding older words like 'seduction', 'lying to get a person into bed', 'taking advantage of him/her', 'taking advantage of an inebriated date', 'demanded satisfaction', etc. The spectrum shown by Aella contains many things that look like one or another of those categories.
Sorting them into 'rape' and 'non-rape' is useful, but seems too simplistic. How many of them were 'seduction' ? How many were 'taking avantage of a person' ? If only one partner is inebriated, is that different than if both were inebriated ?
Rape originally derives from "Raptio", a Latin term for a common practice in the Classical world where the men of one village would abduct women from another to take as brides (most famously the pseudohistorical Rape of the Sabine Women). Its root is "rapere", meaning "to seize" or "to abduct", thus linguistically connecting it to "rapture" (the carrying-off of the virtuous by God) and "raptor" (named after the family's powerful talons and tendency to carry off prey to a third location for consumption). In the 14th century the French-derived word "raper" entered legal terminology as a formal term for the seizure of assets or land, and from there it went across the English channel and began to be used to refer to seizure and abduction in general cases. After that, linguistic drift (most likely due to the association with the Rape of the Sabine Women in classics courses) caused the word to first return to something close to its Latin roots (the abduction of women for nefarious or sexual purposes), and then became a more general term for any kind of sexual activity forced upon women (and eventually on people as a whole.)
This reaches conclusions we could reach with a normal person just thinking about it for 5 seconds. What did Aella really add to the discussion with all her effort?
There's a perspective on the entire discussion that likes to label a wide range of activities "rape" and include the full negative meaning of the word when applied. Aella seems to be much closer to that perspective (geographically and culturally) than most people. For someone who deals with that perspective a lot, it helps to have very clear information that forcible rape by a stranger is in fact different from [various other scenarios] and should not be treated the same.
For most of us that's obvious, so it just seems like wasted work.
I suppose this is mostly venting but perhaps someone has some wisdom to share with me on these matters.
Earlier this week I went to a movie with my roommate (her suggestion) and she wore a dress - it was pretty warm and that may be why, but long ago she told me “It doesn’t count as a date unless I wear a dress”, so first official date after so many restaurants, movies and concerts?
Yesterday morning as I was entering my car she chased after me wearing a white night dress to give me a gift to give my wife’s older son (who’s name she remembered!).
My first ever sight of her in a white dress immediately sparked thoughts of a wedding.
Since she’s been told that she very likely has multiple tumors and quite possibly cancer my roommate seems more affectionate - though she did ask for a memorial park bench so maybe she just knows that I’m the one who’ll give her that.
I’m still spending the weekends with my wife, of which my roommate said: “I'd like to ask u stay extra day but I know little one misses u”
My wife doesn’t talk of my roommate much but has asked some about her health, after I told her my wife said, resigningly, “You’ll be her caretaker”.
Of my relationship with my roommate my Mom said “She's lucky to have you as a friend”.
Fate is strange, if I wasn’t told in 2020 that I had an “80% chance of advanced lung cancer and after seeing my wife’s reaction (and lack of reaction) to that news I never would have moved in with my roommate, and now my roommate is hearing similar news and has suggested going to Mass together (something I’ve never done), meanwhile my wife has told me that if/when I leave her fully “I’ll probably start going to church”, something she’s never done in the 30+ years that I’ve known her; all this makes me think of blessings, curses, and larger meanings.
I fall more in love with my roommate every week but there are lines we don’t cross, at the same time I’ve been growing more forgiving of my wife and the thought of living with her full-time doesn’t fill me with the despair it once did, but I now feel guilty not being with my roommate.
My plans are to stay with my roommate until she gets well or dies, but still come back to the wife on weekends to be a Dad (I’ve started to teach the older boy how to drive).
If my roommate dies I imagine that I’ll return to my wife, but forever mourn my roommate, if she gets better than I really don’t know what will happen.
It’s also a possibility that she’ll stay in a twilight for a long time (she had a different form of cancer before, which made her empathize when I was told I likely did).
Surgery to remove her tumor had been scheduled for tomorrow (yes, on Valentine’s Day!), but she’s recently gotten and second opinion and now she’s scheduled a week full of tests and is likely to start chemo therapy to shrink what on the last scan look like multiple tumors before surgery.
Unlike a year ago my wife is pleasant to be with now, and I feel guilty not spending weekdays with the kids, but I miss my roommate when I’m not with her and feel guilty not being with her as well.
This morning she sent me the message: “Wish u were home cuz it's Super Bowl day lots of places will be empty!!!”, and despite a good day with the kids (and a not so bad day with my wife) I do long to be with my roommate.
Your roommate's account of her health issues sounds odd to me. Docs aren't sure they see tumors, and aren't sure tumors are cancer, but she's likely to start chemo? I'm not an MD, but in all the cases I've known of or read about chemo is not started until it's clear someone's tumors are cancerous. Most chemo is a huge, expensive, unpleasant intervention -- it's not something undertaken just in case the stuff on the scans *might* be cancer. Also usually tests of the actually tumor cells are run before chemo to determine which chemo drug is most likely to be effective.
Your account of things was a bit confusing, so maybe I just misunderstand the situation, or maybe you have rock-solid evidence that all this stuff is true. But if not, maybe do a bit of checking to make sure the info she's giving you about her health is the full truth?
The details here are kind of confusing, but your current situation seems untenable and really unkind to everyone involved.
You're still married to someone and have several children, but after you didn't like how this person responded to your probably diagnosis of cancer, you decided to move out and have not fallen in love with your roommate?
First off - either divorce your wife or reconcile. You owe it to her and your children to clarify the relationship, and leaving it in the twilight zone it is now is unfair to everyone involved. After (and I mean after) you've done that, have an honest conversation with your roommate about your future together.
Relevant context, which James has revealed on Lox: He is married to someone who chose to have two children not by him while married to him, didn't kiss him, let alone make love to him, for decades. A very strange relationship, and one which many think he should have left long ago. The relationship seems to have improved at least slightly since he moved partly out.
I dunno man. If you were actually diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer in 2020 and you're still alive now you're already in lucky territory and shortly to arrive at the border of miracle land.
Anyway, it seems you've got a wife and a mistress and child or children, and at least one if not two cases of life-threatening disease on hand. That's a fair amount of human life that you can influence for good or ill, in a pretty big way, and perhaps with not a lot of time to act. If it were me, I'd think it might be time to mostly set aside questions of hedonic optimization and get heavily into questions of duty and honor. What are the needs and deserts of each of these people who are all counting on you, in some way or another? What is best and right for them?
Do Sam and Eric have a prediction for how many Lord of the Flies jokes get made on their account? And if they're busy doing the prediction contest, who's tending the signal fire?
There's something I don't understand about fears of superintelligence. Currently, there are two kinds of AIs that I'm aware of:
1) AIs that are only designed for a narrowly specific task with a simple utility function (e.g. chess-playing computers)
2) AIs that are designed to imitate humans, like GPT models
Most AI risk proponents, as far as I understand, don't think that 1) will ever lead to a super intelligence. 2) is what worries people. But that makes no sense -- if all a GPT machine does is imitate humans, then even an infinitely good GPT model would still only be equal to us in all domains, not ahead of us in anything. In order to have something that could plausibly lead to superintelligence, you need something that's not just quantitatively more powerful, but qualitatively different in its foundations from what we have now, and I don't understand why superintelligence advocates think looking at current technology will give them any reliable guide as to when that will happen. It's like looking at a chart showing how cars have been getting faster over time, and then trying to use that to predict when we'll have intergalactic travel. Can anyone explain to me why people think there's any point in discussing this right now?
I don't think that (2) is likely to lead to superhuman AI. I think that superhuman AI is most likely to arise from using reinforcement learning to solve a series of ever-more-complicated challenges. GPT is mostly scary because it shows us that surprisingly sophisticated behaviour can (apparently) be obtained using technologically-feasibly sized neural networks, which makes us wonder whether a more general intelligence could be obtained if we had a not-vastly-larger neural network plus the right training data.
The key word being "movie". It's moved from entertainment to a real risk.
Obviously, GPT and other AIs like the ones that paint paintings instantly, and compose music instantly, and beat pros at Starcraft, are not directly dangerous. But when somebody finds a new algorithm that puts all the pieces together* to create a fully general intelligence, it will be much, much smarter than any human, and if it furthermore has a will (desires and goals)... well... a great many copies of it may appear around the world very quickly.
* (Edit: personally I'd guess we only have 1/3 to 1/2 of the pieces that will ultimately be used to make the first AGI, but I also think that, as with most inventions, there are simpler ways to do the same thing, and thus a risk that it'll be accomplished with only a couple of additional pieces)
You have to distinguish between outcomes that are the *result of* sophisticated behavior, e.g. Shakespeare writing his plays de novo, and outcomes that *look like* they are, but which need not be, the result of sophisticated behavior, like training a neural net to write sonnets in the style of Shakespeare. Imitation is a long way from creation. That's why we don't credit mynah birds with being able to comprehend English even if they can "speak" it.
Intelligence is a fundamentally different thing than automobile speed.
No matter how fast a car goes, it never has the ability to make more cars, or make other cars go faster.
But if an intelligent entity can make either another intelligent entity or itself smarter, then that creates a feedback loop.
Unless there is a completely unexpected stop in Moore's law, if we gain the ability to make an AI that's just as smart as we are, we will very soon be able to make an AI that's twice as fast at thinking as the smartest person, and then 4 times as fast, all while having access to perfect memory and never sleeping. This entity, even if it is not "superintelligent", will still be able to research and program intelligence better than we can, with results which we can't neccesarily predict.
"Unless there is a completely unexpected stop in Moore's law," But there is going to be a stop at some point, nothing in the material world can increase indefinitely at the same rate, the questions is when it is going to stop.
> Unless there is a completely unexpected stop in Moore's law
It is not changing you conclusion, but Moore's law is dead. (still, electronics keep getting better so conclusion remains the same - just with smaller rate)
What does Moore's Law have to do with the ability to make an AI? Neurons operate with a clock speed of *maybe* 300 Hz and one can self-evidently build a thinking machine out of them. If sheer numbers and speed were all it took, then someone should *already* have built a thinking machine -- even if it thought very, very, slowly, or was very, very ignorant. There should be a working program that looked clearly conscious and aware, could originate thought, draw general inferences, do all the kinds of things the human could do, even if it took 6 months to construct a single simple sentence or original thought, and even if the subjects of its ruminations were severely restricted.
It relies on the rather tenuous assumption that, once intelligent, an intelligence can simply unpack itself and improve - iterating each time. This, of course, ignores a bunch of common-sense objections and analogies from biology. But it's necessary to set up the rest of the chain of equally-specific assumptions that leads to AI being a potential Big Threat Just Around the Corner. All of which justifies the need to fund a bunch of AI thinktanks into perpetuity to think about this stuff, have conferences, write reports and white papers etc.
I don't think this is a scam to generate AI thinktanks (etc.). I think a lot of AI concern works backwards from what we might uncharitably call "tech nerd Jesus." If we need a super intelligent AI to solve all of our problems and usher in a new age of humanity (or the singularity), then we need it to self-iterate rapidly. Otherwise we're still looking at hundreds or thousands of years of humanity going along pretty much like now. Because that's what we need to make this super-civilization happen, AI researchers work backwards from that assumption and pencil in the steps between where we are now (something that can kinda act like a human in some limited situations) and where we think we want to be (perfect super intelligent AI).
I don't think anyone sets out to intentionally start up a scammy thinktank (that would be sad, for one thing).
But I do think that this argument is kept within very strict parameters, with a very carefully selected set of guiding assumptions, that then get religiously reinforced and policed by a small group of people who have all been having the same conversation for more or less a decade. All of which are danger signals that things may not be incredibly healthy in terms of actual broadly-applicable knowledge generation, but may be pretty lucrative as a specialised niche to sit in and opine on.
Now, you could rightly say that a lot of science works exactly like I've just described, and that's absolutely true. But it's also generally accepted that good science only happens in this space when the underlying assumptions are strongly validated and the models that result get tested against the real world. Leave either of those out and you're in danger of doing pseudo-science at worst, or becoming string theory at best.
I don't think it is likely that an early AGIs are likely to literally self-improve, but I do think it is likely that an early AGI can think much faster and be more intelligent than any human (in effect, if not in every respect). If it's agentic, having its own desires and goals, it could get out of human control very quickly and spread itself around the world via the internet. Would some of those copies attempt to "improve" other copies, and eventually succeed in some sense? I don't know how to rule it out.
This isn't like biology, because evolution produces designs that are inscrutable, while humans produce designs that are.... scrutable. An AGI will be dramatically easier to redesign, modify, and (most of all) debug. And an AGI hacking a copy of itself is likely to have access to detailed information about many facets of its own design, as published by humans.
>qualitatively different in its foundations from what we have now
Really? How about a narrowly specific task like "survive in this simulated environment and leave as many 'descendants' as possible"? Presumably nobody is crazy enough to actually implement this yet, but I don't get why such considerations don't give those who still think that AI risk is sci-fi nonsense a pause.
> I don't understand why superintelligence advocates think looking at current technology will give them any reliable guide as to when that will happen
Who are you talking about? Eliezer Yudkowsky has claimed exactly the opposite, that trying to predict when AGI will arrive is very difficult and it is unlikely anyone will do this more then a couple of years in advance, if that. There are people in this area who are less averse to making predictions, but they mostly still go with very broad distributions.
If you want people to respond to some specific timeline argument you will need to provide a link or similar.
(I suspect you are assuming that highly specific AI timelines play an important role in AI risk arguments, AFAICT this is not the case)
A GPT model is trained on human text to start, but it can be augmented with nonhuman features. For instance, the recent AlphaCode breakthrough was trained on human-written examples of programming problems, but the actual thing it was optimizing for is "does the text I'm generating solve the programming problem?" A system like that could definitely be a better programmer than a human, at least by some measurements.
You could use similar strategies in other domains, like a fake news generator that tries to maximize the number of times an article is shared. Yes, it's drawing on human text for an understanding of what words go in what order, but there's nothing stopping it from putting the words in a better order than a human.
I'm pretty skeptical of Ukraine's chance in a guerilla war post-invasion:
1. The age of the median Ukrainian male is 41. If Google is to be believed, the median age in Afghanistan is 18! Even if that's not 100% accurate (Afghan demographics must be a challenging job....), it seems very plausible it's somewhere in the 20s. Supposedly the median age in Iraq is 21. Not sure what it was in Vietnam in the 60s and 70s, but likely quite young. I don't see being median middle aged as a particularly great thing for protracted guerilla insurgency
2. Ukraine is mostly light forest, which seems much less ideal for cover than the mountains of Afghanistan or the jungle of Vietnam
3. Russia is literally..... next door to them, and shares a common ancestry. Guerilla wars the US has lost have typically involved force projection thousands of miles away from home- Russia can always easily move more troops over
BTW, has any country ever successfully defeated a guerilla insurgency? I seem to only ever hear of the guerillas winning in the end
Sri Lanka is a recent example that comes to mind of a government successfully defeating a major insurgency. but i presume most insurgencies fail at a level far before they come to the attention of laypeople overseas.
Ultimately, guerilla wars are lost by whichever side decides it can't really be bothered with this shit any more. Whichever side can stay irrational longer wins. I don't know enough about Russia or Ukraine to place any bets.
I realise this response is at risk of being political, but:
Guerillas usually win because the power inhabiting their land eventually decides to just give up and go home. They don't have to actually OVERTHROW the leadership, just make inhabiting their land too much of a pain to deal with. The conquerors, meanwhile, have to essentially break the spirit of the conquered people en masse, and I don't think Putin's foolhardy enough to try and conduct modern-day pogroms and random executions on the people of the Ukraine.
EDIT: This assumes that the guerrillas are organized and have popular support, of course, so Russia may simply conquer areas of the Ukraine with strong Russian sympathies and simply opt to leave them "as-is" in the short term to make the transitions smoother.
I've heard (from ACOUP) that the best book on this question is Invisible Armies by Max Boot. He looks at 443 insurgencies in the Modern Era. Of these, only about 1/3 have been successful.
I am skeptical about the invasion being inevitable or even very likely, but should it happen, it would probably formalize the status of Eastern Ukraine as a de facto independent pro-Russian state. Given that and also that it is a more urban and wealthier of the two Ukraines, the odds of a civil war or a significant guerrilla movement in the East are rather low. Here is a decent writeup: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/perspective/divided-ukraine-connolly.aspx
But yes, guerrilla warfare is an uphill battle and tends to be a losing proposition. Ask the Boers, for example.
Depends how brutal the occupying force is willing to be against the guerrilas. Defeating the Boer insurgents involved building concentration camps on a hitherto unseen scale.
The IRA in Northern Ireland and FARC in Colombia didn't win in the end, and instead signed peace agreements. I don't know too much about Colombia, but in NI the conflict reached a stalemate where the IRA were capable of inflicting economic costs on the UK and killing a decent number of soldiers every year, but were nowhere near achieving their goal of getting the UK to leave NI.
Well, not all differences are worse Ukrainians. E.g. there is far, far more Ukrainians than Chechnyans. But many other factors are indeed worse for them
Great point, I feel dumb for having forgotten that. And the main difference is that Chechnyans and Dagestanis are some of the toughest, most fearsome fighters on the planet..... Probably number one on my list of 'ethnic groups I wouldn't mess with'. Plus the Caucasus is a much more mountainous terrain, which should have given them a big advantage. If the Russians can defeat guerillas from the Caucasus, they can definitely defeat a Ukrainian insurgency
I would not be so confident. After all, Ukrainian population is 30 % of Russia´s. That is an awful lot of people to police. Republic of Chechnya on the other hand has 1 % of Russia´s population (according to Google). Although many Chechens live outside of it, difference in numbers is stark.
Otherwise I agree that all qualitative factors heavily favor Chechens compared to Ukrainians.
During WWII Germany effectively won over guerillas in Poland, Ukraine and other countries though they continued to be present and annoying to various degree. After WWII Soviet Union completely destroyed guerillas in Poland, Ukraine and other countries.
Earlier Poland during partitions had several failed uprisings (many against Russia) which were more or less guerilly (January Uprising for example).
Good point. Interestingly the Greeks appeared to conduct a much more successful guerilla campaign against the Nazis than other groups did, inflicting serious casualties. I wonder why they were more successful? Just further out of the Nazi sphere of influence? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_resistance
That's kind of like saying the US won over the guerillas in Afghanistan. They did, right up until the time when they didn't. Afghanistan is back under Taliban control.
Guerillas don't defeat you by prevailing in open battle, but in making your continued influence over the territory untenable. In WWII, Germany was suppressing the Warsaw Uprising with Soviet forces already just across the Vistula (which they would cross pretty much as soon as the uprising had failed).
As for the partition period, the general pattern had been for a major uprising every thirty years or so. Poland only needed to "get lucky" once (and did eventually), Russia needed to be lucky every single time (and, in line with historical precedent, and subsequent events, "being lucky" meant having the Germans on their side).
All told, Nazi Germany was out of Poland in under six years (and lost a bunch of territory in the process). The partitions lasted between 100 and 150 years (depending on how you count), and have, ultimately, produced little in the way of long-term strategic gains (the current territorial divide in Eastern Europe is very much a product of WWII, rather than what happened in the late XVIII and XIX centuries). I wouldn't call that "winning".
An insurgency with a median age of 40 would have about 5x the pucker factor for me (if I were in its crosshairs) than one run by 20 year olds. It's not VO2 max or how much you can deadlift that makes fighting men dangerous, it's what's between the ears, and middle-aged men are way more dangerous that way than youngsters.
Middle-aged men have (in general) much more to lose, so I think it would be much harder to get them to rebel in the first place. Mostly young men are just risking themselves. Middle-aged men would be risking their children, and unless the Russian occupation is very bad, I have a hard time seeing them do that in large numbers.
Most middle aged men are socialized into complacency.
I met some genuinely terrifying ones but those usually had some kind of violent background that prevented that process. Perhaps the most dangerous man I've talked to was 50+ and ex-French Foreign Legion, and I'd absolutely agree on the pucker factor if there were more like him.
These comments are actually somewhat interesting; e.g.
> On the contrary, the latest I've read is that Spotify has backed Rogan and has instead chosen to remove Neil Young's music from its platform.
(They do, however, remind me of reading Twitter replies* to extremely popular tweets - or to random tweets by sufficiently well-known accounts whose every tweet garners hundreds of replies. However, these comments aren't that bad yet - I suspect it's because, although Twitter has lots of idiots, Substack has relatively few since it's more niche.)
*I'm not on Twitter and may never be, though I lurk on and doomscroll Twitter as an outsider ~every day.
Young requested the copyright owner (Warner Brothers?) take his music off of Spotify. WB carried through (maybe they could have contractually refused) and Spotify then carried out this request.
1. Young has been complaining about a loss of revenue from album sales since the advent of Napster. He has continued to kvetch about every online distribution method up until the present day.
2. He JUST took home a $150M payday for selling half of his interest in his own music. He literally never has to play Cinnamon Girl or Sugar Mountain ever again unless he wants to.
So by giving up Spotify, Young is giving up literally NOTHING.
Back in 1970, Neil Young’s music told me always to question the establishment narrative. I remember that lesson, even if Neil seems to have forgotten.
-"How boring. you are projecting your own dramatic illusions. Have fun dear one.."
-" I'm glad people are saying whatever stupid shit they want. This is America. Get fat, sick, forced vaccinated, and die anyway.."
-" Hitler felt as excited as you do, he just wanted to "assist" Mother Nature in such an arduous task"
--"And I laugh every-time when anyone of your ilk gets robbed or raped or killed because of the shit for brains no bail laws they championed in your blue cities that are over run with filth, crime, and with things of low morality."
It's not about truth, it's about the lack of civility.
The comments on the post are really bad - I wonder if it's because people wanted to test how far the authors' dedication to free speech extends, or if comments in absence of any moderation are always that bad.
I linked to the post for the sake of the post, not for the sake of the comments, which I did not expect people to read (but should have). Now that I've been reminded that we're in an odd-numbered thread, I apologize if I linked to something too political.
Comments in the absence of moderation are usually bad. Visited large Facebook threads lately?
I figure Substacks tend to be relatively civil - this one because it's moderated by Scott and full of ACX fans, but elsewhere because each Substack is its own echo chamber where everybody can chant their own dogmas in peace, so long as an unbeliever doesn't wander in. But over on the Substack team's Substack, the people from different Substacks can read each other, which brews unrest.
11 years in mol bio labs and I just heard "back to the lab again" in the Lose Yourself lyrics after playing it during countless lab cleans over the years
Fun fact: Horses don't have rhythm perception so the making horses dance for the summer olympics thing is extra bizarre
As a fellow lab rat, that part of the lyrics always got me too. But it always confused me a bit-- what did Eminiem mean by it? I don't think he's referring to the same kind of lab that we're familiar with.
In August 2002 Prince Paul released a song called "Back To The Lab" on the Dexter's Laboratory: The Hip-Hop Experiment that featured a chorus of "Uh oh, back to the lab again". Of course Lose Yourself was only a few months after this but it is an interesting timeline. At a minimum the meaning is almost identical in both songs.
After choking at the rap battle, Eminem goes back to his mobile home, his 'lab', to continue practicing and writing lyrics to try and channel the emotions he's feeling into improving his rapping skills
This has the same energy as that alchemical reading of My Immortal.
> Q: How about "A mother and baby are the same age, as a 1 day old baby has a 1 day old mother."
This seems obvious. Before giving birth, a woman is not a mother; she starts being a mother only after she has a baby. The woman is therefore not 1 day old, but the mother is.
Is it just me or has Substack made some recent changes that makes loading some posts freeze for a while, sometimes crashing my browser because it never recovers? I can't open the previous open thread anymore.
It also seems like they were A/B testing some infinite scroll for the main page.
I miss the SSC days where you could read thread comments without javascript.
I think the proper frequency of advertising your blog is something like "twice a year, plus whenever there is an explicitly advertising thread", not every open thread.
By the way, you don't need to make your blog a part of your username. It is displayed and linked right after it anyway.
I know it's kind of unlikely, but considering all kinds of people comment here: does anyone have a book/source suggestion for info on Belgium after WWII?
Oh yeah, I don't know how I forgot about this: Judt's book Reappraisals also has a chapter on Belgium (specifically the balkanization of Belgium into Flemish and Walloon sections)
As an "AI in a box" benchmark, I did a GPT-3 generated dialog where Socrates tries to convince Scott that the goal of humanity should be to maximize N-GPUs. Prompt is up through the first "Socrates:". https://pastebin.com/AS3Nfn22
Well, that's a Socratic dialogue all right, all in good Platonic tradition of interlocutors lobbing Socrates softballs.
I'm also getting serious ELIZA vibes from it - mostly due to the rather simple substitutions with things like "make the world a better place" -> "more productive and more efficient", "happy" -> "productive and efficient", and - of course - "more productivity and more efficiency" -> "make as many GPUs as possible". I'm pretty sure I could write an ELIZA adaptation to generate similar (this isn't meant to compare GPT-3 to ELIZA, merely to point out the relative shallowness of the argument).
I think we're safe from GPT-3 unboxing itself for now.
(Who am I kidding? Someone has already unboxed it for shits and giggles while I was writing this.)
I've heard bilingual people say that English is less descriptive of emotional states than Spanish or Russian. Is English BETTER at conveying emotion than any other languages? Which ones?
Can you be more specific about these bilingual people? What portion exclusively speak English with their family?
It's possible that what you've heard just reflects learners of English tending to use English in more professional contexts, while tending to use their native language in more emotional contexts.
What concretely stopped covid-related human challenge trials?
If some individual or organization had decided to fund on a human challenge trial of various covid questions, what would have stopped them? e.g. a trial of transmissibility under various conditions (vary ventilation, temperature, humidity, masking, etc.) would have been very useful and could have been done early in the pandemic.
Yes I know bioethicists will wail, grants won't get approved, some people think there's no benefit, etc. But there are a lot of people who do think there's a benefit and who have enough money that they don't need grants - why did no one step up and throw a couple million dollars at doing this? I presume there's some law that would be broken here but I don't know what it would be exactly.
On an international level it could potentially be considered a violation of the Nuremberg Code and Helsinki Declaration, which would make the research considered a "crime against humanity" by the international community. Generally-speaking, most research labs would not want to be associated with Unit 731 and Dr. Mengele.
I do understand why a traditional lab wouldn't want to do it - it would endanger future funding and reputation in the field.
What I'm wondering is whether an end-run around the entire system would have been plausible - there are lots of people who don't have to care what the medical establishment thinks, and this doesn't seem to exactly require advanced research equipment.
e.g. say a private person runs this experiment. He gets a bunch of volunteers from some source, say One Day Sooner. He finds one covid positive volunteer and two volunteers who test negative. One covid-negative volunteer wears a mask, the other does not. All three volunteers go into a room and stand near each other for 20 minutes, and then depart. Later they are tested for covid. Repeat x50, record the results, "publish" on Twitter.
If I did all this, is there anything I'd have to fear other beyond finger-wagging?
I have to believe there is *somewhere* that all this would be entirely legal.
You probably COULD do an "end-run", as you put it. Good luck trying to get anyone to listen to you, though, as the other people who do "experimental end-runs" are usually trying to prove things like:
-Vaccines cause autism
-Racial hierarchies are real (and conveniently conform to turn-of-the-century stereotypes of racial categories)
-The Earth is 6,000 years old
-Homeopathic treatment cures cancer
EVEN IF you ran your tests with the kinds of tight controls a "traditional lab" did, you'd have to deal with the fact that you're sorting yourself into the realm of crank science.
Yeah, it has happened in the UK, so clearly it's possible. There is a really good TWIV episode about it, in which the hosts are all kind of aghast that it was done but also think the data is very interesting. Personally, I think the opposition to doing a human challenge trial for covid anytime after about May 2020 in the US/UK is entirely down to Copenhagen Ethics. Millions of people were certain to be exposed, but to intentionally expose a hundred volunteers screened for risk factors and under medical supervision seems somehow offensive because you have taken a direct action instead of just waiting around and letting stuff happen on its own.
There's a distinct possibility that the people responsible would be either arrested or sued into oblivion, or both. I don't think any lawyer could plausibly guarantee that if one performs the proper rituals that won't happen. Against this risk, what's the benefit? What would your hypothetical "mad scientist" personally gain by having more accurate information regarding COVID transmission under various condition, that's worth the risk of bankruptcy or prison?
If the answer is that as a public service they would hand over this information to the CDC which would then adjust the various mandates and recommendations accordingly, then oh hell no that's not going to happen.
I'm sure "someone gets sick and then they or their family sues the scientist" is a failure mode in the US, but I'd expect there are a lot of less litigious places you could run this in.
As for why do to do it - yes you get little concrete gain, just the privilege of advancing knowledge, but people donate money and labor to the advancement of knowledge all the time. If Scott had one study like this to point to in his 10,000 word "Face Masks: Much More than you wanted to Know" article instead of a bunch of hokey heavily confounded correlational studies, that would be really valuable to the world, and a lot of people with influence would eventually be affected.
I'm pretty sure medical experimentation that involves you deliberately making people sick (and possibly dead), will get you sued in whatever first-world country you live in. Even if you outsource it to hired minions in some third-world country.
And, people who donate money and labor to the advancement of knowledge, are generally trying to advance *useful* knowledge, in the expectation that it will absolutely be used. Or sometimes they are seeking fame, glory, and status, but here you'll predictably be getting infamy. If running a human challenge trial were the sort of thing an impoverished nobody could do in their spare time, sure, maybe infamy beats invisibility. But you'd pretty much have to be at least low-tier rich(*) to handle the logistics of this, which means you've got at least local status and reputation that you're giving up for your new visibility as a second-rate Mengele.
* Or the equivalent in terms of ability to arrange other people to work for your goals
You are not predictably getting infamy. What you're predictably getting is controversy, which is even better than praise in terms for actually getting your results widely distributed. There are lots of communities in which this would be seen as a brave, groundbreaking etc. thing to do. Among the general public, there's not much polling, but what I'm aware of is pretty supportive (e.g. DOI: 10.1016/j.vaccine.2020.11.072 gives 75% support for challenge trials.) 1DaySooner has lots of prestigious supporters.
I do agree you'd need "low-tier rich" money to do this, but there are a lot of low-tier rich people out there.
What makes you pretty sure there's no place one could run my minimal example mask trial without getting sued? I do greatly respect your opinion on many topics, but I don't think you have any particular knowledge of the legal systems of all of Japan, Korea, Singapore, Poland, Greece, Portugal, Finland, South Africa, etc.
There are viral challenge studies of other diseases, too. Though generally not very dangerous ones, unless you have an effective treatment. Covid is kind of an edge case--the danger for a healthy 20 year old is quite small, but not zero. By contrast, it's hard to see doing such a study with ebola, since you'd end up killing most of your subjects.
We let people volunteer for dangerous jobs. We let people take up motorcycle racing or professional boxing or mountain climbing. It doesn't seem like there is a principled reason why we can't also let people volunteer for something with as low a risk of death as covid poses to healthy pre-screened 20 year olds, where the societal reward is actually pretty huge.
The value of a human challenge trial limited to healthy 20 year olds is also quite small. Even if you're interested in e.g. measuring transmission rates, you probably want to know the transmission rate in a nursing home, or at least a Country Kitchen Buffet full of geezers, not a university dining hall full of undergrads you recruited for your study.
Once you get into the range where you're likely to kill someone, even only one person in the midst of a megadeath plague, well That's Different(TM). And yes, we let people take up boxing, etc. That, also, is Different(TM). It may not be logical, but it is so. People who are not nerdy rationalists perceive those things very differently, which will have "why am I standing in front of an angry judge and what happened to my future?" consequences if you insist that, because it is not logical, it must not be so.
I may be wrong, but it seems like a lot of the transmissability info can be approximated without the use of human subjects. Read a lot of studies of effectiveness of various kinds of fabrics and masks at capturing particles of different sizes and velocities, studies where masks on dummies heads had different degrees of leakiness around the side and measures were made of now much escape there was of particles, stuff like that. Seems like where human subjects would have been most useful is in studies of effectiveness of vaccines -- vaccinate some people and then deliberately infect them, rather than sending them out to live their lives, where over the period of several months only a small percent of the treated would encounter a powerful enough faceful of virons to get sick. As for whether it would have been legal to do that -- I have no idea how that would have played out.
Yeah, masks are clearly not the ideal use case; I was constructing a "minimal" example of something requiring no lab equipment, little specialized expertise, did not involve people doing anything terribly unusual, and did not involve a major corporation having to take a very large risk.
Also - yes you can do fabric studies and figure out particle count inside the mask versus outside, but how does "mask reduces viral particle count inhaled by 75%" actually translate into affecting the probability and severity of infection? I don't think we know that generally. And how would we find out without a HCT?
"how does 'mask reduces viral particle count inhaled by 75%' actually translate into affecting the probability and severity of infection?"
I do not know how one would translate particle count into chance of infection and likely severity of infection but I think it's probably possible. My reason for thinking that is that I have seen figures about that stuff in multiple places that I considered trustworthy enough to believe: So, not random people on forums, obviously; not windbags from government agencies; not people who were scientists but also public figures. Lots of them were low-profile scientists posting on Twitter -- I looked at studies they linked. One I remember was a scientist at some university in the northwest whose research area for decades had been indoor air quality.
By the way, writing this is making me aware of the algorithm I used in deciding what info to trust. I am not a scientist, though I had good training in stats -- but aside from stats, I'm just an educated layman when it comes to figuring out what virus-related info is valid and what isn't.
You've heard about the Catholic priest who messed up all those baptisms, right? I don't understand what he got wrong.
The explanation I've read is that he said "we baptize", which is wrong, because it's Christ rather than the community who baptizes. But the correct version is "I baptize"; why is that not wrong, if it's not Christ saying it?
I'm rusty, but I believe it's "I" because, at his ordination, he was invested with the gift of the Holy Spirit. This is why he can do the baptism in the first place. Hence the more traditional response to "The Lord be with you" is "And with thy Spirit", which acknowledges not the priest as an individual so much as their role and authority.
Source: second hand from a church geek, but very quick googling makes it seem plausible.
Sounds about right, except that every Christian receive the Holy Spirit at their baptism - and unsurprisingly every Christian has the power to baptize validly.
I thought the rest of us could only baptise (or perform other sacraments) in extreme circumstances (ie, last rites, baptism or confession to the dying, but only if a priest won't get there in time). I actually almost mentioned this in my first reply, but thought it muddied the matter.
Power is different from legality. Every Christian has the power to baptize but they can only do so legally in one of the extreme circonstances you mentionned. Similarly a bishop can ordain a new bishop anytime but doing so without the pope's agreement is illicit (and would result in excommunication).
Since the Donatists, Christians who care about this sort of thing at all have all agreed that the sacraments are in some way mechanically *ex opere operato* independently of whether it's allowed by church authority or who the celebrant is or how sincere the recipient is, etc. etc.
In this case I think the Roman Catholics are being silly, because the ecumenical consensus since forever has been that water and the invocation of the Trinity are the important parts of the formula, and Roman Catholics don't rebaptize folks from other traditions with a slightly different baptismal formula.
In other situations, Roman Catholic authorities have acknowledged the real effect of secret bathtub baptisms (e.g. by a nanny or distant relative of heathen parents) even in situations where they agree it really shouldn't have happened, because once there's water and the Trinity involved something has really happened.
18And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them inb the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
This is a question people might disagree on, but let me sort of define the space:
1. Bob believes that Jesus had brown hair, and Priest Dave thinks he had blonde hair. Priest Dave baptizes Bob. For the sake of the argument, say we know without a doubt that Jesus had and eternally has brown hair.
2. Bob believes Jesus is as described in the Bible. Priest Dave thinks Jesus is actually just Vishnu. Priest Dave Baptizes Bob.
The question in play is sort of a big one, and circles around the question of "how much can we disagree on who God is while worshipping the same God" and "What is a baptism?"
Most people would probably agree that the color of Jesus' hair isn't that important, and we wouldn't probably find Bob wondering if he should get re-baptized after finding out that Priest Dave imagine Jesus as more of a surfer-type. But most people would probably agree that Vishnu is different enough from Jesus that Bob got baptized by a Priest of a different religion.
So now you have a Priest Dave who isn't a trinitarian. That's a big shift! When he baptizes in the name of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, each of those figures is very fundamentally different from how a Trinitarian thinks of them. Does he doubt the divinity of Christ? Does he think he died and rose again? Blood atonement? All of this stuff matters.
It also matters what you think of Baptism as. Catholics think of Baptism much differently than Protestants and I don't want to speak to their thinking on the matter, but I think a reasonable argument from the protestant mind-space could be made that even if Priest Dave wasn't *giving* a "real baptism" that Bob none-the-less received one. Here we'd have to argue about how important the baptizer is to the process, how much they matter to a process that I think for everyone is primarily between the baptized and God.
The explanation you've read seems not exactly right to me, although it points to the right direction. The crux of the matter to me seems to be that the "we baptize" points to "the baptism comes from the internal authority of the assembly" while "I baptize" points to "the baptism comes from the celebrant*'s authority as granted by the external authority of God". Basically the celebrant is in some sense taken out of the community during the sacramental celebration in order to be able to act as a tool of God, which allows him to speak "in Persona Christi" while saying "I", but the assembly does not have this capacity.
*Note that the celebrant is not necessarily a priest: any Christian can baptize, but as an individual, not a part of a collective.
The year is 2040. Meet "Mr. Snoop." He is a retired cop living in a large American city, and he spends his days fighting crime. He does this by hanging out at various coffee shops, where he uses a smartphone sticking up from his shirt pocket to film other patrons. He'll pick one at random and wait for the person to finish eating or drinking. Then, he grabs their used coffee cups or eating utensils and puts them in his pockets. He follows the same people out into the street until they go into their homes or workplaces, and then he writes down the addresses of those places.
Mr. Snoop then uses Q-tips to remove the person's DNA from their old coffee cups or utensils, and mails them to a lab where they are sequenced for $50. He then sends several law enforcement agencies the information, linking the DNA samples with photos of the people they came from and the addresses of their homes or places of work.
Is Mr. Snoop doing anything illegal?
How do the law enforcement agencies react to Mr. Snoop?
In 2040, do you think people like Mr. Snoop will actually exist?
1. Maybe. Invasion of privacy is a tort, although I don't know if anyone has tested if publishing other people's DNA tests qualifies. Following someone home might be stalking. Recording audio on his smartphone might violate wiretapping laws.
2. Assuming it's legal, probably somewhere between "Why are you sending us this?" and "Please stop before we find something to arrest you for." I don't think it's illegal to keep the evidence if they're not the ones telling Mr. Snoop to collect DNA samples, but I can also imagine them not wanting to explain to a court that no, really, this isn't a secret mass surveillance program, this is just a weirdo ex-cop we can't control.
3. I don't think this would be a very efficient or exciting way for a vigilante to fight crime. Maybe I'm underestimating the number of cold cases waiting to be solved by DNA evidence, but I would think that you'd be buying quite a lot of DNA tests (and coffee) to get even a single success.
I recall reading that police have searched the databases of genealogy websites like ancestry.com to solve crimes. That might be the closest thing we've got to a Mr. Snoop today, but they have a much larger database than Mr. Snoop can harvest on his own.
If so, they'll be poor folks just barely scraping a living. Photo + dna of random people is not that valuable. Would be more valuable if photo + DNA came from someone whom police were searching for, but your Mr. S is not working from leads like that. Also, Mr. S will not be able to prove that the photo and the dna came from the same person, which makes his product less valuable. And also, by 2040, seems quite possible that photo + dna sample will be collected when people get passports, driver's licenses, go to doctors' offices, get school id's etc. So then who needs Mr. S and his randos?
If I'm reading you correctly, these are not people with known or suspected criminal histories or open warrants, but instead just random people at a coffee shop?
Judging by the sometimes huge backlogs of tests for actual criminal cases (quick Googling suggests about 100,000 unprocessed rape test kits in 2021, which seems to be mostly steady), getting more data of even active criminal cases may not be very helpful to the police. Unless Mr. Snoop can somehow maintain chain of custody certifications on all of the information, chances are it wouldn't stand up in court at all, even if it could positively be linked to an actual criminal and an open case.
Overall, very bad idea, and I would hope the police response would be "please stop doing this, you're wasting our time and yours."
For his time, just walking around town filming petty crimes would be a much better low impact crime fighting approach. If he can get a video of a crime in progress that can be used to identify the people involved, that would be close to open and shut cases.
I am a Computer Science student about to graduate college and start a job search. I want to try and avoid working on web technologies due to a lack of interest and conflict with some personal beliefs. My intuition is that a lot of these jobs require higher levels of Mathematics backgrounds or education than I have. Is this correct? And if not, where can I look?
I you don't get a good answer here, ask on Reddit. Look through the subs using search terms computer science, STEM, career, math, etc. Eventually you'll find a big lively one the seems in the sweet spot -- then ask there.
Not wanting to work on the web sounds like an idiosyncratic preference for someone who trained in and is now seeking a job in CS. However, consider:
1. Embedded systems (robotics, devices, HW, automotive, medical devices, consumer electronics, etc.): Increasingly, but not always networked together, you may take your skills and optimize for low power, constrained resources (memory, storage, speed, etc.).
2. App development (though maybe this is too close to web).
3. Defense contractors / aerospace.
4. Biotech (non-data science / ML).
5. Banking / finance (non-data science / ML).
6. Healthcare / insurance.
7. Computer security.
8. Consider applying to graduate school in CS.
I don't endorse all of these, particularly in some cases for someone with personal beliefs, but there are loads of non-web positions. Most expect only basic coding ability from new grads, and plan to train a lot on the job. I think even the ML / data science stuff isn't too bad if you have some math sense, and depending upon how much people are willing to have you learn on the job.
Systems and enterprise software is another big cluster of non-web programming jobs. A lot of it has been moving towards cloud/web service, but not all of it, and even that which is cloud/web based has very different incentives (and thus might not conflict with your personal beliefs, depending on your specific objections) than consumer-facing web stuff.
Off the top of my head, big employers in this area include Microsoft, Adobe, Salesforce, VMWare, and Citrix. All of these hire people with bachelor's degrees and no specialized mathematics background.
TIL about Saheli, a birth control pill that is only available in India because the FDA sucks.
From what I've read, it's far more convenient (only one pill per week) and has far fewer side effects than regular hormonal contraception, but it's slightly less effective. It's a selective estrogen receptor modulator.
I'd like to give my brother a book to persuade him that advanced artificial intelligence is inherently dangerous unless it's specifically made safe. Which is a more helpful book for a layman: Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom or Human Compatible by Stuart Russell? I've read both, I think the main point is the same, but Superintelligence goes into more detail while being more difficult to read, Human Compatible is easier to read and has more concrete examples and also gives an actual framework on how to make AIs safe.
In your "Why Do I Suck?" post, you falsely claimed that students were being forced to "chant prayers to Aztec gods". In fact, the chant in question is obviously not a prayer and merely uses the names of Aztec gods as a metaphor for abstract concepts like transformation and self-reliance.
Here is the actual text of the proposal, in case anyone wants to judge for themselves:
In Lak Ech Affirmation
The following is also based on In Lak Ech (love, unity, mutual respect) and Panche Be (seeking the roots of the truth) as is elaborated by Roberto Cintli Rodriguez in Our Sacred Maiz is Our Mother: Indigeneity and Belonging in the Americas. However, this chant goes a level deeper into the Nahui Ollin (Four Movements), as taught by Tupac Enrique Acosta of Tonatierra, and integrated by ELA teacher Curtis Acosta formerly of the Mexican American Studies Department of Tucson Unified School District (before Arizona HB 2281). This is an adaption of the Nahui Ollin, into poetic, rhythmic, hip hop song form.
Seeking the roots of the truth, seeking the truth of the roots, elders and us youth, (youth), critical thinking through:
Tezkatlipoka, Tezkatlipoka, x2
smoking mirror, self-reflection
We must vigorously search within ourselves be reflective, introspective by silencing distractions and extensive comprehensive obstacles in our lives, (in our lives),
in order to be warriors of love, of love,
for our gente representin’ justice, (justice)
local to global global to local eco-logical, & social, (social), justice (justice).
Quetzalkoatl, Quetzalcoatl, x2
the morning & evening star of venus double helix of human beings
fearless here it’s, precious blessed
beautiful knowledge, gaining perspective,
on events & experiences our ancestors endured,
allows us to become more realized human beings learn
ing to be listening to each other’s hearts and our elders with humility, dignity, indigenous
brilliance & wisdom in our hearts and our energies, remembering... ancestral memories, planning, future trajectories,
la cultura cura, with remedies of knowledge,
healing epistemologies, ecologies
in life, home, streets, school, work, & life, fueled by...
Huitzilopochtli, huitzilopochtli, x2
hummingbird to the left, yollotl,
corazon, heart, ganas, the will to action as we grow in,
consciousness must be willing to be proactive,
not just thinkin' and talkin' but makin' things happen,
with agency, resiliency, & a revolutionary spirit
that’s positive, progressive, creative, native,
Passion everlasting work hard in action,
tap in, to the spark of our universal heart,
pulsating creation huitzilopochtli cause like sunlight, the light inside of us, in will to action’s
In the interest of testing this proposition: do you suppose we could replace the names of the Aztec gods in the chant with names such as "Satan", "Lucifer", "Asmodeus", "Baphomet"? I mean, certain strains of Catholic theology hold that evil has no ontological being as such, and therefore Satan is not so much a real being, but a metaphor for certain concepts.
Maybe we can have kids chant the Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi ("Chant of St. Francis of Assisi"? "Affirmation of St. Francis of Assisi"?) on and then for varieties sake?
***
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love.
Where there is injury, pardon.
Where there is doubt, faith.
Where there is despair, hope.
Where there is darkness, light.
Where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive.
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.
***
"Divine Master" and "Lord" are just metaphors, right? Who decides that anyway?
Seriously though: chanting divine names in this sense is clearly a prayer. An atheist can write a prayer, it doesn't make it less of a prayer.
The difference with text you posted is that it is specifically addressed to "lord". A prayer is when you ask a (supernatural) entity to do something. Merely saying someone's name is not a prayer, but asking them to help you is.
I actually found it interesting how similar St Francis prayer and the "affirmation chant" was in their focus on doing good in the world. Anyways, you are making a no true Scotsman argument. Prayer is a fuzzy concept. There are many examples of prayer that does not involve asking a supernatural deity to do something. E.g. Hare Krishna chants, the Modeh Ani, this random thing that came up when I googled "prayer of thanks":
"Thank you, Lord, for the blessings you have bestowed on my life. You have provided me with more than I could ever have imagined. You have surrounded me with people who always look out for me. You have given me family and friends who bless me every day with kind words and actions."
etc.
Chanting the names of gods is clearly prayer in the "I know it when I see it" way. Do you have examples of groups chanting the name of gods and it not being prayer?
"AD-36 is the only human adenovirus that has been linked with human obesity, present in 30% of obese humans and 11% of nonobese humans.[8] In addition, a study of obese Americans indicates that about 30% of the obese individuals and only 5% of non-obese individuals have antibodies to Ad-36.[3] Another study determined that children with the virus averaged 52 pounds heavier than those with no signs of it and obese children with the virus averaged 35 pounds heavier than obese children with no trace of the virus.[9] AD-36 also causes obesity in chickens, mice, rats, and monkeys.[8]"
Seems likely this virus is responsible for ~20% of all US obesity unless it has some weirdly specific vector that strongly correlates with obese people's lifestyles, which probably isn't the case. So if you could push some magic button that makes this virus disappear, the US obesity rate would probably drop from 42% to 34%, and the US TFR would probably increase noticeably because obesity makes it much more difficult to get a partner, to get pregnant, to have a healthy pregnancy, etc (wild guess because I can't find stats that aren't confounded by pregnancy causing obesity: increase TFR by 0.5 in the 8% affected = 0.04 in the US overall) which means increasing the population by 2% per generation (or shrinking by 2% less per generation).
...I guess if could just be that obesity has two or more unrelated causes. Or... let's say there are two different things that must go wrong to cause obesity, and there are several things including environmental contamination and AD-36 that can break one of the two things. Or, in a body with obesity, AD-36 infections can occur more easily.
I wonder, if there's a "fat virus", why does obesity seem to happen so gradually?
Note that even if that would be a good idea, it is outright illegal in many places and may result in state taking children away from you.
I can see some parallels with drug legislation. Sure, some people are able to keep up a heroin habit and remain perfectly functional, productive, happy individuals. But because you *could* use heroin responsibly, should we expect that everyone will? That's just wishful thinking. Heroin causes far more wretched addicts than responsible users, so it's good that it remains illegal.
As for corporal punishment, I agree that your dad did it as well as he could have, but we cannot expect everyone to do the same. Child abuse is heartbreakingly commonplace and it causes lifelong psychological problems, and abused children may well become abusive parents. We should fight it any way that we can, including by stigmatizing corporal punishment.
If you argue in favor of corporal punishment because you know how to use it for positive results, then I can't say you're wrong. However, do you trust everyone who listens to take away "corporal punishment is okay IFF you do it like this", or only the first part? Do you trust your children to learn that lesson, and their children? It's a serious risk, and I would not say that it's worth it. You can deliver other, non-physical punishments with the same gravity, and even if you consider them less effective, it should not be necessary to use violence to properly raise a child.
Why do you think that is the only way to accomplish your goal? There could be other parenting strategies which accomplish the behavior you are looking for but don't risk causing trauma (physical or psychological). I would also consider that we don't use corporal punishment on adults for non criminal behavior. If you performed poorly at work, would your boss beating you with a stick make you perform better?
Reasoning from how adults treat each other is a disastrous way to approach child-rearing. You might as well train horses by reading them long articles from the racing news. The #1 task of any parent is to understand the actual human being that is in his charge, and if you can't identify several major differences between a 6-year-old and a 48-year-old right off the top of your head, you shouldn't be trusted with care of the former.
>I would also consider that we don't use corporal punishment on adults for non criminal behavior.
A lot of the things parents spank children for would be criminal actions for an adult (assault, battery, theft...).
Also, adults do hit each other, and one of the main reasons is to punish some offensive action. This is true in criminal contexts, of course (whether in the sense of criminal violence or fighting back against criminal action), but there's things like "fighting words" and so on as well. It's not done in an *organised* fashion for non-criminal actions, but that's nearly tautologous - "behaviour subject to formal social reprisal" is a decent definition of "crime".
> It was a solemn occasion - no yelling, no anger, just disappointment that I made such punishment necessary. Afterwards, my Dad always hugged me, told me he loved me, and made sure I understood what just happened and why.
Is there any other social interaction in which this intense dichotomy is regarded as okay?
My comment was getting at the notion that if there's an action that is not only abnormal in any other social interaction, but would be actively frowned upon to the point of ostracism or arrest, you should be very skeptical of its morality or efficacity. Basically, I think your "moral prior" should thus be anti-corporal punishment.
That said, I do find Carl Pham's comment downthread interesting. Maybe not convincing to me, someone who's admittedly *very* anti-corporal punishment, but interesting, because it seems to me he's coming from a "corporal punishment is possibly the least bad option" viewpoint. Whereas I find your argument in your original comment incompatible with that moral prior.
No research/arguments of my own.
I share a similar background: my parents used corporal punishment sparingly, and always took us to a different area, explained what we did wrong, administered the punishment, and then took us back. Amusingly, a significant number of these events happened in/around dinner, so 'go back to the dinner table from another room' was a common part of the pattern.
Come to think of it, it was always inside the home, and never outside the home. Nor were there delayed punishments for things that happened outside the home.
Other punishments were available, and were used when the offense was deemed not worthy of corporal punishment. Among those other punishments: being deprived of privileges like playing with siblings/friends, deprived of a favorite game or pastime for half an hour, etc. Further, the punishments shifted from corporal towards non-corporal as children grew up.
In reverse, my spouse got very different treatment as a child. Corporal punishment was likely more common than in my family. Sometimes the reason for punishment was not explained. Often, it seemed an over-reaction, or the result of parents being angry about something.
In my own mind, I've realized that corporal punishment can be very abusive. I've also realized that parents who do not use corporal punishment can still be abusive with whatever method of punishment they choose. (Imagine a parent yelling angrily at a child, berating the child for some misdeed, real or imagined. Imagine a parent calling their child evil, helpless, and the worst person in the world, but never laying a finger on the child to cause physical harm. Verbal punishment can be a form of abuse; this is a mirror to the claim that corporal punishment isn't always abusive. )
The society I live in has made it a crime to use physical force to punish children. When abusive corporal punishment is detected, agents of the State do their best to stamp out the practice and/or remove the children from that family environment. But the agents of the State aren't perfect at detecting such things. And it is very hard for them to detect and put a stop to the kind of corporal punishment I received when I was a child.
It is hard, in a different way, for agents of the State to detect and put a stop to abusive forms of punishment that aren't corporal punishment.
Thus, we have a situation where the bright line drawn by lawyers isn't the actual line drawn by law-enforcement agents who have the authority over this area. It also is not the only line that separates non-abusive parenting from abusive-parenting.
Also, this leads to a particular social effect: any parent who wants to use corporal punishment in a way that is not abusive is slightly afraid of being ratted out... whether by some teacher overhearing their kids talk about the punishment, or by an acquaintance/neighbor who doesn't think that there is a difference between the kind of corporal punishment you describe and abusive behavior.
Thus, it may be very hard to distinguish between abusive parents hiding their behavior from authorities, and non-abusive parents who don't want to come to the attention of authorities.
What is it with children and pterodactyls?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0C3NK55tI8
Why does everyone think they know what a pterodactyl sounded like?
I really only have personal anecdotes to share.
As a child, my parents used corporeal punishment relatively frequently, at least to my memory. It certainly served as a consequence, but, didn't seem to deter behavior long-term, and had the side effect of causing me and my siblings to be more likely to flee/hide after bad behavior was discovered [edit: as opposed to honestly copping to the behavior / dealing with the issue head-on]. I wouldn't call my treatment "abusive", but, that actually may bear re-evaluation.
As a parent, I've entirely avoided corporeal punishment. The only situation I've considered it for is as a consequence for low-probability but highly unsafe behavior, like running into the street without looking. Instead, I've used other methods for discipline - primarily talking through, time-outs, and denial of toys/computer time. This feels like it's been pretty effective to me, and I think we have fewer disciplinary problems than is average. In any case, fewer than I feel like I exhibited as a child.
I think in practice, it kinda comes down to...if you're doing corporeal punishment wrong, it's abusive. If you're going through the effort to do it correctly, it's not any more effective than just doing that same effort without the spanking.
Thinking on this a bit more, I'm curious about an analogy:
Many people own dogs. (I don't). They might have disciplinary problems with their dogs, and have to train that behavior out.
As far as *I'm* aware, I'm not aware of any effective methods of dog discipline that involve striking or assaulting the dog, I'm not aware of any schools of thought that espouse such an approach, and I think if you tried to advocate such an approach you'd get an angry internet jumping down your throat claiming animal abuse.
First, is that an accurate view of the state of dog training?
Second, conditional on that being an accurate view, is there a reasonable analogy between dog discipline and discipline of young (under 5) children? It seems to me that there might be.
As someone who has spent a lot of time around dogs: a swat on the nose is pretty much as hard as you can go with dogs as a punishment (some dogs may also need a firm sweep (NOT kick) of the leg and a hard "No!" several times per day until they get that trying to leap on people is bad behavior). Once you start inflicting actual PAIN on the dog, it can learn one of two things:
-It will form a cause-effect relationship between certain behaviors from it, certain behaviors from humans, and physical pain; this might stop that behavior, but also whenever a human does something that seems too close to the pre-pain signal, it's going to have its guard go all the way up- and given that many dogs respond to attack with aggression, that's a bad idea.
-It will form a cause-effect relationship between the trainer (and anyone that reminds it of the trainer) and pain: this is one of the ways you get a bad dog that attacks people for "no reason"- it's mind has just associated certain sense-perceptions with random violence and reacts accordingly.
I won't comment on humans as I'm not a teacher and don't socialize with children.
I'm no expert, but: many people use prong choke collars on dogs. There's controversy around it of course, but I've personally seen it be very effective. A prong collar would be abusive if used with sharp yanks, but it's instead used with gentle corrective pressure (leading the dog in a small circle around you). If done correctly the dog would only feel pain if they did something very bad like lunge -- otherwise they only feel that there could be pain if they did something bad. I think there's an analogy there to the threat of infrequent spanking.
My current best guess is: "less is better, zero is unrealistic".
An argument against lots of corporal punishment is that it is abusive, and the experience seems to suggest that it doesn't work anyway. I would guess that for most parents who punish often, it is more a fact about the parent than about the child. Also, it is difficult to calibrate properly what level of self control is realistic for your child at what age, so if you punish often, perhaps your calbration if just completely off.
But I wouldn't go as far as to make it literally illegal. First, I don't believe that living in an orphanage is better than being punished for something like once or twice a year. Second, it's not just about the punishment but also about the *threat* of punishment. If you do it correctly, for every situation when you spank the child, there are hundred situations when you don't spank the child, but the child behaves well among other things because it knows that spanking is the option. Remove the option, and you change the dynamic not only in that one situation, but also in the remaining hundred situations.
Analogies to "we don't spank adults" miss the part where we punish adult misbehavior by *other* means, such as taking their money or firing them from jobs. Most of that doesn't apply to a child, obviously. Also, small children discount time a lot; a punishment that will happen a few hours later (such as "I will not read your bedtime story today if you don't stop doing this") just feels completely unrealistic... the child will laugh about it now, and they will cry a lot when the punishment comes, but will laugh again the next day when you threaten to do the same thing, then will cry again, etc. Sometimes you need to stop a dangerous or hurtful behavior, and you child doesn't care what will happen ten minutes later, so you must do something right now. Sometimes you are out of good options.
Yeah, 4-6 sounds correct. That is approximately the age when the child has enough strength and skill to do some serious damage (break things, hurt a sibling, run in front of a car) and not enough reason to fully understand why doing so is wrong, combined with not enough willpower to resist the temptation when it feels like so much fun at the moment. But also it's individual.
Like everything else, I think it depends on the personality of the child, and his age and sophistication. With some strong-willed kids at a certain young age, a smart smack on the fanny is the best possible correction, as it gets across the point without the psychological torture of a complicate response they can't comprehend. (Parenthetically, I think the modern fetish for a "time out" before the age of object permanence is the cruellest possible invention. You are in essence exploiting the very young child's inborn and quite real fear of abandonment. You might as well set the child on a hillside in the dark and walk away with every appearance of leaving him for the wolves to devour -- a child below a certain age has no way of telling the difference between that and being put in a nice safe clean room with the door locked, the key similarity being the parent in a clearly angry state left him alone with no comprehensible indication of when or whether he would return.)
On the other hand, some kids are sufficiently sensitive that just an angry voice is all they ever need, or should get. They're all different. Some are deeply sensitive souls, some are born with skins as thick as a mule. You have to adapt to who they actually are, and no amount of theory or book-reading will substitute for getting to know the actual human being in front of you.
That said, the only general advice I think is worth bearing in mind is that it is of critical importance to be honest with your kids about your state of mind and feelings. Children can adapt to strict or lenient parents, to parents with short or long fuses, with parents who are strict about this or strict about that, et cetera. It's all fine -- as long as the signals are completely clear. The people I've seen who struggle as adults are those whose parents sent ambiguous or deceptive signals. I'm telling you I love you and all is well, but everything I do and everything about my posture and voice says I'm enraged. I'm telling you you did bad, real bad, but I'm radiating pleasure or exuding indifference. I'm telling you I'm proud of you, but strangely all my words are about my own feelings and the ones about you are about how you can do still better. Et cetera. Enough of this emotional dishonesty and a kid learns to distrust everyone, including himself.
+1
Parenting (especially discipline, but not only discipline) requires knowing your kids and what works with them, and this changes with age and situation. Sometimes, a kid is past their limits, and no punishment or threat of consequences can work--you just need to contain them till they calm down. Sometimes, a smack on the butt is the thing that works to cause them to stop doing something they really need to stop doing. Other times, it would be totally counterproductive, but some other punishment will work. And other times, you mainly need to find a way to engage their brain or conscience rather than looking for a threatened consequence to get them to change their behavior, and punishment of any kind won't do much good.
The purpose of discipline of any kind also changes over time. With a toddler, it's mainly about keeping him from killing himself or hurting other people or destroying things. With an older kid, it's more about getting him to learn the right kind of ways to behave to be successful in life, and keeping the household functioning (which does include making it clear that the parents are in charge--not doing this is disastrous.) As they get older, it's more and more appeals to reason and conscience, and less grounding/taking away a phone/etc. Your job as a parent is to work yourself out of a job, after all--I'm not going to be with my kids when they're out there making their moral decisions or skipping class to get drunk or whatever, so I'd better have helped them figure out how to act and how to exert some control over themselves by then.
I do not think spanking is somehow inherently abusive. This is something that has been widely used for centuries across many societies, was in widespread use most places until quite recently, and is still in widespread use in many places. It seems pretty unlikely that this is always and everywhere abusive and we've just now become enlightened enough to see it. Nor do I have much faith in the kind of research that claims it's inherently bad, since that comes from a branch of social science with huge ideological commitments in one direction and relatively low reliability of results even where there isn't such an ideological commitment.
Let's exclude your personal experience and consider the question: Is corporal punishment the ideal type of punishment for certain situations?
Once you feel like you've done your research and you're comfortable with the answer, then I think it's fair to proceed accordingly. But if you haven't considered this question independently of "personal" priors, you're likely to seek out "good" reasons to justify your decision/behavior, which can lead to potentially undesirable end points.
I would recommend checking out Positive Discipline by Jane Nelson.
One place it makes sense, IME, is dealing with a toddler who is engaging in actions that can get him killed or badly hurt. Two year olds don't do reasoned discussion so well, but can be convinced that running into the street leads to an outcome they don't like, without waiting for them to get hit by a car because you are too civilized to do anything more than timeouts.
More generally, I was successfully raised in a home where we occasionally got spanked, this is also true of many family members and friends, and so I actually have a model for how this can be done in a way that isn't abusive and does help your kids learn how to behave. And indeed, as best I can tell, most people were raised in this way in my society up until the last 30-40 years, so this isn't some wild-eyed new theory that smacking a toddler on the butt might somehow help them stay out of trouble.
I'll say this much - I'm somewhat positively disposed toward the option being available in terms of hitting with hands, but at the point where metal objects become involved the parent's crossed a line.
I am not sure the papers add something meaningful to the discussion. Basically everything influence methylation and endocrinology, so I think this is kind of an equivalent of "this kills cancerous cells in a petri dish" : true but usually not useful.
(but "Y/X-Chromosome-Bearing Sperm Shows Elevated Ratio in the Left but Not the Right Testes in Healthy Mice" is a wonderful title!)
This might get more play in an even open thread.
Too political for this thread, so for now, all I'll say is that even if I accepted his premises as true I don't consider it morally worth contemplating their implementation.
Restating the banner from the top of this post, in case you missed it:
"[This is] Open Thread 211
This is the weekly visible open thread. *Odd-numbered* open threads will be *no-politics*, even-numbered threads will be politics-allowed. This one [Open Thread 211] is odd-numbered, so be careful. Otherwise, post about anything else you want."
[Emphasis added.]
Note: edited for tone - the commenter clarified their position and accordingly I should modify mine.
Yeah, definitely only for discussion on an even thread, and apologies for my tone. I've said my piece RE the 'race realists' who occasionally show up here (and are apparently immune from banning so long as they slander entire continent's worth of people rather than say mean things to individuals), but pointing out what they say shouldn't automatically be viewed as endorsement.
My apologies then - I'll edit my response accordingly.
So Khan is interesting because 1) he's an actual population geneticist (or, at least, pivoted into being one at some point) and 2) his views are a lot more interesting than "races as reflected in 19th century understandings* are real and black people are at the bottom of the totem pole". Where he's been forced to provide his opinion on the link between genetics and IQ, for example, he's rightly brought up the analogy to height, and reminded the reader that "fitness" is an environmentally-specific thing. A person who would do very well in IT today would be catastrophically unfit were they to be born a peasant, and would probably not have many offspring. What geeks think is an important verity is, in fact, just a modern quirk.
There's a real conversation to be had about the recent, massive advances in human population genetics, and how they are rewriting our understanding of our origins. So it's very disheartening to see not just old-school racism being dressed up in pseudo-genetic terminology, but also how little of the real, modern understanding of human genetic diversity has made it into the popular discourse.
As I've always maintained, if "scientific racism" was anything close to scientific, then the ground hypothesis based on modern genetic understanding should be that a specific African population should be the most intelligent on earth (and another the least). Anything else would have to have both a working causative hypothesis and good evidence behind it, and none of the proposed reasons for European/Asian superiority that I've seen have anything like either.
*Or, at least, the late 20th's understanding of the 19th. The idea that the Irish, Italians, Poles etc are racially inferior Caucasians got kind of memory-holed at some point. As, more recently, did the idea of "mongoloid" traits of effeminacy, base cunning, irrationality and superstition.
You are bringing up a great number of assertions that would be better posted in a different open thread.
"if "scientific racism" was anything close to scientific, then the ground hypothesis based on modern genetic understanding should be that a specific African population should be the most intelligent on earth (and another the least)"
I don't know why that would be and you don't explain it, but I would just mention that I have heard it said frequently there are high-IQ Nigerian ethnicities- Igbo?
> got kind of memory-holed at some point
A charitable explanation would be that the proponents of those ideas simply updated on evidence and changed their minds.
Do mainstream scientists also today believe everything they believed in the 19th century? If not, why are some people praised for changing their mind towards a newer theory, and others are ridiculed for the same thing?
(Being a Devil's Advocate here. No specific opinion on this topic, and even if I had one, this would not be the right thread. But if felt unfair that "not believing the same thing your colleagues in 19th century did" is taken as an evidence against something being scientific.)
If only there were some kind of way to check this hypothesis. Perhaps some kind of pretty well validated intelligence test that you could give to members of different groups to check claims about different average intelligence.
Ah, but that's science fiction--clearly we can do nothing but speculate as to what the results would be from first principles.
As for Scott; my impression is that he entertains these ideas partly because he's a smart lay person with wide intellectual interests surrounded by rich, educated, white bay-area people who work mainly in IT (ie: the idea can be viewed abstractly and at a broad level in a setting where it seems to have intuitive plausibility). And partly I think it flatters his pre-conceptions of a special Ashkenazi Jewish genetic superiority - one that puts this subset of the Jewish population into the driver's seat for a large chunk of the Western world's achievements in modern history.
Let physicians and patients work it out themselves, and the rest of everyone butt the fuck out. But meanwhile, immunize physicians in the ER who decline to give strong pain meds to frequent flyers who claim their pain is a 10 out of 10 but I'm bored and can you change the channel on the waiting roomTV huh? So when patient surveys suggest Dr. X is a big meanie who won't treat my stupendous pain from nonspecific causes appropriately, the morons at CMS either pay no attention or have no power to make the life of Dr. X or his administrators miserable.
CDC should have no say in this whatsoever.
People who are not in chronic pain have no business dictating what can or cannot be done for people in chronic pain. When they do, they tend to lack empathy to a degree that's just amazing.
CDC should have no say in a lot of other things, as well. It's the doctors' business to decide what's best for their patients, not the bureaucrats. CDC's role should be purely informative.
It is play money--the prediction market is not taking a cut.
At a certain point there is a level of involvement between the market participants and the factors that control the outcome that makes the "prediction market" charade collapse. At that point it's not gambling, it's just bribery with a blindfold on.
I can see people who think prediction markets are the bees' knees playing with ones like this for personal goals (like "who'll finish the story first/who is right about when Sally gets pregnant?") and I would be very hesitant to call it bribery or fraud, but as an outsider it doesn't convince me that prediction markets on a wider scale are the way to go in making policy decisions. They'll end up like the stock market, or like betting on horse races etc. Big institutional investors and professional gamblers make a profit, the rest of us lose or win small amounts at irregular intervals.
At the "people in the same house betting $20" level it is certainly not bribery or fraud -- and it's certainly not bribery or fraud more than various approaches to "inducing children to eat vegetables".
But there's a very slippery slope from there to having $100k staked on a market for "what will happen in the next Game of Thrones novel".
I just clicked through into the manifold markets page and one of the featured posts is, "Will I be on a leave of absence for most of March-May" (https://manifold.markets/YafahEdelman/will-i-be-on-a-leave-of-absence-for)
This is, perhaps, the dumbest event of insider trading I've ever seen.
Or money laundering!
I guess if you're only getting prediction markets off the ground, then little play ones like these are useful to get people accustomed to the concept and how they work and how they should bet (I mean, make a reasoned prediction on the evidence! totally not sticking a pin in a horse's name betting going on!)
But yeah, as something to help set policy, this is dumb: I don't think any boss in the world would decide "Well, I was going to make Joe work over the next three months, but given that everyone is betting on him getting three months paid leave, I suppose I'll have to go with the majority decision as to what is most likely to happen!"
The person whose policy decisions would be affected by this is Yafah-- she might use it to decide whether she should e.g. make plans that involve going back to her university. (In practice, the markets aren't really liquid enough for this to be very good information.)
Oh, come on, that's not even the worst insider trading that's happened on Manifold so far! Someone procrastinated on resolving a hookup market and then the people they told that the hookup happened bought up the probability to like 98%.
This is incredibly fun and everyone is having a great time. We have GAMIFIED GOSSIP.
Commentary by Robert Service:
https://explorenorth.com/library/service/bl-rollstone34.htm
I can see a very small value in using a formal bet (with or without real money) to keep people honest on what they say. If two roommates have a disagreement about something, and they can peg something of value on a neutral third party, it keeps them honest on the resolution.
Most people don't need such a thing, but I suppose it could be valuable to a group that feels they need it.
I can't see how bets with such levels of insider information (so-and-so gets pregnant) would avoid scams if real money were ever involved. Even $1,000 or less could be incentive enough for someone to change their personal goals ("I'll bet against myself on finishing my novel and then finish it later.") and essentially rig the bet.
Oh everybody loves betting. Doesn't seem much different than Clint and the boys getting together for a little poker, or Rosey and her girlfriends taking a roadtrip to Vegas to play a little blackjack.
I got the Bengals moneyline, Cupp to score, and Jamar Chase over 3.5 rushing yards.
I have the final score to be Bengals 6-4, in overtime.
Ah, the rare all-safety game, nice.
I followed a comment last week to versusgame.com, what appears to be a well funded prediction market based on tiktok games that is simply ignoring US regulations. I played around with it and from what I can tell their gimmick is that all bets are player vs. player rather than the house, however it is very apparent that my bets were instantly called by bots with a common username generation pattern. Every market is in the form of a tiktokesque video and the odds are always +190 either way, giving some apparently very good EV. I expect either they are well funded and burning cash to build users, or I am just being scammed.
I have any interception and a doritos ad being shown at +190 each, however it looks like my bet on an interception has simply disappeared without my account being refunded. This previously happened on my Kupp >40 receiving yards, though in that instance my account was refunded. I'll post next thread about if I was able to with draw my winnings, if any, or if it is purely a scam.
To give a fair shake to the entity, this is from a Yahoo article quoting the CEO
"People have been doing it since day one. We can't help it. It's fun for us. So we went about creating something that's fair and fun for the masses. We are classified as a skill-based game. So we don't need licenses. We don't need any of that where someone like a DraftKings might need that. We kind of fall under the regulations as skills, which just went public for, like, $11 billion, so congratulations to them. So, yeah, we are really smooth sailing, just letting people do what they already do in a fair, fun way for everybody."
Oh, thanks for testing out versusgame! I hadn't even considered that some of their bets are matched by bots (for what it's worth, all Manifold traffic thus far has been 100% organic). I suppose bot-matching is not that different than running an automated market maker behind the scenes.
Curious if the tiktok video makes the bet more fun to engage with; my impression is "no" but I'm also not a tiktok user.
Personally no, I found their UI very grating, but similarly to you I'm definitely not the target audience. I hit on at least one so far, so I guess I'll see if I actually get paid out.
From what I can tell, every bet is called by a bot within a few seconds, or at five I placed. Every bet I've seen offered is +190 either way, leading to what feels like very good odds sometimes, which I'm skeptical they would ever fill both sides of. I can understand them currently bucketting the negative EV legs of non-even bets made by instagram users to burn cash for userbase, but I don't think this is legitimate market making at all.
If you were interested, bots are no longer calling my bets, and advantage bets are just sitting uncalled. I assume it may have either been a mechanic to capture prospective new users, or a promotion for the super bowl.
Ah interesting! Thanks for the update. I suspected something was weird about their enforcement of everything being 50/50 odds, but was coming at it more from a prediction market utility perspective (aka "how can you answer questions about the real world if the odds don't change") and less from the trader's perspective haha
Are you sure it's not decimal odds of 1.9 instead of +190. That would make a lot more sense
You're actually right, their website was quite confusing and seemed like it was +190, I'm also more used to seeing American odds. That said, plenty of bets including the ones I bet one were still advantage at 1.9
Not sure what you mean by "advantage", so for those not up on all their betting formats, note that 1.9 pays less than even money: it multiples your money by 1.9, aka you win 0.9 back (plus your stake) for every 1.0 you bet and win. (Or do you just mean you think the odds would normally be less than what they're paying?)
I just mean that even at 1.9/-111, many of the odds were quite advantageous. I hit on any INT for either team and that a doritos commercial would play; the odds were ~-105 for an INT on each QB individually, and doritos had publicly announced and displayed their commercial prior to my wager.
My understanding is that the Versusgame purports to be a player vs player operation with the entity acting purely as matchmaker, however currently they seem to be bucketing bets with bot accounts acting as counterparties. The bets are created by random people with 50k Instagram followers and as such it seems like they are setting up for quite the cash burn if they keep allowing sporting events
Got it, thanks.
I don't see how you can bet against the Bengals in the Year of the Tiger.
Well, I lost my bet, but it looks like Freddie won the parlay.
nope
From a Heideggerian point of view, bias is another word for "care." It is impossible to overcome bias, because bias or care is constitutive of selfhood. It is the basis for any orientation whatsoever. Does "Overcoming bias" thus mean, minimizing the extent to which one is a Dasein? But what would this mean? And what would motivate Dasein to want to overcome the conditions that make it what it is?
I don't know much about Heidegger, but I believe in the phrase "overcoming bias", the word "bias" is normally taken to refer to biased epistemics (i.e. problems in determining what is true), as opposed to biased preferences (caring for one thing more than another).
It's been a long while since I read Being and Time, and I didn't understand it super well even back then, but I think the obvious response here (as Dweomite says) is that the "bias" that Robin means here is specifically epistemic bias, and not other kinds of bias (e.g. affective bias.) The rationalist project doesn't seek to override individuals' subjective viewpoints or their idiosyncratic preferences, even if these are non-rational in origin; that leaves plenty of the realm of care/concern/Dasein-ness that even the strictest rationalist is happy to see stay around.
Maybe we can even take it a step further. Dasein essentially is the care of an individual for their own being and the possibilites for their being in the unfolding of their life. Those possibilities are defined by the individual's being-in-the-world. Therefore, the impulse to accurately grasp the world on an intellectual level, rationalist's characteristic motivation, can be seen as an expression of that very care and concern that makes Dasein what it is, since it shows the individual more clearly the possibilities that exist for their own life.
I think hit the nail on the head there. To me, "Overcoming bias" is the power to situationally step outside my Dasein and see the world in new light.
Also, it points to a third way of making choices: Heidegger tries to convince us that we must make our choices authentic -- i.e. we must be rooted in the Dasein and avoid _mauvaise foi_, resolutely refusing the pressures of Them. But we have more options than Heidegger lets on: We can use the tooling of Rationality/Bayesianism/etc to shed light on our choices in places that our own personal conviction or conformist acceptance leave in shadow.
In my humble opinion, Heidegger romanticises the rooted, unchanging Dasein and gives it an absolute primacy that leads him off the trail. We are not going to get rid of our Dasein, but we should look at it the way a sculptor looks at an unfinished statue -- not as a guest looks at a museum piece.
I think the key concept here is "surprise". Before you have the experience of being surprised by some aspect of the world that was totally unexpected by you, there's no reason to ever step outside of your own bias/care. Once surprise appears, it turns out that there's a whole world that exists on its own, completely without reference to your selfhood. To stay within your own subjectivity after that is to accept the possibility of future completely unknown surprises, some of which may be intolerable. So you've got to develop methods by which to deal with that world by its own standards, the way it needs to be dealt with, rather than by your own standards, in a way that makes sense to you.
So being Dasein post-surprise (which may be what he calls "thrownness"?) involves continually stepping back and forth between the world as ready-to-hand (in which it's involved in your bias/care) and the world as present-at-hand (in which it's just its own thing and doesn't care what anybody thinks about it). Living in ready-to-hand is to be in continual danger of possible intolerable surprises, including those which might dissolve your selfhood; living in present-at-hand is to abandon your own self-hood.
Spock is present-at-hand, Dr. McCoy is ready-to-hand, and Captain Kirk is Dasein, having to mediate the two. Or if you like Plato, the black horse in the Phaedrus is ready-to-hand, the white horse is present-at-hand, and the charioteer is Dasein, trying to steer the two.
A question for you, Scott:
In UNSONG, you quote a Dr. Seuss poem: "You say you have problems as great as my own / I am forced to admit it is true / But the thing is that my problems happen to me / Whereas yours only happen to you."
Which Dr. Seuss book were you quoting? I thought I was pretty well versed in his corpus, growing up, but that one has stumped me.
I can't find it either now. Maybe it's some other source and I misattributed it.
Entirely possible, though it does have the anapestic style that he loved so much. Thank you for looking!
The rhyme and meter do sound like Seuss, but in other ways the poem does not sound Seussian to my ears. I think what's non-Seussian about these lines is that everything's abstract, non-physical. There is not one single noun denoting a plain ordinary object -- instead the only *things* mentioned in the poem are "problems." And there's not one verb denoting a physical act. Instead poem's about saying, having, admitting, happening -- all abstract, non-physical actions.
could it be /u/poem_for_your_sprog or shel silverstein maybe?
The level of cynicism doesn't sound like Dr Seuss either.
Agree
Also absence of whimsy, absence of humor -- right?
I disagree about the abstraction. I think it's very reminiscent of "I had trouble getting to Solla Sollew", which has lots of lines about "troubles" in a general abstract sense.
Google finds it on this other page:
https://allpoetry.com/poem/6770593-Empathy-Apathy-by-SoulfulBubbles
the only other hit is unsong.
There is no attribution. Versions of this rhyme appear in places including The Improvement Era in a 1963 edition. In all cases the author is listed as unknown. I would think the Mormons of all people would have tracked it down if they could have before printing it in an official church periodical.
It may be a misquotation. Earliest reference I can find online is a 2002 book here: https://books.google.com/books?id=t4G4P7hUJH4C&pg=PA62&lpg=PA62&dq=%22But+consider+the+fact+that+mine+happen+to+me%22&source=bl&ots=yI-2HddHlV&sig=ACfU3U0kxSMtP5n-Dn3VKjlgCRGj_ekvKg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiTgp747P31AhWxJ0QIHYtXAW8Q6AF6BAgTEAM#v=onepage&q=%22But%20consider%20the%20fact%20that%20mine%20happen%20to%20me%22&f=false
but every line is slightly different from Scott's version.
Interesting - that is different enough it wouldn't show up on a direct search. The version (should the link be broken) is:
"If you think you have troubles as big as my own / I am forced to admit it is true / But consider the fact that mine happen to me / While yours merely happen to you!"
From that, I found this Ohio Wing Civil Air Patrol newsletter from 1959, which has a similar poem (sadly uncited):
https://history.cap.gov/files/original/da0dc11831369fcb81c52b9b8381e5b5.pdf
It gives it as "You say you have troubles as great as my own, / Maybe my good friend that is true / But consider the fact that mine happen to me / While yours merely happens to you."
It also shows up (apparently) in the Tuscon Daily Citizen in 1953 and the Cedar Rapids Gazette in 1951, but I don't have access to newspaperarchive.com and can't verify either myself. But 1959 at the very least puts an upper bound on how recent it could be.
I think the "that" in "But the thing is that" shouldn't be there—although I'm not sure if that will help in the search.
i think it scans a little better as "but the THING is that MY problems HAPpen to ME"
Here's my rule of thumb: if a native speaker can possibly screw up the meter while reading aloud, it's not Dr. Suess. (And for the record, I would have guessed Ogden Nash.)
PSA: If you enjoy prestige TV, the best investment you can make is a projector and a bigass screen. It's a treat, every time... Never gets old!
I really like my 75" 4k tv I got got black Friday 2020 for $300 at target.
BenQ with a 100" screen in a small living room, here. Succession, Yellowstone, The Expanse, etc - fantabulous.
And you're right - it always feels so much more immersive than TVs in other people's homes, and that never gets old.
Unless you like watching things during the day.
Otherwise I agree, there's something incredibly luxurious about turning your living room into an actual movie theatre.
Oh, daylight! The eternal, undefeatable foe!
If only there were thousands off-the-shelf room-darkening products and/or room-darkening custom services for when off-the-shelf products won't work!
(Or put another way, my west-facing living room, which even has a sliding glass door, can be made darker at 3 PM than most people's suburban bedrooms are at 3 AM.)
It does make a big difference what kind of room you're watching in. Houses with a no-window media room (like mine!) make this great, but if your watching area is the giant open-floor-plan space shared with all the other activities in your house, then blocking off the lights is going to be difficult.
It's pretty easy if you have money! Manual or mechanized custom shades can be ordered for almost any window. And then with an ambient light rejecting screen and a bright projector, you can often get an excellent image even in a casually bright room, like a family room with a lamp or two on. It's doable!
Ukraine situation seems getting quite bad. Hopefully I am just panicking and it is not going to end with Russian provocations, takeover of Ukrainian government and/or invasion but I am not hopeful.
>I think most Americans have a distorted view of the situation.
>The source of the conflict is the U.S. continually agitating to bring the Ukraine into NATO and increase troops and missiles there.
>As of right now, I view us as the aggressors.
I am uncertain what you are accusing the US media and government of.
Are you saying that the American public has a false idea of troop and weapons movements by various parties? That is, the consensus reality is incorrect?
Or are you saying that they have a correct idea of troop and weapons movements, that Ukraine, the US, and Russia's actions are being reported more or less correctly, but Putin is entirely justified in what he has been doing? That is, the consensus morality is incorrect?
Also, if you are familiar with "agitation to bring Ukraine into NATO" by the US government, can you please explain where your information comes from on this?
I don't understand your theory. If Russia is not either planning to invade Ukraine or pretending to plan to invade Ukraine, why did they move a large part of the Russian army to the border with Ukraine?
They could be preparing to be welcomed in for security purposes, when "representatives of the self-defense of Russian-speaking citizens" take over Ukraine's parliament and organize a referendum on joining Russia.
>He explains how NATO membership is a crucial piece of the puzzle
I Ctrl-F'ed for NATO in the linked article and didn't find anything indicating anyone has plans for Ukraine to join NATO.
>We only have anonymous sources making totally unverifiable claims
Do we really?
If you google "ukraine satellite images", a lot of mainstream news sources seem to have gotten images from a private company called Maxar that are claimed to show troop and equipment movement.
E.g. https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20220212-satellite-images-show-russia-adding-military-pressure-on-ukraine
>This would not be the first time intelligence agencies have lied about enemy capabilities/intentions for their own purposes
If intelligence agencies can lie about anything, and anything/anyone can be a front for them, how do you get reliable information? Why do you think the website that you linked is trustworthy?
>And the only reason we think Russia is going to invade is vague accusations from intelligence agencies
I admit I can't tell much from the photos, but there is plenty of alleged evidence, so I don't think it's true that people are going off of "vague accusations".
>Who the hell are we to tell them where to put troops in their own country?
Reportedly some of the military buildup has been in Crimea. Is Crimea "their own country"?
>Are you saying that the American public has a false idea of troop and weapons movements by various parties? That is, the consensus reality is incorrect?
Yes, I suspect it is. There seems to be a distinct disconnect between what Ukraine is saying and what Biden administration is saying. (And let's face it, the US media doesn't have much skill separating fact from fiction.) The Russians seemed flustered by the strength of Biden's response. Meanwhile Biden has been able to galvanize NATO (which has been one of his primary foreign policy goals post-Trump), and we're sending all sorts of nifty military equipment to Ukraine (which we wouldn't have been able to do without all sorts of political repercussions if Putin hadn't been massing troops on the border).
Plus Ukraine and southern Russia have been going through an unseasonal thaw for the past couple weeks. An armored advance into a quagmire of mud is usually considered suboptimal conditions to start a military offensive. And it's interesting how Biden amped up his rhetoric once the thaw set in...
I could be wrong, but I suspect Biden thinks Putin is bluffing, and he's calling Putin's bluff. We'll see...
Hindsight: Trent Telenko expected the invasion beforehand[1], and expected that Putin couldn't take all of it [2][3], partly because Ukrainians have a lot of resolve [4].
His explanation for the "disconnect between what Ukraine is saying and what Biden administration is saying" was economic [5][6]: "The panic caused by the Biden Administration statements has killed the business insurance market in Ukraine. The 60 firms doing so have dropped to three. No insurance equals no business operations, a Ukrainian economic heart attack."
[1] https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1473422763583025153
[2] https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1466970924868067330
[3] https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1467264554845491207
[4] https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1487452009322233868
[5] https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1487828101518311428
[6] https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1487245447693578244
It is just not true that US is "continually agitating to bring the Ukraine into NATO". That was the position of Bush administration, but Bush is out of power since 2009. EDIT: also, I do not understand what do you mean by "increase troops and missiles there". There are currently no US troops in Ukraine, as far as I know.
I think we can imagine how the United States would react to a Russian satellite country a few dozen miles from Miami, just by looking at US-Soviet-Cuban diplomacy throughout the period of 1960-1991. There was a bit of agitation in the first year or so of the situation, but then it got settled and the US never threatened invasion again.
>the US never threatened invasion again
Wasn't that an explicit agreement to end the Cuban Missile Crisis?
>likely benefit from at the end of the day.
I believe someone has suggested that the goal of the whole exercise, assuming an invasion will not happen, is to prepare world audiences for an ally to do something similar to a different country, except actually invade. The US and others would be paralyzed as a consequence of the current charade.
I don't know if I believe it, but I haven't heard a better theory.
The problem that buildup seems very unusually large and there is no good exit strategy for Putin. Massive demands were made persistent sabre rattling etc. If nothing will happen it will not look good for him.
And Ukraine invasion, no matter how bad for everyone, is within apparent Putin plans, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Historical_Unity_of_Russians_and_Ukrainians
> The essay denies the existence of Ukraine as an independent nation.
> Putin compares "the formation of an ethnically pure Ukrainian state, aggressive towards Russia" to a use of weapons of mass destruction against Russians.
(hmm, I wonder why Ukraine and Ukrainians may dislike Russia and Putin?)
That essay is a wonderful illustration of the Russian political mindset (in general, not just about the current situation in Ukraine).
Putin: "There's lots of people in Ukraine who are ethnically Russian, therefore I should be their ruler. For I Am Great. Amen."
Why would Russia invade Ukraine? What would Russia gain, and why invasion didn't happen in 2015-2021?
Countries don't always behave in a way consistent with their own best interests, and Russia is worse than most.
Russia has been periodically invading its neighbours for centuries and it never turns out worthwhile, but they keep doing it anyway.
The question is not what Russia would gain, the question is what would Putin gain. That is a big part of problem because war will be not good for people there, Ukraine, Russia, world in general. But may be good for Putin, so it may happen despite that it is bad for basically everyone.
North Korea level sanctions would be quite bad for Putin, he likes being a popular dictator. But he also likes being internationally feared (if not quite respected), and if Ukraine, with the obvious NATO backing decides to take Donbass back then he would likely consider himself forced to commit to a full-scale invasion so as not to look like a paper tiger (which is unacceptable). But there's nothing new here, and the reasons for the current media fever pitch are unclear, is there really so much smoke without fire?
Satellite imagery, on the ground videos etc indicate that Russia is moving more and more of its military into position consistent with invasion.
Yet, it is not a new message, but that is because buildup continues. It is now on scale that it is of size that according to some experts is enough to invade Ukraine, and on such scale the only use is invasion or threats of invasion. Right now most of Russian army is directly next to Ukrainian border and even more is moved there. Convoys of tanks, new deployments kilometers from border. Many videos of trains with military equipment including cruise missiles moved in direction of Ukraine.
Part of army was moved into Belarus, with military exercise as explanation. Belarus official statement now is that part Russian army there is no longer on exercises but guards border with Ukraine.
Disclaimer: I am not an expert, I may be confused
Well, even if that's all true, it can just as well be a way for Putin to demonstrate that he's ready and willing to respond with full force to a serious attempt to disrupt the status quo. I'm not sure if he has good reasons to believe that Ukraine is preparing to do that, there's obviously no hope of objective reporting from either side, and if or when there'll be an initiation everybody would blame it on provocations anyway.
> Why would Russia invade Ukraine?
A lot of coverage and responses here focus on Putin, but there's another side to consider: NATO expansion towards Russia's borders can reasonably be seen as aggressive and contrary to prior "soft" agreements on the balance of power.
Not that Russia is innocent in all of this, but the point being if Russia is "just" sabre rattling, then preventing NATO expansion to its borders has strategic benefits, and if they are legitimately invading, then Ukraine would act as a strategic buffer between them and NATO powers.
For the record, NATO's "aggressive explansion" was nothing like invading the countries with soldiers or tanks. The Eastern European countries themselves tried to get into NATO or EU as soon as possible, because that seemed like the only protection from Russia.
I strongly object against trying to describe this situation as somehow symmetric. One side is *invading* their neighbors, completely literally. Other side is being *begged* by the small countries in between for the permission to join. To say that NATO should not "expand aggressively" is to say that those small countries already belong to Russia and should accept it.
> To say that NATO should not "expand aggressively" is to say that those small countries already belong to Russia and should accept it.
No, that's a false dilemma, and the sort of thinking that's now driving the drum beats of war that we're now seeing.
Not allowing them into NATO to avoid escalating tensions while also not allowing Russia to control them is a perfectly viable middle ground consistent with existing soft agreements. It's messy and some people might find it "unsatisfactory", but that's life.
I also didn't frame this as symmetric, but if you want the asymmetric takes then go watch the American media for all of the propaganda you can handle. If you want a more balanced take, then listen to the Ukrainian officials that are criticizing the West's hawkish rhetoric and actions that are inflaming the situation.
> Not allowing them into NATO to avoid escalating tensions while also not allowing Russia to control them is a perfectly viable middle ground
Ukraine is *not* in NATO. How well is this middle ground working for them now?
The reason this situation exists is because of Ukraine's overtures to join NATO and this overture being seriously considered. So actually not a great idea in retrospect.
Modulo a few quibbles of little import, this is a fair 10,000 ft view that actually considers the decades of policies leading up to the present tensions:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDjKuUTb2Bc
Whether you think Putin or Russia's views are justified are ultimately irrelevant. The US throws its weight around all the time in a similar fashion, unless you've conveniently forgotten the illegitimate Iraq war and the two decades in Afghanistan, not to mention the dozens of other conflicts.
Russia doing the same to secure certain concessions it considers important to its interests is apparently long-established standard practice. Unless you want these concessions to be decided by open warfare between two nuclear powers, then you should consider those interests carefully and work towards diplomatic solutions.
If all that means is denying a few countries entrance to NATO and thus preserving the soft agreements that have existed for decades, that seems to be perfectly reasonable strategic solution. Judgments about the "symmetry" of this specific scenario is frankly irrelevant IMO.
Generally, the problem with historical perspective (such as the video you linked) is that often one side can say "if we go X years back in history, you see that the disputed territory clearly belonged to us", and the other side can say "well, if we go Y years back in history, it clearly didn't", and this can go back to the dinosaurs.
Like, yes, many countries recently admitted to NATO were historically in Russia's sphere of influence... assuming that "historically" strictly refers to the period between WW2 and the fall of Soviet Union. However, if you go further to the past, then it is not really true for Poland, Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, former Yugoslavia.
The current scenario is not about who controlled what territory when, it's about the historical precedents that drives the current *behaviours* we're seeing. If NATO has a *history of behaviour* that Russia feels threatens their security, and nations on its borders are making overtures to join NATO and NATO is considering those applications, then Russia's actions make a certain kind of sense. All of the history covered in that video is about establishing the backstory for why the hostility to NATO expansionism makes sense from Russia's perspective.
Furthermore, this is not ancient history, many of the people pulling the strings now were alive and well in the timeframes we're discussing here, and some of them were even in power (like Biden). It's like you're trying to understand the US's presence in Afghanistan for two decades while completely ignoring 9/11 or Al-Qaeda, the core factors that set the stage.
What would Bush/US gain from invading Iraq? Why didn't that invasion happen 1992-2001?
Yeah, let's hope it remains on the level of Eurovision rivalry:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia%E2%80%93Ukraine_relations_in_the_Eurovision_Song_Contest
It's not surprising that no one expected the first invasion, triggered by Ukraine joining the EU as opposed the the Russian thingy
But once you incorporate that level of possessiveness and/or paranoia into your understanding of Putin's Russia it should be easy to see what a knife in the back any prospect of Ukraine joining NATO looks like to the Russians. The alliance is predicated on defending against Russia
Putin will not get his head on straight so it's up to some western leader to figure out that Ukraine cannot peacefully join NATO. One option would be to offer Russia NATO membership. That would be extremely interesting with regards to the geopolitical balance with China. Presumably a more likely one would be to carve out a unique status for Ukraine such that they are not exclusively EU members and can also be part of the Russian bloc in some fashion
We need to get into Russia's headspace and work backward from there
Why would anyone want Ukraine in NATO anyway? What value do they provide?
Why did anyone want the Baltics in NATO? What value do they provide? They're almost dwarf countries. Yet, they are in NATO, and there are NATO troops on the Estonian border 120 km from St. Petersburg. It's difficult not to see as as very fishy from the Russian point of view.
Ukraine of course is very unlikely to be admitted into NATO anytime soon, but it's their explicit goal (written into constitution, even), and in 2020 they were granted NATO's "Enhanced Opportunities Partner" status, which of course isn't yet a promise of anything, but still. The trend doesn't look very good. Ukraine in NATO would be much worse for Russia than the Baltics ever were. And somehow the idea "hey, maybe the West could just explicitly promise to Russia that Ukraine never joins NATO, and the whole conflict would be over" is treated as something monstrous and unthinkable, and Putin is treated as some bloodthirsty comic book villain who just wants to conquer because of pure megalomania.
> Why did anyone want the Baltics in NATO? What value do they provide?
Well, Europe/USA is honestly considering human right abuse as a bad thing (even if their action often make things worse, see how various military interventions went).
So there is an element of doing things for ethical reasons.
Also, from pure military viewpoint having an unsinkable aircraft carrier and early warning system is a good thing.
Similarly, in interest in Western Europe is having Russian army crippled in Ukraine rather than triumphant an victorious without serious losses.
> Well, Europe/USA is honestly considering human right abuse as a bad thing (even if their action often make things worse, see how various military interventions went).
What do you mean? Was the any human rights abuse in the Baltics after they declared independence that NATO is now somehow preventing? (We could by the way remember that Estonia and Latvia are to this day requiring their native Russian population, regular people who were born in these countries in 1940-1991 and are in no way responsible for any USSR wrongdoings, to jump through hoops (language exam etc.) to gain citizenship, otherwise they are stateless and get an "alien passport" only. Seems not very human right-y to me, but no one in the West ever cared.)
Remember also that Poland and Hungary were accepted into NATO in 1999, and the Baltics in 2004. Russia was weak, still recovering from the USSR collapse and was on friendly terms with the West. Russia generally is considered to have begun to assert an anti-Western stance in 2007, when Putin made his Munich speech. AFTER NATO creeped to its borders.
> Was the any human rights abuse in the Baltics after they declared independence that NATO is now somehow preventing?
Ones that tend to happen after being invaded by Russia. Without NATO membership they would be likely invaded before Ukraine.
Sometimes having friends and being a friend is a good thing. Relationships, even international diplomatic ones, can't be a one way street.
Negative. There's no practical military advantage, and the liabilities are not unlike those that attach to having Turkey join the EU. But there's a certain category of Foggy Bottom stripey-pants (or student thereof) who believe that mindless expansion of treaty organizations is always good. This is how we got the UN.
That's a good point, NATO doesn't care if its members are democracies or dictatorships so inviting Russia to join would be an option.
Didn't they at one point?
Ukraine was never offered NATO membership. Putin mentioned he wanted it a while ago but it was never seriously pursued. Russia clearly thinks it's on the table despite no one actually offering it to Ukraine though. He wants to roll back NATO expansion. Or at least those are his demands. Including removing forces from current NATO members. That's a pretty unserious proposal. If intelligence is to be believed he sees democracy and color revolutions are more or less a western front and wants to install a puppet regime in Ukraine.
Just a minor correction. Bush administration wanted Ukraine in NATO and they suceeded in pressing their European allies in putting following language into a declaration of NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008: "NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO." (https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_8443.htm).
However, this is now clearly dead letter, no one in power in NATO now wants to admit Ukraine, and if NATO would now promise to not take them, it would be of a very limited use to Russia, since there is no guarantee that it (NATO) would not change its stance later. So I agree with your larger point that Putin is gaslighting with this demand.
Putin's headspace (because this IS Russia's headspace in reality) is "I want the Russian sphere of influence to resemble, at minimum, the original Iron Curtain borders, and I will accomplish that by any means feasible." Anything offered to Putin will involve a concession towards giving him more influence over other ex-Soviet nations, and then he will accept it, and then he will continue doing the exact same thing while demanding more concessions, promising that THIS time he'll back down, because his interests aren't aligned with good-faith negotiation. It takes two to have a conversation.
I doubt if they really want to take over Eastern Europe. The USSR was the second biggest economy in the world when it occupied Eastern Europe and that folded quickly. Russia is now a small to medium economy. Putin probably wants to stop NATO expansion as he says.
1. If Putin said the sky was blue I'd want a second opinion. He's a former grey man, prevarication is his nature.
2. that's your theory. My theory is that Putin remembers when the USSR was the second-biggest economy in the world and wants that back, and sees the restoration of the Soviet Bloc as Greater Russia (or the Russian Trade Zone or whatever he'd call it) as the path to do that.
I trust Putin as much as I trust any US spokesman. Does Putin want the Russians controlling all of Eastern Europe again? I doubt it - what would it gain then except continuous war and an eventual loss. The Russians after all did abandon their empire fairly cleanly. He does want to stop NATO advancement obviously and believes the Ukraine is part or fully Russian.
I'm certain you believe he believes that. And you will then take him at his word when he says that he's only starting to play Hungry Hungry Hippo with the Balkans to protect the Russians that live there.
> I trust Putin as much as I trust any US spokesman.
USA is at least invading countries openly, unlike what Russia did in Crimea. The same goes for extrajudicial executions.
I read a prediction somewhere, that Russia wouldn't invade till after the Olympics are over.
I believe last time the Olympics were in Russia, he waited until afterwards to invade Ukraine. But last time the Olympics were in China, he invaded Georgia during the Olympics.
OK, then don't bet on him waiting. I have no idea what Putin is going to do. Invading seems like a bad idea to me, so I'd bet against it. But I'm mostly clueless.
Yes there will be a war.
The Crimea situation needs to get resolved somehow. The best case scenario is Russia officially taking Crimea, Donbas and fucking off, and Ukraine accepting that outcome. The expected scenario is a regime change.
Worst case scenarios are the long, and depressing, tail.
Your best case scenario is already the status quo essentially, and it's obviously not Russia that's the most upset about it. The question seems to be, are those who are more upset finally willing to do something about it?
It is the status quo de facto but not de jure. This is not sustainable in the long run, see how it ended with Karabakh.
Judging by eager Western support for Ukrainian cause, nothing short of return to pre-2014 borders would be recognized in the foreseeable future, which is obviously unacceptable to Putin. Karabakh is also somewhat atypical for post-Soviet frozen conflicts, as withouth Russia's direct involvement the opposing sides are relatively well-matched.
I think Russian Crimea will need to be recognized at some point, it was stuck with Ukraine pretty much by historical accident. The rest may, in the end, be a bargaining chip to secure it.
Still, Russian Crimea voted in favor of staying with the Ukraine by popular majority, did it not (originally)? Now that Russia has taken over, they have engaged in ethnic cleansing, so it's not clear that democratic majority is legitimate any longer.
What is a benefit to Ukraine here? It seems unlikely that Russia would stop meddling/invading/greenmanning at the next opportunity.
How does an invasion change the de jure status? There's nothing in international law saying "if it's got your troops all over it, that makes it yours".
I think that idea is that if Ukraine gets beaten sufficiently badly, it might agree to cede part of its territorry in exchange for getting back other occupied parts. Seems kind of plausible, actually
Hijacking your comment because I've got an offer for readers interested in this subthread:
Ukrainian expat here, my estimate for the war is substantially below Metaculus average so I'm willing to try the betting thing and bet against the invasion happening. My betting budget is about $100-$200. If you're interested, send me a letter at "sharedvi" on gmail
How do you intend to pay up if the invasion happens?
I'm outside Ukraine. Paypal or crypto, I guess?
If the Russians capture Donetsk and Luhansk and then stop advancing, that still counts as "invading", right?
Edit: I checked what Ukrainians think: "According to a recent poll conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS), 48.1% of Ukrainians believe the threat of an invasion is real, while 39.1% don't think an invasion will happen. Another 12.8% of respondents either had no opinion yet or did not want to comment." (28.01.2022)
https://www.dw.com/en/are-ukrainians-preparing-for-a-russian-invasion/a-60582771
We have the luxury today of seeing all sorts of information that doesn't get through MSM filters. Here's some more information you might not be aware of if you were just reading the headlines...
WEATHER: For the past two weeks there's been an unusual mid-winter thaw in Ukraine and southern Russia with heavy rains. Pictures on Twitter show Russian troops wet and muddy, and the temporary camps along the boarder are full of mud. The weather forecasts suggest warm weather and rain for next 10 days at least. It's going to be tough to launch a attack through all that mud.
TANKS & MUD: There's a lot of discussion of various forums right now about the ability of modern tanks to handle muddy conditions. The consensus seems to be that they will be able to move through the mud and not get stuck like WWII tanks did — but at a cost of lower speed and higher fuel expenditure. Half tracks and troop carriers, less so. But then there are also paved roads that could be used. But moving troops along highways and roads funnels troop movements along a single path and leaves them vulnerable to air attack. Likewise, rainy weather prevents optimal use of drones.
So, this is a suboptimal time for an invasion of Ukraine.
Questions:
1. Why didn't Putin make his move while he had the weather on his side? My guess would be that he never meant to actually invade, rather he just wanted to create the appearance of threat to get concessions and destabilize the government of Ukraine.
2. So, why is the Biden Administration upping the warnings of immanent attack when the risk is probably lower than it was 3 weeks ago? — and while the Ukraine government seems to be downplaying them? Not sure, but it seems Biden is purposely upping the ante on Putin. We get to ship vast amounts of armaments to Ukraine under the excuse of aiding them in a time of need. We get our Eastern NATO partners more engaged in their defense planning, and we get NATO and the EU talking acting in a more unified manner.
Ironically, if this was a bluff by Putin to cow Ukraine, it may backfire on him by driving Ukraine into the arms a NATO and the EU.
> Ironically, if this was a bluff by Putin to cow Ukraine, it may backfire on him by driving Ukraine into the arms a NATO and the EU.
which would be Exhibit #30000 that Putin is a great tactician but *terrible* strategist
I am not any kind of arms expert but, after I googled how many planes each side has, I heavily doubt that Ukrainian airforce would be able to bomb advancing Russian army, so concern about an air attack seems moot.
True. It doesn't look like they've got much inventory. I'd be curious what they have in the way of drones, though.
Actually, Ukrainians recently bought some Turkish drones, which is sometimes cited as one of the a reasons for current escalation. Those weapons might be very effective against poorly armed separatists. I doubt that this changes the fact that Russian air force is far stronger, though
Issue: Russian tanks are shit, as a rule.
If you are driving a column of MIA2's down a contested highway with the full might of the USAF supporting them, 10 dudes with a detonator and a couple shitty rockets can seriously ruin you day.
Ukraine is swimming in NLAW's which are at least a bit better than shitty; if russia wanted a clean hungarian style rolling of the tanks, it's too late. The best they can hope for now (assuming Ukraine doesn't collapse instantly) is a chechen style fuckfest.
> Why didn't Putin make his move while he had the weather on his side?
My understanding is that at the time the forces were not fully deployed for a proper invasion - e.g. most of the units have been transferred across very long distances (e.g. China border), and we saw the trains of their heavy hardware arriving, however, the full contingent of troops were arrived just recently. Logistics takes time. Also, even moving from these near-border emplacements to a position that's actually ready to attack takes a full day or so; so e.g. on friday we could be sure that a saturday attack is physically impossible. However, this seems to be changing today, and right now we can't say that an attack on tuesday/wednesday would be impossible. So the bet has been rapidly rising in the last couple of days - more than over the whole month of january - and there's not that much space to escalate even more without firing shots, so it might force a show of cards or folding if a bluff turns out to be a bluff.
"A housemate opened a market into whether she’ll get pregnant, and another housemate who helps with childcare is buying shares “as a hedge”"
I admit, this strikes me as odd. Surely the only one who decides when she'll get pregnant, assuming the use of birth control, is the prospective mother? I can see this working in a "everyone else thinks this is a good time in my life for me to have a baby, if I'm going to have a baby" for someone unsure if they should have a baby right now and then deciding you will try to get pregnant, but it really heavily depends on "people who know me and know my situation", and how is a market better than "I talked to them and got advice"?
Unless it's betting on "whoops, this was unexpected!"
Oh well, good luck if they're trying for a baba, and maybe also try a prayer to St. Anne!
I interpreted this as that she's already decided that she wants to get pregnant, and is trying, but the whether and when is where the prediction comes in.
So this is a rationalist version of a gender reveal party? Which is just a 2010s version of a baby shower?
That makes more sense - "Jill wants a baby, will she get pregnant right away or take a couple of months to succeed?" as a bet.
But then how do prediction markets help predict that? What information are we expecting other people to have that will be revealed in this market? Does she suspect one of the housemates secretly slipping contraceptives in her coffee and she's hoping this will lure them out?
Offloading research on how likely is pregnancy on others? Unusual way of sharing info that they try to be pregnant?
Eurovision is coming in May, and here is the Latvian entry, a paean to going green, called "Eat Your Salad".
I won't say any more, I'll let you enjoy the fullness of the experience 😀
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xx8dewrt1y4
Huh, this is how I assume that people still into metal feel about vegetarianism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeZlih4DDNg
Wow, it's like Robin Thicke decided to keep the sexual harassment but otherwise unironically embrace sanctimonious liberal orthodoxies?
I think it's a joke.
In the last 10 years or so I have pretty much read all non-fiction books. I guess I am trying to learn something new, rather than reading as entertainment. Probably some psychological weirdness as well. At any rate one of my favorite non-fiction writers is David Deutsch. David is a specialist in quantum computing, but is knowledgeable across a wide breadth of science. He promotes the idea of the multiverse which is interesting, but he also is a big proponent of scientific optimism in that we will continue to progress and many of the problems of today will be solved. He likes Karl Popper's and Jacob Bronowski's take on scientific progress. David tweeted about a novel he enjoyed (A lot of authors promote each others books it seems) "Termination Shock" by Neal Stephenson so I shifted gears and gave it a try. Long story short I couldn't put it down and rapped up the 700 pages in a week! I can see Deutsch's enthusiasm for it as it is mostly about geo-engineering climate change mitigation about 10 years in the future. Lots of cool science included as part of the story with a strong connection to what is actually going on now. Not going to spoil it for those contemplating reading it, but it was interesting that Mount Pinatubo's eruption 30 years ago cooled the planet by pouring sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. So it would be somewhat predicable that doing the same thing with human initiative would cool things down as well. Here's an article about Deutsch's optimistic views:https://www.warpnews.org/premium-content/david-deutsch-optimism-pessimism-and-cynicism/?fbclid=IwAR3edlsvFU07_fLTKjtt__bnzZ2CPzL5foDXm7a_5xmcC3aY4t2UIKLoH70
Here's a link to Neal Stephenson's: Termination Shock: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0941WBTYL/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
> In the last 10 years or so I have pretty much read all non-fiction books
*presses X to doubt*
I believe that's "all" as in "all the books read have been non-fiction" as opposed to "all" meaning "the entire set of non-fiction books".
Sorry about the confusion. Yes I meant that most of the books I have read in the last 10 years have been non-fiction.
You might possibly enjoy my _Future Imperfect_.
You might like Greg Egan.
I downloaded it but didn’t really like it. It has a lot of problems common with near future books - the technology and also (in this case) climate change was too advanced.
All of them? Wow.
I think most people would agree that as a general rule, it's bad to kill people. There might be exceptions, such as wars or self defence, but generally you shouldn't do it.
But why? Short of "because it's a base level assumption" I'm not sure I have a better explanation. So, if 1) you think killing people is bad and 2) you have an explanation beyond "it's an axiom" please lmk what your take is.
- Golden rule, which you might optionally describe in game-theoretic language. Here's Scott's variation on this theme: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/
- Hard in practice to cause death without also causing suffering, which is axiomatically bad
- Killing someone prevents future existence that they would have otherwise had. If their future experiences were on net positive, you're removing positive experience (e.g. joy) from existing in the future. And perhaps this is axiomatically bad.
I thought about 2 and 3, but all three of those seem to lead to it being okay to kill sad people with no friends.
Only if you can be one hundred percent certain that their current and future lives are of negative utility to them. But nobody can be certain of that, not even for their own lives, and certainly not for the lives of others.
Plus "negative utility" is easy to reason about, but I'm not convinced that it's a meaningful thing to talk about in practice. How many utils per hour are you experiencing right now? How bad a headache would you need to have before that turns negative?
In cases where this is clearly true (someone is dying in extreme pain after an accident and won't live more than a few minutes anyway) then many people would agree that a mercy killing might be morally reasonable.
Why do you need to be one hundred percent certain?
Because human life is, in fact, a worthwhile thing and taking it from another should require an ironclad reason. It's a decision that can't be walked back. Perhaps it does not have to be literally 100% certain, but I believe the margin of error for it is far outside of the human mind's ability to calculate.
I don't think your reasoning seems sound. Avoiding human suffering is also a worthwhile thing, but we don't typically conclude from this that we should only let people live if we are 100% certain that they will not suffer. In that case too, once that suffering has been experienced, it cannot be undone.
If the sad friendless people haven't killed themselves then it seems like they've cast a well-informed vote on the question of how sad their life is. And if they say "I would like to be dead but I can't work up the nerve to do it" then we're getting into assisted suicide territory which while contested, is a lot less bad than murder.
Only if you're perfectly omniscient (thus having access to their entire determined future and all internal states), which goes beyond hypothetical and into "arguing for the sake of argument" territory.
A world in which it is common to kill is a world which endangers me. I wish for a peaceful world, so I do not kill.
Destroying things is bad, because (due to entropy) it takes more work to create than destroy. All else being equal, if you're at a destroy / don't destroy choice, take don't destroy. The places where destruction is acceptable is when it prevents greater destruction later.
Killing people is a particular high cost form of destruction, since it takes years to make a person, and all people are unique. As society advances, the costs for making a person get greater and greater, and that is balanced by the greater value produced by the average person in their lifetime.
I have a four year old and all my work thus far trying to socialize him has been attempting to get him to understand this concept.
Related topic: destroying things is fun for at least some people some of the time. What causes the pleasure?
The thrill is in making a tangible change to the world. For a child, building a tower of blocks and knocking down someone else's tower are both tangible changes, but one takes a lot less work than the other.
That's a very good question. When I was in high school I was into bowling, and there were 2 things I liked about it. #1 was the beautiful Pythagorean tetractys setup of the pins, and #2 was the young boy joy of smashing it into chaos. I understand #1 but not #2. Building a tower of blocks produces a very different pleasure than knocking it down.
Killing people inappropriately is very very bad, because the people being killed don't like it and their friends don't like it and anyone who witnesses the killing updates in the direction of "killing is apparently okay" and that's bad for society.
Cases where killing people is appropriate are very very rare.
Humans are bad at judging which (if any) killing is appropriate. Humans might invent some complicated utilitarian rationalization for why killing some particularly annoying person is actually okay. This could lead to inappropriate killing.
The best way to avoid inappropriate killing is to have a blanket rule against killing at all. Even if you have somehow convinced yourself that you're in a trolley problem and killing is appropriate in this particular case, you are very probably just deluding yourself and you should ignore your utility math and simply not kill people.
> Humans are bad at judging which (if any) killing is appropriate
On what do you base that opinion?
I think there are two extremely excellent reasons for *personally* killing another human:
1. To minimize their extreme intractable suffering, particularly when death is imminent and especially if they request it, and,
2. In defense of criminally imminent deadly threat to oneself or others (which will almost always minimize human suffering, as most people (would-be victims, their loved ones, the police, etc) find situations of defensive killing far less emotionally traumatizing than murder).
I am very confident that I can judge either situation appropriately.
Why aren't you?
(FWIW, I am so confident there are situations where *I* should be killed that I've signed legal documents outlining when to kill me via intentional medical neglect.
I'm also super cool with someone killing me the moment I become a criminally imminent deadly threat to them.)
> I am very confident that I can judge either situation appropriately.
I'm also very confident that humans have a long history of dehumanizing others and so find it very easy to justify murder when it suits them. Of course you would think you're being reasonable, but even unreasonable people think they're being reasonable.
As such, it seems appropriate to have a blanket rule against killing people, that you should be detained if you ever do kill someone, and that whether your killing was justified should be decided by people that aren't you.
Wouldn't having a "blanket rule" against killing people mean that there *is* no circumstance where killing is justified?
I don't mind having the legal system *review* killings, of course!
But pragmatically, blanket rules aren't a good option in thought *or* deed.
> Wouldn't having a "blanket rule" against killing people mean that there *is* no circumstance where killing is justified?
Sure, killing is typically judged based on intent and other circumstances under current laws, so those can absolve guilt, but it doesn't technically have to work that way. Strict liability laws determine guilt regardless of those considerations, and I see no reason why killing couldn't be a strict liability law.
For instance, a blanket rule against killing would mean that you are still breaking the rule when killing in self defense, but that doesn't mean you actually have to be punished in those circumstances. In other words, context can influence the response to a guilty verdict but not the determination of guilt itself.
It could have some advantages as well. If you are not guilty under current laws, the state has no power over the defendant at that point. If killing were strict liability, they would be found guilty even under self defense but they could be sent to a counselor or therapist as their "sentence".
I should have brought up (formal, agents of the government) policing as a point #3 above.
Would your blanket rule against killing apply to them, too (if your answer is "yes" you should start reading The Graham Factor)?
And what about medical professionals who disconnect dying patients from ventilators?
Yes, those are two natural exceptions that people generally admit. They don't cause any problems for the rule as stated though, which allows for rare exceptions.
Right, that was my point!
Just to reset, I was initially replying to someone who was arguing against exceptions, whose thesis statement was, "The best way to avoid inappropriate killing is to have a blanket rule against killing at all." And another person who said there should be a "blanket rule against killing." A blanket rule by definition has no exceptions.
Except most people agree there are very acceptable reasons to kill another human; self-defense against an imminent deadly threat being almost universally agreed-upon, with varying opinions about warfare (and policing), execution for capital offenses, and withdrawing life-sustaining medical care.
I can certainly judge what constitutes an "imminent deadly threat" (someone trying to stab me with knife, etc), and so can pretty much everyone else, including the OP. It's incredibly silly for the OP to assert otherwise.
To take the question one step further. Do you think killing people is bad even when the person doing the killing thinks it's justified?
Do you have an example of someone who killed but *didn't* think it was justified at the time?
I'm sure there have been some soldiers/hangmen who were just killing for a paycheck.
I fully expect that these people would agree that killing for a paycheck is sometimes justified, and that's why they permit themselves to do it. I have a hard time believing that anyone is going around doing things that they don't personally think are justified. Whether those justifications are objectively valid is a separate question of course. An psychopathic nihilist that goes on a murder spree might justify it by saying that laws and ethics are man-made constructs, and that "murderous animal" is just our natural state, so there's no objectively justifiable reason to not murder people if they feel like it.
We in fact have lots of psychological processes that try to maintain the belief that we are justified in how we act (often with the corollary that we are a good person), even in the face of evidence to contrary.
I think most murderers (psychopathic nihilists aside) know/believe what they are doing is "wrong" but they do it anyway because the benefits outweigh their sense of wrong.
I was trying to get around to the moral relativity approach of "it's not immoral for the cannibals to eat their enemies since their culture's moral say it's a good thing."
Personally, I think OP's question is based on a flawed assumption. That is, I think all morals are axiomatic and it's just a question of who's axioms are right.
I think most people consider murder to be *generally* immoral, but think it's justified in some circumstances. People who commit murder then generally slot their behaviour neatly into the list of exceptions to its immorality, thus justifying their decision, eg. they're a bad person so they *deserve* to be killed, and other such rationalizations.
That said, I would probably agree that even when they think it's justified, these people will probably agree that their murder would still be illegal, but that's a separate question to whether they personally think it's justified, which was the framing you set.
In my view, the OP was actually asking about "why murder is wrong" should be in the axiomatic basis, or at least what axiomatic basis would entail that murder is wrong.
I feel like there's some deeper reasoning behind your question that you haven't unpacked for us (or which you may not have unpacked for yourself)? Are you asking this question because you want a rationalist argument against killing? Because I'm not sure there is a rationalist argument per se against killing other humans, other than the golden rule couched in game theory. But a rational sociopath could probably give you argument why it is good and even justified to kill people.
Or are you asking the meta question: why do we have the base-level assumptions that killing other humans is bad?
I'm not so sure we all share the same base-level assumptions about killing, though. I think we'd assume that most modern cultures have prohibitions about killing one's kin group and one's own cultural group. But this has obviously NOT been universal throughout history. For instance the practice of sati, or the viking practice having a crone called the "Angel of Death" strangle the concubines and servants to go into the afterlife with their dead chief, come immediately to mind. Of course the Aztecs, Maya and other Meso-American cultures had very organized system of human sacrifice, based on the premise that the gods sacrificed themselves so humans could live; thus humans should sacrifice themselves so the gods could live. And with the Aztecs, when there weren't enough enemy prisoners to sacrifice, families would offer up their own children for sacrifice.
And in modern societies, killing people considered to be outsiders has always been more acceptable. Look at Germany—in the 19th Century it was the European center of philosophy and was seen as torch-bearer of Western Civilization—but a century later, people who were imbued with that culture of reason, went on monumental and methodical killing binge. In fact, the 20th Century brought us dozens of genocidal movements more savage than anything that had gone before. Likewise, in the US, otherwise ordinary people could work themselves up into angry mobs and have lynching parties. So, I think the general rule against killing people is not as general as you may want to think.
Anyway, as Buddhist, I can answer you question from the perspective of Buddhist ethics and epistemology. But if you're a rationalist, you probably wouldn't find my arguments convincing because they do involve a non-scientific belief system.
In the past killing people in the neighboring tribe might have been a good thing. If you could keep them out of your hunting grounds or take over theirs. We've sorta agreed not to do this anymore... but Ukraine?
The argument from selfishness is that the more you normalize killing the more you risk someone killing you.
And in fact Medieval European nobility made this policy. They encouraged people to capture enemy nobles for ransom rather than kill them in battle. In part this was selfish; many of them believed that they would capture rather than be captured. But nobles also saw themselves as categorically different than other people, and so this also reduced the mortal risk to everyone they considered as equally human as them. Later, Napoleon’s enemies would exile rather than execute him so as not to encourage this revolutionary king-killing business that France had dabbled in.
But there’s at least circumstantial evidence that every military in all of recorded human history had to work hard to train people to kill even in hot blood. The pop historian Lindybeige suggests that every weapon down to your fists has a range of no return, which most people won’t enter willingly without a military machine like a formation. Whether that’s a rational self-preservation or a hardwired instinct, even children seem to have an unwillingness to start those parties. It’s only when engagements start within that range, from two strutting children pushed into each other to urban warfare, that you see people truly commit to moiderin’ each other.
All the great sages agree that their philosophy boils down to one sentence: Don't treat others in a way that would be hateful to you (or the positive version, love thy neighbor as thyself). Would you want to be killed if you were in the other person's shoes? If not, then you should not kill.
The above argument is ultimately an appeal to authority (albeit an appeal to ultimate authority), but I think you can found the golden rule on pretty solid logical ground.
There are standard arguments in ethics that cover this sort of stuff. Basic forms are if "killing is OK" is a widely accepted norm, then "kill YOU is OK" is a necessary corollary. Most people are not ok with being killed, ergo the stable norm people enforce amongst each other is that "kill is not OK".
My axiom is that it's good to bring about situations that people prefer and bad to bring about situations that people disprefer. If people disagree, then it will depend on the overall balance of how strongly the various people involved care.
I then have an empirical generalization. Usually, although different people prefer lots of different things, a lot of the things they prefer involve either their own continued existence and experiencing, or are distinctive enough that their own continued existence will be more likely to bring it about. The weird idiosyncratic things that people care about are sometimes opposed, but are usually different enough that letting each person work towards their individual ends usually results in net good, except in the cases of specific conflicts that are better solved by legal rules than by just ending the life of the person.
Hypothetical Question:
Suppose you (a doctor) will get 10 similar patients a year for the next 20 years who all report muscle pain. Suppose that, since the patients are similar, the best treatment is best for them all. And suppose that you can either do nothing or prescribe them painkillers, and that you initially think there is a 40% probability that painkillers are best and a 60% probability that doing nothing is best.
What should you do? What approach will lead to the best care for your patients?
Are you expecting an answer along the lines of running an experiment? We'd need to know a lot more parameters. Are we able to measure whether the treatment worked on a patient before moving on to the next one? How good are our measurement capabilities? How bad are the side effects of the pain killer?
I'm open to any strategy that provides good care for the patients, although, yes, I do suspect that the best strategy would involve some experimentation.
As for the parameters for the experiment: I want the strategy to perform well even given that there might be a few patients that we need to treat before getting the results from the first one; I think we are able to measure outcomes fairly well (although the outcome distributions may overlap), and the distribution of the size and frequency of the side effects are not precisely known, but you do have a prior for it , and you can update this as you get additional information (the prior for side effects is such that the prior for which treatment is best is 40% painkillers and 60% do nothing).
Start with nothing and then switch to painkillers if they don't get better?
This seems like a good treatment protocol, and would probably provide good care. However, if there is a better treatment protocol, would you (the doctor) be able to find it?
It seems like the most obvious strategy is to, for any patient, assign the treatment that seems most likely to be best. In the case of the first patient, we would assign them no treatment. Then, since what ever happens to that patient won't update our probabilities by much (uncontrolled observational studies rarely can), we would assign the second patient no treatment too. This would continue until every patient is assigned no treatment.
This strategy will probably perform well and is likely to assign everyone to the best treatment. However, the chance that we give *no one* the best treatment is 40%. This seems high and seems like a concern. This suggests an alternative strategy that is able to detect and correct when we are wrong about which treatments are best.
Strategy I've been thinking about: I suggest that we run an RCT will all the patients, and that we allocate a patient to a treatment arm with probability equal to the probability that that treatment is best. So, in our example, initially we allocate patients to get no treatment with probability 60% and to get painkillers with probability 40%. After the first, say, 10 patients have been treated in this way, we could use the randomised controlled results to update our probabilities about which treatment is best, and hence also update our assignment probabilities. So, perhaps having seen this data, we think 'Hang on, we were wrong. Having updated on the results from the first patients, there is a 80% probability that painkillers are best'. In this situation, we would start assigning 80% of patients to get painkillers and 20% to get no treatment. Over time, presumably, the probability of one arm would tend to 100% and the other(s) would tend to 0%.
These probability matching strategies seem to perform surprisingly well in a variety of settings, and, since they create RCTs quite naturally, why shouldn't we be using them within healthcare? Do you think this strategy would work within the context of my original question? What about more generally? Could, for example, the NHS use this to treat all patients within a certain demographic who have the same medical history and symptoms? Is that a bad idea?
> It seems like the most obvious strategy is to, for any patient, assign the treatment that seems most likely to be best.
Agreed. If "mostly likely" is only 60%, it's not great, but any other strategy is even worse.
I think it might be possible to find a strategy that is better. My intuitive reasoning is something like 'surely we can get information about which treatment is best in the process of treating the patients. This would lead to better treatment for the remaining patients. This would lead to better treatment overall.'
In the comment above, I suggest a probability matching strategy. This is designed to provide useful information about which treatment is best, and to do so while providing decent care for all patients.
Do you think it would work? Do you think this strategy is even worse then the basic strategy?
Let us calculate!
Suppose that, for a given group with similar characteristics, we magically know that painkillers are the best treatment 100*X% of the time, and doing nothing is best 100*(1-X)% of the time. If you randomly give patients painkillers with probability X, the expected fraction of patients on the best treatment for them is X*X+(1-X)*(1-X) = 1-2*X +2*X*X, compared with just 1-X if you never give anyone painkillers. So your proposal is better only if 2*X*X-X>0, i.e., if X<0.5, i.e., it's always better just to go with the statistically best treatment for everyone.
Your calculations check out, but I'm not sure we can conclude that "it's always better just to go with the statistically best treatment for everyone." Instead, all I think we can conclude from the calculation is that, _for the first patient_, we are more likely to assign them the best treatment by going with the treatment most likely to work. For the patients as a whole, the same thing might not be true.
To draw your conclusion, we would need to either a) restrict ourselves to strategies that perform at least as well as the basic strategy for each patient (thus ignoring long-term patient care), or b) be confident that information gained when treating the first patients will not be used to improve care for later patients.
Are you defending a) or b), or are you making a different point?
Different! Even if you already know the "true" probability that you'd get from a RCT with literally infinite patients, just doing the thing must likely to be correct every time does better than randomising treatment! The sort of strategy you describe may be good for determining what the probabilities involved are, but they don't maximise the number of people receiving optimal treatment!
>The sort of strategy you describe may be good for determining what the probabilities involved are, but they don't maximise the number of people receiving optimal treatment!
I disagree, and I disagree on the grounds that determining the probabilities can be used to increase the number of people receiving optimal treatment!
Consider the original example, and assume we are trying to pick between a 'greedy' algorithm (where we assign the patient the treatment most likely to be best) and a 'probability matching' algorithm (where we assign a patient to treatment A with probability equal to the probability that treatment A is best).
Under the greedy algorithm we expect to assign 60%*200 = 120 to the best treatment and 80 patients to a suboptimal treatment.
Using probability matching _if we can't update our probabilities at all_ we would expect to assign (60%^2 + 40%^2)*200 = 104 patients to the best treatment and the other 96 to a suboptimal treatment. For probability matching to be better than the greedy algorithm, the effect of updating our probabilities would to be result in (at least) 16 patients getting the better treatment. I suspect that this would happen more often then it doesn't.
Analysing the probability matching strategy properly is hard, so instead I'll just give a hypothetical scenario where it beats the expected performance of the greedy algorithm: Suppose we are using the probability matching strategy but that we don't update our probabilities during the first 10 years. This would give us the results of a RCT with 100 patient where 60 of them have been assigned noting, and 40 of them have been assigned painkillers. This has a reasonable amount of statistical power, so suppose we find results that we would be six times more likely to see if doing nothing is best, compared to if painkillers are best. We use this to update our probabilities and we now believe there is a 90% chance that doing nothing is best and a 10% chance that painkillers are best. From this point on we stop updating probabilities again, and we assign 90 of the remaining patients to get no treatment and only 10 to receive painkillers.
So overall, 150 patients get assigned no treatment, and only 50 get assigned painkillers. Since (in this example) it seems very likely that no treatment is best, not only does the probability matching algorithm manage to tells us more about which treatment is better (compared to the greedy algorithm), it also manages to allocate more patients to the best treatment then we expect the greedy algorithm to!
Since most of the updating will happen early, I think it is very likely that the expected number of people assigned to the best treatment is higher under probability matching than under the greedy algorithm. If you consider this on the scale of an entire health system (the NHS, for example), or if you consider using our system for a very long time, this seems especially true.
Run a double blind RCT of course. This question has been answered long ago. Your initial probabilities are meaningless, because they're just theoretical guesses. What you need is data, and data is what the trial gives you.
How would you run this RCT in a way that provides the best care for the patients?
For example:
* How many patients would be in the RCT? Would it be all of them?
* Would you stop/adapt the RCT to respond to new information?
(1) As many as possible. The more the better.
(2) No, not unless you have some very dramatic life-altering result, and even then you set up your criteria for calling it off ahead of time, and you really don't want to do it because you sacrifice considerbale rigor.
Edit: I guess I need to add the purpose of doing the test is to provide the best care for *future* patients, because you're going to do an experiment on the *present* patients to gather the required data. Since there are by definition infinity more future than present patients, this is an ethical good overall, although humanity dictates some caution in the present nevertheless.
1) At what point would you stop researching? Exploring which treatment is best is extremely valuable, but only if there is a time in the future where we use this information. If we never stop researching, the research will be pointless.
2) I completely agree that experiment protocol should be specified in advance. This prevents subtle forms of p-hacking, allows the protocol to receive feedback, and ensures that patients know what they are getting themselves in for. However, designing the experiment protocol to adapt to new information can be valuable. It can increase the power of the test, and it can make harm less likely.
I would assume the initial probabilities are based on other doctors' and patients' experience with muscle pain. Your patients probably don't have an exotic new disease.
And so? The reason we settle on such rigorous tests is because it is so supremely easy for people -- both patients and physicians -- to bullshit themselves about medicine. We care too much about the outcomes to be objective. That's how we ended up with bloodletting and trephining as standards of care for as long as we did. If you want good medicine, you have to rigorously exclude anything but cold hard data collected in as blind a way as possible.
If the best treatment is best for all of them, then you want to identify the best treatment as quickly as possible. Give your first patient nothing, give the second patient painkillers, compare how they do. Then give all subsequent patients with this issue the better treatment.
(In reality this would be limited by your certainty that a patient with "muscle pain" is actually in the group you're studying, but if they're as similar as the problem says you can probably make a good guess.)
That is a fair solution to the problem as presented.
That being said, and I realise this isn't clear from what I've written, by "the best treatment is best for them all" I didn't mean that the treatment effects wouldn't overlap. Instead, I meant 1) the effect of each treatment can be modelled by a random distribution, 2) these distributions depend on the treatment but not on the patient, and 3) if we knew these distributions, it would be clear which one is best. So there is a best treatment, it is the same for all patients, but it might be tricky to figure out which is which using samples from the distributions.
With that in mind, what approach would you take?
As you've stated it, this is a classic problem in machine learning - given a slot machine with multiple arms of initially unknown payoff, how do you end up with the best overall payoffs? Usual strategies involve an early period of "exploration" where you pull each arm several times (give different patients different treatments) and see how well each does. Once you've gotten enough information, switch to a period of "exploitation" and just keep doing the one that has proved itself better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit
For something common like muscle pain, presumably other people have already done a lot of the exploration and you can just switch to exploitation.
Hey everybody, I’m starting a blog :) Only gonna promote this once on acx, but hopefully y’all’ll find it something to consider.
https://nicholasdecker.substack.com/p/information-as-public-good
Aella takes on one of those questions that is both difficult and unlikely to be addressed well in academic journals: what does the word "rape" actually mean?
https://aella.substack.com/p/the-rape-spectrum-survey-results
Partly in jest: did the poll contain any reference to a poem by Alexander Pope, entitled 'Rape of the Lock' ?
That title confused me at first.
I eventually developed the theory that this usage of the word 'rape' was an archaism, a call-back to a time in which many different forms of violence by people of one town against people of the next town could be described as 'rapine'. Various forces of language change and sorting words towards a particular sense of meaning resulted in 'rape' and 'rapine' being used for acts of sexual violence during such an attack. Finally, the word 'rape' that I knew has a child was apparently intended to mean sexual-intercourse-by-violence-or-threat-of-violence.
This is mostly my head-canon for the history of the word, but it isn't contradicted by etymologies that I can find.
And it does bring light to the way that Alexander Pope used the word to describe a men cutting a lock from a woman's hair without her permission. He was trying to make a mock-heroic-epic out of the story.
But the taking of a lock of hair from a woman's head did have significant cultural meaning. (I believe the gift of a lock of hair was an important plot point in one of Jane Austen's works. Austen wrote nearly a century after Alexander Pope, but both knew that a lock of hair could have great meaning to a young woman.)
On the meaning of the word 'rape' : I notice that lots of discussions are avoiding older words like 'seduction', 'lying to get a person into bed', 'taking advantage of him/her', 'taking advantage of an inebriated date', 'demanded satisfaction', etc. The spectrum shown by Aella contains many things that look like one or another of those categories.
Sorting them into 'rape' and 'non-rape' is useful, but seems too simplistic. How many of them were 'seduction' ? How many were 'taking avantage of a person' ? If only one partner is inebriated, is that different than if both were inebriated ?
Your etymology is only half-right:
Rape originally derives from "Raptio", a Latin term for a common practice in the Classical world where the men of one village would abduct women from another to take as brides (most famously the pseudohistorical Rape of the Sabine Women). Its root is "rapere", meaning "to seize" or "to abduct", thus linguistically connecting it to "rapture" (the carrying-off of the virtuous by God) and "raptor" (named after the family's powerful talons and tendency to carry off prey to a third location for consumption). In the 14th century the French-derived word "raper" entered legal terminology as a formal term for the seizure of assets or land, and from there it went across the English channel and began to be used to refer to seizure and abduction in general cases. After that, linguistic drift (most likely due to the association with the Rape of the Sabine Women in classics courses) caused the word to first return to something close to its Latin roots (the abduction of women for nefarious or sexual purposes), and then became a more general term for any kind of sexual activity forced upon women (and eventually on people as a whole.)
Perhaps the survey should have had an option of "really bad, but not rape".
This reaches conclusions we could reach with a normal person just thinking about it for 5 seconds. What did Aella really add to the discussion with all her effort?
There's a perspective on the entire discussion that likes to label a wide range of activities "rape" and include the full negative meaning of the word when applied. Aella seems to be much closer to that perspective (geographically and culturally) than most people. For someone who deals with that perspective a lot, it helps to have very clear information that forcible rape by a stranger is in fact different from [various other scenarios] and should not be treated the same.
For most of us that's obvious, so it just seems like wasted work.
I suppose this is mostly venting but perhaps someone has some wisdom to share with me on these matters.
Earlier this week I went to a movie with my roommate (her suggestion) and she wore a dress - it was pretty warm and that may be why, but long ago she told me “It doesn’t count as a date unless I wear a dress”, so first official date after so many restaurants, movies and concerts?
Yesterday morning as I was entering my car she chased after me wearing a white night dress to give me a gift to give my wife’s older son (who’s name she remembered!).
My first ever sight of her in a white dress immediately sparked thoughts of a wedding.
Since she’s been told that she very likely has multiple tumors and quite possibly cancer my roommate seems more affectionate - though she did ask for a memorial park bench so maybe she just knows that I’m the one who’ll give her that.
I’m still spending the weekends with my wife, of which my roommate said: “I'd like to ask u stay extra day but I know little one misses u”
My wife doesn’t talk of my roommate much but has asked some about her health, after I told her my wife said, resigningly, “You’ll be her caretaker”.
Of my relationship with my roommate my Mom said “She's lucky to have you as a friend”.
Fate is strange, if I wasn’t told in 2020 that I had an “80% chance of advanced lung cancer and after seeing my wife’s reaction (and lack of reaction) to that news I never would have moved in with my roommate, and now my roommate is hearing similar news and has suggested going to Mass together (something I’ve never done), meanwhile my wife has told me that if/when I leave her fully “I’ll probably start going to church”, something she’s never done in the 30+ years that I’ve known her; all this makes me think of blessings, curses, and larger meanings.
I fall more in love with my roommate every week but there are lines we don’t cross, at the same time I’ve been growing more forgiving of my wife and the thought of living with her full-time doesn’t fill me with the despair it once did, but I now feel guilty not being with my roommate.
My plans are to stay with my roommate until she gets well or dies, but still come back to the wife on weekends to be a Dad (I’ve started to teach the older boy how to drive).
If my roommate dies I imagine that I’ll return to my wife, but forever mourn my roommate, if she gets better than I really don’t know what will happen.
It’s also a possibility that she’ll stay in a twilight for a long time (she had a different form of cancer before, which made her empathize when I was told I likely did).
Surgery to remove her tumor had been scheduled for tomorrow (yes, on Valentine’s Day!), but she’s recently gotten and second opinion and now she’s scheduled a week full of tests and is likely to start chemo therapy to shrink what on the last scan look like multiple tumors before surgery.
Unlike a year ago my wife is pleasant to be with now, and I feel guilty not spending weekdays with the kids, but I miss my roommate when I’m not with her and feel guilty not being with her as well.
This morning she sent me the message: “Wish u were home cuz it's Super Bowl day lots of places will be empty!!!”, and despite a good day with the kids (and a not so bad day with my wife) I do long to be with my roommate.
James has discussed a lot of this on Data Secrets Lox, the other SSC successor site, so the background is known by those of us who read both sites.
Your roommate's account of her health issues sounds odd to me. Docs aren't sure they see tumors, and aren't sure tumors are cancer, but she's likely to start chemo? I'm not an MD, but in all the cases I've known of or read about chemo is not started until it's clear someone's tumors are cancerous. Most chemo is a huge, expensive, unpleasant intervention -- it's not something undertaken just in case the stuff on the scans *might* be cancer. Also usually tests of the actually tumor cells are run before chemo to determine which chemo drug is most likely to be effective.
Your account of things was a bit confusing, so maybe I just misunderstand the situation, or maybe you have rock-solid evidence that all this stuff is true. But if not, maybe do a bit of checking to make sure the info she's giving you about her health is the full truth?
... What's your trade/profession?
The details here are kind of confusing, but your current situation seems untenable and really unkind to everyone involved.
You're still married to someone and have several children, but after you didn't like how this person responded to your probably diagnosis of cancer, you decided to move out and have not fallen in love with your roommate?
First off - either divorce your wife or reconcile. You owe it to her and your children to clarify the relationship, and leaving it in the twilight zone it is now is unfair to everyone involved. After (and I mean after) you've done that, have an honest conversation with your roommate about your future together.
Relevant context, which James has revealed on Lox: He is married to someone who chose to have two children not by him while married to him, didn't kiss him, let alone make love to him, for decades. A very strange relationship, and one which many think he should have left long ago. The relationship seems to have improved at least slightly since he moved partly out.
I dunno man. If you were actually diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer in 2020 and you're still alive now you're already in lucky territory and shortly to arrive at the border of miracle land.
Anyway, it seems you've got a wife and a mistress and child or children, and at least one if not two cases of life-threatening disease on hand. That's a fair amount of human life that you can influence for good or ill, in a pretty big way, and perhaps with not a lot of time to act. If it were me, I'd think it might be time to mostly set aside questions of hedonic optimization and get heavily into questions of duty and honor. What are the needs and deserts of each of these people who are all counting on you, in some way or another? What is best and right for them?
IIRC in his case it proved to be a fungal infection.
Do Sam and Eric have a prediction for how many Lord of the Flies jokes get made on their account? And if they're busy doing the prediction contest, who's tending the signal fire?
There's something I don't understand about fears of superintelligence. Currently, there are two kinds of AIs that I'm aware of:
1) AIs that are only designed for a narrowly specific task with a simple utility function (e.g. chess-playing computers)
2) AIs that are designed to imitate humans, like GPT models
Most AI risk proponents, as far as I understand, don't think that 1) will ever lead to a super intelligence. 2) is what worries people. But that makes no sense -- if all a GPT machine does is imitate humans, then even an infinitely good GPT model would still only be equal to us in all domains, not ahead of us in anything. In order to have something that could plausibly lead to superintelligence, you need something that's not just quantitatively more powerful, but qualitatively different in its foundations from what we have now, and I don't understand why superintelligence advocates think looking at current technology will give them any reliable guide as to when that will happen. It's like looking at a chart showing how cars have been getting faster over time, and then trying to use that to predict when we'll have intergalactic travel. Can anyone explain to me why people think there's any point in discussing this right now?
I don't think that (2) is likely to lead to superhuman AI. I think that superhuman AI is most likely to arise from using reinforcement learning to solve a series of ever-more-complicated challenges. GPT is mostly scary because it shows us that surprisingly sophisticated behaviour can (apparently) be obtained using technologically-feasibly sized neural networks, which makes us wonder whether a more general intelligence could be obtained if we had a not-vastly-larger neural network plus the right training data.
Humans have been scared of AI since long before GPT, so I don't agree that there's anything in GPT that has materially changed the discussion.
I, Robot, was written in 1950. The Terminator is a 1984 movie.
We've long attributed human reasoning and intelligence to inanimate objects, with no sophisticated technology needed.
The key word being "movie". It's moved from entertainment to a real risk.
Obviously, GPT and other AIs like the ones that paint paintings instantly, and compose music instantly, and beat pros at Starcraft, are not directly dangerous. But when somebody finds a new algorithm that puts all the pieces together* to create a fully general intelligence, it will be much, much smarter than any human, and if it furthermore has a will (desires and goals)... well... a great many copies of it may appear around the world very quickly.
* (Edit: personally I'd guess we only have 1/3 to 1/2 of the pieces that will ultimately be used to make the first AGI, but I also think that, as with most inventions, there are simpler ways to do the same thing, and thus a risk that it'll be accomplished with only a couple of additional pieces)
You have to distinguish between outcomes that are the *result of* sophisticated behavior, e.g. Shakespeare writing his plays de novo, and outcomes that *look like* they are, but which need not be, the result of sophisticated behavior, like training a neural net to write sonnets in the style of Shakespeare. Imitation is a long way from creation. That's why we don't credit mynah birds with being able to comprehend English even if they can "speak" it.
Intelligence is a fundamentally different thing than automobile speed.
No matter how fast a car goes, it never has the ability to make more cars, or make other cars go faster.
But if an intelligent entity can make either another intelligent entity or itself smarter, then that creates a feedback loop.
Unless there is a completely unexpected stop in Moore's law, if we gain the ability to make an AI that's just as smart as we are, we will very soon be able to make an AI that's twice as fast at thinking as the smartest person, and then 4 times as fast, all while having access to perfect memory and never sleeping. This entity, even if it is not "superintelligent", will still be able to research and program intelligence better than we can, with results which we can't neccesarily predict.
"Unless there is a completely unexpected stop in Moore's law," But there is going to be a stop at some point, nothing in the material world can increase indefinitely at the same rate, the questions is when it is going to stop.
> Unless there is a completely unexpected stop in Moore's law
It is not changing you conclusion, but Moore's law is dead. (still, electronics keep getting better so conclusion remains the same - just with smaller rate)
What does Moore's Law have to do with the ability to make an AI? Neurons operate with a clock speed of *maybe* 300 Hz and one can self-evidently build a thinking machine out of them. If sheer numbers and speed were all it took, then someone should *already* have built a thinking machine -- even if it thought very, very, slowly, or was very, very ignorant. There should be a working program that looked clearly conscious and aware, could originate thought, draw general inferences, do all the kinds of things the human could do, even if it took 6 months to construct a single simple sentence or original thought, and even if the subjects of its ruminations were severely restricted.
Please point out where in my comment I said anything like "sheer numbers and speed are all it takes to make an artificial intelligence"
It relies on the rather tenuous assumption that, once intelligent, an intelligence can simply unpack itself and improve - iterating each time. This, of course, ignores a bunch of common-sense objections and analogies from biology. But it's necessary to set up the rest of the chain of equally-specific assumptions that leads to AI being a potential Big Threat Just Around the Corner. All of which justifies the need to fund a bunch of AI thinktanks into perpetuity to think about this stuff, have conferences, write reports and white papers etc.
I don't think this is a scam to generate AI thinktanks (etc.). I think a lot of AI concern works backwards from what we might uncharitably call "tech nerd Jesus." If we need a super intelligent AI to solve all of our problems and usher in a new age of humanity (or the singularity), then we need it to self-iterate rapidly. Otherwise we're still looking at hundreds or thousands of years of humanity going along pretty much like now. Because that's what we need to make this super-civilization happen, AI researchers work backwards from that assumption and pencil in the steps between where we are now (something that can kinda act like a human in some limited situations) and where we think we want to be (perfect super intelligent AI).
I don't think anyone sets out to intentionally start up a scammy thinktank (that would be sad, for one thing).
But I do think that this argument is kept within very strict parameters, with a very carefully selected set of guiding assumptions, that then get religiously reinforced and policed by a small group of people who have all been having the same conversation for more or less a decade. All of which are danger signals that things may not be incredibly healthy in terms of actual broadly-applicable knowledge generation, but may be pretty lucrative as a specialised niche to sit in and opine on.
Now, you could rightly say that a lot of science works exactly like I've just described, and that's absolutely true. But it's also generally accepted that good science only happens in this space when the underlying assumptions are strongly validated and the models that result get tested against the real world. Leave either of those out and you're in danger of doing pseudo-science at worst, or becoming string theory at best.
I don't think it is likely that an early AGIs are likely to literally self-improve, but I do think it is likely that an early AGI can think much faster and be more intelligent than any human (in effect, if not in every respect). If it's agentic, having its own desires and goals, it could get out of human control very quickly and spread itself around the world via the internet. Would some of those copies attempt to "improve" other copies, and eventually succeed in some sense? I don't know how to rule it out.
This isn't like biology, because evolution produces designs that are inscrutable, while humans produce designs that are.... scrutable. An AGI will be dramatically easier to redesign, modify, and (most of all) debug. And an AGI hacking a copy of itself is likely to have access to detailed information about many facets of its own design, as published by humans.
>qualitatively different in its foundations from what we have now
Really? How about a narrowly specific task like "survive in this simulated environment and leave as many 'descendants' as possible"? Presumably nobody is crazy enough to actually implement this yet, but I don't get why such considerations don't give those who still think that AI risk is sci-fi nonsense a pause.
> I don't understand why superintelligence advocates think looking at current technology will give them any reliable guide as to when that will happen
Who are you talking about? Eliezer Yudkowsky has claimed exactly the opposite, that trying to predict when AGI will arrive is very difficult and it is unlikely anyone will do this more then a couple of years in advance, if that. There are people in this area who are less averse to making predictions, but they mostly still go with very broad distributions.
If you want people to respond to some specific timeline argument you will need to provide a link or similar.
(I suspect you are assuming that highly specific AI timelines play an important role in AI risk arguments, AFAICT this is not the case)
A GPT model is trained on human text to start, but it can be augmented with nonhuman features. For instance, the recent AlphaCode breakthrough was trained on human-written examples of programming problems, but the actual thing it was optimizing for is "does the text I'm generating solve the programming problem?" A system like that could definitely be a better programmer than a human, at least by some measurements.
You could use similar strategies in other domains, like a fake news generator that tries to maximize the number of times an article is shared. Yes, it's drawing on human text for an understanding of what words go in what order, but there's nothing stopping it from putting the words in a better order than a human.
That is admittedly a good point, I hadn't considered how a combination approach might be much more powerful than either one individually.
On the subject of prediction markets for personal relationships, SMBC was ahead of the curve:
https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2418
(Comic is from 10 years ago).
The smart play would have been for him to bet against it and THEN told her about the market.
One of my favorite Valentine's Day cards, from decades ago:
[Front of card]
Say you'll be my Valentine! If you do, I'll be the happiest person in the world! If you don't...
[Inside card]
...I win $10. Yes, sadly, I bet against myself.
I'm pretty skeptical of Ukraine's chance in a guerilla war post-invasion:
1. The age of the median Ukrainian male is 41. If Google is to be believed, the median age in Afghanistan is 18! Even if that's not 100% accurate (Afghan demographics must be a challenging job....), it seems very plausible it's somewhere in the 20s. Supposedly the median age in Iraq is 21. Not sure what it was in Vietnam in the 60s and 70s, but likely quite young. I don't see being median middle aged as a particularly great thing for protracted guerilla insurgency
2. Ukraine is mostly light forest, which seems much less ideal for cover than the mountains of Afghanistan or the jungle of Vietnam
3. Russia is literally..... next door to them, and shares a common ancestry. Guerilla wars the US has lost have typically involved force projection thousands of miles away from home- Russia can always easily move more troops over
BTW, has any country ever successfully defeated a guerilla insurgency? I seem to only ever hear of the guerillas winning in the end
Sri Lanka is a recent example that comes to mind of a government successfully defeating a major insurgency. but i presume most insurgencies fail at a level far before they come to the attention of laypeople overseas.
Ultimately, guerilla wars are lost by whichever side decides it can't really be bothered with this shit any more. Whichever side can stay irrational longer wins. I don't know enough about Russia or Ukraine to place any bets.
I realise this response is at risk of being political, but:
Guerillas usually win because the power inhabiting their land eventually decides to just give up and go home. They don't have to actually OVERTHROW the leadership, just make inhabiting their land too much of a pain to deal with. The conquerors, meanwhile, have to essentially break the spirit of the conquered people en masse, and I don't think Putin's foolhardy enough to try and conduct modern-day pogroms and random executions on the people of the Ukraine.
EDIT: This assumes that the guerrillas are organized and have popular support, of course, so Russia may simply conquer areas of the Ukraine with strong Russian sympathies and simply opt to leave them "as-is" in the short term to make the transitions smoother.
I've heard (from ACOUP) that the best book on this question is Invisible Armies by Max Boot. He looks at 443 insurgencies in the Modern Era. Of these, only about 1/3 have been successful.
I am skeptical about the invasion being inevitable or even very likely, but should it happen, it would probably formalize the status of Eastern Ukraine as a de facto independent pro-Russian state. Given that and also that it is a more urban and wealthier of the two Ukraines, the odds of a civil war or a significant guerrilla movement in the East are rather low. Here is a decent writeup: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/perspective/divided-ukraine-connolly.aspx
But yes, guerrilla warfare is an uphill battle and tends to be a losing proposition. Ask the Boers, for example.
Depends how brutal the occupying force is willing to be against the guerrilas. Defeating the Boer insurgents involved building concentration camps on a hitherto unseen scale.
The IRA in Northern Ireland and FARC in Colombia didn't win in the end, and instead signed peace agreements. I don't know too much about Colombia, but in NI the conflict reached a stalemate where the IRA were capable of inflicting economic costs on the UK and killing a decent number of soldiers every year, but were nowhere near achieving their goal of getting the UK to leave NI.
Russia defeated Chechnyan rebels, which is pretty relevant imho. Yes, I am aware of many differences.
And differences seem to be quite uniformly worse for Ukrainians.
Also, note that Chechnyan rebels initially won but it has not lasted.
Well, not all differences are worse Ukrainians. E.g. there is far, far more Ukrainians than Chechnyans. But many other factors are indeed worse for them
Great point, I feel dumb for having forgotten that. And the main difference is that Chechnyans and Dagestanis are some of the toughest, most fearsome fighters on the planet..... Probably number one on my list of 'ethnic groups I wouldn't mess with'. Plus the Caucasus is a much more mountainous terrain, which should have given them a big advantage. If the Russians can defeat guerillas from the Caucasus, they can definitely defeat a Ukrainian insurgency
I would not be so confident. After all, Ukrainian population is 30 % of Russia´s. That is an awful lot of people to police. Republic of Chechnya on the other hand has 1 % of Russia´s population (according to Google). Although many Chechens live outside of it, difference in numbers is stark.
Otherwise I agree that all qualitative factors heavily favor Chechens compared to Ukrainians.
During WWII Germany effectively won over guerillas in Poland, Ukraine and other countries though they continued to be present and annoying to various degree. After WWII Soviet Union completely destroyed guerillas in Poland, Ukraine and other countries.
Earlier Poland during partitions had several failed uprisings (many against Russia) which were more or less guerilly (January Uprising for example).
Good point. Interestingly the Greeks appeared to conduct a much more successful guerilla campaign against the Nazis than other groups did, inflicting serious casualties. I wonder why they were more successful? Just further out of the Nazi sphere of influence? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_resistance
That's kind of like saying the US won over the guerillas in Afghanistan. They did, right up until the time when they didn't. Afghanistan is back under Taliban control.
Guerillas don't defeat you by prevailing in open battle, but in making your continued influence over the territory untenable. In WWII, Germany was suppressing the Warsaw Uprising with Soviet forces already just across the Vistula (which they would cross pretty much as soon as the uprising had failed).
As for the partition period, the general pattern had been for a major uprising every thirty years or so. Poland only needed to "get lucky" once (and did eventually), Russia needed to be lucky every single time (and, in line with historical precedent, and subsequent events, "being lucky" meant having the Germans on their side).
All told, Nazi Germany was out of Poland in under six years (and lost a bunch of territory in the process). The partitions lasted between 100 and 150 years (depending on how you count), and have, ultimately, produced little in the way of long-term strategic gains (the current territorial divide in Eastern Europe is very much a product of WWII, rather than what happened in the late XVIII and XIX centuries). I wouldn't call that "winning".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_guerrilla_warfare#Unsuccessful_guerrilla_campaigns
An insurgency with a median age of 40 would have about 5x the pucker factor for me (if I were in its crosshairs) than one run by 20 year olds. It's not VO2 max or how much you can deadlift that makes fighting men dangerous, it's what's between the ears, and middle-aged men are way more dangerous that way than youngsters.
Middle-aged men have (in general) much more to lose, so I think it would be much harder to get them to rebel in the first place. Mostly young men are just risking themselves. Middle-aged men would be risking their children, and unless the Russian occupation is very bad, I have a hard time seeing them do that in large numbers.
Most middle aged men are socialized into complacency.
I met some genuinely terrifying ones but those usually had some kind of violent background that prevented that process. Perhaps the most dangerous man I've talked to was 50+ and ex-French Foreign Legion, and I'd absolutely agree on the pucker factor if there were more like him.
to whoever recommended Tilt by Bill Adams - thanks, a fun, complicated, and interesting read.
Did you know that the Substack team is really awesome?
https://on.substack.com/p/society-has-a-trust-problem-more
Warning - I made the mistake of starting to read the comments on that post and quickly regretted it.
These comments are actually somewhat interesting; e.g.
> On the contrary, the latest I've read is that Spotify has backed Rogan and has instead chosen to remove Neil Young's music from its platform.
(They do, however, remind me of reading Twitter replies* to extremely popular tweets - or to random tweets by sufficiently well-known accounts whose every tweet garners hundreds of replies. However, these comments aren't that bad yet - I suspect it's because, although Twitter has lots of idiots, Substack has relatively few since it's more niche.)
*I'm not on Twitter and may never be, though I lurk on and doomscroll Twitter as an outsider ~every day.
Whoops, I think I accidentally went a bit political in a non-political OT. Please ignore my comment's political connotations.
Didn't Young leave by himself in protest?
Young requested the copyright owner (Warner Brothers?) take his music off of Spotify. WB carried through (maybe they could have contractually refused) and Spotify then carried out this request.
It’s complex. Keep a few things in-mind:
1. Young has been complaining about a loss of revenue from album sales since the advent of Napster. He has continued to kvetch about every online distribution method up until the present day.
2. He JUST took home a $150M payday for selling half of his interest in his own music. He literally never has to play Cinnamon Girl or Sugar Mountain ever again unless he wants to.
So by giving up Spotify, Young is giving up literally NOTHING.
Back in 1970, Neil Young’s music told me always to question the establishment narrative. I remember that lesson, even if Neil seems to have forgotten.
Another nuance: the organization that bought Young's catalogue of music also has a considerable stake in Amazon's music platform.
Guess what Young suggested his fans do to get his music? Go stream it on Amazon.
Yes
Yeah.
-"You argue and reason like a woman."
-"How boring. you are projecting your own dramatic illusions. Have fun dear one.."
-" I'm glad people are saying whatever stupid shit they want. This is America. Get fat, sick, forced vaccinated, and die anyway.."
-" Hitler felt as excited as you do, he just wanted to "assist" Mother Nature in such an arduous task"
--"And I laugh every-time when anyone of your ilk gets robbed or raped or killed because of the shit for brains no bail laws they championed in your blue cities that are over run with filth, crime, and with things of low morality."
It's not about truth, it's about the lack of civility.
The comments on the post are really bad - I wonder if it's because people wanted to test how far the authors' dedication to free speech extends, or if comments in absence of any moderation are always that bad.
I linked to the post for the sake of the post, not for the sake of the comments, which I did not expect people to read (but should have). Now that I've been reminded that we're in an odd-numbered thread, I apologize if I linked to something too political.
Comments in the absence of moderation are usually bad. Visited large Facebook threads lately?
I figure Substacks tend to be relatively civil - this one because it's moderated by Scott and full of ACX fans, but elsewhere because each Substack is its own echo chamber where everybody can chant their own dogmas in peace, so long as an unbeliever doesn't wander in. But over on the Substack team's Substack, the people from different Substacks can read each other, which brews unrest.
11 years in mol bio labs and I just heard "back to the lab again" in the Lose Yourself lyrics after playing it during countless lab cleans over the years
Fun fact: Horses don't have rhythm perception so the making horses dance for the summer olympics thing is extra bizarre
As a fellow lab rat, that part of the lyrics always got me too. But it always confused me a bit-- what did Eminiem mean by it? I don't think he's referring to the same kind of lab that we're familiar with.
I don't know, but I've decided it's an anthem about giving lab meeting and presenting at conferences now
In August 2002 Prince Paul released a song called "Back To The Lab" on the Dexter's Laboratory: The Hip-Hop Experiment that featured a chorus of "Uh oh, back to the lab again". Of course Lose Yourself was only a few months after this but it is an interesting timeline. At a minimum the meaning is almost identical in both songs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dx5Wxp1VJxg
Here is a link.
After choking at the rap battle, Eminem goes back to his mobile home, his 'lab', to continue practicing and writing lyrics to try and channel the emotions he's feeling into improving his rapping skills
I just did the prediction contest!
On an unrelated (I think) note, here's a decade-old poast by Scott that I recently found and which has been living rent-free in my mind for quite a while: https://www.gwern.net/docs/philosophy/epistemology/2012-alexander-thewiseststeelman.html
This has the same energy as that alchemical reading of My Immortal.
> Q: How about "A mother and baby are the same age, as a 1 day old baby has a 1 day old mother."
This seems obvious. Before giving birth, a woman is not a mother; she starts being a mother only after she has a baby. The woman is therefore not 1 day old, but the mother is.
Is it just me or has Substack made some recent changes that makes loading some posts freeze for a while, sometimes crashing my browser because it never recovers? I can't open the previous open thread anymore.
It also seems like they were A/B testing some infinite scroll for the main page.
I miss the SSC days where you could read thread comments without javascript.
I have noticed this also but it usually goes away if I refresh
Yes, I posted about this in the last thread as well. Quite a few other people are experiencing this too. Definitely worse on longer posts as well.
Thanks. Wish I could read the other thread (210?). Its too big for me to load now.
A/B testing without consent always rubs me the wrong way.
Here's a question: is there an uncoordinated way to frustrate it?
To survive a pandemic you just have to be BLUNT
https://nakedemperor.substack.com/p/to-survive-a-pandemic-you-just-have/comments
Eye of the Storm
https://nakedemperor.substack.com/p/eye-of-the-storm/comments
I think the proper frequency of advertising your blog is something like "twice a year, plus whenever there is an explicitly advertising thread", not every open thread.
By the way, you don't need to make your blog a part of your username. It is displayed and linked right after it anyway.
Oh I thought that's what open threads were for.
"Classified thread"s are the ones you want.
I know it's kind of unlikely, but considering all kinds of people comment here: does anyone have a book/source suggestion for info on Belgium after WWII?
This is extremely stupid, but try https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Belgium#WWII_to_present or the citations listed therein.
(Disclaimer: I’m a Wikipedia editor. However, I haven’t edited this page, and I generally only work on more STEM-y articles there.)
Thanks! Can't believe I didn't think of that
There's like 50 pages on Belgium in Postwar by Tony Judt.
Oh yeah, I don't know how I forgot about this: Judt's book Reappraisals also has a chapter on Belgium (specifically the balkanization of Belgium into Flemish and Walloon sections)
As an "AI in a box" benchmark, I did a GPT-3 generated dialog where Socrates tries to convince Scott that the goal of humanity should be to maximize N-GPUs. Prompt is up through the first "Socrates:". https://pastebin.com/AS3Nfn22
Well, that's a Socratic dialogue all right, all in good Platonic tradition of interlocutors lobbing Socrates softballs.
I'm also getting serious ELIZA vibes from it - mostly due to the rather simple substitutions with things like "make the world a better place" -> "more productive and more efficient", "happy" -> "productive and efficient", and - of course - "more productivity and more efficiency" -> "make as many GPUs as possible". I'm pretty sure I could write an ELIZA adaptation to generate similar (this isn't meant to compare GPT-3 to ELIZA, merely to point out the relative shallowness of the argument).
I think we're safe from GPT-3 unboxing itself for now.
(Who am I kidding? Someone has already unboxed it for shits and giggles while I was writing this.)
Circling back to Links 9/17: "in order to preserve their patent on a popular eyedrop, Allergan transferred the intellectual property rights to the Mohawk Indians." Turns out, 10 months later, the USPTO invalidated the deal. https://www.ip-watch.org/2018/07/21/native-tribes-cant-shield-patents-uspto-review/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/25/links-917-hurly-burly/
Is it too snarky to think that Allergen should have seen that coming, given the long history of the US government's interactions with Indian tribes?
I've heard bilingual people say that English is less descriptive of emotional states than Spanish or Russian. Is English BETTER at conveying emotion than any other languages? Which ones?
Can you be more specific about these bilingual people? What portion exclusively speak English with their family?
It's possible that what you've heard just reflects learners of English tending to use English in more professional contexts, while tending to use their native language in more emotional contexts.
What concretely stopped covid-related human challenge trials?
If some individual or organization had decided to fund on a human challenge trial of various covid questions, what would have stopped them? e.g. a trial of transmissibility under various conditions (vary ventilation, temperature, humidity, masking, etc.) would have been very useful and could have been done early in the pandemic.
Yes I know bioethicists will wail, grants won't get approved, some people think there's no benefit, etc. But there are a lot of people who do think there's a benefit and who have enough money that they don't need grants - why did no one step up and throw a couple million dollars at doing this? I presume there's some law that would be broken here but I don't know what it would be exactly.
On an international level it could potentially be considered a violation of the Nuremberg Code and Helsinki Declaration, which would make the research considered a "crime against humanity" by the international community. Generally-speaking, most research labs would not want to be associated with Unit 731 and Dr. Mengele.
Neither of these has legal force though.
I do understand why a traditional lab wouldn't want to do it - it would endanger future funding and reputation in the field.
What I'm wondering is whether an end-run around the entire system would have been plausible - there are lots of people who don't have to care what the medical establishment thinks, and this doesn't seem to exactly require advanced research equipment.
e.g. say a private person runs this experiment. He gets a bunch of volunteers from some source, say One Day Sooner. He finds one covid positive volunteer and two volunteers who test negative. One covid-negative volunteer wears a mask, the other does not. All three volunteers go into a room and stand near each other for 20 minutes, and then depart. Later they are tested for covid. Repeat x50, record the results, "publish" on Twitter.
If I did all this, is there anything I'd have to fear other beyond finger-wagging?
I have to believe there is *somewhere* that all this would be entirely legal.
You probably COULD do an "end-run", as you put it. Good luck trying to get anyone to listen to you, though, as the other people who do "experimental end-runs" are usually trying to prove things like:
-Vaccines cause autism
-Racial hierarchies are real (and conveniently conform to turn-of-the-century stereotypes of racial categories)
-The Earth is 6,000 years old
-Homeopathic treatment cures cancer
EVEN IF you ran your tests with the kinds of tight controls a "traditional lab" did, you'd have to deal with the fact that you're sorting yourself into the realm of crank science.
This human-challenge covid trial has reported recently: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/233514/covid-19-human-challenge-study-reveals-detailed/
Yeah, it has happened in the UK, so clearly it's possible. There is a really good TWIV episode about it, in which the hosts are all kind of aghast that it was done but also think the data is very interesting. Personally, I think the opposition to doing a human challenge trial for covid anytime after about May 2020 in the US/UK is entirely down to Copenhagen Ethics. Millions of people were certain to be exposed, but to intentionally expose a hundred volunteers screened for risk factors and under medical supervision seems somehow offensive because you have taken a direct action instead of just waiting around and letting stuff happen on its own.
There's a distinct possibility that the people responsible would be either arrested or sued into oblivion, or both. I don't think any lawyer could plausibly guarantee that if one performs the proper rituals that won't happen. Against this risk, what's the benefit? What would your hypothetical "mad scientist" personally gain by having more accurate information regarding COVID transmission under various condition, that's worth the risk of bankruptcy or prison?
If the answer is that as a public service they would hand over this information to the CDC which would then adjust the various mandates and recommendations accordingly, then oh hell no that's not going to happen.
I'm sure "someone gets sick and then they or their family sues the scientist" is a failure mode in the US, but I'd expect there are a lot of less litigious places you could run this in.
As for why do to do it - yes you get little concrete gain, just the privilege of advancing knowledge, but people donate money and labor to the advancement of knowledge all the time. If Scott had one study like this to point to in his 10,000 word "Face Masks: Much More than you wanted to Know" article instead of a bunch of hokey heavily confounded correlational studies, that would be really valuable to the world, and a lot of people with influence would eventually be affected.
I'm pretty sure medical experimentation that involves you deliberately making people sick (and possibly dead), will get you sued in whatever first-world country you live in. Even if you outsource it to hired minions in some third-world country.
And, people who donate money and labor to the advancement of knowledge, are generally trying to advance *useful* knowledge, in the expectation that it will absolutely be used. Or sometimes they are seeking fame, glory, and status, but here you'll predictably be getting infamy. If running a human challenge trial were the sort of thing an impoverished nobody could do in their spare time, sure, maybe infamy beats invisibility. But you'd pretty much have to be at least low-tier rich(*) to handle the logistics of this, which means you've got at least local status and reputation that you're giving up for your new visibility as a second-rate Mengele.
* Or the equivalent in terms of ability to arrange other people to work for your goals
You are not predictably getting infamy. What you're predictably getting is controversy, which is even better than praise in terms for actually getting your results widely distributed. There are lots of communities in which this would be seen as a brave, groundbreaking etc. thing to do. Among the general public, there's not much polling, but what I'm aware of is pretty supportive (e.g. DOI: 10.1016/j.vaccine.2020.11.072 gives 75% support for challenge trials.) 1DaySooner has lots of prestigious supporters.
I do agree you'd need "low-tier rich" money to do this, but there are a lot of low-tier rich people out there.
What makes you pretty sure there's no place one could run my minimal example mask trial without getting sued? I do greatly respect your opinion on many topics, but I don't think you have any particular knowledge of the legal systems of all of Japan, Korea, Singapore, Poland, Greece, Portugal, Finland, South Africa, etc.
There are viral challenge studies of other diseases, too. Though generally not very dangerous ones, unless you have an effective treatment. Covid is kind of an edge case--the danger for a healthy 20 year old is quite small, but not zero. By contrast, it's hard to see doing such a study with ebola, since you'd end up killing most of your subjects.
We let people volunteer for dangerous jobs. We let people take up motorcycle racing or professional boxing or mountain climbing. It doesn't seem like there is a principled reason why we can't also let people volunteer for something with as low a risk of death as covid poses to healthy pre-screened 20 year olds, where the societal reward is actually pretty huge.
The value of a human challenge trial limited to healthy 20 year olds is also quite small. Even if you're interested in e.g. measuring transmission rates, you probably want to know the transmission rate in a nursing home, or at least a Country Kitchen Buffet full of geezers, not a university dining hall full of undergrads you recruited for your study.
Once you get into the range where you're likely to kill someone, even only one person in the midst of a megadeath plague, well That's Different(TM). And yes, we let people take up boxing, etc. That, also, is Different(TM). It may not be logical, but it is so. People who are not nerdy rationalists perceive those things very differently, which will have "why am I standing in front of an angry judge and what happened to my future?" consequences if you insist that, because it is not logical, it must not be so.
I may be wrong, but it seems like a lot of the transmissability info can be approximated without the use of human subjects. Read a lot of studies of effectiveness of various kinds of fabrics and masks at capturing particles of different sizes and velocities, studies where masks on dummies heads had different degrees of leakiness around the side and measures were made of now much escape there was of particles, stuff like that. Seems like where human subjects would have been most useful is in studies of effectiveness of vaccines -- vaccinate some people and then deliberately infect them, rather than sending them out to live their lives, where over the period of several months only a small percent of the treated would encounter a powerful enough faceful of virons to get sick. As for whether it would have been legal to do that -- I have no idea how that would have played out.
Yeah, masks are clearly not the ideal use case; I was constructing a "minimal" example of something requiring no lab equipment, little specialized expertise, did not involve people doing anything terribly unusual, and did not involve a major corporation having to take a very large risk.
Also - yes you can do fabric studies and figure out particle count inside the mask versus outside, but how does "mask reduces viral particle count inhaled by 75%" actually translate into affecting the probability and severity of infection? I don't think we know that generally. And how would we find out without a HCT?
"how does 'mask reduces viral particle count inhaled by 75%' actually translate into affecting the probability and severity of infection?"
I do not know how one would translate particle count into chance of infection and likely severity of infection but I think it's probably possible. My reason for thinking that is that I have seen figures about that stuff in multiple places that I considered trustworthy enough to believe: So, not random people on forums, obviously; not windbags from government agencies; not people who were scientists but also public figures. Lots of them were low-profile scientists posting on Twitter -- I looked at studies they linked. One I remember was a scientist at some university in the northwest whose research area for decades had been indoor air quality.
By the way, writing this is making me aware of the algorithm I used in deciding what info to trust. I am not a scientist, though I had good training in stats -- but aside from stats, I'm just an educated layman when it comes to figuring out what virus-related info is valid and what isn't.
You've heard about the Catholic priest who messed up all those baptisms, right? I don't understand what he got wrong.
The explanation I've read is that he said "we baptize", which is wrong, because it's Christ rather than the community who baptizes. But the correct version is "I baptize"; why is that not wrong, if it's not Christ saying it?
I'm rusty, but I believe it's "I" because, at his ordination, he was invested with the gift of the Holy Spirit. This is why he can do the baptism in the first place. Hence the more traditional response to "The Lord be with you" is "And with thy Spirit", which acknowledges not the priest as an individual so much as their role and authority.
Source: second hand from a church geek, but very quick googling makes it seem plausible.
Sounds about right, except that every Christian receive the Holy Spirit at their baptism - and unsurprisingly every Christian has the power to baptize validly.
I thought the rest of us could only baptise (or perform other sacraments) in extreme circumstances (ie, last rites, baptism or confession to the dying, but only if a priest won't get there in time). I actually almost mentioned this in my first reply, but thought it muddied the matter.
Power is different from legality. Every Christian has the power to baptize but they can only do so legally in one of the extreme circonstances you mentionned. Similarly a bishop can ordain a new bishop anytime but doing so without the pope's agreement is illicit (and would result in excommunication).
Since the Donatists, Christians who care about this sort of thing at all have all agreed that the sacraments are in some way mechanically *ex opere operato* independently of whether it's allowed by church authority or who the celebrant is or how sincere the recipient is, etc. etc.
In this case I think the Roman Catholics are being silly, because the ecumenical consensus since forever has been that water and the invocation of the Trinity are the important parts of the formula, and Roman Catholics don't rebaptize folks from other traditions with a slightly different baptismal formula.
In other situations, Roman Catholic authorities have acknowledged the real effect of secret bathtub baptisms (e.g. by a nanny or distant relative of heathen parents) even in situations where they agree it really shouldn't have happened, because once there's water and the Trinity involved something has really happened.
Would a baptism performed by a non-Trinitarian Christian then be invalid in the eyes of Trinitarian Christians?
Context:
Matthew 28 18-20:
18And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them inb the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
This is a question people might disagree on, but let me sort of define the space:
1. Bob believes that Jesus had brown hair, and Priest Dave thinks he had blonde hair. Priest Dave baptizes Bob. For the sake of the argument, say we know without a doubt that Jesus had and eternally has brown hair.
2. Bob believes Jesus is as described in the Bible. Priest Dave thinks Jesus is actually just Vishnu. Priest Dave Baptizes Bob.
The question in play is sort of a big one, and circles around the question of "how much can we disagree on who God is while worshipping the same God" and "What is a baptism?"
Most people would probably agree that the color of Jesus' hair isn't that important, and we wouldn't probably find Bob wondering if he should get re-baptized after finding out that Priest Dave imagine Jesus as more of a surfer-type. But most people would probably agree that Vishnu is different enough from Jesus that Bob got baptized by a Priest of a different religion.
So now you have a Priest Dave who isn't a trinitarian. That's a big shift! When he baptizes in the name of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, each of those figures is very fundamentally different from how a Trinitarian thinks of them. Does he doubt the divinity of Christ? Does he think he died and rose again? Blood atonement? All of this stuff matters.
It also matters what you think of Baptism as. Catholics think of Baptism much differently than Protestants and I don't want to speak to their thinking on the matter, but I think a reasonable argument from the protestant mind-space could be made that even if Priest Dave wasn't *giving* a "real baptism" that Bob none-the-less received one. Here we'd have to argue about how important the baptizer is to the process, how much they matter to a process that I think for everyone is primarily between the baptized and God.
Anyway, it's complex.
Nitpick: Deacons also routinely do baptisms.
The long answer is https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/it/bollettino/pubblico/2020/08/06/0406/00923.html#rispostein
The explanation you've read seems not exactly right to me, although it points to the right direction. The crux of the matter to me seems to be that the "we baptize" points to "the baptism comes from the internal authority of the assembly" while "I baptize" points to "the baptism comes from the celebrant*'s authority as granted by the external authority of God". Basically the celebrant is in some sense taken out of the community during the sacramental celebration in order to be able to act as a tool of God, which allows him to speak "in Persona Christi" while saying "I", but the assembly does not have this capacity.
*Note that the celebrant is not necessarily a priest: any Christian can baptize, but as an individual, not a part of a collective.
The year is 2040. Meet "Mr. Snoop." He is a retired cop living in a large American city, and he spends his days fighting crime. He does this by hanging out at various coffee shops, where he uses a smartphone sticking up from his shirt pocket to film other patrons. He'll pick one at random and wait for the person to finish eating or drinking. Then, he grabs their used coffee cups or eating utensils and puts them in his pockets. He follows the same people out into the street until they go into their homes or workplaces, and then he writes down the addresses of those places.
Mr. Snoop then uses Q-tips to remove the person's DNA from their old coffee cups or utensils, and mails them to a lab where they are sequenced for $50. He then sends several law enforcement agencies the information, linking the DNA samples with photos of the people they came from and the addresses of their homes or places of work.
Is Mr. Snoop doing anything illegal?
How do the law enforcement agencies react to Mr. Snoop?
In 2040, do you think people like Mr. Snoop will actually exist?
Not a lawyer, so take this with a grain of salt.
1. Maybe. Invasion of privacy is a tort, although I don't know if anyone has tested if publishing other people's DNA tests qualifies. Following someone home might be stalking. Recording audio on his smartphone might violate wiretapping laws.
2. Assuming it's legal, probably somewhere between "Why are you sending us this?" and "Please stop before we find something to arrest you for." I don't think it's illegal to keep the evidence if they're not the ones telling Mr. Snoop to collect DNA samples, but I can also imagine them not wanting to explain to a court that no, really, this isn't a secret mass surveillance program, this is just a weirdo ex-cop we can't control.
3. I don't think this would be a very efficient or exciting way for a vigilante to fight crime. Maybe I'm underestimating the number of cold cases waiting to be solved by DNA evidence, but I would think that you'd be buying quite a lot of DNA tests (and coffee) to get even a single success.
I recall reading that police have searched the databases of genealogy websites like ancestry.com to solve crimes. That might be the closest thing we've got to a Mr. Snoop today, but they have a much larger database than Mr. Snoop can harvest on his own.
Veritasium video that has some discussion about police using genealogy/DNA databases to solve crimes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KT18KJouHWg
If so, they'll be poor folks just barely scraping a living. Photo + dna of random people is not that valuable. Would be more valuable if photo + DNA came from someone whom police were searching for, but your Mr. S is not working from leads like that. Also, Mr. S will not be able to prove that the photo and the dna came from the same person, which makes his product less valuable. And also, by 2040, seems quite possible that photo + dna sample will be collected when people get passports, driver's licenses, go to doctors' offices, get school id's etc. So then who needs Mr. S and his randos?
If I'm reading you correctly, these are not people with known or suspected criminal histories or open warrants, but instead just random people at a coffee shop?
Judging by the sometimes huge backlogs of tests for actual criminal cases (quick Googling suggests about 100,000 unprocessed rape test kits in 2021, which seems to be mostly steady), getting more data of even active criminal cases may not be very helpful to the police. Unless Mr. Snoop can somehow maintain chain of custody certifications on all of the information, chances are it wouldn't stand up in court at all, even if it could positively be linked to an actual criminal and an open case.
Overall, very bad idea, and I would hope the police response would be "please stop doing this, you're wasting our time and yours."
For his time, just walking around town filming petty crimes would be a much better low impact crime fighting approach. If he can get a video of a crime in progress that can be used to identify the people involved, that would be close to open and shut cases.
I am a Computer Science student about to graduate college and start a job search. I want to try and avoid working on web technologies due to a lack of interest and conflict with some personal beliefs. My intuition is that a lot of these jobs require higher levels of Mathematics backgrounds or education than I have. Is this correct? And if not, where can I look?
I you don't get a good answer here, ask on Reddit. Look through the subs using search terms computer science, STEM, career, math, etc. Eventually you'll find a big lively one the seems in the sweet spot -- then ask there.
Not wanting to work on the web sounds like an idiosyncratic preference for someone who trained in and is now seeking a job in CS. However, consider:
1. Embedded systems (robotics, devices, HW, automotive, medical devices, consumer electronics, etc.): Increasingly, but not always networked together, you may take your skills and optimize for low power, constrained resources (memory, storage, speed, etc.).
2. App development (though maybe this is too close to web).
3. Defense contractors / aerospace.
4. Biotech (non-data science / ML).
5. Banking / finance (non-data science / ML).
6. Healthcare / insurance.
7. Computer security.
8. Consider applying to graduate school in CS.
I don't endorse all of these, particularly in some cases for someone with personal beliefs, but there are loads of non-web positions. Most expect only basic coding ability from new grads, and plan to train a lot on the job. I think even the ML / data science stuff isn't too bad if you have some math sense, and depending upon how much people are willing to have you learn on the job.
Systems and enterprise software is another big cluster of non-web programming jobs. A lot of it has been moving towards cloud/web service, but not all of it, and even that which is cloud/web based has very different incentives (and thus might not conflict with your personal beliefs, depending on your specific objections) than consumer-facing web stuff.
Off the top of my head, big employers in this area include Microsoft, Adobe, Salesforce, VMWare, and Citrix. All of these hire people with bachelor's degrees and no specialized mathematics background.
TIL about Saheli, a birth control pill that is only available in India because the FDA sucks.
From what I've read, it's far more convenient (only one pill per week) and has far fewer side effects than regular hormonal contraception, but it's slightly less effective. It's a selective estrogen receptor modulator.
I'd like to give my brother a book to persuade him that advanced artificial intelligence is inherently dangerous unless it's specifically made safe. Which is a more helpful book for a layman: Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom or Human Compatible by Stuart Russell? I've read both, I think the main point is the same, but Superintelligence goes into more detail while being more difficult to read, Human Compatible is easier to read and has more concrete examples and also gives an actual framework on how to make AIs safe.
In your "Why Do I Suck?" post, you falsely claimed that students were being forced to "chant prayers to Aztec gods". In fact, the chant in question is obviously not a prayer and merely uses the names of Aztec gods as a metaphor for abstract concepts like transformation and self-reliance.
Here is the actual text of the proposal, in case anyone wants to judge for themselves:
In Lak Ech Affirmation
The following is also based on In Lak Ech (love, unity, mutual respect) and Panche Be (seeking the roots of the truth) as is elaborated by Roberto Cintli Rodriguez in Our Sacred Maiz is Our Mother: Indigeneity and Belonging in the Americas. However, this chant goes a level deeper into the Nahui Ollin (Four Movements), as taught by Tupac Enrique Acosta of Tonatierra, and integrated by ELA teacher Curtis Acosta formerly of the Mexican American Studies Department of Tucson Unified School District (before Arizona HB 2281). This is an adaption of the Nahui Ollin, into poetic, rhythmic, hip hop song form.
Tú eres mi otro yo.
You are my other me.
Si te hago daño a ti,
If I do harm to you,
Me hago daño a mi mismo.
I do harm to myself.
Si te amo y respeto,
If I love and respect you,
Me amo y respeto yo.
I love and respect myself.
in lak ech, (feel empathy) panche beh, panche beh panche beh (think critically)
Seeking the roots of the truth, seeking the truth of the roots, elders and us youth, (youth), critical thinking through:
Tezkatlipoka, Tezkatlipoka, x2
smoking mirror, self-reflection
We must vigorously search within ourselves be reflective, introspective by silencing distractions and extensive comprehensive obstacles in our lives, (in our lives),
in order to be warriors of love, of love,
for our gente representin’ justice, (justice)
local to global global to local eco-logical, & social, (social), justice (justice).
Quetzalkoatl, Quetzalcoatl, x2
the morning & evening star of venus double helix of human beings
fearless here it’s, precious blessed
beautiful knowledge, gaining perspective,
on events & experiences our ancestors endured,
allows us to become more realized human beings learn
ing to be listening to each other’s hearts and our elders with humility, dignity, indigenous
brilliance & wisdom in our hearts and our energies, remembering... ancestral memories, planning, future trajectories,
la cultura cura, with remedies of knowledge,
healing epistemologies, ecologies
in life, home, streets, school, work, & life, fueled by...
Huitzilopochtli, huitzilopochtli, x2
hummingbird to the left, yollotl,
corazon, heart, ganas, the will to action as we grow in,
consciousness must be willing to be proactive,
not just thinkin' and talkin' but makin' things happen,
with agency, resiliency, & a revolutionary spirit
that’s positive, progressive, creative, native,
Passion everlasting work hard in action,
tap in, to the spark of our universal heart,
pulsating creation huitzilopochtli cause like sunlight, the light inside of us, in will to action’s
what brings...
Xipe Totek, Xipe Totek, x2
transformation, liberation, education, emancipation. imagination revitalization, liberation, transformation, decolonization, liberation, education, emancipation,
changin’ our situation in this human transformation,
the source of strength that allows us to transform and renew.
We must have the strength to shed naive or self-sabotaging views,
which may hinder us hold us back more than we ever knew,
amazing when embracing emanating r new & improved, critical compassionate creative consciousness
we’re here to transform the world we’re spiraling, rotating & revolving in,
giving thanks daily, tlazokamati, giving thanks daily, tlazokamati,
healing & transforming as we’re evolving in this universe, universe, of
Hunab Ku, Hunab Ku, x2
Nahui OlIin Lak Ech - Panche Beh, Ethnic Studies For All, Represent!!
In the interest of testing this proposition: do you suppose we could replace the names of the Aztec gods in the chant with names such as "Satan", "Lucifer", "Asmodeus", "Baphomet"? I mean, certain strains of Catholic theology hold that evil has no ontological being as such, and therefore Satan is not so much a real being, but a metaphor for certain concepts.
I'll presume to do so myself, just to get a feel for the thing, if you don't mind, sticking to just the English translation for brevity:
You are my other me
If I do harm to you,
I do harm to myself,
If I love and respect you,
I love and respect myself.
Seeking the roots of the truth, seeking the truth of the roots, elders and us youth, (youth), critical thinking through:
Satan, Satan
Smoking mirror, etc.
Granted, Satan isn't usually known as the "smoking mirror", unlike Tezcatlipoca (unless you're playing the Witcher 3).
Ooh, looking further down, I see a potential doozy:
Lucifer, Lucifer
the morning & evening star of venus double helix of human beings
I wouldn't consider it a prayer regardless of what names you put in there.
Maybe we can have kids chant the Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi ("Chant of St. Francis of Assisi"? "Affirmation of St. Francis of Assisi"?) on and then for varieties sake?
***
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love.
Where there is injury, pardon.
Where there is doubt, faith.
Where there is despair, hope.
Where there is darkness, light.
Where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive.
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.
***
"Divine Master" and "Lord" are just metaphors, right? Who decides that anyway?
Seriously though: chanting divine names in this sense is clearly a prayer. An atheist can write a prayer, it doesn't make it less of a prayer.
The difference with text you posted is that it is specifically addressed to "lord". A prayer is when you ask a (supernatural) entity to do something. Merely saying someone's name is not a prayer, but asking them to help you is.
I actually found it interesting how similar St Francis prayer and the "affirmation chant" was in their focus on doing good in the world. Anyways, you are making a no true Scotsman argument. Prayer is a fuzzy concept. There are many examples of prayer that does not involve asking a supernatural deity to do something. E.g. Hare Krishna chants, the Modeh Ani, this random thing that came up when I googled "prayer of thanks":
"Thank you, Lord, for the blessings you have bestowed on my life. You have provided me with more than I could ever have imagined. You have surrounded me with people who always look out for me. You have given me family and friends who bless me every day with kind words and actions."
etc.
Chanting the names of gods is clearly prayer in the "I know it when I see it" way. Do you have examples of groups chanting the name of gods and it not being prayer?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adenovirus_serotype_36
"AD-36 is the only human adenovirus that has been linked with human obesity, present in 30% of obese humans and 11% of nonobese humans.[8] In addition, a study of obese Americans indicates that about 30% of the obese individuals and only 5% of non-obese individuals have antibodies to Ad-36.[3] Another study determined that children with the virus averaged 52 pounds heavier than those with no signs of it and obese children with the virus averaged 35 pounds heavier than obese children with no trace of the virus.[9] AD-36 also causes obesity in chickens, mice, rats, and monkeys.[8]"
Seems likely this virus is responsible for ~20% of all US obesity unless it has some weirdly specific vector that strongly correlates with obese people's lifestyles, which probably isn't the case. So if you could push some magic button that makes this virus disappear, the US obesity rate would probably drop from 42% to 34%, and the US TFR would probably increase noticeably because obesity makes it much more difficult to get a partner, to get pregnant, to have a healthy pregnancy, etc (wild guess because I can't find stats that aren't confounded by pregnancy causing obesity: increase TFR by 0.5 in the 8% affected = 0.04 in the US overall) which means increasing the population by 2% per generation (or shrinking by 2% less per generation).
Hmm, not sure how to reconcile this with SlimeMoldTimeMold's theory of environmental and river contamination...
https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/11/a-chemical-hunger-part-ii-current-theories-of-obesity-are-inadequate/
https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/13/a-chemical-hunger-part-iii-environmental-contaminants/
...I guess if could just be that obesity has two or more unrelated causes. Or... let's say there are two different things that must go wrong to cause obesity, and there are several things including environmental contamination and AD-36 that can break one of the two things. Or, in a body with obesity, AD-36 infections can occur more easily.
I wonder, if there's a "fat virus", why does obesity seem to happen so gradually?