"the stock is valued by the market, and an EFT with higher fees would just be valued less to compensate"
There are a limited number for every theme or niche, so there probably isn't much competition between ETFs in the same field to either lower fees, or have a valuation that fairly accounts for them. I.e. there's only a few 2 or 3x levered oil ETFs, there's only like two Russell 3000 ETFs, etc. So it may not necessarily be true that an ETF with higher fees would be valued less- you may not have many alternatives in that niche
Yes. In order to compensate for a higher fee, an ETF or index fund would need to have a higher change in value to break even compared to one with a low fee.
There just aren't that many ETFs. Many sector ETFs and other specialty products are the easiest realistic way to gain exposure to a specific thing, so they charge for the privilege. Other broader etfs do have different expense ratios but this is generally just arbitrary. See
I think what you're missing is that ETFs are not priced by market action like other stocks. An ETF can be said to have a 'correct' price that you can compute by looking at changes in its underlying components, and the ETF provider has mechanisms to ensure that that price is the price you buy or sell it at.
Once you buy it, the fees do matter, because they will determine exactly how the underlying stocks contribute to the growth of the ETF. If an ETF had zero fees, and all of its constituent stocks doubled, you would more or less expect the ETF to exactly double as well. If it has a fee, then you would expect that to detract from the growth accordingly. But that has no relevance to the price you pay at purchase.
Consider two ETFs tracking the same index, but with different fees, and the difference in fees priced into the market price in the manner you propose. At this point, an arbitrageur can buy the higher-fee / lower-priced ETF in creation-unit quantities to exchange the ETF for the underlying securities. This mechanism puts a practical limit on to what extent two substantially identical ETFs in the same market can differ in fees (and a practical limit on the fees chargeable by an ETF that holds highly liquid securities).
What you're missing is that they don't track the index, they track "index minus fees". If an ETF charges (say) 1%, then over 10 years, the basket of the ETF will go from 1 basket of the index to 0.9 baskets of the index as the ETF provider takes money out, and the arbitrage is around the value of the basket.
What you're missing is there are people ("Authorised Participants") who can take a block of ETF shares and redeem them for the underlying assets, and vice versa. They can make money doing this whenever the price drifts away from the underlying assets, and doing it moves the price back, so an ETF will always trade at value of its assets. The ETF management fee then reduces the *size* of the fund (because some people decide not to use it if the fee is too high) rather then the *price* of individual shares.
(This mechanism is also more tax efficient then traditional mutual funds, at least in the US)
"Closed-end" funds that don't have this mechanism indeed work as you suggest: the share price reflects a combination of the assets, the fees, and evaluations of the fund manager's stock picking ability (these fund are usually actively managed).
Another thing you might have been missing (which is to say, another small tweak to how ETFs work that would probably make your intuition right) is that when you're long an ETF you pay a fee to it's manager, but when you're short an ETF you don't get paid that fee. Therefore there is not a profitable arbitrage in which you buy VOO and sell SPY, collecting more fees than you pay ~risk-free, ultimately driving SPY out of business. Instead, the movement of capital from SPY to VOO relies on the collective action of investors, which is more gradual than the action of professional arbitrageurs.
Your basic intuition, "shouldn't that just be priced in?", is right in very many cases and you were right to look for some specific quirk that prevents it from holding in this case.
I don't know, but I recommend "The Lions of Al-Rassan" by Guy Gavriel Kay. It's a novel set in Al-Rassan, a thinly veiled fantasy equivalent of al-Andalus. Kay has written a whole series of novels featuring lots of violence, sex, and political intrigue, set in a fantasy equivalent of the Mediterranean after the fall of Rome (Sarantium = Byzantium, Rhodias = Rome, etc.).
Fun little side-note, but Guy Gavriel Kay was the author who helped Christopher Tolkien finish the "Silmarillion" after JRR Tolkien passed away (including when they basically had to write a whole chapter, "Ruin of Doriath", because Tolkien had left them little to work with).
I've been reading a ton of post-Roman to pre-modern history for my work on my fantasy strategy game. Mughals, Rome, Persia, and a bunch of other stuff including the Caliphates. Mostly been looking Rashidun so far but I looked into the Abbasid and Umayyad Caliphates also. Slowing marching forward in time. Let me dig up my notes for the top tier "normie friendly" recommendations people gave me. Probably have something tomorrow.
Reinhart Dozy's Histoire des Musalman’s d’Espagne, translated obviously, is one of the foundational works in the genre although I'm sure there has been some change since 1863.
This may not be what you're looking for, but Washington Irving wrote an excellent history of the END of the caliphate in Spain, Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada.
(His book of romantic legends about Cordoba is even better: Tales of the Alhambra. And his surprisingly sympathetic account of early Muslim history, Mahomet and His Successors, is best of all, but, of course, furthest away from the topic you asked about.)
This is an excerpt from a sermon of the Irish mathematician and theologian George Salmon. It appears to have been delivered in 1849. The full text is available on Google Books under the title, “The Propriety of Prayer for Temporal Blessings: A Sermon.” The excerpt appears at page 37 of the Google Books edition.
“I may appeal to many controversies of the present day which it would seem much more easy to bring to the test of experience, and yet on which we may find intelligent men forming very opposite opinions. For example,—whether the distresses of this country have arisen in spite of, or in consequence of, free trade; whether homeopathic pilules or wet sheets be sovereign remedies; whether there be a connexion between the characters of men and the shape of their heads; whether the brain adopts the principle of the division of labor, and whether it be possible to assign the places of the several bits of brain which have undertaken the discharge of each of the mental functions; whether men can see with their eyes only, or sometimes also with the pits of their stomachs; whether it is possible for a clairvoyant at Bolton to discern the doings of Sir John Franklin at the North Pole.”
I read along this enumeration of examples and I recognize them as a variety of now-quaint empirical controversies of the period. And then I hit the part about a controversy over whether people sometimes see with their stomachs. What on Earth is this referring to? How could anyone ever have been even tempted to believe that he was seeing with his stomach? I haven’t been able to find the reference to this nineteenth century controversy on Google. Does anyone have any idea what it was?
I mean, that would make the phrase coherent, but it would hardly seem to fit with the other elements of the list, which involved more concrete phenomena. He’s using the list as examples of putative natural phenomena that it’s hard to develop dispositive tests for, such that informed people come to opposite conclusions.
To me, the remark reads as a deliberately jokey/insulting way of getting at the idea of going with your gut--like, he's deliberately trying to frame "knowing something by gut instinct" in a way that makes it sound ridiculous, for comedic value. I'll grant you it doesn't fit super well with the other examples, but it's natural to be a little less careful about whether what you're saying is a perfect example of the serious point you were making if, at that precise moment, you're trying to be funny.
Eventually the idea of the navel as a third eye, serving as a visual transducer to the stomach as the eyes do to that portion of the brain responsible for sight, fell out of fashion, and it became popular to debunk the entire concept by saying "Your eyes were bigger than your stomach".
Sorry, couldn't resist.
But seriously, was "seeing with the stomach" a euphemism for going with one's gut instincts instead of that which we literally saw? If so, the debate over left-brain/right-brain perception continues, and is valid.
But if the stomach was truly considered by some to "see" (in a purely visual sense), it does seem silly now. ("OK, it's my turn to hide; close your stomach and count to 10!") What things do we presently debate that will seem silly to people 150 - 200 years in the future?
I'm hoping that AI Superintelligence will be one of those things. Perhaps, 200 years in the future, we will have some scientific understanding of the physical properties and limits of intelligence and that will show that the concerns over superintelligence risk were invalid.
Or maybe we will all have been turned into paperclips. It could go either way.
I mean, there's an open question right now about just how much of the atmosphere will be turned into CO2 by the runaway processes of capitalism. Obviously not as dramatic as the paperclips, but a result of the same process of partially aligned value maximizers with greater power than any individual human. (In this case, we do obviously benefit from many of the paperclips and other things that are produced, though we're not totally happy about the byproduct.)
It's become clear in recent years that the gut microbiota massively influences just about everything that humans do, including understanding. If he meant "see" in that sense, then he was very far ahead of his time.
THANK YOU for finding this. I really appreciate it. I’m not Irish and have certainly heard the phrase used now and then. It may be falling into archaism and I would guess that infeequncy of use is more due to time rather than place. But I can’t rule out that it was particularly common in Irish English at the time.
Congratulations on tracking that down, it really does shed light on the reference!
Talking about animal magnetism and Mesmerism and directing the magnetic influence by gestures and touch, there is the case of "Stroker" Greatrakes, who did faith healing by touch through what was not yet at the time called 'animal magnetism':
"Valentine Greatrakes (14 February 1628 – 28 November 1682), also known as "Greatorex" or "The Stroker", was an Irish faith healer who toured England in 1666, claiming to cure people by the laying on of hands."
For those who don't want to find it, the main reference is accounts of people seeing without their eyes. One passage:
"We have seen her (a young lady of Grenoble, in a state of somnabulism) select from a packet of more than thirty letters, that one amonst them which had been directed to her. She read on the dial-plate and through the glass, the hour indicated by a watch; we have seen her write several letter; correct, on reading them over, the mistakes she had made; and recopy one of the letter word for word. During all these operations, a screen of thick pasteboard entirely intercepted every visual ray which could possibly have reached her eyes. The same phenomena took place at the soles of her feet, and at the pit of the stomach."
In another case they talk about a women who has seizures and reported the following:
"She referred to her stomach all the sensations of sight, heraing, and smell, which were then no longer produced by the usual organs"
Reminds me of the Roald Dahl short story "The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar" about a man who reads in a book about how you can learn to see using your skin instead of just your eyes by using yogic practices. He practices the techniques and advances far enough that he can see through thin barriers (because yogic powers, that's why). He uses this power to cheat at poker by seeing through the cards to the ink on the other side. Once he gets bored at this he decides to make it his life purpose to cheat casinos out of their money with his trick and donate all his winnings to charity. Weird (but fun) story: the fact that Dahl had any of this in mind would indicate that at some point there was the pop culture idea that you could see using other organs besides the eyes, if you had enough mystic woo.
I don’t fully understand “seeing” with the stomach. On the other hand we do feel with it - butterflies in the stomach, knot in the stomach. We don’t feel with our mind. Lots and people who believe we can upload our brain (and thus personality) forget that.
You don't understand "seeing with the stomach" because it is fake. People see with eyes, but their were claims in the first half of the 19th century that through animal magnetism people were able to read letters and such through their stomachs.
It's possible that the phenomenon he is referring to is dermo-optical perception (I vaguely remembered the concept but had to Google to find out the exact term):
That is, that certain people have a psychic ability to 'see' with organs other than the eyes (usually the fingers/hands by placing them on objects and 'reading' their history):
"Dermo-optical perception (DOP) — also known as dermal vision, dermo-optics, eyeless sight, eyeless vision, skin vision, skin reading, finger vision, paroptic vision, para-optic perception, cutaneous perception, digital sight, and bio-introscopy — is a term that is used in parapsychological literature to denote the alleged capability to perceive colors, differences in brightness, and/or formed images through the skin (without using the eyes, as distinct from blindsight), especially upon touching with the fingertips.
Typically, people who claim to have dermo-optical perception claim to be able to see using the skin of their fingers or hands. People who claim to have DOP often demonstrate it by reading while blindfolded. The effect has not been demonstrated scientifically."
It might be that Salmon is poking fun at the idea by using 'the pit of the stomach' rather than 'the hands'. Or there might be some confusion with psychometry as well, the claimed ability to 'read' the history of an object by touch:
There's a phenomenon called Riddoch's Syndrome where people who have no detectable activity in their retina or optic nerves, being able to distinguish the shapes of large objects without touching them and making judgement as to colors of the objects — but either they or the objects had to be moving.
Of course there's that experiment where a fellow implanted a dense set of electrodes under the derma his back. He connected them to a device with Internet access to a site that was continuously displaying weather maps. And he came to "see" the developing weather patterns in his mind.
From a book entitled: _Dream Land and Ghost Land: Visits and Wanderings There in the Nineteenth Century_, By Edwin Paxton Hood, published 1851. From a chapter entitled "Seeing with the Stomach"...
"There is another remarkable phenomenon to which a few words may be devoted. Persons who read in a state of somnambulism, it is know, read from the pit of the stomach. Dr. Kerner says, 'I gave Mrs. Hauffe two pieces of paper, carefully folded, on one of which I had secretly written, 'There is a God," and on the other, 'There is no God.' I put them into her left hand, when she was apparently awake, and asked her if she felt any difference between the. After a pause, she returned to me the first, and said, 'This gives me a sensation, and the other feels like a void." I repeated the experiment four times and always with the same result...'"
Paxton then recounts other similar experiments done while people were hypnotized (assuming sonambulism equates to hypnotism and not just sleep walking).
Interesting. This must be where we get the term "gut feeling".
It reminds me of an ethnography I read in college where an Amazonian shaman informant explained to the anthropologist author how he could tell whether a plant was harmless, poisonous, or had psychotropic properties by holding it close to his stomach.
The pdf of my book "Evidence-based software engineering based on the publicly available data" was released under a creative commons license. I investigated the possibility of producing a paper version, but the extensive use of color and the A4 size made it look difficult.
Somebody has taken the trouble to produce a paperback version and make it available on Amazon at a reasonable price. I bought a copy, it looks fantastic and feels good in the hand to read.
FaceApp morph of all Democratic Senators ("what if John Hickenlooper was a cannibal") and all Republican Senators ("what if Bob Katter was the smuggest individual on the planet") is *extremely* evocative of Paul Fussell's chart distinguishing upper-middle from prole that Scott posted in his book review. Once you get past that they made the faces eerie and demonic.
Man watching Shoe become a Bernie bro was quite amusing. Something fun to offset feeling bad every time he lost. She wasn't exactly right wing before but kinda.
There's definitely a strong resemblance to that image, but the median Republican senator doesn't look prole to me; he looks like the president of the yacht club.
Still, "Republican face" and "Democrat face" are definitely a thing, and somewhat orthogonal to class-based physiognomy, which is also a thing. Could it be a testosterone thing? A thicker jaw immediately makes you look 50% more Republican.
One of the things I noticed in the US, when I lived there, was that there are conservative and liberal voices. Particularly on radio. You could tell 90% of the time, a callers politics, by the timbre of the voice. Deeper = more conservative.
"The archetype of a red-faced, angry, pompous, jingoistic, and stereotypically British right-wing male has been in present in popular culture since the mid-20th century, with the character Colonel Blimp first appearing in 1934, in newspaper cartoons and in the film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp in 1948"
So not prole, middle-class, but not college-professional type middle class.
"Colonel Blimp is a British cartoon character by cartoonist David Low, first drawn for Lord Beaverbrook's London Evening Standard in April 1934. Blimp is pompous, irascible, jingoistic, and stereotypically British, identifiable by his walrus moustache and the interjection "Gad, Sir!"
Low claimed that he developed the character after overhearing two military men in a Turkish bath declare that cavalry officers should be entitled to wear their spurs inside tanks. The character was named after the barrage balloon, which was known as a blimp."
How did that Democrat end up so definitively white male, when 1/3 of the Democratic senators are women, and 6 are non-white? And how did the Democrat end up so much toothier than the Republican when the same number of them seem to be showing teeth in their official photos?
Role of concussion/mTBI in culture: maybe some human behaviors which are sometimes thought of as learned or modeled, actually originated as a response to mild traumatic brain injury? I'm thinking specifically of some models of "masculinity" but also general ideas of mental wellness.
Over a decade ago I had basically an undiagnosed mTBI. It delivered a very unexpected plus: I was no longer emotionally oversensitive. All the feels that got wrapped up into other people's lives were suddenly gone, replaced with a cheerful peacefulness. Unburdened from the over-consciousness of other people, I went about making decisions to benefit me & my kids, and life has gotten immeasurably better. The downside: several years of forgetting words, disappearing thoughts, misspeaking, getting lost, headaches, difficulty writing, loss of sensitivity to others' feelings when it might matter, balance problems, etc.
The speech bit especially was very trying. But the emotional upside was profound.
Since then I have begun to wonder if humanity is actually optimized for receiving very mild brain injury. Just enough of a bonk on the head that that tremendous oversensitiveness goes away. Perhaps evolutionarily, if males were more likely to get blows to the head, maybe the uncommunicative, unfeeling man with occasional rage derives from mTBI symptoms, and entered culture as a recognition of the way "men are," being the way men become after they are hit in the head often enough, generally as boys.
And now that we are much more careful physically, we get far fewer concussions in general, and that extra layer of emotional sensitivity is not removed, leading to all kinds of mental health problems (for some people) but also requiring skill sets which really are new across large populations - because before about 100 years ago, people in general would have largely lacked the sensitiveness to use those skills. Especially people who did a lot of heavy work leading to head injuries.
Of course for some people there is no upside to a concussion. But I think considering groups of people, especially for the "stereotypes of masculinity" part, there's explanatory power.
It seems pretty darn unlikely to me that the cogs of evolutionary biology turned in such a way as to require an ideal amount of brain damage for optimal functioning. Why wouldn't evolution just optimize for concussion resiliency? Are you sure that the concussion was causal in your emotional improvements? People more often have emotional dysregulation following a traumatic brain injury due to higher level structures controlling emotional inhibition being damaged.
There's a general phenomenon of the optimal amount of stressors for biological systems being small, but nonzero. "Hormesis" is the name.
Without thinking too hard about it, the intuitive story I tell myself is that when stressors can't easily be eliminated through evolution (or it's too costly below some level), other optimisations evolution is doing take place in the context of that small amount of the stressor remaining and thus become reliant on it to some extent. It's a local optimum, not a global one, and moving the stressor toward a more global optimum might decrease fitness until other parameters have time to be optimised in the new, low-stressor context.
E.g. if evolution was optimising for emotionality in the context of some hard-to-avoid stressor dulling the emotions, it would set the level a little higher than the optimum so that in the context of the stressor it would come out about right.
Hormesis is a favorite word of mine. Understanding hormetic stress and the associated dose-response curve is certainly useful. I don't see it as evolutionary laziness or energy conservation so much as a mechanism for biological systems to adapt to their unique environment. The issue with the hormesis argument in the context of brain injury is that we know very clearly that brain injury is associated with greater emotional distress rather than less. The higher level brain structures are the least insulated and thus the most vulnerable to damage. I don't see any mechanism whereby damaging higher level brain structures improves emotional regulation.
It's pretty common for organisms that undergo a certain amount of environmental damage to eventually develop processes that only work well if they do in fact undergo that environmental damage. The obvious example is trees whose seeds only germinate in fires, but the way the human immune system becomes allergic if it doesn't receive enough early childhood practice fighting actual invaders seems relevant.
> All the feels that got wrapped up into other people's lives were suddenly gone, replaced with a cheerful peacefulness. Unburdened from the over-consciousness of other people, I went about making decisions to benefit me & my kids, and life has gotten immeasurably better
Are you sure that this was concussion-related? I've had a similar transformation without any head knocks, and I attribute it just to age, maturity and fatherhood.
Day-of, I didn’t realize what it would lead to, I just felt oddly undisturbed by dynamics that had been upsetting only the day before. The abruptness made me notice the difference. Maybe the difference it made was positive for me because I was much too far over to the wrong side of compassionateness.
I think humans are pretty well adapted for concussion resilience, I don’t know how much better it can get. But it’s not that good, we still get concussed. If all or nearly all people sustained at least one mild concussion, over time that would constitute an evolutionary pressure. People who had any compassion left after getting hit in the head might have been the ones with too much to start with. They might outcompete others in that landscape.
And it wouldn’t have to be extreme blows to the head. Successive smaller impacts can ding a person for sure. It’s the type of thing we might not have historical records of medically, it would have to be estimated from child abuse records and child labor accidents.
Thinking that widespread concussion could have an impact on culture is one thing. The added theory that maybe lack of getting hit upside the head is actually a big problem - that’s definitely harder to prove and yes, might be totally wrong.
The idea that maybe now society is less concussed than we’ve ever been, so we have to develop some new skill sets, that I can buy into.
Apparently getting a stroke makes you enlightened.
My personal guess would be that damage to certain parts of the brain (amygdala?) makes you more chill, and damage to others makes you less chill, but we only ever hear about the first because it's surprising.
Thanks for posting this - I should be able to watch it later - but I think you’re right about the brain region affecting whether it goes the more chill or the less chill direction (or some of both).
It seems more likely to me that you simply got a bit lucky. You were fairly high in neuroticism, maybe with an undiagnosed anxiety disorder which was significantly hindering your life. If you'll indulge a very mechanical analogy: a TBI is like hitting a rotary ball bearing with a hammer; you'll get a few flats on the balls where they impacted one of the races so the whole thing will be a BIT more clunky, but it can also knock loose a ball that was binding up on one of the races and free it to spin again. (And, indeed, hitting a seized-up ball-bearing with a hammer is occasionally useful in repair in spite of the immediate damage from it.)
I suspect TBIs are very similar to ECT in this way. ECT seems to simulate a minimally-destructive TBI; minor temporary amnesia, etc., but all the firmly-embedded brain patterns get shaken up and are able to reform (potentially into a better equilibrium.)
prediction: if this theory is true then otherwise similar men from areas with similar levels of athletism but different sports of choice will have different levels of mental health.
that is, we would expecta a pro football player and a pro basketball player to be similar psychologically, but if the football players were systmatically more stable, this would support your theory.
I agree - I think it might be really hard to sort this geographically now, because so many sports are so widespread, but yes, I think there would be a correlation.
Unless the ones that matter are the concussions in childhood, in which case it would matter what sports men played as children/youth.
I think you would expect there to be an optimal amount of traumatic brain injury, and you would expect the average modern person to be below it, and the average professional football player to be above it. Not clear who would be close to the evolutionary optimum.
TBI's more frequently involve increased emotional instability because they tend to occur in ways that damage the forebrain or washboard the limbic system. You got lucky.
It’s possible I’m looking at this sideways, and society in general is generally more concussed due to automobile travel now, not less, and that that is influencing the increase in mental health diagnoses. So yes.
TBI's have increased because we've gotten better at reducing the impact of accidents and injuries, especially motor vehicle and military related, from something that would cause death to something that causes head injury. There's also more awareness leading to more diagnosis.
Motor vehicle accident induced TBI's have a common front to back, coup contrecoup, pattern that typically leads to reduced executive function and emotional instability. This does the opposite of the effects you report in yourself. I'm not denying your personal experience, but I think you should consider that your case isn't typical and the side-effect you report is fortunate.
I'm in no place to diagnose you from a brief description online, but your quick and dirty summary suggests a temporal lobe injury. Just understand that when people suffer brain injuries, this is not the only way it happens.
I had a couple of bad concussions as a kid, and that list of symptoms - callousness included - all seem like tings that have affected me.... Really makes on think how much of what we consider our very selves is caused by external forces
I started this train of thought trying to understand why “talk” therapies work - some people are able to intentionally “let go” and others find it much harder. I began to wonder if some people were able to fall back on “beneficial callousness” in ways that others were not. Then I began to wonder why some had that beneficial callousness and others did not or couldn’t use it.
I think some of the “just get over it”- type mental health advice derived from eras where people probably did get more TBIs, and “just get over it” might be more directly stated as “why does this still bother you,” ie, haven’t you had your concussions yet. Which also matches the association of being unable to get over something, with being inexperienced or naive (un-concussed.) It’s probably not the only mechanism but I think it’s going on.
I had a similar experience with a mild TBI, though mine was very mild (I never lost consciousness, though I was somewhat woozy for an hour). I also think I became less emotionally sensitive, less neurotic, etc. though I never had problems with memory, word finding difficulties, etc.
Hard to distinguish from just growing up / puberty.
I think there’s a possibility that it’s a widespread experience. But yes, we don’t usually track these medically or statistically and I think we are discouraged from tracking ourselves emotionally to the extent that the before-and-after would be revealed in data. Maybe there’s a huge longitudinal data set somewhere that a study could be made with, where we already have lots of baselines and then several thousand could agree to symptom tracking and journaling. Then some number of them would probably get sub clinical TBI (and a smaller number mTBI, etc) and the after effects of sub-clinical TBI might be visible.
Would you consider the Russian people more culpable for ignoring the atrocities in Ukraine, given that the information is available to anyone interested, internet censorship or not, compared to, say, German people in WWII, who generally had no idea about the death camps, only about their Jewish neighbors suddenly disappearing from the neighborhood?
Or, say, compared to the American people not knowing much about several massacres in Vietnam/Afghanistan/Iraq (e.g. the Haditha massacre)? Or, in an increasingly controversial order, to some of the actions of the IDF in the occupied territories.
I would like to explicitly exclude things like encouraging the local forces to commit atrocities by giving them financial or military aid, since it gets very murky in a hurry. So, no Sabra & Shatila, no actions by US-financed militias, no actions by Luhansk/Donetsk forces, etc. Probably not worth going further back in time and looking into British actions in SA, or Belgian in Congo.
I'm asking because Germans are brought up to feel collective guilt for the WWII atrocities and for not having done anything to stop it, and it seems to work well so far, though the effects are slowly fading, as the last the death camp survivors pass away. On the other hand, Russians and other allied soldiers (but especially the Russians) committed rape and often crimes against civilians during the liberation of Europe, but it is never a big topic of discussion... not even in Germany. And it is not just winners vs losers, since the Japanese people, nominally the losers, don't feel remorse for whatever Japanese forces did in China, even though it was on par with what Germans did in Europe.
The vast majority of Americans seem to have no trouble ignoring our atrocities in the Middle East, the scope of which Russia has yet to eclipse in the Ukraine conflict. I don't think the availability of information matters much. Cultural and historical conditions seem to matter far more.
"the scope of which Russia has yet to eclipse in the Ukraine conflict"
Quantitatively or qualitatively, or both? I can believe numerically more people may have been involved over the many years of Iraq and Afghanistan, but was there much deliberate rape, torture and execution of civilians?
Wiki says 25,000 to 100,000 since 1999 - not all would be Russian killings. So your 15% is too high. In actual numbers it’s estimated that about 1 million died in Iraq since 2003.
That's an important correction, but it's also worth clarifying that your numbers there aren't directly comparable either. We need to distinguish the two types of blame here. There's an important moral difference between deaths that we directly caused, and those that would not have happened if he hadn't invaded. That is: we're far more morally culpable for deaths due to US troops (collateral damage, deliberate murder/rape, etc.) than for deaths due to intra-Iraq sectarian violence unleashed by taking down Saddam.
In either case the deaths were (in some sense) caused by the US, but the second category isn't parallel to the deaths in Chechnya as I understand it.
I was going to add that not all were attributable to the US, however the figures for Chechnya I quoted from wiki were not all attributable to Russia either. I accept the correction in general thoiugh.
American troops killed *1 million* Iraqis? That's...I mean, if you're going to exaggerate, I guess you might as well do it by 2-3 orders of magnitude. Why not be bold?
I don't believe it was the *policy* of the US military to commit atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan. Officially, Americans were supposed to be winning hearts and minds. However, there certainly were atrocities, like the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Graib, and individuals like Edward Gallagher, a Navy SEAL who reportedly would shoot at Iraqi civilians for fun.
Well, it is probably not an official policy of Russia to massacre civilians. Though they seem to do it a lot and on a large scale, with balaclavas and what not. But the US military, not just rogue individuals, is not without blame, either:
When there is a military force in an occupied or invaded country, atrocities are the default. There is too much of a power differential, and too little goodwill in either direction, between soldier and enemy civilian.
Strict discipline and training can reduce the impact. I suspect the US military puts more emphasis on this than the Russian military, and also that the US military is just more disciplined, period. Nevertheless, it seems impossible to me that any amount of training could improve the relationship between soldiers and an occupied population to, say, how cops and black people in the US feel about each other right now.
You have been spending too much time watching CNN and not enough actually in black neighborhoods[1], if you think your last simple sentence bears any close resemblance to the truth on the ground.
Black people appreciate cops even more than suburban whites -- because they actually live where crime is a serious concern. That's one good reason blacks often serve *as* police officers. (For example, the current racial makeup of the LAPD is 30% white, 50% Hispanic, 9% black, 8% Asian.)
Blacks know very well how important the cop's job is, and they can see it making a diference in their actual lives much more than a young white person at a nice college in a safe town participating in her first march for racial justice.
It is also nevertheless also true that blacks are picked out for police surveillance and inquiry at much higher rates than non-blacks, and that can piss them off even when they get the reason for it. So the relationship is definitely fraught, and complicated. But it in no way resembles the trivial black-and-white (so to speak) cartoon that pundits on the tube offer for entertainment purposes.
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[1] Yes, I've personally lived in a neighborhood that was majority working-class black.
Rape? Probably not. Torture and execution? The military obviously claims they didn't do these things deliberately, but there was and continues to be so goddamned much of it that I simply don't believe them.
I’d add that American involvement in Vietnam to Iraq has drawn enormous public opposition and protests, so I wouldn’t say Americans have no problem ignoring those atrocities. Sure it’s legal to protest in the US but Russia is no Soviet Union or China either, I expected more visible opposition despite the circumstances
> the scope of which Russia has yet to eclipse in the Ukraine conflict
Christ, they only invaded two months ago, and directly killed probably ~10,000 civilians so far. So ~5,000 per month... and ~$63 billion in property damage in just one month.
Shared beliefs and cultural assumptions can make either atrocities or human rights more or less likely, but no individual is responsible for the crimes of another, nor should he/she be expected to feel guilt for another’s actions. I would avoid the expectation of collective remorse, or the assignment of collective blame to individuals not involved in the action.
No. Christ was right when he said “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's.” We live in a world with governments but the government isn’t us. “We the people” is a nice aspiration for the government, not a moral albatross for the populace to carry.
Does that rule only apply to states, or also to other organizations? I.e. may one blamelessly render unto Nestlé what is theirs even if doing so supports atrocities? How about choosing to support fledgling states, such as the Islamic State a few years back – completely blameless?
In law, it would be referred to as oblique intent when one performs an action not because of the harm it causes (which would be direct intent) but despite the harm it causes, and one would be culpable for it. Would you disagree with that legal principle?
As tax money is extracted from the tax payer by threat of force no matter what the person feels about the policy being funded and even in a representative democracy there is no way to direct your funds away from any particular policy (even aside from the fact that money is fungible) attributing moral weight to tax payer status is silly. This is even more true in a dictatorship such as Russia where there is not even the Figleaf of representation.
Political representation has nothing to do with my argument. Tens of thousands of Russians have decided to emigrate since the start of the war. Tens of millions have chosen to stay and to thus keep supporting the war financially.
Emigrating is very hard, especially for poor people. Even from a utilitarian standpoint, the suffering one imposes on oneself and one's family likely exceeds the reduction in revenue to the state.
Poor people tend to be a drain on the state, so they're not all that relevant. I don't think "by harming them, I gained more than they lost" is usually considered a valid reason to avoid culpability for that harm, and I think considering it as such would lead to massive problems.
There is a secondary effect of this attitude that I feel cautious about. If people are more culpable the more they know, does this discourage them from learning?
Very interesting - I agree that wilful ignorance is the best defence mechanism against the knowledge that our side is perpetrating atrocities, and the human brain is a fabulous confabulation device.
Knowledge of the Holocaust was probably widespread in Nazi Germany, even among regular people. Claims of ignorance should count very little given the incentive to lie and the official rhethorics which made little secret of the state's murderous intents.
Odds are, people who didn't want to know about death camps and gas chambers didn't know, and they were very much incentivised not to want to know, given the situation (wartime, totalitarianism, pervasive surveillance). There was definitely very little knowledge of the big picture of the Holocaust, as an industrial-scale genocide. My original point is that the information was not as readily available to an average German then as it is to an average Russian now.
Well, certainly the Russian people who actually pulled triggers that snuffed children or civilians in Ukraine, or who knowingly ordered others to do that, are culpable, in my opinion, and I'd be happy to see them hanged to the last man. No excuses, no "I was just following orders" bullshit. Nuremberg rules.
The Russian people who actively work for the regime and its forces, if they have any kind of realistic choice, would also bear culpability by me. If there were war crimes trials afterward and they were all sent to prison for 10 years, that would OK by me. Anyone who's worn a Z since Bucha can sit in a cold prison cell and eat moldy bread for 5 years for all I care.
All other Russians? Different, and complicated. It's difficult to probe a man's heart, and if the only unmistakable evidence of dissent is participating in a revolution -- an exceedingly dangerous thing -- then most of us, anywhere, are not such angels as would pass, so I refrain from judgment there. On the other hand, if harm befalls Russians in this category, collateral damage from sanctions or being shut out of Western ideas and markets for a generation, or having Russia fall further into gangsterism and misery, that wouldn't especially bother me either -- I would not lift a finger to stop it. So...somewhere between guilty and fully innocent.
It might be different if I saw some evidence of massive domestic outrage -- I mean, every time American soldiers have been caught behaving badly in the past 75 years or so, you get a ton of highly visible outrage among Americans. People yell and march, write angry letters, go on TV and shake their fists. Politicians lose elections, officers are court-martialed, careers are ruined. You can easily tell most of us don't like it, and bitterly resent it having happened under the Stars 'n' Stripes, even if there are the usual shitheads and weasel politicians bleating out mealy-mouthed defenses. Maybe something like that is going on in Russia, but so far I'm not seeing it.
I'm also curious what you mean by any sense of inculcated guilt in Germans having "worked." Worked how? Prevented Germany from starting another world war? One would imagine being occupied and having a nuclear-armed behemoth (the US) looking over your shoulder all the time would be more than enough to do that anyway. What else? In another world one might imagine the German people as a result of this alleged sense of guilt becoming passionate champions of the rights of minorities everywhere, or at least of the Jews, being more willing that most other nations to put their own lives on the line to defend people being oppressed by a state all over the world -- but I wouldn't say that has happened. The German response to Black September was shameful. I don't recall any strong German response to Rwanda, or for that matter to Prague 1968. When a people finally took a real stand against Soviet European oppression, at great risk to themselves, it turned out to be the Poles who had the balls.
That doesn't mean I think the Germans have fallen short of any other random nation, just that I don't see any concrete "extra" that happened over the past 80 years that one might plausibly attribute to collective guilt over what happened in the Second World War, and I'm curious what you see that I don't.
I guess the main thing is that Germans are very aware of what their country did that was wrong and criminal in WWII, though mostly as it relates to the death camps. And there is plenty of collective guilt, at least as far as Jews are concerned, just ask a regular German. It definitely expresses itself as an extreme reluctance to go against Israel, as paying compensation to the descendants of the Jews killed or displaced during WWII, and as a general reluctance to interfere in military conflicts abroad. An average American, British, Russian or French would not be nearly as willing to admit that their country committed atrocities sanctioned by their government.
Yeah, I had been wondering ... To the extent to which it holds true, that Germans are more aware than others, I think it relates both
- to very specific historic developments : a very conscious denazification effort by the winning powers. Look for 4 D. I'm not sure that took place in any other country at the time? And then later the 68 movement, which in Germany was linked a lot to the question of what the parents generation had done during Nazi time.
- and to the enormity of the crime. Imagine you - or your parents for that sake - were driving drunk and killed 3 persons including a child. Or you - or your parents - were driving drunk and hit another persons parking car. If you're a more or less decent person, the first incident will somehow impact you and force you to deal with this. With the second one, it's easier to just put this aside as a 'oops, not optimal' and try to forget about it. ... I'm *not* trying to compare this to any specific atrocities, my point is rather: the holocoust was so enourmous a crime, that it was getting difficult at least for the childrens generation not to deal with it. I think the context was also conducive as this childrens generation was living in comparitively good circumsstances, and with nobody blaming them.
Didn't the American-imposed German constitution outlaw foreign military conflicts? I know the Japanese one did. That seems relevant in the discussion of German willingness to get involved in such a conflict.
An interesting assertion, that last, but at least with respect to average Americans, of whom I know quite a few, I find it quite implausible.
I'm also a bit baffled by why a sense of guilt should have as its major concrete consequence a reluctance to interfere in military conflicts abroad. Are you suggesting that otherwise Germany *might* have? Like...where? When...?
Generally speaking, I feel like most First World interventions well beyond their borders since 1945 can be classified as colonial powers intervening in their erstwhile colonies (e.g. the French in Indochina), superpower proxy conflicts (Korea, Vietnam), or World Cop aspirations (the US in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Lebanon, and Afghanistan, et cetera). Germany doesn't fit into any of those categories -- it had no significant colonial assets, never was a superpower, and for that same reason couldn't plausibly play World Cop. So...what foreign conflict *might* the Bundeswehr have got into, had German guilt over the Second World War not prevented it?
>German people in WWII, who generally had no idea about the death camps, only about their Jewish neighbors suddenly disappearing from the neighborhood?
They didn't have any Jewish neighbours by the time of the Holocaust proper. The Jews were in ghettos.
>And it is not just winners vs losers, since the Japanese people, nominally the losers, don't feel remorse for whatever Japanese forces did in China, even though it was on par with what Germans did in Europe.
In Japan, the Reverse Course put the ultranationalists back in charge as part of Cold War realpolitik, and unsurprisingly since a bunch of them were war criminals they went to a lot of trouble to hush up the whole affair. Germany was never "renazified" to the same extent (which is actually the unusual part).
There is also an statement on a related Wiki-page saying they were discussed, but dismissed ... I don't know more about this. 'Bereits unmittelbar nach den Novemberpogromen 1938 erwog Hermann Göring die Einrichtung von Ghettos. Reinhard Heydrich hielt jedoch eine polizeiliche Überwachung dort für schwierig; er empfahl eine Unterbringung in Judenhäusern und rechnete dabei mit einer Kontrolle „durch das wachsame Auge der gesamten Bevölkerung“.[8] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judenhaus
> the information is available to anyone interested, internet censorship or not
Sadly, propaganda is rampant. I would expect some claims of war crimes in the media even if none had happened. I assume Russian media makes similar claims about Ukrainians (maybe not in those exact terms, since it's a "special operation" and not a war...). It's easy to dismiss everything as misinformation, and as discussed below there's a temptation to avoid going looking for the truth.
As someone who's been professionally involved with rumours, allegations, evidence, investigations, trials, etc. of such episodes, and especially because this is a rationalist site, I would urge everyone to be extremely, extremely careful about accepting any of the numerous conflicting accusations about Ukraine at face value. For at least thirty years now, allegations of this sort have been used as weapons of war, normally with the intention of either gaining sympathy and promoting intervention from an outside power, or confirming support among one's own population. In the West, little of what is being said in the region, and reported there and in the media in India or the Middle East, is available to us, but Russian TV has been showing horrifying pictures of massacres, decapitated Russian soldiers and confessions from perpetrators. This, too, needs to be treated with just as much care. (There are, of course a host of technical and forensic issues as well: for example, neither "civilian" nor "atrocity" is a legal term. And a single soldier executed after surrendering is a crime, whereas ten "civilians" killed when a missile goes off course or is destroyed in flight, isn't).
Atrocity stories tend to be believed or not depending on the extent to which they confirm stereotypes of others that you hold yourself. The classic example is Goebbels's use of the stereotype of the savage, brutal Russian, in the last-ditch propaganda effort to encourage the Wehrmacht not to surrender in 1945. That was the origin, among other things, of the "rape as a weapon of war" meme, which has had a long and active existence since. Historians who have been through the records have since shown that Soviet commanders actually did was they could to restrain their troops, though not always successfully. By contrast, and irrespective of evidence, we generally disbelieve accusations made against out own people, because we have our own stereotypes of ourselves. (The exception, of course, is when we are politically opposed to the war in the first place, in which case we might believe anything).
But more generally, in my experience it is futile and even dangerous to apply models of racial guilt to events that definitely happened a long time ago, and even those that may or may not have happened recently. Crimes are ordered and committed by individuals, not racial stereotypes. Ironically, of course, the impulse for this kind of thinking comes from the Bible itself, when the Jews are shown taking responsibility for the death of Jesus: "His blood be upon us and our children" (Matthew, 27,25). Has any single sentence in history ever had such terrible consequences?
"Historians who have been through the records have since shown that Soviet commanders actually did was they could to restrain their troops, though not always successfully."
I would avoid falling back on the nebulous figures of "historians", who of course have their own biases.
Who else could one possibly fall back upon? The alternative is to believe what one wants. Of course there are bad histories written by bad historians, but some good ones have carefully examined the available evidence and concluded as noted.
> That was the origin, among other things, of the "rape as a weapon of war" meme, which has had a long and active existence since. Historians who have been through the records have since shown that Soviet commanders actually did was they could to restrain their troops, though not always successfully.
What I heard from my parents' generation was that Russians raped lots of women even in the allied territories they liberated. (Then during communism it was illegal to talk about it.) The average Russian soldier probably had no idea what country he was currently in.
The Russians think these are false flags. And who knows? We won’t know the reality of this war for years, if ever. Journalism is limited everywhere, to a certain extent. It’s not like the war in Yemen makes the news in the US, although the US is both a passive and active participant in a fairly nasty regional war with significant civilian casualties, and child starvation.
It's an interesting question. I have been defending ordinary Russians in the current situation - in my mind mostly - and then a couple of times, I thought: wait, if you think the Russians are not responsible, why do you think the Germans were? Or vice versa. I grew up in Germany, and I certainly think there was a responsibility.
Part of me just notes this as a contradiction that I will deal with when I have more time. But also, in my view there is an imporant point to consider: Who is talking about whose guilt or responsibility.
I think it's a good thing when Germans take their responsibility - or those of their ancestors - seriously.
And broader, in my mind, I congratulate every nation, whenever they are able to seriously deal with their past issues, small or big, and take responsibility.
But this is something very different than to blame others. In this way, I will be happy if Russians see their responsibility - but I don't support others blaming every ordinary Russian citizen for this war. Especially if the blaming is done from 'the sofa' by persons who might not have the courage or whatever needed for a critical stance themselves.
Intuitively I agree with the idea that they should self-recognize, rather than being condemned from the outside (civilian populations, not those who are directly involved or actually committed the atrocities). That said, there's probably a very good reason that Germans today talk about and admit the atrocities, while Soviet atrocities didn't affect their own civilian populations - Germany was conquered and was forced to recognize what happened, while the Soviets were not.
Japan is a bit of an odd case there, but the atrocities were committed in China, and China was enmeshed in a civil war right after WWII, which may have a lot to do with it.
I had already written a comment about the situation being specific in Germany, somewhere above or below, depends ;). I think the point you mentioned is at least one of the factors. Though my understanding is, that the generation right after the war - the one 'forced to recognize' as you say - rather didn't really do so, and the societal change came later.
I think there are essentially three ways a Russian can approach the current situation:
1. Actively protest. This takes guts and is not likely to bring any change unless massively coordinated (which is hard to do in current Russia). It is very brave and should be commended but it is definitely not something one can ask Russians to do.
2. stay silent without showing any support of the war. This should be the default, the minimum expected. not a sign of bravery but like you said, that is something that cannot be required "from the sofa".
3. support the war. This I believe is actually a reason for blame. Russian government is openly talking about their plans for Ukraine after the "military operation" which are basically a carbon copy of Nazi plans for the Slavic peoples in the Lebensraum in the east. It is just pure evil, Heydrich would be proud. Unless you are so brainwashed by the Russian propaganda as to believe that Ukrainians are all basically members of the SS, this is still completely unacceptable.
Btw, off topic, but since you were looking for good sources about the war in Ukraine, I recently found this youtube channel. It is run by an Australian guy who does not want to disclose a whole lot about his job and other personal info but who apparently knows quite a lot about military economy and logistics. Especially his latest two videos (about the long term outlooks of the war) are very insightful. They also drive home quite effectively how much of an advantage NATO has over Russia economically. It is not even the same scale. If the war keeps going for months and if the NATO support of Ukraine stays or ramps up a bit, Russia simply cannot realistically win, not even close. It is quite astonishing and watching that lessened my frustration with the stranglehold Russia has on the NATO due to its nuclear arsenal. The economy of NATO countries (and other western allies) is able to grind the Russian state to dust over time with just a little bit of sweat, no need for direct invasions. And judging by today's comments by the American secretary of defense, I'd say this is exactly what at least the US aims to do (and the US is a half of total NATO economic power). Of course, a long war is not ideal, but it does not look like Russia will settle for anything reasonable otherwise (at least as long as Putin is still president).
Even just increasing the military budget to 2% of the GPD in all NATO countries, which they pledged to do anyway, and sending the difference to Ukraine would let Ukraine have a larger military budget than Russia. And increasing even further to say the US spending during the Vietnam war would give Ukraine a larger military budget than the entire Russian GDP (this won't happen of course, but it illustrates the point quite effectively). All those huge Russian reserves are also not nearly as easy to mobilize as it may seem (a lot of the equipment is probably mothballed and as long as Russia insist that it is not fighting a war, it cannot really legally mobilize most of the reservists...plus reservists are simply all men that underwent basic military training or were in the army in the last 5 years, not all are really combat ready).
Yeah, there is a huge difference between "I don't want to discuss politics, because I don't know which sources to trust, and also I am afraid of being punished by police or my neighbors" and... well, being a Russian Nazi.
Oops - I should have been careful about that, particularly in a post about me not understanding acronyms! "OP" means "Original Post" (though it's sometimes ambiguous about whether it refers to the main post at the top that all the comments are on, or the first comment in the thread that the current comment is in).
The comparison of post-1945 Germany and Japan is not particularly apt, the differences were huge. For all the dehumanizing stereotypes that the Japanese had of Chinese and Koreans, for all the monstrosities, enslavement and rape that Japanese soldiers committed there, the Japanese had never undertaken a systematic extermination of those peoples.
That, plus the Japanese public was potentially disinclined to take moral lessons from the US occupiers after the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the firebombing of Tokyo.
People comparing the current-day war crimes committed by Russians in Ukraine to those that had been committed by the Nazis, do not have the inkling of the beginning of an idea what the f they are talking about.
Nonsense. Nobody in 1945 thought there was anything especially immoral about nuking Hiroshima. Leveling cities from the air was par for the course in those days, and atomic bombs were just a considerably more efficient way of doing what Curtis LeMay had already been doing across the entire country. Considering it some kind of nuclear Rubicon was a massive 1960s-70s era retcon.
>Nobody in 1945 thought there was anything especially immoral about nuking Hiroshima. Leveling cities from the air was par for the course in those days, and atomic bombs were just a considerably more efficient way
Nonsense, if I may borrow the term. Yes, I know that the USAF firebombings killed over 200.000 Japanese civilians, which is more than the two subsequent nukes did. The preceding Japanese bombings in China had killed an order of magnitude fewer civilians than that, and yet it was widely considered to be "not okay".
LeMay had said "I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal." He won the war, and therefore him having burned to death hundreds of thousands of civilians, was fine. I get that. But yet I wonder, what did LeMay mean with that "if I had lost" sentence? Is there any chance that LeMay might have had a better idea of what was considered immoral in 1945 than you do?
I guess you missed the word "especially" in my first sentence? As I said, the *nuclear* bombings were not considered any more immoral than bombing in general. You do not apparently dispute this point, because you are going on to point out that bombing in general of civilian populations was controversial, if only at the beginning of the war -- one has only to recall the outrage of the world at the German bombings in the Spanish Civil War, cf. Picasso's "Guernica", or consider the outrage even later in the war over Dresden.
It is sadly the case however that by the *end* of the war widespread indiscriminate bombings of civilians had become considerably more accepted (and no doubt in part for the morally squalid reason that the winners employed it, although the Germans after raining a hundred V-1s and V-2s on London, or the Japanese after Nanking, had zero moral standing to complain about it anyway). Few people in the late 40s and early 50s thought it an *unusual* act of war (e.g. like Treblinka) any more.
Certainly LeMay understood 1945 morality better than I. I'm only claiming I understand it (and the meaning of LeMay's statement) better than you.
No I didn't miss the word "especially" in your reply, nor did I use the word "especially" for the nukes when I originally mentioned it alongside the firebombings. *If* you decide to kill civilians by the hundreds of thousands, inside territory which you do not control, then I agree that nukes are obviously a more efficient way to do that than firebombings. (LeMay has burned to death more Japanese civilians than the nukes did - roughly a quarter million). What I disagree with is the *choice* of killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, and I disagree that this was considered as moral even at the time. It dwarfed any Guernicas or V1s or V2s or Dresdens. (yes, the Holocaust was the only thing that it *didn't* dwarf -- in case that "being less bad than the Holocaust" is taken as the threshold for morality?)
I'm not convinced that you understand morality better than I. The Japanese army mass-murdering Chinese civilians is morally wrong. The US army mass-murdering Japanese civilians is - guess what - morally wrong too. (otherwise, it was not an "unusual act of war" for Japanese soldiers to kill Chinese soldiers or for American soldiers to kill Japanese soldiers) Yet there's this persistent framing that the Japanese were morally wrong and the Americans were morally right. Nope. Both were morally wrong; the Americans were merely stronger.
The OP asked why the Japanese had not undergone a moral soul-searching after WWII defeat as the Germans did. Maybe because the German regime had undertaken the systematic extermination of an entire people, and the Japanese regime had not? I mean, it's not like the Japanese had any moral lessons to learn from their occupiers, otherwise...
*Your* opinion on bombing of civilians is not at issue, nor is mine, so most of what you said is irrelevant. The question is whether people in general thought in 1945-55, let us say, that bombing of cities was an unusually immoral act of war. No doubt almost all of them deplored war in general, and violence in general. Not relevant. The question is *if* you have decided war is your only option, is bombing of cities a legitimate way of winning? Most people in that era, for better or worse, decided it was.
If nothing else, you can note the absence of any degree of anguish, debate, or retrospection after the war, the preparation for doing so in any future wars, and in fact the actual use of widespread bombing in later wars. (And there is ample evidence that people felt differently about other techniques of war in the Nuremberg and Japanese war crimes trials, which certainly expressed how people felt about the treatment of prisoners or civilians in occupied territory, and in the treaties on chemical and biological weapons, which expressed how people felt about that.)
Your equation of the Japanese behavior in Manchuria with the American bombing of Japanese cities is moral cardboard, the equivalent of equating a homeowner shooting an intruder to a thug shooting an innocent to steal his wallet, because both are after all deliberate acts of killing.
Japan is a difficult case...the Japanese were even more fanatical then the Hitlerjugend, they would simply fight until the last man. They were willing to kill their families to save resources, all for the Emperor...
Clearly, not all Japanese were like this, but enough of them to leave US with a few precious choices:
1. launch a land war in Japan with extreme casualties on both sides (the US soldiers were conscripts, so they did not sign up for that)
2. bomb japan into submission with conventional weapons (they did this too)
3. Demonstrate their power with the nukes.
4. A peace deal with imperial Japan
Of these, 4 would have lead to least casualties in the short run but it also would have left a fascist power unpunished, with even more hatred towards the US and potentially able to rebuild and endanger the Pacific.
Of the other options, it might be argued that 3 actually saved lives. Fire bombings and generally conventional bombing of Japan ended up killing a lot more people than the two nukes, but there was a lot less shock and awe, so it would probably take a lot more of that for Japan to surrender.
The nukes killed a lot of innocent civilians but probably more would have died in option 1 and 2 (and more US conscripts also). These early nukes were firecrackers compared to modern ICBM warheads and a conventional carpet bombing raid could kill just as many. It was more nasty in the mid-term due to radiation, but otherwise it was not really any worse than what the US was doing already.
Btw, the Japanese were actually quite close to the current Russian behaviour. They were not systematic about their genocide. They did not literally try to kill all the Chinese. But they were trying to turn them into second-class Japanese (and kill those who would oppose). Russians are doing the same. Rape, senseless brutality and talk of re-education of an entire nation (they openly talk about the need to break Ukraine and a collective punishment, "re-education" lasting generations and erasing any Ukraine-ness. It is what the Germans wanted to do with those Slavs they deemed close enough to their arian standards (sending the rest to Siberia or just killing them...the Russians talk about exactly the same plans for Ukraine and very openly).
It seems to me that you and Carl Pham think that I disagree with you on a specific point on which I do not disagree. If you want to kill hundreds of thousands or millions of civilians, then using nukes is merely a more efficient way to achieve that than firebombings, just as firebombings are a more efficient way than regular-explosive bombs, and so forth. This is obviously true and I do not disagree on that. I disagree on the morality of wiping out civilians on an industrial scale in pursuit of a particular goal. Historically, it used to be not normal to do such things, unless your name was Genghis Khan.
Your key point is that the "[#4] would have left a fascist power unpunished, with even more hatred towards the US". Whether Japan was a "fascist power" or an "imperial power" is too long of a digression for now. "Left unpunished" is false; by early 1945 all of Japan's expansionist ambitions had been terminally thwarted, and their capacities were thoroughly destroyed. As in countless such conflicts before, negotiations and treaties could be pursued at that point, in which the loser would be forced to pay.
This was the historically most common resolution of such conflicts, and the US emphatically did not want to pursue it.
As you say, it would lead to "even more hatred towards the US". The alternative which avoided that "hatred" was to *thoroughly and truly break* the Japanese. And if what it took to do *that* was to kill Japanese civilians in the hundreds of thousands, well, that was a sacrifice that Lord Faarquad was willing to make.
I agree that #3 vs. #2 (nukes vs. "regular" firebombing) was just a matter of efficiency -- whereas Curtis LeMay was doing remarkably fine even before the nukes were delivered -- but disagree with the claim that the "#2|#3 vs. #4" decision was a *moral* one. Imperial Japan was willing to, and did, kill tens of thousands of Chinese civilians in an effort to subdue the Chinese. Imperial US was willing to, and did, kill *hundreds* of thousands of Japanese civilians in an effort to subdue the Japanese. I see them as two efforts, one unsuccessful and one successful, but both immoral.
The OP had asked why Japan's defeat did not provoke moral soul-searching among the Japanese. Given *how* it has happened, I asked -- why would it?
I'm surely biased because I find the concept of collective guilt thoroughly repugnant, but why do you assume that this is what's caused this success? Germans were also brought up to reject nationalism and militarism since WW2. You even undermine the attribution to collective guilt in noting that the Japanese don't share this sense of collective guilt, yet Japan has also been an extraordinarily peaceful country since WW2. It seems to me like a lot of European countries (including the Belgians) that don't embrace collective guilt for their countries' historical atrocities are similarly very peaceful today.
FWIW, I think his conclusions are correct, extremely important, and based in research consensus that is only slowly penetrating into mainstream debates. On the other hand I'm also unimpressed with his scholarship. I suppose he's the kind of doctor that's better at treating patients than explaining.
His side business of selling books and talks doesn't help, for sure.
Well, he speaks and writes, ever so slightly, as not a native English speaker...but other than that I cannot find a single flaw in his work. Even that is not really a flaw to me.
Really? I was impressed with his ability with data, actually. And I see him as a doctor eager to help people. He is countering conventional thinking on how to achieve reducing stored fat. I also find his analogies excellent.
That's so handy. Thank you so much. (It looks like identations are lost?) I kind of want to make predictions for whether some of these will be accepted or not as finalists.
How is mesa-optimizing related to meta-gaming? Are these describing pretty much the same phenomenon? Are these actually opposites for some reason, or are we just using the prefix in one of these wrong? (mesa- doesn't seem to be greek, or even a real prefix at all, do they mean "meso-"?)
I guess those could sort of be considered opposites if you look at them from precisely the right angle.
A mesa-optimizer is a subsystem that you delegate a problem to. For example, letting your car's "check engine" light decide how often you should have your car serviced.
Meta-gaming refers to the use of out-of-game information to optimize your strategy; especially information about the statistical prevalence of various strategies. ("Rock tends to be played more often than scissors or paper, which means paper wins more often.") It's "meta" in the sense of relying on out-of-context information.
You could look at meta-gaming like this: When you play a game, you develop an internal decision-making algorithm that only thinks about how to play the game, and ignores considerations like e.g. going to the bathroom. Normally when you play, you delegate your strategy decisions to that algorithm. This part of yourself could be considered a mesa-optimizer relative to your whole self.
Then, when you meta-game, your larger self overrides your mesa-optimizer to take advantage of information from outside the game. (You also override the mesa-optimizer when you decide to let your kid brother win, or to take a break for snacks.)
Of course, there isn't an especially clear separation between "you" and "your game-playing mesa-optimizer". I'd be inclined to take this comparison as more metaphorical than literal.
Yeah, I think you've got your prefixes confused. The antonym of meta- would be infra-, in this case infra-gaming meaning that all the information utilised is information from within the game itself.
Has anyone researched endogenous lipase causing weight loss? Lipase had a moment like ghrelin, leptin and several other enzymes considered a potential weight loss silver bullet, but like everything else that didn’t work out. Usually having too much natural lipase is a sign of trouble with your pancreas, but it’s also in breast milk, to make it more digestible.
I’m curious because while I was nursing I found out I was one of a small number of women who produce too much lipase in their milk. This is inconvenient because it makes your milk go “off” very quickly. But more convenient was that I l lost a surprising amount of weight and have so far kept it off for several years. I’ve been wondering if lipase, produced by the body in a certain way and temporarily, does promote weight loss. I know some folks here are super tapped into this kind of thing, and I don’t have journal access. Has anyone studied high-lipase nursing women?
Speaking of lipase, I lost 90 lbs. to pancreatitis in six years, but regained 20. If you get lower back pain, get checked for acites, pseudo cysts, and /or pancreatitis.
Yes. But the pancreatitis will likely do the job first. They say my CT scan shows gummy lungs from a all the pot smoke, but I'll likely be pushing up daisies before they can kill me with chemicals and radiation.
Interstellar warfare - would it favor defense or offense?
As long as an incoming attack is slower than the speed of light, then I'd imagine an advanced civilization would have plenty of time to detect and defend their planet against any attack, but I'm probably missing something. Defense would overpower attacks, because it's costly and difficult to send a bunch of ICBMs or whatever many lightyears away.
Assuming peer technology level, the simplest defence against a fast-moving rock is hitting it with an equally large, equally fast-moving rock in the other direction.
Not if you have to hit the Earth from several light years away, but the big rock from a much smaller distance.
I'm actually working on the assumption that the aiming part is pretty easy in both cases, though, compared to the difficulty of accelerating rocks up to near light speed.
You could get away with a lot less than "equally large" and "equally fast-moving". All you really need to do is to make it hit something before reaching the target, at which point it explodes and dissipates.
If it's moving fast enough to be useful in interstellar warfare, you don't need to hit it with a large rock, or any sort of rock at all. A whiff of dust in its path will suffice. But you do want to hit it reasonably far out, so that the expanding vapor cloud will have time to dissipate into something mostly harmless.
An ICBM is probably small enough that we wouldn't see it coming, but the isotopes in a modern warhead would decay before it reached us unless the aliens could accelerate it to relativistic speed (in which case they might not need a warhead.)
Best chance for a sneak attack might be to disguise their spaceship full of killer robots (or whatever) as an asteroid or comet set to pass the earth harmlessly, then change course at the last minute.
He probably means the tritium in the starter for a fission weapon. Although if you can accelerate a projectile to relativistic speeds adding a nuclear warhead is just kind of gilding the lily.
There's a lot of sci fi, even semi-hard sci fi, that deals with this. Barring faster than light speed the defender would always be prepared and also they would have a very significant "mass advantage". All the resources of a solar system to defend with vs whatever pitiful amount of mass the attacker could shove interstellar distances.
I really liked it too, even with the gradual christianization that happened starting with hermetic millenia. The sheer scale of it... nothing else like it, not anywhere
But I have to admit... I found it ironic that as the christianity got larger, the internal coherence of the story got shoddier. Oh, so the Cold Equations are true. Oh actually they're agitprop. Oh actually they are one of many internally consistent interpretations. Or, like... we went from jupiter brains being able to model smaller organisms as if they were just mechanisms, to Torment admitting she couldn't beat an ant at rock-paper-scissors because of infinite regression.
it didn't bother me as much as I thought it would though. like I said... the sheer scale of it. Galaxy-sized minds warring with each other. Dyson cannons. The primary lever of power on the universal scale is the use of the eschaton engine to impart spin to galaxies, or remove spin from galaxies, forcing their brains to take on centrifugal or centripetal political structures.
Like... holy shit. Nothing else like that book series exists. The enormity of it all overcomes the flaws.
The Cold Equations flip flopping didn't bother me so much, because it's emblematic of the whole series. In just about every book our entire perspective on the situation at hand changes dramatically with the introduction of new context. In the first book they're worried about being made slaves by an alien empire: they think they know what's going on, and where they are, and what the stakes are, but slowly through the series we find out how drastically ignorant they were of the their actual situation. The Hermetic Millenia has the bad guys trying desperately to create a humanity that would be useful to the aliens, and they don't even have a clue what the aliens want. It really showcases the theme of impossible to imagine magnitudes, both in space and time. At every level larger we realize how tiny the level before it was.
We don't know. Warfare is a rapidly evolving, anti-inductive system. It is impossible to predict it far into the future.
I'm not even sure whether warfare today favors defense or offense. I had thought that it favors offense or insurgency over traditional defense. This was based on the Iraq, Libya, Azerbaijan-Armenia, and a few smaller conflicts. Front lines hardly ever stayed still for more than a week or two when someone was trying to advance. But in Ukraine, defense is looking pretty good. Much of the 2014 line of control hasn't moved after 2 months of war.
Yeah but that's mostly because the Russians are fuckups. And also this is not asymmetrical warfare, with one side at great pains to avoid losses or collateral damage, still less tribal slugging among incompetents. Very different situation from anything we've seen in a while.
My assumption would be that if you can see it coming, you can destroy it. Whatever you fling at me, I can fling something equally massive at it to destroy it before it hits me.
The name of the game would, therefore, be speed. Maybe flinging something at 99% of the speed of light gives me a few days to react, but flinging something at 99.9999% of the speed of light gives me just seconds, and I'll never be able to respond in time.
Of course the best case is a weapon that travels at the speed of light, like a laser (but not really like a laser because actual lasers spread out harmlessly over large distances). But if you can find a way to send a whole bunch of photons my way then you can fry my planet as fast as I see it coming. The only defence would be some kind of gigascale engineering -- build a planet-sized shield and place it to block the view of your unfriendly star from my planet.
Or very slow. If you sent a black hole of a solar mass or so through the Solar System, at 100 km/s or so it would completely screw things up -- I doubt we'd survive as a species -- and we'd never see it coming, unless we happened to look in *exactly* the right direction at the right time and caught a microlensing event. And even then, what could we do about it? Of course, it would take maybe 10,000 years for your revenge to be complete.
It depends a lot on the technology, scenario, and rules of warfare. Are we just talking about a strike out from interstellar space with no warning, or something where there are rules of war or mainly interplanetary combat?
If you're just trying to wreck stuff from a distance, then it tends to favor the attacker (since the defender has to deflect everything thrown at them, and potentially carry out strikes to stop stuff that can't be deflected). But in most other circumstances, I think it would actually favor the defender - they can have some truly massive, powerful space lasers and mass drivers to shoot at incoming ships, and they can also have gigantic telescope arrays to get the most accurate location on where they're going.
Accelerating projectiles to, say, 0.1c and then just letting them drift until they hit the enemy planet is an obvious, devastating and hard-to-counter strategy (and pretty much the only scenario where stealth in interstellar space is viable, see http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewardetect.php#nostealth). But as ACOUP points out (https://acoup.blog/2020/07/17/fireside-friday-july-17th-2020/) this is rarely of any use strategically. If you want to actually conquer a star system, and there are no major revisions to the laws of physics (e.g. warp drive), it gets very difficult: the attacker is operating not only with much less mass but also with an N-year technology deficit. From there my mind goes to self-replicating mining robots that convert rocky bodies to weapons and ammo; it seems an obvious technology for defenders and attackers alike to leverage if it's available (which it likely would be in a world of interstellar colonization). If an attacker manages to deposit such robots surreptitiously things could get dicey fast; otherwise they'll be heavily outgunned by the defenders.
That leaves the harder problem of what it even means to be "at war" on a timescale that, for humans moving between stars, would likely be generations. Even a successful occupying force would have little reason to obey the society that sent it. Value drift would kick in with a vengeance.
Note that warp drive is actually predicted by general relativity (Alcubierre metric) and there's currently a project going on to build one (somebody found a design of cavity that should generate the required metric via Casimir effect, and is AFAIK currently testing whether this works in practice), so I wouldn't call it a "major revision to the laws of physics".
Bombardment with relativistic projectiles works alright on a planetary civilisation, but not very well on an interplanetary one with mobile space habitats and/or deeply-buried bases on asteroids (lower gravity means you can go much, much deeper without getting crushed by the pressure). Against an interplanetary civilisation the only real way to destroy them without being present is to blow up the star (hitting it with a black hole would probably do the trick, assuming you can work things out so that the black hole gets stuck in the star).
As an aside, Bret is playing fast and loose with the truth in that article in order to make a political point. I am 100% certain he knows that total wars in which the primary goal is merely "X political entity destroyed so that it no longer threatens us" are a real thing, but he carefully avoids mentioning them because that would make his "checkmate, war hawks" argument at the end much less solid. Bret knows a lot and usually doesn't lie (this is the closest I've seen to an outright lie), but you've always got to be on your guard when reading him because he's often using his historical expertise to back up a polemic and he's quite happy to present a slanted view when it would help the polemic to do so.
I'm afraid this doesn't actually work. Although QFT permits local negative energy densities (e.g. the Casimir effect, squeezed light, Hawking radiation) it turns out that the negative energy pulse is always accompanied by a greater amount of positive energy elsewhere, and this positive energy ruins the possibility of having warp drives (at least any warp drive which speeds you up asymptotically, relative to distant lightcones). In particular, although the Casmir effect permits negative energy between nearby conducting plates, the plates themselves always have a greater amount of positive energy.
This is now a general theorem in flat space QFT, and there are strong indications that the same result (including many results just shy of a general proof) that the same also applies in curved spacetime.
Source: I am an expert in this exact subfield.
Reference: see e.g. Graham and Olum (arXiv:0705.3193). Note that while this paper formulates its version of the average null energy condition as a conjecture, it has been largely confirmed by subsequent research, some of it by me personally.
Depends a lot on how much the combatants know about each other. The easiest way to win would probably be to screw up the ecology of your opponent's planet. Seed the atmosphere with some weird destructive tailored bacteria, introduce Ice 9, et cetera.
It would partly depend on the speed of the attack, not to mention how numerous the missiles (?) are.
If things are coming in at close to the speed of light, you don't have a lot of time to react even if your defense is fast. Maybe you can succeed at defense if you have sufficiently powerful lasers.
Briefly put, the problem is that attack is far stronger than defence: a grain of sand accelerated to 0.99c has more than enough energy to match the dinosaur-killing Chicxulub asteroid while being nearly undetectable itself (since even if you could detect it, it travels almost as fast as the warning signal it emits; if the grain of sand was fired at you from 100 light years away, the light from its firing would come to you after 100 years but the grain itself would come after 101.01 years; you'd have only a year to react).
Thus, the only defence is a pre-emptive offence: if you detect any signs of life out there, shoot them first before they shoot you. They *may* not be hostile, but you don't know that for certain, while you *do* know for certain that if they are hostile, you're not going to survive them shooting at you. Thus, the Dark Forest as a proposed solution to the Fermi Paradox: everyone's keeping quiet, because those that did not were brutally murdered out of paranoia.
However, this logic is not impeccable. The most notable flaw is travel time: in the 100 light years example, it takes 100 light years for the signs of life to travel from the victim to the shooter, and 101.01 light years for the grain of sand to travel from the shooter to the victim. In those 201 years, the victim civilization might go from 'Advanced enough to generate radio signals detectable from 100 light years away' to 'Advanced enough to colonize the planets and asteroids of their solar system'. (One example of this could be 'Human civilization in the 1950s' vs. 'Human civilization in the 2150s'). Thus, all you'd do by shooting at people would be *really* pissing them off, since you blew up their homeworld but left survivors in the asteroid belt and colonized planets. Then they'd dedicate themselves to getting revenge, and you've just made yourself worse off for no gain at all.
That's the current state of knowledge when it comes to interstellar warfare. Some speculations by science fiction writers, based off known physical and societal principles (speed of light delay, pre-emptive paranoia, speed of light travel time, rapidity of advancement from industrial to space-faring civilization, the desire for revenge when aliens blow up your homeworld)... but nothing concrete so far.
Dark Forest (or, in the original version, Central Park) as an explanation for the Fermi Paradox is dead theory.
The problem is that an interplanetary civilisation can detect planetary civilisations whether they signal or not (in microgravity you can scale individual telescopes up to planetary size, and of course one of the first things to do with interplanetary capability is to stick a bunch of telescopes in the Kuiper belt for interferometry; at that point things like land-use changes and night-time illumination give away any civilisation from thousands of lightyears away), which breaks the Central Park equilibrium; instead of a motive to keep quiet, your motive is to try to be that first interplanetary civ, because if you're not the first you're dead regardless of what you do.
As an aside, a grain of sand at 0.99c does not remotely match the kinetic energy of the Chicxulub impactor. The KE's about 2 kilotons, at the low end of nukes, and since it'd go off high in the atmosphere the blast probably wouldn't be particularly damaging on the ground (less than 1% of the Chelyabinsk meteor, which broke a bunch of glass but didn't kill anyone).
Parenthetically I would observe that a grain of sand would over a trajectory of several light years wander badly off course from interstellar magnetic fields, since even if it started off exquisitely neutral it would certainly build up a charge from friction.
1) Some people have suggested that you could accelerate rocks so fast the enemy wouldn’t have time to react. Imo, the problem with this is that it’d take a while to accelerate them. It’s like you can’t dodge a bullet, but you can dodge someone pointing a gun.
2) Maybe we wouldn’t be worldbound. Planets are basically stationary targets, but if everyone lived on spaceships and just mined planets, dodging things would be far easier.
3) Maybe you just nuke every new world you encounter. This would solve a lot of problems, both in terms of offense and defense.
4) I don’t think you can hide. Probably most civilizations will have beamed enough radiation into space during their “startup phase” that enemy civilizations would know where you were
A ship under thrust can be detected from a long way away, but a KKV that's brought up to speed and then coasts to its target could be hard to spot. You'd be trying to spot a cold, dark rock against the cold, dark sky.
Of course, it's questionable if there's much value in throwing unguided rocks with no people or propulsion attached, unless you're a Fanatic Purifier and you simply want all your galactic neighbors to not be there.
With sufficiently advanced nut nonmagical technology, interstellar warfare is probably offense-dominated. But not because of relativistic kinetic energy weapons, which are overrated. They *may* prevail over a comparable defense, but their advantage isn't obvious or overwhelming.
I did a bunch of math on that 20-30 years ago on Usenet, and I don't want to repeat it, but basically: you can imagine an RKEW is cold and stealthy, but the thing that launched it isn't. The thing that launched it, the muzzle blast of the Death Star if you will, is likely to be visible across interstellar distances to anyone who is seriously looking for it. And even if you do somehow manage a stealth launch, at relativistic speeds every hydrogen atom in its path becomes an uncharacteristically energetic X-ray announcing its presence. That's only going to be visible locally, but it will still offer a chance at defense.
Which is basically going to be "throw some dust in its path while it's still 10-100 AU out", and let its own velocity turn it into a harmless fireworks display. The defense against RKEWs is likely to look like a smart minefield, rocks with a bit of antimatter cleverly contained, linked to telescopes and X-ray sensors.
More generally, it's too easy to handwave "10 km asteroid moving at 99% of lightspeed, there's no way they can stop that!". But then you have to do the math on what sort of resources it actually takes to accelerate a 10km asteroid to 99% of lightspeed, and figure out what a peer civilization with comparable resources could do playing defense, and oh yes they can stop that.
What probably makes interstellar warfare offense-dominated in the advanced technology limit, is the Nicoll-Dyson Beam, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Nicoll#Nicoll-Dyson_Laser . Which can blow a thousand-kilometer hole through an Earthlike planet in a neighboring galaxy in ten minutes flat(*), roughly speaking, and with literally no warning because literally lightspeed. Assuming you can solve the targeting problem, but with an optical sensor of that size you should have pretty good data to work with.
The first civilization to build one of those, gets to decide whether or not to blow up all the other inhabited planets in the Local Group before they try to return the favor.
* Plus several million years for the beam to cross intergalactic distances, if you're being pedantic about that sort of thing.
How does the beam handle interstellar matter? AIUI, dust extinction alone means the beam loses half its power per kiloparsec, more if it's high frequency, right?
Still nasty within a thousand light years or so, to be sure. Gotta watch them neighbors.
On second thought, I don't think anybody would use it beyond a few light years. If you target distant civs about to go stellar, you can't be sure that, by the time your beam hits, they won't have built their own Dyson sphere, which they'll immediately use to retaliate in kind.
I wonder how effective a beam would be against another Dyson swarm. Entirely different target size, and you'd need pretty sharp focus to knock out satellites designed to live in low stellar orbit. Which means you'd need extremely accurate predictions of the orbits of said satellites, and of course any Dyson swarm owners would know this so they'd constantly wiggle their sats to ensure they can always counterattack credibly.
If that's the case, then it's not a very offense-dominated situation. You can easily fry planets, but the owners are sure to retaliate, because you can't reliably fry their Dyson swarms. On the other hand, there's no risk of getting attacked by the upstarts, because they know they can't fry your Dyson swarm either. Stalemate, and everybody keeps their homeworld.
I imagine any Dyson-Sphere type weapon would be very visible to other civilizations. There are interesting problems of how to respond when another civilization begins construction of one. I'd want to find way to communicate a credible commitment to attack anyone seen constructing a Nicoll-Dyson Beam.
Wouldn't such a message likely reach them far too late? Even if we could get the message out before they finished, what could we use to credibly threaten a civilization that has reached the point of constructing Dyson Spheres?
Ideally, a civilization would broadcast the message before anyone else has begun construction to prevent them from constructing the weapon.
You're right that the time delay is tricky. It reminds me of the start of WWI where everyone tried to mobilize before their opponents had the opportunity. Every scenario I think of with the Nicoll-Dyson Beam involves building one ASAP and firing it at every other civilization that has the capability of constructing one.
A Nicoll-Dyson beam weapon probably isn't distinguishable from any other Dyson shell until it fires. And it can probably carve up enemy Dyson shells, weaponized or otherwise, almost as easily as it does planets - they're bigger, yes, but in the way balloons and soap bubbles are big.
So, yes, there are interesting questions regarding preemptive strikes and deterrence strategies if civilizations start enclosing stars.
>it can probably carve up enemy Dyson shells, weaponized or otherwise, almost as easily as it does planets
A swarm, not a shell. Easier to make (what does a non-magical Dyson shell even look like?) and far more robust - the sats need to be killed one by one.
-- Choosing the right book to review does a lot of work, in my opinion. Or, at least it makes your job easier. A mediocre review of a book about ancient history is going to be rated 2-3 points lower than a mediocre review of some interesting, yet not widely known, non-fiction science-y rationalist-adjacent book.
-- Most of y'all could use an editor. If I'm noticing typos on my first read-through...it makes me think no one besides the review's author read it before it was submitted. I'll edit your book review in future years for 10% of any winnings :)
-- For most of the reviews I've read, I've wished they were shorter. Some could be 30% shorter, others need to be 50-75% shorter. (The review of Very Important People was one of my favorites so far, but I also read less than half of it. If it was a 25 minute read, it would have a solid chance of winning this contest.) A long review that's great can be really great. But a long review that's mediocre is worse than a mediocre review that's the "right" length, IMO.
-- I haven't given anything a 9 or 10. Have given two 8's and two 7's. (Both of the 8's were for reviews that took me 16-20 minutes to read) Will be interested to see if any of the reviews I've read become finalists.
Curious if other "book review reviewers" agree or disagree?
Agree with your take on long reviews. Perhaps what's happening is that writing a long review is not a replacement for thinking deeply about what in the book truly needs to be shared with the audience. Some of the long reviews I read seemed to think recapping everything in the book is a replacement for really bringing out the essence of the book's most important parts.
Re: books on history. I think a good review of history could get rated as highly as a good review of any other book. Scott really has a way of bringing out the story & making us care about its characters and then adding interesting analysis and speculation. Maybe I just came across a few too many reviews that felt to me like "this happened, and then this happened" — a little to close to what I could read on the event's Wikipedia article. A similarly mediocre recapping of a book with an interesting idea at least is introducing me to a cool new concept.
But then again, I've never been very interested in reading about history so perhaps that's all just a very personal preference.
No 9 or 10? You're a tough customer :) I gave one 10 so far.
I like long reviews, as long as they are well-written. In fact, I gave some reviews lower marks specifically because they were too short and didn't go into enough detail.
Re: "most of y'all could use an editor" - I admit to having procrastinated on my review and finally slapping it together somewhat half-assedly and submitting it two hours before the deadline in my time zone, so chances are, I'm part of the problem.
I think a 1-10 scale is most useful if all of it actually gets used. So a "1" should be "the worst review someone actually submits" (which is not necessarily "bad", per se) and a "10" is "very likely to win the contest". Comparing in my mind to last year, I don't feel like I've read any that are likely to win, and only a couple that could possibly become finalists. I did choose which reviews to read randomly (a random number 1-4 to pick which document to open, then another random number to pick the review), so maybe I just didn't come across any of the best reviews.
I didn't give any reviews a 10 because I liked some more than others, but I couldn't say "This particular one is best of the entire bunch". Swung between 7-8 for the good ones and 2-3 for the bad ones.
Yeah, I shoved mine in fast because if I let myself think about it, I never would have done it, and I wanted to try my hand at an entry. If I could do it over, I would tidy it up and tighten it up a bit and add in more material to expand on some points, but what's done is done!
I'll second the bit about the editor, some of the typos are just egregious. That said, one of my favorites thus far has also been the longest by far, closing at around 50 pages. I balked at first, but the format made it work. I've given one 9, no 10s, doubt I'll give any.
I've read eight book reviews so far, and given one 7, one 8, and one 10.
-- Choosing the right book is extremely important. It needs to be something with interesting things to say - and a book that you have interesting things to say about. A great book review is of a book that I would value reading, and tells me something more than I would learn just by reading the book.
-- I haven't noticed this as a major problem in the ones I've read.
-- Long mediocre reviews tend to worse than short mediocre reviews. But long great reviews tend to be better than short great reviews. If you're trying to win, write a long review, and make it great.
I agree most of the reviews were way too long - and I hope most ACXers agree, but I'm biased because a) I have ADHD and b) I wrote one of the shorter reviews!
"A mediocre review of a book about ancient history is going to be rated 2-3 points lower than a mediocre review of some interesting, yet not widely known, non-fiction science-y rationalist-adjacent book."
I'm the type that would switch that about; I'm slightly more interested in and have a better grasp of ancient history than some obscure non-fiction science thing, which if it's pop science communication is probably wrong in several fundamental ways, and if it's scholarly has way too much maths for me to understand.
So "Hmm, this isn't really a great review of the Olmecs" is still going to get a slightly higher score from me than "Hmm, this isn't really a great review of Hyperloop Quantum Syzygy because I haven't a bull's notion what the mathematical notations mean".
"If I'm noticing typos on my first read-through...it makes me think no one besides the review's author read it before it was submitted."
It is the Iron Rule of Proofreading that you only ever see the obvious and blatant error *after* you've hit "submit" 😁
"Will be interested to see if any of the reviews I've read become finalists."
Yes, it's like Eurovision voting - the results are the best part! I fully expect to go at least once, if not more, "how the hell did *that* make it through as a finalist?" and I anticipate with great pleasure a lot of discussion over "I thought A was good/I thought A was terrible".
In the past 5 to 10 years, there has been significant progress in understanding exactly what inflammation is. And its connection with aging. The word to google is inflammaging.
I'm very interested in books on menopause nowadays (haven't found a great one for a layperson), but really, the general problem to learn about here is aging.
A key idea is Antagonistic Pleitropy.
The immune system appears to have been crafted to optimize your health when you are young. Once you have reproduced, evolution does not care about your health.
So what this really means, is let us say there is a gene that prevents you from getting heart disease. It could be selected out of the population, as you age.
How can we hack this to be healthier, as we age? Diet, exercise, calorie restriction. (Now intermittent fasting might merely be a way to implement calorie restruction. I see that.)
The endocrine system is key to inflammation. There are a bunch of hormones regulating the functioning of the immune system. Insulin is key.
Our bodies are supposed to work poorly as we age, as a byproduct of evolution.
To ward off problems, we need to eat an anti-inflammatory diet. Refined carbs are the enemy. Also, eat the right amount of protein, not too much. Jason Fung says *when* we eat is important.
This and much more, in Fung's recent book on longevity.
I wonder if it would be easier for longevity research to get funding if they focused on that part of it. Not so much "you can live to be 200!" as "you can feel like you're 30 even though you're actually 80 years old" and so forth.
They already focus on it! Every foundation around the topic talks about healthspan. I think the maximum lifespan angle gets more press because it sounds more outrageous - despite, as you mentioned, not being that much of a deal comparatively.
It also appeals to more people. Extending your 30s into your 50s doesn't do much for folks in their 60s, meanwhile a lot of the teens/20-30somethings who would benefit from extending youth don't realize how valuable it would be because they haven't gone through that part of the aging process yet to see life on the other side.
I've heard it said that regularly journaling about your dreams soon after waking, while the details are still fresh in your mind, can increase your retention of your dreams more generally, and may make your dreams more lucid. Contingent on this actually being true, it sounds pretty great -- however, I've also been having terrible nightmares pretty regularly for the past few weeks. Is there any chance this practice (if legitimate) could make my nightmares worse (or better)?
My experience tracks closely to yours, and I use basically the same staggered alarm trick to avoid getting trapped in bed, but its difficult to apply here because I'm usually woken up late into the night or very early in the morning by the nightmares themselves, much earlier than I'd actually like to be rising. This has the knock-on effect of tanking my sleep schedule, since I almost always want to go back to sleep and hopefully have a normal dream to take the "bad taste" out of my mouth, it takes me a while to get there, and I end up sleeping in. The few times I have tried to suffer through it and just drag myself out of bed 3-4 hours early have been horrible, although the sleep deprivation does usually seem to guarantee a nightmare-free night that evening.
I tried the dream journaling thing for about two weeks. I can attest that my recall improved far more than I expected. The first night or two I could only remember enough to write maybe 5-10 sentences about my dreams. At the end of two weeks, I was easily writing 1,500 words each morning about everything that happened in my dreams, but I decided that was a waste of time so I stopped.
It did not lead to lucid dreams for me. My dreams are not normally nightmares, nor did I notice a change in the tone of my dreams, so I can't comment there either.
Lucid dreaming definitely can help with nightmares. If I realize I'm dreaming during a nightmare, I can usually derail it somehow, either by using superpowers to win, changing the scene and essentially exiting the nightmare, or at least resisting whatever it is until I manage to wake up.
That being said, increasing recall without the lucid dreaming part could suck. You might need to work on how you process nightmares afterward to limit their negative effect on you.
I took up a lucid dreaming experiment with different methods in college. After achieving it, for about 8 months or so it was awesome.
However after some life stressors I began remaining lucid but losing control, and had 5ish months of the worst night terrors of my life. I ended the trial, and have had more vivid and on average slightly more stressful dreams ever since, though I do not consider it to have had a long lasting negative effect.
Note, I used some very mild psychoactives and am on prescription progesterone which is known to affect dreams, so but of a different scenario.
I would be surprised if merely dream journaling got you to lucid dream.
I don't dream much anymore, but in the high school to college to just after college years I dreamed quite a bit, usually lucidly. The down side was that my dreams were usually really bland, generally talking to people, or doing normal day to day things. The big downside was that it didn't much affect the emotional impact of the dream: if it was going to be a nightmare, something trivial was going to be deeply unsettling for no reason.
The sole exception was a recurring nightmare about forgetting to actually drop a Medieval Literature class I intended to drop, and having to take the final without having done any of the reading. That one went the other way, where after a while I recognized the dream and knew how to play it out such that it stopped being scary, like an often rewatched horror movie.
Fitting the more normal pattern was a white two story house that showed up in random dreams and was scary for... some reason. I often would wonder in dream where the hell I knew the house from and why it bothered me so much, and it would just show up in unrelated dreams like a badly executed jump scare.
All that to say, lucid dreams are possibly overrated for many people. I have never met anyone who had them and said they were wonderful, and mine haven't been anything to write home about. Everyone I have known who is enthusiastic about them never had them but really liked the idea.
As was the case for you, I've noticed that the actual content of the dream doesn't have much to do with whether or not it becomes a nightmare. I have dreams about combat that seem like they'd make perfect fodder for one of those nightmares where you've being chased, but they're neutral or maybe even enjoyable; two nights ago I dreamed that I found some books in my car that were so inexplicably horrifying that everyone in the dream began to scream. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I usually don't have almost any recall, but it turns out that when I consciously force it, I have enormously unpleasant dreams that I would rather not remember!
So it's hard to say if attempting better recall is going to be more traumatizing or less. You might be better off attempting to instruct yourself not to fixate on your current anxieties in your dreams shortly before sleeping. I know that's an easy (and almost stupidly obvious) thing to say, but sometimes it helps me to firmly tell my "dreaming brain" (if you will), "We're fine, we don't need any nightmares tonight, knock it off."
What percentage of PhDs in computer science in the US are awarded yearly to people who went through public, secular K-12 education also in the US?
From my personal experience I would almost believe this number to be close to zero, but I haven't been able to find good data about it and might be in a bubble myself. There is the NSF survey https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf22300/report/ but it's not this granular. I would especially be interested in seeing this number in contrast to other countries.
Just to share some anecdata, I meet your criteria, and most of my friends from the PhD do as well. There were certainly plenty of international students, but not even sure if it was a majority. (This was at a top-5 CS school.)
Why would someone matching that criteria *want* to go to grad school, instead of getting a very lucrative job in industry? Foreign students can use grad school as the route to a visa.
Yeah. Getting a PhD (or even a masters) would be a waste of time. I fit the criteria but don't have a CS masters or even a CS undergrad degree but have a very high paying software engineering job after only attending a bootcamp. Getting a PhD would be a great way to waste half a million bucks.
What's the source of Macron's appeal to French voters? He's a product of elite universities and was an investment banker for a bank literally owned by the Rothschilds (it's in the bank's name!) He seems to have basically neoliberal economic policies, an especially tough sell in France, a country with a long protest history. He meets the poly sci definition of an 'outsider' candidate- President is the only elected office he's ever held- yet virtually all other outsiders are populists, and in the middle of a populist age, he is like the absolute opposite. I believe he's trying to raise the retirement age, cut back some pensions, etc.
He not only ran for & won the Presidency twice, he formed his own political party which after existing for a year or two won a plurality in the last parliament. Clearly, he has widespread appeal in France.
I personally have vanilla center-left neoliberal politics, so I think he's fantastic- I just can't imagine a Macron-like candidate winning anywhere else. He seems like the kind of candidate that would've won in a Western democracy in the 90s, but is now scorned decades later. Do the French just really love his specific policies? Is he like unusually charismatic in French oratory or something? What's his appeal? (Can we replicate it here in America?)
Macron is a right winger. But he's pro-immigration and pro-EU. Because he's basically a creature of conservative institutions and the business class. Both of who very much want the trade deals and subsidies and increased workforce that come from those policies. I agree he'd have had a harder time against Melenchon. In part because it's not certain the Le Pen crowd would ever vote for him. This is actually a problem with hyper-partisan, hyper-competitive elections like in the US. It makes it very difficult for either party to fight their radical wings because they need every single vote (tied Senate anyone?)
I agree with the right wing and pro-EU part, but I don't actually see why you affirm that Macron is pro-immigration. Sure, during his 2017 presidential campaign it might have seemed so, and of course that Le Pen or Zemmour are much extreme than Macron when it comes to protesting against immigration. However, in 2018, his government passed a law that shortened the delay during which asylum could make appeal to their rejection to asylum, and which increased the maximal number of days during which they could be maintained in close centers, Also, asylum seekers have been repeatedly sent back illegally to Italy when trying to cross the border. He advocated for doing more effort in sending back the immigrants whose application have been rejected to their country of origin. Immigrants have been harassed (for example by having their tents illegally cut/destroyed) by the police during his first mandate.
Of course Macron is pro-immigration, he is a right-winger in the true sense of that term. Immigration is the will of the business class, Macron's chief sponsors. You can cite as many anecdotes as you wish, but the data is what you get at https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/3633212#graphique-Tableau1_radio1 . If that graph were a stock trend, I'd indebt myself to buy that stock.
The "advocated for doing more effort in sending back the immigrants whose application have been rejected to their country of origin" is also known as "applying the law". Whereas the law *is* what leads to that peppy graph in the first place, even when the law is actually applied. The illegal-harassment-of-those-that-enter-illegally was perpetuated by rank-and-file policemen, it is not Macron who was going around doing it. And as you correctly noted, it tended to happen more at the start of his tenure - meaning, less and less during his years in power.
For the *vast majority* of the quarter-millennia that the terms "left" and "right" had existed, "left" had meant "aligned with the interests of the peasant/working classes". Which very plainly implies: immigration should be next to none. The bourgeois revolution of the soixante-huitards has made a complete travesty of the meaning of the terms "left" and "right", and trying to make sense of the world by using those mashed-up terms has been futile for a good while.
Yes, that was done too, whereas the workers tended to stay where they originally were.
It hadn't benefited much the said workers - on the contrary, really. It's not the lack of their internal migration which was at fault, it was more about failing to acknowledge the laws of the market, and human nature.
Flooding French territory with Algerian workers, is good for the French business class and bad for the French workers.
Flooding Algerian territory with French workers, is good for the Algerian business class and bad for the Algerian workers.
That one of those is virtually not happening and the other is happening in spades, doesn't mean that both are not iron laws.
Not just protesting. Le Pen and Zemmour want to ban immigration and have even floated taking citizenship away from recent immigrants. Macron, meanwhile, has been a thorough defender of EU freedom of movement. He's tried to get more immigration by law, especially high skill. And he's supported the right of refugees who go through the process to stay, including increased funding to courts to process claims more quickly.
He's also enforced laws against illegal immigration including following up on illegal actions by police or immigration enforcement. Le Pen hammered him for that, open borders etc etc.
Macron is pro-immigration unless you define pro-immigration as supporting illegal immigration. You say one thing against him is that he wants to send back refugees whose applications have been denied. Well, yes? Does pro-immigration mean, "We let in everyone, even the people we've legally decided not to let in?"
Looking at the list of public opinion polls on the French presidential election (available on the French-language Wikipedia, https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_de_sondages_sur_l%27%C3%A9lection_pr%C3%A9sidentielle_fran%C3%A7aise_de_2022), the polls about a Macron-Mélenchon second round (somewhere down that page) seem to have been even slightly more favourable to Macron than those about a Macron-Le Pen second round. (About 53-47 for Macron-Le Pen in early April, compared to about 58-42 for Macron-Mélenchon around that same time.)
I'm also not an expert on French politics, but as I understand it, in 2017 Macron became the de facto main moderate candidate for the French presidency when Fillon's campaign self-destructed (I don't remember what for though). Now why was Macron able to fill this role? I'm not sure, I'd say he was probably in the right place at the right time, as one of the least left-leaning ministers in a Socialist government he was able to successfully portray himself as a centrist, and since he was a relative newcomer in politics voters hadn't had a long time to learn to hate him. This time he's the incumbent, and therefore the establishment candidate against the more populist, anti-system candidates like Mélenchon or Le Pen. His vote share in the second round still went down nearly eight percentage points between 2017 and 2022, which follows what we can expect from the turn to populism in Western politics, and which suggests that a populist candidate might win next time when Macron will no longer be the incumbent candidate.
He's the beneficiary of getting to the 2nd round against a fascist (and I don't mean a Trump-like "fascist", I mean her parents were MPs of a party that denied the Holocaust and thought Vichy France was a great idea, and she inherited their political movement (while, in fairness, backing away from the more openly swastika-waving bits).
I don't think his base is much larger than the ~28% he received in the 1st round, and he faced what was probably the most serious challenge to the Fifth Republic since '68 during his term in the form of the Yellow Vests. Macron is, however, the beneficiary of a pan-French coalition to keep the Nazis out (Chirac, benefiting from the same coalition, got *82%*) which is increasingly fraying but remains strong enough to win him a 2nd term.
This doesn't explain why a) twice in a row he's received the most votes of any presidential candidate in the 1st round specifically. I agree he's more appealing than Le Pen, but that doesn't tell me why a neoliberal investment banker got to the 2nd round to begin with. And b) his plurality in Parliament, for a party that he created himself that didn't exist a few years ago. En Marche has 267 seats, the next largest party has 101. Imagine a younger Michael Bloomberg not only winning the US Presidency twice in a row, but creating his own neoliberal competitor to the existing party system- and then winning a majority in the House with it
Just looking at raw election results on Wikipedia without knowing much about French politics, it looks like the 2017 first round results were very close between four candidates. Macron and Le Pen were the top two, with 24.0% and 21.3% respectively, but Dillon (the candidate for the previously-major center-right party) and Mélenchon (nominee of a relatively new Democratic Socialist party) got 20.0% and 19.6%. That doesn't strike me as a particularly robust victory for Macron.
This year's first round totals had Macron gaining 3.85 percentage points from the 2017 first round, while Le Pen gained 1.85, Mélenchon gained 2.35, and the center-right party (which ran a different nominee this time) lost 12.93. That make Macron's margin in the first round a bit better, but it's still not that impressive a gain (at least to my American eyes) for an incumbent President running for reelection in an election where an ideologically adjacent major party's support had collapsed to minor party levels.
That still leaves a question of why Macron was one of the top four in 2017 at all, which I tentatively think can be explained by a "tallest midget" theory where the discrediting of the previously-major center-left and center-right parties left a vacuum and Macron was the only vaguely credible centrist candidate available for centrist voters to support instead of the previous major parties.
The exit polls helpfully listed in the Wikipedia page for the 2017 election seem to corroborate this. Macron seems to have picked up 47% of the 2012 supporter pf the major center-left party, 43% of the 2012 supporters of a centrist independent who'd gotten 9.1% in that election's first round and didn't run again in 2017, and 17% of the 2012 supporters of the center-right party. He only picked up 10% of Mélenchon's 2012 supporters, which Mélenchon more than made up by picking up more 2012 center-left party voters than anyone but Macron.
Similar exit poll data doesn't seem to be available for the 2022 first eound, at least I don't see it on Wikipedia and a very quick googling failed to turn it up.
Mostly, it's that France has a lot of left-wing parties that split the vote so a centre or right-wing party can get a plurality much more easily than any given left-wing one. I have no idea why French political parties haven't changed electoral strategy to compensate for this, but it might be that their current strategy works well at every level except the presidential elections, or it might just be that the left is incapable of *not* having massive infighting
"I mean her parents were MPs of a party that denied the Holocaust and thought Vichy France was a great idea"
Ah yes, the famous antifascist stance of blaming a children for their father's sin.
And for that matter, VIchy *was* a great idea, relative to every other alternative. With an army disorganized and out of supply, germans already roaming half the country, the lack of an armistice only meant slaugther, for soldiers and civilians alike, not useful resistance. And it kept half of France (and most importantly, it's navy) out of the war, until it was annexed in 1942, allowed for a steady drip of personnel to defect to FFL. And what was the alternative? At best a military occupation government, and at worse, a civilian (read: nazi) one.
Maybe Petain could have done things better. But I'm almost certain that anyone dabbing on him 70 years after the fact would have made things worse in his shoes.
Yea there's no interpretation of real-life 1940 -- not on this Earth anyway -- in which Hitler's victorious government would have tolerated a Vichy French regime that was anything but enthusiastically anti-semitic.
I'm a bit less sure that Vichy in general was a "great" idea relative to every other alternative...but only a bit, and only from this vast distance of perspective and knowledge. So yea probably it was.
And there certainly wasn't any available alternative which didn't lead to the Germans shoving at _least_ as many French Jews into the cattle cars heading eastward 1941-1944 as the Vichy government did.
As I understand it, Pierre Laval's government did go further than the Nazis requested in rounding up French Jews for deportation. There are some things that they could have decided not to do, but did anyway. But I'm not an expert on the history of the Vichy regime.
Nazi Germany's main interests in the Vichy regime were:
1. Outsourcing the job of administering Metropolitan France and collecting taxes to feed the Reich's war effort (through exorbitant assessments for reparations and "occupation costs") to a more-or-less legitimate French government. German administrative resources were stretched pretty thin as things were, so trying to administer France through a military government would have strained available resources quite a bit in addition to be less effective than working through Vichy. Remember that the Vichy government continued to employ most of the Third Republic's bureaucracy and police and security forces, giving them not just trained administrative and security manpower who spoke the local language, or even the social authority of being seen by most French citizens as the legitimate French government, but also intact organizations and the kind of local knowledge that James Scott kept going on about in Seeing Like a State.
2. A free hand to garrison a defensive zone around the Channel and Atlantic coasts of France (to try to keep Britain and later the United States out of mainland Europe) and to use that zone as a springboard for offensive air and naval actions against Britain.
3. Friendly-neutral control of France's colonies in Africa and the Middle East and the military that were either already stationed there or which could be evacuated from Metropolitan France. In particular, Vichy controlled Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia and had over 100k soldiers stationed there until the Allies invaded in November 1942. Had those territories and soldiers been on the Allied side the whole time, the North African campaigns would likely have gone a lot worse for the Germans and Italians in 1941 and early-to-mid 1942.
It was losing #3 to American and British military actions (and defections of many local Vichy commanders to Free France) that lead Germany to execute Case Anton and occupy all of Metropolitan France. But even then, that was a case of Germany garrisoning the territory and looming menacingly over the Vichy authorities, not direct military administration: the Vichy government continued to exist and hold administrative control of most of France until after the Allied breakout from the Normandy beachheads and the liberation of Paris.
So long as Germany was getting most of these points from our hypothetical Diet Vichy government, they would only have so much leverage to try to insist on enforcing secondary policy priorities on their French collaborators. Diet Vichy probably didn't need to be anti-semitic, or even authoritarian, so long as it made the trains run on time, let the Germans in, kept the British out, and kept sending money (either gold or money that could be used to buy raw materials and manufactured goods from French firms) to Berlin.
The case against the 1940 armistice is the claim that offering 1-3 to Germany on a silver platter was too valuable to the German war effort, and that making the deal to accommodate Germany in that way was a perfidious betrayal of their British allies, a stain on national honor, and may also have hurt France in the long run by prolonging the war and delaying the liberation of Metropolitan France.
In many cases, it's a bad thing to blame a child for their father's sin. But when the child specifically is only known for one thing, and that one thing is continuing her father's political career, then it seems totally reasonable to blame the child for the father's political career, since she is adopting it as her one thing.
What's the source of Biden's appeal for American voters? There isn't one; you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who was excited about the prospect of a Joe Biden presidency; and yet there he is, by virtue of repeatedly seeming like the least bad candidate out of all the jerks who managed to get their campaigns taken seriously.
That said, the current French political landscape and the idiosyncrasies of its Presidential election system do seem to strongly support the idea of a generally-tolerable centrist. If Le Pen is inevitably going to wind up as the challenger in the second round, there's an incentive for the normies to rally around a tolerable centrist in the first round so they don't wind up having to choose between two candidates they hate.
Macron does have a fan base but it is largely people like himself. He was successful mostly by circumstance. Both the conservative and socialist party were in shambles with scandals, the left was not united, and of course a large part of the right wing was under control of Marine and her father. The top 2 system in France is superior to the American system but only barely. Once he got into the final round vs La Pen he had a great shot and he managed to carry it. Macron is extremely unpopular now but against La Pen he can't lose and the left is still infighting which cost Melenchon his shot at the second round. However he didn't poll that much better than La Pen so maybe we'd have Macron anyways. Macron is *not* a runaway success. He benefits from weak enemies. His first choice numbers are pretty bleh.
I think that the bigger part of the story is the complete collapse of the traditional center-left and center-right parties in France. The main center-left party got 29% of the vote in 2012 in the first round, 6% of the vote in 2017, and 2% of the vote this time. The main center-right party got 27% of the vote in the first round in 2012, 20% of the vote in 2017, and 5% of the vote this time. Both parties had completely discredited themselves, and increasing numbers of people were turning to far-right and far-left parties in protest.
This left a giant hole in the center of French politics that Macron stepped into. He had been part of the previous governor, but was sufficiently disassociated with either party to avoid being pulled down by their scandals. Once he got into the second round (by being one of the top two from the first round), it became much easier for a centrist to win against someone on the far-right.
Macron's voters are basically a mainstream conservative coalition. The old, the wealthy, the business classes, to some extent the religious. He's Mitt Romney basically. These people vote at high rates and have money to spend on politics. And they're a reasonably large voting block, larger than Le Pen's really. They have consistently been able to push their favored candidates into the top two spots.
A fragmented and non-energetic (pre-Melenchon) left allowed Le Pen's very motivated base to push her into the second place spot. And the French left despises Le Pen. I really cannot emphasize this enough. Leftist radicals literally tried to kill her entire family in the 1970s. They dislike Macron. But they see him for what he is: a basically normal right winger. So in the second round the left candidates all negotiate some deal and then tell their supporters to vote for Macron. So Macron gets a majority of the right and most of the left.
Why doesn't this happen in the US? Well, the system's different. But more importantly the current President of the US called Mitt Romney a racist who was going to reinstate slavery. And the statement was praised and not followed up on outside of the right wing press.
That kind of thing wouldn't happen in France. I can't exactly say why but I suspect it has to do with a healthier information environment. If Melenchon had tried that with Macron the press would have followed up on it. Le Pen likes to say the media treats her worse than the other candidates. But that's because she does lie a lot more. And they don't treat Macron that way because Macron doesn't lie all that much. So the French right doesn't feel like they're playing Calvinball with a hostile press. They feel they can win following the rules. Indeed, they objectively can: Macron won.
France has a long tradition with conservatism and Catholicism. You'll notice nobody in the campaign is droning on about genderism rights. It's not Romania or Poland.
I’m parsing your comment as suggesting that you think French people are to conservative to “fall for genderism”, is that correct? Or are catholics generally comfortable with trans people?
France seems to have publicly funded healthcare for trans people, and laws against discrimination against trans people. They seem to have stopped classifying being trans as a mental disorder in 2010. I suspect don’t know why this hasn’t been done in France but I suspect it becomes a political issue in the US because US politics relies on motivating your voter base, and gay people are generally no longer sufficiently controversial to serve this role, though I’m by no means an expert on us politics
I’ll offer another component in the explanation. It’s true he benefits from being not-far right and not-far left, which in a two round election system benefits the least disliked option in the second round.
However, it is a mistake to only analyze Macron in light of what he is not. France has been pretty stagnant for years, and in the ever-present comparison with the Germans, a good chunk of the French see they have fewer options, lower earnings, less impressive companies and worse cars. So it isn’t a given that some dose of neoliberal, pro-tech posturing would be unpopular among a decent subsection of the French electorate. In the first round this year Macron gets nearly 30%, so that would be a rough indicator of the pro-Macron group, separate from the anti-Le Pen.
About replication in USA, I suspect that’s tough, since it seems from afar that most benefactors in USA of the economic and technological miracle of the last decades of USA have embraced a self-critical far-left viewpoint. Now maybe if USA had a two stage election model that that group would disaggregate into a more centrist position. Still, I’m doubtful given the success of the last decades, which reduces the impetus for innovation and change.
I am in the process of writing a long analysis of this for my Substack, which I hope to publish in a couple of days. It's from the perspective of someone who has lived here a long time and has worked inside the French political system. For the time being, I'd suggest the following, very briefly.
The French vote. Much more than Anglo-Saxons do. Turnout is high, but of course you can only vote for the candidates that actually present themselves. In many cases also, among the multiplicity of parties and candidates, people will vote for someone they think stands a chance of winning, even though they may really prefer a different candidate. This is what is known as the "useful vote" argument.
Macron has a core vote of those who benefit from the system. Around 45% of his vote is from the wealthy retired, who like the idea of their children working longer to support them. The rest of his core vote is youngish professionals, teachers, the media/NGO/think tank complex, middle and senior managers and people working in banking and finance. These people are generally comfortably off, tend to be deep into IdPol, support neoliberal economic policies, and see themselves as Europeans and internationalists first, regarding French history and culture with amusement and derision, and ordinary French people with contempt. Macron is their patron saint. This part of his core vote doesn't exceed 10-15% of the population, but is overwhelming in the media and intellectual life.
His first round score (28%) was basically the maximum that this combination of voters could produce. He had the enormous good fortune to find himself in the second round against Le Pen, against whom all other political forces in France, and all the media were united, because she was a political outsider. Why Le Pen ? Well the traditional parties of Left and Right have destroyed themselves utterly, and the ragtag collection of Mélenchon would never have been a serious threat. Thus Le Pen.
So this time the script worked again for Macron. He campaigned not on anything very much, but rather against the "threat" from Le Pen, whose programme and campaign resonated much more with ordinary people, since it was largely on economic issues. (Her politics would have been regarded as mainstream thirty or forty years ago) Once more, the French people trudged to the voting booths to do their duty to Stop Le Pen, but in smaller numbers and with much less enthusiasm, than they did last time.
I'm a data science student, and I'm looking for volunteers for a survey on Spotify User Data. If you have a Spotify account, I invite you to check out the form here: https://forms.gle/U9Y2QMn4EPfh3JjHA
It won't take very long, though you'll need to wait a few days partway through. Thanks in advance to any volunteers!
My original plan was that everything better than an 8.0 average would be a finalist (I would add something like "if it has more than 5 ratings", but so far everything is on track to get there).
But right now this would mean 14 finalists, and last year people complained that 10 was too many. Also, there's SO MUCH GOOD STUFF that I feel really bad limiting it to 14.
I'm seriously thinking of making every Friday from now until December a Finalist Friday and posting yet another book review, I know you guys would hate me for it but it's so tempting.
Scott could do this: 16 winners. 2 on a Friday and people read both and select the winner. Next week 2 on a Friday and people vote the winner. Then people vote for the winner between those two. This way people don't have to read all 16 to participate. People can also wait to vote for finalists and time doesn't become so much of a factor. For the championship, you could ask people to reread or for people who haven't voted yet to vote in order to keep them both fresh in people's mind.
I don't mind having 14 finalists, and I wouldn't mind finalist Friday at all. I have read through ~25 of them and there is a lot of good stuff out there.
The selection criterion of an average above 8.0 seems extremely noisy though, because every reviewer uses a different scaling.
An alternative might be that Scott reads the top-30 rated reviews and makes a dictatorial decision between them. That avoids mixing different scalings. It's a bit similar to how scientific conference (e.g., in computer science) make their selection. There is a reviewing process with grades. All papers with extremely high grades are in. All papers with low-to-moderate grades are out. For the remaining gray zone, a committee looks at the papers (or rather, their reviews), compares them and makes a decision. The reason to put it in the hand of a single committee is precisely to not mix different scalings (plus hoping that they are more competent than the average reviewer).
I'm not sure whether this works out time-wise because Scott would need to read 30 reviews before starting to post, which is a lot of material.
14 finalists seems fine. If the book review contest continues to grow in popularity, it'll end up like Eurovision - two semi-finals and then the grand final! And then the final vote on the end of that!
I think you could do both the Top 14 Finalists *and* Finalist Friday with all the rest that didn't make it into the 14 but you thought/the community voted were really good. We have M - Mondays for several things, why not a Finalist Friday for the rest of the year? Everyone could then have a long and engaging conversation about "so what did you think of this? why did you like it, why did you dislike it, what did you think it did well, did it make you want to read the book?"
Is there someway to post the ranking of the good reviews that didn't make the final cut? I guess this gives something away. Maybe post a link of the top 30 reviews in alphabetical order.. or something like that.
My feeling is that if a review isn't promising after a few pages, it probably isn't going to get good. If you want a further check on quality, read the conclusion.
I think I've read about 10. All but two I read all the way through. Since everyone is rating them, I figure it would be nice to make use of that and have (what many think) are the good ones pointed out. I guess the short answer is no, I'm not going to read them all.
Biased because I wrote a review, but I'm kind of in this group too. I'd rather see it be 5-10ish people even if I got cut out - at some point the process has gone on so long that being at the wrong spot in the order is a disadvantage (probably for the middle folks) or it all hinges on one big "just to remind you, here's all the reviews" post anyway.
I want to expose myself to the best writing of various major political alignments, and right now I'm looking at conservatism. If you think you can tell good conservative books from bad ones, then my question is...what do you think of the google results for "best conservative books"?
I'm also in the market for blogs (and nothing shorter-form than that), especially blogs with a convenient list of best posts.
Comparisons/contrasts are especially appreciated, not least of all because I expect those to be more substantial and less tribal.
I want to say "The Space Trilogy" is definitely worth a read, whether you are doing this project or not. I did a little blurb review of it a few wees back, and am working on an essay comparing/contrasting it with 1984 that hopefully will be up in a week. TL;DR version is "That Hideous Strength" is a fantastic book.
This isn't a book or a blog recommendation, but I try to read news sources from various perspectives. The conservative news that I like best are City Journal: https://www.city-journal.org/ and National Review: https://www.nationalreview.com/ . I would also recommend RealClearPolitics & its associates (RCPolicy, RCWorld, etc) as a conglomeration of news from a diverse group of sources.
Good recommendations. Also, there are lots of free podcasts to supplement your reading. Jonah Goldberg’s The Remnant and various podcasts by National Review and Commentary.
NR has some excellent writers but it’s largely paywalled.
Michael Oakeshott might be worth a look. You could read the article on him at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, before looking at some of his writing. Perhaps Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays would be a good place to start.
I've just finished Michael Rectenwald's 'Springtime for Snowflakes' (New English Review Pr., 2018). It was a refreshing read. He's straightforward and succinct, which is a blessing, and provides one of the most lucid responses to gender ideology and 'trans' dogma I've read. Tom Nichols's 'Our Own Worst Enemy' (Oxford Univ. Pr., 2021) presents a similarly well-crafted response to postmodernism run amok, as does Ben Shapiro's 'The Authoritarian Moment' (Broadside Bks. / HarperCollins Publishers, 2021). Shoshana Zuboff's 'The Age of Surveillance Capitalism' (Hatchette Book Group, Inc., 2019) is probably more libertarian than conservative, but her perspective is foundational to many, I think.
I recommend Chesterton's Father Brown stories, Tolkien's short stories, Lewis's Space Trilogy and later essays, and more recently Wendell Berry's fiction and non. Alan Jacobs's blog is excellent, mostly literature and theology but sometimes politics.
First Things covered a big tent pre-Trump and then went off the rails but FT from 2014 is a good snapshot of intelligent conservative thought by a cross section of Christian thinkers. TAC also got much dumber after 2016 but was the voice of the culturally conservative anti-war right before then. Since then, conservatism as a public intellectual movement (think tanks, magazines, etc) has been a dumpster fire. Quillette is an interesting sample of heterodox, sometimes conservative, not-woke views.
The kinds of modern conservatives I find interesting are concerned with things like local politics, raising families, being good neighbours, market urbanism, Georgism, local niche political issues, conservation, arts and culture, and internecine church issues, without much interaction with the mainstream culture war. These folks are temperamentally and morally unfit for national public office or broadcast media.
A lot of the google results seem to be too heavily influenced by the Trump Era (which has radically shifted the republican party away from the philosophies of conservatism that held for the prior 50 years.) Some of the others (like the yaf link) are extensive bibliographies with some wheat and some chaff which doesn't usefully serve your purpose IMO.
I think the fivebooks.com hit on google (https://fivebooks.com/books/american-conservatism/) is pretty solid. I read four of the seven books they recommend back when I was more solidly conservative, and they were exceptionally well-written and foundational to my philosophy. I've heard numerous citations to the others in conservative circles, so they seem like reasonable choices as well.
I think it’s worth throwing in the WSJ. They technically aren’t a blog, but a subscription should get you access to their archives, and they’re a solid conservative paper. Their Op-Eds can be interesting, though anything not by their editorial board tends to be hit or miss imo
Whatever serious book recommendations you take from others here, when you need a break from that try the humor of the late P. J. O'Rourke. Exactly which O'Rourke depends on which facet of conservative thought you are interested in, e.g. "Eat the Rich" for economics or "How the Hell Did This Happen?" for Trumpism. Usually not too hard to tell from a capsule description on Amazon or whatever. Then have a Guinness or a Jameson in his memory, because we lost him this year and the world is poorer for it.
So, let me voice a concern first. I worry that I am going to give a list of what conservatives SHOULD read and take inspiration from, instead of what they do read. In other words, if you want to understand conservatives as they are, this might not be a great list. If you want books that make the best arguments for conservatism, or what was called conservatism in the 80's and 90's, here's my best shot. I drift more classical liberal or small l libertarian, and am not terribly religious, so bear that in mind if you are trying to understand very religious conservatives.
This will echo some of what is posted already, but here goes:
1: C.S. Lewis, especially Screwtape Letters, Abolition of Man, The Inner Ring, and That Hideous Strength (book 3 of the Space Trilogy, might as well read them all) really do a better job selling Christian conservatism than anyone else. I am not by nature high religiosity, but I would convert to whatever religion C.S. Lewis led.
2: Thomas Sowell, probably Vision of the Anointed most of all, but also Race and Culture. He has a lot of great books, however.
3: William F. Buckley's earlier essays.
4: P.J. O Rourke, probably Eat The Rich and Parliament of Whores being top picks.
Now for less common ones...
5: David Beito's From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State. When conservatives bemoan the deterioration of civil society, this sort of thing is what they have in mind, even if they don't realize it I suspect. I found this book much more compelling than "Bowling Alone" and its ilk.
6: Adam Smith' Theory of Moral Sentiments. I always recommend this book, but it was what made him a super star and heavily influenced British thought from ~1750 till the early to mid 1800's. Wealth of Nations became more famous, but TMS addresses the social and moral relations between humans in a way that the best conservative writers could only hope to approach.
The other benefit here is that Smith talks about earlier philosophers a fair bit, Cicero and such, so it saves you trying to plow through them. Smith is a modern writer in a way that e.g. David Hume definitely is not. Much easier to read.
7: Victor David Hanson's Soul of Battle. Not because of the conscious arguments he makes (though it is a good book itself) but because of the virtues he calls out. The book is basically about how particular wars or battles had some really great knock-on effects for humans and society/civilization. I think you can learn a lot about modern conservatives like Hanson by looking at what he thinks those really good things were.
8: Maybe some Locke? Second Treatise on Government? I hesitate because although Locke is cited a great deal, I don't really know how much he actually matches modern conservatism, or how much you learn about the latter from reading him. If you wanted to understand the modern left, I would say "Read all of Rousseau, and despair." I don't know how much Locke fits that bill.
Are you planning on writing anything up about this project? I would be interested in reading it if you do!
I'm having a sort of rumination marathon about prose-producing AI. ACX user Lumberheart told me about a Tumblr question-answering bot named Frank, and I just asked it a question posed by Nancy Lebovitz on the recent open thread (hope you don't mind, Nancy!): "Do you need to be a wiseass or have a wiseass on tap to tell whether some ideas are stupid?" Here is Frank's reply:
Not really
It’s a nice quality to have, and some of my ideas (like “a lot of people believe in this and I don’t” or “a lot of people who I interact with online seem to believe in this” or “I’m doing a science project that involves interviewing people and I was expecting to get a lot of negative results” and so forth) are a lot less interesting than they should be if I hadn’t thought up the idea first.
(Or if I’d had someone to whom I could say “hey this is dumb and you should stop believing it, please do so” or “how do people even believe that, I mean come on, that makes no sense, how do they not realize that?”)
Also, it’s a nice quality to have when you’re telling a joke or talking about a book you’re reading or discussing something that other people agree with or are reading. There’s the whole thing of “talking about stuff you like when other people you know like that stuff too is fun,” and then it becomes especially fun when you see the thing they like when they’re a big smartass. It’s a sort of reverse status, I suppose – there’s the feeling that you shouldn’t be agreeing with the other person on every trivial issue, which is fun, and then once you agree with them a bunch, it becomes fun just because you know they’re a smartass about it.
I have made my own mental ratings of various aspects of this answer -- curious what others think.
Edit: Can somebody suggest an article or book about how GPT-3 & the like work? I have read a couple books about AI, so get the general idea about how machine learning and deep learning work. But I want to learn about how you train AI to to do *this*. I'd like to hear about the stages of developing the thing: "So we started out by doing this, and the output was that, which was obviously flawed in ways a, b, and c. So then we tweaked it by . . ." That stuff.
It's garbled. The first paragraph is incoherent: "Some of my ideas... are a lot less interesting than they should be if I hadn't thought the idea up first".
The rest of it is a fairly good selection of snippets culled from online interactions, but it doesn't really get close until the end, when the term "smartass" is plainly the nearest to "wiseass" that the training materials or wherever it's sourcing its databank contained.
As a way of saying nothing at great length, it's great at creating the kind of filler that is common enough online (have you seen recipe and cookery blogs where in order to keep you scrolling down, they fill up the entire page with verbiage before finally, *finally* just giving you the recipe for turnip greens?)
It successfully manages to sound like a human... that has moderate dementia/mild-to-moderate aphasia. A lot of it is grammatically-correct, but the signal-to-noise ratio is hitting bedrock.
I agree with all of you about Frank: If you spend 10 secs. skimming her response (Frank identifies as she/her, according to Tumblr) you have the sense it’s normal chatty rambly stuff, but the moment you try to actually grasp what she’s getting at it’s like breathing mud. There is no mind there, not even a very dumb or deluded one.
But there is one thing that impresses me about this passage: the variety and complexity of sentence structure. Look at that first long sentence. I was taught sentence diagramming in school, and what you’ve got there is a compound sentence, and the second of the 2 parts of it (the part beginning with “and some”) is a complex sentence with multiple compound and complex sentences nested within it, and all of that complicated construction is done *correctly*. There’s even what’s called parallelism in the 3 short sentences in quotation marks within the parentheses.
It’s hard to appreciate the structure of the sentence because the content is nonsense. Below is a modified version that makes sense, so you can just pay attention to the structure. Say somebody asked an essayist whether he thought it was important to be perfectionist about prose style, and he gave the following reply:
“It’s a useful skill to have, and some of my essays (like “A Lot of People are Jerks about Money but I’m Not” or “A Lot of People Who I Play Bridge with Seem to Use Superprecision Bidding” or “I’m Planning a Paperback Book that Involves Interviewing Models and I was Expecting to Get a Lot of Random Hookups” and so forth) are a lot more persuasive than they would be if I hadn’t polished up the prose.”
That’s a run-on sentence, but it is structurally sound and quite fancy. There are a few small errors (“like” should be replaced by “such as,” “would be” by “would have been”), but by the conventions of conversational English those things aren’t errors.
So I am wondering how Frank managed to do so well with sentence structure. ACX user A. has sent me to a 1996 article about something called Enhanced Recursive Transition Networks that some wag used to generate postmodernism essays that are said to be only slightly more pretentious and pointless than those being churned out by academics of that era. That system seems to be based on sentence structure templates. Article is here: https://www.elsewhere.org/journal/wp-content/uploads/2005/11/tr-cs96-264.pdf
Can anyone here send me to a book or article that details how GPT-3 and the like work — how the system was trained? I understand machine learning and deep learning in a general sort of way, but am looking for more detailed info.
I think syntax is a lot easier than meaning. There aren't *that* many models of sentences, and a lot of complexity can be generated by just adding adverbs and adjectives, then replacing some of those with preposition phrases and such. ("I ran" -> "I ran fast" -> "I ran like the wind" -> "I ran like the wind to the store" -> "I ran like the wind to the nearest store" -> "I ran like the wind to the nearest store that was open")
Of course, I doubt that's how it's done at all, I would guess it's done by pattern recognition. But it's probably pretty easy to pick up on grammar and syntax patterns, because they tend to be pretty rigid -- nobody would ever write "I ran the wind like to the nearest store" -- so building that sentence would probably run up against a big negative weight somewhere. On the other hand, writing "I ran like a sausage to the nearest store" might not, because "like a sausage" and other near-misses probably occur with enough frequency that this particular instantiation doesn't get smacked down as hard. Or so I would surmise.
Thank you for commenting. I had thought maybe the thread had gotten so old and shopworn that nobody would respond. I do see that grammatical formulas, like subject [must be a noun] + verb + adverb are actually a simpler thing to teach than other patterns that do not have a formula that can be summarized so clearly.
Still, grammatical formulas can get quite complex, and the structure here is pretty fancy. For instance, if you look at my version of the first long sentence:
-At “and some” you begin part 2 of a long compound sentence. A compound sentence is 2 sentences connected by “or” or “and”
Now look at part 2. It’s subject is “some” and “of my essays” is an adjective phrase qualifying “some”
-The verb is “are.” “Are” is odd sort of a verb called a copulative — it doesn’t denote an action, but an equivalency with what follows,which can be an adjective (for instance, “idiotic”) or a noun (for ex.“screeds’).
-In this case what follows is a phrase that functions as an adjective “a lot more persuasive than they would be if I hadn’t polished up the prose.” Within that phrase, “a lot more” is an adverb phrase modifying the adjective “persuasive,” and within that adverb phrase “a lot” is an adverb modifying the adverb “more”.
-“Than they would be if I hadn’t polished up the prose” is an adverb phrase modifying “more.” “Than” is a connector, linking to “they would be if a hadn’t polished up the prose” which is an entire complex sentence functioning as an adverb.
-And I could break down “they would be if I hadn’t polished up the prose,” which is itself a compound sentence , i.e. a sentence with another sentence nested inside of it, functioning as an adverb. But I’ll stop here because I’m sure you get the idea and I’m beginning to get embarrassed by the extent of my grammar nerdery.
Do you think the complexity of all this makes it a greater achievement to get an AI to produce a sentence like this, or is it just the same sort of stuff you were talking about, syntax formulas, but more of it? And do you know of anything I could read that would tell me more about how GPT-3 works? I understand the general priniciples, am looking for specifics.
Out of curiosity, why do you ask? I work a good bit with urban data on plots, buildings, and land use regulations, and am always interested in what others are up to on these topics.
Sounds interesting. As I understand it, the tricky part about LVT is that taxes are endogenous to land prices. You might underestimate the LVT tax rates if/when market prices decline as a result of the policy.
I recently agreed to read a non-fiction book with a friend. After reading the introduction (and the afterword from the second edition), I found myself regretting it because of how often the authors' use heavy rhetoric against their opponents. Here's my questions:
- If you read a book/article that uses heavy anti-opponent rhetoric, do you keep reading it?
- If you do, how do you tune it out to better analyze the argument? Especially so if you're part of the group the author is opposing.
There's a place for rhetoric, but saying your view has "immense and rigorously analyzed body of knowledge" that was "a treasure of information that has been largely ignored" by the opposition and supporting your ideas with "Much as some observers wished it were not true..." is immensely distracting to me. Doubly so when the afterword states the author aimed to be "relentlessly moderate—in its tone, science, and argumentation".
As a further question:
- Do you think authors that write this way still tend to have well-formed arguments (are they worth reading) or do you think your time is better spent in finding and reading a different book/article on the topic?
Good books I've read tend to treat the author's intellectual opponents generously. It's definitely a bad sign when the author is solely concerned with making it clear the other people are stupid.
"If you read a book/article that uses heavy anti-opponent rhetoric, do you keep reading it?"
It depends on what the book/article is about and what my mood is. If I'm feeling grumpy and the opponents are my opponents, I'm likely to go "yeah! sock it to 'em!" If I'm feeling grumpy and the opponents are my side, I'm likely to spite-read in order to go "what an idiot" at everything the writer says.
If I want a good book/article that gives me information, and it's all guns blazing about Those Maroons On That Side There, then I'll leave it because it's not going to tell me anything useful over the sound of the grindstone whirring away.
I would give it maybe a chapter or two to stop being like that, but honestly that sort of talk is a really bad sign. There are subject fields where large sources of evidence are ignored due to social or political reasons, but usually the people pointing to them and working on them are a bit less bombastic about it, because they know they are already starting at a disadvantage when it comes to persuasion and so tend to be a bit more humble. From what you write it sounds a lot more like the author is preaching to the choir against a tiny minority of dissenters, or just so wrong that everyone largely ignores their rants at this point. Then again, maybe they are only willing to write such a book because they are aggressive and don't give a damn what others say.
Still, if that keeps up for more than a chapter or two without any really solid, careful arguments I would say it can be safely tossed aside.
I initially wanted to not say the name to avoid any way it might have swayed people, but I have a few responses now so I don't mind staying it outright: The Bell Curve by Charles Murray.
Yea, I thought it might be. That is one of the fields where there are really strong "no go" areas. I would recommend reading it, as Murray is pretty evenhanded but highly persecuted, which resulted in a somewhat... cranky afterward, especially. I found the content of the book much better than the discussion around the content of the book, including the intro and afterward. The content is also a lot less controversial than one would think from the talk around it; as I recall only one chapter (6?) discussed racial differences in IQ, but even then stated that within group differences were greater than between group differences, so racial discrimination didn't make sense if you can judge the individual in question.
Lots of academic proclaim that their work is unappreciated genius, beset by their jealous colleagues and ignored out of spite despite their genius, and just are wrong. Murray's work really was attacked for political reasons, not scientific. I am amazed he still writes at all.
Hi, I've decided to give twitter another chance and I would love to get a few more intelligent readers before I burn out in frustration and delete another account.
My page (and come to think of it, my life) is a sort of performance art that I think you're really going to enjoy.
The Motte is a nephew of Astral Codex Ten, dedicated towards being "a working discussion ground for people who may hold dramatically different beliefs", currently hosted on Reddit and led by me. It is likely moving off Reddit in the moderately near future. See https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/uaoyng/meta_like_rationalists_leaving_a/ for more context.
Of extra interest to this community, I've set up a set of prediction markets on Manifold, tracking both my decision on how to do this move and the eventual success of that move. The decision market is at https://manifold.markets/ZorbaTHut/how-will-zorbathut-choose-to-contin and links to the others.
Different community, different goals. We have a very specific goal around being a place for people with different opinions to discuss things; I think DSL is more of a general rationalist discussion board. The Culture War thread is aimed more at rapid discussion of many topics, in a way that a forum-style board IMO doesn't work as well for.
DSL seems like a good place and honestly I should talk to them about setting up some kind of mutual links to crosspollinate, but I don't think it's the *same* place.
IMO DSL is the proper successor of the old SSC comment threads (esp the open threads). It is ACX that is the new community (for all that ACX has the same `headline act' that SSC had). By which I mean, the feel of the space at DSL is much closer to the feel of the old SSC comment threads, the ACX comment threads feel like a different community.
Never been on the Motte so can't comment on how it relates to either ACX or DSL.
What do folks think of Michael Saylor? I think he's got a point that inflation and velocity of money (and probably a lot of other measurements in economics) shouldn't be single numbers, but he's got sort of a Buckminster Fuller vibe... skids away into abstractions an awful lot.
A friend finally convinced me to view "The Saylor Series" on YouTube, a series of 17 lectures by Saylor hosted by Robert Breedlove on investing in Bitcoin. I'm usually very reluctant to devote even 1 hour of my time to any kind of lecture, and some of these run more than 2 hours.
I can't comment on his economic theories because I don't have the background, but I found him a very engaging speaker. He speaks extemporaneously, apparently for hours, and I don't get bored. Yes, the theme throughout is proselytizing for Bitcoin, but to do this he feels the need to start with primitive man, proceed through Roman history, to the industrial age with many interesting diversions along the way.
There are a few subjects where I could nitpick, but in his lectures I was exposed to many new and interesting ideas. It's possible that I find his ideas compelling because he, like me, is an engineer. He considers engineering, defined as using the tools and information at hand to make life better for everyone, Man's highest calling.
His distinction between property (a thing owned which has stable value) versus securities (a thing whose value is solely (?) dependent on its reputation) seems good to me, but I think it's a continuum.
A house is property. It will keep the rain off no matter what people think of it. As least for a while, though they might stop caring enough to maintain it. Its value can change a lot depending on what transportation is near it.
NFTs are pure value from reputation.
His idea of evaluating situations according to how quickly various aspects change is at least interesting.
What a thing is cheap or expensive matters a lot, but is it true that all education can be done through automated systems?
Yeah I'm not sure a security is solely based on reputation. I thought it was more a security was under the influence of a CEO or board of directors or some such that could change the security. And property was a thing; land, house, bar of gold, painting. I'm not sure the distinction is as important as he makes it out to be... but I've only listened to one podcast. (Lex is great BTW. He asks the perfect dumb questions, with humility.)
Yeah economists talk about the velocity of money, I only half understand it.
I did like his idea of inflation being not one number, but a multidimensional vector.
Re education. Did he say automated? I thought he was talking more about online or remote learning. If you're motivated, you can learn a lot by reading books and watching youtube videos. There has to be some doing too, but no reason you can't do that mostly on your own, or with a few partners (fellow students/learners.) The Khan Academy is pretty awesome for learning math... I was expecting Saylor to mention it.
Looking for books that cover the Latin American debt crises of the 1980s and 1990s, as well as the Asian contagion and the Russian default of the latter decade. Something like Adam Tooze's Crashed, but 30 years before 2008. I'm interested in BoP crises, sudden stops, monetary policy, fiscal policy, imbalances, and so on and so forth.
Economist's perspectives are heavily favoured, naturally, but it would be nice to be directed to not obviously or aggresively academic (and expensive and dry) overviews. That being said, maybe the best stuff is academic, so I'll take it if you think it's good.
This sort of topic interests me for all historical periods, so if you know something like it for the interwar years, the 70s, the late nineteenth century or whatever, I'll happily take that, too.
Closest I can offer is Homer and Sylla’s History of Interest Rates, but it only touches on them briefly at the end of 800 pages on lending across the rest of human history, but that does seem to address your later point. Further recommendations in good finance history are Jim Grant’s biography of Walter Bagehot and Lords of Finance (ignore the awful title, the book is a brilliant tour of the mechanics of pre-Breton Woods currencies and the tangled relationship with gold).
Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the US. When I google for how to reduce my risk I get rather generic advice that doesn't cite sources, doesn't talk about effect sizes, and doesn't get into nuances. Surely there is a source out there that has compiled the research, gives detailed information including effect sizes, admits certain things aren't known, and constantly cites sources. Where do find it?
You want review articles. If they're "systematic reviews" then they're under constraints that limit bias and cherry picking, but they also tend to be limited to a narrow domain.
That's still very short. I'm looking for like a wiki where I can find much more detailed information about specific foods. Like is saturated fat from plants different from a health perspective than saturated fat from animals? Maybe it isn't known but at least tell me what is known and what the leading scientists think.
I spent a month heavily reading nutrition literature and came away with the conclusion that we know hardly anything in detail since conducting long term randomized control trials is extremely difficult, and the observational studies are of very poor quality. Secondarily, a lot of conventional wisdom in nutrition (i.e. sat fat is bad) is specifically refuted by RCTs (e.g. the Minnesota Coronary Experiment), suggesting much expert opinion may be tainted by bad science and a lack of update to ancient priors established in the 1950s.
One compelling argument that avoids the morass of noisy studies is how rare heart disease was prior to the emergence of hyper-processed foods. To a first approximation, avoid those and you have avoided most of the danger.
After that, the various food cults bifurcate in a variety of ways. I'm a member of the seed-oils-are-poison cult, and indeed, seed oils are prevalent in hyper-processed foods and their consumption temporally correlated with the rise of CVD much moreso than sugar or refined carbs. Are they *actually* bad? No idea, but they are not needed in your diet and are easy to avoid if you I cook all of your own food.
That "slime mold time mold" blog series going around isn't a bad place to at least get a healthy scepticism regarding conventional wisdom and narrow in on the important unresolved questions.
Some people theorize that the huge spike in heart disease between the 50's and 90's was caused by switching from butter to margerine, specifically because butter (apparantly?) has vitamin K2 and margerine doesn't, and vitamin K2 prevents calcium from depositing in arteries. I have no idea if any of that is true, but you might look into it and take a K2 supplement if it sounds good to you.
Margarine also contains a truckload of trans fats, especially the kind made between the 50s and the 90s. IIRC current methods of manufacture avoid the problem.
The only people who aggregate that kind of thing for the layman are people who have an agenda and/or are full of shit and paid by taxpayer money.
You'll need to spend a few evenings on Pubmed to figure things out yourself, sadly. Al Quinn's comment is also on point regarding the terrible state of nutrition science.
I am not sure if this will satisfy your need as it doesn't directly address reducing the risk of heart disease; however, I think the style of research you are looking for could be found at https://www.barbellmedicine.com/blog/ This is written by doctors who approach things with a lot of nuance and practicality.
Announcing the ACX aphorism competition. Your aphorisms must fit on one line of comment, and the pithiest wins. You have 24 hours, and your time starts now!
Also, if you read one blog this Orthodox Easter week, read mine - not so pithily entitled 'Rabbits, robots and resurrection: Riffing with Karnofsky on the value of present and future lives, to celebrate the 50th anniversaries of 'Watership Down', 'Limits to Growth' and the Alcor foundation...' https://pathfindings.substack.com/p/rabbits-robots-and-resurrection?s=w
Yes, it's about bunnies and population dynamics, but pops down several philosophical rabbit holes and hops for future of humanity, and subheads with terrible puns (Warren peace, anyone... hello...?)
"This is the first principle of democracy: that the essential things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things they hold separately. And the second principle is merely this: that the political instinct or desire is one of these things which they hold in common. Falling in love is more poetical than dropping into poetry. The democratic contention is that government (helping to rule the tribe) is a thing like falling in love, and not a thing like dropping into poetry. It is not something analogous to playing the church organ, painting on vellum, discovering the North Pole (that insidious habit), looping the loop, being Astronomer Royal, and so on. For these things we do not wish a man to do at all unless he does them well. It is, on the contrary, a thing analogous to writing one's own love-letters or blowing one's own nose. These things we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly. I am not here arguing the truth of any of these conceptions; I know that some moderns are asking to have their wives chosen by scientists, and they may soon be asking, for all I know, to have their noses blown by nurses. I merely say that mankind does recognize these universal human functions, and that democracy classes government among them. In short, the democratic faith is this: that the most terribly important things must be left to ordinary men themselves—the mating of the sexes, the rearing of the young, the laws of the state. This is democracy; and in this I have always believed."
And the winner is... @Unsaintly - who not demonstrated the truth of her/his own aphorism by misquoting it - very much in the spirit of ACX Aphorism Contest - so let's do it all half-assed again next week. After all, if a job's worth doing, it's worth doing badly!
They are decreasingly prescribed by physicians despite their extreme efficacy. Is it just not worth it anymore for pharmaceutical companies to produce them?
Also, any ideas where I could get tranylcypromine (Parnate)?
I think there was an SSC post about MAOIs a long time ago. Short answer is the side-effects require massive personal/medical life management. But, they do work.
Slightly longer version is that MAOIs suppress the metabolic pathway used to tolerate the trace amino acid tyramine, which can trigger hypertensive crises if it builds up to too high a level, so people taking MAOIs need to avoid foods high in tyramine or face serious health risks.
Tangentially, the famous line in Silence of the Lambs where Hannibal Lecter says "I ate his liver with fava beans and a nice chianti" is a reference to this: at the time the movie was made, MAOIs were much more widely prescribed than today. Liver, fava beans, and red wine are all notably high in tyramine, so Lecter was indirectly telling Clarice Starling that he had been off his meds.
Suicide is more dangerous than hypertensive crises. It's irresponsible to deprive patients from an effective treatment for a life-threatening disorder.
Does anybody here know of any research into the supposed 6th sense that humans have. As in turning around when someone behind your back looks at you, or something not quite visible and noiseless behind your back causes you to turn around to see it. I believe there is something there, nothing supernatural but a change in the environment
If you want to be pedantic, humans have quite a bit more than five documented and understood sense, depending on how you count. The two big ones I know of beyond the five classic senses are Vestibular (sense of the movement and orientation of the head relative to gravity and other acceleration) and Kinesthetic (sense of the position and orientation of body parts relative to one another).
This calls for new physics, the sense of being stared at. Thought waves, perhaps. I think more likely that we remember those occasions when we discovered someone was looking at us and that we forget those times no one was there. Or, we think someone was looking at us when all they're doing is looking at the person who turned their head. In other words, I think this "sense" is a fairly common delusion.
Some think that eyes emit a beam, like radar. Researching same is pointless, I would suggest, although such a belief would justify the feeling of being stared at.
What those linked studies should lead one to strongly suspect is that they are in some way flawed. Another example: When one hears of a study into perpetual motion concluding that there's "something there" then one ought recognise that even electing to do such a study demonstrates a non-scientific bias. Thermodynamics contradicts the idea. Similarly, this example: Investigating the feeling that one is being stared at does mean that one believes in a new field or force or beam, it is so unlikely that much much more likely is that the believers and the studies are deluded.
I'm not rejecting anything "out of hand". I have good *rationalist* reason on my side.
(a) It is well known a large proportion of so-called scientific studies are flawed in design or methodology or otherwise.
(b) Physicists have always been on the look out for new forces, new fields and they've not found anything new coming from the brain or the eyes.
(c) The studies you would want us to take seriously posit a cause and effect which require magic or a new unknown physical effect.
(d) Magic is not scientific, although I do feel cheap making this point.
(e) Investigating extra (or new) sensory perception of the type posited should be as promising a project to the good PhD student as would be investigating perpetual motion.
(f) I didn't say impossible, I said given the relative probabilities (quack science vs new physics) most unlikely this is anything other than delusion. Of self or of others.
You don't have good rationalist reasons at all. You've invented your own straw man here - extra fields or forces that you claim must be solution, engage in generalised attacks about magic or something, then you debunk the magic or invented forces claimed by nobody and totally ignore other potential solutions.
My guess is that humans more aware of movement outside the visual range than we now know. Certainly even in the absence of sound I think most humans would sense a disturbance behind them, and possibly staring is the absence of movement, but who knows?
"my hare-brained plan of asking you to just pick something at random and rate it worked perfectly"
"[The newspaper] was bought — first, by all the people who agreed with him and wanted to read it; and secondly, by all the people who disagreed with him, and wanted to write him letters. Those letters were voluminous (I helped, I am glad to say, to swell their volume), and they were generally inserted with a generous fulness. Thus was accidentally discovered (like the steam-engine) the great journalistic maxim — that if an editor can only make people angry enough, they will write half his newspaper for him for nothing."
In regards to GPT-3: I wonder whether meaning for an AI would naturally relate to how an AI works-- for example, how easy it is to gather information about something from online sources, while meaning for humans is sort of a second language.
Can you elaborate a bit? Since GPT-3 itself doesn't do the gathering, I can see how it informs selection bias in its knowledge, but not really how it functions or stores "meaning."
Looking for an English -> Russian translator to produce 80000 Hours guide and other EA/rationality related texts, including ACX. It is surprisingly challenging to find someone who would notice when they are being wrong (as a lower bound for high quality), especially someone with related knowledge.
At this point, we are ready to pay the engineer's salary to the person who we'd hire.
We are offering a bounty of 1000$ for a recommendation of someone we will hire to translate ten or more articles.
I've begun a weight-lifting and cardio regimen recently (with the primary purpose of improving my strength and stamina and overall health, but definitely looking forward to changes in appearance as well) and I've received very conflicting advice about stretching before, or after, or at all. The received wisdom from my youth is of course that you should always stretch before any strenuous activity, to reduce the risk of injury. On the other hand a number of articles I've found say that stretching, in particularly static stretching, does not do much of anything to prevent injury and may actually be counterproductive in that it will temporarily weaken the muscles, which is the last thing you want before a heavy lifting session. I know that in the fitness community there is a lot of bro science floating around that is best ignored, but these articles link to primary sources that seem pretty credible -- yet the "official" advice, to always stretch before a workout, has not changed as far as I know.
Does anyone here have expertise to offer on this subject? Does stretching before a strength- or stamina-training workout have any clear, undisputed benefits? If not, does regularly stretching have any other independent benefits?
In my early 40s, years of obsessive recreational hockey were catching up with me in the form of chronic lower-back stiffness and aching. Bad enough to interfere with sleep, not responsive to over-the-counter meds, etc. Saw some back doctors who did all the tests and determined that my issue wasn't structural in nature, my spine and related structures were all perfectly healthy for my age group.
A doctor diagnosed that I had unbalanced my muscle groups as I got older. Mainly because of the ice hockey, my hamstrings were unusually strong; but the rest of the muscle groups that connect in the lower-back region were normal for my age. Since those other muscle groups weren't going to magically catch up to my hams, I needed to either quit playing hockey or gain a bunch of new flexibility. The short-term answer was a few weeks of physical therapy sessions, which worked. A practical step which the therapists suggested was to become consistent about stretching both before, and especially immediately _after_, playing hockey.
So I did that part, became the guy who's always stretching himself right after finishing a skate. Just a few minutes of it before and after, but every single time I play, no exceptions.
Importantly from an analytical perspective that is _all_ I ever changed: didn't take up yoga, didn't go back for more rounds of physical therapy, didn't take up any other new physical activities, no noticeable weight change, etc.
Now here it is 15 years later and I'm still obsessively playing hockey, now usually among the oldest players on the ice, and haven't had more than a little twinge from my back in years. [Reaching over and knocking on wood as I type this....] Since I (obviously) deeply love and cherish the playing of the One True Sport, as it's known in my household, this extended borrowed time on skates has been a blessing.
And as far as I can tell it is literally 100 percent due to having taken up just a bit of basic-but-consistent stretching.
I want to signal boost this a bit. I developed rather bad lower back pain in my early/mid 20's, and for two years going to doctors did nothing to help. I then went to the ergonomic nurse at my company who had me lay on my back and tried to lift my leg towards my chest. "Wow... you have really tight hamstrings." I started stretching them daily, or at least as often as I thought about it, and that solved what dozens of doctor visits couldn't. It also helps with my cold toes, which apparently is because my hamstrings tend to clench off the blood and nerves to my feet. Apparently your ham strings can really hose up your back and other things when they are out of whack relative to your other muscles, which isn't too tough it seems. I am usually really skeptical of the ergonomic stuff, but damn, that nurse deserved a medal.
"Stretching is a pleasant ritual for many people, myself included. It’s simple, it feels good, and we believe — or hope — that it prevents and treats injuries."
I was taken aback by this. Stretching is possibly least pleasant part of exercise for me, and since high school PE class I've always loathed it. It's so painful! I'm not sure how anyone would enjoy it. I was very happy to learn a couple years ago, and again now, that it's not necessary. That someone would characterize it as pleasant baffles me. What are they doing exactly that they're enjoying themselves?
If it is that painful you are pushing yourself too far. Just need to ease up and not stretch quite as hard. You may not be able to fully get into the picture-perfect stretching form without passing the point of pain, that is perfectly ok. Just push the stretch as far as you can without causing actual pain and over a long enough period of time you will find that you can push it more and more.
I don't really know what it would mean to stretch without pain. I just got up and did a "touch my toes" type stretch, and backed up once it got painful until it stopped being painful. It doesn't really feel like I'm doing anything at all. Shouldn't you feel something if you're stretching? How do you know if you're stretching if you don't feel a stretch? Which, to me, has always been the feeling of painful burning along the tendons being stretched.
If it's literally a burning sensation then you're either doing too much or irritating nerves that are pinched by muscles when you stretch. Possibly both. It should feel like... uh... things stretching, a bit like having a somewhat intense massage?
Stretching can feel a bit intense and slightly uncomfortable, but it should be moderately pleasant during and you should feel relief and increased range of motion after.
FWIW I do short stretches in the morning to mobilize my back and long stretches after climbing, and it seems to work fine for back problems which plagued me before I started doing it. My ROM is still not great, but slowly expanding.
Caveat, I am going almost entirely off of memory. I think I originally got this info from Greg Nuckols, who is generally very good. For my bona fides, I'm Weak For On the Internet, yet still mysteriously in the top 10% or so of regulars at the gyms I've gone to (415/315/500 squat/bench/deadlift). Not winning any medals anytime soon, but stronger than most casuals. Anyway.
There have been studies showing long bouts of static stretching pre-lifting lead to decreased (power output? strength?).
However, when you dig in, they were doing an amount of stretching that is frankly absurd.
If light stretching makes you subjectively feel better, do it. If not, don't bother. Agree w the painscience link that it's certainly not necessary.
Someone in the comments below says that Jesus was right when he said “ Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's.” This supposedly draws a distinction in Christianity between church and state.
I think people mis-interpret that statement. Jesus wasn’t saying the coin did in fact belong to Caesar - had he done that then he would have fallen into the very trap set up for him. He was playing with words. Sure Caesar is on the coin but did he specifically say it was Caesar’s coin? Any Roman soldier listening in would think so, Wikipedia seems to think so, theologians often seem to think so, but he didn’t.
If you are Jewish at the time you realise that he avoided the question. The coin could still belong to God, if everything actually belongs to God. That’s why they “marvelled” at his response. “Smart guy avoiding that question, innit? The Pharisees couldn’t get him”.
The other interpretation doesn’t make sense because it states that the trap was designed to make Jesus either accept Roman authority and lose face with his Jewish followers, or be arrested by refusing to accept Roman authority over Jews, particularly in punitive imperial taxation represented by the coin - but he “avoided” the trap by saying that Rome has legitimate taxation authority over its coinage. Clearly that is actually falling into the trap.
In summary “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s” is not “this coin is definitely Caesar’s coin”.
I've also heard a claimed interpretation that a key component of the story was Jesus calling attention to Caesar's picture on the coin, which the interpretation asserts was calling attention to the Ten Commandments injunction against graven images. Under this interpretation, Jesus was either calling out the Pharisees for using coins graven images, or he was calling for Caesar to suffer the penalties for violating the ban on graven images.
While an interesting claim, it seems from a quick googling to confirm the details that the graven image theory is not a mainstream theological or historical interpretation. The "calling for Caesar to suffer the penalty" sub-theory in particular seems fishy to me, since I thought traditional Jewish religious law had only been understood to apply to Israelites, while Caesar was clearly a Gentile.
The accepted interpretation where I grew up was that he was introducing the concept of separation of church and state to resolve the dilemma. It wasn't a clever conversational dodge; it was occupying a position rejected by both sides. Both Romans and the Jews held that religion was central to public order and the success of the state, so Jesus making a sharp distinction between duties to the two was completely and obviously out of frame for BOTH listeners.
I think this is one of those cases where a radical proposition seems strangely banal to the modern ear because it's now in the water supply; separation of church and state just doesn't sound like dangerous heresy any more.
But in that Interpretation of "Render to Caesar what is Caesar's" means that he is accepting Roman authority over coinage, which is the very thing that he was supposed to be avoiding as a trap.
Well yes. Jesus often settled theological disputes by making everyone unhappy. He fell for both sides of the trap (while laying out a path that ACTUALLY works.)
in lockstep with his followers, not the Pharisees who are generally reported as having accepted Roman rule. What I have him doing is getting out of a deliberate catch-22 situation by using a formula of words which can be interpreted by one group one way, and another group another way. In any case Jesus wasn't arrested here for opposing Roman rule, nor did he lose his followers.
LOL: no plan is Hair brained: at least it is a plan :) OUCH on the OPEN ENDED book "recommendations" there is a big difference in genre and what one would consider classical, fantasy, sci fi: though I am older than many of you: My recommendation would be FRANK HERBERT's DUNE Series: ALL OF THEM.. the BOOKs.. not the "movies": Dune was never meant to be made into an epic movie: If I have to explain then you won't understand unless you read the first Dune.. :) Have a great Monday.
Ah, time to play my favorite game: poorly-trained bot or paranoid schizophrenia? The barrage of random quotation marks and random capitalization leans me towards the latter (either that, or someone fed the bot a whole bunch of Francis E Dec).
If you look at the blog linked in the username, I'd definitely go with some sort of generic crazy-type. Very unhinged and poorly written, but not in a "probably a bot" way
Given his blog is full of bizarre rambling conspiracy theories, I'd class it as schizophrenic. Whether that condition was reached "honestly" or was pharmacogenic is really a secondary question.
Are you talking about me? I am a woman.. and my name is Isabella.. and I was on Twitter under my real name IsabelHale (something like that) and left over two years ago because of the NUTCASAES on there.. yeah.. maybe I should change my photo.. that is my photo from GMU when I graduated University .. and I am much much older than most of you: I am well over 65 and my son is 40. Science is Political is my blog and I don't make stuff up.. and I am a retired (well) I write and read in my field of Molecular Biology.. I only am responding because someone mentioned DUNE.. which I do highly recommend.. I read the whole series. and my son who went to UVA and is a Computer Architect.. told me it was one of his favorite books.. I don't read science fiction anymore.. and while we are talking about "writing and reading" because of all the work I did in biohazard field (using radioactive isotopes etc) well who knows,, I also had a job where I had to "fly" as in airplanes and also traveled.. I have torn retinas (you can look that up) very serious, so i am forever a RETINAL patient and now will need early cataract surgery.. yeah.. so.. enjoy your vision and time while you can. Take care.. :) I am on Facebook and have been on the internet since before Y2K,, worked of Cable and Wireless back then. anyway. so much for that I am actually trying to buy a house to move into.. for my retirement which I can actually maintain with as little help from my sons (who have their own busy lives).. so.. I will be back .. and what does ASTRAL CODEX TEN mean anyway? answer if you feel like it.. I was looking at houses but wow.. so much to know.. that I don't know know.. in Virginia that is.. best to you all. Isabella
This is too complicated for me.. I am not a mathematician.. I am retired scientist in molecular biology: my son is the mathematician.. like he said and I will POST.. in an email to me..when people were complaining about how hard C was to program in: and I will quote his email: he is on 8 chan and math forums: "This business about C not being a programming language is just hyperbole. It is basically a complaint that C is so fundamental to computing that the use of C could practically be called Compute Science itself. This complaint is only valid or well received by incompetent "programmers" who wish C wasn't so hard to do (although it is not that hard to use) and wishful thinking that some easier to use programming language could dethrone C which is impossible and totally unnecessary to even wish after. Picture a bunch of lazy ass college students that didn't want to take any courses in C because "C is hard yo" and are upset when there easy-ass programming language is not capable enough to do what is necessary and then they must use C at some point and are bitching about it instead of being happy that such a universal language exists. This is like complaining that math is not just math it is the language of engineering and "maths is hard yo". "HE DOES HAVE A SENSE OF HUMOR.. he is 40 and I am 71 and need to preserve my vision.. (he loves math) I took it to learn chemistry.. lol.. :) Isabell YO. :)
Computer Science is not actually a science, but instead applied math. And what language is just math and older than C? You guessed it: Lisp! Paul Graham says all programming languages gradually turn into Lisp if they improve over time.
Even though I said I didn't like this site: I am aware of that because of my son.. who I quoted:,, he went to E School at UVA.. graduated in 2008 and in fact: is an applied mathematician who maxed his SATS out,, taking them in Calculus at the age of 16. He applied to UVA to their College of Science in Math to be an applied Math student but the Dean of the E school (Engineering) at UVA actually asked him to join the E School. He went on a Full Paul Mellon Scholarship and is a Phi Beta Math Scholar, took him six years as he minored in Greek/Math scholars (lol) but was important to him; I saw his work: notebook full of all Math proofs. He is just a normal person in all other areas,, but gifted in Math,, runs on both sides of our family, my grandfather was Phd in Chemical engineering and Patent attorney and my husband's father (his grandfather) was an MIT aeronautical engineer. I was not even close to that kind of math student. ever. I took Calculus got my A and then spent my time in Molecular Biology. I hoped he would go into medicine but he THRIVES IN CODING: His area is actually C ++ and writes in about 15 other coding languages. I graduated in 1980 from GMU and I do remember taking computer science but at that time like you say there was NO actually "Computer Science" School, I programmed in SASS on a Main frame and took advanced Biostatistics at the Graduate level but did not enjoy that type of work: I did work in Virology and other areas and now the whole world knows what Biologists know that HUGE WORKING DATABASES are needed to "store" all the information generated by "Scientists".. :) thanks for that. I feel better today.. haven't been well, as you now realize I am over 65 by a couple years (had my sons late it life).. take care..Isabell
I'm curious what the thoughts of the commentariat at-large are regarding the implications of this deal. Do you think Twitter will meaningfully change under Musk's ownership, and, if so, do you believe these changes will be a net-positive or net-negative for the end-user experience?
Also, congratulations to anyone who placed long-shot bets on the prediction markets when the poison-pill shitstorm was being kicked up.
there's a feature on the side that's constantly serving me news I couldn't care less about (lots of celebs/fashion/movie stuff). If Elon could incorporate any amount of self-customization for that [it's not an ad feature; it's just horribly ill-targeted suggestions of stories I might be interested in] it would improve my experience immeasurably...
The obvious answer seems to go back to doing what twitter was designed for: you see stuff from the people you follow, you don't see stuff from the people you don't follow.
This would not only be a less annoying version of twitter, it would give the perfect response to people whon complain about people they don't like not being banned from the platform: if you don't like what they say then don't follow them and you won't have to read it.
This would give a twitter that is much less annoying for users, but also probably reduce engagement metrics, at least in the short term, which would make it the kind of thing that current twitter management just would not do. From a business point of view you could gamble that a less-engaging but less-annoying twitter is one that would attract more normie users and make make more money in the long term.
The purpose of the poison pill was to force Musk to negotiate with the board. Which he did. It turns out that they had a bad position and couldn't get any concessions, but the pill itself worked as intended.
End-user experience? Depends on who you are. I don't think Musk is going to change the social rules of the platform as much as people think he will (though I also don't pretend to be able to second-guess him) because he realises he's bought a valuable, mostly-functioning, and shock-sensitive ecosystem. He'll probably loosen it up somewhat, and various minorities will take more abuse, as ever when artificial civility is more weakly enforced and the situation moves closer to the law of the jungle.
Technologically/algorithm-wise, Twitter is more likely now to improve than it had been before the purchase, for obvious reasons.
Culturally/politically, it's a wash. Some people will discover that their social ostracism wasn't a WEF conspiracy after all, political demagogues might prosper, but even Musk libertarian fans should probably look askance at the concentration of power in the hands of one man.
On that note, I'd be curious to read a comment from someone better informed about American and EU regulatory practices than I am as to what, if anything, happens on that front.
The zeitgeist seems to be that Musk has no idea what he's getting himself into and will probably be crashing headfirst into reality soon, though there are theoretically several good moves he could make. In the short-term I expect Twitter to decline noticeably but not catastrophically.
I agree with this take. It's really easy to say "more free speech!" or "anything that's not illegal should be free to post!" when you don't have to think about the fine details. Once you actually have to implement your changes with real users, you run into trouble.
(For instance, spam is usually not illegal, merely unwanted.)
From what I gather, the point of the poison pill was to act as a speed bump to limit Musk's ability to try to force the issue by buying up many more shares on the open market. Twitter has a staggered board, which nominally requires a hostile takeover to win two successive proxy elections a year apart, but there are ways around that if the prospective buyer controls enough stock:
1. Board members have a legally enforceable duty to represent the interests of shareholders. Delaware courts have tended to be very lenient in enforcing this against board members rejecting takeover bids in recent decades, but this leniency has limits. It would be pretty awkward for a board member to try to explain to a judge how it's in the shareholder interests to actively thwart the efforts of a majority shareholder to direct how the company is run.
2. The existing board is not necessarily monolithic in opposition to Musk's takeover bid. If Musk can persuade or cut deals with enough individual board members, he might be able to get a working majority of the board in a single election. The inevitability implied by a prospective buyer owning a majority or near-majority of shares would tend to help with this, as it limits the upside of continuing to try to fight the buyer if he's near-certain to eventually vote out anyone who won't cooperate.
3. Shareholder votes can also amend bylaws to change board structure. There's a proposal up for a vote at Twitter's upcoming shareholder meeting next month to abolish the staggered terms of the board and put everyone up for election at the same time.
In this light, the role of a poison pill like this is to limit the amount of control the prospective buyer can get through open market purchases, removing an opportunity to short-circuit the process and allowing the board to mostly control the pace of the process. By delaying the process, the board can use the additional time to try to raise competing takeover bids or deter hostile bidders who'd have to commit to attempting to win two different shareholder votes a year apart. I'm guessing that the board put out feelers for competing bids, didn't get anything good, and concluded it was better (for the board members and for the shareholders) to take Musk's offer than to try to drag out the process in hopes that Musk would get bored and wander off.
The decline of wokism is kicking into high gear. About time, I'd say.
Net positive for the end-user experience, and probably nudging the culture at large from the SJW thought police attractor to the weird silicon valley technofacism attractor. I have mixed feelings about it but I'm cautiously optimistic.
Also, bull market on shitcoins should start any day now.
I frankly don't get what's this talk that Twitter is woke. You mean, "most of Twitter's employees"? Look, it's in San Francisco, what do you expect? But if someone thinks that of Twitter *content*, then they haven't seen Twitter content.
Has it got woke stuff? Yes sure, but look, it has *absolutely everything*. "Babylonian Bazaar" does not even begin to describe it. It has Democrats, Republicans, Rappers, Pimps, Cops, Proud Boys, Antifas, MAGAs, Anarchists, 9/11 Conspiracy Theorists, CERN Scientists, Red Scare, Trotskyte Communists, Stalinist Communists, Perfume Nationalists, Alt Right, Dirtbag Left, Carpetbagger Left, Anime Nazis, Feminists, Reactionaries, Reactionary Feminists, Masculinists, Rationalists, Postrationalists, Black Lives Matter, Blue Lives Matter, All Lives Matter, Furry Trans Pansexual Wiccan Lives Matter, The Judean People's Front and The People's Front of Judea. Come on in! If Twitter don't got it, you don't wan' it.
It has everything and everyone. You have to be an ex-POTUS or something to not have an account on it. Jonathan Haidt has some wonderfully articulated remarks why that platform is insane, follow his Twitter and see.
Twitter is the aggregated collective neurosis of humanity, made manifest on a touchscreen for whomever wishes to scroll through it while taking a dump. And you can participate, too! It is simply perfect. I don't think that even a genius like Musk could do anything to further improve on it.
(except perhaps to pull the plug, and for eons be remembered as the savior of mankind)
Well that's clearly not true, because all my favourite twitter accounts are now banned. I want @bronzeagemantis, @temporarilyembarrassedelysiumresident, and of course @realdonaldtrump
Oh, they did? I had read some @bronzeagemantis. He's not my thing - just as furrydom, homosexuality and Sufi mysticism are not my things - but I've got nothing against him. (nor them). What I've read of him is enough for me to grok why the woke commissariat - with their toxic concept of "toxic masculinity" - would hate his guts, but I didn't know they actually cancelled him.
I thought it was only Trump. I've no idea who the Elysium Resident is, but I do stand corrected, thanks. I'd dive into Twitter very rarely, but whenever I'd reemerge from the rabbit hole, I'd reemerge having found a mind-boggling variety of weltanschauungs - which I mistook for Twitter actually *tolerating* that variety. I did not have a contiguous exposure to the twitterverse that would let me notice the woke commissars were actively trimming a whole bunch of tall poppies, not just POTUSes...
I've dived into Twitter again now, and saw it's true. I saw the top woke commissars throwing fits and rending garments about the arrival of Musk. It is such a beautiful scene. It brings a warm smile to the face of anyone whose heart hasn't turned to stone.
While I don't particularly like Trump, I dislike the woke commissars with the passion of a GenX-er who had grown east of the Iron Curtain. I don't think Trump should be banned, and I don't think he would have risen at all in a West without woke commissars. Nor do I think he will ever end them; Trump needs the woke commissars as much as the woke commissars need Trump (otherwise, he's just a guy who tweets a lot, makes bizarre cabinet picks and changes nothing). They will be ended by Bill Maher, Joe Rogan, Freddie deBoer, Anna Khachiyan and the like, much sooner than they will be ended by Chris Rufo, Ben Shapiro and the like.
The purpose of the poison pill was to force Musk to negotiate with the board. Which he did. It turns out that they had a bad position and couldn't get any concessions, but the pill itself worked as intended.
Looking for a book recommendation, but I don't know the terminology I need here. Basically, I am interested to learn why and how groups of people believe different things. To apply to the war in Ukraine, why there are pro-Russian and pro-Ukraine stances on the level of the whole countries?
I've already read a bunch of things about related effects: "The Elephant In The Brain" about how we genuinely believe in what is beneficial for us, Scott's writings on in-group/out-group dynamics, "Imaginary Communities" which explores the origin of one particular group belief (but doesn't provide the underlying theory why individual humans work in way that allows group beliefs to arise), "The Lucifer Effect" as a long exploration of the fundamental attribution error.
However, what I lack here is a coherent theory with predictive power which ties everything together and explains how this all works on the level of large communities of people. And, to clarify, I am really looking for some rigor here, as it seems pretty easy to formulate a just-so-story here ("people first identify with a particular group, and then rationalize their beliefs in group-and-self-serving way").
Are you after an analysis of Real Politik, where countries might decide to parrot obvious Russian lies because they see winning Russian favour as being valuable? Or are you after an understanding of why people with very limited access to free info and lots of propaganda believe it? Or are you after an explanation of why there are Westerners who argue pro-Putin positions?
The second point. Though, I am not necessarily after propaganda per se, to me it seems that propaganda is more a consequence, rather than a cause, of people’s mystifying ability to coordinate around abstract ideas.
I'm a musician and have read lots of scientific stuff about "Perfect pitch", which is more accurately called Absolute pitch (vs Relative pitch). This article is obvious BS.
I looked up Valproic Acid, having never heard of it before. It seems to be fairly widely prescribed as an anticonvulsant and a treatment for bipolar disorder, and is occasionally prescribed as a migraine preventative. There are apparently about five million prescriptions written for it each year in the US. It's been around for a long time, too: the chemical was first developed in 1882 as an organic solvent for laboratory use, and has been used as a medication since 1962.
If it really has the kind of effects the NPR article claims it has on learning and brain plasticity, then it's astonishing that nobody has noticed until now.
If it has anything at all to do with migraine treatment/prevention, you'll want to research carefully before using it, especially long-term. With e.g. triptans it's not hard to give yourself lifelong recurring migraines by using them too much.
I'd be very dubious about messing around with "restoring juvenile brain plasticity". The story seems to contradict itself in places; the results seem to be yes, there were some better results than if he had done it with a group with no intervention (though I have no idea if he actually did use a control group) and then it spins "better results than nothing" into "gave them perfect pitch".
Just buying it, taking it, and hoping it'll work seems to be not the perfect idea.
The article is 8 years old now. I would expect to have heard more about it by now if it panned out as portrayed. A magic youthful brain plasticity medication would be pretty amazing. I’m thinking how great it would be to have a young brain for language acquisition.
A few months ago there was a link in an ACX post to an article arguing that the human body usually maintains the correct balance of vitamins and nutrients regardless of diet. I think it was titled "The *Something* Principle". Does anybody know the article I'm talking about? I haven't been able to find it.
So with all the impressive results coming out of DALL-E 2 recently, does anyone know how readily this sort of technology could be applicable to videos? DALL-E creates images of pretty much whatever you want, and videos are just sequences of images.
If so, this would have some pretty interesting consequences:
Say you don't like Joe Biden and want to spread fake news that makes him look bad. So you go into DALL-E 3, type the prompt "Video of Joe Biden kicking a puppy," generate the video, and polish up a few imperfections until it looks super realistic.
(Of course, people can already do that with deepfakes and whatnot. But an AI like DALL-E could make it much easier, such that any random person could generate hundreds of these videos with no technical background.)
Other applications could be in animation. For instance, instead of hiring a bunch of animators to draw animations, you just type the prompt "Girl with blue hair running across a field, anime style" and polish up the result. Similar techniques could be used to add special effects to movies.
I guess one obstacle would be that image training data is usually well labeled, whereas videos don't always have clear textual descriptions.
I think this is mostly wishlisting things you want a DALL-E-like AI to do- I am not saying AI will never be able to do these things, only that I don't see the potential in them being done with the efficacy you describe in the near future.
As for my personal thoughts: I believe AIs like DALL-E-2 or more advanced should be kept as novelty objects, by law or even force if necessary, instead of being allowed to kill the human imagination in the name of Progress or Profit. I do not wish to live in a world without dreams.
I think they'll kill art less than you think. I've been running the best open source text to image model (so not DALL-E quality, but can still make recognizable images), and I am shocked at how unable to come up with great prompts I am. The model does not fill in for the creativity or imagination, only the technical ability.
If you imagine a world where AIs can make entire novels or movies, there would just be a lot of terrible novels and movies. The people who would be filling the artist role would be those who can curate a good selection from a sea of garbage.
I think that the technical ability is a non-trivial component of what we appreciate about art. It's not a coincidence that the stereotypical complaint about contemporary art is "i could have done it too".
First, I would personally claim that the original lion king is actually more impressive on the side of personal technical ability than something done in cgi.
Second, what i was claiming is that even an actually beautiful and meaningful art piece made using dall e would be perceived less than a similarly beautiful one in traditional (or even digital but not "neural") techniques because it lacks the physicality of the art process, that something that even i that don't know anything about art can understand at first glance that, well, certainly i couldn't have done it.
Even if in fact, if you give me dall e, i would most probably not produce anything as meaningful. But it does cheapen part of the art process.
Sure it's a non-trivial component, but this is a very similar complaint to the ones people made about photography. There are still people who do realistic painting despite the existence of cameras, and we treat it as impressive because a human did it. Also, note that DALL-E can only make pixels, so there's still work for artists making actual physical paintings.
(I don't know what I'm talking about but) given a DALL-E image, I'm sure that a backend that can produce a physical, interestingly painted version of it would not be difficult, if there were demand.
It would be quite difficult. People overestimate how far along we are on the physical side of robotics.
You're right though that in principle, anything that humans can do can eventually be done by machines. I personally think we'll see people who care about the human element buying "organic" art, even if it's possible to get something made automatically.
You do not need to pay an AI and companies in the wild respond to profit motive and not the needs of humanity (or indeed any semblance of quality). The exact second that paying an AI to vomit drek onto a screen or paper becomes more profitable than paying a human to produce something is when the human capacity to dream will come under attack by Moloch. The arts (as something different from mindless entertainment) are already seen by many people in the US as at best a vestigial organ tolerated because you need some kind of arts training to produce mindless entertainment and at worst as a parasitic element. DALL-E-7 or whatever form it takes poses a very real threat of driving the arts extinct and killing the single most important part of the human experience- the ability to express feeling and internal experience in a way that transcends the incredibly barbaric and limited form of language. I believe many social ills can be traced back to a loss of artistic literacy in the population and this final step poses a very real risk of setting humanity on a trajectory of permanent dehumanization.
Okay actually artists do need to pay for materials, movies cost an insane amount to produce, and authors need to pay to publish their books. There's a reason we only get a few good movies a year, and the rest are just recycled content. I'm really looking forward to the future where any director can realize their vision.
I really see DALL-E etc. as more similar to a new medium than replacing the creator.
I do not believe DALL-E will make a world where "any director can realize their vision", I believe it will make a world where realizing a vision is impossible- both because it will utterly destroy the craft of art by mechanizing it, like how every other craft has been slowly mechanized and made soulless, but more importantly because a sea of infinite garbage will utterly drown out any work of quality. It is hard enough to find things of quality now- once Moloch can churn out thousands of films per day of soulless Pablum, works of art worth allowing into your mind will become invisible.
You can see DALL-E however you want, I am describing what it is and almost certainly will be. You have to pay a creator for his tools and labor, as you point out. All you have to pay for an AI is a licensing fee at most. Why maintain the art schools when you can manufacture art en masse? Woodworking has all but died out for this exact reason.
This is why DALL-E and similar must remain firmly pigeonholed as novelty objects, little shiny baubles and playthings, and if this requires law, so be it, and if this requires violence, once again so be it.
> like how every other craft has been slowly mechanized and made soulless
Can you give some examples of crafts which have been mechanized and made soulless? I feel like they all persist, and I'm struggling to think of cases where people have stopped doing something creative. Has woodworking died? I have an uncle who is a woodworker and people still buy his creations despite the availability of machining. Of course people don't need to buy every chair from a woodworker, but not everything needs to be a work of art. Unlike chairs though, art has _no_ practical utility other than the aesthetic.
I think something that you really need to defend is why DALL-E will kill visual art, when photography didn't kill realistic painting. Another example: I have an aunt who does calligraphy, and she doesn't seem to resent printers.
> a sea of infinite garbage will utterly drown out any work of quality
What I am saying is that the volume will elevate the value of curators. For example I like Brandon Sanderson's novels, and respect his taste, so his "AI Goodreads" would be an extremely valuable resource to me. Same for movie critics.
> and almost certainly will be
Claiming to be able to almost certainly predict the future of human interaction with a technology is extremely bold, so you should probably raise the temperature of your priors.
I think if it can make still photos move, the next step is then getting video etc. to produce new content e.g. Granny says a few sentences culled from already recorded sources so she can congratulate you on the new baby born after she died. For something short and looks convincing if you don't examine it too closely, I think we have the tools or soon will have them, and 'short and looks convincing' is all that's needed to start outrage storms on social media.
I've read that commercial illustration is unlikely to benefit, except for maybe concept art and stuff, because you can't yet enforce consistency from Dall-E. So you put in "girl with blue hair running across a field anime style" in one scene and it gives you Rei Ayanami, then in the next scene you write "girl with blue hair in an anime fight scene" and it gives you Sailor Mercury. You'd need some way to teach the AI the equivalent of a "model sheet" for anything that needs to be consistent between images.
I am familiar with that and this is why I'm not advocating for the immediate destruction of DALL-E: it can't be taught style yet. My concern is with some future DALL-E-7 that can do that.
The Biden administration is now allowing people to sponsor Ukrainian refugees. Under the program you can sponsor specific refugees for entry to the US. The way it works:
-You find a Ukrainian or group of Ukrainians (think family sized, not a village).
-You file a Form I-134 declaring you are willing to assist in their entry, including financially.
-The government checks out your information and the information of the Ukrainians.
-If approved, the Ukrainians are eligible for a temporary stay period of two years during which they can work. They are eligible to apply for a green card and eventual citizenship on the basis of jobs/residence they get under this status.
The requirements for this kind of thing are very low. It's about $23,000 + $6k for each additional person. So a family of three requires an income of $34,687. Note this is what your income must be, not what you are expected to pay. There's no specific amount you have to pay other than keeping them in decent conditions. A spare bedroom in a decent house (clean, structurally sound, power/water) is fine. Likewise them working to pay their way once they get work authorization is normal. And they don't have to live with you if you can make other arrangements or they become self-supporting.
The big potential downside is that you are responsible for keeping these people in a basic standard of living and off of welfare. If you don't then the government can force you to pay. That requirement goes away at the end of the sponsorship period, currently two years.
There's currently no cap and the government has set a minimum of 100,000 people before they'll even think about caps. (And being the Biden administration I doubt a cap will ever come.) So if you know someone who wants to come over or if you have the ability to sponsor then I'd suggest you check it out!
They're not too interested in refugee stuff in my limited experience. High skill immigration maybe but not the average person. But yeah, if they want to jump on it, I'll give anyone credit who gets it done.
Speaking in terms of influence and both popular and academic acclaim, probably Melville, Whitman, Faulkner or Twain. Within the US, it's almost certainly Twain, Fitzgerald or Hemingway. But it doesn't seem to me that Fitzgerald and Hemingway's international reputation comes close to the status they have at home. Honestly I think Whitman and Melville are the only ones likely to be remembered 300 years from now, seeing as Melville wrote a novel of almost Homerian universality, and Whitman pretty much single-handedly created the western tradition of free verse and helped shape American identity when it was in desperate need of shaping.
You may be correct about Frost. My ranking of best American poets is Whitman and Dickinson at the top, then Poe and Frost. For highest literary reputation, especially outside USA, I think it's Twain, Poe, Melville. Hemingway seems to be seen as problematic by some.
As a European I never heard of Whitman, heard about Melville, read some Twain by myself, and read Hemingway at school. I guess that forms a gradient of popular acclaim.
Also, I'm in the process of correcting the Melville thing at the moment. Moby Dick is amazing, I suppose doubly so if you read it for pleasure instead of school.
Surprised to hear that about Whitman. I think he's contributed more to the world artistic culture than any other American, and he's better compared to someone like Nietzsche, rather than Frost or EE Cummings. But I suppose that in European literature class, it makes sense that he'd be glossed over, as we usually learn about him in the context of the American Civil war and his hand in raising Lincoln to secular statehood.
Whitman was certainly on the Irish school poetry curriculum back when I was in secondary school but I think that's been overhauled now (Emily Dickinson still remains). He may have been more in vogue in the English-speaking countries of Europe; Chesterton was certainly a huge fan of his, and Whitman seems to have been a fresh, original voice in English poetry when first popular.
And of course, that leads on to Chesterton quotes:
(1) From his American trip:
Another interviewer once asked me who was the greatest American writer. I have forgotten exactly what I said, but after mentioning several names, I said that the greatest natural genius and artistic force was probably Walt Whitman. The printed interview is more precise; and students of my literary and conversational style will be interested to know that I said, 'See here, Walt Whitman was your one real red-blooded man.'
(2) From the short story "The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown":
The man of business leaned over the back of the chair, and fixed his dark eyes on the other's face.
'Major,' said he, 'did you ever, as you walked along the empty street upon some idle afternoon, feel the utter hunger for something to happen---something, in the splendid words of Walt Whitman: "Something pernicious and dread; something far removed from a puny and pious life; something unproved; something in a trance; something loosed from its anchorage, and driving free." Did you ever feel that?'
'Certainly not,' said the Major shortly.
(3) From the Father Brown story "The Secret Garden"
Valentin was expecting, for special reasons, a man of world-wide fame, whose friendship he had secured during some of his great detective tours and triumphs in the United States. He was expecting Julius K. Brayne, that multi-millionaire whose colossal and even crushing endowments of small religions have occasioned so much easy sport and easier solemnity for the American and English papers. Nobody could quite make out whether Mr Brayne was an atheist or a Mormon or a Christian Scientist; but he was ready to pour money into any intellectual vessel, so long as it was an untried vessel. One of his hobbies was to wait for the American Shakespeare--a hobby more patient than angling. He admired Walt Whitman, but thought that Luke P. Tanner, of Paris, Pa, was more "progressive" than Whitman any day. He liked anything that he thought "progressive." He thought Valentin "progressive," thereby doing him a grave injustice.
(4) From his autobiography:
This way of looking at things, with a sort of mystical minimum of gratitude, was of course, to some extent assisted by those few of the fashionable writers who were not pessimists; especially by Walt Whitman, by Browning and by Stevenson; Browning's "God must be glad one loves his world so much", or Stevenson's "belief in the ultimate decency of things".
John Steinbeck and Edgar Allan Poe probably deserve honorary mention as well, although they're both probably behind Melville and Hemingway in terms of literary reputation.
France: Balzac, Flaubert, Proust, Hugo, Rimbaud... bunch of other poets
I suppose this exercise isn't as interesting as I thought it would be considering one eventually starts Googling and at that point asking what individuals think no longer matters. Anyway, thanks for playing.
I think a more interesting question is what writer deserves that level of esteem, but has been denied it? In the case of America, I think it's Richard Yates. Revolutionary Road is at least as good as anything Fitzgerald or Hemingway wrote, yet now I can't even find him in most bookstores, and I'd never heard his name before stumbling upon him online.
My guess would be Whitman, Melville, Twain and maybe Faulkner would be the top 4. I'll go with Whitman for number one, though my own preference is Melville.
Does anyone know if Poe still has a big reputation in France?
Anyone read through the Meadows texts, because holy shit.
I was part of the "Clown coup" camp vis. 1/6; that it was absolutely intended to be a coup, but it was a bunch of Q-anon wackos that were doing it and it could be safely ignored. Turns out I wasn't cynical enough.
Some shit about false electors, a pre-arranged vote in the legislature if Pence was willing to push the button, etc.
Could be why Pence refused to leave the capitol.
In any case, I encourage everyone to look into these in particular.
I live in St Paul. Stayed up all night during riots after murder of George Floyd watching it play out in real time.
I might have joined the initial demonstration if not for COVID. Wouldn’t have broken a lawful curfew or damaged property though.
At some early morning hour Mn governor came on to recommend people in my neighborhood pack a go bag. It came close to my house. Someone tried to smash through the drive through window of my Walgreens. The Trader Joe’s was raided. The corner gas station had a lot of no pay drive offs.
There have been 200 felony arrests so far in the TwinCities. Would be a lot more if all the crime had been committed on CCTV.
Have you been looking at the 1/6 texts? It was as near a miss as I care to experience. Red state legislators have been passing laws since 1/6 to make it easier to send ‘alternate electors’ in ‘24 at the behest of… I can’t remember his name, just that he was cruel and ignorant and thought that losing an election shouldn’t make him leave the White House.
The issue is: They thought that they could make it stick if Pence was willing to push the button.
They had the votes in the senate, they have the supreme court, they have enough state legislatures that they could do it; if the water was muddy enough.
Comes down to pence being a career poltico, and realizing that even if conservatives always have disproportionate amounts of reps compared to the votes, the armed forces/intelligence are majority Dem.
Had a thought: if you think it can't happen here, remember the 2000 election.
A revision of my earlier question about Literature. I'm interested in what authors you think are either underrated or overrated. Let's categorize them by country.
For example, I think for the US, John Steinbeck is overrated, Thomas Pynchon is underrated.
It seems to me like countries go through phases in which their literature is more fashionable. It's crazy to me that Thomas Pynchon nor Philip Roth has won a Nobel while so many obviously inferior writers have. I believe post-war American writers are mostly underrated because after Hemingway nobody really wanted to celebrate another US author that much.
What authors from various countries do you think are underrated or overrated?
Underrated (or at least, mis-identified) french litterature:
-Alexandre Dumas is often perceived as a "serious" author, but the 3 musketeers trilogy and Monte Cristo are pretty much pulp adventure, and a ton of fun at that.
-Octave Mirbeau seems to be almost entirely forgotten, but a marvelous ironic novellist.
-Jean Raspail (tho apparently he had a lot of success in america) is a fascinating writer, both highly poetic and with a style that's...kinda reminiscent of Ayn Rand (uses of recurring leitmotivs, very manicheans characters)
-ASP Explorer, some random software engineer who wrote silly internet stories parodying and subverting Conan, D&D, Lovecraft and so on, with great skill. Sadly never edited, his work can only be found online, but god damn it's one of the best modern fantasy writer I know of.
I think Steinbeck is part of a large group of authors that strike young people first getting into literature as extremely important and weighty, but whom many people then grow out of but never return to and thus revise their opinion. I know I walked around for a few years thinking Hemingway and Steinbeck were among the best of world literature, simply because I hadn't read them since I'd explored more of the western canon. Kerouac and the rest of the beats are in this same category, though I think more people realize their relative worth past the age of 18. On the other hand, similar authors like Bukowski and Hunter S. Thompson deserve their hype among young people, and mostly hold their value over time, though they're obviously nowhere close to deserving the esteem of a Proust or a Tolstoy.
As for underrated authors in the US, I think Sinclair Lewis is now in that category as he's hardly read, as is JD Salinger because of the degree to which Catcher in the Rye has overshadowed his other (and in my opinion, superior) works. Ezra Pound may also be underrated, simply because his political affiliations and overall post-middle-age unraveling kind of destroyed his legacy as anything but another famous face from 1920s expat Paris.
Again we have to remember that reading a piece of fiction is a subjective experience. My feeling about Steinbeck is that he was an important writer describing a unique American experience during the Great Depression, but really not a terribly good writer. It honestly feels like WPA work to me. Your mileage may vary.
If you are tuned to Thomas Pynchon’s wavelength, he will take you on an unforgettable ride. As I understand it The Pulitzer committee recommended that Gravity’s Rainbow receive the prize for fiction in ‘73, I believe. They were overruled by those that found it incomprehensible and transgressive. It’s one of those love it or hate works.
The whole Hemingway / Faulkner thing seems to divide people into camps also. For a while their individual writing seemed to converge into one style but they were both more interesting when they each went their own way. My personal favorite of the two is Faulkner.
I love to read Saul Bellows but John Updike bores me so again it comes down to your own experience. As Iris Murdoch noted in what seemed like a throw away line that really was quite important, “We’re all so very different.”
Steinbeck didn't write about the Great Depression nearly as well as Woody Guthrie in his autobiography. Bound for Glory deserves to be more famous than The Grapes of Wrath but isn't. I blame public education.
I think I am the only person who has been banned from DSL, what Scott calls the Bulletin Board, by number of strikes. I'm not here to argue against that. I do find it interesting how different an offshoot of one group can be. I didn't get along with those guys for various reasons.
In retrospect it's obvious that one group that is distilled from another will be very different from the mother group.
This phenomenon may explain a power law, why large firms get larger and vice versa.
DSL sucks because the moderators aren't fit to determine what anyone sees but I did want to respond to what you got banned for. You said "I think the right way to increase fertility is to make society more "sex positive", as the kids say." But this is economically uninformed. If women are the producers and men are the consumers, and sex positivity increases consumption at some price-point (the quality of the man), then the average price demanded by the producers will increase. Basic equilibrium. The key is that sex positivity actually increases the consumption/production ratio, because men want sex way more, so you get a higher "market price."
No, no, no. My petulant point there was a callback to another, older dispute. I'm glad I was banned because the essential cultural conflict was never going to end.
(The root debate was over the abortion law in Texas.)
FWIW, I agree that DSL moderation is biased against the left (particularly Cassander), but I also agree with your ban (for calling people "cocksuckers"). There's a difference between disagreement and gratuitous insult.
I don't disagree with their decision. I mention what happened here because I find it hard not to mention it to someone and the only forum I know of where I feel like I have an audience for such a story is the audience here. (My girlfriend has no interest in my online life.)
My original reference to c*s*ers was to particular politicians who deserved the slight I was hurling in their general direction. The callback to it was me giving up on that forum, knowing i would be banned.
DSL's moderation is definitely harsher on low-effort left-leaning comments than Scott's was on SSC. But I think that actually puts them closer to the center (though a little past it). Remember that applying a stricter standard to right-leaning comments than left-leaning ones was an explicit policy Scott published.
DSL moderation will tend to come down on people gesturing towards common negative stereotypes of non-left groups as undisputed truth. I approve of this and think it creates a more honest discussion space. I wish they would apply the same zeal to stereotypes of left groups, but stopping the most common type of bad behavior is better than stopping none of it.
In any case, that's not "the most common type of bad behavior". DSL is a conservative echo chamber where digs at the left flow like water with little pushback, let alone punishment.
Can you suggest an alternative? Somewhere that doesn't allow low-effort digs at the left, but also doesn't allow "but this comes from the right, so obviously we should be looking for the racist angle."?
I'd love to engage intellectually with a community like that, but all I've been able to find so far is a couple (DSL and one other) that allow shots at the left but not the right. And several dozen (basically the rest of the internet, as far as I can tell) that allow shots at the right but not the left.
I've found the left-leaning commentary and argument on DSL to be unusually high quality, possibly because its one of the only places with significant left-leaning participation that actually puts a burden of argument on those participants.
Cassander was an extremely fair moderator (IMO) until January 6th, at which point you could see the transformation happening practically in real time by reading his posts in the threads from that day as the events unfolded.
Now I’m curious. Did the forum start to deny the reality of what happened?
That sort of stuff frightens and confuses me. When people start to present ‘alternative facts’ something has gone terribly, fundamentally wrong. Discourse at that point becomes pointless. We might as well be throwing rocks at each other.
The last famous philosophers outside academia were Sartre and Camus. I don't even know if they are taken seriously inside academia. But they were famous because they wrote not only boring philosophical essays but plays and novels (Boring ones, but they achieved popular acclaim...)
Why don't more philosophers write plays and novels? On the one hand, I'm glad philosophy and art isn't generally conflated, because I prefer art to be pure. OTOH, I get sleepy reading philosophy and wish philosophers wrote more plays and novels. I think the reason Scott is so internet famous is because you never know whether you are getting a dry analysis of a meta drug study or a short story about gods. He's the American Camus, if Camus were funny.
In my experience, abstracting your philosophy into novels or plays (or even video games if you take things like The Talos Principle or Nier: Automata) gives you a trade off: it can become more approachable, but it can be harder for people to get the message. I've read Sartre's No Exit, and I found it pretty fun. But I'd have missed the philosophical elements if I wasn't looking for them. Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra is better in that you can tell that it is a philosophy book (the numerous speeches and lack of real plot make it clear), but it still loses clarity from the format and setting.
Of course, novelization can have the opposite effect as well and make things _less_ approachable. Rand only wrote in novels and a slow reader like me looks at 1000+ pages as a huge commitment that is better spent on something concise like Kierkegaard's Either/Or (/s).
To make fiction out of philosophy, you have to have three things: good philosophy/reasoning, a good story, and the ability to balance both so one doesn't overpower the other. Writing philosophy directly just requires the first one.
> The last famous philosophers outside academia were Sartre and Camus. I don't even know if they are taken seriously inside academia
How about Ayn Rand? She outlived Sartre and Camus, and has the distinction of being the last famous philosopher who isn't taken seriously _inside_ academia.
Really though, what kinds of philosophers do you want to be writing novels? Could Daniel Dennett write a novel about how qualia don't exist? Would a play by W. V. O. Quine on the subject of logical positivism be enlightening? How about a romantic comedy by Peter Singer where the author breaks in every two minutes to explain why the main characters' actions are unethical?
Western (by which I mean not French) philosophy values rigour and precision. French philosophy values wooly crap that sounds deep. You can get away with putting the latter into a fictional form, but not the former; the former needs lots of footnotes and rebuttals to obvious objections.
What fiction has to offer is expression through form. Some things can't be said literally with words but can be pointed at fictionally through form. Ayn Rand fails at doing that in my opinion because she doesn't seem capable of metaphorical thinking.
Scott is good at pointing at things with his fiction, things he can't express in an essay because they are not expressible in an essay. That's the point of a good story. To say what can't be said otherwise.
It occurs to me now that Keirkegaard wrote short fiction to express his philosophy, works which remind me a lot of Scott's short fiction.
Neitzsche brought philosophy closer to art. My belief is that bringing philosophy closer to art is unavoidable. because art is the only thing that actually shines a light on human existence. I don't know what Daniel Dennet thinks and I don't care because I don't see any wisdom coming from modern philosophy that hasn't been better said by our artists.
Maybe that is an ignorant assertion but if the recent generation of philosophers have departed, once again, from art, then aren't the taking a huge risk -- the risk that they don't know better than the artists?
I suppose i need to read Daniel Dennet now to gauge how ignorant my statement above is.
Agree there is a centrist case for UBI. That's different than it being a policy position that is popular among centrists.
I'm talking about a party that tries to win by appealing to the median voter, taking positions that are currently popular among centrists. Andrew Yang's party is not popular.
I don't know for a fact that a centrist party would be popular; perhaps the electorate is too bifurcated along tribal lines for that to be the case, but it seems like the Dems and Repubs have moved in much more radical directions than has the general population and that a party that tries to appeal to the sensibilities of normal people might have a chance of winning.
I would be 100% behind this for the USA, but I don't know if it would be viable for the same reason that the Greens/Libretarians don't get office very often: the current system incentivizes a two party system. Unless you're solidly in the very center of an issue, voting for any party other than the lesser of the two "evils" just increases the chance that the opposite party succeeds. This also means that the two main parties can keep getting more different from one another (and further polarized) because there's very little incentive to vote against them.
Full disclosure, though: I'm no expert on the subject. If you're curious, I recommend looking at CGP Grey's video series on the voting system in America and some alternatives. https://www.cgpgrey.com/politics-in-the-animal-kingdom
"Democrats but not woke" is just "a wing of the Democratic party." The reason there's only two parties is because small parties have more success getting merging with a larger party than trying to make it on their own. FPTP voting means splitting your voting base is a losing strategy.
I shouldn't have written "not conservative". I had in mind a party that tries to capture the moderates from both major parties, eventually displacing one of them by offering a bigger tent to the middle. True, eventually that party would be known as the more conservative or liberal party, depending on which of the two major parties now dies in its wake. But right now, with the GOP and Dems moving fast apart in opposite directions, there's an opportunity to flood the gap. Major parties have died before.
Guys how do you manage your acid base balance? There must be something else besides taking some magnesiumcitrate and potassium and what not. Stop bullshitting with “oh it’s bogus science”. How do I increase that HCO3
"the stock is valued by the market, and an EFT with higher fees would just be valued less to compensate"
There are a limited number for every theme or niche, so there probably isn't much competition between ETFs in the same field to either lower fees, or have a valuation that fairly accounts for them. I.e. there's only a few 2 or 3x levered oil ETFs, there's only like two Russell 3000 ETFs, etc. So it may not necessarily be true that an ETF with higher fees would be valued less- you may not have many alternatives in that niche
Yes. In order to compensate for a higher fee, an ETF or index fund would need to have a higher change in value to break even compared to one with a low fee.
There just aren't that many ETFs. Many sector ETFs and other specialty products are the easiest realistic way to gain exposure to a specific thing, so they charge for the privilege. Other broader etfs do have different expense ratios but this is generally just arbitrary. See
https://www.inspiretofire.com/voo-vs-spy-head-to-head-comparison/ for a comparison of VOO and SPY, which track the same index and have extremely similar returns, but SPY's ratio is 300% VOO's.
In a word, no.
I think what you're missing is that ETFs are not priced by market action like other stocks. An ETF can be said to have a 'correct' price that you can compute by looking at changes in its underlying components, and the ETF provider has mechanisms to ensure that that price is the price you buy or sell it at.
Once you buy it, the fees do matter, because they will determine exactly how the underlying stocks contribute to the growth of the ETF. If an ETF had zero fees, and all of its constituent stocks doubled, you would more or less expect the ETF to exactly double as well. If it has a fee, then you would expect that to detract from the growth accordingly. But that has no relevance to the price you pay at purchase.
Consider two ETFs tracking the same index, but with different fees, and the difference in fees priced into the market price in the manner you propose. At this point, an arbitrageur can buy the higher-fee / lower-priced ETF in creation-unit quantities to exchange the ETF for the underlying securities. This mechanism puts a practical limit on to what extent two substantially identical ETFs in the same market can differ in fees (and a practical limit on the fees chargeable by an ETF that holds highly liquid securities).
What you're missing is that they don't track the index, they track "index minus fees". If an ETF charges (say) 1%, then over 10 years, the basket of the ETF will go from 1 basket of the index to 0.9 baskets of the index as the ETF provider takes money out, and the arbitrage is around the value of the basket.
NAV
Some funds trade at that value strictly. No way to arbitrage on the fee.
Some funds trade above or below their NAV. Fees could play a role in the price here.
What you're missing is there are people ("Authorised Participants") who can take a block of ETF shares and redeem them for the underlying assets, and vice versa. They can make money doing this whenever the price drifts away from the underlying assets, and doing it moves the price back, so an ETF will always trade at value of its assets. The ETF management fee then reduces the *size* of the fund (because some people decide not to use it if the fee is too high) rather then the *price* of individual shares.
(This mechanism is also more tax efficient then traditional mutual funds, at least in the US)
"Closed-end" funds that don't have this mechanism indeed work as you suggest: the share price reflects a combination of the assets, the fees, and evaluations of the fund manager's stock picking ability (these fund are usually actively managed).
Another thing you might have been missing (which is to say, another small tweak to how ETFs work that would probably make your intuition right) is that when you're long an ETF you pay a fee to it's manager, but when you're short an ETF you don't get paid that fee. Therefore there is not a profitable arbitrage in which you buy VOO and sell SPY, collecting more fees than you pay ~risk-free, ultimately driving SPY out of business. Instead, the movement of capital from SPY to VOO relies on the collective action of investors, which is more gradual than the action of professional arbitrageurs.
Your basic intuition, "shouldn't that just be priced in?", is right in very many cases and you were right to look for some specific quirk that prevents it from holding in this case.
Best popular history of the caliphate in Spain?
I don't know, but I recommend "The Lions of Al-Rassan" by Guy Gavriel Kay. It's a novel set in Al-Rassan, a thinly veiled fantasy equivalent of al-Andalus. Kay has written a whole series of novels featuring lots of violence, sex, and political intrigue, set in a fantasy equivalent of the Mediterranean after the fall of Rome (Sarantium = Byzantium, Rhodias = Rome, etc.).
I'll second the recommendation
I'll third that recommendation.
Fun little side-note, but Guy Gavriel Kay was the author who helped Christopher Tolkien finish the "Silmarillion" after JRR Tolkien passed away (including when they basically had to write a whole chapter, "Ruin of Doriath", because Tolkien had left them little to work with).
I've been reading a ton of post-Roman to pre-modern history for my work on my fantasy strategy game. Mughals, Rome, Persia, and a bunch of other stuff including the Caliphates. Mostly been looking Rashidun so far but I looked into the Abbasid and Umayyad Caliphates also. Slowing marching forward in time. Let me dig up my notes for the top tier "normie friendly" recommendations people gave me. Probably have something tomorrow.
https://www.amazon.com/Spanish-Islam-Routledge-Editions-International-ebook/dp/B08YGXQCXB/ref=sr_1_1?qid=1650894648&refinements=p_27%3AReinhart+Dozy&s=books&sr=1-1
Reinhart Dozy's Histoire des Musalman’s d’Espagne, translated obviously, is one of the foundational works in the genre although I'm sure there has been some change since 1863.
This may not be what you're looking for, but Washington Irving wrote an excellent history of the END of the caliphate in Spain, Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada.
(His book of romantic legends about Cordoba is even better: Tales of the Alhambra. And his surprisingly sympathetic account of early Muslim history, Mahomet and His Successors, is best of all, but, of course, furthest away from the topic you asked about.)
This is an excerpt from a sermon of the Irish mathematician and theologian George Salmon. It appears to have been delivered in 1849. The full text is available on Google Books under the title, “The Propriety of Prayer for Temporal Blessings: A Sermon.” The excerpt appears at page 37 of the Google Books edition.
“I may appeal to many controversies of the present day which it would seem much more easy to bring to the test of experience, and yet on which we may find intelligent men forming very opposite opinions. For example,—whether the distresses of this country have arisen in spite of, or in consequence of, free trade; whether homeopathic pilules or wet sheets be sovereign remedies; whether there be a connexion between the characters of men and the shape of their heads; whether the brain adopts the principle of the division of labor, and whether it be possible to assign the places of the several bits of brain which have undertaken the discharge of each of the mental functions; whether men can see with their eyes only, or sometimes also with the pits of their stomachs; whether it is possible for a clairvoyant at Bolton to discern the doings of Sir John Franklin at the North Pole.”
I read along this enumeration of examples and I recognize them as a variety of now-quaint empirical controversies of the period. And then I hit the part about a controversy over whether people sometimes see with their stomachs. What on Earth is this referring to? How could anyone ever have been even tempted to believe that he was seeing with his stomach? I haven’t been able to find the reference to this nineteenth century controversy on Google. Does anyone have any idea what it was?
I’ll make a guess. Could ‘see’ be used with meaning ‘understand’?
So is he asking if a ‘gut feeling’, an intuition, could be as valuable as rational analysis of what is right before your eyes at times?
Is ‘Spideysense’ a thing?
I mean, that would make the phrase coherent, but it would hardly seem to fit with the other elements of the list, which involved more concrete phenomena. He’s using the list as examples of putative natural phenomena that it’s hard to develop dispositive tests for, such that informed people come to opposite conclusions.
One of the things he brings up is clairvoyants - is there some old theory of psychic powers that relies on the pit of your stomach?
To me, the remark reads as a deliberately jokey/insulting way of getting at the idea of going with your gut--like, he's deliberately trying to frame "knowing something by gut instinct" in a way that makes it sound ridiculous, for comedic value. I'll grant you it doesn't fit super well with the other examples, but it's natural to be a little less careful about whether what you're saying is a perfect example of the serious point you were making if, at that precise moment, you're trying to be funny.
Eventually the idea of the navel as a third eye, serving as a visual transducer to the stomach as the eyes do to that portion of the brain responsible for sight, fell out of fashion, and it became popular to debunk the entire concept by saying "Your eyes were bigger than your stomach".
Sorry, couldn't resist.
But seriously, was "seeing with the stomach" a euphemism for going with one's gut instincts instead of that which we literally saw? If so, the debate over left-brain/right-brain perception continues, and is valid.
But if the stomach was truly considered by some to "see" (in a purely visual sense), it does seem silly now. ("OK, it's my turn to hide; close your stomach and count to 10!") What things do we presently debate that will seem silly to people 150 - 200 years in the future?
I'm hoping that AI Superintelligence will be one of those things. Perhaps, 200 years in the future, we will have some scientific understanding of the physical properties and limits of intelligence and that will show that the concerns over superintelligence risk were invalid.
Or maybe we will all have been turned into paperclips. It could go either way.
The paperclips idea doesn’t need a n AI. Just a runaway process generally assumed to be nanotechnology.
I mean, specifically, a paperclip maximiser, not a grey goo generator.
But the paperclip maximiser doesn't need to be AGI either. Just a runaway process. Anyway neither are likely.
No one mentioned AGI, but a technical process that outsmarts humans whenever we try to turn it off sounds like a misaligned AI to me.
I mean, there's an open question right now about just how much of the atmosphere will be turned into CO2 by the runaway processes of capitalism. Obviously not as dramatic as the paperclips, but a result of the same process of partially aligned value maximizers with greater power than any individual human. (In this case, we do obviously benefit from many of the paperclips and other things that are produced, though we're not totally happy about the byproduct.)
It's become clear in recent years that the gut microbiota massively influences just about everything that humans do, including understanding. If he meant "see" in that sense, then he was very far ahead of his time.
He literally means seeing from the pit of your stomach. For some cases of people supposedly able to do this you can read starting on page 218 in this edition of the Dublin Review in an article about animal magnetism: https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Dublin_Review/4vsLAQAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1
Also, is the phrase "pit of your stomach" mainly just used in Ireland?
THANK YOU for finding this. I really appreciate it. I’m not Irish and have certainly heard the phrase used now and then. It may be falling into archaism and I would guess that infeequncy of use is more due to time rather than place. But I can’t rule out that it was particularly common in Irish English at the time.
Congratulations on tracking that down, it really does shed light on the reference!
Talking about animal magnetism and Mesmerism and directing the magnetic influence by gestures and touch, there is the case of "Stroker" Greatrakes, who did faith healing by touch through what was not yet at the time called 'animal magnetism':
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentine_Greatrakes
"Valentine Greatrakes (14 February 1628 – 28 November 1682), also known as "Greatorex" or "The Stroker", was an Irish faith healer who toured England in 1666, claiming to cure people by the laying on of hands."
For those who don't want to find it, the main reference is accounts of people seeing without their eyes. One passage:
"We have seen her (a young lady of Grenoble, in a state of somnabulism) select from a packet of more than thirty letters, that one amonst them which had been directed to her. She read on the dial-plate and through the glass, the hour indicated by a watch; we have seen her write several letter; correct, on reading them over, the mistakes she had made; and recopy one of the letter word for word. During all these operations, a screen of thick pasteboard entirely intercepted every visual ray which could possibly have reached her eyes. The same phenomena took place at the soles of her feet, and at the pit of the stomach."
In another case they talk about a women who has seizures and reported the following:
"She referred to her stomach all the sensations of sight, heraing, and smell, which were then no longer produced by the usual organs"
Reminds me of the Roald Dahl short story "The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar" about a man who reads in a book about how you can learn to see using your skin instead of just your eyes by using yogic practices. He practices the techniques and advances far enough that he can see through thin barriers (because yogic powers, that's why). He uses this power to cheat at poker by seeing through the cards to the ink on the other side. Once he gets bored at this he decides to make it his life purpose to cheat casinos out of their money with his trick and donate all his winnings to charity. Weird (but fun) story: the fact that Dahl had any of this in mind would indicate that at some point there was the pop culture idea that you could see using other organs besides the eyes, if you had enough mystic woo.
I can taste with my feet, but the other people in the restaurant keep complaining.
So you're an invertebrate?
I can smell certain things with my mouth (flehming) but that is because I am a cat.
I don’t fully understand “seeing” with the stomach. On the other hand we do feel with it - butterflies in the stomach, knot in the stomach. We don’t feel with our mind. Lots and people who believe we can upload our brain (and thus personality) forget that.
You don't understand "seeing with the stomach" because it is fake. People see with eyes, but their were claims in the first half of the 19th century that through animal magnetism people were able to read letters and such through their stomachs.
Yes I saw your link above. Did you use a dedicated search engine for that?
I just searched google books and limited the date of publication. Google Books is probably the best part of the internet.
Thanks.
It's possible that the phenomenon he is referring to is dermo-optical perception (I vaguely remembered the concept but had to Google to find out the exact term):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dermo-optical_perception
That is, that certain people have a psychic ability to 'see' with organs other than the eyes (usually the fingers/hands by placing them on objects and 'reading' their history):
"Dermo-optical perception (DOP) — also known as dermal vision, dermo-optics, eyeless sight, eyeless vision, skin vision, skin reading, finger vision, paroptic vision, para-optic perception, cutaneous perception, digital sight, and bio-introscopy — is a term that is used in parapsychological literature to denote the alleged capability to perceive colors, differences in brightness, and/or formed images through the skin (without using the eyes, as distinct from blindsight), especially upon touching with the fingertips.
Typically, people who claim to have dermo-optical perception claim to be able to see using the skin of their fingers or hands. People who claim to have DOP often demonstrate it by reading while blindfolded. The effect has not been demonstrated scientifically."
It might be that Salmon is poking fun at the idea by using 'the pit of the stomach' rather than 'the hands'. Or there might be some confusion with psychometry as well, the claimed ability to 'read' the history of an object by touch:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychometry_(paranormal)
There's a phenomenon called Riddoch's Syndrome where people who have no detectable activity in their retina or optic nerves, being able to distinguish the shapes of large objects without touching them and making judgement as to colors of the objects — but either they or the objects had to be moving.
Of course there's that experiment where a fellow implanted a dense set of electrodes under the derma his back. He connected them to a device with Internet access to a site that was continuously displaying weather maps. And he came to "see" the developing weather patterns in his mind.
From a book entitled: _Dream Land and Ghost Land: Visits and Wanderings There in the Nineteenth Century_, By Edwin Paxton Hood, published 1851. From a chapter entitled "Seeing with the Stomach"...
"There is another remarkable phenomenon to which a few words may be devoted. Persons who read in a state of somnambulism, it is know, read from the pit of the stomach. Dr. Kerner says, 'I gave Mrs. Hauffe two pieces of paper, carefully folded, on one of which I had secretly written, 'There is a God," and on the other, 'There is no God.' I put them into her left hand, when she was apparently awake, and asked her if she felt any difference between the. After a pause, she returned to me the first, and said, 'This gives me a sensation, and the other feels like a void." I repeated the experiment four times and always with the same result...'"
Paxton then recounts other similar experiments done while people were hypnotized (assuming sonambulism equates to hypnotism and not just sleep walking).
Interesting. This must be where we get the term "gut feeling".
It reminds me of an ethnography I read in college where an Amazonian shaman informant explained to the anthropologist author how he could tell whether a plant was harmless, poisonous, or had psychotropic properties by holding it close to his stomach.
Thanks very much for posting this. I appreciate it.
The pdf of my book "Evidence-based software engineering based on the publicly available data" was released under a creative commons license. I investigated the possibility of producing a paper version, but the extensive use of color and the A4 size made it look difficult.
Somebody has taken the trouble to produce a paperback version and make it available on Amazon at a reasonable price. I bought a copy, it looks fantastic and feels good in the hand to read.
Looks interesting, ordered!
https://twitter.com/shoe0nhead/status/1518006583187456006/photo/1
FaceApp morph of all Democratic Senators ("what if John Hickenlooper was a cannibal") and all Republican Senators ("what if Bob Katter was the smuggest individual on the planet") is *extremely* evocative of Paul Fussell's chart distinguishing upper-middle from prole that Scott posted in his book review. Once you get past that they made the faces eerie and demonic.
Man watching Shoe become a Bernie bro was quite amusing. Something fun to offset feeling bad every time he lost. She wasn't exactly right wing before but kinda.
There's definitely a strong resemblance to that image, but the median Republican senator doesn't look prole to me; he looks like the president of the yacht club.
Still, "Republican face" and "Democrat face" are definitely a thing, and somewhat orthogonal to class-based physiognomy, which is also a thing. Could it be a testosterone thing? A thicker jaw immediately makes you look 50% more Republican.
One of the things I noticed in the US, when I lived there, was that there are conservative and liberal voices. Particularly on radio. You could tell 90% of the time, a callers politics, by the timbre of the voice. Deeper = more conservative.
The redness of the combined faces makes me think of the English term "gammon" (recently revived as an insult for Brexit):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gammon_(insult)
"The archetype of a red-faced, angry, pompous, jingoistic, and stereotypically British right-wing male has been in present in popular culture since the mid-20th century, with the character Colonel Blimp first appearing in 1934, in newspaper cartoons and in the film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp in 1948"
So not prole, middle-class, but not college-professional type middle class.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonel_Blimp
"Colonel Blimp is a British cartoon character by cartoonist David Low, first drawn for Lord Beaverbrook's London Evening Standard in April 1934. Blimp is pompous, irascible, jingoistic, and stereotypically British, identifiable by his walrus moustache and the interjection "Gad, Sir!"
Low claimed that he developed the character after overhearing two military men in a Turkish bath declare that cavalry officers should be entitled to wear their spurs inside tanks. The character was named after the barrage balloon, which was known as a blimp."
To be honest, I’m dubious about this. Average faces tend to get better looking and trend towards the norm. These are caricature.
Vernon Dursley is probably the best modern example.
How did that Democrat end up so definitively white male, when 1/3 of the Democratic senators are women, and 6 are non-white? And how did the Democrat end up so much toothier than the Republican when the same number of them seem to be showing teeth in their official photos?
I think Eugene Norman's got it right: it's a fake.
Role of concussion/mTBI in culture: maybe some human behaviors which are sometimes thought of as learned or modeled, actually originated as a response to mild traumatic brain injury? I'm thinking specifically of some models of "masculinity" but also general ideas of mental wellness.
Over a decade ago I had basically an undiagnosed mTBI. It delivered a very unexpected plus: I was no longer emotionally oversensitive. All the feels that got wrapped up into other people's lives were suddenly gone, replaced with a cheerful peacefulness. Unburdened from the over-consciousness of other people, I went about making decisions to benefit me & my kids, and life has gotten immeasurably better. The downside: several years of forgetting words, disappearing thoughts, misspeaking, getting lost, headaches, difficulty writing, loss of sensitivity to others' feelings when it might matter, balance problems, etc.
The speech bit especially was very trying. But the emotional upside was profound.
Since then I have begun to wonder if humanity is actually optimized for receiving very mild brain injury. Just enough of a bonk on the head that that tremendous oversensitiveness goes away. Perhaps evolutionarily, if males were more likely to get blows to the head, maybe the uncommunicative, unfeeling man with occasional rage derives from mTBI symptoms, and entered culture as a recognition of the way "men are," being the way men become after they are hit in the head often enough, generally as boys.
And now that we are much more careful physically, we get far fewer concussions in general, and that extra layer of emotional sensitivity is not removed, leading to all kinds of mental health problems (for some people) but also requiring skill sets which really are new across large populations - because before about 100 years ago, people in general would have largely lacked the sensitiveness to use those skills. Especially people who did a lot of heavy work leading to head injuries.
Of course for some people there is no upside to a concussion. But I think considering groups of people, especially for the "stereotypes of masculinity" part, there's explanatory power.
It seems pretty darn unlikely to me that the cogs of evolutionary biology turned in such a way as to require an ideal amount of brain damage for optimal functioning. Why wouldn't evolution just optimize for concussion resiliency? Are you sure that the concussion was causal in your emotional improvements? People more often have emotional dysregulation following a traumatic brain injury due to higher level structures controlling emotional inhibition being damaged.
There's a general phenomenon of the optimal amount of stressors for biological systems being small, but nonzero. "Hormesis" is the name.
Without thinking too hard about it, the intuitive story I tell myself is that when stressors can't easily be eliminated through evolution (or it's too costly below some level), other optimisations evolution is doing take place in the context of that small amount of the stressor remaining and thus become reliant on it to some extent. It's a local optimum, not a global one, and moving the stressor toward a more global optimum might decrease fitness until other parameters have time to be optimised in the new, low-stressor context.
E.g. if evolution was optimising for emotionality in the context of some hard-to-avoid stressor dulling the emotions, it would set the level a little higher than the optimum so that in the context of the stressor it would come out about right.
Hormesis is a favorite word of mine. Understanding hormetic stress and the associated dose-response curve is certainly useful. I don't see it as evolutionary laziness or energy conservation so much as a mechanism for biological systems to adapt to their unique environment. The issue with the hormesis argument in the context of brain injury is that we know very clearly that brain injury is associated with greater emotional distress rather than less. The higher level brain structures are the least insulated and thus the most vulnerable to damage. I don't see any mechanism whereby damaging higher level brain structures improves emotional regulation.
It's pretty common for organisms that undergo a certain amount of environmental damage to eventually develop processes that only work well if they do in fact undergo that environmental damage. The obvious example is trees whose seeds only germinate in fires, but the way the human immune system becomes allergic if it doesn't receive enough early childhood practice fighting actual invaders seems relevant.
> All the feels that got wrapped up into other people's lives were suddenly gone, replaced with a cheerful peacefulness. Unburdened from the over-consciousness of other people, I went about making decisions to benefit me & my kids, and life has gotten immeasurably better
Are you sure that this was concussion-related? I've had a similar transformation without any head knocks, and I attribute it just to age, maturity and fatherhood.
That’s good to hear :)
Day-of, I didn’t realize what it would lead to, I just felt oddly undisturbed by dynamics that had been upsetting only the day before. The abruptness made me notice the difference. Maybe the difference it made was positive for me because I was much too far over to the wrong side of compassionateness.
I think humans are pretty well adapted for concussion resilience, I don’t know how much better it can get. But it’s not that good, we still get concussed. If all or nearly all people sustained at least one mild concussion, over time that would constitute an evolutionary pressure. People who had any compassion left after getting hit in the head might have been the ones with too much to start with. They might outcompete others in that landscape.
And it wouldn’t have to be extreme blows to the head. Successive smaller impacts can ding a person for sure. It’s the type of thing we might not have historical records of medically, it would have to be estimated from child abuse records and child labor accidents.
Thinking that widespread concussion could have an impact on culture is one thing. The added theory that maybe lack of getting hit upside the head is actually a big problem - that’s definitely harder to prove and yes, might be totally wrong.
The idea that maybe now society is less concussed than we’ve ever been, so we have to develop some new skill sets, that I can buy into.
Oh shit do I have the relevant video for you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyyjU8fzEYU
Apparently getting a stroke makes you enlightened.
My personal guess would be that damage to certain parts of the brain (amygdala?) makes you more chill, and damage to others makes you less chill, but we only ever hear about the first because it's surprising.
Thanks for posting this - I should be able to watch it later - but I think you’re right about the brain region affecting whether it goes the more chill or the less chill direction (or some of both).
It seems more likely to me that you simply got a bit lucky. You were fairly high in neuroticism, maybe with an undiagnosed anxiety disorder which was significantly hindering your life. If you'll indulge a very mechanical analogy: a TBI is like hitting a rotary ball bearing with a hammer; you'll get a few flats on the balls where they impacted one of the races so the whole thing will be a BIT more clunky, but it can also knock loose a ball that was binding up on one of the races and free it to spin again. (And, indeed, hitting a seized-up ball-bearing with a hammer is occasionally useful in repair in spite of the immediate damage from it.)
I suspect TBIs are very similar to ECT in this way. ECT seems to simulate a minimally-destructive TBI; minor temporary amnesia, etc., but all the firmly-embedded brain patterns get shaken up and are able to reform (potentially into a better equilibrium.)
I like the ball bearing repair/hammer metaphor. I think mechanical analogies are very useful (for me anyway.) And yes to the comparison with ECT.
prediction: if this theory is true then otherwise similar men from areas with similar levels of athletism but different sports of choice will have different levels of mental health.
that is, we would expecta a pro football player and a pro basketball player to be similar psychologically, but if the football players were systmatically more stable, this would support your theory.
I agree - I think it might be really hard to sort this geographically now, because so many sports are so widespread, but yes, I think there would be a correlation.
Unless the ones that matter are the concussions in childhood, in which case it would matter what sports men played as children/youth.
I think you would expect there to be an optimal amount of traumatic brain injury, and you would expect the average modern person to be below it, and the average professional football player to be above it. Not clear who would be close to the evolutionary optimum.
Clumsy people at the optimum?
Yes, with location on the head, direction & intensity of force, as well as frequency, being part of that optimization.
Agreed it is not clear who would be at the evolutionary optimum.
TBI's more frequently involve increased emotional instability because they tend to occur in ways that damage the forebrain or washboard the limbic system. You got lucky.
It’s possible I’m looking at this sideways, and society in general is generally more concussed due to automobile travel now, not less, and that that is influencing the increase in mental health diagnoses. So yes.
TBI's have increased because we've gotten better at reducing the impact of accidents and injuries, especially motor vehicle and military related, from something that would cause death to something that causes head injury. There's also more awareness leading to more diagnosis.
Motor vehicle accident induced TBI's have a common front to back, coup contrecoup, pattern that typically leads to reduced executive function and emotional instability. This does the opposite of the effects you report in yourself. I'm not denying your personal experience, but I think you should consider that your case isn't typical and the side-effect you report is fortunate.
I'm in no place to diagnose you from a brief description online, but your quick and dirty summary suggests a temporal lobe injury. Just understand that when people suffer brain injuries, this is not the only way it happens.
You’re right, I’m lucky. I also posed too many questions in the initial post.
I had a couple of bad concussions as a kid, and that list of symptoms - callousness included - all seem like tings that have affected me.... Really makes on think how much of what we consider our very selves is caused by external forces
I appreciate the observation.
I started this train of thought trying to understand why “talk” therapies work - some people are able to intentionally “let go” and others find it much harder. I began to wonder if some people were able to fall back on “beneficial callousness” in ways that others were not. Then I began to wonder why some had that beneficial callousness and others did not or couldn’t use it.
I think some of the “just get over it”- type mental health advice derived from eras where people probably did get more TBIs, and “just get over it” might be more directly stated as “why does this still bother you,” ie, haven’t you had your concussions yet. Which also matches the association of being unable to get over something, with being inexperienced or naive (un-concussed.) It’s probably not the only mechanism but I think it’s going on.
I had a similar experience with a mild TBI, though mine was very mild (I never lost consciousness, though I was somewhat woozy for an hour). I also think I became less emotionally sensitive, less neurotic, etc. though I never had problems with memory, word finding difficulties, etc.
Hard to distinguish from just growing up / puberty.
I think there’s a possibility that it’s a widespread experience. But yes, we don’t usually track these medically or statistically and I think we are discouraged from tracking ourselves emotionally to the extent that the before-and-after would be revealed in data. Maybe there’s a huge longitudinal data set somewhere that a study could be made with, where we already have lots of baselines and then several thousand could agree to symptom tracking and journaling. Then some number of them would probably get sub clinical TBI (and a smaller number mTBI, etc) and the after effects of sub-clinical TBI might be visible.
Where you were woozy, that counts, that registers on the “symptoms of concussion” lists.
TWCW:
Would you consider the Russian people more culpable for ignoring the atrocities in Ukraine, given that the information is available to anyone interested, internet censorship or not, compared to, say, German people in WWII, who generally had no idea about the death camps, only about their Jewish neighbors suddenly disappearing from the neighborhood?
Or, say, compared to the American people not knowing much about several massacres in Vietnam/Afghanistan/Iraq (e.g. the Haditha massacre)? Or, in an increasingly controversial order, to some of the actions of the IDF in the occupied territories.
I would like to explicitly exclude things like encouraging the local forces to commit atrocities by giving them financial or military aid, since it gets very murky in a hurry. So, no Sabra & Shatila, no actions by US-financed militias, no actions by Luhansk/Donetsk forces, etc. Probably not worth going further back in time and looking into British actions in SA, or Belgian in Congo.
I'm asking because Germans are brought up to feel collective guilt for the WWII atrocities and for not having done anything to stop it, and it seems to work well so far, though the effects are slowly fading, as the last the death camp survivors pass away. On the other hand, Russians and other allied soldiers (but especially the Russians) committed rape and often crimes against civilians during the liberation of Europe, but it is never a big topic of discussion... not even in Germany. And it is not just winners vs losers, since the Japanese people, nominally the losers, don't feel remorse for whatever Japanese forces did in China, even though it was on par with what Germans did in Europe.
The vast majority of Americans seem to have no trouble ignoring our atrocities in the Middle East, the scope of which Russia has yet to eclipse in the Ukraine conflict. I don't think the availability of information matters much. Cultural and historical conditions seem to matter far more.
"the scope of which Russia has yet to eclipse in the Ukraine conflict"
Quantitatively or qualitatively, or both? I can believe numerically more people may have been involved over the many years of Iraq and Afghanistan, but was there much deliberate rape, torture and execution of civilians?
And did the USA kill 15% of the population of Afghanistan or Irak ? Because that's what happenned in Chechen.
Sorry for a nitpick: Chechen is an adjective. The region is called Chechnya.
Wiki says 25,000 to 100,000 since 1999 - not all would be Russian killings. So your 15% is too high. In actual numbers it’s estimated that about 1 million died in Iraq since 2003.
That's an important correction, but it's also worth clarifying that your numbers there aren't directly comparable either. We need to distinguish the two types of blame here. There's an important moral difference between deaths that we directly caused, and those that would not have happened if he hadn't invaded. That is: we're far more morally culpable for deaths due to US troops (collateral damage, deliberate murder/rape, etc.) than for deaths due to intra-Iraq sectarian violence unleashed by taking down Saddam.
In either case the deaths were (in some sense) caused by the US, but the second category isn't parallel to the deaths in Chechnya as I understand it.
I was going to add that not all were attributable to the US, however the figures for Chechnya I quoted from wiki were not all attributable to Russia either. I accept the correction in general thoiugh.
You're not including the First Chechen War?
American troops killed *1 million* Iraqis? That's...I mean, if you're going to exaggerate, I guess you might as well do it by 2-3 orders of magnitude. Why not be bold?
Where did I say that?
I don't believe it was the *policy* of the US military to commit atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan. Officially, Americans were supposed to be winning hearts and minds. However, there certainly were atrocities, like the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Graib, and individuals like Edward Gallagher, a Navy SEAL who reportedly would shoot at Iraqi civilians for fun.
Well, it is probably not an official policy of Russia to massacre civilians. Though they seem to do it a lot and on a large scale, with balaclavas and what not. But the US military, not just rogue individuals, is not without blame, either:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haditha_massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishaqi_incident
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Mosul_airstrike
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Shinwar_shooting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narang_night_raid
When there is a military force in an occupied or invaded country, atrocities are the default. There is too much of a power differential, and too little goodwill in either direction, between soldier and enemy civilian.
Strict discipline and training can reduce the impact. I suspect the US military puts more emphasis on this than the Russian military, and also that the US military is just more disciplined, period. Nevertheless, it seems impossible to me that any amount of training could improve the relationship between soldiers and an occupied population to, say, how cops and black people in the US feel about each other right now.
You have been spending too much time watching CNN and not enough actually in black neighborhoods[1], if you think your last simple sentence bears any close resemblance to the truth on the ground.
Black people appreciate cops even more than suburban whites -- because they actually live where crime is a serious concern. That's one good reason blacks often serve *as* police officers. (For example, the current racial makeup of the LAPD is 30% white, 50% Hispanic, 9% black, 8% Asian.)
Blacks know very well how important the cop's job is, and they can see it making a diference in their actual lives much more than a young white person at a nice college in a safe town participating in her first march for racial justice.
It is also nevertheless also true that blacks are picked out for police surveillance and inquiry at much higher rates than non-blacks, and that can piss them off even when they get the reason for it. So the relationship is definitely fraught, and complicated. But it in no way resembles the trivial black-and-white (so to speak) cartoon that pundits on the tube offer for entertainment purposes.
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[1] Yes, I've personally lived in a neighborhood that was majority working-class black.
Rape? Probably not. Torture and execution? The military obviously claims they didn't do these things deliberately, but there was and continues to be so goddamned much of it that I simply don't believe them.
I’d add that American involvement in Vietnam to Iraq has drawn enormous public opposition and protests, so I wouldn’t say Americans have no problem ignoring those atrocities. Sure it’s legal to protest in the US but Russia is no Soviet Union or China either, I expected more visible opposition despite the circumstances
It may be legal to protest in Russia, but you can't say that there is a "war", because that comes with 15 years prison time.
You probably can protest against a "special anti-Nazi operation" though.
Didn't someone get into trouble for having a blank sign?
If we're comparing the US war on Iraq and Afghanistan to the Russian war on Ukraine, I think the rate of killing and destruction should be included.
> the scope of which Russia has yet to eclipse in the Ukraine conflict
Christ, they only invaded two months ago, and directly killed probably ~10,000 civilians so far. So ~5,000 per month... and ~$63 billion in property damage in just one month.
Shared beliefs and cultural assumptions can make either atrocities or human rights more or less likely, but no individual is responsible for the crimes of another, nor should he/she be expected to feel guilt for another’s actions. I would avoid the expectation of collective remorse, or the assignment of collective blame to individuals not involved in the action.
Taxpayers are financing these alleged atrocities. Does that not make them culpable?
No. Christ was right when he said “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's.” We live in a world with governments but the government isn’t us. “We the people” is a nice aspiration for the government, not a moral albatross for the populace to carry.
Does that rule only apply to states, or also to other organizations? I.e. may one blamelessly render unto Nestlé what is theirs even if doing so supports atrocities? How about choosing to support fledgling states, such as the Islamic State a few years back – completely blameless?
A key distinction is that one is not putting oneself in legal risk by not giving money to Nestle.
I think emigration can be done without much legal risk.
I think will and intent make a difference for culpability.
In law, it would be referred to as oblique intent when one performs an action not because of the harm it causes (which would be direct intent) but despite the harm it causes, and one would be culpable for it. Would you disagree with that legal principle?
As tax money is extracted from the tax payer by threat of force no matter what the person feels about the policy being funded and even in a representative democracy there is no way to direct your funds away from any particular policy (even aside from the fact that money is fungible) attributing moral weight to tax payer status is silly. This is even more true in a dictatorship such as Russia where there is not even the Figleaf of representation.
Political representation has nothing to do with my argument. Tens of thousands of Russians have decided to emigrate since the start of the war. Tens of millions have chosen to stay and to thus keep supporting the war financially.
Emigrating is very hard, especially for poor people. Even from a utilitarian standpoint, the suffering one imposes on oneself and one's family likely exceeds the reduction in revenue to the state.
Poor people tend to be a drain on the state, so they're not all that relevant. I don't think "by harming them, I gained more than they lost" is usually considered a valid reason to avoid culpability for that harm, and I think considering it as such would lead to massive problems.
There is a secondary effect of this attitude that I feel cautious about. If people are more culpable the more they know, does this discourage them from learning?
It actually does, you are right. This article (in Russian, but Google translate does a passable job) talks about it. https://meduza.io/feature/2022/04/24/voyti-vo-mrak-i-naschupat-v-nem-lyudey
Very interesting - I agree that wilful ignorance is the best defence mechanism against the knowledge that our side is perpetrating atrocities, and the human brain is a fabulous confabulation device.
Knowledge of the Holocaust was probably widespread in Nazi Germany, even among regular people. Claims of ignorance should count very little given the incentive to lie and the official rhethorics which made little secret of the state's murderous intents.
Strangely, there is still an ongoing debate about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_of_the_Holocaust_in_Nazi_Germany_and_German-occupied_Europe
Odds are, people who didn't want to know about death camps and gas chambers didn't know, and they were very much incentivised not to want to know, given the situation (wartime, totalitarianism, pervasive surveillance). There was definitely very little knowledge of the big picture of the Holocaust, as an industrial-scale genocide. My original point is that the information was not as readily available to an average German then as it is to an average Russian now.
Well, certainly the Russian people who actually pulled triggers that snuffed children or civilians in Ukraine, or who knowingly ordered others to do that, are culpable, in my opinion, and I'd be happy to see them hanged to the last man. No excuses, no "I was just following orders" bullshit. Nuremberg rules.
The Russian people who actively work for the regime and its forces, if they have any kind of realistic choice, would also bear culpability by me. If there were war crimes trials afterward and they were all sent to prison for 10 years, that would OK by me. Anyone who's worn a Z since Bucha can sit in a cold prison cell and eat moldy bread for 5 years for all I care.
All other Russians? Different, and complicated. It's difficult to probe a man's heart, and if the only unmistakable evidence of dissent is participating in a revolution -- an exceedingly dangerous thing -- then most of us, anywhere, are not such angels as would pass, so I refrain from judgment there. On the other hand, if harm befalls Russians in this category, collateral damage from sanctions or being shut out of Western ideas and markets for a generation, or having Russia fall further into gangsterism and misery, that wouldn't especially bother me either -- I would not lift a finger to stop it. So...somewhere between guilty and fully innocent.
It might be different if I saw some evidence of massive domestic outrage -- I mean, every time American soldiers have been caught behaving badly in the past 75 years or so, you get a ton of highly visible outrage among Americans. People yell and march, write angry letters, go on TV and shake their fists. Politicians lose elections, officers are court-martialed, careers are ruined. You can easily tell most of us don't like it, and bitterly resent it having happened under the Stars 'n' Stripes, even if there are the usual shitheads and weasel politicians bleating out mealy-mouthed defenses. Maybe something like that is going on in Russia, but so far I'm not seeing it.
I'm also curious what you mean by any sense of inculcated guilt in Germans having "worked." Worked how? Prevented Germany from starting another world war? One would imagine being occupied and having a nuclear-armed behemoth (the US) looking over your shoulder all the time would be more than enough to do that anyway. What else? In another world one might imagine the German people as a result of this alleged sense of guilt becoming passionate champions of the rights of minorities everywhere, or at least of the Jews, being more willing that most other nations to put their own lives on the line to defend people being oppressed by a state all over the world -- but I wouldn't say that has happened. The German response to Black September was shameful. I don't recall any strong German response to Rwanda, or for that matter to Prague 1968. When a people finally took a real stand against Soviet European oppression, at great risk to themselves, it turned out to be the Poles who had the balls.
That doesn't mean I think the Germans have fallen short of any other random nation, just that I don't see any concrete "extra" that happened over the past 80 years that one might plausibly attribute to collective guilt over what happened in the Second World War, and I'm curious what you see that I don't.
I guess the main thing is that Germans are very aware of what their country did that was wrong and criminal in WWII, though mostly as it relates to the death camps. And there is plenty of collective guilt, at least as far as Jews are concerned, just ask a regular German. It definitely expresses itself as an extreme reluctance to go against Israel, as paying compensation to the descendants of the Jews killed or displaced during WWII, and as a general reluctance to interfere in military conflicts abroad. An average American, British, Russian or French would not be nearly as willing to admit that their country committed atrocities sanctioned by their government.
Yeah, I had been wondering ... To the extent to which it holds true, that Germans are more aware than others, I think it relates both
- to very specific historic developments : a very conscious denazification effort by the winning powers. Look for 4 D. I'm not sure that took place in any other country at the time? And then later the 68 movement, which in Germany was linked a lot to the question of what the parents generation had done during Nazi time.
- and to the enormity of the crime. Imagine you - or your parents for that sake - were driving drunk and killed 3 persons including a child. Or you - or your parents - were driving drunk and hit another persons parking car. If you're a more or less decent person, the first incident will somehow impact you and force you to deal with this. With the second one, it's easier to just put this aside as a 'oops, not optimal' and try to forget about it. ... I'm *not* trying to compare this to any specific atrocities, my point is rather: the holocoust was so enourmous a crime, that it was getting difficult at least for the childrens generation not to deal with it. I think the context was also conducive as this childrens generation was living in comparitively good circumsstances, and with nobody blaming them.
Didn't the American-imposed German constitution outlaw foreign military conflicts? I know the Japanese one did. That seems relevant in the discussion of German willingness to get involved in such a conflict.
An interesting assertion, that last, but at least with respect to average Americans, of whom I know quite a few, I find it quite implausible.
I'm also a bit baffled by why a sense of guilt should have as its major concrete consequence a reluctance to interfere in military conflicts abroad. Are you suggesting that otherwise Germany *might* have? Like...where? When...?
Generally speaking, I feel like most First World interventions well beyond their borders since 1945 can be classified as colonial powers intervening in their erstwhile colonies (e.g. the French in Indochina), superpower proxy conflicts (Korea, Vietnam), or World Cop aspirations (the US in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Lebanon, and Afghanistan, et cetera). Germany doesn't fit into any of those categories -- it had no significant colonial assets, never was a superpower, and for that same reason couldn't plausibly play World Cop. So...what foreign conflict *might* the Bundeswehr have got into, had German guilt over the Second World War not prevented it?
>German people in WWII, who generally had no idea about the death camps, only about their Jewish neighbors suddenly disappearing from the neighborhood?
They didn't have any Jewish neighbours by the time of the Holocaust proper. The Jews were in ghettos.
>And it is not just winners vs losers, since the Japanese people, nominally the losers, don't feel remorse for whatever Japanese forces did in China, even though it was on par with what Germans did in Europe.
In Japan, the Reverse Course put the ultranationalists back in charge as part of Cold War realpolitik, and unsurprisingly since a bunch of them were war criminals they went to a lot of trouble to hush up the whole affair. Germany was never "renazified" to the same extent (which is actually the unusual part).
Ghettos were often times implemented in the occupied territories in Central and Eastern Europe, but not so in the 'Reich' itself.
That's what I learned and I quickly checked with some sources (in German): https://www.bpb.de/themen/nationalsozialismus-zweiter-weltkrieg/geheimsache-ghettofilm/141448/ghettos-in-osteuropa-definitionen-strukturen-funktionen/
https://www.holocaust.cz/de/geschichte/endloesung/general/die-ghettoisierung-der-juedischen-bevoelkerung/
There is also an statement on a related Wiki-page saying they were discussed, but dismissed ... I don't know more about this. 'Bereits unmittelbar nach den Novemberpogromen 1938 erwog Hermann Göring die Einrichtung von Ghettos. Reinhard Heydrich hielt jedoch eine polizeiliche Überwachung dort für schwierig; er empfahl eine Unterbringung in Judenhäusern und rechnete dabei mit einer Kontrolle „durch das wachsame Auge der gesamten Bevölkerung“.[8] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judenhaus
> the information is available to anyone interested, internet censorship or not
Sadly, propaganda is rampant. I would expect some claims of war crimes in the media even if none had happened. I assume Russian media makes similar claims about Ukrainians (maybe not in those exact terms, since it's a "special operation" and not a war...). It's easy to dismiss everything as misinformation, and as discussed below there's a temptation to avoid going looking for the truth.
As someone who's been professionally involved with rumours, allegations, evidence, investigations, trials, etc. of such episodes, and especially because this is a rationalist site, I would urge everyone to be extremely, extremely careful about accepting any of the numerous conflicting accusations about Ukraine at face value. For at least thirty years now, allegations of this sort have been used as weapons of war, normally with the intention of either gaining sympathy and promoting intervention from an outside power, or confirming support among one's own population. In the West, little of what is being said in the region, and reported there and in the media in India or the Middle East, is available to us, but Russian TV has been showing horrifying pictures of massacres, decapitated Russian soldiers and confessions from perpetrators. This, too, needs to be treated with just as much care. (There are, of course a host of technical and forensic issues as well: for example, neither "civilian" nor "atrocity" is a legal term. And a single soldier executed after surrendering is a crime, whereas ten "civilians" killed when a missile goes off course or is destroyed in flight, isn't).
Atrocity stories tend to be believed or not depending on the extent to which they confirm stereotypes of others that you hold yourself. The classic example is Goebbels's use of the stereotype of the savage, brutal Russian, in the last-ditch propaganda effort to encourage the Wehrmacht not to surrender in 1945. That was the origin, among other things, of the "rape as a weapon of war" meme, which has had a long and active existence since. Historians who have been through the records have since shown that Soviet commanders actually did was they could to restrain their troops, though not always successfully. By contrast, and irrespective of evidence, we generally disbelieve accusations made against out own people, because we have our own stereotypes of ourselves. (The exception, of course, is when we are politically opposed to the war in the first place, in which case we might believe anything).
But more generally, in my experience it is futile and even dangerous to apply models of racial guilt to events that definitely happened a long time ago, and even those that may or may not have happened recently. Crimes are ordered and committed by individuals, not racial stereotypes. Ironically, of course, the impulse for this kind of thinking comes from the Bible itself, when the Jews are shown taking responsibility for the death of Jesus: "His blood be upon us and our children" (Matthew, 27,25). Has any single sentence in history ever had such terrible consequences?
"Historians who have been through the records have since shown that Soviet commanders actually did was they could to restrain their troops, though not always successfully."
I would avoid falling back on the nebulous figures of "historians", who of course have their own biases.
Who else could one possibly fall back upon? The alternative is to believe what one wants. Of course there are bad histories written by bad historians, but some good ones have carefully examined the available evidence and concluded as noted.
> That was the origin, among other things, of the "rape as a weapon of war" meme, which has had a long and active existence since. Historians who have been through the records have since shown that Soviet commanders actually did was they could to restrain their troops, though not always successfully.
What I heard from my parents' generation was that Russians raped lots of women even in the allied territories they liberated. (Then during communism it was illegal to talk about it.) The average Russian soldier probably had no idea what country he was currently in.
The Russians think these are false flags. And who knows? We won’t know the reality of this war for years, if ever. Journalism is limited everywhere, to a certain extent. It’s not like the war in Yemen makes the news in the US, although the US is both a passive and active participant in a fairly nasty regional war with significant civilian casualties, and child starvation.
It's an interesting question. I have been defending ordinary Russians in the current situation - in my mind mostly - and then a couple of times, I thought: wait, if you think the Russians are not responsible, why do you think the Germans were? Or vice versa. I grew up in Germany, and I certainly think there was a responsibility.
Part of me just notes this as a contradiction that I will deal with when I have more time. But also, in my view there is an imporant point to consider: Who is talking about whose guilt or responsibility.
I think it's a good thing when Germans take their responsibility - or those of their ancestors - seriously.
And broader, in my mind, I congratulate every nation, whenever they are able to seriously deal with their past issues, small or big, and take responsibility.
But this is something very different than to blame others. In this way, I will be happy if Russians see their responsibility - but I don't support others blaming every ordinary Russian citizen for this war. Especially if the blaming is done from 'the sofa' by persons who might not have the courage or whatever needed for a critical stance themselves.
Intuitively I agree with the idea that they should self-recognize, rather than being condemned from the outside (civilian populations, not those who are directly involved or actually committed the atrocities). That said, there's probably a very good reason that Germans today talk about and admit the atrocities, while Soviet atrocities didn't affect their own civilian populations - Germany was conquered and was forced to recognize what happened, while the Soviets were not.
Japan is a bit of an odd case there, but the atrocities were committed in China, and China was enmeshed in a civil war right after WWII, which may have a lot to do with it.
I had already written a comment about the situation being specific in Germany, somewhere above or below, depends ;). I think the point you mentioned is at least one of the factors. Though my understanding is, that the generation right after the war - the one 'forced to recognize' as you say - rather didn't really do so, and the societal change came later.
I think there are essentially three ways a Russian can approach the current situation:
1. Actively protest. This takes guts and is not likely to bring any change unless massively coordinated (which is hard to do in current Russia). It is very brave and should be commended but it is definitely not something one can ask Russians to do.
2. stay silent without showing any support of the war. This should be the default, the minimum expected. not a sign of bravery but like you said, that is something that cannot be required "from the sofa".
3. support the war. This I believe is actually a reason for blame. Russian government is openly talking about their plans for Ukraine after the "military operation" which are basically a carbon copy of Nazi plans for the Slavic peoples in the Lebensraum in the east. It is just pure evil, Heydrich would be proud. Unless you are so brainwashed by the Russian propaganda as to believe that Ukrainians are all basically members of the SS, this is still completely unacceptable.
Btw, off topic, but since you were looking for good sources about the war in Ukraine, I recently found this youtube channel. It is run by an Australian guy who does not want to disclose a whole lot about his job and other personal info but who apparently knows quite a lot about military economy and logistics. Especially his latest two videos (about the long term outlooks of the war) are very insightful. They also drive home quite effectively how much of an advantage NATO has over Russia economically. It is not even the same scale. If the war keeps going for months and if the NATO support of Ukraine stays or ramps up a bit, Russia simply cannot realistically win, not even close. It is quite astonishing and watching that lessened my frustration with the stranglehold Russia has on the NATO due to its nuclear arsenal. The economy of NATO countries (and other western allies) is able to grind the Russian state to dust over time with just a little bit of sweat, no need for direct invasions. And judging by today's comments by the American secretary of defense, I'd say this is exactly what at least the US aims to do (and the US is a half of total NATO economic power). Of course, a long war is not ideal, but it does not look like Russia will settle for anything reasonable otherwise (at least as long as Putin is still president).
Even just increasing the military budget to 2% of the GPD in all NATO countries, which they pledged to do anyway, and sending the difference to Ukraine would let Ukraine have a larger military budget than Russia. And increasing even further to say the US spending during the Vietnam war would give Ukraine a larger military budget than the entire Russian GDP (this won't happen of course, but it illustrates the point quite effectively). All those huge Russian reserves are also not nearly as easy to mobilize as it may seem (a lot of the equipment is probably mothballed and as long as Russia insist that it is not fighting a war, it cannot really legally mobilize most of the reservists...plus reservists are simply all men that underwent basic military training or were in the army in the last 5 years, not all are really combat ready).
Anyway, this is the channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCC3ehuUksTyQ7bbjGntmx3Q
Hi Tibor, thanks for the info about the channel!
Yeah, there is a huge difference between "I don't want to discuss politics, because I don't know which sources to trust, and also I am afraid of being punished by police or my neighbors" and... well, being a Russian Nazi.
Btw., what's TWCW?
"Trigger Warning: Culture War", I think.
I'd rather not have this acronym. Too niche. A warning is not useful to those who can't parse it.
Ah, thanks! Good to know. I guess I might not have read the post in that case. I didn't realize I participated in a culture war topic.
Yeah, doesn't seem very common.
Thanks - that would have been helpful for OP to explain indeed. It really wasn't a clear warning.
I guess I'm on my way of catching up on typicial (?) abbreviations used here. What's OP?
Oops - I should have been careful about that, particularly in a post about me not understanding acronyms! "OP" means "Original Post" (though it's sometimes ambiguous about whether it refers to the main post at the top that all the comments are on, or the first comment in the thread that the current comment is in).
Thanks!
And sometimes it refers to the person who wrote it, the "original poster". Usually you can distinguish the OP from the OP's OP using context.
How do you feel about the US backed conflict in Yemen? https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-29319423
The comparison of post-1945 Germany and Japan is not particularly apt, the differences were huge. For all the dehumanizing stereotypes that the Japanese had of Chinese and Koreans, for all the monstrosities, enslavement and rape that Japanese soldiers committed there, the Japanese had never undertaken a systematic extermination of those peoples.
That, plus the Japanese public was potentially disinclined to take moral lessons from the US occupiers after the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the firebombing of Tokyo.
People comparing the current-day war crimes committed by Russians in Ukraine to those that had been committed by the Nazis, do not have the inkling of the beginning of an idea what the f they are talking about.
Nonsense. Nobody in 1945 thought there was anything especially immoral about nuking Hiroshima. Leveling cities from the air was par for the course in those days, and atomic bombs were just a considerably more efficient way of doing what Curtis LeMay had already been doing across the entire country. Considering it some kind of nuclear Rubicon was a massive 1960s-70s era retcon.
>Nobody in 1945 thought there was anything especially immoral about nuking Hiroshima. Leveling cities from the air was par for the course in those days, and atomic bombs were just a considerably more efficient way
Nonsense, if I may borrow the term. Yes, I know that the USAF firebombings killed over 200.000 Japanese civilians, which is more than the two subsequent nukes did. The preceding Japanese bombings in China had killed an order of magnitude fewer civilians than that, and yet it was widely considered to be "not okay".
LeMay had said "I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal." He won the war, and therefore him having burned to death hundreds of thousands of civilians, was fine. I get that. But yet I wonder, what did LeMay mean with that "if I had lost" sentence? Is there any chance that LeMay might have had a better idea of what was considered immoral in 1945 than you do?
I guess you missed the word "especially" in my first sentence? As I said, the *nuclear* bombings were not considered any more immoral than bombing in general. You do not apparently dispute this point, because you are going on to point out that bombing in general of civilian populations was controversial, if only at the beginning of the war -- one has only to recall the outrage of the world at the German bombings in the Spanish Civil War, cf. Picasso's "Guernica", or consider the outrage even later in the war over Dresden.
It is sadly the case however that by the *end* of the war widespread indiscriminate bombings of civilians had become considerably more accepted (and no doubt in part for the morally squalid reason that the winners employed it, although the Germans after raining a hundred V-1s and V-2s on London, or the Japanese after Nanking, had zero moral standing to complain about it anyway). Few people in the late 40s and early 50s thought it an *unusual* act of war (e.g. like Treblinka) any more.
Certainly LeMay understood 1945 morality better than I. I'm only claiming I understand it (and the meaning of LeMay's statement) better than you.
No I didn't miss the word "especially" in your reply, nor did I use the word "especially" for the nukes when I originally mentioned it alongside the firebombings. *If* you decide to kill civilians by the hundreds of thousands, inside territory which you do not control, then I agree that nukes are obviously a more efficient way to do that than firebombings. (LeMay has burned to death more Japanese civilians than the nukes did - roughly a quarter million). What I disagree with is the *choice* of killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, and I disagree that this was considered as moral even at the time. It dwarfed any Guernicas or V1s or V2s or Dresdens. (yes, the Holocaust was the only thing that it *didn't* dwarf -- in case that "being less bad than the Holocaust" is taken as the threshold for morality?)
I'm not convinced that you understand morality better than I. The Japanese army mass-murdering Chinese civilians is morally wrong. The US army mass-murdering Japanese civilians is - guess what - morally wrong too. (otherwise, it was not an "unusual act of war" for Japanese soldiers to kill Chinese soldiers or for American soldiers to kill Japanese soldiers) Yet there's this persistent framing that the Japanese were morally wrong and the Americans were morally right. Nope. Both were morally wrong; the Americans were merely stronger.
The OP asked why the Japanese had not undergone a moral soul-searching after WWII defeat as the Germans did. Maybe because the German regime had undertaken the systematic extermination of an entire people, and the Japanese regime had not? I mean, it's not like the Japanese had any moral lessons to learn from their occupiers, otherwise...
*Your* opinion on bombing of civilians is not at issue, nor is mine, so most of what you said is irrelevant. The question is whether people in general thought in 1945-55, let us say, that bombing of cities was an unusually immoral act of war. No doubt almost all of them deplored war in general, and violence in general. Not relevant. The question is *if* you have decided war is your only option, is bombing of cities a legitimate way of winning? Most people in that era, for better or worse, decided it was.
If nothing else, you can note the absence of any degree of anguish, debate, or retrospection after the war, the preparation for doing so in any future wars, and in fact the actual use of widespread bombing in later wars. (And there is ample evidence that people felt differently about other techniques of war in the Nuremberg and Japanese war crimes trials, which certainly expressed how people felt about the treatment of prisoners or civilians in occupied territory, and in the treaties on chemical and biological weapons, which expressed how people felt about that.)
Your equation of the Japanese behavior in Manchuria with the American bombing of Japanese cities is moral cardboard, the equivalent of equating a homeowner shooting an intruder to a thug shooting an innocent to steal his wallet, because both are after all deliberate acts of killing.
Japan is a difficult case...the Japanese were even more fanatical then the Hitlerjugend, they would simply fight until the last man. They were willing to kill their families to save resources, all for the Emperor...
Clearly, not all Japanese were like this, but enough of them to leave US with a few precious choices:
1. launch a land war in Japan with extreme casualties on both sides (the US soldiers were conscripts, so they did not sign up for that)
2. bomb japan into submission with conventional weapons (they did this too)
3. Demonstrate their power with the nukes.
4. A peace deal with imperial Japan
Of these, 4 would have lead to least casualties in the short run but it also would have left a fascist power unpunished, with even more hatred towards the US and potentially able to rebuild and endanger the Pacific.
Of the other options, it might be argued that 3 actually saved lives. Fire bombings and generally conventional bombing of Japan ended up killing a lot more people than the two nukes, but there was a lot less shock and awe, so it would probably take a lot more of that for Japan to surrender.
The nukes killed a lot of innocent civilians but probably more would have died in option 1 and 2 (and more US conscripts also). These early nukes were firecrackers compared to modern ICBM warheads and a conventional carpet bombing raid could kill just as many. It was more nasty in the mid-term due to radiation, but otherwise it was not really any worse than what the US was doing already.
Btw, the Japanese were actually quite close to the current Russian behaviour. They were not systematic about their genocide. They did not literally try to kill all the Chinese. But they were trying to turn them into second-class Japanese (and kill those who would oppose). Russians are doing the same. Rape, senseless brutality and talk of re-education of an entire nation (they openly talk about the need to break Ukraine and a collective punishment, "re-education" lasting generations and erasing any Ukraine-ness. It is what the Germans wanted to do with those Slavs they deemed close enough to their arian standards (sending the rest to Siberia or just killing them...the Russians talk about exactly the same plans for Ukraine and very openly).
It seems to me that you and Carl Pham think that I disagree with you on a specific point on which I do not disagree. If you want to kill hundreds of thousands or millions of civilians, then using nukes is merely a more efficient way to achieve that than firebombings, just as firebombings are a more efficient way than regular-explosive bombs, and so forth. This is obviously true and I do not disagree on that. I disagree on the morality of wiping out civilians on an industrial scale in pursuit of a particular goal. Historically, it used to be not normal to do such things, unless your name was Genghis Khan.
Your key point is that the "[#4] would have left a fascist power unpunished, with even more hatred towards the US". Whether Japan was a "fascist power" or an "imperial power" is too long of a digression for now. "Left unpunished" is false; by early 1945 all of Japan's expansionist ambitions had been terminally thwarted, and their capacities were thoroughly destroyed. As in countless such conflicts before, negotiations and treaties could be pursued at that point, in which the loser would be forced to pay.
This was the historically most common resolution of such conflicts, and the US emphatically did not want to pursue it.
As you say, it would lead to "even more hatred towards the US". The alternative which avoided that "hatred" was to *thoroughly and truly break* the Japanese. And if what it took to do *that* was to kill Japanese civilians in the hundreds of thousands, well, that was a sacrifice that Lord Faarquad was willing to make.
I agree that #3 vs. #2 (nukes vs. "regular" firebombing) was just a matter of efficiency -- whereas Curtis LeMay was doing remarkably fine even before the nukes were delivered -- but disagree with the claim that the "#2|#3 vs. #4" decision was a *moral* one. Imperial Japan was willing to, and did, kill tens of thousands of Chinese civilians in an effort to subdue the Chinese. Imperial US was willing to, and did, kill *hundreds* of thousands of Japanese civilians in an effort to subdue the Japanese. I see them as two efforts, one unsuccessful and one successful, but both immoral.
The OP had asked why Japan's defeat did not provoke moral soul-searching among the Japanese. Given *how* it has happened, I asked -- why would it?
I'm surely biased because I find the concept of collective guilt thoroughly repugnant, but why do you assume that this is what's caused this success? Germans were also brought up to reject nationalism and militarism since WW2. You even undermine the attribution to collective guilt in noting that the Japanese don't share this sense of collective guilt, yet Japan has also been an extraordinarily peaceful country since WW2. It seems to me like a lot of European countries (including the Belgians) that don't embrace collective guilt for their countries' historical atrocities are similarly very peaceful today.
Not sure if I phrased it wrong, my question was of culpability, not of feeling guilt. Surely you see the difference.
Repost: please share your favorite biochemistry/ microbiology / medicine blogs and newsletters :)
You can't go wrong with In the Pipeline (Derek Lowe's blog): https://www.science.org/blogs/pipeline
Also, apologies for the self-promotion but I write about those things here: https://denovo.substack.com/
My latest one is about quality control issues in stem cell experiments.
Thank you!
Codon mag is really fun and good
I like Dr. Jason Fung's work. I follow him on Twitter and youtube. He has written many books too. His focus is intermittent fasting.
I read some of his work and was deeply unimpressed. He cherrypicks a lot and writes badly simplified or blatantly wrong explanations.
People who use twitter tend to be shitty scientists, for what it's worth.
There's no way that generalisation can possibly be justified
FWIW, I think his conclusions are correct, extremely important, and based in research consensus that is only slowly penetrating into mainstream debates. On the other hand I'm also unimpressed with his scholarship. I suppose he's the kind of doctor that's better at treating patients than explaining.
His side business of selling books and talks doesn't help, for sure.
Well, he speaks and writes, ever so slightly, as not a native English speaker...but other than that I cannot find a single flaw in his work. Even that is not really a flaw to me.
He is VERY good with data, I think. He has lots of references for his claims too.
Really? I was impressed with his ability with data, actually. And I see him as a doctor eager to help people. He is countering conventional thinking on how to achieve reducing stored fat. I also find his analogies excellent.
Here is an April 2022 NEMJ article that finds no difference in intermittent fasting vs. plain old caloric restriction https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2114833
Except, for me, intermittent fasting is an easy way to implement calorie restriction. Skimmed the paper, not sure it addresses that.
It is now a habit to eat 2 times a day, in a period of 8 hours. I just end up eating fewer calories overall this way.
I created https://readsomethinginteresting.com/acx for easy access to random book reviews.
Thank you! the link to review 117 is broken though fyi
That's so handy. Thank you so much. (It looks like identations are lost?) I kind of want to make predictions for whether some of these will be accepted or not as finalists.
+1 to the thanks!
Creating this website for people was really generous!! (Yaay, we can think of something that should exist and take actions!)
thanks for creating this—it seems to truncate a few of the reviews for me though (i.e. 125)
Thanks! This lowered the activation energy of starting to read one enough that I am now doing so.
Great job! Much easier to go through than the google document.
I was hoping someone could answer a question I originally posted to Deceptively Aligned Mesa-Optimizers <https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/deceptively-aligned-mesa-optimizers/comment/6105290>:
How is mesa-optimizing related to meta-gaming? Are these describing pretty much the same phenomenon? Are these actually opposites for some reason, or are we just using the prefix in one of these wrong? (mesa- doesn't seem to be greek, or even a real prefix at all, do they mean "meso-"?)
I guess those could sort of be considered opposites if you look at them from precisely the right angle.
A mesa-optimizer is a subsystem that you delegate a problem to. For example, letting your car's "check engine" light decide how often you should have your car serviced.
Meta-gaming refers to the use of out-of-game information to optimize your strategy; especially information about the statistical prevalence of various strategies. ("Rock tends to be played more often than scissors or paper, which means paper wins more often.") It's "meta" in the sense of relying on out-of-context information.
You could look at meta-gaming like this: When you play a game, you develop an internal decision-making algorithm that only thinks about how to play the game, and ignores considerations like e.g. going to the bathroom. Normally when you play, you delegate your strategy decisions to that algorithm. This part of yourself could be considered a mesa-optimizer relative to your whole self.
Then, when you meta-game, your larger self overrides your mesa-optimizer to take advantage of information from outside the game. (You also override the mesa-optimizer when you decide to let your kid brother win, or to take a break for snacks.)
Of course, there isn't an especially clear separation between "you" and "your game-playing mesa-optimizer". I'd be inclined to take this comparison as more metaphorical than literal.
Yeah, I think you've got your prefixes confused. The antonym of meta- would be infra-, in this case infra-gaming meaning that all the information utilised is information from within the game itself.
This is also my belief... It was the article that reported mesa- is the opposite of meta-. I'm not even sure where "mesa-" comes from.
Has anyone researched endogenous lipase causing weight loss? Lipase had a moment like ghrelin, leptin and several other enzymes considered a potential weight loss silver bullet, but like everything else that didn’t work out. Usually having too much natural lipase is a sign of trouble with your pancreas, but it’s also in breast milk, to make it more digestible.
I’m curious because while I was nursing I found out I was one of a small number of women who produce too much lipase in their milk. This is inconvenient because it makes your milk go “off” very quickly. But more convenient was that I l lost a surprising amount of weight and have so far kept it off for several years. I’ve been wondering if lipase, produced by the body in a certain way and temporarily, does promote weight loss. I know some folks here are super tapped into this kind of thing, and I don’t have journal access. Has anyone studied high-lipase nursing women?
Speaking of lipase, I lost 90 lbs. to pancreatitis in six years, but regained 20. If you get lower back pain, get checked for acites, pseudo cysts, and /or pancreatitis.
Does that impact your risk for PAC/pancreatic cancer?
Yes. But the pancreatitis will likely do the job first. They say my CT scan shows gummy lungs from a all the pot smoke, but I'll likely be pushing up daisies before they can kill me with chemicals and radiation.
Reminder that Schelling meetups are going on in over a hundred cities this month and next! Check this spreadsheet to see if there's one in your city! https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KUCsdwLtDB5TQMJ0iqQIlnMgs6iTcgaAKzJdr5FpfmU/edit#gid=1585750313
Interstellar warfare - would it favor defense or offense?
As long as an incoming attack is slower than the speed of light, then I'd imagine an advanced civilization would have plenty of time to detect and defend their planet against any attack, but I'm probably missing something. Defense would overpower attacks, because it's costly and difficult to send a bunch of ICBMs or whatever many lightyears away.
Assuming peer technology level, the simplest defence against a fast-moving rock is hitting it with an equally large, equally fast-moving rock in the other direction.
Hitting the Earth with a big rock seems much easier than hitting a big rock with a big rock.
Not if you have to hit the Earth from several light years away, but the big rock from a much smaller distance.
I'm actually working on the assumption that the aiming part is pretty easy in both cases, though, compared to the difficulty of accelerating rocks up to near light speed.
But the Earth is literally just a big rock
I was assuming a "dinosaur asteroid" scale of big rock, not "Earth" scale, I guess.
On a solar system or even interstellar scale, there's not much difference.
You could get away with a lot less than "equally large" and "equally fast-moving". All you really need to do is to make it hit something before reaching the target, at which point it explodes and dissipates.
If it's moving fast enough to be useful in interstellar warfare, you don't need to hit it with a large rock, or any sort of rock at all. A whiff of dust in its path will suffice. But you do want to hit it reasonably far out, so that the expanding vapor cloud will have time to dissipate into something mostly harmless.
An ICBM is probably small enough that we wouldn't see it coming, but the isotopes in a modern warhead would decay before it reached us unless the aliens could accelerate it to relativistic speed (in which case they might not need a warhead.)
Best chance for a sneak attack might be to disguise their spaceship full of killer robots (or whatever) as an asteroid or comet set to pass the earth harmlessly, then change course at the last minute.
Half-life time of U-235 is ~700 million years. Or they can produce shorter live substances on the fly.
He probably means the tritium in the starter for a fission weapon. Although if you can accelerate a projectile to relativistic speeds adding a nuclear warhead is just kind of gilding the lily.
There's a lot of sci fi, even semi-hard sci fi, that deals with this. Barring faster than light speed the defender would always be prepared and also they would have a very significant "mass advantage". All the resources of a solar system to defend with vs whatever pitiful amount of mass the attacker could shove interstellar distances.
That sounds like an interesting premise. What works are you referring to?
Count to the Eschaton had a multi book arc about this
Unfortunately the author converted to christianity halfway through the series and it shows
I really liked the series, but then again, being a Christian, I suppose I would.
Certainly the best series I know of to really grapple with interstellar and intergalactic conflict without faster than light technology.
I really liked it too, even with the gradual christianization that happened starting with hermetic millenia. The sheer scale of it... nothing else like it, not anywhere
But I have to admit... I found it ironic that as the christianity got larger, the internal coherence of the story got shoddier. Oh, so the Cold Equations are true. Oh actually they're agitprop. Oh actually they are one of many internally consistent interpretations. Or, like... we went from jupiter brains being able to model smaller organisms as if they were just mechanisms, to Torment admitting she couldn't beat an ant at rock-paper-scissors because of infinite regression.
it didn't bother me as much as I thought it would though. like I said... the sheer scale of it. Galaxy-sized minds warring with each other. Dyson cannons. The primary lever of power on the universal scale is the use of the eschaton engine to impart spin to galaxies, or remove spin from galaxies, forcing their brains to take on centrifugal or centripetal political structures.
Like... holy shit. Nothing else like that book series exists. The enormity of it all overcomes the flaws.
The Cold Equations flip flopping didn't bother me so much, because it's emblematic of the whole series. In just about every book our entire perspective on the situation at hand changes dramatically with the introduction of new context. In the first book they're worried about being made slaves by an alien empire: they think they know what's going on, and where they are, and what the stakes are, but slowly through the series we find out how drastically ignorant they were of the their actual situation. The Hermetic Millenia has the bad guys trying desperately to create a humanity that would be useful to the aliens, and they don't even have a clue what the aliens want. It really showcases the theme of impossible to imagine magnitudes, both in space and time. At every level larger we realize how tiny the level before it was.
We don't know. Warfare is a rapidly evolving, anti-inductive system. It is impossible to predict it far into the future.
I'm not even sure whether warfare today favors defense or offense. I had thought that it favors offense or insurgency over traditional defense. This was based on the Iraq, Libya, Azerbaijan-Armenia, and a few smaller conflicts. Front lines hardly ever stayed still for more than a week or two when someone was trying to advance. But in Ukraine, defense is looking pretty good. Much of the 2014 line of control hasn't moved after 2 months of war.
Yeah but that's mostly because the Russians are fuckups. And also this is not asymmetrical warfare, with one side at great pains to avoid losses or collateral damage, still less tribal slugging among incompetents. Very different situation from anything we've seen in a while.
My assumption would be that if you can see it coming, you can destroy it. Whatever you fling at me, I can fling something equally massive at it to destroy it before it hits me.
The name of the game would, therefore, be speed. Maybe flinging something at 99% of the speed of light gives me a few days to react, but flinging something at 99.9999% of the speed of light gives me just seconds, and I'll never be able to respond in time.
Of course the best case is a weapon that travels at the speed of light, like a laser (but not really like a laser because actual lasers spread out harmlessly over large distances). But if you can find a way to send a whole bunch of photons my way then you can fry my planet as fast as I see it coming. The only defence would be some kind of gigascale engineering -- build a planet-sized shield and place it to block the view of your unfriendly star from my planet.
Or very slow. If you sent a black hole of a solar mass or so through the Solar System, at 100 km/s or so it would completely screw things up -- I doubt we'd survive as a species -- and we'd never see it coming, unless we happened to look in *exactly* the right direction at the right time and caught a microlensing event. And even then, what could we do about it? Of course, it would take maybe 10,000 years for your revenge to be complete.
It depends a lot on the technology, scenario, and rules of warfare. Are we just talking about a strike out from interstellar space with no warning, or something where there are rules of war or mainly interplanetary combat?
If you're just trying to wreck stuff from a distance, then it tends to favor the attacker (since the defender has to deflect everything thrown at them, and potentially carry out strikes to stop stuff that can't be deflected). But in most other circumstances, I think it would actually favor the defender - they can have some truly massive, powerful space lasers and mass drivers to shoot at incoming ships, and they can also have gigantic telescope arrays to get the most accurate location on where they're going.
Accelerating projectiles to, say, 0.1c and then just letting them drift until they hit the enemy planet is an obvious, devastating and hard-to-counter strategy (and pretty much the only scenario where stealth in interstellar space is viable, see http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewardetect.php#nostealth). But as ACOUP points out (https://acoup.blog/2020/07/17/fireside-friday-july-17th-2020/) this is rarely of any use strategically. If you want to actually conquer a star system, and there are no major revisions to the laws of physics (e.g. warp drive), it gets very difficult: the attacker is operating not only with much less mass but also with an N-year technology deficit. From there my mind goes to self-replicating mining robots that convert rocky bodies to weapons and ammo; it seems an obvious technology for defenders and attackers alike to leverage if it's available (which it likely would be in a world of interstellar colonization). If an attacker manages to deposit such robots surreptitiously things could get dicey fast; otherwise they'll be heavily outgunned by the defenders.
That leaves the harder problem of what it even means to be "at war" on a timescale that, for humans moving between stars, would likely be generations. Even a successful occupying force would have little reason to obey the society that sent it. Value drift would kick in with a vengeance.
Note that warp drive is actually predicted by general relativity (Alcubierre metric) and there's currently a project going on to build one (somebody found a design of cavity that should generate the required metric via Casimir effect, and is AFAIK currently testing whether this works in practice), so I wouldn't call it a "major revision to the laws of physics".
Bombardment with relativistic projectiles works alright on a planetary civilisation, but not very well on an interplanetary one with mobile space habitats and/or deeply-buried bases on asteroids (lower gravity means you can go much, much deeper without getting crushed by the pressure). Against an interplanetary civilisation the only real way to destroy them without being present is to blow up the star (hitting it with a black hole would probably do the trick, assuming you can work things out so that the black hole gets stuck in the star).
As an aside, Bret is playing fast and loose with the truth in that article in order to make a political point. I am 100% certain he knows that total wars in which the primary goal is merely "X political entity destroyed so that it no longer threatens us" are a real thing, but he carefully avoids mentioning them because that would make his "checkmate, war hawks" argument at the end much less solid. Bret knows a lot and usually doesn't lie (this is the closest I've seen to an outright lie), but you've always got to be on your guard when reading him because he's often using his historical expertise to back up a polemic and he's quite happy to present a slanted view when it would help the polemic to do so.
I thought the Alcubierre metric required negative mass, a.k.a. dark energy.
Requires negative energy (dark energy's a different thing). Casimir effect does that.
Huh. I've never heard that interpretation. Do you have somewhere that lays this out more explicitly? That would be most interesting!
I'm afraid this doesn't actually work. Although QFT permits local negative energy densities (e.g. the Casimir effect, squeezed light, Hawking radiation) it turns out that the negative energy pulse is always accompanied by a greater amount of positive energy elsewhere, and this positive energy ruins the possibility of having warp drives (at least any warp drive which speeds you up asymptotically, relative to distant lightcones). In particular, although the Casmir effect permits negative energy between nearby conducting plates, the plates themselves always have a greater amount of positive energy.
This is now a general theorem in flat space QFT, and there are strong indications that the same result (including many results just shy of a general proof) that the same also applies in curved spacetime.
Source: I am an expert in this exact subfield.
Reference: see e.g. Graham and Olum (arXiv:0705.3193). Note that while this paper formulates its version of the average null energy condition as a conjecture, it has been largely confirmed by subsequent research, some of it by me personally.
Depends a lot on how much the combatants know about each other. The easiest way to win would probably be to screw up the ecology of your opponent's planet. Seed the atmosphere with some weird destructive tailored bacteria, introduce Ice 9, et cetera.
It would partly depend on the speed of the attack, not to mention how numerous the missiles (?) are.
If things are coming in at close to the speed of light, you don't have a lot of time to react even if your defense is fast. Maybe you can succeed at defense if you have sufficiently powerful lasers.
Atomic Rockets has some discussion of this problem as the 'Dark Forest' problem: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/aliencontact.php#darkforest.
Briefly put, the problem is that attack is far stronger than defence: a grain of sand accelerated to 0.99c has more than enough energy to match the dinosaur-killing Chicxulub asteroid while being nearly undetectable itself (since even if you could detect it, it travels almost as fast as the warning signal it emits; if the grain of sand was fired at you from 100 light years away, the light from its firing would come to you after 100 years but the grain itself would come after 101.01 years; you'd have only a year to react).
Thus, the only defence is a pre-emptive offence: if you detect any signs of life out there, shoot them first before they shoot you. They *may* not be hostile, but you don't know that for certain, while you *do* know for certain that if they are hostile, you're not going to survive them shooting at you. Thus, the Dark Forest as a proposed solution to the Fermi Paradox: everyone's keeping quiet, because those that did not were brutally murdered out of paranoia.
However, this logic is not impeccable. The most notable flaw is travel time: in the 100 light years example, it takes 100 light years for the signs of life to travel from the victim to the shooter, and 101.01 light years for the grain of sand to travel from the shooter to the victim. In those 201 years, the victim civilization might go from 'Advanced enough to generate radio signals detectable from 100 light years away' to 'Advanced enough to colonize the planets and asteroids of their solar system'. (One example of this could be 'Human civilization in the 1950s' vs. 'Human civilization in the 2150s'). Thus, all you'd do by shooting at people would be *really* pissing them off, since you blew up their homeworld but left survivors in the asteroid belt and colonized planets. Then they'd dedicate themselves to getting revenge, and you've just made yourself worse off for no gain at all.
That's the current state of knowledge when it comes to interstellar warfare. Some speculations by science fiction writers, based off known physical and societal principles (speed of light delay, pre-emptive paranoia, speed of light travel time, rapidity of advancement from industrial to space-faring civilization, the desire for revenge when aliens blow up your homeworld)... but nothing concrete so far.
Dark Forest (or, in the original version, Central Park) as an explanation for the Fermi Paradox is dead theory.
The problem is that an interplanetary civilisation can detect planetary civilisations whether they signal or not (in microgravity you can scale individual telescopes up to planetary size, and of course one of the first things to do with interplanetary capability is to stick a bunch of telescopes in the Kuiper belt for interferometry; at that point things like land-use changes and night-time illumination give away any civilisation from thousands of lightyears away), which breaks the Central Park equilibrium; instead of a motive to keep quiet, your motive is to try to be that first interplanetary civ, because if you're not the first you're dead regardless of what you do.
As an aside, a grain of sand at 0.99c does not remotely match the kinetic energy of the Chicxulub impactor. The KE's about 2 kilotons, at the low end of nukes, and since it'd go off high in the atmosphere the blast probably wouldn't be particularly damaging on the ground (less than 1% of the Chelyabinsk meteor, which broke a bunch of glass but didn't kill anyone).
Parenthetically I would observe that a grain of sand would over a trajectory of several light years wander badly off course from interstellar magnetic fields, since even if it started off exquisitely neutral it would certainly build up a charge from friction.
A few thoughts on this in no particular order.
1) Some people have suggested that you could accelerate rocks so fast the enemy wouldn’t have time to react. Imo, the problem with this is that it’d take a while to accelerate them. It’s like you can’t dodge a bullet, but you can dodge someone pointing a gun.
2) Maybe we wouldn’t be worldbound. Planets are basically stationary targets, but if everyone lived on spaceships and just mined planets, dodging things would be far easier.
3) Maybe you just nuke every new world you encounter. This would solve a lot of problems, both in terms of offense and defense.
4) I don’t think you can hide. Probably most civilizations will have beamed enough radiation into space during their “startup phase” that enemy civilizations would know where you were
A ship under thrust can be detected from a long way away, but a KKV that's brought up to speed and then coasts to its target could be hard to spot. You'd be trying to spot a cold, dark rock against the cold, dark sky.
Of course, it's questionable if there's much value in throwing unguided rocks with no people or propulsion attached, unless you're a Fanatic Purifier and you simply want all your galactic neighbors to not be there.
With sufficiently advanced nut nonmagical technology, interstellar warfare is probably offense-dominated. But not because of relativistic kinetic energy weapons, which are overrated. They *may* prevail over a comparable defense, but their advantage isn't obvious or overwhelming.
I did a bunch of math on that 20-30 years ago on Usenet, and I don't want to repeat it, but basically: you can imagine an RKEW is cold and stealthy, but the thing that launched it isn't. The thing that launched it, the muzzle blast of the Death Star if you will, is likely to be visible across interstellar distances to anyone who is seriously looking for it. And even if you do somehow manage a stealth launch, at relativistic speeds every hydrogen atom in its path becomes an uncharacteristically energetic X-ray announcing its presence. That's only going to be visible locally, but it will still offer a chance at defense.
Which is basically going to be "throw some dust in its path while it's still 10-100 AU out", and let its own velocity turn it into a harmless fireworks display. The defense against RKEWs is likely to look like a smart minefield, rocks with a bit of antimatter cleverly contained, linked to telescopes and X-ray sensors.
More generally, it's too easy to handwave "10 km asteroid moving at 99% of lightspeed, there's no way they can stop that!". But then you have to do the math on what sort of resources it actually takes to accelerate a 10km asteroid to 99% of lightspeed, and figure out what a peer civilization with comparable resources could do playing defense, and oh yes they can stop that.
What probably makes interstellar warfare offense-dominated in the advanced technology limit, is the Nicoll-Dyson Beam, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Nicoll#Nicoll-Dyson_Laser . Which can blow a thousand-kilometer hole through an Earthlike planet in a neighboring galaxy in ten minutes flat(*), roughly speaking, and with literally no warning because literally lightspeed. Assuming you can solve the targeting problem, but with an optical sensor of that size you should have pretty good data to work with.
The first civilization to build one of those, gets to decide whether or not to blow up all the other inhabited planets in the Local Group before they try to return the favor.
* Plus several million years for the beam to cross intergalactic distances, if you're being pedantic about that sort of thing.
How does the beam handle interstellar matter? AIUI, dust extinction alone means the beam loses half its power per kiloparsec, more if it's high frequency, right?
Still nasty within a thousand light years or so, to be sure. Gotta watch them neighbors.
On second thought, I don't think anybody would use it beyond a few light years. If you target distant civs about to go stellar, you can't be sure that, by the time your beam hits, they won't have built their own Dyson sphere, which they'll immediately use to retaliate in kind.
I wonder how effective a beam would be against another Dyson swarm. Entirely different target size, and you'd need pretty sharp focus to knock out satellites designed to live in low stellar orbit. Which means you'd need extremely accurate predictions of the orbits of said satellites, and of course any Dyson swarm owners would know this so they'd constantly wiggle their sats to ensure they can always counterattack credibly.
If that's the case, then it's not a very offense-dominated situation. You can easily fry planets, but the owners are sure to retaliate, because you can't reliably fry their Dyson swarms. On the other hand, there's no risk of getting attacked by the upstarts, because they know they can't fry your Dyson swarm either. Stalemate, and everybody keeps their homeworld.
I imagine any Dyson-Sphere type weapon would be very visible to other civilizations. There are interesting problems of how to respond when another civilization begins construction of one. I'd want to find way to communicate a credible commitment to attack anyone seen constructing a Nicoll-Dyson Beam.
Wouldn't such a message likely reach them far too late? Even if we could get the message out before they finished, what could we use to credibly threaten a civilization that has reached the point of constructing Dyson Spheres?
Ideally, a civilization would broadcast the message before anyone else has begun construction to prevent them from constructing the weapon.
You're right that the time delay is tricky. It reminds me of the start of WWI where everyone tried to mobilize before their opponents had the opportunity. Every scenario I think of with the Nicoll-Dyson Beam involves building one ASAP and firing it at every other civilization that has the capability of constructing one.
A Nicoll-Dyson beam weapon probably isn't distinguishable from any other Dyson shell until it fires. And it can probably carve up enemy Dyson shells, weaponized or otherwise, almost as easily as it does planets - they're bigger, yes, but in the way balloons and soap bubbles are big.
So, yes, there are interesting questions regarding preemptive strikes and deterrence strategies if civilizations start enclosing stars.
>it can probably carve up enemy Dyson shells, weaponized or otherwise, almost as easily as it does planets
A swarm, not a shell. Easier to make (what does a non-magical Dyson shell even look like?) and far more robust - the sats need to be killed one by one.
Some thoughts after reading 17ish book reviews:
-- Choosing the right book to review does a lot of work, in my opinion. Or, at least it makes your job easier. A mediocre review of a book about ancient history is going to be rated 2-3 points lower than a mediocre review of some interesting, yet not widely known, non-fiction science-y rationalist-adjacent book.
-- Most of y'all could use an editor. If I'm noticing typos on my first read-through...it makes me think no one besides the review's author read it before it was submitted. I'll edit your book review in future years for 10% of any winnings :)
-- For most of the reviews I've read, I've wished they were shorter. Some could be 30% shorter, others need to be 50-75% shorter. (The review of Very Important People was one of my favorites so far, but I also read less than half of it. If it was a 25 minute read, it would have a solid chance of winning this contest.) A long review that's great can be really great. But a long review that's mediocre is worse than a mediocre review that's the "right" length, IMO.
-- I haven't given anything a 9 or 10. Have given two 8's and two 7's. (Both of the 8's were for reviews that took me 16-20 minutes to read) Will be interested to see if any of the reviews I've read become finalists.
Curious if other "book review reviewers" agree or disagree?
Agree with your take on long reviews. Perhaps what's happening is that writing a long review is not a replacement for thinking deeply about what in the book truly needs to be shared with the audience. Some of the long reviews I read seemed to think recapping everything in the book is a replacement for really bringing out the essence of the book's most important parts.
Re: books on history. I think a good review of history could get rated as highly as a good review of any other book. Scott really has a way of bringing out the story & making us care about its characters and then adding interesting analysis and speculation. Maybe I just came across a few too many reviews that felt to me like "this happened, and then this happened" — a little to close to what I could read on the event's Wikipedia article. A similarly mediocre recapping of a book with an interesting idea at least is introducing me to a cool new concept.
But then again, I've never been very interested in reading about history so perhaps that's all just a very personal preference.
No 9 or 10? You're a tough customer :) I gave one 10 so far.
I like long reviews, as long as they are well-written. In fact, I gave some reviews lower marks specifically because they were too short and didn't go into enough detail.
Re: "most of y'all could use an editor" - I admit to having procrastinated on my review and finally slapping it together somewhat half-assedly and submitting it two hours before the deadline in my time zone, so chances are, I'm part of the problem.
I think a 1-10 scale is most useful if all of it actually gets used. So a "1" should be "the worst review someone actually submits" (which is not necessarily "bad", per se) and a "10" is "very likely to win the contest". Comparing in my mind to last year, I don't feel like I've read any that are likely to win, and only a couple that could possibly become finalists. I did choose which reviews to read randomly (a random number 1-4 to pick which document to open, then another random number to pick the review), so maybe I just didn't come across any of the best reviews.
I didn't give any reviews a 10 because I liked some more than others, but I couldn't say "This particular one is best of the entire bunch". Swung between 7-8 for the good ones and 2-3 for the bad ones.
I agree. On any likart scale I pretty much never choose either extreme, because I can always imagine something being worse or better than it is.
Yeah, I shoved mine in fast because if I let myself think about it, I never would have done it, and I wanted to try my hand at an entry. If I could do it over, I would tidy it up and tighten it up a bit and add in more material to expand on some points, but what's done is done!
I'll second the bit about the editor, some of the typos are just egregious. That said, one of my favorites thus far has also been the longest by far, closing at around 50 pages. I balked at first, but the format made it work. I've given one 9, no 10s, doubt I'll give any.
I've read eight book reviews so far, and given one 7, one 8, and one 10.
-- Choosing the right book is extremely important. It needs to be something with interesting things to say - and a book that you have interesting things to say about. A great book review is of a book that I would value reading, and tells me something more than I would learn just by reading the book.
-- I haven't noticed this as a major problem in the ones I've read.
-- Long mediocre reviews tend to worse than short mediocre reviews. But long great reviews tend to be better than short great reviews. If you're trying to win, write a long review, and make it great.
I agree most of the reviews were way too long - and I hope most ACXers agree, but I'm biased because a) I have ADHD and b) I wrote one of the shorter reviews!
"A mediocre review of a book about ancient history is going to be rated 2-3 points lower than a mediocre review of some interesting, yet not widely known, non-fiction science-y rationalist-adjacent book."
I'm the type that would switch that about; I'm slightly more interested in and have a better grasp of ancient history than some obscure non-fiction science thing, which if it's pop science communication is probably wrong in several fundamental ways, and if it's scholarly has way too much maths for me to understand.
So "Hmm, this isn't really a great review of the Olmecs" is still going to get a slightly higher score from me than "Hmm, this isn't really a great review of Hyperloop Quantum Syzygy because I haven't a bull's notion what the mathematical notations mean".
"If I'm noticing typos on my first read-through...it makes me think no one besides the review's author read it before it was submitted."
It is the Iron Rule of Proofreading that you only ever see the obvious and blatant error *after* you've hit "submit" 😁
"Will be interested to see if any of the reviews I've read become finalists."
Yes, it's like Eurovision voting - the results are the best part! I fully expect to go at least once, if not more, "how the hell did *that* make it through as a finalist?" and I anticipate with great pleasure a lot of discussion over "I thought A was good/I thought A was terrible".
Hey, I'll come back to that editing offer! :)
I agree on the length issue. I started reading a couple of long reviews and ended up thinking "wow, this turned out to be a bit self-indulgent."
In the past 5 to 10 years, there has been significant progress in understanding exactly what inflammation is. And its connection with aging. The word to google is inflammaging.
I'm very interested in books on menopause nowadays (haven't found a great one for a layperson), but really, the general problem to learn about here is aging.
A key idea is Antagonistic Pleitropy.
The immune system appears to have been crafted to optimize your health when you are young. Once you have reproduced, evolution does not care about your health.
So what this really means, is let us say there is a gene that prevents you from getting heart disease. It could be selected out of the population, as you age.
How can we hack this to be healthier, as we age? Diet, exercise, calorie restriction. (Now intermittent fasting might merely be a way to implement calorie restruction. I see that.)
The endocrine system is key to inflammation. There are a bunch of hormones regulating the functioning of the immune system. Insulin is key.
Our bodies are supposed to work poorly as we age, as a byproduct of evolution.
To ward off problems, we need to eat an anti-inflammatory diet. Refined carbs are the enemy. Also, eat the right amount of protein, not too much. Jason Fung says *when* we eat is important.
This and much more, in Fung's recent book on longevity.
I wonder if it would be easier for longevity research to get funding if they focused on that part of it. Not so much "you can live to be 200!" as "you can feel like you're 30 even though you're actually 80 years old" and so forth.
They already focus on it! Every foundation around the topic talks about healthspan. I think the maximum lifespan angle gets more press because it sounds more outrageous - despite, as you mentioned, not being that much of a deal comparatively.
It also appeals to more people. Extending your 30s into your 50s doesn't do much for folks in their 60s, meanwhile a lot of the teens/20-30somethings who would benefit from extending youth don't realize how valuable it would be because they haven't gone through that part of the aging process yet to see life on the other side.
I've heard it said that regularly journaling about your dreams soon after waking, while the details are still fresh in your mind, can increase your retention of your dreams more generally, and may make your dreams more lucid. Contingent on this actually being true, it sounds pretty great -- however, I've also been having terrible nightmares pretty regularly for the past few weeks. Is there any chance this practice (if legitimate) could make my nightmares worse (or better)?
My experience tracks closely to yours, and I use basically the same staggered alarm trick to avoid getting trapped in bed, but its difficult to apply here because I'm usually woken up late into the night or very early in the morning by the nightmares themselves, much earlier than I'd actually like to be rising. This has the knock-on effect of tanking my sleep schedule, since I almost always want to go back to sleep and hopefully have a normal dream to take the "bad taste" out of my mouth, it takes me a while to get there, and I end up sleeping in. The few times I have tried to suffer through it and just drag myself out of bed 3-4 hours early have been horrible, although the sleep deprivation does usually seem to guarantee a nightmare-free night that evening.
I tried the dream journaling thing for about two weeks. I can attest that my recall improved far more than I expected. The first night or two I could only remember enough to write maybe 5-10 sentences about my dreams. At the end of two weeks, I was easily writing 1,500 words each morning about everything that happened in my dreams, but I decided that was a waste of time so I stopped.
It did not lead to lucid dreams for me. My dreams are not normally nightmares, nor did I notice a change in the tone of my dreams, so I can't comment there either.
+1, exact same experience. I need to revisit it at some point.
Lucid dreaming definitely can help with nightmares. If I realize I'm dreaming during a nightmare, I can usually derail it somehow, either by using superpowers to win, changing the scene and essentially exiting the nightmare, or at least resisting whatever it is until I manage to wake up.
That being said, increasing recall without the lucid dreaming part could suck. You might need to work on how you process nightmares afterward to limit their negative effect on you.
I took up a lucid dreaming experiment with different methods in college. After achieving it, for about 8 months or so it was awesome.
However after some life stressors I began remaining lucid but losing control, and had 5ish months of the worst night terrors of my life. I ended the trial, and have had more vivid and on average slightly more stressful dreams ever since, though I do not consider it to have had a long lasting negative effect.
Note, I used some very mild psychoactives and am on prescription progesterone which is known to affect dreams, so but of a different scenario.
I would be surprised if merely dream journaling got you to lucid dream.
I don't dream much anymore, but in the high school to college to just after college years I dreamed quite a bit, usually lucidly. The down side was that my dreams were usually really bland, generally talking to people, or doing normal day to day things. The big downside was that it didn't much affect the emotional impact of the dream: if it was going to be a nightmare, something trivial was going to be deeply unsettling for no reason.
The sole exception was a recurring nightmare about forgetting to actually drop a Medieval Literature class I intended to drop, and having to take the final without having done any of the reading. That one went the other way, where after a while I recognized the dream and knew how to play it out such that it stopped being scary, like an often rewatched horror movie.
Fitting the more normal pattern was a white two story house that showed up in random dreams and was scary for... some reason. I often would wonder in dream where the hell I knew the house from and why it bothered me so much, and it would just show up in unrelated dreams like a badly executed jump scare.
All that to say, lucid dreams are possibly overrated for many people. I have never met anyone who had them and said they were wonderful, and mine haven't been anything to write home about. Everyone I have known who is enthusiastic about them never had them but really liked the idea.
As was the case for you, I've noticed that the actual content of the dream doesn't have much to do with whether or not it becomes a nightmare. I have dreams about combat that seem like they'd make perfect fodder for one of those nightmares where you've being chased, but they're neutral or maybe even enjoyable; two nights ago I dreamed that I found some books in my car that were so inexplicably horrifying that everyone in the dream began to scream. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The library fines in your area must be brutal :D
I've attempted to complete Lucid Dreams in 30 Days (https://www.amazon.com/Lucid-Dreams-30-Days-Creative/dp/0312199880) many times over two decades and have never made it out of the first week's exercises to increase recall.
I usually don't have almost any recall, but it turns out that when I consciously force it, I have enormously unpleasant dreams that I would rather not remember!
So it's hard to say if attempting better recall is going to be more traumatizing or less. You might be better off attempting to instruct yourself not to fixate on your current anxieties in your dreams shortly before sleeping. I know that's an easy (and almost stupidly obvious) thing to say, but sometimes it helps me to firmly tell my "dreaming brain" (if you will), "We're fine, we don't need any nightmares tonight, knock it off."
What percentage of PhDs in computer science in the US are awarded yearly to people who went through public, secular K-12 education also in the US?
From my personal experience I would almost believe this number to be close to zero, but I haven't been able to find good data about it and might be in a bubble myself. There is the NSF survey https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf22300/report/ but it's not this granular. I would especially be interested in seeing this number in contrast to other countries.
Just to share some anecdata, I meet your criteria, and most of my friends from the PhD do as well. There were certainly plenty of international students, but not even sure if it was a majority. (This was at a top-5 CS school.)
Interesting! thanks for sharing. Maybe I am inside a bubble ...
Why would someone matching that criteria *want* to go to grad school, instead of getting a very lucrative job in industry? Foreign students can use grad school as the route to a visa.
Yeah. Getting a PhD (or even a masters) would be a waste of time. I fit the criteria but don't have a CS masters or even a CS undergrad degree but have a very high paying software engineering job after only attending a bootcamp. Getting a PhD would be a great way to waste half a million bucks.
What's the source of Macron's appeal to French voters? He's a product of elite universities and was an investment banker for a bank literally owned by the Rothschilds (it's in the bank's name!) He seems to have basically neoliberal economic policies, an especially tough sell in France, a country with a long protest history. He meets the poly sci definition of an 'outsider' candidate- President is the only elected office he's ever held- yet virtually all other outsiders are populists, and in the middle of a populist age, he is like the absolute opposite. I believe he's trying to raise the retirement age, cut back some pensions, etc.
He not only ran for & won the Presidency twice, he formed his own political party which after existing for a year or two won a plurality in the last parliament. Clearly, he has widespread appeal in France.
I personally have vanilla center-left neoliberal politics, so I think he's fantastic- I just can't imagine a Macron-like candidate winning anywhere else. He seems like the kind of candidate that would've won in a Western democracy in the 90s, but is now scorned decades later. Do the French just really love his specific policies? Is he like unusually charismatic in French oratory or something? What's his appeal? (Can we replicate it here in America?)
Macron is a right winger. But he's pro-immigration and pro-EU. Because he's basically a creature of conservative institutions and the business class. Both of who very much want the trade deals and subsidies and increased workforce that come from those policies. I agree he'd have had a harder time against Melenchon. In part because it's not certain the Le Pen crowd would ever vote for him. This is actually a problem with hyper-partisan, hyper-competitive elections like in the US. It makes it very difficult for either party to fight their radical wings because they need every single vote (tied Senate anyone?)
I agree with the right wing and pro-EU part, but I don't actually see why you affirm that Macron is pro-immigration. Sure, during his 2017 presidential campaign it might have seemed so, and of course that Le Pen or Zemmour are much extreme than Macron when it comes to protesting against immigration. However, in 2018, his government passed a law that shortened the delay during which asylum could make appeal to their rejection to asylum, and which increased the maximal number of days during which they could be maintained in close centers, Also, asylum seekers have been repeatedly sent back illegally to Italy when trying to cross the border. He advocated for doing more effort in sending back the immigrants whose application have been rejected to their country of origin. Immigrants have been harassed (for example by having their tents illegally cut/destroyed) by the police during his first mandate.
Of course Macron is pro-immigration, he is a right-winger in the true sense of that term. Immigration is the will of the business class, Macron's chief sponsors. You can cite as many anecdotes as you wish, but the data is what you get at https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/3633212#graphique-Tableau1_radio1 . If that graph were a stock trend, I'd indebt myself to buy that stock.
The "advocated for doing more effort in sending back the immigrants whose application have been rejected to their country of origin" is also known as "applying the law". Whereas the law *is* what leads to that peppy graph in the first place, even when the law is actually applied. The illegal-harassment-of-those-that-enter-illegally was perpetuated by rank-and-file policemen, it is not Macron who was going around doing it. And as you correctly noted, it tended to happen more at the start of his tenure - meaning, less and less during his years in power.
For the *vast majority* of the quarter-millennia that the terms "left" and "right" had existed, "left" had meant "aligned with the interests of the peasant/working classes". Which very plainly implies: immigration should be next to none. The bourgeois revolution of the soixante-huitards has made a complete travesty of the meaning of the terms "left" and "right", and trying to make sense of the world by using those mashed-up terms has been futile for a good while.
Unless you think alignment with the interests of the working classes should include foreign people...
"Workers of the world, unite?"
Yes, that was done too, whereas the workers tended to stay where they originally were.
It hadn't benefited much the said workers - on the contrary, really. It's not the lack of their internal migration which was at fault, it was more about failing to acknowledge the laws of the market, and human nature.
Flooding French territory with Algerian workers, is good for the French business class and bad for the French workers.
Flooding Algerian territory with French workers, is good for the Algerian business class and bad for the Algerian workers.
That one of those is virtually not happening and the other is happening in spades, doesn't mean that both are not iron laws.
Not just protesting. Le Pen and Zemmour want to ban immigration and have even floated taking citizenship away from recent immigrants. Macron, meanwhile, has been a thorough defender of EU freedom of movement. He's tried to get more immigration by law, especially high skill. And he's supported the right of refugees who go through the process to stay, including increased funding to courts to process claims more quickly.
He's also enforced laws against illegal immigration including following up on illegal actions by police or immigration enforcement. Le Pen hammered him for that, open borders etc etc.
Macron is pro-immigration unless you define pro-immigration as supporting illegal immigration. You say one thing against him is that he wants to send back refugees whose applications have been denied. Well, yes? Does pro-immigration mean, "We let in everyone, even the people we've legally decided not to let in?"
He's been campaigning against Le Pen for his entire term, by adopting mild versions of her stances even when he doesn't support them.
Looking at the list of public opinion polls on the French presidential election (available on the French-language Wikipedia, https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_de_sondages_sur_l%27%C3%A9lection_pr%C3%A9sidentielle_fran%C3%A7aise_de_2022), the polls about a Macron-Mélenchon second round (somewhere down that page) seem to have been even slightly more favourable to Macron than those about a Macron-Le Pen second round. (About 53-47 for Macron-Le Pen in early April, compared to about 58-42 for Macron-Mélenchon around that same time.)
I'm also not an expert on French politics, but as I understand it, in 2017 Macron became the de facto main moderate candidate for the French presidency when Fillon's campaign self-destructed (I don't remember what for though). Now why was Macron able to fill this role? I'm not sure, I'd say he was probably in the right place at the right time, as one of the least left-leaning ministers in a Socialist government he was able to successfully portray himself as a centrist, and since he was a relative newcomer in politics voters hadn't had a long time to learn to hate him. This time he's the incumbent, and therefore the establishment candidate against the more populist, anti-system candidates like Mélenchon or Le Pen. His vote share in the second round still went down nearly eight percentage points between 2017 and 2022, which follows what we can expect from the turn to populism in Western politics, and which suggests that a populist candidate might win next time when Macron will no longer be the incumbent candidate.
He's the beneficiary of getting to the 2nd round against a fascist (and I don't mean a Trump-like "fascist", I mean her parents were MPs of a party that denied the Holocaust and thought Vichy France was a great idea, and she inherited their political movement (while, in fairness, backing away from the more openly swastika-waving bits).
I don't think his base is much larger than the ~28% he received in the 1st round, and he faced what was probably the most serious challenge to the Fifth Republic since '68 during his term in the form of the Yellow Vests. Macron is, however, the beneficiary of a pan-French coalition to keep the Nazis out (Chirac, benefiting from the same coalition, got *82%*) which is increasingly fraying but remains strong enough to win him a 2nd term.
This doesn't explain why a) twice in a row he's received the most votes of any presidential candidate in the 1st round specifically. I agree he's more appealing than Le Pen, but that doesn't tell me why a neoliberal investment banker got to the 2nd round to begin with. And b) his plurality in Parliament, for a party that he created himself that didn't exist a few years ago. En Marche has 267 seats, the next largest party has 101. Imagine a younger Michael Bloomberg not only winning the US Presidency twice in a row, but creating his own neoliberal competitor to the existing party system- and then winning a majority in the House with it
Just looking at raw election results on Wikipedia without knowing much about French politics, it looks like the 2017 first round results were very close between four candidates. Macron and Le Pen were the top two, with 24.0% and 21.3% respectively, but Dillon (the candidate for the previously-major center-right party) and Mélenchon (nominee of a relatively new Democratic Socialist party) got 20.0% and 19.6%. That doesn't strike me as a particularly robust victory for Macron.
This year's first round totals had Macron gaining 3.85 percentage points from the 2017 first round, while Le Pen gained 1.85, Mélenchon gained 2.35, and the center-right party (which ran a different nominee this time) lost 12.93. That make Macron's margin in the first round a bit better, but it's still not that impressive a gain (at least to my American eyes) for an incumbent President running for reelection in an election where an ideologically adjacent major party's support had collapsed to minor party levels.
That still leaves a question of why Macron was one of the top four in 2017 at all, which I tentatively think can be explained by a "tallest midget" theory where the discrediting of the previously-major center-left and center-right parties left a vacuum and Macron was the only vaguely credible centrist candidate available for centrist voters to support instead of the previous major parties.
The exit polls helpfully listed in the Wikipedia page for the 2017 election seem to corroborate this. Macron seems to have picked up 47% of the 2012 supporter pf the major center-left party, 43% of the 2012 supporters of a centrist independent who'd gotten 9.1% in that election's first round and didn't run again in 2017, and 17% of the 2012 supporters of the center-right party. He only picked up 10% of Mélenchon's 2012 supporters, which Mélenchon more than made up by picking up more 2012 center-left party voters than anyone but Macron.
Similar exit poll data doesn't seem to be available for the 2022 first eound, at least I don't see it on Wikipedia and a very quick googling failed to turn it up.
Mostly, it's that France has a lot of left-wing parties that split the vote so a centre or right-wing party can get a plurality much more easily than any given left-wing one. I have no idea why French political parties haven't changed electoral strategy to compensate for this, but it might be that their current strategy works well at every level except the presidential elections, or it might just be that the left is incapable of *not* having massive infighting
"it might just be that the left is incapable of *not* having massive infighting"
I'm pretty sure it's this.
"I mean her parents were MPs of a party that denied the Holocaust and thought Vichy France was a great idea"
Ah yes, the famous antifascist stance of blaming a children for their father's sin.
And for that matter, VIchy *was* a great idea, relative to every other alternative. With an army disorganized and out of supply, germans already roaming half the country, the lack of an armistice only meant slaugther, for soldiers and civilians alike, not useful resistance. And it kept half of France (and most importantly, it's navy) out of the war, until it was annexed in 1942, allowed for a steady drip of personnel to defect to FFL. And what was the alternative? At best a military occupation government, and at worse, a civilian (read: nazi) one.
Maybe Petain could have done things better. But I'm almost certain that anyone dabbing on him 70 years after the fact would have made things worse in his shoes.
The better alternative was a version of Vichy that was less enthusiastic about anti semitism.
...and gets annexed into some sort of Generalgouvernement or ReichKommisariat even faster than they already did. I'm unsure who it'd have helped.
Yea there's no interpretation of real-life 1940 -- not on this Earth anyway -- in which Hitler's victorious government would have tolerated a Vichy French regime that was anything but enthusiastically anti-semitic.
I'm a bit less sure that Vichy in general was a "great" idea relative to every other alternative...but only a bit, and only from this vast distance of perspective and knowledge. So yea probably it was.
And there certainly wasn't any available alternative which didn't lead to the Germans shoving at _least_ as many French Jews into the cattle cars heading eastward 1941-1944 as the Vichy government did.
As I understand it, Pierre Laval's government did go further than the Nazis requested in rounding up French Jews for deportation. There are some things that they could have decided not to do, but did anyway. But I'm not an expert on the history of the Vichy regime.
Nazi Germany's main interests in the Vichy regime were:
1. Outsourcing the job of administering Metropolitan France and collecting taxes to feed the Reich's war effort (through exorbitant assessments for reparations and "occupation costs") to a more-or-less legitimate French government. German administrative resources were stretched pretty thin as things were, so trying to administer France through a military government would have strained available resources quite a bit in addition to be less effective than working through Vichy. Remember that the Vichy government continued to employ most of the Third Republic's bureaucracy and police and security forces, giving them not just trained administrative and security manpower who spoke the local language, or even the social authority of being seen by most French citizens as the legitimate French government, but also intact organizations and the kind of local knowledge that James Scott kept going on about in Seeing Like a State.
2. A free hand to garrison a defensive zone around the Channel and Atlantic coasts of France (to try to keep Britain and later the United States out of mainland Europe) and to use that zone as a springboard for offensive air and naval actions against Britain.
3. Friendly-neutral control of France's colonies in Africa and the Middle East and the military that were either already stationed there or which could be evacuated from Metropolitan France. In particular, Vichy controlled Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia and had over 100k soldiers stationed there until the Allies invaded in November 1942. Had those territories and soldiers been on the Allied side the whole time, the North African campaigns would likely have gone a lot worse for the Germans and Italians in 1941 and early-to-mid 1942.
It was losing #3 to American and British military actions (and defections of many local Vichy commanders to Free France) that lead Germany to execute Case Anton and occupy all of Metropolitan France. But even then, that was a case of Germany garrisoning the territory and looming menacingly over the Vichy authorities, not direct military administration: the Vichy government continued to exist and hold administrative control of most of France until after the Allied breakout from the Normandy beachheads and the liberation of Paris.
So long as Germany was getting most of these points from our hypothetical Diet Vichy government, they would only have so much leverage to try to insist on enforcing secondary policy priorities on their French collaborators. Diet Vichy probably didn't need to be anti-semitic, or even authoritarian, so long as it made the trains run on time, let the Germans in, kept the British out, and kept sending money (either gold or money that could be used to buy raw materials and manufactured goods from French firms) to Berlin.
The case against the 1940 armistice is the claim that offering 1-3 to Germany on a silver platter was too valuable to the German war effort, and that making the deal to accommodate Germany in that way was a perfidious betrayal of their British allies, a stain on national honor, and may also have hurt France in the long run by prolonging the war and delaying the liberation of Metropolitan France.
In many cases, it's a bad thing to blame a child for their father's sin. But when the child specifically is only known for one thing, and that one thing is continuing her father's political career, then it seems totally reasonable to blame the child for the father's political career, since she is adopting it as her one thing.
What's the source of Biden's appeal for American voters? There isn't one; you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who was excited about the prospect of a Joe Biden presidency; and yet there he is, by virtue of repeatedly seeming like the least bad candidate out of all the jerks who managed to get their campaigns taken seriously.
That said, the current French political landscape and the idiosyncrasies of its Presidential election system do seem to strongly support the idea of a generally-tolerable centrist. If Le Pen is inevitably going to wind up as the challenger in the second round, there's an incentive for the normies to rally around a tolerable centrist in the first round so they don't wind up having to choose between two candidates they hate.
That's not how elections work here. People vote for the candidate they hate least, not the one they actually like, because there aren't any.
Is "here" France or the United States? Because that seems to describe both.
I meant US, but I guess it works for France also
Macron does have a fan base but it is largely people like himself. He was successful mostly by circumstance. Both the conservative and socialist party were in shambles with scandals, the left was not united, and of course a large part of the right wing was under control of Marine and her father. The top 2 system in France is superior to the American system but only barely. Once he got into the final round vs La Pen he had a great shot and he managed to carry it. Macron is extremely unpopular now but against La Pen he can't lose and the left is still infighting which cost Melenchon his shot at the second round. However he didn't poll that much better than La Pen so maybe we'd have Macron anyways. Macron is *not* a runaway success. He benefits from weak enemies. His first choice numbers are pretty bleh.
I think that the bigger part of the story is the complete collapse of the traditional center-left and center-right parties in France. The main center-left party got 29% of the vote in 2012 in the first round, 6% of the vote in 2017, and 2% of the vote this time. The main center-right party got 27% of the vote in the first round in 2012, 20% of the vote in 2017, and 5% of the vote this time. Both parties had completely discredited themselves, and increasing numbers of people were turning to far-right and far-left parties in protest.
This left a giant hole in the center of French politics that Macron stepped into. He had been part of the previous governor, but was sufficiently disassociated with either party to avoid being pulled down by their scandals. Once he got into the second round (by being one of the top two from the first round), it became much easier for a centrist to win against someone on the far-right.
Macron's voters are basically a mainstream conservative coalition. The old, the wealthy, the business classes, to some extent the religious. He's Mitt Romney basically. These people vote at high rates and have money to spend on politics. And they're a reasonably large voting block, larger than Le Pen's really. They have consistently been able to push their favored candidates into the top two spots.
A fragmented and non-energetic (pre-Melenchon) left allowed Le Pen's very motivated base to push her into the second place spot. And the French left despises Le Pen. I really cannot emphasize this enough. Leftist radicals literally tried to kill her entire family in the 1970s. They dislike Macron. But they see him for what he is: a basically normal right winger. So in the second round the left candidates all negotiate some deal and then tell their supporters to vote for Macron. So Macron gets a majority of the right and most of the left.
Why doesn't this happen in the US? Well, the system's different. But more importantly the current President of the US called Mitt Romney a racist who was going to reinstate slavery. And the statement was praised and not followed up on outside of the right wing press.
That kind of thing wouldn't happen in France. I can't exactly say why but I suspect it has to do with a healthier information environment. If Melenchon had tried that with Macron the press would have followed up on it. Le Pen likes to say the media treats her worse than the other candidates. But that's because she does lie a lot more. And they don't treat Macron that way because Macron doesn't lie all that much. So the French right doesn't feel like they're playing Calvinball with a hostile press. They feel they can win following the rules. Indeed, they objectively can: Macron won.
France has a long tradition with conservatism and Catholicism. You'll notice nobody in the campaign is droning on about genderism rights. It's not Romania or Poland.
I’m parsing your comment as suggesting that you think French people are to conservative to “fall for genderism”, is that correct? Or are catholics generally comfortable with trans people?
France seems to have publicly funded healthcare for trans people, and laws against discrimination against trans people. They seem to have stopped classifying being trans as a mental disorder in 2010. I suspect don’t know why this hasn’t been done in France but I suspect it becomes a political issue in the US because US politics relies on motivating your voter base, and gay people are generally no longer sufficiently controversial to serve this role, though I’m by no means an expert on us politics
I’ll offer another component in the explanation. It’s true he benefits from being not-far right and not-far left, which in a two round election system benefits the least disliked option in the second round.
However, it is a mistake to only analyze Macron in light of what he is not. France has been pretty stagnant for years, and in the ever-present comparison with the Germans, a good chunk of the French see they have fewer options, lower earnings, less impressive companies and worse cars. So it isn’t a given that some dose of neoliberal, pro-tech posturing would be unpopular among a decent subsection of the French electorate. In the first round this year Macron gets nearly 30%, so that would be a rough indicator of the pro-Macron group, separate from the anti-Le Pen.
About replication in USA, I suspect that’s tough, since it seems from afar that most benefactors in USA of the economic and technological miracle of the last decades of USA have embraced a self-critical far-left viewpoint. Now maybe if USA had a two stage election model that that group would disaggregate into a more centrist position. Still, I’m doubtful given the success of the last decades, which reduces the impetus for innovation and change.
I am in the process of writing a long analysis of this for my Substack, which I hope to publish in a couple of days. It's from the perspective of someone who has lived here a long time and has worked inside the French political system. For the time being, I'd suggest the following, very briefly.
The French vote. Much more than Anglo-Saxons do. Turnout is high, but of course you can only vote for the candidates that actually present themselves. In many cases also, among the multiplicity of parties and candidates, people will vote for someone they think stands a chance of winning, even though they may really prefer a different candidate. This is what is known as the "useful vote" argument.
Macron has a core vote of those who benefit from the system. Around 45% of his vote is from the wealthy retired, who like the idea of their children working longer to support them. The rest of his core vote is youngish professionals, teachers, the media/NGO/think tank complex, middle and senior managers and people working in banking and finance. These people are generally comfortably off, tend to be deep into IdPol, support neoliberal economic policies, and see themselves as Europeans and internationalists first, regarding French history and culture with amusement and derision, and ordinary French people with contempt. Macron is their patron saint. This part of his core vote doesn't exceed 10-15% of the population, but is overwhelming in the media and intellectual life.
His first round score (28%) was basically the maximum that this combination of voters could produce. He had the enormous good fortune to find himself in the second round against Le Pen, against whom all other political forces in France, and all the media were united, because she was a political outsider. Why Le Pen ? Well the traditional parties of Left and Right have destroyed themselves utterly, and the ragtag collection of Mélenchon would never have been a serious threat. Thus Le Pen.
So this time the script worked again for Macron. He campaigned not on anything very much, but rather against the "threat" from Le Pen, whose programme and campaign resonated much more with ordinary people, since it was largely on economic issues. (Her politics would have been regarded as mainstream thirty or forty years ago) Once more, the French people trudged to the voting booths to do their duty to Stop Le Pen, but in smaller numbers and with much less enthusiasm, than they did last time.
[Self Promotion-ish]
I'm a data science student, and I'm looking for volunteers for a survey on Spotify User Data. If you have a Spotify account, I invite you to check out the form here: https://forms.gle/U9Y2QMn4EPfh3JjHA
It won't take very long, though you'll need to wait a few days partway through. Thanks in advance to any volunteers!
Scott, I'm curious, if you're willing to share: how are you going to rate the book reviews?
Are you going to read the n% best-rated reviews, or the top [fill-in-the-blank] reviews? For what values of n and fill-in-the-blank?
Are you going to adjust for the number of scores each review received? What is the median number of scores per review?
Some of the reviews were really great, and I'm looking forward to seeing the outcome! I wonder if my favorite one will win.
I'm honestly not sure.
My original plan was that everything better than an 8.0 average would be a finalist (I would add something like "if it has more than 5 ratings", but so far everything is on track to get there).
But right now this would mean 14 finalists, and last year people complained that 10 was too many. Also, there's SO MUCH GOOD STUFF that I feel really bad limiting it to 14.
I'm seriously thinking of making every Friday from now until December a Finalist Friday and posting yet another book review, I know you guys would hate me for it but it's so tempting.
Scott could do this: 16 winners. 2 on a Friday and people read both and select the winner. Next week 2 on a Friday and people vote the winner. Then people vote for the winner between those two. This way people don't have to read all 16 to participate. People can also wait to vote for finalists and time doesn't become so much of a factor. For the championship, you could ask people to reread or for people who haven't voted yet to vote in order to keep them both fresh in people's mind.
>I don't personally mind if this entire blog becomes nothing but "Scott and various smart people review interesting books each day."
Hm, I wouldn't like that.
14 finalists would mean 10% of the full set would be selected — that seems reasonable to me!
"Making every Friday from now until December a Finalist Friday" - I think that's a great idea!
Finalist Friday sounds good to me.
I don't mind having 14 finalists, and I wouldn't mind finalist Friday at all. I have read through ~25 of them and there is a lot of good stuff out there.
The selection criterion of an average above 8.0 seems extremely noisy though, because every reviewer uses a different scaling.
An alternative might be that Scott reads the top-30 rated reviews and makes a dictatorial decision between them. That avoids mixing different scalings. It's a bit similar to how scientific conference (e.g., in computer science) make their selection. There is a reviewing process with grades. All papers with extremely high grades are in. All papers with low-to-moderate grades are out. For the remaining gray zone, a committee looks at the papers (or rather, their reviews), compares them and makes a decision. The reason to put it in the hand of a single committee is precisely to not mix different scalings (plus hoping that they are more competent than the average reviewer).
I'm not sure whether this works out time-wise because Scott would need to read 30 reviews before starting to post, which is a lot of material.
Yay - every Friday is Finalist Friday!
14 finalists seems fine. If the book review contest continues to grow in popularity, it'll end up like Eurovision - two semi-finals and then the grand final! And then the final vote on the end of that!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfS6SrGS7Bk
I think you could do both the Top 14 Finalists *and* Finalist Friday with all the rest that didn't make it into the 14 but you thought/the community voted were really good. We have M - Mondays for several things, why not a Finalist Friday for the rest of the year? Everyone could then have a long and engaging conversation about "so what did you think of this? why did you like it, why did you dislike it, what did you think it did well, did it make you want to read the book?"
Finalist Friday sounds great to me.
It would probably lead to me reading more and more diverse reviews overall, which I think is a good thing.
Is there someway to post the ranking of the good reviews that didn't make the final cut? I guess this gives something away. Maybe post a link of the top 30 reviews in alphabetical order.. or something like that.
I like the idea of finalist friday
Are you committed to reading all of every review?
My feeling is that if a review isn't promising after a few pages, it probably isn't going to get good. If you want a further check on quality, read the conclusion.
I think I've read about 10. All but two I read all the way through. Since everyone is rating them, I figure it would be nice to make use of that and have (what many think) are the good ones pointed out. I guess the short answer is no, I'm not going to read them all.
I don't mind 14 finalists, but please don't extend things all the way to December. I'd rather the actual contest wrap up sooner than that.
Biased because I wrote a review, but I'm kind of in this group too. I'd rather see it be 5-10ish people even if I got cut out - at some point the process has gone on so long that being at the wrong spot in the order is a disadvantage (probably for the middle folks) or it all hinges on one big "just to remind you, here's all the reviews" post anyway.
I would love it! (Nothing against your own writing tho, lest this be taken the wrong way.)
Lots of book reviews is fine by me, they're good reading! 14 sounds like a good number though, it would get overwhelming if it were 20+
So for future contests, set a limit, say "no fewer than 10, no more than 20" for Final Finalist Friday?
I want to expose myself to the best writing of various major political alignments, and right now I'm looking at conservatism. If you think you can tell good conservative books from bad ones, then my question is...what do you think of the google results for "best conservative books"?
I'm also in the market for blogs (and nothing shorter-form than that), especially blogs with a convenient list of best posts.
Comparisons/contrasts are especially appreciated, not least of all because I expect those to be more substantial and less tribal.
I want to say "The Space Trilogy" is definitely worth a read, whether you are doing this project or not. I did a little blurb review of it a few wees back, and am working on an essay comparing/contrasting it with 1984 that hopefully will be up in a week. TL;DR version is "That Hideous Strength" is a fantastic book.
This isn't a book or a blog recommendation, but I try to read news sources from various perspectives. The conservative news that I like best are City Journal: https://www.city-journal.org/ and National Review: https://www.nationalreview.com/ . I would also recommend RealClearPolitics & its associates (RCPolicy, RCWorld, etc) as a conglomeration of news from a diverse group of sources.
Good recommendations. Also, there are lots of free podcasts to supplement your reading. Jonah Goldberg’s The Remnant and various podcasts by National Review and Commentary.
NR has some excellent writers but it’s largely paywalled.
For books, anything by Thomas Sowell (whose rise from extreme poverty in Harlem to one of the great economics writers is remarkable in itself).
Michael Oakeshott might be worth a look. You could read the article on him at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, before looking at some of his writing. Perhaps Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays would be a good place to start.
I've just finished Michael Rectenwald's 'Springtime for Snowflakes' (New English Review Pr., 2018). It was a refreshing read. He's straightforward and succinct, which is a blessing, and provides one of the most lucid responses to gender ideology and 'trans' dogma I've read. Tom Nichols's 'Our Own Worst Enemy' (Oxford Univ. Pr., 2021) presents a similarly well-crafted response to postmodernism run amok, as does Ben Shapiro's 'The Authoritarian Moment' (Broadside Bks. / HarperCollins Publishers, 2021). Shoshana Zuboff's 'The Age of Surveillance Capitalism' (Hatchette Book Group, Inc., 2019) is probably more libertarian than conservative, but her perspective is foundational to many, I think.
I recommend Chesterton's Father Brown stories, Tolkien's short stories, Lewis's Space Trilogy and later essays, and more recently Wendell Berry's fiction and non. Alan Jacobs's blog is excellent, mostly literature and theology but sometimes politics.
First Things covered a big tent pre-Trump and then went off the rails but FT from 2014 is a good snapshot of intelligent conservative thought by a cross section of Christian thinkers. TAC also got much dumber after 2016 but was the voice of the culturally conservative anti-war right before then. Since then, conservatism as a public intellectual movement (think tanks, magazines, etc) has been a dumpster fire. Quillette is an interesting sample of heterodox, sometimes conservative, not-woke views.
The kinds of modern conservatives I find interesting are concerned with things like local politics, raising families, being good neighbours, market urbanism, Georgism, local niche political issues, conservation, arts and culture, and internecine church issues, without much interaction with the mainstream culture war. These folks are temperamentally and morally unfit for national public office or broadcast media.
Particularly “The Elementary Particles” for Houellebecq.
"A World After Liberalism" by Matthew Rose.
A lot of the google results seem to be too heavily influenced by the Trump Era (which has radically shifted the republican party away from the philosophies of conservatism that held for the prior 50 years.) Some of the others (like the yaf link) are extensive bibliographies with some wheat and some chaff which doesn't usefully serve your purpose IMO.
I think the fivebooks.com hit on google (https://fivebooks.com/books/american-conservatism/) is pretty solid. I read four of the seven books they recommend back when I was more solidly conservative, and they were exceptionally well-written and foundational to my philosophy. I've heard numerous citations to the others in conservative circles, so they seem like reasonable choices as well.
I think it’s worth throwing in the WSJ. They technically aren’t a blog, but a subscription should get you access to their archives, and they’re a solid conservative paper. Their Op-Eds can be interesting, though anything not by their editorial board tends to be hit or miss imo
Whatever serious book recommendations you take from others here, when you need a break from that try the humor of the late P. J. O'Rourke. Exactly which O'Rourke depends on which facet of conservative thought you are interested in, e.g. "Eat the Rich" for economics or "How the Hell Did This Happen?" for Trumpism. Usually not too hard to tell from a capsule description on Amazon or whatever. Then have a Guinness or a Jameson in his memory, because we lost him this year and the world is poorer for it.
And so today I learn that O'Rourke has died. Thanks for nothing, 2022.
Hear here. P.J. will be missed :(
Theodore Dalrymple's "Life at the Bottom" is an interesting book.
So, let me voice a concern first. I worry that I am going to give a list of what conservatives SHOULD read and take inspiration from, instead of what they do read. In other words, if you want to understand conservatives as they are, this might not be a great list. If you want books that make the best arguments for conservatism, or what was called conservatism in the 80's and 90's, here's my best shot. I drift more classical liberal or small l libertarian, and am not terribly religious, so bear that in mind if you are trying to understand very religious conservatives.
This will echo some of what is posted already, but here goes:
1: C.S. Lewis, especially Screwtape Letters, Abolition of Man, The Inner Ring, and That Hideous Strength (book 3 of the Space Trilogy, might as well read them all) really do a better job selling Christian conservatism than anyone else. I am not by nature high religiosity, but I would convert to whatever religion C.S. Lewis led.
2: Thomas Sowell, probably Vision of the Anointed most of all, but also Race and Culture. He has a lot of great books, however.
3: William F. Buckley's earlier essays.
4: P.J. O Rourke, probably Eat The Rich and Parliament of Whores being top picks.
Now for less common ones...
5: David Beito's From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State. When conservatives bemoan the deterioration of civil society, this sort of thing is what they have in mind, even if they don't realize it I suspect. I found this book much more compelling than "Bowling Alone" and its ilk.
6: Adam Smith' Theory of Moral Sentiments. I always recommend this book, but it was what made him a super star and heavily influenced British thought from ~1750 till the early to mid 1800's. Wealth of Nations became more famous, but TMS addresses the social and moral relations between humans in a way that the best conservative writers could only hope to approach.
The other benefit here is that Smith talks about earlier philosophers a fair bit, Cicero and such, so it saves you trying to plow through them. Smith is a modern writer in a way that e.g. David Hume definitely is not. Much easier to read.
7: Victor David Hanson's Soul of Battle. Not because of the conscious arguments he makes (though it is a good book itself) but because of the virtues he calls out. The book is basically about how particular wars or battles had some really great knock-on effects for humans and society/civilization. I think you can learn a lot about modern conservatives like Hanson by looking at what he thinks those really good things were.
8: Maybe some Locke? Second Treatise on Government? I hesitate because although Locke is cited a great deal, I don't really know how much he actually matches modern conservatism, or how much you learn about the latter from reading him. If you wanted to understand the modern left, I would say "Read all of Rousseau, and despair." I don't know how much Locke fits that bill.
Are you planning on writing anything up about this project? I would be interested in reading it if you do!
I'm having a sort of rumination marathon about prose-producing AI. ACX user Lumberheart told me about a Tumblr question-answering bot named Frank, and I just asked it a question posed by Nancy Lebovitz on the recent open thread (hope you don't mind, Nancy!): "Do you need to be a wiseass or have a wiseass on tap to tell whether some ideas are stupid?" Here is Frank's reply:
Not really
It’s a nice quality to have, and some of my ideas (like “a lot of people believe in this and I don’t” or “a lot of people who I interact with online seem to believe in this” or “I’m doing a science project that involves interviewing people and I was expecting to get a lot of negative results” and so forth) are a lot less interesting than they should be if I hadn’t thought up the idea first.
(Or if I’d had someone to whom I could say “hey this is dumb and you should stop believing it, please do so” or “how do people even believe that, I mean come on, that makes no sense, how do they not realize that?”)
Also, it’s a nice quality to have when you’re telling a joke or talking about a book you’re reading or discussing something that other people agree with or are reading. There’s the whole thing of “talking about stuff you like when other people you know like that stuff too is fun,” and then it becomes especially fun when you see the thing they like when they’re a big smartass. It’s a sort of reverse status, I suppose – there’s the feeling that you shouldn’t be agreeing with the other person on every trivial issue, which is fun, and then once you agree with them a bunch, it becomes fun just because you know they’re a smartass about it.
I have made my own mental ratings of various aspects of this answer -- curious what others think.
Edit: Can somebody suggest an article or book about how GPT-3 & the like work? I have read a couple books about AI, so get the general idea about how machine learning and deep learning work. But I want to learn about how you train AI to to do *this*. I'd like to hear about the stages of developing the thing: "So we started out by doing this, and the output was that, which was obviously flawed in ways a, b, and c. So then we tweaked it by . . ." That stuff.
Ive read it over three times.
It’s nonsense with some reasonably good bullshit mixed in.
The Arkansas Writers' Workshop?
Word salad. If a human being wrote this I'd suspect brain damage, as it doesn't even have the focus of mental illness.
Hmmm... this looks like a post by Eremolalos, but Frankly speaking I suspect it's another bot
It's garbled. The first paragraph is incoherent: "Some of my ideas... are a lot less interesting than they should be if I hadn't thought the idea up first".
The rest of it is a fairly good selection of snippets culled from online interactions, but it doesn't really get close until the end, when the term "smartass" is plainly the nearest to "wiseass" that the training materials or wherever it's sourcing its databank contained.
As a way of saying nothing at great length, it's great at creating the kind of filler that is common enough online (have you seen recipe and cookery blogs where in order to keep you scrolling down, they fill up the entire page with verbiage before finally, *finally* just giving you the recipe for turnip greens?)
It successfully manages to sound like a human... that has moderate dementia/mild-to-moderate aphasia. A lot of it is grammatically-correct, but the signal-to-noise ratio is hitting bedrock.
It’s a little Yogi Berra-like.
I agree with all of you about Frank: If you spend 10 secs. skimming her response (Frank identifies as she/her, according to Tumblr) you have the sense it’s normal chatty rambly stuff, but the moment you try to actually grasp what she’s getting at it’s like breathing mud. There is no mind there, not even a very dumb or deluded one.
But there is one thing that impresses me about this passage: the variety and complexity of sentence structure. Look at that first long sentence. I was taught sentence diagramming in school, and what you’ve got there is a compound sentence, and the second of the 2 parts of it (the part beginning with “and some”) is a complex sentence with multiple compound and complex sentences nested within it, and all of that complicated construction is done *correctly*. There’s even what’s called parallelism in the 3 short sentences in quotation marks within the parentheses.
It’s hard to appreciate the structure of the sentence because the content is nonsense. Below is a modified version that makes sense, so you can just pay attention to the structure. Say somebody asked an essayist whether he thought it was important to be perfectionist about prose style, and he gave the following reply:
“It’s a useful skill to have, and some of my essays (like “A Lot of People are Jerks about Money but I’m Not” or “A Lot of People Who I Play Bridge with Seem to Use Superprecision Bidding” or “I’m Planning a Paperback Book that Involves Interviewing Models and I was Expecting to Get a Lot of Random Hookups” and so forth) are a lot more persuasive than they would be if I hadn’t polished up the prose.”
That’s a run-on sentence, but it is structurally sound and quite fancy. There are a few small errors (“like” should be replaced by “such as,” “would be” by “would have been”), but by the conventions of conversational English those things aren’t errors.
So I am wondering how Frank managed to do so well with sentence structure. ACX user A. has sent me to a 1996 article about something called Enhanced Recursive Transition Networks that some wag used to generate postmodernism essays that are said to be only slightly more pretentious and pointless than those being churned out by academics of that era. That system seems to be based on sentence structure templates. Article is here: https://www.elsewhere.org/journal/wp-content/uploads/2005/11/tr-cs96-264.pdf
Can anyone here send me to a book or article that details how GPT-3 and the like work — how the system was trained? I understand machine learning and deep learning in a general sort of way, but am looking for more detailed info.
I think syntax is a lot easier than meaning. There aren't *that* many models of sentences, and a lot of complexity can be generated by just adding adverbs and adjectives, then replacing some of those with preposition phrases and such. ("I ran" -> "I ran fast" -> "I ran like the wind" -> "I ran like the wind to the store" -> "I ran like the wind to the nearest store" -> "I ran like the wind to the nearest store that was open")
Of course, I doubt that's how it's done at all, I would guess it's done by pattern recognition. But it's probably pretty easy to pick up on grammar and syntax patterns, because they tend to be pretty rigid -- nobody would ever write "I ran the wind like to the nearest store" -- so building that sentence would probably run up against a big negative weight somewhere. On the other hand, writing "I ran like a sausage to the nearest store" might not, because "like a sausage" and other near-misses probably occur with enough frequency that this particular instantiation doesn't get smacked down as hard. Or so I would surmise.
This makes sense.
Thank you for commenting. I had thought maybe the thread had gotten so old and shopworn that nobody would respond. I do see that grammatical formulas, like subject [must be a noun] + verb + adverb are actually a simpler thing to teach than other patterns that do not have a formula that can be summarized so clearly.
Still, grammatical formulas can get quite complex, and the structure here is pretty fancy. For instance, if you look at my version of the first long sentence:
-At “and some” you begin part 2 of a long compound sentence. A compound sentence is 2 sentences connected by “or” or “and”
Now look at part 2. It’s subject is “some” and “of my essays” is an adjective phrase qualifying “some”
-The verb is “are.” “Are” is odd sort of a verb called a copulative — it doesn’t denote an action, but an equivalency with what follows,which can be an adjective (for instance, “idiotic”) or a noun (for ex.“screeds’).
-In this case what follows is a phrase that functions as an adjective “a lot more persuasive than they would be if I hadn’t polished up the prose.” Within that phrase, “a lot more” is an adverb phrase modifying the adjective “persuasive,” and within that adverb phrase “a lot” is an adverb modifying the adverb “more”.
-“Than they would be if I hadn’t polished up the prose” is an adverb phrase modifying “more.” “Than” is a connector, linking to “they would be if a hadn’t polished up the prose” which is an entire complex sentence functioning as an adverb.
-And I could break down “they would be if I hadn’t polished up the prose,” which is itself a compound sentence , i.e. a sentence with another sentence nested inside of it, functioning as an adverb. But I’ll stop here because I’m sure you get the idea and I’m beginning to get embarrassed by the extent of my grammar nerdery.
Do you think the complexity of all this makes it a greater achievement to get an AI to produce a sentence like this, or is it just the same sort of stuff you were talking about, syntax formulas, but more of it? And do you know of anything I could read that would tell me more about how GPT-3 works? I understand the general priniciples, am looking for specifics.
Anyone have a clue how to measure the total amount (in m^2) of all residential land in Flanders?
How would you count a mixed-used, multiple-story building?
https://cemonitor.be/en/indicator/housing/market/floor-area-of-residential-buildings/
https://cemonitor.be/en/indicator/housing/condition-of-resources/built-up-area/
These two resources, between them, appear to have the answer to either way this question could be interpreted.
This is great, thanks! 😊
Out of curiosity, why do you ask? I work a good bit with urban data on plots, buildings, and land use regulations, and am always interested in what others are up to on these topics.
I'm trying to calculate how high a land value tax on residential land would have to be to replace the property tax here
Part of a larger project where I'm attempting to figure out the potential impact on homebuilding (of replacing the property tax with an LVT)
Sounds interesting. As I understand it, the tricky part about LVT is that taxes are endogenous to land prices. You might underestimate the LVT tax rates if/when market prices decline as a result of the policy.
Yeah, I'm still not quite sure how I'm going to model that in.
If you figure it out, let me know. We're talking about LVT here too and I'd love to fork and cite your model for a local demo.
I recently agreed to read a non-fiction book with a friend. After reading the introduction (and the afterword from the second edition), I found myself regretting it because of how often the authors' use heavy rhetoric against their opponents. Here's my questions:
- If you read a book/article that uses heavy anti-opponent rhetoric, do you keep reading it?
- If you do, how do you tune it out to better analyze the argument? Especially so if you're part of the group the author is opposing.
There's a place for rhetoric, but saying your view has "immense and rigorously analyzed body of knowledge" that was "a treasure of information that has been largely ignored" by the opposition and supporting your ideas with "Much as some observers wished it were not true..." is immensely distracting to me. Doubly so when the afterword states the author aimed to be "relentlessly moderate—in its tone, science, and argumentation".
As a further question:
- Do you think authors that write this way still tend to have well-formed arguments (are they worth reading) or do you think your time is better spent in finding and reading a different book/article on the topic?
Well, then this is the age for you! It seems to me that these days, all attempts at objectivity have been abandoned :D
Yes, there is a lot to be said for transparent non-transparencies.
Good books I've read tend to treat the author's intellectual opponents generously. It's definitely a bad sign when the author is solely concerned with making it clear the other people are stupid.
"If you read a book/article that uses heavy anti-opponent rhetoric, do you keep reading it?"
It depends on what the book/article is about and what my mood is. If I'm feeling grumpy and the opponents are my opponents, I'm likely to go "yeah! sock it to 'em!" If I'm feeling grumpy and the opponents are my side, I'm likely to spite-read in order to go "what an idiot" at everything the writer says.
If I want a good book/article that gives me information, and it's all guns blazing about Those Maroons On That Side There, then I'll leave it because it's not going to tell me anything useful over the sound of the grindstone whirring away.
I would give it maybe a chapter or two to stop being like that, but honestly that sort of talk is a really bad sign. There are subject fields where large sources of evidence are ignored due to social or political reasons, but usually the people pointing to them and working on them are a bit less bombastic about it, because they know they are already starting at a disadvantage when it comes to persuasion and so tend to be a bit more humble. From what you write it sounds a lot more like the author is preaching to the choir against a tiny minority of dissenters, or just so wrong that everyone largely ignores their rants at this point. Then again, maybe they are only willing to write such a book because they are aggressive and don't give a damn what others say.
Still, if that keeps up for more than a chapter or two without any really solid, careful arguments I would say it can be safely tossed aside.
Any hint on the book or author?
I initially wanted to not say the name to avoid any way it might have swayed people, but I have a few responses now so I don't mind staying it outright: The Bell Curve by Charles Murray.
Yea, I thought it might be. That is one of the fields where there are really strong "no go" areas. I would recommend reading it, as Murray is pretty evenhanded but highly persecuted, which resulted in a somewhat... cranky afterward, especially. I found the content of the book much better than the discussion around the content of the book, including the intro and afterward. The content is also a lot less controversial than one would think from the talk around it; as I recall only one chapter (6?) discussed racial differences in IQ, but even then stated that within group differences were greater than between group differences, so racial discrimination didn't make sense if you can judge the individual in question.
Lots of academic proclaim that their work is unappreciated genius, beset by their jealous colleagues and ignored out of spite despite their genius, and just are wrong. Murray's work really was attacked for political reasons, not scientific. I am amazed he still writes at all.
Hi, I've decided to give twitter another chance and I would love to get a few more intelligent readers before I burn out in frustration and delete another account.
My page (and come to think of it, my life) is a sort of performance art that I think you're really going to enjoy.
https://mobile.twitter.com/running4fuhrer
. . .
The Motte is a nephew of Astral Codex Ten, dedicated towards being "a working discussion ground for people who may hold dramatically different beliefs", currently hosted on Reddit and led by me. It is likely moving off Reddit in the moderately near future. See https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/uaoyng/meta_like_rationalists_leaving_a/ for more context.
Of extra interest to this community, I've set up a set of prediction markets on Manifold, tracking both my decision on how to do this move and the eventual success of that move. The decision market is at https://manifold.markets/ZorbaTHut/how-will-zorbathut-choose-to-contin and links to the others.
Feedback on any part of this is welcome :)
Why not just go to DSL? My impression is that the politics are similar, am I incorrect in that?
He wants to keep his janny powers
Different community, different goals. We have a very specific goal around being a place for people with different opinions to discuss things; I think DSL is more of a general rationalist discussion board. The Culture War thread is aimed more at rapid discussion of many topics, in a way that a forum-style board IMO doesn't work as well for.
DSL seems like a good place and honestly I should talk to them about setting up some kind of mutual links to crosspollinate, but I don't think it's the *same* place.
IMO DSL is the proper successor of the old SSC comment threads (esp the open threads). It is ACX that is the new community (for all that ACX has the same `headline act' that SSC had). By which I mean, the feel of the space at DSL is much closer to the feel of the old SSC comment threads, the ACX comment threads feel like a different community.
Never been on the Motte so can't comment on how it relates to either ACX or DSL.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mC43pZkpTec&ab_channel=LexFridman
What do folks think of Michael Saylor? I think he's got a point that inflation and velocity of money (and probably a lot of other measurements in economics) shouldn't be single numbers, but he's got sort of a Buckminster Fuller vibe... skids away into abstractions an awful lot.
Oh my, I wanted to ask this same question. You can down load (4 hour!) podcast here. https://lexfridman.com/michael-saylor/
I found this conversation very interesting. I'd really like to hear criticism from an economist, as Michael was pretty hard on them.
A friend finally convinced me to view "The Saylor Series" on YouTube, a series of 17 lectures by Saylor hosted by Robert Breedlove on investing in Bitcoin. I'm usually very reluctant to devote even 1 hour of my time to any kind of lecture, and some of these run more than 2 hours.
I can't comment on his economic theories because I don't have the background, but I found him a very engaging speaker. He speaks extemporaneously, apparently for hours, and I don't get bored. Yes, the theme throughout is proselytizing for Bitcoin, but to do this he feels the need to start with primitive man, proceed through Roman history, to the industrial age with many interesting diversions along the way.
There are a few subjects where I could nitpick, but in his lectures I was exposed to many new and interesting ideas. It's possible that I find his ideas compelling because he, like me, is an engineer. He considers engineering, defined as using the tools and information at hand to make life better for everyone, Man's highest calling.
His distinction between property (a thing owned which has stable value) versus securities (a thing whose value is solely (?) dependent on its reputation) seems good to me, but I think it's a continuum.
A house is property. It will keep the rain off no matter what people think of it. As least for a while, though they might stop caring enough to maintain it. Its value can change a lot depending on what transportation is near it.
NFTs are pure value from reputation.
His idea of evaluating situations according to how quickly various aspects change is at least interesting.
What a thing is cheap or expensive matters a lot, but is it true that all education can be done through automated systems?
Yeah I'm not sure a security is solely based on reputation. I thought it was more a security was under the influence of a CEO or board of directors or some such that could change the security. And property was a thing; land, house, bar of gold, painting. I'm not sure the distinction is as important as he makes it out to be... but I've only listened to one podcast. (Lex is great BTW. He asks the perfect dumb questions, with humility.)
Yeah economists talk about the velocity of money, I only half understand it.
I did like his idea of inflation being not one number, but a multidimensional vector.
Re education. Did he say automated? I thought he was talking more about online or remote learning. If you're motivated, you can learn a lot by reading books and watching youtube videos. There has to be some doing too, but no reason you can't do that mostly on your own, or with a few partners (fellow students/learners.) The Khan Academy is pretty awesome for learning math... I was expecting Saylor to mention it.
Looking for books that cover the Latin American debt crises of the 1980s and 1990s, as well as the Asian contagion and the Russian default of the latter decade. Something like Adam Tooze's Crashed, but 30 years before 2008. I'm interested in BoP crises, sudden stops, monetary policy, fiscal policy, imbalances, and so on and so forth.
Economist's perspectives are heavily favoured, naturally, but it would be nice to be directed to not obviously or aggresively academic (and expensive and dry) overviews. That being said, maybe the best stuff is academic, so I'll take it if you think it's good.
This sort of topic interests me for all historical periods, so if you know something like it for the interwar years, the 70s, the late nineteenth century or whatever, I'll happily take that, too.
Many thanks.
Closest I can offer is Homer and Sylla’s History of Interest Rates, but it only touches on them briefly at the end of 800 pages on lending across the rest of human history, but that does seem to address your later point. Further recommendations in good finance history are Jim Grant’s biography of Walter Bagehot and Lords of Finance (ignore the awful title, the book is a brilliant tour of the mechanics of pre-Breton Woods currencies and the tangled relationship with gold).
Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the US. When I google for how to reduce my risk I get rather generic advice that doesn't cite sources, doesn't talk about effect sizes, and doesn't get into nuances. Surely there is a source out there that has compiled the research, gives detailed information including effect sizes, admits certain things aren't known, and constantly cites sources. Where do find it?
You want review articles. If they're "systematic reviews" then they're under constraints that limit bias and cherry picking, but they also tend to be limited to a narrow domain.
I'd start e.g. here, and work through references that interest you (use scihub if they're not open access): https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2048004016687211
That's still very short. I'm looking for like a wiki where I can find much more detailed information about specific foods. Like is saturated fat from plants different from a health perspective than saturated fat from animals? Maybe it isn't known but at least tell me what is known and what the leading scientists think.
I spent a month heavily reading nutrition literature and came away with the conclusion that we know hardly anything in detail since conducting long term randomized control trials is extremely difficult, and the observational studies are of very poor quality. Secondarily, a lot of conventional wisdom in nutrition (i.e. sat fat is bad) is specifically refuted by RCTs (e.g. the Minnesota Coronary Experiment), suggesting much expert opinion may be tainted by bad science and a lack of update to ancient priors established in the 1950s.
One compelling argument that avoids the morass of noisy studies is how rare heart disease was prior to the emergence of hyper-processed foods. To a first approximation, avoid those and you have avoided most of the danger.
After that, the various food cults bifurcate in a variety of ways. I'm a member of the seed-oils-are-poison cult, and indeed, seed oils are prevalent in hyper-processed foods and their consumption temporally correlated with the rise of CVD much moreso than sugar or refined carbs. Are they *actually* bad? No idea, but they are not needed in your diet and are easy to avoid if you I cook all of your own food.
That "slime mold time mold" blog series going around isn't a bad place to at least get a healthy scepticism regarding conventional wisdom and narrow in on the important unresolved questions.
Some people theorize that the huge spike in heart disease between the 50's and 90's was caused by switching from butter to margerine, specifically because butter (apparantly?) has vitamin K2 and margerine doesn't, and vitamin K2 prevents calcium from depositing in arteries. I have no idea if any of that is true, but you might look into it and take a K2 supplement if it sounds good to you.
Margarine also contains a truckload of trans fats, especially the kind made between the 50s and the 90s. IIRC current methods of manufacture avoid the problem.
What is it with Minnesota and experiments?
The only people who aggregate that kind of thing for the layman are people who have an agenda and/or are full of shit and paid by taxpayer money.
You'll need to spend a few evenings on Pubmed to figure things out yourself, sadly. Al Quinn's comment is also on point regarding the terrible state of nutrition science.
I am not sure if this will satisfy your need as it doesn't directly address reducing the risk of heart disease; however, I think the style of research you are looking for could be found at https://www.barbellmedicine.com/blog/ This is written by doctors who approach things with a lot of nuance and practicality.
Announcing the ACX aphorism competition. Your aphorisms must fit on one line of comment, and the pithiest wins. You have 24 hours, and your time starts now!
Also, if you read one blog this Orthodox Easter week, read mine - not so pithily entitled 'Rabbits, robots and resurrection: Riffing with Karnofsky on the value of present and future lives, to celebrate the 50th anniversaries of 'Watership Down', 'Limits to Growth' and the Alcor foundation...' https://pathfindings.substack.com/p/rabbits-robots-and-resurrection?s=w
Yes, it's about bunnies and population dynamics, but pops down several philosophical rabbit holes and hops for future of humanity, and subheads with terrible puns (Warren peace, anyone... hello...?)
“Don’t let your sympathy for the unfortunate make you one of them.” - Balthazar Gracian
"Anything worth doing is worth doing badly" (apparently by GK Chesterton, but I've seen it in many places)
The full quote, in context:
"This is the first principle of democracy: that the essential things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things they hold separately. And the second principle is merely this: that the political instinct or desire is one of these things which they hold in common. Falling in love is more poetical than dropping into poetry. The democratic contention is that government (helping to rule the tribe) is a thing like falling in love, and not a thing like dropping into poetry. It is not something analogous to playing the church organ, painting on vellum, discovering the North Pole (that insidious habit), looping the loop, being Astronomer Royal, and so on. For these things we do not wish a man to do at all unless he does them well. It is, on the contrary, a thing analogous to writing one's own love-letters or blowing one's own nose. These things we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly. I am not here arguing the truth of any of these conceptions; I know that some moderns are asking to have their wives chosen by scientists, and they may soon be asking, for all I know, to have their noses blown by nurses. I merely say that mankind does recognize these universal human functions, and that democracy classes government among them. In short, the democratic faith is this: that the most terribly important things must be left to ordinary men themselves—the mating of the sexes, the rearing of the young, the laws of the state. This is democracy; and in this I have always believed."
You win!!
"He who quotes another man's words has insufficient wit for his own"
"People are idiots, and there are boneheads everywhere." -- me, to each of my sons during their formative years.
Aim at Heaven and you will get earth "thrown in": aim at earth and you will get neither. -C. S. Lewis
He can look mighty deep into a millstone.
"Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution."
--Clay Shirky
People *are* what they *do,* and nothing else.
And the winner is... @Unsaintly - who not demonstrated the truth of her/his own aphorism by misquoting it - very much in the spirit of ACX Aphorism Contest - so let's do it all half-assed again next week. After all, if a job's worth doing, it's worth doing badly!
now please go and read my blog!
Why is there an international shortage of MAOIs?
They are decreasingly prescribed by physicians despite their extreme efficacy. Is it just not worth it anymore for pharmaceutical companies to produce them?
Also, any ideas where I could get tranylcypromine (Parnate)?
I think there was an SSC post about MAOIs a long time ago. Short answer is the side-effects require massive personal/medical life management. But, they do work.
Slightly longer version is that MAOIs suppress the metabolic pathway used to tolerate the trace amino acid tyramine, which can trigger hypertensive crises if it builds up to too high a level, so people taking MAOIs need to avoid foods high in tyramine or face serious health risks.
Tangentially, the famous line in Silence of the Lambs where Hannibal Lecter says "I ate his liver with fava beans and a nice chianti" is a reference to this: at the time the movie was made, MAOIs were much more widely prescribed than today. Liver, fava beans, and red wine are all notably high in tyramine, so Lecter was indirectly telling Clarice Starling that he had been off his meds.
Suicide is more dangerous than hypertensive crises. It's irresponsible to deprive patients from an effective treatment for a life-threatening disorder.
It interacts with food that have high tyramine concentrations. The risk is often exaggerated but here is a good summary: https://psychotropical.com/maoi-diet-short-2019/
Does anybody here know of any research into the supposed 6th sense that humans have. As in turning around when someone behind your back looks at you, or something not quite visible and noiseless behind your back causes you to turn around to see it. I believe there is something there, nothing supernatural but a change in the environment
https://www.sheldrake.org/research/sense-of-being-stared-at
If you want to be pedantic, humans have quite a bit more than five documented and understood sense, depending on how you count. The two big ones I know of beyond the five classic senses are Vestibular (sense of the movement and orientation of the head relative to gravity and other acceleration) and Kinesthetic (sense of the position and orientation of body parts relative to one another).
This calls for new physics, the sense of being stared at. Thought waves, perhaps. I think more likely that we remember those occasions when we discovered someone was looking at us and that we forget those times no one was there. Or, we think someone was looking at us when all they're doing is looking at the person who turned their head. In other words, I think this "sense" is a fairly common delusion.
Some think that eyes emit a beam, like radar. Researching same is pointless, I would suggest, although such a belief would justify the feeling of being stared at.
The linked studies show something there.
What those linked studies should lead one to strongly suspect is that they are in some way flawed. Another example: When one hears of a study into perpetual motion concluding that there's "something there" then one ought recognise that even electing to do such a study demonstrates a non-scientific bias. Thermodynamics contradicts the idea. Similarly, this example: Investigating the feeling that one is being stared at does mean that one believes in a new field or force or beam, it is so unlikely that much much more likely is that the believers and the studies are deluded.
There’s nothing particularly non scientific about empiricism. Rejecting something out if hand is non scientific.
I'm not rejecting anything "out of hand". I have good *rationalist* reason on my side.
(a) It is well known a large proportion of so-called scientific studies are flawed in design or methodology or otherwise.
(b) Physicists have always been on the look out for new forces, new fields and they've not found anything new coming from the brain or the eyes.
(c) The studies you would want us to take seriously posit a cause and effect which require magic or a new unknown physical effect.
(d) Magic is not scientific, although I do feel cheap making this point.
(e) Investigating extra (or new) sensory perception of the type posited should be as promising a project to the good PhD student as would be investigating perpetual motion.
(f) I didn't say impossible, I said given the relative probabilities (quack science vs new physics) most unlikely this is anything other than delusion. Of self or of others.
You don't have good rationalist reasons at all. You've invented your own straw man here - extra fields or forces that you claim must be solution, engage in generalised attacks about magic or something, then you debunk the magic or invented forces claimed by nobody and totally ignore other potential solutions.
My guess is that humans more aware of movement outside the visual range than we now know. Certainly even in the absence of sound I think most humans would sense a disturbance behind them, and possibly staring is the absence of movement, but who knows?
"my hare-brained plan of asking you to just pick something at random and rate it worked perfectly"
"[The newspaper] was bought — first, by all the people who agreed with him and wanted to read it; and secondly, by all the people who disagreed with him, and wanted to write him letters. Those letters were voluminous (I helped, I am glad to say, to swell their volume), and they were generally inserted with a generous fulness. Thus was accidentally discovered (like the steam-engine) the great journalistic maxim — that if an editor can only make people angry enough, they will write half his newspaper for him for nothing."
Or review his books for him 😁
In regards to GPT-3: I wonder whether meaning for an AI would naturally relate to how an AI works-- for example, how easy it is to gather information about something from online sources, while meaning for humans is sort of a second language.
Can you elaborate a bit? Since GPT-3 itself doesn't do the gathering, I can see how it informs selection bias in its knowledge, but not really how it functions or stores "meaning."
Looking for an English -> Russian translator to produce 80000 Hours guide and other EA/rationality related texts, including ACX. It is surprisingly challenging to find someone who would notice when they are being wrong (as a lower bound for high quality), especially someone with related knowledge.
At this point, we are ready to pay the engineer's salary to the person who we'd hire.
We are offering a bounty of 1000$ for a recommendation of someone we will hire to translate ten or more articles.
Telegram me @IAmMckiev if interested
Sent a telegram message
I recommend this guy: https://www.deepl.com/translator
I've begun a weight-lifting and cardio regimen recently (with the primary purpose of improving my strength and stamina and overall health, but definitely looking forward to changes in appearance as well) and I've received very conflicting advice about stretching before, or after, or at all. The received wisdom from my youth is of course that you should always stretch before any strenuous activity, to reduce the risk of injury. On the other hand a number of articles I've found say that stretching, in particularly static stretching, does not do much of anything to prevent injury and may actually be counterproductive in that it will temporarily weaken the muscles, which is the last thing you want before a heavy lifting session. I know that in the fitness community there is a lot of bro science floating around that is best ignored, but these articles link to primary sources that seem pretty credible -- yet the "official" advice, to always stretch before a workout, has not changed as far as I know.
Does anyone here have expertise to offer on this subject? Does stretching before a strength- or stamina-training workout have any clear, undisputed benefits? If not, does regularly stretching have any other independent benefits?
https://www.painscience.com/articles/stretching.php
Nice summary of the current state of the science
In my early 40s, years of obsessive recreational hockey were catching up with me in the form of chronic lower-back stiffness and aching. Bad enough to interfere with sleep, not responsive to over-the-counter meds, etc. Saw some back doctors who did all the tests and determined that my issue wasn't structural in nature, my spine and related structures were all perfectly healthy for my age group.
A doctor diagnosed that I had unbalanced my muscle groups as I got older. Mainly because of the ice hockey, my hamstrings were unusually strong; but the rest of the muscle groups that connect in the lower-back region were normal for my age. Since those other muscle groups weren't going to magically catch up to my hams, I needed to either quit playing hockey or gain a bunch of new flexibility. The short-term answer was a few weeks of physical therapy sessions, which worked. A practical step which the therapists suggested was to become consistent about stretching both before, and especially immediately _after_, playing hockey.
So I did that part, became the guy who's always stretching himself right after finishing a skate. Just a few minutes of it before and after, but every single time I play, no exceptions.
Importantly from an analytical perspective that is _all_ I ever changed: didn't take up yoga, didn't go back for more rounds of physical therapy, didn't take up any other new physical activities, no noticeable weight change, etc.
Now here it is 15 years later and I'm still obsessively playing hockey, now usually among the oldest players on the ice, and haven't had more than a little twinge from my back in years. [Reaching over and knocking on wood as I type this....] Since I (obviously) deeply love and cherish the playing of the One True Sport, as it's known in my household, this extended borrowed time on skates has been a blessing.
And as far as I can tell it is literally 100 percent due to having taken up just a bit of basic-but-consistent stretching.
I want to signal boost this a bit. I developed rather bad lower back pain in my early/mid 20's, and for two years going to doctors did nothing to help. I then went to the ergonomic nurse at my company who had me lay on my back and tried to lift my leg towards my chest. "Wow... you have really tight hamstrings." I started stretching them daily, or at least as often as I thought about it, and that solved what dozens of doctor visits couldn't. It also helps with my cold toes, which apparently is because my hamstrings tend to clench off the blood and nerves to my feet. Apparently your ham strings can really hose up your back and other things when they are out of whack relative to your other muscles, which isn't too tough it seems. I am usually really skeptical of the ergonomic stuff, but damn, that nurse deserved a medal.
"Stretching is a pleasant ritual for many people, myself included. It’s simple, it feels good, and we believe — or hope — that it prevents and treats injuries."
I was taken aback by this. Stretching is possibly least pleasant part of exercise for me, and since high school PE class I've always loathed it. It's so painful! I'm not sure how anyone would enjoy it. I was very happy to learn a couple years ago, and again now, that it's not necessary. That someone would characterize it as pleasant baffles me. What are they doing exactly that they're enjoying themselves?
If it is that painful you are pushing yourself too far. Just need to ease up and not stretch quite as hard. You may not be able to fully get into the picture-perfect stretching form without passing the point of pain, that is perfectly ok. Just push the stretch as far as you can without causing actual pain and over a long enough period of time you will find that you can push it more and more.
I don't really know what it would mean to stretch without pain. I just got up and did a "touch my toes" type stretch, and backed up once it got painful until it stopped being painful. It doesn't really feel like I'm doing anything at all. Shouldn't you feel something if you're stretching? How do you know if you're stretching if you don't feel a stretch? Which, to me, has always been the feeling of painful burning along the tendons being stretched.
If it's literally a burning sensation then you're either doing too much or irritating nerves that are pinched by muscles when you stretch. Possibly both. It should feel like... uh... things stretching, a bit like having a somewhat intense massage?
Stretching can feel a bit intense and slightly uncomfortable, but it should be moderately pleasant during and you should feel relief and increased range of motion after.
FWIW I do short stretches in the morning to mobilize my back and long stretches after climbing, and it seems to work fine for back problems which plagued me before I started doing it. My ROM is still not great, but slowly expanding.
Caveat, I am going almost entirely off of memory. I think I originally got this info from Greg Nuckols, who is generally very good. For my bona fides, I'm Weak For On the Internet, yet still mysteriously in the top 10% or so of regulars at the gyms I've gone to (415/315/500 squat/bench/deadlift). Not winning any medals anytime soon, but stronger than most casuals. Anyway.
There have been studies showing long bouts of static stretching pre-lifting lead to decreased (power output? strength?).
However, when you dig in, they were doing an amount of stretching that is frankly absurd.
If light stretching makes you subjectively feel better, do it. If not, don't bother. Agree w the painscience link that it's certainly not necessary.
I do about 3-4 minutes of rowing before a proper workout to warm up my muscles. That's what has worked for me.
Someone in the comments below says that Jesus was right when he said “ Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's.” This supposedly draws a distinction in Christianity between church and state.
I think people mis-interpret that statement. Jesus wasn’t saying the coin did in fact belong to Caesar - had he done that then he would have fallen into the very trap set up for him. He was playing with words. Sure Caesar is on the coin but did he specifically say it was Caesar’s coin? Any Roman soldier listening in would think so, Wikipedia seems to think so, theologians often seem to think so, but he didn’t.
If you are Jewish at the time you realise that he avoided the question. The coin could still belong to God, if everything actually belongs to God. That’s why they “marvelled” at his response. “Smart guy avoiding that question, innit? The Pharisees couldn’t get him”.
The other interpretation doesn’t make sense because it states that the trap was designed to make Jesus either accept Roman authority and lose face with his Jewish followers, or be arrested by refusing to accept Roman authority over Jews, particularly in punitive imperial taxation represented by the coin - but he “avoided” the trap by saying that Rome has legitimate taxation authority over its coinage. Clearly that is actually falling into the trap.
In summary “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s” is not “this coin is definitely Caesar’s coin”.
I've also heard a claimed interpretation that a key component of the story was Jesus calling attention to Caesar's picture on the coin, which the interpretation asserts was calling attention to the Ten Commandments injunction against graven images. Under this interpretation, Jesus was either calling out the Pharisees for using coins graven images, or he was calling for Caesar to suffer the penalties for violating the ban on graven images.
While an interesting claim, it seems from a quick googling to confirm the details that the graven image theory is not a mainstream theological or historical interpretation. The "calling for Caesar to suffer the penalty" sub-theory in particular seems fishy to me, since I thought traditional Jewish religious law had only been understood to apply to Israelites, while Caesar was clearly a Gentile.
The accepted interpretation where I grew up was that he was introducing the concept of separation of church and state to resolve the dilemma. It wasn't a clever conversational dodge; it was occupying a position rejected by both sides. Both Romans and the Jews held that religion was central to public order and the success of the state, so Jesus making a sharp distinction between duties to the two was completely and obviously out of frame for BOTH listeners.
I think this is one of those cases where a radical proposition seems strangely banal to the modern ear because it's now in the water supply; separation of church and state just doesn't sound like dangerous heresy any more.
But in that Interpretation of "Render to Caesar what is Caesar's" means that he is accepting Roman authority over coinage, which is the very thing that he was supposed to be avoiding as a trap.
Well yes. Jesus often settled theological disputes by making everyone unhappy. He fell for both sides of the trap (while laying out a path that ACTUALLY works.)
I find it strange, given how radical Jesus's other beliefs are, that you essentially have him in lock-step with the Pharisees on this one.
in lockstep with his followers, not the Pharisees who are generally reported as having accepted Roman rule. What I have him doing is getting out of a deliberate catch-22 situation by using a formula of words which can be interpreted by one group one way, and another group another way. In any case Jesus wasn't arrested here for opposing Roman rule, nor did he lose his followers.
Jesus invented the dogwhistle.
> This supposedly draws a distinction in Christianity between church and state.
I think he’s making a distinction between the world and the spirit.
I know it’s a quaint term these days but it had traction then.
LOL: no plan is Hair brained: at least it is a plan :) OUCH on the OPEN ENDED book "recommendations" there is a big difference in genre and what one would consider classical, fantasy, sci fi: though I am older than many of you: My recommendation would be FRANK HERBERT's DUNE Series: ALL OF THEM.. the BOOKs.. not the "movies": Dune was never meant to be made into an epic movie: If I have to explain then you won't understand unless you read the first Dune.. :) Have a great Monday.
Ah, time to play my favorite game: poorly-trained bot or paranoid schizophrenia? The barrage of random quotation marks and random capitalization leans me towards the latter (either that, or someone fed the bot a whole bunch of Francis E Dec).
If you look at the blog linked in the username, I'd definitely go with some sort of generic crazy-type. Very unhinged and poorly written, but not in a "probably a bot" way
You're forgetting the third option: posting while off his face.
If he's that into Dune and says he's older than many on here, there's a good chance he overdid acid in the 70s.
Given his blog is full of bizarre rambling conspiracy theories, I'd class it as schizophrenic. Whether that condition was reached "honestly" or was pharmacogenic is really a secondary question.
So doing lots of acid turns you into a neural network?
Come to think of it, it does explain the deepdream dogscapes...
Are you talking about me? I am a woman.. and my name is Isabella.. and I was on Twitter under my real name IsabelHale (something like that) and left over two years ago because of the NUTCASAES on there.. yeah.. maybe I should change my photo.. that is my photo from GMU when I graduated University .. and I am much much older than most of you: I am well over 65 and my son is 40. Science is Political is my blog and I don't make stuff up.. and I am a retired (well) I write and read in my field of Molecular Biology.. I only am responding because someone mentioned DUNE.. which I do highly recommend.. I read the whole series. and my son who went to UVA and is a Computer Architect.. told me it was one of his favorite books.. I don't read science fiction anymore.. and while we are talking about "writing and reading" because of all the work I did in biohazard field (using radioactive isotopes etc) well who knows,, I also had a job where I had to "fly" as in airplanes and also traveled.. I have torn retinas (you can look that up) very serious, so i am forever a RETINAL patient and now will need early cataract surgery.. yeah.. so.. enjoy your vision and time while you can. Take care.. :) I am on Facebook and have been on the internet since before Y2K,, worked of Cable and Wireless back then. anyway. so much for that I am actually trying to buy a house to move into.. for my retirement which I can actually maintain with as little help from my sons (who have their own busy lives).. so.. I will be back .. and what does ASTRAL CODEX TEN mean anyway? answer if you feel like it.. I was looking at houses but wow.. so much to know.. that I don't know know.. in Virginia that is.. best to you all. Isabella
"Astral Codex Ten" used to be "Slate Star Codex". Scott Alexander likes rearranging letters (such as ones appearing in his name).
This is too complicated for me.. I am not a mathematician.. I am retired scientist in molecular biology: my son is the mathematician.. like he said and I will POST.. in an email to me..when people were complaining about how hard C was to program in: and I will quote his email: he is on 8 chan and math forums: "This business about C not being a programming language is just hyperbole. It is basically a complaint that C is so fundamental to computing that the use of C could practically be called Compute Science itself. This complaint is only valid or well received by incompetent "programmers" who wish C wasn't so hard to do (although it is not that hard to use) and wishful thinking that some easier to use programming language could dethrone C which is impossible and totally unnecessary to even wish after. Picture a bunch of lazy ass college students that didn't want to take any courses in C because "C is hard yo" and are upset when there easy-ass programming language is not capable enough to do what is necessary and then they must use C at some point and are bitching about it instead of being happy that such a universal language exists. This is like complaining that math is not just math it is the language of engineering and "maths is hard yo". "HE DOES HAVE A SENSE OF HUMOR.. he is 40 and I am 71 and need to preserve my vision.. (he loves math) I took it to learn chemistry.. lol.. :) Isabell YO. :)
Computer Science is not actually a science, but instead applied math. And what language is just math and older than C? You guessed it: Lisp! Paul Graham says all programming languages gradually turn into Lisp if they improve over time.
Even though I said I didn't like this site: I am aware of that because of my son.. who I quoted:,, he went to E School at UVA.. graduated in 2008 and in fact: is an applied mathematician who maxed his SATS out,, taking them in Calculus at the age of 16. He applied to UVA to their College of Science in Math to be an applied Math student but the Dean of the E school (Engineering) at UVA actually asked him to join the E School. He went on a Full Paul Mellon Scholarship and is a Phi Beta Math Scholar, took him six years as he minored in Greek/Math scholars (lol) but was important to him; I saw his work: notebook full of all Math proofs. He is just a normal person in all other areas,, but gifted in Math,, runs on both sides of our family, my grandfather was Phd in Chemical engineering and Patent attorney and my husband's father (his grandfather) was an MIT aeronautical engineer. I was not even close to that kind of math student. ever. I took Calculus got my A and then spent my time in Molecular Biology. I hoped he would go into medicine but he THRIVES IN CODING: His area is actually C ++ and writes in about 15 other coding languages. I graduated in 1980 from GMU and I do remember taking computer science but at that time like you say there was NO actually "Computer Science" School, I programmed in SASS on a Main frame and took advanced Biostatistics at the Graduate level but did not enjoy that type of work: I did work in Virology and other areas and now the whole world knows what Biologists know that HUGE WORKING DATABASES are needed to "store" all the information generated by "Scientists".. :) thanks for that. I feel better today.. haven't been well, as you now realize I am over 65 by a couple years (had my sons late it life).. take care..Isabell
Well, it appears the poison pill and similar threats were a bunch of hot air: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/04/25/twitter-elon-musk-deal/
I'm curious what the thoughts of the commentariat at-large are regarding the implications of this deal. Do you think Twitter will meaningfully change under Musk's ownership, and, if so, do you believe these changes will be a net-positive or net-negative for the end-user experience?
Also, congratulations to anyone who placed long-shot bets on the prediction markets when the poison-pill shitstorm was being kicked up.
I'm very excited about this acquisition. From my perspective, I expect significant improvement
On what axes? What do you think these improvements will actually look like?
there's a feature on the side that's constantly serving me news I couldn't care less about (lots of celebs/fashion/movie stuff). If Elon could incorporate any amount of self-customization for that [it's not an ad feature; it's just horribly ill-targeted suggestions of stories I might be interested in] it would improve my experience immeasurably...
The obvious answer seems to go back to doing what twitter was designed for: you see stuff from the people you follow, you don't see stuff from the people you don't follow.
This would not only be a less annoying version of twitter, it would give the perfect response to people whon complain about people they don't like not being banned from the platform: if you don't like what they say then don't follow them and you won't have to read it.
This would give a twitter that is much less annoying for users, but also probably reduce engagement metrics, at least in the short term, which would make it the kind of thing that current twitter management just would not do. From a business point of view you could gamble that a less-engaging but less-annoying twitter is one that would attract more normie users and make make more money in the long term.
I added this whole panel to my adblock list ages ago; much recommended.
I expect it to blow up in spectacular fashion as huge amounts of Twitter employees revolt.
Since I hate Twitter, I am also very excited and expect significant improvement.
This year has a lot of potential for schadenfreude.
Would threats of poison-pilling work as a negotiating tactic to drive up the price Elon pays?
That could have been the strategy, but if it was it failed- Twitter's board has agreed to sell for the exact price he offered.
The purpose of the poison pill was to force Musk to negotiate with the board. Which he did. It turns out that they had a bad position and couldn't get any concessions, but the pill itself worked as intended.
Yes, I was very surprised to read this. All the fuss over a poison pill and then - nothing?
Well, Musk clearly has money to burn and if he wants to buy a vanity project, let him.
End-user experience? Depends on who you are. I don't think Musk is going to change the social rules of the platform as much as people think he will (though I also don't pretend to be able to second-guess him) because he realises he's bought a valuable, mostly-functioning, and shock-sensitive ecosystem. He'll probably loosen it up somewhat, and various minorities will take more abuse, as ever when artificial civility is more weakly enforced and the situation moves closer to the law of the jungle.
Technologically/algorithm-wise, Twitter is more likely now to improve than it had been before the purchase, for obvious reasons.
Culturally/politically, it's a wash. Some people will discover that their social ostracism wasn't a WEF conspiracy after all, political demagogues might prosper, but even Musk libertarian fans should probably look askance at the concentration of power in the hands of one man.
On that note, I'd be curious to read a comment from someone better informed about American and EU regulatory practices than I am as to what, if anything, happens on that front.
I’m still not joining Twitter. My attention is already fully fragmented.
The zeitgeist seems to be that Musk has no idea what he's getting himself into and will probably be crashing headfirst into reality soon, though there are theoretically several good moves he could make. In the short-term I expect Twitter to decline noticeably but not catastrophically.
I agree with this take. It's really easy to say "more free speech!" or "anything that's not illegal should be free to post!" when you don't have to think about the fine details. Once you actually have to implement your changes with real users, you run into trouble.
(For instance, spam is usually not illegal, merely unwanted.)
No meaningful changes. He will make some big splashy moves about Freeze Peach, unban trump maybe, then shitpost away into the sunset.
Re user expireince: it will stay the same or get worse. Your shitty feed is necesary for twitter to make any money.
Maybe Im wrong though; 44B is a big check for somthing that is questionably profitable.
From what I gather, the point of the poison pill was to act as a speed bump to limit Musk's ability to try to force the issue by buying up many more shares on the open market. Twitter has a staggered board, which nominally requires a hostile takeover to win two successive proxy elections a year apart, but there are ways around that if the prospective buyer controls enough stock:
1. Board members have a legally enforceable duty to represent the interests of shareholders. Delaware courts have tended to be very lenient in enforcing this against board members rejecting takeover bids in recent decades, but this leniency has limits. It would be pretty awkward for a board member to try to explain to a judge how it's in the shareholder interests to actively thwart the efforts of a majority shareholder to direct how the company is run.
2. The existing board is not necessarily monolithic in opposition to Musk's takeover bid. If Musk can persuade or cut deals with enough individual board members, he might be able to get a working majority of the board in a single election. The inevitability implied by a prospective buyer owning a majority or near-majority of shares would tend to help with this, as it limits the upside of continuing to try to fight the buyer if he's near-certain to eventually vote out anyone who won't cooperate.
3. Shareholder votes can also amend bylaws to change board structure. There's a proposal up for a vote at Twitter's upcoming shareholder meeting next month to abolish the staggered terms of the board and put everyone up for election at the same time.
In this light, the role of a poison pill like this is to limit the amount of control the prospective buyer can get through open market purchases, removing an opportunity to short-circuit the process and allowing the board to mostly control the pace of the process. By delaying the process, the board can use the additional time to try to raise competing takeover bids or deter hostile bidders who'd have to commit to attempting to win two different shareholder votes a year apart. I'm guessing that the board put out feelers for competing bids, didn't get anything good, and concluded it was better (for the board members and for the shareholders) to take Musk's offer than to try to drag out the process in hopes that Musk would get bored and wander off.
The decline of wokism is kicking into high gear. About time, I'd say.
Net positive for the end-user experience, and probably nudging the culture at large from the SJW thought police attractor to the weird silicon valley technofacism attractor. I have mixed feelings about it but I'm cautiously optimistic.
Also, bull market on shitcoins should start any day now.
I frankly don't get what's this talk that Twitter is woke. You mean, "most of Twitter's employees"? Look, it's in San Francisco, what do you expect? But if someone thinks that of Twitter *content*, then they haven't seen Twitter content.
Has it got woke stuff? Yes sure, but look, it has *absolutely everything*. "Babylonian Bazaar" does not even begin to describe it. It has Democrats, Republicans, Rappers, Pimps, Cops, Proud Boys, Antifas, MAGAs, Anarchists, 9/11 Conspiracy Theorists, CERN Scientists, Red Scare, Trotskyte Communists, Stalinist Communists, Perfume Nationalists, Alt Right, Dirtbag Left, Carpetbagger Left, Anime Nazis, Feminists, Reactionaries, Reactionary Feminists, Masculinists, Rationalists, Postrationalists, Black Lives Matter, Blue Lives Matter, All Lives Matter, Furry Trans Pansexual Wiccan Lives Matter, The Judean People's Front and The People's Front of Judea. Come on in! If Twitter don't got it, you don't wan' it.
It has everything and everyone. You have to be an ex-POTUS or something to not have an account on it. Jonathan Haidt has some wonderfully articulated remarks why that platform is insane, follow his Twitter and see.
Twitter is the aggregated collective neurosis of humanity, made manifest on a touchscreen for whomever wishes to scroll through it while taking a dump. And you can participate, too! It is simply perfect. I don't think that even a genius like Musk could do anything to further improve on it.
(except perhaps to pull the plug, and for eons be remembered as the savior of mankind)
> If Twitter don't got it, you don't wan' it.
Well that's clearly not true, because all my favourite twitter accounts are now banned. I want @bronzeagemantis, @temporarilyembarrassedelysiumresident, and of course @realdonaldtrump
Oh, they did? I had read some @bronzeagemantis. He's not my thing - just as furrydom, homosexuality and Sufi mysticism are not my things - but I've got nothing against him. (nor them). What I've read of him is enough for me to grok why the woke commissariat - with their toxic concept of "toxic masculinity" - would hate his guts, but I didn't know they actually cancelled him.
I thought it was only Trump. I've no idea who the Elysium Resident is, but I do stand corrected, thanks. I'd dive into Twitter very rarely, but whenever I'd reemerge from the rabbit hole, I'd reemerge having found a mind-boggling variety of weltanschauungs - which I mistook for Twitter actually *tolerating* that variety. I did not have a contiguous exposure to the twitterverse that would let me notice the woke commissars were actively trimming a whole bunch of tall poppies, not just POTUSes...
I've dived into Twitter again now, and saw it's true. I saw the top woke commissars throwing fits and rending garments about the arrival of Musk. It is such a beautiful scene. It brings a warm smile to the face of anyone whose heart hasn't turned to stone.
While I don't particularly like Trump, I dislike the woke commissars with the passion of a GenX-er who had grown east of the Iron Curtain. I don't think Trump should be banned, and I don't think he would have risen at all in a West without woke commissars. Nor do I think he will ever end them; Trump needs the woke commissars as much as the woke commissars need Trump (otherwise, he's just a guy who tweets a lot, makes bizarre cabinet picks and changes nothing). They will be ended by Bill Maher, Joe Rogan, Freddie deBoer, Anna Khachiyan and the like, much sooner than they will be ended by Chris Rufo, Ben Shapiro and the like.
The purpose of the poison pill was to force Musk to negotiate with the board. Which he did. It turns out that they had a bad position and couldn't get any concessions, but the pill itself worked as intended.
Looking for a book recommendation, but I don't know the terminology I need here. Basically, I am interested to learn why and how groups of people believe different things. To apply to the war in Ukraine, why there are pro-Russian and pro-Ukraine stances on the level of the whole countries?
I've already read a bunch of things about related effects: "The Elephant In The Brain" about how we genuinely believe in what is beneficial for us, Scott's writings on in-group/out-group dynamics, "Imaginary Communities" which explores the origin of one particular group belief (but doesn't provide the underlying theory why individual humans work in way that allows group beliefs to arise), "The Lucifer Effect" as a long exploration of the fundamental attribution error.
However, what I lack here is a coherent theory with predictive power which ties everything together and explains how this all works on the level of large communities of people. And, to clarify, I am really looking for some rigor here, as it seems pretty easy to formulate a just-so-story here ("people first identify with a particular group, and then rationalize their beliefs in group-and-self-serving way").
Are you after an analysis of Real Politik, where countries might decide to parrot obvious Russian lies because they see winning Russian favour as being valuable? Or are you after an understanding of why people with very limited access to free info and lots of propaganda believe it? Or are you after an explanation of why there are Westerners who argue pro-Putin positions?
The second point. Though, I am not necessarily after propaganda per se, to me it seems that propaganda is more a consequence, rather than a cause, of people’s mystifying ability to coordinate around abstract ideas.
How stupid an idea is it to try and buy Valproic acid online, so that I test if I can develop perfect pitch?
https://www.npr.org/2014/01/04/259552442/want-perfect-pitch-you-could-pop-a-pill-for-that
I'm a musician and have read lots of scientific stuff about "Perfect pitch", which is more accurately called Absolute pitch (vs Relative pitch). This article is obvious BS.
I looked up Valproic Acid, having never heard of it before. It seems to be fairly widely prescribed as an anticonvulsant and a treatment for bipolar disorder, and is occasionally prescribed as a migraine preventative. There are apparently about five million prescriptions written for it each year in the US. It's been around for a long time, too: the chemical was first developed in 1882 as an organic solvent for laboratory use, and has been used as a medication since 1962.
If it really has the kind of effects the NPR article claims it has on learning and brain plasticity, then it's astonishing that nobody has noticed until now.
If it has anything at all to do with migraine treatment/prevention, you'll want to research carefully before using it, especially long-term. With e.g. triptans it's not hard to give yourself lifelong recurring migraines by using them too much.
I'd be very dubious about messing around with "restoring juvenile brain plasticity". The story seems to contradict itself in places; the results seem to be yes, there were some better results than if he had done it with a group with no intervention (though I have no idea if he actually did use a control group) and then it spins "better results than nothing" into "gave them perfect pitch".
Just buying it, taking it, and hoping it'll work seems to be not the perfect idea.
The article is 8 years old now. I would expect to have heard more about it by now if it panned out as portrayed. A magic youthful brain plasticity medication would be pretty amazing. I’m thinking how great it would be to have a young brain for language acquisition.
A few months ago there was a link in an ACX post to an article arguing that the human body usually maintains the correct balance of vitamins and nutrients regardless of diet. I think it was titled "The *Something* Principle". Does anybody know the article I'm talking about? I haven't been able to find it.
So with all the impressive results coming out of DALL-E 2 recently, does anyone know how readily this sort of technology could be applicable to videos? DALL-E creates images of pretty much whatever you want, and videos are just sequences of images.
If so, this would have some pretty interesting consequences:
Say you don't like Joe Biden and want to spread fake news that makes him look bad. So you go into DALL-E 3, type the prompt "Video of Joe Biden kicking a puppy," generate the video, and polish up a few imperfections until it looks super realistic.
(Of course, people can already do that with deepfakes and whatnot. But an AI like DALL-E could make it much easier, such that any random person could generate hundreds of these videos with no technical background.)
Other applications could be in animation. For instance, instead of hiring a bunch of animators to draw animations, you just type the prompt "Girl with blue hair running across a field, anime style" and polish up the result. Similar techniques could be used to add special effects to movies.
I guess one obstacle would be that image training data is usually well labeled, whereas videos don't always have clear textual descriptions.
I think this is mostly wishlisting things you want a DALL-E-like AI to do- I am not saying AI will never be able to do these things, only that I don't see the potential in them being done with the efficacy you describe in the near future.
As for my personal thoughts: I believe AIs like DALL-E-2 or more advanced should be kept as novelty objects, by law or even force if necessary, instead of being allowed to kill the human imagination in the name of Progress or Profit. I do not wish to live in a world without dreams.
I think they'll kill art less than you think. I've been running the best open source text to image model (so not DALL-E quality, but can still make recognizable images), and I am shocked at how unable to come up with great prompts I am. The model does not fill in for the creativity or imagination, only the technical ability.
If you imagine a world where AIs can make entire novels or movies, there would just be a lot of terrible novels and movies. The people who would be filling the artist role would be those who can curate a good selection from a sea of garbage.
I think that the technical ability is a non-trivial component of what we appreciate about art. It's not a coincidence that the stereotypical complaint about contemporary art is "i could have done it too".
I think you misunderstood my point.
First, I would personally claim that the original lion king is actually more impressive on the side of personal technical ability than something done in cgi.
Second, what i was claiming is that even an actually beautiful and meaningful art piece made using dall e would be perceived less than a similarly beautiful one in traditional (or even digital but not "neural") techniques because it lacks the physicality of the art process, that something that even i that don't know anything about art can understand at first glance that, well, certainly i couldn't have done it.
Even if in fact, if you give me dall e, i would most probably not produce anything as meaningful. But it does cheapen part of the art process.
Sure it's a non-trivial component, but this is a very similar complaint to the ones people made about photography. There are still people who do realistic painting despite the existence of cameras, and we treat it as impressive because a human did it. Also, note that DALL-E can only make pixels, so there's still work for artists making actual physical paintings.
(I don't know what I'm talking about but) given a DALL-E image, I'm sure that a backend that can produce a physical, interestingly painted version of it would not be difficult, if there were demand.
It would be quite difficult. People overestimate how far along we are on the physical side of robotics.
You're right though that in principle, anything that humans can do can eventually be done by machines. I personally think we'll see people who care about the human element buying "organic" art, even if it's possible to get something made automatically.
You do not need to pay an AI and companies in the wild respond to profit motive and not the needs of humanity (or indeed any semblance of quality). The exact second that paying an AI to vomit drek onto a screen or paper becomes more profitable than paying a human to produce something is when the human capacity to dream will come under attack by Moloch. The arts (as something different from mindless entertainment) are already seen by many people in the US as at best a vestigial organ tolerated because you need some kind of arts training to produce mindless entertainment and at worst as a parasitic element. DALL-E-7 or whatever form it takes poses a very real threat of driving the arts extinct and killing the single most important part of the human experience- the ability to express feeling and internal experience in a way that transcends the incredibly barbaric and limited form of language. I believe many social ills can be traced back to a loss of artistic literacy in the population and this final step poses a very real risk of setting humanity on a trajectory of permanent dehumanization.
Okay actually artists do need to pay for materials, movies cost an insane amount to produce, and authors need to pay to publish their books. There's a reason we only get a few good movies a year, and the rest are just recycled content. I'm really looking forward to the future where any director can realize their vision.
I really see DALL-E etc. as more similar to a new medium than replacing the creator.
I do not believe DALL-E will make a world where "any director can realize their vision", I believe it will make a world where realizing a vision is impossible- both because it will utterly destroy the craft of art by mechanizing it, like how every other craft has been slowly mechanized and made soulless, but more importantly because a sea of infinite garbage will utterly drown out any work of quality. It is hard enough to find things of quality now- once Moloch can churn out thousands of films per day of soulless Pablum, works of art worth allowing into your mind will become invisible.
You can see DALL-E however you want, I am describing what it is and almost certainly will be. You have to pay a creator for his tools and labor, as you point out. All you have to pay for an AI is a licensing fee at most. Why maintain the art schools when you can manufacture art en masse? Woodworking has all but died out for this exact reason.
This is why DALL-E and similar must remain firmly pigeonholed as novelty objects, little shiny baubles and playthings, and if this requires law, so be it, and if this requires violence, once again so be it.
> like how every other craft has been slowly mechanized and made soulless
Can you give some examples of crafts which have been mechanized and made soulless? I feel like they all persist, and I'm struggling to think of cases where people have stopped doing something creative. Has woodworking died? I have an uncle who is a woodworker and people still buy his creations despite the availability of machining. Of course people don't need to buy every chair from a woodworker, but not everything needs to be a work of art. Unlike chairs though, art has _no_ practical utility other than the aesthetic.
I think something that you really need to defend is why DALL-E will kill visual art, when photography didn't kill realistic painting. Another example: I have an aunt who does calligraphy, and she doesn't seem to resent printers.
> a sea of infinite garbage will utterly drown out any work of quality
What I am saying is that the volume will elevate the value of curators. For example I like Brandon Sanderson's novels, and respect his taste, so his "AI Goodreads" would be an extremely valuable resource to me. Same for movie critics.
> and almost certainly will be
Claiming to be able to almost certainly predict the future of human interaction with a technology is extremely bold, so you should probably raise the temperature of your priors.
"if this requires violence, once again so be it" - somehow this reminds me of the (actual) Luddites.
I suspect you might find that "polish up the result" takes about 90% of the time and effort.
Keeping consistency between the DALL-E images would be a pain in the ass, but I give it 3-4 years max before thispersonkickingpuppiesdoesnotexist.com .
There is AI to animate photos. Granny died six years ago? Now you can have an image of her smiling and nodding at you!
https://www.myheritage.com/deep-nostalgia
It's between 'slightly creepy' and 'people who lost loved ones appreciate it'.
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/tech/news/d-day-veteran-sees-late-26801634
I think if it can make still photos move, the next step is then getting video etc. to produce new content e.g. Granny says a few sentences culled from already recorded sources so she can congratulate you on the new baby born after she died. For something short and looks convincing if you don't examine it too closely, I think we have the tools or soon will have them, and 'short and looks convincing' is all that's needed to start outrage storms on social media.
I've read that commercial illustration is unlikely to benefit, except for maybe concept art and stuff, because you can't yet enforce consistency from Dall-E. So you put in "girl with blue hair running across a field anime style" in one scene and it gives you Rei Ayanami, then in the next scene you write "girl with blue hair in an anime fight scene" and it gives you Sailor Mercury. You'd need some way to teach the AI the equivalent of a "model sheet" for anything that needs to be consistent between images.
I am familiar with that and this is why I'm not advocating for the immediate destruction of DALL-E: it can't be taught style yet. My concern is with some future DALL-E-7 that can do that.
The Biden administration is now allowing people to sponsor Ukrainian refugees. Under the program you can sponsor specific refugees for entry to the US. The way it works:
-You find a Ukrainian or group of Ukrainians (think family sized, not a village).
-You file a Form I-134 declaring you are willing to assist in their entry, including financially.
-The government checks out your information and the information of the Ukrainians.
-If approved, the Ukrainians are eligible for a temporary stay period of two years during which they can work. They are eligible to apply for a green card and eventual citizenship on the basis of jobs/residence they get under this status.
The requirements for this kind of thing are very low. It's about $23,000 + $6k for each additional person. So a family of three requires an income of $34,687. Note this is what your income must be, not what you are expected to pay. There's no specific amount you have to pay other than keeping them in decent conditions. A spare bedroom in a decent house (clean, structurally sound, power/water) is fine. Likewise them working to pay their way once they get work authorization is normal. And they don't have to live with you if you can make other arrangements or they become self-supporting.
The big potential downside is that you are responsible for keeping these people in a basic standard of living and off of welfare. If you don't then the government can force you to pay. That requirement goes away at the end of the sponsorship period, currently two years.
There's currently no cap and the government has set a minimum of 100,000 people before they'll even think about caps. (And being the Biden administration I doubt a cap will ever come.) So if you know someone who wants to come over or if you have the ability to sponsor then I'd suggest you check it out!
https://www.dhs.gov/ukraine
Sure, why not? Any excuse to import a bunch more cheap labour.
Ah yes, the famous "get invaded by Russia for a free green card" strategy.
All I got was a free frogurt. :(
Just overflowing with the milk of human kindness over hear, aren't we.
I would expect EA folks to be all over this.
They're not too interested in refugee stuff in my limited experience. High skill immigration maybe but not the average person. But yeah, if they want to jump on it, I'll give anyone credit who gets it done.
Which American author has the highest literary reputation? I won't answer any questions about the question.
Speaking in terms of influence and both popular and academic acclaim, probably Melville, Whitman, Faulkner or Twain. Within the US, it's almost certainly Twain, Fitzgerald or Hemingway. But it doesn't seem to me that Fitzgerald and Hemingway's international reputation comes close to the status they have at home. Honestly I think Whitman and Melville are the only ones likely to be remembered 300 years from now, seeing as Melville wrote a novel of almost Homerian universality, and Whitman pretty much single-handedly created the western tradition of free verse and helped shape American identity when it was in desperate need of shaping.
You may be correct about Frost. My ranking of best American poets is Whitman and Dickinson at the top, then Poe and Frost. For highest literary reputation, especially outside USA, I think it's Twain, Poe, Melville. Hemingway seems to be seen as problematic by some.
As a European I never heard of Whitman, heard about Melville, read some Twain by myself, and read Hemingway at school. I guess that forms a gradient of popular acclaim.
Also, I'm in the process of correcting the Melville thing at the moment. Moby Dick is amazing, I suppose doubly so if you read it for pleasure instead of school.
A lot of books are like that. I never enjoyed reading as an assignment.
Surprised to hear that about Whitman. I think he's contributed more to the world artistic culture than any other American, and he's better compared to someone like Nietzsche, rather than Frost or EE Cummings. But I suppose that in European literature class, it makes sense that he'd be glossed over, as we usually learn about him in the context of the American Civil war and his hand in raising Lincoln to secular statehood.
*Sainthood
Whitman was certainly on the Irish school poetry curriculum back when I was in secondary school but I think that's been overhauled now (Emily Dickinson still remains). He may have been more in vogue in the English-speaking countries of Europe; Chesterton was certainly a huge fan of his, and Whitman seems to have been a fresh, original voice in English poetry when first popular.
And of course, that leads on to Chesterton quotes:
(1) From his American trip:
Another interviewer once asked me who was the greatest American writer. I have forgotten exactly what I said, but after mentioning several names, I said that the greatest natural genius and artistic force was probably Walt Whitman. The printed interview is more precise; and students of my literary and conversational style will be interested to know that I said, 'See here, Walt Whitman was your one real red-blooded man.'
(2) From the short story "The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown":
The man of business leaned over the back of the chair, and fixed his dark eyes on the other's face.
'Major,' said he, 'did you ever, as you walked along the empty street upon some idle afternoon, feel the utter hunger for something to happen---something, in the splendid words of Walt Whitman: "Something pernicious and dread; something far removed from a puny and pious life; something unproved; something in a trance; something loosed from its anchorage, and driving free." Did you ever feel that?'
'Certainly not,' said the Major shortly.
(3) From the Father Brown story "The Secret Garden"
Valentin was expecting, for special reasons, a man of world-wide fame, whose friendship he had secured during some of his great detective tours and triumphs in the United States. He was expecting Julius K. Brayne, that multi-millionaire whose colossal and even crushing endowments of small religions have occasioned so much easy sport and easier solemnity for the American and English papers. Nobody could quite make out whether Mr Brayne was an atheist or a Mormon or a Christian Scientist; but he was ready to pour money into any intellectual vessel, so long as it was an untried vessel. One of his hobbies was to wait for the American Shakespeare--a hobby more patient than angling. He admired Walt Whitman, but thought that Luke P. Tanner, of Paris, Pa, was more "progressive" than Whitman any day. He liked anything that he thought "progressive." He thought Valentin "progressive," thereby doing him a grave injustice.
(4) From his autobiography:
This way of looking at things, with a sort of mystical minimum of gratitude, was of course, to some extent assisted by those few of the fashionable writers who were not pessimists; especially by Walt Whitman, by Browning and by Stevenson; Browning's "God must be glad one loves his world so much", or Stevenson's "belief in the ultimate decency of things".
And this excellent article:
http://www.transpositions.co.uk/19339-2/
John Steinbeck and Edgar Allan Poe probably deserve honorary mention as well, although they're both probably behind Melville and Hemingway in terms of literary reputation.
Melville and Faulkner were the names I was expecting. I believe Whitman deserves his place too.
What is the answer for major European countries? I'd guess:
Russia: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Turgenev, Chekhov, Gogol
Germany: Goethe, Rilke, Mann, Schiller, Musil
France: Balzac, Flaubert, Proust, Hugo, Rimbaud... bunch of other poets
I suppose this exercise isn't as interesting as I thought it would be considering one eventually starts Googling and at that point asking what individuals think no longer matters. Anyway, thanks for playing.
I’d add Herman Hesse to Germany/Switzerland
I think a more interesting question is what writer deserves that level of esteem, but has been denied it? In the case of America, I think it's Richard Yates. Revolutionary Road is at least as good as anything Fitzgerald or Hemingway wrote, yet now I can't even find him in most bookstores, and I'd never heard his name before stumbling upon him online.
I haven't read Yates, but agree with you that a more interesting question is who is underrated.
My guess would be Whitman, Melville, Twain and maybe Faulkner would be the top 4. I'll go with Whitman for number one, though my own preference is Melville.
Does anyone know if Poe still has a big reputation in France?
What were the best and worst book reviews you read?
Can anyone ref me a good history of politics between Western countries during the Cold War?
Anyone read through the Meadows texts, because holy shit.
I was part of the "Clown coup" camp vis. 1/6; that it was absolutely intended to be a coup, but it was a bunch of Q-anon wackos that were doing it and it could be safely ignored. Turns out I wasn't cynical enough.
Some shit about false electors, a pre-arranged vote in the legislature if Pence was willing to push the button, etc.
Could be why Pence refused to leave the capitol.
In any case, I encourage everyone to look into these in particular.
It’s some scary stuff alright. The end of the American Experiment was within view for the second time.
I suspect it will be written off as unimportant culture war stuff in these parts tho.
I live in St Paul. Stayed up all night during riots after murder of George Floyd watching it play out in real time.
I might have joined the initial demonstration if not for COVID. Wouldn’t have broken a lawful curfew or damaged property though.
At some early morning hour Mn governor came on to recommend people in my neighborhood pack a go bag. It came close to my house. Someone tried to smash through the drive through window of my Walgreens. The Trader Joe’s was raided. The corner gas station had a lot of no pay drive offs.
There have been 200 felony arrests so far in the TwinCities. Would be a lot more if all the crime had been committed on CCTV.
Have you been looking at the 1/6 texts? It was as near a miss as I care to experience. Red state legislators have been passing laws since 1/6 to make it easier to send ‘alternate electors’ in ‘24 at the behest of… I can’t remember his name, just that he was cruel and ignorant and thought that losing an election shouldn’t make him leave the White House.
The issue is: They thought that they could make it stick if Pence was willing to push the button.
They had the votes in the senate, they have the supreme court, they have enough state legislatures that they could do it; if the water was muddy enough.
Comes down to pence being a career poltico, and realizing that even if conservatives always have disproportionate amounts of reps compared to the votes, the armed forces/intelligence are majority Dem.
Had a thought: if you think it can't happen here, remember the 2000 election.
A revision of my earlier question about Literature. I'm interested in what authors you think are either underrated or overrated. Let's categorize them by country.
For example, I think for the US, John Steinbeck is overrated, Thomas Pynchon is underrated.
It seems to me like countries go through phases in which their literature is more fashionable. It's crazy to me that Thomas Pynchon nor Philip Roth has won a Nobel while so many obviously inferior writers have. I believe post-war American writers are mostly underrated because after Hemingway nobody really wanted to celebrate another US author that much.
What authors from various countries do you think are underrated or overrated?
Overrated french litterature:
-Flaubert is a bore
Underrated (or at least, mis-identified) french litterature:
-Alexandre Dumas is often perceived as a "serious" author, but the 3 musketeers trilogy and Monte Cristo are pretty much pulp adventure, and a ton of fun at that.
-Octave Mirbeau seems to be almost entirely forgotten, but a marvelous ironic novellist.
-Jean Raspail (tho apparently he had a lot of success in america) is a fascinating writer, both highly poetic and with a style that's...kinda reminiscent of Ayn Rand (uses of recurring leitmotivs, very manicheans characters)
-ASP Explorer, some random software engineer who wrote silly internet stories parodying and subverting Conan, D&D, Lovecraft and so on, with great skill. Sadly never edited, his work can only be found online, but god damn it's one of the best modern fantasy writer I know of.
I think Steinbeck is part of a large group of authors that strike young people first getting into literature as extremely important and weighty, but whom many people then grow out of but never return to and thus revise their opinion. I know I walked around for a few years thinking Hemingway and Steinbeck were among the best of world literature, simply because I hadn't read them since I'd explored more of the western canon. Kerouac and the rest of the beats are in this same category, though I think more people realize their relative worth past the age of 18. On the other hand, similar authors like Bukowski and Hunter S. Thompson deserve their hype among young people, and mostly hold their value over time, though they're obviously nowhere close to deserving the esteem of a Proust or a Tolstoy.
As for underrated authors in the US, I think Sinclair Lewis is now in that category as he's hardly read, as is JD Salinger because of the degree to which Catcher in the Rye has overshadowed his other (and in my opinion, superior) works. Ezra Pound may also be underrated, simply because his political affiliations and overall post-middle-age unraveling kind of destroyed his legacy as anything but another famous face from 1920s expat Paris.
Again we have to remember that reading a piece of fiction is a subjective experience. My feeling about Steinbeck is that he was an important writer describing a unique American experience during the Great Depression, but really not a terribly good writer. It honestly feels like WPA work to me. Your mileage may vary.
If you are tuned to Thomas Pynchon’s wavelength, he will take you on an unforgettable ride. As I understand it The Pulitzer committee recommended that Gravity’s Rainbow receive the prize for fiction in ‘73, I believe. They were overruled by those that found it incomprehensible and transgressive. It’s one of those love it or hate works.
The whole Hemingway / Faulkner thing seems to divide people into camps also. For a while their individual writing seemed to converge into one style but they were both more interesting when they each went their own way. My personal favorite of the two is Faulkner.
I love to read Saul Bellows but John Updike bores me so again it comes down to your own experience. As Iris Murdoch noted in what seemed like a throw away line that really was quite important, “We’re all so very different.”
Steinbeck didn't write about the Great Depression nearly as well as Woody Guthrie in his autobiography. Bound for Glory deserves to be more famous than The Grapes of Wrath but isn't. I blame public education.
Hadn’t heard of Bound for Glory. I’ll check it out.
Wait a minute. This isn’t some fetish thing is it? [joke]
I think I am the only person who has been banned from DSL, what Scott calls the Bulletin Board, by number of strikes. I'm not here to argue against that. I do find it interesting how different an offshoot of one group can be. I didn't get along with those guys for various reasons.
In retrospect it's obvious that one group that is distilled from another will be very different from the mother group.
This phenomenon may explain a power law, why large firms get larger and vice versa.
How can one get banned by 'strikes' - asking, as I never used that Board yet? And how do you think those groups are different?
It means I got banned multiple times until it became permanent. Main difference is that group is very conservative and the culture war never ends.
okay, I see
DSL sucks because the moderators aren't fit to determine what anyone sees but I did want to respond to what you got banned for. You said "I think the right way to increase fertility is to make society more "sex positive", as the kids say." But this is economically uninformed. If women are the producers and men are the consumers, and sex positivity increases consumption at some price-point (the quality of the man), then the average price demanded by the producers will increase. Basic equilibrium. The key is that sex positivity actually increases the consumption/production ratio, because men want sex way more, so you get a higher "market price."
No, no, no. My petulant point there was a callback to another, older dispute. I'm glad I was banned because the essential cultural conflict was never going to end.
(The root debate was over the abortion law in Texas.)
FWIW, I agree that DSL moderation is biased against the left (particularly Cassander), but I also agree with your ban (for calling people "cocksuckers"). There's a difference between disagreement and gratuitous insult.
I don't disagree with their decision. I mention what happened here because I find it hard not to mention it to someone and the only forum I know of where I feel like I have an audience for such a story is the audience here. (My girlfriend has no interest in my online life.)
My original reference to c*s*ers was to particular politicians who deserved the slight I was hurling in their general direction. The callback to it was me giving up on that forum, knowing i would be banned.
DSL's moderation is definitely harsher on low-effort left-leaning comments than Scott's was on SSC. But I think that actually puts them closer to the center (though a little past it). Remember that applying a stricter standard to right-leaning comments than left-leaning ones was an explicit policy Scott published.
DSL moderation will tend to come down on people gesturing towards common negative stereotypes of non-left groups as undisputed truth. I approve of this and think it creates a more honest discussion space. I wish they would apply the same zeal to stereotypes of left groups, but stopping the most common type of bad behavior is better than stopping none of it.
I don't think that this one was very fair. https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,6273.msg236629.html#msg236629
In any case, that's not "the most common type of bad behavior". DSL is a conservative echo chamber where digs at the left flow like water with little pushback, let alone punishment.
Can you suggest an alternative? Somewhere that doesn't allow low-effort digs at the left, but also doesn't allow "but this comes from the right, so obviously we should be looking for the racist angle."?
I'd love to engage intellectually with a community like that, but all I've been able to find so far is a couple (DSL and one other) that allow shots at the left but not the right. And several dozen (basically the rest of the internet, as far as I can tell) that allow shots at the right but not the left.
I've found the left-leaning commentary and argument on DSL to be unusually high quality, possibly because its one of the only places with significant left-leaning participation that actually puts a burden of argument on those participants.
Cassander was an extremely fair moderator (IMO) until January 6th, at which point you could see the transformation happening practically in real time by reading his posts in the threads from that day as the events unfolded.
Now I’m curious. Did the forum start to deny the reality of what happened?
That sort of stuff frightens and confuses me. When people start to present ‘alternative facts’ something has gone terribly, fundamentally wrong. Discourse at that point becomes pointless. We might as well be throwing rocks at each other.
The last famous philosophers outside academia were Sartre and Camus. I don't even know if they are taken seriously inside academia. But they were famous because they wrote not only boring philosophical essays but plays and novels (Boring ones, but they achieved popular acclaim...)
Why don't more philosophers write plays and novels? On the one hand, I'm glad philosophy and art isn't generally conflated, because I prefer art to be pure. OTOH, I get sleepy reading philosophy and wish philosophers wrote more plays and novels. I think the reason Scott is so internet famous is because you never know whether you are getting a dry analysis of a meta drug study or a short story about gods. He's the American Camus, if Camus were funny.
In my experience, abstracting your philosophy into novels or plays (or even video games if you take things like The Talos Principle or Nier: Automata) gives you a trade off: it can become more approachable, but it can be harder for people to get the message. I've read Sartre's No Exit, and I found it pretty fun. But I'd have missed the philosophical elements if I wasn't looking for them. Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra is better in that you can tell that it is a philosophy book (the numerous speeches and lack of real plot make it clear), but it still loses clarity from the format and setting.
Of course, novelization can have the opposite effect as well and make things _less_ approachable. Rand only wrote in novels and a slow reader like me looks at 1000+ pages as a huge commitment that is better spent on something concise like Kierkegaard's Either/Or (/s).
To make fiction out of philosophy, you have to have three things: good philosophy/reasoning, a good story, and the ability to balance both so one doesn't overpower the other. Writing philosophy directly just requires the first one.
> The last famous philosophers outside academia were Sartre and Camus. I don't even know if they are taken seriously inside academia
How about Ayn Rand? She outlived Sartre and Camus, and has the distinction of being the last famous philosopher who isn't taken seriously _inside_ academia.
Really though, what kinds of philosophers do you want to be writing novels? Could Daniel Dennett write a novel about how qualia don't exist? Would a play by W. V. O. Quine on the subject of logical positivism be enlightening? How about a romantic comedy by Peter Singer where the author breaks in every two minutes to explain why the main characters' actions are unethical?
Western (by which I mean not French) philosophy values rigour and precision. French philosophy values wooly crap that sounds deep. You can get away with putting the latter into a fictional form, but not the former; the former needs lots of footnotes and rebuttals to obvious objections.
What fiction has to offer is expression through form. Some things can't be said literally with words but can be pointed at fictionally through form. Ayn Rand fails at doing that in my opinion because she doesn't seem capable of metaphorical thinking.
Scott is good at pointing at things with his fiction, things he can't express in an essay because they are not expressible in an essay. That's the point of a good story. To say what can't be said otherwise.
It occurs to me now that Keirkegaard wrote short fiction to express his philosophy, works which remind me a lot of Scott's short fiction.
Neitzsche brought philosophy closer to art. My belief is that bringing philosophy closer to art is unavoidable. because art is the only thing that actually shines a light on human existence. I don't know what Daniel Dennet thinks and I don't care because I don't see any wisdom coming from modern philosophy that hasn't been better said by our artists.
Maybe that is an ignorant assertion but if the recent generation of philosophers have departed, once again, from art, then aren't the taking a huge risk -- the risk that they don't know better than the artists?
I suppose i need to read Daniel Dennet now to gauge how ignorant my statement above is.
Let's start a political party! Seems to me there's room for a new one as the left and right continue to slide apart.
The new party should be the sensible middle. Not woke, not conservative. A bowling ball strike right through the center of the lane.
Why can't we do this? Does anyone here actually like the Republicans or the Democrats?
My idea for the name of the party is The American Party.
Andrew Yang has the Forward Party, just join it?
How is UBI a centrist position?
From a centrist perspective, it rationalizes the welfare system and does away with its special interest groups and bureaucracy.
Agree there is a centrist case for UBI. That's different than it being a policy position that is popular among centrists.
I'm talking about a party that tries to win by appealing to the median voter, taking positions that are currently popular among centrists. Andrew Yang's party is not popular.
I don't know for a fact that a centrist party would be popular; perhaps the electorate is too bifurcated along tribal lines for that to be the case, but it seems like the Dems and Repubs have moved in much more radical directions than has the general population and that a party that tries to appeal to the sensibilities of normal people might have a chance of winning.
I would be 100% behind this for the USA, but I don't know if it would be viable for the same reason that the Greens/Libretarians don't get office very often: the current system incentivizes a two party system. Unless you're solidly in the very center of an issue, voting for any party other than the lesser of the two "evils" just increases the chance that the opposite party succeeds. This also means that the two main parties can keep getting more different from one another (and further polarized) because there's very little incentive to vote against them.
Full disclosure, though: I'm no expert on the subject. If you're curious, I recommend looking at CGP Grey's video series on the voting system in America and some alternatives. https://www.cgpgrey.com/politics-in-the-animal-kingdom
"Democrats but not woke" is just "a wing of the Democratic party." The reason there's only two parties is because small parties have more success getting merging with a larger party than trying to make it on their own. FPTP voting means splitting your voting base is a losing strategy.
I shouldn't have written "not conservative". I had in mind a party that tries to capture the moderates from both major parties, eventually displacing one of them by offering a bigger tent to the middle. True, eventually that party would be known as the more conservative or liberal party, depending on which of the two major parties now dies in its wake. But right now, with the GOP and Dems moving fast apart in opposite directions, there's an opportunity to flood the gap. Major parties have died before.
Notice you got a mention in the Times today (not NY).
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/why-success-in-life-is-the-art-of-the-possible-tj663nkjh
Not sure if any of that column could have been written without your piece.
Guys how do you manage your acid base balance? There must be something else besides taking some magnesiumcitrate and potassium and what not. Stop bullshitting with “oh it’s bogus science”. How do I increase that HCO3