This is an interesting concept. For the nihilism example, wouldn't the original fallacy be unconvincing to a nihilist?
"If you believe in nihilism, that life has no value, then there's no reason to do anything, the only possibility is apathy and death, therefore you shouldn't believe in nihilism."
That is, a nihilist shouldn't actually see apathy/death as bad since everything is meaningless. If you see those consequences as bad, it must be because you are not actually a nihilist at some level. The only way this argument even makes sense is if both parties agree that apathy/death are bad, and if you do, then I think it's a pretty good argument that you're not actually a nihilist.
That is - can nihilists believe that subjective unpleasantness is inherently bad? My understanding is no, in which case again this seems like either a good argument against nihilism ("nihilism will make you feel subjectively unpleasant, which I think you agree is inherently bad, but if you believe that then you must not be a nihilist") or ill-formed (a true nihilist could respond "so what? There's nothing good or bad about subjective unpleasantness") in ways that have to do with unshared assumptions about whether subjective unpleasantness is bad. You really shouldn't be a nihilist if you actively avoid subjectively unpleasant things!
This is basically what I assume people are talking about when they say "instrumental rationality." Believing something not because it's correct, but because the belief is useful.
People often give the example of (over-) confidence. That particular example I find less well supported after reading The Scout Mindset.
For what it's worth, I think nihilism is neither true nor pragmatic.
For instance, if we call nihilism the belief that "there are no universal truths." then that statement itself is a claim to universal truth ("It is universally true that "there are no universal truths""). The same argument I believe holds for universal moral truths. Hence, nihilism appears to be a contradiction in terms. You point out a similar thing, where nihilism often holds bare truth as a highest value while denying such truth exists. Somewhat sado-masochistic, don't you think?
The real argument against nihilism, though, is that simple, rational alternatives exist. Consider the Delphic Maxim: "nothing too much." Is it ever good to do anything too much/little? (e.g. eat, drink, think, etc)? If not, then there's a universal categorical imperative for you. Don't do anything too much. Why? Because too much of anything is bad, no matter your maxim.
Somewhat trivially this means that nihilism (which is definitionally void in useful content) is less pragmatic than the above principle (which has at least some useful content). Something is better than nothing.
More to your argument, I think that the "nothing-too-much" principle is more pragmatic to even hedonistic ends. For instance, say your sole purpose is to eat fancy food to feel pleasure. Fine by me, it's your life. However, you still never ought eat too much fancy food, since eating too much is unpleasant.
This fact, I think, renders the pleasure principle somewhat obsolete. Aiming at pleasure alone may cause you to indulge in excessive pleasure, which is at best unpleasant and at worse dangerous (cf. heroin). Aiming away from excess has none of these risks, and optimizes your pleasure to boot.
It seems, then, that we ought dispense with pleasure as a goal entirely, and should instead focus on having in no way too much fancy food, fine wine, stinky cheese, etc. So it would seem that nihilism is neither true, pragmatic, nor even pleasurable. To be honest, this matches my experience with it.
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[To be clear, I don't think "nothing-too-much" is the only viable moral principle. I just think it is a good principle and concise enough to show that nihilism is false and pragmatic in a blog comment. Helps that it is also central to Ancient Greek, Roman, and Chinese philosophy, as well as to Buddhism, Hinduism, and Christianity (or at least Catholicism).]
1) This differs from my experience, in which nihilists tend to claim that, because there is no such thing as objective truth (or that it is unknowable), that therefore there are no objective values and that life is ultimately meaningless. Would you like to provide another definition of nihilism?
2) Did I claim that it was? Or merely that an argument of similar form held for moral truths as held for analytic truths?
3) Please address the argument above. What leap of faith does "nothing too much" involve?
4a) If moderation (and the other virtues defined by nothing too much) is trivially good under your definition of nihilism, then haven't you built in almost the entirety of common morality into your nihilism?
4b) Triviality. I agree that there is something essential about your being human that allows you to delay gratification now for health, wealth, and wisdom later. "Passing pleasure or perennial joy? This is the choice one is to make always," sing the Upanishads. I also agree that the signals for this are built into our biology (and, I would add, not only in our biology), and should always be heeded.
However, I do not feel like you are addressing my argument about pleasure. It seems to me that "nothing too much" is true a priori, without necessary reference to pleasure or experience, since "too much" is bad by definition. Hence, there seems to be another reason besides "X is pleasant" to do X. Hence, there are non-hedonistic moral values. Do you see anything that prevents this reasoning?
Further, by my previous argument, pleasure should not even enter into moral calculus, since it can only cloud the judgement of "nothing too much," and will not even optimize pleasure. Do you think this argument is flawed?
5) Do you always choose perennial joy over passing pleasure? Or do you sometimes choose instant gratification over lasting health, wealth, wisdom, etc.?
If you do always choose right, then may you be hailed as a god amongst men, and may I sit at your feet that I might learn to live well!
I believe it just means that such things are unconditionally good per se, since they are always to be pursued.
For what it's worth, I think this means that moderation, courage, and wisdom (not too much pleasure, not too much fear, not claiming too much) are all manifestations of this proverb, and so in themselves unconditionally good and always to be pursued.
the bots are getting better but the mindless repetition gives it away just like me please don't do that again please never let that happen please no don't but do log in here and send money money money.
Also why does Abraham Aruguete's tale of woe jump between the first and third person? I think if Abraham is a real person, Abraham does need psychiatric treatment, but schizophrenic ramblings on GoFundMe are not the way to access it.
We have the technology to avoid the repetition too! I guess people who know how to use language models can convert that into money more effectively doing something other than spamming substacks though.
I saw Biden saying he was planning on sending shotguns (among other supplies) to Ukraine. Why shotguns? I'd assume something like M16s would be better for most military uses (and also that the US military would have a lot more surplus M16s). Are there usecases in urban fighting that make shotguns better for some things?
It could be influenced by availability of ammunition too. All U.S. M16s, M4s, etc. will use 5.56 NATO cartridges, which may be in short supply in Ukraine. It does appear that the USSR used 12 gauge, which is what American shotguns would use (provided it's the same "12ga", I don't know). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_modern_Russian_small_arms_and_light_weapons#Shotguns
This makes sense, actually. Especially given how hard it's been to get 5.56/.223 ammo even right here in the US and A.
Follow-up point: US army doctrine says (and actual military folks can correct me) that more people are killed by "fires" (meaning artillery, drone, helicopter, or other strikes) than by troops with rifles. The main thing in modern war that a grunt can do is direct "fires" onto targets.
It might make even more sense to just send them a bunch of consumer drones. Some of the footage we've seen looks remarkably similar to what you'd see in a modest DJI drone, for example, and the amount of range and flight time you get from even the cheapest DJI model is quite good. So $400 or so for a basic pump shotgun, or $400 for a DJI Mini 2? Might get more value out of the latter.
Be careful of DJI drones, they come from a Chinese company. My understanding is that DJI has access to a certain amount of metadata from their drones and in theory could make it available to the Russians.
(Disclaimer, I haven't researched this allegation in any detail so take it with a grain of salt. But regardless, if I was Ukrainian I would be pretty concerned.)
That rather depends how much "fires" one has access to - the USA has virtually limitless amounts; Ukraine may be quite limited in what it has available, and heavy equipment like that is much harder to supply than small arms.
Additionally, if they're expecting to fight in the streets of their own cities they probably don't want to call in indirect fire when they can help it, and there will be a lot of infantry-on-infantry fighting.
Other than Mariupol, the Ukrainians are doing most of their fighting outside of cities, trying (mostly successfully) to keep the Russians out. And they inherited their starter army with its kit and doctrine from the Russians, so they aren't exactly short on artillery. My sources say 1000+ howitzers, ~350 each multiple rocket launchers and heavy mortars, and probably no shortage of 82mm mortars.
So, drones that can tell them where to direct fires should be quite useful. But as noted, *consumer* drones may not be the right tool for that.
"Support for Ukrainians fighting against the Russian invasion of their country is pouring forth from all over the United States, including the ammunition industry. Two major US ammo producers have pledged to support the resistance — with bullets. Combined, the manufacturers will be delivering 2 million rounds of ammunition Ukraine desperately needs, as stated by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a now-famous video response to President Biden’s offer of evacuation assistance.
...
Wagenhals, who also achieved fortune and fame in NASCAR, told Free Range American that the entire shipment will consist of 7.62x39mm cartridges. He said members of Congress told the company that’s what Ukraine needs the most. The ammo has an approximate value of $700,000."
Ukraine mostly has weapons of Soviet descent. Most pictures of them distributing rifles just before the conflict showed Soviet weapons, often Kalashnikov-family rifles. Those weapons are chambered in Soviet calibers like the 7.62x39mm, used in (for example) the AK-47 and AK-74 rifles.
Introducing a new caliber rifle, such as the NATO 5.56, risks a lot of confusion in the Ukrainian logistics for a small improvement in lethality. The value of the wrong ammo for the wrong gun is less than zero, because you had to carry it all the way to wherever you discovered the mismatch.
But if the Ukrainians don't have many shotguns in the first place, then sending them shotguns may add a capability and likely won't add much confusion. Similarly, most infantry missile systems are their own stream of logistics, but the Western systems are much better than the aging examples the Ukrainian military had before. Ukraine has been training in those Western systems since 2014 for an eventuality exactly like the ongoing fighting. So clearly the West and Ukraine agreed that any risk of confusion in the missile department was totally worth it.
This is part of what "up to NATO standard" means, the line that Zelenskyy recently took a shot at. NATO wasn't necessarily dissing the Ukrainian military's resolve, gallantry, or resourcefulness even before the conflict. Certainly they wouldn't be now. Rather, NATO was making a factual observation that Ukraine's military machine isn't totally interoperable with the NATO network. Clearly true!
We don't want to add to that confusion. And at least with 7.62 vs 5.45mm, (or 7.62x39 vs 7.62x54R) there's not much chance of actually trying to *load* the wrong cartridge into the wrong gun. With the two standard NATO calibers, that would be a risk.
I have no idea. Shotguns aren't ineffective. As others have noted, they were highly effective in WWI trench warfare. Other reasons I can think of:
* Best case: Ukraine has a huge surplus of shotgun ammo relative to the number of shotguns present.
* Shotguns are cheaper on a per-unit basis, allowing a fixed amount of money to buy more firearms.
* Magic thinking that "you don't need to learn how to aim a shotgun" so that newly-armed civilians will be able to be effective without training.
* Ukrainian Law makes it easier to distribute shotguns to the public at-large as compared to magazine-fed rifles. Given that civilian purchase of shotguns/rifles was expedited to take "only" 3 days, this might be it.
* Biden doesn't know any meaningful differences between shotguns and rifles.
* Biden hates the idea of individual ownership of black rifles so much that he'll sabotage any military aid to avoid the bad political press.
As others have noted, distributing M16/M4 rifles may be a logistical issue without appropriate training, given ammo issues. However, the US still does manufacture some AK47-pattern rifles for civilian use. Those could be shipped over, if appropriate.
Others gave OK answers, I think the likeliest real answer is Biden misspoke (not for the first time) and probably meant to say "rifles". Or maybe there technically are some shotguns in the aid package, but 100x more rifles.
You're right that rifles (M4 carbines not M16) are much more all-purpose. I think the US military mainly only uses shotguns for door breaches. Even when Seal Team Six goes into what it knows with 100% certainty will be a very close-quarters situation like storming Bin Laden's compound, they're mostly carrying rifles.
That doesn't mean a shotgun isn't useful in a close-quarters firefight if it's what you have at hand, but I think most of the time someone suggests he'd rather be carrying a shotgun into a life-or-death situation than an M4, he's played too many video games or something. Shotguns are fun, I like shotguns, but there's this shotgun-worship meme that likes to act as if their stopping power within 10 yards is 1000x that of the next-best alternative, and that shooting someone with a rifle or pistol at that range is half a step up from throwing sand at him.
The official White House fact sheet says 5,000 rifles, 1,000 pistols, 400 machine guns(*), and 400 shotguns. So this probably isn't a Biden thinko.
There are very very few military applications where a shotgun would be *better* than an appropriate-caliber rifle, especially now that even second-tier armies give their soldiers kevlar. But if we've got extra shotguns sitting in crates Ukraine in a caliber the Ukrainians can use, it can't hurt to add them to the list. And America isn't exactly the land of flawlessly rational thinking when it comes to firearms, so quite possibly the list was compiled by one of enthusiasts with an inflated opinion of the martial utility of shotguns.
* presumably the military usage, i.e. belt-fed support weapons
One thing I didn't see: the army might also be using Ukraine to dump weapons and equipment they can no longer use. Stuff that still "good" but no longer part of doctrine or that they have too much of. The very fact that shotguns are less common in modern war makes it a good reason to donate them to be given out to some Ukrainian farmer, rather than keep them.
I'm looking to spend 2-6 weeks in Austin or Denver (or potentially other cool American cities) this summer as a trial experience to see if I may want to live there. If anyone who lives in any of those cities has a spare room, wants to rent me their apartment (presumably while they go on vacation/travel elsewhere), or do an apartment swap with me in Toronto, please let me know!
Happy to provide much more information.
Please email me at daniel $ mm $ frank at gmail $com (all $ can be replaced with .s)
I can’t answer for that person, but Austin and Denver are the clear cultural referents for the places people move who like coastal superstar cities but don’t like their prices. Portland might also count here.
Chicago, Columbus/Indianapolis/Nashville, Minneapolis, and Boise seem to serve a related function, but not quite the same.
Chicago and Minneapolis sure, but Columbus, Indianapolis and Boise? Really? I live in St Louis which I would consider a peer to Indianapolis and near-peer but ahead of the other two, and I wouldn't describe any of us that way. What context am I missing?
St Louis is a very established city, and has the amenities people expect from a big city, because they were set up in the 19th century. These other places are not that, but are experiencing a period of sudden growth, and hoping to some day become established cities.
I was in Denver for work about 5-6 years ago, then for vacation 3 years ago, and each time I thought it was awesome. I sort of unseriously considered moving out there after each trip. Austin created no such temptations, although I was only there for 3-4 days.
While in Denver consider visiting the surrounding cities of Colorado Springs, Golden, and Fort Collins (where I live and highly recommend, especially if its the outdoors aspect you are interested in; seemly every third car has a ski rack/bike rack/fly fishing rack on it). You may also consider Boulder if the cost doesn't put you off.
For those looking for remote work: Four people have contacted me. I've responded to all of them and sent them (collectively) something like thirty job postings in the last week with salaries between $40k and $150k. One of them had a good interview and is probably getting an offer next week. I've done this before a lot so feel free to reach out to me. My email is the definite article in the English language (if you Google the phrase "definite article in the English language" you'll get it as first result) plus my username at gmail dot com.
GPT-3 got the word first try from "What is the definite article in the English language?" Couldn't generate an email address from the whole paragraph though.
Any ACX readers in Bend, Oregon? (I'm new to the area and looking to make friends. I'd be happy to meet with people one-on-one, but also, I'll probably offer to host a meetup here for this mini-Meetups-Everywhere thing.)
Not a full book review but I wrote a blogpost critiquing Emily Oster’s interpretation of evidence on drinking during pregnancy on IQ (she thinks light drinking has no harmful effects).
Short version. Her preferred studies are clearly confounded towards positive effects of drinking on IQ (which she acknowledges). The studies eventually get zero effect after controls but it’s clear that the controls are very noisy so real effect is probably negative. At the very least saying that these studies invalidate a recommendation of abstaining seems overblown
I don't drink often and I cannot comprehend the mind of somebody who would, given the ambiguity here, risk hurting their unborn child rather than go 9 months without drinking.
My concern is that her book presents the evidence as having no remaining ambiguity. I think that may make some parents make decisions that don’t match their own risk preferences
Yes, the problem is that while an occasional glass of wine over the course of an entire pregnancy may not cause any problems, the people who already drink very lightly or who will cut back on their drinking don't need to be told this (though they may need the support when people accuse them of "don't you know that this will damage the baby? don't you care? you are being abusive to your unborn child!" and that sort of finger-wagging does no good at all).
The people who drink heavily will just use it as an excuse: "see, drinking does no harm!" and continue to abuse alcohol and create real problems for their unborn child. They won't cut back, they won't drink rarely or lightly, they will use anything like this to deflect criticism.
I agree. Without even knowing the specifics, I can't imagine not strongly siding on precautionary principle on this one. To be clear, I suppose there is an amount of evidence which I would believe it's okay to drink while pregnant but it would need to be really strong.
So let's say that something like "while there's evidence that heavy drinking causes problems, there's no evidence the same is true of light drinking" is true.
There's going to be people who approach that in different ways. Some people are never even going to consider taking a drink - the smell of a possible risk is enough; the association is enough, for them to not do it.
Some people only treat things like risks if they can be shown they are risky. They'd have drinks here and there, because there's no data telling them they shouldn't.
I fall into the latter category of people pretty hard (can't say what I'd do if I were pregnant) because I've seen a lifetime's worth of what I view as massive overreaches of pain avoidance and risk mitigation, and I have an emotional overreaction to things I associate with that.
I think there's the possibility of a certain amount of people reading Oster's piece and going "you know what, I have specific data and an entire rationale that makes me reject this". But my guess is most people are just as emotionally driven as me on the subject, basically just going with what "seems right" as opposed to anything else.
Well, not exactly. I tend to interpret inquiries into this question as "I had a glass of wine every day until I figured out I was pregnant. How much should I worry?" Which is totally a thing- a lot of women don't realize they're pregnant until a few weeks in, which is the critical formative period for lots of body systems, and they spend the next five years shitting bricks because they drank even a little during that time. Oster is one of the few pushing back on the million plus little pieces of wisdom, some borne out by studies but most not, that constantly bombard pregnant women.
Alcohol seems pretty clear cut, but researching dietary do's and don'ts, I found forums full of women convinced that lemongrass caused their miscarriages, or who were scrutinizing every milestone and tantrum because they maybe drank to much coffee in the first trimester. The default medical advice for a huge amount of behavior in pregnancy is "We don't know the effect, so maybe don't do it?" Which is not a mindset that would be considered sane or rational applied to any other period of life. When it comes to pregnancy, putting actual numbers behind these ideas is not just about quantifying the harm, it's also quantifying how worried to be relative to everything else.
"a few weeks in, which is the critical formative period for lots of body systems"
Is that true? Does the embryo even have any connection to the mother's body in the first few weeks? How long does it take the umbilical cord to develop?
The embryo might start absorbing nutrients from the mother's endometrial layer within 5 days after conception, and the umbilical cord is formed at 5 weeks. The neural tube closes around week 6 and from there brain development picks up quite quickly. The heartbeat should be detectable by then as well, though it's not really a "heart" yet.
I was just wondering if anyone knows whether there is a risk to a mother drinking in the first 2-3 weeks of pregnancy. My previous thought had been that it was not likely to be dangerous (not that I would recommend binge drinking).
I don't have an issue with reassuring women who drank a small amount of alcohol before they knew they were pregnant. A small amount of drinking a couple of times probably isn't going to be the major determining factor in a child's life. People in that circumstance probably do worry too much.
But Oster goes quite a bit further. These are the concluding paragraphs from her chapter on drinking. For context, multiple academic friends sent me the book and said it changed their minds about this issue:
"The bottom line is that the evidence overwhelmingly shows that light drinking is fine. In fact, there is virtually no evidence that drinking a glass of wine a day has negative impacts on pregnancy or child outcomes. Of course, this is a little sensitive to timing—7 drinks a week does not mean 7 shots of vodka in an hour on a Saturday night. Both the data and the science suggest that speed of drinking, and whether you are eating at the same time, matters. It’s not that complicated: drink like a European adult, not like a fraternity brother."
"In doing research for this book, I found the strength of the evidence in this case extremely surprising given the rhetoric around drinking during pregnancy in the United States. Many women I know seem unsure about having even a glass of wine at Christmas or on their anniversary, let alone having a few drinks a week. Yet there seems to be absolutely no reason for anything even close to these draconian restrictions. I am sure we can all see the case for wanting to stay well inside the danger zone, but drawing the line at any drinking at all seems, frankly, ridiculous."
There's a huge number of equivalent constraints on a pregnant woman's / new mother's behavior: people say similar things about drinking coffee while pregnant, traveling during the third trimester (in case of early labor), going on one taxi ride without a car seat, putting a pillow or blanket or stuffed animal in bed with a baby or using a soft mattress or sleeping in the same bed as them, washing bottles rather than steam-sterilizing them, skipping well visits where no vaccine will be given, etc.
I think alcohol *in particular* is easy to avoid, but avoiding all the things that people say might harm a baby is not easy.
An issue I have with your asteroid analogy is that the dose matters. The asteroid prior for 1 drink is not the same as 10 drinks. In asteroid terms a 1 cm wide asteroid is never going to cause a catastrophe just as 1 drink over the course of dinner will not produce enough acetaldehyde to cause harm. There is a cap to the risk based on the dose which I don't see reflected in your distributions.
As in, if I'm dating someone and they ask if I love them, what are they asking and how can I tell if the true answer is yes or no?
The only definitions I've found amount to something like "you'll know it when you see it." As a queer person, I'm pretty skeptical of this approach. Presumably some people don't experience this particular mental state, but that's impossible to even theorize about without a more practical definition.
I'm not even merely being pedantic. I've never been able to find a working definition that is precise enough to navigate simple English conversations. I know it's a step in the process of a growing relationship (somewhere between the first date and marriage, but is it before or after moving in together, or can it be either?). I get that it's more romantic than sexual. Can anyone be more specific?
Sorry, team "you'll know it when you feel it" here. I used to share your skepticism, and figured people were just using 'love' as short hand for "think this person is nice to be around and also attractive". Then I fell in love, and yeah, it's not just a scaled up version of that.
Okay, that's informative in itself. Still though, what makes you think that new emotion was what people mean by "love"? I've experienced emotional shifts during the course of a relationship, does the love one have any identifying characteristics other than what it isn't?
This is not the answer I would provide in a vacuum (I'm more of a "you'll know it when you feel it" person), but I think it's more to the point of your question. I'm trying to think of the practical effects of love, rather than describe how it feels. Describing a feeling is probably like trying to describe color to a blind person, so I hope you recognize that this is imprecise at best.
When I fell in love with my wife, there was a shift in approach in my mind. That is, in my mental calculations of what to do and what to prioritize, my wife's thoughts and feelings mattered as much as my own or more. It goes beyond caring for her wellbeing (which could be selfish - not wanting to lose her), to caring about what she cares about directly, only because she cares about it. That doesn't mean that I necessarily like the things she does, but that I want to help her fulfill her needs and desires independent of or even at the expense of my own desires. This desire is also independent of any kinds of rewards ("I make her happy, she does _____ for me" kinds of tradeoffs), but can tip significantly one-sided without me noticing or caring. There's a very significant level of trust built in, but it goes beyond trust. She could treat me poorly and do things that would normally create distrust and I would still want to treat her well.
From an outside perspective, that situation probably sounds ripe for abuse. I suppose it is, but when two people are in love, that's not the biggest concern of either, and both should want to care about the other enough to prevent themselves from abusing the trust being put in them. Then there are situations where a spouse gets badly injured or terminally sick, and the other spouse gives up everything in life to take care of them even though they will never be able to repay that. Leaving the sick spouse doesn't even seem like an option, and wouldn't even be considered. I know a couple where the husband got badly injured in a car wreck while they were engaged. They were about 20 years old at the time. He was in a coma for a long time, and had pretty bad brain damage. A lot of people wondered if she would leave him, but she stayed by his side and cared for him during the coma and the long recovery. He's still significantly impaired and will be for life, but they've been married for over 10 years.
The clearest shift is the amount of certainty I had in being in love (they say, only slightly tongue in cheek).
OK, trying to give a more helpful answer: Mr. Doolittle probably has the right approach. I would describe it almost as a blurring of the self/other boundary, but mutual, such that their happiness and desires and success become more equivalent to yours
(I suppose by this definition, patriotism is a kind of love (albeit non-mutual), which maybe isn't completely wrong)
What else would you go on? Do you feel a strong, positive feeling for me that you rarely, or never, have felt toward someone else? If yes then 'love'. If no then you will probably leave me for someone else when you find you can feel a stronger emotion than 'is pretty, nice to be with'.
Okay, I’ll take a stab at it. I by no means claim to be an expert on love, but I’m at least decent at definitions and remember being dubious of the emotion enough to hopefully be helpful.
A disclaimer first though. 1) we can’t know eachother’s internal states, so likely different people will feel different things and 2) if you use some pedantic thing to decide, your partner may very well not be pleased with this if they’re looking for the emotion. 3) You kind of know it when you feel it, but this is hopefully useful to some degree anyway
Ahem, now onto an attempt at a definition.
First off, “being in love” is a state of being that often has one of two meanings. Meaning 1 would be “the honeymoon phase” or “puppy love” which is often characterized by intense attraction, attention, and emotional connection to the other person.
Meaning two (loving someone) is much vaguer. But, many experienced people say it is a choice, and this roughly squares with my experience as a less experienced person. “Loving someone” could be seen as the active choice to pursue a relationship with them, work to be closer to them, and to help/protect them as best you can. This choice is not just a short-term decision, but to some degree a commitment towards a longer term goal.
Okay, this is getting long, but let me try to bring it home with my own perspective. The honeymoon period will probably pop up anywhere from 1 month to 2 years in depending on how many times it’s happened before. Loving someone is something that happens once you know them well enough and commit to a serious relationship. Maybe this will seem pedantic, but once you’ve decided to love someone, you will always have loved them, and to me that in and of itself is significant.
I think part of why everyone says, “it depends” is that it can mean different things to different people. Personally, it’s a kind of inflection point I feel when I realize I really, really want to know everything about someone and be known in all my ways by them, to spend a lot of time with them, to share my vulnerabilities with them and support them no matter what, to care for and be cared for by them. There’s a sexual component, which not everyone feels, but the physical feeling of being in love even without the sexual dimension is an overwhelming desire to be in their presence, to take them in, to bask in the glow of their being. It’s more than butterflies or limerence, and has a deep, resonant aspect of wanting to stick by this person, even if things get tough.
I empathize with your situation because I think it can be kind of unfair to ask someone if they love you - I think it’s perfectly fine, if you’ve shared that you love someone and they don’t say it back, to ask if it’s something they think is in the cards, and to set a timetable for checking in again, so the in-love party can decide if they need to move on - but asking if someone loves you can feel an awful lot like pressure to say yes. I wish you luck in your relationship(s) and unfolding understanding of what being-in-love means to you!
A place that’s been really helpful to me on relationship questions is Ask MetaFilter: while there’s often advice I don’t agree with, people share experience and advice really openly, and I’ve learned a lot just reading through various people’s perspectives. As a nerdy bi lady with ADHD and baggage, I also see a lot more representation of questions/answers from nerdy, LGBTQIA+++, neurodiverse, and complicated folks.
Sadly, I'm with Arbituram. Like satori, it is a profound experience beyond that which can be communicated. The best I can say is "if you find yourself struggling to compress the feelings you hold about someone down into language, it's probably love."
AFTER (not before) you have sex with that person, is your first thought "how long till I can GTF out of here and home to my comfy bed?" Or is it "I want to stay here all night with this person".
Lust is the first one; nothing wrong with that, but let's be honest with ourselves here.
Once you're at the second stage, you don't immediately want to leave (or have them leave), then you *might* be on the way to love. There are more hurdles, but that's the first one.
(Second one, if you have any common sense, is to engage in some sort of fairly stressful activity together. What counts as stressful differs between people, but something like a two day drive is a possible example, or flying [ideally by coach, with two long layovers] through an especially crowded airport.
Can the two of you handle the co-ordination, compromises, and mistakes that come up? Does the other person's disorganized cluelessness/insane level of organization drive you mad? Do you see eye-to-eye on things like money, food, time, material possessions, ...
If you don't, bail out now. You won't change them, they won't change you. What's quirky and charming today will be a screaming match in five years and exhibit #7 at the divorce proceedings in 8 years.)
I've heard it said that love is when the other person's utility function becomes part of your own. Said slightly less nerdily, their well-being is important to you intrinsically, not instrumentally.
You may not been sure if you've ever experienced romantic love, but have you ever loved a family member? Or a friend? Or a pet? I don't think you necessarily have to separate romantic and non-romantic love — I love my husband a lot, but that love feels very similar to my love for my family. In all cases of love (partner, family member, friend), I want the person to succeed in their endeavors, I feel sad when they're sad, I want them to like me, and I want to take care of them when they need that. I also have a lot of positive things to say about them, and in most cases I get excited about seeing them (though not all cases; love is complicated and it's possible to love someone you don't like interacting with that much — most common in family relationships).
I do think that in a newer romantic relationship, the distinction will be greater, because there's more 'new relationship energy' (aka NRE), which is like the feeling of having a crush (which you might be familiar with). However, I would say that that's still basically in the same magisterium, it's just that the balance of excitement is higher relative to the other things.
As for when I say "I love you" in a romantic relationship, the heuristic I follow is, "wait to say it until it feels impossible to not say it" — which I guess is where "you'll know it when you see it" comes in. I also mix in an element of 'belief reporting', which is an introspection technique where you check whether saying a phrase evokes any feelings of wrongness in you. I may feel the urge to say I love someone before I can belief report that it's true, but I definitely wait to tell them until I can belief report it.
Do you feel better in the presence of this person? Does the thought of them make you feel warm and fuzzy and glowy? Do their needs feel as important (or more) than your own? Did you watch Atypical Season 1 and the 3 ways Sam's parents described being in love?
Can't tell you, I've never been. From the outside, it looks like "a fit of temporary insanity". I suppose all the usual clichés about wanting to be with this person, thinking this person is the greatest ever, going around simply being happy in your day-to-day life, etc.
But if you can't get an idea from all the songs and all the poems and all the movies and all the marketing campaigns for St. Valentine's Day, I can't give you any hint.
When people talk about love, they generally mean eros and not familial affection, friendship, the feeling of being part of a team, the feeling for pets, love of country, etc.
I was struck by the very great change in attitudes between the time of the Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet" (published 1892) and modern attitudes, where *of course* you put your romantic partner over your family! If your family don't approve of your love-life, break off connections with them. If your in-laws or your own parents are 'interfering', and you have to choose between them and your partner, you pick the partner.
"I have no doubt that she loved you, but there are women in whom the love of a lover extinguishes all other loves, and I think that she must have been
It gets complicated, but I think a lot of people think love means both eros and at least loyalty. I'm not sure what the relationship is between loyalty and agape.
One hopes within a sound marriage, there is plenty of agape. Otherwise, it gets rough when you get old and wrinkled.
Yes, the modern affectation (for I think it that) that love should be an obsession undeniable, an addiction, like getting hooked on crack, is discouraging. As if we are no better than rutting swine. But at that, it's also inconsistent, because at the same time the modern naif thinks he can *rationally* choose the addiction -- e.g. by filling out a long compatibility form on a dating website.
I struggled with this as well, and I'm a pretty traditional person. But I had some baggage from my childhood that made me wonder if what I was feeling was really love.
Because of my doubts, I was unusually conservative in saying "I love you." In fact, it wasn't until someone else asked me why I was willing to commit to my then-long-distance boyfriend that I said "Because I love him." I hadn't even said that to *him* yet, but as the words left my mouth, I knew it was true. The relationship we'd been having, even over the phone, kept unfolding into something more and more wonderful. Our conversations were consistently the most fun and interesting I'd ever had. Everything we said and did felt sweet and respectful and mutual. And the idea of losing him was more emotionally painful than anything I had ever felt.
I still doubted that I was capable of giving, receiving, or recognizing love. It wasn't just my own feelings- I was in love! I couldn't wait to be with him! Everything was better with him around! But I had never trusted my feelings, even as other evidence piled up. There was nothing that *didn't* feel like love about our situation. The way he listened to and supported me, the way we were both willing to go above and beyond just to be together, it all amounted to something irrefutable.
But that damaged part of me still wanted to refute it, to disbelieve in it somehow. It's not really in anyone's playbook to consciously accept that, yes, this is love, a thing I am in fact capable of and am actually experiencing. Thinking of love in this way is a risky gambit. But it also felt both right and *correct*. If this isn't love, this wonderful feeling and all the good, warm, sane, happy, healing things coming with it, what is? What could possibly be better than this?
I couldn't imagine anything better. Because it was love.
Slightly contrarian view here. I don't think there is a correct answer to this question. "Love" is not a specific state but a range of states encompassing attachment to a person that goes beyond transactional utility. It also has a range of usages in language from strong new relationship energy, to longstanding trust in a romantic context, or even platonic love like for a best friend.
I think younger and more inexperienced people will tend to use the word faster in a romantic context. Perhaps in part because they do form stronger emotions more quickly (young love is a hell of a thing) but also because experience shows that such kind of confessions don't necessarily last and are more performative than sincere. So some people may expect love to be kind of a binding commitment (not easily broken) and some may merely expect it to reflect momentary intensity of feeling.
You can tell someone you love them if you are comfortable doing so and it doesn't feel like a lie. Don't get too caught up in "you know it when you feel it" because it may just be in your nature to question and doubt that feeling more than others
Don't worry about it too much. A lot of these comments are making a distinction between short term infatuation and long term love, which is the basic social concept. But Nobody is actually good at making this determination, realistically, and everyone either has a tiny sample size or has been wrong. The vast, vast majority of times someone says "I love you" to a romantic partner they don't die in each other's arms decades later, they break up within a year or so.
Don't aim to be perfect, merely above the social average. Don't tell a partner you love them if you aren't considering them as a permanent life partner, or if you don't see yourselves together in a year, and in any case not too soon into a relationship.
What??? You say "don't worry about it too much" and then go on to give very opinionated advice.
"Don't tell a partner you love them if you aren't considering them as a permanent life partner"? Why not? I can love someone in the moment without wanting to commit to them for the rest of my life! Relatively short-term relationships can still be meaningful and beautiful and full of mutual respect and affection.
I also dislike the advice not to tell someone you love them "too soon". I've been with my husband for over four years and told him I loved him when we'd only been dating for a month. I wasn't wrong, and I think telling him that was a positive thing for our relationship.
Assuming you mean romantic love, CS Lewis's chapter on Eros in The Four Loves is the best explanation of it that I've seen, in particular this paragraph:
>To the evolutionist Eros (the human variation) will be something that grows out of Venus, a late complication and development of the immemorial biological impulse. We must not assume, however, that this is necessarily what happens within the consciousness of the individual. There may be those who have first felt mere sexual appetite for a woman and then gone on at a later stage to "fall in love with her". But I doubt if this is at all common. Very often what comes first is simply a delighted pre-occupation with the Beloved--a general, unspecified pre-occupation with her in her totality. A man in this state really hasn't leisure to think of sex. He is too busy thinking of a person. The fact that she is a woman is far less important than the fact that she is herself. He is full of desire, but the desire may not be sexually toned. If you asked him what he wanted, the true reply would often be, "To go on thinking of her." He is love's contemplative. And when at a later stage the explicitly sexual element awakes, he will not feel (unless scientific theories are influencing him) that this had all along been the root of the whole matter. He is more likely to feel that the incoming tide of Eros, having demolished many sand-castles and made islands of many rocks, has now at last with a triumphant seventh wave flooded this part of his nature also--the little pool of ordinary sexuality which was there on his beach before the tide came in. Eros enters him like an invader, taking over and reorganising, one by one, the institutions of a conquered country. It may have taken over many others before it reaches the sex in him; and it will reorganise that too.
I've read that most of Russia's major rivers are partly frozen during multi-month periods each winter, and that this causes major problems. Ice blocks river boats, driving up transportation costs. Moreover, ice dams act as "clogs" in rivers by backing up the water behind them and causing it to overflow the river banks, leading to floods.
Could the Russians fix this problem by building more power plants and factories next to these rivers to heat up the water? The new infrastructure would suck up cold river water to serve as coolant, and would then expel the hot water back into the rivers.
No; if the river is big enough for modern transportation, it's too big for that kind of heating (unless you're going to mass produce nuclear power plants). It works in Sheffield because 1) it doesn't get that cold anyway, and 2) it's over a small area. Transportation,by definition,needs clear water over a long distance.
Ah...let's see...reaching for the ol' back of the envelope. Within Moscow the Moscow River is about ~150 m wide. I found a paper from Canada that estimates the convective heat transfer coefficient for a sheltered lake is about 11 W/(m^2*oC), so if we assume the typical Russian winter day is -10C, we need to supply (150 m^2)(11 W/(m^2*oC))*(10oC) = 16.5 kW of heat per meter of the river's length to keep it from freezing. The Moscow River is about 470 km long, so that would be about 470,000 m * 16.5kW/m = 7.8 GW to keep the entire river from freezing. The thermal power output of the famous RBMK 1000 nuclear power plant (the one that exploded at Chernobyl) is about 3.2 GW, so if we dedicated 2-3 of these to just heating the Moscow River that might keep it from freezing in winter, although this assumes all the water entering the river all winter does so in liquid form, which might be a little suspect. The electricity capacity of these nukes is about 1/3 of their thermal cpacity, so 7.8 GW thermal ~ 2.6 GW electrical. The entire Russian electrical capacity is about ~240 GW, so we are talking roughly about diverting 1% of Russian generating capacity to keeping the Moscow River liquid.
"The thermal power output of the famous RBMK 1000 nuclear power plant (the one that exploded at Chernobyl) is about 3.2 GW, so if we dedicated 2-3 of these to just heating the Moscow River that might keep it from freezing in winter"
What do you mean "dedicated"? Nuclear power plants use water as a coolant; they are not "dedicated" to heating up bodies of water.
What if the Russians built RBMK reactors along the Moscow River for the purpose of generating electricity for the city's regular needs, used the River's water as coolant, and then expelled the heated water back into the River? How many reactors would be needed to keep the River from freezing under that constraint?
By "dedicated" I mean the reactor's entire output is diverted to heating the water. Basically all you do is run the river water through the reactor core[1] and nothing else. If you want to use only the amount needed for cooling, that is, you still want to use the nuke to generate as much electricity as you can, you need to subtract off the power you extract as electricity, which is not available to heat the river. A big power plant has a thermal efficiency of ~30%, so basically multiply the number of power plants required by 3/2.
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[1] Actually you'll run it through a heat exchanger with the actual core cooling water, which is quite radioactive.
Depends on what you mean by the word, I think. Physically it's surprisingly plausible. (Although bear in mind the assumptions above are pretty ideal, engineering reality might crank that up by a factor of 2-5 easily enough.) Economically, though, the idea is madness. A modern electrical grid is already a fantastically expensive piece of infrastructure, and expanding it by, say, 50% (a number I am pulling out of thin air, assuming you have 50x as many river km to keep liquid than were on my envelope) is a very expensive megaproject, and I cannot imagine whatever economic benefits flow from keeping the rivers unfrozen would compensate.
And then you have the unforeseen environmental consequences: the history of massive landscape engineering projects like this during the Soviet era (cf. the Aral Sea) is cautionary.
Another big issue would be getting the warmed water spread out evenly. Putting that much heat into the water near the power plant would cause it to be extremely hot (unsafe, kill all the wildlife, maybe boil it off), while the water ~200km away would still be cold and frozen. The extra heat would definitely escape into the atmosphere or even the river banks before it would travel up and downstream to continue melting ice.
@Carl Pham - Instead of expanding the electrical grid, I'm envisioning the Russians building new power plants along their rivers to replace older power plants as the latter are decommissioned per their regular lifecycles. The process would take decades.
Your math assumes the river is a stationary body of water being frozen by cold air above that just needs enough heat to combat that freezing. That water you just heated up isn't just getting chilled by the air above, it's also being completely replaced with fresh upstream cold water immediately after you heat it.
I'm not sure on the science here, but you may have a different problem, namely that if you keep the river flowing all the time, you may well either deplete upstream water storage, or the river will shrink.
The river does flow all the time. It just develops a skin of ice over it in the winter, maybe 10-40cm, which is certainly very solid from a human perspective -- at the upper limit you could drive a truck on it -- but doesn't restrict the water flow to any important extent.
True, though I do wonder if you create increased vulnerability to rain-on-snow events. More critically, I think if this is theoretically being done with waste heat, you either have to build two entirely separate disposal mechanisms, or else you may get very hot rivers in the summer. I don't know anything about what lives in those rivers, but fish often have surprisingly narrow temperature ranges before you start getting serious fish kills.
Very much not my area of expertise (as you can see from the fact that I did think they froze clean through).
I really want to homeschool my kids. I really don’t want to homeschool my kids.
Both of these statements are very true. Except for the fact that I don’t have kids. But if all goes well, I will have a kid in a couple weeks.
I really want to homeschool my kids for a couple of reasons, one passive and one active. The passive reason is that school sucks. I have no faith in the existing educational system. And once one loses said faith, putting one’s child into the school is like going to church after having lost faith in God — deeply dissatisfying, though not without some social benefits.
The active one is that I want my kids to be awesome. Not awesome by your standards, or by mine. Objectively awesome. Like Marvel superheroes, I want superkids who grow into superhumans.
This may not be a popular line of thinking. I know that “one is not supposed to try to mold their kids into something specific.” I’m not trying to mold them into anything. My aim is to help them mold themselves into superhumans. My job is to give them the opportunities, tools, and fuel to do so. That is - awesome opportunities, awesome tools, and awesome fuel. That is - 12 hours per day, every day, of awesome.
So, that’s why I really want to homeschool my kids.
But the problem is that I really don’t want to homeschool my kids. I really don’t want to homeschool my kids for a couple of reasons, one passive and one active.
The passive one is that I may not be good enough. I have big ideas. I have some expertise and some experience. But 12 hours per day of awesome? What if the best I can muster is 12 hours per day of pretty good? What a failure that would be!
The active one is more selfish. What about my awesome? What if I want to build disruptive systems that will change the lives of millions? With time economics being what they are, I kind of have to choose, don’t I? If any of you have succeeded in creating “awesome” in your lives, you probably agree that it’s an all or nothing thing.
So, you might be wondering, “what’s this whiner gonna do about it?”
Well, I’ll tell you what I’ve done so far.
For the past two decades I’ve traded stocks professionally. I took the job out of college because I wouldn’t have to shave for work. I was introduced to it as a video game and I treated it as such. I learned the game. I played the game. I never had much respect for, or interest in, the game, but playing it was fun enough.
In the meantime, I had started a company developing interactive educational content, thinking maybe an AI can teach kids the basics. Then I started a company that developed interactive StoryGames for young kids, because maybe if we gamified education, kids would learn better. Then I started a company that developed a university campus where instead of classrooms we had project incubators, where students worked on solving real problems, because project-based learning yada yada yada…
The first two companies made a bit of money; the last one lost a lot of money; but all three were a winning bet on experience and expertise.
More recently, I started mapping out a more defined version of an anti-school and its awesome-generator functions. I’ll spare you the details. But the idea is that if I could build the anti-school that develops superkids, I solve my problem and the world’s problem as well. Makes some sense, right?! And if this aligns with your practical/personal non-academic interests, then I’d be happy to talk about those details, so please reach out.
Anyway, here’s where I can perhaps tell you something useful. A few weeks ago, my wife came across a podcast which she referred to me. This podcast led me to a small school originated in Austin, Texas. This led me to a book, Courage to Grow, written by Laura Sandefer, the founder of Acton Academy.
Consider this image: a 42-year-old 6’2" hairy ex-Soviet with a 5-day beard and a grey head of hair, sitting at the breakfast table, reading something off an iPad, constantly wiping his eyes and nose with a napkin. He is not sick. It’s not allergies. It appears to be something emotional that’s happening to him. He occasionally lifts his head to see if anybody is watching him in this foreign, tender state.
If you can relate to any of the above (not counting the last paragraph), please read this book. The Kindle version is $1 on Amazon. It maybe a situation where some of you may read it and say “so what”. But others may find, finally, the seeds of something new and better. You, like me, will recognize the struggles that the school founders experienced and the bravery required to meet them. The trials and failures, the risks and payoffs, may seems as profound to you as they did to me. For those of you who are starved for hope in the realm of child development, I’d like to hear your thoughts.
I can confirm. Even in high school it was closer to 4 than 6, and sometimes less. Definitely never 12 hours unless we turned family vacation into a "learning experience" or something like that. Most of the time we did that after the fact, counting time we already put into something fun as also educational.
> I want my kids to be awesome. Not awesome by your standards, or by mine. Objectively awesome. Like Marvel superheroes, I want superkids who grow into superhumans.
Please think a bit more about this one. Having clearly impossible goals for yourself or your children doesn't help anyone.
You might think "ah well, I'll just aim for something impossibly high and maybe I'll get something impressive". I don't think it works like that. I think aiming for impossible goals discourages the sort of sensible incremental steps that you need to take to make real progress. Who wants to work out with those boring dumbells when your goal is to lift a bus over your head?
It's even worse with children. You're just going to be disappointed in everything they do, and children don't react well to parents who are disappointed in everything they do.
Can confirm that inflexibly-high expectations may result in estrangement and trauma.
The relevant word is "inflexibly", though; if you trust yourself to be able to *stop* rather than escalating, there's a lot of room for this kind of scattershot strategy.
Also, having two parents with different strategies can mitigate the consequences of fucking it up, at least for the child (avoids the "child's feedback is 100% negative" danger zone, and largely prevents the "child runs away from home due to hostility with parent" failure state that is a very real possibility for a single parent trying this).
Yes, this thinking alarms me. Your children are mere mortals and so are you. So is Elon Musk, and so was Leonardo DaVinci, or whatever world-changing "superhuman" you had in mind as a role model. Norman Borlaug, perhaps?
You apparently worked with educational software. Have any of the students you worked with qualified as superkids or superhumans? Or were they failed experiments? If your own children turn out to be what most of us would consider functional adults, will you see them and yourself as failures?
I am not sure what your definition of "awesome" really is, but you cannot will this sort of thing into being. You can't control all of the variables, especially not the variables present in the child themselves. If you currently consider "12 hours a day of pretty good" a failure, I do hope that exposure to your own newborn baby will temper that sentiment a bit.
Raising a child to be a responsible, productive being with the character and integrity for leadership is laudable and probably achievable, but aiming for "superhuman" is a terrible burden to place on yourself and your child. Your child's social interactions and friendships may also suffer from the implicit goal of making them some sort of ubermensch; even if I had a prodigy on my hands, I would reject this kind of thinking as dangerous. Not to the status quo, but to my child's mental and social health (not to mention my own).
And I don't see any space in your model for *peace* and *rest*, which will shortly be your most precious commodities. I'm not sure what twelve hours a day of awesome looks like for you, but the intensity you're projecting here has me concerned it might be something that could easily grind a small child into dust long before it makes them awesome.
"Your children are mere mortals and so are you. So is Elon Musk, and so was Leonardo DaVinci"
I disagree. They were mortals, but I wouldn't call them mere.
"If your own children turn out to be what most of us would consider functional adults, will you see them and yourself as failures?"
If my children turn out to be what most of "you" would consider functional adults, then I would consider myself a failure.
"I am not sure what your definition of "awesome" really is"
I think that Da Vinci was pretty awesome, and so's Elon Musk. In very different ways, mind you. The potential for, and variety of, awesome in the world is pretty awesome.
"Your child's social interactions and friendships may also suffer from the implicit goal of making them some sort of ubermensch"
The goal is for the child to be able to establish awesome social interactions and awesome friendships. If successful, these would only benefit the child's mental health.
"And I don't see any space in your model for *peace* and *rest*, which will shortly be your most precious commodities."
Well.. there's a lot that you might not see in my model, since I basically repeated awesome 20 times. But yeah, awesome peace and rest are part of the model.
I have a feeling that 99.99999% of the depressed, unhappy, unproductive, mediocre, bored, disinterested people out there are not any of those things because their parents tried to make them awesome. So while you're afraid of what I'm going to do to my children, I'm afraid of what everybody else does to theirs.
It appears that we both recognize awesome similarly to some extent (Da Vinci, Musk), yet I get the feeling that you are not interested in personally taking ownership of it. I'm not saying you could, or should. I'm guessing that you don't even see it as an option available to you. ("Guessing", because I could be entirely wrong about you.)
Well, I think it's my responsibility to help my children be as awesome as they possibly can be. But there's a difference between taking ownership of that responsibility and having a specific personal mission that my kids should achieve some objective standard of awesomeness. If "awesome" means they have to disruptively change the world and positively affect millions of people with their awesomeness, I don't think that's a reasonable goal to put on yourself or your kid.
DaVinci and Musk weren't just talented or correctly educated; they were in the right place geographically and temporally as well. Elon's parents probably did not imagine the internet when they conceived him. They gave him advantages, but if the sphere to use them as he did hadn't developed at just the right moment, would we know his name?
My kids are little, and their strengths and weaknesses are still largely mysterious. Are my daughters capable of greatness? Of course I think so- I'm their mom. Will I help them fulfill that potential? As much as I can. But I wouldn't want to give her the specific goal of greatness, or an idea of herself as a superkid. I disagree that you can build solid friendships while believing that the other kids who aren't getting the awesomeness program are inherently less awesome than you. I also have serious doubts about my ability to truly direct the social interactions and friendships my child develops, which will be at least as important as any parental input. And even awesome friendships with awesome kids won't be 100% awesome, because those kids are human, too.
I don't want my kid to feel like her inevitable failures and heartbreaks, besides being painful, are dings against her "awesomeness", or that if she doesn't foment massive change she's a failure. Keep in mind that the awesome superkid needs people to help them. I personally am a bit concerned about teaching every kid that they ought to be in the drivers seat all the time. Teaching kids that they're capable of leadership is good; demanding it of them on pain of being labeled failures is not.
I also have to consider the possibility that my kids may be awesome by some standard I myself cannot recognize or understand, and that validation of any greatness they achieve might not come from me at all. I meet a lot of smart, successful people who feel like failures, impostors or underachievers because of some illusory greatness they never managed to reach. Sometimes this comes from their parents, sometimes themselves. These are people who really are changing the world for the better, and they lose even when they win. I want my kids to have ambition and integrity, but I don't want them to feel like failures in success because the bar was "change the world".
>>>"Well, I think it's my responsibility to help my children be as awesome as they possibly can be."
When you say this, what do you mean exactly? How do you what "they can possibly be"? How do you plan/measure/assess your performance with regard to this metric? In reality, you will know "their potential" only after the fact, at which point it is too late to make adjustments to your "responsibility to help".
>>>"But there's a difference between taking ownership of that responsibility and having a specific personal mission that my kids should achieve some objective standard of awesomeness."
Really, it's objective standards (plural) of awesomeness. What if you replace awesomeness with "very high levels of development"? Would objective standards still seem inappropriate? What if the categories of said development are ability categories like: cognitive, emotional, relational, moral, kinesthetic, humor, creativity, aesthetics, etc.? Wouldn't objective standards be helpful?
>>>"If "awesome" means they have to disruptively change the world and positively affect millions of people with their awesomeness, I don't think that's a reasonable goal to put on yourself or your kid."
I don't think that I would use such a narrow definition.
>>>"DaVinci and Musk weren't just talented or correctly educated; they were in the right place geographically and temporally as well. Elon's parents probably did not imagine the internet when they conceived him. They gave him advantages, but if the sphere to use them as he did hadn't developed at just the right moment, would we know his name?"
I don't know much about Elon's upbringing. It's an interesting and potentially helpful topic to explore. But I'm not trying to reproduce Elon.
>>>"My kids are little, and their strengths and weaknesses are still largely mysterious. Are my daughters capable of greatness? Of course I think so- I'm their mom."
I think so, and I'm not their mom. Am I disadvantaging your kids by thinking so?
>>>"Will I help them fulfill that potential? As much as I can."
"As much as I can." Is this true? How much can you? Do you honestly know? Have you honestly thought enough about how much "you can"? I'm sure you've thought plenty about how much "you're willing", or how much you "can afford"... but those are very different questions. Usually, when people say "I do what I can," or, "I'm doing my best," they are stating (often unknowingly) an untruth.
>>>"But I wouldn't want to give her the specific goal of greatness, or an idea of herself as a superkid."
I agree... A specific goal of greatness is problematic. You need hundreds/thousands of goals that build up to greatness.
>>>"I disagree that you can build solid friendships while believing that the other kids who aren't getting the awesomeness program are inherently less awesome than you."
I think this is wrong. By developing empathy and understanding, you can help your children have and enjoy many kinds of asymmetrical relationships.
>>>"I also have serious doubts about my ability to truly direct the social interactions and friendships my child develops, which will be at least as important as any parental input."
You absolutely have this ability. It's not god-like, but it's there.
>>>"I don't want my kid to feel like her inevitable failures and heartbreaks, besides being painful, are dings against her "awesomeness", or that if she doesn't foment massive change she's a failure."
Failure is default. How much we risk, under what circumstances, and with what agency — how we deal with and learn from failure is the difference. Some people make the same mistakes thousands of times. Awesome is using failure to supercharge growth.
>>>"Keep in mind that the awesome superkid needs people to help them. I personally am a bit concerned about teaching every kid that they ought to be in the drivers seat all the time. Teaching kids that they're capable of leadership is good; demanding it of them on pain of being labeled failures is not."
I'm not sure why people assume that working towards greatness makes one a cruel figure that ridicules failure.
>>>"I also have to consider the possibility that my kids may be awesome by some standard I myself cannot recognize or understand, and that validation of any greatness they achieve might not come from me at all. I meet a lot of smart, successful people who feel like failures, impostors or underachievers because of some illusory greatness they never managed to reach. Sometimes this comes from their parents, sometimes themselves. These are people who really are changing the world for the better, and they lose even when they win. I want my kids to have ambition and integrity, but I don't want them to feel like failures in success because the bar was "change the world"."
These successful people are incomplete role models. Why is it so hard to imagine successful people who are changing the world for the better AND are happy, heathy, confident? I'll tell you why — it's because they are very rare. That doesn't mean it's impossible. It just means that the developmental means that are currently in-use suck.
Your kids should never have to think of the bar as "change the world". If they are engaged in 12 hours of awesome development every day, they have dozens of bars every week to focus on — with many bars that they enjoy, are passionate about, etc. etc. Developing video games, preparing 5 course meals with surprise ingredients, working on their weekly standup comedy routines, updating the family's financial plan, and thousands of other awesome things that 99.99999% of kids don't do, because they are immersed in lameness.
I think some of the pushback you're getting here stems from the fact that you said up front you don't actually have children yet[1]. So you are coming at this entirely from a theoretical perspective -- you have zero data on which to base any of your plans or opinions.
That's not bad in itself, of course, everyone has to start at square zero, and we all try to dig into the experience and observations of others as much as we can.
However...I think what all long-term successful parents can tell you also is that it's best to approach the job with a huge helping of humility *and* to be exceedingly open to learning from experience. In other words, the best approach to parenting seems to be much more empirical and practice-based than what you seem to be driving here. You really, really, need to be very open to learning new and surprising things, and radically altering your understanding and plans as the real data on the real people we are talking about rolls in.
Bear in mind it's unreasonable to think of children, even the youngest children, as anything like pets or employees or stupid people or game characters. They actually have not one speck less will and self-awareness than you do. They lack language skills, and they lack experience, but they're just as smart as you (arguably smarter, since the raw performance of the brain probably peaks at birth and declines throughout life), and they have just as much interest in controlling their own fate as you do.
It's true for quite a number of years they are programmed to love and obey you, and they are also smart enough to know that this is a pretty functional thing to do -- take advantage of your knowledge, resources, and attachment to them. But make no mistake: they are real people, just like you, and they will be distinct and challenging from the age of 5 minutes, because it's not a natural state for any one human being to be nothing more than a metaphysical extension of another, and they will be evolving out of dependence starting immediately.
Doesn't mean you can't do great things for them, but remember you're trying to exert amazing levels of leadership on a human being as wilful and resourceful in his or her way as yourself, so you will need to be adaptable and learn quickly. Best not to let theory and prior plans get in the way of that -- I think that's what people are trying to say.
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[1] In case you're wondering about my bona fides here, I have 5 children and the oldest is turning 31 in July.
I would like to personally report that my mother explicitly tried to raise me from a very early age to be a wunderkind and all it gave me was imposter syndrome and a crippling need to lie to people to earn their approval that I didn't shake off until my early 20's. I suspect if she had just recognized that I was a fairly bright child and NOT the next leading light of the science world I would probably be in a better place than I am now. My aunt was similarly pushed to give superhuman performances of ability by her parents. Unlike me, she didn't crash and burn and by pure financial terms was a very successful lawyer. Psychologically, however, she was deeply neurotic and self-hating to the point where she BEGGED my mother to not repeat what her parents did to me (which my mother ignored to her deep regret) and later told both of us that she could count the number of days she was actually happy with her life on both hands.
I get the impression you are using "awesome" a lot because you can use it as a kind of magic catch-all that allows you to abstract away any hard questions about how you're going to raise your children. It's a hand-wave. So I will ask a question that you can't hand-wave away by slapping "awesome" onto a verb: what if you child decides they don't WANT to be a superhuman? What if they decide they'd be perfectly happy as a chartered accountant, or a farmer, or a plumber, or a photographer, or some other humble position? Or what if they want to enter a given field that you'd classify as sufficiently superhuman but show no signs of wanting to become the morning star for some great revolution in that field and in fact are talented in an un-awesome manner?
If your answer is "my awesome child would never want to be something lame like a plumber"- you can only guarantee that if you completely cloister your child off from the outside world and make sure their every experience is near-totally mediated through you. I knew a guy who was raised like that (child of two psychologists- go figure). He's extremely intelligent and a veritable polymath- and he lives in a homeless shelter because it turns out raising a child in a bubble renders them utterly unprepared for the outside world, which shows that even if you do everything right you still can lose.
Your strategy only works if you are so incredibly confident you have found the One True Way To Be A Parent To A Genius That Works Every Time that you're willing to bet a human life on it. I hope that when you hold your child in your arms you realize what that gamble actually means and step back from doing something that will cause pain for your whole family.
"All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." I think that our minds veer towards imagining disfunctional outcomes, because we are so much more familiar with those. I talk about the rarity of superchildren, but superparents are equally rare. Most of us have never met one. As a result, our imagination is colored by what we know, and what we know is abuse, trauma, mediocrity.
I recently read The Marva Collins Way, a fantastic book. One thing that it makes apparent is the massive gulf between an average teacher, a pretty good teacher, and an awesome teacher. The experience and impact really gets a 10x treatment when moving to awesome. Another thing it portrays, is that once you're in the awesome teacher zone, hard work and fun happily coexist, high expectations/challenges and love/support are not mutually exclusive.
When I talk about intense development, you might imagine risk and damage, but please don't assume that flourishing and confidence are out of the realm of outcome possibilities.
You are right: I do use awesome as a magic catch all. If I was to define development models across multitudes of facets and competencies, it would be a post that's hundreds of thousands words in length.
In regards to your question of the plumber — I view it as irrelevant. Just as I don't envision/prescribe a specific shape to what the child should become, I don't spend time thinking of what they shouldn't become. I'm guessing that awesome plumbers are both rare and awesome. Plumbing is a development channel that a child/person would chose. My job is to develop the more general abilities: cognitive, emotional, relational, moral, kinesthetic, humor, creativity, aesthetics, etc.
"Your strategy only works if you are so incredibly confident you have found the One True Way To Be A Parent To A Genius That Works Every Time that you're willing to bet a human life on it."
Every parent makes the gamble when they have children. Most don't know they are gambling. Most don't even really know the rules of the game, or the odds. They are going through the motions. They are doing what others seem to be doing. They are exactly like most gamblers in Vegas.
The rare professional gamblers, at least, take their job seriously, do their research and training, and behave with intention. It's not easy. It's hard work. It might appear less fun than the drunken pissing away of hard earned money at the amateur tables and slots. But there is an objective difference in the performance/results between the two groups. I chose to be the professional gambler who doesn't outsource his wins to lady luck.
Right, so as far as I can parse your adman-style explanation, we've somehow gone to "I want my child to be as close to a Marvel superhero as is permissible by the laws of biology and physics" to "I'm fine with my child being a plumber provided they're the best plumber they can be." Most people would see these statements as contradictory, but given that you clearly believe you are fundamentally a superior (perhaps even greatly superior) species to most people I doubt that bothers you. The question (to me) then becomes "why is this natural aristocrat coming to us unwashed peasants with what sounds less like a declaration of intent and more like an ad pitch for their parenting style?"
Everything else here sounds like you are doing things parents have done in one form or another for at least the past century, but couched in a way where you believe you're a brilliant trailblazer, and I have nothing to say to that.
If you don't work in marketing, I think you've missed your calling.
I disagree on "impossible", on "doesn't help anyone", "sensible incremental steps", "disappointed in everything they do". I wish you luck in your incrementalism, and I'm going to stick to Zero to One, for lack of a better metaphor.
We (ok, mostly my wife) homeschool / virtual school our children, and have found it deeply rewarding. We are aiming for a broad vaguely Classical education, and we are able to let them go very deep on their individual strengths, which is different for each of them. I will say, I am skeptical of “learner-driven” education. But mostly that’s from experience with friends using extreme “Thomas Jefferson” education and “un-school” approaches, with poor results - lots of projects about superheroes and comic books, not much learning in traditional topics like world history and math. If the Acton approach gives more balance with some structured learning in addition to “learner-driven” freedom it might not be so bad. And with the level of enthusiasm and experience you express in your post I’m sure you could make any method amazing for your kids. Good luck!
On the small scale level - if your work is highly paid, and you don't want to give it up, you can hire tutors for your kids. Grad students are basically always broke, and you can probably afford to pay them more per hour than their university would. (I gather in America sometimes the teaching commitments are not optional, though, so they may not have time; frankly, American grad school looks a lot like ~~slavery~~ *indentured servitude* to me)
I think high expectations may tacitly lead to high pressure (for them), or disappointment (for you). Ensuring kids are as well equipped as possible to excel sounds sensible however and that's what I'm going for.
Full-time homeschooling is off the table, so here's my approach: a) send the kids to school with a relaxed attitude, but ensure they do the work, b) help them fully understand the problems they're working on, c) teach them about the world, the arts, STEM topics, and encourage home projects.
I don't want to overwhelm them as I expect attention to fizzle out after a day of school, but picking my moments. Regular exercise and outdoor time is necessary as well to tune their focus. From school they'll get some structure (fwiw) and social contact.
This is more or less my plan. We live in a good school district, and my husband is a product of this school system himself, so I'm not concerned about school doing any active damage. I had some rough patches in school, but even with the ups and downs it was overall a big positive in my opinion. A lot of the bugs people identify about school I see as features; I learned a lot about myself and the systems that surrounded me that I feel have been beneficial in navigating adulthood. And the social aspect was immeasurably important and could not have been engineered whole cloth by myself or my parents. School was really my only domain *outside of my parents*, and for me that was essential. I'm grateful to the strong social norm that made them *let me go* for seven hours per day.
My husband and I probably both did more raw learning on our own in elementary school as voracious readers and born tinkerers. But school exposed us to things we would never have discovered otherwise, and we made all our friends there. We're fortunate have more resources to offer our children in pursuing their interests, and I'm hoping to give my kids more freedom. I don't see what I could offer over school + hobbies and reading in terms of making my kid more successful. And I know if my parents had taken it on themselves to homeschool me, it would have been a disaster.
One thing school teaches you, for better or worse, is how to cope with rigid rules, how to work alongside people who are obnoxious and/or don't like you, and how to cope with stupid leadership.
Those are actually very important qualities of character, among the most important. There's a lot of talk these days about the importance of "grit" to success -- a lot of teachers love Carol Dweck on the 'growth' mindset for example -- but even though it's fashionable I think there's a big kernel of truth there. When I reflect on all the people I know in my field, there's a strong correlation between grit, stick-to-it-ness, resilience, the ability to cope well with failure, setback, injustice, bad luck. With a flawlessly brilliant education -- less so. The latter will certainly take you far, don't get me wrong, but for genuine and lasting success as an adult, strength of character is definitely the ace card.
Of course, there might be better ways to get that then school, in cases. Siblings definitely help a lot, an active social circle, probably some degree of cooperative team activities, getting a job in your teens, et cetera. I'm just saying school has a function well beyond just ABCs, and some of its imperfections are actually key to those functions -- which I think is very similar to what you said.
I think I put more stock in grit than most Liberals, but the key to it's effectiveness, I believe, is a reliable source of validation and respect at home.
How much awesomeness do you attribute to genetics vs environment? Like a good tiger parent you want to provide your child with the optimal environment for turning them into your current vision of “awesome,” but you don’t know what genetic cards your child has been dealt, so it will be difficult to plan that environment.
You also seem to be putting yourself at the center of your child’s environment. Is 12 hours a day of your curated awesomeness going to be what is best for the kid? I imagine if Elon’s Dad had followed him around trying to make his life awesome, Elon would not have ended up where he is. Instead, his Dad called him an idiot and had no faith in him.
I teach in very expensive private schools, and I have a lot of experience with tiger parenting. One secret, which you can’t fake, is to genuinely withhold approval, and to have your kid constantly seeking your approval by working tirelessly to succeed. My grandfather was Dean of a prestigious medical school, my father constantly tried to get his attention by succeeding. This became a habit and eventually he went on to have 15 patents and head a major cancer research lab. Unfortunately, I never felt I had to seek my parents’ approval, and I only wanted to be happy, and I wasn’t driven to succeed in the same way. Of course, the upside is I have so far had a happier life than my father. There is no free lunch?
"Objectively awesome. Like Marvel superheroes, I want superkids who grow into superhumans."
There are nearly 8 billion people on earth. Objectively awesome is going to require innate talent mixed with ideal circumstances. Having lots of kids will increase your chances of having one who is awesome.
That's accurate in a world where parents do not have agency. And that's our world, because either one is poor and doesn't have the agency, or one chooses to outsource the agency to institutions (middle and upper classes).
This doesn't mean that it is impossible to exercise parental agency towards development at very advanced levels. It's just exceedingly rare, there are few resources to support it, and there is very little know-how around it.
Nobody would argue that parents don't have agency. But it is absurd to argue that there is very little know how, or resources devoted to raising exceptional children. Parents have been trying to get a leg up for their children since time immemorial.
Why is it absurd? Consider medicine just a few hundred years ago. It's been practiced since time immortal, but it was mostly all bad.
Modern parents are like 18th century doctors, when medicine was still a highly immature field. All 18th century doctors were bad doctors. Sure, some were better than others, but statistically, if you got really sick, you were screwed regardless of which doctor you went to. So while today, saying “all doctors are bad at medicine” is a senseless statement, it’s much less imprudent to say “all 18th century doctors were bad at medicine”.
What we do know is that when it comes to speed, science beats evolution by several orders of magnitude. So let’s consider parenting as a science. How much research and financial resources have gone to the scientific study of parenting, as compared to medicine?
Outside of several thousand books on parenting (most non-scientific), and the research of dozens psychology, sociology, and public policy departments, not all that much scientific exploration or funding has been spent on parenting. And all of it in the last couple of centuries.
Whereas medicine has 2 millenia of consistent research and focused inquiry, with a culmination of hundreds of billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of professionals engaged in scientific research during the 20th and 21st centuries. In relative terms, it would be conservative to place the science of parenting into the middle ages.
Science is progress. All parenting is bad because the science of parenting has never existed. There's no such thing as Parentology.
As for the science of child development, it's barely on the map. Pedology never succeeded in getting off the ground, despite some distinguished champions of it, such as Lev Vygotsky. Meanwhile, developmental psychology is all over the place. Its students and practitioners are a thin diaspora navigating in treacherous academic and political waters. As for the engineers of parenting, those developing practical applications in the real world, who might they be? They don't exist either, perhaps with the exception of the rare and reluctant Bryan Caplan (the parent, not the economist/writer).
So perhaps the first thing we should admit about parenting is that we don’t know all that much about it. It has slid under the radar for hundreds of thousands of years, presenting as a rite of passage, an internal capacity, or as a property of the old and wise. What we know of parenting we know from our childhood experiences, and from what we’ve seen on sitcoms, and what we “did our best” at with our own kids. Circumstantial and anecdotal, all of it.
Meanwhile, if we look to the current science of parenting for answers, what does it tell us? It says, “Look away! Nothing to see here! Parenting is overrated. Don’t worry about it (too much). Take it easy. Things will turn out just fine. Or they won’t. It’s not really up to the parents.”
You’ll find that I get frustrated with the “parenting is not essential” crowd. Not because they are wrong -- they’re not wrong within the construct of the available data. I’m frustrated with them because they are closing the door on further research and discovery of parenting. They are the rationalists who in the dark ages would have suggested that medicine should be outlawed in the name of science.
I feel similarly, and should have my own baby in 7 weeks.
Unfortunately I lack any background in education and I have very little idea of how to be successful at teaching the kids good values, good epistemology, and other rationalist and EA stuff. I couldn't even teach that stuff to my wife, really (I married her before discovering the ACX/LW/EA communities). And there's not really an ACX/LW/EA community in my area (one other person showed up to the meetup yesterday, which is a significant improvement over the previous meetup's zero). I can't imagine doing this alone. But I suppose the first 3-4 years aren't that crucial, and that later I'll have more money and be able to move somewhere with a bigger community... and then get help raising the child from that community? I don't know.
I'm not sure that the rationalist community holds the answer. I've found very few aligned/interested voices on the discussion boards. Perhaps it's my communication style that turns people off.
Check out the Acton school network and the book I referenced. I'd like to know your thoughts.
I saw the Acton video and it looked cool. I was going to say I don't have time to read the book and don't have the Kindle app, but for you? Well, I bought it, can't say when I'll read it.
I don't think it's very fair to put an ad for a politician in an odd-numbered thread. I'll assume this is an invite to discuss this in what would normally be a no-politics thread:
I'm skeptical that you can take a good altruist or a science expert, and make them an effective lawmaker. It is a very different discipline. Personally fighting "poverty in Africa" has very little crossover with writing laws that will fight poverty in Africa. This is because politics and economics always involves trade-offs, often ones not aligned with my values. For example, "universal health care" sounds great per se, but how does it sound when it would likely reduce the total supply of healthcare? Environmentalism, abortion, and universal healthcare are usually touted for being "fair" and it's not at all clear these are actually "altruistic" (abortion definitely not, in my morality; universal healthcare would likely reduce the total supply of healthcare, also the opposite of altruism).
Altruism in law, to me, would imply things like revising and removing old and obsolete statue, removing redundant provisions, removing special carve-outs, removing large discontinuities (e.g. a huge penalty if you're 17 years 11 months for something that's legal the day you turn 18), cutting red tape, evidence-based public policy, and breaking down the institutions that keep causing these perfect party-line splits.
You're right - I included this because I realized the reporting deadline was coming up. I suspend no-politics rules for this thread on topics related to the Flynn campaign.
I'm not claiming that just because Flynn has experience running antipoverty campaigns, he's going to be a good lawmaker. I think what I want out of a candidate is some combination of smart/competent and ideological alignment. Flynn seems plenty smart/competent - Yale law grad, has founded big institutions, has worked for a well-respected security think tank, and is running a good campaign. In terms of ideological alignment, I expect him to do things like vote yes on allocating more money pandemic prevention, which is an actual issue before Congress which lots of Congressmen are voting no on.
Normally when you post donation links, the target donor is every reader. But for US political contributions, I recommend that you also specify who is allowed to donate, by e.g. quoting the restrictions (who would guess 'not a federal contractor'?) listed near the bottom of the ActBlue webpage. Some readers might not scroll further down than the payment link, which is above those restrictions.
>Personally fighting "poverty in Africa" has very little crossover with writing laws that will fight poverty in Africa.
I think it's fundamentally silly for a US congressperson to be 'writing laws to fight poverty in Africa', not least because, as I see things, there are much more important things to be doing even from a utilitarian perspective, even if you assume that these laws can have any appreciable level of success.
Why does there seem to be an upper limit as to how expensive consumer electronics can get- unlike virtually any other consumer good? As far as I can tell, there is no super-expensive iPhone or Android beyond the latest stock models that any upper middle class person can easily afford- there are no $5,000 iPhones, or ones for $10k, or 50. To the best of my knowledge, I have just as nice of an iPhone as Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, or a Saudi prince. The same seems to be true for laptops- there's just a hard limit on how expensive manufacturers make them.
Why is this true for consumer electronics, but almost no other field? For example you can purchase a car at any price point, and there are specialized automobiles ranging in value of up to a few million dollars (this is excluding antiques- I mean purely, a millionaire can purchase an extremely fast car for a large sum of money). In fact, I almost can't think of another consumer good that doesn't have an ultra-luxury price point- so, why are there no ultra-luxury phones or laptops? Is it just that the latest standard-issue iPhone is already at the technological frontier of what Apple can produce? Hard to believe. Curious if anyone's thought about this at all
The idea that the iPhone is at the technological frontier (given the constraints on size, weight, and power) doesn't sound implausible to me. Silicon chips pretty much have to be mass-produced - the expensive part is setting up a semiconductor fab and designing the chip, but once that massive upfront cost is paid you can start churning out phone processors by the batch load. It's not like designing a car engine where you could hand-machine a bunch of specialty parts to build a single engine for your supercar.
Most of the other variables of a phone - screen resolution, camera size, battery capacity, etc - are constrained by the size of the case. You could put it in a nicer case with some accessories, but that's the equivalent of putting leather seats in your car - it's not changing any fundamental performance characteristics. You can't even pay loads of money for a really artsy design, because a phone has to be a small rectangle that fits comfortably in your hand and your pocket.
Economies of scale are enormous in manufactured high tech goods: the R&D cost of designing the device and arranging to manufacture any components that can't be acquired off the shelf aren't enormously cheaper if you sell a hundred devices than if you sell tens of millions. This makes the economics of ultra-luxury phones and laptops more than a bit tricky.
Another problem is lack of use cases for the ultra-premium options if they're available. What is Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos going to do with their multi-million dollar custom phones that they can't do with a top-of-the-line iPhone or Android?
Where there does exist an ultra-premium market for high tech goods is in things like desktop workstations. For one thing, the economies of scale are a lot smaller because you can assemble one out of off the shelf parts that are mass-produced for high-end servers and are designed to be highly modular so the additional design work needed is readily manageable. For another, there's a decent sized market for five-figure-priced workstation besides enthusiasts and conspicuous consumers: rendering, ML development, science and engineering work that involves computationally intensive simulations, etc.
"What is Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos going to do with their multi-million dollar custom phones that they can't do with a top-of-the-line iPhone or Android?"
Brag that they have a one-of-a-kind, every bell and whistle you can think of and then some, custom phone, of course. These are men who are playing with their own real-life rocket ships, do you expect them to slum it with some phone one of the plebs working for them could also buy?
Plus, have you seen some of Bezos' recent get-ups? He's clearly in full mid-life crisis, post-divorce, livin' it up 'cos I can still pull hot sexy chicks swing:
In addition to the other answers, I would say that having something like a $5k iPhone (as opposed to a $100k iPhone) risks reducing sales of the regular iPhone (by enough to reduce profit even with the higher margin of the $5k phones). The reason being is that it makes the $5k iPhone look like the good , proper iPhone, and the regular iPhone looks like a cheap watered down version, so for that money I would be better off buying the best samsung phone which is the most expensive one so therefore isn't watered down, even though the iphone would no worse than the actual iphone is today (assuming they aren't making the $5k phone better by making the regular iphone worse than it curently is).
Is it possible that there are expensive improvements for cell phones which need network effects? I can't think of anything at the moment, but cell phones themselves made a lot more sense when many people could afford them.
Probably because you specified "consumer" electronics, meaning mass-produced commodity hardware. You might equally ask why there are not $5,000 pencils or garden hoses, building bricks that go for $150/each, or why Toyota doesn't sell any cars with an MSRP of $1 million. If you remove "consumer," and just ask whether there is an upper limit to the cost of computing hardware, for assorted boutique or custom uses, like a Lamborghini in the world of cars, the answer becomes "of course not."
More subtly, I would say this is also because general-purpose computing is now a mature field, and innovation is slowed relative to, say, 1975. We are in an era when the improvements are incremental, not revolutionary, and so there is much less qualitative distinction between the leading/research edge and what's available in the mass consumer marketplace.
While I doubt that Jeff Bezos is the market for it-- it doesn't strike me as a very American style of conspicuous consumption-- Faber-Castell evidently does sell a $12,800 pencil for those who want one.
"Maud recalled leaving the pencil on the couch in the very instant she heard Georgie's inhuman shriek from the living room, where he had gone to watch TV. Fortunately (she recalled) they kept the other hall door closed and locked, so she could almost certainly beat him to the front door, and her car keys were right next to it."
Wow. You'd think that a luxury brand would make sure the text on their website is well-written, but it looks like it's been automatically translated: "Genius leather and classic flat screen create the perfect balance of functionality and aesthetics, even the design of minimalism is sufficient to interpret the most luxurious artwork with equal emphasis on technology and temperature."
I’m guessing that their target audience is mostly under sanctions right now so it isn’t too pressing a need to get their translators to get this right.
I noticed that too, but clearly they are aiming at markets where English is not the first language but buckets full of money are sloshing around for showing off.
Yep. And you _can_ get expensive iPhones but they are expensive because they are covered in gold/crystals/whatever, not because they have better features.
Professional grade equipment unbundles things, the form factors change, you bring your own infrastructure, etc. You can spend any amount of money building out a mobile communications network with your own licensed RF spectrum, leased space on towers for base stations and repeaters, satellite services for tens of thousands a month, various vehicle and marine and handheld stations that can be extremely rugged and have various voice and data capabilities. If you have a blank check and need the global communications capabilities of the Defense Department, give your local Motorola or Iridium rep a call.
You can spend any amount of money on cameras and lenses. The ones used in serious productions are expensive enough that even serious productions rent them by the day. A modern Arri body might cost as much as your house before we even get into the glass.
You can spend any amount of money on audio recording and playback gear. The playback systems used in professional broadcasts or Broadway shows are entire computers or redundant groups or computers, highly controllable and automatable and supporting different I/O formats like Dante, or with digital to analog and analog to digital conversion that is itself worth several iPhones.
Computers themselves go pretty far, you can get hundreds of cores and TB of RAM in a server chassis.
Consumer electronics includes things like hi-fi systems, and these can cost arbitrarily much. I suppose cameras count, too. What these have in common is that it's possible for a small operator to use skilled manual labour and expensive materials to make something slightly better than the mass-market version that comes out of a factory.
'Cause you can't just use more expensive inputs and spend more time to make better silicone.
You can make more expensive phones by putting dumb shit on them (gold, or whatever), but if you have one of those you are an insecure asshole, and not signaling wealth. That's what expensive watches are for.
Because the top shelf electronics are the actual R&D output while the lower shelves are the exact same device with artificial limits. Market segmentation. You can't go above the ceiling because the ceiling is already the state of the art.
On the other hand, non-consumer specialized electronics, e.g. scientific instruments, cost an arm and a leg. If you want to buy an Amnis imaging flow cytometer that'll take quite a bit of funding.
Garmin seem to be doing this with their Marq watches. They're $2500 special editions of the ~$600 Fenix sports watches with fancier casing and a couple of very basic extra software features. I've no idea how well they sell though.
I'm pretty sure Steve Jobs was adamant there should only ever be iPhone and resisted even numbering later models (e.g. no iPhone 12, just iPhone). Apple has strayed from that a bit but I can see it still affecting the smartphone market they created.
Apple does do a bit of this with their watches: you can get a "Watch Edition" with a titanium case and sapphire crystal for twice as much, or an Hermès Apple Watch with a fancy band and a special watch face for 3-4 times the price of the base model.
Not at the skys-the-limit level of luxury watches, but still a set of tiers that they don't do for phones. (But presumably could.)
To quote from Dorothy Sayers' "Murder Must Advertise", the profitability doesn't come from the rich, but the middle and lower classes:
"Like all rich men, he had never before paid any attention to advertisements. He had never realized the enormous commercial importance of the comparatively poor. Not on the wealthy, who buy only what they want when they want it, was the vast superstructure of industry founded and built up, but on those who, aching for a luxury beyond their reach and for a leisure for ever denied them, could be bullied or wheedled into spending their few hardly won shillings on whatever might give them, if only for a moment, a leisured and luxurious illusion. Phantasmagoria—a city of dreadful day, of crude shapes and colours piled Babel-like in a heaven of harsh cobalt and rocking over a void of bankruptcy—a Cloud Cuckooland, peopled by pitiful ghosts, from the Thrifty Housewife providing a Grand Family Meal for Fourpence with the aid of Dairyfields Butter Beans in Margarine, to the Typist capturing the affections of Prince Charming by a liberal use of Muggins's Magnolia Face Cream."
Luxury goods brands catering to the rich do have the $5,000 phones or what-not. Look at expensive watches (and read the blogs and reddits by the watch snobs turning up their noses at 'the ignorant and newly wealthy think this brand is a good one simply because it's vulgarly expensive').
But even they appeal to the snobbier/richer by special, very limited edition, models; total production around 60,000 timepieces annually and the special editions even smaller (for one, just 170 watches) and you can't just rock up to the retailers, slap a wad of cash down, and buy one, oh no, you have to be *approved*:
Q: How do you decide which customers will get delivery of a rare watch?
TS: “The challenge is that it is the retailer who has to choose the clients that will receive the coveted watch. I produce the watches and allocate them to the retailer, but he has to choose his own clients. He knows who are the serious buyers and who will covet and protect the watch, not turn around and sell it.”
Scarcity and snob value are what drive high prices for luxury brands. You could produce ten million thousand dollar phones, but who wants to buy something a lot of other people can also buy? Now cut that down to one million, and you start stoking demand.
I don't think there's any limit to the amount of bling you can have added to the custom case of your smartphone if you want.
As for electronic functionality, the issue there is that it's going to cost on the order of a billion dollars to develop, test, and tool up to produce a smartphone that's significantly different than your high-end mass-market model. Your lower-end mass-market models are going to be basically crippled versions of the high-end model, for price discrimination purposes, but that only works one way. And you have to sell a *lot* of $50,000 rich-person smartphones to pay off a billion dollars of up-front costs.
And if the plan is to build one really good smartphone and then sell as your "high end mass market" model a crippled version of *that*, then in the mass market where most of your profit comes you'll be competing with the people who built the best smartphone they could and *didn't* cripple it.
Most of the components in a phone are commodity grade. Even in an iPhone the screen, camera lenses, camera chips, etc are supplied from the likes of Samsung, etc. The value of iPhone comes from the chip, which apple makes, and the software. The software has a near zero marginal cost and apple has mostly outsourced that via the App Store. In many ways the cost of an iPhone is the admission price of getting into the apple ecosystem.
Apple could make phone hardware that could justify those types of prices but it would ruin the form factor of a phone. it would need to be much thicker or larger or have some big camera lens hanging off it. In other areas where they have more physical space to play with they do max out on price. Just look at the $6k monitor they have been selling along with a crazy expensive stand.
I do think this is an important point:
"To the best of my knowledge, I have just as nice of an iPhone as Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, or a Saudi prince"
When people talk about inequality getting worse I often think about the above. Even the cheapest smart phone and phone plan (the phone is probably free) are basically as powerful/feature rich as what the "best" phone is. You may get better pictures or a crisper screen but these things hardly improve the overall feature set. To me there is basically no inequality when it comes to phones.
This is also kind of true in some of the other consumer goods you mention. The cheapest car sold in the US today has more features and is way safer than the most expensive car sold even 20 years ago. The benefits of a more expensive car are mostly creature comforts that are not necessary.
Some of Marc Andresson's "Software eats the world" hypothesis is that the "best" of something will have the same cost as the "worst" of something. Therefore everyone will just have the "best" which make the world a fantastically better place.
“What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca Cola, too. A coke is a coke and no amount of money can get you a better coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the cokes are the same and all the cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.”
Sure, but the embellishments on the outside are the point where the (vulgarly) rich show off how they have a limited edition 24K gold plated iPhone (gotta admit, they do look kind of tacky):
The less vulgarly rich - well, Apple started off with snob value. They were the computers for the smart people, the genuine techie types who knew all about programming and software and weren't just blindly clicking on icons. They were also for the cool creative types, with fantastic graphics capability so your important work as a graphic designer would really shine and be super-easy, super-fast to create.
There were other bragging points as well: our products don't crash, our products don't get viruses, etc. Functionality and more than that, *style*: these were all products for the cool kids, this was the rationale of the "I'm a Mac and I'm a PC" ads:
This is not to say that there wasn't real innovation, but the entire product range from earphones to phones was curated carefully as a brand to exude the aura of taste, quality, aspirational lifestyle. You weren't served by a shop assistant in a store, you chatted with an Apple Genius.
Scott’s covid / ivermectin work was quoted in a similar review of many trials and how to think about the collective conclusions. They also highlight the FDA administrative process that means ivermectin would be unlikely to be approved due to financial incentives regardless of whether it actually works or not.
Henderson writes "However, when the larger pool of studies is examined, they show a benefit to ivermectin of 72% in areas of low parasitic prevalence, while in areas with high prevalence the benefit is 55%. This is the exact opposite of what Alexander conjectured" but does not give any citation.
I’m working on developing an understanding of deep learning — not with the aim of becoming a professional in a related area, but just because I crave to understand it. I already understand a reasonable amount about AI, in a general sort of way, & have a “general idea” kind of understanding of neural networks as well. But there’s something at the very beginning of things that I cannot find a clear explanation of, and it’s driving me crazy: Rosenblatt’s 1958 demo of the perceptron learning to discriminate between cards with the square on the left and cards with the square on the right: How, exactly did that work?
Anyone who has the patience to explain, or knows a site to send me to, please read on. However, I have already been to many sites, and so far every single one of them is only useful to somebody who *already knows* the answers to the questions I have.
OK, so perceptron gets card as a 20x20 black & white image. Info from each of the 400 pixels in card photo is fed to machine as 0 if pixel is black and 1 if pixel is white. I believe these 1’s and 0’s are accurate, not random — that is, they actually contain, in numerical form, the accurate info about whether the pixel is black or white. (Do I have that right?) So then the 0 or 1 corresponding to each of these 400 pixels is multiplied by a randomly assigned weight, and all the products are added together, and if the sum is negative that indicates the square is on the left and if it’s positive that indicates the square is on the right.
So at the beginning of the trials, the perceptron is performing at chance.So then Rosenblatt trains the machine by dialing up the weights that were too low and down those that were too high, and he feeds it another card. And adjust the weights again. After a series of these trainings, the machine’s output for each card is correct. It discriminates between the 2 kinds of cards by outputting a negative number if the square is on the left and a positive one if the square is on the right.
OK, so here’s what I don’t understand:
-When the perceptron gets the info on the pixel (0 or 1, black or white), does it also know *where* in the photo the pixel is located? Because if so I don’t understand why we need all this mishegoss. All the Perceptron needs to do is wait til it gets the info on one of the pixels from the center of the left side of the card, and forget about weighting the 0 or 1 (black or white) data on that pixel. If that pixel is 0, then the card has its square on the left. If it’s 1, then the square’s on the right. End of story. OK, then that can’t be how the damn thing works. So does that mean the perceptron gets 400 bits of info, a 1 or a 0 for each pixel, but it does not know the location of any of these pixels?
-Regarding the random weights that are assigned to be multipliers of the number 0 or 1 that corresponds to the color of its pixel: From what set are these weights drawn? All integers? All integers between +5 & -5? All numbers between +1 and -1?
-Did Rosenblatt adjust the weights after each single card, or only running the whole batch through once?
-If Rosenblatt adjusts the weight after each card, he's going to get the correct answer (left or right) for half the cards even on the first run-through. So after those cards he just doesn't adjust the weights, is that right?
-How did he decide *how* to adjust each of the 400 weights? What data did he go by that let him know whether a weight for a particular piece of pixel data is too high or too low? How did he decide how much up or down to move the weight?
I’ve read about 10 explanations of this process online last night, and every single one of them was only suitable for someone who *already knows the answers to my questions, above*. Anyone who can explain this for me, or send me to a site that can, will scratch a huge mind itch that is driving me crazy and will have my eternal gratitude.
I think it might be possible to greatly simplify the situation for the purposes of explanation. Maybe the perceptron gets an image that’s only 2 pixels in size (so then obviously either the left of the right pixel will be black). Maybe there are only 4 cards for the perceptron to work on. So then how would it work with weighting the 2 pieces of info machine got for each card (0 or 1 for pixel #1, 0 or 1 for pixel #2).
Yup, it’s simple questions. But I’m not too proud to post this.
My understanding is as follows, someone who knows more about the specifics of Rosenblatt's experiments can correct me:
> When the perceptron gets the info on the pixel (0 or 1, black or white), does it also know *where* in the photo the pixel is located?
Yes, insofar as each of the 400 weights consistently referred to the same position. Instead of thinking of it as receiving info from a pixel, you could imagine it as a vector of 400 bits. This differs from modern vision systems in that there's no inductive bias telling it that pixels are related to their neighbors, or that the learned function should be translation invariant. (And in many other ways as well).
>Regarding the random weights that are assigned to be multipliers of the number 0 or 1 that corresponds to the color of its pixel: From what set are these weights drawn? All integers? All integers between +5 & -5? All numbers between +1 and -1?
> Did Rosenblatt adjust the weights after each single card, or only running the whole batch through once?
> If Rosenblatt adjusts the weight after each card, he's going to get the correct answer (left or right) for half the cards even on the first run-through. So after those cards he just doesn't adjust the weights, is that right?
> How did he decide *how* to adjust each of the 400 weights? What data did he go by that let him know whether a weight for a particular piece of pixel data is too high or too low? How did he decide how much up or down to move the weight?
The answer to all of these is to know the perceptron algorithm. Basically, the algorithm is as follows:
1) If you get an example correct, do nothing to the weights
2) If you get an example wrong, update the weights (w) as follows using the input vector (x):
- If the label was positive w_new = w + learning_rate * x
- If the label was negative w_new = w - learning_rate * x
I believe that answers all the above questions as follows:
What can the weights be? Any floating point number
When are the weights updated? After every example
Are updates skipped for cards that are already predicted correctly? Yes
I wouldn't call myself an expert and I'm not familiar with the exact specific experiment you're talking about, but I have used neural nets in the past and I believe I have a working knowledge of the basics. I will try to answer your questions:
1. The input is an array of 400 bits, each representing a pixel. The neural net doesn't "know" where each pixel is "located"--or even that they _have_ "locations"--but it DOES receive the bits in a specific order. So it has a weight for "bit #37", and on any given input it knows which bit is "bit #37". Therefore, it can gradually learn that "bit #37" is correlated with answer A and anticorrelated with answer B.
Deciding whether a dark region is on the right or left side of an image could probably be done much more simply using some non-machine-learning technique, but I imagine the purpose of this experiment is to prove the technology before applying it to harder examples.
2. The weights are floating-point numbers. Usually the random initial weights are "small", to try to ensure they don't change the final outcome very much. (Perhaps <0.01? I don't remember what I used last time I did this.) The *final* weights after training can be basically anything--if the learning algorithm keeps saying to increase weight #174, there's no specific reason to cut it off at any particular number.
3. You calculate an update for the weights after each individual image (although you might choose to save these updates and apply them all at once after a full batch, in order to make the learning less sensitive to the order of the samples).
4. Usually the output is not a binary yes/no, but rather a floating-point number that can be interpreted as a confidence level. So if the correct answer is "1", and the net output "0.99", the weights still get adjusted a little bit to push it towards being more confident in the future.
(Note: Contra your summary, the output is NOT JUST the sum of all inputs multiplied by their respective weights; that sum is further processed by an "activation function" that limits the final output to a fixed range, usually 0-1. Traditionally, I believe sigmoid curves were typically used as activation functions, but I believe different functions are popular now.)
(Also, most neural nets don't connect the input neurons directly to the output neuron, but have 1 or more "hidden layers" of additional neurons, where the inputs activate layer #1, and then layer #1 activates layer #2, etc. until you finally get to the output. There's a separate array of activation weights for each layer.)
5. To calculate how weights should be adjusted, you look at the local gradient. Basically, ask what would happen if the weight had been a tiny bit higher/lower, and see whether that gets you closer or farther from the right answer (and how much).
The learning algorithm also has a parameter called something like the "learning rate" that says how big the adjustments should be; to a first approximation, slower learning rates are more reliable but take longer.
Well they were technically asking about the original perceptron not SGD. The perceptron algorithm is basically SGD on the "perceptron loss", which is max(0, -label * output). (Although at the time I don't think they would have framed it in these terms).
A great answer, I want to propose a few minor corrections
Regarding 1: even though it does receive bits in specific order, each input bit is passed to each hidden layer neuron, where they all are multiplied by weights and summed up. Initially the network doesn't know if the order of bits is important at all. My guess is that it will gradually learn to give different weights based on order (e.g. more positive weights for the left side, negative weights for the right side), to approximate order somehow. But initially it doesn't do this.
Regarding 2: not sure about perceptrons specifically, but you actually do want to limit the weight absolute values. It's the same problem as with linear regression. A large weight overfits the data. It basically forces the outcome to depend only on one pixel. This compounds and the model starts to ignore all the rest. To mitigate this, people usually penalize the model for large weights. So basically your loss (error) becomes: (classification loss) + (weight penalty loss). It forces the model to learn a solution with small weights.
Machine Learning researcher here. I will try my best.
Update: I misinterpreted the question as being about multi-layer perceptrons. The answer below is about them and modern deep learning. @dyoshida gives a good answer for OP's case about a linear perceptron with no gradient descent. Still, a lot of things are similar.
Let's get some things straight about a perceptron. I am assuming a multi-layer perceptron that consists of one hidden layer. As input it gets a vector of 400 numbers, then it does a linear transformation as you said by multiplying the vector by a weight matrix, then it performs a non-linear transformation of the result by applying the Tanh function (or Softmax, or Relu). The nonlinear transformation is critical, though the model can *probably* solve this exact task without it.
Now about your questions:
1. The perceptron has practically no information about how pixels are related between eachother, because they were stretched into a vector. It also can't learn this information with only one hidden layer. If it had more layers, it could learn a bit about how pixels are related. So yes, it does not know the location of any of these pixels. To the weighted sum the order doesn't matter. Why the Perceptron can't just wait till it gets the one informative pixel and be done with the prediction? The problem is that the perceptron is not sequentially parsing a sequence. It is processing the vector all at once, even if most features are useless. Despite that, it will eventually learn something close to what you are thinking: a large positive weight for some "left pixel" and a large negative weight to some "right pixel". We don't want this though, because such a model that attends to one pixel only will generalize poorly - shift everything by one pixel and it breaks. Various techniques (weight decay, dropout) are used to make sure it learns a more generalizable solution.
However, if you train a convolutional network, which does utilize the inherent local relationships of pixels in an image, it tends to do what you are thinking about. See the top image in this article [1]. It is grad cam: a way to visualize how a network makes its' predictions. We can check what it's "looking" at and find that actually it attends to small local regions. For example it might classify a cat based solely on the shape of the ears. So if you had a dog with ears very similar to a cats ears, a network might classify it as a cat. Computer vision neural networks do not attend to the shape of objects, like people do. This is a big problem in DL research.
2. Regarding random weights. They are never integers. NN's basically cant work with integers, because adjusting the weights is based on derivatives (more about it below), but you can't take derivatives for ints. The weights are real numbers and can be from -infty to +infty, but in practice weights with large absolute values lead to very bad solutions. Usually the weights are initialized from a uniform [-1, 1] distribution, a normal distribution with mean 0 and std 1, or something more fancy like Xavier. Basically, to get a single weight you get your computer to throw a dart at the number line and see where it landed.
3. You can adjust weights after all training cards have been passed, this is vanilla gradient descent. You can adjust after each card, while drawing cards at random, and this is stochastic gradient descent. Or you can take the middle ground: take a batch of cards, pass through the network, obtain the errors for each card, average them, compute the gradients from this averaged error and then update the weight. This is batch gradient descent and in practice people almost always use this, it's a good compromise between training efficiency and result accuracy.
4 - 5. Questions are very related, so answering both here. To adjust the weights you need some update rule. The simplest one is to randomly pick weights and check the accuracy until you find a lucky draw with good accuracy. It's too slow. A better way is to define some differentiable function of error. For this task, it could be mean squared error, or negative log-likelihood. It's such a function that takes as input the right answer, the model answer, and outputs a number that's high when predictions are very different from reality and low when they are same. You can take the derivative of this error function with respect to each weight. After this you get a vector that tells you how you should update each weight to make the error larger in the fastest way possible. But you want the error to be smaller, so you invert the sign of this. Now you have a vector that tells you how to update your weights to make the error smaller. Smaller error equals better predictions, so you keep on getting predictions from the model, computing the error, taking derivatives, updating weights. This is gradient descent, because you take the gradient, the vector of derivatives that points to the maximum error, and "descend" in the opposite direction by changing weights to reach the minimum error. It's just a much faster way to search for the solution than the random weight picking approach.
Taking this approach, your network won't produce any error on the half cards it got right, so these cards won't trigger any weight updates. However, it will be heavily "penalized" with a large error when it makes a mistake. So yeah, neural networks only learn from mistakes.
I want to set forth an idea, a way of looking at things, that will make a lot of people very angry, because few people like reconsidering their ideas...
So, if your immediate response is to tell me that I'm wrong, well, hold that thought and maybe spend a day pondering the idea before doing so?
And if your immediate response is some legal-technical response why I'm wrong because of seven minute points of difference, well, you're clearly playing the scoring points game, not the introspection game, so go play with someone else.
And, OMG, I can't believe it's necessary to say this, but such are the times we live in, this is not about blame, it is not about ethics; it is about understanding -- understanding now, and understanding the past, understanding the future. If you don't get that, well, stop reading now.
OK, consider Igor Strelkov. Russian Warlord. Present everywhere you'd expect from Transistria to Chechnya to Crimea to Donbas.
He always has the same story for the locals (plenty of whom support him): "These odds are impossible, we'll give our blood sweat and tears for nothing but our phantoms of honor," and his devotees don't believe him, but then it turns out just as he prophesied. He's saying the same thing right now about Ukraine. If you want to read about him, best is to look for stuff before, say 2020, so you don't get caught up in the most recent emotion, and what you see is stuff like this: https://www.e-ir.info/2017/07/22/igor-strelkov-moscow-agent-or-military-romantic/
OK, so how do we interpret this? Who does it remind you of? Well, many answers could come to mind depending on the point you want to make, but what comes to my mind is characters like Nongqawuse or Sitting Bull. Characters leading people who are well aware that modernity is on the way to crush them, so how should they respond? They (the leaders and the people) are well aware that modernity always wins in the end, the only choices they get are to submit without a fight, or to fight in the hope that thereby they will be remembered rather than just forgotten. This is not Götterdämmerung, it's not about the destruction of the world; it's about leaving some small mark on the world before the inevitable swamping of your culture by modernity.
Now when you see analogy, Russians as Native Americans, Strelkov as Sitting Bull, Putin as Crazy Horse, the point is not "Russians good", The point is what does this analogy tell us? Maybe it tells us something about Native Americans? Maybe it tells us something about whom the current elites in the West have chosen to valorize? Maybe it tells us something about the whitewashing of history (first by the victors, yes, but then by later discontents)?
In 70 years will Strelkov be considered a terrible person? Probably. Hitler believed he was doing, in Russia, no less than what the Americans had done in the West, and they didn't seem, as of 1930s, too upset about it.
But in 150 years will Strelkov be considered a terrible person? Ah, well, that's the question isn't it? Will we see, starting in a 100 years, a stream of stories about the Romance of Old Russia, how its people just wanted to live their traditional lives with their traditional belief systems, but modernity would not leave them alone; how they tried to keep out those corrupting influences but realized that was just impossible, that the only thing they could do was destroy their civilization in one glorious fruitless gesture, kill all their cattle, ghost dance against the cavalry. Will we see movies like "Bury my heart at Kiev" and "A Man named Igor" about the wise ways of these noble people who were too good for the forces arrayed against them? Untll Strelkov is up there with Che, Mao, and Sitting Bull as the T-shirt worn by 18 yr olds just arrived at college eager to show everyone how they understand the true tragedy of the world, and how they would never have been so short-sighted, back in 2022, as to insist that the only way to deal with the problem of Russia was to grind its face into the dirt, and change not only its government but the entire cultural system that had allowed such a government to come to power?
People who refuse to adapt to changing social paradigms, so long as they're not outright evil -- and those occasions are rare and short-lived -- are either stupid or mentally inflexible. They are romanticized by populists later for cynical purposes of the latter, e.g. American politicians romanticized Native Americans in the 60s and 70s *not* because they actually wanted to be anything like them, or held their values in any serious way, but because it was a good way to bamboozle Joe Average Voter, vaguely dissatisfied with the necessity of coping with a world full of nukes, air pollution, Vietnam, and other novel horrors. Send me your money and your vote, dear dumb citizen, and I will turn back time, restore Eden, make the kids respectful, restore the color to your hair and spring to your step. And by the way, here's A Free Lunch, too. It's a sad commentary on our species that this works as well as it does.
I said neither "accept" nor "subscribe to," I said "adapt to." Consider it to be similar to living through a hurricane. The wise man doesn't refuse to delay his midday trip to the liquor store for another fifth of Thunderbird, daring the storm to do its worst. Not at all the same as reveling in hurricanes, or taking steps to minimize the damage they do.
"the only way to deal with the problem of Russia was to grind its face into the dirt, and change not only its government but the entire cultural system"
Che and Mao and Sitting bull get to be on Tshirts cause of Pizaze. Armored Train Raids! Guerilla warfare from mist shrouded moutains! Having a Rad Name!
The soviets had style while they were sending people to the gulag, so the hammer and sickle get to live on forever.
Putin is just some old bald rich guy who is trying to find a way to take it with him. Dime a dozen, but with nukes.
Russia's culture has already been destroyed by the Bolsheviks, and Putin as ex-KGB is a direct successor to the destroyers, not the destroyed.
Putting the undead USSR abomination to long overdue sleep is best for everyone, Russians can resurrect their history and traditions just fine without Putin and his kind.
The problem is, of course, how to go about it. The pre-Brezhnev USSR propaganda was all about how Russia is pioneering the utopian future for the whole world, and from Brezhnev on it shifted to a hyperfocus on how Russia saved the world from the Nazi menace (a theme which is obviously alive and well even now).
The glossed over elephant in the room is of course that Russia was comprehensively defeated in the subsequent war, its empire and pride broken, and found that it has no place in the modern world, except as a source of brain drain to the Silicon Valley and fossil fuels to any takers. So it should come as no surprise that nationalist and irredentist ideas find fertile ground there. When the realistic choice is between a slow decay and a flashy attempt at a blast from the past, going out with a bang might not seem like such a bad idea.
If college students ever end up wearing Strelkov or Putin shirts the way they wear Che shirts, it will be for the same reason they wear Che shirts today. Complete or near-complete ignorance of the person's actual acts & legacy, combined with a desire to set themselves apart as an edgelord for holding an “big, scary, unthinkable opinion that would upset the normies - look how bold and independent I am!”
But the thing is that only every once and a while does holding the anti-consensus opinion mean that you are a lone voice of truth among the sheep. More likely than not, when 1000 people say “X” and you say “not X,” you’re not a bold contrarian truth-teller. You’re just wrong.
This is even more likely the case when the person proffering the opinion feels compelled to preface it by asking his audience 2-3 times not to "tell me I'm wrong" or give "some legal-technical response why I'm wrong," so maybe instead of us all taking a day to ponder this, you should do some introspection into what the appeal of this position is to you.
"More likely than not, when 1000 people say “X” and you say “not X,” "
Unfortunately I suspect there is a category of idea that this doesn't actually work for. Ideas where you are a good person to believe in, and a bad person to not, seem to me to invariably fail this test.
Specifying which ideas is explicitly taking a side in someones culture war though, so I won't do that here.
I fail to see how I'm even coming close to trolling here. You made the VERY strong claim that " Ideas where you are a good person to believe in, and a bad person to not, seem to me to invariably fail this test (truth supported by popular consensus)". "Murder is wrong" is one of those moral axioms where you are good if you believe it and bad if you don't.
If you're completely unwilling to actually say what you mean instead of Darkly Hinting at it, you're going to leave yourself very open to interpretation.
Of course, I suspect you're worried you CAN'T say what you actually mean because it would violate the no-culture-war rule. In that case, I'd suggest refraining from commenting at all instead of doing the rhetorical equivalent of sticking your hand an inch away from your brother's face and going "I'm not touching you!"
There is no popular consensus, as far as I am aware, that believing murder is wrong makes you a good person. It is a universal implicit default, different cultural and legal definitions of murder aside. There isn't a debate about it, and there is no common phenomenon of labelling and othering people who think murder is ok. Presumably because they do not exist in number outside of certain prisons.
Speaking of failing tests, your remark completely fails to meet Scott's test for acceptable comments, which is that comments must meet at least 2 of the following 3 criteria: Your point is right. Your remark is kind. Your remark is necessary to the discussion, i.e. it is relevant. What you produced is basically a verbal fart. You're 0 for 3, Ryan.
I have spent, roughly, a full day considering your statement. My conclusion is that your statement is stupid in a very bizzare way. Among the many, MANY important differences between Strelkov and any of the indigenous resistance leaders that aren't mere nit-picking in term of analogy is that indigenous resistance leaders were fighting against the incursion of actively hostile foreign powers into their sovereign nation (who had either cultural or physical genocide as explicit internal goals- see White Man's Burden and the "Indian Schools"), while Strelkov is trying to deliberately generate ethnic conflict on behalf of an invading and imperialistic foreign power. Your attempt at insinuating some kind of moral inconsistency RE: idolization of these two is very weak because you're not looking at the place where the internal consistency is: support of the ideal of national sovereignty (Native American Nations and Ukraine) vs. imperialist ambitions (Manifest Destiny expansion into the West and Russian revanchism).
Beyond that, your attempt to imply that this war ends with the cultural genocide of the Russian people to "modernize" them is outlandish. Nobody is talking about that. Nobody is planning that. That is on exactly zero political agents' checklists. Russia isn't pre-modern- it's a very modern nation-state that is being run by an autocrat. You're really tipping your hand that you buy into the historical dialectic (which is a gross oversimplification of actual historical events by several orders of magnitude).
(a) I love how you know, better than I do, what I really feel about these issues, whom I consider right or wrong, smart or dumb...
(b) You seem very very certain that this is not about the imposition of particular aspects of modernity on Russia. The people in Russia do not feel that way. Many of them are, for example, very unhappy about things like changing gender and sexual norms; but they are also aware that they cannot fight these, they are brought in by every movie, every book, every internet connection to the outside world.
Your lack of concern for this is, conceptually, no different from an 1860s American's saying that Native Americans should just damn well settle down and get with the program of Christianity and farming because that's the modern way.
So should Strelkin and Putin fight? Well, there were certainly some Native Americans who looked at what was happening, with responses ranging from "Damn right, Agriculture and Manufacturing are better than this crap of freezing on the prairie in a thin tent in the the middle of winter" to "Look, I agree farming is way less fun than nomad'ing, but this is not something I want over". But it's an empirical fact that those pragmatists are not the ones in the history books.
As for who threw the first punch, well again it depends how you frame this fight. If you insist on looking at this as a fight between nations, then, sure, it's about tanks and missiles and no-one denies that Russia invaded Ukraine.
But if you see this as a fight against modernity, well that's similar to the US settlers constantly moving westwards, constantly probing, creating barriers and complications of various sorts. It's not about the US Cavalry, that's a minor side issue; it's just clear to everyone with eyes that regardless of the US cavalry, agriculture and civilization are going to end nomadic life, the only question is whether it happens fast via the military, or over two generations via constant encroachment. Likewise for those books, movies, internet, international norms, etc.
There are plenty of indigenous people for whom things played out militarily differently, from Northern Canada to Australia to New Zealand. But they all landed up in the place... The indigenous culture is a pathetic sham, many of those born into it are perpetually drunk on reservations of one sort or another, the only success stories are the "success" of abandoning that culture to become modern.
In THEORY you can do this differently; you can go the Amish route. But that seems to be really really hard to pull off. What successful cases are there? Amish, some extremely orthodox Jewish, maybe some Asian cases [I know very little about the aboriginals on Taiwan or in Japan except that they exist]. My guess is to go that route is only possible once you've already been beaten up pretty badly (as were the Amish in Europe), enough so that no-one either believe they can usefully fight back, or sees any romance in some sort of mass cattle killing.
Are you seriously insisting that there is no meaningful difference between cultural exchange and the destruction of a nation at the point of the sword? Or, for that matter, that people should be FORCED to live a certain way? Yes, yes, blue jeans and rock 'n' roll are degenerate art, but people in Russia clearly WANT them. Likewise- Native Americans in fact wanted and LIKED horses, firearms, and the printing press (and most of them DID, in fact, have agriculture and primitive manufacturing already, thank you very much). They were less interested in having their nations dissolved. Fuck directly off with your noble savages in their happy hunting ground.
Since you brought up Native history, those pragmatists ARE, in fact, the ones in their history books. I should know, because I live on the Qualla Boundary and know a great deal about Cherokee and Native history. Tsali, Sitting Bull, etc. weren't fighting some romantic heroic doomed last stand against "modernity"- they were fighting against treaty violations by the US, and lost. In that first case (the Cherokee), the actions undertaken were so patently illegal that they were done in direct defiance of the US Supreme Court. The United States then decided to carry out a very deliberate campaign of cultural genocide against Native peoples because they, much like you seem to, saw them as a bunch of pre-civilized cave-men incapable of adapting to the modern world without having their entire culture annihilated. I would recommend looking at the EBCI, the Cherokee Nation, and the Seminole Tribe of Florida to see how the culture and then reassess whether Native culture and society is a "pathetic, failing sham". Half of these charter city movements and their government-corporations are just reinventing the functional structure of tribal governments and dressing them up in Libertarian colors. For that matter, I recommend picking up an actual history book instead of an apologist polemic disguised as one and learning about what Native civilization actually looked like instead of using The Searchers as a primary reference. You might even learn that Native Americans managed to maintain their culture while taking advantage of modern technology.
This is probably a waste of time because you already know that you know all the answers, and trying to argue at a conceptual level with someone who's already pulled out the insults rarely ends well.
But the very framing of your answer is the framing of modernity, not the framing of tradition. The framing of tradition puts the individual as no more important than the group, and posits that certain things (in particular the maintenance of a culture) are only possible through co-ordinated behavior (including sanctions against defectors). This is, of course, not a foreign argument to modern polemicists *when it is convenient for them*.
On the right this would be the argument against porn or drugs; on the left this would be the "No-one makes you shop at Walmart" argument:
Likewise you are missing the structure of the argument if you insist on technicalities of the precise reasons this battle was supposedly fought at this time. (ie the "The Civil War was fought over States' Rights, here are all the documents showing that" argument)
World history gives us many many versions of modernity confronting non-modernity, from cases within Europe to the Americas to Oceania, and they generally turned out as I described. That is the phenomenon I am interested in, not your legalistic arguments for why Native America vs the US should be considered a case of two equally modern states arguing over the modern concept of Treaty Breaking.
Right, I think I've heard enough. You've advanced from talking shit about Native Americans to representing this weird fucking dialectic view pitting traditional ways of life against the modern world.
How about this: my landlord is one of those "cultureless drunkards" and a fairly "traditional" Cherokee. Cherokee culture is one of those cultures that puts the group value above the individual and thus by your dialectic is "traditional". I told him about your ideas and he is sufficiently curious that he's going to come in here and give his viewpoint. You can work out whatever highly conceptual issues you have about my objections to this framing with a Native historian.
Hi, cultureless drunkard and Historian who is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation here, I'd like to weigh my thoughts in here as both a Native American, and a Social Historian
So I'd like to say that not only are the ideological frameworks of resisting cultural assimilation fundamentally different for both states in Eastern Europe and Native Nations in North America, but that your original posit seems VERY incorrect about Sitting Bull and Red Cloud.
Both Red Cloud and Sitting Bull resisted United States imperialism through warfare because they were actively resisting their homes being burnt and their lands being seized by force, and both of them were forced into what amounts to concentration camps where they died.
Neither of them even opposed "modernity" in the sense of technological innovation, or in the thought of mutual cohabitation with people around them. Sitting Bull went all the way to London as a performer in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, and often was found to enjoy some of the things of modern life, and modern Commanche historian Paul Chaat Smith in his novel on Native Americans and modernity states that Natives being opposed to modernity is in fact, a white promulgated narrative.
The idea that Vladimir Putin is somehow a freedom fighter disregards the entire context of his existence, the governmental superstructure around him, the cultural imperialism he wishes to pursue as he re-forges what he sees as "The Real Russia," is more of a policy line in the thought school of Western Imperialism than of Native Resistance. He's not being a hero here by bombing schools, destroying monuments, or advocating the dissolution of humanities programs and rewriting history favorably.
That would be something the United States would advocate for Native people to erase them from both history and society.
I would say Natives opposed imperialism, not changing or advancing their often highly manipular societies. The Lakota in particular prior to US intervention had a positive relationship to the settled and oft urbane native cultures of the Mandan, Arikara and Hidatsa, who were forced to adopt Plains cultural traditions to survive and escape the United States military and its often violent settlers.
You seem to be conflating two things you don't seem to understand a whole lot about, then get upset when someone says you don't know about those things because you demonstrate a lack of factual understanding, and seem to just assume a cultural metanarrative that's awfully Western European of you.
I highly encourage you to learn more about native societies, and also about Russian Imperialism and their history of cultural assimilation and termination within their historic reach. Putin is much more a Custer than a Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake.
As a native, I feel like you don't understand our history, culture, developments, or situations well. As a historian, I feel like you're shoehorning in so much into your dialectic your view of history and of current events seems largely only a framework that operates if I don't understand either Russian, OR Native history.
Let's try one last time. And let's try to remember that, yes, indeed this is a "weird fucking dialectic view" because that's how philosophy works; if you imagine this is a set of posts that's supposed to provide blame or excuses, well, read the first damn entry.
To Gawonisgi, the point of interest is not Sitting Bull interpreted as a figure of modernity, it is the ways in which the phenomenon was NOT modern.
How then would you analyze features like Prophetic Visions, or the whole Ghost Dancer phenomenon? And similar versions of the same phenomenon, from the Taiping Rebellion to Nongqawuse to the Sudanese Mahdi (plus more than a dozen other, lesser, Mahdi's) to, in our day, ISIS? When you see the same sort of behavior under what seem like the same sort of conditions across widely separated space and time, it seems willfully blind to insist on the particularities of each case rather than the similarities.
Look, I understand that Luria's are rare, and most people are peasants. Of course one hopes, on this particular site, to encounter a higher fraction of Luria's. But higher does not mean universal.
Because there are no downvotes, I'm commenting to say that this is a deeply stupid take. For all the reasons other people have already offered in more detail.
I have a question about the atmosphere at ACX meetups. There seems to be a reasonably active community in my city (Boston). As I moved here during COVID I haven't really met friends - I do know some people in the area, but mostly through my wife, who is from here - and I've recently been looking into ways to rectify that.
However, I wonder if the ACX crowd would be for me. I'm into politics in a technocratic center-left sort of way (I've at times called myself a "Matt Yglesias/Noah Smith Democrat"), I like history and intellectual discussions a lot, and I'm somewhat into political philosophy and economics. I'm also casual-ish cyclist and hiker, and I like wandering around the city. But I wonder if the ACX crowd would be too techie/STEM for me, and/or too explicitly rationalist in orientation (I've tried to read other rationalist stuff here and there and while I think it can be interesting, it isn't entirely my thing for a variety of reasons).
So, are the meet-ups generally a good time? Are people generally friendly and welcoming? Is everyone a programmer who reads Less Wrong religiously and is super into AI risk, or are there different sorts of people with some variety of interests? Just curious!
It differs from city to city, but I recommend giving it a shot! Not everyone reads Less Wrong religiously and is super into AI risk — at least not in bigger communities (like the one in Boston) and especially ACX-branded (rather than LW- or rationality-branded) ones. There will probably be a lot of programmers, but even at the Bay Area weekly meetup, it's not everyone, and we almost never talk about programming. Again, this varies between communities, and people feeling unwelcome because of too much programming talk is definitely sometimes an issue — but the larger the group, the less likely you are to get an unlucky roll of the dice and end up with homogeneity.
I'm a qual-not-quant ultra-trad religious brawler type who spends a lot of time antiquing. I can't program; my mathematical ability is such that I have to regularly remind myself how to calculate percentages. I've had a really good time at an ACX meetup.
Oh, I def didn't expect you to be those things; I'm just saying those things aren't average for the meetups, and I have done fine considering my limited dataset. Most of the conversations are more normal than you'd think.
Bay Area (not weekly) meetup here, not tech person and not rationalist, and I can usually participate in ~1/2 the conversations - which is fine because at an average meetup there are usually 2-4 happening at once, so you just wander until you find one you're interested in. At our just-finished meetup we had, at one point or another: history of the Russian Revolution, something technical about GPUs that I didn't have the background to follow, heredity in musical talent/interest, historical cooking, genetic diseases (when homozyguos) caused by variants that are beneficial when heterozygous (I didn't catch what precisely about them), genetic engineering, something brief programming-related, and (of course) the Ukraine War; that's probably about half the ones I heard (skewed to my interests), and I probably heard (bits of) ~10% of the conversations at the meetup or less.
I find people friendly and welcoming but I'm hosting, so my perspective will be slanted there - I've never had trouble getting into a conversation, though, and people are very nice about things like bringing dishes to the kitchen at the end of the meetup (we do a lot of snacks). I vaguely think AI risk came up once in one of the clusters but I might have misheard; it's definitely not the main topic. That said I get the vague sense our meetup is less Rationalist than many.
As you describe yourself I expect you would be fine - honestly at our meetup "history and intellectual discussions" would comfortably get you through an evening with no shortage of conversations. I would be no warier of politics at such meetups than at any party where people are likely not to agree on everything - which means I personally would be incredibly wary, but I'm conflict-averse. If you can follow the old SSC posting rules (true, kind, or necessary, two out of three)/generally try to provide more light than heat/don't mind being argued with - I would expect you to be fine.
But caveat for all of this that I have never been to a meetup except as one of the hosts (and, therefore, never been to one outside the Bay Area), and am a bit socially clueless, so may be missing things.
I'd like to thank everyone who replied but this one was particularly detailed so I'l drop it here! Sounds like meet-ups are generally a good time. And I hope my question about 'programmers who are super-into AI risk' didn't come off as glib, I certainly didn't mean it that way.
Also I am generally quite happy to disagree about politics as long as the discussion is friendly and reasonably well-informed. The only exception is stuff that is just outrageously incorrect; I wouldn't have much patience for stop-the-steal types or anti-vaxxers but I'd probably just walk away from them rather than start a shouting match. (And I don't imagine you'd get many such people at an ACX meet-up.) I generally view such discussions as a learning opportunity rather than an opportunity to convince the other person that I'm right.
I am a *bit* concerned about the scene being to Rationalist for me but I guess the only way to find out is to try it!
I host the Philadelphia meetup, and we're a mixed bag of (IMO) very interesting people. We have lots of techies, but also lawyers, writers, teachers and researchers in various fields. I'm not really sure how rationalist I am personally, which is one reason I'm hosting ACX meetups rather than LW ones.
I'm mostly a homemaker, but also a part-time archivist and also worked in content management and data for years. I'm a pretty traditional person, center or slightly center left politically, and consider myself a Christian. My degrees are in Russian History and Library Science and I'm not quantitative at all, which is why I enjoy reading breakdowns of scientific studies and their methodology on ACX. Scott's writing gives me access to useful knowledge I could not parse on my own.
I've hosted most of the meetups the past two years at my house. At our last meetup, we began nerding out about food and historical cooking, and ended up having a fish sauce tasting. I'm always impressed by the interests and knowledge base of the people attending- it takes me places I don't expect. As someone who spends most of her time around her own small children, the meetup has been a vital intellectual outlet for me. It's been pleasantly intergenerational, too- the Philly meetup has folks over 50 and college kids discussing the latest post in a pleasant social environment, and I can't think of many places where that kind of crossover happens.
My church is skewed quite old. We’ve recently switched to a different church with a lot more families with kids, but it’s still probably 75% people over 60 on your average Sunday.
How's the stem cell field looking these days? I'm living with and managing a SLAP tear that would require surgery to fix, which I'm not interested in doing unless I have to. There are always stories of people injecting stem cells to fix these kind of shoulder issues, or alternately MCL or ACL tears. I've always assumed that these stories are BS- Joe Rogan has such a story of how stem cells fixed a similar shoulder issue, I don't think of him as a source of legitimate medical information. (Quite the opposite, actually).
Just thought I'd check in and see if any SMEs can describe how the stem cell therapy field is looking these days. Any recent advances? Any chance that musculoskeletal repair is on the horizon? I've also considered doing multiple bouts of PRP (platelet rich plasma), as the part of the shoulder with the injury doesn't receive a lot of blood flow- perhaps adding some blood in could help it repair over time. (I'm also middle-aged so I understand that this is unlikely).
There are also reports in the bodybuilding community of people buying peptides like BPC 157 or TB 500, and injecting those directly for joint repair. I think this is insanely risky
Can you tell me more what 'excellent results' looks like? I mean it can't.... like actually heal the tear, can it? I would love for that to actually work, I'm just trying not to get my hopes up
The Pareto distribution is a more radical and transformative idea than most people give it credit for. Specifically, I propose that all tasks have a Pareto-distributed cost. Wait... wait. I worry what you just heard was: "a lot of tasks have a Pareto-distributed cost". What I said was, ALL tasks do. From grand research programs all the way down to making coffee. And different assumptions about that atomic cost function will drive you to plan projects and even your life differently.
One of the biggest changes is that if you believe things have a Pareto cost, then you should design everything to be easy to throw out. "What's the worst that can happen" is a question that should give you nightmares. If you're a lawyer and you go after some punk kid for jailbreaking your product, there's no possible way your decision will cause a 10% drop in your company's stock price. Maybe you'll get some money, maybe you won't, but you're protecting your brand and your product. But that's exactly what happened to Sony when hackers decided to break into the PSN to punish Sony for their petty case against George Hotz, and the security of the PSN was found to simply not exist.
If you model with finite, normal distributions - or even memoryless, exponential distributions - that outcome is a fluke. An act of god. You can't predict it. If you model with the Pareto distribution, it's a boring eventuality. "It's true," Nassim Taleb says as he walks in, coincidentally emerging from one of his strolls to lecture you. "you can't predict where these heavy tail events will come from. You can only design for their eventuality. Stop losses. STOP LOSSES!" He continues away mumbling something about fractals and the Stoics.
You'll still care about efficiency, but the biggest efficiencies are in not stumbling into one of those heavy tail events, almsot never in small optimizations. And if you do stumble into a heavy tail event, pulling off the bandaid and shelving your work and starting again. Yeah, sure, *maybe* you're almost done. Or maybe you're trying to turn lead into gold, which you can't do and even if you did it would kill you. In fact, in the Pareto distribution, the longer you've been working on a case the longer you expect you have left to work *from now*. This is the one true innoculation against the sunk cost fallacy.
You'll develop a suspicion of time estimates. You can estimate normally distributed hours, but not the mean of a Pareto distribution. The variance could be infinite, even when the mean is finite. You can maybe estimate the median, though, which is why it's usually the superior average.
You'll find a joy in breaking down problems into their smallest parts, so that as few things as possible are levered on whatever you discover to be the heavy tail.
You'll develop a stiff reluctance to take on tech debt; not are bugs combinatorially complicated to
find and fix, but each combination is a task which could incur you a tail cost.
The optimistic note to end on is that tasks can have positive pareto value, too. Sometimes you go to clean bird shit off your radio antenna and discover the Big Bang. Sometimes you accidentally discover positrons because your equation has a square root. Sometimes your dirty dishes lead you to penicillin.
Keep an open mind, and think about the specific facts over the general prediction, and it will make all the difference.
Fun times in gout land tonight. Annoyingly enough, apparently losing weight can trigger gout flare ups.
There seems to be a link between hyperuricemia (high uric acid in the blood can cause gout flares) and kidney disease, but it's not entirely clear yet whether the former can actually help cause the latter (and how it does it), or whether it's just a result of the latter (since declining kidney function can cause it).
I assume you're on allopurinol? I'd expect you can fiddle with the dosage until you can lose weight safely, but yeah, increasing catabolism dumps lots of purines into the bloodstream.
I have hyperuricemia too and I'm low key terrified I'll start having gout attacks any time now :(
I was inspired by Scott to express my ideas in a more in-depth and nuanced way compared to what traditional social media platforms allow for. I opened my own independent blog.
I wrote about why you should move the conversation from social media to long-form blogs:
Sorry to be a spoiler, but this is supposed to be no-politics thread. I've held out on posting an update of my war prediction since I would have to discuss Biden in it, so no one gets to have fun :-)
Well we could do that I suppose, but I would prefer to know if supporting abortion is actually a prerequisite to being accepted as a Democratic candidate.
If we're talking about D members of Congress, I think it's possible, but I think there are career tradeoffs to consider in buying local electability by sacrificing allegiance to the national party's core values.
Take someone like Doug Jones, the former senator from AL who beat Roy Moore and then last election was destroyed by 20 points by Tuberville, who basically refused to debate or campaign. I've never seen anything like it. To beat an incumbent by 20 points, one who had no serious ethics allegations against him, Tuberville literally just needed to get an R behind his name on the ballot and not be accused of child molestation.
Now a lot of the commentary afterwards said, "Well, that's just Alabama." It's true Jones had a tough fight in any scenario, but there's still a little more to it than that. Jones positioned himself as trying to govern from the center, but if he was aiming for a center it was clearly the US center, not the AL center. E.g., he was marginally more pro-life than the national Dem Party, but only in the matter of late-term abortions. And of course he voted against Kavanaugh.
Had he aimed for the AL center, or even a position slightly to the left of it, his re-election campaign surely would have gone better, but maybe he would have ruined his chances to serve in D administrations (as he is currently doing now, working on the SCOTUS nomination). And I think it's quite possible he made the career calculation and figured it was better for his future to not even try to win re-election and to stay fully loyal to the party.
Oh, let's not, nobody is going to change their minds about it. The pro-abortion rights people are going to think it is a natural human right, the anti-abortion rights people are going to think it is not, and neither of us are going to convince the others to change or shift.
There are pro-life Democrats and they've had their ups and downs (mainly downs recently):
I feel like Scott's audience has had many civil conversations about abortion in the past. I'd even go so far as to say that I remember lots of discussions about it that were civil and zero that weren't.
Yes. Bernie Sanders supported a left wing pro-life, though obviously not a campaign focus, guy. This generated lots of controversy. Additionally prominent left-wingers are pro-life, just not in a militant way. An example would be the Bruenigs.
You can't raise money or win a competitive primary as a Democrat today unless you are willing to publicly say you are "pro-choice". That isn't quite the same as "thinking that killing the unborn is a basic right", but as far as TV ads are concerned they are the same.
The old dog for the hard road? Guy who has been long enough in politics to know how to trim his sails between what his constituents will keep voting him back in for, and what the national party demands. There's a lot of comments online excoriating Manchin for various things and being insufficiently pure on the party line, but the guy plainly knows what he's doing.
I'm pretty sure this is allowed; did you see Erusian's comment earlier in the thread? He mentioned that he ends up knowing about a lot of remote job opportunities, and recommended that you reach out to him. (I think the personal pronouns are correct in this, but apologies to Erusian if I'm wrong!)
ACX Philadelphia is doing a special meetup with Mingyuan on Friday, April 15 starting at 6:00pm. We'll be checking out the Uptown Beer Garden as a possible steady meetup location (at least while the weather is good).
We typically hold our meetups on the last Thursday of the month at 7pm.
Uptown Beer Garden is right next to Philadelphia City Hall, and the nearest train is Suburban Station. In case of rain, we'll move to Tir na Nog Irish Pub across the street.
1. Any informed opinions out there on how likely this is to replicate?
2. Any recommendations for far-UVC lamps one could use in a DIY indoor disinfection setup? I sing in a choir and am thinking of trying to set up something for our rehearsal and performance spaces.
"There is some evidence that excimer lamps, with peak wavelength of 222-nm may cause less damage to the skin, eyes, and DNA than the 254 nm wavelength, but long-term safety data is lacking."
I donated to Carrick Flynn's campaign on the basis of this recommendation. The Metaculus odds being decently high were a significant factor.
This makes me wonder if this kind of usage poses a threat to low skin-in-the-game prediction aggregators like Metaculus that people are using to direct skin-in-the-game decisions like donating money to particular candidates. Carrick's team could make the Metaculus watchers of the world more willing to donate by estimating higher odds on Metaculus at no monetary cost to them.
It seems that shame is not the only root of violence, because violence also arises from fear, which is an (accurate or otherwise) perception of and response to danger.
In fact, it seems to me that we can cast every example you state above as a fear of losing respect or approval, and of the danger which losing respect or approval implies. Ironically, in each of those situations, more respect was lost by the response than would have been lost by inaction. Less is more.
Violence also arises from a combination of greed and indifference, which I think is more relevant to the Ukraine-Russia war. I would call Will Smith-Chris Rock more of a reaction to stress than shame or danger, and Jan 6 was an offensive battle for influence, not defensive.
I will disagree about January 6: those were borderline mentally ill and "alienated". Alienation is the outgrowth of the shame of not being able to really answer the question whom am I and who are were. Some granfalloons are less benign than others. Gangs, putting on a red maga hat, white suprematists groups, the military basically the same process to solve the problem of alienation.
> those were borderline mentally ill and "alienated".
Counterpoint: lots of people believe stupid things, but don't get put in a pressure cooker designed to make them go on a rampage that will clearly lose
The theory proposed by Gilligan is not about generic shame but "hidden shame". Fear of losing respect, arguable is about a hidden shame which involving the "perceived entitlement to" ( probably not the right words) respect or honor.
What if I had once been Russian, but not any more; and I had formerly spent time in Tbilisi, but not any more; and I previously had wanted someone to invest in my business, but not currently (though probably soon, unless the Russians in Moscow decide to press a red button, then maybe not so soon)...
Personally I'd prefer to structure a world in which Russia can't sponsor refugee crises. The Wikipedia page "List of refugee crises" shows six active ones, and Russia played a major role in creating or sustaining 3 (Ukraine, Syria, Venezuela). (The other 3 are Somalia, Myanmar/Rohingya, Palestine.)
I'm increasingly of the opinion that the US/NATO should get involved in Ukraine. Russia's military is over-committed there. Speed its collapse. Then keep sanctions long enough for Russia to sort its leadership out. Then welcome them (and their natural resources) back into the global economy.
The idea is probably way too naive. But watching Russia turn Ukraine into rubble isn't so great either.
Russia's *army* is overcommitted in Ukraine. Their strategic rocket forces are hardly committed to that conflict at all. Which is sensible, because the primary purpose of the Russian strategic rocket forces is to keep NATO's armies from stomping all over Russian ones,
Most of us would like to keep that aspect of the conflict at the "staring angrily at one another" level rather than the "shooting strategic rockets at one another" level. Yes, we can cause Russia to collapse if we push hard enough. And they can cause us to collapse back, and now I have to point to bean's latest on why that wouldn't be literally the end of the world but could still be really really bad. https://www.navalgazing.net/Nuclear-Weapon-Destructiveness
I believe that the sanctions alone will cause Russia to collapse, though loss of prestige in Ukraine might contribute;. I'm seeing a big humanitarian* disaster looming.
*I hate "humanitarian disaster". The disaster is a disaster for the humans who are subject to it, not primarily for the humanitarians who are helping.
What do you think the main problems facing refugees are? Depending on your answer, I think my response will range from large-scale spiritual awakening to Georgism to saying things are pretty much fine as they are.
Imagine you suddenly have to flee your home, in fear for your life, and move to a whole other country. You have just enough time to throw a few pieces of clothing, protein bars, and some cash into a bag, if you're lucky.
What are your main problems?
You have a whole pile of problems all up and down Maslow's hierarchy, from "I don't have a safe place to sleep" to "I can't reach my elderly parents who stayed behind, I'm terrified that they've been killed' to "I don't have a way to earn a living" to "I miss my home so much" to "I'm consumed by hatred for the f***ers who did this to me" to "I don't understand the local language in the country I fled to, and it makes me feel so lonely." Add a whole other exciting pile of problems if you're accompanied by small children or pets who need your care and quite likely have been traumatized by the experience.
I don't know how it affects your answer, but I'm pretty sure that "saying things are pretty much fine as they are" is NOT IT.
Refugees have a truly terrible plight. The human trauma caused by such crises is astounding, and ripples across generations. Honestly it breaks my heart to even think about.
But none of the problems you mention changes the geopolitical calculus of how to accept refugees well. Indeed, many of the problems mentioned are endemic to being a refugee, and couldn't even in principle be solved by government intervention without e.g. ending all wars forever, let alone be solved practically.
Below, OP Suggests more prosperity and governments permitting people to move. States accepting refugees already have historically outrageous prosperity and freedom of movement. It could be that more is needed, but it could also be that things are pretty much fine as they are on that front.
One large answer is enough prosperity so that people have something to share, which is a lot of what's going on now. Another piece is governments permitting people to move, and I hope, to work.
Whether there should be help from governments and how it should be structured is something else to think about.
1) Neo-liberalism does not really lack for material prosperity, but I would really like to see Georgism tried here, at least in cities; it seems like a massive force-multiplier for social spending (since that no longer gets privately siphoned by landlords). I think it could separately ease the cost of housing for refugees.
2) I agree in principle. Why do you think governments don't permit people to move?
3) There's something to be said for solving problems at home before you try to solve them abroad, especially since foreign aid often props up a bad status quo. It also seems to me that refugee policy is often downstream from other political issues.
For instance, I think that upstream technocratic changes, like voting reform (auto-districting over gerrymandering, universal mail-in voting, ranked choice or approval voting), tax reform (more pigovian and land value taxes, collecting taxes already owed by the rich and corps), and public health reform (insulating the FDA from political and corporate pressure by treating like an arm of the justice department, public campaigns against alcohol like the one on tobacco, funding psychedelic psychotherapy for PTSD, Depression, Addiction, esp contra the opioid epidemic), not only heal current ills, but increase our capacity to heal other, further off ills, insofar as they make society more transparent, accountable, and prosperous.
I have no idea how Georgism would affect people having enough extra room in their houses to make taking in refugees relatively easy.
It may be hard to come up with a general theory of why governments don't let people move since policies vary a lot. For purposes of this discussion, the relevant part is pretty much governments not letting people move *in*.
The underlying theory is that governments have the right to "control their borders", which I think is conflating immigration with an invasion.
As for the rest, I don't know how much is that some significant number of people don't want to live with strangers, and how much it's easy for politicians to stir up xenophobia. For that matter, I don't know how much having a norm of hospitality takes the edge off.
I think the lowest hanging fruit would be developing a viable model of integrating waves of refugees with the host society.
For Ukrainian refugees in Poland I expect this to go swimmingly. We share so much cultural and linguistic background, we can have a pretty complex conversation without actually knowing a word of the interlocutor's language. Most Ukrainians have friends who already immigrated here for economic reasons years ago. They're mostly women and children, they're not threatening, certainly not aggressive. The children are already joining mixed nationality groups in school, by next year they'll probably be speaking Polish with a weird accent but fluently. Some of _our_ children will probably take up Ukrainian phrases by osmosis.
This is the best case scenario which happens basically nowhere else.
At the point the refugees form their own insular community, you lost. At the point they feel they cannot find jobs in your country while your own population associates them with joblessness and poverty, you double lost. At the point you get loud aggressive bands of young foreign males cruising your streets, you triple lost and you're a decade away from electing some kind of crypto-fascists because people have only so much patience. This is the current situation in some parts of the old EU.
I honestly have no idea how to stop this process, certainly the tribes of culture warring baboons that push for closing the borders and shooting refugee boats vs. hiding heads in the sand and pretending everything is great don't help. It does seem solvable somehow, and I think the standard approach - refugee camps, then dumping them into a foreign society with barely any help - is a terrible social and humanitarian failure.
Damn, I feel bad for Andrew in that. I mean, he wasn't perfect, but this is exactly the kind of interaction that helps nobody and the comments on the video seem to agree on that.
I've been mentally toying around with a theory of morality lately that can be roughly summarized as "X is objectively good if, for any coherent value system Y, promoting X is required to promote Y; value systems can be compared against one another on the basis of the degree to which they promote objectively good things". Has any philosopher articulated a view like this before? It seems like I'd expect there to be one, but I don't think I've ever heard of any.
The system defines some thing X as objectively good if any coherent value system Y will necessarily imply valuing X. To give a concrete example, I would consider holding true beliefs to be objectively good under this scheme, because to consistently and effectively promote any set of values requires holding true beliefs about what those values are and how to promote them.
I've only been thinking about this for a fairly short time, and I don't yet have a good idea of how to decide what tradeoffs can be made between objectively good things. It seems at least plausible to me that some sort of hierarchy of objectively good things could be established which could be used to make tradeoffs. That's part of why I'm curious to know if anyone has come up with something like this before me, and hopefully fleshed it out a bit more.
I think that an issue is that you will have contradictions between coherent systems. There are some systems which clearly more ethical. For example, both "Actively lower existential risk" and "Actively increase existential risk" could be coherent ethical systems. But should we value one over the other? I think yes, because I have ethical intuitions about what is moral and what is not. If we take an approach that equally values any coherent ethical system we will overvalue coherent but evil ethical systems. Does that make sense?
Existence is a prerequisite for promoting any value, including the value of maximizing x-risk. So human existence would be considered an objective good under this system, and therefore value systems which lower existential risk would be considered objectively superior to value systems which increase it, all else being equal.
Rereading my comment, I suppose a better way to phrase that might have been:
"X is objectively good if, for all Ys such that Y is in the set of coherent value systems, promoting X is required to promote Y; value systems can be compared against one another on the basis of the degree to which they promote objectively good things"
I don't think this is circular, although it does rest on the assumption that objective goodness exists at all, which I'm not sure how I would defend.
This seems similar to an enlightenment theory of natural rights. For instance, if one has the right to pursue happiness, and one must have life to pursue happiness, then one also has the right to life. And if one must have adequate food, water, and shelter to live, then one also has a right to adequate food, water, and shelter.
In general, if X is a right, and Y is a necessary means to X, then Y is also a right. Add that all rights, ex definitione, should be promoted and you have your first principle.
"Enlightenment theories" is a pretty broad category encompassing a number of views, not all of which are mutually reconcilable. Which Enlightenment writers or texts are you referring to here?
In general, a Kantian + Jeffersonian/American theory of rights. Specifically, Kant in the Groundwork and Metaphysics of Morals, Jefferson and the Americans in most of the early American political documents, but especially the Declaration of Independence and US Bill of Rights.
"Coherent value system" contains a lot of unstated assumptions. What if I'm a negative utilitarian supervillain and I want to destroy all life?
I think either your set of CVSes will turn out to be arbitrarily picked by criteria not outlined in that statement, or the intersection of all CVSes will turn out to be an empty set.
Still, I like the formulation and it's really philosophically elegant. I think it's a seed of an interesting idea worth exploring further.
"'Coherent value system' contains a lot of unstated assumptions. What if I'm a negative utilitarian supervillain and I want to destroy all life?"
Life is a prerequisite for promoting any values, so is objectively good according to this definition. Even a value system that long-term seeks destruction of all life still has to seek the preservation of certain life forms until they can figure out the optimal way to destroy the other life forms. Hence, under the system of judgments I've outlined, value-systems that promote the destruction of all life can be considered objectively inferior to ones that oppose this.
Things would get trickier with a value-system like Nazism or jihadism, which only tries to destroy specific subgroups of people. But I think an argument could still be made against such views based on this system. Something like: in order to properly optimize for any given value Y, I have to not only act consistently with increase Y myself, but also persuade/incentivize others to optimize for Y. Hence, supporting others who promote objectively good values is itself an objectively good value. Therefore, all else being equal, a value system which unnecessarily destroys potential good-promoting agents is inferior to one that doesn't do so. Therefore, value systems such as Nazism and jihadism, which promote unnecessary destruction of certain humans based on characteristics unrelated to their objective goodness, are objectively worse than value systems which seek to protect human life in general.
"Objectively worse" is relative, and a useful conclusion. But that's only half of what you have claimed here, and not the half most people are replying to.
To classify such a thing as "Objectively good, but less good than another thing" makes absolute "good" a useless concept.
"Russia will be completely discredited as a threat if they fail to beat Ukraine" doesn't seem like that crazy a take - arguably this has *already* happened, and Russia needs to find a politically acceptable peace deal before something even more embarrassing happens.
The second part, "if we lose here we also lose India, China, and the Middle East" and "if we lose here it's the beginning of the end for Russia," does sound a bit crazy. Putin still seems to have strong control over internal security, still has plenty of oil money, and still has the near-absolute external security provided by nuclear weapons. Regimes have survived on much less.
I mean people saying crazy BS on TV is a concept that should be familiar across different cultures by now... Certainly this is an inconvenient rant to Putin, who will have to deal with Zelensky, but that just means government control over TV in Russia, while far stronger that in the US, is not absolute
Over the past decade the word "status" has gained, um, significantly in status, as far as I can tell. It is treated now as a natural end in itself, nevermind the irony that whatever value status has, its only obvious value is that it is upstream from many other things people want as more terminal desires.
"Status" seems to have replaced wealth or fame or sex-appeal as a catch-all upstream cultural value. I'm talking specifically about the word "status". Concepts such as class have always been with us, but unless you believe in the dubious prospect of perfect synonyms, status means something different from class. "Status" seems to be a new concept, perhaps an American or Americanized one, to distinguish it from old European classist values.
But is status really a terminal value? Might there not be something more upstream from status? Or something with more immediate value?
How many of us are really striving for status? All?
I think more modern "status" combines a few different older terms. A combination of wealth, power, influence, and some other factors, and the more of them you have to a higher degree the more "status" you have. A middle class influencer has some status. A wealthy recluse has some status. A wealthy influential politican or royalty has much more.
Oh. Just saw thread about ukr-rus community member. Don't know if I am counted... Long-time SSC reader from Russia here with psychiatric problems (I have a legal disability). Somatic health got worse in later 2 years, too.
I'd leave Russia if I could. One of main problems..... I hate programming now and have no experience doing anything else.
I worked for Russian military contractor for some time and left in late feb 2014. I guess this could earn me virtue points. But any use of these?
A few years ago someone on (IIRC) Less Wrong or Slate Star Codex or somewhere like that linked to a web comic making the point that in order for an analogy to be useful two things don't have to be similar in *all* respects, only in relevant ones. Does any of you guys know where that was?
Ok so how I heard it pronounced by a bunch of people at EAGx was kind of like met-al-culus? Not sure how pronunciations are written but yeah, is that not how you say it?
Anyone here work at Tesla or Goldman Sachs (or similar places) and willing to provide a referral ? If that’s you please email me (rot13) lcrvxrf18@tznvy.pbz
I found myself without something to read this morning - Donna Tartt, get on the ball and write another great novel please - so I bought NRSV the C S Lewis Bible. So far I’m disappointed. I was expecting a lot more exegesis than I’m getting so far.
What would be a good computer game for 4 and 7 years old kids who don't speak English? Preferably one that doesn't require internet connection.
Most games that I tried are simply too complicated for kids that small. (And then there is a specific genre of baby games where you just point mouse cursor at things and they do some animation, and a short story is told, but those require speaking the language.)
Or, not necessarily a game, but something enjoyable. Currently the only things I found are Tux Racer and Tux Paint. (Also tried GCompris, that was too boring.)
Can someone explain why Russia wants to be paid in rubles for its gas now?
My guess is that it would somehow help the value of the ruble, but I can't figure out why it would. German firms would have to, say, trade euros for rubles and then use those rubles to buy gas. So it would increase the demand for rubles in the very short run but not on net since those rubles would immediately be spent. It seems like the end result is simply using euros (or dollars) to purchase Russian gas.
I feel like a fair analogy would be if there was a huge increase in the number of people who wanted to flip used cars. If a bunch of people suddenly want to buy and then immediately sell used cars, what would that do to the price of cars? It should do nothing, right? Because the increase in demand for used cars would be perfectly matched by the increase in the supply of used cars for sale.
What am I missing?
It occurs to me now that Russia could, perhaps, force German utilities to pay a premium for the rubles it purchases, although I'm far from confident that is the explanation.
Maybe the plan is to get rubles held by foreigners back into Russia, where they can then be taken out of circulation, thereby propping up the ruble's value.
It occurs to me that this must be related to Dutch Disease, although for reasons explained above, I don't understand the mechanics of Dutch Disease either. Usually a country wants to avoid Dutch Disease, but given the collapse of the ruble, Russia very much wants at least a minor case of it right now.
I am not sure, but I suspect that the goal is to avoid sanctions that prevent Russian central bank from propping up the ruble. This article (https://www.dw.com/en/germany-says-putin-agreed-to-keep-payments-for-gas-in-euros/a-61310461) at least makes it seem that what Putin really wants is for suppliers to switch payments from sanctioned Russian central bank to non-sanctioned Gazprom Bank.
Presumably now, when Russian central bank recieves euros, they sit uselessly in some frozen account. Non-sanctioned bank could immediately exchange them for rubles, driving up the value of Russian currency on the international forex market.
Note that ruble had strenghtened to almost prewar level in the time between Putin's announcement of this plan and now, which makes me suspect that he knows what he is doing, at least in this particular matter.
Thanks. Does sound like it's about steering payments to non-sanctioned Gazprom Bank. Still not clear why Putin had to demand it in rubles -- perhaps to obfuscate the issue enough to keep Gazprom Bank out of the headlines in order to reduce the risk politicians would feel pressure to sanction it?
Some moderately well known people in the rationalist [adjacent] community[s] make a habit of thinking and writing and polling about topics relevant to everyday life, often from a rationalist perspective, rather than just writing about rationalist thought and behavior itself. However they tend to do so either in places where there is a low level of discussion-style engagement between readers (e.g. a Substack with posts that mostly get single digit comment counts), or in places with strong algorithmic sorting/filtering that leads to less influential participants having few opportunities to interact with more influential participants (e.g. Twitter threads with hundreds of replies and thousands of threaded replies, where most people won't see all the replies at any particular level).
Naming one of these people on the ACX Discord had some undesirable consequences, so I'll try naming two here and see if that goes any better: Duncan Sabien and Aella
Are there any more active and/or centralized forum-like discussion platforms where I am likely to find discourse on the sorts of posts I've described here? A forum, discourse instance, subreddit, etc. Failing that, a Discord or other chat-like environment? Not about these specific two people, but in general about the "off topic" writings of prolific rationalist community members who don't themselves directly post on such platforms.
Ways to organize a search for a missing person in LA from abroad?
TL/DR: My father-in-law is missing, asking for help/advice in coordinating search from abroad
My father-in-law, Igor, has gone missing in LA after the stroke; because of his medical condition he is confused and unable to use his phone. He doesn’t have any friends or relatives in the US, his English is not very good (he is Ukrainian and only moved to LA last year), and he doesn’t have a place to go to – his landlord has evicted him from the apartment he rented when Igor was admitted to the hospital.
My wife and I live in Georgia (the country, not the state), and we try to organize a search for him from abroad; we can’t come to the US.
So the question is – what would be the recommended course of action to coordinate the search for a missing person from abroad? We have filed a missing person report to the police, we post to Facebook groups and made a simple website with basic information – https://findigor.help/ – what are our other options?
I don't know if a Silver Alert would help in this situation or not, but perhaps contacting the CHP about it would give you some ideas about what other resources could be used.
Did you file the missing person report with the LA Police Department? I can't imagine that working well. They would just be busy with too many other problems.
I would try contacting the California Highway Patrol.
Research protocol. Take a tissue sample from the same part of the body of ten percent or more of the people who died in a year in the US. That is roughly 300,000 samples (or more).
Null hypothesis: there is no significant relationship between microplastics concentration and age at death.
One might find that people with lots of microplastics in their flesh die at a younger age, or older.
This is an interesting concept. For the nihilism example, wouldn't the original fallacy be unconvincing to a nihilist?
"If you believe in nihilism, that life has no value, then there's no reason to do anything, the only possibility is apathy and death, therefore you shouldn't believe in nihilism."
That is, a nihilist shouldn't actually see apathy/death as bad since everything is meaningless. If you see those consequences as bad, it must be because you are not actually a nihilist at some level. The only way this argument even makes sense is if both parties agree that apathy/death are bad, and if you do, then I think it's a pretty good argument that you're not actually a nihilist.
Isn't this just kicking the can down the road?
That is - can nihilists believe that subjective unpleasantness is inherently bad? My understanding is no, in which case again this seems like either a good argument against nihilism ("nihilism will make you feel subjectively unpleasant, which I think you agree is inherently bad, but if you believe that then you must not be a nihilist") or ill-formed (a true nihilist could respond "so what? There's nothing good or bad about subjective unpleasantness") in ways that have to do with unshared assumptions about whether subjective unpleasantness is bad. You really shouldn't be a nihilist if you actively avoid subjectively unpleasant things!
This is basically what I assume people are talking about when they say "instrumental rationality." Believing something not because it's correct, but because the belief is useful.
People often give the example of (over-) confidence. That particular example I find less well supported after reading The Scout Mindset.
I've been playing with the idea that concern about remote consequences is a risky line of thought.
For example, making drugs illegal because of a concern that there will be a lot of addication if drugs are legal.
For what it's worth, I think nihilism is neither true nor pragmatic.
For instance, if we call nihilism the belief that "there are no universal truths." then that statement itself is a claim to universal truth ("It is universally true that "there are no universal truths""). The same argument I believe holds for universal moral truths. Hence, nihilism appears to be a contradiction in terms. You point out a similar thing, where nihilism often holds bare truth as a highest value while denying such truth exists. Somewhat sado-masochistic, don't you think?
The real argument against nihilism, though, is that simple, rational alternatives exist. Consider the Delphic Maxim: "nothing too much." Is it ever good to do anything too much/little? (e.g. eat, drink, think, etc)? If not, then there's a universal categorical imperative for you. Don't do anything too much. Why? Because too much of anything is bad, no matter your maxim.
Somewhat trivially this means that nihilism (which is definitionally void in useful content) is less pragmatic than the above principle (which has at least some useful content). Something is better than nothing.
More to your argument, I think that the "nothing-too-much" principle is more pragmatic to even hedonistic ends. For instance, say your sole purpose is to eat fancy food to feel pleasure. Fine by me, it's your life. However, you still never ought eat too much fancy food, since eating too much is unpleasant.
This fact, I think, renders the pleasure principle somewhat obsolete. Aiming at pleasure alone may cause you to indulge in excessive pleasure, which is at best unpleasant and at worse dangerous (cf. heroin). Aiming away from excess has none of these risks, and optimizes your pleasure to boot.
It seems, then, that we ought dispense with pleasure as a goal entirely, and should instead focus on having in no way too much fancy food, fine wine, stinky cheese, etc. So it would seem that nihilism is neither true, pragmatic, nor even pleasurable. To be honest, this matches my experience with it.
---
[To be clear, I don't think "nothing-too-much" is the only viable moral principle. I just think it is a good principle and concise enough to show that nihilism is false and pragmatic in a blog comment. Helps that it is also central to Ancient Greek, Roman, and Chinese philosophy, as well as to Buddhism, Hinduism, and Christianity (or at least Catholicism).]
1) This differs from my experience, in which nihilists tend to claim that, because there is no such thing as objective truth (or that it is unknowable), that therefore there are no objective values and that life is ultimately meaningless. Would you like to provide another definition of nihilism?
2) Did I claim that it was? Or merely that an argument of similar form held for moral truths as held for analytic truths?
3) Please address the argument above. What leap of faith does "nothing too much" involve?
4a) If moderation (and the other virtues defined by nothing too much) is trivially good under your definition of nihilism, then haven't you built in almost the entirety of common morality into your nihilism?
4b) Triviality. I agree that there is something essential about your being human that allows you to delay gratification now for health, wealth, and wisdom later. "Passing pleasure or perennial joy? This is the choice one is to make always," sing the Upanishads. I also agree that the signals for this are built into our biology (and, I would add, not only in our biology), and should always be heeded.
However, I do not feel like you are addressing my argument about pleasure. It seems to me that "nothing too much" is true a priori, without necessary reference to pleasure or experience, since "too much" is bad by definition. Hence, there seems to be another reason besides "X is pleasant" to do X. Hence, there are non-hedonistic moral values. Do you see anything that prevents this reasoning?
Further, by my previous argument, pleasure should not even enter into moral calculus, since it can only cloud the judgement of "nothing too much," and will not even optimize pleasure. Do you think this argument is flawed?
5) Do you always choose perennial joy over passing pleasure? Or do you sometimes choose instant gratification over lasting health, wealth, wisdom, etc.?
If you do always choose right, then may you be hailed as a god amongst men, and may I sit at your feet that I might learn to live well!
Applying the concept "nothing-too-much" to itself results in the paradox "something-too-much".
Do you think it is a contradiction to allow that some things cannot be done too much, and that following the statement is one of these things?
As a gloss: "anything which is possible to do too much, don't do too much."
That's an improvement. Now I'm trying to think what happens if you apply that to itself, but my brain hurts.
I believe it just means that such things are unconditionally good per se, since they are always to be pursued.
For what it's worth, I think this means that moderation, courage, and wisdom (not too much pleasure, not too much fear, not claiming too much) are all manifestations of this proverb, and so in themselves unconditionally good and always to be pursued.
This is indeed one of the traditionally-recognized logical fallacies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_consequences
the bots are getting better but the mindless repetition gives it away just like me please don't do that again please never let that happen please no don't but do log in here and send money money money.
Also why does Abraham Aruguete's tale of woe jump between the first and third person? I think if Abraham is a real person, Abraham does need psychiatric treatment, but schizophrenic ramblings on GoFundMe are not the way to access it.
We have the technology to avoid the repetition too! I guess people who know how to use language models can convert that into money more effectively doing something other than spamming substacks though.
Now I am curious to know that the comment was. I think I have not seen such kind of spam before.
I think it was spam for a go fund me scam.
There's a group in Austin that meets every Saturday! There's more info on their Google Group: https://groups.google.com/g/austin-less-wrong
Question for gun people here:
I saw Biden saying he was planning on sending shotguns (among other supplies) to Ukraine. Why shotguns? I'd assume something like M16s would be better for most military uses (and also that the US military would have a lot more surplus M16s). Are there usecases in urban fighting that make shotguns better for some things?
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/yes-us-military-loves-shotguns-27897
TL;DR: Close combat in urban areas, trench combat etc. are suitable for shotguns. This type of fighting is likely to occur in Ukraine.
Also, Joe seems to like shotguns.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/feb/20/joe-biden-buy-a-shotgun
It could be influenced by availability of ammunition too. All U.S. M16s, M4s, etc. will use 5.56 NATO cartridges, which may be in short supply in Ukraine. It does appear that the USSR used 12 gauge, which is what American shotguns would use (provided it's the same "12ga", I don't know). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_modern_Russian_small_arms_and_light_weapons#Shotguns
This makes sense, actually. Especially given how hard it's been to get 5.56/.223 ammo even right here in the US and A.
Follow-up point: US army doctrine says (and actual military folks can correct me) that more people are killed by "fires" (meaning artillery, drone, helicopter, or other strikes) than by troops with rifles. The main thing in modern war that a grunt can do is direct "fires" onto targets.
It might make even more sense to just send them a bunch of consumer drones. Some of the footage we've seen looks remarkably similar to what you'd see in a modest DJI drone, for example, and the amount of range and flight time you get from even the cheapest DJI model is quite good. So $400 or so for a basic pump shotgun, or $400 for a DJI Mini 2? Might get more value out of the latter.
Be careful of DJI drones, they come from a Chinese company. My understanding is that DJI has access to a certain amount of metadata from their drones and in theory could make it available to the Russians.
See this Twitter thread. DJI allegedly made feature changes to Ukrainian drones to favor the Russians. https://twitter.com/vshymanskyy/status/1501966844118372356
(Disclaimer, I haven't researched this allegation in any detail so take it with a grain of salt. But regardless, if I was Ukrainian I would be pretty concerned.)
That rather depends how much "fires" one has access to - the USA has virtually limitless amounts; Ukraine may be quite limited in what it has available, and heavy equipment like that is much harder to supply than small arms.
Additionally, if they're expecting to fight in the streets of their own cities they probably don't want to call in indirect fire when they can help it, and there will be a lot of infantry-on-infantry fighting.
Other than Mariupol, the Ukrainians are doing most of their fighting outside of cities, trying (mostly successfully) to keep the Russians out. And they inherited their starter army with its kit and doctrine from the Russians, so they aren't exactly short on artillery. My sources say 1000+ howitzers, ~350 each multiple rocket launchers and heavy mortars, and probably no shortage of 82mm mortars.
So, drones that can tell them where to direct fires should be quite useful. But as noted, *consumer* drones may not be the right tool for that.
"Support for Ukrainians fighting against the Russian invasion of their country is pouring forth from all over the United States, including the ammunition industry. Two major US ammo producers have pledged to support the resistance — with bullets. Combined, the manufacturers will be delivering 2 million rounds of ammunition Ukraine desperately needs, as stated by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a now-famous video response to President Biden’s offer of evacuation assistance.
...
Wagenhals, who also achieved fortune and fame in NASCAR, told Free Range American that the entire shipment will consist of 7.62x39mm cartridges. He said members of Congress told the company that’s what Ukraine needs the most. The ammo has an approximate value of $700,000."
So, yeah, maybe.
The M16 was a few generations back. The present day US Army & Marine Corps uses the M4 rifle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M4_carbine
Not a gun person. But perhaps, simply, the Ukrainians already have enough assault rifles (Kalashnikovs), but they happen to be short on shotguns.
Ukraine mostly has weapons of Soviet descent. Most pictures of them distributing rifles just before the conflict showed Soviet weapons, often Kalashnikov-family rifles. Those weapons are chambered in Soviet calibers like the 7.62x39mm, used in (for example) the AK-47 and AK-74 rifles.
Introducing a new caliber rifle, such as the NATO 5.56, risks a lot of confusion in the Ukrainian logistics for a small improvement in lethality. The value of the wrong ammo for the wrong gun is less than zero, because you had to carry it all the way to wherever you discovered the mismatch.
But if the Ukrainians don't have many shotguns in the first place, then sending them shotguns may add a capability and likely won't add much confusion. Similarly, most infantry missile systems are their own stream of logistics, but the Western systems are much better than the aging examples the Ukrainian military had before. Ukraine has been training in those Western systems since 2014 for an eventuality exactly like the ongoing fighting. So clearly the West and Ukraine agreed that any risk of confusion in the missile department was totally worth it.
This is part of what "up to NATO standard" means, the line that Zelenskyy recently took a shot at. NATO wasn't necessarily dissing the Ukrainian military's resolve, gallantry, or resourcefulness even before the conflict. Certainly they wouldn't be now. Rather, NATO was making a factual observation that Ukraine's military machine isn't totally interoperable with the NATO network. Clearly true!
The AK74 uses a different cartridge than the AK47. 7.62x39mm vs. 5.45×39mm. So we're already dealing with confusion.
We don't want to add to that confusion. And at least with 7.62 vs 5.45mm, (or 7.62x39 vs 7.62x54R) there's not much chance of actually trying to *load* the wrong cartridge into the wrong gun. With the two standard NATO calibers, that would be a risk.
I have no idea. Shotguns aren't ineffective. As others have noted, they were highly effective in WWI trench warfare. Other reasons I can think of:
* Best case: Ukraine has a huge surplus of shotgun ammo relative to the number of shotguns present.
* Shotguns are cheaper on a per-unit basis, allowing a fixed amount of money to buy more firearms.
* Magic thinking that "you don't need to learn how to aim a shotgun" so that newly-armed civilians will be able to be effective without training.
* Ukrainian Law makes it easier to distribute shotguns to the public at-large as compared to magazine-fed rifles. Given that civilian purchase of shotguns/rifles was expedited to take "only" 3 days, this might be it.
* Biden doesn't know any meaningful differences between shotguns and rifles.
* Biden hates the idea of individual ownership of black rifles so much that he'll sabotage any military aid to avoid the bad political press.
As others have noted, distributing M16/M4 rifles may be a logistical issue without appropriate training, given ammo issues. However, the US still does manufacture some AK47-pattern rifles for civilian use. Those could be shipped over, if appropriate.
Others gave OK answers, I think the likeliest real answer is Biden misspoke (not for the first time) and probably meant to say "rifles". Or maybe there technically are some shotguns in the aid package, but 100x more rifles.
You're right that rifles (M4 carbines not M16) are much more all-purpose. I think the US military mainly only uses shotguns for door breaches. Even when Seal Team Six goes into what it knows with 100% certainty will be a very close-quarters situation like storming Bin Laden's compound, they're mostly carrying rifles.
That doesn't mean a shotgun isn't useful in a close-quarters firefight if it's what you have at hand, but I think most of the time someone suggests he'd rather be carrying a shotgun into a life-or-death situation than an M4, he's played too many video games or something. Shotguns are fun, I like shotguns, but there's this shotgun-worship meme that likes to act as if their stopping power within 10 yards is 1000x that of the next-best alternative, and that shooting someone with a rifle or pistol at that range is half a step up from throwing sand at him.
The official White House fact sheet says 5,000 rifles, 1,000 pistols, 400 machine guns(*), and 400 shotguns. So this probably isn't a Biden thinko.
There are very very few military applications where a shotgun would be *better* than an appropriate-caliber rifle, especially now that even second-tier armies give their soldiers kevlar. But if we've got extra shotguns sitting in crates Ukraine in a caliber the Ukrainians can use, it can't hurt to add them to the list. And America isn't exactly the land of flawlessly rational thinking when it comes to firearms, so quite possibly the list was compiled by one of enthusiasts with an inflated opinion of the martial utility of shotguns.
* presumably the military usage, i.e. belt-fed support weapons
One thing I didn't see: the army might also be using Ukraine to dump weapons and equipment they can no longer use. Stuff that still "good" but no longer part of doctrine or that they have too much of. The very fact that shotguns are less common in modern war makes it a good reason to donate them to be given out to some Ukrainian farmer, rather than keep them.
I'm looking to spend 2-6 weeks in Austin or Denver (or potentially other cool American cities) this summer as a trial experience to see if I may want to live there. If anyone who lives in any of those cities has a spare room, wants to rent me their apartment (presumably while they go on vacation/travel elsewhere), or do an apartment swap with me in Toronto, please let me know!
Happy to provide much more information.
Please email me at daniel $ mm $ frank at gmail $com (all $ can be replaced with .s)
Why those two cities?
I can’t answer for that person, but Austin and Denver are the clear cultural referents for the places people move who like coastal superstar cities but don’t like their prices. Portland might also count here.
Chicago, Columbus/Indianapolis/Nashville, Minneapolis, and Boise seem to serve a related function, but not quite the same.
Chicago and Minneapolis sure, but Columbus, Indianapolis and Boise? Really? I live in St Louis which I would consider a peer to Indianapolis and near-peer but ahead of the other two, and I wouldn't describe any of us that way. What context am I missing?
Columbus, Indianapolis, and Nashville are relatively booming in terms of population growth, while many of the larger cities in the region are either growing slower than the US as a whole, or even shrinking (https://www.manhattan-institute.org/10-successful-midwest-cities-population-and-job-growth)
Boise was apparently already the fastest growing city in the US just before the pandemic (https://www.businessinsider.com/boise-idaho-fastest-growing-city-in-us-photos-growth-cost-2019-12) and has had some of the fastest-increasing prices during the pandemic too (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/12/magazine/real-estate-pandemic.html)
St Louis is a very established city, and has the amenities people expect from a big city, because they were set up in the 19th century. These other places are not that, but are experiencing a period of sudden growth, and hoping to some day become established cities.
Largely to see how I find the experience of being a city with more like-minded people (Denver for outdoorsy, active people; Austin for tech nerds).
I was in Denver for work about 5-6 years ago, then for vacation 3 years ago, and each time I thought it was awesome. I sort of unseriously considered moving out there after each trip. Austin created no such temptations, although I was only there for 3-4 days.
While in Denver consider visiting the surrounding cities of Colorado Springs, Golden, and Fort Collins (where I live and highly recommend, especially if its the outdoors aspect you are interested in; seemly every third car has a ski rack/bike rack/fly fishing rack on it). You may also consider Boulder if the cost doesn't put you off.
For those looking for remote work: Four people have contacted me. I've responded to all of them and sent them (collectively) something like thirty job postings in the last week with salaries between $40k and $150k. One of them had a good interview and is probably getting an offer next week. I've done this before a lot so feel free to reach out to me. My email is the definite article in the English language (if you Google the phrase "definite article in the English language" you'll get it as first result) plus my username at gmail dot com.
Another way to not outright say it.
I recall “definite article” being clued as “Billy the Kid” used one in his name in a 2010ish NYT XWord.
Let a bot try to harvest your email from this comment.
GPT-3 got the word first try from "What is the definite article in the English language?" Couldn't generate an email address from the whole paragraph though.
Oh, clever idea!
Any ACX readers in Bend, Oregon? (I'm new to the area and looking to make friends. I'd be happy to meet with people one-on-one, but also, I'll probably offer to host a meetup here for this mini-Meetups-Everywhere thing.)
Huh, where's the 4/20 meet up? :^) (Oh I see it's NYC... makes sense.)
Not a full book review but I wrote a blogpost critiquing Emily Oster’s interpretation of evidence on drinking during pregnancy on IQ (she thinks light drinking has no harmful effects).
Short version. Her preferred studies are clearly confounded towards positive effects of drinking on IQ (which she acknowledges). The studies eventually get zero effect after controls but it’s clear that the controls are very noisy so real effect is probably negative. At the very least saying that these studies invalidate a recommendation of abstaining seems overblown
https://www.filedrawer.blog/post/oster_pregnancy_alcohol/
I don't drink often and I cannot comprehend the mind of somebody who would, given the ambiguity here, risk hurting their unborn child rather than go 9 months without drinking.
My concern is that her book presents the evidence as having no remaining ambiguity. I think that may make some parents make decisions that don’t match their own risk preferences
Yes, the problem is that while an occasional glass of wine over the course of an entire pregnancy may not cause any problems, the people who already drink very lightly or who will cut back on their drinking don't need to be told this (though they may need the support when people accuse them of "don't you know that this will damage the baby? don't you care? you are being abusive to your unborn child!" and that sort of finger-wagging does no good at all).
The people who drink heavily will just use it as an excuse: "see, drinking does no harm!" and continue to abuse alcohol and create real problems for their unborn child. They won't cut back, they won't drink rarely or lightly, they will use anything like this to deflect criticism.
I agree. Without even knowing the specifics, I can't imagine not strongly siding on precautionary principle on this one. To be clear, I suppose there is an amount of evidence which I would believe it's okay to drink while pregnant but it would need to be really strong.
So let's say that something like "while there's evidence that heavy drinking causes problems, there's no evidence the same is true of light drinking" is true.
There's going to be people who approach that in different ways. Some people are never even going to consider taking a drink - the smell of a possible risk is enough; the association is enough, for them to not do it.
Some people only treat things like risks if they can be shown they are risky. They'd have drinks here and there, because there's no data telling them they shouldn't.
I fall into the latter category of people pretty hard (can't say what I'd do if I were pregnant) because I've seen a lifetime's worth of what I view as massive overreaches of pain avoidance and risk mitigation, and I have an emotional overreaction to things I associate with that.
I think there's the possibility of a certain amount of people reading Oster's piece and going "you know what, I have specific data and an entire rationale that makes me reject this". But my guess is most people are just as emotionally driven as me on the subject, basically just going with what "seems right" as opposed to anything else.
I think it’s exactly the same as the mindset of someone who would, given the ambiguity, go into public spaces without a mask.
Well, not exactly. I tend to interpret inquiries into this question as "I had a glass of wine every day until I figured out I was pregnant. How much should I worry?" Which is totally a thing- a lot of women don't realize they're pregnant until a few weeks in, which is the critical formative period for lots of body systems, and they spend the next five years shitting bricks because they drank even a little during that time. Oster is one of the few pushing back on the million plus little pieces of wisdom, some borne out by studies but most not, that constantly bombard pregnant women.
Alcohol seems pretty clear cut, but researching dietary do's and don'ts, I found forums full of women convinced that lemongrass caused their miscarriages, or who were scrutinizing every milestone and tantrum because they maybe drank to much coffee in the first trimester. The default medical advice for a huge amount of behavior in pregnancy is "We don't know the effect, so maybe don't do it?" Which is not a mindset that would be considered sane or rational applied to any other period of life. When it comes to pregnancy, putting actual numbers behind these ideas is not just about quantifying the harm, it's also quantifying how worried to be relative to everything else.
"a few weeks in, which is the critical formative period for lots of body systems"
Is that true? Does the embryo even have any connection to the mother's body in the first few weeks? How long does it take the umbilical cord to develop?
Implantation takes place 8-9 days after conception.
Thanks. Prior to implantation I'm assuming alcohol consumption is not going to directly affect the fertilized egg? What about soon afterwards?
The embryo might start absorbing nutrients from the mother's endometrial layer within 5 days after conception, and the umbilical cord is formed at 5 weeks. The neural tube closes around week 6 and from there brain development picks up quite quickly. The heartbeat should be detectable by then as well, though it's not really a "heart" yet.
I was just wondering if anyone knows whether there is a risk to a mother drinking in the first 2-3 weeks of pregnancy. My previous thought had been that it was not likely to be dangerous (not that I would recommend binge drinking).
I don't have an issue with reassuring women who drank a small amount of alcohol before they knew they were pregnant. A small amount of drinking a couple of times probably isn't going to be the major determining factor in a child's life. People in that circumstance probably do worry too much.
But Oster goes quite a bit further. These are the concluding paragraphs from her chapter on drinking. For context, multiple academic friends sent me the book and said it changed their minds about this issue:
"The bottom line is that the evidence overwhelmingly shows that light drinking is fine. In fact, there is virtually no evidence that drinking a glass of wine a day has negative impacts on pregnancy or child outcomes. Of course, this is a little sensitive to timing—7 drinks a week does not mean 7 shots of vodka in an hour on a Saturday night. Both the data and the science suggest that speed of drinking, and whether you are eating at the same time, matters. It’s not that complicated: drink like a European adult, not like a fraternity brother."
"In doing research for this book, I found the strength of the evidence in this case extremely surprising given the rhetoric around drinking during pregnancy in the United States. Many women I know seem unsure about having even a glass of wine at Christmas or on their anniversary, let alone having a few drinks a week. Yet there seems to be absolutely no reason for anything even close to these draconian restrictions. I am sure we can all see the case for wanting to stay well inside the danger zone, but drawing the line at any drinking at all seems, frankly, ridiculous."
There's a huge number of equivalent constraints on a pregnant woman's / new mother's behavior: people say similar things about drinking coffee while pregnant, traveling during the third trimester (in case of early labor), going on one taxi ride without a car seat, putting a pillow or blanket or stuffed animal in bed with a baby or using a soft mattress or sleeping in the same bed as them, washing bottles rather than steam-sterilizing them, skipping well visits where no vaccine will be given, etc.
I think alcohol *in particular* is easy to avoid, but avoiding all the things that people say might harm a baby is not easy.
An issue I have with your asteroid analogy is that the dose matters. The asteroid prior for 1 drink is not the same as 10 drinks. In asteroid terms a 1 cm wide asteroid is never going to cause a catastrophe just as 1 drink over the course of dinner will not produce enough acetaldehyde to cause harm. There is a cap to the risk based on the dose which I don't see reflected in your distributions.
What is love?
As in, if I'm dating someone and they ask if I love them, what are they asking and how can I tell if the true answer is yes or no?
The only definitions I've found amount to something like "you'll know it when you see it." As a queer person, I'm pretty skeptical of this approach. Presumably some people don't experience this particular mental state, but that's impossible to even theorize about without a more practical definition.
I'm not even merely being pedantic. I've never been able to find a working definition that is precise enough to navigate simple English conversations. I know it's a step in the process of a growing relationship (somewhere between the first date and marriage, but is it before or after moving in together, or can it be either?). I get that it's more romantic than sexual. Can anyone be more specific?
Sorry, team "you'll know it when you feel it" here. I used to share your skepticism, and figured people were just using 'love' as short hand for "think this person is nice to be around and also attractive". Then I fell in love, and yeah, it's not just a scaled up version of that.
Okay, that's informative in itself. Still though, what makes you think that new emotion was what people mean by "love"? I've experienced emotional shifts during the course of a relationship, does the love one have any identifying characteristics other than what it isn't?
This is not the answer I would provide in a vacuum (I'm more of a "you'll know it when you feel it" person), but I think it's more to the point of your question. I'm trying to think of the practical effects of love, rather than describe how it feels. Describing a feeling is probably like trying to describe color to a blind person, so I hope you recognize that this is imprecise at best.
When I fell in love with my wife, there was a shift in approach in my mind. That is, in my mental calculations of what to do and what to prioritize, my wife's thoughts and feelings mattered as much as my own or more. It goes beyond caring for her wellbeing (which could be selfish - not wanting to lose her), to caring about what she cares about directly, only because she cares about it. That doesn't mean that I necessarily like the things she does, but that I want to help her fulfill her needs and desires independent of or even at the expense of my own desires. This desire is also independent of any kinds of rewards ("I make her happy, she does _____ for me" kinds of tradeoffs), but can tip significantly one-sided without me noticing or caring. There's a very significant level of trust built in, but it goes beyond trust. She could treat me poorly and do things that would normally create distrust and I would still want to treat her well.
From an outside perspective, that situation probably sounds ripe for abuse. I suppose it is, but when two people are in love, that's not the biggest concern of either, and both should want to care about the other enough to prevent themselves from abusing the trust being put in them. Then there are situations where a spouse gets badly injured or terminally sick, and the other spouse gives up everything in life to take care of them even though they will never be able to repay that. Leaving the sick spouse doesn't even seem like an option, and wouldn't even be considered. I know a couple where the husband got badly injured in a car wreck while they were engaged. They were about 20 years old at the time. He was in a coma for a long time, and had pretty bad brain damage. A lot of people wondered if she would leave him, but she stayed by his side and cared for him during the coma and the long recovery. He's still significantly impaired and will be for life, but they've been married for over 10 years.
The clearest shift is the amount of certainty I had in being in love (they say, only slightly tongue in cheek).
OK, trying to give a more helpful answer: Mr. Doolittle probably has the right approach. I would describe it almost as a blurring of the self/other boundary, but mutual, such that their happiness and desires and success become more equivalent to yours
(I suppose by this definition, patriotism is a kind of love (albeit non-mutual), which maybe isn't completely wrong)
This is the correct answer.
What else would you go on? Do you feel a strong, positive feeling for me that you rarely, or never, have felt toward someone else? If yes then 'love'. If no then you will probably leave me for someone else when you find you can feel a stronger emotion than 'is pretty, nice to be with'.
Okay, I’ll take a stab at it. I by no means claim to be an expert on love, but I’m at least decent at definitions and remember being dubious of the emotion enough to hopefully be helpful.
A disclaimer first though. 1) we can’t know eachother’s internal states, so likely different people will feel different things and 2) if you use some pedantic thing to decide, your partner may very well not be pleased with this if they’re looking for the emotion. 3) You kind of know it when you feel it, but this is hopefully useful to some degree anyway
Ahem, now onto an attempt at a definition.
First off, “being in love” is a state of being that often has one of two meanings. Meaning 1 would be “the honeymoon phase” or “puppy love” which is often characterized by intense attraction, attention, and emotional connection to the other person.
Meaning two (loving someone) is much vaguer. But, many experienced people say it is a choice, and this roughly squares with my experience as a less experienced person. “Loving someone” could be seen as the active choice to pursue a relationship with them, work to be closer to them, and to help/protect them as best you can. This choice is not just a short-term decision, but to some degree a commitment towards a longer term goal.
Okay, this is getting long, but let me try to bring it home with my own perspective. The honeymoon period will probably pop up anywhere from 1 month to 2 years in depending on how many times it’s happened before. Loving someone is something that happens once you know them well enough and commit to a serious relationship. Maybe this will seem pedantic, but once you’ve decided to love someone, you will always have loved them, and to me that in and of itself is significant.
This is very helpful, thank you.
I think part of why everyone says, “it depends” is that it can mean different things to different people. Personally, it’s a kind of inflection point I feel when I realize I really, really want to know everything about someone and be known in all my ways by them, to spend a lot of time with them, to share my vulnerabilities with them and support them no matter what, to care for and be cared for by them. There’s a sexual component, which not everyone feels, but the physical feeling of being in love even without the sexual dimension is an overwhelming desire to be in their presence, to take them in, to bask in the glow of their being. It’s more than butterflies or limerence, and has a deep, resonant aspect of wanting to stick by this person, even if things get tough.
I empathize with your situation because I think it can be kind of unfair to ask someone if they love you - I think it’s perfectly fine, if you’ve shared that you love someone and they don’t say it back, to ask if it’s something they think is in the cards, and to set a timetable for checking in again, so the in-love party can decide if they need to move on - but asking if someone loves you can feel an awful lot like pressure to say yes. I wish you luck in your relationship(s) and unfolding understanding of what being-in-love means to you!
A place that’s been really helpful to me on relationship questions is Ask MetaFilter: while there’s often advice I don’t agree with, people share experience and advice really openly, and I’ve learned a lot just reading through various people’s perspectives. As a nerdy bi lady with ADHD and baggage, I also see a lot more representation of questions/answers from nerdy, LGBTQIA+++, neurodiverse, and complicated folks.
Sadly, I'm with Arbituram. Like satori, it is a profound experience beyond that which can be communicated. The best I can say is "if you find yourself struggling to compress the feelings you hold about someone down into language, it's probably love."
Your utility function reconfigures to focus on that person to a similar degree to how it includes food or sleep
The experience of the color red is not a meaningful thing because it cannot be described in precise language.
AFTER (not before) you have sex with that person, is your first thought "how long till I can GTF out of here and home to my comfy bed?" Or is it "I want to stay here all night with this person".
Lust is the first one; nothing wrong with that, but let's be honest with ourselves here.
Once you're at the second stage, you don't immediately want to leave (or have them leave), then you *might* be on the way to love. There are more hurdles, but that's the first one.
(Second one, if you have any common sense, is to engage in some sort of fairly stressful activity together. What counts as stressful differs between people, but something like a two day drive is a possible example, or flying [ideally by coach, with two long layovers] through an especially crowded airport.
Can the two of you handle the co-ordination, compromises, and mistakes that come up? Does the other person's disorganized cluelessness/insane level of organization drive you mad? Do you see eye-to-eye on things like money, food, time, material possessions, ...
If you don't, bail out now. You won't change them, they won't change you. What's quirky and charming today will be a screaming match in five years and exhibit #7 at the divorce proceedings in 8 years.)
You will know it when you see it.
Unfortunately false positives are also part of the game.
I've heard it said that love is when the other person's utility function becomes part of your own. Said slightly less nerdily, their well-being is important to you intrinsically, not instrumentally.
You may not been sure if you've ever experienced romantic love, but have you ever loved a family member? Or a friend? Or a pet? I don't think you necessarily have to separate romantic and non-romantic love — I love my husband a lot, but that love feels very similar to my love for my family. In all cases of love (partner, family member, friend), I want the person to succeed in their endeavors, I feel sad when they're sad, I want them to like me, and I want to take care of them when they need that. I also have a lot of positive things to say about them, and in most cases I get excited about seeing them (though not all cases; love is complicated and it's possible to love someone you don't like interacting with that much — most common in family relationships).
I do think that in a newer romantic relationship, the distinction will be greater, because there's more 'new relationship energy' (aka NRE), which is like the feeling of having a crush (which you might be familiar with). However, I would say that that's still basically in the same magisterium, it's just that the balance of excitement is higher relative to the other things.
As for when I say "I love you" in a romantic relationship, the heuristic I follow is, "wait to say it until it feels impossible to not say it" — which I guess is where "you'll know it when you see it" comes in. I also mix in an element of 'belief reporting', which is an introspection technique where you check whether saying a phrase evokes any feelings of wrongness in you. I may feel the urge to say I love someone before I can belief report that it's true, but I definitely wait to tell them until I can belief report it.
Hope this was helpful!
Do you feel better in the presence of this person? Does the thought of them make you feel warm and fuzzy and glowy? Do their needs feel as important (or more) than your own? Did you watch Atypical Season 1 and the 3 ways Sam's parents described being in love?
Can't tell you, I've never been. From the outside, it looks like "a fit of temporary insanity". I suppose all the usual clichés about wanting to be with this person, thinking this person is the greatest ever, going around simply being happy in your day-to-day life, etc.
But if you can't get an idea from all the songs and all the poems and all the movies and all the marketing campaigns for St. Valentine's Day, I can't give you any hint.
All eros, no agape?
When people talk about love, they generally mean eros and not familial affection, friendship, the feeling of being part of a team, the feeling for pets, love of country, etc.
I was struck by the very great change in attitudes between the time of the Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet" (published 1892) and modern attitudes, where *of course* you put your romantic partner over your family! If your family don't approve of your love-life, break off connections with them. If your in-laws or your own parents are 'interfering', and you have to choose between them and your partner, you pick the partner.
"I have no doubt that she loved you, but there are women in whom the love of a lover extinguishes all other loves, and I think that she must have been
one."
It gets complicated, but I think a lot of people think love means both eros and at least loyalty. I'm not sure what the relationship is between loyalty and agape.
One hopes within a sound marriage, there is plenty of agape. Otherwise, it gets rough when you get old and wrinkled.
Yes, the modern affectation (for I think it that) that love should be an obsession undeniable, an addiction, like getting hooked on crack, is discouraging. As if we are no better than rutting swine. But at that, it's also inconsistent, because at the same time the modern naif thinks he can *rationally* choose the addiction -- e.g. by filling out a long compatibility form on a dating website.
I struggled with this as well, and I'm a pretty traditional person. But I had some baggage from my childhood that made me wonder if what I was feeling was really love.
Because of my doubts, I was unusually conservative in saying "I love you." In fact, it wasn't until someone else asked me why I was willing to commit to my then-long-distance boyfriend that I said "Because I love him." I hadn't even said that to *him* yet, but as the words left my mouth, I knew it was true. The relationship we'd been having, even over the phone, kept unfolding into something more and more wonderful. Our conversations were consistently the most fun and interesting I'd ever had. Everything we said and did felt sweet and respectful and mutual. And the idea of losing him was more emotionally painful than anything I had ever felt.
I still doubted that I was capable of giving, receiving, or recognizing love. It wasn't just my own feelings- I was in love! I couldn't wait to be with him! Everything was better with him around! But I had never trusted my feelings, even as other evidence piled up. There was nothing that *didn't* feel like love about our situation. The way he listened to and supported me, the way we were both willing to go above and beyond just to be together, it all amounted to something irrefutable.
But that damaged part of me still wanted to refute it, to disbelieve in it somehow. It's not really in anyone's playbook to consciously accept that, yes, this is love, a thing I am in fact capable of and am actually experiencing. Thinking of love in this way is a risky gambit. But it also felt both right and *correct*. If this isn't love, this wonderful feeling and all the good, warm, sane, happy, healing things coming with it, what is? What could possibly be better than this?
I couldn't imagine anything better. Because it was love.
We've been together for 16 years.
Slightly contrarian view here. I don't think there is a correct answer to this question. "Love" is not a specific state but a range of states encompassing attachment to a person that goes beyond transactional utility. It also has a range of usages in language from strong new relationship energy, to longstanding trust in a romantic context, or even platonic love like for a best friend.
I think younger and more inexperienced people will tend to use the word faster in a romantic context. Perhaps in part because they do form stronger emotions more quickly (young love is a hell of a thing) but also because experience shows that such kind of confessions don't necessarily last and are more performative than sincere. So some people may expect love to be kind of a binding commitment (not easily broken) and some may merely expect it to reflect momentary intensity of feeling.
You can tell someone you love them if you are comfortable doing so and it doesn't feel like a lie. Don't get too caught up in "you know it when you feel it" because it may just be in your nature to question and doubt that feeling more than others
> What is love?
Baby don't hurt me.
That was brilliant on at least two levels.
Don't worry about it too much. A lot of these comments are making a distinction between short term infatuation and long term love, which is the basic social concept. But Nobody is actually good at making this determination, realistically, and everyone either has a tiny sample size or has been wrong. The vast, vast majority of times someone says "I love you" to a romantic partner they don't die in each other's arms decades later, they break up within a year or so.
Don't aim to be perfect, merely above the social average. Don't tell a partner you love them if you aren't considering them as a permanent life partner, or if you don't see yourselves together in a year, and in any case not too soon into a relationship.
What??? You say "don't worry about it too much" and then go on to give very opinionated advice.
"Don't tell a partner you love them if you aren't considering them as a permanent life partner"? Why not? I can love someone in the moment without wanting to commit to them for the rest of my life! Relatively short-term relationships can still be meaningful and beautiful and full of mutual respect and affection.
I also dislike the advice not to tell someone you love them "too soon". I've been with my husband for over four years and told him I loved him when we'd only been dating for a month. I wasn't wrong, and I think telling him that was a positive thing for our relationship.
Assuming you mean romantic love, CS Lewis's chapter on Eros in The Four Loves is the best explanation of it that I've seen, in particular this paragraph:
>To the evolutionist Eros (the human variation) will be something that grows out of Venus, a late complication and development of the immemorial biological impulse. We must not assume, however, that this is necessarily what happens within the consciousness of the individual. There may be those who have first felt mere sexual appetite for a woman and then gone on at a later stage to "fall in love with her". But I doubt if this is at all common. Very often what comes first is simply a delighted pre-occupation with the Beloved--a general, unspecified pre-occupation with her in her totality. A man in this state really hasn't leisure to think of sex. He is too busy thinking of a person. The fact that she is a woman is far less important than the fact that she is herself. He is full of desire, but the desire may not be sexually toned. If you asked him what he wanted, the true reply would often be, "To go on thinking of her." He is love's contemplative. And when at a later stage the explicitly sexual element awakes, he will not feel (unless scientific theories are influencing him) that this had all along been the root of the whole matter. He is more likely to feel that the incoming tide of Eros, having demolished many sand-castles and made islands of many rocks, has now at last with a triumphant seventh wave flooded this part of his nature also--the little pool of ordinary sexuality which was there on his beach before the tide came in. Eros enters him like an invader, taking over and reorganising, one by one, the institutions of a conquered country. It may have taken over many others before it reaches the sex in him; and it will reorganise that too.
I've read that most of Russia's major rivers are partly frozen during multi-month periods each winter, and that this causes major problems. Ice blocks river boats, driving up transportation costs. Moreover, ice dams act as "clogs" in rivers by backing up the water behind them and causing it to overflow the river banks, leading to floods.
Could the Russians fix this problem by building more power plants and factories next to these rivers to heat up the water? The new infrastructure would suck up cold river water to serve as coolant, and would then expel the hot water back into the rivers.
Related: https://ianswalkonthewildside.wordpress.com/2016/01/08/river-don-fig-forest/
No; if the river is big enough for modern transportation, it's too big for that kind of heating (unless you're going to mass produce nuclear power plants). It works in Sheffield because 1) it doesn't get that cold anyway, and 2) it's over a small area. Transportation,by definition,needs clear water over a long distance.
Ah...let's see...reaching for the ol' back of the envelope. Within Moscow the Moscow River is about ~150 m wide. I found a paper from Canada that estimates the convective heat transfer coefficient for a sheltered lake is about 11 W/(m^2*oC), so if we assume the typical Russian winter day is -10C, we need to supply (150 m^2)(11 W/(m^2*oC))*(10oC) = 16.5 kW of heat per meter of the river's length to keep it from freezing. The Moscow River is about 470 km long, so that would be about 470,000 m * 16.5kW/m = 7.8 GW to keep the entire river from freezing. The thermal power output of the famous RBMK 1000 nuclear power plant (the one that exploded at Chernobyl) is about 3.2 GW, so if we dedicated 2-3 of these to just heating the Moscow River that might keep it from freezing in winter, although this assumes all the water entering the river all winter does so in liquid form, which might be a little suspect. The electricity capacity of these nukes is about 1/3 of their thermal cpacity, so 7.8 GW thermal ~ 2.6 GW electrical. The entire Russian electrical capacity is about ~240 GW, so we are talking roughly about diverting 1% of Russian generating capacity to keeping the Moscow River liquid.
"The thermal power output of the famous RBMK 1000 nuclear power plant (the one that exploded at Chernobyl) is about 3.2 GW, so if we dedicated 2-3 of these to just heating the Moscow River that might keep it from freezing in winter"
What do you mean "dedicated"? Nuclear power plants use water as a coolant; they are not "dedicated" to heating up bodies of water.
What if the Russians built RBMK reactors along the Moscow River for the purpose of generating electricity for the city's regular needs, used the River's water as coolant, and then expelled the heated water back into the River? How many reactors would be needed to keep the River from freezing under that constraint?
By "dedicated" I mean the reactor's entire output is diverted to heating the water. Basically all you do is run the river water through the reactor core[1] and nothing else. If you want to use only the amount needed for cooling, that is, you still want to use the nuke to generate as much electricity as you can, you need to subtract off the power you extract as electricity, which is not available to heat the river. A big power plant has a thermal efficiency of ~30%, so basically multiply the number of power plants required by 3/2.
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[1] Actually you'll run it through a heat exchanger with the actual core cooling water, which is quite radioactive.
Then the idea might be feasible.
Depends on what you mean by the word, I think. Physically it's surprisingly plausible. (Although bear in mind the assumptions above are pretty ideal, engineering reality might crank that up by a factor of 2-5 easily enough.) Economically, though, the idea is madness. A modern electrical grid is already a fantastically expensive piece of infrastructure, and expanding it by, say, 50% (a number I am pulling out of thin air, assuming you have 50x as many river km to keep liquid than were on my envelope) is a very expensive megaproject, and I cannot imagine whatever economic benefits flow from keeping the rivers unfrozen would compensate.
And then you have the unforeseen environmental consequences: the history of massive landscape engineering projects like this during the Soviet era (cf. the Aral Sea) is cautionary.
Another big issue would be getting the warmed water spread out evenly. Putting that much heat into the water near the power plant would cause it to be extremely hot (unsafe, kill all the wildlife, maybe boil it off), while the water ~200km away would still be cold and frozen. The extra heat would definitely escape into the atmosphere or even the river banks before it would travel up and downstream to continue melting ice.
@Carl Pham - Instead of expanding the electrical grid, I'm envisioning the Russians building new power plants along their rivers to replace older power plants as the latter are decommissioned per their regular lifecycles. The process would take decades.
Your math assumes the river is a stationary body of water being frozen by cold air above that just needs enough heat to combat that freezing. That water you just heated up isn't just getting chilled by the air above, it's also being completely replaced with fresh upstream cold water immediately after you heat it.
I'm not sure on the science here, but you may have a different problem, namely that if you keep the river flowing all the time, you may well either deplete upstream water storage, or the river will shrink.
The river does flow all the time. It just develops a skin of ice over it in the winter, maybe 10-40cm, which is certainly very solid from a human perspective -- at the upper limit you could drive a truck on it -- but doesn't restrict the water flow to any important extent.
True, though I do wonder if you create increased vulnerability to rain-on-snow events. More critically, I think if this is theoretically being done with waste heat, you either have to build two entirely separate disposal mechanisms, or else you may get very hot rivers in the summer. I don't know anything about what lives in those rivers, but fish often have surprisingly narrow temperature ranges before you start getting serious fish kills.
Very much not my area of expertise (as you can see from the fact that I did think they froze clean through).
I really want to homeschool my kids. I really don’t want to homeschool my kids.
Both of these statements are very true. Except for the fact that I don’t have kids. But if all goes well, I will have a kid in a couple weeks.
I really want to homeschool my kids for a couple of reasons, one passive and one active. The passive reason is that school sucks. I have no faith in the existing educational system. And once one loses said faith, putting one’s child into the school is like going to church after having lost faith in God — deeply dissatisfying, though not without some social benefits.
The active one is that I want my kids to be awesome. Not awesome by your standards, or by mine. Objectively awesome. Like Marvel superheroes, I want superkids who grow into superhumans.
This may not be a popular line of thinking. I know that “one is not supposed to try to mold their kids into something specific.” I’m not trying to mold them into anything. My aim is to help them mold themselves into superhumans. My job is to give them the opportunities, tools, and fuel to do so. That is - awesome opportunities, awesome tools, and awesome fuel. That is - 12 hours per day, every day, of awesome.
So, that’s why I really want to homeschool my kids.
But the problem is that I really don’t want to homeschool my kids. I really don’t want to homeschool my kids for a couple of reasons, one passive and one active.
The passive one is that I may not be good enough. I have big ideas. I have some expertise and some experience. But 12 hours per day of awesome? What if the best I can muster is 12 hours per day of pretty good? What a failure that would be!
The active one is more selfish. What about my awesome? What if I want to build disruptive systems that will change the lives of millions? With time economics being what they are, I kind of have to choose, don’t I? If any of you have succeeded in creating “awesome” in your lives, you probably agree that it’s an all or nothing thing.
So, you might be wondering, “what’s this whiner gonna do about it?”
Well, I’ll tell you what I’ve done so far.
For the past two decades I’ve traded stocks professionally. I took the job out of college because I wouldn’t have to shave for work. I was introduced to it as a video game and I treated it as such. I learned the game. I played the game. I never had much respect for, or interest in, the game, but playing it was fun enough.
In the meantime, I had started a company developing interactive educational content, thinking maybe an AI can teach kids the basics. Then I started a company that developed interactive StoryGames for young kids, because maybe if we gamified education, kids would learn better. Then I started a company that developed a university campus where instead of classrooms we had project incubators, where students worked on solving real problems, because project-based learning yada yada yada…
The first two companies made a bit of money; the last one lost a lot of money; but all three were a winning bet on experience and expertise.
More recently, I started mapping out a more defined version of an anti-school and its awesome-generator functions. I’ll spare you the details. But the idea is that if I could build the anti-school that develops superkids, I solve my problem and the world’s problem as well. Makes some sense, right?! And if this aligns with your practical/personal non-academic interests, then I’d be happy to talk about those details, so please reach out.
Anyway, here’s where I can perhaps tell you something useful. A few weeks ago, my wife came across a podcast which she referred to me. This podcast led me to a small school originated in Austin, Texas. This led me to a book, Courage to Grow, written by Laura Sandefer, the founder of Acton Academy.
Consider this image: a 42-year-old 6’2" hairy ex-Soviet with a 5-day beard and a grey head of hair, sitting at the breakfast table, reading something off an iPad, constantly wiping his eyes and nose with a napkin. He is not sick. It’s not allergies. It appears to be something emotional that’s happening to him. He occasionally lifts his head to see if anybody is watching him in this foreign, tender state.
If you can relate to any of the above (not counting the last paragraph), please read this book. The Kindle version is $1 on Amazon. It maybe a situation where some of you may read it and say “so what”. But others may find, finally, the seeds of something new and better. You, like me, will recognize the struggles that the school founders experienced and the bravery required to meet them. The trials and failures, the risks and payoffs, may seems as profound to you as they did to me. For those of you who are starved for hope in the realm of child development, I’d like to hear your thoughts.
Much of this resonates with me and some of my personal projects. Mind sharing your contact info?
Get in touch: protopiacone (at) gmail
Hopping in real quick to say I was homeschooled and it was nowhere close to 12 hours a day. More like 4 for most of elementary school.
I will read that book though, just bought it.
I can confirm. Even in high school it was closer to 4 than 6, and sometimes less. Definitely never 12 hours unless we turned family vacation into a "learning experience" or something like that. Most of the time we did that after the fact, counting time we already put into something fun as also educational.
Did you get a chance to read the book? Any thoughts?
> I want my kids to be awesome. Not awesome by your standards, or by mine. Objectively awesome. Like Marvel superheroes, I want superkids who grow into superhumans.
Please think a bit more about this one. Having clearly impossible goals for yourself or your children doesn't help anyone.
You might think "ah well, I'll just aim for something impossibly high and maybe I'll get something impressive". I don't think it works like that. I think aiming for impossible goals discourages the sort of sensible incremental steps that you need to take to make real progress. Who wants to work out with those boring dumbells when your goal is to lift a bus over your head?
It's even worse with children. You're just going to be disappointed in everything they do, and children don't react well to parents who are disappointed in everything they do.
Can confirm that inflexibly-high expectations may result in estrangement and trauma.
The relevant word is "inflexibly", though; if you trust yourself to be able to *stop* rather than escalating, there's a lot of room for this kind of scattershot strategy.
Also, having two parents with different strategies can mitigate the consequences of fucking it up, at least for the child (avoids the "child's feedback is 100% negative" danger zone, and largely prevents the "child runs away from home due to hostility with parent" failure state that is a very real possibility for a single parent trying this).
Yes, this thinking alarms me. Your children are mere mortals and so are you. So is Elon Musk, and so was Leonardo DaVinci, or whatever world-changing "superhuman" you had in mind as a role model. Norman Borlaug, perhaps?
You apparently worked with educational software. Have any of the students you worked with qualified as superkids or superhumans? Or were they failed experiments? If your own children turn out to be what most of us would consider functional adults, will you see them and yourself as failures?
I am not sure what your definition of "awesome" really is, but you cannot will this sort of thing into being. You can't control all of the variables, especially not the variables present in the child themselves. If you currently consider "12 hours a day of pretty good" a failure, I do hope that exposure to your own newborn baby will temper that sentiment a bit.
Raising a child to be a responsible, productive being with the character and integrity for leadership is laudable and probably achievable, but aiming for "superhuman" is a terrible burden to place on yourself and your child. Your child's social interactions and friendships may also suffer from the implicit goal of making them some sort of ubermensch; even if I had a prodigy on my hands, I would reject this kind of thinking as dangerous. Not to the status quo, but to my child's mental and social health (not to mention my own).
And I don't see any space in your model for *peace* and *rest*, which will shortly be your most precious commodities. I'm not sure what twelve hours a day of awesome looks like for you, but the intensity you're projecting here has me concerned it might be something that could easily grind a small child into dust long before it makes them awesome.
"Your children are mere mortals and so are you. So is Elon Musk, and so was Leonardo DaVinci"
I disagree. They were mortals, but I wouldn't call them mere.
"If your own children turn out to be what most of us would consider functional adults, will you see them and yourself as failures?"
If my children turn out to be what most of "you" would consider functional adults, then I would consider myself a failure.
"I am not sure what your definition of "awesome" really is"
I think that Da Vinci was pretty awesome, and so's Elon Musk. In very different ways, mind you. The potential for, and variety of, awesome in the world is pretty awesome.
"Your child's social interactions and friendships may also suffer from the implicit goal of making them some sort of ubermensch"
The goal is for the child to be able to establish awesome social interactions and awesome friendships. If successful, these would only benefit the child's mental health.
"And I don't see any space in your model for *peace* and *rest*, which will shortly be your most precious commodities."
Well.. there's a lot that you might not see in my model, since I basically repeated awesome 20 times. But yeah, awesome peace and rest are part of the model.
I have a feeling that 99.99999% of the depressed, unhappy, unproductive, mediocre, bored, disinterested people out there are not any of those things because their parents tried to make them awesome. So while you're afraid of what I'm going to do to my children, I'm afraid of what everybody else does to theirs.
It appears that we both recognize awesome similarly to some extent (Da Vinci, Musk), yet I get the feeling that you are not interested in personally taking ownership of it. I'm not saying you could, or should. I'm guessing that you don't even see it as an option available to you. ("Guessing", because I could be entirely wrong about you.)
Well, I think it's my responsibility to help my children be as awesome as they possibly can be. But there's a difference between taking ownership of that responsibility and having a specific personal mission that my kids should achieve some objective standard of awesomeness. If "awesome" means they have to disruptively change the world and positively affect millions of people with their awesomeness, I don't think that's a reasonable goal to put on yourself or your kid.
DaVinci and Musk weren't just talented or correctly educated; they were in the right place geographically and temporally as well. Elon's parents probably did not imagine the internet when they conceived him. They gave him advantages, but if the sphere to use them as he did hadn't developed at just the right moment, would we know his name?
My kids are little, and their strengths and weaknesses are still largely mysterious. Are my daughters capable of greatness? Of course I think so- I'm their mom. Will I help them fulfill that potential? As much as I can. But I wouldn't want to give her the specific goal of greatness, or an idea of herself as a superkid. I disagree that you can build solid friendships while believing that the other kids who aren't getting the awesomeness program are inherently less awesome than you. I also have serious doubts about my ability to truly direct the social interactions and friendships my child develops, which will be at least as important as any parental input. And even awesome friendships with awesome kids won't be 100% awesome, because those kids are human, too.
I don't want my kid to feel like her inevitable failures and heartbreaks, besides being painful, are dings against her "awesomeness", or that if she doesn't foment massive change she's a failure. Keep in mind that the awesome superkid needs people to help them. I personally am a bit concerned about teaching every kid that they ought to be in the drivers seat all the time. Teaching kids that they're capable of leadership is good; demanding it of them on pain of being labeled failures is not.
I also have to consider the possibility that my kids may be awesome by some standard I myself cannot recognize or understand, and that validation of any greatness they achieve might not come from me at all. I meet a lot of smart, successful people who feel like failures, impostors or underachievers because of some illusory greatness they never managed to reach. Sometimes this comes from their parents, sometimes themselves. These are people who really are changing the world for the better, and they lose even when they win. I want my kids to have ambition and integrity, but I don't want them to feel like failures in success because the bar was "change the world".
>>>"Well, I think it's my responsibility to help my children be as awesome as they possibly can be."
When you say this, what do you mean exactly? How do you what "they can possibly be"? How do you plan/measure/assess your performance with regard to this metric? In reality, you will know "their potential" only after the fact, at which point it is too late to make adjustments to your "responsibility to help".
>>>"But there's a difference between taking ownership of that responsibility and having a specific personal mission that my kids should achieve some objective standard of awesomeness."
Really, it's objective standards (plural) of awesomeness. What if you replace awesomeness with "very high levels of development"? Would objective standards still seem inappropriate? What if the categories of said development are ability categories like: cognitive, emotional, relational, moral, kinesthetic, humor, creativity, aesthetics, etc.? Wouldn't objective standards be helpful?
>>>"If "awesome" means they have to disruptively change the world and positively affect millions of people with their awesomeness, I don't think that's a reasonable goal to put on yourself or your kid."
I don't think that I would use such a narrow definition.
>>>"DaVinci and Musk weren't just talented or correctly educated; they were in the right place geographically and temporally as well. Elon's parents probably did not imagine the internet when they conceived him. They gave him advantages, but if the sphere to use them as he did hadn't developed at just the right moment, would we know his name?"
I don't know much about Elon's upbringing. It's an interesting and potentially helpful topic to explore. But I'm not trying to reproduce Elon.
>>>"My kids are little, and their strengths and weaknesses are still largely mysterious. Are my daughters capable of greatness? Of course I think so- I'm their mom."
I think so, and I'm not their mom. Am I disadvantaging your kids by thinking so?
>>>"Will I help them fulfill that potential? As much as I can."
"As much as I can." Is this true? How much can you? Do you honestly know? Have you honestly thought enough about how much "you can"? I'm sure you've thought plenty about how much "you're willing", or how much you "can afford"... but those are very different questions. Usually, when people say "I do what I can," or, "I'm doing my best," they are stating (often unknowingly) an untruth.
>>>"But I wouldn't want to give her the specific goal of greatness, or an idea of herself as a superkid."
I agree... A specific goal of greatness is problematic. You need hundreds/thousands of goals that build up to greatness.
>>>"I disagree that you can build solid friendships while believing that the other kids who aren't getting the awesomeness program are inherently less awesome than you."
I think this is wrong. By developing empathy and understanding, you can help your children have and enjoy many kinds of asymmetrical relationships.
>>>"I also have serious doubts about my ability to truly direct the social interactions and friendships my child develops, which will be at least as important as any parental input."
You absolutely have this ability. It's not god-like, but it's there.
>>>"I don't want my kid to feel like her inevitable failures and heartbreaks, besides being painful, are dings against her "awesomeness", or that if she doesn't foment massive change she's a failure."
Failure is default. How much we risk, under what circumstances, and with what agency — how we deal with and learn from failure is the difference. Some people make the same mistakes thousands of times. Awesome is using failure to supercharge growth.
>>>"Keep in mind that the awesome superkid needs people to help them. I personally am a bit concerned about teaching every kid that they ought to be in the drivers seat all the time. Teaching kids that they're capable of leadership is good; demanding it of them on pain of being labeled failures is not."
I'm not sure why people assume that working towards greatness makes one a cruel figure that ridicules failure.
>>>"I also have to consider the possibility that my kids may be awesome by some standard I myself cannot recognize or understand, and that validation of any greatness they achieve might not come from me at all. I meet a lot of smart, successful people who feel like failures, impostors or underachievers because of some illusory greatness they never managed to reach. Sometimes this comes from their parents, sometimes themselves. These are people who really are changing the world for the better, and they lose even when they win. I want my kids to have ambition and integrity, but I don't want them to feel like failures in success because the bar was "change the world"."
These successful people are incomplete role models. Why is it so hard to imagine successful people who are changing the world for the better AND are happy, heathy, confident? I'll tell you why — it's because they are very rare. That doesn't mean it's impossible. It just means that the developmental means that are currently in-use suck.
Your kids should never have to think of the bar as "change the world". If they are engaged in 12 hours of awesome development every day, they have dozens of bars every week to focus on — with many bars that they enjoy, are passionate about, etc. etc. Developing video games, preparing 5 course meals with surprise ingredients, working on their weekly standup comedy routines, updating the family's financial plan, and thousands of other awesome things that 99.99999% of kids don't do, because they are immersed in lameness.
I think some of the pushback you're getting here stems from the fact that you said up front you don't actually have children yet[1]. So you are coming at this entirely from a theoretical perspective -- you have zero data on which to base any of your plans or opinions.
That's not bad in itself, of course, everyone has to start at square zero, and we all try to dig into the experience and observations of others as much as we can.
However...I think what all long-term successful parents can tell you also is that it's best to approach the job with a huge helping of humility *and* to be exceedingly open to learning from experience. In other words, the best approach to parenting seems to be much more empirical and practice-based than what you seem to be driving here. You really, really, need to be very open to learning new and surprising things, and radically altering your understanding and plans as the real data on the real people we are talking about rolls in.
Bear in mind it's unreasonable to think of children, even the youngest children, as anything like pets or employees or stupid people or game characters. They actually have not one speck less will and self-awareness than you do. They lack language skills, and they lack experience, but they're just as smart as you (arguably smarter, since the raw performance of the brain probably peaks at birth and declines throughout life), and they have just as much interest in controlling their own fate as you do.
It's true for quite a number of years they are programmed to love and obey you, and they are also smart enough to know that this is a pretty functional thing to do -- take advantage of your knowledge, resources, and attachment to them. But make no mistake: they are real people, just like you, and they will be distinct and challenging from the age of 5 minutes, because it's not a natural state for any one human being to be nothing more than a metaphysical extension of another, and they will be evolving out of dependence starting immediately.
Doesn't mean you can't do great things for them, but remember you're trying to exert amazing levels of leadership on a human being as wilful and resourceful in his or her way as yourself, so you will need to be adaptable and learn quickly. Best not to let theory and prior plans get in the way of that -- I think that's what people are trying to say.
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[1] In case you're wondering about my bona fides here, I have 5 children and the oldest is turning 31 in July.
I would like to personally report that my mother explicitly tried to raise me from a very early age to be a wunderkind and all it gave me was imposter syndrome and a crippling need to lie to people to earn their approval that I didn't shake off until my early 20's. I suspect if she had just recognized that I was a fairly bright child and NOT the next leading light of the science world I would probably be in a better place than I am now. My aunt was similarly pushed to give superhuman performances of ability by her parents. Unlike me, she didn't crash and burn and by pure financial terms was a very successful lawyer. Psychologically, however, she was deeply neurotic and self-hating to the point where she BEGGED my mother to not repeat what her parents did to me (which my mother ignored to her deep regret) and later told both of us that she could count the number of days she was actually happy with her life on both hands.
I get the impression you are using "awesome" a lot because you can use it as a kind of magic catch-all that allows you to abstract away any hard questions about how you're going to raise your children. It's a hand-wave. So I will ask a question that you can't hand-wave away by slapping "awesome" onto a verb: what if you child decides they don't WANT to be a superhuman? What if they decide they'd be perfectly happy as a chartered accountant, or a farmer, or a plumber, or a photographer, or some other humble position? Or what if they want to enter a given field that you'd classify as sufficiently superhuman but show no signs of wanting to become the morning star for some great revolution in that field and in fact are talented in an un-awesome manner?
If your answer is "my awesome child would never want to be something lame like a plumber"- you can only guarantee that if you completely cloister your child off from the outside world and make sure their every experience is near-totally mediated through you. I knew a guy who was raised like that (child of two psychologists- go figure). He's extremely intelligent and a veritable polymath- and he lives in a homeless shelter because it turns out raising a child in a bubble renders them utterly unprepared for the outside world, which shows that even if you do everything right you still can lose.
Your strategy only works if you are so incredibly confident you have found the One True Way To Be A Parent To A Genius That Works Every Time that you're willing to bet a human life on it. I hope that when you hold your child in your arms you realize what that gamble actually means and step back from doing something that will cause pain for your whole family.
"All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." I think that our minds veer towards imagining disfunctional outcomes, because we are so much more familiar with those. I talk about the rarity of superchildren, but superparents are equally rare. Most of us have never met one. As a result, our imagination is colored by what we know, and what we know is abuse, trauma, mediocrity.
I recently read The Marva Collins Way, a fantastic book. One thing that it makes apparent is the massive gulf between an average teacher, a pretty good teacher, and an awesome teacher. The experience and impact really gets a 10x treatment when moving to awesome. Another thing it portrays, is that once you're in the awesome teacher zone, hard work and fun happily coexist, high expectations/challenges and love/support are not mutually exclusive.
When I talk about intense development, you might imagine risk and damage, but please don't assume that flourishing and confidence are out of the realm of outcome possibilities.
You are right: I do use awesome as a magic catch all. If I was to define development models across multitudes of facets and competencies, it would be a post that's hundreds of thousands words in length.
In regards to your question of the plumber — I view it as irrelevant. Just as I don't envision/prescribe a specific shape to what the child should become, I don't spend time thinking of what they shouldn't become. I'm guessing that awesome plumbers are both rare and awesome. Plumbing is a development channel that a child/person would chose. My job is to develop the more general abilities: cognitive, emotional, relational, moral, kinesthetic, humor, creativity, aesthetics, etc.
"Your strategy only works if you are so incredibly confident you have found the One True Way To Be A Parent To A Genius That Works Every Time that you're willing to bet a human life on it."
Every parent makes the gamble when they have children. Most don't know they are gambling. Most don't even really know the rules of the game, or the odds. They are going through the motions. They are doing what others seem to be doing. They are exactly like most gamblers in Vegas.
The rare professional gamblers, at least, take their job seriously, do their research and training, and behave with intention. It's not easy. It's hard work. It might appear less fun than the drunken pissing away of hard earned money at the amateur tables and slots. But there is an objective difference in the performance/results between the two groups. I chose to be the professional gambler who doesn't outsource his wins to lady luck.
Right, so as far as I can parse your adman-style explanation, we've somehow gone to "I want my child to be as close to a Marvel superhero as is permissible by the laws of biology and physics" to "I'm fine with my child being a plumber provided they're the best plumber they can be." Most people would see these statements as contradictory, but given that you clearly believe you are fundamentally a superior (perhaps even greatly superior) species to most people I doubt that bothers you. The question (to me) then becomes "why is this natural aristocrat coming to us unwashed peasants with what sounds less like a declaration of intent and more like an ad pitch for their parenting style?"
Everything else here sounds like you are doing things parents have done in one form or another for at least the past century, but couched in a way where you believe you're a brilliant trailblazer, and I have nothing to say to that.
If you don't work in marketing, I think you've missed your calling.
I disagree on "impossible", on "doesn't help anyone", "sensible incremental steps", "disappointed in everything they do". I wish you luck in your incrementalism, and I'm going to stick to Zero to One, for lack of a better metaphor.
We (ok, mostly my wife) homeschool / virtual school our children, and have found it deeply rewarding. We are aiming for a broad vaguely Classical education, and we are able to let them go very deep on their individual strengths, which is different for each of them. I will say, I am skeptical of “learner-driven” education. But mostly that’s from experience with friends using extreme “Thomas Jefferson” education and “un-school” approaches, with poor results - lots of projects about superheroes and comic books, not much learning in traditional topics like world history and math. If the Acton approach gives more balance with some structured learning in addition to “learner-driven” freedom it might not be so bad. And with the level of enthusiasm and experience you express in your post I’m sure you could make any method amazing for your kids. Good luck!
On the small scale level - if your work is highly paid, and you don't want to give it up, you can hire tutors for your kids. Grad students are basically always broke, and you can probably afford to pay them more per hour than their university would. (I gather in America sometimes the teaching commitments are not optional, though, so they may not have time; frankly, American grad school looks a lot like ~~slavery~~ *indentured servitude* to me)
I think high expectations may tacitly lead to high pressure (for them), or disappointment (for you). Ensuring kids are as well equipped as possible to excel sounds sensible however and that's what I'm going for.
Full-time homeschooling is off the table, so here's my approach: a) send the kids to school with a relaxed attitude, but ensure they do the work, b) help them fully understand the problems they're working on, c) teach them about the world, the arts, STEM topics, and encourage home projects.
I don't want to overwhelm them as I expect attention to fizzle out after a day of school, but picking my moments. Regular exercise and outdoor time is necessary as well to tune their focus. From school they'll get some structure (fwiw) and social contact.
This is more or less my plan. We live in a good school district, and my husband is a product of this school system himself, so I'm not concerned about school doing any active damage. I had some rough patches in school, but even with the ups and downs it was overall a big positive in my opinion. A lot of the bugs people identify about school I see as features; I learned a lot about myself and the systems that surrounded me that I feel have been beneficial in navigating adulthood. And the social aspect was immeasurably important and could not have been engineered whole cloth by myself or my parents. School was really my only domain *outside of my parents*, and for me that was essential. I'm grateful to the strong social norm that made them *let me go* for seven hours per day.
My husband and I probably both did more raw learning on our own in elementary school as voracious readers and born tinkerers. But school exposed us to things we would never have discovered otherwise, and we made all our friends there. We're fortunate have more resources to offer our children in pursuing their interests, and I'm hoping to give my kids more freedom. I don't see what I could offer over school + hobbies and reading in terms of making my kid more successful. And I know if my parents had taken it on themselves to homeschool me, it would have been a disaster.
One thing school teaches you, for better or worse, is how to cope with rigid rules, how to work alongside people who are obnoxious and/or don't like you, and how to cope with stupid leadership.
Those are actually very important qualities of character, among the most important. There's a lot of talk these days about the importance of "grit" to success -- a lot of teachers love Carol Dweck on the 'growth' mindset for example -- but even though it's fashionable I think there's a big kernel of truth there. When I reflect on all the people I know in my field, there's a strong correlation between grit, stick-to-it-ness, resilience, the ability to cope well with failure, setback, injustice, bad luck. With a flawlessly brilliant education -- less so. The latter will certainly take you far, don't get me wrong, but for genuine and lasting success as an adult, strength of character is definitely the ace card.
Of course, there might be better ways to get that then school, in cases. Siblings definitely help a lot, an active social circle, probably some degree of cooperative team activities, getting a job in your teens, et cetera. I'm just saying school has a function well beyond just ABCs, and some of its imperfections are actually key to those functions -- which I think is very similar to what you said.
I think I put more stock in grit than most Liberals, but the key to it's effectiveness, I believe, is a reliable source of validation and respect at home.
How much awesomeness do you attribute to genetics vs environment? Like a good tiger parent you want to provide your child with the optimal environment for turning them into your current vision of “awesome,” but you don’t know what genetic cards your child has been dealt, so it will be difficult to plan that environment.
You also seem to be putting yourself at the center of your child’s environment. Is 12 hours a day of your curated awesomeness going to be what is best for the kid? I imagine if Elon’s Dad had followed him around trying to make his life awesome, Elon would not have ended up where he is. Instead, his Dad called him an idiot and had no faith in him.
I teach in very expensive private schools, and I have a lot of experience with tiger parenting. One secret, which you can’t fake, is to genuinely withhold approval, and to have your kid constantly seeking your approval by working tirelessly to succeed. My grandfather was Dean of a prestigious medical school, my father constantly tried to get his attention by succeeding. This became a habit and eventually he went on to have 15 patents and head a major cancer research lab. Unfortunately, I never felt I had to seek my parents’ approval, and I only wanted to be happy, and I wasn’t driven to succeed in the same way. Of course, the upside is I have so far had a happier life than my father. There is no free lunch?
I don't think that a kid needs to win the genetic lottery. I do think that it's tough if he loses it (i.e. left tail).
"Objectively awesome. Like Marvel superheroes, I want superkids who grow into superhumans."
There are nearly 8 billion people on earth. Objectively awesome is going to require innate talent mixed with ideal circumstances. Having lots of kids will increase your chances of having one who is awesome.
That's accurate in a world where parents do not have agency. And that's our world, because either one is poor and doesn't have the agency, or one chooses to outsource the agency to institutions (middle and upper classes).
This doesn't mean that it is impossible to exercise parental agency towards development at very advanced levels. It's just exceedingly rare, there are few resources to support it, and there is very little know-how around it.
Nobody would argue that parents don't have agency. But it is absurd to argue that there is very little know how, or resources devoted to raising exceptional children. Parents have been trying to get a leg up for their children since time immemorial.
Why is it absurd? Consider medicine just a few hundred years ago. It's been practiced since time immortal, but it was mostly all bad.
Modern parents are like 18th century doctors, when medicine was still a highly immature field. All 18th century doctors were bad doctors. Sure, some were better than others, but statistically, if you got really sick, you were screwed regardless of which doctor you went to. So while today, saying “all doctors are bad at medicine” is a senseless statement, it’s much less imprudent to say “all 18th century doctors were bad at medicine”.
What we do know is that when it comes to speed, science beats evolution by several orders of magnitude. So let’s consider parenting as a science. How much research and financial resources have gone to the scientific study of parenting, as compared to medicine?
Outside of several thousand books on parenting (most non-scientific), and the research of dozens psychology, sociology, and public policy departments, not all that much scientific exploration or funding has been spent on parenting. And all of it in the last couple of centuries.
Whereas medicine has 2 millenia of consistent research and focused inquiry, with a culmination of hundreds of billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of professionals engaged in scientific research during the 20th and 21st centuries. In relative terms, it would be conservative to place the science of parenting into the middle ages.
Science is progress. All parenting is bad because the science of parenting has never existed. There's no such thing as Parentology.
As for the science of child development, it's barely on the map. Pedology never succeeded in getting off the ground, despite some distinguished champions of it, such as Lev Vygotsky. Meanwhile, developmental psychology is all over the place. Its students and practitioners are a thin diaspora navigating in treacherous academic and political waters. As for the engineers of parenting, those developing practical applications in the real world, who might they be? They don't exist either, perhaps with the exception of the rare and reluctant Bryan Caplan (the parent, not the economist/writer).
So perhaps the first thing we should admit about parenting is that we don’t know all that much about it. It has slid under the radar for hundreds of thousands of years, presenting as a rite of passage, an internal capacity, or as a property of the old and wise. What we know of parenting we know from our childhood experiences, and from what we’ve seen on sitcoms, and what we “did our best” at with our own kids. Circumstantial and anecdotal, all of it.
Meanwhile, if we look to the current science of parenting for answers, what does it tell us? It says, “Look away! Nothing to see here! Parenting is overrated. Don’t worry about it (too much). Take it easy. Things will turn out just fine. Or they won’t. It’s not really up to the parents.”
You’ll find that I get frustrated with the “parenting is not essential” crowd. Not because they are wrong -- they’re not wrong within the construct of the available data. I’m frustrated with them because they are closing the door on further research and discovery of parenting. They are the rationalists who in the dark ages would have suggested that medicine should be outlawed in the name of science.
I feel similarly, and should have my own baby in 7 weeks.
Unfortunately I lack any background in education and I have very little idea of how to be successful at teaching the kids good values, good epistemology, and other rationalist and EA stuff. I couldn't even teach that stuff to my wife, really (I married her before discovering the ACX/LW/EA communities). And there's not really an ACX/LW/EA community in my area (one other person showed up to the meetup yesterday, which is a significant improvement over the previous meetup's zero). I can't imagine doing this alone. But I suppose the first 3-4 years aren't that crucial, and that later I'll have more money and be able to move somewhere with a bigger community... and then get help raising the child from that community? I don't know.
I'm not sure that the rationalist community holds the answer. I've found very few aligned/interested voices on the discussion boards. Perhaps it's my communication style that turns people off.
Check out the Acton school network and the book I referenced. I'd like to know your thoughts.
I saw the Acton video and it looked cool. I was going to say I don't have time to read the book and don't have the Kindle app, but for you? Well, I bought it, can't say when I'll read it.
Cool. If you'd like to discuss it more directly, or to join some education related brainstorms, contact me at protopiacone at gmail.
I don't think it's very fair to put an ad for a politician in an odd-numbered thread. I'll assume this is an invite to discuss this in what would normally be a no-politics thread:
I'm skeptical that you can take a good altruist or a science expert, and make them an effective lawmaker. It is a very different discipline. Personally fighting "poverty in Africa" has very little crossover with writing laws that will fight poverty in Africa. This is because politics and economics always involves trade-offs, often ones not aligned with my values. For example, "universal health care" sounds great per se, but how does it sound when it would likely reduce the total supply of healthcare? Environmentalism, abortion, and universal healthcare are usually touted for being "fair" and it's not at all clear these are actually "altruistic" (abortion definitely not, in my morality; universal healthcare would likely reduce the total supply of healthcare, also the opposite of altruism).
Altruism in law, to me, would imply things like revising and removing old and obsolete statue, removing redundant provisions, removing special carve-outs, removing large discontinuities (e.g. a huge penalty if you're 17 years 11 months for something that's legal the day you turn 18), cutting red tape, evidence-based public policy, and breaking down the institutions that keep causing these perfect party-line splits.
You're right - I included this because I realized the reporting deadline was coming up. I suspend no-politics rules for this thread on topics related to the Flynn campaign.
I'm not claiming that just because Flynn has experience running antipoverty campaigns, he's going to be a good lawmaker. I think what I want out of a candidate is some combination of smart/competent and ideological alignment. Flynn seems plenty smart/competent - Yale law grad, has founded big institutions, has worked for a well-respected security think tank, and is running a good campaign. In terms of ideological alignment, I expect him to do things like vote yes on allocating more money pandemic prevention, which is an actual issue before Congress which lots of Congressmen are voting no on.
I have no issue with your suggestion about Flynn and welcome it.
Strong contribution.
It also opens the door to a lot of "Flynn effect" puns, which is clearly a net-good.
Normally when you post donation links, the target donor is every reader. But for US political contributions, I recommend that you also specify who is allowed to donate, by e.g. quoting the restrictions (who would guess 'not a federal contractor'?) listed near the bottom of the ActBlue webpage. Some readers might not scroll further down than the payment link, which is above those restrictions.
>Personally fighting "poverty in Africa" has very little crossover with writing laws that will fight poverty in Africa.
I think it's fundamentally silly for a US congressperson to be 'writing laws to fight poverty in Africa', not least because, as I see things, there are much more important things to be doing even from a utilitarian perspective, even if you assume that these laws can have any appreciable level of success.
Why does there seem to be an upper limit as to how expensive consumer electronics can get- unlike virtually any other consumer good? As far as I can tell, there is no super-expensive iPhone or Android beyond the latest stock models that any upper middle class person can easily afford- there are no $5,000 iPhones, or ones for $10k, or 50. To the best of my knowledge, I have just as nice of an iPhone as Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, or a Saudi prince. The same seems to be true for laptops- there's just a hard limit on how expensive manufacturers make them.
Why is this true for consumer electronics, but almost no other field? For example you can purchase a car at any price point, and there are specialized automobiles ranging in value of up to a few million dollars (this is excluding antiques- I mean purely, a millionaire can purchase an extremely fast car for a large sum of money). In fact, I almost can't think of another consumer good that doesn't have an ultra-luxury price point- so, why are there no ultra-luxury phones or laptops? Is it just that the latest standard-issue iPhone is already at the technological frontier of what Apple can produce? Hard to believe. Curious if anyone's thought about this at all
The idea that the iPhone is at the technological frontier (given the constraints on size, weight, and power) doesn't sound implausible to me. Silicon chips pretty much have to be mass-produced - the expensive part is setting up a semiconductor fab and designing the chip, but once that massive upfront cost is paid you can start churning out phone processors by the batch load. It's not like designing a car engine where you could hand-machine a bunch of specialty parts to build a single engine for your supercar.
Most of the other variables of a phone - screen resolution, camera size, battery capacity, etc - are constrained by the size of the case. You could put it in a nicer case with some accessories, but that's the equivalent of putting leather seats in your car - it's not changing any fundamental performance characteristics. You can't even pay loads of money for a really artsy design, because a phone has to be a small rectangle that fits comfortably in your hand and your pocket.
Economies of scale are enormous in manufactured high tech goods: the R&D cost of designing the device and arranging to manufacture any components that can't be acquired off the shelf aren't enormously cheaper if you sell a hundred devices than if you sell tens of millions. This makes the economics of ultra-luxury phones and laptops more than a bit tricky.
Another problem is lack of use cases for the ultra-premium options if they're available. What is Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos going to do with their multi-million dollar custom phones that they can't do with a top-of-the-line iPhone or Android?
Where there does exist an ultra-premium market for high tech goods is in things like desktop workstations. For one thing, the economies of scale are a lot smaller because you can assemble one out of off the shelf parts that are mass-produced for high-end servers and are designed to be highly modular so the additional design work needed is readily manageable. For another, there's a decent sized market for five-figure-priced workstation besides enthusiasts and conspicuous consumers: rendering, ML development, science and engineering work that involves computationally intensive simulations, etc.
"What is Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos going to do with their multi-million dollar custom phones that they can't do with a top-of-the-line iPhone or Android?"
Brag that they have a one-of-a-kind, every bell and whistle you can think of and then some, custom phone, of course. These are men who are playing with their own real-life rocket ships, do you expect them to slum it with some phone one of the plebs working for them could also buy?
Plus, have you seen some of Bezos' recent get-ups? He's clearly in full mid-life crisis, post-divorce, livin' it up 'cos I can still pull hot sexy chicks swing:
https://www.ft.com/content/a6ce9a0b-d09a-4881-a712-4151465b3b78
A multi-million dollar all-singing, all-dancing phone would be just the ticket for him!
I find it interesting that there are no special movies for the ultra-rich. Everyone watches the same movies.
... Certain forms of blackmail might count as this? ;-)
I can't remember the details but a somewhat well known musical group recorded a whole album then sold the only copy to a rich person.
That was Wu Tang Clan. The buyer turned out to be Martin Shkreli. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_Upon_a_Time_in_Shaolin
In addition to the other answers, I would say that having something like a $5k iPhone (as opposed to a $100k iPhone) risks reducing sales of the regular iPhone (by enough to reduce profit even with the higher margin of the $5k phones). The reason being is that it makes the $5k iPhone look like the good , proper iPhone, and the regular iPhone looks like a cheap watered down version, so for that money I would be better off buying the best samsung phone which is the most expensive one so therefore isn't watered down, even though the iphone would no worse than the actual iphone is today (assuming they aren't making the $5k phone better by making the regular iphone worse than it curently is).
Is it possible that there are expensive improvements for cell phones which need network effects? I can't think of anything at the moment, but cell phones themselves made a lot more sense when many people could afford them.
Probably because you specified "consumer" electronics, meaning mass-produced commodity hardware. You might equally ask why there are not $5,000 pencils or garden hoses, building bricks that go for $150/each, or why Toyota doesn't sell any cars with an MSRP of $1 million. If you remove "consumer," and just ask whether there is an upper limit to the cost of computing hardware, for assorted boutique or custom uses, like a Lamborghini in the world of cars, the answer becomes "of course not."
More subtly, I would say this is also because general-purpose computing is now a mature field, and innovation is slowed relative to, say, 1975. We are in an era when the improvements are incremental, not revolutionary, and so there is much less qualitative distinction between the leading/research edge and what's available in the mass consumer marketplace.
While I doubt that Jeff Bezos is the market for it-- it doesn't strike me as a very American style of conspicuous consumption-- Faber-Castell evidently does sell a $12,800 pencil for those who want one.
https://luxatic.com/the-perfect-pencil-by-faber-castell-most-expensive-in-the-world/
Imagine the stress of sharpening such a thing
"Maud recalled leaving the pencil on the couch in the very instant she heard Georgie's inhuman shriek from the living room, where he had gone to watch TV. Fortunately (she recalled) they kept the other hall door closed and locked, so she could almost certainly beat him to the front door, and her car keys were right next to it."
Someone doesn't know their luxury brands!
https://en.vertuonline.com
Wow. You'd think that a luxury brand would make sure the text on their website is well-written, but it looks like it's been automatically translated: "Genius leather and classic flat screen create the perfect balance of functionality and aesthetics, even the design of minimalism is sufficient to interpret the most luxurious artwork with equal emphasis on technology and temperature."
I’m guessing that their target audience is mostly under sanctions right now so it isn’t too pressing a need to get their translators to get this right.
I noticed that too, but clearly they are aiming at markets where English is not the first language but buckets full of money are sloshing around for showing off.
Wow. Maybe it's like a tone poem? I feel things, nameless things...
Although "genius leather" creepily makes it sound like they've tanned Einstein.
Yep. And you _can_ get expensive iPhones but they are expensive because they are covered in gold/crystals/whatever, not because they have better features.
Professional grade equipment unbundles things, the form factors change, you bring your own infrastructure, etc. You can spend any amount of money building out a mobile communications network with your own licensed RF spectrum, leased space on towers for base stations and repeaters, satellite services for tens of thousands a month, various vehicle and marine and handheld stations that can be extremely rugged and have various voice and data capabilities. If you have a blank check and need the global communications capabilities of the Defense Department, give your local Motorola or Iridium rep a call.
You can spend any amount of money on cameras and lenses. The ones used in serious productions are expensive enough that even serious productions rent them by the day. A modern Arri body might cost as much as your house before we even get into the glass.
You can spend any amount of money on audio recording and playback gear. The playback systems used in professional broadcasts or Broadway shows are entire computers or redundant groups or computers, highly controllable and automatable and supporting different I/O formats like Dante, or with digital to analog and analog to digital conversion that is itself worth several iPhones.
Computers themselves go pretty far, you can get hundreds of cores and TB of RAM in a server chassis.
Consumer electronics includes things like hi-fi systems, and these can cost arbitrarily much. I suppose cameras count, too. What these have in common is that it's possible for a small operator to use skilled manual labour and expensive materials to make something slightly better than the mass-market version that comes out of a factory.
'Cause you can't just use more expensive inputs and spend more time to make better silicone.
You can make more expensive phones by putting dumb shit on them (gold, or whatever), but if you have one of those you are an insecure asshole, and not signaling wealth. That's what expensive watches are for.
Because the top shelf electronics are the actual R&D output while the lower shelves are the exact same device with artificial limits. Market segmentation. You can't go above the ceiling because the ceiling is already the state of the art.
On the other hand, non-consumer specialized electronics, e.g. scientific instruments, cost an arm and a leg. If you want to buy an Amnis imaging flow cytometer that'll take quite a bit of funding.
Garmin seem to be doing this with their Marq watches. They're $2500 special editions of the ~$600 Fenix sports watches with fancier casing and a couple of very basic extra software features. I've no idea how well they sell though.
I'm pretty sure Steve Jobs was adamant there should only ever be iPhone and resisted even numbering later models (e.g. no iPhone 12, just iPhone). Apple has strayed from that a bit but I can see it still affecting the smartphone market they created.
Apple does do a bit of this with their watches: you can get a "Watch Edition" with a titanium case and sapphire crystal for twice as much, or an Hermès Apple Watch with a fancy band and a special watch face for 3-4 times the price of the base model.
Not at the skys-the-limit level of luxury watches, but still a set of tiers that they don't do for phones. (But presumably could.)
To quote from Dorothy Sayers' "Murder Must Advertise", the profitability doesn't come from the rich, but the middle and lower classes:
"Like all rich men, he had never before paid any attention to advertisements. He had never realized the enormous commercial importance of the comparatively poor. Not on the wealthy, who buy only what they want when they want it, was the vast superstructure of industry founded and built up, but on those who, aching for a luxury beyond their reach and for a leisure for ever denied them, could be bullied or wheedled into spending their few hardly won shillings on whatever might give them, if only for a moment, a leisured and luxurious illusion. Phantasmagoria—a city of dreadful day, of crude shapes and colours piled Babel-like in a heaven of harsh cobalt and rocking over a void of bankruptcy—a Cloud Cuckooland, peopled by pitiful ghosts, from the Thrifty Housewife providing a Grand Family Meal for Fourpence with the aid of Dairyfields Butter Beans in Margarine, to the Typist capturing the affections of Prince Charming by a liberal use of Muggins's Magnolia Face Cream."
Luxury goods brands catering to the rich do have the $5,000 phones or what-not. Look at expensive watches (and read the blogs and reddits by the watch snobs turning up their noses at 'the ignorant and newly wealthy think this brand is a good one simply because it's vulgarly expensive').
Some brands are consistently valuable:
https://www.watchtime.com/featured/what-makes-patek-philippe-watches-so-valuable-seven-reasons-for-the-brands-success/
But even they appeal to the snobbier/richer by special, very limited edition, models; total production around 60,000 timepieces annually and the special editions even smaller (for one, just 170 watches) and you can't just rock up to the retailers, slap a wad of cash down, and buy one, oh no, you have to be *approved*:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertanaas/2019/11/27/thierry-stern-patek-philippe-ceo-talks-watch-allocation-steel-and-more/?sh=375ba96e13fe
Q: How do you decide which customers will get delivery of a rare watch?
TS: “The challenge is that it is the retailer who has to choose the clients that will receive the coveted watch. I produce the watches and allocate them to the retailer, but he has to choose his own clients. He knows who are the serious buyers and who will covet and protect the watch, not turn around and sell it.”
Scarcity and snob value are what drive high prices for luxury brands. You could produce ten million thousand dollar phones, but who wants to buy something a lot of other people can also buy? Now cut that down to one million, and you start stoking demand.
Nutrax for Nerves!
I don't think there's any limit to the amount of bling you can have added to the custom case of your smartphone if you want.
As for electronic functionality, the issue there is that it's going to cost on the order of a billion dollars to develop, test, and tool up to produce a smartphone that's significantly different than your high-end mass-market model. Your lower-end mass-market models are going to be basically crippled versions of the high-end model, for price discrimination purposes, but that only works one way. And you have to sell a *lot* of $50,000 rich-person smartphones to pay off a billion dollars of up-front costs.
And if the plan is to build one really good smartphone and then sell as your "high end mass market" model a crippled version of *that*, then in the mass market where most of your profit comes you'll be competing with the people who built the best smartphone they could and *didn't* cripple it.
What, does Bezos use a $150 sleep mask? A $30 eraser? $10 toilet paper rolls? $500 pajamas?
Most of the components in a phone are commodity grade. Even in an iPhone the screen, camera lenses, camera chips, etc are supplied from the likes of Samsung, etc. The value of iPhone comes from the chip, which apple makes, and the software. The software has a near zero marginal cost and apple has mostly outsourced that via the App Store. In many ways the cost of an iPhone is the admission price of getting into the apple ecosystem.
Apple could make phone hardware that could justify those types of prices but it would ruin the form factor of a phone. it would need to be much thicker or larger or have some big camera lens hanging off it. In other areas where they have more physical space to play with they do max out on price. Just look at the $6k monitor they have been selling along with a crazy expensive stand.
I do think this is an important point:
"To the best of my knowledge, I have just as nice of an iPhone as Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, or a Saudi prince"
When people talk about inequality getting worse I often think about the above. Even the cheapest smart phone and phone plan (the phone is probably free) are basically as powerful/feature rich as what the "best" phone is. You may get better pictures or a crisper screen but these things hardly improve the overall feature set. To me there is basically no inequality when it comes to phones.
This is also kind of true in some of the other consumer goods you mention. The cheapest car sold in the US today has more features and is way safer than the most expensive car sold even 20 years ago. The benefits of a more expensive car are mostly creature comforts that are not necessary.
Some of Marc Andresson's "Software eats the world" hypothesis is that the "best" of something will have the same cost as the "worst" of something. Therefore everyone will just have the "best" which make the world a fantastically better place.
There are no original thoughts :-)
Andy Warhol (1962, I think):
“What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca Cola, too. A coke is a coke and no amount of money can get you a better coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the cokes are the same and all the cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.”
Sure, but the embellishments on the outside are the point where the (vulgarly) rich show off how they have a limited edition 24K gold plated iPhone (gotta admit, they do look kind of tacky):
https://www.trulyexquisite.co.uk/luxury-customised-iphone-13
The less vulgarly rich - well, Apple started off with snob value. They were the computers for the smart people, the genuine techie types who knew all about programming and software and weren't just blindly clicking on icons. They were also for the cool creative types, with fantastic graphics capability so your important work as a graphic designer would really shine and be super-easy, super-fast to create.
There were other bragging points as well: our products don't crash, our products don't get viruses, etc. Functionality and more than that, *style*: these were all products for the cool kids, this was the rationale of the "I'm a Mac and I'm a PC" ads:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfv6Ah_MVJU
This is not to say that there wasn't real innovation, but the entire product range from earphones to phones was curated carefully as a brand to exude the aura of taste, quality, aspirational lifestyle. You weren't served by a shop assistant in a store, you chatted with an Apple Genius.
Scott’s covid / ivermectin work was quoted in a similar review of many trials and how to think about the collective conclusions. They also highlight the FDA administrative process that means ivermectin would be unlikely to be approved due to financial incentives regardless of whether it actually works or not.
https://www.cato.org/regulation/spring-2022/ivermectin-statistical-significance
Henderson also wrote a blog post about it, which I commented on here: https://www.econlib.org/ivermectin-and-statistical-significance/#comment-293594
Henderson writes "However, when the larger pool of studies is examined, they show a benefit to ivermectin of 72% in areas of low parasitic prevalence, while in areas with high prevalence the benefit is 55%. This is the exact opposite of what Alexander conjectured" but does not give any citation.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2790173 is a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association which says that I am right and their unsourced claim is wrong.
I'm not really sure where to go from here.
I’m working on developing an understanding of deep learning — not with the aim of becoming a professional in a related area, but just because I crave to understand it. I already understand a reasonable amount about AI, in a general sort of way, & have a “general idea” kind of understanding of neural networks as well. But there’s something at the very beginning of things that I cannot find a clear explanation of, and it’s driving me crazy: Rosenblatt’s 1958 demo of the perceptron learning to discriminate between cards with the square on the left and cards with the square on the right: How, exactly did that work?
Anyone who has the patience to explain, or knows a site to send me to, please read on. However, I have already been to many sites, and so far every single one of them is only useful to somebody who *already knows* the answers to the questions I have.
OK, so perceptron gets card as a 20x20 black & white image. Info from each of the 400 pixels in card photo is fed to machine as 0 if pixel is black and 1 if pixel is white. I believe these 1’s and 0’s are accurate, not random — that is, they actually contain, in numerical form, the accurate info about whether the pixel is black or white. (Do I have that right?) So then the 0 or 1 corresponding to each of these 400 pixels is multiplied by a randomly assigned weight, and all the products are added together, and if the sum is negative that indicates the square is on the left and if it’s positive that indicates the square is on the right.
So at the beginning of the trials, the perceptron is performing at chance.So then Rosenblatt trains the machine by dialing up the weights that were too low and down those that were too high, and he feeds it another card. And adjust the weights again. After a series of these trainings, the machine’s output for each card is correct. It discriminates between the 2 kinds of cards by outputting a negative number if the square is on the left and a positive one if the square is on the right.
OK, so here’s what I don’t understand:
-When the perceptron gets the info on the pixel (0 or 1, black or white), does it also know *where* in the photo the pixel is located? Because if so I don’t understand why we need all this mishegoss. All the Perceptron needs to do is wait til it gets the info on one of the pixels from the center of the left side of the card, and forget about weighting the 0 or 1 (black or white) data on that pixel. If that pixel is 0, then the card has its square on the left. If it’s 1, then the square’s on the right. End of story. OK, then that can’t be how the damn thing works. So does that mean the perceptron gets 400 bits of info, a 1 or a 0 for each pixel, but it does not know the location of any of these pixels?
-Regarding the random weights that are assigned to be multipliers of the number 0 or 1 that corresponds to the color of its pixel: From what set are these weights drawn? All integers? All integers between +5 & -5? All numbers between +1 and -1?
-Did Rosenblatt adjust the weights after each single card, or only running the whole batch through once?
-If Rosenblatt adjusts the weight after each card, he's going to get the correct answer (left or right) for half the cards even on the first run-through. So after those cards he just doesn't adjust the weights, is that right?
-How did he decide *how* to adjust each of the 400 weights? What data did he go by that let him know whether a weight for a particular piece of pixel data is too high or too low? How did he decide how much up or down to move the weight?
I’ve read about 10 explanations of this process online last night, and every single one of them was only suitable for someone who *already knows the answers to my questions, above*. Anyone who can explain this for me, or send me to a site that can, will scratch a huge mind itch that is driving me crazy and will have my eternal gratitude.
I think it might be possible to greatly simplify the situation for the purposes of explanation. Maybe the perceptron gets an image that’s only 2 pixels in size (so then obviously either the left of the right pixel will be black). Maybe there are only 4 cards for the perceptron to work on. So then how would it work with weighting the 2 pieces of info machine got for each card (0 or 1 for pixel #1, 0 or 1 for pixel #2).
Yup, it’s simple questions. But I’m not too proud to post this.
My understanding is as follows, someone who knows more about the specifics of Rosenblatt's experiments can correct me:
> When the perceptron gets the info on the pixel (0 or 1, black or white), does it also know *where* in the photo the pixel is located?
Yes, insofar as each of the 400 weights consistently referred to the same position. Instead of thinking of it as receiving info from a pixel, you could imagine it as a vector of 400 bits. This differs from modern vision systems in that there's no inductive bias telling it that pixels are related to their neighbors, or that the learned function should be translation invariant. (And in many other ways as well).
>Regarding the random weights that are assigned to be multipliers of the number 0 or 1 that corresponds to the color of its pixel: From what set are these weights drawn? All integers? All integers between +5 & -5? All numbers between +1 and -1?
> Did Rosenblatt adjust the weights after each single card, or only running the whole batch through once?
> If Rosenblatt adjusts the weight after each card, he's going to get the correct answer (left or right) for half the cards even on the first run-through. So after those cards he just doesn't adjust the weights, is that right?
> How did he decide *how* to adjust each of the 400 weights? What data did he go by that let him know whether a weight for a particular piece of pixel data is too high or too low? How did he decide how much up or down to move the weight?
The answer to all of these is to know the perceptron algorithm. Basically, the algorithm is as follows:
1) If you get an example correct, do nothing to the weights
2) If you get an example wrong, update the weights (w) as follows using the input vector (x):
- If the label was positive w_new = w + learning_rate * x
- If the label was negative w_new = w - learning_rate * x
I believe that answers all the above questions as follows:
What can the weights be? Any floating point number
When are the weights updated? After every example
Are updates skipped for cards that are already predicted correctly? Yes
How are the weights updated? See above (and see here for more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptron#Learning_algorithm)
If you're a programmer I can give you a few lines of python which implement the algorithm.
I wouldn't call myself an expert and I'm not familiar with the exact specific experiment you're talking about, but I have used neural nets in the past and I believe I have a working knowledge of the basics. I will try to answer your questions:
1. The input is an array of 400 bits, each representing a pixel. The neural net doesn't "know" where each pixel is "located"--or even that they _have_ "locations"--but it DOES receive the bits in a specific order. So it has a weight for "bit #37", and on any given input it knows which bit is "bit #37". Therefore, it can gradually learn that "bit #37" is correlated with answer A and anticorrelated with answer B.
Deciding whether a dark region is on the right or left side of an image could probably be done much more simply using some non-machine-learning technique, but I imagine the purpose of this experiment is to prove the technology before applying it to harder examples.
2. The weights are floating-point numbers. Usually the random initial weights are "small", to try to ensure they don't change the final outcome very much. (Perhaps <0.01? I don't remember what I used last time I did this.) The *final* weights after training can be basically anything--if the learning algorithm keeps saying to increase weight #174, there's no specific reason to cut it off at any particular number.
3. You calculate an update for the weights after each individual image (although you might choose to save these updates and apply them all at once after a full batch, in order to make the learning less sensitive to the order of the samples).
4. Usually the output is not a binary yes/no, but rather a floating-point number that can be interpreted as a confidence level. So if the correct answer is "1", and the net output "0.99", the weights still get adjusted a little bit to push it towards being more confident in the future.
(Note: Contra your summary, the output is NOT JUST the sum of all inputs multiplied by their respective weights; that sum is further processed by an "activation function" that limits the final output to a fixed range, usually 0-1. Traditionally, I believe sigmoid curves were typically used as activation functions, but I believe different functions are popular now.)
(Also, most neural nets don't connect the input neurons directly to the output neuron, but have 1 or more "hidden layers" of additional neurons, where the inputs activate layer #1, and then layer #1 activates layer #2, etc. until you finally get to the output. There's a separate array of activation weights for each layer.)
5. To calculate how weights should be adjusted, you look at the local gradient. Basically, ask what would happen if the weight had been a tiny bit higher/lower, and see whether that gets you closer or farther from the right answer (and how much).
The learning algorithm also has a parameter called something like the "learning rate" that says how big the adjustments should be; to a first approximation, slower learning rates are more reliable but take longer.
Well they were technically asking about the original perceptron not SGD. The perceptron algorithm is basically SGD on the "perceptron loss", which is max(0, -label * output). (Although at the time I don't think they would have framed it in these terms).
A great answer, I want to propose a few minor corrections
Regarding 1: even though it does receive bits in specific order, each input bit is passed to each hidden layer neuron, where they all are multiplied by weights and summed up. Initially the network doesn't know if the order of bits is important at all. My guess is that it will gradually learn to give different weights based on order (e.g. more positive weights for the left side, negative weights for the right side), to approximate order somehow. But initially it doesn't do this.
Regarding 2: not sure about perceptrons specifically, but you actually do want to limit the weight absolute values. It's the same problem as with linear regression. A large weight overfits the data. It basically forces the outcome to depend only on one pixel. This compounds and the model starts to ignore all the rest. To mitigate this, people usually penalize the model for large weights. So basically your loss (error) becomes: (classification loss) + (weight penalty loss). It forces the model to learn a solution with small weights.
Machine Learning researcher here. I will try my best.
Update: I misinterpreted the question as being about multi-layer perceptrons. The answer below is about them and modern deep learning. @dyoshida gives a good answer for OP's case about a linear perceptron with no gradient descent. Still, a lot of things are similar.
Let's get some things straight about a perceptron. I am assuming a multi-layer perceptron that consists of one hidden layer. As input it gets a vector of 400 numbers, then it does a linear transformation as you said by multiplying the vector by a weight matrix, then it performs a non-linear transformation of the result by applying the Tanh function (or Softmax, or Relu). The nonlinear transformation is critical, though the model can *probably* solve this exact task without it.
Now about your questions:
1. The perceptron has practically no information about how pixels are related between eachother, because they were stretched into a vector. It also can't learn this information with only one hidden layer. If it had more layers, it could learn a bit about how pixels are related. So yes, it does not know the location of any of these pixels. To the weighted sum the order doesn't matter. Why the Perceptron can't just wait till it gets the one informative pixel and be done with the prediction? The problem is that the perceptron is not sequentially parsing a sequence. It is processing the vector all at once, even if most features are useless. Despite that, it will eventually learn something close to what you are thinking: a large positive weight for some "left pixel" and a large negative weight to some "right pixel". We don't want this though, because such a model that attends to one pixel only will generalize poorly - shift everything by one pixel and it breaks. Various techniques (weight decay, dropout) are used to make sure it learns a more generalizable solution.
However, if you train a convolutional network, which does utilize the inherent local relationships of pixels in an image, it tends to do what you are thinking about. See the top image in this article [1]. It is grad cam: a way to visualize how a network makes its' predictions. We can check what it's "looking" at and find that actually it attends to small local regions. For example it might classify a cat based solely on the shape of the ears. So if you had a dog with ears very similar to a cats ears, a network might classify it as a cat. Computer vision neural networks do not attend to the shape of objects, like people do. This is a big problem in DL research.
2. Regarding random weights. They are never integers. NN's basically cant work with integers, because adjusting the weights is based on derivatives (more about it below), but you can't take derivatives for ints. The weights are real numbers and can be from -infty to +infty, but in practice weights with large absolute values lead to very bad solutions. Usually the weights are initialized from a uniform [-1, 1] distribution, a normal distribution with mean 0 and std 1, or something more fancy like Xavier. Basically, to get a single weight you get your computer to throw a dart at the number line and see where it landed.
3. You can adjust weights after all training cards have been passed, this is vanilla gradient descent. You can adjust after each card, while drawing cards at random, and this is stochastic gradient descent. Or you can take the middle ground: take a batch of cards, pass through the network, obtain the errors for each card, average them, compute the gradients from this averaged error and then update the weight. This is batch gradient descent and in practice people almost always use this, it's a good compromise between training efficiency and result accuracy.
4 - 5. Questions are very related, so answering both here. To adjust the weights you need some update rule. The simplest one is to randomly pick weights and check the accuracy until you find a lucky draw with good accuracy. It's too slow. A better way is to define some differentiable function of error. For this task, it could be mean squared error, or negative log-likelihood. It's such a function that takes as input the right answer, the model answer, and outputs a number that's high when predictions are very different from reality and low when they are same. You can take the derivative of this error function with respect to each weight. After this you get a vector that tells you how you should update each weight to make the error larger in the fastest way possible. But you want the error to be smaller, so you invert the sign of this. Now you have a vector that tells you how to update your weights to make the error smaller. Smaller error equals better predictions, so you keep on getting predictions from the model, computing the error, taking derivatives, updating weights. This is gradient descent, because you take the gradient, the vector of derivatives that points to the maximum error, and "descend" in the opposite direction by changing weights to reach the minimum error. It's just a much faster way to search for the solution than the random weight picking approach.
Taking this approach, your network won't produce any error on the half cards it got right, so these cards won't trigger any weight updates. However, it will be heavily "penalized" with a large error when it makes a mistake. So yeah, neural networks only learn from mistakes.
[1] https://towardsdatascience.com/interpretability-in-deep-learning-with-w-b-cam-and-gradcam-45ba5296a58a
I want to set forth an idea, a way of looking at things, that will make a lot of people very angry, because few people like reconsidering their ideas...
So, if your immediate response is to tell me that I'm wrong, well, hold that thought and maybe spend a day pondering the idea before doing so?
And if your immediate response is some legal-technical response why I'm wrong because of seven minute points of difference, well, you're clearly playing the scoring points game, not the introspection game, so go play with someone else.
And, OMG, I can't believe it's necessary to say this, but such are the times we live in, this is not about blame, it is not about ethics; it is about understanding -- understanding now, and understanding the past, understanding the future. If you don't get that, well, stop reading now.
OK, consider Igor Strelkov. Russian Warlord. Present everywhere you'd expect from Transistria to Chechnya to Crimea to Donbas.
He always has the same story for the locals (plenty of whom support him): "These odds are impossible, we'll give our blood sweat and tears for nothing but our phantoms of honor," and his devotees don't believe him, but then it turns out just as he prophesied. He's saying the same thing right now about Ukraine. If you want to read about him, best is to look for stuff before, say 2020, so you don't get caught up in the most recent emotion, and what you see is stuff like this: https://www.e-ir.info/2017/07/22/igor-strelkov-moscow-agent-or-military-romantic/
OK, so how do we interpret this? Who does it remind you of? Well, many answers could come to mind depending on the point you want to make, but what comes to my mind is characters like Nongqawuse or Sitting Bull. Characters leading people who are well aware that modernity is on the way to crush them, so how should they respond? They (the leaders and the people) are well aware that modernity always wins in the end, the only choices they get are to submit without a fight, or to fight in the hope that thereby they will be remembered rather than just forgotten. This is not Götterdämmerung, it's not about the destruction of the world; it's about leaving some small mark on the world before the inevitable swamping of your culture by modernity.
Now when you see analogy, Russians as Native Americans, Strelkov as Sitting Bull, Putin as Crazy Horse, the point is not "Russians good", The point is what does this analogy tell us? Maybe it tells us something about Native Americans? Maybe it tells us something about whom the current elites in the West have chosen to valorize? Maybe it tells us something about the whitewashing of history (first by the victors, yes, but then by later discontents)?
In 70 years will Strelkov be considered a terrible person? Probably. Hitler believed he was doing, in Russia, no less than what the Americans had done in the West, and they didn't seem, as of 1930s, too upset about it.
But in 150 years will Strelkov be considered a terrible person? Ah, well, that's the question isn't it? Will we see, starting in a 100 years, a stream of stories about the Romance of Old Russia, how its people just wanted to live their traditional lives with their traditional belief systems, but modernity would not leave them alone; how they tried to keep out those corrupting influences but realized that was just impossible, that the only thing they could do was destroy their civilization in one glorious fruitless gesture, kill all their cattle, ghost dance against the cavalry. Will we see movies like "Bury my heart at Kiev" and "A Man named Igor" about the wise ways of these noble people who were too good for the forces arrayed against them? Untll Strelkov is up there with Che, Mao, and Sitting Bull as the T-shirt worn by 18 yr olds just arrived at college eager to show everyone how they understand the true tragedy of the world, and how they would never have been so short-sighted, back in 2022, as to insist that the only way to deal with the problem of Russia was to grind its face into the dirt, and change not only its government but the entire cultural system that had allowed such a government to come to power?
People who refuse to adapt to changing social paradigms, so long as they're not outright evil -- and those occasions are rare and short-lived -- are either stupid or mentally inflexible. They are romanticized by populists later for cynical purposes of the latter, e.g. American politicians romanticized Native Americans in the 60s and 70s *not* because they actually wanted to be anything like them, or held their values in any serious way, but because it was a good way to bamboozle Joe Average Voter, vaguely dissatisfied with the necessity of coping with a world full of nukes, air pollution, Vietnam, and other novel horrors. Send me your money and your vote, dear dumb citizen, and I will turn back time, restore Eden, make the kids respectful, restore the color to your hair and spring to your step. And by the way, here's A Free Lunch, too. It's a sad commentary on our species that this works as well as it does.
That's rather a defeatist attitude, particularly if the "changing social paradigms" are foolish or harmful.
I said neither "accept" nor "subscribe to," I said "adapt to." Consider it to be similar to living through a hurricane. The wise man doesn't refuse to delay his midday trip to the liquor store for another fifth of Thunderbird, daring the storm to do its worst. Not at all the same as reveling in hurricanes, or taking steps to minimize the damage they do.
"the only way to deal with the problem of Russia was to grind its face into the dirt, and change not only its government but the entire cultural system"
Whaa?
No, because modern russia is a borring dystopia.
Che and Mao and Sitting bull get to be on Tshirts cause of Pizaze. Armored Train Raids! Guerilla warfare from mist shrouded moutains! Having a Rad Name!
The soviets had style while they were sending people to the gulag, so the hammer and sickle get to live on forever.
Putin is just some old bald rich guy who is trying to find a way to take it with him. Dime a dozen, but with nukes.
Russia's culture has already been destroyed by the Bolsheviks, and Putin as ex-KGB is a direct successor to the destroyers, not the destroyed.
Putting the undead USSR abomination to long overdue sleep is best for everyone, Russians can resurrect their history and traditions just fine without Putin and his kind.
> undead USSR abomination
By the way, many people managed to miss the best explanation of the letter Z.
The problem is, of course, how to go about it. The pre-Brezhnev USSR propaganda was all about how Russia is pioneering the utopian future for the whole world, and from Brezhnev on it shifted to a hyperfocus on how Russia saved the world from the Nazi menace (a theme which is obviously alive and well even now).
The glossed over elephant in the room is of course that Russia was comprehensively defeated in the subsequent war, its empire and pride broken, and found that it has no place in the modern world, except as a source of brain drain to the Silicon Valley and fossil fuels to any takers. So it should come as no surprise that nationalist and irredentist ideas find fertile ground there. When the realistic choice is between a slow decay and a flashy attempt at a blast from the past, going out with a bang might not seem like such a bad idea.
If college students ever end up wearing Strelkov or Putin shirts the way they wear Che shirts, it will be for the same reason they wear Che shirts today. Complete or near-complete ignorance of the person's actual acts & legacy, combined with a desire to set themselves apart as an edgelord for holding an “big, scary, unthinkable opinion that would upset the normies - look how bold and independent I am!”
But the thing is that only every once and a while does holding the anti-consensus opinion mean that you are a lone voice of truth among the sheep. More likely than not, when 1000 people say “X” and you say “not X,” you’re not a bold contrarian truth-teller. You’re just wrong.
This is even more likely the case when the person proffering the opinion feels compelled to preface it by asking his audience 2-3 times not to "tell me I'm wrong" or give "some legal-technical response why I'm wrong," so maybe instead of us all taking a day to ponder this, you should do some introspection into what the appeal of this position is to you.
"More likely than not, when 1000 people say “X” and you say “not X,” "
Unfortunately I suspect there is a category of idea that this doesn't actually work for. Ideas where you are a good person to believe in, and a bad person to not, seem to me to invariably fail this test.
Specifying which ideas is explicitly taking a side in someones culture war though, so I won't do that here.
"Murder is bad" fails this test?
Go away troll.
You said "invariably", he gave a counterexample that fit your criteria.
It doesn't fit the criteria in the rest of the sentence.
I fail to see how I'm even coming close to trolling here. You made the VERY strong claim that " Ideas where you are a good person to believe in, and a bad person to not, seem to me to invariably fail this test (truth supported by popular consensus)". "Murder is wrong" is one of those moral axioms where you are good if you believe it and bad if you don't.
If you're completely unwilling to actually say what you mean instead of Darkly Hinting at it, you're going to leave yourself very open to interpretation.
Of course, I suspect you're worried you CAN'T say what you actually mean because it would violate the no-culture-war rule. In that case, I'd suggest refraining from commenting at all instead of doing the rhetorical equivalent of sticking your hand an inch away from your brother's face and going "I'm not touching you!"
Of course you weren't trolling. Ryan has produced a textbook example of PVA -- Primative Verbal Abuse. I reported his comment.
There is no popular consensus, as far as I am aware, that believing murder is wrong makes you a good person. It is a universal implicit default, different cultural and legal definitions of murder aside. There isn't a debate about it, and there is no common phenomenon of labelling and othering people who think murder is ok. Presumably because they do not exist in number outside of certain prisons.
Speaking of failing tests, your remark completely fails to meet Scott's test for acceptable comments, which is that comments must meet at least 2 of the following 3 criteria: Your point is right. Your remark is kind. Your remark is necessary to the discussion, i.e. it is relevant. What you produced is basically a verbal fart. You're 0 for 3, Ryan.
I'm sorry to say that your own comment fails those criteria, being neither kind or necessary for certain, and debatably true.
You're 0-1 for 3 Eremolalos, but I don't see any need to report you for such petty measures. Have a nice day.
I have spent, roughly, a full day considering your statement. My conclusion is that your statement is stupid in a very bizzare way. Among the many, MANY important differences between Strelkov and any of the indigenous resistance leaders that aren't mere nit-picking in term of analogy is that indigenous resistance leaders were fighting against the incursion of actively hostile foreign powers into their sovereign nation (who had either cultural or physical genocide as explicit internal goals- see White Man's Burden and the "Indian Schools"), while Strelkov is trying to deliberately generate ethnic conflict on behalf of an invading and imperialistic foreign power. Your attempt at insinuating some kind of moral inconsistency RE: idolization of these two is very weak because you're not looking at the place where the internal consistency is: support of the ideal of national sovereignty (Native American Nations and Ukraine) vs. imperialist ambitions (Manifest Destiny expansion into the West and Russian revanchism).
Beyond that, your attempt to imply that this war ends with the cultural genocide of the Russian people to "modernize" them is outlandish. Nobody is talking about that. Nobody is planning that. That is on exactly zero political agents' checklists. Russia isn't pre-modern- it's a very modern nation-state that is being run by an autocrat. You're really tipping your hand that you buy into the historical dialectic (which is a gross oversimplification of actual historical events by several orders of magnitude).
(a) I love how you know, better than I do, what I really feel about these issues, whom I consider right or wrong, smart or dumb...
(b) You seem very very certain that this is not about the imposition of particular aspects of modernity on Russia. The people in Russia do not feel that way. Many of them are, for example, very unhappy about things like changing gender and sexual norms; but they are also aware that they cannot fight these, they are brought in by every movie, every book, every internet connection to the outside world.
Your lack of concern for this is, conceptually, no different from an 1860s American's saying that Native Americans should just damn well settle down and get with the program of Christianity and farming because that's the modern way.
So should Strelkin and Putin fight? Well, there were certainly some Native Americans who looked at what was happening, with responses ranging from "Damn right, Agriculture and Manufacturing are better than this crap of freezing on the prairie in a thin tent in the the middle of winter" to "Look, I agree farming is way less fun than nomad'ing, but this is not something I want over". But it's an empirical fact that those pragmatists are not the ones in the history books.
As for who threw the first punch, well again it depends how you frame this fight. If you insist on looking at this as a fight between nations, then, sure, it's about tanks and missiles and no-one denies that Russia invaded Ukraine.
But if you see this as a fight against modernity, well that's similar to the US settlers constantly moving westwards, constantly probing, creating barriers and complications of various sorts. It's not about the US Cavalry, that's a minor side issue; it's just clear to everyone with eyes that regardless of the US cavalry, agriculture and civilization are going to end nomadic life, the only question is whether it happens fast via the military, or over two generations via constant encroachment. Likewise for those books, movies, internet, international norms, etc.
There are plenty of indigenous people for whom things played out militarily differently, from Northern Canada to Australia to New Zealand. But they all landed up in the place... The indigenous culture is a pathetic sham, many of those born into it are perpetually drunk on reservations of one sort or another, the only success stories are the "success" of abandoning that culture to become modern.
In THEORY you can do this differently; you can go the Amish route. But that seems to be really really hard to pull off. What successful cases are there? Amish, some extremely orthodox Jewish, maybe some Asian cases [I know very little about the aboriginals on Taiwan or in Japan except that they exist]. My guess is to go that route is only possible once you've already been beaten up pretty badly (as were the Amish in Europe), enough so that no-one either believe they can usefully fight back, or sees any romance in some sort of mass cattle killing.
Are you seriously insisting that there is no meaningful difference between cultural exchange and the destruction of a nation at the point of the sword? Or, for that matter, that people should be FORCED to live a certain way? Yes, yes, blue jeans and rock 'n' roll are degenerate art, but people in Russia clearly WANT them. Likewise- Native Americans in fact wanted and LIKED horses, firearms, and the printing press (and most of them DID, in fact, have agriculture and primitive manufacturing already, thank you very much). They were less interested in having their nations dissolved. Fuck directly off with your noble savages in their happy hunting ground.
Since you brought up Native history, those pragmatists ARE, in fact, the ones in their history books. I should know, because I live on the Qualla Boundary and know a great deal about Cherokee and Native history. Tsali, Sitting Bull, etc. weren't fighting some romantic heroic doomed last stand against "modernity"- they were fighting against treaty violations by the US, and lost. In that first case (the Cherokee), the actions undertaken were so patently illegal that they were done in direct defiance of the US Supreme Court. The United States then decided to carry out a very deliberate campaign of cultural genocide against Native peoples because they, much like you seem to, saw them as a bunch of pre-civilized cave-men incapable of adapting to the modern world without having their entire culture annihilated. I would recommend looking at the EBCI, the Cherokee Nation, and the Seminole Tribe of Florida to see how the culture and then reassess whether Native culture and society is a "pathetic, failing sham". Half of these charter city movements and their government-corporations are just reinventing the functional structure of tribal governments and dressing them up in Libertarian colors. For that matter, I recommend picking up an actual history book instead of an apologist polemic disguised as one and learning about what Native civilization actually looked like instead of using The Searchers as a primary reference. You might even learn that Native Americans managed to maintain their culture while taking advantage of modern technology.
This is probably a waste of time because you already know that you know all the answers, and trying to argue at a conceptual level with someone who's already pulled out the insults rarely ends well.
But the very framing of your answer is the framing of modernity, not the framing of tradition. The framing of tradition puts the individual as no more important than the group, and posits that certain things (in particular the maintenance of a culture) are only possible through co-ordinated behavior (including sanctions against defectors). This is, of course, not a foreign argument to modern polemicists *when it is convenient for them*.
On the right this would be the argument against porn or drugs; on the left this would be the "No-one makes you shop at Walmart" argument:
https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/02/to-slee-no-one-makes-you-shop-at-wal-mart-chapter-1.html
Likewise you are missing the structure of the argument if you insist on technicalities of the precise reasons this battle was supposedly fought at this time. (ie the "The Civil War was fought over States' Rights, here are all the documents showing that" argument)
World history gives us many many versions of modernity confronting non-modernity, from cases within Europe to the Americas to Oceania, and they generally turned out as I described. That is the phenomenon I am interested in, not your legalistic arguments for why Native America vs the US should be considered a case of two equally modern states arguing over the modern concept of Treaty Breaking.
Right, I think I've heard enough. You've advanced from talking shit about Native Americans to representing this weird fucking dialectic view pitting traditional ways of life against the modern world.
How about this: my landlord is one of those "cultureless drunkards" and a fairly "traditional" Cherokee. Cherokee culture is one of those cultures that puts the group value above the individual and thus by your dialectic is "traditional". I told him about your ideas and he is sufficiently curious that he's going to come in here and give his viewpoint. You can work out whatever highly conceptual issues you have about my objections to this framing with a Native historian.
Hi, cultureless drunkard and Historian who is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation here, I'd like to weigh my thoughts in here as both a Native American, and a Social Historian
So I'd like to say that not only are the ideological frameworks of resisting cultural assimilation fundamentally different for both states in Eastern Europe and Native Nations in North America, but that your original posit seems VERY incorrect about Sitting Bull and Red Cloud.
Both Red Cloud and Sitting Bull resisted United States imperialism through warfare because they were actively resisting their homes being burnt and their lands being seized by force, and both of them were forced into what amounts to concentration camps where they died.
Neither of them even opposed "modernity" in the sense of technological innovation, or in the thought of mutual cohabitation with people around them. Sitting Bull went all the way to London as a performer in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, and often was found to enjoy some of the things of modern life, and modern Commanche historian Paul Chaat Smith in his novel on Native Americans and modernity states that Natives being opposed to modernity is in fact, a white promulgated narrative.
The idea that Vladimir Putin is somehow a freedom fighter disregards the entire context of his existence, the governmental superstructure around him, the cultural imperialism he wishes to pursue as he re-forges what he sees as "The Real Russia," is more of a policy line in the thought school of Western Imperialism than of Native Resistance. He's not being a hero here by bombing schools, destroying monuments, or advocating the dissolution of humanities programs and rewriting history favorably.
That would be something the United States would advocate for Native people to erase them from both history and society.
I would say Natives opposed imperialism, not changing or advancing their often highly manipular societies. The Lakota in particular prior to US intervention had a positive relationship to the settled and oft urbane native cultures of the Mandan, Arikara and Hidatsa, who were forced to adopt Plains cultural traditions to survive and escape the United States military and its often violent settlers.
You seem to be conflating two things you don't seem to understand a whole lot about, then get upset when someone says you don't know about those things because you demonstrate a lack of factual understanding, and seem to just assume a cultural metanarrative that's awfully Western European of you.
I highly encourage you to learn more about native societies, and also about Russian Imperialism and their history of cultural assimilation and termination within their historic reach. Putin is much more a Custer than a Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake.
As a native, I feel like you don't understand our history, culture, developments, or situations well. As a historian, I feel like you're shoehorning in so much into your dialectic your view of history and of current events seems largely only a framework that operates if I don't understand either Russian, OR Native history.
Let's try one last time. And let's try to remember that, yes, indeed this is a "weird fucking dialectic view" because that's how philosophy works; if you imagine this is a set of posts that's supposed to provide blame or excuses, well, read the first damn entry.
To Gawonisgi, the point of interest is not Sitting Bull interpreted as a figure of modernity, it is the ways in which the phenomenon was NOT modern.
How then would you analyze features like Prophetic Visions, or the whole Ghost Dancer phenomenon? And similar versions of the same phenomenon, from the Taiping Rebellion to Nongqawuse to the Sudanese Mahdi (plus more than a dozen other, lesser, Mahdi's) to, in our day, ISIS? When you see the same sort of behavior under what seem like the same sort of conditions across widely separated space and time, it seems willfully blind to insist on the particularities of each case rather than the similarities.
Look, I understand that Luria's are rare, and most people are peasants. Of course one hopes, on this particular site, to encounter a higher fraction of Luria's. But higher does not mean universal.
Because there are no downvotes, I'm commenting to say that this is a deeply stupid take. For all the reasons other people have already offered in more detail.
I have a question about the atmosphere at ACX meetups. There seems to be a reasonably active community in my city (Boston). As I moved here during COVID I haven't really met friends - I do know some people in the area, but mostly through my wife, who is from here - and I've recently been looking into ways to rectify that.
However, I wonder if the ACX crowd would be for me. I'm into politics in a technocratic center-left sort of way (I've at times called myself a "Matt Yglesias/Noah Smith Democrat"), I like history and intellectual discussions a lot, and I'm somewhat into political philosophy and economics. I'm also casual-ish cyclist and hiker, and I like wandering around the city. But I wonder if the ACX crowd would be too techie/STEM for me, and/or too explicitly rationalist in orientation (I've tried to read other rationalist stuff here and there and while I think it can be interesting, it isn't entirely my thing for a variety of reasons).
So, are the meet-ups generally a good time? Are people generally friendly and welcoming? Is everyone a programmer who reads Less Wrong religiously and is super into AI risk, or are there different sorts of people with some variety of interests? Just curious!
They are disproportionately programmers, but not as skewed as you think. Programming isn't normally discussed there.
It differs from city to city, but I recommend giving it a shot! Not everyone reads Less Wrong religiously and is super into AI risk — at least not in bigger communities (like the one in Boston) and especially ACX-branded (rather than LW- or rationality-branded) ones. There will probably be a lot of programmers, but even at the Bay Area weekly meetup, it's not everyone, and we almost never talk about programming. Again, this varies between communities, and people feeling unwelcome because of too much programming talk is definitely sometimes an issue — but the larger the group, the less likely you are to get an unlucky roll of the dice and end up with homogeneity.
I can't program and I have generally enjoyed meetups.
did you enjoy your country/world tour meetups or just local?
I'm a qual-not-quant ultra-trad religious brawler type who spends a lot of time antiquing. I can't program; my mathematical ability is such that I have to regularly remind myself how to calculate percentages. I've had a really good time at an ACX meetup.
I'm literally none of those things - though I've acquired a taste for occasional antiquing thanks to my wife - but I enjoy reading your blog!
(Well, I guess I'm more-qual-than-quant, but despite not being a STEM type, I'm actually not-terrible with numbers.)
Oh, I def didn't expect you to be those things; I'm just saying those things aren't average for the meetups, and I have done fine considering my limited dataset. Most of the conversations are more normal than you'd think.
Bay Area (not weekly) meetup here, not tech person and not rationalist, and I can usually participate in ~1/2 the conversations - which is fine because at an average meetup there are usually 2-4 happening at once, so you just wander until you find one you're interested in. At our just-finished meetup we had, at one point or another: history of the Russian Revolution, something technical about GPUs that I didn't have the background to follow, heredity in musical talent/interest, historical cooking, genetic diseases (when homozyguos) caused by variants that are beneficial when heterozygous (I didn't catch what precisely about them), genetic engineering, something brief programming-related, and (of course) the Ukraine War; that's probably about half the ones I heard (skewed to my interests), and I probably heard (bits of) ~10% of the conversations at the meetup or less.
I find people friendly and welcoming but I'm hosting, so my perspective will be slanted there - I've never had trouble getting into a conversation, though, and people are very nice about things like bringing dishes to the kitchen at the end of the meetup (we do a lot of snacks). I vaguely think AI risk came up once in one of the clusters but I might have misheard; it's definitely not the main topic. That said I get the vague sense our meetup is less Rationalist than many.
As you describe yourself I expect you would be fine - honestly at our meetup "history and intellectual discussions" would comfortably get you through an evening with no shortage of conversations. I would be no warier of politics at such meetups than at any party where people are likely not to agree on everything - which means I personally would be incredibly wary, but I'm conflict-averse. If you can follow the old SSC posting rules (true, kind, or necessary, two out of three)/generally try to provide more light than heat/don't mind being argued with - I would expect you to be fine.
But caveat for all of this that I have never been to a meetup except as one of the hosts (and, therefore, never been to one outside the Bay Area), and am a bit socially clueless, so may be missing things.
I'd like to thank everyone who replied but this one was particularly detailed so I'l drop it here! Sounds like meet-ups are generally a good time. And I hope my question about 'programmers who are super-into AI risk' didn't come off as glib, I certainly didn't mean it that way.
Also I am generally quite happy to disagree about politics as long as the discussion is friendly and reasonably well-informed. The only exception is stuff that is just outrageously incorrect; I wouldn't have much patience for stop-the-steal types or anti-vaxxers but I'd probably just walk away from them rather than start a shouting match. (And I don't imagine you'd get many such people at an ACX meet-up.) I generally view such discussions as a learning opportunity rather than an opportunity to convince the other person that I'm right.
I am a *bit* concerned about the scene being to Rationalist for me but I guess the only way to find out is to try it!
I'm not a programmer or a STEM person, more of a person with wide interests and a preference for thoughtful people. I've enjoyed meetups.
I host the Philadelphia meetup, and we're a mixed bag of (IMO) very interesting people. We have lots of techies, but also lawyers, writers, teachers and researchers in various fields. I'm not really sure how rationalist I am personally, which is one reason I'm hosting ACX meetups rather than LW ones.
I'm mostly a homemaker, but also a part-time archivist and also worked in content management and data for years. I'm a pretty traditional person, center or slightly center left politically, and consider myself a Christian. My degrees are in Russian History and Library Science and I'm not quantitative at all, which is why I enjoy reading breakdowns of scientific studies and their methodology on ACX. Scott's writing gives me access to useful knowledge I could not parse on my own.
I've hosted most of the meetups the past two years at my house. At our last meetup, we began nerding out about food and historical cooking, and ended up having a fish sauce tasting. I'm always impressed by the interests and knowledge base of the people attending- it takes me places I don't expect. As someone who spends most of her time around her own small children, the meetup has been a vital intellectual outlet for me. It's been pleasantly intergenerational, too- the Philly meetup has folks over 50 and college kids discussing the latest post in a pleasant social environment, and I can't think of many places where that kind of crossover happens.
In terms of generational crossover, church?
My church is skewed quite old. We’ve recently switched to a different church with a lot more families with kids, but it’s still probably 75% people over 60 on your average Sunday.
Thanks to everyone who donated clothes and other supplies for Ukrainian refugees in Poland! We managed to ship over 500 pounds. https://denovo.substack.com/p/help-is-on-the-way
How's the stem cell field looking these days? I'm living with and managing a SLAP tear that would require surgery to fix, which I'm not interested in doing unless I have to. There are always stories of people injecting stem cells to fix these kind of shoulder issues, or alternately MCL or ACL tears. I've always assumed that these stories are BS- Joe Rogan has such a story of how stem cells fixed a similar shoulder issue, I don't think of him as a source of legitimate medical information. (Quite the opposite, actually).
Just thought I'd check in and see if any SMEs can describe how the stem cell therapy field is looking these days. Any recent advances? Any chance that musculoskeletal repair is on the horizon? I've also considered doing multiple bouts of PRP (platelet rich plasma), as the part of the shoulder with the injury doesn't receive a lot of blood flow- perhaps adding some blood in could help it repair over time. (I'm also middle-aged so I understand that this is unlikely).
There are also reports in the bodybuilding community of people buying peptides like BPC 157 or TB 500, and injecting those directly for joint repair. I think this is insanely risky
I had excellent results from one PRP treatment for rotator cuff tear. Not covered by insurance :-(
Can you tell me more what 'excellent results' looks like? I mean it can't.... like actually heal the tear, can it? I would love for that to actually work, I'm just trying not to get my hopes up
Took a bit of time, but the pain went away and hasn't come back. I assume the tear healed.
The Pareto distribution is a more radical and transformative idea than most people give it credit for. Specifically, I propose that all tasks have a Pareto-distributed cost. Wait... wait. I worry what you just heard was: "a lot of tasks have a Pareto-distributed cost". What I said was, ALL tasks do. From grand research programs all the way down to making coffee. And different assumptions about that atomic cost function will drive you to plan projects and even your life differently.
One of the biggest changes is that if you believe things have a Pareto cost, then you should design everything to be easy to throw out. "What's the worst that can happen" is a question that should give you nightmares. If you're a lawyer and you go after some punk kid for jailbreaking your product, there's no possible way your decision will cause a 10% drop in your company's stock price. Maybe you'll get some money, maybe you won't, but you're protecting your brand and your product. But that's exactly what happened to Sony when hackers decided to break into the PSN to punish Sony for their petty case against George Hotz, and the security of the PSN was found to simply not exist.
If you model with finite, normal distributions - or even memoryless, exponential distributions - that outcome is a fluke. An act of god. You can't predict it. If you model with the Pareto distribution, it's a boring eventuality. "It's true," Nassim Taleb says as he walks in, coincidentally emerging from one of his strolls to lecture you. "you can't predict where these heavy tail events will come from. You can only design for their eventuality. Stop losses. STOP LOSSES!" He continues away mumbling something about fractals and the Stoics.
You'll still care about efficiency, but the biggest efficiencies are in not stumbling into one of those heavy tail events, almsot never in small optimizations. And if you do stumble into a heavy tail event, pulling off the bandaid and shelving your work and starting again. Yeah, sure, *maybe* you're almost done. Or maybe you're trying to turn lead into gold, which you can't do and even if you did it would kill you. In fact, in the Pareto distribution, the longer you've been working on a case the longer you expect you have left to work *from now*. This is the one true innoculation against the sunk cost fallacy.
You'll develop a suspicion of time estimates. You can estimate normally distributed hours, but not the mean of a Pareto distribution. The variance could be infinite, even when the mean is finite. You can maybe estimate the median, though, which is why it's usually the superior average.
You'll find a joy in breaking down problems into their smallest parts, so that as few things as possible are levered on whatever you discover to be the heavy tail.
You'll develop a stiff reluctance to take on tech debt; not are bugs combinatorially complicated to
find and fix, but each combination is a task which could incur you a tail cost.
The optimistic note to end on is that tasks can have positive pareto value, too. Sometimes you go to clean bird shit off your radio antenna and discover the Big Bang. Sometimes you accidentally discover positrons because your equation has a square root. Sometimes your dirty dishes lead you to penicillin.
Keep an open mind, and think about the specific facts over the general prediction, and it will make all the difference.
Is there anything special about the Pareto distribution here, or does your take apply to all heavy tailed distributions?
Fun times in gout land tonight. Annoyingly enough, apparently losing weight can trigger gout flare ups.
There seems to be a link between hyperuricemia (high uric acid in the blood can cause gout flares) and kidney disease, but it's not entirely clear yet whether the former can actually help cause the latter (and how it does it), or whether it's just a result of the latter (since declining kidney function can cause it).
I assume you're on allopurinol? I'd expect you can fiddle with the dosage until you can lose weight safely, but yeah, increasing catabolism dumps lots of purines into the bloodstream.
I have hyperuricemia too and I'm low key terrified I'll start having gout attacks any time now :(
I was inspired by Scott to express my ideas in a more in-depth and nuanced way compared to what traditional social media platforms allow for. I opened my own independent blog.
I wrote about why you should move the conversation from social media to long-form blogs:
https://lanfranco.me/posts/reptiles-on-supernormal-stimuli/
and how exactly to do it from a practical point of view:
https://lanfranco.me/posts/resilient-lean-low-cost-blogging/
I am not an experienced writer, so any feedback is more than welcome.
I hope this does not violate any rule about self-promotion, if that's the case please remove this comment.
"He also supports normal Democratic priorities like the environment, abortion rights, and universal health care"
Is it possible to be a Democratic candidate without thinking that killing the unborn is a basic right?
I unno. Depends on your definitions, I guess.
Sorry to be a spoiler, but this is supposed to be no-politics thread. I've held out on posting an update of my war prediction since I would have to discuss Biden in it, so no one gets to have fun :-)
Scott posted about politics, so its fair game to talk about it in that context. He's literally discussing the contents of this post.
Ok, I guess if you guys want a giant flamewar about abortion, I am happy to join the party
Well we could do that I suppose, but I would prefer to know if supporting abortion is actually a prerequisite to being accepted as a Democratic candidate.
No, but not opposing it is.
Think of it as similar culture war issues on the right, eg. "color blindness", trans panic, etc.
Most R's probably don't give a shit about trans athletes in sport one way or the other , but they usually don't come out in support of it.
The governor of Utah would like a word, though I suppose whether or not he has a future remains to be seen.
Whatever about Carrick Flynn, come to Carrickfergus:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0S9bIOK790
If we're talking about D members of Congress, I think it's possible, but I think there are career tradeoffs to consider in buying local electability by sacrificing allegiance to the national party's core values.
Take someone like Doug Jones, the former senator from AL who beat Roy Moore and then last election was destroyed by 20 points by Tuberville, who basically refused to debate or campaign. I've never seen anything like it. To beat an incumbent by 20 points, one who had no serious ethics allegations against him, Tuberville literally just needed to get an R behind his name on the ballot and not be accused of child molestation.
Now a lot of the commentary afterwards said, "Well, that's just Alabama." It's true Jones had a tough fight in any scenario, but there's still a little more to it than that. Jones positioned himself as trying to govern from the center, but if he was aiming for a center it was clearly the US center, not the AL center. E.g., he was marginally more pro-life than the national Dem Party, but only in the matter of late-term abortions. And of course he voted against Kavanaugh.
Had he aimed for the AL center, or even a position slightly to the left of it, his re-election campaign surely would have gone better, but maybe he would have ruined his chances to serve in D administrations (as he is currently doing now, working on the SCOTUS nomination). And I think it's quite possible he made the career calculation and figured it was better for his future to not even try to win re-election and to stay fully loyal to the party.
Oh, let's not, nobody is going to change their minds about it. The pro-abortion rights people are going to think it is a natural human right, the anti-abortion rights people are going to think it is not, and neither of us are going to convince the others to change or shift.
There are pro-life Democrats and they've had their ups and downs (mainly downs recently):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrats_for_Life_of_America
I think we literally just had a big abortion brawl a thread or two ago.
I feel like Scott's audience has had many civil conversations about abortion in the past. I'd even go so far as to say that I remember lots of discussions about it that were civil and zero that weren't.
Is that a question requiring the answer "no"?
Yeah, "reproductive justice" is now "normal Democratic priority".
Ah well, he must be a proper politician, he is involved in a stupid minor accusation by a rival over improper videos or something:
https://www.wweek.com/news/state/2022/03/02/congressional-campaign-alleges-super-pac-and-democratic-candidate-for-oregons-new-seat-are-improperly-coordinating/
And of course, with a name like "Carrick Flynn", can we possibly guess what ancestral heritage he may hail from? 😁
Yes. Bernie Sanders supported a left wing pro-life, though obviously not a campaign focus, guy. This generated lots of controversy. Additionally prominent left-wingers are pro-life, just not in a militant way. An example would be the Bruenigs.
You can't raise money or win a competitive primary as a Democrat today unless you are willing to publicly say you are "pro-choice". That isn't quite the same as "thinking that killing the unborn is a basic right", but as far as TV ads are concerned they are the same.
*sets off dynamite*
*walks away*
Joe Manchin was re-elected as senator for West Virginia in 2018. It seems he supports pro-life legislation (https://justfacts.votesmart.org/candidate/political-courage-test/7547/joe-manchin-iii). It also seems he opposes the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade (https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/394933-manchin-warns-trump-against-picking-court-nominee-who-will-overturn-roe-v). Classify that as you will.
"Classify that as you will".
The old dog for the hard road? Guy who has been long enough in politics to know how to trim his sails between what his constituents will keep voting him back in for, and what the national party demands. There's a lot of comments online excoriating Manchin for various things and being insufficiently pure on the party line, but the guy plainly knows what he's doing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bel_Edwards
Yes. That possibility can be realized by not classifying the unborn as alive, or terminating a pregnancy as killing them.
***MOD*** Medium warning. Come on, this isn't adding to the conversation.
I am not sure this is allowed, feel free to delete the post if it isn't.
I am a Machine Learning Scientist. I left Russia and now I am looking for a new position.
I once found a great job via ACX (then SSC), so maybe it will work again.
My linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/btseytlin/
Feel free to reach out!
I'm pretty sure this is allowed; did you see Erusian's comment earlier in the thread? He mentioned that he ends up knowing about a lot of remote job opportunities, and recommended that you reach out to him. (I think the personal pronouns are correct in this, but apologies to Erusian if I'm wrong!)
Thanks, I will message him
Just FYI, I haven't received any emails from anyone named Boris. Let me know if you're having trouble.
Please check now :) I am not sure I solved the email riddle correctly
Karl Friston's book, Active Inference, comes out tomorrow. Very excited to read it!
ACX Philadelphia is doing a special meetup with Mingyuan on Friday, April 15 starting at 6:00pm. We'll be checking out the Uptown Beer Garden as a possible steady meetup location (at least while the weather is good).
We typically hold our meetups on the last Thursday of the month at 7pm.
Uptown Beer Garden is right next to Philadelphia City Hall, and the nearest train is Suburban Station. In case of rain, we'll move to Tir na Nog Irish Pub across the street.
A rather hopium-ish study mentioned in MR says far-UVC lamps are likely to be very effective at reducing indoor airborne virus transmission.
https://www.cuimc.columbia.edu/news/new-type-ultraviolet-light-makes-indoor-air-safe-outdoors
Questions:
1. Any informed opinions out there on how likely this is to replicate?
2. Any recommendations for far-UVC lamps one could use in a DIY indoor disinfection setup? I sing in a choir and am thinking of trying to set up something for our rehearsal and performance spaces.
Probably effective, possibly safe.
https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/coronavirus-covid-19-and-medical-devices/uv-lights-and-lamps-ultraviolet-c-radiation-disinfection-and-coronavirus
"There is some evidence that excimer lamps, with peak wavelength of 222-nm may cause less damage to the skin, eyes, and DNA than the 254 nm wavelength, but long-term safety data is lacking."
Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/1217/
What are the chances this could create UV-resistant viruses/bacteria? Does our world already UV-saturated places that it would happen if it could?
Yes, anywhere outdoors in clear summer days
I donated to Carrick Flynn's campaign on the basis of this recommendation. The Metaculus odds being decently high were a significant factor.
This makes me wonder if this kind of usage poses a threat to low skin-in-the-game prediction aggregators like Metaculus that people are using to direct skin-in-the-game decisions like donating money to particular candidates. Carrick's team could make the Metaculus watchers of the world more willing to donate by estimating higher odds on Metaculus at no monetary cost to them.
Will Smith, Juwan Howard, Putin, January 6ers. "I/we was/were 'disrespected'." Is the source of violence "hidden" shame?
See James Gilligan, Thomas Scheff or in Girardian terms perhaps what is hidden is the shame about the process of concealed mimetic desire.
It seems that shame is not the only root of violence, because violence also arises from fear, which is an (accurate or otherwise) perception of and response to danger.
In fact, it seems to me that we can cast every example you state above as a fear of losing respect or approval, and of the danger which losing respect or approval implies. Ironically, in each of those situations, more respect was lost by the response than would have been lost by inaction. Less is more.
Violence also arises from a combination of greed and indifference, which I think is more relevant to the Ukraine-Russia war. I would call Will Smith-Chris Rock more of a reaction to stress than shame or danger, and Jan 6 was an offensive battle for influence, not defensive.
Good point. Do you think greed would exist without fear?
I will disagree about January 6: those were borderline mentally ill and "alienated". Alienation is the outgrowth of the shame of not being able to really answer the question whom am I and who are were. Some granfalloons are less benign than others. Gangs, putting on a red maga hat, white suprematists groups, the military basically the same process to solve the problem of alienation.
> those were borderline mentally ill and "alienated".
Counterpoint: lots of people believe stupid things, but don't get put in a pressure cooker designed to make them go on a rampage that will clearly lose
"Reaction to stress"? What's the stress?
"Indifference" as the source of violence? I'm not sure how that would work.
Not caring enough about others to treat them as you would be treated. Again can be cast as the cause of all violence.
The theory proposed by Gilligan is not about generic shame but "hidden shame". Fear of losing respect, arguable is about a hidden shame which involving the "perceived entitlement to" ( probably not the right words) respect or honor.
If you're a Russian in Tbilisi and you want someone to invest in your business, I'll meet with you
What if I had once been Russian, but not any more; and I had formerly spent time in Tbilisi, but not any more; and I previously had wanted someone to invest in my business, but not currently (though probably soon, unless the Russians in Moscow decide to press a red button, then maybe not so soon)...
I'm a businessman, not a riddler. Are you looking to make a deal or are you not?
Any thoughts about how a world which is hospitable to refugees on a large scale could be structured?
Assume that Ukraine is only the beginning.
Personally I'd prefer to structure a world in which Russia can't sponsor refugee crises. The Wikipedia page "List of refugee crises" shows six active ones, and Russia played a major role in creating or sustaining 3 (Ukraine, Syria, Venezuela). (The other 3 are Somalia, Myanmar/Rohingya, Palestine.)
Who bells the bear? Seriously, if you have ideas about a world that produces fewer refugee crises, I'm interested.
I'm increasingly of the opinion that the US/NATO should get involved in Ukraine. Russia's military is over-committed there. Speed its collapse. Then keep sanctions long enough for Russia to sort its leadership out. Then welcome them (and their natural resources) back into the global economy.
The idea is probably way too naive. But watching Russia turn Ukraine into rubble isn't so great either.
Russia's *army* is overcommitted in Ukraine. Their strategic rocket forces are hardly committed to that conflict at all. Which is sensible, because the primary purpose of the Russian strategic rocket forces is to keep NATO's armies from stomping all over Russian ones,
Most of us would like to keep that aspect of the conflict at the "staring angrily at one another" level rather than the "shooting strategic rockets at one another" level. Yes, we can cause Russia to collapse if we push hard enough. And they can cause us to collapse back, and now I have to point to bean's latest on why that wouldn't be literally the end of the world but could still be really really bad. https://www.navalgazing.net/Nuclear-Weapon-Destructiveness
I believe that the sanctions alone will cause Russia to collapse, though loss of prestige in Ukraine might contribute;. I'm seeing a big humanitarian* disaster looming.
*I hate "humanitarian disaster". The disaster is a disaster for the humans who are subject to it, not primarily for the humanitarians who are helping.
Such structure is much less realistic than US electing Rand Paul as a president.
What do you think the main problems facing refugees are? Depending on your answer, I think my response will range from large-scale spiritual awakening to Georgism to saying things are pretty much fine as they are.
Imagine you suddenly have to flee your home, in fear for your life, and move to a whole other country. You have just enough time to throw a few pieces of clothing, protein bars, and some cash into a bag, if you're lucky.
What are your main problems?
You have a whole pile of problems all up and down Maslow's hierarchy, from "I don't have a safe place to sleep" to "I can't reach my elderly parents who stayed behind, I'm terrified that they've been killed' to "I don't have a way to earn a living" to "I miss my home so much" to "I'm consumed by hatred for the f***ers who did this to me" to "I don't understand the local language in the country I fled to, and it makes me feel so lonely." Add a whole other exciting pile of problems if you're accompanied by small children or pets who need your care and quite likely have been traumatized by the experience.
I don't know how it affects your answer, but I'm pretty sure that "saying things are pretty much fine as they are" is NOT IT.
Refugees have a truly terrible plight. The human trauma caused by such crises is astounding, and ripples across generations. Honestly it breaks my heart to even think about.
But none of the problems you mention changes the geopolitical calculus of how to accept refugees well. Indeed, many of the problems mentioned are endemic to being a refugee, and couldn't even in principle be solved by government intervention without e.g. ending all wars forever, let alone be solved practically.
Below, OP Suggests more prosperity and governments permitting people to move. States accepting refugees already have historically outrageous prosperity and freedom of movement. It could be that more is needed, but it could also be that things are pretty much fine as they are on that front.
It would help to let refugees in sooner rather than later, so they haven't taken as much damage from deprivation.
One large answer is enough prosperity so that people have something to share, which is a lot of what's going on now. Another piece is governments permitting people to move, and I hope, to work.
Whether there should be help from governments and how it should be structured is something else to think about.
1) Neo-liberalism does not really lack for material prosperity, but I would really like to see Georgism tried here, at least in cities; it seems like a massive force-multiplier for social spending (since that no longer gets privately siphoned by landlords). I think it could separately ease the cost of housing for refugees.
2) I agree in principle. Why do you think governments don't permit people to move?
3) There's something to be said for solving problems at home before you try to solve them abroad, especially since foreign aid often props up a bad status quo. It also seems to me that refugee policy is often downstream from other political issues.
For instance, I think that upstream technocratic changes, like voting reform (auto-districting over gerrymandering, universal mail-in voting, ranked choice or approval voting), tax reform (more pigovian and land value taxes, collecting taxes already owed by the rich and corps), and public health reform (insulating the FDA from political and corporate pressure by treating like an arm of the justice department, public campaigns against alcohol like the one on tobacco, funding psychedelic psychotherapy for PTSD, Depression, Addiction, esp contra the opioid epidemic), not only heal current ills, but increase our capacity to heal other, further off ills, insofar as they make society more transparent, accountable, and prosperous.
I have no idea how Georgism would affect people having enough extra room in their houses to make taking in refugees relatively easy.
It may be hard to come up with a general theory of why governments don't let people move since policies vary a lot. For purposes of this discussion, the relevant part is pretty much governments not letting people move *in*.
The underlying theory is that governments have the right to "control their borders", which I think is conflating immigration with an invasion.
As for the rest, I don't know how much is that some significant number of people don't want to live with strangers, and how much it's easy for politicians to stir up xenophobia. For that matter, I don't know how much having a norm of hospitality takes the edge off.
I think the lowest hanging fruit would be developing a viable model of integrating waves of refugees with the host society.
For Ukrainian refugees in Poland I expect this to go swimmingly. We share so much cultural and linguistic background, we can have a pretty complex conversation without actually knowing a word of the interlocutor's language. Most Ukrainians have friends who already immigrated here for economic reasons years ago. They're mostly women and children, they're not threatening, certainly not aggressive. The children are already joining mixed nationality groups in school, by next year they'll probably be speaking Polish with a weird accent but fluently. Some of _our_ children will probably take up Ukrainian phrases by osmosis.
This is the best case scenario which happens basically nowhere else.
At the point the refugees form their own insular community, you lost. At the point they feel they cannot find jobs in your country while your own population associates them with joblessness and poverty, you double lost. At the point you get loud aggressive bands of young foreign males cruising your streets, you triple lost and you're a decade away from electing some kind of crypto-fascists because people have only so much patience. This is the current situation in some parts of the old EU.
I honestly have no idea how to stop this process, certainly the tribes of culture warring baboons that push for closing the borders and shooting refugee boats vs. hiding heads in the sand and pretending everything is great don't help. It does seem solvable somehow, and I think the standard approach - refugee camps, then dumping them into a foreign society with barely any help - is a terrible social and humanitarian failure.
I just stumbled on this clip from the newest Jon Stewart show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cmnwbGmu7w
The way they are talking just feels so far from reality to me. Am I just missing what's going on in the world?
Damn, I feel bad for Andrew in that. I mean, he wasn't perfect, but this is exactly the kind of interaction that helps nobody and the comments on the video seem to agree on that.
Sounded like overwrought white guilt to me.
I've been mentally toying around with a theory of morality lately that can be roughly summarized as "X is objectively good if, for any coherent value system Y, promoting X is required to promote Y; value systems can be compared against one another on the basis of the degree to which they promote objectively good things". Has any philosopher articulated a view like this before? It seems like I'd expect there to be one, but I don't think I've ever heard of any.
The disagreement is on the question of what are the objectively good things and what sort of tradeoffs you can make between objectively good things.
The system defines some thing X as objectively good if any coherent value system Y will necessarily imply valuing X. To give a concrete example, I would consider holding true beliefs to be objectively good under this scheme, because to consistently and effectively promote any set of values requires holding true beliefs about what those values are and how to promote them.
I've only been thinking about this for a fairly short time, and I don't yet have a good idea of how to decide what tradeoffs can be made between objectively good things. It seems at least plausible to me that some sort of hierarchy of objectively good things could be established which could be used to make tradeoffs. That's part of why I'm curious to know if anyone has come up with something like this before me, and hopefully fleshed it out a bit more.
I think that an issue is that you will have contradictions between coherent systems. There are some systems which clearly more ethical. For example, both "Actively lower existential risk" and "Actively increase existential risk" could be coherent ethical systems. But should we value one over the other? I think yes, because I have ethical intuitions about what is moral and what is not. If we take an approach that equally values any coherent ethical system we will overvalue coherent but evil ethical systems. Does that make sense?
Existence is a prerequisite for promoting any value, including the value of maximizing x-risk. So human existence would be considered an objective good under this system, and therefore value systems which lower existential risk would be considered objectively superior to value systems which increase it, all else being equal.
Wait, did we just re-invent Anselm's Ontological Argument?
Surely with no restrictions on X this is very circular right?
Rereading my comment, I suppose a better way to phrase that might have been:
"X is objectively good if, for all Ys such that Y is in the set of coherent value systems, promoting X is required to promote Y; value systems can be compared against one another on the basis of the degree to which they promote objectively good things"
I don't think this is circular, although it does rest on the assumption that objective goodness exists at all, which I'm not sure how I would defend.
This seems similar to an enlightenment theory of natural rights. For instance, if one has the right to pursue happiness, and one must have life to pursue happiness, then one also has the right to life. And if one must have adequate food, water, and shelter to live, then one also has a right to adequate food, water, and shelter.
In general, if X is a right, and Y is a necessary means to X, then Y is also a right. Add that all rights, ex definitione, should be promoted and you have your first principle.
"Enlightenment theories" is a pretty broad category encompassing a number of views, not all of which are mutually reconcilable. Which Enlightenment writers or texts are you referring to here?
In general, a Kantian + Jeffersonian/American theory of rights. Specifically, Kant in the Groundwork and Metaphysics of Morals, Jefferson and the Americans in most of the early American political documents, but especially the Declaration of Independence and US Bill of Rights.
"Coherent value system" contains a lot of unstated assumptions. What if I'm a negative utilitarian supervillain and I want to destroy all life?
I think either your set of CVSes will turn out to be arbitrarily picked by criteria not outlined in that statement, or the intersection of all CVSes will turn out to be an empty set.
Still, I like the formulation and it's really philosophically elegant. I think it's a seed of an interesting idea worth exploring further.
"'Coherent value system' contains a lot of unstated assumptions. What if I'm a negative utilitarian supervillain and I want to destroy all life?"
Life is a prerequisite for promoting any values, so is objectively good according to this definition. Even a value system that long-term seeks destruction of all life still has to seek the preservation of certain life forms until they can figure out the optimal way to destroy the other life forms. Hence, under the system of judgments I've outlined, value-systems that promote the destruction of all life can be considered objectively inferior to ones that oppose this.
Things would get trickier with a value-system like Nazism or jihadism, which only tries to destroy specific subgroups of people. But I think an argument could still be made against such views based on this system. Something like: in order to properly optimize for any given value Y, I have to not only act consistently with increase Y myself, but also persuade/incentivize others to optimize for Y. Hence, supporting others who promote objectively good values is itself an objectively good value. Therefore, all else being equal, a value system which unnecessarily destroys potential good-promoting agents is inferior to one that doesn't do so. Therefore, value systems such as Nazism and jihadism, which promote unnecessary destruction of certain humans based on characteristics unrelated to their objective goodness, are objectively worse than value systems which seek to protect human life in general.
"Objectively worse" is relative, and a useful conclusion. But that's only half of what you have claimed here, and not the half most people are replying to.
To classify such a thing as "Objectively good, but less good than another thing" makes absolute "good" a useless concept.
So is Yakov Kedmi as crazy as this article makes him sound, or is this some kind of internal politics or propaganda that doesn't translate well?
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/russia-ukraine-war-final-and-complete-defeat-panic-on-russian-state-tv-over-the-war-in-ukraine/X43IJZA5DLQ6VDVP2NYSED4H3E/
"Russia will be completely discredited as a threat if they fail to beat Ukraine" doesn't seem like that crazy a take - arguably this has *already* happened, and Russia needs to find a politically acceptable peace deal before something even more embarrassing happens.
The second part, "if we lose here we also lose India, China, and the Middle East" and "if we lose here it's the beginning of the end for Russia," does sound a bit crazy. Putin still seems to have strong control over internal security, still has plenty of oil money, and still has the near-absolute external security provided by nuclear weapons. Regimes have survived on much less.
I mean people saying crazy BS on TV is a concept that should be familiar across different cultures by now... Certainly this is an inconvenient rant to Putin, who will have to deal with Zelensky, but that just means government control over TV in Russia, while far stronger that in the US, is not absolute
Over the past decade the word "status" has gained, um, significantly in status, as far as I can tell. It is treated now as a natural end in itself, nevermind the irony that whatever value status has, its only obvious value is that it is upstream from many other things people want as more terminal desires.
"Status" seems to have replaced wealth or fame or sex-appeal as a catch-all upstream cultural value. I'm talking specifically about the word "status". Concepts such as class have always been with us, but unless you believe in the dubious prospect of perfect synonyms, status means something different from class. "Status" seems to be a new concept, perhaps an American or Americanized one, to distinguish it from old European classist values.
But is status really a terminal value? Might there not be something more upstream from status? Or something with more immediate value?
How many of us are really striving for status? All?
I'm pretty sure status is a terminal value at a deep instinctive level for a significant fraction of humanity. Not all, but not rare either.
I think more modern "status" combines a few different older terms. A combination of wealth, power, influence, and some other factors, and the more of them you have to a higher degree the more "status" you have. A middle class influencer has some status. A wealthy recluse has some status. A wealthy influential politican or royalty has much more.
Oh. Just saw thread about ukr-rus community member. Don't know if I am counted... Long-time SSC reader from Russia here with psychiatric problems (I have a legal disability). Somatic health got worse in later 2 years, too.
I'd leave Russia if I could. One of main problems..... I hate programming now and have no experience doing anything else.
I worked for Russian military contractor for some time and left in late feb 2014. I guess this could earn me virtue points. But any use of these?
Regarding the book report contest, I assume it's ok to write a review of 2-3 books/essays that relate to each other?
A few years ago someone on (IIRC) Less Wrong or Slate Star Codex or somewhere like that linked to a web comic making the point that in order for an analogy to be useful two things don't have to be similar in *all* respects, only in relevant ones. Does any of you guys know where that was?
Why is metaculus pronounced like “metalculus” but not spelled that way?
Who is pronouncing it that way? I've only heard it with "meta" pronounced as in "metastasize".
Ok so how I heard it pronounced by a bunch of people at EAGx was kind of like met-al-culus? Not sure how pronunciations are written but yeah, is that not how you say it?
Anyone here work at Tesla or Goldman Sachs (or similar places) and willing to provide a referral ? If that’s you please email me (rot13) lcrvxrf18@tznvy.pbz
"An Assessment of the Evidence For Psychic Functioning"
https://www.ics.uci.edu/~jutts/air.pdf
Anyone who is smarter than I am and wants to analyze the above?
I found myself without something to read this morning - Donna Tartt, get on the ball and write another great novel please - so I bought NRSV the C S Lewis Bible. So far I’m disappointed. I was expecting a lot more exegesis than I’m getting so far.
What would be a good computer game for 4 and 7 years old kids who don't speak English? Preferably one that doesn't require internet connection.
Most games that I tried are simply too complicated for kids that small. (And then there is a specific genre of baby games where you just point mouse cursor at things and they do some animation, and a short story is told, but those require speaking the language.)
Or, not necessarily a game, but something enjoyable. Currently the only things I found are Tux Racer and Tux Paint. (Also tried GCompris, that was too boring.)
Can someone explain why Russia wants to be paid in rubles for its gas now?
My guess is that it would somehow help the value of the ruble, but I can't figure out why it would. German firms would have to, say, trade euros for rubles and then use those rubles to buy gas. So it would increase the demand for rubles in the very short run but not on net since those rubles would immediately be spent. It seems like the end result is simply using euros (or dollars) to purchase Russian gas.
I feel like a fair analogy would be if there was a huge increase in the number of people who wanted to flip used cars. If a bunch of people suddenly want to buy and then immediately sell used cars, what would that do to the price of cars? It should do nothing, right? Because the increase in demand for used cars would be perfectly matched by the increase in the supply of used cars for sale.
What am I missing?
It occurs to me now that Russia could, perhaps, force German utilities to pay a premium for the rubles it purchases, although I'm far from confident that is the explanation.
Maybe the plan is to get rubles held by foreigners back into Russia, where they can then be taken out of circulation, thereby propping up the ruble's value.
It occurs to me that this must be related to Dutch Disease, although for reasons explained above, I don't understand the mechanics of Dutch Disease either. Usually a country wants to avoid Dutch Disease, but given the collapse of the ruble, Russia very much wants at least a minor case of it right now.
I am not sure, but I suspect that the goal is to avoid sanctions that prevent Russian central bank from propping up the ruble. This article (https://www.dw.com/en/germany-says-putin-agreed-to-keep-payments-for-gas-in-euros/a-61310461) at least makes it seem that what Putin really wants is for suppliers to switch payments from sanctioned Russian central bank to non-sanctioned Gazprom Bank.
Presumably now, when Russian central bank recieves euros, they sit uselessly in some frozen account. Non-sanctioned bank could immediately exchange them for rubles, driving up the value of Russian currency on the international forex market.
Note that ruble had strenghtened to almost prewar level in the time between Putin's announcement of this plan and now, which makes me suspect that he knows what he is doing, at least in this particular matter.
Thanks. Does sound like it's about steering payments to non-sanctioned Gazprom Bank. Still not clear why Putin had to demand it in rubles -- perhaps to obfuscate the issue enough to keep Gazprom Bank out of the headlines in order to reduce the risk politicians would feel pressure to sanction it?
Some moderately well known people in the rationalist [adjacent] community[s] make a habit of thinking and writing and polling about topics relevant to everyday life, often from a rationalist perspective, rather than just writing about rationalist thought and behavior itself. However they tend to do so either in places where there is a low level of discussion-style engagement between readers (e.g. a Substack with posts that mostly get single digit comment counts), or in places with strong algorithmic sorting/filtering that leads to less influential participants having few opportunities to interact with more influential participants (e.g. Twitter threads with hundreds of replies and thousands of threaded replies, where most people won't see all the replies at any particular level).
Naming one of these people on the ACX Discord had some undesirable consequences, so I'll try naming two here and see if that goes any better: Duncan Sabien and Aella
Are there any more active and/or centralized forum-like discussion platforms where I am likely to find discourse on the sorts of posts I've described here? A forum, discourse instance, subreddit, etc. Failing that, a Discord or other chat-like environment? Not about these specific two people, but in general about the "off topic" writings of prolific rationalist community members who don't themselves directly post on such platforms.
Ways to organize a search for a missing person in LA from abroad?
TL/DR: My father-in-law is missing, asking for help/advice in coordinating search from abroad
My father-in-law, Igor, has gone missing in LA after the stroke; because of his medical condition he is confused and unable to use his phone. He doesn’t have any friends or relatives in the US, his English is not very good (he is Ukrainian and only moved to LA last year), and he doesn’t have a place to go to – his landlord has evicted him from the apartment he rented when Igor was admitted to the hospital.
My wife and I live in Georgia (the country, not the state), and we try to organize a search for him from abroad; we can’t come to the US.
So the question is – what would be the recommended course of action to coordinate the search for a missing person from abroad? We have filed a missing person report to the police, we post to Facebook groups and made a simple website with basic information – https://findigor.help/ – what are our other options?
I don't have a grand solution, but ask your network (including here) if they know anyone in LA who can spread the word on their social media.
There's a Silver Alert system the California Highway Patrol uses to search for missing elderly people: https://www.chp.ca.gov/News-Alerts/Silver-Alert
I don't know if a Silver Alert would help in this situation or not, but perhaps contacting the CHP about it would give you some ideas about what other resources could be used.
Did you file the missing person report with the LA Police Department? I can't imagine that working well. They would just be busy with too many other problems.
I would try contacting the California Highway Patrol.
Research Study of Microplastics and Human Health
Lots of [interest/concern/alarm/hysteria] over "microplastics" these days.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/could-microplastics-in-human-blood-pose-a-health-risk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microplastics
Research protocol. Take a tissue sample from the same part of the body of ten percent or more of the people who died in a year in the US. That is roughly 300,000 samples (or more).
Null hypothesis: there is no significant relationship between microplastics concentration and age at death.
One might find that people with lots of microplastics in their flesh die at a younger age, or older.
Same study could test for other substances.
Is it still allowed to edit the book review after submitting, wrt language etc?