Very vague question: How we can estimate my real-world impact when betting on a prediction market?
Let's say I raise a fund of 100 mln$, and then go all-in for "No" on "Will Putin resign by 1 April 2022?"
Should I expect some of his friends say to him: "You gonna resign anyway, let's at least make some money on the way out". They bet a few grand on a "Yes", announce resignation – PROFIT.
I lose my 100 mln$ (mostly), but this way I "buy" my future. (Literally buying "futures").
Sounds too naive, I know. Are there examples where this worked, in a brief history of low-liqudity prediction markets?
P.S. Idea stolen from "Assassination Politics", but I wanted to take a wholesome spin on that.
Given how high (>1%) the estimates are for a gigadeath famine, and how cheaply alternative food sources could be researched and developed, I suspect the most cost-effective way to save lives at the moment is to support AllFED (https://twitter.com/ALLFEDALLIANCE).
That goes back a long way. Back to the Carter administration, when federal money for alternative energy was plentiful. There were a number of proposals for harnessing tides, waves, and ocean thermal gradients to generate electrical energy. I think the basic problem with all of these was low energy density, combined with the very harsh ocean environment.
TL;DR: Putin and his oligarch buddies are a successful branch of the Mexican avocado mafia. This assertion explains nothing less than the hierarchy of Russian oligarchs, the structure of the Russian economy, and why Putin launched the Ukraine war (and all the others) despite the predictable sanctions.
Summary: The standing of a Russian oligarch is inversely proportional to their ability to manage complex businesses. Mafia are not the best and brightest, so they only (barely) manage to manage relatively simple businesses like oil and gas. On the other end, hightech like complex machinery is left to stupid engineer nerds who got nothing to say among the real men. Russia doesn't export their own high-tech products, because it's too complicated for simpleton Mafia and would thus enrich and eventually empower the wrong people - the stupid nerds. So the nerd businesses must be sabotaged wherever possible, even if it means that Russia becomes entirely dependent on imports for such goods.
The war in Ukraine is a show of force to bully their neighbors, which is the only thing the Mafia is actually good at, and which is a perfectly rational decision for the Mafia. It is the basis of their business, their means of production - if you want to bully your neighbors into submission, you got to look and act the part. The entirely predictable Western sanctions are also a feature, not a bug: Inflation and seizing of assets abroad hurts the stupid nerds and helps the Mafia's export-oriented businesses. And if the sanctions are ramped up and targeted to a point where they threaten the very existence of Putin's avocado Mafia, then it was a miscalculation on Putin's part because he was surrounded by Yes Men who would tell him anything to stay on his good side.
We are https://hookelabs.com, a family-owned company (15 years old, ~50 people but growing fast) based in Lawrence MA USA (30 min north of Boston/Cambridge). Our focus is research on autoimmune diseases (multiple sclerosis, colitis, arthritis, etc.), but we’re also branching out into development of scientific equipment.
You’d be the third regular SSC/ACX reader here (that I know about).
About 80% of the work we have now is in Python/NumPy, with another 15% in C (or Rust if you prefer), and 5% “other” including Google Apps Script. You don’t need to be able to do *all* of that.
The Python/NumPy work is on PCs and Raspberry Pi. The C/Rust work is on microcontrollers.
We have a lot of different projects, large and small. These include:
• Image analysis in Python/NumPy
• Embedded systems work on Raspberry Pi and microcontrollers
• Web-based UI development for scientific analytical equipment (mostly image related)
• Act as mentor to other sw developers
We could also use some help with IT stuff – we have a full-time IT person but he’s pretty overloaded. (We run Windows networks.)
This is a good position for a person who gets bored easily - you'll get to juggle projects, to some degree, to your taste, so long as they all move forward at some reasonable rate.
I don’t really expect one person to be able to do all this stuff, but the more you can do the better.
I’d prefer a full-time, on-site person, but we’ll also consider part-timers and people working from home (part of the time). Hours and most other things are very flexible. We offer all the usual benefits. We pay well and expect high performance.
To apply send a CV to <jobs (at) hookelabs.com>; put “Software Engineer” in the subject line.
How is zlibrary giving me much better book recommendations than amazon?
Amazon has a virtually infinite dataset and infinite money to hire programmers. Zlibrary is probably one or two anonymous guys hiding in some former soviet country that doesn't extradite to the US.
It could be that the average zlibrary user is more similar to me than the average amazon user. But if Amazon had good algorithms that shouldn't be a problem -- there are probably way more people like me on amazon than people like me on zlibrary, and ways of finding them algorithmically.
I'd assume that Amazon is putting their fingers on the scale to make sure you see the books that make them the most profit, not the ones you most want to see.
This study says that, as a nation, we've lost 824,097,690 million IQ points due to lead exposure. I have yet to read the article, but I find it an interesting way to frame a serious issue. But as Kevin Drum pointed out, it's a stunning misuse of significant digits... ;-)
A single IQ point increases adult income by ~1k/year in current dollars (based on eyeballing this graph and adjusting for inflation https://pumpkinperson.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/dollarbar.png), and income scales a bit faster than inflation, and adults earn for about 50 years, so the cost of losing 8e8 IQ points among youth now would be at least 8e8*1e3*50 = 4e13 dollars of lost individual income (even before considering Hive Mind style network effects which are probably even bigger than the individual effects). That's 1.3x the entire US national debt.
Some of those dollars are surely zero-sum, i.e. if you raise everyone's IQ, the total amount of useful resources doesn't necessarily increase, so total real income doesn't necessarily increase.
On the other hand, raise intelligence and the general amount of innovation could increase, which could then increase the amount of useful resources. It seems like raising *everyone's* IQ is unnecessary for that beneficial outcome, but there are probably some other benefits of higher IQ among the general public too.
If natural resources were a bottleneck, we wouldn't have had all that income growth worldwide over the last hundred years. >99% of earth's surface is still uninhabited by humans. I don't worry about running out of any natural resources in the future either. One of the unsuccessful book contest entries last year was for a pamphlet by Tim Worstall on that: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1M1m8o1HInGYJR3cEMYZ6TQgNmeBOWo98YC6djNnFWf0/edit#heading=h.6wuv83sms3jq
Yes, but I don't think it's significant. Higher IQ increases productivity within the same job, plus opens up whole new types of jobs in the O-ring sector. I'm also ignoring positive network effects which are probably bigger than total individual effects. And total individual effects are probably an OOM bigger than the zero-sum individual effects.
One issue I don't see much discussed in the context of climate change is the effect of warming on the amount of habitable land. As temperature contours are pushed north in the northern hemisphere land that was too cold to be habitable becomes barely habitable, land that was barely habitable becomes somewhat better, and so on down the line. The net effect is to increase the amount of land suited to human habitation. At the same time, some land that is now almost too warm for habitation gets a little warmer, which decreases the amount of land suitable for habitation.
I have done back of the envelope calculations suggesting that, with 3°C of warming, the gain in land from the first effect comes to the equivalent of about three-quarters the area of the U.S., the loss of land from the second to about half as much. If so these are large effects that ought to be taken into account. Does anyone here know of published estimates, ideally better than I can produce? Along similar lines, are there published estimates of the total loss of usable land due to sea level rise? My guess is that it is much smaller, but I could be wrong.
There's a paper that goes into that subject in depth, I'll see if I can find it sometime. I recall most of the increase in available land is permafrost in Russia, which isn't very arable.
Have you read Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters by Steven E Koonin? It doesn't discuss agriculture at length, but it discusses climate change in general in the same honest and unideological way that you propose.
I'd be much more interested in the effect on agriculture. How many people can live in the world mostly comes down to how much food the world can produce, not how much space there is for homes.
Emm. Food production capacity, in the absolute sense, hasn't been an issue since the Green Revolution. There are issues with input & processing considerations, which can vary from place to place (water in CA, roads & docks in less developed places) but we-humans command a staggering variety of crops and livestock breeds, and the ability to modify fertility of soil to very large degrees. Climate change will necessitate changes in production methods on the margins, not in the whole.
I believe that was what he was calculating, not housing space. In the northern hemisphere there is a lot of land that is currently too cold (Canada and Russia mainly) for much agriculture, that could become better suited if a little bit warmer. There is more ocean water in the areas that may become too warm for agriculture, so there would be less loss of arable land than the gain. That is, if I'm understanding David correctly.
Housing space isn't a serious constraint in most of the world. I was thinking mostly of agriculture, more generally of land warm enough for people to do things on it. I don't have data on how far north crops are grown, did find a map on population density. If someone knows of good information on where crops grow, that would be useful.
It occurs to me that I do have a map showing climate zones in North America, so could try working from that.
Filmed back in the day, when, if you needed hundreds of horsemen, you didn't fake something up with CGI, you went down to Argentina and hired their army. The thing they're yelling is, more or less, the Cossack equivalent of "U! S! A!". The story itself is a bit of pan-Slavic romanticism from the days of the Russian Empire, but it's still Ukrainians kicking butt. And Yul Brynner still rocks, as does the score.
Yes I have, and yes it is. It seems to happen most when I have collapsed a thread. It may be that it is forgetting to take the no-longer-displayed text lines into account.
> that Anatoly Karlin was wrong before he was right.
He seems to be mostly right when reading Putin, but I worry about his understanding of the situation in Ukraine. On his substack, he correctly predicted on the eve of the invasion that Russia would attack in the next 48 hours (at 70%), but also claimed that fighting would last less than a week (90%, and with lots of weight on victory in the first two days): https://akarlin.substack.com/p/happening-the-ukraine-war-2022?s=r
Since then he seems to have swallowed the Russian propaganda whole. He seems to think that economic gifts can make people forget the killing of civilians (e.g. https://twitter.com/akarlin0/status/1500299500342157317?cxt=HHwWioC56cqckdIpAAAA) and that the sanctions will mostly be bad for the "eurocels" (rich Russians that live in London, Milan, etc). Both seem to me to be a pretty dramatic misreading of the situation. Past injustices live on long in the memory of people: Hitler came to power by bashing the contract of Versailles, Isis recruited from people burned by the American invasion 15 years prior. It is difficult to imagine Ukrainians simply accepting to be part of Russia. And with Russia's economy estimated to shrink 7-11% this year (even without an export ban on oil, which might still be implemented) and many European shops gone, Moscow might be much less fun soon.
(also, note how he wrote "(Z, Z)" behind his name. "Z" has become a symbol for supporting the war since it is written on many Russian military vehicles. I would assume that he writes it this way to further make fun of people who add their pronouns behind their names. Is that the kind of guy Scott should signal-boost?)
I would like to calculate that X amount of alcohol caused the same number of germ line mutations as Y years of parental age, but I can’t find any good sources quantifying alcohol’s effect on the germ line mutation rate. Any carcinogen would increase it, and alcohol is strongly carcinogenic. NORML used to publish calculations of how alcohol is a zillion times worse than weed even before considering the negative utility of these germ line mutations. (My aunt was a heavy drinker for years and her son is anomalously dumb relative to everyone else in the extended family, to the point that he can barely hold down a job, which sucks a lot. I don’t know if the alcohol is to blame but it probably worsened the odds. https://amp.theguardian.com/science/2018/jan/03/alcohol-can-cause-irreversible-genetic-damage-to-stem-cells-says-study Seems like it could also apply to ova.) De-alcoholizing society seems like a worthy EA goal. Not prohibition 2.0 but changing education to treat alcohol the same as tobacco. Standard advice should be to totally avoid it. There’s been a massive success in tobacco harm reduction over the last few decades and I see no reason that can’t be replicated with alcohol.
Hm. Assuming there's no more direct method, you could try pedigree approaches. Something like: if alcohol really is causing nontrivial amounts of trait-lowering de novo mutations (which BTW I really doubt), then correlations with alcoholic parents should be more than twice that aunts/uncles etc, because the more distant relatives do not have the parents' new mutations. Combine that with total units of alcohol consumed over a lifetime before conception of the child, then you should be able to back out that 'X IUs of alcohol cause -Y SDs on IQ [or whatever]'. You could also try to count de novo counts directly in children of alcoholics and then use other estimates of pathogenicity fraction + average effect size of a harmful de novo. I suppose you could also try to do time-series or look for discontinuities by age: do kids of people just past the legal drinking age suddenly become dumber?
Yes. Sugar is probably responsible for at least as many health problems as alcohol. People could be educated to avoid it and the distribution/advertising of it could be subject to some restrictions like tobacco.
I've come to distrust in vitro studies as predictor of in vivo outcomes. Eremolalos is correct. You've already got abundant evidence for the negative health and social impacts of alcohol. And by referencing studies whose conclusions may or may not have any detectable effect on living populations will likely weaken your arguments (by allowing others to quote studies with different conclusions). Once it comes down to dueling studies reported in Science section of the New York Times, you've probably lost the public's interest. ;-)
But if you find powerful evidence of germ line mutations from alcohol, do you think that finding would greatly strengthen the case against alcohol, and strengthen it in a way that would powerfully de-incentivize drinking it? There is abundant evidence now of the harmed caused by alcohol, and it's harm of a kind that's really easy for people to recognize (auto accidents, etc.)
Similarly, modern articles on the history progressivism mention nothing of the Georgist Progressives at the turn of the 20th century. The wikipedia article similarly labels the early 20th century progressives as a mix of eugenicists and teetotalers.
Bearing in mind George was only outsold by the bible in his time, it does feel like some sort of weird cultural amnesia - and I'm sure a true schizo could run with it.
Why should it mention Henry George? Do articles about Value Added Tax feel the need to discuss Wilhelm von Siemens? Do articles about income tax feel the need to make reference to Emperor Wang Mang?
Constant reference to some 19th century dude is what makes Land Value Tax advocates look like weird cranks rather than just advocates for vaguely sensible tax reform. Sensible LVT advocates would, I think, do well to distance themselves from Henry George.
I think they made the wise choice not to go by Siemenism and Wangism, and not just because of the obvious juvenile humor. Tying your movement/ideas to a particular place and time (or person in this case) allows people to categorize your idea in a mental box. Once they have done that, they only have to dismiss your box of ideas once, and then forever conclude "I am against _______." This is especially easy when the box is clearly labeled "19th century, and not adopted" and can add the cultural weight of the previous rejection. If it wasn't implemented at the height of its popularity, then obviously it's a failed idea.
Better in this case to repackage the idea for modern audiences and give it a different polish.
Because "of the impact of increasing material and logistics costs, as well as severe supply constraints, on the solar business" i.e., they don't make enough money with them.
Optimistic take: as solar cell production becomes more and more commoditised and the equipment gets more widespread, it's no longer worthwhile for high tech companies like LG to make them. In the future, solar cells will be manufactured like bricks -- cheaply, and close to the point where they're needed.
Isn't that exactly backwards? LG isn't halting production due to a decrease in production costs of solar panels - their statement says the exact opposite. They're halting production because everything that goes into making solar panels (the "factors of production"), as well as the costs to transport those factors, has drastically increased.
Ironically, this is probably driven in significant part by the rising price of fossil fuels. I've said it before and I'll say it again - if you want to go green, first you have to go brown; you can't revolutionize your energy and your economy without a stable industrial base.
It's a step in the process to what Melvin is saying. The real reason LG is leaving the business has more to do with Chinese firms making them in bulk, and cheaper. There's no longer a significant margin to make them more advanced, so the incremental cost increases eats away at the profit or makes them unprofitable entirely. LG and other "tech" firms survive by making something that's expensive, but has a good margin due to being new. Once the technology can be reproduced by the "cheap" manufacturers, there's nothing left for a firm like LG to make money on, unless they can revolutionize the solar panels with a new design. It seems like new design space in solar panels is drying up.
I suppose I agree in the long term. But what I'm adding to that is, in the short and medium term, we're hurting both our economy *and* that transition by sanctioning, prohibiting, and over-regulating fossil fuel production and use.
Also, we're not running out anytime soon. "Peak oil" is like nuclear fusion; it's been 15 years away for my entire life, and always based on the same kinds of faulty calculations. Only look at the oil fields we're currently tapping; only look at what's close to the surface; ignore sour crude, ignore offshoring, ignore tar sands... it's like basing your estimate of how much money has been minted based only on how many pennies are lying on the ground. We're not running out anytime soon, and we're shooting a potential green transition in the foot by damaging our existing energy base.
I'd say, if you want to go green, you have to go nuclear.
If someone tells you to panic over climate change, ask them if they expect the consequences of climate change to be worse than the consequences of nuclear power. Then watch their brain freeze up.
I think it is worth being at least seriously concerned about climate change (only not saying panic because panicking isn't doing any good) and think that the consequences of climate change are WAY worse than the consequences of nuclear power and agree that we should invest into more nuclear power
He predicted: (1) Russia was actually going to invade Ukraine and (2) the cost for Russia to occupy Ukraine would be too high.
His conclusion is that the goal of Russia's invasion would not be to occupy territory. Instead, they would try to destroy as much of Ukraine's military as quickly as possible, while avoiding going into most cities. The only city that might be worth entering is Kiev, to seize the seat of the government and replace Zelenskyy as the president of Ukraine. This is a war that Russia should be able to win quickly.
Instead, Russia did not destroy Ukraine's military capacity as quickly as expected and instead rushed in cities like Kharkiv, Kherson, and Mariupol in addition to Kiev. He was surprised by both parts. This suggests a massive intelligence failure by Russia on figuring out the mood on the street and on basic questions like "Where does Ukraine store its drones?", along with the more well known logistical and morale problems that Russia is facing.
Rob Lee seems to have gotten the facts on the ground right, but then concluded from them the wrong objective of the war.
Yes, I've been following him. But it's pretty clear now that Russia was depending on Zelenskyy to flee and Ukainian armed forces to collapse (as they did in the early stages of Donbass rebellion). For instance, If this were a "normal" blitzkrieg, Russian forces would be backfilling their forward units as they advanced, to secure the captured infrastructure behind the front line, and to protect it against raids from special forces and partisans. But the Russians expected Ukraine to collapse quickly, and they never really planned their incursion this way.
Several military commentator/experts are now suggesting that Russian military didn't have the resources to this (and they may not have the resources to correct their mistakes). But we see maps like this one from the UK MoD showing huge red zones, supposedly under Russian control...
But a truer map of the conflict would show that the Russians are occupying a bunch of roads, and the Ukrainians are picking off their heavy armor and their supply vehicles that are sitting ducks for Ukraine hit and run attacks.
The big question now is where is Russian air superiority? Their air force has hundreds and hundreds of aircraft, and why haven't they taken control over the Ukrainian airspace?Experts are beginning to suggest that Russia's air force has their own serious problems: for instance, planes shot down are using commercial GPS equipment, and they've been carrying dumb bombs (so they have to fly low and are easily shot down).
> ...planes shot down are using commercial GPS equipment, and they've been carrying dumb bombs...
These two ideas are tightly linked. If they can't afford better GPS for aircraft that they presumably intend to use more than once, then they sure as hell can't afford them for single-use applications like a JDAM equivalent.
It seems to me that if Russia felt threatened by NATO nations he would simply bring more attention to the multitude of issues with pandemic politics that have large groups of peoples converging on their capitals in NATO nations . I question why Russia does not do this and the timing of these provocations to be when protests are crossing a threshold
I'm not sure the marginal propaganda dollar would have made that much difference, beyond what the news already reports on these events. And while the Canada convoy was pretty big and annoying, the corresponding one in the US barely made the news. (Something like five trucks showed up, last I read?)
But also, I'm not really sure what goal this would accomplish? I don't think Russia is feeling threatened by NATO in a "our people might think democracy is better than autocracy" sort of way, which could plausibly be handled by propaganda. It's more of a military concern - "we need to throw our weight around with our neighbors or we'll look weak and NATO will start bullying us." I don't know if Russia could accomplish that without actually using their military.
Because the idea that Russia feels threatened by NATO nations is complete BS. It is a fiction Putin has created as propaganda. What is he worried about? NATO invading Russia? Why would NATO do that. NATO nations may want economic, social, and political changes to happen in Russia but the only groups threatened by that are Putin and his cronies.
But when was Russia threatened and what were they threatened with? I know what Putin/Rus gov claims the threat is or what they believe the threat is, but these all seem to be closer to paranoid delusions than reality.
I'm saying it is hard to make the case that NATO might attack you, since in this instance they have a clear reason to, and widespread support, and are still doing their best not to be at war with you.
He's probably worried about NATO having nuclear missiles that can reach Moscow in under 2 minutes. Although they would only arrive seconds earlier than missiles from Latvia.
The Russian leadership is not as secure in their power as the Western democracies. And the leadership doesn't see itself as semi-expendable in the way the Western democracies do. In the West, if the President or Prime Minister dies, meh, we've got a backup and a backup for the backup, and if it matters they've got the spare keys for the nukes, things will continue more or less as they would have if the President hadn't died. And the President understands that this is part of the deal.
Not so in Russia. "If Putin dies, there's a guy deep under the Urals with a spare key to the nukes" is a very worrisome scenario because of what that guy might do in peacetime, which makes it an even more worrisome scenario in a crisis because you maybe lied about which sofa cushion the spare key to the nukes was hidden under and were counting on at least being able to give him a phone call if it mattered.
If Putin can only absolutely trust the people he can keep under his watchful ex-FSB eye in the Kremlin, then he has to worry about the Kremlin being nuked before anyone in the Kremlin even has time to send a text saying "hey please nuke the Americans to avenge me PS keys to the nukes are really in the oregano jar". Which means he also has to worry about what the Americans might get up to when they figure that out.
The ideal solution is to not run such a paranoid, corrupt government, but if you're not up to that, you do want to not have to worry about your entire trusted inner circle being killed before any of them can do anything about it.
Also, NATO isn't putting nuclear ballistic missiles in the Baltic states or Poland or whatever, but if you're too paranoid to entirely trust what your own people might do with your own nuclear weapons, you're certainly not going to take NATO's word for that.
In fairness to the differences, at the time there were fewer (maybe none? I'd have to research to be sure) options to hit targets from long range. Not too long after that, it was easy for both sides to launch ICBMs to pretty much anywhere in the world, but at the time it was a degree of safety if the enemy missiles were not within a certain proximity.
Response time is the issue now. If missiles in Ukraine were launched at Moscow, by the time the Russians detected them, they'd have about one minute to decide whether it was a false alarm, call the President, get him into a bunker, have him decide what to do, and issue orders. Probably not possible.
On the flip side--if NATO detected that Russia was launching missiles, missiles stationed in Ukraine could be close enough to take some Russian launch sites out before they launched their missiles. Russia would have to move its own missiles further into its heartland to keep them safe, reducing its ability to make a successful unretaliated first strike.
Submarines are probably a bigger worry for everyone, though. A Russian Typhoon submarine carries 20 MIRV missiles, with 6 warheads per missile, and so can hit 120 cities. It could take its time, travelling along the coast for weeks, launching missiles, submerging, and moving on. It's very hard to find one submarine submerged in the ocean other than by catching it moving between the Pacific and the Atlantic. So a single Russian submarine might be able to kill half the people in America on its own, supposing that its targeting system still worked.
Westerners were noting that Russia felt threatened by NATO long before Putin was in charge, and that any Russian leader (even if Putin was out) would take that stance. Not that this justifies the invasion.
Because that wouldn’t work. Putting aside the object level concerns about whether Putin is motaviated in this way, having Russian propaganda say “oh, look at how bad NATO is failing lol” wouldn’t actually acomplish anything in the near term.
I noticed Adam Something on Youtube (he was recommended to me by the Algorithm). He has quite a few interesting videos, but unfortunately, he is very partisan and picks easy targets.
He spent 15 minutes in a video ranting about an alt-right American who moved to Hungary to enjoy "the good old world where men are still men and women are women". Now, the guy he was criticizing was an imbecile but I don't like the "and therefore all right-wingers are idiots" vibe his video had. In another video he pretty much literally said that "It is fine and natural that universities are so heavily leaning to the left since nobody who is intelligent can be a conservative because curiosity and intelligence are antitheses to conservatism".
He has a tendency for straw-manning and equally to glorify his political views. I found him an interesting and engaging left-winger at first but I soon lost interest.
Also, I noticed factual errors in his videos where I know a little bit (not that much, mind you, but enough to spot the errors) about the subject (communist city planning, original colours on statues from the antiquity) which makes him less trustworthy for me on matters where I don't have much of a clue (city planning more broadly and logistics/transportation projects he talks about a lot).
Of course, that does not mean he does not deserve credit for correctly predicting the war in Ukraine.
The Alexander Cube model of prediction markets assumes that it is desirable for anyone to be able to easily create markets, but this is not obvious to me. Consider Metaculus: they currently have a couple dozen Russia/Ukraine-related markets, if they made it easy for anyone to create one they have a thousand such markets and every single one would be undertraded. Real money over fake points does some work to fix this, but even then it's not ideal: assume the world contains a bunch of perfectly rational traders with some large but finite amount of money to sink into your service: would it be more informative to spread that money over twenty different questions, or a thousand variations on forty different questions?
I share this concern regarding the idea of micro-markets for very local things. Scott has used examples like "will [person I know] get pregnant this year?" and similarly hyper local, hyper minor, markets. Unless people are putting insanely large amounts of money into prediction markets (which I'm sure Scott would like to see but I'm even more sure it will never happen), there doesn't seem to be enough money to actually arbitrage the different questions. There doesn't seem to be enough money, fake or not, to even align the current markets properly, as people leave small amounts of money on the table regularly.
I think a market that can repeat the same (or worse, very slightly different) questions will naturally deplete their users and leave a lot of potential money on the table. Doing so will make the actual predictions worth far less. Consider this scenario - a major question, such as "Will Russia invade the Ukraine?" that is open to any number of user-created markets. If the answer is a clear "yes" and the market starts to show that, then the incentive to bet on "yes" decreases as more and more people do so. By the time it gets above 90%, it may not be worth adding more money to "yes" after considering fees, holding up your money, etc. But it does make sense to create a new market with a slightly different question but really the same answer. You create a market that's getting closer to 50% and that's worth far more for an investor. The net result is that even really clear answers that should be obviously "yes" or "no" start to cap out lower, and new markets with much smaller market caps and less reliable percent chances spring up instead of the main market reflecting accurate predictions. Maybe the main market says 85% chance of something that should be an obvious yes, and then a bunch of smaller markets showing something like 70%.
Depending on how closely aligned the resolution criteria are, there should be arbitrage opportunities between these markets if they're not priced equally, so they should all still end up at the same point.
Consider one market on "Will Russia invade Ukraine by Feb 28" vs many markets for "Will Russia invade Ukraine by Feb 20/21/22/23/etc". The latter is arguably more informative overall because it gets us a better view of the distribution of outcomes, but $X distributed over the entire month of February seems like it will necessarily provide a less precise answer to the specific question of whether Russia will invade by the 28th. Easy market creation seems like it will inevitably lead to questions covering the spread like this, and until prediction markets reach stock market levels of "assume infinite arbitrage" there will be cases where people want to concentrate the market's attention more narrowly.
On the Ukraine post, Scott said "If you look at the 2016 election in isolation, Scott Adams is the smartest guy in the world". I pointed it out there and am doing so again here: This is a major mistake worthy of correction, Scott Adams predicted a landslide Trump victory, he was wrong! Wronger than the generic pundit predicting a 55-45 Clinton victory! Stop giving Scott Adams credit he doesn't deserve!
Scott Adams also predicted that after winning the 2016 election Trump would use his persuasive powers to unify the country and be popular with everyone
Scott Adams is the "smartest guy in the world that is famous". Literally millions people thought Trump would win, some farther out than Adams and without the wrong "landslide" part.
It's not just the claim he made, it's how far out he made it; the generic pundit was aiming at a target 1m out, so them not being very wrong isn't very interesting, there wasn't much for them to be right or wrong about. Scott Adams might have hit barely hit the edge of the target, but he did so at 10,000m, when the Republican field was still full of candidates, and nobody took Trump seriously.
I think that what Scott (Alexander) said in the last post is my basic view ... Adams likes to make out-there predictions, always with sky-high confidence, and conveniently forgets about the ones that are wrong (or retcons them). IIRC he also predicted a 100% chance of trump winning in 2020, and even after the networks called it for Biden, he said there was a 65% chance of trump winning, and if the election wasn't stolen then his entire worldview is wrong. And also counted Kamala Harris being the VP nominee as vindicating his prediction that Harris would the Presidential nominee. (this is from the one thing he has put out that I remember looking at in the last several years).
So saying "98% chance that trump will win 65% of the popular vote" and then claiming vindication when trump wins with 46% of the popular vote is in line with that tendency.
Yeah my impression of Scott Adams is that he is at least a useful foil for recieved wisdom where you can get his take and be able to consider possibilities that no one else will contemplate
As someone who lives in deep Trump country, I watched in real-time as many Republicans of my acquaintance went from dismissing Trump as a grifter in 2015 to supporting Trump harder than they had supported any Republican POTUS candidate of my living memory by November 2016.
The hypnosis claim, taken strictly, is weird and false, but Adams' style is always to overhype things, so even if he's right, it's going to be in a way that involves overhype. If we soften it to a claim that Trump had/has an unusual persuasive ability, the claim does seem to hold up. The problem is that ability is only highly effective on about 20-30% of the population, and a much smaller percentage of the chattering classes (many of whom are outright antagonized by that ability), which made this fact hard for the chattering classes to observe.
I also live deep in Trump country, yet most Trump-voters I know recognize that Trump is an asshole. But they hate and fear the Squad, Bernie Sanders, and the Clintons far more.
If someone constantly talks in hyperbole about everything in a way that's excessive even for Americans, and defends such wild claims unto the last trench, that goes beyond "clever rhetorical trick".
I'm not trying to say Adams' style is a clever trick, I think it's just plain annoying.
I think he adopted a certain approach because he thinks it will sell more of his books or whatever venture he's currently cooking up, the same reason "buy our carbonated sugar water, some people think it tastes marginally better than other carbonated sugar water" never caught on as an advertising approach. And at some point he decided it's better to be "always on" and also to never back down or apologize.
Which maybe does help him sell more books, but it's just plain weird and annoying in spheres where people sit down and try to reason things out. But again, that doesn't mean he's always wrong, and I do think that just being weird, he sometimes has a unique insight.
What are folks' thoughts on refugee resettlement from conflict zones as a philanthropic cause in relation to other popular EA causes (tb research, etc)? It has felt to me in the past like one of the highest value philanthropies, both in terms of the qualitative effect on individual lives and the spillover effects of whatever that person creates throughout the rest of their lifetime. It's also critical since, refugee populations that receive poor welcomes or are ineffectively resettled can become sources of significant civil strife decades down the road.
I can think of a few arguments against it - mostly just that resettlement efforts are expensive and have perhaps weaker effects on outcomes for migrants. Also that it could detract resources from other efforts (like stopping infectious diseases or building effective policy structures in failed states) that have the potential to actually stop the destabilizing event that's generating refugees.
>>>refugee populations that receive poor welcomes or are ineffectively resettled
In the context of the Boston Marathon bombing, I am not sure what you mean.
'Effectively resettled' probably includes 'convince the refugees that returning to their homeland is out of the question and they should focus on integration where they are' which can be a hard sell for both refugees and citizens of the refuge.
One general argument is that if you tell the world, "Hey, people, you can come to the US if your country is threatened by an evil dictator", this motivates soldiers fighting evil dictators to throw down their weapons and flee to the US. It might even motivate people in hopeless countries to support potential evil dictators, in the hopes of getting to flee from them to the US.
In my opinion to do it right and actually lead to good outcomes requires a degree of encouraged cultural that to some people would be impractical. You don't want to do what Merkel did, and to go reasonably away from her approach would raise concerns of destroying foreign cultures and similar.
Lets say there are rationalists in two countries that are at war with each other. The rationalists are patriots for their respective country - but they know that a lot of the news they receive is propaganda and they would like to know the truth. They also want to convince the rationalists on the other side about the facts that they learn. Not all communication channels between the two countries are closed - but to be realistic they are quite limited.
What they can do? What can we establish before we get into a situation like this?
I think two big questions should be asked by each:
1. Is my country's access to information open and competitive? Can media outlets in your nation take any position on the war or provide any information without fear of government reprisal? It doesn't mean that the mainstream media outlets will have the correct story, but it's an important baseline. If you find that news sources in your own nation are being censured for taking positions opposed to the government, your best bet is probably to suspend judgement on all counts and refuse to participate in any war that is not an immediate defense of your home region.
2. What type of war is being called for? This should affect your information threshold for support. There are other positions like pacifism and ethnic nationalism, but most "normie" war ethics are pretty straightforward: attacking country = bad, defending country = good. If the war is being fought on your own nation's soil and your neighbors are largely unhappy about it, you can relax most skepticism of your nation's war efforts.
But if your nation's troops are fighting on another country's soil, you should raise your thresholds for support significantly. The next level up from defending your own soil would probably be defending an ally with whom your nation has a mutual defense treaty. Then you would need to know that there was in fact an invasion of that country. The next level up from that would be intervention in a civil conflict or genocide, in which case you would need to be absolutely sure that your country had free access to information - and you should probably have the support of nearly the entirety of the United Nations or another legitimate international body.
Much grayer - and probably requiring you to develop a more detailed philosophical position - are ideological wars. E.g. attempting to remove a regime of one kind and replace it with another regime. Americans have been talked into getting embroiled in these (IMHO unjustified) gray wars for years and I think it's badly warped our discourse around war.
Remember in early January 2020, when some of us were enjoying ignorance and others were pontificating on what China should do about that pesky pandemic? If only we had focused on the global contagion and the perfect day to get short the market, we could be running our own, self-funded, fast-grant programs right now.
It kinda feels like we're in the same situation today. A local crisis has turned global, but all the focus is still on Ukraine, first, and Russia, second. Instead, let's talk about what this crisis is going to do to me, and what I should do about it. (By me, I mean us. By us, I mean western financial markets.)
So we've seen the Russian markets tank. We've seen a few companies that operate in Russia tank. We've seen the energy markets react. What's next? What are the second and third order effects?
Let's break it down by sources of contagion (feel free to add to this list):
1. Energy prices > Commodity prices > Inflation
2. Russian banks > European banks > American Banks
Would anybody be interested in a working session Zoom + White board to figure out: when and what to short? As a bonus, we could all share our plans for surviving a nuclear war.
My background: I've been a professional stock trader for over 2 decades (with some detours). I also founded a quant fund that operated from 2006-2009. I also never found finance very interesting and know very little about the underlying structure of capital markets.
If you have ideas on the categories/scenarios, please comment. If you're interested in joining the work-session, please email me at: protopiacone at gmail dot com.
I'm thinking along similar lines. During covid I did actually buy the first dip and if I can repeat without getting arrogant then I will. But it may have been luck.
The of the most interesting things is the rotation from fiat reserves to gold if these sanctions really take effect (which I understand to be in around 25 days).
The one thing I would personally add is that it look's like the biggest risk to your position would be a peace treaty followed by a rally or kicking the can down the road. It would be great for the world, but would mean a shift in direction. That could happen at any time. There are also unknown unknowns which there are a lot of. So we have to be humble.
With short positions you need an opinion about timing and volatility. In this market I'm afraid to do that. It might be safer to just move to gold and buy the dip.
I think your Ukraine question depends critically on how you define "Ukraine" and "invasion." Since the ignorant are making 1914-comparisons at the moment, it would be rather like asking somebody in June 1914 "will there be a European war sometime in the next few years?" A "right" answer would distinguish between a war between Austria and Serbia, a General European war, and a war that lasted four years, killed ten million people, brought down three Empires and eventually brought troops from the United States.
So with Ukraine. As of, say, 20 February, I and a lot of other people would have agreed that there were forces in place on the border to enable a limited incursion into the country. But whether this was to apply political pressure, or whether it was in preparation for an actual operation, was impossible to say, because the decision had not been made yet. It looks as though it was Zelensky's performance at the Munich Security Conference that tipped the scales: and the Russians interpreted his threat to develop nuclear weapons as a sign that, in spite of his reformist instincts, he was completely under the sway of the West and the extreme nationalists in his administration and in the country. Such an interpretation of his actions (not what would happen, but how a government would interpret something that hadn't happened yet) seems to me effectively impossible to predict using any percentage methodology.
I thought (and again so did others) that the most likely course would be a limited operation to end the war in the Donbass and to wipe out the nationalist militias which have tended to concentrate there. Certainly, the relatively small forces originally on the frontier would have suggested that. But in the end they seem to have decided there was no point in waiting, and to go for the much more ambitious objective of demilitarising the country and returning it to something like the 2014 situation, but probably more dominated by Russia. That's why they've been feeding reinforcements in slowly, and trying to avoid destruction and civilian casualties in the areas they intend to control directly after they withdraw. Again, this is partly a question of timescale, and I suspect the "do it now and get it over with" argument won out against the "well things might get better in five to ten years" argument.
There are, in other words, so many dependent variables that I'm not sure a question like 'will Russia invade Ukraine" actually means very much, and there's a good argument that the correct answer was "no": they have, after all, no intention of occupying the whole country, even temporarily, nor do they have the military capability to do so. On the other hand the answer to the question "will Russian soldiers enter Ukraine" was clearly yes.
Part of the trouble with this interpretation is that war goals can change as a war goes on, with a general trend towards the winning side becoming more maximalist. Terms that it would have been prepared to accept at the outset of the war will later be unacceptable. In US history, this was clearly true of both the Revolutionary War and the Civil War.
So once Russia invaded Ukraine, questions like Putin's specific intentions became much less relevant. My guess is that the longer and bloodier this campaign is for Russia, the more maximalist will be its demands, assuming its victory is total enough that it can fully impose its will upon Ukraine, and that the West doesn't try to create real incentives for Russia to reduce its demands (i.e., if Russia is treated the same by the West whether it annexes the whole country or merely expands the Donbass, then it's just as well hanged for a sheep as a lamb).
> But whether this was to apply political pressure, or whether it was in preparation for an actual operation, was impossible to say, because the decision had not been made yet. It looks as though it was Zelensky's performance at the Munich Security Conference that tipped the scales: and the Russians interpreted his threat to develop nuclear weapons as a sign that, in spite of his reformist instincts, he was completely under the sway of the West and the extreme nationalists in his administration and in the country. Such an interpretation of his actions (not what would happen, but how a government would interpret something that hadn't happened yet) seems to me effectively impossible to predict using any percentage methodology.
What makes you so sure this interpretation is correct, rather than the view of the US government that Putin was planning to invade from the start? I give them a bit of credit here since they accurately predicted an invasion when most other sources were saying it wouldn't happen, though of course their overall track record still leaves room for doubt if we have conflicting evidence.
I don't have "an interpretation." My point was that the information available was consistent with a variety of interpretations, one of which was political pressure, the other of which (in several sub-variants) was deliberate military action of some kind. I personally thank the calculus changed very late on, but, as I say, if you are trying to decide on the likelihood of "an invasion" you first have to decide what you mean. You're not defining "an invasion" in the dictionary sense, you're saying what precisely the Russians will do.
I see. To my mind the phrasing "it looks as though" in this context suggested you saw that scenario as a bit more likely than just one possible explanation among several.
Fair point. To set it out more clearly, up until a couple of weeks ago, it was impossible to tell what the purpose of the (relatively small) reinforcements of troops in the forward areas were supposed to be for. At that point, there were many possible interpretations. But then it happened, so the question is, was that the plan all along, or did something change at the last minute, since clearly only one of those interpretations can be true. I don't know, and I don't think any of us do but, for what its worth I'm persuaded by various specialists who have pointed both to Zelensky's bizarre antics at Munich, and also to the fact that Duma approval to deploy troops outside the country was not given (as required by the Constitution) until the very last minute. My impression is that those to factors make the hypothesis of a late change of policy more convincing than the other (and there its some support for this if you compare the actual language and body language of Putin's two speeches) but I'd be the first to accept it's only one interpretation. The issue, however, is that in such circumstances, "prediction" of any kind is next to impossible; it's little better than guesswork.
Their intention may not be to occupy all of Ukraine, but I think they will probably accept nothing less than A. a Ukrainian puppet government friendly to Russia, or B. incorporating the eastern parts of the country into Russian territory. In my mind that certainly qualifies as an invasion.
They certainly don't want all of Ukraine, even if they could take it. I suspect (and I have no inside knowledge) they want a neutral Ukraine without foreign troops stationed, and a government that is similar to that before 2014, when relations between the countries were cool, but not hostile. They also want an end to the war in the Donbass (in which case there's no need to annex it (have you seen the area? Most countries couldn't give it away) and an end to the existence off the far-right wing nationalists. Strategically, they want NATO to accept that there's now a large STOP sign in front of the Polish-Ukrainian border.
What is the end to the war in Donbass without either annexation or independence for the area (Which seems like it would be controlled by Russian puppets)?
And there's no way any democratically elected government in Ukraine will revert to 2014 policies after this. They've eliminated that option by invading, so where does that leave things? Will they withdraw if Donbass gets independence and let the rest of ukraine join the west?
The leaked Russian news article early in the war gave me the impression that annexation *was* the goal, or at least it would have been if Ukraine had collapsed immediately the way they imagined. Lots of stuff about "resolving the Ukraine question" and "returning Ukraine to its natural place in the Russian world."
But even if they only wanted a regime change, sending tanks into Kyiv to decapitate the government still counts as an "invasion" in my book.
This 100% nationalistic/religious war. I spent yesterday a good hour reading vk.com what some of my Russian acquaintances think and they are mostly entertaining the idea that Russia is attacked by the west, it needs to wage war to kill nazis in Ukraine, they don't believe that civilians are being killed and they believe Russian army have suffered only about 500 casualties (the actual number is closer to 10,000) and think that this number too high.
Other Russians try to argue that this is still unnecessary spilling of brothers' blood but no attempt to even dispute any of those numbers.
All these things about demands about NATO and so on are just rationalizations of their feelings of superiority and hate of the west. They don't want neutral Ukraine but Ukraine that is under their rule.
Do you have a source for the 10k Russian casualty number? And is that deaths or casualties (i.e. rendered incapable of fighting)? Because those two things are sometimes mixed up.
> the Russians interpreted his threat to develop nuclear weapons as a sign that, in spite of his reformist instincts, he was completely under the sway of the West
This doesn't make sense. Ukraine needs nuclear weapons because their ties to the West aren't strong enough.
The point of nuclear weapons is to keep other countries from invading. Either nuclear weapons or NATO membership would have preventing the current war; they didn't need both, just one or the other.
You're falling into the common trap of assuming that what makes sense to you makes sense to everybody: in this case, that the Russians think like you. But they don't, and they have been making that clear for at least fifteen years. Their position has been that incorporation of Ukraine into NATO, either de jure or de facto (as is increasingly the case) was a red line beyond which they would take action. They said very clearly that they wouldn't accept a position where there could be US forces and nuclear weapons on their border. The West either chose not to believe them, or thought they were too weak to make good on their threats. Oops.
If you're trying to estimate the possibility of conflict, what matters is what the potential combatants think and say, not what may be reasonable from an external abstract perspective. So before 2014, you could say that the chances of conflict were very low. After 2014 they increased substantially. With the election of Zelesnky they went down again, because he was elected on a programme of calming tensions with Russia, as most Ukrainians were sick of confrontation. More recently, with NATO pressure and the increasing strength of the nationalist militias, which the government could no longer control, the chances went up again. All this is the result of the interactions between actors on the ground: it has little to do with what you or I think might be reasonable.
It seems to me that if you don't want countries to join a defensive alliance against you, the best idea is to quit threatening them.
You know why there's no anti-Thailand defensive alliance in South East Asia? Because Thailand doesn't go round attacking its neighbours.
Russia has just signalled that they are keen to invade and swallow up any neighbour that isn't part of NATO, guaranteeing that all its neighbours will now be desperate to join NATO.
Certainly Putin has a different perspective from me, but he's also a liar. I just don't believe that he doesn't understand what nuclear weapons are for.
As an American, I also don't believe our own leaders when they pretend not to know why our adversaries want nukes.
Austrian Empire, German Empire, Russian Empire and Ottoman Empire make 4. And, long term, signed the death warrant on the French and British colonial Empires
Maybe but both the French and British empires gobbled up Middle Eastern territory after the war. Britain lost Ireland though (something that wouldn’t have happened without the war).
If Russia invades my country, how do I go out with dignity? Print out a thousand copies of Rationality A-Z translated to Russian and start handing it to the occupying soldiers?
There are plenty of ways to go out with dignity. There are plenty more ways to go *on* with dignity. Pick a goal and pursue it... although personally, I think your idea is basically a doorstop donation program.
ever thought of doing a quick and dirty guide to psychotherapy? list of resources, self help books, what concepts relate to what symptoms, etc? something that anyone motivated enough could read and get either get a head start on therapy or bypass it altogether? im getting increasingly frustrated by the whole person centred/find your own truth/its all about the relationship position that they seem to take; it strikes me as more than a little self serving
Here's mine, *extremely* quick and dirty. All that person-centered, find your own truths stuff sounds sort of lame, but if it is delivered by a therapist who actually gets what it is like to be you, and geniunely cares about your wellbeing, it is a pretty good tonic, and suffices to help many people claw their way out of various pits they're stuck in. Research about the effectiveness of psychotherapy finds that the big predictor of patient improvement is therapist warmth, genuineness and empathy.
That being said, there are some therapies that are effective as actual *treatment*, rather than as tonics. They tend to be treatments specific to particular problems, e.g. PTSD, anxiety disorders. Exposure-based treatments of anxiety disorders are often quite effective. Time-limited structured treatment approaches incorporating psychedelics or MDMA for PTSD, profound social anxiety and addiction are looking promising.
Psychotherapy for "depression" is a morass of generic support, bullshit techniques and prescription drugs that make you fat and anorgasmic. The reason treatment for "depression" is so nondescript and ineffective is, in my opinion, because "depression" is a pseudo-scientific term for chronic unhappiness, which is not an illness but a state of mind that can come about for all kinds of reasons, many of them valid.
Does anyone here happen to know of country-wide composite wellbeing measures besides ISEW, MEW, GPI? Or new/updated versions of the ones I just mentioned? Writing a blog post about wellbeing comparison and want to make sure I haven't missed anything.
The YouTuber is great - and was not at all sure about an invasion! Thanks for the link! (content: excellent - form: could be improved, but that takes a bit more money, so: fine). I still kick me for being wrong about the invasion, but there were/are THREE questions to consider not just two: 1. Will Putin invade? (I wrote 50%, but did not really believe it, else I'd sold shares) I was wrong, sadly. 2. Will he "win"? (I thought: probably; I mean he can make up what a "win" is and go for the "easy" part first.) I was wrong, kinda happily. AND 3. Would any mayor military victory be any good for Putin (even just the other half of Donbass)? Still a firm*: NO. - Which is why I thought "1." and did not care too much about "2.". (*updating: not that firm anymore; I think I understand better now, how Putin miscalculated; still: Njet.) Anyway: Slava Ukraina. - And Mikhael: do not get yourself shot! I brosai kurit.
My understanding of a stock price is that it directly influences how easy it is for the company to raise capital. The higher the price, the less the company has to sell to raise money. Why aren't there more situations where a stock drops for some reason, and then the resulting increase in difficulty for the company to raise money then causes it to drop further, and so on, until the company is suddenly illiquid and the stock price is just a measure of the fixed assets of the company?
Stocks\Companies listed on a major exchange would either go bankrupt or be delisted before reaching zero. I'm not an expert on unlisted "penny stocks" but I'd assume some of those do go to zero (or as close to zero as possible before the company just folds).
Often times you'll also see a reverse stock split (instead of 10 shares at $1 dollar now you have 1 share at $10 dollars) specifically so they can maintain some level of price and preserve their listing. Looking at companies market caps rather than just share price is useful in that instance
To your specific question/assumptions. Stocks don’t go to zero when the share price declines because most companies do not need to raise money at any given point in time. They often generate cash flows or have a cash balance or reserve funding. There are also other ways to raise money if needed (eg debt) and investors are usually happy to give money to companies which may be suffering from short term illiquidity but are still viable, as these are often good investments. Caveat that the illiquidity is not too messy or structural.
We see some go to zero all right, called: bankruptcy. Not just Wirecard or Enron. For many companies the "raise capital with shares"-time is at IPO. There shares are sold, capital is raised big-time. After most shares are sold- maybe all, why keep any: you sell over 51% of shares, you no longer own that company - , "capital raising" goes back to: go to bank, ask for credit line; if you have no shares anymore as collateral you argue: "the profit will pay for the interest" + the assets are collateral. (If you still have shares, this could go as collateral too. Though a bank may not value them at 1:1. ) #
The share price reflects the value of all expected dividends in the future - or the value if the company was liquidated/assets sold+debts paid - whatever is higher. (Obviously, there are finer points and more options to raise capital, and a company that won't get credit won't usu. have a very high share price. Not sure GameStop has easy access to bank credit nowadays.)
Normally when the price of something drops the demand increases, right? So normally when a stock price drops it makes it easier, not harder, for the company to raise money by selling stock. Of course, that's not what a company in trouble usually does anyway. If they need money they borrow it, either from a bank if they can, or by issuing bonds sometimes, because they want the best possible terms, which are going to come from people who insist on the best collateral they've got, and being put ahead of all the equity owners in case it doesn't work out.
When the price of something drops, the QUANTITY demanded increases, that is, how much people buy, not the demand (the curve) itself. If the price dropped because the demand curve shifted down (people don't want it as much) you need not expect the amount purchased to increase. So a price drop in stock is likely to make it harder to raise capital because you are selling the same amount of stock for less money.
Note: In cases where the supply of a stock changes, either because something spooks people into selling off, or a stock split, you can get changes in volume sold and price depending on what demand is doing.
Maybe this is a stupid answer but: the stock doesn't go all the way to zero because the fixed assets of the company can always be sold as long as the company exists.
Up to and including the asset that it *is* a publicly traded corporation. Occasionally these rump companies with no real assets or cash flows are used for mergers or other taking-public purposes.
Is anyone familiar with the literature on adolescent cannabis use and working memory/IQ?
I care because I used cannabis heavily as an adolescent, and value my working memory and IQ. I sometimes get bummed out about it and reread the famous studies, but I don't really have the skillset to assess them properly.
Two famous ones are the Dunedin study (https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.1206820109) which found a correlation between teenage cannabis use and decreased cognitive performance in adulthood, and this American twin study (https://www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.1516648113) which found the same, but suggested the link might not be causal, since there was no difference between twins when one used cannabis and the other didn't.
Do you think adolescent cannabis use negatively affects working memory and IQ later in life? I know the answer doesn't make a difference for me now either way, but (i) I care emotionally, and (ii) it strongly affects the advice I'll give to my future teenage children.
I don't know the answer to your question, but have a couple comments that may be useful. First, my own cannabis use, which began at age 18 and has never been heavy -- once a week at its most frequent, and often much less -- has left me with the sense that weed changed my brain. It's like my brain learned some new moves from its episodes of being temporarily altered by cannabis. Mostly the new moves involve a sort of non-rational, judgment-free way of becoming absorbed in things -- a mental playfulness. I enjoy my ability to make mental cannabis moves, and experience it as a plus. Even if I were to learn that my working memory had taken a small hit in the process, I think I'd accept the trade-off. On the other hand, it does feel like what my modest cannabis use did had a pretty big impact on my brain, given the relatively few hours I spent under the influence of the drug. So that makes it quite believable to me that if someone happens to be wired so that cannabis shoves their brain in a bad direction, that brain might get shoved pretty damn far.
The other thing to keep in mind for when you have real teenagers is that their friends and their own autonomous exploration of life's possibilities are terribly important to them. If their friend group is smoking weed and having vast weed adventures together, you are taking *a lot* away from your teenager if you prevent him or her from participating in that scene. With my daughter, I ended up deciding to give her the info I had about the drug's bad effects (psychosis, possible damage to cognitive abilities) and then let her choose what to do. She laughed off the info about the drugs dangers and continued to get high. 10 years later, she seems to be doing fine in life.
Well that is one approach. Mine was to tell my daughter that if I ever found that she had used cannabis, I would find out the name of the person that gave it to her and smash his f-ing kneecaps with a large, two-handed mallet that I keep handy. (Really, I would probably just call the police, but I think that I put on a convincing performance).
"NHS opens up UK’s first ever cannabis treatment clinic
The NHS has responded to soaring levels of cannabis-induced psychosis by opening the country’s first ever cannabis treatment clinic.
The clinic is being set up in Lambeth, south London, by academics whose research found links between mental health problems and a readily available, super-strength strain of cannabis known colloquially as ‘skunk’.
Consultant adult psychiatrist and lecturer at King’s College London, Dr Marta Di Forti, is running a pilot 12-month trial with 20 patients.
Dr Di Forti called cannabis-induced psychosis a “crisis” which cannot be ignored, affecting tens of thousands of people."
Yes, she probably does. But that highlights another downside to your approach, which is that you're saying something she knows is not true. So you're modeling blustering and lying as the move to make in a tricky situation.
Well, if she was a spirited girl, as mine was, she would have smoked weed anyhow and, of course, shared it with her friends. Then, if any of them had dads like you, she'd now have shattered kneecaps, or at least a criminal record. If she was a tough, low-empathy kid, your approach upped the chances that she would grow up believing it's fine to be a bully. If she was a kid who admired and adored you, she's now at risk of marrying someone with a substantial thuggish side. If she was an intuitive kid, prone to anxiety, she would have absorbed your raging and unmanageable anxiety, set off by a single article of questionable merit, and is now more vulnerable to letting her own fears rip through her and impair her judgement as she navigates the many hard-to-think-straight-about dangers of the modern world.
Or, alternatively, she obeyed my command and now understands why teenagers are not considered competent to make decisions that seem pleasurable at first but have potentially serious, long term implications. Especially as she has seen bright children from liberal parents succumb to foolish temptation and damage their minds and bodies in pursuit of a worthless goal.
In the coming years both you and your daughter are going to see numerous bright children and parents of all stripes damaging their minds and bodies enjoying various pleasures, some of which turn out to be harmful and some of which do not, and pursuing various goals, some of which turn out to be worthwhile and some of which do not. There is no way to guarantee that you or your daughter will not end up as one of those who suffer harm. All you can do is try to make the calls that improve her odds of making it through to adulthood in good shape. Here are the things you are doing that worsen her odds:
-You are threatening to shatter the kneecaps of her teenager friends, because those are the people she would be getting weed from. So now she has to decide whether (a) the friends she loves and learns from are actually so worthless that they deserve to be crippled or (b) her father is a heartless thug. That’s a big interpersonal lose-lose for her. If she gets some weed on the sly (and I’d say chances of that are better than 50-50) and shares it with her friends, she has to live with the fact that she is now, by your standards, apparently someone deserving of kneecap shattering herself.
-You are threatening to punish other people (the ones she gets weed from) rather than her for an action she took. So you aren’t teaching her that dumb mistakes lead to bad consequences for her, you’re teaching her that daddy will remove dangers and obstacles from her path by harming others.
-You are modeling bad problem-solving strategy here because you are missing a really easy get: Most teenagers are brought to their knees by punishments involving loss of electronics — “one puff of weed and your iphone's gone for a month.” You’re modelling Work Harder not Smarter.
Some grain of salt . A large portion of studies were specifically funded to demonstrate harm. This was part of the war on drugs and building of evidence to back policy . It took other nations to study the medicinal benefits of cannabis to challenge these policies . And what we learned is that such means to direct science toward objectives suppressed valuable knowledge about the body and and entire bodily system . The endo cAnnabinoid system . This does not mean that studies are necessarily wrong , but a Significant bias has been imposed .
Cannabis is perhaps one of the most potent natural medicines that anyone can grow and utilize . This naturally threatens some businesses that have a lot of influence .
More then likely , any kind of abuse of substances that effect the bodily systems will have effects that may include long term effects .
Fraud is one way to call it. Just talk to anyone that works in cannabis medicine . It’s not even a hidden thing . It’s common knowledge . The multitude of people working in the field over the decades have all been quite open about how funding and access has worked . I am simply
Pointing to a well known artifact and suggesting anyone looking at the art to gain insight must keep it in mind. Like, this study is from x year is there more current research that offer other insights . Because we all know and it’s well established what has occurred .
I see, it clearly means a lot to you. I however just left a comment on social media. I am not willing to spend any time attempting to persuade you or anyone to what is widely known. I know that many might have the time and perhaps even going about with their footnotes and citation in the waiting, you know like when someone is writing papers on the subject and stuff. me...I say with a grain of salt. so if you want to be spoon fed, I suggest the local brothel or modern parenting
TLDR: Cannabis, especially high THC varieties, is remarkably dangerous, especially for teenagers. The advice that you should give to your children should be to avoid it at all costs.
This is not a paper but a short article with references. This doesn't answer the question posed - it's about increased chance of 'schizophrenia-like psychotic illness' and not about the impact years later on memory/IQ.
My reply address the final question - what advice should you give to your children about cannabis? Only looking at one risk (IQ and memory damage) and ignoring the other (serious mental illness) seems rather unwise to me.
I haven't seen a Meta-Analysis or similar and the results from the existing studies are inconsistent. In general, we see people recover from much more serious drug use if they don't consume any for long enough so I doubt even heavy cannabis use as a teen would have much of an impact later if you've stopped using it.
I have someone close to me that suddenly developped a fear of tunnels, to the point of having panic attacks when they are in them. That comes after developing a sudden fear of large bridges (think Brooklyn bridge) 10 years earlier. Any advice/stories on that?
Tunnels and large bridge top the list for settings that people develop this kind of fear of, usually a fear associated with panic attacks. Other settings on the list are limited-access highways, especially places with heavy traffic and/or without a breakdown lane, large indoor spaces with only a few exits (malls, Target, etc.) and public convenances that will not stop on demand (buses, trains, planes). The common feature that sends panic disorder sufferers into panic mode is entrapment -- you can't instantly escape the situation no matter how badly you want to. People with panic disorder, recognizing that they are in a place of that kind, find their minds going down a sort of funnel: This would be a terrible place to have a panic attack, because if I started to panic there would be no way to escape, and then I'd lose control of the car/flip out in front of a bunch of strangers. Wow that's a scary thought. In fact, thinking about it is giving me a little bit of a panicky feeling. Oh, no, what if this feeling actually is the start of a panic attack . . . etc.
Sounds to me like your friend's core problem is more panic attacks than the particular settings that set them off. I agree with dlkf that CBT is a very effective treatment for anxiety disorders, including panic disorder. Lots of therapists claim to know how to do CBT, but your friend should look for someone who describes themselves as an anxiety disorder specialist.
If your friend goes to a psychiatrist they will likely want to put him on an SSRI. An awful lot of them seem to think most people have Prozac Deficiency Disorder. I recommend that your friend keep SSRI's as a last resort.
One of the triumphs of 20th century psychology was the realisation that etiology of irrational phobias is largely irrelevant to treatment. Exposure and response prevention is spectacularly effective whether or not you have some origin story for the fear. So rather than look for an explanation—you'll never find find one, and even if you did it wouldn't help—I'd recommend your friend seek treatment from a psychologist who specialises in CBT for fears. Treatment will probably look something like "spend more time in tunnels." In addition to addressing the immediate problem (ie tunnels), a good practitioner will be able to help develop tools and heuristics for recognising when the fear is re-emerging in a new form, and for responding in a constructive way.
My friend had a similar attitude towards freeways that developed into agoraphobia. I can't say much but after about 3 to 5 months it seemed to go away. He had always had some anxiety. I wish the best to you and your friend.
This is a recent Predictive Coding review article (pre-print published on January 22, 2022).
The authors say "no comprehensive review of predictive coding theory, and especially of recent developments in this field, exists."
Until now!
This may be of interest to readers of ACX who have enjoyed Scott's articles on predictive coding.
Does anyone else have any favorite articles on predictive coding / free energy / Bayesian inference and perceptual control theory?
After reading Scott's article series I'm interested in learning more about these computational neuroscience models and their applications to neuropsychiatry and understanding the mechanism of action of psychedelics.
I'm planning to read (REBUS and the Anarchic Brain: Toward a Unified Model of the Brain Action of Psychedelics by Carhart-Harris and Friston next).
"It’s fun to say OK this is where this belongs, and does this contradict something I knew before, and I’d better look that up, I’d better figure that out - it really bothers you when you read something, and there’s some inconsistency”
Ie. if there is surprise (ie. a prediction error - a signal that the new information is different to your priors), then you consciously consider whether to update.
And -
"If I disagree with the book, sometimes it takes me a long time to read the book, because I’m writing so much in the margin - it’s actually kind of frustrating - oh please say something I agree with, so I can get through to the end of this book"
Would you be interested in a prediction contest for the War in Ukraine?
I'm thinking of modeling it off the contest Sam Marks and Eric Neyman set up for Scott's predictions for 2022 (if either / both of you wants to help with this, let me know). I've been putting together a list of relevant questions, including from the prediction markets. If you have a question that you would particularly like to see, you can reply here, especially if it's not a question already on the market.
This is a not-completely-overlapping community and so it would be interesting to see if it has different results.
What I'm thinking of is more like your yearly predictions than Metaculus: a collection of predictions made at a single time and are evaluated together at a specified later date, instead of a collection of markets that change in real time and evaluate at a bunch of different dates. These seem like sufficiently different things to be worth having both.
I would ask for 1 significant digit of probability instead of picking a number between 1 & 99. So round to the nearest 10% if your estimate is between 10% & 90%, to the nearest 1% if your estimate is between 1% & 10% or 90% & 99%, to the nearest 0.1% if your estimate is between 0.1% and 1% or 99% & 99.9%. Etc. This would make it easier for the prediction market to evaluate unlikely events.
There are some specific questions that would be different. For example, I'm interested in a question on whether or when there will be hyperinflation in Russia.
I would also be interested in hearing people's estimations on a few unevaluatable questions, like "Ukraine maintains a morale advantage throughout a war". In order to be evaluatable, the statement has to have direct contact with empirical observation. These only form part of someone's web of belief (as per Quine), and it would be interesting to see estimates for further removed statements as well.
I'm thinking I should write a living will but I know very little about the pros and cons of various medical interventions. Any recommendations? If it's any help, I think your brain turning on you (e.g. paranoid dementia) is a really bad outcome.
TL:DR Standard living wills are near useless. Identify someone who you want to make decisions for you if you are incapacitated and make sure they understand your goals of care and acceptable outcomes.
Source: I’m a trauma/critical care physician in the US and chair of the hospital ethics committee for over a decade. I deal with this stuff a lot.
The problem with living wills in general is two-fold, neither of which is improved by knowing more about the exact pros and cons of medical interventions. Firstly, the vast majority of living will forms whether they are created by a lawyer using state-specific language or something more global like the Five Wishes ( https://thelastvisit.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/5-Wishes-Advanced-Planning-Guide1.pdf ) they start off with “In the case of an irreversible terminal condition I would like . . . .” Which sounds all well and good except that without defining the term “irreversible” and using the standard definition of “terminal” to mean “fatal during that admission to the hospital” the number of absolutely irreversible terminal conditions is quite small. For example doing CPR on patients with known fatal metastatic cancer still has a hospital discharge rate of ~2%. So is cardiac arrest in a patient with metastatic cancer a “fatal, terminal condition”? To me it is, but maybe not if someone wants any chance to see their kid get married next week. More broadly, there are a lot of conditions that have a moderately good chance at survival a small chance at good recovery but a high chance of severe long-term disability (in young people this is generally things like head injury, high spinal cord injury, and stroke) which many people would not want to live with but are not really covered under “terminal and irreversible”. For example, if you get into a car accident and stop breathing for a while and suffer anoxic brain injury to the point of being comatose in the hospital there is approximately a 17% chance that if we perform a tracheostomy and feeding tube on you and send you to a nursing home you will have a “good neurologic outcome“ at six months. Unfortunately a good neurologic outcome means that you are awake and probably can recognize people and interact but not take care of yourself. There is maybe a 1 to 2% chance that you’ll be a functional adult under these circumstances. How does this fit in with your desires?
This brings up the second point of specificity. This also is not fixed by knowing the pros and cons of medical interventions in general because we can do the same intervention for multiple indications and they have different pros and cons. For example I mentioned a surgically placed feeding tube and tracheostomy. In a patient with facial fractures and a mild to moderate closed head injury these procedures allow us to keep the patient alive during their time their jaw is wired shut, allows us to operate on their face safely, and are generally removed in 6-12 weeks when the patient walks back into our office and asked us to. Obviously these procedures are useful and indicated in the situation. Conversely in an 80 year old with end-stage dementia whose family demands prolonged care these procedures allow us to discharge the patient to a long-term care facility but have been shown not to actually prolong actuarial life. In that patient with anoxic brain injury I mentioned earlier it allows us to give him the six months to get that 17% chance of waking up. I could go on and on with examples but that is the point. A living will is highly unlikely to end up specifically applicable to the situation you find yourself in and therefore knowing what medical interventions are indicated and their risks/benefits in every situation is both almost impossible and fundamentally unhelpful.
A much better strategy is to identify what are known as your “goals of care” — the outcomes you are willing to accept and generally how much risk you are willing to take for the potential outcomes. Then identify a surrogate decision maker who will be willing to take the time to understand your goals of care and to communicate them to the medical staff if you are admitted to the hospital and lack capacity to make decisions. This btw is the most useful part of the standard Living Will form. If you do not legally identify a surrogate decision maker it will default to your “next of kin” which is somewhat state specific. The conversations with the medical staff on this basis are much more fruitful and generally take the form of:
Medical staff: “John has X condition. He has Y chance of survival and Z chance of this long term disability if we pursue aggressive medical therapy.”
Surrogate: “He would not want to live with that long term disability.”
Medical staff: “Well he has X chance of escaping with minimal disability but he would need to go through 3-6 months in a nursing home for that chance.”
Surrogate: “He told me that he wouldn’t want to go through that for such a low chance of meaningful recovery.”
MS: “OK, we would like you to talk to our palliative care team for end of life planning.”
Sorry this is so long. I’d be happy to answer any questions if my thoughts are unclear.
Thanks very much for such a long thoughtful reply. Can the "goals of care" be put in a written form? I trust my partner but there's a good chance I'll outlive him.
Yes. And doing this for your surrogate can be very helpful but you definitely need the surrogate to be able to translate that into actionable decisions. If you are afraid that you were going to outlive your surrogate, have a next in line.
Thanks, any recommendations for a guide for translating my own intuitions into goals of care? E.g. that 17% chance of being able to recognise people doesn't appeal to me. But that's only one case.
My wife is also a physician and is my surrogate. We have had long discussions about what our goals of care would be and I feel comfortable with her decision making therefore I have not felt it necessary to formalize a Living Will. If I wanted my surrogate to be anyone other than my wife (which is automatic) I would have done one.
Do you have a child or partner that you trust to act in your best interests? (child might be better than partner, if you're worried about age-related illnesses). You'll probably get higher fidelity by having in-person conversations with them and writing a document that gives them medical power of attorney, rather that trying to specify in advance the precise things you want to happen in every hypothetical.
Statistically there's a good chance I'll outlive my partner, kids are too young now, and I love my siblings but there's one who once he gets an idea in his head it's very hard to dislodge it and that could cause hard family dynamics.
I don’t have the link but I know there was a foundation creating information and videos on this topic so people would be able to make better informed choices.
Also random question - what’s the best analysis on the accuracy of prediction markets? There must be a ton to analysis - what’s the best?
For example - credit default swaps. Is Russia going to default? Last I checked the cost to insure $10 million in Russian sovereign debt was $4 million. We must have a ton of data.
Some days ago, the Ukraine government announced that men between the ages of 18 and 60 are forbidden from leaving the nation, while younger men, children, and women of all ages are all allowed to leave. The reasoning, according to the New York Post, is that 18-60 year olds are expected to stay and fight the Russians:
>The Ukrainian authorities “were nice, not rude, but they said that men have a duty to defend the country,” said Erzsebet Kovacs, 50, at a train station.
Per my book, An Empirical Introduction to Youth, they have self-owned by drawing the line too high. The Ukrainian government is missing out on about a million fully grown, high T young men aged 15-17 who would certainly make better fighters than any inexperienced man over 30.
According to Vegetius, an Ancient Roman who lived around 400 AD, it was ancient custom to recruit boys into the military at the beginning of puberty, “as soon as they were of age to carry arms.” If the Ukrainians did like the ancients and lowered the threshold to “stronger than a woman” they’d have another million 13-14 year olds ready to fight.
It’s even somewhat ahistorical for today. In certain societies, children are considered adults from the age of 14 or 15. A young person of 15 who joins an armed group can therefore be considered as an adult soldier according to his own culture. Current international law in force fixes 15 years as the minimum age for recruitment in the army and participation in conflicts. 48 countries today allow enlistment of 16 or 17 year olds. That includes the US.
So why would the Ukrainian government self-own like this? Probably because of the UN’s commitment to ageism. The International Convention on the “Rights” of the “Child” fixes 18 as the age of adulthood. The UN crybullies that grown, hairy, 6 ft tall 17 year olds are “child soldiers.” While a blind eye is turned to the US enlisting 17 year olds with parental consent, it’s reasonable to expect the Ukrainian government to kow-tow to international ageism when they’re relying on good press and any enlistment right now means immediate fighting, not bootcamp and a peace-time station.
Why is the UN and the Western press so ageist? As I showed in my book, it appears that ageism is mainly driven by the desires of the professional managerial class, especially those who reside in universities. The point is to reduce youth to schoolchildren who are seen as needing to be at school all day, under the control and management of the PMC, who are compensated for their manufactured utility. The UN and its associated NGOs are filled with a rotating cast of academics and similar types. They are the people who run the day-to-day, and while they may not be sovereign, they have been extended the liberty of pushing ageism as long as it doesn’t get in the way of anyone who might be considered their employer.
Consequently, the media takes the liberty to fill people’s heads with the idea that a child is anyone who is under 18 or 25, while ignoring the American military-industrial complex’s predatory behavior regarding teenagers, i.e. recruiting 17 year olds, sending recruiters to high schools, “stealing” PMC chickens as it were. This is ignored because the military industrial complex is in fact more powerful than and even employs the educational-infantilization complex.
Had Ukraine ordered 16 year olds to stay, it probably would have been ignored after being briefly excused as permitted under national law and justified due to the dire nature of the conflict, on the orders of MIC and State Department people. Nonetheless, the PMC’s goal is to make people internalize ageism, and indeed it does appear that they have made the westernized Ukrainian government internalize ageism to the point of self-owning. So it goes.
Interesting comment. I agree that an untrained 17 year old would make a better soldier than an untrained 60 year old. In a lot of countries a 17 year old can enlist, but a 60 year old cannot.
> According to Vegetius, an Ancient Roman who lived around 400 AD, it was ancient custom to recruit boys into the military at the beginning of puberty, “as soon as they were of age to carry arms.” If the Ukrainians did like the ancients and lowered the threshold to “stronger than a woman” they’d have another million 13-14 year olds ready to fight.
Sorry, but blindly following ancient Romans on social issues is an idiotic argument.
Ignore him. This guy has a bee in his bonnet about brain development, age of majority and that teenagers should be classed as legal adults with full freedoms and rights at around age 15 when puberty is finished in boys (he sets the bound at 14 for girls) and thus the brain and body are both fully mature and finished.
He had an entire series of threads about this over on TheMotte sub-reddit. Short version of all this - he doesn't care a straw about Ukraine, he is saddling up his hobbyhorse about how teenagers are LITERAL SLAVES nowadays by being forced to go to school and be under the control of their parents.
“JB” (JuliusBranson and multiple other nom de plumes) was also banned at DSL for multiple shenanigans, he started with “teenagers are truly oppressed”, moved on to “blacks have it too good”, then “Wouldn’t it have been great if Hitler won?”, but it was his pricklyness towards other commenters and multiple “sock puppets” that finally got him banned.
I'm not at all surprised to hear it, Plumber. If he stuck to his original contention about "the brain does not, in fact, remain in an undeveloped state until the age of 25" then this would be a reasonable debate to have.
He just went off on several tangents about oppression and then flamed out in "you are all too stupid to recognise and appreciate my genius".
>He just went off on several tangents about oppression and then flamed out in "you are all too stupid to recognise and appreciate my genius".
I think it's reasonable to get a little frustrated with people who think a misremembered n ~ 1 anecdote trumps scientific scholarship and a community that largely enables that kind of shadowy thinking as equal to reasonable thought.
Flaming out is counterproductive but don't act like you have no idea why I thought that the people trolling me at The Motte were being unreasonable. They were being unreasonable, I just shouldn't have responded with the same.
I'm unsure what your point is here, Ame. Would you like the government to tell you what to do for 40 hours a week, under the threat of force if you don't comply, while at the same time taking away your right to drive, own property, vote, and work for a living, among luxury things like the privilege to watch R rated movies, drink alcohol, smoke, and so on, while assigning you a "guardian" that will make all life decisions for you, control all of your economic activity, and freely punish you as he sees fit with extrajudicial beatings and confinement?
I'd assume not. That means you recognize that this is wrong. You've seen enough by now to know that the brain develops at the end of puberty and that the "teenage brain" is merely a myth that justifies those extreme violations of human rights, similar to the myth that Black slaves were a "slave race" or that women had "childish brains."
Yes, it is wrong to do those to adults, who are fully mentally developed. Children are not mentally developed. Teenagers are still not mentally developed, regardless of whatever studies you might brandish. So what if you can find a study that agrees with you? I can find a study that suggests vaccines cause testicular cancer. I'm certain.
It's not a study, it's the whole literature, 250+ studies cited in my book. You're throwing away all of science for ageism. Why? This sort of self-owning commitment to ageism is what my post is about, ironically.
When I was 15 I thought I could literally kill people with curses and was friends with someone who believed they were an honest-to-god werewolf. Were we dumb kids coping with bad life circumstances through ridiculous childish fantasies, or were we psychotic? Because if you want me to take your "teenagers are adults and just as mentally competent as adults" line to its conclusion, most teenagers would be considered to be SEVERELY mentally ill with every justifiable reason to say so.
EDIT: "You are throwing away all of science for ageism"
I don't support "child labor," I support extending the right to freely participate in the economy to all young adults. If you're calling young adults "children," that's problematic in that it seems that you took nothing from the post and decided to just respond with pure ageism. "Child" is like the n-word for youth. I'm not saying it's necessarily as bad as the n-word, but it's the closest thing to it for ageists. So responding by calling youth children is analogous to responding to a piece which promotes racial equality by calling Black people the n-word.
I also support the right of children to work. I do think that calling young adults children does serve as somewhat of a conversation stopper. They also use the term "kids" for people who are into their twenties. They are not kids and that's thinking more in words than with reasons, I would say.
I am confused: 1. You say it is bad NOT to recruit teenagers as soldiers (and workers, I guess). That may be so (Bryan Caplan is said to like "child -labor" - anyone knows where?) - but:
2. You seem to disapprove of "the American military-industrial complex’s predatory behavior regarding teenagers, i.e. recruiting 17 year olds". Why say "predatory" when you think "really smart and the right thing to do"?
That all said: Ukraine is not exactly full of young people. Low birth rate for over 30 years. One-child-families are not as eager to send their only child into a war, that will have much higher casualties than what the super-rich US-Army met in Iraq/Afghanistan.
Military: Far better to have 5 trained soldiers with 20 Javelins/Stinger/... than 20 Soldiers with 5 Panzerfäuste. The Russian tank will not care whether a 15 or 50 year old fired.
Or possibly they have human compassion and don't want to traumatise children.
Ignoring the moral element, in a modern war physical strength isn't especially important, but emotional maturity, good decision making skills and ability to cope with high pressure situations is. Which a 60 year old will be superior at than a teenager.
This reply is problematic in that it seems that you took nothing from the post and decided to just respond with pure ageism. "Child" is like the n-word for youth. I'm not saying it's necessarily as bad as the n-word, but it's the closest thing to it for ageists. So responding by calling youth children is analogous to responding to a piece which promotes racial equality by calling Black people the n-word.
>but emotional maturity, good decision making skills and ability to cope with high pressure situations is.
In my book I conclusively showed that teenagers 15+ are as good at these things as 25 year olds, and the gap between 13-14 year olds and youth on these metrics is less than or equal to gaps between equal groups like races and genders.
If you're analysing along these lines, why exclude women from the draft? Sure, they'd be far less useful in hand-to-hand combat, but that's not a common feature of modern combat, and indeed there are countries out there that have the draft for women as well as men, eg. Israel.
The strength and endurance requirements of modern militaries are, if I understand correctly, mostly about being able to do long treks with heavy supplies, but that isn't particularly relevant either in defensive urban combat.
Hand-to-hand combat is still a common feature of urban conflict. Not every engagement will go hand-to-hand, but it happens often enough that you wouldn't want to have your forces at a disadvantage in that type of combat.
Carrying those Javelins and firing them (or other guns) seems to require some physical strength (as in upper body muscles) - and we've all seen those funny videos where (often female) civilians hurt themselves badly on firing a gun. That said, there are women fighting in the US and Israeli army, I heard. And Ukrainian ladies are no push-overs, lol. Any volunteers will be given a gun, I guess, even if under 18 or XX. Still, you better care for appearances - we all love Ukrainians now, cuz they fight the "just war the brave way", no child-soldiers. And we see women with kids as refugees - not young illiterate chads with dreams of a BMW shining in their eyes.
First off, I want to say that whatever I write, my intention is not to be derogatory to your argument, which - the way you put it - isn't bad. I'd agree that men between 15 - 17 would perhaps make better soldiers than 60 year olds. Brain plasticity is quite high still in that age, so you'd have a learning machine on your hands which you can mold into shape.
Having said that, though, I think your interpretation of the reality is at best uncharitable. Why would it be a form of discrimination against young people that they aren't conscripted into war? If anything, you're privileging them by not having to take an AK-47 into their sweaty, pubescent hands and march into battle.
I would give you a point, though, in saying that we're infantilizing youth and that this might be a manifestation of it. Slapping a label "ageism" on it, though, is something I wouldn't do, because I don't think the big intention is to harm or exclude those people (that's how I intuitively understand any kind of discrimination without looking up the exact definition). It has probably a lot more to do with moral aspects and cultural traditions than people being hell-bent on making the lives of a certain group miserable.
I would have this beef with all sorts of -isms, by the way. If you have a job that requires physical prowess, you are perfectly fine to "discriminate" against most obese people. If you have a job that requires good reaction times, you are perfectly fine to "discriminate" against most older people. And so on.
> Why would it be a form of discrimination against young people that they aren't conscripted into war? If anything, you're privileging them by not having to take an AK-47 into their sweaty, pubescent hands and march into battle.
15-17 year olds aren't pubescent. That aside, it is discrimination. You may view it as positive, but saying "no 15-17 year olds" in the military is discrimination. Maybe they're taking volunteers that age right now, but allowing that age is, as you inferred, a manifestation of broader anti-youth ageism. Like how sexism got women off the Titanic, sometimes it works in their favor, but they're still the ones who are mainly oppressed.
>Slapping a label "ageism" on it, though, is something I wouldn't do, because I don't think the big intention is to harm or exclude those people (that's how I intuitively understand any kind of discrimination without looking up the exact definition).
I think you have to look at the broader social context, like sexism and the Titanic.
>It has probably a lot more to do with moral aspects and cultural traditions than people being hell-bent on making the lives of a certain group miserable.
I'm fairly certain I know where ageism comes from, I explained it in the post.
>I would have this beef with all sorts of -isms, by the way. If you have a job that requires physical prowess, you are perfectly fine to "discriminate" against most obese people. If you have a job that requires good reaction times, you are perfectly fine to "discriminate" against most older people. And so on.
In this case they're not discriminating based on anything real. They're discriminating based on the purely symbolic, i.e. time since birth. That's why ageism is wrong and meritocracy isn't.
I get it, discriminating against based on arbitrary age categories seem, well, arbitrary. It must be frustrating to see all these instances of ageism in the world go unnoticed and the perpetrators unashamedly pursuing their evil agenda.
Anyway, sorry for the bit of sarcasm at the end, but I don't think any further discussion will be productive since you seem to already know what's up. But I'm happy I could provide a medium for you to justify your beliefs and share your problems. If you want to make victims out of those poor youths, you sure go ahead and do so. Many of them will be thankful, I'm sure.
Ah, yes, I was wondering when the grievance studies field would reach this stage. All The Last Wars At Once continues to be the most prescient piece of dystopian fiction.
They may, or they may not. Black people in the US have extremely serious grievances which should be addressed, but this doesn't justify grievance studies.
1. Grievance studies is any sociological field that revolves around finding new, exciting ways in which to divide people into warring factional groups full of animus with each other who see the other side as The Hated Foe using dubious pseudo-logic.
2. Your primary concerns seem to be along the lines of:
-13-year olds can't be sent to die in a war.
-13-year olds have to go to school and can't start working on an assembly line right out of elementary school.
Calling this "oppression" is frankly laughable. You could make an argument that a lack of child labor and child soldiers is a sign of Western decadence, but using the language of grievance studies for this is so comedic I can't possibly take you seriously. If you want an answer to why your writing might be bad, however: what's your feelings on the age of consent? Is forbidding a *loving, consensual relationship* between a pedophile and a 14-year old oppression as well?
>1. Grievance studies is any sociological field that revolves around finding new, exciting ways in which to divide people into warring factional groups full of animus with each other who see the other side as The Hated Foe using dubious pseudo-logic.
That's not what I'm doing, I'm just recognizing that youth are severely oppressed in that the government tells youth what to do for 40 hours a week, under the threat of force if they don't comply, while at the same time taking away their right to drive, own property, vote, and work for a living, among luxury things like the privilege to watch R rated movies, drink alcohol, smoke, and so on, while assigning them a "guardian" that will make all life decisions for them, control all of your economic activity, and freely punish them as he sees fit with extrajudicial beatings and confinement.
I'm pointing out that this extreme oppression is justified by the false narrative that youth are essentially children, despite their adult appearances, with "developing brains." This is unscientific and wrong.
Then I'm pointing out that this false narrative seems to exist to support the material desires of the professional managerial class, based on my analysis of its origin and spread.
Now you can understand that my post is about how the Ukraine government has internalized this ageist false narrative to their own detriment. It's not about handouts for youth, it's about truth and justice, which might mean making all young men stay and fight the invaders, not just the young men who are above the arbitrary PMC age when high school ends in the US. I'm like a feminist who supports the ERA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Rights_Amendment
So, I guess I played "traditional" prediction markets on Ukraine by moving my money around, warning some friends, etc. If I wanted to get involved in actual prediction markets what would be some good first steps? How much of an investment is it?
I want to become one of those people who has thirty different bumper stickers on their car, but I want it to be about something ridiculous that no one would ever seriously put bumper stickers on their car about. Right now, my best idea is sporks. "My other untensil is a spork." One of those white ovals with black text that just says "SPORK". "Coexist"-style, but with sporks to make up the lines. Maybe something styled like a political sticker.
Right now I'm still thinking up ideas while I save up enough money to print enough one-off magnets. Does anyone have a suggestion?
The word spork has become somewhat of a meme making fun of nerdy "random" kids: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/katy-t3h-pengu1n-of-d00m, such it that it feels like exactly the word someone that intentionally wants to countersignal about bumper signals would pick. This would cause me to stereotype you in an unfavorable way, much like I would roll my eyes at someone who refers to a sport as "sportsball".
I have been reading recently about Gerald Bull and his space-gun, project Babylon. There is something deeply captivating about the almost comic-book story of a man so hellbent to pursue his vision for humanity's future that he is willing to side with a dictator and ultimately face assassination. I'm romanticizing some of course, but still. On that subject though, I have learned that there is still someone carrying the space-gun torch!
Just as Bull came out of project HARP, John Hunter came out of Super-HARP to create a company called Greenlaunch (formerly Quicklaunch) that aims to use a a light gas gun to put small payloads into orbit for very low costs. I have no real motivation for sharing this except I think it's super cool and more people should know. It bothers me too that they have apparently received comparatively little funding when start-ups like spin-launch are working on (it seems?) inferior concepts, but with more support.
John Hunter gave a talk at Google back in 2009 explaining the concept and advantages of light-gas guns but from checking the site it seems like things have moved at a crawl since then. I don't know what the rules on posting links are but I'm placing it below. That's my factoid for this Open Thread anyway. Happy hunting!
VT, I read Frederick Forsythe's novel The Fist Of God back in the mid-'90s. The first 40 or pages deal with Gerald Bull, and, as is typical of Forsythe's novels, it's hard to tell where the fact ends and the fiction begins. But in any case, it was a very good read.
The "strong Ukranian resistance" is a fantasy. Russia could take out all of Kiev's political headquarters within 15 minutes using its total domination of Ukranian airspace, in the same way that the US did during the "shock and awe" phase of its invasion of Iraq. Putin has wisely chosen not to do so because he needs a legitimate government to negotiate a settlement with rather than the total chaos created by the US when it decapitated SH's government. Insofar as the 40 mile long column of tanks and soldiers unable to penetrate into Kiev... that would be laughable if I hadn't heard it from so many otherwise intelligent people. Those tank units could roll into the Maidan in an afternoon. Do you really think poorly armed untrained civilians could withstand several divisions of well disciplined soldiers backed by 100's of tanks? Utterly ridiculous! Unlike W. Bush, Putin understands what a mess it would be trying to occupy chaotic cities with a hostile citizenry. If anyone had listened to him directly rather than taking our media at face value, they'd have heard that P's objectives are to neutralize the military, not mess with private citizens.
He invaded Ukraine only after Biden called the non-entry of Ukraine into NATO non-negotiable, and Levensky mentioned that he might want nuclear arms.
When you look at the steady eastern expansion of NATO and the arming of Poland and Romania with nuclear rockets, was it so unreasonable for Putin to draw a red line concerning Ukraine's future NATO membership? What was America's response to Russian ICBMs 70 miles from our shores? Do we seriously want to risk war with a nuclear armed opponent over the right of Ukraine to join NATO? That's madness!
If cooler heads prevail, there's a peaceful way out of this mess where no one loses face. Demand that Russia withdraw all troops from Ukraine. Declare Ukraine neutral and surround it with a UN Peacekeeping force that would stand in the way of any invasion and not permit the entry of any new weapons. This has been a successful strategy to achieve peace in the past... the divided island of Greek and Turkish Cyprus comes to mind, though many other examples could be given. These days who even knows what the issues that were creating all the trouble back then? Let's stop the blame game. World war is the enemy and our mutual survival ought to be our motivation. Let's all live to see another spring.
"Those tank units could roll into the Maidan in an afternoon. Do you really think poorly armed untrained civilians could withstand several divisions of well disciplined soldiers backed by 100's of tanks? Utterly ridiculous! "
Poe's law would seem to apply here; I can't tell whether this is a mindkilled Putin apoligist or just a troll.
The 150,000 trained full-time soldiers of the Ukrainian army, many with recent combat experience thanks to Russia's last invasion, backed by 900,000 trained reservists, armed with tens of thousands of anti-tank rockets and missiles (and 800+ of their own modern tanks), can absolutely withstand "several divisions" of "well-disciplined" soldiers backed by "100's" of tanks. Especially when the attacking divisions are channeled along the few paved roads through a hundred kilometers of Ukrainian spring mud, with crap logistics, into hostile urban areas.
One might as well ridicule the very concept of the people of Stalingrad and Leningrad standing up to crack German Panzer Divisions.
And, in the spirit of "pics or it didn't happen", here are verified pics of 902 Russian military vehicles, including 143 main battle tanks, destroyed or captured by the people you write off as "poorly-trained unarmed civilians"
I am certain it was as inconceivable to Vladimir Putin as it is to John L. here that Russian tanks wouldn't have rolled into the Maidan on the first day, that Russian MiGs wouldn't have ruled the sky from the first hour. Reality, and the Ukrainians, had different ideas. And sensible people update their beliefs based on new evidence.
My reading of the situation is that for whatever reason, Russia doesn't have a competent fighting force. Apparently the Russian footsoldiers don't have night vision goggles, GPS or secure communications. There are reports of looting and fuel shortages. Trucks that haven't been maintained. Basically Incompetence, corruption or pro Ukraine views in the provisions and logistics. For whatever reason, the Russians have really bungled the logistics, and many of the soldiers aren't that well trained. Ukraine has an army. Smaller than the Russian army, but apparently more competent.
So your contention is that Russia has decided to not win this war as quickly as they can to accomplish... ??? If Russia could have established air dominance they would have done it.
Based on your analysis of the situation I don't think you are very informed on the current state of the conflict.
The column of armor outside of Ukraine isn't stopped their because it has been unable to penetrate the defense of the city. Its stopped because of logistical failings on the part of russian war planners. They don't have the necessary supplies to move that column of vehicles forward. Additionally the ground in the area isnt able to support heavy vehicles off road. Another failing of Russian planning.
Ukraine is not defended by " poorly armed untrained civilians" but by a modern military that has been fighting a war since 2014. They are supplied by Western allies with billions of dollars worth of modern equipment. Also there is little evidence that "several divisions of well disciplined soldiers backed by 100's of tanks" have actually attacked Kyiv. Russian infantry discipline has clearly been lacking - they are under supplied with food, have been abandoning their vehicles, and are not willing/able to properly defend armored support.
tl;dr, the Russian military has a lot of man-power, but a lot of those people have very little training an aren't likely to fight effectively.
Note: The source (ISW) seems to be more hawkish, possibly "neo-conservative". The assessment seems reasonable to me, but some people might be more skeptical of the source.
Hi Ryan L, Thanks for your response and the link. I'm not really qualified to respond intelligently to all the technical information, though perhaps it underestimates the experience gained from Russias involvement in Syria where they were successful in achieving their military goals. I'm not in a position to gauge how the air war is going though I haven't heard of any Ukrainian planes that survived through the first 2 days of the invasion.
Interesting, but it is an article from 2016, relying on anonymous sources, and officials are quoted in it as denying that. Hardly an ironclad evidence that there are nukes in Romania in 2022. But even if true, those would not be Romanian nukes, but American nukes on Romanian soil.
No European NATO member is. The entire US nuclear arsenal in Europe, and some fraction of the French, consists of gravity bombs to be delivered by F-16s or the national equivalent. The remainder of the European-based nukes are on British or French submarines.
My understanding of the progression of the war is based not on taking the media at face value, but on counting up abandoned, captured, and destroyed vehicles, and by that measure the Ukranian Army is having an absolute field day. Hundreds and hundreds of Russian vehicles so far. This is not from media reports, it's from images of the burnt-out vehicles. You can find and review them yourself if you're so inclined. Putin may still win, but it would be a pyrrhic victory with insane costs.
If you'd like to send me links I'll view them even though in a world of photoshop you can't necessarily trust pictures. But honestly, that's not the point. It's not important how the war is going or even what precipitated it. Everyone should focus on how to end it. When 2 nuclear powers with the ability to end life on earth just keep upping the ante, we all have a stake in getting out of this terrible mess. If things continue to go south it won't just be a sad situation for Ukraine. Everyone on this board and everyone they love or don't love will die terrible deaths. Please comment on the peace proposal I advanced in my initial post and give your own peace proposals.
It's certainly still possible to win through attrition, which is why a lot of serious commentators are saying "Ukraine is doing really well... but at some point the Russians will probably regroup and start pushing forwards again." The question is if they can win before their logistics, economy, or morale problems make it impossible to keep the army going.
Also, I wouldn't consider modern tanks or fighter jets to be "fodder" - they're expensive and can take a long time to replace, especially if your industry is currently getting strangled by sanctions.
I don't think so. Nobody wins a war slowly and painfully if he can do it quickly and at much lower cost in blood and treasure. (Not to mention the significantly increased cost of looking ineffectual to rivals and allies alike the longer it takes.) The most probable reason Russia hasn't taken Kiev or Kharkhiv yet is the simplest one: because it hasn't been able to.
And no, Putin doesn't need an intact Ukrainian governmetn with which to negotiate, any more than the Allies needed Hitler and Goering alive in May of 1945. It is unlikely Putin wants to negotiate anything, anyway. Most likely his initial aim was simply to decapitate the Ukrainian government, kill, capture, or drive into hiding most of the top leadership, and install puppets more agreeable to Russian interests, and there's no reason to think that isn't still his aim.
In principle he needs a functioning bureaucracy further down from the top if he wants to maintain order, but I doubt he loses much sleep over the importance of protecting the lives of the Assistant Secretary for Highways or the shop steward for Local 666 of the Pipefitters' Union. Those people are easily found when you need them, and they work for money, so it isn't especially important to win their hearts and minds -- giving them bread, particularly in a post-war country that is wrecked and starving, is good enough.
Hi CP, I appreciate your response though I don't think the present situation is comparable to WW2 or Hitler, nor was Vietnam or Afghanistan or Iraq or numerous other wars that attempted to use it to justify actions we've come to regret.
If anyone had actually listened directly to Putin they'd have known that his only demand was that Ukraine not join NATO. He called it a red line. Biden called that non-negotiable and Putin invaded. That's the long and the short of it. Turn Ukraine into a neutral state and Putin will withdraw. Even if you doubt that, shouldn't it at least be tried? Mutual survival should be our common ground. Kindly read the peace proposal in my initial post and I'll welcome your response.
It's not true that Putin's only demand was that Ukraine not join NATO. Among other things, he wanted 1) a commitment to not expand NATO *at all*; 2) a return to 1997-level NATO troop deployments (which would mean NATO forces leaving central and eastern Europe, and maybe even reducing troop levels in western Europe depending on exact interpretation); 3) an end to any military activity (presumably including joint exercises) in eastern Europe, central Asia, and the Caucasus; 4) restrictions on missile deployments.
The Biden administration actually signaled a willingness to negotiate on missile deployments. I hope you can understand why the other demands are non-starters.
Also, if all Putin wanted was to keep Ukraine out of NATO, he basically just had to maintain the status quo. NATO won't add members until they settle territorial disputes, e.g. Russia's claims over Crimea and the situation in Donbass, via "peaceful means".
Hi Ryan L. Putin's demands after he invaded included what you've mentioned. Before then, he'd only asked that Ukraine not join NATO. After the invasion he added the other items to his wish list. Perhaps he wanted to use the other demands as bargaining chips to be be conceded in negotiations. It might help America and the allies save face. The best way to find out would be to offer to only give the guarantee in exchange for withdrawal then see what he says. Do you agree that would be worth a try?
Also for what it's worth, I don't personally see any need for cooler heads to prevail, and I don't think our (at least American) lives are at serious risk. Russia is not the USSR in its heyday, and the US has not stood still since 1985. Were Putin to seriously attempt to draw his aging nuclear sword, I think we would know enough ahead of time to take his entire apparatus out pre-emptively. There would be a shocking loss of Russian life, to be sure, and a fair amount of short-term fallout with which the poor Finns would have to cope, but I don't see any big danger for the continental US.
Putin's a smart guy, and he certainly knows this, so I expect him to scrupulously avoid stepping on any NATO toes. He will probably rely on the short American attention span, and our unwillingness to look up from our iPhones long enough to get involved in yet another weird war in Asia - I know it's technically Europe but it looks like Asia to us -- just after we got tired of the last one and unceremoniously abandoned it.
In that I think he's correct. And I personally wouldn't support going to war over the Ukraine, largely because it annoys me that they didn't figure this out themselves. It's not like they didn't know who their neighbor was. It was their problem to either make some accommodation to keep the bear satisfied or make themselves sufficiently and obviously indigestible that they could live next to an angry bear indefinitely. Zelensky's ranting up and down about how it's *my* responsibility to backstop *his* failure to prevent Russian shell fragments from killing little girls in Mariupol is just annoying.
Not that I object to the Biden Adminstration, if some among them can be found who can find their asses without GPS, sending Zelensky a crapton of Stingers, Javelins, high-class ELINT and whatever other form of brass knuckles can be slid under the radar. I don't like bullies, and Putin is a first-class bully, and I hope the Ukrainians bloody his nose badly and then the Russian people string him up by the heels for screwing up their lives so he can (try to) re-live the glory days of his Soviet youth. I mean, what a putz, especially compared to his mentor, who had real balls even if he did drink himself to death.
Let's just say conservatively that 10% of Russia's 7700 warheads made it to American cities... that's 770 nuclear bombs, most larger than what devastated Hiroshima. There are 50 states. On average, that's 14 bombs per state. You, your family and everyone you know are as good as dead and even billionaires in their bunkers will wish they were once again enjoying cocktails in their gardens 5 years from now. Most people are incapable of grasping this level of completely unprecedented devastation. It may sound preposterous, but when I was shot in Vietnam 50 years ago it came as a shock that war was for real.
I believe your analysis neglects to take into consideration, Russia's nuclear submarine fleet near our shores which could survive any first strike by the US. I speak as a Vietnam veteran who took 2 machine gun bullets. One missed my heart by a cm. My first thought was, "this wasn't cowboys and indians."
I would even appeal to billionaires and high level politicians who may or may not survive the first day. Two years down the road things might not be as rosy as you assumed they'd be. The bowling alley has run out of spare parts, your sex slaves are quarreling and you've just learned that your son is trying to poison you.
> Putin's a smart guy, and he certainly knows this, so I expect him to scrupulously avoid stepping on any NATO toes.
This sounds a lot like the same reasoning that led people to say there's "no way Putin will invade Ukraine". Perhaps it's in Russia's best interest to avoid stepping on any NATOes, but it seems dangerous to rely on any reasoning that assumes Putin's behavior will align with Russia's best interest at this point, at least as we understand them.
It's possible Putin's just playing some 4D chess that's beyond the ken of us mere mortals, but so many people are saying that the Ukraine invasion just looks like a mistake that there's a non-trivial chance that Putin's goals no longer align with Russia's, or that he's taken leave of his senses entirely.
If anyone had listened to Putin they'd have known that he said over and over that if Ukraine was free to join NATO, it was a red line for him. Biden called that non-negotiable, so Putin invaded. It's essential to listen to your "enemy." How many wars have we entered where we neglected to listen? With RT forced off the airwaves this becomes increasingly more difficult.
I hope you'll read the peace proposal in my initial post and respond. We don't need a nuclear war and anyone who discounts that possibility should carefully read the history of the Cuban missile crisis. Castro, said he'd prefer nuclear war to backing down. A Soviet submariner refused to follow orders and didn't fire off his nucs.
Obviously this is merely playing a devil's advocate. No, Ukrainians are totally committed to the protection of Ukraine. Their forces are not as numerous and strong but they are still mounting a strong resistance. If Putin could have taken Kyiv in 15 minutes he would have done it by now. It is not done, the Ocam's razor says he could not apart from throwing a nuclear bomb or something.
Joining NATO was the best thing my country did from protection point of view. Whatever mistakes were committed in Ukraine, the ship for neutral Ukraine has sailed with this war. There are only 2 options: either Ukraine is completely crushed or they win despite heavy losses and casualties and rebuild the country with closer integration in the EU.
Don't you figure the Ukrainians are kicking themselves now for giving up their nuclear weapons in 1994 in exchange for a piece of paper in which Russia swore solemnly "to respect the independence and sovereignty and existing border of Ukraine" and "to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine?"
Which means: if they *don't* lose the war, and *don't* join NATO, what are the chances the Ukrainians decide to start building some atomic bombs? They have the reactors, and very probably the know-how.
The Ukrainians didn't have nuclear weapons in 1994. A weapon is defined by its function, which at minimum requires that it be capable of some function. What the Ukrainians had in 1994, were some but not all of the parts of a functional nuclear weapons system. Which made for very flashy lawn ornaments, but did not give them the ability to actually nuke anyone.
The Ukrainians do have a fair deal of talent in both aerospace and nuclear engineering; given six months or so they could probably have turned components and materials salvaged from their leftover Soviet systems into a minimally functional nuclear arsenal of their own.
But doing so, would have completely alienated them from the west, and would probably have earned them a Russian invasion (or at least airstrikes on the facilities doing the work) before they were finished. And everyone would have quietly nodded in approval, because in 1994 Volodymyr Zelensky was still a child and "post-Soviet Republic" still meant "probably dysfunctional kleptocracy out of a Borat movie, on no account to be trusted with a bunch of stolen nuclear weapons."
An independent Ukraine with a nuclear arsenal never existed, and never realistically could have existed.
John, what you've stated is entirely accurate. Dick Lugar, may he always be revered for this, purchased the materials on behalf of the US, without consulting with anyone. It was used up in a nuclear reactor and converted to electricity.
Nuclear deterrence works till it doesn't We came very close to the precipice during the Cuban missile crisis. Ukraine gave up its nucs not long after the wall fell and world peace seemed within our grasp. Gradually, rather than jumping at this incredible opportunity Russia became encircled by NATO. Frankly speaking, the MIC that Eisenhower warned us about thought peace would be unprofitable. There's much I could add to this but most of it can be found in earlier posts, besides my dog needs walking.
It's worth noting here that reactor-grade uranium and weapons-grade uranium are radically different (~4% U-235 vs 95% U-235.) Nothing about running reactors really provides you with expertise in heavily refining uranium (especially if you are purchasing your reactor-grade uranium pre-processed from another country, as most nations with reactors do.)
The other road to nuclear weapons is producing plutonium in breeder reactors. Plutonium bombs are notably much more difficult to design than uranium; they don't produce enough neutrons in a neutral state to self-ignite, so you need some sort of explosive shock-wave or something to set them off (the details are classified.) I don't THINK Ukraine has any breeder reactors either based on a quick google, but I'm not certain.
Ukraine may end up developing nukes, but I expect it would take quite a bit of money and expense if they aren't given a covert hand up by an existing nuclear power.
Thanks for that much respected expertise. I would only add the possibility of a direct transfer of nuclear weapons to another state. Until 6 months after the Cuban missile crisis, Turkey had nuclear armed rockets given to thedm by, thed US, then there's the placement of armed nuclear missiles and more recently the nucs in Romania that NATO is responsible for.
No, in general they are not sorry for giving up their nuclear weapons. Some already explained that their ownership was only formal anyway. And they don't really look towards devastating nuclear war and their stance is still strongly anti-nuclear.
They are not going to lose this war but the question is how many deaths and destruction will this involve?
NoPie, I hope you're right but who would have guessed that WW1 would have been ignited by the assassination of some archduke in Serbia by an anarchist. Ego plus military alliances spun events out of control. We need to nip this war in the bud and prevent it from spreading. I'm sure you'd agree with that.
John L., you are right that we need to stop this war. I just don't see the UN capable to do it now unless we make some new alliances. I don't think that a random even will decide the outcome of this. If the conditions are right, it will happen anyway in one way or another. If we wait, it becomes more and more capable of greater escalation.
Why do wars happen? Some of them are fights for resources, access to trade routes etc. But in this case as in many other wars, it is just hatred of a different people (or religion). People are not thinking rationally and only force can stop them.
So what's your solution to "nipping the war in the bud"? Forcing Ukraine's unilateral surrender to Putin and hoping he doesn't ask for more? What happens if he does? "Okay, you can have Latvia too... and Montenegro... and Bosnia, but if you invade ONE more country this time I'm REALLY going to get mad!"?
I'm with John L here. The volume and monotony of anti-Russia / pro-Ukraine news is enough to set off any skeptic's BS-detector. Do Americans ever wonder if their "indispensable nation" is actually a huge cult?
During the fog of war, we can assume up-to-date news is unreliable. Do you not remember WMD misinformation? Everyone who had an Iraq-war boner is banging the anti-Russia drums now, but 10x louder, and bootlicking of national security types has become our media's raison d'être.
You seem to assume that people who oppose Russia are mostly Americans? I think that the closer you live to Russia, the more anti-Russia you are... unless you are so close that being anti-Russia becomes literally illegal, of course.
There is some truth to what you say, though in recent worldwide Pew and Gallup polls, the US was rated far and away the greatest threat to world peace. Regardless of who we may think the villains and heroes to be, we all share a desire to survive. Let's focus on that.
This is so intellectually lazy. There is copious evidence to support the non-Russia assessment of this conflict. Why do you discount it? It's fine to be skeptical of claims without evidence. It is foolish to continue to be skeptical when evidence presents itself.
It comes down to which sources you trust. Having visited 147 countries I trust American corporate media less than most people I know. At bottom though you'd be foolish indeed not to listen open-mindedly to conflicting sources. If your preferred source distorts the other sides point of view, that alone should set off alarms.
The only "other side" of this situation I have heard from is Russia which has a hell of a lot to gain from their version of events. They distort the non-Russian side's view way more than any anti-russia report has. I haven't seen any reporting that would make me want to trust the Russian side and doubt the Ukrainian side when it comes to the overall narrative.
What you call evidence I see as propaganda. It's not like social media posts filtered by weird algorithms and interviews with US-aligned officials are likely to reflect the ground truth. Crisis = Opportunity for politicians. All indicators are that they are maximizing this one, just like they maximized the last one.
Facts that make one side look good are still facts! You can argue that the media is publicizing Russian losses while obscuring Ukranian losses, but I don't think you can argue that the hundreds of photos of burned-out or captured tanks have *all* been faked and that none of the many, many nerds studying those photos have noticed the fakery. Nobody's propaganda machine is that good.
Even from an extremely skeptical "pics or it didn't happen" posture, that puts an upper bound on how well the Russians can be doing. We know they've lost more tanks and jets than the US lost in Iraq, while waging war in their own backyard. We know the Russians don't have full control of the air like we did in Iraq either, because the Ukrainians are occasionally launching sorties and Russian jets are occasionally getting shut down. And we can guess that they've lost more soldiers as well, although people obviously aren't spreading photos of that around for easy verification.
Usually I can't even tell from the photo if the burned-out vehicles are Russian or Ukrainian. Even if they are Russian, is it an inordinate number? I guess I'm not plugged in with the war nerds. Unlike the US, Russia has been winning its recent wars, so the stories of gross military incompetence strike me as unlikely. But if I'm wrong and Russia is getting schooled by the Ukraine, I won't be sad.
There is a way to tell. Russian and Ukrainian, although almost the same language, are not the same and the people have different accents. Native speakers can tell the difference and will often provide comments. Russian vehicles are marked with painted letters that the military has been using to signify their vehicles. They two sides use different equipment. They don't have the same guns, tanks, artillery, uniforms, etc. You or I may not be able to tell the difference but there are people who can that are offering their insights all over the internet. You seem to recognize your lack of knowledge about this subject, which is great, but then aren't willing to trust sources that do have lots of knowledge on this subject.
A free person will never accept the opinion of the majority because it's the majority. There's a famous psychological experiment when 2 lengths of string are shown to a dozen people. One is quite obviously longer than the other but after 11 ringers claim the shorter one is longer most people go with the majority.... but not everyone!!! Stand up and speak your own truth even if you risk ostracism.
It's not just the Ds and Rs tho; it's basically all of the West, including all the places where hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to protest the US invasion of Iraq. I don't think one needs the concept of group think to explain why almost all people in the West find naked aggression against a West-leaning country by a despotism-leaning country to be a bad thing.
It's actually fascinating the lack of polarisation (at least for now) on this one. I think the issue is a lack of other sensible options. Unlike Covid, which presented a vast array of possible sucky tradeoffs (so it was always possible for the opposition to claim that a different set of tradeoffs should have been made), the hands of the US are pretty tied on this one.
Doing less isn't a realistic option, because everyone understands that allowing Russia to re-invade Eastern Europe would be terrible for everyone except Russia (and maybe China). Doing _more_ isn't a realistic option because that's a recipe for Actual World War Three. And doing "about the same only better" isn't a realistic option because the exact nature of what's already being done is largely secret meaning nobody can publically critique it.
Maybe I'll be proven wrong and the Republicans can find a "Here's why Joe Biden is doing Ukraine wrong" attack by next week. But I think they'll have to settle for "It's Joe Biden's fault that Russia thought they could get away with this".
Here's a way out that's worked before. Fifty years ago I passed through a line of UN peacekeepers on the island of Cyprus. Both the Greek and Turkish Cypriots were bent on avenging some now-forgotten atrocity, but the UN soldiers prevented them getting at each other's throats. Ten years later tempers had cooled, human and commercial interactions had reestablished themselves and the benefits of peace were becoming clear to all. Today, who knows or cares who started the fight or who was to blame.
This solution has been tried successfully many times.
We should demand that Russia leave Ukraine immediately, declare Ukraine neutral and cordon the border with UN soldiers thereby preventing any future invasion or the introduction of any new weapons to Ukraine.
Any comments about how this idea could be improved are welcome.
"Doing less isn't a realistic option, because everyone understands that allowing Russia to re-invade Eastern Europe would be terrible for everyone except Russia (and maybe China)."
Why everyone? It's not like the US has much at stake besides pride and rhetoric. For that matter, India, Brazil, Nigeria, Indonesia, and most populous and less-populous countries are unaffected. Global crises for energy and food from sanctions would hurt everyone though, except the wealthy.
“It's not like the US has much at stake besides pride and rhetoric“
The EU, if treated as a whole, is the US’s largest trading partner and the world’s third biggest economy. Granted, the bulk of that comes from countries outside of Eastern Europe, but an even larger European war would have huge spillover effects that would materially hurt average Americans pretty significantly.
The rest of the world will not escape a nuclear confligration which we appear to be headed for. It's crunch time. Stick your neck out and be a peace warrior. Future generations will bless you.
Hyperpolarization is worse. I'll take agreement on something that's pretty obviously true (Russia's invasion of another sovereign nation bad, actually).
Russia invaded when it received no guarantee that Ukraine would not join NATO...Simple as that.
As for sovereign nations, let's start with democratically elected governments of Guatemala, Chile and Iran that we replaced with dictatorships. Skip on to Iraq where we invaded under the known lie that they had WMDs. Millions of civilians spelled with an "M"died as a result. Their government has repeatedly asked us to leave but we refuse. I could continue, but I hope I've made my point.
I think the sanctions will hurt America and Europe as well, though it's hard to know how much. If Russia ever cuts off natural gas to Germany, which I hope they won't, the results for the German's will be very severe.
I don't know enough to have an intelligent opinion, but the basic argument that Putin has already incurred heavy costs suggests the lack of intensification of the air campaign is due to some degree of incapability.
That's true enough. 16,000 have died from indiscriminate artillery fire in the Donbass. The poorly armed untrained civilians I was referring to were the citizens of Kiev where no military personnel are located to my knowledge.
I'm fairly certain there are some Ukrainian military personnel in Kyiv. But I'm even more certain that there are an even greater number of Ukrainian military personnel north and east of Kyiv, which is why Kyiv proper is still conspicuously free of Russian tanks (but frequently bombarded by Russian artillery).
Where is your "knowledge" coming from, that you think otherwise?
While we're at it, Russia's "total domination of Ukranian airspace" is a figment of Russian propaganda. One of the biggest surprises of the conflict so far has been the poor performance of the Russian airforce.
I'm not in a position to comment other than to say that Russias stated military objectives were to subdue the Ukrainian military and their military infrastructure.
The thing is, the facts as we know them appear to be entirely compatible with two diametrically different theories - 1) Russia is very competent strategically
2) Russia is very incompetent strategically and, especially, tactically
That's interesting. It very much depends on priors. For me it is very believable that Ukrainians are mounting a strong resistance because I know them personally. Also the fact that Russia's forces are more numerous and thus stronger is not really in dispute. Also Ukrainians clearly are not winning. And yet, they are resisting very strongly. Now I heard that in case of strong defence the attacker needs the superiority of 3:1 to win. This is just about what Russians have but there is a margin of error. Therefore the outcome is not really predictable yet and can go either way.
Hi Machine Intelligence, There are many versions from many sources about who's "winning" this war though I wouldn't trust anyone blindly. I would agree that the necessity of striking quickly and decisively would necessitate not briefing everyone involved beforehand. Kiev didn't have any major military emplacements, so it's hard to imagine how a well trained, massively armed military machine would have trouble moving into a largely unarmed city. Hundreds of tanks are a formidable force compared to small arms. Baghdad was far better protected, yet American forces drove in and took it over almost as fast as their army could move. With the government in total disarray chaos ensued and within a year millions written with an "M" of innocent civilians had died. It's my contention that Putin wants an intact legitimate government he can negotiate with. You'll no doubt disagree with that but hopefully we can agree that regardless of who's to blame for this mess, we all should be concentrated on ending it... and ending it in a way that will prevent it happening again. If you'll re-read my original post you'll find my possible solution. Whatever you may think of Putin or Russia, it seems unwise to continue raising the ante on a game where your "enemy" possesses 1000s of nuclear weapons. Even billionaires and high level politicians who survive the big day may regret their decisions in 2 or 3 years. Would you agree with that?
A million dead people is a lot of suffering, Daniel Kokotajlo, but like Stalin once said, "One death is a tragedy, a million is just a statistic." I've done my best today. It's time to sleep. All kindest wishes my brother.
There's an interesting uneasiness on the right regarding the new national mood in the US. One right/libertarian blog that I read summed it up as something like "Much as I hate Putin's invasion of Ukraine, I'm really uncomfortable about being on the same side as the establishment".
I identify with this feeling. It's weird seeing your outgroup suddenly take the weapons it's been hitting you with for years (twitter bans, reddit deplatformings, firings of wrongthinkers, censorship of opposing opinions and clearly slanted media coverage) and suddenly start using them against a genuine villain. I'm not sure whether to cheer that these weapons are finally being used against someone who deserves it, or just wince at the realisation that my outgroup has been treating me like I'm Vlad Putin all along.
I'm also trying hard not to let the Gell-Mann amnesia settle in. If the media narrative has been wrong about so many things for so long, what are the chances that it's right when it tells me that this time my enemies really are stupid and evil and incompetent and definitely totally losing?
Here's an argument for everyone here who doesn't see why some people are uncomfortable about suddenly being on the same side as the establishment.
Imagine it's an election year. Imagine you're a leftist, all posed to vote for what looks like the perfect D candidate for the US Senate from your state, a leftist with impeccable credentials and principles, running against a vanilla R.
Suddenly, Donald Trump endorses your perfect candidate. Do you proceed with voting without thinking twice about this, because who cares what Trump says, some things are obviously right, or do you pause to wonder what you're missing and whether you should vote for someone else instead?
The term "fake news" has replaced "book burning" and suddenly anything that Twitter or Facebook finds disagreeable can be banned without recourse by someone anonymous. When Covid first came on the scene even saying the truth that the only level 4 bioweapons lab in China was located in Wuhan got you banned. I have friends who think that there are Nazi bases on Mars. That's ok with me to hear. I can vet my sources, thanks. If something isn't true it should be openly disputed not made to disappear.
I get that there are a lot of people on the Right that consider "the establishment" their enemy. There are a lot of people on the Left that feel the same way.
But unless your enemy du jour is Literally The Greatest Evil ever, it is always possible that a greater evil will come along and have your current enemy say "hey, these other guys are really damn evil, let's maybe make that our #1 priority today".
Don't be the guy who sympathizes with Hitler because he's still peeved with FDR's third term or his mishandling of the Great Depression.
If you dislike something because your opponents like that thing (and vice versa), then you're giving your opponents the power to decide what you like and don't like.
It should be obvious that you don't want to give them that kind of power.
I think you have been poisoned by the internet. "twitter bans, reddit deplatformings, firings of wrongthinkers, censorship of opposing opinions and clearly slanted media coverage". I don't think the people of Ukraine, or Yemen, or Syria care about these things. Consider if you believe violence is bad or good, is killing bad or good, is children dying bad or good. Does it really matter who is doing the killing or the dying?
You seem to have joined a group and decided to believe what the group thinks. Try developing your morals from first principles. Support people working to advance goals that align with those morals. Ignore what tribe they subscribe to.
Russia invaded Ukraine with no justification. You can see it with your own eyes. Why do you care what the "establishment" thinks?
Yeah I could see this. I think a federal or state level anti-cancellation law is needed. People with commercial bases in a platform should be well compensated when a platform drops them for political reasons
People who are fired for legal speech should be compensated through taxes on the platforms that the cancellation activity is hottest on. If it's a blatantly reasonable opinion they expressed the company should face a severe fine
Right now it's a fun hobby to wreck peoples lives in the digital neo-witch hunts. If it becomes something with no cost to the targets and a liability to the institutions facilitating it that will change a lot
It's about more than money. If Joe Rogan gets deplatformed I don't care if he gets a billion dollars, nor perhaps does he. I want to hear what he has to say.
Notable is that per your example, you appear to be most concerned about the deplatforming of people who are so popular that it's effectively impossible to restrict what they have to say to anyone who wants to listen to them, unless you think "deplatforming" or "cancelling" Joe Rogan would prevent him from accessing the internet.
At what point would a law like this consider you to be large enough to be a platform? And what constitutes "political reasons"?
If a mod on an anti-MLM subreddit bans a person coming in to promote their new MLM, would that person be eligible for this compensation? If yes, you've simply invented a new job of "pissing in public discord enough to get banned to ask the government for money" which seems... not ideal? If no, then why can't that person simply accuse you of being an anti-capitalist leftist who's shutting down your legitimate political pro-business speech?
I'm aware that this was likely something you thought of in a relatively small amount of time, but when proposing changes to how legality should work, you need to also be aware of how it can be abused as well.
I see a lot of people around me thinking Russia is loosing, and they are getting their information from mainstream media, and they are not morons.
I think they are being misled, which is not surprising, since on both BBC and CNN I see a lot of rather uncritical boosting of Ukrainian propaganda, and of analysts one-sidedly focusing on what has gone wrong for Russia, without saying the same about Ukraine
I can see on the map where Russian soldiers are, and they are in places where they most definitely should not have been if Ukrainians were winning.
Many Ukrainian cities are surrounded or nearly surrounded, and modern cities cannot withstand the sieges for long. Especially on the whole east side of the Dnieper, Russian advances cut deep into the Ukrainian territory, and that is half of the country, while there are extremely dangerous Russian advances even on the west side.
I am not saying that Russia is winning, especially on the economic front they look rather shaky, but they are not loosing.
Has the best I've seen, and broadly consistent with every other credible source's maps except it doesn't fall into the trap of painting huge tracts of land red just because they are between two roads that Russian tanks are using (or gridlocked on).
But even if you do that, Kyiv is conspicuosuly un-encircled, and the vast majority of the east side of the Dnieper is still Ukrainian.
Yes, Russian troops have moved into Ukraine and are in some places continuing to move forward. Victory in defensive war does not consist of stopping the enemy literally at the border. It consists of trading space for time and lives, until the enemy runs out of time and lives. And the Russians are paying an awful lot for those little bits of red; it's not clear that they can sustain it until they have the whole of the Ukraine.
I think winning vs. losing all depends on how you define objectives. That's different from expectations. Most people expected Russia to be able to roll over the Ukrainians militarily at the outset of the war. Those were expectations, not objectives. In some ways, it matters what Putin's ultimate objectives are and whether he's able to achieve them and then go home.
Arguably, the US could have defined limited objectives in Iraq and Afghanistan and withdrew early. Instead, the US defined broad objectives that kept unwinnable wars going for exhaustive periods. Russia could do the same in the Ukraine, but that's unlikely. I doubt Putin's only objective is to absorb all of Ukraine into greater Russia. He might WANT that to be possible, but from his writings and speeches it seems clear he's more pragmatic than that.
This is why I think that's the least likely scenario, but one I see a lot of people in the West assuming as the de facto objective. Why all the wishful thinking? Maybe because that's Ukraine's best chance for ultimate victory. I don't think Putin is that stupid. I'm not happy Russia invaded either, but that doesn't mean I have to analyze the situation on the ground in a way that ignores Russia's strategic imperatives.
At least three other objectives are all well within Russian reach at this point:
1. Russia marches into Kiev, deposes the current regime, and sets up a pro-Russia government. A strategy of only regime change isn't very long-term, considering how interested the West is in countering that down the road (and how they've meddled in Ukrainian election in the past). It's also not something you normally need to commit ground troops for, so if that's part of Putin's strategy I can't see it as his only objective.
2. The same tactic they used in the Georgia war. They pacify resistance in pro-Russia regions, march into the capital city, and leave. They then allow the pro-Russia regions to become 'independent' pro-Russia client mini-states and/or vote to join Russia.
3. Same as 2 above, but this time they blatantly absorb the pro-Russia regions. This is riskier, because you still have the possibility of an insurgency against Russia, so I think it's the least likely option.
Given those objectives, we can assess how it's going for Putin. From recent advances and fighting, it appears they're on track to marching into Kiev within the next week or two, maybe a month or two if things slow down a lot more. A 3-month war isn't long. Despite the crowing about the Ruble and markets, that's well within Russia's ability to handle.
That's probably not enough to declare victory without also achieving either 2 or 3 above. For that, Putin needs to take the Donbass (already well underway) and potentially also Kharkiv (fighting in the streets right now). By the time they take Kiev, they should be close to achieving one or both of those objectives (but I would wager pacification of the Donbass is an all-or-nothing in any declaration of victory). A bonus would be to reach Odessa, but it doesn't look like they're pushing hard in that direction at the moment.
Based on the situation on the ground, if things continue as they have been I could easily see Russia creating a split in Ukraine, where the future is two nations: East Ukraine and West Ukraine, possibly divided along the Dnieper River (though maybe not all the way to Kiev). That mostly prevents them from having to fight a post-war insurgency, and allows them to declare victory at some rational point in the future. If that's the future Putin is driving toward, it's not that far out of his reach.
He has a lot of Ukrainian troops already deployed in the Donbass to deal with, so that will likely be a major obstacle to deal with. Strategically, the Ukrainians need to hold that region above all others to force the insurgency scenario.
You’re not making any sense. It’s like you’re attacking something that no one is saying. Or like you’re misunderstanding the terms of taking them too literally.
From War and Peace: “success never depends . . . on position, on equipment, or even on numbers, and least of all on position”.
“On what, then?”
“On the feeling that is in me and him . . . and in each soldier.”
The Western media has been pretty steady in predicting that Russia can prevail militarily. But the images of Russian bombings and dead Ukrainians are never going away. We are not used to seeing blond haired Christians destroyed in war.
I don't get where this is coming. Look at any detailed battle map published by reputable Western news media source, and look at how it has evolved. It is the Russian military who makes most advances day-to-day, not Ukrainian. Ukrainian armed forces have been able to pull off only very limited counterattacks near Kiev. There would not be humanitarian crisis in Mariupol, Kharkiv, or anywhere else if Ukrainian forces had been able to fully defend their territory 1 to 1 or make significant counter-attacks to prevent encirclement.
As far as conventional war goes, it is not Russians who are losing. Western media simply likes to cheer because Ukrainian resistance fiercer than expected and Russia is showing some incompetence, but all of that does not equal "Ukraine winning the war" (except maybe on some political level objectives and Ukraine not having totally lost until all of its territory is occupied).
And mind you, this simply observing the facts on the ground as communicated by mainstream western media. They do put some spin into writing headlines, but they are not even lying about this stuff, so I think it is on the reader not understanding what is being written.
I see a lot of rather uncritical boosting of Ukrainian propaganda, and of analysts one-sidedly focusing on what has gone wrong for Russia, without saying the same about Ukraine, on both BBC and CNN.
I have given up on CNN since that Malaysian plane went missing. (I had to check, it was in 2014, same year the previous iteration of War in Ukraine started.)
But I don't think anyone sane could infer from BBC coverage hysterics like "[Russians are] definitely totally losing". The war is not going too well for Russians, but if you look whose cities are shelled, it is 99%-1% in favor of Russians shelling Ukrainian cities. I wouldn't care for that kind "winning". All the discussion about "Russians totally losing" are about stuff like: Russians overextending, Russians reverting back to the strategy of superior devastating artillery, Russians not having total air superiority, etc.
I agree with your other comment, it is too early to say if Russians are going lose the war. And I also said Western media puts a positive spin on the Ukrainian successes. But if you read what outlets like BBC say, I think anyone who ends up with idea "Russians are definitely totally losing" is getting their analysis from Twitter, not BBC.
If this is a war that Ukraine will win then you would still expect the Russians to be expanding their forces right now as the Ukranians "trade space for time" as they say. The winning strategy for Ukraine involves stretching the Russians out, attacking their flanks, attacking their logistics, and generally making their life difficult until they give up and go home. The Russians should be deeply familiar with this strategy, they used it against Napoleon in 1812.
There isn't that much space between Russian troops & Kiev left. And they're not just going to freeze in the winter (Hitler's invasion was able to last longer than Napoleon's as nature became less important relative to the enemy). The Russian economy is hurting and the longer it takes the worse for Russia (also really bad for Ukraine), but the Ukrainian military just doesn't seem capable of driving them out. The Russians were able to fight Napoleon to a draw at Borodino because their army actually had more manpower than his Grande Armee. I don't see the Ukrainians doing that. The Russians could exhaust themselves to the extent that they can no longer exert force elsewhere, like they had to do recently in Kazakhstan, but if we're talking Napoleon the more relevant campaign is likely the Peninsular one.
My bet is that it's going to turn into a protracted war over many years. The Ukrainian army cannot stand up to the Russian army directly. They will need to fight a guerilla war and prevent them from ever really holding territory.
I fear a protracted war as well (particularly if Putin thinks he needs to save face and make the invasion seem worth it), although my understanding is that guerrilla war is less viable in urban environments and more amenable to the areas James Scott would identify as difficult for states to make legible. Post-Soviet Russia fought wars in Chechnya for years. Ukraine is less mountainous, but also more populous.
The Ukrainians are playing defense. They don't need to beat the Russians in the field, they just need to keep their polity alive long enough for the war to become unbearably expensive to the Russians. Like those illiterate goatherders in Afghanistan did, remember?
We withdrew from Afghanistan, but yes we won in Iraq. It was a terrible idea which didn't serve our national interest, but we won. The post-Soviet Russians also won in Chechnya, where a predominately Muslim population fought them like hell and dragged them into urban warfare.
The Afghans didn't win by "keeping their polity alive". The US really did overthrow the Taliban, even if they came back later (having been sheltered in Pakistan). The Afghan government had gone communist before the Soviets invaded to make sure it stayed communist (they actually got rid of the communists in charge at the time, not trusting their ability to handle things). The Brits wanted the Afghans to subordinate their foreign policy to theirs (to keep out the Russians) rather than incorporate it into the British empire. They succeeded for a while, but then after WW1 the Afghan government (which hadn't been under attack from the Brits at the time) invaded India and the resolution was that they got to have an independent foreign policy again in exchange for agreeing to the border (currently dividing them from Pakistan, which everyone agrees is an unnatural border now).
This time it is different because this is a real war, not just something on internet or culture space.
Overall, most active recent internet fights were about antivax and the mainstream media was basically right. They got many details wrong initially, i.e., the vaccine effectiveness to limit the spread of infection etc. But not the core message that vaccines are good and despite some adverse reactions considerably reduce deaths and severity of disease.
I used to strongly object against vaccine passports and vaccine mandates. I am still against but this war has made these issues irrelevant at this time.
The chances that they are completely right and I am completely wrong is vanishingly small, just like the chances that I am completely right and they are completely wrong. Hence the need for open discussion so that we might all slowly approach rightness.
A broken clock is right two times a day. Just think of your outgroup as of a broken clock.
Like a broken clock, they might be wrong most of the time, but they are at least partially right now - about the enemies being evil. Usually, they are a lot more likely to be wrong than not, but in this particular situation their opinions about the situation carry no information. You know their opinions are usually no more reliable than yours, and it's hard to see why they would be more reliable now.
Do be careful not to fall into the trap of refusing to believe the narrative simply because that makes you identify with the establishment, since, well, sometimes it really is clear who's the good guy and who's the bad guy, and the media isn't *that* dumb when they don't have to be.
NATO enlargement was already controversial 25 years ago. "The key U.S. interest in Europe is ensuring Russia's continued democratization and integration into the community of nations. Enlargement will humiliate Moscow and create a "Weimar Russia," vulnerable to Russian nationalists hostile to the west who believe that the country's interests are being sacrificed by weak leadership." https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/19980414_97-718_81adcdfb86b36372da1040de989ca396710b5422.pdf
All of the con-arguments are validated, yet the defense hawks continue to hold the microphone.
> [...] given the result of NATO expansion and the 2014 coup in Ukraine [...] but Western diplomacy is certainly culpable
I don't understand this kind of reasoning at all. What do you think would have happened if NATO hadn't expanded after the end of the Cold War? Do you think an imperialistic ruler like Putin would have just left small, almost defenseless countries like the Baltics alone? That's not how imperialists tick – just ask Chamberlain how well appeasement works.
And please don't claim that NATO's expansion threatened Russia in any way. NATO is a defensive treaty, and nobody had *any* interest in invading Russia for the last 30 years; it would have been all downside (huge country, large military, nukes), and no upside (poor; any infrastructure to extract natural resources would have been destroyed by the inevitable nuclear exchange). Russia was much, much more valuable as a trading partner to Europe than as an invasion target. Putin isn't dumb, he knew this – any justification along the lines of "NATO aggression" are excuses and propaganda.
Was NATO defensive when it bombed Serbia? Was it defensive when it overthrew Gaddafi and plunged Libya into chaos? No. So that puts the 'defensive treaty' argument to bed.
Now, it is all very well claiming that NATO had no intent to attack Russia, it is probably even true. But how does NATO expansion up to Russia's borders *look* from the point of view of Russia.
A country with a large land border and a history or wars sweeping across those borders (within living memory!) is going to want allied or, at least, neutral neighbours. It is foolish to pretend that the feelings of Russia in this matter are irrelevant, irrational or malign.
International diplomacy was once about keeping sensible buffers between powerful nations to avoid precisely this sort of conflict, but apparently the lure of lucrative defence contracts or the belief in the manifest destiny of the liberal international order was more powerful than the lessons of history.
Sensible people having been warning about this eventuality ever since the end of the Cold War, and now the Cassandra's have been shown to be right.
I try to just keep using the more reliable heuristics I've had (which are neither reflexively pro- or anti-media) and ignore the noise. Afaict this is a case where the obvious answer is in fact the right one, and the media's biases don't get in the way of it.
What is the difference between OCD and schizophrenia? I am diagnosed with OCD but sometimes I wonder if I don't have schizophrenia, because I have mood and anxiety problems and difficulty with concentration. But I don't hear voices or have delusions.
Problems with mood, anxiety and concentration are experienced by most people who have a diagnosable mental disorder, and by many, many people who do not. They are basically just generic, extremely common ways of feeling not-that-great mentally and emotionally. They are the mental equivalents of common ways of feeling not-that-great physically (fatigue, mild pain here and there, etc.). So when you're wondering whether you have OCD or schizophrenia, you can basically disregard the fact that you have low mood, anxiety and problems concentrating. Those things don't weigh on either side of the scale.
Here are characteristics of the 2 disorders that are pretty distinct:
-OCD: You have some fears or worries about specific things that you know do not really make sense (for instance, you may fear that you are going to catch rabies from germs somehow lurking on surfaces in most indoor environments). You know other people don't worry about that stuff, and that you can't make a logical case that the worries are valid. Nevertheless, the fear and worry you feel is extremely compelling, and you feel driven to do various things that temporarily reduce it even though you recognize that doing these things does not truly make you safer: taking some precaution over and over and over ((wipe down things in your house with rubbing alcohol, for instance), avoiding something that you know there's no logical reason to avoid, asking repeatedly for reassurance about something. If a lot of your time is spent thinking about your irrational worry, and taking precautions against it and avoiding it and getting reassurance about it, then you qualify for OCD.
-Schizophrenia: You have a some quite unusual ideas that you are pretty sure are true. You may or may not recognize that they are unusual, and that most people would find them implausible. If you do realize the ideas are not shared by most people, you believe those people just haven't figured out the truth, as you have. Or you might think that everybody knows these things are true, but they are conspiring not to acknowledge that they are true. You may also be having some unusual perceptions -- seeing or hearing things that others cannot hear. If so, your thinking about the fact of having them will be along the same lines as your thinking about your unusual ideas: You may not recognize you are seeing and hearing things others do not. Or you may think you have the gift of hearing sprit voices that others cannot. Or you may think everyone can see and hear the spirits, but they are all denying that they can. One other thing about being schizophrenic: Rather than or in addition to being preoccupied with delusions and hallucinations, you may just be in a state of great mental disarray, with disorganized trains of thought, random transitions of attention, periods of mental blankness. If so, you will probably lack insight into the fact that your mind is rambling, impoverished and disorganized.
OCD version of rabies fear: I can't stop having horrible fears about death by rabies, and worrying that it's everywhere in my house, even though I know it can't be, and everything in the house just feels dirty and unsafe. So I am going to wipe down the whole kitchen with alcohol just so I can have some peace of mind.
Schizophrenic version of rabies fear: Nobody but me recognizes that FBI experiments in Argentina have created a new form of rabies. All the people in my subway car today were giving each other meaningful looks and I heard lots of them whispering the word shil-tohl, which is some FBI code. I know that because sometimes the guy on the evening newcast whispers it when I look at him on the screen.
This is not medical advice, seek a trained professional etc.
The main issue in differentiating schizophrenia and OCD in most cases in which differential diagnosis is required is probably going to be distinguishing delusions and obsessions.
Obsessions in obsessive compulsive disorder come with some degree of awareness that they are not grounded in reality, although this can become blurry/less so in severe OCD or during a flareup. Delusions in schizophrenia are not accompanied by such self-awareness.
However you've said you don't have delusions. I'm curious then as to why you think you might have schizophrenia?
Mood and anxiety problems are essential to OCD. Concentration problems are also very common, perhaps more common than not in moderate and severe cases. I want to be careful about how I say this, but if your description of yourself is accurate, then you are a patient with:
1. Mood, anxiety & concentration difficulties
2. And no delusions or hallucinations
Such a patient is *vastly* more likely to have OCD than schizophrenia, unless there's more to the story than you are telling? Even the fact that you are writing coherently and posting on this forum tends to speak against schizophrenia. Nothing you have said about yourself gives any indication of schizophrenia.
One of the most common OCD fears is fear of being or going psychotic, mad or schizophrenic. Perhaps this sense that you might be schizophrenic is an expression of such an OCD worry?
Yes, I think you are correct. I am a typical case of OCD. I once read a good differentiation between hallucinations and obsessions which is that the voices you can tell if it's a man or a woman who's talking.
Also I feel like Scott would have something witty to say about the liklihood of you having schizophrenia if you're wondering if you have schizophrenia
My third cousin developed anti-NMDAR and the 1st one almost died in Wicklow before they filtered her CSF and figured it out and I would keep it in mind as a possible etiology much as you can if you're going crazy
I'd never heard of it, or the symptoms, but surely "ordinary" schizophrenia is *some* kind of immune disorder too.
Antipsychotics are antihistamines; I've heard it from a pharmacist and an allergist. Literally, atypical antipsychotics mask the standard skin tests for common allergies. And, if you have a reaction to a psych drug, they will say *do not* take Benadryl because it'll make things worse.
People with Sz have relatives with MS.
I've seen people with terminal cancer and chemo (that is, immunocompromised, and potentially going to die any minute from an opportunistic infection) having mental/mood disturbances very much like some people who have Sz.
A thing that seems common (hearsay from people I've known) is dramatic mental/mood changes, reversible with antibiotics, from UTIs. Particularly in nursing homes, where the staff doesn't seem to recognize it. It's not like Sz from what I've heard, but shows how immune reactions can affect the brain without signifying anything to society.
I've read multiple things recently about how Epstein-Barr virus could be linked to bipolar and MS, if I recall correctly.
Oh, and a study found that Sz is a big risk factor for covid-19. Don't dismiss that as "paranoid people refuse the vaccine" because anyone who's compliant with Sz meds is used to taking risky treatment with no guarantee.
Just got contacted by Future Fund about my ACX grants proposal—in the process I discovered that I'd somehow missed Scott's announcement about doing a writeup for ACX Grants ++, so while I totally missed that opportunity, I'm glad my idea is at least being considered! I'm looking through the FF website, and it looks quite promising. I can't even begin to imagine the logistical and financial challenges of effectively allocating such large sums of money...
FTX Future Fund. I'm not sure what the nominative deterministic take on them both using the same name is, but I'm realizing we may be in for a whole lot of semantically confusing conversations...
Really sorry about the mixup—it’s actually most likely the Long Term Future Fund! They didn’t explicitly say either FTX or EA, and due to the timing I think my brain just filled in the gaps. I looked over the conversation again though, and they did specifically say “long-term,” so that seems more likely—I’ll ask them explicitly today just to make sure though 🙃
Repost from a previous, odd open thread, since there was a request to continue this prompt on political topics.
What do you think of the following claim: “if two parties agree on the likelihood of some distant future outcome, say, 30+ years out, then they are also likely to agree on how desirable that outcome is. The likelihood of “probability agreement implies desirability agreement” increases as the time horizon of the prediction.”
I see no reason to believe that claim. Plenty of likely outcomes have groups that will benefit and groups that dread it, as the commenters before me have pointed out.
To take a toy example, if it were certain that next week some third party would force me to give you a large sum of money, and we both agreed it was going to happen, I would probably be unhappy about it but could easily foresee you looking forward to it. (If that seems like a bizarre hypothetical, it basically describes tax)
"In 20 years, every kitchen appliance will be connected to the internet, and you will be able to give it directions remotely." Most people: cool! Us luddites, who tend to think about how things break: *rolling our eyes and wondering how long our current kitchen appliances will survive*.
Likewise: "in 20 years, every dishwasher, washer, dryer will be Energy Star certified."
Or: "in 20 years, every car will contain 10 times as many computers as now and will be connected to the internet at all times."
I don't know if that really holds as a principle at all, or if the examples which first come to mind are simply selection bias. I can easily imagine counter-examples, though, such as a misanthrope who looks forward to the heat death of the universe (which they predict with high certainty), vs a humanist who dreads it (while believing it to be as likely as the misanthrope thinks it is).
Or, on a shorter time horizon, the proposition "In thirty years, [some particular group] will dominate the world" is something that I can easily imagine many people believing optimistically and others believing pessimistically.
If there's any truth to it, it's because we have fewer opportunities to think about long-term predictions than short term ones. I can have a reasonable opinion on who will win the 2022 election in my country, but no hope of forming a sensible opinion on who might win the 2053 election.
Here is a Russian journalist who predicted 10 months ago that Russia invade Ukraine and accurately predicted how unsuccessful it would be. Start watching from 2.50
Ha ha - I don't understand everything but he is really good: "what is war for Russians? First of all it is a great opportunity to steal with impunity everything from their army, because everything can be written down."
Work at a large software focused company (FAANG) first, for 3-5 years. You will learn fundamentals of good org hygiene and development practices. You may even find a good mentor. After 5 years, you definitely need to get out and work at a smaller company. This will force you to stretch and grow in ways that you can't at bigcorp. This will make you well rounded and suitable for eng leadership at any sized corp (or your own!).
Literally get any job at all, after 2-3 years of experience, you have essentially written yourself a blank check for a salary afterwards. If you care about happiness, try to avoid an environment that is explicitly using a programming language that you hate, because the easiest jobs to get after that first one will all be more of that. (This may be happening less, but 15 years ago, I happened to get a job doing Java, and didn't manage to escape Java-land until almost 10 years later.)
First, find work at a software company, rather than a company in a different industry that develops software to support their main business. Organizations that aren't focused on delivering software to customers don't see enough pressure on their development practices to create good work environments or good products, and the people in charge rarely understand the idiosyncracies of producing software: what's possible, what doesn't work, and how long it takes.
Second, look for a team composed mainly of people that care about software quality but aren't religious about particular approaches.
My first job was at a highly dysfunctional software company with the shittiest software architecture imaginable. (It is left as an exercise to the reader, how would you design a system in such a way that the simplest refactoring: renaming public methods, is near impossible? In a compiled language nonetheless, Java)
And my advice would be: Don't worry about it, just get in there.
Working at this place taught me things that helped me progress my career. Being able to describe how NOT to do things, has a lot of value.
Also, the easiest way to get a good job, is having a job, and networking is everything
The money, the social proof value of the experience to other companies, the stock options for public companies are an actual fungible money like object, you have more users, which makes your projects feel more meaningful.
That said, a lot of your day to day experience is determined by your team and if you like them, which is something totally independent of company size or shape.
As you get more experienced as a developer you also get more experienced about how to maintain and grow your skills, but as a new developer there is a ton of unknown unknowns that large companies will have the resources and time to help you with.
I'm in a weird spot answering this question, because I was much happier in my first job than either of the subsequent two (all well-funded mid-stage start-ups in the Bay Area). Arguably I might have been better off in a job that exposed me to more chaos / unfamiliarity / office politics sooner so I could develop an immunity (or find another career) but the jury's still out on that one.
On the whole I think I would still advise my past self to look for jobs like the first one I took, which would be something like: "work on a product that stands or falls on its technical capabilities, with a team that cares about high-quality engineering and problem-solving above all else and has already had some success". (The technical interview is a great place to look for this-- challenging, interesting, and distinctive questions are a hard-to-fake signal.)
"go to a team that does something specific that you want to do, and in which you have a comparative advantage. Absolutely do not got to Google general recruitment pipeline without knowing what team you're going to be in."
Ha, I'd have given myself the opposite advice! My experience has been that the exact project I'm working on matters relatively little, but team dynamics and developer workflow (ex. how quick my code gets to production, how many people need to sign off on launches) makes a huge difference. Your mileage may vary.
Basically I'd say look for a team that you can have an enjoyable conversation with. You're gonna interact with these people 40 hours a week for at least a year, so having a culture fit is pretty important to your enjoyment.
This isn't wrong. I think the real issue with going into "general developer" pipeline is that there's massive adverse selection - the teams that pick up new grads with no relevant experience at random are the teams that can't get anyone better, because nobody wants to work there (usually because it's a dysfunctional team). So if you can select on a team with fast turnaround times and great communication, that's ideal - but if not, at least make sure you select in *some* advantage, because otherwise adverse selection will eat you up.
I'm not sure there's much wiggle room as a junior dev to manage to actually get on a team that's good and established, so another idea is to look for teams that are growing really fast. Slowly growing teams good teams can afford to hire senior outside talent (or poach it from sister teams), while rapidly growing teams are forced to hire more liberally. It's still kind of a crap shoot whether the rapidly growing team will turn out good or bad, but it really is a bit of a bad sign if an established team can't keep folks around.
Are there any good articles evaluating whether "intelligence" can be meaningfully reduced to a single dimension? My prior is that even less of the variance in intelligence can be meaningfully explained than the political spectrum, which makes me skeptical of basically anything related to IQ and its correlations.
But, e.g. Gardner's multiple intelligences correlating with *g* makes me skeptical of my skepticism
This doesn't answer your question, but I felt compelled to write it -- if I try to analogize to strength: it's intuitive that
(1) some people are stronger than others
(2) strength rankings of people can change based on measurement method, and this seems to point at something about the person not the method (eg I'm fairly good at deadlifts percentile-wise adjusted for weight/age/gender, and horrible at bench press, despite having trained both just as much)
(3) measurement methods yield results that correlate fairly well, but I'm not sure how useful or insight-generating it is to extract a single "strength quotient / SQ" or "strength g-factor" out of them (I'm obligated to link to Cosma's critique of g http://bactra.org/weblog/523.html -- it's 11k words, but boils down to "the triviality of finding that positively correlated variables are all correlated with a linear combination of each other, and why this becomes no more profound when the variables are scores on intelligence tests")
(4) you can train to do better at measurement methods, but I don't think this "invalidates" these methods (the way some folks claim re: IQ), except insofar as regards claims that any single method is "the true measure of strength"
(5) related to (4), all measurement methods are gameable (e.g. for powerlifting, the ultra-arched bench press where range of motion reduces to a few centimeters seems to me an obvious case of a strength test being Goodhart-ed), but nonetheless still mostly useful in practice
Circling back to your question, if I'm asked "can 'strength' be meaningfully reduced to a single dimension?" my instinctive response is "what's your use case?"
I think that's a great analogy. It checks out colloquially too - sure, some people over focus on one or two muscle groups or neglect others, but most people are pretty uncontroversially "strong" or not.
There is some research suggesting the presence of an additional axis (roughly speaking, tracking the System I/System II distinction in cognitive processing). But I’m not aware of anything in the peer reviewed literature along these lines.
Source: I was an external on the above-mentioned research — my question was “what’s it like being a flat-earther?” Candidate laughed, ruefully.
Longer version: the question has been mildly radioactive because it got caught up in the culture wars. Outsiders want to break g, and the public at large sets a (too) low bar for claims that they have.
I don't think you'll find anyone seriously making the case that intelligence is truly one-dimensional.
The opposite position, that intelligence isn't really real at all and nobody can be said to more more intelligent than anyone else, we're all just intelligent in different ways, is equally silly but I think you'll find some people believing this.
In between these extremes, where the sane people live, I think most people aren't in that much disagreement. There's a whole bundle of innate-ish intellectual skills and they're all somewhat correlated with one another.
Most sources agree that g explains ~40-50% of variance, implying an r squared of around .4 or .5, so r is probably somewhere in the ballpark of [0.6, 0.8].
My vague memory is that it two dimensions would be "functional" vs "crystalized" intelligence that are usually measured in IQ tests. So, stuff like "can you arrange blocks to form this pattern" vs "how many 'F' words can you recall?" Now, these two dimensions obviously aren't orthogonal; if you can remember the word "juice" you can probably use more functional skills to come up with juicy, juicier, juiciest, juiced, and juices without really using your memory at all. But, they also aren't going to be perfectly related; you still need to be able to pull "juice" out of your brain.
My guess would be that "dimension" probably isn't a good way to frame the question. If you can come up with 32 non-linearly dependent vectors, you're working in 32-dimensional space. Rather we should probably talk about "how correlated are they/how tight of a cone do they form"
No I can't, because not only is intelligence not a one-dimensional line, it's not an N-dimensional space either. It's a loose fuzzy concept that isn't directly mappable to any particular set of numbers.
I think the analogy to "fitness" is always enlightening, since people seem to have fewer hang-ups about defining physical fitness. Fitness is correlated with many things, like core strength, arm strength, sprint speed, running endurance, and flexibility. There are many "fitness tests" out there which can gauge someone's fitness and put a number on it. But you'll never get a sensible answer to a question like "Is [top soccer player] more or less fit than [top gymnast]" because they excel in different areas and the fitness of one can't be compared to the fitness of the other. Nonetheless, any sensible fitness test will tell you that they're both fitter than me, and that I'm more fit than the guy on the obesity scooter down at Walmart.
I think that intelligence is not such a clearly cut concept and that it's a loose fuzzy concept. So, my take on its relation to IQ is that IQ correlates well with what people think of when they think of intelligence and IQ is unidimensional. I would say that we should say that IQ is a measure of "cognitive ability" as a specialized term that avoids bringing up the connotations that people have when they say intelligence and the fuzziness. "cognitive ability" is predictive of a number of things and so it is interesting.
I'd like to throw my hat as someone who predicted "invasion will actually happen, Ukrainian resistance will be significant." I was giving it one in three odds of a major invasion happening this year all the way back in December of 2021 (https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,5442.msg198416.html#msg198416). It was in the context of international cheese markets because... have you met me? That's actually really on brand. Anyway, my predictions got increasingly more dire in the lead up to the war and I said a few times that Ukrainian resistance would be significant.
I don't mean to be petty. But I got a lot of pushback and I want the acknowledgment that I had a point. Also, I am not some Russian nationalist or hawk who regularly predicts war or doom. (I just recently bet against China invading Taiwan.) So I'm not a stopped clock being right twice a day.
What caused your predictions to get more dire, and by how much did your probability estimate increase? Did you expect a full-scale invasion or something more limited and east of the Dnieper? What's with you and cheese?
I became more certain the invasion was going to happen and more certain it would be a large scale operation. I remained positive on the performance of Ukraine.
> and by how much did your probability estimate increase?
By the end I was certain an invasion was imminent. I thought the most likely week was the week after the Olympics closed. I had a bet with twenty to one odds (though it was just pure gambling) so 95% I guess?
>Did you expect a full-scale invasion or something more limited and east of the Dnieper?
Full scale was always possible. I thought it was the most likely play by a month or two before the invasion. Even my initial prediction was not that Russian forces would limit themselves to the Dnieper. It was that they wouldn't annex territory past it. I still think that's probably true.
> What's with you and cheese?
I like cheese. I even make some of my own. And I know import/export. So Russian agricultural autarky and its results on cheese and organized crime was something I took a fair bit of interest in. Someone else said I'm awful at biology. Which I probably am. I'm more into things like trade or engineering.
Hmm, the Guardian had a story the other day by a journalist who belatedly realised that the cheese choices of a Russian oligarch whom she was interviewing was an indicator that war might be more likely than not.
I Googled it. It wasn't quite my take and it seems far too self-impressed and cute. "Aww gee, these rich people sure do have subtle signs you can watch to predict things!" As if that wasn't already well known and also done with government officials. The only thing she appeared to have noticed was that Russian had a cheese import ban. Which was well known from the beginning. They were not subtle. Russian nationalists held cheese burnings were they shot and stomped on and otherwise destroyed foreign cheese in a nationalist fervor.
I'll second this. Erusian called this early and isn't a stopped clock. Actually, I think he's one of the most perceptive commenters in the broader SSC-verse.
No, he's not. Perhaps he is good with this stuff, perhaps, but he is woefully denialistic of heritability and all too often he makes strong, authoritative statements about things which are in reality highly speculative in nature.
Do you have a link to an actual prediction of the performance of the Ukranian military? There is a 60% invasion to take significant territory prediction here which is impressive. But without the second part it’s nothing special
Same thread, where I hedge a little but basically predict the Ukrainians will put up pretty fierce resistance (but that Putin will win a knock down, drag out fight):
Not sure how to parse this comment. You explicitly say you doubt Ukraine will collapse and that a quick Russian victory is unlikely (+1). You say a slow Russian victory is only likely in the scenario of no western assistance. The positive reference to Russian logistical capability looks less than prescient.
Leaving it as “doubt Ukraine will collapse” it’s not nothing! There seems to be a prediction of “Russia loses” since western military aid is in the picture. Care to offer a probability so we can come back?
This would have been much more useful with the %s like your first comment.
The logistics thing is a reference to how the Russian army is railroad based and the Ukrainian system works on the same gauges etc. There's more of a hard limit in Europe than in Ukraine. Ukrainian logistics strikes have been pretty effective too.
Anyway, I'm not really familiar with rationalist prediction games. The only reason I produced that last set was because a rationalist challenged me to do it. If you want to define some value of "loses" I can tell you what I think and attach probabilities.
Oh cool, a topic I actually know things about! Your piece is broadly accurate but I thought I'd contribute a summary of my own:
The US Constitution by design gave the President broad executive powers (i.e. powers traditionally held by monarchs), including the power to conduct foreign affairs and the role of Commander in Chief of the military. It also enumerated important limitations to these powers, e.g. by placing the power to declare war, to raise armies, and to ratify (i.e. give force of law to) treaties in the hands of Congress.
There have always been gray areas to this separation of power, for example the US-France "Quasi-War" of 1798 where Congress authorized use of force against French ships without declaring war, or President Lincoln's suspension of the writ (another power reserved to Congress) while Congress was out of session and Washington DC faced threats of secessionist violence. The gray areas have become more acute recently because of e.g. the accelerated pace of military operations (hours or even minutes response time being relevant).
The gray areas naturally give rise to a lot of disagreement (refreshingly nonpartisan-- or rather, the party that controls the White House at a given moment is very consistently the one that believes in expansive executive power), the more so since Congress's "Authorization for the Use of Military Force" against 9/11 plotters and states aiding them is still in effect. But the following would still be fairly uncontroversial:
- The President may not instigate a war with a foreign power without Congress's approval
- The President may not carry on a war with a foreign power, even a defensive one, unless Congress approves expenditures to fight the war
- But the President may order military action in response to sudden crises-- e.g. if Russia attacked a NATO country the President could launch counterattacks in advance of Congress's approval. Whether this covers any kind of "preemptive strike" would, however, be intensely controversial.
@hnau thanks for your input - I agree with everything you said, and you did it in 1/7th of the words count! The gray area is definitely what I'm most interested in. I'm not a SME in this, just an eager enthusiast, so let me know if there's anything that stands out as needing correction.
"No government worth its salt will allow a currency that is unregulated, anonymous, or untaxed."
There have been lots of countries, at various times, where people made heavy use of foreign currency which, from the standpoint of the government, was unregulated, anonymous and untaxed. In modern times its a common result of the local currency being inflationary. Historically, gold coins such as the dinar, the noumisma, or the ducat circulated widely in international trade.
I think the only thing you're missing is that you assume governments want their own actions to be transparent. Think about the origins of the TOR browser, and consider how many governments are blatantly corrupt.
The disappointing truth is that they'll probably refuse to crush the CC competition because they'll find a CC that suits their own shady agendas.
Algorithmic stable coins like Dai exist and are used regularly. Why do you think governments won't be able to collect taxes in crypto? They are able to collect taxes on cash transactions.
What you're missing is that your 4th paragraph isn't really accurate. If you make a wallet and Bob pays you in BTC for delivering a pizza there's no way the government can tell who you are or what the transaction was for. There's no way the government can tell when you use your payment to buy a soda at the local convenience store. All the government knows is that Bob paid X and then X paid Y amount to Z address. Maybe it was just X transferring money to himself, or X bought a nuke for $4 from Z, or Z hacked X.
The three issues preventing that use case right now are effective software (people somehow still haven't made really good wallets that you can just dl onto your phone and use to run a business), widespread adoption, and lower transaction fees (btc and eth fees both hover around equivalent of $1, nothing if you're talking about buying a car, but a lot if you're talking about buying a soda).
To stop btc and most cryptos the governments of the world would have to either put a lot of computing power together (perfectly coordinated) to 51% attack btc, cut off access to the internet to almost every legitimate miner, just wipe out the internet altogether, or really strongly disincentivize mining some other way (maybe by threatening prison sentences for anybody caught running a btc node).
Crypto as a currency is really valid and totally possible right now. I think adoption will go FOOM. Wider adoption incentivizes wider adoption. You can already use BTC to buy all sorts of drugs and other illegal things off the internet. I'm sure there's local drug dealers who will sell for BTC or some other crypto. All we need is adoption to spread to slightly larger places then boom the mexicans sitting outside Home Depot will start accepting under the table BTC as payment for construction services, convenience stores will start accepting crypto because they want the construction dudes to patronize them, landlords will accept crypto because the convenience store guy will pay rent at a premium so he can avoid exchange fees (and maybe avoid taxes).
The best evidence that crypto is valid as a currency is that it's already being used as a currency for tons of things that exist without government regulation
"There's no way the government can tell when you use your payment to buy a soda at the local convenience store"
Of course they can, this is silly. Eventually the convenience store has to store the Bitcoin in some kind of bank account, or otherwise convert it to fiat- there are a dozen steps in this process where the government can monitor, intervene, and regulate.
The government can just..... make it illegal to pay for goods and services in a cryptocurrency. The convenience store owner, or owner of that chain, is an upper middle class person somewhere who doesn't want to be fined or arrested, he's going to comply with the law. Anyone who runs any business that you would want to transact with is going to be an upper middle class person somewhere who wants to avoid Real Jail. This is not a 'damn the man!', rebellious crowd. And if they are rebellious, they'll be arrested and replaced with someone who isn't. You won't be able to spend your crypto at the hardware store, at Starbucks, at Amazon, at the car dealership..... Just think of any business, it's ultimately being run by a person not willing to do jail time for your payment method- and especially not if they have no motivation, fiat currency works just fine for them as-is.
Also, crypto was invented 14 years ago, and to date outside of the criminal underworld still no one uses it as an actual means of payment for anything- it's purely speculation
To kill crypto they just have ban converting it into “fiat” and ban crypto transactions in any case where legal documentation is required, buying a house or car etc.
The primary issue is with variable gas fees and slow transaction times - if you don't know how much making a transaction will cost in advance (without looking it up) and the transaction time is so slow that the value of the amount of "currency" paid can be significantly different by the time the transaction completes, then you're not working with a usable currency.
Additionally, you can simply look at all of the language coming out of crypto space to see that it's purely being used as a speculative instrument and not a currency - widespread "hodl"ing of a currency would cause massive deflation, leading to every transaction made causing a permanent loss of net wealth. You don't want a currency to "go to the moon" you want it to be stable so that the $30 you spent yesterday on groceries doesn't retroactively become $60 today or $500 tomorrow.
OK, thanks for that! Yeah, I guess if you define cash as "instant settlement and no transaction fee" then yeah.
It's still cash though if you're willing to wait for the transaction to clear and pay the transaction fee. For example transferring $5M for a $1 fee 24/7 don't need banks to be open. If that's not your definition of cash then I guess not.
But it would be incorrect to say "all of the language coming out of crypto space".
There is a big chunk of language (and technology) coming out of the crypto space focused on being cash, being legal tender, etc.
If governments around the world took up single-minded and determined opposition to cryptocurrency, they could almost certainly stomp it out, for the reasons you mention.
But, this ignores the game theory of it all. Governments don't act singlemindedly, not in coordination with each other, and not even internally with themselves. They are composed of many competing actors who all want power/money/prestige/influence/whatever for themselves, at the expense of their political or geo-political opponents. As such, there may be many situations in which it could be advantageous for a government or political party to support crypto currency if it gives them an edge over competing parties or nations, even if that government or political party might prefer that crypto doesn't exist (i.e. they would choose to outlaw crypto if they had dictatorial powers).
"Governments don't act singlemindedly, not in coordination with each other"
There are dozens of institutional global bodies, there have been for over a century. Most of the world didn't just agree to join the WTO, they all voluntarily gave up some sovereignty over trade decisions for the privilege- even the US did. The US loses cases at the WTO all the time and is forced to comply with the arbitrators' decision.
Governments especially coordinate where their money is on the line, in the past most notably around taxes. Even the US and China share some information about potential tax cheats
There is a tension between cryptocurrency as an alternative currency vs cryptocurrency as an alternative investment. They have very different goals.
If we want it to function as a currency, then we want a stable price / conversion rate and most transactions involve buying goods or services instead of other currencies. If we want it to function as an investment, then we want an unstable price (ideally growing) and most transactions involve buying other currencies instead of goods or services.
A similar balance exists for government backed currencies too. The currency is both used as a medium of exchange within the country and used as investment scheme for people who buy and sell currencies. Most of the time, the use within the country is larger, which helps to stabilize the price.
Cryptocurrencies don't have much of an internal economy: people who use them for regular purchases. So they are dominated by investment, which drives their instability.
You're not wrong, but none of that is the real problem—the real problem is that cryptocurrencies aren't underpinned by an asset. Gold is underpinned by being gold, valued for itself/its decorative use. Fiat currency is underpinned by the issuing government accepting it as payment of taxes, i.e. it's a unit of keeping (the rest of) your stuff safe from bullies with guns. (Which is part of why libertarian-types beef with fiat, they don't like that it practically requires a government ready and willing to crawl up your asshole.) Even tulip futures are underpinned by tulips, even when they're grossly overvalued. Crypto is underpinned by nothing, i.e., it's a pure speculation bubble, refined and distilled until there's no junk real estate or flower bulb left to be hyped, just the pure, antiseptic hype itself.
I absolutely agree that this is a fundamental difference, although I question how important this difference is.
I can see a big practical difference between an asset that is valued mostly for its practical utility (e.g. iron) and one that's valued mostly for speculation (e.g. gold).
I'm less convinced that there's a pragmatic difference between an asset that is vastly overvalued relative to its utility and one with literally zero utility. Does it really matter whether you are at risk of losing 100% of your investment if the bubble pops, vs only being at risk of losing 99%?
No, you're right that there's no pragmatic distinction; losing all your money on crypto is functionally identical to losing all your money on a grotesquely overvalued tulip bulb. The difference is one flower to plant on your unmarked pauper's grave once you've starved to death, which isn't that big a deal to you, the corpse. Nor, for that matter, is there a meaningful difference between making your fortune scamming others in the crypto bubble or making your fortune hustling tulips in the bull-b market; both are equally immoral in spite of the pretty flower.
The point I'm trying to make, I guess, is that crypto has *no* chance of being a good investment. Sometimes people get suckered into buying worthless California sandlot real estate and the lots turn out to have oil under them, or they end up being in Montecito or Bel-Air and worth a fortune to your grandkid. With crypto, there isn't even the *possibility* of a score; there is no bait and zero potential for Bitcoin to have any real value whatsoever. Dorks rused themselves into believing this scam all on their own, for no reason *at all*. (Except possibly the appetizing prospect of finally, finally becoming rich off your conviction that you're smarter than everybody else.)
Eh, I’m not sure I agree with that take. Your point is valid for fiat and tulips, but gold is actually a one for one for any finite coin. Gold is just a thing we all agree has value. (Silver is more complex bc it has much more utility as a commodity.) There’s no inherent difference between a scarce bit of metal and a scarce bit of code. Obviously gold has a much better track record at retaining value and is a much safer bet during a crash. But from a structural perspective, most crypto has more in common with hard, fixed assets than with fiat. Collectibles like classic Pokémon cards are another apt comparison - price can swing dramatically and relies on sentiment, but the available amount is fixed.
Gold and Pokémon cards have intrinsic value. Some people buy them as an investment to sell later, but some people buy them because they actually want them. Crypto is different; if it somehow became impossible to sell your Bitcoin, it would become completely worthless.
I believe Bullseye's point is that the value of gold cannot drop to LITERALLY zero, because you could always use it to manufacture electrical cables or something. Even in a world with literally zero people who are willing to buy gold, you could still DO something with it.
Whereas in a hypothetical world with literally zero people willing to buy your BTC, you are SOL.
I would also add that many use cases are developing for various coins - NFT marketplaces are a big one to watch. So while the crypto market currently functions almost entirely on pure speculation, genuine utility is developing that will give such crypto a more stable valuation - again, similar to silver in that it has a dual role as a scarce store of value and as a commodity. Still not enough to let it develop into a currency, but far from a non-asset.
Arguing that cryptocurrencies have utility because of NFTs seems kind of like arguing that cryptocurrencies have utility because you can trade them for other cryptocurrencies. That is, it seems obvious that anyone arguing that cryptocurrencies lack true utility is going to say exactly the same thing about NFTs.
The only thing you can do with an NFT is sell it, right? You can't eat it, or forge a plow out of it, or even use it to decorate your wall. (No, hanging up a piece of paper saying that you own the NFT doesn't count--you can do that whether you actually own the NFT or not.)
There’s actually a ton of interesting stuff being done in that space - it’s going to grow a lot in the next 5-10 years. Decentralized proof of digital ownership is an extremely versatile innovation. Right now NFT marketplaces are developing for the gaming ecosystem. You’ll be able to sell your ‘used’ digital copy of a game on a secondary marketplace. You’ll also be able to trade and sell your skins, in-game items, etc….That’s a huge ecosystem with lots of money, and a genuine use case with real utility. Same goes for your Kindle ebooks, your music and movies, etc…. Eventually things like the title to your car or your stock portfolio could end up on the blockchain.
That would make the crypto that such systems run on (ETH 2.0 seems a leading candidate) much more valuable, in terms of utility, than gold or collectibles.
It seems to me like a pretty big red flag that I asked "the only thing you can do with it is sell it, right?" and you replied with a list of examples of...selling things.
You did kinda vaguely gesture towards a possible answer, which is that (in some hypothetical future) you might be allowed to play a video game if you own a certain NFT, while being prevented from playing that game if you lack that NFT. Which would be an example of doing something with an NFT other than selling it--in this case, using it to play a video game.
But we already *have* digital ownership of video games--you can go and buy digital games on Steam right now!
Steam doesn't allow you to sell used games, but how would the existence of NFTs force them to start allowing that? The things preventing you from selling your used Steam games *right now* are not *technological* barriers! Why would NFTs change them?
If this was a mention of a fellowship (not sure, refreshed the page and now can no longer find a comment about a fellowship affiliated with Simon DeDeo), I'm interested in learning more! Therefore, I'd say it's relevant for this audience. If not, sorry about the confusion.
Very vague question: How we can estimate my real-world impact when betting on a prediction market?
Let's say I raise a fund of 100 mln$, and then go all-in for "No" on "Will Putin resign by 1 April 2022?"
Should I expect some of his friends say to him: "You gonna resign anyway, let's at least make some money on the way out". They bet a few grand on a "Yes", announce resignation – PROFIT.
I lose my 100 mln$ (mostly), but this way I "buy" my future. (Literally buying "futures").
Sounds too naive, I know. Are there examples where this worked, in a brief history of low-liqudity prediction markets?
P.S. Idea stolen from "Assassination Politics", but I wanted to take a wholesome spin on that.
Given how high (>1%) the estimates are for a gigadeath famine, and how cheaply alternative food sources could be researched and developed, I suspect the most cost-effective way to save lives at the moment is to support AllFED (https://twitter.com/ALLFEDALLIANCE).
Whatever happened to the DAM-ATOLL energy generator?
That goes back a long way. Back to the Carter administration, when federal money for alternative energy was plentiful. There were a number of proposals for harnessing tides, waves, and ocean thermal gradients to generate electrical energy. I think the basic problem with all of these was low energy density, combined with the very harsh ocean environment.
A seductive (at least for smooth brains like myself) theory laid out by Kamil Galeev:
https://nitter.net/kamilkazani/status/1501360272442896388#m
TL;DR: Putin and his oligarch buddies are a successful branch of the Mexican avocado mafia. This assertion explains nothing less than the hierarchy of Russian oligarchs, the structure of the Russian economy, and why Putin launched the Ukraine war (and all the others) despite the predictable sanctions.
Summary: The standing of a Russian oligarch is inversely proportional to their ability to manage complex businesses. Mafia are not the best and brightest, so they only (barely) manage to manage relatively simple businesses like oil and gas. On the other end, hightech like complex machinery is left to stupid engineer nerds who got nothing to say among the real men. Russia doesn't export their own high-tech products, because it's too complicated for simpleton Mafia and would thus enrich and eventually empower the wrong people - the stupid nerds. So the nerd businesses must be sabotaged wherever possible, even if it means that Russia becomes entirely dependent on imports for such goods.
The war in Ukraine is a show of force to bully their neighbors, which is the only thing the Mafia is actually good at, and which is a perfectly rational decision for the Mafia. It is the basis of their business, their means of production - if you want to bully your neighbors into submission, you got to look and act the part. The entirely predictable Western sanctions are also a feature, not a bug: Inflation and seizing of assets abroad hurts the stupid nerds and helps the Mafia's export-oriented businesses. And if the sanctions are ramped up and targeted to a point where they threaten the very existence of Putin's avocado Mafia, then it was a miscalculation on Putin's part because he was surrounded by Yes Men who would tell him anything to stay on his good side.
Counterpoint: he is reacting to an anti-Russian alliance that seeks to topple him (Putin's perspective).
https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/03/11/john-mearsheimer-on-why-the-west-is-principally-responsible-for-the-ukrainian-crisis
What is the most advanced analog computer?
(Animal brains don't count.)
Maybe those analog chips in Veritassium's new video? If you put a bunch of them in one box anyway. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVsUOuSjvcg [edit: link fixed[
SOFTWARE ENGINEER WANTED
We are https://hookelabs.com, a family-owned company (15 years old, ~50 people but growing fast) based in Lawrence MA USA (30 min north of Boston/Cambridge). Our focus is research on autoimmune diseases (multiple sclerosis, colitis, arthritis, etc.), but we’re also branching out into development of scientific equipment.
You’d be the third regular SSC/ACX reader here (that I know about).
About 80% of the work we have now is in Python/NumPy, with another 15% in C (or Rust if you prefer), and 5% “other” including Google Apps Script. You don’t need to be able to do *all* of that.
The Python/NumPy work is on PCs and Raspberry Pi. The C/Rust work is on microcontrollers.
We have a lot of different projects, large and small. These include:
• Image analysis in Python/NumPy
• Embedded systems work on Raspberry Pi and microcontrollers
• Web-based UI development for scientific analytical equipment (mostly image related)
• Act as mentor to other sw developers
We could also use some help with IT stuff – we have a full-time IT person but he’s pretty overloaded. (We run Windows networks.)
This is a good position for a person who gets bored easily - you'll get to juggle projects, to some degree, to your taste, so long as they all move forward at some reasonable rate.
I don’t really expect one person to be able to do all this stuff, but the more you can do the better.
I’d prefer a full-time, on-site person, but we’ll also consider part-timers and people working from home (part of the time). Hours and most other things are very flexible. We offer all the usual benefits. We pay well and expect high performance.
To apply send a CV to <jobs (at) hookelabs.com>; put “Software Engineer” in the subject line.
How is zlibrary giving me much better book recommendations than amazon?
Amazon has a virtually infinite dataset and infinite money to hire programmers. Zlibrary is probably one or two anonymous guys hiding in some former soviet country that doesn't extradite to the US.
It could be that the average zlibrary user is more similar to me than the average amazon user. But if Amazon had good algorithms that shouldn't be a problem -- there are probably way more people like me on amazon than people like me on zlibrary, and ways of finding them algorithmically.
I'd assume that Amazon is putting their fingers on the scale to make sure you see the books that make them the most profit, not the ones you most want to see.
This study says that, as a nation, we've lost 824,097,690 million IQ points due to lead exposure. I have yet to read the article, but I find it an interesting way to frame a serious issue. But as Kevin Drum pointed out, it's a stunning misuse of significant digits... ;-)
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2118631119
A single IQ point increases adult income by ~1k/year in current dollars (based on eyeballing this graph and adjusting for inflation https://pumpkinperson.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/dollarbar.png), and income scales a bit faster than inflation, and adults earn for about 50 years, so the cost of losing 8e8 IQ points among youth now would be at least 8e8*1e3*50 = 4e13 dollars of lost individual income (even before considering Hive Mind style network effects which are probably even bigger than the individual effects). That's 1.3x the entire US national debt.
Some of those dollars are surely zero-sum, i.e. if you raise everyone's IQ, the total amount of useful resources doesn't necessarily increase, so total real income doesn't necessarily increase.
On the other hand, raise intelligence and the general amount of innovation could increase, which could then increase the amount of useful resources. It seems like raising *everyone's* IQ is unnecessary for that beneficial outcome, but there are probably some other benefits of higher IQ among the general public too.
If natural resources were a bottleneck, we wouldn't have had all that income growth worldwide over the last hundred years. >99% of earth's surface is still uninhabited by humans. I don't worry about running out of any natural resources in the future either. One of the unsuccessful book contest entries last year was for a pamphlet by Tim Worstall on that: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1M1m8o1HInGYJR3cEMYZ6TQgNmeBOWo98YC6djNnFWf0/edit#heading=h.6wuv83sms3jq
"natural resources" is your phrase, not mine.
If you mean to include machines and finished products phrase "useful resources", those are downstream of intelligence and very much influenced by it.
I could easily believe that. But where did they get IQ vs income level data?
its not necessarily all lost though, right? some (but not all) of personal income must be zero sum with everyone else
Yes, but I don't think it's significant. Higher IQ increases productivity within the same job, plus opens up whole new types of jobs in the O-ring sector. I'm also ignoring positive network effects which are probably bigger than total individual effects. And total individual effects are probably an OOM bigger than the zero-sum individual effects.
to understand what I mean by the O-ring sector see this paper:
http://mason.gmu.edu/~gjonesb/O%20Ring%20Foolproof.pdf
and this blog:
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/stupid-people/
thank you, look like good references. will take me some time to get through though.
mostly NLSY, via Charles Murray, via blogger Pumpkin Person converting it and combining it with some other data. The text from Charles Murray is republished here (see table 2-1): https://analyseeconomique.wordpress.com/2012/11/10/income-inequality-and-iq-by-charles-murray/
8.24097690 x 10 to the 8th power million
Yeah, well beyond slide rule interpolation
One issue I don't see much discussed in the context of climate change is the effect of warming on the amount of habitable land. As temperature contours are pushed north in the northern hemisphere land that was too cold to be habitable becomes barely habitable, land that was barely habitable becomes somewhat better, and so on down the line. The net effect is to increase the amount of land suited to human habitation. At the same time, some land that is now almost too warm for habitation gets a little warmer, which decreases the amount of land suitable for habitation.
I have done back of the envelope calculations suggesting that, with 3°C of warming, the gain in land from the first effect comes to the equivalent of about three-quarters the area of the U.S., the loss of land from the second to about half as much. If so these are large effects that ought to be taken into account. Does anyone here know of published estimates, ideally better than I can produce? Along similar lines, are there published estimates of the total loss of usable land due to sea level rise? My guess is that it is much smaller, but I could be wrong.
Billions of people already live in the tropics.
Go live in the Philippines for over two years, as I did, before you tell me they won't mind if the temperature goes up another 2°C.
Note that global warming affects land more than sea; 3°C global warming is likely to correspond to almost 4.5°C of land warming.
There's a paper that goes into that subject in depth, I'll see if I can find it sometime. I recall most of the increase in available land is permafrost in Russia, which isn't very arable.
Not yet. But over time the land will become more valuable through ecological succession. Perhaps humans can accelerate this?
Do you think that could happen fast enough to take all the refugees from places that become uninhabitable?
No, or maybe. Not for arable crops for quite a while. But other plants may do well enough. And if it can produce plenty of grass, dairy is an option.
Have you read Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters by Steven E Koonin? It doesn't discuss agriculture at length, but it discusses climate change in general in the same honest and unideological way that you propose.
I'd be much more interested in the effect on agriculture. How many people can live in the world mostly comes down to how much food the world can produce, not how much space there is for homes.
Emm. Food production capacity, in the absolute sense, hasn't been an issue since the Green Revolution. There are issues with input & processing considerations, which can vary from place to place (water in CA, roads & docks in less developed places) but we-humans command a staggering variety of crops and livestock breeds, and the ability to modify fertility of soil to very large degrees. Climate change will necessitate changes in production methods on the margins, not in the whole.
I agree with this - the fact we eat meat is a testament to how low food prices are
I believe that was what he was calculating, not housing space. In the northern hemisphere there is a lot of land that is currently too cold (Canada and Russia mainly) for much agriculture, that could become better suited if a little bit warmer. There is more ocean water in the areas that may become too warm for agriculture, so there would be less loss of arable land than the gain. That is, if I'm understanding David correctly.
Housing space isn't a serious constraint in most of the world. I was thinking mostly of agriculture, more generally of land warm enough for people to do things on it. I don't have data on how far north crops are grown, did find a map on population density. If someone knows of good information on where crops grow, that would be useful.
It occurs to me that I do have a map showing climate zones in North America, so could try working from that.
I thought I'd share this link to a lovely bit from the 1962 movie "Taras Bulba".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8G6S6fQQ4I
Filmed back in the day, when, if you needed hundreds of horsemen, you didn't fake something up with CGI, you went down to Argentina and hired their army. The thing they're yelling is, more or less, the Cossack equivalent of "U! S! A!". The story itself is a bit of pan-Slavic romanticism from the days of the Russian Empire, but it's still Ukrainians kicking butt. And Yul Brynner still rocks, as does the score.
https://www.facebook.com/nancy.lebovitz/posts/10222121121199494
https://www.facebook.com/nancy.lebovitz/posts/10220156256039093
Discussion of whether you can manage what you can't measure. What counts as measurement, anyway?
What Management by Walking around really means, and perversions of the idea.
How McDonnell really managed by walking around, and how his grandson got it wrong.
What's the best way to share a public Facebook post to people who don't want to have a Facebook account?
Has anyone else noticed that substack is fucking with the page up and page down buttons?
It is quite disheartening how much they seem to struggle with not breaking extremely basic functionality
Yes I have, and yes it is. It seems to happen most when I have collapsed a thread. It may be that it is forgetting to take the no-longer-displayed text lines into account.
> that Anatoly Karlin was wrong before he was right.
He seems to be mostly right when reading Putin, but I worry about his understanding of the situation in Ukraine. On his substack, he correctly predicted on the eve of the invasion that Russia would attack in the next 48 hours (at 70%), but also claimed that fighting would last less than a week (90%, and with lots of weight on victory in the first two days): https://akarlin.substack.com/p/happening-the-ukraine-war-2022?s=r
Since then he seems to have swallowed the Russian propaganda whole. He seems to think that economic gifts can make people forget the killing of civilians (e.g. https://twitter.com/akarlin0/status/1500299500342157317?cxt=HHwWioC56cqckdIpAAAA) and that the sanctions will mostly be bad for the "eurocels" (rich Russians that live in London, Milan, etc). Both seem to me to be a pretty dramatic misreading of the situation. Past injustices live on long in the memory of people: Hitler came to power by bashing the contract of Versailles, Isis recruited from people burned by the American invasion 15 years prior. It is difficult to imagine Ukrainians simply accepting to be part of Russia. And with Russia's economy estimated to shrink 7-11% this year (even without an export ban on oil, which might still be implemented) and many European shops gone, Moscow might be much less fun soon.
(also, note how he wrote "(Z, Z)" behind his name. "Z" has become a symbol for supporting the war since it is written on many Russian military vehicles. I would assume that he writes it this way to further make fun of people who add their pronouns behind their names. Is that the kind of guy Scott should signal-boost?)
Agreed. He is delusional and clearly high on propaganda. Bad decision by Scott to legitimize him.
I would like to calculate that X amount of alcohol caused the same number of germ line mutations as Y years of parental age, but I can’t find any good sources quantifying alcohol’s effect on the germ line mutation rate. Any carcinogen would increase it, and alcohol is strongly carcinogenic. NORML used to publish calculations of how alcohol is a zillion times worse than weed even before considering the negative utility of these germ line mutations. (My aunt was a heavy drinker for years and her son is anomalously dumb relative to everyone else in the extended family, to the point that he can barely hold down a job, which sucks a lot. I don’t know if the alcohol is to blame but it probably worsened the odds. https://amp.theguardian.com/science/2018/jan/03/alcohol-can-cause-irreversible-genetic-damage-to-stem-cells-says-study Seems like it could also apply to ova.) De-alcoholizing society seems like a worthy EA goal. Not prohibition 2.0 but changing education to treat alcohol the same as tobacco. Standard advice should be to totally avoid it. There’s been a massive success in tobacco harm reduction over the last few decades and I see no reason that can’t be replicated with alcohol.
Hm. Assuming there's no more direct method, you could try pedigree approaches. Something like: if alcohol really is causing nontrivial amounts of trait-lowering de novo mutations (which BTW I really doubt), then correlations with alcoholic parents should be more than twice that aunts/uncles etc, because the more distant relatives do not have the parents' new mutations. Combine that with total units of alcohol consumed over a lifetime before conception of the child, then you should be able to back out that 'X IUs of alcohol cause -Y SDs on IQ [or whatever]'. You could also try to count de novo counts directly in children of alcoholics and then use other estimates of pathogenicity fraction + average effect size of a harmful de novo. I suppose you could also try to do time-series or look for discontinuities by age: do kids of people just past the legal drinking age suddenly become dumber?
should we do the same with sugar?
Yes. Sugar is probably responsible for at least as many health problems as alcohol. People could be educated to avoid it and the distribution/advertising of it could be subject to some restrictions like tobacco.
I've come to distrust in vitro studies as predictor of in vivo outcomes. Eremolalos is correct. You've already got abundant evidence for the negative health and social impacts of alcohol. And by referencing studies whose conclusions may or may not have any detectable effect on living populations will likely weaken your arguments (by allowing others to quote studies with different conclusions). Once it comes down to dueling studies reported in Science section of the New York Times, you've probably lost the public's interest. ;-)
But if you find powerful evidence of germ line mutations from alcohol, do you think that finding would greatly strengthen the case against alcohol, and strengthen it in a way that would powerfully de-incentivize drinking it? There is abundant evidence now of the harmed caused by alcohol, and it's harm of a kind that's really easy for people to recognize (auto accidents, etc.)
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22951092/land-tax-housing-crisis
An article on Land Value Tax that somehow never mentions Henry George or Georgism. I can't imagine this is an accident, so what's the deal here?
Similarly, modern articles on the history progressivism mention nothing of the Georgist Progressives at the turn of the 20th century. The wikipedia article similarly labels the early 20th century progressives as a mix of eugenicists and teetotalers.
Bearing in mind George was only outsold by the bible in his time, it does feel like some sort of weird cultural amnesia - and I'm sure a true schizo could run with it.
Why should it mention Henry George? Do articles about Value Added Tax feel the need to discuss Wilhelm von Siemens? Do articles about income tax feel the need to make reference to Emperor Wang Mang?
Constant reference to some 19th century dude is what makes Land Value Tax advocates look like weird cranks rather than just advocates for vaguely sensible tax reform. Sensible LVT advocates would, I think, do well to distance themselves from Henry George.
The difference is that there's no such thing as Siemensism or Wangism. Unlike the other two, George's name is synonymous with his proposed tax reform.
I think they made the wise choice not to go by Siemenism and Wangism, and not just because of the obvious juvenile humor. Tying your movement/ideas to a particular place and time (or person in this case) allows people to categorize your idea in a mental box. Once they have done that, they only have to dismiss your box of ideas once, and then forever conclude "I am against _______." This is especially easy when the box is clearly labeled "19th century, and not adopted" and can add the cultural weight of the previous rejection. If it wasn't implemented at the height of its popularity, then obviously it's a failed idea.
Better in this case to repackage the idea for modern audiences and give it a different polish.
Which may contribute to many people not taking it seriously.
I don't want to post this as a reply to dozen different comments, so I am just posting it here separately. Maybe someone will notice.
Yes, Putin wanted to conquer the whole Ukraine, he described his long-term goals clearly in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Historical_Unity_of_Russians_and_Ukrainians
Yes, Putin expected to conquer Ukraine fast, Russian media already had in advance written articles celebrating the fast victory, and some of them accidentally published them e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20220226051154/https://ria.ru/20220226/rossiya-1775162336.html
Somehow, in the midst of a climate change crisis, the company "LG" has decided that it is leaving the business of manufacturing solar panels. But why?
https://www.lg.com/us/press-release/lg-to-exit-global-solar-panel-business
Because "of the impact of increasing material and logistics costs, as well as severe supply constraints, on the solar business" i.e., they don't make enough money with them.
Optimistic take: as solar cell production becomes more and more commoditised and the equipment gets more widespread, it's no longer worthwhile for high tech companies like LG to make them. In the future, solar cells will be manufactured like bricks -- cheaply, and close to the point where they're needed.
Isn't that exactly backwards? LG isn't halting production due to a decrease in production costs of solar panels - their statement says the exact opposite. They're halting production because everything that goes into making solar panels (the "factors of production"), as well as the costs to transport those factors, has drastically increased.
Ironically, this is probably driven in significant part by the rising price of fossil fuels. I've said it before and I'll say it again - if you want to go green, first you have to go brown; you can't revolutionize your energy and your economy without a stable industrial base.
It's a step in the process to what Melvin is saying. The real reason LG is leaving the business has more to do with Chinese firms making them in bulk, and cheaper. There's no longer a significant margin to make them more advanced, so the incremental cost increases eats away at the profit or makes them unprofitable entirely. LG and other "tech" firms survive by making something that's expensive, but has a good margin due to being new. Once the technology can be reproduced by the "cheap" manufacturers, there's nothing left for a firm like LG to make money on, unless they can revolutionize the solar panels with a new design. It seems like new design space in solar panels is drying up.
Or, as I like to put it, you need to develop sustainable energy before you've run out of the other kind.
I suppose I agree in the long term. But what I'm adding to that is, in the short and medium term, we're hurting both our economy *and* that transition by sanctioning, prohibiting, and over-regulating fossil fuel production and use.
Also, we're not running out anytime soon. "Peak oil" is like nuclear fusion; it's been 15 years away for my entire life, and always based on the same kinds of faulty calculations. Only look at the oil fields we're currently tapping; only look at what's close to the surface; ignore sour crude, ignore offshoring, ignore tar sands... it's like basing your estimate of how much money has been minted based only on how many pennies are lying on the ground. We're not running out anytime soon, and we're shooting a potential green transition in the foot by damaging our existing energy base.
I'd say, if you want to go green, you have to go nuclear.
If someone tells you to panic over climate change, ask them if they expect the consequences of climate change to be worse than the consequences of nuclear power. Then watch their brain freeze up.
I think it is worth being at least seriously concerned about climate change (only not saying panic because panicking isn't doing any good) and think that the consequences of climate change are WAY worse than the consequences of nuclear power and agree that we should invest into more nuclear power
Good! I was, of course, overgeneralizing.
Why are you writing an open letter to "Andrew Hill" (whoever that is) here, of all places?
I would give Rob Lee an A- for his Ukraine predictions. I heard about him from Noah Smith's interview with him: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/video-interview-rob-lee-russian-defense?s=r , and the main article for his predictions is https://www.fpri.org/article/2022/01/moscows-compellence-strategy/ .
He predicted: (1) Russia was actually going to invade Ukraine and (2) the cost for Russia to occupy Ukraine would be too high.
His conclusion is that the goal of Russia's invasion would not be to occupy territory. Instead, they would try to destroy as much of Ukraine's military as quickly as possible, while avoiding going into most cities. The only city that might be worth entering is Kiev, to seize the seat of the government and replace Zelenskyy as the president of Ukraine. This is a war that Russia should be able to win quickly.
Instead, Russia did not destroy Ukraine's military capacity as quickly as expected and instead rushed in cities like Kharkiv, Kherson, and Mariupol in addition to Kiev. He was surprised by both parts. This suggests a massive intelligence failure by Russia on figuring out the mood on the street and on basic questions like "Where does Ukraine store its drones?", along with the more well known logistical and morale problems that Russia is facing.
Rob Lee seems to have gotten the facts on the ground right, but then concluded from them the wrong objective of the war.
Yes, I've been following him. But it's pretty clear now that Russia was depending on Zelenskyy to flee and Ukainian armed forces to collapse (as they did in the early stages of Donbass rebellion). For instance, If this were a "normal" blitzkrieg, Russian forces would be backfilling their forward units as they advanced, to secure the captured infrastructure behind the front line, and to protect it against raids from special forces and partisans. But the Russians expected Ukraine to collapse quickly, and they never really planned their incursion this way.
Several military commentator/experts are now suggesting that Russian military didn't have the resources to this (and they may not have the resources to correct their mistakes). But we see maps like this one from the UK MoD showing huge red zones, supposedly under Russian control...
https://twitter.com/DefenceHQ/status/1499005871770288132/photo/1
But a truer map of the conflict would show that the Russians are occupying a bunch of roads, and the Ukrainians are picking off their heavy armor and their supply vehicles that are sitting ducks for Ukraine hit and run attacks.
https://twitter.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1500645154939625473
The big question now is where is Russian air superiority? Their air force has hundreds and hundreds of aircraft, and why haven't they taken control over the Ukrainian airspace?Experts are beginning to suggest that Russia's air force has their own serious problems: for instance, planes shot down are using commercial GPS equipment, and they've been carrying dumb bombs (so they have to fly low and are easily shot down).
One explanation is that they're only trained in flying small numbers of planes at a time rather than large complex formations. https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/rusi-defence-systems/russian-air-force-actually-incapable-complex-air-operations
> ...planes shot down are using commercial GPS equipment, and they've been carrying dumb bombs...
These two ideas are tightly linked. If they can't afford better GPS for aircraft that they presumably intend to use more than once, then they sure as hell can't afford them for single-use applications like a JDAM equivalent.
His Twitter is also a great source of OSINT / materiel loss documentation
It seems to me that if Russia felt threatened by NATO nations he would simply bring more attention to the multitude of issues with pandemic politics that have large groups of peoples converging on their capitals in NATO nations . I question why Russia does not do this and the timing of these provocations to be when protests are crossing a threshold
I think that was always a bullsh*t excuse for him to do what he wanted to do anyway, and regather the Russian peoples.
I don't think Putin really cares much about people whining about covid restrictions that are mostly being lifted anyway.
I'm not sure the marginal propaganda dollar would have made that much difference, beyond what the news already reports on these events. And while the Canada convoy was pretty big and annoying, the corresponding one in the US barely made the news. (Something like five trucks showed up, last I read?)
But also, I'm not really sure what goal this would accomplish? I don't think Russia is feeling threatened by NATO in a "our people might think democracy is better than autocracy" sort of way, which could plausibly be handled by propaganda. It's more of a military concern - "we need to throw our weight around with our neighbors or we'll look weak and NATO will start bullying us." I don't know if Russia could accomplish that without actually using their military.
Because the idea that Russia feels threatened by NATO nations is complete BS. It is a fiction Putin has created as propaganda. What is he worried about? NATO invading Russia? Why would NATO do that. NATO nations may want economic, social, and political changes to happen in Russia but the only groups threatened by that are Putin and his cronies.
This invasion seems like proof Russia should not be threatend. NATO is doing everything they can not to be involved in this war.
But when was Russia threatened and what were they threatened with? I know what Putin/Rus gov claims the threat is or what they believe the threat is, but these all seem to be closer to paranoid delusions than reality.
I'm saying it is hard to make the case that NATO might attack you, since in this instance they have a clear reason to, and widespread support, and are still doing their best not to be at war with you.
He's probably worried about NATO having nuclear missiles that can reach Moscow in under 2 minutes. Although they would only arrive seconds earlier than missiles from Latvia.
But why would NATO do that? What is to be gained?
The Russian leadership is not as secure in their power as the Western democracies. And the leadership doesn't see itself as semi-expendable in the way the Western democracies do. In the West, if the President or Prime Minister dies, meh, we've got a backup and a backup for the backup, and if it matters they've got the spare keys for the nukes, things will continue more or less as they would have if the President hadn't died. And the President understands that this is part of the deal.
Not so in Russia. "If Putin dies, there's a guy deep under the Urals with a spare key to the nukes" is a very worrisome scenario because of what that guy might do in peacetime, which makes it an even more worrisome scenario in a crisis because you maybe lied about which sofa cushion the spare key to the nukes was hidden under and were counting on at least being able to give him a phone call if it mattered.
If Putin can only absolutely trust the people he can keep under his watchful ex-FSB eye in the Kremlin, then he has to worry about the Kremlin being nuked before anyone in the Kremlin even has time to send a text saying "hey please nuke the Americans to avenge me PS keys to the nukes are really in the oregano jar". Which means he also has to worry about what the Americans might get up to when they figure that out.
The ideal solution is to not run such a paranoid, corrupt government, but if you're not up to that, you do want to not have to worry about your entire trusted inner circle being killed before any of them can do anything about it.
Also, NATO isn't putting nuclear ballistic missiles in the Baltic states or Poland or whatever, but if you're too paranoid to entirely trust what your own people might do with your own nuclear weapons, you're certainly not going to take NATO's word for that.
In 1961, the Soviets put nuclear missiles in Cuba, and the US put nuclear missiles in Turkey. They were all removed by the end of 1963.
In fairness to the differences, at the time there were fewer (maybe none? I'd have to research to be sure) options to hit targets from long range. Not too long after that, it was easy for both sides to launch ICBMs to pretty much anywhere in the world, but at the time it was a degree of safety if the enemy missiles were not within a certain proximity.
Response time is the issue now. If missiles in Ukraine were launched at Moscow, by the time the Russians detected them, they'd have about one minute to decide whether it was a false alarm, call the President, get him into a bunker, have him decide what to do, and issue orders. Probably not possible.
On the flip side--if NATO detected that Russia was launching missiles, missiles stationed in Ukraine could be close enough to take some Russian launch sites out before they launched their missiles. Russia would have to move its own missiles further into its heartland to keep them safe, reducing its ability to make a successful unretaliated first strike.
Submarines are probably a bigger worry for everyone, though. A Russian Typhoon submarine carries 20 MIRV missiles, with 6 warheads per missile, and so can hit 120 cities. It could take its time, travelling along the coast for weeks, launching missiles, submerging, and moving on. It's very hard to find one submarine submerged in the ocean other than by catching it moving between the Pacific and the Atlantic. So a single Russian submarine might be able to kill half the people in America on its own, supposing that its targeting system still worked.
Westerners were noting that Russia felt threatened by NATO long before Putin was in charge, and that any Russian leader (even if Putin was out) would take that stance. Not that this justifies the invasion.
Because that wouldn’t work. Putting aside the object level concerns about whether Putin is motaviated in this way, having Russian propaganda say “oh, look at how bad NATO is failing lol” wouldn’t actually acomplish anything in the near term.
I noticed Adam Something on Youtube (he was recommended to me by the Algorithm). He has quite a few interesting videos, but unfortunately, he is very partisan and picks easy targets.
He spent 15 minutes in a video ranting about an alt-right American who moved to Hungary to enjoy "the good old world where men are still men and women are women". Now, the guy he was criticizing was an imbecile but I don't like the "and therefore all right-wingers are idiots" vibe his video had. In another video he pretty much literally said that "It is fine and natural that universities are so heavily leaning to the left since nobody who is intelligent can be a conservative because curiosity and intelligence are antitheses to conservatism".
He has a tendency for straw-manning and equally to glorify his political views. I found him an interesting and engaging left-winger at first but I soon lost interest.
Also, I noticed factual errors in his videos where I know a little bit (not that much, mind you, but enough to spot the errors) about the subject (communist city planning, original colours on statues from the antiquity) which makes him less trustworthy for me on matters where I don't have much of a clue (city planning more broadly and logistics/transportation projects he talks about a lot).
Of course, that does not mean he does not deserve credit for correctly predicting the war in Ukraine.
I have no information about this particular case. But I will note that it is possible to come to the right conclusions from the wrong premises.
The Alexander Cube model of prediction markets assumes that it is desirable for anyone to be able to easily create markets, but this is not obvious to me. Consider Metaculus: they currently have a couple dozen Russia/Ukraine-related markets, if they made it easy for anyone to create one they have a thousand such markets and every single one would be undertraded. Real money over fake points does some work to fix this, but even then it's not ideal: assume the world contains a bunch of perfectly rational traders with some large but finite amount of money to sink into your service: would it be more informative to spread that money over twenty different questions, or a thousand variations on forty different questions?
I share this concern regarding the idea of micro-markets for very local things. Scott has used examples like "will [person I know] get pregnant this year?" and similarly hyper local, hyper minor, markets. Unless people are putting insanely large amounts of money into prediction markets (which I'm sure Scott would like to see but I'm even more sure it will never happen), there doesn't seem to be enough money to actually arbitrage the different questions. There doesn't seem to be enough money, fake or not, to even align the current markets properly, as people leave small amounts of money on the table regularly.
I think a market that can repeat the same (or worse, very slightly different) questions will naturally deplete their users and leave a lot of potential money on the table. Doing so will make the actual predictions worth far less. Consider this scenario - a major question, such as "Will Russia invade the Ukraine?" that is open to any number of user-created markets. If the answer is a clear "yes" and the market starts to show that, then the incentive to bet on "yes" decreases as more and more people do so. By the time it gets above 90%, it may not be worth adding more money to "yes" after considering fees, holding up your money, etc. But it does make sense to create a new market with a slightly different question but really the same answer. You create a market that's getting closer to 50% and that's worth far more for an investor. The net result is that even really clear answers that should be obviously "yes" or "no" start to cap out lower, and new markets with much smaller market caps and less reliable percent chances spring up instead of the main market reflecting accurate predictions. Maybe the main market says 85% chance of something that should be an obvious yes, and then a bunch of smaller markets showing something like 70%.
Depending on how closely aligned the resolution criteria are, there should be arbitrage opportunities between these markets if they're not priced equally, so they should all still end up at the same point.
Consider one market on "Will Russia invade Ukraine by Feb 28" vs many markets for "Will Russia invade Ukraine by Feb 20/21/22/23/etc". The latter is arguably more informative overall because it gets us a better view of the distribution of outcomes, but $X distributed over the entire month of February seems like it will necessarily provide a less precise answer to the specific question of whether Russia will invade by the 28th. Easy market creation seems like it will inevitably lead to questions covering the spread like this, and until prediction markets reach stock market levels of "assume infinite arbitrage" there will be cases where people want to concentrate the market's attention more narrowly.
On the Ukraine post, Scott said "If you look at the 2016 election in isolation, Scott Adams is the smartest guy in the world". I pointed it out there and am doing so again here: This is a major mistake worthy of correction, Scott Adams predicted a landslide Trump victory, he was wrong! Wronger than the generic pundit predicting a 55-45 Clinton victory! Stop giving Scott Adams credit he doesn't deserve!
Scott Adams also predicted that after winning the 2016 election Trump would use his persuasive powers to unify the country and be popular with everyone
Scott Adams is the "smartest guy in the world that is famous". Literally millions people thought Trump would win, some farther out than Adams and without the wrong "landslide" part.
It's not just the claim he made, it's how far out he made it; the generic pundit was aiming at a target 1m out, so them not being very wrong isn't very interesting, there wasn't much for them to be right or wrong about. Scott Adams might have hit barely hit the edge of the target, but he did so at 10,000m, when the Republican field was still full of candidates, and nobody took Trump seriously.
I think that what Scott (Alexander) said in the last post is my basic view ... Adams likes to make out-there predictions, always with sky-high confidence, and conveniently forgets about the ones that are wrong (or retcons them). IIRC he also predicted a 100% chance of trump winning in 2020, and even after the networks called it for Biden, he said there was a 65% chance of trump winning, and if the election wasn't stolen then his entire worldview is wrong. And also counted Kamala Harris being the VP nominee as vindicating his prediction that Harris would the Presidential nominee. (this is from the one thing he has put out that I remember looking at in the last several years).
So saying "98% chance that trump will win 65% of the popular vote" and then claiming vindication when trump wins with 46% of the popular vote is in line with that tendency.
Sure.
Ultimately the question comes down to this: If you bet $1 on each of Scott Adam's 1000-1 claims, would you come out ahead?
Yeah my impression of Scott Adams is that he is at least a useful foil for recieved wisdom where you can get his take and be able to consider possibilities that no one else will contemplate
The possibility he contemplated was that Trump was literally hypnotizing people. I assert that it is not useful to consider this wisdom.
As someone who lives in deep Trump country, I watched in real-time as many Republicans of my acquaintance went from dismissing Trump as a grifter in 2015 to supporting Trump harder than they had supported any Republican POTUS candidate of my living memory by November 2016.
The hypnosis claim, taken strictly, is weird and false, but Adams' style is always to overhype things, so even if he's right, it's going to be in a way that involves overhype. If we soften it to a claim that Trump had/has an unusual persuasive ability, the claim does seem to hold up. The problem is that ability is only highly effective on about 20-30% of the population, and a much smaller percentage of the chattering classes (many of whom are outright antagonized by that ability), which made this fact hard for the chattering classes to observe.
I also live deep in Trump country, yet most Trump-voters I know recognize that Trump is an asshole. But they hate and fear the Squad, Bernie Sanders, and the Clintons far more.
If someone constantly talks in hyperbole about everything in a way that's excessive even for Americans, and defends such wild claims unto the last trench, that goes beyond "clever rhetorical trick".
I'm not trying to say Adams' style is a clever trick, I think it's just plain annoying.
I think he adopted a certain approach because he thinks it will sell more of his books or whatever venture he's currently cooking up, the same reason "buy our carbonated sugar water, some people think it tastes marginally better than other carbonated sugar water" never caught on as an advertising approach. And at some point he decided it's better to be "always on" and also to never back down or apologize.
Which maybe does help him sell more books, but it's just plain weird and annoying in spheres where people sit down and try to reason things out. But again, that doesn't mean he's always wrong, and I do think that just being weird, he sometimes has a unique insight.
What are folks' thoughts on refugee resettlement from conflict zones as a philanthropic cause in relation to other popular EA causes (tb research, etc)? It has felt to me in the past like one of the highest value philanthropies, both in terms of the qualitative effect on individual lives and the spillover effects of whatever that person creates throughout the rest of their lifetime. It's also critical since, refugee populations that receive poor welcomes or are ineffectively resettled can become sources of significant civil strife decades down the road.
I can think of a few arguments against it - mostly just that resettlement efforts are expensive and have perhaps weaker effects on outcomes for migrants. Also that it could detract resources from other efforts (like stopping infectious diseases or building effective policy structures in failed states) that have the potential to actually stop the destabilizing event that's generating refugees.
>>>refugee populations that receive poor welcomes or are ineffectively resettled
In the context of the Boston Marathon bombing, I am not sure what you mean.
'Effectively resettled' probably includes 'convince the refugees that returning to their homeland is out of the question and they should focus on integration where they are' which can be a hard sell for both refugees and citizens of the refuge.
One general argument is that if you tell the world, "Hey, people, you can come to the US if your country is threatened by an evil dictator", this motivates soldiers fighting evil dictators to throw down their weapons and flee to the US. It might even motivate people in hopeless countries to support potential evil dictators, in the hopes of getting to flee from them to the US.
In my opinion to do it right and actually lead to good outcomes requires a degree of encouraged cultural that to some people would be impractical. You don't want to do what Merkel did, and to go reasonably away from her approach would raise concerns of destroying foreign cultures and similar.
Lets say there are rationalists in two countries that are at war with each other. The rationalists are patriots for their respective country - but they know that a lot of the news they receive is propaganda and they would like to know the truth. They also want to convince the rationalists on the other side about the facts that they learn. Not all communication channels between the two countries are closed - but to be realistic they are quite limited.
What they can do? What can we establish before we get into a situation like this?
I think two big questions should be asked by each:
1. Is my country's access to information open and competitive? Can media outlets in your nation take any position on the war or provide any information without fear of government reprisal? It doesn't mean that the mainstream media outlets will have the correct story, but it's an important baseline. If you find that news sources in your own nation are being censured for taking positions opposed to the government, your best bet is probably to suspend judgement on all counts and refuse to participate in any war that is not an immediate defense of your home region.
2. What type of war is being called for? This should affect your information threshold for support. There are other positions like pacifism and ethnic nationalism, but most "normie" war ethics are pretty straightforward: attacking country = bad, defending country = good. If the war is being fought on your own nation's soil and your neighbors are largely unhappy about it, you can relax most skepticism of your nation's war efforts.
But if your nation's troops are fighting on another country's soil, you should raise your thresholds for support significantly. The next level up from defending your own soil would probably be defending an ally with whom your nation has a mutual defense treaty. Then you would need to know that there was in fact an invasion of that country. The next level up from that would be intervention in a civil conflict or genocide, in which case you would need to be absolutely sure that your country had free access to information - and you should probably have the support of nearly the entirety of the United Nations or another legitimate international body.
Much grayer - and probably requiring you to develop a more detailed philosophical position - are ideological wars. E.g. attempting to remove a regime of one kind and replace it with another regime. Americans have been talked into getting embroiled in these (IMHO unjustified) gray wars for years and I think it's badly warped our discourse around war.
Remember in early January 2020, when some of us were enjoying ignorance and others were pontificating on what China should do about that pesky pandemic? If only we had focused on the global contagion and the perfect day to get short the market, we could be running our own, self-funded, fast-grant programs right now.
It kinda feels like we're in the same situation today. A local crisis has turned global, but all the focus is still on Ukraine, first, and Russia, second. Instead, let's talk about what this crisis is going to do to me, and what I should do about it. (By me, I mean us. By us, I mean western financial markets.)
So we've seen the Russian markets tank. We've seen a few companies that operate in Russia tank. We've seen the energy markets react. What's next? What are the second and third order effects?
Let's break it down by sources of contagion (feel free to add to this list):
1. Energy prices > Commodity prices > Inflation
2. Russian banks > European banks > American Banks
3. Disrupted supply chains > Additional disruptions > shipping? retail?
4. Military tension > military escalation > nervous boomers getting out of the market (lack of liquidity?)
5. Interim market shock > stimulus/mmt (fast enough?)
6. Financial market stress > liquidity crunch > (who's over-leveraged?)
Would anybody be interested in a working session Zoom + White board to figure out: when and what to short? As a bonus, we could all share our plans for surviving a nuclear war.
My background: I've been a professional stock trader for over 2 decades (with some detours). I also founded a quant fund that operated from 2006-2009. I also never found finance very interesting and know very little about the underlying structure of capital markets.
If you have ideas on the categories/scenarios, please comment. If you're interested in joining the work-session, please email me at: protopiacone at gmail dot com.
Likely too late to even be a fly on the wall, but I’d very much like a summary of any ensuing discussion in one of these threads.
I'm thinking along similar lines. During covid I did actually buy the first dip and if I can repeat without getting arrogant then I will. But it may have been luck.
I can't add a lot as I don't have a finance background, but I can point you to some people with well developed thinking on this. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klOSrrN4ETU. 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEHjN1r2pB0
The of the most interesting things is the rotation from fiat reserves to gold if these sanctions really take effect (which I understand to be in around 25 days).
The one thing I would personally add is that it look's like the biggest risk to your position would be a peace treaty followed by a rally or kicking the can down the road. It would be great for the world, but would mean a shift in direction. That could happen at any time. There are also unknown unknowns which there are a lot of. So we have to be humble.
With short positions you need an opinion about timing and volatility. In this market I'm afraid to do that. It might be safer to just move to gold and buy the dip.
Emailed you.
I doubt i could contribute anything, but I'd enjoy being a fly on the wall.
I think your Ukraine question depends critically on how you define "Ukraine" and "invasion." Since the ignorant are making 1914-comparisons at the moment, it would be rather like asking somebody in June 1914 "will there be a European war sometime in the next few years?" A "right" answer would distinguish between a war between Austria and Serbia, a General European war, and a war that lasted four years, killed ten million people, brought down three Empires and eventually brought troops from the United States.
So with Ukraine. As of, say, 20 February, I and a lot of other people would have agreed that there were forces in place on the border to enable a limited incursion into the country. But whether this was to apply political pressure, or whether it was in preparation for an actual operation, was impossible to say, because the decision had not been made yet. It looks as though it was Zelensky's performance at the Munich Security Conference that tipped the scales: and the Russians interpreted his threat to develop nuclear weapons as a sign that, in spite of his reformist instincts, he was completely under the sway of the West and the extreme nationalists in his administration and in the country. Such an interpretation of his actions (not what would happen, but how a government would interpret something that hadn't happened yet) seems to me effectively impossible to predict using any percentage methodology.
I thought (and again so did others) that the most likely course would be a limited operation to end the war in the Donbass and to wipe out the nationalist militias which have tended to concentrate there. Certainly, the relatively small forces originally on the frontier would have suggested that. But in the end they seem to have decided there was no point in waiting, and to go for the much more ambitious objective of demilitarising the country and returning it to something like the 2014 situation, but probably more dominated by Russia. That's why they've been feeding reinforcements in slowly, and trying to avoid destruction and civilian casualties in the areas they intend to control directly after they withdraw. Again, this is partly a question of timescale, and I suspect the "do it now and get it over with" argument won out against the "well things might get better in five to ten years" argument.
There are, in other words, so many dependent variables that I'm not sure a question like 'will Russia invade Ukraine" actually means very much, and there's a good argument that the correct answer was "no": they have, after all, no intention of occupying the whole country, even temporarily, nor do they have the military capability to do so. On the other hand the answer to the question "will Russian soldiers enter Ukraine" was clearly yes.
Part of the trouble with this interpretation is that war goals can change as a war goes on, with a general trend towards the winning side becoming more maximalist. Terms that it would have been prepared to accept at the outset of the war will later be unacceptable. In US history, this was clearly true of both the Revolutionary War and the Civil War.
So once Russia invaded Ukraine, questions like Putin's specific intentions became much less relevant. My guess is that the longer and bloodier this campaign is for Russia, the more maximalist will be its demands, assuming its victory is total enough that it can fully impose its will upon Ukraine, and that the West doesn't try to create real incentives for Russia to reduce its demands (i.e., if Russia is treated the same by the West whether it annexes the whole country or merely expands the Donbass, then it's just as well hanged for a sheep as a lamb).
> But whether this was to apply political pressure, or whether it was in preparation for an actual operation, was impossible to say, because the decision had not been made yet. It looks as though it was Zelensky's performance at the Munich Security Conference that tipped the scales: and the Russians interpreted his threat to develop nuclear weapons as a sign that, in spite of his reformist instincts, he was completely under the sway of the West and the extreme nationalists in his administration and in the country. Such an interpretation of his actions (not what would happen, but how a government would interpret something that hadn't happened yet) seems to me effectively impossible to predict using any percentage methodology.
What makes you so sure this interpretation is correct, rather than the view of the US government that Putin was planning to invade from the start? I give them a bit of credit here since they accurately predicted an invasion when most other sources were saying it wouldn't happen, though of course their overall track record still leaves room for doubt if we have conflicting evidence.
I don't have "an interpretation." My point was that the information available was consistent with a variety of interpretations, one of which was political pressure, the other of which (in several sub-variants) was deliberate military action of some kind. I personally thank the calculus changed very late on, but, as I say, if you are trying to decide on the likelihood of "an invasion" you first have to decide what you mean. You're not defining "an invasion" in the dictionary sense, you're saying what precisely the Russians will do.
I see. To my mind the phrasing "it looks as though" in this context suggested you saw that scenario as a bit more likely than just one possible explanation among several.
Fair point. To set it out more clearly, up until a couple of weeks ago, it was impossible to tell what the purpose of the (relatively small) reinforcements of troops in the forward areas were supposed to be for. At that point, there were many possible interpretations. But then it happened, so the question is, was that the plan all along, or did something change at the last minute, since clearly only one of those interpretations can be true. I don't know, and I don't think any of us do but, for what its worth I'm persuaded by various specialists who have pointed both to Zelensky's bizarre antics at Munich, and also to the fact that Duma approval to deploy troops outside the country was not given (as required by the Constitution) until the very last minute. My impression is that those to factors make the hypothesis of a late change of policy more convincing than the other (and there its some support for this if you compare the actual language and body language of Putin's two speeches) but I'd be the first to accept it's only one interpretation. The issue, however, is that in such circumstances, "prediction" of any kind is next to impossible; it's little better than guesswork.
Their intention may not be to occupy all of Ukraine, but I think they will probably accept nothing less than A. a Ukrainian puppet government friendly to Russia, or B. incorporating the eastern parts of the country into Russian territory. In my mind that certainly qualifies as an invasion.
They certainly don't want all of Ukraine, even if they could take it. I suspect (and I have no inside knowledge) they want a neutral Ukraine without foreign troops stationed, and a government that is similar to that before 2014, when relations between the countries were cool, but not hostile. They also want an end to the war in the Donbass (in which case there's no need to annex it (have you seen the area? Most countries couldn't give it away) and an end to the existence off the far-right wing nationalists. Strategically, they want NATO to accept that there's now a large STOP sign in front of the Polish-Ukrainian border.
> They certainly don't want all of Ukraine...
Does "they" include the author of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Historical_Unity_of_Russians_and_Ukrainians
How can Ukraine be "neutral" when it has already been invaded by Russia?
The way Finland was neutral through the cold war, in spite of having been invaded by Russia in WW2.
What is the end to the war in Donbass without either annexation or independence for the area (Which seems like it would be controlled by Russian puppets)?
And there's no way any democratically elected government in Ukraine will revert to 2014 policies after this. They've eliminated that option by invading, so where does that leave things? Will they withdraw if Donbass gets independence and let the rest of ukraine join the west?
The leaked Russian news article early in the war gave me the impression that annexation *was* the goal, or at least it would have been if Ukraine had collapsed immediately the way they imagined. Lots of stuff about "resolving the Ukraine question" and "returning Ukraine to its natural place in the Russian world."
But even if they only wanted a regime change, sending tanks into Kyiv to decapitate the government still counts as an "invasion" in my book.
This 100% nationalistic/religious war. I spent yesterday a good hour reading vk.com what some of my Russian acquaintances think and they are mostly entertaining the idea that Russia is attacked by the west, it needs to wage war to kill nazis in Ukraine, they don't believe that civilians are being killed and they believe Russian army have suffered only about 500 casualties (the actual number is closer to 10,000) and think that this number too high.
Other Russians try to argue that this is still unnecessary spilling of brothers' blood but no attempt to even dispute any of those numbers.
All these things about demands about NATO and so on are just rationalizations of their feelings of superiority and hate of the west. They don't want neutral Ukraine but Ukraine that is under their rule.
Do you have a source for the 10k Russian casualty number? And is that deaths or casualties (i.e. rendered incapable of fighting)? Because those two things are sometimes mixed up.
These are deaths. I don't have any primary sources, I just use wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War
I think your definition of invasion must be a lot narrower than mine. How would you define it?
See my comment above.
> the Russians interpreted his threat to develop nuclear weapons as a sign that, in spite of his reformist instincts, he was completely under the sway of the West
This doesn't make sense. Ukraine needs nuclear weapons because their ties to the West aren't strong enough.
The point of nuclear weapons is to keep other countries from invading. Either nuclear weapons or NATO membership would have preventing the current war; they didn't need both, just one or the other.
You're falling into the common trap of assuming that what makes sense to you makes sense to everybody: in this case, that the Russians think like you. But they don't, and they have been making that clear for at least fifteen years. Their position has been that incorporation of Ukraine into NATO, either de jure or de facto (as is increasingly the case) was a red line beyond which they would take action. They said very clearly that they wouldn't accept a position where there could be US forces and nuclear weapons on their border. The West either chose not to believe them, or thought they were too weak to make good on their threats. Oops.
If you're trying to estimate the possibility of conflict, what matters is what the potential combatants think and say, not what may be reasonable from an external abstract perspective. So before 2014, you could say that the chances of conflict were very low. After 2014 they increased substantially. With the election of Zelesnky they went down again, because he was elected on a programme of calming tensions with Russia, as most Ukrainians were sick of confrontation. More recently, with NATO pressure and the increasing strength of the nationalist militias, which the government could no longer control, the chances went up again. All this is the result of the interactions between actors on the ground: it has little to do with what you or I think might be reasonable.
It seems to me that if you don't want countries to join a defensive alliance against you, the best idea is to quit threatening them.
You know why there's no anti-Thailand defensive alliance in South East Asia? Because Thailand doesn't go round attacking its neighbours.
Russia has just signalled that they are keen to invade and swallow up any neighbour that isn't part of NATO, guaranteeing that all its neighbours will now be desperate to join NATO.
Certainly Putin has a different perspective from me, but he's also a liar. I just don't believe that he doesn't understand what nuclear weapons are for.
As an American, I also don't believe our own leaders when they pretend not to know why our adversaries want nukes.
>down three Empires
Austrian Empire, German Empire, Russian Empire and Ottoman Empire make 4. And, long term, signed the death warrant on the French and British colonial Empires
Maybe but both the French and British empires gobbled up Middle Eastern territory after the war. Britain lost Ireland though (something that wouldn’t have happened without the war).
If Russia invades my country, how do I go out with dignity? Print out a thousand copies of Rationality A-Z translated to Russian and start handing it to the occupying soldiers?
There are plenty of ways to go out with dignity. There are plenty more ways to go *on* with dignity. Pick a goal and pursue it... although personally, I think your idea is basically a doorstop donation program.
Good idea, bore them to death.
ever thought of doing a quick and dirty guide to psychotherapy? list of resources, self help books, what concepts relate to what symptoms, etc? something that anyone motivated enough could read and get either get a head start on therapy or bypass it altogether? im getting increasingly frustrated by the whole person centred/find your own truth/its all about the relationship position that they seem to take; it strikes me as more than a little self serving
Here's mine, *extremely* quick and dirty. All that person-centered, find your own truths stuff sounds sort of lame, but if it is delivered by a therapist who actually gets what it is like to be you, and geniunely cares about your wellbeing, it is a pretty good tonic, and suffices to help many people claw their way out of various pits they're stuck in. Research about the effectiveness of psychotherapy finds that the big predictor of patient improvement is therapist warmth, genuineness and empathy.
That being said, there are some therapies that are effective as actual *treatment*, rather than as tonics. They tend to be treatments specific to particular problems, e.g. PTSD, anxiety disorders. Exposure-based treatments of anxiety disorders are often quite effective. Time-limited structured treatment approaches incorporating psychedelics or MDMA for PTSD, profound social anxiety and addiction are looking promising.
Psychotherapy for "depression" is a morass of generic support, bullshit techniques and prescription drugs that make you fat and anorgasmic. The reason treatment for "depression" is so nondescript and ineffective is, in my opinion, because "depression" is a pseudo-scientific term for chronic unhappiness, which is not an illness but a state of mind that can come about for all kinds of reasons, many of them valid.
Does anyone here happen to know of country-wide composite wellbeing measures besides ISEW, MEW, GPI? Or new/updated versions of the ones I just mentioned? Writing a blog post about wellbeing comparison and want to make sure I haven't missed anything.
HDI?
Right, almost forgot. Thanks!
The YouTuber is great - and was not at all sure about an invasion! Thanks for the link! (content: excellent - form: could be improved, but that takes a bit more money, so: fine). I still kick me for being wrong about the invasion, but there were/are THREE questions to consider not just two: 1. Will Putin invade? (I wrote 50%, but did not really believe it, else I'd sold shares) I was wrong, sadly. 2. Will he "win"? (I thought: probably; I mean he can make up what a "win" is and go for the "easy" part first.) I was wrong, kinda happily. AND 3. Would any mayor military victory be any good for Putin (even just the other half of Donbass)? Still a firm*: NO. - Which is why I thought "1." and did not care too much about "2.". (*updating: not that firm anymore; I think I understand better now, how Putin miscalculated; still: Njet.) Anyway: Slava Ukraina. - And Mikhael: do not get yourself shot! I brosai kurit.
How come we don't see more stocks go to zero?
My understanding of a stock price is that it directly influences how easy it is for the company to raise capital. The higher the price, the less the company has to sell to raise money. Why aren't there more situations where a stock drops for some reason, and then the resulting increase in difficulty for the company to raise money then causes it to drop further, and so on, until the company is suddenly illiquid and the stock price is just a measure of the fixed assets of the company?
Stocks\Companies listed on a major exchange would either go bankrupt or be delisted before reaching zero. I'm not an expert on unlisted "penny stocks" but I'd assume some of those do go to zero (or as close to zero as possible before the company just folds).
Often times you'll also see a reverse stock split (instead of 10 shares at $1 dollar now you have 1 share at $10 dollars) specifically so they can maintain some level of price and preserve their listing. Looking at companies market caps rather than just share price is useful in that instance
To your specific question/assumptions. Stocks don’t go to zero when the share price declines because most companies do not need to raise money at any given point in time. They often generate cash flows or have a cash balance or reserve funding. There are also other ways to raise money if needed (eg debt) and investors are usually happy to give money to companies which may be suffering from short term illiquidity but are still viable, as these are often good investments. Caveat that the illiquidity is not too messy or structural.
We see some go to zero all right, called: bankruptcy. Not just Wirecard or Enron. For many companies the "raise capital with shares"-time is at IPO. There shares are sold, capital is raised big-time. After most shares are sold- maybe all, why keep any: you sell over 51% of shares, you no longer own that company - , "capital raising" goes back to: go to bank, ask for credit line; if you have no shares anymore as collateral you argue: "the profit will pay for the interest" + the assets are collateral. (If you still have shares, this could go as collateral too. Though a bank may not value them at 1:1. ) #
The share price reflects the value of all expected dividends in the future - or the value if the company was liquidated/assets sold+debts paid - whatever is higher. (Obviously, there are finer points and more options to raise capital, and a company that won't get credit won't usu. have a very high share price. Not sure GameStop has easy access to bank credit nowadays.)
Normally when the price of something drops the demand increases, right? So normally when a stock price drops it makes it easier, not harder, for the company to raise money by selling stock. Of course, that's not what a company in trouble usually does anyway. If they need money they borrow it, either from a bank if they can, or by issuing bonds sometimes, because they want the best possible terms, which are going to come from people who insist on the best collateral they've got, and being put ahead of all the equity owners in case it doesn't work out.
When the price of something drops, the QUANTITY demanded increases, that is, how much people buy, not the demand (the curve) itself. If the price dropped because the demand curve shifted down (people don't want it as much) you need not expect the amount purchased to increase. So a price drop in stock is likely to make it harder to raise capital because you are selling the same amount of stock for less money.
Note: In cases where the supply of a stock changes, either because something spooks people into selling off, or a stock split, you can get changes in volume sold and price depending on what demand is doing.
When the price drops, demand increases. /
When demand increases, the price drops.
I feel like something is wrong here.
Maybe this is a stupid answer but: the stock doesn't go all the way to zero because the fixed assets of the company can always be sold as long as the company exists.
Up to and including the asset that it *is* a publicly traded corporation. Occasionally these rump companies with no real assets or cash flows are used for mergers or other taking-public purposes.
Is anyone familiar with the literature on adolescent cannabis use and working memory/IQ?
I care because I used cannabis heavily as an adolescent, and value my working memory and IQ. I sometimes get bummed out about it and reread the famous studies, but I don't really have the skillset to assess them properly.
Two famous ones are the Dunedin study (https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.1206820109) which found a correlation between teenage cannabis use and decreased cognitive performance in adulthood, and this American twin study (https://www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.1516648113) which found the same, but suggested the link might not be causal, since there was no difference between twins when one used cannabis and the other didn't.
Do you think adolescent cannabis use negatively affects working memory and IQ later in life? I know the answer doesn't make a difference for me now either way, but (i) I care emotionally, and (ii) it strongly affects the advice I'll give to my future teenage children.
I don't know the answer to your question, but have a couple comments that may be useful. First, my own cannabis use, which began at age 18 and has never been heavy -- once a week at its most frequent, and often much less -- has left me with the sense that weed changed my brain. It's like my brain learned some new moves from its episodes of being temporarily altered by cannabis. Mostly the new moves involve a sort of non-rational, judgment-free way of becoming absorbed in things -- a mental playfulness. I enjoy my ability to make mental cannabis moves, and experience it as a plus. Even if I were to learn that my working memory had taken a small hit in the process, I think I'd accept the trade-off. On the other hand, it does feel like what my modest cannabis use did had a pretty big impact on my brain, given the relatively few hours I spent under the influence of the drug. So that makes it quite believable to me that if someone happens to be wired so that cannabis shoves their brain in a bad direction, that brain might get shoved pretty damn far.
The other thing to keep in mind for when you have real teenagers is that their friends and their own autonomous exploration of life's possibilities are terribly important to them. If their friend group is smoking weed and having vast weed adventures together, you are taking *a lot* away from your teenager if you prevent him or her from participating in that scene. With my daughter, I ended up deciding to give her the info I had about the drug's bad effects (psychosis, possible damage to cognitive abilities) and then let her choose what to do. She laughed off the info about the drugs dangers and continued to get high. 10 years later, she seems to be doing fine in life.
Well that is one approach. Mine was to tell my daughter that if I ever found that she had used cannabis, I would find out the name of the person that gave it to her and smash his f-ing kneecaps with a large, two-handed mallet that I keep handy. (Really, I would probably just call the police, but I think that I put on a convincing performance).
The impetus for this approach was this story: https://www.nationalhealthexecutive.com/News/nhs-cannabis-clinic
"NHS opens up UK’s first ever cannabis treatment clinic
The NHS has responded to soaring levels of cannabis-induced psychosis by opening the country’s first ever cannabis treatment clinic.
The clinic is being set up in Lambeth, south London, by academics whose research found links between mental health problems and a readily available, super-strength strain of cannabis known colloquially as ‘skunk’.
Consultant adult psychiatrist and lecturer at King’s College London, Dr Marta Di Forti, is running a pilot 12-month trial with 20 patients.
Dr Di Forti called cannabis-induced psychosis a “crisis” which cannot be ignored, affecting tens of thousands of people."
She's known you her whole life, so she probably knows whether you're the kind of guy who's actually going to bust somebody's kneecaps.
Yes, she probably does. But that highlights another downside to your approach, which is that you're saying something she knows is not true. So you're modeling blustering and lying as the move to make in a tricky situation.
Well, if she was a spirited girl, as mine was, she would have smoked weed anyhow and, of course, shared it with her friends. Then, if any of them had dads like you, she'd now have shattered kneecaps, or at least a criminal record. If she was a tough, low-empathy kid, your approach upped the chances that she would grow up believing it's fine to be a bully. If she was a kid who admired and adored you, she's now at risk of marrying someone with a substantial thuggish side. If she was an intuitive kid, prone to anxiety, she would have absorbed your raging and unmanageable anxiety, set off by a single article of questionable merit, and is now more vulnerable to letting her own fears rip through her and impair her judgement as she navigates the many hard-to-think-straight-about dangers of the modern world.
Or, alternatively, she obeyed my command and now understands why teenagers are not considered competent to make decisions that seem pleasurable at first but have potentially serious, long term implications. Especially as she has seen bright children from liberal parents succumb to foolish temptation and damage their minds and bodies in pursuit of a worthless goal.
In the coming years both you and your daughter are going to see numerous bright children and parents of all stripes damaging their minds and bodies enjoying various pleasures, some of which turn out to be harmful and some of which do not, and pursuing various goals, some of which turn out to be worthwhile and some of which do not. There is no way to guarantee that you or your daughter will not end up as one of those who suffer harm. All you can do is try to make the calls that improve her odds of making it through to adulthood in good shape. Here are the things you are doing that worsen her odds:
-You are threatening to shatter the kneecaps of her teenager friends, because those are the people she would be getting weed from. So now she has to decide whether (a) the friends she loves and learns from are actually so worthless that they deserve to be crippled or (b) her father is a heartless thug. That’s a big interpersonal lose-lose for her. If she gets some weed on the sly (and I’d say chances of that are better than 50-50) and shares it with her friends, she has to live with the fact that she is now, by your standards, apparently someone deserving of kneecap shattering herself.
-You are threatening to punish other people (the ones she gets weed from) rather than her for an action she took. So you aren’t teaching her that dumb mistakes lead to bad consequences for her, you’re teaching her that daddy will remove dangers and obstacles from her path by harming others.
-You are modeling bad problem-solving strategy here because you are missing a really easy get: Most teenagers are brought to their knees by punishments involving loss of electronics — “one puff of weed and your iphone's gone for a month.” You’re modelling Work Harder not Smarter.
Some grain of salt . A large portion of studies were specifically funded to demonstrate harm. This was part of the war on drugs and building of evidence to back policy . It took other nations to study the medicinal benefits of cannabis to challenge these policies . And what we learned is that such means to direct science toward objectives suppressed valuable knowledge about the body and and entire bodily system . The endo cAnnabinoid system . This does not mean that studies are necessarily wrong , but a Significant bias has been imposed .
Cannabis is perhaps one of the most potent natural medicines that anyone can grow and utilize . This naturally threatens some businesses that have a lot of influence .
More then likely , any kind of abuse of substances that effect the bodily systems will have effects that may include long term effects .
Do you have any evidence to back up your claims of serious scientific fraud?
Fraud is one way to call it. Just talk to anyone that works in cannabis medicine . It’s not even a hidden thing . It’s common knowledge . The multitude of people working in the field over the decades have all been quite open about how funding and access has worked . I am simply
Pointing to a well known artifact and suggesting anyone looking at the art to gain insight must keep it in mind. Like, this study is from x year is there more current research that offer other insights . Because we all know and it’s well established what has occurred .
I asked if you had any actual evidence, but instead you offer innuendo, slander and hearsay.
I see, it clearly means a lot to you. I however just left a comment on social media. I am not willing to spend any time attempting to persuade you or anyone to what is widely known. I know that many might have the time and perhaps even going about with their footnotes and citation in the waiting, you know like when someone is writing papers on the subject and stuff. me...I say with a grain of salt. so if you want to be spoon fed, I suggest the local brothel or modern parenting
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
This paper has quite a few references that might help: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-of-psychiatry/article/cannabis-and-psychosis-what-do-we-know-and-what-should-we-do/D09D5E6B7A77D475B3BD63D81462BF7A
TLDR: Cannabis, especially high THC varieties, is remarkably dangerous, especially for teenagers. The advice that you should give to your children should be to avoid it at all costs.
This is not a paper but a short article with references. This doesn't answer the question posed - it's about increased chance of 'schizophrenia-like psychotic illness' and not about the impact years later on memory/IQ.
My reply address the final question - what advice should you give to your children about cannabis? Only looking at one risk (IQ and memory damage) and ignoring the other (serious mental illness) seems rather unwise to me.
I haven't seen a Meta-Analysis or similar and the results from the existing studies are inconsistent. In general, we see people recover from much more serious drug use if they don't consume any for long enough so I doubt even heavy cannabis use as a teen would have much of an impact later if you've stopped using it.
Auditioning for Mensa does get old.
I have someone close to me that suddenly developped a fear of tunnels, to the point of having panic attacks when they are in them. That comes after developing a sudden fear of large bridges (think Brooklyn bridge) 10 years earlier. Any advice/stories on that?
Tunnels and large bridge top the list for settings that people develop this kind of fear of, usually a fear associated with panic attacks. Other settings on the list are limited-access highways, especially places with heavy traffic and/or without a breakdown lane, large indoor spaces with only a few exits (malls, Target, etc.) and public convenances that will not stop on demand (buses, trains, planes). The common feature that sends panic disorder sufferers into panic mode is entrapment -- you can't instantly escape the situation no matter how badly you want to. People with panic disorder, recognizing that they are in a place of that kind, find their minds going down a sort of funnel: This would be a terrible place to have a panic attack, because if I started to panic there would be no way to escape, and then I'd lose control of the car/flip out in front of a bunch of strangers. Wow that's a scary thought. In fact, thinking about it is giving me a little bit of a panicky feeling. Oh, no, what if this feeling actually is the start of a panic attack . . . etc.
Sounds to me like your friend's core problem is more panic attacks than the particular settings that set them off. I agree with dlkf that CBT is a very effective treatment for anxiety disorders, including panic disorder. Lots of therapists claim to know how to do CBT, but your friend should look for someone who describes themselves as an anxiety disorder specialist.
If your friend goes to a psychiatrist they will likely want to put him on an SSRI. An awful lot of them seem to think most people have Prozac Deficiency Disorder. I recommend that your friend keep SSRI's as a last resort.
One of the triumphs of 20th century psychology was the realisation that etiology of irrational phobias is largely irrelevant to treatment. Exposure and response prevention is spectacularly effective whether or not you have some origin story for the fear. So rather than look for an explanation—you'll never find find one, and even if you did it wouldn't help—I'd recommend your friend seek treatment from a psychologist who specialises in CBT for fears. Treatment will probably look something like "spend more time in tunnels." In addition to addressing the immediate problem (ie tunnels), a good practitioner will be able to help develop tools and heuristics for recognising when the fear is re-emerging in a new form, and for responding in a constructive way.
Environmental, endocrinological, or immunological shift?
My friend had a similar attitude towards freeways that developed into agoraphobia. I can't say much but after about 3 to 5 months it seemed to go away. He had always had some anxiety. I wish the best to you and your friend.
This is a recent Predictive Coding review article (pre-print published on January 22, 2022).
The authors say "no comprehensive review of predictive coding theory, and especially of recent developments in this field, exists."
Until now!
This may be of interest to readers of ACX who have enjoyed Scott's articles on predictive coding.
Does anyone else have any favorite articles on predictive coding / free energy / Bayesian inference and perceptual control theory?
After reading Scott's article series I'm interested in learning more about these computational neuroscience models and their applications to neuropsychiatry and understanding the mechanism of action of psychedelics.
I'm planning to read (REBUS and the Anarchic Brain: Toward a Unified Model of the Brain Action of Psychedelics by Carhart-Harris and Friston next).
https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.12979
By the way, I like how Bill Gates' method of reading / understanding new information, suggests a predictive coding / Bayesian updating framework
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xwh88cI_d8&ab_channel=Quartz -
"It’s fun to say OK this is where this belongs, and does this contradict something I knew before, and I’d better look that up, I’d better figure that out - it really bothers you when you read something, and there’s some inconsistency”
Ie. if there is surprise (ie. a prediction error - a signal that the new information is different to your priors), then you consciously consider whether to update.
And -
"If I disagree with the book, sometimes it takes me a long time to read the book, because I’m writing so much in the margin - it’s actually kind of frustrating - oh please say something I agree with, so I can get through to the end of this book"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTFy8RnUkoU&ab_channel=Quartz
Would you be interested in a prediction contest for the War in Ukraine?
I'm thinking of modeling it off the contest Sam Marks and Eric Neyman set up for Scott's predictions for 2022 (if either / both of you wants to help with this, let me know). I've been putting together a list of relevant questions, including from the prediction markets. If you have a question that you would particularly like to see, you can reply here, especially if it's not a question already on the market.
What do you think yours would add over Metaculus'?
This is a not-completely-overlapping community and so it would be interesting to see if it has different results.
What I'm thinking of is more like your yearly predictions than Metaculus: a collection of predictions made at a single time and are evaluated together at a specified later date, instead of a collection of markets that change in real time and evaluate at a bunch of different dates. These seem like sufficiently different things to be worth having both.
I would ask for 1 significant digit of probability instead of picking a number between 1 & 99. So round to the nearest 10% if your estimate is between 10% & 90%, to the nearest 1% if your estimate is between 1% & 10% or 90% & 99%, to the nearest 0.1% if your estimate is between 0.1% and 1% or 99% & 99.9%. Etc. This would make it easier for the prediction market to evaluate unlikely events.
There are some specific questions that would be different. For example, I'm interested in a question on whether or when there will be hyperinflation in Russia.
I would also be interested in hearing people's estimations on a few unevaluatable questions, like "Ukraine maintains a morale advantage throughout a war". In order to be evaluatable, the statement has to have direct contact with empirical observation. These only form part of someone's web of belief (as per Quine), and it would be interesting to see estimates for further removed statements as well.
I have a collection of my own predictions about the war at the bottom of this reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/t5hi09/some_thoughts_on_ukraine/ . I would also include the recommended questions from the last section of Zvi's Ukraine Prediction Markets post: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2022/02/28/ukraine-post-1-prediction-markets/ .
I'm thinking I should write a living will but I know very little about the pros and cons of various medical interventions. Any recommendations? If it's any help, I think your brain turning on you (e.g. paranoid dementia) is a really bad outcome.
TL:DR Standard living wills are near useless. Identify someone who you want to make decisions for you if you are incapacitated and make sure they understand your goals of care and acceptable outcomes.
Source: I’m a trauma/critical care physician in the US and chair of the hospital ethics committee for over a decade. I deal with this stuff a lot.
The problem with living wills in general is two-fold, neither of which is improved by knowing more about the exact pros and cons of medical interventions. Firstly, the vast majority of living will forms whether they are created by a lawyer using state-specific language or something more global like the Five Wishes ( https://thelastvisit.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/5-Wishes-Advanced-Planning-Guide1.pdf ) they start off with “In the case of an irreversible terminal condition I would like . . . .” Which sounds all well and good except that without defining the term “irreversible” and using the standard definition of “terminal” to mean “fatal during that admission to the hospital” the number of absolutely irreversible terminal conditions is quite small. For example doing CPR on patients with known fatal metastatic cancer still has a hospital discharge rate of ~2%. So is cardiac arrest in a patient with metastatic cancer a “fatal, terminal condition”? To me it is, but maybe not if someone wants any chance to see their kid get married next week. More broadly, there are a lot of conditions that have a moderately good chance at survival a small chance at good recovery but a high chance of severe long-term disability (in young people this is generally things like head injury, high spinal cord injury, and stroke) which many people would not want to live with but are not really covered under “terminal and irreversible”. For example, if you get into a car accident and stop breathing for a while and suffer anoxic brain injury to the point of being comatose in the hospital there is approximately a 17% chance that if we perform a tracheostomy and feeding tube on you and send you to a nursing home you will have a “good neurologic outcome“ at six months. Unfortunately a good neurologic outcome means that you are awake and probably can recognize people and interact but not take care of yourself. There is maybe a 1 to 2% chance that you’ll be a functional adult under these circumstances. How does this fit in with your desires?
This brings up the second point of specificity. This also is not fixed by knowing the pros and cons of medical interventions in general because we can do the same intervention for multiple indications and they have different pros and cons. For example I mentioned a surgically placed feeding tube and tracheostomy. In a patient with facial fractures and a mild to moderate closed head injury these procedures allow us to keep the patient alive during their time their jaw is wired shut, allows us to operate on their face safely, and are generally removed in 6-12 weeks when the patient walks back into our office and asked us to. Obviously these procedures are useful and indicated in the situation. Conversely in an 80 year old with end-stage dementia whose family demands prolonged care these procedures allow us to discharge the patient to a long-term care facility but have been shown not to actually prolong actuarial life. In that patient with anoxic brain injury I mentioned earlier it allows us to give him the six months to get that 17% chance of waking up. I could go on and on with examples but that is the point. A living will is highly unlikely to end up specifically applicable to the situation you find yourself in and therefore knowing what medical interventions are indicated and their risks/benefits in every situation is both almost impossible and fundamentally unhelpful.
A much better strategy is to identify what are known as your “goals of care” — the outcomes you are willing to accept and generally how much risk you are willing to take for the potential outcomes. Then identify a surrogate decision maker who will be willing to take the time to understand your goals of care and to communicate them to the medical staff if you are admitted to the hospital and lack capacity to make decisions. This btw is the most useful part of the standard Living Will form. If you do not legally identify a surrogate decision maker it will default to your “next of kin” which is somewhat state specific. The conversations with the medical staff on this basis are much more fruitful and generally take the form of:
Medical staff: “John has X condition. He has Y chance of survival and Z chance of this long term disability if we pursue aggressive medical therapy.”
Surrogate: “He would not want to live with that long term disability.”
Medical staff: “Well he has X chance of escaping with minimal disability but he would need to go through 3-6 months in a nursing home for that chance.”
Surrogate: “He told me that he wouldn’t want to go through that for such a low chance of meaningful recovery.”
MS: “OK, we would like you to talk to our palliative care team for end of life planning.”
Sorry this is so long. I’d be happy to answer any questions if my thoughts are unclear.
Thanks very much for such a long thoughtful reply. Can the "goals of care" be put in a written form? I trust my partner but there's a good chance I'll outlive him.
Yes. And doing this for your surrogate can be very helpful but you definitely need the surrogate to be able to translate that into actionable decisions. If you are afraid that you were going to outlive your surrogate, have a next in line.
Thanks, any recommendations for a guide for translating my own intuitions into goals of care? E.g. that 17% chance of being able to recognise people doesn't appeal to me. But that's only one case.
Given your knowledge and experience, (really valuable to read thanks) have you decided on a Living Will for yourself?
My wife is also a physician and is my surrogate. We have had long discussions about what our goals of care would be and I feel comfortable with her decision making therefore I have not felt it necessary to formalize a Living Will. If I wanted my surrogate to be anyone other than my wife (which is automatic) I would have done one.
Do you have a child or partner that you trust to act in your best interests? (child might be better than partner, if you're worried about age-related illnesses). You'll probably get higher fidelity by having in-person conversations with them and writing a document that gives them medical power of attorney, rather that trying to specify in advance the precise things you want to happen in every hypothetical.
Statistically there's a good chance I'll outlive my partner, kids are too young now, and I love my siblings but there's one who once he gets an idea in his head it's very hard to dislodge it and that could cause hard family dynamics.
I'd suggest you go with your partner now and involve your kids when they're old enough.
I don’t have the link but I know there was a foundation creating information and videos on this topic so people would be able to make better informed choices.
Also random question - what’s the best analysis on the accuracy of prediction markets? There must be a ton to analysis - what’s the best?
For example - credit default swaps. Is Russia going to default? Last I checked the cost to insure $10 million in Russian sovereign debt was $4 million. We must have a ton of data.
Some days ago, the Ukraine government announced that men between the ages of 18 and 60 are forbidden from leaving the nation, while younger men, children, and women of all ages are all allowed to leave. The reasoning, according to the New York Post, is that 18-60 year olds are expected to stay and fight the Russians:
>The Ukrainian authorities “were nice, not rude, but they said that men have a duty to defend the country,” said Erzsebet Kovacs, 50, at a train station.
Per my book, An Empirical Introduction to Youth, they have self-owned by drawing the line too high. The Ukrainian government is missing out on about a million fully grown, high T young men aged 15-17 who would certainly make better fighters than any inexperienced man over 30.
According to Vegetius, an Ancient Roman who lived around 400 AD, it was ancient custom to recruit boys into the military at the beginning of puberty, “as soon as they were of age to carry arms.” If the Ukrainians did like the ancients and lowered the threshold to “stronger than a woman” they’d have another million 13-14 year olds ready to fight.
It’s even somewhat ahistorical for today. In certain societies, children are considered adults from the age of 14 or 15. A young person of 15 who joins an armed group can therefore be considered as an adult soldier according to his own culture. Current international law in force fixes 15 years as the minimum age for recruitment in the army and participation in conflicts. 48 countries today allow enlistment of 16 or 17 year olds. That includes the US.
So why would the Ukrainian government self-own like this? Probably because of the UN’s commitment to ageism. The International Convention on the “Rights” of the “Child” fixes 18 as the age of adulthood. The UN crybullies that grown, hairy, 6 ft tall 17 year olds are “child soldiers.” While a blind eye is turned to the US enlisting 17 year olds with parental consent, it’s reasonable to expect the Ukrainian government to kow-tow to international ageism when they’re relying on good press and any enlistment right now means immediate fighting, not bootcamp and a peace-time station.
Why is the UN and the Western press so ageist? As I showed in my book, it appears that ageism is mainly driven by the desires of the professional managerial class, especially those who reside in universities. The point is to reduce youth to schoolchildren who are seen as needing to be at school all day, under the control and management of the PMC, who are compensated for their manufactured utility. The UN and its associated NGOs are filled with a rotating cast of academics and similar types. They are the people who run the day-to-day, and while they may not be sovereign, they have been extended the liberty of pushing ageism as long as it doesn’t get in the way of anyone who might be considered their employer.
Consequently, the media takes the liberty to fill people’s heads with the idea that a child is anyone who is under 18 or 25, while ignoring the American military-industrial complex’s predatory behavior regarding teenagers, i.e. recruiting 17 year olds, sending recruiters to high schools, “stealing” PMC chickens as it were. This is ignored because the military industrial complex is in fact more powerful than and even employs the educational-infantilization complex.
Had Ukraine ordered 16 year olds to stay, it probably would have been ignored after being briefly excused as permitted under national law and justified due to the dire nature of the conflict, on the orders of MIC and State Department people. Nonetheless, the PMC’s goal is to make people internalize ageism, and indeed it does appear that they have made the westernized Ukrainian government internalize ageism to the point of self-owning. So it goes.
For hyperlinks see: https://criticalagetheory.substack.com/p/ukraine-government-self-owns-with?s=w
Interesting comment. I agree that an untrained 17 year old would make a better soldier than an untrained 60 year old. In a lot of countries a 17 year old can enlist, but a 60 year old cannot.
> According to Vegetius, an Ancient Roman who lived around 400 AD, it was ancient custom to recruit boys into the military at the beginning of puberty, “as soon as they were of age to carry arms.” If the Ukrainians did like the ancients and lowered the threshold to “stronger than a woman” they’d have another million 13-14 year olds ready to fight.
Sorry, but blindly following ancient Romans on social issues is an idiotic argument.
Are you also proposing to restart slavery?
Ignore him. This guy has a bee in his bonnet about brain development, age of majority and that teenagers should be classed as legal adults with full freedoms and rights at around age 15 when puberty is finished in boys (he sets the bound at 14 for girls) and thus the brain and body are both fully mature and finished.
He had an entire series of threads about this over on TheMotte sub-reddit. Short version of all this - he doesn't care a straw about Ukraine, he is saddling up his hobbyhorse about how teenagers are LITERAL SLAVES nowadays by being forced to go to school and be under the control of their parents.
@Deiseach,
“JB” (JuliusBranson and multiple other nom de plumes) was also banned at DSL for multiple shenanigans, he started with “teenagers are truly oppressed”, moved on to “blacks have it too good”, then “Wouldn’t it have been great if Hitler won?”, but it was his pricklyness towards other commenters and multiple “sock puppets” that finally got him banned.
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,2026.0.html
I'm not at all surprised to hear it, Plumber. If he stuck to his original contention about "the brain does not, in fact, remain in an undeveloped state until the age of 25" then this would be a reasonable debate to have.
He just went off on several tangents about oppression and then flamed out in "you are all too stupid to recognise and appreciate my genius".
>He just went off on several tangents about oppression and then flamed out in "you are all too stupid to recognise and appreciate my genius".
I think it's reasonable to get a little frustrated with people who think a misremembered n ~ 1 anecdote trumps scientific scholarship and a community that largely enables that kind of shadowy thinking as equal to reasonable thought.
Flaming out is counterproductive but don't act like you have no idea why I thought that the people trolling me at The Motte were being unreasonable. They were being unreasonable, I just shouldn't have responded with the same.
I'm unsure what your point is here, Ame. Would you like the government to tell you what to do for 40 hours a week, under the threat of force if you don't comply, while at the same time taking away your right to drive, own property, vote, and work for a living, among luxury things like the privilege to watch R rated movies, drink alcohol, smoke, and so on, while assigning you a "guardian" that will make all life decisions for you, control all of your economic activity, and freely punish you as he sees fit with extrajudicial beatings and confinement?
I'd assume not. That means you recognize that this is wrong. You've seen enough by now to know that the brain develops at the end of puberty and that the "teenage brain" is merely a myth that justifies those extreme violations of human rights, similar to the myth that Black slaves were a "slave race" or that women had "childish brains."
So why the ageism, Ms. Ame_Damnee?
Yes, it is wrong to do those to adults, who are fully mentally developed. Children are not mentally developed. Teenagers are still not mentally developed, regardless of whatever studies you might brandish. So what if you can find a study that agrees with you? I can find a study that suggests vaccines cause testicular cancer. I'm certain.
It's not a study, it's the whole literature, 250+ studies cited in my book. You're throwing away all of science for ageism. Why? This sort of self-owning commitment to ageism is what my post is about, ironically.
When I was 15 I thought I could literally kill people with curses and was friends with someone who believed they were an honest-to-god werewolf. Were we dumb kids coping with bad life circumstances through ridiculous childish fantasies, or were we psychotic? Because if you want me to take your "teenagers are adults and just as mentally competent as adults" line to its conclusion, most teenagers would be considered to be SEVERELY mentally ill with every justifiable reason to say so.
EDIT: "You are throwing away all of science for ageism"
Please, stop, I need to breathe at some point.
Ah, yes, the great anti-slavery symbol of... child labor.
I think this one should be filed under "Self-parodies, unconscious".
I don't support "child labor," I support extending the right to freely participate in the economy to all young adults. If you're calling young adults "children," that's problematic in that it seems that you took nothing from the post and decided to just respond with pure ageism. "Child" is like the n-word for youth. I'm not saying it's necessarily as bad as the n-word, but it's the closest thing to it for ageists. So responding by calling youth children is analogous to responding to a piece which promotes racial equality by calling Black people the n-word.
I also support the right of children to work. I do think that calling young adults children does serve as somewhat of a conversation stopper. They also use the term "kids" for people who are into their twenties. They are not kids and that's thinking more in words than with reasons, I would say.
"Child is like the n-word for youth"
Please, keep these lines up, I might wake up my insomniac roommate.
No, the point is to show that the cult of the 18th birthday is ahistorical nonsense, not to blindly follow Romans on social issues.
Bring back chimney sweeps, is it? I agree that the younger lads fit better up the chimney.
I am confused: 1. You say it is bad NOT to recruit teenagers as soldiers (and workers, I guess). That may be so (Bryan Caplan is said to like "child -labor" - anyone knows where?) - but:
2. You seem to disapprove of "the American military-industrial complex’s predatory behavior regarding teenagers, i.e. recruiting 17 year olds". Why say "predatory" when you think "really smart and the right thing to do"?
That all said: Ukraine is not exactly full of young people. Low birth rate for over 30 years. One-child-families are not as eager to send their only child into a war, that will have much higher casualties than what the super-rich US-Army met in Iraq/Afghanistan.
Military: Far better to have 5 trained soldiers with 20 Javelins/Stinger/... than 20 Soldiers with 5 Panzerfäuste. The Russian tank will not care whether a 15 or 50 year old fired.
Or possibly they have human compassion and don't want to traumatise children.
Ignoring the moral element, in a modern war physical strength isn't especially important, but emotional maturity, good decision making skills and ability to cope with high pressure situations is. Which a 60 year old will be superior at than a teenager.
This reply is problematic in that it seems that you took nothing from the post and decided to just respond with pure ageism. "Child" is like the n-word for youth. I'm not saying it's necessarily as bad as the n-word, but it's the closest thing to it for ageists. So responding by calling youth children is analogous to responding to a piece which promotes racial equality by calling Black people the n-word.
>but emotional maturity, good decision making skills and ability to cope with high pressure situations is.
In my book I conclusively showed that teenagers 15+ are as good at these things as 25 year olds, and the gap between 13-14 year olds and youth on these metrics is less than or equal to gaps between equal groups like races and genders.
"Ignoring the moral element, in a modern war physical strength isn't especially important"
This statement is incorrect. Modern soldiers carry significantly heavier loads, for longer periods of time, than historical soldiers.
If you're analysing along these lines, why exclude women from the draft? Sure, they'd be far less useful in hand-to-hand combat, but that's not a common feature of modern combat, and indeed there are countries out there that have the draft for women as well as men, eg. Israel.
The strength and endurance requirements of modern militaries are, if I understand correctly, mostly about being able to do long treks with heavy supplies, but that isn't particularly relevant either in defensive urban combat.
Hand-to-hand combat is still a common feature of urban conflict. Not every engagement will go hand-to-hand, but it happens often enough that you wouldn't want to have your forces at a disadvantage in that type of combat.
Carrying those Javelins and firing them (or other guns) seems to require some physical strength (as in upper body muscles) - and we've all seen those funny videos where (often female) civilians hurt themselves badly on firing a gun. That said, there are women fighting in the US and Israeli army, I heard. And Ukrainian ladies are no push-overs, lol. Any volunteers will be given a gun, I guess, even if under 18 or XX. Still, you better care for appearances - we all love Ukrainians now, cuz they fight the "just war the brave way", no child-soldiers. And we see women with kids as refugees - not young illiterate chads with dreams of a BMW shining in their eyes.
First off, I want to say that whatever I write, my intention is not to be derogatory to your argument, which - the way you put it - isn't bad. I'd agree that men between 15 - 17 would perhaps make better soldiers than 60 year olds. Brain plasticity is quite high still in that age, so you'd have a learning machine on your hands which you can mold into shape.
Having said that, though, I think your interpretation of the reality is at best uncharitable. Why would it be a form of discrimination against young people that they aren't conscripted into war? If anything, you're privileging them by not having to take an AK-47 into their sweaty, pubescent hands and march into battle.
I would give you a point, though, in saying that we're infantilizing youth and that this might be a manifestation of it. Slapping a label "ageism" on it, though, is something I wouldn't do, because I don't think the big intention is to harm or exclude those people (that's how I intuitively understand any kind of discrimination without looking up the exact definition). It has probably a lot more to do with moral aspects and cultural traditions than people being hell-bent on making the lives of a certain group miserable.
I would have this beef with all sorts of -isms, by the way. If you have a job that requires physical prowess, you are perfectly fine to "discriminate" against most obese people. If you have a job that requires good reaction times, you are perfectly fine to "discriminate" against most older people. And so on.
> Why would it be a form of discrimination against young people that they aren't conscripted into war? If anything, you're privileging them by not having to take an AK-47 into their sweaty, pubescent hands and march into battle.
15-17 year olds aren't pubescent. That aside, it is discrimination. You may view it as positive, but saying "no 15-17 year olds" in the military is discrimination. Maybe they're taking volunteers that age right now, but allowing that age is, as you inferred, a manifestation of broader anti-youth ageism. Like how sexism got women off the Titanic, sometimes it works in their favor, but they're still the ones who are mainly oppressed.
>Slapping a label "ageism" on it, though, is something I wouldn't do, because I don't think the big intention is to harm or exclude those people (that's how I intuitively understand any kind of discrimination without looking up the exact definition).
I think you have to look at the broader social context, like sexism and the Titanic.
>It has probably a lot more to do with moral aspects and cultural traditions than people being hell-bent on making the lives of a certain group miserable.
I'm fairly certain I know where ageism comes from, I explained it in the post.
>I would have this beef with all sorts of -isms, by the way. If you have a job that requires physical prowess, you are perfectly fine to "discriminate" against most obese people. If you have a job that requires good reaction times, you are perfectly fine to "discriminate" against most older people. And so on.
In this case they're not discriminating based on anything real. They're discriminating based on the purely symbolic, i.e. time since birth. That's why ageism is wrong and meritocracy isn't.
I get it, discriminating against based on arbitrary age categories seem, well, arbitrary. It must be frustrating to see all these instances of ageism in the world go unnoticed and the perpetrators unashamedly pursuing their evil agenda.
Anyway, sorry for the bit of sarcasm at the end, but I don't think any further discussion will be productive since you seem to already know what's up. But I'm happy I could provide a medium for you to justify your beliefs and share your problems. If you want to make victims out of those poor youths, you sure go ahead and do so. Many of them will be thankful, I'm sure.
I'm just going to drop this essay about meritocracy as an answer to your last line: https://aeon.co/ideas/a-belief-in-meritocracy-is-not-only-false-its-bad-for-you
Ah, yes, I was wondering when the grievance studies field would reach this stage. All The Last Wars At Once continues to be the most prescient piece of dystopian fiction.
This is a bit uncharitable, isn't it? Youth have extremely serious "grievances." You can't just reduce that to some absurd story.
They may, or they may not. Black people in the US have extremely serious grievances which should be addressed, but this doesn't justify grievance studies.
What do you mean by grievance studies? Why is it bad for me to write a blog exploring the ways in which youth are oppressed?
1. Grievance studies is any sociological field that revolves around finding new, exciting ways in which to divide people into warring factional groups full of animus with each other who see the other side as The Hated Foe using dubious pseudo-logic.
2. Your primary concerns seem to be along the lines of:
-13-year olds can't be sent to die in a war.
-13-year olds have to go to school and can't start working on an assembly line right out of elementary school.
Calling this "oppression" is frankly laughable. You could make an argument that a lack of child labor and child soldiers is a sign of Western decadence, but using the language of grievance studies for this is so comedic I can't possibly take you seriously. If you want an answer to why your writing might be bad, however: what's your feelings on the age of consent? Is forbidding a *loving, consensual relationship* between a pedophile and a 14-year old oppression as well?
>1. Grievance studies is any sociological field that revolves around finding new, exciting ways in which to divide people into warring factional groups full of animus with each other who see the other side as The Hated Foe using dubious pseudo-logic.
That's not what I'm doing, I'm just recognizing that youth are severely oppressed in that the government tells youth what to do for 40 hours a week, under the threat of force if they don't comply, while at the same time taking away their right to drive, own property, vote, and work for a living, among luxury things like the privilege to watch R rated movies, drink alcohol, smoke, and so on, while assigning them a "guardian" that will make all life decisions for them, control all of your economic activity, and freely punish them as he sees fit with extrajudicial beatings and confinement.
I'm pointing out that this extreme oppression is justified by the false narrative that youth are essentially children, despite their adult appearances, with "developing brains." This is unscientific and wrong.
Then I'm pointing out that this false narrative seems to exist to support the material desires of the professional managerial class, based on my analysis of its origin and spread.
Now you can understand that my post is about how the Ukraine government has internalized this ageist false narrative to their own detriment. It's not about handouts for youth, it's about truth and justice, which might mean making all young men stay and fight the invaders, not just the young men who are above the arbitrary PMC age when high school ends in the US. I'm like a feminist who supports the ERA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Rights_Amendment
The Germans tried this. You’ll recall the last photos of Hitler.
https://www.warrelics.eu/forum/attachments/photos-papers-propaganda-third-reich/599635d1385187317-adolf-hitler-last-pictures-who-took-them-fuhrer-shaking-hands-hitler-youth-soldiers.jpg
It doesn’t work.
So, I guess I played "traditional" prediction markets on Ukraine by moving my money around, warning some friends, etc. If I wanted to get involved in actual prediction markets what would be some good first steps? How much of an investment is it?
I want to become one of those people who has thirty different bumper stickers on their car, but I want it to be about something ridiculous that no one would ever seriously put bumper stickers on their car about. Right now, my best idea is sporks. "My other untensil is a spork." One of those white ovals with black text that just says "SPORK". "Coexist"-style, but with sporks to make up the lines. Maybe something styled like a political sticker.
Right now I'm still thinking up ideas while I save up enough money to print enough one-off magnets. Does anyone have a suggestion?
"This Lane Kinda Sucks"
"C + I + G + X - M + 3.8"
"Glove Box Contains No Cash"
"Well... We're Late"
"This Is Not A Bumper Sticker"
"OBEY KAT DENNINGS"
Take your 30 favourite non-canon 'ships in various media and make a bumper sticker for each of them :D
"Lucas was right!" referring to the Lucas Critique in economics.
"FEWER for discrete, LESS for continuous"
"0.9999 recurring = 1"
"Gravity: it's not just a good idea, it's a law"
"Feudalism: it was invented by 16th century lawyers"
"Year-Month-Day is the only correct order"
The "0.9999 recurring = 1" proof for me was 1/9 = 0.1111..., and 9 * 1/9 = 1, and 9 * 0.1111... = 0.9999..., and so therefore 0.9999... = 1.
This in turn made the calculus limits thing seem more credible.
The word spork has become somewhat of a meme making fun of nerdy "random" kids: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/katy-t3h-pengu1n-of-d00m, such it that it feels like exactly the word someone that intentionally wants to countersignal about bumper signals would pick. This would cause me to stereotype you in an unfavorable way, much like I would roll my eyes at someone who refers to a sport as "sportsball".
Damn it! It's the 47 of topics. I'll need to spend some time hitting the random article button on wikipedia.
I have been reading recently about Gerald Bull and his space-gun, project Babylon. There is something deeply captivating about the almost comic-book story of a man so hellbent to pursue his vision for humanity's future that he is willing to side with a dictator and ultimately face assassination. I'm romanticizing some of course, but still. On that subject though, I have learned that there is still someone carrying the space-gun torch!
Just as Bull came out of project HARP, John Hunter came out of Super-HARP to create a company called Greenlaunch (formerly Quicklaunch) that aims to use a a light gas gun to put small payloads into orbit for very low costs. I have no real motivation for sharing this except I think it's super cool and more people should know. It bothers me too that they have apparently received comparatively little funding when start-ups like spin-launch are working on (it seems?) inferior concepts, but with more support.
John Hunter gave a talk at Google back in 2009 explaining the concept and advantages of light-gas guns but from checking the site it seems like things have moved at a crawl since then. I don't know what the rules on posting links are but I'm placing it below. That's my factoid for this Open Thread anyway. Happy hunting!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IXYsDdPvbo
VT, I read Frederick Forsythe's novel The Fist Of God back in the mid-'90s. The first 40 or pages deal with Gerald Bull, and, as is typical of Forsythe's novels, it's hard to tell where the fact ends and the fiction begins. But in any case, it was a very good read.
I've heard about this book. Planning to give it a look. Thanks!
The "strong Ukranian resistance" is a fantasy. Russia could take out all of Kiev's political headquarters within 15 minutes using its total domination of Ukranian airspace, in the same way that the US did during the "shock and awe" phase of its invasion of Iraq. Putin has wisely chosen not to do so because he needs a legitimate government to negotiate a settlement with rather than the total chaos created by the US when it decapitated SH's government. Insofar as the 40 mile long column of tanks and soldiers unable to penetrate into Kiev... that would be laughable if I hadn't heard it from so many otherwise intelligent people. Those tank units could roll into the Maidan in an afternoon. Do you really think poorly armed untrained civilians could withstand several divisions of well disciplined soldiers backed by 100's of tanks? Utterly ridiculous! Unlike W. Bush, Putin understands what a mess it would be trying to occupy chaotic cities with a hostile citizenry. If anyone had listened to him directly rather than taking our media at face value, they'd have heard that P's objectives are to neutralize the military, not mess with private citizens.
He invaded Ukraine only after Biden called the non-entry of Ukraine into NATO non-negotiable, and Levensky mentioned that he might want nuclear arms.
When you look at the steady eastern expansion of NATO and the arming of Poland and Romania with nuclear rockets, was it so unreasonable for Putin to draw a red line concerning Ukraine's future NATO membership? What was America's response to Russian ICBMs 70 miles from our shores? Do we seriously want to risk war with a nuclear armed opponent over the right of Ukraine to join NATO? That's madness!
If cooler heads prevail, there's a peaceful way out of this mess where no one loses face. Demand that Russia withdraw all troops from Ukraine. Declare Ukraine neutral and surround it with a UN Peacekeeping force that would stand in the way of any invasion and not permit the entry of any new weapons. This has been a successful strategy to achieve peace in the past... the divided island of Greek and Turkish Cyprus comes to mind, though many other examples could be given. These days who even knows what the issues that were creating all the trouble back then? Let's stop the blame game. World war is the enemy and our mutual survival ought to be our motivation. Let's all live to see another spring.
"Those tank units could roll into the Maidan in an afternoon. Do you really think poorly armed untrained civilians could withstand several divisions of well disciplined soldiers backed by 100's of tanks? Utterly ridiculous! "
Poe's law would seem to apply here; I can't tell whether this is a mindkilled Putin apoligist or just a troll.
The 150,000 trained full-time soldiers of the Ukrainian army, many with recent combat experience thanks to Russia's last invasion, backed by 900,000 trained reservists, armed with tens of thousands of anti-tank rockets and missiles (and 800+ of their own modern tanks), can absolutely withstand "several divisions" of "well-disciplined" soldiers backed by "100's" of tanks. Especially when the attacking divisions are channeled along the few paved roads through a hundred kilometers of Ukrainian spring mud, with crap logistics, into hostile urban areas.
One might as well ridicule the very concept of the people of Stalingrad and Leningrad standing up to crack German Panzer Divisions.
And, in the spirit of "pics or it didn't happen", here are verified pics of 902 Russian military vehicles, including 143 main battle tanks, destroyed or captured by the people you write off as "poorly-trained unarmed civilians"
https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-documenting-equipment.html
I am certain it was as inconceivable to Vladimir Putin as it is to John L. here that Russian tanks wouldn't have rolled into the Maidan on the first day, that Russian MiGs wouldn't have ruled the sky from the first hour. Reality, and the Ukrainians, had different ideas. And sensible people update their beliefs based on new evidence.
My reading of the situation is that for whatever reason, Russia doesn't have a competent fighting force. Apparently the Russian footsoldiers don't have night vision goggles, GPS or secure communications. There are reports of looting and fuel shortages. Trucks that haven't been maintained. Basically Incompetence, corruption or pro Ukraine views in the provisions and logistics. For whatever reason, the Russians have really bungled the logistics, and many of the soldiers aren't that well trained. Ukraine has an army. Smaller than the Russian army, but apparently more competent.
So your contention is that Russia has decided to not win this war as quickly as they can to accomplish... ??? If Russia could have established air dominance they would have done it.
Based on your analysis of the situation I don't think you are very informed on the current state of the conflict.
The column of armor outside of Ukraine isn't stopped their because it has been unable to penetrate the defense of the city. Its stopped because of logistical failings on the part of russian war planners. They don't have the necessary supplies to move that column of vehicles forward. Additionally the ground in the area isnt able to support heavy vehicles off road. Another failing of Russian planning.
Ukraine is not defended by " poorly armed untrained civilians" but by a modern military that has been fighting a war since 2014. They are supplied by Western allies with billions of dollars worth of modern equipment. Also there is little evidence that "several divisions of well disciplined soldiers backed by 100's of tanks" have actually attacked Kyiv. Russian infantry discipline has clearly been lacking - they are under supplied with food, have been abandoning their vehicles, and are not willing/able to properly defend armored support.
Here is an interesting and fairly short read on the composition of the Russian military:
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/explainer-russian-conscription-reserve-and-mobilization
tl;dr, the Russian military has a lot of man-power, but a lot of those people have very little training an aren't likely to fight effectively.
Note: The source (ISW) seems to be more hawkish, possibly "neo-conservative". The assessment seems reasonable to me, but some people might be more skeptical of the source.
Hi Ryan L, Thanks for your response and the link. I'm not really qualified to respond intelligently to all the technical information, though perhaps it underestimates the experience gained from Russias involvement in Syria where they were successful in achieving their military goals. I'm not in a position to gauge how the air war is going though I haven't heard of any Ukrainian planes that survived through the first 2 days of the invasion.
Poland and Romania are not armed with nuclear rockets.
I stand corrected ab out Poland but Romania has them.https://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/news/us-moves-nuclear-weapons-from-turkey-to-romania/
Interesting, but it is an article from 2016, relying on anonymous sources, and officials are quoted in it as denying that. Hardly an ironclad evidence that there are nukes in Romania in 2022. But even if true, those would not be Romanian nukes, but American nukes on Romanian soil.
No European NATO member is. The entire US nuclear arsenal in Europe, and some fraction of the French, consists of gravity bombs to be delivered by F-16s or the national equivalent. The remainder of the European-based nukes are on British or French submarines.
Even that would hardly be reassuring, but here's another link https://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/news/us-moves-nuclear-weapons-from-turkey-to-romania/
My understanding of the progression of the war is based not on taking the media at face value, but on counting up abandoned, captured, and destroyed vehicles, and by that measure the Ukranian Army is having an absolute field day. Hundreds and hundreds of Russian vehicles so far. This is not from media reports, it's from images of the burnt-out vehicles. You can find and review them yourself if you're so inclined. Putin may still win, but it would be a pyrrhic victory with insane costs.
In the short-term, Russia can easily afford losing equipment at a 2:1 ratio, which is about what's been happening.
Pictures are anecdotal. If you want to know what's actually happening overall you can look at maps instead. https://twitter.com/GrayConnolly/status/1500911070156062720
If you'd like to send me links I'll view them even though in a world of photoshop you can't necessarily trust pictures. But honestly, that's not the point. It's not important how the war is going or even what precipitated it. Everyone should focus on how to end it. When 2 nuclear powers with the ability to end life on earth just keep upping the ante, we all have a stake in getting out of this terrible mess. If things continue to go south it won't just be a sad situation for Ukraine. Everyone on this board and everyone they love or don't love will die terrible deaths. Please comment on the peace proposal I advanced in my initial post and give your own peace proposals.
It's certainly still possible to win through attrition, which is why a lot of serious commentators are saying "Ukraine is doing really well... but at some point the Russians will probably regroup and start pushing forwards again." The question is if they can win before their logistics, economy, or morale problems make it impossible to keep the army going.
Also, I wouldn't consider modern tanks or fighter jets to be "fodder" - they're expensive and can take a long time to replace, especially if your industry is currently getting strangled by sanctions.
I don't think so. Nobody wins a war slowly and painfully if he can do it quickly and at much lower cost in blood and treasure. (Not to mention the significantly increased cost of looking ineffectual to rivals and allies alike the longer it takes.) The most probable reason Russia hasn't taken Kiev or Kharkhiv yet is the simplest one: because it hasn't been able to.
And no, Putin doesn't need an intact Ukrainian governmetn with which to negotiate, any more than the Allies needed Hitler and Goering alive in May of 1945. It is unlikely Putin wants to negotiate anything, anyway. Most likely his initial aim was simply to decapitate the Ukrainian government, kill, capture, or drive into hiding most of the top leadership, and install puppets more agreeable to Russian interests, and there's no reason to think that isn't still his aim.
In principle he needs a functioning bureaucracy further down from the top if he wants to maintain order, but I doubt he loses much sleep over the importance of protecting the lives of the Assistant Secretary for Highways or the shop steward for Local 666 of the Pipefitters' Union. Those people are easily found when you need them, and they work for money, so it isn't especially important to win their hearts and minds -- giving them bread, particularly in a post-war country that is wrecked and starving, is good enough.
Hi CP, I appreciate your response though I don't think the present situation is comparable to WW2 or Hitler, nor was Vietnam or Afghanistan or Iraq or numerous other wars that attempted to use it to justify actions we've come to regret.
If anyone had actually listened directly to Putin they'd have known that his only demand was that Ukraine not join NATO. He called it a red line. Biden called that non-negotiable and Putin invaded. That's the long and the short of it. Turn Ukraine into a neutral state and Putin will withdraw. Even if you doubt that, shouldn't it at least be tried? Mutual survival should be our common ground. Kindly read the peace proposal in my initial post and I'll welcome your response.
It's not true that Putin's only demand was that Ukraine not join NATO. Among other things, he wanted 1) a commitment to not expand NATO *at all*; 2) a return to 1997-level NATO troop deployments (which would mean NATO forces leaving central and eastern Europe, and maybe even reducing troop levels in western Europe depending on exact interpretation); 3) an end to any military activity (presumably including joint exercises) in eastern Europe, central Asia, and the Caucasus; 4) restrictions on missile deployments.
https://intellinews.com/russia-issues-a-eight-point-list-of-demands-229829/?source=russia
The Biden administration actually signaled a willingness to negotiate on missile deployments. I hope you can understand why the other demands are non-starters.
Also, if all Putin wanted was to keep Ukraine out of NATO, he basically just had to maintain the status quo. NATO won't add members until they settle territorial disputes, e.g. Russia's claims over Crimea and the situation in Donbass, via "peaceful means".
https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_24733.htm
Hi Ryan L. Putin's demands after he invaded included what you've mentioned. Before then, he'd only asked that Ukraine not join NATO. After the invasion he added the other items to his wish list. Perhaps he wanted to use the other demands as bargaining chips to be be conceded in negotiations. It might help America and the allies save face. The best way to find out would be to offer to only give the guarantee in exchange for withdrawal then see what he says. Do you agree that would be worth a try?
“Putins demands after he invaded included what you mentioned. Before then, he’d only asked that Ukraine not join NATO”
Sorry, but you are wrong about this. The article I linked to is dated Dec 13, 2021. That’s two full months before the invasion began.
Perhaps you're correct. Much obliged.
Also for what it's worth, I don't personally see any need for cooler heads to prevail, and I don't think our (at least American) lives are at serious risk. Russia is not the USSR in its heyday, and the US has not stood still since 1985. Were Putin to seriously attempt to draw his aging nuclear sword, I think we would know enough ahead of time to take his entire apparatus out pre-emptively. There would be a shocking loss of Russian life, to be sure, and a fair amount of short-term fallout with which the poor Finns would have to cope, but I don't see any big danger for the continental US.
Putin's a smart guy, and he certainly knows this, so I expect him to scrupulously avoid stepping on any NATO toes. He will probably rely on the short American attention span, and our unwillingness to look up from our iPhones long enough to get involved in yet another weird war in Asia - I know it's technically Europe but it looks like Asia to us -- just after we got tired of the last one and unceremoniously abandoned it.
In that I think he's correct. And I personally wouldn't support going to war over the Ukraine, largely because it annoys me that they didn't figure this out themselves. It's not like they didn't know who their neighbor was. It was their problem to either make some accommodation to keep the bear satisfied or make themselves sufficiently and obviously indigestible that they could live next to an angry bear indefinitely. Zelensky's ranting up and down about how it's *my* responsibility to backstop *his* failure to prevent Russian shell fragments from killing little girls in Mariupol is just annoying.
Not that I object to the Biden Adminstration, if some among them can be found who can find their asses without GPS, sending Zelensky a crapton of Stingers, Javelins, high-class ELINT and whatever other form of brass knuckles can be slid under the radar. I don't like bullies, and Putin is a first-class bully, and I hope the Ukrainians bloody his nose badly and then the Russian people string him up by the heels for screwing up their lives so he can (try to) re-live the glory days of his Soviet youth. I mean, what a putz, especially compared to his mentor, who had real balls even if he did drink himself to death.
"I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed"
Let's just say conservatively that 10% of Russia's 7700 warheads made it to American cities... that's 770 nuclear bombs, most larger than what devastated Hiroshima. There are 50 states. On average, that's 14 bombs per state. You, your family and everyone you know are as good as dead and even billionaires in their bunkers will wish they were once again enjoying cocktails in their gardens 5 years from now. Most people are incapable of grasping this level of completely unprecedented devastation. It may sound preposterous, but when I was shot in Vietnam 50 years ago it came as a shock that war was for real.
I believe your analysis neglects to take into consideration, Russia's nuclear submarine fleet near our shores which could survive any first strike by the US. I speak as a Vietnam veteran who took 2 machine gun bullets. One missed my heart by a cm. My first thought was, "this wasn't cowboys and indians."
I would even appeal to billionaires and high level politicians who may or may not survive the first day. Two years down the road things might not be as rosy as you assumed they'd be. The bowling alley has run out of spare parts, your sex slaves are quarreling and you've just learned that your son is trying to poison you.
> Putin's a smart guy, and he certainly knows this, so I expect him to scrupulously avoid stepping on any NATO toes.
This sounds a lot like the same reasoning that led people to say there's "no way Putin will invade Ukraine". Perhaps it's in Russia's best interest to avoid stepping on any NATOes, but it seems dangerous to rely on any reasoning that assumes Putin's behavior will align with Russia's best interest at this point, at least as we understand them.
It's possible Putin's just playing some 4D chess that's beyond the ken of us mere mortals, but so many people are saying that the Ukraine invasion just looks like a mistake that there's a non-trivial chance that Putin's goals no longer align with Russia's, or that he's taken leave of his senses entirely.
If anyone had listened to Putin they'd have known that he said over and over that if Ukraine was free to join NATO, it was a red line for him. Biden called that non-negotiable, so Putin invaded. It's essential to listen to your "enemy." How many wars have we entered where we neglected to listen? With RT forced off the airwaves this becomes increasingly more difficult.
I hope you'll read the peace proposal in my initial post and respond. We don't need a nuclear war and anyone who discounts that possibility should carefully read the history of the Cuban missile crisis. Castro, said he'd prefer nuclear war to backing down. A Soviet submariner refused to follow orders and didn't fire off his nucs.
Obviously this is merely playing a devil's advocate. No, Ukrainians are totally committed to the protection of Ukraine. Their forces are not as numerous and strong but they are still mounting a strong resistance. If Putin could have taken Kyiv in 15 minutes he would have done it by now. It is not done, the Ocam's razor says he could not apart from throwing a nuclear bomb or something.
Joining NATO was the best thing my country did from protection point of view. Whatever mistakes were committed in Ukraine, the ship for neutral Ukraine has sailed with this war. There are only 2 options: either Ukraine is completely crushed or they win despite heavy losses and casualties and rebuild the country with closer integration in the EU.
Don't you figure the Ukrainians are kicking themselves now for giving up their nuclear weapons in 1994 in exchange for a piece of paper in which Russia swore solemnly "to respect the independence and sovereignty and existing border of Ukraine" and "to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine?"
Which means: if they *don't* lose the war, and *don't* join NATO, what are the chances the Ukrainians decide to start building some atomic bombs? They have the reactors, and very probably the know-how.
The Ukrainians didn't have nuclear weapons in 1994. A weapon is defined by its function, which at minimum requires that it be capable of some function. What the Ukrainians had in 1994, were some but not all of the parts of a functional nuclear weapons system. Which made for very flashy lawn ornaments, but did not give them the ability to actually nuke anyone.
The Ukrainians do have a fair deal of talent in both aerospace and nuclear engineering; given six months or so they could probably have turned components and materials salvaged from their leftover Soviet systems into a minimally functional nuclear arsenal of their own.
But doing so, would have completely alienated them from the west, and would probably have earned them a Russian invasion (or at least airstrikes on the facilities doing the work) before they were finished. And everyone would have quietly nodded in approval, because in 1994 Volodymyr Zelensky was still a child and "post-Soviet Republic" still meant "probably dysfunctional kleptocracy out of a Borat movie, on no account to be trusted with a bunch of stolen nuclear weapons."
An independent Ukraine with a nuclear arsenal never existed, and never realistically could have existed.
John, what you've stated is entirely accurate. Dick Lugar, may he always be revered for this, purchased the materials on behalf of the US, without consulting with anyone. It was used up in a nuclear reactor and converted to electricity.
Nuclear deterrence works till it doesn't We came very close to the precipice during the Cuban missile crisis. Ukraine gave up its nucs not long after the wall fell and world peace seemed within our grasp. Gradually, rather than jumping at this incredible opportunity Russia became encircled by NATO. Frankly speaking, the MIC that Eisenhower warned us about thought peace would be unprofitable. There's much I could add to this but most of it can be found in earlier posts, besides my dog needs walking.
It's worth noting here that reactor-grade uranium and weapons-grade uranium are radically different (~4% U-235 vs 95% U-235.) Nothing about running reactors really provides you with expertise in heavily refining uranium (especially if you are purchasing your reactor-grade uranium pre-processed from another country, as most nations with reactors do.)
The other road to nuclear weapons is producing plutonium in breeder reactors. Plutonium bombs are notably much more difficult to design than uranium; they don't produce enough neutrons in a neutral state to self-ignite, so you need some sort of explosive shock-wave or something to set them off (the details are classified.) I don't THINK Ukraine has any breeder reactors either based on a quick google, but I'm not certain.
Ukraine may end up developing nukes, but I expect it would take quite a bit of money and expense if they aren't given a covert hand up by an existing nuclear power.
Thanks for that much respected expertise. I would only add the possibility of a direct transfer of nuclear weapons to another state. Until 6 months after the Cuban missile crisis, Turkey had nuclear armed rockets given to thedm by, thed US, then there's the placement of armed nuclear missiles and more recently the nucs in Romania that NATO is responsible for.
No, in general they are not sorry for giving up their nuclear weapons. Some already explained that their ownership was only formal anyway. And they don't really look towards devastating nuclear war and their stance is still strongly anti-nuclear.
They are not going to lose this war but the question is how many deaths and destruction will this involve?
NoPie, I hope you're right but who would have guessed that WW1 would have been ignited by the assassination of some archduke in Serbia by an anarchist. Ego plus military alliances spun events out of control. We need to nip this war in the bud and prevent it from spreading. I'm sure you'd agree with that.
John L., you are right that we need to stop this war. I just don't see the UN capable to do it now unless we make some new alliances. I don't think that a random even will decide the outcome of this. If the conditions are right, it will happen anyway in one way or another. If we wait, it becomes more and more capable of greater escalation.
Why do wars happen? Some of them are fights for resources, access to trade routes etc. But in this case as in many other wars, it is just hatred of a different people (or religion). People are not thinking rationally and only force can stop them.
Thanks for your commitment to peace. If the UN idea doesn't work what have we lost?
So what's your solution to "nipping the war in the bud"? Forcing Ukraine's unilateral surrender to Putin and hoping he doesn't ask for more? What happens if he does? "Okay, you can have Latvia too... and Montenegro... and Bosnia, but if you invade ONE more country this time I'm REALLY going to get mad!"?
Here are Putin's terms for the cessation of military action. Do they sound reasonable?https://www.reuters.com/world/kremlin-says-russian-military-action-will-stop-moment-if-ukraine-meets-2022-03-07/
I'm with John L here. The volume and monotony of anti-Russia / pro-Ukraine news is enough to set off any skeptic's BS-detector. Do Americans ever wonder if their "indispensable nation" is actually a huge cult?
Out of curiosity, where would you and John L suggest we go for our pro-Russia / anti-Ukraine news?
This write-up was informative: https://mate.substack.com/p/by-using-ukraine-to-fight-russia
During the fog of war, we can assume up-to-date news is unreliable. Do you not remember WMD misinformation? Everyone who had an Iraq-war boner is banging the anti-Russia drums now, but 10x louder, and bootlicking of national security types has become our media's raison d'être.
You seem to assume that people who oppose Russia are mostly Americans? I think that the closer you live to Russia, the more anti-Russia you are... unless you are so close that being anti-Russia becomes literally illegal, of course.
I think Germany, France, Turkey, India, and China have been relatively pro-Russia, compared to the US.
There is some truth to what you say, though in recent worldwide Pew and Gallup polls, the US was rated far and away the greatest threat to world peace. Regardless of who we may think the villains and heroes to be, we all share a desire to survive. Let's focus on that.
This is so intellectually lazy. There is copious evidence to support the non-Russia assessment of this conflict. Why do you discount it? It's fine to be skeptical of claims without evidence. It is foolish to continue to be skeptical when evidence presents itself.
It comes down to which sources you trust. Having visited 147 countries I trust American corporate media less than most people I know. At bottom though you'd be foolish indeed not to listen open-mindedly to conflicting sources. If your preferred source distorts the other sides point of view, that alone should set off alarms.
The only "other side" of this situation I have heard from is Russia which has a hell of a lot to gain from their version of events. They distort the non-Russian side's view way more than any anti-russia report has. I haven't seen any reporting that would make me want to trust the Russian side and doubt the Ukrainian side when it comes to the overall narrative.
What you call evidence I see as propaganda. It's not like social media posts filtered by weird algorithms and interviews with US-aligned officials are likely to reflect the ground truth. Crisis = Opportunity for politicians. All indicators are that they are maximizing this one, just like they maximized the last one.
Facts that make one side look good are still facts! You can argue that the media is publicizing Russian losses while obscuring Ukranian losses, but I don't think you can argue that the hundreds of photos of burned-out or captured tanks have *all* been faked and that none of the many, many nerds studying those photos have noticed the fakery. Nobody's propaganda machine is that good.
Even from an extremely skeptical "pics or it didn't happen" posture, that puts an upper bound on how well the Russians can be doing. We know they've lost more tanks and jets than the US lost in Iraq, while waging war in their own backyard. We know the Russians don't have full control of the air like we did in Iraq either, because the Ukrainians are occasionally launching sorties and Russian jets are occasionally getting shut down. And we can guess that they've lost more soldiers as well, although people obviously aren't spreading photos of that around for easy verification.
Usually I can't even tell from the photo if the burned-out vehicles are Russian or Ukrainian. Even if they are Russian, is it an inordinate number? I guess I'm not plugged in with the war nerds. Unlike the US, Russia has been winning its recent wars, so the stories of gross military incompetence strike me as unlikely. But if I'm wrong and Russia is getting schooled by the Ukraine, I won't be sad.
There is a way to tell. Russian and Ukrainian, although almost the same language, are not the same and the people have different accents. Native speakers can tell the difference and will often provide comments. Russian vehicles are marked with painted letters that the military has been using to signify their vehicles. They two sides use different equipment. They don't have the same guns, tanks, artillery, uniforms, etc. You or I may not be able to tell the difference but there are people who can that are offering their insights all over the internet. You seem to recognize your lack of knowledge about this subject, which is great, but then aren't willing to trust sources that do have lots of knowledge on this subject.
Exactly
Anything's a cult if you massage the facts enough. Rationalism's a cult. Baseball teams are cults. Extended families are cults.
When is the last time Ds and Rs agreed to such an extent, 9/11? The second Iraq War? Groupthink is not a recipe for good policy.
A free person will never accept the opinion of the majority because it's the majority. There's a famous psychological experiment when 2 lengths of string are shown to a dozen people. One is quite obviously longer than the other but after 11 ringers claim the shorter one is longer most people go with the majority.... but not everyone!!! Stand up and speak your own truth even if you risk ostracism.
It's not just the Ds and Rs tho; it's basically all of the West, including all the places where hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to protest the US invasion of Iraq. I don't think one needs the concept of group think to explain why almost all people in the West find naked aggression against a West-leaning country by a despotism-leaning country to be a bad thing.
A bad thing yes, but predicted by those who opposed NATO expansion decades ago.
Now everyone wants to turn Russia into a pariah state. What will prevent them from using their nuclear weapons? Threat of double pariah status?
> What will prevent them from using their nuclear weapons?
The threat of instantaneous and total nuclear annihilation.
Definitely not the Iraq war.
It's actually fascinating the lack of polarisation (at least for now) on this one. I think the issue is a lack of other sensible options. Unlike Covid, which presented a vast array of possible sucky tradeoffs (so it was always possible for the opposition to claim that a different set of tradeoffs should have been made), the hands of the US are pretty tied on this one.
Doing less isn't a realistic option, because everyone understands that allowing Russia to re-invade Eastern Europe would be terrible for everyone except Russia (and maybe China). Doing _more_ isn't a realistic option because that's a recipe for Actual World War Three. And doing "about the same only better" isn't a realistic option because the exact nature of what's already being done is largely secret meaning nobody can publically critique it.
Maybe I'll be proven wrong and the Republicans can find a "Here's why Joe Biden is doing Ukraine wrong" attack by next week. But I think they'll have to settle for "It's Joe Biden's fault that Russia thought they could get away with this".
Here's a way out that's worked before. Fifty years ago I passed through a line of UN peacekeepers on the island of Cyprus. Both the Greek and Turkish Cypriots were bent on avenging some now-forgotten atrocity, but the UN soldiers prevented them getting at each other's throats. Ten years later tempers had cooled, human and commercial interactions had reestablished themselves and the benefits of peace were becoming clear to all. Today, who knows or cares who started the fight or who was to blame.
This solution has been tried successfully many times.
We should demand that Russia leave Ukraine immediately, declare Ukraine neutral and cordon the border with UN soldiers thereby preventing any future invasion or the introduction of any new weapons to Ukraine.
Any comments about how this idea could be improved are welcome.
That sounds like a great deal if you can get the Russians to accept it.
"Doing less isn't a realistic option, because everyone understands that allowing Russia to re-invade Eastern Europe would be terrible for everyone except Russia (and maybe China)."
Why everyone? It's not like the US has much at stake besides pride and rhetoric. For that matter, India, Brazil, Nigeria, Indonesia, and most populous and less-populous countries are unaffected. Global crises for energy and food from sanctions would hurt everyone though, except the wealthy.
“It's not like the US has much at stake besides pride and rhetoric“
The EU, if treated as a whole, is the US’s largest trading partner and the world’s third biggest economy. Granted, the bulk of that comes from countries outside of Eastern Europe, but an even larger European war would have huge spillover effects that would materially hurt average Americans pretty significantly.
The rest of the world will not escape a nuclear confligration which we appear to be headed for. It's crunch time. Stick your neck out and be a peace warrior. Future generations will bless you.
Hyperpolarization is worse. I'll take agreement on something that's pretty obviously true (Russia's invasion of another sovereign nation bad, actually).
Russia invaded when it received no guarantee that Ukraine would not join NATO...Simple as that.
As for sovereign nations, let's start with democratically elected governments of Guatemala, Chile and Iran that we replaced with dictatorships. Skip on to Iraq where we invaded under the known lie that they had WMDs. Millions of civilians spelled with an "M"died as a result. Their government has repeatedly asked us to leave but we refuse. I could continue, but I hope I've made my point.
Doing wrong does not permit you to not do right.
So the West can feel good about its moral superiority, but what will be the global consequences of sanctions? https://nakedemperor.substack.com/p/global-food-crisis
I think the sanctions will hurt America and Europe as well, though it's hard to know how much. If Russia ever cuts off natural gas to Germany, which I hope they won't, the results for the German's will be very severe.
Here is another take:
https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/rusi-defence-systems/russian-air-force-actually-incapable-complex-air-operations
I don't know enough to have an intelligent opinion, but the basic argument that Putin has already incurred heavy costs suggests the lack of intensification of the air campaign is due to some degree of incapability.
Ukraine is defended by the Ukraine armed forces, not "poorly armed untrained civilians".
They have been fighting a smaller version of this war for 8 years already.
That's true enough. 16,000 have died from indiscriminate artillery fire in the Donbass. The poorly armed untrained civilians I was referring to were the citizens of Kiev where no military personnel are located to my knowledge.
I'm fairly certain there are some Ukrainian military personnel in Kyiv. But I'm even more certain that there are an even greater number of Ukrainian military personnel north and east of Kyiv, which is why Kyiv proper is still conspicuously free of Russian tanks (but frequently bombarded by Russian artillery).
Where is your "knowledge" coming from, that you think otherwise?
While we're at it, Russia's "total domination of Ukranian airspace" is a figment of Russian propaganda. One of the biggest surprises of the conflict so far has been the poor performance of the Russian airforce.
I'm not in a position to comment other than to say that Russias stated military objectives were to subdue the Ukrainian military and their military infrastructure.
The thing is, the facts as we know them appear to be entirely compatible with two diametrically different theories - 1) Russia is very competent strategically
2) Russia is very incompetent strategically and, especially, tactically
That's interesting. It very much depends on priors. For me it is very believable that Ukrainians are mounting a strong resistance because I know them personally. Also the fact that Russia's forces are more numerous and thus stronger is not really in dispute. Also Ukrainians clearly are not winning. And yet, they are resisting very strongly. Now I heard that in case of strong defence the attacker needs the superiority of 3:1 to win. This is just about what Russians have but there is a margin of error. Therefore the outcome is not really predictable yet and can go either way.
Hi Machine Intelligence, There are many versions from many sources about who's "winning" this war though I wouldn't trust anyone blindly. I would agree that the necessity of striking quickly and decisively would necessitate not briefing everyone involved beforehand. Kiev didn't have any major military emplacements, so it's hard to imagine how a well trained, massively armed military machine would have trouble moving into a largely unarmed city. Hundreds of tanks are a formidable force compared to small arms. Baghdad was far better protected, yet American forces drove in and took it over almost as fast as their army could move. With the government in total disarray chaos ensued and within a year millions written with an "M" of innocent civilians had died. It's my contention that Putin wants an intact legitimate government he can negotiate with. You'll no doubt disagree with that but hopefully we can agree that regardless of who's to blame for this mess, we all should be concentrated on ending it... and ending it in a way that will prevent it happening again. If you'll re-read my original post you'll find my possible solution. Whatever you may think of Putin or Russia, it seems unwise to continue raising the ante on a game where your "enemy" possesses 1000s of nuclear weapons. Even billionaires and high level politicians who survive the big day may regret their decisions in 2 or 3 years. Would you agree with that?
"Within a year millions written with an "M" of innocent civilians had died."
-->OK yeah you are bullshitting. True number is about two orders of magnitude smaller. https://www.iraqbodycount.org/
Let's go with what are referred to as "excess deaths".Here's a Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
...which lists figures closer on a log scale to what I said than to what you said...
A million dead people is a lot of suffering, Daniel Kokotajlo, but like Stalin once said, "One death is a tragedy, a million is just a statistic." I've done my best today. It's time to sleep. All kindest wishes my brother.
There's an interesting uneasiness on the right regarding the new national mood in the US. One right/libertarian blog that I read summed it up as something like "Much as I hate Putin's invasion of Ukraine, I'm really uncomfortable about being on the same side as the establishment".
I identify with this feeling. It's weird seeing your outgroup suddenly take the weapons it's been hitting you with for years (twitter bans, reddit deplatformings, firings of wrongthinkers, censorship of opposing opinions and clearly slanted media coverage) and suddenly start using them against a genuine villain. I'm not sure whether to cheer that these weapons are finally being used against someone who deserves it, or just wince at the realisation that my outgroup has been treating me like I'm Vlad Putin all along.
I'm also trying hard not to let the Gell-Mann amnesia settle in. If the media narrative has been wrong about so many things for so long, what are the chances that it's right when it tells me that this time my enemies really are stupid and evil and incompetent and definitely totally losing?
Here's an argument for everyone here who doesn't see why some people are uncomfortable about suddenly being on the same side as the establishment.
Imagine it's an election year. Imagine you're a leftist, all posed to vote for what looks like the perfect D candidate for the US Senate from your state, a leftist with impeccable credentials and principles, running against a vanilla R.
Suddenly, Donald Trump endorses your perfect candidate. Do you proceed with voting without thinking twice about this, because who cares what Trump says, some things are obviously right, or do you pause to wonder what you're missing and whether you should vote for someone else instead?
The term "fake news" has replaced "book burning" and suddenly anything that Twitter or Facebook finds disagreeable can be banned without recourse by someone anonymous. When Covid first came on the scene even saying the truth that the only level 4 bioweapons lab in China was located in Wuhan got you banned. I have friends who think that there are Nazi bases on Mars. That's ok with me to hear. I can vet my sources, thanks. If something isn't true it should be openly disputed not made to disappear.
I get that there are a lot of people on the Right that consider "the establishment" their enemy. There are a lot of people on the Left that feel the same way.
But unless your enemy du jour is Literally The Greatest Evil ever, it is always possible that a greater evil will come along and have your current enemy say "hey, these other guys are really damn evil, let's maybe make that our #1 priority today".
Don't be the guy who sympathizes with Hitler because he's still peeved with FDR's third term or his mishandling of the Great Depression.
If you dislike something because your opponents like that thing (and vice versa), then you're giving your opponents the power to decide what you like and don't like.
It should be obvious that you don't want to give them that kind of power.
I think you have been poisoned by the internet. "twitter bans, reddit deplatformings, firings of wrongthinkers, censorship of opposing opinions and clearly slanted media coverage". I don't think the people of Ukraine, or Yemen, or Syria care about these things. Consider if you believe violence is bad or good, is killing bad or good, is children dying bad or good. Does it really matter who is doing the killing or the dying?
You seem to have joined a group and decided to believe what the group thinks. Try developing your morals from first principles. Support people working to advance goals that align with those morals. Ignore what tribe they subscribe to.
Russia invaded Ukraine with no justification. You can see it with your own eyes. Why do you care what the "establishment" thinks?
Agreement and respect Julian.
Yeah I could see this. I think a federal or state level anti-cancellation law is needed. People with commercial bases in a platform should be well compensated when a platform drops them for political reasons
People who are fired for legal speech should be compensated through taxes on the platforms that the cancellation activity is hottest on. If it's a blatantly reasonable opinion they expressed the company should face a severe fine
Right now it's a fun hobby to wreck peoples lives in the digital neo-witch hunts. If it becomes something with no cost to the targets and a liability to the institutions facilitating it that will change a lot
It's about more than money. If Joe Rogan gets deplatformed I don't care if he gets a billion dollars, nor perhaps does he. I want to hear what he has to say.
Notable is that per your example, you appear to be most concerned about the deplatforming of people who are so popular that it's effectively impossible to restrict what they have to say to anyone who wants to listen to them, unless you think "deplatforming" or "cancelling" Joe Rogan would prevent him from accessing the internet.
At what point would a law like this consider you to be large enough to be a platform? And what constitutes "political reasons"?
If a mod on an anti-MLM subreddit bans a person coming in to promote their new MLM, would that person be eligible for this compensation? If yes, you've simply invented a new job of "pissing in public discord enough to get banned to ask the government for money" which seems... not ideal? If no, then why can't that person simply accuse you of being an anti-capitalist leftist who's shutting down your legitimate political pro-business speech?
I'm aware that this was likely something you thought of in a relatively small amount of time, but when proposing changes to how legality should work, you need to also be aware of how it can be abused as well.
Russia is not loosing the war. It is less clear whether it is winning, but media narrative around that is clearly misleading.
On the other hand, media narrative is totally correct in that Putin is a brutal dictator (duh).
How is it “clearly misleading?”
I see a lot of people around me thinking Russia is loosing, and they are getting their information from mainstream media, and they are not morons.
I think they are being misled, which is not surprising, since on both BBC and CNN I see a lot of rather uncritical boosting of Ukrainian propaganda, and of analysts one-sidedly focusing on what has gone wrong for Russia, without saying the same about Ukraine
I think you’re just misunderstanding. Things are going disastrously bad for Russia. That’s what people are talking about.
What specific arguments have you heard that they are losing?
I can see on the map where Russian soldiers are, and they are in places where they most definitely should not have been if Ukrainians were winning.
Many Ukrainian cities are surrounded or nearly surrounded, and modern cities cannot withstand the sieges for long. Especially on the whole east side of the Dnieper, Russian advances cut deep into the Ukrainian territory, and that is half of the country, while there are extremely dangerous Russian advances even on the west side.
I am not saying that Russia is winning, especially on the economic front they look rather shaky, but they are not loosing.
Which maps are you looking at?
https://twitter.com/Nrg8000/status/1500810470688985091
Has the best I've seen, and broadly consistent with every other credible source's maps except it doesn't fall into the trap of painting huge tracts of land red just because they are between two roads that Russian tanks are using (or gridlocked on).
But even if you do that, Kyiv is conspicuosuly un-encircled, and the vast majority of the east side of the Dnieper is still Ukrainian.
Yes, Russian troops have moved into Ukraine and are in some places continuing to move forward. Victory in defensive war does not consist of stopping the enemy literally at the border. It consists of trading space for time and lives, until the enemy runs out of time and lives. And the Russians are paying an awful lot for those little bits of red; it's not clear that they can sustain it until they have the whole of the Ukraine.
This is not chess, you can not just look at the board and see who is winning.
I think winning vs. losing all depends on how you define objectives. That's different from expectations. Most people expected Russia to be able to roll over the Ukrainians militarily at the outset of the war. Those were expectations, not objectives. In some ways, it matters what Putin's ultimate objectives are and whether he's able to achieve them and then go home.
Arguably, the US could have defined limited objectives in Iraq and Afghanistan and withdrew early. Instead, the US defined broad objectives that kept unwinnable wars going for exhaustive periods. Russia could do the same in the Ukraine, but that's unlikely. I doubt Putin's only objective is to absorb all of Ukraine into greater Russia. He might WANT that to be possible, but from his writings and speeches it seems clear he's more pragmatic than that.
This is why I think that's the least likely scenario, but one I see a lot of people in the West assuming as the de facto objective. Why all the wishful thinking? Maybe because that's Ukraine's best chance for ultimate victory. I don't think Putin is that stupid. I'm not happy Russia invaded either, but that doesn't mean I have to analyze the situation on the ground in a way that ignores Russia's strategic imperatives.
At least three other objectives are all well within Russian reach at this point:
1. Russia marches into Kiev, deposes the current regime, and sets up a pro-Russia government. A strategy of only regime change isn't very long-term, considering how interested the West is in countering that down the road (and how they've meddled in Ukrainian election in the past). It's also not something you normally need to commit ground troops for, so if that's part of Putin's strategy I can't see it as his only objective.
2. The same tactic they used in the Georgia war. They pacify resistance in pro-Russia regions, march into the capital city, and leave. They then allow the pro-Russia regions to become 'independent' pro-Russia client mini-states and/or vote to join Russia.
3. Same as 2 above, but this time they blatantly absorb the pro-Russia regions. This is riskier, because you still have the possibility of an insurgency against Russia, so I think it's the least likely option.
Given those objectives, we can assess how it's going for Putin. From recent advances and fighting, it appears they're on track to marching into Kiev within the next week or two, maybe a month or two if things slow down a lot more. A 3-month war isn't long. Despite the crowing about the Ruble and markets, that's well within Russia's ability to handle.
That's probably not enough to declare victory without also achieving either 2 or 3 above. For that, Putin needs to take the Donbass (already well underway) and potentially also Kharkiv (fighting in the streets right now). By the time they take Kiev, they should be close to achieving one or both of those objectives (but I would wager pacification of the Donbass is an all-or-nothing in any declaration of victory). A bonus would be to reach Odessa, but it doesn't look like they're pushing hard in that direction at the moment.
Based on the situation on the ground, if things continue as they have been I could easily see Russia creating a split in Ukraine, where the future is two nations: East Ukraine and West Ukraine, possibly divided along the Dnieper River (though maybe not all the way to Kiev). That mostly prevents them from having to fight a post-war insurgency, and allows them to declare victory at some rational point in the future. If that's the future Putin is driving toward, it's not that far out of his reach.
He has a lot of Ukrainian troops already deployed in the Donbass to deal with, so that will likely be a major obstacle to deal with. Strategically, the Ukrainians need to hold that region above all others to force the insurgency scenario.
You’re not making any sense. It’s like you’re attacking something that no one is saying. Or like you’re misunderstanding the terms of taking them too literally.
From War and Peace: “success never depends . . . on position, on equipment, or even on numbers, and least of all on position”.
“On what, then?”
“On the feeling that is in me and him . . . and in each soldier.”
The Western media has been pretty steady in predicting that Russia can prevail militarily. But the images of Russian bombings and dead Ukrainians are never going away. We are not used to seeing blond haired Christians destroyed in war.
>definitely totally losing?
I don't get where this is coming. Look at any detailed battle map published by reputable Western news media source, and look at how it has evolved. It is the Russian military who makes most advances day-to-day, not Ukrainian. Ukrainian armed forces have been able to pull off only very limited counterattacks near Kiev. There would not be humanitarian crisis in Mariupol, Kharkiv, or anywhere else if Ukrainian forces had been able to fully defend their territory 1 to 1 or make significant counter-attacks to prevent encirclement.
As far as conventional war goes, it is not Russians who are losing. Western media simply likes to cheer because Ukrainian resistance fiercer than expected and Russia is showing some incompetence, but all of that does not equal "Ukraine winning the war" (except maybe on some political level objectives and Ukraine not having totally lost until all of its territory is occupied).
And mind you, this simply observing the facts on the ground as communicated by mainstream western media. They do put some spin into writing headlines, but they are not even lying about this stuff, so I think it is on the reader not understanding what is being written.
I see a lot of rather uncritical boosting of Ukrainian propaganda, and of analysts one-sidedly focusing on what has gone wrong for Russia, without saying the same about Ukraine, on both BBC and CNN.
I have given up on CNN since that Malaysian plane went missing. (I had to check, it was in 2014, same year the previous iteration of War in Ukraine started.)
But I don't think anyone sane could infer from BBC coverage hysterics like "[Russians are] definitely totally losing". The war is not going too well for Russians, but if you look whose cities are shelled, it is 99%-1% in favor of Russians shelling Ukrainian cities. I wouldn't care for that kind "winning". All the discussion about "Russians totally losing" are about stuff like: Russians overextending, Russians reverting back to the strategy of superior devastating artillery, Russians not having total air superiority, etc.
I agree with your other comment, it is too early to say if Russians are going lose the war. And I also said Western media puts a positive spin on the Ukrainian successes. But if you read what outlets like BBC say, I think anyone who ends up with idea "Russians are definitely totally losing" is getting their analysis from Twitter, not BBC.
I recommend acoup's latest blog post if you haven't read it: https://acoup.blog/2022/03/03/collections-how-the-weak-can-win-a-primer-on-protracted-war/
If this is a war that Ukraine will win then you would still expect the Russians to be expanding their forces right now as the Ukranians "trade space for time" as they say. The winning strategy for Ukraine involves stretching the Russians out, attacking their flanks, attacking their logistics, and generally making their life difficult until they give up and go home. The Russians should be deeply familiar with this strategy, they used it against Napoleon in 1812.
There isn't that much space between Russian troops & Kiev left. And they're not just going to freeze in the winter (Hitler's invasion was able to last longer than Napoleon's as nature became less important relative to the enemy). The Russian economy is hurting and the longer it takes the worse for Russia (also really bad for Ukraine), but the Ukrainian military just doesn't seem capable of driving them out. The Russians were able to fight Napoleon to a draw at Borodino because their army actually had more manpower than his Grande Armee. I don't see the Ukrainians doing that. The Russians could exhaust themselves to the extent that they can no longer exert force elsewhere, like they had to do recently in Kazakhstan, but if we're talking Napoleon the more relevant campaign is likely the Peninsular one.
My bet is that it's going to turn into a protracted war over many years. The Ukrainian army cannot stand up to the Russian army directly. They will need to fight a guerilla war and prevent them from ever really holding territory.
I fear a protracted war as well (particularly if Putin thinks he needs to save face and make the invasion seem worth it), although my understanding is that guerrilla war is less viable in urban environments and more amenable to the areas James Scott would identify as difficult for states to make legible. Post-Soviet Russia fought wars in Chechnya for years. Ukraine is less mountainous, but also more populous.
Thanks.
The Ukrainians are playing defense. They don't need to beat the Russians in the field, they just need to keep their polity alive long enough for the war to become unbearably expensive to the Russians. Like those illiterate goatherders in Afghanistan did, remember?
Yep. It so funny to me that people think the map is all the matters. I guess the US "won" the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We withdrew from Afghanistan, but yes we won in Iraq. It was a terrible idea which didn't serve our national interest, but we won. The post-Soviet Russians also won in Chechnya, where a predominately Muslim population fought them like hell and dragged them into urban warfare.
“Like those illiterate goatherders in Afghanistan did, remember?”
The times to three different empires!
The Afghans didn't win by "keeping their polity alive". The US really did overthrow the Taliban, even if they came back later (having been sheltered in Pakistan). The Afghan government had gone communist before the Soviets invaded to make sure it stayed communist (they actually got rid of the communists in charge at the time, not trusting their ability to handle things). The Brits wanted the Afghans to subordinate their foreign policy to theirs (to keep out the Russians) rather than incorporate it into the British empire. They succeeded for a while, but then after WW1 the Afghan government (which hadn't been under attack from the Brits at the time) invaded India and the resolution was that they got to have an independent foreign policy again in exchange for agreeing to the border (currently dividing them from Pakistan, which everyone agrees is an unnatural border now).
This time it is different because this is a real war, not just something on internet or culture space.
Overall, most active recent internet fights were about antivax and the mainstream media was basically right. They got many details wrong initially, i.e., the vaccine effectiveness to limit the spread of infection etc. But not the core message that vaccines are good and despite some adverse reactions considerably reduce deaths and severity of disease.
I used to strongly object against vaccine passports and vaccine mandates. I am still against but this war has made these issues irrelevant at this time.
It seems sometimes these things are being used against Russians who don't deserve it. Marginal Revolution posts about this sometimes.
What are the chances they are right and you are your values and beliefs are dangerous and wrong?
It’s not zero. One on ten? One in 100? 1 in 10^100?
1 in 1, because all values and belief are dangerous to someone?
The chances that they are completely right and I am completely wrong is vanishingly small, just like the chances that I am completely right and they are completely wrong. Hence the need for open discussion so that we might all slowly approach rightness.
A broken clock is right two times a day. Just think of your outgroup as of a broken clock.
Like a broken clock, they might be wrong most of the time, but they are at least partially right now - about the enemies being evil. Usually, they are a lot more likely to be wrong than not, but in this particular situation their opinions about the situation carry no information. You know their opinions are usually no more reliable than yours, and it's hard to see why they would be more reliable now.
To echo what Yitz said, consider giving Scott's recent article "Bounded Distrust" another read. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/bounded-distrust
https://twitter.com/Yascha_Mounk/status/1498836959493595141
Do be careful not to fall into the trap of refusing to believe the narrative simply because that makes you identify with the establishment, since, well, sometimes it really is clear who's the good guy and who's the bad guy, and the media isn't *that* dumb when they don't have to be.
NATO enlargement was already controversial 25 years ago. "The key U.S. interest in Europe is ensuring Russia's continued democratization and integration into the community of nations. Enlargement will humiliate Moscow and create a "Weimar Russia," vulnerable to Russian nationalists hostile to the west who believe that the country's interests are being sacrificed by weak leadership." https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/19980414_97-718_81adcdfb86b36372da1040de989ca396710b5422.pdf
All of the con-arguments are validated, yet the defense hawks continue to hold the microphone.
That might have made sense in 1998, when that report was written, and Russia was a far more important country than it is now.
It makes considerably more sense *now*, given the result of NATO expansion and the 2014 coup in Ukraine.
Putin is the only person responsible for the current war, but Western diplomacy is certainly culpable.
Perhaps this will remind us that some nations have planning horizons of at least a century.
> [...] given the result of NATO expansion and the 2014 coup in Ukraine [...] but Western diplomacy is certainly culpable
I don't understand this kind of reasoning at all. What do you think would have happened if NATO hadn't expanded after the end of the Cold War? Do you think an imperialistic ruler like Putin would have just left small, almost defenseless countries like the Baltics alone? That's not how imperialists tick – just ask Chamberlain how well appeasement works.
And please don't claim that NATO's expansion threatened Russia in any way. NATO is a defensive treaty, and nobody had *any* interest in invading Russia for the last 30 years; it would have been all downside (huge country, large military, nukes), and no upside (poor; any infrastructure to extract natural resources would have been destroyed by the inevitable nuclear exchange). Russia was much, much more valuable as a trading partner to Europe than as an invasion target. Putin isn't dumb, he knew this – any justification along the lines of "NATO aggression" are excuses and propaganda.
Was NATO defensive when it bombed Serbia? Was it defensive when it overthrew Gaddafi and plunged Libya into chaos? No. So that puts the 'defensive treaty' argument to bed.
Now, it is all very well claiming that NATO had no intent to attack Russia, it is probably even true. But how does NATO expansion up to Russia's borders *look* from the point of view of Russia.
A country with a large land border and a history or wars sweeping across those borders (within living memory!) is going to want allied or, at least, neutral neighbours. It is foolish to pretend that the feelings of Russia in this matter are irrelevant, irrational or malign.
International diplomacy was once about keeping sensible buffers between powerful nations to avoid precisely this sort of conflict, but apparently the lure of lucrative defence contracts or the belief in the manifest destiny of the liberal international order was more powerful than the lessons of history.
Sensible people having been warning about this eventuality ever since the end of the Cold War, and now the Cassandra's have been shown to be right.
And when "continued democratization and integration into the community of nations" was something you could say about Russia with a straight face.
Well, without NATO I would probably be dead by now.
I try to just keep using the more reliable heuristics I've had (which are neither reflexively pro- or anti-media) and ignore the noise. Afaict this is a case where the obvious answer is in fact the right one, and the media's biases don't get in the way of it.
What is the difference between OCD and schizophrenia? I am diagnosed with OCD but sometimes I wonder if I don't have schizophrenia, because I have mood and anxiety problems and difficulty with concentration. But I don't hear voices or have delusions.
Problems with mood, anxiety and concentration are experienced by most people who have a diagnosable mental disorder, and by many, many people who do not. They are basically just generic, extremely common ways of feeling not-that-great mentally and emotionally. They are the mental equivalents of common ways of feeling not-that-great physically (fatigue, mild pain here and there, etc.). So when you're wondering whether you have OCD or schizophrenia, you can basically disregard the fact that you have low mood, anxiety and problems concentrating. Those things don't weigh on either side of the scale.
Here are characteristics of the 2 disorders that are pretty distinct:
-OCD: You have some fears or worries about specific things that you know do not really make sense (for instance, you may fear that you are going to catch rabies from germs somehow lurking on surfaces in most indoor environments). You know other people don't worry about that stuff, and that you can't make a logical case that the worries are valid. Nevertheless, the fear and worry you feel is extremely compelling, and you feel driven to do various things that temporarily reduce it even though you recognize that doing these things does not truly make you safer: taking some precaution over and over and over ((wipe down things in your house with rubbing alcohol, for instance), avoiding something that you know there's no logical reason to avoid, asking repeatedly for reassurance about something. If a lot of your time is spent thinking about your irrational worry, and taking precautions against it and avoiding it and getting reassurance about it, then you qualify for OCD.
-Schizophrenia: You have a some quite unusual ideas that you are pretty sure are true. You may or may not recognize that they are unusual, and that most people would find them implausible. If you do realize the ideas are not shared by most people, you believe those people just haven't figured out the truth, as you have. Or you might think that everybody knows these things are true, but they are conspiring not to acknowledge that they are true. You may also be having some unusual perceptions -- seeing or hearing things that others cannot hear. If so, your thinking about the fact of having them will be along the same lines as your thinking about your unusual ideas: You may not recognize you are seeing and hearing things others do not. Or you may think you have the gift of hearing sprit voices that others cannot. Or you may think everyone can see and hear the spirits, but they are all denying that they can. One other thing about being schizophrenic: Rather than or in addition to being preoccupied with delusions and hallucinations, you may just be in a state of great mental disarray, with disorganized trains of thought, random transitions of attention, periods of mental blankness. If so, you will probably lack insight into the fact that your mind is rambling, impoverished and disorganized.
OCD version of rabies fear: I can't stop having horrible fears about death by rabies, and worrying that it's everywhere in my house, even though I know it can't be, and everything in the house just feels dirty and unsafe. So I am going to wipe down the whole kitchen with alcohol just so I can have some peace of mind.
Schizophrenic version of rabies fear: Nobody but me recognizes that FBI experiments in Argentina have created a new form of rabies. All the people in my subway car today were giving each other meaningful looks and I heard lots of them whispering the word shil-tohl, which is some FBI code. I know that because sometimes the guy on the evening newcast whispers it when I look at him on the screen.
This is not medical advice, seek a trained professional etc.
The main issue in differentiating schizophrenia and OCD in most cases in which differential diagnosis is required is probably going to be distinguishing delusions and obsessions.
Obsessions in obsessive compulsive disorder come with some degree of awareness that they are not grounded in reality, although this can become blurry/less so in severe OCD or during a flareup. Delusions in schizophrenia are not accompanied by such self-awareness.
However you've said you don't have delusions. I'm curious then as to why you think you might have schizophrenia?
Mood and anxiety problems are essential to OCD. Concentration problems are also very common, perhaps more common than not in moderate and severe cases. I want to be careful about how I say this, but if your description of yourself is accurate, then you are a patient with:
1. Mood, anxiety & concentration difficulties
2. And no delusions or hallucinations
Such a patient is *vastly* more likely to have OCD than schizophrenia, unless there's more to the story than you are telling? Even the fact that you are writing coherently and posting on this forum tends to speak against schizophrenia. Nothing you have said about yourself gives any indication of schizophrenia.
One of the most common OCD fears is fear of being or going psychotic, mad or schizophrenic. Perhaps this sense that you might be schizophrenic is an expression of such an OCD worry?
Yes, I think you are correct. I am a typical case of OCD. I once read a good differentiation between hallucinations and obsessions which is that the voices you can tell if it's a man or a woman who's talking.
Also I feel like Scott would have something witty to say about the liklihood of you having schizophrenia if you're wondering if you have schizophrenia
My third cousin developed anti-NMDAR and the 1st one almost died in Wicklow before they filtered her CSF and figured it out and I would keep it in mind as a possible etiology much as you can if you're going crazy
Third cousin as in three of my first cousins
it's super rare but misdiagnosis common
I'd never heard of it, or the symptoms, but surely "ordinary" schizophrenia is *some* kind of immune disorder too.
Antipsychotics are antihistamines; I've heard it from a pharmacist and an allergist. Literally, atypical antipsychotics mask the standard skin tests for common allergies. And, if you have a reaction to a psych drug, they will say *do not* take Benadryl because it'll make things worse.
People with Sz have relatives with MS.
I've seen people with terminal cancer and chemo (that is, immunocompromised, and potentially going to die any minute from an opportunistic infection) having mental/mood disturbances very much like some people who have Sz.
A thing that seems common (hearsay from people I've known) is dramatic mental/mood changes, reversible with antibiotics, from UTIs. Particularly in nursing homes, where the staff doesn't seem to recognize it. It's not like Sz from what I've heard, but shows how immune reactions can affect the brain without signifying anything to society.
I've read multiple things recently about how Epstein-Barr virus could be linked to bipolar and MS, if I recall correctly.
Oh, and a study found that Sz is a big risk factor for covid-19. Don't dismiss that as "paranoid people refuse the vaccine" because anyone who's compliant with Sz meds is used to taking risky treatment with no guarantee.
Just got contacted by Future Fund about my ACX grants proposal—in the process I discovered that I'd somehow missed Scott's announcement about doing a writeup for ACX Grants ++, so while I totally missed that opportunity, I'm glad my idea is at least being considered! I'm looking through the FF website, and it looks quite promising. I can't even begin to imagine the logistical and financial challenges of effectively allocating such large sums of money...
Congratulations! What is your proposal?
Was it FTX Future Fund or the EA Long-Term Future Fund?
FTX Future Fund. I'm not sure what the nominative deterministic take on them both using the same name is, but I'm realizing we may be in for a whole lot of semantically confusing conversations...
Huh, do you know how they found out about it? I didn't share any proposals with them.
Really sorry about the mixup—it’s actually most likely the Long Term Future Fund! They didn’t explicitly say either FTX or EA, and due to the timing I think my brain just filled in the gaps. I looked over the conversation again though, and they did specifically say “long-term,” so that seems more likely—I’ll ask them explicitly today just to make sure though 🙃
Repost from a previous, odd open thread, since there was a request to continue this prompt on political topics.
What do you think of the following claim: “if two parties agree on the likelihood of some distant future outcome, say, 30+ years out, then they are also likely to agree on how desirable that outcome is. The likelihood of “probability agreement implies desirability agreement” increases as the time horizon of the prediction.”
I see no reason to believe that claim. Plenty of likely outcomes have groups that will benefit and groups that dread it, as the commenters before me have pointed out.
To take a toy example, if it were certain that next week some third party would force me to give you a large sum of money, and we both agreed it was going to happen, I would probably be unhappy about it but could easily foresee you looking forward to it. (If that seems like a bizarre hypothetical, it basically describes tax)
This is why I specified distant future outcomes.
"In 20 years, every kitchen appliance will be connected to the internet, and you will be able to give it directions remotely." Most people: cool! Us luddites, who tend to think about how things break: *rolling our eyes and wondering how long our current kitchen appliances will survive*.
Likewise: "in 20 years, every dishwasher, washer, dryer will be Energy Star certified."
Or: "in 20 years, every car will contain 10 times as many computers as now and will be connected to the internet at all times."
I don't know if that really holds as a principle at all, or if the examples which first come to mind are simply selection bias. I can easily imagine counter-examples, though, such as a misanthrope who looks forward to the heat death of the universe (which they predict with high certainty), vs a humanist who dreads it (while believing it to be as likely as the misanthrope thinks it is).
Or, on a shorter time horizon, the proposition "In thirty years, [some particular group] will dominate the world" is something that I can easily imagine many people believing optimistically and others believing pessimistically.
If there's any truth to it, it's because we have fewer opportunities to think about long-term predictions than short term ones. I can have a reasonable opinion on who will win the 2022 election in my country, but no hope of forming a sensible opinion on who might win the 2053 election.
Here is a Russian journalist who predicted 10 months ago that Russia invade Ukraine and accurately predicted how unsuccessful it would be. Start watching from 2.50
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ia8RFaeIqEk
Ha ha - I don't understand everything but he is really good: "what is war for Russians? First of all it is a great opportunity to steal with impunity everything from their army, because everything can be written down."
Subtitles crap out after about a minute. Transcript available anywhere?
For all you software engineers, if you could go back and give yourself advice on what to look for in a first job, what would it be ?
Work at a large software focused company (FAANG) first, for 3-5 years. You will learn fundamentals of good org hygiene and development practices. You may even find a good mentor. After 5 years, you definitely need to get out and work at a smaller company. This will force you to stretch and grow in ways that you can't at bigcorp. This will make you well rounded and suitable for eng leadership at any sized corp (or your own!).
Literally get any job at all, after 2-3 years of experience, you have essentially written yourself a blank check for a salary afterwards. If you care about happiness, try to avoid an environment that is explicitly using a programming language that you hate, because the easiest jobs to get after that first one will all be more of that. (This may be happening less, but 15 years ago, I happened to get a job doing Java, and didn't manage to escape Java-land until almost 10 years later.)
First, find work at a software company, rather than a company in a different industry that develops software to support their main business. Organizations that aren't focused on delivering software to customers don't see enough pressure on their development practices to create good work environments or good products, and the people in charge rarely understand the idiosyncracies of producing software: what's possible, what doesn't work, and how long it takes.
Second, look for a team composed mainly of people that care about software quality but aren't religious about particular approaches.
My first job was at a highly dysfunctional software company with the shittiest software architecture imaginable. (It is left as an exercise to the reader, how would you design a system in such a way that the simplest refactoring: renaming public methods, is near impossible? In a compiled language nonetheless, Java)
And my advice would be: Don't worry about it, just get in there.
Working at this place taught me things that helped me progress my career. Being able to describe how NOT to do things, has a lot of value.
Also, the easiest way to get a good job, is having a job, and networking is everything
Big companies are better, and apply even though you don't feel good enough
What about big companies is better in your opinion ?
The money, the social proof value of the experience to other companies, the stock options for public companies are an actual fungible money like object, you have more users, which makes your projects feel more meaningful.
That said, a lot of your day to day experience is determined by your team and if you like them, which is something totally independent of company size or shape.
Support and training for new developers.
As you get more experienced as a developer you also get more experienced about how to maintain and grow your skills, but as a new developer there is a ton of unknown unknowns that large companies will have the resources and time to help you with.
I'm in a weird spot answering this question, because I was much happier in my first job than either of the subsequent two (all well-funded mid-stage start-ups in the Bay Area). Arguably I might have been better off in a job that exposed me to more chaos / unfamiliarity / office politics sooner so I could develop an immunity (or find another career) but the jury's still out on that one.
On the whole I think I would still advise my past self to look for jobs like the first one I took, which would be something like: "work on a product that stands or falls on its technical capabilities, with a team that cares about high-quality engineering and problem-solving above all else and has already had some success". (The technical interview is a great place to look for this-- challenging, interesting, and distinctive questions are a hard-to-fake signal.)
"go to a team that does something specific that you want to do, and in which you have a comparative advantage. Absolutely do not got to Google general recruitment pipeline without knowing what team you're going to be in."
Ha, I'd have given myself the opposite advice! My experience has been that the exact project I'm working on matters relatively little, but team dynamics and developer workflow (ex. how quick my code gets to production, how many people need to sign off on launches) makes a huge difference. Your mileage may vary.
Basically I'd say look for a team that you can have an enjoyable conversation with. You're gonna interact with these people 40 hours a week for at least a year, so having a culture fit is pretty important to your enjoyment.
This isn't wrong. I think the real issue with going into "general developer" pipeline is that there's massive adverse selection - the teams that pick up new grads with no relevant experience at random are the teams that can't get anyone better, because nobody wants to work there (usually because it's a dysfunctional team). So if you can select on a team with fast turnaround times and great communication, that's ideal - but if not, at least make sure you select in *some* advantage, because otherwise adverse selection will eat you up.
The point on adverse selection is a great one.
I'm not sure there's much wiggle room as a junior dev to manage to actually get on a team that's good and established, so another idea is to look for teams that are growing really fast. Slowly growing teams good teams can afford to hire senior outside talent (or poach it from sister teams), while rapidly growing teams are forced to hire more liberally. It's still kind of a crap shoot whether the rapidly growing team will turn out good or bad, but it really is a bit of a bad sign if an established team can't keep folks around.
Thanks for the advice guys!
My wife and I want to write down a five year plan for our personal and professional lives. Anybody knows of some good resources we could use?
Historically, the Communist Manifesto is always a good starting place for five year plans.
Parchment and quill?
Impress your stylus into clay, in the best traditional manner, so that not alone will it last five years but three thousand years
https://greenheart-anon.tumblr.com/post/678077714440273921/imperiumtyr-peter-pantomime
Future Authoring was great for that. Very focused and intentional
Are there any good articles evaluating whether "intelligence" can be meaningfully reduced to a single dimension? My prior is that even less of the variance in intelligence can be meaningfully explained than the political spectrum, which makes me skeptical of basically anything related to IQ and its correlations.
But, e.g. Gardner's multiple intelligences correlating with *g* makes me skeptical of my skepticism
This doesn't answer your question, but I felt compelled to write it -- if I try to analogize to strength: it's intuitive that
(1) some people are stronger than others
(2) strength rankings of people can change based on measurement method, and this seems to point at something about the person not the method (eg I'm fairly good at deadlifts percentile-wise adjusted for weight/age/gender, and horrible at bench press, despite having trained both just as much)
(3) measurement methods yield results that correlate fairly well, but I'm not sure how useful or insight-generating it is to extract a single "strength quotient / SQ" or "strength g-factor" out of them (I'm obligated to link to Cosma's critique of g http://bactra.org/weblog/523.html -- it's 11k words, but boils down to "the triviality of finding that positively correlated variables are all correlated with a linear combination of each other, and why this becomes no more profound when the variables are scores on intelligence tests")
(4) you can train to do better at measurement methods, but I don't think this "invalidates" these methods (the way some folks claim re: IQ), except insofar as regards claims that any single method is "the true measure of strength"
(5) related to (4), all measurement methods are gameable (e.g. for powerlifting, the ultra-arched bench press where range of motion reduces to a few centimeters seems to me an obvious case of a strength test being Goodhart-ed), but nonetheless still mostly useful in practice
Circling back to your question, if I'm asked "can 'strength' be meaningfully reduced to a single dimension?" my instinctive response is "what's your use case?"
I think that's a great analogy. It checks out colloquially too - sure, some people over focus on one or two muscle groups or neglect others, but most people are pretty uncontroversially "strong" or not.
Apparently, all the fitness tests correlate too: https://dynomight.net/general-intelligence/
So fitness can be reduced to a single number just as much (or as little) as intelligence.
There is some research suggesting the presence of an additional axis (roughly speaking, tracking the System I/System II distinction in cognitive processing). But I’m not aware of anything in the peer reviewed literature along these lines.
Source: I was an external on the above-mentioned research — my question was “what’s it like being a flat-earther?” Candidate laughed, ruefully.
Longer version: the question has been mildly radioactive because it got caught up in the culture wars. Outsiders want to break g, and the public at large sets a (too) low bar for claims that they have.
http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/03/07/what-the-general-factor-of-intelligence-is-and-isnt-or-why-intuitive-unitarianism-is-a-lousy-guide-to-the-neurobiology-of-higher-cognitive-ability/
The author doesn't deny psychometric g but he says that we don't know the underlying biology. I don't think this would be what Jack G is looking for.
I'd read some literature on factor analysis of intelligence. Decent starter: the 'Factor structure of cognitive abilities' from the wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)#:~:text=Factor%20analysis%20is%20a%20family,explain%20the%20patterns%20in%20it
Reducing intelligence to one dimension misses some variance, but manages to explain a big chunk of it.
I don't think you'll find anyone seriously making the case that intelligence is truly one-dimensional.
The opposite position, that intelligence isn't really real at all and nobody can be said to more more intelligent than anyone else, we're all just intelligent in different ways, is equally silly but I think you'll find some people believing this.
In between these extremes, where the sane people live, I think most people aren't in that much disagreement. There's a whole bundle of innate-ish intellectual skills and they're all somewhat correlated with one another.
> There's a whole bundle of innate-ish intellectual skills and they're all somewhat correlated with one another.
My question is more or less about the quantification of that "somewhat". r=0.30? 0.50? 0.95?
Most sources agree that g explains ~40-50% of variance, implying an r squared of around .4 or .5, so r is probably somewhere in the ballpark of [0.6, 0.8].
I don't understand this idea of intelligence not being one-dimensional. Can you name the dimensions?
My vague memory is that it two dimensions would be "functional" vs "crystalized" intelligence that are usually measured in IQ tests. So, stuff like "can you arrange blocks to form this pattern" vs "how many 'F' words can you recall?" Now, these two dimensions obviously aren't orthogonal; if you can remember the word "juice" you can probably use more functional skills to come up with juicy, juicier, juiciest, juiced, and juices without really using your memory at all. But, they also aren't going to be perfectly related; you still need to be able to pull "juice" out of your brain.
My guess would be that "dimension" probably isn't a good way to frame the question. If you can come up with 32 non-linearly dependent vectors, you're working in 32-dimensional space. Rather we should probably talk about "how correlated are they/how tight of a cone do they form"
No I can't, because not only is intelligence not a one-dimensional line, it's not an N-dimensional space either. It's a loose fuzzy concept that isn't directly mappable to any particular set of numbers.
I think the analogy to "fitness" is always enlightening, since people seem to have fewer hang-ups about defining physical fitness. Fitness is correlated with many things, like core strength, arm strength, sprint speed, running endurance, and flexibility. There are many "fitness tests" out there which can gauge someone's fitness and put a number on it. But you'll never get a sensible answer to a question like "Is [top soccer player] more or less fit than [top gymnast]" because they excel in different areas and the fitness of one can't be compared to the fitness of the other. Nonetheless, any sensible fitness test will tell you that they're both fitter than me, and that I'm more fit than the guy on the obesity scooter down at Walmart.
I think that intelligence is not such a clearly cut concept and that it's a loose fuzzy concept. So, my take on its relation to IQ is that IQ correlates well with what people think of when they think of intelligence and IQ is unidimensional. I would say that we should say that IQ is a measure of "cognitive ability" as a specialized term that avoids bringing up the connotations that people have when they say intelligence and the fuzziness. "cognitive ability" is predictive of a number of things and so it is interesting.
I'd like to throw my hat as someone who predicted "invasion will actually happen, Ukrainian resistance will be significant." I was giving it one in three odds of a major invasion happening this year all the way back in December of 2021 (https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,5442.msg198416.html#msg198416). It was in the context of international cheese markets because... have you met me? That's actually really on brand. Anyway, my predictions got increasingly more dire in the lead up to the war and I said a few times that Ukrainian resistance would be significant.
I don't mean to be petty. But I got a lot of pushback and I want the acknowledgment that I had a point. Also, I am not some Russian nationalist or hawk who regularly predicts war or doom. (I just recently bet against China invading Taiwan.) So I'm not a stopped clock being right twice a day.
What caused your predictions to get more dire, and by how much did your probability estimate increase? Did you expect a full-scale invasion or something more limited and east of the Dnieper? What's with you and cheese?
> What caused your predictions to get more dire
I became more certain the invasion was going to happen and more certain it would be a large scale operation. I remained positive on the performance of Ukraine.
> and by how much did your probability estimate increase?
By the end I was certain an invasion was imminent. I thought the most likely week was the week after the Olympics closed. I had a bet with twenty to one odds (though it was just pure gambling) so 95% I guess?
>Did you expect a full-scale invasion or something more limited and east of the Dnieper?
Full scale was always possible. I thought it was the most likely play by a month or two before the invasion. Even my initial prediction was not that Russian forces would limit themselves to the Dnieper. It was that they wouldn't annex territory past it. I still think that's probably true.
> What's with you and cheese?
I like cheese. I even make some of my own. And I know import/export. So Russian agricultural autarky and its results on cheese and organized crime was something I took a fair bit of interest in. Someone else said I'm awful at biology. Which I probably am. I'm more into things like trade or engineering.
Hmm, the Guardian had a story the other day by a journalist who belatedly realised that the cheese choices of a Russian oligarch whom she was interviewing was an indicator that war might be more likely than not.
I Googled it. It wasn't quite my take and it seems far too self-impressed and cute. "Aww gee, these rich people sure do have subtle signs you can watch to predict things!" As if that wasn't already well known and also done with government officials. The only thing she appeared to have noticed was that Russian had a cheese import ban. Which was well known from the beginning. They were not subtle. Russian nationalists held cheese burnings were they shot and stomped on and otherwise destroyed foreign cheese in a nationalist fervor.
"Cheese burnings"? My god! Is there no end to their depravity?
I'll second this. Erusian called this early and isn't a stopped clock. Actually, I think he's one of the most perceptive commenters in the broader SSC-verse.
No, he's not. Perhaps he is good with this stuff, perhaps, but he is woefully denialistic of heritability and all too often he makes strong, authoritative statements about things which are in reality highly speculative in nature.
Do you have a link to an actual prediction of the performance of the Ukranian military? There is a 60% invasion to take significant territory prediction here which is impressive. But without the second part it’s nothing special
Same thread, where I hedge a little but basically predict the Ukrainians will put up pretty fierce resistance (but that Putin will win a knock down, drag out fight):
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,5442.msg198079.html#msg198079
Not sure how to parse this comment. You explicitly say you doubt Ukraine will collapse and that a quick Russian victory is unlikely (+1). You say a slow Russian victory is only likely in the scenario of no western assistance. The positive reference to Russian logistical capability looks less than prescient.
Leaving it as “doubt Ukraine will collapse” it’s not nothing! There seems to be a prediction of “Russia loses” since western military aid is in the picture. Care to offer a probability so we can come back?
This would have been much more useful with the %s like your first comment.
The logistics thing is a reference to how the Russian army is railroad based and the Ukrainian system works on the same gauges etc. There's more of a hard limit in Europe than in Ukraine. Ukrainian logistics strikes have been pretty effective too.
Anyway, I'm not really familiar with rationalist prediction games. The only reason I produced that last set was because a rationalist challenged me to do it. If you want to define some value of "loses" I can tell you what I think and attach probabilities.
I haven't seen much recent discussion of executive war powers in the United States despite fears of future conflict. I wrote a piece on Metaculus that feels very relevant these days: https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/8703/the-expansion-of-executive-war-powers/
Oh cool, a topic I actually know things about! Your piece is broadly accurate but I thought I'd contribute a summary of my own:
The US Constitution by design gave the President broad executive powers (i.e. powers traditionally held by monarchs), including the power to conduct foreign affairs and the role of Commander in Chief of the military. It also enumerated important limitations to these powers, e.g. by placing the power to declare war, to raise armies, and to ratify (i.e. give force of law to) treaties in the hands of Congress.
There have always been gray areas to this separation of power, for example the US-France "Quasi-War" of 1798 where Congress authorized use of force against French ships without declaring war, or President Lincoln's suspension of the writ (another power reserved to Congress) while Congress was out of session and Washington DC faced threats of secessionist violence. The gray areas have become more acute recently because of e.g. the accelerated pace of military operations (hours or even minutes response time being relevant).
The gray areas naturally give rise to a lot of disagreement (refreshingly nonpartisan-- or rather, the party that controls the White House at a given moment is very consistently the one that believes in expansive executive power), the more so since Congress's "Authorization for the Use of Military Force" against 9/11 plotters and states aiding them is still in effect. But the following would still be fairly uncontroversial:
- The President may not instigate a war with a foreign power without Congress's approval
- The President may not carry on a war with a foreign power, even a defensive one, unless Congress approves expenditures to fight the war
- But the President may order military action in response to sudden crises-- e.g. if Russia attacked a NATO country the President could launch counterattacks in advance of Congress's approval. Whether this covers any kind of "preemptive strike" would, however, be intensely controversial.
I think we intervened against Libya despite Congress denying funding.
@hnau thanks for your input - I agree with everything you said, and you did it in 1/7th of the words count! The gray area is definitely what I'm most interested in. I'm not a SME in this, just an eager enthusiast, so let me know if there's anything that stands out as needing correction.
"No government worth its salt will allow a currency that is unregulated, anonymous, or untaxed."
There have been lots of countries, at various times, where people made heavy use of foreign currency which, from the standpoint of the government, was unregulated, anonymous and untaxed. In modern times its a common result of the local currency being inflationary. Historically, gold coins such as the dinar, the noumisma, or the ducat circulated widely in international trade.
I think the only thing you're missing is that you assume governments want their own actions to be transparent. Think about the origins of the TOR browser, and consider how many governments are blatantly corrupt.
The disappointing truth is that they'll probably refuse to crush the CC competition because they'll find a CC that suits their own shady agendas.
Algorithmic stable coins like Dai exist and are used regularly. Why do you think governments won't be able to collect taxes in crypto? They are able to collect taxes on cash transactions.
What you're missing is that your 4th paragraph isn't really accurate. If you make a wallet and Bob pays you in BTC for delivering a pizza there's no way the government can tell who you are or what the transaction was for. There's no way the government can tell when you use your payment to buy a soda at the local convenience store. All the government knows is that Bob paid X and then X paid Y amount to Z address. Maybe it was just X transferring money to himself, or X bought a nuke for $4 from Z, or Z hacked X.
The three issues preventing that use case right now are effective software (people somehow still haven't made really good wallets that you can just dl onto your phone and use to run a business), widespread adoption, and lower transaction fees (btc and eth fees both hover around equivalent of $1, nothing if you're talking about buying a car, but a lot if you're talking about buying a soda).
To stop btc and most cryptos the governments of the world would have to either put a lot of computing power together (perfectly coordinated) to 51% attack btc, cut off access to the internet to almost every legitimate miner, just wipe out the internet altogether, or really strongly disincentivize mining some other way (maybe by threatening prison sentences for anybody caught running a btc node).
Crypto as a currency is really valid and totally possible right now. I think adoption will go FOOM. Wider adoption incentivizes wider adoption. You can already use BTC to buy all sorts of drugs and other illegal things off the internet. I'm sure there's local drug dealers who will sell for BTC or some other crypto. All we need is adoption to spread to slightly larger places then boom the mexicans sitting outside Home Depot will start accepting under the table BTC as payment for construction services, convenience stores will start accepting crypto because they want the construction dudes to patronize them, landlords will accept crypto because the convenience store guy will pay rent at a premium so he can avoid exchange fees (and maybe avoid taxes).
The best evidence that crypto is valid as a currency is that it's already being used as a currency for tons of things that exist without government regulation
"There's no way the government can tell when you use your payment to buy a soda at the local convenience store"
Of course they can, this is silly. Eventually the convenience store has to store the Bitcoin in some kind of bank account, or otherwise convert it to fiat- there are a dozen steps in this process where the government can monitor, intervene, and regulate.
The government can just..... make it illegal to pay for goods and services in a cryptocurrency. The convenience store owner, or owner of that chain, is an upper middle class person somewhere who doesn't want to be fined or arrested, he's going to comply with the law. Anyone who runs any business that you would want to transact with is going to be an upper middle class person somewhere who wants to avoid Real Jail. This is not a 'damn the man!', rebellious crowd. And if they are rebellious, they'll be arrested and replaced with someone who isn't. You won't be able to spend your crypto at the hardware store, at Starbucks, at Amazon, at the car dealership..... Just think of any business, it's ultimately being run by a person not willing to do jail time for your payment method- and especially not if they have no motivation, fiat currency works just fine for them as-is.
Also, crypto was invented 14 years ago, and to date outside of the criminal underworld still no one uses it as an actual means of payment for anything- it's purely speculation
To kill crypto they just have ban converting it into “fiat” and ban crypto transactions in any case where legal documentation is required, buying a house or car etc.
I like the term "cryptoasset" because it doesn't cause this confusion
Yeah but it goes against the original vision of "peer to peer electronic cash"
As does the current implementation of the technology, so that's not really an issue here.
In what sense does the current implementation go against the original vision exactly?
The primary issue is with variable gas fees and slow transaction times - if you don't know how much making a transaction will cost in advance (without looking it up) and the transaction time is so slow that the value of the amount of "currency" paid can be significantly different by the time the transaction completes, then you're not working with a usable currency.
Additionally, you can simply look at all of the language coming out of crypto space to see that it's purely being used as a speculative instrument and not a currency - widespread "hodl"ing of a currency would cause massive deflation, leading to every transaction made causing a permanent loss of net wealth. You don't want a currency to "go to the moon" you want it to be stable so that the $30 you spent yesterday on groceries doesn't retroactively become $60 today or $500 tomorrow.
OK, thanks for that! Yeah, I guess if you define cash as "instant settlement and no transaction fee" then yeah.
It's still cash though if you're willing to wait for the transaction to clear and pay the transaction fee. For example transferring $5M for a $1 fee 24/7 don't need banks to be open. If that's not your definition of cash then I guess not.
But it would be incorrect to say "all of the language coming out of crypto space".
There is a big chunk of language (and technology) coming out of the crypto space focused on being cash, being legal tender, etc.
If governments around the world took up single-minded and determined opposition to cryptocurrency, they could almost certainly stomp it out, for the reasons you mention.
But, this ignores the game theory of it all. Governments don't act singlemindedly, not in coordination with each other, and not even internally with themselves. They are composed of many competing actors who all want power/money/prestige/influence/whatever for themselves, at the expense of their political or geo-political opponents. As such, there may be many situations in which it could be advantageous for a government or political party to support crypto currency if it gives them an edge over competing parties or nations, even if that government or political party might prefer that crypto doesn't exist (i.e. they would choose to outlaw crypto if they had dictatorial powers).
"Governments don't act singlemindedly, not in coordination with each other"
There are dozens of institutional global bodies, there have been for over a century. Most of the world didn't just agree to join the WTO, they all voluntarily gave up some sovereignty over trade decisions for the privilege- even the US did. The US loses cases at the WTO all the time and is forced to comply with the arbitrators' decision.
Governments especially coordinate where their money is on the line, in the past most notably around taxes. Even the US and China share some information about potential tax cheats
There is a tension between cryptocurrency as an alternative currency vs cryptocurrency as an alternative investment. They have very different goals.
If we want it to function as a currency, then we want a stable price / conversion rate and most transactions involve buying goods or services instead of other currencies. If we want it to function as an investment, then we want an unstable price (ideally growing) and most transactions involve buying other currencies instead of goods or services.
A similar balance exists for government backed currencies too. The currency is both used as a medium of exchange within the country and used as investment scheme for people who buy and sell currencies. Most of the time, the use within the country is larger, which helps to stabilize the price.
Cryptocurrencies don't have much of an internal economy: people who use them for regular purchases. So they are dominated by investment, which drives their instability.
You're not wrong, but none of that is the real problem—the real problem is that cryptocurrencies aren't underpinned by an asset. Gold is underpinned by being gold, valued for itself/its decorative use. Fiat currency is underpinned by the issuing government accepting it as payment of taxes, i.e. it's a unit of keeping (the rest of) your stuff safe from bullies with guns. (Which is part of why libertarian-types beef with fiat, they don't like that it practically requires a government ready and willing to crawl up your asshole.) Even tulip futures are underpinned by tulips, even when they're grossly overvalued. Crypto is underpinned by nothing, i.e., it's a pure speculation bubble, refined and distilled until there's no junk real estate or flower bulb left to be hyped, just the pure, antiseptic hype itself.
I absolutely agree that this is a fundamental difference, although I question how important this difference is.
I can see a big practical difference between an asset that is valued mostly for its practical utility (e.g. iron) and one that's valued mostly for speculation (e.g. gold).
I'm less convinced that there's a pragmatic difference between an asset that is vastly overvalued relative to its utility and one with literally zero utility. Does it really matter whether you are at risk of losing 100% of your investment if the bubble pops, vs only being at risk of losing 99%?
No, you're right that there's no pragmatic distinction; losing all your money on crypto is functionally identical to losing all your money on a grotesquely overvalued tulip bulb. The difference is one flower to plant on your unmarked pauper's grave once you've starved to death, which isn't that big a deal to you, the corpse. Nor, for that matter, is there a meaningful difference between making your fortune scamming others in the crypto bubble or making your fortune hustling tulips in the bull-b market; both are equally immoral in spite of the pretty flower.
The point I'm trying to make, I guess, is that crypto has *no* chance of being a good investment. Sometimes people get suckered into buying worthless California sandlot real estate and the lots turn out to have oil under them, or they end up being in Montecito or Bel-Air and worth a fortune to your grandkid. With crypto, there isn't even the *possibility* of a score; there is no bait and zero potential for Bitcoin to have any real value whatsoever. Dorks rused themselves into believing this scam all on their own, for no reason *at all*. (Except possibly the appetizing prospect of finally, finally becoming rich off your conviction that you're smarter than everybody else.)
Eh, I’m not sure I agree with that take. Your point is valid for fiat and tulips, but gold is actually a one for one for any finite coin. Gold is just a thing we all agree has value. (Silver is more complex bc it has much more utility as a commodity.) There’s no inherent difference between a scarce bit of metal and a scarce bit of code. Obviously gold has a much better track record at retaining value and is a much safer bet during a crash. But from a structural perspective, most crypto has more in common with hard, fixed assets than with fiat. Collectibles like classic Pokémon cards are another apt comparison - price can swing dramatically and relies on sentiment, but the available amount is fixed.
Gold and Pokémon cards have intrinsic value. Some people buy them as an investment to sell later, but some people buy them because they actually want them. Crypto is different; if it somehow became impossible to sell your Bitcoin, it would become completely worthless.
Gold is pretty; so long as a woman can wear a gold bracelet it will have value. But the value of Pokemon cards seems as fragile as that of crypto.
I believe Bullseye's point is that the value of gold cannot drop to LITERALLY zero, because you could always use it to manufacture electrical cables or something. Even in a world with literally zero people who are willing to buy gold, you could still DO something with it.
Whereas in a hypothetical world with literally zero people willing to buy your BTC, you are SOL.
Yes, that is exactly my point.
What I mean is that crypto has no value except for your ability to sell it. The only reason to buy it is that you intend to sell it later.
I would also add that many use cases are developing for various coins - NFT marketplaces are a big one to watch. So while the crypto market currently functions almost entirely on pure speculation, genuine utility is developing that will give such crypto a more stable valuation - again, similar to silver in that it has a dual role as a scarce store of value and as a commodity. Still not enough to let it develop into a currency, but far from a non-asset.
Arguing that cryptocurrencies have utility because of NFTs seems kind of like arguing that cryptocurrencies have utility because you can trade them for other cryptocurrencies. That is, it seems obvious that anyone arguing that cryptocurrencies lack true utility is going to say exactly the same thing about NFTs.
The only thing you can do with an NFT is sell it, right? You can't eat it, or forge a plow out of it, or even use it to decorate your wall. (No, hanging up a piece of paper saying that you own the NFT doesn't count--you can do that whether you actually own the NFT or not.)
There’s actually a ton of interesting stuff being done in that space - it’s going to grow a lot in the next 5-10 years. Decentralized proof of digital ownership is an extremely versatile innovation. Right now NFT marketplaces are developing for the gaming ecosystem. You’ll be able to sell your ‘used’ digital copy of a game on a secondary marketplace. You’ll also be able to trade and sell your skins, in-game items, etc….That’s a huge ecosystem with lots of money, and a genuine use case with real utility. Same goes for your Kindle ebooks, your music and movies, etc…. Eventually things like the title to your car or your stock portfolio could end up on the blockchain.
That would make the crypto that such systems run on (ETH 2.0 seems a leading candidate) much more valuable, in terms of utility, than gold or collectibles.
NFTs are much more than bad digital art.
It seems to me like a pretty big red flag that I asked "the only thing you can do with it is sell it, right?" and you replied with a list of examples of...selling things.
You did kinda vaguely gesture towards a possible answer, which is that (in some hypothetical future) you might be allowed to play a video game if you own a certain NFT, while being prevented from playing that game if you lack that NFT. Which would be an example of doing something with an NFT other than selling it--in this case, using it to play a video game.
But we already *have* digital ownership of video games--you can go and buy digital games on Steam right now!
Steam doesn't allow you to sell used games, but how would the existence of NFTs force them to start allowing that? The things preventing you from selling your used Steam games *right now* are not *technological* barriers! Why would NFTs change them?
MAGA. Hats. Back. On!!
I think it is kind of spamy to just post this email here, rather than re-writing it for this audience and explaining why you think it is relevant.
My apologies, NN
If this was a mention of a fellowship (not sure, refreshed the page and now can no longer find a comment about a fellowship affiliated with Simon DeDeo), I'm interested in learning more! Therefore, I'd say it's relevant for this audience. If not, sorry about the confusion.
Hi KillerBee — sure. A copy is now available at https://simondedeo.com/?p=1050