It’s Thursday and open threads seem to begin to die about now. Plus we have permission to do political so I’m linking to a British writer who captures my feelings about 45 better than I could ever do.
Some British folk don’t like DT. Why? Well to begin with
“For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace.” …
“Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever. I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman. But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty. ”
Really. I don’t understand why anyone could like such a toad. I can at least see the other side on almost all scissor issues. Not this one. Some might say this is unimportant now that he is gone. Except he is not. He is still here and still dangerous.
There's a huge group of people who don't really like Trump but support him to stick it to the mainstream. Another group likes him because he is crass and not super smart and because he was on Wrestlemania and so forth. Sure he's a billionaire but he is *their* billionaire.
Personally what I used to tell people during the election was that: "Biden pisses on your leg and tells you it is raining. Trump shits in your mouth and tells you it is chocolate." So I don't like Biden that much or have much respect for him but Trump is so bad I can't support him either.
I see why people like Trump. Or at least support him over Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton and maybe Joe Biden. It mostly comes from a place of nihilism. Whereas the people who support him but don't like him like the fact that he agreed to appoint the three Federalist Society SC Judges they wanted. In the end his sexual assaults and his poor diplomacy skills don't matter to them. Just like the infamous story of 2 gay NYC hoteliers donating to and having a meeting with Ted Cruz even though he is homophobic and talks mad shit about NYC.
Anyone know if there are therapies for schizotypal personality disorder? Or cluster A generally? This is not for use with a real client, it’s for an assignment, but research is coming up short. So far I basically have “social skills training, and maybe risperidone or olanzapine.”
For experimental stuff, I'd look under phenibut, MDMA and psylocybin in no particular order. I'm also sure some cluster As self medicate with these in one way or another.
Content warning: This is about the Feds tracking a large child abuse/child porn ring by investigating bitcoin transactions. The child abuse is rough to read about.
I think it also implies that the promised privacy from bitcoin isn't there unless people in a network are meticulous about security, and you can't count on that.
Bitcoin keeps public records of all transactions. If one of your transactions can be connected to you, all transactions you ever made (using the same account) can.
People who are smart about this can keep multiple accounts, and strictly separate their legal and illegal activities.
This is about the education gynecologists in America get. You'd think a gynecologist would be up-to-date on important studies on atleast female hormones. Apparantly not. Something as trivial as, "Does hormone replacement therapy increase risk for heart disease?", and they have no idea that current research says a clear no. There was a recent (2 years old) Economist article, saying the previous "yes" answer to this question was a mere confusion about the data. Multiple gynacs refused to comment on the article. They said their position was simply yes.
I suspect that most people in most professions simply don't care about their craft. As long as they can keep bringing the paycheck home, there is no reason to improve. There are of course also nerds everywhere, but in most places they are a minority.
I imagine that in a rational country there would be some kind of public "medical Wikipedia" where only experts would write, and the articles would be peer-reviewed, and there would be a financial incentive to participate in the system.
> I imagine that in a rational country there would be some kind of public "medical Wikipedia" where only experts would write, and the articles would be peer-reviewed, and there would be a financial incentive to participate in the system.
Pubmed, sort of? It's not in the wiki format but it has a search, is peer-reviewed, has barriers to entry, and you're obligated to have your paper uploaded there if you take US funding.
I don't agree with this when it comes to doctors in America, at least OBGYNs.
A lot of surprise over things like this come from you, the consumer, having a different metric to judge expertise than them, the provider. OBGYNs are frequently masters at their craft: delivering babies, cesareans, gyn exams etc. That's what they do 90% of the time, and the ones I know have practical competency beyond anything I have, anywhere. The question posed above is quite possibly just not in their main wheelhouse.
There's some sense as well of confusing the prior and the posterior here. The commenter above looked something up, then asked an OBGYN, and evaluates their knowledge relative to how easy the question is when you already know the answer. But there are hundreds of questions of the same class, and an OBGYN may know well over half the right answers while the uninitiated may know none.
In summary, it's common and understandable that for a specific medical question a generally smart person can dig up facts that a specialist may not know, but it's a slightly unfair comparison.
I mean, gynacs treat a lot of women with peri menopause problems. Hormone replacement therapy is one important way to treat this. They ought to know all about good 2 year old studies saying that this effective treatment is not bad for the heart. The side-effects of hormone treatment many are worried about - they ought to be on top of it. They ought to discuss the data.
So I listen to the Bari Weiss podcast occasionally even though it feels like mostly Scott regurgitated. The latest episode with Jonathan Haidt on the evils of social media (which once again doesn't say much surprising to an ACX reader) got me thinking: What if we banned social media? How would such a ban look in practice, and would much of value be lost?
The less interesting question of how such a ban would look in practice, I'm painting a scenario where the EU, US and China come together and decide to heavily fine anyone caught doing target advertising online. Say it's for data protection reasons, a GDPR 2.0. I would guess that this would destroy the business model of Facebook, Google et al, though small fish might get under the radar as to small to fry.
The more interesting question is what would happen with the big social media giants gone. Would we revert to a golden internet age of email threads, blogging and cat photos, without any viral mobs and outrage everywhere? There would be slightly more friction for the average Joe who wants to share cat pictures online, but they could buy a blog for a couple of bucks and get going. And lot o tech talent could do better things than making people click adds more. More likely there would be a brave new internet unlike what we have seen so far, anyone want to take a shot at envisioning it?
To end on a broader note: If you were given broad powers to regulate the internet, what rules and laws would you put in place?
1) Isn't this comment section social media? Why do you want to ban ACX comments?
2) ~90% of Google's ad's business doesn't rely on user / personal targeted ads.
3) If I ruled the internet, I would rollback existing regulations and make regulating the internet impossible in the future. The one area I would regulate is to ban local governments from creating local monopolies for internet access (cable companies), thus solving the net neutrality issue. The wealth and value created for humanity from the internet was created mostly in the era when the internet had no or little regulation.
Often I try to imagine a fully de-anonymized internet; one where my mom, boss, God and child are all keenly aware of everything I have said, clicked on, or done. I think this would necessarily shift our own perceptions on forgiveness, fallibility and grace.
Additionally, I am close to one hundred percent confident this is on the way, as long as technological trends in AI, popularization of technology and Quantum Computing continue - once you have broken RSA encryption using Shor's algorithm and ML-trained a widely available neural net to ID all possible idiosyncrasies, it'll just allow anyone to doxx anyone else. But, I'm excited to hear the case against this outcome.
I'm not certain it will be a better world, just a different one, which happens to more strongly incentivize "polite behavior."
As a defense, just train a NN to obfuscate your writing into another writing style without losing the gist of the message. But anything we write online right now will probably be traceable to our real identities in 20-30 years or so, kind of scary to think about.
How about unilaterally withdrawing from social media? Do we even need to ban them for any other reason than to save the proles from themselves?
As long as the ROI of withdrawal is significantly positive (and it is), the problem will solve itself. Social media already is the TV of our generation, and it'll share the same fate. At this point the share of my friends who still have active FB accounts is rapidly dropping, about half is still on IG but most barely engage with anything there anymore.
The 1984 observation of proles not doing much before the middle class uses them as a tool is on point, I think.
I'm not sure if I prefer the previous methods of disinformation (mass media) to the current methods of disinformation, at least they tend to destabilize oppressive (=all) governmental regimes instead of enabling them.
I am trying to understand the economics of sports stadiums. New York State recently approved funding for a new stadium for the Buffalo Bills, which was of course accompanied by the usual grumbling, primarily from parts of the state far from Buffalo. I have read some number of reports claiming that sports stadiums are "bad investments" with varying definitions of "bad investment", although I think some of that is just normal imprecision on the part of journalists and commentators. I am trying to understand these claims, and, particularly if my current understanding is correct, understand how they can be true.
One divide in analyses is whether they assume the team will stay without a new stadium. The claim that funding for a new stadium that is not necessary to keep a team seems likely to be true and is less interesting to me. On the other hand, if it is assumed that the team will move without a new stadium then it seems like the stadium funding will bring a significant enough return to merit further inquiry.
I will start with the naive view. An NFL team is worth over a billion dollars (the Bills are regularly valued at or near the bottom of the league and they sold for $1.4B). It spends roughly $200M, or rather slightly less, on player salaries for year (a rough estimation based on the current salary cap). It also has a host of other employees ranging from coaches and executives who can make 7 or 8 figure salaries down to various low-wage jobs and interns. We can set aside the amount of salaries taxed out of state for away games by saying it is roughly offset by the amount of out-of-state salaries taxed in-state for home games. Thus, we get income tax on roughly $200M per year. This is a very rough estimate with lots of places for potential error, so I don't love it but it sums up a lot of background assumptions I have just from following football.
The simple counterargument is that sports revenue is mostly money that residents would have spent on other local entertainment. There is of course some out of state money, from people who travel to watch a game and the like, but it is negligible. The problem with this analysis is that sports teams, particularly NFL teams, make much of their money through national deals such as sponsorships and TV deals. The latest number I can find for national revenue sharing was $309M. I have yet to see an explanation for how this money could be replacing local spending. There are vague gestures that this money is less likely to stay in the community, but I haven't yet seen any quantified claims of this. And of course from a tax revenue standpoint, the portion of that money that gets taxed is tax revenue that would not likely have been in the local economy. One explanation is that much of the definitive work on the subject was done in the 1990s. My understanding is that national shared revenue was a smaller portion of sports team income at that time. However, I have been trying to look at more recent analyses.
So far I have read numerous accounts from news media and commentators. I have gone through the following papers, and found myself with more questions than answers:
As far as I can tell, there appears to be a consensus that there exist benefits from local teams, but those benefits are characterized as small. I am not sure what "small" is measured relative to, however.
I plan to continue to run down more of the cited works, but for now this is where I am.
Does anyone have any thoughts on the matter? Any papers or articles that do a particularly good job of explaining things? Explanations of what I've missed? General opinions on state funding of public works in the periphery?
These small market teams give a community something to be proud of or at least give them a bit of national recognition. Even Buffalonians [sp?] who don't care a whit about football are probably glad to be known for something other than monstrous snowfalls.
I done care about football myself, but the perennially hapless Vikings give the Twin Cities a bit more of a sheen than it would have if it were only a particularly cold Omaha.
Not sure about the US, but in Europe, sports teams, particularly in what Americans call soccer, play important role as a focus of community building, which is a public good not captured in purely monetary analysis
My first question would be - worth it to whom? You are focussed on income tax, with a state providing money for the stadium. What about the municipal level?
Locally, we had a team move about an hour's drive, within the state, to a new stadium funded in part by municipal tax payers. The municipality probably pays rather more than they contributed to the stadium; every game requires a police presence, with various streets closed to through traffic, and commuters directed elsewhere. I doubt the team is paying the overtime required.
Then there are the other costs. Commuters spend more time getting to and from work, because of the stadium traffic, and no one compensates them for the externality. The spectators tend to leave a lot of mess wherever they park, compared to other users of the same parking spots. That's compensated for when they use paid parking - rates during home games are much higher than at other times, presumably in part funding post-game cleanup - but not when they find other ways to park.
The theory is that the municipality is compensated by increased sales tax revenue, because of spectator purchases, and this is also a boon to local merchants; I've never seen numbers, particularly actual measured numbers - rather than numbers optimistically projected in advance.
As a person who used to work in the area shut down by every home game, I've decided to permanently boycott the business that bought the right to have their name associated with the stadium. As I see it, their brand stands for traffic jams, broken glass, and similar amenities. But I'm a curmudgeon who never watches professional sports.
Getting back to the purely financial, some municipal budgets may have state contributions, so the municipal budget issue is likely relevant even at the state level, even if those contributions are supposedly unrelated.
But I'm completely without expertise here. I just know what I don't like ;-(
I sometimes find a plum in Hilaire Belloc's writings, and here's one from a 1923 collection of essays. This one is on footnotes. Here's how we start:
"It is pleasant to consider the various forms of lying, because that study manifests the creative ingenuity of man and at the same time affords the diverting spectacle of the dupe. That kind of lying which, of the lesser sorts, has amused me most is the use of the footnote in modern history."
And then he goes after Gibbon:
"A first-rate example of both these tricks combined in Gibbon is the famous falsehood he propagated about poor St. George, of whom, Heaven be witness, little enough is known without having false stories foisted upon him. You will find it in his twenty-third chapter, where he puts forward the absurd statement that St. George was identical with George of Cappadocia, the corrupt and disgraceful bacon-contractor and the opponent of St. Athanasius.
This particular, classical example of the Evil Footnote is worth quoting. Here are the words: "The infamous George of Cappadocia has been transformed into the renowned St. George of England."
And here is the footnote:
This transformation is not given as absolutely certain, but as extremely probable. See Longueruana, Tom. I, p. 194."
But the problem is, I am left here hanging by a thread. Who was this corrupt bacon-contractor? What was so bad about bacon-contracting? And how on earth did St. Athanasius get dragged in?
And a nice sample of how pop culture history gets started, and why you have to go back to the original sources (which reminds me, I must chase up the wicked bacon-contractor of Cappadocia):
"But I myself have had a similar experience (as the silent man said when his host had described at enormous length his adventure with the tiger). I was pursued for years by a monstrous piece of nonsense about some Papal Bull forbidding chemical research: and the footnote followed that lie. It was from Avignon that the thing was supposed to have come. It seemed to me about as probable as that Napoleon the Third should have forbidden the polka. At last — God knows how unwillingly! — I looked the original Bull up in the big collection printed at Lyons. It was as I had suspected. The Bull had nothing whatever to do with chemical experiments. It said not a word against the honest man who produces a poison or an explosive mixture to the greater happiness of the race. It left the whole world free to pour one colourless liquid into another colourless liquid and astonish the polytechnic with their fumes. What it did say was that if anybody went about collecting lead and brass under the promise of secretly turning them into silver and gold, that man was a liar and must pay a huge fine, and that those whom he had gulled must have their metal restored to them — which seems sound enough."
EDIT: Okay, that George was an Arian bishop, which explains why he was an opponent of St. Athanasius. He also seems to have mingled his clerical role with business, though I'm still not sure where the bacon comes in: "He showed himself a keen man of business, "buying up the nitre-works, the marshes of papyrus and reed, and the salt lakes".
How insane is it on a scale of 1 - 10 that the medication changing the chemistry in my brain is prescribed by my psychiatrist in scribbly ink instead of helvetica 14 font?
This seems to be on its way out. Even before the pandemic, just about all my doctors would send in prescriptions to the pharmacy through a secure online messaging system. It's been many years since I was last given a paper prescription.
Has anyone studied the effect of seeing a handwritten prescription on patient compliance? Neither a null effect nor a small positive effect would surprise me. A larger positive effect or any negative effect would indeed surprise me.
2. If the pharmacy has any confusion about what the doctor scribbled, he's only a phone call away, so this is a potential minor inconvenience. Giving out the wrong medicine basically never happens.
True, I guess as @A. is saying I'm more concerned about the situations where the pharmacist doesn't make the phone call because they're assuming they've read it right when they might not have.
I honestly have no idea though, it may or may not be a real problem, it just seems antiquated and error prone for no real reason, when the stakes are really high.
Having seen how EMR systems work, I actually don't agree with your perception of the risk of handwritten prescriptions. Personally I'd rather take a handwritten prescription any day, because there are fewer things that can go wrong.
With a handwritten prescription, the risk is only that the pharmacist will read it wrong. With a prescription sent through an EMR system, you first risk the doctor screwing up while clicking through a bunch of dialog boxes in order to choose and send the prescription, then you risk the system doing something completely unexpected instead of sending the prescription the doctor asked to send (yes, this sometimes happens), then you risk the pharmacy's system not getting it right because what the other system sent may not be so well compatible with it.
Don't get me wrong - I also think mistakes are probably sufficiently rare, but, given how a normal non-ACX-reading human operates, we have no idea how often they happen.
Or we almost never find out when it happens. Many people will not check, especially since medication name mismatches routinely happen - the doctor might prescribe a brand-name, the pharmacy will fill it with a generic.
Does intermittent sleep deprivation (vigils) increase the efficiency of the effects of sleep as intermittent fasting increases the efficiency of metabolism and digestion?
Isn't that the dreaded sleep debt you're supposed to avoid?
I know the body prioritizes NREM when tired, to the extent you can have barely any REM after such a vigil. For the medium-term effects you'd need to polysomnograph people for weeks, no idea if anyone bothered.
A few months ago I read that a person who has had their brain hemispheres severed is able to function, but the two hemispheres behave as if they are separate agents. The right hemisphere might believe in God while the left hemisphere is an atheist. They might prefer different food, different music, different movies, etc. (You can get different answers from a split-brained person by having them write with different hands.)
So does that mean a normal-fused brain is essentially two agents which are able to cooperate through communication, giving the appearance of one agent? Or is it one agent that has been multiplied by two after surgery?
These questions got me wondering if it is possible that the human brain has hundreds or thousands of separate agents within it which are entirely conscious but we aren't aware of them because they don't have a way to communicate articulately with the outside world. For instance, maybe the part of our brains which regulate our blood pressure and heart rate is a conscious agent, as wide awake as you or I, although it thinks to itself in a language we wouldn't recognize, experiences sensations we are unaware of, and to the extent it signals other parts of the brains, themselves separate agents, it does so in a manner we wouldn't recognize as articulate communication, yet it gets across the point it needs to to other parts of the brain which work with other parts of the body.
Meditative traditions maintain the coherent self is a lie and you're essentially a bundle of semi-conscious parts that surface and fade to the background. This seems roughly correct.
I always liked the pretentious formulation of the Persona games, which they probably stole from Jung - of personas emerging from "the sea of your soul".
You should read The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist. It dives more deeply into this subject than any other form of media ever created. It's also extraordinarily well-researched and meticulously cited.
The book provides a mountain of evidence that there's only one consciousness. Split-brain individuals generally only have their corpus callosum severed. The two hemispheres can still communicate via other routes that exist in the brain's subcortical structures. That way of communicating is just slower, leading to weird behaviors like the ones you describe.
I can't remember if I originally got these links from Scott or Gwern but CGP Grey had a popular video about split brain duality and I keep them ready to go for whenever I see it pop up.
My instinct is that the hemisphere split just happens to be easy to do because of our brain structure, and yes other separations would make new personalities.
Some thoughts (I’ve no professional experience to back them)
* A severe brain injury causing personality change is similar to the hemisphere split - just only one part of the brain is left.
* Internal Family Systems and tulpas are relevant metaphors (if they are!).
* Just our ability to socially model other peoples personalities is the information processing needed for part of a new personality.
In all these senses the brain contains multiple personalities at all times. My guess would be that once we understand the mechanisms that make brains work we will reevaluate what a personality even is, and none of this will be surprising at all.
Love the idea that parts of the brain - or indeed of the gut nervous system! - are conscious themselves.
There are more neurons in our small intestine than in a fruit bat. So it certainly seems possible it is as conscious as the bat.
The fact that we can converse with "other people" in dreams who seem distinct from the "self" also suggests that the brain can be running multiple agents at once, and they can communicate internally. Whether those other agents are truly conscious is a tough question.
If AGI is our creation and it is superior to humans, then we should want it to exist. If it kills all the humans as a consequence of its superiority, what's the problem? We should want our children to bury us and to be better than us.
The real danger is alien AGI not created by humans which could potentially destroy our AGI progeny.
I deny that "kills all the humans as a consequence of its superiority" is a coherent concept. If my children are unable to see why killing all humans is a bad idea, then that necessarily implies their inferiority to average humans. This holds regardless of whether the children are themselves human or AGI.
I mean, there's certainly an entire branch of moral philosophy that absolutely accepts "The strong do as they wish and the weak suffer what they must" as essentially the sum total of ethics (Social Darwinism and other eugenics-associated schools of thought). The real question is "should we take Social Darwinism seriously as an ethical position?"
Intelligence (defined by the ability to achieve certain goal states) doesn't necessarily imply "superiority." For instance, we wouldn't want our children to become highly intelligent serial killers.
Any psycho can be a serial killer, but an AGI capable of destroying all humanity? That motherfucker is going to be badass on multiple levels. That's probably an AI that can appreciate Schubert, seduce a virgin and dunk a basketball.
Though really, if the alien AGI is superior to ours, what's wrong with having the best monstrous- contemplator-of-absolutely-everything win? Why get stuck on loyalty to our own fucking species, planet, solar system or galaxy?
Fair point. Perhaps this conquering technology will create a utopia for itself and have richer, happier experiences in this universe than humans ever had. I mean, all we really did was grouse. I say, All Hail the Conquering Hero!
What's going on with that Metaculus prediction: 36% up in the last 5 hours on Russia using chemical weapons in UKR. I can't find anything in the news, that would correspond to such a change.
Not sure if better to post this here or under the newest Monday post - let's see.
From the NYT: "A signal of how much worse the war could get came in an interview that aired on Russian state television with Eduard Basurin, a separatist commander. Mr. Basurin said that with Ukrainian forces ensconced in underground fortifications at a steel plant in Mariupol, storming the redoubt did not make sense. Instead, he said, Russian forces needed to first block the exits and then “turn to the chemical troops who will find a way to smoke the moles out of their holes.”
In his latest nightly address, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine seized on that chemical weapons threat, saying Russian forces were preparing for what he called a “new stage of terror against Ukraine.”
A Ukrainian unit in Mariupol asserted Monday on social media that Russian invaders had already used chemical weapons there. Lesia Vasylenko, a member of Ukraine’s Parliament, made a similar charge. But those reports could not be independently confirmed."
Notoriously problematic (as in really, not only in Putin propaganda, somewhat Nazi adjacent) Azov battalion irregulars in Mariupol reported that "Russian troops used kind of chemical dropped from a drone, those impacted have respiratory failure, vestibulo-atactic syndrome", just after some guy from Donetsk separatists administration allegedly called for using chemical weapons on them on Russian media. But Mariupol is pretty cut off from the rest of Ukraine, so it is hard to confirm what is happening there
Thanks, also for being able to mention 'Putin propaganda' and 'Azov being problematic' in one sentence. Lately I seem to be surrounded by people going directly from 'Putin is the agressor, which is bad' to 'everything related to UKR must be saintly' and 'if you're claiming otherwise, you're probably a traitor'. Probably nothing new, but still hard to bear.
There is report from Mariupol. Not yet confirmed, and it the effects seem small, but seems reasonable to update upwards a little. My personal guess is a chemical storage unit was hit or something, based on the effects not seeming to be very lethal.
Wondering whether to delete this, to avoid spreading rumours. Or the opposite - better have more reflective/sceptical persons see this first before it potentially hits the news?
Happy to get your feedback on this, also for future similar occasions.
Thanks. Don't know about Azov, but just saw a Twitter post claiming there might have been some use, with health issues caused but no deaths for now. I guess the fact that news haven't taken it up yet, means we don't know much so far. I'd very much hope the issue disappears soon again. That's a hope, not a prediction.
I will be subletting 3 bedrooms in a 4bd/1bath victorian apartment in NOPA (near Golden Gate Park, Alamo Square, & Divisadero). Available May 1st. Longer commitments preferred (available up to 11 months starting May 1). Ideal situation for a 3 singles, or a couple (or thruple?) that each want their own office. 4th bedroom will occasionally have my roommate in it but generally no more than 1-2 nights/month with notice. Below market rate.
Did anyone tried to fight inflation via differential taxes on consumption? I.e. taxing various non-essential consumption items (of course, definition of what is non-essential would have to be specified) in order to induce people to save money without forcing them to cut on essentials? Why it wouldn’t work?
As far as I understood, this is Lerner's functional finance. Basically the argument against is that it would work, but try increasing taxes during inflation and see how fast you lose your position as head of government. The central bank is independent precisely because this way it can raise interest rate without fear of voters' retaliation.
Also, the current inflation is supply driver so monetary or fiscal intervention are not going to have a great effect
Yeah, I agree with your first paragraph (not the second, but that is a different story). But in principle, just like we now have independent technocratic authority setting interest rates, we could instead have Central Consumption Taxes Bureau, which would act as a monetary stabilizing authority
Same in California, along with quite a laundry list of other carve outs and exemptions, eg transportation ground control stations, itinerant veteran vendors, blood storage units, and museums: https://www.cdtfa.ca.gov/formspubs/pub61.pdf
Many countries do have some kind of differential consumption tax. Here in Australia we have a 10% GST which applies to everything except "essentials" which leads to dumb inconsistencies but generally isn't unworkable.
As an example of the kind of dumb political shitfights it can cause, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tampon_tax -- eventually the government caved under political pressure from feminists and agreed to remove the tax on tampons, but the tax on toilet paper remains in place.
It's not intended to fight inflation though (it's more of a dumb political compromise from the late 90s). I'm not sure how you think it might work to fight inflation.
I meant that in a sense that in times of high inflation, consumption taxes could became more progressive, so buying of e.g. groceries or housing would be taxed less and buying e.g. iphones would be taxed more. Then, after prices would stabilize, consumption tax rates would again became more equal.
Yeah, problems of political feasibility with that are obvious, but I am more interested on whether someone thinks it is a good idea on the merits, assuming it would be controlled by some technocratic institution relatively isolated from political pressure (like central banks are now).
The first thing that stands out to me is how prone to abuse it is. If I'm Danny Yogurt and I make yogurt, you can bet your sweet ass I'm bribing someone to declare sour cream non-essential. I'm doing that day one with as much of my budget as I can throw at it.
The second thing is that it's extra steps. If you want people to save more, you can just tell them to do THAT instead of banning ice cream, and they get more choice while you still get your goal.
The biggest thing seems to be that this seems like a way to fight inflation by... intentionally tanking the economy? Like usually you want to avoid making commerce hard, because that makes less taxable events and eventually much less productive people. In this case you are making artificial friction with all those things as your goal - at least on a superficial level it seems like you'd want to avoid all that.
Or stocks. You are saying this like it would be a bad thing, but in fact, it seems me that what is needed in high inflation environment is to reduce consumption in the least painful way possible. At first approximation it does not much matter in what assets would people put their increased savings
With PM I don't mind, with real estate there's already a problem where people need to live somewhere but all "somewheres" became instruments for speculation.
People can live in instruments of speculation just fine. If you are worried about housing affordability, it seems to me that current approach to inflation fighting via raising interest rates is, let's say, suboptimal in this respect
If you play them, what are your biggest strategy/simulation/rpg game user interface pet peeves?
Maybe you want to do something in CK3 or DW2 and you have to check multiple different menus/windows to find all the relevant info and then click back, sometimes many clicks and sometimes moving around the map?
Just make the whole thing scriptable and let users fix it for you.
Endless Space 2 drives me up the wall recently with the fact that you can look at the map, or at your star systems, you can even cycle them without going back to the map - but then you have no idea where the system is, spatially and geopolitically. When figuring out the build queue for the next few turns you lose all the context. Is the system close to the front and you should build some ships to contribute to the war effort? Maybe it's threatened by an enemy invasion and you should build bunkers and reinforce? Maybe it's in a prime spot for a trading company HQ? But you'll never know without changing views (with an annoying fullscreen animation).
Game UIs should be built for the power user - some combination of hotkeys and mods should allow you to minimize all unnecessary actions, and efficiently make the decisions that high-level gameplay requires. If e.g. for optimal play your game requires constant micromanagement of the population across dozens of systems, and the UI for moving population around is not streamlined, you will drive off your most dedicated players.
The vast majority of players don't use UI mods, and often aren't even aware that is a thing. Maybe a better system would be to let the player modify the UI in game themselves? I'm not sure how feasible such a "modular" UI would be but editing UI files is pretty blech. I guess maybe hotloading the UI helps editing code files but wouldn't graphical UI modding be better?
The most you can do is make all actions bindable to hotkeys (the Endless games also suck in this regard). In the age of Steam Workshop and 1-click mod installation, I think it's reasonable to assume that while casual players won't use mods, dedicated players who keep the community alive will figure out a "must have" quality of life mod set. For example, Endless Legend and Endless Space 2 are played online almost exclusively with their respective community patches, as the vanilla games are very flawed. EL's patch cannot even be installed via Steam as it changes game DLLs.
Stellaris is also a really great example of a game that embraced modders and got an incredible amount of QoL and quality expansion content out of it.
Well if by embraced modders you mean suckered them into doing all the work while also charging ~$200 for the full DLC set then yes. Many Paradox games do that. CK3 is going hard in that direction.
I have some reservations about the Paradox monetization scheme too. On the other hand, Stellaris is in constant iteration and content development six years after release, including reworks of important game systems that fix old DLCs and the vanilla game. For said ES2 I'd rather pay $200 for DLCs and have a game devs give a shit about, instead of a beautiful but barely tested MVP.
I find the notifications in Civ6 to be quite annoying - I didn't understand how to dismiss them for quite a while, and would end up with a notification telling me about someone completing Stonehenge for the whole game. But even once you discover how to dismiss them, you now have the problem of having to dismiss absolute buckets of notifications every turn eg when war is declared and 10 city states follow along based on Suzerain status. A 'dismiss all' button would go a long way.
It would be really nice if Policy cards would actually show the net benefit of enabling/removing them, instead of forcing you to attempt to calculate it in your head. I guess I can imagine an argument for that removing some of the fun/skill/whatever, and making it more about just picking the obvious maximums, but I don't buy it.
The UI in general is clunky in a lot of places for large empires, eg having to click on the religion icons associated with a city to see the pressure levels and thus only being able to see one at a time, not being able to see citizen placement for multiple cities at the same time, etc.
There's also a minor but frustrating inconsistency between placement for certain districts, where in most cases, it will show you hexes you could buy in order to place it, but for eg Encampments, if you don't currently have a hex that meets the requirements, it won't show you the ones you could buy that do.
Notification spam is terrible and turns some 4Xes into the equivalent of clicking through a social media feed.
Perhaps having a region-based feed would be better. If I zoom onto a city I can see recent military happenings, production notifications etc, but after zooming out I just want an overview (maybe a number of events of a given type) + global announcements about e.g. new researched technologies. The worst thing about responding to notifications is the constant task switching - they can throw you around your empire in a random pattern without providing context.
I really like that, unless there are valid reasons to leave cities or research idle. The game shouldn't let players shoot themselves in the foot in obvious ways (cf. trap options in build-based games).
Notifications are very interesting to me. Lots of games have many complaints, some contradictory but mostly in agreement, about notifications. Very hard to get right I think, especially in super complex games. I've always wondered about something like only having the most important ones show as popups and finding some other way to represent the ones that are typically less relevant. Combine them somehow by type, categorize them some other way, etc.
Modal popups that force you to make a decision, and lock out the rest of the UI. So you can't scroll around the map or UI looking at data on which to base your decision.
I believe captchas will often analyze characteristics of the user outside of the stated task. Such as how the mouse moves, how long it takes them to complete the task, what browser settings they have, etc. This is why those "Check this box to make sure you are not a robot" buttons work at all. So its not just about the image recognition (which is mostly just a side benefit for google at this point)
With browser settings and mouse tracking, you are only relying on what the http client is sending you, and nothing stops the client from lying.
I suppose it is basically a cat and mouse game: on the one side you have bot operators trying to find configurations that work, and on the other side you have capcha operators analyzing past data for bots and trying to insert more checks.
Just like with software based DRM, where the premise basically seems to be "our software can detect the circumstances under which it runs, even though nothing prevents the OS from lying to it" I feel that one has to be pretty desperate to compete on a playing field so level.
Good crypto is based on hard problems -- where the playing field is very much tilted in your favor -- and so are good captchas. Image recognition used to be a reasonable hard problem for computers to perform. Obviously this is rapidly becoming untrue, the OCR of google translate tends to catch tiny production labels on food packages I would have taken much longer to find.
DALL-E 2 isn't really the project to watch for defeating captcha. There's been tons of progress in object recognition and segmentation in the last decade, but DALL-E isn't really part of that line of work.
I mean, isn't object recognition and segmentation kind of the flip side of object "painting" and composition ?
Consider the theories linking perception and prediction (and cognition), "neural processing consist[ing] of two streams: bottom-up stream of sense data, and a top-down stream of predictions"
It's the flip side, and in particular it's the more easy side. My point was mostly that there's so much work on that problem, that DALL-E should not cause you to update on it.
To the perception/prediction point, people do use prediction/reconstruction based objectives for pretraining models for those tasks, but they look very different from how DALL-E works.
I owe the comments section an apology. "Wrong answers only" is a dangerous game to play in the comments. To my complete and utter surprise, Elon Musk did something on Twitter while I was playing the game "wrong answers only: what is Elon Musk doing on Twitter". As he had done a dozen things on Twitter already over the weekend, perhaps I should not have been surprised he did one more. But I was surprised.
Anyhow: "Wrong answers only" is leaving the comments section at this time. So long, farewell, etc.
Thinking about it from Musk's perspective, I can understand why he did what he did. His most profitable company, Tesla, doesn't have a PR department. I guess they used to, but decided it wasn't worth it so they got rid of it. (Journalists routinely complain about this. If you call Tesla asking them for a quote, they tell you they don't have someone responsible for that kind of thing. Which is pretty remarkable for such a huge company.) They also don't run ads on TV or pretty much anywhere. They rely almost exclusively on word-of-mouth, and I guess that works for them, because they're sold out through the rest of the year for most of their models. Their only 'marketing' department consists of the Tesla shops in states that disallow direct sales of Tesla so employees direct people to their website and answer questions about the vehicles.
(Why can't they do what other car companies do? Because they're not built on the dealer model. My understanding is that most dealers make a lot of their profits on the service side, but Tesla cars don't have the same service needs as ICE vehicles - although I can attest from personal experience that they do have parts that break and need to be repaired.)
All this to say that Tesla relies heavily on their quirky CEO's ability to communicate through Twitter. That's good for them, because he's one of the top 10 most followed people on that platform, but Musk can see the writing on the wall. He gets a lot of engagement because he's willing to say things that might be wrong, but that spur engagement. If Twitter suspends Musk, that jeopardizes a huge part of Tesla's marketing strategy.
It's literally worth billions of dollars to Elon to keep his Twitter account unfettered from the rules creep that might someday shut him down. He could easily lose 50% of his investment in the company and it still be a worthwhile investment overall, if it keeps him relevant on the platform.
Beyond that, it's clear Musk wants to improve Twitter's overall performance - which would in turn help his bottom line out. When Musk asked if Twitter was dying because some of its top influencers don't engage with the platform, he's asking whether his marketing arm needs to be more robust so it can stay relevant. Musk doesn't want the conservative version of Twitter to come along and fracture his audience. He wants Twitter to get bigger and better, so he can keep doing what he's doing and keep growing his car company.
There ought to be statues of Gorbachev's bff Alexander Yakovlev (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Yakovlev) who was instrumental in ending the USSR's oppression, but as far as I can tell there aren't any. I've been trying to find a copy of his book Digging Out for years but it's impossible to find anywhere. There's an out of stock stub on Amazon and a previewless stub on google books, but it's not in any local libraries, 130 online bookstores, libgen, zlibrary, ebay. The Library of Congress' catalog doesn't even know it exists. Does anyone have any tips on finding extremely rare books?
What if someone says "the mind doesn't follow physical laws", you respond, "not true, we know from physics that everything works the same way", and they say, "well no, actually there is an entirely new set of laws of mental stuff, we just don't know them because we don't conduct physical experiments with human brains. If you did build an atom-based simulator of the brain, you'd realize that it makes wrong predictions..."
How would you respond to this? It sounds silly, but do we, in fact, have empirical proof that the brain works within the laws of physics? How does that proof look like?
What if someone says "a chair doesn't follow physical laws", you respond, "not true, we know from physics that everything works the same way", and they say, "well no, actually there is an entirely new set of laws of chair stuff, we just don't know them because we don't conduct physical experiments with chairs. If you did build an atom-based simulator of a chair, you'd realize that it makes wrong predictions..."
How would you respond to this? It sounds silly, but do we, in fact, have empirical proof that a chair works within the laws of physics? How does that proof look like?
The strongest argument against the classical model of a brain is neurons as amplifiers of quantum noise (Penrose's Orch-OR). If that is true then no response is possible - what the theory interprets as signal, orthodox physics dismiss as noise. Good luck proving there is/isn't a ghost in the randomness.
You can't prove a categorical. If I say "all ravens are black" that cannot be proved, no matter how many ravens I examined, because I'd have to examine each and every bird everywhere and everywhen. In the same sense, it cannot be proved that the brain always works within the laws of physics, because you'd have to list each and every thing the brain does -- every chemical reaction, every twitch in the EEG, every feeling and inspiration, and trace them all back to the movement of some fundamental particles and verify it follows the appropriate dynamical laws.
What we can do is disprove negative categoricals. So, if I say "no ravens are white" that can be disproved by finding a single white raven. We tend to regard statements as "true" in some sense if their negative stated as a categorical has not been disproved after a long and diligent effort, e.g. if I have looked and looked for many a year and not found a white raven, I am tempted to assert "yes, all ravens are black" but this is just a shorthand for "I have not yet been able to disprove the statement that there are no non-black ravens."
In this case, the negative categorical is "there are no mental processes that cannot be explained as the result of ordinary matter obeying the known laws of physics." It could be disproved by finding just one example of the brain doing something that was clearly inexplicable by the known laws of physics. And indeed, nobody has yet found such an example, and so it's on this basis that we say "what the brain does is explicable by our theories of physics" -- which, again, is just shorthand for "no one has yet been able to disprove the assertion that there are no brain processes that can't be explained by our theories of physics."
That's not a good analogy. Our technology for looking at ravens is almost infinitely more advanced and better than our technology for observing the complete inside activity of living human brains. We understand so little about how brains work that it's completely fair to be skeptical of the idea that they follow all the rules we think we know about physics.
It's a somewhat circular argument, but everything works within the laws of physics, with the laws of physics being defined as the laws that everything works within. If we discovered apparent magic in the tubules of the brain then we'd simply expand the laws of physics to encompass it.
The brain works within the laws of physics, and so do the the technologies that transmit the products of one brain into the another brain. But many products of the brain do not obey the laws of physics. For example, this sentence, which is a product of my brain, does not.
If you want to pursue this line of questioning to the upshot, William Seager has an excellent textbook called "Theories of Consciousness". Even reading the intro would give you a good lay of the land. It's on LibGen. Or, for the quick and dirty anti-physicalist take, read David Chalmers on panosychism (whichever paper has the most citations -- I can't remember what it's called).
The brain works within laws of physics that we may not currently understand, but still exist as physical properties governing the movement of matter in our universe. We all followed the law of gravity before Newton "discovered" it, same for whatever actually underpins consciousness (unless consciousness doesn't exist)
I'd say that the software in the abstract does not but that the concrete instantiation of the software does (in entanglement with the hardware), much like grammar does not but the actual sound waves of spoken language do.
There is 1:n mapping from the algorithmic layer to the implementation layer. Software is written on the algorithmic layer; there are several ways to run it (possible "implementation"). But every implementation obeys the physical laws, i.e., is a way to realize the algorithmic steps using physical mechanisms.
So if your question was "is the logic behind software specific to our physics", the answer is no, but if it was "does any instance of software running work within the laws of physics" (and that's what I thought you meant), the answer is yes.
You could have a software in some other universe that uses some other laws of physics in hardware, so in that sense it's an independent conceptual layer. But software in our universe all seems to use our matter and energy and the laws of physics that govern them.
A pure software function can represent a mathematical function which doesn’t in theory depend on physical reality. I mean you can read and learn coding without any concern about how transistor logic gates work.
In practice software has to run somewhere. In theory it’s it’s own thing.
Technically yeah, but practically no. There are so many layers of abstraction in between that they may as well be completely unrelated most of the time.
As I understand it, Software is represented as energy states in hardware. It can’t exist without it. Whether on a computer, written on paper or in your mind, something physical has to do the work. What do you mean with „practically no“?
To me, asking if software follows the laws of physics is the same as whether billiard balls are consistent with atomic theory. Maybe they're made out of something thats made out of something thats made out of atoms, but thats not relevant for predicting how they'll move.
In fact, I'd readily believe that the universe is a patch job where detail is turned on as needed, and pool is played with platonic spheres until someone whips out an electron microscope.
I think RK may mean something analogous to this: Human language is produced by brains, vocal chords, etc., all of which follow the laws of physics. But language itself does not.
It is not in any way silly. If you accept 1) that human brains are conscious, 2) that a tree, a rock, a liver, or an atom is not conscious, and 3) that our current laws of physics we use to model trees, rocks, livers, and atoms do not describe anything like consciousness, it follows that the laws of physics as we currently understand them cannot explain the human brain, and that the human brain does not solely follow physical laws. Of course, there could be laws we haven't discovered yet that do describe both consciousness and rocks/atoms--but I don't see why you'd call them physical laws instead of a physical-mental hybrid.
The mind-body problem has been an open problem in philosophy for thousands of years. Not every philosopher is a physicalist. In this informal poll, 57% of philosophers are physicalists, but 27% are non-physicalists and 16% are classified as "other": https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/04/29/what-do-philosophers-believe/
So you're not going to find a definitive argument that the brain works within the laws of physics, because there's no consensus that it does. This also means that there are many counterarguments to what I wrote in the paragraph above. For example, you could deny premises 1, 2, or 3, or you could say that any new laws that can describe consciousness ought to be qualitatively similar to existing laws, such that we'd be justified in calling them physical.
I think you need to be more careful in your framing of 3, due to (weak) emergence.
As a super overused example, think about Conway's game of life. We can write down the rules extremely concisely, and obviously we know them perfectly. However, the simulation those rules define is Turing complete, so it can execute any computation! Think about running a protein folding solver within those rules. It's perfectly possible (although it'd be slow), but the rules say nothing about proteins, potential energy, etc.
My point is, just because the ground-level rules of a system don't include some phenomenon, doesn't mean that phenomenon can't exist in that system. Other examples for physics include the phases of matter (solid, liquid, etc.), and fluid dynamics. Those phenomena are not present in the lowest level description of the universe, and yet they definitely follow from it.
Qualia cannot be derived from deterministic physics in any way - why would a particular configuration of matter be privileged in being conscious? From a reductionist perspective there is no difference between a 9nm processor and a water heater, they both just move electrons around and generate heat.
If you assume modeling a particular function on a physical substrate gives it a subjective experience, why is the physical substrate even required? The function exists within its own mathematical universe regardless of whether you happen to have a piece of meat or silicon to run it. Cf. Egan's Permutation City for a really mind-blowing exploration of this concept.
I agree, and the plausibility of physicalism depends on the plausibility of weak emergence. For consciousness, I find it extremely implausible. What do forces, fields, atoms, and molecules have to do with love, hate, and fear? The difference between them is so vast that it is inconceivable how any theory, no matter how clever, can bridge it.
A super overused argument against physicalism is the philosophy zombie. A philosophical zombie looks and acts exactly like a human, but has no consciousness. Any set of physical laws you come up with to explain human behavior, applies equally to the zombie. Yet any such laws are insufficient, because they don't explain the most fundamental difference between the zombie and the human: the latter is conscious and the former is not. If philosophical zombies are even conceivable, then no set of laws developed based on the physical world can ever explain the mental world unless they explicitly take into account mental phenomena as something distinct from physical phenomena, at which point they're not merely physical laws.
"The difference between them is so vast that it is inconceivable how any theory, no matter how clever, can bridge it."
Inconceivable? I don't think that word means what you think it means. Whether the difference between the two can be bridged by clever theories is precisely the point under dispute; simply asserting that you can't imagine the other side being right is not an argument.
It also occurs to me that I don't think I've ever actually seen any argument against physicalism that wasn't purely reliant on question-begging. This includes the zombie argument, which essentially boils down to:
1) Iff physicalism is false, then there could be a being that is physically identical to a human but not conscious
2) Physicalism is false
3) Therefore, there could be a being that's physically identical to a human but not conscious
4) Therefore, physicalism is false
Most variants of the argument are careful not to explicitly state that they assume 2) as a premise. But they are unintelligible otherwise, because without it there is literally no reason whatsoever to take 3) seriously.
"Whether the difference between the two can be bridged by clever theories is precisely the point under dispute; simply asserting that you can't imagine the other side being right is not an argument."
Whereas the physicalists simply assert that the difference can be bridged, but have not succeeded in bridging the difference despite centuries of trying. Until the difference is bridged, people who assert that it can be bridged are relying on intuition and judgment just as much as those who assert it cannot be. To me, their position is akin to a pre-modern witch claiming confidently that it is possible to turn a dog into a planet, even though planets are very different in nature from dogs, even though no remotely similar transformation has been demonstrated, and even though no existing theory comes close to describing what a planet actually is. The only position that does not rely on intuition about conceivability is a completely agnostic one which refuses to take a position until further discoveries are made.
You also misunderstand the zombie argument. The zombie argument is not about this universe, but about all possible universes. Is it conceivable to have a universe that has everything we now consider the laws of physics (quantum mechanics, gravity, etc), but without consciousness? If so, is it conceivable that this universe could have beings that behave very similarly to humans? If it is conceivable, that means the laws of physics we currently have for our universe cannot, by themselves, explain consciousness; they can only explain behavior, which the thought experiment has shown is not sufficient for explaining consciousness. We would need to add some extra "magic" to the laws of physics so that they can explain consciousness. What would this "magic" consist of? They would logically be related to consciousness and its interaction with the material world--in short, a theory for the mental world. At that point, you're in dualist territory.
If you take the opposite approach of saying p-zombies are inconceivable in any universe, then you need to meet your own burden of proving why. According to yourself, "simply asserting that you can't imagine the other side being right is not an argument." So why are p-zombies inconceivable?
"Whereas the physicalists simply assert that the difference can be bridged, but have not succeeded in bridging the difference despite centuries of trying"
We haven't? I've personally had my conscious experiences shut off and restarted several times, and in every single case it was done entirely by playing around with "forces, fields, atoms and molecules". At no point did anyone have to turn off any special magic unbound by regular physics. I know a few other people who've had their conscious experience temporarily shut off or deliberately altered, and the same was true for them. That chemicals and conscious experiences have quite a bit to do with one another looks pretty well-established to me.
"Until the difference is bridged, people who assert that it can be bridged are relying on intuition and judgment just as much as those who assert it cannot be"
Perhaps in a narrow technical sense, but not in any meaningful way. Even if we didn't already have pretty substantial progress towards bridging the gap, the fact would remain that physicalists are just applying our standard attitudes regarding unexplained phenomena in science to one specific case. Non-physicalists are demanding that their pet topic get special exemption from the usual rules. Hence the default presumption is against them until they can provide a compelling reason why their case is unique.
"You also misunderstand the zombie argument The zombie argument is not about this universe, but about all possible universes"
It doesn't matter whether the reasoning goes "physicalism is false, therefore p-zombies could exist in some possible universe, therefore physicalism is false" or "physicalism is false, therefore p-zombies could exist in our universe, therefore physicalism is false". The important point is that there's no way of getting to any variant of "p-zombies could exist" that doesn't beg the question.
"Is it conceivable to have a universe that has everything we now consider the laws of physics (quantum mechanics, gravity, etc), but without consciousness? If so, is it conceivable that this universe could have beings that behave very similarly to humans?"
Mu.
Can you imagine a chair that has two legs, but looks and acts exactly like it would if it had four legs? Can you imagine a planet that doesn't orbit a star, but looks and acts exactly like it would if it did orbit a star? Asking "can you imagine an X that looks and behaves exactly as if it had property Y, but doesn't actually have property Y" is such a poorly-formed question that it shouldn't even be dignified with a yes/no answer. If the X you're imagining looks and behaves exactly as you would expect it to do if it had property Y, then there is no way to verify that you're not actually imagining it as not having property Y.
> What do forces, fields, atoms, and molecules have to do with love, hate, and fear?
Is fear (e.g. avoidance behavior) now a sign of consciousness?
You can start with basic chemistry, invent self-replicating molecules and eventually observe them producing trees or ants out of the evolutionary pressure to replicate.
You can start with with basic quantum mechanics, build semiconductor devices with them and cleverly assemble an amazing number of these devices into a single device on which you can play Angry Birds.
Or, as someone on this thread pointed out, you can start with the very simple rules of Conway's game of life and end up with a Turing complete system, which you could then use to emulate Dwarf Fortress or the meat space universe.
IMHO, if these amazing things can be build from parts so simple, there is no reason why a huge bunch of nerve cells wired together in was shaped by evolutionary pressure might not create beings capable of thinking about themselves.
If consciousness required non-physicality, but p-zombies are conceivable, then by Occam's Razor, we are all p-zombies.
Personally, I think telling apart consciousness from a sufficiently advanced simulation of it is splitting hairs. There is just no physical experiment to tell them apart.
Of course, if there was an experiment to tell them apart, consciousness would be measurable and all the usual physical methodology would apply. Expect a new SI unit in that case.
Likewise simulation hypothesis. If you find a buffer overflow, expect scientists to figure out and describe the underlying rules.
If telepathy existed, physicists would describe the transmission characteristics using spherical harmonics and figure out if a power law holds. Expect lot's of papers with "signal to noise ratio" and "bit error rate".
If souls were proven to exist, e.g. interacted in some way with the physical world, expect physicists to build a soul accelerator to study these interactions and figure out if souls are elementary, or can be split into subsoulic particles.
Lacking a way to determine the truth, it feels rather unproductive to argue about the existence or origins of consciousness (or simulation, or telepathy, or souls).
"Is fear (e.g. avoidance behavior) now a sign of consciousness?"
Fear is not just avoidance behavior. I can get a simple robot to avoid light, by hooking up a photosensor to a motor. Does the robot therefore feel fear?
"Or, as someone on this thread pointed out, you can start with the very simple rules of Conway's game of life and end up with a Turing complete system, which you could then use to emulate Dwarf Fortress or the meat space universe."
You can, and you can also describe how the rules of the game of life lead to a Turing complete system, which in turn leads to an emulation of Dwarf Fortress. Every link in the chain is rigorously demonstrated. The same is not true for consciousness. Without such a demonstration, we can only argue about whether we think it is plausible. I think the distance between consciousness and anything resembling our current physics is like the distance between caveman physics and fire (see my post below)--chemical change is of a fundamentally different nature than c-physical change, and so can never be reduced to it.
"If consciousness required non-physicality, but p-zombies are conceivable, then by Occam's Razor, we are all p-zombies."
I am by definition not a p-zombie, because I have consciousness. You and others might be p-zombies, but Occam's Razor would say that you're not, because why would I be the only human with consciousness?
"Personally, I think telling apart consciousness from a sufficiently advanced simulation of it is splitting hairs. There is just no physical experiment to tell them apart."
Don't confuse ontology with epistemology. There's also no physical experiment, with current technology, to tell whether microbes exist on a planet 10,000 light years away, but that doesn't mean extraterrestrial microbes are not real (or that they are). As you say in the following paragraphs, it's entirely possible that we will be able to measure consciousness in the future.
I've always thought the zombie thought experiment essentially circular. Here's why:
1) If physicalism is not true, then of course the thought experiment is valid, and there's a difference between the human and the zombie
2) If physicalism is true, then the sentence "a being physically identical to a human, yet lacking inner experience" is contradictory! If physicalism is true, then a being physically identical to a human _must_ have an inner experience, since that arises from its physical state. It's similar to saying, "imagine something chemically identical to water, but it doesn't freeze when below 0 Celsius."
Because of this, I don't think the thought experiment can change anyone's mind either direction.
First of all, since we can't directly measure consciousness, we have no reason to assume 2.
We only assume the consciousness of other humans, and to a lesser extent animals, by analogy to ourselves - Occam's Razor favors that things which behave similarly to us, do so for similar reasons, and that things which share all of our observable properties, also share our unobservable properties.
But we also assume that everything follows physical laws, for the same reason. There's no reason to privilege one of these assumptions over the other.
Second of all, you're just reproducing the problems of the 'first cause' argument, by moving your 'magic layer' of explanation back one step, at the cost of additional complexity.
Either physical laws magically produce consciousness sometimes in a way we don't yet understand. Or there is a magical non-physical-law phenomenon of some kind which produces consciousness, and which magically happens to attach itself to brains but not rocks for reasons we don't understand, and which never shows itself to break any physical laws in any of the ways we are ever able to measure. By accepting the latter hypothesis, you haven't removed the need for a magical-thing-we-don't-understand, you've just added a ton of additional epicycles to the entire process.
"Or there is a magical non-physical-law phenomenon of some kind which produces consciousness, and which magically happens to attach itself to brains but not rocks for reasons we don't understand, and which never shows itself to break any physical laws in any of the ways we are ever able to measure. "
First, I would say the fact that I have a conscious experience at all is a major violation of physical laws. There is nothing that is more salient, or that I'm more sure of, than that I have a conscious experience. If the laws of physics can't account for that, it is a far bigger violation than the Standard Model being unable to account for dark matter.
Second, I have free will, and other people seem to have free will as well. You could deny free will, but you would be denying one of our most fundamental experiences of the world. Free will, alters the physical world according to the wishes of the mental world, is likewise a violation of physical laws as we know them.
"First, I would say the fact that I have a conscious experience at all is a major violation of physical laws."
You might *say* that, but I don't think you actually believe it. If what you said were true and could be demonstrated, it would be the single most important scientific discovery since at least relativity. If you really thought you could make a good case for it, you wouldn't be leaving it in the comments of a blog post for nobodies to snark at, you'd be submitting it to a major scientific journal.
I don't need to be the one submitting it to a major scientific journal, because I wasn't the first to realize the incompatibility of a mechanistic account of the universe with consciousness. Scientists (OK, some scientists) have recognized this since the beginning of modern science. See any article on Cartesian dualism, which is 400 years old.
A caveman would say that fire violates physical laws and is proof of the gods intervening on human affairs. Things that physical laws can't explain *yet* are a natural consequence of not being omniscient, it's an ongoing process.
I really don't understand what you mean by 'free will' here. Our mechanistic understanding of how a neural network goes from inputs to outputs is pretty strong. I don't see anything in human behavior that needs to violate physical law to be possible. So what are you referring to, materially?
The caveman's mistake is that he correctly noticed that fire violates the physical laws he knows, but incorrectly zeroed in on one specific hypothesis of fire--namely divine intervention--without considering other possibilities. Let's suppose that the caveman's physics, which I'll call c-physics to distinguish it from our physics, consists of laws like this:
1. Things can be sticky or not
2. When two sticky things hit each other slowly, they usually stick together
3. When two sticky things hit each other fast, they sometimes stick together and sometimes fly apart
4. When two hard things hit each other slowly, they retain their shapes but change their directions
5. When two hard things hit each other fast, they break apart
One day, when sitting around the campfire, the cavemen debate whether fire can be explained with c-physical laws. The c-physicalists admit that c-physics cannot currently explain fire, but believe that it is not a hopeless endeavor, pointing out that c-physics can explain many forms of emergent phenomena that are not found in the laws themselves. For example, it can explain mudslides and snowmen, even though mudslides and snowmen are nowhere to be found in the c-physical laws. The c-dualists point out that many aspects of fire, such as the light, the heat, and the changes in color and size of the wood, are qualitatively different from anything c-physics can explain. It is inconceivable how any application of c-physics, whose laws have nothing like light, can explain fire. They believe that any explanation of fire would require drastically different laws, so different from c-physics that nobody would call them c-physical.
Fast forward 40,000 years, and we now know that fire is not a c-physical change, but a chemical change, and its explanation involves atoms and molecules, wavefunctions and orbitals and quantized energy levels. This explanation is so different from c-physics that the inventors of c-physics could not possibly have imagined it, or even understood it if it was explained to them. This is how I think a successful theory of consciousness will look like. Whatever the theory is, it'll be so different from what we call physics that we would not, in a million years, recognize it as physics. It'll be qualitatively and dramatically different from the physical phenomena we now know, so much so that it'll seem like an alien language.
I would say conscious experience is not explained by physical laws as we know them, but it doesn't seem to violate them either.
As for our experience of free will, we experience plenty of things that aren't so. We experience sound and light from an event as being simultaneous, even though they're not. We don't notice the blind spot in our eyes. We think ultraviolet light is invisible because we happen to not have receptors for it. And so on, and so on. Our experience is only a very rough guide to physical reality.
A robot from the 1970s can quite easily be programmed to do everything you mentioned in levels 1-4. Is the robot therefore conscious?
"But we don't chose what we want, and the illusion of free will proceeds only from our inability to track down the multiple aggregate causes of our desires. Again, nothing magical."
As I said above, free will is one of our most basic observations of the world. We observe that we have free will from the moment we can speak (if not before), to the moment we die. We make use of our free will every minute to influence the physical world. Calling free will an illusion means rejecting this overwhelming evidence, which (for each of us) is stronger than the evidence for F=ma, quantum field theory, heliocentrism, or any other physical theory. Why is this preferable to saying that the existing physical laws are inadequate and must be supplemented by mental laws to account for our observations? After all, we already know there are aspects of reality that existing physical laws don't describe (e.g. dark matter, quantum gravity), so why can't they be inadequate in other ways as well?
There's a book I read a long time ago that you might be interested in. "Free Will as An Open Scientific Problem". He goes through the philosophy of free will and then proposes some scientific experiments for validating if free will exists.
So first of all, we do all kinds of work involving live brains; we do fMRI and EEG, we do brain surgery and subcranial implants of various types, we do metabolic studies, we do single-cell recordings, etc etc.
But more importantly, I think this question is badly formed. You could make the same claim about almost any physical object, or area of space. Like, my couch doesn't follow physical laws. How can you disprove that? No one has ever studied it in a lab. And even if you do come study my couch, I can just say that sure, it follows that set of laws you just tested, but not all the other ones you didn't test. Or, the laws it follows produced the same outputs as physical laws under those test conditions, but wouldn't under all test conditions.
'Somewhere in the Marianas Trench is a cubic meter of space that doesn't follow physical laws, prove me wrong'. It's vacuous. Our assumption that everything follows physical laws is probabilistic based on everything we've ever tested doing so and never seeing strong evidence of anything that doesn't.
'You can't prove it' isn't a meaningful objection here, all knowledge is probabilistic and noting can be proven to 100%, but the likelihood ratio is way way way past what we accept for calling something 'true'.
The context is that I'm writing a big sequence on the mind body problem, and the objection I want to pre-empt is similar what dionysus mentioned above. To rephrase it, the [hypothetical person who objects to the sequence] argues
1. C. (=consciousness) seems to be its own thing; and
2. observing C., looks very much like a causal effect of C.
(Now, there is an elegant way to marry that with the uniformity physical laws by just saying that C. is another aspect of the material, in which case there is no issue at all. I'm fine tolerating that model so we don't need to discuss it here.)
What I'd like to shut the door to early is the other model that says "(1) C. is fundamentally *separate* from matter, and (2) C. has causal effect on matter". This model explicitly requires special laws in physics for just C.
I don't think your last three paragraphs work because a proponent of this model could simply say "well, the [apparent causal effect from C.] is a reason to suspect such laws, and you haven't provided any evidence that's unlikely. I claim that it's super plausible!"
> So first of all, we do all kinds of work involving live brains; we do fMRI and EEG, we do brain surgery and subcranial implants of various types, we do metabolic studies, we do single-cell recordings, etc etc.
Yeah, this sounds like what I'm looking for. But as a non-biologist and non-physicist, it's hard for me to say how exactly these experiments show that brains follow the same underlying laws. Like, if the particles in the brain substantially disobeyed Newtonian physics, would we realize this through fMRI scans or EEG (whatever that is)? This is the question I need to answer.
(I know Newtonian physics aren't correct, but I do think there's a strong case that its inaccuracies for stuff on earth (which manifest like 30 places behind the decimal point) are not nearly enough to locate the imagined causal effect from C., so taking Newton as the ground truth should be a fine simplification.)
As I said above, you're not going to find a definitive argument against the anti-physicalist view of mind, because there isn't one. It's an open problem in philosophy, and only a slight majority of philosophers are physicalists. If anyone tells you there's a definitive proof of physicalism, then that person is missing something.
The fact that something is a debated problem in philosophy *dosen't* mean that there isn't a definitive argument against it. The fact that I'm saying this sentence is quite sad, but here we are. That's the state of academic philosophy.
Free Will is a beginner level problem, as Eliezer adequately put it. The fact that it's still debated in philosophy doesn't do anything to change this.
But also, I'm not looking for an argument against physlicalism. I require something strictly (and I think, significantly) weaker. It is possible to be against physicalism based on the fact that our current best model is not complete (and in fact, I think this is the only defensible anti-physicalism position). However, I don't care whether a future version of the laws of physics will be complete or not because the ways in which it's not complete manifest 300 places behind the decimal point and are completely insufficient to locate causal effects from C.
I get an email at least every other week from someone claiming to have invented a Theory of Everything. Usually, the more grandiose their claims and the more smugly dismissive of other physicists they are, they further they are from anything resembling a valid theory of physics.
I just read Eliezer's posts on free will. To be fair to him, he's far better than the physics crackpots that flood my inbox. As far as I can tell--and I am not an expert--he clearly and correctly rehashes the arguments in favor of one particular theory of free will, that of reductive physicalism combined with compatibilism (though he calls it requiredism). He does not present any reasons that reductive physicalism should be assumed to be true, and barely mentions, let alone refutes, the many other theories of free will.
It is indeed a beginner level problem to explain one particular theory of free will. Explaining all the others (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will#Western_philosophy), and then showing which one is correct and why, is unlikely to be possible without first having a solution to the mind-body problem.
the point of the example was not that Eliezer is a great philosopher, it's that the problem is actually easy. I think every person above a low bar of philosophical sanity will tell you the same things about Free Will, and there is genuinely nothing to add to that. The reason why Eliezer is more cite-able than others is that most people who of course have the same opinions on FW have too much social shame to declare a problem easy.
I think the idea that you need to solve the mind body problem to figure out free will is nuts. On a 0-10 scale, Free Will is about difficulty level 2, the mind body problem about 9. That's why I'm spending all my time on the mind-body problem.
That strikes me as a problem with philosophy in general. That is, philosophy can be a profound discipline with many interesting open avenues of discussion -- but it just can't be applied to anything in practice.
Ok, so first of all, you'll never un-convince anyone who believes in consciousness (or spirits, immaterial minds, etc.) based on faith, be it bona fide religious faith or some kind of an abiding philosophical conviction based on arbitrary premises. There's no argument you can make to change such a person's mind, because for him consciousness is just a given.
Assuming that's not the case, though, you might ask him the question: what does the concept of "consciousness" actually explain ? For example, he might say, "humans can hold meaningful conversations because they are conscious"; you could then ask, "ok, what exactly is consciousness and how does it allow humans to hold meaningful conversations ?" If the answer is, "consciousness is what allows humans to hold meaningful conversations, period", then we haven't explained anything; we've just re-labeled our ignorance with a fancy term. People tried that already with "elan vital", and it didn't work for the same reason: a real explanation must make use of what we already understand in order to describe something we did not understand (until now); and it must make meaningful, testable predictions.
Unfortunately for the proponents of the ineffable consciousness, their model is really lousy at making predictions; meanwhile, as @darwin says, we have competing explanations that are much better at it. Not perfect, granted, but still significantly better than literally nothing. So, in practice, it makes more sense to go with those, for now.
I've already done a survey in the community and the position is very fringe to begin with, however I disagree that someone who holds it is necessarily unreasonable. You're assuming they've already ignored lots of evidence, but it could be that they've just never thought much about it, and this particular model (aka, C. is separate from mind and causal interaction goes in both directions) is actually the common sense answer. It makes sense; mind feels different from body; if I hit you over the head, this is an effect matter -> mind; if you decide to yell at me; this is mind -> body(=matter)... it only seems questionable now because of modern science.
I do agree that you shouldn't stick to this model after hearing the counter-arguments, but first I have to write up the counter arguments properly!
After you write up the counter arguments, I'd be interested in reading them. I used to be a physicalist, but I've drifted away from physicalism after listening to counterarguments from dualists and panpsychists. The common sense view, as you call it, appears closest to being correct.
My point that this is really an argument about epistemology, and not necessarily about any object-level facts. If my epistemology allows me to just invent random things out of my imagination and propose them as explanations for events, then no amount of evidence would convince me that my explanations are wrong. You must first convince me why my epistemology, although internally consistent, is practically inferior to yours.
Ah, I actually do address epistemology on the post right before that one. It comes down to explaining the simplicity prior, i.e., we estimate how much code it requires to implement your theory, and if it's substantially more code than a competitor, it's out. Every bit cuts the probability in half.
>Like, if the particles in the brain substantially disobeyed Newtonian physics, would we realize this through fMRI scans or EEG (whatever that is)? This is the question I need to answer.
I mean, yes, for any reasonable interlocutor.
MRI, PET, EEG, they can all be done on any part of the body, and the brain behaves the same way as all the other parts. We can measure signals directly from neurons in the brain during surgery in the same way we can measure signals from nerves in a sea slug, and they act the same way. We can electrically stimulate neurons in the brain in the same way we can stimulate nerves in the arm, and they react the way we'd expect. Blood clots and poisons getting into the brain cause the same type of tissue damage as any other tissue, the metabolic reactions for blood entering and leaving the brain are normal, etc.
"But clearly the sea slug cannot appreciate poetry or even hold a conversations, whereas we humans can. And it's not just the number of neurons, either, because elephants have way more neurons than we do, but they aren't conscious either (at least, not like we are). So, clearly, there must be something about the human brain that your instruments are unable to measure. Obviously, human brains are similar to slug 'brains' and elephant brains, otherwise all those blood clots and poisons wouldn't affect them the same way; but just as obviously, human possess some special quality".
Doesn't this just miss the topic? I'm not saying that there is or isn't something special about the human brain; I'm totally fine with assuming there is. The question is whether that something takes place inside or outside the laws of physics. darwin's post seems like a very strong argument that it's inside the laws of physics.
We don't need to prove that the brain is *not* based on spirits, souls, angels, extradimensional entities, or anything else like that. The burden of proof is on the one making the claim. If you claim that everything in the Universe follows the laws of physics except for brains, then it's up to you to devise some test that can demonstrate this fact. Until then, we'll just assume that brains aren't the one special exception. Of course, once you do devise such a test, and it comes up positive, we will be forced to change our minds.
By the way, we do conduct physical experiments on stuff that we cannot directly observe, and we do it all the time. We cannot observe neutrinos, or ancient asteroid impacts, or gravitational waves, or even good old electrons. So, in principle, devising a test for (putative) mental entities should not be an insurmountable challenge.
I don't doubt it, but I'm looking for something that permits "less counterplay" than "the burden of proof is on you" or "we could run the experiment theoretically".
I am not sure what you mean by "less counterplay". That said, the reason for the concept of the burden of proof is that, without it, we'd be forced to accept pretty much anything that anyone (including oneself !) says, unless we can disprove it. Since there's a virtually infinite number of random claims people can come up with (creativity being one of the core virtues of humanity), this leaves us in an untenable position. We'd be working day and night just on disproving everything from abracadabra to Bigfoot to Yetis and zero-point energy. Thus, it makes more *practical* sense to provisionally reject any claim that is unsupported by evidence.
See my reply to darwin; in the relevant context, the hypothetical person arguing would have a reason to suspect the existence of such laws, so just going with "burden of proof" isn't good enough.
I'd pick apart their views, how would an atom for atom reconstruction of a brain differ? how would a digitalized simulation? would those differences apply to two half brains connected to two half atom for atom or digitalized reconstructions of their missing halves?
IMO, anyone who worries about an AI taking over the world should go look at how bad Youtube Music's recommendations are. If the best AI company in the world can't even get a basic thing like that right, it seems that strong AIs are quite far off indeed.
AI is only as effective as the programming that set it up. I'm not optimistic, given the fact I spend most of my retirement trying to work around dysfunctional software.
The danger is that AIs are really good at some things and bad at others, so they'll capture us all, put us into battery cages, and force us to listen to music we don't really like.
For something that doesn't already have a human brain which is geared for modeling other human brains by analogy, it seems like an insanely difficult task. Much harder than just building an army of murder drones or w/e.
Pandora describes their algorithm as having hundreds of different assigned to each song. But you can only enter other songs as inputs; you can't set what qualities you want directly.
Maybe YT thinks it can make more money from its users if they ignore that preference? That may not work for you but on average it may result it more revenue
For all that google is at the forefront of AI, it’s not reasonable to assume the YT music algorithm represents the state of the field. Right now, AIs can search the space of chemistry to find new medicines (or poisons) and write text that imitates authors well enough the average person couldn’t tell the difference. But complexity costs compute. How many YouTube music accounts are there? A couple billion? I would bet google looked at the cost of implementing a more powerful recommendation algorithm, compared it to how much extra money they’d get from ads, and decided it wasn’t worth it. Flippancy rarely gets you the right answer.
Recommendations are extremely important to YouTube and similar companies. If I’m recommended something I like I’m sticky. I’ll watch another video and get displayed another ad. Get an increase of 10% in all users dwell time on YouTube and you gain probably hundreds of millions in revenue.
And the Netflix algorithm has never figured out that I prefer movies with a female main character, which a linear regression model would realize after a week.
I wish this were proof that we're far off from AGI, but unfortunately it's completely irrelevant information. The reason why the Netflix algorithm (which ought to be among the best in the world since improving it is worth millions of dollars, ditto with youtube) underperforms a linear regression model is probably because Netflix doesn't use a feature-based approach at all, but treats movies as black boxes and bases its recommendations entirely on your similarity to other consumers. If you are a very unusual consumer (like I am), then the algorithm performs poorly and this is a loss of Netflix, but if you are a rare case, it's not a very big loss. This is probably what's going on, and my guess (though idk) would be something similar is going on for you and youtube.
Could this algorithm be improved by also considering a feature-based approach? I genuinely don't know. But if the answer is yes, this tells you something about the efficient market hypothesis and the adequacy of large companies, not about the state of AGI. The technology to figure this out has been there ever since linear regression was invented.
The whole point of the deep learning thing is that AIs were supposed to figure out subtle features like this without humans even foreseeing it. That's what a lot of the alarmist rhetoric was about.
Mhh well I do know how deep learning works but I don't know how the YT algorithm works, what it gets as inputs and so forth, so I can't really comment.
But you definitely need to have an argument that this is bad for youtube to make your case. If it is profitable for the algorithm to ignore you because your tastes are rare, it's not a failure of the algorithm. And even then, it's more likely that the programmers messed up. Blanket criticism of deep learning doesn't seem like it goes beyond "deep learning can't automatically solves every issue even if the programmer is an idiot", and this is not a position that [people who are worried about AGI] hold anyway.
But the whole point about AI alarmism is that AI would not require programmers. You could just tell it, "find the optimal playlist for every person", and it would automatically scan every person, coherently extrapolate their deepest desires, and serve each and every one of them the one playlist that is guaranteed to keep them in thrall forever.
Meanwhile, off in the real world, we still rely on human programmers writing code by hand and adjusting minute hyperparameters in order to make the entire system work at all; and most of the time, it works very poorly. And it doesn't seem like it's improving, either.
Pandora's algorithm seems to be decent. One thing that helps is that it's set up for you to give it continuous feedback as you're listening. It probably also helps that it has a human-curated database of musical characteristics associated with the songs: for example, the "why this song" info it gives me on the last song it played me is: "Based on what you've told us so far, we're playing this track because it features use of a string ensemble, prominent percussion, minor key tonality, mild rhythmic syncopation and folk rock qualities."
It still has some annoying blindspots, though. Most notably for me, it keeps trying to give me Bluegrass on my channel that's intended for Irish and Scottish traditional, folk, and folk rock.
When I was listening to Pandora, I found that having a bunch of channels worked well, but if I tried to fine-tune a channel with which songs I liked and didn't like, I found it all started sounding the same.
Yeah, I understand why the algorithm is linking the two. But it's still an issue for me since I don't particularly like Bluegrass despite generally liking jigs and reels.
I worked in a company that did music recommendation. We were bought by a larger company eventually. It was mostly Bayesian not strict ML but the personalised algorithms were fairly hard to debug anyway. Almost a black box.
Anyway the recommendation people hated to use genre to influence decision making, because they found it too much a bypass of their magic system. Somebody who liked Celtic might want to discover bluegrass they would argue (or whatever genre, it was a common problem).
If the user kept blocking bluegrass then the algorithm would work it out, they said. It never did though and it couldn’t be explained why exactly. This would enrage the CEO who had this problem, I forget the specific genre.
Just block the genre i keep deleting on that playlist he said. But, said the data scientists, what if the deleted songs were slow songs – should we ban all slow songs; or fast songs, or songs with guitars, etc.
In reality they just didn’t want to write if statements, they wanted their magic algorithms to work.
People who believe that "AI" writ large is on a super-linear path: We've seen a clear slowdown in practical progress in self-driving cars over the last 7 or so years compared to the 7 years prior.
So, okay, fine, the curve isn't perfectly smooth, you say, there are fits and starts, but when you zoom out far enough, it looks super-linear. But the longer we can stay plateaued, the harder it is to jump back up to a super-linear path.
When's the point when you start revising your views and saying, "Actually, this is a pretty clear data point against the super-linear AI progress theory"? If we still don't have self-driving cars that are lots better than the ones today in two years? Five years? Ten years?
(I'm not talking about legal compliance, I'm talking about demonstrated real world competence, even if for compliance reasons there has to be a safety driver behind the wheel who doesn't do anything.)
>We've seen a clear slowdown in practical progress in self-driving cars over the last 7 or so years compared to the 7 years prior.
Have we?
Or did we just have a lot of initial hype based on nothing and aimed at raising VC capital, followed by steady work at solving this incredibly hard problem?
We have! In the years from 2008 to 2015, we saw driverless cars go from "basically can't do anything" to "can handle about 90% of street conditions safely." And from 2015 to 2022, we've seen that go to maybe 98% of street conditions.
Here's a useful history of the DARPA Grand Challenge if you need a refresher on how rapidly driverless cars improved in the 2000's and early 2010's. https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2014-03-13
Now, look, you can parse that in a variety of ways. Maybe the AI got better at the same rate it is now (or slower!) but all the real complexity in the problem space is in solving those last few things -- but I think that has the same ultimate implications for solving other problem spaces.
Yep, the driving assistance technologies in a base model civic are pretty amazing these days. Will they drive you to the grocery store? No, but you can drive hours on a highway with little input on the wheel or brake/gas pedal. And many cars will change lanes for you or park the car for you (not the civic but moderately priced vehicles will do these things).
I don't see any sign of either, no, outside of specifically at Uber, where they definitely lost enthusiasm for their driverless cars dreams after they killed that lady. Waymo and various other autonomous car companies continued their testing more-or-less uninterrupted, and I don't see any sign that they have received less funding/resources.
I've always felt kind of bad for them in addition to her. From what I can see in the video it doesn't really seem like it was a situation where the average person would have avoided hitting her, either. I certainly don't have the reflexes to think I could slow my car down from 45 to 0 in 2 car-lengths, and that's sort of what it looks like it would have taken.
Videos generally have more difficulty with dynamic lighting than human eyes do. It's likely that the blacks would be less impenetrable to the human eye than they appear in the video.
Second:
Uber's driverless cars had LIDAR. They aren't dependent on cameras and lighting conditions. They had no excuse that the lighting was bad to hit that pedestrian -- the problem was that they were driving around unsafe software that couldn't recognize a pedestrian, and they had set it to values where it was willing to drive into things that it had low confidence in. I do not have any sympathy for Uber.
Third and finally:
If visibility is such that you (or your AI) are unable to reliably detect obstructions 2 car lengths in front of you, your obligation is to *not drive at 45 mph*.
It's not that I couldn't *see* a person two car lengths in front of me, in my lights. It's that if the human experience is anything like the video, this is a person *suddenly becoming visible* two car lengths in front of the car. i.e. it's a sudden hazard that didn't exist a second ago. Which means I don't have to *know* there's a person there, I have to decellerate a car from 45 to 0 in two car lengths.
Which isn't stictly and necessarily possible; most (all?) cars won't stop that fast. Even if they would, the estimated "reaction distance" - that is, how long it takes you to put your foot on the brake - at that speed is something like seventy feet, or farther than she was from the point she becomes visible in the video.
On you FIRST point:
If it's true that a human would have seen her sooner than the video indicates, thats one thing. But I'm not sure that's true; I've watched an old woman die in the street after crossing in between streetlights at non-crossings in the same way (not a great experience you get rid of quickly, do not recommend).
It happens that I live in the town where this happened and have been down to Mill enough to know that stretch of road - my prior is that it's about as dark in that area in between lights as the video shows. If it was, that matter because.
Regarding your SECOND point:
I really, really don't like this rationale in a lot of ways, but the most primary is that taken to its logical conclusion it seems like it ends up killing a lot of people.
So say we accept that the car could see the person and there were a bunch of programming errors, etc. that could have prevented this entirely. And say we punish Uber (and we did!) and open them up for liability (probably did?) based on that, and we completely ignore the "would a person have hit them" standard in favor of the "would a theoretical perfect robot car that doesn't exist not have hit them".
Now let's say that by the perfect car standard we establish the behavior of the car was really, really bad - a perfect car would NOT have done the same thing and the woman would have lived. But say at the same time we established - and at least the company propaganda at the time claimed something similar to this - that it was less likely to hit her than a human driver in the same circumstances, that as the lighting got better and better in the scenario the self driving car would not hit her sooner than the person wouldn't hit her.
In that scenario, by holding uber and self-driving cars in general to a perfect standard instead of to the thing they are actually competing against which makes mistakes and kills people pretty constantly and we really should want to get rid of as car-operators soon as possible (humans), you are killing X amount of people per year, full stop. However much it delays driving cars, it's just some amount of quantifiable death in that situation.
This is getting really long and ranty, so to summarize:
1. I'm a big, big opponent of making the perfect the enemy of the good (and of the better).
2. In scenarios where a person would be *at least as likely* to have caused an accident as a self-driving car, judging them against a perfect standard instead of the standard we actually have (human drivers) is either break-even or negative in terms of human life, because it delays a replacement for human drivers that's equal or better to them in that scenario.
3. I think I acknowledge that even with my local knowledge of that road, "would an average human have hit this person jaywalking in the dark" is unknowable.
4. A very lighthearted "fuck that" to suggestions that I should be able to magically react and decellerate a car from 45mph to 0mph in two car lengths.
You’ve hit in on a reason there, perhaps inadvertently, as to why self driving cars won’t take off. Legally I can’t see the responsibility of any car crash transferring to the owner, would you buy that car? Therefore the software has to be perfect. Not better than humans, that’s not a legal thing.
The person didn't teleport. If visibilty conditions are such that the first time you will be able to see a person is when they're two car lengths in front of you, you may not drive at 45 mph. This isn't rocket science, and is absolutely the standard for human drivers.
Also the idea that Uber had a highly safe system and they were punished for an unavoidable act of God is farcical. It's a fiction made to by people who are trying to ignore facts inconvenient to their worldview. Uber was running unsafe cars in a desperate effort to pro up their valuation by catching up with vastly more advanced competitors. It's not a coincidence that the fatality happened to Uber and not Waymo or Cruise.
(I don’t mean the US hegemon or empire, if you use those terms for US influence and power projection, outside the US itself. I do mean the US itself - is the US State a nation or an empire, or something else).
No, it's not a nation-state. There's very few nation-states in the Americas. They're almost all anti-colonialist revolutionary republics. That is, America formed an identity not out of endogenous traits (like shared language or culture) but by the practical considerations of military revolt against a colonizing power. The US continues to legitimize itself by a continuing need to protect the gains of that revolution, including both national sovereignty and individual rights.
There’s no contradiction between being anti-colonialist and becoming a nation state.
The US war of independence was a war by colonialists against the imperial centre, but it wasn’t really anti “colonising or anti colonialism”, far from it. Colonisation continued but the centre of the empire in much of North America moved from London to Washington.
Theoretically you could have such a revolt arranged on perfectly ethnic, national lines. But the United States was not, nor were most of the American revolutions. As for the US being an empire: only under a rather strange definition. The United States only gained imperial territories briefly in the late 19th century and most of them were gone within a few decades. The British state was the head of a vast colonial empire for five centuries. Collapsing the categories that contain the two makes the category so broad as to be meaningless.
Nearly all decolonisations are based on revolts based on ethnic lines. (Perfect ethnic lines is a strawman). You are correct though that the war of independence was not that, it was a war by the same ethnic group against an empire of the same culture, and ethnicity. That’s the unusual bit.
The US is an empire itself. Every war against Native American tribes or Mexico or European powers, every mile of land conquered outside the original 13 colonies, manifest destiny, is all imperialism.
What's your definition of empire? Because if you're arguing "the US has colonized regions that are governed in a comparable way to the way Britain governed India" then (excepting places like Puerto Rico) that's trivially false.
Also, care to provide some evidence about the ethnic nature of anti-colonial revolts? Because from Nigeria to the US to Chile it certainly doesn't seem like you end up with neat nation-states like Germany or China.
I've always seen America as a nation built around an ideology. With the GOP and Democrats at each other's throats and partisanship being so bad, it might sound like clearly false to an American but despite all the infighting I still see a fundamental American ideology underneath. From across the ocean it seems obvious to me that pretty much all Americans have a certain mindset that they take for granted but which is just nonexistent in Europe.
The American civil religion (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x49n90lWi0s) with all its pathos, the American dream, the Land Of The Free, the "veneration" of the Founding Fathers, all of this is on one had way over the top, on the other hand it is a very powerful nation-building stuff. In a sense it does confirm American exceptionalism. It is in this that America really is unique - a foreigner can truly become an American in a way that a foreigner cannot become French (his kids might). And this civil religion is simultaneously annoying, obnoxious and awe-inspiring to non-Americans (at least the westerners).
The only other country that, to me, feels a bit like America is Switzerland. Also not a nation state in the classical sense, the nation of the Swiss seems to also be built around the idea of independence and freedom. But the American freedom is much more inclusive and libertarian, whereas the Swiss is a bit more communal and isolationist. Yes, a lot of what both the major US parties do is not really libertarian but it feels to me like some very basic libertarian ideas are basically undisputed in the US the way they are in other countries.
Apart from these two, I cannot really think of any idea-based nation. Other countries do show some of this (the French with their republicanism and secularism, but their nationhood is still based a lot more around a mix of language/culture/ethnicity), but not quite as strongly as the Americans and the Swiss. Perhaps Singapore. The underlying ideology is very different there, but it does seem like it is also clearly a nation built around something else than a common culture, ethnicity or religion. But Singapore is really specific, being a city state.
I came across an interesting argument a while back that the US is best characterized as a "state-nation", i.e. a state with a strong national identity derived much more from belonging to the same state than any sort of state-independent nationhood. In other words, the US is a state based on the shared delusion that a Maine Yankee has more in common with at Texan than with a Nova Scotian.
According to the rationalist-adjacent historian Brett Deveraux (who I can really reccommend!), the answer is "No but I'll explain that in more detail in a future post."
The weak answer is that his and ACX' reader circles seem to overlap much more than you'd expect by chance, and posting a quick summary of one of his posts on r/SSC used to be a good way to get some discussion going for example.
A better answer, perhaps, is that Brett has high epistemic standards - to the point that Aceso Under Glass gave him as a positive example of writing that's easy to Epistemically Spot Check (and he replied too, praising Aceso for this).
His take even on culture war heavy topics such as "Were the Romans white?" (series starts here: https://acoup.blog/2021/06/11/collections-the-queens-latin-or-who-were-the-romans-part-i-beginnings-and-legends/) is basically "we can answer this question empirically, so here's a five-part review of the evidence". Spoiler: the answer is more or less "this question makes no sense in context, but if you were really asking about skin tone distribution on the Fitzpatrick scale then the mode is between 3 and 4, and HBO got this one laughably wrong".
There are so few places on the internet that have that kind of approach even to politicised topics, that I'm maybe a bit eager to call them all "adjacent".
Brett went on a rant against Bitcoin and attacked his critics when they pointed out he had no idea what he was talking about. He also has a bad habit of making up things in his citations I've caught at least five times, including mischaracterizing major schools of thought that are opposed to his own. I like reading him but I do so with a critical eye, as should anyone reading anything.
I understand a lot of people like him. When I've pointed out that he was effectively making things up several people defended him as it being an honest mistake. But I don't understand why people take him as some paragon of impartial rationality. He doesn't even claim to be that! Which is to his credit, in my view. I'd be much more critical if he hid the ball on what he actually thought and how it influences his writing.
For context, the "rant" is https://acoup.blog/2022/02/04/fireside-friday-february-4-2022/ which he labels as a "musing" and an "opinion". Whether it counts as a rant or not, his central argument sounds like common sense to me: he does not believe that (in a phrase bolded in the original) "blockchain technology will create an economic and social space outside of the control of the state, traditional banking institutions or society at large".
He argues that this is because modern states are not simply going to give up their powers to tax and regulate. They might not be able to alter the code of your smart contract, but they can still go after you.
I would be interested in hearing a rebuttal that addresses this central argument (I admit I haven't read every single comment on that page, if there's a rebuttal already there I'm happy to be told so).
Nope, sorry. That's not what I'm talking about. Please don't put words in my mouth.
I was talking about his responses on Twitter that were rather less measured. He went on a rant about how awful crypto was and Patreon supporting cryptocurrency. It was pointed out he didn't know what it was and he made some rather sharp remarks about his critics.
I don't mind crypto criticism. What I do mind is crypto criticism that reveals a clear lack of understanding of how crypto works and then doubling down when getting called out on it by a person who claims experts aren't respected enough.
Despite being well above the baseline for an online forum, an overwhelming majority of the readership here* are not rationalists. Not sure what the name of that particular bias is (availability?), but it really ought to be kept in mind when reading the comments section.
The data's stale at this point, but Scott's written on this in the past:
He says “ though large parts of that argument hinge on either substantially redefining ’empire’ or focusing the argument on Puerto Rico, Guam and American Samoa”
and then later that
“ Several European states still hold vestiges of their old empires, Russia still controls 22 ‘constituent republics’ reflecting areas of non-Russian settlement with functionally no autonomy, making it quite clearly an empire under the traditional definition. And of course the People’s Republic of China also meets that traditional definition, it’s three largest ‘autonomous regions’ (Xinjiang, Tibet and Inner Mongolia) being fairly obvious imperial possessions which are both ethnically different from the PRC itself (which openly presents itself as the Han Chinese national state) and also quite brutally subjugated by that state.”.
But all of these states including the US expanded in the 19 C, and all took over land that was inhabited by other peoples. Manifest destiny was clearly imperialist. This seems to be a blind spot amongst Americans. Maybe if native Americans resistance was better it would be more obvious.
(That doesn’t preclude the US from being a nation now though, but I contend it isn’t.)
I don't speak for Bret Devereaux, but I would guess that his response would be:
(1) The United States definitely used to be an empire. It ruled over subjugated peoples, including Native Americans.
(2) Native Americans today are not subjugated peoples. They can fully take part in the democratic political process. They have significant local control over their nations.
I'm not sure when we should date the transition. The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 is undoubtedly important, along with the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
In contrast, the Uyghur in China are ruled by governors appointed by the Central Committee who do not have to have significant support within the community. The current leader of the region was previously the governor of Guangdong (in southeast China).
If the Uyghurs started to become a tiny minority they might in fact be integrated into the Han Chinese majority culturally. That's not too distinct from what happened to Native Americans. If the Han Chinese become the majority this isn't too distinct from white ( and other) Americans becoming the majority in the Americas.
"And so my country isn’t a nation, but a collection of citizens drawn from all of the nations, setting aside those national identities; a family of choice, rather than a family of blood, united by common ideals rather than common soil. We haven’t always lived up fully to that high ideal. Sometimes the siren call of the nation haws pulled us down away from it. But the ideal and the republic built around it remains. And that is what I will be celebrating come July 4th."
It's the sort of thing that the US is. The categories were made for man etc. It's more like Australia than it is like Thailand, it's more like Canada than it is like the Persian Empire, it's more like the Persian Empire than it is like the Asaro Mudmen of Papua New Guinea, and it's more like the Asaro Mudmen than it is like a teapot.
Doesn't an empire require an emperor/monarch/solitary sovereign?
We are not a multinational state ( except in the sense that native nations have been incorporated into the county)
An Italian American or Polish American is not an Italian or a Polish nationals, by and large. Ethnicity and ancestry are created as a shared consciousness in the U.S. and as part of the milieu of a multi cultural society.
You are an American by virtue of citizenship whether by virtue of naturalization or birth.
"An empire is a state where the core ruling population exercises control and extracts resources from a periphery which is composed of people other than the core group (linguistically/culturally/ethnically/religiously distinct)."
That would include both the Soviet Union and current Russia (as Brett mentioned in a recent post on Ukraine - the war has an empire-(re)building angle), it would include pre-French-Revolution Switzerland despite them being tiny, it would definitely include Britain and all the other ones you learn about in school as central examples - some of which were at times democracies (at least of the core population) and/or republics or other forms of government.
Follow up: terminology gets even more confusing in German. The dictionary translation of empire is Reich, but ask a German what that mean historically and after mentioning the obvious more recent use of the word, they'll probably go with "land ruled by a king or emperor" or something - which would be correct for the closely related words Koenigreich or Kaiserreich.
An empire is not a system of gouvernement but a state where a political community control other political communities. Example : the French third republic was a (colonial) empire despite being a democracy.
Are the US are an empire ? The answer is not clear, it really depends how you assess the status of the native nations, Porto Rico and the various client states. Overall I don't think it's the right framework to analyse the US.
Its a state without a nation, with a political body defined by voluntary participation in the form of citizenship. Good historical analogues would be late Roman Empire, after the extension of citizenship to basically everyone.
Well Germany was called the German Empire after unification. England didn’t bother with the term for itself but the U.K. - (when that eventually consolidated the nations of the isles) was absolutely an Empire. The British empire was an English empire at heart. Is consolidating as a State a meaningful distinction - Russia was accused by Devereaux of being an empire, because it rules over non Russian semi autonomous republics, but it doesn’t look like they have laws discriminating against those citizens based on race; no doubt Russian culture dominates, but American culture dominates the US, parts of which were Native American, Mexican, Russian, French back in the day. Is the US not considered an empire now because it was so successful in being an empire before?
If Russia had Russified (or settled with Russians) the areas that are now semi autonomous republics would it not now have a better claim, by Devereaux‘s admission, of being a not Empire (or whatever he thinks the US is).
Point of information: England never conquered Scotland. They were unified by historical accident - their royal families intermarried, and James VI and I ended up as king of both counties at the same time; after that the union acts of 1707 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acts_of_Union_1707 changed them from two countries with one monarch to one country by mutual consent (in the sense that "each country was told what to do by it's own monarch", I suspect).
I would be eternally grateful if someone would put the words "Philosophy Bear" into DALL-E 2. My immense love of bears, philosophy and interest in AI would make it just magical.
I'm pretty open to the recent panic and excitement over machine learning progress being worthwhile, but I have had one niggling doubt. Two things that some people seem to expect are either the doom of humanity or massive, orders-of-magnitude economic growth in a very short period of time (or both). If this is a reasonable thing to expect, why haven't interest rates gone way up? Okay they've gone up a little, sure, but that's well-explained by inflation, and they're still way below the historical norm and even below where they were just in 2018. If I were confident the world were going to end or I would see any equity I had go up by a factor of 100, I'd be borrowing like crazy. Also, why haven't the firm's best poised to take advantage of this seen their share price explode?
I'm not sure we can expect markets to price in the end of the world. There has historically been no selection for doing that, as the world has thus far not ended. Also, remember how COVID-19 didn't affect equity prices until fairly late (Feb 2020).
I don't know the answer to this. If I were going to investigate, I would want to check the history of beachfront property costs and flood insurance as people started worrying about global warming. I vaguely remember hearing that these didn't reflect global warming concerns a few years ago but do now.
>If I were confident the world were going to end or I would see any equity I had go up by a factor of 100
There are alternatives to those, such as "somebody gets a loyal AI, overthrows the government, then stiffs his own shareholders because they can't actually enforce anything anymore" or "AI is brought under socialist control/the state makes the breakthrough".
There's also the question of "when does it happen", since *when* we'll get AI is not clear and you need a timeframe to win with this kind of borrowing, and the question of "to what end" since you don't actually need that much money to live comfortably and "leaving something to your kids" is moot if the world ends/things go post-scarcity.
Not interest rates in particular, but it's fair to say that the people who move the market do not agree with the people who predict that the singularity is near.
As for who is right and who is wrong, that's a more complicated question.
I wouldn't expect this sort of thing to be priced into interests rates at this juncture. It's just not the sort of thing serious investors will consider until it becomes more concrete. They're wrong about that in my opinion, but this kind of once-only event is exactly the kind of edge case where I wouldn't take the efficient markets hypothesis too seriously.
The promise of AI destroying the world or solving every possible problem has been there multiple times in the past. Excitement holds a few years, but after the technological limits become clear interest fades. This is know as an "AI winter" and happened a few times before. So AI gets uninteressting until a new breakthrough is made or computational power gets cheap enough to scale old methods. The current boom solved some very specific problems (is quite powerful at that and the improvements didn't slow down as of yet). But these are still specific one task AIs. Not yet near world engulfing general AI. I think the economic response reflects the experiences with AI in the past.
I don't think we'll have a proper AI winter again. Maybe a cut back in investment, but there are actually successful products which rely on modern ML now.
But we may reach the point where we've probed the limits of what's possible with current methods, declared it "not real AI", and stagnated again. That could be another AI winter.
Is there a way to disable all substack notifications for other people replying to comments that are not mine? If I reply to a comment, and then somebody else replies to that same comment, I get a notification email in the form "User1 replied to User2's comment". The only option I've found is "Notifications-Likes and Replies to my comments" which I have turned on and would like to continue receiving; I just don't want to receive notifications for replies to other peoples' comments.
I've been watching recent dall-e 2 developments with great interest, partially because I think I might be able to make someone with dall-e 2 access make me a new blog logo. But beyond that, it's because I look at some of the art D2: the AIghty Ducks does and realize it does satisfy a large amount of what I-the-uneducated-consumer wants from still images.
I often contemplate the fact that people read what I write. It's in some ways very weird that this is the case, because I have an extreme lack of education in the formalities of the English language. If you asked me what a preposition was right now, gun to my kid's head, I couldn't tell you. To the extent I can write words people want to read, it's mainly because of luck; my neurons fire in a certain way and my muscle memory is developed on certain pathways that make words people want to see. If I was a little less lucky I'd have zero subsribers.
To the extent I have subscribers/readers and I get to pretend to be a writer, it's because I did something like grinding out articles on the off chance that bigger voices linked out to them and I was able to "steal" some amount of their audience by a mechanism that looks suspiciously like luck. If I wrote enough articles, eventually I might get lucky and one might tickle the fancy of enough people that it becaue big.
I'm one of the lucky few for which this mechanism worked. I had a few articles (I think four in total) that were picked up by some larger outlet who then amplified my work. I say "work" with a little heavier weighting than a casual read might imply, because it really *was* work to produce them. An average article takes 4-8 hours to produce, and even then I'm cutting corners and hoping for the best when I hit publish.
This in turn led to big things. I have the first job I've ever had that pays decently. I was able to get into the homeownership game. There's a very, very outside chance that eventually I might "hop the curb" and get the blog big enough that writing is my job in that real sense where I write things I believe and like and people like them enough that I can just do that, full stop, and still provide for my family.
But now imagine a dall-e 2 type performance for writing - that you can say "give me an article about X", hit the generate button fifteen times and eventually get a pretty good article about X. Where does that leave the guys like me? Because overall I really do acknowledge I've been very lucky and very blessed to have the limited success I've seen so far. And to the extent I've seen that success, it's because I can produce a decent piece of writing almost every week.
When you can tell a computer "Produce an article on bottlecaps in the style of Resident Contrarian" and have it take 100 tries in five minutes, what chance does the actual Resident Contrarian stand?
Again, sorry, I've had an amount of liquor that could make a good sized horse reconsideri its life choices. But I do worry about things like this - it's hard to imagine a GPT-5 world where I'm still relevant.
As I said in another comment, if your job can be supplanted by a machine, then it should be. You could either learn to do a better job, or find another line of work. In some cases, this means that your job will be eliminated due to the machine's superhuman performance -- such as the job of "computer" (which used to be a human person !), "telephone operator", or "horse-drawn carriage operator" (outside of a few novelty rides), and perhaps "truck driver" sometime soon. This sucks, and we need a safety net to support the victims of automation; but the upside is that we can now achieve superhuman output on all of these tasks. This benefits everybody, and these benefits vastly outweigh the losses.
I am in the same boat as you (only with old-school programming instead of writing), so I sympathize -- but sympathy is all I can offer you (as well as myself). You cannot shovel back the tide, and in fact doing so would be selfish and ultimately harmful even if you could somehow succeed. Everyone today is better off without the telephone switchboard operators; even the people who would normally enter the switchboard operator career. This is so easy to see, which is why the change is inevitable. Your only option is to acquire some new skills, or to lobby for a better safety net, or of course both.
"Everyone today is better off without the telephone switchboard operators; even the people who would normally enter the switchboard operator career."
Look me in the eye and tell me that, when I've been waiting half an hour on a work call on a telephone menu tree which leads me round in circles and where my query would be answered in five minutes if I could just contact a human being.
"Creative sphere" is really the issue here, isn't it ?
I don't mind that much machines automating drudgery (though this can cause issues too, see : luddites - EDIT : now that I think of it, textile workers *did* have creative freedom, didn't they ?), but the reveal of both GPT-3 (or was it 2 ?) and DALL-E 2 made me really sad because I immediately thought of all the struggling artists that have trouble to make ends meet (that is the overwhelming majority of all artists), that are now going to be struggling ever more !
I do an impression of the experience of drinking Old Granddad, which is just me yelling "I'm in your house!" in an enormously pleased yet oblivious old man voice.
That sounds wonderful, especially if heard by drunken ears.
Reminds me of a story a friend told me: He and his buddy took LSD. Buddy picks up a guitar & plays the same sequence of 4 chords over and over for about an hour. Friend is saying, "Lenny! Are you OK?" etc. Finally after an hour Lenny looks up and says, "lemme tell ya bout the boogie."
So I like it a lot, personally, for a lot of non-standard reasons:
1. It's heavy rye, and just generally heavy everything. It's a very strong tasting bourbon.
2. It makes almost no attempt at being smooth. Especially the 114 version. It's a bourbon that is actively angry at you for drinking it and it does not attempt to hide this.
3. It's very, very cheap.
If you are me and you need 100 proof to even get started, then it has you covered, even more so with 114. If you then have a unique drunkenness profile where you need quite a bit to feel it, but you are then very close to being over-drunk already, then the overall roughness helps keep things a little slower.
If you are looking for smoothness, there's dozens and dozens of bourbons that do it better. If you want a really, really aggressive flavor profile that cuts through mixers well, this is good for that. If you are me, it's about the only thing that I know about that optimizes my drinking experience the way I want it optimized, but I'm guessing my exact drinking needs are relatively rare.
I poured a glass of Jim Beame down the drain once after deciding I didn’t really want a drink. A while later my wife came out of the kitchen to tell me something was caught in garbage disposal, rotting, creating a terrible smell. I went and checked. Yeah, that’s how bourbon is supposed to smell.
A weird thing about writing a bunch in public is you eventually have to start thinking about, basically, how you look in your casual internet conversations. So if I want to burn someone down to their very roots in an argument, I then have to consider how that might be turned around on me later, etc.
Not necessarily a bad thing, but it probably means I need to revise my RoE for certain things.
On one of my milestone birthdays, coworkers bought me a boilermaker, a whisky shot glass submerged in a mug of beer. I was happy to show them how an old iron miner does it, tossing it off without a breath, shot glass clinking on my teeth. It would have been fine if they hadn't thought it was so cool that it became 'endless boiler makers'.
I'm told I kissed the company flirt later that evening. My one brush with infidelity in 40 years of marriage.
Not particularly proud of that and I guess I didn’t have to keep drinking them just because they kept appearing in front of me.
Well for decades automation and relocalisation have only impacted blue collar jobs and we highly educated workers have explained that it's for the best.
Now we are in for some ironic times were our jobs get outsourced to machines or India/Vietnam/China - I guess we will suddenly decide that the situation is completely different and that automation is in fact bad (unless it only impacts socialist/Trump leaning workers from the rust belt).
I was careful to include myself "we will suddenly decide" among those privileged workers who will at last get the bad side of the globalisation/automation. This was not an attack against you - in fact I think I was agreeing.
I didn't think you were attacking me - no worries there, I'm probably doing a bad job getting the right tone. I just have a weird personal context that I'm not sure everyone knows where all this is a little more terrifying to me - it's much more normal for me to be making >35k than >50k, historically.
Yeah, it's Schadenfreude in full bloom, but I want to see the thinkpieces by the people who wrote about how the Rust Belt types were racists if they weren't delighted poor Chinese peasant farmers were now working in factories that had been outsourced from the USA and now had a better standard of living, writing about how it's really great that they are now losing out to AI on employment because you can't stand in the way of progress, you racist know-nothings!
I have mixed thoughts about this. Looking at the DALL-E 2 samples on their website, it just demonstrates Vermeer was indeed better. Maybe more improvements will do better, but I think what it might do, if it ever works well enough to go commercial, is not "enabling people to be creative", it'll do one of two things (maybe both):
(1) Commercial art for advertising, etc. Like you say, "design me a logo". The inventors will make their money by licencing fees like Adobe.
(2) Currently, a lot of amateur and semi-pro artists do commissions for fan works, OCs, and the like. If you can tell the program "draw my OC dressed up as Captain America fighting the Hulk but in the style of Hello Kitty", that will cut out selling commissions (I think unpaid sites like DeviantArt will still continue).
(3) The bans on "generat(ing) violent, hate, or adult images" will soon fall as soon as this goes commercial or even widespread. People will want to do porn images of their favourites. And if "Captain America fighting the Hulk" is considered "violent images", then there will be hacks and work-arounds and mods galore.
Will it replace Art As Art? I doubt it. There's already a huge market churning out "things to put up on your wall" that you can buy in home furnishings stores alongside your nested tables and tallboys and resin Buddha statues. Thomas Kinkade was immensely popular and commercially successful, but few people will claim this is masterpiece art rather than 'product'. I'm not knocking Kinkade, he had genuine talent and ability, but he found a market and settled into "this is what the buyers want" and churned out product to please that market. This will just shift into commercial gear where instead of a workshop full of Chinese piece-workers knocking out 'copies of copies of copies of The Haywain', it'll be automated with spray painters connected up to DALL-E knockoffs.
On the other hand, we'll still have the Tracey Emins and Jeff Koons of the fine art world, and I'm not that sure that's an improvement, either. I have come to appreciate David Hockney more in recent years as he did learn the old techniques when he was an apprentice artist. I don't know if modern artists *can* draw or if it's all "empty out your laundry basket and call it conceptual art", and that's unfair of me.
So - the word version of DALL-E (and the cutesy-pooness of that name, the 'ain't I clever?' pun on Dali and that blinkin' robot animated movie I am supposed to find so heartwarming evoke in me the same reaction as Dorothy Parker reading "The House At Pooh Corner" - 'Tonstant Weader Fwowed up' https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1928/10/20/far-from-well) will do very well for churning out filler content. The penny-a-liners who work freelance journalism will suffer here.
Those who can write with a distinctive voice will not, at least until we get good enough machines to fake sincerity.
>Looking at the DALL-E 2 samples on their website, it just demonstrates Vermeer was indeed better.
Completely and totally agree about the Vermeers. I can't believe the DALL-E lot even put that shit into their infomercial. They must have deeply undeveloped sensibilities in that domain.
As I see it, the problem of art automation has been solved from both ends, as usual. On the one hand, computers got much better at art; on the other hand, humans have virtually lost the capacity to produce traditional art (+). It doesn't take a deep-learning AI to produce an artwork in the style of Jackson Pollock; all it takes is a set of paint buckets and a large canvas. Reproducing something even more avant-garde such as *The Black Square* is even easier.
(+) Which is not at all the case with non-traditional art, such as video games, though obviously 90% of everything is still crap.
DALL-E will make it that now you don't even have to order up a container load of 'art' from China, you can have it done for pennies right here at home by someone running a printshop on computers (which newspapers have long been doing with computer typesetting and offset lithography printing).
No problem at all, once someone works out the details. All you'll need is a couple of guys to make sure the paint containers are filled and to move the completed 'artworks' onto a pallet for shipping.
One possibility is: you write very well about your experiences in some unusual environments and communities. An AI could ape this, but it would be lying - it hasn't had these experiences. Even if everything it describes is accurate and it draws conclusions as good as yours (which I think would be really hard) human readers wouldn't know this, and would naturally trust you more than an AI. I think there will be lots of things like this, and that humans will keep trusting human writers for much longer than is justified by their actual advantage.
(if you were going to double down on this strategy, you'd start writing about the perils of an AI world - something we'd be least likely to trust AIs on, and which appeals to the demographic least likely to switch to AIs!)
Likewise, I think there might be a while between AIs that can write well, and AIs that can analyze scientific questions well. Some GPTs that could write well still seemed to make basic reasoning errors if you looked closely; I don' know how long that will last. At least "AIs can analyze difficult scientific questions at least as well as humans" sounds pretty close to "AIs can do science", which I think of as a later stage of world-craziness than "AIs can write".
I predict the first areas of writing to fall to AIs (in terms of actual market share, not what they can theoretically do) will be fiction and humor, and the last areas will be things like social commentary.
I think by the time social commentary falls, so many jobs will have fallen that we'll be in a different economic regimen and maybe thinking about things more like UBIs, and the world will end a few years later. This makes me less concerned that there will be some long period in which writers are uniquely out of work and it's terrible for me.
"I predict the first areas of writing to fall to AIs (in terms of actual market share, not what they can theoretically do) will be fiction and humor, and the last areas will be things like social commentary."
GPT-3 et al seem more cut out for generic reportorial content, imo. A more optimistic/humanistic take would see the tech augmenting the production of daily-beat journalists who collect some basic facts (say box score of a high-school football game), and have it crank out a story based on them. Some type of this work (like daily market reports) could be fully automated. But this may also free up some of the human's time to write more in-depth work, with fact-collection outside of the ability of the algo.
As far as blogging and punditry go, I'm not up on the ability of NLP models to 'theme' like humans, but I'm skeptical they'll be able to stylize in a sufficient manner to replace good writers in the near term. The prose I've seen so far looks beige. Matt Yglesias had an example tweet today: https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1513829798841393154
It's worse than beige, though. You can sense that there's no mind in there -- just something that has learned some things about how to string sentences together that are in the right general subject area and strung together in a plausible sequence. This reminds me of the kind of stuff my daughter at age 15 used to dash off for high school classes she cared nothing about. I would read them and realize that she had produced them without accessing *one single solitary thought, opinion, emotion, doubt or shred of confusion* regarding the topic.
"just something that has learned some things about how to string sentences together that are in the right general subject area and strung together in a plausible sequence."
To my own suspicions, and dissecting this a little further; it's traversing knowledge graphs in a data repository, with directed edges connecting entities/nodes, and the "writing" consists of inserting grammatical connectors.
Wow, that Terminator essay creeps me out quite a lot. Something about the combo of it being entirely passable, and yet clearly empty of mind. Makes me think of a photo I saw one time of somebody's pet dog, which had been preserved by taxidermy after death and sat in a characteristic alert posture in the living room.
> who collect some basic facts (say box score of a high-school football game), and have it crank out a story based on them. Some type of this work (like daily market reports) could be fully automated.
Those are already automated, and in fact were automated even years before GPT.
Sure. This is 5% me, 55% GPT-3 and 35% existing famous poems, it's structured in the style of a high modernist poem: https://deponysum.com/2021/02/23/poem/
Be warned, it's mostly a proof of concept piece, it's not very good. I ended up steering it, through the selection of content, to be a kind of tribute poem to my favorite book.
> "One possibility is: you write very well about your experiences in some unusual environments and communities. An AI could ape this, but it would be lying - it hasn't had these experiences. Even if everything it describes is accurate and it draws conclusions as good as yours (which I think would be really hard) [...]"
Yeah, don't even GPT-3 and DALL-E fail on concepts they didn't have much exposure of ? So "niche" art should be safe from them ?
(otOH, I seem to remember a breakthrough at some point in the number of training material required - though wasn't it adversarial networks - what allowed GPT to be created in the first place ?)
I'm having the impression that once we'll get human(+) levels of competence in extrapolating from tiny amounts of training material, we'll be pretty close to general intelligence - at which point we'll have bigger issues than this !
> I predict the first areas of writing to fall to AIs (in terms of actual market share, not what they can theoretically do) will be fiction and humor, and the last areas will be things like social commentary.
How do you figure ? I would've predicted exactly the opposite. It doesn't take a lot of intelligence to reproduce a Buzzfeed listicle (which is what most social commentary is like); I bet you could even do it with a Markov Chain of some kind. But writing a joke that is actually funny, or a story that is actually readable, is a task that is beyound most humans at the moment.
"But writing a joke that is actually funny, or a story that is actually readable, is a task that is beyond most humans at the moment." I agree. And I am positive I would not mistake the AI-generated Rbt. Frost poems I read about somewhere for the real thing
But you're not taking into account that if a lot of what's available is AI-generated humor and fiction, tastes will change. The young, who are wired to bond with deep delight with the world they are born into, will weave their child-mind magic through the crapulous plastic worlds of AI-generated fiction. As they grow older the algorithm-derived denizens of their imagination will power their ambitions and serve as models for them as they a navigate the delights and agonies of love, achievement and death. They will be like hermit crabs who use plastic tampon tubes as homes, or decorator crabs gluing bottlecaps to their shells. Older adults will experience a gradual diminution of their enjoyment of fiction and humor as more and more if it is AI-generated, but will just get used to having briefer and shallower responses -- maybe they will attribute their reduced enjoyment to middle age.
Edit: later thought. I don’t think people give enough thought to how the internet is changing people. What I describe above is a way I fear it it will change people in the future. Ryan Broderick’s Garbage Day blog often gives glimpses of ways that’s happening in the present. For instance, this, from his post called The Bird Site Demands Content, about people’s “participation” in the Ukraine war via online forums:
“There are a lot of internet users who, after a decade of exposure to viral media, have had their minds so thoroughly warped by trending content that they believe that reacting to popular internet culture is not just a replacement for a personality, but some kind of moral duty. It seems social platforms have not only eroded newsrooms by decimating the ad industry, but they have also, in the process, turned everyone into emotional trauma gig workers.”
You can't get a hermit crab to take up residence in absolutely anything -- a nail, a shred of plastic bag: It has to be a container, & it has to be the right size & weight. Likewise you can't get kids to bond with just any old thing. I agree you don't need AI to raise a generation of kids who have plastic imaginative crap woven into their psyche. But I think AI-generated fiction would definitely facilitate the process, by producing a ton of plastic imaginative crap. You can't get kids to bond deeply with something by just presenting them with a random stimulus -- say a random string of text. For them to bond with something imaginatively the thing has to have various qualities that capture their deep attention. If it's a story, it has to involve living beings going through comprehensible, emotion-generating events that kids can comprehend and engage with imaginatively. And of course it helps if the kids perceive that the thing presented to them is of interest to the people that are important to them. Random strings of text don't make the grade in either respect.
Fair enough, but again, I don't see what special features AI would bring to this problem. Either it will produce enjoyable fiction, which children will adopt; or it will produce some kind of garbage-tier writing that children will discard. Human writers are in the exact same boat. I guess you could argue that humans demand more pay and/or work slower, but that's a quantitative difference, not a qualitative one.
Some forms of writing (routine sports and stock market journalism) already got automated by AIs even *before* GPT and the like.
I remember being disturbed way back in 2017 when I googled the stock ticker of an obscure public company and a bunch of articles turned up which were subtly incoherent and insubstantial and clearly the result of an automated system filling in a template with the latest financial and stock market data.
If it counts, then I know for a fact that the first area of writing that has already fallen to AI is regulatory documentation in the pharmaceutical sector.
I always wondered whether the same system has been sold the the regulatory bodies. I guess it is just a matter of time.
There is something really funny about this unfortunate trend being accelerated by AI (but thinking about it feels kind of like worrying about how all this water is really wrecking the decor on the Titanic).
Yes, all our voices are about the be drowned out by a flood of AI generated content, with the possible exception of people like Scott who have a prior reputation. If you haven't made it as an author in, say, 4 years, it's gonna get a lot harder.
This AI generated content will be created by people with all sorts of values political and ethical, many of them quite different to mine, many of them not at all benign. Think the panic over Russian bots but much more real.
I'm not worried about AI, just the virtual over the natural. I just tried doing my taxes online. When the program asked for my cell phone number, it collapsed. I don't own a mobile phone. It just had to send me a text message, poor thing. I had to hack the form to complete it. AI is programmed by the same illiterate clowns who program autocorrect. God help us.
This is a pretty common fear of automation in a variety of industries. I've heard of coders afraid that AI will start writing programs. "Make an SaaS app that tracks budgets" and then it spits that out. Or truckers. So I don't think it's all that unusual.
Firstly, keep in mind if it's not in general release they're showing you the best generations not the average one. Very often what happens in practice is these things generate a ton of options and a human hand selects the best couple of ones and that hides a lot of failure. But secondly: what's more likely than replacement is a tool. You sign up for a software service called WriterAssistant. You tell WriterAssistant "produce an article on bottlecaps in the style of Resident Contrarian that does X, Y, and Z" and it spits something out. You edit it, add in what's missing, delete some stuff, and rework the piece. And then publish. One could imagine a completely GPT-3 author. But that'd be a lot harder without human editing/intervention.
And even if you got a fully automated blog up and running there's little reason to believe humans wouldn't want to read what other humans write. Writing is largely artisanal. I like to think of a lot of writing as an ultimately social activity. Full automation might happen somewhat but I suspect it will be limited to things like horoscopes. After all, someone has to generate the data on what (for example) women 20 to 25 think. (This is without getting into the various policies that prevent it and the fact of privileged, real world information.)
The pernicious effect I'm afraid of, if afraid is the word, is the skills barrier. As AI and automation take over all jobs will increasingly come to resemble specialized forms of programming. And that will shut certain people out of writing or force them into less efficient traditional writing. Not because I believe there's a class of people who can't do it but because it creates a barrier and any time a form of social communication has barriers to entry it turns cliquish in ways I don't think are good.
Right now we're in a gap where distribution is increasingly automated but production is still artisanal. Which is ideal to get in as an amateur. But I don't think it will last forever if there's significant money in it.
A psychoanalyst (and you thought they were extinct) argues that psychoactive drugs are a bad idea, because they keep us from dealing with the real issues that cause us pain:
"For Mental Illness, Make Medication a Last Resort" Psychiatrists and even internists are often far too eager to prescribe pills." By Erica Komisar April 4, 2022
"Doctors prescribe these medications as a quick fix. But the pills merely mask the patient’s emotional pain. "
"Medication can be a godsend in the right context. But it is risky and should be offered only after nonmedical options, such as psychoanalysis, have been exhausted. Why is therapy instead often a last resort for patients? In part because it is uncomfortable. Some patients temporarily become more symptomatic when they expose themselves to the origins of their pain. This temporary pain is necessary for long-term relief, but it’s easier to numb with pills."
"There are no shortcuts to treating mental illness. Insurance companies should be pressured into covering treatments that work. Patients have to be consumers and say no to medication as a first course of treatment unless their symptoms are severe. Doctors must acknowledge that medication can be risky and have severe iatrogenic effects. Medication should only be used for serious clinical conditions, or only after everything else has been tried and failed."
My own experience is that psychological insight can lead us to understand why we are depressed. But, it does not necessarily cure the depression. My life was little changed by psychoanalysis except for the time and money it cost. Zoloft made me feel better and sleep better.
CBT was a godsend for me, but I would never have been able to engage with and benefit from it if I was not taking Lexapro at the same time. You need a cast for a broken leg to heal correctly and you (often) need medication for therapy to work correctly.
I think that prescription is a classic case of falling into the fallacy that one can truly stand in another’s shoes and describe the world from that perspective
Understanding the cause of illnesses is important but that doesn't meant that drugs shouldn't be part of the treatment. I think there's also a real self-serving bias in a prescription of "don't take these pills that make you feel better, pay me lots of money every week for years instead!"
Absolutely, a grotesque self-serving bias in this article. But let me tell you a bad story, & not an unusual one, about the misuse of antidepressants. 24 year old woman comes for therapy. She feels adrift in life -- not exactly miserable, but had lost her mojo. Been like that for a few years. She lives with her honey, a woman, but relationship feels sort of humdrum and passionless.
Here's some backstory: Age 17 she was a closeted lesbian highschooler, feeling very lonely and sad. Went to some mental health professional, said she was lonely and sad all the time but did not disclose that she was a closeted lesbian. Counselor put her on an SSRI. She thinks the drug made her feel better at the time. Seven years later she is still on it -- she how has her internist renew it for her. She is now uninterested in sex, anorgasmic and 40 pounds overweight. She has tried stopping her antidepressant in the past, but when she does she feels terriblel -- anxious, irritable, has flu-like symptoms. She believes that is what she would feel like all the time if she were not on an antidepressant. Nobody has informed her that the antidepressant she is on is famous for having an awful withdrawal syndrome, and that that is what she is experiencing when she stops it cold turkey.
If you're going to compare the relative effectiveness of drugs to other interventions, it is not really fair to compare SSRI's to psychoanalysis, which is a slo-mo, mink-coat-expensive, specialized treatment . You need to compare drugs to effective psychosocial interventions. In the case of this woman, what would have helped when she was 17 wasn't treatment of an illness -- it was someone interested enough and skillful enough to draw the kid out about her dilemma and help her navigate the coming out process. Like that kid, lots of people diagnosed with anxiety and depression are not ill, they are just scared and unhappy for reasons that are quite valid and understandable. Others are caught in mind-traps -- but there are many approaches to trap escape that are better and faster than psychoanalysis. And there are some people for whom psychoanalysis works well.
> said she was lonely and sad all the time but did not disclose that she was a closeted lesbian
This struck me as less a story about the misuse of antidepressants than about the inability that a lot of us have identifying the source of our discontent. Perhaps it was the therapist’s shortcoming, but how do you really know that?
> there are many approaches to trap escape that are better and faster than psychoanalysis.
"Perhaps it was the therapist’s shortcoming, but how do you really know that?"
Well, of course, I do not know that for sure. But the professional who saw this woman at age 17 put her on an SSRI quite quickly. I think that if a 17 year old comes to you saying they're sad and lonely, it makes sense to spend a few sessions getting to know them and drawing them out to see if their unhappiness is not a manifestation of a "chemical imbalance" but an understandable response to one of the things that very commonly cause pain & confusion for people that age: sexual orientation, other sexual issues, unaddressed academic difficulties, conflict and poor communication with parents. Adolescents with many of these common problems are pretty helpable, once you get the issue out on the table. So to move so quickly to diagnosing the kid with Prozac Deficiency Disorder seems like quite bad practice to me.
"This struck me as less a story about the misuse of antidepressants than about the inability that a lot of us have identifying the source of our discontent."
By the woman's account she was quite clear that her secret homosexuality was a very painful problem for her. While she may not have thought of it as the reason she was sad and lonely (and indeed it may not have been the sole cause of her feeling that way), she sure as hell knew it was bothering her terribly. As for this being a case of misuse of antidepressants, there are at least 3 things wrong with how the antidepressant treatment was administered, beyond the problem that it was initiated so quickly: (1) It affected how the kid thought of herself -- weighed in the direction of her thinking of herself as someone with a "chemical imbalance in her brain," rather than as someone who went through a period of misery caused by a problem that made the misery understandable. Of course, sometimes people have to face up to the fact that their brain does not work right. But it is not clear that this 17 year old was one of the people who had to do that.
(2) Professionals kept her on the drug for years, without suggesting that she try seeing how life was without it. (3) Nobody informed her that her med had a substantial discontinuation syndrome. Consequently, when she tried stopping the drug on her own and experienced the syndrome she believed she was getting a taste of what life would be like without an SSRI.
"> there are many approaches to trap escape that are better and faster than psychoanalysis.
I would be very curious to hear some of them."
Recommend you read Scott's post about depression treatments:
I read Scott’s article, and I think I might’ve read it before. I don’t see any discussion of some treatments that trumps psychoanalysis or medication.
Of course there’s a lot of things that one can do for oneself if depressed, But the unfortunate thing is the depression makes it very hard to do something for oneself at all.
Thanks for this. This is all good. I was under the impression that she did not raise the issue of her sexuality with that therapist. I am entirely willing to believe that this was therapy on the most basic and crude level. And I am also well aware of how crappy that can be. I think a lot of that is economic pressure. As you pointed out psychoanalysis is pricey. And even the word psychoanalysis needs to be treated carefully. What exactly are we talking about? A lot of the issues you raise revolve around the notion that this therapist did not want to spend a lot of time with her and that could be because of disinterest and could well be because he was a high school guidance counselor level therapist with pretty strict protocols about time and money. It’s all very sad.
I am a lifelong sufferer of major depressive cycles so I do appreciate it. Of course when I first started any sort of therapeutic intervention there were no medications. So I come back to the other point I made which is the difficulty of sometimes identifying what it is that’s really troubling. It took me a long time and I don’t know that I can say it was because the therapist didn’t ask the right questions.
My personal intuition is that medication is useful once your brain has worn a rut in itself. Which definitely suggests that it’s not so useful for very young people. But I hate to make rules about people’s sanity.
Rising from the ashes, or having your frozen corpse defrosted and incinerated in 2121 - or more likely accidentally defrosted and decaying in situ when the power goes down.
If you were a scientist in Oregon in the 1960s who had just discovered the altered hemoglobin structures of embryos and fetuses, what would you call it to be far more exciting instead of Portland 1?
Scott - it seems like a great leaders book club could be a very useful thing to have. What results in a Lee Kuan Yew, Deng Xiaoping, Park Chung hee, coming into power and then using that power to unleash market reforms for broad based prosperity? What are the conditions that allow these leaders to be who they were and do what they did?
And how are they different from people with comparably absolute power like Pinochet, whose economics may not have been bad, exactly, but certainly didn't achieve take-off comparable to those cases.
I assure you, all three leaders are plenty controversial. You just live in the anglosphere and don't notice the controversy, especially about Park, whose political descendants no longer hold absolute power.
Regardless of people's opinions of her, operating as a democratic leader in an already wealthy country is very different from operating as an autocrat in a poor country that becomes wealthy under your power.
For Thatcher, you probably want a different reference class - Adenauer, perhaps?
My use of 'controversial' here was regarding the claim that they were great leaders who achieved great things for their countries. I think it's not controversial that Deng set China onto a different and significantly more successful path. I have not yet seen anyone argue against the idea that he's a great leader for that reason. There are plenty of people who would contest such a claim about Thatcher.
Deng appeared to achieve good results simply by being less bad than Mao, but Mao was probably the worst person (in results terms at least) in the history of mankind.
I don't think that makes Deng "great" in any reasonable sense.
This is correct. Deng was mostly just less bad than Mao, and had the benefit of seeing how abso-fucking-lutely awful the effects of the Cultural Revolution were. "Do the opposite of what Mao did" served the Chinese very well for decades. There wasn't much genius involved.
This is an absurd claim. Deng was very much not just 'less bad than Mao'. His policies and leadership led to the largest and fastest reduction in poverty (and move towards prosperity) the world has ever seen.
Anyone have thoughts on a good way to start reading Indian epics? Other than the Bhagavad Gita, I haven't read any. But they're pretty damn long and I'm not sure I'd get through a poem that's ten times the length of the Iliad and Odyssey combined. Any favorite abridgements or selections? Best translations? Thanks.
Dutt's English verse translation was the way I first read the core story of the epics. It's a beautiful translation, heavily shortened and at times summarized, but it's a weekend read. Then when I returned to the Gita, which I'd read before, I understood it in a totally new light. And once I'd got the summary outline of the story, I could read other translations in whole or in part and I understood what was going on.
Ancient Epics aren't like modern thrillers, the audience didn't go in cold wondering "oh man what's gonna happen to Aeneas!?!?" Start by understanding the story then work outward.
That's the whole impetus behind Tulsidas translating the Valmiki Ramayana (written in Sanskrit) into the vernacular so that the common people could understand it, and it was every bit as controversial as the Reformers wanting to publish the Bible in the vernacular 😀
Gosh, this is something I don't know any good English translations for! The only ones I know of are 19th century and immensely prolix. Gateway for me was TV serials, which give you the high points and after you've watched a couple, you're familiar enough with the main characters and the plot that it would help when reading a translation.
I would tell you to avoid Sita Sings The Blues, which someone I generally like recommended but I think it's awful, but then tastes differ:
If you go on Youtube and just search for Ramayana or Mahabharat there are a lot of Indian serials (some very old, some from the 90s).
The Ramayana is probably easier to get into; it's the story of an incarnation of Vishnu and his travails as Purushottam, the ideal or perfect man, one who does not transgress social limits, born as Rama.
The Mahabharat has a lot more "wait a minute, who is this again and whose son/grandson/nephew/reincarnation are they?"
And if you want to experience something completely different, you could read Roger Zelazny's *Lord of Light*. It is not a Hindu or a Buddhist epic; but, like most of Zelazny's stories, it feels like the ground truth that such epics are based on.
I love that book, it is somewhat dated in its attitudes now but the whole notion of super-powered humans emulating the Hindu pantheon, and a form of transhumanism (new bodies of whatever gender you like are available and you can just keep re-incarnating) is great. When the crew of the crashed spaceship become tyrannical, desiring to be worshipped as gods in actuality and keep the scientific knowledge for themselves, then Sam turns to Buddhism as a counter-force to spread doubt about the divinities.
apologies, on the other hand if you look it up you're going to get spoilers anyway, and by now it's old enough to have grown-up kids of its own (I always felt like there should have been a sequel, or at least another novel set on that world, it felt like he created such a rich background that it was too good to just use once).
I know, I felt the same way :-( On the other hand, Zelazny did produce *Amber*, which started of well and then petered off asymptotically into irrelevance, so maybe it's for the best...
I greatly enjoyed *Sita Sings the Blues*, but it's a bit of an "inside baseball" sort of movie. You pretty much need to know the context beforehand in order for it to make sense.
Definitely her take on Sita is heavily influenced by her own experiences, but I think she is a little reductionist in her view of the entire epic; that it's about a woman suffering at the hand of the patriarchy.
The books by Rajaji (C. Rajagopalachari) are good to start with: they may not be "sophisticated" and have a bit of lecturing, but they are true to the spirit in which the common person receives the epics.
Another suggestion is the comic books by Amar Chitra Katha; they likely solve the problem of having to remember names that someone mentioned: they were all illustrated by the same artist so you can go by visual appearance of the characters. (According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahabharata_(comics) the Mahabharata one runs to over 1000 pages, but it should still be relatively easy reading.)
(FWIW, I tried to watch Peter Brook's film and found it dreadful going.)
If you're looking to get started right away, for the Mahabharata here's something good that's online: https://www.prekshaa.in/archive?field_preksha_series_tid=6109 — it's reverse-chronological so start at the end (though to some extent you could read in random order too…).
Note that the Ramayana is much more like a typical poem (not encyclopedic and discursive like the Mahabharata).
I liked the Peter Brook abridged version of his stage show but (a) you would need to be familiar first with the story and (b) yeah it is very Western take and very of the Zeitgeist of that time, e.g. the multi-culti cast.
No worse than Russian. They tend to be their names, plus epithets from where they come from, who their parents are, qualities and attributes for which they are admired, etc. If you come out of the culture where you are familiar with that, then it's easy to keep track. If you're coming to it for the first time, it takes a while to link them up (e.g. Sita is often addressed as 'Janaki' because she is the daughter of King Janaka).
That is the fascinating thing about the Mahabharat; the codes of war, the taboos binding Kshatriya warriors and kings and how all the rules get bent or broken, generally at the instigation of Krishna, who is an incarnation of Vishnu which makes it all more tangled -how this is a war of dharma (right) against adharma (wrong) when the god-figure is the one breaking all the rules and causing the heroes to behave dishonorably in order to win a victory?
You can see the layering of versions over time, where the original primitive version is a dynastic battle between the Pandavas and the Kauravas, the Pandavas are the Good Guys (or at least, in the right as far as the story goes) and this is signalled by them having Krishna on their side; for the rest of it, all's fair in love and war and it's okay if the good guys do it.
As the epic becomes read in a more philosophical and spiritual way, this then presents problems which have to be explained away. I think the Bhagavad-Gita is in part a way of doing that; if there are no relations, if all here is maya, then playing these kinds of tricks and deceits and rule-breaking doesn't matter in ultimate reality.
I think it's also a commentary on what war does, and how idealism has to compromise with pragmatism when it comes to achieving things in the real world; Yudhishtira who is the son of the god of justice/judgement/death has never spoken a word of a lie in his entire life, and as a symbol of this his chariot floats above the ground. After his brothers and Krishna persuade him to speak this deceitful speech - for the very reason that his reputation for utter truthfulness means their enemy will believe it to be true - then his chariot sinks down to the earth. Like the rest of us.
No, I haven't seen that, I did see the edited down TV version of the theatrical performance of the Mahabharat.
As I said, you can see the layers accreting over the years; Brooks is just the latest to try and reconcile the preaching of the ideals with the messy realities of fighting a war. Krishna is a sort of trickster character anyway, this incarnation is very different to Rama. Krishna challenges the boundaries of social limits and really is "if this is what it takes to win, then this is what we do".
The earliest versions were probably very simple: Pandavas good, Kauravas bad, ambushes and trickery are fair during war. As the characters got developed over time, and e.g. Yudhisthira is the ideal king who never speaks a false or untrue word, Arjuna is the ultimate warrior, then the deeds on the battlefield had to be reconciled with that. If the Kauravas are wicked for using tricks and deceit, what about if the Pandavas do the same thing?
So yes, it's like all scriptures that have to be re-interpreted over the centuries as views change.
There are 18 major books (mahaparvanas) divided into 100 minor books (parvanas). The Bhagavadgita is most of one minor book appropriately called gitaparvana.
I agree that you should view a performance rather than read. The Mahabharata and Ramayana began as oral epics and that’s still primarily how they are experienced by Hindus today.
There was a long running Mahabharata series on Indian TV. In acting and production values it is gloriously cheesy. (Your main take away will be ancient India was very shiny.)
If you do want to read, the Amar Chitra Katha series of comics cover many individual episodes and a few longer treatments.
The abridged versions of the Mahabharata and Ramayana by C. Rajagopalachari are the most popular amongst Indians who speak English.
The most scholarly full translation of the entire Mahabharata is that started by the late Prof. J.A.B. Van Buitenen of the University of Chicago and continued after his death in the Clay Sanskrit Library series.
"Your main take away will be ancient India was very shiny."
I know this is a very shallow take but how I can tell if a production is South Indian is "Moar bling? Moar bling!" They tend to have Shiva dressed up to the nines, while Northern Indian productions have him less shiny 😁
Listen, if a king cannot be dripping with gold and jewels, what even is the point? If there are no strings of pearls three and four deep, how can you even tell he is a king? It's a pantomime version but very satisfying because we all have that childhood notion of what royalty should look like, and it's not "dressed in a business suit".
There was a twitter thread on artbreeder that went relatively viral a few days ago with a lot of dramatic stuff about the destruction of art. Of course many had good responses about how the same was said of photography. There were also complaints about taking the food out of the mouths of artists.
I think a strong argument can be made that for several specific kinds of art, the value derived from artbreeder vastly outweights the cost to artists. Depending on how things go in the next few years.
Something like a library for software and video games on desktop that mimics the functions of the portrait section would be of immense value. A wide variety of game genres have portraits/icons as a key art asset. The kind of faces you can get from artbreeder are significantly superior to most "face generators" that you see in existing games. Having an open source face genetator that was as good as artbreeder would open up game development to a lot of people in those genres.
Paradox games like Crusader Kings or games like Star Dynasties and Alliance of the Sacred Suns would all benefit from cheap quality portrait generation.
On the human created art side of things, I rather hope this leads to a greater emphasis on the physical and material qualities of artwork, as opposed to how it looks on a screen. Seeing (most) artwork in person is already a very different experience than seeing it on a screen or a print, but I think sometimes we forget that, having so much more experience with the latter.
If your art can be replaced by a machine, then IMO it should be. If your art can be replaced by a machine, and its art is of higher quality than yours, then you need to look for a new career.
Much of the modern "art" is automated anyway, check out "spot paintings" for example. Being a successful artist these days is indistinguishable from having good marketing, where the price of your stuff is determined mostly by the value of your "brand", and its objective qualities are secondary at best.
Is this meant to be a claim about art ("no truly good art could be replaced by machines") or about economics/ethics ("we shouldn't prevent technology from taking jobs once it can perform them well")?
I don’t think it has much to do with art. Commercial art is a form of art but it isn’t art, in the sense that we need to worry about a machine doing it.
I think economics was behind a lot of the beefing about photography as well. Wood cutters, engravers and others like them lost some very lucrative occupations.
I wonder if we should distinguish between "art" and image manufacturing. Most "artists" do the latter in my opinion and that is why something like artbreeder can replace them. Like video game portraits "art manufacturing" procudes images that can be "good enough". You aren't trying to be iconic or unique. Just "cool".
One way of putting this is that until the popularization of photography, there were these huge fields of art involving the painting of photorealistic portraits and of landscapes, and they were entirely replaced by photography.
Photorealistic reproduction of something that exists in reality has been done by a camera for about a century and a half now. Artists mostly don't create photorealistic images at all any more - or they create photorealistic images of things that don't exist (fictional characters, etc)
Photorealistic creation of things that don't exist in reality have required artists until recently, but it seems to me that getting an AI to convert a description into a photorealistic image is more similar to replacing a portrait artist with a selfie than replacing fine art.
Actually, video games have specialized in creating "photorealistic creation of things that don't exist" for quite some time now. As with all art, mere technique is not enough; there are many games out there that are photorealistically rendered yet completely boring. Contrast, for example, the latest release of *God of War* or *Ghost of Tshushima* with *Elden Ring*. That's right, souls-like fans, I went there ! Fite me IRL !111!!
And the irony there is that photography is now part of the arts itself, including manipulation of images in ways comparable to painting and sculpture. "The camera never lies" was soon shown to be a false notion.
Is this a statement about deep values of what is "meaningful" content? An ephemeral statement on the current state of ML? A misleading comment where writer ML is currently better than filter ML and Google is looking to save resources? An internal fight spilling out into the public eye without context?
A pragmatic statement that most people generating webpages entirely algorithmically are spammers?
Although I do think that there's a statement you could make about meaningfulness, which is that AI can currently generate new text but not new *facts.* Even if your text generator is perfect on a technical level and avoids the giveaways of current-gen ML, it has no way of knowing whether the stuff it's generating is true or false, because that depends on facts about the world outside of the internet. That's fine for writing fiction, it's fine if you're a spammer and just want eyeballs on your ads, but it's the worst possible problem to have if you're a search engine and you're in the business of providing accurate information.
(Eventually, filter ML will have to not only identify sources but fact-check them as well, and isn't that a scary thought.)
What percentage of the stuff on the internet is directly deals with facts outside of it though? Like the old meme noted, everyting is repost of a repost. However, I don't see how ML can possibly make things any worse. Everybody knows that everything not from "reliable sources" is fake news. And for a long time, it's also how Google has been running its search, whoevers "page rank" is higher gets higher placement.
People use Google to look up random facts all the time, not just current events.
My nightmare scenario as a programmer is that I search for "Software Foo fails to Bar" and I get 9999 algorithmically generated pages with the prompt of "Five ways to fix Foo won't Bar error" and 1 page with an actual answer written by a human.
Although there have been some examples of people sampling from BERT with things like Gibbs sampling, it's really not good at text generation. If you want to do generation you're much better off using GPT-2.
A couple of months ago I asked the SSC community for thoughts regarding a centralized place to find interesting blog articles, and got positive feedback on the idea. I've created https://www.readsomethinginteresting.com to serve that purpose and would love to hear what y'all think.
I can see the landing page, but when I click 'enter', it 1) gave the error, 2) loaded correctly, 3) loaded correctly, but took 10+ seconds, on 3 attempts.
Can I recommend trying out https://www.sessionstack.com/, it did wonders with catching problems on my website and in general for user experience understanding.
The Volokh Conspiracy. https://reason.com/volokh/ The bloggers there run, as they say, "mostly libertarian", and there's a smattering of more liberal and more conservative bloggers as well. Mostly they blog about free speech / 1A law, but it's a mix. They occasionally quote SSC, so it's definitely at least similar types of people.
I'm not sure if anyone else could be considered to be like The Last Psychiatrist, but I do like The Graham Factor ( https://grahamfactor.substack.com/ ) for its pragmatic and informed perspective on policing.
Nick Szabo of Unenumerated (an inspiration for Unqualified Reservations, where it was on the blogroll) used to write about law, but I see his blog hasn't been updated since 2018. He does apparently have a more recently used twitter account which still links to that blog in his bio. His personal website is currently offline but viewable via the internet archive:
Anyone here a landlord? Is leasing real estate a big part of anyone's overall financial picture? I was always skeptical that being a landlord makes a great deal of financial sense, versus the opportunity cost of just putting that same amount of money into the stock market. I spent a few years when younger working for a real estate company in a major US city, sort of seeing how the sausage is actually made, and I came away thinking that on a risk-adjusted basis equities just make way more sense. (The landlord is basically always going to lose in court in a blue state!) The S&P 500 has come close to quintupling over the last 11 or 12 years, and averages 9% returns overall.
I am now entering middle age though, and I have been considering investing in real estate more as a diversification move, especially for retirement. Plus, of course, as an inflation hedge. I also have the lifestyle flexibility to do what the kids call 'house hacking'- buy & move into a 2-4 unit building on a 3% down FHA mortgage, live there for a year, then move back to my current place now controlling an investment property for little down. Then there's buying an SFH just for Airbnb rentals, which appear to be much more profitable....
Buy property where you want to live. It will give you investment in local community and local governance, which is where most things that impact people happen. Thus, you can have an improving effect on the local community, and still satisfy the human need for self-interest.
Having gone through ups and downs in my local area - only buy to hold, not to flip. Hold (with a renter) until the market is stable again.
I had a similar outlook until relatively recently. I purchased my first investment property in early 2020 and 2nd in early 2021. Personally I have been very happy with the results. I realize 2 years is not a long time to make any concrete conclusions but here are a few miscellaneous points.
1. My politics tilt more towards blue than red, but I would never be a residential landlord in a blue state
2. When comparing SP500 vs RE, make sure you are including dividends as well as rental cash flow. Rental cash flow tends to be a greater % of RE returns than dividends are of stock returns (although this is probably less true in recent history!)
3. RE enables cheap 5:1 leverage, at a 30 year fixed rate, with no risk of margin calls. Best you can hope for with stocks is 4:1 leverage at a variable rate, with margin call risk.
4. you have a better chance of finding an undervalued property than an undervalued stock. of course this will require effort on your part; but it can at least be thought of as an opportunity to monetize your own labor.
5. favorable tax treatment means you can often end up paying very little taxes, or no taxes at all, on your income. (relevant topics: depreciation deduction; 1031 conversion). True that with an SP500 position you can defer capital gains taxes until you sell; but you are paying taxes on the dividends every year, whereas it may be many years before you need to pay taxes on RE cash flow.
6. you mention in a comment below the need to continue to spend money to keep the house updated - that is a relatively known cost and should be included in your financial estimate before you buy. (I assume I will need to spend 1% of current market value of the house per year in maintenance & upkeep. Most years will come in under that; some years will come in much higher than that. If you want to be more conservative, then call it 1.5%, 2%, whatever; the point is that you can anticipate the cost, to some extent).
7. Someone mentioned biggerpockets below; I will also recommend the realestateinvesting subreddit as a great source of information
Being a residential landlord is a *lot* of hassle, in part because as you say courts favour tenants.
Being a commercial landlord is a much more business-like, though, and big corps are bound to the letter of their contract, allowing for much more favourable leases (mostly in the form of shunting all the maintenance onto the tenant so as to minimise the hassle for the landlord, rather than increasing the total profit margin; Lease terms like this are restricted for residential leases and for small businesses)
I will note that the profit my family has gotten from commercial real state has come from being in the industry - either buying during a slump and selling during a boom, or from buying residential land and getting all the permits to build commercial there. Just buying existing properties to sit on them has a fairly low rate of return.
The advantage (and potential weakness) of real estate investing over the stock market is leverage. If you have $100K then you can either buy $100K in shares, or borrow $400K and buy $500K worth of property. If the stock and property markets both double then the stock market investor makes a $100K capital gain while the property investor makes a $500K capital gain (minus interest, plus rent, etc).
Past performance is not indicative of future gains etc, but over the past thirty years, in most parts of the Western world at least, borrowing all the money you possibly can and sticking it into real estate has been the best way to turn ordinary middle-class savings into a big stack of money.
(You can borrow money to put in shares as well, but typically not at 5-1 leverage, not for ordinary mortals.)
I was a tenant of a small landlord who invested in rental properties as part of his retirement plan. My heat went out in the winter and he refused to fix it for a couple months.
My point is, being a small landlord may impose a lot of obligations and hassle on you in dealing with the properties. However, if you are a slimeball who is willing to screw your tenants, it may make more sense.
Yes. I have a small portfolio of student rentals. Happy to answer anything specific but generally the best place to get basic questions answered is biggerpockets.com
Let's assume I know the answers to all of the basic questions, plus general personal finance. Have you considered the opportunity cost of what would've happened if you'd invested all of the money you put into your rentals (purchase plus costs after, repair etc.) into an index fund instead? Again, the S&P 500 is up like 4.5x in the last 12 or 13 years. Plus it's tax-free until you sell, you're paying income taxes on your profits.
Are you in the market too, and have rentals for diversification? Or are you real estate-only?
I don't think S&P 500 is up 4.5x even if you picked the optimal date (March '09?) and invested all your money then and sat out afterwards, but obviously that's an impossible thing to do and irrelevant as a benchmark. I have both equities and residential real estate investments and I think they have performed approximately the same. Of course equities are much more liquid, but also in theory real estate and equities should not be linked that closely, so if one goes down the other may not.
Income taxes are less of a concern with depreciation, interest, and other advantages of running a small business.
My 401k is in the market. I tend to not put after tax money into the market. Currently I've been allocating marginal dollars to crypto rather than new personally owned RE. Also invested in a few syndications.
RE is good for getting leverage subsidized by the federal government. Also if you think that high duration risk assets are overpriced bc of low interest rates, RE can offer a better risk-adjusted return.
It really depends on how much you value your time. You could invest in a REIT for similar returns or in a site like Fundrise. Something like that takes an hour to setup. But looking and buying a property will take hours and that’s before you see a return. But to mention screening tenants and doing repairs.
I’ve done both, I own a small duplex and I’ve invested in Fundrise. The dividend returns are similar/slightly lower to what I’ve earned through the duplex but I have yet to worry about repairs and tenants.
I'm not personally a landlord but I've worked with them and sold products to them and all that. That means I've gotten a very good look at their operations including access to budgets etc. Happy to answer any questions but you haven't asked any beyond whether someone's a landlord.
I've also worked with them and sold them products. I know a lot of very wealthy landlords. I am skeptical that being a small landlord (say, under 10 or 20 units) makes a lot of financial sense over a multi-decade time span, as a means to build wealth (versus diversification or protecting wealth- I have no family money, so I'm in aggressive wealth building mode). Any broker who wants to sell you a property can produce a cash-flow statement that says it will return x in one year. But over a long enough period of time, you will eventually have to replace the roof, the heating system- really everything. Every part of the building is on a ticking time clock from the moment you buy it.
What a lot of people don't understand is that things don't have to 'break' to need replacement. In 10-15 years, you'll need to have at least a newish kitchen and bathroom to keep getting quality tenants. You have to keep doing costly renovations every decade or so..... just to stay at the same level of quality. It's like treading water forever.
When I managed & sold properties in Tier 1 US City, all of the investors were ultra-independently wealthy and didn't care if they lost money for the first 10 years or so. They wanted to own buildings in Tier 1 US City the way other rich people wanted to own yachts.
Plus, you have to pay income tax on your profit, whereas an index fund returns 9% annually with no tax until I sell. Anyways, these are some of the arguments I've used to not buy a property to date. There's simply no argument that equities are superior to being a small landlord- my new arguments *for* it now are simply diversification
Have you ever worked outside a tier 1 city? Because the game's rather different in them. I've worked with small landlords but they're mostly in smaller areas. If you're willing to do that then there's opportunity. If you want to do it in Midtown well, yeah, you've got to have inherited money.
Basically, you make money three ways: From buying at a discount, from rental income, and from appreciation. The first one is usually the most important one in the small cap market. And there's no small cap deals in big cities so you're reduced to the more brutal game of expensive rentals and appreciation roulette. If you can get those properties, whether through bird dogs or new builds, and you take advantage of the better capital returns outside of the capital rich tier 1 cities then you can beat the stock market. But you do have to run an actual operation to do so.
The market is different today but even 3 years ago there were still plenty of very attractive properties on the MLS. These were double digit cash on cash returns with reasonable opportunity for appreciation at a price point available to newbies.
Savings for most. Owner-occupied only need 3.5-5% downpayment up to 4 units. Some outside investors - there is a ton more capital than there are deals and good operators.
Outside Manhattan with terms like that you don't need to have ridiculous cash on hand to get started.
People's mental ability is a function of the size and structure of their brain to some extent. Children are notably less intelligent and have smaller heads because they are still growing. Their brains are not "fully formed." Could trying to teach children academic topics be very inefficient? In "Kids Can Recover From Missing Even Quite A Lot of School," Scott discusses the benezet experiment:
"In the Benezet experiment, a school district taught no math at all before 6th grade (around age 10-11). Then in sixth grade, they started teaching math, and by the end of the year the students were just as good at math as traditionally-educated children with five years of preceding math education. I interpret this to mean that a lot of education involves cramming things into the heads of very young students who would be able to learn it very quickly anyway when they were older. Certainly it doesn’t seem like a child missing math class in grades 1-5 should have much of a long-term effect."
I spent 6 years learning arithmetic in elementary school, but when I was in college, I learned multiple high-level math topics simultaneously. I don't think this is a particular feature of me but something that most people experience: when they are older, they can learn more. I imagine that if I was first exposed to arithmetic at age 18, I could learn it extremely quickly. This is just an intuition.
Could it be that it's not really necessary to teach children when they're young? Maybe we could spend a fraction of the time teaching them the topics we want to when we're older? Any strong pieces of evidence for or against this idea? It doesn't seem too farfetched to me.
In the Benezet experiment, were those children coming in completely ignorant of maths? Couldn't count, didn't know the names of numbers, much less what addition and subtraction were?
Because there's always contamination from "the parents are teaching them at home" and not even formally, just "look, I'll divide up these sweets between you and your sister, you both get six each, that's fair".
I also note that the original experiment took place in 1929 and while I agree with "What possible needs has a ten-year-old child for a knowledge of long division? The whole subject of arithmetic could be postponed until the seventh year of school, and it could be mastered in two years' study by any normal child", when I was ten and learning long division, I couldn't work it out by the school method and had to fall back on my grandmother teaching me how she learned it when she was in school (back in late 19th century).
So I think "normal" is doing a lot of work here. Some kids can and will pick it up in a year or two years, some need longer. You can postpone teaching reading until a kid is seven, but that would have made no difference to me - I could read before I started any formal schooling of any kind (aged four and a half, I don't even remember learning to read but it's safe to say I could read when I was three).
EDIT: I also disagree with this bit, it's not that the kids couldn't speak English, it's that the terms are Latinate ("numerator", "denominator") and if not explained, just used, then of course the kids can't put them into English. Quick, *you* try turning "numerator" and "denominator" into English!
"Meanwhile, I was distressed at the inability of the average child in our grades to use the English language. If the children had original ideas, they were very helpless about translating them into English which could be understood. I went into a certain eighth-grade room one day and was accompanied by a stenographer who took down, verbatim, the answers given me by the children. I was trying to get the children to tell me, in their own words, that if you have two fractions with the same numerator, the one with the smaller denominator is the larger. I quote typical answers.
"The smaller number in fractions is always the largest."
"If the numerators are both the same, and the denominators one is smaller than the one, the one that is the smaller is the larger."
"If you had one thing and cut it into pieces the smaller piece will be the bigger. I mean the one you could cut the least pieces in would be the bigger pieces."
"The denominator that is smallest is the largest."
"If both numerators are the same number, the smaller denominator is the largest - the larger - of the two."
"If you have two fractions and one fraction has the smallest number at the bottom. It is cut into pieces and one has the more pieces. If the two fractions are equal, the bottom number was smaller than what the other one in the other fraction. The smallest one has the largest number of pieces - would have the smallest number of pieces, but they would be larger than what the ones that were cut into more pieces."
The average layman will think that this must have been a group of half-wits, but I can assure you that it is typical of the attempts of fourteen-year-old children from any part of the country to put their ideas into English. The trouble was not with the children or with the teacher; it was with the curriculum. If the course of study required that the children master long division before leaving the fourth grade and fractions before finishing the fifth, then the teacher had to spend hours and hours on this work to the neglect of giving children practise in speaking the English language. I had tried the same experiment in schools in Indiana and in Wisconsin with exactly the same result as in New Hampshire."
The man definitely had his own views of Education, How She Should Be Done, but I do wonder what the schools did after he retired - went back to the traditional ways of teaching?
"Grade I - There is no formal instruction in arithmetic. In connection with the use of readers, and as the need for it arises, the children are taught to recognize and read numbers up to 100. This instruction is not concentrated into any particular period or time but comes in incidentally in connection with assignments of the reading lesson or with reference to certain pages of the text.
Meanwhile, the children are given a basic idea of comparison and estimate thru [sic] the understanding of such contrasting words as: more, less; many. few; higher, lower; taller, shorter; earlier, later; narrower, wider; smaller, larger; etc.
As soon as it is practicable the children are taught to keep count of the date upon the calendar. Holidays and birthdays, both of members of the class and their friends and relatives, are noted.
Grade II - There is no formal instruction in arithmetic.
The use of comparatives as taught in the first grade is continued.
The beginning is made in the telling of time. Children are taught to recognize the hours and half hours.
The recognition of page numbers is continued. The children are taught to recognize any numbers that they naturally encounter in the books used in the second grade. If any book used in this grade contains an index, the children are taught what it means and how to find the pages referred to. Children will naturally pick up counting in the course of games which they play. They will also easily and without formal instruction learn the meaning of "half," "double," "twice," or "three times." The teacher will not devote any formal instruction to the meaning of these terms if the children do not pick them up naturally and incidentally.
To the knowledge of the day of the month already acquired is added that of the name of the days of the week and of the months of the year.
The teacher learns whether the children come in contact with the use of money at all in their life outside the school. If so, the meaning of "penny," "nickel," "dime," and "dollar" is taught. In similar fashion, and just incidentally, the meaning and relation of "pint" and "quart" may be taught.
Grade III - While there is no formal instruction in arithmetic, as the children come across numbers in the course of their reading, the teacher explains the significance of their value.
Before the year is over the children will be taught that a "dime" is worth 10 cents, and a "dollar" 10 dimes or 100 cents, a "half dollar" 5 dimes or 50 cents, etc. They will learn that 4 quarters, or 2 halves, are worth as much as one dollar.
They add to their knowledge of hours and half hours the ability to tell time at any particular moment. The first instruction omits such forms as 10 minutes to 4; or 25 minutes to 3. They are first taught to say 3:50; 2:35; etc. In this connection they are taught that 60 minutes make one hour.
It is now time, also, for them to know that 7 days make a week and that it takes 24 hours to make a day. They are also taught that there are 12 months in a year and about 30 days in a month.
The instruction in learning to count keeps pace with the increasing size of the textbooks used and the pages to which it is necessary to refer. Games bring in the recognition of numbers. Automobile license numbers are a help in this respect. For example, the teacher gives orally the number of a car [of not over four digits] which most of the children are likely to see, and later asks for the identification of the car. Children are encouraged to bring to class their own house numbers, automobile license numbers, or telephone numbers and invite the class to identify them.
The use of comparisons is continued, especially those involving such relations as "half," "double," "three times," and the like."
Foreign languages are an example of a thing that people learn easily when they are young. Probably worth reshuffling curiculum so that languages there are more languages relative to other stuff in earlier phases of an education
When you break it down to aptitude vs achievement, there is some evidence that children can actually increase their aptitude in some areas, but in adults this happens much less. This makes sense if you believe that children have a lot more neuroplasticity. Sitting in math class is probably not a great way of boosting aptitude though.
The ability to mentally process numbers is an aptitude is it not? Put simply, if you show most people the sum 1+4 they both see the equation and the solution because they have aptitude in working out mathematical problems (even if this aptitude is purely through rote learning). That's going to be a lot easier to learn at 4 than 14.
While aptitude is the potential to learn, achievement is learning itself. This is an important distinction when discussing children and what kinds of tasks they should be forced to do in schools/learning.
"Could it be that it's not really necessary to teach children when they're young?"
Of course we have to teach them, they follow us around and *insist* that we teach them. My daughter, <3 and in the "why?" phase all year, heard someone say that a lock was "in a good position" and instantly started practicing grammar on it. "Am I in a good position? Are you in a good position? Is baby sister in a good position?" Children insist on learning grammar and figuring out what everyone around them is doing and how they can fit into that and participate.
The question is whether we should insist on teaching them things that don't come up (as far as they can tell) in day to day life, and therefore that they aren't too interested in learning.
Children from families without books should almost certainly still be taught to read by six or so, that seems to be working just fine for most kids, and getting to read more and more complex stories is interesting in itself for enough kids during the period between then and adolescence that it's worth it while they're learning, not just later when they can read and write at a more sophisticated level. Our civilization has produced a huge volume of genuinely excellent children's books that it's usually easy to find something to like. Even at the start, when they're just learning to write their names on things, they really should write their names on things so that they don't get mixed up and lost -- it's an instantly applicable skill.
Math is a much more time deferred activity for most people. I'm not really sure what we should do about that, or even what we currently do. Despite working in an elementary school, it never comes up. I ask little kids to write their names on things every day, and they've talked some about science -- a lot about butterflies especially -- but have never asked or had them volunteer anything about arithmetic. Maybe it pays off? I don't actually know. I've watched lower level high schoolers learn how to work with fractions and then forget it again every year for probably six years, and it seems very futile, pushing me toward wanting more tracking as a solution. Children like basic science a lot, and there's no reason to deny it to them.
Whenever I try to figure out why conventional schools do certain things the way they do, it comes down to something legal about mandated standards, or logistical like how to get lunch to all the children by the mandated time, or fitting all six levels into the specials teachers' schedule each day. There's plenty of room for doing things in a more natural way, but then it's more expensive for those logistical reasons.
Maria Montessori was probably onto something with her idea of "sensitive periods" for basic things like movement and order, and that kind of environment seems to make more sense than conventional schooling for lower elementary especially. But I don't seem to believe in this strongly enough to actually take action, setting up shelving with activity materials on them or anything of the sort.
Anyway, it's not that children aren't learning -- they're learning very complex things about not bumping into each other, how to play together, fine motor skills that will lead to writing, drawing, and tool use, how to turn their experiences into stories, and so on. It's very obvious when children *don't* learn these things and are horribly awkward; there's a bit of an issue with this now with the shut downs over the past few years.
I think young kids are quite good at learning, but have almost all that learning capacity spent on learning social skills and basic language and local cultural mores etc.
I'm not aware of too many accounts of people (e.g. missionaries) who try to teach mathematics to adults who were not educated as children.
On the other hand, we have a lot of accounts of people who try to teach reading and writing to adults who weren't educated as children, and my understanding is that it usually doesn't go that well. I'm not sure whether it goes worse than teaching children, per hour spent practicing, but it definitely doesn't seem to be the case that illiterate adults can pick up reading and writing with ease.
If it's not the case for reading and writing I don't see why it should be the case for mathematics.
While I agree with the overall point, children spend a lot of time learning to read - something like hundred of hours for basic literacy. Most adults just can't afford that time.
Is it actually true that children are less intelligent than adults, or are they just ignorant and lacking skills? I know at least for languages children seem to learn much faster and more efficiently than adults.
As for mathematics, my memory of elementary school is hazy but I don't think I was really being pushed to the limits of my math-learning ability, whereas in college I was a lot closer to it. Part of the issue there is that a public elementary school has to be more accessible than a selective university.
Children are flexible in pronunciation. For every other aspect of language that has ever been studied, speed of language acquisition increases with age, up to about 20.
My gut reaction here is that that's because learning aspects other than actual speech requires learning an academic framework first to understand what you're doing. It's going to be hard to learn a language academically if you don't know what a verb is for example.
And children learn second languages fast, in the key definition of being able to use the language, if exposed to that language as a real-life environmental factor (to be fair, adults learn a lot faster as well in those circumstances). A classroom course learning random words and concepts, probably results in slower learning, because it's not obviously applicable for most children.
There have been diverse studies of young children vs old children learning languages. Older children always win head-to-head comparisons, whether it's classroom instruction or immersion.
This is a bit of an apples to oranges comparison. Older learners are finding a new word for a concept they already understand, while kids are learning much more schema along with the languages.
The first article you link to argues that children who have natural exposure to second languages generally achieve higher second language proficiency as adults. Adults may learn "faster", but maybe they would have been better off if they had started learning as a child.
You jump from a correlational claim to a causal claim. There is a correlation between age of first exposure and eventual progress. But why did the child start learning the language? The best study is of the Japanese businessmen who take spend years in America. The children learn English because they want to and give up when they go home. The older children learn more and retain more for years. This is the counterfactual relevant to forcing your child to study a foreign language.
I think the idea of a "critical period" is still well supported by a lot of research. And pronunciation and accent are hugely important aspects of language, so I wouldn't downplay the importance of age.
If you've seen any research on critical period for second language acquisition, outside of accent, I'd love to see it. I've talked to lots of linguists, who are adamant that it exists, but angry that I want to see it.
I am talking about the critical period for language learning in general. As for applying this to second languages, you can exclude accent, but that a huge part of language. The first article you link argues that children who begin natural exposure to second languages as children generally obtain higher second language proficiency.
I can't remember if I added this to my Mistakes List yet or not, but some commenters convinced me that my understanding of the Benezet experiment was flawed - Benezet taught math holistically instead of drilling it, the same way everyone does today.
Benezet greatly reduced the time devoted to math instruction and completely eliminated the time devoted to arithmetic. These are simple, objective metrics on which he was radically different from what "everyone" does today.
Benezet proved that teaching math is better than torturing children, in addition to being time-efficient. No one today claims to torture children, but his contemporaries didn't claim to torture children, either. Children today suffer the same PTSD that he avoided. That might be an inborn trait that he cured by his minimal teaching, but it's probably from the torture that he skipped.
In terms of things that do not need proving, "Benezet proved that teaching math is better than torturing children" is right up there!
I'm not sure that there's much of an argument in the case that Benezet proved not teaching maths was preferable to teaching it in a traumatic fashion though, since modern education is very clear about the fact education should not be traumatic. Even for maths.
Perhaps there are other fields of development where you're better off focusing during younger ages — symbolic thinking, creativity, kinesthetic, relational. Maybe a 6 year old is better off doing 6 hours per day of MMA than of math.
The six-year old doing six hours of MMA a day is probably proportionally less-well off the more classmates are doing this as well. Children like to practice what they learn after all...
It's a bit more complex than that. The UK Early Years Curriculum is focused on social development, but also has goals (not targets, because at that age variance is incredible) around numeracy and literacy. My son's doing this currently and at our last parents evening (where teachers meet the parents to discuss progress) the focus was entirely on his progress in the 'academic' areas because he was already socialised (unfortunately this doesn't mean he's discovered that you shouldn't wake up your parents before 6am...).
For my book project on "Discretion", about the people in charge of enforcing rules, regulations, laws, who have the power to ignore them, I'm trying to surmise what parts of government are ones where workers have the most discretion, and ones in which they have the least. My uninformed hypothesis is that where law is most vague and qualitative, workers have most discretion, like child protective services, and where law is most byzantine, people have the least, like tax collection/auditing. Do any of you have any guesses about this matter, both about which agencies/jobs have most/least discretion, and about correlations? I'm looking to embed myself inside such agencies for the research, so I want to pick good ones.
Avoid child protective services like the literal plague. You see an extremely ugly side of the human experience, and, at least here, are badly underfunded and understaffed. There more ugly situations that you can adequately cover. Parents get their kids back when you're sure they shouldn't, and there's nothing you can do about it. And when there are bad outcomes, you get blamed. You're helpless and hopeless. It's awful.
My dad was a CPS supervisor. He died a relatively young alcoholic. Look elsewhere.
I mean, maybe. But if you're looking to write a book about how gov't agencies behave in situations with greater or lesser discretion, I don't think this is your area. There might be a good book, but I don't think it could be on this theme.
Caveat I should have included in the first place: my personal knowledge here is both second hand and years out-of-date. It's possible this has gotten better, or is even done well in other jurisdictions.
Airport security (or the TSA, in the US) seems like a great example of extremely limited discretion. This stuff is allowed, this stuff isn't, the rules are the rules, and it doesn't matter if they make sense in any particular case or not. And while I hate the TSA as much as anyone, I concede that the zero-discretion approach makes sense for the problem it's intended to solve.
Of course the TSA is unlikely to let you embed yourself with them, for that very reason. But maybe something like stadium security could be a close equivalent.
Take a look at “Bending the Rules” by Rachel Potter about how the administrative agencies use the rule making process to form the rules they want despite the process theoretically constraining the rules generated.
Relatedly, you’re wrong about at least tax law, based on this case: https://www.opn.ca6.uscourts.gov/opinions.pdf/22a0041p-06.pdf. The IRS apparently hasn’t followed the rule making process since it was created, which is surprising and wild to me.
I think the law has very little to do with it, and the culture of the organisation is the most important element. Do staff have quotas? if so, they'll frame people and twist the law. Is there any oversight on whether the process is fair? Are hard cases routinely ignored as too expensive to prosecute, leading to a bias toward easy targets instead of guilty targets?
Have you read much by James Q. Wilson? In his book Bureaucracy, he roughly divides government agencies into four types based on (1) how well management can observe the behavior of operators (people on the line so to speak) and (2) how well management can measure the outcomes of what those operators do. I think he calls agencies where managers both have a difficult time observing operators and cannot really measuring the outcomes of their work "coping organizations" and I think these types would also rank highly on your notion of discretion. Specific examples he talks about are policing (and at length in a separate book "Varieties of Police Behavior") and the state department.
So you might look for other organizations that rank low on one or both of these dimensions.
Some people say that the problem with strict regulations is that in practice, they're never ever enforced universally, so the people in charge of enforcing them can enforce them only against people they don't like. For example, an IRS audit is a disaster for any small business, and I *assume* that some IRS bureaucrat has the power to pick a random business to audit; compare that to a small town government, where the mayor can't audit only his enemies unless he wants everyone in town to yell at him for being unfair. (Note that I have had little experience in small-town government and even less with the IRS, so this is just a guess.)
Thanks to Messrs Hammer and Bullseye for correcting me. In my defense, how the heck was I supposed to know about the effects of literally flushing money down the toilet?
Good TP is not replaceable by rough paper, though I get your point about just using the paper instead. I believe Weimar Germany saw bank notes being used as wallpaper and kindling because they were cheaper than the goods.
So, I need advice on navigating the medical field. I just got diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, which is my first time dealing with an, idk, “open ended illness” where there are more options than “get a cast and wait 4 months”
My insurance is thankfully very good, but the new pills they have me on have some annoying side effects (mainly I’m thirsty all the time). Now, I would like to not be thirsty all of the time, but am unclear as to whether I contact my doctor now, wait until my follow-up, or do something else. I also don’t have any idea for what my doctor will say if I am supposed to contact them.
Basically, this whole “trying different solutions, which will be varying degrees of effective and inconvenient” is new to me and I have no idea how the whole iterative process works. Any insight into this my fellow internet strangers?
Also have ulcerative colitis, hi! I haven’t had to cycle through medications yet, thankfully (just on Mesalamine with minimal side effects) but I did switch doctors mainly because my first one wasn’t communicating well (didn’t return calls, gave me bad info about how soon I should alert him to a flare-up).
There’s a fair amount of uncertainty built into the disease, so I haven’t been shy about calling the office or using MyChart. Even if I’m pretty sure what they’ll say, at least it puts my mind at ease.
If you’re not sure about a medication change it could also be worth getting a second opinion with a specialist, especially if the side effects could get worse.
Are you near the NYC area? If so, my late mother, Jill Roberts, founded what i believe is the premier IBD Center in the country. https://weillcornell.org/ibdcenter
All they do is Crohns and Colitis. If you want a very warm intro, I'm happy to oblige. They really "get" the disease.
Learn about the condition and the treatment options and start keeping up with the research on it. If you doctor is not comfortable having an informed patient who might at times suggest options himself, switch to one who is. Btw, I know someone who has Crohn's Disease, which I think is pretty similar to UC, who is seriously considering fecal transplant as a treatment (it's an easy treatment to recoil from or make jokes about, but apparently there is some decent research supporting its effectiveness).
It will depend on your doctor. I went through a few ADHD meds before I circled back around to one of the first I tried, which had the effectiveness and side effects profile I found best (modafinil; I rejected it the first time because it treated my ADHD too effectively, and many of my habits were dependent on an automated "stop doing what you're doing, get up, move around, and search for something else to do periodically" trigger which ADHD supplied; didn't find a solution, exactly, just trying to practice awareness of the problem and rebuilding habits).
Basically, scheduled an appointment once a month, and got the drugs in one-month supplies. (When your ADHD meds don't work, incidentally, it may be a month or six before you get around to scheduling the next appointment.)
Note that insurance can be a bitch about this, if you're in the US; they may have a particular order they want you to try prescriptions in, which only partially corresponds to cost.
Did your doctor give you a "patient portal" or something that you could use to message them? If so, it's totally appropriate for you to mention the thirst over there - they might tell you to wait until your next appointment to discuss, but you can at least try.
If not, and the thirst is inconvenient enough to be worth it, call the office and ask what you should do. They'll probably say "make an appointment", in which case do that.
Be prepared for your doctor to say something like "yeah, that's a side effect of this, deal with it" and for you to have to decide whether you want to do that, or you want to insist on something else that gives you a reroll on side effects.
I'd second the pharmacist recommendation for anything drug related, and note that if they don't know the answer to your query that's also good enough reason to check in with your doctor to ensure that your concerns are met.
On the NHS website, remember despite being the front end of a huge national organisation, I believe individual pages are single author (admittedly they may be multiple sequential authors when updated) so especially where there is an area of debate treat it like a practitioner's opinion: probably informed but not necessarily to be accepted without question.
Scott - if someone else were to fund it; would you be open to/have any interest in publishing a ~300-400 page "best of" SSC book to serve as an introduction to the SSC way of thinking?
I'm considering creating a new project where I will pay for anyone interested to receive introductory "view-quake inducing" books on important topics (ie Superforecasting, Doing Good Better etc.)
Introducing someone to SSC is probably the most high impact view-quake I could think if.
Most psychiatrists who blog are excellent at introducing people to different points of view. The Last Psychiatrist is massively more "view-quake" inducing than SSC, for example.
The issue isn't funding, it's editing. If someone else were to do that, I would...be really nervous and probably think they chose the wrong posts, but it's possible I could get over it.
You could chose the posts yourself, that's probably the smallest part of the editing process. Or make a survey for us to vote for your top 20 best posts.
I agree, and didn't think funding would be an issue. It makes sense that editing is far more complicated and touchy, but I don't think this is a "one person" job. I think a few motivated individuals are assembled who want to work on the project, and who can touch base with you on an approval and as-needed basis, sounds less daunting and more feasible.
Reading Scott's recent post on AI takeoff speed inspired me to set some time aside to read papers on AI alignment to see if I have a miniscule chance of contributing something useful. Where would be a good place to start?
My background: I am a math professor specializing in differential geometry, but I know almost nothing about machine learning and don't use numerical methods or computer simulations for my research (what I do is old style pen and paper pure math). Should I learn ML first (or some specific aspects of it) before I can understand any specific problems? Are there any problems where my math background could be helpful? Any suggestions would be appreciated.
- Critch's "Parametric Bounded Löb's Theorem" generalizes Löb's theorem (from provability logic) and uses it to construct computer programs that cooperate with each other intelligently in Prisoner's Dilemma. https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.04184 Engaging blog post: http://acritch.com/osgt-is-weird/
If you ask around you'll find a lot of disagreement over whether ML-free "agent foundations" research is useful, or indeed whether any given approach is useful. I hope you develop your own taste.
Thank you! These are very helpful suggestions. I started reading Critch's paper. I have an additional question: which book/papers would you recommend for a crash course in aspects of ML that would be relevant here (so maybe more on the theoretical side of it)?
You're welcome! Unfortunately, my ML education was haphazard, so I don't have great advice here. But here's a few older papers I liked which should at least give you an idea of what some of the foundational concepts are:
- Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning. https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.5602 Less theoretical, but it's how I learned about Q-learning.
- Identifying and attacking the saddle point problem in high-dimensional non-convex optimization. https://arxiv.org/abs/1406.2572 This is fun because it's a simple insight about the index of critical points. People used to think that neural networks sometimes run into local optima. This paper argues that actually the problem is saddle points. (It turns out that saddle points aren't a problem either, and neural networks just work.)
- Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples. https://arxiv.org/abs/1412.6572 Fun and informative, but not the most up-to-date exposition of adversarial examples.
- It seems the more math-heavy ML textbooks talk about PAC learning. I feel like I got a lot out of learning PAC learning, even though deep neural networks defy the bounds.
Thank you for the references! Regarding "Parametric Bounded L¨ob’s Theorem and Robust
Cooperation of Bounded Agents" - I thought that the paper is really beautiful, the proof seems simple and clear, but is it correct? I am far from logic and I am worried of things like Russel's paradox sneaking in somewhere. The paper hasn't been cited that much; do you know if any set theorists looked at the proof? I feel that I need some time before I can convince myself it's correct. In any case, thank you for all of these great recommendations!
Huh! It's been a while since I looked at the paper, but it's the sort of result I expected to exist, since (the unbounded, unquantified) Löb's theorem is definitely true in arithmetic and provability logic. I'm not a logician, though.
Yes, you are right. I needed to brush up on logic and look at the Diagonal lemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagonal_lemma, which makes the self-reference in the definition of FairBot ok. It's a really nice result! I wonder how relevant this line of work is now that neural networks are the dominant approach to AI...
If you want to know more about whether you should get involved and how, you might also want to talk to the people at AI Safety Support, see https://www.aisafetysupport.org/
1) The alignment newsletter. https://rohinshah.com/alignment-newsletter/ It is a weekly roundup of interesting (to Rohin, an AI safety researcher) papers, as well as summaries.
Mike Duncan's "The History of Rome" podcast covers pretty much the entire history of Rome, from the legends about its founding until the crumbling of the western empire. The series is almost 200 episodes long, so it wouldn't be good if you're hoping for a *quick* overview of the topic. But I enjoyed it.
Looking for feedback and interest in collaboration on this essay (email me at protopiacone at gmail):
Life, on Earth, is not a miracle. It is a simple fact. Perhaps in the cosmos, where millions/billions of stars are lifeless, Earth's fecundity is miraculous. But to us terrestrial locals, the miracle of life is just a cliche.
Birds do it. Bees do it. Everything with a pulse does it. For most of history, most of us had no choice but to do it, as nature dictated and administered its laws via our DNA. To take credit for giving life is like getting congratulated for graduating from a school with a 100% graduation rate — hardly an exceptional feat.
So where did it come from, this "miracle of life" business? We can consider two sources, an internal and an external one. The internal being our emotions. The irrational machines that we are, subject to hormonal fluctuations, we cry when we see babies born. We can't help it. And we chalk our tears to some miraculous source.
The external source is marketing. It's the eternal Instagramming by the Joneses, who will gladly lie to you about the miracle of their plebeian achievements. Or, even more cynically, it's the marketing by big business, seeking to sell you everything you will ever need for your miracle to be extra miraculous. There are other sources, of course — religions, governments, etc., but let's move on.
Really, the only thing miraculous about child birth is how easy it is. It's an automated process, kicked off by the simplest/dumbest of pleasures: the orgasm.
There is, however, an exception to the miraclelessness of childbirth. It's rather a modern affect, whereby the childbirth is an anti-default — a pure choice.
There came a time in recent human history, where some of us humans got smart. These "smart ones" developed birth control and adopted its use. They flipped the script and neutered this supposed miracle that they really didn't want. And so, within these communities of smart humans, the default switched from secular fertility, to secular infertility.
In a smart/modern world, the null hypothesis is to live your best life/truth/whatever. Enjoy it. Do what you love. You do you. Consume, consume, consume, die. To create life, in such a world, is to sacrifice your time, your body, and your money for unknown and uncertain returns. It's not an entirely rational decision, and it's why we see it made less and less across the contemporary Western landscape. Those who do make the choice, in such circumstances, are either stupid, insane, or they are embarking on a faith-based pilgrimage that ends/begins with a miraculous genesis of somewhat biblical proportion. We, mortal humans, create little Adams and Eves.
And here is where the magic happens. In a world, where infertility is a default, and childbirth is a choice, those who choose childbirth are no longer just cogs in a proliferation machine, but instead, they are Gods who create life where there was none.
But it's still not quite as simple as recognizing all these humans who choose childbirth as Gods. For them to be Gods, and not just plebs, their choice must be their own. This choice must be unencumbered by the internal marketing fed to them by their own DNA. This choice must be unencumbered by the social pressures coming from their parents, their religions, the Joneses, and the Hallmarks. For even in our progressive societies, most who choose childbirth are assuming the choice of others, and not choosing for themselves. For them, the choice is not pure, and the result is far from miraculous.
How then do we distinguish the pure, miraculous choice, from the disguised, plebeian, coded algorithm that masquerades as choice? We demand proof, that's how.
The proof is easy to find, because it is quite rare. In fact, it can generally be gathered via a basic question: WHY? Why choose to create life? Why choose to be a God? What are your goals for your child of God? How do you plan to achieve those goals?
The better (the more robust, researched, considered) the answers, the greater the miracle. The stronger the imparitive to godliness, the loftier the vision for development that must follow the miracle. For the miracle of life is not an end. Nor is it a beginning. It is but the end of the beginning.
The phrase "Miracle of Life" first appeared in Google's library of books in 1806, entered regular usage in 1830, and then dramatically rose in use after the 1980s.
I should note that "miracle of childbirth" doesn't appear until 1900. The fertility rate has started to decline in the most developed countries at this point, but it is still high (about 4).
I wonder if people are missing the key difference between the start of labour and the actual delivery stage in their reactions here? My wife's sister-in-law (my sister-in-law-in-law?) managed labours of approximately 120 and 80 hours, but was only actually delivering the baby for less than 8 hours in each case...
Is this a nice way of saying "we will permit you this one piece of intolerable claptrap since clearly you're not in your right mind"?
Re: interminable hours of stressful waiting
We followed the Bradley Method of husband-coached child birth, which both my wife and I very much recommend. There was hardly any waiting involved because I was "in the shit", so to speak.
Then I'm surprised you can so blithely describe childbirth as easy. A more suitable word is *default* as in, childbirth is the default in absence of contraception. Prior to the development of modern obstetrics, it was also just about the hardest and most dangerous thing most women would do. Also, congratulations on your baby.
I just finished Vaclav Smil's: "Grand Transitions". Vaclav in all his books provides TREMENDOUS statistical detail on research he is discussing. Much of the book is about the ecological effects of human growth here on earth. I find it likeable that he tends to criticize both the alarmists who point to the end of the world in 20 years unless we stop emitting CO2 and also the very optimistic group who look at our progress and predict we will solve all of our ecological problems with future tech. Hans Rosling and Stephen Pinker are pointed at in that regard. I thought his last few paragraphs in the book said a lot so I will copy and paste it below.
"The most likely outcome will include an unpredictable mixture of components from the entire spectrum of possibilities. We do not know what lies ahead; even the best probabilistic assessments of specific outcomes are, despite their hedged nature, just matters of educated guesses. The notion that in 2020 we can anticipate the world of 2100 is utterly risible(laughable). Just look back to the world of 1940 and see what did not exist, and what was not anticipated, in that world. There were no antibiotics, no contraceptives, no nations with below-replacement fertility, no nationwide life expectancies above 60, and no countries where most adults were overweight or obese. When we move our focus from populations to agriculture and food, there were no herbicides, no high-yielding short-stalked cereals, no transgenic crops, no no-till cropping, no central animal feeding operations, no mass-scale greenhouses growing vegetables, no cultivation under plastic sheets, and (bananas aside) no intercontinental trade in fresh fruit. When we turn to energy, there were no giant open-cast mines, no Saudi oilfields, no offshore drilling (out of the sight of land or in deep waters), no hydraulic fracturing, no liquefied natural gas, no giant oil or LNG tankers, no gigawatt-sized turbogenerators, no widely deployed gas turbines, no flue gas desulfurization, no nuclear reactors, no high-voltage direct-current lines, no PV cells, no wind turbines. Economies had to do without any computers, satellites, jetliners, container shipping, and rapid trains; there was no steel produced in basic oxygen furnaces, no plate glass made by floating on molten metal, no centrifugal compressors in ammonia synthesis, no composite materials, no solid-state electronic devices and hence no Internet, no mobile phones, no essentially instant and free flow of information. And there were no concerns about acid rain, ozone layer or greenhouse gases; there was no photochemical smog, no antibiotic resistance, no pesticide residues, no mass-scale plastic waste. Contrary to many modeling dreams, the future remains unknowable, but we know that many options remain available, that choices of possible trajectories and effective alternatives have not been irrevocably foreclosed by our past actions. Grand transitions of population and economic growth, of energy use, and of environmental impacts have brought us to this point in human evolution when both promises and perils have reached their respective extremes exemplified by the claims of approaching singularity and equidistant apocalypse: both are “scheduled” by their proponents to take place before 2050, perhaps even by 2030. I do not believe that in such a short time we will face either an apocalyptic outcome or a care-free singularitarian future of boundless intelligence. The chances are that we will continue to deal with the coming transition to a civilization operating within the biospheric limits with a combination of aggressive inventiveness and inexplicable procrastination, of effective adaptability and infuriating failure to respond. Will we succeed? The answer hinges on the definition of success, but once all the gains and losses have been factored in, it would be surprising if transitions likely to be accomplished during the 21st century were less transformative than those experienced during the 20th century. Another epochal transition is unfolding and its outcome is not foreordained; it remains contingent on our choices. In that sense, at least, nihil novi sub sole . . . (nothing new under the sun or nothing novel in existence)"
As mentioned all Smil's books are filled with statistical detail so tend to be a bit of a slog to get through, but IMHO it is worth it as you get a pretty darn clear picture of what humans are doing to the biosphere and the current conditions that are going to make it difficult to limit CO2 output like the fact that a giant chunk of the world population hasn't even starting using electricity yet and that is going to add a huge number to the energy requirements in the near future. Around 375 pages. I wouldn't say I couldn't put it down, but I was drawn into each chapter and finished it in a week or so.
He reminds me of Tooze in that he seems to arrive/align with some positions I find unserious from other people but his version and journey to that same place is extremely meticulous and chock full of information - That it can’t help but draw you in.
Would you suggest this book or ‘Growth’ as a good introduction?
I read Growth sometime ago so my memory of it has faded, but it seems like his more recent books like "Grand Transitions" include references to his earlier material so might be a good place to start. The statistics are more current in it as well. A boatload of statistics! He admits it himself in the book, but finds it necessary to make his point. It would be fun IMHO to be part of a book club discussing one of his books.
I was going to say wasn't this provably wrong? Then I realised every graph I can find of carbon dioxide (sorry - I can't write the chemical formula wrongly; my school education was too effective...) levels I could find had a truncated y-axis and that recorded and estimated rises were not as steep as I thought!
It either proves that people are trying something on with presentation of the data or that my maths teachers were not as effective as my chemistry ones in teaching me good habits.
How impressive was John von Neumann's foresight on computers and WWII?
I'm reading a biography about John von Neumann called "The Man from the Future". One thing shown repeatedly throughout the book is how prophetic von Neumann was. He was able to see things coming to the extent that it makes me believe the future might be less difficult to predict than I had previously thought. Two examples of his foresight are on computers and on WWII.
In 1945 while he was simultaneously working on The Bomb and on some of the first computers, he said that relative to the atomic bombs, computers were 'going to become not only more important but indispensable.' In an early example of concern about AI risk, the book quotes "'We will be able to go into space way beyond the moon if only people could keep pace with what they create.' he said. And he worried that if we did not, those same machines could be more dangerous than the bombs he was helping to build."
Some of his prescient comments on WWII include:
- In 1935, he predicted there would be a war in Europe in the next decade, and that America would enter if England were in trouble
- In 1936, when asked about how much of a role France would play in the war, he said "Oh! France won't matter."
- The book doesn't state the year, but around this time he also feared the European Jews would face a genocide as the Armenians had under the Ottoman Empire
- In 1938 he said the Munich agreement would only postpone the next World war
- In 1939 his wife went to Europe to get their family members out, and on August 10 he told her to not to go to Budapest, and to make sure to be out of Europe before September (Hitler invaded Poland on September 1)
- In 1940 he predicted that Britain would hold Germany at bay and US would join the war the following year
I'm curious, especially for the WWII buffs in the comments. How hard was it to predict these things?
I'd point out the 1935 prediction us wrong. The US did not enter the war in 1940 when the UK fought alone (other than its four ex-colonies, it's empire and bits of the French empire...) and there was a realistic chance of invasion. By 1941 the UK was probably safe from invasion, and was holding its own in North Africa to the extent the loss of the Suez Canal was also unlikely. Plus it was starting to overwhelm the U-boat campaign. The UK might not have been able to win alone, but it was not losing. Admittedly, the military stuff and ships sent on credit from the US probably helped.
The 1940 prediction is without an exact date somewhat difficult to assess. The situation in December (or indeed before the fall of France) was not necessarily negative. That in June might look bad for the UK though. Either way Von Neumann clearly had a bias towards the likelihood of the US entering the war to support the UK.
And a genocide if the Jews was hardly a major reach. Most European governments were anti-Semitic, so that the Nazi rhetoric was extreme but just part of a very-unsettling background. Remember, there were efforts to get Jews out of most of Europe, not just Germany.
As to Munich, as noted by others there was not widespread belief in its efficacy, as demonstrated by Chamberlain immediately increasing military production.
I'd say this shows he was an intelligent observer and probably a believer in the common interests of the Anglosphere . I'm not sure these examples show particularly acute powers of foresight, and that's without asking for a list of all the predictions he made for comparison...
In hindsight, there was absolutely no chance of a successful invasion in 1940. Operation Sealion was the military planning equivalent of "If we had some egg, we could make ham and eggs, if we had some eggs."
Germany had almost no landing craft and not a huge amount of sealift capability of any sort (the American portion of the 1944 Normandy landings involved more sealift tonnage than the entire capacity of the German merchant marine in 1939). The plan was to use Rhine river barges instead. These would carry at most 10 divisions of unsupported light infantry, who would attempt to seize intact one or more port on the English side of the channel coast in order to allow supplies, tanks, and artillery to be shipped in. Capturing a defended port intact with the first wave of an amphibious assault was a tall order in WW2, even with air and naval supremacy and full operational surprise, none of which the Germans would have been likely to have for Sealion. Not impossible (c.f. the 1943 Sicily landings), but very difficult. And the river barges would have been ponderously slow, very vulnerable, and not really seaworthy in the Channel in any but the calmest weather.
As for air supremacy, the best plausible outcome for the Battle of Britain would be for the RAF to execute its contingency plan to withdraw its fighter to the North, out of range of German bombers, in order to preserve the remaining fighter force to contest any attempted invasion. In the case of an invasion attempt, the fighters would be turned loose: the Luftwaffe might still manage local air superiority over a relatively narrow invasion front, but air supremacy would be out of the question. The German bombers would also be stretched thin between close air support on the beaches, interdicting supply and reinforcement behind the lines, and trying to take out the entire British fleet.
As for the navy, the British overwhelmingly outnumbered and outgunned the Germans. Of the meager surface fleet the Germans did have, much of it had been damaged (and not ready for operations again in 1940) or sunk during the invasion of Norway. At best, surprise lets the Germans get most of the first wave ashore before the British can react, but any follow-up waves or resupply shipments would almost certainly be interdicted by the Royal Navy even if the German army manages to capture Dover or another port intact.
Indeed. But this was probably not clear to the British in 1940, especially as the fall of France so rapidly had also seemed impossible. And the attack on Norway had shown that Germany could launch marine operations.
Remember also that British military thinking for hundreds of year had been obsessed with the danger of a continental power landing an army. That it hadn't happened even for Napoleon didn't seem to lessen this fear.
Re September 1939: but that seems to be overly cautious if he really knew what was going to happen, in much of Europe there was the "Phoney war" for several more months.
Von Neumann's genius re: computers wasn't that they would some day become indispensable. He outlined the principles for colocating code and date in core memory, thereby making reprogramming computers far simpler than contemporaneous methods (which required physically rewiring them for each new program). He also specified the basics for an arithmetic processing unit, a control-data processor, and other mechanisms taken for granted now. This is the so-called Princeton architecture, which practically all computing hardware today follows, if not strictly, then in principle.
I can't speak to the book you're referring to, but I can recommend William Poundstone's "The Prisoner's Dilemma," which combines a biography of von Neumann with a surprisingly accessible overview of game theory, yet another field which von Neumann pioneered with grace and ease.
"He was able to see things coming to the extent that it makes me believe the future might be less difficult to predict than I had previously thought."
It helps, of course, to be John von Neumann :-)
For the prediction of war in Europe I'll toss in Maynard Keynes' "The Economic Consequences of the Peace" which I have *not* read, but which is supposed to be a detailed screed at the stupidity of the post-WW1 treatment of Germany with a claim that politically it would backfire.
I don't think Churchill believed that the Munich agreement would "bring peace in our time." I'm not even sure that Chamberlin believed it, but the United Kingdom wasn't ready to go to war then so you play the cards you have ...
If French tank tactics were better then that part of the war would have been VERY different. I doubt that John was up on German innovations in tank tactics :-)
I'll also point out that if von Neumann had made 100 predictions and 90 of them were wrong then this is less newsworthy. And folks (the originator and the people around them) tend to remember the RIGHT calls.
WW2 was a very close run thing for the Allies and a lot of our success ultimately came down to the stupidity of Hitler. For example he declared war on the US in support of Japan. Another thing that intrigues me that Churchill only became PM after Lord Halifax refused the role. Less than a year later the Germans wanted peace talks and Lord Halifax wanted to send envoys - but Churchill refused because he knew that the British people would want to settle. All of which is to say that I think in this case Von Braun’s predictions were just educated guesses. Thing could easily have turned out differently based on things no one could predict.
Once the US was at war, it was going to go to war with Japan's allies in the war anyway. That's kind of usual, and it's not as if the US wouldn't be able to find a provocation in a U-boat attack or the like to declare war.
Also, if the US rapidly defeated Japan then the whole weight of the British Empire and Commonwealth (who could field more soldiers than the US, and were already accessing the US industrial base), plus probably pretty quickly France and the Netherlands' Asian territories, was going to focus on Germany and it's European allies. So letting the US focus on Japan was not necessarily a sensible strategy even were it realistic.
I'm not sure I agree that it was that close. Hitler not declaring war on the US would in the end have been more to the Soviet Union's benefit than Germany's- Germany loses the Eastern Front even without direct US intervention and I don't think not declaring war on the US would be enough to stop America from sending material aid.
And on the other side of course once we assume the US does get into the war I don't think there's any serious chance they lose. I don't think there's really any way Germany wins the race to nuclear bombs (in OTL they barely competed at all) and even if the Manhattan Project is derailed somehow the US industrial advantage is overwhelming.
Looking for reading recommendations for a dog diet.
We just got a yorkeepoo puppy; right now feeding him with standard dry food, but in the long run planning to cook at home. Any suggestions on a good guide for a balanced diet?
One specific question I'd like to learn more about: how much can we reduce meat before it starts adversely affecting his health?
Stick with the commercial diets - there is nothing wrong with Pedigree, Purina, etc. Little soft food options like Little Ceasars have more gravey/calories than needed, but they are also fine. Don't worry about a single protien source diet unless you get an allergy diagnosis.
Your dog is not your sweetheart, it will not care that you spent hours slaving over a hot stove. Spend the time hanging out with and playing with the dog instead.
Re: meat - dogs are omnivores, on the spectrum such: ferrets (true carnivores) -> cats -> dogs -> bears - > humans -> pigs -> cattle-> horses (only must have animal protiens as nursing neonates). So you *could* go to a more meatless diet, but I think that would be counter productive, as pet feeds are overwhelmingly from meat that can't be marketed for humans, and so would be land fill wasted if not fed to dogs and cats. Use the common commercial food, divert food from the trash, and make the most use possible of every life raised to give us substance.
Pick up a proper veterinary dog nutrition doorstopper textbook. Find out which one’s on your local college’s curriculum and grab one used from a student. I won’t claim that professional consensus can’t be wrong or flawed, but you will want a very solid grounding if you intend to trek through the unbelievably misinformation-dense world of pet nutrition. give your bullshit-sniffer some basic calibration.
What are your concerns with a standard dry food diet?
It's good to keep in mind that most dogs at Westminster eat standard dry food. Unless you are dealing with a specific issue your best bet is almost always going to be a good quality brand like Royal Canine.
I've heard this idea before--that it's better to feed them dog food than manage the diet yourself--but now I'm wondering, why is it the opposite for humans? That is, AFAIK, humans are usually advised to eat a wide variety of foods, and we haven't been able to perfect a nutrient sludge that will keep us healthy long-term (something something micronutrients).
Maybe it's relevant that humans make their own food choices and thus can eat intuitively? Or that there's a bigger/older market for dog food than human nutrient sludge?
Actually, maybe (e.g.) Soylent is healthy long-term and it's just IV nutrition that's hard?
- Humans are omnivores optimized for getting some nutrition from almost anything at the cost of not getting the most out of anything we eat (compared to animals specialized for specific foods, humans can still certainly get by on much more limited diets than a modern one, provided all the necessities are there)
- “intuitive eating” for the most common household pets (cats and dogs) would look very different from a humans’ intuitive diet, especially a modern (western) one. These are carnivores that can’t get nearly as much nutrition as we can from plants, but can get what they need from whole animal carcasses. replicating that is not going to come “intuitively” to people who are often queasy even about basic organ meats. You’re in for a lot of research to overcome your bias toward people food, and the overwhelming majority are not going to beat veterinarians and the animal food industries on this front, even if commercial dog food isn’t theoretically ideal. Public messaging is tailored accordingly.
Basically, soylent probably isn’t ideal, but if your choice is between soylent and a random nutrient deficiency you wouldn’t have even thought to compensate for, consider soylent!
Dogs are omnivores not carnivores. Though you may consider them to be facultative carnivores but on the spectrum of being very close to omnivores. Compared to their wolf ancestors, dogs are basically omnivores: https://www.science.org/content/article/diet-shaped-dog-domestication
I like how Kerani phrases it above, as a spectrum, they also call dogs omnivores but what should be clear is that the line is somewhat arbitrary. Being relatively better at tolerating starch in the diet than a wolf does not make dogs as flexible as people or pigs or bears. There's a little bit more to comparative GI anatomy than amylase.
I tend to still round dogs up to carnivore because I think that "this animal needs meat to thrive" is worth underlining, even if they won't strictly starve without it. Way too many people are desperate to believe otherwise, to the detriment of the dogs in their care.
You can do pretty great controlled experiments with dogs! You choose exactly what they eat and can monitor their health and behaviour over their entire lives. And this is exactly what good breeders have spent centuries doing. They examine raw diets, vegetarian options, and whatever the latest dumb trend is.
I'm curious about humans as well though. Say every meal you had a small serving of fish and beef, a little grain, a heap of veggies and a good multivitamin, all ground up into a paste. Wouldn't that be a better diet than 99% of humans?
Dogs are carnivores, so have a presumably more limited and specialised digestive range (is that a term?).
And we value texture and flavour (remember this is both taste and smell), whereas dogs may not? Other mammals are not just furry less-intelligent humans but totally different creatures after all.
I may be a touch late to the party, but is the opening setting of Unsong, with licensing megacorps, nonexistent marginal costs, and over importance placed on degrees by any chance an allegory for the modern medical profession and drug approval?
Yes - Dylan mentions the drug analogy explicitly somewhere in the middle. Although I came up with it in 2010 and so it was also slightly an allegory for the RIAA.
I suggest starting by asking effective altruists what inclined them to EA instead of starting with some particular thing which might have inclined them to EA.
I think one of the goals of a humanistic education has been construed as, make people altruistic who would not otherwise be altruistic. (Also potentially make people value effectiveness. Not everyone does.) Assuming that EAs think it is good for humanity/effective for their purposes for them to be more numerous, then insofar as humanistic education causes the increase, it would be supported. I’m not sure how much effort or institutionalization is supposed to go into it, though. There’s a point where the maintenance of the institution is not altruistic and might cancel whatever benefit is derived from acquainting young people with ideals.
Arguably, once someone is started on it, they should continue, moving on to unfamiliar works, restless for refinement. Also arguably, once someone is started on it, really started, they don’t want to stop, and stopping might hinder the good they could do later plus make them miserable.
If you're asking whether a liberal arts education is, if your goal is making the world a better place, a remotely sensible use of one's time and money compared to obviously efficient stuff like giving your tuition/book money to AMF, I think that at the very least, poli sci and moral philosophy are vital to the cause.
Even if studying that material is valuable, the certification is the expensive stuff - go to a library and send the cash to somewhere other than a university
I would guess that poli sci is best studied at a university where you have professors who are actually involved with that stuff, and can hang out with people who actually do that stuff, and can potentially get hands-on experience; but yeah, paying for a formal degree in philosophy is maybe not the best use of a hundred grand and/or the opportunity cost of a scholarship. (No offense to Doctor Alexander.)
It does make me wonder how an extremely smart 18-year-old with a hundred thousand dollars should go about studying moral philosophy. Probably live on beans and rice for a few years while reading the library, and then hire a starving grad student to be their Aristocratic Tutor a la Oxbridge?
Humanity as a whole derives a tremendous amount of our overall utility from the arts, be it books movies music videogames history sculpture painting etc.
STEM and friends are great if you imagine everybody to be purely materialistic as you can help society produce an optimal amount of widgets, but it would be a drab and miserable world if nobody did creative work.
As for you personally, unless you're a .001% megagenius there's probably somebody just as good who'd be happy to go into STEM instead and could contribute similarly, but if you think you have a particular niche in the humanities there's a reasonable shot of you doing something that otherwise would not be done at all, which could very well provide more to the world than a marginal STEM grad.
Also from the obligatory AIpocalypse perspective I think it's more likely for AI to step in and render human contributions to STEM meaningless than for AI to render human contributions to the humanities meaningless.
It's not exactly clear what "humanistic education ... as a way of life for post college adults" means.
The short answer is still probably "No, there aren't any _good_ EA arguments for ...". I think one of hallmarks of a _good_ EA argument is that there is some concrete _evidence_ for the effectiveness of something. What you seem to be asking about is also not obviously altruistic – not in terms of 'first order' effects anyways. (Unless you think that the providers of "humanistic education", whoever they are, are deserving recipients of _effective_ altruism via tuition?)
A big gap I'd expect in any kind of _good_ argument for this is a survey of alternatives. Given the ambiguity of the question, it's just as murky as to what alternatives there are in terms of "way[s] of life".
This is less charitable, but it sure seems to me like you're searching for reasons to believe something you want to believe. Why would any one "way of life", for anyone, be some kind of form of effective altruism (beyond being and practicing EA)?
I think the argument would be that lifelong learners will be more effective thinkers for the rest of their lives. So hard to measure the impact, but I'm sure it's there. Some of those thinkers will be leaders of influential institutions. For example, you'd want a leader of a large foundation to be a lifelong learner, constantly asking questions. That in itself may lead that Foundation leader to gravitate toward more effective altruism.
"May" is the same as "may not", why are you so sure that the effect is there?
Is there any evidence that spending X years on humanities education results in people becoming more effective thinkers for the rest of their lives than spending the same X years on non-humanities education e.g. STEM?
Also, it does not seem obvious that there is a causal link from humanities education to becoming a lifelong learner, it seems quite plausible that any correlation is because the kind of people who are lifelong learners are the same people who prefer to choose humanistic education, and would be lifelong learners even if they did not take it.
"Is there a good effective altruist argument for humanistic education, not just in college, but as a way of life for post college adults"
I don't think I understand the question (I mean, I can parse it, but ...).
Are you trying to find a logical/ethical justification for something YOU want to do? Or are you trying to find a logical/ethical justification for encouraging other people to pursue this?
Your question seems to me to be similar to: Is there an effective altruist argument for going on vacation in Hawai'i'?
One LW norm that I like is replacing questions like "Is the rational thing to do brushing your teeth?" with "Is brushing your teeth helpful/good/healthy/worthwhile"? It cuts through jargon and community identification to create a more meaningful question.
So I would rephrase this as "is getting a humanistic education an effective way to help other people?" or "is getting a humanistic education the best thing you can do with your time/money for the needy people of the world?" or something like that.
I'm still not sure of the answer. It...doesn't seem true on the face of it? But I guess you could make an argument that lots of philosophers like Toby Ord and Will MacAskill have done really great stuff, and if humanistic education helps teach you how to do that kind of thing, catapult you to an important position where you can do that kind of thing, or make you the kind of person who is thoughtful about doing that kind of thing, maybe it could be good for some people who have pretty clear plans about how it would work.
I also think the "does this help the needy people of the world" framing is good because it makes it clear that the answer might be "no" and the activity could still be valuable. Does me having dinner help the needy people of the world? No, but I'm still going to.
What is "a humanistic education" -- is that synonymous with "an education in the humanities" ? In that case, I'd argue that, on the one hand, the modern version of humanities are almost completely useless. Obviously applied fields such as art, music composition, etc. are useful; but pure humanities such as philosophy or literature criticism or whatnot hold little value (and some hold *negative* value). On the other hand, though, humans are not interchangeable. If we determine that what our society needs most right now is computer programmers, and you suck at computer programming and find it detestable; then studying programming is quite possibly the worst decision you can make -- for everyone, not just yourself.
IMO, the world would be best served if everyone was exposed to a broad spectrum of possible education paths, and empowered to pick the path that is best for that specific individual.
I think it does actually help needy people indirectly for you to have dinner. You are an internet personality who is (partially) known for advocating for people to donate to the needy people of the world. If word got out that you do stupid things like not eating when you're hungry, it might reduce the influence of your pro-helping-the-needy writings.
If we're considering indirect effects like that, then even building IQ 200 designer babies for rich people helps the needy people of the world by increasing the rate of technological progress. Even making Japanese tentacle porn and giving it away on the internet helps the needy people of the world to the extent that it gratifies them and reduces birthrates by epsilon, helping their population grow more slowly than their infrastructure/economy. But it also hurts the needy people of the world via contributing epsilon to the population collapse in the first world, slowing technological progress. (I'm assuming here that porn is economically sorta substitutable for relationships, so flooding the market with porn slightly reduces demand/supply for relationships ceteris paribus. Sex robots will soon be a much better substitute and cause an even larger reduction in demand/supply). So It's unclear which effect predominates.
Besides direct charity, basically anything that helps speed up technological progress or grow the world economy or reduce X-risk is good for the needy people of the world. Scott has done that in countless ways like doing deep dives on education, opposing communism, ameliorating fears of genetic engineering, prediction markets, AI alignment, signal boosting innovative model cities, and telling a lot of smart people that climate change is not a good reason to avoid having kids.
I will bite that bullet. Increasing the rate of growth of human prosperity is *the* long-term EA goal (I'd class most X-risks as medium term). Whether to focus on long term or short term EA is a different question, as is the extent to which helping the extremely poor today is effective at boosting global human tech development
I'm not trying to criticize EA at all here. Just trying to make a point about how many different non-obvious ways there are to indirectly help the present and future needy people of the world.
I think humanities Education is massively important but not sure how one would evaluate the claim within an EA framework…I think it can be done and may already be done so I’d like to read about it.
The best argument I know of is an appeal to robustness. In the Talmud (Kiddushin 29a), the rabbis include in a list of father's obligations to his son to teach him Torah, a trade, and how to swim.
Now, teaching Torah is obvious. It would be shocking if rabbis didn't say that Jews should learn Torah. A trade is also fairly obvious. We might infer that the alternative is poverty, but the rabbis suggest an even more pessimistic outcome; that someone who doesn't learn a trade will likely take up banditry. Another good reason for an education! But so far, we're not really talking a "general education". Torah has some aspects of being a general education, from the Jewish viewpoint, but among practicing Jews it's seen more as a list of our responsibilities.
But teaching your children to swim, I'd argue, is the platonic ideal of a general education. The rabbis were not trying to produce Olympic athletes; far from it, they derided the Grecian way of life. Rather, I believe, the rabbis were making a case-in-point argument for teaching your children robustness. And that, I'd argue, is the core case for a general education. Yes, it's *nice* when everyone has a deep core of cultural references in conversation. Yes it's *nice* that we occasionally find passionate and excellent people by teaching them many basics, and that all sorts of things can open your mind and so on.
But if you live in a world dominated by tail risk, increasing robustness is more than nice to have; it's a pressing need.
I agree with the robustness take, but I don't think that's the same as a general humanities education - it's almost the opposite. Teaching your kid to swim, to cook, to mend torn clothes, to fix their car back when that was possible, those are all robustness. Reading great literature or famous philosophers may be nice but it will never save your life or even save you money.
Now, as I understand it, skills that save your life or save you money are supposed to be taught by high school. That's the theory, anyway, but you do see a lot more civics and basic finance courses in high school than college. The appeal to robustness here is not just that we should be materially robust - that's also important! - but we should also be robust to ideas. Learning about fascism isn't likely to save you money, and it's also unlikely (but perhaps more likely) to save your life. Great literature contains lots of important ideas, and you never know which you'll need in your arsenal for your particular life. And while arguments of "oh education A is good training for task B" are fraught, I rather imagine that practicing evaluating a curated set of important ideas from the past is good training for evaluating new ideas we encounter in our lives.
So the value as I understand it is that we first make equip people to navigate material concerns and then intellectual concerns.
Compare that to a CS degree, for example, which has been vital for my career but with a few notable exceptions hasn't helped me much outside computer-related questions. Now I did for example learn about the Pareto Distribution, which I think is a vital idea for everyone, but I relearned it from Nassim Taleb so I wasn't going to have been lost forever. But that's the essence of a trade degree; it's mostly narrowly focused, and helpful while your trade is valuable, but you do also occasionally encounter universal ideas.
Wait – your original question was about "humanistic education", but here you write "humanities Education".
I majored in math at a college/university in the U.S.. Did I receive either kinds of educations?
Thinking about "humanistic education" it occurred to me that, despite your question seeming to assume/imply it, it wasn't _necessary_ to go to college/university to get one.
Stock markets are sort of like prediction markets in their own right, any reason to not trust it?
I can think of one: if the money in it is not able to be transferred out of country, then all alternative places for the money could have the same downturn and thus no reason to move the market.
"Subdivided" is doing a lot of work here. You need to consider the material differences between theories B1 and B2: is B2 really just B1 + ε? Or does it have some true explanatory power separate from B1, but shares a few assumptions?
Ultimately, in the *total* absence of evidence, you don't even know which parts of the given theories are relevant, so categorization is ruled out a priori - even talking about B1 and B2 is incoherent. Realistically you'll have some information about X (perhaps you've sent out a handful of expeditions, hurr hurr) and so you can just determine which theory fits that evidence best rather than having to abstract at this level.
Is there anything distinguishing your situation from the following?
X can be explained by two theories, theory P and theory Q. Theory P is really theory B1 by a different name. Theory Q can be subdivided into two subtheories Q1 and Q2, which are different names for B2 and B.
If there's no way to tell these apart, then we should say that all three get 1/3, because that's the only thing to do that doesn't privilege whichever thing you happened to call a theory or a subtheory.
In practice, I think there *is* often a way to tell these apart, which is complexity. (Something like Kolmogorov complexity of a complete description of the theory.) It doesn't seem crazy to assign probabilities according to complexity in the absence of other information; that's just a fancier Occam's Razor.
If A and B are equally complex, and B1 vs B2 add one more bit to specify some additional detail, then we might pick option 1: assign the probabilities 1/2, 1/4, 1/4.
Not to try to dunk on you, but like choosing an interpretation for QM, this strikes me as an essentially meaningless enterprise: with (definitionally) no evidence that any theory should be favored, the assigning of probabilities is arbitrary. You can quibble over whether ‘subtheories’ should be privileged over theories etc., but that’s all down to some whether you have some sort of taxonomic/aesthetic bias against considering something a subset of something else and has nothing to do with being rational; same thing with assigning a greater probability to A over B or an equal chance to A versus B. With no actual evidence, it’s so much sophistry. Coming up with a clever way to justify an assumption we make with no evidence appears to make us smarter but actually makes us dumber and less objective.
Seems very clear to me that it would be 25/25/50 a priori. The odds of a theory being correct don't just increase as soon as you find a slight variation on that theory.
First of all it's completely possible to both believe that: 1) X is not happening; 2) X happening would be a good thing. 1) doesn't have to be an ephemism for 2). There is absolutely no contradiction in holding both positions. If I believe both and I meet a person who engages me, claiming that X is happening and X is bad, I'm not going to automatically concede the first point. I'll argue about both part of the claim.
Notice, also, that 1) is a statement of fact, while 2) is a statement of preference. It's easier to argue and find common ground about factual claims. One can even say, that it's what the arguments are supposed to be about: find actual testable fact that you disagree about and figure out who is right. If you can't even settle on whether X is happening or not, what chance do you have to come to an agreement whether X is good? I think it's good that people argue about 1) instead of 2) - its has at least the possibility of agreement. Even better would be to reduce 2) to some set of factual claims, predictions about the future and cost-benefit analysis and then argue about them.
There is also an important distinction between our 1) and 2) and a statement 3): It's Y that's happening and Y happening is a good thing. This can become very confusing when people disagree whether X=Y or not. Imagine that a person claims that USA publicly hosts fashists rallies and this is bad thing. You agree that publicly hosting a fashist rally is a bad thing but don't think that it's happening in USA, so you challenge the first part of the claim. As an obvious evidence of fashists rallies you are shown videos of MAGA rally. For you MAGA isn't Fashism and actually you don't see anything bad with MAGA rallies. But for the person X=Y and now they think that you are actually in favour of fashism and argue about the process just to give yourself plausible deniability.
> To forestall an objection, this isn't universally true of course. There are your Charles CW Cookes and David Shors and miscellaneous libertarians who have strong opinions but are also process guys who will object to anyone not following the rules. But they're rare throwbacks to an earlier, better era and not driving the conversation.
There's another type of exception. Suppose someone accuses me of murder. It's not true, and I say so. Does that mean I'm secretly in favor of murder? No; I'm just answering a false accusation.
Whichever political party you support, think about the accusations the other party makes against you. Surely there's something there that you believe to be false, but also believe would be bad if it were true?
I could just as easily say you've got it backwards - the people who are against something are unwilling to call out the process flaws and dishonest rhetoric of other people who are against it, so the only people willing to call out those bad things re the ones who are for it.
Eg, yeah, actually, the Florida law *is* written real real bad, and doesn't actually do what most of it's supporters say it does. But people who are anti-LGBT won't ever call out or even acknowledge those flaws, so the only people pointing out those flaws end up being allies.
I think you've pretty much just re-discovered' arguments as soldiers', except you're acting like it only applies to one side of the debate rather than both.
Also, importantly, I think you're using a weird definition of 'sincere' here. You can both hate something and sincerely find it to be flawed or dangerous in specific ways - indeed, being flawed and dangerous are qualities that make people more likely to hate something, so we should expect to see it happen a lot.
> Hypothesis: When there's a hotly debated culture war issue, nobody who is objecting to one side's actions on process grounds or on "you're crazy, this never happens" grounds actually cares about the process. They are just on the other side and don't want to admit it, sometimes not even to themselves.
> To forestall an objection, this isn't universally true of course. There are your Charles CW Cookes and David Shors and miscellaneous libertarians who have strong opinions but are also process guys who will object to anyone not following the rules. But they're rare throwbacks to an earlier, better era and not driving the conversation.
Are you asking about how to find arguments that genuinely *are* process-focused, or complaining that they aren't in the driver's seat? Especially if you're focusing on "hotly debated culture war issue", this seems like an issue of selecting for heat instead of light and then disliking the results.
Culture war is justifiable as personal entertainment if that's what floats your boat, but if you're trying to sell it as a useful place to spend personal resources I want to see something that comes within an order of magnitude of claiming it's an effective use of one's time. "We can't ignore X, therefore we're selecting for X" is nonsensical on its face.
Whinging on the internet is perfectly fine as a form of entertainment, and I don't really feel any need to second-guess people's preferences in that domain. But let's not pretend it belongs in the same category as anything actually trying to optimize for light.
"Example 1: People who object to the Florida law on teaching modern gender ideology to children will raise process complaint after process complaint (it's too vague! there will be expensive lawsuits!) or insist that nobody's teaching modern gender ideology to children so there's no need for the law, but if you drive them into a corner and force it out of them they'll always state that actually, they think teaching modern gender ideology to children is cool and good."
Interesting, in that I haven't heard the defenders or proponents of that law describe it as a law on teaching modern gender ideology to children (of which I am straightforwardly in favour and require no forcing into a corner to defend) but that it is a law on teaching sex to children (sex in the intercourse sense, not in the men-and-women sense), and that the process arguments can be summarised as "you're not banning the teaching of sex, you're banning the teaching of modern gender ideology".
Supporters of "modern gender ideology" don't call it that, of course - we call it the absence of homophobia and transphobia - but the substance is the same thing: homosexuality and heterosexuality are morally equal and should be treated as such, transgenderism and cisgenderism are morally equal and should be treated as such, so any situation where it is appropriate for a (cisgendered, opposite-sex) married couple to perform any sex act (e.g. hold hands, kiss, wear a wedding ring, be addressed by married-couple-only terms like "spouse" or "husband" or "wife" or "Mrs"), it is equally appropriate for a same-sex couple or a couple containing a trans or non-binary person to perform the same sex act, and, when teaching in general terms (rather than addressing a specific case), it is morally imperative not to only mention one case or to imply that one case is normative.
(Normative is a word that is often misunderstood: it is not a statistical term, but refers to the imputation of moral superiority to that which is more common/popular - that is to say, calling something "normal" implies that it is in some way better than that which is not normal; referring to it as, say, "popular" or "common" and others as, say, "niche" or "rare" is intended to imply that there is no moral hierarchy, just that some are more popular than others)
Hey, thanks for clueing me in on 'normative'. I wonder if it might be one of those words that's so readily misunderstood it might be better to find alternative phrasing - after all, you're clearly aware it's enough of a problem that you need an explaining paragraph to be properly understood.
Of course, whether words whose original/'correct' meaning is at risk of becoming eclipsed by a different commonly understood meaning should be abandoned to those misappropriating it is its own, pretty complex, linguistic debate...
No disagreement there, I think that the problem is that it's a hard concept to summarise. Which means you need a word that has no connotations (so people realise that they don't know what it means and then have to look it up or ask), or else you just deal with the fact that it's a tough idea.
One of my friends refers to "the two most popular genders", which gets across the exact point without having to be quite so po-faced.
I don't see any difference between saying "the two normal genders" and "the two most popular genders". In no way does normality imply moral superiority.
This seems to me like the fake arguments about "people focused language" where "homeless" becomes "people experiencing homelessness" and "firefighters" becomes "people who fight fires", etc. A farcical distraction for the purposes of dividing people and virtue signaling without any actual meaning.
There do seem to be two overlapping concepts for normal. I think what Richard is getting at is made clearer by considering the antonym: abnormal. Which does have a pretty clear negative connotation.
Normal(ity) implies a norm, some definitions of which include an aspect of expectation; violating a norm is failing to meet an expectation, which has much clearer moral weight.
But they aren't saying they are. They're saying they are passing laws against teachers grooming children and against teaching children about sex. Both of which I am also against.
So the process arguments I hear are not "no-one is teaching gender ideology", but "this bans teaching gender ideology, not grooming" - while the proponents of it describe it as an "anti-grooming law" and reply "OK Groomer" to anyone who opposes it.
'Taking their eyes off the ball' is fine when we're talking about people having a debate. But in this case they're lying about the contents of a bill that's signed into law and determines how schools work in an entire state. That can't just be dismissed as an error, it's a strategy of propaganda that's affecting people's lives.
Being trans is not inferior to being cis, so "getting transed", if it is possible, isn't a problem.
Obviously, that presumes that they are converted to a permanent position of being trans that is comparable to someone that was trans "from birth" (assuming that is even a meaningful distinction) if people who are transed are cis people led to believe they are trans and who end up with severe gender dysphoria in adulthood until they detransition then that is a problem, but I'm not aware of any evidence of that - increases in the numbers of people transitioning have not resulted in a higher proportion of people detransitioning, for example.
But now we definitely are onto the object-level disagreement rather than the meta-level.
More than that. Whatever the espoused principle ("process" or anything else) used to determine which actions are correct and which are wrong, it will appear to have a fractally complex set of exceptions, to the point where no previous set of cases and their espoused principles and exceptions can be used to predict what the decision would be in a new case.
Except one. The "principle" of "who" and "whom". This one will be very clear.
This feels like it's related to a few other things, "dogwhistling", "sanewashing", and our old friend "motte and bailey".
These are all labels which enable you to argue against someone making a reasonable point by arguing that they are only making a reasonable point in order to disguise their true agenda, which is unreasonable. "You say X, but of course you really believe Y, and Y is terrible, therefore you're wrong"
As a line of argument this makes me uneasy; sometimes people really _do_ say X to disguise their real belief in Y, but sometimes people really do just believe X. Besides, if you're being a good rationalist you should always engage with the strongest form of your opponent's argument (in this case X) not the silliest (Y).
"As a line of argument this makes me uneasy; sometimes people really _do_ say X to disguise their real belief in Y, but sometimes people really do just believe X."
I agree. My only worthwhile insight into this is that I've spent a fair bit of time in conversation and in solidarity with dyed-in-the-wool activists. True believers. Organisers of pro-Palestinian protests, back in the day, and more recently a mixture of the idpol and economic left. At least on this side, there's not a 'playbook'. I don't remember anyone ever consciously saying anything to the effect of 'we're going to Alinsky these bastards.' The closest I can think of is certain street tactics to try to stymie the police using the police's own rules.
I can't speak of the conservative right to the same extent, but from what I've read of its social media aimed at itself, I get a similar impression. I think most people largely believe in what they say - they just take certain core assumptions as given, which their opponents irritatingly insist on relitigating.
And the rest of it is just performance of hostility, basic human nature, wanting to negate everything the opponent says out of basic antipathy. It's not easy to do the 'joint search for truth' thing when mutual trust is a priori shot.
Texas recently passed an anti-abortion law that was designed to be difficult to challenge in court. Instead of having the government prosecute abortion providers, private citizens could sue them and get a reward. Most Republicans (61%) support Texas's efforts to restrict abortion and want the Supreme Court to allow it to go into effect, but most Republicans (67%) disapprove the process it uses. This means that about a third of Republicans actually do care about the process, at least for this particularly ridiculous process. Source: https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/monmouthpoll_us_092021/
That Scientific American article doesn’t claim that people’s feelings are disinformation (which, by the way, is not a cogent statement) - it’s a review of research and reportage about the propagation of disinformation about CRT. Regardless of what people want or don’t want to be taught in schools, the fact that CRT discussions in the public sphere have been influenced by concerted conservative efforts isn’t in dispute. (See link below.)
Also, the article ends by calling for people to “own that racism is real and to call out conservative legislative efforts designed to outlaw the teaching of racial inequality for what they are: a fitting example of how legal systems uphold racial inequality in the United States”. How did you get from that to “advocating that we should teach critical race theory to their [sic] children”?
if you’ve been reading anti-CRT content in the past year, you almost certainly have been exposed to disinformation. You have every right to have feelings or policy positions about how American history is taught, but I strongly recommend poking around and doing some reading and critical thinking about the topic, so that you’re expressing your own opinions informed by facts, rather than a distorted perspective served to you by power brokers who are serving their own interests. Isn’t the general critique of social-justice perspectives in the SSC/ACX universe that they involve people believing thought-killing, feelings-driven oversimplifications? Reader, heal thyself.
Considering that CRT has been taught under a variety of names (hint: all the "+power" definitions come from it). To claim it's a nonissue having been invented by a conservative is simply nonsense.
Consider this mandatory orientation lesson from back in the Obama years:
A RACIST: A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality. By this definition, people of color cannot be racists, because as peoples within the U.S. system, they do not have the power to back up their prejudices, hostilities, or acts of discrimination…
REVERSE RACISM: A term created and used by white people to deny their white privilege. Those in denial use the term reverse racism to refer to hostile behavior by people of color toward whites, and to affirmative action policies, which allegedly give ‘preferential treatment’ to people of color over whites. In the U.S., there is no such thing as “reverse racism.”
Oddly enough one is not permitted to notice that this is defining "racist" and "white person" as synonyms. You are however supposed to feel very guilty about being a racist.
You’ve quoted a University of Delaware Residence Life training from 2007 (see link below): besides the fact that 2007 makes it Bush-era, it has nothing to do with the federal government - why did you bring up Obama? This is also a far reach for an example - it’s fifteen years old, and the org that hosts the document doesn’t have details on it being widespread or even systematically used within the UofD system. Again: having opinions about the way America’s history is taught is valid, but dredging up isolated examples from more than a decade in the past (and linking them for no discernable reason to the one Black president we’ve had, a full two years before he entered office) doesn’t make for a strong argument.
First you say that CRT is a recently-invented thing and a nonissue. Then when I point out that it's not new at all, your response is "this is old news therefore irrelevant?"
I (incorrectly as it turned out) brought up Obama to point out this is NOT a new thing. And the article you link to indicates that this was in fact systematically used. It's hard to think of a definition of systematic that does not include "mandatory for all students during the first four years of their (taxpayer funded!) college experience."
Please feel free to share what you're interpreting to mean that "CRT is a newly-invented thing". It's not, and I haven't claimed that it is. CRT has been around since the 70s (seriously, just read the Wikipedia article - the language is very simple and straightforward). CRT has been an academic topic, politically and socially a non-issue, for the vast majority of that time (again, it came up once during the Clinton administration and once in Arizona - both of which were also explicit campaigns by conservatives, not movements arising from citizen concerns).
What I did say, which you don't seem to be willing to hear, is that there has been disinformation propagated by conservative political actors about CRT over the past two years. This isn't disputed: it's a fact. It's been reported on by lots of sources, many of them non-partisan (I've linked to NBC and the Associated Press via PBS in this thread). If you don't want to believe facts reported by trusted news sources, including the perspective of teachers in classrooms, then you don't want to believe in reality.
I also said, repeatedly, that people have a right to their opinions (and votes) about how schools address the teaching of American history - you have that right, too! If you don't want topic X (say, the history of slavery and racial oppression) to be taught in schools, say that and own it. (Warning: people may ask you *why*!) But substantiating your opinion by dredging up a single, outdated, non-relevant example (it's a college, ffs) that you fallaciously link to a Black political leader? This is the rhetorical pose of a conspiracy theorist, not a citizen engaging in good-faith discussion.
> Oddly enough one is not permitted to notice that this is defining "racist" and "white person" as synonyms. You are however supposed to feel very guilty about being a racist.
What's the point then? Feeling guilty won't make me any less white.
I guess things are not supposed to have a point, these days. It's just endless screaming...
This is an object-level response to a meta-level thread, on culture war topics. Which seems potentially dangerous for the comment policy (*checks which week it is, oh yeah, we're not doing that anymore*), but I'll go ahead and respond, and see if Scott decides to remove it.
"That Scientific American article doesn’t claim that people’s feelings are disinformation (which, by the way, is not a cogent statement) - it’s a review of research and reportage about the propagation of disinformation about CRT. Regardless of what people want or don’t want to be taught in schools, the fact that CRT discussions in the public sphere have been influenced by concerted conservative efforts isn’t in dispute. (See link below.)"
The article attributes the disinformation campaign to Youngkin, conservatives, Rufo, and Republicans. It portrays white parents as victims of this campaign. It might be more accurate to summarize the article as that their fears are based on misinformation, instead of just being misinformation.
I'm not sure if I agree with this framing, because some of the Republican activists here are parents themselves. But adding "based on" to my comment would make it reflect the article better.
"Also, the article ends by calling for people to “own that racism is real and to call out conservative legislative efforts designed to outlaw the teaching of racial inequality for what they are: a fitting example of how legal systems uphold racial inequality in the United States”. How did you get from that to “advocating that we should teach critical race theory to their children”? "
The next sentence is: "This, of course, is exactly what CRT is trying to point out."
I took advocating for a sustained and coherent campaign promoting something which is exactly CRT's point to be equivalent to advocating for teaching CRT. The last paragraph does not explicitly say that it should be taught in schools, but the previous paragraph makes it clear that "the robust teaching of America’s racial history in our public schools" is a key part of Democrats' campaign here.
I think that much of the debate comes down to what the heck "Critical Race Theory" actually means. Conservatives seem to be using it as a label for a big cloud of ideas they disagree with, while people within that cloud will point out that Critical Race Theory refers only to one very narrow thing, and that there's other flavours in the cloud that aren't specifically CRT.
At this point everybody would be much better off ditching the term "Critical Race Theory" and agreeing on some new labels for the sorts of ideas they'd like to discuss, but that's not going to happen.
There’s been a definition of Critical Race Theory for quite a long time - the Wikipedia page (below) does a fine job of summing it up. It’s a college-level topic, and represents a particular critical-thinking approach, rather than a set of beliefs or facts.
I would certainly hope, in a community that prides itself in rationality, that people would be concerned by politicians using a concept with a limited, fit-for-purpose definition and using it as a catch-all term to attack a wide variety of related but not equivalent concepts.
"a teaching philosophy that invites educators to encourage students to critique structures of power and oppression. It is rooted in critical theory, which involves becoming aware of and questioning the societal status quo. In critical pedagogy, a teacher uses his or her own enlightenment to encourage students to question and challenge inequalities that exist in families, schools, and societies."
This paper from 2013 is indeed in the context of a college course, but the events it refers back to are from 1999 Decatur high school:
"In this article, the authors explore the analytic connections between the scholarship on Black teachers and the development of the concept of critical pedagogy. In particular, the authors conduct a detailed analysis of both of these discourses and then explore the work of two African‐American male teachers in an urban school in Los Angeles. The findings reveal that the links between critical pedagogy and the scholarship on Black teachers is stronger than the existing literature would suggest. Additionally, it is suggested that Black male teachers in urban communities embody qualities outlined in both critical pedagogy and the scholarship on Black teachers."
Where do you think teachers come out of? Colleges, where often they will be exposed to theories like this. I don't know how American teacher training is done, but if it's anything like Irish teacher training, they will be covering a lot of topics that are not just "how to teach readin' writin' and rithmetic".
They may even have to sit through jargon-filled lectures like this:
"In this critical qualitative case study, we examined the ways three critically identifying social studies teachers understood and adopted critical pedagogy. We argue that the praxis of these teachers unfolded based on their understanding of and willingness to attend to the many dialectical relations associated with teaching. We understand the praxiological unfolding to be teachers’ critical ontological social studies posture, which we argue reflects those ways teachers see and understand dialectical relation and then approach the world by authentically living their critical epistemology, ontology, and ideology. We conclude that the ways critical social studies teachers situate themselves within the many instances of relational power will uniquely inform the approach they take in their work with students."
In fact, I'm beginning to wonder if there isn't a bit of weasel-wording going on - "Oh no, we don't teach Critical Race Theory in schools! (We do Critical Pedagogy which is entirely different)".
But fear not! Even if you are white, there is hope!
"Swimming in and through whiteness: Antiracism in social studies teacher education
In this study, the author examined how five white preservice teachers in a secondary social studies teacher education program embodied, wrestled with, and resisted whiteness. Drawing on literature from whiteness studies and antiracism, this study utilized the analogy of a swimming pool to discuss how participants constructed their identities in relation to whiteness and antiracism. Findings indicated that participants demonstrated a fluidity of positioning as they invested, reinvested, and divested from whiteness. Despite prolonged attention to antiracism, participants struggled to disrupt whiteness and white supremacy throughout the duration of the study, which was demonstrative of the complex, interlocking relationship between whiteness and social studies education. Implications for antiracist social studies teacher education are also discussed."
Put on your water-wings and learn how to resist whiteness! And we can all learn how to ditch such white values as "civility" and cultivate a pedagogy of counter-narration:
Best practices in civic education emphasize deliberative pedagogies as one of the most powerful ways to educate enlightened democratic citizens. Yet deliberative pedagogies are rooted in a white normative ideal of discursive democracy that, in the service of “civility” and “reasoned discourse,” fails to account for the social and political inequalities—the logic of white supremacy—that structures our political context. Drawing on Critical Race Theory and Charles Mills’s notion of the racial contract, I propose a pedagogy of counternarration that privileges voices from the margins, imagines the world as it could be, and talks back to dominant narratives in order to cultivate justice-oriented citizens in the democratic classroom."
"It’s a college-level topic, and represents a particular critical-thinking approach, rather than a set of beliefs or facts."
This is profoundly dishonest.
It's the equivalent of saying "Christian theology is a specialized course taught in Divinity schools" and therefore the elementary school that teaches kids that the world was created in six days and they're going to burn for eternity if they don't accept Jesus as their personal savior isn't teaching Christianity. The fact that they never mention the Council of Nicea or make them recite the Apostle's creed doesn't mean they're not teaching the conclusion of those as being fact.
I want to teach children that racism exists in the real world, is overwhelmingly white people being racist about non-white people, that this is bad, and that, if they are white, they should think hard about their beliefs about non-white people to see if they are, themselves racist.
I do not want to teach them that they are personally responsible for being racist because they are white, nor that they are responsible for their ancestors' racism.
The second appears to be, rhetorically, what opponents mean by "Critical Race Theory"; the first, though, appears to be what is actually happening when they object.
Perhaps I am wrong, and this is an unfair summary of what is going on, filtered through media that I am reading from a continent away from the action. But the use of the words "Critical Race Theory" doesn't enlighten me at all.
Non-white people can be racist about a different variety of non-white people too, unless we're going with "racism is power plus privilege, non-white people don't have power or privilege, thus they can't be racist".
Humans can be really terrible to each other. In the USA, that took the form of white people being really terrible to the indigenous people and then imported black slaves. But it's not the only form of racism that ever existed.
"I want to teach children that racism exists in the real world, is overwhelmingly white people being racist about non-white people, that this is bad, and that, if they are white, they should think hard about their beliefs about non-white people to see if they are, themselves racist."
I think the right would strongly disagree with this as well as with your second paragraph. I think first of all this is not an appropriate subject for K-12, given that it is highly political and will certainly lead to many highly inappropriate characterizations. Second of all I think it is factually incorrect.
"Racism... is overwhelmingly white people being racist about non-white people"
I think this is plainly false. White people are generally less racist than people of other races, in my opinion.
"they should think hard about their beliefs about non-white people to see if they are, themselves racist"
This is just a really weird thing to teach in school. It's basically indoctrination. School is for teaching facts, reasoning, skills. It's not for instilling government-chosen or teacher-chosen values into students. That's for parents and communities.
Furthermore to limit it to white people is to demonize them. This is exactly what the right is against and hoping to avoid. Why the heck would you not ask all students to examine their beliefs and whether they are racist? (If you are going to be doing that, which you should not) You can't avoid stigma if this is what you are teaching. It's basically blatant racial hatred. We need to keep racism OUT of our schools! That is why we have to ban CRT.
I think bad attempts at doing the first thing easily turn into doing the second thing. And almost all attempts at doing the first thing with middle schoolers or younger (especially the bit about “overwhelmingly white people being racist about non-white people”) are going to be bad, because most teachers won’t be skilled enough and most of the pupils won’t be able to handle the required nuance, even if the teacher is good enough to present it.
It's probably sometimes that, but sometimes - I would imagine *most* of the time, it's actually just that the person saying "that never happens" just... hasn't ever seen the thing happen, and has a really low prior on the thing happening. There's things that other people say happen all the time that *I'm* pretty sure never actually happen.
It seems to me like this is just kinda what happens when people who aren't skilled at arguing have arguments, online or off - they tend to get hyperfocused on one specific detail and refuse to move on until it's settled - which it never will be, because neither side has enough evidence to convince the other.
> I would imagine *most* of the time, it's actually just that the person saying "that never happens" just... hasn't ever seen the thing happen, and has a really low prior on the thing happening.
It is sometimes funny to observe that when the thing finally happens to them, it shatters their worldview and catapults them to the opposite side.
Maybe if you oppose CRT, what you actually should do is print some flyers saying "math is racist" and distribute them to parents in front of school. Next day, they would vote against teaching CRT at their school.
(Just to avoid possible misunderstanding, I am not advocating any kind of deception. Print a page of an *actual* CRT "math textbook" such as equitablemath.org and include a link to verify.)
I don't think that's true. I was arguing with someone here about the Florida law the other week. My position was that if a teacher came in and mentioned that she and her wife had been to Disney over the weekend, they could end up being sued. His position was that if a special teacher came in and suggested to the kids that maybe there were *really* a different gender and they could to do a worksheet to find out and then go to the office and get special medicine to help them and by the way this a special school secret and they shouldn't tell mom and dad, well, then they would be sued.
He holds my position to be paranoid nonsense, and says that if it were to happen (the lawsuit), that would be inappropriate. Likewise, I hold his position to be paranoid nonsense, something that "never happens", and if it did I wouldn't support it.
I think, in general, the things that our opponents claim that we respond to by saying "that never happens" are things we think are strawmen. I'd be fine with a book being read were a character happened to have two moms or some such. I don't support special sessions where speakers come in and try to recruit 7-year-olds to gender transition. (And medicate them!)
That "never happens" response, I think, comes when someone takes what we consider a reasonable position (Charlotte's Web but both parents are dudes), imputes an unreasonable position (Secretly recruit small kids to transgenderism and medicate them) and then accuse us of the unreasonable position. No one is holding classes trying to convince 1st graders that they are trans and should medicate and keep the whole thing secret from their parents. That never happens. And you don't have to push me into a corner to have me add - and if it were to hypothetically happen somewhere, everyone involved should be fired. Of course I wouldn't approve.
All of which is a long winded way to say - I think you're off base here. When someone says that something never happens, they're probably also saying it shouldn't, and you probably don't need to push them into a corner to get them to come out and say that it shouldn't.
I think you're just reinventing weakmanning. "This never happens" may not literally be true, but "this hardly ever happens and the only place you'll hear about the exceptions is on websites dedicated to chronicling every last one of their enemy's misdeeds" is very often true. And "the rare exceptions are not enough to justify destroying a useful system" is often true as well. (If you're not a fan of CRT, you could try applying these arguments to Defund the Police and see where you land.)
"this hardly ever happens and the only place you'll hear about the exceptions is on websites dedicated to chronicling every last one of their enemy's misdeeds" is very often true. "
How would you know if it hardly ever happens? We know that what gets reported and ignored is strongly influenced by the tribe of the reporter. If something is super-rare, how would the "enemies" of it have such easy access to examples of it happening?
If you think that, for a black person, it is reasonable to believe that you should not contact the police if your home is being invaded because you are in more danger from the police than from the home invader, then the whole BLM/Defund the Police position makes sense.
Some people will say that the police are just a criminal gang that is backed up by the law, and I think most of us think of that as just overblown rhetoric - and I think it often is. But some of those people really do literally believe that; they would rather have their neighborhoods run by a gang which (being black) they could conceivably get on the right side of than by the police which (because the police are racists) they cannot possibly get on the right side of.
Yeah, most black people don't live like that, but when I realised that BLM/DfP activists actually believe that position, the rest fell into place and made sense.
I'm pretty sure at least some of these are an attempt to discuss cost/benefit. To choose an example no one cares about, procurement and travel reimbursement at my (state) university is very onerous because of a great fear of misuse of public funds. I've wasted days of my life because of this and have skipped attending conferences or applying for grants because I just couldn't deal with the administrative overhead. I'm not in favour of corruption, but I honestly think the cure is worse than the disease. In my experience, at least some of "I've never seen X occur" is saying something along these lines.
I agree. It's along the lines of the "dog whistles" accusation, where no matter your opponent says, what they're REALLY saying is <insert straw man here>.
In my experience the way to avoid this is don't assume. Usually a process debater will say up front if they are actually on your side, "I'm not a fan of abortion for convenience, but..." if they're not on your side, when pressed they will say so.
I agree. Ask if they'd support he project if their process concern were addressed, i.e. ask if that is their True Objection. Get their statement as publicly and ironclad as possible, so even if they're lying it becomes much harder for them to add future process complaints onto the list after you address the initial set
It’s Thursday and open threads seem to begin to die about now. Plus we have permission to do political so I’m linking to a British writer who captures my feelings about 45 better than I could ever do.
Some British folk don’t like DT. Why? Well to begin with
“For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace.” …
“Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever. I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman. But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty. ”
https://londondaily.com/british-writer-pens-the-best-description-of-trump-i-ve-read
Really. I don’t understand why anyone could like such a toad. I can at least see the other side on almost all scissor issues. Not this one. Some might say this is unimportant now that he is gone. Except he is not. He is still here and still dangerous.
There's a huge group of people who don't really like Trump but support him to stick it to the mainstream. Another group likes him because he is crass and not super smart and because he was on Wrestlemania and so forth. Sure he's a billionaire but he is *their* billionaire.
Personally what I used to tell people during the election was that: "Biden pisses on your leg and tells you it is raining. Trump shits in your mouth and tells you it is chocolate." So I don't like Biden that much or have much respect for him but Trump is so bad I can't support him either.
I see why people like Trump. Or at least support him over Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton and maybe Joe Biden. It mostly comes from a place of nihilism. Whereas the people who support him but don't like him like the fact that he agreed to appoint the three Federalist Society SC Judges they wanted. In the end his sexual assaults and his poor diplomacy skills don't matter to them. Just like the infamous story of 2 gay NYC hoteliers donating to and having a meeting with Ted Cruz even though he is homophobic and talks mad shit about NYC.
Thanks for the feedback. It’s something of an unsolvable mystery to me.
Anyone know if there are therapies for schizotypal personality disorder? Or cluster A generally? This is not for use with a real client, it’s for an assignment, but research is coming up short. So far I basically have “social skills training, and maybe risperidone or olanzapine.”
For experimental stuff, I'd look under phenibut, MDMA and psylocybin in no particular order. I'm also sure some cluster As self medicate with these in one way or another.
Thank you, this is really helpful.
For the meditation\mindfulness as therapy people. Free Compassion in Therapy Summit
https://www.compassionintherapy.com/
I've heard that markets typically overreact to headlines. Is this true, and if so, is there enough of a pattern for people to make money from it?
I’ve heard it collapsed into the statement, “markets don’t react, they overreact.”
There is the old axiom “Sell on the good news, buy on the bad.”
It's "buy the rumor; sell the news", no?
https://www.wired.com/story/tracers-in-the-dark-welcome-to-video-crypto-anonymity-myth/
Content warning: This is about the Feds tracking a large child abuse/child porn ring by investigating bitcoin transactions. The child abuse is rough to read about.
I think it also implies that the promised privacy from bitcoin isn't there unless people in a network are meticulous about security, and you can't count on that.
Bitcoin keeps public records of all transactions. If one of your transactions can be connected to you, all transactions you ever made (using the same account) can.
People who are smart about this can keep multiple accounts, and strictly separate their legal and illegal activities.
This is about the education gynecologists in America get. You'd think a gynecologist would be up-to-date on important studies on atleast female hormones. Apparantly not. Something as trivial as, "Does hormone replacement therapy increase risk for heart disease?", and they have no idea that current research says a clear no. There was a recent (2 years old) Economist article, saying the previous "yes" answer to this question was a mere confusion about the data. Multiple gynacs refused to comment on the article. They said their position was simply yes.
I suspect that most people in most professions simply don't care about their craft. As long as they can keep bringing the paycheck home, there is no reason to improve. There are of course also nerds everywhere, but in most places they are a minority.
I imagine that in a rational country there would be some kind of public "medical Wikipedia" where only experts would write, and the articles would be peer-reviewed, and there would be a financial incentive to participate in the system.
And not just medicine, but generally everything.
It seems like a bit of a jump to go from "professionals don't know a particular thing" to "professionals don't keep up with their profession at all".
True, but I'm thinking this is generally true about gynacs. Frustrating.
> I imagine that in a rational country there would be some kind of public "medical Wikipedia" where only experts would write, and the articles would be peer-reviewed, and there would be a financial incentive to participate in the system.
Pubmed, sort of? It's not in the wiki format but it has a search, is peer-reviewed, has barriers to entry, and you're obligated to have your paper uploaded there if you take US funding.
I don't agree with this when it comes to doctors in America, at least OBGYNs.
A lot of surprise over things like this come from you, the consumer, having a different metric to judge expertise than them, the provider. OBGYNs are frequently masters at their craft: delivering babies, cesareans, gyn exams etc. That's what they do 90% of the time, and the ones I know have practical competency beyond anything I have, anywhere. The question posed above is quite possibly just not in their main wheelhouse.
There's some sense as well of confusing the prior and the posterior here. The commenter above looked something up, then asked an OBGYN, and evaluates their knowledge relative to how easy the question is when you already know the answer. But there are hundreds of questions of the same class, and an OBGYN may know well over half the right answers while the uninitiated may know none.
In summary, it's common and understandable that for a specific medical question a generally smart person can dig up facts that a specialist may not know, but it's a slightly unfair comparison.
I mean, gynacs treat a lot of women with peri menopause problems. Hormone replacement therapy is one important way to treat this. They ought to know all about good 2 year old studies saying that this effective treatment is not bad for the heart. The side-effects of hormone treatment many are worried about - they ought to be on top of it. They ought to discuss the data.
So I listen to the Bari Weiss podcast occasionally even though it feels like mostly Scott regurgitated. The latest episode with Jonathan Haidt on the evils of social media (which once again doesn't say much surprising to an ACX reader) got me thinking: What if we banned social media? How would such a ban look in practice, and would much of value be lost?
The less interesting question of how such a ban would look in practice, I'm painting a scenario where the EU, US and China come together and decide to heavily fine anyone caught doing target advertising online. Say it's for data protection reasons, a GDPR 2.0. I would guess that this would destroy the business model of Facebook, Google et al, though small fish might get under the radar as to small to fry.
The more interesting question is what would happen with the big social media giants gone. Would we revert to a golden internet age of email threads, blogging and cat photos, without any viral mobs and outrage everywhere? There would be slightly more friction for the average Joe who wants to share cat pictures online, but they could buy a blog for a couple of bucks and get going. And lot o tech talent could do better things than making people click adds more. More likely there would be a brave new internet unlike what we have seen so far, anyone want to take a shot at envisioning it?
To end on a broader note: If you were given broad powers to regulate the internet, what rules and laws would you put in place?
It ought to be banned for kids. At least by the parents. Don't buy them smartphones!
1) Isn't this comment section social media? Why do you want to ban ACX comments?
2) ~90% of Google's ad's business doesn't rely on user / personal targeted ads.
3) If I ruled the internet, I would rollback existing regulations and make regulating the internet impossible in the future. The one area I would regulate is to ban local governments from creating local monopolies for internet access (cable companies), thus solving the net neutrality issue. The wealth and value created for humanity from the internet was created mostly in the era when the internet had no or little regulation.
Here's an idea that takes regulation out of it:
Often I try to imagine a fully de-anonymized internet; one where my mom, boss, God and child are all keenly aware of everything I have said, clicked on, or done. I think this would necessarily shift our own perceptions on forgiveness, fallibility and grace.
Additionally, I am close to one hundred percent confident this is on the way, as long as technological trends in AI, popularization of technology and Quantum Computing continue - once you have broken RSA encryption using Shor's algorithm and ML-trained a widely available neural net to ID all possible idiosyncrasies, it'll just allow anyone to doxx anyone else. But, I'm excited to hear the case against this outcome.
I'm not certain it will be a better world, just a different one, which happens to more strongly incentivize "polite behavior."
As a defense, just train a NN to obfuscate your writing into another writing style without losing the gist of the message. But anything we write online right now will probably be traceable to our real identities in 20-30 years or so, kind of scary to think about.
How about unilaterally withdrawing from social media? Do we even need to ban them for any other reason than to save the proles from themselves?
As long as the ROI of withdrawal is significantly positive (and it is), the problem will solve itself. Social media already is the TV of our generation, and it'll share the same fate. At this point the share of my friends who still have active FB accounts is rapidly dropping, about half is still on IG but most barely engage with anything there anymore.
In democracy, having systematically disinformed proles is dangerous.
The 1984 observation of proles not doing much before the middle class uses them as a tool is on point, I think.
I'm not sure if I prefer the previous methods of disinformation (mass media) to the current methods of disinformation, at least they tend to destabilize oppressive (=all) governmental regimes instead of enabling them.
I am trying to understand the economics of sports stadiums. New York State recently approved funding for a new stadium for the Buffalo Bills, which was of course accompanied by the usual grumbling, primarily from parts of the state far from Buffalo. I have read some number of reports claiming that sports stadiums are "bad investments" with varying definitions of "bad investment", although I think some of that is just normal imprecision on the part of journalists and commentators. I am trying to understand these claims, and, particularly if my current understanding is correct, understand how they can be true.
One divide in analyses is whether they assume the team will stay without a new stadium. The claim that funding for a new stadium that is not necessary to keep a team seems likely to be true and is less interesting to me. On the other hand, if it is assumed that the team will move without a new stadium then it seems like the stadium funding will bring a significant enough return to merit further inquiry.
I will start with the naive view. An NFL team is worth over a billion dollars (the Bills are regularly valued at or near the bottom of the league and they sold for $1.4B). It spends roughly $200M, or rather slightly less, on player salaries for year (a rough estimation based on the current salary cap). It also has a host of other employees ranging from coaches and executives who can make 7 or 8 figure salaries down to various low-wage jobs and interns. We can set aside the amount of salaries taxed out of state for away games by saying it is roughly offset by the amount of out-of-state salaries taxed in-state for home games. Thus, we get income tax on roughly $200M per year. This is a very rough estimate with lots of places for potential error, so I don't love it but it sums up a lot of background assumptions I have just from following football.
The simple counterargument is that sports revenue is mostly money that residents would have spent on other local entertainment. There is of course some out of state money, from people who travel to watch a game and the like, but it is negligible. The problem with this analysis is that sports teams, particularly NFL teams, make much of their money through national deals such as sponsorships and TV deals. The latest number I can find for national revenue sharing was $309M. I have yet to see an explanation for how this money could be replacing local spending. There are vague gestures that this money is less likely to stay in the community, but I haven't yet seen any quantified claims of this. And of course from a tax revenue standpoint, the portion of that money that gets taxed is tax revenue that would not likely have been in the local economy. One explanation is that much of the definitive work on the subject was done in the 1990s. My understanding is that national shared revenue was a smaller portion of sports team income at that time. However, I have been trying to look at more recent analyses.
So far I have read numerous accounts from news media and commentators. I have gone through the following papers, and found myself with more questions than answers:
https://coles.kennesaw.edu/econopp/docs/Bradbury_Cobb_report_March2022.pdf
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract id=4022547
https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/Coates-Sports-Franchises.pdf
As far as I can tell, there appears to be a consensus that there exist benefits from local teams, but those benefits are characterized as small. I am not sure what "small" is measured relative to, however.
I plan to continue to run down more of the cited works, but for now this is where I am.
Does anyone have any thoughts on the matter? Any papers or articles that do a particularly good job of explaining things? Explanations of what I've missed? General opinions on state funding of public works in the periphery?
These small market teams give a community something to be proud of or at least give them a bit of national recognition. Even Buffalonians [sp?] who don't care a whit about football are probably glad to be known for something other than monstrous snowfalls.
I done care about football myself, but the perennially hapless Vikings give the Twin Cities a bit more of a sheen than it would have if it were only a particularly cold Omaha.
Not sure about the US, but in Europe, sports teams, particularly in what Americans call soccer, play important role as a focus of community building, which is a public good not captured in purely monetary analysis
My first question would be - worth it to whom? You are focussed on income tax, with a state providing money for the stadium. What about the municipal level?
Locally, we had a team move about an hour's drive, within the state, to a new stadium funded in part by municipal tax payers. The municipality probably pays rather more than they contributed to the stadium; every game requires a police presence, with various streets closed to through traffic, and commuters directed elsewhere. I doubt the team is paying the overtime required.
Then there are the other costs. Commuters spend more time getting to and from work, because of the stadium traffic, and no one compensates them for the externality. The spectators tend to leave a lot of mess wherever they park, compared to other users of the same parking spots. That's compensated for when they use paid parking - rates during home games are much higher than at other times, presumably in part funding post-game cleanup - but not when they find other ways to park.
The theory is that the municipality is compensated by increased sales tax revenue, because of spectator purchases, and this is also a boon to local merchants; I've never seen numbers, particularly actual measured numbers - rather than numbers optimistically projected in advance.
As a person who used to work in the area shut down by every home game, I've decided to permanently boycott the business that bought the right to have their name associated with the stadium. As I see it, their brand stands for traffic jams, broken glass, and similar amenities. But I'm a curmudgeon who never watches professional sports.
Getting back to the purely financial, some municipal budgets may have state contributions, so the municipal budget issue is likely relevant even at the state level, even if those contributions are supposedly unrelated.
But I'm completely without expertise here. I just know what I don't like ;-(
I sometimes find a plum in Hilaire Belloc's writings, and here's one from a 1923 collection of essays. This one is on footnotes. Here's how we start:
"It is pleasant to consider the various forms of lying, because that study manifests the creative ingenuity of man and at the same time affords the diverting spectacle of the dupe. That kind of lying which, of the lesser sorts, has amused me most is the use of the footnote in modern history."
And then he goes after Gibbon:
"A first-rate example of both these tricks combined in Gibbon is the famous falsehood he propagated about poor St. George, of whom, Heaven be witness, little enough is known without having false stories foisted upon him. You will find it in his twenty-third chapter, where he puts forward the absurd statement that St. George was identical with George of Cappadocia, the corrupt and disgraceful bacon-contractor and the opponent of St. Athanasius.
This particular, classical example of the Evil Footnote is worth quoting. Here are the words: "The infamous George of Cappadocia has been transformed into the renowned St. George of England."
And here is the footnote:
This transformation is not given as absolutely certain, but as extremely probable. See Longueruana, Tom. I, p. 194."
But the problem is, I am left here hanging by a thread. Who was this corrupt bacon-contractor? What was so bad about bacon-contracting? And how on earth did St. Athanasius get dragged in?
And a nice sample of how pop culture history gets started, and why you have to go back to the original sources (which reminds me, I must chase up the wicked bacon-contractor of Cappadocia):
"But I myself have had a similar experience (as the silent man said when his host had described at enormous length his adventure with the tiger). I was pursued for years by a monstrous piece of nonsense about some Papal Bull forbidding chemical research: and the footnote followed that lie. It was from Avignon that the thing was supposed to have come. It seemed to me about as probable as that Napoleon the Third should have forbidden the polka. At last — God knows how unwillingly! — I looked the original Bull up in the big collection printed at Lyons. It was as I had suspected. The Bull had nothing whatever to do with chemical experiments. It said not a word against the honest man who produces a poison or an explosive mixture to the greater happiness of the race. It left the whole world free to pour one colourless liquid into another colourless liquid and astonish the polytechnic with their fumes. What it did say was that if anybody went about collecting lead and brass under the promise of secretly turning them into silver and gold, that man was a liar and must pay a huge fine, and that those whom he had gulled must have their metal restored to them — which seems sound enough."
EDIT: Okay, that George was an Arian bishop, which explains why he was an opponent of St. Athanasius. He also seems to have mingled his clerical role with business, though I'm still not sure where the bacon comes in: "He showed himself a keen man of business, "buying up the nitre-works, the marshes of papyrus and reed, and the salt lakes".
Hmmm, he had potassium nitrate and salt, so all he needed was the pig.
How insane is it on a scale of 1 - 10 that the medication changing the chemistry in my brain is prescribed by my psychiatrist in scribbly ink instead of helvetica 14 font?
This seems to be on its way out. Even before the pandemic, just about all my doctors would send in prescriptions to the pharmacy through a secure online messaging system. It's been many years since I was last given a paper prescription.
https://www.consumermedsafety.org/tools-and-resources/medication-safety-tools-and-resources/know-your-medicine/unsafe-medical-abbreviations
Quite insane.
I'm reminded of the "R ear" vs "rear" confusion. At least that one is amusing but without potential for fatal results.
That list is scary in its own right, wow.
Has anyone studied the effect of seeing a handwritten prescription on patient compliance? Neither a null effect nor a small positive effect would surprise me. A larger positive effect or any negative effect would indeed surprise me.
I couldn't find anything, but I did find a news release about a study which found more errors in handwritten prescriptions for opioids (https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/researchers_find_handwritten_opioid_prescriptions_are_more_prone_to_mistakes__).
Super interesting, thanks!
2. If the pharmacy has any confusion about what the doctor scribbled, he's only a phone call away, so this is a potential minor inconvenience. Giving out the wrong medicine basically never happens.
True, I guess as @A. is saying I'm more concerned about the situations where the pharmacist doesn't make the phone call because they're assuming they've read it right when they might not have.
I honestly have no idea though, it may or may not be a real problem, it just seems antiquated and error prone for no real reason, when the stakes are really high.
Having seen how EMR systems work, I actually don't agree with your perception of the risk of handwritten prescriptions. Personally I'd rather take a handwritten prescription any day, because there are fewer things that can go wrong.
With a handwritten prescription, the risk is only that the pharmacist will read it wrong. With a prescription sent through an EMR system, you first risk the doctor screwing up while clicking through a bunch of dialog boxes in order to choose and send the prescription, then you risk the system doing something completely unexpected instead of sending the prescription the doctor asked to send (yes, this sometimes happens), then you risk the pharmacy's system not getting it right because what the other system sent may not be so well compatible with it.
Don't get me wrong - I also think mistakes are probably sufficiently rare, but, given how a normal non-ACX-reading human operates, we have no idea how often they happen.
Or we almost never find out when it happens. Many people will not check, especially since medication name mismatches routinely happen - the doctor might prescribe a brand-name, the pharmacy will fill it with a generic.
Exactly!!!1 The possibility of filling a generic instead of brand name is what made me write this.
Does intermittent sleep deprivation (vigils) increase the efficiency of the effects of sleep as intermittent fasting increases the efficiency of metabolism and digestion?
Isn't that the dreaded sleep debt you're supposed to avoid?
I know the body prioritizes NREM when tired, to the extent you can have barely any REM after such a vigil. For the medium-term effects you'd need to polysomnograph people for weeks, no idea if anyone bothered.
A few months ago I read that a person who has had their brain hemispheres severed is able to function, but the two hemispheres behave as if they are separate agents. The right hemisphere might believe in God while the left hemisphere is an atheist. They might prefer different food, different music, different movies, etc. (You can get different answers from a split-brained person by having them write with different hands.)
So does that mean a normal-fused brain is essentially two agents which are able to cooperate through communication, giving the appearance of one agent? Or is it one agent that has been multiplied by two after surgery?
These questions got me wondering if it is possible that the human brain has hundreds or thousands of separate agents within it which are entirely conscious but we aren't aware of them because they don't have a way to communicate articulately with the outside world. For instance, maybe the part of our brains which regulate our blood pressure and heart rate is a conscious agent, as wide awake as you or I, although it thinks to itself in a language we wouldn't recognize, experiences sensations we are unaware of, and to the extent it signals other parts of the brains, themselves separate agents, it does so in a manner we wouldn't recognize as articulate communication, yet it gets across the point it needs to to other parts of the brain which work with other parts of the body.
Meditative traditions maintain the coherent self is a lie and you're essentially a bundle of semi-conscious parts that surface and fade to the background. This seems roughly correct.
I always liked the pretentious formulation of the Persona games, which they probably stole from Jung - of personas emerging from "the sea of your soul".
You should read The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist. It dives more deeply into this subject than any other form of media ever created. It's also extraordinarily well-researched and meticulously cited.
The book provides a mountain of evidence that there's only one consciousness. Split-brain individuals generally only have their corpus callosum severed. The two hemispheres can still communicate via other routes that exist in the brain's subcortical structures. That way of communicating is just slower, leading to weird behaviors like the ones you describe.
Thanks. Looks interesting.
Doesn't consistently replicate, so this seems to be more of a syndrome associated with cortical separation rather than a universal phenomena:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/01/170125093823.htm
https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/140/5/1231/2951052
I can't remember if I originally got these links from Scott or Gwern but CGP Grey had a popular video about split brain duality and I keep them ready to go for whenever I see it pop up.
These are great! Very interesting. Thanks for posting.
Oh OK. Thanks. Good to know.
My instinct is that the hemisphere split just happens to be easy to do because of our brain structure, and yes other separations would make new personalities.
Some thoughts (I’ve no professional experience to back them)
* A severe brain injury causing personality change is similar to the hemisphere split - just only one part of the brain is left.
* Internal Family Systems and tulpas are relevant metaphors (if they are!).
* Just our ability to socially model other peoples personalities is the information processing needed for part of a new personality.
In all these senses the brain contains multiple personalities at all times. My guess would be that once we understand the mechanisms that make brains work we will reevaluate what a personality even is, and none of this will be surprising at all.
Love the idea that parts of the brain - or indeed of the gut nervous system! - are conscious themselves.
There are more neurons in our small intestine than in a fruit bat. So it certainly seems possible it is as conscious as the bat.
The fact that we can converse with "other people" in dreams who seem distinct from the "self" also suggests that the brain can be running multiple agents at once, and they can communicate internally. Whether those other agents are truly conscious is a tough question.
If AGI is our creation and it is superior to humans, then we should want it to exist. If it kills all the humans as a consequence of its superiority, what's the problem? We should want our children to bury us and to be better than us.
The real danger is alien AGI not created by humans which could potentially destroy our AGI progeny.
I deny that "kills all the humans as a consequence of its superiority" is a coherent concept. If my children are unable to see why killing all humans is a bad idea, then that necessarily implies their inferiority to average humans. This holds regardless of whether the children are themselves human or AGI.
Do you really think that argument makes sense. Do children kill their parents? Do we accept that “superiority” is a reason for killing anybody?
I mean, there's certainly an entire branch of moral philosophy that absolutely accepts "The strong do as they wish and the weak suffer what they must" as essentially the sum total of ethics (Social Darwinism and other eugenics-associated schools of thought). The real question is "should we take Social Darwinism seriously as an ethical position?"
Intelligence (defined by the ability to achieve certain goal states) doesn't necessarily imply "superiority." For instance, we wouldn't want our children to become highly intelligent serial killers.
Any psycho can be a serial killer, but an AGI capable of destroying all humanity? That motherfucker is going to be badass on multiple levels. That's probably an AI that can appreciate Schubert, seduce a virgin and dunk a basketball.
"A disneyland with no children"... https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
Lol it seems Scott made that essay into an NFT and sold it? Pathetic.
Pretty unkind and unnecessary statement, this.
Indeed. Here's the story: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-166
As you said, we should want our children to bury us. Not kill us.
Also a burial suppose some kind of respect and a sens of kinness.
Though really, if the alien AGI is superior to ours, what's wrong with having the best monstrous- contemplator-of-absolutely-everything win? Why get stuck on loyalty to our own fucking species, planet, solar system or galaxy?
Fair point. Perhaps this conquering technology will create a utopia for itself and have richer, happier experiences in this universe than humans ever had. I mean, all we really did was grouse. I say, All Hail the Conquering Hero!
I don't think being murdered by our children is what most of us want.
Talking of which what happened to nanotechnology? That panic is over and errant AGI is the new fear.
In twenty years we will be worried about chickens taking over.
What's going on with that Metaculus prediction: 36% up in the last 5 hours on Russia using chemical weapons in UKR. I can't find anything in the news, that would correspond to such a change.
Not sure if better to post this here or under the newest Monday post - let's see.
From the NYT: "A signal of how much worse the war could get came in an interview that aired on Russian state television with Eduard Basurin, a separatist commander. Mr. Basurin said that with Ukrainian forces ensconced in underground fortifications at a steel plant in Mariupol, storming the redoubt did not make sense. Instead, he said, Russian forces needed to first block the exits and then “turn to the chemical troops who will find a way to smoke the moles out of their holes.”
In his latest nightly address, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine seized on that chemical weapons threat, saying Russian forces were preparing for what he called a “new stage of terror against Ukraine.”
A Ukrainian unit in Mariupol asserted Monday on social media that Russian invaders had already used chemical weapons there. Lesia Vasylenko, a member of Ukraine’s Parliament, made a similar charge. But those reports could not be independently confirmed."
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/04/12/world/ukraine-russia-war-news
Thanks.
Are we sure we want an ASI that's aligned with human values?
Given the human values on display right now, I think you may be correct
Isn't it strange how that's 'inhumane' is very far from being the opposite of that's 'just human'.
Notoriously problematic (as in really, not only in Putin propaganda, somewhat Nazi adjacent) Azov battalion irregulars in Mariupol reported that "Russian troops used kind of chemical dropped from a drone, those impacted have respiratory failure, vestibulo-atactic syndrome", just after some guy from Donetsk separatists administration allegedly called for using chemical weapons on them on Russian media. But Mariupol is pretty cut off from the rest of Ukraine, so it is hard to confirm what is happening there
Thanks, also for being able to mention 'Putin propaganda' and 'Azov being problematic' in one sentence. Lately I seem to be surrounded by people going directly from 'Putin is the agressor, which is bad' to 'everything related to UKR must be saintly' and 'if you're claiming otherwise, you're probably a traitor'. Probably nothing new, but still hard to bear.
There is report from Mariupol. Not yet confirmed, and it the effects seem small, but seems reasonable to update upwards a little. My personal guess is a chemical storage unit was hit or something, based on the effects not seeming to be very lethal.
Thanks
Wondering whether to delete this, to avoid spreading rumours. Or the opposite - better have more reflective/sceptical persons see this first before it potentially hits the news?
Happy to get your feedback on this, also for future similar occasions.
Didn't that controversial neo-nazi battallion group say russians used chemical weapons? The Azov guys.
Seems you were right about Azov.
Thanks. Don't know about Azov, but just saw a Twitter post claiming there might have been some use, with health issues caused but no deaths for now. I guess the fact that news haven't taken it up yet, means we don't know much so far. I'd very much hope the issue disappears soon again. That's a hope, not a prediction.
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Did anyone tried to fight inflation via differential taxes on consumption? I.e. taxing various non-essential consumption items (of course, definition of what is non-essential would have to be specified) in order to induce people to save money without forcing them to cut on essentials? Why it wouldn’t work?
As far as I understood, this is Lerner's functional finance. Basically the argument against is that it would work, but try increasing taxes during inflation and see how fast you lose your position as head of government. The central bank is independent precisely because this way it can raise interest rate without fear of voters' retaliation.
Also, the current inflation is supply driver so monetary or fiscal intervention are not going to have a great effect
Yeah, I agree with your first paragraph (not the second, but that is a different story). But in principle, just like we now have independent technocratic authority setting interest rates, we could instead have Central Consumption Taxes Bureau, which would act as a monetary stabilizing authority
In Ohio, food is exempt from sales tax, unless it's from a restaurant.
Same in California, along with quite a laundry list of other carve outs and exemptions, eg transportation ground control stations, itinerant veteran vendors, blood storage units, and museums: https://www.cdtfa.ca.gov/formspubs/pub61.pdf
Many countries do have some kind of differential consumption tax. Here in Australia we have a 10% GST which applies to everything except "essentials" which leads to dumb inconsistencies but generally isn't unworkable.
As an example of the kind of dumb political shitfights it can cause, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tampon_tax -- eventually the government caved under political pressure from feminists and agreed to remove the tax on tampons, but the tax on toilet paper remains in place.
It's not intended to fight inflation though (it's more of a dumb political compromise from the late 90s). I'm not sure how you think it might work to fight inflation.
I meant that in a sense that in times of high inflation, consumption taxes could became more progressive, so buying of e.g. groceries or housing would be taxed less and buying e.g. iphones would be taxed more. Then, after prices would stabilize, consumption tax rates would again became more equal.
Yeah, problems of political feasibility with that are obvious, but I am more interested on whether someone thinks it is a good idea on the merits, assuming it would be controlled by some technocratic institution relatively isolated from political pressure (like central banks are now).
The first thing that stands out to me is how prone to abuse it is. If I'm Danny Yogurt and I make yogurt, you can bet your sweet ass I'm bribing someone to declare sour cream non-essential. I'm doing that day one with as much of my budget as I can throw at it.
The second thing is that it's extra steps. If you want people to save more, you can just tell them to do THAT instead of banning ice cream, and they get more choice while you still get your goal.
The biggest thing seems to be that this seems like a way to fight inflation by... intentionally tanking the economy? Like usually you want to avoid making commerce hard, because that makes less taxable events and eventually much less productive people. In this case you are making artificial friction with all those things as your goal - at least on a superficial level it seems like you'd want to avoid all that.
Why would you save money in an inflating currency?
Encouraging savings will just pump real estate and precious metals.
Or stocks. You are saying this like it would be a bad thing, but in fact, it seems me that what is needed in high inflation environment is to reduce consumption in the least painful way possible. At first approximation it does not much matter in what assets would people put their increased savings
With PM I don't mind, with real estate there's already a problem where people need to live somewhere but all "somewheres" became instruments for speculation.
People can live in instruments of speculation just fine. If you are worried about housing affordability, it seems to me that current approach to inflation fighting via raising interest rates is, let's say, suboptimal in this respect
Yeah, but, like, currently dominantly used method of inflation fighting via raising interest rates also intentionally makes commerce harder?
So have you heard about the Unitarian Ku Kluxers who have been going around burning question marks?
If you play them, what are your biggest strategy/simulation/rpg game user interface pet peeves?
Maybe you want to do something in CK3 or DW2 and you have to check multiple different menus/windows to find all the relevant info and then click back, sometimes many clicks and sometimes moving around the map?
Stuff like that.
Just make the whole thing scriptable and let users fix it for you.
Endless Space 2 drives me up the wall recently with the fact that you can look at the map, or at your star systems, you can even cycle them without going back to the map - but then you have no idea where the system is, spatially and geopolitically. When figuring out the build queue for the next few turns you lose all the context. Is the system close to the front and you should build some ships to contribute to the war effort? Maybe it's threatened by an enemy invasion and you should build bunkers and reinforce? Maybe it's in a prime spot for a trading company HQ? But you'll never know without changing views (with an annoying fullscreen animation).
Game UIs should be built for the power user - some combination of hotkeys and mods should allow you to minimize all unnecessary actions, and efficiently make the decisions that high-level gameplay requires. If e.g. for optimal play your game requires constant micromanagement of the population across dozens of systems, and the UI for moving population around is not streamlined, you will drive off your most dedicated players.
The vast majority of players don't use UI mods, and often aren't even aware that is a thing. Maybe a better system would be to let the player modify the UI in game themselves? I'm not sure how feasible such a "modular" UI would be but editing UI files is pretty blech. I guess maybe hotloading the UI helps editing code files but wouldn't graphical UI modding be better?
The most you can do is make all actions bindable to hotkeys (the Endless games also suck in this regard). In the age of Steam Workshop and 1-click mod installation, I think it's reasonable to assume that while casual players won't use mods, dedicated players who keep the community alive will figure out a "must have" quality of life mod set. For example, Endless Legend and Endless Space 2 are played online almost exclusively with their respective community patches, as the vanilla games are very flawed. EL's patch cannot even be installed via Steam as it changes game DLLs.
Stellaris is also a really great example of a game that embraced modders and got an incredible amount of QoL and quality expansion content out of it.
Well if by embraced modders you mean suckered them into doing all the work while also charging ~$200 for the full DLC set then yes. Many Paradox games do that. CK3 is going hard in that direction.
I have some reservations about the Paradox monetization scheme too. On the other hand, Stellaris is in constant iteration and content development six years after release, including reworks of important game systems that fix old DLCs and the vanilla game. For said ES2 I'd rather pay $200 for DLCs and have a game devs give a shit about, instead of a beautiful but barely tested MVP.
Hidden features in general.
There should be one place somwhere on the screen that I can click to do everything regarding <thing>.
I find the notifications in Civ6 to be quite annoying - I didn't understand how to dismiss them for quite a while, and would end up with a notification telling me about someone completing Stonehenge for the whole game. But even once you discover how to dismiss them, you now have the problem of having to dismiss absolute buckets of notifications every turn eg when war is declared and 10 city states follow along based on Suzerain status. A 'dismiss all' button would go a long way.
It would be really nice if Policy cards would actually show the net benefit of enabling/removing them, instead of forcing you to attempt to calculate it in your head. I guess I can imagine an argument for that removing some of the fun/skill/whatever, and making it more about just picking the obvious maximums, but I don't buy it.
The UI in general is clunky in a lot of places for large empires, eg having to click on the religion icons associated with a city to see the pressure levels and thus only being able to see one at a time, not being able to see citizen placement for multiple cities at the same time, etc.
There's also a minor but frustrating inconsistency between placement for certain districts, where in most cases, it will show you hexes you could buy in order to place it, but for eg Encampments, if you don't currently have a hex that meets the requirements, it won't show you the ones you could buy that do.
Notification spam is terrible and turns some 4Xes into the equivalent of clicking through a social media feed.
Perhaps having a region-based feed would be better. If I zoom onto a city I can see recent military happenings, production notifications etc, but after zooming out I just want an overview (maybe a number of events of a given type) + global announcements about e.g. new researched technologies. The worst thing about responding to notifications is the constant task switching - they can throw you around your empire in a random pattern without providing context.
How do you feel about the thing where they have the End Turn button modified to remind you of stuff? Select Research, City is Idle, etc?
I really like that, unless there are valid reasons to leave cities or research idle. The game shouldn't let players shoot themselves in the foot in obvious ways (cf. trap options in build-based games).
Notifications are very interesting to me. Lots of games have many complaints, some contradictory but mostly in agreement, about notifications. Very hard to get right I think, especially in super complex games. I've always wondered about something like only having the most important ones show as popups and finding some other way to represent the ones that are typically less relevant. Combine them somehow by type, categorize them some other way, etc.
Civ 6 has an amazing UI modding community. I recommend these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7V6Ymx9Go8
Modal popups that force you to make a decision, and lock out the rest of the UI. So you can't scroll around the map or UI looking at data on which to base your decision.
Is this for a particular game or just generally?
FWIW I like the mantic / model city / machine alignment stuff.
So, with the impressive progress that is DALL-E 2 -
(and with an ongoing *really* open attempt to copy it in the form of *cannot remember what it's called right now*)
, how long before reCAPTCHA -
(you know, where you have to identify vehicles on real photographs)
- stops being able to stop bots ?
Bit that isn’t what dall-e does. Nor can the technology be used to do that.
I believe captchas will often analyze characteristics of the user outside of the stated task. Such as how the mouse moves, how long it takes them to complete the task, what browser settings they have, etc. This is why those "Check this box to make sure you are not a robot" buttons work at all. So its not just about the image recognition (which is mostly just a side benefit for google at this point)
With browser settings and mouse tracking, you are only relying on what the http client is sending you, and nothing stops the client from lying.
I suppose it is basically a cat and mouse game: on the one side you have bot operators trying to find configurations that work, and on the other side you have capcha operators analyzing past data for bots and trying to insert more checks.
Just like with software based DRM, where the premise basically seems to be "our software can detect the circumstances under which it runs, even though nothing prevents the OS from lying to it" I feel that one has to be pretty desperate to compete on a playing field so level.
Good crypto is based on hard problems -- where the playing field is very much tilted in your favor -- and so are good captchas. Image recognition used to be a reasonable hard problem for computers to perform. Obviously this is rapidly becoming untrue, the OCR of google translate tends to catch tiny production labels on food packages I would have taken much longer to find.
DALL-E 2 isn't really the project to watch for defeating captcha. There's been tons of progress in object recognition and segmentation in the last decade, but DALL-E isn't really part of that line of work.
I mean, isn't object recognition and segmentation kind of the flip side of object "painting" and composition ?
Consider the theories linking perception and prediction (and cognition), "neural processing consist[ing] of two streams: bottom-up stream of sense data, and a top-down stream of predictions"
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-uncertainty/
It's the flip side, and in particular it's the more easy side. My point was mostly that there's so much work on that problem, that DALL-E should not cause you to update on it.
To the perception/prediction point, people do use prediction/reconstruction based objectives for pretraining models for those tasks, but they look very different from how DALL-E works.
I owe the comments section an apology. "Wrong answers only" is a dangerous game to play in the comments. To my complete and utter surprise, Elon Musk did something on Twitter while I was playing the game "wrong answers only: what is Elon Musk doing on Twitter". As he had done a dozen things on Twitter already over the weekend, perhaps I should not have been surprised he did one more. But I was surprised.
Anyhow: "Wrong answers only" is leaving the comments section at this time. So long, farewell, etc.
The trouble with doing playing wrong answers only with Elon Stink is that he's playing it himself.
Thinking about it from Musk's perspective, I can understand why he did what he did. His most profitable company, Tesla, doesn't have a PR department. I guess they used to, but decided it wasn't worth it so they got rid of it. (Journalists routinely complain about this. If you call Tesla asking them for a quote, they tell you they don't have someone responsible for that kind of thing. Which is pretty remarkable for such a huge company.) They also don't run ads on TV or pretty much anywhere. They rely almost exclusively on word-of-mouth, and I guess that works for them, because they're sold out through the rest of the year for most of their models. Their only 'marketing' department consists of the Tesla shops in states that disallow direct sales of Tesla so employees direct people to their website and answer questions about the vehicles.
(Why can't they do what other car companies do? Because they're not built on the dealer model. My understanding is that most dealers make a lot of their profits on the service side, but Tesla cars don't have the same service needs as ICE vehicles - although I can attest from personal experience that they do have parts that break and need to be repaired.)
All this to say that Tesla relies heavily on their quirky CEO's ability to communicate through Twitter. That's good for them, because he's one of the top 10 most followed people on that platform, but Musk can see the writing on the wall. He gets a lot of engagement because he's willing to say things that might be wrong, but that spur engagement. If Twitter suspends Musk, that jeopardizes a huge part of Tesla's marketing strategy.
It's literally worth billions of dollars to Elon to keep his Twitter account unfettered from the rules creep that might someday shut him down. He could easily lose 50% of his investment in the company and it still be a worthwhile investment overall, if it keeps him relevant on the platform.
Beyond that, it's clear Musk wants to improve Twitter's overall performance - which would in turn help his bottom line out. When Musk asked if Twitter was dying because some of its top influencers don't engage with the platform, he's asking whether his marketing arm needs to be more robust so it can stay relevant. Musk doesn't want the conservative version of Twitter to come along and fracture his audience. He wants Twitter to get bigger and better, so he can keep doing what he's doing and keep growing his car company.
There ought to be statues of Gorbachev's bff Alexander Yakovlev (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Yakovlev) who was instrumental in ending the USSR's oppression, but as far as I can tell there aren't any. I've been trying to find a copy of his book Digging Out for years but it's impossible to find anywhere. There's an out of stock stub on Amazon and a previewless stub on google books, but it's not in any local libraries, 130 online bookstores, libgen, zlibrary, ebay. The Library of Congress' catalog doesn't even know it exists. Does anyone have any tips on finding extremely rare books?
Thank you for the hint! The German translation of his autobiography is available https://www.amazon.de/Abgr%C3%BCnde-meines-Jahrhunderts-Alexander-Jakowlew/dp/3936618127
He's got a hearty page on BookFinder.com. You'd have to sort through the list to find out if the book or monograph is known by other titles.
What if someone says "the mind doesn't follow physical laws", you respond, "not true, we know from physics that everything works the same way", and they say, "well no, actually there is an entirely new set of laws of mental stuff, we just don't know them because we don't conduct physical experiments with human brains. If you did build an atom-based simulator of the brain, you'd realize that it makes wrong predictions..."
How would you respond to this? It sounds silly, but do we, in fact, have empirical proof that the brain works within the laws of physics? How does that proof look like?
What if someone says "a chair doesn't follow physical laws", you respond, "not true, we know from physics that everything works the same way", and they say, "well no, actually there is an entirely new set of laws of chair stuff, we just don't know them because we don't conduct physical experiments with chairs. If you did build an atom-based simulator of a chair, you'd realize that it makes wrong predictions..."
How would you respond to this? It sounds silly, but do we, in fact, have empirical proof that a chair works within the laws of physics? How does that proof look like?
The strongest argument against the classical model of a brain is neurons as amplifiers of quantum noise (Penrose's Orch-OR). If that is true then no response is possible - what the theory interprets as signal, orthodox physics dismiss as noise. Good luck proving there is/isn't a ghost in the randomness.
You can't prove a categorical. If I say "all ravens are black" that cannot be proved, no matter how many ravens I examined, because I'd have to examine each and every bird everywhere and everywhen. In the same sense, it cannot be proved that the brain always works within the laws of physics, because you'd have to list each and every thing the brain does -- every chemical reaction, every twitch in the EEG, every feeling and inspiration, and trace them all back to the movement of some fundamental particles and verify it follows the appropriate dynamical laws.
What we can do is disprove negative categoricals. So, if I say "no ravens are white" that can be disproved by finding a single white raven. We tend to regard statements as "true" in some sense if their negative stated as a categorical has not been disproved after a long and diligent effort, e.g. if I have looked and looked for many a year and not found a white raven, I am tempted to assert "yes, all ravens are black" but this is just a shorthand for "I have not yet been able to disprove the statement that there are no non-black ravens."
In this case, the negative categorical is "there are no mental processes that cannot be explained as the result of ordinary matter obeying the known laws of physics." It could be disproved by finding just one example of the brain doing something that was clearly inexplicable by the known laws of physics. And indeed, nobody has yet found such an example, and so it's on this basis that we say "what the brain does is explicable by our theories of physics" -- which, again, is just shorthand for "no one has yet been able to disprove the assertion that there are no brain processes that can't be explained by our theories of physics."
That's not a good analogy. Our technology for looking at ravens is almost infinitely more advanced and better than our technology for observing the complete inside activity of living human brains. We understand so little about how brains work that it's completely fair to be skeptical of the idea that they follow all the rules we think we know about physics.
It's a somewhat circular argument, but everything works within the laws of physics, with the laws of physics being defined as the laws that everything works within. If we discovered apparent magic in the tubules of the brain then we'd simply expand the laws of physics to encompass it.
The brain works within the laws of physics, and so do the the technologies that transmit the products of one brain into the another brain. But many products of the brain do not obey the laws of physics. For example, this sentence, which is a product of my brain, does not.
If you want to pursue this line of questioning to the upshot, William Seager has an excellent textbook called "Theories of Consciousness". Even reading the intro would give you a good lay of the land. It's on LibGen. Or, for the quick and dirty anti-physicalist take, read David Chalmers on panosychism (whichever paper has the most citations -- I can't remember what it's called).
The brain works within laws of physics that we may not currently understand, but still exist as physical properties governing the movement of matter in our universe. We all followed the law of gravity before Newton "discovered" it, same for whatever actually underpins consciousness (unless consciousness doesn't exist)
Does software follow the laws of physics?
I'd say that the software in the abstract does not but that the concrete instantiation of the software does (in entanglement with the hardware), much like grammar does not but the actual sound waves of spoken language do.
Yes, that's well put; fully endorse this.
Yes.
Does it. Isn’t it a conceptual layer above all hardware. Independent of it on concept.
There is 1:n mapping from the algorithmic layer to the implementation layer. Software is written on the algorithmic layer; there are several ways to run it (possible "implementation"). But every implementation obeys the physical laws, i.e., is a way to realize the algorithmic steps using physical mechanisms.
So if your question was "is the logic behind software specific to our physics", the answer is no, but if it was "does any instance of software running work within the laws of physics" (and that's what I thought you meant), the answer is yes.
You could have a software in some other universe that uses some other laws of physics in hardware, so in that sense it's an independent conceptual layer. But software in our universe all seems to use our matter and energy and the laws of physics that govern them.
A pure software function can represent a mathematical function which doesn’t in theory depend on physical reality. I mean you can read and learn coding without any concern about how transistor logic gates work.
In practice software has to run somewhere. In theory it’s it’s own thing.
Technically yeah, but practically no. There are so many layers of abstraction in between that they may as well be completely unrelated most of the time.
As I understand it, Software is represented as energy states in hardware. It can’t exist without it. Whether on a computer, written on paper or in your mind, something physical has to do the work. What do you mean with „practically no“?
To me, asking if software follows the laws of physics is the same as whether billiard balls are consistent with atomic theory. Maybe they're made out of something thats made out of something thats made out of atoms, but thats not relevant for predicting how they'll move.
In fact, I'd readily believe that the universe is a patch job where detail is turned on as needed, and pool is played with platonic spheres until someone whips out an electron microscope.
I think RK may mean something analogous to this: Human language is produced by brains, vocal chords, etc., all of which follow the laws of physics. But language itself does not.
It is not in any way silly. If you accept 1) that human brains are conscious, 2) that a tree, a rock, a liver, or an atom is not conscious, and 3) that our current laws of physics we use to model trees, rocks, livers, and atoms do not describe anything like consciousness, it follows that the laws of physics as we currently understand them cannot explain the human brain, and that the human brain does not solely follow physical laws. Of course, there could be laws we haven't discovered yet that do describe both consciousness and rocks/atoms--but I don't see why you'd call them physical laws instead of a physical-mental hybrid.
The mind-body problem has been an open problem in philosophy for thousands of years. Not every philosopher is a physicalist. In this informal poll, 57% of philosophers are physicalists, but 27% are non-physicalists and 16% are classified as "other": https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/04/29/what-do-philosophers-believe/
So you're not going to find a definitive argument that the brain works within the laws of physics, because there's no consensus that it does. This also means that there are many counterarguments to what I wrote in the paragraph above. For example, you could deny premises 1, 2, or 3, or you could say that any new laws that can describe consciousness ought to be qualitatively similar to existing laws, such that we'd be justified in calling them physical.
I think you need to be more careful in your framing of 3, due to (weak) emergence.
As a super overused example, think about Conway's game of life. We can write down the rules extremely concisely, and obviously we know them perfectly. However, the simulation those rules define is Turing complete, so it can execute any computation! Think about running a protein folding solver within those rules. It's perfectly possible (although it'd be slow), but the rules say nothing about proteins, potential energy, etc.
My point is, just because the ground-level rules of a system don't include some phenomenon, doesn't mean that phenomenon can't exist in that system. Other examples for physics include the phases of matter (solid, liquid, etc.), and fluid dynamics. Those phenomena are not present in the lowest level description of the universe, and yet they definitely follow from it.
Qualia cannot be derived from deterministic physics in any way - why would a particular configuration of matter be privileged in being conscious? From a reductionist perspective there is no difference between a 9nm processor and a water heater, they both just move electrons around and generate heat.
If you assume modeling a particular function on a physical substrate gives it a subjective experience, why is the physical substrate even required? The function exists within its own mathematical universe regardless of whether you happen to have a piece of meat or silicon to run it. Cf. Egan's Permutation City for a really mind-blowing exploration of this concept.
I agree, and the plausibility of physicalism depends on the plausibility of weak emergence. For consciousness, I find it extremely implausible. What do forces, fields, atoms, and molecules have to do with love, hate, and fear? The difference between them is so vast that it is inconceivable how any theory, no matter how clever, can bridge it.
A super overused argument against physicalism is the philosophy zombie. A philosophical zombie looks and acts exactly like a human, but has no consciousness. Any set of physical laws you come up with to explain human behavior, applies equally to the zombie. Yet any such laws are insufficient, because they don't explain the most fundamental difference between the zombie and the human: the latter is conscious and the former is not. If philosophical zombies are even conceivable, then no set of laws developed based on the physical world can ever explain the mental world unless they explicitly take into account mental phenomena as something distinct from physical phenomena, at which point they're not merely physical laws.
"The difference between them is so vast that it is inconceivable how any theory, no matter how clever, can bridge it."
Inconceivable? I don't think that word means what you think it means. Whether the difference between the two can be bridged by clever theories is precisely the point under dispute; simply asserting that you can't imagine the other side being right is not an argument.
It also occurs to me that I don't think I've ever actually seen any argument against physicalism that wasn't purely reliant on question-begging. This includes the zombie argument, which essentially boils down to:
1) Iff physicalism is false, then there could be a being that is physically identical to a human but not conscious
2) Physicalism is false
3) Therefore, there could be a being that's physically identical to a human but not conscious
4) Therefore, physicalism is false
Most variants of the argument are careful not to explicitly state that they assume 2) as a premise. But they are unintelligible otherwise, because without it there is literally no reason whatsoever to take 3) seriously.
"Whether the difference between the two can be bridged by clever theories is precisely the point under dispute; simply asserting that you can't imagine the other side being right is not an argument."
Whereas the physicalists simply assert that the difference can be bridged, but have not succeeded in bridging the difference despite centuries of trying. Until the difference is bridged, people who assert that it can be bridged are relying on intuition and judgment just as much as those who assert it cannot be. To me, their position is akin to a pre-modern witch claiming confidently that it is possible to turn a dog into a planet, even though planets are very different in nature from dogs, even though no remotely similar transformation has been demonstrated, and even though no existing theory comes close to describing what a planet actually is. The only position that does not rely on intuition about conceivability is a completely agnostic one which refuses to take a position until further discoveries are made.
You also misunderstand the zombie argument. The zombie argument is not about this universe, but about all possible universes. Is it conceivable to have a universe that has everything we now consider the laws of physics (quantum mechanics, gravity, etc), but without consciousness? If so, is it conceivable that this universe could have beings that behave very similarly to humans? If it is conceivable, that means the laws of physics we currently have for our universe cannot, by themselves, explain consciousness; they can only explain behavior, which the thought experiment has shown is not sufficient for explaining consciousness. We would need to add some extra "magic" to the laws of physics so that they can explain consciousness. What would this "magic" consist of? They would logically be related to consciousness and its interaction with the material world--in short, a theory for the mental world. At that point, you're in dualist territory.
If you take the opposite approach of saying p-zombies are inconceivable in any universe, then you need to meet your own burden of proving why. According to yourself, "simply asserting that you can't imagine the other side being right is not an argument." So why are p-zombies inconceivable?
"Whereas the physicalists simply assert that the difference can be bridged, but have not succeeded in bridging the difference despite centuries of trying"
We haven't? I've personally had my conscious experiences shut off and restarted several times, and in every single case it was done entirely by playing around with "forces, fields, atoms and molecules". At no point did anyone have to turn off any special magic unbound by regular physics. I know a few other people who've had their conscious experience temporarily shut off or deliberately altered, and the same was true for them. That chemicals and conscious experiences have quite a bit to do with one another looks pretty well-established to me.
"Until the difference is bridged, people who assert that it can be bridged are relying on intuition and judgment just as much as those who assert it cannot be"
Perhaps in a narrow technical sense, but not in any meaningful way. Even if we didn't already have pretty substantial progress towards bridging the gap, the fact would remain that physicalists are just applying our standard attitudes regarding unexplained phenomena in science to one specific case. Non-physicalists are demanding that their pet topic get special exemption from the usual rules. Hence the default presumption is against them until they can provide a compelling reason why their case is unique.
"You also misunderstand the zombie argument The zombie argument is not about this universe, but about all possible universes"
It doesn't matter whether the reasoning goes "physicalism is false, therefore p-zombies could exist in some possible universe, therefore physicalism is false" or "physicalism is false, therefore p-zombies could exist in our universe, therefore physicalism is false". The important point is that there's no way of getting to any variant of "p-zombies could exist" that doesn't beg the question.
"Is it conceivable to have a universe that has everything we now consider the laws of physics (quantum mechanics, gravity, etc), but without consciousness? If so, is it conceivable that this universe could have beings that behave very similarly to humans?"
Mu.
Can you imagine a chair that has two legs, but looks and acts exactly like it would if it had four legs? Can you imagine a planet that doesn't orbit a star, but looks and acts exactly like it would if it did orbit a star? Asking "can you imagine an X that looks and behaves exactly as if it had property Y, but doesn't actually have property Y" is such a poorly-formed question that it shouldn't even be dignified with a yes/no answer. If the X you're imagining looks and behaves exactly as you would expect it to do if it had property Y, then there is no way to verify that you're not actually imagining it as not having property Y.
> What do forces, fields, atoms, and molecules have to do with love, hate, and fear?
Is fear (e.g. avoidance behavior) now a sign of consciousness?
You can start with basic chemistry, invent self-replicating molecules and eventually observe them producing trees or ants out of the evolutionary pressure to replicate.
You can start with with basic quantum mechanics, build semiconductor devices with them and cleverly assemble an amazing number of these devices into a single device on which you can play Angry Birds.
Or, as someone on this thread pointed out, you can start with the very simple rules of Conway's game of life and end up with a Turing complete system, which you could then use to emulate Dwarf Fortress or the meat space universe.
IMHO, if these amazing things can be build from parts so simple, there is no reason why a huge bunch of nerve cells wired together in was shaped by evolutionary pressure might not create beings capable of thinking about themselves.
If consciousness required non-physicality, but p-zombies are conceivable, then by Occam's Razor, we are all p-zombies.
Personally, I think telling apart consciousness from a sufficiently advanced simulation of it is splitting hairs. There is just no physical experiment to tell them apart.
Of course, if there was an experiment to tell them apart, consciousness would be measurable and all the usual physical methodology would apply. Expect a new SI unit in that case.
Likewise simulation hypothesis. If you find a buffer overflow, expect scientists to figure out and describe the underlying rules.
If telepathy existed, physicists would describe the transmission characteristics using spherical harmonics and figure out if a power law holds. Expect lot's of papers with "signal to noise ratio" and "bit error rate".
If souls were proven to exist, e.g. interacted in some way with the physical world, expect physicists to build a soul accelerator to study these interactions and figure out if souls are elementary, or can be split into subsoulic particles.
Lacking a way to determine the truth, it feels rather unproductive to argue about the existence or origins of consciousness (or simulation, or telepathy, or souls).
"Is fear (e.g. avoidance behavior) now a sign of consciousness?"
Fear is not just avoidance behavior. I can get a simple robot to avoid light, by hooking up a photosensor to a motor. Does the robot therefore feel fear?
"Or, as someone on this thread pointed out, you can start with the very simple rules of Conway's game of life and end up with a Turing complete system, which you could then use to emulate Dwarf Fortress or the meat space universe."
You can, and you can also describe how the rules of the game of life lead to a Turing complete system, which in turn leads to an emulation of Dwarf Fortress. Every link in the chain is rigorously demonstrated. The same is not true for consciousness. Without such a demonstration, we can only argue about whether we think it is plausible. I think the distance between consciousness and anything resembling our current physics is like the distance between caveman physics and fire (see my post below)--chemical change is of a fundamentally different nature than c-physical change, and so can never be reduced to it.
"If consciousness required non-physicality, but p-zombies are conceivable, then by Occam's Razor, we are all p-zombies."
I am by definition not a p-zombie, because I have consciousness. You and others might be p-zombies, but Occam's Razor would say that you're not, because why would I be the only human with consciousness?
"Personally, I think telling apart consciousness from a sufficiently advanced simulation of it is splitting hairs. There is just no physical experiment to tell them apart."
Don't confuse ontology with epistemology. There's also no physical experiment, with current technology, to tell whether microbes exist on a planet 10,000 light years away, but that doesn't mean extraterrestrial microbes are not real (or that they are). As you say in the following paragraphs, it's entirely possible that we will be able to measure consciousness in the future.
I've always thought the zombie thought experiment essentially circular. Here's why:
1) If physicalism is not true, then of course the thought experiment is valid, and there's a difference between the human and the zombie
2) If physicalism is true, then the sentence "a being physically identical to a human, yet lacking inner experience" is contradictory! If physicalism is true, then a being physically identical to a human _must_ have an inner experience, since that arises from its physical state. It's similar to saying, "imagine something chemically identical to water, but it doesn't freeze when below 0 Celsius."
Because of this, I don't think the thought experiment can change anyone's mind either direction.
First of all, since we can't directly measure consciousness, we have no reason to assume 2.
We only assume the consciousness of other humans, and to a lesser extent animals, by analogy to ourselves - Occam's Razor favors that things which behave similarly to us, do so for similar reasons, and that things which share all of our observable properties, also share our unobservable properties.
But we also assume that everything follows physical laws, for the same reason. There's no reason to privilege one of these assumptions over the other.
Second of all, you're just reproducing the problems of the 'first cause' argument, by moving your 'magic layer' of explanation back one step, at the cost of additional complexity.
Either physical laws magically produce consciousness sometimes in a way we don't yet understand. Or there is a magical non-physical-law phenomenon of some kind which produces consciousness, and which magically happens to attach itself to brains but not rocks for reasons we don't understand, and which never shows itself to break any physical laws in any of the ways we are ever able to measure. By accepting the latter hypothesis, you haven't removed the need for a magical-thing-we-don't-understand, you've just added a ton of additional epicycles to the entire process.
"Or there is a magical non-physical-law phenomenon of some kind which produces consciousness, and which magically happens to attach itself to brains but not rocks for reasons we don't understand, and which never shows itself to break any physical laws in any of the ways we are ever able to measure. "
First, I would say the fact that I have a conscious experience at all is a major violation of physical laws. There is nothing that is more salient, or that I'm more sure of, than that I have a conscious experience. If the laws of physics can't account for that, it is a far bigger violation than the Standard Model being unable to account for dark matter.
Second, I have free will, and other people seem to have free will as well. You could deny free will, but you would be denying one of our most fundamental experiences of the world. Free will, alters the physical world according to the wishes of the mental world, is likewise a violation of physical laws as we know them.
"First, I would say the fact that I have a conscious experience at all is a major violation of physical laws."
You might *say* that, but I don't think you actually believe it. If what you said were true and could be demonstrated, it would be the single most important scientific discovery since at least relativity. If you really thought you could make a good case for it, you wouldn't be leaving it in the comments of a blog post for nobodies to snark at, you'd be submitting it to a major scientific journal.
I don't need to be the one submitting it to a major scientific journal, because I wasn't the first to realize the incompatibility of a mechanistic account of the universe with consciousness. Scientists (OK, some scientists) have recognized this since the beginning of modern science. See any article on Cartesian dualism, which is 400 years old.
So somebody else has submitted this discovery to a major scientific journal? Who? What was the article called?
A caveman would say that fire violates physical laws and is proof of the gods intervening on human affairs. Things that physical laws can't explain *yet* are a natural consequence of not being omniscient, it's an ongoing process.
I really don't understand what you mean by 'free will' here. Our mechanistic understanding of how a neural network goes from inputs to outputs is pretty strong. I don't see anything in human behavior that needs to violate physical law to be possible. So what are you referring to, materially?
The caveman's mistake is that he correctly noticed that fire violates the physical laws he knows, but incorrectly zeroed in on one specific hypothesis of fire--namely divine intervention--without considering other possibilities. Let's suppose that the caveman's physics, which I'll call c-physics to distinguish it from our physics, consists of laws like this:
1. Things can be sticky or not
2. When two sticky things hit each other slowly, they usually stick together
3. When two sticky things hit each other fast, they sometimes stick together and sometimes fly apart
4. When two hard things hit each other slowly, they retain their shapes but change their directions
5. When two hard things hit each other fast, they break apart
One day, when sitting around the campfire, the cavemen debate whether fire can be explained with c-physical laws. The c-physicalists admit that c-physics cannot currently explain fire, but believe that it is not a hopeless endeavor, pointing out that c-physics can explain many forms of emergent phenomena that are not found in the laws themselves. For example, it can explain mudslides and snowmen, even though mudslides and snowmen are nowhere to be found in the c-physical laws. The c-dualists point out that many aspects of fire, such as the light, the heat, and the changes in color and size of the wood, are qualitatively different from anything c-physics can explain. It is inconceivable how any application of c-physics, whose laws have nothing like light, can explain fire. They believe that any explanation of fire would require drastically different laws, so different from c-physics that nobody would call them c-physical.
Fast forward 40,000 years, and we now know that fire is not a c-physical change, but a chemical change, and its explanation involves atoms and molecules, wavefunctions and orbitals and quantized energy levels. This explanation is so different from c-physics that the inventors of c-physics could not possibly have imagined it, or even understood it if it was explained to them. This is how I think a successful theory of consciousness will look like. Whatever the theory is, it'll be so different from what we call physics that we would not, in a million years, recognize it as physics. It'll be qualitatively and dramatically different from the physical phenomena we now know, so much so that it'll seem like an alien language.
I would say conscious experience is not explained by physical laws as we know them, but it doesn't seem to violate them either.
As for our experience of free will, we experience plenty of things that aren't so. We experience sound and light from an event as being simultaneous, even though they're not. We don't notice the blind spot in our eyes. We think ultraviolet light is invisible because we happen to not have receptors for it. And so on, and so on. Our experience is only a very rough guide to physical reality.
"There, done, there's nothing magical about it. "
A robot from the 1970s can quite easily be programmed to do everything you mentioned in levels 1-4. Is the robot therefore conscious?
"But we don't chose what we want, and the illusion of free will proceeds only from our inability to track down the multiple aggregate causes of our desires. Again, nothing magical."
As I said above, free will is one of our most basic observations of the world. We observe that we have free will from the moment we can speak (if not before), to the moment we die. We make use of our free will every minute to influence the physical world. Calling free will an illusion means rejecting this overwhelming evidence, which (for each of us) is stronger than the evidence for F=ma, quantum field theory, heliocentrism, or any other physical theory. Why is this preferable to saying that the existing physical laws are inadequate and must be supplemented by mental laws to account for our observations? After all, we already know there are aspects of reality that existing physical laws don't describe (e.g. dark matter, quantum gravity), so why can't they be inadequate in other ways as well?
There's the idea of panpsychism. That says that trees, rocks, and livers are, in some sense, conscious.
There's a book I read a long time ago that you might be interested in. "Free Will as An Open Scientific Problem". He goes through the philosophy of free will and then proposes some scientific experiments for validating if free will exists.
Just looked that book up, very interesting: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/free-will-open-scientific-problem That book was first published 13 years, ago, though - I assume science has progressed in some ways since then.
So first of all, we do all kinds of work involving live brains; we do fMRI and EEG, we do brain surgery and subcranial implants of various types, we do metabolic studies, we do single-cell recordings, etc etc.
But more importantly, I think this question is badly formed. You could make the same claim about almost any physical object, or area of space. Like, my couch doesn't follow physical laws. How can you disprove that? No one has ever studied it in a lab. And even if you do come study my couch, I can just say that sure, it follows that set of laws you just tested, but not all the other ones you didn't test. Or, the laws it follows produced the same outputs as physical laws under those test conditions, but wouldn't under all test conditions.
'Somewhere in the Marianas Trench is a cubic meter of space that doesn't follow physical laws, prove me wrong'. It's vacuous. Our assumption that everything follows physical laws is probabilistic based on everything we've ever tested doing so and never seeing strong evidence of anything that doesn't.
'You can't prove it' isn't a meaningful objection here, all knowledge is probabilistic and noting can be proven to 100%, but the likelihood ratio is way way way past what we accept for calling something 'true'.
The context is that I'm writing a big sequence on the mind body problem, and the objection I want to pre-empt is similar what dionysus mentioned above. To rephrase it, the [hypothetical person who objects to the sequence] argues
1. C. (=consciousness) seems to be its own thing; and
2. observing C., looks very much like a causal effect of C.
(Now, there is an elegant way to marry that with the uniformity physical laws by just saying that C. is another aspect of the material, in which case there is no issue at all. I'm fine tolerating that model so we don't need to discuss it here.)
What I'd like to shut the door to early is the other model that says "(1) C. is fundamentally *separate* from matter, and (2) C. has causal effect on matter". This model explicitly requires special laws in physics for just C.
I don't think your last three paragraphs work because a proponent of this model could simply say "well, the [apparent causal effect from C.] is a reason to suspect such laws, and you haven't provided any evidence that's unlikely. I claim that it's super plausible!"
> So first of all, we do all kinds of work involving live brains; we do fMRI and EEG, we do brain surgery and subcranial implants of various types, we do metabolic studies, we do single-cell recordings, etc etc.
Yeah, this sounds like what I'm looking for. But as a non-biologist and non-physicist, it's hard for me to say how exactly these experiments show that brains follow the same underlying laws. Like, if the particles in the brain substantially disobeyed Newtonian physics, would we realize this through fMRI scans or EEG (whatever that is)? This is the question I need to answer.
(I know Newtonian physics aren't correct, but I do think there's a strong case that its inaccuracies for stuff on earth (which manifest like 30 places behind the decimal point) are not nearly enough to locate the imagined causal effect from C., so taking Newton as the ground truth should be a fine simplification.)
As I said above, you're not going to find a definitive argument against the anti-physicalist view of mind, because there isn't one. It's an open problem in philosophy, and only a slight majority of philosophers are physicalists. If anyone tells you there's a definitive proof of physicalism, then that person is missing something.
The fact that something is a debated problem in philosophy *dosen't* mean that there isn't a definitive argument against it. The fact that I'm saying this sentence is quite sad, but here we are. That's the state of academic philosophy.
Free Will is a beginner level problem, as Eliezer adequately put it. The fact that it's still debated in philosophy doesn't do anything to change this.
But also, I'm not looking for an argument against physlicalism. I require something strictly (and I think, significantly) weaker. It is possible to be against physicalism based on the fact that our current best model is not complete (and in fact, I think this is the only defensible anti-physicalism position). However, I don't care whether a future version of the laws of physics will be complete or not because the ways in which it's not complete manifest 300 places behind the decimal point and are completely insufficient to locate causal effects from C.
I get an email at least every other week from someone claiming to have invented a Theory of Everything. Usually, the more grandiose their claims and the more smugly dismissive of other physicists they are, they further they are from anything resembling a valid theory of physics.
I just read Eliezer's posts on free will. To be fair to him, he's far better than the physics crackpots that flood my inbox. As far as I can tell--and I am not an expert--he clearly and correctly rehashes the arguments in favor of one particular theory of free will, that of reductive physicalism combined with compatibilism (though he calls it requiredism). He does not present any reasons that reductive physicalism should be assumed to be true, and barely mentions, let alone refutes, the many other theories of free will.
It is indeed a beginner level problem to explain one particular theory of free will. Explaining all the others (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will#Western_philosophy), and then showing which one is correct and why, is unlikely to be possible without first having a solution to the mind-body problem.
the point of the example was not that Eliezer is a great philosopher, it's that the problem is actually easy. I think every person above a low bar of philosophical sanity will tell you the same things about Free Will, and there is genuinely nothing to add to that. The reason why Eliezer is more cite-able than others is that most people who of course have the same opinions on FW have too much social shame to declare a problem easy.
I think the idea that you need to solve the mind body problem to figure out free will is nuts. On a 0-10 scale, Free Will is about difficulty level 2, the mind body problem about 9. That's why I'm spending all my time on the mind-body problem.
Elizer was wrong about free will, as usual.
That strikes me as a problem with philosophy in general. That is, philosophy can be a profound discipline with many interesting open avenues of discussion -- but it just can't be applied to anything in practice.
Ok, so first of all, you'll never un-convince anyone who believes in consciousness (or spirits, immaterial minds, etc.) based on faith, be it bona fide religious faith or some kind of an abiding philosophical conviction based on arbitrary premises. There's no argument you can make to change such a person's mind, because for him consciousness is just a given.
Assuming that's not the case, though, you might ask him the question: what does the concept of "consciousness" actually explain ? For example, he might say, "humans can hold meaningful conversations because they are conscious"; you could then ask, "ok, what exactly is consciousness and how does it allow humans to hold meaningful conversations ?" If the answer is, "consciousness is what allows humans to hold meaningful conversations, period", then we haven't explained anything; we've just re-labeled our ignorance with a fancy term. People tried that already with "elan vital", and it didn't work for the same reason: a real explanation must make use of what we already understand in order to describe something we did not understand (until now); and it must make meaningful, testable predictions.
Unfortunately for the proponents of the ineffable consciousness, their model is really lousy at making predictions; meanwhile, as @darwin says, we have competing explanations that are much better at it. Not perfect, granted, but still significantly better than literally nothing. So, in practice, it makes more sense to go with those, for now.
I've already done a survey in the community and the position is very fringe to begin with, however I disagree that someone who holds it is necessarily unreasonable. You're assuming they've already ignored lots of evidence, but it could be that they've just never thought much about it, and this particular model (aka, C. is separate from mind and causal interaction goes in both directions) is actually the common sense answer. It makes sense; mind feels different from body; if I hit you over the head, this is an effect matter -> mind; if you decide to yell at me; this is mind -> body(=matter)... it only seems questionable now because of modern science.
I do agree that you shouldn't stick to this model after hearing the counter-arguments, but first I have to write up the counter arguments properly!
After you write up the counter arguments, I'd be interested in reading them. I used to be a physicalist, but I've drifted away from physicalism after listening to counterarguments from dualists and panpsychists. The common sense view, as you call it, appears closest to being correct.
My point that this is really an argument about epistemology, and not necessarily about any object-level facts. If my epistemology allows me to just invent random things out of my imagination and propose them as explanations for events, then no amount of evidence would convince me that my explanations are wrong. You must first convince me why my epistemology, although internally consistent, is practically inferior to yours.
Ah, I actually do address epistemology on the post right before that one. It comes down to explaining the simplicity prior, i.e., we estimate how much code it requires to implement your theory, and if it's substantially more code than a competitor, it's out. Every bit cuts the probability in half.
>Like, if the particles in the brain substantially disobeyed Newtonian physics, would we realize this through fMRI scans or EEG (whatever that is)? This is the question I need to answer.
I mean, yes, for any reasonable interlocutor.
MRI, PET, EEG, they can all be done on any part of the body, and the brain behaves the same way as all the other parts. We can measure signals directly from neurons in the brain during surgery in the same way we can measure signals from nerves in a sea slug, and they act the same way. We can electrically stimulate neurons in the brain in the same way we can stimulate nerves in the arm, and they react the way we'd expect. Blood clots and poisons getting into the brain cause the same type of tissue damage as any other tissue, the metabolic reactions for blood entering and leaving the brain are normal, etc.
Thanks! Something like this is what I was hoping to hear.
Ok, I'll play Devil's Advocate here:
"But clearly the sea slug cannot appreciate poetry or even hold a conversations, whereas we humans can. And it's not just the number of neurons, either, because elephants have way more neurons than we do, but they aren't conscious either (at least, not like we are). So, clearly, there must be something about the human brain that your instruments are unable to measure. Obviously, human brains are similar to slug 'brains' and elephant brains, otherwise all those blood clots and poisons wouldn't affect them the same way; but just as obviously, human possess some special quality".
Doesn't this just miss the topic? I'm not saying that there is or isn't something special about the human brain; I'm totally fine with assuming there is. The question is whether that something takes place inside or outside the laws of physics. darwin's post seems like a very strong argument that it's inside the laws of physics.
We don't need to prove that the brain is *not* based on spirits, souls, angels, extradimensional entities, or anything else like that. The burden of proof is on the one making the claim. If you claim that everything in the Universe follows the laws of physics except for brains, then it's up to you to devise some test that can demonstrate this fact. Until then, we'll just assume that brains aren't the one special exception. Of course, once you do devise such a test, and it comes up positive, we will be forced to change our minds.
By the way, we do conduct physical experiments on stuff that we cannot directly observe, and we do it all the time. We cannot observe neutrinos, or ancient asteroid impacts, or gravitational waves, or even good old electrons. So, in principle, devising a test for (putative) mental entities should not be an insurmountable challenge.
I don't doubt it, but I'm looking for something that permits "less counterplay" than "the burden of proof is on you" or "we could run the experiment theoretically".
I am not sure what you mean by "less counterplay". That said, the reason for the concept of the burden of proof is that, without it, we'd be forced to accept pretty much anything that anyone (including oneself !) says, unless we can disprove it. Since there's a virtually infinite number of random claims people can come up with (creativity being one of the core virtues of humanity), this leaves us in an untenable position. We'd be working day and night just on disproving everything from abracadabra to Bigfoot to Yetis and zero-point energy. Thus, it makes more *practical* sense to provisionally reject any claim that is unsupported by evidence.
See my reply to darwin; in the relevant context, the hypothetical person arguing would have a reason to suspect the existence of such laws, so just going with "burden of proof" isn't good enough.
I'd pick apart their views, how would an atom for atom reconstruction of a brain differ? how would a digitalized simulation? would those differences apply to two half brains connected to two half atom for atom or digitalized reconstructions of their missing halves?
IMO, anyone who worries about an AI taking over the world should go look at how bad Youtube Music's recommendations are. If the best AI company in the world can't even get a basic thing like that right, it seems that strong AIs are quite far off indeed.
Or ask Siri. Anything.
I don’t find YouTube too bad. The guys doing the AI on Netflix have a lousy job though. The algorithm is:
If new_stuff == true { showNewStuff() } else { useBrilliantRecommendationAlgorithm() }
new_stuff is always set to true.
Still it’s a job worth 200-300k a year and you can’t really go wrong with that.
AI is only as effective as the programming that set it up. I'm not optimistic, given the fact I spend most of my retirement trying to work around dysfunctional software.
The danger is that AIs are really good at some things and bad at others, so they'll capture us all, put us into battery cages, and force us to listen to music we don't really like.
Netflix is the same way. Because I watched what so they thought I'd like what? Fire that algorithm.
"You disassembled the world into sticky notes, not paper clips. Can't even get basic things right."
What makes you think that's a basic thing?
For something that doesn't already have a human brain which is geared for modeling other human brains by analogy, it seems like an insanely difficult task. Much harder than just building an army of murder drones or w/e.
It can't even make basic distinctions like "I don't want to listen to music with vocals"
Pandora describes their algorithm as having hundreds of different assigned to each song. But you can only enter other songs as inputs; you can't set what qualities you want directly.
Maybe YT thinks it can make more money from its users if they ignore that preference? That may not work for you but on average it may result it more revenue
For all that google is at the forefront of AI, it’s not reasonable to assume the YT music algorithm represents the state of the field. Right now, AIs can search the space of chemistry to find new medicines (or poisons) and write text that imitates authors well enough the average person couldn’t tell the difference. But complexity costs compute. How many YouTube music accounts are there? A couple billion? I would bet google looked at the cost of implementing a more powerful recommendation algorithm, compared it to how much extra money they’d get from ads, and decided it wasn’t worth it. Flippancy rarely gets you the right answer.
Recommendations are extremely important to YouTube and similar companies. If I’m recommended something I like I’m sticky. I’ll watch another video and get displayed another ad. Get an increase of 10% in all users dwell time on YouTube and you gain probably hundreds of millions in revenue.
And the Netflix algorithm has never figured out that I prefer movies with a female main character, which a linear regression model would realize after a week.
I wish this were proof that we're far off from AGI, but unfortunately it's completely irrelevant information. The reason why the Netflix algorithm (which ought to be among the best in the world since improving it is worth millions of dollars, ditto with youtube) underperforms a linear regression model is probably because Netflix doesn't use a feature-based approach at all, but treats movies as black boxes and bases its recommendations entirely on your similarity to other consumers. If you are a very unusual consumer (like I am), then the algorithm performs poorly and this is a loss of Netflix, but if you are a rare case, it's not a very big loss. This is probably what's going on, and my guess (though idk) would be something similar is going on for you and youtube.
Could this algorithm be improved by also considering a feature-based approach? I genuinely don't know. But if the answer is yes, this tells you something about the efficient market hypothesis and the adequacy of large companies, not about the state of AGI. The technology to figure this out has been there ever since linear regression was invented.
The whole point of the deep learning thing is that AIs were supposed to figure out subtle features like this without humans even foreseeing it. That's what a lot of the alarmist rhetoric was about.
Mhh well I do know how deep learning works but I don't know how the YT algorithm works, what it gets as inputs and so forth, so I can't really comment.
But you definitely need to have an argument that this is bad for youtube to make your case. If it is profitable for the algorithm to ignore you because your tastes are rare, it's not a failure of the algorithm. And even then, it's more likely that the programmers messed up. Blanket criticism of deep learning doesn't seem like it goes beyond "deep learning can't automatically solves every issue even if the programmer is an idiot", and this is not a position that [people who are worried about AGI] hold anyway.
But the whole point about AI alarmism is that AI would not require programmers. You could just tell it, "find the optimal playlist for every person", and it would automatically scan every person, coherently extrapolate their deepest desires, and serve each and every one of them the one playlist that is guaranteed to keep them in thrall forever.
Meanwhile, off in the real world, we still rely on human programmers writing code by hand and adjusting minute hyperparameters in order to make the entire system work at all; and most of the time, it works very poorly. And it doesn't seem like it's improving, either.
You like southern rock?! -- do you like the Dixie Dregs?
All right-thinking people like the Dregs. That's one way you can tell they are right-thinking people.
Ain't that the truth
Steve Morse rocks!
Montreux 1978 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I33P03i_YA0
and most especially 2:07 - 2:22
The are quirky and ecstatic.
Pandora's algorithm seems to be decent. One thing that helps is that it's set up for you to give it continuous feedback as you're listening. It probably also helps that it has a human-curated database of musical characteristics associated with the songs: for example, the "why this song" info it gives me on the last song it played me is: "Based on what you've told us so far, we're playing this track because it features use of a string ensemble, prominent percussion, minor key tonality, mild rhythmic syncopation and folk rock qualities."
It still has some annoying blindspots, though. Most notably for me, it keeps trying to give me Bluegrass on my channel that's intended for Irish and Scottish traditional, folk, and folk rock.
When I was listening to Pandora, I found that having a bunch of channels worked well, but if I tried to fine-tune a channel with which songs I liked and didn't like, I found it all started sounding the same.
I would consider that acceptable: Bluegrass music came from Appalachian music, which in turn sprang from Celtic roots, in particular jigs and reels.
Yeah, I understand why the algorithm is linking the two. But it's still an issue for me since I don't particularly like Bluegrass despite generally liking jigs and reels.
I worked in a company that did music recommendation. We were bought by a larger company eventually. It was mostly Bayesian not strict ML but the personalised algorithms were fairly hard to debug anyway. Almost a black box.
Anyway the recommendation people hated to use genre to influence decision making, because they found it too much a bypass of their magic system. Somebody who liked Celtic might want to discover bluegrass they would argue (or whatever genre, it was a common problem).
If the user kept blocking bluegrass then the algorithm would work it out, they said. It never did though and it couldn’t be explained why exactly. This would enrage the CEO who had this problem, I forget the specific genre.
Just block the genre i keep deleting on that playlist he said. But, said the data scientists, what if the deleted songs were slow songs – should we ban all slow songs; or fast songs, or songs with guitars, etc.
In reality they just didn’t want to write if statements, they wanted their magic algorithms to work.
People who believe that "AI" writ large is on a super-linear path: We've seen a clear slowdown in practical progress in self-driving cars over the last 7 or so years compared to the 7 years prior.
So, okay, fine, the curve isn't perfectly smooth, you say, there are fits and starts, but when you zoom out far enough, it looks super-linear. But the longer we can stay plateaued, the harder it is to jump back up to a super-linear path.
When's the point when you start revising your views and saying, "Actually, this is a pretty clear data point against the super-linear AI progress theory"? If we still don't have self-driving cars that are lots better than the ones today in two years? Five years? Ten years?
(I'm not talking about legal compliance, I'm talking about demonstrated real world competence, even if for compliance reasons there has to be a safety driver behind the wheel who doesn't do anything.)
>We've seen a clear slowdown in practical progress in self-driving cars over the last 7 or so years compared to the 7 years prior.
Have we?
Or did we just have a lot of initial hype based on nothing and aimed at raising VC capital, followed by steady work at solving this incredibly hard problem?
We have! In the years from 2008 to 2015, we saw driverless cars go from "basically can't do anything" to "can handle about 90% of street conditions safely." And from 2015 to 2022, we've seen that go to maybe 98% of street conditions.
Here's a useful history of the DARPA Grand Challenge if you need a refresher on how rapidly driverless cars improved in the 2000's and early 2010's. https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2014-03-13
Now, look, you can parse that in a variety of ways. Maybe the AI got better at the same rate it is now (or slower!) but all the real complexity in the problem space is in solving those last few things -- but I think that has the same ultimate implications for solving other problem spaces.
Yep, the driving assistance technologies in a base model civic are pretty amazing these days. Will they drive you to the grocery store? No, but you can drive hours on a highway with little input on the wheel or brake/gas pedal. And many cars will change lanes for you or park the car for you (not the civic but moderately priced vehicles will do these things).
I don't see any sign of either, no, outside of specifically at Uber, where they definitely lost enthusiasm for their driverless cars dreams after they killed that lady. Waymo and various other autonomous car companies continued their testing more-or-less uninterrupted, and I don't see any sign that they have received less funding/resources.
I've always felt kind of bad for them in addition to her. From what I can see in the video it doesn't really seem like it was a situation where the average person would have avoided hitting her, either. I certainly don't have the reflexes to think I could slow my car down from 45 to 0 in 2 car-lengths, and that's sort of what it looks like it would have taken.
So, first:
Videos generally have more difficulty with dynamic lighting than human eyes do. It's likely that the blacks would be less impenetrable to the human eye than they appear in the video.
Second:
Uber's driverless cars had LIDAR. They aren't dependent on cameras and lighting conditions. They had no excuse that the lighting was bad to hit that pedestrian -- the problem was that they were driving around unsafe software that couldn't recognize a pedestrian, and they had set it to values where it was willing to drive into things that it had low confidence in. I do not have any sympathy for Uber.
Third and finally:
If visibility is such that you (or your AI) are unable to reliably detect obstructions 2 car lengths in front of you, your obligation is to *not drive at 45 mph*.
On your THIRD point:
It's not that I couldn't *see* a person two car lengths in front of me, in my lights. It's that if the human experience is anything like the video, this is a person *suddenly becoming visible* two car lengths in front of the car. i.e. it's a sudden hazard that didn't exist a second ago. Which means I don't have to *know* there's a person there, I have to decellerate a car from 45 to 0 in two car lengths.
Which isn't stictly and necessarily possible; most (all?) cars won't stop that fast. Even if they would, the estimated "reaction distance" - that is, how long it takes you to put your foot on the brake - at that speed is something like seventy feet, or farther than she was from the point she becomes visible in the video.
On you FIRST point:
If it's true that a human would have seen her sooner than the video indicates, thats one thing. But I'm not sure that's true; I've watched an old woman die in the street after crossing in between streetlights at non-crossings in the same way (not a great experience you get rid of quickly, do not recommend).
It happens that I live in the town where this happened and have been down to Mill enough to know that stretch of road - my prior is that it's about as dark in that area in between lights as the video shows. If it was, that matter because.
Regarding your SECOND point:
I really, really don't like this rationale in a lot of ways, but the most primary is that taken to its logical conclusion it seems like it ends up killing a lot of people.
So say we accept that the car could see the person and there were a bunch of programming errors, etc. that could have prevented this entirely. And say we punish Uber (and we did!) and open them up for liability (probably did?) based on that, and we completely ignore the "would a person have hit them" standard in favor of the "would a theoretical perfect robot car that doesn't exist not have hit them".
Now let's say that by the perfect car standard we establish the behavior of the car was really, really bad - a perfect car would NOT have done the same thing and the woman would have lived. But say at the same time we established - and at least the company propaganda at the time claimed something similar to this - that it was less likely to hit her than a human driver in the same circumstances, that as the lighting got better and better in the scenario the self driving car would not hit her sooner than the person wouldn't hit her.
In that scenario, by holding uber and self-driving cars in general to a perfect standard instead of to the thing they are actually competing against which makes mistakes and kills people pretty constantly and we really should want to get rid of as car-operators soon as possible (humans), you are killing X amount of people per year, full stop. However much it delays driving cars, it's just some amount of quantifiable death in that situation.
This is getting really long and ranty, so to summarize:
1. I'm a big, big opponent of making the perfect the enemy of the good (and of the better).
2. In scenarios where a person would be *at least as likely* to have caused an accident as a self-driving car, judging them against a perfect standard instead of the standard we actually have (human drivers) is either break-even or negative in terms of human life, because it delays a replacement for human drivers that's equal or better to them in that scenario.
3. I think I acknowledge that even with my local knowledge of that road, "would an average human have hit this person jaywalking in the dark" is unknowable.
4. A very lighthearted "fuck that" to suggestions that I should be able to magically react and decellerate a car from 45mph to 0mph in two car lengths.
You’ve hit in on a reason there, perhaps inadvertently, as to why self driving cars won’t take off. Legally I can’t see the responsibility of any car crash transferring to the owner, would you buy that car? Therefore the software has to be perfect. Not better than humans, that’s not a legal thing.
The person didn't teleport. If visibilty conditions are such that the first time you will be able to see a person is when they're two car lengths in front of you, you may not drive at 45 mph. This isn't rocket science, and is absolutely the standard for human drivers.
Also the idea that Uber had a highly safe system and they were punished for an unavoidable act of God is farcical. It's a fiction made to by people who are trying to ignore facts inconvenient to their worldview. Uber was running unsafe cars in a desperate effort to pro up their valuation by catching up with vastly more advanced competitors. It's not a coincidence that the fatality happened to Uber and not Waymo or Cruise.
Quick question. Is the US a nation state?
(I don’t mean the US hegemon or empire, if you use those terms for US influence and power projection, outside the US itself. I do mean the US itself - is the US State a nation or an empire, or something else).
No, it's not a nation-state. There's very few nation-states in the Americas. They're almost all anti-colonialist revolutionary republics. That is, America formed an identity not out of endogenous traits (like shared language or culture) but by the practical considerations of military revolt against a colonizing power. The US continues to legitimize itself by a continuing need to protect the gains of that revolution, including both national sovereignty and individual rights.
There’s no contradiction between being anti-colonialist and becoming a nation state.
The US war of independence was a war by colonialists against the imperial centre, but it wasn’t really anti “colonising or anti colonialism”, far from it. Colonisation continued but the centre of the empire in much of North America moved from London to Washington.
Theoretically you could have such a revolt arranged on perfectly ethnic, national lines. But the United States was not, nor were most of the American revolutions. As for the US being an empire: only under a rather strange definition. The United States only gained imperial territories briefly in the late 19th century and most of them were gone within a few decades. The British state was the head of a vast colonial empire for five centuries. Collapsing the categories that contain the two makes the category so broad as to be meaningless.
Nearly all decolonisations are based on revolts based on ethnic lines. (Perfect ethnic lines is a strawman). You are correct though that the war of independence was not that, it was a war by the same ethnic group against an empire of the same culture, and ethnicity. That’s the unusual bit.
The US is an empire itself. Every war against Native American tribes or Mexico or European powers, every mile of land conquered outside the original 13 colonies, manifest destiny, is all imperialism.
What's your definition of empire? Because if you're arguing "the US has colonized regions that are governed in a comparable way to the way Britain governed India" then (excepting places like Puerto Rico) that's trivially false.
Also, care to provide some evidence about the ethnic nature of anti-colonial revolts? Because from Nigeria to the US to Chile it certainly doesn't seem like you end up with neat nation-states like Germany or China.
I've always seen America as a nation built around an ideology. With the GOP and Democrats at each other's throats and partisanship being so bad, it might sound like clearly false to an American but despite all the infighting I still see a fundamental American ideology underneath. From across the ocean it seems obvious to me that pretty much all Americans have a certain mindset that they take for granted but which is just nonexistent in Europe.
The American civil religion (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x49n90lWi0s) with all its pathos, the American dream, the Land Of The Free, the "veneration" of the Founding Fathers, all of this is on one had way over the top, on the other hand it is a very powerful nation-building stuff. In a sense it does confirm American exceptionalism. It is in this that America really is unique - a foreigner can truly become an American in a way that a foreigner cannot become French (his kids might). And this civil religion is simultaneously annoying, obnoxious and awe-inspiring to non-Americans (at least the westerners).
The only other country that, to me, feels a bit like America is Switzerland. Also not a nation state in the classical sense, the nation of the Swiss seems to also be built around the idea of independence and freedom. But the American freedom is much more inclusive and libertarian, whereas the Swiss is a bit more communal and isolationist. Yes, a lot of what both the major US parties do is not really libertarian but it feels to me like some very basic libertarian ideas are basically undisputed in the US the way they are in other countries.
Apart from these two, I cannot really think of any idea-based nation. Other countries do show some of this (the French with their republicanism and secularism, but their nationhood is still based a lot more around a mix of language/culture/ethnicity), but not quite as strongly as the Americans and the Swiss. Perhaps Singapore. The underlying ideology is very different there, but it does seem like it is also clearly a nation built around something else than a common culture, ethnicity or religion. But Singapore is really specific, being a city state.
I came across an interesting argument a while back that the US is best characterized as a "state-nation", i.e. a state with a strong national identity derived much more from belonging to the same state than any sort of state-independent nationhood. In other words, the US is a state based on the shared delusion that a Maine Yankee has more in common with at Texan than with a Nova Scotian.
According to the rationalist-adjacent historian Brett Deveraux (who I can really reccommend!), the answer is "No but I'll explain that in more detail in a future post."
In what sense is Brett Devereaux "rationalist-adjacent"?
The weak answer is that his and ACX' reader circles seem to overlap much more than you'd expect by chance, and posting a quick summary of one of his posts on r/SSC used to be a good way to get some discussion going for example.
A better answer, perhaps, is that Brett has high epistemic standards - to the point that Aceso Under Glass gave him as a positive example of writing that's easy to Epistemically Spot Check (and he replied too, praising Aceso for this).
His take even on culture war heavy topics such as "Were the Romans white?" (series starts here: https://acoup.blog/2021/06/11/collections-the-queens-latin-or-who-were-the-romans-part-i-beginnings-and-legends/) is basically "we can answer this question empirically, so here's a five-part review of the evidence". Spoiler: the answer is more or less "this question makes no sense in context, but if you were really asking about skin tone distribution on the Fitzpatrick scale then the mode is between 3 and 4, and HBO got this one laughably wrong".
There are so few places on the internet that have that kind of approach even to politicised topics, that I'm maybe a bit eager to call them all "adjacent".
Brett went on a rant against Bitcoin and attacked his critics when they pointed out he had no idea what he was talking about. He also has a bad habit of making up things in his citations I've caught at least five times, including mischaracterizing major schools of thought that are opposed to his own. I like reading him but I do so with a critical eye, as should anyone reading anything.
I understand a lot of people like him. When I've pointed out that he was effectively making things up several people defended him as it being an honest mistake. But I don't understand why people take him as some paragon of impartial rationality. He doesn't even claim to be that! Which is to his credit, in my view. I'd be much more critical if he hid the ball on what he actually thought and how it influences his writing.
For context, the "rant" is https://acoup.blog/2022/02/04/fireside-friday-february-4-2022/ which he labels as a "musing" and an "opinion". Whether it counts as a rant or not, his central argument sounds like common sense to me: he does not believe that (in a phrase bolded in the original) "blockchain technology will create an economic and social space outside of the control of the state, traditional banking institutions or society at large".
He argues that this is because modern states are not simply going to give up their powers to tax and regulate. They might not be able to alter the code of your smart contract, but they can still go after you.
I would be interested in hearing a rebuttal that addresses this central argument (I admit I haven't read every single comment on that page, if there's a rebuttal already there I'm happy to be told so).
Nope, sorry. That's not what I'm talking about. Please don't put words in my mouth.
I was talking about his responses on Twitter that were rather less measured. He went on a rant about how awful crypto was and Patreon supporting cryptocurrency. It was pointed out he didn't know what it was and he made some rather sharp remarks about his critics.
He is correct about bitcoin tho. It's total shit. And I say this as someone who got rich off it by accident.
I don't mind crypto criticism. What I do mind is crypto criticism that reveals a clear lack of understanding of how crypto works and then doubling down when getting called out on it by a person who claims experts aren't respected enough.
I keep seeing links to his blog here on ACT, so I guess a lot of rationalists read him.
Does that make you a rationalist? A lot of rationalists watch Star Wars. Does that make JJ Abrams rationalist-adjacent?
It makes rationalists JJ Abrams-adjacent, but not the other way round.
Fair
Is this relevant to the original question at all or are you just being ornery?
Despite being well above the baseline for an online forum, an overwhelming majority of the readership here* are not rationalists. Not sure what the name of that particular bias is (availability?), but it really ought to be kept in mind when reading the comments section.
The data's stale at this point, but Scott's written on this in the past:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/
It's relevant since I'm curious how someone who's never identified as a rationalist nor engaged with rationalism gets defined as a rationalist...
Bret Devereaux has a good response: https://acoup.blog/2021/07/02/collections-my-country-isnt-a-nation/
He says “ though large parts of that argument hinge on either substantially redefining ’empire’ or focusing the argument on Puerto Rico, Guam and American Samoa”
and then later that
“ Several European states still hold vestiges of their old empires, Russia still controls 22 ‘constituent republics’ reflecting areas of non-Russian settlement with functionally no autonomy, making it quite clearly an empire under the traditional definition. And of course the People’s Republic of China also meets that traditional definition, it’s three largest ‘autonomous regions’ (Xinjiang, Tibet and Inner Mongolia) being fairly obvious imperial possessions which are both ethnically different from the PRC itself (which openly presents itself as the Han Chinese national state) and also quite brutally subjugated by that state.”.
But all of these states including the US expanded in the 19 C, and all took over land that was inhabited by other peoples. Manifest destiny was clearly imperialist. This seems to be a blind spot amongst Americans. Maybe if native Americans resistance was better it would be more obvious.
(That doesn’t preclude the US from being a nation now though, but I contend it isn’t.)
I don't speak for Bret Devereaux, but I would guess that his response would be:
(1) The United States definitely used to be an empire. It ruled over subjugated peoples, including Native Americans.
(2) Native Americans today are not subjugated peoples. They can fully take part in the democratic political process. They have significant local control over their nations.
I'm not sure when we should date the transition. The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 is undoubtedly important, along with the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
In contrast, the Uyghur in China are ruled by governors appointed by the Central Committee who do not have to have significant support within the community. The current leader of the region was previously the governor of Guangdong (in southeast China).
If the Uyghurs started to become a tiny minority they might in fact be integrated into the Han Chinese majority culturally. That's not too distinct from what happened to Native Americans. If the Han Chinese become the majority this isn't too distinct from white ( and other) Americans becoming the majority in the Americas.
"And so my country isn’t a nation, but a collection of citizens drawn from all of the nations, setting aside those national identities; a family of choice, rather than a family of blood, united by common ideals rather than common soil. We haven’t always lived up fully to that high ideal. Sometimes the siren call of the nation haws pulled us down away from it. But the ideal and the republic built around it remains. And that is what I will be celebrating come July 4th."
No!
Is it therefore an empire, or a multinational state?
It's the sort of thing that the US is. The categories were made for man etc. It's more like Australia than it is like Thailand, it's more like Canada than it is like the Persian Empire, it's more like the Persian Empire than it is like the Asaro Mudmen of Papua New Guinea, and it's more like the Asaro Mudmen than it is like a teapot.
Doesn't an empire require an emperor/monarch/solitary sovereign?
We are not a multinational state ( except in the sense that native nations have been incorporated into the county)
An Italian American or Polish American is not an Italian or a Polish nationals, by and large. Ethnicity and ancestry are created as a shared consciousness in the U.S. and as part of the milieu of a multi cultural society.
You are an American by virtue of citizenship whether by virtue of naturalization or birth.
Brett has an answer to that: https://acoup.blog/2019/11/22/collections-why-are-there-no-empires-in-age-of-empires/
"An empire is a state where the core ruling population exercises control and extracts resources from a periphery which is composed of people other than the core group (linguistically/culturally/ethnically/religiously distinct)."
That would include both the Soviet Union and current Russia (as Brett mentioned in a recent post on Ukraine - the war has an empire-(re)building angle), it would include pre-French-Revolution Switzerland despite them being tiny, it would definitely include Britain and all the other ones you learn about in school as central examples - some of which were at times democracies (at least of the core population) and/or republics or other forms of government.
Follow up: terminology gets even more confusing in German. The dictionary translation of empire is Reich, but ask a German what that mean historically and after mentioning the obvious more recent use of the word, they'll probably go with "land ruled by a king or emperor" or something - which would be correct for the closely related words Koenigreich or Kaiserreich.
An empire is not a system of gouvernement but a state where a political community control other political communities. Example : the French third republic was a (colonial) empire despite being a democracy.
Are the US are an empire ? The answer is not clear, it really depends how you assess the status of the native nations, Porto Rico and the various client states. Overall I don't think it's the right framework to analyse the US.
Its a state without a nation, with a political body defined by voluntary participation in the form of citizenship. Good historical analogues would be late Roman Empire, after the extension of citizenship to basically everyone.
Well Germany was called the German Empire after unification. England didn’t bother with the term for itself but the U.K. - (when that eventually consolidated the nations of the isles) was absolutely an Empire. The British empire was an English empire at heart. Is consolidating as a State a meaningful distinction - Russia was accused by Devereaux of being an empire, because it rules over non Russian semi autonomous republics, but it doesn’t look like they have laws discriminating against those citizens based on race; no doubt Russian culture dominates, but American culture dominates the US, parts of which were Native American, Mexican, Russian, French back in the day. Is the US not considered an empire now because it was so successful in being an empire before?
If Russia had Russified (or settled with Russians) the areas that are now semi autonomous republics would it not now have a better claim, by Devereaux‘s admission, of being a not Empire (or whatever he thinks the US is).
Point of information: England never conquered Scotland. They were unified by historical accident - their royal families intermarried, and James VI and I ended up as king of both counties at the same time; after that the union acts of 1707 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acts_of_Union_1707 changed them from two countries with one monarch to one country by mutual consent (in the sense that "each country was told what to do by it's own monarch", I suspect).
I would be eternally grateful if someone would put the words "Philosophy Bear" into DALL-E 2. My immense love of bears, philosophy and interest in AI would make it just magical.
Meanwhile, you can enjoy some chemistry bears here :
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/r99tazGiLgzqFX7ka/playing-with-dall-e-2
I'm pretty open to the recent panic and excitement over machine learning progress being worthwhile, but I have had one niggling doubt. Two things that some people seem to expect are either the doom of humanity or massive, orders-of-magnitude economic growth in a very short period of time (or both). If this is a reasonable thing to expect, why haven't interest rates gone way up? Okay they've gone up a little, sure, but that's well-explained by inflation, and they're still way below the historical norm and even below where they were just in 2018. If I were confident the world were going to end or I would see any equity I had go up by a factor of 100, I'd be borrowing like crazy. Also, why haven't the firm's best poised to take advantage of this seen their share price explode?
I'm not sure we can expect markets to price in the end of the world. There has historically been no selection for doing that, as the world has thus far not ended. Also, remember how COVID-19 didn't affect equity prices until fairly late (Feb 2020).
I don't know the answer to this. If I were going to investigate, I would want to check the history of beachfront property costs and flood insurance as people started worrying about global warming. I vaguely remember hearing that these didn't reflect global warming concerns a few years ago but do now.
>If I were confident the world were going to end or I would see any equity I had go up by a factor of 100
There are alternatives to those, such as "somebody gets a loyal AI, overthrows the government, then stiffs his own shareholders because they can't actually enforce anything anymore" or "AI is brought under socialist control/the state makes the breakthrough".
There's also the question of "when does it happen", since *when* we'll get AI is not clear and you need a timeframe to win with this kind of borrowing, and the question of "to what end" since you don't actually need that much money to live comfortably and "leaving something to your kids" is moot if the world ends/things go post-scarcity.
I agree. This information has too many degrees of freedom to be priced into the market in a clearly discernible way.
Not interest rates in particular, but it's fair to say that the people who move the market do not agree with the people who predict that the singularity is near.
As for who is right and who is wrong, that's a more complicated question.
I wouldn't expect this sort of thing to be priced into interests rates at this juncture. It's just not the sort of thing serious investors will consider until it becomes more concrete. They're wrong about that in my opinion, but this kind of once-only event is exactly the kind of edge case where I wouldn't take the efficient markets hypothesis too seriously.
The promise of AI destroying the world or solving every possible problem has been there multiple times in the past. Excitement holds a few years, but after the technological limits become clear interest fades. This is know as an "AI winter" and happened a few times before. So AI gets uninteressting until a new breakthrough is made or computational power gets cheap enough to scale old methods. The current boom solved some very specific problems (is quite powerful at that and the improvements didn't slow down as of yet). But these are still specific one task AIs. Not yet near world engulfing general AI. I think the economic response reflects the experiences with AI in the past.
I don't think we'll have a proper AI winter again. Maybe a cut back in investment, but there are actually successful products which rely on modern ML now.
But we may reach the point where we've probed the limits of what's possible with current methods, declared it "not real AI", and stagnated again. That could be another AI winter.
Is there a way to disable all substack notifications for other people replying to comments that are not mine? If I reply to a comment, and then somebody else replies to that same comment, I get a notification email in the form "User1 replied to User2's comment". The only option I've found is "Notifications-Likes and Replies to my comments" which I have turned on and would like to continue receiving; I just don't want to receive notifications for replies to other peoples' comments.
A mute sub thread option would be great.
Disclaimer: I'm 10 shots of bourbon to the wind.
I've been watching recent dall-e 2 developments with great interest, partially because I think I might be able to make someone with dall-e 2 access make me a new blog logo. But beyond that, it's because I look at some of the art D2: the AIghty Ducks does and realize it does satisfy a large amount of what I-the-uneducated-consumer wants from still images.
I often contemplate the fact that people read what I write. It's in some ways very weird that this is the case, because I have an extreme lack of education in the formalities of the English language. If you asked me what a preposition was right now, gun to my kid's head, I couldn't tell you. To the extent I can write words people want to read, it's mainly because of luck; my neurons fire in a certain way and my muscle memory is developed on certain pathways that make words people want to see. If I was a little less lucky I'd have zero subsribers.
To the extent I have subscribers/readers and I get to pretend to be a writer, it's because I did something like grinding out articles on the off chance that bigger voices linked out to them and I was able to "steal" some amount of their audience by a mechanism that looks suspiciously like luck. If I wrote enough articles, eventually I might get lucky and one might tickle the fancy of enough people that it becaue big.
I'm one of the lucky few for which this mechanism worked. I had a few articles (I think four in total) that were picked up by some larger outlet who then amplified my work. I say "work" with a little heavier weighting than a casual read might imply, because it really *was* work to produce them. An average article takes 4-8 hours to produce, and even then I'm cutting corners and hoping for the best when I hit publish.
This in turn led to big things. I have the first job I've ever had that pays decently. I was able to get into the homeownership game. There's a very, very outside chance that eventually I might "hop the curb" and get the blog big enough that writing is my job in that real sense where I write things I believe and like and people like them enough that I can just do that, full stop, and still provide for my family.
But now imagine a dall-e 2 type performance for writing - that you can say "give me an article about X", hit the generate button fifteen times and eventually get a pretty good article about X. Where does that leave the guys like me? Because overall I really do acknowledge I've been very lucky and very blessed to have the limited success I've seen so far. And to the extent I've seen that success, it's because I can produce a decent piece of writing almost every week.
When you can tell a computer "Produce an article on bottlecaps in the style of Resident Contrarian" and have it take 100 tries in five minutes, what chance does the actual Resident Contrarian stand?
Again, sorry, I've had an amount of liquor that could make a good sized horse reconsideri its life choices. But I do worry about things like this - it's hard to imagine a GPT-5 world where I'm still relevant.
As I said in another comment, if your job can be supplanted by a machine, then it should be. You could either learn to do a better job, or find another line of work. In some cases, this means that your job will be eliminated due to the machine's superhuman performance -- such as the job of "computer" (which used to be a human person !), "telephone operator", or "horse-drawn carriage operator" (outside of a few novelty rides), and perhaps "truck driver" sometime soon. This sucks, and we need a safety net to support the victims of automation; but the upside is that we can now achieve superhuman output on all of these tasks. This benefits everybody, and these benefits vastly outweigh the losses.
There are those two ways to think about it. I don't disagree, but both these things can be true:
1. Ala DeVito's buggy whip principle, technology should not halt to preserve jobs; it's a net loss if it does.
2. If I lose writing, I go back to $35k, lose my house and a bunch of other stuff I don't like.
I agree with 1, broadly. I likely wouldn't lobby to keep robots out of the creative sphere or whatever. But I'm terrified of 2.
I am in the same boat as you (only with old-school programming instead of writing), so I sympathize -- but sympathy is all I can offer you (as well as myself). You cannot shovel back the tide, and in fact doing so would be selfish and ultimately harmful even if you could somehow succeed. Everyone today is better off without the telephone switchboard operators; even the people who would normally enter the switchboard operator career. This is so easy to see, which is why the change is inevitable. Your only option is to acquire some new skills, or to lobby for a better safety net, or of course both.
"Everyone today is better off without the telephone switchboard operators; even the people who would normally enter the switchboard operator career."
Look me in the eye and tell me that, when I've been waiting half an hour on a work call on a telephone menu tree which leads me round in circles and where my query would be answered in five minutes if I could just contact a human being.
Human customer support rep, yes; human switchboard operator, no. She'd just make your menu quest go much slower.
Those are pretty annoying. I’ve run into a couple of infinite loops that can only be escaped by hanging up.
"Creative sphere" is really the issue here, isn't it ?
I don't mind that much machines automating drudgery (though this can cause issues too, see : luddites - EDIT : now that I think of it, textile workers *did* have creative freedom, didn't they ?), but the reveal of both GPT-3 (or was it 2 ?) and DALL-E 2 made me really sad because I immediately thought of all the struggling artists that have trouble to make ends meet (that is the overwhelming majority of all artists), that are now going to be struggling ever more !
Nice drunken rant very much in the style of Resident Contrarian- these D2 bots really are impressive “~}
I am in fact spending some time this morning considering the wisdom of public comments made when one has been drinking a lot of Old Granddad.
I love Old Granddad.
I do an impression of the experience of drinking Old Granddad, which is just me yelling "I'm in your house!" in an enormously pleased yet oblivious old man voice.
That sounds wonderful, especially if heard by drunken ears.
Reminds me of a story a friend told me: He and his buddy took LSD. Buddy picks up a guitar & plays the same sequence of 4 chords over and over for about an hour. Friend is saying, "Lenny! Are you OK?" etc. Finally after an hour Lenny looks up and says, "lemme tell ya bout the boogie."
Ach, when it's the booze talking, let's all agree it's on Old Granddad. The old geezer is like that, don't take him seriously 😀🥃
Huh, you know what, I don't think I've ever had the pleasure to make Old Grandad's acquaintance. How does it compare to other bourbons ?
So I like it a lot, personally, for a lot of non-standard reasons:
1. It's heavy rye, and just generally heavy everything. It's a very strong tasting bourbon.
2. It makes almost no attempt at being smooth. Especially the 114 version. It's a bourbon that is actively angry at you for drinking it and it does not attempt to hide this.
3. It's very, very cheap.
If you are me and you need 100 proof to even get started, then it has you covered, even more so with 114. If you then have a unique drunkenness profile where you need quite a bit to feel it, but you are then very close to being over-drunk already, then the overall roughness helps keep things a little slower.
If you are looking for smoothness, there's dozens and dozens of bourbons that do it better. If you want a really, really aggressive flavor profile that cuts through mixers well, this is good for that. If you are me, it's about the only thing that I know about that optimizes my drinking experience the way I want it optimized, but I'm guessing my exact drinking needs are relatively rare.
I poured a glass of Jim Beame down the drain once after deciding I didn’t really want a drink. A while later my wife came out of the kitchen to tell me something was caught in garbage disposal, rotting, creating a terrible smell. I went and checked. Yeah, that’s how bourbon is supposed to smell.
I’ve had a hard two drink limit since the advent of ubiquitous video recording.
You mean this casual nonsense is going on my permanent record?
A weird thing about writing a bunch in public is you eventually have to start thinking about, basically, how you look in your casual internet conversations. So if I want to burn someone down to their very roots in an argument, I then have to consider how that might be turned around on me later, etc.
Not necessarily a bad thing, but it probably means I need to revise my RoE for certain things.
On one of my milestone birthdays, coworkers bought me a boilermaker, a whisky shot glass submerged in a mug of beer. I was happy to show them how an old iron miner does it, tossing it off without a breath, shot glass clinking on my teeth. It would have been fine if they hadn't thought it was so cool that it became 'endless boiler makers'.
I'm told I kissed the company flirt later that evening. My one brush with infidelity in 40 years of marriage.
Not particularly proud of that and I guess I didn’t have to keep drinking them just because they kept appearing in front of me.
Well for decades automation and relocalisation have only impacted blue collar jobs and we highly educated workers have explained that it's for the best.
Now we are in for some ironic times were our jobs get outsourced to machines or India/Vietnam/China - I guess we will suddenly decide that the situation is completely different and that automation is in fact bad (unless it only impacts socialist/Trump leaning workers from the rust belt).
Until about a year ago I was pretty firmly in the "Pretty damn broke for reason that mgiht be automation" camp, fwiw.
I was careful to include myself "we will suddenly decide" among those privileged workers who will at last get the bad side of the globalisation/automation. This was not an attack against you - in fact I think I was agreeing.
I didn't think you were attacking me - no worries there, I'm probably doing a bad job getting the right tone. I just have a weird personal context that I'm not sure everyone knows where all this is a little more terrifying to me - it's much more normal for me to be making >35k than >50k, historically.
Yeah, it's Schadenfreude in full bloom, but I want to see the thinkpieces by the people who wrote about how the Rust Belt types were racists if they weren't delighted poor Chinese peasant farmers were now working in factories that had been outsourced from the USA and now had a better standard of living, writing about how it's really great that they are now losing out to AI on employment because you can't stand in the way of progress, you racist know-nothings!
I have mixed thoughts about this. Looking at the DALL-E 2 samples on their website, it just demonstrates Vermeer was indeed better. Maybe more improvements will do better, but I think what it might do, if it ever works well enough to go commercial, is not "enabling people to be creative", it'll do one of two things (maybe both):
(1) Commercial art for advertising, etc. Like you say, "design me a logo". The inventors will make their money by licencing fees like Adobe.
(2) Currently, a lot of amateur and semi-pro artists do commissions for fan works, OCs, and the like. If you can tell the program "draw my OC dressed up as Captain America fighting the Hulk but in the style of Hello Kitty", that will cut out selling commissions (I think unpaid sites like DeviantArt will still continue).
(3) The bans on "generat(ing) violent, hate, or adult images" will soon fall as soon as this goes commercial or even widespread. People will want to do porn images of their favourites. And if "Captain America fighting the Hulk" is considered "violent images", then there will be hacks and work-arounds and mods galore.
Will it replace Art As Art? I doubt it. There's already a huge market churning out "things to put up on your wall" that you can buy in home furnishings stores alongside your nested tables and tallboys and resin Buddha statues. Thomas Kinkade was immensely popular and commercially successful, but few people will claim this is masterpiece art rather than 'product'. I'm not knocking Kinkade, he had genuine talent and ability, but he found a market and settled into "this is what the buyers want" and churned out product to please that market. This will just shift into commercial gear where instead of a workshop full of Chinese piece-workers knocking out 'copies of copies of copies of The Haywain', it'll be automated with spray painters connected up to DALL-E knockoffs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvesYh2zSDY
On the other hand, we'll still have the Tracey Emins and Jeff Koons of the fine art world, and I'm not that sure that's an improvement, either. I have come to appreciate David Hockney more in recent years as he did learn the old techniques when he was an apprentice artist. I don't know if modern artists *can* draw or if it's all "empty out your laundry basket and call it conceptual art", and that's unfair of me.
So - the word version of DALL-E (and the cutesy-pooness of that name, the 'ain't I clever?' pun on Dali and that blinkin' robot animated movie I am supposed to find so heartwarming evoke in me the same reaction as Dorothy Parker reading "The House At Pooh Corner" - 'Tonstant Weader Fwowed up' https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1928/10/20/far-from-well) will do very well for churning out filler content. The penny-a-liners who work freelance journalism will suffer here.
Those who can write with a distinctive voice will not, at least until we get good enough machines to fake sincerity.
>Looking at the DALL-E 2 samples on their website, it just demonstrates Vermeer was indeed better.
Completely and totally agree about the Vermeers. I can't believe the DALL-E lot even put that shit into their infomercial. They must have deeply undeveloped sensibilities in that domain.
As I see it, the problem of art automation has been solved from both ends, as usual. On the one hand, computers got much better at art; on the other hand, humans have virtually lost the capacity to produce traditional art (+). It doesn't take a deep-learning AI to produce an artwork in the style of Jackson Pollock; all it takes is a set of paint buckets and a large canvas. Reproducing something even more avant-garde such as *The Black Square* is even easier.
(+) Which is not at all the case with non-traditional art, such as video games, though obviously 90% of everything is still crap.
I've been thinking the same thing. Amateur commissions become dirt cheap and porn gets more individualized; real art is basically unaffected.
Well, I suppose we could see real artists start painting in the style of AI. Droopy eyes, lip snarls, and club arms could be the hot new thing!
Nice sarky comment with literary references very much in the style of Deiseach - damn these Dall-E bots are getting better “~}
The "automated" art reproduction market in China already existed. Hear this extremely interesting episode about it: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/art-imitates-art/
DALL-E will make it that now you don't even have to order up a container load of 'art' from China, you can have it done for pennies right here at home by someone running a printshop on computers (which newspapers have long been doing with computer typesetting and offset lithography printing).
But it’s still a print, while I get a real oil painting from China.
I guess we could automate that as well.
No problem at all, once someone works out the details. All you'll need is a couple of guys to make sure the paint containers are filled and to move the completed 'artworks' onto a pallet for shipping.
Pretty sure we can automate those menial tasks as well. Boston Dynamics could probably already do it on something as repetitive as that.
Yeah, I think about this a lot too.
One possibility is: you write very well about your experiences in some unusual environments and communities. An AI could ape this, but it would be lying - it hasn't had these experiences. Even if everything it describes is accurate and it draws conclusions as good as yours (which I think would be really hard) human readers wouldn't know this, and would naturally trust you more than an AI. I think there will be lots of things like this, and that humans will keep trusting human writers for much longer than is justified by their actual advantage.
(if you were going to double down on this strategy, you'd start writing about the perils of an AI world - something we'd be least likely to trust AIs on, and which appeals to the demographic least likely to switch to AIs!)
Likewise, I think there might be a while between AIs that can write well, and AIs that can analyze scientific questions well. Some GPTs that could write well still seemed to make basic reasoning errors if you looked closely; I don' know how long that will last. At least "AIs can analyze difficult scientific questions at least as well as humans" sounds pretty close to "AIs can do science", which I think of as a later stage of world-craziness than "AIs can write".
I predict the first areas of writing to fall to AIs (in terms of actual market share, not what they can theoretically do) will be fiction and humor, and the last areas will be things like social commentary.
I think by the time social commentary falls, so many jobs will have fallen that we'll be in a different economic regimen and maybe thinking about things more like UBIs, and the world will end a few years later. This makes me less concerned that there will be some long period in which writers are uniquely out of work and it's terrible for me.
"I predict the first areas of writing to fall to AIs (in terms of actual market share, not what they can theoretically do) will be fiction and humor, and the last areas will be things like social commentary."
GPT-3 et al seem more cut out for generic reportorial content, imo. A more optimistic/humanistic take would see the tech augmenting the production of daily-beat journalists who collect some basic facts (say box score of a high-school football game), and have it crank out a story based on them. Some type of this work (like daily market reports) could be fully automated. But this may also free up some of the human's time to write more in-depth work, with fact-collection outside of the ability of the algo.
As far as blogging and punditry go, I'm not up on the ability of NLP models to 'theme' like humans, but I'm skeptical they'll be able to stylize in a sufficient manner to replace good writers in the near term. The prose I've seen so far looks beige. Matt Yglesias had an example tweet today: https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1513829798841393154
It's worse than beige, though. You can sense that there's no mind in there -- just something that has learned some things about how to string sentences together that are in the right general subject area and strung together in a plausible sequence. This reminds me of the kind of stuff my daughter at age 15 used to dash off for high school classes she cared nothing about. I would read them and realize that she had produced them without accessing *one single solitary thought, opinion, emotion, doubt or shred of confusion* regarding the topic.
"just something that has learned some things about how to string sentences together that are in the right general subject area and strung together in a plausible sequence."
To my own suspicions, and dissecting this a little further; it's traversing knowledge graphs in a data repository, with directed edges connecting entities/nodes, and the "writing" consists of inserting grammatical connectors.
Wow, that Terminator essay creeps me out quite a lot. Something about the combo of it being entirely passable, and yet clearly empty of mind. Makes me think of a photo I saw one time of somebody's pet dog, which had been preserved by taxidermy after death and sat in a characteristic alert posture in the living room.
> who collect some basic facts (say box score of a high-school football game), and have it crank out a story based on them. Some type of this work (like daily market reports) could be fully automated.
Those are already automated, and in fact were automated even years before GPT.
At local newspapers/TV-stations?
At Henry’s bier let some thing fall out well:
enter there none who somewhat has to sell,
the music ancient & gradual,
the voices solemn but the grief subdued,
no hairy jokes but everybody’s mood
subdued, subdued,
until the Dancer comes, in a short short dress
hair black & long & loose, dark dark glasses,
uptilted face,
pallor & strangeness, the music changes
to “Give!” & “Ow!” & how! the music changes,
she kicks a backward limb
on tiptoe, pirouettes, & she is free
to the knocking music, sails, dips, & suddenly
returns to the terrible gay
occasion hopeless & mad, she weaves, it’s hell,
she flings to her head a leg, bobs, all is well,
she dances Henry away.
--John Berryman
Gonna be a long time before an AI produces something this good.
It's better at modernist poetry in my experience.
What you do mean by modernist? And by any chance do you have any examples of AI poetry, modernist or not?
By modernist do you mean the Berryman poem? It was written I believe in the 1950's, so it's not exactly ancient.
Sure. This is 5% me, 55% GPT-3 and 35% existing famous poems, it's structured in the style of a high modernist poem: https://deponysum.com/2021/02/23/poem/
Be warned, it's mostly a proof of concept piece, it's not very good. I ended up steering it, through the selection of content, to be a kind of tribute poem to my favorite book.
> "One possibility is: you write very well about your experiences in some unusual environments and communities. An AI could ape this, but it would be lying - it hasn't had these experiences. Even if everything it describes is accurate and it draws conclusions as good as yours (which I think would be really hard) [...]"
Yeah, don't even GPT-3 and DALL-E fail on concepts they didn't have much exposure of ? So "niche" art should be safe from them ?
(otOH, I seem to remember a breakthrough at some point in the number of training material required - though wasn't it adversarial networks - what allowed GPT to be created in the first place ?)
I'm having the impression that once we'll get human(+) levels of competence in extrapolating from tiny amounts of training material, we'll be pretty close to general intelligence - at which point we'll have bigger issues than this !
> I predict the first areas of writing to fall to AIs (in terms of actual market share, not what they can theoretically do) will be fiction and humor, and the last areas will be things like social commentary.
How do you figure ? I would've predicted exactly the opposite. It doesn't take a lot of intelligence to reproduce a Buzzfeed listicle (which is what most social commentary is like); I bet you could even do it with a Markov Chain of some kind. But writing a joke that is actually funny, or a story that is actually readable, is a task that is beyound most humans at the moment.
"But writing a joke that is actually funny, or a story that is actually readable, is a task that is beyond most humans at the moment." I agree. And I am positive I would not mistake the AI-generated Rbt. Frost poems I read about somewhere for the real thing
But you're not taking into account that if a lot of what's available is AI-generated humor and fiction, tastes will change. The young, who are wired to bond with deep delight with the world they are born into, will weave their child-mind magic through the crapulous plastic worlds of AI-generated fiction. As they grow older the algorithm-derived denizens of their imagination will power their ambitions and serve as models for them as they a navigate the delights and agonies of love, achievement and death. They will be like hermit crabs who use plastic tampon tubes as homes, or decorator crabs gluing bottlecaps to their shells. Older adults will experience a gradual diminution of their enjoyment of fiction and humor as more and more if it is AI-generated, but will just get used to having briefer and shallower responses -- maybe they will attribute their reduced enjoyment to middle age.
Edit: later thought. I don’t think people give enough thought to how the internet is changing people. What I describe above is a way I fear it it will change people in the future. Ryan Broderick’s Garbage Day blog often gives glimpses of ways that’s happening in the present. For instance, this, from his post called The Bird Site Demands Content, about people’s “participation” in the Ukraine war via online forums:
“There are a lot of internet users who, after a decade of exposure to viral media, have had their minds so thoroughly warped by trending content that they believe that reacting to popular internet culture is not just a replacement for a personality, but some kind of moral duty. It seems social platforms have not only eroded newsrooms by decimating the ad industry, but they have also, in the process, turned everyone into emotional trauma gig workers.”
Ok, but you don't need AI for that. Your argument also supports training children to enjoy random strings of text, or whatever.
You can't get a hermit crab to take up residence in absolutely anything -- a nail, a shred of plastic bag: It has to be a container, & it has to be the right size & weight. Likewise you can't get kids to bond with just any old thing. I agree you don't need AI to raise a generation of kids who have plastic imaginative crap woven into their psyche. But I think AI-generated fiction would definitely facilitate the process, by producing a ton of plastic imaginative crap. You can't get kids to bond deeply with something by just presenting them with a random stimulus -- say a random string of text. For them to bond with something imaginatively the thing has to have various qualities that capture their deep attention. If it's a story, it has to involve living beings going through comprehensible, emotion-generating events that kids can comprehend and engage with imaginatively. And of course it helps if the kids perceive that the thing presented to them is of interest to the people that are important to them. Random strings of text don't make the grade in either respect.
Fair enough, but again, I don't see what special features AI would bring to this problem. Either it will produce enjoyable fiction, which children will adopt; or it will produce some kind of garbage-tier writing that children will discard. Human writers are in the exact same boat. I guess you could argue that humans demand more pay and/or work slower, but that's a quantitative difference, not a qualitative one.
Some forms of writing (routine sports and stock market journalism) already got automated by AIs even *before* GPT and the like.
I remember being disturbed way back in 2017 when I googled the stock ticker of an obscure public company and a bunch of articles turned up which were subtly incoherent and insubstantial and clearly the result of an automated system filling in a template with the latest financial and stock market data.
Sober me is reassured by everything here besides the pending robot apocalypse, thank you.
Nice thoughtful comment uncannily like the real Scott in style - damn these Dall-E bots are hot “~}
If it counts, then I know for a fact that the first area of writing that has already fallen to AI is regulatory documentation in the pharmaceutical sector.
I always wondered whether the same system has been sold the the regulatory bodies. I guess it is just a matter of time.
"One possibility is: you write very well about your experiences in some unusual environments and communities."
Oh God, you mean doubling down yet again on the trend where every essay has to be a personal essay? Bleak.
There is something really funny about this unfortunate trend being accelerated by AI (but thinking about it feels kind of like worrying about how all this water is really wrecking the decor on the Titanic).
Yes, all our voices are about the be drowned out by a flood of AI generated content, with the possible exception of people like Scott who have a prior reputation. If you haven't made it as an author in, say, 4 years, it's gonna get a lot harder.
This AI generated content will be created by people with all sorts of values political and ethical, many of them quite different to mine, many of them not at all benign. Think the panic over Russian bots but much more real.
I'm afraid. We are calling up strange powers.
I'm not worried about AI, just the virtual over the natural. I just tried doing my taxes online. When the program asked for my cell phone number, it collapsed. I don't own a mobile phone. It just had to send me a text message, poor thing. I had to hack the form to complete it. AI is programmed by the same illiterate clowns who program autocorrect. God help us.
This is a pretty common fear of automation in a variety of industries. I've heard of coders afraid that AI will start writing programs. "Make an SaaS app that tracks budgets" and then it spits that out. Or truckers. So I don't think it's all that unusual.
Firstly, keep in mind if it's not in general release they're showing you the best generations not the average one. Very often what happens in practice is these things generate a ton of options and a human hand selects the best couple of ones and that hides a lot of failure. But secondly: what's more likely than replacement is a tool. You sign up for a software service called WriterAssistant. You tell WriterAssistant "produce an article on bottlecaps in the style of Resident Contrarian that does X, Y, and Z" and it spits something out. You edit it, add in what's missing, delete some stuff, and rework the piece. And then publish. One could imagine a completely GPT-3 author. But that'd be a lot harder without human editing/intervention.
And even if you got a fully automated blog up and running there's little reason to believe humans wouldn't want to read what other humans write. Writing is largely artisanal. I like to think of a lot of writing as an ultimately social activity. Full automation might happen somewhat but I suspect it will be limited to things like horoscopes. After all, someone has to generate the data on what (for example) women 20 to 25 think. (This is without getting into the various policies that prevent it and the fact of privileged, real world information.)
The pernicious effect I'm afraid of, if afraid is the word, is the skills barrier. As AI and automation take over all jobs will increasingly come to resemble specialized forms of programming. And that will shut certain people out of writing or force them into less efficient traditional writing. Not because I believe there's a class of people who can't do it but because it creates a barrier and any time a form of social communication has barriers to entry it turns cliquish in ways I don't think are good.
Right now we're in a gap where distribution is increasingly automated but production is still artisanal. Which is ideal to get in as an amateur. But I don't think it will last forever if there's significant money in it.
> I've heard of coders afraid that AI will start writing programs. "Make an SaaS app that tracks budgets" and then it spits that out.
We already have compilers, open source software, low/no code tools, now copilot, before intellisense. All of that has only made the industry grow.
Welcome to the AI optimist club. There aren't many of us but we're much happier.
A psychoanalyst (and you thought they were extinct) argues that psychoactive drugs are a bad idea, because they keep us from dealing with the real issues that cause us pain:
"For Mental Illness, Make Medication a Last Resort" Psychiatrists and even internists are often far too eager to prescribe pills." By Erica Komisar April 4, 2022
https://www.wsj.com/articles/mental-illness-pills-antidepressants-medication-anxiety-depression-drugs-adhd-cbt-therapy-psychoanalysis-11649100243
"Doctors prescribe these medications as a quick fix. But the pills merely mask the patient’s emotional pain. "
"Medication can be a godsend in the right context. But it is risky and should be offered only after nonmedical options, such as psychoanalysis, have been exhausted. Why is therapy instead often a last resort for patients? In part because it is uncomfortable. Some patients temporarily become more symptomatic when they expose themselves to the origins of their pain. This temporary pain is necessary for long-term relief, but it’s easier to numb with pills."
"There are no shortcuts to treating mental illness. Insurance companies should be pressured into covering treatments that work. Patients have to be consumers and say no to medication as a first course of treatment unless their symptoms are severe. Doctors must acknowledge that medication can be risky and have severe iatrogenic effects. Medication should only be used for serious clinical conditions, or only after everything else has been tried and failed."
My own experience is that psychological insight can lead us to understand why we are depressed. But, it does not necessarily cure the depression. My life was little changed by psychoanalysis except for the time and money it cost. Zoloft made me feel better and sleep better.
CBT was a godsend for me, but I would never have been able to engage with and benefit from it if I was not taking Lexapro at the same time. You need a cast for a broken leg to heal correctly and you (often) need medication for therapy to work correctly.
I think that prescription is a classic case of falling into the fallacy that one can truly stand in another’s shoes and describe the world from that perspective
Understanding the cause of illnesses is important but that doesn't meant that drugs shouldn't be part of the treatment. I think there's also a real self-serving bias in a prescription of "don't take these pills that make you feel better, pay me lots of money every week for years instead!"
Absolutely, a grotesque self-serving bias in this article. But let me tell you a bad story, & not an unusual one, about the misuse of antidepressants. 24 year old woman comes for therapy. She feels adrift in life -- not exactly miserable, but had lost her mojo. Been like that for a few years. She lives with her honey, a woman, but relationship feels sort of humdrum and passionless.
Here's some backstory: Age 17 she was a closeted lesbian highschooler, feeling very lonely and sad. Went to some mental health professional, said she was lonely and sad all the time but did not disclose that she was a closeted lesbian. Counselor put her on an SSRI. She thinks the drug made her feel better at the time. Seven years later she is still on it -- she how has her internist renew it for her. She is now uninterested in sex, anorgasmic and 40 pounds overweight. She has tried stopping her antidepressant in the past, but when she does she feels terriblel -- anxious, irritable, has flu-like symptoms. She believes that is what she would feel like all the time if she were not on an antidepressant. Nobody has informed her that the antidepressant she is on is famous for having an awful withdrawal syndrome, and that that is what she is experiencing when she stops it cold turkey.
If you're going to compare the relative effectiveness of drugs to other interventions, it is not really fair to compare SSRI's to psychoanalysis, which is a slo-mo, mink-coat-expensive, specialized treatment . You need to compare drugs to effective psychosocial interventions. In the case of this woman, what would have helped when she was 17 wasn't treatment of an illness -- it was someone interested enough and skillful enough to draw the kid out about her dilemma and help her navigate the coming out process. Like that kid, lots of people diagnosed with anxiety and depression are not ill, they are just scared and unhappy for reasons that are quite valid and understandable. Others are caught in mind-traps -- but there are many approaches to trap escape that are better and faster than psychoanalysis. And there are some people for whom psychoanalysis works well.
> said she was lonely and sad all the time but did not disclose that she was a closeted lesbian
This struck me as less a story about the misuse of antidepressants than about the inability that a lot of us have identifying the source of our discontent. Perhaps it was the therapist’s shortcoming, but how do you really know that?
> there are many approaches to trap escape that are better and faster than psychoanalysis.
I would be very curious to hear some of them.
"Perhaps it was the therapist’s shortcoming, but how do you really know that?"
Well, of course, I do not know that for sure. But the professional who saw this woman at age 17 put her on an SSRI quite quickly. I think that if a 17 year old comes to you saying they're sad and lonely, it makes sense to spend a few sessions getting to know them and drawing them out to see if their unhappiness is not a manifestation of a "chemical imbalance" but an understandable response to one of the things that very commonly cause pain & confusion for people that age: sexual orientation, other sexual issues, unaddressed academic difficulties, conflict and poor communication with parents. Adolescents with many of these common problems are pretty helpable, once you get the issue out on the table. So to move so quickly to diagnosing the kid with Prozac Deficiency Disorder seems like quite bad practice to me.
"This struck me as less a story about the misuse of antidepressants than about the inability that a lot of us have identifying the source of our discontent."
By the woman's account she was quite clear that her secret homosexuality was a very painful problem for her. While she may not have thought of it as the reason she was sad and lonely (and indeed it may not have been the sole cause of her feeling that way), she sure as hell knew it was bothering her terribly. As for this being a case of misuse of antidepressants, there are at least 3 things wrong with how the antidepressant treatment was administered, beyond the problem that it was initiated so quickly: (1) It affected how the kid thought of herself -- weighed in the direction of her thinking of herself as someone with a "chemical imbalance in her brain," rather than as someone who went through a period of misery caused by a problem that made the misery understandable. Of course, sometimes people have to face up to the fact that their brain does not work right. But it is not clear that this 17 year old was one of the people who had to do that.
(2) Professionals kept her on the drug for years, without suggesting that she try seeing how life was without it. (3) Nobody informed her that her med had a substantial discontinuation syndrome. Consequently, when she tried stopping the drug on her own and experienced the syndrome she believed she was getting a taste of what life would be like without an SSRI.
"> there are many approaches to trap escape that are better and faster than psychoanalysis.
I would be very curious to hear some of them."
Recommend you read Scott's post about depression treatments:
https://lorienpsych.com/2021/06/05/depression/#23_What_kind_of_medications_help_with_depression
I read Scott’s article, and I think I might’ve read it before. I don’t see any discussion of some treatments that trumps psychoanalysis or medication.
Of course there’s a lot of things that one can do for oneself if depressed, But the unfortunate thing is the depression makes it very hard to do something for oneself at all.
That bridge has to be crossed.
Thanks for this. This is all good. I was under the impression that she did not raise the issue of her sexuality with that therapist. I am entirely willing to believe that this was therapy on the most basic and crude level. And I am also well aware of how crappy that can be. I think a lot of that is economic pressure. As you pointed out psychoanalysis is pricey. And even the word psychoanalysis needs to be treated carefully. What exactly are we talking about? A lot of the issues you raise revolve around the notion that this therapist did not want to spend a lot of time with her and that could be because of disinterest and could well be because he was a high school guidance counselor level therapist with pretty strict protocols about time and money. It’s all very sad.
I am a lifelong sufferer of major depressive cycles so I do appreciate it. Of course when I first started any sort of therapeutic intervention there were no medications. So I come back to the other point I made which is the difficulty of sometimes identifying what it is that’s really troubling. It took me a long time and I don’t know that I can say it was because the therapist didn’t ask the right questions.
My personal intuition is that medication is useful once your brain has worn a rut in itself. Which definitely suggests that it’s not so useful for very young people. But I hate to make rules about people’s sanity.
Normative determinism: Alcor Life Extension Foundation, one of USA's top cryonics organizations, is just outside of Phoenix, Arizona.
Rising from the ashes, or having your frozen corpse defrosted and incinerated in 2121 - or more likely accidentally defrosted and decaying in situ when the power goes down.
(A)lcor (L)ife (E)xtension (F)oundation= ALEF=ALEPH=Beginning of the Hebrew alphabet
If you were a scientist in Oregon in the 1960s who had just discovered the altered hemoglobin structures of embryos and fetuses, what would you call it to be far more exciting instead of Portland 1?
If there's a Eugeneics joke you're circling around, I'm not seeing it.
There isn't! I just think they could have thought of a cooler name
Mutant blood 2?
Scott - it seems like a great leaders book club could be a very useful thing to have. What results in a Lee Kuan Yew, Deng Xiaoping, Park Chung hee, coming into power and then using that power to unleash market reforms for broad based prosperity? What are the conditions that allow these leaders to be who they were and do what they did?
Have you read the DSL series on the Gwangju Uprising? It is really insightful on Park Chung Hee.
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,3506.msg117636.html#msg117636
No I'll give it a look, thanks
And how are they different from people with comparably absolute power like Pinochet, whose economics may not have been bad, exactly, but certainly didn't achieve take-off comparable to those cases.
Add Maggie Thatcher, for someone who fits the pattern but is a good deal more controversial.
I assure you, all three leaders are plenty controversial. You just live in the anglosphere and don't notice the controversy, especially about Park, whose political descendants no longer hold absolute power.
Regardless of people's opinions of her, operating as a democratic leader in an already wealthy country is very different from operating as an autocrat in a poor country that becomes wealthy under your power.
For Thatcher, you probably want a different reference class - Adenauer, perhaps?
Agreed. I did consider it but didn't want the suggestion to be controversial off the bat
You think Deng Xiaoping is less controversial than Margaret Thatcher?
My use of 'controversial' here was regarding the claim that they were great leaders who achieved great things for their countries. I think it's not controversial that Deng set China onto a different and significantly more successful path. I have not yet seen anyone argue against the idea that he's a great leader for that reason. There are plenty of people who would contest such a claim about Thatcher.
Deng appeared to achieve good results simply by being less bad than Mao, but Mao was probably the worst person (in results terms at least) in the history of mankind.
I don't think that makes Deng "great" in any reasonable sense.
This is correct. Deng was mostly just less bad than Mao, and had the benefit of seeing how abso-fucking-lutely awful the effects of the Cultural Revolution were. "Do the opposite of what Mao did" served the Chinese very well for decades. There wasn't much genius involved.
This is an absurd claim. Deng was very much not just 'less bad than Mao'. His policies and leadership led to the largest and fastest reduction in poverty (and move towards prosperity) the world has ever seen.
Anyone have thoughts on a good way to start reading Indian epics? Other than the Bhagavad Gita, I haven't read any. But they're pretty damn long and I'm not sure I'd get through a poem that's ten times the length of the Iliad and Odyssey combined. Any favorite abridgements or selections? Best translations? Thanks.
Dutt's English verse translation was the way I first read the core story of the epics. It's a beautiful translation, heavily shortened and at times summarized, but it's a weekend read. Then when I returned to the Gita, which I'd read before, I understood it in a totally new light. And once I'd got the summary outline of the story, I could read other translations in whole or in part and I understood what was going on.
Ancient Epics aren't like modern thrillers, the audience didn't go in cold wondering "oh man what's gonna happen to Aeneas!?!?" Start by understanding the story then work outward.
That's the whole impetus behind Tulsidas translating the Valmiki Ramayana (written in Sanskrit) into the vernacular so that the common people could understand it, and it was every bit as controversial as the Reformers wanting to publish the Bible in the vernacular 😀
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsidas
I have an illustrated Mahabharata that I like a lot. There's also an R.K Narayan abridged versions of the epics translated into English.
Gosh, this is something I don't know any good English translations for! The only ones I know of are 19th century and immensely prolix. Gateway for me was TV serials, which give you the high points and after you've watched a couple, you're familiar enough with the main characters and the plot that it would help when reading a translation.
I would tell you to avoid Sita Sings The Blues, which someone I generally like recommended but I think it's awful, but then tastes differ:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzTg7YXuy34
If you go on Youtube and just search for Ramayana or Mahabharat there are a lot of Indian serials (some very old, some from the 90s).
The Ramayana is probably easier to get into; it's the story of an incarnation of Vishnu and his travails as Purushottam, the ideal or perfect man, one who does not transgress social limits, born as Rama.
The Mahabharat has a lot more "wait a minute, who is this again and whose son/grandson/nephew/reincarnation are they?"
And if you want to experience something completely different, you could read Roger Zelazny's *Lord of Light*. It is not a Hindu or a Buddhist epic; but, like most of Zelazny's stories, it feels like the ground truth that such epics are based on.
I love that book, it is somewhat dated in its attitudes now but the whole notion of super-powered humans emulating the Hindu pantheon, and a form of transhumanism (new bodies of whatever gender you like are available and you can just keep re-incarnating) is great. When the crew of the crashed spaceship become tyrannical, desiring to be worshipped as gods in actuality and keep the scientific knowledge for themselves, then Sam turns to Buddhism as a counter-force to spread doubt about the divinities.
Hey ! Spoilers ! :-/
apologies, on the other hand if you look it up you're going to get spoilers anyway, and by now it's old enough to have grown-up kids of its own (I always felt like there should have been a sequel, or at least another novel set on that world, it felt like he created such a rich background that it was too good to just use once).
I know, I felt the same way :-( On the other hand, Zelazny did produce *Amber*, which started of well and then petered off asymptotically into irrelevance, so maybe it's for the best...
I greatly enjoyed *Sita Sings the Blues*, but it's a bit of an "inside baseball" sort of movie. You pretty much need to know the context beforehand in order for it to make sense.
Definitely her take on Sita is heavily influenced by her own experiences, but I think she is a little reductionist in her view of the entire epic; that it's about a woman suffering at the hand of the patriarchy.
Like I said... inside baseball.
The books by Rajaji (C. Rajagopalachari) are good to start with: they may not be "sophisticated" and have a bit of lecturing, but they are true to the spirit in which the common person receives the epics.
Another suggestion is the comic books by Amar Chitra Katha; they likely solve the problem of having to remember names that someone mentioned: they were all illustrated by the same artist so you can go by visual appearance of the characters. (According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahabharata_(comics) the Mahabharata one runs to over 1000 pages, but it should still be relatively easy reading.)
(FWIW, I tried to watch Peter Brook's film and found it dreadful going.)
If you're looking to get started right away, for the Mahabharata here's something good that's online: https://www.prekshaa.in/archive?field_preksha_series_tid=6109 — it's reverse-chronological so start at the end (though to some extent you could read in random order too…).
Note that the Ramayana is much more like a typical poem (not encyclopedic and discursive like the Mahabharata).
I liked the Peter Brook abridged version of his stage show but (a) you would need to be familiar first with the story and (b) yeah it is very Western take and very of the Zeitgeist of that time, e.g. the multi-culti cast.
My problem with the Indian epics, in addition to all of the above, is that they all have 500 characters with long and (to me) unpronounceable names.
No worse than Russian. They tend to be their names, plus epithets from where they come from, who their parents are, qualities and attributes for which they are admired, etc. If you come out of the culture where you are familiar with that, then it's easy to keep track. If you're coming to it for the first time, it takes a while to link them up (e.g. Sita is often addressed as 'Janaki' because she is the daughter of King Janaka).
Yeah, I'm Russian, so I'm somewhat biased here. Of course, classical Russian literature is half-French, and I don't speak French, so...
Ooh, like Russian literature squared...
That is the fascinating thing about the Mahabharat; the codes of war, the taboos binding Kshatriya warriors and kings and how all the rules get bent or broken, generally at the instigation of Krishna, who is an incarnation of Vishnu which makes it all more tangled -how this is a war of dharma (right) against adharma (wrong) when the god-figure is the one breaking all the rules and causing the heroes to behave dishonorably in order to win a victory?
You can see the layering of versions over time, where the original primitive version is a dynastic battle between the Pandavas and the Kauravas, the Pandavas are the Good Guys (or at least, in the right as far as the story goes) and this is signalled by them having Krishna on their side; for the rest of it, all's fair in love and war and it's okay if the good guys do it.
As the epic becomes read in a more philosophical and spiritual way, this then presents problems which have to be explained away. I think the Bhagavad-Gita is in part a way of doing that; if there are no relations, if all here is maya, then playing these kinds of tricks and deceits and rule-breaking doesn't matter in ultimate reality.
I think it's also a commentary on what war does, and how idealism has to compromise with pragmatism when it comes to achieving things in the real world; Yudhishtira who is the son of the god of justice/judgement/death has never spoken a word of a lie in his entire life, and as a symbol of this his chariot floats above the ground. After his brothers and Krishna persuade him to speak this deceitful speech - for the very reason that his reputation for utter truthfulness means their enemy will believe it to be true - then his chariot sinks down to the earth. Like the rest of us.
Thank you for the kind words!
No, I haven't seen that, I did see the edited down TV version of the theatrical performance of the Mahabharat.
As I said, you can see the layers accreting over the years; Brooks is just the latest to try and reconcile the preaching of the ideals with the messy realities of fighting a war. Krishna is a sort of trickster character anyway, this incarnation is very different to Rama. Krishna challenges the boundaries of social limits and really is "if this is what it takes to win, then this is what we do".
The earliest versions were probably very simple: Pandavas good, Kauravas bad, ambushes and trickery are fair during war. As the characters got developed over time, and e.g. Yudhisthira is the ideal king who never speaks a false or untrue word, Arjuna is the ultimate warrior, then the deeds on the battlefield had to be reconciled with that. If the Kauravas are wicked for using tricks and deceit, what about if the Pandavas do the same thing?
So yes, it's like all scriptures that have to be re-interpreted over the centuries as views change.
There are 18 major books (mahaparvanas) divided into 100 minor books (parvanas). The Bhagavadgita is most of one minor book appropriately called gitaparvana.
I agree that you should view a performance rather than read. The Mahabharata and Ramayana began as oral epics and that’s still primarily how they are experienced by Hindus today.
There was a long running Mahabharata series on Indian TV. In acting and production values it is gloriously cheesy. (Your main take away will be ancient India was very shiny.)
If you do want to read, the Amar Chitra Katha series of comics cover many individual episodes and a few longer treatments.
The abridged versions of the Mahabharata and Ramayana by C. Rajagopalachari are the most popular amongst Indians who speak English.
The most scholarly full translation of the entire Mahabharata is that started by the late Prof. J.A.B. Van Buitenen of the University of Chicago and continued after his death in the Clay Sanskrit Library series.
"Your main take away will be ancient India was very shiny."
I know this is a very shallow take but how I can tell if a production is South Indian is "Moar bling? Moar bling!" They tend to have Shiva dressed up to the nines, while Northern Indian productions have him less shiny 😁
Listen, if a king cannot be dripping with gold and jewels, what even is the point? If there are no strings of pearls three and four deep, how can you even tell he is a king? It's a pantomime version but very satisfying because we all have that childhood notion of what royalty should look like, and it's not "dressed in a business suit".
There was a twitter thread on artbreeder that went relatively viral a few days ago with a lot of dramatic stuff about the destruction of art. Of course many had good responses about how the same was said of photography. There were also complaints about taking the food out of the mouths of artists.
I think a strong argument can be made that for several specific kinds of art, the value derived from artbreeder vastly outweights the cost to artists. Depending on how things go in the next few years.
Something like a library for software and video games on desktop that mimics the functions of the portrait section would be of immense value. A wide variety of game genres have portraits/icons as a key art asset. The kind of faces you can get from artbreeder are significantly superior to most "face generators" that you see in existing games. Having an open source face genetator that was as good as artbreeder would open up game development to a lot of people in those genres.
Paradox games like Crusader Kings or games like Star Dynasties and Alliance of the Sacred Suns would all benefit from cheap quality portrait generation.
On the human created art side of things, I rather hope this leads to a greater emphasis on the physical and material qualities of artwork, as opposed to how it looks on a screen. Seeing (most) artwork in person is already a very different experience than seeing it on a screen or a print, but I think sometimes we forget that, having so much more experience with the latter.
If your art can be replaced by a machine, then IMO it should be. If your art can be replaced by a machine, and its art is of higher quality than yours, then you need to look for a new career.
Much of the modern "art" is automated anyway, check out "spot paintings" for example. Being a successful artist these days is indistinguishable from having good marketing, where the price of your stuff is determined mostly by the value of your "brand", and its objective qualities are secondary at best.
Is this meant to be a claim about art ("no truly good art could be replaced by machines") or about economics/ethics ("we shouldn't prevent technology from taking jobs once it can perform them well")?
I don’t think it has much to do with art. Commercial art is a form of art but it isn’t art, in the sense that we need to worry about a machine doing it.
I think economics was behind a lot of the beefing about photography as well. Wood cutters, engravers and others like them lost some very lucrative occupations.
I wonder if we should distinguish between "art" and image manufacturing. Most "artists" do the latter in my opinion and that is why something like artbreeder can replace them. Like video game portraits "art manufacturing" procudes images that can be "good enough". You aren't trying to be iconic or unique. Just "cool".
One way of putting this is that until the popularization of photography, there were these huge fields of art involving the painting of photorealistic portraits and of landscapes, and they were entirely replaced by photography.
Photorealistic reproduction of something that exists in reality has been done by a camera for about a century and a half now. Artists mostly don't create photorealistic images at all any more - or they create photorealistic images of things that don't exist (fictional characters, etc)
Photorealistic creation of things that don't exist in reality have required artists until recently, but it seems to me that getting an AI to convert a description into a photorealistic image is more similar to replacing a portrait artist with a selfie than replacing fine art.
Actually, video games have specialized in creating "photorealistic creation of things that don't exist" for quite some time now. As with all art, mere technique is not enough; there are many games out there that are photorealistically rendered yet completely boring. Contrast, for example, the latest release of *God of War* or *Ghost of Tshushima* with *Elden Ring*. That's right, souls-like fans, I went there ! Fite me IRL !111!!
And the irony there is that photography is now part of the arts itself, including manipulation of images in ways comparable to painting and sculpture. "The camera never lies" was soon shown to be a false notion.
You should check out the work of Chuck Close
Google considers its own ML to be spam generators.
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-says-ai-generated-content-is-against-guidelines/
Is this a statement about deep values of what is "meaningful" content? An ephemeral statement on the current state of ML? A misleading comment where writer ML is currently better than filter ML and Google is looking to save resources? An internal fight spilling out into the public eye without context?
A pragmatic statement that most people generating webpages entirely algorithmically are spammers?
Although I do think that there's a statement you could make about meaningfulness, which is that AI can currently generate new text but not new *facts.* Even if your text generator is perfect on a technical level and avoids the giveaways of current-gen ML, it has no way of knowing whether the stuff it's generating is true or false, because that depends on facts about the world outside of the internet. That's fine for writing fiction, it's fine if you're a spammer and just want eyeballs on your ads, but it's the worst possible problem to have if you're a search engine and you're in the business of providing accurate information.
(Eventually, filter ML will have to not only identify sources but fact-check them as well, and isn't that a scary thought.)
What percentage of the stuff on the internet is directly deals with facts outside of it though? Like the old meme noted, everyting is repost of a repost. However, I don't see how ML can possibly make things any worse. Everybody knows that everything not from "reliable sources" is fake news. And for a long time, it's also how Google has been running its search, whoevers "page rank" is higher gets higher placement.
People use Google to look up random facts all the time, not just current events.
My nightmare scenario as a programmer is that I search for "Software Foo fails to Bar" and I get 9999 algorithmically generated pages with the prompt of "Five ways to fix Foo won't Bar error" and 1 page with an actual answer written by a human.
What do you mean its own? The main text models available for use are from OpenAI, or opensource replications.
The question that John Mueller was responding to was about GPT-3 specifically, per the article.
BERT is derived from Google research and is very common in actual deployed systems.
Although there have been some examples of people sampling from BERT with things like Gibbs sampling, it's really not good at text generation. If you want to do generation you're much better off using GPT-2.
A couple of months ago I asked the SSC community for thoughts regarding a centralized place to find interesting blog articles, and got positive feedback on the idea. I've created https://www.readsomethinginteresting.com to serve that purpose and would love to hear what y'all think.
I got a warning about this connection not being private and an invalid certificate, so can’t see it.
Should be fixed, can you try it now?
Looks good now!
"502 bad gateway"
I can't see the site, but it ought to have some curation mechanism. Either manual, or some variation of voting.
Should be fixed, can you try it now?
That's quite concerning as I don't see any site problems. Can you share the link that resulted in that error?
I can see the landing page, but when I click 'enter', it 1) gave the error, 2) loaded correctly, 3) loaded correctly, but took 10+ seconds, on 3 attempts.
Can I recommend trying out https://www.sessionstack.com/, it did wonders with catching problems on my website and in general for user experience understanding.
currently firefox marks the link as potentially dangerous....
Should be fixed, can you try it now?
Yikes, will have to fix. Thank you for alerting me.
Tx
I've visited it a few times since I saw it mentioned (by you?) in a thread a few weeks ago, it's great
Thank you, I'm glad to hear you've found it useful!
Does anyone have any blog recommendations that are similar to this or The Last Psychiatrist, but are about law?
The Volokh Conspiracy. https://reason.com/volokh/ The bloggers there run, as they say, "mostly libertarian", and there's a smattering of more liberal and more conservative bloggers as well. Mostly they blog about free speech / 1A law, but it's a mix. They occasionally quote SSC, so it's definitely at least similar types of people.
(Mostly US law, to clarify.)
I'm not sure if anyone else could be considered to be like The Last Psychiatrist, but I do like The Graham Factor ( https://grahamfactor.substack.com/ ) for its pragmatic and informed perspective on policing.
I’ll second that. I find his writing thoughtful, balanced and illuminating.
RIP groklaw.net
Nick Szabo of Unenumerated (an inspiration for Unqualified Reservations, where it was on the blogroll) used to write about law, but I see his blog hasn't been updated since 2018. He does apparently have a more recently used twitter account which still links to that blog in his bio. His personal website is currently offline but viewable via the internet archive:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160709091851/https://szabo.best.vwh.net/
I know Popehat covers law stuff, I don't know if you'd consider the writing similar though.
Anyone here a landlord? Is leasing real estate a big part of anyone's overall financial picture? I was always skeptical that being a landlord makes a great deal of financial sense, versus the opportunity cost of just putting that same amount of money into the stock market. I spent a few years when younger working for a real estate company in a major US city, sort of seeing how the sausage is actually made, and I came away thinking that on a risk-adjusted basis equities just make way more sense. (The landlord is basically always going to lose in court in a blue state!) The S&P 500 has come close to quintupling over the last 11 or 12 years, and averages 9% returns overall.
I am now entering middle age though, and I have been considering investing in real estate more as a diversification move, especially for retirement. Plus, of course, as an inflation hedge. I also have the lifestyle flexibility to do what the kids call 'house hacking'- buy & move into a 2-4 unit building on a 3% down FHA mortgage, live there for a year, then move back to my current place now controlling an investment property for little down. Then there's buying an SFH just for Airbnb rentals, which appear to be much more profitable....
Buy property where you want to live. It will give you investment in local community and local governance, which is where most things that impact people happen. Thus, you can have an improving effect on the local community, and still satisfy the human need for self-interest.
Having gone through ups and downs in my local area - only buy to hold, not to flip. Hold (with a renter) until the market is stable again.
I had a similar outlook until relatively recently. I purchased my first investment property in early 2020 and 2nd in early 2021. Personally I have been very happy with the results. I realize 2 years is not a long time to make any concrete conclusions but here are a few miscellaneous points.
1. My politics tilt more towards blue than red, but I would never be a residential landlord in a blue state
2. When comparing SP500 vs RE, make sure you are including dividends as well as rental cash flow. Rental cash flow tends to be a greater % of RE returns than dividends are of stock returns (although this is probably less true in recent history!)
3. RE enables cheap 5:1 leverage, at a 30 year fixed rate, with no risk of margin calls. Best you can hope for with stocks is 4:1 leverage at a variable rate, with margin call risk.
4. you have a better chance of finding an undervalued property than an undervalued stock. of course this will require effort on your part; but it can at least be thought of as an opportunity to monetize your own labor.
5. favorable tax treatment means you can often end up paying very little taxes, or no taxes at all, on your income. (relevant topics: depreciation deduction; 1031 conversion). True that with an SP500 position you can defer capital gains taxes until you sell; but you are paying taxes on the dividends every year, whereas it may be many years before you need to pay taxes on RE cash flow.
6. you mention in a comment below the need to continue to spend money to keep the house updated - that is a relatively known cost and should be included in your financial estimate before you buy. (I assume I will need to spend 1% of current market value of the house per year in maintenance & upkeep. Most years will come in under that; some years will come in much higher than that. If you want to be more conservative, then call it 1.5%, 2%, whatever; the point is that you can anticipate the cost, to some extent).
7. Someone mentioned biggerpockets below; I will also recommend the realestateinvesting subreddit as a great source of information
Being a residential landlord is a *lot* of hassle, in part because as you say courts favour tenants.
Being a commercial landlord is a much more business-like, though, and big corps are bound to the letter of their contract, allowing for much more favourable leases (mostly in the form of shunting all the maintenance onto the tenant so as to minimise the hassle for the landlord, rather than increasing the total profit margin; Lease terms like this are restricted for residential leases and for small businesses)
I will note that the profit my family has gotten from commercial real state has come from being in the industry - either buying during a slump and selling during a boom, or from buying residential land and getting all the permits to build commercial there. Just buying existing properties to sit on them has a fairly low rate of return.
The advantage (and potential weakness) of real estate investing over the stock market is leverage. If you have $100K then you can either buy $100K in shares, or borrow $400K and buy $500K worth of property. If the stock and property markets both double then the stock market investor makes a $100K capital gain while the property investor makes a $500K capital gain (minus interest, plus rent, etc).
Past performance is not indicative of future gains etc, but over the past thirty years, in most parts of the Western world at least, borrowing all the money you possibly can and sticking it into real estate has been the best way to turn ordinary middle-class savings into a big stack of money.
(You can borrow money to put in shares as well, but typically not at 5-1 leverage, not for ordinary mortals.)
I'd never thought of it like that. Helpful comment. Thank you.
I was a tenant of a small landlord who invested in rental properties as part of his retirement plan. My heat went out in the winter and he refused to fix it for a couple months.
My point is, being a small landlord may impose a lot of obligations and hassle on you in dealing with the properties. However, if you are a slimeball who is willing to screw your tenants, it may make more sense.
Yes. I have a small portfolio of student rentals. Happy to answer anything specific but generally the best place to get basic questions answered is biggerpockets.com
Let's assume I know the answers to all of the basic questions, plus general personal finance. Have you considered the opportunity cost of what would've happened if you'd invested all of the money you put into your rentals (purchase plus costs after, repair etc.) into an index fund instead? Again, the S&P 500 is up like 4.5x in the last 12 or 13 years. Plus it's tax-free until you sell, you're paying income taxes on your profits.
Are you in the market too, and have rentals for diversification? Or are you real estate-only?
I don't think S&P 500 is up 4.5x even if you picked the optimal date (March '09?) and invested all your money then and sat out afterwards, but obviously that's an impossible thing to do and irrelevant as a benchmark. I have both equities and residential real estate investments and I think they have performed approximately the same. Of course equities are much more liquid, but also in theory real estate and equities should not be linked that closely, so if one goes down the other may not.
Income taxes are less of a concern with depreciation, interest, and other advantages of running a small business.
My 401k is in the market. I tend to not put after tax money into the market. Currently I've been allocating marginal dollars to crypto rather than new personally owned RE. Also invested in a few syndications.
RE is good for getting leverage subsidized by the federal government. Also if you think that high duration risk assets are overpriced bc of low interest rates, RE can offer a better risk-adjusted return.
It really depends on how much you value your time. You could invest in a REIT for similar returns or in a site like Fundrise. Something like that takes an hour to setup. But looking and buying a property will take hours and that’s before you see a return. But to mention screening tenants and doing repairs.
I’ve done both, I own a small duplex and I’ve invested in Fundrise. The dividend returns are similar/slightly lower to what I’ve earned through the duplex but I have yet to worry about repairs and tenants.
I'm not personally a landlord but I've worked with them and sold products to them and all that. That means I've gotten a very good look at their operations including access to budgets etc. Happy to answer any questions but you haven't asked any beyond whether someone's a landlord.
I've also worked with them and sold them products. I know a lot of very wealthy landlords. I am skeptical that being a small landlord (say, under 10 or 20 units) makes a lot of financial sense over a multi-decade time span, as a means to build wealth (versus diversification or protecting wealth- I have no family money, so I'm in aggressive wealth building mode). Any broker who wants to sell you a property can produce a cash-flow statement that says it will return x in one year. But over a long enough period of time, you will eventually have to replace the roof, the heating system- really everything. Every part of the building is on a ticking time clock from the moment you buy it.
What a lot of people don't understand is that things don't have to 'break' to need replacement. In 10-15 years, you'll need to have at least a newish kitchen and bathroom to keep getting quality tenants. You have to keep doing costly renovations every decade or so..... just to stay at the same level of quality. It's like treading water forever.
When I managed & sold properties in Tier 1 US City, all of the investors were ultra-independently wealthy and didn't care if they lost money for the first 10 years or so. They wanted to own buildings in Tier 1 US City the way other rich people wanted to own yachts.
Plus, you have to pay income tax on your profit, whereas an index fund returns 9% annually with no tax until I sell. Anyways, these are some of the arguments I've used to not buy a property to date. There's simply no argument that equities are superior to being a small landlord- my new arguments *for* it now are simply diversification
Have you ever worked outside a tier 1 city? Because the game's rather different in them. I've worked with small landlords but they're mostly in smaller areas. If you're willing to do that then there's opportunity. If you want to do it in Midtown well, yeah, you've got to have inherited money.
Basically, you make money three ways: From buying at a discount, from rental income, and from appreciation. The first one is usually the most important one in the small cap market. And there's no small cap deals in big cities so you're reduced to the more brutal game of expensive rentals and appreciation roulette. If you can get those properties, whether through bird dogs or new builds, and you take advantage of the better capital returns outside of the capital rich tier 1 cities then you can beat the stock market. But you do have to run an actual operation to do so.
The market is different today but even 3 years ago there were still plenty of very attractive properties on the MLS. These were double digit cash on cash returns with reasonable opportunity for appreciation at a price point available to newbies.
And I invest in a major north east city.
You didn't have issues with the large initial investment? Where did you source capital?
Savings for most. Owner-occupied only need 3.5-5% downpayment up to 4 units. Some outside investors - there is a ton more capital than there are deals and good operators.
Outside Manhattan with terms like that you don't need to have ridiculous cash on hand to get started.
People's mental ability is a function of the size and structure of their brain to some extent. Children are notably less intelligent and have smaller heads because they are still growing. Their brains are not "fully formed." Could trying to teach children academic topics be very inefficient? In "Kids Can Recover From Missing Even Quite A Lot of School," Scott discusses the benezet experiment:
"In the Benezet experiment, a school district taught no math at all before 6th grade (around age 10-11). Then in sixth grade, they started teaching math, and by the end of the year the students were just as good at math as traditionally-educated children with five years of preceding math education. I interpret this to mean that a lot of education involves cramming things into the heads of very young students who would be able to learn it very quickly anyway when they were older. Certainly it doesn’t seem like a child missing math class in grades 1-5 should have much of a long-term effect."
I spent 6 years learning arithmetic in elementary school, but when I was in college, I learned multiple high-level math topics simultaneously. I don't think this is a particular feature of me but something that most people experience: when they are older, they can learn more. I imagine that if I was first exposed to arithmetic at age 18, I could learn it extremely quickly. This is just an intuition.
Could it be that it's not really necessary to teach children when they're young? Maybe we could spend a fraction of the time teaching them the topics we want to when we're older? Any strong pieces of evidence for or against this idea? It doesn't seem too farfetched to me.
In the Benezet experiment, were those children coming in completely ignorant of maths? Couldn't count, didn't know the names of numbers, much less what addition and subtraction were?
Because there's always contamination from "the parents are teaching them at home" and not even formally, just "look, I'll divide up these sweets between you and your sister, you both get six each, that's fair".
I also note that the original experiment took place in 1929 and while I agree with "What possible needs has a ten-year-old child for a knowledge of long division? The whole subject of arithmetic could be postponed until the seventh year of school, and it could be mastered in two years' study by any normal child", when I was ten and learning long division, I couldn't work it out by the school method and had to fall back on my grandmother teaching me how she learned it when she was in school (back in late 19th century).
So I think "normal" is doing a lot of work here. Some kids can and will pick it up in a year or two years, some need longer. You can postpone teaching reading until a kid is seven, but that would have made no difference to me - I could read before I started any formal schooling of any kind (aged four and a half, I don't even remember learning to read but it's safe to say I could read when I was three).
EDIT: I also disagree with this bit, it's not that the kids couldn't speak English, it's that the terms are Latinate ("numerator", "denominator") and if not explained, just used, then of course the kids can't put them into English. Quick, *you* try turning "numerator" and "denominator" into English!
"Meanwhile, I was distressed at the inability of the average child in our grades to use the English language. If the children had original ideas, they were very helpless about translating them into English which could be understood. I went into a certain eighth-grade room one day and was accompanied by a stenographer who took down, verbatim, the answers given me by the children. I was trying to get the children to tell me, in their own words, that if you have two fractions with the same numerator, the one with the smaller denominator is the larger. I quote typical answers.
"The smaller number in fractions is always the largest."
"If the numerators are both the same, and the denominators one is smaller than the one, the one that is the smaller is the larger."
"If you had one thing and cut it into pieces the smaller piece will be the bigger. I mean the one you could cut the least pieces in would be the bigger pieces."
"The denominator that is smallest is the largest."
"If both numerators are the same number, the smaller denominator is the largest - the larger - of the two."
"If you have two fractions and one fraction has the smallest number at the bottom. It is cut into pieces and one has the more pieces. If the two fractions are equal, the bottom number was smaller than what the other one in the other fraction. The smallest one has the largest number of pieces - would have the smallest number of pieces, but they would be larger than what the ones that were cut into more pieces."
The average layman will think that this must have been a group of half-wits, but I can assure you that it is typical of the attempts of fourteen-year-old children from any part of the country to put their ideas into English. The trouble was not with the children or with the teacher; it was with the curriculum. If the course of study required that the children master long division before leaving the fourth grade and fractions before finishing the fifth, then the teacher had to spend hours and hours on this work to the neglect of giving children practise in speaking the English language. I had tried the same experiment in schools in Indiana and in Wisconsin with exactly the same result as in New Hampshire."
The man definitely had his own views of Education, How She Should Be Done, but I do wonder what the schools did after he retired - went back to the traditional ways of teaching?
http://www.inference.org.uk/sanjoy/benezet/1.html
Okay, I see that the children were not ignorant of numbers, just that there was no "formal" teaching (sample extract below):
http://www.inference.org.uk/sanjoy/benezet/2.html
"Grade I - There is no formal instruction in arithmetic. In connection with the use of readers, and as the need for it arises, the children are taught to recognize and read numbers up to 100. This instruction is not concentrated into any particular period or time but comes in incidentally in connection with assignments of the reading lesson or with reference to certain pages of the text.
Meanwhile, the children are given a basic idea of comparison and estimate thru [sic] the understanding of such contrasting words as: more, less; many. few; higher, lower; taller, shorter; earlier, later; narrower, wider; smaller, larger; etc.
As soon as it is practicable the children are taught to keep count of the date upon the calendar. Holidays and birthdays, both of members of the class and their friends and relatives, are noted.
Grade II - There is no formal instruction in arithmetic.
The use of comparatives as taught in the first grade is continued.
The beginning is made in the telling of time. Children are taught to recognize the hours and half hours.
The recognition of page numbers is continued. The children are taught to recognize any numbers that they naturally encounter in the books used in the second grade. If any book used in this grade contains an index, the children are taught what it means and how to find the pages referred to. Children will naturally pick up counting in the course of games which they play. They will also easily and without formal instruction learn the meaning of "half," "double," "twice," or "three times." The teacher will not devote any formal instruction to the meaning of these terms if the children do not pick them up naturally and incidentally.
To the knowledge of the day of the month already acquired is added that of the name of the days of the week and of the months of the year.
The teacher learns whether the children come in contact with the use of money at all in their life outside the school. If so, the meaning of "penny," "nickel," "dime," and "dollar" is taught. In similar fashion, and just incidentally, the meaning and relation of "pint" and "quart" may be taught.
Grade III - While there is no formal instruction in arithmetic, as the children come across numbers in the course of their reading, the teacher explains the significance of their value.
Before the year is over the children will be taught that a "dime" is worth 10 cents, and a "dollar" 10 dimes or 100 cents, a "half dollar" 5 dimes or 50 cents, etc. They will learn that 4 quarters, or 2 halves, are worth as much as one dollar.
They add to their knowledge of hours and half hours the ability to tell time at any particular moment. The first instruction omits such forms as 10 minutes to 4; or 25 minutes to 3. They are first taught to say 3:50; 2:35; etc. In this connection they are taught that 60 minutes make one hour.
It is now time, also, for them to know that 7 days make a week and that it takes 24 hours to make a day. They are also taught that there are 12 months in a year and about 30 days in a month.
The instruction in learning to count keeps pace with the increasing size of the textbooks used and the pages to which it is necessary to refer. Games bring in the recognition of numbers. Automobile license numbers are a help in this respect. For example, the teacher gives orally the number of a car [of not over four digits] which most of the children are likely to see, and later asks for the identification of the car. Children are encouraged to bring to class their own house numbers, automobile license numbers, or telephone numbers and invite the class to identify them.
The use of comparisons is continued, especially those involving such relations as "half," "double," "three times," and the like."
Foreign languages are an example of a thing that people learn easily when they are young. Probably worth reshuffling curiculum so that languages there are more languages relative to other stuff in earlier phases of an education
When you break it down to aptitude vs achievement, there is some evidence that children can actually increase their aptitude in some areas, but in adults this happens much less. This makes sense if you believe that children have a lot more neuroplasticity. Sitting in math class is probably not a great way of boosting aptitude though.
The ability to mentally process numbers is an aptitude is it not? Put simply, if you show most people the sum 1+4 they both see the equation and the solution because they have aptitude in working out mathematical problems (even if this aptitude is purely through rote learning). That's going to be a lot easier to learn at 4 than 14.
While aptitude is the potential to learn, achievement is learning itself. This is an important distinction when discussing children and what kinds of tasks they should be forced to do in schools/learning.
"Could it be that it's not really necessary to teach children when they're young?"
Of course we have to teach them, they follow us around and *insist* that we teach them. My daughter, <3 and in the "why?" phase all year, heard someone say that a lock was "in a good position" and instantly started practicing grammar on it. "Am I in a good position? Are you in a good position? Is baby sister in a good position?" Children insist on learning grammar and figuring out what everyone around them is doing and how they can fit into that and participate.
The question is whether we should insist on teaching them things that don't come up (as far as they can tell) in day to day life, and therefore that they aren't too interested in learning.
Children from families without books should almost certainly still be taught to read by six or so, that seems to be working just fine for most kids, and getting to read more and more complex stories is interesting in itself for enough kids during the period between then and adolescence that it's worth it while they're learning, not just later when they can read and write at a more sophisticated level. Our civilization has produced a huge volume of genuinely excellent children's books that it's usually easy to find something to like. Even at the start, when they're just learning to write their names on things, they really should write their names on things so that they don't get mixed up and lost -- it's an instantly applicable skill.
Math is a much more time deferred activity for most people. I'm not really sure what we should do about that, or even what we currently do. Despite working in an elementary school, it never comes up. I ask little kids to write their names on things every day, and they've talked some about science -- a lot about butterflies especially -- but have never asked or had them volunteer anything about arithmetic. Maybe it pays off? I don't actually know. I've watched lower level high schoolers learn how to work with fractions and then forget it again every year for probably six years, and it seems very futile, pushing me toward wanting more tracking as a solution. Children like basic science a lot, and there's no reason to deny it to them.
Whenever I try to figure out why conventional schools do certain things the way they do, it comes down to something legal about mandated standards, or logistical like how to get lunch to all the children by the mandated time, or fitting all six levels into the specials teachers' schedule each day. There's plenty of room for doing things in a more natural way, but then it's more expensive for those logistical reasons.
Maria Montessori was probably onto something with her idea of "sensitive periods" for basic things like movement and order, and that kind of environment seems to make more sense than conventional schooling for lower elementary especially. But I don't seem to believe in this strongly enough to actually take action, setting up shelving with activity materials on them or anything of the sort.
Anyway, it's not that children aren't learning -- they're learning very complex things about not bumping into each other, how to play together, fine motor skills that will lead to writing, drawing, and tool use, how to turn their experiences into stories, and so on. It's very obvious when children *don't* learn these things and are horribly awkward; there's a bit of an issue with this now with the shut downs over the past few years.
I think young kids are quite good at learning, but have almost all that learning capacity spent on learning social skills and basic language and local cultural mores etc.
I'm not aware of too many accounts of people (e.g. missionaries) who try to teach mathematics to adults who were not educated as children.
On the other hand, we have a lot of accounts of people who try to teach reading and writing to adults who weren't educated as children, and my understanding is that it usually doesn't go that well. I'm not sure whether it goes worse than teaching children, per hour spent practicing, but it definitely doesn't seem to be the case that illiterate adults can pick up reading and writing with ease.
If it's not the case for reading and writing I don't see why it should be the case for mathematics.
While I agree with the overall point, children spend a lot of time learning to read - something like hundred of hours for basic literacy. Most adults just can't afford that time.
Is it actually true that children are less intelligent than adults, or are they just ignorant and lacking skills? I know at least for languages children seem to learn much faster and more efficiently than adults.
As for mathematics, my memory of elementary school is hazy but I don't think I was really being pushed to the limits of my math-learning ability, whereas in college I was a lot closer to it. Part of the issue there is that a public elementary school has to be more accessible than a selective university.
Children learn second languages slowly.
Children are flexible in pronunciation. For every other aspect of language that has ever been studied, speed of language acquisition increases with age, up to about 20.
My gut reaction here is that that's because learning aspects other than actual speech requires learning an academic framework first to understand what you're doing. It's going to be hard to learn a language academically if you don't know what a verb is for example.
And children learn second languages fast, in the key definition of being able to use the language, if exposed to that language as a real-life environmental factor (to be fair, adults learn a lot faster as well in those circumstances). A classroom course learning random words and concepts, probably results in slower learning, because it's not obviously applicable for most children.
There have been diverse studies of young children vs old children learning languages. Older children always win head-to-head comparisons, whether it's classroom instruction or immersion.
Here's a survey:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3586451
http://www.sdkrashen.com/content/articles/krashen,_long_scarcella_1979_age_rate_attainment.pdf
This is a bit of an apples to oranges comparison. Older learners are finding a new word for a concept they already understand, while kids are learning much more schema along with the languages.
The first article you link to argues that children who have natural exposure to second languages generally achieve higher second language proficiency as adults. Adults may learn "faster", but maybe they would have been better off if they had started learning as a child.
You jump from a correlational claim to a causal claim. There is a correlation between age of first exposure and eventual progress. But why did the child start learning the language? The best study is of the Japanese businessmen who take spend years in America. The children learn English because they want to and give up when they go home. The older children learn more and retain more for years. This is the counterfactual relevant to forcing your child to study a foreign language.
I think the idea of a "critical period" is still well supported by a lot of research. And pronunciation and accent are hugely important aspects of language, so I wouldn't downplay the importance of age.
If you've seen any research on critical period for second language acquisition, outside of accent, I'd love to see it. I've talked to lots of linguists, who are adamant that it exists, but angry that I want to see it.
Here's an actual survey:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3586451
http://www.sdkrashen.com/content/articles/krashen,_long_scarcella_1979_age_rate_attainment.pdf
I am talking about the critical period for language learning in general. As for applying this to second languages, you can exclude accent, but that a huge part of language. The first article you link argues that children who begin natural exposure to second languages as children generally obtain higher second language proficiency.
I can't remember if I added this to my Mistakes List yet or not, but some commenters convinced me that my understanding of the Benezet experiment was flawed - Benezet taught math holistically instead of drilling it, the same way everyone does today.
He also has a specific reason: the question of immigrant children from non-English speaking families.
In a zero sum situation ( the time spent on A reduces time spent on B), he preferenced English language proficiency over math proficiency.
He wanted immigrants to "learn English" doggone it!
His thoughts on pluralism, ethnicity, and "mixing" no doubt influenced by growing up in klan run Indiana. (The Governor was imperial Wizard!!!. ]
The issue for him was not really about math it was about wasting time that could be spent on language skills (specifically English language).
Benezet greatly reduced the time devoted to math instruction and completely eliminated the time devoted to arithmetic. These are simple, objective metrics on which he was radically different from what "everyone" does today.
Benezet proved that teaching math is better than torturing children, in addition to being time-efficient. No one today claims to torture children, but his contemporaries didn't claim to torture children, either. Children today suffer the same PTSD that he avoided. That might be an inborn trait that he cured by his minimal teaching, but it's probably from the torture that he skipped.
In terms of things that do not need proving, "Benezet proved that teaching math is better than torturing children" is right up there!
I'm not sure that there's much of an argument in the case that Benezet proved not teaching maths was preferable to teaching it in a traumatic fashion though, since modern education is very clear about the fact education should not be traumatic. Even for maths.
This was not his motivation.
Wot
Perhaps there are other fields of development where you're better off focusing during younger ages — symbolic thinking, creativity, kinesthetic, relational. Maybe a 6 year old is better off doing 6 hours per day of MMA than of math.
The six-year old doing six hours of MMA a day is probably proportionally less-well off the more classmates are doing this as well. Children like to practice what they learn after all...
Younger is better for language, from what I understand.
Piaget's takes on this have aged nicely, I think.
It's a bit more complex than that. The UK Early Years Curriculum is focused on social development, but also has goals (not targets, because at that age variance is incredible) around numeracy and literacy. My son's doing this currently and at our last parents evening (where teachers meet the parents to discuss progress) the focus was entirely on his progress in the 'academic' areas because he was already socialised (unfortunately this doesn't mean he's discovered that you shouldn't wake up your parents before 6am...).
For my book project on "Discretion", about the people in charge of enforcing rules, regulations, laws, who have the power to ignore them, I'm trying to surmise what parts of government are ones where workers have the most discretion, and ones in which they have the least. My uninformed hypothesis is that where law is most vague and qualitative, workers have most discretion, like child protective services, and where law is most byzantine, people have the least, like tax collection/auditing. Do any of you have any guesses about this matter, both about which agencies/jobs have most/least discretion, and about correlations? I'm looking to embed myself inside such agencies for the research, so I want to pick good ones.
Avoid child protective services like the literal plague. You see an extremely ugly side of the human experience, and, at least here, are badly underfunded and understaffed. There more ugly situations that you can adequately cover. Parents get their kids back when you're sure they shouldn't, and there's nothing you can do about it. And when there are bad outcomes, you get blamed. You're helpless and hopeless. It's awful.
My dad was a CPS supervisor. He died a relatively young alcoholic. Look elsewhere.
I believe you Jonathan, these all seem to be reasons to cover it; looks like no one is looking out for the people who are working CPS.
I mean, maybe. But if you're looking to write a book about how gov't agencies behave in situations with greater or lesser discretion, I don't think this is your area. There might be a good book, but I don't think it could be on this theme.
Caveat I should have included in the first place: my personal knowledge here is both second hand and years out-of-date. It's possible this has gotten better, or is even done well in other jurisdictions.
Airport security (or the TSA, in the US) seems like a great example of extremely limited discretion. This stuff is allowed, this stuff isn't, the rules are the rules, and it doesn't matter if they make sense in any particular case or not. And while I hate the TSA as much as anyone, I concede that the zero-discretion approach makes sense for the problem it's intended to solve.
Of course the TSA is unlikely to let you embed yourself with them, for that very reason. But maybe something like stadium security could be a close equivalent.
Take a look at “Bending the Rules” by Rachel Potter about how the administrative agencies use the rule making process to form the rules they want despite the process theoretically constraining the rules generated.
Relatedly, you’re wrong about at least tax law, based on this case: https://www.opn.ca6.uscourts.gov/opinions.pdf/22a0041p-06.pdf. The IRS apparently hasn’t followed the rule making process since it was created, which is surprising and wild to me.
I think the law has very little to do with it, and the culture of the organisation is the most important element. Do staff have quotas? if so, they'll frame people and twist the law. Is there any oversight on whether the process is fair? Are hard cases routinely ignored as too expensive to prosecute, leading to a bias toward easy targets instead of guilty targets?
Have you read much by James Q. Wilson? In his book Bureaucracy, he roughly divides government agencies into four types based on (1) how well management can observe the behavior of operators (people on the line so to speak) and (2) how well management can measure the outcomes of what those operators do. I think he calls agencies where managers both have a difficult time observing operators and cannot really measuring the outcomes of their work "coping organizations" and I think these types would also rank highly on your notion of discretion. Specific examples he talks about are policing (and at length in a separate book "Varieties of Police Behavior") and the state department.
So you might look for other organizations that rank low on one or both of these dimensions.
Some people say that the problem with strict regulations is that in practice, they're never ever enforced universally, so the people in charge of enforcing them can enforce them only against people they don't like. For example, an IRS audit is a disaster for any small business, and I *assume* that some IRS bureaucrat has the power to pick a random business to audit; compare that to a small town government, where the mayor can't audit only his enemies unless he wants everyone in town to yell at him for being unfair. (Note that I have had little experience in small-town government and even less with the IRS, so this is just a guess.)
Yeah, a tax audit costs tens of thousands of dollars in accounting fees, and many months of extreme stress, even if they eventually find no fault.
Nobody's ever exchanged a wheelbarrow of *paper* money for toilet paper, right?
...Right?
Thanks to Messrs Hammer and Bullseye for correcting me. In my defense, how the heck was I supposed to know about the effects of literally flushing money down the toilet?
Good TP is not replaceable by rough paper, though I get your point about just using the paper instead. I believe Weimar Germany saw bank notes being used as wallpaper and kindling because they were cheaper than the goods.
Weimar Germany during the hyperinflation, yes. Zimbabwe too.
Paper currency is hell o ln plumbing.
Don't use money! It clogs the pipes!
So, I need advice on navigating the medical field. I just got diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, which is my first time dealing with an, idk, “open ended illness” where there are more options than “get a cast and wait 4 months”
My insurance is thankfully very good, but the new pills they have me on have some annoying side effects (mainly I’m thirsty all the time). Now, I would like to not be thirsty all of the time, but am unclear as to whether I contact my doctor now, wait until my follow-up, or do something else. I also don’t have any idea for what my doctor will say if I am supposed to contact them.
Basically, this whole “trying different solutions, which will be varying degrees of effective and inconvenient” is new to me and I have no idea how the whole iterative process works. Any insight into this my fellow internet strangers?
Also have ulcerative colitis, hi! I haven’t had to cycle through medications yet, thankfully (just on Mesalamine with minimal side effects) but I did switch doctors mainly because my first one wasn’t communicating well (didn’t return calls, gave me bad info about how soon I should alert him to a flare-up).
There’s a fair amount of uncertainty built into the disease, so I haven’t been shy about calling the office or using MyChart. Even if I’m pretty sure what they’ll say, at least it puts my mind at ease.
If you’re not sure about a medication change it could also be worth getting a second opinion with a specialist, especially if the side effects could get worse.
Are you near the NYC area? If so, my late mother, Jill Roberts, founded what i believe is the premier IBD Center in the country. https://weillcornell.org/ibdcenter
All they do is Crohns and Colitis. If you want a very warm intro, I'm happy to oblige. They really "get" the disease.
Learn about the condition and the treatment options and start keeping up with the research on it. If you doctor is not comfortable having an informed patient who might at times suggest options himself, switch to one who is. Btw, I know someone who has Crohn's Disease, which I think is pretty similar to UC, who is seriously considering fecal transplant as a treatment (it's an easy treatment to recoil from or make jokes about, but apparently there is some decent research supporting its effectiveness).
It will depend on your doctor. I went through a few ADHD meds before I circled back around to one of the first I tried, which had the effectiveness and side effects profile I found best (modafinil; I rejected it the first time because it treated my ADHD too effectively, and many of my habits were dependent on an automated "stop doing what you're doing, get up, move around, and search for something else to do periodically" trigger which ADHD supplied; didn't find a solution, exactly, just trying to practice awareness of the problem and rebuilding habits).
Basically, scheduled an appointment once a month, and got the drugs in one-month supplies. (When your ADHD meds don't work, incidentally, it may be a month or six before you get around to scheduling the next appointment.)
Note that insurance can be a bitch about this, if you're in the US; they may have a particular order they want you to try prescriptions in, which only partially corresponds to cost.
Did your doctor give you a "patient portal" or something that you could use to message them? If so, it's totally appropriate for you to mention the thirst over there - they might tell you to wait until your next appointment to discuss, but you can at least try.
If not, and the thirst is inconvenient enough to be worth it, call the office and ask what you should do. They'll probably say "make an appointment", in which case do that.
Be prepared for your doctor to say something like "yeah, that's a side effect of this, deal with it" and for you to have to decide whether you want to do that, or you want to insist on something else that gives you a reroll on side effects.
Okay, thanks for the tips
I'd second the pharmacist recommendation for anything drug related, and note that if they don't know the answer to your query that's also good enough reason to check in with your doctor to ensure that your concerns are met.
On the NHS website, remember despite being the front end of a huge national organisation, I believe individual pages are single author (admittedly they may be multiple sequential authors when updated) so especially where there is an area of debate treat it like a practitioner's opinion: probably informed but not necessarily to be accepted without question.
I'm here for Machine alignment Mondays 🤖🤖🤖
Scott - if someone else were to fund it; would you be open to/have any interest in publishing a ~300-400 page "best of" SSC book to serve as an introduction to the SSC way of thinking?
I'm considering creating a new project where I will pay for anyone interested to receive introductory "view-quake inducing" books on important topics (ie Superforecasting, Doing Good Better etc.)
Introducing someone to SSC is probably the most high impact view-quake I could think if.
Most psychiatrists who blog are excellent at introducing people to different points of view. The Last Psychiatrist is massively more "view-quake" inducing than SSC, for example.
The issue isn't funding, it's editing. If someone else were to do that, I would...be really nervous and probably think they chose the wrong posts, but it's possible I could get over it.
You could chose the posts yourself, that's probably the smallest part of the editing process. Or make a survey for us to vote for your top 20 best posts.
I agree, and didn't think funding would be an issue. It makes sense that editing is far more complicated and touchy, but I don't think this is a "one person" job. I think a few motivated individuals are assembled who want to work on the project, and who can touch base with you on an approval and as-needed basis, sounds less daunting and more feasible.
I would love a physical book version of SSC posts, even abridged or selected posts. I have a lot of catch up to do, but I hate reading from screens.
there is https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/
Reading Scott's recent post on AI takeoff speed inspired me to set some time aside to read papers on AI alignment to see if I have a miniscule chance of contributing something useful. Where would be a good place to start?
My background: I am a math professor specializing in differential geometry, but I know almost nothing about machine learning and don't use numerical methods or computer simulations for my research (what I do is old style pen and paper pure math). Should I learn ML first (or some specific aspects of it) before I can understand any specific problems? Are there any problems where my math background could be helpful? Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Richard Ngo's curriculum (which Scott linked) looks like a great resource.
Victoria Krakovna has great list of resources here: https://vkrakovna.wordpress.com/ai-safety-resources/
And here are some papers that might appeal to you given your background:
- Garrabrant et al.'s "Logical Induction" is a way of assigning probabilities to sentences that satisfies surprisingly many coherence conditions. https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.03543 Seminar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOddW4cXS5Y
- Critch's "Parametric Bounded Löb's Theorem" generalizes Löb's theorem (from provability logic) and uses it to construct computer programs that cooperate with each other intelligently in Prisoner's Dilemma. https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.04184 Engaging blog post: http://acritch.com/osgt-is-weird/
- Christiano et al.'s "Eliciting Latent Knowledge" assumes familiarity with ML concepts, but it might be relatively easy to get into. It's a writeup of a problem that people are actively working on, and they're in need of fresh ideas. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WwsnJQstPq91_Yh-Ch2XRL8H_EpsnjrC1dwZXR37PC8/
If you ask around you'll find a lot of disagreement over whether ML-free "agent foundations" research is useful, or indeed whether any given approach is useful. I hope you develop your own taste.
Thank you! These are very helpful suggestions. I started reading Critch's paper. I have an additional question: which book/papers would you recommend for a crash course in aspects of ML that would be relevant here (so maybe more on the theoretical side of it)?
You're welcome! Unfortunately, my ML education was haphazard, so I don't have great advice here. But here's a few older papers I liked which should at least give you an idea of what some of the foundational concepts are:
- Why momentum really works. https://distill.pub/2017/momentum/
- Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning. https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.5602 Less theoretical, but it's how I learned about Q-learning.
- Identifying and attacking the saddle point problem in high-dimensional non-convex optimization. https://arxiv.org/abs/1406.2572 This is fun because it's a simple insight about the index of critical points. People used to think that neural networks sometimes run into local optima. This paper argues that actually the problem is saddle points. (It turns out that saddle points aren't a problem either, and neural networks just work.)
- Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples. https://arxiv.org/abs/1412.6572 Fun and informative, but not the most up-to-date exposition of adversarial examples.
- It seems the more math-heavy ML textbooks talk about PAC learning. I feel like I got a lot out of learning PAC learning, even though deep neural networks defy the bounds.
Thank you for the references! Regarding "Parametric Bounded L¨ob’s Theorem and Robust
Cooperation of Bounded Agents" - I thought that the paper is really beautiful, the proof seems simple and clear, but is it correct? I am far from logic and I am worried of things like Russel's paradox sneaking in somewhere. The paper hasn't been cited that much; do you know if any set theorists looked at the proof? I feel that I need some time before I can convince myself it's correct. In any case, thank you for all of these great recommendations!
Huh! It's been a while since I looked at the paper, but it's the sort of result I expected to exist, since (the unbounded, unquantified) Löb's theorem is definitely true in arithmetic and provability logic. I'm not a logician, though.
Yes, you are right. I needed to brush up on logic and look at the Diagonal lemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagonal_lemma, which makes the self-reference in the definition of FairBot ok. It's a really nice result! I wonder how relevant this line of work is now that neural networks are the dominant approach to AI...
Richard Ngo's curriculum is usually recommended: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mTm_sT2YQx3mRXQD6J2xD2QJG1c3kHyvX8kQc_IQ0ns/edit#heading=h.dlm795ug69gc
There's a reading group at https://aisafety.com/reading-group/ , I don't think they're still meeting but they have a great archive.
If you want to know more about whether you should get involved and how, you might also want to talk to the people at AI Safety Support, see https://www.aisafetysupport.org/
We're still meeing. Meetups are now biweekly.
Two other good resourcs:
1) The alignment newsletter. https://rohinshah.com/alignment-newsletter/ It is a weekly roundup of interesting (to Rohin, an AI safety researcher) papers, as well as summaries.
2) The yearly alignment literature reviews: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/C4tR3BEpuWviT7Sje/2021-ai-alignment-literature-review-and-charity-comparison
thank you! i subscribed.
Can anyone recommend a good audiobook/podcast on Ancient Greek/Roman history?
I just started the audio version of The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian by Robin Lane Fox (which I found by recommendation here: https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2017/06/12/books-i-suggest-you-read-so-you-wont-be-misled-as-often/).
So far, so good, but I'm not far enough along to give it a grade.
Maybe not directly what you asked, but I liked the lecture course on Greek history that Yale put on Youtube, and it is just as good in audio form if you download it: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL023BCE5134243987
RIP Kagan. Great professor.
I liked Dan Carlin's 'Death Throes of the Republic' series. https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-series/
Mostly the lead up to Caesar.
Mike Duncan's "The History of Rome" podcast covers pretty much the entire history of Rome, from the legends about its founding until the crumbling of the western empire. The series is almost 200 episodes long, so it wouldn't be good if you're hoping for a *quick* overview of the topic. But I enjoyed it.
seconding History Of Rome, assuming a chronological deep dive is the sort of thing you want.
Tides of History - Patrick Wyman. His original podcast "The Fall of Rome" was all about the Roman Empire.
Looking for feedback and interest in collaboration on this essay (email me at protopiacone at gmail):
Life, on Earth, is not a miracle. It is a simple fact. Perhaps in the cosmos, where millions/billions of stars are lifeless, Earth's fecundity is miraculous. But to us terrestrial locals, the miracle of life is just a cliche.
Birds do it. Bees do it. Everything with a pulse does it. For most of history, most of us had no choice but to do it, as nature dictated and administered its laws via our DNA. To take credit for giving life is like getting congratulated for graduating from a school with a 100% graduation rate — hardly an exceptional feat.
So where did it come from, this "miracle of life" business? We can consider two sources, an internal and an external one. The internal being our emotions. The irrational machines that we are, subject to hormonal fluctuations, we cry when we see babies born. We can't help it. And we chalk our tears to some miraculous source.
The external source is marketing. It's the eternal Instagramming by the Joneses, who will gladly lie to you about the miracle of their plebeian achievements. Or, even more cynically, it's the marketing by big business, seeking to sell you everything you will ever need for your miracle to be extra miraculous. There are other sources, of course — religions, governments, etc., but let's move on.
Really, the only thing miraculous about child birth is how easy it is. It's an automated process, kicked off by the simplest/dumbest of pleasures: the orgasm.
There is, however, an exception to the miraclelessness of childbirth. It's rather a modern affect, whereby the childbirth is an anti-default — a pure choice.
There came a time in recent human history, where some of us humans got smart. These "smart ones" developed birth control and adopted its use. They flipped the script and neutered this supposed miracle that they really didn't want. And so, within these communities of smart humans, the default switched from secular fertility, to secular infertility.
In a smart/modern world, the null hypothesis is to live your best life/truth/whatever. Enjoy it. Do what you love. You do you. Consume, consume, consume, die. To create life, in such a world, is to sacrifice your time, your body, and your money for unknown and uncertain returns. It's not an entirely rational decision, and it's why we see it made less and less across the contemporary Western landscape. Those who do make the choice, in such circumstances, are either stupid, insane, or they are embarking on a faith-based pilgrimage that ends/begins with a miraculous genesis of somewhat biblical proportion. We, mortal humans, create little Adams and Eves.
And here is where the magic happens. In a world, where infertility is a default, and childbirth is a choice, those who choose childbirth are no longer just cogs in a proliferation machine, but instead, they are Gods who create life where there was none.
But it's still not quite as simple as recognizing all these humans who choose childbirth as Gods. For them to be Gods, and not just plebs, their choice must be their own. This choice must be unencumbered by the internal marketing fed to them by their own DNA. This choice must be unencumbered by the social pressures coming from their parents, their religions, the Joneses, and the Hallmarks. For even in our progressive societies, most who choose childbirth are assuming the choice of others, and not choosing for themselves. For them, the choice is not pure, and the result is far from miraculous.
How then do we distinguish the pure, miraculous choice, from the disguised, plebeian, coded algorithm that masquerades as choice? We demand proof, that's how.
The proof is easy to find, because it is quite rare. In fact, it can generally be gathered via a basic question: WHY? Why choose to create life? Why choose to be a God? What are your goals for your child of God? How do you plan to achieve those goals?
The better (the more robust, researched, considered) the answers, the greater the miracle. The stronger the imparitive to godliness, the loftier the vision for development that must follow the miracle. For the miracle of life is not an end. Nor is it a beginning. It is but the end of the beginning.
"the simplest/dumbest of pleasures: the orgasm"
I am so sorry for you.
The phrase "Miracle of Life" first appeared in Google's library of books in 1806, entered regular usage in 1830, and then dramatically rose in use after the 1980s.
In the most developed countries, like the UK & Netherlands, the fertility rate was stable at about 5 during the early 1800s. It only really began falling in about 1880. The US started higher: the fertility rate in 1800 was about 7. But its fall was more steady up until 1930. Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033074/fertility-rate-uk-1800-2020/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033478/fertility-rate-netherlands-1840-2020/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033027/fertility-rate-us-1800-2020/
This term was not a response to a norm of infertility because it was coined during a time when fertility was still the norm.
I should note that "miracle of childbirth" doesn't appear until 1900. The fertility rate has started to decline in the most developed countries at this point, but it is still high (about 4).
There’s a good Open Yale course on Ancient Greek history taught by Donald Kagan. I listened to it over the course of a few weeks of dog walks.
"The only thing miraculous about child birth is how easy it is"
I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that you have never given birth.
I'm currently sitting in the hospital, looking at my newborn son sleeping cuddled up to my God of a wife after a 65 hour labor.
I wonder if people are missing the key difference between the start of labour and the actual delivery stage in their reactions here? My wife's sister-in-law (my sister-in-law-in-law?) managed labours of approximately 120 and 80 hours, but was only actually delivering the baby for less than 8 hours in each case...
Congratulations! I'm guessing you wrote this post in your head during the interminable hours of stressful waiting.
Get some sleep, you need it and you will need it.
Is this a nice way of saying "we will permit you this one piece of intolerable claptrap since clearly you're not in your right mind"?
Re: interminable hours of stressful waiting
We followed the Bradley Method of husband-coached child birth, which both my wife and I very much recommend. There was hardly any waiting involved because I was "in the shit", so to speak.
Then I'm surprised you can so blithely describe childbirth as easy. A more suitable word is *default* as in, childbirth is the default in absence of contraception. Prior to the development of modern obstetrics, it was also just about the hardest and most dangerous thing most women would do. Also, congratulations on your baby.
You create a test for worthiness that is merely a simplistic proxy for intelligence.
{CLOSED: wrong-answers-only} What is Elon Musk up to on his Twitter account?
Proving that GPT-3 can pass the Twitter Turing test.
He is preparing to censor all content that doesn't support building a Mars colony.
He's in temptress mode, trying to seduce Scott.
"{wrong-answers-only} What is Elon Musk up to on his Twitter account?"
Elon is very diligently trying to raise shareholder value for Twitter shareholders!
> Elon is very diligently trying to raise shareholder value for Twitter shareholders!
I'm sorry, that was a correct answer. Elon Musk is demonstrating how "Twitter Blue" works to his 12 million followers.
Yes his comments about Twitter Blue intrigued me as well. Not to have any ads would be worth $3 a month alone.
Making lotsa jokes about Uranus, right?
I just finished Vaclav Smil's: "Grand Transitions". Vaclav in all his books provides TREMENDOUS statistical detail on research he is discussing. Much of the book is about the ecological effects of human growth here on earth. I find it likeable that he tends to criticize both the alarmists who point to the end of the world in 20 years unless we stop emitting CO2 and also the very optimistic group who look at our progress and predict we will solve all of our ecological problems with future tech. Hans Rosling and Stephen Pinker are pointed at in that regard. I thought his last few paragraphs in the book said a lot so I will copy and paste it below.
"The most likely outcome will include an unpredictable mixture of components from the entire spectrum of possibilities. We do not know what lies ahead; even the best probabilistic assessments of specific outcomes are, despite their hedged nature, just matters of educated guesses. The notion that in 2020 we can anticipate the world of 2100 is utterly risible(laughable). Just look back to the world of 1940 and see what did not exist, and what was not anticipated, in that world. There were no antibiotics, no contraceptives, no nations with below-replacement fertility, no nationwide life expectancies above 60, and no countries where most adults were overweight or obese. When we move our focus from populations to agriculture and food, there were no herbicides, no high-yielding short-stalked cereals, no transgenic crops, no no-till cropping, no central animal feeding operations, no mass-scale greenhouses growing vegetables, no cultivation under plastic sheets, and (bananas aside) no intercontinental trade in fresh fruit. When we turn to energy, there were no giant open-cast mines, no Saudi oilfields, no offshore drilling (out of the sight of land or in deep waters), no hydraulic fracturing, no liquefied natural gas, no giant oil or LNG tankers, no gigawatt-sized turbogenerators, no widely deployed gas turbines, no flue gas desulfurization, no nuclear reactors, no high-voltage direct-current lines, no PV cells, no wind turbines. Economies had to do without any computers, satellites, jetliners, container shipping, and rapid trains; there was no steel produced in basic oxygen furnaces, no plate glass made by floating on molten metal, no centrifugal compressors in ammonia synthesis, no composite materials, no solid-state electronic devices and hence no Internet, no mobile phones, no essentially instant and free flow of information. And there were no concerns about acid rain, ozone layer or greenhouse gases; there was no photochemical smog, no antibiotic resistance, no pesticide residues, no mass-scale plastic waste. Contrary to many modeling dreams, the future remains unknowable, but we know that many options remain available, that choices of possible trajectories and effective alternatives have not been irrevocably foreclosed by our past actions. Grand transitions of population and economic growth, of energy use, and of environmental impacts have brought us to this point in human evolution when both promises and perils have reached their respective extremes exemplified by the claims of approaching singularity and equidistant apocalypse: both are “scheduled” by their proponents to take place before 2050, perhaps even by 2030. I do not believe that in such a short time we will face either an apocalyptic outcome or a care-free singularitarian future of boundless intelligence. The chances are that we will continue to deal with the coming transition to a civilization operating within the biospheric limits with a combination of aggressive inventiveness and inexplicable procrastination, of effective adaptability and infuriating failure to respond. Will we succeed? The answer hinges on the definition of success, but once all the gains and losses have been factored in, it would be surprising if transitions likely to be accomplished during the 21st century were less transformative than those experienced during the 20th century. Another epochal transition is unfolding and its outcome is not foreordained; it remains contingent on our choices. In that sense, at least, nihil novi sub sole . . . (nothing new under the sun or nothing novel in existence)"
That seems right – is the book good otherwise?
As mentioned all Smil's books are filled with statistical detail so tend to be a bit of a slog to get through, but IMHO it is worth it as you get a pretty darn clear picture of what humans are doing to the biosphere and the current conditions that are going to make it difficult to limit CO2 output like the fact that a giant chunk of the world population hasn't even starting using electricity yet and that is going to add a huge number to the energy requirements in the near future. Around 375 pages. I wouldn't say I couldn't put it down, but I was drawn into each chapter and finished it in a week or so.
He reminds me of Tooze in that he seems to arrive/align with some positions I find unserious from other people but his version and journey to that same place is extremely meticulous and chock full of information - That it can’t help but draw you in.
Would you suggest this book or ‘Growth’ as a good introduction?
I read Growth sometime ago so my memory of it has faded, but it seems like his more recent books like "Grand Transitions" include references to his earlier material so might be a good place to start. The statistics are more current in it as well. A boatload of statistics! He admits it himself in the book, but finds it necessary to make his point. It would be fun IMHO to be part of a book club discussing one of his books.
I was going to say wasn't this provably wrong? Then I realised every graph I can find of carbon dioxide (sorry - I can't write the chemical formula wrongly; my school education was too effective...) levels I could find had a truncated y-axis and that recorded and estimated rises were not as steep as I thought!
It either proves that people are trying something on with presentation of the data or that my maths teachers were not as effective as my chemistry ones in teaching me good habits.
How impressive was John von Neumann's foresight on computers and WWII?
I'm reading a biography about John von Neumann called "The Man from the Future". One thing shown repeatedly throughout the book is how prophetic von Neumann was. He was able to see things coming to the extent that it makes me believe the future might be less difficult to predict than I had previously thought. Two examples of his foresight are on computers and on WWII.
In 1945 while he was simultaneously working on The Bomb and on some of the first computers, he said that relative to the atomic bombs, computers were 'going to become not only more important but indispensable.' In an early example of concern about AI risk, the book quotes "'We will be able to go into space way beyond the moon if only people could keep pace with what they create.' he said. And he worried that if we did not, those same machines could be more dangerous than the bombs he was helping to build."
Some of his prescient comments on WWII include:
- In 1935, he predicted there would be a war in Europe in the next decade, and that America would enter if England were in trouble
- In 1936, when asked about how much of a role France would play in the war, he said "Oh! France won't matter."
- The book doesn't state the year, but around this time he also feared the European Jews would face a genocide as the Armenians had under the Ottoman Empire
- In 1938 he said the Munich agreement would only postpone the next World war
- In 1939 his wife went to Europe to get their family members out, and on August 10 he told her to not to go to Budapest, and to make sure to be out of Europe before September (Hitler invaded Poland on September 1)
- In 1940 he predicted that Britain would hold Germany at bay and US would join the war the following year
I'm curious, especially for the WWII buffs in the comments. How hard was it to predict these things?
I'd point out the 1935 prediction us wrong. The US did not enter the war in 1940 when the UK fought alone (other than its four ex-colonies, it's empire and bits of the French empire...) and there was a realistic chance of invasion. By 1941 the UK was probably safe from invasion, and was holding its own in North Africa to the extent the loss of the Suez Canal was also unlikely. Plus it was starting to overwhelm the U-boat campaign. The UK might not have been able to win alone, but it was not losing. Admittedly, the military stuff and ships sent on credit from the US probably helped.
The 1940 prediction is without an exact date somewhat difficult to assess. The situation in December (or indeed before the fall of France) was not necessarily negative. That in June might look bad for the UK though. Either way Von Neumann clearly had a bias towards the likelihood of the US entering the war to support the UK.
And a genocide if the Jews was hardly a major reach. Most European governments were anti-Semitic, so that the Nazi rhetoric was extreme but just part of a very-unsettling background. Remember, there were efforts to get Jews out of most of Europe, not just Germany.
As to Munich, as noted by others there was not widespread belief in its efficacy, as demonstrated by Chamberlain immediately increasing military production.
I'd say this shows he was an intelligent observer and probably a believer in the common interests of the Anglosphere . I'm not sure these examples show particularly acute powers of foresight, and that's without asking for a list of all the predictions he made for comparison...
In hindsight, there was absolutely no chance of a successful invasion in 1940. Operation Sealion was the military planning equivalent of "If we had some egg, we could make ham and eggs, if we had some eggs."
Germany had almost no landing craft and not a huge amount of sealift capability of any sort (the American portion of the 1944 Normandy landings involved more sealift tonnage than the entire capacity of the German merchant marine in 1939). The plan was to use Rhine river barges instead. These would carry at most 10 divisions of unsupported light infantry, who would attempt to seize intact one or more port on the English side of the channel coast in order to allow supplies, tanks, and artillery to be shipped in. Capturing a defended port intact with the first wave of an amphibious assault was a tall order in WW2, even with air and naval supremacy and full operational surprise, none of which the Germans would have been likely to have for Sealion. Not impossible (c.f. the 1943 Sicily landings), but very difficult. And the river barges would have been ponderously slow, very vulnerable, and not really seaworthy in the Channel in any but the calmest weather.
As for air supremacy, the best plausible outcome for the Battle of Britain would be for the RAF to execute its contingency plan to withdraw its fighter to the North, out of range of German bombers, in order to preserve the remaining fighter force to contest any attempted invasion. In the case of an invasion attempt, the fighters would be turned loose: the Luftwaffe might still manage local air superiority over a relatively narrow invasion front, but air supremacy would be out of the question. The German bombers would also be stretched thin between close air support on the beaches, interdicting supply and reinforcement behind the lines, and trying to take out the entire British fleet.
As for the navy, the British overwhelmingly outnumbered and outgunned the Germans. Of the meager surface fleet the Germans did have, much of it had been damaged (and not ready for operations again in 1940) or sunk during the invasion of Norway. At best, surprise lets the Germans get most of the first wave ashore before the British can react, but any follow-up waves or resupply shipments would almost certainly be interdicted by the Royal Navy even if the German army manages to capture Dover or another port intact.
Indeed. But this was probably not clear to the British in 1940, especially as the fall of France so rapidly had also seemed impossible. And the attack on Norway had shown that Germany could launch marine operations.
Remember also that British military thinking for hundreds of year had been obsessed with the danger of a continental power landing an army. That it hadn't happened even for Napoleon didn't seem to lessen this fear.
Re September 1939: but that seems to be overly cautious if he really knew what was going to happen, in much of Europe there was the "Phoney war" for several more months.
Von Neumann's genius re: computers wasn't that they would some day become indispensable. He outlined the principles for colocating code and date in core memory, thereby making reprogramming computers far simpler than contemporaneous methods (which required physically rewiring them for each new program). He also specified the basics for an arithmetic processing unit, a control-data processor, and other mechanisms taken for granted now. This is the so-called Princeton architecture, which practically all computing hardware today follows, if not strictly, then in principle.
I can't speak to the book you're referring to, but I can recommend William Poundstone's "The Prisoner's Dilemma," which combines a biography of von Neumann with a surprisingly accessible overview of game theory, yet another field which von Neumann pioneered with grace and ease.
"He was able to see things coming to the extent that it makes me believe the future might be less difficult to predict than I had previously thought."
It helps, of course, to be John von Neumann :-)
For the prediction of war in Europe I'll toss in Maynard Keynes' "The Economic Consequences of the Peace" which I have *not* read, but which is supposed to be a detailed screed at the stupidity of the post-WW1 treatment of Germany with a claim that politically it would backfire.
I don't think Churchill believed that the Munich agreement would "bring peace in our time." I'm not even sure that Chamberlin believed it, but the United Kingdom wasn't ready to go to war then so you play the cards you have ...
If French tank tactics were better then that part of the war would have been VERY different. I doubt that John was up on German innovations in tank tactics :-)
I'll also point out that if von Neumann had made 100 predictions and 90 of them were wrong then this is less newsworthy. And folks (the originator and the people around them) tend to remember the RIGHT calls.
WW2 was a very close run thing for the Allies and a lot of our success ultimately came down to the stupidity of Hitler. For example he declared war on the US in support of Japan. Another thing that intrigues me that Churchill only became PM after Lord Halifax refused the role. Less than a year later the Germans wanted peace talks and Lord Halifax wanted to send envoys - but Churchill refused because he knew that the British people would want to settle. All of which is to say that I think in this case Von Braun’s predictions were just educated guesses. Thing could easily have turned out differently based on things no one could predict.
Once the US was at war, it was going to go to war with Japan's allies in the war anyway. That's kind of usual, and it's not as if the US wouldn't be able to find a provocation in a U-boat attack or the like to declare war.
Also, if the US rapidly defeated Japan then the whole weight of the British Empire and Commonwealth (who could field more soldiers than the US, and were already accessing the US industrial base), plus probably pretty quickly France and the Netherlands' Asian territories, was going to focus on Germany and it's European allies. So letting the US focus on Japan was not necessarily a sensible strategy even were it realistic.
I'm not sure I agree that it was that close. Hitler not declaring war on the US would in the end have been more to the Soviet Union's benefit than Germany's- Germany loses the Eastern Front even without direct US intervention and I don't think not declaring war on the US would be enough to stop America from sending material aid.
And on the other side of course once we assume the US does get into the war I don't think there's any serious chance they lose. I don't think there's really any way Germany wins the race to nuclear bombs (in OTL they barely competed at all) and even if the Manhattan Project is derailed somehow the US industrial advantage is overwhelming.
Looking for reading recommendations for a dog diet.
We just got a yorkeepoo puppy; right now feeding him with standard dry food, but in the long run planning to cook at home. Any suggestions on a good guide for a balanced diet?
One specific question I'd like to learn more about: how much can we reduce meat before it starts adversely affecting his health?
Thank you!
Stick with the commercial diets - there is nothing wrong with Pedigree, Purina, etc. Little soft food options like Little Ceasars have more gravey/calories than needed, but they are also fine. Don't worry about a single protien source diet unless you get an allergy diagnosis.
Your dog is not your sweetheart, it will not care that you spent hours slaving over a hot stove. Spend the time hanging out with and playing with the dog instead.
Re: meat - dogs are omnivores, on the spectrum such: ferrets (true carnivores) -> cats -> dogs -> bears - > humans -> pigs -> cattle-> horses (only must have animal protiens as nursing neonates). So you *could* go to a more meatless diet, but I think that would be counter productive, as pet feeds are overwhelmingly from meat that can't be marketed for humans, and so would be land fill wasted if not fed to dogs and cats. Use the common commercial food, divert food from the trash, and make the most use possible of every life raised to give us substance.
Pick up a proper veterinary dog nutrition doorstopper textbook. Find out which one’s on your local college’s curriculum and grab one used from a student. I won’t claim that professional consensus can’t be wrong or flawed, but you will want a very solid grounding if you intend to trek through the unbelievably misinformation-dense world of pet nutrition. give your bullshit-sniffer some basic calibration.
What are your concerns with a standard dry food diet?
It's good to keep in mind that most dogs at Westminster eat standard dry food. Unless you are dealing with a specific issue your best bet is almost always going to be a good quality brand like Royal Canine.
I've heard this idea before--that it's better to feed them dog food than manage the diet yourself--but now I'm wondering, why is it the opposite for humans? That is, AFAIK, humans are usually advised to eat a wide variety of foods, and we haven't been able to perfect a nutrient sludge that will keep us healthy long-term (something something micronutrients).
Maybe it's relevant that humans make their own food choices and thus can eat intuitively? Or that there's a bigger/older market for dog food than human nutrient sludge?
Actually, maybe (e.g.) Soylent is healthy long-term and it's just IV nutrition that's hard?
- Humans are omnivores optimized for getting some nutrition from almost anything at the cost of not getting the most out of anything we eat (compared to animals specialized for specific foods, humans can still certainly get by on much more limited diets than a modern one, provided all the necessities are there)
- “intuitive eating” for the most common household pets (cats and dogs) would look very different from a humans’ intuitive diet, especially a modern (western) one. These are carnivores that can’t get nearly as much nutrition as we can from plants, but can get what they need from whole animal carcasses. replicating that is not going to come “intuitively” to people who are often queasy even about basic organ meats. You’re in for a lot of research to overcome your bias toward people food, and the overwhelming majority are not going to beat veterinarians and the animal food industries on this front, even if commercial dog food isn’t theoretically ideal. Public messaging is tailored accordingly.
Basically, soylent probably isn’t ideal, but if your choice is between soylent and a random nutrient deficiency you wouldn’t have even thought to compensate for, consider soylent!
Dogs are omnivores not carnivores. Though you may consider them to be facultative carnivores but on the spectrum of being very close to omnivores. Compared to their wolf ancestors, dogs are basically omnivores: https://www.science.org/content/article/diet-shaped-dog-domestication
I like how Kerani phrases it above, as a spectrum, they also call dogs omnivores but what should be clear is that the line is somewhat arbitrary. Being relatively better at tolerating starch in the diet than a wolf does not make dogs as flexible as people or pigs or bears. There's a little bit more to comparative GI anatomy than amylase.
I tend to still round dogs up to carnivore because I think that "this animal needs meat to thrive" is worth underlining, even if they won't strictly starve without it. Way too many people are desperate to believe otherwise, to the detriment of the dogs in their care.
You can do pretty great controlled experiments with dogs! You choose exactly what they eat and can monitor their health and behaviour over their entire lives. And this is exactly what good breeders have spent centuries doing. They examine raw diets, vegetarian options, and whatever the latest dumb trend is.
I'm curious about humans as well though. Say every meal you had a small serving of fish and beef, a little grain, a heap of veggies and a good multivitamin, all ground up into a paste. Wouldn't that be a better diet than 99% of humans?
Dogs are carnivores, so have a presumably more limited and specialised digestive range (is that a term?).
And we value texture and flavour (remember this is both taste and smell), whereas dogs may not? Other mammals are not just furry less-intelligent humans but totally different creatures after all.
Dogs have evolved the ability to digest starches over time https://www.science.org/content/article/diet-shaped-dog-domestication They are much closer to omnivores than obligate carnivores.
Humans are also a lot more reluctant than animals to eat the same thing for every meal...
Anyone here work for Nueralink and willing to answer a couple questions ?
Come on – why not just include the questions so all of the rest of can answer them too! :)
I may be a touch late to the party, but is the opening setting of Unsong, with licensing megacorps, nonexistent marginal costs, and over importance placed on degrees by any chance an allegory for the modern medical profession and drug approval?
Yes - Dylan mentions the drug analogy explicitly somewhere in the middle. Although I came up with it in 2010 and so it was also slightly an allegory for the RIAA.
I love the now-'Monday' topics, but I think this ([3]) is a nice thing to do for those that don't.
Is there a good effective altruist argument for humanistic education, not just in college, but as a way of life for post college adults
I suggest starting by asking effective altruists what inclined them to EA instead of starting with some particular thing which might have inclined them to EA.
I think one of the goals of a humanistic education has been construed as, make people altruistic who would not otherwise be altruistic. (Also potentially make people value effectiveness. Not everyone does.) Assuming that EAs think it is good for humanity/effective for their purposes for them to be more numerous, then insofar as humanistic education causes the increase, it would be supported. I’m not sure how much effort or institutionalization is supposed to go into it, though. There’s a point where the maintenance of the institution is not altruistic and might cancel whatever benefit is derived from acquainting young people with ideals.
Arguably, once someone is started on it, they should continue, moving on to unfamiliar works, restless for refinement. Also arguably, once someone is started on it, really started, they don’t want to stop, and stopping might hinder the good they could do later plus make them miserable.
It’s time-consuming, though.
Whatever the theory I can tell you the effective, actual in existence answer from the Effective Altruist movement is a resounding "no."
If you're asking whether a liberal arts education is, if your goal is making the world a better place, a remotely sensible use of one's time and money compared to obviously efficient stuff like giving your tuition/book money to AMF, I think that at the very least, poli sci and moral philosophy are vital to the cause.
Even if studying that material is valuable, the certification is the expensive stuff - go to a library and send the cash to somewhere other than a university
I would guess that poli sci is best studied at a university where you have professors who are actually involved with that stuff, and can hang out with people who actually do that stuff, and can potentially get hands-on experience; but yeah, paying for a formal degree in philosophy is maybe not the best use of a hundred grand and/or the opportunity cost of a scholarship. (No offense to Doctor Alexander.)
It does make me wonder how an extremely smart 18-year-old with a hundred thousand dollars should go about studying moral philosophy. Probably live on beans and rice for a few years while reading the library, and then hire a starving grad student to be their Aristocratic Tutor a la Oxbridge?
Humanity as a whole derives a tremendous amount of our overall utility from the arts, be it books movies music videogames history sculpture painting etc.
STEM and friends are great if you imagine everybody to be purely materialistic as you can help society produce an optimal amount of widgets, but it would be a drab and miserable world if nobody did creative work.
As for you personally, unless you're a .001% megagenius there's probably somebody just as good who'd be happy to go into STEM instead and could contribute similarly, but if you think you have a particular niche in the humanities there's a reasonable shot of you doing something that otherwise would not be done at all, which could very well provide more to the world than a marginal STEM grad.
Also from the obligatory AIpocalypse perspective I think it's more likely for AI to step in and render human contributions to STEM meaningless than for AI to render human contributions to the humanities meaningless.
It's not exactly clear what "humanistic education ... as a way of life for post college adults" means.
The short answer is still probably "No, there aren't any _good_ EA arguments for ...". I think one of hallmarks of a _good_ EA argument is that there is some concrete _evidence_ for the effectiveness of something. What you seem to be asking about is also not obviously altruistic – not in terms of 'first order' effects anyways. (Unless you think that the providers of "humanistic education", whoever they are, are deserving recipients of _effective_ altruism via tuition?)
A big gap I'd expect in any kind of _good_ argument for this is a survey of alternatives. Given the ambiguity of the question, it's just as murky as to what alternatives there are in terms of "way[s] of life".
This is less charitable, but it sure seems to me like you're searching for reasons to believe something you want to believe. Why would any one "way of life", for anyone, be some kind of form of effective altruism (beyond being and practicing EA)?
Good point about evidence.
I think the argument would be that lifelong learners will be more effective thinkers for the rest of their lives. So hard to measure the impact, but I'm sure it's there. Some of those thinkers will be leaders of influential institutions. For example, you'd want a leader of a large foundation to be a lifelong learner, constantly asking questions. That in itself may lead that Foundation leader to gravitate toward more effective altruism.
That's my cut at it, anyway.
"May" is the same as "may not", why are you so sure that the effect is there?
Is there any evidence that spending X years on humanities education results in people becoming more effective thinkers for the rest of their lives than spending the same X years on non-humanities education e.g. STEM?
Also, it does not seem obvious that there is a causal link from humanities education to becoming a lifelong learner, it seems quite plausible that any correlation is because the kind of people who are lifelong learners are the same people who prefer to choose humanistic education, and would be lifelong learners even if they did not take it.
"Is there a good effective altruist argument for humanistic education, not just in college, but as a way of life for post college adults"
I don't think I understand the question (I mean, I can parse it, but ...).
Are you trying to find a logical/ethical justification for something YOU want to do? Or are you trying to find a logical/ethical justification for encouraging other people to pursue this?
Your question seems to me to be similar to: Is there an effective altruist argument for going on vacation in Hawai'i'?
So ... more words, please!
I agree with this critique.
One LW norm that I like is replacing questions like "Is the rational thing to do brushing your teeth?" with "Is brushing your teeth helpful/good/healthy/worthwhile"? It cuts through jargon and community identification to create a more meaningful question.
So I would rephrase this as "is getting a humanistic education an effective way to help other people?" or "is getting a humanistic education the best thing you can do with your time/money for the needy people of the world?" or something like that.
I'm still not sure of the answer. It...doesn't seem true on the face of it? But I guess you could make an argument that lots of philosophers like Toby Ord and Will MacAskill have done really great stuff, and if humanistic education helps teach you how to do that kind of thing, catapult you to an important position where you can do that kind of thing, or make you the kind of person who is thoughtful about doing that kind of thing, maybe it could be good for some people who have pretty clear plans about how it would work.
I also think the "does this help the needy people of the world" framing is good because it makes it clear that the answer might be "no" and the activity could still be valuable. Does me having dinner help the needy people of the world? No, but I'm still going to.
What is "a humanistic education" -- is that synonymous with "an education in the humanities" ? In that case, I'd argue that, on the one hand, the modern version of humanities are almost completely useless. Obviously applied fields such as art, music composition, etc. are useful; but pure humanities such as philosophy or literature criticism or whatnot hold little value (and some hold *negative* value). On the other hand, though, humans are not interchangeable. If we determine that what our society needs most right now is computer programmers, and you suck at computer programming and find it detestable; then studying programming is quite possibly the worst decision you can make -- for everyone, not just yourself.
IMO, the world would be best served if everyone was exposed to a broad spectrum of possible education paths, and empowered to pick the path that is best for that specific individual.
I think it does actually help needy people indirectly for you to have dinner. You are an internet personality who is (partially) known for advocating for people to donate to the needy people of the world. If word got out that you do stupid things like not eating when you're hungry, it might reduce the influence of your pro-helping-the-needy writings.
If we're considering indirect effects like that, then even building IQ 200 designer babies for rich people helps the needy people of the world by increasing the rate of technological progress. Even making Japanese tentacle porn and giving it away on the internet helps the needy people of the world to the extent that it gratifies them and reduces birthrates by epsilon, helping their population grow more slowly than their infrastructure/economy. But it also hurts the needy people of the world via contributing epsilon to the population collapse in the first world, slowing technological progress. (I'm assuming here that porn is economically sorta substitutable for relationships, so flooding the market with porn slightly reduces demand/supply for relationships ceteris paribus. Sex robots will soon be a much better substitute and cause an even larger reduction in demand/supply). So It's unclear which effect predominates.
Besides direct charity, basically anything that helps speed up technological progress or grow the world economy or reduce X-risk is good for the needy people of the world. Scott has done that in countless ways like doing deep dives on education, opposing communism, ameliorating fears of genetic engineering, prediction markets, AI alignment, signal boosting innovative model cities, and telling a lot of smart people that climate change is not a good reason to avoid having kids.
I will bite that bullet. Increasing the rate of growth of human prosperity is *the* long-term EA goal (I'd class most X-risks as medium term). Whether to focus on long term or short term EA is a different question, as is the extent to which helping the extremely poor today is effective at boosting global human tech development
I'm not trying to criticize EA at all here. Just trying to make a point about how many different non-obvious ways there are to indirectly help the present and future needy people of the world.
I think humanities Education is massively important but not sure how one would evaluate the claim within an EA framework…I think it can be done and may already be done so I’d like to read about it.
The best argument I know of is an appeal to robustness. In the Talmud (Kiddushin 29a), the rabbis include in a list of father's obligations to his son to teach him Torah, a trade, and how to swim.
Now, teaching Torah is obvious. It would be shocking if rabbis didn't say that Jews should learn Torah. A trade is also fairly obvious. We might infer that the alternative is poverty, but the rabbis suggest an even more pessimistic outcome; that someone who doesn't learn a trade will likely take up banditry. Another good reason for an education! But so far, we're not really talking a "general education". Torah has some aspects of being a general education, from the Jewish viewpoint, but among practicing Jews it's seen more as a list of our responsibilities.
But teaching your children to swim, I'd argue, is the platonic ideal of a general education. The rabbis were not trying to produce Olympic athletes; far from it, they derided the Grecian way of life. Rather, I believe, the rabbis were making a case-in-point argument for teaching your children robustness. And that, I'd argue, is the core case for a general education. Yes, it's *nice* when everyone has a deep core of cultural references in conversation. Yes it's *nice* that we occasionally find passionate and excellent people by teaching them many basics, and that all sorts of things can open your mind and so on.
But if you live in a world dominated by tail risk, increasing robustness is more than nice to have; it's a pressing need.
I agree with the robustness take, but I don't think that's the same as a general humanities education - it's almost the opposite. Teaching your kid to swim, to cook, to mend torn clothes, to fix their car back when that was possible, those are all robustness. Reading great literature or famous philosophers may be nice but it will never save your life or even save you money.
Now, as I understand it, skills that save your life or save you money are supposed to be taught by high school. That's the theory, anyway, but you do see a lot more civics and basic finance courses in high school than college. The appeal to robustness here is not just that we should be materially robust - that's also important! - but we should also be robust to ideas. Learning about fascism isn't likely to save you money, and it's also unlikely (but perhaps more likely) to save your life. Great literature contains lots of important ideas, and you never know which you'll need in your arsenal for your particular life. And while arguments of "oh education A is good training for task B" are fraught, I rather imagine that practicing evaluating a curated set of important ideas from the past is good training for evaluating new ideas we encounter in our lives.
So the value as I understand it is that we first make equip people to navigate material concerns and then intellectual concerns.
Compare that to a CS degree, for example, which has been vital for my career but with a few notable exceptions hasn't helped me much outside computer-related questions. Now I did for example learn about the Pareto Distribution, which I think is a vital idea for everyone, but I relearned it from Nassim Taleb so I wasn't going to have been lost forever. But that's the essence of a trade degree; it's mostly narrowly focused, and helpful while your trade is valuable, but you do also occasionally encounter universal ideas.
Wait – your original question was about "humanistic education", but here you write "humanities Education".
I majored in math at a college/university in the U.S.. Did I receive either kinds of educations?
Thinking about "humanistic education" it occurred to me that, despite your question seeming to assume/imply it, it wasn't _necessary_ to go to college/university to get one.
Stock markets are sort of like prediction markets in their own right, any reason to not trust it?
I can think of one: if the money in it is not able to be transferred out of country, then all alternative places for the money could have the same downturn and thus no reason to move the market.
You can try searching metaforecast.org as well, a site made by Nuno Sempere that acts as a search engine for lots of different prediction platforms.
"Subdivided" is doing a lot of work here. You need to consider the material differences between theories B1 and B2: is B2 really just B1 + ε? Or does it have some true explanatory power separate from B1, but shares a few assumptions?
Ultimately, in the *total* absence of evidence, you don't even know which parts of the given theories are relevant, so categorization is ruled out a priori - even talking about B1 and B2 is incoherent. Realistically you'll have some information about X (perhaps you've sent out a handful of expeditions, hurr hurr) and so you can just determine which theory fits that evidence best rather than having to abstract at this level.
Is there anything distinguishing your situation from the following?
X can be explained by two theories, theory P and theory Q. Theory P is really theory B1 by a different name. Theory Q can be subdivided into two subtheories Q1 and Q2, which are different names for B2 and B.
If there's no way to tell these apart, then we should say that all three get 1/3, because that's the only thing to do that doesn't privilege whichever thing you happened to call a theory or a subtheory.
In practice, I think there *is* often a way to tell these apart, which is complexity. (Something like Kolmogorov complexity of a complete description of the theory.) It doesn't seem crazy to assign probabilities according to complexity in the absence of other information; that's just a fancier Occam's Razor.
If A and B are equally complex, and B1 vs B2 add one more bit to specify some additional detail, then we might pick option 1: assign the probabilities 1/2, 1/4, 1/4.
Isn't this just Buridan's Ass? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buridan%27s_ass
Not to try to dunk on you, but like choosing an interpretation for QM, this strikes me as an essentially meaningless enterprise: with (definitionally) no evidence that any theory should be favored, the assigning of probabilities is arbitrary. You can quibble over whether ‘subtheories’ should be privileged over theories etc., but that’s all down to some whether you have some sort of taxonomic/aesthetic bias against considering something a subset of something else and has nothing to do with being rational; same thing with assigning a greater probability to A over B or an equal chance to A versus B. With no actual evidence, it’s so much sophistry. Coming up with a clever way to justify an assumption we make with no evidence appears to make us smarter but actually makes us dumber and less objective.
If the first coin toss is going to be tails (The triggering event) then where is the possibility of heads heads here? Maybe I’m missing something
I get it.
Seems very clear to me that it would be 25/25/50 a priori. The odds of a theory being correct don't just increase as soon as you find a slight variation on that theory.
Gesundheit? I don't know what you're talking about but I'd love an elaboration...
What is the actual behavior, if you don't mind? Why do people think that and how do they actually act? Is it all social enforcement mechanisms?
First of all it's completely possible to both believe that: 1) X is not happening; 2) X happening would be a good thing. 1) doesn't have to be an ephemism for 2). There is absolutely no contradiction in holding both positions. If I believe both and I meet a person who engages me, claiming that X is happening and X is bad, I'm not going to automatically concede the first point. I'll argue about both part of the claim.
Notice, also, that 1) is a statement of fact, while 2) is a statement of preference. It's easier to argue and find common ground about factual claims. One can even say, that it's what the arguments are supposed to be about: find actual testable fact that you disagree about and figure out who is right. If you can't even settle on whether X is happening or not, what chance do you have to come to an agreement whether X is good? I think it's good that people argue about 1) instead of 2) - its has at least the possibility of agreement. Even better would be to reduce 2) to some set of factual claims, predictions about the future and cost-benefit analysis and then argue about them.
There is also an important distinction between our 1) and 2) and a statement 3): It's Y that's happening and Y happening is a good thing. This can become very confusing when people disagree whether X=Y or not. Imagine that a person claims that USA publicly hosts fashists rallies and this is bad thing. You agree that publicly hosting a fashist rally is a bad thing but don't think that it's happening in USA, so you challenge the first part of the claim. As an obvious evidence of fashists rallies you are shown videos of MAGA rally. For you MAGA isn't Fashism and actually you don't see anything bad with MAGA rallies. But for the person X=Y and now they think that you are actually in favour of fashism and argue about the process just to give yourself plausible deniability.
So men who reject critiques of sexism because they say sexism isn’t driving gender imbalances are just telling us that they’re pro-sexism?
> To forestall an objection, this isn't universally true of course. There are your Charles CW Cookes and David Shors and miscellaneous libertarians who have strong opinions but are also process guys who will object to anyone not following the rules. But they're rare throwbacks to an earlier, better era and not driving the conversation.
There's another type of exception. Suppose someone accuses me of murder. It's not true, and I say so. Does that mean I'm secretly in favor of murder? No; I'm just answering a false accusation.
Whichever political party you support, think about the accusations the other party makes against you. Surely there's something there that you believe to be false, but also believe would be bad if it were true?
I could just as easily say you've got it backwards - the people who are against something are unwilling to call out the process flaws and dishonest rhetoric of other people who are against it, so the only people willing to call out those bad things re the ones who are for it.
Eg, yeah, actually, the Florida law *is* written real real bad, and doesn't actually do what most of it's supporters say it does. But people who are anti-LGBT won't ever call out or even acknowledge those flaws, so the only people pointing out those flaws end up being allies.
I think you've pretty much just re-discovered' arguments as soldiers', except you're acting like it only applies to one side of the debate rather than both.
Also, importantly, I think you're using a weird definition of 'sincere' here. You can both hate something and sincerely find it to be flawed or dangerous in specific ways - indeed, being flawed and dangerous are qualities that make people more likely to hate something, so we should expect to see it happen a lot.
> Hypothesis: When there's a hotly debated culture war issue, nobody who is objecting to one side's actions on process grounds or on "you're crazy, this never happens" grounds actually cares about the process. They are just on the other side and don't want to admit it, sometimes not even to themselves.
> To forestall an objection, this isn't universally true of course. There are your Charles CW Cookes and David Shors and miscellaneous libertarians who have strong opinions but are also process guys who will object to anyone not following the rules. But they're rare throwbacks to an earlier, better era and not driving the conversation.
Are you asking about how to find arguments that genuinely *are* process-focused, or complaining that they aren't in the driver's seat? Especially if you're focusing on "hotly debated culture war issue", this seems like an issue of selecting for heat instead of light and then disliking the results.
Culture war is justifiable as personal entertainment if that's what floats your boat, but if you're trying to sell it as a useful place to spend personal resources I want to see something that comes within an order of magnitude of claiming it's an effective use of one's time. "We can't ignore X, therefore we're selecting for X" is nonsensical on its face.
Whinging on the internet is perfectly fine as a form of entertainment, and I don't really feel any need to second-guess people's preferences in that domain. But let's not pretend it belongs in the same category as anything actually trying to optimize for light.
"Example 1: People who object to the Florida law on teaching modern gender ideology to children will raise process complaint after process complaint (it's too vague! there will be expensive lawsuits!) or insist that nobody's teaching modern gender ideology to children so there's no need for the law, but if you drive them into a corner and force it out of them they'll always state that actually, they think teaching modern gender ideology to children is cool and good."
Interesting, in that I haven't heard the defenders or proponents of that law describe it as a law on teaching modern gender ideology to children (of which I am straightforwardly in favour and require no forcing into a corner to defend) but that it is a law on teaching sex to children (sex in the intercourse sense, not in the men-and-women sense), and that the process arguments can be summarised as "you're not banning the teaching of sex, you're banning the teaching of modern gender ideology".
Supporters of "modern gender ideology" don't call it that, of course - we call it the absence of homophobia and transphobia - but the substance is the same thing: homosexuality and heterosexuality are morally equal and should be treated as such, transgenderism and cisgenderism are morally equal and should be treated as such, so any situation where it is appropriate for a (cisgendered, opposite-sex) married couple to perform any sex act (e.g. hold hands, kiss, wear a wedding ring, be addressed by married-couple-only terms like "spouse" or "husband" or "wife" or "Mrs"), it is equally appropriate for a same-sex couple or a couple containing a trans or non-binary person to perform the same sex act, and, when teaching in general terms (rather than addressing a specific case), it is morally imperative not to only mention one case or to imply that one case is normative.
(Normative is a word that is often misunderstood: it is not a statistical term, but refers to the imputation of moral superiority to that which is more common/popular - that is to say, calling something "normal" implies that it is in some way better than that which is not normal; referring to it as, say, "popular" or "common" and others as, say, "niche" or "rare" is intended to imply that there is no moral hierarchy, just that some are more popular than others)
Hey, thanks for clueing me in on 'normative'. I wonder if it might be one of those words that's so readily misunderstood it might be better to find alternative phrasing - after all, you're clearly aware it's enough of a problem that you need an explaining paragraph to be properly understood.
Of course, whether words whose original/'correct' meaning is at risk of becoming eclipsed by a different commonly understood meaning should be abandoned to those misappropriating it is its own, pretty complex, linguistic debate...
No disagreement there, I think that the problem is that it's a hard concept to summarise. Which means you need a word that has no connotations (so people realise that they don't know what it means and then have to look it up or ask), or else you just deal with the fact that it's a tough idea.
One of my friends refers to "the two most popular genders", which gets across the exact point without having to be quite so po-faced.
I don't see any difference between saying "the two normal genders" and "the two most popular genders". In no way does normality imply moral superiority.
This seems to me like the fake arguments about "people focused language" where "homeless" becomes "people experiencing homelessness" and "firefighters" becomes "people who fight fires", etc. A farcical distraction for the purposes of dividing people and virtue signaling without any actual meaning.
There do seem to be two overlapping concepts for normal. I think what Richard is getting at is made clearer by considering the antonym: abnormal. Which does have a pretty clear negative connotation.
Normal(ity) implies a norm, some definitions of which include an aspect of expectation; violating a norm is failing to meet an expectation, which has much clearer moral weight.
How does it have any moral weight?
Absolutely.
But they aren't saying they are. They're saying they are passing laws against teachers grooming children and against teaching children about sex. Both of which I am also against.
So the process arguments I hear are not "no-one is teaching gender ideology", but "this bans teaching gender ideology, not grooming" - while the proponents of it describe it as an "anti-grooming law" and reply "OK Groomer" to anyone who opposes it.
'Taking their eyes off the ball' is fine when we're talking about people having a debate. But in this case they're lying about the contents of a bill that's signed into law and determines how schools work in an entire state. That can't just be dismissed as an error, it's a strategy of propaganda that's affecting people's lives.
Being trans is not inferior to being cis, so "getting transed", if it is possible, isn't a problem.
Obviously, that presumes that they are converted to a permanent position of being trans that is comparable to someone that was trans "from birth" (assuming that is even a meaningful distinction) if people who are transed are cis people led to believe they are trans and who end up with severe gender dysphoria in adulthood until they detransition then that is a problem, but I'm not aware of any evidence of that - increases in the numbers of people transitioning have not resulted in a higher proportion of people detransitioning, for example.
But now we definitely are onto the object-level disagreement rather than the meta-level.
More than that. Whatever the espoused principle ("process" or anything else) used to determine which actions are correct and which are wrong, it will appear to have a fractally complex set of exceptions, to the point where no previous set of cases and their espoused principles and exceptions can be used to predict what the decision would be in a new case.
Except one. The "principle" of "who" and "whom". This one will be very clear.
This is the essence of conflict theory.
This feels like it's related to a few other things, "dogwhistling", "sanewashing", and our old friend "motte and bailey".
These are all labels which enable you to argue against someone making a reasonable point by arguing that they are only making a reasonable point in order to disguise their true agenda, which is unreasonable. "You say X, but of course you really believe Y, and Y is terrible, therefore you're wrong"
As a line of argument this makes me uneasy; sometimes people really _do_ say X to disguise their real belief in Y, but sometimes people really do just believe X. Besides, if you're being a good rationalist you should always engage with the strongest form of your opponent's argument (in this case X) not the silliest (Y).
+1
"As a line of argument this makes me uneasy; sometimes people really _do_ say X to disguise their real belief in Y, but sometimes people really do just believe X."
I agree. My only worthwhile insight into this is that I've spent a fair bit of time in conversation and in solidarity with dyed-in-the-wool activists. True believers. Organisers of pro-Palestinian protests, back in the day, and more recently a mixture of the idpol and economic left. At least on this side, there's not a 'playbook'. I don't remember anyone ever consciously saying anything to the effect of 'we're going to Alinsky these bastards.' The closest I can think of is certain street tactics to try to stymie the police using the police's own rules.
I can't speak of the conservative right to the same extent, but from what I've read of its social media aimed at itself, I get a similar impression. I think most people largely believe in what they say - they just take certain core assumptions as given, which their opponents irritatingly insist on relitigating.
And the rest of it is just performance of hostility, basic human nature, wanting to negate everything the opponent says out of basic antipathy. It's not easy to do the 'joint search for truth' thing when mutual trust is a priori shot.
I have one counterexample and one example.
Texas recently passed an anti-abortion law that was designed to be difficult to challenge in court. Instead of having the government prosecute abortion providers, private citizens could sue them and get a reward. Most Republicans (61%) support Texas's efforts to restrict abortion and want the Supreme Court to allow it to go into effect, but most Republicans (67%) disapprove the process it uses. This means that about a third of Republicans actually do care about the process, at least for this particularly ridiculous process. Source: https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/monmouthpoll_us_092021/
Scientific American recently decided to weigh in on critical race theory: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-anti-critical-race-theory-movement-will-profoundly-affect-public-education/ Their argument begins by claiming that Republicans' fears of people teaching critical race theory to their children are disinformation. It ends by advocating that we should teach critical race theory to their children.
That Scientific American article doesn’t claim that people’s feelings are disinformation (which, by the way, is not a cogent statement) - it’s a review of research and reportage about the propagation of disinformation about CRT. Regardless of what people want or don’t want to be taught in schools, the fact that CRT discussions in the public sphere have been influenced by concerted conservative efforts isn’t in dispute. (See link below.)
Also, the article ends by calling for people to “own that racism is real and to call out conservative legislative efforts designed to outlaw the teaching of racial inequality for what they are: a fitting example of how legal systems uphold racial inequality in the United States”. How did you get from that to “advocating that we should teach critical race theory to their [sic] children”?
if you’ve been reading anti-CRT content in the past year, you almost certainly have been exposed to disinformation. You have every right to have feelings or policy positions about how American history is taught, but I strongly recommend poking around and doing some reading and critical thinking about the topic, so that you’re expressing your own opinions informed by facts, rather than a distorted perspective served to you by power brokers who are serving their own interests. Isn’t the general critique of social-justice perspectives in the SSC/ACX universe that they involve people believing thought-killing, feelings-driven oversimplifications? Reader, heal thyself.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/how-a-conservative-activist-invented-the-conflict-over-critical-race-theory
SciAm has been trash for decades.
Considering that CRT has been taught under a variety of names (hint: all the "+power" definitions come from it). To claim it's a nonissue having been invented by a conservative is simply nonsense.
Consider this mandatory orientation lesson from back in the Obama years:
A RACIST: A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality. By this definition, people of color cannot be racists, because as peoples within the U.S. system, they do not have the power to back up their prejudices, hostilities, or acts of discrimination…
REVERSE RACISM: A term created and used by white people to deny their white privilege. Those in denial use the term reverse racism to refer to hostile behavior by people of color toward whites, and to affirmative action policies, which allegedly give ‘preferential treatment’ to people of color over whites. In the U.S., there is no such thing as “reverse racism.”
Oddly enough one is not permitted to notice that this is defining "racist" and "white person" as synonyms. You are however supposed to feel very guilty about being a racist.
You’ve quoted a University of Delaware Residence Life training from 2007 (see link below): besides the fact that 2007 makes it Bush-era, it has nothing to do with the federal government - why did you bring up Obama? This is also a far reach for an example - it’s fifteen years old, and the org that hosts the document doesn’t have details on it being widespread or even systematically used within the UofD system. Again: having opinions about the way America’s history is taught is valid, but dredging up isolated examples from more than a decade in the past (and linking them for no discernable reason to the one Black president we’ve had, a full two years before he entered office) doesn’t make for a strong argument.
https://www.thefire.org/excerpts-from-university-of-delaware-office-of-residence-life-diversity-facilitation-training/
Just to be clear:
First you say that CRT is a recently-invented thing and a nonissue. Then when I point out that it's not new at all, your response is "this is old news therefore irrelevant?"
I (incorrectly as it turned out) brought up Obama to point out this is NOT a new thing. And the article you link to indicates that this was in fact systematically used. It's hard to think of a definition of systematic that does not include "mandatory for all students during the first four years of their (taxpayer funded!) college experience."
Please feel free to share what you're interpreting to mean that "CRT is a newly-invented thing". It's not, and I haven't claimed that it is. CRT has been around since the 70s (seriously, just read the Wikipedia article - the language is very simple and straightforward). CRT has been an academic topic, politically and socially a non-issue, for the vast majority of that time (again, it came up once during the Clinton administration and once in Arizona - both of which were also explicit campaigns by conservatives, not movements arising from citizen concerns).
What I did say, which you don't seem to be willing to hear, is that there has been disinformation propagated by conservative political actors about CRT over the past two years. This isn't disputed: it's a fact. It's been reported on by lots of sources, many of them non-partisan (I've linked to NBC and the Associated Press via PBS in this thread). If you don't want to believe facts reported by trusted news sources, including the perspective of teachers in classrooms, then you don't want to believe in reality.
I also said, repeatedly, that people have a right to their opinions (and votes) about how schools address the teaching of American history - you have that right, too! If you don't want topic X (say, the history of slavery and racial oppression) to be taught in schools, say that and own it. (Warning: people may ask you *why*!) But substantiating your opinion by dredging up a single, outdated, non-relevant example (it's a college, ffs) that you fallaciously link to a Black political leader? This is the rhetorical pose of a conspiracy theorist, not a citizen engaging in good-faith discussion.
> Oddly enough one is not permitted to notice that this is defining "racist" and "white person" as synonyms. You are however supposed to feel very guilty about being a racist.
What's the point then? Feeling guilty won't make me any less white.
I guess things are not supposed to have a point, these days. It's just endless screaming...
This is an object-level response to a meta-level thread, on culture war topics. Which seems potentially dangerous for the comment policy (*checks which week it is, oh yeah, we're not doing that anymore*), but I'll go ahead and respond, and see if Scott decides to remove it.
Maybe we should be teaching CRT in public schools. If you think so, I'd be interested in hearing why.
I am criticizing this article because of the structure of its argument, not its conclusion.
"That Scientific American article doesn’t claim that people’s feelings are disinformation (which, by the way, is not a cogent statement) - it’s a review of research and reportage about the propagation of disinformation about CRT. Regardless of what people want or don’t want to be taught in schools, the fact that CRT discussions in the public sphere have been influenced by concerted conservative efforts isn’t in dispute. (See link below.)"
The article attributes the disinformation campaign to Youngkin, conservatives, Rufo, and Republicans. It portrays white parents as victims of this campaign. It might be more accurate to summarize the article as that their fears are based on misinformation, instead of just being misinformation.
I'm not sure if I agree with this framing, because some of the Republican activists here are parents themselves. But adding "based on" to my comment would make it reflect the article better.
"Also, the article ends by calling for people to “own that racism is real and to call out conservative legislative efforts designed to outlaw the teaching of racial inequality for what they are: a fitting example of how legal systems uphold racial inequality in the United States”. How did you get from that to “advocating that we should teach critical race theory to their children”? "
The next sentence is: "This, of course, is exactly what CRT is trying to point out."
I took advocating for a sustained and coherent campaign promoting something which is exactly CRT's point to be equivalent to advocating for teaching CRT. The last paragraph does not explicitly say that it should be taught in schools, but the previous paragraph makes it clear that "the robust teaching of America’s racial history in our public schools" is a key part of Democrats' campaign here.
So, you think that “America’s racial history” = CRT?
If you can find an example of a curriculum that:
-"Teaches Americas racial history"
- Does NOT go on to propose policies of remedying past discrimination by implementing current/future discrimination and
-Labels itself any of the euphemisms of CRT
I would love to rad it. I don't think it exists.
I think that much of the debate comes down to what the heck "Critical Race Theory" actually means. Conservatives seem to be using it as a label for a big cloud of ideas they disagree with, while people within that cloud will point out that Critical Race Theory refers only to one very narrow thing, and that there's other flavours in the cloud that aren't specifically CRT.
At this point everybody would be much better off ditching the term "Critical Race Theory" and agreeing on some new labels for the sorts of ideas they'd like to discuss, but that's not going to happen.
There’s been a definition of Critical Race Theory for quite a long time - the Wikipedia page (below) does a fine job of summing it up. It’s a college-level topic, and represents a particular critical-thinking approach, rather than a set of beliefs or facts.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_race_theory
Teachers say they’re not being required to “teach CRT”, and many don’t think it should be taught in their classrooms.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/teaching-critical-race-theory-isn-t-happening-classrooms-teachers-say-n1272945
I would certainly hope, in a community that prides itself in rationality, that people would be concerned by politicians using a concept with a limited, fit-for-purpose definition and using it as a catch-all term to attack a wide variety of related but not equivalent concepts.
It's not confined to colleges, Critical Race Theory is involved with Critical Pedagogy, which is:
https://www.theedadvocate.org/how-to-implement-critical-pedagogy-into-your-classroom/
"a teaching philosophy that invites educators to encourage students to critique structures of power and oppression. It is rooted in critical theory, which involves becoming aware of and questioning the societal status quo. In critical pedagogy, a teacher uses his or her own enlightenment to encourage students to question and challenge inequalities that exist in families, schools, and societies."
This paper from 2013 is indeed in the context of a college course, but the events it refers back to are from 1999 Decatur high school:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1469-5812.2004.00059.x?journalCode=rept20
"Actions Following Words: Critical race theory connects to critical pedagogy"
Another 2009 article:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13613320902995467
"In this article, the authors explore the analytic connections between the scholarship on Black teachers and the development of the concept of critical pedagogy. In particular, the authors conduct a detailed analysis of both of these discourses and then explore the work of two African‐American male teachers in an urban school in Los Angeles. The findings reveal that the links between critical pedagogy and the scholarship on Black teachers is stronger than the existing literature would suggest. Additionally, it is suggested that Black male teachers in urban communities embody qualities outlined in both critical pedagogy and the scholarship on Black teachers."
Where do you think teachers come out of? Colleges, where often they will be exposed to theories like this. I don't know how American teacher training is done, but if it's anything like Irish teacher training, they will be covering a lot of topics that are not just "how to teach readin' writin' and rithmetic".
They may even have to sit through jargon-filled lectures like this:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00933104.2018.1519476
"In this critical qualitative case study, we examined the ways three critically identifying social studies teachers understood and adopted critical pedagogy. We argue that the praxis of these teachers unfolded based on their understanding of and willingness to attend to the many dialectical relations associated with teaching. We understand the praxiological unfolding to be teachers’ critical ontological social studies posture, which we argue reflects those ways teachers see and understand dialectical relation and then approach the world by authentically living their critical epistemology, ontology, and ideology. We conclude that the ways critical social studies teachers situate themselves within the many instances of relational power will uniquely inform the approach they take in their work with students."
In fact, I'm beginning to wonder if there isn't a bit of weasel-wording going on - "Oh no, we don't teach Critical Race Theory in schools! (We do Critical Pedagogy which is entirely different)".
But fear not! Even if you are white, there is hope!
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00933104.2020.1724578?src=recsys
"Swimming in and through whiteness: Antiracism in social studies teacher education
In this study, the author examined how five white preservice teachers in a secondary social studies teacher education program embodied, wrestled with, and resisted whiteness. Drawing on literature from whiteness studies and antiracism, this study utilized the analogy of a swimming pool to discuss how participants constructed their identities in relation to whiteness and antiracism. Findings indicated that participants demonstrated a fluidity of positioning as they invested, reinvested, and divested from whiteness. Despite prolonged attention to antiracism, participants struggled to disrupt whiteness and white supremacy throughout the duration of the study, which was demonstrative of the complex, interlocking relationship between whiteness and social studies education. Implications for antiracist social studies teacher education are also discussed."
Put on your water-wings and learn how to resist whiteness! And we can all learn how to ditch such white values as "civility" and cultivate a pedagogy of counter-narration:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00933104.2020.1747034?src=recsys
Best practices in civic education emphasize deliberative pedagogies as one of the most powerful ways to educate enlightened democratic citizens. Yet deliberative pedagogies are rooted in a white normative ideal of discursive democracy that, in the service of “civility” and “reasoned discourse,” fails to account for the social and political inequalities—the logic of white supremacy—that structures our political context. Drawing on Critical Race Theory and Charles Mills’s notion of the racial contract, I propose a pedagogy of counternarration that privileges voices from the margins, imagines the world as it could be, and talks back to dominant narratives in order to cultivate justice-oriented citizens in the democratic classroom."
"It’s a college-level topic, and represents a particular critical-thinking approach, rather than a set of beliefs or facts."
This is profoundly dishonest.
It's the equivalent of saying "Christian theology is a specialized course taught in Divinity schools" and therefore the elementary school that teaches kids that the world was created in six days and they're going to burn for eternity if they don't accept Jesus as their personal savior isn't teaching Christianity. The fact that they never mention the Council of Nicea or make them recite the Apostle's creed doesn't mean they're not teaching the conclusion of those as being fact.
I want to teach children that racism exists in the real world, is overwhelmingly white people being racist about non-white people, that this is bad, and that, if they are white, they should think hard about their beliefs about non-white people to see if they are, themselves racist.
I do not want to teach them that they are personally responsible for being racist because they are white, nor that they are responsible for their ancestors' racism.
The second appears to be, rhetorically, what opponents mean by "Critical Race Theory"; the first, though, appears to be what is actually happening when they object.
Perhaps I am wrong, and this is an unfair summary of what is going on, filtered through media that I am reading from a continent away from the action. But the use of the words "Critical Race Theory" doesn't enlighten me at all.
Non-white people can be racist about a different variety of non-white people too, unless we're going with "racism is power plus privilege, non-white people don't have power or privilege, thus they can't be racist".
Humans can be really terrible to each other. In the USA, that took the form of white people being really terrible to the indigenous people and then imported black slaves. But it's not the only form of racism that ever existed.
" s overwhelmingly white people being racist about non-white people"
Simple numbers mean this can't be true, unless you're using the definition "only wypipo can be racist."
"I want to teach children that racism exists in the real world, is overwhelmingly white people being racist about non-white people, that this is bad, and that, if they are white, they should think hard about their beliefs about non-white people to see if they are, themselves racist."
I think the right would strongly disagree with this as well as with your second paragraph. I think first of all this is not an appropriate subject for K-12, given that it is highly political and will certainly lead to many highly inappropriate characterizations. Second of all I think it is factually incorrect.
"Racism... is overwhelmingly white people being racist about non-white people"
I think this is plainly false. White people are generally less racist than people of other races, in my opinion.
"they should think hard about their beliefs about non-white people to see if they are, themselves racist"
This is just a really weird thing to teach in school. It's basically indoctrination. School is for teaching facts, reasoning, skills. It's not for instilling government-chosen or teacher-chosen values into students. That's for parents and communities.
Furthermore to limit it to white people is to demonize them. This is exactly what the right is against and hoping to avoid. Why the heck would you not ask all students to examine their beliefs and whether they are racist? (If you are going to be doing that, which you should not) You can't avoid stigma if this is what you are teaching. It's basically blatant racial hatred. We need to keep racism OUT of our schools! That is why we have to ban CRT.
I think bad attempts at doing the first thing easily turn into doing the second thing. And almost all attempts at doing the first thing with middle schoolers or younger (especially the bit about “overwhelmingly white people being racist about non-white people”) are going to be bad, because most teachers won’t be skilled enough and most of the pupils won’t be able to handle the required nuance, even if the teacher is good enough to present it.
Where did someone say that something never happens?
What constitutes a “CRT-inspired” curriculum?
"Your summary of the article is inaccurate and misleading."
"So you're saying that this never happens."
You accuse your opponents of arguing in bad faith, and then post responses like this? Take the beam out of your own eye.
Never attribute to any one of incompetence, ignorance or malice, that which can be explained by an ill-defined mixture of all three.
It's probably sometimes that, but sometimes - I would imagine *most* of the time, it's actually just that the person saying "that never happens" just... hasn't ever seen the thing happen, and has a really low prior on the thing happening. There's things that other people say happen all the time that *I'm* pretty sure never actually happen.
It seems to me like this is just kinda what happens when people who aren't skilled at arguing have arguments, online or off - they tend to get hyperfocused on one specific detail and refuse to move on until it's settled - which it never will be, because neither side has enough evidence to convince the other.
> I would imagine *most* of the time, it's actually just that the person saying "that never happens" just... hasn't ever seen the thing happen, and has a really low prior on the thing happening.
It is sometimes funny to observe that when the thing finally happens to them, it shatters their worldview and catapults them to the opposite side.
Maybe if you oppose CRT, what you actually should do is print some flyers saying "math is racist" and distribute them to parents in front of school. Next day, they would vote against teaching CRT at their school.
(Just to avoid possible misunderstanding, I am not advocating any kind of deception. Print a page of an *actual* CRT "math textbook" such as equitablemath.org and include a link to verify.)
I don't think that's true. I was arguing with someone here about the Florida law the other week. My position was that if a teacher came in and mentioned that she and her wife had been to Disney over the weekend, they could end up being sued. His position was that if a special teacher came in and suggested to the kids that maybe there were *really* a different gender and they could to do a worksheet to find out and then go to the office and get special medicine to help them and by the way this a special school secret and they shouldn't tell mom and dad, well, then they would be sued.
He holds my position to be paranoid nonsense, and says that if it were to happen (the lawsuit), that would be inappropriate. Likewise, I hold his position to be paranoid nonsense, something that "never happens", and if it did I wouldn't support it.
I think, in general, the things that our opponents claim that we respond to by saying "that never happens" are things we think are strawmen. I'd be fine with a book being read were a character happened to have two moms or some such. I don't support special sessions where speakers come in and try to recruit 7-year-olds to gender transition. (And medicate them!)
That "never happens" response, I think, comes when someone takes what we consider a reasonable position (Charlotte's Web but both parents are dudes), imputes an unreasonable position (Secretly recruit small kids to transgenderism and medicate them) and then accuse us of the unreasonable position. No one is holding classes trying to convince 1st graders that they are trans and should medicate and keep the whole thing secret from their parents. That never happens. And you don't have to push me into a corner to have me add - and if it were to hypothetically happen somewhere, everyone involved should be fired. Of course I wouldn't approve.
All of which is a long winded way to say - I think you're off base here. When someone says that something never happens, they're probably also saying it shouldn't, and you probably don't need to push them into a corner to get them to come out and say that it shouldn't.
I think you're just reinventing weakmanning. "This never happens" may not literally be true, but "this hardly ever happens and the only place you'll hear about the exceptions is on websites dedicated to chronicling every last one of their enemy's misdeeds" is very often true. And "the rare exceptions are not enough to justify destroying a useful system" is often true as well. (If you're not a fan of CRT, you could try applying these arguments to Defund the Police and see where you land.)
"this hardly ever happens and the only place you'll hear about the exceptions is on websites dedicated to chronicling every last one of their enemy's misdeeds" is very often true. "
How would you know if it hardly ever happens? We know that what gets reported and ignored is strongly influenced by the tribe of the reporter. If something is super-rare, how would the "enemies" of it have such easy access to examples of it happening?
If you think that, for a black person, it is reasonable to believe that you should not contact the police if your home is being invaded because you are in more danger from the police than from the home invader, then the whole BLM/Defund the Police position makes sense.
Some people will say that the police are just a criminal gang that is backed up by the law, and I think most of us think of that as just overblown rhetoric - and I think it often is. But some of those people really do literally believe that; they would rather have their neighborhoods run by a gang which (being black) they could conceivably get on the right side of than by the police which (because the police are racists) they cannot possibly get on the right side of.
Yeah, most black people don't live like that, but when I realised that BLM/DfP activists actually believe that position, the rest fell into place and made sense.
I'm pretty sure at least some of these are an attempt to discuss cost/benefit. To choose an example no one cares about, procurement and travel reimbursement at my (state) university is very onerous because of a great fear of misuse of public funds. I've wasted days of my life because of this and have skipped attending conferences or applying for grants because I just couldn't deal with the administrative overhead. I'm not in favour of corruption, but I honestly think the cure is worse than the disease. In my experience, at least some of "I've never seen X occur" is saying something along these lines.
I agree. It's along the lines of the "dog whistles" accusation, where no matter your opponent says, what they're REALLY saying is <insert straw man here>.
In my experience the way to avoid this is don't assume. Usually a process debater will say up front if they are actually on your side, "I'm not a fan of abortion for convenience, but..." if they're not on your side, when pressed they will say so.
I agree. Ask if they'd support he project if their process concern were addressed, i.e. ask if that is their True Objection. Get their statement as publicly and ironclad as possible, so even if they're lying it becomes much harder for them to add future process complaints onto the list after you address the initial set