Any good resources for entertaining and informative blogs on modern physics? Any suggested reading for someone who would like to learn more about the field as a dilettante? Right now I’m just reading Wikipedia articles
The concept of a "dry port" confuses me. It sounds like a fancy name for a big parking lot full of shipping containers, plus some cranes to move the containers around.
I know that modern seaports have large areas where many shipping containers are stored--often stacked on each other. Instead of building "dry ports" located far from the seaports, why don't the seaports just expand their own parking lot areas to fit in as many containers as they need to? It seems inefficient to build a dry port several (maybe dozens) of miles inland, and to have to ship the containers back and forth between it and the seaport over a road or railroad.
Thing I actually know: They don't pack and unpack those containers at the actual port or the dry port. They get packed at the source, sent out by some combination of truck, barge, ship, and/or rail, and unpacked at the destination.
My guess: The dry port is in the same general direction that the containers were going to or coming from anyway.
You might want to ask again on the next thread; I don't think many people are still checking this one.
Thoughts on universal DNR? I'm an ER doc and I'm sick of doing CPR on 87 year olds in terrible health. Seems like a national universal DNR with an option to opt-out would save the health system money. So much of what we do to these super elderly are efforts in futility. 80 seems like a reasonable age to me for universal DNR, again with the option to opt out for those that want "everything done" including CPR/intubation or simply feel they are still spry and could survive a cardiac arrest.
Your key problem is probably "in terrible health", not "87-year-olds".
I had and still have some relatives with little or no cognitive issues after 87 years old. (I think our last tax preparer was over 80 years old when he died, too, and he was still doing his work until the very end.) I never heard of them needing CPR (I might not know about the times they did), so you are probably just not seeing that kind of people, which partly justifies your suggestion. It's possible that such people just don't end up in ERs needing CPR, but if that ever happened, it would be a great loss if they were not resuscitated.
Universal DNR sounds scary. All humans are different. Statistically and anecdotally, it may not be as terrible, but it's always scary when it's agreed that some people will just be statistics.
Although even a “healthy” 87 year old has an incredibly low chance of survival with cognitive function if their heart stops. And survival with cognitive function is what counts- survival without cognitive function is a “vegetable”, and I don’t know anyone who would want that.
I’d think you’d know if any of your family needed CPR- they end up in the hospital for many days on a ventilator and very very ill.
To be clear, DNR doesn’t mean a patient can’t get antibiotics or fluids or whatever they need to get better. It means if their heart stops, we let nature take its course instead of CPR and putting them on a ventilator.
Most people want to die at home amongst family and friends. But instead many die at a hospital getting poked and prodded. That’s worth it for someone with a chance of survival, but maybe not as much when the chance is as close to 0 as it can be. Again though, people can make their own choice to opt out if they choose.
If you are going to have the opt-out option, how would that be different from the current situation?
If you have a patient's medical record, it either already has directives - in which case, you're in the situation you're already in now - or you don't have the medical record (it's at another hospital), or you are just missing that section (which might or might not be in his record at another hospital).
How would you go about resuscitating a patient whose medical record is elsewhere or whose record is missing that section, which might be elsewhere? Would you skip CPR by default only to find out, when you finally figure out where to get his record, and the hospital finally answers the frantic calls about it, that he was one of those who opted out?
Yeah good question. I’ve thought about that too. Most people don’t have advanced directives, so we always have to assume “do everything” when the probably better answer for a very elderly when their heart stops is “don’t do everything”. Maybe for the opt out group they could wear a medical alert bracelet/necklace that specifies full code. And for anyone under the specified DNR age, it would still be assume “do everything” unless clearly stated otherwise.
So now I am thinking of Warren Buffet, net worth about 111 billion, age 91. He has said he that he wants his tombstone to read, “Here lies the oldest man in the world.”
Just how much more time above ground can that sort of money buy?
Edit
Expanding on the idea a bit, Michael Jackson and Prince had the wealth to hire physicians with the moral flexibility to allow them to prescribe unhealthy medication to keep any ordinary dip in the stars' moods at bay. They may have both even died happy men - well before their time though.
Say a man of unlimited means merely wanted to remain healthy and alive well beyond his biblically allotted three score plus ten. The sort of wealth that Warren Buffet possesses seems like it could buy a *lot* of moral flexibility. What would be available to such a man?
I don't begrudge Mr Buffet his wealth or have any reason to think he is of low character, but just for the sake of a thought experiment, let's say ethics are off the table. How well could doctors extend his years of life - years worth living only - with the best of today's technology?
I'll simplify a bit, but I like to think about longevity optimization as having three categories: preventative, curative, and heroic.
-Preventative is diet, exercise, and not smoking (there are a few other things like wearing your seat-belt, not dying to violence, getting vaccinated etc.) and if required, taking your meds as prescribed.
-Curative is when something has gone wrong, and you need a medicine/intervention to fix it. This happens a few times in the course of a normal persons life, and can have a variable impact. Minor impact could be something like a knee injury when you're young where you damage the cartilage a bit, and if you don't get surgery you'll have pain in later life. Major could be something like cancer and you need chemo to fix it or you'll die from it.
-Heroic is when something has catastrophically failed (heart stopped, lungs not oxygenating blood etc.) and now you need intense, urgent, and high-cost measures to fix it (CPR, ECMO).
Warren Buffet can't do too much better than the average upper-middle class person in terms of preventative measures, because so much of them require personal effort (eating well, exercising, and avoiding smoking). And he probably won't get much better heroic measures than someone who goes to a good hospital (I have never personally heard anyone ask to do a "wallet biopsy" before giving someone heroic measures).
You might make the case that he has better access to curatives, which could improve his quality of life, but even there I wonder if he's so much better off than the standard person with really good (the so called "Cadillac") insurance. Would he have had access to top-tier anti-HIV drugs before anyone else? Yeah, he probably could have swung that. Maybe experimental COVID antibodies if he had gotten sick? Sure, I expect so. But I'm having trouble thinking of a variety of examples where his extreme wealth/influence would put him that much ahead.
Thanks for your thoughts. As a person with good insurance and a comfortable income, but well short of unlimited financial resources, I’ve wondered what the truly rich have access to.
I read Ross Douthat’s latest book about his struggles with Lyme disease and I was a bit surprised that someone with his degree of national recognition has the same sort of waits to see in demand specialists as us un-famous folk.
Thanks for the reminder to get that health care directive completed. Somehow it never makes it to the top of my todo list. Out of curiosity, do you manage to resuscitate many 87 year olds?
Agreed with Black Mountain Radio. We can sometimes get a heartbeat back, but in terms of leaving the hospital with any brain function (the thing we care about), it almost never happens in an elderly person. But they do get a few hours in an ICU and a massive bill...
"Resuscitate" can mean a lot of things here. Do you mean "get their heart beating on it's own again" then yes, maybe half the time. If you mean "they ever wake up and see their loved ones and smile for they are glad to be alive" then the count is 0.
Family doc here. I like the idea of a UDNR, because cracking ribs for no reason feels awful (I've done my fair share). I worry that this is going to put more strain on PCPs to explain those end-of-life decisions that we do such a bad job of explaining anyway (since we only get 14 minutes a visit). Additionally, there's the component of the healthcare proxy rescinding the decision at the last second and the need to contact them. What would it feel like to get a message saying "sorry your mother died, we didn't do everything we could because you didn't answer your phone when we tried to call you"?
I don't know what age I would set the UDNR to. Would we slide it for comorbidities?
I would think it would lessen the burden on PCPs, right? Because then everyone over a certain age is presumed to be DNR, except for the small percentage that choose to opt out. That way when another 91year old nursing home patient comes in and the home "couldn't find their papers", instead of having to "do everything" and breaking all their ribs and giving them a massive bill, we can let nature take it's course. Heck, maybe the nursing home wouldn't send that patient to the ER in the first place and could just do palliative measures at the home.
I wonder, if we had universal DNR after 80 (with the possibility to opt out, but let's assume only 5% would take it) but also universal *cryonics*, whether the whole system would be still cheaper than what we have today?
I am assuming that universal cryonics would make the costs per capita significantly lower. First, because there would be lots of specialists, so you wouldn't need to call someone from the opposite side of the country; the local hospital would do. Second, costs of freezing scale sublinearly with the number of frozen people. The costs of freezing a volume are proportional to the surface, so in theory freezing 1000 people should only cost 100× more than freezing one.
Let's assume Thomas Piketty's thesis is right, and the owners of capital will keep getting richer while everyone else's share of the economic pie shrinks. For the sake of convenience, let's say 1% of the human race owns 100% of the world's capital right now, and let's call those people "The 1%." The others are "The 99%." Even though the 99% don't own any capital, they still have money and assets, so they own most of the economy.
1) I guess Piketty envisions the 1%'s share of the global economy will keep growing until one day, they own all assets while the 99% own none. Is that right?
2) If it is right, are we to assume the 99% will rent everything they use, and/or only own things that are worthless (e.g. - ripped, unstylish clothing no one else would pay anything for)?
3) Furthermore, does Piketty think the process of economic dispossession will ever stop? For example, let's again assume we've reached the day when the 1% own the whole economy. Do they call a truce at that point, and agree to preserve the distribution of assets as it is, or would the top 0.01% start using their advantages to gradually capture the assets of the bottom 0.99%?
4) Would that process proceed through several iterations until it reached its logical endpoint, with one person ("The 0.0000000001%") owned the whole economy?
5) Is that the actual logical endpoint of the process, or should we extend the X-axis out some more until zero people own the economy, in which case we can assume humanity is extinct and/or AIs have taken over?
Piketty argues that capital has a higher return on investment than the economy has growth, generally. The question "In absolute or relative terms" is very important here; if true in absolute terms, what Piketty is arguing is that all other forms of economy have a negative rate of return, because the total growth contains the ROI of capital. In this case, everybody else gets impoverished, but this has nothing to do with the ultra-wealthy people, and instead is because something else is actively destroying their wealth.
If true only in relative terms, then it's unsustainable; it implies a state of undercapitalization, that is, a state of affairs in which the best current investment is capital. If we look at the world today - well, yes. There are lots of places in the world that are desperately short on capital. It makes sense for the ROI for capital to exceed growth in relative terms, because this is just representing the fact that capital "beats the market", which is to say, is currently the best investment. This looks plausible, but in such a world, nobody is being deprived of anything, rather, different fortunes are growing at different rates (and the richest grow fastest of all - if they didn't, they'd stop being the richest).
In long term, it also matters how you split your wealth among your children. For example, if the rich 1% reproduced more than the poor 99%, this would increase their fraction in population, and also potentially dilute some of their wealth by occassional intermarriage with the poor.
Also, sometimes the poor seize the resources of the rich, either quickly by revolution, or slowly by taxation. Maybe for any fixed tax rate there is an equilibrium where the 1% getting richer from their capital is on average balanced by the taxes they pay.
"Tabling" an issue. In the US, this means setting it aside indefinitely in order to move on the other topics. In Britain, this means bringing it up for immediate discussion.
My understanding is that dinner is typically the largest meal of the day. Traditionally, blue collar workers would have dinner in the middle of the day, then a smaller supper in the evening. White collar workers would have lunch in the middle of the day then a larger dinner in the evening.
As events unfold in Ukraine (Russia is invading Ukraine), I would be very glad to see a discussion of this in the community.
Could someone point me to some relevant place, if such a discussion has already took place, or is currently going on LessWrong or maybe a good reddit thread?
Currently, to me it seems like Russia/Putin is trying to replace the Ukrainian government with a more Russia-favoring one, either through making the government resign in the chaos, executing a coup through special forces or forcing the government to relocate and then taking Kiev and recognizing a new government controlling the Eastern territories as the "official Ukraine".
I would be particularly interested in what this means for the future, eg:
- How Ukrainian refugees will change European politics? (I am from Hungary, and it seems like an important question.)
- What sanctions are likely to be put in place?
- How will said sanctions influence European economy? (Probably energy prices go up - what are the implications of that?)
So "replace the Ukrainian government with a more Russia-favoring one" may be ignoring the 2014 coup in which the Russia-favoring Ukrainian government was replaced with a more Western-favoring one, and is one of three reasons for the situation today. Who is right? Mu.
I expect the refugees will generally be more Western-oriented, assuming Russia successfully installs a more Russia-favoring government in Ukraine, as those who favorably view the new government are likely to return, balanced against the financial ability to do so. "Leftward shift" is misleading but not entirely inaccurate; a combination of well-educated people, and people who can't afford to get back.
I doubt any sanctions will be long-lived; Russian natural gas is critical to European infrastructure, and China is happy to buy any natural gas that Europe doesn't.
As for that natural gas, it's less critical to energy (energy prices will indeed go up, but this can be mitigated to some extent) so much as it is critical to heating; the crunch here isn't higher energy prices, it's freezing winter temperatures. Assuming this goes far enough, expect strict rationing of heating, possibly increased winter fatalities, and likely widespread damage in the form of burst pipes.
Setting the "Who is right" question aside, why do you think sanctions will be short lived?
Do you think Russia will increase gas price/cut access entirely, should Europe place "too serious" sanctions in place? It is also their interest to sell the gas.
Also, could Europe not import gas for a higher price from different sources? Obviously it is costly, but sanctions are always costly for both parties - what is actually the estimated cost?
Russia can sell their gas to China, who will basically buy as much as they're willing to sell them. The cost to Russia is thus much lower than it would be to Europe.
I can't put a price tag on it, but a substantial part of the issue is logistics and infrastructure - this isn't a great time, logistically, to suddenly need to import a lot more of something by ocean.
Russia can sell their gas to China, but they can't *deliver* their gas to China because there's no Trans-Siberian natural gas pipeline. There are some small local pipelines for delivering natural gas from Yakutsk and Sakhalin to China, but I think they're already close to capacity and in any event irrelevant to the gas produced in Western Russia and currently sold to e.g. Germany.
> So "replace the Ukrainian government with a more Russia-favoring one" may be ignoring the 2014 coup in which the Russia-favoring Ukrainian government was replaced with a more Western-favoring one, and is one of three reasons for the situation today.
Yeah, those situations are sooooooo similar... except that one of them involved foreign armies invading Ukraine, and the other did not.
Sure. And I'm not going to say that that is not an important line, certainly I grew up thinking that was an important line to draw; certainly I was taught that that is an important line to draw.
But I do notice it's an important line in my culture. And I notice it is drawn in a place that is comfortable for my culture; my country doesn't have to give up safety or security in order to keep that line where it is, and indeed may have quite the competitive advantage in terms of utilizing that line to our advantage. But maybe that's the right place for that line to be.
But then again, I have a suspicion that, if Trump supporters were to overthrow the US government, a lot of people who currently insist that that line is very important, would suddenly be fine if Canadian troops marched down to intervene.
Counterfactuals really have to be plausible to bear any weight. (Same problem with "shove the fat guy in front of the trolley.") The only plausible scenario in such a situation would be the US military itself intervening.
In any case, I agree that this may not be the important dividing line. The line, which can be easily generalized to your hypo and to other cases, is whether, following whatever unrest occurs, a democratically legitimate government is promptly (re)installed. That was the outcome in Ukraine, and if it were the outcome in the US, it would be acceptable in general.
Suppose, for a moment, that Trump supporters overthrew the US government, and passed a law that said that no current government employees can ever be government employees again. (This happened in Ukraine.)
Now suppose that in the next election, Trump won, as counted by the people hired by the new Trump supporter government. The only people you can appeal to were also hired by the new government, which also changed the laws so it had more control over who was in the courts. (This happened in Ukraine.)
Is that a democratically legitimate government? Would you be able to tell?
If Maine, Connecticut, and New York refused to go along with this, and it was their independence Canada was nominally moving in to protect, how would that look?
Like, Russia isn't a good guy in any of this, not by a longshot. But this didn't come out of nowhere, either.
Also, I'll predict that more than one prominent US government official took money from the new Ukrainian government, and evidence of this will surface in the next two years.
Indeed, I agree issues of that kind would be serious obstacles to democratic legitimacy. I am sure there are questions and I do not have a strong prior regarding the legitimacy of the Ukrainian election of 2014. The important point, to me, is that the line is the same -- despite it not being trivial to decide whether it was reached.
I do note that Putin/Russia accepted the 2014 result as legitimate, and also that it seems unlikely that greater participation in separatist areas would have changed the outcome. Therefore, I still think it was legitimate, but again, without extreme confidence (or investment).
Ukrainian immigrants in Poland tend to behave, despite their numbers nobody's bothered by them outside of some fringe far-right assholes. I don't see any reason why war refugees would cause any problems, other than the logistics of handling the sudden influx. EU's approach to this is baffling to me.
Energy prices are already going up and they will go up further. The implications is everyone's fucked in inverse proportion to the fuel reserves they had. On the individual level, prepare for inflation, buy things now rather than later, keep a stock of necessities etc etc. Apparently Poland already had a fuel run today because every reason is good to panic.
I agree that war refugees shouldn't be a huge problem (given they are distributed), but in some aspects they are different than work-related migrants, so might be worth a thought.
What would be your ballpark estimate for energy prices increasing and inflation?
Shit, I'd like to know myself. For inflation I'm expecting anything from chill 10-20% YoY to complete hyperinflationary collapse of our currency - I am told that's likely to happen at ~50% or above.
It doesn't radically change the actions you need to take though, unless you really like holding fiat currency for some reason.
As for energy, I'm really angry at myself for not setting up solar earlier, especially since we just got legislation to _discourage_ solar installations because the country's energy grid couldn't handle all the backflow during the day. Oh well, I'll wait for another order of magnitude of improvement in the tech I suppose.
Quantum computing is technically substrate-dependent. Theoretically, there could be other substrate-dependent computations. Theoretically, the brain could use them.
Without motivating this in any way, I'm curious how serious modern neuroscience takes this idea (if anyone here is familiar enough with the literature to answer that). Say on a scale from 0 to 10, with floating point numbers since the answer is probably <1?
Yes, but you can't implement something that holds a qubit with silicon
My definition of substrate-dependence would be something like "you lose on computational speedup if you change the substrate". Whatever the substrate does, if it's not a quantum thing (which I'm explicitly less interested in), you can run an atom-level simulation and compute the results in a substrate-independent way -- but that will take much more computational power.
"you lose on computational speedup if you change the substrate" is true for regular 'classical' computation too, i.e. depending on the computation(s) performed and the design of the computers.
> you can't implement something that holds a qubit with silicon
Existing solid state computers aren't made purely of silicon either so I'm not sure what point you're making.
Are you claiming that different (hypothetical) quantum systems could be used to create different kinds (or different speeds) of quantum computers?
(I'm not sure that anyone has even built a _functional_ quantum computer yet. AFAIK, there are still not non-theoretical results providing particularly strong evidence of 'quantum supremacy'.)
> Are you claiming that different (hypothetical) quantum systems could be used to create different kinds (or different speeds) of quantum computers?
No. Forget quantum mechanics. I was only bringing it up to pre-empt the response "all computation is always substrate-independent".
So if you take a classical computer, you can abstract it as a bunch of binary states flickering on or off. All computation translates to turning states on or off depending on some algorithm and other states. You could then implement the same thing by having e.g. a little physical hole for each binary memory, where the two states are "there's a rock in here" and "there's not a rock in here". (A 1-byte register is eight holes next to each other.) Then when your computer computes something, you could do the same by pushing rocks in and out of the holes. This would require the same number of operations, hence the silicon substrate does not give you "computational speedup" in the way I was talking about.
On the other hand, if you want to compute how atoms align in a tuning fork when you hit it on a table, this *does* require more operations, since just hitting the fork against the table gives you the alignment without computing anything explicitly. That's what I'd call computational speedup, for this incredibly contrived example.
Roger Penrose's Orch-OR would be the most developed take in that direction. Being endorsed by a Nobel laureate would probably bring it to at least 0.5/10, being near-universally dismissed as crackpottery would keep it below 1/10.
Well, technically *any* substrate-dependent effect solves *some* computational problem. If you take a tuning fork and hit it against a table, it will vibrate in a certain way; you can view this as the solution to the problem of computing how atoms align during vibration. If you create a computer simulation where you translate each atom into a point in 3d euclidean space, no equivalent to "hit it against a table" exists; you have to go through each atom one-by-one and calculate a displacement vector.
Anyway, I suspected and mostly wanted to confirm that this kind of thing is not considered relevant.
You can simulate the tuning fork with a computer though, but cannot simulate a computer with the fork. So the computer is Turing-complete, the fork isn't, and for substrate-dependent consciousness we probably want some kind of a super-Turing-complete system.
Yeah, substrate-dependence, if it were relevant, would not extend the set of things you can do; classical computation is already Turing Complete. What it could to, theoretically, is provide opportunities for speedup.
If I change my avatar it back propagates. If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say changing the name on your Substack account would do the same thing. But that’s just my best guess.
The name of my publication definitely backpropagates. I guess I'll just let this account's subscription expire and buy a new subscription on a new account.
Also, advocated lowering age of consent (from 18 to lower) and in other posts complained about dating issues because 16 year olds are the sexiest.
And linked photos of specific one (princess of Spain, IIRC).
Also, were irritated when Scott asked to stop lowering age of consent topic and were confused why he prefers to not start this until something substantial and useful can be said.
It's already lower than 18 in every developed country except for south korea and ~1/4 of US states. Not exactly a radical idea.
Also I wasn't "confused and irritated" by Scott's decision to avoid the topic. I accepted it without responding. Seems like a reasonable way to allocate weirdness points.
A podcast series about the Russian Imperial Movement, an organization for unifying white nationalists worldwide. They're not well known in the US, probably because their violence tends to be against refugees in camps in other countries.
So far, the podcast hasn't gotten into who's financing them-- the amount of money looks to me like a billionaire's hobby rather than a government, but I'm guessing.
Has anyone else here been keeping track of this group?
From “Dreyer’s English An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style”
The Celebrated Ending-a Sentence-with-a-Preposition Story
Two women are seated side by side at a posh dinner party, one a matron of the sort played in old Marx Brothers movies by Margaret Dumont, except frostier, the other an easy going southern gal, let’s say for the sake of visuals, wearing a very pink and very ruffled evening gown.
Southern Gal, amiably to Frosty Matron: So where y’all from?
Frosty Matron, no doubt giving Southern Gal a once over with a lorgnette: I’m from a place where people don’t end their sentences with prepositions.
Southern Gal, sweetly, after a moments consideration: OK. So where y’all from, bitch.
Starting a week or two ago, I’ve been having scrolling problems on my 4+ year old iPad Pro.
I’ll get halfway into the comments, and suddenly they don’t want to scroll. I drag the page up, and it snaps down again. Eventually starts working again, but only after multiple attempts to scroll. The only other site where I’ve seen this is Reddit - maybe they use the same stack?
Super annoying…today I just got tired of fighting with it and noped out.
No, I'm very sure Substack isn't using "the same stack" in any significant way as Reddit. I wish Substack's comments worked as well as Reddit's! Tho that might be because I don't use the default/new Reddit site (nearly) at all.
Tho maybe you're sorta right in that the problems might be due to using 'JavaScript trickery' (e.g. to dynamically add new comments to the page as they're made) versus '(mostly) plain old HTML' – that's what I suspect anyways.
But yes, I've observed similar scrolling/rendering problems on Substack pretty regularly, particularly on blogs like this one with posts with lots of comments.
Is anyone here experienced with parasomnias, in particular, has anyone figured out a successful strategy to manage them? Because evidence-based medicine apparently looks the other way and pretends they don't exist.
I suffer from psychopompic hallucinations and waking up with just half of a brain awake and disoriented, ie. confusional arousal (which I assure you is the correct term, and has nothing to do with confused boners). Might be genetic since there's some light somnabulism in my family, happens pretty much from birth. It's not an immediate threat to either myself or others, but it's stressful and understandably drives my partner up the wall.
The conventional answer is sleep hygiene, which I experimented with a bunch and if anything it makes the problem _worse_ (when I'm really tired the parasomnias happen rarely). The other conventional answer is chronic use of clonazepam, which I won't experiment with because I'd rather sleep alone for the rest of my life than get addicted to benzos.
I'm starting to rigorously track the influence of melatonin before sleep, because apparently for a small % of patients it helps. After that I'm out of ideas.
I know something about treatment of sleep disorders, and might be able to offer some suggestions, but I'd need to hear more about the problem -- in particular what makes it a bug rather than a feature of your nights? Are the hallucinations and the confused arousals sort of one and the same or separate phenomena? If separate, is each a problem itself, or only one, and if so which? What is the problematic aspect of these experiences: Intrinsically very unpleasant? Dread having, so dread interferes with falling asleep? Alarms you so much when happens that afterwards you can't calm down and go back to sleep? Scares your partner? Also, what's the nature of the hypnopompic phenomena?
The hallucinations are mostly okay by themselves, even interesting, it's the confusion that's the problem - I tend to sit up in bed and be upset about something that I see but doesn't exist, or reinterpret a harmless item as something very strange, or be alarmed about something that can't even be explained logically after waking up fully. Often I don't even remember the event, or remember just the last bit.
"Scares the partner/flatmates/family/whoever is close at the moment" would be what makes it a bug, if I lived alone I wouldn't care.
The hypnopompic hallucinations are, well, full blown hallucinations. Things floating in the air, often vaguely organic. I once saw a black hole with tendrils wrapping around everything in the room, which I think was a very weird interpretation of the eye's blood vessels (usually filtered out by the visual cortex). A desk lamp would become a detailed, clawed robotic arm. My partner would look like a car crash victim covered head to toe in bandages, instead of the duvet she's sleeping under. A ceiling lamp would turn into a literal Alien xenomorph hanging upside down. Rune-like writing on the walls. Paintings on the walls that aren't there.
It's actually really cool to observe when I happen to be relatively awake and calm, but combined with the agitated state and "disorientation to time and place" as it's called in the literature, it's troublesome.
FWIW, as a child I had full blown night terrors (which are quite different and cannot be recollected at all), which I seem to have grown out of. The parasomnias remain.
Wow, those are really interesting. It’s like the dreaming process is still going on, but using as raw materials things you are actually sitting up and looking at. Even though you don’t experience these hallucinations as terrifying, it’s notable that virtually every image you describe has a dark quality: Some are of things dangerous, destructive or destroyed (black holes, clawed arms, car crash victims). Others are of things alien, unfamiliar (robots, xenomorphs, runes.). I’d say what your mind’s up to here is trying to integrate 2 things: What you’re actually seeing around you; and your awareness that something is wrong. Because you are in dream mode, and think in images, you’re not able to say to yourself, “I’m awake in my bedroom but something is wrong — my mind’s not working right.” Instead, your mind says that in dream-language, i.e. in images. You have images of things alien, dangerous, and damaged.
Anyhow, as for what to do about having these hypnopompics, I actually do not have any great suggestions, just a few ideas. Since you do not mind having the experiences themselves, would it work to just give your partner and flatmates a clear explanation of the phenomenon, some reassurance, and a simple plan for them to follow when you’re in that state (make soothing noises, wait it out)? If during these experiences you are screaming and thrashing, and people really need to have some way of managing you, you might try having them play music — the kind of music people use on psychedelic playlists. Pick something out in advance and have it ready to play. I did a couple of experiments with IM ketamine that put me into a state that was sort of like the one you’re describing, and my frightened and disabled mind wrapped itself around the music like a vine and stabilized. Another possibility would be to use a technique that sometimes helps with night terrors. If these awakenings tend to happen during a certain part of the sleep cycle, like say in the last couple hours before your usual wakeup time, you could try setting your alarm for that time, sitting up and orienting yourself for 60 secs or so, then going back to sleep. Doing that might hit some reset button that causes the final portion of your night’s sleep to proceed in a somewhat different way, one that does not wander into hypnopompic territory.
I strongly recommend against trying drugs for the problem, unless problem is doing quite serious damage to your life. Drugs that help with sleep problems also change sleep architecture, and it’s not good to mess with that.
I suppose the dark ones are the most notable, but they're honestly all over the place (my imagination is kind of edgy, I admit). One of the weirdest experiences of this kind was waking up, looking at the wall near my bed, and noticing that the vaguely Greek mural on said wall is waving in place. So I thought "oh, cool hallucination". Then I realized "wait, I have no mural on the wall" and it disappeared, in something that is best described as a higher-level equivalent of the Necker cube switch - nothing happened in the visual field but the object was no longer there. And it was pretty detailed, had a lady in a toga lying by a lake and everything.
I kinda like the idea that the visuals are a manifestation of a vague sense of unease from the unnatural state of consciousness I find myself in, I haven't thought about it this way. The hypnagogic ones I (rarely) see when falling asleep tend to be more abstract and less dramatic.
Forcing a break in the sleep cycle before the usual hour these may happen is a nuclear option, from a sleep quality perspective, but I'll consider it if things get worse. I wonder why I never heard about it despite having night terrors for a better part of my childhood, sounds like it could work.
"I kinda like the idea that the visuals are a manifestation of a vague sense of unease from the unnatural state of consciousness I find myself in, I haven't thought about it this way. "
Here's an example of a similar phenom from my ketamine trip. I was sort of peaking, and while I kept having thoughts, I'd lost the ability to set them in any context. I'd lost track of where I was, and the fact that I'd just had a shot of ketamine. And while I was having a thought, I wasn't able to think about the fact that I was thinking, or recall what I was thinking a moment before I'd had the present thought. So I just had a woozy, powerful feeling that something was wrong but I couldn't say what. Then I had am image: I saw, or maybe was, a huge block of ice breaking off from the South Pole and floating off into the cold waters. I think that was my mind's imagistic representation of what was wrong with how it was working -- I've broken loose from context. (By the way, fuck IM ketamine.)
Don't forget the suggestion about music. I actually think it's the most promising idea.
Did Scott get rid of the even/odd politics/no-politics rule? That's probably good, as it didn't seem to do much. I never noticed a difference in topics between the two thread parities, and it certainly wasn't the case that one thread was completely overrun with political discussion
My guess is that it was an oversight, and that odd/even distinctions will return. But I have very little to back that up and I agree that there wasn't a big difference between the two - I tended to only notice when someone commented "Better save that for the politics thread!", tho' it is also true that I don't involve myself much in politics or CW issues.
Does the theories that short term and minor but fascinating items in the new are *intentional* distractions actually do any good? I think it's more likely that people are more interested in dramatic and human interest stories without any intention being needed.
People tend to read more intention into things than is really there. Person X does a thing that has a side effect Person Y doesn't like; Y then assumes the side effect is the real purpose.
How do you know that it cures every disease? People make that claim about a lot of stuff, but sometimes they’re wrong, so it’s important to test it.
You should start by feeding the pill to some animals to see if it explodes. If the animals explode it would not be good to give to a human.
If the animals don’t explode, you might try giving it to a dozen or so humans to see if the humans explode, which they might do since this pill is unproven magic.
If the humans don’t explode you might try giving it to a hundred or so people to see if it cures all their diseases, which it might not do since again it’s unproven magic
Once that’s done you should do a larger scale study with a couple hundred to a thousand people to prove that the drug is safe and effective on a large scale.
All this will take a long time. But importantly you should be doing it regardless of whether or not the FDA exists, since it’s entirely necessary to test drugs. This isn’t bureaucracy or red tape- it’s science. The direct difficult slog of work in separating truth from fiction.
Since your drug cures all diseases it will probably be eligible for several FDA programs including the fast track program, breakthrough therapy program, accelerated approval program, and priority review. You’ll be able to start the approval process before you’ve finished clinical trials, and you’ll get feedback from the FDA throughout the process to make sure that your experiments are sound and your drug will be approved. You’ll also have designated experts to help you with the efficiency of your clinical trials. These programs also mean you can use proxy-measures of efficacy. So if your drug cures cancer you can measure tumor shrinkage rather than cancer rates overall, which will help get it to market faster. Although after it’s released you’ll have to perform follow up studies.
It’s hard to say how much time this will add. Priority review gives a maximum of 6 months, and that process can begin before you’ve finished clinical trials since it’s a fast track breakthrough therapy.
Since your drug is magic it seems fair to guess it will be faster since the FDA can direct all of its resources at evaluating and approving this one drug since it eliminates the need for all other drugs.
If you had at least one doctor who believed in your pill, I think you could get it approved within a year. Have your doctor friend recommend it as a "supplement" to his patients - if the pill instantly cures them, they'll tell everyone they know and you'll have exponential growth on your hands. If you have enough supply, send every order a whole bottle of pills. Even if the FDA shuts you down at this point, a black market will spring up instantly that no force on earth will be able to stop.
My feeling is that the amount of value your pill would create (if it were not incredibly expensive to produce) would be equivalent to the current world GDP. Even if the FDA banned it, other countries will allow it and its effects will quickly be impossible to deny.
Lastly, no president will want to be the one who let the FDA sit on a miracle pill until their successor poked the FDA into approving it. A happy and healthy population is much more likely to give you a second term. The FDA has already proven it can get a vaccine approved pretty quickly (relatively speaking) if time really counts. This doesn't seem much different to me.
I'm very far from an expert, but my best guess is that it would be guaranteed but still cost a billion dollars and take a decade, and event hen you'd be getting it approved for some specific disease because the FDA doesn't have a category for "panacaea", so doctors would have to prescribe it off-label for most conditions with all the issues that causes with insurance and general patient scepticism and ill-informed doctors unaware of the drug's potential
> The supporters of the region's administration state that it is an officially secular polity[30][31][32] with direct democratic ambitions based on an anarchistic, feminist, and libertarian socialist ideology promoting decentralization, gender equality,[33][34] environmental sustainability, social ecology and pluralistic tolerance for religious, cultural and political diversity, and that these values are mirrored in its constitution, society, and politics, stating it to be a model for a federalized Syria as a whole, rather than outright independence.
Has anyone seen evidence on cases of reinfection with Omicron — people who got Omicron twice? I believe there were cases with previous Covid varieties, and Omicron is more contagious which should make it more likely, but I don't know if it actually does.
I know of this happening anecdotally to people. However it is likely they had false positives. I am in South Africa, where we apparently have a new B variant of omicron, so maybe that affects things.
I haven't heard of many cases of reinfection within two months of a previous infection. At this point, we are not yet three months out from the identification of Omicron, so there just aren't many people who recovered long enough ago to have much chance of a second infection, if protection is extremely strong for the first two months after an infection.
(That said, quick reinfections may be hard to identify if it's soon enough that someone might think it's just a long first infection.)
I predict that this appeal method: "If you want to appeal any decision, please write up your argument, start a conditional prediction market..." will work great. But not for any reason related to prediction markets.
From a prediction-market perspective it will be a complete failure. We are asking (suspected) trolls to create prediction-market questions on Manifold, but then the troll is the person who adjudicates the outcome. Everyone will reason: "this person is not that interested in the integrity of the prediction market; they are much more interested in rewarding people who help them get above 25% YES, and punishing people who interfere with this. So they're likely to resolve the market for YES regardless of what actually happens." No prediction market will go below 25%.
This will still work fine as a filter for ban appeals, because the effort involved in doing all this prediction-market stuff is so high that nobody will do this unless they're confident Scott will overturn the ban. (It would be much lower-effort to just create a new account.)
It occurs to me that it might be a useful feature for a prediction market to allow the question-submitter to assign resolution-authority to some other account. (With a publicly-visible default resolution if that other account doesn't bother to do anything. "This question will resolve to <no> on <date> unless <third party> takes action.")
This would allow you to create various predictions of the form "I will convince <public figure> of <X>" (provided the public figure already has an account on the site) without the question-creator needing to have their own established reputation to lean on.
Lizardman's constant is a very useful concept. It is quite helpful to understand that a certain percentage of crazy replies to a question are likely to be noise that can be safely ignored.
I get the feeling that now this value is a lot higher in the US, seeing that in all kinds of questionnaires people are required to answer questions that to most people feel ridiculous - e.g. to list pronouns not only for themselves and other grownup members of their family, but also for their infants and toddlers, and to pick their gender out of "Male, Female, Other". I get the feeling - I might be wrong - that having to answer questions that feel ridiculous also causes people to be less responsible about the rest of the questionnaire. I don't have any sense for whether this would extend to questionnaires without such questions.
I'm curious if anyone estimated the current lizardman's constant for questionnaires with and without such questions (since these are probably different numbers), or if someone thinks they know how high it might go.
Hey your question sounds like a shower thought (not a bad thing). Was it?
Idea wouldn't be hard to test with an online questionnaire about some matter that everybody has opinions about. Have 2 versions that are identical except that one contains demographic or other questions with many "ridiculous" options, other contains same questions with conventional options. Have some measure of how many crazy answers there are, maybe variance, compare results for 2 questionnaires.
Yes, I agree that this wouldn't be hard to test. What I was wondering was if anyone already had such data or estimates.
It wasn't a shower thought. It was something that's been bothering me for a while. Since Scott's 2013 post, I've always been aware of the lizardman's constant when looking at poll numbers or other self-reported data. Lately, I couldn't help noticing 1) what seems like ridiculously-looking questions or answer options to reasonable questions; 2) people I know who are not conservative and not troll types coming up with answers that are definitely not expected; 3) me having to spend extra cycles on these questions, which makes me less eager to spend adequate effort on the rest of the form and makes me consider trolling.
Personally, until very recently, I've tried to answer any questionnaire, survey, form to the best of my knowledge. Now I notice that my thought process is going something like this. Ow, not another one of these, can I leave this blank? (The form might not let me - damn web developers.) Am I really supposed to give pronouns for a toddler? Is it "he/him/his" or "he/his/him"? How about I just write "male"? Why don't I just write "N/A" and have them figure this out, or is this already trolling? (I know a statistician who answers "Default", is that trolling?) If I'm already trolling anyway, why don't I write, say, "meow", because, after all, ask a silly question, get a silly answer? What about my gender - it's definitely not "Other", but should I put "Other" for "I don't want you to have any more of my data than you absolutely must", or to troll you for having a silly answer option?
It's a natural guess that people acting like this would contribute to self-reported data containing more invalid answers.
I am aware that the influence of ridiculous questions might be a drop in the bucket, because, as Nancy Lebovitz points out, there's so much bad blood in the society, that people are probably giving a lot of invalid answers even in the absence of ridiculous questions. However, ridiculous questions reach across the aisle to annoy even people who were not initially interested in trolling, so I do think they contribute.
So the natural question is, how much? How much of our data, and what parts of it, are now noise? What part is due to ridiculous questions, and what part to something else?
Not shower thought -- too bad, it was fun to think for a moment I had learned to recognize them. Silly superpower to have even if real, though.
Agree that other things besides ridiculous questions, such as for example bad blood, could be sending people into troll mode. Still, you could test for both the bad blood and the ridiculous question hypotheses by controlling what the questionnaire asks about. For instance, a questionnaire about food preferences seems unlikely to stir up much culture war shit, so if people are giving more crazy answers on the ridiculous question version of the food questionnaire than on the no-ridiculous-questions version, you've got an answer there. Then you could have a similar pair of questionnaires about some divisive question. Anything about covid precautions in the schools currently gives half the people on my state coronavirus Reddit sub a case of rabies, so I suggest that as a topic that would pull strongly for rage-trolling in the answers.
Here's a related thing I often wonder about, both in the shower and out: The issue of the answerability of questionnaire questions. I once participated in a study where at random times during the day my phone asked me to indicate what activity I was engaged in and rate how happy I was. I found the latter very hard to rate. Maybe 10% of the time I was clearly happy or unhappy (usually about a recent or upcoming life event, not about the activity I was engaged in). The rest of the time, I ended up giving the middle rating (0 on a -5 to +5 scale) because I wasn't clearly happy or unhappy, so guessed I was in the middle. While "happiness" was hard to rate, I would have found it quite doable to rate something like engagement -- how interested and committed I felt about the activity I was engaged in. For instance just now, before I started this sentence, I asked myself how happy or unhappy I have been feeling as I wrote this, and felt unable to answer. On the other hand, I feel very clearly engaged and committed in writing this post, and definitely would be displeased if some interruption made me break off writing. I could rate the level of my engagement, too: +3. A positive rating because this is a subject I'm interested in, and I'm satisfied with how I've expressed my thoughts, and I think there's a reasonable chance of getting back an interesting and friendly answer. On the other hand, the whole thing is sort of low-stakes, so not a +4 or +5.
There are some questionnaires -- the Myers-Briggs, is an egregious example -- where I find almost all the questions unanswerable: "Does it bother you more having things (a) incomplete or (b) completed." Well, neither completeness or incompleteness in themselves bother me particularly. My being bothered depends on the things that are complete or incomplete. On questionnaires like the M-B I pretty soon give up on trying to figure out which choice applies to me because the task is impossible. I get sloppy and random. Also *irritated*. If there were some fill-in-the-blank items at the end I'd definitely feel tempted to write a bunch of random, mystifying, insulting stuff.
Sorry, you just happened to run into someone who no longer has shower thoughts. Your superpower might still work on someone who does.
You are making a good point: some questionnaires are annoying for reasons other than ridiculous questions. I just got through a really awful example that wanted all kinds of information I either did not have at hand or no longer had available at all. While doing this, I could feel getting more sloppy with every screen. (This questionnaire is even more annoying than normal because it does not let people skip questions -- and also because you have to save all the time, or else it throws out all of the work if you walk away from the computer to look for info! Believe it or not, some organizations running surveys actually do this to you!)
I would like to believe that there probably is some kind of baseline that can be seen in surveys that are not particularly awful, in particular the ones run by organizations that know that if they annoy people enough, then people will just hang up on them or close the browser tab.
I scanned Gallup and PPP websites for recent polls, but nothing that would be an obvious lizardman's constant estimate jumped out at me.
I don't know about that, but I've heard from a conservative/libertarian person that there's a movement among conservatives to just not answer political polls on the grounds that accurate answers will just be used against conservatives. This might imply that some conservatives are giving inaccurate answers instead.
I'm not just talking political polls here. You get this in all kinds of polls and just about in any piece of paperwork that wants to know anything about you. Enrolling your toddler in daycare? Pronouns for the toddler, please. Registering for a COVID test? Please check if your gender is "Other".
I know people who are definitely not conservative and who have been giving trollish replies to these questions, because "ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer". Lizardman's constant is probably skewed conservative/libertarian at this point, but a number of lefties are getting in the mix as well.
Does anyone have any ideas concerning a mechanism for the "wood wide web"? I keep hearing about how trees use fungal networks to communicate and trade with one another. This comes up in podcasts (e.g., Radiolab, from Tree to Shining Tree), books (e.g., Entangled life by merlin sheldrake), netflix (fantastic fungi). I think scientists injected some radioactive substance into a tree, and then found that substance appeared in the tree's saplings that were connected to the tree via the fungal networks, but not in unrelated trees or unconnected saplings. But in all cases, the authors are vague about how exactly it works.
I gather that the fungi are basically little tubes that connect trees by drilling into its roots. The relationship between fungi and tree is symbiotic. The fungi are better at finding minerals the tree needs like phosphorus, they send these minerals into the trees' roots in exchange for glucose. But suppose a tree wants to send some mineral via a fungal network to a sapling. Of all the different fungi that have drilled into the tree's roots, how does the tree know which is also connected to a particular sapling? And how does the tree ensure that the fungus will pass the minerals on to its sapling, rather than somewhere else?
Is it possible the tree can recognize a "message" from a sapling, and reward the fungus for delivering it? Can trees train fungi that anything sent through one particular point of connection is intended to be delivered to another particular tree? If so, how?
Armchair speculation: I don't think this requires tree-to-tree communication.
Maybe the fungus knows how much phosphorus each tree has; either by directly sensing it, or some signal the trees send. It allocates its phosphorus accordingly. If this results in the fungus itself being short on phosphorus, it pulls phosphorus from whatever trees have an excess.
Still, seems like trees would benefit from being able to "communicate" in a more nuanced way than that about need for minerals -- for instance to advocate for available phosphorus to be sent to its sapling rather than to others, or to *not* be sent to trees that are crowding it. Advantages of more nuanced communication might have nudged tree and fungus evolution in the direction of permitting more nuance. (Meanwhile, the idea of nuanced communication among trees has so much charm and weirdness to it that my mind is constantly nudged in the direction of believing it's there, because if it were I would be thrilled & fascinated.)
Like with most things in biology, if you can imagine it certainly exists in some species.
Realistically though, I'd expect the fungus to promote the growth of everything that plays nice with it and stifle everything that doesn't. Between-tree communications would require the tree somehow manipulating the fungus at a distance? I guess they could "broadcast" their chemical signalling into the network and just let it diffuse.
Begs the question - what makes a 'good' starting word (S.W)?
Follow-up question: Is it optimal to use a standard S.W everyday? Change randomly? Or try to be as different as possible from last day's answer (gambler's fallacy)?
NB I'm about to spoil a lot of Wordle theory, part of the fun of which is surely figuring out for yourself. Don't read if you don't want to know optimal starting words!
I got really into algorithmically solving Wordle a few months ago and have been developing my approach ever since - I think I might be a bone fide expert on this topic!
There is one obvious definition for how a word can be 'good', and this is the sense where it helps you solve the puzzle quickly. There are actually a few possible ways to think about this.
The first - and probably honestly the most straightforward - is to pick the word that helps you guess the puzzle fastest on expectation. Wordle is 'solved', which is to say that for every possible target word it is known how efficiently each possible starting word solves the puzzle. By picking the word which solves the puzzle most efficiently, that's a pretty good case for the 'best' starting word. This word is 'SALET' (a type of helmet), which solves Wordle in 3.421 guesses on average. 'CRATE' and 'TRACE' are also not bad choices (3.424 on average), but feel aesthetically more pleasant to me since they are normal words which could also potentially be the hidden word for the day.
However, I'm not so convinced this is actually the 'best' starting word in terms of human-level performance. It relies on you making the perfectly optimal response to the response grid you get every time, and this might mean two or even three effectively random-looking guesses before you start to hone in on what will eventually be the correct answer. If you play SALET and intend to play optimally you are basically just memorising patterns of response grids and not really 'playing' at all. A more human-tractable way of playing is to try and reduce the search space as far as possible, and the best word for that is 'ROATE' ('the cumulative net earnings after taxes available to common shareholders'). 'ROAST' is not bad if you prefer reasonable words. After playing 'ROATE', you have (on expectation) the fewest number of words remaining which is probably the best possible state that a human could reasonably explore
Another possible definition of 'best' is the word which is most likely to give you hits, because hits are exciting and let you experience the 'fun' part of Wordle which is trying to think about the structure of words and what the hidden word might be. People on reddit like 'ADIEU' for this reason, because all the vowels mean you're almost guaranteed a hit. I don't really like ADIEU much though because the sorts of hit you get aren't really exciting to me ("Oh really, this word has an E in it? Tell me more..."). A nice word for getting hits is 'SOARE' ('a young hawk') and 'SLATE' is not a bad substitute if you prefer 'real' words, although the exact word you want to use the most depends on how you weight greens vs yellows in the response grid.
However my current best starting word is different from all of these - I've played enough Wordle (both 'officially' and as part of testing my algorithms) that I can now almost always beat it in 4, and so the challenge for me is not guessing the word, but guessing the word as fast as possible. To that end, I went looking for the word that is most likely to give almost-unique answer grids. This gives approximately a 10% chance of getting the answer in 2, and if I miss on the second guess I just solve it as usual. The best word for this is 'LATEN' but I prefer to use 'FLIRT' because I think it is showboatier to pick up words which start with F and it is only slightly worse in terms of performance.
There are a couple of other ways you might think of the 'best' word, but I'd consider them cheating. It is trivially easy to check the code of Wordle to find out what the actual word of the day is, and in that sense it is optimal to do this every day. There's a more flash way to do the same thing which is to look at the grids produced by friends and family (or on twitter) and then reason backwards from these grids to what the word must be. For example if you see a grid that begins GGxxx you can be confident that the final word is not 'AHEAD' because there's only one five-letter word that begins AH in the Wordle dictionary - if you do this to enough grids you can get the hidden word pretty much every time. Again, if you can do this it makes for the 'optimal' guess by a long way. I spent about two days trying to solve a set of grids in this way without using a computer and failed miserably, so even though it is a cool solution I think it is still cheating because it has to be computer-assisted.
Thanks. This was great. I absolutely despise the 'ADIEU' approach because it over-optimises for hits. Most of the time forcing the 'unhit' vowels to be used repeatedly in further guesses.
I adopt a similar approach to 'TRACE'. Incidentally, my starting word for a long time was TRICK, so that I extinguish the more comparatively irregular consonants early.
I try to think up a new starter every day (for me the fun of Wordle is picking 5 letter words, and having a starter I use every time is just robbing me of a fun decision), but when I have trouble thinking of one I often use "Haunt"
So, Phil gave a 6 letter word, and two people gave 5 letter words. And a smart person who I told about using "crypto" started by telling me that crypto is a 5 letter word, and realized it's really 6 letters faster than I did.
I should probably lower my estimate of people's numeracy.
Possibly should get its own post, but I believe there's a difference between problem-solving numeracy and spontaneous numeracy. There are some rationalists (and possibly also sff fans) who react to hearing numbers by checking on them.
How long should a caffeine detox last in order to reset caffeine tolerance properly? I learned from Gwern that I could instead take nicotine in order to stay alert, but should I do this for one week? Two? I find it difficult to understand the processes involved and how long they take. So, has ACX done a caffeine detox before, and if so how was it?
I abstained from caffeine for about a year, and while my tolerance did go down significantly, when I started consuming caffeine again it went back fairly quickly to where it was before that.
I've had success taking Modafinil (specifically Waklert and Modalert in 200 mg tablets) to help reduce and regulate my caffeine cravings. My previous routine was wake up at 6am and be utterly incapable of doing anything until about 20 mins after my first coffee, and really only hit my stride after 2nd coffee. My current routine involves an early morning walk (fasted) followed by a light breakfast and Modafinil. I can easily go several hours into my day without needing coffee, and i'm down to 1 cup a day.
Also note that many people who enjoy stimulants prefer Armodafinil to Moda. Both of which can be bought online without much issue.
I once did it successfully using No-Doz, tapering dose gradually over several weeks. An advantage of using No-Doz rather than ever-smaller amounts of coffee is that you eliminate the pleasurable-habit aspect completely from the process: Just switch from coffee to best-estimate equivalent in No-Doz dose on day 1, then start tapering. As I said, I took several weeks, maybe 3 or 4, to complete taper. However, quicker might be possible. I have to be cautious when doing caffeine withdrawal because the headaches it produces turn into migraines for me.
Having green tea in the mornings to stave off withdrawal for ~ a week works best for me when I feel like my tolerance is too high. I find that fully abstaining doesn't 'reset' my tolerance in a detectable way, and it builds back about as fast. Plus the week of suffering isn't worth it for me. I would suggest experimenting for yourself and possibly documenting to see what works best.
Second thing: Taking nicotine to detox from caffeine sounds like a risky proposition, as nicotine is a relatively dangerous substance. If you're not averse to taking risky stimulant drugs off-label (I know, dirty word here), why not just get your hands on some ADHD meds, like Ritalin or Adderall?
3 weeks on 1 week off, to go with my lifting program of 3 working weeks 1 recovery week. I have personally found nicotine to be a shitty stimulant, worse than nothing while I was self medicated for ADHD.
Oh hey, I also self-medicate ADHD with coffee and it works!
I'm in the middle of a caffeine taper because drinking coffee daily gave me some kind of low grade IBS thing, so I need to let the digestive tract rest for a while. It's day two and I envy the dead, so I'd appreciate any tips how to survive the withdrawal. I'm considering reaching for my emergency Ritalin stash just to be functional during the day.
I was able to get off large amounts of caffeine completely in a week, without any substitutions. I cut it off completely, and it was not a pleasant week, but at the end of it all caffeine withdrawal effects were gone. In retrospect I should have taken it slower and had it taper off.
I have also gone from a large amount to a much smaller amount without any ill effects that I noticed; it's reducing it to zero that hurt.
What did he base the 2-3 months time interval on? That's much longer than I had hoped. I wonder if this book (it seems to be very recent) can be found in libraries yet.
I drink large amounts of tea (equivalent of 3-4 coffees a day). Occasionally when my anxiety flares up I stop to rule out caffeine as a factor. I usually find I get a bad headache in the early afternoon the day I give up. Then I drink one coffee, my headache goes, and I carry on completely caffeine free with no further symptoms.
Not sure how long, but you should taper off when quitting to avoid caffeine withdrawal headaches. Like, drop down to one cup of coffee a day, then a cup or two of tea, then maybe a Cola. Nicotine is strongly physically addictive, so look out for that.
Sure, thanks for the advice. I like tea so I would probably enjoy switching to tea as an intermediate step, even if it is just to soften the blow from withdrawal this time.
Every time either here or in a social setting, when anxiety / self-destructive behaviours / neurotic tendencies comes up, there's a chorus of agreement. Is this *actually* that widespread? There doesn't seem to be any real data here, or even a very good way of framing the question.
Am *I* the weirdo for not being particularly anxious or failure-avoidant (which seems to drive a lot of the self-sabotaging behaviour)? Do that many people actually regularly fantasise about spontaneous fame and fortune?
Neuroticism is an axis in the OCEAN model, so... yeah, people are neurotic about as often as they are extroverted, I suppose? It's normally distributed just like everything else, and you seem to be closer to the tail.
Are you suggesting there's some connection between anxiety/self-destruction/neurosis and fantasizing about spontaneous fame and fortune -- like that people who are prone to one are also prone to the other?
I don’t know. I can tell you that I share your feeling of being the odd one out. I’m not anxious or neurotic or mentally ill or neuro-atypical (I’ve had my blue periods, and I have my eccentricities, but who hasn’t/doesn’t?), and being on the internet makes me feel like that is exceptionally strange.
I’m not sure what to make of that. I used to think it was just a curiosity of online spaces, but folks my age and younger seem to be much more anxious and neurotic than what I consider baseline over the last decade, and growing worse. I’m not sure if this is selection bias or if my perception is colored by online life or if this is a real trend.
I'm not sure whether or how anxiety is associated with fantasizing about spontaneous fame and fortune but I can imagine that they might be associated I guess.
I have a very strange relationship to anxiety and neuroticism myself, in that they're pretty much completely absent from me. I think I talked about it in the 'what supposed human universal are you missing' post years ago, but yeah that's missing for me. It took me a while growing up to understand what people meant by anxiety. As a kid I used to think it meant they were waiting for something.
When I mention this to a lot of people, they usually are envious of it, or say something like "that sounds amazing." I do agree that it's mostly a good thing, and I really like being able to not freak out about things in general, but it's not completely without downsides. For example, there are a couple of traffic tickets I recently got that I know I have to pay but I just can't bring myself to care about them. Whenever something goes wrong and it's my fault, it's always something like this.
Disregard, I found it - that's the post that introduced me to the idea that other people *can* casually "read information about status signalling and hierarchy into body language", which was suddenly an explanation for quite a lot in my life (mostly good). I'm otherwise neurotypical / not-autistic, don't have trouble reading emotional or other social cues, just the status stuff.
Failure avoidance and rejection sensitivity are very common issues with ADHD, and I think they're also common with people on the autism spectrum. It may be that your peer group is full of people who are various degrees and varieties of neurodivergent.
I'd +1 that, I'm anxious and failure avoidant and was recently diagnosed with ADHD. It amazing how much calmer I am now that I'm medicated. The other day I got up from my table to find our waitress at a casual restaurant because my wife needed something: in the past I've been too anxious to even flag our waitress down. Its like I can suddenly recognize that most of the things I've been chronically anxious about aren't scary at all.
Tune the alarm bells out with an edible and let’s the visuals flow over you. Mushrooms also work, it’s a body of work that brilliantly skips a stone across history so you can marvel at the modulating surface. Note that two of his films are 100% fact.
Not sure if this is appropriate for an open thread so feel free to delete. Does anyone here have an in with the Polymarket team? I'm looking to get an interview with them.
I'm a member of an Eastern mystery cult that teaches that God came to earth and was poor, ugly, rejected, and killed. We can still mystically eat his flesh and drink his blood, and one day he will return to make us his bride.
I thought the defining feature of a mystery cult was that key pieces of the theology and doctrines were closely-guarded secrets out shared out in pieces to members as they intitiate into the inner circles of trust of the cult.
Modern Christianity generally doesn't have much of this: while there's a ton of theology and doctrines that have built up over the millennia, the scriptures, credos, catechisms, and whatnot are widely available and generally intentionally shared to all comers by the various denominational churches.
Although I suppose there are some major exceptions to this, both historical and contemporary. The Late Medieval Catholic Church, by conducting services in Ecclisastical Latin and resisting efforts to translate the scriptures into vernacular, can be seen as acting substantially like a mystery cult that restricted a lot of info to the clerical class. Similarly, I've been told by ex-Mormons that the LDS Church has a lot of mystery-cult-like behaviors in terms of trying to limit knowledge of certain rituals and doctrines to temple members.
The knowledge of rituals and doctrines is widely distributed. There are a few small details of those rituals which are not widely distributed (though still easy to find online etc.), but they aren't important details. Basically it boils down to, everything in the temple is fine and can be discussed, but the exact hand signals which symbolize the promises we make there should not be shared with others.
I realize that sounds weird. It is pretty weird, but I don't really think it's comparable to a mystery cult. The doctrine is all out in the open, and everything important about the rituals is too.
Scott, have you read the Genetic Lottery by Dr. Kathryn Paige Harden? I'm in the middle of it and finding it extremely stimulating, kind of excavating the intersection of the thorny questions (in that they kick up a lot of feelings, even when the answers are morally clear) of genetics, IQ, meritocracy, progressivism, and its discontents.
Related, wishing there was a bespoke search engine for SSC, ACX, and all the comment threads. And maybe the adjacent blogosphere.
There's a section that pretty clearly says that we should society should behave morally in a way that does not rest on no-evidence for IQ inequality, but I agree she inadequately takes on the possibility of inequality itself.
I'm working on a review/commentary of this book now (unfortunately not in time for the contest) where I want to spend a lot more time on this point. In particular, I find it compelling to consider that all instances of extant and historical discrimination as evidence against scientific racist beliefs - observed inequality is a function of a long causal chain, which, even if it originated in actual IQ inequality (which I strongly doubt, particularly at the granularity of "race"), and even if that inequality is not small compared to the within-group distribution (which I also doubt), is still clearly dominated by the effects of racist power structures.
(But I find the point she DOES make more compelling, that nothing like that could be grounds for people to deserve to have power over each other in any reasonable society.)
The problem with many of those topics is not their validity, but rather the way they interact with motivated reasoning to give bad results. E.g. IQ is a valid measure of something, but what, exactly? Motivated reasoning will look at confusing evidence, and provide a self-justifying answer that is shallowly convincing and wrong.
Probabilistic justice systems are fun! And sometimes scary.
My favourite one is described in a Russian story named “Gusi-Gusi, Ga-Ga-Ga” (it’s an untranslatable onomatopoeia, an imitation of sounds geese make, and also part of a children’s nursery rhyme) by Vladislav Krapivin. He describes a vaguely western utopian society where everyone has a chip which transponds their unique citizen identifier (a “biological index”) and this serves as your ID, medical record, bank account and everything. It also has a very special penitentiary system where every sentence is death. Depending on the conviction, the convict gets some chance of serving, and the court computer “tosses the coin” for them. If the toss is successful, they are executed, if not, they walk away free. Chance is higher for more serious crimes.
The whole story is about a lowly paper-pusher who jaywalks, gets a one in a million chance of serving, and the toss succeeds. He comes to serve his execution, but the only executioner is ill and due to a system error, his biological index is already marked as belonging to an executed man, so he is put in a secret prison for unchipped indexless people, who are except him all children, and becomes their guardian.
In the end, turns out this was all a sick prank by his friend who somehow worked on the court computer. He gets a show trial with 99/100 chance of serving.
The darkly funny part is that in Russia Krapivin is usually understood as a children’s writer, and this story came out in a book with children’s stories. I can only imagine what it feels like when you are reading stories about value of friendship and how cool it is to escape home and build a ship, or something, and then you get hit with this.
This reminds me vaguely of that one episode of star trek with the planet where in lieu of actual wars they run computer simulations of war, but any person marked as a casualty in the simulation has to report to the death pods and die irl.
Kind of remarkable that they came up with that in the 60s, feels like it could be the premise of a black mirror episode.
It is strange that you think that it is odd that science fiction was far-sighted in the 1960's. Technical progress from the 1940's to the late 1960's was arguably faster than it was between 1970 and now. That sort of rapid progress always comes with imaginative sci-fi.
Good point! I guess what I'm trying to say is that the premise feels eerily more plausible or resonant to me in today's world than when I first saw that episode in the 90s, and it was old even back then. IIRC when it came out, people took it as a commentary on the Vietnam war and similar American military adventures–it's easier for people to tolerate or support an overseas war, where they don't see and hear the violence up close, even though real people, even maybe their own relatives and neighbors, are dying. Needless to say, this is still a relevant point today, which is also interesting. But today the technology itself and its implementation, blurring the line between virtual and real worlds, the tyrannical pragmatism, not to mention the death pods, feels uncomfortably relevant as well.
I feel like I vaguely remember getting hit with this when I was reading stories about the value of friendship as a child. Is there a bit at the end where the main character is informed about the friend's 99/100 chances, responds with, "Oh, well, that doesn't seem too bad," and then finds out that it's 99/100 for death and not (as he assumed) 99/100 to go free?
I basically read everything as a child, though, so I don't think I was too traumatized by the probabilistic justice system.
My personal experience was entirely positive. I experienced higher empathy, and greater insight into personal relationships. I was prepped for a positive experience though. In college a coworker on a campus job was doing something like an evangelical promotion of MDMA. He had clipped a number of articles from magazines touting its effectiveness in helping with relationships. He also helpfully provided a sample. I don’t mean that ‘help’ ironically. He was entirely sincere and seemed to be on a mission of some sort.
If you decide to give this a try yourself, you will have to be careful if you are not getting it from an MD. My understanding is that a lot of street MDMA can contain amphetamines or even fentanyl.
One resource for information on therapeutic use is:
I've never done it, but the clinic I work at is very interested in ketamine therapy for depression. My wife has been trying it for postpartum issues: so far it seems helpful? I let you know when she's gone through the whole course of treatment.
Not me, but a friend. She seems to have had good results. She’s tried a lot of things in the past few years for her anxiety, depression and unaddressed trauma from her upbringing. I know she tried MDMA as well as psilocybin and at least one other thing. She said they all create a different background feeling as you work through your issues. I’m not sure what her overall assessment of specifically MDMA as a therapy tool was but I could ask.
I'm curious. I'm not dealing with any trauma to speak of. I'm curious about the experience, and think it might help me with a few things I feel stuck on, but also I really like being me and my general personality, so I'm hesitant to "reroll the dice".
> I'm curious about the experience, and think it might help me with a few things I feel stuck on, but also I really like being me and my general personality, so I'm hesitant to "reroll the dice"
You will never feel more you than when you are on a *correct* dose of MDMA (dosage is key!). It's supercharged-you, where your inhibitions driven by fears and anxieties basically melt away leaving only the pure essence of you.
It's Zen-you, with a mental clarity and compassion that's hard to capture in words. It's what you might be like if you walked into a time dilation chamber where only 45 minutes in the real world passed, while you spent 50 years within and managed to overcome all of the irrational fears, anxieties and other mental obstacles that prevent you from experiencing serenity, compassion for all, and confidence of your worth and place in the world.
This might be a bit hyperbolic, but not as much as you might think. MDMA will certainly give you perspective on attitudes, thoughts and beliefs that may be holding you back.
This is why it's so effective for trauma: it's almost impossible to experience fear, you're left with only your rational evaluation of risks, and it doesn't seem to impair your reason (at correct dosage, again). This enables people suffering from PTSD to rationally re-evaluate and reframe their experiences without triggering the problematic parts of the brain underlying the condition.
Really? I've heard from multiple people including experts on mushrooms that anxiety contraindicated the use of psilocybin. Although in a medical context perhaps a lot of the failure-modes associated with tripping as an anxious person would be controlled for.
I'll have to double check then, I might have gotten that wrong: still, my understanding is that bad anxiety can be treated with psilocybin in a therapeutic environment with a trained practitioner: all by yourself, you're liable to make it worse.
About the prediction-market-based reviews: Maybe I'm overlooking something, but wouldn't this just be a voting, and if the results correlate with probabilities then they only do so because Scott likes prediction markets?
It's a hybrid market, and (at least in theory) it will work fine. The price is dependent on two variables: whether Scott picks the book (which is under his control) and whether Scott likes the book (which is what he wants predicted). There is an incentive to bid up both "books you want Scott to review" and "books you think Scott will pick and like" - but no incentive to bid up a book that Scott will pick and not like.
The key bit is that it isn't a guarantee that Scott reviews the book, so what he is really asking, in a sense, is whether or not it is both a book he would review (don't tie up resources betting on a contest that won't happen), and if he did, whether that review would be successful.
The first part is strongly endogenous (= he might review it to make the prediction come true because he likes prediction markets), the second part is partly endogenous.
I don't exactly get this, either. If a prediction market is "I think this is the most likely outcome so I bet $X on it", then participants should be looking at the list of books, considering what books Scott has previously reviewed, then estimating "Y is the genre of book Scott reviews most" or "Z seems like a topic Scott would really like to cover".
But this one *sounds* like "which book would you like me to review next?" so why a prediction market rather than a straight vote?
Is this an answer to Deiseach's question (which I also have)? Because if so it didn't work, at least not for me. I don't feel answered. (But I dunno, Deiseach may be feeling clarified and grateful for it.)
There's some pretty significant differences with voting
- If I like team A, but think it's more likely team B will win, I'll vote for team A, but bet on team B.
- There is a downside to participating (you may lose your money). There is no downside to voting even if your team loses.
- Most voting systems operate on a basis of 'one person, one vote'. In prediciton markets you can increase your influence over the result (price?) based on your level of confidence.
However, in this specific case it seems to me that it is not clear how large the influence of an exogenous factor is. It seems to me there is a risk that if Scott likes prediction markets and wants them to be "predictive", he can make them predictive, and this may happen via his writing enthusiasm (maybe subconsciously). If this effect is strong enough, then this becomes a Keynesian beauty contest or a self-fulfilling prophecy (or more technically, the shares for some book review become strategic complements).
That doesn't mean the two variables are not related, just that the correlation is less than perfect. There would be a strong relation between the two within a single participant and that would most likely translate to a strong correlation over your entire dataset (given enough participants)
In response to the proposal to read "A Clinical Introduction To Lacanian Psychoanalysis": There are things like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy that resemble psychoanalysis and have research apparently showing they are good for something. It seems to me that ideas that have research purporting to show they work should be investigated before ideas that have no such research. So learning more about Lacan is useful if either: Lacan's approach has research claiming that it works (I haven't found any), or we're out of competing ideas that have research claiming they work.
Otherwise, any fool can make a pile of vague ideas. If we then randomly fixate on them, that's a bad use of our time.
We've discussed CBT on here previously while we haven't had a go at Lacanian psychoanalysis, therefore I'd be more interested in the novel topic than round 59 of "CBT: fad or genuine cure?"
Do we have actual first hand reports from people who found it useful?
(My point isn't that we should limit our attention to first hand reports. My point is that the particular report I came across was second hand and uninspiring, and I would be more interested in reading first hand reports.)
Found a negative first hand report: Dylan Evans couldn't make sense of Lacan either, despite writing a book on the subject and attempting to make a career out of doing Lacanian psychoanalysis. He describes his journey in "From Lacan to Darwin", which is 16 pages. http://freudquotes.blogspot.com/2016/02/dylan-evans-lacans-ideas-are-hopelessly.html?m=1
That was an interesting read! Thanks for the link - I like how he still shows some sympathy for Lacan and Freud, given their historical circumstances, while ultimately rejecting their ideas as unscientific
I have always been deeply drawn by evolutionary models, and I have worked a bit in the field ~10years ago, but then got sidestepped and involved in other businesses.
Nowadays everyone seems interested in deep models trained with gradient descent, and few people are considering alternative optimization approach. In my tool, a population of agents is compteting for food. Agents have a NN coded by a genome which is under the influence of natural selection. Depending on their environment setup, they could develop all kinds of behaviour. I will soon add sexual reproduction which will really spice things up.
With EvoAgent I plan to build the tool to simulate a wide variety of evolutionary phenomena (see the future project section in link above). I also plan to use this as a experimental/modelling suite for testing evolutionary hypothesis about populations. Who knows, maybe I'll manage to publish a couple of papers with this tool.
If anyone is interested in collaborating/donating, please follow the link or contact me (email in the page, or just comment here).
Have you considered having reproduction be a decision made by the organism itself (with an associated cost) rather than something that occurs automatically at fixed intervals? You could even explore having the parent choose how much of its energy to invest in the offspring, to see if you can elicit K and R selection strategies.
' reproduction be a decision made by the organism - having the parent choose how much of its energy to invest in the offspring'
Great idea, I'll add it to the future project list!
I have tested an idea of difficult vs easy vs fluctuating environemnts (where easy=a lot of food tokens, difficult=less tokens). My intuition was that agents would develop to be better hunters in fluctuating envs. This was connected with the idea that we h sapiens evolved in a time of oscillating ice ages. In the end it doesn't seem to make a massive difference: with a easy environment, the env can sustain more agents, so each agent has more competitor. With difficult env you have less agents but also less food. Overall the "food per agent" quantity stays costant across these different environments! I'll write a blog post about it.
I also really need to focus on extending the available mechanism. The "visual" system is really primitive, and each agent only see the closest food token within it's field of view. Really they should be able to recognize other agents. I am thinking about a good and computationally efficient solution to this.
"My intuition was that agents would develop to be better hunters in fluctuating envs." The classical view in ecology is that an important factor is the probability of random mortality (random in the sens that agents can not adapt to it. A classical example is a temporary pond drying out which kills aquatic flies). If it is high enough, the best strategy will be to heavily discount the future and invest all available resources in a large number of copies of yourself.
That's very interesting, I have never found that view (but it does sound plausible). Is it too much to ask for some reference to it, so I can delve deeper? A quick search on the web didn't produce the relevant results
It is the r/K strategies that were mentioned above. It is an oldish ecology theory which is a bit too simplistic but it does explain many differences between species strategies.
What do people think about representing the actual practice of ruling in a strategy game? Not anemically like Royal Court in CK3 but robustly? Turn based obviously so that complex things don't disrupt flow. You'd have feasting and court, probably itinerant court as was more common in history, hunts and tournaments. Not quite a social calender but close. Personal relationships that are potentially strong, multi-generational loyalty/friendship. With a backdrop similar to a map game but maybe with more flexible diplomatic options.
So you might host a social occasion of some kind, costing money, resources, and time, but potentially helping you connect with vassals personally and impress them. Invite people, snub people. Etc.
Sort of like mixing a sim rpg into the broad context of a fully functional map painter.
The games by A Sharp, King of Dragon Pass and Six Ages: Ride like the Wind, try something like that. You play a clan in a fictional version of the bronze age, and the game works very hard so that you have to think like an actual person from that era.
In your decisions, you have to consider the time of year, the traditions, religion and the relationships both in your clan and with other clans. You have a clan council that will give you good advice in general, but the different council members often have different opinions, so you have to think for yourself whose advice you should follow.
Both games are truly unique. I think I can recommend starting with Six Ages, as the difficulty is much lower than King of Dragon Pass, even though they share the same mechanics.
I've played KoDP and it was pretty good given when it was made. Beat it a couple times. Basically a visual novel with a little bit of resource management. The lore and art was quite fun.
"Yes, Your Grace" is a game that seems to be all about holding court. I haven't played it, so I'm not sure if it has the things you're looking for, but it might be worth checking out.
That sounds like a good idea, what I've picked up about royal progresses reading up on the Tudor court is that they served multiple functions.
(1) Running the royal household was vast, expensive, and consumed a lot of resources. When the king and selected courtiers went off on the summer progress, this permitted restocking, cleaning and any necessary repairs, new building, decorating, and hiring/firing servants. By calling in on a round of royal castles and local dignataries on a circuit, this spread the expense of maintaining the court.
(2) It also meant avoiding places where sickness had broken out, e.g. the sweating sickness in London which broke out in regular bouts and seemed to be pretty fatal - one case being Thomas Cromwell's wife, who seemed fine when he left in the morning and was dead before he returned home in the evening. Going on progress also meant that depending on the monarch's interests, he could be entertained by chances for hunting, hawking, riding out, courtly entertainments laid on by his hosts, visiting local beauty spots, and so on.
(3) It allowed the rise and fall of favourites; if the king invited you, or you wangled your way into the progress, this was good. Necessary ministers/courtiers stayed behind (somebody had to run the country) but being disinvited or not included, if you didn't have the excuse of high office, was a sign you weren't yet in favour or were falling out of favour. If you had fallen out of favour, getting on the progress was a means of gaining access to the king and winning back his favour.
(4) It was a political statment. Because mass media didn't exist, the only times the subjects got to see the king (and queen, if she accompanied him) was on such progresses. In times of turmoil or unrest, making a big visible appearance with all the calculated pomp and ceremony could settle down the unruly:
"The western progress and visitation in 1535 had still wider significance. When the North rose in rebellion a year later, nearly bringing down the regime, the equally traditionalist West Country and border country with Wales beyond it remained quiet. They had been gratified by the royal presence but will also have noted how closely King and minister were aligned, and that the principal secular hosts in Gloucestershire and Wiltshire were gentry openly identified with evangelical reformation. In these regions, the traditional fiction which sustained English rebellions – that the King was ignorant of his evil ministers’ conduct – was difficult to sustain. (MacCulloch, Diarmaid. "Thomas Cromwell").
The king could also check up - is the local lord charged with defending these borders doing a good job or not? are our ports/ships/forts in good condition? if we need to raise a military force, how much from here and of what quality?
Yeah so basically all of these factors are simulated in some way. I got really into this concept when I was like 11-12 and reading the Majipoor series by Robert Silverberg. Karl Franz does a Grand Tour in Warhammer Fantasy as well. I think I haven't seen a ton of this in more modern fantasy/sci-fi. Like Sanderson and such. But every once in a while you see it.
I think it would be a challenge to make something that's both accurate and fun to play. Just about any mediaeval strategy game follows certain conventions (pikes "counter" cavalry, arrows do full damage at maximum range etc.) that make for good gameplay but are historically inaccurate. Also, and Brett makes this point at the end of his post (link above), "the actual practice of ruling" is very dependent on the place and time - what would go down well in a Byzantine court might not be so good in an Abbasid one, and that's not just the name of the God involved.
While we're here, can I plug siderea's old series on Watership Down as an exploration of the Jungian archetype of the King? https://siderea.livejournal.com/1212245.html Worth reading for any aspiring game developer who wants to do something like this - if there is some overarching theme of what makes a good ruler, that's where you might find it.
I've read ACOUP, due to a recommendation a couple months ago, but that wasn't the driving force of the post. If anything I think he gives way too much credit to Paradox in his discussions of them.
While I haven't played it myself I hear a recent game called Suzerain does a very good job at representing the very personal nature of political power that most games gloss over. It is a visual novel masquerading as a strategy game, which is probably not what you're looking for, but it uses the trapping of strategy gaming to draw the player in to a tense and desperate personal struggle for political legitimacy in a time of crisis for a county.
I think that to do the concept justice you would have to simulate a bunch of things in the background and then only have them interact with the player via diagetic interface. You'd of course need some system to track how the kingdom itself is doing (with the nobles and courtiers often actively hiding or withholding this information from the king), and another for managing the international situation. You'd also need a system (probably built along the lines of Shadow of Mordor's nemesis system) to track the relationships between the upper nobles and courtiers, and to generate intrigues.
Then there would be more simple random or simple arithmetic components. One would be a system for generating confounders or events (religious revivals, plagues, environmental catastrophes and so on). Another would be a system for generating heirs and managing personal relationships at court. I imagine that spouses, courtiers and councillors would be generated and forwarded by the nemesis-type system, but would then be managed by something more like a relationship/dating sim.
So, totting it all up: two full-fledged strategy games (one domestic, one international), a complex rivalry simulator and a dating sim - all of which are layered and interacting with each other, and most of which is invisible to the player. A fully-realised court life simulation looks like a tall order on this basis.
Almost all gamers insist on a superhumanly competent intelligence (and logistics, financial, etc, etc) network, which is going to make this an extremely niche game and probably not profitable to develop.
He means that gamers riot when stuff like tax income, ministers' opinions of you, etc. is uncertain. Real people behaved like this too, hence practices like tax farming where a lower average tax income (since the middlemen take a large cut) was an acceptable trade-off for it being consistent and known in advance.
Strategy gamers in particular like to do calculations, and while randomness is sometimes acceptable the odds need to be known; you'd probably have better luck appealing to a different crowd who are more focused on the role-play
Okay just the whole perfect information fetish gamers have. The wording was comfusing me.
So you can do calculations Paradox style. It isn't like Star Dynasties which even I savescummed hard because of the horrible blue=100, red=0, yellow=1-99 percentage system.
I've actually been getting thoughts from people on certain stuff related to that. Basically you have hard numbers for everything and the tooltips tell you where that comes from. So it might be like the hidden factors are still visible but you don't know where they come from. I have a few different variations of stuff I asked about in various forums/reddits/discords.
When you click a button to do some action there isn't, in most cases, a big unknown about whether it works or you wasted your time or resources or w/e.
I mean in a dating sim you have most pre-written events and results and a bunch of other stuff like that. But otherwise sure. You have to build and maintain relationships with individuals and families/houses. Something like KoDP or CK2 but with more detail and possibility space.
I mean Academagia for example is a school sim/visual novel type thing but not a dating sim so that would be more the comparison I'd make. Building up your clique as your party is called in that game. Or doing support convos in Fire Emblem but not as stilted and pre-written.
If you haven’t read it, you might want to read ACOUP’s take on Royal Court, where the author talks about how vital the court work was to a medieval ruler.
I've read it but Paradox has been a running disappointment to me since it was recommended to me early after the release of CK2. They play at being a sim but it is very shallow. Not that it can't be fun or is terrible but it is more of a small step than a giant leap.
The news about Vicky3 hasn't been great lately. I'm still cautiously optimistic but not hyped. The recent buildings/canal diary and dev comments have been very disappointing.
I was delighted by an aside in one of Scott’s recent posts where he described his longtime daydream of being a famous musical performer. I had just been telling someone that since I’ve always struggled with quantitative subjects, when I fantasize about being someone else I usually daydream about being a brilliant physicist or mathematician. So now I’m wondering: in what fields do other readers of this blog dream about being fabulously successful?
Poetry writing. But in my daydreams the fabulous success is in how great my poems are, and how wonderfully free I feel to scoop up deep intuitions and access wild and weird skills to conjure words from them. I don't imagine money or fame -- just a few dozen friends who love my work and enjoy the hell out of it. I remember the day I got over daydreaming about fame. I'd read a piece I loved and admired. And then I thought, so if I was a famous and admired writer, that's what it would be. There would be a bunch of people having about my work the feeling I'm having about this one. Just the interest of a bunch of me's -- that's what fame would be. And I was sort of over "fame" from then on. It was as though, until I sort of deconstructed it for myself, I thought fame was *more* than having lots of me's deeply enjoy a piece of my work -- it was something like being seen by the eye of God or Eternity, and becoming a new and more permanent and glorious sort of being myself.
When I daydream about personal success, I mostly daydream about being rich. On my internal hierarchy of needs I seem to care a lot more about money than status. The idea of fame makes me a bit nervous: my ideal career is Gary Larson's. Enough fame to acquire enough money to retire and do whatever I want in obscurity for the rest of my life.
Given the very small but non-zero chance of nuclear weapon exchange (mostly considering Putin's threats which stated it explicitly) and conditional on that, a sub-50% but still significant chance of attacking population/economic centers and not just tactical targets, has anyone in big cities in the US or other targets made some adjustments accordingly?
Adapting behavior to fluctuating covid risks is much easier than adapting behavior to an 0.05% chance of a successful nuclear strike on Boston, although the expected risk is comparable.
Has anyone here considered the practical aspects? Stocking on supplies, triggers to move somewhere else?
The only adjustment I've made is creating a plan in case it happens. I live in a city that has a decent chance of getting nuked in a war with Russia or China: right now my plan is that if war breaks out or seems imminent I'm going to send my kids to live with family in Idaho for a while. I've already asked my family down there if that's okay, and they're fine with it. Other than making that plan, I'm not going to put more money or time into preparations.
Aside from maybe getting some iodine tablets (I already have food and water storage), there's not really many adjustments I could make that wouldn't be too huge a response to a pretty low probability threat.
Is it just me or is substack's comment linking system too bad to be able to actually find the comments people were banned for? most of the given links are to Scott saying "user was banned for this" without showing the parent comment; the "return to thread" button on them takes me to nothing in particular and i cannot search for either Scott's comment mentioning banning or the username of the person banned.
i guess it doesn't really matter, it's just sort of morbid curiousity. but if Scott's intention is to show off the kinds of things people get banned for around here, it's not working, at least for me.
Huh, on my side I'm able to hit a "Show" button on a "user was banned for this" comment and it becomes visible, is this something that only admins can do?
Some of the links (eg the Johnny Fakename one) appear to be to your comment announcing the ban rather than the original comment. I also can't find his comment with a Ctrl-F on "fakename".
some of the links had that, others did not. e.g. this is a screen capture of what i see when i click on the link for "Naked Emperor" https://i.imgur.com/7gOrtWT.png
I don't understand. When I have searched by username I see a non-collapsed list of comments, which I can move through jumping from post to post for the user I'm searching for. I see the user's full posts, and can scroll upwards or downwards at will from each after I land on them.
The issue is that currently under some circumstances and for at least some of us, comment threads are loading with all non-top-level comments collapsed by default. This stops Ctrl-F from working properly unless everything is tediously expanded.
For me the circumstance is "Open Thread's comment section" (as opposed to "Open Thread post, with comment section following", which loads properly). This "comment section only" view happens to be what the backlink from a "view individual comment" goes to (rather than directly to the post), hence the difficulty encountered when following the links Scott gave (which are all to individual comments, some to the banned comment and some to Scott's own comment).
I was just listening to a neuroethology podcast about mate attachment mechanisms (Huberman Lab episode 59, "The science of love, desire & attachment). Huberman began by saying that the brain uses the same systems for pair bonding as for familial bonding, which I found surprising and a little icky, but anyway. Part of this system, which is very active during sex, is called the autonomic matching system, which tries to match emotional state with another person (and I suppose ideally leads to simultaneous orgasms).
Then he mentioned John & Julie Gottman's "love lab", where they studied the behavior of couples and learned (they claim) to predict with very high accuracy whether couples will eventually break up. (Debunking of their work here: https://slate.com/human-interest/2010/03/a-dissection-of-john-gottman-s-love-lab.html. TLDR: they didn't make predictions; they waited long enough for some couples to break up, then built a model which "predicted" breakup. But no hold-outs or cross validation; no testing the model on anybody not used to construct the model.) But I don't think the "debunking" means that the behaviors they found predicted breakups most strongly don't, in fact, predict breakups. I think it just means we shouldn't take their "accuracy" figure seriously.
One of the strongest predictors of breakup (Huberman may have said "the strongest"; anyway, it was the one he singled out to discuss) was contempt, which he described as the "inversion" of the autonomic matching system. If person B feels contempt for person A, then when person B detects that X pleases person A, person B feels disgust for X rather than shared pleasure in X; and likewise is pleased by things that displease A.
Huberman didn't say whether anyone had verified that contempt uses the same neural circuits as autonomic attachment; but it would be redundant to build a second brain mechanism for contempt if it does just invert attachment. Particularly since there's no obvious /purpose/ for a dedicated contempt mechanism.
Presumably there is some adjustment, probably involving neurotransmitters, which ratchets attachment up. Perhaps contempt is a side-effect of this system: sufficiently low attractiveness adjusts a "match output" signal down so far that it produces repulsion.
If so, then contempt, human tribalism, and the generation of, and stability of, 2-party political systems, could be explained as a by-product of this brain mechanism for mating and simultaneous orgasms.
I think this theory would predict that status and sexual desirability should correlate with political agreement. So, for instance, people in a community would attune themselves politically with the high-status people they know, and should be biased to agree with high-status people and to disagree with people they perceive as low-status. Likewise, people should be biased to perceive people in an opposing political party as lower-status, and people in their party as higher-status.
A problem for this theory is that people have lots of relationships with people they don't regard as potential mates, and my impression is that they don't form revulsion as easily for people who aren't presenting as potential mates. Many people are happy to be friends with people who would repulse them as mates. But if non-potential mates provide no signal, while potential mates provide a signal, that should give signals strong enough for the entire population to divide into opposing belief systems.
I'm familiar with the Gottman research. Have not read the slate debunking, but assume it must have hinged on the fact that the power of after-the-fact "predictions" made in studies like these are invariably highly inflated because folded into them is a lot of purely coincidental correlation. For ex., let's say you look at 20 couples, 7 of whom ultimately divorced, and what distinguishes them. Even if you look at completely stupid variables that cannot possibly have anything to do with marital harmony, you will be able to come up with a formula that "predicts" breakup: For ex., maybe the couples that broke up differed from those that did not in how many letters were in the wife's middle name, husband's hair color, whether last digit of wife's social security number was odd or even. But try using a formula employing those variables on a new set of couples and it will have zero predictive power. Upshot regarding Contempt and the other Gottman variables is that they are actually not very strong predictors of relationship satisfaction and stability. Really bummed me out.
I heard a (probably apocryphal) story about a someone asking a Nobel-prize winning physicist what he thought of psychology. He replied "y'know I have a lot of respect for psychology -- imagine how hard particle physics would be if all the particles could think!"
So too with any science of higher complexity (such as relationshipology) in my opinion. Beware of Huberman on such topics.
That said, it seems to me that feelings are like hunger -- they indicate, sometimes hyperbolically, unmet needs necessary for health. Sometimes these needs are for material things like food. Other times they are indicate a need for abstract things like respect (anger) or social connection (sadness).
On this theory, contempt is there for a reason, and from personal experience, it indicates a an unmet need for fair treatment -- esp someone not treating you the way they would want or expect to be treated if in your shoes. Sometimes this is because the other person is actually acting like they're better than you. Sometimes it comes from your own misinterpretations and prior baggage.
Regardless, getting you out of such situations seems (to me anyway) sufficient explanation for the existence of contempt.
If people want to read along, I think this be will be a much more enjoyable way to read probably the world's greatest novel and a cool social reading experiment besides.
I’ve read it five or six times. [just this once - Not a joke]
Something about the angle of the sun at my latitude makes me pull it of the shelf in February. I hadn’t grabbed it this year. Yet.
You’ll never be able to eat a slice of cucumber without thinking of the Eucharist when you’re done. When Leo wants to talk about God and man he likes the bee\beekeeper metaphor.
It may interest you to know that AK (like nearly all great Russian novels) was originally published serially (in this case over the course of 2.5 years), and so never meant to be binged. My hunch is that binging it corrupts the dramatic timing -- you probably don't watch your movies on fast forward for a similar reason. Hopefully, then, the slow drip will be much more engaging, enjoyable, and most importantly, more manageable.
You know those times when you're futilely checking all your feeds for something interesting to read? I build a website for that last week: www.ReadSomethingInteresting.com. Would love to hear feedback or suggestions. If y'all enjoy, I'll put more links on.
Really cool, would definitely make use of this when I'm looking for a more virtuous way to take a break on the internet -- but I second the question posed by Ozarth, how did you determine what to put in there? It seems like some fields are favoured pretty heavily whereas others are completely absent. Can an individual modify the pool that articles are drawn from to align more with their own interests?
I've just tried your site and just wanted to say thank you, I really like it! Aside from the occasional ad block (on my completely untouchable by me work computer, so not your fault), it works really well and has already sent me down a couple of rabbit holes.
Just a question - how did you determine what to put in there? Is it like a randomized 'reading list'?
This is pretty cool and I'll be bookmarking it for later, but the "Read another link" button doesn't seem to be working - it just refreshes the iframe of the current link. Refreshing does bring up new links. (Firefox 97.0.1, uBlock Origin extension installed if that matters)
Also, I would _really_ like to see SSL/TLS security!
As an update to my versusgame adventure, I attempted to withdraw my winnings. I was presented with a $200 weekly withdrawal limit which I had not been informed of when signing up or depositing. I attempted to withdraw the maximum and was confronted with an error page telling me to try again on 2/22. However it appears that the weekly limit functionality will not let me attempt to withdraw at all until 2/26. I checked around and it appears that other users are having similar issues.
If it wasn't clear already, I strongly recommend everybody stay away from this platform. Fortunately I don't have too much on there but I do hope I am able to get it out eventually.
I don't suppose substack would allow you to create a new subscription tier that is $1 for 3 days, or $0.10 for seven-ish hours? A $10 gift seems like it would have to be a pretty stellar comment.
Maybe a version of 'reddit gold' here would have the same issues as upvotes and also other issues.
On the other hand, if we really ran with this, and integrated manifold, maybe people could solicit patronage in advance, with a promise to make quality contributions to future comment threads.
How do you tie such a promise to a measurable outcome to resolve the question though? I think you'd need a karma system to point to, which the community has already strongly voted against.
I object to the Give Gift option. How many users would even want to receive it? Many are already subscribers, some may not want to be a subscriber, and a hell of a lot of users do not need a $10 scholarship. Seems mostly like a way of giving money to Substack -- money must go to Substack whether the user wants or needs it or not.
(It seems that) you can only Give Gift to people who are not currently subscribers. At least the option only appears for some commenters. It really looks like some kind of scholarship, not like a genuine "more of this comment please" incentive, since it's impossible to award to subscribers. I also don't know whether anything would change to inform readers that a specific comment got the Gift.
Stripe fees (which are themselves a product of credit card fees) make $0.1 transactions impossible and $1 transactions impractical - https://stripe.com/pricing
I think the bigger obstacle is that it's hard to aggregate small-amount transactions, e.g. batch them as a single larger transaction as Patreon once did.
I agree, there's a weird barrier to microtransactions.
I think 7-8 years ago people were excited for bitcoin to solve this, but it wasn't really designed to, and now its tx fees are significantly larger than most microtransactions.
If only there was a way to pool fake internet points and eventually cash them out for real money.
It would solve a lot of problems (while creating so many new ones).
This would be much more of an involved substack suggestion, but maybe rather than a smaller subscription tier they could allow a charitable contribution from a list of charities defined by the writer as a pseudo reddit gold system.
3) The resource cost for rating comments means nobody will rate except for people who are really passionate, which would not be representative,
4) The resource cost for rating comments means commenters could spam comments and get different results,
5) The edit functions mean commenters could lie about results here, swapping good and bad comments, or bad with better content,
6) No guarantee a commenter will judge a poorly rated comment fairly (though I think the reputational hit might matter... but if this is normalized for hundreds of comments maybe they sneak one or two frauds in and nobody catches them),
7) Maybe this is (1) again, but self-adjudicating questions are weird singularities where the equilibrium is to drive it all the way towards whichever extreme it's already pointed at, it's like the worst possible echo chamber, or get a mob to suddenly flip it completely the other way, it's just... behavior is dominated by artifacts not the object level question.
I think if I were reading the above comment fresh I might vote down, ha.
Sometimes it's useful to try a broken proof of concept you can build off of though. The goal here would be to figure out a system where prediction markets could rate the quality of comments, which would give you the ability to use a second market to pledge your quality contributions, which would induce patronage for commenting.
Which is admittedly a pretty silly idea, but it's weird enough and feels just close enough to solvable that I find it really compelling.
This video is a two hour overview of the 2008 crash, crytpo, and NFTs. I'd been getting annoyed at youtubers who fill time with banter and repetition. Be careful what you ask for. This is quite an efficient video. (Well, efficient about bitcoin and NFTs., I'm not sure who the 2008 crash is connected to them.) You might want to listen in small chunks or read the transcript.
I went into this mildly pro-crypto. My feeling is that there are things wrong with fiat currency, though not so bad that fiat currency needs to be replaced. Hyperinflation is rare, but it's very bad when it happens. Sanctions can unjustly impoverish societies and don't work very well. Not everything that's illegal should be illegal.
However, crypto being generally valuable is dependent on it being useful for small transactions, and that doesn't seem to be happening, and it may be impossible for it to happen unless there's some major inspiration for a new structure.
Anyone want to argue that crypto is a valuable addition to the financial world?
I've seen crypto called a Ponzi scheme, and I'm not sure it started that way. It may have become one. Thoughts?
For a while, I was thinking "There's a lot of silly money out there. Why shouldn't I get some of it?" And I came up with TulipCoin (I think the name is taken), with the idea being to market it honestly-- "This is ridiculous, you could have fun spending money doing something ridiculous." However, my attention went to a tulip-breeding game to attract attention to the site. Maybe I should just work on a tulip-breeding game. I'm clearly not of the temperament to swim with the sharks.
If crypto and NFTs collapse, what effect would that have on the rest of the economy? If we're lucky, the apparent value is fairy gold which can disappear harmlessly. In a follow-up, Olsen says he thinks that a collapse of crypto will probably be harmless, but he doesn't know whether there's a hidden risk like some banks being substantially invested in crypto.
I'm dubious about the end of the video. I have trouble keeping track of my own subconscious, and I've become dubious about anyone's claims about large numbers of people's subconscious motivations.
Recently, I was writing about 1 Corinthians 13, and how there's no substitute for love, or at least good will. I think part of the problem with crypto is that it's an effort to substitute structure for trustworthiness, and if you've got deeply untrustworthy people, you just can't have machines supply your trustworthiness. Actually, I look at crypto and NFTs, and I wonder how anyone is making and selling anything that isn't crap. I think ethics and conscientiousness in the real world haven't been studied enough.
If the trustworthiness problem isn't substantially solved, I'm dubious about uploading one's consciousness into a computer. I was dubious about it anyway because I'm not sure you can get a person without a body, but even if you can, it may not be worth it if it's constantly under attack.
Crypto and NFTs seem to be extremely scammy ecosystems. There have been scammers and suckers for a very long time. Does it get worse when times are bad?
Paypal is offering to do $1 transactions in crypto, both buying and selling. I have no idea whether this works or makes any sense. While Paypal is unreliable (they can take your money at any time,and sometimes they do), I don't want it taken down unless something better is available.
I was pretty bearish on most crypto as anything but an investment vehicle, but the Canadian government stopping two different crowdfunding platforms from funding the Truck Protests, followed by freezing all their bank accounts, has caused me to update my priors on how valuable cryptocurrencies will be in the future. A currency that the government can't stop could actually be very useful.
I saw the documentary too, and I agree it's very well done although I had to watch it in chunks (and the part on the 2008 crash, while I get where he was going, was the weakest part).
To that I would add the recent (short) post over on ACOUP:
He's approaching it from a historical perspective, namely that state power wouldn't tolerate crypto actually being successful in its stated goal as a decentralized financial system, even if it did work.
And then, as another commentator mentioned, I will point to the Ottawa convoy, which has already resulted in the Federal Government declaring an emergency in order to, among other things, more easily freeze crypto assets, and already courts are going after the crypto:
(the "secret" aspect of the lawsuit there is a bit overblown, it's fairly routine for asset freezing as far as I understand).
Maybe someone with a better technical understanding might see a way around this, but now that a government has serious interest in regulating crypto transactions, it seems like it will expose crypto's inability to function as a real alternative to fiat currency (which of course have also been quickly frozen for convoy backers).
I think the point of the connection to the 2008 crash was to explain why there is a large group of people so entirely disenchanted with the financial/political system that they are willing to pump their money into something (anything?) that promises to be more 'fair' for ordinary people.
I feel like there are a small number of people in the crypto community who are genuinely working towards an admirable goal, but are running into:
- fundamental problems with the technology (transaction rates/costs, environmental concerns with proof of work, tension between privacy, accountability and anonymity)
- the small number of genuine advocates being totally outnumbered by criminals, scammers, and enthusiasts who don't really understand the tech or philosophy
- the absolute knowledge that the financial giants are watching very closely and the first hint that crypto will genuinely start to replace the current international system will see crypto ground to a very fine paste
I still have some hope for blockchain being a useful technology in some widespread application, but I haven't seen anything yet. It sure as hell isn't as a catalogue for bad art.
I don't have much hope for cryptocurrencies, if for no other reason that the main advantage (trustless decentralisation) is completely against the interests of power and capital. You'd need the revolution first, and I don't think that would end well.
I thoroughly enjoyed this video, however my gut feel is that about 60% of the content in this video was straw manning.
For example
"However, crypto being generally valuable is dependent on it being useful for small transactions, and that doesn't seem to be happening, and it may be impossible for it to happen unless there's some major inspiration for a new structure."
How this guy managed to make a video like this and get something like this so wrong is beyond me. I can only assume he took a very disciplined breadth-first approach and didn't go very deep on any specific topic.
Concretely I'm referring to his lack of mentioning a) Bitcoin's segwit and taproot upgrades and b) L2 solutions such as the lightning network.
For example, yesterday I sent someone a 0.00000010 BTC payment and the fee was 0.00000001 BTC over lightning.
That counts as a small transaction in my books.
If you don't like lightning, fine. A few days ago I sent someone $50 on layer 1 BTC and the fee was $0.20
Anyway yeah, I felt like a lot of the content in this video was based on 7 year old information. Bitcoin is the most robust monetary network ever created (as in you can't stop or censor transactions) and it can scale really well now.
It could use some additional privacy features to make it more cash-like, but I'm confident that's coming..
This is very tentative, but I believe the big cost of transactions is related to the size of the blockchain. Would there be a cheaper way of having small chains hanging off the central blockchain, with some reliable way to check them against each other?
Another very tentative idea. I believe the high cost of the blockchain is the need to verify every transaction every time. Could it make sense to verify a random subset of transactions on the assumptions that problems will get caught, just not as quickly?
But then you're not transacting on the blockchain, you're transacting on the Lightning Network. So then you have to trust the Lightning Network as much as you trust the blockchain. And why should you do that if it doesn't have the trustless and decentralised nature of the blockchain?
"A few days ago I sent someone $50 on layer 1 BTC and the fee was $0.20"
And what would that price be (or how long would the wait be) if you had to compete with 10^8 other transactions daily instead of 10^5 (ie if Bitcoin handled some reasonable proportion of total daily transactions)?
"Bitcoin is the most robust monetary network ever created"
No point being robust if you can't handle a reasonable transaction volume, as far as being "generally valuable" is concerned, otherwise you're just niche.
"It could use some additional privacy features to make it more cash-like"
Seems to me like all transactions being public is fundamental to both the technology and the philosophy of Bitcoin.
> Seems to me like all transactions being public is fundamental to both the technology and the philosophy of Bitcoin.
Not at all. You need a canonical list of transactions and a way to verify that all the transactions on the list are valid, but surprisingly you *don't* need to be able to actually read the contents of any transaction. I believe zcash (https://z.cash/) was the first cryptocurrency to allow this, but there seem to be other implementations now e.g. Tornado Cash (https://tornado.cash/).
As far as I can tell there is absolutely no easy explanation of how this works in detail, but the very high-level summary is that if you specify some bounded computation that takes an input and returns "yes" or "no", you can create a short proof that you know an input that produces "yes", without revealing any information about that input. "Is this transaction valid?" can be formulated as a bounded computation, so transactions can be replaced with proofs-of-valid-transactions.
> I went into this mildly pro-crypto. My feeling is that there are things wrong with fiat currency, though not so bad that fiat currency needs to be replaced. Hyperinflation is rare, but it's very bad when it happens.
Something I've been curious about: my understanding is that you can also have deflationary catastrophes, as happened in the US Great Depression. Where mortgage holders, say, have the amount of work they must do/amount of goods they must sell to make payments goes up until they have no way to avoid default.
However, when you hear people compare currencies, people often mention the risks of hyperinflation, but not the risk of catastrophic deflation. I don't mean this as an attack, but I'm curious why people think of one rather than the other? Is it a matter of one being less well known? People viewing the risk of deflation as more localized (confined to debtors, but if you have a store of value you can still get stuff), or my understanding of the deflation risk being wrong?
Deflation is a potentially severe risk, but it's *usually* pretty easy for a competent government to avoid it by printing more money. Not all governments are competent, but at least in this case the incentives line up in the right direction.
To fix inflation, you need the government to print (broadly speaking) less money at a time when people are visibly suffering from things that more money could superficially fix, and that's much harder to arrange - especially in a democracy.
Tentatively, the more recent problems in the US have been with inflation, so it's more on people's minds. You're absolutely right that deflation could also be a disaster.
Is anyone doing or working on a bitcoin that has a fairly stable price and low inflation built in?
Bitcoin itself is inherently deflationary due to the hard cap on the number of coins that can ever exist. Economically it behaves like gold, and dropping the gold standard is how countries pulled out of the dive of the Great Depression.
I know Dogecoin is moderately (and predictably) inflationary, adding a fixed number of coins per year.
Stable price is hard. I imagine that if you WANTED to try to approach that from a technical perspective. If one could design something with low transaction overhead. Then make it moderately inflationary AND, perhaps, have held coins evaporate at a slow fixed rate, to discourage speculation, that might at least be an interesting experiment. Not so useful as a store of value. Perhaps one could have the evaporation slow over time, assuming the anti-speculation shield is needed less as it gets used for transactions.
This is assuming my mental model of cryptocoin instability being caused by gold-fans piling in and priming the pump for general speculation is correct. The evaporation would have to be fairly slow even in the beginning to not be a de facto transaction fee.
My understanding is that hyperinflation is driven by lack of trust in a currency, not (just) by printing money.
Currencies tend to be fairly stable in relative prices in the short to medium term.
That’s another reason why Bitcoin isn’t a currency. It’s not a store of value.
if you were earning units of Bitcoin in your job, starting last October, your purchasing power has dropped by 40% since then. If they promised you 3BTC last October you would have been looking turn at a annual salary of $174000, right now it’s €103,000. Fine for a speculative investment but not for a currency with which you would expect to pay bills. Another way of looking at this is that there’s a lot of inflation for BTC earners.
As for deflation, it is as serious. In fact the Nazis are often assumed to have come to power because of hyperinflation but the real reason was deflation and austerity in the early 30s. We have tools to fight it now though, as we do with inflation.. without QE the world economy might have dried up for a decade.
I just watched that video yesterday. It's extremely well-substantiated and greatly informative for anyone who has only watched the crypto space with a side-eye like me.
Is RationalWiki a reliable, responsible steward of information related to Rationalist discussion?
After having been directed to RationalWiki a few times recently via links in various essays and articles, I got the distinct impression that the site is contributed to/controlled by a relatively small number of very zealous individuals who seem to not make much effort at all to maintain balance or neutrality. It's as if the worst editorial practices of Wikipedia (page-camping, ax-grinding, very selective application of the "maintained by a community" maxim) have been shipped straight to RatWiki, but because the scope of the site is so much narrower the ratio of heat to light is way higher than it's parent site.
The degree to which this occurs seems to range from tongue-in-cheek expressions of a preference for leftist politics (see pages: Communism, AnCap); to needlessly snarky and self-defeating (see page: SJW) right through to almost-libellous slander and targetted personal abuse (see page: Emil Kirkegaard).
Given the structure and philosophy of Wikis in general, was it wrong to expect RatWiki to be immune (on the basis of their presumed rationality) to the same failure mechanisms as Wiki itself? What went wrong?
I'm pretty sure it was created as an explicitly anti-LessWrong site (where LessWrong is something like 'the (Internet) home of (the) modern rationality ('movement')').
I don't think it's unreasonable to assume, from a zero-special-knowledge starting point, that a Wiki dedicated to rational thought would be mainly aimed at objectivity with the occasional subjective detour, rather than the other way around.
It's fun to imply that people were suckers ex post for *ever* thinking a project was well-intentioned, but that's not the kind of insight i'm looking for here.
> You might think that a belief system which praised "reason" and "rationality" and "individualism" would have gained some kind of special immunity, somehow...?
> Well, it didn't.
> It worked around as well as putting a sign saying "Cold" on a refrigerator that wasn't plugged in.
> The active effort required to resist the slide into entropy wasn't there, and decay inevitably followed.
This was written about a different group, but the lesson is general. Merely calling yourself "rational" doesn't make it so. It actually seems to work in the opposite direction -- you start with a group of generally smart people, who decide that they are mentally superior to anyone who disagrees with them, and from that moment no feedback is possible, because everyone who disagrees with them is, by definition, stupid.
(Notice how the websites of the rationalist community typically have names like "Overcoming Bias" and "Less Wrong", rather than "Documenting the Biases of Our Political Opponents" or "Absolutely Correct". Yes, we are biased and wrong, *and* we strive to do better -- there is no contradiction. Noticing your mistakes is the first step towards correcting them.)
I believe that people at RationalWiki actually consider themselves rational. I just don't agree with their definition of rationality (and they don't agree with mine). Their "rationality" is more about being academic and politically correct. So, I don't think that their intentions are bad. They are just... what is the euphemism for "stupid"? :D Just kidding.
I actually think their greatest mistake is the ethos of "if we see someone being wrong, we must collectively laugh hard at them" (officially called "the snarky point of view"; I am not making this up). The problem with this attitude is that once you make a mistake (which sooner or later happens to everyone), it becomes almost impossible to change your mind -- because the first person at RationalWiki to publicly change their mind would be aggressively laughed at by the rest of their community.
I think it's a useful heuristic to assume, if someone deliberately chooses a vague positive-affect term to label themselves with, that they're doing so for an ulterior motive. Because this is a "heuristic that's almost always right" you SHOULD generally try and check to confirm these suspicions, but I think it's a sign of a weak psychic immune system to see someone conspicuously labelling themselves as "the goodies" and take them at their word without at least CONSIDERING why they might want to have a certain label beyond accuracy.
Agreed: there's "rational" in the way most people use it ("that makes sense" or "that sounds smart and agrees with my moral intuitions") and then there's Yud-rationalism as a whole identity-consuming philosophy.
It's run by substantially the same people who run r/sneerclub, so you might say it's not especially reliable on the "rationalist" community or ideas commonly discussed therein. (The opposite, even!)
How exactly did the "split" happen, by the way? Apparently David Gerard commented on early LessWrong. Was it because the ratsphere resisted conversion into SJ unlike the rest of nerddom?
I suspect that one important source of conflict is the fact that Eliezer blogged some non-mainstream opinions on *quantum physics*, without having corresponding education. That inevitably triggered the crackpot alarms at RationalWiki. And I don't blame them... 99% of people who express strong opinions on quantum physics online, without having studied it, *are* crackpots.
Problem is, this was the 1% exception. Like, at some moment people asked at Physics Stack Exchange what is the expert opinion on Eliezer's blog, and the answer was like: "what he says is a *minority* opinion among the experts, but it is *not* a fringe opinion; there is simply no consensus". So, yes controversial, but no crackpot, unless you are ready to call half of professional quantum physicists (possibly including Einstein) crackpots too, for believing in something other than the Copenhagen interpretation.
But once RationalWiki makes up its hive mind and declares you a crackpot, and starts writing a "snarky" article on you, it become socially impossible to say "actually, we were wrong, he is actually quite okay and this attack was totally undeserved, let's delete it". So the question became: we *already know* that Eliezer is a crackpot, but since it's not because of the quantum physics, what *else* is he possibly guilty of? Well, if you look at Eliezer, it is not at all difficult to find something that will trigger someone, whether it's polyamory, or belief that a superhuman AI will most likely kill us all, or writing Harry Potter fanfiction, or being too popular, or all of that together.
So the next iteration was evolving vaguely in the "Eliezer is a cult leader who has sex with many of his followers" direction. But then some lucky soul found a deleted comment that became later known as Roko's Basilisk, and the RationalWiki decided that *this* is what Less Wrong is actually all about.
I suspect that David Gerard (the admin of RationalWiki) originally believed that he could make the rationalists from Less Wrong see the light (of political correctness), but then realized that we cannot be recruited as fighters for his cause, and that broke his heart. Although according to surveys the Less Wrong audience is mostly liberal, we believe that stupidity in service of one's political tribe is still stupidity, while an intelligent discussion with political opponents can be quite enjoyable (that is, until the opponent runs out of intelligent arguments).
Less Wrong resisted the conversion because we had the "politics is the mind-killer" meme long before anyone tried to convert us. Also, not sure if this was always the case, but many members are from Europe or other parts of the world, and we frankly often do not give a fuck about things that make Americans clutch their pearls; we are mostly immune against the woke mobs. The rationalist celebrities in USA, such as Eliezer and Scott, do not make their money by pandering to the normie masses, so even if a journalist does a sucessful hit job on them, their original audience remains loyal to them. (I am not saying it was easy for Scott. But he was not destroyed, and possibly became even stronger as a result.)
It wasn't obvious at the beginning, but we (the rationalist community) are now stronger than RationalWiki. Somehow, over the last decade, we became more relevant, and they became less revelant. Not sure what is the causality here, if any.
Physics stack exchange contains yet another statement of the overconfidence criticism, this time from Scott Aaronson:
"I think Yudkowsky's central argument---basically, that anyone who rejects Everett needs to have their head examined---is to put it mildly, a bit overstated."
Believing that the MWI is true, does not make one a crank. Believing that the MWI is so obviously true that all rational people must accept it, makes one a crank - at least in the realm of physics.
But no one is saying that EY is a crank because MWI is a crazy idea. The claim made *on rational wiki* is that he is making a very confident claim.about a complex subject. Remember, he goes so far as to suggest that science itself is broken for having ever embraced the Copenhagen interpretation. How is a pro-science.organisation supposed to.react to that?
Hehe, I noticed the incongruence between my preaching of non-tribalism while simultaneously framing the situation with RationalWiki as "us versus them". :D
But the fact is, LessWrong was never about being *against* RationalWiki or anyone else. It was never personal; unlike RationalWiki, which is about detecting and attacking perceived enemies.
The entire conflict between the communities is RW attacking LW, and LW mostly ignoring them and doing our own things, occassionally commenting on how unfair their attacks seem to us.
And yet, somehow, at the beginning, RationalWiki was a popular website, and if they wrote something about you, you could bet that anyone who puts your name in google will find it first, so if they want to ruin your reputation then you are done. In addition, David Gerard is administrator of both RationalWiki and Wikipedia, so he can do a hit job on you at RationalWiki, then a journalist will quote him, and then he will quote the journalist as a "reliable source" in the Wikipedia article about you; and he will also keep watching the article and reverting any edits in your favor...
...and yet, somehow, now, when you say "RationalWiki", most people go like "rational what?", but most people know the famous blogger Scott Alexander. David Gerard was banned from editing articles related to Scott Alexander on Wikipedia. And generally, the dogs bark, but the rationalist caravan goes on.
It's interesting. I wouldn't have predicted it. And I enjoy it. But soon I will forget about RationalWiki again, and focus on doing my own things.
LW is pretty against mainstream.philosophy ('diseased'), copenhagenism, theism, dualism, free will, socialism,.big government, etc, etc. Have you ever tried arguing against an LW dogma? It could give you a different perspective.
There was no split; the site never had anything to do with Less-Wrong-style rationalism. I don't know how they became so acrimonious towards LW, though.
Well, the wiki may have had nothing to do with it initially, but sneerclub appears to be specifically anti-"rationalist", so clearly there was some sort of conflict, to which I've seen some allusions but nothing concrete.
As far as I know there was never any "split" they way you're imagining. Some people encounter something on the internet and love it and make it a part of their identity. Some people find it boring and forget about it. Some people make hating it a part of their identity. A hatedom doesn't require a part of a fandom to break of acrimoniously due to drama, they can just form directly out of people who want to join a hatedom.
As for how these people ended up running rationalwiki specifically, I don't know. I won't go so far as to say it's a pure coincidence that two groups claiming that label "rational" ended up looking down on each other.
It seems extremely hard to get good publicly available information about the military/naval aspects of a US conflict with China over Taiwan.
In this podcast, Steve thinks were the US to come to Taiwan's aid, naval carrier groups would be extremely vulnerable to chinese missile attack near Taiwan, and that breaking a naval blockage china imposed on Taiwan would be very dangerous.
Peter Zeihan recently publicly mocked the idea of a Chinese/US naval conflict, saying plainly that the chinese would lose terribly, and all we would have to do in the event of an amphibious invasion is send a few destroyers to the west coast of taiwan and shoot stuff down.
These seem like people who know what they're talking about disagreeing about some
Disclaimer: I'm not a subject-matter expert, and so the below is more or less just naval nerdery informed by amateur interest.
A full US carrier group very hard to knock down except by a massive, well-coordinated saturation attack (think hundreds of aircraft and other launch platforms, all launching at staggered intervals so that the missiles all arrive at the same time). This is a scenario that the surface navy has apparently been training and optimising for since the 70s (and is more or less a continuation of their experiences against the Japanese in WW2), and is part of the impetus behind the Chinese developing ballistic anti-ship missiles such as DF-21D.
On the other hand, US carrier groups have proven very vulnerable in exercises to lurking submarines - especially quiet diesel-electric types that can sit on the sea bed and wait for the fleet to come nearby before making an attack run. The Chinese subs would probably get slaughtered in a stand-up fight with the subs and ships that screen a carrier task force, so the Kilo-type attack would be more or less a snipe-and-run affair conducted by a very brave/suicidal crew.
Speaking of suicide: conventional fleet engagements versus the US are essentially that, and would only be carried out as part of a coordinated missile barrage, or as a costly distraction to allow other assets to get into position.
Naval warfare is generally very dynamic and all-or-nothing, and the modern variant of it is even more so. So there's almost an even chance of either of the following playing out:
1) The Chinese missile barrage goes off without a hitch, and/or one of their subs manages to slip in and spike the carrier. The result is that the carrier group gets slaughtered and the U.S. sees the greatest single-day loss since Pearl Harbour (perhaps upwards of 10 000 killed in a single day of combat). This probably results in all-out war for the next five years (but that's not a consideration here). The Chinese get fairly well mauled in the process, though - losing dozens of aircraft and most likely a number of subs and surface vessels.
2) Something goes wrong with the missile barrage, and the carrier group swats down more or less every missile. The carrier group then goes on to slaughter any surviving aircraft, and probably spends a while wrecking shore-based assets, ships and whatever else comes within its sights before heading home to restock. The result is that the Chinese lose most of their Eastern fleet and hundreds of aircraft, and spend a while more or less helpless until they can re-position assets and start making up losses. The US potentially still loses hundreds of personnel in the process, but the victory is incredibly lopsided. This also kicks off years of open warfare, but that's again beyond scope here.
Conclusion: both experts are more or less right, it's just impossible to tell the outcome from this end, given that it can turn on very small factors (a single sub getting lucky, a few missile-carriers not making their launch windows, a few minutes of extra warning and so on). Overall I'd say that either scenario ends up being pretty horrific (years of open warfare between major powers), so the hope is that the decision-makers involved know what a gamble the whole thing is.
I know nothing about anything, but a basic pattern used to accomplish something in the face of overwhelming opposing forces is to do it *fast* before they can react.
Maybe we should 'sell'/lend-lease more missiles to Taiwan. As many people have noted, 21st century missile technology can now obliterate most carriers and ships, which makes the US Navy coming to Taiwan's defense extremely risky. Also less frequently noted- it's unlikely that the US would actively strike those missile emplacements on Chinese soil, as striking the Chinese mainland and likely killing soldiers there is an extreme escalation.
Seeing as fixed missile emplacements on land are so devastating to ships- Taiwan can do the same, right? And litter their coast with staging areas to attack Chinese ships and troop carriers trying to cross the 90 mile strait, which is a very long ways to go in the face of enemy missiles. The US can use the lend-lease program to effectively give them advanced missiles that Taiwan couldn't otherwise afford.
Also, looking the other way or even covertly helping out a Taiwanese nuclear program would seem to make a lot of sense
As mentioned above - anti-ship missiles have to be carefully massed and coordinated to take out a fully US carrier fleet, and any foul-ups result in the missiles getting swatted down and vengeful wrath descending on you. The Chinese analogue is built more on the Russian model, but is just as mean when it comes to dealing with saturation attacks. So it would have to be a lot of missiles, and all of them carefully emplaced. This would be extremely obvious, and would take months to do.
Which leads to the next issue: the Taiwanese buying a lot of missiles and putting them into caves in the hills is more or less an open declaration of war, and would be treated as such. The Chinese simply would not allow another nation to have the option to close off the Taiwan Straight to them, let alone threaten their fleets there. And letting the Taiwanese get nukes would be directly counter-productive to US interests, which turn substantially on not diluting the monopoly of force that comes with their majority ownership of the bomb.
Also important to note is that the Taiwanese military is poorly trained, and a lot of their equipment is poorly maintained. Insider reports like this one:
See this is what I mean. I thought the taiwanese military was well-prepared *for the single plausible conflict it could participate in*. The variation in opinion about this is so strange.
The other thing to keep in mind is the sort of operations likely to happen. What are the chances that the US is going to attempt a contested landing on the Chinese mainland? Low. The US has no geostrategic interest in seizing Shanghai and... I don't even know what the US would try and do with it. Much more likely is the Chinese attempting a contested landing on Taiwan. So the US is likely to be supporting an ally on the defensive while China is likely to be engaging in offensive operations. So, for example, in Taiwan the question is not how well Chinese artillery can defend Taiwan. The question is how well Chinese artillery can deny the US the opportunity to support the Taiwanese military.
You can read this rand report from a few years ago. It's getting out of date, and I think it's a little pessimistic, but it's a good and short intro to the topic.
If the conflict happened tomorrow, but we would send submarines, not destroyers, and it would not go well for the chinese. But as the report makes clear, our advantage is eroding.
1. if I'm reading them right, the prediction markets are giving a significant probability to an invasion happening but not going much further than the Donbas. Is this something knowledgeable commentators also think might happen? If so, is the implicit idea that formally occupying the Donbas (for some nominally "protective" reason) might let Putin claim a win at home without going far enough to actually incur much in the way of costs and consequences?
2. It occurs to me that Biden's strategy of preannouncing everything his intelligence has learned that Putin is planning, in an attempt to deprive him of excuses, is a very interesting instance of a state weaponizing transparency in a way that these days we usually see from non-state actors. Seems like Martin Gurri must be taking a considerable interest in this-- might it be a result of people in the administration actually learning something from _The Revolt of the Public_? Or is this kind of leak-everything tactic not so new as I think? It reminds me of the constant stream of TGIF leaks from mid-2010s Google (I keep expecting to see somebody livetweeting one of Putin's strategy meetings) but I'm sure others will have different associations with it.
I'm not sure the "preannouncing everything" is so much a strategy as it is a sign that many people in the US government are physically incapable of keeping a secret.
In other words, Putin can leak material to the US government and be confident the US government will leak it to the Western press, even if the leak only benefits Putin.
On the other hand, some of the "preannouncements" are deliberate misdirection from the Biden administration. Sure, they have intelligence that Russia is building a pontoon bridge in Belarus as part of scheduled military operations ... they just don't point out that this is entirely irrelevant to the Ukraine situation.
Ad 1, you should be aware of the fact that word "Donbas" is ambiguous. It might mean just the territory controlled by separatists, or it might mean much wider area in eastern Ukraine, including portions currently under the control of the Ukrainian government.
Ad 1), consider the possibility that Russia's beef is exactly what Russia says that her beef is: Russia wants the NATO military entrenched on its border with Ukraine just as much as US wanted the Soviet military entrenched in Cuba 60 years ago. And that beside that, Russia doesn't -particularly- wish to occupy Ukraine, beyond disabling her to bring in NATO.
This goal could be met by occupying Donbas, period.
On one hand, a lot of the Donbas population would welcome the Russian troops. On the other hand, Ukraine cannot ascend to NATO while she doesn't fully control her territory. (unless NATO changes their rules...)
NATO could of course *choose* to attack Russia over that, even without Ukraine's ascenscion - just as NATO attacked Serbia, Afghanistan, Libya etc. - but some NATO member countries appear to be less enthusiastic about attacking Russia than this newfangled neocon+democrat alliance in the US is.
Ukraine even now cannot get into NATO, unless NATO changes its "rules" (I don´t think those are formal rules, but they do exist, and yeah, they are changeable), until it sorts out its territorial disputes with Russia.
Formally incorporating two separatists republics into Russia does not alter this reality in any way.
Yes, that's the point. Russia _needs_ Ukraine to have territorial disputes, for Ukraine to remain non-integrable into NATO.
Imagine Ukraine were to hypothetically agree about transferring Crimea into Russia (*). Then Ukraine would no longer have territorial disputes with Russia, and could proceed with NATO ascension. Whereas if Russia *occupies* Donbas - *without* the "formal incorporation", which Ukraine is way less likely to accept, even hypothetically - then you get that stalemate which pretty much blocks Ukraine's NATO ascension. (meaning, NATO can still *choose* to attack Russia, if NATO members agree, but it doesn't get to entrench on the UKR/RUS border "for free")
(*) Crimea was Russian all the way from Ekaterina the Great to the formation of the USSR. It got out of USSR as Ukrainian due to a "transfer on paper", but its population remained mostly Russian. In the Crimean 2014 referendum, 97% votes in a 83% turnout voted for joining Russia. (this referendum is of course disputed by parties who did not like its outcome, and who appear to assert that if some other military had been on the ground at the time, then Crimea's mostly-Russian population would have voted otherwise)
I don´t think it works this way. Everyone knows that Russia has deep ties with Donbas separatists, and, under current "rules", NATO wants to avoid direct military confrontation with Russia if at all possible (for rather obvious reasons that nukes might start to fall), so Ukraine would not be allowed to join the alliance even if it would agree to cede Crimea to Russia, until it would solve its Donbas situation.
Of course, if God forbid, current rules were to change, all bets are off. I hope that it is not going there.
Nukes are not the key matter here. The US is the only one to ever have used nukes against actual cities -- there's no other nuclear power that ever did that, and not for there being a lack of conflicts involving those powers. Whereas all the strategizing in the current standoff is quite rooted in conventional warfare.
You seem to be awfully confident considering how Putin has been regularly threatening to nuke various European and USA cities since 2014...
And consider also how they have been developing a doomsday weapon - a nuclear-powered rocket which contaminates the ground it flows over - on which the USA has stopped the work during the Cold War because its mere development has been deemed too problematic !
> there's no other nuclear power that ever did that
We were getting close to use of nuclear weapons, scarily close multiple times. In some of this cases escalation to full nuclear WW III was very likely.
"Russia wants the NATO military entrenched on its border with Ukraine just as much as US wanted the Soviet military entrenched in Cuba 60 years ago."
Waaaaaait a minute, where are you saying the "NATO military" is?? You are saying it's on the border between Russia and Ukraine, which logically means it must be *in* either Russia or Ukraine.
As we all are aware, I think, neither is a member of NATO, so how did that happen?
As is common knowledge, Ukraine is motioning to join NATO since 2008, in an over a dozen years long standoff with Russia over that topic. On which side of the UKR/RUS border NATO gets to entrench freely if RUS lets that happen, is an exercise left to the reader.
That said, I'll grant that the analogy with Cuba is not perfect. There's at least three important differences.
1. From Cuba to Washington DC there's >100 miles of sea, and then >1000 miles of land. From the UKR/RUS border to Moscow there's <300 miles of land, and exactly zero miles of sea. The military significance is not remotely comparable.
2. The Soviets engaged in the Cuban deployment in response to - i.e. a couple of years after - the US had deployed nukes to Turkey. In the current standoff, Russia has made no equivalent deployment that precedes the intended deployment of NATO.
3. In spite of #2, the Soviets had ultimately agreed to back off from Cuba. In this instance, it seems possible that Russia... will not agree to back off.
I believe all of the above information to be known to the OP prediction markets, and already factored into the predictions.
For withdrawing missiles, the Soviets got an agreement to respect Cuba's sovereignty from the US.
If this were a parallel between Cuba and Ukraine, then the US would have missiles in Ukraine, and Russia would guarantee Ukraine's sovereignty to get them withdrawn.
This is the most opposite thing possible to what is happening!
Also, if Ukraine's been trying to join NATO since 2008, why haven't they?
Must be because NATO won't let them! Show a little gratitude!
>If this were a parallel between Cuba and Ukraine, then the US would have missiles in Ukraine, and Russia would guarantee Ukraine's sovereignty to get them withdrawn. This is the most opposite thing possible to what is happening!
"US missiles == NATO". Russia said it won't invade if US/NATO guarantee they will not extend to Ukraine.
The US/NATO did the most opposite thing possible. So Russia invaded.
For the record, now that it finally started happening, Russia has gone beyond entering the Ukraininan territories where the people *really do want* to go into Russia -- which, contrary to what you'll read in western media, absolutely do exist -- and crossed over into those territories where the people *really do not want* that. This is really, really wrong. And it is *unnecessary* for achieving any justifiable Russian goals. The former is/has happened practically without a shot fired. The latter is bound to be bloodshed.
Russia has very solid claims to Crimea. And I don't mean *relatively* more solid - as in "more solid than the US has to Guantanamo" - but *absolutely* solid. There was never a slightest whiff of recognition of that simple fact in the West; Russia is always the designated comic-book villain, whether what it does is right or if it's wrong.
After years and years of such exchanges, Russia comes out with an IDGAF attitude. It's truly tragic that it's come to this.
Leaving aside the incredible chutzpah it takes to say "an invasion *right now* is necessary because otherwise Ukraine might some day many years from now join NATO," Latvia's border is even closer to Moscow than Ukraine is. And they're an actual bona-fide member of NATO and the EU, and have been for 18 years now, so it would be much easier to station missiles there if NATO wanted. How is Ukraine more of a threat than they are?
About "right now", although Ukraine has been doing joint military exercises withNATO since 2010 or so, it has significantly ramped up in the last two years. 2020 was the first time the US flew B-52s in Ukraine next to Russian borders. 2021 saw the largest exercises so far.
About "How is Ukraine more of a threat than they are", aside from the disposition of each of those countries to fight Russia and their own military potential, the point is that in military operations, being attacked from two fronts is much more than twice as difficult to fend off than an attack from one front. All militaries are quite familiar with the principles of the "pincer attack". I.e. "Ukraine + Baltics" >> "2 * Baltics" > "1 * Baltics".
A war between NATO and Russia would be nuclear, and I'm not sure how much this pincer matters (except psychologically ?) when we're talking ICBMs criss-crossing half+ of the globe, including over the Arctic.
Another reason for an invasion of Ukraine would be the supposed lack that Russia has in terms of advanced anti-ICBM detection - not being able to rely on satellites, barely 15 minutes of warning ? - but it seems to me that Ukraine wouldn't give much more compared to the current early warnings that Kaliningrad, Crimea (and Transnistria ?) already provide ?
For 2. you also have to consider the possibility that US intelligence is either lying or incompetent, and the "transparency" is a post-facto justification of false claims.
The way I see it, the current ambiguous status of Donetsk/Luhansk People's Republics was advantageous to Russia - they could have formally annexed them at any point of time of their choosing doing the last 7 years, but did not, since keeping that pressure on Ukraine with that semi-active conflict zone is more valuable for multiple reasons. So in that regard, while Putin could easily occupy that territory and a bit more, for Russia that outcome would be worse than the current status quo even if it would come "for free" with no losses and sanctions. Perhaps it would help to 'save face' for domestic political purposes, but strategically it would not be useful, so why would Putin do that?
On the other hand, achieving results that actually would help him would require effectively replacing Kiev government with a pro-Russian one; and a minor conquest would only work against that.
I think the intelligence community has been saying the plan is maybe to annex a bit of territory. But mainly to knock over the government in Kiev and replace it with a puppet. As for the pre-announcement, the question is whether it successfully deters him. If it does then it's a good use of intelligence assets that are more likely to be burned by their use. After all, each release means the Russians know what we know which will help them know how we're spying.
A lot of how we're collecting intelligence is via ISR platforms which the public can track on Flightradar24; no substantive risk of burning sources there.
I'm probably taking the numbers more literally than intended, but it seems hard to believe that any warning could be "1% of a ban". Scott was clearly annoyed enough at the comments to respond with a warning, and put it in the open thread. I find it hard to believe that a person could make comments that Scott finds that objectionable *19* more times, without being banned.
And if you consider the effect of this paired with more severe infractions, it would weaken any assumption of charity that Scott might make.
I'm playing with numbers (and so far inconsistent, as you noticed), but my thought was that a trivial warning is literally just a warning and not intended to ever end up to a ban, but for consistency's sake I ought to put it on the same scale as everything else.
Really really interested to see how the appeal efforts go in bullet four. On one hand I hope you don’t get enough data to get a really great answer because it would be annoying, but on the other… this is the only type of high level scheme I think can work long-term for fair moderation.
Where are people finding the best information regarding the Ukraine/Russia situation? Are there substacks I should be reading? Twitter users I should follow?
Adam Tooze has written some substack posts about the economic background to the situation. (Mostly that Ukraine has underperformed compared to all its neighbors since 1991)
https://ironcurtain.substack.com/ - my father writes an almost daily newsletter about Russia. He used to be a senior government official in Russia in pre-Putin days and recently advised the Zelenskiy government, so he's pretty well-informed.
Caveat, I think he overextends trends in a few places to tell a better story, so I read these with a grain of salt, and as a jumping off point for keywords to explore specific subtopics in more depth on my own.
I think it is incredibly difficult and painful to do, through personal effort, but you have to train yourself to not come to any conclusions about anything via Wikipedia unless you actually check the references.
It's like market efficiency - you should be able to piggyback on other people doing reality checks, but in practice, you can't.
Among the things I see a lot once I started looking are:
1) References that specify a publication which might or might not exist and say nothing about *where* specifically the support for the claim may be.
2) References that seem to be random documents on public storage that look like someone's draft undergraduate paper.
3) References that are specific and misrepresented.
4) References that are not available online, which may be fine, but do you believe *anyone* ever verified it?
5) References ostensibly online, but now unobtainable, so were they really ever there?
I absolutely agree that people should read it, but *anything* can be disinformation or propaganda from anyone and the system is not that good at sifting it.
Often I read a page that I infer is contentious because the text is just so disjointed and incoherent, it seems clear that different people were inserting sentences to push their point of view in the middle of older writing.
And lately I've been seeing entries that have an oddly conversational style unlike the way lots of stuff used to be written. Nothing's wrong with that necessarily, but it stands out and makes me wonder if it's somebody in particular who's writing a disproportionate amount.
Now I am not saying that the CIA or Putin is brainwashing you. It could be someone you least expect...
All good points. The Ukraine entry seemed well maintained and thorough. But there's always a risk. fifteen years ago, my teenage son and a friend created on Wikipedia a fake sport called "The Walking Game" that involved walking quickly down a crowded urban street without touching another pedestrian. They included a few fictional champions and various cheating scandals. It only lasted a day, before it was taken down. I actually thought it was pretty funny.
Acknowledging a risk, though, doesn't mitigate it. There's a mental block, which I acknowledged I've experienced, where one implicitly says "oh, yeah, sure, some references may be questionable, but *most* of them must be good" and I don't have time to obsess over it. But if you don't actually check, you don't even know what the odds are, and if you won't look, the truth is you don't want to know.
Getting into a habit of seeing if the reference for whatever you want to believe in or quote is obtainable is *hard*, like dieting or something. You won't appreciate the problem until you start checking.
It doesn't mean most of the references that can't be verified are sinister. There's usually no way to tell and that's why it's so tempting to assume that something you can't check exists and is represented accurately.
True, but then you have to consider the reward of mitigation, i.e., the stakes involved. Reading a general Wikipedia article about Ukraine's history has low stakes for me in terms of determining its degree of accuracy.
Anatoly Karlin is a pro-Putin (I think) Russian nationalist blogger, although I disagree with him on a lot of stuff I find him really valuable in explaining how Putin thinks and what he wants, especially https://akarlin.substack.com/p/regathering-of-the-russian-lands .
Second Karlin. From his Twitter feed I get the sense that he's much more committed to nationalism than he is to Putin personally. It's interesting to get a take from an actual Russian nationalist, and he's clearly a sharp guy; and though he obviously sees the history through a particular lens, I haven't yet noticed anything that's actually false.
TLDR Train horn laws seem to save around 200 lives a year (value: ~$3 billion), but the costs of their noise on health and quality of life are something like $20 billion a year
This is interesting. I recently read a similar analysis of police/ambulance sirens that came to a similar conclusion.
My city has three major freight lines that run through the heart of the city. About 1 person a year dies crossing the tracks. Not in cars, they are walking across the tracks. When trains pass through the city they blow their horns for almost 20 minutes straight.
There are new police sires that use a deeper sound which is projected directionally to try to cut down on how much the sound spreads. I have always wondered why trains don't have similar horns. They seem to be stuck blowing the same airhorns they have for over 50 years.
Most train accidents are people driving around the barriers. It's expensive to upgrade the crossings, and there are a lot of crossings. This is a frustrating problem to try to solve.
Is there any steelman discussion or commentary on Landmark Forum or other transformational personal development programs written by Scott or the rationalist community writ large?
I'll give you my (amateur) perspective - I think by and large the Landmark forum focuses on emotionally healthy perspectives (connect, be assertive, be honest, don't let things hang over you), mixed in with a little weird stuff (thinking childhood events having outsize impact), mixed in with a LOT of wanting to make you a missionary for the landmark forum. They're very upfront about this last thing, and to some extent it's understandable what they're trying to do, but it's irritating. For me the biggest benefit was that it gave me emotional impetus to do what I knew I should be doing anyway(the healthy things listed above), but it was not transformative in the sense that I generally knew those things to be good, I just wasn't very good at doing and sustaining them. This remains true now, several years after. It could be significantly more(or less) helpful for others
I misinterpreted this comment as saying that Scott and the rationalist community write personal development programs, Landmark Forum being one of them, and was temporarily confused.
No. I've heard a lot of people say it seems like a cult and made them feel weirdly pressured, and a couple of people say they got a lot out of it and really appreciate it.
Came up with an unusual geopolitical move for Putin today - assassinate Lukashenko. Russian troops are already in Belarus, presumably wouldn't be hard to seize control in the ensuing chaos. He gets to enlarge Russia without worsening the conflict with the West.
This seems based on the assumption that Putin wants to gain more territory. He already controls the largest nation on Earth, most of which is essentially unused. More territory doesn't help him. He either wants good territory (that which directly benefits him and his plans - Crimea's port for instance) or he wants power generally. Belarus already belongs to him as surely as Gazprom, even though it's also controlled through an intermediary. Why spend resources trying to take control of what he already has? Putin actually gains by having Lukashenko in power, as he can outsource decisions through him and also the blame for those decisions.
Why assassinate someone who can be blamed in future? It was announced recently that Russian army will stay in Belarus in near future so what Russia gains from a clear takeover?
Perhaps reducing the probability that a west-instigated coup can replace Russia's puppet dictator with their own puppet dictator.
8 years after the revolution in Ukraine, it still gets a very low score on Freedom House (https://freedomhouse.org/country/ukraine/freedom-world/2021), even though their bias as an extension of the US state department is probably to exaggerate Ukraine's freeness to paint it as a more sympathetic victim of Russian aggression. It doesn't seem like that revolution accomplished much beyond replacing a pro-Russia regime with a pro-west regime. I'm going to back this up quantitatively with scores from Freedom House before and after the revolution.
Freedom house changed their scale between 2012 and 2022, but in 2012 Ukraine scored the same as Bosnia, Georgia, and Kenya. On the new scale in 2022, Ukraine is 60, Bosnia is 53, Georgia is 60, and Kenya is 48. So if you squint really hard maybe you can see Ukraine doing slightly better than its peers, but mostly it's just as unfree as it was before the revolution.
Putin had the opportunity a decade or so go to absorb Belarussia nearly costlessly in term of political capital. But Belarussia would drain Russia's economy, because its own economy is a backward disaster. (Which I suppose is a retsasid?) So I suspect that's not the play.
I do put about 20% probability on Putin just sending all the troops home and saying, "see, I told you we weren't invading." Then do it again in six months over and over, perpetually disrupting Ukraine's economy, costing Russia nearly nothing but the cost of exercises that increase Russia's army's preparedness. As a bonus, it would make the west's leaders look like idiots and reaffirm Putin's narrative that the west is ideologically inclined against Russia.
*checks news to make sure war hadn't broken out since starting this post*
Ukraine's economy is also a backward disaster though.
"What makes Ukraine into the object of Russian power is not just its geography, but the division of its politics, the factional quality of its elite and its economic failure.
"The end of the Soviet Union may have given Ukraine independence but for Ukrainian society at large it has been an economic disaster. Like Russia, Ukraine suffered a devastating shock in the 1990s. GDP per capita in constant PPP terms halved between 1990 and 1996. It then recovered to 80 percent of its 1990 level in 2007 and has stagnated ever since. Thirty years on, Ukraine’s GDP per capita (in constant PPP dollars as measured by the World Bank) is 20 percent lower than in 1990.
"Ukraine’s experience contrasts sharply with that of Russian Federation which since the 1998 crisis has seen much more dramatic and sustained recovery. It also contrasts painfully with the growth trajectory of Ukraine’s neighbors Turkey and Poland."
Can confirm - Ukraine now feels like Poland in the 90s.
What's not obvious to foreign observers is that Ukraine is close to a failed state already, between "green men" doing whatever they want and such gems as the 2014 Odessa massacre, in which oligarchs brought buses full of neonazis to crash anti-Maidan protests, and it escalated into wholesale slaughter with knives (46 people dead) and the torching of the Trade Unions House to which said protesters escaped.
Sure, but Russia already gets everything it needs from Belarussia. Taking over Belarussia only brings it Belarussia's problems. But it's not currently getting anything it needs from Ukraine.
Not even counting Crimea's naval bases and hydrocarbons, East Ukraine used to be one of the biggest if not *the* biggest industrial center of the USSR : hydropower, natural resources (coal, metals), sea access...
For instance it has several (former) ICBM factories (and since 2014 North Korea seems to have *somehow* made breakthroughs based on these designs, NK spies were caught there). (They're now supposedly working on a Ukrainian hyperloop project, lol.)
Ukraine also has very fertile land.
And has gas pipelines (formerly ?) carrying mostly Russian gas into Europe.
I'd say a variety of things: space between Russia and its western rivals, symbols of respect that generate international prestige, support in international fora to overcome diplomatic isolation all come to mind, and affirmation of narratives of western perfidy and Russian greatness. I think economics is distant from the decision-making.
Also, for Ukraine to relinquish sovereignity over the culturally/ethnically Russian border regions. Nothing of that will happen of course, both Ukraininan nationalists and the perfidious West understand perfectly well that this is Russia's weak underbelly, and will mercilessly exploit this weakness to punish Russia and remind it of its actual place in the world's pecking order.
I would like to second that this seems really interesting and I've long been interested in a rationalist-aligned take on dating apps, emerging social media and the way they are changing human interaction.
Dating apps are an interesting one, because most people I know are already in relationships / married and they don't seem to understand how radically the dating app process is changing socio-sexual and gender dynamics that I think have the potential to trigger important flow on effects for culture at large.
I think there's a definite niche here for someone to write about this from a social perspective. I'd be very interested in your content, if you would like to share samples on an open thread here :)
They'll probably be equipped with cameras that livestream to a server: if you jack the bot, you face goes to police. That's enough to deter casual pranksters and opportunists, if bots keep getting jacked in an area despite that then they'll probably not deliver to that area.
And if it's San Francisco, the police will do nothing at all because they don't prosecute property crimes. There's plenty of articles out there about serial thieves with known identities who don't get punished by the law at all.
I wonder if this is in part because the idea of an autonomous robot is novel enough that "person is punished for damaging or destroying autonomous robot" isn't a salient risk in the minds of the folks who would do that? I'm no "law and order" type, but it might be that after a period of acclimation - during which the relevant companies put funding and organizational power, perhaps in excess of what value they would expect to be able to recover or deter in the short term, into some high-effort, high-profile prosecutions of drone strippers (for their own PR, maybe only the really unsympathetic folks; not the poor mechanic with a one-off idea about how to feed his kids this week, but the prestigious college students whacking a drone for Greek Life shits and giggles and the high-throughput criminal chop shops that mistreat their own people) - people might generally learn that this is a bad idea, and rates will become more manageable - perhaps comparable to rates for stationary public infrastructure.
Small flying drones that drop small packages from some small height and never land could avoid this problem. But they'd need a separate trip to the base station for each package. Not only would it have a much less efficient route than a truck, they'd also have much worse drag per kg, much less efficient means of obtaining thrust, and have to constantly use that inefficient thrust to fight gravity. It would eliminate the human driver, but 100x energy usage, and probably come out behind in overall cost.
I guess the attrition factor is probably the biggest barrier to robots. Theft, catastrophic error and wear and tear all cost the company money in the long run, but the alternative is either not providing the service or paying someone to carry the object for you. As long as the cost of replacing the robots is more than paying some guy to do the job delivery will remain a human task, but when that flips the robots will take over very quickly.
> As long as the cost of replacing the robots is more than paying some guy to do the job delivery will remain a human task, but when that flips the robots will take over very quickly.
It is not so easy: company needs to pay for robot to be existing, not necessary for a worker. (alternatively: leasing + insurance instead of buying robots)
There used to be (maybe still are) these little delivery robots in Berkeley called "Kiwibots". They deliver sandwiches and things like that to people. The company that makes them used to pretend they were self driving but actually they were controlled remotely by operators in Columbia. I never saw them come to harm in any way.
Nothing's 100%. Retail stores treat "shrinkage" as a fact of life. If there's too much robot attrition, then no doubt the software or hardware will be modified to reduce "friendliness" or increase agility. Brings new meaning to "Agile development".
Or conceivably they will draw invisible red lines around areas deemed unfriendly and not tell anybody unless or until they get sued. Geofencing is pretty simple conceptually and has been common for quite a while. Some people might prefer to be within such a boundary.
If I was really interested in the logistics, I'd read up on scooter-sharing companies experiences. I remember seeing pictures of gigantic piles of discarded scooters, somewhere in China.
The discarded scooters were there because Chinese companies were pyramid schemes - they made money from investors and never recovered costs. When their bikes would get impounded for improper parking, they would not bother picking it up as it'd be easier to just put a new one on the street and say how you "deployed another 100.000 bikes last week" to the investors.
However, the problems for them were real enough that they withdrew from markets - and this was with 10 euro or less costing bikes. With robots, this is massively larger risk, for not much larger reward. I agree with Trebuchet that this is in my opinion the biggest reason that drone delivery of documents is not more prominent for example. Malicious actors in the UK for example were the reason why many of Chinese firms pulled back, as were those in Eastern Europe, who would just throw a bike into the river - no benefit, not stealing for your own profit, just maliciousness of drunken teenagers. The monetary value of each bike is so low it did not pay off to sue, and they just quietly sold off their bikes and left these markets, staying in those more profitable and polite like Italy. The unfortunate effect is that poorer neighborhoods that would benefit more from cheap last-mile transport and precisely those denied it.
(speaking from experience of my wife who used to work in these Chinese transport companies rolling them out in Europe)
"Malicious actors in the UK for example were the reason why many of Chinese firms pulled back, as were those in Eastern Europe, who would just throw a bike into the river - no benefit, not stealing for your own profit, just maliciousness of drunken teenagers."
Sounds like they should have read St. Augustine on stealing pears when he was a teenager:
"There was a pear-tree close to our vineyard, heavily laden with fruit, which was tempting neither for its color nor its flavour. To shake and rob this some of us wanton young fellows went, late one night (having, according to our disgraceful habit, prolonged our games in the streets until then), and carried away great loads, not to eat ourselves, but to fling to the very swine, having only eaten some of them; and to do this pleased us all the more because it was not permitted."
Seems alien to me. Would have been plausible for some of my classmates to do something like that before age 13 ish. After that, they were too well trained. Or at least the ones I associated with were. I think my last act of vandalism was smashing a pumpkin in 6th grade.
> Malicious actors in the UK for example were the reason why many of Chinese firms pulled back, as were those in Eastern Europe, who would just throw a bike into the river - no benefit, not stealing for your own profit, just maliciousness of drunken teenagers.
Note that companies operating them were also malicious (or ignorant to point of malice).
Putting their vehicles in way that was at once dangerous, stupid, illegal and blocking way was done regularly[1]. While I like idea of such vehicles they were so annoying in practice that I was happy that they left markets.
[1] both by users and operator regrouping vehicles during night
(Historically, because the ID card was first introduced when France was under nazi occupation, so the legal obligation was removed not too long after the Libération.)
However, in practice I'd expect it to be a tremendous hassle...
(Also note that for some decades now, making an ID card involved giving your fingerprints.)
"In addition to the national government, all these administrative divisions have their own local government instances and their own elections."
I feel iffy about that description, because I'd describe the regional and departemental "governments" as administration councils instead. They manage their division, they don't rule it. They'll allocate budget, but won't vote laws. They'll decide on local taxes (which are a part of their budget), but the collection of it will depend on the centralized national administrations, etc etc.
You seem to be using the word "censored" in a way I'm not familiar with- can you explain what you mean by eg. "the Prime Minister can be censored by the National Assembly"?
Well it's not exactly "censor" ("censurer"), it's a special expression that I have only heard in this context, "motion de censure"
When the president wants "force" the adoption of a law, he can use the article 49-3 of the... constitution I think?
The way this works is, the law is automatically accepted, with not need for a vote by the assembly or the senate
However, any member of the assembly can start a "motion de censure", which is effectively a vote by the assembly on the question "should we remove the government" (i.e. force every minister to be replaced)
So it's a very risky play for the president if they don't have the majority in the assembly, because they can be forced to name new ministers that are less aligned with them.
Even when they do have the majority, there is a chance that some members of the party will defect, and "censor" the government (running the risk of losing their place in the party).
Also, this article can only be used three times per year, but thankfully it never comes close to that.
I'm confused about the presidential elections between 1965 and 2002. They had lots of candidates running at once, but someone always got an absolute majority in the first round?
Just wanted to say how much I appreciated this post. My girlfriend is French and I've been pinging her asking about various aspects.
QQ: what about the French system do you think accounts for the fact only two leaders in the 5th have made it through 2 terms? US perspective is obviously that the incumbent almost always wins, for a variety of reasons. Curious what the difference is.
Could you expand on your comment about legislative power generally being an extension of presidential will? You mention that executive orders are unpopular. Is there a strong executive veto power? Or some other mechanism?
An other key point is that the president can dissolve the National Assembly and call a new election if the Assembly does not support him. (This happenned in 1981 and 1988 when Mitterrand was elected president while the Assembly was controled by the right : he immediately dissolved the Assembly and got a new majority for his own party.
It also happenned in 1997 in the most beautiful self-hit of the 5th republic history when Chirac dissolved the Assembly while he had a supportive majority and his party got soundly beaten in the consecutive election).
Also, a key point is that the duration of terms and time of elections was set up to make sure the parliament would as much as possible support the government: before 2002, presidential terms lasted 7 years while terms in parliament were 5 years, and there were a few cases of, well, what happens after most US midterms, the parliament turning from supportive of the government to opposed to it in a few years into the presidential term. And that blocked everything, mainly because the prime minister was, in that case, actually chosen by the parliament, as is usual in parliamentary democracies. So, there would be two conflicting heads of government, the PM and the president (they generally divided the work and each would deal with domestic, day-to-day politics for the PM, and war, foreign affairs, etc., the big stuff, for the president, but it still lead to conflicts). So, in 2002, both terms were made 5 years, with the legislative election taking place just a few weeks after the presidential, which, in practice, makes people vote for candidates of the same side as the guy they put into power a few weeks before. So, the president basically always enjoy a majority in parliament, and, what is more, that’s basically a majority on his name, a majority that was elected partly because that guy had been made president before, so he structurally has the parliament has much on his side as you can in a parliamentary democracy.
Any good resources for entertaining and informative blogs on modern physics? Any suggested reading for someone who would like to learn more about the field as a dilettante? Right now I’m just reading Wikipedia articles
Not a full blog on the topic, but I enjoyed Yudkowsky on Quantum Mechanics.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/apbcLXz5zB7PXfgg2/an-intuitive-explanation-of-quantum-mechanics
Given the amount of shit hitting the fan globally since the last OT, I think a new one is desperately needed.
The concept of a "dry port" confuses me. It sounds like a fancy name for a big parking lot full of shipping containers, plus some cranes to move the containers around.
I know that modern seaports have large areas where many shipping containers are stored--often stacked on each other. Instead of building "dry ports" located far from the seaports, why don't the seaports just expand their own parking lot areas to fit in as many containers as they need to? It seems inefficient to build a dry port several (maybe dozens) of miles inland, and to have to ship the containers back and forth between it and the seaport over a road or railroad.
Thing I actually know: They don't pack and unpack those containers at the actual port or the dry port. They get packed at the source, sent out by some combination of truck, barge, ship, and/or rail, and unpacked at the destination.
My guess: The dry port is in the same general direction that the containers were going to or coming from anyway.
You might want to ask again on the next thread; I don't think many people are still checking this one.
Thoughts on universal DNR? I'm an ER doc and I'm sick of doing CPR on 87 year olds in terrible health. Seems like a national universal DNR with an option to opt-out would save the health system money. So much of what we do to these super elderly are efforts in futility. 80 seems like a reasonable age to me for universal DNR, again with the option to opt out for those that want "everything done" including CPR/intubation or simply feel they are still spry and could survive a cardiac arrest.
Your key problem is probably "in terrible health", not "87-year-olds".
I had and still have some relatives with little or no cognitive issues after 87 years old. (I think our last tax preparer was over 80 years old when he died, too, and he was still doing his work until the very end.) I never heard of them needing CPR (I might not know about the times they did), so you are probably just not seeing that kind of people, which partly justifies your suggestion. It's possible that such people just don't end up in ERs needing CPR, but if that ever happened, it would be a great loss if they were not resuscitated.
Universal DNR sounds scary. All humans are different. Statistically and anecdotally, it may not be as terrible, but it's always scary when it's agreed that some people will just be statistics.
Simply solution then, those people opt out.
Although even a “healthy” 87 year old has an incredibly low chance of survival with cognitive function if their heart stops. And survival with cognitive function is what counts- survival without cognitive function is a “vegetable”, and I don’t know anyone who would want that.
I’d think you’d know if any of your family needed CPR- they end up in the hospital for many days on a ventilator and very very ill.
To be clear, DNR doesn’t mean a patient can’t get antibiotics or fluids or whatever they need to get better. It means if their heart stops, we let nature take its course instead of CPR and putting them on a ventilator.
Most people want to die at home amongst family and friends. But instead many die at a hospital getting poked and prodded. That’s worth it for someone with a chance of survival, but maybe not as much when the chance is as close to 0 as it can be. Again though, people can make their own choice to opt out if they choose.
If you are going to have the opt-out option, how would that be different from the current situation?
If you have a patient's medical record, it either already has directives - in which case, you're in the situation you're already in now - or you don't have the medical record (it's at another hospital), or you are just missing that section (which might or might not be in his record at another hospital).
How would you go about resuscitating a patient whose medical record is elsewhere or whose record is missing that section, which might be elsewhere? Would you skip CPR by default only to find out, when you finally figure out where to get his record, and the hospital finally answers the frantic calls about it, that he was one of those who opted out?
Yeah good question. I’ve thought about that too. Most people don’t have advanced directives, so we always have to assume “do everything” when the probably better answer for a very elderly when their heart stops is “don’t do everything”. Maybe for the opt out group they could wear a medical alert bracelet/necklace that specifies full code. And for anyone under the specified DNR age, it would still be assume “do everything” unless clearly stated otherwise.
So now I am thinking of Warren Buffet, net worth about 111 billion, age 91. He has said he that he wants his tombstone to read, “Here lies the oldest man in the world.”
Just how much more time above ground can that sort of money buy?
Edit
Expanding on the idea a bit, Michael Jackson and Prince had the wealth to hire physicians with the moral flexibility to allow them to prescribe unhealthy medication to keep any ordinary dip in the stars' moods at bay. They may have both even died happy men - well before their time though.
Say a man of unlimited means merely wanted to remain healthy and alive well beyond his biblically allotted three score plus ten. The sort of wealth that Warren Buffet possesses seems like it could buy a *lot* of moral flexibility. What would be available to such a man?
I don't begrudge Mr Buffet his wealth or have any reason to think he is of low character, but just for the sake of a thought experiment, let's say ethics are off the table. How well could doctors extend his years of life - years worth living only - with the best of today's technology?
I'll simplify a bit, but I like to think about longevity optimization as having three categories: preventative, curative, and heroic.
-Preventative is diet, exercise, and not smoking (there are a few other things like wearing your seat-belt, not dying to violence, getting vaccinated etc.) and if required, taking your meds as prescribed.
-Curative is when something has gone wrong, and you need a medicine/intervention to fix it. This happens a few times in the course of a normal persons life, and can have a variable impact. Minor impact could be something like a knee injury when you're young where you damage the cartilage a bit, and if you don't get surgery you'll have pain in later life. Major could be something like cancer and you need chemo to fix it or you'll die from it.
-Heroic is when something has catastrophically failed (heart stopped, lungs not oxygenating blood etc.) and now you need intense, urgent, and high-cost measures to fix it (CPR, ECMO).
Warren Buffet can't do too much better than the average upper-middle class person in terms of preventative measures, because so much of them require personal effort (eating well, exercising, and avoiding smoking). And he probably won't get much better heroic measures than someone who goes to a good hospital (I have never personally heard anyone ask to do a "wallet biopsy" before giving someone heroic measures).
You might make the case that he has better access to curatives, which could improve his quality of life, but even there I wonder if he's so much better off than the standard person with really good (the so called "Cadillac") insurance. Would he have had access to top-tier anti-HIV drugs before anyone else? Yeah, he probably could have swung that. Maybe experimental COVID antibodies if he had gotten sick? Sure, I expect so. But I'm having trouble thinking of a variety of examples where his extreme wealth/influence would put him that much ahead.
Thanks for your thoughts. As a person with good insurance and a comfortable income, but well short of unlimited financial resources, I’ve wondered what the truly rich have access to.
I read Ross Douthat’s latest book about his struggles with Lyme disease and I was a bit surprised that someone with his degree of national recognition has the same sort of waits to see in demand specialists as us un-famous folk.
Thanks for the reminder to get that health care directive completed. Somehow it never makes it to the top of my todo list. Out of curiosity, do you manage to resuscitate many 87 year olds?
Agreed with Black Mountain Radio. We can sometimes get a heartbeat back, but in terms of leaving the hospital with any brain function (the thing we care about), it almost never happens in an elderly person. But they do get a few hours in an ICU and a massive bill...
"Resuscitate" can mean a lot of things here. Do you mean "get their heart beating on it's own again" then yes, maybe half the time. If you mean "they ever wake up and see their loved ones and smile for they are glad to be alive" then the count is 0.
Family doc here. I like the idea of a UDNR, because cracking ribs for no reason feels awful (I've done my fair share). I worry that this is going to put more strain on PCPs to explain those end-of-life decisions that we do such a bad job of explaining anyway (since we only get 14 minutes a visit). Additionally, there's the component of the healthcare proxy rescinding the decision at the last second and the need to contact them. What would it feel like to get a message saying "sorry your mother died, we didn't do everything we could because you didn't answer your phone when we tried to call you"?
I don't know what age I would set the UDNR to. Would we slide it for comorbidities?
I would think it would lessen the burden on PCPs, right? Because then everyone over a certain age is presumed to be DNR, except for the small percentage that choose to opt out. That way when another 91year old nursing home patient comes in and the home "couldn't find their papers", instead of having to "do everything" and breaking all their ribs and giving them a massive bill, we can let nature take it's course. Heck, maybe the nursing home wouldn't send that patient to the ER in the first place and could just do palliative measures at the home.
Actually, I think you're right, it would lessen the burden on PCPs. I have changed my mind.
I wonder, if we had universal DNR after 80 (with the possibility to opt out, but let's assume only 5% would take it) but also universal *cryonics*, whether the whole system would be still cheaper than what we have today?
I am assuming that universal cryonics would make the costs per capita significantly lower. First, because there would be lots of specialists, so you wouldn't need to call someone from the opposite side of the country; the local hospital would do. Second, costs of freezing scale sublinearly with the number of frozen people. The costs of freezing a volume are proportional to the surface, so in theory freezing 1000 people should only cost 100× more than freezing one.
Now I’m thinking of Walt Disney in the deep freeze. That one has to be an urban legend, doesn’t it?
Let's assume Thomas Piketty's thesis is right, and the owners of capital will keep getting richer while everyone else's share of the economic pie shrinks. For the sake of convenience, let's say 1% of the human race owns 100% of the world's capital right now, and let's call those people "The 1%." The others are "The 99%." Even though the 99% don't own any capital, they still have money and assets, so they own most of the economy.
1) I guess Piketty envisions the 1%'s share of the global economy will keep growing until one day, they own all assets while the 99% own none. Is that right?
2) If it is right, are we to assume the 99% will rent everything they use, and/or only own things that are worthless (e.g. - ripped, unstylish clothing no one else would pay anything for)?
3) Furthermore, does Piketty think the process of economic dispossession will ever stop? For example, let's again assume we've reached the day when the 1% own the whole economy. Do they call a truce at that point, and agree to preserve the distribution of assets as it is, or would the top 0.01% start using their advantages to gradually capture the assets of the bottom 0.99%?
4) Would that process proceed through several iterations until it reached its logical endpoint, with one person ("The 0.0000000001%") owned the whole economy?
5) Is that the actual logical endpoint of the process, or should we extend the X-axis out some more until zero people own the economy, in which case we can assume humanity is extinct and/or AIs have taken over?
1.) No.
2.) Irrelevant.
3.) Represents some confusion.
4.) No.
5.) This part is way more plausible.
Piketty argues that capital has a higher return on investment than the economy has growth, generally. The question "In absolute or relative terms" is very important here; if true in absolute terms, what Piketty is arguing is that all other forms of economy have a negative rate of return, because the total growth contains the ROI of capital. In this case, everybody else gets impoverished, but this has nothing to do with the ultra-wealthy people, and instead is because something else is actively destroying their wealth.
If true only in relative terms, then it's unsustainable; it implies a state of undercapitalization, that is, a state of affairs in which the best current investment is capital. If we look at the world today - well, yes. There are lots of places in the world that are desperately short on capital. It makes sense for the ROI for capital to exceed growth in relative terms, because this is just representing the fact that capital "beats the market", which is to say, is currently the best investment. This looks plausible, but in such a world, nobody is being deprived of anything, rather, different fortunes are growing at different rates (and the richest grow fastest of all - if they didn't, they'd stop being the richest).
In long term, it also matters how you split your wealth among your children. For example, if the rich 1% reproduced more than the poor 99%, this would increase their fraction in population, and also potentially dilute some of their wealth by occassional intermarriage with the poor.
Also, sometimes the poor seize the resources of the rich, either quickly by revolution, or slowly by taxation. Maybe for any fixed tax rate there is an equilibrium where the 1% getting richer from their capital is on average balanced by the taxes they pay.
Can you give me examples of English words that have a completely different meaning in USA vs Europe? So far I have "liberal" and "football".
"Tabling" an issue. In the US, this means setting it aside indefinitely in order to move on the other topics. In Britain, this means bringing it up for immediate discussion.
"Chips" for what Americans call "fries".
"Flat" to mean what Americans call "apartment".
"Dinner". American is in the evening, British - I'm not sure anymore, but I think it used to be in the afternoon?
My understanding is that dinner is typically the largest meal of the day. Traditionally, blue collar workers would have dinner in the middle of the day, then a smaller supper in the evening. White collar workers would have lunch in the middle of the day then a larger dinner in the evening.
"Corn" is maize in America and any sort of grain in Britain.
"Pants" are trousers in America and underpants in Britain.
"I could care less", which in the US means "I could not care less".
The verb "table" has *opposite* meanings in the US (to end discussion of something) and Britain (to open a thing up for discussion).
I always assumed that in both the US and Britain, this was one of the words that is its own antonym. (See https://qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1104)
As an American, I've never heard the British meaning of table.
"quite"
"Quite" has different meanings in UK English and UK English. IE. "somewhat" and "entirely".
British people always find it amusing how Americans use the word "Fanny".
"Bum" and "Tramp" have different definitions across the pond, although the American meanings are becoming more common in the UK.
"Biscuit," "truck", "pants", and "fall" either mean something else or are not (typically) used in the UK to mean what they (can) mean in the US.
The counter programming on Pravda dot Ru right now is fascinating. It can be viewed in English with a menu selection.
Edit
Take this headline for example:
“Russian submarine with 160 nukes on board surfaces off US coast”
As events unfold in Ukraine (Russia is invading Ukraine), I would be very glad to see a discussion of this in the community.
Could someone point me to some relevant place, if such a discussion has already took place, or is currently going on LessWrong or maybe a good reddit thread?
Currently, to me it seems like Russia/Putin is trying to replace the Ukrainian government with a more Russia-favoring one, either through making the government resign in the chaos, executing a coup through special forces or forcing the government to relocate and then taking Kiev and recognizing a new government controlling the Eastern territories as the "official Ukraine".
I would be particularly interested in what this means for the future, eg:
- How Ukrainian refugees will change European politics? (I am from Hungary, and it seems like an important question.)
- What sanctions are likely to be put in place?
- How will said sanctions influence European economy? (Probably energy prices go up - what are the implications of that?)
So "replace the Ukrainian government with a more Russia-favoring one" may be ignoring the 2014 coup in which the Russia-favoring Ukrainian government was replaced with a more Western-favoring one, and is one of three reasons for the situation today. Who is right? Mu.
I expect the refugees will generally be more Western-oriented, assuming Russia successfully installs a more Russia-favoring government in Ukraine, as those who favorably view the new government are likely to return, balanced against the financial ability to do so. "Leftward shift" is misleading but not entirely inaccurate; a combination of well-educated people, and people who can't afford to get back.
I doubt any sanctions will be long-lived; Russian natural gas is critical to European infrastructure, and China is happy to buy any natural gas that Europe doesn't.
As for that natural gas, it's less critical to energy (energy prices will indeed go up, but this can be mitigated to some extent) so much as it is critical to heating; the crunch here isn't higher energy prices, it's freezing winter temperatures. Assuming this goes far enough, expect strict rationing of heating, possibly increased winter fatalities, and likely widespread damage in the form of burst pipes.
Setting the "Who is right" question aside, why do you think sanctions will be short lived?
Do you think Russia will increase gas price/cut access entirely, should Europe place "too serious" sanctions in place? It is also their interest to sell the gas.
Also, could Europe not import gas for a higher price from different sources? Obviously it is costly, but sanctions are always costly for both parties - what is actually the estimated cost?
Russia can sell their gas to China, who will basically buy as much as they're willing to sell them. The cost to Russia is thus much lower than it would be to Europe.
I can't put a price tag on it, but a substantial part of the issue is logistics and infrastructure - this isn't a great time, logistically, to suddenly need to import a lot more of something by ocean.
Russia can sell their gas to China, but they can't *deliver* their gas to China because there's no Trans-Siberian natural gas pipeline. There are some small local pipelines for delivering natural gas from Yakutsk and Sakhalin to China, but I think they're already close to capacity and in any event irrelevant to the gas produced in Western Russia and currently sold to e.g. Germany.
> So "replace the Ukrainian government with a more Russia-favoring one" may be ignoring the 2014 coup in which the Russia-favoring Ukrainian government was replaced with a more Western-favoring one, and is one of three reasons for the situation today.
Yeah, those situations are sooooooo similar... except that one of them involved foreign armies invading Ukraine, and the other did not.
Sure. And I'm not going to say that that is not an important line, certainly I grew up thinking that was an important line to draw; certainly I was taught that that is an important line to draw.
But I do notice it's an important line in my culture. And I notice it is drawn in a place that is comfortable for my culture; my country doesn't have to give up safety or security in order to keep that line where it is, and indeed may have quite the competitive advantage in terms of utilizing that line to our advantage. But maybe that's the right place for that line to be.
But then again, I have a suspicion that, if Trump supporters were to overthrow the US government, a lot of people who currently insist that that line is very important, would suddenly be fine if Canadian troops marched down to intervene.
Counterfactuals really have to be plausible to bear any weight. (Same problem with "shove the fat guy in front of the trolley.") The only plausible scenario in such a situation would be the US military itself intervening.
In any case, I agree that this may not be the important dividing line. The line, which can be easily generalized to your hypo and to other cases, is whether, following whatever unrest occurs, a democratically legitimate government is promptly (re)installed. That was the outcome in Ukraine, and if it were the outcome in the US, it would be acceptable in general.
Suppose, for a moment, that Trump supporters overthrew the US government, and passed a law that said that no current government employees can ever be government employees again. (This happened in Ukraine.)
Now suppose that in the next election, Trump won, as counted by the people hired by the new Trump supporter government. The only people you can appeal to were also hired by the new government, which also changed the laws so it had more control over who was in the courts. (This happened in Ukraine.)
Is that a democratically legitimate government? Would you be able to tell?
If Maine, Connecticut, and New York refused to go along with this, and it was their independence Canada was nominally moving in to protect, how would that look?
Like, Russia isn't a good guy in any of this, not by a longshot. But this didn't come out of nowhere, either.
Also, I'll predict that more than one prominent US government official took money from the new Ukrainian government, and evidence of this will surface in the next two years.
Indeed, I agree issues of that kind would be serious obstacles to democratic legitimacy. I am sure there are questions and I do not have a strong prior regarding the legitimacy of the Ukrainian election of 2014. The important point, to me, is that the line is the same -- despite it not being trivial to decide whether it was reached.
I do note that Putin/Russia accepted the 2014 result as legitimate, and also that it seems unlikely that greater participation in separatist areas would have changed the outcome. Therefore, I still think it was legitimate, but again, without extreme confidence (or investment).
Ukrainian immigrants in Poland tend to behave, despite their numbers nobody's bothered by them outside of some fringe far-right assholes. I don't see any reason why war refugees would cause any problems, other than the logistics of handling the sudden influx. EU's approach to this is baffling to me.
Energy prices are already going up and they will go up further. The implications is everyone's fucked in inverse proportion to the fuel reserves they had. On the individual level, prepare for inflation, buy things now rather than later, keep a stock of necessities etc etc. Apparently Poland already had a fuel run today because every reason is good to panic.
I agree that war refugees shouldn't be a huge problem (given they are distributed), but in some aspects they are different than work-related migrants, so might be worth a thought.
What would be your ballpark estimate for energy prices increasing and inflation?
Shit, I'd like to know myself. For inflation I'm expecting anything from chill 10-20% YoY to complete hyperinflationary collapse of our currency - I am told that's likely to happen at ~50% or above.
It doesn't radically change the actions you need to take though, unless you really like holding fiat currency for some reason.
As for energy, I'm really angry at myself for not setting up solar earlier, especially since we just got legislation to _discourage_ solar installations because the country's energy grid couldn't handle all the backflow during the day. Oh well, I'll wait for another order of magnitude of improvement in the tech I suppose.
Well, bad news, I'm a student and all my small assets are in fiat currency and student loan :P
Quantum computing is technically substrate-dependent. Theoretically, there could be other substrate-dependent computations. Theoretically, the brain could use them.
Without motivating this in any way, I'm curious how serious modern neuroscience takes this idea (if anyone here is familiar enough with the literature to answer that). Say on a scale from 0 to 10, with floating point numbers since the answer is probably <1?
Do you mind elaborating what do you mean with it being substrate dependent here? A qubit is a qubit, from a computational perspective.
Yes, but you can't implement something that holds a qubit with silicon
My definition of substrate-dependence would be something like "you lose on computational speedup if you change the substrate". Whatever the substrate does, if it's not a quantum thing (which I'm explicitly less interested in), you can run an atom-level simulation and compute the results in a substrate-independent way -- but that will take much more computational power.
"you lose on computational speedup if you change the substrate" is true for regular 'classical' computation too, i.e. depending on the computation(s) performed and the design of the computers.
> you can't implement something that holds a qubit with silicon
Existing solid state computers aren't made purely of silicon either so I'm not sure what point you're making.
Are you claiming that different (hypothetical) quantum systems could be used to create different kinds (or different speeds) of quantum computers?
(I'm not sure that anyone has even built a _functional_ quantum computer yet. AFAIK, there are still not non-theoretical results providing particularly strong evidence of 'quantum supremacy'.)
> Are you claiming that different (hypothetical) quantum systems could be used to create different kinds (or different speeds) of quantum computers?
No. Forget quantum mechanics. I was only bringing it up to pre-empt the response "all computation is always substrate-independent".
So if you take a classical computer, you can abstract it as a bunch of binary states flickering on or off. All computation translates to turning states on or off depending on some algorithm and other states. You could then implement the same thing by having e.g. a little physical hole for each binary memory, where the two states are "there's a rock in here" and "there's not a rock in here". (A 1-byte register is eight holes next to each other.) Then when your computer computes something, you could do the same by pushing rocks in and out of the holes. This would require the same number of operations, hence the silicon substrate does not give you "computational speedup" in the way I was talking about.
On the other hand, if you want to compute how atoms align in a tuning fork when you hit it on a table, this *does* require more operations, since just hitting the fork against the table gives you the alignment without computing anything explicitly. That's what I'd call computational speedup, for this incredibly contrived example.
Roger Penrose's Orch-OR would be the most developed take in that direction. Being endorsed by a Nobel laureate would probably bring it to at least 0.5/10, being near-universally dismissed as crackpottery would keep it below 1/10.
Thanks! How much lower does it drop if we exclude theories that rely on quantum-mechanical effects?
Uh, zero? I don't think you can get anything above a Turing machine equivalent with classical physics, but I might be mistaken.
Well, technically *any* substrate-dependent effect solves *some* computational problem. If you take a tuning fork and hit it against a table, it will vibrate in a certain way; you can view this as the solution to the problem of computing how atoms align during vibration. If you create a computer simulation where you translate each atom into a point in 3d euclidean space, no equivalent to "hit it against a table" exists; you have to go through each atom one-by-one and calculate a displacement vector.
Anyway, I suspected and mostly wanted to confirm that this kind of thing is not considered relevant.
You can simulate the tuning fork with a computer though, but cannot simulate a computer with the fork. So the computer is Turing-complete, the fork isn't, and for substrate-dependent consciousness we probably want some kind of a super-Turing-complete system.
Yeah, substrate-dependence, if it were relevant, would not extend the set of things you can do; classical computation is already Turing Complete. What it could to, theoretically, is provide opportunities for speedup.
Is it possible to edit my substack account to use my real name without putting my real name on comments I wrote in the past here?
If I change my avatar it back propagates. If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say changing the name on your Substack account would do the same thing. But that’s just my best guess.
The name of my publication definitely backpropagates. I guess I'll just let this account's subscription expire and buy a new subscription on a new account.
well, you shouldnt wait unril it expires. do it a month before, and post with both for a while
Also, advocated lowering age of consent (from 18 to lower) and in other posts complained about dating issues because 16 year olds are the sexiest.
And linked photos of specific one (princess of Spain, IIRC).
Also, were irritated when Scott asked to stop lowering age of consent topic and were confused why he prefers to not start this until something substantial and useful can be said.
It's already lower than 18 in every developed country except for south korea and ~1/4 of US states. Not exactly a radical idea.
Also I wasn't "confused and irritated" by Scott's decision to avoid the topic. I accepted it without responding. Seems like a reasonable way to allocate weirdness points.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/verified/id1497379527
A podcast series about the Russian Imperial Movement, an organization for unifying white nationalists worldwide. They're not well known in the US, probably because their violence tends to be against refugees in camps in other countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Imperial_Movement
So far, the podcast hasn't gotten into who's financing them-- the amount of money looks to me like a billionaire's hobby rather than a government, but I'm guessing.
Has anyone else here been keeping track of this group?
From “Dreyer’s English An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style”
The Celebrated Ending-a Sentence-with-a-Preposition Story
Two women are seated side by side at a posh dinner party, one a matron of the sort played in old Marx Brothers movies by Margaret Dumont, except frostier, the other an easy going southern gal, let’s say for the sake of visuals, wearing a very pink and very ruffled evening gown.
Southern Gal, amiably to Frosty Matron: So where y’all from?
Frosty Matron, no doubt giving Southern Gal a once over with a lorgnette: I’m from a place where people don’t end their sentences with prepositions.
Southern Gal, sweetly, after a moments consideration: OK. So where y’all from, bitch.
The version I heard ends with the Texan asking the Harvard student "Can you tell me where the Widener Library is at, asshole?"
That’s pretty good too.
One more Substack comment problem.
Starting a week or two ago, I’ve been having scrolling problems on my 4+ year old iPad Pro.
I’ll get halfway into the comments, and suddenly they don’t want to scroll. I drag the page up, and it snaps down again. Eventually starts working again, but only after multiple attempts to scroll. The only other site where I’ve seen this is Reddit - maybe they use the same stack?
Super annoying…today I just got tired of fighting with it and noped out.
Anyone else seeing this problem?
No, I'm very sure Substack isn't using "the same stack" in any significant way as Reddit. I wish Substack's comments worked as well as Reddit's! Tho that might be because I don't use the default/new Reddit site (nearly) at all.
Tho maybe you're sorta right in that the problems might be due to using 'JavaScript trickery' (e.g. to dynamically add new comments to the page as they're made) versus '(mostly) plain old HTML' – that's what I suspect anyways.
But yes, I've observed similar scrolling/rendering problems on Substack pretty regularly, particularly on blogs like this one with posts with lots of comments.
I'm seeing it too. Dragging the scroll bar seems to unstick it.
Is anyone here experienced with parasomnias, in particular, has anyone figured out a successful strategy to manage them? Because evidence-based medicine apparently looks the other way and pretends they don't exist.
I suffer from psychopompic hallucinations and waking up with just half of a brain awake and disoriented, ie. confusional arousal (which I assure you is the correct term, and has nothing to do with confused boners). Might be genetic since there's some light somnabulism in my family, happens pretty much from birth. It's not an immediate threat to either myself or others, but it's stressful and understandably drives my partner up the wall.
The conventional answer is sleep hygiene, which I experimented with a bunch and if anything it makes the problem _worse_ (when I'm really tired the parasomnias happen rarely). The other conventional answer is chronic use of clonazepam, which I won't experiment with because I'd rather sleep alone for the rest of my life than get addicted to benzos.
I'm starting to rigorously track the influence of melatonin before sleep, because apparently for a small % of patients it helps. After that I'm out of ideas.
I know something about treatment of sleep disorders, and might be able to offer some suggestions, but I'd need to hear more about the problem -- in particular what makes it a bug rather than a feature of your nights? Are the hallucinations and the confused arousals sort of one and the same or separate phenomena? If separate, is each a problem itself, or only one, and if so which? What is the problematic aspect of these experiences: Intrinsically very unpleasant? Dread having, so dread interferes with falling asleep? Alarms you so much when happens that afterwards you can't calm down and go back to sleep? Scares your partner? Also, what's the nature of the hypnopompic phenomena?
The hallucinations are mostly okay by themselves, even interesting, it's the confusion that's the problem - I tend to sit up in bed and be upset about something that I see but doesn't exist, or reinterpret a harmless item as something very strange, or be alarmed about something that can't even be explained logically after waking up fully. Often I don't even remember the event, or remember just the last bit.
"Scares the partner/flatmates/family/whoever is close at the moment" would be what makes it a bug, if I lived alone I wouldn't care.
The hypnopompic hallucinations are, well, full blown hallucinations. Things floating in the air, often vaguely organic. I once saw a black hole with tendrils wrapping around everything in the room, which I think was a very weird interpretation of the eye's blood vessels (usually filtered out by the visual cortex). A desk lamp would become a detailed, clawed robotic arm. My partner would look like a car crash victim covered head to toe in bandages, instead of the duvet she's sleeping under. A ceiling lamp would turn into a literal Alien xenomorph hanging upside down. Rune-like writing on the walls. Paintings on the walls that aren't there.
It's actually really cool to observe when I happen to be relatively awake and calm, but combined with the agitated state and "disorientation to time and place" as it's called in the literature, it's troublesome.
FWIW, as a child I had full blown night terrors (which are quite different and cannot be recollected at all), which I seem to have grown out of. The parasomnias remain.
Wow, those are really interesting. It’s like the dreaming process is still going on, but using as raw materials things you are actually sitting up and looking at. Even though you don’t experience these hallucinations as terrifying, it’s notable that virtually every image you describe has a dark quality: Some are of things dangerous, destructive or destroyed (black holes, clawed arms, car crash victims). Others are of things alien, unfamiliar (robots, xenomorphs, runes.). I’d say what your mind’s up to here is trying to integrate 2 things: What you’re actually seeing around you; and your awareness that something is wrong. Because you are in dream mode, and think in images, you’re not able to say to yourself, “I’m awake in my bedroom but something is wrong — my mind’s not working right.” Instead, your mind says that in dream-language, i.e. in images. You have images of things alien, dangerous, and damaged.
Anyhow, as for what to do about having these hypnopompics, I actually do not have any great suggestions, just a few ideas. Since you do not mind having the experiences themselves, would it work to just give your partner and flatmates a clear explanation of the phenomenon, some reassurance, and a simple plan for them to follow when you’re in that state (make soothing noises, wait it out)? If during these experiences you are screaming and thrashing, and people really need to have some way of managing you, you might try having them play music — the kind of music people use on psychedelic playlists. Pick something out in advance and have it ready to play. I did a couple of experiments with IM ketamine that put me into a state that was sort of like the one you’re describing, and my frightened and disabled mind wrapped itself around the music like a vine and stabilized. Another possibility would be to use a technique that sometimes helps with night terrors. If these awakenings tend to happen during a certain part of the sleep cycle, like say in the last couple hours before your usual wakeup time, you could try setting your alarm for that time, sitting up and orienting yourself for 60 secs or so, then going back to sleep. Doing that might hit some reset button that causes the final portion of your night’s sleep to proceed in a somewhat different way, one that does not wander into hypnopompic territory.
I strongly recommend against trying drugs for the problem, unless problem is doing quite serious damage to your life. Drugs that help with sleep problems also change sleep architecture, and it’s not good to mess with that.
I suppose the dark ones are the most notable, but they're honestly all over the place (my imagination is kind of edgy, I admit). One of the weirdest experiences of this kind was waking up, looking at the wall near my bed, and noticing that the vaguely Greek mural on said wall is waving in place. So I thought "oh, cool hallucination". Then I realized "wait, I have no mural on the wall" and it disappeared, in something that is best described as a higher-level equivalent of the Necker cube switch - nothing happened in the visual field but the object was no longer there. And it was pretty detailed, had a lady in a toga lying by a lake and everything.
I kinda like the idea that the visuals are a manifestation of a vague sense of unease from the unnatural state of consciousness I find myself in, I haven't thought about it this way. The hypnagogic ones I (rarely) see when falling asleep tend to be more abstract and less dramatic.
Forcing a break in the sleep cycle before the usual hour these may happen is a nuclear option, from a sleep quality perspective, but I'll consider it if things get worse. I wonder why I never heard about it despite having night terrors for a better part of my childhood, sounds like it could work.
"I kinda like the idea that the visuals are a manifestation of a vague sense of unease from the unnatural state of consciousness I find myself in, I haven't thought about it this way. "
Here's an example of a similar phenom from my ketamine trip. I was sort of peaking, and while I kept having thoughts, I'd lost the ability to set them in any context. I'd lost track of where I was, and the fact that I'd just had a shot of ketamine. And while I was having a thought, I wasn't able to think about the fact that I was thinking, or recall what I was thinking a moment before I'd had the present thought. So I just had a woozy, powerful feeling that something was wrong but I couldn't say what. Then I had am image: I saw, or maybe was, a huge block of ice breaking off from the South Pole and floating off into the cold waters. I think that was my mind's imagistic representation of what was wrong with how it was working -- I've broken loose from context. (By the way, fuck IM ketamine.)
Don't forget the suggestion about music. I actually think it's the most promising idea.
Did Scott get rid of the even/odd politics/no-politics rule? That's probably good, as it didn't seem to do much. I never noticed a difference in topics between the two thread parities, and it certainly wasn't the case that one thread was completely overrun with political discussion
My guess is that it was an oversight, and that odd/even distinctions will return. But I have very little to back that up and I agree that there wasn't a big difference between the two - I tended to only notice when someone commented "Better save that for the politics thread!", tho' it is also true that I don't involve myself much in politics or CW issues.
Even Putin waited for the even-numbered open thread before invading Ukraine.
Does the theories that short term and minor but fascinating items in the new are *intentional* distractions actually do any good? I think it's more likely that people are more interested in dramatic and human interest stories without any intention being needed.
People tend to read more intention into things than is really there. Person X does a thing that has a side effect Person Y doesn't like; Y then assumes the side effect is the real purpose.
Imagine hypothetically that you have a magic pill that instantly cures every disease. How hard would it be to get FDA approval?
How do you know that it cures every disease? People make that claim about a lot of stuff, but sometimes they’re wrong, so it’s important to test it.
You should start by feeding the pill to some animals to see if it explodes. If the animals explode it would not be good to give to a human.
If the animals don’t explode, you might try giving it to a dozen or so humans to see if the humans explode, which they might do since this pill is unproven magic.
If the humans don’t explode you might try giving it to a hundred or so people to see if it cures all their diseases, which it might not do since again it’s unproven magic
Once that’s done you should do a larger scale study with a couple hundred to a thousand people to prove that the drug is safe and effective on a large scale.
All this will take a long time. But importantly you should be doing it regardless of whether or not the FDA exists, since it’s entirely necessary to test drugs. This isn’t bureaucracy or red tape- it’s science. The direct difficult slog of work in separating truth from fiction.
Since your drug cures all diseases it will probably be eligible for several FDA programs including the fast track program, breakthrough therapy program, accelerated approval program, and priority review. You’ll be able to start the approval process before you’ve finished clinical trials, and you’ll get feedback from the FDA throughout the process to make sure that your experiments are sound and your drug will be approved. You’ll also have designated experts to help you with the efficiency of your clinical trials. These programs also mean you can use proxy-measures of efficacy. So if your drug cures cancer you can measure tumor shrinkage rather than cancer rates overall, which will help get it to market faster. Although after it’s released you’ll have to perform follow up studies.
It’s hard to say how much time this will add. Priority review gives a maximum of 6 months, and that process can begin before you’ve finished clinical trials since it’s a fast track breakthrough therapy.
Since your drug is magic it seems fair to guess it will be faster since the FDA can direct all of its resources at evaluating and approving this one drug since it eliminates the need for all other drugs.
If you had at least one doctor who believed in your pill, I think you could get it approved within a year. Have your doctor friend recommend it as a "supplement" to his patients - if the pill instantly cures them, they'll tell everyone they know and you'll have exponential growth on your hands. If you have enough supply, send every order a whole bottle of pills. Even if the FDA shuts you down at this point, a black market will spring up instantly that no force on earth will be able to stop.
My feeling is that the amount of value your pill would create (if it were not incredibly expensive to produce) would be equivalent to the current world GDP. Even if the FDA banned it, other countries will allow it and its effects will quickly be impossible to deny.
Lastly, no president will want to be the one who let the FDA sit on a miracle pill until their successor poked the FDA into approving it. A happy and healthy population is much more likely to give you a second term. The FDA has already proven it can get a vaccine approved pretty quickly (relatively speaking) if time really counts. This doesn't seem much different to me.
I'm very far from an expert, but my best guess is that it would be guaranteed but still cost a billion dollars and take a decade, and event hen you'd be getting it approved for some specific disease because the FDA doesn't have a category for "panacaea", so doctors would have to prescribe it off-label for most conditions with all the issues that causes with insurance and general patient scepticism and ill-informed doctors unaware of the drug's potential
Came across something that sounds even better than a charter city, a charter territory in Syria of all places:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_Administration_of_North_and_East_Syria
which seems to be doing amazingly well:
> The supporters of the region's administration state that it is an officially secular polity[30][31][32] with direct democratic ambitions based on an anarchistic, feminist, and libertarian socialist ideology promoting decentralization, gender equality,[33][34] environmental sustainability, social ecology and pluralistic tolerance for religious, cultural and political diversity, and that these values are mirrored in its constitution, society, and politics, stating it to be a model for a federalized Syria as a whole, rather than outright independence.
What is their strategy for not getting a missile to the face, given the geopolitics of the region?
"I'm going to STRANGLE the next person who talks to me about the new Batman film!" said Christian, balefully.
"Ahh, I kid! I kid, man!" said Nicole, "just go with it!".
"I had no idea that training day at the distillery would be so laborious," said Denzel, washing the tun.
"New Jersey must pay back all the money it owes Rhode Island within a year," said N.J. Sloan.
"I hate whales", Tom blubbered.
I physically grimaced--almost recoiled--when I got the third; I suppose your kind takes that as a kind of compliment...
Has anyone seen evidence on cases of reinfection with Omicron — people who got Omicron twice? I believe there were cases with previous Covid varieties, and Omicron is more contagious which should make it more likely, but I don't know if it actually does.
Here are some hints:
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/mrc-global-infectious-disease-analysis/covid-19/report-49-Omicron/
https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1482219593351450627
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.11.21266068v2
I know of this happening anecdotally to people. However it is likely they had false positives. I am in South Africa, where we apparently have a new B variant of omicron, so maybe that affects things.
I haven't heard of many cases of reinfection within two months of a previous infection. At this point, we are not yet three months out from the identification of Omicron, so there just aren't many people who recovered long enough ago to have much chance of a second infection, if protection is extremely strong for the first two months after an infection.
(That said, quick reinfections may be hard to identify if it's soon enough that someone might think it's just a long first infection.)
Haven't seen such evidence, and find the claims dubious, on the basis of this: https://www.amazon.com/Virus-Mania-COVID-19-Hepatitis-Billion-Dollar/dp/3752629789
“This is a genuine nonspam message”
"And a test of how quick genuine spammers are"
I predict that this appeal method: "If you want to appeal any decision, please write up your argument, start a conditional prediction market..." will work great. But not for any reason related to prediction markets.
From a prediction-market perspective it will be a complete failure. We are asking (suspected) trolls to create prediction-market questions on Manifold, but then the troll is the person who adjudicates the outcome. Everyone will reason: "this person is not that interested in the integrity of the prediction market; they are much more interested in rewarding people who help them get above 25% YES, and punishing people who interfere with this. So they're likely to resolve the market for YES regardless of what actually happens." No prediction market will go below 25%.
This will still work fine as a filter for ban appeals, because the effort involved in doing all this prediction-market stuff is so high that nobody will do this unless they're confident Scott will overturn the ban. (It would be much lower-effort to just create a new account.)
Interesting point.
It occurs to me that it might be a useful feature for a prediction market to allow the question-submitter to assign resolution-authority to some other account. (With a publicly-visible default resolution if that other account doesn't bother to do anything. "This question will resolve to <no> on <date> unless <third party> takes action.")
This would allow you to create various predictions of the form "I will convince <public figure> of <X>" (provided the public figure already has an account on the site) without the question-creator needing to have their own established reputation to lean on.
In 2013, Scott estimated lizardman's constant at 4% in https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/ .
Lizardman's constant is a very useful concept. It is quite helpful to understand that a certain percentage of crazy replies to a question are likely to be noise that can be safely ignored.
I get the feeling that now this value is a lot higher in the US, seeing that in all kinds of questionnaires people are required to answer questions that to most people feel ridiculous - e.g. to list pronouns not only for themselves and other grownup members of their family, but also for their infants and toddlers, and to pick their gender out of "Male, Female, Other". I get the feeling - I might be wrong - that having to answer questions that feel ridiculous also causes people to be less responsible about the rest of the questionnaire. I don't have any sense for whether this would extend to questionnaires without such questions.
I'm curious if anyone estimated the current lizardman's constant for questionnaires with and without such questions (since these are probably different numbers), or if someone thinks they know how high it might go.
Hey your question sounds like a shower thought (not a bad thing). Was it?
Idea wouldn't be hard to test with an online questionnaire about some matter that everybody has opinions about. Have 2 versions that are identical except that one contains demographic or other questions with many "ridiculous" options, other contains same questions with conventional options. Have some measure of how many crazy answers there are, maybe variance, compare results for 2 questionnaires.
Yes, I agree that this wouldn't be hard to test. What I was wondering was if anyone already had such data or estimates.
It wasn't a shower thought. It was something that's been bothering me for a while. Since Scott's 2013 post, I've always been aware of the lizardman's constant when looking at poll numbers or other self-reported data. Lately, I couldn't help noticing 1) what seems like ridiculously-looking questions or answer options to reasonable questions; 2) people I know who are not conservative and not troll types coming up with answers that are definitely not expected; 3) me having to spend extra cycles on these questions, which makes me less eager to spend adequate effort on the rest of the form and makes me consider trolling.
Personally, until very recently, I've tried to answer any questionnaire, survey, form to the best of my knowledge. Now I notice that my thought process is going something like this. Ow, not another one of these, can I leave this blank? (The form might not let me - damn web developers.) Am I really supposed to give pronouns for a toddler? Is it "he/him/his" or "he/his/him"? How about I just write "male"? Why don't I just write "N/A" and have them figure this out, or is this already trolling? (I know a statistician who answers "Default", is that trolling?) If I'm already trolling anyway, why don't I write, say, "meow", because, after all, ask a silly question, get a silly answer? What about my gender - it's definitely not "Other", but should I put "Other" for "I don't want you to have any more of my data than you absolutely must", or to troll you for having a silly answer option?
It's a natural guess that people acting like this would contribute to self-reported data containing more invalid answers.
I am aware that the influence of ridiculous questions might be a drop in the bucket, because, as Nancy Lebovitz points out, there's so much bad blood in the society, that people are probably giving a lot of invalid answers even in the absence of ridiculous questions. However, ridiculous questions reach across the aisle to annoy even people who were not initially interested in trolling, so I do think they contribute.
So the natural question is, how much? How much of our data, and what parts of it, are now noise? What part is due to ridiculous questions, and what part to something else?
Not shower thought -- too bad, it was fun to think for a moment I had learned to recognize them. Silly superpower to have even if real, though.
Agree that other things besides ridiculous questions, such as for example bad blood, could be sending people into troll mode. Still, you could test for both the bad blood and the ridiculous question hypotheses by controlling what the questionnaire asks about. For instance, a questionnaire about food preferences seems unlikely to stir up much culture war shit, so if people are giving more crazy answers on the ridiculous question version of the food questionnaire than on the no-ridiculous-questions version, you've got an answer there. Then you could have a similar pair of questionnaires about some divisive question. Anything about covid precautions in the schools currently gives half the people on my state coronavirus Reddit sub a case of rabies, so I suggest that as a topic that would pull strongly for rage-trolling in the answers.
Here's a related thing I often wonder about, both in the shower and out: The issue of the answerability of questionnaire questions. I once participated in a study where at random times during the day my phone asked me to indicate what activity I was engaged in and rate how happy I was. I found the latter very hard to rate. Maybe 10% of the time I was clearly happy or unhappy (usually about a recent or upcoming life event, not about the activity I was engaged in). The rest of the time, I ended up giving the middle rating (0 on a -5 to +5 scale) because I wasn't clearly happy or unhappy, so guessed I was in the middle. While "happiness" was hard to rate, I would have found it quite doable to rate something like engagement -- how interested and committed I felt about the activity I was engaged in. For instance just now, before I started this sentence, I asked myself how happy or unhappy I have been feeling as I wrote this, and felt unable to answer. On the other hand, I feel very clearly engaged and committed in writing this post, and definitely would be displeased if some interruption made me break off writing. I could rate the level of my engagement, too: +3. A positive rating because this is a subject I'm interested in, and I'm satisfied with how I've expressed my thoughts, and I think there's a reasonable chance of getting back an interesting and friendly answer. On the other hand, the whole thing is sort of low-stakes, so not a +4 or +5.
There are some questionnaires -- the Myers-Briggs, is an egregious example -- where I find almost all the questions unanswerable: "Does it bother you more having things (a) incomplete or (b) completed." Well, neither completeness or incompleteness in themselves bother me particularly. My being bothered depends on the things that are complete or incomplete. On questionnaires like the M-B I pretty soon give up on trying to figure out which choice applies to me because the task is impossible. I get sloppy and random. Also *irritated*. If there were some fill-in-the-blank items at the end I'd definitely feel tempted to write a bunch of random, mystifying, insulting stuff.
Sorry, you just happened to run into someone who no longer has shower thoughts. Your superpower might still work on someone who does.
You are making a good point: some questionnaires are annoying for reasons other than ridiculous questions. I just got through a really awful example that wanted all kinds of information I either did not have at hand or no longer had available at all. While doing this, I could feel getting more sloppy with every screen. (This questionnaire is even more annoying than normal because it does not let people skip questions -- and also because you have to save all the time, or else it throws out all of the work if you walk away from the computer to look for info! Believe it or not, some organizations running surveys actually do this to you!)
I would like to believe that there probably is some kind of baseline that can be seen in surveys that are not particularly awful, in particular the ones run by organizations that know that if they annoy people enough, then people will just hang up on them or close the browser tab.
I scanned Gallup and PPP websites for recent polls, but nothing that would be an obvious lizardman's constant estimate jumped out at me.
I don't know about that, but I've heard from a conservative/libertarian person that there's a movement among conservatives to just not answer political polls on the grounds that accurate answers will just be used against conservatives. This might imply that some conservatives are giving inaccurate answers instead.
I'm not just talking political polls here. You get this in all kinds of polls and just about in any piece of paperwork that wants to know anything about you. Enrolling your toddler in daycare? Pronouns for the toddler, please. Registering for a COVID test? Please check if your gender is "Other".
I know people who are definitely not conservative and who have been giving trollish replies to these questions, because "ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer". Lizardman's constant is probably skewed conservative/libertarian at this point, but a number of lefties are getting in the mix as well.
More likely just ignoring polls, further skewing them leftward.
Does anyone have any ideas concerning a mechanism for the "wood wide web"? I keep hearing about how trees use fungal networks to communicate and trade with one another. This comes up in podcasts (e.g., Radiolab, from Tree to Shining Tree), books (e.g., Entangled life by merlin sheldrake), netflix (fantastic fungi). I think scientists injected some radioactive substance into a tree, and then found that substance appeared in the tree's saplings that were connected to the tree via the fungal networks, but not in unrelated trees or unconnected saplings. But in all cases, the authors are vague about how exactly it works.
I gather that the fungi are basically little tubes that connect trees by drilling into its roots. The relationship between fungi and tree is symbiotic. The fungi are better at finding minerals the tree needs like phosphorus, they send these minerals into the trees' roots in exchange for glucose. But suppose a tree wants to send some mineral via a fungal network to a sapling. Of all the different fungi that have drilled into the tree's roots, how does the tree know which is also connected to a particular sapling? And how does the tree ensure that the fungus will pass the minerals on to its sapling, rather than somewhere else?
Is it possible the tree can recognize a "message" from a sapling, and reward the fungus for delivering it? Can trees train fungi that anything sent through one particular point of connection is intended to be delivered to another particular tree? If so, how?
Paul Stametes is a well respected mycologist. A search on his name will turn up a lot of articles and video including a TED Talk.
Armchair speculation: I don't think this requires tree-to-tree communication.
Maybe the fungus knows how much phosphorus each tree has; either by directly sensing it, or some signal the trees send. It allocates its phosphorus accordingly. If this results in the fungus itself being short on phosphorus, it pulls phosphorus from whatever trees have an excess.
Still, seems like trees would benefit from being able to "communicate" in a more nuanced way than that about need for minerals -- for instance to advocate for available phosphorus to be sent to its sapling rather than to others, or to *not* be sent to trees that are crowding it. Advantages of more nuanced communication might have nudged tree and fungus evolution in the direction of permitting more nuance. (Meanwhile, the idea of nuanced communication among trees has so much charm and weirdness to it that my mind is constantly nudged in the direction of believing it's there, because if it were I would be thrilled & fascinated.)
Like with most things in biology, if you can imagine it certainly exists in some species.
Realistically though, I'd expect the fungus to promote the growth of everything that plays nice with it and stifle everything that doesn't. Between-tree communications would require the tree somehow manipulating the fungus at a distance? I guess they could "broadcast" their chemical signalling into the network and just let it diffuse.
I have found a good use for crypto!
It's a decent starting word for 6-letter Hello Wordle.
Begs the question - what makes a 'good' starting word (S.W)?
Follow-up question: Is it optimal to use a standard S.W everyday? Change randomly? Or try to be as different as possible from last day's answer (gambler's fallacy)?
NB I'm about to spoil a lot of Wordle theory, part of the fun of which is surely figuring out for yourself. Don't read if you don't want to know optimal starting words!
I got really into algorithmically solving Wordle a few months ago and have been developing my approach ever since - I think I might be a bone fide expert on this topic!
There is one obvious definition for how a word can be 'good', and this is the sense where it helps you solve the puzzle quickly. There are actually a few possible ways to think about this.
The first - and probably honestly the most straightforward - is to pick the word that helps you guess the puzzle fastest on expectation. Wordle is 'solved', which is to say that for every possible target word it is known how efficiently each possible starting word solves the puzzle. By picking the word which solves the puzzle most efficiently, that's a pretty good case for the 'best' starting word. This word is 'SALET' (a type of helmet), which solves Wordle in 3.421 guesses on average. 'CRATE' and 'TRACE' are also not bad choices (3.424 on average), but feel aesthetically more pleasant to me since they are normal words which could also potentially be the hidden word for the day.
However, I'm not so convinced this is actually the 'best' starting word in terms of human-level performance. It relies on you making the perfectly optimal response to the response grid you get every time, and this might mean two or even three effectively random-looking guesses before you start to hone in on what will eventually be the correct answer. If you play SALET and intend to play optimally you are basically just memorising patterns of response grids and not really 'playing' at all. A more human-tractable way of playing is to try and reduce the search space as far as possible, and the best word for that is 'ROATE' ('the cumulative net earnings after taxes available to common shareholders'). 'ROAST' is not bad if you prefer reasonable words. After playing 'ROATE', you have (on expectation) the fewest number of words remaining which is probably the best possible state that a human could reasonably explore
Another possible definition of 'best' is the word which is most likely to give you hits, because hits are exciting and let you experience the 'fun' part of Wordle which is trying to think about the structure of words and what the hidden word might be. People on reddit like 'ADIEU' for this reason, because all the vowels mean you're almost guaranteed a hit. I don't really like ADIEU much though because the sorts of hit you get aren't really exciting to me ("Oh really, this word has an E in it? Tell me more..."). A nice word for getting hits is 'SOARE' ('a young hawk') and 'SLATE' is not a bad substitute if you prefer 'real' words, although the exact word you want to use the most depends on how you weight greens vs yellows in the response grid.
However my current best starting word is different from all of these - I've played enough Wordle (both 'officially' and as part of testing my algorithms) that I can now almost always beat it in 4, and so the challenge for me is not guessing the word, but guessing the word as fast as possible. To that end, I went looking for the word that is most likely to give almost-unique answer grids. This gives approximately a 10% chance of getting the answer in 2, and if I miss on the second guess I just solve it as usual. The best word for this is 'LATEN' but I prefer to use 'FLIRT' because I think it is showboatier to pick up words which start with F and it is only slightly worse in terms of performance.
There are a couple of other ways you might think of the 'best' word, but I'd consider them cheating. It is trivially easy to check the code of Wordle to find out what the actual word of the day is, and in that sense it is optimal to do this every day. There's a more flash way to do the same thing which is to look at the grids produced by friends and family (or on twitter) and then reason backwards from these grids to what the word must be. For example if you see a grid that begins GGxxx you can be confident that the final word is not 'AHEAD' because there's only one five-letter word that begins AH in the Wordle dictionary - if you do this to enough grids you can get the hidden word pretty much every time. Again, if you can do this it makes for the 'optimal' guess by a long way. I spent about two days trying to solve a set of grids in this way without using a computer and failed miserably, so even though it is a cool solution I think it is still cheating because it has to be computer-assisted.
Thanks. This was great. I absolutely despise the 'ADIEU' approach because it over-optimises for hits. Most of the time forcing the 'unhit' vowels to be used repeatedly in further guesses.
I adopt a similar approach to 'TRACE'. Incidentally, my starting word for a long time was TRICK, so that I extinguish the more comparatively irregular consonants early.
I try to think up a new starter every day (for me the fun of Wordle is picking 5 letter words, and having a starter I use every time is just robbing me of a fun decision), but when I have trouble thinking of one I often use "Haunt"
I am similar - I start with a random-ish word that has a mix of common and uncommon letters (e.g. FLUME)
I've used that and "trade". Good words to get a lot of common letters out there.
I laughed. (I use "atones".)
So, Phil gave a 6 letter word, and two people gave 5 letter words. And a smart person who I told about using "crypto" started by telling me that crypto is a 5 letter word, and realized it's really 6 letters faster than I did.
I should probably lower my estimate of people's numeracy.
Possibly should get its own post, but I believe there's a difference between problem-solving numeracy and spontaneous numeracy. There are some rationalists (and possibly also sff fans) who react to hearing numbers by checking on them.
How long should a caffeine detox last in order to reset caffeine tolerance properly? I learned from Gwern that I could instead take nicotine in order to stay alert, but should I do this for one week? Two? I find it difficult to understand the processes involved and how long they take. So, has ACX done a caffeine detox before, and if so how was it?
I abstained from caffeine for about a year, and while my tolerance did go down significantly, when I started consuming caffeine again it went back fairly quickly to where it was before that.
I've had success taking Modafinil (specifically Waklert and Modalert in 200 mg tablets) to help reduce and regulate my caffeine cravings. My previous routine was wake up at 6am and be utterly incapable of doing anything until about 20 mins after my first coffee, and really only hit my stride after 2nd coffee. My current routine involves an early morning walk (fasted) followed by a light breakfast and Modafinil. I can easily go several hours into my day without needing coffee, and i'm down to 1 cup a day.
Also note that many people who enjoy stimulants prefer Armodafinil to Moda. Both of which can be bought online without much issue.
I once did it successfully using No-Doz, tapering dose gradually over several weeks. An advantage of using No-Doz rather than ever-smaller amounts of coffee is that you eliminate the pleasurable-habit aspect completely from the process: Just switch from coffee to best-estimate equivalent in No-Doz dose on day 1, then start tapering. As I said, I took several weeks, maybe 3 or 4, to complete taper. However, quicker might be possible. I have to be cautious when doing caffeine withdrawal because the headaches it produces turn into migraines for me.
Having green tea in the mornings to stave off withdrawal for ~ a week works best for me when I feel like my tolerance is too high. I find that fully abstaining doesn't 'reset' my tolerance in a detectable way, and it builds back about as fast. Plus the week of suffering isn't worth it for me. I would suggest experimenting for yourself and possibly documenting to see what works best.
Second thing: Taking nicotine to detox from caffeine sounds like a risky proposition, as nicotine is a relatively dangerous substance. If you're not averse to taking risky stimulant drugs off-label (I know, dirty word here), why not just get your hands on some ADHD meds, like Ritalin or Adderall?
This is definitely not medical or legal advice.
3 weeks on 1 week off, to go with my lifting program of 3 working weeks 1 recovery week. I have personally found nicotine to be a shitty stimulant, worse than nothing while I was self medicated for ADHD.
Oh hey, I also self-medicate ADHD with coffee and it works!
I'm in the middle of a caffeine taper because drinking coffee daily gave me some kind of low grade IBS thing, so I need to let the digestive tract rest for a while. It's day two and I envy the dead, so I'd appreciate any tips how to survive the withdrawal. I'm considering reaching for my emergency Ritalin stash just to be functional during the day.
I was able to get off large amounts of caffeine completely in a week, without any substitutions. I cut it off completely, and it was not a pleasant week, but at the end of it all caffeine withdrawal effects were gone. In retrospect I should have taken it slower and had it taper off.
I have also gone from a large amount to a much smaller amount without any ill effects that I noticed; it's reducing it to zero that hurt.
Michael Pollan wrote about it in This is your Mind on Plants and he went 2-3 months I think.
What did he base the 2-3 months time interval on? That's much longer than I had hoped. I wonder if this book (it seems to be very recent) can be found in libraries yet.
I got it from my local library, about a month ago.
You can listen to him regale his adventure to Joe Rogan here: https://youtu.be/mAPG18zNtXk
I drink large amounts of tea (equivalent of 3-4 coffees a day). Occasionally when my anxiety flares up I stop to rule out caffeine as a factor. I usually find I get a bad headache in the early afternoon the day I give up. Then I drink one coffee, my headache goes, and I carry on completely caffeine free with no further symptoms.
Not sure how long, but you should taper off when quitting to avoid caffeine withdrawal headaches. Like, drop down to one cup of coffee a day, then a cup or two of tea, then maybe a Cola. Nicotine is strongly physically addictive, so look out for that.
Sure, thanks for the advice. I like tea so I would probably enjoy switching to tea as an intermediate step, even if it is just to soften the blow from withdrawal this time.
Every time either here or in a social setting, when anxiety / self-destructive behaviours / neurotic tendencies comes up, there's a chorus of agreement. Is this *actually* that widespread? There doesn't seem to be any real data here, or even a very good way of framing the question.
Am *I* the weirdo for not being particularly anxious or failure-avoidant (which seems to drive a lot of the self-sabotaging behaviour)? Do that many people actually regularly fantasise about spontaneous fame and fortune?
Neuroticism is an axis in the OCEAN model, so... yeah, people are neurotic about as often as they are extroverted, I suppose? It's normally distributed just like everything else, and you seem to be closer to the tail.
Are you suggesting there's some connection between anxiety/self-destruction/neurosis and fantasizing about spontaneous fame and fortune -- like that people who are prone to one are also prone to the other?
I don’t know. I can tell you that I share your feeling of being the odd one out. I’m not anxious or neurotic or mentally ill or neuro-atypical (I’ve had my blue periods, and I have my eccentricities, but who hasn’t/doesn’t?), and being on the internet makes me feel like that is exceptionally strange.
I’m not sure what to make of that. I used to think it was just a curiosity of online spaces, but folks my age and younger seem to be much more anxious and neurotic than what I consider baseline over the last decade, and growing worse. I’m not sure if this is selection bias or if my perception is colored by online life or if this is a real trend.
I'm not sure whether or how anxiety is associated with fantasizing about spontaneous fame and fortune but I can imagine that they might be associated I guess.
I have a very strange relationship to anxiety and neuroticism myself, in that they're pretty much completely absent from me. I think I talked about it in the 'what supposed human universal are you missing' post years ago, but yeah that's missing for me. It took me a while growing up to understand what people meant by anxiety. As a kid I used to think it meant they were waiting for something.
When I mention this to a lot of people, they usually are envious of it, or say something like "that sounds amazing." I do agree that it's mostly a good thing, and I really like being able to not freak out about things in general, but it's not completely without downsides. For example, there are a couple of traffic tickets I recently got that I know I have to pay but I just can't bring myself to care about them. Whenever something goes wrong and it's my fault, it's always something like this.
Do you have a high pain threshold?
There's this lady in the UK who has broken pain receptors due to a mutation, and she's just _completely_ chill about everything mentally as well.
https://www.webmd.com/pain-management/news/20190328/woman-feels-no-pain-thanks-to-gene-mutations
That sounds like a very interesting post, I'll try to search for it; do you remember if it was ACX or SSC?
Disregard, I found it - that's the post that introduced me to the idea that other people *can* casually "read information about status signalling and hierarchy into body language", which was suddenly an explanation for quite a lot in my life (mostly good). I'm otherwise neurotypical / not-autistic, don't have trouble reading emotional or other social cues, just the status stuff.
Failure avoidance and rejection sensitivity are very common issues with ADHD, and I think they're also common with people on the autism spectrum. It may be that your peer group is full of people who are various degrees and varieties of neurodivergent.
Huh. Is that related to stimulants making people confident socially?
That's... extremely possible
I'd +1 that, I'm anxious and failure avoidant and was recently diagnosed with ADHD. It amazing how much calmer I am now that I'm medicated. The other day I got up from my table to find our waitress at a casual restaurant because my wife needed something: in the past I've been too anxious to even flag our waitress down. Its like I can suddenly recognize that most of the things I've been chronically anxious about aren't scary at all.
What med, if you don’t mind me asking?
Adderal.
Thank you for sharing; I find personal stories like that to be good for empathy building.
What's everyone's thoughts on Adam Curtis? I quite enjoy his documentaries but the bold historical claims are constantly ringing alarm bells for me.
Tune the alarm bells out with an edible and let’s the visuals flow over you. Mushrooms also work, it’s a body of work that brilliantly skips a stone across history so you can marvel at the modulating surface. Note that two of his films are 100% fact.
Well said. My aversion to narratives could probably afford to be turned down a bit, as I suppose Adam Curtis might say to all progressives
Not sure if this is appropriate for an open thread so feel free to delete. Does anyone here have an in with the Polymarket team? I'm looking to get an interview with them.
A job interview, or a press interview?
Either way, I recommend you ask again on the Mantic Monday thread later today.
Thanks - good idea ! I meant a job interview as I see they’re hiring a full stack engineers and I’d love to interview for that position.
Did you mention in your application that you're a reader of this blog?
I didn’t. Should I reapply and do so?
I'm a member of an Eastern mystery cult that teaches that God came to earth and was poor, ugly, rejected, and killed. We can still mystically eat his flesh and drink his blood, and one day he will return to make us his bride.
I thought the defining feature of a mystery cult was that key pieces of the theology and doctrines were closely-guarded secrets out shared out in pieces to members as they intitiate into the inner circles of trust of the cult.
Modern Christianity generally doesn't have much of this: while there's a ton of theology and doctrines that have built up over the millennia, the scriptures, credos, catechisms, and whatnot are widely available and generally intentionally shared to all comers by the various denominational churches.
Although I suppose there are some major exceptions to this, both historical and contemporary. The Late Medieval Catholic Church, by conducting services in Ecclisastical Latin and resisting efforts to translate the scriptures into vernacular, can be seen as acting substantially like a mystery cult that restricted a lot of info to the clerical class. Similarly, I've been told by ex-Mormons that the LDS Church has a lot of mystery-cult-like behaviors in terms of trying to limit knowledge of certain rituals and doctrines to temple members.
The fact that there are actual secrets, is itself a well kept secret.
Great point, I'll have to think about that. There's still always some degree of "You won't really get it unless it's revealed to you."
The knowledge of rituals and doctrines is widely distributed. There are a few small details of those rituals which are not widely distributed (though still easy to find online etc.), but they aren't important details. Basically it boils down to, everything in the temple is fine and can be discussed, but the exact hand signals which symbolize the promises we make there should not be shared with others.
I realize that sounds weird. It is pretty weird, but I don't really think it's comparable to a mystery cult. The doctrine is all out in the open, and everything important about the rituals is too.
Scott, have you read the Genetic Lottery by Dr. Kathryn Paige Harden? I'm in the middle of it and finding it extremely stimulating, kind of excavating the intersection of the thorny questions (in that they kick up a lot of feelings, even when the answers are morally clear) of genetics, IQ, meritocracy, progressivism, and its discontents.
Related, wishing there was a bespoke search engine for SSC, ACX, and all the comment threads. And maybe the adjacent blogosphere.
Kathryn turns a blind eye to how economists will respond if they discover IQ inequality. Implications would be not in favor of her ideology.
There's a section that pretty clearly says that we should society should behave morally in a way that does not rest on no-evidence for IQ inequality, but I agree she inadequately takes on the possibility of inequality itself.
I'm working on a review/commentary of this book now (unfortunately not in time for the contest) where I want to spend a lot more time on this point. In particular, I find it compelling to consider that all instances of extant and historical discrimination as evidence against scientific racist beliefs - observed inequality is a function of a long causal chain, which, even if it originated in actual IQ inequality (which I strongly doubt, particularly at the granularity of "race"), and even if that inequality is not small compared to the within-group distribution (which I also doubt), is still clearly dominated by the effects of racist power structures.
(But I find the point she DOES make more compelling, that nothing like that could be grounds for people to deserve to have power over each other in any reasonable society.)
> wishing there was a bespoke search engine for SSC, ACX, and all the comment threads.
Can't you get results from just these by appending "site:slatestarcodex.com" or "site:astralcodexten.substack.com" to your search term in most search engines?
The problem with many of those topics is not their validity, but rather the way they interact with motivated reasoning to give bad results. E.g. IQ is a valid measure of something, but what, exactly? Motivated reasoning will look at confusing evidence, and provide a self-justifying answer that is shallowly convincing and wrong.
>a weird definition of eugenics, too.
isn't it fairly mainstream to define it Bad Things That Moral People Should Be Against?
Probabilistic justice systems are fun! And sometimes scary.
My favourite one is described in a Russian story named “Gusi-Gusi, Ga-Ga-Ga” (it’s an untranslatable onomatopoeia, an imitation of sounds geese make, and also part of a children’s nursery rhyme) by Vladislav Krapivin. He describes a vaguely western utopian society where everyone has a chip which transponds their unique citizen identifier (a “biological index”) and this serves as your ID, medical record, bank account and everything. It also has a very special penitentiary system where every sentence is death. Depending on the conviction, the convict gets some chance of serving, and the court computer “tosses the coin” for them. If the toss is successful, they are executed, if not, they walk away free. Chance is higher for more serious crimes.
The whole story is about a lowly paper-pusher who jaywalks, gets a one in a million chance of serving, and the toss succeeds. He comes to serve his execution, but the only executioner is ill and due to a system error, his biological index is already marked as belonging to an executed man, so he is put in a secret prison for unchipped indexless people, who are except him all children, and becomes their guardian.
In the end, turns out this was all a sick prank by his friend who somehow worked on the court computer. He gets a show trial with 99/100 chance of serving.
The darkly funny part is that in Russia Krapivin is usually understood as a children’s writer, and this story came out in a book with children’s stories. I can only imagine what it feels like when you are reading stories about value of friendship and how cool it is to escape home and build a ship, or something, and then you get hit with this.
This reminds me vaguely of that one episode of star trek with the planet where in lieu of actual wars they run computer simulations of war, but any person marked as a casualty in the simulation has to report to the death pods and die irl.
Kind of remarkable that they came up with that in the 60s, feels like it could be the premise of a black mirror episode.
It is strange that you think that it is odd that science fiction was far-sighted in the 1960's. Technical progress from the 1940's to the late 1960's was arguably faster than it was between 1970 and now. That sort of rapid progress always comes with imaginative sci-fi.
Good point! I guess what I'm trying to say is that the premise feels eerily more plausible or resonant to me in today's world than when I first saw that episode in the 90s, and it was old even back then. IIRC when it came out, people took it as a commentary on the Vietnam war and similar American military adventures–it's easier for people to tolerate or support an overseas war, where they don't see and hear the violence up close, even though real people, even maybe their own relatives and neighbors, are dying. Needless to say, this is still a relevant point today, which is also interesting. But today the technology itself and its implementation, blurring the line between virtual and real worlds, the tyrannical pragmatism, not to mention the death pods, feels uncomfortably relevant as well.
I feel like I vaguely remember getting hit with this when I was reading stories about the value of friendship as a child. Is there a bit at the end where the main character is informed about the friend's 99/100 chances, responds with, "Oh, well, that doesn't seem too bad," and then finds out that it's 99/100 for death and not (as he assumed) 99/100 to go free?
I basically read everything as a child, though, so I don't think I was too traumatized by the probabilistic justice system.
Has anyone had experience with psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy? Specifically using MDMA?
What has your experience been like?
I've only ever done self-experimentation :)
But all of my sessions have been positive!
My personal experience was entirely positive. I experienced higher empathy, and greater insight into personal relationships. I was prepped for a positive experience though. In college a coworker on a campus job was doing something like an evangelical promotion of MDMA. He had clipped a number of articles from magazines touting its effectiveness in helping with relationships. He also helpfully provided a sample. I don’t mean that ‘help’ ironically. He was entirely sincere and seemed to be on a mission of some sort.
If you decide to give this a try yourself, you will have to be careful if you are not getting it from an MD. My understanding is that a lot of street MDMA can contain amphetamines or even fentanyl.
One resource for information on therapeutic use is:
https://maps.org/
Edit
The experience also had more than a hint of the numinous. Very odd for a non believer. Opened me up to some different possibilities.
I've never done it, but the clinic I work at is very interested in ketamine therapy for depression. My wife has been trying it for postpartum issues: so far it seems helpful? I let you know when she's gone through the whole course of treatment.
Not me, but a friend. She seems to have had good results. She’s tried a lot of things in the past few years for her anxiety, depression and unaddressed trauma from her upbringing. I know she tried MDMA as well as psilocybin and at least one other thing. She said they all create a different background feeling as you work through your issues. I’m not sure what her overall assessment of specifically MDMA as a therapy tool was but I could ask.
I'm curious. I'm not dealing with any trauma to speak of. I'm curious about the experience, and think it might help me with a few things I feel stuck on, but also I really like being me and my general personality, so I'm hesitant to "reroll the dice".
> I'm curious about the experience, and think it might help me with a few things I feel stuck on, but also I really like being me and my general personality, so I'm hesitant to "reroll the dice"
You will never feel more you than when you are on a *correct* dose of MDMA (dosage is key!). It's supercharged-you, where your inhibitions driven by fears and anxieties basically melt away leaving only the pure essence of you.
It's Zen-you, with a mental clarity and compassion that's hard to capture in words. It's what you might be like if you walked into a time dilation chamber where only 45 minutes in the real world passed, while you spent 50 years within and managed to overcome all of the irrational fears, anxieties and other mental obstacles that prevent you from experiencing serenity, compassion for all, and confidence of your worth and place in the world.
This might be a bit hyperbolic, but not as much as you might think. MDMA will certainly give you perspective on attitudes, thoughts and beliefs that may be holding you back.
This is why it's so effective for trauma: it's almost impossible to experience fear, you're left with only your rational evaluation of risks, and it doesn't seem to impair your reason (at correct dosage, again). This enables people suffering from PTSD to rationally re-evaluate and reframe their experiences without triggering the problematic parts of the brain underlying the condition.
The current research is (roughly): use Ketamine for depression, MDMA for trauma, Psilocybin for anxiety.
>Psilocybin for anxiety
Really? I've heard from multiple people including experts on mushrooms that anxiety contraindicated the use of psilocybin. Although in a medical context perhaps a lot of the failure-modes associated with tripping as an anxious person would be controlled for.
I'll have to double check then, I might have gotten that wrong: still, my understanding is that bad anxiety can be treated with psilocybin in a therapeutic environment with a trained practitioner: all by yourself, you're liable to make it worse.
Okay, I just checked and I was off: it’s MDMA for trauma and anxiety, psilocybin for addictions.
About the prediction-market-based reviews: Maybe I'm overlooking something, but wouldn't this just be a voting, and if the results correlate with probabilities then they only do so because Scott likes prediction markets?
It's a hybrid market, and (at least in theory) it will work fine. The price is dependent on two variables: whether Scott picks the book (which is under his control) and whether Scott likes the book (which is what he wants predicted). There is an incentive to bid up both "books you want Scott to review" and "books you think Scott will pick and like" - but no incentive to bid up a book that Scott will pick and not like.
The key bit is that it isn't a guarantee that Scott reviews the book, so what he is really asking, in a sense, is whether or not it is both a book he would review (don't tie up resources betting on a contest that won't happen), and if he did, whether that review would be successful.
The first part is strongly endogenous (= he might review it to make the prediction come true because he likes prediction markets), the second part is partly endogenous.
I don't exactly get this, either. If a prediction market is "I think this is the most likely outcome so I bet $X on it", then participants should be looking at the list of books, considering what books Scott has previously reviewed, then estimating "Y is the genre of book Scott reviews most" or "Z seems like a topic Scott would really like to cover".
But this one *sounds* like "which book would you like me to review next?" so why a prediction market rather than a straight vote?
People who fail at prediction will lose some point (maybe representing actual money) and ones predicting well will gain it.
I am dubious that it is going to be a meaningful improvement here.
Is this an answer to Deiseach's question (which I also have)? Because if so it didn't work, at least not for me. I don't feel answered. (But I dunno, Deiseach may be feeling clarified and grateful for it.)
There's some pretty significant differences with voting
- If I like team A, but think it's more likely team B will win, I'll vote for team A, but bet on team B.
- There is a downside to participating (you may lose your money). There is no downside to voting even if your team loses.
- Most voting systems operate on a basis of 'one person, one vote'. In prediciton markets you can increase your influence over the result (price?) based on your level of confidence.
Thanks, you are of course right.
However, in this specific case it seems to me that it is not clear how large the influence of an exogenous factor is. It seems to me there is a risk that if Scott likes prediction markets and wants them to be "predictive", he can make them predictive, and this may happen via his writing enthusiasm (maybe subconsciously). If this effect is strong enough, then this becomes a Keynesian beauty contest or a self-fulfilling prophecy (or more technically, the shares for some book review become strategic complements).
Even if "Round 1" causes Scott to write a specific review, the market might still resolve to "no" if that review doesn't get enough Likes?
Yes, that is right. I guess it depends on how important Scott's effort etc is relative to exogenous factors.
assuming that "money you are willing to bet" is related to your level of confidence, which is in most not even remotely close to the truth.
Why would those not be related?
Widely different economic status amongst participants.
That doesn't mean the two variables are not related, just that the correlation is less than perfect. There would be a strong relation between the two within a single participant and that would most likely translate to a strong correlation over your entire dataset (given enough participants)
You are indeed right.
In response to the proposal to read "A Clinical Introduction To Lacanian Psychoanalysis": There are things like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy that resemble psychoanalysis and have research apparently showing they are good for something. It seems to me that ideas that have research purporting to show they work should be investigated before ideas that have no such research. So learning more about Lacan is useful if either: Lacan's approach has research claiming that it works (I haven't found any), or we're out of competing ideas that have research claiming they work.
Otherwise, any fool can make a pile of vague ideas. If we then randomly fixate on them, that's a bad use of our time.
We've discussed CBT on here previously while we haven't had a go at Lacanian psychoanalysis, therefore I'd be more interested in the novel topic than round 59 of "CBT: fad or genuine cure?"
There are several other modalities besides CBT which haven't really been covered here, unless you count this:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/20/book-review-all-therapy-books/
I got the sense that the point wasn't to learn and apply Lacanian psychoanalysis, it was to understand people who already do find it useful.
Do we have actual first hand reports from people who found it useful?
(My point isn't that we should limit our attention to first hand reports. My point is that the particular report I came across was second hand and uninspiring, and I would be more interested in reading first hand reports.)
Found a negative first hand report: Dylan Evans couldn't make sense of Lacan either, despite writing a book on the subject and attempting to make a career out of doing Lacanian psychoanalysis. He describes his journey in "From Lacan to Darwin", which is 16 pages. http://freudquotes.blogspot.com/2016/02/dylan-evans-lacans-ideas-are-hopelessly.html?m=1
That was an interesting read! Thanks for the link - I like how he still shows some sympathy for Lacan and Freud, given their historical circumstances, while ultimately rejecting their ideas as unscientific
Hi, I would like to share a project of mine I have been developing in my free time: https://valeriob88.github.io/EvoAgent/about.html
I have always been deeply drawn by evolutionary models, and I have worked a bit in the field ~10years ago, but then got sidestepped and involved in other businesses.
Nowadays everyone seems interested in deep models trained with gradient descent, and few people are considering alternative optimization approach. In my tool, a population of agents is compteting for food. Agents have a NN coded by a genome which is under the influence of natural selection. Depending on their environment setup, they could develop all kinds of behaviour. I will soon add sexual reproduction which will really spice things up.
With EvoAgent I plan to build the tool to simulate a wide variety of evolutionary phenomena (see the future project section in link above). I also plan to use this as a experimental/modelling suite for testing evolutionary hypothesis about populations. Who knows, maybe I'll manage to publish a couple of papers with this tool.
If anyone is interested in collaborating/donating, please follow the link or contact me (email in the page, or just comment here).
Are you familiar with the (many) existing similar projects? I was always really fascinated by them.
I have done quite an extensive research and couldnt find anything similar. In particular, I wanted to satisft the following requirements :
Evolving neural networks (not RL or gradient descent)
Multiagents
Written on a widespread language (possibly python as it s easy to speed up processing with a GPU+pytorch)
Easy to use and modify
What similar projects are you referring to? It's possible I missed something relevant?
I was thinking of something like Tierra [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tierra_(computer_simulation)] and similar (and older) Artificial Life systems.
Given your other requirements, I realize now your project covers something very different.
great, it means I am not exactly reinventing the wheel :)
Fun project! Any interesting insights so far?
Have you considered having reproduction be a decision made by the organism itself (with an associated cost) rather than something that occurs automatically at fixed intervals? You could even explore having the parent choose how much of its energy to invest in the offspring, to see if you can elicit K and R selection strategies.
' reproduction be a decision made by the organism - having the parent choose how much of its energy to invest in the offspring'
Great idea, I'll add it to the future project list!
I have tested an idea of difficult vs easy vs fluctuating environemnts (where easy=a lot of food tokens, difficult=less tokens). My intuition was that agents would develop to be better hunters in fluctuating envs. This was connected with the idea that we h sapiens evolved in a time of oscillating ice ages. In the end it doesn't seem to make a massive difference: with a easy environment, the env can sustain more agents, so each agent has more competitor. With difficult env you have less agents but also less food. Overall the "food per agent" quantity stays costant across these different environments! I'll write a blog post about it.
I also really need to focus on extending the available mechanism. The "visual" system is really primitive, and each agent only see the closest food token within it's field of view. Really they should be able to recognize other agents. I am thinking about a good and computationally efficient solution to this.
"My intuition was that agents would develop to be better hunters in fluctuating envs." The classical view in ecology is that an important factor is the probability of random mortality (random in the sens that agents can not adapt to it. A classical example is a temporary pond drying out which kills aquatic flies). If it is high enough, the best strategy will be to heavily discount the future and invest all available resources in a large number of copies of yourself.
That's very interesting, I have never found that view (but it does sound plausible). Is it too much to ask for some reference to it, so I can delve deeper? A quick search on the web didn't produce the relevant results
It is the r/K strategies that were mentioned above. It is an oldish ecology theory which is a bit too simplistic but it does explain many differences between species strategies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory
oh sure, I thought there was something more specifically focussed on the "random mortality" idea. Thanks for the clarification
What do people think about representing the actual practice of ruling in a strategy game? Not anemically like Royal Court in CK3 but robustly? Turn based obviously so that complex things don't disrupt flow. You'd have feasting and court, probably itinerant court as was more common in history, hunts and tournaments. Not quite a social calender but close. Personal relationships that are potentially strong, multi-generational loyalty/friendship. With a backdrop similar to a map game but maybe with more flexible diplomatic options.
So you might host a social occasion of some kind, costing money, resources, and time, but potentially helping you connect with vassals personally and impress them. Invite people, snub people. Etc.
Sort of like mixing a sim rpg into the broad context of a fully functional map painter.
The games by A Sharp, King of Dragon Pass and Six Ages: Ride like the Wind, try something like that. You play a clan in a fictional version of the bronze age, and the game works very hard so that you have to think like an actual person from that era.
In your decisions, you have to consider the time of year, the traditions, religion and the relationships both in your clan and with other clans. You have a clan council that will give you good advice in general, but the different council members often have different opinions, so you have to think for yourself whose advice you should follow.
Both games are truly unique. I think I can recommend starting with Six Ages, as the difficulty is much lower than King of Dragon Pass, even though they share the same mechanics.
I've played KoDP and it was pretty good given when it was made. Beat it a couple times. Basically a visual novel with a little bit of resource management. The lore and art was quite fun.
"Yes, Your Grace" is a game that seems to be all about holding court. I haven't played it, so I'm not sure if it has the things you're looking for, but it might be worth checking out.
That sounds like a good idea, what I've picked up about royal progresses reading up on the Tudor court is that they served multiple functions.
(1) Running the royal household was vast, expensive, and consumed a lot of resources. When the king and selected courtiers went off on the summer progress, this permitted restocking, cleaning and any necessary repairs, new building, decorating, and hiring/firing servants. By calling in on a round of royal castles and local dignataries on a circuit, this spread the expense of maintaining the court.
(2) It also meant avoiding places where sickness had broken out, e.g. the sweating sickness in London which broke out in regular bouts and seemed to be pretty fatal - one case being Thomas Cromwell's wife, who seemed fine when he left in the morning and was dead before he returned home in the evening. Going on progress also meant that depending on the monarch's interests, he could be entertained by chances for hunting, hawking, riding out, courtly entertainments laid on by his hosts, visiting local beauty spots, and so on.
(3) It allowed the rise and fall of favourites; if the king invited you, or you wangled your way into the progress, this was good. Necessary ministers/courtiers stayed behind (somebody had to run the country) but being disinvited or not included, if you didn't have the excuse of high office, was a sign you weren't yet in favour or were falling out of favour. If you had fallen out of favour, getting on the progress was a means of gaining access to the king and winning back his favour.
(4) It was a political statment. Because mass media didn't exist, the only times the subjects got to see the king (and queen, if she accompanied him) was on such progresses. In times of turmoil or unrest, making a big visible appearance with all the calculated pomp and ceremony could settle down the unruly:
"The western progress and visitation in 1535 had still wider significance. When the North rose in rebellion a year later, nearly bringing down the regime, the equally traditionalist West Country and border country with Wales beyond it remained quiet. They had been gratified by the royal presence but will also have noted how closely King and minister were aligned, and that the principal secular hosts in Gloucestershire and Wiltshire were gentry openly identified with evangelical reformation. In these regions, the traditional fiction which sustained English rebellions – that the King was ignorant of his evil ministers’ conduct – was difficult to sustain. (MacCulloch, Diarmaid. "Thomas Cromwell").
The king could also check up - is the local lord charged with defending these borders doing a good job or not? are our ports/ships/forts in good condition? if we need to raise a military force, how much from here and of what quality?
Yeah so basically all of these factors are simulated in some way. I got really into this concept when I was like 11-12 and reading the Majipoor series by Robert Silverberg. Karl Franz does a Grand Tour in Warhammer Fantasy as well. I think I haven't seen a ton of this in more modern fantasy/sci-fi. Like Sanderson and such. But every once in a while you see it.
Hello fellow ACOUP reader, I presume?
(For anyone else: https://acoup.blog/2022/02/18/miscellanea-thoughts-on-ckiii-royal-court/)
I think it would be a challenge to make something that's both accurate and fun to play. Just about any mediaeval strategy game follows certain conventions (pikes "counter" cavalry, arrows do full damage at maximum range etc.) that make for good gameplay but are historically inaccurate. Also, and Brett makes this point at the end of his post (link above), "the actual practice of ruling" is very dependent on the place and time - what would go down well in a Byzantine court might not be so good in an Abbasid one, and that's not just the name of the God involved.
While we're here, can I plug siderea's old series on Watership Down as an exploration of the Jungian archetype of the King? https://siderea.livejournal.com/1212245.html Worth reading for any aspiring game developer who wants to do something like this - if there is some overarching theme of what makes a good ruler, that's where you might find it.
I've read ACOUP, due to a recommendation a couple months ago, but that wasn't the driving force of the post. If anything I think he gives way too much credit to Paradox in his discussions of them.
While I haven't played it myself I hear a recent game called Suzerain does a very good job at representing the very personal nature of political power that most games gloss over. It is a visual novel masquerading as a strategy game, which is probably not what you're looking for, but it uses the trapping of strategy gaming to draw the player in to a tense and desperate personal struggle for political legitimacy in a time of crisis for a county.
Map painters and visual novels are very close in format if not in theme.
Doesn't CK3 already have these features? CK2 certainly does.
The CK series has *some* of these features though they are quite shallow. Which is something I specifically mentioned at the start of the post.
I think that to do the concept justice you would have to simulate a bunch of things in the background and then only have them interact with the player via diagetic interface. You'd of course need some system to track how the kingdom itself is doing (with the nobles and courtiers often actively hiding or withholding this information from the king), and another for managing the international situation. You'd also need a system (probably built along the lines of Shadow of Mordor's nemesis system) to track the relationships between the upper nobles and courtiers, and to generate intrigues.
Then there would be more simple random or simple arithmetic components. One would be a system for generating confounders or events (religious revivals, plagues, environmental catastrophes and so on). Another would be a system for generating heirs and managing personal relationships at court. I imagine that spouses, courtiers and councillors would be generated and forwarded by the nemesis-type system, but would then be managed by something more like a relationship/dating sim.
So, totting it all up: two full-fledged strategy games (one domestic, one international), a complex rivalry simulator and a dating sim - all of which are layered and interacting with each other, and most of which is invisible to the player. A fully-realised court life simulation looks like a tall order on this basis.
It would be a single strategy game with more than normally detailed character relations among other moderately sized changes.
I suppose there would be "invisible" stuff going on if the player didn't have a decent intelligence network.
Almost all gamers insist on a superhumanly competent intelligence (and logistics, financial, etc, etc) network, which is going to make this an extremely niche game and probably not profitable to develop.
I don't understand. You mean like how the automation in Stellaris is super shit and they would rather micro themselves rather than delegate?
He means that gamers riot when stuff like tax income, ministers' opinions of you, etc. is uncertain. Real people behaved like this too, hence practices like tax farming where a lower average tax income (since the middlemen take a large cut) was an acceptable trade-off for it being consistent and known in advance.
Strategy gamers in particular like to do calculations, and while randomness is sometimes acceptable the odds need to be known; you'd probably have better luck appealing to a different crowd who are more focused on the role-play
Okay just the whole perfect information fetish gamers have. The wording was comfusing me.
So you can do calculations Paradox style. It isn't like Star Dynasties which even I savescummed hard because of the horrible blue=100, red=0, yellow=1-99 percentage system.
I've actually been getting thoughts from people on certain stuff related to that. Basically you have hard numbers for everything and the tooltips tell you where that comes from. So it might be like the hidden factors are still visible but you don't know where they come from. I have a few different variations of stuff I asked about in various forums/reddits/discords.
When you click a button to do some action there isn't, in most cases, a big unknown about whether it works or you wasted your time or resources or w/e.
Sounds like a mix of a Paradox game and a dating sim
Some cultures might have a fancy courting tradition but you'd be spending a fraction of your time on that.
I think his point is that the non-romantic 'courting' of powerful nobles and ministers is very like a dating sim
I mean in a dating sim you have most pre-written events and results and a bunch of other stuff like that. But otherwise sure. You have to build and maintain relationships with individuals and families/houses. Something like KoDP or CK2 but with more detail and possibility space.
I mean Academagia for example is a school sim/visual novel type thing but not a dating sim so that would be more the comparison I'd make. Building up your clique as your party is called in that game. Or doing support convos in Fire Emblem but not as stilted and pre-written.
If you haven’t read it, you might want to read ACOUP’s take on Royal Court, where the author talks about how vital the court work was to a medieval ruler.
https://acoup.blog/2022/02/18/miscellanea-thoughts-on-ckiii-royal-court/
I've read it but Paradox has been a running disappointment to me since it was recommended to me early after the release of CK2. They play at being a sim but it is very shallow. Not that it can't be fun or is terrible but it is more of a small step than a giant leap.
CK is definitely on the shallower end. I am looking forward to Victoria 3, though!
The news about Vicky3 hasn't been great lately. I'm still cautiously optimistic but not hyped. The recent buildings/canal diary and dev comments have been very disappointing.
I was delighted by an aside in one of Scott’s recent posts where he described his longtime daydream of being a famous musical performer. I had just been telling someone that since I’ve always struggled with quantitative subjects, when I fantasize about being someone else I usually daydream about being a brilliant physicist or mathematician. So now I’m wondering: in what fields do other readers of this blog dream about being fabulously successful?
Poetry writing. But in my daydreams the fabulous success is in how great my poems are, and how wonderfully free I feel to scoop up deep intuitions and access wild and weird skills to conjure words from them. I don't imagine money or fame -- just a few dozen friends who love my work and enjoy the hell out of it. I remember the day I got over daydreaming about fame. I'd read a piece I loved and admired. And then I thought, so if I was a famous and admired writer, that's what it would be. There would be a bunch of people having about my work the feeling I'm having about this one. Just the interest of a bunch of me's -- that's what fame would be. And I was sort of over "fame" from then on. It was as though, until I sort of deconstructed it for myself, I thought fame was *more* than having lots of me's deeply enjoy a piece of my work -- it was something like being seen by the eye of God or Eternity, and becoming a new and more permanent and glorious sort of being myself.
I’m all about music as well.
World-class opera singer….sigh
When I daydream about personal success, I mostly daydream about being rich. On my internal hierarchy of needs I seem to care a lot more about money than status. The idea of fame makes me a bit nervous: my ideal career is Gary Larson's. Enough fame to acquire enough money to retire and do whatever I want in obscurity for the rest of my life.
Given the very small but non-zero chance of nuclear weapon exchange (mostly considering Putin's threats which stated it explicitly) and conditional on that, a sub-50% but still significant chance of attacking population/economic centers and not just tactical targets, has anyone in big cities in the US or other targets made some adjustments accordingly?
Adapting behavior to fluctuating covid risks is much easier than adapting behavior to an 0.05% chance of a successful nuclear strike on Boston, although the expected risk is comparable.
Has anyone here considered the practical aspects? Stocking on supplies, triggers to move somewhere else?
The only adjustment I've made is creating a plan in case it happens. I live in a city that has a decent chance of getting nuked in a war with Russia or China: right now my plan is that if war breaks out or seems imminent I'm going to send my kids to live with family in Idaho for a while. I've already asked my family down there if that's okay, and they're fine with it. Other than making that plan, I'm not going to put more money or time into preparations.
Aside from maybe getting some iodine tablets (I already have food and water storage), there's not really many adjustments I could make that wouldn't be too huge a response to a pretty low probability threat.
Read this: https://nuclearadvice.org/
Building an emergency kit with food and (especially) water is very much worth doing, even putting nuclear weapons aside.
Nope. Just toss it into the pile with all the other horrors that could happen but probably won't (pancreatic cancer, loved ones gunned down, etc.)
Is it just me or is substack's comment linking system too bad to be able to actually find the comments people were banned for? most of the given links are to Scott saying "user was banned for this" without showing the parent comment; the "return to thread" button on them takes me to nothing in particular and i cannot search for either Scott's comment mentioning banning or the username of the person banned.
i guess it doesn't really matter, it's just sort of morbid curiousity. but if Scott's intention is to show off the kinds of things people get banned for around here, it's not working, at least for me.
Huh, on my side I'm able to hit a "Show" button on a "user was banned for this" comment and it becomes visible, is this something that only admins can do?
Some of the links (eg the Johnny Fakename one) appear to be to your comment announcing the ban rather than the original comment. I also can't find his comment with a Ctrl-F on "fakename".
some of the links had that, others did not. e.g. this is a screen capture of what i see when i click on the link for "Naked Emperor" https://i.imgur.com/7gOrtWT.png
Did you try doing cmd-f and searching for user name?
yes, the comments are collapsed and shortened so on in ways that made that less than fruitful
I don't understand. When I have searched by username I see a non-collapsed list of comments, which I can move through jumping from post to post for the user I'm searching for. I see the user's full posts, and can scroll upwards or downwards at will from each after I land on them.
The issue is that currently under some circumstances and for at least some of us, comment threads are loading with all non-top-level comments collapsed by default. This stops Ctrl-F from working properly unless everything is tediously expanded.
For me the circumstance is "Open Thread's comment section" (as opposed to "Open Thread post, with comment section following", which loads properly). This "comment section only" view happens to be what the backlink from a "view individual comment" goes to (rather than directly to the post), hence the difficulty encountered when following the links Scott gave (which are all to individual comments, some to the banned comment and some to Scott's own comment).
May or may not be an A-B test.
Haha I did the exact same thing. I'm not sure if we were supposed to be able to see the comments or not.
I was just listening to a neuroethology podcast about mate attachment mechanisms (Huberman Lab episode 59, "The science of love, desire & attachment). Huberman began by saying that the brain uses the same systems for pair bonding as for familial bonding, which I found surprising and a little icky, but anyway. Part of this system, which is very active during sex, is called the autonomic matching system, which tries to match emotional state with another person (and I suppose ideally leads to simultaneous orgasms).
Then he mentioned John & Julie Gottman's "love lab", where they studied the behavior of couples and learned (they claim) to predict with very high accuracy whether couples will eventually break up. (Debunking of their work here: https://slate.com/human-interest/2010/03/a-dissection-of-john-gottman-s-love-lab.html. TLDR: they didn't make predictions; they waited long enough for some couples to break up, then built a model which "predicted" breakup. But no hold-outs or cross validation; no testing the model on anybody not used to construct the model.) But I don't think the "debunking" means that the behaviors they found predicted breakups most strongly don't, in fact, predict breakups. I think it just means we shouldn't take their "accuracy" figure seriously.
One of the strongest predictors of breakup (Huberman may have said "the strongest"; anyway, it was the one he singled out to discuss) was contempt, which he described as the "inversion" of the autonomic matching system. If person B feels contempt for person A, then when person B detects that X pleases person A, person B feels disgust for X rather than shared pleasure in X; and likewise is pleased by things that displease A.
Huberman didn't say whether anyone had verified that contempt uses the same neural circuits as autonomic attachment; but it would be redundant to build a second brain mechanism for contempt if it does just invert attachment. Particularly since there's no obvious /purpose/ for a dedicated contempt mechanism.
Presumably there is some adjustment, probably involving neurotransmitters, which ratchets attachment up. Perhaps contempt is a side-effect of this system: sufficiently low attractiveness adjusts a "match output" signal down so far that it produces repulsion.
If so, then contempt, human tribalism, and the generation of, and stability of, 2-party political systems, could be explained as a by-product of this brain mechanism for mating and simultaneous orgasms.
I think this theory would predict that status and sexual desirability should correlate with political agreement. So, for instance, people in a community would attune themselves politically with the high-status people they know, and should be biased to agree with high-status people and to disagree with people they perceive as low-status. Likewise, people should be biased to perceive people in an opposing political party as lower-status, and people in their party as higher-status.
A problem for this theory is that people have lots of relationships with people they don't regard as potential mates, and my impression is that they don't form revulsion as easily for people who aren't presenting as potential mates. Many people are happy to be friends with people who would repulse them as mates. But if non-potential mates provide no signal, while potential mates provide a signal, that should give signals strong enough for the entire population to divide into opposing belief systems.
In case y'all weren't aware, Scott discusses Gottman's work in https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/27/book-review-the-seven-principles-for-making-marriage-work/ (with a nod to Slate's reporting on it).
Thanks! I only googled and found the Slate article because I had a nagging sense I'd read some criticism of the work. That was probably it.
I'm familiar with the Gottman research. Have not read the slate debunking, but assume it must have hinged on the fact that the power of after-the-fact "predictions" made in studies like these are invariably highly inflated because folded into them is a lot of purely coincidental correlation. For ex., let's say you look at 20 couples, 7 of whom ultimately divorced, and what distinguishes them. Even if you look at completely stupid variables that cannot possibly have anything to do with marital harmony, you will be able to come up with a formula that "predicts" breakup: For ex., maybe the couples that broke up differed from those that did not in how many letters were in the wife's middle name, husband's hair color, whether last digit of wife's social security number was odd or even. But try using a formula employing those variables on a new set of couples and it will have zero predictive power. Upshot regarding Contempt and the other Gottman variables is that they are actually not very strong predictors of relationship satisfaction and stability. Really bummed me out.
I heard a (probably apocryphal) story about a someone asking a Nobel-prize winning physicist what he thought of psychology. He replied "y'know I have a lot of respect for psychology -- imagine how hard particle physics would be if all the particles could think!"
So too with any science of higher complexity (such as relationshipology) in my opinion. Beware of Huberman on such topics.
That said, it seems to me that feelings are like hunger -- they indicate, sometimes hyperbolically, unmet needs necessary for health. Sometimes these needs are for material things like food. Other times they are indicate a need for abstract things like respect (anger) or social connection (sadness).
On this theory, contempt is there for a reason, and from personal experience, it indicates a an unmet need for fair treatment -- esp someone not treating you the way they would want or expect to be treated if in your shoes. Sometimes this is because the other person is actually acting like they're better than you. Sometimes it comes from your own misinterpretations and prior baggage.
Regardless, getting you out of such situations seems (to me anyway) sufficient explanation for the existence of contempt.
I'm reserializing Anna Karenina at something like the original rate of publication (works out to ~2ch/wk) at this Substack: https://grafleotolstoy.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=substack_profile
If people want to read along, I think this be will be a much more enjoyable way to read probably the world's greatest novel and a cool social reading experiment besides.
You could ask Dominic Cummings to join in. He mentions in a recent interview that he plans to reread it. And he reads this blog.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/01/dominic-cummings-the-man-trying-to-take-down-boris-johnson.html
Spirit of Dominic Cummings, hear my prayer!
Great book. Good choice. One of my favorites.
I’ve read it five or six times. [just this once - Not a joke]
Something about the angle of the sun at my latitude makes me pull it of the shelf in February. I hadn’t grabbed it this year. Yet.
You’ll never be able to eat a slice of cucumber without thinking of the Eucharist when you’re done. When Leo wants to talk about God and man he likes the bee\beekeeper metaphor.
Please do.
It may interest you to know that AK (like nearly all great Russian novels) was originally published serially (in this case over the course of 2.5 years), and so never meant to be binged. My hunch is that binging it corrupts the dramatic timing -- you probably don't watch your movies on fast forward for a similar reason. Hopefully, then, the slow drip will be much more engaging, enjoyable, and most importantly, more manageable.
You know those times when you're futilely checking all your feeds for something interesting to read? I build a website for that last week: www.ReadSomethingInteresting.com. Would love to hear feedback or suggestions. If y'all enjoy, I'll put more links on.
Really cool, would definitely make use of this when I'm looking for a more virtuous way to take a break on the internet -- but I second the question posed by Ozarth, how did you determine what to put in there? It seems like some fields are favoured pretty heavily whereas others are completely absent. Can an individual modify the pool that articles are drawn from to align more with their own interests?
I've just tried your site and just wanted to say thank you, I really like it! Aside from the occasional ad block (on my completely untouchable by me work computer, so not your fault), it works really well and has already sent me down a couple of rabbit holes.
Just a question - how did you determine what to put in there? Is it like a randomized 'reading list'?
This is pretty cool and I'll be bookmarking it for later, but the "Read another link" button doesn't seem to be working - it just refreshes the iframe of the current link. Refreshing does bring up new links. (Firefox 97.0.1, uBlock Origin extension installed if that matters)
Also, I would _really_ like to see SSL/TLS security!
As an update to my versusgame adventure, I attempted to withdraw my winnings. I was presented with a $200 weekly withdrawal limit which I had not been informed of when signing up or depositing. I attempted to withdraw the maximum and was confronted with an error page telling me to try again on 2/22. However it appears that the weekly limit functionality will not let me attempt to withdraw at all until 2/26. I checked around and it appears that other users are having similar issues.
If it wasn't clear already, I strongly recommend everybody stay away from this platform. Fortunately I don't have too much on there but I do hope I am able to get it out eventually.
The "Give Gift" button below comments seems new.
I don't suppose substack would allow you to create a new subscription tier that is $1 for 3 days, or $0.10 for seven-ish hours? A $10 gift seems like it would have to be a pretty stellar comment.
Maybe a version of 'reddit gold' here would have the same issues as upvotes and also other issues.
On the other hand, if we really ran with this, and integrated manifold, maybe people could solicit patronage in advance, with a promise to make quality contributions to future comment threads.
How do you tie such a promise to a measurable outcome to resolve the question though? I think you'd need a karma system to point to, which the community has already strongly voted against.
Is there a way to get rid of that button? It is annoying in exactly the same way as reddit gold.
I object to the Give Gift option. How many users would even want to receive it? Many are already subscribers, some may not want to be a subscriber, and a hell of a lot of users do not need a $10 scholarship. Seems mostly like a way of giving money to Substack -- money must go to Substack whether the user wants or needs it or not.
(It seems that) you can only Give Gift to people who are not currently subscribers. At least the option only appears for some commenters. It really looks like some kind of scholarship, not like a genuine "more of this comment please" incentive, since it's impossible to award to subscribers. I also don't know whether anything would change to inform readers that a specific comment got the Gift.
Stripe fees (which are themselves a product of credit card fees) make $0.1 transactions impossible and $1 transactions impractical - https://stripe.com/pricing
I think the bigger obstacle is that it's hard to aggregate small-amount transactions, e.g. batch them as a single larger transaction as Patreon once did.
I agree, there's a weird barrier to microtransactions.
I think 7-8 years ago people were excited for bitcoin to solve this, but it wasn't really designed to, and now its tx fees are significantly larger than most microtransactions.
If only there was a way to pool fake internet points and eventually cash them out for real money.
It would solve a lot of problems (while creating so many new ones).
What about PayPal? No fees for private (casual) use.
(That's why it goes well with ebay for example)
This would be much more of an involved substack suggestion, but maybe rather than a smaller subscription tier they could allow a charitable contribution from a list of charities defined by the writer as a pseudo reddit gold system.
We could have comments self-refer to an external reputation system.
I predict the reaction to this comment will be slightly positive:
https://manifold.markets/p_journal/this-question-measures-sentiment-to
This has several obvious problems:
1) Keynesian beauty contests,
2) Rating comments considered harmful,
3) The resource cost for rating comments means nobody will rate except for people who are really passionate, which would not be representative,
4) The resource cost for rating comments means commenters could spam comments and get different results,
5) The edit functions mean commenters could lie about results here, swapping good and bad comments, or bad with better content,
6) No guarantee a commenter will judge a poorly rated comment fairly (though I think the reputational hit might matter... but if this is normalized for hundreds of comments maybe they sneak one or two frauds in and nobody catches them),
7) Maybe this is (1) again, but self-adjudicating questions are weird singularities where the equilibrium is to drive it all the way towards whichever extreme it's already pointed at, it's like the worst possible echo chamber, or get a mob to suddenly flip it completely the other way, it's just... behavior is dominated by artifacts not the object level question.
I think if I were reading the above comment fresh I might vote down, ha.
Sometimes it's useful to try a broken proof of concept you can build off of though. The goal here would be to figure out a system where prediction markets could rate the quality of comments, which would give you the ability to use a second market to pledge your quality contributions, which would induce patronage for commenting.
Which is admittedly a pretty silly idea, but it's weird enough and feels just close enough to solvable that I find it really compelling.
This video is a two hour overview of the 2008 crash, crytpo, and NFTs. I'd been getting annoyed at youtubers who fill time with banter and repetition. Be careful what you ask for. This is quite an efficient video. (Well, efficient about bitcoin and NFTs., I'm not sure who the 2008 crash is connected to them.) You might want to listen in small chunks or read the transcript.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g&ab_channel=FoldingIdeas
Transcript:
https://downsub.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DYQ_xWvX1n9g
I went into this mildly pro-crypto. My feeling is that there are things wrong with fiat currency, though not so bad that fiat currency needs to be replaced. Hyperinflation is rare, but it's very bad when it happens. Sanctions can unjustly impoverish societies and don't work very well. Not everything that's illegal should be illegal.
However, crypto being generally valuable is dependent on it being useful for small transactions, and that doesn't seem to be happening, and it may be impossible for it to happen unless there's some major inspiration for a new structure.
Anyone want to argue that crypto is a valuable addition to the financial world?
I've seen crypto called a Ponzi scheme, and I'm not sure it started that way. It may have become one. Thoughts?
For a while, I was thinking "There's a lot of silly money out there. Why shouldn't I get some of it?" And I came up with TulipCoin (I think the name is taken), with the idea being to market it honestly-- "This is ridiculous, you could have fun spending money doing something ridiculous." However, my attention went to a tulip-breeding game to attract attention to the site. Maybe I should just work on a tulip-breeding game. I'm clearly not of the temperament to swim with the sharks.
If crypto and NFTs collapse, what effect would that have on the rest of the economy? If we're lucky, the apparent value is fairy gold which can disappear harmlessly. In a follow-up, Olsen says he thinks that a collapse of crypto will probably be harmless, but he doesn't know whether there's a hidden risk like some banks being substantially invested in crypto.
I'm dubious about the end of the video. I have trouble keeping track of my own subconscious, and I've become dubious about anyone's claims about large numbers of people's subconscious motivations.
Recently, I was writing about 1 Corinthians 13, and how there's no substitute for love, or at least good will. I think part of the problem with crypto is that it's an effort to substitute structure for trustworthiness, and if you've got deeply untrustworthy people, you just can't have machines supply your trustworthiness. Actually, I look at crypto and NFTs, and I wonder how anyone is making and selling anything that isn't crap. I think ethics and conscientiousness in the real world haven't been studied enough.
If the trustworthiness problem isn't substantially solved, I'm dubious about uploading one's consciousness into a computer. I was dubious about it anyway because I'm not sure you can get a person without a body, but even if you can, it may not be worth it if it's constantly under attack.
Crypto and NFTs seem to be extremely scammy ecosystems. There have been scammers and suckers for a very long time. Does it get worse when times are bad?
Paypal is offering to do $1 transactions in crypto, both buying and selling. I have no idea whether this works or makes any sense. While Paypal is unreliable (they can take your money at any time,and sometimes they do), I don't want it taken down unless something better is available.
https://billypenn.com/2022/02/12/phillycoin-cryptocurrency-philadelphia-citycoins-kenney-wheeler/
Philadelphia is considering a crypto lottery. I hope if they do it,that it's no worse than any other lottery.
I was pretty bearish on most crypto as anything but an investment vehicle, but the Canadian government stopping two different crowdfunding platforms from funding the Truck Protests, followed by freezing all their bank accounts, has caused me to update my priors on how valuable cryptocurrencies will be in the future. A currency that the government can't stop could actually be very useful.
I saw the documentary too, and I agree it's very well done although I had to watch it in chunks (and the part on the 2008 crash, while I get where he was going, was the weakest part).
To that I would add the recent (short) post over on ACOUP:
https://acoup.blog/2022/02/04/fireside-friday-february-4-2022/
He's approaching it from a historical perspective, namely that state power wouldn't tolerate crypto actually being successful in its stated goal as a decentralized financial system, even if it did work.
And then, as another commentator mentioned, I will point to the Ottawa convoy, which has already resulted in the Federal Government declaring an emergency in order to, among other things, more easily freeze crypto assets, and already courts are going after the crypto:
https://fortune.com/2022/02/18/freedom-convoy-protests-canada-lawsuit-freeze-crypto-wallets-ottawa/
(the "secret" aspect of the lawsuit there is a bit overblown, it's fairly routine for asset freezing as far as I understand).
Maybe someone with a better technical understanding might see a way around this, but now that a government has serious interest in regulating crypto transactions, it seems like it will expose crypto's inability to function as a real alternative to fiat currency (which of course have also been quickly frozen for convoy backers).
I think the point of the connection to the 2008 crash was to explain why there is a large group of people so entirely disenchanted with the financial/political system that they are willing to pump their money into something (anything?) that promises to be more 'fair' for ordinary people.
I feel like there are a small number of people in the crypto community who are genuinely working towards an admirable goal, but are running into:
- fundamental problems with the technology (transaction rates/costs, environmental concerns with proof of work, tension between privacy, accountability and anonymity)
- the small number of genuine advocates being totally outnumbered by criminals, scammers, and enthusiasts who don't really understand the tech or philosophy
- the absolute knowledge that the financial giants are watching very closely and the first hint that crypto will genuinely start to replace the current international system will see crypto ground to a very fine paste
I still have some hope for blockchain being a useful technology in some widespread application, but I haven't seen anything yet. It sure as hell isn't as a catalogue for bad art.
I don't have much hope for cryptocurrencies, if for no other reason that the main advantage (trustless decentralisation) is completely against the interests of power and capital. You'd need the revolution first, and I don't think that would end well.
Disclaimer: I'm a Bitcoin maximalist.
I thoroughly enjoyed this video, however my gut feel is that about 60% of the content in this video was straw manning.
For example
"However, crypto being generally valuable is dependent on it being useful for small transactions, and that doesn't seem to be happening, and it may be impossible for it to happen unless there's some major inspiration for a new structure."
How this guy managed to make a video like this and get something like this so wrong is beyond me. I can only assume he took a very disciplined breadth-first approach and didn't go very deep on any specific topic.
Concretely I'm referring to his lack of mentioning a) Bitcoin's segwit and taproot upgrades and b) L2 solutions such as the lightning network.
For example, yesterday I sent someone a 0.00000010 BTC payment and the fee was 0.00000001 BTC over lightning.
That counts as a small transaction in my books.
If you don't like lightning, fine. A few days ago I sent someone $50 on layer 1 BTC and the fee was $0.20
Anyway yeah, I felt like a lot of the content in this video was based on 7 year old information. Bitcoin is the most robust monetary network ever created (as in you can't stop or censor transactions) and it can scale really well now.
It could use some additional privacy features to make it more cash-like, but I'm confident that's coming..
This is very tentative, but I believe the big cost of transactions is related to the size of the blockchain. Would there be a cheaper way of having small chains hanging off the central blockchain, with some reliable way to check them against each other?
Another very tentative idea. I believe the high cost of the blockchain is the need to verify every transaction every time. Could it make sense to verify a random subset of transactions on the assumptions that problems will get caught, just not as quickly?
"That counts as a small transaction in my books."
But then you're not transacting on the blockchain, you're transacting on the Lightning Network. So then you have to trust the Lightning Network as much as you trust the blockchain. And why should you do that if it doesn't have the trustless and decentralised nature of the blockchain?
"A few days ago I sent someone $50 on layer 1 BTC and the fee was $0.20"
And what would that price be (or how long would the wait be) if you had to compete with 10^8 other transactions daily instead of 10^5 (ie if Bitcoin handled some reasonable proportion of total daily transactions)?
"Bitcoin is the most robust monetary network ever created"
No point being robust if you can't handle a reasonable transaction volume, as far as being "generally valuable" is concerned, otherwise you're just niche.
"It could use some additional privacy features to make it more cash-like"
Seems to me like all transactions being public is fundamental to both the technology and the philosophy of Bitcoin.
> Seems to me like all transactions being public is fundamental to both the technology and the philosophy of Bitcoin.
Not at all. You need a canonical list of transactions and a way to verify that all the transactions on the list are valid, but surprisingly you *don't* need to be able to actually read the contents of any transaction. I believe zcash (https://z.cash/) was the first cryptocurrency to allow this, but there seem to be other implementations now e.g. Tornado Cash (https://tornado.cash/).
As far as I can tell there is absolutely no easy explanation of how this works in detail, but the very high-level summary is that if you specify some bounded computation that takes an input and returns "yes" or "no", you can create a short proof that you know an input that produces "yes", without revealing any information about that input. "Is this transaction valid?" can be formulated as a bounded computation, so transactions can be replaced with proofs-of-valid-transactions.
> I went into this mildly pro-crypto. My feeling is that there are things wrong with fiat currency, though not so bad that fiat currency needs to be replaced. Hyperinflation is rare, but it's very bad when it happens.
Something I've been curious about: my understanding is that you can also have deflationary catastrophes, as happened in the US Great Depression. Where mortgage holders, say, have the amount of work they must do/amount of goods they must sell to make payments goes up until they have no way to avoid default.
However, when you hear people compare currencies, people often mention the risks of hyperinflation, but not the risk of catastrophic deflation. I don't mean this as an attack, but I'm curious why people think of one rather than the other? Is it a matter of one being less well known? People viewing the risk of deflation as more localized (confined to debtors, but if you have a store of value you can still get stuff), or my understanding of the deflation risk being wrong?
Deflation is a potentially severe risk, but it's *usually* pretty easy for a competent government to avoid it by printing more money. Not all governments are competent, but at least in this case the incentives line up in the right direction.
To fix inflation, you need the government to print (broadly speaking) less money at a time when people are visibly suffering from things that more money could superficially fix, and that's much harder to arrange - especially in a democracy.
Tentatively, the more recent problems in the US have been with inflation, so it's more on people's minds. You're absolutely right that deflation could also be a disaster.
Is anyone doing or working on a bitcoin that has a fairly stable price and low inflation built in?
Bitcoin itself is inherently deflationary due to the hard cap on the number of coins that can ever exist. Economically it behaves like gold, and dropping the gold standard is how countries pulled out of the dive of the Great Depression.
I know Dogecoin is moderately (and predictably) inflationary, adding a fixed number of coins per year.
Stable price is hard. I imagine that if you WANTED to try to approach that from a technical perspective. If one could design something with low transaction overhead. Then make it moderately inflationary AND, perhaps, have held coins evaporate at a slow fixed rate, to discourage speculation, that might at least be an interesting experiment. Not so useful as a store of value. Perhaps one could have the evaporation slow over time, assuming the anti-speculation shield is needed less as it gets used for transactions.
This is assuming my mental model of cryptocoin instability being caused by gold-fans piling in and priming the pump for general speculation is correct. The evaporation would have to be fairly slow even in the beginning to not be a de facto transaction fee.
My understanding is that hyperinflation is driven by lack of trust in a currency, not (just) by printing money.
Currencies tend to be fairly stable in relative prices in the short to medium term.
That’s another reason why Bitcoin isn’t a currency. It’s not a store of value.
if you were earning units of Bitcoin in your job, starting last October, your purchasing power has dropped by 40% since then. If they promised you 3BTC last October you would have been looking turn at a annual salary of $174000, right now it’s €103,000. Fine for a speculative investment but not for a currency with which you would expect to pay bills. Another way of looking at this is that there’s a lot of inflation for BTC earners.
As for deflation, it is as serious. In fact the Nazis are often assumed to have come to power because of hyperinflation but the real reason was deflation and austerity in the early 30s. We have tools to fight it now though, as we do with inflation.. without QE the world economy might have dried up for a decade.
I just watched that video yesterday. It's extremely well-substantiated and greatly informative for anyone who has only watched the crypto space with a side-eye like me.
Is RationalWiki a reliable, responsible steward of information related to Rationalist discussion?
After having been directed to RationalWiki a few times recently via links in various essays and articles, I got the distinct impression that the site is contributed to/controlled by a relatively small number of very zealous individuals who seem to not make much effort at all to maintain balance or neutrality. It's as if the worst editorial practices of Wikipedia (page-camping, ax-grinding, very selective application of the "maintained by a community" maxim) have been shipped straight to RatWiki, but because the scope of the site is so much narrower the ratio of heat to light is way higher than it's parent site.
The degree to which this occurs seems to range from tongue-in-cheek expressions of a preference for leftist politics (see pages: Communism, AnCap); to needlessly snarky and self-defeating (see page: SJW) right through to almost-libellous slander and targetted personal abuse (see page: Emil Kirkegaard).
Given the structure and philosophy of Wikis in general, was it wrong to expect RatWiki to be immune (on the basis of their presumed rationality) to the same failure mechanisms as Wiki itself? What went wrong?
I'm pretty sure it was created as an explicitly anti-LessWrong site (where LessWrong is something like 'the (Internet) home of (the) modern rationality ('movement')').
Do people want a better wiki for the rationalist community? It would be a lot of work, and I haven't seen anyone calling for it.
It didn't go wrong, because it never even aimed at objectivity. Why did you expect it would?
I don't think it's unreasonable to assume, from a zero-special-knowledge starting point, that a Wiki dedicated to rational thought would be mainly aimed at objectivity with the occasional subjective detour, rather than the other way around.
It's fun to imply that people were suckers ex post for *ever* thinking a project was well-intentioned, but that's not the kind of insight i'm looking for here.
> You might think that a belief system which praised "reason" and "rationality" and "individualism" would have gained some kind of special immunity, somehow...?
> Well, it didn't.
> It worked around as well as putting a sign saying "Cold" on a refrigerator that wasn't plugged in.
> The active effort required to resist the slide into entropy wasn't there, and decay inevitably followed.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/96TBXaHwLbFyeAxrg/guardians-of-ayn-rand
This was written about a different group, but the lesson is general. Merely calling yourself "rational" doesn't make it so. It actually seems to work in the opposite direction -- you start with a group of generally smart people, who decide that they are mentally superior to anyone who disagrees with them, and from that moment no feedback is possible, because everyone who disagrees with them is, by definition, stupid.
(Notice how the websites of the rationalist community typically have names like "Overcoming Bias" and "Less Wrong", rather than "Documenting the Biases of Our Political Opponents" or "Absolutely Correct". Yes, we are biased and wrong, *and* we strive to do better -- there is no contradiction. Noticing your mistakes is the first step towards correcting them.)
I believe that people at RationalWiki actually consider themselves rational. I just don't agree with their definition of rationality (and they don't agree with mine). Their "rationality" is more about being academic and politically correct. So, I don't think that their intentions are bad. They are just... what is the euphemism for "stupid"? :D Just kidding.
I actually think their greatest mistake is the ethos of "if we see someone being wrong, we must collectively laugh hard at them" (officially called "the snarky point of view"; I am not making this up). The problem with this attitude is that once you make a mistake (which sooner or later happens to everyone), it becomes almost impossible to change your mind -- because the first person at RationalWiki to publicly change their mind would be aggressively laughed at by the rest of their community.
By the way: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YSP9prWnjKxzwuAKp/rationalwiki-on-face-masks
Rationalwiki is run by "The Skeptic" in Heuristics That Almost Always Work. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/heuristics-that-almost-always-work?utm_source=url
I think it's a useful heuristic to assume, if someone deliberately chooses a vague positive-affect term to label themselves with, that they're doing so for an ulterior motive. Because this is a "heuristic that's almost always right" you SHOULD generally try and check to confirm these suspicions, but I think it's a sign of a weak psychic immune system to see someone conspicuously labelling themselves as "the goodies" and take them at their word without at least CONSIDERING why they might want to have a certain label beyond accuracy.
For whose definition of "rational"? There's no reason they have to follow Yudkowskys definition.
Agreed: there's "rational" in the way most people use it ("that makes sense" or "that sounds smart and agrees with my moral intuitions") and then there's Yud-rationalism as a whole identity-consuming philosophy.
It's run by substantially the same people who run r/sneerclub, so you might say it's not especially reliable on the "rationalist" community or ideas commonly discussed therein. (The opposite, even!)
How exactly did the "split" happen, by the way? Apparently David Gerard commented on early LessWrong. Was it because the ratsphere resisted conversion into SJ unlike the rest of nerddom?
I suspect that one important source of conflict is the fact that Eliezer blogged some non-mainstream opinions on *quantum physics*, without having corresponding education. That inevitably triggered the crackpot alarms at RationalWiki. And I don't blame them... 99% of people who express strong opinions on quantum physics online, without having studied it, *are* crackpots.
Problem is, this was the 1% exception. Like, at some moment people asked at Physics Stack Exchange what is the expert opinion on Eliezer's blog, and the answer was like: "what he says is a *minority* opinion among the experts, but it is *not* a fringe opinion; there is simply no consensus". So, yes controversial, but no crackpot, unless you are ready to call half of professional quantum physicists (possibly including Einstein) crackpots too, for believing in something other than the Copenhagen interpretation.
But once RationalWiki makes up its hive mind and declares you a crackpot, and starts writing a "snarky" article on you, it become socially impossible to say "actually, we were wrong, he is actually quite okay and this attack was totally undeserved, let's delete it". So the question became: we *already know* that Eliezer is a crackpot, but since it's not because of the quantum physics, what *else* is he possibly guilty of? Well, if you look at Eliezer, it is not at all difficult to find something that will trigger someone, whether it's polyamory, or belief that a superhuman AI will most likely kill us all, or writing Harry Potter fanfiction, or being too popular, or all of that together.
So the next iteration was evolving vaguely in the "Eliezer is a cult leader who has sex with many of his followers" direction. But then some lucky soul found a deleted comment that became later known as Roko's Basilisk, and the RationalWiki decided that *this* is what Less Wrong is actually all about.
I suspect that David Gerard (the admin of RationalWiki) originally believed that he could make the rationalists from Less Wrong see the light (of political correctness), but then realized that we cannot be recruited as fighters for his cause, and that broke his heart. Although according to surveys the Less Wrong audience is mostly liberal, we believe that stupidity in service of one's political tribe is still stupidity, while an intelligent discussion with political opponents can be quite enjoyable (that is, until the opponent runs out of intelligent arguments).
Less Wrong resisted the conversion because we had the "politics is the mind-killer" meme long before anyone tried to convert us. Also, not sure if this was always the case, but many members are from Europe or other parts of the world, and we frankly often do not give a fuck about things that make Americans clutch their pearls; we are mostly immune against the woke mobs. The rationalist celebrities in USA, such as Eliezer and Scott, do not make their money by pandering to the normie masses, so even if a journalist does a sucessful hit job on them, their original audience remains loyal to them. (I am not saying it was easy for Scott. But he was not destroyed, and possibly became even stronger as a result.)
It wasn't obvious at the beginning, but we (the rationalist community) are now stronger than RationalWiki. Somehow, over the last decade, we became more relevant, and they became less revelant. Not sure what is the causality here, if any.
Physics stack exchange contains yet another statement of the overconfidence criticism, this time from Scott Aaronson:
"I think Yudkowsky's central argument---basically, that anyone who rejects Everett needs to have their head examined---is to put it mildly, a bit overstated."
Believing that the MWI is true, does not make one a crank. Believing that the MWI is so obviously true that all rational people must accept it, makes one a crank - at least in the realm of physics.
But no one is saying that EY is a crank because MWI is a crazy idea. The claim made *on rational wiki* is that he is making a very confident claim.about a complex subject. Remember, he goes so far as to suggest that science itself is broken for having ever embraced the Copenhagen interpretation. How is a pro-science.organisation supposed to.react to that?
Hehe, I noticed the incongruence between my preaching of non-tribalism while simultaneously framing the situation with RationalWiki as "us versus them". :D
But the fact is, LessWrong was never about being *against* RationalWiki or anyone else. It was never personal; unlike RationalWiki, which is about detecting and attacking perceived enemies.
The entire conflict between the communities is RW attacking LW, and LW mostly ignoring them and doing our own things, occassionally commenting on how unfair their attacks seem to us.
And yet, somehow, at the beginning, RationalWiki was a popular website, and if they wrote something about you, you could bet that anyone who puts your name in google will find it first, so if they want to ruin your reputation then you are done. In addition, David Gerard is administrator of both RationalWiki and Wikipedia, so he can do a hit job on you at RationalWiki, then a journalist will quote him, and then he will quote the journalist as a "reliable source" in the Wikipedia article about you; and he will also keep watching the article and reverting any edits in your favor...
...and yet, somehow, now, when you say "RationalWiki", most people go like "rational what?", but most people know the famous blogger Scott Alexander. David Gerard was banned from editing articles related to Scott Alexander on Wikipedia. And generally, the dogs bark, but the rationalist caravan goes on.
It's interesting. I wouldn't have predicted it. And I enjoy it. But soon I will forget about RationalWiki again, and focus on doing my own things.
LW is pretty against mainstream.philosophy ('diseased'), copenhagenism, theism, dualism, free will, socialism,.big government, etc, etc. Have you ever tried arguing against an LW dogma? It could give you a different perspective.
David Gerard attended a LW meetup where someone raised race/IQ links.
There was no split; the site never had anything to do with Less-Wrong-style rationalism. I don't know how they became so acrimonious towards LW, though.
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RationalWiki
> It was created in 2007 as a counterpoint to Conservapedia after an incident in which contributors attempting to edit Conservapedia were banned.
Well, the wiki may have had nothing to do with it initially, but sneerclub appears to be specifically anti-"rationalist", so clearly there was some sort of conflict, to which I've seen some allusions but nothing concrete.
As far as I know there was never any "split" they way you're imagining. Some people encounter something on the internet and love it and make it a part of their identity. Some people find it boring and forget about it. Some people make hating it a part of their identity. A hatedom doesn't require a part of a fandom to break of acrimoniously due to drama, they can just form directly out of people who want to join a hatedom.
As for how these people ended up running rationalwiki specifically, I don't know. I won't go so far as to say it's a pure coincidence that two groups claiming that label "rational" ended up looking down on each other.
It seems extremely hard to get good publicly available information about the military/naval aspects of a US conflict with China over Taiwan.
In this podcast, Steve thinks were the US to come to Taiwan's aid, naval carrier groups would be extremely vulnerable to chinese missile attack near Taiwan, and that breaking a naval blockage china imposed on Taiwan would be very dangerous.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-future-of-humanity-is-ivf-babies-and/id1548137490?i=1000551022938
Peter Zeihan recently publicly mocked the idea of a Chinese/US naval conflict, saying plainly that the chinese would lose terribly, and all we would have to do in the event of an amphibious invasion is send a few destroyers to the west coast of taiwan and shoot stuff down.
These seem like people who know what they're talking about disagreeing about some
pretty basic facts. anyone care to weigh in?
I think technology has changed enough since the last great power naval conflict that it's hard to know how things will go.
Disclaimer: I'm not a subject-matter expert, and so the below is more or less just naval nerdery informed by amateur interest.
A full US carrier group very hard to knock down except by a massive, well-coordinated saturation attack (think hundreds of aircraft and other launch platforms, all launching at staggered intervals so that the missiles all arrive at the same time). This is a scenario that the surface navy has apparently been training and optimising for since the 70s (and is more or less a continuation of their experiences against the Japanese in WW2), and is part of the impetus behind the Chinese developing ballistic anti-ship missiles such as DF-21D.
On the other hand, US carrier groups have proven very vulnerable in exercises to lurking submarines - especially quiet diesel-electric types that can sit on the sea bed and wait for the fleet to come nearby before making an attack run. The Chinese subs would probably get slaughtered in a stand-up fight with the subs and ships that screen a carrier task force, so the Kilo-type attack would be more or less a snipe-and-run affair conducted by a very brave/suicidal crew.
Speaking of suicide: conventional fleet engagements versus the US are essentially that, and would only be carried out as part of a coordinated missile barrage, or as a costly distraction to allow other assets to get into position.
Naval warfare is generally very dynamic and all-or-nothing, and the modern variant of it is even more so. So there's almost an even chance of either of the following playing out:
1) The Chinese missile barrage goes off without a hitch, and/or one of their subs manages to slip in and spike the carrier. The result is that the carrier group gets slaughtered and the U.S. sees the greatest single-day loss since Pearl Harbour (perhaps upwards of 10 000 killed in a single day of combat). This probably results in all-out war for the next five years (but that's not a consideration here). The Chinese get fairly well mauled in the process, though - losing dozens of aircraft and most likely a number of subs and surface vessels.
2) Something goes wrong with the missile barrage, and the carrier group swats down more or less every missile. The carrier group then goes on to slaughter any surviving aircraft, and probably spends a while wrecking shore-based assets, ships and whatever else comes within its sights before heading home to restock. The result is that the Chinese lose most of their Eastern fleet and hundreds of aircraft, and spend a while more or less helpless until they can re-position assets and start making up losses. The US potentially still loses hundreds of personnel in the process, but the victory is incredibly lopsided. This also kicks off years of open warfare, but that's again beyond scope here.
Conclusion: both experts are more or less right, it's just impossible to tell the outcome from this end, given that it can turn on very small factors (a single sub getting lucky, a few missile-carriers not making their launch windows, a few minutes of extra warning and so on). Overall I'd say that either scenario ends up being pretty horrific (years of open warfare between major powers), so the hope is that the decision-makers involved know what a gamble the whole thing is.
I know nothing about anything, but a basic pattern used to accomplish something in the face of overwhelming opposing forces is to do it *fast* before they can react.
Maybe we should 'sell'/lend-lease more missiles to Taiwan. As many people have noted, 21st century missile technology can now obliterate most carriers and ships, which makes the US Navy coming to Taiwan's defense extremely risky. Also less frequently noted- it's unlikely that the US would actively strike those missile emplacements on Chinese soil, as striking the Chinese mainland and likely killing soldiers there is an extreme escalation.
Seeing as fixed missile emplacements on land are so devastating to ships- Taiwan can do the same, right? And litter their coast with staging areas to attack Chinese ships and troop carriers trying to cross the 90 mile strait, which is a very long ways to go in the face of enemy missiles. The US can use the lend-lease program to effectively give them advanced missiles that Taiwan couldn't otherwise afford.
Also, looking the other way or even covertly helping out a Taiwanese nuclear program would seem to make a lot of sense
As mentioned above - anti-ship missiles have to be carefully massed and coordinated to take out a fully US carrier fleet, and any foul-ups result in the missiles getting swatted down and vengeful wrath descending on you. The Chinese analogue is built more on the Russian model, but is just as mean when it comes to dealing with saturation attacks. So it would have to be a lot of missiles, and all of them carefully emplaced. This would be extremely obvious, and would take months to do.
Which leads to the next issue: the Taiwanese buying a lot of missiles and putting them into caves in the hills is more or less an open declaration of war, and would be treated as such. The Chinese simply would not allow another nation to have the option to close off the Taiwan Straight to them, let alone threaten their fleets there. And letting the Taiwanese get nukes would be directly counter-productive to US interests, which turn substantially on not diluting the monopoly of force that comes with their majority ownership of the bomb.
So no to both options, basically.
Also important to note is that the Taiwanese military is poorly trained, and a lot of their equipment is poorly maintained. Insider reports like this one:
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/08/20/taiwan-military-flashy-american-weapons-no-ammo/
show how poor the situation is, and that selling more guns is not the solution.
See this is what I mean. I thought the taiwanese military was well-prepared *for the single plausible conflict it could participate in*. The variation in opinion about this is so strange.
The other thing to keep in mind is the sort of operations likely to happen. What are the chances that the US is going to attempt a contested landing on the Chinese mainland? Low. The US has no geostrategic interest in seizing Shanghai and... I don't even know what the US would try and do with it. Much more likely is the Chinese attempting a contested landing on Taiwan. So the US is likely to be supporting an ally on the defensive while China is likely to be engaging in offensive operations. So, for example, in Taiwan the question is not how well Chinese artillery can defend Taiwan. The question is how well Chinese artillery can deny the US the opportunity to support the Taiwanese military.
https://www.rand.org/paf/projects/us-china-scorecard.html
You can read this rand report from a few years ago. It's getting out of date, and I think it's a little pessimistic, but it's a good and short intro to the topic.
If the conflict happened tomorrow, but we would send submarines, not destroyers, and it would not go well for the chinese. But as the report makes clear, our advantage is eroding.
Two random observations/questions on UKR/RUS:
1. if I'm reading them right, the prediction markets are giving a significant probability to an invasion happening but not going much further than the Donbas. Is this something knowledgeable commentators also think might happen? If so, is the implicit idea that formally occupying the Donbas (for some nominally "protective" reason) might let Putin claim a win at home without going far enough to actually incur much in the way of costs and consequences?
2. It occurs to me that Biden's strategy of preannouncing everything his intelligence has learned that Putin is planning, in an attempt to deprive him of excuses, is a very interesting instance of a state weaponizing transparency in a way that these days we usually see from non-state actors. Seems like Martin Gurri must be taking a considerable interest in this-- might it be a result of people in the administration actually learning something from _The Revolt of the Public_? Or is this kind of leak-everything tactic not so new as I think? It reminds me of the constant stream of TGIF leaks from mid-2010s Google (I keep expecting to see somebody livetweeting one of Putin's strategy meetings) but I'm sure others will have different associations with it.
I'm not sure the "preannouncing everything" is so much a strategy as it is a sign that many people in the US government are physically incapable of keeping a secret.
In other words, Putin can leak material to the US government and be confident the US government will leak it to the Western press, even if the leak only benefits Putin.
On the other hand, some of the "preannouncements" are deliberate misdirection from the Biden administration. Sure, they have intelligence that Russia is building a pontoon bridge in Belarus as part of scheduled military operations ... they just don't point out that this is entirely irrelevant to the Ukraine situation.
Ad 1, you should be aware of the fact that word "Donbas" is ambiguous. It might mean just the territory controlled by separatists, or it might mean much wider area in eastern Ukraine, including portions currently under the control of the Ukrainian government.
Ad 1), consider the possibility that Russia's beef is exactly what Russia says that her beef is: Russia wants the NATO military entrenched on its border with Ukraine just as much as US wanted the Soviet military entrenched in Cuba 60 years ago. And that beside that, Russia doesn't -particularly- wish to occupy Ukraine, beyond disabling her to bring in NATO.
This goal could be met by occupying Donbas, period.
On one hand, a lot of the Donbas population would welcome the Russian troops. On the other hand, Ukraine cannot ascend to NATO while she doesn't fully control her territory. (unless NATO changes their rules...)
NATO could of course *choose* to attack Russia over that, even without Ukraine's ascenscion - just as NATO attacked Serbia, Afghanistan, Libya etc. - but some NATO member countries appear to be less enthusiastic about attacking Russia than this newfangled neocon+democrat alliance in the US is.
Ukraine even now cannot get into NATO, unless NATO changes its "rules" (I don´t think those are formal rules, but they do exist, and yeah, they are changeable), until it sorts out its territorial disputes with Russia.
Formally incorporating two separatists republics into Russia does not alter this reality in any way.
Yes, that's the point. Russia _needs_ Ukraine to have territorial disputes, for Ukraine to remain non-integrable into NATO.
Imagine Ukraine were to hypothetically agree about transferring Crimea into Russia (*). Then Ukraine would no longer have territorial disputes with Russia, and could proceed with NATO ascension. Whereas if Russia *occupies* Donbas - *without* the "formal incorporation", which Ukraine is way less likely to accept, even hypothetically - then you get that stalemate which pretty much blocks Ukraine's NATO ascension. (meaning, NATO can still *choose* to attack Russia, if NATO members agree, but it doesn't get to entrench on the UKR/RUS border "for free")
(*) Crimea was Russian all the way from Ekaterina the Great to the formation of the USSR. It got out of USSR as Ukrainian due to a "transfer on paper", but its population remained mostly Russian. In the Crimean 2014 referendum, 97% votes in a 83% turnout voted for joining Russia. (this referendum is of course disputed by parties who did not like its outcome, and who appear to assert that if some other military had been on the ground at the time, then Crimea's mostly-Russian population would have voted otherwise)
Donbas, however, is more complicated.
I don´t think it works this way. Everyone knows that Russia has deep ties with Donbas separatists, and, under current "rules", NATO wants to avoid direct military confrontation with Russia if at all possible (for rather obvious reasons that nukes might start to fall), so Ukraine would not be allowed to join the alliance even if it would agree to cede Crimea to Russia, until it would solve its Donbas situation.
Of course, if God forbid, current rules were to change, all bets are off. I hope that it is not going there.
Nukes are not the key matter here. The US is the only one to ever have used nukes against actual cities -- there's no other nuclear power that ever did that, and not for there being a lack of conflicts involving those powers. Whereas all the strategizing in the current standoff is quite rooted in conventional warfare.
You seem to be awfully confident considering how Putin has been regularly threatening to nuke various European and USA cities since 2014...
And consider also how they have been developing a doomsday weapon - a nuclear-powered rocket which contaminates the ground it flows over - on which the USA has stopped the work during the Cold War because its mere development has been deemed too problematic !
> there's no other nuclear power that ever did that
We were getting close to use of nuclear weapons, scarily close multiple times. In some of this cases escalation to full nuclear WW III was very likely.
"Russia wants the NATO military entrenched on its border with Ukraine just as much as US wanted the Soviet military entrenched in Cuba 60 years ago."
Waaaaaait a minute, where are you saying the "NATO military" is?? You are saying it's on the border between Russia and Ukraine, which logically means it must be *in* either Russia or Ukraine.
As we all are aware, I think, neither is a member of NATO, so how did that happen?
As is common knowledge, Ukraine is motioning to join NATO since 2008, in an over a dozen years long standoff with Russia over that topic. On which side of the UKR/RUS border NATO gets to entrench freely if RUS lets that happen, is an exercise left to the reader.
That said, I'll grant that the analogy with Cuba is not perfect. There's at least three important differences.
1. From Cuba to Washington DC there's >100 miles of sea, and then >1000 miles of land. From the UKR/RUS border to Moscow there's <300 miles of land, and exactly zero miles of sea. The military significance is not remotely comparable.
2. The Soviets engaged in the Cuban deployment in response to - i.e. a couple of years after - the US had deployed nukes to Turkey. In the current standoff, Russia has made no equivalent deployment that precedes the intended deployment of NATO.
3. In spite of #2, the Soviets had ultimately agreed to back off from Cuba. In this instance, it seems possible that Russia... will not agree to back off.
I believe all of the above information to be known to the OP prediction markets, and already factored into the predictions.
For withdrawing missiles, the Soviets got an agreement to respect Cuba's sovereignty from the US.
If this were a parallel between Cuba and Ukraine, then the US would have missiles in Ukraine, and Russia would guarantee Ukraine's sovereignty to get them withdrawn.
This is the most opposite thing possible to what is happening!
Also, if Ukraine's been trying to join NATO since 2008, why haven't they?
Must be because NATO won't let them! Show a little gratitude!
>If this were a parallel between Cuba and Ukraine, then the US would have missiles in Ukraine, and Russia would guarantee Ukraine's sovereignty to get them withdrawn. This is the most opposite thing possible to what is happening!
"US missiles == NATO". Russia said it won't invade if US/NATO guarantee they will not extend to Ukraine.
The US/NATO did the most opposite thing possible. So Russia invaded.
For the record, now that it finally started happening, Russia has gone beyond entering the Ukraininan territories where the people *really do want* to go into Russia -- which, contrary to what you'll read in western media, absolutely do exist -- and crossed over into those territories where the people *really do not want* that. This is really, really wrong. And it is *unnecessary* for achieving any justifiable Russian goals. The former is/has happened practically without a shot fired. The latter is bound to be bloodshed.
Russia has very solid claims to Crimea. And I don't mean *relatively* more solid - as in "more solid than the US has to Guantanamo" - but *absolutely* solid. There was never a slightest whiff of recognition of that simple fact in the West; Russia is always the designated comic-book villain, whether what it does is right or if it's wrong.
After years and years of such exchanges, Russia comes out with an IDGAF attitude. It's truly tragic that it's come to this.
Leaving aside the incredible chutzpah it takes to say "an invasion *right now* is necessary because otherwise Ukraine might some day many years from now join NATO," Latvia's border is even closer to Moscow than Ukraine is. And they're an actual bona-fide member of NATO and the EU, and have been for 18 years now, so it would be much easier to station missiles there if NATO wanted. How is Ukraine more of a threat than they are?
About "right now", although Ukraine has been doing joint military exercises withNATO since 2010 or so, it has significantly ramped up in the last two years. 2020 was the first time the US flew B-52s in Ukraine next to Russian borders. 2021 saw the largest exercises so far.
About "How is Ukraine more of a threat than they are", aside from the disposition of each of those countries to fight Russia and their own military potential, the point is that in military operations, being attacked from two fronts is much more than twice as difficult to fend off than an attack from one front. All militaries are quite familiar with the principles of the "pincer attack". I.e. "Ukraine + Baltics" >> "2 * Baltics" > "1 * Baltics".
A war between NATO and Russia would be nuclear, and I'm not sure how much this pincer matters (except psychologically ?) when we're talking ICBMs criss-crossing half+ of the globe, including over the Arctic.
Another reason for an invasion of Ukraine would be the supposed lack that Russia has in terms of advanced anti-ICBM detection - not being able to rely on satellites, barely 15 minutes of warning ? - but it seems to me that Ukraine wouldn't give much more compared to the current early warnings that Kaliningrad, Crimea (and Transnistria ?) already provide ?
They don't want it - it is not there, but if Ukraine joined NATO, it would be. Russia is trying to stop that.
For 2. you also have to consider the possibility that US intelligence is either lying or incompetent, and the "transparency" is a post-facto justification of false claims.
Yes, and that is also true of non-state leakers/deliberate embarrassment producers of the WikiLeaks type. Sauce for the goose and all.
The way I see it, the current ambiguous status of Donetsk/Luhansk People's Republics was advantageous to Russia - they could have formally annexed them at any point of time of their choosing doing the last 7 years, but did not, since keeping that pressure on Ukraine with that semi-active conflict zone is more valuable for multiple reasons. So in that regard, while Putin could easily occupy that territory and a bit more, for Russia that outcome would be worse than the current status quo even if it would come "for free" with no losses and sanctions. Perhaps it would help to 'save face' for domestic political purposes, but strategically it would not be useful, so why would Putin do that?
On the other hand, achieving results that actually would help him would require effectively replacing Kiev government with a pro-Russian one; and a minor conquest would only work against that.
I think the intelligence community has been saying the plan is maybe to annex a bit of territory. But mainly to knock over the government in Kiev and replace it with a puppet. As for the pre-announcement, the question is whether it successfully deters him. If it does then it's a good use of intelligence assets that are more likely to be burned by their use. After all, each release means the Russians know what we know which will help them know how we're spying.
A lot of how we're collecting intelligence is via ISR platforms which the public can track on Flightradar24; no substantive risk of burning sources there.
A jury of peers for ban appeals? Scott can always overrule.
The jury doesn't decide whether someone gets unbanned/unwarned, they decide whether Scott reads the appeal at all.
Your idea is better than mine!
It's not my idea, it's his! I didn't realize you were making a suggestion, I was just clarifying how the described prediction market works.
I'm probably taking the numbers more literally than intended, but it seems hard to believe that any warning could be "1% of a ban". Scott was clearly annoyed enough at the comments to respond with a warning, and put it in the open thread. I find it hard to believe that a person could make comments that Scott finds that objectionable *19* more times, without being banned.
And if you consider the effect of this paired with more severe infractions, it would weaken any assumption of charity that Scott might make.
In the actual comment he gives it 10% of a ban, so it might have been a typo.
I'm playing with numbers (and so far inconsistent, as you noticed), but my thought was that a trivial warning is literally just a warning and not intended to ever end up to a ban, but for consistency's sake I ought to put it on the same scale as everything else.
Love this probabilistic, prediction-market-based justice system
Really really interested to see how the appeal efforts go in bullet four. On one hand I hope you don’t get enough data to get a really great answer because it would be annoying, but on the other… this is the only type of high level scheme I think can work long-term for fair moderation.
In https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-ukraine-cube-manifold?utm_source=url, Scott comments on a market predicting enhancement of human intellience by 2050.
The one thing that makes me thing this is possible is the discovery that some birds can pack in twice as many neurons per unit of mass:
https://www.pnas.org/content/113/26/7255
If someone could find the genes for that and transfer them to mammals, we might be onto something.
Of course, on the other side of the bet is the possibility of human extinction, due to some idiot letting the hyperintelligent rats escape.
I wouldn't worry about double neurons creating hyperintelligent rats. Their brains are much smaller than half of ours.
Where are people finding the best information regarding the Ukraine/Russia situation? Are there substacks I should be reading? Twitter users I should follow?
Some stuff on Twitter: https://twitter.com/i/lists/1266120907816407048 (a Twitter list titled "Mostly Ukraine OSINT", exactly what it says on the tin); https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/1496702542775939076 (a tweet with a bunch of replies that list similar lists).
Also, as a clarifier: Russia just invaded Ukraine today (February 24th, 2022).
Anything from Mark Galeotti is worth a read.
Adam Tooze has written some substack posts about the economic background to the situation. (Mostly that Ukraine has underperformed compared to all its neighbors since 1991)
https://ironcurtain.substack.com/ - my father writes an almost daily newsletter about Russia. He used to be a senior government official in Russia in pre-Putin days and recently advised the Zelenskiy government, so he's pretty well-informed.
Kamil Galeev has written some long threads about Russian history and culture that are relevant:
https://twitter.com/kamilkazani
Caveat, I think he overextends trends in a few places to tell a better story, so I read these with a grain of salt, and as a jumping off point for keywords to explore specific subtopics in more depth on my own.
Dmitri Alperovitch https://mobile.twitter.com/DAlperovitch?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor has been very prescient about the issues. He’s an ethnic Russian, US citizen, who founded Crowdstrike ($30b cybersecurity company) and now does public policy in DC.
I think the Wikipedia history of Ukraine is really good background.
For a contrarian, but dated warning from George Kennan, I recommend
https://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/05/opinion/a-fateful-error.html?searchResultPosition=1
I think it is incredibly difficult and painful to do, through personal effort, but you have to train yourself to not come to any conclusions about anything via Wikipedia unless you actually check the references.
It's like market efficiency - you should be able to piggyback on other people doing reality checks, but in practice, you can't.
Among the things I see a lot once I started looking are:
1) References that specify a publication which might or might not exist and say nothing about *where* specifically the support for the claim may be.
2) References that seem to be random documents on public storage that look like someone's draft undergraduate paper.
3) References that are specific and misrepresented.
4) References that are not available online, which may be fine, but do you believe *anyone* ever verified it?
5) References ostensibly online, but now unobtainable, so were they really ever there?
Other stuff I can't think of now.
I absolutely agree that people should read it, but *anything* can be disinformation or propaganda from anyone and the system is not that good at sifting it.
Often I read a page that I infer is contentious because the text is just so disjointed and incoherent, it seems clear that different people were inserting sentences to push their point of view in the middle of older writing.
And lately I've been seeing entries that have an oddly conversational style unlike the way lots of stuff used to be written. Nothing's wrong with that necessarily, but it stands out and makes me wonder if it's somebody in particular who's writing a disproportionate amount.
Now I am not saying that the CIA or Putin is brainwashing you. It could be someone you least expect...
Never forget this:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-us-teenager-wrote-huge-slice-of-scots-wikipedia
All good points. The Ukraine entry seemed well maintained and thorough. But there's always a risk. fifteen years ago, my teenage son and a friend created on Wikipedia a fake sport called "The Walking Game" that involved walking quickly down a crowded urban street without touching another pedestrian. They included a few fictional champions and various cheating scandals. It only lasted a day, before it was taken down. I actually thought it was pretty funny.
Acknowledging a risk, though, doesn't mitigate it. There's a mental block, which I acknowledged I've experienced, where one implicitly says "oh, yeah, sure, some references may be questionable, but *most* of them must be good" and I don't have time to obsess over it. But if you don't actually check, you don't even know what the odds are, and if you won't look, the truth is you don't want to know.
Getting into a habit of seeing if the reference for whatever you want to believe in or quote is obtainable is *hard*, like dieting or something. You won't appreciate the problem until you start checking.
It doesn't mean most of the references that can't be verified are sinister. There's usually no way to tell and that's why it's so tempting to assume that something you can't check exists and is represented accurately.
True, but then you have to consider the reward of mitigation, i.e., the stakes involved. Reading a general Wikipedia article about Ukraine's history has low stakes for me in terms of determining its degree of accuracy.
Anatoly Karlin is a pro-Putin (I think) Russian nationalist blogger, although I disagree with him on a lot of stuff I find him really valuable in explaining how Putin thinks and what he wants, especially https://akarlin.substack.com/p/regathering-of-the-russian-lands .
Clay Graubard has been following superforecasting and prediction markets on the conflict at https://twitter.com/ClayGraubard
Second Karlin. From his Twitter feed I get the sense that he's much more committed to nationalism than he is to Putin personally. It's interesting to get a take from an actual Russian nationalist, and he's clearly a sharp guy; and though he obviously sees the history through a particular lens, I haven't yet noticed anything that's actually false.
A somewhat SSC/EA inspired cost-benefit analysis of train horn laws at US train crossings: https://statistagilfix.blogspot.com/2022/02/a-nation-at-crossroads-cost-benefit.html
TLDR Train horn laws seem to save around 200 lives a year (value: ~$3 billion), but the costs of their noise on health and quality of life are something like $20 billion a year
This is interesting. I recently read a similar analysis of police/ambulance sirens that came to a similar conclusion.
My city has three major freight lines that run through the heart of the city. About 1 person a year dies crossing the tracks. Not in cars, they are walking across the tracks. When trains pass through the city they blow their horns for almost 20 minutes straight.
There are new police sires that use a deeper sound which is projected directionally to try to cut down on how much the sound spreads. I have always wondered why trains don't have similar horns. They seem to be stuck blowing the same airhorns they have for over 50 years.
This was fascinating, thanks.
Most train accidents are people driving around the barriers. It's expensive to upgrade the crossings, and there are a lot of crossings. This is a frustrating problem to try to solve.
Is there any steelman discussion or commentary on Landmark Forum or other transformational personal development programs written by Scott or the rationalist community writ large?
I'll give you my (amateur) perspective - I think by and large the Landmark forum focuses on emotionally healthy perspectives (connect, be assertive, be honest, don't let things hang over you), mixed in with a little weird stuff (thinking childhood events having outsize impact), mixed in with a LOT of wanting to make you a missionary for the landmark forum. They're very upfront about this last thing, and to some extent it's understandable what they're trying to do, but it's irritating. For me the biggest benefit was that it gave me emotional impetus to do what I knew I should be doing anyway(the healthy things listed above), but it was not transformative in the sense that I generally knew those things to be good, I just wasn't very good at doing and sustaining them. This remains true now, several years after. It could be significantly more(or less) helpful for others
I misinterpreted this comment as saying that Scott and the rationalist community write personal development programs, Landmark Forum being one of them, and was temporarily confused.
Yes https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/BrF3jGCHnNm9iCCxp/a-review-and-summary-of-the-landmark-forum
No. I've heard a lot of people say it seems like a cult and made them feel weirdly pressured, and a couple of people say they got a lot out of it and really appreciate it.
Came up with an unusual geopolitical move for Putin today - assassinate Lukashenko. Russian troops are already in Belarus, presumably wouldn't be hard to seize control in the ensuing chaos. He gets to enlarge Russia without worsening the conflict with the West.
Epistemic status: joke/wild speculation.
This seems based on the assumption that Putin wants to gain more territory. He already controls the largest nation on Earth, most of which is essentially unused. More territory doesn't help him. He either wants good territory (that which directly benefits him and his plans - Crimea's port for instance) or he wants power generally. Belarus already belongs to him as surely as Gazprom, even though it's also controlled through an intermediary. Why spend resources trying to take control of what he already has? Putin actually gains by having Lukashenko in power, as he can outsource decisions through him and also the blame for those decisions.
One of the rules that all Sicilians must know is "never speculate about the death of a sitting head of state".
To a certain extent, the inability to enforce that type of rule is *why* prediction markets are illegal in the US.
Why assassinate someone who can be blamed in future? It was announced recently that Russian army will stay in Belarus in near future so what Russia gains from a clear takeover?
Perhaps reducing the probability that a west-instigated coup can replace Russia's puppet dictator with their own puppet dictator.
8 years after the revolution in Ukraine, it still gets a very low score on Freedom House (https://freedomhouse.org/country/ukraine/freedom-world/2021), even though their bias as an extension of the US state department is probably to exaggerate Ukraine's freeness to paint it as a more sympathetic victim of Russian aggression. It doesn't seem like that revolution accomplished much beyond replacing a pro-Russia regime with a pro-west regime. I'm going to back this up quantitatively with scores from Freedom House before and after the revolution.
2012 freedom house report:
https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/2020-02/Freedom_in_the_World_2012_complete_book.pdf
Freedom house changed their scale between 2012 and 2022, but in 2012 Ukraine scored the same as Bosnia, Georgia, and Kenya. On the new scale in 2022, Ukraine is 60, Bosnia is 53, Georgia is 60, and Kenya is 48. So if you squint really hard maybe you can see Ukraine doing slightly better than its peers, but mostly it's just as unfree as it was before the revolution.
Putin had the opportunity a decade or so go to absorb Belarussia nearly costlessly in term of political capital. But Belarussia would drain Russia's economy, because its own economy is a backward disaster. (Which I suppose is a retsasid?) So I suspect that's not the play.
I do put about 20% probability on Putin just sending all the troops home and saying, "see, I told you we weren't invading." Then do it again in six months over and over, perpetually disrupting Ukraine's economy, costing Russia nearly nothing but the cost of exercises that increase Russia's army's preparedness. As a bonus, it would make the west's leaders look like idiots and reaffirm Putin's narrative that the west is ideologically inclined against Russia.
*checks news to make sure war hadn't broken out since starting this post*
Ukraine's economy is also a backward disaster though.
"What makes Ukraine into the object of Russian power is not just its geography, but the division of its politics, the factional quality of its elite and its economic failure.
"The end of the Soviet Union may have given Ukraine independence but for Ukrainian society at large it has been an economic disaster. Like Russia, Ukraine suffered a devastating shock in the 1990s. GDP per capita in constant PPP terms halved between 1990 and 1996. It then recovered to 80 percent of its 1990 level in 2007 and has stagnated ever since. Thirty years on, Ukraine’s GDP per capita (in constant PPP dollars as measured by the World Bank) is 20 percent lower than in 1990.
"Ukraine’s experience contrasts sharply with that of Russian Federation which since the 1998 crisis has seen much more dramatic and sustained recovery. It also contrasts painfully with the growth trajectory of Ukraine’s neighbors Turkey and Poland."
https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-68-putins-challenge-to?utm_source=url
Can confirm - Ukraine now feels like Poland in the 90s.
What's not obvious to foreign observers is that Ukraine is close to a failed state already, between "green men" doing whatever they want and such gems as the 2014 Odessa massacre, in which oligarchs brought buses full of neonazis to crash anti-Maidan protests, and it escalated into wholesale slaughter with knives (46 people dead) and the torching of the Trade Unions House to which said protesters escaped.
Sure, but Russia already gets everything it needs from Belarussia. Taking over Belarussia only brings it Belarussia's problems. But it's not currently getting anything it needs from Ukraine.
What does Russia need from Ukraine?
Not even counting Crimea's naval bases and hydrocarbons, East Ukraine used to be one of the biggest if not *the* biggest industrial center of the USSR : hydropower, natural resources (coal, metals), sea access...
For instance it has several (former) ICBM factories (and since 2014 North Korea seems to have *somehow* made breakthroughs based on these designs, NK spies were caught there). (They're now supposedly working on a Ukrainian hyperloop project, lol.)
Ukraine also has very fertile land.
And has gas pipelines (formerly ?) carrying mostly Russian gas into Europe.
I'd say a variety of things: space between Russia and its western rivals, symbols of respect that generate international prestige, support in international fora to overcome diplomatic isolation all come to mind, and affirmation of narratives of western perfidy and Russian greatness. I think economics is distant from the decision-making.
Also, for Ukraine to relinquish sovereignity over the culturally/ethnically Russian border regions. Nothing of that will happen of course, both Ukraininan nationalists and the perfidious West understand perfectly well that this is Russia's weak underbelly, and will mercilessly exploit this weakness to punish Russia and remind it of its actual place in the world's pecking order.
My thoughts come from the Wikipedia entry for the site:
“American Renaissance (AR or AmRen) is a white supremacy website and former monthly magazine publication founded and edited by Jared Taylor.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Renaissance_(magazine)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Taylor
Where do your thoughts come from?
I would like to second that this seems really interesting and I've long been interested in a rationalist-aligned take on dating apps, emerging social media and the way they are changing human interaction.
Dating apps are an interesting one, because most people I know are already in relationships / married and they don't seem to understand how radically the dating app process is changing socio-sexual and gender dynamics that I think have the potential to trigger important flow on effects for culture at large.
I think there's a definite niche here for someone to write about this from a social perspective. I'd be very interested in your content, if you would like to share samples on an open thread here :)
It sounds interesting. Could you give an example before asking for an email address?
They'll probably be equipped with cameras that livestream to a server: if you jack the bot, you face goes to police. That's enough to deter casual pranksters and opportunists, if bots keep getting jacked in an area despite that then they'll probably not deliver to that area.
And if it's San Francisco, the police will do nothing at all because they don't prosecute property crimes. There's plenty of articles out there about serial thieves with known identities who don't get punished by the law at all.
... and then the bot owner gets a lawsuit if the area that the robot doesn't deliver to is disproportionately minority.
I wonder if this is in part because the idea of an autonomous robot is novel enough that "person is punished for damaging or destroying autonomous robot" isn't a salient risk in the minds of the folks who would do that? I'm no "law and order" type, but it might be that after a period of acclimation - during which the relevant companies put funding and organizational power, perhaps in excess of what value they would expect to be able to recover or deter in the short term, into some high-effort, high-profile prosecutions of drone strippers (for their own PR, maybe only the really unsympathetic folks; not the poor mechanic with a one-off idea about how to feed his kids this week, but the prestigious college students whacking a drone for Greek Life shits and giggles and the high-throughput criminal chop shops that mistreat their own people) - people might generally learn that this is a bad idea, and rates will become more manageable - perhaps comparable to rates for stationary public infrastructure.
Small flying drones that drop small packages from some small height and never land could avoid this problem. But they'd need a separate trip to the base station for each package. Not only would it have a much less efficient route than a truck, they'd also have much worse drag per kg, much less efficient means of obtaining thrust, and have to constantly use that inefficient thrust to fight gravity. It would eliminate the human driver, but 100x energy usage, and probably come out behind in overall cost.
Any height from which one might reasonably drop a package is well within the range of stone-age anti-aircraft weapons.
Being vulnerable at the depot and at the destination is way less bad than being vulnerable along the whole route.
I guess the attrition factor is probably the biggest barrier to robots. Theft, catastrophic error and wear and tear all cost the company money in the long run, but the alternative is either not providing the service or paying someone to carry the object for you. As long as the cost of replacing the robots is more than paying some guy to do the job delivery will remain a human task, but when that flips the robots will take over very quickly.
> As long as the cost of replacing the robots is more than paying some guy to do the job delivery will remain a human task, but when that flips the robots will take over very quickly.
It is not so easy: company needs to pay for robot to be existing, not necessary for a worker. (alternatively: leasing + insurance instead of buying robots)
As per hitchhiking robot, just do it in Canada!
There used to be (maybe still are) these little delivery robots in Berkeley called "Kiwibots". They deliver sandwiches and things like that to people. The company that makes them used to pretend they were self driving but actually they were controlled remotely by operators in Columbia. I never saw them come to harm in any way.
Nothing's 100%. Retail stores treat "shrinkage" as a fact of life. If there's too much robot attrition, then no doubt the software or hardware will be modified to reduce "friendliness" or increase agility. Brings new meaning to "Agile development".
Or conceivably they will draw invisible red lines around areas deemed unfriendly and not tell anybody unless or until they get sued. Geofencing is pretty simple conceptually and has been common for quite a while. Some people might prefer to be within such a boundary.
If I was really interested in the logistics, I'd read up on scooter-sharing companies experiences. I remember seeing pictures of gigantic piles of discarded scooters, somewhere in China.
The discarded scooters were there because Chinese companies were pyramid schemes - they made money from investors and never recovered costs. When their bikes would get impounded for improper parking, they would not bother picking it up as it'd be easier to just put a new one on the street and say how you "deployed another 100.000 bikes last week" to the investors.
However, the problems for them were real enough that they withdrew from markets - and this was with 10 euro or less costing bikes. With robots, this is massively larger risk, for not much larger reward. I agree with Trebuchet that this is in my opinion the biggest reason that drone delivery of documents is not more prominent for example. Malicious actors in the UK for example were the reason why many of Chinese firms pulled back, as were those in Eastern Europe, who would just throw a bike into the river - no benefit, not stealing for your own profit, just maliciousness of drunken teenagers. The monetary value of each bike is so low it did not pay off to sue, and they just quietly sold off their bikes and left these markets, staying in those more profitable and polite like Italy. The unfortunate effect is that poorer neighborhoods that would benefit more from cheap last-mile transport and precisely those denied it.
(speaking from experience of my wife who used to work in these Chinese transport companies rolling them out in Europe)
"Malicious actors in the UK for example were the reason why many of Chinese firms pulled back, as were those in Eastern Europe, who would just throw a bike into the river - no benefit, not stealing for your own profit, just maliciousness of drunken teenagers."
Sounds like they should have read St. Augustine on stealing pears when he was a teenager:
https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/110102.htm
"There was a pear-tree close to our vineyard, heavily laden with fruit, which was tempting neither for its color nor its flavour. To shake and rob this some of us wanton young fellows went, late one night (having, according to our disgraceful habit, prolonged our games in the streets until then), and carried away great loads, not to eat ourselves, but to fling to the very swine, having only eaten some of them; and to do this pleased us all the more because it was not permitted."
Seems alien to me. Would have been plausible for some of my classmates to do something like that before age 13 ish. After that, they were too well trained. Or at least the ones I associated with were. I think my last act of vandalism was smashing a pumpkin in 6th grade.
> Malicious actors in the UK for example were the reason why many of Chinese firms pulled back, as were those in Eastern Europe, who would just throw a bike into the river - no benefit, not stealing for your own profit, just maliciousness of drunken teenagers.
Note that companies operating them were also malicious (or ignorant to point of malice).
Putting their vehicles in way that was at once dangerous, stupid, illegal and blocking way was done regularly[1]. While I like idea of such vehicles they were so annoying in practice that I was happy that they left markets.
[1] both by users and operator regrouping vehicles during night
"national ID card or passport, which in France everyone must legally own"
This is not *strictly* true :
https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F11601
(Historically, because the ID card was first introduced when France was under nazi occupation, so the legal obligation was removed not too long after the Libération.)
However, in practice I'd expect it to be a tremendous hassle...
(Also note that for some decades now, making an ID card involved giving your fingerprints.)
"In addition to the national government, all these administrative divisions have their own local government instances and their own elections."
I feel iffy about that description, because I'd describe the regional and departemental "governments" as administration councils instead. They manage their division, they don't rule it. They'll allocate budget, but won't vote laws. They'll decide on local taxes (which are a part of their budget), but the collection of it will depend on the centralized national administrations, etc etc.
Please correct: Vote by mail (and internet) are permitted. At least for the "législatives" (at least voting from abroad)
https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/fr/services-aux-francais/voter-a-l-etranger/elections-presidentielle-et-legislatives-2022/#sommaire_3
I understand you focus on presidential elections but it seems you were giving a general overview at the beginning, so...
Anyway thanks for the resume!
you should post this as an effort post on DSL:
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php?board=1.0
You seem to be using the word "censored" in a way I'm not familiar with- can you explain what you mean by eg. "the Prime Minister can be censored by the National Assembly"?
Well it's not exactly "censor" ("censurer"), it's a special expression that I have only heard in this context, "motion de censure"
When the president wants "force" the adoption of a law, he can use the article 49-3 of the... constitution I think?
The way this works is, the law is automatically accepted, with not need for a vote by the assembly or the senate
However, any member of the assembly can start a "motion de censure", which is effectively a vote by the assembly on the question "should we remove the government" (i.e. force every minister to be replaced)
So it's a very risky play for the president if they don't have the majority in the assembly, because they can be forced to name new ministers that are less aligned with them.
Even when they do have the majority, there is a chance that some members of the party will defect, and "censor" the government (running the risk of losing their place in the party).
Also, this article can only be used three times per year, but thankfully it never comes close to that.
Maybe it should be "censured"?
"express severe disapproval of (someone or something), especially in a formal statement"
Tip-tier post. I don't actually have anything to contribute, I just want to express my appreciation that you did.
EU citizens living in France without French citizenship can vote in some of these local elections, right?
The rules (or rights if you prefer) for EU citizens are explained here: https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/residence/elections-abroad/european-elections/index_en.htm
I'm confused about the presidential elections between 1965 and 2002. They had lots of candidates running at once, but someone always got an absolute majority in the first round?
I don't think I've seen the word "censor" used in this way. Is that what they call it in French?
Just wanted to say how much I appreciated this post. My girlfriend is French and I've been pinging her asking about various aspects.
QQ: what about the French system do you think accounts for the fact only two leaders in the 5th have made it through 2 terms? US perspective is obviously that the incumbent almost always wins, for a variety of reasons. Curious what the difference is.
Could you expand on your comment about legislative power generally being an extension of presidential will? You mention that executive orders are unpopular. Is there a strong executive veto power? Or some other mechanism?
An other key point is that the president can dissolve the National Assembly and call a new election if the Assembly does not support him. (This happenned in 1981 and 1988 when Mitterrand was elected president while the Assembly was controled by the right : he immediately dissolved the Assembly and got a new majority for his own party.
It also happenned in 1997 in the most beautiful self-hit of the 5th republic history when Chirac dissolved the Assembly while he had a supportive majority and his party got soundly beaten in the consecutive election).
Also, a key point is that the duration of terms and time of elections was set up to make sure the parliament would as much as possible support the government: before 2002, presidential terms lasted 7 years while terms in parliament were 5 years, and there were a few cases of, well, what happens after most US midterms, the parliament turning from supportive of the government to opposed to it in a few years into the presidential term. And that blocked everything, mainly because the prime minister was, in that case, actually chosen by the parliament, as is usual in parliamentary democracies. So, there would be two conflicting heads of government, the PM and the president (they generally divided the work and each would deal with domestic, day-to-day politics for the PM, and war, foreign affairs, etc., the big stuff, for the president, but it still lead to conflicts). So, in 2002, both terms were made 5 years, with the legislative election taking place just a few weeks after the presidential, which, in practice, makes people vote for candidates of the same side as the guy they put into power a few weeks before. So, the president basically always enjoy a majority in parliament, and, what is more, that’s basically a majority on his name, a majority that was elected partly because that guy had been made president before, so he structurally has the parliament has much on his side as you can in a parliamentary democracy.