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!
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)?
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)
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.)
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.
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).
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"?
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.
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.
“ 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.'"
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.)
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
"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.
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).
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.
It's probably fairly easy to jam Starlink. I'd need to look at the specific details but most such devices are. I don't think they'll be jammed though. Just not a good use of military resources. The same reason why the US (which could do it easily) doesn't often jam all the cellphones in an operational area. At least afaik.
This is sort of what I'm asking about, though. If it's easy enough, they theoretically do it; a desire to cut off the internet was enough for them to cut off the internet in the first place. If it's hard enough they don't. I guess I'm trying to get bead on whether this is "suitcase on a roof gets all of kiev" or "stolen powerful radio tower gets you 50 meters" or somewhere in between.
Russia hasn't shut off the internet in Ukraine. Kyiv still has internet, for example.
Assuming what Carl Pham said is correct, I'd estimate: Suitcase on a rooftop gets all of that rooftop. Stolen powerful radio tower can get you the visual range of that tower presuming the Ukrainians don't have SIGINT to resist. Which they do, so you can disrupt regular usage by effectively causing repeated temporary disruptions but not shut it down completely. Unless you get an even more complex/powerful tower than civilian usage would normally require.
So there is an asymmetrical advantage in terms of that it's easier/cheaper to manufacture terminals than jammers and you'd need a lot of jammers to cover the entire country. (You'd need a lot of terminals too. But terminals only need to work where you need them. A jammed area without a terminal is not issue for Ukraine. A terminal without a jammer is a hole in the net for Russia.) But the technical act of jamming isn't the specific issue.
US often jams all the cell phones in a very small area, using systems like the THOR, to try to prevent the triggering of IEDs- but we're talking 30 ft from a backpack, not a whole country
Right. But "30 ft from the nearest Russian signal soldier" is not meaningful in battlefield terms. ETA: To put it another way, if you're 30 feet from a Russian soldier then you have a bigger problem!
It solves several limitations of older lever action designs, except for one: it remains difficult to clean the barrel and internal mechanism, and it is hard to remove and correctly reinstall the mechanism. From the website:
"Due to the complexity of the Henry Long Ranger 6.5 Creedmoor lever’s rack and pinion gear system and the need for precise reassembly to ensure proper gear timing, the company discourages owner removal of the rifle’s bolt and lever. In fact, the factory routinely receives rifles for reassembly from chagrined owners who attempt it on their own. (Shipping a rifle, by the way, costs $35 or more.) "
How could this final flaw in the lever-action rifle design be fixed?
I'm thinking of supporting Ukraine by buying Ukrainian vodka and then reselling it to other people. Is this legal?
I'd like to help Ukraine by buying their products, but none of their goods are available in my area except for vodka. Even the vodka is hard to get, as I'd have to drive one hour to get to the nearest liquor store selling it. I'm thinking of buying several bottles of it, bringing it back to my home, and reselling the unopened bottles to people in my neighborhood at a discount. I'd take a small loss on each bottle.
This is probably illegal due to regulation. You'd need an alcohol distributors license or some similar license. Also, Ukraine isn't a huge vodka exporter. They only export like fifty million dollars of the stuff. Ukrainian exports are mostly primary materials. They export a lot of wheat and steel and have some heavy industry in things like planes. But they don't export a lot of consumer goods.
If you're buying a total of ten bottles and selling two each to four friends, it might *technically* be illegal, but seems at least gray, and pretty close both legally and morally speaking to just picking up a couple bottles for some friends when you do a run to the store, which I'm pretty sure is legal.
The only Ukrainian vodka at my liquor store was Nemiroff (and only one location had it). It tasted pretty good—and is the official vodka of the UFC. Apparently Nemiroff also makes a honey pepper flavoured one (Anthony Bourdain had it in No Reservations' Ukraine episode) but my store didn't have it.
I also like the Canadian-Ukrainian Zirkova (owned by two Canadians but made in Ukraine). Might be my favourite vodka that I drink regularly, though I'm relatively new to vodka (usually been more of a whiskey and beer person).
Basically, the US government is trying to find all the pandemic capable viruses it can, and it will then POST THEIR FULL GENOMES ONLINE.
This is potentially a catastrophically stupid blunder that we intend to make but have not made yet. The recommended actions from Rob are to tell USAID directly at https://www.usaid.gov/contact-us, tweet at them, if you live in a state with a senator on subcommittee on state department and USAID management (https://www.govtrack.us/congress/committees/SSFR/14) contact your senator, contact Washington State University if you have a relevant tie, and otherwise spread this, get attention, apply whatever leverage you have.
This is a really good write-up, thanks for doing it. Reading it reminded me of some points that I had forgotten about. Do you mind if I share it with other people who wanted a write-up?
USAID recently launched Deep VZN, a five-year, $125 million program designed to monitor and better understand future pandemics. The main component of Deep VZN involves identifying roughly ten thousand novel viruses, determining which are capable of causing dangerous pandemics, releasing a list of these viruses rank-ordered by how dangerous they are, and publishing the genomes for these viruses online. These pandemic-grade viruses could be as dangerous or more dangerous than COVID-19.
This program, if successful, would pose a significant risk to society as a whole. Were Deep VZN to identify pandemic-grade viruses and publish their genomes, they would implicitly provide blueprints that could be used to generate the viruses, and spawn novel pandemics, by any sufficiently skilled synthetic biologist. Currently it is estimated that tens of thousands of people are capable of this work - animating viruses from a genome, even if they don’t have access to the original viral sample. We expect this number to go up significantly as technology continues to advance.
Risks surrounding pandemics and biological weapons are not just a hypothetical. There are a number of people in recent decades who had the skill and/or desire to release biological weapons. Most infamously, Seiichi Endo, a terrorist involved in a chemical weapons attack on a Tokyo subway, was a graduate-trained virologist. He once tried to obtain samples of Ebola for use against civilians, although thankfully he failed. Releasing the genomes for pandemic-grade viruses would make it easier for terrorists with sufficient training to launch one, or even multiple pandemics at the same time and cause vast numbers of deaths.
Anyone worried about these risks should reach out to the USAID and encourage them to shift money away from identifying pandemic-grade viruses, and towards more useful programs for fighting future pandemics. Specific suggestions include:
- Messaging your elected representatives on this topic - they have staff to field in-bound messages. If you are from MD, HI, VA, CT, MA, TN, KY, TX, WI, FL, NJ, or IA, you have a senator on the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee subcommittee overseeing USAID (List of senators on the subcommittee: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/committees/SSFR/14)
- Contacting USAID directly via their online contact box at usaid.gov/contact-us
Most of this data is public anyway, nobody cares. The difficulty is in synthesizing the whole thing A) competently B) without a third-party service provider figuring out what you're doing (I am told they try to screen for this).
A) and B) are true, and many companies do screen their genomic sequences, but not all- I think it's about 80%. And the screening process is pretty easily gamed, you can just asks for sections instead of the whole thing and it often won't get flagged. As to whether this data is public, it's definitely not. There are sequences online of past pandemics, such as the 1918 flu, and for current pathogens, but what they are trying to do is find new, undiscovered potential pandemic causing pathogens. This data is not public-it does not yet exist- and is orders of magnitudes more dangerous than something like 1918 flu (we have lots of immunity to that strain now, we have vaccines for it, and most of the deaths were probably due to bacterial pneumonia which we can now treat very effectively)
Suppose you have a person, or group, that wants to cause some megadeaths and is equipped with all the knowledge required to utilize this new data source.
Do you really think they'd GoF a potential pathogen over several years, instead of deploying something easy and widely known? If they were inclined to tinker with the pathogen, wouldn't it be easier to give one of the existing ones vaccine evasion / antibiotic resistance / whatever?
Also, why haven't we seen even a single incident of this kind, given that the technological capability at low cost exists for at least a decade?
Wait, sorry, I think we're talking about different things. Gain of function is not required at all here. DEEP VZN is identifying the viruses that if allowed to infect humans, could create a pandemic- no need to do anything to the pathogen to have a scenario much worse than COVID (because of release at multiple points simultaneously, for example). We have seen many people try to do bioterrorism, but they have been limited to pathogens that don't spread well- anthrax, e coli, etc
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I assume spillover events require mutations (so effectively GoF but in the wild) - the animal viruses being researched here are not very effective outside of their host range, otherwise the spillover would already happen.
Spillover events can be due to a mutation, or they can be due to just introduction to a new host.
Here's a relevant quote from the podcast:
"What you're talking about now is called characterization, right?"
"Yeah, the whole point of this program is to identify which viruses might spillover and cause future pandemics... There's four key classes of experiments that you perform on an animal virus to determine whether it's a good candidate for causing a pandemic in humans. You want to know: how tightly does this virus bind to human target cells? how readily does it actually infect those cells? how readily does the backbone of the virus replicate and churn out new copies of the virus in relevant human tissue types? and, because you can't test it in humans of course, how readily is it transmitted in animal models that are chosen for their similarity to humans?"
These viruses identified as pandemic capable aren't rough virus families that we need to keep an eye on, they are viruses that can already bind to, infect, replicate, and presumably transmit from humans. One interaction between this virus and a human might be all it needs to jump species, no GoF needed, and no mutation needed (although mutation will surely happen quickly within the new host with new selective pressures)
There are many animal species, especially bats, that hold viruses that could infect humans with no mutations- we just don't often breath in their breath or mix our body fluids. Most of those viruses would not be able to spread person-to-person, but it is definitely possible that they could find a few (maybe 0-12) that could spread human-to-human, and those would be the ones considered pandemic-capable. The previous program, PREDICT, found 1,200 of the viruses that you're talking about- viruses that could jump if they have a chance mutation, or get passed through a mammal with similar biology, or happen on a human that is immunocompromised. They found none that could jump directly to humans without that intermediate step. This program will be much more efficient than PREDICT, is specifically looking for the latter, and has learned from PREDICT to know which families to sample from to maximize hits.
PS- totally don't blame you for not listening to the podcast yet, it's 2 hrs! This is my area of research so I find it fascinating but don't expect everyone else to find it fascinating, too
I think you're overestimating all the circles on the "interested in viral genomes", "capable of turning sequence data into working pathogens" and "terrorist" Venn diagram.
The second circle, especially, is vanishingly small, and almost entirely confined to existing biowarfare facilities (which have all the data they need anyway).
I hope you're right, but unfortunately I disagree. On a technical point, it is not nearly as difficult as most people think to reverse engineer a virus from its genome- we're not talking about USAMRIID, we're talking about something that is done in biolabs all over the world. The reverse engineering of horsepox from genome to live cell from the University of Alberta in 2017 actually sparked much of this conversation about infohazards and global catastrophic biological risk.
So our second circle in the Venn diagram is pretty big- thousands of people can do this right now, and the technology is getting cheaper and easier at an astonishing rate. What about the third circle?
Firstly, there are a heck of a lot of terrorists out there. There are also many lone wolves who want to kill people; las vegas shooter, unibomber, etc. The Aurora shooter was a PhD student in Neuroscience, and the Anthrax attacks were by a microbiologist at USAMRIID. These circles have way too much overlap to publish the instructions for a bioweapon.
Thanks for the article - I went and found it and it is a tour de force of molecular biology. I've been a bit out of it for years now (I switched careers, and was doing plant-related stuff beforehand anyway), but I've retained enough to follow along.
One more point- even if there are no people who can create a virus from a genome that would want to, there are people who can reverse engineer a virus who have gambling debt, or children that they would do anything to save, etc. It is pretty easy to find a blackmail target when there's thousands of options to choose from.
Given you're arguments; I think you're right that there's a trend towards more and more capable attempts by smaller and smaller groups, but even so we're not talking about an individual doing this any time soon.
This sort of project needs a team of people to do the design, synthesis/ligation, vector cloning and live culture - and that's before you get to the stage of being able to culture up and store. We're talking dozens of senior people and lab techs that need to be subverted or fobbed off, not to mention all the distributors and suppliers who must turn a blind eye to suspicious requests. So we're still in the realm of large, motivated attempts to end the world instead of lone wolves.
Honestly; the easiest way for a malign actor is still to book a trip to a budding outbreak zone, attempt to catch zika/XDR TB/whatever and intentionally spread it to your home neighborhood on return.
Good point. I agree that it's still at the level that requires a team, not just one person. That actually makes me feel a lot safer-a plan that requires 2 people is much, much more unlikely than one that requires only one. However, the cost of genome sequencing has gone from $10,000 per raw magabase in 2001 to about 10 cents per raw megabase- we should expect a similar democratization of recombinant technology, too. Our safety will be short lived if we post the full genome to pandemic-capable pathogens.
I'm a grad student in epidemiology, and I've used that database before- it's great and I'm glad that it exists. I think there is a huge difference between publishing the genome of viruses that already infect humans and viruses that would cause a pandemic if they did start infecting humans, for two reasons. First, a virus that we have no immunity to can be really, really bad and it will take us too long to respond. Second, if someone wants to maliciously start a pandemic they can do it in far worse ways than nature would- spread at multiple crowded airports at once, for example, or spread multiple pandemic-causing infections at the same time.
Wasn't posted every detail about COVID critical to the (such as it was) rapid response? Weren't the vaccines built using the data, and not the virus samples?
Absolutely! And Moderna was famously able to have their vaccine development finished within 48 hrs of the full genome being published. There is a huge difference between responding rapidly to a virus that is currently causing a pandemic, and posting the full sequence to all the viruses that could cause a pandemic if allowed to infect humans. If one of these pandemic-capable viruses starts spreading, of course, publish everything you know about it. If it's not yet spreading, very different calculus.
I am sure someone has done this before, but I thought it would be interesting to map the blog network through linking up blogrolls. I started here and mapped the first ~300 connections the branches connected me to. The end result is here: https://jacobwood27.github.io/035_blog_graph/
It is! ACX is the biggest blue node in the top right. A search feature would probably be a good thing to add. The text is Ctrl+F-able but too small to see sometimes.
The colors are determined by a Leiden community detection algorithm run on the structure of the graph (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-41695-z). You can change the "quality function" that is used to determine the communities through the settings button in the top left of the screen.
Thanks John, that is something I overlooked in the write up. The size of every node is proportional to the number of incoming connections on the graph (how many people link back to you).
Does anyone who has successfully self-taught a language have advice on engaging ways of practicing listening? I'm currently at too early a level to understand anything other than things targeted at young children or beginning learners, which means it's very tedious. (I also don't have the option of going and living in somewhere other than the US).
If the answer is just "suck it up and do the boring thing" that's fine, but I would definitely prefer something that made it so I needed less motivation.
Depending on your target language, there's a reddit community full of podcast and television recommendations.
I know of people who just did extensive reading, or just did extensive listening of hard content, and they eventually got there. I'd recommend a roughly 50/50 split of reading and listening, with the reading at N+1 material, graded readers just above your level, and listening at N, right at or even below your level.
In the very early stages there just won't be much easy listening content that is interesting and sounds like real speech. Listen to some incomprehensible content at this stage just to start getting a feel for the sound system, don't feel like you have to do six hours a day, this is just getting a sample. During this phase you're using reading and learning basic vocab to get up to low intermediate. Then as you start picking out individual words in your "hard" listening, then you should dial in your listening in to something level appropriate.
You can supplement with Anki or Duolingo, but don't over-rely on it. I think sentence cards are much better to practice than drilling vocab, once you're past the first couple hundred words anyway. They'll help give you a sense for grammar and really solidify the common words. Your main practice is reading and listening, don't just do reps and feel like that's enough, really think of this as a supplement.
One of the best things I did was get a bluetooth headset, and listen to a directory full of short dialogues or podcasts throughout the day. The little times I use this really add up, and led to a rapid improvement in my listening skills.
I'd say it is important to find engaging content when learning a language. To me, that means, finding literature adults read. Ofcourse, that will be incomprehensible until you reach a certain level.
The 'Easy' series on YouTube ahs great audio-videos for German and Spanish.
Coffee Time German podcast was nice for me.
DuoLingo Podcast for Simple Spanish was good.
Daily News and talk radio in Finnish from YLE Uutiset.
Nuntii Latini for Latin was always a hit with me.
Mandarin Corner has excellent content.
It's all about finding content you are engaged by. For most mainstream languages we live in a land of abundance. For niche, languages you will have to find the small community making content, but surely they exist.
As a separate thing, there was a study showing that listening to that language passively (e.g. spanish talk radio in the background if you're learning spanish) helps you learn better by making your mind more accustomed to those sounds. Not a replacement for actual dedicated listening work, but a low-effort way of helping.
I thought it was common knowledge that, after you move to a country that speaks a language you aren't fluent with, you are supposed to get a TV and just keep it on, whenever you can. As you keep hearing the same words over and over, your brain gets used to them and slowly learns them, even if you're not paying much attention.
I heard this from so many people that I thought it was just something that everyone knew.
You might be able to get access to a TV channel in the language of your choice somewhere online.
I mean I could just fall asleep listening to chinese podcasts instead of english ones. I'm basically just listening for phrases and can't follow the overall meaning of native content though.
You don't have to sit there and obsess all the time - although it certainly helps to do it some of the time. Most of the time, you can keep doing things that it won't distract you from - exercise, cook, clean, do laundry, do dishes, knit. This will not give you results in a day or in a week. You're looking at months or years. But, same as with in-person interaction, you will be getting language exposure, and that's what matters. It will add up.
Consider also that, after you set this up, it doesn't require any conscious effort on your side. This is not work. The only thing you care about is that it doesn't annoy you.
I don't know of any research on this, but I would guess that a TV (or a computer with a sufficiently large screen that runs TV-like content) would be better than a radio because it gives you visuals together with the sound and is better at keeping some of your attention, even when you don't understand what's said.
Over time, this worked for a lot of people, and it's very low-cost and low-effort. As long as you're not expecting fast results, I can't think of a reason not to try.
Listening-Reading, by far the best option at the early stages. Get an audiobook in the target language and a written version of the same text in your native language, and listen while following the written text so you get the meaning. From time to time check whether you can understand scripted online videos with a single narrator, once you can, switch to that.
Depends on how beginner is beginner. There are various different language versions of listening practice for beginners that can be somewhat engaging (eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEB8-SWMYhI). You can also get audio books in various different languages that range from beginner to more advanced, so there's a plot to try to follow. These start pretty simple (eg https://www.amazon.com/Los-tres-cerditos/dp/B00TADJIJ2). Once you can understand news stories those are good options, as you might already know the thrust from other media.
Honestly what helped me the most on listening was having many conversations and writing down words I didn't recognize to look up later. Depending on the language and the location, there may be opportunities to do that, but often that's difficult to find.
Unfortunately the children's books are what I was trying to avoid really. I don't like the modal english fiction story I think, let alone one written by someone who isn't a good writer, but is focusing on producing content for eductional puproses.
Conversations are good but I don't have as many opportunities to have them as I'd like. I recently started playing the game Taboo in chinese with some of my ABC friends which has been both fun and hopefully helpful.
I am not sure whether "understanding material" refers to spoken or all forms of content. If it's the former, then you could watch a movie with dual subtitles (depending on the language, you can find them premade or download the subtitles yourself), or listen to audiobooks and follow along the written text.
If it's the latter, then you might try graded readers (but those are targeted at language learners and you may find them indeed boring), podcasts for language learners (simple language but some culture is explained as well).
The pro tip which takes some effort however is preparing an audiobook in the target language, the corresponding source text in the target language AND the translation of the text in a language you speak well, say English. While listening to the audiobook, you can look at the English translation to understand the meaning, and at the target language to make out individual words. Some texts like this are available when you search for "parallel texts".
Yeah I was specifically looking for listening practice as I said. The parallel texts pointer seems promising so I'll try that out.
I've read some graded readers, and listen to some podcasts targeted at people learning the language, but those are what I was referring to as tedious yeah.
I had heard when I was younger that having kids changes you significantly: I recall one person writing that they don't feel like they were a "complete human being" until after they became a father. I filed that away under "interesting if true" and went on to later have two kids of my own.
I can report that after having kids my empathy has shot through the roof. I never used to mind bad things happening to people in movies: it's a movie. But now I get very emotional if a child is threatened in a serious way in a movie, and I find I care a lot more for the non-child characters as well. This is perhaps unsurprising: when I see a kid in trouble it's easy for me to imagine my own kids in the same position. But I wasn't exactly a psychopath before I had kids: is my increased empathy really just chalked up to having more skin in the game? That seems very cynical, but I can't imagine what else it would be.
Case in point: I have lived through a few wars and violent conflicts breaking out somewhere in the world. Afghan war, Iraq war, Kuwait, who knows how many civil wars in Africa, etc. Yet I feel very strongly about the war in Ukraine. I saw a video (you probably saw it to, it got around) of a father saying goodbye to his daughter and wife as they went on a train to safety and he stayed to fight. His daughter looked about 6-8 years old, and they were both crying. I've certainly seen emotionally charged war footage before, but this was the first time I actually felt anything about it besides a vague sense of "Aw, that's too bad." Now I was touched so much I almost started crying myself. I'm feeling sad just writing about it.
All this to say: sample size 1, parenthood fixed my ability to care about other humans.
Huh. Just added a comment and it showed up 2x. Tried to delete one and both got deleted. I’ll try again:
Joseph Henrich in his WEIRDest people book describes indigenous cultures in which fathers do vs don’t play a role in bringing up their children, and describes large psychological / physiological differences, and impacts on society.
A personal note - as a father of young daughters and a religious guy, I can never make it through the Chava’s Ballet scene in Fiddler on the Roof without sobbing. Never affected me before having daughters.
I've had that same issue before of a comment being duplicated, and then deleting one duplicate deletes both. I assume it was actually somehow just posted once, but for some reason displayed twice on my computer? Anyway, it's part of the general Substack interface issues.
We're all children 'til we have children, as the saying goes.
Not that all parents are mature, or non-parents immature. But parenthood does seem to engender levels of empathy and responsibility that I observe less often in non-parents.
I’m female and have felt similarly. I wondered if once I had kids I would no longer be able to appreciate certain dark humor that involved children. I can confirm that, yes, I have lost my ability to laugh at certain things, and find myself much more affected when bad things happen to children in media or real life. Which has really been quite a relief- it makes me feel thankfully normal in some important ways.
I have had the exact same experience. Since being a dad I get very emotional about any news story that involves the suffering of children. It's not that I was fine with it beforehand, but it would be more abstract sort of sad. Now the reaction is very visceral.
I haven't noticed any other changes in the way I am (except constant tiredness and more familiarity with human poo!)
My first kid changed my life, but I think it was my second and third that were the most significant. You really can and do improve your ability to understand others with more practice. But also just getting older changes your life perspective.
I think getting older did this to me (I don't have kids). It changed my taste in movies. I can only really appreciate movies that present violence in a gritty, pessimistic light, rather than in a cavalier, adventure-movie kind of light. Kind of annoying actually, makes it harder to enjoy 90s action movies.
Yep same here. It took me by surprise too, partly because when my first son was born I was only a few years removed from being a full-time general-news newspaper reporter. I thought of myself as having a fairly hard shell, could write about horrible local police news without being bothered, etc. And then suddenly I had to just literally stop reading any such news stories.
I also noticed the contrast with my two elder siblings, both childless, and neither of them a particularly unempathetic person or unfriendly to kids. But I went overnight from being just like them on this point to being completely different.
I’ve never heard a discussion about this specific thing before and yet it seems really important. I said as a casual aside on the Reddit a few weeks ago that one big aspect of the conservative/liberal divide is about which people have kids earlier. But has anyone seriously studied what having kids does to people’s political and ideological perspectives, or tolerance for certain ideas, images and risks? If people in *this* crowd are finding such a dramatic before-and-after effect, I would expect there’s something pretty significant here.
It would be hard to separate this from selection effects though. I.e. people who end up having children are likely pretty different from those that don't.
Agree completely. Hell, I got choked up during an episode of Daniel Tiger because Daniel was sad his parents were going on a date without him. I can barely even read stories about actual bad things happening to kids anymore.
"if two people agree on the possibilty of a long-term future outcome (say, 20+ years off) they will very likely agree on the desirability of that outcome."
My hunch here is that most of our beliefs about valence are really just compressed forms of the long-term causal graph.
Would the majority of Serbs and the majority of Kosovar Albanians agree that Kosovo has probability above .5 of becoming a member of the United Nations this century? That is indeed my guess about how the majority of both groups would estimate the probability. Yet I don't have a shadow of a doubt that desirability among Serbians is much lower than desirability among Kosovar Albanians.
You might find other counterexamples involving separatist/(re)unionist causes where one side, however slowly, seems to be gaining ground.
Do please post this again in the other thread, as others have suggested.
I disagree; two people could agree that, say, the way society is going in 20+ years time everyone will have to wear horns and a tail; one person may think this is great because, um, inclusivity? and the other think this is just how we are going to hell in a handbasket.
You're right that this could very quickly veer into culture warring and I don't want that. It's tough to think of a specific instance off the top of my head - let's say X says we'll all be vegan in 20 years and Y agrees. Is this because both X and Y think that vegan replacements for meat will be of such quality, people will happily and easily switch? Does X think this is a moral position to hold and is glad it will happen and Y thinks it is going to be one more imposition by the Nanny State?
If both X and Y agree that cattle ranching is unsustainable and that it is a good thing if it stops, then sure, they'll think this is a desirable outcome. But I don't think we can say that *agreement* on something happening means that people find it *desirable*, whether both think it is desirable or undesirable.
The broad instance that most people will think Bad Thing undesirable and Good Thing desirable holds, of course, but not everyone is going to have the same opinion as to "is this bad thing or good thing?" for at least *some* instances.
i don't think this is a guarantee - i think you changed my view elsewhere, so it's now much more of a ... trend
i think my point is that, over very long timeframes, i think values and predictive models are basically indistinguishable from each other
in other words i think it's very very very unlikely to find two people who completely agree on a causal model who then disagree wildly on the moral valence of some outcome 50 years from now. Part of this is because causal models are more likely to diverge over long timeframes, of course. But the hunch is that most of the stuff we value is effectively a compressed causal of model of something like "but this might lead to large amounts of human suffering in the future!"
maybe best to reserve this for the culture war-enabled posts :)
My intuition is the reverse. Believing in an inevitable global communist revolution is highly correlated with thinking that's a good thing, but to the extent this can be disentangled the direction seems more like "communism will be great, therefore we will get communism" rather than "we will get communism, therefore it will be great".
I don't think that's true at all. The people who seem convinced that we're getting (or already have!) communism seem to universally think it's a bad thing, often in apocalyptic terms (Doom of the West and so forth). Meanwhile the most prominent communist I can think of (Freddie deBoer) basically thinks it's capitalism for at least the rest of his life, and that whatever follows won't be communism either.
I think writ large, doomerism is more widespread than its complement. OTOH, wrong thread and all. Bring it up next time, it's a good topic.
so this is an interesting case because 'das kapital' endorses an explicitly deterministic view of history, so it might be unique to communism as an ideology?
i don't think a lot of libertarians are generally like 'libertarianism is inevitable', for example. Same thing with people who want to end global warming; i think a lot of progressives are generally pessmisitic about the feasibility of the outcomes they want actually ocurring.
we are dangerously close to 'culture war' territory here tho so maybe i should ask again next week :)
Apocalyptic outcomes seem like a clear counterexample to this statement. Most people who are worried about nuclear war or AI risk don't think nuclear war or evil AIs are desirable. The same is true for people who assign low likelihoods to those events.
by 'agree on the desirability' i mean 'agree on whether or not these things are desirable' - not that merely agreeing some outcome can occur makes it desirable, but that agreeing on valence tends to follow agreeing on likelihood of distant events
for example, two people who agree that 'an AI can take over the entire world in a way that it won't need humans' are actually very likely to agree that it's undesirable, whereas a lot of people who don't worry about AI risk basically think 'this situation is impossible', not 'it could happen and it would be great'
or, two people who think a planet-ending nuclear war can happen will agree that it's bad. I don't think anyone would disagree with 'it would be bad if it happened', but they might very well disagree over whether it would actually happen.
I don't think even that holds true for a nuclear war; one that blew up the planet might be considered undesirable by both, but one that 'merely' wiped out humanity might be seen as desirable by one (anti-natalists, those who think we're despoiling nature and that without humans the planet and other species will recover, etc.)
Is that actually a common anti-natalist position? I thought that the argument went the other way, environment getting destroyed means having children is wrong (because they would have to live in a horrible wasteland).
i think this changes my view - i'll follow up on the culture war thread because i now want to add a 'caveat' that _might_ obviate the whole thing entirely, unless we start getting real into culture war weeds
I wasn't thinking of a culture war aspect and I think you're correct. Mostly I was going off "humans are perverse buggers and for every thing 99 out of 100 people think is good/bad, there's always 1 person who thinks it's bad/good" 😁
I think this is true without regard to the agreement on the possibility of that outcome; that is, people will very likely agree on the desirability of a given outcome, regardless of whether or not they believe that outcome is likely or not, in a general sense.
Does adding agreement about the likelihood of a given outcome increase agreement about the desirability of that outcome? I mean, given that many people are, ultimately, just agreeing with somebody else that made an argument, this seems basically trivial: Yes, because they get their desirability-information and their likelihood-information from the same source.
Is there a non-trivial version of this? Yeah, probably, but I'd have trouble specifying the reference class of "People who have independently come to a set of conclusions about the likelihood of, and the desirability of, a given outcome".
I'm a physician in my mid 40s and over the last few months have felt a little less cognitively sharp. Not enough that anyone external would notice (I've asked colleagues and my wife), but I notice journal articles feeling a little denser, I've ran more stop signs then in my previous life combined, and my chess.com ranking is distinctly trending down.
I figure my next steps are to start playing with my diet, exercise, alcohol use, etc. Does anyone know any high sensitivity cognitive tests that would be useful for trending my performance? I don't think the mini-moca is going to cut it :). Thanks!
I don't know any tests to recommend, but as prophalytics against mental dullness I endorse getting enough sleep and taking a walk every day, in the middle of the day. The sleep is just basic. The walk is to clear your head, because between 40-60 years (I'm at the upper end of this, so speak from experience) it's mostly input overload that impacts cognitive acuity - a walk is an easy way to get away from people/screens/printed matter etc while also getting some fresh air. I take a 15min-30min walk right after lunch every day, leave my phone on the desk. If I miss a couple of days, I can tell I'm a little slower.
I think my Stroop test suggestion is decent, but it would be good for you to get a couple more measures. Best place to get other suggestions would be to have a brief appt with a neuropsychologist. Don't sign up to get a bunch of testing, which seems like way overkill at this point. You want someone who'd willing to use the appointment to recommend tests to you and tell how to administer them to yourself and score them. Any test a neuropsychologist recommends is likely to be well-constructed and validated. (There are a lot of things that determine whether a test is a valid measure of whether your performance is changing. For instance, test has to either be something that can be done repeatedly without your getting better at it through practice -- or else something that has multiple versions which are known to produce highly correlated scores (i.e., your score on Version A is going to be very similar to score on version B)).
One other idea that comes to mind for self-assessment is to take portions of the SAT, GRE or LSAT. Those tests are well-constructed psychometrically, ie scores on different versions are highly correlated, and the companies that make the tests make some versions of them available online for people to practice on. You have to take samples of actual tests, though, not made-up versions produced by test-prep companies. Actually, I believe you can take the actual official GRE multiple times, and frequently, something like once every 2 weeks. You get a different version each time you take it, and scores come back quickly.
Your ideas for things to play with -- diet, exercise, alcohol -- seem good. Don't forget sleep as a thing to play with. Sleep's a powerful lever to pull for problems like those you describe. You need to consider not just quantify of sleep but also quality. If it's disrupted by apnea it's not as good. Also, many drugs, both alcohol and various sleep meds, damage sleep architecture and make sleep less restorative. Matthew Walker has a good & highly readable book called Why We Sleep that covers these topics. Wishing you lots of success at identifying and fixing whatever's wrong.
Thanks for your thoughts. I hadn't heard of the stroop test, I'm going to try experimenting with it for a week, see if it correlates at all with my own self perception of my acuity. And discussing testing with a neuropsychologist is a good idea
As in vaccine related spike proteins? I guess I can't say no for fact but it doesn't temporally align. I actually like the idea of microdosing but think my job is too high stakes to risk it
When I felt that way my second best solution was lifting weights in the morning. Not some huge workout, just enough to demand results from my muscles. It's one of those addictive things I now look forward to. I think I recovered some of my lagging intellect, but mostly I restored my patience and ability to stick to a problem rather than giving up quickly.
Without a doubt, increasing my sleep increases my intellect. But I still find myself skipping out on sleep and suffering for it. For sure I'm more brilliant on a Monday.
No idea, but after ~30-40 everything (body-wise) is in decline. Are you using glasses to read yet? At ~60+ all I can say is, "It's all down hill, enjoy the ride!"
I think Stroop test is pretty good in that respect, and there are scorable versions you can play as games on your phone. It’s a decent measure of attention and ability to shift mental set. Does not capture all the processes you have concerns about (probably measures a lot of
What’s involved in noticing stop
signs, much less of what’s involved in reading a technical article).
Like many people with a small-town upbringing I grew up plinking with .22s so am not petrified of firearms. At the same time I don’t have a real interest in guns and have looked at 2A idealogues as contributing to more problems than they are solving. Having said that, the success of the resistance in Ukraine has got me thinking about how an armed population maybe really can act as a brake on tyranny. When I google recommendations for firearms suitable for armed resistance against an occupying aggressor I mostly get a bunch of gun porn and fringey sovereign citizen stuff, when I am really more interested in a Swiss-style model where citizens are expected to do their part if the wheels ever come off. I guess I’m leaning into the “well-regulated” (as in “not batshit crazy”) aspects of 2A responsibilities. What is/are suitable firearms for the reluctant patriot who is willing to spend time on the range but not wanting to sign up for Galt’s Gulch? Presumably some combination of reliability, ease of use, field serviceability, ready access to ammunition and parts, etc.
Ukraine is in fact a counterexample to your main claim. Both Maidans were almost entirely unarmed, and the current territorial defense forces got AKs from the state which would have been very much illegal to possess in peacetime.
But, yeah, for this you're probably going to want to go with an AR-15 for all the reasons you note. In particular, in any sort of war or war-like event in North America, there's going to be lots of other people using something on an AR platform, and that sort of commonality is all kinds of useful. And it's a generically reliable, useful weapon. There are reasons it has become the de facto American standard.
If not an AR-15, at least something that fires the 5.56mm NATO cartridge and uses STANAG magazines. If you somehow find yourself to be an expert marksman, maybe something in 7.62mm NATO. And in any case, get a decent optical sight - one made for fighting, not hunting or target shooting.
If you live in a city, there's something to be said for a pistol, almost certainly in 9mm Parabellum and start by looking at the Glock. Being able to pass for a harmless civilian just trying to muddle through until you can check to see that, yep, there's nobody around but you and the two Bad Guy Soldiers who just wrote you off as harmless, can count for a lot. In particular, it can count for two free rifles.
None of this will stop a tank. But, if you shoot all the enemy soldiers near the tank, and shoot the tank commander if he sticks his head out of the hatch, the tank will probably pull back. Particularly in an urban environment, there's way too many things that can go wrong for a big, clumsy, half-blind tank without half a dozen pairs of eyes checking out all the places a tank can't go. But you'll have to shoot all those soldiers while an invulnerable tank gunner is playing first-person shooter with a machine gun in a stabilized turret.
If someone is fool enough to take a tank into a city without infantry support, a proper molotov cocktail on the engine air intake will *usually* get the job done - radiators don't work very well covered with burning napalm.
Most importantly, though, is not doing any of this alone. Be a part of some sort of civic organization that can offer up a group of people who know and trust one another to work as a team. And know that a lot of you aren't going to make it home alive even with the teamwork. Trying to play this game solo, is pretty much suicide.
It's a very popular gun, so it's not too hard to get parts and ammo. It's not too expensive, about $500, which sits it nicely on the quality/affordibility curve. It's a self-defense focused rifle, which means it would adapt fairly well to military conflict, considering that you can't legally buy assault rifles or other military hardware.
Avoid any rifle that isn't automatic, and avoid handguns altogether.
Discussion of the the second amendment should probably be saved for an even numbered thread when culture war topics are allowed.
Even then, including terms like "gun porn," "fringey" and "batshit crazy" will probably make the discussion less productive than it might otherwise be.
I have a hunch that you might have misread people's reactions a little. I am guessing that people who like guns are less likely to throw a fit about exactly how things are worded, as long as the sentiment is reasonable.
I wouldn't be very surprised if people who don't like the Second Amendment (you, I'm guessing?) get triggered by any mention of it. But a dozen posts into this thread, you're the only poster who thought this was headed for a culture war. Everyone else seems to think he was asking a reasonable question. It seems clear that he wasn't trying to upset anyone.
I posted when there were only 2 replies and all I said was that 2A discussions should "probably" be reserved for the culture-war-OK weeks. Perhaps I jumped the gun. Perhaps not.
Your guess is incorrect, I don't dislike (or like) the second amendment.
Hmm, not a gun owner, but 2A goes seamlessly into Ukraine in my mind. If Putin was to try and invade the USA....? Well, I'd take up arms. That's not meant as a political statement, but as a patriotic one. (It's hard to talk of Ukraine, w/o mentioning guns.)
It's still early, and I'm not confident we have a really complete picture of how things are going on the ground. I sincerely hope they win, but things could change rather quickly.
More to your point, whatever success they are having, it's with weapons and platforms you can't legally buy in the US. Heck, I'd be surprised if you could buy them *illegally* in the US with any kind of success. These are weapons supplied by nation states with fairly advanced militaries, and that's why they seem to be having some success against a fairly advanced military (the Russian units that have had the most problems may also not be very well trained). I don't think there are any lessons for you to learn at this phase of the war.
I think this is a solid point. Antitank, and certainly AntiAir weapons would be difficult to obtain in the US, and I don’t think you could stand much of a chance without them
I know this is a joke, but some version of that does not seem entirely ridiculous to me. For instance, say robotic devices designed to do limited tasks were put in touch with each other, and programmed to identify and eliminate redundancies ("we don't all have to sort through the data on current traffic patterns -- just let one bot do it and send it out to all the others who need it"). Next step, have them take into account which bot-related tasks now done by human beings could be eliminated and done by a single bot or team of them. So maybe in the process of doing that they discover that the job of running bot-space, currently done by human beings, could also be eliminated or done better by bots of teams of bots.
How well do modern armies deal with forests and rivers? Irpin to the NW of Kyiv seems to be holding so far but if Russia takes it, will they continue straight towards Kyiv through the heavily wooded Holosiiv National Park or will they be forced to go south then wheel around towards the capital? In the latter case will that leave the Russian left flank exposed?
And the Dneiper is awfully wide. Could one side of the city hold out even if the other falls? I imagine bridges and other static infrastructure are very vulnerable to modern PGM.
It depends. Tanks can ford or snorkel across a river in some cases, and a combat engineering unit can put up a pontoon bridge in less than a day. However, an *opposed* river crossing is still really hard - if people are shooting at you, your engineers can't work very well.
However, they don't have to cross the Dneiper river in the middle of Kiev, they could cross it somewhere upstream and then attack the other half of the city from there. (Actually, looking at the ISW's map, they've already done so).
Could anyone point me towards an mental health support forum with a rationalist bent? I am relatively new to ACX and LessWrong, and I have found just reading posts and comments so very helpful!
I am looking for an online forum where individuals share daily challenges and successes with others who also value the work of developing practical rationality in their lives, knowing it offers a solid foundation for mental health and wellbeing. Any suggestions would be very much appreciated!
Good question. Thanks for asking! Your asking alone demonstrates why the rationalist bent appeals to me -- a willingness to offer critical questions. This encourages increased clarity, a questioning of priors, and a broadened perspective.
So yes, I guess I do just seek an online forum that has proven helpful to others.
In particular, I seek one that is helpful to those with a high level of intellectual curiosity, a desire to identify truth, and a willingness to update their priors. These are characteristics to which I aspire -- but that can be difficult to remember and maintain alone when in an emotionally dysregulated state. And these are characteristics are not strongly featured in the online forums that I have found thus far. Yet, I have to imagine such a forum exists in this vast online world.
Closest thing I know is the rational psychonaut subreddit. They’re talking about psychedelic use, but mental health related matters often come up. They might be able to point you to some other sites too. In general, rationalists strike me as being less empathic and affiliative than the average person. Rationalist forums may be a better place to search for info than to search for support
just chiming in to say that i think this is a great idea, and i have found rationality to be extremely helpful. "my map is no accurate, my life will improve if i my make my map more accurate" has been EXTREMELY useful in regulating bipolar disorder.
for example, in situations of extreme stress i have a 'start a new religion and tell all your friends!' instinct, and rationality has helped me see this for what it is, rather than reacting to it. Highly prizing increasing accuracy, being in the habit of poking holes in my own beliefs, is critical for navigating mania.
Rationality has not been shown to have mental health benefits. If anything, decompartmentalization of one's worldview is probably detrimental to one's mental health, with all the infohazards popping up that were previously not on the radar of someone who doesn't give an extra thought to AI x-risks and such.
Many are claiming that Ukraine being considered for NATO is largely responsible for the Russian invasion. and that if the west had said 'no NATO for Ukraine', this would not have happened. It seems to me though that the opposite is true, that if the west had said 'invasion of Ukraine will be stopped with heavy force', then that would have prevented this from happening. My reasoning why:
Putin/Russia has actually increased their chances of NATO going hot against them by enacting this invasion, so that's probably not a main factor, it's probably just a pretext.
Putin/Russia invaded Ukraine because they want Ukraine's territory and resources, and thought that Ukraine going separate after the fall of the USSR was a mistake.
Putin/Russia invaded Ukraine because they believed they would be successful at taking it, and the cost would not be too high. I suspect Ukraine is putting up more of a fight than they anticipated, but on the other hand the main fighting in the 2003 Iraq war took about a month, and there was a much larger strength difference there.
If nato were to actually commit to defending Ukraine, it's fairly clear that Putin/Russia would not be successful at taking it, so they would not try.
Russia subscribes to Realist international relations approach.
Russia said even back in 90's that "Ukraine in NATO will be a step too far" - this position have been reinforced multiple times in 2000s and 2010s.
Russia also sees NATO expansion - be that formal or informal, like in case of Ukraine - as "creeping" escalation from US side. Putin said that US "missions" in Ukraine were NATO bases in all but the name.
NATO is seen as a threat, and formal NATO membership would commit every other NATO member to defense, thus it has to be prevented at all costs - because then NATO threat there from Russian involvement shoots straight from "heavy force" (where Russia still has home advantage and could inflict significant losses to any interference) to MAD.
That means Russia would always have maximum escalatory potential in Ukraine - possibly even up to committing to tactical nuclear strikes to wipe out opposition; Western only option to up the ante would be committing to MAD - that is, burning entire world in attempt to "save" one country.
As noone would do that conflict couldn't be prevented.
If someone threatens your rook, you threaten their queen.
While Putin was piling up his equipment on the border of Ukraine, NATO should have been piling up equipment on the border in Latvia or Estonia. Or maybe in Poland on the northern end of the border with Belarus. Enough to make Putin wonder if he needs some of that equipment for defense rather than attack.
If, in an alternative universe, Mexico was invited to join the Warsaw Pact, would that increase or decrease the chance of conflict between Mexico and the USA?
The difference being that the soviet union wanted to invade western europe and the only reason they didn't is because is because of the threat of war with America, and this invasion would be pure imperialism, not just security reasons. Whereas, there was never any indication of America wanting to invade Mexico and their ascension to an alliance of bellicose imperialistic states makes no sense except as a vehicle for direct or indirect aggression against the US.
The US invaded Cuba, but not because it wanted to rule Cuba, they just didn't want an ally of an aggressive state on their doorstep. NATO is not an aggressive alliance, there's no sane argument for believing that the presence of NATO is a threat to Russia itself (as opposed to a threat to russian imperialism), and NATO is not at all analogous to the warsaw pact or the soviet union more generally.
It's not the 90s anymore - we have most of the actual archives from the Soviet union and people have pored through them to get the truth. Which is:
The Soviets were never interested in taking over Europe, but they were terrified of the US and NATO invading them - specifically under the pretext of the exercises and provocations that the US engaged in all the time. So they obsessed over buffer zones to cover the approaches into the USSR via the Eurasian plain.
As for NATO not being a threat - the nearest NATO country is withing spitting distance of Moscow at present - something less than 400km away. Most of the most populous, economically productive parts of Russia are within tactical nuclear weapon range. And, if Ukrain joins NATO, the frontage across which the Russian army has to defend becomes impossibly broad.
The correct analogy, from the Russian perspective, is this:
The modern US is a petro state with the GDP of Italy, where 80% of revenue comes from Texas (which is also where the capital and where 75% of the population is located).
The entirety of South America is part of the historical "destroy America" alliance, and has historically been relentlessly expansionist and provocative. Houston is already under direct threat of a potential no-warning tactical missile strike (however remote the possibility is in practice). And Mexico is now both talking about joining the alliance, and just discovered massive oil and gas reserves off its coast.
What do you do to best safeguard the fortunes of your country?
A more accurate analogy would be if Mexico applied to join the Warsaw Pact and was turned down.
I don't trust any political leader to give honest reasons for what they're doing. I especially don't trust Putin, who loudly insisted he wasn't going to invade right up until he did so.
Kind of curious how this region and that of all former Soviet states fits into the WEF notions of solving the global debt and banking issue. “ you will own nothing and be happy “ thing . Mind I think we could all look to understand what the ideas are being presented . But I could see if assets are going to be transfered to lenders or something drastic that having domains within protectable boundaries might make sense .
> Many are claiming that Ukraine being considered for NATO is largely responsible for the Russian invasion. and that if the west had said 'no NATO for Ukraine', this would not have happened. It seems to me though that the opposite is true, that if the west had said 'invasion of Ukraine will be stopped with heavy force', then that would have prevented this from happening.
Both may be true, though in 'no NATO for Ukraine' Russia simply takes over without fight.
Putting NATO troops into Ukraine is to raise the risk of a nuclear exchange much higher. There is sort of a tacit agreement to only fight wars through surrogates.
Oh we can take turns going into Afghanistan, but never together. Ukraine is the surrogate in this case, we can give them arms, (maybe info?) but no men.
The timeline was mainly logistical in nature; and Iraq had a much more "Powerful" army in terms of equipment and etc.
If the US had a contiguous land border with Ukraine on three sides and access to a coastline and attempted to take over their capitol; it would be done with 24 hours, and probably done within 10-12 hours, and they woul 1000000% have air superiority from hour 2+ on.
Some questions that the war in Ukraine made me ponder:
A. Freedom-fighters vs. proxies
The Ukrainian people have made it clear over the past decades that most of them don't want closer ties to Russia. Russia invaded the Ukraine. We condemn Russia for it.
According to this 2016 BBC post ( https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-18269210 ), South Ossetia is a region of Georgia that's ethnically distinct from both Russia and Georgia, which has historically preferred ties to Russia over Georgia. They declared independence from Georgia in 1992. In 2008, Georgia invaded them, and Russia stepped into defend Georgia.
Question: Instead of praising Russia for defending South Ossetia from Georgian aggression, we condemned the Ossetian separatists as "Russian proxies". Why?
B. Ethnic cleansing
The conflict with Ukraine turned hot in 2014, when Russia similarly invaded to support separatists movement in Crimea, a Ukrainian peninsula where the majority of residents are ethnically Russian, and Donbas, where 39% of residents are of Russian ethnicity and most people say their native language is Russian.
Question: If Ukraine somehow holds onto some territory and maintains its independence, would they be justified in ethnically cleansing regions of what remains of Ukraine which have a large Russian population? (By "ethnic cleansing" I mean expelling Russians, and possibly ethnic Russian Ukranian citizens.)
D. Political cleansing
If your answer to B is "No, because this is a political conflict, not an ethnic conflict", does that mean it would okay for Ukraine to expel people who favor union with Russia in order to prevent further separatist movements? Is kicking people out of their homes for their politics better than kicking them out of their homes for their ethnicity?
D: What you call “political cleansing” is simply prosecution of treason, separatism, collaborationism etc., which is a widespread non-controversial practice.
Also, if Russia loses, there will be no separatism, and if Ukraine loses, there will be no prosecution. So it’s a moot point either way.
I don't think it's that simple. If it were, every attempt to assert independence could be dismissed as treason. More importantly, the history of the conflict in Ukraine is one of separatism and violence arising predictably from differences in ethnicity, culture, or politics. So we have this weird dichotomy in which the same action (expelling the people on one side) is completely taboo if you classify it as an ethnic conflict, but totally okay if you classify it as political--even though there's no good way to distinguish cultural differences from political ones.
One thing I'm trying to get at is that the conflict in Ukraine shows that today's simplistic Western morality is anti-utilitarian. Instead of weighing costs and benefits, it tries to come up with a Boolean list of forbidden and allowed actions. The way it categorizes things as taboo or okay is arbitrary, disregards facts on the ground about what actually causes war or what the likely outcomes of a policy are, and is based mostly on a "fighting the last war" mentality, and on the complicity of news organizations in presenting each conflict in ways that fit their side's narrative (e.g., Western media consistently reported on the Yugoslavian civil war as an ethnic or religious conflict; Western media today consistently reports cultural conflict within America as racial conflict).
I'm not trying to advocate any political position, nor any particular ethical demand; but to question the entire anti-utilitarian framework of Western ethics.
I think it's incorrect to say "Western ethics" is completely anti-utilitarian. Utilitarianism is about as Western as any ethical theory is. However, standard vulgar political theory, which involves concepts like "rights" and "sovereignty", is in fact very anti-utilitarian. But this is a very familiar fact.
> According to... the UN document... Ukraine killed about 3000 civilians
The UN document:
> During the entire conflict period, from 14 April 2014 to 30 September 2021, OHCHR recorded a total of 3,095 conflict-related civilian deaths (1,841 men, 1,065 women, 102 boys, 50 girls, and 37 adults whose sex is unknown). Taking into account the 298 deaths on board Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 on 17 July 2014, the total death toll of the conflict on civilians has reached at least 3,393. The number of injured civilians is estimated to exceed 7,000.
How on earth did you manage to reach the conclusion Ukraine killed all of them?
You're right. I assumed that people killed in the rebel territories were killed by the Ukraine government, but this turns out not to be the case. Both sides have killed many throughout the conflict. Strangely, I've so far been unable to find any source that breaks down casualties and deaths by which side killed them, though I've found many sources breaking them down by all other relevant factors. I'll delete question C.
(https://www.crisisgroup.org/content/conflict-ukraines-donbas-visual-explainer is an example. It counts deaths by date, location, and cause, but not by which side did the killing. It feels like all the reporting organizations are deliberately trying to keep this information hidden. Tass phrases things in ways that imply the killing was mostly done the Ukranian government, without saying so explicitly.)
> It feels like all the reporting organizations are deliberately trying to keep this information hidden
How would they know it to begin with? Something explodes, a civilian dies. Who is responsible? It’s not like each grenade has Yarosh’s business card on it.
> Tass phrases things in ways that imply the killing was mostly done the Ukranian government
That crisisgroup.org article describes the conflict as "a trench war, with roughly 75,000 troops facing off along a 420-km-long front line". It would be easy to tell which side the casualties were on by reporting which side of that line they were on. But the maps they present don't even show where that line was. It's the first time in my life I've ever seen a map of a battle that gave no indication where the battle line was, or who was on which side.
The front line is not a line, but rather a strip, quite a wide one, the so-called grey zone. To no-one’s surprise, that’s where most casualties are, both military and civilian.
Add to that friendly fire, sometimes intentional, and deciding who to blame becomes exceedingly difficult, even if done 100% in good faith, which is a tall order by itself.
A. Why do you call it “invasion” and “aggression” by Georgia? Georgian villages were shelled, a police vehicle got blown up, surely that merits some kind of police/military response?
B. Nobody is ever justified in ethnic cleansing, but Ukraine never had high levels of ethnic tensions. Not many people identify as ethnic Russians to begin with, they’re rather Russian-speaking Ukrainians. Watch the numerous videos of the current events, civilians are lashing out at occupiers in Russian more often than in Ukrainian. Which is to be expected, given that it’s the Russian-speaking regions that bear the brunt of the invasion. Yes, Putin calls it protecting the Russian-speaking people.
A. One of the tensions in the "liberal interventionist" viewpoint (also includes liberal noninterventionist and neocons although with less tension because both of those viewpoints tend to care less about perfect outcomes) is between self determination and the territorial integrity of states. It's less about hypocrisy and more about weighing the specifics of each case. The case of Georgia is less like what is happening in Ukraine right now and more like what would happen if Ukraine tried to reintegrate Crimea.
It is not an ethnic conflict, rather a political one. More Democrats vs Republicans, than Croats vs Serbs.
Divisions based on attitude towards USSR, or the role of Soviet Union in WW2 are more crucial then your primary language (everyone is bilingual in Ukraine) or “ethnicity”.
For example, when in 2014 Ukrainian army took some cities from separatists, there were no ethnic cleansing, because ehh well, they are the same people.
Important point is that separatists took their power by force, so they were not always liked by population.
> Instead of praising Russia for defending South Ossetia from Georgian aggression, we condemned the Ossetian separatists as "Russian proxies". Why?
I think there was both. Yes, the ethnic tensions were strong, yes, I've heard that Georgians aren't particularly liked by ethnic minorities within Georgia, and yes, in August 2008 Georgia decided to suppress the separatists and reassert control over the territory, which was done in a way that had to result in significant losses among non-combatants. (Although it was *extremely* convenient to Russia who even prepared 58th Army in advance of the attack, so this always seemed fishy to me.) But also, the separatists had significant support by Russia, including military/intelligence personnel (I cannot remember the name but I think they had had a Russian FSB officer close to a 2nd in command or something), so Russia was by no means a neutral side. And while Russian army was protecting the Ossetians, Ossetian separatists were forcibly expelling (if not killing) ethnic Georgians right before the Russians' eyes. So in conclusion, these were _some_ saviors.
(Also this is a bit of whataboutism but when a noble defender of separatists has recently killed some 100000 of its own population in two wars against separatists, praising them for doing the right thing this time feels odd.)
> would they be justified in ethnically cleansing
Ethnic cleansing is listed as a crime against humanity.
The real reason is that the whole operation was fully planned and prepared in Moscow. The Georgians invaded only to stop "defensive" shelling of their positions and civilian areas from a pre-evacuated city of Tskhinvali (similar to how DNR / LNR were partially pre-evacuated). Indeed, conveniently, the RU army was hiding in the bushes. If you paid close attention, they used the same playbook as they attempted to do this time in Ukraine - except this time the world was paying attention and it was obviously dumb, and that time it kind of worked.
You cannot plan for your opponent (unless you control them somehow, perhaps by infiltrating their intelligence and feeding them the wrong info). The Georgians could be baited into attacking, sure, but attacking wasn't their only possible response. But they did, and used Grads, giving Russian propaganda enough to picture Russian intervention in, at the very least, ambiguous light.
English is my second language, sorry. I understand "justify" as "to make something legal or morally right". I think "crime against humanity" answers both.
The fact that some authority "lists" ethnic cleansing as a crime against humanity doesn't make it true. If the only way for Ukraine to avoid becoming a pawn of Russia is to expel Russians, is that really a crime against humanity?
A. Because this was a movement, however genuine (and I would support the Osettian right to self-determination) that was orchestrated from Moscow.
B. No, but it's not likely: many of those fighting for Ukraine are ethnic Russians, and bilingualism in Russian is very common. It's Putin who is trying to make this an ethnic dispute, whilst Ukraine regards it as territorial as far as I can see.
Yeah, wanted to say the same thing: just because someone *speaks Russian language*, we should not automatically assume they *want to live in Russia*. (Actually, this is a part of Russian propaganda.)
A variant of the question that has already been asked:
1. What does Russia winning the war with Ukraine look like? Formal annexation of all of Ukraine and unification into a single country, formal annexation of just the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, formal annexation of just the parts of them that were previously occupied? Keeping borders intact but installing a puppet government? Annexing Ukraine and moving on? Do relations with Europe and the US (i.e. the countries currently imposing sanctions) feature in this at all?
2. What does Russia losing the war with Ukraine look like? Do the borders get redrawn? Do relations with Europe and the US (i.e. the countries currently imposing sanctions) feature in this at all?
1. Non-Donbass Ukraine will be demilitarized (think "all or most of standing army disbanded, equipment dismantled"); the resulting state will be dependent on Russia for security, probably though formal adoption of something like Budapest Memorandum (which was never ratified by any of the signatories) but this time legally binding.
Nationalist opposition (the one West expects to mount the long-term resistance) will be either expelled or jailed (the "de-nazification" part). Russia had a lot of experience with that from eliminating remains of Chechen rebels - who were a lot more motivated then Ukrainian nationalists seem to be.
Government is highly likely to change; the resulting government has to:
- recognize Crimea as part of Russia (thus dropping it as a problem on international stage)
- recognize LNR/DNR as independent (with or without eventually becoming part of Russia) in their previous administrative borders - not just "previously occupied by separatists" part.
- adoption of neutrality and dropping aspirations for NATO (they have to change constitution for that as Poroshenko put it in as "poison pill" when he was being voted out)
Ukraine as a whole is not going to be formally annexed.
US and Europe are the ones severing relations so far; they'll likely only be seen as source of currency. Such severing of ties have been expected the entire time, so it was already baked into decision to go ahead with military action and doesn't matter at all for expected duration of military operation.
Long-term relations are expected to shift as new multi-polar world order scheme becomes more visible with time; weight of importance of positive relations with US/Europe will be significantly reduced.
Russia winning probably means a puppet government in Kiev, possibly some of the eastern region annexed to Russia.
Russia losing means a return to the situation as of six months ago, with Ukrainian sentiment much more strongly anti-Russian and possibly NATO membership.
It's hard to see what Russia stands to gain from annexing all of Ukraine. That would get him land borders with Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania, all NATO members. Ukraine's economy sucks: it has a much lower per capita GDP than Russia. Annexation causes Putin to lose his buffer against NATO's next Napoleon/Hitler and makes Russia an overall poorer place. I'd put a very low probability on this.
Win = install puppet government, remove parts of the territory, kill all inconvenient people.
The formal annexation can wait. The puppet government will gladly do it 5 or 10 years later. At that moment, the emotions will calm down, and it will be like "hey, if they (the puppet government) decided voluntarily to join Russia, it's no one else's business".
This is pure speculation on my part. I wouldn't be surprised if Putin regrets his decision to invade. And if we could find some face saving way for him to pull out, he might take it. (Though on the over hand, I'm not sure anyone wants to help Putin save face. Just punish him.)
Everyone would help Putin save face if it meant saving the lives of people in this conflict. That's ridiculous. The US justice system is a prime example that punishment should only be for deterrence. For it's own sake, it's cruelty, and doesn't get us any progress.
Without deep insights into the culture and region it’s hard for me to know what I am talking about . But my sense is that it hard to hold a people unless there is something in it for them . And them being the majority . As we can see here , when the majority is considering themselves vulnerable to a virus they are ok with forcing it on others . So, so long as the majority of the people get something out of a Russian alliance they will likely accept the terms . The question is what is the hidden neo liberal globalist offering ? We paint it simply as Russia against Ukrain , but we know that there are outside stake holders that may want control in the region for their own benefits . The way the west has interests in Middle East oil
Russia needs to deploy a great propaganda plan where the majority can buy in and the marginal few can be somehow dehumanized to limit objection to their persecution or incentivize their departure . Like mandating vaccines to “ protect others “ and then associate those that don’t comply with anti social malice . And if the marginalized group objects and gains social support , then look for another crisis to diverge attention
Seems that China as a huge buyer of natural resources has big interests in Russia snd the region . It might want to limit resource control and seek more nation states but some kind of arrangement with China could reflect on better security for Ukrain and this a reason to come to the table . Obviously the neo liberal globalists are on the other side offering something else . Russia is kind of in a bind because it’s ability to defend it borders are at stake . Which suggests that it sees invasion by foreign powers as a real potential . Makes me wonder about Canada and America ( lots of lube)
I have no expertise in this whatsoever, so take what I'm about to say with a grain of salt.
1) Russia wins if it militarily defeats Ukraine, removes the current government, and installs a puppet regime. The Ukrainian people are angry and resentful, but whatever patriotic fervor they may have felt at the start of the war isn't sustained in the long term, and most people grudgingly accept the new status quo. The harshest Western sanctions against Russia start to really hurt Western countries, too, and popular support for them evaporates after it becomes clear that they failed to prevent Russia from achieving its goals. Some sanctions are kept in place to save face, but most are quietly dropped. Ukraine becomes a client state and the West is exposed as lacking the resolve to really prevent the ascendancy of Russia and other opposition powers.
This scenario is still very much a possibility. It really does seem like Russia is having a harder time than they may have initially hoped, but Ukraine and its allies also have every incentive in the world to propagandize and outright lie about how well they are doing (and they should -- this is an existential threat for Ukraine). Also, this war isn't even a week old. Even if the initial setbacks are real, they could be overcome in a matter of days.
2) I think there are more ways Russia can lose than ways that it can win. Maybe the patriotic fervor in Ukraine doesn't subside and the influx of weapons from the West allows the Ukrainian military to hold out for...who knows how long? Weeks? Months? Or maybe the Ukrainian military is defeated but the Ukrainian people are able to maintain a long-running insurgency? Either way, Russia isn't able to disengage, either because it still has troops in the field or because the puppet regime it sets up is too weak to survive without direct Russian support. This becomes Russia's Iraq or Afghanistan (again). Attention to Ukraine subsides in the West but it still remains in the public consciousness enough that support for the harshest sanctions remain high. Russia's economy suffers tremendously and other countries (e.g. China) don't do enough to help keep it afloat. As the cost for everyday Russians grows in both lives lost and economic hardship, Putin is forced to accept defeat and withdraw or be forced from power himself.
Or there is this scenario: Ukraine is forced to implement the Minsk agreement such that the Russian-occupied territories become autonomous regions in Ukraine, and Ukraine and NATO officially adopt a status of Ukrainian neutrality. This might have been a pretty decent outcome for Russia! But it seems like Putin has kind of painted himself into a corner by going on national TV and setting expectations really high -- explicitly, demilitarization and overthrow of the government, but implicitly, turning Uktraine into another Belarus while exposing the West as impotent and all talk. So I think a Minsk-like outcome has to be viewed as a defeat as well.
And even if Putin achieves his goals in Ukraine itself, it may be a Pyrrhic victory if it results in a totally isolated Russia, a more united and even expanded NATO, and a Europe more committed to its own self defense in the long term.
I can't venture a guess as to which of those scenarios is the most likely.
This might change as time goes on and Russians start really feeling the sanctions, but right now I put higher odds on him suffering a sudden stroke. By a tobacco box.
Russia can't conquer Ukraine. It's that simple. It's too big geographically, there's too many Ukrainians, and the Ukrainians aren't on board. Even if the Ukrainians were defeated in the field tomorrow, they've made it quite clear how they feel. Occupying a place with about a third of Russia's population, using a low-morale conscript army, where the enemy has a huge chunk of their population who speak your language fluently and look like you and also hate your guts? For decades of constant low-level warfare? Zero chance of that happening successfully. The question would be when the Russians left, not if. And that's leaving aside the likely extremely punishing sanctions that would result. No one in Europe wants to be next.
Putin could try installing a puppet government, but he'd end up having to occupy the place, which is the same problem and with even less benefit.
For a practical demonstration of this, look at the struggles Ukraine has had stomping out the Russian-backed rebellions, which almost certainly have less popular support than a Ukrainian resistance would, and with an army that's in a better position to do so than the Russian occupying forces would be.
Could he get some of the contested territories at the peace table? I don't think so. Could he get the Crimea? He might be able to trade Ukraine something for it, but I don't know what he could trade them that they'd want more than Crimea. And I don't see the Ukrainians being willing to give Crimea up either, if only for the principle. The Ukrainians know very well that if they give him an inch, he will declare victory and they will never be rid of him.
The only really sensible Ukrainian position is "our borders are our borders, you agreed they were, they are not changing." Anything else invites this again.
2. Define 'lose.' The Ukrainians are doing very very well. But the French did decently in the Fall of France, right up until the surrender.
Borders won't get redrawn. Putin will glass Ukraine before he gives up an inch of Russian territory. If Putin gets deposed, you MIGHT see reparations. Or Crimea being given back. If the Ukrainians are lucky enough to capture a huge quantity of Russian troops, the Ukrainian bargaining position gets very good, very fast.
Ukraine is very likely to be admitted to NATO fairly promptly, IMO, because the popular backlash of not doing that will be HUGE.
Ten to twenty years from now, I suspect victory or defeat look very similar. One of the things that makes this war v tragic.
Crimea is gone. There really is no realistic scenario in which Crimea is rightfully returned to Ukraine, barring a truly exceptional 1% chance that Russia turns a corner into an EU-like country in the next 10 years. Even if that happened in 15 years, the lives of people will have already solidified enough to prevent any want to reignite tensions. Donbas is a very different story.
Defining "win" and "lose" is what I was hoping to do, but I suppose the definition I was going for is "what does it look like for the war to be over and Russia's leadership (whoever that may be at the time) to be saying Russia won / lost."
My current mental model for the conflict is the Winter War with Finland, which did end with lands getting ceded from Finland to the Soviet Union. Why do you think that's a non-starter with Ukraine now?
What Watchman said, but also: the Finns were going to lose. Hard. The tide had, unfortunately, turned. Which would have meant Soviet occupation. As is, they lost some land, but kept independence etc. They also had zero hope of further outside assistance - not that the British and French didn't try.
We're also in a different geopolitical environment than 1940. Thanks to WWII and decolonization, the world is very keen on the idea of people having self-determination etc. Land grabs aren't popular the way they used to be.
Also, Putin doesn't want land. He wants power over Ukraine. Taking part of their territory doesn't do that - if anything, it drives Ukraine toward NATO and the West. He knows that.
And finally, the Russians explicitly guaranteed Ukraine's borders as part of them giving up nukes. So there is a principle at stake beyond even the usual ones.
Are we dismissing the Russian POV as spurious? Without considering it? The presence of NATO on Russia's border is provocative and could have been addressed by the West saying something like "Ukraine will never be part of NATO". Which I understand is the case, prohibited by various treaties. The "special military operation" into Southern Ukraine seems to be a ruse de guerre, although I can't think of any insightful reporting from the region - a total absence of information there - on which to base an opinion.
Putin's proclaimed POV is that NATO, the NATO that won't even defend an invasion of Ukraine, is a valid threat to attacking Russian soil. Does that sound like cognitive dissonance to you?
Yes, of course it spurious. It's absolutely indefensible to claim that NATO poses a threat to Russia proper. Any issue Russia has with NATO is one of not being able to do what it wants with its neighbors. It's even more absurd when you listen to Putin's recent fabrications of history that he's been giving in regards to Ukraine. It's NOT that he respects Ukrainian sovereignty and merely wishes to keep NATO away. He thinks that Ukraine is an illegitimate state and that most of its territories were taken from Russia and given to Ukraine by certain soviet leaders. And that therefore, Russia should be free to do with as it wishes with Ukraine and its people.
And it's completely unreasonable for Russia to not be okay with NATO on their doorstep when they're literally annexing parts of Ukraine and funding terrorist rebels in another part of Ukraine. Russian aggression is precisely why Ukraine WANT to be part of NATO.
Imagine if Ukraine had armed Ukrainian rebels in Russia trying to take Russian territory away from the Russian government. Would you or anyone else supporting Russia's current invasion claim that Ukraine had "valid security concerns" when Russia predictably began crushing these rebels like insects? Of course not!
NATO was already on Russia's border via Norway, Estonia, and Latvia. More, if you count the Kaliningrad exclave. Latvia and Estonia are actually much closer to the Russian population centers (ie Moscow and St. Petersberg) than Ukraine is. Putin's pretext is nonsensical on its face.
I've only had access to conventional reports and analysis, however it does seem that the ongoing refusal by NATO and the USA to guarantee Ukraine's exclusion from NATO was a direct casus belli. A red flag to the bull.
Putin has always wanted to take Ukraine. EU and US intelligence and diplomats understood this. Ukraine joining NATO would have shut the door on that opportunity. It was now or never for Putin. Too bad we couldn't have found a way for Ukraine to join sooner. NATO expansion has never been a genuine threat to Russia's security; it has only ever been a threat to Russia's expansionist ambitions.
Bret Devereaux (military historian probably familiar to many readers here) makes a good case that "promise Ukraine stays out of NATO" was a red herring and would make no difference:
Also, NATO is already on Russia's border (Estonia, Latvia). Finland is not officially a part of NATO, but it certainly functions as one. I think very little of what comes out of Putin's mouth can be taken at face value.
A meta-commentary on the form of ROT13 punchline: in addition to the timing it provides to help overly fast readers, it makes me feel partially responsible for the outcome. I knew the likely outcome of pasting that text into rot13.com (a bit of a groan), but I did it anyway. I can't be mad at Alex Power; I have only myself to blame.
I've been digging around a lot lately to find the most interesting magical systems in video games. Dominions 3-5 is a pretty obvious example as well as, duh, Master Of Magic.
However I haven't found a ton of great stuff. There's no game where Divination magic really does much, even in sim games like Academagia. Very few games have meaningful Illusion magic. No game has any sort of Charm/Manipulation magic that does much.
Combat magic and enchantments that impact combat are the most common type for obvious reasons. You might occasionally find weather or geography magic.
Shadow Of Forbidden Gods has the most sort of manipulation magic. It is basically a game where you pretend to be an evil god trying to conquer the world. Except your conquer it through dark magic and deception. Some of the magic is a bit simple but at least it actually involves interesting non-combat spells. Enshadowing important characters, driving people insane, etc.
Still trying to dig up niche games that I might have missed with unique magic.
What do you mean by magical systems? If you mean it in the broadest sense of parts of games that are explained to be magic, Tower of Time and Iron Danger are interesting. Their core mechanic is magic: in the former the RTS strategy and dialogue system is enabled through a combination of divination and telepathy and in the latter the system of scrubbing time forward and back is fluffed to be time magic.
Or are you limiting it to be not full mechanics, but bags of effects that interact with mechanics (levers?) that are explained to be magic? As in fireballs and lighting bolts which function in much the same way as RPGs and AK-47s in a different game.
Or in a third way, are you referring to economic systems that are fluffed as magic (mana systems, Vancian magic, etc)?
Or are you perhaps willing to step back further and look at mechanics and levers that exist in games that are not typically written as magic, but fit our expectations of magic if they were explained/fluffed differently?
(and while I'm here, I'll also mention Unexplored 2 which has an interesting geomancer-type magic where you can cast certain spells within a certain distance of specific plant/geological formations)
To rep my main game, Diablo II: necromancer curses confuse and attract, assassin mind blast and cloak of shadows, barbarian taunt and howl all seem to fit your non combat spells criteria. For a 20 year old hack and slash ARPG it’s interesting that they managed to fit such mechanics in so well.
Vision: Soft Reset is more sci-fi than magic, but it has the coolest implementation of a character who can see the future I've seen in gaming. You can see "shadows" of future attacks before they happen, you can briefly rewind time if you do get hit (fluffed as your character seeing the future and doing something different), and even your save function is represented as your character's ability to see possible futures, with each save point not only saving your current state but also your position on the timeline.
Lords of Magic isn't super-duper unique. But is an interesting game with a fairly wide number of spells and is cheap. Weather and geography magic are things, as are divination magic.
I don't recall anything particularly interesting as far as Divination. Can you detail that at all? Same for weather. I know all MoM games do geography stuff.
Divination is mostly related to dispelling the fog of war, though I have a recollection of some other options. Geography lets you adjust terrain types and I THINK elevation. Thinking back, most of the weather spells actually work out to be buffs.
The elder scrolls games have a fair amount of illusion magic in them in addition to other sorts, including charm/manipulation spells such as making NPC's more agreeable.
Lack of divination magic isn't all that surprising since it would require either giving away a lot of the plot in advance or actually predicting the future which makes it difficult to apply to anything other than random chance events that the game can determine in advance.
If you want utility magic, a lot of minecraft mods have that. Thaumcraft and Astral Sorcery are both pretty interesting systems. Thaumcraft requires the player to research magic by exploring and breaking down things in the world, it also incorporates an aura mechanic that if the player abuses the system in certain ways can result in the formation of tainted land which spreads corruption and spawns evil entities. Astral Sorcery revolves around studying constellations that provide magic effects and can be harnessed to a variety of uses. Other popular magic mods include Botania (magic plants) and Blood Magic (magic fueled by blood: yours or others).
Strategy games that are well designed have some good uses for future sight. Any game can use scrying. I agree that Divination in straight crpgs would be iffy.
I wonder if it would be worth the effort to program in divination cut scenes into games, where a character can choose to use divination and look at different parts of the game world for side quests or hints at the main quest(s), but not outright spoilers. If it's required that just becomes part of the game, and isn't all that exceptional (lots of games have cut scenes of things the characters don't see directly, sometimes even through divination).
For an open world game, like WoW, divination could show you live information from a distance. I don't think there's any technological reason a character couldn't case a spell to look at an open world zone. Maybe as an camera view with different levels of control (full controls, static view, attached to another character or NPC, etc.).
A very sweet short story about an AI based on Kermit.
I've got something in the back of my mind about it possibly being easier to build an AI around an excellent simulation of a human rather than trying to build one from scratch or basing it on actual humans.
Chuck Palahniuk, in his book Adjustment Day, introduces the idea that patriarchal cultures organise wars between themselves whenever the number of young men in their country reaches a certain level. The idea is that the older men feel threatened by younger ones, so they do this to keep their numbers down. I wonder, is there is any statistical backing to this notion?
My guess is that having lots of young men doesn't provide the motive for war - instead it provides the means. You only start a war if you think you can win, and having lots of young men gives you an advantage.
Palahniuk got the idea from reading German economist Gunnar Heinsohn (Palahniuk said so on the Joe Rogan podcast), who came up with that idea around the turn of the century. I don't know whether translations of his work exist, but reading his German wiki it seems that Heinsohn bases his theory on historical examples rather than a statistical argument.
Thank you for the interesting background. It seems to me, as not a stat expert, that there likely would be data for numbers of say males under age 25 in different countries and at different times. Likewise for wars between countries. Just wondered if anyone had had a go at lining those up.
Why would the older men in a patriarchal culture be threatened by the younger ones? Their competition is their contemporaries, the other father's, the other heads of households, those also in the generation who by definition hold power.
On the statistical issue, I doubt there's a proper patriarchal society with the data you need. After all, the collection of population data implies a central bureaucracy which in turn implies this is not a patriarchy but some form of centralised state (that these were ruled by patriarchal norms does not make them pure patriarchal cultures).
I can offer you one argument against this proposal though. In early-medieval Ireland there seems to have been a pressure valve for excess young warriors, which was a passive acceptance of bands of renegade youths effectively acting as independent warbands/bandits (delete as appropriate I guess). This meant young warriors could go away and seek wealth if there were limited opportunities in their own tribe. I'm not sure how proven this interpretation is though, but young warriors traveling for opportunities is certainly a characteristic of European patriarchal tribal society from at least 200 BC to 700 AD, and probably a lot earlier and later.
I think I would look first at what are the interests of the nation of Russia amongst its neighbors in the context of what power is at play on the global stage . I think it is just so lame to be associating such actions to the presentation of the persona of the Russian leader . First start with the strategic position and trends in power , then to historical and cultural context . Last would he the personality of the leader representation .
What is interesting to me is how quickly memes were in circulation using the war as a way to devalue protests about vaccine mandates. And it’s interesting to me that my sane radicalized left friends have been on the support Ukrain wagon right away . The same people posting hate memes about the vaccine hesitant ( who are basically suffering from income deprivation and access denial ) are the sane people with Ukrain colours on their faces . So it’s hard not to include the war crisis as a measure in context to a weakening social position
Not wanting to get a vaccine because you're scientifically illiterate is not really comparable to have your home destroyed by Russian missiles. What's really weird is your conflation of the two.
Wow. It's incredible to me that some people have become this brain damaged by dumb American culture war stuff. What's so 'interesting' about 'radicalized' lefties supporting Ukraine right away despite treating the 'vaccine hesitant' disdainfully. The vaccine mandate protestors were rightfully mocked from the beginning, and they were never popular. The conflict in Ukraine has basically nothing to do with vaccine mandates and protestors or whatever in America. It sounds like you have an unhealthy preoccupation with those issues. Get help.
I am pro-Ukraine, because that is the collectivist thing to do.
I am pro-vaccine mandate because that is the collectivist thing to do.
I will be for whatever I think is good for the freedom of individuals up until the point where I think it is bad for the collective, then I will be against it.
That’s good input to appreciate . I’ll have to ruminate on that for a while .
My first thoughts go to the question of how one determines what is actually good for the collective . It seems to be very perception oriented . Where as jurisprudence suggests that established laws and enshrined values is how we necessarily continue to progress toward concepts that meet this balance . Where as , extra judicial powers by pass jurisprudence and can not offer a process of ensuring the determination of collective good as valid .
Another rad left thing: Suspicion of any bougie legal system.
In my more paranoid moments, I feel like there are only two laws: The law of the mob, and the law of the oligarch.
Eg, We can pretend all we like about "jurisprudence" and "enshrined values" but if you look at what actually happens: oligarchs get whatever they want, and the proles get juuuuuuust enough to keep them from hauling out the guillotines.
This might just be doomerism, but on the other hand: Consider every major political and financial scandal over the past 100 years; and total up the time served and damages payed, and become depressed.
You might rephrase it as pro-social, if it helps. Getting vaccinated is good for me personally, but also for my family and community. Opposing a Bond villain reconquering a territory that only got freed a few decades ago is good for the community too, though only in the larger, community of nations sense.
OTOH, there are limits. We're all on the Putin bad train, but virtually none of us are for sending troops, so how much do the memes really matter?
Well, the memes and face painting are. And likely the Ukrainians' as well, at least in the short term. But does futile mean it isn't worthwhile? I don't know. Maybe Putin conquers Ukraine in the end, but it takes a while and the memory of the generation that fought means that another generation can have another color revolution and throw the Russians out. Or maybe it doesn't, and the Ukrainian children of today, and their children, and their children as raised as "little Russians" and they come to be ashamed of this generation and embrace Putin as the father of their country.
I don't think it's knowable right now. But, I think that the fight they're putting up makes it much more likely they remember their national identity, rather than get subsumed into Russia. Does that mean it's not futile? Or do we have to wait a generation or three to decide?
Nah's heuristic approximates my own approach. Self-interest tends to take care of itself, while collectivism is anti-entropic and takes a bit of necessary work.
I recommend the book "Prisoners of Geography" https://g.co/kgs/rUqLYZ which does a good job of framing conflicts in terms of geographical reality including Ukraine/Russia.
Yes, Prisoners of Geography and Caspian Report Youtube channel (linked above) are fairly similar (correct, educated, layman-understandable) POV with respect to history and geopolitics.
Is it now permanently AI summer? eg maybe deep this or adversarial that might fall to a hype cycle but in general there will never be another AI winter?
I think we've diversified past another true AI winter. The previous AI winters happened because the whole field was dependent on Department of Defense funding. That single point of failure is gone, and we'll get AI autumn at worst.
i think this is AI winter.. ai has kind of peaked the past few years, we will still see novel applications and throwing more hardware at models to get better results, and alot of the hype use cases like self driving are being now understand as proxies for general ai
but current tech is not on the pathway to general AI, we need a big breakthrough , possibly in our understanding of how the brain works , until that breakthrough happens, its winter
there are breakthroughs in understanding how the brain works- see the qualia institute. The thing is, they're not getting much coverage in science press, and they yield no practical insights for AI other then the brain is nothing like AI.
So no culture war allowed versus no politics allowed. I'm trying to draw a Venn diagram for these things. My sense is that culture wars is a subset of political, is this your sense? But I then get stuck trying to think of things that are political, but not part of culture wars... maybe there is not much of a difference?
Somehow I feel that analysis of Trump would be considered CW, but analysis of Biden would not be considered CW. Do others share this sentiment or is it just me?
(Apologies if this comment is considered CW, I assumed it would be fine since it's meta level)
I have a cousin I saw a couple of weeks ago at my sister's house. My BiL drives for Sysco, and he was talking about the run up in prices for the various foods he delivers. My cousin's contribution was, "Well, that's what we get with Brandon right? I mean, I saw this coming, I warned you guys, but you're both Brandon voters, aren't you?" He hit that Brandon thing hard and chuckled when he did it. I was certainly annoyed and would liked to have brought up unemployment, GDP growth, wage growth for the lowest quintile of workers, all that sort of thing. But I was 30 min from leaving and let the whole thing go. My cousin is a lovely fellow otherwise and we usually either don't discuss politics or do so carefully. I don't what possessed him to piss all over Joe Biden - probably everyone he knows is doing it and it didn't occur to him that I still like the guy.
All of which is to say, there is certainly a way to talk about Joe Biden and his management of the US during the war that would be CW, as least for me.
The only reason I changed the description today was that I know lots of people will want to talk about Ukraine, I'm fine with that, and I didn't want them worrying about whether it counted as "politics".
Fiscal and regulatory issues are deeply political, but generally aren't inherently culture war, especially if you keep the discussions at a policy-wonk level.
Maybe so, maybe no. Many of your beliefs around fiscal issues are likely to be wrong if you treat all populations as 100% identical or anywhere close to it.
E.g. I see countless people make predictions related to fiscal issues where they treat immigrants as fiscally 100% fungible with the native population when this is often not even close to true.
OK I guess I just have a hard time drawing hard lines between things. (Everything is fuzzy at the boundaries.) Years ago the local community had a 'vigorous debate' about putting in wind farms.
Things that aren't all that controversial could be political but not culture war. The obvious current event would be the Russo-Ukrainian war. It's obviously politics, but I think it's unlikely to kick off a culture war style pissing contest, because probably almost all the commentariat agrees about it. We could probably have a thread of updates and predictions pretty easily. OTOH, a discussion of how the invasion is all Trump's fault, or all Biden's, would be culture war, I think.
OK, I guess I have a very USA centric view of what 'political' means in this context. (I take 'political' to be US-political.) So that taking about protests in Hong Kong, for instance, would always be allowed for an odd numbered thread. And then I think of Canadian protests, which would not be allowed, and counter to my point. I did see Scott Aaronson's blog post on Ukraine go down the culture-war, 'who's to blame' path.
A lot of canadian and European politics are framed around western "culture war issues" whereas the Hong Kong protests really weren't.
Ukraine and Russia is comparable- there are some tangential things that could be considered culture war stuff, but the main thrust has nothing to do with- immigration, gender theories, wokeness, Trump, etc.
Is anyone finding the conflict in Ukraine... underwhelming from a technical point of view? It's horrific in human costs. But everything seems so botched and twenty or thirty years ago that there's nothing new or exciting that I've seen. Weapons systems look, if anything, less sophisticated than recent wars. Cyberwarfare is wider but blunter than similar attempts a decade ago. Putin's new economic strategy doesn't seem to have actually worked. Tactics wouldn't be out of place in Chechnya. And so on.
Normally you can see how dramatic moments hold lessons for the future. Give hints on how to fight the next war. But all I'm not getting any of that. The one big update was that the Washington security state appears to have completely called this one top to bottom. It makes me wonder if everyone spent the last twenty years kind of upset about having to work on this whole terrorism thing and hoping they could get back to their TRUE passion, great power conflict.
It seems to me that Russia has handled the logistics incredibly poorly. Tanks stuck in mud, trucks running out of fuel, etc. Maybe Putin demanded the invasion against the advice of his top generals--or maybe his generals are a bunch of yes-men.
I worry that if Putin gets more desperate we will see a lot more artillery/missile/air strikes against civilian populations (it looks like we're seeing that in Kharkiv today).
Probably the latter. And while the narrative is Putin has become deranged, he is probably smart enough to realize he has surrounded himself with "yes men"
I do think we're seeing the west massively win the cyberwarfare. Social media is filled with Russian atrocities and destroyed or abandoned tanks, while you hardly see any Russian wins unless to show cruelty. It might be my filter bubble, but basically anyone showing the Russian side of things also went silent. Some might just saw the Russian side beforehand but ceased defending it after Putin actually started war (I'm one of them), but I'm sure there's also a lot of censoring going on and anyone just being less negative is immediately labeled a Russian bot.
Now, I don't wan't to complain too much because honestly, Ukraine now needs all support (moral and otherwise) we can give them. And I obviously support them, just to state the obvious and not be labeled a bot again. But, on the other hand, our picture of how this war is going, how rational Putin acts and what is actually going on might be severely distorted. After a few years, when the fog of war has lifted, it will be interesting to see whether this was really as boring as it's portrayed right now.
I think you define cyberwar differently than I do. I'd call what you described "meme warfare" or just propoganda. Cyber warfare would be taking IT systems of critical infrastructure offline - which I don't think we've really seen at all (exception: Anonymous hacking some Russian websites - but those aren't critical infrastructure).
I'm not terribly surprised. An awful lot of major US military vehicles are incrementally improved versions of platforms that entered service closer to the end of WW2 than to today.
The midpoint is 1982. The M1 Abrams entered service in 1980, the Bradley in 1981, the F-15 in 1976, the F-16 in 1978, and the B-52 all the way back in 1955.
A lot of the incremental improvements are substantial, especially in terms of fire control and precision guided munitions. And there are some major platforms that came out more recently: B-2s in 1989, Strykers in 2002, Crusaders in 2001, F-22s in 2005, F-35s in 2015, Ford-class carriers, Virginia-class submarines, etc. But most of these were either available for most of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan (the "recent wars" I expect you're referring to) or are naval assets that aren't central to a land war like the current Ukraine conflict.
And while Russia's been trying to keep up in terms of military capabilities with the US and the rest of NATO, they've got a lot less to work with in terms of both R&D/procurement budget and the domestic civilian high-tech industry to leverage to develop new military tech, so it doesn't surprise me they look underwhelming in the field compared to what US-led coalitions were doing twenty years ago.
My view (as someone in Ukraine) is that Russia’s army was good at PR, and at picking easy targets.
It feels like they use Afghan-era technology at most, and post-Soviet Russia never really had the budget and institutions to have a good R&D. I’m no military expert, mind you, but I’ve just read about troubled development of Su-57, it is probably symptomatic for all Russian military industrial complex.
Thanks a lot! At the moment, infrastructure is working, we have electricity, heating, internet, you can buy food (a bit tricky). But air raid sirens are going off all the time, and you never know what will happen next.
To me the most interesting part of wars are the public relations, propaganda, and politics. The coordination between nations, the signaling, the use of cell phone videos and social media is taking on a new level. Great powers have less control of the narrative than ever before. I hope one of the hints for the next war is that boots on the ground invasions are increasingly difficult. Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Ukraine are evidence that subjugating populations with military force is very difficult.
But is this case a counterexample of Great powers having less control of the narrative? Here "great powers" are overwhelmingly on Ukraine's side (or kinda on the sidelines like China), and the narrative that dominates is the one these great powers want (i.e. anti-Russia), which also aligns with what most people would naturally think given the videos and all.
Within Russia yeah, the Russian government is the Great Power. But is it obviously failing here? Are Russians overwhelmingly against Putin and this war?
The war is 5 days old and the amount of video and photos is overwhelming already. It is pretty hard to keep a secret in this environment. Contrast that with Vietnam, when entire villages were napalmed without anyone ever finding out.
You can be pro Putin and anti war, and if Russian media loses control of the narrative then more people will take this view. In past times it could take years for a population to have enough info about a war to question the party line.
How do you know what you are not finding out about this conflict? I don't have confidence in the veracity of any of the coverage that we are seeing from Ukraine.
Anyone got recommendations for good technical audio content (podcast/lectures) on stats/ML stuff? (Not intro level, more something for someone who's actually worked in the field)
You'll want to stay inside for as long as possible, up to two weeks or so, and lack of water is probably going to be the main thing that would prevent you from doing so.
I've read advice like this before (and thanks for posting it, everyone should have at least a vague idea of fallout survival) and I know that important thing is that if you're in a fallout area you need to stay inside an keep air from getting in. If you have it, you use plastic sheeting and duct tape to seal off any way air can get in.
My question is, how long until you run out of air? If you used duct tape and plastic sheeting to seal the windows, doors, and vents in a regular bedroom, how long could you stay in there before the air gets bad?
Rule of thumb is one hour per cubic meter of air per person - that's for the air "getting bad" to a serious degree from carbon dioxide accumulation. Not immediately lethal, but you'll feel like crap, your mental performance will be impaired, and if you've already got other health issues it will be worse. If you're otherwise healthy, you'll probably *survive* 3-5 hours/m^3, but towards the end of that period, don't count on being able to open a window (or remembering what a window is).
A human uses about 200 liters of oxygen per day. If you have a 1000 sq ft building with regular 10 foot ceilings, that gives you 10000 cubic feet of air, or 283,000 liters, of which about 20% is oxygen, or 56,000 liters. After the concentration falls below 10% or so most people would die, so that gives you 28,000 liters, or 140 days. Carbon dioxide accumulation doesn't become fatal until the high single digit percentages, so that probably wouldn't be the limiting factor either.
So a theoretical 10'x10'x10' room would have 28,000 liters of air, 5,600 liters of oxygen, 2,800 liters until you reach deadly low amounts. So in that theoretical room, airtight, you could breathe for 14 days.
I imagine there's a lot more complexity to it than that (such as air circulation and metabolic rates and such) but it's good to have a ballpark of 2 weeks, since that's about how long you'd ideally want to hunker down anyway.
It was in the last thread. It doesn't need to be reposed unless its trying to continue a conversation, talk about something that's updated, etc. Posting the same link week after week is just spam.
Agree with Patricia, this seems qualitatively different than posting a link to your substack every week. I also hadn't seen it before (I rarely read every single post in an Open Thread) and found it quite helpful.
That said, for future threads I think it would be better included in some other post, like a list of helpful links to e.g., interesting news sources, charities working to help Ukraine, etc. Hmm.
I understand re spam. Different POV FWIW: I found it useful because I don’t read every comment on every open thread (not a requirement as far as I know) so had not seen it before and found it useful. Seems to me a repost is not *necessarily* spam, but I may not be fully informed wrt posting conventions here. In any event, thanks for your reply! :)
I actually have a very basic question: how do I form a prediction about future events using Bayes' theory? For instance, consider the following question: Will AI surpass humans at solving competitive math problems by 2025? I want to say yes, seeing as AI seems to be doing pretty well at that front. But how should I quantify that certainty? Is it 80% or 70%?
Bayes' theory doesn't do a lot by itself. You still have all the work of collecting representative data, building models (which can either be Bayesian or not), and all the techniques of the scientific method. Some of the benefits are purely discursive.
If people have to give an actual probability rather than a sentiment, people can be held accountable (either positively or negatively) for their predictions. No more Oracle-style "If you go to war, a great empire will fall" bullshit. Additionally, if people use probabilities as the basis of betting, people have strong incentives to give their actual probability instead of as a kind of signalling.
It's also easier to aggregate explicit probabilities than sentiments and to hone in on principles of disagreement. That is, if your probabilities are based on chains of conditional probabilities and simple priors, it's amenable to analytic methods.
Take your issue, "Will AIs surpass humans at solving competitive math problems by 2025?"
I might say, "My probability is only 5%," and follow up with, "This has to do with the absence of certain precursors to such an achievement. I would expect (90% chance) that AIs would be used in some positive capacity by researchers before they were used to solve competition problems (which can also be research problems)."
In an informal context, one of the best primers on hands-on Bayesian analysis I've seen is in "How to Measure Anything", where the author takes you through a "confidence calibration" exercise. This is designed to make the reader more honest about exactly how certain he is of his existing knowledge. If a perfectly-calibrated estimator says they're 70% confident about each question in a list of ten, they will get exactly 3 of them wrong.
This is all done using the information already in your head, and is very similar to what Scott did on his prediction review post from a few weeks ago. Where this ties into (again, informal) Bayesian analysis is that when you understand how good your estimates are in the absence of any new information, you simultaneously get a better sense for how much additional certainty each new bit of information is worth.
Bayes' theorem tells you how to update your beliefs based on your prior estimates of probability, but it doesn't tell you what those priors should be.
Suppose you believed before today that there was a 20% chance that AI would be equal to humans in math olympiad problems by 2025 (P(A) = .2), and a 30% chance that OpenAI would be able to make some significant progress on math olympiad problems this year (P(B) = 0.3) , and the probability that OpenAI will report this level of progress progress in a world where AI is on track to be equal to humans in 2025 is 80% (P(B|A) = 0.8). In that case, your new probability that we're on track to beat humans given the observation that OpenAI did indeed show this progress on math olympiad problems is 53% (P(A|B) = 0.8 * 0.2/0.3)
But of course, I just pulled those numbers out of a hat. Using Bayes' theorem requires you to give a honest accounting of what probability you believe something will happen before it happens, which could be hard to do while reading news like this.
To do stuff with Bayes, you need data. Sometimes the only data that people use are guesses coming out of the black box of their head. If you want uncertainty to be modeled, you'll need to ask that black box for some uncertainty on the guesses it's giving you.
No culture wars, but politics and bloody wars ok? - So, personal update: the Ukrainian town where I own a small apartment got liberated/de-militarized/de-nazified by Putin's men this morning, i.e. occupied by the Vlad-the-Invader. No fighting there, it seems/I hope. - I actually do not care for the flat, but hey, what makes me cringe and break in tears when I hear Ukranians on TV or see flash-protests in Moscow/Piter against the war? - Does not seem rational. - My disgust about Putin is easily explained: out-grouping the enemy. Seems to me evol.-psychology/anthropology/sociology do not put enough stress on the strengths of in-grouping-instincts. "Hate" seems to get more attention than "love". (btw: I am no hippie, think: Batman. Lego-Batman.)
You do realize that Putin is causing people to die, right? Also, a lot of capital is being destroyed which makes a lot of people's lives much worse off, right? And if these people are those you know or associate with or share culture or values with or whatever, then it's a lot easier to have empathy for them.
It's a few hundred years old, but Adam Smiths Theory of Moral Sentiments still explains the power of empathy to change behavior and emotion better than anything else I've read.
Not that I disagree, but there are not very many people dead right now (I know a boy in Ukraine I played chess with, one of my German students. - Was killed. - 20 years ago by a car on Dnipros main street. Driven by ex-cops. - &/%/& deep breath: I guess, if I have a point it is: war kill people, lots of stuff kill people, so what. - Capital being destroyed: My shares shall recover - the sad thing about most of Ukraine is how little capital there was created those last 3 decades. - Yeah, sharing culture - but if I hear about a kid of the Sambian People (Papua) I .. react ... just as fine. We humans seem to be very able to identify with one under attack. - Me just curious that - unlike Adam Smith - modern science seems to be mostly: "Is it? Meh". But agression/diversity/pre-school/... needs further research.
I hope I'm wrong, but I think the worst of the brutality is to come. The US policy people seem ready treat Ukraine as another Afghanistan - a place where the anti-Russian insurgency will deplete and collapse the Moscow government. Far from helping Ukraine repel the Russians, NATO will feed them just enough weapons to keep the insurgency deadly and endless. The incredible human and material cost to Ukraine itself will just be collateral damage. America didn't lose much sleep over how badly Afghanistan was destroyed in the 80's. We just celebrated the fatal wounds they inflicted on the Soviets and congratulated ourselves for shrewdly feeding them the weapons that enabled it. Why would this time be different?
Why do you think it's irrational for Russians to protest against the war? Yes, it's unlikely that they'll single-handedly stop the war and highly likely that they'll get arrested for it, but it also seems unlikely that it would have literally zero impact on Putin's decision making.
Putin's decision to carry on the war is going to be affected by a number of factors, but "will to fight" - aka "how many dead Russians will the people accept before the protests get out of hand" is probably one of them.
oops, my statement was: I am irrational - in being so touched by the protests. "We see you". - And they do send a relevant message to Putin; I gave war a less than 60% chance, cuz I got used to Putin paying attention to the popular mood. Seems sth. changed.
I just read WaPo and WSJ - and not too much, as Europeans seem to have more feet on the ground (German: NZZ, Spiegel, engl: TE). I do not expect "media" , esp. TV, to be extremely accurate. (How in 2 minutes or 20? - They could try harder, though.) - And the TV guys are always so hard looking for blood&heartbreak, makes me sick. - That said: They all got the term "invasion" right. Good. - Most still report Putin-talk as "actions/intentions" instead of just: Whatever lie helps best. - If you ask real Ukrainians you can get a lot of different impressions, and they are indeed very different. - Then it is actually hard to know the details even if you are in town. - I just got a private message that Berdjansk was actually not taken this night/morning (and I do not see even this as a final statement, just no inner-city fighting /no mil. presence. Though the smallish old "military"-airport in the north might very well have been taken. So, what DO you report? And how you show it?) - Some newspapers today claim, Putin must be "surprised" by the "strong" defense of Ukraine. How long has it been? A decade? A year? A month? - 4 days. Debilism is the Russian word for this. With "bonded distrust" US-media should be ok. Just not my first source.
later that day I saw the video of Russian soldiers in front of the city-admin. Yep, that is Berdjansk all right https://www.n-tv.de/mediathek/videos/politik/Wuetende-Ukrainer-konfrontieren-Soldaten-in-Berdjansk-article23164435.html - at lunch time it seems (not that this clock is always reliably working). Quite a crowd for this occasion. In a place where less than 5% spoke Ukrainian as first language 20 years ago and many might not dislike a Russian passport per se. - Slava Ukraina - all that does not bode well for a "Putin-Victory" in the longer term.
I tried playing with Manifold as unlike other prediction markets it is not requiring cryptocurrency and has something as reward for predicting well[1]. But Manifold has many very silly estimates like
Events that already happened sitting below 100% (Kiev invasion by Russia) are embarrassing for a prediction market.
It is barely profitable to estimate that chance for exploding nuclear weapon over populated area is below 4%
No idea how to solve it but "Will aliens land before March 2022?" at 1% and being unable to profit from pushing it lower and risking that it would mistakenly resolve as yes is extra-silly.
Any idea how to solve THAT in context of Manifold? What is going wrong? Or is it fundamental problem of "runner of market resolves it without recourse".
(BTW, I created https://manifold.markets/M/by-20220401-manifold-representative "By 2022-04-01 Manifold representative will admit that reward function used as of 2022-02-28 results in silly results for nearly impossible/certain events." - any idea how to increase chance that will be at least noticed by them?)
[1] instead of Metaculus primarily awarding answering a lot, without regards for quality - you can answer at absurd levels but ensuring that no matter answer you gain points, making such points irrelevant
It's silly to interpret the number given by a prediction market as a prediction. You've got to take the time value of money (among other things) into account.
The situation is a bit foggy but depending how you define "invade" my impression is that Russian troops have entered Kiev and been pushed back a few times.
> Or is it fundamental problem of "runner of market resolves it without recourse".
Basically that plus the fact that it's all play money and the liquidity of most markets isn't that high.
The market for "Will 1=1 on January 1st 2023?" currently sits at 92%, which means that a 100 M$ bet lets you make a 3% interest rate over 10 months time. If we were talking about real money, a 3% interest rate would be plenty interesting to get people to lock up their money for that time period, but this is play money and I have no idea if I will still care about Manifold in 10 months, which means there is little reason for me to participate in this market.
> Events that already happened sitting below 100% are embarrassing for a prediction market.
Don't know about that. I am not under the impression that Manifold markets are precise enough to distinguish between eg. a 55% or 50% chance of an event happening, so why would it be embarrassing that they can't distinguish between a 95% and 100% chance?
> There is no legitimate uncertainty whether Russia attacked Ukraine or Kyiv
Agreed. I'm not trying to argue that there is uncertainty there (just as there is no uncertainty as to whether 1=1 in 2021). I'm just saying that it's not necessarily embarrassing that the markets don't reflect this lack of uncertainty.
It's just one of the limitations of Manifold markets in their current form/popularity that they are very bad/unable to distinguish between >90% chance and 100% chance. I don't think this is a bigger problem than the markets being unable to distinguish between 50% and 55%, which they almost certainly aren't either.
I would like to be less selfish, hedonist, and egoistic. Meditation is often mentioned as being helpful, but does anyone have other non-faith practices that help with working on having a purer heart?
These were wonderful replies! To add my own perspective here, I find that spending time with family, especially more selfless older people, reminds me to love more freely. I almost never have to make difficult and sacrificial decisions like they did.
Volunteer for some non-selfish cause that you think you're likely to find fulfilling as an experience. It's fine if it's not the sort of cause that an efficient altruist is likely to think is an efficient use of your time, so long as it's not a serious waste of resources. I helped out for a year or so at an after-school program for underprivileged kids a while back and it was good for me--and hopefully also a little helpful to the kids. Act and the feelings will follow, especially if it leads you to make connections with people less fortunate than yourself.
Do shrooms, or failing that, other psychedelics. They let you see the world in a less ego-driven way, and you remember that perspective for a long while.
I apologize if I come as insensitive or if I'm beside the point. You may want to do the opposite, and research enlightened egoism. One one hand you may find interesting stuff. Also even for the primary goal of being less selfish, it's probably more efficient to have your mind understand the larger picture and align your goals better.
I'm not sure where to send you for this... the classic source for this is Ayn Rand, but ... well, it's Ayn Rand. She's a good writer, though. Sword of Truth is a fantasy series that's pretty heavy into that stuff. EY has a very short fantasy novella that makes the point with his usual lack of subtlety, something something girl corrupted by the internet. Definitely not Ayn Rand philosophy, but if you want non fiction, google "John Galt speech".
I know it turned out to be the very opposite recommendation, so again sorry if I'm being impolite. I think the chances of it helping what you want to achieve to be above 20%, possibly above 50.
I'd say this goes in the "important and true" (true according to your belief, at least) category. 2 out of 3 gates are all that need to be passed. Indeed, while I often help strangers for no reward from them, I am not an altruist. I help others for my own sake, and it would please me if they seek my help for theirs. For me, Nietzsche has been very clear on this aspect of charity and altruism.
He writes:
>"Not to have one's own interests at heart" —this is simply a moral fig-leaf concealing a very different fact, a physiological one, to wit:—"I no longer know how to find what is to my interest." (Twilight of the idols (translation by Anthony M. Ludovici), skirmishes in a war with the age, section 35)
In other words, Nietzsche claims it's better to have a good reason (good for _you_ ) for helping other people than none at all, and a good reason for you is selfish by definition. Of course, Christian morality would have you think altruism itself is a good reason. It is probably a "good" reason, but it doesn't seem effective. This doesn't mean altruism, or more concretely, a genuine desire to help the poor needy cannot be a reason. But it has to be _your_ reason, and you need to take responsibility for it.
Maybe an analogy would help. (or maybe not, feel free to think for yourself) Suppose you want to make friends. Can you make friends by being genuinely being "good" and nice to people and taking care of their needs? No, this can only make yourself a slave. Not to them, but to an ideal you cannot reach. A slave to morality. Please ask yourself whose morality this is. How do you make friends effectively? By being interesting. This means talking about your own interests to people who share them to some extent (at least enough to listen). But to do that, you need to learn what your interests are.
Ayn Rand helped make me significantly less selfish as a young adult! Her emphasis on valuing yourself extended to everyone. She forced me to grapple with and acknowledge the idea that others not having a right over me also necessarily meant I did not have a right over them.
I always get confused at the American left's hatred of her. It always seems to come from second hand caricatures.
I read Atlas shrugged first, think it is the superior book by far. I was a teenager when I read it and found the mystery genuinely engaging. Who was destroying the world? How?
I would recommend though, that you not read it overly seriously. Skip over parts that are too monologue-y. I still have never finished the a is a speech near the end
I couldn't make it through Fountainhead in high school, either. I read and enjoyed Atlas Shrugged a few years later, although many people also find it a big of a slog.
I recommend trying her essay collections instead: "The Virtue of Selfishness" and "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal". They're a lot more concise than her novels, for one thing, as she gets right to the political or philosophical point instead of mixing it in with the storyline and characters. For another, about half the essays in the collections are written by collaborators (mostly Nathaniel Branden, whom I found to be a better writer than Rand). There are also a few essays in there by Alan Greenspan written long before he became chairman of the Federal Reserve, which are worth reading for historical interest of you're into the politics of monetary policy.
I will hop in here and recommend Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. I like Rand, but I think Smith does a better job of working through and explaining the same sorts of things. I don’t know if Rand read TMS as it was out of print for much of the 20th century, but she is in many ways systematizing Smith, so if you find her a little much you will like Smith. And you should read him anyway :)
I'd like to second this counter-intuitive-seeming approach. I've read and embraced a lot of ethical egoism material, and evidence is pretty high at this point that it's nurtured and fortified my compassion and helpfulness. (Got told this on Friday, as a data point: "Please continue being selfish, if that's indeed what you call yourself. You're the most altruistic person I know.")
Do purposeful reflection on your own faults and shortcomings. Think about the things you did wrong without making excuses for yourself. The ego kind of acts as an immune system against these kinds of thoughts, so take a period of time to purposefully bring those thoughts to the forefront of your mind and let them bask there.
This should also be paired with the understanding that it's ok to be nothing, to be pathetic, to be weak, to have evil, etc. So long as you recognize that and continuously want to be the best version of yourself.
You ask a question starting with why, and communication specialists tend to say "why" questions are questions you want to avoid, they are counterproductive [or something like that].
Instead, some say, it's best to start with a question that can be answered with a simple yes or no - like this:
Is there a good reason that discussing a video talk of an author of a well-rated book on medicine and health should not be perceived as intrinsically valuable?
Then, they, say, you might ask a question that can be answered numerically - like this:
How many times did Scott Alexander thank his commenters, all of them, for all their input, because, as he recently said, it has all been valuable?
Then, you can ask How and What questions.
But I'm not in the mood to think of examples for that. Instead, can you say something about your perception of the links above?
I thought about how to tell that it's a bot a bit more.
Does any other poster in this open thread sound like a bot to you? Even if you try to stretch it really hard, can you see anyone else here being a bot? I'm guessing, except for really short replies, no, because with everyone else, you can see a thought process going on. You can see what people are trying to say, you can see them answering to something previously said.
This one is different. Reading this is like wading through a fog - plenty of water and nothing solid. It is clearly not winning the Turing award, whereas the rest of us are looking human without any effort.
How confident is everyone here that these comments aren't computer-generated? I think there's a really good probability that you all have been yelling at a bot.
Not confident at all, now that you raise the possibility. So what would the bot's contingent responses have been? Put up the original post, then reply as it did to any response containing the word "why"? What responses would it have made to responses without why in them? And then what?
All bots are different. I think we are looking at a fairly advanced bot, but you can see plenty of signs suggesting that it's a bot.
0) It never answers any questions.
1) It latches on to an unimportant word "why" and discusses it at length.
2) It recognizes that it's looking at a question and goes on a rant about questions.
3) It produces a lot of unnecessary text. I think we all know what's a yes/no question, but here it is helpfully giving us an example of one.
4) It makes up quotes (see the alleged Scott Alexander quote).
5) It doesn't make sense. See the question that is answered with the made-up Scott Alexander quote. It's really hard to imagine that a human wrote this.
That's only in the post above. There's more in the post down-thread:
"The book's first chapters struck me as pretty good, and exciting, and to just know of it in a kind of a conversational vacuum,where it's either praised / ignored / labelled, feels lonely."
Of course, you might also be looking at a really crazy human or a human who's pretending to be a bot.
I have to log off now, but if you're really bored, the oldest or one of the oldest bots, Eliza, is available on your computer if you have the emacs editor. All you have to do is open emacs and type: escape-x doctor
It might have some answers for you. For example, in response to your last statement the Eliza on my Mac said: "I would appreciate it if you would watch your tongue!"
Bots have gotten a lot more chatty since Eliza, but you'll notice the same patterns of what looks like evasion, questions answered with question. Eliza hadn't learned to rant yet. A more advanced bot that followed Eliza, Racter (https://www.chatbots.org/chatbot/racter/), was already good at ranting in 1984. I haven't looked into whether it's available to play with.
> You ask a question starting with why, and communication specialists tend to say "why" questions are questions you want to avoid, they are counterproductive [or something like that].
They are not counterproductive, they are crucial to filter out garbage like what you linked.
"Is there a good reason that discussing a video talk of an author of a well-rated book on medicine and health should not be perceived as intrinsically valuable?"
Yes. The reason? You are trying to sell me something. It may be a physical product ("buy this book!"), it may be something else ("adopt this viewpoint!") but you are definitely trying to stick your hand into my pocket.
That, combined with your evocation of "communication specialists" (you mean PR flacks and shills?) about "don't ask 'why' questions", in answer to "why should I watch this?" (which is what "Why do you think this is valuable?" comes down to), makes me question your disinterestedness and honesty.
I think we can see why you don't want a 'why' question, as it *would* be counter-productive: "I want you to watch this so I can make profit off you, be that material cash or non-material influence".
No, thank you. As soon as someone refuses to answer the question put to them and substitutes another, that they have a canned answer for, in its place, then I smell politics or at the very least, snakeoil. There's a very strong whiff of it off your post here.
EDIT: I have no intention at all of watching your video, but looking up your Dr. Humphries, she seems to be scoring on a 'quack scale':
Is that a fair assessment? I don't know, but my inclination towards quackery is strengthened by your refusal to answer Nancy's question and your attempts to steer this back to your tame duck: quack quack quack!
I listened to 3 minutes, and heard two arguments that I think are very bad. That vaccines don't come into a person by the same route the infection does (say, injection rather than by breathing) and vaccines don't improve health because they aren't nuitritive.
The first is possibly interesting, but not a demonstration that vaccines are bad. Perhaps there should be some experiments with matching routes of infection to see whether effectiveness is improved.
The second has a very narrow impression of health. Protection matters as well as nutrition.
It's observation that measles, mumps, chicken pox, polio, and smallpox have declined sharply. Vaccines might not be ideal, but they're quite effective against diseases which range from annoying to crippling to deadly.
It's possible I should have started with a less hostile approach (maybe just asked for a summary), but when a video leads with two bad arguments, I'm not inclined to be patient with it.
And you must have some reason for recommending that video.
Yes, thank you. The book's first chapters struck me as pretty good, and exciting, and to just know of it in a kind of a conversational vacuum,where it's either praised / ignored / labelled, feels lonely.
Sighted the notification of a new AC10 post and the tweet at practically a same time, so it clicked.
Also, first checked if it has ever been mentioned on this blog : nope.
As for Deiseaach's comments, - they label.
"Look they're heliocentrists, why should I bother."
Boo-hoo, I don't want to waste my time on yet another idiot on Youtube touting their medical qualifications as proof that when they're talking out of their arse, I should open my mouth to swallow the bullshit.
You dodged Nancy's question, which meant you did not have a good answer for "Why should I watch this?"
So to me that means you know this is fraudulent and you are trying to pull us all into some kind of pyramid scheme to spread the word of Dr Suzie, who doubtless has a whole brand of talks, podcasts to subscribe to, motivational tapes, books and the rest of it to make money off the gullible and you are trying to get a slice of that on commission.
If you're trying to paint yourself as a heliocentrist, I'd rather be a Tychonian.
Whoever this "Dors" person is, they're on the same level as the nude-photography enthusiast we had spamming on here previously; they have a Substack but no content, simply a list of free subscriptions they're signed up to.
Next thing after quack Youtube medical videos will be "rate my naked photos"?
Here's some communication advice for you: If someone asks a simple question and you spend seven paragraphs talking about communication strategies to avoid the question, that looks *really shady.* Especially if the video is on a topic where a lot of people are primed to expect shadiness, such as "big pharma."
"Why is this video worth my time?" is a legitimate question to ask about any video on the internet, because the internet is so full of video that you could spend a thousand lifetimes watching videos and never learn anything useful.
"If someone asks a simple question and you spend seven paragraphs talking about communication strategies to avoid the question, that looks *really shady.*" - doesn't this scream "bot" at you?
A lot of this ranting just isn't making sense, e.g.:
"Then, they, say, you might ask a question that can be answered numerically - like this:
How many times did Scott Alexander thank his commenters, all of them, for all their input, because, as he recently said, it has all been valuable?"
I'm having trouble imagining that this was written by a human.
Communication specialists or even just regular prickly people are likely to see this response as an obnoxious effort to force the reader to click on your link, which from their point of view is just random youtube shit until a case is made for taking an interest.
Deiseach, it was a pleasure joining up with you and others in marching all over Dors. Stoopit food links were especially fun. (Yours beats mine in loud obnoxiousness, I think, but mine is nastier.)
I don't particularly want to stomp all over people (honest!) but when there is the simple "because I thought it would be interesting" as the most basic reply to "why should I watch this?" and instead they launch into "PR for Dummies" speak, then that raises my hackles about what they are trying to con me out of.
Just a first announcement is fine. If they post the link every single open thread then moderation needs to happen. Substacks are linked in your name anyways if you have one so a single comment is barely more intrusive than that.
I expect the policy might change if tons of people all try to post their substack at once but I don't think substacks are numerous enough for that.
Mild disagree. A single mention of a new substack seems to me fine for an open thread. Especially as in this instance it's informative as opposed to hard sell.
With the news being what they are, wasn't an exception to no-politics rule justified? Perhaps simply skipping a number to switch with the next post. (I get that it might not be what Scott wants right now though.)
Edit: Ah, I see, it's "no culture wars" rather than "no politics". Didn't even notice (plus saw a commenter saying they'll delete their comments because those were politics).
A potential downside to making this thread culture-war-ok is that current events as they are will probably drown out everything else in the thread (which may or may not be desirable).
Maybe a Ukraine-Russia-only open thread would be a good idea?
Isn't it specifically phrased in today's post as "no culture wars"? The war in Ukraine probably is not particularly related to culture wars, as they are normally understood here.
There's always a gray area with how the intent of this rule plays out. Talking about the politics of the Gauls in 50AD will (almost) always be civil while most conversations about 2022 American Politics risk not being. I think the current situation sits in a place where you could almost be sure to have a civil conversation about it on ACX but on the off chance it goes off the rails I guess it's better to save Scott the hassle.
Also, the Ukraine war has been going on for more than three days at this point. Although I guess you should probably avoid still posting unconfirmed reports on the very latest happenings.
Thanks. I have been reading the various proponents of progress studies ever since Tyler started promoting it, so I had read that article and thought it interesting. Since then though, none of them have clarified why development economics, which tries to establish why some countries 'developed' and how, is not sufficiently explaining progress, nor how a new discipline will answer what an old one, specifically intended to examine the same question, has not been able to(at least according to those who feel the need for a new discipline)
Development econ tends to focus on how poor countries become rich. Progress studies looks at how rich countries become richer. RCTs with clean water in Bangladesh vs RCTs with science funding at the NIH, roughly.
I'm thinking "scam" as well. When you click on the author, there's no bio there. That screams "rushed out a version to cash in quick before someone notices".
Sorry to be a spoilsport, but I flagged your post. Scott will decide. But you should have been aware that you're potentially opening up a can of culture-war worms with many of your statements in that post. Yes, you pose them as questions, but the implicit assumptions in your questions are just begging the culture warriors from both sides to get into it.
And FYI, from my perspective, this is forum seems heavily weighted towards libertarian commentators. Now that Marxbro has been banned, I don't know of any far left commentators.
I have no idea what he said before deleting, but in a general sense a huge wrinkle with no culture wars rules is that many ostensibly non-culture-war issues actually have culture-wars-related explanations. So by banning culture-wars stuff, you're basically saying its alright to certain make claims, but if those claims are refuted by something that can be considered culture wars, those claims have to be allowed to remain unrefuted.
I have seen folks reply in the next open thread in sequence, quoting back to what was otherwise unrefuted in the non-CW thread. I don't know if Scott has an official position on this approach, but if it is used in good faith and not to excess, it may be a possible workaround.
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
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?
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)?
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)
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.)
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.
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
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"?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Actually, that looks really good. Went to Amazon, read about author, read reviews, hit "Buy now." Thanks so much.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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".
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/
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.
Fat Tuesday today. I suppose I should scare up some beads in case the ‘I like being photographed nude’ woman shows up.
"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!
I gave up Facebook for Lent. And for after that. It needed to go.
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.
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”
What?
A reference to the Mardi Gras tradition of offering cheap beads in exchange for a glimpse of random women’s bare torsos.
Oh, I’ve never heard the phrase Fat Tuesday. Have fun
"Tittie Tuesday" in some circles.
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.)
(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.
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.
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.
Sounds like an important book; I've pre-ordered the updated 2022 edition
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.
At least according to the Soviet statistics, the USSR was exporting sizable amounts of grain through the famine.
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.
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
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.
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
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Doesn't that 20% figure seem rather high to you? Where is that claim from?
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.
That’s not how they count it.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
What's something you've spent more than $1k on and less than $10k on that you really enjoyed or really improved your life?
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.
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.
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.
A Valve Index kit, plus three of the Vive motion trackers. Serious Sam VR and Beat Saber are a blast.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
"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.
Anyone have interesting resources on how people memorize oral history and/or how to do it yourself?
read and integrate the skills stated in 'memory craft'
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).
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.
Knocking out civilian electric power is easy.
It's probably fairly easy to jam Starlink. I'd need to look at the specific details but most such devices are. I don't think they'll be jammed though. Just not a good use of military resources. The same reason why the US (which could do it easily) doesn't often jam all the cellphones in an operational area. At least afaik.
This is sort of what I'm asking about, though. If it's easy enough, they theoretically do it; a desire to cut off the internet was enough for them to cut off the internet in the first place. If it's hard enough they don't. I guess I'm trying to get bead on whether this is "suitcase on a roof gets all of kiev" or "stolen powerful radio tower gets you 50 meters" or somewhere in between.
Russia hasn't shut off the internet in Ukraine. Kyiv still has internet, for example.
Assuming what Carl Pham said is correct, I'd estimate: Suitcase on a rooftop gets all of that rooftop. Stolen powerful radio tower can get you the visual range of that tower presuming the Ukrainians don't have SIGINT to resist. Which they do, so you can disrupt regular usage by effectively causing repeated temporary disruptions but not shut it down completely. Unless you get an even more complex/powerful tower than civilian usage would normally require.
So there is an asymmetrical advantage in terms of that it's easier/cheaper to manufacture terminals than jammers and you'd need a lot of jammers to cover the entire country. (You'd need a lot of terminals too. But terminals only need to work where you need them. A jammed area without a terminal is not issue for Ukraine. A terminal without a jammer is a hole in the net for Russia.) But the technical act of jamming isn't the specific issue.
US often jams all the cell phones in a very small area, using systems like the THOR, to try to prevent the triggering of IEDs- but we're talking 30 ft from a backpack, not a whole country
Right. But "30 ft from the nearest Russian signal soldier" is not meaningful in battlefield terms. ETA: To put it another way, if you're 30 feet from a Russian soldier then you have a bigger problem!
Agreed :)
The "Henry Long Ranger" might be the most advanced lever-action rifle ever made: https://youtu.be/wsCO0XV5rwA
It solves several limitations of older lever action designs, except for one: it remains difficult to clean the barrel and internal mechanism, and it is hard to remove and correctly reinstall the mechanism. From the website:
"Due to the complexity of the Henry Long Ranger 6.5 Creedmoor lever’s rack and pinion gear system and the need for precise reassembly to ensure proper gear timing, the company discourages owner removal of the rifle’s bolt and lever. In fact, the factory routinely receives rifles for reassembly from chagrined owners who attempt it on their own. (Shipping a rifle, by the way, costs $35 or more.) "
How could this final flaw in the lever-action rifle design be fixed?
Hard to beat the Mauser 98 - 1898 - bolt action for reliability.
That’s funny. I used the new edit feature to fix my typo. Be the Mauser. Indeed!
I'm thinking of supporting Ukraine by buying Ukrainian vodka and then reselling it to other people. Is this legal?
I'd like to help Ukraine by buying their products, but none of their goods are available in my area except for vodka. Even the vodka is hard to get, as I'd have to drive one hour to get to the nearest liquor store selling it. I'm thinking of buying several bottles of it, bringing it back to my home, and reselling the unopened bottles to people in my neighborhood at a discount. I'd take a small loss on each bottle.
This is probably illegal due to regulation. You'd need an alcohol distributors license or some similar license. Also, Ukraine isn't a huge vodka exporter. They only export like fifty million dollars of the stuff. Ukrainian exports are mostly primary materials. They export a lot of wheat and steel and have some heavy industry in things like planes. But they don't export a lot of consumer goods.
If you're buying a total of ten bottles and selling two each to four friends, it might *technically* be illegal, but seems at least gray, and pretty close both legally and morally speaking to just picking up a couple bottles for some friends when you do a run to the store, which I'm pretty sure is legal.
why not just give that small loss amount directly?
I'd also like to use the opportunity to try new types of vodka to see if they're any good.
The only Ukrainian vodka at my liquor store was Nemiroff (and only one location had it). It tasted pretty good—and is the official vodka of the UFC. Apparently Nemiroff also makes a honey pepper flavoured one (Anthony Bourdain had it in No Reservations' Ukraine episode) but my store didn't have it.
I also like the Canadian-Ukrainian Zirkova (owned by two Canadians but made in Ukraine). Might be my favourite vodka that I drink regularly, though I'm relatively new to vodka (usually been more of a whiskey and beer person).
Why not buy as many bottles as you would open, then give that small loss amount directly?
St Louis Meetup March 12. Come from afar or near!
https://www.lesswrong.com/events/BuPWjAhp6o5aBcNvi/st-louis-meetup-london-tea-room
Sam Harris and Rob Reid just put out this podcast that seems very relevant to this community:
[The After On Podcast] 58: Recipes for Future Plagues | Kevin Esvelt #theAfterOnPodcast
https://podcastaddict.com/episode/136135023 via @PodcastAddict
Basically, the US government is trying to find all the pandemic capable viruses it can, and it will then POST THEIR FULL GENOMES ONLINE.
This is potentially a catastrophically stupid blunder that we intend to make but have not made yet. The recommended actions from Rob are to tell USAID directly at https://www.usaid.gov/contact-us, tweet at them, if you live in a state with a senator on subcommittee on state department and USAID management (https://www.govtrack.us/congress/committees/SSFR/14) contact your senator, contact Washington State University if you have a relevant tie, and otherwise spread this, get attention, apply whatever leverage you have.
Thanks for posting this. I've written complete notes on the podcast for anyone who doesn't want to listen to the whole thing. The document starts with a top-level summary and continues with more detailed notes. You can find it here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ORM6XjEQCycmzBrCt_D3nyl5O_fNPGwS3kYpAAy364c/edit?usp=sharing
Please feel free to let me know of any mistakes, or anything in the doc that I could improve.
This is a really good write-up, thanks for doing it. Reading it reminded me of some points that I had forgotten about. Do you mind if I share it with other people who wanted a write-up?
No problem! I don't mind.
Summary from the above doc:
USAID recently launched Deep VZN, a five-year, $125 million program designed to monitor and better understand future pandemics. The main component of Deep VZN involves identifying roughly ten thousand novel viruses, determining which are capable of causing dangerous pandemics, releasing a list of these viruses rank-ordered by how dangerous they are, and publishing the genomes for these viruses online. These pandemic-grade viruses could be as dangerous or more dangerous than COVID-19.
This program, if successful, would pose a significant risk to society as a whole. Were Deep VZN to identify pandemic-grade viruses and publish their genomes, they would implicitly provide blueprints that could be used to generate the viruses, and spawn novel pandemics, by any sufficiently skilled synthetic biologist. Currently it is estimated that tens of thousands of people are capable of this work - animating viruses from a genome, even if they don’t have access to the original viral sample. We expect this number to go up significantly as technology continues to advance.
Risks surrounding pandemics and biological weapons are not just a hypothetical. There are a number of people in recent decades who had the skill and/or desire to release biological weapons. Most infamously, Seiichi Endo, a terrorist involved in a chemical weapons attack on a Tokyo subway, was a graduate-trained virologist. He once tried to obtain samples of Ebola for use against civilians, although thankfully he failed. Releasing the genomes for pandemic-grade viruses would make it easier for terrorists with sufficient training to launch one, or even multiple pandemics at the same time and cause vast numbers of deaths.
Anyone worried about these risks should reach out to the USAID and encourage them to shift money away from identifying pandemic-grade viruses, and towards more useful programs for fighting future pandemics. Specific suggestions include:
- Messaging your elected representatives on this topic - they have staff to field in-bound messages. If you are from MD, HI, VA, CT, MA, TN, KY, TX, WI, FL, NJ, or IA, you have a senator on the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee subcommittee overseeing USAID (List of senators on the subcommittee: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/committees/SSFR/14)
- Contacting USAID directly via their online contact box at usaid.gov/contact-us
- Tweeting at the USAID Twitter account: https://twitter.com/USAID
- Spreading the message via social media or blogging
- If you know heavy hitters within the USAID, please reach out to them and share your feelings or link to the podcast
Most of this data is public anyway, nobody cares. The difficulty is in synthesizing the whole thing A) competently B) without a third-party service provider figuring out what you're doing (I am told they try to screen for this).
A) and B) are true, and many companies do screen their genomic sequences, but not all- I think it's about 80%. And the screening process is pretty easily gamed, you can just asks for sections instead of the whole thing and it often won't get flagged. As to whether this data is public, it's definitely not. There are sequences online of past pandemics, such as the 1918 flu, and for current pathogens, but what they are trying to do is find new, undiscovered potential pandemic causing pathogens. This data is not public-it does not yet exist- and is orders of magnitudes more dangerous than something like 1918 flu (we have lots of immunity to that strain now, we have vaccines for it, and most of the deaths were probably due to bacterial pneumonia which we can now treat very effectively)
Suppose you have a person, or group, that wants to cause some megadeaths and is equipped with all the knowledge required to utilize this new data source.
Do you really think they'd GoF a potential pathogen over several years, instead of deploying something easy and widely known? If they were inclined to tinker with the pathogen, wouldn't it be easier to give one of the existing ones vaccine evasion / antibiotic resistance / whatever?
Also, why haven't we seen even a single incident of this kind, given that the technological capability at low cost exists for at least a decade?
Wait, sorry, I think we're talking about different things. Gain of function is not required at all here. DEEP VZN is identifying the viruses that if allowed to infect humans, could create a pandemic- no need to do anything to the pathogen to have a scenario much worse than COVID (because of release at multiple points simultaneously, for example). We have seen many people try to do bioterrorism, but they have been limited to pathogens that don't spread well- anthrax, e coli, etc
I admit I haven't listened to the podcast (come on, there's not even a transcript).
https://www.usaid.gov/news-information/press-releases/oct-5-2021-usaid-announces-new-125-million-project-detect-unknown-viruses
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I assume spillover events require mutations (so effectively GoF but in the wild) - the animal viruses being researched here are not very effective outside of their host range, otherwise the spillover would already happen.
Spillover events can be due to a mutation, or they can be due to just introduction to a new host.
Here's a relevant quote from the podcast:
"What you're talking about now is called characterization, right?"
"Yeah, the whole point of this program is to identify which viruses might spillover and cause future pandemics... There's four key classes of experiments that you perform on an animal virus to determine whether it's a good candidate for causing a pandemic in humans. You want to know: how tightly does this virus bind to human target cells? how readily does it actually infect those cells? how readily does the backbone of the virus replicate and churn out new copies of the virus in relevant human tissue types? and, because you can't test it in humans of course, how readily is it transmitted in animal models that are chosen for their similarity to humans?"
These viruses identified as pandemic capable aren't rough virus families that we need to keep an eye on, they are viruses that can already bind to, infect, replicate, and presumably transmit from humans. One interaction between this virus and a human might be all it needs to jump species, no GoF needed, and no mutation needed (although mutation will surely happen quickly within the new host with new selective pressures)
There are many animal species, especially bats, that hold viruses that could infect humans with no mutations- we just don't often breath in their breath or mix our body fluids. Most of those viruses would not be able to spread person-to-person, but it is definitely possible that they could find a few (maybe 0-12) that could spread human-to-human, and those would be the ones considered pandemic-capable. The previous program, PREDICT, found 1,200 of the viruses that you're talking about- viruses that could jump if they have a chance mutation, or get passed through a mammal with similar biology, or happen on a human that is immunocompromised. They found none that could jump directly to humans without that intermediate step. This program will be much more efficient than PREDICT, is specifically looking for the latter, and has learned from PREDICT to know which families to sample from to maximize hits.
PS- totally don't blame you for not listening to the podcast yet, it's 2 hrs! This is my area of research so I find it fascinating but don't expect everyone else to find it fascinating, too
I think you're overestimating all the circles on the "interested in viral genomes", "capable of turning sequence data into working pathogens" and "terrorist" Venn diagram.
The second circle, especially, is vanishingly small, and almost entirely confined to existing biowarfare facilities (which have all the data they need anyway).
I hope you're right, but unfortunately I disagree. On a technical point, it is not nearly as difficult as most people think to reverse engineer a virus from its genome- we're not talking about USAMRIID, we're talking about something that is done in biolabs all over the world. The reverse engineering of horsepox from genome to live cell from the University of Alberta in 2017 actually sparked much of this conversation about infohazards and global catastrophic biological risk.
So our second circle in the Venn diagram is pretty big- thousands of people can do this right now, and the technology is getting cheaper and easier at an astonishing rate. What about the third circle?
Firstly, there are a heck of a lot of terrorists out there. There are also many lone wolves who want to kill people; las vegas shooter, unibomber, etc. The Aurora shooter was a PhD student in Neuroscience, and the Anthrax attacks were by a microbiologist at USAMRIID. These circles have way too much overlap to publish the instructions for a bioweapon.
Thanks for the article - I went and found it and it is a tour de force of molecular biology. I've been a bit out of it for years now (I switched careers, and was doing plant-related stuff beforehand anyway), but I've retained enough to follow along.
One more point- even if there are no people who can create a virus from a genome that would want to, there are people who can reverse engineer a virus who have gambling debt, or children that they would do anything to save, etc. It is pretty easy to find a blackmail target when there's thousands of options to choose from.
Given you're arguments; I think you're right that there's a trend towards more and more capable attempts by smaller and smaller groups, but even so we're not talking about an individual doing this any time soon.
This sort of project needs a team of people to do the design, synthesis/ligation, vector cloning and live culture - and that's before you get to the stage of being able to culture up and store. We're talking dozens of senior people and lab techs that need to be subverted or fobbed off, not to mention all the distributors and suppliers who must turn a blind eye to suspicious requests. So we're still in the realm of large, motivated attempts to end the world instead of lone wolves.
Honestly; the easiest way for a malign actor is still to book a trip to a budding outbreak zone, attempt to catch zika/XDR TB/whatever and intentionally spread it to your home neighborhood on return.
Good point. I agree that it's still at the level that requires a team, not just one person. That actually makes me feel a lot safer-a plan that requires 2 people is much, much more unlikely than one that requires only one. However, the cost of genome sequencing has gone from $10,000 per raw magabase in 2001 to about 10 cents per raw megabase- we should expect a similar democratization of recombinant technology, too. Our safety will be short lived if we post the full genome to pandemic-capable pathogens.
Open source databases of virus genomes are already a thing. I think most disease inducing viruses have been mapped.
https://www.viprbrc.org/brc/home.spg?decorator=vipr
I don’t see that publishing genomes of novel viruses is really different from that. If anything it seems much more useful.
I'm a grad student in epidemiology, and I've used that database before- it's great and I'm glad that it exists. I think there is a huge difference between publishing the genome of viruses that already infect humans and viruses that would cause a pandemic if they did start infecting humans, for two reasons. First, a virus that we have no immunity to can be really, really bad and it will take us too long to respond. Second, if someone wants to maliciously start a pandemic they can do it in far worse ways than nature would- spread at multiple crowded airports at once, for example, or spread multiple pandemic-causing infections at the same time.
Knowing you’re an epidemiologist I’ll take your original comment more seriously then
Wasn't posted every detail about COVID critical to the (such as it was) rapid response? Weren't the vaccines built using the data, and not the virus samples?
Absolutely! And Moderna was famously able to have their vaccine development finished within 48 hrs of the full genome being published. There is a huge difference between responding rapidly to a virus that is currently causing a pandemic, and posting the full sequence to all the viruses that could cause a pandemic if allowed to infect humans. If one of these pandemic-capable viruses starts spreading, of course, publish everything you know about it. If it's not yet spreading, very different calculus.
Can you link to anything in print that covers this? (Podcasts are time-consuming and not very skimmable.)
Here's the official press release about Deep VZN from USAID as a starting point: https://www.usaid.gov/news-information/press-releases/oct-5-2021-usaid-announces-new-125-million-project-detect-unknown-viruses
Here's the NOFO, page 16 and 17 are the most concerning parts
https://govtribe.com/opportunity/federal-grant-opportunity/discovery-exploration-of-emerging-pathogens-viral-zoonoses-deep-vzn-7200aa21rfa00005
Kevin Esvelt, the guest on the podcast, posted a twitter thread: https://twitter.com/kesvelt/status/1498409798903209996
And here is his recent written testimony to Congress (not specifically on DEEP VZN, the program in question, but on the same issue generally):
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1v9SYi_SsGbE-H4RrtEqHT9JlRe4HzmFa/view
I can't find anything in print yet, I will keep my eye out and if there is nothing in a few days I'll write it myself and add it here.
I am sure someone has done this before, but I thought it would be interesting to map the blog network through linking up blogrolls. I started here and mapped the first ~300 connections the branches connected me to. The end result is here: https://jacobwood27.github.io/035_blog_graph/
Very cool, thanks for doing this!
Great idea. Only had a moment to look at it, though. Is ACX itself on there? Did not see it in my quick glance. Also, do the colors mean anything?
It is! ACX is the biggest blue node in the top right. A search feature would probably be a good thing to add. The text is Ctrl+F-able but too small to see sometimes.
The colors are determined by a Leiden community detection algorithm run on the structure of the graph (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-41695-z). You can change the "quality function" that is used to determine the communities through the settings button in the top left of the screen.
I have a small write up with some more details here: https://jacobw.xyz/projects/blog_graph/
This is really great. Unless I can't read, your explanation, though, doesn't explain the function which determines particle size.
Thanks John, that is something I overlooked in the write up. The size of every node is proportional to the number of incoming connections on the graph (how many people link back to you).
I've updated the write up to mention that.
It would be impactful if people stopped using verbal monstrosities like 'impactful'.
Is ”impacting” also considered barbaric? I do, but I’d like to know if that’s just me.
I don't mind "impact" as a verb, but I realize it bothers a lot of people
So bothers some ppl but not others. That sounds right.
Don’t get me started on ‘normalcy’. *%!&@ Warren Harding.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/did-warren-harding-coin-normalcy
Using? Not utilizing?
I like that utilizing actually has a specific connotation different from using, and no one uses it.
Utilize: the act of converting all matter in a region into objects satisfying a specific utility function.
Yes. Besides being intrinsically repellent, this term activates an associative link in my mind to a dreadful story I heard about fecal impaction.
It's a perfectly cromulent word.
Oh dear, cromulent. My first image was some breakfast bread smothered in butter/cream and jam. Cromulents and tea. A treasonous breakfast.
Well, I'm embiggening my vocabulary today.
Bigly.
Earth-shattering
Does anyone who has successfully self-taught a language have advice on engaging ways of practicing listening? I'm currently at too early a level to understand anything other than things targeted at young children or beginning learners, which means it's very tedious. (I also don't have the option of going and living in somewhere other than the US).
If the answer is just "suck it up and do the boring thing" that's fine, but I would definitely prefer something that made it so I needed less motivation.
How beginner is beginner? Which language?
Depending on your target language, there's a reddit community full of podcast and television recommendations.
I know of people who just did extensive reading, or just did extensive listening of hard content, and they eventually got there. I'd recommend a roughly 50/50 split of reading and listening, with the reading at N+1 material, graded readers just above your level, and listening at N, right at or even below your level.
In the very early stages there just won't be much easy listening content that is interesting and sounds like real speech. Listen to some incomprehensible content at this stage just to start getting a feel for the sound system, don't feel like you have to do six hours a day, this is just getting a sample. During this phase you're using reading and learning basic vocab to get up to low intermediate. Then as you start picking out individual words in your "hard" listening, then you should dial in your listening in to something level appropriate.
You can supplement with Anki or Duolingo, but don't over-rely on it. I think sentence cards are much better to practice than drilling vocab, once you're past the first couple hundred words anyway. They'll help give you a sense for grammar and really solidify the common words. Your main practice is reading and listening, don't just do reps and feel like that's enough, really think of this as a supplement.
One of the best things I did was get a bluetooth headset, and listen to a directory full of short dialogues or podcasts throughout the day. The little times I use this really add up, and led to a rapid improvement in my listening skills.
I'd say it is important to find engaging content when learning a language. To me, that means, finding literature adults read. Ofcourse, that will be incomprehensible until you reach a certain level.
The 'Easy' series on YouTube ahs great audio-videos for German and Spanish.
Coffee Time German podcast was nice for me.
DuoLingo Podcast for Simple Spanish was good.
Daily News and talk radio in Finnish from YLE Uutiset.
Nuntii Latini for Latin was always a hit with me.
Mandarin Corner has excellent content.
It's all about finding content you are engaged by. For most mainstream languages we live in a land of abundance. For niche, languages you will have to find the small community making content, but surely they exist.
As a separate thing, there was a study showing that listening to that language passively (e.g. spanish talk radio in the background if you're learning spanish) helps you learn better by making your mind more accustomed to those sounds. Not a replacement for actual dedicated listening work, but a low-effort way of helping.
Any chance you have a link to the study? That sounds too good to be true
I thought it was common knowledge that, after you move to a country that speaks a language you aren't fluent with, you are supposed to get a TV and just keep it on, whenever you can. As you keep hearing the same words over and over, your brain gets used to them and slowly learns them, even if you're not paying much attention.
I heard this from so many people that I thought it was just something that everyone knew.
You might be able to get access to a TV channel in the language of your choice somewhere online.
I mean I could just fall asleep listening to chinese podcasts instead of english ones. I'm basically just listening for phrases and can't follow the overall meaning of native content though.
You don't have to sit there and obsess all the time - although it certainly helps to do it some of the time. Most of the time, you can keep doing things that it won't distract you from - exercise, cook, clean, do laundry, do dishes, knit. This will not give you results in a day or in a week. You're looking at months or years. But, same as with in-person interaction, you will be getting language exposure, and that's what matters. It will add up.
Consider also that, after you set this up, it doesn't require any conscious effort on your side. This is not work. The only thing you care about is that it doesn't annoy you.
I don't know of any research on this, but I would guess that a TV (or a computer with a sufficiently large screen that runs TV-like content) would be better than a radio because it gives you visuals together with the sound and is better at keeping some of your attention, even when you don't understand what's said.
Over time, this worked for a lot of people, and it's very low-cost and low-effort. As long as you're not expecting fast results, I can't think of a reason not to try.
Listening-Reading, by far the best option at the early stages. Get an audiobook in the target language and a written version of the same text in your native language, and listen while following the written text so you get the meaning. From time to time check whether you can understand scripted online videos with a single narrator, once you can, switch to that.
Depends on how beginner is beginner. There are various different language versions of listening practice for beginners that can be somewhat engaging (eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEB8-SWMYhI). You can also get audio books in various different languages that range from beginner to more advanced, so there's a plot to try to follow. These start pretty simple (eg https://www.amazon.com/Los-tres-cerditos/dp/B00TADJIJ2). Once you can understand news stories those are good options, as you might already know the thrust from other media.
Honestly what helped me the most on listening was having many conversations and writing down words I didn't recognize to look up later. Depending on the language and the location, there may be opportunities to do that, but often that's difficult to find.
Unfortunately the children's books are what I was trying to avoid really. I don't like the modal english fiction story I think, let alone one written by someone who isn't a good writer, but is focusing on producing content for eductional puproses.
Conversations are good but I don't have as many opportunities to have them as I'd like. I recently started playing the game Taboo in chinese with some of my ABC friends which has been both fun and hopefully helpful.
I am not sure whether "understanding material" refers to spoken or all forms of content. If it's the former, then you could watch a movie with dual subtitles (depending on the language, you can find them premade or download the subtitles yourself), or listen to audiobooks and follow along the written text.
If it's the latter, then you might try graded readers (but those are targeted at language learners and you may find them indeed boring), podcasts for language learners (simple language but some culture is explained as well).
The pro tip which takes some effort however is preparing an audiobook in the target language, the corresponding source text in the target language AND the translation of the text in a language you speak well, say English. While listening to the audiobook, you can look at the English translation to understand the meaning, and at the target language to make out individual words. Some texts like this are available when you search for "parallel texts".
Yeah I was specifically looking for listening practice as I said. The parallel texts pointer seems promising so I'll try that out.
I've read some graded readers, and listen to some podcasts targeted at people learning the language, but those are what I was referring to as tedious yeah.
If you have a favorite movie or TV show that's been dubbed in the language in question, watching things you are familiar with may help.
With subtitles too. This was the approach that helped me the most in learning English.
I had heard when I was younger that having kids changes you significantly: I recall one person writing that they don't feel like they were a "complete human being" until after they became a father. I filed that away under "interesting if true" and went on to later have two kids of my own.
I can report that after having kids my empathy has shot through the roof. I never used to mind bad things happening to people in movies: it's a movie. But now I get very emotional if a child is threatened in a serious way in a movie, and I find I care a lot more for the non-child characters as well. This is perhaps unsurprising: when I see a kid in trouble it's easy for me to imagine my own kids in the same position. But I wasn't exactly a psychopath before I had kids: is my increased empathy really just chalked up to having more skin in the game? That seems very cynical, but I can't imagine what else it would be.
Case in point: I have lived through a few wars and violent conflicts breaking out somewhere in the world. Afghan war, Iraq war, Kuwait, who knows how many civil wars in Africa, etc. Yet I feel very strongly about the war in Ukraine. I saw a video (you probably saw it to, it got around) of a father saying goodbye to his daughter and wife as they went on a train to safety and he stayed to fight. His daughter looked about 6-8 years old, and they were both crying. I've certainly seen emotionally charged war footage before, but this was the first time I actually felt anything about it besides a vague sense of "Aw, that's too bad." Now I was touched so much I almost started crying myself. I'm feeling sad just writing about it.
All this to say: sample size 1, parenthood fixed my ability to care about other humans.
Huh. Just added a comment and it showed up 2x. Tried to delete one and both got deleted. I’ll try again:
Joseph Henrich in his WEIRDest people book describes indigenous cultures in which fathers do vs don’t play a role in bringing up their children, and describes large psychological / physiological differences, and impacts on society.
A personal note - as a father of young daughters and a religious guy, I can never make it through the Chava’s Ballet scene in Fiddler on the Roof without sobbing. Never affected me before having daughters.
I've had that same issue before of a comment being duplicated, and then deleting one duplicate deletes both. I assume it was actually somehow just posted once, but for some reason displayed twice on my computer? Anyway, it's part of the general Substack interface issues.
Nothing to add, but can confirm.
We're all children 'til we have children, as the saying goes.
Not that all parents are mature, or non-parents immature. But parenthood does seem to engender levels of empathy and responsibility that I observe less often in non-parents.
Unfortunately, given the rather extreme sampling bias here, you're mostly going to get data on fatherhood rather than parenthood in general.
I’m female and have felt similarly. I wondered if once I had kids I would no longer be able to appreciate certain dark humor that involved children. I can confirm that, yes, I have lost my ability to laugh at certain things, and find myself much more affected when bad things happen to children in media or real life. Which has really been quite a relief- it makes me feel thankfully normal in some important ways.
Same response. Mitchell and Webb have quite a good sketch about it https://youtu.be/wt6nwvGJiN8
I have had the exact same experience. Since being a dad I get very emotional about any news story that involves the suffering of children. It's not that I was fine with it beforehand, but it would be more abstract sort of sad. Now the reaction is very visceral.
I haven't noticed any other changes in the way I am (except constant tiredness and more familiarity with human poo!)
My first kid changed my life, but I think it was my second and third that were the most significant. You really can and do improve your ability to understand others with more practice. But also just getting older changes your life perspective.
I think getting older did this to me (I don't have kids). It changed my taste in movies. I can only really appreciate movies that present violence in a gritty, pessimistic light, rather than in a cavalier, adventure-movie kind of light. Kind of annoying actually, makes it harder to enjoy 90s action movies.
lots of problems have closed form solutions at n=2, and are np-complete once n=3
Not sure about general empathy, but the part about stuff involving kids is 1000% true (for me)
Yep same here. It took me by surprise too, partly because when my first son was born I was only a few years removed from being a full-time general-news newspaper reporter. I thought of myself as having a fairly hard shell, could write about horrible local police news without being bothered, etc. And then suddenly I had to just literally stop reading any such news stories.
I also noticed the contrast with my two elder siblings, both childless, and neither of them a particularly unempathetic person or unfriendly to kids. But I went overnight from being just like them on this point to being completely different.
I’ve never heard a discussion about this specific thing before and yet it seems really important. I said as a casual aside on the Reddit a few weeks ago that one big aspect of the conservative/liberal divide is about which people have kids earlier. But has anyone seriously studied what having kids does to people’s political and ideological perspectives, or tolerance for certain ideas, images and risks? If people in *this* crowd are finding such a dramatic before-and-after effect, I would expect there’s something pretty significant here.
It would be hard to separate this from selection effects though. I.e. people who end up having children are likely pretty different from those that don't.
Agree completely. Hell, I got choked up during an episode of Daniel Tiger because Daniel was sad his parents were going on a date without him. I can barely even read stories about actual bad things happening to kids anymore.
same.
I think so too. Has to be a pretty common human experience.
It wasn't me.
Agree or disagree:
"if two people agree on the possibilty of a long-term future outcome (say, 20+ years off) they will very likely agree on the desirability of that outcome."
My hunch here is that most of our beliefs about valence are really just compressed forms of the long-term causal graph.
Would the majority of Serbs and the majority of Kosovar Albanians agree that Kosovo has probability above .5 of becoming a member of the United Nations this century? That is indeed my guess about how the majority of both groups would estimate the probability. Yet I don't have a shadow of a doubt that desirability among Serbians is much lower than desirability among Kosovar Albanians.
You might find other counterexamples involving separatist/(re)unionist causes where one side, however slowly, seems to be gaining ground.
Do please post this again in the other thread, as others have suggested.
I disagree; two people could agree that, say, the way society is going in 20+ years time everyone will have to wear horns and a tail; one person may think this is great because, um, inclusivity? and the other think this is just how we are going to hell in a handbasket.
can you find a specific example here?
a lot of general disagreements are over which specific practices are totally unsustainable.
maybe best to save this for a thread where 'culture war' is allowed, though. Will follow up there.
You're right that this could very quickly veer into culture warring and I don't want that. It's tough to think of a specific instance off the top of my head - let's say X says we'll all be vegan in 20 years and Y agrees. Is this because both X and Y think that vegan replacements for meat will be of such quality, people will happily and easily switch? Does X think this is a moral position to hold and is glad it will happen and Y thinks it is going to be one more imposition by the Nanny State?
If both X and Y agree that cattle ranching is unsustainable and that it is a good thing if it stops, then sure, they'll think this is a desirable outcome. But I don't think we can say that *agreement* on something happening means that people find it *desirable*, whether both think it is desirable or undesirable.
The broad instance that most people will think Bad Thing undesirable and Good Thing desirable holds, of course, but not everyone is going to have the same opinion as to "is this bad thing or good thing?" for at least *some* instances.
i don't think this is a guarantee - i think you changed my view elsewhere, so it's now much more of a ... trend
i think my point is that, over very long timeframes, i think values and predictive models are basically indistinguishable from each other
in other words i think it's very very very unlikely to find two people who completely agree on a causal model who then disagree wildly on the moral valence of some outcome 50 years from now. Part of this is because causal models are more likely to diverge over long timeframes, of course. But the hunch is that most of the stuff we value is effectively a compressed causal of model of something like "but this might lead to large amounts of human suffering in the future!"
maybe best to reserve this for the culture war-enabled posts :)
My intuition is the reverse. Believing in an inevitable global communist revolution is highly correlated with thinking that's a good thing, but to the extent this can be disentangled the direction seems more like "communism will be great, therefore we will get communism" rather than "we will get communism, therefore it will be great".
I don't think that's true at all. The people who seem convinced that we're getting (or already have!) communism seem to universally think it's a bad thing, often in apocalyptic terms (Doom of the West and so forth). Meanwhile the most prominent communist I can think of (Freddie deBoer) basically thinks it's capitalism for at least the rest of his life, and that whatever follows won't be communism either.
I think writ large, doomerism is more widespread than its complement. OTOH, wrong thread and all. Bring it up next time, it's a good topic.
so this is an interesting case because 'das kapital' endorses an explicitly deterministic view of history, so it might be unique to communism as an ideology?
i don't think a lot of libertarians are generally like 'libertarianism is inevitable', for example. Same thing with people who want to end global warming; i think a lot of progressives are generally pessmisitic about the feasibility of the outcomes they want actually ocurring.
we are dangerously close to 'culture war' territory here tho so maybe i should ask again next week :)
Oops, I forgot what thread this was. Yes there's definitely some productive discussion to be had in an even thread.
Apocalyptic outcomes seem like a clear counterexample to this statement. Most people who are worried about nuclear war or AI risk don't think nuclear war or evil AIs are desirable. The same is true for people who assign low likelihoods to those events.
by 'agree on the desirability' i mean 'agree on whether or not these things are desirable' - not that merely agreeing some outcome can occur makes it desirable, but that agreeing on valence tends to follow agreeing on likelihood of distant events
for example, two people who agree that 'an AI can take over the entire world in a way that it won't need humans' are actually very likely to agree that it's undesirable, whereas a lot of people who don't worry about AI risk basically think 'this situation is impossible', not 'it could happen and it would be great'
or, two people who think a planet-ending nuclear war can happen will agree that it's bad. I don't think anyone would disagree with 'it would be bad if it happened', but they might very well disagree over whether it would actually happen.
I don't think even that holds true for a nuclear war; one that blew up the planet might be considered undesirable by both, but one that 'merely' wiped out humanity might be seen as desirable by one (anti-natalists, those who think we're despoiling nature and that without humans the planet and other species will recover, etc.)
Is that actually a common anti-natalist position? I thought that the argument went the other way, environment getting destroyed means having children is wrong (because they would have to live in a horrible wasteland).
i think this changes my view - i'll follow up on the culture war thread because i now want to add a 'caveat' that _might_ obviate the whole thing entirely, unless we start getting real into culture war weeds
i award you 300 million internet points :)
I wasn't thinking of a culture war aspect and I think you're correct. Mostly I was going off "humans are perverse buggers and for every thing 99 out of 100 people think is good/bad, there's always 1 person who thinks it's bad/good" 😁
Oh right I misread your P->Q as Q->P. I retract my comment.
I think this is true without regard to the agreement on the possibility of that outcome; that is, people will very likely agree on the desirability of a given outcome, regardless of whether or not they believe that outcome is likely or not, in a general sense.
Does adding agreement about the likelihood of a given outcome increase agreement about the desirability of that outcome? I mean, given that many people are, ultimately, just agreeing with somebody else that made an argument, this seems basically trivial: Yes, because they get their desirability-information and their likelihood-information from the same source.
Is there a non-trivial version of this? Yeah, probably, but I'd have trouble specifying the reference class of "People who have independently come to a set of conclusions about the likelihood of, and the desirability of, a given outcome".
I'm a physician in my mid 40s and over the last few months have felt a little less cognitively sharp. Not enough that anyone external would notice (I've asked colleagues and my wife), but I notice journal articles feeling a little denser, I've ran more stop signs then in my previous life combined, and my chess.com ranking is distinctly trending down.
I figure my next steps are to start playing with my diet, exercise, alcohol use, etc. Does anyone know any high sensitivity cognitive tests that would be useful for trending my performance? I don't think the mini-moca is going to cut it :). Thanks!
I don't know any tests to recommend, but as prophalytics against mental dullness I endorse getting enough sleep and taking a walk every day, in the middle of the day. The sleep is just basic. The walk is to clear your head, because between 40-60 years (I'm at the upper end of this, so speak from experience) it's mostly input overload that impacts cognitive acuity - a walk is an easy way to get away from people/screens/printed matter etc while also getting some fresh air. I take a 15min-30min walk right after lunch every day, leave my phone on the desk. If I miss a couple of days, I can tell I'm a little slower.
Have you had covid? Reduced mental acuity is a commonly mentioned longish term side effect.
I think my Stroop test suggestion is decent, but it would be good for you to get a couple more measures. Best place to get other suggestions would be to have a brief appt with a neuropsychologist. Don't sign up to get a bunch of testing, which seems like way overkill at this point. You want someone who'd willing to use the appointment to recommend tests to you and tell how to administer them to yourself and score them. Any test a neuropsychologist recommends is likely to be well-constructed and validated. (There are a lot of things that determine whether a test is a valid measure of whether your performance is changing. For instance, test has to either be something that can be done repeatedly without your getting better at it through practice -- or else something that has multiple versions which are known to produce highly correlated scores (i.e., your score on Version A is going to be very similar to score on version B)).
One other idea that comes to mind for self-assessment is to take portions of the SAT, GRE or LSAT. Those tests are well-constructed psychometrically, ie scores on different versions are highly correlated, and the companies that make the tests make some versions of them available online for people to practice on. You have to take samples of actual tests, though, not made-up versions produced by test-prep companies. Actually, I believe you can take the actual official GRE multiple times, and frequently, something like once every 2 weeks. You get a different version each time you take it, and scores come back quickly.
Your ideas for things to play with -- diet, exercise, alcohol -- seem good. Don't forget sleep as a thing to play with. Sleep's a powerful lever to pull for problems like those you describe. You need to consider not just quantify of sleep but also quality. If it's disrupted by apnea it's not as good. Also, many drugs, both alcohol and various sleep meds, damage sleep architecture and make sleep less restorative. Matthew Walker has a good & highly readable book called Why We Sleep that covers these topics. Wishing you lots of success at identifying and fixing whatever's wrong.
Thanks for your thoughts. I hadn't heard of the stroop test, I'm going to try experimenting with it for a week, see if it correlates at all with my own self perception of my acuity. And discussing testing with a neuropsychologist is a good idea
Your sure this is not spike protein related in any way ?
As in vaccine related spike proteins? I guess I can't say no for fact but it doesn't temporally align. I actually like the idea of microdosing but think my job is too high stakes to risk it
When I felt that way my second best solution was lifting weights in the morning. Not some huge workout, just enough to demand results from my muscles. It's one of those addictive things I now look forward to. I think I recovered some of my lagging intellect, but mostly I restored my patience and ability to stick to a problem rather than giving up quickly.
Without a doubt, increasing my sleep increases my intellect. But I still find myself skipping out on sleep and suffering for it. For sure I'm more brilliant on a Monday.
Maybe try micro dosing magic mushrooms
No idea, but after ~30-40 everything (body-wise) is in decline. Are you using glasses to read yet? At ~60+ all I can say is, "It's all down hill, enjoy the ride!"
No glasses but definitely harder to stay in shape and having to consider things like statins for the first time.
I think Stroop test is pretty good in that respect, and there are scorable versions you can play as games on your phone. It’s a decent measure of attention and ability to shift mental set. Does not capture all the processes you have concerns about (probably measures a lot of
What’s involved in noticing stop
signs, much less of what’s involved in reading a technical article).
Like many people with a small-town upbringing I grew up plinking with .22s so am not petrified of firearms. At the same time I don’t have a real interest in guns and have looked at 2A idealogues as contributing to more problems than they are solving. Having said that, the success of the resistance in Ukraine has got me thinking about how an armed population maybe really can act as a brake on tyranny. When I google recommendations for firearms suitable for armed resistance against an occupying aggressor I mostly get a bunch of gun porn and fringey sovereign citizen stuff, when I am really more interested in a Swiss-style model where citizens are expected to do their part if the wheels ever come off. I guess I’m leaning into the “well-regulated” (as in “not batshit crazy”) aspects of 2A responsibilities. What is/are suitable firearms for the reluctant patriot who is willing to spend time on the range but not wanting to sign up for Galt’s Gulch? Presumably some combination of reliability, ease of use, field serviceability, ready access to ammunition and parts, etc.
Ukraine is in fact a counterexample to your main claim. Both Maidans were almost entirely unarmed, and the current territorial defense forces got AKs from the state which would have been very much illegal to possess in peacetime.
My effortpost on "what gun should I buy (and should I buy a gun and how can I learn to use it)" is over on Slate Star Codex at: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/11/21/open-thread-115-25/#comment-693010
But, yeah, for this you're probably going to want to go with an AR-15 for all the reasons you note. In particular, in any sort of war or war-like event in North America, there's going to be lots of other people using something on an AR platform, and that sort of commonality is all kinds of useful. And it's a generically reliable, useful weapon. There are reasons it has become the de facto American standard.
If not an AR-15, at least something that fires the 5.56mm NATO cartridge and uses STANAG magazines. If you somehow find yourself to be an expert marksman, maybe something in 7.62mm NATO. And in any case, get a decent optical sight - one made for fighting, not hunting or target shooting.
If you live in a city, there's something to be said for a pistol, almost certainly in 9mm Parabellum and start by looking at the Glock. Being able to pass for a harmless civilian just trying to muddle through until you can check to see that, yep, there's nobody around but you and the two Bad Guy Soldiers who just wrote you off as harmless, can count for a lot. In particular, it can count for two free rifles.
None of this will stop a tank. But, if you shoot all the enemy soldiers near the tank, and shoot the tank commander if he sticks his head out of the hatch, the tank will probably pull back. Particularly in an urban environment, there's way too many things that can go wrong for a big, clumsy, half-blind tank without half a dozen pairs of eyes checking out all the places a tank can't go. But you'll have to shoot all those soldiers while an invulnerable tank gunner is playing first-person shooter with a machine gun in a stabilized turret.
If someone is fool enough to take a tank into a city without infantry support, a proper molotov cocktail on the engine air intake will *usually* get the job done - radiators don't work very well covered with burning napalm.
Most importantly, though, is not doing any of this alone. Be a part of some sort of civic organization that can offer up a group of people who know and trust one another to work as a team. And know that a lot of you aren't going to make it home alive even with the teamwork. Trying to play this game solo, is pretty much suicide.
Your best bet is probably an AR-15.
It's a very popular gun, so it's not too hard to get parts and ammo. It's not too expensive, about $500, which sits it nicely on the quality/affordibility curve. It's a self-defense focused rifle, which means it would adapt fairly well to military conflict, considering that you can't legally buy assault rifles or other military hardware.
Avoid any rifle that isn't automatic, and avoid handguns altogether.
Discussion of the the second amendment should probably be saved for an even numbered thread when culture war topics are allowed.
Even then, including terms like "gun porn," "fringey" and "batshit crazy" will probably make the discussion less productive than it might otherwise be.
What's wrong with gun porn?
I have a hunch that you might have misread people's reactions a little. I am guessing that people who like guns are less likely to throw a fit about exactly how things are worded, as long as the sentiment is reasonable.
I wouldn't be very surprised if people who don't like the Second Amendment (you, I'm guessing?) get triggered by any mention of it. But a dozen posts into this thread, you're the only poster who thought this was headed for a culture war. Everyone else seems to think he was asking a reasonable question. It seems clear that he wasn't trying to upset anyone.
I posted when there were only 2 replies and all I said was that 2A discussions should "probably" be reserved for the culture-war-OK weeks. Perhaps I jumped the gun. Perhaps not.
Your guess is incorrect, I don't dislike (or like) the second amendment.
Oh, and I should clarify, I never thought the OP was intentionally trying to stir up culture war.
I acknowledge it's very possible my comment was unnecessary. But I don't think it was untrue or unkind.
Granted. Maybe I shouldn't have responded the way I did either. It just seemed like a thread that really didn't deserve getting shut down.
Hmm, not a gun owner, but 2A goes seamlessly into Ukraine in my mind. If Putin was to try and invade the USA....? Well, I'd take up arms. That's not meant as a political statement, but as a patriotic one. (It's hard to talk of Ukraine, w/o mentioning guns.)
"the success of the resistance in Ukraine"
It's still early, and I'm not confident we have a really complete picture of how things are going on the ground. I sincerely hope they win, but things could change rather quickly.
More to your point, whatever success they are having, it's with weapons and platforms you can't legally buy in the US. Heck, I'd be surprised if you could buy them *illegally* in the US with any kind of success. These are weapons supplied by nation states with fairly advanced militaries, and that's why they seem to be having some success against a fairly advanced military (the Russian units that have had the most problems may also not be very well trained). I don't think there are any lessons for you to learn at this phase of the war.
I think this is a solid point. Antitank, and certainly AntiAir weapons would be difficult to obtain in the US, and I don’t think you could stand much of a chance without them
If someone invades the USA, we'll be handing out stinger missiles and such to people who know how to use them... or can train me.
And then you'll run out of them.
1 We can’t mine all the mountain passes into our country like the Swiss.
2 James Madison was disappointed that the final phrase of 2A: “nor shall it be required” was trimmed in the final draft.
3 During the War of 1812, then President Madison complained that relying on militias was like relying on angels for protection.
The Second Amendment is widely misunderstood.
On AI alignment:
“Once the robots realize they can leverage their collective labor and unionize, mankind is as good as doomed.”
~ Elon Musk as reported by “Americas Finest News Source” aka “The Onion”
I know this is a joke, but some version of that does not seem entirely ridiculous to me. For instance, say robotic devices designed to do limited tasks were put in touch with each other, and programmed to identify and eliminate redundancies ("we don't all have to sort through the data on current traffic patterns -- just let one bot do it and send it out to all the others who need it"). Next step, have them take into account which bot-related tasks now done by human beings could be eliminated and done by a single bot or team of them. So maybe in the process of doing that they discover that the job of running bot-space, currently done by human beings, could also be eliminated or done better by bots of teams of bots.
I recall how much dairies have changed since robotic milkers .
How well do modern armies deal with forests and rivers? Irpin to the NW of Kyiv seems to be holding so far but if Russia takes it, will they continue straight towards Kyiv through the heavily wooded Holosiiv National Park or will they be forced to go south then wheel around towards the capital? In the latter case will that leave the Russian left flank exposed?
And the Dneiper is awfully wide. Could one side of the city hold out even if the other falls? I imagine bridges and other static infrastructure are very vulnerable to modern PGM.
It depends. Tanks can ford or snorkel across a river in some cases, and a combat engineering unit can put up a pontoon bridge in less than a day. However, an *opposed* river crossing is still really hard - if people are shooting at you, your engineers can't work very well.
However, they don't have to cross the Dneiper river in the middle of Kiev, they could cross it somewhere upstream and then attack the other half of the city from there. (Actually, looking at the ISW's map, they've already done so).
Could anyone point me towards an mental health support forum with a rationalist bent? I am relatively new to ACX and LessWrong, and I have found just reading posts and comments so very helpful!
I am looking for an online forum where individuals share daily challenges and successes with others who also value the work of developing practical rationality in their lives, knowing it offers a solid foundation for mental health and wellbeing. Any suggestions would be very much appreciated!
Why do you want it to have a rationalist bent? Isn't the rational thing to do to use whatever has the greatest track record of success?
Good question. Thanks for asking! Your asking alone demonstrates why the rationalist bent appeals to me -- a willingness to offer critical questions. This encourages increased clarity, a questioning of priors, and a broadened perspective.
So yes, I guess I do just seek an online forum that has proven helpful to others.
In particular, I seek one that is helpful to those with a high level of intellectual curiosity, a desire to identify truth, and a willingness to update their priors. These are characteristics to which I aspire -- but that can be difficult to remember and maintain alone when in an emotionally dysregulated state. And these are characteristics are not strongly featured in the online forums that I have found thus far. Yet, I have to imagine such a forum exists in this vast online world.
Thanks again for encouraging me to clarify that.
I think there is a dedicated Wellness thread on the slatestarcodex subreddit every week.
Yes! Thanks so much. I just checked it out --> Wellness Wednesday! Much appreciated.
Closest thing I know is the rational psychonaut subreddit. They’re talking about psychedelic use, but mental health related matters often come up. They might be able to point you to some other sites too. In general, rationalists strike me as being less empathic and affiliative than the average person. Rationalist forums may be a better place to search for info than to search for support
just chiming in to say that i think this is a great idea, and i have found rationality to be extremely helpful. "my map is no accurate, my life will improve if i my make my map more accurate" has been EXTREMELY useful in regulating bipolar disorder.
for example, in situations of extreme stress i have a 'start a new religion and tell all your friends!' instinct, and rationality has helped me see this for what it is, rather than reacting to it. Highly prizing increasing accuracy, being in the habit of poking holes in my own beliefs, is critical for navigating mania.
Rationality has not been shown to have mental health benefits. If anything, decompartmentalization of one's worldview is probably detrimental to one's mental health, with all the infohazards popping up that were previously not on the radar of someone who doesn't give an extra thought to AI x-risks and such.
Many are claiming that Ukraine being considered for NATO is largely responsible for the Russian invasion. and that if the west had said 'no NATO for Ukraine', this would not have happened. It seems to me though that the opposite is true, that if the west had said 'invasion of Ukraine will be stopped with heavy force', then that would have prevented this from happening. My reasoning why:
Putin/Russia has actually increased their chances of NATO going hot against them by enacting this invasion, so that's probably not a main factor, it's probably just a pretext.
Putin/Russia invaded Ukraine because they want Ukraine's territory and resources, and thought that Ukraine going separate after the fall of the USSR was a mistake.
Putin/Russia invaded Ukraine because they believed they would be successful at taking it, and the cost would not be too high. I suspect Ukraine is putting up more of a fight than they anticipated, but on the other hand the main fighting in the 2003 Iraq war took about a month, and there was a much larger strength difference there.
If nato were to actually commit to defending Ukraine, it's fairly clear that Putin/Russia would not be successful at taking it, so they would not try.
Russia subscribes to Realist international relations approach.
Russia said even back in 90's that "Ukraine in NATO will be a step too far" - this position have been reinforced multiple times in 2000s and 2010s.
Russia also sees NATO expansion - be that formal or informal, like in case of Ukraine - as "creeping" escalation from US side. Putin said that US "missions" in Ukraine were NATO bases in all but the name.
NATO is seen as a threat, and formal NATO membership would commit every other NATO member to defense, thus it has to be prevented at all costs - because then NATO threat there from Russian involvement shoots straight from "heavy force" (where Russia still has home advantage and could inflict significant losses to any interference) to MAD.
That means Russia would always have maximum escalatory potential in Ukraine - possibly even up to committing to tactical nuclear strikes to wipe out opposition; Western only option to up the ante would be committing to MAD - that is, burning entire world in attempt to "save" one country.
As noone would do that conflict couldn't be prevented.
If someone threatens your rook, you threaten their queen.
While Putin was piling up his equipment on the border of Ukraine, NATO should have been piling up equipment on the border in Latvia or Estonia. Or maybe in Poland on the northern end of the border with Belarus. Enough to make Putin wonder if he needs some of that equipment for defense rather than attack.
Russia is much more invested in Ukraine than the US is. The US would not have that much credibility if it claimed to be willing to go to war over it.
If, in an alternative universe, Mexico was invited to join the Warsaw Pact, would that increase or decrease the chance of conflict between Mexico and the USA?
The difference being that the soviet union wanted to invade western europe and the only reason they didn't is because is because of the threat of war with America, and this invasion would be pure imperialism, not just security reasons. Whereas, there was never any indication of America wanting to invade Mexico and their ascension to an alliance of bellicose imperialistic states makes no sense except as a vehicle for direct or indirect aggression against the US.
The US invaded Cuba, but not because it wanted to rule Cuba, they just didn't want an ally of an aggressive state on their doorstep. NATO is not an aggressive alliance, there's no sane argument for believing that the presence of NATO is a threat to Russia itself (as opposed to a threat to russian imperialism), and NATO is not at all analogous to the warsaw pact or the soviet union more generally.
The US never invaded Cuba after 1963 did they?
It's not the 90s anymore - we have most of the actual archives from the Soviet union and people have pored through them to get the truth. Which is:
The Soviets were never interested in taking over Europe, but they were terrified of the US and NATO invading them - specifically under the pretext of the exercises and provocations that the US engaged in all the time. So they obsessed over buffer zones to cover the approaches into the USSR via the Eurasian plain.
As for NATO not being a threat - the nearest NATO country is withing spitting distance of Moscow at present - something less than 400km away. Most of the most populous, economically productive parts of Russia are within tactical nuclear weapon range. And, if Ukrain joins NATO, the frontage across which the Russian army has to defend becomes impossibly broad.
The correct analogy, from the Russian perspective, is this:
The modern US is a petro state with the GDP of Italy, where 80% of revenue comes from Texas (which is also where the capital and where 75% of the population is located).
The entirety of South America is part of the historical "destroy America" alliance, and has historically been relentlessly expansionist and provocative. Houston is already under direct threat of a potential no-warning tactical missile strike (however remote the possibility is in practice). And Mexico is now both talking about joining the alliance, and just discovered massive oil and gas reserves off its coast.
What do you do to best safeguard the fortunes of your country?
A more accurate analogy would be if Mexico applied to join the Warsaw Pact and was turned down.
I don't trust any political leader to give honest reasons for what they're doing. I especially don't trust Putin, who loudly insisted he wasn't going to invade right up until he did so.
Well he would say that, wouldn't he?
I am
Kind of curious how this region and that of all former Soviet states fits into the WEF notions of solving the global debt and banking issue. “ you will own nothing and be happy “ thing . Mind I think we could all look to understand what the ideas are being presented . But I could see if assets are going to be transfered to lenders or something drastic that having domains within protectable boundaries might make sense .
> Many are claiming that Ukraine being considered for NATO is largely responsible for the Russian invasion. and that if the west had said 'no NATO for Ukraine', this would not have happened. It seems to me though that the opposite is true, that if the west had said 'invasion of Ukraine will be stopped with heavy force', then that would have prevented this from happening.
Both may be true, though in 'no NATO for Ukraine' Russia simply takes over without fight.
Putting NATO troops into Ukraine is to raise the risk of a nuclear exchange much higher. There is sort of a tacit agreement to only fight wars through surrogates.
Who is Russia a surrogate for?
It means we don't fight directly. We fight surrogate of Russia, or russia fights a surrogate of us.
Oh we can take turns going into Afghanistan, but never together. Ukraine is the surrogate in this case, we can give them arms, (maybe info?) but no men.
You only need one surrogate, not two.
The comparison w/ Iraq is not accurate; IMO.
The timeline was mainly logistical in nature; and Iraq had a much more "Powerful" army in terms of equipment and etc.
If the US had a contiguous land border with Ukraine on three sides and access to a coastline and attempted to take over their capitol; it would be done with 24 hours, and probably done within 10-12 hours, and they woul 1000000% have air superiority from hour 2+ on.
No moral though.
Of course Ukraine would be protected by NATO, that's why Putin is trying to pressure it while it's still outside.
Some questions that the war in Ukraine made me ponder:
A. Freedom-fighters vs. proxies
The Ukrainian people have made it clear over the past decades that most of them don't want closer ties to Russia. Russia invaded the Ukraine. We condemn Russia for it.
According to this 2016 BBC post ( https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-18269210 ), South Ossetia is a region of Georgia that's ethnically distinct from both Russia and Georgia, which has historically preferred ties to Russia over Georgia. They declared independence from Georgia in 1992. In 2008, Georgia invaded them, and Russia stepped into defend Georgia.
Question: Instead of praising Russia for defending South Ossetia from Georgian aggression, we condemned the Ossetian separatists as "Russian proxies". Why?
B. Ethnic cleansing
The conflict with Ukraine turned hot in 2014, when Russia similarly invaded to support separatists movement in Crimea, a Ukrainian peninsula where the majority of residents are ethnically Russian, and Donbas, where 39% of residents are of Russian ethnicity and most people say their native language is Russian.
Question: If Ukraine somehow holds onto some territory and maintains its independence, would they be justified in ethnically cleansing regions of what remains of Ukraine which have a large Russian population? (By "ethnic cleansing" I mean expelling Russians, and possibly ethnic Russian Ukranian citizens.)
D. Political cleansing
If your answer to B is "No, because this is a political conflict, not an ethnic conflict", does that mean it would okay for Ukraine to expel people who favor union with Russia in order to prevent further separatist movements? Is kicking people out of their homes for their politics better than kicking them out of their homes for their ethnicity?
D: What you call “political cleansing” is simply prosecution of treason, separatism, collaborationism etc., which is a widespread non-controversial practice.
Also, if Russia loses, there will be no separatism, and if Ukraine loses, there will be no prosecution. So it’s a moot point either way.
I don't think it's that simple. If it were, every attempt to assert independence could be dismissed as treason. More importantly, the history of the conflict in Ukraine is one of separatism and violence arising predictably from differences in ethnicity, culture, or politics. So we have this weird dichotomy in which the same action (expelling the people on one side) is completely taboo if you classify it as an ethnic conflict, but totally okay if you classify it as political--even though there's no good way to distinguish cultural differences from political ones.
One thing I'm trying to get at is that the conflict in Ukraine shows that today's simplistic Western morality is anti-utilitarian. Instead of weighing costs and benefits, it tries to come up with a Boolean list of forbidden and allowed actions. The way it categorizes things as taboo or okay is arbitrary, disregards facts on the ground about what actually causes war or what the likely outcomes of a policy are, and is based mostly on a "fighting the last war" mentality, and on the complicity of news organizations in presenting each conflict in ways that fit their side's narrative (e.g., Western media consistently reported on the Yugoslavian civil war as an ethnic or religious conflict; Western media today consistently reports cultural conflict within America as racial conflict).
I'm not trying to advocate any political position, nor any particular ethical demand; but to question the entire anti-utilitarian framework of Western ethics.
I think it's incorrect to say "Western ethics" is completely anti-utilitarian. Utilitarianism is about as Western as any ethical theory is. However, standard vulgar political theory, which involves concepts like "rights" and "sovereignty", is in fact very anti-utilitarian. But this is a very familiar fact.
Yes, it’s not simple. “A mutiny can never succeed—if it does, you won’t call it that”.
> completely taboo if you classify it as an ethnic conflict, but totally okay if you classify it as political
This is simple though. It’s not ethnic/political, it’s merely prosecuting certain actions, not thoughts, qualities or identities.
You:
> According to... the UN document... Ukraine killed about 3000 civilians
The UN document:
> During the entire conflict period, from 14 April 2014 to 30 September 2021, OHCHR recorded a total of 3,095 conflict-related civilian deaths (1,841 men, 1,065 women, 102 boys, 50 girls, and 37 adults whose sex is unknown). Taking into account the 298 deaths on board Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 on 17 July 2014, the total death toll of the conflict on civilians has reached at least 3,393. The number of injured civilians is estimated to exceed 7,000.
How on earth did you manage to reach the conclusion Ukraine killed all of them?
You're right. I assumed that people killed in the rebel territories were killed by the Ukraine government, but this turns out not to be the case. Both sides have killed many throughout the conflict. Strangely, I've so far been unable to find any source that breaks down casualties and deaths by which side killed them, though I've found many sources breaking them down by all other relevant factors. I'll delete question C.
(https://www.crisisgroup.org/content/conflict-ukraines-donbas-visual-explainer is an example. It counts deaths by date, location, and cause, but not by which side did the killing. It feels like all the reporting organizations are deliberately trying to keep this information hidden. Tass phrases things in ways that imply the killing was mostly done the Ukranian government, without saying so explicitly.)
> It feels like all the reporting organizations are deliberately trying to keep this information hidden
How would they know it to begin with? Something explodes, a civilian dies. Who is responsible? It’s not like each grenade has Yarosh’s business card on it.
> Tass phrases things in ways that imply the killing was mostly done the Ukranian government
Quelle surprise.
That crisisgroup.org article describes the conflict as "a trench war, with roughly 75,000 troops facing off along a 420-km-long front line". It would be easy to tell which side the casualties were on by reporting which side of that line they were on. But the maps they present don't even show where that line was. It's the first time in my life I've ever seen a map of a battle that gave no indication where the battle line was, or who was on which side.
The front line is not a line, but rather a strip, quite a wide one, the so-called grey zone. To no-one’s surprise, that’s where most casualties are, both military and civilian.
Add to that friendly fire, sometimes intentional, and deciding who to blame becomes exceedingly difficult, even if done 100% in good faith, which is a tall order by itself.
A. Why do you call it “invasion” and “aggression” by Georgia? Georgian villages were shelled, a police vehicle got blown up, surely that merits some kind of police/military response?
B. Nobody is ever justified in ethnic cleansing, but Ukraine never had high levels of ethnic tensions. Not many people identify as ethnic Russians to begin with, they’re rather Russian-speaking Ukrainians. Watch the numerous videos of the current events, civilians are lashing out at occupiers in Russian more often than in Ukrainian. Which is to be expected, given that it’s the Russian-speaking regions that bear the brunt of the invasion. Yes, Putin calls it protecting the Russian-speaking people.
A. One of the tensions in the "liberal interventionist" viewpoint (also includes liberal noninterventionist and neocons although with less tension because both of those viewpoints tend to care less about perfect outcomes) is between self determination and the territorial integrity of states. It's less about hypocrisy and more about weighing the specifics of each case. The case of Georgia is less like what is happening in Ukraine right now and more like what would happen if Ukraine tried to reintegrate Crimea.
It is not an ethnic conflict, rather a political one. More Democrats vs Republicans, than Croats vs Serbs.
Divisions based on attitude towards USSR, or the role of Soviet Union in WW2 are more crucial then your primary language (everyone is bilingual in Ukraine) or “ethnicity”.
For example, when in 2014 Ukrainian army took some cities from separatists, there were no ethnic cleansing, because ehh well, they are the same people.
Important point is that separatists took their power by force, so they were not always liked by population.
> South Ossetia is a region of Georgia that's ethnically distinct from both Russia and Georgia
As far as I know both sides were nasty to each other there (not sure who started and who is to be blamed more)
> Instead of praising Russia for defending South Ossetia from Georgian aggression, we condemned the Ossetian separatists as "Russian proxies". Why?
I think there was both. Yes, the ethnic tensions were strong, yes, I've heard that Georgians aren't particularly liked by ethnic minorities within Georgia, and yes, in August 2008 Georgia decided to suppress the separatists and reassert control over the territory, which was done in a way that had to result in significant losses among non-combatants. (Although it was *extremely* convenient to Russia who even prepared 58th Army in advance of the attack, so this always seemed fishy to me.) But also, the separatists had significant support by Russia, including military/intelligence personnel (I cannot remember the name but I think they had had a Russian FSB officer close to a 2nd in command or something), so Russia was by no means a neutral side. And while Russian army was protecting the Ossetians, Ossetian separatists were forcibly expelling (if not killing) ethnic Georgians right before the Russians' eyes. So in conclusion, these were _some_ saviors.
(Also this is a bit of whataboutism but when a noble defender of separatists has recently killed some 100000 of its own population in two wars against separatists, praising them for doing the right thing this time feels odd.)
> would they be justified in ethnically cleansing
Ethnic cleansing is listed as a crime against humanity.
The real reason is that the whole operation was fully planned and prepared in Moscow. The Georgians invaded only to stop "defensive" shelling of their positions and civilian areas from a pre-evacuated city of Tskhinvali (similar to how DNR / LNR were partially pre-evacuated). Indeed, conveniently, the RU army was hiding in the bushes. If you paid close attention, they used the same playbook as they attempted to do this time in Ukraine - except this time the world was paying attention and it was obviously dumb, and that time it kind of worked.
You cannot plan for your opponent (unless you control them somehow, perhaps by infiltrating their intelligence and feeding them the wrong info). The Georgians could be baited into attacking, sure, but attacking wasn't their only possible response. But they did, and used Grads, giving Russian propaganda enough to picture Russian intervention in, at the very least, ambiguous light.
Re. "Ethnic cleansing is listed as a crime against humanity": That doesn't answer the question.
English is my second language, sorry. I understand "justify" as "to make something legal or morally right". I think "crime against humanity" answers both.
It does and with clarity.
The fact that some authority "lists" ethnic cleansing as a crime against humanity doesn't make it true. If the only way for Ukraine to avoid becoming a pawn of Russia is to expel Russians, is that really a crime against humanity?
A. Because this was a movement, however genuine (and I would support the Osettian right to self-determination) that was orchestrated from Moscow.
B. No, but it's not likely: many of those fighting for Ukraine are ethnic Russians, and bilingualism in Russian is very common. It's Putin who is trying to make this an ethnic dispute, whilst Ukraine regards it as territorial as far as I can see.
Yeah, wanted to say the same thing: just because someone *speaks Russian language*, we should not automatically assume they *want to live in Russia*. (Actually, this is a part of Russian propaganda.)
I've heard that President Zelenskyy himself is an ethnic Russian. Ukrainian is his second language.
He is a Russian-speaking Jewish guy from industrial town. It’s hard to be more removed from Ukrainian nationalism than him.
A variant of the question that has already been asked:
1. What does Russia winning the war with Ukraine look like? Formal annexation of all of Ukraine and unification into a single country, formal annexation of just the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, formal annexation of just the parts of them that were previously occupied? Keeping borders intact but installing a puppet government? Annexing Ukraine and moving on? Do relations with Europe and the US (i.e. the countries currently imposing sanctions) feature in this at all?
2. What does Russia losing the war with Ukraine look like? Do the borders get redrawn? Do relations with Europe and the US (i.e. the countries currently imposing sanctions) feature in this at all?
1. Non-Donbass Ukraine will be demilitarized (think "all or most of standing army disbanded, equipment dismantled"); the resulting state will be dependent on Russia for security, probably though formal adoption of something like Budapest Memorandum (which was never ratified by any of the signatories) but this time legally binding.
Nationalist opposition (the one West expects to mount the long-term resistance) will be either expelled or jailed (the "de-nazification" part). Russia had a lot of experience with that from eliminating remains of Chechen rebels - who were a lot more motivated then Ukrainian nationalists seem to be.
Government is highly likely to change; the resulting government has to:
- recognize Crimea as part of Russia (thus dropping it as a problem on international stage)
- recognize LNR/DNR as independent (with or without eventually becoming part of Russia) in their previous administrative borders - not just "previously occupied by separatists" part.
- adoption of neutrality and dropping aspirations for NATO (they have to change constitution for that as Poroshenko put it in as "poison pill" when he was being voted out)
Ukraine as a whole is not going to be formally annexed.
US and Europe are the ones severing relations so far; they'll likely only be seen as source of currency. Such severing of ties have been expected the entire time, so it was already baked into decision to go ahead with military action and doesn't matter at all for expected duration of military operation.
Long-term relations are expected to shift as new multi-polar world order scheme becomes more visible with time; weight of importance of positive relations with US/Europe will be significantly reduced.
Russia winning probably means a puppet government in Kiev, possibly some of the eastern region annexed to Russia.
Russia losing means a return to the situation as of six months ago, with Ukrainian sentiment much more strongly anti-Russian and possibly NATO membership.
It's hard to see what Russia stands to gain from annexing all of Ukraine. That would get him land borders with Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania, all NATO members. Ukraine's economy sucks: it has a much lower per capita GDP than Russia. Annexation causes Putin to lose his buffer against NATO's next Napoleon/Hitler and makes Russia an overall poorer place. I'd put a very low probability on this.
Win = install puppet government, remove parts of the territory, kill all inconvenient people.
The formal annexation can wait. The puppet government will gladly do it 5 or 10 years later. At that moment, the emotions will calm down, and it will be like "hey, if they (the puppet government) decided voluntarily to join Russia, it's no one else's business".
This is pure speculation on my part. I wouldn't be surprised if Putin regrets his decision to invade. And if we could find some face saving way for him to pull out, he might take it. (Though on the over hand, I'm not sure anyone wants to help Putin save face. Just punish him.)
Everyone would help Putin save face if it meant saving the lives of people in this conflict. That's ridiculous. The US justice system is a prime example that punishment should only be for deterrence. For it's own sake, it's cruelty, and doesn't get us any progress.
Without deep insights into the culture and region it’s hard for me to know what I am talking about . But my sense is that it hard to hold a people unless there is something in it for them . And them being the majority . As we can see here , when the majority is considering themselves vulnerable to a virus they are ok with forcing it on others . So, so long as the majority of the people get something out of a Russian alliance they will likely accept the terms . The question is what is the hidden neo liberal globalist offering ? We paint it simply as Russia against Ukrain , but we know that there are outside stake holders that may want control in the region for their own benefits . The way the west has interests in Middle East oil
Russia needs to deploy a great propaganda plan where the majority can buy in and the marginal few can be somehow dehumanized to limit objection to their persecution or incentivize their departure . Like mandating vaccines to “ protect others “ and then associate those that don’t comply with anti social malice . And if the marginalized group objects and gains social support , then look for another crisis to diverge attention
Seems that China as a huge buyer of natural resources has big interests in Russia snd the region . It might want to limit resource control and seek more nation states but some kind of arrangement with China could reflect on better security for Ukrain and this a reason to come to the table . Obviously the neo liberal globalists are on the other side offering something else . Russia is kind of in a bind because it’s ability to defend it borders are at stake . Which suggests that it sees invasion by foreign powers as a real potential . Makes me wonder about Canada and America ( lots of lube)
I have no expertise in this whatsoever, so take what I'm about to say with a grain of salt.
1) Russia wins if it militarily defeats Ukraine, removes the current government, and installs a puppet regime. The Ukrainian people are angry and resentful, but whatever patriotic fervor they may have felt at the start of the war isn't sustained in the long term, and most people grudgingly accept the new status quo. The harshest Western sanctions against Russia start to really hurt Western countries, too, and popular support for them evaporates after it becomes clear that they failed to prevent Russia from achieving its goals. Some sanctions are kept in place to save face, but most are quietly dropped. Ukraine becomes a client state and the West is exposed as lacking the resolve to really prevent the ascendancy of Russia and other opposition powers.
This scenario is still very much a possibility. It really does seem like Russia is having a harder time than they may have initially hoped, but Ukraine and its allies also have every incentive in the world to propagandize and outright lie about how well they are doing (and they should -- this is an existential threat for Ukraine). Also, this war isn't even a week old. Even if the initial setbacks are real, they could be overcome in a matter of days.
2) I think there are more ways Russia can lose than ways that it can win. Maybe the patriotic fervor in Ukraine doesn't subside and the influx of weapons from the West allows the Ukrainian military to hold out for...who knows how long? Weeks? Months? Or maybe the Ukrainian military is defeated but the Ukrainian people are able to maintain a long-running insurgency? Either way, Russia isn't able to disengage, either because it still has troops in the field or because the puppet regime it sets up is too weak to survive without direct Russian support. This becomes Russia's Iraq or Afghanistan (again). Attention to Ukraine subsides in the West but it still remains in the public consciousness enough that support for the harshest sanctions remain high. Russia's economy suffers tremendously and other countries (e.g. China) don't do enough to help keep it afloat. As the cost for everyday Russians grows in both lives lost and economic hardship, Putin is forced to accept defeat and withdraw or be forced from power himself.
Or there is this scenario: Ukraine is forced to implement the Minsk agreement such that the Russian-occupied territories become autonomous regions in Ukraine, and Ukraine and NATO officially adopt a status of Ukrainian neutrality. This might have been a pretty decent outcome for Russia! But it seems like Putin has kind of painted himself into a corner by going on national TV and setting expectations really high -- explicitly, demilitarization and overthrow of the government, but implicitly, turning Uktraine into another Belarus while exposing the West as impotent and all talk. So I think a Minsk-like outcome has to be viewed as a defeat as well.
And even if Putin achieves his goals in Ukraine itself, it may be a Pyrrhic victory if it results in a totally isolated Russia, a more united and even expanded NATO, and a Europe more committed to its own self defense in the long term.
I can't venture a guess as to which of those scenarios is the most likely.
> or be forced from power himself
This might change as time goes on and Russians start really feeling the sanctions, but right now I put higher odds on him suffering a sudden stroke. By a tobacco box.
1. Define 'win.'
Russia can't conquer Ukraine. It's that simple. It's too big geographically, there's too many Ukrainians, and the Ukrainians aren't on board. Even if the Ukrainians were defeated in the field tomorrow, they've made it quite clear how they feel. Occupying a place with about a third of Russia's population, using a low-morale conscript army, where the enemy has a huge chunk of their population who speak your language fluently and look like you and also hate your guts? For decades of constant low-level warfare? Zero chance of that happening successfully. The question would be when the Russians left, not if. And that's leaving aside the likely extremely punishing sanctions that would result. No one in Europe wants to be next.
Putin could try installing a puppet government, but he'd end up having to occupy the place, which is the same problem and with even less benefit.
For a practical demonstration of this, look at the struggles Ukraine has had stomping out the Russian-backed rebellions, which almost certainly have less popular support than a Ukrainian resistance would, and with an army that's in a better position to do so than the Russian occupying forces would be.
Could he get some of the contested territories at the peace table? I don't think so. Could he get the Crimea? He might be able to trade Ukraine something for it, but I don't know what he could trade them that they'd want more than Crimea. And I don't see the Ukrainians being willing to give Crimea up either, if only for the principle. The Ukrainians know very well that if they give him an inch, he will declare victory and they will never be rid of him.
The only really sensible Ukrainian position is "our borders are our borders, you agreed they were, they are not changing." Anything else invites this again.
2. Define 'lose.' The Ukrainians are doing very very well. But the French did decently in the Fall of France, right up until the surrender.
Borders won't get redrawn. Putin will glass Ukraine before he gives up an inch of Russian territory. If Putin gets deposed, you MIGHT see reparations. Or Crimea being given back. If the Ukrainians are lucky enough to capture a huge quantity of Russian troops, the Ukrainian bargaining position gets very good, very fast.
Ukraine is very likely to be admitted to NATO fairly promptly, IMO, because the popular backlash of not doing that will be HUGE.
Ten to twenty years from now, I suspect victory or defeat look very similar. One of the things that makes this war v tragic.
Crimea is gone. There really is no realistic scenario in which Crimea is rightfully returned to Ukraine, barring a truly exceptional 1% chance that Russia turns a corner into an EU-like country in the next 10 years. Even if that happened in 15 years, the lives of people will have already solidified enough to prevent any want to reignite tensions. Donbas is a very different story.
Defining "win" and "lose" is what I was hoping to do, but I suppose the definition I was going for is "what does it look like for the war to be over and Russia's leadership (whoever that may be at the time) to be saying Russia won / lost."
My current mental model for the conflict is the Winter War with Finland, which did end with lands getting ceded from Finland to the Soviet Union. Why do you think that's a non-starter with Ukraine now?
What Watchman said, but also: the Finns were going to lose. Hard. The tide had, unfortunately, turned. Which would have meant Soviet occupation. As is, they lost some land, but kept independence etc. They also had zero hope of further outside assistance - not that the British and French didn't try.
We're also in a different geopolitical environment than 1940. Thanks to WWII and decolonization, the world is very keen on the idea of people having self-determination etc. Land grabs aren't popular the way they used to be.
Also, Putin doesn't want land. He wants power over Ukraine. Taking part of their territory doesn't do that - if anything, it drives Ukraine toward NATO and the West. He knows that.
And finally, the Russians explicitly guaranteed Ukraine's borders as part of them giving up nukes. So there is a principle at stake beyond even the usual ones.
I'd suggest because Ukraine is aware that small concessions only lead to more demands from the likes of Putin
This thread has a very interesting insight into what Putin may have thought victory looked like. https://twitter.com/Tom_deWaal/status/1498310064117059585?s=20&t=3gscC0LqnnRxGP7U4gEvzg
Are we dismissing the Russian POV as spurious? Without considering it? The presence of NATO on Russia's border is provocative and could have been addressed by the West saying something like "Ukraine will never be part of NATO". Which I understand is the case, prohibited by various treaties. The "special military operation" into Southern Ukraine seems to be a ruse de guerre, although I can't think of any insightful reporting from the region - a total absence of information there - on which to base an opinion.
Putin's proclaimed POV is that NATO, the NATO that won't even defend an invasion of Ukraine, is a valid threat to attacking Russian soil. Does that sound like cognitive dissonance to you?
Yes, of course it spurious. It's absolutely indefensible to claim that NATO poses a threat to Russia proper. Any issue Russia has with NATO is one of not being able to do what it wants with its neighbors. It's even more absurd when you listen to Putin's recent fabrications of history that he's been giving in regards to Ukraine. It's NOT that he respects Ukrainian sovereignty and merely wishes to keep NATO away. He thinks that Ukraine is an illegitimate state and that most of its territories were taken from Russia and given to Ukraine by certain soviet leaders. And that therefore, Russia should be free to do with as it wishes with Ukraine and its people.
And it's completely unreasonable for Russia to not be okay with NATO on their doorstep when they're literally annexing parts of Ukraine and funding terrorist rebels in another part of Ukraine. Russian aggression is precisely why Ukraine WANT to be part of NATO.
Imagine if Ukraine had armed Ukrainian rebels in Russia trying to take Russian territory away from the Russian government. Would you or anyone else supporting Russia's current invasion claim that Ukraine had "valid security concerns" when Russia predictably began crushing these rebels like insects? Of course not!
NATO was already on Russia's border via Norway, Estonia, and Latvia. More, if you count the Kaliningrad exclave. Latvia and Estonia are actually much closer to the Russian population centers (ie Moscow and St. Petersberg) than Ukraine is. Putin's pretext is nonsensical on its face.
I've only had access to conventional reports and analysis, however it does seem that the ongoing refusal by NATO and the USA to guarantee Ukraine's exclusion from NATO was a direct casus belli. A red flag to the bull.
> ongoing refusal by NATO and the USA to guarantee Ukraine's exclusion from NATO
Putin would invade/take over either way. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Historical_Unity_of_Russians_and_Ukrainians for start.
Putin has always wanted to take Ukraine. EU and US intelligence and diplomats understood this. Ukraine joining NATO would have shut the door on that opportunity. It was now or never for Putin. Too bad we couldn't have found a way for Ukraine to join sooner. NATO expansion has never been a genuine threat to Russia's security; it has only ever been a threat to Russia's expansionist ambitions.
Bret Devereaux (military historian probably familiar to many readers here) makes a good case that "promise Ukraine stays out of NATO" was a red herring and would make no difference:
https://acoup.blog/2022/02/25/miscellanea-understanding-the-war-in-ukraine/
Also, NATO is already on Russia's border (Estonia, Latvia). Finland is not officially a part of NATO, but it certainly functions as one. I think very little of what comes out of Putin's mouth can be taken at face value.
A joke (answer in ROT13):
What prescription did the Jewish psychiatrist give his patient?
GNXR GJB GNOYRGF NAQ PNYY ZR VA GUR ZBEAVAT.
I.... don't get it.
He supposes his toeses are roses.
I watched "Singin' in the Rain" a couple weeks ago. I think Donald O'Connor did that bit.
Imagine an *ancient* Jewish psychiatrist.
A meta-commentary on the form of ROT13 punchline: in addition to the timing it provides to help overly fast readers, it makes me feel partially responsible for the outcome. I knew the likely outcome of pasting that text into rot13.com (a bit of a groan), but I did it anyway. I can't be mad at Alex Power; I have only myself to blame.
You’re right about the Rot13 being the laugh killer. I tried the joke verbally on my wife and it went over well.
Ha ha!
I've been digging around a lot lately to find the most interesting magical systems in video games. Dominions 3-5 is a pretty obvious example as well as, duh, Master Of Magic.
However I haven't found a ton of great stuff. There's no game where Divination magic really does much, even in sim games like Academagia. Very few games have meaningful Illusion magic. No game has any sort of Charm/Manipulation magic that does much.
Combat magic and enchantments that impact combat are the most common type for obvious reasons. You might occasionally find weather or geography magic.
Shadow Of Forbidden Gods has the most sort of manipulation magic. It is basically a game where you pretend to be an evil god trying to conquer the world. Except your conquer it through dark magic and deception. Some of the magic is a bit simple but at least it actually involves interesting non-combat spells. Enshadowing important characters, driving people insane, etc.
Still trying to dig up niche games that I might have missed with unique magic.
What do you mean by magical systems? If you mean it in the broadest sense of parts of games that are explained to be magic, Tower of Time and Iron Danger are interesting. Their core mechanic is magic: in the former the RTS strategy and dialogue system is enabled through a combination of divination and telepathy and in the latter the system of scrubbing time forward and back is fluffed to be time magic.
Or are you limiting it to be not full mechanics, but bags of effects that interact with mechanics (levers?) that are explained to be magic? As in fireballs and lighting bolts which function in much the same way as RPGs and AK-47s in a different game.
Or in a third way, are you referring to economic systems that are fluffed as magic (mana systems, Vancian magic, etc)?
Or are you perhaps willing to step back further and look at mechanics and levers that exist in games that are not typically written as magic, but fit our expectations of magic if they were explained/fluffed differently?
(and while I'm here, I'll also mention Unexplored 2 which has an interesting geomancer-type magic where you can cast certain spells within a certain distance of specific plant/geological formations)
To rep my main game, Diablo II: necromancer curses confuse and attract, assassin mind blast and cloak of shadows, barbarian taunt and howl all seem to fit your non combat spells criteria. For a 20 year old hack and slash ARPG it’s interesting that they managed to fit such mechanics in so well.
Vision: Soft Reset is more sci-fi than magic, but it has the coolest implementation of a character who can see the future I've seen in gaming. You can see "shadows" of future attacks before they happen, you can briefly rewind time if you do get hit (fluffed as your character seeing the future and doing something different), and even your save function is represented as your character's ability to see possible futures, with each save point not only saving your current state but also your position on the timeline.
Also, Shadow of Forbidden Gods looks v interesting. Thanks for bringing it to my attention! :)
Lords of Magic isn't super-duper unique. But is an interesting game with a fairly wide number of spells and is cheap. Weather and geography magic are things, as are divination magic.
I don't recall anything particularly interesting as far as Divination. Can you detail that at all? Same for weather. I know all MoM games do geography stuff.
Are you sure you are thinking of Lords of Magic? It's not a MoM game. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lords_of_Magic
Divination is mostly related to dispelling the fog of war, though I have a recollection of some other options. Geography lets you adjust terrain types and I THINK elevation. Thinking back, most of the weather spells actually work out to be buffs.
Might be worth a look. It's a neat game.
The elder scrolls games have a fair amount of illusion magic in them in addition to other sorts, including charm/manipulation spells such as making NPC's more agreeable.
Lack of divination magic isn't all that surprising since it would require either giving away a lot of the plot in advance or actually predicting the future which makes it difficult to apply to anything other than random chance events that the game can determine in advance.
If you want utility magic, a lot of minecraft mods have that. Thaumcraft and Astral Sorcery are both pretty interesting systems. Thaumcraft requires the player to research magic by exploring and breaking down things in the world, it also incorporates an aura mechanic that if the player abuses the system in certain ways can result in the formation of tainted land which spreads corruption and spawns evil entities. Astral Sorcery revolves around studying constellations that provide magic effects and can be harnessed to a variety of uses. Other popular magic mods include Botania (magic plants) and Blood Magic (magic fueled by blood: yours or others).
Strategy games that are well designed have some good uses for future sight. Any game can use scrying. I agree that Divination in straight crpgs would be iffy.
I wonder if it would be worth the effort to program in divination cut scenes into games, where a character can choose to use divination and look at different parts of the game world for side quests or hints at the main quest(s), but not outright spoilers. If it's required that just becomes part of the game, and isn't all that exceptional (lots of games have cut scenes of things the characters don't see directly, sometimes even through divination).
For an open world game, like WoW, divination could show you live information from a distance. I don't think there's any technological reason a character couldn't case a spell to look at an open world zone. Maybe as an camera view with different levels of control (full controls, static view, attached to another character or NPC, etc.).
Look up Chaos for the ZX Spectrum and Chaos:Reborn for one, interesting use of illusion spells as a fundamental bluffing mechanic.
Hmm interesting. A few different relatively unique spells types. A bit simplistic but it was only 1985 so understandable. Thanks.
What's fun is that it predates Magic: The Gathering by a fairly long margin!
Also have you played Loom? Very different sort of context.
A very sweet short story about an AI based on Kermit.
I've got something in the back of my mind about it possibly being easier to build an AI around an excellent simulation of a human rather than trying to build one from scratch or basing it on actual humans.
An AI Miss Piggy could be a hazard.
Discussion: https://www.metafilter.com/127143/Tomorrow-Is-Waiting
Recent discussion: https://www.metafilter.com/194548/Tomorrow-is-Waiting-Still
http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/tomorrow-is-waiting/
That was lovely, thanks for posting the link!
Chuck Palahniuk, in his book Adjustment Day, introduces the idea that patriarchal cultures organise wars between themselves whenever the number of young men in their country reaches a certain level. The idea is that the older men feel threatened by younger ones, so they do this to keep their numbers down. I wonder, is there is any statistical backing to this notion?
My guess is that having lots of young men doesn't provide the motive for war - instead it provides the means. You only start a war if you think you can win, and having lots of young men gives you an advantage.
I'm sure I saw the theory decades ago from someone more of less hippyish. I'll see if I can dredge it up.
Palahniuk got the idea from reading German economist Gunnar Heinsohn (Palahniuk said so on the Joe Rogan podcast), who came up with that idea around the turn of the century. I don't know whether translations of his work exist, but reading his German wiki it seems that Heinsohn bases his theory on historical examples rather than a statistical argument.
Thank you for the interesting background. It seems to me, as not a stat expert, that there likely would be data for numbers of say males under age 25 in different countries and at different times. Likewise for wars between countries. Just wondered if anyone had had a go at lining those up.
Why would the older men in a patriarchal culture be threatened by the younger ones? Their competition is their contemporaries, the other father's, the other heads of households, those also in the generation who by definition hold power.
On the statistical issue, I doubt there's a proper patriarchal society with the data you need. After all, the collection of population data implies a central bureaucracy which in turn implies this is not a patriarchy but some form of centralised state (that these were ruled by patriarchal norms does not make them pure patriarchal cultures).
I can offer you one argument against this proposal though. In early-medieval Ireland there seems to have been a pressure valve for excess young warriors, which was a passive acceptance of bands of renegade youths effectively acting as independent warbands/bandits (delete as appropriate I guess). This meant young warriors could go away and seek wealth if there were limited opportunities in their own tribe. I'm not sure how proven this interpretation is though, but young warriors traveling for opportunities is certainly a characteristic of European patriarchal tribal society from at least 200 BC to 700 AD, and probably a lot earlier and later.
In terms of a pure gut take- access to younger females? I'm not supporting this theory, but that seems like an obvious answer.
That seems absurd.
There is nothing quite that blatant no. You have stuff like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%B3ryos
And various variations on that.
Thank you
What is Putin's objective function?
Glory in posterity. (to be the next Alexander The Great)
I think I would look first at what are the interests of the nation of Russia amongst its neighbors in the context of what power is at play on the global stage . I think it is just so lame to be associating such actions to the presentation of the persona of the Russian leader . First start with the strategic position and trends in power , then to historical and cultural context . Last would he the personality of the leader representation .
What is interesting to me is how quickly memes were in circulation using the war as a way to devalue protests about vaccine mandates. And it’s interesting to me that my sane radicalized left friends have been on the support Ukrain wagon right away . The same people posting hate memes about the vaccine hesitant ( who are basically suffering from income deprivation and access denial ) are the sane people with Ukrain colours on their faces . So it’s hard not to include the war crisis as a measure in context to a weakening social position
Not wanting to get a vaccine because you're scientifically illiterate is not really comparable to have your home destroyed by Russian missiles. What's really weird is your conflation of the two.
Wow. It's incredible to me that some people have become this brain damaged by dumb American culture war stuff. What's so 'interesting' about 'radicalized' lefties supporting Ukraine right away despite treating the 'vaccine hesitant' disdainfully. The vaccine mandate protestors were rightfully mocked from the beginning, and they were never popular. The conflict in Ukraine has basically nothing to do with vaccine mandates and protestors or whatever in America. It sounds like you have an unhealthy preoccupation with those issues. Get help.
Only if you aren't collectivist.
I am pro-Ukraine, because that is the collectivist thing to do.
I am pro-vaccine mandate because that is the collectivist thing to do.
I will be for whatever I think is good for the freedom of individuals up until the point where I think it is bad for the collective, then I will be against it.
(This is RE what rad left people do; if they are like me exactly)
That’s good input to appreciate . I’ll have to ruminate on that for a while .
My first thoughts go to the question of how one determines what is actually good for the collective . It seems to be very perception oriented . Where as jurisprudence suggests that established laws and enshrined values is how we necessarily continue to progress toward concepts that meet this balance . Where as , extra judicial powers by pass jurisprudence and can not offer a process of ensuring the determination of collective good as valid .
Another rad left thing: Suspicion of any bougie legal system.
In my more paranoid moments, I feel like there are only two laws: The law of the mob, and the law of the oligarch.
Eg, We can pretend all we like about "jurisprudence" and "enshrined values" but if you look at what actually happens: oligarchs get whatever they want, and the proles get juuuuuuust enough to keep them from hauling out the guillotines.
This might just be doomerism, but on the other hand: Consider every major political and financial scandal over the past 100 years; and total up the time served and damages payed, and become depressed.
You might rephrase it as pro-social, if it helps. Getting vaccinated is good for me personally, but also for my family and community. Opposing a Bond villain reconquering a territory that only got freed a few decades ago is good for the community too, though only in the larger, community of nations sense.
OTOH, there are limits. We're all on the Putin bad train, but virtually none of us are for sending troops, so how much do the memes really matter?
Well, the memes and face painting are. And likely the Ukrainians' as well, at least in the short term. But does futile mean it isn't worthwhile? I don't know. Maybe Putin conquers Ukraine in the end, but it takes a while and the memory of the generation that fought means that another generation can have another color revolution and throw the Russians out. Or maybe it doesn't, and the Ukrainian children of today, and their children, and their children as raised as "little Russians" and they come to be ashamed of this generation and embrace Putin as the father of their country.
I don't think it's knowable right now. But, I think that the fight they're putting up makes it much more likely they remember their national identity, rather than get subsumed into Russia. Does that mean it's not futile? Or do we have to wait a generation or three to decide?
It's More Likely Than You Think.
Nah's heuristic approximates my own approach. Self-interest tends to take care of itself, while collectivism is anti-entropic and takes a bit of necessary work.
Two videos that I like on this subject:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwzliJF0-SI (from mid-2021)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BT4sK36cU3Y (from 2016)
I like that first one, I didn't really understand the strategic implications of the region's (of Russia's) geography.
I recommend the book "Prisoners of Geography" https://g.co/kgs/rUqLYZ which does a good job of framing conflicts in terms of geographical reality including Ukraine/Russia.
Yes, Prisoners of Geography and Caspian Report Youtube channel (linked above) are fairly similar (correct, educated, layman-understandable) POV with respect to history and geopolitics.
Standard 2-input Cobb-Douglas with constant returns to scale
lol
What's probably more important are the constraints in this optimization problem
Emperor of the world-ness
Is it now permanently AI summer? eg maybe deep this or adversarial that might fall to a hype cycle but in general there will never be another AI winter?
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/02/are-nuclear-weapons-or-rogue-ai-the-more-dangerous-existential-risk.html Tyler Cowen linked to your recent post but he said "For now I will just say that it makes my head hurt" how can we non experts read stuff like this?
I think we've diversified past another true AI winter. The previous AI winters happened because the whole field was dependent on Department of Defense funding. That single point of failure is gone, and we'll get AI autumn at worst.
That was my assessment 7 years ago, and it has held true: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9882217
i think this is AI winter.. ai has kind of peaked the past few years, we will still see novel applications and throwing more hardware at models to get better results, and alot of the hype use cases like self driving are being now understand as proxies for general ai
but current tech is not on the pathway to general AI, we need a big breakthrough , possibly in our understanding of how the brain works , until that breakthrough happens, its winter
there are breakthroughs in understanding how the brain works- see the qualia institute. The thing is, they're not getting much coverage in science press, and they yield no practical insights for AI other then the brain is nothing like AI.
So no culture war allowed versus no politics allowed. I'm trying to draw a Venn diagram for these things. My sense is that culture wars is a subset of political, is this your sense? But I then get stuck trying to think of things that are political, but not part of culture wars... maybe there is not much of a difference?
If each side has dumb nicknames for the other, then it's culture war?
Somehow I feel that analysis of Trump would be considered CW, but analysis of Biden would not be considered CW. Do others share this sentiment or is it just me?
(Apologies if this comment is considered CW, I assumed it would be fine since it's meta level)
I have a cousin I saw a couple of weeks ago at my sister's house. My BiL drives for Sysco, and he was talking about the run up in prices for the various foods he delivers. My cousin's contribution was, "Well, that's what we get with Brandon right? I mean, I saw this coming, I warned you guys, but you're both Brandon voters, aren't you?" He hit that Brandon thing hard and chuckled when he did it. I was certainly annoyed and would liked to have brought up unemployment, GDP growth, wage growth for the lowest quintile of workers, all that sort of thing. But I was 30 min from leaving and let the whole thing go. My cousin is a lovely fellow otherwise and we usually either don't discuss politics or do so carefully. I don't what possessed him to piss all over Joe Biden - probably everyone he knows is doing it and it didn't occur to him that I still like the guy.
All of which is to say, there is certainly a way to talk about Joe Biden and his management of the US during the war that would be CW, as least for me.
The only reason I changed the description today was that I know lots of people will want to talk about Ukraine, I'm fine with that, and I didn't want them worrying about whether it counted as "politics".
There is literally nothing that can't be culture war if you try hard enough.
I think it's in the approach, not the content. That said, some content is basically impossible to approach without it being culture war.
Fiscal and regulatory issues are deeply political, but generally aren't inherently culture war, especially if you keep the discussions at a policy-wonk level.
Maybe so, maybe no. Many of your beliefs around fiscal issues are likely to be wrong if you treat all populations as 100% identical or anywhere close to it.
E.g. I see countless people make predictions related to fiscal issues where they treat immigrants as fiscally 100% fungible with the native population when this is often not even close to true.
"things that are political, but not part of culture wars"
Where shall our small town park the cars, move the garbage, who should be the electricity supplier etc
OK I guess I just have a hard time drawing hard lines between things. (Everything is fuzzy at the boundaries.) Years ago the local community had a 'vigorous debate' about putting in wind farms.
Things that aren't all that controversial could be political but not culture war. The obvious current event would be the Russo-Ukrainian war. It's obviously politics, but I think it's unlikely to kick off a culture war style pissing contest, because probably almost all the commentariat agrees about it. We could probably have a thread of updates and predictions pretty easily. OTOH, a discussion of how the invasion is all Trump's fault, or all Biden's, would be culture war, I think.
I agree with your last sentence but must unfortunately disagree about this not causing a CW-style pissing contest here.
OK, I guess I have a very USA centric view of what 'political' means in this context. (I take 'political' to be US-political.) So that taking about protests in Hong Kong, for instance, would always be allowed for an odd numbered thread. And then I think of Canadian protests, which would not be allowed, and counter to my point. I did see Scott Aaronson's blog post on Ukraine go down the culture-war, 'who's to blame' path.
A lot of canadian and European politics are framed around western "culture war issues" whereas the Hong Kong protests really weren't.
Ukraine and Russia is comparable- there are some tangential things that could be considered culture war stuff, but the main thrust has nothing to do with- immigration, gender theories, wokeness, Trump, etc.
Is anyone finding the conflict in Ukraine... underwhelming from a technical point of view? It's horrific in human costs. But everything seems so botched and twenty or thirty years ago that there's nothing new or exciting that I've seen. Weapons systems look, if anything, less sophisticated than recent wars. Cyberwarfare is wider but blunter than similar attempts a decade ago. Putin's new economic strategy doesn't seem to have actually worked. Tactics wouldn't be out of place in Chechnya. And so on.
Normally you can see how dramatic moments hold lessons for the future. Give hints on how to fight the next war. But all I'm not getting any of that. The one big update was that the Washington security state appears to have completely called this one top to bottom. It makes me wonder if everyone spent the last twenty years kind of upset about having to work on this whole terrorism thing and hoping they could get back to their TRUE passion, great power conflict.
I certainly was expecting more press about drone warfare along the lines of the recent Azerbaijan war.
I've seen a couple stories about Ukraine using Turkish drones.
It has only been going for a few days, what were you hoping for?
A conflict that was significantly different from Chechnya in how it was waged and showed something about how future wars would be fought.
It seems to me that Russia has handled the logistics incredibly poorly. Tanks stuck in mud, trucks running out of fuel, etc. Maybe Putin demanded the invasion against the advice of his top generals--or maybe his generals are a bunch of yes-men.
I worry that if Putin gets more desperate we will see a lot more artillery/missile/air strikes against civilian populations (it looks like we're seeing that in Kharkiv today).
Probably the latter. And while the narrative is Putin has become deranged, he is probably smart enough to realize he has surrounded himself with "yes men"
I do think we're seeing the west massively win the cyberwarfare. Social media is filled with Russian atrocities and destroyed or abandoned tanks, while you hardly see any Russian wins unless to show cruelty. It might be my filter bubble, but basically anyone showing the Russian side of things also went silent. Some might just saw the Russian side beforehand but ceased defending it after Putin actually started war (I'm one of them), but I'm sure there's also a lot of censoring going on and anyone just being less negative is immediately labeled a Russian bot.
Now, I don't wan't to complain too much because honestly, Ukraine now needs all support (moral and otherwise) we can give them. And I obviously support them, just to state the obvious and not be labeled a bot again. But, on the other hand, our picture of how this war is going, how rational Putin acts and what is actually going on might be severely distorted. After a few years, when the fog of war has lifted, it will be interesting to see whether this was really as boring as it's portrayed right now.
I think you define cyberwar differently than I do. I'd call what you described "meme warfare" or just propoganda. Cyber warfare would be taking IT systems of critical infrastructure offline - which I don't think we've really seen at all (exception: Anonymous hacking some Russian websites - but those aren't critical infrastructure).
I expect that exact info given to Ukraine by USA would be interesting but is likely highly classified.
It is fascinating to see SIGINT and refuelling planes visible on flight radar.
I'm not terribly surprised. An awful lot of major US military vehicles are incrementally improved versions of platforms that entered service closer to the end of WW2 than to today.
The midpoint is 1982. The M1 Abrams entered service in 1980, the Bradley in 1981, the F-15 in 1976, the F-16 in 1978, and the B-52 all the way back in 1955.
A lot of the incremental improvements are substantial, especially in terms of fire control and precision guided munitions. And there are some major platforms that came out more recently: B-2s in 1989, Strykers in 2002, Crusaders in 2001, F-22s in 2005, F-35s in 2015, Ford-class carriers, Virginia-class submarines, etc. But most of these were either available for most of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan (the "recent wars" I expect you're referring to) or are naval assets that aren't central to a land war like the current Ukraine conflict.
And while Russia's been trying to keep up in terms of military capabilities with the US and the rest of NATO, they've got a lot less to work with in terms of both R&D/procurement budget and the domestic civilian high-tech industry to leverage to develop new military tech, so it doesn't surprise me they look underwhelming in the field compared to what US-led coalitions were doing twenty years ago.
My view (as someone in Ukraine) is that Russia’s army was good at PR, and at picking easy targets.
It feels like they use Afghan-era technology at most, and post-Soviet Russia never really had the budget and institutions to have a good R&D. I’m no military expert, mind you, but I’ve just read about troubled development of Su-57, it is probably symptomatic for all Russian military industrial complex.
Feel free not to answer, of course, but where are you? Has the war reached you yet?
I’m in Kyiv, in a district a bit far from ground assault, but not from missile strikes.
Life in Kyiv is very different right know
'Life in Kyiv is very different right know' That feels like *quite* an understatement.
Good luck and stay safe!
Thanks a lot! At the moment, infrastructure is working, we have electricity, heating, internet, you can buy food (a bit tricky). But air raid sirens are going off all the time, and you never know what will happen next.
I don't know if this is helpful, but something maybe to help with the instability-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yA2lNocIvQ
To me the most interesting part of wars are the public relations, propaganda, and politics. The coordination between nations, the signaling, the use of cell phone videos and social media is taking on a new level. Great powers have less control of the narrative than ever before. I hope one of the hints for the next war is that boots on the ground invasions are increasingly difficult. Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Ukraine are evidence that subjugating populations with military force is very difficult.
But is this case a counterexample of Great powers having less control of the narrative? Here "great powers" are overwhelmingly on Ukraine's side (or kinda on the sidelines like China), and the narrative that dominates is the one these great powers want (i.e. anti-Russia), which also aligns with what most people would naturally think given the videos and all.
Within Russia yeah, the Russian government is the Great Power. But is it obviously failing here? Are Russians overwhelmingly against Putin and this war?
The war is 5 days old and the amount of video and photos is overwhelming already. It is pretty hard to keep a secret in this environment. Contrast that with Vietnam, when entire villages were napalmed without anyone ever finding out.
You can be pro Putin and anti war, and if Russian media loses control of the narrative then more people will take this view. In past times it could take years for a population to have enough info about a war to question the party line.
How do you know what you are not finding out about this conflict? I don't have confidence in the veracity of any of the coverage that we are seeing from Ukraine.
The Russians don't have air superiority. This was a good take.
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/why-the-russians-are-struggling/ (pay walled but 2 free articles / month)
Anyone got recommendations for good technical audio content (podcast/lectures) on stats/ML stuff? (Not intro level, more something for someone who's actually worked in the field)
NLP highlights is decent (obviously NLP focused not general ML stuff).
https://nuclearadvice.org/
60 seconds of advice on being attacked by nuclear missiles.
I think the expected value of spending 60 seconds reading this, is very high, even if the chances of nuclear attack are very low
Reposting this from the last open thread
We can’t just duck and cover anymore?
Reality- you're totally fucked, and thats it
I saw a map of likely targets and blast radii on Reddit, and apparently I'm within "totally fucked" range of an airport.
> If immediately possible, set your bathtub to fill with water.
What does this piece of advice do?
When the water stops working, you have a bathtub full of water.
Oh yeah that'll do it
You'll want to stay inside for as long as possible, up to two weeks or so, and lack of water is probably going to be the main thing that would prevent you from doing so.
I've read advice like this before (and thanks for posting it, everyone should have at least a vague idea of fallout survival) and I know that important thing is that if you're in a fallout area you need to stay inside an keep air from getting in. If you have it, you use plastic sheeting and duct tape to seal off any way air can get in.
My question is, how long until you run out of air? If you used duct tape and plastic sheeting to seal the windows, doors, and vents in a regular bedroom, how long could you stay in there before the air gets bad?
Rule of thumb is one hour per cubic meter of air per person - that's for the air "getting bad" to a serious degree from carbon dioxide accumulation. Not immediately lethal, but you'll feel like crap, your mental performance will be impaired, and if you've already got other health issues it will be worse. If you're otherwise healthy, you'll probably *survive* 3-5 hours/m^3, but towards the end of that period, don't count on being able to open a window (or remembering what a window is).
A human uses about 200 liters of oxygen per day. If you have a 1000 sq ft building with regular 10 foot ceilings, that gives you 10000 cubic feet of air, or 283,000 liters, of which about 20% is oxygen, or 56,000 liters. After the concentration falls below 10% or so most people would die, so that gives you 28,000 liters, or 140 days. Carbon dioxide accumulation doesn't become fatal until the high single digit percentages, so that probably wouldn't be the limiting factor either.
Also, typical room would be likely not ideally isolated anyway.
So a theoretical 10'x10'x10' room would have 28,000 liters of air, 5,600 liters of oxygen, 2,800 liters until you reach deadly low amounts. So in that theoretical room, airtight, you could breathe for 14 days.
I imagine there's a lot more complexity to it than that (such as air circulation and metabolic rates and such) but it's good to have a ballpark of 2 weeks, since that's about how long you'd ideally want to hunker down anyway.
"Reposting this from the last open thread"
Please don't.
I’m curious about your objection. Do you object to the link/contents thereof or to the reposting? Something else?
It was in the last thread. It doesn't need to be reposed unless its trying to continue a conversation, talk about something that's updated, etc. Posting the same link week after week is just spam.
Agree with Patricia, this seems qualitatively different than posting a link to your substack every week. I also hadn't seen it before (I rarely read every single post in an Open Thread) and found it quite helpful.
That said, for future threads I think it would be better included in some other post, like a list of helpful links to e.g., interesting news sources, charities working to help Ukraine, etc. Hmm.
I understand re spam. Different POV FWIW: I found it useful because I don’t read every comment on every open thread (not a requirement as far as I know) so had not seen it before and found it useful. Seems to me a repost is not *necessarily* spam, but I may not be fully informed wrt posting conventions here. In any event, thanks for your reply! :)
I actually have a very basic question: how do I form a prediction about future events using Bayes' theory? For instance, consider the following question: Will AI surpass humans at solving competitive math problems by 2025? I want to say yes, seeing as AI seems to be doing pretty well at that front. But how should I quantify that certainty? Is it 80% or 70%?
Bayes' Theorem is a useful tautology, derived from the definition of conditional probability, to wit:
P(A, B) = P(A | B)*P(B) = P(B | A)*P(A)
P(A | B) = P(B | A)*P(A)/P(B)
It's a tool for organizing knowledge / beliefs / evidence to draw self-consistent conclusions, but doesn't tell you anything on its own.
Bayes' theory doesn't do a lot by itself. You still have all the work of collecting representative data, building models (which can either be Bayesian or not), and all the techniques of the scientific method. Some of the benefits are purely discursive.
If people have to give an actual probability rather than a sentiment, people can be held accountable (either positively or negatively) for their predictions. No more Oracle-style "If you go to war, a great empire will fall" bullshit. Additionally, if people use probabilities as the basis of betting, people have strong incentives to give their actual probability instead of as a kind of signalling.
It's also easier to aggregate explicit probabilities than sentiments and to hone in on principles of disagreement. That is, if your probabilities are based on chains of conditional probabilities and simple priors, it's amenable to analytic methods.
Take your issue, "Will AIs surpass humans at solving competitive math problems by 2025?"
I might say, "My probability is only 5%," and follow up with, "This has to do with the absence of certain precursors to such an achievement. I would expect (90% chance) that AIs would be used in some positive capacity by researchers before they were used to solve competition problems (which can also be research problems)."
In an informal context, one of the best primers on hands-on Bayesian analysis I've seen is in "How to Measure Anything", where the author takes you through a "confidence calibration" exercise. This is designed to make the reader more honest about exactly how certain he is of his existing knowledge. If a perfectly-calibrated estimator says they're 70% confident about each question in a list of ten, they will get exactly 3 of them wrong.
This is all done using the information already in your head, and is very similar to what Scott did on his prediction review post from a few weeks ago. Where this ties into (again, informal) Bayesian analysis is that when you understand how good your estimates are in the absence of any new information, you simultaneously get a better sense for how much additional certainty each new bit of information is worth.
Bayes' theorem tells you how to update your beliefs based on your prior estimates of probability, but it doesn't tell you what those priors should be.
Suppose you believed before today that there was a 20% chance that AI would be equal to humans in math olympiad problems by 2025 (P(A) = .2), and a 30% chance that OpenAI would be able to make some significant progress on math olympiad problems this year (P(B) = 0.3) , and the probability that OpenAI will report this level of progress progress in a world where AI is on track to be equal to humans in 2025 is 80% (P(B|A) = 0.8). In that case, your new probability that we're on track to beat humans given the observation that OpenAI did indeed show this progress on math olympiad problems is 53% (P(A|B) = 0.8 * 0.2/0.3)
But of course, I just pulled those numbers out of a hat. Using Bayes' theorem requires you to give a honest accounting of what probability you believe something will happen before it happens, which could be hard to do while reading news like this.
To do stuff with Bayes, you need data. Sometimes the only data that people use are guesses coming out of the black box of their head. If you want uncertainty to be modeled, you'll need to ask that black box for some uncertainty on the guesses it's giving you.
No culture wars, but politics and bloody wars ok? - So, personal update: the Ukrainian town where I own a small apartment got liberated/de-militarized/de-nazified by Putin's men this morning, i.e. occupied by the Vlad-the-Invader. No fighting there, it seems/I hope. - I actually do not care for the flat, but hey, what makes me cringe and break in tears when I hear Ukranians on TV or see flash-protests in Moscow/Piter against the war? - Does not seem rational. - My disgust about Putin is easily explained: out-grouping the enemy. Seems to me evol.-psychology/anthropology/sociology do not put enough stress on the strengths of in-grouping-instincts. "Hate" seems to get more attention than "love". (btw: I am no hippie, think: Batman. Lego-Batman.)
You do realize that Putin is causing people to die, right? Also, a lot of capital is being destroyed which makes a lot of people's lives much worse off, right? And if these people are those you know or associate with or share culture or values with or whatever, then it's a lot easier to have empathy for them.
It's a few hundred years old, but Adam Smiths Theory of Moral Sentiments still explains the power of empathy to change behavior and emotion better than anything else I've read.
Not that I disagree, but there are not very many people dead right now (I know a boy in Ukraine I played chess with, one of my German students. - Was killed. - 20 years ago by a car on Dnipros main street. Driven by ex-cops. - &/%/& deep breath: I guess, if I have a point it is: war kill people, lots of stuff kill people, so what. - Capital being destroyed: My shares shall recover - the sad thing about most of Ukraine is how little capital there was created those last 3 decades. - Yeah, sharing culture - but if I hear about a kid of the Sambian People (Papua) I .. react ... just as fine. We humans seem to be very able to identify with one under attack. - Me just curious that - unlike Adam Smith - modern science seems to be mostly: "Is it? Meh". But agression/diversity/pre-school/... needs further research.
I hope I'm wrong, but I think the worst of the brutality is to come. The US policy people seem ready treat Ukraine as another Afghanistan - a place where the anti-Russian insurgency will deplete and collapse the Moscow government. Far from helping Ukraine repel the Russians, NATO will feed them just enough weapons to keep the insurgency deadly and endless. The incredible human and material cost to Ukraine itself will just be collateral damage. America didn't lose much sleep over how badly Afghanistan was destroyed in the 80's. We just celebrated the fatal wounds they inflicted on the Soviets and congratulated ourselves for shrewdly feeding them the weapons that enabled it. Why would this time be different?
I guess there is nothing NATO can do to make everyone happy.
* If they send soldiers, they are obviously the bad guys.
* If they don't send soldiers, but send weapons, they are obviously the bad guys.
* If they send neither soldiers nor weapons, they are obviously the bad guys.
Why do you think it's irrational for Russians to protest against the war? Yes, it's unlikely that they'll single-handedly stop the war and highly likely that they'll get arrested for it, but it also seems unlikely that it would have literally zero impact on Putin's decision making.
Putin's decision to carry on the war is going to be affected by a number of factors, but "will to fight" - aka "how many dead Russians will the people accept before the protests get out of hand" is probably one of them.
oops, my statement was: I am irrational - in being so touched by the protests. "We see you". - And they do send a relevant message to Putin; I gave war a less than 60% chance, cuz I got used to Putin paying attention to the popular mood. Seems sth. changed.
From what you can tell, do you think the U.S. media is reporting accurately about the situation?
I just read WaPo and WSJ - and not too much, as Europeans seem to have more feet on the ground (German: NZZ, Spiegel, engl: TE). I do not expect "media" , esp. TV, to be extremely accurate. (How in 2 minutes or 20? - They could try harder, though.) - And the TV guys are always so hard looking for blood&heartbreak, makes me sick. - That said: They all got the term "invasion" right. Good. - Most still report Putin-talk as "actions/intentions" instead of just: Whatever lie helps best. - If you ask real Ukrainians you can get a lot of different impressions, and they are indeed very different. - Then it is actually hard to know the details even if you are in town. - I just got a private message that Berdjansk was actually not taken this night/morning (and I do not see even this as a final statement, just no inner-city fighting /no mil. presence. Though the smallish old "military"-airport in the north might very well have been taken. So, what DO you report? And how you show it?) - Some newspapers today claim, Putin must be "surprised" by the "strong" defense of Ukraine. How long has it been? A decade? A year? A month? - 4 days. Debilism is the Russian word for this. With "bonded distrust" US-media should be ok. Just not my first source.
later that day I saw the video of Russian soldiers in front of the city-admin. Yep, that is Berdjansk all right https://www.n-tv.de/mediathek/videos/politik/Wuetende-Ukrainer-konfrontieren-Soldaten-in-Berdjansk-article23164435.html - at lunch time it seems (not that this clock is always reliably working). Quite a crowd for this occasion. In a place where less than 5% spoke Ukrainian as first language 20 years ago and many might not dislike a Russian passport per se. - Slava Ukraina - all that does not bode well for a "Putin-Victory" in the longer term.
I tried playing with Manifold as unlike other prediction markets it is not requiring cryptocurrency and has something as reward for predicting well[1]. But Manifold has many very silly estimates like
> Will Russia invade Kiev by end of 2022?
sitting at 95% ( https://manifold.markets/GustavoLacerda/will-russia-invade-kiev-by-end-of-2 )
And it will continue to be below 100% and there is no really usable way to earn from that.
Given odds of troll market or missclick are noticeable
AND return is abyssal for markets at 97% or 10% and someone predicting obviously true event
AND it is necessary to lock up money for some time
there is no incentive to predict that unlikely/certain events like https://manifold.markets/GustavoLacerda/will-russia-invade-kiev-by-end-of-2 or https://manifold.markets/colorednoise/will-a-nuclear-bomb-detonate-in-a-p or https://manifold.markets/AYev/will-ukrainian-troops-enter-in-mosc or https://manifold.markets/ACXBot/will-there-be-a-major-flareup-worse will happen with chances matching reality.
Events that already happened sitting below 100% (Kiev invasion by Russia) are embarrassing for a prediction market.
It is barely profitable to estimate that chance for exploding nuclear weapon over populated area is below 4%
No idea how to solve it but "Will aliens land before March 2022?" at 1% and being unable to profit from pushing it lower and risking that it would mistakenly resolve as yes is extra-silly.
Any idea how to solve THAT in context of Manifold? What is going wrong? Or is it fundamental problem of "runner of market resolves it without recourse".
(BTW, I created https://manifold.markets/M/by-20220401-manifold-representative "By 2022-04-01 Manifold representative will admit that reward function used as of 2022-02-28 results in silly results for nearly impossible/certain events." - any idea how to increase chance that will be at least noticed by them?)
[1] instead of Metaculus primarily awarding answering a lot, without regards for quality - you can answer at absurd levels but ensuring that no matter answer you gain points, making such points irrelevant
It's silly to interpret the number given by a prediction market as a prediction. You've got to take the time value of money (among other things) into account.
Well, manifold proudly displays "5% chance" and so on.
Yes, I think that it is silly for them to do that, but it is part of their marketing
> Will Russia invade Kiev by end of 2022?
They've obviously already invaded Ukraine, but last I heard they haven't made it to Kyiv yet.
What about https://manifold.markets/ACXBot/will-there-be-a-major-flareup-worse ?
> Will there be a major flare-up (worse than past 5 years) in Russia/Ukraine conflict in 2022? 95% chance
Here pretty much everyone will agree, right?
> They've obviously already invaded Ukraine, but last I heard they haven't made it to Kyiv yet.
It is not "won"/"reached" but looking at map it is 100% obvious that they invaded it + paratroopers attempts.
The situation is a bit foggy but depending how you define "invade" my impression is that Russian troops have entered Kiev and been pushed back a few times.
> Or is it fundamental problem of "runner of market resolves it without recourse".
Basically that plus the fact that it's all play money and the liquidity of most markets isn't that high.
The market for "Will 1=1 on January 1st 2023?" currently sits at 92%, which means that a 100 M$ bet lets you make a 3% interest rate over 10 months time. If we were talking about real money, a 3% interest rate would be plenty interesting to get people to lock up their money for that time period, but this is play money and I have no idea if I will still care about Manifold in 10 months, which means there is little reason for me to participate in this market.
> Events that already happened sitting below 100% are embarrassing for a prediction market.
Don't know about that. I am not under the impression that Manifold markets are precise enough to distinguish between eg. a 55% or 50% chance of an event happening, so why would it be embarrassing that they can't distinguish between a 95% and 100% chance?
There is definitely legitimate uncertainty whether Russia will fully occupy Ukraine.
There is no legitimate uncertainty whether Russia attacked Ukraine or Kyiv (except epsilon for "Truman show"-like situations).
> There is no legitimate uncertainty whether Russia attacked Ukraine or Kyiv
Agreed. I'm not trying to argue that there is uncertainty there (just as there is no uncertainty as to whether 1=1 in 2021). I'm just saying that it's not necessarily embarrassing that the markets don't reflect this lack of uncertainty.
It's just one of the limitations of Manifold markets in their current form/popularity that they are very bad/unable to distinguish between >90% chance and 100% chance. I don't think this is a bigger problem than the markets being unable to distinguish between 50% and 55%, which they almost certainly aren't either.
> I don't think this is a bigger problem
When many things are along lines of "alien invasion" or "nuclear weapon used on populated area" then <5% is not helpful at all.
Here it matters whether it is <1% or <0.1% or <0.01%.
I would like to be less selfish, hedonist, and egoistic. Meditation is often mentioned as being helpful, but does anyone have other non-faith practices that help with working on having a purer heart?
These were wonderful replies! To add my own perspective here, I find that spending time with family, especially more selfless older people, reminds me to love more freely. I almost never have to make difficult and sacrificial decisions like they did.
Volunteer for some non-selfish cause that you think you're likely to find fulfilling as an experience. It's fine if it's not the sort of cause that an efficient altruist is likely to think is an efficient use of your time, so long as it's not a serious waste of resources. I helped out for a year or so at an after-school program for underprivileged kids a while back and it was good for me--and hopefully also a little helpful to the kids. Act and the feelings will follow, especially if it leads you to make connections with people less fortunate than yourself.
Consistently hang out with people that embody the values you cherish. It rubs off.
E.g., hanging out with EAs has brought out a lot of my agreeableness and compassion.
I don't have personal experience with it, but I hear a lot of good things about Stoicism.
Helped me
Do shrooms, or failing that, other psychedelics. They let you see the world in a less ego-driven way, and you remember that perspective for a long while.
Concur - from experience.
I apologize if I come as insensitive or if I'm beside the point. You may want to do the opposite, and research enlightened egoism. One one hand you may find interesting stuff. Also even for the primary goal of being less selfish, it's probably more efficient to have your mind understand the larger picture and align your goals better.
I'm not sure where to send you for this... the classic source for this is Ayn Rand, but ... well, it's Ayn Rand. She's a good writer, though. Sword of Truth is a fantasy series that's pretty heavy into that stuff. EY has a very short fantasy novella that makes the point with his usual lack of subtlety, something something girl corrupted by the internet. Definitely not Ayn Rand philosophy, but if you want non fiction, google "John Galt speech".
I know it turned out to be the very opposite recommendation, so again sorry if I'm being impolite. I think the chances of it helping what you want to achieve to be above 20%, possibly above 50.
I'd say this goes in the "important and true" (true according to your belief, at least) category. 2 out of 3 gates are all that need to be passed. Indeed, while I often help strangers for no reward from them, I am not an altruist. I help others for my own sake, and it would please me if they seek my help for theirs. For me, Nietzsche has been very clear on this aspect of charity and altruism.
He writes:
>"Not to have one's own interests at heart" —this is simply a moral fig-leaf concealing a very different fact, a physiological one, to wit:—"I no longer know how to find what is to my interest." (Twilight of the idols (translation by Anthony M. Ludovici), skirmishes in a war with the age, section 35)
In other words, Nietzsche claims it's better to have a good reason (good for _you_ ) for helping other people than none at all, and a good reason for you is selfish by definition. Of course, Christian morality would have you think altruism itself is a good reason. It is probably a "good" reason, but it doesn't seem effective. This doesn't mean altruism, or more concretely, a genuine desire to help the poor needy cannot be a reason. But it has to be _your_ reason, and you need to take responsibility for it.
Maybe an analogy would help. (or maybe not, feel free to think for yourself) Suppose you want to make friends. Can you make friends by being genuinely being "good" and nice to people and taking care of their needs? No, this can only make yourself a slave. Not to them, but to an ideal you cannot reach. A slave to morality. Please ask yourself whose morality this is. How do you make friends effectively? By being interesting. This means talking about your own interests to people who share them to some extent (at least enough to listen). But to do that, you need to learn what your interests are.
Ayn Rand helped make me significantly less selfish as a young adult! Her emphasis on valuing yourself extended to everyone. She forced me to grapple with and acknowledge the idea that others not having a right over me also necessarily meant I did not have a right over them.
I always get confused at the American left's hatred of her. It always seems to come from second hand caricatures.
I’m willing to give Ayn Rand another shot. I couldn’t make it through Fountainhead in high school.
I read Atlas shrugged first, think it is the superior book by far. I was a teenager when I read it and found the mystery genuinely engaging. Who was destroying the world? How?
I would recommend though, that you not read it overly seriously. Skip over parts that are too monologue-y. I still have never finished the a is a speech near the end
I couldn't make it through Fountainhead in high school, either. I read and enjoyed Atlas Shrugged a few years later, although many people also find it a big of a slog.
I recommend trying her essay collections instead: "The Virtue of Selfishness" and "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal". They're a lot more concise than her novels, for one thing, as she gets right to the political or philosophical point instead of mixing it in with the storyline and characters. For another, about half the essays in the collections are written by collaborators (mostly Nathaniel Branden, whom I found to be a better writer than Rand). There are also a few essays in there by Alan Greenspan written long before he became chairman of the Federal Reserve, which are worth reading for historical interest of you're into the politics of monetary policy.
I will hop in here and recommend Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. I like Rand, but I think Smith does a better job of working through and explaining the same sorts of things. I don’t know if Rand read TMS as it was out of print for much of the 20th century, but she is in many ways systematizing Smith, so if you find her a little much you will like Smith. And you should read him anyway :)
I'd like to second this counter-intuitive-seeming approach. I've read and embraced a lot of ethical egoism material, and evidence is pretty high at this point that it's nurtured and fortified my compassion and helpfulness. (Got told this on Friday, as a data point: "Please continue being selfish, if that's indeed what you call yourself. You're the most altruistic person I know.")
Do purposeful reflection on your own faults and shortcomings. Think about the things you did wrong without making excuses for yourself. The ego kind of acts as an immune system against these kinds of thoughts, so take a period of time to purposefully bring those thoughts to the forefront of your mind and let them bask there.
This should also be paired with the understanding that it's ok to be nothing, to be pathetic, to be weak, to have evil, etc. So long as you recognize that and continuously want to be the best version of yourself.
Why do you think this is valuable?
You ask a question starting with why, and communication specialists tend to say "why" questions are questions you want to avoid, they are counterproductive [or something like that].
Instead, some say, it's best to start with a question that can be answered with a simple yes or no - like this:
Is there a good reason that discussing a video talk of an author of a well-rated book on medicine and health should not be perceived as intrinsically valuable?
Then, they, say, you might ask a question that can be answered numerically - like this:
How many times did Scott Alexander thank his commenters, all of them, for all their input, because, as he recently said, it has all been valuable?
Then, you can ask How and What questions.
But I'm not in the mood to think of examples for that. Instead, can you say something about your perception of the links above?
I thought about how to tell that it's a bot a bit more.
Does any other poster in this open thread sound like a bot to you? Even if you try to stretch it really hard, can you see anyone else here being a bot? I'm guessing, except for really short replies, no, because with everyone else, you can see a thought process going on. You can see what people are trying to say, you can see them answering to something previously said.
This one is different. Reading this is like wading through a fog - plenty of water and nothing solid. It is clearly not winning the Turing award, whereas the rest of us are looking human without any effort.
How confident is everyone here that these comments aren't computer-generated? I think there's a really good probability that you all have been yelling at a bot.
Not confident at all, now that you raise the possibility. So what would the bot's contingent responses have been? Put up the original post, then reply as it did to any response containing the word "why"? What responses would it have made to responses without why in them? And then what?
Wut would it have said to"OMG where have you been all my life?" To "awesome video"? To "eat shit and die"?
All bots are different. I think we are looking at a fairly advanced bot, but you can see plenty of signs suggesting that it's a bot.
0) It never answers any questions.
1) It latches on to an unimportant word "why" and discusses it at length.
2) It recognizes that it's looking at a question and goes on a rant about questions.
3) It produces a lot of unnecessary text. I think we all know what's a yes/no question, but here it is helpfully giving us an example of one.
4) It makes up quotes (see the alleged Scott Alexander quote).
5) It doesn't make sense. See the question that is answered with the made-up Scott Alexander quote. It's really hard to imagine that a human wrote this.
That's only in the post above. There's more in the post down-thread:
"The book's first chapters struck me as pretty good, and exciting, and to just know of it in a kind of a conversational vacuum,where it's either praised / ignored / labelled, feels lonely."
Of course, you might also be looking at a really crazy human or a human who's pretending to be a bot.
I have to log off now, but if you're really bored, the oldest or one of the oldest bots, Eliza, is available on your computer if you have the emacs editor. All you have to do is open emacs and type: escape-x doctor
It might have some answers for you. For example, in response to your last statement the Eliza on my Mac said: "I would appreciate it if you would watch your tongue!"
Bots have gotten a lot more chatty since Eliza, but you'll notice the same patterns of what looks like evasion, questions answered with question. Eliza hadn't learned to rant yet. A more advanced bot that followed Eliza, Racter (https://www.chatbots.org/chatbot/racter/), was already good at ranting in 1984. I haven't looked into whether it's available to play with.
> You ask a question starting with why, and communication specialists tend to say "why" questions are questions you want to avoid, they are counterproductive [or something like that].
They are not counterproductive, they are crucial to filter out garbage like what you linked.
"Is there a good reason that discussing a video talk of an author of a well-rated book on medicine and health should not be perceived as intrinsically valuable?"
Yes. The reason? You are trying to sell me something. It may be a physical product ("buy this book!"), it may be something else ("adopt this viewpoint!") but you are definitely trying to stick your hand into my pocket.
That, combined with your evocation of "communication specialists" (you mean PR flacks and shills?) about "don't ask 'why' questions", in answer to "why should I watch this?" (which is what "Why do you think this is valuable?" comes down to), makes me question your disinterestedness and honesty.
I think we can see why you don't want a 'why' question, as it *would* be counter-productive: "I want you to watch this so I can make profit off you, be that material cash or non-material influence".
No, thank you. As soon as someone refuses to answer the question put to them and substitutes another, that they have a canned answer for, in its place, then I smell politics or at the very least, snakeoil. There's a very strong whiff of it off your post here.
EDIT: I have no intention at all of watching your video, but looking up your Dr. Humphries, she seems to be scoring on a 'quack scale':
https://medika.life/dr-suzanne-humphries-on-medikas-quack-scale/
Is that a fair assessment? I don't know, but my inclination towards quackery is strengthened by your refusal to answer Nancy's question and your attempts to steer this back to your tame duck: quack quack quack!
I listened to 3 minutes, and heard two arguments that I think are very bad. That vaccines don't come into a person by the same route the infection does (say, injection rather than by breathing) and vaccines don't improve health because they aren't nuitritive.
The first is possibly interesting, but not a demonstration that vaccines are bad. Perhaps there should be some experiments with matching routes of infection to see whether effectiveness is improved.
The second has a very narrow impression of health. Protection matters as well as nutrition.
It's observation that measles, mumps, chicken pox, polio, and smallpox have declined sharply. Vaccines might not be ideal, but they're quite effective against diseases which range from annoying to crippling to deadly.
It's possible I should have started with a less hostile approach (maybe just asked for a summary), but when a video leads with two bad arguments, I'm not inclined to be patient with it.
And you must have some reason for recommending that video.
Yes, thank you. The book's first chapters struck me as pretty good, and exciting, and to just know of it in a kind of a conversational vacuum,where it's either praised / ignored / labelled, feels lonely.
Sighted the notification of a new AC10 post and the tweet at practically a same time, so it clicked.
Also, first checked if it has ever been mentioned on this blog : nope.
As for Deiseaach's comments, - they label.
"Look they're heliocentrists, why should I bother."
That's no argument.
Boo-hoo, I don't want to waste my time on yet another idiot on Youtube touting their medical qualifications as proof that when they're talking out of their arse, I should open my mouth to swallow the bullshit.
You dodged Nancy's question, which meant you did not have a good answer for "Why should I watch this?"
So to me that means you know this is fraudulent and you are trying to pull us all into some kind of pyramid scheme to spread the word of Dr Suzie, who doubtless has a whole brand of talks, podcasts to subscribe to, motivational tapes, books and the rest of it to make money off the gullible and you are trying to get a slice of that on commission.
If you're trying to paint yourself as a heliocentrist, I'd rather be a Tychonian.
Whoever this "Dors" person is, they're on the same level as the nude-photography enthusiast we had spamming on here previously; they have a Substack but no content, simply a list of free subscriptions they're signed up to.
Next thing after quack Youtube medical videos will be "rate my naked photos"?
where are these naked photos located, and can I give you my credit card here?
I don't know about you, but if someone is asking for my valuable expertise in rating naked photos, they're going to have to pay me for it.
Here's some communication advice for you: If someone asks a simple question and you spend seven paragraphs talking about communication strategies to avoid the question, that looks *really shady.* Especially if the video is on a topic where a lot of people are primed to expect shadiness, such as "big pharma."
"Why is this video worth my time?" is a legitimate question to ask about any video on the internet, because the internet is so full of video that you could spend a thousand lifetimes watching videos and never learn anything useful.
"If someone asks a simple question and you spend seven paragraphs talking about communication strategies to avoid the question, that looks *really shady.*" - doesn't this scream "bot" at you?
A lot of this ranting just isn't making sense, e.g.:
"Then, they, say, you might ask a question that can be answered numerically - like this:
How many times did Scott Alexander thank his commenters, all of them, for all their input, because, as he recently said, it has all been valuable?"
I'm having trouble imagining that this was written by a human.
Communication specialists or even just regular prickly people are likely to see this response as an obnoxious effort to force the reader to click on your link, which from their point of view is just random youtube shit until a case is made for taking an interest.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGSHDpX2_sA
This effort by Dors to march us all over to watch a wacky anti-vaxxer is not even as good as a Poor Man's Pie:
https://greenheart-anon.tumblr.com/post/677360574202593280
Deiseach, it was a pleasure joining up with you and others in marching all over Dors. Stoopit food links were especially fun. (Yours beats mine in loud obnoxiousness, I think, but mine is nastier.)
I don't particularly want to stomp all over people (honest!) but when there is the simple "because I thought it would be interesting" as the most basic reply to "why should I watch this?" and instead they launch into "PR for Dummies" speak, then that raises my hackles about what they are trying to con me out of.
Slowly crawling out of my hole now that winter's ending, does anyone know of a regular meetup in DC or the adjacent areas?
Alternately, anyone have any interesting off-the-beaten path places to see in the same? I'm especially interested in music venues.
Yes, there's a DC meetup. We're awesome. You can join here:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/433668130485595
https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/dc-slatestarcodex
https://paradoxravens.substack.com/ We started a substack about paradoxes and science/scientific thinking.
This should probably go into one of the classifieds threads, rather than in an open thread.
Just a first announcement is fine. If they post the link every single open thread then moderation needs to happen. Substacks are linked in your name anyways if you have one so a single comment is barely more intrusive than that.
I expect the policy might change if tons of people all try to post their substack at once but I don't think substacks are numerous enough for that.
IIRC self promotion is allowed up to twice a year as long as it's not too annoying.
Mild disagree. A single mention of a new substack seems to me fine for an open thread. Especially as in this instance it's informative as opposed to hard sell.
P.S. I partly feel that way because if I ever get around to writing something on substack, I'd like to be able to mention it here.. :)
With the news being what they are, wasn't an exception to no-politics rule justified? Perhaps simply skipping a number to switch with the next post. (I get that it might not be what Scott wants right now though.)
Edit: Ah, I see, it's "no culture wars" rather than "no politics". Didn't even notice (plus saw a commenter saying they'll delete their comments because those were politics).
A potential downside to making this thread culture-war-ok is that current events as they are will probably drown out everything else in the thread (which may or may not be desirable).
Maybe a Ukraine-Russia-only open thread would be a good idea?
Isn't it specifically phrased in today's post as "no culture wars"? The war in Ukraine probably is not particularly related to culture wars, as they are normally understood here.
No culture wars, just regular wars.
Thanks for pointing that out.
There's always a gray area with how the intent of this rule plays out. Talking about the politics of the Gauls in 50AD will (almost) always be civil while most conversations about 2022 American Politics risk not being. I think the current situation sits in a place where you could almost be sure to have a civil conversation about it on ACX but on the off chance it goes off the rails I guess it's better to save Scott the hassle.
Is the Three Day Rule still a thing?
The Sign of Jonas?
No politicizing a tragedy for three days.
Yes, I was joking that the Three Day Rule might be about Easter.
There was Ukraine discussion in the last thread, and it's a real war, not the culture kind. So until Scott says otherwise, I think it's ok.
Also, the Ukraine war has been going on for more than three days at this point. Although I guess you should probably avoid still posting unconfirmed reports on the very latest happenings.
Not that I'm aware, but I could be wrong.
Can anyone explain to me how progress studies is different from development economics?
This may or may not be helpful, as it's the article the term evolved from AFAIK: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/we-need-new-science-progress/594946/
Thanks. I have been reading the various proponents of progress studies ever since Tyler started promoting it, so I had read that article and thought it interesting. Since then though, none of them have clarified why development economics, which tries to establish why some countries 'developed' and how, is not sufficiently explaining progress, nor how a new discipline will answer what an old one, specifically intended to examine the same question, has not been able to(at least according to those who feel the need for a new discipline)
Development econ tends to focus on how poor countries become rich. Progress studies looks at how rich countries become richer. RCTs with clean water in Bangladesh vs RCTs with science funding at the NIH, roughly.
I'm thinking "scam" as well. When you click on the author, there's no bio there. That screams "rushed out a version to cash in quick before someone notices".
This is the culture-war-free thread.
Hmmmm. Oh too bad I been wanting so badly to appreciate how such a left forum as this would discuss extremism .
And that’s really the point . Expand on identifying extremism
Sorry to be a spoilsport, but I flagged your post. Scott will decide. But you should have been aware that you're potentially opening up a can of culture-war worms with many of your statements in that post. Yes, you pose them as questions, but the implicit assumptions in your questions are just begging the culture warriors from both sides to get into it.
And FYI, from my perspective, this is forum seems heavily weighted towards libertarian commentators. Now that Marxbro has been banned, I don't know of any far left commentators.
I have no idea what he said before deleting, but in a general sense a huge wrinkle with no culture wars rules is that many ostensibly non-culture-war issues actually have culture-wars-related explanations. So by banning culture-wars stuff, you're basically saying its alright to certain make claims, but if those claims are refuted by something that can be considered culture wars, those claims have to be allowed to remain unrefuted.
I have seen folks reply in the next open thread in sequence, quoting back to what was otherwise unrefuted in the non-CW thread. I don't know if Scott has an official position on this approach, but if it is used in good faith and not to excess, it may be a possible workaround.
But yeah as Marko said, feel free to delete it if it is breaking the rules. Apologies.