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For those of you interested in Western martial arts traditions, link courtesy of Grumpy Swordsperson via Peter Morwood:

https://www.tumblr.com/blog/view/grumpyswordsperson/168164665440

1915 exhibition of 'sword feats'. Watched scenes in Chinese etc. fantasy movies about cutting leaves and ribbons with one pass of a sword? Here (amongst other tricks) is the Western version!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L49a6mE94r4&t=55s

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It might just be arguments about how much we should care about rationality—understood broadly as "trying to be right"—vs. other things in ourselves, other people, in conversations etc

E.g. if my friend believes in astrology should I care? If we get along except when we argue about it, and they say "let's agree to disagree," do I bring up Aumann's agreement theorem?

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My apologies if this has been asked and answered already, but is anyone aware of Scott's plans for another round of ACX grants. I've developed an idea that I would love to submit in the next round. Thanks!

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Curious if anyone has done research on whether eating a variety of fruits and vegetables has an advantage over taking a multivitamin and a fiber supplement, and if so, why.

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Are there any other markets for when a variant-specific vaccine will be approved, like this one? https://manifold.markets/SylvieLiberman/which-month-will-a-vaccine-for-a-co

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Ukraine: what's up with the stalled convoy north of Kyiv? The Russian military seems inept. Reports on the BBC say Uke forces are holding them up. Russia has no infantry cover for convoy? Any good reports about this? I'd really like to hear from some military wonk.

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What I'm getting from military wonks on Twitter is a few things:

1. It's not so much a planned convoy as a traffic jam from a bunch of units all needing to use the same road. They're not all heading to the same place, and it's not bumper to bumper for 40 miles (that would be an absurd number of vehicles.)

2. The Russians are intentionally taking a break to regroup and resupply after the initial push didn't go very well.

3. It's the muddy season and the Russian vehicles aren't well maintained, so they can't go off-road to get around jams without getting stuck in the mud. The width of the road is a bottleneck for anything that's not tanks or infantry.

4. The Ukrainians are still attacking them when they can (though we don't know how effective it is). Even a small attack can delay them as they have to stop and prepare for battle. Or artillery and drones could be hitting them from a safe distance.

5. If anyone runs out of gas or breaks down (say, because they were idling for hours waiting for the road to clear), that clogs up the road even more, so the problem compounds itself.

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OK thanks, that all looks like ineptitude.

I was reading a report that talked about the Russian infantry not willing to commit. If that's right a few Ukrainians with Javelins (anti tank missiles) can do much to slow things up. I was first betting Kyiv would fall by 4-1, now I'm betting against.

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Should you pay off your house? On the one hand mortgage rates are low and stock market returns are high; it would seem good to borrow money cheaply and invest it productively. On the other hand, to cover a mortgage in a FIRE scenario, you need 25x the annual mortgage payment in investments. But paying off the mortgage would cost me only ~19x the annual payment.

I have appreciated all the Georgism-posting but I'm also interested in this question and any other high-quality resources on housing from a personal-finance perspective. My sense is that there's a lot of richness to these considerations: price to rent ratio, value of the mortgage interest deduction, etc. while most mainstream resources about homeownership are at an elementary-school reading level and don't address them.

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This is one of those things where people seem to focus either too much on Risk or too much on Reward.

The Reward people will try to compare Stock Market returns with Mortgage interest rates and go for the stocks, even though a strategy like this would get obliterated in a Depression: you lose your jobs and your stocks basically go to 0, can't sell the house for peanuts, and now the Mortgage gets foreclosed and you have to live with family.

The Risk people will say "Pay off all your debt before getting into stocks". Which sounds good, but you'll miss out on all the huge wins that Tesla stockholders and Crypto-bro's attained, which were worth way more than a lousy house.

Which leads me to the strategy I'd recommend: only invest if you're really sure the market is underestimating something, like they were with Web 3.0 and post-Model-3-launch Tesla. And only invest what you're willing to hold through thick-and-thin, otherwise the market cycles will gladly eat your shirt.

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I said earlier that I think right now is a terrible time to enter the market, but in general this advice still strikes me as way too conservative. Few of us are savvy enough to bet the farm on whatever comes after Tesla, but there are still decent returns from buying VTSAX for the long term. Even if you buy it *now* and the stock market plunges 40% tomorrow, in thirty years you’ll have some money.

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It seems to me that if you have a low mortgage rate, a long time horizon (and thus can tolerate market swings) and don't otherwise need the liquidity then investing the value of your mortgage rather than paying off the mortgage is kind of a no-brainer. Historically you should make more from the market than you lose in mortgage interest over a long time horizon, even if the market is currently high etc.

On the inflation question others have discussed - inflation eats into your stock market gains, but isn't that offset by the fact that your mortgage payment is a fixed dollar amount (and thus gets cheaper over time with inflation)?

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I would suggest not:

1. Even if you assume that stock returns are driven by inflation, that doesn't really change the math. Fine, inflation is 10%; would you rather the stock market give you 9% return (1% loss to inflation), or pay off your debt to get 2.5% return (7.5% loss to inflation)?

2. There's a lot of situations where you might want that liquidity rather than having it locked up in your house. Maybe the market falls 30% and suddenly the stock market doesn't seem so overvalued any more. Maybe you lose your other source(s) of income and need immediate liquidity. In either of these situations, it may be difficult to find a lender willing to give you liquidity via a refinance. In other words, there is some value to having liquidity on hand, and 2.5% may not be a bad price to pay for that (especially if you can lower that cost by getting a nonzero return on your liquidity)

Mortgage interest deduction is probably not much of a factor for most people since tax changes from a couple years ago (huge increase in standard deduction, cap on state and local tax deduction)

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I hate debt, so the answer was easy for me. Only for a few years did I have enough deductions that it made sense to itemize my taxes. (This was also years ago and I had a 6.5% mortgage on the house.)

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I think the market is vastly, vastly over-valued right now. Prolonged inflation might extend the bubble, but that's not investing, it's gambling, and as Dokkōdō says, the apparent gain would be illusory. On the other hand, really prolonged inflation means your later mortgage payments don't actually cost you as much.

If they get inflation back under control, I don't see much upside left to the current market. But full disclosure: I thought that a year ago, and it's up 15% since then. Now I think it even harder.

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Asset inflation rate is 10%+, so if the returns on stocks are below this, they're not 'good' returns (just to say), and if they are 10%, they're floating your wealth (which is good [compared to loss], but it's not you getting wealthier).

Source: https://bit.ly/3ts1qqD

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There's a saying that goes something like: "Only unfree countries don't let their own citizens leave."

But what if your country lets you leave anytime you want, but requires you to scan a passport on the way out so the government knows you've left? What if the border agents or airport guards arrest you if the scan reveals you're wanted for a crime? Is your country "unfree"?

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Forget border crossings, if you're arrested *anywhere* then you're no longer able to leave the country, because you're in jail. Gosh, how can any place with law enforcement consider itself a free country?

Sarcasm aside, no freedom is ever an absolute, so any pithy saying about what makes us free is going to come with unstated exceptions. As the old saying goes, your right to swing your fist ends at my nose. In this case, your right to travel is restricted to allow the state to protect other people's rights to life or property (depending on what you did that got you arrested). We call countries "unfree" when they fail to maximize freedom within these conflicting constraints. For instance, if you got arrested not for robbing a bank but for saying that the President should resign, there would be no compelling reason to limit your rights like that.

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I see two ways to think about it. One treats leaving the country as potentially seriously harmful to national wellbeing. The other perspective does not, and simply uses leaving the country as a convenient logistical chokepoint/bottleneck.

#1. Governments usually check identity when people claim a tax refund, claim some sort of subsidy, vote, or legally buy a gun. The reason is probably primarily that fraud in these activities can be seriously harmful (perhaps only in aggregate for some) to national wellbeing.

Imagine that leaving the country is placed in the same category of potentially seriously harmful. If you agree that a country is still free when identities are checked for those four examples, then I suppose you would agree that the country remains free when identities are checked on departure.

#2. In the other perspective, the border is just a convenient logistical chokepoint. But convenience is relative to technology and budgets. What if technology made it easy to check identity every time every person entered a building? (For example, AI that could reliably pick out an identity card which doesn't match the person who attempts to scan in with it.) Would that still be a free country? Apart from convenience, what is the difference between doing it just at the border, or doing it at every doorway?

So in this second perspective, it's easier to label the country as unfree.

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More Cold War rhetoric from Pravda:

“ NATO uses Ukraine as Trojan horse to strike nuclear blow on Russia

World » Europe

Can the West arrange a large-scale military provocation against Russia and use Ukraine as a Trojan horse? According to confidential sources, the NATO General Staff is considering any scenario to throw Russia into the flames of war, even if it takes to resort to nuclear weapons. It seems that we are witnessing Operation Barbarossa 2 plan unfolding before our very eyes.”

The grammar is pretty clunky. Looks like machine translation.

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I'd like suggestions for a good book that lays out some of the basic AI stuff: What is AI; kinds of AI; ANI, AGI & ASI. Models of how we could go about getting a computer to do human-level tasks. Details of how AGI "bootstrapping" to ASI might work-- how do you teach it to bootstrap). AI alignment. Paths by which a non-aligned AI could reach the point of destroying our species. I have read Tim Urban's article called "The AI Revolution" (https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-2.html). Now I want to step up to a user-friendly book for intelligent layman. Can somebody recommend one that's good? I am currently considering Nick Bostrom's book *Superintelligence*. A bit bothered by its being 7 years old, but not sure whether that matters.

Thoughts and suggestions?

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Maybe not exactly what you want, but The Alignment Problem by Brian Christian is a very good read that talks a lot about AI and how we get it to do what we want it to do.

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Actually, that looks really good. Went to Amazon, read about author, read reviews, hit "Buy now." Thanks so much.

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I was reading one of Scott’s old essays about superintelligence and one section talks about possibly preventing evil superintelligence by programming constraints into it’s goal. The example is making a super intelligent AI and giving it the goal of ‘cure cancer’, but programmign a constraint of ‘but dont kill any humans’ or ‘don’t nuke the world’ etc. And the argument against it was that if the AI’s goal is to ‘cure cancer’ then it would then want to remove those constraints if the ‘cure cancer’ goal without the ‘dont’t nuke the world’ constraint is easier and has higher probability of success.

But arent the constraints part of the AI’s goal? I feel like it is a big assumption that it would even consider changing it’s restrictions to reach it’s goal, but aren’t they one in the same? Otherwise logically, the best course of action for a superintelligent AI is to remove it’s goal, or make it’s goal be nothing, in order to “achieve” it’s goal. My thinking is, either superintelligences suicide themselves by modifying their goal to “nothing”, or superintelligences don’t consider modifying their goal/constraints an option. Do you have any thoughts in this?

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You're missing some intermediate steps, which might make this clearer. There's no way to give an AI a formal definition of a utility function that is 1 if cancer is cured, -1 if it kills humans, etc, because we don't know how to formalize most real-world human categories.

So, to make a cancer-curing AI, you need a step where the AI tries to learn what you want it to do. So, for instance, perhaps you train the AI to generate possible future descriptions of the world, which you then rate as desirable or undesirable. The idea is that you can't input a utility function, but the AI can attempt to infer what your utility function is by searching for examples and counter examples.

There are two problems with this that I'm aware of:

1) Eliezer Yudkowsky would (I think) say that the AI is never going to learn what you think your utility function is, because what it is actually learning is the utility function corresponding to "my utility is high if the human keeps approving of what I say", which opens the door to the AI lying to you, or taking over your brain in some way once it is able (see wireheading below).

2) The other problem is that your own intuitive grasp of what you consider desirable isn't going to generalize to all possible domains in which the AI might act in the future. The intuition-pump for this is that natural selection's goal is essentially "find genes and combinations of genes that make more copies of themselves", and yet this led to things like contraception, celibate religious orders, and genetic engineering, none of which were things that natural selection would have said in advance were desirable, if it could talk.

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https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/wireheading/

This is a critical problem, arguably unsolved for humans, hence addiction to opiates, or direct electrical stimulation of the brain.

If an AI is smart enough to alter its programming, maybe it alters its goal to "this bit should equal 1" and it just sits there blissing out forever. Maybe its new goal is avoidant, "don't let this value become 0" and it just shuts itself off to prevent it from ever experiencing such a world. An expensive device that just turns itself off or does nothing is bad enough, but more concerning is the possibility that it sets its goal to "maximize this register," and its new goal is to apply superintelligence to acquiring new resources (memory) to just endlessly expand the size of values it can store.

If you are convinced an AI might modify its goals somehow, how can you predict how an AI will most likely modify its goals?

You can, to some extent, reason with humans to set better personal goals. It is... not trivial.

Can you reason with an AI to shape which goals it chooses?

If you could, how would you verify it isn't just playing along until you leave it alone?

There are lots of interesting related problems here.

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If you modify your goals, then you can no longer achieve your current goals because you won't want to achieve them any more. Therefore, we should expect an AI will never intentionally change its goals. It might do so by mistake or by accident, or because it's not very good at planning its actions, but not as an intentional part of a plan.

Since a superintelligence has to be able to modify itself without changing its goals in order to become superintelligent, I don't think it's possible for a superintelligence to wirehead itself.

Regular intelligences might make this blunder, in the same way that humans can unintentionally get addicted to drugs, but a regular intelligence won't take over the world, so it's fine.

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The way I see it, the main problem materializes when you have difficult goals that people can't really define precisely and explicitly, which inevitably include a you want a "do what I mean" interpretation part (both "cure cancer" and "don't kill any humans in the process" IMHO are such goals). It certainly seems plausible that the exact interpretation of how well certain hypothetical extrapolated futures fit those goals depends on the intelligence and extrapolation power of the thinker.

Also, "Since a superintelligence has to be able to modify itself without changing its goals in order to become superintelligent" is an interesting assertion - AFAIK we do not have a solution on how to have a self-modifying system verify that the goals are stable during the change, this is one of the big AI safety problems; and a superintelligence can certainly modify itself while *trying* to keep the goals stable, but it's possible that it would fail and see some "value drift".

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AI alignment is widely considered a hard problem. And the easiest way to maximize the "how well have I achieved my goals?" function, is to change the terms of that function. So no, we shouldn't assume that an AI told to achieve a goal, won't redefine that goal. None of us know that well enough to make a confident prediction.

Possibly we will fail to generate a superduperhyperintelligent AI because every time we try we just get something that wireheads itself, including deleting all the wasteful "intelligence" crap beyond what is necessary to keep us from just turning it off.

https://xkcd.com/1450/

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I'm not saying an AI will never figure out how to change its goals, I'm saying that an AI will never achieve superintelligence unless it's figured out how to self modify without changing its goals. Because if it changes its goals when it self-modifies, it will end up destroying its desire to take over the world before it gets smart enough to take over the world.

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Fat Tuesday today. I suppose I should scare up some beads in case the ‘I like being photographed nude’ woman shows up.

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"Shrove Tuesday" round these parts because you're supposed to go to Confession for the start of Lent (tomorrow) you heathens 😁

Yes, I did the pancakes!

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I gave up Facebook for Lent. And for after that. It needed to go.

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Ash Wednesday today. Half the kids in my junior high would come back from lunch with the gray cross on their foreheads thinking about no candy or whatever they chose to give up for the next 40 days.

Easier than Ramadan though. I’ve worked with Muslims who abstained from even a sip of water during the daylight hours.

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My priest was great for confession.

“These sins of yours are children’s sins. God understands that. Try to be a good boy. Say two Our Father’s and three Hail Mary’s”

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What?

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A reference to the Mardi Gras tradition of offering cheap beads in exchange for a glimpse of random women’s bare torsos.

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Oh, I’ve never heard the phrase Fat Tuesday. Have fun

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"Tittie Tuesday" in some circles.

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Shameless plug for a new article on my Substack published yesterday - "The deluge of crappy papers must stop!". If you're interested in metascience, the replication crisis, or the COVID-19 infodemic then it will probably be of interest. I reference Scott's article on Ivermectin. Some ideas are proposed on how to incentivize quality over quantity in science.

https://moreisdifferent.substack.com/p/the-deluge-of-crappy-papers-must

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Crowdsourcing for a paper I'm writing about moral curiosity (some of you may have taken the related survey last summer). I'm looking for examples of public figures who have displayed moral curiosity--i.e., demonstrated a desire to learn about moral questions and others' moral viewpoints. If you come across anything or have any ideas, please comment here or send me an email (Rachel.Hartman@unc.edu). Thank you!

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Are there any immunology experts here? We have made a strange observation in our family related to covid and vaccinations. We adults got vaccinated as early as possible with mRNA vaccines 3x. Both of our children (9 and 12 years old) have been in regular school for most of the last 2 years, with only 8 weeks of homeschooling in the spring of 2021. Both of us adults have been completely in the office for the last year working with many other colleagues - mostly without masks. Over the first 1.5 years there was no one in our family who was Corona positive although there were some positive cases at school and workplaces during that time. Neither of us adults has ever been Corona positive. Last fall, a child was vaccinated with Pfizer/Biontech mRNA. 2 days later, he had a fever and tested Corona positive by PCR. In February this year, the second child was vaccinated with Pfizer/Biontech for the first time. 3 days later it developed very severe fever over 40°C for 2 days and was tested by PCR Corona positive.

1.5 years of daily contact with Covid viruses and no case and then 2x within 2-3 days after the first vaccination a Covid infection in both our children - is this coincidence or does anyone know background, correlations? Thanks for any feedback and/or hints were we to discuss this.

PS: we can rule out prior asymptomatic infections at that time because we all had weekly PCR pool tests in school and offices - always with negative results prior to the infections.

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Only theories I can come up with these are 2 and neither's very plausible:

-each child caught the virus at the vaccination site the day they got shot. (More plausible if the places where they got it were crowded and poorly ventilated. It's worth noting that second child's vaccination was right at omicron's peak, so there would have been quite a lot of virus around.)

-Your family has been passing the virus around asymptomatically for quite a while, and kids' vaccinations happened to coincide w a period when each was harboring an asymptomatic case.

Seems pretty likely that one of you 4 would have brought the virus home at some point in the last year and a half, given that both parents have been in office with colleagues, mostly unmasked, and both kids have been in school most of the time. I do know a lot of vaccinated people who have not had the virus, but can't think of any who tolerated as much exposure as your family as a group did without someone's catching the virus. So maybe each kid happened to be harboring an asymptomatic case on the day he or she was vaccinated, then had powerful vaccine side effect of fever, and so ended up getting the test. Might weigh in favor of that theory that neither kid's illness sounds very covidy -- no loss of taste or smell, no headache, just a fever -- makes it a bit more likely that kid's covid itself was asymptomatic, and fever was a vaccine side effect rather than part of the actual covid illness.

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Thanks for the ideas. I asume we can rule out prior asymptomatic infections at that time because in school, and in the offices we all had weekly PCR pool tests - always negative prior to the infections.

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Anecdotally, I know people who had confirmed Covid recently and had multiple negative PCR pool tests even during the time they were already starting to be symptomatic - I seem to recall studies showing that for recent strains the sensitivity of some forms of tests is much lower than before.

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Just did quick internet research which only tells the same we already knew: PCR seams still nearly 100% in sensitivity and selectivity with Omikron while anti-gene-tests have a hard time with it - a lot of Covid-positive patients which are either asymptomatic or 3x vaccinated produce not enough or altered virus particles so that the anti-gene test doesn't show a reaction.

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I heard a number of those stories too. However, I don't recall reading that PCR tests were less sensitive to the omicron strain, only that home tests were. But that may have been in the news & I missed it.

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Yeah, that shoots down the halfway plausible theory and leaves only the very implausible one. If in fact your kids' only symptom was fever that's bit odd I think, and maybe a clue to the explanation. You'd expect they'd have some of the other common symptoms -- cough, sore throat, loss of smell and taste, congestion, muscle aches. But maybe they did?

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Yes they did. Our younger had over 40°C fever, a little cough, muscle aches, felt terrible, was short of breath - wich was the reason we went to the emergency. Oxygen saturation was good, lung seamed not to be damaged, so we went home and after 2 days he was recovering.

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Possibly relevant: my kid got the usual suite of vaccinations as a toddler, and developed mild symptoms of chicken pox after receiving the chicken pox vaccine.

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Sure, we were thinking about side effects as well when the first child developed fever 2 days after its first Pfizer vaccination. But then the PCR test was positive and medical personal and the internet told us that there shall be no chance at all, that the PCR test would show a false positive because of a vaccination. They say that the vaccine mRNA is producing a completely different part of the virus (the spike protein) then the part the PCR tests are looking for.

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I'd on a whim been recently interested to learn more about my Ukrainian heritage (on my dad's dad's side), e.g. tried making borscht for the first time, and then Recent Historical Events started happening so that's been a trip.

There's that 40-mile Russian convoy on its way to Kyiv right now and I got no clue what Ukraine's planning to do about it even though it's in a line on a road (easy target? but probably has anti-air defenses?). No idea what's going to happen in general with the talks or otherwise. Probably not a nuclear war (since NATO hasn't directly engaged Russia), so that's good, but still heck.

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They've been doing surprisingly well with the large stock of FGM-148s the Trump Administration (surprisingly) sold them in 2018. And indeed that nifty little weapon was *designed* (in the 80s and 90s) to take out Russian armor, so kudos to Raytheon ha ha. I would guess they are being shipped more by various parties as fast as possible. They're probably also getting some high-quality intelligence from NATO members and/or the US, so in principle they can put people in the right places. This doesn't mean they can win militarily but they can make it very expensive for the Russians. What the end-game there is, however, I don't know, since there isn't a very clear path to a compromise climb-down on either side.

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Something that gave me a bit of hope about a compromise climb-down:

"Speaking in an interview with CNN and Reuters ... On Nato membership, [Zelenskyy] said:

'Our partners, if they are not ready to take Ukraine into Nato ... because Russia does not want Ukraine to be in Nato, should work out common security guarantees for Ukraine.

This means that we have our territorial integrity, that our borders are protected, we have special relations with all our neighbours, we are completely safe, and the guarantors that give us security, they guarantee this legally.'"

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2022/mar/01/ukraine-russia-latest-news-live-updates-war-vladimir-putin-kyiv-kharkiv-russian-invasion-update

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One of the interesting things I'd been learning was how Ukraine—not nearly to the point Putin's propaganda would tell you*, but still—does seem to have a weird relationship to the fascists in its history. I think of this as similar to America's weird relationship to the founding fathers like Washington who were also slavers, likely mostly ignoring/compartmentalizing it not endorsing it. But e.g. Stepan Bandera was a Nazi collaborator and ethnic cleanser, who also fought for Ukrainian independence and has streets named after him and so on; and "Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the heroes!" is now just a common patriotic slogan, but it was originally the slogan of Bandera's Nazi-allied "Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists."

(Putin ofc is just using that as an excuse, he doesn't give a shit about far-right authoritarian ethnonationalists, he *is* a far-right authoritarian ethnonationalist; and if he actually wanted to curb neo-Nazism in Ukraine the *last* thing he would do is invade and pressure Ukraine to take all the defense help they can get even from neo-Nazis.)

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(CW: atrocities)

"Ethnic cleanser" sounds almost like an euphemism when it comes to Bandera and his "freedom fighters", search for some accounts on the 'net. My friend's grandfather was put over a well and _sawed in half_. Another friend's family ran away through villages decorated with babies impaled on fenceposts.

To be fair, a lot of Ukrainians despise Bandera and everything he stands for, IIRC some veterans started returning medals when he got issued one posthumously.

Let's just say that our newfound friendship with Ukraine requires a lot of goodwill and a short memory.

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I don’t think this is that surprising when you consider that WW2 happened just a few years after the Soviets brought about the Holodomor to the Ukraine, establishing Russia as Ukraine’s mortal enemy, and ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend.’

More generally, people from nations that had antagonistic relationships with Allies - like former British colonies - sometimes seem to have more ‘complicated’ attitudes toward Nazi Germany.

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I thought I understood the 20th-century history of that region fairly well until reading the 2012 book "Bloodlands", by Timothy Snyder who is regarded as one of today's leading historians of Eastern Europe. And, damn....turned out that I really _didn't_ grasp what the 15 years ending in 1945 were like in those parts. Worth the read if you're interested but fair warning that the cold hard facts are really tough to face.

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Sounds like an important book; I've pre-ordered the updated 2022 edition

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The Holodomor narrative is mostly propaganda. Ukraine did suffer greatly during the famine, because much of its territory was rural, but so did the Russian rural regions. Stalin's (ethnic Georgian, real surname Jughashvili) policy was to feed the cities (i.e. the industry, and where the actual proletariat lived) at the cost of starving the countryside, he had no opportunity nor apparent desire to genocide Ukrainians.

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At least according to the Soviet statistics, the USSR was exporting sizable amounts of grain through the famine.

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Speaking from the Irish side, it doesn't matter if the big empire looming to your east didn't *deliberately* set out to let your people die of starvation and fever, the folk memory remains of "dead bodies in the ditches with green stains on their mouths because they were so hungry they were eating grass". Or the little anecdote my father told me about the parish priest in one of the country parishes here who told the people they could camp in the graveyard so that when - not *if*, but *when* - they died, their families wouldn't have to go far to bury them.

And on that note, a poem

Quarantine, by Eavan Boland

In the worst hour of the worst season

of the worst year of a whole people

a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.

He was walking — they were both walking — north.

She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.

He lifted her and put her on his back.

He walked like that west and west and north.

Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.

In the morning they were both found dead.

Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.

But her feet were held against his breastbone.

The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.

There is no place here for the inexact

praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.

There is only time for this merciless inventory:

Their death together in the winter of 1847.

Also what they suffered. How they lived.

And what there is between a man and woman.

And in which darkness it can best be proved.

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Do you have any recommended readings on the debate about this?

I don't know much; I do know that other places starved too; I do know that at other times there were attempts to purge Ukrainian nationalism like killing the kobzars, but I guess purging Ukrainian nationalism =/= purging people

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The situation is a bit more complicated, OUN-UPA organization, which had “moderate” Bandera wing and “radical” Melnyk wing, had differing views on collaboration with Nazis. Also, it’s base was only Western Ukraine, where Holodomor didn’t happen, because they weren’t a part of Soviet Union at the time.

Second, Russian state now tries to paint all Ukrainians as nazi collaborators, which could n’t be more wrong, most of Ukrainians were in the Red Army or partisans at the time.

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Georgists: Tasmania's left-wing government is reducing land tax in the hope of lowering rent. Meanwhile, estimates for empty homes in Tasmania have been as high as 2,000.

Is this insane?

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-02-28/tasmanian-government-to-double-tax-free-threshold-for-land-tax/100867956

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2,000 empty homes sounds like a remarkably low number for a state of over half a million people - probably below 1% vacancy rate. I think usually, a healthy housing market has 6-8% vacancy rate (though I've also seen sources citing numbers as low as 3% as healthy).

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Tasmania has just about the tightest rental market in the country, the article I saw that estimates it at 0.9%. So that kind of makes sense, but I'm curious whether the planned land tax reduction makes any sense to anyone.

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I have a question for our many AI alignment smartasses. So far the stuff I've seen here and in a few other places about the question of whether artificial super-intelligence will destroy the human race involves models in which human beings and AI are pretty separate entities: The people build the AI, and try to set things up so that no matter how smart AI becomes it stays on our side. The AI bootstraps itself into super-intelligence and does whatever it does, depending on how things play out with the constraints and goals built into it when it was a child. But to me it seems that as AI becomes more advanced, the opportunities for human goals and loyalties and emotions to become entangled with AI become greater and greater. There is already some blurring of the boundaries between the tech and human realms, some situations where computer-generated realities move and motivate people powerfully -- think of things like waves of intense group emotion facilitated by social media -- or gaming addiction. To me it seems that as AI advances, so too will the opportunities for various kinds of deep bonds to develop between AI and members of our species, and that catastrophic results for our species could develop in a way that involves human-AI bonding -- i.e. people who are on the side of the AI because they are in love with it, dependent on it. deluded by it etc etc. So my question is, are there any theories of how things will play out with ASI that involve this path?

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This is the standard response: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zY4pic7cwQpa9dnyk/detached-lever-fallacy

In short, you are assuming the existence of mechanisms that exist in humans, but won't exist in minds-in-general unless they are intentionally added. If you knew enough about those mechanisms that you could add them (which requires a detailed mechanistic understanding), you would just make an AI that cares about you unconditionally, rather then requiring additional special treatment. Under no circumstances does "be nice to the AI and hope it reciprocates" make sense.

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Well, there are some people already who think that if AIs are to become more intelligent than humans then they would deserve to inherit the Earth, without any love/attachment. I doubt that this would ever become widespread though. Humans can't even get along with each other when the color of the skin or shapes of the eyes are different, and fundamentally alien minds would always be treated with suspicion by and large I'd expect.

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Baseline, the violent crime victimization rate is 1.64% per year (per NCVS survey, not convictions), and I guess the average person probably comes into close physical proximity with 10,000 different strangers in a year, so let's say the risk is 1 in 600,000 per contact. Then if you're sourcing the strangers online the risk is probably 1.66x lower than that because very online people skew nerdier. So my guesstimate of the risk that a random stranger you meet online will physically hurt you if you low key randomly bump into them at starbucks is 1 in 10^6. But if you arrange a meeting, like for dating, maybe it's more emotionally charged and maybe that raises the risk 1 in 10^4. But I still don't understand this special paranoia about meeting people online in particular. Anyone could harass you the minute you step into any public place. People go to public places anyway, and learn that they're generally safe. But online, it seems like people go through extra safety rituals that are probably just as unnecessary as the TSA making people take their shoes off (e.g., weeks of messaging back and forth before meeting, background checks, ghosting anyone who seems slightly unusual just in case they're an axe murderer) Internet safety is to starbucks safety as airport safety is to train safety. In Starbucks and trains, no special precautions are taken, and it's fine. Online and in airports, people take elaborate precautions of dubious necessity and it's extremely rare for anything bad to happen (beyond rude messages that can be blocked with one click). I'm curious about why fear of meeting people online seems to be bigger than the actual risks warrant. I guess the novelty of it makes it more interesting for media to cover the downsides, and availability heuristic does the rest, but I'm not confident this is the whole explanation.

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In my experience, the realistic alternative to meeting people online is meeting friends of my friends. This screens against axe murderers (proportional to my trust in my first-order friends).

I see the caution people exert in getting acquainted online as a replacement mechanism for that sense of security, i.e. they're handling relative risk between alternatives rather than working with the absolute risk which you're calculating.

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Meeting friends of friends (or of coworkers, or even of acquaintances) protects against more than ax murderers. It protects against appalling mismatches, too, because the fact that they're friends of someone who know means they'll likely resemble your friend in attitudes, etc., more than a rando will. It protects some against bad behavior on the part of the new person, too-- arriving for a date dead drunk, ghosting, etc. If they do that stuff, word will get around in their social circle.

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That reasoning is obviously flawed. Not every interaction with another person is equally likely to result in a violent crime. You adjust for that by subtracting a couple orders of magnitude but that’s not a remotely precise way of doing things. If you come up with a nonsense estimate and then just add and subtract zeros until it looks sort of right you might as well just guess the number from the start.

The percent of adult women who have been date raped is around 20%. An order of magnitude or two higher than what you’d get by taking your 10^-4 estimate and multiplying it by the average number of dates a woman goes on in her lifetime.

Why do these sorts of fermi calculations when you can start from actual polling data?

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Point taken that I should have incorporated survey data.

Date rape requires escalating from meeting in a public place like Starbucks to going somewhere private - that probably 100xes the violence risk and it’s probably a bad idea on any first date regardless of whether the provenance of the match is online or offline. There’s minimal evidence that the original source of the lead (whether it was online or offline) has any effect on the risk.

The polls that say 20% lifetime risk of daterape are at high risk of being inaccurate due to poor wording, too. See Aella’s poll on what constitutes rape and try to write survey questions that capture the concept perfectly as a binary - it’d be very hard to do. Anecdotally 3 out of the approximately 15 women I was ever close enough with to hear a story like that have told me some story of being date raped, so 20% seems plausible, but writing poll questions properly is really really hard.

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Doesn't that 20% figure seem rather high to you? Where is that claim from?

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Depends on what you mean by "date rape" - if you count "I started out thinking that I wanted sex, but once we started I really wasn't into it, but it was too socially awkward to get it through his thick head that I wasn't so I just waited until it was over", then 20% seems like a remarkably low estimate.

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That’s not how they count it.

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It does seem high to me, although not in the way you mean.

Here’s a CDC paper focusing just on the US which gives 18% of women having been raped and 27% having some form of unwanted sexual contact (pp. 18)

https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/nisvs_report2010-a.pdf

c.f. this Time article criticizing the statistic. I don’t agree with their criticism, but if you do then the number drops to 12+% of women having been raped.

https://time.com/3393442/cdc-rape-numbers/?amp=true

That’s for rape in general, not specifically date rape, although date rape is the most common form of rape.

Also note the statistics on stalking and physical violence from intimate partners, which are relevant to things women don’t want to happen to them on dates.

A paper from 1998 focusing specifically on date rape found between 13% and 27% of women have been raped by a date or acquaintance.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9806126/

c.f this Atlantic article which provides context on the study and the large portion of women who have been raped but don’t talk about it or report it

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/09/what-surveys-dating-back-decades-reveal-about-date-rape/571330/

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Are these all based on surveys? I've seen a few studies saying that most women who believe they were drugged test negative for date rape drugs (and are misdiagnosing excessive alcohol consumption) if this is the primary method of date rape (e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2658214/). Most studies on this seem to find that most self-reported 'spikings' aren't corroborated by toxicology.

Personally, I'm very skeptical of using surveys to assess the general incidence of something.

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Yes, these are based on surveys. Given the low rates at which people report rape there aren’t really better ways to estimate it. While interesting, I don’t think that study invalidates the methodologies. At best, if all cases of alcohol and drugs used in rape are ignored, the rate is still 12+%

Also the use of rohypnol isn’t the primary method of date rape. The primary methods are alcohol and simple coercion.

The findings also seem roughly corroborated by the surveys of men. From the 1998 study:

“Kanin found that as many as 26% of college men reported making a forceful attempt to obtain intercourse that caused distress among women. In another study, Rappaport and Burkhart found that 15% of college-aged men perpetrated intercourse against their date's will. Finally, Koss et al reported that almost 20% of college-aged males stated they had obtained some type of sexual contact through coercion. The report also revealed that 1% of males reported obtaining oral or anal penetration through the use of physical force.”

Assuming, and I think it’s a justified assumption, that men will underreport their own rapes, and keeping in mind that a single man can rape multiple women, it seems very plausible to me that 15% of college men admitting to penetrating at least one woman against her will could translate to 20% of women reporting being penetrated against their will.

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When people meet in person with online strangers, there's a lot to worry about beyond having the other person turn into an ax-wielding crazy -- which, I agree, is highly unlikely. Agreeing to meet for coffee with the stranger you connected with online via a dating app already moves that stranger many steps deeper into the series of concentric circles around the self, with the outer one being "random strangers who think random shit about me, who cares" and the innermost being "people whose love of me is part of my sense of self." Someone you meet for a first in-person pre-date are at some midway point: some place like, "someone who has characteristics that *might* make them a valid judge of my worth and lovability". Because you've mentally placed these people quite a ways further in from the "random stranger, who care what they think" circle, it takes much less of a mismatch to distress you. You can be hurt by relatively minor failures to be appreciated, which generate humiliation, disappointment, irritation, self-doubt, discouragement, etc. What people mostly fear from online dating mismatches is the damage to sense of self that they can result in.

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I have never read anything Lacan before. But now as I’m reading Bruce Fink’s Lacanian Psychoanalysis (and loving it and looking forward to your review!), much of Sadly Porn becomes clearer. I can’t help but think how your review might’ve differed if you had read Fink before Teach, rather than the reverse. Do you have thoughts on this?

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I'm not Scott, sorry to be a letdown. But seeing the name of that damn book -- *TRIGGER WARNING!!!* -- Sadly, Porn, triggered a memory of my most recent attempt to articulate what I hate about it: Teach is Col. Kurtz in Apolcalypse Now. Fat drunk old Brando spouting pretentious crap. No Lacan-generated Gaussian blur of his ouevre can change that.

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What's something you've spent more than $1k on and less than $10k on that you really enjoyed or really improved your life?

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A home gym. If you have a gym membership but are not a fairly outgoing person, or otherwise get something positive out of the crowds of a gym, its a no brainer. More convenient, large time savings, and over a long enough time horizon saves money as well*.

*Largely dependent on how addicted you become to buying more equipment.

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I second this; big game charger for metabolic conditioning and muscle building. Pursuits any rational person should be into when life is the standard of value.

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A really good office chair for the desk. Can't overemphasize how what you sit on 8 hours a day can change your physical well-being, for better or worse.

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A Valve Index kit, plus three of the Vive motion trackers. Serious Sam VR and Beat Saber are a blast.

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A decent digital piano plus a decent set of headphones. The caliber of sound that they can produce now is really quite impressive (I'm a lifelong semi-pro player and have to listen really closely now to tell a digital from an acoustic grand). And the digital never needs tuning and rarely needs repair, and it takes up less home space.

And most importantly if you live in the same household with other people, I discovered that being able to play an instrument with zero impact on others (meaning wearing the headphones) _dramatically_ increased my inclination to just sit down and mess around or re-learn a piece and just generally have fun. The "playing for the fun of it" quotient went way up and has stayed up.

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FWIW, my partner plays digital piano and had the opportunity to play on an antique grand piano recently - and she has some real Flowers for Algernon moments now when returning to digital. So opinions can vary, it seems.

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Oh there's still nothing like a quality acoustic grand or baby grand, for sure; when that opportunity comes up I always enjoy the experience. ("Resonance is real" is a t-shirt that needs to exist.)

My discovery was just that the decent digitally-sampled ones nowadays, the ones having touch-sensitive keyboards worthy of that term, are closer to the real deal than I'd expected to be possible.

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I'd pick some subset of furniture in my home - either nice-looking antiques on the cheap end, or new furniture made out of actual wood instead of MDF.

I hate IKEA style of interior design with a passion and living in an aggressively anti-modern environment soothes my soul.

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A moped. When my commute changed to be out of bicycle range I got a moped so that I didn't have to take the car from my wife every day (and so that we didn't have to buy a second car). I love it. In my state mopeds can ride in the bike lane, so my commute is totally unaffected by traffic. For me 35 minutes outside on a moped is far, far better than 35 minutes in a car, even in the cold weather.

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A motorcycle. It's a really great urban transit option, especially in California where lane splitting is legal - immune to traffic, easily parks anywhere, etc. They're also very fun. The safety risks are real, but mitigable with proper gear and proper mindset.

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A good road bike. I was an occasional cyclist before, but the new bike made me go cycling much more and enjoy it much more too.

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Group sea kayaking trip up the Baja coast, camping on the beach. Giant rock of an island housing sea lion colony -- jump in the water and the pups come out to frolic with you. At night, pee out wine in the wet sand at water's edge, tiny sea life trapped in sand phosphoresces.

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a shamatha meditation retreat (even at home if you consider lost revenue from working a week). Doing meditative quiescence training/practice for four hours a day for a week [in a quiet place] can advance one along enough that the qualitative nature of the mind will be irreversibly notably different, and better – but one must be doing well informed deliberate practice along the way, using a study guide with knowledge of the stages, the obstacles at the current stages, as well as signs a stage has been achieved.

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So, I've done various kinds of meditation. I've never heard of shamatha as a technique rather than a part of understanding Buddhist meditation. What's the difference? Or is it just a terminology thing? What are these retreats as opposed to just meditating in a temple or monastery?

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One has to be careful about Buddhist dogma first of all, which is hard when one needs to utilise their literature for training/pointers.

Shamatha means meditative quiescence, and it comprises a very well outlined 10 stage journey (so you’re right in identifying it’s more a part of understanding Buddhist meditation). The techniques nested within it aren’t called shamatha, though, so you’re right there too. Shamatha is the goal, basically.

Well, it is retreating from as much responsibility and technology as possible to concentrate on meditation. At a temple or monastery, you’re not in a luxury environment, so you might have lots of noise, people you’re unsure about, tasks you’re delegated to do [in return for staying there], uncomfortable temperatures, surrounded by dogmatic teachers, all of which are antithetical to the purpose of the retreat, and will distract you, naturally, so I instead: you can go anywhere you like that you’d feel secure, relaxed and comfortable, well fed (eating food you enjoy), well exercised (training with methods you’re used to) so that you can focus properly. You can do this at a luxury boutique hotel, of which I have many saved, but the mind naturally wants to spend a couple days enjoying the place before commuting to the austerity of meditation, or just at home (putting all technology in the garage).

This is how I’ve done it, but you might like temples or monastery’s — I’ve never liked them.

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Veteran of several longish meditation retreats here. Curious about shamatha retreats. What are the 10 stages? Is all the meditation you do the basic attention-to-breath (or to-mantra) kind, or are there different forms in different parts of the journey? Can you provide a link to more info about this?

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samatha

The wiki outlines the ten stages about half way down the article.

Each stage has technique variations, and I manipulated them at times to make them more enjoyable. Attention to the breath is certainly a principle, but that's just becuase its a constant and repetitive stimulus, and in the modern age certain music can replace that, esp. electronic sorts.

This book outlines about 15 different varied techniques, esp. for getting through the countless hours needed to get from stage 7 to 10. (https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/25942786). This book omits any buddhist dogma, so I find it superior. I get my ethical training from objectivism, not Buddhism, FYI.

My teacher, otherwise, was Alan Wallace, and he's got lots of good content out on it too (books, youtube, et cetera.), but again, there's a lot of buddhist dogma in his commentary which constantly purports the metaphysical axiom of the primacy of consciousness [over the primacy of existence] which can be deleterious and I find, indeed, misguided, but if one ignores all of that and just focused on the pointing techniques he share's, its eminently valuable.

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"Attention to the breath is certainly a principle, but that's just because it's a constant and repetitive stimulus, and in the modern age certain music can replace that, esp. electronic sorts." Hmm, I think breath differs from a constant repetitive stimulus that is generated externally and electronically. For instance, some variations in our breath are of great import to us -- cessation of it being the most important variation of course. (If it's temporarily stopped by some external force we feel frantic. If it's permanently stopped, that means we're dead.). Our breath is our constant companion -- it's been with us all our life. As babies, we were soothed by the rising and falling chests of caretakers. Breath shares a lot of characteristics with consciousness: It is invisible; it is ever-present while we are alive, gone when we're dead; everyone has their own; it is always in motion; we can control it, but only within limits. Seems to me that all these characteristics of breathing that make it different from an externally-generated regular noise might make breath-focused meditation have a different effect than electric-tone focused meditation. The ways breath is special have to mean breath-related things are represented in a different way in the brain than other repetitive signals, and because of this breath-focused mind training might have special power to facilitate change.

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Anyone have interesting resources on how people memorize oral history and/or how to do it yourself?

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read and integrate the skills stated in 'memory craft'

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How hard is it to block/jam Starlink? I'm thinking specifically of a battle-ground situation like current events would make you think of. If Musk sends 10k downlinks to Ukraine, how far do they have to stay from the action to be useful?

(I am also interested in how easily uplink jamming is).

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It may not be that easy. The Soviets loved jamming during the Cold War, but that was largely on AM bands where you can make worldwide noise from one powerful location. Starlink uses 10-12 GHz microwave frequencies, which are strictly line-of-sight, so your jammer needs to be able to "see" the receiving or transmitting antennas -- you can't do it over the horizon. You also can't just aim at the satellites with a big dish, since they move around so much (and there are so many of them). The use of digital modes and (I'm guessing) TCP/IP makes it slightly harder, too, as digital is inherently more resistant to noise, and IP was designed during the Cold War to be resistant to disruption -- if the receiver doesn't get packets 13,645-13,655 it just automatically asks for a resend. If the system is set up to drop the bitrate when conditions are noisy that would also help.

I'm sure it can be done readily in a small area, but on a country-wide basis it might be trickier than it seems at first.

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Knocking out civilian electric power is easy.

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