FiveThirtyEight is giving odds Liverpool 65%/Real Madrid 35% of winning, so now I'm nervous!
Still, it should be a beautiful night in the City of Lights, the weather here in Ireland at least is beautiful (for the weekend, getting cloudy again Monday) so here we go!
EDIT: Curse of FiveThirtyEight strikes again - Real win their 14th Champions League with 1 goal to 0. Courtois (the Real Madrid goalkeeper) had the perfect game, saving everything.
It's a shame that the universe wasted it's chance for plucky underdogs to get outplayed by four seperate teams and somehow get through and win the cup on ree-al-bloody-madrid.
It's also a shame that football discourse is filled with outcome bias even more than normal.
Liverpool had all the chances but couldn't get past the keeper. A bit of luck with the disallowed goal but then Real took their chance in the second half.
I sort of expected that kind of result, but it's disappointing all the same. Ah well, next year!
I have tried silexian based on Scott's recommendation. Seems to have a bit of a calming effect (after a bad few days) but I got a lot of lavender burpies. It feels like I literally washed my mouth with soap! Is there a way to mitigate this effect?
Starting very low because D-D requires much higher temperature than D-T and we can't even break even with D-T yet and T/He3 fuels are prohibitively expensive until you solve D-D fusion. The number of neutrons produced from fusion will be nowhere near enough to breed as much T from Lithium as it consumes. Maybe excess neutrons from fission plants can will be used to produce enough T for a few reactors, but fusion is probably never going to provide a large fraction of grid power. I want Helion to succeed but based on my understanding of the physics I'm 98% confident that they're the next Theranos. They claim they'll be able to break even with D-D but nobody else has even solved D-T yet, and that's orders of magnitude easier.
"It's pretty much an evolutionary environment that selects for chaotic nonsense, if anything makes too much sense then the locusts can (and will) descend and strip it to the bone. That might make for a fascinating experiment in a jar but not a very good way to run a society "
I don't know if people here are familiar with the Amazon Vine programme, but it is immensely frustrating.
For me, anyway, and I will tell you why.
I found that when I was leaving reviews on products purchased through Amazon, I had this little flair about "Vine Voice" included. I had no idea what that was, and it was only by looking this up that I found out what it was all about:
Amazon Vine is a program that enables a select group of Amazon customers to post opinions about new and pre-release items to help their fellow customers make educated purchase decisions. Customers are invited to become Amazon Vine Voices based on the trust they have earned in the Amazon community for writing accurate and insightful reviews. Amazon Vine provides members with free copies of products that have been submitted to the program by vendors. Since Voices will receive access to products that are not yet available on the market, their opinions may be among the first posted on a product’s detail page. Amazon does not influence the opinions of Amazon Vine members, nor do we modify or edit their reviews."
Well, free goodies, what is there to complain about, you ask?
No free goodies, because I'm not American. And they didn't even ask me before slapping this label on, and there was no damn way to tell them "Knock it off, I'm not American":
"I am not a U.S. person (either a U.S. citizen or a resident alien). Do I need to provide any information to Amazon?
No. Unfortunately, you will not be able to continue to participate in Amazon Vine. The Vine program is open only to U.S. persons."
It was only today, after they sent me an email inviting me to once again submit reviews, that I was able to get taken off this programme, by filling out the tax questionnaire. Once it was Officially IRS Not An American, *then* they booted me:
"Your Vine account has been closed for not meeting our program participation criteria. You will still be able to view your Vine reviews and Vine order history but will no longer be able to request Vine items. We encourage you to continue posting unbiased reviews to be able to participate in the program again in the future."
Which is fine by me! Being a "Vine Voice" gave me no benefits, I had never requested or received any Vine items, and I did not like Amazon using me to sell their goods by shilling me as a reviewer who should be trusted, so if I said I liked product X, you can be sure it's good so please buy product X!
But damn it, Jeff, can you tear yourself away from your midlife crisis with your new armcandy to fix your damn website so people can inform it "Believe it or not, other countries than America exist and I am not an American and this bloody thing does not apply to me, stop using my name, thanks and kisses"?
The CA primaries have me thinking about tactical voting, and it occurred to me that the Instant Runoff Voting that people keep advocating is also vulnerable to tactical voting, due to the risk of a second choice being eliminated early.
For example, if you have something like 49%-A, 48%-BC, 3%-C, then the B supporters have an incentive to vote for their second choice C instead of B in order to prevent the hated A from winning. IRV is often touted as letting people vote their heart instead of compromising on the most electable candidates, but that's exactly what happens in this example!
Given that tactical voting is a problem anyway, it seems like it makes sense to just stick with FPTP, which has the simplest and easiest to understand rules. And simplicity is an underlooked virtue, given how confused people are and how controversial vote counting is even in existing elections. Just look at the shitshow that happened during the NYC mayoral election vote counting.
"B supporters have an incentive to vote for their second choice C instead of B"
Voting C=1 and B=2 will not increase the chances of A losing. It will only increase the chances of C beating B, which is not what that voter wants. But since the chances of C winning are extremely unlikely, voting either way will probably have the same outcome. (I'm Australian, by the way, ask me anything you like about instant runoff voting)
The complexity is certainly a downside. Approval voting is a much simpler but still highly-regarded voting method - this org does a lot of work advocating for it https://electionscience.org/
The point is that the B voters prefer C to A and thus are encouraged to vote C first. Imagine that B and C are candidates from the same party and A the opposing party for instance.
Ah, so in Australia, each party can only have one candidate for the lower house, which prevents that. There's something more complicated for the upper house.
It's entirely up to the party, different parties have different processes and there's definitely a lot of backroom politics. But if they make a bad choice, the voting method makes it easy for them to lose the seat.
One fun story: in a safe Labor seat, Labor opted not to run a popular community figure, in favor of an established politician who had lost a factional war. They lost the seat to an independent, thanks to the community outrage (also worth mentioning the area has a high Vietnamese population - the winning candidate and the original rejected community figure are both Vietnamese)
The idea that candidates just get chosen arbitrarily by party insiders would strike Americans as terribly undemocratic (although that's how presidential candidates were often chosen prior to 1972). At least on paper, parties are much weaker in the US than they are in parliamentary systems.
The way it works in the US is that there are two rounds of elections, a primary election in spring or summer followed by general elections in November. In most cases, each party holds a separate primary election to determine that party's candidate, and then the winners of each primary face off in the general election in November.
Party primaries are usually, but not always, restricted to voters of that party. However, party registration is just a box you check on your voter registration - there are no party dues or anything required to vote in a primary (this would be seen as an unconsitutional outrage in the US). People sometimes switch party registrations to vote in the other sides' primary.
California has a different system where primaries are *nonpartisan*. Every candidate, regardless of party preference, competes in a single primary election, and every voter can vote in the primary, regardless of party. The top two vote-getters of the primary advance to the general election in November. Also, candidates can list any party as their "party preference" on the ballot, and do not need the consent of the actual party to do so.
In the US, candidates are expected choose their party, rather than the other way around (though in practice, it tends to amount to the same thing.)
General elections usually only have two serious candidates (the Democrat and the Republican), but primaries are often hotly contested, with many people vying to win the party's nomination, and they can be highly volatile and subject to tactical voting as a result.
Incidentally, I actually just engaged in some tactical voting myself in the CA primary, voting for the Republican in hopes of stopping the 2nd place Democrat from advancing to the general.
Scott, is there any chance to see the ratings for the non-finalists (after you've decided which extra ones get honorable mentions etc). It's hard to know how it was received otherwise.
Manifold is predicting 80% chance of open source DALL-E substitute within 2 years. Alphazero to leelazero was much quicker than that, but getting enough good training data is harder here. I presume the open source version will be uncensored or trivially uncensorable by a mod. Not sure what google and openAI are accomplishing by refusing to generate sexy things. Avoiding bad press perhaps but no real world benefit beyond that as far as I can see.
Distributed network of volunteers can provide plenty of compute and plenty of web crawling for training data but maybe the training data quality would have issues. I predict 90% chance of an open source dall-E substitute within 2 years, considering how quickly google replicated it with Imagen.
I knew it was bad there, but these are genuine 1984 levels of state oppression. I feel like even North Korea does not do this (mainly because they don't have the tech).
It made me feel physically ill for the most of the day and it also left me wondering whether there are any feasible long-run strategies for regime change in China (or even short-run ones, but there probably aren't any). Is there anything the West could realistically do to bring the Chinese communist party down?
I guess that one strategy would be a gradual shift from manufacturing in China towards India, South America and Africa. China would stagnate or get poorer and once the country does not keep getting richer, people there might be less supportive of the regime. And if not, then at least the regime will stop getting more powerful and become weaker internationally instead. I don't know much about economic geography, but I'd say China is not all that interesting in terms of its raw resources and the West mostly uses it for cheap production. But India can probably do it cheaper already and most African countries can do that too.
I suppose that both India and most of Sub-Saharan Africa lacks the infrastructure (and stability, in case of many countries in Africa). But it does not seem like these are insurmountable problems. Also, geopolitically it might be wise to invest in Africa to reduce the Chinese influence there.
I am not sure what is going on with Latin America. The countries there have a reasonably well-developed infrastructure (in most regions), they almost all speak either Spanish or Portuguese (easy to learn languages for English speakers, plus a lot of people there speak at least some English), closer to the US than China is. The corruption there is fairly high and stability is an issue in some countries. But corruption is high in China as well, plus China has a complete disregard for patents and copyright which makes the real costs of production in China much higher. Not sure how expensive Latin American countries are, I guess Chile might be a bit expensive, but for instance Colombia might be only slightly more expensive than China?
Is there anything else that might be done? I am afraid that Milton Friedman was unfortunately wrong on China when he predicted that when people there become richer, they will demand more freedom as well and communism in China would end. It looks like the comrades found the mythical "third way" unfortunately, and it is no less ugly than real communism (except that it is probably more sustainable and gives them more power).
In any case, like with the conflict with Russia, the West (plus allied nations like Japan, South Korea, Australia, ...) is extremely powerful economically and given that a war with China is even more unthinkable than a war with Russia (which would be easy pickings if they had no nukes, the same cannot be said of China), I guess that any such strategy has to involve using that leverage. Only trouble is, a lot of that is tied to cooperation with China, so that is why I feel that shifting this away from China elsewhere would be a necessary first step that would weaken China and strengthen the global influence of the West.
Unfortunately, I think the only thing that will end the CCP would be total war. And also unfortunately, I think it's necessary and inevitable that this will happen. I do not see there being any other option to put this to an end, as, unfortunately it seems like they found a 'third way', which is brutally authoritarian and anti-humanitarian, but not incompetent enough to collapse by itself.
The only solution I can think of is that the entire civilized world gets together and delivers the following ultimatum to the CCP leadership: 'surrender now and you will be spared.' If they accept, there will be regime change in china and this will end. If they decline, there would have to be regime change by force.
>I’m typing this on an iPhone so I’m in no position to throw stones.
I remember thinking pretty much exactly this every time I listened to someone spout some hot take about Phil Mickelson's comments on that Saudi golf league. It wasn't an impressive sentiment, but also not one that I believe anyone in the US can claim a moral high ground on.
Looking for career advice in a broad what should I do with my life kind of way. I recently graduated from a prestigious music conservatory but because of an overuse injury I've had to give up pursuing a classical music career. While doing my masters I built and sold my own publishing business, but besides being self-employed I have no work experience outside of the classical music world.
I'm looking for career ideas that don't require me to do more school but would make use of my skills (hard worker, self-motivated, good writer, fast learner). So far, most "no experience necessary" job listings that have decent pay are all in sales. I'm fairly confident that I would not make a great salesperson however.
Any former classical musicians successfully pivoted to a new career? I really want to be done with school but I have no idea how to change careers after spending my whole life pursuing one in classical music. I know I could just do some kind of coding bootcamp but my experience with coding in the past has led me to believe that I wouldn't enjoy it long-term. Any advice/ideas appreciated!
https://startup.jobs/music?page=2 seems like a starting point. I'd be looking at startups that want people who understand music from a theory perspective to start, and I'd make that a daily part of what you do. If you find companies that make music related products, do cold outreach saying "I have this degree and all this knowledge; what do you have that might make sense for me?"
Now's not a great time for startups, but you might find something that way.
Also: people are going to overwhelmingly push you towards programming, but jobs with "product" in the name are more likely to intersect with your ablities than engineering jobs as a general rule.
Well, maybe try something on the intersection of (classical) music and coding?
For example - video games tend to have music component, and there are fairly complex RPG / MMORPG worlds which put heavy emphasis on creating immersive experience...
I think you won't lose anything by trying the coding bootcamp.
At 25 I was a philosopher that, because of a long story, was stranded in a dictatorial country. Of course, my philosophy degree and my love for ideas were not a way of making a life there.
I ended up doing a sales job like the one you described. Of course, it was a nightmare for me. I started to learn programming...
Fast forward ten years: I love programming, I have a nice salary, nice living (in a new country of course), nice job, and enough time to read about the topic that I love that is philosophy.
In a hypothetical future world where SEC is disbanded for one reason or another, how would investing look like? Immediate thought is that SPY would cease to be a solid conservative choice since the top valuation companies in America would be various crypto ponzies.
I think the opposition to preservatives leads to increased energy costs and wasted food, but I don't have numbers. I'm also uncertain about the risks/benefits from various preservatives.
The simple answer is that in most cases (exceptions: cassava, potatoes, a few others) making storage modifications to increase shelflife costs time and money, and decreases the nutrition capability vs immediate consumption as fresh. However, in the natural world, there is significant variation in supply, and it has always made sense to modify an over abundance of milk, cod, cabbage, whatever NOW into a different and slightly less form (cheese, salt cod, kimchee) for use LATER.
A classic example of "is this really worth it" was canned spinach. (In contrast, most everyone likes white bread - with the fast-spoiling protein germ removed - better than whole wheat. Same with rice.)
1900s innovations in refrigeration (by which we mean 'freezing') made it possible to store food so that the taste and texture was less much affected. (People had been doing this in northern regions in the winter for forever, technology made this possible year round everywhere.) At the present moment, commercial freezing is the best, most economical way to supply high quality produce, aside from home production. Produce that is grown for commercial fresh sale tends to be somewhat reduced in quality due to the long shipping period, and a tremendous amount goes to waste. (Even true for larger farmers markets.) Even worse, unlike commercial processing, waste at grocery stores is unlikely to be composted or fed to animals, due to logistics, cost, and/or local ordinances.
The treatment of meat is even more stark - because the shelf life of fresh meat is even less, and the pathogen (vs spoilage) microbes are more concerning.
Bread - which is a relatively shelf stable product - is an interesting one, as can be seen here: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/28/bread-additives-chemicals-us-toxic-america What I find interesting is what is COMPLETELY missing from the discussion, which is that European breads have a notoriously short shelf life, and will develop mold in very short order (in my experience, less than 4 days.) This means that shipping bread from central bakeries is pretty limited, and without the preservatives, lots of local bakeries stay in business. (Not down playing the vital need for small local businesses, just that a lot of food safety laws are like this - not so much public interest as private.)
In any case - yes, increasing the shelf stability of food reduces waste and (depending on the type of storage) can reduce storage energy/infrastructure costs. There is a trade off from basic physical (canning, freezing, toasting, smoking) and chemical (salt, sugar, vinegar) preservations in terms of taste & quality. The stability offered by modern chemicals (often added to packaging and with a low transfer to food) mostly applies to less modified/more shelf stable items such as breads. These are generally accepted as safe and are almost certainly contributing to fewer deaths per year than are happening from bleeding gut ulcers from aspirin.
However, there are a multitude of other ways that we waste food - labeling recalls, allergen contamination recalls, single-source ingredients, nation of origin, and plain old refusal to eat old liver.
(Apologies for the length of the answer, and lack of numbers, I deleted the first two versions which were much much too long.)
Yeap - and corn & beans are not 'true' veggies, and traditionally both corn/maize and beans were stored dry, with a multi year shelf life so long as you kept the weevils and rats out of them.
And still nobody can use lettuce in a form other than fresh.
In the social revolution that took place in Spain in 1936, over a period of two years, people took power into their own hands and started to construct a completely different society based on anarchist principles.
Anarchist ideas had been gaining strength in Spain since the second half of the 19th century. The CNT, an anarcho-syndicalist trade union, was formed in 1910, and by 1936 was very powerful, having a membership of 1.5 million. By that time anarchist ideas were strong in the minds of the peasants. In fact, collectivisation had actually started in some areas of the countryside before the revolution. ?
On July 17th a military coup took place in Spanish Morocco which spread the next day to the peninsula. In the cities and villages the workers organised themselves to defeat the military uprising and thanks to their courage and initiative the fascist revolt was stopped in three-quarters of Spain. These people however were fighting not only to crush the fascist attempt to seize power, they were also fighting for a new social order in Spain.
As soon as the fascists were defeated, workers’ militias were set up independent of the state. The factories in the cities were taken over by the workers, and in the rural areas the lands of the fleeing fascists and fascist sympathisers were taken over. In the rural parts of the Republican zone, under the influence of CNT and FAI (Federation of Iberian Anarchists) members, collectivisation was the most far reaching. Usually it was the members of the CNT or the FAI who called general meetings in the villages and pushed for collectivisation.
At these meetings people voluntarily pooled whatever land, tools and cattle they possessed. To this was added whatever land had been expropriated from the large land owners. “People who had nothing to bring to the collective were admitted with the same rights and duties as the rest”. [1] Soon almost two-thirds of all the land in the area controlled by anti-fascist forces was taken over and collectivised. In all between five and seven million people were involved.
…
Unlike in Soviet Russia, collectivisation was not forced on people and those who did not wish to join the collectives were allowed to do so on one condition: they could keep only as much land as they and their family could work and could not hire anyone to work for them. People who refused to join collectives were called “individualists”.
In keeping with the anarchist principle that there is no freedom unless everyone is free, people believed that participation in the collectives should always be voluntary. The collectivists were by far the majority in the countryside, however they made special efforts to respect the choice made by the individualists and they were not condemned. In many areas the individualists, encouraged by the example set by the collective, eventually joined the collectives voluntarily and their numbers declined.[7]
The individualists often benefited from the collectives. In Calanda for example they received free electricity and paid no rent. They also paid low prices for any goods bought from the collective.
…
Communities were not interested in possessing more land purely for the sake of increasing their domain, but instead they wanted only as much land as they could work themselves. There was a strong feeling of solidarity between the different collectives. For example, 1,000 collectivists from the Levant, which was quite advantaged, moved to Castille to help out. The collectives sent food and provisions regularly to the Front and also to the cities.
…
The collectivists in Albalate de Cinca sent the following to the unconquered city of Madrid in March 1937: ten live hogs, 500 kilos of bacon; 87 chickens; 50 rabbits; 2.5 tons of potatoes; 200 dozen eggs; vegetables and several dozen goats. “There was no question of payment or requisition by the military”.[9] Refugees fleeing from areas conquered by the fascist advance were also taken care of in the remaining collectives.
With the creation of the collectives people were no longer in competition with each other. They were also free from having to follow the orders of some boss, working land they did not own for little reward but instead had control over their work and had equal input in any important decisions made concerning the organisation of work and the management of resources. Thus liberated, the initiative and enthusiasm of the Spanish peasants knew no bounds. “Collectivisation has all the advantages of free co-operation: humane collective labour. Freedom and equality are its foundation.”[10]
New modern methods of farming were employed. Experimental farms were set up. Resources were used to modernise the farms and get new machinery. Communities gained greatly from having pooled resources. Expert technical advice was made available by the Regional Federation. In addition, parasitic middlemen and the wasteful bureaucracy and other control mechanisms necessary for maintaining a capitalist system were dispensed with.
Production greatly increased in the collectives. In some cases harvests increased by up to five times their pre-revolution level. In Alcoriza the collectivists established a sausage factory in an old convent. “Daily production has reached 500 kilos. This production is sent to the anti-fascist militia. They have also built a shoe factory where they produce leather and fabric footwear, not only for the residents of their village, but also for neighbouring communities.”[11]
In no collective did unemployment exist. This was a big change from life in Spain before the collectives where often peasants would be unemployed for half of the year.
…
The Spanish revolution is unique in history insofar as it is the only time when the masses consciously put anarchist theories into practice. Although the collectives were not given the chance to develop fully and were not perfect, they were nonetheless a great success while they lasted. They show how ordinary people are perfectly capable of organising a just and efficient society given the right conditions. The peasants and workers in Spain showed that anarchism is possible.
What definition of 'works' are you using? Because fomenting (and subsequently losing) a civil war that killed and impoverished hundreds of thousands of people is not my definition of 'working'. These kid of utopian schemes only ever seem to work in some hypothetical world where reality and history never interfere, whereas my definition of 'working' requires not only that a scheme is implementable in the actual world in which we live, but that it leads to a better, not worse, outcome once implemented.
"I was taking the content of Emma Goldman´s comment at face value"
Well, there's the mistake. To me it read as blatantly deceptive and disingenuous on it's face.
To wit: 'the people' supposedly voluntarily pooled their land and resources together, and added it to the land they seized from 'rich landowners'... who are by implication not 'people' apparently, on account of them failing to voluntarily donate their family lands to the collective. It's a slimy and disingenuous tautology. You can make any group's activity seem virtuous if you implicitly define virtue as whatever it is that the preferred group happen to be doing. The text reeked of manipulation and deception from the very first paragraph. To me anyhow.
Not so - I'm not a staunch opponent of collectivism, although I do consider it wrong in the sense of being in error. What I am a staunch opponent of is /motivated reasoning/, which is wrong in the sense of being morally bad. And since communism seems to be a siren song to motivated reasoners everywhere, its easy to see how these two kinds of response will get conflated, since both kinds of wrongness are usually present in abundance.
Rationally, it seems to me that there is abundant evidence that collectivization of agricultural production leads to violence, oppression, poverty and misery everywhere it has been implemented at scale. As an 'engineering question', collective agriculture seems to be an unambiguously bad design template. That's my rational response. But my emotional response to the disingenuousness of the essay is one of profound disgust. The level of disgust is somewhat paradoxical, in that the /closer/ a disingenuous argument seems to being reasonable, the more disgusting it is. An uncanny valley, as it were.
Say, is anyone else being heavily censored on YouTube? I started to notice it late last year. YouTube tries to hide the fact that it is censoring you using two methods, and if they only used the second method, almost no one would realize it is happening.
Often I edit my comments because I’m rarely quite happy with how I worded it the first time around. This started to fail. It would say that an error occurred. Then if I refreshed the page, my comment would be gone. It would be deleted from my comment history, too. After this happened twice, I started to save each comment and check which ones were deleted.
So, here are four of my comments that YouTube censored, broken down by technique.
### Method 1: hidden deletion ###
Your comment is visible to you, but secretly, it was deleted immediately and is not visible when the page reloads.
> Yes, correcting them [flat earthers] won't do anything; they are aware there are endless reasons to think the world is round, and they reject all of them. OTOH you can find a lot of people dismissing climate science or slamming Covid vaccines, who seem reasonable in the sense that there are a lot of plausible-sounding arguments against both of these and it's understandable that they would be taken in.... nevertheless you almost certainly won't convince anybody. My father's anti-vax brother died of Covid in October and (as I expected) my father stayed just as anti-vax after that happened. I went so far as to send him a copy of the book Scout Mindset in an effort to influence his *style* of thinking, but all signs point to that having no effect either.
> You left out the theory that personally makes the most sense to me, which is that the universe is *endless* but *not infinite*. I got this idea from Stephen Wolfram's preposterous, yet attractive ideas which in turn were inspired by cellular automata: Finally We May Have a Path to the Fundamental Theory of Physics… and It’s Beautiful—Stephen Wolfram Writings
> In this model, time and space are both endless but finite. Let's start with time first, because it is simpler: the universe is about 13.8 billion years old. Assuming that time had a beginning, the total amount of time is about 13.8 billion years. 13.8 billion is clearly a finite amount. But we never run out of time, so it is also endless.
> Similarly, space begins as a single point and then expands outward at the speed of light, creating an unimaginable amount of new matter as it expands. After being created, space then expands uniformly as it does in the standard inflationary model. But, this endless space always has an outer edge. The new space being created today is probably absurdly dense, just as the very first space was. In this model, the universe is no longer 13.8 billion years old. Rather, 13.8 billion is just a lower bound; the universe might be 14 billion years old or 14 quintillion years old, depending on how far we are from its original origin point. But since the universe is finite in this model, there are no exact duplicate copies of you.
*Update* Example 1c: Here I corrected misinformation. The video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRCzj_uCmZ4) gives the impression that document “War crimes of the armed forces and security forces of Ukraine: torture and inhumane treatment" was written/endorsed by the OSCE. YouTube deleted my reply:
> 13:13 Important: this is NOT an OSCE report. It was written by "Foundation for the Study of Democracy", a Russian organization (its web site is democracyfund dot ru), but it is hosted on the OSCE web site for some reason.
By the way, it's hard to find any information about this organization in English. Basically the report is just a long series of anecdotes about torture by Ukrainian authorities, generally without corroborating evidence, and often without any date or location of the alleged event.
### Method 2: Shadowban ###
Your comment is visible to you, and still visible when you reload, but invisible to everyone else. [edit: except people who choose the non-default Chronological viewing mode]
> I think something important is missing here though. I don't know what. But sanctions and a defeat in Ukraine don't seem like they will inspire Russia toward new leadership. To the contrary, while sanctions somewhat disempower the Putin regime, both in Ukraine and domestically, I think sanctions will make ordinary Russians feel even more disempowered, and Putin's propaganda will continue having a lot of success selling the idea that this is all the fault of NATO and Western Nazis. How can the Russian people be given a vision of a future without Putin, within their new high-censorship environment?
> I'm surprised to see so many Latin and English names on products. I do think prices will continue to rise in Russia because the Kremlin has used unsustainable efforts to create the appearance of normalcy. It won't work for long. I wonder if P*tin might announce a "victory" in the "special operation" soon, an "operations winding down" phase, to help convince ordinary Russians that the effects of sanctions next fall/winter are not related to Russia's actions. It seems like the Kremlin already convinced most Russians that none of this is Put*n's fault. But if a "victory" is announced, the shelling and fighting will continue, and Ukraine will regain territory because it will have more replacement troops than Russia.
> 5:55 It's exceedingly strange to have a whole discussion about house-price appreciation that doesn't mention any factors that have limited the supply of housing for 40 years (factors limiting on higher-density housing.) I *didn't want* a house with a lawn in the suburbs, but that's what I bought because, in my city, it was the most affordable option (and it should not have been). You say "it's simple supply and demand. People were demanding not only larger homes but homes that were closer to city centres or other amenities. This restricted supply." No, that's not what restricted supply. Something that actually restricted supply was the illegality of building medium-density housing in a location zoned for single-family homes. Think: requirements limiting the house-size-to-lot ratio, requirements for parking spaces, requirements to get approval from neighbors before building something larger, etc.
In fact, the majority of my comments are either deleted or shadowbanned, and the second method (which of course I did not discover until later) turned out to be more common. So maybe this has happened to you too, even if you don’t know it.
Wow, that sucks even more than YouTube itself. You know who might be interested in this? Ryan Broderick, who writes Garbage Day on Substack. He's quite smart (also funny), & seems to know all kinds of way to dig under the surface of social media and figure out the the current rules, scams & fads. He may already know all about it.
I tried contacting him once about something via asking him a question in the comments section of his blog & he didn't answer -- to be fair, though, my question did not have to do with his blog post. I'm sure there are lots of other ways to contact him that would work better.
Hm, he didn't reply to me on Twitter, but now, two years later, I know I've been shadowbanned on Twitter too, and I have no idea how long @mentioning has not produced notifications. I can't recall a case when I @mentioned someone who then responded.
YouTube has a _huge_ comment spam issue. He finds that more than half of the comments on his videos are spam. Mostly scams and porn. With his large audience he was getting daily tweets from people who fell for the scams.
There are a few types of tools available:
* Blocking URLs
* Blocking keywords
* Blocking users
* Deleting individual comments
YouTube provides pre-defined lists that channel owners can opt into, but it seems that they can also add their own stuff. I'm not sure who (YouTube or the channel owner) decides on when to delete vs shadowban.
Looking at the comments you posted, they have words that are likely on the keyword list: Covid, Russia, Putin. These are all hot topics right now. These all tend to derail legitimate conversations. They are irrelevant to most channels, so they may be on some sort of broadly used blocklist. If Putin is on the list, workarounds like P*tin will be as well.
I really have no idea for the space/time related ones. My only guess at this point is a filter on people over a certain ban threshold. I do think there is some sort of tiering of users going on. I figured out a while ago that if I posted a channel's host's name in hiragana (which is how she usually spelled it) it would get auto deleted, but if I used romanji or kanji it would be fine. I did narrow it down to that one word then noticed others could use it just fine.
To figure it out, you'd probably have to go looking thru what other people are commenting and guess what words/phrases that you might be using that they are not.
This situation invokes one of the classic tragedies of infosec: by revealing to good agents precisely what is and is not allowed, you make it easier for bad agents to circumvent your systems.
All the comments were on-topic though. I mention Russia on a video about Russia, anti-science people on a video discussing misinformation, etc. And I didn't even use the word Putin (because the video was made by a Russian living in Russia and I'm just a little worried about him getting into trouble, which is also why I avoided saying "war"). Some other comments do use "Putin" and "war" on that video, though.
In Ukraine Warcasting[1] nobody predicted both that Putin would invade, AND that his army would do badly or lose. I haven't quite found that unicorn, but Trent Telenko came close.
And Putin will definitely not conquer the whole country:
> Whatever else happens, Putin will not be able to conquer the entire Ukraine. The Ukrainians are fighting as a national people. The Russians are fighting as a classic Oriental despotism who's chief objective is to keep Putin in power https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1466970924868067330
> The issue isn't "will the Ukrainians stand and fight?" They have stood and fought every day since 2014. The question is, rather, who will get Ukrainians to stop once Putin kicks off his next invasion. It certainly won't be the Zelensky government. https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1487452009322233868
- Before 2022, RU suffered far higher casualties in Donbas than UKR. He notes that "Putin stopped in 2014-2015 when the Regime Security Forces were rendered combat ineffective. The Ukrainians are aware of this Putin Regime dynamic" https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1484694297836503040
Granted, Scott was just talking about "pundit" predictions, but the people who understand things best tend not to be pundits. What we can do is belatedly follow people who got things right, after their predictions come true. Anybody else want to credit somebody who made good predictions (not just Ukraine, any topic)?
Forgive my vanity, but I also claimed that Zelensky is bullshiting for economic reasons with his denial of an invasion threat (over here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-ukraine-cube-manifold/comment/5093770?s=r); although I was agnostic on the question on whether invasion is gonna happen, and I was definetely caught off guard by its extent (specificaly by attack from Belorus).
For two years we wondered why Japan had so few Covid cases, and after all that time, some guy swoops in to take credit. In a plausible way. In a respected publication.[1] Well played.
> By the end of February 2020, scientists had identified many clusters of transmission and realized that most infected people did not infect anyone else, but a few infected many. From my past work, I knew that respiratory viruses are mainly transmitted through aerosols. My colleagues and I looked for common risk factors among superspreading events to come up with a more effective public-health message for the public. It incorporated early indications that SARS-CoV-2 could spread through aerosols.
> This led us to warn against the ‘3Cs’ (sanmitsu): closed environments, crowded conditions and close-contact settings. Even as other countries focused on disinfection, Japan promoted this concept extensively, by asking people to avoid high-risk activities such as karaoke bars, nightclubs and indoor dining. People largely complied. A panel of artists, academics and journalists named sanmitsu Japan’s buzzword of the year in 2020.
How come we never got this "3 Cs" messaging? I didn't learn Covid was airborne until, I don't know, 7 to 12 months later, and WHO was like "pshhhh it's not airborne"...
'Making Nature' sounds intriguing. I wonder if it means what's beyond The Green Wall, in Zamyatin's -- Huxley's -- Orwell's dystopias. Who the Naturals are.
Why isn't this the top story on every media outlet? I learned about it from Wikipedia's Current Events page. Of course, if Trump had done this, it would be a different story (remember when he talked to the president of Taiwan on the phone and it was the End of the World?), but this is Actually Important and a new low for the media, if the NYT is to be trusted.
I think we may have reached the point where the word of a US president is as likely to be good as not. If a president's word was always good, that would be absolutely huge news.
TurnItIn is a for-profit text-matching tool which instructors use to check their students' work for plagiarism. It gives a numerical rating of text similarity to each submission, based on overlap with other students' submissions and published text.
This blog post summarizes a panel discussion at the recent European Conference on Academic Integrity and Plagiarism (https://copy-shake-paste.blogspot.com/2022/05/ecaip2022-day-2.html). Apparently, TurnItIn has been purchasing smaller competitors. A plagiarism researcher says this is bad, because different plagiarism detectors use differing methods to discover plagiarism that their competitors didn't discover. A TurnItIn employee responded that the bigger TurnItIn gets, the more it can innovate.
I am interested in any programmers' views, whether or not you have worked with text matching. From that brief summary, do you think this consolidation is more likely to be good or bad for plagiarism detection?
I haven't worked in this subfield, but in general I find that the larger a software company is, and the more of the relevant market share it has, the less innovation it accomplishes. They may well end up with a larger R&D budget, but not one that translates to significant innovation.
This is definitely an economic question rather than a programming question. When a company starts buying out competition rather than directly competing with them, they have already shown their hand - they aren't interested in competing anymore.
TurnItIn employee is spewing the classic bs that never shakes out in the end.
That was a good read and motivated me to subscribe. I'm really amused that a person can have this much intelligence, geniune introspection and self-awareness, while still being a conservative.
He sees the required level of recursion to understand that he is being driven by the moral outrage exactly the same way as the outgroup he is annoyed about being driven by moral outrage. He thinks that his internal dialogue sounds crazier than an internal dialogue of a liberal, he is aware that his stances on social issues are the result of system 1 intuitions, thus actually acknowledging that liberal inner dialogue is kind of correct. He notices how his mind generates rationalisations to his stances even when he doesn't actually have good intellectual reasons, notices his motivational cognition... and then just congratulates himself with it and moves on.
I mean, this all is definetely commendable. I praise his self reflection. Credit where it's due. But making all these steps and then say something as blatant as: "I hate conformity and non-conforming to the traditional gender tropes"? I'll take it as the reminder that culture war is bad for cognition and I now should better reflect on whether I'm doing similar errors myself.
On a different note, I think Hanania misses obvious point when trying to answer why cancel culture targets racists rather than, say murderers. Because murder is already illegal and it's not controversial. There already is an accountability system for murder so there is much less motivation to use social pressure.
Yep, it's amusing that he says stuff like "an individual concerned with truth – and whose self-esteem is based on thinking of himself as the kind of person concerned with truth – naturally finds wokeness uniquely offensive regardless of how damaging he thinks it is" without coming close to mentioning religion once in a pretty long post. He is simply bashing stupidity on the left while being blind to the same on the right, which is as boring culture war as it gets, plus hilarious lack of self-awareness with claims like being a "1 in 100,000 non-conformist".
My first reaction was to say that he doesn't necessarily have to mention religion in this context, but then I reread the quote and yeah, you definitely have a point.
The thing is, religion is much much more offensive to the truth than wokeness. The whole core of religious beliefs is completely wrong. There is neither God, nor afterlife. You can somewhat rescue religious ethics, but it's not even a good one. Compared to that, transgenders exist, discrimination against minorities exists. We can dispute to what degree this discrimination affects the real world outcomes and whether there are more important factors in play and should we call something racism or not, but the core beliefs are true.
Does anyone know of any good resources for finding apartments for rent in NYC? My wife is a travel nurse who will be working in the city over the summer. She paid a deposit for an apartment, but I'm pretty sure she just got scammed (going to the bank tomorrow to try and cancel the wire transfer).
So I figured I'd go to the one place where you know you can trust people and not get scammed. The internet. 😎
NYC is the only place I know of where apartment brokers are a common thing. My work paid for one as part of my relocation package but I think they cost something like one month's rent. It's pretty annoying (like many things) but at least they will take you around and show you apartments and you wont get further ripped off. This is more for a year+ lease though. If it's only for a few months airbnb may be an option.
Why is there so little innovation in building materials?
If I walk down my local streets while keeping the damn phone in my pocket and ignoring the cars and clothes, there's little that distinguishes the view from how it would have looked in, say, 1927.
It's basically 1940s flagstones, concrete that was probably poured in the 60s and 70s, tarmac (patented early 20th century), steel (invented 400 BC?), glass (3,500 BC) clay bricks and tiles (7,000 BC), and wood (400,000,000 BC). There's some plastic, but surprisingly little.
Admittedly, I live in London. But I've been to Tokyo, and yeah there's more steel, glass and plastic... and also more wood... but not like, pavements you can bounce 10 feet high on, or, say, colour-and-opacity-controllable super-strong super-lightweight transparent walls.
Is this because:
(1) The innovation is everywhere but invisible to me – sure it's still called "tarmac" but it's 95% different from the Macadam stuff and full of fancy compounds
(2) I may have been to Tokyo but I haven't been to Seoul
(3) We're at some local minimum where better materials are very hard to discover or expensive to manufacture
(4) No one wants fucking bouncy pavements or see-through walls, materials are optimised to the needs of people and machines as our culture currently produces them
(5) Some sort of Andreesen / Thiel shtick that as a society we just lost interest in atoms.
(6) Conspiracy by government / developers / Big Tarmac
One major innovation in construction materials in the last 30 years or so is cross-laminated timber (CLT), which is made from layers of wood laid in alternating directions for greater strength https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-laminated_timber. It's not a hugely complicated concept, but it's allowed for a lot of innovation and development in mass timber buildings. It's become much more feasible to use engineered wood for tall buildings and there's a lot of research currently going on to try to expand that use and update building codes to work with mass timber construction.
There's also a bunch of research at the moment trying to make alternatives to portland cement, asphalt roads that are more durable, etc. These innovations are less visible but are pretty nice to have. We've also been working pretty hard to improve earthquake systems in seismic zones, which isn't very visible but does save a lot of lives.
Kinda (5), but people have lost interest in civil engineering. If you're a smart, engineering-focused person in 2022, you can go work in aerospace or robotics or as a computer programmer and make mountains of money working with fancy new materials. There are still interesting new frontiers in civil, but there's a lack of really smart people to explore them. If we could divert a chunk of the brain power (and funding) that currently goes towards making iPad updates or silicon chips to construction materials research, we could probably make faster progress. Then again, plus or minus carbon emissions from concrete I'm not sure we really need/want to.
For structural materials, you basically want the cheapest material that can hold the load. If its twice as cheap but twice as big, who cares. And there are only so many materials that are both cheap and strong.
And both concrete and asphalt are by weight mostly made out of local rocks, which are still the same local rocks that were here a century ago. It's hard to beat rock in cheapness.
However, there were definitely changes. For example, I think that reinforced concrete high-rise buildings are a fairly new invention - 20th century skyscrapers tend to be made of steel.
And also for mid-rise buildings, something must have changed, since the default height for mid-rise apartment buildings is now 6-8 floors instead of 2-3, and I don't think its land prices since I haven't seen new short apartment buildings even in cheaper places.
The 5-over-1 design (5 stories of apartments over a row of stores) became common because of a change in US building codes. Basically, you're now allowed to construct wood-framed buildings up to 5 stories tall as long as you use fire-retardant-treated wood, which is much cheaper than building them out of concrete.
As someone who owns an old house that needs renovation, I have a feeling that part of the problem is that we discovered that lead and asbestos are really bad for you and we had to invest a few decades of effort and money into finding ways to get the same things we already have in a form that won't kill people.
(This is not a serious answer, I'm just griping about how much a pain in the ass it is to find lead-safe contractors.)
You can get LCD window film; it's £350 a square metre. And good luck heating your house with giant windows.
I grew up in a house with single-glazed lead-flashed windows. It was terribly cold in the winter and we had to run a dehumidifier. Modern houses have cavity wall insulation and double-glazed windows which reduce fuel usage.
The other improvement is that modern houses are a lot less liable to burn down.
We used plastic extensively in the Summerland leisure centre (caught fire in 1973, killing 50) and Grenfel Tower (caught fire in 2017, killing 72).
I strongly suspect though that giant windows - defining windows as "exterior made of hard transparent material" not as glass or perspex - which regulate heat flow *much better* than either glass or brick are possible. Maybe it's an insoluble problem, but I'd be very surprised.
That's what I'm asking about. Not why don't we make entirely glass houses, but why the fairly widespread love of huge windows hasn't led to innovation in materials that can provide that without compromising on things like heating.
Mostly that's a matter of using multiple layers of (coated) glass, and sometimes filling the space between them with something other than air. No plausible super-material is going to do much better than that.
I would be very surprised if we came back in 1,000 years and glass was still being used. In the space of possible materials there have got to be some that are far less breakable, more easily mouldable into different shapes, and much more controllable in terms of translucence, colour, projection of images and heat transmission.
I think you're missing drywall. I live in a neighborhood built out in the 1900s and 1910s, and the old houses all have plaster and lath. Anything that gets seriously rehabbed has that replaced with drywall. Having just had to replace four ceilings due to water damage at our "new" rental house, I can tell you that drywall is much cheaper and much faster.
Mostly economics. We've gotten really, *really* good at making traditional building materials cheap, and we've got lots of construction crews trained and equipped to turn those materials into buildings cheaply and efficiently. Anything new, isn't going to have a hundred years of cost-optimized manufacturing improvements, and isn't going to have millions of construction workers saying "yeah, just give me a pallet of WonderPlast and I know what to do with it". So it's going to be more expensive, at least at first.
More expensive is only worth doing if it enables you to do something you couldn't do before, or at least to do it much better. Titanium and composites let us build airplanes that can fly faster and/or farther than they could before, carrying more payload and burning less fuel. WonderPlast makes a building that, what, has 2.5% of its internal volume devoted to structure while giving you full earthquake resistance rather than the 4.8% you'd need with reinforced concrete? It's probably cheaper to just make the building 2.3% bigger. Unlike the airplane, we don't really care what a building weighs.
And if using first-generation WonderPlast for making buildings is too expensive to bother, then you don't get many more generations of incremental manufacturing improvements.
You will see things like better insulation (thermal and acoustic both), because getting really good results with cheap insulation starts eating up more than 2-3% of your internal volume and getting really good results with any sort of insulation is worth paying for. Better paints that require less frequent repainting, that can be worth doing. Basic structural materials, there's not much room for improvement unless the improvement is dirt cheap, or unless someone is trying to build a mile-high skyscraper.
Also, this is an environment that is pretty risk-averse. Builders who try to do new stuff and fail can easily go bankrupt, any building you build anywhere has to comply with building codes or you won't be allowed to build it (and those codes change slowly), etc. The wonderful Construction Physics substack is a good place to read about this stuff. Alternatively, the Essential Craftsman Youtube channel has a lot of discussion of the building trades from a guy who's spent his life in them. There is a point where this guy (a master carpenter in his 60s) is building a staircase, realizes he is slightly out of compliance with the local building code (I think the treads were an inch or so too short), and he has to tear them out and redo them. (I loved that he actually showed this in his series instead of just glossing over it).
Interestingly, his channel highlights a lot of stuff that has changed over his career. Things like everyone using Skill saws, using I-beams made of engineered wood to hold up floors and the roof, flexible PEX pipes instead of copper or PVC, etc. I have zero background in any of this stuff (changing out a light fixture is about the extent of my handyman skills), and I've found both these really fascinating.
Probably economics. Tearing up all the flagstones, concrete and tarmac to replace them with bouncy pavement would cost a fortune, badly disrupt traffic, cause maximum inconvenience to everyone, and why do all that unless the street is literally crumbling underfoot so you *have* to repair it?
New building, such as one of the vanity architect projects, can have bouncy pavement and transparent walls (subject to building codes). But if it's a shop that has been there since 1901, why the heck am I going to tear out all the existing frontage and put in transparent plastic walls? Never mind that there is probably restrictions on what you can and can't do, in regard to fitting in with the existing styles - see the case of Lego here:
A combination of 1 and 4 go a long way. Glass technology has improved a lot so it is more scratch resistant, insulating, tintable so the building doesn't become an oven and simply stronger so you can have bigger windows. There's a reason modern skyscrapers are pillars of glass, whereas old ones have a lot more exposed concrete/brickwork/steel/etc etc. Similar mechanics in concrete for resistance to water, erosion, making it more aquaphobic/slippery, etc. Polystyrene formwork/ICF and prefab technologies in home building are also out there, and getting more common but not really cost advantageous (depending on what architectural aesthetic you're after).
But I guess what you're really getting at is why are we still innovating on existing platforms rather than bringing entirely new materials to market (carbon fiber walls or the like I guess?). Part of it is mentioned by Melvin (construction materials are measured by the tonne, so there's a lot of innovation required to make something that cheap), and another part is that aesthetics take a while to change (I expect especially in architecture?), so the demand for novel materials isn't really that high. Carbon taxes may change dynamics somewhat, but I don't think that would get us close to bouncy sidewalks.
We already have switchable glass that you can make transparent or opaque based on electrical flow btw.
You gotta remember that ABAC (All Buildings Are Cursed).
7000 years of built up institutional knowledge keeps your roof from falling on your head; besieged on all sides as it is by convenience and cost cutting.
Basically: any new building technique or material is inherently risky, and needs to offer substantial benififit over the current state of the art to supplant it
There's loads and loads of innovation in materials science, almost all of which produces very expensive materials with fancy properties.
For building materials, you want stuff whose cost is measured in dollars per ton, which means that you're limited to commonplace materials processed in straightforward ways. And most of the straightforward ways of processing common materials have already been tried.
Eco-friendliness! Concrete synthesis causes hideously high CO2 emissions. I understand there's some research being done on "green concrete" (i.e. concrete that emits less/no CO2 during its production) but I have no idea how close it is to being deployed at scale.
In general, building construction and industrial chemical synthesis seem to be unappreciated sources of greenhouse gases. Every environmentalists is focused on electricity, transportation, and maybe food, but there's relatively little talk about how to make industrial processes more green.
I don't think that concrete synthesis has high CO2 emissions compared to any other material that can hold a comparable weight. It's just that you have a shitton of concrete.
The construction/concrete aspects of GHGs are one of (multiple) reasons why the Green New Deal was immediately shown to be completely unserious.
This is not my field, but professionals in the field say that it is an incredibly wicked problem: production of [widgets] at an affordable cost means at large scale, which means large automated machines performing repeated motions at speed, which means a firm floor, large pallets of inputs and outputs, which means incredibly heavy forklifts and firm floors (again) and increasingly strict safety clearances, which means a larger building...and more concrete.
A revision will depend on material revolution akin to plastics. Which might be over the horizon, but no one has seen the sails yet.
Living in a building is much better than not doing, but I can think of a lot I'd like better... like I don't know, enormous room-wide-and-high windows that don't need curtains or blinds because you can adjust their opacity and colour.
2) Aesthetics
Tarmac looks decent for a year or so after it's laid. Brick and glass can look lovely for ages, but just as we can value old art / film / music while still wanting new stuff that expresses our own moment, so we might want beautiful and surprising new surfaces around us.
3) Maintenance and safety
Roads erode and and buildings crack and subside. I appreciate that brick is pretty good at expanding and contracting according to heat, but surely we can do better?
Buildings burn down.
Roads / pavements (sidewalks) are actually pretty terrible at interfacing pedestrians and traffic. We take it for granted that children can't be allowed far from our grasp until they're old enough to know that they're never more than 2 feet from death, but do streets have to be that way?
"Any new road material will require local governments to start from scratch when it comes to figuring out maintenance. "
Hoo-boy, tell me about it! About ten years back the local council was renovating the quays area of my town and replaced the conventional tarmac surface with cobblestones. They even got a proper professional firm in to do it.
And it's been a *disaster*. Due to volume of traffic, the cobbles are always coming loose and needing to be reset, the surface is uneven so people trip (I had a fall myself, full-length faceplant that I got my hands under me in time to avoid smashing my face into the ground, in front of - thank goodness, only one - onlooker), it was just badly conceived all round.
The *idea* was to be innovative and aesthetic, but it would have been simpler and cheaper to stick with tarmac and concrete.
Oh it is going back, and the thing is, if it had been done properly (as in, the surface had always been cobblestones) then it might have worked.
But the idea at the time was to renovate the area for tourism and pedestrian traffic and make it more upscale in appeal, so instead of boring old tarmac it was going to be quaint and attractive cobblestones for the aesthetics of it.
Didn't work. The same way I suspect your bouncy pavements might sound like great fun, but in practice they wouldn't work.
It's also ongoing maintenance; an innovative material is probably going to be more expensive, and while it might last longer than the conventional materials, it probably will require repairs and maintenance (and given the way real life works, a lot more of both than the projections in the tender claim).
I can only speak out of local knowledge, but road repairs budget was badly squeezed for the local council, so only very necessary repairs were being done. An expensive new material that eats up even bigger chomps out of the budget is going to be a non-starter.
At this point I'm desperate for a child covid vaccine not because I'm worried about my child getting covid (he already had it), but so I can finally avoid these nonsensical quarantines that make me hemorrhage money. Covid policies in schools is the one thing that's close to making me a single issue voter, the cost to benefit ratio is miniscule and the "think of the children" attitude from people who sacrifice nothing is maddening. Daycares love it because their "charge full fees, provide no services" is perfectly legitimate under the health guidelines.
Local health department only parrots state department guidelines, which only parrots CDC guidelines. Is there anything one can do to change this?
Is anyone else on their third Covid go-round yet? I've just recovered from Round 3 - got it in the Delta wave last summer, then in an Omicron wave over Christmas, and then this one. Hoping it doesn't become an every 4-5 months thing from now on, though we seem to be heading towards that level of seasonality.
Interestingly, the 3rd time made me more ill than the 2nd time, despite occurring after my booster. If I had to give some statistics, I would rate the experiences (in chronological order) as follows on a scale of 0-10, with 7 being the sickest I've ever been from all causes:
- 1st vax: 4
- 2nd vax: 0
- 1st Covid: 6
- 2nd Covid: 1
- Booster: 1
- 3rd Covid: 5
In all cases + the vax illnesses, my symptoms were mainly extreme fatigue (for multiple days), plus fever for a day or so, and some aches. No real respiratory symptoms, thankfully. Would be curious to hear what patterns other multi-covid sufferers have seen!
Are you sure you got the order right? Maybe I'm misremembering, but I think nobody I know became sick after the 1st dose, and everyone became sick after the 2nd.
Your order would make sense if you already had coronavirus before, suggesting that you might have had it 4 times, not 3. Or am I missing something?
Most vaccinated people can catch omicron, but catching delta after vax is surprising. If you caught omicron twice, I'm suspecting that your immune system is unusually... daft. (my wife & I just got Covid once, in 2020. She works in a supermarket, I work from home. But we're in Canada which has had one-third as much Covid as the US, and we got Covid when our region was the "Covid Capital of Canada")
It's weird, actually! I'm normally extremely healthy, my 3 worst illnesses have all been food poisoning. Otherwise all I can remember pre Covid is one or two cases of "24 hour flu". Hoping this doesn't mark a long term change
There does seem to be a growing number of people who are getting omicron a second time, now that we're four or five months from the first wave (so that people's immune systems have had time to relax) and we've got a growing second omicron wave with a slightly modified variant.
Thanks for this discussion! I have one friend who said he got covid twice in 2020 (March and December), then got three doses of vaccine in 2021, and then got omicron in December 2021, but I didn't hear much description of his symptoms.
I recently got covid for the first time a couple weeks ago (and am still fighting a lingering cough, though my antigen test faded to negative a week ago).
My second vaccine dose had one evening that was almost as bad as the worst evening of actual covid, but actual covid had three evenings of significant fever and discomfort leading to me staying in bed, as well as several weeks of cough, and two days of moderately lost smell (about three days after the fever was fully gone). I think my worst evening of covid was as bad as some of the time that I had strep throat, but not as bad as a few occasions when I've had food poisoning, so 6 might be comparable.
Oh dear, it sounds very unfortunate that you had the vaccines and booster and *still* picked up Covid. Commiserations on that!
I've had my two doses of vaccine and no Covid (fingers crossed) but we're getting a new sub-variant of Omicron over here. I'm starting to wonder if Covid will become like a seasonal flu now, and we'll get the jab annually as we do for flu vaccines.
Besides, now the new international health crisis seems to be monkeypox!
Turns out immunity to this virus wears off quickly and/or the virus evolves around it quickly. I would find it interesting to know which specific cold/flu viruses I might have had multiple times in my life, and how frequently.
I mean, it does appear to reduce frequency of infection by a factor of 2 to 5 in recent months depending on variant. It's unfortunate that human brains are so bad at processing anecdotal evidence that is consistent with small single digit ratios, which are objectively extremely significant. (With the original variant, the factor of 20 seemed to be immediately obvious even anecdotally.)
And it appears to reduce frequency of death by a factor of 10 or more.
The only real question at this point is whether a fourth dose shows significant improvement over a third, or whether it's already reached saturation.
Yes, these are all confirmed with lateral flow antigen tests (I live in Europe so they have been cheap / free for many months). 1st one was picked up by a PCR test for travel when I was abroad.
I developed an immune response to politicians asking for donations a while back, when I realized they'll send you a new email every week with some clever argument about how they really actually desperately need a donation this time, and it's more important than ever before.
Over the years I developed other immune responses to other kinds of bullshit, to the point that I was mostly just bitter about everything.
And then the Flynn thing happened, and I made a second donation specifically because it was supposed to be a close election. It wasn't.
I don't want to imply this is a big deal. It isn't. Scott has a superhuman but still imperfect capacity for avoiding mistakes, and I was too lazy to do my own research. I'm just sad that I can't personally seem to interact with this world in a sustainable way without turning my cynicism up to eleven.
Not just politicians. Donate to charitable fundraising once, and they will haunt you for perpetuity about signing up for online donations, begging emails, canvassers calling to the house, etc.
I'm already inclined to be "bah, humbug" and this pestering just turns me right off. Look, I gave because this was one big humanitarian crisis and things were desperate, that does not mean I signed up to be your piggybank.
As a slight counterweight to the macro-level cynicism... I think it's a good thing for our democracy that political donations have a limited ROI. They're not useless and they provide a great way to give a slight edge to candidates that have extremely invested supporters (or, if you're a soulless libertarian, that are more pro-business). But realistically you still can't buy elections in this country, no matter how many times people claim you can.
The call to donate to Flynn didn't make sense to me. He was already one of the best funded candidates in history for a congressional primary. If $11M isn't enough, it's hard to understand how a marginal $1M would help. I guess divide your contribution by $1200 and figure out how many votes you funded. That's some effective altruism there!
I can't make head nor tail of how PACs work and how donations are handled, but it seems on cursory reading that candidates can't just dip into them, so for other campaign expenses they do need donations to come in from every angle.
Besides, it was precisely because Flynn was unknown with no track record in office that they needed to throw money at him to get his campaign going.
I think the evidence does seem to suggest that candidate funding matters more than PAC funding, given that there are many things the candidate funds can do that the PAC can't. But candidate funding is low value, and PAC funding is even lower value.
But candidate funding might be a general signal of candidate appeal, and any subsequent good performance could be for either reason. Any studies that try to separate these effects?
At this point you've gotten beyond my very basic familiarity with some general trends. I know that people have studied the questions you ask, but I don't know what in particular they find, or what the quality of the evidence is.
Good point. And I'm not sure that EAs really need to win an election right now, so much as learn how to win elections while not overspending and not sacrificing too much reputation. Overspending itself is a reputational sacrifice: it makes you look like a "candidate of the rich".
Matt Yglesias says[1]:
> speaking from a media and politics perspective, I want to underline with the boldest possible stroke that I think the most important lesson from the race is the extent to which Flynn was understood to be the “crypto candidate” rather than the “EA candidate.”
So here's another reputational risk. If you're lucky, opponents try to distract from you being an Effective Altruist by portraying you as something else or magnifying some minor fact about you. If you're unlucky, opponents create a meme in which Effective Altruism is a fake pretend concept and that actually so-called EAs have ominous real goals. Which ominous goals? That's TBD by a focus group or famous influencer, but Matt proposes one himself:
> EA is applied consequentialism [...]
> Perhaps more scandalously, opponents of consequentialism often argue that it follows from this position that it is morally appropriate (perhaps even obligatory) to murder innocent people and harvest their organs in order to save multiple lives.
Matt somehow fails to mention that EAs wouldn't actually ever do this. So as an EA I propose a moral rule, which is based on my answer to the "fat man" problem:
> A trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by putting something very heavy in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you – your only way to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge and onto the track, killing him to save five. Should you proceed?
My answer is that this is the fat man's decision to make, not yours. If *he* wants to jump in front of the train, he can. If he *asks* me to push him, then... it could be morally okay, but I probably wouldn't have the nerve to actually do it. Similarly for the organ harvesting scenario, I think someone can volunteer to give zis life to save several other people, but it's not acceptable to force it on zim. And in today's society, of course, the whole question is moot; the volunteer couldn't realistically have his wish granted anyway.
"Matt somehow fails to mention that EAs wouldn't actually ever do this. "
Maybe not, but does it not follow directly from utilitarianism, which is the moral framework that's taken for granted by EAs? If EAs based their philosophy on any other moral framework, I certainly haven't heard of it on ACX.
"My answer is that this is the fat man's decision to make, not yours. "
That's your personal opinion, not the implication of utilitarianism, or the official position of EA. So the question is, if you're right that EAs would never push the fat man, why not? How do EAs decide when to abandon utilitarianism and when to adopt it?
> does it not follow directly from utilitarianism, which is the moral framework that's taken for granted by EAs
EAs tend to be consequentialists*, i.e. concerned with all predictable consequences and even unpredictable ones to the extent possible (edit: and they are looking for the best available consequences, not merely consequences that are better than doing nothing). So, aside from saving a few lives, what are the likely consequences of pushing the fat man? Here are some possibilities:
- Potential charges of murder / attempted murder
- Mental distress for the pusher
- Public controversy about the actions of the pusher
- Public controversy about EA, if the pusher is EA, harming EA's reputation
- People worrying that EAs are psychopaths
- Potentially stunted growth for the EA movement, reducing its future positive impact
These consequences are avoided if the fat man jumps of his own accord.
While distributing moral responsibility (e.g. "it's the fat man's decision to make, not yours") can be formulated as a deontological rule, ultimately I justify it on consequentialist grounds. (Edit: note that the fat man probably won't realistically jump, but I wouldn't worry too much about that because the scenario is terribly unrealistic, and not just because there's no assurance that the fat man's body can stop the trolley... an organ-harvesting scenario is much more realistic, and there you can see that in the long run, if EA were to become popular, it would probably get a few, or many, members willing to volunteer to die to save the lives of ten strangers, provided legal hurdles don't prevent it. As to whether EA orgs would actively encourage this, I'm guessing they would not, but they may advocate for legalization.)
Some people describe consequentialism as "the ends justify the means", but this is wrong. In common usage, "the ends justify the means" excludes "the means" from "the ends" so that we don't worry about the eggs we broke to make the omelet. A true consequentialist includes "the means" in "the ends", so those broken eggshells - and the ripple effects produced in society by those who care about those eggshells - as part of "the ends". Thus "the ends justify the means" is a different (and less respectable) idea than consequentialism.
* originally I said 'are consequentialists' but it's not a requirement.
You're dodging the thought experiment. Of course if the total utility of pushing the man ends up being less than the total utility of not pushing, the thought experiment is pointless. For it to have any meaning at all, you should at least assume that nobody will know you pushed the man, and that the mental distress of the pusher does not outweigh the deaths of several people. Neither of these are unreasonable assumptions. If these assumptions are granted, would it be moral to push the fat man?
As I said, the thought experiment itself is misleading. Why should I believe a fat man's body will stop the trolley? Why would I assume there are no security cameras or witnesses when it's not stipulated? It's a bad thought experiment that should be replaced.
And your attempt to retcon it, here, ironically disregards the essence of consequentialism. Ironically, because you use the phrase "total utility" as if it were an ubiquitous idea (and as if you were consequentialist). Non-consequentialists aren't thinking about "total utility" when they answer! So, what, deontologists can respond to the thought experiment in its original form, but consequentialists should address a version of it that is modified such that (key aspects of) consequentialism are no longer relevant? That's bullshit!
Perhaps it's assumed that a fat man will be larger than a fat woman.
In general, I don't approve of training people to think they get to decide who lives and who dies without consequences to themselves, and calling it ethics.
As for the fat man, I don't see how you can reliably push a person larger than yourself off an overpass. I assume you'd actually have to release the brake on a wheelchair and shove. Would that make it more personal? More horrifying?
When did Scott say it was going to be a close election? He says in this post that "I might be sorry for saying I thought he was more likely to win than the prediction markets said", but I can't find this in the previous Open Thread. In that Open Thread, he said nothing at all about Flynn's likelihood of winning.
I think my memory failed me here. I distinctly remember reading a claim that the race would be close, and then donating a second time after something Scott said. If that first memory wasn't from Scott (seems likely at this point) then I apologize for misrepresenting what he said.
Looking at the previous open thread, I think I got the impression that it would be a close race from a subthread where Dave Orr asked if it would be a close race, and Scott replied that "Metaculus puts Flynn at 46% to win primary".
In retrospect we all should have realised that this is one of those places where Metaculus is unreliable. A good topic for a Mantic Monday post, perhaps?
Actually there were a couple of other comments in that thread arguing for a close race; one poll had Flynn at 14% to Salinas's 19% (but I wonder what the other polls said) and someone else said the race was tight based on the testimony of "A friend who flew to Portland to help with the campaign"
I think the problem is that many of us saw the election mentioned, aren't used to hearing individual elections mentioned unless either they are close or one of the candidates has made themselves a social media target of extreme emotions, and thus we assumed this election was closer than it was.
I cooked a thing I'm quite happy with-- an approximate kuku sabze.
It's a Persian herb frittata, possibly using an expansive definition of frittata.
It's not the kind of thing with some little bits of green in a dish that's almost all egg, the chopped herbs should have a larger volume than the eggs.
6 eggs
3/4 stick of butter
2 large bunches parsley
1 large bunch cilantro
good sized bunch (not as large as the other one) of fresh dill
a giant leek (probably about a pound) with the dry parts of the leaves cut off
So, chop all the veggies, beat the eggs, fry the veggies at a medium heat until they flatten out. Add eggs and garlic. Cook at a low heat until the eggs solidify.
The reason I did it in two steps is that it was okay but not special, and I was reminded that it was supposed to have walnuts, fenugreek, and turmeric. The last two are major ingredients in Abdul the Strong, and it was convenient.
So I chopped up the walnuts and fried them a bit in olive oil and spices. The result was excellent, and I might well explore more nuts fried with spices.
What impresses me most about this dish is that usually I make three or four meals worth of whatever I cook, and then rotate them, but with this, I ate four meals in a row of the same thing.
It's possible that butter was a little bland on the first phase, and it should be at least partly olive oil. I don't see any reason not to cook everything together.
I'm thinking about an Italian variant with parsley, basil, garlic, and rosemary.
These three recipes together give some idea of how flexible the concept is. Mine wasn't nearly as green.
I put the walnuts on top, but I could have mixed them in with no loss, I think.
The pan was 11" diameter. (28 cm)
It came out thick, as it's supposed to. I'm guessing at 1 1/2". (3.81 cm) It doesn't need to be exact, but it shouldn't be flat like an omelet. I didn't add any liquid except for some lemon juice, and that was after the eggs were cooked.
It's an extremely flexible recipe. I can't think of any reason to not use fennel. It's not as strong flavored as dill, so maybe a larger volume.
Some recipes include chopped romaine lettuce. I prefer strong flavors, so it seems like missing the point to me, but I've never eaten the authentic dish, so I might be missing something.
There are a lot of recipes online if you want something more precise than what I wrote.
Regarding this would-be Oregon congressman. It's easy to be altruistic when you are spending other people's money (and other people's descendants' money, via the US national debt). That's why EA and politics do not mix. Better to let people spend their own money.
Money is not (inherently) a carrier of value. It's a promissory note issued by (i.e. debt taken by) the government entitling you to a purchase of government services, whose worth depends solely on the capability (and reputation, in case you want to use it as a commodity of exchange) of said government. There's just no logically consistent scenario under which "letting people spend their own money" takes the government out of the equation.
There is a valid complaint to be made about politicians' self-interest not being aligned well with that of the government's stakeholders which, coupled with the politicians' outsized decision-making powers, results in wasteful allocation of resources. But, phrased that way, it's an argument for, not against, greater involvement in politics (though, granted, not exactly for donating to an individual politician's campaign). There are also valid arguments against governments at large, but they must grapple with the fact that the government wouldn't be there anymore and the functionality it provides would need to be made unnecessary or reimplemented by other means. (And the most common strain of "I can assume everything stays the same" alternatives, based on private companies taking over government functions, needs to grapple with the fact that, historically, modern social-liberal democratic governments evolved out from and largely outcompeted private kingdoms.)
You are all too correct that money is not value. (If only the government had remembered this before they printed it by the trillions the past two years.) So, "spend their own money" was indeed shorthand for "trade the goods+services they produce for whatever goods+services that they want".
As much as the monarchy may have been the first example of a family business in the violence market, it was also type of a government and therefore a type of localized monopoly in that market. Economic activity being at a historic low during the Dark Ages, there's little reason to characterize kingdoms (nor fiefdoms) as "private" in the economic sense of that word, and little reason to predict that they would inevitably recur if not for government even today, when we possess things such as the Enlightenment and the Haber process.
Many things are kept in an unusual state by the nature of government; without it, many things would become much more illegible, decentralized and variable, the only constant being that they would change to fit local resource-allocation preferences. Nobody today can predict exactly how any given problem will be solved in an un-"governed" territory; and in a fictional universe containing a crystal ball with which to make such predictions, there would be hundreds, thousands, millions of answers depending on the territory's population.
During the late 1960's, there was a viral pandemic which, per capita, killed about as many as the 2019 coronavirus. This was contemporaneous with, among other things, the Woodstock festival. EA did not exist at that time. Government has, since the late 1960's, expanded drastically, so if pandemic management were to be a task that is better done by just throwing more money at the government, then one would expect that the 2019 coronavirus would be responded-to better. It wasn't. And unused field hospitals alone have represented a very expensive very pointless government undertaking. Therefore I doubt your hypothesis.
Are you an anarchist? If not, then you believe the government performs at least one useful function. I think the EA approach would be to try to make it do that efficiently.
In the case of pandemic management, the problem isn't a lack of funding, it's a lack of funding being used productively to perform those functions. There are actually a lot of things I think are inefficient about governments that aren't due to a lack of funding - even how the government gets funded, for example. It seems to be a horrendous mix of taxes on random things, with low or zero weight on things that can be taxed efficiently, like land or carbon emissions.
Possibly, but that sounds like mission creep for "effective altruism". That sounds more like "effective government", which I think most people can agree would be generally a good idea.
Hypothesis: effective altruism was solved about fifteen years ago. Turns out the answer is mosquito nets. But this is very boring, so there's a massive demand for more interesting sounding things to spend your theoretically-EA dollars on, and a massive industry has developed to hoover up those dollars with plausible-sounding justifications.
The main EA priority of this candidate and campaign was pandemic prevention. In contrast to some other EA priorities, this one is absolutely worth it (i.e. it has incredibly positive EV) even if voters care about nothing outside their own borders.
So why don't politicians already take care of this problem on their own? The problem here is not lack of altruism among politicans and voters, but inability to make long-term plans, and lack of incentives to do so.
Okay, let's look at the monkeypox thing. Reports are being very circumspect, but it looks like from the original person or persons returning from Africa with the infection, people are spreading it via sex. And it's the gay/bi/men who have sex with men type of sex:
How to prevent this spreading? Well, you *could* send out a public health message: hey, gay/bi/men who have sex with men dudes, please don't hook up with any strangers for the duration until we get a vaccine and/or a grip on this.
Yes, that is going to work *so* well. Imagine all the protests about stigmatising LGBT+ folx and victim-blaming and how this is homophobia in action.
Since "wear a condom" isn't going to work here as advice, how would you (let's say you're Carrick Flynn) run an epidemic prevention programme that is not going to have you villified as a homophobe within the first ten minutes?
I think the WHO will probably recommend that gay/bi/mlm get the smallpox vaccine, but that is going to be 'treading on eggshells' level of trying to not be offensive:
Risk to the general population is low, risk is higher amongst the promiscuous:
""For the broader population, the likelihood of spread is very low," said Dr Andrea Ammon of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.
"However the likelihood of further spread of the virus through close contact for example during sexual activities amongst persons with multiple sexual partners is considered to be high".
Monkeypox has not previously been described as a sexually transmitted infection, but it can be passed on by direct contact during sex.
Dr Ammon suggested that countries should review the availability of the smallpox vaccine which is also effective against monkeypox."
Since it's apparently spread through skin-to-skin contact, rather than sex per se, I doubt it makes any difference what kind of sex is involved. If they do a third sex-rave with some of the guys from the first two, it'll be another spreader-event, even if they have women this time around.
"please don't hook up with any strangers for the duration until we get a vaccine and/or a grip on this."
This alone is a perfectly good message; you don't need to, and in fact shouldn't, specify that the message is only for "gay/bi/men who have sex with men".
Origin of the 2019 coronavirus remains an unanswered question, but neither answer has a primarily-altruistic solution. Putting tighter controls on US sponsorship of foreign-soil bioweapons research requires no altruism - the money saved by ceasing such operations would quickly pay for the upfront cost of closing them down and shipping out the sensitive materials. And exporting some laws on meat cleanliness, again requires no altruism, other than maybe some lobbying.
While I'd certainly support getting US funding out of things like the Wuhan lab, it's not clear to me that a Wuhan lab without a skerrick of US funding would be any safer than one with US funding.
It wouldn't have safer practices. There's no way, whatsoever, to ensure BSL4 adherence on Chinese soil.
But without our funding and materials, that lab wouldn't have been effective enough for that to matter. Thus, in totality and by technicality, it would be safer.
How much funding did the US contribute to the Wuhan Institute of Virology?
The most controversial grant, for gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses, contributed $600K over five years, which even on Chinese wages doesn't seem like a lot.
So you are ok with letting the people of the present steal from the people of the future but not ok with letting the people of the future steal from the people of the present? \s
Stealing from the people of the future is what is being done by spending money we don't have and adding it to the national debt. I'm *not* okay with that. I don't understand how the people of the future could steal from us, but stealing is evil regardless.
I recently realized that whenever I am on my laptop, I subconsciously arrange it so it is tiled away slightly to the right. And whenever I try to straighten it out, it feels unnatural and like it is tiled to the left. It's really bugging me. Anyone know what's going on?
Does it have something to do with how you hold your arms at the keyboard? I've noticed that my typical pose for using my phone is to hold my phone in my left hand and type with my left thumb and right index finger. I've you've adopted some similarly asymmetric way of using a laptop keyboard, you might then naturally hold the laptop at some sort of angle.
What are your favorite books about the counterculture of the 60s and 70s? Biographies, histories, memoirs, pro-counterculture, anti-counterculture, whatever.
You might be interested in _Summer of Love_ by Lisa Mason-- it's a time travel novel, but a friend who was there said it was accurate about the period.
Rhoney Gissen Stanley's 'Owsley and Me' is pretty good on the San Francisco / Grateful Dead / Owsley Stanley scene in Northern California (9780983358930).
I´m no American, so I may well have overlooked a lot of gems. Best I have read so far was Alex Haley´s MalcolmX autobiography and stuff by Hunter S. Thompson and Jack Kerouac. The music spoke much more to me about that time than books.
What country are you from? Was there anything like a counter culture there at the time? Swingin' London and Paris in 68 had some similarities with the US counter culture. Any good books on the time from your country?
Germany. I grew up into the punk / new wave era so my personal experience with the earlier subcultures is limited. It seems to have been more political in germany (and france too) than in the US. At school, We had a new freshman biology teacher every year, who asked if we already had sexual education, so that was repeated often. Sexual revolution sure was a thing here but in the seventies one could already smell the lies of its champions.
An interesting book was Bommi Baumanns "Wie alles anfing." A view of a mostly hedonist working class guy on the roots of leftist terrorism.
Kerouac brackets it if you mean he precedes it -- and certainly influenced it strongly--but his work really captures the 50s beatnik counterculture, not the 60s.
SDS: Students for a Democratic Society, Kirkpatrick Sale
The Strawberry Statement, James Simon Kunen
Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion
An interesting counterpoint is Boston Against Busing by Ronald P. Formisano. An account of the Boston Bus protest and how it adopted some counterculture tactics. Possible parallels to today are intriguing.
"During an eighteen month period in 1971 and 1972, the FBI reported more than 2,500 bombings on U.S. soil, nearly five a day." Jesus, this book is nuts. I mean, I knew things got violent at times, but thank god lots of these people sucked at making bombs.
“Days of Rage” made me understand quite a few things about the past 10-15 years. It explained a lot about my parents’ generation, and where a lot of right-ish political sentiment among older people in the present came from. Like, horrible people did horrible things and a lot of them were rewarded with…pretty nice lives by the establishment. It made the angry 50-70 year old conservatives I know who watched all of it unfold make a lot more sense.
> Thanks to everyone who donated to or otherwise supported Carrick Flynn. Unfortunately he didn’t win.
Predictably. As I've said a few times, the EA community doesn't really survive on effectiveness but on selling the idea of effectiveness to wealthy EA donors. Anyone with even modest political experience (and mine was quite modest) could see the failure coming. And could have pointed out the $14 million was an inefficient use of resources. But it excited people to solve a problem that liberal people from SF want solved (political representation, winning in moderate districts, etc) so it attracted a lot of donations.
So it failed but it got $14 million and boosted the profile of everyone involved. Which is a classic principal agent split. The principals didn't get what they wanted (a successful election) but the agents got to raise their profiles and a whole lot of money.
This is not how the EAs should be doing politics. They should acknowledge what they are: a small minority with some profoundly weird ideas who have a lot of money and a specialized skill set. And they should act appropriately like a special interest group or a radical political faction. (Indeed, lobbying the government like one is probably the best multiple available for effectiveness. But it's not sexy I suppose.) But instead, from what I've read on LW, there's a significant contingent who truly believe they're going to take over the world or have an EA president or something.
Did you say this before he lost? If so, linking to your previous post would greatly increase your trustworthiness. Anyone can say "I saw it coming!" after something happens.
I said it to friends offline. No one asked me online so I have no paper trail either way. But my position was the consensus position so there was less need for me to assert the opinion. (If it was different among the rationalists then I can't speak to that.)
If you want to take bets in advance the next time this happens I'd be happy to.
There's some degree of evidence that you can't win elections purely on spend, but this was a colossal amount of money to apply for what they got. How bad does your advertising have to be to end up at like $1200 a voter? And not even for the GE.
John Fetterman in Pennsylvania spent $14million, so roughly the same amount as Carrick. For 745000 votes. Vs 11000.
I think there's a lot of evidence that campaign spending has quickly diminishing marginal return. Look at races like Beto O'Rourke or Amy McGrath in 2018, who I think each raised more than nearly all other Senate candidates combined.
It doesn't help when you have a single donor that is visibly affiliated.
That's roughly true. Generally there is a "saturation level" for ads in a given market. But money can be used for lots of stuff. Campaign staff, paying consultants, some of which are good though they are mostly shit, running good solidly designed polls to get accurate information.
You'd prefer to have high name ID, although you'd also worry about if the impression was good, rather than low name ID.
I suppose one issue is that a big dollar donor isn't allowed to give to the campaign, but can only run an "independent expenditure". While these independent expenditures aren't really all that independent, they probably are substantially less effective.
Wouldn't it have made more sense to have someone with even a tiny amount of political knowledge involved in the Flynn thing? They could have told you dumping 10mil on a House race with a candidate with no serious experience and no plan for local issues was dumb as hell. I lose a lot of confidence in EA people for not just thinking this would work but piling a bunch of cash in and setting it on fire.
When I submitted by grant application it wasn't with serious intent but maybe you, Scott, and your friends, would have benefitted from a more personal understanding of what motivates a politician and why and how that relates to a constituency.
He came in second out of a field of nine, which is good going for a first-timer with no previous political experience. But yeah, politics. I saw this linked story in one of the SSC comments:
"On April 28, five groups put out a lengthy statement condemning Flynn’s remarks on an April 13 episode of politics podcast The Bridge, during which he gave voice to rural hostility to the spotted owl (”it’s an owl, looks like other owls”) and said he had “emotional sympathy” for the group Timber Unity.
“As organizations who have been fighting for decades to uphold the strong environmental values held by the people of Oregon, we are stunned and deeply saddened to hear Carrick Flynn, a Democratic candidate running for Congress, make comments mocking critical environmental protections, sympathizing with a far-right group that has ties to the Jan. 6 insurrection, and referring to our state’s iconic land use system as ‘insane,’” says the statement released by Oregon League of Conservation Voters, Oregon Wild Conservation Leaders Fund, Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (PCUN), Renew Oregon Action Fund. and RiverPAC of Oregon."
I am very flippin' sure the members of the union for Northwest Tree-Planters and Farmworkers United care passionately about the spotted owl. But what they do care about is that one of his rivals (and eventual winner) Andrea Salinas is 'one of their own' (her father was a Mexican immigrant worker involved in the union and she comes of a union family) so if the cause of the spotted owl was good enough to use to attack him, they love the little birdies.
My own view, on reading the story, is that he shouldn't have apologised and backtracked but should have stuck with "I care about conservation, but I care more about jobs for the workers of rural Oregon" but that was his inexperience talking.
This was a primary, not even the election that determines the winner, for one of 435 seats in the lower US House, in a state that never sees a ton of spending. Flynn received roughly 13.2 million dollars in outside support in the race, vs 1.7 million for the winning candidate. No one else topped 5 digits. About $18mil was spent over all.
Carrick also received an unprecedented 7 figure donation from the House Majority Pac because they wanted his donors to support them.
For all this it was 36.8% to 18.4%. So 2 to 1. Additionally there were 5 candidates who received 6.4% to 11.5% of the vote. They had 0 outside spending. To argue that Carrick getting 6.9% more of the vote over the third place candidate after shitting cash all over the airwaves in a primary race is impressive is shockingly ignorant.
If only the tech bros and Scott had done some basic research they might have been aware of Salinas and her strength in the area and picked a better race to blow money on.
"Carrick also received an unprecedented 7 figure donation from the House Majority Pac because they wanted his donors to support them."
This, yes indeed. Full agreement.
"To argue that Carrick getting 6.9% more of the vote over the third place candidate after shitting cash all over the airwaves in a primary race is impressive is shockingly ignorant."
Then just call me Grug. Yes, he (or his sponsors) threw a ton of money at it, and still managed to run a terrible campaign. With a bad campaign, awful "why should you vote for me?" goals, and no experience at all to demonstrate why the people of District 6 should send him off to Congress with his little lunchbox and a clean hanky in his pocket, as well as his more experienced rivals being able to dance the tarantella all over him (I do like the plea on behalf of the spotted owl from the logging workers' union), the fact that he still managed to come in second after doing all he could to shoot himself in both feet *is* impressive.
He didn't have a snowball in Hell's chance, of course, as anyone looking at this without stars in their eyes about "first EA candidate!!!" could have foretold, but honestly he did better than I expected.
No it's not, really. American elections tend to have a fair number of voters who vote for the last name they heard before wandering into the booth. So just making a whole lot noise -- which is what piles of money does for you -- can indeed get you into some kind of distant 2nd even if there is no hope at all you can be elected.[1] Famous business leaders kind of do this regularly, e.g. Carly Fiorina, Meg Whitman, and I would say even the inimitable Ross Perot. Each was a doofus politician with bags of money, and each managed a "respectable showing," which with $4 can get you a cup of coffee at Starbucks.
----------------
[1] Then there are the truly weird cases. When I lived in Chicago a guy ran for alderman *from prison* on the platform the major plank of which was that since there were so many cons and ex-cons in Chicago, they totally deserved a voice in local government. He didn't win, but he came in a respectable 2nd or 3rd, which just goes to show you that while Americans have yet to actually elect a yellow dog, it could yet happen.
Michael Bloomberg ran a surprisingly strong campaign in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary this way. He didn't win many delegates, but he did get a very large number of votes in the states he was competing in!
Does anyone want to defend presidential systems in general, as opposed to parliamentary ones? From a pretty detailed study of 20th & 21st century comparative politics, parliamentary systems seem obviously superior. This seems to be the consensus view of most or all political scientists and academics. Famously most developed countries are parliamentary ones, and most poor countries are presidential. Also, the Allies pushed Germany and Japan to go the former route post-war, which has again lead to great stability. The most prominent presidency, in the US, seems to have fallen prey to exactly what political scientists had always critiqued- a demagogue who achieved power by going directly to the voters, despite being opposed by nearly all party elites. Aka the classic Latin American situation.
I’m pretty familiar with the pro-parliamentary arguments- what are the pro-presidential ones? Wikipedia has something vague about allowing for more ‘decisiveness’ in an emergency, to which I’d respond that Churchill seemed decisive enough, and Israel seems to function just fine with a prime minister despite being in decades of near-constant conflict. I’ve never found the checks & balances argument persuasive- the only real check necessary is an independent judiciary, and Germany has an even stronger one than the US does, in hand with a parliament. Why should any country choose a presidential system? Have any notable academics written a defense of the presidency?
I just want to add that in addition to all the arguments other people have made, the most powerful and wealthiest nation on earth has a president, which seems to indicate that even if it's not an advantage, it's no significant handicap.
In what sense has the US "fallen prey" to a demagogue? If you pay attention to actual structure of government and policy, the Trump presidency was barely distinguishable from any other. This is a far cry from being taken over by a populist dictator who has hundreds of thousands of his political enemies arrested or outright killed, or declares territorial wars against neighboring powers, or runs ethnic cleansing campaigns
Having the Executive Branch be separate from the Legislative Branch provides a more robust system of checks and balances. I agree that having an independent Judicial Branch is the *really* important part, but separation of Legislative and Executive powers is a further improvement still.
Also, your claim that "most poor countries are Presidential" is mixing up correlation and causation (at least if it's meant to be anything other than an interesting but ultimately meaningless little factoid). I'd need VERY strong evidence to even start entertaining the possibility that they're poor *because* they have Presidential systems, especially since there are a great many other, much more convincing explanations for their poverty.
The Australian federal election was last weekend. I nearly cried when I saw the PM had called the opposition leader to concede defeat - this was on the same day, and at that point, only 70% of the votes had even been counted, but everyone could see he was going to lose. Trumpism was nowhere to be seen.
I think there are large benefits to power being widely distributed among a diverse group of stakeholders.
Sure. The advantage of a President elected separately, and not beholden to his party in the legislature, is that they form independent power centers, which hugely enhances that old checks 'n' balances thing, and makes it considerably harder for a unified power structure that can become dictatorial, like Mussolini and the Fascisti in Italy, or Hilter and the Nazis in Germany, or Putin and the Duma in Russia. That England has escaped this scourge since 1688 roughly is due to some kind of natural English aversion to following orders, I think, or else something in the water.
The remarkable thing about the United States is that it is fabulous prize for a demagogue, and it has a heterogenous and (for a Western nation) fractious and not especially well-educated voter population, and yet, despite all these manifest susceptibilities, it has never yet fallen into autocracy or even come close. It's just too hard to master *both* centers of power, Congress and the President, jealous as they are of each other's prerogatives, and owing each other (in the political sense) almost nothing.
That is, we value the separate Presidency and Congress not for what they can do, but for the limits they put on each other, so that there's a strong limit on the damage that can be done when any strange mood of the electorate puts weirdo(s) in charge of one branch.
I've never really understood the "separation of powers" argument in the terms it's often presented. It seems to come from the original Liberal idea that government is itself a danger to the people just by existing. In reality, separation of powers is best understood (as Montesquieu understood it) as a way of regulating elite oligarchic competition such that everyone gets a share of power and nobody feels disappointed. Shameless advertisement: I recently wrote about this on a Substack post.
But I suspect history shows that in practice, separation of powers is actually an obstacle to worthwhile reform at least as much as it's a theoretical hedge against dictatorship. In Europe, at least, most of the fundamental social legislation of the modern era (old age pensions, universal free education, legalisation of trades unions etc. etc.) was obstructed and delayed at some point by some part of government, parliament or the courts.
Right. See, by me government old page pensions, universal free education, and giving trade unions quasi-government-sanctioned status are all bad ideas that have significantly hampered European growth, both economically and culturally. Europe *ought* to be at least as powerful and wealthy as the US, but it's not.
So hooray for obstacles to reform, because popular reform -- bread and circuses -- is almost always a bad idea, and when it's passed with too much enthusiastic haste it builds constituencies that make it incredibly difficult to change or retract. On the other hand, reform that is seen to be a very good idea, across wide coalitions of voters, and across many years, usually manages to overcome the obstacle of divided powers.
I'm not sure if you exactly meant that, but I can't really agree with the fact that presidential regimes are less prone to be dictatorial. To me the fact that the head of executive branch is directly elected by the people yields the risk of a political figure to use such legitimacy (in opposition to the one of the parliament) to promote an authoritarian agenda. For example Napoleon III in France, who was first elected president before making a coup.
The rise of Mussolini and Hitler to power were rather caused by the fact the conservative and liberal (in the economic sense of the word) parties preferred to not oppose to their policies at the start of their rule because their priority was to 'restore order' against the socialist/communist/anarchist political forces. I don't see how Mussolini being appointed president in a presidential regime rather than prime minister in a parliamentary regime after the march of Roma would have made Italy less likely to fall into dictatorship.
I also wouldn't say that the recent transformation of Turkey from a parliamentary to a presidential regime makes it less likely to become more authoritarian.
Because the President and Congress represent different power centers, each ijndependently elected by the people, and they are *always* jealous of each other's power, even when they are in the hands of the same party.
If you pay attention, you'll notice that there is nontrivial strain between Joe Biden and the Democratic leaders of both the House and Senate. This is not the slightest bit unusual. They represent three distinct sources of power, and none of them is uniquely answerable to the other. The President can't dissolve the House and call for new elections. The House can't put in a vote of no confidence. The President can send the Marines off to Lebanon or Iraq without consulting Congress -- but he needs Congress to pay the bill if it costs anything serious. Congress can pass a law over the President's veto. And so on.
I'm aware one can construct any manner of theories that explain the 20th century dictatorships. What you need to do is explain the *absence* of any similar thing in the United States for the past 250 years, even though it possesses an evangelical, credulous population and represents the juicist prize on the planet for the would-be populist dictator.
I agree that there is a strong separation of powers in the US that prevents it to fall into dictatorship, but I wouldn't say that this is inherent to presidential systems in general.
Well, it is not impossible that the US has defenses against dictatorship that have nothing to do with the election for head of state entirely separate from the election for the legislature, but that seems doubtful to me. If nothing else, avoiding the possibility of Caesarism was of great concern to the Founders -- they discussed it extensively while framing the Constitution -- and they explicitly chose the structure they did to forestall it. Sure, they could've been deluded, but their answer has stood the test of time, and as an empiricist that carries considerable weight for me.
I don't and have never understood the independent power centers/checks & balances thing (Russia, BTW, is a presidential system). If you become dictator, you don't have to worry about whether Congress disapproves of your action. I don't really see how a few hundred mostly elderly people are a serious impediment to the traditional ways that democracies become totalitarian- a coup or an autogolpe. You can just..... shoot them. Democracies don't/have never fallen because parliament proposed a Law To End Democracy, and they dutifully voted for it. They fall due to who has the guns.
Also, presidential systems have a much worse track record in terms of becoming autocracies! This seems like a relevant fact!
The only real check & balance that matters in a democracy is the judiciary, and I am pro-strong judicial review like the US or Germany (and unlike most other democracies, some of which literally don't have it). It's not like Congress is routinely up to no good, and the wise President has to regularly watch out for their crafty shenanigans. The only party that needs to be checked & balanced is the President, who can and has in many countries devolved into an autocrat. So far parliaments have a much better track record here
It's very odd that you believe a judge has more power than the legislature. I can't imagine how that's logically consistent. Who is going to enforce a judge's order?
In the United States, you need Congress's support to become a dictator in the first place. Without Congress, you're just an impotent blowhard ordering things that never happen. And no, you can't "just shoot them". A US President who tries to have Congress shot, will very quickly become an ex-President, and probably a dead one.
My own country Italy is a beautiful example of an extremely disfunctional parliamentary republic. The government need to receive confidence from both houses of parliament. Alas, because party members are notoriously unfaithful to their own government, the executives tend to last very little. A government lasts on average ~2 years, less than half of the expected 5.
However, even in this system, the executive is capable of passing laws by tying them to the no confidence vote. In order to not have new elections and risk losing their job, parlamentarians give a rubber stamp to the executive proposal. This was the way in which salvini's "security decree" which greatly expanded the powers of the minister of the interior (ie, salvini himself) was passed. This was also the way the socialdemocratic PD forced the electoral law through parliament (Did i mentioned we completely change the electoral system very very often? Not just gerrymandering, really changing between proportional and majoritarian)
It seems like the worst thing you can have in a country is ideological diversity -- groups of people with wildly different ideas on how the country should be run. If half fraction of the population is apopleptic with rage about the policies which the other half would like to see enacted, then it doesn't matter too much whether you resolve these disputes with a parliamentary or presidential system, it's going to be messy.
If the whole population of your country is in basic agreement on most things, then democracy is a whole lot easier.
French guy here, I can give you a couple of arguments about why some of the French folks prefer our current (de facto) presidential system over a parliamentary one. Note that I'd be personally in favor of a proportional parliamentary system so I have some clear bias in talking about this topic.
First thing to note is that France actually does not have a presidential system, according to the constitution the president has in fact limited political powers compared to the prime minister. The president can however dissolve the parliament, is the chief of the french army, may create some referendums (although there are some restrictions here, it's nowadays rather admitted that no referendums touching the constitution can be done without the agreement of the parliament/senate), and it is the president which names the prime minister (but cannot dismiss him directly, he'd have to dissolve the parliament and hope that the newly elected parliament would censure the government). Most of the executive power is in theory in the hands of the prime minister. So why does it seem that in France a lot of powers are concentrated in the presidency?
In the post-WW2 France (i.e. 1946-1958, during the so-called 4th republic), France has a proportional parliamentary system, which was very unstable, the cold-war situation not helping in that. Some political parties allied together both in opposition to the communist party and De Gaulle, but failed to really build an long-lasting homogenous political force so parliamentary crisis were very frequent. This instability in the context of the war of independence of Algeria lead to some generals in Algeria to do a kind of putsch, opposing the government in the metropole and calling for the return of De Gaulle at the head of the state, which then passed a new constitution (of the 5th republic) by referendum to increase the power of the president (and decrease these of the parliaments) and therefore restore some kind of stability in the country. Despite the fact that the role of the prime minister was supposedly still prominent in interior politics according to the new constitution, the wish for more stability, the strong figure of De Gaulle, and the type of election for the parliament (two-rounds majority vote per electoral district in most of the course of the 5th republic) created this illusion of a presidential regime, which influenced today's french political culture.
Nevertheless, it happened 3 times (the last time between 1997 and 2002) in the 5th Republic that the majority of the parliament didn't support the current ruling president, leading to a system of so-called 'cohabitation' where the prime minister is both constitutionally and de facto ruling the interior politics in the country, the president having more a representative function. France is therefore often more rightfully considered as a bicephal system/semi-presidential system
Some tiredness grew about this cohabitation situation between the two classical parties of the 5th republic (which since 2017 lost a lot of their prestige) and a reform of the calendar of the presidential elections was voted so that from 2002 on the parliamentary elections would happen shortly after the presidential elections (i.e. the presidential mandate would last 5 years instead of 7). Due to the total absence of the proportionality in the elections of the parliament, it was therefore very easy for the president to surf on the tide of its victory in the presidential election and win an (artificial) majority in the parliament.
So with this contect, to come back to your original question, I'd argue that in France people who support our semi-presidential system (i.e. argue for example against the introduction of proportionality in the parliamentary elections or for a shift between the presidential and parliamentary elections calendar) do it for the following reasons:
- They assume this guarantees a bigger stability, and often quotes the example of the 4th republic (or Italy/Belgium) to demonstrate that parliamentary system can be very unstable. Ignoring the fact that Merkel stayed chancellor for 16 years in Germany in a proportional parliamentary system.
- They are anchored in the political culture inherited from De Gaulle, in which a strong leader 'dictates' its politic and where the majority in the parliament wouldn't dare to contradict him. I would say that for most french it would sound very weird that the government/parliament wouldn't let the president do the reforms he said he'd do during the presidential campaign (although constitutionally it is not his role to conduct these reforms).
- A 3rd point, which is related to both the aforementioned one, is that a fully parliamentary system would be too much controlled by the little arrangement between the political parties (this was heavily criticized during the 4th Republic). The existence of a powerful president is supposedly creating the possibility that a figure higher than the political parties is directly elected by the people. Although I believe that this goal of the 5th republic failed, as (at least between the end of De Gaulle mandate and until 2017) one wouldn't be able to say that the different presidents were emerging out of the control of the political parties.
I've long argued that every French political regime in modern times is essentially a reaction against the previous one: as I say later on, French political culture is very dualistic. So the Fifth Republic was a reaction against the excessive parliamentarianism of the Fourth which was itself a reaction against the authoritarianism of Vichy, was was supported by those who were exasperated with the hyper-parliamentary Third Republic, which was itself a reaction to the authoritarian regime of Napoleon III ... you get the picture. Unsurprisingly, the talk of the Sixth Republic, which has grown over the last fifteen to twenty years, is all about moving power back to Parliament again.
I'd agree with that, although I'm not sure about how much this is specific about France. One could say the same thing about Germany for example: 2nd Reich -> Weimar Republic -> 3rd Reich -> Current parliamentary system.
I'm also not sure about the 3rd republic part. I'm far from being an expert about this historical period, but I had the impression that the 3rd republic was rather a (I'd argue fortunate) accident and that it lasted only because the legitimist and orleanist factions of the monarchists (which altogether had the majority in the parliament) couldn't stand each others
It's doubtful if there's any such thing as "an argument" for or against the idea of a Presidency. The basic idea in most countries is that you distinguish between the Head of State and the Head of Government functions. In a surprising number of countries, there is still a hereditary Head of State (King, Queen, Emperor) but the functions of Government have been hived off to a strong elected Parliament. In other countries (Germany is an example) the President is a largely ceremonial figure, elected by Parliament. In both cases, the Head of State has a representational role, and is responsible for asking party leaders to try to form governments, but has little real power. At the other end, you have elected executive Presidents, as in France, Russia, the US etc. However, in all of these examples that I know of, only the US tries to combine the functions of Head of State and Head of Government in the same person. In France, for example, there's a clear constitutional distinction between the President (Head of State) and the Prime Minister (Head of Government). On a number of occasions a French President has been obliged to appoint a PM from an opposition political party.
I think the question of which system "works" is really a question about stability and political tradition. To take two examples, French culture is extremely dualistic and black and white, and historically French politics was hopelessly split in a series of dualities; not just Left/Right, but Religious/Secular, Traditional/Modern and so forth. It has also been very personal, and full of arcane splits and obscure jealousies. Compromise isn't in the French spirit, and forming a government under parliamentary systems (1870-1940 and again from 1944-1958), was exceptionally difficult. Governments were generally short-lived, and the system was deeply unstable. That was one reason why some of the French welcomed, at least initially, the Vichy regime (1940-44). Then Fifth Republic, even if now dying, got round that by having an elected Presidential figure deliberately above politics, and leaving much of the sordid political stuff to the PM. But that required Presidents of the moral stature we no longer have. The actual question of which system was better has no answer.
In Lebanon, to take a completely different example, the political system is essentially the superstructure on top of an endless competition for power within and between 18 ethnic groups. Especially after the Civil War (1975-90) the answer seemed to be to provide a system with something for everybody. The President is a Maronite Christian, the Prime Minister is a Sunni and the Speaker of Parliament is a Shia. All governments have to include representatives from all the major communities. Parliament elects the President, but he has to be a Maronite. However, the actual powers and influence of these individuals vary depending on who they are, what other political leaders think of them (the current President, Aoun, is close politically to Hezbollah) and how they are perceived abroad. There are so many undercurrents in Lebanese politics that sometimes formal labels don't matter much.
In other words, I don't think there are any general rules at all.
Arguments that countries with parliamentary systems are doing better are very sample sensitive. I am sceptical that if Latin American countries would switch to parliamentary system, they would get as rich as Western Europe (or the US, which of course also has a presidential system, as we all know). But if this is true, that means their problems are NOT caused by the presidential system.
If you restrict yourself to a sample of reasonably rich countries, you get to problems like whether Fifth republic France, Finland, and perhaps other countries should be counted as presidential, and overall picture of the superiority of parliamentary system becames far less clear.
Presidential systems allow for stronger leaders who can lead during crises without risking an accompanying political crisis due to fixed terms and the ability to retain control despite losing the legislature. We have a leader for 4 years at a time, and a few fringe MPs far outside the political mainstream don't have so much outsize influence for making a coalition that they can simply blow up the government if they aren't pandered to.
As for checks and balances, frankly America's have eroded as Congress has failed to effectively legislate and the executive branch's powers have ballooned through executive orders and agency decisions. I feel it would be even worse if the president could personally legislate through congress rather than legislating around it.
Israel loves its parliamentary system so much that they have 3 elections for it every year, I believe the most recent crises was the 61-59 majority losing an MK over matzah, and then almost losing another MK, who changed her mind and did not kill the 60-60 bloc. Israel functions due to its strong military tradition and support, as well as external support, in spite of its government, not because of it.
Milton Friedman advanced a theoretical argument in favor of an executive chosen by national election in his 1984 book "The Tyranny of the Status Quo".
It's been a while, but as I recall the argument was based on the idea that one of the failure modes of electoral politics is that concentrated interests get overweighed relative to diffuse general interests: people whose livelihoods depend on a particular program or regulatory policy are going to weigh that very heavily in their voting decisions, while the general population might be affected very little by very slightly increased taxes or very slightly worse options at the store and in most cases will barely notice. Friedman's argument (based on the observed behavior of the last few decades of Congressional policy-making at the time of writing) was that individual legislators are particularly vulnerable to being reliant on the support of concentrated special interests (since the special interests are often geographically concentrated), and legislative logrolling can combine many such interests into a Congressional.majority. But having a President who's chosen at-large by the entire electorate provides a check against this, as the cumulative effect of many diffuse costs add up across many, many policies affecting the whole nation, so the Presidency is the best potential vehicle for a political entrepreneur to push a program of blocking or rolling back many net-negative policies at once.
Another argument for Presidential systems is that the executive presents a clearer target for retrospective voting than legislators. Consider that in the US, current approval ratings for Congress as a whole are around 20% with around 70% unfavorable, while ratings for one's *own* representative are typically net-positive by a nontrivial margin. But for the President, there's no mass of other Presidents to hide behind.
These two arguments can be mitigated if people in a Parliamentary elections vote retrospectively based on the performance of the party currently in power, and prospectively based on each party's leadership and manifesto rather than taking each individual seat in isolation, but then that becomes a Presidential system with extra steps.
Going back further, Presidential systems have historically been chosen as like-kind replacements for Monarchies. For example, the US Constitutional arrangement very strongly resembles the unwritten British constitution c. 1786, with the House mapping to Commons, the Senate mapping to Lords, and the President mapping to the King. The main substantive differences were mode of selection and term of office (Senate and President being indirectly elected for a term of years instead of inheriting for life) and the Executive being somewhat weaker as the power to declare war was transferred to the legislature and the legislature was given the ability to override executive vetoes by a supermajority vote. This is a fairly common pattern in other countries that have done major constitutional overhauls: replacing a King with a President keeps things in a mode people are accustomed to and allows many institutional norms to carry over instead of having to be reestablished from scratch.
Most Parliamentary systems seem to have happened gradually by accident, as evolving norms have gradually weakened the de facto role of the head of state from "ruler" or "leader" to "referee" or "mascot".
> These two arguments can be mitigated if people in a Parliamentary elections vote retrospectively based on the performance of the party currently in power, and prospectively based on each party's leadership and manifesto rather than taking each individual seat in isolation, but then that becomes a Presidential system with extra steps.
I don't think that's right. The important feature of a Presidential system is that there is an empowered Legislature that can oppose the President, while in a Parliamentary system, the Legislature and Executive are in unison. The claim is that in a Parliamentary system, people have a clear understanding of which party to praise/blame for the current conditions, while a Presidential system muddies the waters. Having people vote effectively for the Prime Minister through their local vote isn't a Presidential system with extra steps, because you never have the confusion of a divided government.
What I meant by "Presidential system with extra steps" is that you have a de facto at-large election for the head of government. You're correct that it doesn't have the legislative dynamics of a Presidential system with an empowered legislature: it's more like a Presidential system where the legislature is a rubber stamp in most cases, which isn't necessarily an improvement.
The claim is that it creates a more informed populace. You never have a situation with a President of one party and a legislature of the other that is constantly stymying the president, and then people vote out the President because they think the President is stopping everything. This sort of dynamic is not unheard of in the United States, where people vote for the opposition party because they want the current Presidential party policies and don't understand that the opposition is the problem.
I think you have to look at the rest of the political structure in a polity before making an argument about president vs prime minister. Look at Boris for instance. Meanwhile the presidency in France remains under the power of essentially a political elite like it would in a parliamentary system.
The problem in the US is every other aspect of the federal election system, not the presidency. A properly sized lower House for the population, some solution to the whole Senate shitfest, some form of non-plurality voting in prominent use, potentially multi-memeber districts, reasonable campaign finance law, etc.
Is there really a cogent argument for a larger House, though? 435 is already larger than an organization can plausibly be without hierarchy (Dunbar's number, etc.). The idea that, say, doubling the size of the House would parse as a "governing deliberative body" rather than "a morass where nobody's individual vote actually matters" (I mean, more so than the current House already so parses) seems implausible....
The main argument for a larger house is that it would facilitate better legislative elections. Smaller districts can have more homogenous interests than larger ones, and individual votes in a smaller district matter more. And district size drastically affects the nature of the campaign: a large district election tends to be won by party heuristics, mass advertising, and courting the support of local political machines; while a small enough district can be canvassed personally by the candidate and a handful of volunteers.
Overall, the current US House is a really awkward size: too big for Dunbar's number, too big even for the majority party's caucus to be below or even close to the Dunbar threshold, but too small to be properly representative.
My druthers would be to bite the bullet and expand the House by a lot, accepting that it isn't going to be a flat deliberative body. In terms of operating rules, the best I've come up with is to have the back-bench members function as a part-time legislature, residing in their respective districts and voting electronically. The members would form caucuses at will, and each caucuses would have a proportionate number of seats on each subject-matter committee. Each committee would be firmly below Dunbar's Number in size (and would probably have working groups in the 5-15 member range for studying specific proposals or subareas), and would recommend draft bills to a "general policy committee", which would amend, merge overlapping proposals, and send to the whole membership for ratification. Meanwhile, the Senate would continue to serve the function of being a flat-organization working deliberative body.
UK Parliament has 650 members. With a quarter of the population. France has 577 seats with 1/5th the population. Germany has 736 seats for 83 million people.
The US House has roughly 7x more constituents per lower chamber constituency than every single European country. The numbers are relatively consistent across all of Europe. 135k people for Spain, 100k for Italy, ~110k for the UK and Germany. Etc.
Of course the US probably shouldn't have 2800 seats in the House, but we have plenty of room to go for say 850 or something and remain comparable to European states in total size.
So the points about the size of respective European parliaments are certainly a propos, But presuming we go from a 7x to 3.5x constituent : representative ratio by a rough doubling of the size of the House, what specific political dysfunction do we expect to solve given that there's still going to be a massive disparity in that ratio? The cost of running a campaign? That seems like the most obvious source of systematic dysfunction directly addressable by decreased constituency sizes (and one that I would acknowledge is a genuine problem), but also kind of the only one, and I'm not sure it's worth sacrificing organizational management capacity and increasing coordination costs to make that tradeoff.
I would agree that that in the abstract I would expect government to be more responsive with lower constituent:representative ratios, but given that it sounds like we agree that there's a conceptual upper bound on how big you can make an egalitarian deliberative body while having it even approximate being functional (e.g. you would agree 2800 is too big), I would moot that both 350k:1 and 700k:1 round to the constituent:representative ratio being an essentially insoluble problem (i.e., even though one number is half the other, both can be well-summarized as "too damn big").
In view of the fact that the constituent:representative ratio problem basically can't be solved without a hard national population cap, why not go in the opposite direction and try to optimize for the effective capacity of the deliberative body (e.g., try to get the House close to 150) since we can't offer a permanent fix by increasing representative numbers?
A larger House doesn't fix the fact that someone with small majorities in states with just over half the population, that loses by landslides in the rest of the states, can win the Presidency. That is the core problem for the Electoral College, that it's possible for a minority to be geographically distributed in an unusually effective way and use its power to govern. It doesn't matter so much whether the districts that give the electoral votes are particularly equivalent in power ratio (though that can exacerbate the problem).
A larger House has a somewhat strong impact on the Senate giving small states too much representation. It also helps ameliorate gerrymandering. It doesn't resolve it 100% of course vs just doing a popular vote.
Yeah, fixing proportionality is definitely a nice feature of this step, but I don't think failures of proportionality are really the biggest problem with the Electoral College in the current world. (I think the biggest five and the smallest five states are both about equally split between blue and red.)
>The most prominent presidency, in the US, seems to have fallen prey to exactly what political scientists had always critiqued- a demagogue who achieved power by going directly to the voters, despite being opposed by nearly all party elites
"Fallen prey" isn't the wording I'd have chosen. In my view, this itself shows a good argument for a presidential system: power capture by increasingly cuckoo elites can, perhaps, be checked. Slightly.
Well, to be technical, impeachment is for "Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors", not boneheadedness, incompetence, or *nearly* criminal behavior.
The real downside is that Congress has delegated great power to the President (placing regulatory agencies under the President's command and de facto giving him the authority to declare war) and has little interest in taking it back. The framers expected members of Congress to fight for a strong Congress; instead they fight for the strength of their party, and hand over power whenever the same party controls both Congress and the White House. The framers thought parties were a bad idea and wrote the Constitution with the assumption that there wouldn't be, but they accidently created a system that makes a two-party system almost inevitable.
American parties are pretty weak though, in a sense of control over their parliamentarians, compared to parties in Europe. Arguably "anti-partisan" nature of US Constitution has something to do with that.
Re: 1- the Germans have the solution. Instituted post-WW2 in reaction to how dysfunctional the Weimar Republic was, they have a rule that the PM can be replaced only once the parliament has voted a new one in. This is to avoid situations where it's easy for all of the parties to get rid of a Prime Minister, but impossible for them to agree on a replacement
Re: 2- I believe most African democracies are presidential as well
I bought an old house and have been replacing all the water pipes because they are made of galvanized steel, and their insides are badly rusted. Some pipe segments are so constricted with rust that they're practically clogged. This led me to do some research into galvanized pipes, and I discovered the material is considered obsolete for water pipes because of this problem.
With that said, why are galvanized steel pipes still sold at places like Home Depot? Are they only used for natural gas lines? Are some fools still using them as water pipes?
Galvanized pipe is sold mainly for repair and extension of existing galvanized pipe systems. Joining copper directly to galvanized steel is bad, since the materials have different electrode potentials and will suffer accelerated corrosion due to acting like a shorted out chemical battery. This can be mitigated by using special fittings, but it's easier to just replace like with like.until you have to replace the whole thing.
Galvanized pipe is also used as a finish material sometimes. Industrial-look decor has been semi-fashionably for a while, and galvanized pipe gets used there a fair amount for things like railings and shelving.
Generally speaking, the lifespan of the pipes is long enough that it will almost certainly be somebody else's problem by the time it is necessary to do something about it.
(I've redone plumbing in multiple houses; personally, I'd be ecstatic to see galvanized steel, as what I have replaced has almost always been an eclectic mixture of copper - great - and black iron - wtf.)
I think the "sturdiness" factor probably matters a lot, however, as the only real alternative there, stainless steel, is far too expensive for most DIYers. (If you're looking to spend that kind of money, you're probably hiring somebody to do the work.) Additionally there is UV and heat resistance, which can matter in particular applications, and copper is both more expensive and much harder to work with.
Nebula offers 30X coverage for $299. You can do all sorts of interesting things, basically anything that 23andme does it can do better. You can directly look for medically-relevant variation instead of having to impute it using 3rd party services (eg Promethease). And since you have all the data, you can run new analysis methods over time as they're published.
You will need some skill with bioinformatics to do the more advanced things, though.
Compared to the price of 23andme (and keep in mind, that price also includes 23andme having your data) I think it's worth it.
Usually it is not useful beacuse most frequent disease are influenced by many genes and the environement. So you will learn for example that you have a slightly lower probability than average to get diabetis and a slightly higher probability to develop psoriasis, which have alpmots zero usefulness.
Some common traits are influenced by just one gene, but ussually you already know about tehse traits. For example you will learn that you have the genotype indicating lactose intolerance but you probably already knew that dairy did not agree with you!
Rare genetic diseases are usually associated with one or just a few genes, but most of them are pretty bad (and you will already know about them...) or not really actionable. In very rare cases you will learn something not obvious and actionable, for example that you have hemochromatosis and should become a blood donor to avoid the associated complications.
I had that question myself and reading a few genetic subs on reddit came to the conclusion that you don't win much (yet) compared to the lower cost of myHeritage/23andme. Personally I didn't find much I couldn't have known If I had just looked at my parents (grand-parents), eg health risks.
A few months back I posted a complaint in one of the hidden open threads about my experience interviewing at Google, in which I took a round of interviews, was congratulated by my recruiter on having passed and told to expect some "team fit" interviews, and was then rejected without any further input from me into the process.
My least favorite response was a comment letting me know I had no reason to be upset, because obviously if I can pass an interview at Google I can just go get a job somewhere else. Needless to say, I have not actually found this to be the case.
But if anyone is aware of someone willing to hire based on this kind of ability signal ("if I can pass an interview at Google..."), I would appreciate a pointer.
(I had thought the classifieds posts might be more appropriate for this, but they do not appear to be a going concern.)
My understanding is that some percentage of candidates pass the hiring committee but are for some reason not chosen by any teams during team matching. I'm not sure why that would happen - you may have had borderline interview performance and/or some other red flag. Or you may have just been unlucky with timing or something else. Google hiring is a huge impersonal machine at the entry level so there is lots a randomness I would guess.
The level was L3. I am not aware that I was applying for any role in particular, though of course it's possible that I was doing so without realizing it.
In the past I would have said I had more of a problem with not getting past the interview stage. (For example, I have feedback from TripleByte telling me that, in their opinion, I did a great job on the take-home project they offered as an alternative to interviewing, but they can't move forward with me because they can only take candidates who will look good in an interview.)
Now I seem to have bigger problems getting interviews, which obscures whether the problems getting past interviews are still there.
The last time I was hired, I didn't provide a resume at all; I figured it could only hurt my position.
I can claim about three years of relevant or semi-relevant experience over the last ~12 years. I generally provide my resume; I didn't do it that time because by the time anyone actually asked for it, the final in-person interview was already scheduled.
Google had my resume before they even arranged the phone screen, though.
It got me talking more about this with close friends, but... if anyone can explain what jati means, or has good suggestions for essays to read, or has strong opinions about casteism in India (and other parts of the world), I would appreciate it.
It sounds to me like caste is a lot more analogous to social class in western societies than to race. It's damn near invisible to outsiders and taboo to discuss even among insiders, but it's a complicated system of discrimination that everyone participates in whether they like it or not.
As a white guy from Europe, it feels weird to have an opinion on this topic, but if I can reason by analogy... sometimes the situation is very different from one place to another, one cultural bubble to another, city versus village. So I am going to assume that what you described reflects the situation you find yourself in, but other people can have dramatically different experience.
My example of difference between city and village in Slovakia would be religion. In a big city, almost no one cares. Many people are atheists; and most of the believers are the kind that only visits the church once in a few months. Religion is almost not a topic; many people have no idea about their classmates or colleagues.
Now go to a village, preferably somewhere near the border with Poland, and the population is divided to Catholic majority and Protestant minority, who often hate each other. (Maybe you are like "wtf is the difference?". Exactly. Two groups of Jesus worshipers, each of them believing the other group will go to hell, because they do something slightly differently. Plus some historical baggage of religious wars, etc.) They do not kill each other anymore - that was a few centuries ago - but if your child marries someone from the other group, you try to prevent it, and sometimes you simply break contact with the child afterwards. Sometimes the atheist cousin living in a big city is the only person still talking to both branches of the family, because ironically they both tolerate him for not belonging to the *other* side.
You also can't tell the difference between a Catholic and a Protestant by looking at them. But in a village, everyone knows perfectly who you are. You either visit the same church every Sunday, or you don't. Plus there is gossip. Everyone knows everything about everyone. -- On the other hand, city is anonymous; the random people on the street know nothing about you. What you reveal is up to you.
Which is different from race, because you do not have the option to hide the color of your skin. Then the entire country is de facto a village for you. So perhaps the caste is different from race in a city, but similar in a village. Maybe for the poor people who spend their whole lives in a village, there is no difference.
There is a Wikipedia page on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste-related_violence_in_India which seems quite bad. I had to remind myself that India is the size of 1/2 Europe, and seeing a compilation of hate crimes from a half of Europe would also make a horrible list. Yet, looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_Europe and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_racial_violence_in_the_United_States maybe I am unfair, but the Indian list looks more like "50 people killed here, 20 people killed there", the European list (in recent decades) more like "a Swedish man motivated by racism attacked people at a school in Trollhättan with a sword, killing four", and the American list (in recent decades) more like "police killed a black man, riots burned down a town". Then again, Europe had its huge killings during WW2.
I guess my point is that it is different, but maybe comparable. I felt like the last part of your article put too much emphasis on the author who identifies as a Communist and Marxist and had a terrorist uncle. Perhaps the author is disproportionally famous in USA, but that doesn't make the problem any less real.
> On the other hand, city is anonymous; the random people on the street know nothing about you. What you reveal is up to you.
> Which is different from race, because you do not have the option to hide the color of your skin. Then the entire country is de facto a village for you. So perhaps the caste is different from race in a city, but similar in a village.
That's not a difference. You're attributing aspects to racial difference that aren't there. But being Korean is a big deal in Japan, and you can be fired if somebody learns that you're Korean when they thought you were Japanese. There is no visual distinction, and generally no cultural one either. Being from a different race that is visually identical doesn't mean you're not from a different race.
Indian castes are large groups of people that have been endogamous for thousands of years. That is also the definition of "races"; the concepts are not different things.
> To an American, Japanese and Koreans are plainly the same race because they look the same.
This is not true; we're already seeing colleges start to separate out different types of Asians for admission preference/dispreference purposes. Filipinos now get to be "disadvantaged" (given preferences) while Japanese and Koreans continue to receive dispreference. But an American can't tell the difference between a Filipino and a Japanese any more than they can tell the difference between a Japanese and a Korean.
Okay, but for most Americans, I think the difference between Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese, say, is more-or-less invisible. And that works out okay, since after a couple generations in the US, everyone tends to kind-of mix together and just be an American kid with somewhat darker skin and slightly different facial features.
Thanks for sharing this, Sravan. I've been wanting to learn about caste from an Indian without an axe to grind for a long time, but I (American white guy) haven't ever felt satisfied by the answers I received, and I suspect my questions have been a little offensive. While there are some similarities with US racial issues, I think you're correct in highlighting that they're not really parallel or analogous processes.
The response I've heard when I've mentioned caste to Indians in the US is basically "Caste? That doesn't really matter much any more". ... But it's instructive that everyone I've talked to was a brahmin studying in the US. Certain white conservatives here might give similar answers when asked about US racism.
Thoughts / comments / feedback on the following analogy / chain of thoughts:
A) production ML models typically have a predictive component and a loss function
B) the predictive component generates predictions from signals, the loss function says 'how much it matters' that a given prediction was correct or incorrect
C) the 'predictive component' is something like a 'map of the space', and the loss function says something like 'where do we ~actually~ want to go' (edit: i think 'utility function' is what i want here)
D) if we squint at a humans and think of them as ML models, the utility function encodes our value systems; these represent some mapping between world states and how we appraise them
E) less wrong / ssc / ea / rationalist community promotes a series of norms / values which pertain _mostly_ to the internal structure of the ML model and how it _ought_ to update based upon evidence, and how it _ought_ to evaluate (i.e. predict) various choices, but not details such as 'this aspect of the loss function, as it pertains to the territory represented by the map, is more important than this other aspect' (i.e. this part of the territory is more important than this other part)
F) there aren't modern materialist movements devoted to helping people improve the quality of their loss functions
G) such a movement might be useful and would fit naturally into the EA / SSC / Less wrong community
H) such a movement might also be risky and dangerous because it would look something like a religion (in that it might end up promoting a set of values about acting in the world)
I) a loss function could be considered more or less correct, given some pre-existing definition of 'correctness', but in some sense, asking 'is there a correct loss function for a human being' is roughly equivalent to asking 'is there a correct human moral system' ?
J) we might skip the bootstrap problem by reframing the question in 'I' as: "are there loss functions which allow my predictive model to more rapidly converge on stable, net-positive valences?"
K) a positive answer to that last problem might look something like wireheading yourself. To avoid wireheading, we might use something like 'coherent extrapolated volition', so 'is there a loss function which satisfies the constraints in J, yet which gives rise to behavior that my current loss function also evaluates as being a desirable way for me to act in the world now'
L) at some point all of this starts to look so much like 'the search for moral truth' that it's reasonable to believe at least some aspect of historical religions can be understood in these ML terms: religions act as claims about correct loss functions
> F) there aren't modern materialist movements devoted to helping people improve the quality of their loss functions
It sounds like you are referring to "utility functions" or "terminal values". I'm not sure what "quality" means. I think that lots of people tend to (1) not really think about what their terminal values are or should be, and (2) get in the habit of obeying their intuition - their system 1 - but intuition isn't based on careful thought and often makes decisions that system 2 analysis would find flawed.
> G) such a movement might be useful and would fit naturally into the EA / SSC / Less wrong community
But doesn't EA do just that? Ideas like Peter Singer's drowning child are meant to suggest what our terminal values should be (by using logic to extrapolate from our built-in moral intuition) and how to "optimize" to honor those values.
I think EA comes the closest here, but to me it feels much more like "being rational in the pursuit of some value system that you shouldn't look too much in detail at"
in other words, they're using a not-really-well-thought out, debated, explored, nuanced, definition of good (i.e. saving lives, or maybe something like 'quality adjusted life years') and then running forward with figuring out how to maximize that. I'm not saying "hey that's bad," so much as arguing that i think the question of "what should our terminal values be" needs a lot more investigation.
Scott wrote some post once talking about people in EA who were saying ' but think of the suffering of all the insects', for example. When we say 'the greatest good for the greatest number', do we ~mean~ anything by good there, other than simply 'not dying'? Is there a territory there?
That sounds right, except I wonder if you're seeing a lack of nuance in the *average* of people's values in the EA movement, and mistaking that for "no one cares to look too closely at this philosophy" which I would disagree about.
I sometimes think about how we tend to use one standard for humans (QALYs which heavily favors length of life) and another for other animals (average pleasantness of experience, which ignores length entirely).
There are of course practical reasons to do the second thing--asking factory farms to give chickens long and pleasant lives is a non-starter. Separately from that, though, my axioms lead me to believe quality of life is more important than length, although life length is a big deal for humans in ways it is not for animals: our early lives are unpleasant (if my baby crying is any guide) so a long and healthy life can potentially increase average pleasantness; we plan for the far future, we dwell on how soon we will die, we think back to loved ones we've lost, and in general care, in the present, a lot about time that isn't the present; and last but not least, a human's instrumental value to other humans tends to increase with life length.
So, as an EA I have a fairly nuanced philosophy around this stuff, but EA is a fairly big tent and it seems impractical to share that nuance to everyone else, let alone get everybody to agree on it.
I think this is a central idea in David Hume's work. He says action is always governed by belief and desire operating together. He thinks belief is governed by rationality, but desire is not.
I suspect that reason *doesn't* provide as much uniqueness for our epistemology as many Humeans think, and that there should be a greater symmetry between our treatment of values and evidence.
THANKS - this is exactly what i'm looking for. I can see that the 'loss function' is the wrong function, it's the _utility_ function i'm thinking of. And i think my question boils down to "it seems the lesswrong / scc takes 'my utilty function' as a kind of given blackbox instead of something a person can and should optimize'
>H) such a movement might also be risky and dangerous because it would look something like a religion (in that it might end up promoting a set of values about acting in the world)
In what sense do you mean that this is risky and dangerous? As in, we could accidentally a cult like with Leverage? Or as in, people could get arrested (for what?)?
i dunno what 'Leverage' refers to, but yes, the latter
it seems to me like EA/SSC/LessWrong is i this weird space of like, sort of being a religion, except the only values we expressly advocate have to do with the integrity of internal models
Somewhat disagree on E). There are very strong belief in EA/rat communities, such as: that all human life is valuable, that all humans are equally valuable, that animal suffering matters, that borders are meaningless, that nationalism is a scam, that war is always bad, that more population is always better, but abortions are also good, that gay rights are important, that the rights of the individual cannot be superseded by the needs of the society, etc. etc.
It starts from the most basic introductions. Whenever anyone starts explaining EA, they give the example of africans and malaria nets, which is very reasonable, but also holds implicit the belief that african lives hold the same value to me as the lives of people from my country. (And if you make the obvious follow-up that the effective altruism logic can be applied for different value systems, *you're missing the point*)
On F) - literally every single religion or cultural movement comes with their own "loss functions" under your definition.
Overall, I don't understand why you're forcing this metaphor.
You don't need to believe that African lives are worth EXACTLY as much as every other life in order for the marginal life saved for a dollar to be more effective than elsewhere. As long as it's sufficiently easy to save a life, that can overwhelm other margins.
Since you brought up abortion, in Freakonomics Levitt writes that rather than treating it as a binary if someone thought of abortion as fractionally bad then the very large numbers of abortions required to prevent one homicide (by his theory) could still overwhelm that. That's the kind of logic I'm thinking of above.
EA seems like the one exception here, but it comes down to this:
> if you make the obvious follow-up that the effective altruism logic can be applied for different value systems, *you're missing the point*
There's a HUGE difference between saying "we should be consistent in using rationality to evaluate choices in terms of moral values" and "here is the specific set of values we should use," and what EA seems to do is lean _very heavily_ into the latter, while claiming to be all about the former.
So there's a bit of a motte and bailey going on. If you try to poke at the underpinnings - like, how do you choose _which_ values system to use EA on, i find that people generally reject _that_ question as meaningless.
>There are very strong belief in EA/rat communities, such as: that all human life is valuable, that all humans are equally valuable, that animal suffering matters, that borders are meaningless, that nationalism is a scam, that war is always bad, that more population is always better, but abortions are also good, that gay rights are important, that the rights of the individual cannot be superseded by the needs of the society, etc. etc.
I think I missed a memo somewhere, since I disagree with at least three of those and two of them contradict each other.
It's a very good point, and underappreciated. I love borders. Borders is what stops us from killing each other, because we can agree you live over there, on that side of the border, and do whatever crazy ass thing you want, and I live here, on this side of the border, and I don't have to put up with your crazy. (Nor you with mine.)
If there were no borders, if we all had to act and think and move the same, we'd have to fight it out, and it would be bloody and miserable. Good fences make good neighbors, as a poet no doubt long forgotten said.
Right. It was hard enough to get from a system of hitting each others heads in reciprocally to some kinds of rules of laws and it paid out. However fine you think your law is, it's not universal. A state is not necessarily a nation but common law. If things go well, people who don't like their local laws can leave to a different place. People who don't like laws at all have to go into business.
Perhaps you *should* remember that poem. It starts off "Something there is that doesn't love a wall". The "Good fences make good neighbors" is the voice of the relatively unthinking neighbor.
I've read it and pondered it, and I daresay I understand far better, if you think it's as sophomoric as that. It helps to understand what "a wall" represents in Vermont, which I do, having lived there a spell.
It's the thing you put up at the edge of your field to get the stones out of the way so you can plow. Yes. And Frost doesn't really come down on one side or the other. But the voice of the neighbor saying "Good fences make good neighbors" is portrayed as relatively unthinking.
For most ML systems, one uses the canonically correct choice of loss function, (log-)likelihood- because the model doesn't just predict an output, but rather a distribution on outputs. Most other loss functions derive from this by assuming a particular distribution on the output- for example mean squared error corresponds to a Gaussian predictive distribution's log likelihood.
If you're 'building global government', I think you'll find large numbers of people who are certain that what you are doing is pernicious and detrimental to every human being on the planet.
I note by your Twitter that you use a very silly icon, I would hope that is meant humourously but I can't be sure, too much "uwu" going on there.
May I ask why the Korean name of Venus? Do you claim to come from Venus, represent Venus, or that Venus is the ideal that Earth should strive to emulate?
Also, when was the election held to appoint you to the Planetary Council? I do not recall casting my vote in that, and certainly not for you.
Everyone has the right to be an idiot on the Internet, so if you want to play at being a cyborg girl who is the ruler of the global government as part of the intergalactic federation of planets, go you Lady Venus.
RE: Carrick Flynn, I'm not surprised. He ran on "I'm a local boy" but the problem was, he wasn't local enough. He'd never held any sort of political office, and his message boiled down to "Vote for me, send me off to the Big City, and I will work on - preventing pandemics".
That's nice, but what are you going to do for me? By contrast, the winner was someone who already holds office in the Oregon House of Representatives and has a track record voters can look at. She's from a union family, so that gives her a big connection to the local and wider Democratic Party:
"Andrea’s experience is what sets her apart in a crowded primary field. She doesn’t just hold progressive values – she has delivered progressive victories. She’s worked as a US congressional aide and policy advisor to three Members of Congress including Senator Harry Reid, Congressman Pete Stark, and Congresswoman Darlene Hooley. After serving as a congressional staffer for over a decade, Andrea became an advocate for unions, environmental groups, and reproductive rights organizations like the Oregon Environmental Council, NARAL Pro-Choice Oregon, Planned Parenthood Advocates of Oregon, SEIU Local 49, SEIU Local 503, Pineros Y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (PCUN), and more. She also served on the Oregon League of Conservation Voters Board for over 8 years."
Over on r/TheMotte, I had a look at the new congressional district that was carved out and which both parties are hoping to take in order to be first and hold on to it. It is constituted from the following:
"(1) Polk County - votes Republican. A mix of agriculture and education (Western Oregon University is a major employer). So he'll probably take the college/city votes. Is that enough?
(2) Yamhill County - Republican leaning. Again, agriculture, wine and education as above, again, he'll probably take the college votes.
(3) Marion County - Democrat, but just about. Has switched between the Republican and Democrat candidate in the last four presidential elections. Economy runs on agriculture and "government". Again, he'll probably take Democrat votes but will that be enough?
(4) Clackamas County - ooh, whoever edited the Wikipedia article does not like the knuckledraggers living here: "In contrast with the more liberal and cosmopolitan Multnomah County to the north, and the more corporate Washington County to the west, some citizens of Clackamas County have espoused a blue-collar, yet conservative political outlook of the backlash mold described by Thomas Frank. It was the headquarters of the Oregon Citizens Alliance, which has worked to pass a number of homophobic initiatives" 'Homophobic', oh my! But it leans Democrat, all the same.
(5) Washington County - very Democratic since the 90s, and besides the usual agricultural economy, has many electronics and computer companies located there such as Intel and Epson, as well as Nike. If he's going to get votes, this is the place.
But he's not the only Democratic candidate running for selection, and maybe Oregonians will go for someone more established that they know, rather than a new guy who is getting headlines about all the big-money outsiders backing him."
And that's what happened. Andrea Salinas (white Hispanic) is the local politician who got the nod despite all the outside money that came flooding in for Flynn. And *because* it was outside money, that's where he fell down. If I'm a winegrower or logger from one of those counties, and I see all these headlines about "big rich guys from something called EA are pouring money into Flynn's campaign", my instinctive reaction is "what are they gonna do for me?" and I'll vote for someone who I think will do something for me.
Also, it looks like Flynn just got outplayed on politics; there seem to have been immediate complaints about his campaign by the rivals from the get-go. That doesn't mean he did anything wrong, just that the old stagers know how the sausage is made.
What was Salinas' message?
"In Congress, she will fight for a $15 minimum wage, paid family and medical leave, and an even bigger social safety net for our communities."
What was Flynn's message?
"With the correct government interventions, it is possible for us to never have a serious pandemic again. I will champion these measures."
I see he's revamped his campaign website to emphasise 'growing the economy', etc. but up to recently that was his big message. Parish pump politics - that's what you can't beat. $15 an hour for the workers of Oregon versus something something committees something.
"Carrick Flynn, running in the Democratic primary, had almost no local contacts or organized support, was known before the campaign hardly at all locally and showed no distinctive issues or talking points. But his candidacy was supported by money – mountains of it, amounts most House candidates would never dream of.
A cryptocurrency billionaire contributed millions to a pro-Flynn political action committee, and a national Democratic PAC added in with more – totaling $12.2 million according to the most recent campaign finance reports. Flynn did not control that PAC money, but the funds spent on his behalf were enough to cast a deep shadow over the funding of all the other eight candidates.
The leading conventional candidate in that primary, Andrea Salinas, was well funded by usual standards but brought to bear only a fraction as much. Pro-Flynn ads (and toward the end, anti-Salinas ads) swamped the district. Salinas did however have plenty of endorsements, a strong campaign organization and some familiarity with the district through work in the legislature and in advocacy organizations. Voters heard a message appealing to the Democratic base."
Not to mention if you say your big issue is you're going to do pandemic preparation *right* that conveys two negative messages: (1) this is all going to happen again (yuck!) not long from now, and (2) the idiots who did the preparation *this* time are all idiots. You can get away with the latter message when you're running for President, but when you're a kid running for your first office *as a Democrat* and your implicit message is *the Democrats who run your state* totally fucked this up, you come across as more than a little full of yourself, and that doesn't work super well at the local level for your first race, even if you're trying to flip a district, and much less so if you're trying to assume the mantle of the local governing ideology.
Yeah, he's a first timer trying to persuade voters from what are largely rural counties with a few big city/university spots to vote for him. He may or may not win the techie vote on a platform of EA, pandemic prevention, and cleaning up Congress, but for the farmers and blue-collar workers, what does that translate into on the ground?
The national party seems to have been behind him, which is interesting, but which may be more down to the fact that he managed to attract very big name donors and it's always a good idea to be on good terms with very big name donors. I don't know what the local party thought of him, and since the people went for Salinas instead, they know what bread they want buttered, by whom, and how much butter per slice.
If Flynn intends to stick in politics instead of giving up after this and heading off for some think-tank job, then he needs to put in the hours and the slog to build up a local base so potential constituents know who he is and what he's about, and what he intends to do for them in particular.
> If Flynn intends to stick in politics instead of giving up after this and heading off for some think-tank job...
Think-tanks are politics, just not electoral politics. Think-tanks help decision-makers understand 1) what issues ought to be addressed and 2) what the various options are (presumably within the limits of each group's Overton window). They can have immense influence. Recall how President Trump outsourced his list of possible judicial appointments to the originalists at the Federalist Society.
If EAs want to influence the Democratic Party, building a reputation as the most effective number-crunchers on issues like healthcare might be more effective than spending a large amount of money on elections.
One problem there is that there is no shortage of wonks and think-tanks affiliated with the Democratic Party. I wonder if this is why some EAs felt it was so important that Flynn be elected.
I’m a lifelong vegetarian, and I just got diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. Most diabetic cookbooks seem to be about dieting/losing weight, which I don’t need to do (I could stand to put on about 10 pounds right now).
Does anyone have a good recommendation for a vegetarian low-carb cookbook that still has recipes with actual calories? Thanks.
Since you're a vegetarian, not a vegan, you have a lot of really good options. I don't have a good cookbook to recommend, but I'd look into Asian ones or into books about breakfast if I was you.
I'd like to recommend this website: https://thewoksoflife.com/ . Vegetarian recipes are here: https://thewoksoflife.com/category/recipes/vegetarian/ . In some non-vegetarian recipes, you can use tofu or fake meat instead of meat. Where noodles are involved, you can use shirataki noodles; there are also other low carb noodles that I haven't tried.
Oh, also Nancy Lebovitz has a recipe just for you in this open thread.
How important is Glycaemic Index? I recall people around here talking about how barley bread gets digested slower, so the same amount of carbs results in lower but wider spike in blood sugar levels compared to wheat bread.
The magic words you are looking for are "vegitarian keto", not because keto is magic, just because vegetarian keto dies replace carbs with fat or protein, and fat has more calories per bite than carbs.
Type 1 is not Type 2 and your doctor should have explained this to you. Very different causes and on average opposite effects (most Type 1 diabetics struggle to gain weight until they get their levels under control by taking insulin) The diabetic cookbooks are aimed at Type 2, who do generally need to lose weight, not you.
Laurels Kitchen - it's vegan, not vegetarian, and while I disagree with their veganism, it's my go to book for cooking veggies. Their rattitollie is amazing. They emphasize bread a lot but that's not the only food covered.
Type 1? Then you've probably got immune system problems. It's type 2 where you're most likely overweight. If you're on insulin, then you need to WATCH, not limit, your carbs, and really make sure your insulin intake matches your carb intake.
Your request makes me think that you're type 2, which you can handle by really controlling your carbs. If so, check what baked potato does to your blood sugar. That's reported to be less problematic than most starches.
If you are going to try this by controlling carbs, then I recommend stir-frys, with lots of Napa Cabbage, mushrooms, nuts, tofu, etc. You can very that a lot by shifting the ingredients and spices around. The problem is it doesn't keep well. What was good last night is repulsive by breakfast. Nuts are good. I can't recommend a good cook book, but it's pretty easy to handle this if you've got access to a good grocery store. The problem is that the stuff doesn't keep well, you expect to make lots of trips. Oat bran is good if you want baked stuff. But most of this only applies if you are type 2, and not using drugs to control your insulin levels (or at least only using metformin). I don't think type 1 can be controlled by diet.
I’m still not at the point where my doctors are giving me total control of my insulin, so if I went out and, say, ate a pack of oreos, I’d probably drive my blood sugars through the roof. My understanding is that even once you’re experienced with dosing insulin, it’s a bad idea to go crazy with carbs, because if you mistime your dose, or misdose, you can seriously screw up your blood sugars. And I’m a guy who really likes my breads and desserts, so I figure that if I can cut other things easily, I’ll have more carbs left in my buffer to use on other stuff
You've got to be really careful to BALANCE your carbs vs. your insulin. Even those who have lived with insulin for years tend to get it wrong occasionally, and can go unconscious. If that happens you better hope someone notices in time to get you to an emergency room. I don't have direct experience with that, but I've got a couple of friends who do. So far they're alive, but there have been a couple of close calls. One time one of them only survived because his girlfriend decided to visit, and he'd been dealing with it for over a decade.
That said, yes, it's always a good idea to limit your carb intake, but it's not the way diabetes type 1 is controlled. But if you ate a pack of oreos, you'd have a really hard time calculating how much insulin to take. I can't really say more than that, because I've no direct experience, but I know you don't need to be as strict as I do. (Diabetes 2, unmedicated, because of a bad reaction to meds. So I need to be really strict about carbs.)
Sorry you're going through this. I try to keep low card + minimal meat, one thing that's really helped me is nuts, hemp seeds, and oils. I get most of my calories from fat, and plant-based fats like that seem to work the best.
I'd really value some feedback on my book review entry (Surface Detail by Iain M Banks) from anyone who read it. My best guess is that either it was too long or that I didn't do a good enough job justifying the choice of book in the text, since fiction generally didn't do well in the contest - but I'd really like to know if the writing itself was incompetent / boring, whether there were any specific sections that didn't work, and whether my self-assessment of my review is accurate.
Also, since nobody else seems to have started one, perhaps this can be a general 'discuss my non-winning review' thread - I'll try and read and comment on any review anyone posts below if others are also looking for more detailed feedback on their own work.
I enjoyed your review! Ranked it higher than 3 of the finalists, equal to 6 of them, and only ranked 3 of the finalist reviews higher than yours. No prior knowledge of the book you reviewed or its author - haven’t read much science fiction in a long time. Having read all of the entries, I agree with Scott: there were just a lot of really good ones! And subject matter does count for a lot: 100% of the finalists are non-fiction.
It's true, there was a lot to like! I enjoyed 'The Future of Fusion' as well, but liked some of the other finalists even more. 'Consciousness and the Brain' was my favorite, followed by 'The Dawn of Everything' (EH review) and 'The Righteous Mind' (BW review). Funny enough, of those which didn't make the finals, 'The Dawn of Everything' (BW review) and 'The Righteous Mind' (E review) were also pretty high up in the my rankings. My favorite which didn't make the finals (aside from mine, of course - '1587: A Year of No Significance') is 'Now It Can Be Told', about the military guy who spearheaded the Manhattan Project (probably I'm a little more interested in history than most ACX fans.) Cheers!
I liked your writing, rated it highly. (7/10, making it a 5th-8th place among the 60-something I've read.) My main problem with it was, it wasn't a review.
There's a formula I've come to expect of SSC/ACX-style reviews of books. You start with the content, presenting a summary of the books' arguments as faithfully as possible. Then, you examine them critically, raising every doubt and question you can think of, and describe how the book itself deals with them and what your independent research and/or experience tells you about their validity. Then, and only then, you situate the book in the wider epistemic context, including using it as a springboard for your own musings.
You did not do any of that. You started with a pre-committed thesis, then expanded on it even before getting to the book itself. By the point you did get to the book, it was firmly in the context of elaborating your larger argument, essentially preventing me, the reader, from forming an impression of the book separate from it. (The reverse is also true, I'm not sure I agree with some of your assertions, but you made it harder for me to argue with them by submerging them in the context of Culture, a series I mostly haven't read (yet?). I can only assume someone who's never heard of Banks at all would have an even harder time following your argument.)
That's really interesting - thank you for the feedback. It never really occurred to me that people would have an expectation of what a review might look like because all the reviews are so different, but you're completely right that structurally the book-review bit actually comes at the end. I would never have even thought about this without your feedback, really appreciate it!
I do have some feedback on your review, if you want it (caveat that i did not rank reviews for the contest, so I don't have a good grasp yet of the field this year)
* Overall I enjoyed the read and it spurred some thoughts about fictional utopias. But you asked for ideas on improvement, so:
* I agree that choosing a fiction book probably increased the difficulty. I notice that I tend to expect to Learn Something About a Nonfiction Topic when I read the reviews, so a fiction review might be swimming upstream.
* The second sentence is off-puttingly self-abasing, ("why should I like this if the author isn't enthusiastic about it?"). I get the instinct but better to just fake your way through that awkward feeling.
* I found it all easy to follow and understand, and I think you're a competent writer, although I am a sci fi reader and a Iain Banks fan, so maybe background familiarity is required.
* I think a more clear thesis statement (maybe something about the Culture's place in fictional utopias) & signposting that at the beginning & re-organizing around that statement & trimming to about 80% of the length would have helped. I enjoyed a lot of the material about other fictional utopias, but I think making it clear from the beginning what the point was would make it go down easier. I also note that this advice is a bit in tension with how I usually read the book reviews, ie., I like many that don't have clear thesis statements, but I think I want one here because you're reviewing a fiction book so your analysis / conclusions have to do more heavy lifting than in some reviews. (Relatedly, when I first read it, I really enjoyed the use of ship names as headers . . . but on reflection, I'm wondering if that contributed to the feeling others had of lack of organization, because they're not really doing the heavy lifting on signposting that headers would usually do).
* I enjoyed it and I enjoyed thinking about Culture for a while, so thanks for writing!
And if we're having Thoughts about Culture time, the topic of your review did hit on my biggest issue, which is that I can't buy that the Culture is a utopia, although I get the impression Banks wants us to reach that conclusion. As I recall, the books are all pretty focused on members of Contact or Special Circumstances (or people drafted into being ad hoc members) and can be read to suggest that everyone else is sort of doing a lot of jockeying for position and social climbing, but otherwise leading a life that is fairly meaningless compared to the "real" work the protagonists are doing. I think I could absolutely buy that living in a post-scarcity spaceship etc was utopian, but it would require describing a lot of aspects of the normal experience that Banks has no interested in (people able to spend unlimited time with friends, developing relationships that deepen over decades and centuries, creating works of art and discussing them with friends, inspiring one another, doing all this and knowing that yourself and your loved ones aren't threatened by poor health, jail, the need to perform drone-like labor, etc.).
Thanks so much for the thoughtful feedback. And I definitely agree Banks wants us to think of Culture as a utopia - I think he works hard to present the opposite case in the interest of intellectual honesty, but I think he stops short of really thoroughly fisking it because he is more interested in presenting how much BETTER it is than what we have currently. A lot of people think _Look to Windward_ is the best Culture novel for this reason, because it is basically just 90% ordinary Culture people having conversations in the context of recreational trips, and then the remaining 10% a little detective mystery sideshow.
I read it, and liked it, and hoped it would get in because I was interested in the discussion that would ensue. But for a reader who hasn't read or isn't interested in the politics of The Culture books, I can see why they wouldn't find it compelling.
But since we're discussing the politics of The Culture, let's discuss the politics of The Culture. I'm always puzzled as to why people describe The Culture as left-wing. In foreign policy terms it's somewhere between neoconservative and downright imperialist; the central foreign policy debate of The Culture seem to be "To exactly what extent should we use our overwhelming military force to impose our superior civilisation on people less morally sophisticated?" which is basically the same central foreign policy debate as the Bush administration.
In terms of domestic policy, The Culture is an absolute aristocracy ruled by a heirachy of princes, dukes and earls... excuse me, GSVs, LSVs and GCUs, while the common masses are denied any meaningful agency. The aristocracy is of course perfectly entitled to rule on the basis of their superior breeding and intelligence. Class mobility is of course completely impossible. The underclass is, at least, all alike in their level of deprivation... except perhaps for the few kept as Very Special Pets by the ruling class (ie Contact and Special Circumstances agents). Anyway, none of this sounds like a left-wing utopia to me, but maybe I don't understand leftism very well.
I think this might be the perennial problem that the words 'left' and 'right' don't really mean anything when transplanted outside the context of modern politics. From a modern perspective, the Culture is incredibly socially permissive and free (which map onto classical left-wing politics), but also very individualistic and has aggressive foreign policy justified by an appeal to the moral correctness of Culture politics (which map onto classically right-wing politics). I don't have masses to add here except to say that your criticism of the hypocrisy of the Culture's foreign policy as it pertains beyond the way we choose to describe it seems spot on to me, and it is probably the biggest failing of the Culture that Banks doesn't properly grapple with (maybe in _Excession_, with the Affront?)
Your second point is very interesting to me though. The Minds don't actually quite map onto Princes / Dukes / Earls etc because Princes are just people in whom we invest political power, whereas GSVs are specialist Minds in which the Culture invests both political power and more conventional firepower. I'm not sure the concept of aristocracy as you use it quite translates across to a world where Princes actually are significantly more powerful than their Dukes / Earls etc and therefore don't need to rely on them for patronage. I wonder also if the concept quite maps when ordinary citizens don't really 'rely' on GSVs for protection and other state functions (although obviously people live on GSVs, exit rights are a core concept in the Culture so the relationship isn't quite like the relationship between citizens and a Prince).
In the books there is some evidence that the Minds don't function as a strict aristocracy as you describe. _Excession_ and _Hydrogen Sonata_ both feature groups of Minds trying to reach a conclusion to some conflict, and multiple different ships are involved in the process without an obvious hierarchy except those imposed by the ships themselves. I note in _Hydrogen Sonata_ the GSV 'Empiricist' is roundly condemned by the coordinating group when it makes a careless mistake leading to the destruction of another Mind, and the OU 'Mistake Not...' is given a very high degree of freedom to pursue its objectives despite being a smaller class of ship.
I think what people mean when they say the Culture is left wing is that it doesn't have obvious hierarchies. As you correctly point out (as do I in my review) that isn't quite the same thing as *no* hierarchies. In general I think this line of thought it an interesting one to pursue in a critique of anarcho-leftism; does this solution actually remove hierarchies or does it just make those hierarchies less legible?
Thanks for your response. I'd say you're probably reading too much into my offhand comparison of various ship types to various aristocratic ranks; that wasn't really the part I wanted to emphasise; I wanted to emphasise the vast gulf between Minds and common people.
Haven't you heard that neoconservativism was forged by former Trotskyists? Admittedly, many belonged to a right-communist faction that allied with left-communist Trotskyists over their shared dissidence from orthodox Stalinism, but Stalin is the one who advocated "socialism in one country" instead of focusing on the exporting of revolution (not that it stopped him from being a de facto imperialist).
Iain Banks is one of my favorite SF authors and I really liked you review. I did not find it too long, but I like long texts in general and I love Iain Banks so...
I really loved you classification of utopias, which I would have liked to be longer in fact. Very interesting, and totally relevant for discussing Banks novels. I also loved, of course, the use you made of the ships'names.
The only thing I found a bit off putting was the "pathetic" at the begining. Please do not describe yourself like that! Ah, and I kind of expected you to open with Musk paying hommage to Banks with the names of SpaceX drones, as it was I think a natural hook to present Banks to rationalist readers but it appears only briefly and a bit late.
Anyway, thank you for this review. I need to reread some of these Culture books!
Not pertaining to your review, but can you explain the point of the cannibal island interlude in Consider Phlebas? That's really the only thing I remember from that book, and simply because it was truly baffling why it was even in the book.
Relatedly, one thing that put me off of Banks is that in the three Culture books I read (Phlebas, Player of Games, Use of Weapons) there's always this really random moment where someone gets raped "on-screen" and it has 0 relevance to the plot or anything. The cannibal island style asides are easily the weakest part of the books, and bring up bad memories of Piers Anthony and other rape-fetish authors
That was my exact reaction when I read Consider Phlebas. The best explanation that I have come up with, is that the shuttle waiting to rescue the cannibals is how Horza sees the Culture: ignoring the evil on their footsteps because they might get upset if they looked too closely. But Froolows explanation sounds reasonable
Yeah that bit is very weird. I've got a sort of vaguely literary explanation below, but it also seems relatively possible to me that there is no real explanation and Banks just wrote it because he wanted to. I'll talk through the 'he did it just for the craic' position first, because it is what I reckon the actual explanation is:
When _Consider Phlebas_ was published people mostly thought of Banks as primarily a 'serious' author. He might have been somewhat unsure his experimental shift to the sci-fi genre was going to go down well with reviewers / the public and so wanted to get all his mad ideas down in one place because he didn't know if he'd get another chance at it. Banks *really* likes body horror, as anyone who has read _Wasp Factory_ will tell you, so it might just have been that he had some especially grotesque body horror stuff he wanted to write and couldn't think of a way to get a 'cannibal island' into any other setting.
The literary purpose for the scene is more debatable. One possible explanation is as follows:
Probably the key theme in _Consider Phlebas_ is in regards to whether life's meaning comes from traditional values versus whether we construct meaning for ourselves (primarily through technology). This is quite unsubtly drawn in the overarching narrative which is literally a war between the techno-optimistic Culture and a group of militant religious fanatics, the Idirans. However it also crops up in quite a few of the other little vignettes like for example the high-stakes card game of Damage, where (again very unsubtly) human players must pit their basic biological instincts against technological manipulation of their emotions, up to and including a technologically-induced urge to kill oneself (competing against the 'traditional' human desire not to do that).
In this context, the cannibal island functions as a significant rebuke to Horza's worldview (Horza is the shapeshifting spy protagonist who fights for the pro-tradition Idiran side). Horza believes that the Culture will eventually ossify and remove an important measure of 'human-ness' from humans in the pursuit of describing its own values, and therefore fights for the Idirans who he thinks will eventually rationalise away their bellicose and expansionist religion and leave just the vibrant traditional measures of meaning in its place.
Cannibal Island is, however, an example of a religious society which has gone utterly off the deep end; everyone is starving, their prophet is insane and they all live on a world which is going to be destroyed down to its component atoms in just a few days. Horza has to confront the fact that there are some ways of deriving meaning which are entirely unacceptable to him, and that traditional sources of value like religion can produce grotesque excesses of these unacceptable outcomes.
I'd liken it to the same argument made in Three Worlds Collide (https://robinhanson.typepad.com/files/three-worlds-collide.pdf), in the sense that Cannibal Island adds a new position to the religious-Idiran / technological-Culture dichotomy which profoundly affects Horza's philosophical stability, except in _Consider Phlebas_ the extremely degenerate society is the last one to be discovered so the character's reaction to the discovery is quite different.
I'm an culture series reader, but mostly I love Player of Games and found pluses and minuses in the other books.
I like the idea of the Culture series setting, but other than Player of Games I haven't always found the plots fun. I like the world building and the ambience mostly.
I think your essay was really long, but I think I'm spoiled by Scott's essay standards which is a really high mark. I've never read surface detail and I don't really want to get into that horrifying tradeoffs like you mentioned in the plot summary.
I like my Sci Fi and Fantasy a bit lighter toned. I've been burned out on heavy, dark settings (which the Culture series can touch on but not usually so on the nose) so I don't think I would like Surface Detail and maybe that affected my opinion of the piece.
I love Banks, so I went to have a look, and I agree with some of the comments you've received above. There were some interesting ideas, but there was one problem which put me off: an interest in having Banks jockey for position with other books. Several sections felt like you were trying to prove that Banks books could win in some sci-fi Top Trumps, and therefore is good. This is deadly dull and wrong. I suppose when you're a grand old person of literature, you do get to pronounce who is as good as who, and make toplists. And kids do it. But for those of us in the middle, the reason to read Banks isn't because he scores three points higher than [insert other author].
Sorry, this is a bit of a negative comment. There was a bunch of good stuff in your review as well (in great need of being edited into a coherent sequence). But these "ranking" elements seemed really offputting to me, and I think by far the biggest thing you can do to improve this piece would be to cut all of that stuff out.
That's great feedback, thank you. I think it sounds like I failed really badly to communicate what I was trying to do there, but there's a decent chance that's because you're exactly right and the reason the 'ranking' bits didn't work was because I was just being defensive about Banks
Also obviously very delighted to interact with another Banks fan :)
_Player of Games_ is much more of a 'traditional' novel with an exciting and plot-driven story, and therefore could be made significantly worse if I revealed plot twists (plus there's a bit less directly relevant utopian content, because it takes place mostly on an alien planet). _Surface Detail_ is more philosophical, so I'd be doing less harm by spoiling it (plus there's a bit more directly relevant utopian content)
I really enjoyed the blogpost you linked and I'm setting off the read the entire series. I'm glad I didn't know about it before I wrote mine, it is a much more tightly written critique of a utopia!
I remember being disappointed by Surface Detail as a philosophical book; mostly because the whole idea of simulated hells was very interesting to me, but the book refuses to even give the pro-hell side a hearing.
I have enjoyed your review a lot. I rated it 8/10, and I this is the second-highest rating that I gave to any review of a fiction book, after Golem XIV. That puts in into the top 15-25% for me. (I have read >3/4 of the reviews by now, and will go on reading the remaining ones, too.)
I may have been the perfect target group for your review. I generally know about the Culture novels, but not in detail (my partner has read them all, I have read one). So I started out with some base curiosity about the Culture setting. That might work less well for someone who either knows the series very well, or has never heard of it.
I like your style of writing and found a lot of your analysis to the point. The review was not too long for me, because I had the impression that you have to tell enough interesting stuff throughout the review.
The reason why it did not go even higher for me (finalist level) has more to do with the topic than with your writing. I very much aim to maximize my knowledge of the world. Your review did give me some interesting insights about sci-fi utopias, but that has a hard time competing with some of the really eye-opening textbook and pop-science finalists that are around.
Thank you, that's really helpful feedback and I'm glad you enjoyed it. I think you're right that doing well in the contest probably required more careful thought about what exactly I would be reviewing (i.e. increasing people's knowledge about the world is more worthwhile than talking about sci-fi utopias) so it is useful to know that the writing was of a worthwhile quality even though it was eclipsed by other (really excellent) nonfiction reviews. Thank you once again!
First, yes, it is too long, but "too long" here really means "insufficiently organized." Nobody complains about the length of "The Lord of The Rings," because it is incredibly tightly organized -- you can readily imagine Tolkien polishing the prose for 10 years, shifting an article from here to there. So the first thing you would need to do to improve it is step back and consider the piece as a whole. It's an essay, not a novel. You need to plan out about 2-3 main points, maximum (and just 1 is even better) that you want to get across, and ensure that the writing from start to finish drives at that goal. Take a look at each section: does it advance your point? Introduce it, explain it, buttress it, derive its consequences? If not -- if it just says interesting stuff that isn't germane to where you're going -- out it goes. When you achieve that at the section level, descend to the paragraph. Is each paragraph necessary? Can you see how it's advancing the point? If not, dump it. And on to the sentence, and, if you have the stomach, to the individual word. That would improve things tremendously.
Second (to switch to the positive for a moment), the writing at the sentence level is quite good. You are clearly a master of English, and your words and sentences flow smoothly. You are clearly not writing to impress, or snipe, or defend, you're just trying to inform, and that earnest competence is manifest in each sentence. A really good skill to have. (You basically just need a superb editor, and also to think about what the big points are you're trying to make.)
Third, I fear your writing comes *too* easily, because it's easy for you to wander off into arcana that only someone who has already read the books would easily grok. There's discussions of all kinds of concepts using jargon that just went right by me, whoosh, because I've never read the books. I fear you forget your reader some times, don't feel him hovering over your shoulder, because the words flow too easily and quickly, like you are talking to yourself, or a good friend who shares your enthusiasm. The one suggestion I can make here is: do something to slow down your words. If you're writing on a computer, write on paper, with a pencil (or a pen, if you want to go hard core). Forcing the words to come more slowly, and with more effort, may help you measure them (the words) in a more miserly fashion, and with more awareness of the reader. Think of it as distilling your first rush of thoughts into something more potent, because more concentrated.
Fourth, please do ask yourself *what* you are trying to say. The overall theme seems to be "we can explore ideas about utopia by reading novels, and also these ideas seem cool to me, but they have some problems." Pick one of those! Argue why fiction might be more helpful than just thinking about what laws to draft. Talk about *why* one (or maybe two) of the ideas in these books seem cool to you. Or talk about how one (or maybe two) idea seems cool at first but on reflection you can see it has problems.
I hope this doesn't seem hard. I emphasize that you have the building blocks there, an easy way with words and the ability to make sense. Your writing just seems a little immature, in a sense, like it needs time and weathering to become better -- perhaps much better. My broadest advice is: (1) become your own most brutal editor, or enlist someone else in it, someone who will push you to question whether you need each word, each sentence; and (2) focus, figure out the most important thing you want to say, and drive that home. Most writing conveys zero ideas well, or interestingly, so if you can aspire to just one -- that is a big win. Two...well, save it for your first bestseller. Best of luck
I still have great fondness for a series of posts from 2011 where a guy decides to finally read "The Lord of the Rings" even though, y'know, it is like fifty years old. So ancient, such a tome from the dim and distant past.
He ends up liking it. It's great fun to read his progress, though I would warn for a lot of online enthusiasm of the time (lots of CAPITALS and catchphrases). It's always heart-warming to see someone succumbing to the power of the One Ring - wait, no, I mean good fantasy writing. Yes, that's it, nothing else involving Dark Lords intended. The parts where he's anticipating what is going to happen next, and everyone who already knows the book is going "oh ho ho ho" are very enjoyable.
This is amazing feedback, I so appreciate that you've taken such a long time to read a (very long) review and then draft such comprehensive comments
Could I ask a little more about your first point on "insufficiently organised"? I was really pleased with the structure of the essay when I bulleted it out, so this is an area where my self-criticism is clearly lacking because I wouldn't have spotted this without your feedback. I think you are suggesting that it is not automatically true that an argument which is clear and organised when written down as one-sentence bullet points will retain that clarity when each bullet point is inflated to paragraph length - and that therefore the solution is to cut at both the paragraph and structure level to try and make sure clarity is preserved. Have I understood that correctly? Or is it that you think the argument was likely never clear, and that cutting ruthlessly is the best way to force yourself to organise your thoughts better?
Yes, it's possible the bullet point organization got swamped when it was expanded. That can happen, and indeed it can so easily happen that when I talk to people about writing I usually recommend strongly *against* an outline. I rarely think they're useful, because they too often substitute for good writing, or kill it by nailing it down too much, like trying to paint on a deadline.
The organization of good writing has to be organic, it has to imbue each paragraph and sentence. There should at each point be a sense of forward motion. (The sure signs of failure in this regard is when the tyro finds himself writing "anyway as I was saying" or "let's recap where we are" or something of this nature. If you have to summarize what you just said, you didn't say it very well even to your own ears.)
So my actual advice, which may be worth exactly what you're paying for it, is to *not* do an outline. Just write the first draft of the essay, stream it out as it comes to mind. This has two advantages: first, you do not forestall any spontaneous emergence of wit, or an elegant turn of phrase, or some fascinating little point, by consciously laboring to hit some particular bullet point. Second, you may discover as you write that what you really want to write changes. You find what you planned to say sounds tedious once you get into it, or that something you thought tangential really grabs your attention. Writing focusses your thoughts, but when thoughts come into focus, they can sometimes be different than you thought they were when they were in partial shadow -- so let them out, get them down on the page as raw material, after all your unique thoughts are all you really have to give.
Once you've done that, *then* go over it with a critical eye. What am I really saying here? What do I most want people to understand? When it's on the page in front of you, all the words written, no longer just a collection of vaguish thoughts, it's easier to do that dissection, bore in on what's important.
And once you know what's important, you can start editing, cutting, and re-organizing so that it shines through. Anyway, my two kopeks.
Thank you once again. I can only reiterate that I'm hugely grateful you've spent so much time offering me such stellar advice, and that I plan to implement all your suggestions next time I have something of value to write about. Enormously appreciated.
"you can readily imagine Tolkien polishing the prose for 10 years, shifting an article from here to there"
You would think, but if you read his letters which mention the process - and the sixth volume of "The History of Middle-earth" series, titled 'The Return of the Shadow' - it was a very slow and laborious process where he didn't really know where he was going. He was writing it in between his work as an academic, at the urging of Allen and Unwin who wanted a sequel to "The Hobbit", and there were amazing changes as he went along.
BIG SPOILER: At the very start, it was a direct sequel to "The Hobbit" so everyone involved were Hobbits. Including Aragorn, who started off as a wandering Hobbit nicknamed "Trotter" (because he had wooden feet, because his feet had been burned off when he was tortured in Mordor). At a certain point Tolkien went "No, this is not working" and tried a couple of changes before scrapping Trotter all together and creating Strider, the Man.
Whom he still had not much idea about who he was, or what he was doing. He sent the installments as he wrote them to his son Christopher who was in the Royal Air Force during the war, keeping him up to date on progress (which was very slow).
The letters are full of things like the following:
"A new character has come on the scene (I am sure I did not invent him, I did not even want him, though I like him, but there he came walking into the woods of Ithilien): Faramir, the brother of Boromir – and he is holding up the 'catastrophe' by a lot of stuff about the history of Gondor and Rohan (with some very sound reflections no doubt on martial glory and true glory): but if he goes on much more a lot of him will have to be removed to the appendices — where already some fascinating material on the hobbit Tobacco industry and the Languages of the West have gone."
So yeah, a combination of hit-and-miss inspiration and a lot of slogging along until the story reached a point where it started to flow.
Now, as to your book review: yeah, it was good. It was about a Culture novel. It was interesting - but not really enough to vote for as a finalist. I wasn't familiar with that novel so it told me about it, but it didn't make me want to read the book. I have read some of the Culture books and while I liked them well enough, I don't like the worldbuilding enough to be captivated by it (I don't think the Culture is such a paradise as on the surface it seems) so you would have a hard job making me go "I must read this!"
I agree with others that your review worked best if the reader had some knowledge of the Culture and/or other books in the series. Banks is an interesting author and the way he switched between 'literary' fiction and SF as Iain Banks and Iain M. Banks respectively may indeed have contributed to the problems you mention with American publication.
His first novel, "The Wasp Factory", is literary fiction and definitely went hard (not revealing any spoilers for those who haven't read it yet) and of his other literary or 'proper' fiction books, I loved "The Bridge". Of his not-really-but-sorta Culture-set novels, I liked "Feersum Endjinn", mostly because of the sheer cheekiness of the ending.
The Culture as such I don't like, and that may be down to the gulf between his politics and mine. The Culture, on the surface, is a great place to live. Who wouldn't want to live there? Post-scarcity luxury! You can do and be anything you want (within the limitations of being only a mere human and not a Mind)!
I think that beneath the shiny veneer, there is a rotteness at the heart of the Culture. It's an authoritarian dictatorship, and it doesn't much matter if we argue if it is a fascist or a communist one (I lean towards fascist despite the Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism of life as it appears to be in the Culture), and I don't trust it. And I think the less shiny bits poke through in places despite Banks' political views, because he was a writer, and that honesty to the craft meant that the flaws were there as well as the glossy, shiny, waxy red coat of the apple.
So yes, your review was enthusiastic, but I have too visceral a "no, thanks" response to the Culture for it to persuade me to read that particular novel.
"Sadly, I find Banks is almost unknown even amongst people that would consider themselves moderately well-read science fiction enthusiasts (this is especially true amongst American science fiction enthusiasts, where there seems to have been some sort of issue with Banks’ UK-based publisher I can’t get to the bottom of such that Banks wasn’t properly marketed in the US – a bit like Terry Pratchett, but to a much more significant extent and much less to do with the non-translatability of British humour).
The idea of this review is to focus on one element of Banks’ work which most distinguishes it from science fiction of the same period but which – to my knowledge – has not been given a high level of analysis anywhere to date, and which I think will particularly entice the sort of person who reads ACX to pick up the series (I assume if you are familiar with the series you don’t need any further enticing and are already skipping to the ‘arguing about your favourite ship name in the comments’ phase of discussing the novels)."
The two paragraphs above I've quoted directly from your review, and show one of the problems I had reading it. They are actually just sentences - very very long ones. It does make following your train of thought quite difficult at times, though otherwise your writing is quite readable. I would add that the review itself is also very long, and for people who aren't already fans of the Banks or the Culture series, that maybe is another problem. I would have recommended pruning the whole thing ruthlessly, and finding all the sentences that are more than a hundred words long and breaking them up.
I'm a fan of Iain Banks (The Player of Games is one of my favourite books) but I don't consider myself a rationalist. As your review was looking at a Banks book through a rationalist lens this also put me off, but I'd stress that this is my issue not yours - after all, you wrote the review for a rationalist blog!
Thank you so much - really appreciate the comments. Reading those sentences through your eyes I can absolutely see what you mean, but would have been totally oblivious otherwise, so the criticism is really valuable to me!
Yeah I agree that sentence length is something that's a bit of an issue. It's something I struggle with in my own writing. Trying to mix in short sentences takes effort but I think helps a lot.
The secret is not to be afraid of periods. If you're doing a good job, your reader isn't going to wander off when you release him for a moment. Indeed, it's just a chance for him to take a sip of coffee and tap his forehead thoughtfully at the last thing you said.
...although, that said, there is a style that just drops commas everywhere, and between proceeds with sufficient languor that the reader is sort of wafted along, an doesn't notice how many lines have passed by without a full stop. But you need impeccable timing to pull this off.
Thank you so much - I really appreciate how long it must have taken you to closely read the essay and give feedback here (especially because you've started rather a lively discussion upthread which must be occupying a lot of your time too!). It is also very kind to give such immediately actionable advice for me - I'll definitely try everything you've suggested here.
1. Dave Simonds for kind permission to use his cartoon (originally in The Economist, 2017)
2. Prof. Consuelo Borras Blasco, University of Valencia, for graciously agreeing to be interviewed and giving corrections and encouragement
3. The Good Lady @Deiseach of this parish, for alerting me to Mary Elizabeth Braddon's 1869 gothic sci-fi in which our heroine employs a progressive doctor to keep her in wonderfully wicked health through blood transfusions from young women (who sicken and die, natch).
You're entirely welcome, it's when you mentioned current science/wishful thinking around the notion of blood from the young to rejuvenate the old or extend their lives that the idea went "bing!" (shove off, Microsoft, not your Bing) about "Oh that's Good Lady Ducayne which is more pertinent to this topic than vampires in general".
Lady Ducayne is reliant on the medical science of her day, and hoping to find even more up-to-date modern doctors with the latest cutting-edge research, for exactly this project. So it fitted like a glove!
"Promising candidates for therapeutic interventions include oxytocin, the ‘love hormone’ that plays a complex role in signalling and is known to decline with age. Combined with already approved drugs called ALK-5 inhibitors, which effectively ‘reawaken’ stem cells in the tissues of mice and humans, injections of oxytocin in mice appear to promote regeneration of brain, muscle and liver."
I wonder about that, is it that oxytocin is associated with pregnancy and thus a high level of it in the blood puts the system into "reset for reproductive years" mode? Though this wouldn't have the same effect on male mice, so who knows what is going on there?
It's very unfortunate communities like this haven't developed any norms against the political '-isms' and '-phobias' (racism, sexism, transphobia, ableism, fatphobia) when they have developed norms against 'lazy swipes'. Perhaps they're not exactly the same thing, but they're certainly bad for very similar reasons. Racism is of course the most egregious of the lot based on a comibination of how meaningless the word is and the political weight it carries. Given how meaningless the word is, I don't think its use can possibly be justified on a good faith basis. I don't see how it serves any good faith purpose at all.
It's become nothing but a bludgeon used to silence one's political opponents (which includes people merely stating salient empirical facts, and increasingly those facts spoken by well-meaning, good faith liberal-mninded people). It doesn't convey any meaningful information about that person, it never progresses any debate or brings anyone colser to the truth. It's a modern day equivalent of proclaiming somebody is a "heretic". And yet, on ACT and adjacent communities, I see people uncritically using it, as if it were a useful and meaningful term, when its not. There ought to be a norm that basically says you should say what you you're alleging in plain terms. Instead of saying "So and so is a racist", it should be "so and so believes [heritable differences explains racial outcome differences/black people aren't disproportionately the victim of police violence/doesn't hire black people in his business/hates black people]".
See the stupidly broad range of things that "racist" can mean to people? See why using one extremely powerful word to describe all of these vastly different views can be problematic? "Racism" rolls off the tongue better than any of those things, but since the word has been reduced to a slur, convenience is no justification for its continued usage. Even "so-and-so hates black people" is ripe for abuse, because the people who use 'racism' excessively will claim that acknowledging some empiricaly true facts represents hating black people, but at least this makes it more plainly obvious when its being used abusively ("really? Acknowedging that 'hands up don't shoot' was a lie means that literally *hate* black people?"). I've even seen people on here use the term "scientific racism", with the obvious implication that any scientific pursuit that has as it's empirical finding a fact that contradicts egalitarian ideology is necessary *incorrect*. This is just wildly anti-science in a way that even anti-vaxism isn't.
"Racism" is used to silence dissent and foster hatred of political foes. Nothing more.. Maybe its use was justifiable once upon a time, but now there's no good faith basis for its use.
And the same is largely true of all the other isms and phobias. I saw somebody angrily proclaim that a new pubilc building design was "ableist!" for not incorporating sufficient disabled access. Ableist! She didn't just say, "this building design doesn't accomodate disabled persons adequately", no it's "ableist". What is the point of that word other than trying to make its target look evil and/or stupid?
If nothing else, if you don't see what I'm saying, then it should be opposed because it's the quickest way to alienate anyone who isn't part of your tribe. I'm sure the overwhelming majority of people believe that building should be designed to accomodate the disabled, even if that increased the cost of construction. But for a lot of people, they hear somebody bleating on about "ableism", and they reasonably assume that the person saying it is an unstable asshole and their claims are probably some SJW nonsense. Even if *you* think that they shouldn't do this and should care about "ableism", or look past this partisan language and see the real issue at play, what matters is what they're actually going to do.
Scott has touched on something *similar* in 'Against Murderism', but huge numbers of ACT commentors either haven't read it or don't agree with it.
I completely misread your opening. I assumed you were pointing out the way that this community doesn't have any norms against racism, sexism, fatphobia, etc. But after a few paragraphs, I realized that you were *actually* saying a very *different* thing, which is that this community doesn't have any norms against *identifying* things as racism, sexism, fatphobia, etc.
It seems to me that it's important to have norms against the underlying wrongs, and it can often be valuable to label such wrongs correctly. If the labels are used incorrectly though, they can be problematic.
"Has no meaning?" It's certainly a broad term and specification would help if you're trying to have a more detailed conversation, but the word "racism" does describe a common instinct: the drive to categorize humans based on physical appearance and broad lineage and then establish or justify status hierarchies between these categories.
This instinct seems to be responsible for an immense amount of human suffering throughout history and I suspect it's a pretty resilient neural pathway linked to some hard-wired instincts. That means it will have to be regularly identified and stigmatized in each generation.
While many of the abuses of the term that you bring up are bothersome (particularly to people in this community), I'm just not seeing anything on the same scale as the harm that's been done by endorsing or accepting racism. My guess is that societies with a concept of "racism" (even an imprecise one) and strong stigmas against it are likely to be much better places to live than societies that don't use the word or concept "racism" because it is too broad.
No, it has no meaning. Vast swathes of the uses of the term today have absolutely nothing to do with the definition you gave. That's the entire problem!!
>This instinct seems to be responsible for an immense amount of human suffering throughout history and I suspect it's a pretty resilient neural pathway linked to some hard-wired instincts. That means it will have to be regularly identified and stigmatized in each generation.
So basically, you want to stigmatize objective empirical facts if they contradict your political ideology?
I support this as an example of a virtue of precision. If there are confusing terms which gear level isn't clerly understood by the people you talk with, it's better to taboo them and explain the phenomena in more words. I don't think that requires a new norm for specific words. It's a general principle to be as clear and as preciese as possible, when trying to explain things and cross the inferential distances.
Can you give a concrete example of what you mean by this? Because as it stands, your post reads like "Man, why can't I be racist about minorities? I have FACTS and SCIENCE to back me up! This place is supposed to be all about FACTS and SCIENCE!"
And I say that as someone who does believe that 'racist', 'transphobe' etc. have been weaponised into general terms of ridicule and scorn meaning nothing more than "you are a political opponent" or "you don't believe the things I believe" or simply "you are bad and evil".
"I've even seen people on here use the term "scientific racism", with the obvious implication that any scientific pursuit that has as it's empirical finding a fact that contradicts egalitarian ideology is necessary *incorrect*. This is just wildly anti-science in a way that even anti-vaxism isn't."
I know what *I* mean by "scientific racism" and it's "Here I (or rather, the cherry-picked studies I'm using) demonstrate that blacks are our natural inferiors and should be treated as such legally, morally and in all other ways". I've seen crap of that nature and I don't agree with it. All too often Richard Lynn is trotted out with his bullshit, shoddy, 'work' on IQ. I know his material on Irish average national IQ is bollocks, I have no reason to believe him about the Trobriand Islanders or Senegalese or anyone else.
But he's a fan fave of those who indulge in "scientific racism" - 'look, Lynn says the [ethnic minority of such and such a nation] have a mean IQ of 85, Science has proved my point!"
>I know what *I* mean by "scientific racism" and it's "Here I (or rather, the cherry-picked studies I'm using) demonstrate that blacks are our natural inferiors and should be treated as such legally, morally and in all other ways". I've seen crap of that nature and I don't agree with it. All too often Richard Lynn is trotted out with his bullshit, shoddy, 'work' on IQ.
To be fair, while such people certainly exist, you don't have to look very far to find HBD proponents who *don't* advocate treating any group as inferior, but simply advocate for not *expecting* all groups to have comparable outcomes if we treat all *individuals* fairly according to their abilities. Russell Warne, for example, reads very much as someone who would strongly prefer it if HBD were false, but is simply persuaded on the strength of the evidence that some form of it appears to be true. And regarding Lynn, it seems to be fairly widely agreed that his work on the IQ of nations is not ready for primetime, but that unless we can actually secure funding for the massive costs of IQ tests on adequately large, properly randomised population samples, it is a sort of rough-and-ready better-than-nothing approximation that shouldn't be taken too seriously. Indeed, Warne had this to say on the topic back in 2020: https://russellwarne.com/2020/07/19/thoughts-on-low-national-iqs-intellectual-disability-and-data-quality/?fbclid=IwAR3Augd2ONBr73hEcGI_o6J_OYFkf9CRn3diPTozTwScva819klN0gI5Hs8
(1) Yes, the idea that there are population differences and that this may mean disparate outcomes once all the unfavourable elements have been stripped out, but this does not mean we regard that population as having fewer to no human, natural and legal rights is the ideal. The trouble is that HBD has gotten a stinking name, in part from those fiercely opposed to the very notion of genetic differences, but also in part because of those who are all "now is the time to implement the plan of cleansing the genetic pool, and by that I mean, and here is the science to back me up".
(2) The trouble is that Lynn's work *is* being treated seriously, for whatever value of "serious" you place on "quoted in newspaper articles". But also online posts, of the kind very frequent with the "HBD is true, cleanse the human gene pool" types. And if you look into it, his work is shoddy (and that's being kind). Too much "There haven't been any IQ tests done on the Penguin Islanders, but in 1938 a series of tests were performed on the Kangaroo Peninsula natives, and they're pretty much the same population if you take a very broad approach to it, so I'm going to presume the Kangaroo tests fit the Penguin people and claim that they have a mean IQ of 55 and three-quarters" fudging of data.
Yet he's very fine-grained when it comes to Southern Irish versus Northern Irish versus Scots versus Welsh versus North of England versus London IQ scores, no "they're all the same population pretty much"! His work has so much political bias behind it that I can't take it seriously, and it annoys me when I see it quoted as the gospel on IQ test results.
>but this does not mean we regard that population as having fewer to no human, natural and legal rights is the ideal.
Almost no HBD advocates are doing this. What they're saying is that it's not white people's fault that black people have worse socioeconomic outcomes, so piss off with these anti-white narratives and policy proposals.
"What they're saying is that it's not white people's fault that black people have worse socioeconomic outcomes"
The problem is, sometimes it was/is white people's fault. Racism is a thing, the ill-effects of slavery and colonialism are things. And I would throw in - and this applies for all races and countries - socially liberal attitudes that were intended in the best way but encouraged detrimental behaviour, and is now encoded as "you can't criticise X, it's Their Culture and saying anything bad about it is racism".
Which is how you get the Smithsonian putting up displays about Whiteness that then have to be taken down after they list such traits as "hard work" are Whiteness (and hence privileged and oppressive).
Yes, those are the noble hippies of the group. Most people who have a strong political attachment to HBD don't care about what they think, frankly. They care that they can add their work to a little folder labeled "proof my ethnic group should rule the world". I would even go so far as to suggest your framing is, being kind, the result of the famed rationalist myopia of what the world looks like beyond the rationalist space. You seem to be trying to suggest that the race-supremacist types are a small minority, while people like Lynn and Warne speak for the masses. This is probably true in rationalist circles, but certainly isn't true once you look at the people who believe in race science who AREN'T rationalists.
Egalitarians: White people being RACIST is why there's black white inequality and we need reparations and affirmative action and to brainwash schoolkids into thinking that they're "privileged" for being white
HBDers: That's wrong, these differences can be explained in terms of heritable differences in intelligence and other behavioral traits
It's political self defense. Nobody gets off on feeling smarter than black people, we just want to not be held responsible for their problems and ideally would just want to not live around them. Nobody is basing a political ideology on wanting to feel superior, and consider how COMPLETELY ABSURD it would be for them to do this while consistently advocating for the fact that jews and asians are SMARTER than them.
You already can choose to not live around them. Move to Montana or Wyoming or North Dakota or Utah and seeing a black person will be like seeing a polar bear. What you mean is "I don't want to live in the same country as them, want to make them not live here anymore, and will deliberately turn my brain off after that statement so I can ignore the whys and wherefores because they aren't compatible with my self-concept."
As for absurdity I find your entire ideology absurd, so insisting that you must be taken seriously by me won't work.
Different bubbles, I guess - most of the people who I've read who are HBD proponents don't strike me as frothing nazis - although some of them are undoubtedly somewhat weird people ... but then you probably *need* to be pretty weird to want to investivate this subject at a high level, much like you would have needed to be pretty weird to be an atheist a few centuries ago.
But in any case, the truth or falsity of any given HBD claim is what it is - if we live in a universe where some claims that ethnonarcissists can make hay out of are actually true, then our only realistic choices are to figure out how to live with that knowledge and treat people fairly in light of it, or engage in permanent censorship of the topic - and the latter option will certainly make it look as if you've got something to hide.
Well the thing about most HBD claims, as Deiseach points out, is that they're based on not very good, politically-motivated research (I believe Lynn lumps the staggering genetic diversity of Africa into two or three groups while slicing like 8 groups out of the objectively far less diverse British Isles- groups that just so happen to align with how a 19th-century race scientist would classify the people of Britain and whose results would confirm the superiority of the noble Arian-descended Anglo race over the insidious Negroidal Hibernian, with their obsession with potatoes and tendency towards theft, alcoholism, and Popery). IF HBD claims were true, we'd have to grapple with them, but the blunt fact is that there's not a lot of reason to believe they're true unless you fetishize the shape of scientific research, which I don't. Yes, you can plea that there's a catch-22 there, where most people won't fund HBD research because they think HBD research is false and morally repugnant. At some point, evolution was in the same place- and so is the Flat Earth. Like both of those, you will need to fight for a seat at the table.
I think Lynn's research is pretty widely considered shoddy, including by serious HBD people. Maybe instead of arguing against the weakest evidence, you might engage with the strongest?
Racial differences in average IQ in the US (and I think other first-world countries) are well-established, based on decades of evidence. These differences are big enough to have a big real-world impact, and they basically predict a lot of what we see in the world. There's not any real question about whether those differences exist, though the cause of the differences is an open research question.
Similarly, there are differences in disease prevalence across racial groups that are big enough to matter for how doctors diagnose and treat members of different groups.
In some sense, it's amazing that this works at all, because racial groups are these insanely broad and fuzzy things that basically come down to which continent most of your ancestors came from. (It's probably the least surprising it works for American Indians, but even there, you're talking about folks whose ancestors populated the Americas like 12-15 thousand years ago, so lots and lots of generations of wildly different cultures and environments.) And yet, at least in a US context, it does work surprisingly well.
Something I have always found amusing (in a cosmic sort of way) is that those who advocate for race science jump immediately from "These people have below-average IQ" to "Therefore, they're incapable of developing/maintaining civilization" (usually trivially-untrue: The Great Mosque of Djenne might be made of mud, but so are the brownstones that line the streets of British towns, and I know which one is more impressive) and then "therefore, they have inferior moral significance compared to (speaker's chosen Type-A Heroic Race) and we don't have to treat them like real people"- when this is totally nonsensical to me. The thing that makes humans morally valuable isn't their IQ score, and I suspect that most of them wouldn't advocate that we treat a member of their race with a mild intellectual disability the way they advocate for their racial inferiors to be treated.
Also funny to me is that they usually have some excuse as to why, say, the Ashkenazim or Han shouldn't be allowed to run the world as the races with the highest IQ, which really does put the lie to this modern form of race science. When their score is lower than mine, it proves they're my genetic inferior. When their score is higher than mine, this proves they're cheating or are soulless bio-automata.
Was not built by subsaharan africans, and is not maintained properly by subsaharan africans.
>when this is totally nonsensical to me
Its also a complete and utter strawman. The left kept telling us that white people are to blame for black underachievement, we're saying that this is false. THAT'S IT.
>Also funny to me is that they usually have some excuse as to why, say, the Ashkenazim or Han shouldn't be allowed to run the world as the races with the highest IQ, which really does put the lie to this modern form of race science.
"Allowed to run the world" - What the hell does this even mean?
You're engaging with hysterical, bad faith strawman positions you have completely fabricated.
>When their score is lower than mine, it proves they're my genetic inferior. When their score is higher than mine, this proves they're cheating or are soulless bio-automata.
The nazis dismissed IQ as a valid concept because it undermined their belief that Jews go ahead by cheating. So congratulations, you're siding with Hitler on this one.
Godwin's Law. This is the last reply you get from me. Frankly, I shouldn't even have started- it's clear by your breathless, outraged style of commentary that actual communication can't happen here. Have a nice life.
>When their score is lower than mine, it proves they're my genetic inferior. When their score is higher than mine, this proves they're cheating or are soulless bio-automata
I think that's a bit of a strawman. The argument I've seen is that while a whole society organised by the highest IQ populations will have a better standard of living than one organised by lower IQ populations, there is also the question of ... I guess let's call it ethnic nepotism - that people have perfectly understandable Darwinian incentives for favouring members of their own ethnic group, and there's no reason to presuppose that a Chinese/Ashkenazi run society wouldn't serve the interests of Chinese/Ashkenazi people ahead of whatever other populations they may rule over, in which case those other populations may reasonably prefer to be ruled by people more like themselves even if at a lower level of civilisational complexity.
Of course, if you can find someone who takes that view, but *also* advocates for Europeans recolonising Africa, or for white Americans taking on the permanent White Man's Burden of raising the level of civilisation of African-Americans (as opposed to just letting people voluntarily self-segregate and let everyone find their own natural level of civilisational complexity) then I will happily join you in noting the hypocrisy.
...unless they are proposing to raise the level of civilisation of African-Americans by some sort of eugenics program that would actually bring their average IQ up to the level of white or even Asian Americans, in which case I guess that would be non-hypocritical, but may have its own issues.
Firstly, "Darwinian incentives" is laughably reductionist and that strain of evolutionary psychology belongs in a museum alongside a phrenological diagram illustrating the Mongoloid's tendency towards deceit and opium addiction. Like many such theories, it reveals more about the theorist than what he describes.
The people who I am criticizing view Africans (and frankly everyone who isn't a European, and more specifically of the same claimed European ethnicity as them) as a pest, somewhere between locusts and wild dogs (although they wouldn't be so articulate in their expression, merely muttering something about alleged theft of jobs, crime rates, welfare queens, and rape), and would like to INVOLUNTARILY segregate the Europeans and everyone else, preferably giving the non-Europeans the worst bits of the country and quietly hoping they'll just die off. This is when they aren't more honest with themselves and admit they want to either ship them back to "where they belong" (ignoring that their families may have lived here for many generations, or in the case of Native Americans pre-date the earliest colonists by many centuries) or want to segregate them into the ground.
I hope you can stretch your enlightened Type-A Heroic Race intellect to understand how that might be objectionable to those of us born with the highly un-Darwinian evolutionary defect of basic human empathy.
Maybe try engaging with a higher quality of thinker in this area? I mean, yes, you can find dumb/crazy/evil/ideologically blinded people arguing for any position, but I don't think you get any smarter by engaging with them.
For example, Charles Murray, Razib Khan, Greg Cochran, and Steve Sailer are pretty smart and serious people who approach the world at least partly from an HBD frame. None of them think nonwhites are subhuman or destined to forever be carriers of water and hewers of wood, or want to segregate the country by race or any of that stuff.
I feel like you are in approximately the position of someone who judges progressivism by the craziest exemplars dug up and retweeted by Ben Shapiro or something. Those ideas may be good or bad, but you won't learn which by only reading their dumbest and craziest advocates.
I am familiar with those thinkers, and I have some measure of intellectual respect for them. However, as I emphasize once again- the people interested in HBD and who make HBD a notable part of their politics are not going to be people who think like them. They are going to be people like Richard Spencer and the people who saw him as a thought leader (or rejected him as a federal agent) and who think that racial caricature memes are a vital part of online discourse. Regardless of whether or not you like these people, they make up the body of people in the "HBD" space, not your virtuous examples. Just like you can find dumb/crazy/evil people in every movement, I can also produce noble, virtuous, polite people for every movement. I can probably produce a person in the top quarter of kind human beings who will argue that Hitler should have won WWII or that consensual sexual relations between a 9-year old and a 40-year old should be legal. I've judged the argument, and I think that "HBD" might have some merit to it, but the merit it has in a truism- yes, different humans are different- that's trivial, most people understand that. So what do you want DONE about it?
Fair enough, I guess we've just been reading different HBD bloggers for the most part. Though even the ones that do strike me as more alt-rightish than dispassionate-scientistish (I guess I'm mostly thinking of the Those Who Can See blog) do make the argument from genetic interests for restricting the importation of not just a low-IQ underclass but also a high-IQ but genetically non-aligned overclass. In any case, I'm not making the strong claim that it is true, but I don't see that it is so easy to dismiss. It is simply an extension of the logic of kin selection - individuals can be expected to care most about those who share the most genes with them, from siblings/children, to first cousins, nieces and nephews, more distant extended family, clan, tribe, nation etc. At any rate, most human for most of history have been fanatically ethnocentric by the standards of contemporary left-liberalism, so it would not surprise me at all if there was something adaptive about it.
Also, given the whole 'white liberals are the only major American ethno/political demographic to have *less* warmth for their own ethnic group than for others' thing - assuming this is reasonably accurate - https://twitter.com/ZachG932/status/1074524252638982144 - I would want to at least be wary that you might not be wrong, despite your sarcasm, about 'basic human empathy' for all humans equally being an evolutionary defect, in the sense that if you develop it, you are likely to be outcompeted by those who lack it (with appropriate caveating that too much ethnicentrism surely has its own costs too, presumably in things like enabling corruption, reducing free exchange of ideas that would make your polity more competitive etc.)
Either way, no matter how distasteful and hateful some of the proponents of HBD may be, that doesn't offer even the slightest shred of evidence against any given HBD claim being true. We need to be able to decouple if we want to arrive at an accurate understanding of reality. And, of course, in the parts of the internet where the sober HBD proponents hang out, I see far more fanatical hatred directed *against* HBD proponents, than by HBD proponents against any other group. I just don't think 'how many fanatical haters line up on this side of the argument' is good evidence for or against the argument in any direction.
"most human for most of history have been fanatically ethnocentric by the standards of contemporary left-liberalism"
Tell me, what exactly is your history background? I want to know because this statement is actively psychotic if you have a non-trivial familiarity with history. Yes, people had strong ingroup biases, but what that ingroup WAS varied greatly and rarely resembled the nice, clean, late-19th-century-geopolitical-boundary-following categories asserted by race scientists. There were certainly groups like the Mongols and Romans that had a strong ethnic character to their empire (but even then we find contradictory evidence- the contempt Romans reserved for the very genetically-distinct Gallic and Germanic people was fractional to the contempt they reserved for other varieties of Italians - the classic "narcissism of small differences" in action) but other nations show very different models. The HRE was primarily predicated on common religion, as was the Ottoman Empire (although even there, you see tolerance for other Abrahamic faiths to a degree that would outrage the modern Hanbali-addled Islamic nation-states), and the various Chinese dynasties were generally far more concerned about your filial piety and payment of tax than your creed or ethnicity (yes, there were the Four Persecutions, but frankly it was historically notable because usually Emperors didn't give a shit about your religion, and thus the actions of the Three Wu's and Suizong are abnormal- and even here, we see a wide variety of reasons for these persecutions, three of which don't align well with a theory that these religious persecutions were a cipher for ethnic cleansings.) Once again, this whole "kinship bias" thing smacks of 19th-century race science of the Social Darwinistic variety. If you want to bite the bullet and say "Yes, I think Social Darwinism is objectively correct", go ahead, but I don't think you want to because you seem invested in making me believe that you're actually a nice and kind person.
Evolution is a Molochian force (to borrow Scott's parlance) and I see no reason why I should elevate the morally-repugnant things it spits out as noble. Do you believe humanity should try and be more than what evolution wants us to be, or do you think we're just slaves to our genetic directives?
Right, since I have neither the ability nor temperament to debate whether race science is accurate with you on the level of an expert geneticist, I'll just cut to what I can discuss. Let's say I accept your assertions that 1) there are insurmountable genetic differences between the races and 2) all the races are engaged in a war of all against all in which there can only be one victor. What do you imagine people DOING with this information that they are not already doing? You mention people "self-segregating to the level of their interest"- people already do this. Since we're hurling charts at each other, here's one from me: https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1529066744496660480
Despite what people might SAY about being oikophobic (that's the word the modern race scientists like to use, right? Sounds much more scientific than "race traitor"), people still gravitate towards association with their own race, with non-whites being more likely to be friends with people of other races than whites, even as we see trends overall towards more "xenophilic" association. This certainly suggests that my own belief (that despite differences in culture and maybe even genetics between races people can expand their kin-group to include people who look very different from them) is right, AND that your belief (That if you let people freely associate some number will naturally segregate) is also right. People are selecting their level of segregation, and over time the number of people who want to self-segregate is decreasing. So I'd imagine you want something beyond that, but I don't want to put words in your mouth.
I'm really not sure I've ever seen someone labelled a racist or other type of -ist on this blog. Probably because of the norm of commenting in good faith.
Oh I dunno. Having people say "He/She/You are a racist!" right up front means I get to stop listening to them after hearing or reading only four words. I like that efficiency. If it took people four or five paragraphs to fully unroll the crazy in their head, that might be an additional 5-10 minutes lost.
I feel the same way about criticisms of people's ideas that hinge on the letters they use to spell the words they use to express their ideas. I know immediately that this person is making some shallow point that very likely amounts to nothing more than them justifying their knee jerk emotional reaction to something. I sometimes wonder what would happen if you scrambled text through a synonym randomizer of some kind so that they can't react in this way.
You certainly have a point. However I'm torn on this, because it's useful to have a shorthand for "your views are an embarrassment, created out of primitive tribalism and shared exclusively by really close-minded people, and you should reconsider them on these grounds alone". The problem is that its use is getting out of hand.
In related news, I really like the recent "living rent free in your head" meme which 4chan and its satellite communities use to ridicule pointless hatred, and I'd love to have more of this kind of memetic vaccine in the water supply.
No, it's absolutely *not* as good as any. It carries almost no informational content, it used as a slur against people to silence them, and "racially prejudiced attitudes" is absolutely NOT a good definition of "racism" as used by the American left today.
I think you're wrong about woke, which some practitioners still use un-ironically and positively. I also think you're wrong about CRT. There's a whole fight where people who don't like some of the changes in classroom teaching since they were kids slap CRT onto as a label, then find the most egregious corners of things that are actually CRT and tie those things to the changes they don't like, in an (increasingly successful) attempt to drown the whole thing.
CRT has a meaning and a set of scholarship. I don't agree with all of it and a lot of it is damned off-putting. But teaching that the Civil War was fought over slavery, and that the South fired the first shots, instead of the Civil War being fought over states rights, being the fault of the Fire-Eaters and the Abolitionists (who were the real villains), and oh by the way slavery was bad and all but not *that* bad because lots of people had it tough back then is *not* CRT. It's just more accurate history.
I'm not a CRT supporter. But I am anti the anti-CRT crowd, because I think they fall pretty much exclusively into fighting against things I support that have dick-all to do CRT.
Lots of the anti-CRT bills mention the 1619 project by name, and "Slavery was the cause of the Civil War" is a central point of the K-5 curriculum suggestions. Whereas the first POV was what I learned in small town southeastern Missouri in the 1980s. The shift is presumably what's pissing people off.
Or, if not, here are the 10 key concepts. They seem pretty reasonable to me. Based on past experience I assume you yourself are pretty anti-CRT. Pick one. 8 maybe?
The key concepts, in order, are:
1. Slavery, which Europeans practiced before they invaded the Americas, was important to all colonial powers and existed in all North American colonies.
2. Slavery and the slave trade were central to the development and growth of the colonial economies and what is now the United States.
3. Protections for slavery were embedded in the founding documents; enslavers dominated the federal government, Supreme Court and Senate from 1787 through 1860.
4. “Slavery was an institution of power,” designed to create profit for the enslavers and break the will of the enslaved and was a relentless quest for profit abetted by racism.*
5. Enslaved people resisted the efforts of their enslavers to reduce them to commodities in both revolutionary and everyday ways.
6. The experience of slavery varied depending on time, location, crop, labor performed, size of slaveholding and gender.
7. Slavery was the central cause of the Civil War.
8. Slavery shaped the fundamental beliefs of Americans about race and whiteness, and white supremacy was both a product and legacy of slavery.
9. Enslaved and freed people worked to maintain cultural traditions while building new ones that sustain communities and impact the larger world.
10. By knowing how to read and interpret the sources that tell the story of American slavery, we gain insight into some of what enslaving and enslaved Americans aspired to, created, thought and desired.
The 1619 project is trivially propaganda and full of historical inaccuracies.
>2. Slavery and the slave trade were central to the development and growth of the colonial economies and what is now the United States.
This is false. Slavery severely retarded America's economic development.
>4. “Slavery was an institution of power,” designed to create profit for the enslavers and break the will of the enslaved and was a relentless quest for profit abetted by racism.*
That's weird. That's really really weird. Were Africans who actually enslaved these people (or their ancestors) in the first place "racist" too? Were they, what, raising money for their community centre rather than earning a profit?
>8. Slavery shaped the fundamental beliefs of Americans about race and whiteness, and white supremacy was both a product and legacy of slavery.
This is completely false. The behavior of freed slaves is what determined attitudes to race. Blacks in the north who were freed before the civil war were treated much better than those freed after, and its entirely because the type of person to secure freedom before the civil war was very different than those who were freed by Lincoln and were treated better based on their better behavior.
Topline: The key concepts I quoted were from a different framework listed next to the 1619 project when I googled 1619 project curriculum. The 1619 project has some good stuff in it, but also more egregious stuff than I realized, including the spurious claim about the revolution which you site. (Though you overstate it. It's cited as *a* cause, not *the* cause.)
>The 1619 Project saying that slavery caused the Civil War is not why the 1619 Project bothers most of its opponents, and you know that. So you're already deep in the hole.
Even so, I don't really believe this. If you look at that essay, The Idea of America, the one that's included in the lesson plan (assuming I haven't found the wrong thing again), that's not at all a central theme. It's a throwaway line in an essay who's central thrust is going through various important moments and looking at them from a black, rather than white, point of view. And I think that's really valuable.
America is the story of an intrepid people fleeing tyranny and difficult conditions in the old countries and hacking out a new and great civilization in the new world, and lighting a great beacon of freedom and opportunity to the world while we do it. That's the story I was taught, and it's a true story.
But it's not complete. It's true from one POV. Even with the admitted wart, that essay is a nice look at what America looks like from the POV of some of her deepest rooted citizens. Citizens whose story we don't usually tell. And it's not a pretty picture, but it's *also* a true story.
In the past few years it's become popular to teach a more complete narrative about our history. And yes, *that* is what I think anti-CRT people are really objecting to. That's what I think the effect of the anti-CRT bills will be, and that's what I think the effect is supposed to be.
And, to loop it back to the original point, whether I'm right or you're right, it's not CRT. People who don't like these changes have dragged CRT out of the obscure and obtuse legal theory classes, chained it to this debate, and then complained CRT being taught in elementary schools. And then passed laws against CRT in schools. And then accused me and mine of Motte and Bailey tactics when we splutter that we don't know what their talking about, because nobody's doing that.
> we do need a snappy word to sum up racially prejudiced attitudes and "racism" is as good as any
I disagree, I think that "racism" needs to be split into at least half a dozen different words to cover the various different meanings that the word has.
Do we get a word for people who do the same for white people (i.e. the thing that is vastly more common and completely accepted by major american institutions)?
I mean, just say "anti-black". It's more transparent, and its much clearer what it means and when its being abused.
It should be noted that *this* community doesn't use "racism" to mean e.g. "knowing and stating true facts (the murder rate among blacks is way higher than among whites)" (quoting None of the Above) except in reference to other communities that act this way.
Given that, the word "racism" retains more of its meaning here. However, I like to promote the word "prejudice" instead, because if someone seems to have an unreasonable dislike of hispanics, maybe it's that ze doesn't like their accent, or their English skills, or their culture, rather than their skin color. Someone who seems to dislike all black people might still like Denzel Washington, suggesting that maybe what they really hate is "ebonics". Often it's unclear if a person making suspicious statements is even prejudiced, but certainly "prejudice" is a bigger tent that is more likely to be correct.
A nuanced view will take in the idea that prejudice or racism isn't all one thing. My grandfather believed in the separation of the races. He believed that God made the birds and the fish, and nothing was wrong with either one, but they weren't meant to marry or have kids together.
He also cried like a baby at the end of the movie Glory. "Well, he sure showed that his boys could fight."
The hard thing about the word "racism" is that it has about ten commonly-used and incompatible meanings.
For example, you might call the guys walking around in Klan robes burning a cross at a rally racists, and you might also call the policeman who tends to frisk black kids a little more readily than white kids (perhaps because of experience about who carries illegal weapons/drugs, perhaps because of stereotypes) a racist, and you might also call a politician who opposes affirmative action programs racist.
Those are all ways the word is commonly used, and yet they are completely different--the anti-affirmative-action politician isn't burning crosses in anyone's yard, and neither is the policeman who engages in racial profiling. And by contrast, the Klansmen probably couldn't give you a very coherent argument against affirmative action and may well only object to it because they think members of the wrong race are getting the admissions boost.
Similarly, you might be called racist for knowing and stating true facts (the murder rate among blacks is way higher than among whites), or for advocating for a whites-only separatist homeland. A policy might be called racist because it explicitly discriminates against blacks (like tons of laws did in the past), but it might also be called racist because it has a disparate impact on blacks relative to whites without any explicit consideration of race.
Because if this, when someone refers to some person, idea, policy, etc. as racist, I always want to figure out which of the many incompatible meanings they intend. And I think it is very common in political argument to strategically use the ambiguity in the definition--I call you racist for accurately citing crime statistics in hopes of creating the association between your use of those statistics and the guys in Klan robes.
>Well, either you have to recognize that the misuse of a label associated with a concept doesn't, by itself, invalidate the concept,
It's not that's its misused. It's that there isn't a coherent, accepted definition of "racism" at all. There's no concept to be invalid because there's no singular "concept" here at all.
You're substituting your own definition of racism and assuming that this is the "correct" one, which totally misses the point of the word being a problem in the first place.
>u have to apply the same scrutiny to more right-wing concepts and argue that it doesn't matter if the individuals who originally coined "cultural marxism", "human biodiversity" or "great replacement" had a point — in practice the majority of people who use these terms are insane and wrong.
Okay, that's a lazy outgroup swipe, plain and simple. Like seriously, everyone in your political outgroup is "insane and wrong"?
But again, the problem is not that the terms are misused. Everybody knows what it meant by "human biodiversity", and its not used as a slur. It always mean heritable differences within and between human populations that affect physiology and behavior. You can disagree with the concept, but there's zero ambiguity to this term, and its not used as a way of silencing people you disagree with.
>Otherwise it's just you saying "my outgroup's ideological constructs are emotional and dumb whereas my ingroup's ideological constructs are rational and smart".
No, that's you doing that. YOU'RE the only one here calling the outgroup dumb. The whole point is that racism does not have a singular, coherent definition and it is therefore bad faith and/or irresponsible to use it considering the power it has.
Also, "racism" has broad institutional support as a concept. If somebody is branded "racist", they will be fired from most major coproations, universities, media organisations. Calling somebody a "cultural marxist" is already seen as stupid and has no real world implications because people in power by and large do not accept its validity. So "racism" is a much more dangerous and powerful word.
I'm happy to bite that bullet and say that buzzwords should be tabooed more generally in high quality discussion spaces like this one, though I recognise that it makes posting take more effort.
I would argue such tabooing is pointless because of the euphemism treadmill: the kind of person who will raise objections for months about people calling individuals who see other races as their race's inferiors "racist" will not stop merely because you switch to using the term "race-based prejudice"- they will instead (rightly) point out that "race-based prejudice" is a longform way to say "racism" and demand that word be tabooed as well. And so on with "ethnic discrimination" and so on and so forth.
Bluntly, the goal of such semantic games is not to actually improve dialogue, it's to tie people down in debates over semantics instead of the actual content (see the left-wing kooks arguing that we shouldn't use the term "walkable cities" because it would offend the disabled) and to taboo the topic itself.
Of course, Brett S could be engaging in good faith! But I've seen this kind of maneuver in left-wing circles too many times to not notice the pattern as it forms, and the only person I know of whose made wide, sweeping declarations of racism was myself when I was particularly pissed off over politics and had too much to drink (and even then, that was at the Right as a whole and not this site), and thus can't really buy OP's declaration as coming from a place of real concern instead of a troll's concern.
>I would argue such tabooing is pointless because of the euphemism treadmill: the kind of person who will raise objections for months about people calling individuals who see other races as their race's inferiors "racist"
The overwhelming majority of people called "racist" are not described by this, THATS THE ENTIRE POINT.
If that's ALL racism ever meant, it wouldn't be a problem at all in the first place! The point is precisely that the term "racist" describes these people, as well as people who oppose affirmative action, avoid black neighborhoods because of the higher crime rate, or believe that the data show blacks are no more likely than whites to be the victims of police force once you control for relevant factors.
These are all vastly different things, and using the term "racist" to describe them
>see the left-wing kooks arguing that we shouldn't use the term "walkable cities" because it would offend the disabled
That's not even remotely analogous. It's absolutely clear what "walkable cities" means, and its not used a slur to shout down political opponents.
If any part of this is true, a scientist - well renowned, nobel-tipped, and talented scientist - can't find work because of the dynamics of how grants and studies play out today. If the story is false, it still feels like he wasn't given due process.
There are two claims in the opposing narratives that I disagree with:
On one hand, no one is an irreplaceable genius. Especially in a messy experimental science like bio where everything is done by a big community. An individual can have an outstanding (and recognized and rewarded) contribution to the community, but you shouldn't preserve them at the expense of the community's 'scientific health' (research standards, training pipeline, reputation etc.)
Is expelling Sabatini overall healthy for the community? I'm torn on that. If you read the report, you see that the allegations are not some nebulous rumors - it's very clear he led a very 'un-American', bro-team, highly sexualized lab culture. That includes travelling alone with your undergrad to a conference and telling her sexual stories, which is... holy shit.
He's not a sexual predator, however - he didn't assault or harass anyone. And the lab culture was OK for most of his trainees (students and postdocs) - many of them, including women, did well for themselves and support him. I had a commander just like that in my first Army job and most of the women who served with me, including my best friend, remember him overall fondly - simultaneously as an amazing leader and creepy bastard.
For a few trainees the culture was damaging, which is horrible but unfortunately not unusual or restricted to sexualized environments.
I don't think clamping down on unusual lab cultures, even those like Sabatini's, and upholding homogeneity is healthy for the scientific community (and if I ever get an academic position I will probably have an equally weird and unamerican - though not sexually so - lab environment), but it can be healthy for specific institutions.
Overall, I think it's great that the report came out - everyone associating with him, including potential trainees, should know what they're getting into. It's also legit for Whitehead and MIT to decide they're willing to sacrifice some science to not have this on their campus. They're big and prestigious enough to take the hit and have thousands of other trainees and hundreds of other labs, plus reputations, to think about. It's also equally legit for some other institution to decide they are absolutely ok with this kind of lab culture on *their* campus.
As for protecting trainees - I have a lot of thoughts about how we should make them much less dependent on the PI, give them non-PI mentorship and support (from e.g. thesis chair), and normalize changing labs even in years 2-3-4 in a way that lets people preserve as much of their work as possible. But that's for another time.
No one is an irreplaceable genius, but there are some people who are *way* more productive than others in science, just as in many other fields. If we as a society push a lot of the super-productive, super-insightful people out of science, we're going to be a lot poorer as a result.
I mean, I don't think it's a stretch to say that if Einstein or Newton had been stillborn, it would have taken many more years for the scientific community to work out important bits of how the universe works. While it's easy to overstate the lone-genius theory of the world, there really are very smart and insightful and driven people who really do push a lot of progress in the world, and if you make it impossible for them to do science, then a lot less science will get done.
IMO, this is one of the reasons why it's such a big win to make sure that women, Jews, nonwhites, LGBT folks, etc. are welcome in science. Keeping Katalin Karikó out of science because she's a woman would have meant going without mRNA vaccines today. But the same thing applies to brilliant people who are socially awkward, or have weird ideas/beliefs, or whatever.
Was it on here we had a discussion about romance in the workplace? I think this is a good example of why it's a bad idea. I don't know who is in the right or in the wrong, but this is yet another example of "it is never 'just a fun, no-strings fling' whatever *you* may think".
If I'm being mean about the accuser, then the guy is old enough to have known better. A 29 year old woman is not banging a 50 year old man because he's just such a virile hunk of studliness. If the attributes quoted here are true (really big name in the field, potential Nobel winner) than the woman was trying to hitch her wagon to a star. When he still regarded it as just a fling and indeed showed signs of possibly dumping her (getting involved with another woman), then she turned vengeful.
If I'm being mean about the accused, he was a randy old goat who was thinking with his dick, not his big brain. You don't bang co-workers, and that includes people working in the same place who are on the level below you, even if they aren't directly working under you. The rest of it same as above: the woman was looking for benefits for her career and social status from her association with him, he didn't provide what she expected, revenge.
True but not the whole story, there were definitely some pretty shady things going on at the Sabatini lab (including both sexual and scientific misconduct).
Even though he's a hothead I would fully agree with Sabatini's crude characterization of the worth of those particular critiques. Peurile and sterile sniping, at best.
Things went completely to hell under Rafael Reif. Thank God he's going. And, yeah, what happened to Sabatini is an incredible embarrassment, the more so as *at the very same time* MIT was squiring Jeff Epstein around campus *in secret* so they could get some of that sweet sweet $$$ without pissing off the people on campus who knew he'd been credibly charged with molesting and trafficking underage girls. Reif claims he didn't know about Epstein, despite his signature on a number of documents related to the gift, and to the special provisions for letting him come on campus incognito, so to speak - oh gosh I just sign whatever they put in front of me, never read a thing - but who believes that I cannot imagine. How MIT ended up with such a terrible and ethically bankrupt leader is one of the big mysteries, right up there with the Trinity.
If you read any source besides the substack article things look very different. I myself was indignant until I did some Googling and realized the story was much more complex than was presented. If you just ignore the Knouse aspect there was *still* some incredibly inapporpriate behavior in that lab and specifically from Sabatini.
I don't agree, and I did read other sources of course. If you have one that you think is particular persuasive, I'd be glad to get a pointer to it. My overall read is: (1) Sabatini is an arrogant, brilliant, and hot-tempered narcissist, thinks the world revolves around him because he has the best ideas in the room...which he actually does, almost all the time. But I don't read a shred of deceit nor genuine misogyny in him, and given the number of female colleagues and students who passionately supported him, I find the proposion that he belongs in the same category as an Epstein genuinely offensive, an unforgiveable degradement of the language of evil.
(2) I have a much lower opinion of Knouse. Suggesting a 29-year-old PI at MIT -- a cutthroat environment if there ever was one -- was some innocent little girl to be "groomed" by a predator is so farcical it makes you wonder what other snakes dwell in her head. She was in early middle age, slept around, and clearly needed validation in a ton of ways, both physical, emotional, and scientific. She reads almost like a borderline personality. It seemed like she was pretty excited to hook up with Sabatini -- not, I think, as any crass career move, but probably just because she liked the drama and glamor -- and then he got bored and moved on, and...well, hell hath no fury.
(3) My opinion of the MIT Administration is, as I said above, lowest of all. These people don't even have personal passions or hobgoblins in the head as a defense, they were just cynically using people left and right.
By the way, that these two events (Sabatini and Epstein) are *connected* is admittedly a little on the paranoid side, but not so much that it passeth all understanding. Remember O.J. Simpson vowing to "find the real killer?" Harvey Weinstein saying he was going to really smash the NRA after his own shit hit the fan? Like that. After Epstein came to light, the people with stained hands in the MIT Administration were going to *make sure* everyone was 100% clear on how righteously severe they were on anything that hinted of sexual no-nos. Yes. mistakes may have been made -- honest, understandable mistakes, you understand -- we knew nothing! -- but we are *totally* on the side of the angels, you betcha, yes sir, and how.
Speaking of E.H., his recent Harper's article is a good corrective for conservatives who think they have a monopoly on accusing the powerful of using COVID as an excuse to increase their authoritarian power: https://justinehsmith.substack.com/p/is-everything-political?s=r
This is a bit beside the point of the article, but alas, I have to say that i am left a bit saddened by hearing that anglo analytic philosophy has moved away from metaphysics towards sociopolitics.
Never heard of this person but did find the post quite interesting. I have had the same exact issue with political spectrum tests as described, even down to the questions and nuanced answers.
This article is truly atrocious. Just pure masturbation from an total asshole. Sorry if this sounds dismissive, but there isn't actually a coherent argument in here to argue against.
"I really don’t think the America I take to be “real” —founded on genocide and slavery; sustained by greater brute force and glossier propaganda than anything the second-tier global powers have been able to conjure; belovèd by me like an imperfect parent, only because it’s the place that shaped me, but in fact not one iota better or worse than any other empire in human history—"
Oh boy! This sounds like a reasonable person whose opinions I'm interested in hearing and definitely not an oblivious, obnoxious, partisan hack who serves no purpose but to preach to their tribe!
What exactly make you condemn this as not reasonable? The stuff about not being one iota better or worse sounds weird to me, but aren't genocide, slavery, brute force and propaganda plainly true?
The part about "not one iota better or worse" is of course absurd.
The rest of the text feels motte-and-bailey-ish to me. Is the author saying that America is sustained *exclusively* by brute force, or that America is sustained by many things but brute force *also* happens to be a part of the toolkit? Etc.
<meta>It saddens me how knowledge of the motte-bailey fallacy can lead to automatically suspecting anybody of committing it, just due to them not being 100% preciese with words. This gives a whole new dimension to partisanship and uncharitable reading.</meta>
My reading is that America is sustained *to an substantial extent* by brute force. In a sense that if USA had significantly less brute forse, it and the balance of powers in whole world would've been noticebly different. Is it a controversial take?
Is any country not sustained by brute force? (Maybe Vatican City?)
If the guy wanted to make a point about how all governments are morally suspect then I'd be right there with him. But if he wants to use universal sins to dump on one particular country then that's just silly.
Some countries are sustained brutal force to a *significantly less substantial extent*. And I believe the foundational assumption is that the less brutal fource is sustaining the country the better all things being equal.
He makes a point that all empires are morally suspect to a nearly same degree. That's what "not being one iota better or worse" is about. This line is still questionable, but it's definetely not an isolated demand for rigor.
So the defense of the assertion reduces to a tautology? "If the balance of power over the course of history were different, the course of history would be different...because the balance of power would be different?"
This is my general thought as well and over the last ~decade have become much more comfortable with the idea. I do still roll my eyes a bit when someone says/writes something like Smith did, even if I don't disagree. I guess it comes from a "is it necessary to say that" feeling.
Keep in mind that the motivation for that post was that his Harper's article apparently caused him to be pegged as a conservative by its progressive readers. It seems that he wanted to demonstrate just how left wing many of his thoughts really were.
You may call it sanewashing or steelmanning if you want. For me it's just not trying to imagine things that the author say and reading with basic charitability rather than being offended because it's something your outgroup may say without even engaging with the point.
He says it was *founded* on "genocide" and "slavery" then *sustained* through "brute force". Though you may disagree on the degree to which these forces played in the founding of America they did play a role. And America has used brute force to sustain itself either though military action, covert means, or police action against its own citizens.
The same phrase that I'm unhappy about, claims that USA is just as bad as other empires. I fail to see how you can perseive it as an isolated demand for rigor.
If anyone has time for a really short and terribly unscientific survey (no market research, I promise), I'd love you to fill out https://forms.gle/RSkx4ujp1F6vkrVn8.
Ah, nice. I like the interspersing of the explanation with the responses.
I think I agree that "emotion" is kind of a broad umbrella of concepts, sufficiently so that it can't be made concrete. I wonder if there are any two people whose concepts of emotion are entirely non-overlapping, if there is some intersection which could be thought of as "minimal mutually agreed upon emotion"
An interesting thing about "The Society Of The Spectacle" by Debord is that Baudrillard became much more famous than Debord by just repeating Debord's ideas in "Simulacra and Simulation".
I feel I should say something stronger against Baudrillard, Debord, and the entire dialectical school of philosophy. I have little respect for the early Church fathers of the 2nd through 5th centuries, or for the medieval scholastics; but both groups at least made arguments and engaged with their intellectual opponents point-by-point in logical discussion.
Debord and Baudrillard, by contrast, are dialecticians. Plato introduced the term "dialectic", by which he meant dialogue between two people. But that's not how it's used today. The practice descends from Plato, but more from his mythological mode of "argumentation", which was to spin fabulous tales about creation, Atlantis, reincarnation, the history of love, or The Cave, and then pretend these fairy tales were arguments that applied to real life.
Rousseau, I think, re-invigorated the mythological method and the storytelling method. Hegel and Marx turned it to something with some semblance of logic, but a very poor semblance; more of a camouflage to conceal that they were still just spinning tales. They did not engage with counter-arguments; they did not use data to support their claims (though Engels wrote down masses of data in Kapital, it's only data to validate their claims that bad things happen, never data to validate their proposed solution). Freud followed the same mode of reasoning, telling just-so stories, but never considering alternative explanations, nor testing the predictions of his theories.
In France, Voltaire and other *philosophes* clung to the method of debate and of empirical observation, although they used anecdotes rather than large samples of random data. They engaged with the opposing view and made counter-arguments. But somewhere between the French Revolution and the 20th century, reasoned argumentation receded from continental philosophy. French philosophers like Camus, Sartre, and Derrida, and fellow-travellers like Lacan and Barthes, preferred to tell stories.
[Footnote 1 below on exceptions to this.]
Continental philosophy developed a special flowery style, which is something like a refined, more-elegant, more French version of Puritan and Baptist fire-and-brimstone preaching. What matters is not reason, but emotional resonance, poetry, beautiful style, and a tantalizing obscurity and ambiguity which gives readers the pleasure of always feeling that they're on the verge of discovering what the sentence actually means.
20th-century continental epistemology relies on the notion of what Derrida called "the discourse", which is not an /argument/ in the old-fashioned sense of arguing that some fact is true in the external world, because objective truth and the external world were out of fashion. "The discourse" is just a family tree of texts and speeches which refer to each other. There is no need, Derrida says, to consider anything beyond the discourse, since no discourse can possibly refer to anything outside the discourse. So trying to support an argument with data is not only unnecessary, but naive. The discourse is only about the discourse. That which is repeated most-often is not merely /assumed/ to be true; it's true within the discourse /by definition/, because it has become the center of the discourse. Being repeated is thus the equivalent of "proof" in continental philosophy.
Debord and Baudrillard are both part of this tradition. <edit@5pm May 25>They seldom support their claims with evidence from reality.</edit> Baudrillard begins *Simulacra And Simulation* by presenting "evidence" drawn from Jorge Luis Borges stories. Fiction is considered valid evidence in continental philosophy because it can be part of the discourse.
For another example, just minutes before I began typing this, I was listening to an audio recording of Debord's "Comments on the Society and the Spectacle". In one chapter, he complains that, because of the media, the 20th century has seen the end of the division of labor -- that everyone can do everything, that any person's views on any subject are taken seriously by the mere fact that the media transmits them.
This resonates with our experience of reporters interviewing movie stars to learn their opinions on politics. But is it more true than false? Is it not true, rather, that jack-of-all trades were more common in the past? Before the 19th century, it was extremely common for intellectuals to have wide-ranging interests and to be seen as authorities in many different fields. Debord doesn't even provide true anecdotes to support his claims; he makes up his own anecdotes.
Then in the very next chapter, Debord complains about over-specialization in the 20th century, again with no data and no anecdotes. He doesn't even notice that this directly contradicts his claim in the previous chapter that labor in the 20th century is under-specialization, let alone worry about what could be *good* if specialization and lack of specialization are both bad. Logical thought like that is foreign to 20th-century continental philosophers.
<edit>But I agree with Jack's distinction below, that Debord was complaining about an over-specialization which does seem to exist; and complaining not about under-specialization in general, but specifically about accepting fame in one field as validation of someone's opinion in other fields.</edit>
My opinion is that, while clearly there's some need to convince people that continental philosophy is a burning pile of garbage that needs to be extinguished, we should not treat it with respect. Reading it and talking about it risks spreading it further. It has evolved to be catchy and repeatable. As a sweeping but useful over-generalization, there is no need to read any of it, except to recognize it and to debunk it. That entire field of philosophy renounced every method of reasoning that leads to correct results; the number of truths it finds can be relied on to be at the level of chance.
[1] Sartre did write a big impenetrable book, *Being and Nothingness*, using argument; but the tiny bit of it that I read seemed illogical; and it's based on the writings of Heidegger, which are incoherent and even ungrammatical.
Foucault did use examples and lots of data, but I'm skeptical of its provenance and selection. The only data of his which I investigated was his central piece of evidence for his book on the history of madness: the medieval practice of exporting madmen from a city by putting them on a "ship of fools" and sending them all off into the sea. He provided several references to specific incidents. But every 20th-century source I can find on the subject says that the ship of fools is a myth and never happened.
I suspect Foucault may have been more like Chomsky, who uses lots of references, but considers only those which agree with him to be reputable, and dismisses everyone who disagrees with him as unscholarly thralls of US imperialism. For instance, in Chomsky's writings in support of the Viet Cong in North Vietnam, and of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, he relied on a combination of government news agencies, reports from foreigners who had been taken on show tours by government propaganda agencies, and the writings of ideological allies who had rarely or never been to Cambodia. He scorned interviews of eye-witnesses as unscholarly and unreliable, and dismissed respectable news media outlets on the grounds that news services in Europe or America were just serving up government propaganda. In this way he managed to deny the atrocities done in North Vietnam and in Cambodia for years after most leftists had conceded those issues.
Well, I can't support burning books, but I do support ignoring or de-canonizing some books. I think that sifting through continental philosophy for the wheat is mostly a waste of time, because the chaff-to-wheat ratio is too high. It just grants those works a high social status they don't deserve. Hundreds of books criticizing Hegel and Marx seem to have accomplished little, and may have helped bring them both into the center of cultural discourse today.
Also, your reply just convinced me that my criticism re. under- and over-specialization was unfair.
Re. "Point being, just because someone doesn't use lots of data, doesn't mean that they don't have anything valuable or useful to say about the world. " Yeah, I don't mean quite that, but I see how it sounds like I'm saying that. In fact, I just came back here now to delete my previous comment savaging Debord, because, as I get further into "Comments on the Society of the Spectacle", I find myself agreeing with an important part of Debord's basic claim. Steel-manned, that part might be that, above some threshold, correlations between the narratives of different media outlets are self-reinforcing, and thus the media ends up dictating a single narrative divorced from corrections by empirical reality. Also, some of his comments, like his scorn of McLuhan, reveal an important split with post-modernism that made me rethink dismissing him as "yet another 20th-century French philosopher." Also, I feel like my treatment of Foucault was a bit like Chomsky quickly dismissing people for disagreeing with him.
Also, I found 3 places where Debord used specific examples to support his point:
- that democracy and history began in the same time (5th century BCE) and place (Athens); in support (I think) of the claim that erasing history will destroy democracy
- a West German revolutionary who in 1978 was (maybe; unclear) denied political asylum on the grounds that critiquing society is social and not political action; I forget what this was supposed to demonstrate
- an incident involving Dr. Achambu (sp?) in Poitier (sp?) in 1984; in support of the claim that "it can also happen that an innocent suspect confesses to a crime he did not commit, simply because he is impressed by the logic of an informer who turns on him, to believe that he's guilty".
But these are separated by lots of groundless claims, which are sometimes fantastic, like his claim that weather predictions are manipulated by capitalists to maximize economic gains from tourism, or his claim that children are now being taught to program computers before they know how to read. And Debord is still guilty of never, ever considering other possible explanations for anything.
So I still wouldn't recommend that most people read Debord or Foucault. Both have some useful insights; but both exaggerate them and spin them out into paranoid conspiracy theories pinned unjustly on their opponents. I think both have done more harm than good.
I think Debord's attempts to blame the Spectacle on capitalism are wrong; "the society of the spectacle" describes better most other societies from history, especially those most strongly opposed to free thought and free trade: Sparta, the European Middle Ages, imperial China, communist Russia and China, and academia today.
Not if you already read and understood Debord. Debord and Baudrillard say basically the same thing as far as I recall. Debord is the better writer, but that's not saying much. People who take either of them seriously tend to become paranoid conspiracy theorists who believe society is completely corrupt, and that you need to take the red pill and see the malicious masters pulling all the strings of our fake puppet-show reality. Michael Vassar would probably recommend taking a dose of LSD and reading Baudrillard. I would not. I think that even if he's right about some things, his grand narrative is historicist, apocalyptic, dogmatic, hopeless, and unhelpful.
Another Bayesian brain / predictive processing example, this time with music:
“The ‘Mysterious Melody’ illusion was discovered and first published by Deutsch in *Perception and Psychophysics*, 1972. This musical brain teaser shows how our knowledge of a piece of music can have a profound influence on how we hear it. Suppose you play a well-known tune such that all the note names (C, D, E, and so on) are correct, but the tones are distributed haphazardly among three different octaves. If people are given no clues as to what the tune might be, they find it very difficult to identify. But once they know what to listen for, the melody becomes easy to follow.
“The ‘Mysterious Melody’ illusion provides a striking example of ‘top-down processing’, or the use of previously acquired knowledge, in sound perception.”
I had to play the music several times on a piano while listening to the scrambled version, before I could convince myself they were in fact the same notes. Now I can hear the scrambled melody, but it isn't easy or automatic.
Only the very ending of the scrambled melody 'sounded' like the one I was supposed to be hearing, after learning what it was. I'm bad at identifying music, so that may be part of it; people who can recognise what "C, D and E" are may do a lot better.
I wonder if people who have more musical training or less do better? I played an instrument for many years, and I almost felt like my top-down expectations were being overwritten by the way I know those notes are moving in the wrong directions/amounts. Clocking note movement was a skill that I had to train for, so I wonder if it affects non-musicians differently?
I'm not exactly a great musician but I have played a couple of instruments for a couple of years, sing reasonably well and can read sheet music, and I really can't, there's no progression I can follow, the notes are just too far apart.
It a tonal version of the “what song am I tapping out?” thing.
It's obvious if you already know, and is in fact completely opaque if you don't: the illusion is the pattern matching we do that makes us think that now we can actually hear the song, when in fact we're just primed to it and could probably pick it out of white noise in that state.
What I'd be interested in seeing is whether you can easily fool people by sticking some wrong notes (say, swap a C for a G) in the scrambled version of the melody.
I wonder if being primed to hear "oh, that's whatever" makes us hear it as whatever. I feel as if, had the unscrambled version been "Pop Goes The Weasel", it would be as easy to hear the scrambled version as "oh, that's what it is".
Looking for advice and commentary on a design for a new prediction market model. I think it should be possible to design prediction markets that play nice with Kelly bets, and I've come up with a concept that improves handling for Kelly bets, allows for much higher leverage, and allows the market to automatically track your preferred betting algorithm. The big cost is complexity, of course. Here's my writeup:
To /eliminate/ aging? I can recommend an effective course, if you have a few billion dollars and at least 20 years. The key problem at this point, IMHO, is the math-phobic culture of the NIH and of molecular biology. People are still trying to find "anti-aging drugs". That's hopeless. Trying to stop aging by injecting a few drugs, each with a single target, with measurements and drug administration on a time scale measured in days, is like trying to repair a computer with a sledgehammer. Not to mention that the ubiquitous use of relational databases instead of semantic networks in bioinformatics makes the necessary juggling of a large hierarchy of probabilistic inferences impossible.
We need anti-aging scientists who are willing to phrase anti-aging intervention as a machine learning problem. That means that you define the phenotype you wish to achieve or preserve, and you /trust your ML system to figure out how to do it/. That trust in machines is completely lacking in biological research. Everybody still insists on having humans study each and every function of each and every protein / miRNA / epigenetic marker / binding site / etc., relying mostly on humans writing and reading papers to communicate information. That's not gonna cure aging. Humans should work on a level of abstraction above that of individual protein-protein, protein-DNA, or RNA-DNA interactions.
This might begin with ML analysis of high-throughput experimental data, to estimate what information is needed to model genomic networks, and what minimum capabilities would be necessary to use those networks to maintain cellular and genomic stability indefinitely. Researchers must study how the performance of the cellular systems which provide these capabilities degrades with demand; cellular operations compete for resources, and we need to know how much spare capacity cells have to work with in terms of intracellular space, DNA transcription, siRNA production, protein production, protein transport, protein degradation, etc., without triggering cancer or progeria. I also recommend basic research into the cytoskeleton, a crucial structural and transport system which has been neglected due to how the NIH funds research. We're also probably going to need bioinformatics for determining a person's original genome (and making any obviously good corrections to it), and better ways of generating stem cells with that genome, and of implanting them into their niches. There are many other obvious "first" steps, and promising approaches to test; Aubrey de Gray wrote a book full of them.
The intermediate stages would likely involve intelligent robotic systems which used cell simulators to autonomously devise and conduct experiments 24 hours a day (similar systems have existed for over 10 years now, but are unpopular, probably because scientists find them threatening; when biologists say "lab automation" they nearly always mean computer control of high-throughput experiments designed by humans).
Deployment in vivo might involve groups of plasmids which, collectively, continually took measurements, made computations, and then made interventions to restore a youthful equilibrium, using mechanisms such as siRNA, histone modifications, and the production of transcription factors, on a timescale of minutes. It might also be necessary to edit or epigenetically modify the human genome in vivo, to decouple different parts of enormous, overly-general genetic networks such as the the mTOR and FOXO3A systems (these are internal regulatory sledgehammers that make shockingly crude adjustments to the expression levels of dozens or hundreds of proteins).
Hey Phil, thanks so much for your comment here (and all of them down below - the Art thread was an interesting spinoff :) ). Took me a while to get back - sorry for the delay in my response. If you could keep it real simple for me - imagine we have $100M (not a few billions to work with but still a meaningful starting point), what would be your next 10 action items in reality?
Giving a list of my next 10 action items without that overview would be misleading, because my action items are a mix of what is most-important and what is neglected. I boldfaced most of them in that document. They are:
- Human mitochondrial DNA contains two copies of the 13-base-pair sequence ACCTCCCTCACCA, which often causes the 4977-base-pair "human common deletion" in mitochondrial DNA during replication. Changing a few base pairs in one of these repeats to functionally-equivalent ones (they're both in coding regions) could therefore prevent many cases of diseases of aging. One obvious project is thus to create transgenic mice with mtDNA that won't suffer the common deletion. (Mice have a different 13-bp common deletion, which has similar effects.)
- Use math to figure out how to fix aging with the tools we already have. The effects of aging are all different types of physical damage that must be repaired or replaced, and so each effect needs an entirely different mechanism of intervention, and often a different mechanism based on cell type. Additionally, the causes behind each aging phenotype are only partly and imperfectly known. Targeting the molecular effects of aging thus requires on the order of 100 massive research projects. But given a short list of modalities of intervention that we already kinda-sorta know how to do, such as drugs, diet, gene therapy, and monoclonal antibodies, we can try to come up with a minimal set of interventions which would collectively ameliorate aging. There are more details on that in the gdoc.
- Import genes from one species to another, or use them as models for protein engineering. Obvious projects include:
-- replacing mammalian genes for the electron transport chain with ones from birds or bats
-- adding antioxidant genes from birds, bats, or naked mole rats to (other) mammals
-- using the nuclear genes from species which encode our mitochondrial genes in their nuclear DNA as models for allotopic expression (moving mitochondrial genes into nuclear DNA)
-- more details on this in the gdoc
- Destroy or down-regulate pathways which age us in the course of responding to evolutionary constraints which no longer constrain us, i.e.:
-- Pathways that motivate us to eat are too highly activated for modern life. (Minus or Bonus: You'd have to cure anorexia in order to safely modulate these pathways.)
-- Muscle tissue is so metabolically expensive that the body aggressively destroys it when it isn't used. This endless alternation between (and overlapping of) anabolism and catabolism may be the primary cause of misfolded proteins and their aggregates, ROS production, autophagic disorder, stem cell depletion, sarcopenia, the clonal expansion of DNA with large deletions (because short DNA reproduces faster than long DNA), and mitochondrial malfunction. There's a huge potential upside here, and nobody is working on this except for people trying to regulate myostatin; and they're not interested in aging. Besides, we've had treatments to alleviate muscular dystrophy by suppressing myostatin for over 20 years now, and none of them have ever been used due to "safety" concerns, even though MD victims rarely live past their 20s.
- I've wanted for decades to simply get a bunch of long-lived mouse strains from Jackson labs, cross them to get many different combinations of longevity mutations, and then see how long they live. Most longevity mutations affect the mTOR pathway, so I expect their results are not additive. Finding that other mutations are also not additive with mTOR-affecting mutations would suggest that they also hit the mTOR pathway. I never did because, as a private individual, I can't buy mice from The Jackson Lab (it's easier to legally buy machine guns than to buy lab mice!); and because the transgenic strains have several different background strains, making cross-breeding much more difficult to do and to interpret. It seems to me that I recall someone is finally doing this experiment, but I've forgotten who.
- Develop a framework for the development of complex bioinformatics programs, including:
-- An easy-to-use replacement for relational databases which can keep track of all of the evidence used in inferring a proposition, and compute a probability distribution from it.
-- An alternative architecture to pipelined systems.
-- Massive parallelism, using more GPUs than CPUs.
-- A plug-and-play agent-based methodology, so that the resolution of models or the accuracy of algorithms can be scaled up or down, or pipelined as a progressive filter, to increase speed and reduce memory requirements. This isn't just neglected in bioinformatics; it's neglected in programming methodology. (More info in the gdoc.)
- Cell simulators. People are working on this, but I'm not aware of any sufficiently ambitious projects. IMHO we need a Human Cell Simulator Project with at least hundreds of millions of dollars in funding. This isn't one of the first 10 steps; it's just huge and hugely important.
- Politics and culture:
-- Hire someone to write a book about how many Americans the FDA kills every year.
-- Found a small publishing house to specialize in novels in which old people are main characters, and aren't used to argue that aging is all in the head, or to advocate resignation towards death. They don't even need to read slush if they can incentivize pre-readers and editors at other publishers, and agents, to forward them manuscripts which they like, but don't want to publish due to having old protagonists (which are widely seen in most genres other than "cozy mystery" as unviable).
One important type of training data would be to measure the level of expression of every gene, at short time intervals. This can be done with RNA microarrays or with exome sequencing. This can also be done experimentally, applying an intervention to be tested to the cell and then monitoring gene expression over time afterwards. There are other types of data to gather, as I mentioned above when writing on omics. The easiest kind of intervention for plasmids to accomplish is to regulate the expression of individual genes up or down, which is why I think first of gene expression data. But other data, like lipidomics and measurements of nutrients, mitochondrial abundance and membrane potential, ATP, and free radicals, would provide important clues about the organism's state. Those are unfortunately more-difficult to measure.
There are already cell simulators. They don't simulate every protein or molecule. Many are quite crude, treating the cell as a homogeneous bag of chemicals and proteins with instantaneous diffusion. But those were originally designed to run on a single CPU from the previous century. You simulate to the resolution you have computational power for. Spatially-detailed simulation is very parallelizable, so I'm not overly worried about that. GPUs now cost about 10 cents apiece. Cells have tens or hundreds of millions of proteins, so you could dedicate one CPU to every protein in a cell for just millions or tens of millions of dollars. And that would be overkill.
"It might also be necessary to edit or epigenetically modify the human genome in vivo, to decouple different parts of enormous, overly-general genetic networks such as the the mTOR and FOXO3A systems (these are internal regulatory sledgehammers that make shockingly crude adjustments to the expression levels of dozens or hundreds of proteins)."
Oh, I absolutely want to see this done on animal studies to see how catastrophically wrong it can go. If anything is an example of Chesterton's Fence, "I think I can do better than evolution" here is it. Yes, evolution is a horrible kludge. But also yes, biology is complicated and interconnected in ways we don't fully realise. "Well I'll just strip out the carburettor since I'm sure the engine will work fine without it" is not the way to go about this.
I understand your instinct, but the particulars of how the mTOR and FOXO3A networks work strongly suggest that we'll need to break them up to prevent aging. When I said they're "shockingly crude", that's misleading in that the details of regulation are incredibly complicated, but correct in that they can be approximated as being just one bistable network, which has one stable state in which mTOR and other genes responsible for growth, high metabolism, energy use, and reproduction (including everything from the cell cycle to sexual activity) are activated, and another stable state in which the FOXO transcription factors and stress-response genes are activated, increasing DNA repair, lipofuscin clearance, and apoptosis, inducing hibernation or dauer, reducing immune response, and lowering metabolic rate. Permanent activation of FOXO3A and repression of mTOR after maturity might greatly reduce aging, but would make you weak, tired, sick, and asexual.
This network is ancient and evolutionarily conserved; it's found in every animal, and even in yeast. It presumably evolved because bistability is easy to evolve, whereas I can't think of a single case of tristability that exists at the molecular or even the cellular level [EDIT: Hormesis within a cell can be tristable.] I expect that the basic network evolved to use nutrient levels to decide when to turn the cell cycle on and off, and all sorts of activities that should correlate with high or low nutrient levels were then tacked onto the network, like dauer, hibernation, immune response, muscle growth, dominance behavior, and sexual activity.
But you shouldn't have to reduce muscle growth, sexual arousal, and immune response just to do some DNA repair or clear some lipofuscin. These networks tie together all sorts of mechanisms just because they all correlate, directly or indirectly, with nutrient levels. It's a fatal design that was easy to evolve.
As we no longer starve to death regularly, it no longer makes sense to use a network that turns our anti-aging mechanisms off when nutrient levels are low. Or does it?
One predictable catastrophe that might result from breaking up these networks is that we might then activate all these systems at the same time, and this might overload our cells' capacity in many different ways. For example, the administration of too much siRNA to a cell clogs the siRNA machinery, which is used largely to prevent cancer. Therefore, high doses of siRNAs induce cancer. That's why I said we need to study the maximum capacity of all our cellular processes.
You have explained beautifully why some scientists (and also me, if you count phd students) don't want to have anything to do with machine learning. I couldn't care less for a black box that tells me how to intervene to accomplish X if I have to trade not understanding how the world works. If I did care for it i would have become an engineer.
(Alas, I am a physicist. What i do is pretty pointless anyway and yet people want to introduce machine learning even here)
I care little about living forever if I have to live forever in a world where we have diluted all things that make life worth living, such as science and (with dall e) art. ("But photography did not kill art" - yeah, no, ever seen a modern art museum? Photography definitely massacred art)
Edit : ok guys and gals, you convinced me about art.
As to photography massacring art, I disagree. If photography invalidated art, artists could have just adopted photography as a new tool. It was the stupid spiritualism of Theosophists and other late-19th-century Platonists that destroyed art. Their rebellion was against representation in general.
The problem was that they believed Plato's silly arguments that representation is mere re-presentation, inherently impure and corrupt, and can't communicate anything new. As Platonists, they believed that the use of a single consistent viewpoint in space and time, and of logical and causal relations between objects, to tell an original story, was theoretically impossible. They believed that all art was nothing but the depiction of, or pointing to, eternal Platonic Forms, and therefore was necessarily non-re-presentational. They were attempting to restart the process of divining the eternal Platonic Forms and finding new, abstract icons to symbolize them. They believed that Art-with-a-capital-A must communicate with the viewer not in any ordinary materialist re-presentational way, but by the artist opening up a connection to a spiritual world of Platonic essences, and drawing something which would inspire the viewer with the same transcendental intuition of essence.
This is never taught anymore (see Evans 2014 for a brief explanation of why it has been suppressed), but is clear if you read the writings of Plato (especially the Meno and the parts in the Republic about poetry), and compare them with the writings of the original modern artists, e.g., Gauguin, Matisse, Kandinsky, Gleizes, Mondrian, or Malevich (see some of the references below). Highlight every occurence of "essence", "nature", "form", "ideal", "idea", "reality", "spirit", "pure", "absolute", "universal", "eternal", "timeless", "pre-existing", "higher", and "truth". Also look up the influence of theosophy on modern art, and count what fraction of the first modern artists were raised Catholic or Russian Orthodox.
Art was never destroyed; it was just forced out of academia and museums. But I would rather not even use the word "art"; Platonists have done so much damage with that word that we'd be better off without it. The logocentric assumption that the existence of the word "art" implies there is a Platonic essence of Art-with-a-capital-A, which specifies the One True Essence of Art; and that the business of artists is therefore to dialectically discover that essence, and expunge the art world of everything not matching that description; is totalitarian and stupid. I don't want to say that modern and post-modern art isn't art; I just want modernists and post-modernists to stop insisting that nothing else is.
Rina Arya (ed), 2014. Contemplations of the Spiritual in Art. Oxford & Bern: Peter Lang.
Michael Evans, 2014. "Out of Nothing : Painting and Spirituality." In Arya 2013 p. 77-96.
Albert Gleizes, 1922 (or 1923); transl 2000. La Peinture et ses lois (Painting and Its Laws). London: Francis Boutle.
Albert Gleizes & Jean Metzinger, 1912. "Cubism." In Harrison & Wood 1992, p. 187-196.
Charles Harrison & Paul Wood, eds., 1992. Art in Theory. Oxford: Blackwell.
Hans L.C. Jaffé (translator), 1971. De Stijl. NYC: H.N. Abrams.
Wassily Kandinsky, 1911; transl. Michael Sadler 2008. Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Floating Press.
Henri Matisse, 1908. Notes of a Painter (Notes d’un Peintre). In (Matisse & Flam 1978): 32-40.
Henri Matisse; transl. Jack Flam 1973; Dutton edition 1978. Matisse on Art. NYC: Dutton.
Piet Mondrian (Dutch "Mondriaan"), 1917. Neoplasticism in Painting (Dutch: De niewu beelding in de schilderkunst, literally "the new representation in painting"), 1. Introduction. (Dutch: "1. Inleiding"). De Stijl 1(1): 2-6. Translated in (Jaffé 1971 p. 36-39).
This might just be me being under the weather, but this made absolutely no sense. "Modern art" (a term that is completely useless) is bad because... something something, it was all made by neo-Platonists and started experimenting with abstract forms?
As someone actively involved in the art world, what you're describing doesn't resemble the art world at all except in the form of a fever dream. I assure you that there's probably like two people who think like that last paragraph you shot out and no more- the overwhelming majority of artists believe that art is a highly subjective and personal experience, not some quest to manifest the One True Art.
The last time I felt this level of alienated confusion listening to someone talk about something I know from the inside was when my (mentally unstable, Protestant) neighbor cornered me when I was a kid and asked me if my (Catholic) mother had stolen her cat as a blood offering to Mary, before launching into a Chick-esque homily about how I needed to repent and leave the Catholic church because it was a Satanic cult that invented atheism, homosexuality, and Islam.
I'm not talking about what people say today. I was writing about why modern artists did what they did more than 100 years ago. I gave you a long list of references. If you read them and still don't believe that modern art is Platonist, I'll discuss it with you them.
Right, so what do you mean by "modern art"? Once again, I will repeat that the term "modern art" is a useless word. Do you mean works produced today, or works produced in the late 19th to early 20th centuries, or everything between those two eras and inclusive of them?
The world works on many different levels. I'm talking, for example, about a bioinformatician who uses large correlation matrices from time-sequence exome sequencing experiments, in order to reconstruct a gene-regulation network which produces the same correlations. That bioinformatician will have a much better grasp on how gene regulation works than would a molecular biologist studying exactly how hemoglobin binds oxygen. A neuroscientist identifying the basins of attraction in the olfactory bulb which correspond to different smells will have a much better grasp on how the brain constructs categories, and thus on what concepts mean and how words work, than would a neuroscientist who studies neurotransmitters.
Would you say that Newton "didn't know how the world worked" because he didn't understand the electromagnetic interactions that make collections of atoms act like solid bodies? Would you say Edward Jenner was an "engineer" because he didn't know how viruses replicate?
By your standards, you will /never/ know how the world works; or, if you do find out, you'll never know that you know. There always might be levels beneath your theory that you cannot yet discern. In my opinion, the more-abstract levels are more interesting, and more beautiful, than particle interactions. But that's why I'm not a physicist.
I think you misunderstand my point. I totally agree with you regarding emergence and yes, probably fundamental physics is not even the most interesting one (but qft is quite nice anyway).
What I meant to say is that I am very scared that the moment we have neural networks science will become superfluous. Will we still care about understanding the moment in which a neural network understand in our place? Or we will just buy its answer, without caring why said answer is true?
Ah. Well, a neural network is just one way of solving optimization problems (and machine learning isn't just neural networks). In terms of freeing the analyst from having to personally inspect all of the datapoints, it isn't qualitatively different from using regression to find the linear model that minimizes least-squared error, or principal component analysis and k-nearest-neighbor clustering to solve classification problems. If I do a regression analysis to ask whether strict gun laws reduce homicide, and get an answer, it doesn't really make sense to say that, because I didn't compute all of the prediction errors by hand, I don't care why that answer is true. I know why that answer is true. I know what the dataset is and how I gathered it, and what I mean when I say that data gives that answer. That's still true if you use a neural network instead of regression.
> I know [...] what I mean when I say that data gives that answer. That's still true if you use a neural network instead of regression
This is true in a very literal sense: “that data gives that answer” means “that answer is the output of the regression/neural network”.
But it seems harder to understand the meaning of a neural network’s output, compared to a regression’s. They’re both optimization problems, but what is optimized is much clearer in one case.
(Not arguing about the original subject of using tools to understand the world, I think I mostly agree with you there. But tools can be more powerful and still allow you to reach less understanding.)
If you live in the Western US, I'd advise going to Omega Mart, House of Eternal Return, or Convergence Station before you try to close the book on art. We've started to graduate from the kiddy pool in terms of Art, is all. The museums can't contain real Art anymore.
Good modern art isn't in modern art museums. But ever browsed around DeviantArt, or artsy Tumblr, or any webcomic-hosting site? There are as many people doing great, non-abstract work as ever, in a bewildering variety of styles. It's just not the stuff that gets shown off much in museums anymore, but so what?
There's a book called Diaspora by Greg Egan, that I quite like. Early on in the book, when the main character is quite young, they're studying and learning maths, reinventing things for themself because that's far more interesting than simply being told the (long since discovered) solutions. It's well understood that it might take millenia or even longer to get tot the knowledge frontier, but that's fine because everyone is immortal (or close enough; I don't know if they have a plan to outlive the stars)
We're surrounded by art! A single AAA game has more sculpture in it than any museum. Visual media has become nearly commoditised -- you can get an illustration or painting of whatever you want for ridiculously cheap.
Art hasn't disapeared, it's just been abstracted one level up: illustration and sculpture is used in service of stories or games, but art-as-a-transcendent-experience is thriving.
Modern art is just a series of status symbols, made available to the public.
I'll take an intermediate position: Photography massacred art for a century (art barely survived in the niches of surrealists and S.F. book illustrators). But then came photoshop et al. and art was rebirthed.
BTW, hat tip to the wardens of traditional art: the presidential portraitist and the court illustrators
What I think we have lost is architecture as art. This place was a *carpet factory*, built with hundreds of dedicated craftspeople, just because they could: they wanted to build something beautiful (and, in a rare victory for planning systems being useful, satisfy the bureaucrats)
I don't think we are anywhere close to building a complete systems biology model of any eukaryotic cell, let alone an organism, we can barely simulate a mycoplasma for a short time. ML won't help if we don't have the data to ground its predictions in reality.
I've also worked in extracting knowledge from medical journal articles, on a system the NIH is developing called SemRep. It's pretty good, but its developer doesn't like to let anybody use it, and doesn't want to use machine learning or logical inference.
But I didn't write anything about trying to extract data from journal articles. I wrote "high-throughput experimental data" and "intelligent robotic systems which used cell simulators to autonomously devise and conduct experiments". PDB and KEGG are just the kind of manually-curated databases I'm complaining about. They're cool, and very valuable as gold standards for validating ML systems. But I think we have a better chance of curing aging with massive amounts of uncertain, poorly-curated, but homogenous data (not compiled from dozens of different sources) than with a small amount of labor-intensive, highly-curated data.
We're still not very good at reconstructing genetic networks or at cell simulation, but I think we're limited by questionable math. In the case of genetic network reconstruction, people always throw away the "noisy" data, without considering the likelihood that most of the data of an evolved system is in that "noise". Biologists always want to respond to inaccuracy by throwing away more data, in the false hope that using only the "purest" data will give better answers. This works with man-made systems, because in intelligently engineered systems, each mechanism operates through a small number of deliberate causal interactions. (It also works in natural systems like avalanches, or accidentally-made man-made systems like language, which have power-law distributions of size or causal importance, but it would take too long to explain why I don't think gene networks are such systems.)
There's no good reason to assume it will work in reconstructing an evolved genetic regulatory network. I've never seen a study that showed the full distribution of the fold-reduction (or fold-amplification) by which other genes modulate a single gene's expression. (You could probably estimate that distribution from the raw data of full-exome sequencing time series experiments.) If that distribution is normal (which seems to me like a good guess), then throwing away all regulators less than 2 or 3 standard deviations above the mean (which most people do) throws away most of what you're looking for.
(Also, we arguably just haven't got enough full-exome time-series data, nor enough hybrid omics data, e.g., genomic, metabolomic, lipidomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic data for the same sample.)
Another common problem is that, instead of computing the expected information content of a judgement (e.g., that this protein is a kinase), or at least the expected value of a judgement, bioinformaticians are always using receiver operating curves; or worse, false positives and false negatives; or worse (and what we always did at JCVI), just counting false positives and ignoring false negatives. Information theory is rare in bioinformatics today.
Another is that they're always trying to stuff things into discrete categories (or worse, true and false) so they can throw away those nasty probability distributions and use fast pipelined systems instead of complicated ones with bidirectional propagation of probabilities. This is largely because high-throughput on big data seems to require the speed of relational databases, and relational databases don't let you store probabilities of conclusions as functions of the probabilities of the inputs. The ubiquitous use of pipelines is itself yet another problem. This is not an easy problem to solve, but nobody's even trying.
That's an interesting approach, though right now fully automating an experimental pipeline sounds like pure science fiction. I'll grant you that the homogenity of such a dataset alone would be an incredible boon, as right now bioinformatics is gated not necessarily by scarcity of data as by its heterogenity (comparing any -omics data from GEO is pointless unless it was done with the exact same protocol, and probably the exact same lab).
I'd say the CS aspects are the easiest part, and the fully autonomous robot experimenter sounds more like a governmental Project Manhattan than something done with startup funding. On the other hand pulling this off correctly eliminates so many problems - run all experiments in standarized microfluidic environments, have the whole thing hermetically sealed and disinfected... You'd require a human in the loop to provide fresh reagents and microfluidic chips and remove spent ones, I suppose.
IIRC, Watson is (or was, when I was briefed on it at the Naval Research Labs) mostly old-school symbolic, rule-based AI systems joined together with duct tape. It's labor-intensive, and not very amenable to large data matrices or massively parallel computing. I think Watson's approach could work for medical applications, but not for curing aging. And I don't know if machine learning and big matrices would work well in medicine.
But AI in medicine isn't really a technical problem. We had expert systems that outperformed doctors at diagnosis in the 1980s. The bottlenecks for AI in medicine have always been doctors, government regulation, insurance companies, and the general human distrust of computers.
Also, Wikipedia says IBM sold Watson Health in January for a billion dollars, so it might not need saving.
Thanks for your insights. They make me think that AI will largely fail in medicine. Medicine is human problem, not a technical problem. In most cases diagnosis and treatment plan is easy. Today even patient could do this part themselves with the help of an app. The hard part is to actually convince patients to follow the treatment plan. People are not very rational by nature and when encountering disease they have even more worries and distrust. Doctors' task is to convince patients to take a certain medicine and not to take a certain medicine (both equally important).
The question is whom you can trust? Even with highly powerful AI you will need a strict regulations around it to ensure that people are not sold snake oil solutions. A lot of people will be professionally engaged in medicine to navigate these regulations.
"They make me think that AI will largely fail in medicine. Medicine is human problem, not a technical problem. In most cases diagnosis and treatment plan is easy."
But AI has repeatedly shown to do diagnosis not just competently, but *better*. Maybe this isn't the bottleneck, but better diagnosis and treatment plans cannot make things worse. If waht you're saying is true, then all it means is that doctors should leave the diagnosis and treatment plans to computers, and they should focus on the human side of things.
I am operating with the model that improving the current medicine will be providing only marginal gains. Diagnostics are correct in about 95% of cases. Improving remaining 5% will not cause a revolution.
For example, diabetes. It is very rare nowadays to misdiagnose it (even a simple fasting glucose test will give you correct diagnose in 99% of cases) and treatment is usually appropriate. Most issues are caused by patient non-adherence and cost of treatment (semaglutide is relatively expensive compared to metformin). Navigating these issues is hard and require human input.
It seems that most AI solutions are being applied in cancer therapeutics but the gains are very marginal. Even if we cured all cancer miraculously, the life expectancy in the UK increase by 2 years only. In comparison, Latvia needs to increase life-expectancy by 6 years to reach the current UK level. While AI solutions could and should be part of it, it really is a society wide problem how to make people to chose better lifestyle and adhere to medical care.
I think that Scott is right that spending money on better political causes can ultimately give the best returns (his recent failure notwithstanding). That would especially be true in less developed world.
Oh. Those are paywalled, so I can't read them past the first page. I'm a little suspicious that the second one is non-quantitative ("Watson recommended unsafe treatments" doesn't say how often it did that, or whether it recommended more unsafe treatments than doctors did). But I don't really have the time to read them now, so that's okay.
You can find both by a little googling, but if it's not worth your time to do that, it's even less worth my time to do it for you, right? Anyway, now you know there's a respectable opinion out there to the contrary (I linked the original articles so you would see these are not fly-by-night randos with a blog.)
I just read Blum and Blum's very recent paper, A theory of consciousness from a theoretical computer science perspective: Insights from the Conscious Turing Machine (CTM) https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2115934119
I might be fooling myself, but it seems to me that their CTM architecture might actually provide a solution to the hard problem of algorithmically conjuring consciousness from a machine. It also seems like it would be both buildable and testable. And yet, as far as I can tell, no one is even playing around with this approach, far less working seriously on implementing it.
So please feel free either to tell me what I'm missing here -- or else to get as excited about this as I am!
This appears to be a kitchen sink kind of model. I also found the presentation quite difficult to follow. Reference 49 is slightly clearer, with less extraneous waffle, but my initial impression is still quite negative: eminent older scientists weighing in about stuff outside their core competence. There might be an interesting model in there but only glimmers of it are visible to me through the verbiage, and I think this work comes across half-baked. I hope they work on a succinct presentation of the model and results aimed at a more specialist audience, but I suspect the model is so complex that few results can be proved rigorously, and there isn't really interest in models of stuff without results in AI or CS.
Well, even though the authors explicitly state that they're 'not looking to model the [human] brain', I think their model, even with all its simplifications, does in fact hew quite closely to my intuition of how the human brain actually works and what it does. In support of this, it may be somewhat pat, but I like how easily the CTM can accommodate eg blindsight with a couple of tweaks, and eg how it accounts for our impression of free will.
Plus and in particular, to me the CTM is unique in its ability to plausibly capture something very like the slippery emergence of consciousness. The heart of it, in section 3, being --
'We propose that CTM as a whole feels conscious, as the term is normally understood, as a consequence in part of the fact that the Model of the World processor views the "CTM" in its models of the world as conscious and that this view is broad-cast to all processors. Here, "CTM" is a simple learned representation of the much more complex CTM.'
Agreed. On re-reading this looks like a successful way to formalize the global workspace point of view. It doesn't seem to have extraneous moving parts yet still seems to capture some interesting phenomena of consciousness. My initial reading was too grumpy. Thanks for highlighting this work!
(Pretty antiphysicalist paper.) Just skimmed it so I may not have completely understood it.
>Our view is that consciousness is a property of all properly organized computing systems, whether made of flesh and blood or metal and silicon.
I don't buy functionalism, this is a pretty big assumption. At the end, consciousness is a physical and biological phenomenon and it must be explained in terms of physics and biology. Physical phenomena are not algorithms, they are described by algorithms. If I have a perfect simulation of fire, that's not real fire even if i cannot distinguish simulated measurements from real measurements. At the same time a simulation of the brain may or may not be conscious - we just don't know. This is the thing they should be arguing against but they don't do it.
Indeed their "processors" are quite implicit and kinda magical, aren't they? They are pretty much where the "magic" (read: not yet understood physics) of qualia happens and yet nowhere in the paper they explain them, they are just assumed. All this model seems to me compatible with a physicalist understanding in which the processors are the neural correlates of consciousness and qualia; lacking a purely informational description of these processors, they offer no justification that they could be made of silicon and that consciousness could emerge from a purely computational process. The model kinda try to explain what becomes conscious but not how.
"I don't buy functionalism, this is a pretty big assumption. At the end, consciousness is a physical and biological phenomenon and it must be explained in terms of physics and biology."
I think assuming that functionalism is false (which is what you're doing in asserting that consciousness is a physical and biological phenomenon) is at least as big an assumption as assuming that it's true.
Meh, so long as all known examples of conscious being are made up of meat i would say that the empirical evidence is on the side of physicalism
But anyway that's beside the point. The model doesn’t offer any good justification, it should provide an example in favour of functionalism but it's really convincing only if you already accept it. It seems quite circular to me.
Isn’t that kind of like saying that “flight is a biological phenomenon” a century or so ago?
Or, to say it the other way around, pretty much everything technological did not exist 50k years ago, which means there are innumerable examples of stuff where “all examples are biological” was true for thousands or millions of years and then it became false in a relatively short time window. I’d say that should lower our confidence on that kind of argument.
I have never said that you cannot have a non-organic conscious system. Flight is a physical phenomenon and to fly we have replicated the same physical phenomena.
What I meant to say is that consciousness is physical, not a result of information processing, therefore mere information processing (as in this model) may not be not enough, you need to replicate the same physical phenomena that give origin to consciousness.
Pretty much like an airplane replicate the same physical phenomenon that give origin to flight
Edit: Put it differently. The physical substrate (may) matter (pun not intented). Doesn’t need to be meat, could be something else. For flight the physical substrate definitely matter: doesn't need to be a bird, could be an airplane, but you cannot fly on a computer simulating a plane.
Functionalism says that the physical substrate doesn't matter for consciousness, provided you process the correct information. That's what we don’t know and I am arguing against
Edit2: just as an example, if you accept functionalism you need to accept that the "china brain" actually perceive qualia in the same way an actual brain does. Which. Well.
This is pretty close to my PoV, but I see the matter as more of asynchronous parallel vs synchronous parallel computation. It might take the former to generate our qualia by the way of contrast of intermediary activation states. So we might be able to extract cognitive algorithms out of our organic architecture and even build GAI with that but it wouldn't have any qualia unless you were imitating biological 'hardware' to compute it on.
Well, “physical substrate may matter” is a sentence with a complicated range of meanings, for both flight and consciousness.
Things that fly can be made out of paper, (dead) wood, plastic, metal, and all sorts of other things. If you allow flight in other kinds of atmospheres, I think in theory we could make flying things out of almost anything, including even plasma for some kind of stretched definitions of flying. (Degenerate matter is probably stretching it too far, though. It might work for very low & short flights very close to neutron star surfaces, but a submarine is probably closer to “flying” than anything in those conditions.) I would argue that it is reasonable to describe this situation as “substrate doesn’t matter”; not in the sense that you don’t need any, but that you can use almost anything for it.
(On a different but related note, it’s also interesting is that most things we can make that fly do so using methods very different from how the organic things fly. It’s not that it’s impossible to build flight machines with the flapping-wing method, it’s just way harder and has all sort of disadvantages. If we made non-organic consciousness, it might also work very differently, and our current intuitions would be about as accurate as Aristotle’s were about rocket flight.)
Now, this is an analogy, not a proof. In as much as this analogy holds, it should mean that consciousness might work on any kind of substrate, including silicon. And yes, even the “china brain”, though it would “perceive qualia in the same way an actual brain does” the same way a meticulously-constructed human-powered construct that mimics a sparrow, in an environment with gravity and atmosphere chosen very carefully to scale such that the construct actually flies would “navigate air currents in the same way an actual sparrow does”.
Which, yeah, I guess if you would watch a zoomed out and accelerated video would look the same, assuming the human that powered it didn’t die too soon.
(I’ve no idea if the scaling factors required would allow multiple wing flaps in a lifetime. I’m almost sure they wouldn’t allow anything resembling a Turing-test–passing conversation during a life-time in the “chinese brain” experiment, either, and as-sure-as-I-could-be that it wouldn’t allow qualia-level simulation. But that’s a different discussion.)
Anyway, I’m not actually sure we‘re disagreeing. I agree that consciousness is physical, but information processing is also physical. You seem to disagree with the second statement, and I don’t quite get what you mean. You need to do stuff with matter to process information.
For consciousness it *might* be significant that the matter is flesh rather than silicon. But as far as I can tell we have lots of examples of other processes where this is not true, and I can’t think of any evidence that would support consciousness being in a different class.
To me, any argument that reduces to “p-zombies can exist”, has lost the argument. Or rather, it's been reduced to an instance of a debate with a that I'm no longer interested in rehashing.
Which won't stop me, of course:
Perfectly simulated fire can't burn real me, but it can definitely (as in, by definition) burn simulated me, can definitely cause perfectly simulated third degree burns, and definitely cause simulated me to emit perfectly simulated screams of agony.
And if those screams occur in simulated me for the same reasons as they would in real me, then either either simulated screams are caused by real suffering (ie, simulated consciousness is still real), or real screams are causally disconnected from real suffering (ie, real conciousness isn't real).
Ok so first of all, that's not even what a p zombie is. A p zombie is a physical system which is identical to a brain yet does not have consciousness. A brain and the physical system that simulate a brain are completely different - one is made of meat and the other is made of silicon. That the pattern of electrons in the silicon oxide layers encode in some way the informational properties of the brain doesn’t meant that "inside the simulation " they are the same thing. There is no such thing as the inside of a simulation, it's just a way we conceptualize it.
Information does not really exist, not in the same way matter exists. It exist in the same way numbers exist, encoded in a system but completely indifferente to the physics of said systems.
So no, I totally disagree that the simulated screams happen for the same reasons. At the physical level, the physical causes are completely different. Then, at some abstract level, one is encoded in the other.
Then again, it may very well be that consciousness is not a physical but an informational property. In that case, the simulation would be conscious. But that is up to empirical study (that I have no idea how to conduct. All experiments i can think of will answer that a computer is not conscious), not armchair philosophy.
Fair enough. If you don't buy functionalism -- which I take to mean that you rule out the possibility that a mind might be substrate independent -- then it follows that the CTM model, by definition, isn't going to work for you.
Fwiw though, I don't think it's the LTM processors themselves that are 'magical', rather it's the architecture that they're part of that brings the magic; as the authors put it, it's the 'CTM as a whole [that] feels conscious.'
Of course, whether consciousness really would emerge from the CTM is unknown at this point. I gather that you think it wouldn't, but to me it seems that it might. And it would certainly be worth experimentally investigating by building one of these puppies and seeing what happens.
I've never been able to understand the argument of perfect simulation of X not being actually X. If the simulation of X is perfect it behaves like X in every way. How can something behave like fire in every way, while not being fire?
Playing chess is a physical phenomena, in the end. That doesn't prevent us from making programs that can play chess. And whether a program possess a chess playing ability is a question of algorithm, that it executes. Why won't the same be the case for consciousness?
Check 1 2 1 2
Champions League final tonight, pray for us!
FiveThirtyEight is giving odds Liverpool 65%/Real Madrid 35% of winning, so now I'm nervous!
Still, it should be a beautiful night in the City of Lights, the weather here in Ireland at least is beautiful (for the weekend, getting cloudy again Monday) so here we go!
EDIT: Curse of FiveThirtyEight strikes again - Real win their 14th Champions League with 1 goal to 0. Courtois (the Real Madrid goalkeeper) had the perfect game, saving everything.
It's a shame that the universe wasted it's chance for plucky underdogs to get outplayed by four seperate teams and somehow get through and win the cup on ree-al-bloody-madrid.
It's also a shame that football discourse is filled with outcome bias even more than normal.
And Toni Kroos got really pissed off when a tv reporter tacitly asked about what his team had beeen up against. Couldn't admit his luck.
Liverpool had all the chances but couldn't get past the keeper. A bit of luck with the disallowed goal but then Real took their chance in the second half.
I sort of expected that kind of result, but it's disappointing all the same. Ah well, next year!
I have tried silexian based on Scott's recommendation. Seems to have a bit of a calming effect (after a bad few days) but I got a lot of lavender burpies. It feels like I literally washed my mouth with soap! Is there a way to mitigate this effect?
I created a prediction market for whether fusion will provide >2% of US electricity by 2050:
https://manifold.markets/J/will-fusion-provide-2-of-us-electri
Starting very low because D-D requires much higher temperature than D-T and we can't even break even with D-T yet and T/He3 fuels are prohibitively expensive until you solve D-D fusion. The number of neutrons produced from fusion will be nowhere near enough to breed as much T from Lithium as it consumes. Maybe excess neutrons from fission plants can will be used to produce enough T for a few reactors, but fusion is probably never going to provide a large fraction of grid power. I want Helion to succeed but based on my understanding of the physics I'm 98% confident that they're the next Theranos. They claim they'll be able to break even with D-D but nobody else has even solved D-T yet, and that's orders of magnitude easier.
"It's pretty much an evolutionary environment that selects for chaotic nonsense, if anything makes too much sense then the locusts can (and will) descend and strip it to the bone. That might make for a fascinating experiment in a jar but not a very good way to run a society "
https://twitter.com/BeltedEve/status/1527848871896174592
This at least sounds plausible to me as a consequence of the efficient market hypothesis.
In theory, it means people need to settle for typical returns. Does it work out that way?
I don't know if people here are familiar with the Amazon Vine programme, but it is immensely frustrating.
For me, anyway, and I will tell you why.
I found that when I was leaving reviews on products purchased through Amazon, I had this little flair about "Vine Voice" included. I had no idea what that was, and it was only by looking this up that I found out what it was all about:
https://www.amazon.com/vine/help?ref_=pe_12426300_640160870
"What is Amazon Vine?
Amazon Vine is a program that enables a select group of Amazon customers to post opinions about new and pre-release items to help their fellow customers make educated purchase decisions. Customers are invited to become Amazon Vine Voices based on the trust they have earned in the Amazon community for writing accurate and insightful reviews. Amazon Vine provides members with free copies of products that have been submitted to the program by vendors. Since Voices will receive access to products that are not yet available on the market, their opinions may be among the first posted on a product’s detail page. Amazon does not influence the opinions of Amazon Vine members, nor do we modify or edit their reviews."
Well, free goodies, what is there to complain about, you ask?
No free goodies, because I'm not American. And they didn't even ask me before slapping this label on, and there was no damn way to tell them "Knock it off, I'm not American":
"I am not a U.S. person (either a U.S. citizen or a resident alien). Do I need to provide any information to Amazon?
No. Unfortunately, you will not be able to continue to participate in Amazon Vine. The Vine program is open only to U.S. persons."
It was only today, after they sent me an email inviting me to once again submit reviews, that I was able to get taken off this programme, by filling out the tax questionnaire. Once it was Officially IRS Not An American, *then* they booted me:
"Your Vine account has been closed for not meeting our program participation criteria. You will still be able to view your Vine reviews and Vine order history but will no longer be able to request Vine items. We encourage you to continue posting unbiased reviews to be able to participate in the program again in the future."
Which is fine by me! Being a "Vine Voice" gave me no benefits, I had never requested or received any Vine items, and I did not like Amazon using me to sell their goods by shilling me as a reviewer who should be trusted, so if I said I liked product X, you can be sure it's good so please buy product X!
But damn it, Jeff, can you tear yourself away from your midlife crisis with your new armcandy to fix your damn website so people can inform it "Believe it or not, other countries than America exist and I am not an American and this bloody thing does not apply to me, stop using my name, thanks and kisses"?
The CA primaries have me thinking about tactical voting, and it occurred to me that the Instant Runoff Voting that people keep advocating is also vulnerable to tactical voting, due to the risk of a second choice being eliminated early.
For example, if you have something like 49%-A, 48%-BC, 3%-C, then the B supporters have an incentive to vote for their second choice C instead of B in order to prevent the hated A from winning. IRV is often touted as letting people vote their heart instead of compromising on the most electable candidates, but that's exactly what happens in this example!
Given that tactical voting is a problem anyway, it seems like it makes sense to just stick with FPTP, which has the simplest and easiest to understand rules. And simplicity is an underlooked virtue, given how confused people are and how controversial vote counting is even in existing elections. Just look at the shitshow that happened during the NYC mayoral election vote counting.
"B supporters have an incentive to vote for their second choice C instead of B"
Voting C=1 and B=2 will not increase the chances of A losing. It will only increase the chances of C beating B, which is not what that voter wants. But since the chances of C winning are extremely unlikely, voting either way will probably have the same outcome. (I'm Australian, by the way, ask me anything you like about instant runoff voting)
The complexity is certainly a downside. Approval voting is a much simpler but still highly-regarded voting method - this org does a lot of work advocating for it https://electionscience.org/
The point is that the B voters prefer C to A and thus are encouraged to vote C first. Imagine that B and C are candidates from the same party and A the opposing party for instance.
Ah, so in Australia, each party can only have one candidate for the lower house, which prevents that. There's something more complicated for the upper house.
How are the parties' candidates chosen? Is there an intra-party election? Just insiders in smoke-filled rooms?
It's entirely up to the party, different parties have different processes and there's definitely a lot of backroom politics. But if they make a bad choice, the voting method makes it easy for them to lose the seat.
One fun story: in a safe Labor seat, Labor opted not to run a popular community figure, in favor of an established politician who had lost a factional war. They lost the seat to an independent, thanks to the community outrage (also worth mentioning the area has a high Vietnamese population - the winning candidate and the original rejected community figure are both Vietnamese)
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-05-21/nsw-fowler-kristina-keneally-federal-election-2022/101088072
The idea that candidates just get chosen arbitrarily by party insiders would strike Americans as terribly undemocratic (although that's how presidential candidates were often chosen prior to 1972). At least on paper, parties are much weaker in the US than they are in parliamentary systems.
The way it works in the US is that there are two rounds of elections, a primary election in spring or summer followed by general elections in November. In most cases, each party holds a separate primary election to determine that party's candidate, and then the winners of each primary face off in the general election in November.
Party primaries are usually, but not always, restricted to voters of that party. However, party registration is just a box you check on your voter registration - there are no party dues or anything required to vote in a primary (this would be seen as an unconsitutional outrage in the US). People sometimes switch party registrations to vote in the other sides' primary.
California has a different system where primaries are *nonpartisan*. Every candidate, regardless of party preference, competes in a single primary election, and every voter can vote in the primary, regardless of party. The top two vote-getters of the primary advance to the general election in November. Also, candidates can list any party as their "party preference" on the ballot, and do not need the consent of the actual party to do so.
In the US, candidates are expected choose their party, rather than the other way around (though in practice, it tends to amount to the same thing.)
General elections usually only have two serious candidates (the Democrat and the Republican), but primaries are often hotly contested, with many people vying to win the party's nomination, and they can be highly volatile and subject to tactical voting as a result.
Incidentally, I actually just engaged in some tactical voting myself in the CA primary, voting for the Republican in hopes of stopping the 2nd place Democrat from advancing to the general.
Scott, is there any chance to see the ratings for the non-finalists (after you've decided which extra ones get honorable mentions etc). It's hard to know how it was received otherwise.
Seconding this! I'm curious to see how my personal scores compare to community scores.
Manifold is predicting 80% chance of open source DALL-E substitute within 2 years. Alphazero to leelazero was much quicker than that, but getting enough good training data is harder here. I presume the open source version will be uncensored or trivially uncensorable by a mod. Not sure what google and openAI are accomplishing by refusing to generate sexy things. Avoiding bad press perhaps but no real world benefit beyond that as far as I can see.
Distributed network of volunteers can provide plenty of compute and plenty of web crawling for training data but maybe the training data quality would have issues. I predict 90% chance of an open source dall-E substitute within 2 years, considering how quickly google replicated it with Imagen.
Trying to avoid bad press but no real world benefit sounds like than more than half of PR efforts of any modern corporation.
I read this article on the BBC today https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/85qihtvw6e/the-faces-from-chinas-uyghur-detention-camps
I knew it was bad there, but these are genuine 1984 levels of state oppression. I feel like even North Korea does not do this (mainly because they don't have the tech).
It made me feel physically ill for the most of the day and it also left me wondering whether there are any feasible long-run strategies for regime change in China (or even short-run ones, but there probably aren't any). Is there anything the West could realistically do to bring the Chinese communist party down?
I guess that one strategy would be a gradual shift from manufacturing in China towards India, South America and Africa. China would stagnate or get poorer and once the country does not keep getting richer, people there might be less supportive of the regime. And if not, then at least the regime will stop getting more powerful and become weaker internationally instead. I don't know much about economic geography, but I'd say China is not all that interesting in terms of its raw resources and the West mostly uses it for cheap production. But India can probably do it cheaper already and most African countries can do that too.
I suppose that both India and most of Sub-Saharan Africa lacks the infrastructure (and stability, in case of many countries in Africa). But it does not seem like these are insurmountable problems. Also, geopolitically it might be wise to invest in Africa to reduce the Chinese influence there.
I am not sure what is going on with Latin America. The countries there have a reasonably well-developed infrastructure (in most regions), they almost all speak either Spanish or Portuguese (easy to learn languages for English speakers, plus a lot of people there speak at least some English), closer to the US than China is. The corruption there is fairly high and stability is an issue in some countries. But corruption is high in China as well, plus China has a complete disregard for patents and copyright which makes the real costs of production in China much higher. Not sure how expensive Latin American countries are, I guess Chile might be a bit expensive, but for instance Colombia might be only slightly more expensive than China?
Is there anything else that might be done? I am afraid that Milton Friedman was unfortunately wrong on China when he predicted that when people there become richer, they will demand more freedom as well and communism in China would end. It looks like the comrades found the mythical "third way" unfortunately, and it is no less ugly than real communism (except that it is probably more sustainable and gives them more power).
In any case, like with the conflict with Russia, the West (plus allied nations like Japan, South Korea, Australia, ...) is extremely powerful economically and given that a war with China is even more unthinkable than a war with Russia (which would be easy pickings if they had no nukes, the same cannot be said of China), I guess that any such strategy has to involve using that leverage. Only trouble is, a lot of that is tied to cooperation with China, so that is why I feel that shifting this away from China elsewhere would be a necessary first step that would weaken China and strengthen the global influence of the West.
Unfortunately, I think the only thing that will end the CCP would be total war. And also unfortunately, I think it's necessary and inevitable that this will happen. I do not see there being any other option to put this to an end, as, unfortunately it seems like they found a 'third way', which is brutally authoritarian and anti-humanitarian, but not incompetent enough to collapse by itself.
The only solution I can think of is that the entire civilized world gets together and delivers the following ultimatum to the CCP leadership: 'surrender now and you will be spared.' If they accept, there will be regime change in china and this will end. If they decline, there would have to be regime change by force.
You can't force regime change on a nuclear power. Well, you can *try,* but you're rolling dice with the entire planet if you do.
>I’m typing this on an iPhone so I’m in no position to throw stones.
I remember thinking pretty much exactly this every time I listened to someone spout some hot take about Phil Mickelson's comments on that Saudi golf league. It wasn't an impressive sentiment, but also not one that I believe anyone in the US can claim a moral high ground on.
Looking for career advice in a broad what should I do with my life kind of way. I recently graduated from a prestigious music conservatory but because of an overuse injury I've had to give up pursuing a classical music career. While doing my masters I built and sold my own publishing business, but besides being self-employed I have no work experience outside of the classical music world.
I'm looking for career ideas that don't require me to do more school but would make use of my skills (hard worker, self-motivated, good writer, fast learner). So far, most "no experience necessary" job listings that have decent pay are all in sales. I'm fairly confident that I would not make a great salesperson however.
Any former classical musicians successfully pivoted to a new career? I really want to be done with school but I have no idea how to change careers after spending my whole life pursuing one in classical music. I know I could just do some kind of coding bootcamp but my experience with coding in the past has led me to believe that I wouldn't enjoy it long-term. Any advice/ideas appreciated!
https://startup.jobs/music?page=2 seems like a starting point. I'd be looking at startups that want people who understand music from a theory perspective to start, and I'd make that a daily part of what you do. If you find companies that make music related products, do cold outreach saying "I have this degree and all this knowledge; what do you have that might make sense for me?"
Now's not a great time for startups, but you might find something that way.
Also: people are going to overwhelmingly push you towards programming, but jobs with "product" in the name are more likely to intersect with your ablities than engineering jobs as a general rule.
Well, maybe try something on the intersection of (classical) music and coding?
For example - video games tend to have music component, and there are fairly complex RPG / MMORPG worlds which put heavy emphasis on creating immersive experience...
I think you won't lose anything by trying the coding bootcamp.
At 25 I was a philosopher that, because of a long story, was stranded in a dictatorial country. Of course, my philosophy degree and my love for ideas were not a way of making a life there.
I ended up doing a sales job like the one you described. Of course, it was a nightmare for me. I started to learn programming...
Fast forward ten years: I love programming, I have a nice salary, nice living (in a new country of course), nice job, and enough time to read about the topic that I love that is philosophy.
Give it a try.
Maybe this is not something for good, but what about remote writing jobs? You can find some via search engines.
In a hypothetical future world where SEC is disbanded for one reason or another, how would investing look like? Immediate thought is that SPY would cease to be a solid conservative choice since the top valuation companies in America would be various crypto ponzies.
You don't need a hypothetical future world - you have an actual historical world to refer to. It wasn't great!
I think the opposition to preservatives leads to increased energy costs and wasted food, but I don't have numbers. I'm also uncertain about the risks/benefits from various preservatives.
Thoughts?
The simple answer is that in most cases (exceptions: cassava, potatoes, a few others) making storage modifications to increase shelflife costs time and money, and decreases the nutrition capability vs immediate consumption as fresh. However, in the natural world, there is significant variation in supply, and it has always made sense to modify an over abundance of milk, cod, cabbage, whatever NOW into a different and slightly less form (cheese, salt cod, kimchee) for use LATER.
A classic example of "is this really worth it" was canned spinach. (In contrast, most everyone likes white bread - with the fast-spoiling protein germ removed - better than whole wheat. Same with rice.)
1900s innovations in refrigeration (by which we mean 'freezing') made it possible to store food so that the taste and texture was less much affected. (People had been doing this in northern regions in the winter for forever, technology made this possible year round everywhere.) At the present moment, commercial freezing is the best, most economical way to supply high quality produce, aside from home production. Produce that is grown for commercial fresh sale tends to be somewhat reduced in quality due to the long shipping period, and a tremendous amount goes to waste. (Even true for larger farmers markets.) Even worse, unlike commercial processing, waste at grocery stores is unlikely to be composted or fed to animals, due to logistics, cost, and/or local ordinances.
The treatment of meat is even more stark - because the shelf life of fresh meat is even less, and the pathogen (vs spoilage) microbes are more concerning.
Bread - which is a relatively shelf stable product - is an interesting one, as can be seen here: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/28/bread-additives-chemicals-us-toxic-america What I find interesting is what is COMPLETELY missing from the discussion, which is that European breads have a notoriously short shelf life, and will develop mold in very short order (in my experience, less than 4 days.) This means that shipping bread from central bakeries is pretty limited, and without the preservatives, lots of local bakeries stay in business. (Not down playing the vital need for small local businesses, just that a lot of food safety laws are like this - not so much public interest as private.)
In any case - yes, increasing the shelf stability of food reduces waste and (depending on the type of storage) can reduce storage energy/infrastructure costs. There is a trade off from basic physical (canning, freezing, toasting, smoking) and chemical (salt, sugar, vinegar) preservations in terms of taste & quality. The stability offered by modern chemicals (often added to packaging and with a low transfer to food) mostly applies to less modified/more shelf stable items such as breads. These are generally accepted as safe and are almost certainly contributing to fewer deaths per year than are happening from bleeding gut ulcers from aspirin.
However, there are a multitude of other ways that we waste food - labeling recalls, allergen contamination recalls, single-source ingredients, nation of origin, and plain old refusal to eat old liver.
(Apologies for the length of the answer, and lack of numbers, I deleted the first two versions which were much much too long.)
Thanks for the substantial answer.
It's noticeable that canning works pretty well for corn and beans, but not well for green vegetables.
Yeap - and corn & beans are not 'true' veggies, and traditionally both corn/maize and beans were stored dry, with a multi year shelf life so long as you kept the weevils and rats out of them.
And still nobody can use lettuce in a form other than fresh.
Sauerkraut, kimchi and other pickled cabbage?
If I were to make a list of all the delicious (or allegedly delicious) ways that humans ferment vegetables, I would be here all day.
In the social revolution that took place in Spain in 1936, over a period of two years, people took power into their own hands and started to construct a completely different society based on anarchist principles.
Anarchist ideas had been gaining strength in Spain since the second half of the 19th century. The CNT, an anarcho-syndicalist trade union, was formed in 1910, and by 1936 was very powerful, having a membership of 1.5 million. By that time anarchist ideas were strong in the minds of the peasants. In fact, collectivisation had actually started in some areas of the countryside before the revolution. ?
On July 17th a military coup took place in Spanish Morocco which spread the next day to the peninsula. In the cities and villages the workers organised themselves to defeat the military uprising and thanks to their courage and initiative the fascist revolt was stopped in three-quarters of Spain. These people however were fighting not only to crush the fascist attempt to seize power, they were also fighting for a new social order in Spain.
As soon as the fascists were defeated, workers’ militias were set up independent of the state. The factories in the cities were taken over by the workers, and in the rural areas the lands of the fleeing fascists and fascist sympathisers were taken over. In the rural parts of the Republican zone, under the influence of CNT and FAI (Federation of Iberian Anarchists) members, collectivisation was the most far reaching. Usually it was the members of the CNT or the FAI who called general meetings in the villages and pushed for collectivisation.
At these meetings people voluntarily pooled whatever land, tools and cattle they possessed. To this was added whatever land had been expropriated from the large land owners. “People who had nothing to bring to the collective were admitted with the same rights and duties as the rest”. [1] Soon almost two-thirds of all the land in the area controlled by anti-fascist forces was taken over and collectivised. In all between five and seven million people were involved.
…
Unlike in Soviet Russia, collectivisation was not forced on people and those who did not wish to join the collectives were allowed to do so on one condition: they could keep only as much land as they and their family could work and could not hire anyone to work for them. People who refused to join collectives were called “individualists”.
In keeping with the anarchist principle that there is no freedom unless everyone is free, people believed that participation in the collectives should always be voluntary. The collectivists were by far the majority in the countryside, however they made special efforts to respect the choice made by the individualists and they were not condemned. In many areas the individualists, encouraged by the example set by the collective, eventually joined the collectives voluntarily and their numbers declined.[7]
The individualists often benefited from the collectives. In Calanda for example they received free electricity and paid no rent. They also paid low prices for any goods bought from the collective.
…
Communities were not interested in possessing more land purely for the sake of increasing their domain, but instead they wanted only as much land as they could work themselves. There was a strong feeling of solidarity between the different collectives. For example, 1,000 collectivists from the Levant, which was quite advantaged, moved to Castille to help out. The collectives sent food and provisions regularly to the Front and also to the cities.
…
The collectivists in Albalate de Cinca sent the following to the unconquered city of Madrid in March 1937: ten live hogs, 500 kilos of bacon; 87 chickens; 50 rabbits; 2.5 tons of potatoes; 200 dozen eggs; vegetables and several dozen goats. “There was no question of payment or requisition by the military”.[9] Refugees fleeing from areas conquered by the fascist advance were also taken care of in the remaining collectives.
With the creation of the collectives people were no longer in competition with each other. They were also free from having to follow the orders of some boss, working land they did not own for little reward but instead had control over their work and had equal input in any important decisions made concerning the organisation of work and the management of resources. Thus liberated, the initiative and enthusiasm of the Spanish peasants knew no bounds. “Collectivisation has all the advantages of free co-operation: humane collective labour. Freedom and equality are its foundation.”[10]
New modern methods of farming were employed. Experimental farms were set up. Resources were used to modernise the farms and get new machinery. Communities gained greatly from having pooled resources. Expert technical advice was made available by the Regional Federation. In addition, parasitic middlemen and the wasteful bureaucracy and other control mechanisms necessary for maintaining a capitalist system were dispensed with.
Production greatly increased in the collectives. In some cases harvests increased by up to five times their pre-revolution level. In Alcoriza the collectivists established a sausage factory in an old convent. “Daily production has reached 500 kilos. This production is sent to the anti-fascist militia. They have also built a shoe factory where they produce leather and fabric footwear, not only for the residents of their village, but also for neighbouring communities.”[11]
In no collective did unemployment exist. This was a big change from life in Spain before the collectives where often peasants would be unemployed for half of the year.
…
The Spanish revolution is unique in history insofar as it is the only time when the masses consciously put anarchist theories into practice. Although the collectives were not given the chance to develop fully and were not perfect, they were nonetheless a great success while they lasted. They show how ordinary people are perfectly capable of organising a just and efficient society given the right conditions. The peasants and workers in Spain showed that anarchism is possible.
What definition of 'works' are you using? Because fomenting (and subsequently losing) a civil war that killed and impoverished hundreds of thousands of people is not my definition of 'working'. These kid of utopian schemes only ever seem to work in some hypothetical world where reality and history never interfere, whereas my definition of 'working' requires not only that a scheme is implementable in the actual world in which we live, but that it leads to a better, not worse, outcome once implemented.
"I was taking the content of Emma Goldman´s comment at face value"
Well, there's the mistake. To me it read as blatantly deceptive and disingenuous on it's face.
To wit: 'the people' supposedly voluntarily pooled their land and resources together, and added it to the land they seized from 'rich landowners'... who are by implication not 'people' apparently, on account of them failing to voluntarily donate their family lands to the collective. It's a slimy and disingenuous tautology. You can make any group's activity seem virtuous if you implicitly define virtue as whatever it is that the preferred group happen to be doing. The text reeked of manipulation and deception from the very first paragraph. To me anyhow.
Not so - I'm not a staunch opponent of collectivism, although I do consider it wrong in the sense of being in error. What I am a staunch opponent of is /motivated reasoning/, which is wrong in the sense of being morally bad. And since communism seems to be a siren song to motivated reasoners everywhere, its easy to see how these two kinds of response will get conflated, since both kinds of wrongness are usually present in abundance.
Rationally, it seems to me that there is abundant evidence that collectivization of agricultural production leads to violence, oppression, poverty and misery everywhere it has been implemented at scale. As an 'engineering question', collective agriculture seems to be an unambiguously bad design template. That's my rational response. But my emotional response to the disingenuousness of the essay is one of profound disgust. The level of disgust is somewhat paradoxical, in that the /closer/ a disingenuous argument seems to being reasonable, the more disgusting it is. An uncanny valley, as it were.
Say, is anyone else being heavily censored on YouTube? I started to notice it late last year. YouTube tries to hide the fact that it is censoring you using two methods, and if they only used the second method, almost no one would realize it is happening.
Often I edit my comments because I’m rarely quite happy with how I worded it the first time around. This started to fail. It would say that an error occurred. Then if I refreshed the page, my comment would be gone. It would be deleted from my comment history, too. After this happened twice, I started to save each comment and check which ones were deleted.
So, here are four of my comments that YouTube censored, broken down by technique.
### Method 1: hidden deletion ###
Your comment is visible to you, but secretly, it was deleted immediately and is not visible when the page reloads.
Example 1a: My reply to Saaber Shoyeb Jan. 11, 2022 was immediately deleted from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Grv1RJkdyqI
I had said
> Yes, correcting them [flat earthers] won't do anything; they are aware there are endless reasons to think the world is round, and they reject all of them. OTOH you can find a lot of people dismissing climate science or slamming Covid vaccines, who seem reasonable in the sense that there are a lot of plausible-sounding arguments against both of these and it's understandable that they would be taken in.... nevertheless you almost certainly won't convince anybody. My father's anti-vax brother died of Covid in October and (as I expected) my father stayed just as anti-vax after that happened. I went so far as to send him a copy of the book Scout Mindset in an effort to influence his *style* of thinking, but all signs point to that having no effect either.
Example 1b: my comment on “How big is the universe?” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pn3euL8Tbfw) was immediately deleted:
> You left out the theory that personally makes the most sense to me, which is that the universe is *endless* but *not infinite*. I got this idea from Stephen Wolfram's preposterous, yet attractive ideas which in turn were inspired by cellular automata: Finally We May Have a Path to the Fundamental Theory of Physics… and It’s Beautiful—Stephen Wolfram Writings
> In this model, time and space are both endless but finite. Let's start with time first, because it is simpler: the universe is about 13.8 billion years old. Assuming that time had a beginning, the total amount of time is about 13.8 billion years. 13.8 billion is clearly a finite amount. But we never run out of time, so it is also endless.
> Similarly, space begins as a single point and then expands outward at the speed of light, creating an unimaginable amount of new matter as it expands. After being created, space then expands uniformly as it does in the standard inflationary model. But, this endless space always has an outer edge. The new space being created today is probably absurdly dense, just as the very first space was. In this model, the universe is no longer 13.8 billion years old. Rather, 13.8 billion is just a lower bound; the universe might be 14 billion years old or 14 quintillion years old, depending on how far we are from its original origin point. But since the universe is finite in this model, there are no exact duplicate copies of you.
*Update* Example 1c: Here I corrected misinformation. The video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRCzj_uCmZ4) gives the impression that document “War crimes of the armed forces and security forces of Ukraine: torture and inhumane treatment" was written/endorsed by the OSCE. YouTube deleted my reply:
> 13:13 Important: this is NOT an OSCE report. It was written by "Foundation for the Study of Democracy", a Russian organization (its web site is democracyfund dot ru), but it is hosted on the OSCE web site for some reason.
By the way, it's hard to find any information about this organization in English. Basically the report is just a long series of anecdotes about torture by Ukrainian authorities, generally without corroborating evidence, and often without any date or location of the alleged event.
### Method 2: Shadowban ###
Your comment is visible to you, and still visible when you reload, but invisible to everyone else. [edit: except people who choose the non-default Chronological viewing mode]
Example 2a on Vlax Vexler’s “BIG PICTURE UPDATE as battle for Donbass begins” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGwqEYKXz4Q&t=365s):
> I think something important is missing here though. I don't know what. But sanctions and a defeat in Ukraine don't seem like they will inspire Russia toward new leadership. To the contrary, while sanctions somewhat disempower the Putin regime, both in Ukraine and domestically, I think sanctions will make ordinary Russians feel even more disempowered, and Putin's propaganda will continue having a lot of success selling the idea that this is all the fault of NATO and Western Nazis. How can the Russian people be given a vision of a future without Putin, within their new high-censorship environment?
Example 2b on Niki Proshin’s “Life in Russia Under Sanctions: Half-Empty Malls and Food Prices” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsjDSLgOMMc):
> I'm surprised to see so many Latin and English names on products. I do think prices will continue to rise in Russia because the Kremlin has used unsustainable efforts to create the appearance of normalcy. It won't work for long. I wonder if P*tin might announce a "victory" in the "special operation" soon, an "operations winding down" phase, to help convince ordinary Russians that the effects of sanctions next fall/winter are not related to Russia's actions. It seems like the Kremlin already convinced most Russians that none of this is Put*n's fault. But if a "victory" is announced, the shelling and fighting will continue, and Ukraine will regain territory because it will have more replacement troops than Russia.
*Update* example 1c on "The Housing Affordability Crisis We Don't Want To Solve" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUFZ1_fC3Kw)
> 5:55 It's exceedingly strange to have a whole discussion about house-price appreciation that doesn't mention any factors that have limited the supply of housing for 40 years (factors limiting on higher-density housing.) I *didn't want* a house with a lawn in the suburbs, but that's what I bought because, in my city, it was the most affordable option (and it should not have been). You say "it's simple supply and demand. People were demanding not only larger homes but homes that were closer to city centres or other amenities. This restricted supply." No, that's not what restricted supply. Something that actually restricted supply was the illegality of building medium-density housing in a location zoned for single-family homes. Think: requirements limiting the house-size-to-lot ratio, requirements for parking spaces, requirements to get approval from neighbors before building something larger, etc.
In fact, the majority of my comments are either deleted or shadowbanned, and the second method (which of course I did not discover until later) turned out to be more common. So maybe this has happened to you too, even if you don’t know it.
Yeah, lots of youtube comments get censored for me, particularly whenever I post a link.
Wow, that sucks even more than YouTube itself. You know who might be interested in this? Ryan Broderick, who writes Garbage Day on Substack. He's quite smart (also funny), & seems to know all kinds of way to dig under the surface of social media and figure out the the current rules, scams & fads. He may already know all about it.
I tried contacting him once about something via asking him a question in the comments section of his blog & he didn't answer -- to be fair, though, my question did not have to do with his blog post. I'm sure there are lots of other ways to contact him that would work better.
Hm, he didn't reply to me on Twitter, but now, two years later, I know I've been shadowbanned on Twitter too, and I have no idea how long @mentioning has not produced notifications. I can't recall a case when I @mentioned someone who then responded.
Marquess Brownlee (aka MKBHD) did a recent video that's quite relevent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Cw-vODp-8Y
YouTube has a _huge_ comment spam issue. He finds that more than half of the comments on his videos are spam. Mostly scams and porn. With his large audience he was getting daily tweets from people who fell for the scams.
There are a few types of tools available:
* Blocking URLs
* Blocking keywords
* Blocking users
* Deleting individual comments
YouTube provides pre-defined lists that channel owners can opt into, but it seems that they can also add their own stuff. I'm not sure who (YouTube or the channel owner) decides on when to delete vs shadowban.
Looking at the comments you posted, they have words that are likely on the keyword list: Covid, Russia, Putin. These are all hot topics right now. These all tend to derail legitimate conversations. They are irrelevant to most channels, so they may be on some sort of broadly used blocklist. If Putin is on the list, workarounds like P*tin will be as well.
I really have no idea for the space/time related ones. My only guess at this point is a filter on people over a certain ban threshold. I do think there is some sort of tiering of users going on. I figured out a while ago that if I posted a channel's host's name in hiragana (which is how she usually spelled it) it would get auto deleted, but if I used romanji or kanji it would be fine. I did narrow it down to that one word then noticed others could use it just fine.
To figure it out, you'd probably have to go looking thru what other people are commenting and guess what words/phrases that you might be using that they are not.
This situation invokes one of the classic tragedies of infosec: by revealing to good agents precisely what is and is not allowed, you make it easier for bad agents to circumvent your systems.
All the comments were on-topic though. I mention Russia on a video about Russia, anti-science people on a video discussing misinformation, etc. And I didn't even use the word Putin (because the video was made by a Russian living in Russia and I'm just a little worried about him getting into trouble, which is also why I avoided saying "war"). Some other comments do use "Putin" and "war" on that video, though.
In Ukraine Warcasting[1] nobody predicted both that Putin would invade, AND that his army would do badly or lose. I haven't quite found that unicorn, but Trent Telenko came close.
He says Putin will definitely invade:
> A Russian invasion of Ukraine is no longer a question of "if". It is all about "When." https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1473422763583025153
And Putin will definitely not conquer the whole country:
> Whatever else happens, Putin will not be able to conquer the entire Ukraine. The Ukrainians are fighting as a national people. The Russians are fighting as a classic Oriental despotism who's chief objective is to keep Putin in power https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1466970924868067330
> The issue isn't "will the Ukrainians stand and fight?" They have stood and fought every day since 2014. The question is, rather, who will get Ukrainians to stop once Putin kicks off his next invasion. It certainly won't be the Zelensky government. https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1487452009322233868
Other things he said before the war started:
- The reason Zelenskyy complained about the US's claims that an invasion was imminent was economic: "The panic caused by the Biden Administration statements has killed the business insurance market in Ukraine. The 60 firms doing so have dropped to three. No insurance equals no business operations, a Ukrainian economic heart attack." https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1487245447693578244 https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1487828101518311428
- Before 2022, RU suffered far higher casualties in Donbas than UKR. He notes that "Putin stopped in 2014-2015 when the Regime Security Forces were rendered combat ineffective. The Ukrainians are aware of this Putin Regime dynamic" https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1484694297836503040
- He predicts world famine as a result of the invasion's impact on grain supply https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1484948780705361922 https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1484988985256681479
- He shares a lovely UKR military recruiting video: https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1466966039372218372
- Thinks that the separation of the UKR and RU orthodox churches made the invasion inevitable...? https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1484589369629589506
- Says Russia's huge buildup of forex reserves is... payments from China? https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1486016489899630592
- Knows his Javelins https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1486031108168892420
Granted, Scott was just talking about "pundit" predictions, but the people who understand things best tend not to be pundits. What we can do is belatedly follow people who got things right, after their predictions come true. Anybody else want to credit somebody who made good predictions (not just Ukraine, any topic)?
[1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ukraine-warcasting?s=r
Forgive my vanity, but I also claimed that Zelensky is bullshiting for economic reasons with his denial of an invasion threat (over here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-ukraine-cube-manifold/comment/5093770?s=r); although I was agnostic on the question on whether invasion is gonna happen, and I was definetely caught off guard by its extent (specificaly by attack from Belorus).
Pundits are under pressure to NOT correct their views in spite of a new evidence, so yeah, unreliable
For two years we wondered why Japan had so few Covid cases, and after all that time, some guy swoops in to take credit. In a plausible way. In a respected publication.[1] Well played.
> By the end of February 2020, scientists had identified many clusters of transmission and realized that most infected people did not infect anyone else, but a few infected many. From my past work, I knew that respiratory viruses are mainly transmitted through aerosols. My colleagues and I looked for common risk factors among superspreading events to come up with a more effective public-health message for the public. It incorporated early indications that SARS-CoV-2 could spread through aerosols.
> This led us to warn against the ‘3Cs’ (sanmitsu): closed environments, crowded conditions and close-contact settings. Even as other countries focused on disinfection, Japan promoted this concept extensively, by asking people to avoid high-risk activities such as karaoke bars, nightclubs and indoor dining. People largely complied. A panel of artists, academics and journalists named sanmitsu Japan’s buzzword of the year in 2020.
How come we never got this "3 Cs" messaging? I didn't learn Covid was airborne until, I don't know, 7 to 12 months later, and WHO was like "pshhhh it's not airborne"...
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01385-9
'Making Nature' sounds intriguing. I wonder if it means what's beyond The Green Wall, in Zamyatin's -- Huxley's -- Orwell's dystopias. Who the Naturals are.
It's already out, and you may be disappointed - it's about the scientific journal! That said, I really enjoyed the review.
Biden has abandoned strategic ambiguity and committed the US to defending Taiwan:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/23/world/asia/biden-taiwan-china.html
Why isn't this the top story on every media outlet? I learned about it from Wikipedia's Current Events page. Of course, if Trump had done this, it would be a different story (remember when he talked to the president of Taiwan on the phone and it was the End of the World?), but this is Actually Important and a new low for the media, if the NYT is to be trusted.
I think we may have reached the point where the word of a US president is as likely to be good as not. If a president's word was always good, that would be absolutely huge news.
Senile old men say all sorts of crazy things. In this case an aide immediately walked it back so it doesn't count.
> I’ll still take him over “I just got a _beautiful_ letter from Kim in North Korea”
I'm sure the Ukrainians are thrilled that Biden ended up in office as well.
"Hello. Period" is an improvement?
TurnItIn is a for-profit text-matching tool which instructors use to check their students' work for plagiarism. It gives a numerical rating of text similarity to each submission, based on overlap with other students' submissions and published text.
This blog post summarizes a panel discussion at the recent European Conference on Academic Integrity and Plagiarism (https://copy-shake-paste.blogspot.com/2022/05/ecaip2022-day-2.html). Apparently, TurnItIn has been purchasing smaller competitors. A plagiarism researcher says this is bad, because different plagiarism detectors use differing methods to discover plagiarism that their competitors didn't discover. A TurnItIn employee responded that the bigger TurnItIn gets, the more it can innovate.
I am interested in any programmers' views, whether or not you have worked with text matching. From that brief summary, do you think this consolidation is more likely to be good or bad for plagiarism detection?
I haven't worked in this subfield, but in general I find that the larger a software company is, and the more of the relevant market share it has, the less innovation it accomplishes. They may well end up with a larger R&D budget, but not one that translates to significant innovation.
This is definitely an economic question rather than a programming question. When a company starts buying out competition rather than directly competing with them, they have already shown their hand - they aren't interested in competing anymore.
TurnItIn employee is spewing the classic bs that never shakes out in the end.
Why would turnitin need to innovate if it already has 100% market share?
It doesn't have 100% market share. This chart shows the situation last year. The orange represents the market share of companies Turnitin hadn't bought/wasn't buying at the time of publication (https://listedtech.com/blog/turnitin-acquiring-ouriginal-whats-left-on-the-market/).
Interesting piece by Hanania: https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/why-do-i-hate-pronouns-more-than
That was a good read and motivated me to subscribe. I'm really amused that a person can have this much intelligence, geniune introspection and self-awareness, while still being a conservative.
He sees the required level of recursion to understand that he is being driven by the moral outrage exactly the same way as the outgroup he is annoyed about being driven by moral outrage. He thinks that his internal dialogue sounds crazier than an internal dialogue of a liberal, he is aware that his stances on social issues are the result of system 1 intuitions, thus actually acknowledging that liberal inner dialogue is kind of correct. He notices how his mind generates rationalisations to his stances even when he doesn't actually have good intellectual reasons, notices his motivational cognition... and then just congratulates himself with it and moves on.
I mean, this all is definetely commendable. I praise his self reflection. Credit where it's due. But making all these steps and then say something as blatant as: "I hate conformity and non-conforming to the traditional gender tropes"? I'll take it as the reminder that culture war is bad for cognition and I now should better reflect on whether I'm doing similar errors myself.
On a different note, I think Hanania misses obvious point when trying to answer why cancel culture targets racists rather than, say murderers. Because murder is already illegal and it's not controversial. There already is an accountability system for murder so there is much less motivation to use social pressure.
Yep, it's amusing that he says stuff like "an individual concerned with truth – and whose self-esteem is based on thinking of himself as the kind of person concerned with truth – naturally finds wokeness uniquely offensive regardless of how damaging he thinks it is" without coming close to mentioning religion once in a pretty long post. He is simply bashing stupidity on the left while being blind to the same on the right, which is as boring culture war as it gets, plus hilarious lack of self-awareness with claims like being a "1 in 100,000 non-conformist".
My first reaction was to say that he doesn't necessarily have to mention religion in this context, but then I reread the quote and yeah, you definitely have a point.
The thing is, religion is much much more offensive to the truth than wokeness. The whole core of religious beliefs is completely wrong. There is neither God, nor afterlife. You can somewhat rescue religious ethics, but it's not even a good one. Compared to that, transgenders exist, discrimination against minorities exists. We can dispute to what degree this discrimination affects the real world outcomes and whether there are more important factors in play and should we call something racism or not, but the core beliefs are true.
He's never been a big fan of masks if you know what I mean.
Don't reply to spambots.
I can't even figure out what currency 12,000DLR is supposed to be.
Dollar without the vowels?
Does anyone know of any good resources for finding apartments for rent in NYC? My wife is a travel nurse who will be working in the city over the summer. She paid a deposit for an apartment, but I'm pretty sure she just got scammed (going to the bank tomorrow to try and cancel the wire transfer).
So I figured I'd go to the one place where you know you can trust people and not get scammed. The internet. 😎
NYC is the only place I know of where apartment brokers are a common thing. My work paid for one as part of my relocation package but I think they cost something like one month's rent. It's pretty annoying (like many things) but at least they will take you around and show you apartments and you wont get further ripped off. This is more for a year+ lease though. If it's only for a few months airbnb may be an option.
Boston also has brokers, they are rent-seeking parasites
Why is there so little innovation in building materials?
If I walk down my local streets while keeping the damn phone in my pocket and ignoring the cars and clothes, there's little that distinguishes the view from how it would have looked in, say, 1927.
It's basically 1940s flagstones, concrete that was probably poured in the 60s and 70s, tarmac (patented early 20th century), steel (invented 400 BC?), glass (3,500 BC) clay bricks and tiles (7,000 BC), and wood (400,000,000 BC). There's some plastic, but surprisingly little.
Admittedly, I live in London. But I've been to Tokyo, and yeah there's more steel, glass and plastic... and also more wood... but not like, pavements you can bounce 10 feet high on, or, say, colour-and-opacity-controllable super-strong super-lightweight transparent walls.
Is this because:
(1) The innovation is everywhere but invisible to me – sure it's still called "tarmac" but it's 95% different from the Macadam stuff and full of fancy compounds
(2) I may have been to Tokyo but I haven't been to Seoul
(3) We're at some local minimum where better materials are very hard to discover or expensive to manufacture
(4) No one wants fucking bouncy pavements or see-through walls, materials are optimised to the needs of people and machines as our culture currently produces them
(5) Some sort of Andreesen / Thiel shtick that as a society we just lost interest in atoms.
(6) Conspiracy by government / developers / Big Tarmac
(7) Something else
?
One major innovation in construction materials in the last 30 years or so is cross-laminated timber (CLT), which is made from layers of wood laid in alternating directions for greater strength https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-laminated_timber. It's not a hugely complicated concept, but it's allowed for a lot of innovation and development in mass timber buildings. It's become much more feasible to use engineered wood for tall buildings and there's a lot of research currently going on to try to expand that use and update building codes to work with mass timber construction.
There's also a bunch of research at the moment trying to make alternatives to portland cement, asphalt roads that are more durable, etc. These innovations are less visible but are pretty nice to have. We've also been working pretty hard to improve earthquake systems in seismic zones, which isn't very visible but does save a lot of lives.
Kinda (5), but people have lost interest in civil engineering. If you're a smart, engineering-focused person in 2022, you can go work in aerospace or robotics or as a computer programmer and make mountains of money working with fancy new materials. There are still interesting new frontiers in civil, but there's a lack of really smart people to explore them. If we could divert a chunk of the brain power (and funding) that currently goes towards making iPad updates or silicon chips to construction materials research, we could probably make faster progress. Then again, plus or minus carbon emissions from concrete I'm not sure we really need/want to.
Really interesting. I read a piece a few years ago on the new wood-based high-rises, they do look impressive.
I suppose the loss of interest in civil engineering does suggest people are broadly happy with the city infrastructure they have.
For structural materials, you basically want the cheapest material that can hold the load. If its twice as cheap but twice as big, who cares. And there are only so many materials that are both cheap and strong.
And both concrete and asphalt are by weight mostly made out of local rocks, which are still the same local rocks that were here a century ago. It's hard to beat rock in cheapness.
However, there were definitely changes. For example, I think that reinforced concrete high-rise buildings are a fairly new invention - 20th century skyscrapers tend to be made of steel.
And also for mid-rise buildings, something must have changed, since the default height for mid-rise apartment buildings is now 6-8 floors instead of 2-3, and I don't think its land prices since I haven't seen new short apartment buildings even in cheaper places.
The 5-over-1 design (5 stories of apartments over a row of stores) became common because of a change in US building codes. Basically, you're now allowed to construct wood-framed buildings up to 5 stories tall as long as you use fire-retardant-treated wood, which is much cheaper than building them out of concrete.
I'm thinking about Israel, not the US. There are no huge forests here, and so no wood buildings.
As someone who owns an old house that needs renovation, I have a feeling that part of the problem is that we discovered that lead and asbestos are really bad for you and we had to invest a few decades of effort and money into finding ways to get the same things we already have in a form that won't kill people.
(This is not a serious answer, I'm just griping about how much a pain in the ass it is to find lead-safe contractors.)
Mass-produced steel (1856), float glass (1950s).
You can get LCD window film; it's £350 a square metre. And good luck heating your house with giant windows.
I grew up in a house with single-glazed lead-flashed windows. It was terribly cold in the winter and we had to run a dehumidifier. Modern houses have cavity wall insulation and double-glazed windows which reduce fuel usage.
The other improvement is that modern houses are a lot less liable to burn down.
We used plastic extensively in the Summerland leisure centre (caught fire in 1973, killing 50) and Grenfel Tower (caught fire in 2017, killing 72).
I strongly suspect though that giant windows - defining windows as "exterior made of hard transparent material" not as glass or perspex - which regulate heat flow *much better* than either glass or brick are possible. Maybe it's an insoluble problem, but I'd be very surprised.
That's what I'm asking about. Not why don't we make entirely glass houses, but why the fairly widespread love of huge windows hasn't led to innovation in materials that can provide that without compromising on things like heating.
Mostly that's a matter of using multiple layers of (coated) glass, and sometimes filling the space between them with something other than air. No plausible super-material is going to do much better than that.
I would be very surprised if we came back in 1,000 years and glass was still being used. In the space of possible materials there have got to be some that are far less breakable, more easily mouldable into different shapes, and much more controllable in terms of translucence, colour, projection of images and heat transmission.
I think you're missing drywall. I live in a neighborhood built out in the 1900s and 1910s, and the old houses all have plaster and lath. Anything that gets seriously rehabbed has that replaced with drywall. Having just had to replace four ceilings due to water damage at our "new" rental house, I can tell you that drywall is much cheaper and much faster.
Mostly economics. We've gotten really, *really* good at making traditional building materials cheap, and we've got lots of construction crews trained and equipped to turn those materials into buildings cheaply and efficiently. Anything new, isn't going to have a hundred years of cost-optimized manufacturing improvements, and isn't going to have millions of construction workers saying "yeah, just give me a pallet of WonderPlast and I know what to do with it". So it's going to be more expensive, at least at first.
More expensive is only worth doing if it enables you to do something you couldn't do before, or at least to do it much better. Titanium and composites let us build airplanes that can fly faster and/or farther than they could before, carrying more payload and burning less fuel. WonderPlast makes a building that, what, has 2.5% of its internal volume devoted to structure while giving you full earthquake resistance rather than the 4.8% you'd need with reinforced concrete? It's probably cheaper to just make the building 2.3% bigger. Unlike the airplane, we don't really care what a building weighs.
And if using first-generation WonderPlast for making buildings is too expensive to bother, then you don't get many more generations of incremental manufacturing improvements.
You will see things like better insulation (thermal and acoustic both), because getting really good results with cheap insulation starts eating up more than 2-3% of your internal volume and getting really good results with any sort of insulation is worth paying for. Better paints that require less frequent repainting, that can be worth doing. Basic structural materials, there's not much room for improvement unless the improvement is dirt cheap, or unless someone is trying to build a mile-high skyscraper.
Thanks, really good explanation.
Also, this is an environment that is pretty risk-averse. Builders who try to do new stuff and fail can easily go bankrupt, any building you build anywhere has to comply with building codes or you won't be allowed to build it (and those codes change slowly), etc. The wonderful Construction Physics substack is a good place to read about this stuff. Alternatively, the Essential Craftsman Youtube channel has a lot of discussion of the building trades from a guy who's spent his life in them. There is a point where this guy (a master carpenter in his 60s) is building a staircase, realizes he is slightly out of compliance with the local building code (I think the treads were an inch or so too short), and he has to tear them out and redo them. (I loved that he actually showed this in his series instead of just glossing over it).
Interestingly, his channel highlights a lot of stuff that has changed over his career. Things like everyone using Skill saws, using I-beams made of engineered wood to hold up floors and the roof, flexible PEX pipes instead of copper or PVC, etc. I have zero background in any of this stuff (changing out a light fixture is about the extent of my handyman skills), and I've found both these really fascinating.
I'll check those out, cheers.
Probably economics. Tearing up all the flagstones, concrete and tarmac to replace them with bouncy pavement would cost a fortune, badly disrupt traffic, cause maximum inconvenience to everyone, and why do all that unless the street is literally crumbling underfoot so you *have* to repair it?
New building, such as one of the vanity architect projects, can have bouncy pavement and transparent walls (subject to building codes). But if it's a shop that has been there since 1901, why the heck am I going to tear out all the existing frontage and put in transparent plastic walls? Never mind that there is probably restrictions on what you can and can't do, in regard to fitting in with the existing styles - see the case of Lego here:
https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2022/0520/1300231-not-awesome-council-vetoes-legos-grafton-st-facade/
A combination of 1 and 4 go a long way. Glass technology has improved a lot so it is more scratch resistant, insulating, tintable so the building doesn't become an oven and simply stronger so you can have bigger windows. There's a reason modern skyscrapers are pillars of glass, whereas old ones have a lot more exposed concrete/brickwork/steel/etc etc. Similar mechanics in concrete for resistance to water, erosion, making it more aquaphobic/slippery, etc. Polystyrene formwork/ICF and prefab technologies in home building are also out there, and getting more common but not really cost advantageous (depending on what architectural aesthetic you're after).
But I guess what you're really getting at is why are we still innovating on existing platforms rather than bringing entirely new materials to market (carbon fiber walls or the like I guess?). Part of it is mentioned by Melvin (construction materials are measured by the tonne, so there's a lot of innovation required to make something that cheap), and another part is that aesthetics take a while to change (I expect especially in architecture?), so the demand for novel materials isn't really that high. Carbon taxes may change dynamics somewhat, but I don't think that would get us close to bouncy sidewalks.
We already have switchable glass that you can make transparent or opaque based on electrical flow btw.
Also: Saftey.
You gotta remember that ABAC (All Buildings Are Cursed).
7000 years of built up institutional knowledge keeps your roof from falling on your head; besieged on all sides as it is by convenience and cost cutting.
Basically: any new building technique or material is inherently risky, and needs to offer substantial benififit over the current state of the art to supplant it
There's loads and loads of innovation in materials science, almost all of which produces very expensive materials with fancy properties.
For building materials, you want stuff whose cost is measured in dollars per ton, which means that you're limited to commonplace materials processed in straightforward ways. And most of the straightforward ways of processing common materials have already been tried.
Eco-friendliness! Concrete synthesis causes hideously high CO2 emissions. I understand there's some research being done on "green concrete" (i.e. concrete that emits less/no CO2 during its production) but I have no idea how close it is to being deployed at scale.
In general, building construction and industrial chemical synthesis seem to be unappreciated sources of greenhouse gases. Every environmentalists is focused on electricity, transportation, and maybe food, but there's relatively little talk about how to make industrial processes more green.
I don't think that concrete synthesis has high CO2 emissions compared to any other material that can hold a comparable weight. It's just that you have a shitton of concrete.
The construction/concrete aspects of GHGs are one of (multiple) reasons why the Green New Deal was immediately shown to be completely unserious.
This is not my field, but professionals in the field say that it is an incredibly wicked problem: production of [widgets] at an affordable cost means at large scale, which means large automated machines performing repeated motions at speed, which means a firm floor, large pallets of inputs and outputs, which means incredibly heavy forklifts and firm floors (again) and increasingly strict safety clearances, which means a larger building...and more concrete.
A revision will depend on material revolution akin to plastics. Which might be over the horizon, but no one has seen the sails yet.
Good questions. Off the top of my head:
1) Functionality
Living in a building is much better than not doing, but I can think of a lot I'd like better... like I don't know, enormous room-wide-and-high windows that don't need curtains or blinds because you can adjust their opacity and colour.
2) Aesthetics
Tarmac looks decent for a year or so after it's laid. Brick and glass can look lovely for ages, but just as we can value old art / film / music while still wanting new stuff that expresses our own moment, so we might want beautiful and surprising new surfaces around us.
3) Maintenance and safety
Roads erode and and buildings crack and subside. I appreciate that brick is pretty good at expanding and contracting according to heat, but surely we can do better?
Buildings burn down.
Roads / pavements (sidewalks) are actually pretty terrible at interfacing pedestrians and traffic. We take it for granted that children can't be allowed far from our grasp until they're old enough to know that they're never more than 2 feet from death, but do streets have to be that way?
"Any new road material will require local governments to start from scratch when it comes to figuring out maintenance. "
Hoo-boy, tell me about it! About ten years back the local council was renovating the quays area of my town and replaced the conventional tarmac surface with cobblestones. They even got a proper professional firm in to do it.
And it's been a *disaster*. Due to volume of traffic, the cobbles are always coming loose and needing to be reset, the surface is uneven so people trip (I had a fall myself, full-length faceplant that I got my hands under me in time to avoid smashing my face into the ground, in front of - thank goodness, only one - onlooker), it was just badly conceived all round.
The *idea* was to be innovative and aesthetic, but it would have been simpler and cheaper to stick with tarmac and concrete.
OK but when I said "innovative" I wasn't really thinking cobblestones! That's going backward from tarmac!
Oh it is going back, and the thing is, if it had been done properly (as in, the surface had always been cobblestones) then it might have worked.
But the idea at the time was to renovate the area for tourism and pedestrian traffic and make it more upscale in appeal, so instead of boring old tarmac it was going to be quaint and attractive cobblestones for the aesthetics of it.
Didn't work. The same way I suspect your bouncy pavements might sound like great fun, but in practice they wouldn't work.
Interesting. So there are promising candidate materials out there, but they just haven't gbeen able to get municipal buy-in?
It's also ongoing maintenance; an innovative material is probably going to be more expensive, and while it might last longer than the conventional materials, it probably will require repairs and maintenance (and given the way real life works, a lot more of both than the projections in the tender claim).
I can only speak out of local knowledge, but road repairs budget was badly squeezed for the local council, so only very necessary repairs were being done. An expensive new material that eats up even bigger chomps out of the budget is going to be a non-starter.
At this point I'm desperate for a child covid vaccine not because I'm worried about my child getting covid (he already had it), but so I can finally avoid these nonsensical quarantines that make me hemorrhage money. Covid policies in schools is the one thing that's close to making me a single issue voter, the cost to benefit ratio is miniscule and the "think of the children" attitude from people who sacrifice nothing is maddening. Daycares love it because their "charge full fees, provide no services" is perfectly legitimate under the health guidelines.
Local health department only parrots state department guidelines, which only parrots CDC guidelines. Is there anything one can do to change this?
Become a socialist lol.
For real though, that seems to be your choice.
People in my area did round robin style daycare; where people juggled their schedules so 6 families would take turns watching all the kids at once.
Alternatly, become a mexican imigrant and have some sort of impossibly competent bodhisattva aunt that can do all things at all times.
Is anyone else on their third Covid go-round yet? I've just recovered from Round 3 - got it in the Delta wave last summer, then in an Omicron wave over Christmas, and then this one. Hoping it doesn't become an every 4-5 months thing from now on, though we seem to be heading towards that level of seasonality.
Interestingly, the 3rd time made me more ill than the 2nd time, despite occurring after my booster. If I had to give some statistics, I would rate the experiences (in chronological order) as follows on a scale of 0-10, with 7 being the sickest I've ever been from all causes:
- 1st vax: 4
- 2nd vax: 0
- 1st Covid: 6
- 2nd Covid: 1
- Booster: 1
- 3rd Covid: 5
In all cases + the vax illnesses, my symptoms were mainly extreme fatigue (for multiple days), plus fever for a day or so, and some aches. No real respiratory symptoms, thankfully. Would be curious to hear what patterns other multi-covid sufferers have seen!
Are you sure you got the order right? Maybe I'm misremembering, but I think nobody I know became sick after the 1st dose, and everyone became sick after the 2nd.
Your order would make sense if you already had coronavirus before, suggesting that you might have had it 4 times, not 3. Or am I missing something?
I live in the UK, so I got AstraZeneca for dose 1&2. That jacks nearly everyone up on the 1st dose, doesn't cause problems on the 2nd.
Interesting, thank you for correcting my incorrect assertions.
Most vaccinated people can catch omicron, but catching delta after vax is surprising. If you caught omicron twice, I'm suspecting that your immune system is unusually... daft. (my wife & I just got Covid once, in 2020. She works in a supermarket, I work from home. But we're in Canada which has had one-third as much Covid as the US, and we got Covid when our region was the "Covid Capital of Canada")
It's weird, actually! I'm normally extremely healthy, my 3 worst illnesses have all been food poisoning. Otherwise all I can remember pre Covid is one or two cases of "24 hour flu". Hoping this doesn't mark a long term change
There does seem to be a growing number of people who are getting omicron a second time, now that we're four or five months from the first wave (so that people's immune systems have had time to relax) and we've got a growing second omicron wave with a slightly modified variant.
Incidentally, the first hit I found searching for "omicron reinfection" is a Canadian source: https://globalnews.ca/news/8861413/covid-reinfection-canada/
And coincidentally, I got my single infection while visiting Canada a few weeks ago.
Thanks for this discussion! I have one friend who said he got covid twice in 2020 (March and December), then got three doses of vaccine in 2021, and then got omicron in December 2021, but I didn't hear much description of his symptoms.
I recently got covid for the first time a couple weeks ago (and am still fighting a lingering cough, though my antigen test faded to negative a week ago).
My second vaccine dose had one evening that was almost as bad as the worst evening of actual covid, but actual covid had three evenings of significant fever and discomfort leading to me staying in bed, as well as several weeks of cough, and two days of moderately lost smell (about three days after the fever was fully gone). I think my worst evening of covid was as bad as some of the time that I had strep throat, but not as bad as a few occasions when I've had food poisoning, so 6 might be comparable.
Oh dear, it sounds very unfortunate that you had the vaccines and booster and *still* picked up Covid. Commiserations on that!
I've had my two doses of vaccine and no Covid (fingers crossed) but we're getting a new sub-variant of Omicron over here. I'm starting to wonder if Covid will become like a seasonal flu now, and we'll get the jab annually as we do for flu vaccines.
Besides, now the new international health crisis seems to be monkeypox!
https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2022/0523/1300592-ireland-monkeypox/
Remind me to look up the Book of Revelation again about what exactly Plague is supposed to be doing in the End Times?
Turns out immunity to this virus wears off quickly and/or the virus evolves around it quickly. I would find it interesting to know which specific cold/flu viruses I might have had multiple times in my life, and how frequently.
I mean, it does appear to reduce frequency of infection by a factor of 2 to 5 in recent months depending on variant. It's unfortunate that human brains are so bad at processing anecdotal evidence that is consistent with small single digit ratios, which are objectively extremely significant. (With the original variant, the factor of 20 seemed to be immediately obvious even anecdotally.)
And it appears to reduce frequency of death by a factor of 10 or more.
The only real question at this point is whether a fourth dose shows significant improvement over a third, or whether it's already reached saturation.
This post should probably go into some style guide of "How not to post in ACT's comments section".
With beating the odds like that, they should have played the lottery!
Yes, these are all confirmed with lateral flow antigen tests (I live in Europe so they have been cheap / free for many months). 1st one was picked up by a PCR test for travel when I was abroad.
I developed an immune response to politicians asking for donations a while back, when I realized they'll send you a new email every week with some clever argument about how they really actually desperately need a donation this time, and it's more important than ever before.
Over the years I developed other immune responses to other kinds of bullshit, to the point that I was mostly just bitter about everything.
And then the Flynn thing happened, and I made a second donation specifically because it was supposed to be a close election. It wasn't.
I don't want to imply this is a big deal. It isn't. Scott has a superhuman but still imperfect capacity for avoiding mistakes, and I was too lazy to do my own research. I'm just sad that I can't personally seem to interact with this world in a sustainable way without turning my cynicism up to eleven.
Not just politicians. Donate to charitable fundraising once, and they will haunt you for perpetuity about signing up for online donations, begging emails, canvassers calling to the house, etc.
I'm already inclined to be "bah, humbug" and this pestering just turns me right off. Look, I gave because this was one big humanitarian crisis and things were desperate, that does not mean I signed up to be your piggybank.
As a slight counterweight to the macro-level cynicism... I think it's a good thing for our democracy that political donations have a limited ROI. They're not useless and they provide a great way to give a slight edge to candidates that have extremely invested supporters (or, if you're a soulless libertarian, that are more pro-business). But realistically you still can't buy elections in this country, no matter how many times people claim you can.
The call to donate to Flynn didn't make sense to me. He was already one of the best funded candidates in history for a congressional primary. If $11M isn't enough, it's hard to understand how a marginal $1M would help. I guess divide your contribution by $1200 and figure out how many votes you funded. That's some effective altruism there!
The argument was that candidates can make use of money better than super PACs. But I admit I don’t know what the evidence is on that.
I can't make head nor tail of how PACs work and how donations are handled, but it seems on cursory reading that candidates can't just dip into them, so for other campaign expenses they do need donations to come in from every angle.
Besides, it was precisely because Flynn was unknown with no track record in office that they needed to throw money at him to get his campaign going.
The evidence is generally not there for candidate funding mattering much.
I think the evidence does seem to suggest that candidate funding matters more than PAC funding, given that there are many things the candidate funds can do that the PAC can't. But candidate funding is low value, and PAC funding is even lower value.
But candidate funding might be a general signal of candidate appeal, and any subsequent good performance could be for either reason. Any studies that try to separate these effects?
At this point you've gotten beyond my very basic familiarity with some general trends. I know that people have studied the questions you ask, but I don't know what in particular they find, or what the quality of the evidence is.
Good point. And I'm not sure that EAs really need to win an election right now, so much as learn how to win elections while not overspending and not sacrificing too much reputation. Overspending itself is a reputational sacrifice: it makes you look like a "candidate of the rich".
Matt Yglesias says[1]:
> speaking from a media and politics perspective, I want to underline with the boldest possible stroke that I think the most important lesson from the race is the extent to which Flynn was understood to be the “crypto candidate” rather than the “EA candidate.”
So here's another reputational risk. If you're lucky, opponents try to distract from you being an Effective Altruist by portraying you as something else or magnifying some minor fact about you. If you're unlucky, opponents create a meme in which Effective Altruism is a fake pretend concept and that actually so-called EAs have ominous real goals. Which ominous goals? That's TBD by a focus group or famous influencer, but Matt proposes one himself:
> EA is applied consequentialism [...]
> Perhaps more scandalously, opponents of consequentialism often argue that it follows from this position that it is morally appropriate (perhaps even obligatory) to murder innocent people and harvest their organs in order to save multiple lives.
Matt somehow fails to mention that EAs wouldn't actually ever do this. So as an EA I propose a moral rule, which is based on my answer to the "fat man" problem:
> A trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by putting something very heavy in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you – your only way to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge and onto the track, killing him to save five. Should you proceed?
My answer is that this is the fat man's decision to make, not yours. If *he* wants to jump in front of the train, he can. If he *asks* me to push him, then... it could be morally okay, but I probably wouldn't have the nerve to actually do it. Similarly for the organ harvesting scenario, I think someone can volunteer to give zis life to save several other people, but it's not acceptable to force it on zim. And in today's society, of course, the whole question is moot; the volunteer couldn't realistically have his wish granted anyway.
[1] https://www.slowboring.com/p/understanding-effective-altruisms
"Matt somehow fails to mention that EAs wouldn't actually ever do this. "
Maybe not, but does it not follow directly from utilitarianism, which is the moral framework that's taken for granted by EAs? If EAs based their philosophy on any other moral framework, I certainly haven't heard of it on ACX.
"My answer is that this is the fat man's decision to make, not yours. "
That's your personal opinion, not the implication of utilitarianism, or the official position of EA. So the question is, if you're right that EAs would never push the fat man, why not? How do EAs decide when to abandon utilitarianism and when to adopt it?
> does it not follow directly from utilitarianism, which is the moral framework that's taken for granted by EAs
EAs tend to be consequentialists*, i.e. concerned with all predictable consequences and even unpredictable ones to the extent possible (edit: and they are looking for the best available consequences, not merely consequences that are better than doing nothing). So, aside from saving a few lives, what are the likely consequences of pushing the fat man? Here are some possibilities:
- Potential charges of murder / attempted murder
- Mental distress for the pusher
- Public controversy about the actions of the pusher
- Public controversy about EA, if the pusher is EA, harming EA's reputation
- People worrying that EAs are psychopaths
- Potentially stunted growth for the EA movement, reducing its future positive impact
These consequences are avoided if the fat man jumps of his own accord.
While distributing moral responsibility (e.g. "it's the fat man's decision to make, not yours") can be formulated as a deontological rule, ultimately I justify it on consequentialist grounds. (Edit: note that the fat man probably won't realistically jump, but I wouldn't worry too much about that because the scenario is terribly unrealistic, and not just because there's no assurance that the fat man's body can stop the trolley... an organ-harvesting scenario is much more realistic, and there you can see that in the long run, if EA were to become popular, it would probably get a few, or many, members willing to volunteer to die to save the lives of ten strangers, provided legal hurdles don't prevent it. As to whether EA orgs would actively encourage this, I'm guessing they would not, but they may advocate for legalization.)
Some people describe consequentialism as "the ends justify the means", but this is wrong. In common usage, "the ends justify the means" excludes "the means" from "the ends" so that we don't worry about the eggs we broke to make the omelet. A true consequentialist includes "the means" in "the ends", so those broken eggshells - and the ripple effects produced in society by those who care about those eggshells - as part of "the ends". Thus "the ends justify the means" is a different (and less respectable) idea than consequentialism.
* originally I said 'are consequentialists' but it's not a requirement.
You're dodging the thought experiment. Of course if the total utility of pushing the man ends up being less than the total utility of not pushing, the thought experiment is pointless. For it to have any meaning at all, you should at least assume that nobody will know you pushed the man, and that the mental distress of the pusher does not outweigh the deaths of several people. Neither of these are unreasonable assumptions. If these assumptions are granted, would it be moral to push the fat man?
As I said, the thought experiment itself is misleading. Why should I believe a fat man's body will stop the trolley? Why would I assume there are no security cameras or witnesses when it's not stipulated? It's a bad thought experiment that should be replaced.
And your attempt to retcon it, here, ironically disregards the essence of consequentialism. Ironically, because you use the phrase "total utility" as if it were an ubiquitous idea (and as if you were consequentialist). Non-consequentialists aren't thinking about "total utility" when they answer! So, what, deontologists can respond to the thought experiment in its original form, but consequentialists should address a version of it that is modified such that (key aspects of) consequentialism are no longer relevant? That's bullshit!
Also weird given that he specified that the fat person was a man. Why can't we sacrifice a fat woman for a change?
Perhaps it's assumed that a fat man will be larger than a fat woman.
In general, I don't approve of training people to think they get to decide who lives and who dies without consequences to themselves, and calling it ethics.
As for the fat man, I don't see how you can reliably push a person larger than yourself off an overpass. I assume you'd actually have to release the brake on a wheelchair and shove. Would that make it more personal? More horrifying?
They call it The Fat Man Scenario, so I guess he's stuck being a man forever.
Speaking of fat women and trains - some poetry!
(1) The original poem
To A Lady Seen From The Train - Frances Darwin Cornford
O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
Missing so much and so much?
O fat white woman whom nobody loves,
Why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
When the grass is soft as the breast of doves
And shivering sweet to the touch?
O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
Missing so much and so much?
(2) The reply
The Fat White Woman Speaks
by G. K. Chesterton
O fat white woman whom nobody loves,
Why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
Missing so much and so much?
FRANCES CORNFORD
Why do you rush through the field in trains,
Guessing so much and so much.
Why do you flash through the flowery meads,
Fat-head poet that nobody reads;
And why do you know such a frightful lot
About people in gloves as such?
And how the devil can you be sure,
Guessing so much and so much,
How do you know but what someone who loves
Always to see me in nice white gloves
At the end of the field you are rushing by,
Is waiting for his Old Dutch?
When did Scott say it was going to be a close election? He says in this post that "I might be sorry for saying I thought he was more likely to win than the prediction markets said", but I can't find this in the previous Open Thread. In that Open Thread, he said nothing at all about Flynn's likelihood of winning.
I think my memory failed me here. I distinctly remember reading a claim that the race would be close, and then donating a second time after something Scott said. If that first memory wasn't from Scott (seems likely at this point) then I apologize for misrepresenting what he said.
Looking at the previous open thread, I think I got the impression that it would be a close race from a subthread where Dave Orr asked if it would be a close race, and Scott replied that "Metaculus puts Flynn at 46% to win primary".
In retrospect we all should have realised that this is one of those places where Metaculus is unreliable. A good topic for a Mantic Monday post, perhaps?
Actually there were a couple of other comments in that thread arguing for a close race; one poll had Flynn at 14% to Salinas's 19% (but I wonder what the other polls said) and someone else said the race was tight based on the testimony of "A friend who flew to Portland to help with the campaign"
I think the problem is that many of us saw the election mentioned, aren't used to hearing individual elections mentioned unless either they are close or one of the candidates has made themselves a social media target of extreme emotions, and thus we assumed this election was closer than it was.
I cooked a thing I'm quite happy with-- an approximate kuku sabze.
It's a Persian herb frittata, possibly using an expansive definition of frittata.
It's not the kind of thing with some little bits of green in a dish that's almost all egg, the chopped herbs should have a larger volume than the eggs.
6 eggs
3/4 stick of butter
2 large bunches parsley
1 large bunch cilantro
good sized bunch (not as large as the other one) of fresh dill
a giant leek (probably about a pound) with the dry parts of the leaves cut off
about 3/4 T of salt
a little roasted powdered garlic
second round:
1/4 pound walnuts
olive oil
Abdul the Strong curry powder
https://www.auntiearwenspices.com/store/p249/Abdul_the_Strong%E2%80%99s_Curry.html
So, chop all the veggies, beat the eggs, fry the veggies at a medium heat until they flatten out. Add eggs and garlic. Cook at a low heat until the eggs solidify.
The reason I did it in two steps is that it was okay but not special, and I was reminded that it was supposed to have walnuts, fenugreek, and turmeric. The last two are major ingredients in Abdul the Strong, and it was convenient.
So I chopped up the walnuts and fried them a bit in olive oil and spices. The result was excellent, and I might well explore more nuts fried with spices.
What impresses me most about this dish is that usually I make three or four meals worth of whatever I cook, and then rotate them, but with this, I ate four meals in a row of the same thing.
It's possible that butter was a little bland on the first phase, and it should be at least partly olive oil. I don't see any reason not to cook everything together.
I'm thinking about an Italian variant with parsley, basil, garlic, and rosemary.
I think I'm failing the reading comprehension test here. What do you do with the walnut mix after? Top the cooked eggs with it?
Also, what's your pan size? I.e. does this come out thin or thick? And, do you add liquid to the eggs?
Sounds fantastic, thank you! Going to try it soon. I've been cooking a walnut-less version of this for years, and even that was quite good.
https://www.tabasco.com/recipe/kuku-sabzi-persian-herb-walnut-cranberry-frittata/
This says to put the walnuts on top.
https://www.unicornsinthekitchen.com/kuku-sabzi-persian-herb-frittata/
Some walnuts mixed in and some on top.
https://www.themediterraneandish.com/kuku-sabzi-persian-baked-omelet/
Walnuts mixed in.
These three recipes together give some idea of how flexible the concept is. Mine wasn't nearly as green.
I put the walnuts on top, but I could have mixed them in with no loss, I think.
The pan was 11" diameter. (28 cm)
It came out thick, as it's supposed to. I'm guessing at 1 1/2". (3.81 cm) It doesn't need to be exact, but it shouldn't be flat like an omelet. I didn't add any liquid except for some lemon juice, and that was after the eggs were cooked.
Thank you so much! Looking forward to trying this out.
Sounds very tasty, I'm not a fan of coriander but I do like dill. Now I'm wondering how it would work if you tried using fennel bulb?
It's an extremely flexible recipe. I can't think of any reason to not use fennel. It's not as strong flavored as dill, so maybe a larger volume.
Some recipes include chopped romaine lettuce. I prefer strong flavors, so it seems like missing the point to me, but I've never eaten the authentic dish, so I might be missing something.
There are a lot of recipes online if you want something more precise than what I wrote.
That is very interesting, thanks
I have not heard of this. Sounds tasty.
I made kuku according to Madhur Jaffreys recipe years ago.
Regarding this would-be Oregon congressman. It's easy to be altruistic when you are spending other people's money (and other people's descendants' money, via the US national debt). That's why EA and politics do not mix. Better to let people spend their own money.
Money is not (inherently) a carrier of value. It's a promissory note issued by (i.e. debt taken by) the government entitling you to a purchase of government services, whose worth depends solely on the capability (and reputation, in case you want to use it as a commodity of exchange) of said government. There's just no logically consistent scenario under which "letting people spend their own money" takes the government out of the equation.
There is a valid complaint to be made about politicians' self-interest not being aligned well with that of the government's stakeholders which, coupled with the politicians' outsized decision-making powers, results in wasteful allocation of resources. But, phrased that way, it's an argument for, not against, greater involvement in politics (though, granted, not exactly for donating to an individual politician's campaign). There are also valid arguments against governments at large, but they must grapple with the fact that the government wouldn't be there anymore and the functionality it provides would need to be made unnecessary or reimplemented by other means. (And the most common strain of "I can assume everything stays the same" alternatives, based on private companies taking over government functions, needs to grapple with the fact that, historically, modern social-liberal democratic governments evolved out from and largely outcompeted private kingdoms.)
You are all too correct that money is not value. (If only the government had remembered this before they printed it by the trillions the past two years.) So, "spend their own money" was indeed shorthand for "trade the goods+services they produce for whatever goods+services that they want".
As much as the monarchy may have been the first example of a family business in the violence market, it was also type of a government and therefore a type of localized monopoly in that market. Economic activity being at a historic low during the Dark Ages, there's little reason to characterize kingdoms (nor fiefdoms) as "private" in the economic sense of that word, and little reason to predict that they would inevitably recur if not for government even today, when we possess things such as the Enlightenment and the Haber process.
Many things are kept in an unusual state by the nature of government; without it, many things would become much more illegible, decentralized and variable, the only constant being that they would change to fit local resource-allocation preferences. Nobody today can predict exactly how any given problem will be solved in an un-"governed" territory; and in a fictional universe containing a crystal ball with which to make such predictions, there would be hundreds, thousands, millions of answers depending on the territory's population.
There are some areas where governments have a unique opportunity to do a lot of good relatively inexpensively (e.g. pandemic management).
During the late 1960's, there was a viral pandemic which, per capita, killed about as many as the 2019 coronavirus. This was contemporaneous with, among other things, the Woodstock festival. EA did not exist at that time. Government has, since the late 1960's, expanded drastically, so if pandemic management were to be a task that is better done by just throwing more money at the government, then one would expect that the 2019 coronavirus would be responded-to better. It wasn't. And unused field hospitals alone have represented a very expensive very pointless government undertaking. Therefore I doubt your hypothesis.
Are you an anarchist? If not, then you believe the government performs at least one useful function. I think the EA approach would be to try to make it do that efficiently.
In the case of pandemic management, the problem isn't a lack of funding, it's a lack of funding being used productively to perform those functions. There are actually a lot of things I think are inefficient about governments that aren't due to a lack of funding - even how the government gets funded, for example. It seems to be a horrendous mix of taxes on random things, with low or zero weight on things that can be taxed efficiently, like land or carbon emissions.
Possibly, but that sounds like mission creep for "effective altruism". That sounds more like "effective government", which I think most people can agree would be generally a good idea.
Hypothesis: effective altruism was solved about fifteen years ago. Turns out the answer is mosquito nets. But this is very boring, so there's a massive demand for more interesting sounding things to spend your theoretically-EA dollars on, and a massive industry has developed to hoover up those dollars with plausible-sounding justifications.
The main EA priority of this candidate and campaign was pandemic prevention. In contrast to some other EA priorities, this one is absolutely worth it (i.e. it has incredibly positive EV) even if voters care about nothing outside their own borders.
So why don't politicians already take care of this problem on their own? The problem here is not lack of altruism among politicans and voters, but inability to make long-term plans, and lack of incentives to do so.
Okay, let's look at the monkeypox thing. Reports are being very circumspect, but it looks like from the original person or persons returning from Africa with the infection, people are spreading it via sex. And it's the gay/bi/men who have sex with men type of sex:
https://news.sky.com/story/monkeypox-spreading-in-uk-through-community-transmission-with-new-cases-identified-daily-says-senior-doctor-12618792
It's not sexually transmitted as such, but vectors of transmission include close contact and bodily fluids, so yeah sex counts there:
https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/health-family/monkeypox-your-questions-answered-from-transmission-to-symptoms-1.4885947
How to prevent this spreading? Well, you *could* send out a public health message: hey, gay/bi/men who have sex with men dudes, please don't hook up with any strangers for the duration until we get a vaccine and/or a grip on this.
Yes, that is going to work *so* well. Imagine all the protests about stigmatising LGBT+ folx and victim-blaming and how this is homophobia in action.
Since "wear a condom" isn't going to work here as advice, how would you (let's say you're Carrick Flynn) run an epidemic prevention programme that is not going to have you villified as a homophobe within the first ten minutes?
I think the WHO will probably recommend that gay/bi/mlm get the smallpox vaccine, but that is going to be 'treading on eggshells' level of trying to not be offensive:
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-61553822
Risk to the general population is low, risk is higher amongst the promiscuous:
""For the broader population, the likelihood of spread is very low," said Dr Andrea Ammon of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.
"However the likelihood of further spread of the virus through close contact for example during sexual activities amongst persons with multiple sexual partners is considered to be high".
Monkeypox has not previously been described as a sexually transmitted infection, but it can be passed on by direct contact during sex.
Dr Ammon suggested that countries should review the availability of the smallpox vaccine which is also effective against monkeypox."
Since it's apparently spread through skin-to-skin contact, rather than sex per se, I doubt it makes any difference what kind of sex is involved. If they do a third sex-rave with some of the guys from the first two, it'll be another spreader-event, even if they have women this time around.
"please don't hook up with any strangers for the duration until we get a vaccine and/or a grip on this."
This alone is a perfectly good message; you don't need to, and in fact shouldn't, specify that the message is only for "gay/bi/men who have sex with men".
Origin of the 2019 coronavirus remains an unanswered question, but neither answer has a primarily-altruistic solution. Putting tighter controls on US sponsorship of foreign-soil bioweapons research requires no altruism - the money saved by ceasing such operations would quickly pay for the upfront cost of closing them down and shipping out the sensitive materials. And exporting some laws on meat cleanliness, again requires no altruism, other than maybe some lobbying.
While I'd certainly support getting US funding out of things like the Wuhan lab, it's not clear to me that a Wuhan lab without a skerrick of US funding would be any safer than one with US funding.
It wouldn't have safer practices. There's no way, whatsoever, to ensure BSL4 adherence on Chinese soil.
But without our funding and materials, that lab wouldn't have been effective enough for that to matter. Thus, in totality and by technicality, it would be safer.
How much funding did the US contribute to the Wuhan Institute of Virology?
The most controversial grant, for gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses, contributed $600K over five years, which even on Chinese wages doesn't seem like a lot.
So you are ok with letting the people of the present steal from the people of the future but not ok with letting the people of the future steal from the people of the present? \s
Stealing from the people of the future is what is being done by spending money we don't have and adding it to the national debt. I'm *not* okay with that. I don't understand how the people of the future could steal from us, but stealing is evil regardless.
Yes, please, do add your selected book reviews to the finalists!!
I had been wondering about this already - in my ideal world finalists would come both from Scott's selection and from readers' selection.
I recently realized that whenever I am on my laptop, I subconsciously arrange it so it is tiled away slightly to the right. And whenever I try to straighten it out, it feels unnatural and like it is tiled to the left. It's really bugging me. Anyone know what's going on?
Does it have something to do with how you hold your arms at the keyboard? I've noticed that my typical pose for using my phone is to hold my phone in my left hand and type with my left thumb and right index finger. I've you've adopted some similarly asymmetric way of using a laptop keyboard, you might then naturally hold the laptop at some sort of angle.
Is your eyesight the same in both eyes?
What are your favorite books about the counterculture of the 60s and 70s? Biographies, histories, memoirs, pro-counterculture, anti-counterculture, whatever.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson is a classic of that era.
You might be interested in _Summer of Love_ by Lisa Mason-- it's a time travel novel, but a friend who was there said it was accurate about the period.
I really enjoyed Huey Newton's autobiography Revolutionary Suicide
Rhoney Gissen Stanley's 'Owsley and Me' is pretty good on the San Francisco / Grateful Dead / Owsley Stanley scene in Northern California (9780983358930).
The Armies of the Night
I´m no American, so I may well have overlooked a lot of gems. Best I have read so far was Alex Haley´s MalcolmX autobiography and stuff by Hunter S. Thompson and Jack Kerouac. The music spoke much more to me about that time than books.
What country are you from? Was there anything like a counter culture there at the time? Swingin' London and Paris in 68 had some similarities with the US counter culture. Any good books on the time from your country?
Germany. I grew up into the punk / new wave era so my personal experience with the earlier subcultures is limited. It seems to have been more political in germany (and france too) than in the US. At school, We had a new freshman biology teacher every year, who asked if we already had sexual education, so that was repeated often. Sexual revolution sure was a thing here but in the seventies one could already smell the lies of its champions.
An interesting book was Bommi Baumanns "Wie alles anfing." A view of a mostly hedonist working class guy on the roots of leftist terrorism.
Oh, and comic books, of course. Robert Crumb, Rand Holmes, Gilbert Shelton, even Richard Corben.
Kerouac brackets it if you mean he precedes it -- and certainly influenced it strongly--but his work really captures the 50s beatnik counterculture, not the 60s.
SDS: Students for a Democratic Society, Kirkpatrick Sale
The Strawberry Statement, James Simon Kunen
Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion
An interesting counterpoint is Boston Against Busing by Ronald P. Formisano. An account of the Boston Bus protest and how it adopted some counterculture tactics. Possible parallels to today are intriguing.
I'm reading Slouching Towards Bethlehem right now. It's really good so far!
Didion was unique. If you like her writing you might enjoy Caitlin Flanagan's recent piece in the Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/06/chasing-joan-didion-california/629633/?utm_source=msn
Thanks, I will check it out!
Are you wanting general historical books from that period, or are you wanting them to be on a specific topic?
Probably the closest to your counter-culture questions that I've got is Days of Rage:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22571602-days-of-rage?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=PHAlKeXqKm&rank=2
Either is fine. I read a bio of Timothy Leary recently and realized I just never wrapped my head around how weird the period was.
Then yeah, Days of Rage may be up your alley. It's about the now-mostly-forgotten political violence/terrorism of the period.
"During an eighteen month period in 1971 and 1972, the FBI reported more than 2,500 bombings on U.S. soil, nearly five a day." Jesus, this book is nuts. I mean, I knew things got violent at times, but thank god lots of these people sucked at making bombs.
“Days of Rage” made me understand quite a few things about the past 10-15 years. It explained a lot about my parents’ generation, and where a lot of right-ish political sentiment among older people in the present came from. Like, horrible people did horrible things and a lot of them were rewarded with…pretty nice lives by the establishment. It made the angry 50-70 year old conservatives I know who watched all of it unfold make a lot more sense.
Thanks, that looks good. And only 5 bucks on Kindle!
I second the Tom Wolfe recommendation. He documents the burial of Hippy by the Merry Pranksters in 1967 and the end of the post-war youth movement.
2nd this. And a good one about Hollywood in that era is: Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'N Roll Generation Saved Hollywood
> Thanks to everyone who donated to or otherwise supported Carrick Flynn. Unfortunately he didn’t win.
Predictably. As I've said a few times, the EA community doesn't really survive on effectiveness but on selling the idea of effectiveness to wealthy EA donors. Anyone with even modest political experience (and mine was quite modest) could see the failure coming. And could have pointed out the $14 million was an inefficient use of resources. But it excited people to solve a problem that liberal people from SF want solved (political representation, winning in moderate districts, etc) so it attracted a lot of donations.
So it failed but it got $14 million and boosted the profile of everyone involved. Which is a classic principal agent split. The principals didn't get what they wanted (a successful election) but the agents got to raise their profiles and a whole lot of money.
This is not how the EAs should be doing politics. They should acknowledge what they are: a small minority with some profoundly weird ideas who have a lot of money and a specialized skill set. And they should act appropriately like a special interest group or a radical political faction. (Indeed, lobbying the government like one is probably the best multiple available for effectiveness. But it's not sexy I suppose.) But instead, from what I've read on LW, there's a significant contingent who truly believe they're going to take over the world or have an EA president or something.
Did you say this before he lost? If so, linking to your previous post would greatly increase your trustworthiness. Anyone can say "I saw it coming!" after something happens.
I said it to friends offline. No one asked me online so I have no paper trail either way. But my position was the consensus position so there was less need for me to assert the opinion. (If it was different among the rationalists then I can't speak to that.)
If you want to take bets in advance the next time this happens I'd be happy to.
There's some degree of evidence that you can't win elections purely on spend, but this was a colossal amount of money to apply for what they got. How bad does your advertising have to be to end up at like $1200 a voter? And not even for the GE.
John Fetterman in Pennsylvania spent $14million, so roughly the same amount as Carrick. For 745000 votes. Vs 11000.
I think there's a lot of evidence that campaign spending has quickly diminishing marginal return. Look at races like Beto O'Rourke or Amy McGrath in 2018, who I think each raised more than nearly all other Senate candidates combined.
It doesn't help when you have a single donor that is visibly affiliated.
That's roughly true. Generally there is a "saturation level" for ads in a given market. But money can be used for lots of stuff. Campaign staff, paying consultants, some of which are good though they are mostly shit, running good solidly designed polls to get accurate information.
You'd prefer to have high name ID, although you'd also worry about if the impression was good, rather than low name ID.
I suppose one issue is that a big dollar donor isn't allowed to give to the campaign, but can only run an "independent expenditure". While these independent expenditures aren't really all that independent, they probably are substantially less effective.
Wouldn't it have made more sense to have someone with even a tiny amount of political knowledge involved in the Flynn thing? They could have told you dumping 10mil on a House race with a candidate with no serious experience and no plan for local issues was dumb as hell. I lose a lot of confidence in EA people for not just thinking this would work but piling a bunch of cash in and setting it on fire.
When I submitted by grant application it wasn't with serious intent but maybe you, Scott, and your friends, would have benefitted from a more personal understanding of what motivates a politician and why and how that relates to a constituency.
He came in second out of a field of nine, which is good going for a first-timer with no previous political experience. But yeah, politics. I saw this linked story in one of the SSC comments:
"On April 28, five groups put out a lengthy statement condemning Flynn’s remarks on an April 13 episode of politics podcast The Bridge, during which he gave voice to rural hostility to the spotted owl (”it’s an owl, looks like other owls”) and said he had “emotional sympathy” for the group Timber Unity.
“As organizations who have been fighting for decades to uphold the strong environmental values held by the people of Oregon, we are stunned and deeply saddened to hear Carrick Flynn, a Democratic candidate running for Congress, make comments mocking critical environmental protections, sympathizing with a far-right group that has ties to the Jan. 6 insurrection, and referring to our state’s iconic land use system as ‘insane,’” says the statement released by Oregon League of Conservation Voters, Oregon Wild Conservation Leaders Fund, Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (PCUN), Renew Oregon Action Fund. and RiverPAC of Oregon."
I am very flippin' sure the members of the union for Northwest Tree-Planters and Farmworkers United care passionately about the spotted owl. But what they do care about is that one of his rivals (and eventual winner) Andrea Salinas is 'one of their own' (her father was a Mexican immigrant worker involved in the union and she comes of a union family) so if the cause of the spotted owl was good enough to use to attack him, they love the little birdies.
My own view, on reading the story, is that he shouldn't have apologised and backtracked but should have stuck with "I care about conservation, but I care more about jobs for the workers of rural Oregon" but that was his inexperience talking.
This was a primary, not even the election that determines the winner, for one of 435 seats in the lower US House, in a state that never sees a ton of spending. Flynn received roughly 13.2 million dollars in outside support in the race, vs 1.7 million for the winning candidate. No one else topped 5 digits. About $18mil was spent over all.
Carrick also received an unprecedented 7 figure donation from the House Majority Pac because they wanted his donors to support them.
For all this it was 36.8% to 18.4%. So 2 to 1. Additionally there were 5 candidates who received 6.4% to 11.5% of the vote. They had 0 outside spending. To argue that Carrick getting 6.9% more of the vote over the third place candidate after shitting cash all over the airwaves in a primary race is impressive is shockingly ignorant.
If only the tech bros and Scott had done some basic research they might have been aware of Salinas and her strength in the area and picked a better race to blow money on.
"Carrick also received an unprecedented 7 figure donation from the House Majority Pac because they wanted his donors to support them."
This, yes indeed. Full agreement.
"To argue that Carrick getting 6.9% more of the vote over the third place candidate after shitting cash all over the airwaves in a primary race is impressive is shockingly ignorant."
Then just call me Grug. Yes, he (or his sponsors) threw a ton of money at it, and still managed to run a terrible campaign. With a bad campaign, awful "why should you vote for me?" goals, and no experience at all to demonstrate why the people of District 6 should send him off to Congress with his little lunchbox and a clean hanky in his pocket, as well as his more experienced rivals being able to dance the tarantella all over him (I do like the plea on behalf of the spotted owl from the logging workers' union), the fact that he still managed to come in second after doing all he could to shoot himself in both feet *is* impressive.
He didn't have a snowball in Hell's chance, of course, as anyone looking at this without stars in their eyes about "first EA candidate!!!" could have foretold, but honestly he did better than I expected.
No it's not, really. American elections tend to have a fair number of voters who vote for the last name they heard before wandering into the booth. So just making a whole lot noise -- which is what piles of money does for you -- can indeed get you into some kind of distant 2nd even if there is no hope at all you can be elected.[1] Famous business leaders kind of do this regularly, e.g. Carly Fiorina, Meg Whitman, and I would say even the inimitable Ross Perot. Each was a doofus politician with bags of money, and each managed a "respectable showing," which with $4 can get you a cup of coffee at Starbucks.
----------------
[1] Then there are the truly weird cases. When I lived in Chicago a guy ran for alderman *from prison* on the platform the major plank of which was that since there were so many cons and ex-cons in Chicago, they totally deserved a voice in local government. He didn't win, but he came in a respectable 2nd or 3rd, which just goes to show you that while Americans have yet to actually elect a yellow dog, it could yet happen.
Michael Bloomberg ran a surprisingly strong campaign in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary this way. He didn't win many delegates, but he did get a very large number of votes in the states he was competing in!
Yeah he's another example of the phenomenon. What amazes me is that otherwise intelligent people think THIS time it will be different...
It is impressive if you wildly underestimate the important of name ID in American elections I guess.
Does anyone want to defend presidential systems in general, as opposed to parliamentary ones? From a pretty detailed study of 20th & 21st century comparative politics, parliamentary systems seem obviously superior. This seems to be the consensus view of most or all political scientists and academics. Famously most developed countries are parliamentary ones, and most poor countries are presidential. Also, the Allies pushed Germany and Japan to go the former route post-war, which has again lead to great stability. The most prominent presidency, in the US, seems to have fallen prey to exactly what political scientists had always critiqued- a demagogue who achieved power by going directly to the voters, despite being opposed by nearly all party elites. Aka the classic Latin American situation.
I’m pretty familiar with the pro-parliamentary arguments- what are the pro-presidential ones? Wikipedia has something vague about allowing for more ‘decisiveness’ in an emergency, to which I’d respond that Churchill seemed decisive enough, and Israel seems to function just fine with a prime minister despite being in decades of near-constant conflict. I’ve never found the checks & balances argument persuasive- the only real check necessary is an independent judiciary, and Germany has an even stronger one than the US does, in hand with a parliament. Why should any country choose a presidential system? Have any notable academics written a defense of the presidency?
I just want to add that in addition to all the arguments other people have made, the most powerful and wealthiest nation on earth has a president, which seems to indicate that even if it's not an advantage, it's no significant handicap.
In what sense has the US "fallen prey" to a demagogue? If you pay attention to actual structure of government and policy, the Trump presidency was barely distinguishable from any other. This is a far cry from being taken over by a populist dictator who has hundreds of thousands of his political enemies arrested or outright killed, or declares territorial wars against neighboring powers, or runs ethnic cleansing campaigns
Having the Executive Branch be separate from the Legislative Branch provides a more robust system of checks and balances. I agree that having an independent Judicial Branch is the *really* important part, but separation of Legislative and Executive powers is a further improvement still.
Also, your claim that "most poor countries are Presidential" is mixing up correlation and causation (at least if it's meant to be anything other than an interesting but ultimately meaningless little factoid). I'd need VERY strong evidence to even start entertaining the possibility that they're poor *because* they have Presidential systems, especially since there are a great many other, much more convincing explanations for their poverty.
The Australian federal election was last weekend. I nearly cried when I saw the PM had called the opposition leader to concede defeat - this was on the same day, and at that point, only 70% of the votes had even been counted, but everyone could see he was going to lose. Trumpism was nowhere to be seen.
I think there are large benefits to power being widely distributed among a diverse group of stakeholders.
Concession speech highlights (this guy is a conservative by the way) https://youtu.be/L2FatYp9Bcg
Sure. The advantage of a President elected separately, and not beholden to his party in the legislature, is that they form independent power centers, which hugely enhances that old checks 'n' balances thing, and makes it considerably harder for a unified power structure that can become dictatorial, like Mussolini and the Fascisti in Italy, or Hilter and the Nazis in Germany, or Putin and the Duma in Russia. That England has escaped this scourge since 1688 roughly is due to some kind of natural English aversion to following orders, I think, or else something in the water.
The remarkable thing about the United States is that it is fabulous prize for a demagogue, and it has a heterogenous and (for a Western nation) fractious and not especially well-educated voter population, and yet, despite all these manifest susceptibilities, it has never yet fallen into autocracy or even come close. It's just too hard to master *both* centers of power, Congress and the President, jealous as they are of each other's prerogatives, and owing each other (in the political sense) almost nothing.
That is, we value the separate Presidency and Congress not for what they can do, but for the limits they put on each other, so that there's a strong limit on the damage that can be done when any strange mood of the electorate puts weirdo(s) in charge of one branch.
I've never really understood the "separation of powers" argument in the terms it's often presented. It seems to come from the original Liberal idea that government is itself a danger to the people just by existing. In reality, separation of powers is best understood (as Montesquieu understood it) as a way of regulating elite oligarchic competition such that everyone gets a share of power and nobody feels disappointed. Shameless advertisement: I recently wrote about this on a Substack post.
https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/when-its-gone-its-gone?s=w
But I suspect history shows that in practice, separation of powers is actually an obstacle to worthwhile reform at least as much as it's a theoretical hedge against dictatorship. In Europe, at least, most of the fundamental social legislation of the modern era (old age pensions, universal free education, legalisation of trades unions etc. etc.) was obstructed and delayed at some point by some part of government, parliament or the courts.
Right. See, by me government old page pensions, universal free education, and giving trade unions quasi-government-sanctioned status are all bad ideas that have significantly hampered European growth, both economically and culturally. Europe *ought* to be at least as powerful and wealthy as the US, but it's not.
So hooray for obstacles to reform, because popular reform -- bread and circuses -- is almost always a bad idea, and when it's passed with too much enthusiastic haste it builds constituencies that make it incredibly difficult to change or retract. On the other hand, reform that is seen to be a very good idea, across wide coalitions of voters, and across many years, usually manages to overcome the obstacle of divided powers.
I'm not sure if you exactly meant that, but I can't really agree with the fact that presidential regimes are less prone to be dictatorial. To me the fact that the head of executive branch is directly elected by the people yields the risk of a political figure to use such legitimacy (in opposition to the one of the parliament) to promote an authoritarian agenda. For example Napoleon III in France, who was first elected president before making a coup.
The rise of Mussolini and Hitler to power were rather caused by the fact the conservative and liberal (in the economic sense of the word) parties preferred to not oppose to their policies at the start of their rule because their priority was to 'restore order' against the socialist/communist/anarchist political forces. I don't see how Mussolini being appointed president in a presidential regime rather than prime minister in a parliamentary regime after the march of Roma would have made Italy less likely to fall into dictatorship.
I also wouldn't say that the recent transformation of Turkey from a parliamentary to a presidential regime makes it less likely to become more authoritarian.
Because the President and Congress represent different power centers, each ijndependently elected by the people, and they are *always* jealous of each other's power, even when they are in the hands of the same party.
If you pay attention, you'll notice that there is nontrivial strain between Joe Biden and the Democratic leaders of both the House and Senate. This is not the slightest bit unusual. They represent three distinct sources of power, and none of them is uniquely answerable to the other. The President can't dissolve the House and call for new elections. The House can't put in a vote of no confidence. The President can send the Marines off to Lebanon or Iraq without consulting Congress -- but he needs Congress to pay the bill if it costs anything serious. Congress can pass a law over the President's veto. And so on.
I'm aware one can construct any manner of theories that explain the 20th century dictatorships. What you need to do is explain the *absence* of any similar thing in the United States for the past 250 years, even though it possesses an evangelical, credulous population and represents the juicist prize on the planet for the would-be populist dictator.
I agree that there is a strong separation of powers in the US that prevents it to fall into dictatorship, but I wouldn't say that this is inherent to presidential systems in general.
Well, it is not impossible that the US has defenses against dictatorship that have nothing to do with the election for head of state entirely separate from the election for the legislature, but that seems doubtful to me. If nothing else, avoiding the possibility of Caesarism was of great concern to the Founders -- they discussed it extensively while framing the Constitution -- and they explicitly chose the structure they did to forestall it. Sure, they could've been deluded, but their answer has stood the test of time, and as an empiricist that carries considerable weight for me.
I don't and have never understood the independent power centers/checks & balances thing (Russia, BTW, is a presidential system). If you become dictator, you don't have to worry about whether Congress disapproves of your action. I don't really see how a few hundred mostly elderly people are a serious impediment to the traditional ways that democracies become totalitarian- a coup or an autogolpe. You can just..... shoot them. Democracies don't/have never fallen because parliament proposed a Law To End Democracy, and they dutifully voted for it. They fall due to who has the guns.
Also, presidential systems have a much worse track record in terms of becoming autocracies! This seems like a relevant fact!
The only real check & balance that matters in a democracy is the judiciary, and I am pro-strong judicial review like the US or Germany (and unlike most other democracies, some of which literally don't have it). It's not like Congress is routinely up to no good, and the wise President has to regularly watch out for their crafty shenanigans. The only party that needs to be checked & balanced is the President, who can and has in many countries devolved into an autocrat. So far parliaments have a much better track record here
It's very odd that you believe a judge has more power than the legislature. I can't imagine how that's logically consistent. Who is going to enforce a judge's order?
In the United States, you need Congress's support to become a dictator in the first place. Without Congress, you're just an impotent blowhard ordering things that never happen. And no, you can't "just shoot them". A US President who tries to have Congress shot, will very quickly become an ex-President, and probably a dead one.
My own country Italy is a beautiful example of an extremely disfunctional parliamentary republic. The government need to receive confidence from both houses of parliament. Alas, because party members are notoriously unfaithful to their own government, the executives tend to last very little. A government lasts on average ~2 years, less than half of the expected 5.
However, even in this system, the executive is capable of passing laws by tying them to the no confidence vote. In order to not have new elections and risk losing their job, parlamentarians give a rubber stamp to the executive proposal. This was the way in which salvini's "security decree" which greatly expanded the powers of the minister of the interior (ie, salvini himself) was passed. This was also the way the socialdemocratic PD forced the electoral law through parliament (Did i mentioned we completely change the electoral system very very often? Not just gerrymandering, really changing between proportional and majoritarian)
So we end up with the worst of both worlds
It seems like the worst thing you can have in a country is ideological diversity -- groups of people with wildly different ideas on how the country should be run. If half fraction of the population is apopleptic with rage about the policies which the other half would like to see enacted, then it doesn't matter too much whether you resolve these disputes with a parliamentary or presidential system, it's going to be messy.
If the whole population of your country is in basic agreement on most things, then democracy is a whole lot easier.
French guy here, I can give you a couple of arguments about why some of the French folks prefer our current (de facto) presidential system over a parliamentary one. Note that I'd be personally in favor of a proportional parliamentary system so I have some clear bias in talking about this topic.
First thing to note is that France actually does not have a presidential system, according to the constitution the president has in fact limited political powers compared to the prime minister. The president can however dissolve the parliament, is the chief of the french army, may create some referendums (although there are some restrictions here, it's nowadays rather admitted that no referendums touching the constitution can be done without the agreement of the parliament/senate), and it is the president which names the prime minister (but cannot dismiss him directly, he'd have to dissolve the parliament and hope that the newly elected parliament would censure the government). Most of the executive power is in theory in the hands of the prime minister. So why does it seem that in France a lot of powers are concentrated in the presidency?
In the post-WW2 France (i.e. 1946-1958, during the so-called 4th republic), France has a proportional parliamentary system, which was very unstable, the cold-war situation not helping in that. Some political parties allied together both in opposition to the communist party and De Gaulle, but failed to really build an long-lasting homogenous political force so parliamentary crisis were very frequent. This instability in the context of the war of independence of Algeria lead to some generals in Algeria to do a kind of putsch, opposing the government in the metropole and calling for the return of De Gaulle at the head of the state, which then passed a new constitution (of the 5th republic) by referendum to increase the power of the president (and decrease these of the parliaments) and therefore restore some kind of stability in the country. Despite the fact that the role of the prime minister was supposedly still prominent in interior politics according to the new constitution, the wish for more stability, the strong figure of De Gaulle, and the type of election for the parliament (two-rounds majority vote per electoral district in most of the course of the 5th republic) created this illusion of a presidential regime, which influenced today's french political culture.
Nevertheless, it happened 3 times (the last time between 1997 and 2002) in the 5th Republic that the majority of the parliament didn't support the current ruling president, leading to a system of so-called 'cohabitation' where the prime minister is both constitutionally and de facto ruling the interior politics in the country, the president having more a representative function. France is therefore often more rightfully considered as a bicephal system/semi-presidential system
Some tiredness grew about this cohabitation situation between the two classical parties of the 5th republic (which since 2017 lost a lot of their prestige) and a reform of the calendar of the presidential elections was voted so that from 2002 on the parliamentary elections would happen shortly after the presidential elections (i.e. the presidential mandate would last 5 years instead of 7). Due to the total absence of the proportionality in the elections of the parliament, it was therefore very easy for the president to surf on the tide of its victory in the presidential election and win an (artificial) majority in the parliament.
So with this contect, to come back to your original question, I'd argue that in France people who support our semi-presidential system (i.e. argue for example against the introduction of proportionality in the parliamentary elections or for a shift between the presidential and parliamentary elections calendar) do it for the following reasons:
- They assume this guarantees a bigger stability, and often quotes the example of the 4th republic (or Italy/Belgium) to demonstrate that parliamentary system can be very unstable. Ignoring the fact that Merkel stayed chancellor for 16 years in Germany in a proportional parliamentary system.
- They are anchored in the political culture inherited from De Gaulle, in which a strong leader 'dictates' its politic and where the majority in the parliament wouldn't dare to contradict him. I would say that for most french it would sound very weird that the government/parliament wouldn't let the president do the reforms he said he'd do during the presidential campaign (although constitutionally it is not his role to conduct these reforms).
- A 3rd point, which is related to both the aforementioned one, is that a fully parliamentary system would be too much controlled by the little arrangement between the political parties (this was heavily criticized during the 4th Republic). The existence of a powerful president is supposedly creating the possibility that a figure higher than the political parties is directly elected by the people. Although I believe that this goal of the 5th republic failed, as (at least between the end of De Gaulle mandate and until 2017) one wouldn't be able to say that the different presidents were emerging out of the control of the political parties.
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I've long argued that every French political regime in modern times is essentially a reaction against the previous one: as I say later on, French political culture is very dualistic. So the Fifth Republic was a reaction against the excessive parliamentarianism of the Fourth which was itself a reaction against the authoritarianism of Vichy, was was supported by those who were exasperated with the hyper-parliamentary Third Republic, which was itself a reaction to the authoritarian regime of Napoleon III ... you get the picture. Unsurprisingly, the talk of the Sixth Republic, which has grown over the last fifteen to twenty years, is all about moving power back to Parliament again.
I'd agree with that, although I'm not sure about how much this is specific about France. One could say the same thing about Germany for example: 2nd Reich -> Weimar Republic -> 3rd Reich -> Current parliamentary system.
I'm also not sure about the 3rd republic part. I'm far from being an expert about this historical period, but I had the impression that the 3rd republic was rather a (I'd argue fortunate) accident and that it lasted only because the legitimist and orleanist factions of the monarchists (which altogether had the majority in the parliament) couldn't stand each others
It's doubtful if there's any such thing as "an argument" for or against the idea of a Presidency. The basic idea in most countries is that you distinguish between the Head of State and the Head of Government functions. In a surprising number of countries, there is still a hereditary Head of State (King, Queen, Emperor) but the functions of Government have been hived off to a strong elected Parliament. In other countries (Germany is an example) the President is a largely ceremonial figure, elected by Parliament. In both cases, the Head of State has a representational role, and is responsible for asking party leaders to try to form governments, but has little real power. At the other end, you have elected executive Presidents, as in France, Russia, the US etc. However, in all of these examples that I know of, only the US tries to combine the functions of Head of State and Head of Government in the same person. In France, for example, there's a clear constitutional distinction between the President (Head of State) and the Prime Minister (Head of Government). On a number of occasions a French President has been obliged to appoint a PM from an opposition political party.
I think the question of which system "works" is really a question about stability and political tradition. To take two examples, French culture is extremely dualistic and black and white, and historically French politics was hopelessly split in a series of dualities; not just Left/Right, but Religious/Secular, Traditional/Modern and so forth. It has also been very personal, and full of arcane splits and obscure jealousies. Compromise isn't in the French spirit, and forming a government under parliamentary systems (1870-1940 and again from 1944-1958), was exceptionally difficult. Governments were generally short-lived, and the system was deeply unstable. That was one reason why some of the French welcomed, at least initially, the Vichy regime (1940-44). Then Fifth Republic, even if now dying, got round that by having an elected Presidential figure deliberately above politics, and leaving much of the sordid political stuff to the PM. But that required Presidents of the moral stature we no longer have. The actual question of which system was better has no answer.
In Lebanon, to take a completely different example, the political system is essentially the superstructure on top of an endless competition for power within and between 18 ethnic groups. Especially after the Civil War (1975-90) the answer seemed to be to provide a system with something for everybody. The President is a Maronite Christian, the Prime Minister is a Sunni and the Speaker of Parliament is a Shia. All governments have to include representatives from all the major communities. Parliament elects the President, but he has to be a Maronite. However, the actual powers and influence of these individuals vary depending on who they are, what other political leaders think of them (the current President, Aoun, is close politically to Hezbollah) and how they are perceived abroad. There are so many undercurrents in Lebanese politics that sometimes formal labels don't matter much.
In other words, I don't think there are any general rules at all.
Arguments that countries with parliamentary systems are doing better are very sample sensitive. I am sceptical that if Latin American countries would switch to parliamentary system, they would get as rich as Western Europe (or the US, which of course also has a presidential system, as we all know). But if this is true, that means their problems are NOT caused by the presidential system.
If you restrict yourself to a sample of reasonably rich countries, you get to problems like whether Fifth republic France, Finland, and perhaps other countries should be counted as presidential, and overall picture of the superiority of parliamentary system becames far less clear.
Presidential systems allow for stronger leaders who can lead during crises without risking an accompanying political crisis due to fixed terms and the ability to retain control despite losing the legislature. We have a leader for 4 years at a time, and a few fringe MPs far outside the political mainstream don't have so much outsize influence for making a coalition that they can simply blow up the government if they aren't pandered to.
As for checks and balances, frankly America's have eroded as Congress has failed to effectively legislate and the executive branch's powers have ballooned through executive orders and agency decisions. I feel it would be even worse if the president could personally legislate through congress rather than legislating around it.
Israel loves its parliamentary system so much that they have 3 elections for it every year, I believe the most recent crises was the 61-59 majority losing an MK over matzah, and then almost losing another MK, who changed her mind and did not kill the 60-60 bloc. Israel functions due to its strong military tradition and support, as well as external support, in spite of its government, not because of it.
Milton Friedman advanced a theoretical argument in favor of an executive chosen by national election in his 1984 book "The Tyranny of the Status Quo".
It's been a while, but as I recall the argument was based on the idea that one of the failure modes of electoral politics is that concentrated interests get overweighed relative to diffuse general interests: people whose livelihoods depend on a particular program or regulatory policy are going to weigh that very heavily in their voting decisions, while the general population might be affected very little by very slightly increased taxes or very slightly worse options at the store and in most cases will barely notice. Friedman's argument (based on the observed behavior of the last few decades of Congressional policy-making at the time of writing) was that individual legislators are particularly vulnerable to being reliant on the support of concentrated special interests (since the special interests are often geographically concentrated), and legislative logrolling can combine many such interests into a Congressional.majority. But having a President who's chosen at-large by the entire electorate provides a check against this, as the cumulative effect of many diffuse costs add up across many, many policies affecting the whole nation, so the Presidency is the best potential vehicle for a political entrepreneur to push a program of blocking or rolling back many net-negative policies at once.
Another argument for Presidential systems is that the executive presents a clearer target for retrospective voting than legislators. Consider that in the US, current approval ratings for Congress as a whole are around 20% with around 70% unfavorable, while ratings for one's *own* representative are typically net-positive by a nontrivial margin. But for the President, there's no mass of other Presidents to hide behind.
These two arguments can be mitigated if people in a Parliamentary elections vote retrospectively based on the performance of the party currently in power, and prospectively based on each party's leadership and manifesto rather than taking each individual seat in isolation, but then that becomes a Presidential system with extra steps.
Going back further, Presidential systems have historically been chosen as like-kind replacements for Monarchies. For example, the US Constitutional arrangement very strongly resembles the unwritten British constitution c. 1786, with the House mapping to Commons, the Senate mapping to Lords, and the President mapping to the King. The main substantive differences were mode of selection and term of office (Senate and President being indirectly elected for a term of years instead of inheriting for life) and the Executive being somewhat weaker as the power to declare war was transferred to the legislature and the legislature was given the ability to override executive vetoes by a supermajority vote. This is a fairly common pattern in other countries that have done major constitutional overhauls: replacing a King with a President keeps things in a mode people are accustomed to and allows many institutional norms to carry over instead of having to be reestablished from scratch.
Most Parliamentary systems seem to have happened gradually by accident, as evolving norms have gradually weakened the de facto role of the head of state from "ruler" or "leader" to "referee" or "mascot".
> These two arguments can be mitigated if people in a Parliamentary elections vote retrospectively based on the performance of the party currently in power, and prospectively based on each party's leadership and manifesto rather than taking each individual seat in isolation, but then that becomes a Presidential system with extra steps.
I don't think that's right. The important feature of a Presidential system is that there is an empowered Legislature that can oppose the President, while in a Parliamentary system, the Legislature and Executive are in unison. The claim is that in a Parliamentary system, people have a clear understanding of which party to praise/blame for the current conditions, while a Presidential system muddies the waters. Having people vote effectively for the Prime Minister through their local vote isn't a Presidential system with extra steps, because you never have the confusion of a divided government.
What I meant by "Presidential system with extra steps" is that you have a de facto at-large election for the head of government. You're correct that it doesn't have the legislative dynamics of a Presidential system with an empowered legislature: it's more like a Presidential system where the legislature is a rubber stamp in most cases, which isn't necessarily an improvement.
The claim is that it creates a more informed populace. You never have a situation with a President of one party and a legislature of the other that is constantly stymying the president, and then people vote out the President because they think the President is stopping everything. This sort of dynamic is not unheard of in the United States, where people vote for the opposition party because they want the current Presidential party policies and don't understand that the opposition is the problem.
I think you have to look at the rest of the political structure in a polity before making an argument about president vs prime minister. Look at Boris for instance. Meanwhile the presidency in France remains under the power of essentially a political elite like it would in a parliamentary system.
The problem in the US is every other aspect of the federal election system, not the presidency. A properly sized lower House for the population, some solution to the whole Senate shitfest, some form of non-plurality voting in prominent use, potentially multi-memeber districts, reasonable campaign finance law, etc.
Is there really a cogent argument for a larger House, though? 435 is already larger than an organization can plausibly be without hierarchy (Dunbar's number, etc.). The idea that, say, doubling the size of the House would parse as a "governing deliberative body" rather than "a morass where nobody's individual vote actually matters" (I mean, more so than the current House already so parses) seems implausible....
The main argument for a larger house is that it would facilitate better legislative elections. Smaller districts can have more homogenous interests than larger ones, and individual votes in a smaller district matter more. And district size drastically affects the nature of the campaign: a large district election tends to be won by party heuristics, mass advertising, and courting the support of local political machines; while a small enough district can be canvassed personally by the candidate and a handful of volunteers.
Overall, the current US House is a really awkward size: too big for Dunbar's number, too big even for the majority party's caucus to be below or even close to the Dunbar threshold, but too small to be properly representative.
My druthers would be to bite the bullet and expand the House by a lot, accepting that it isn't going to be a flat deliberative body. In terms of operating rules, the best I've come up with is to have the back-bench members function as a part-time legislature, residing in their respective districts and voting electronically. The members would form caucuses at will, and each caucuses would have a proportionate number of seats on each subject-matter committee. Each committee would be firmly below Dunbar's Number in size (and would probably have working groups in the 5-15 member range for studying specific proposals or subareas), and would recommend draft bills to a "general policy committee", which would amend, merge overlapping proposals, and send to the whole membership for ratification. Meanwhile, the Senate would continue to serve the function of being a flat-organization working deliberative body.
UK Parliament has 650 members. With a quarter of the population. France has 577 seats with 1/5th the population. Germany has 736 seats for 83 million people.
The US House has roughly 7x more constituents per lower chamber constituency than every single European country. The numbers are relatively consistent across all of Europe. 135k people for Spain, 100k for Italy, ~110k for the UK and Germany. Etc.
Of course the US probably shouldn't have 2800 seats in the House, but we have plenty of room to go for say 850 or something and remain comparable to European states in total size.
So the points about the size of respective European parliaments are certainly a propos, But presuming we go from a 7x to 3.5x constituent : representative ratio by a rough doubling of the size of the House, what specific political dysfunction do we expect to solve given that there's still going to be a massive disparity in that ratio? The cost of running a campaign? That seems like the most obvious source of systematic dysfunction directly addressable by decreased constituency sizes (and one that I would acknowledge is a genuine problem), but also kind of the only one, and I'm not sure it's worth sacrificing organizational management capacity and increasing coordination costs to make that tradeoff.
I would agree that that in the abstract I would expect government to be more responsive with lower constituent:representative ratios, but given that it sounds like we agree that there's a conceptual upper bound on how big you can make an egalitarian deliberative body while having it even approximate being functional (e.g. you would agree 2800 is too big), I would moot that both 350k:1 and 700k:1 round to the constituent:representative ratio being an essentially insoluble problem (i.e., even though one number is half the other, both can be well-summarized as "too damn big").
In view of the fact that the constituent:representative ratio problem basically can't be solved without a hard national population cap, why not go in the opposite direction and try to optimize for the effective capacity of the deliberative body (e.g., try to get the House close to 150) since we can't offer a permanent fix by increasing representative numbers?
A larger House doesn't fix the fact that someone with small majorities in states with just over half the population, that loses by landslides in the rest of the states, can win the Presidency. That is the core problem for the Electoral College, that it's possible for a minority to be geographically distributed in an unusually effective way and use its power to govern. It doesn't matter so much whether the districts that give the electoral votes are particularly equivalent in power ratio (though that can exacerbate the problem).
A larger House has a somewhat strong impact on the Senate giving small states too much representation. It also helps ameliorate gerrymandering. It doesn't resolve it 100% of course vs just doing a popular vote.
Yeah, fixing proportionality is definitely a nice feature of this step, but I don't think failures of proportionality are really the biggest problem with the Electoral College in the current world. (I think the biggest five and the smallest five states are both about equally split between blue and red.)
>The most prominent presidency, in the US, seems to have fallen prey to exactly what political scientists had always critiqued- a demagogue who achieved power by going directly to the voters, despite being opposed by nearly all party elites
"Fallen prey" isn't the wording I'd have chosen. In my view, this itself shows a good argument for a presidential system: power capture by increasingly cuckoo elites can, perhaps, be checked. Slightly.
Isn't that just impeachment? Or to be technical, impeachment and conviction.
Well, to be technical, impeachment is for "Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors", not boneheadedness, incompetence, or *nearly* criminal behavior.
The real downside is that Congress has delegated great power to the President (placing regulatory agencies under the President's command and de facto giving him the authority to declare war) and has little interest in taking it back. The framers expected members of Congress to fight for a strong Congress; instead they fight for the strength of their party, and hand over power whenever the same party controls both Congress and the White House. The framers thought parties were a bad idea and wrote the Constitution with the assumption that there wouldn't be, but they accidently created a system that makes a two-party system almost inevitable.
American parties are pretty weak though, in a sense of control over their parliamentarians, compared to parties in Europe. Arguably "anti-partisan" nature of US Constitution has something to do with that.
Re: 1- the Germans have the solution. Instituted post-WW2 in reaction to how dysfunctional the Weimar Republic was, they have a rule that the PM can be replaced only once the parliament has voted a new one in. This is to avoid situations where it's easy for all of the parties to get rid of a Prime Minister, but impossible for them to agree on a replacement
Re: 2- I believe most African democracies are presidential as well
I bought an old house and have been replacing all the water pipes because they are made of galvanized steel, and their insides are badly rusted. Some pipe segments are so constricted with rust that they're practically clogged. This led me to do some research into galvanized pipes, and I discovered the material is considered obsolete for water pipes because of this problem.
With that said, why are galvanized steel pipes still sold at places like Home Depot? Are they only used for natural gas lines? Are some fools still using them as water pipes?
Galvanized pipe is sold mainly for repair and extension of existing galvanized pipe systems. Joining copper directly to galvanized steel is bad, since the materials have different electrode potentials and will suffer accelerated corrosion due to acting like a shorted out chemical battery. This can be mitigated by using special fittings, but it's easier to just replace like with like.until you have to replace the whole thing.
Galvanized pipe is also used as a finish material sometimes. Industrial-look decor has been semi-fashionably for a while, and galvanized pipe gets used there a fair amount for things like railings and shelving.
Generally speaking, the lifespan of the pipes is long enough that it will almost certainly be somebody else's problem by the time it is necessary to do something about it.
(I've redone plumbing in multiple houses; personally, I'd be ecstatic to see galvanized steel, as what I have replaced has almost always been an eclectic mixture of copper - great - and black iron - wtf.)
I think the "sturdiness" factor probably matters a lot, however, as the only real alternative there, stainless steel, is far too expensive for most DIYers. (If you're looking to spend that kind of money, you're probably hiring somebody to do the work.) Additionally there is UV and heat resistance, which can matter in particular applications, and copper is both more expensive and much harder to work with.
that thing inside the pipes is not just rust, it's mostly calcium deposits. You could run some acid through.
most people do use pvc pipes since they're cheaper too but some are concerned about phthalates in PVC and still go for steel.
What’s the current best option for consumer whole-genome sequencing, and what can you do with it once you have it?
Nebula offers 30X coverage for $299. You can do all sorts of interesting things, basically anything that 23andme does it can do better. You can directly look for medically-relevant variation instead of having to impute it using 3rd party services (eg Promethease). And since you have all the data, you can run new analysis methods over time as they're published.
You will need some skill with bioinformatics to do the more advanced things, though.
Compared to the price of 23andme (and keep in mind, that price also includes 23andme having your data) I think it's worth it.
Usually it is not useful beacuse most frequent disease are influenced by many genes and the environement. So you will learn for example that you have a slightly lower probability than average to get diabetis and a slightly higher probability to develop psoriasis, which have alpmots zero usefulness.
Some common traits are influenced by just one gene, but ussually you already know about tehse traits. For example you will learn that you have the genotype indicating lactose intolerance but you probably already knew that dairy did not agree with you!
Rare genetic diseases are usually associated with one or just a few genes, but most of them are pretty bad (and you will already know about them...) or not really actionable. In very rare cases you will learn something not obvious and actionable, for example that you have hemochromatosis and should become a blood donor to avoid the associated complications.
I had that question myself and reading a few genetic subs on reddit came to the conclusion that you don't win much (yet) compared to the lower cost of myHeritage/23andme. Personally I didn't find much I couldn't have known If I had just looked at my parents (grand-parents), eg health risks.
A few months back I posted a complaint in one of the hidden open threads about my experience interviewing at Google, in which I took a round of interviews, was congratulated by my recruiter on having passed and told to expect some "team fit" interviews, and was then rejected without any further input from me into the process.
My least favorite response was a comment letting me know I had no reason to be upset, because obviously if I can pass an interview at Google I can just go get a job somewhere else. Needless to say, I have not actually found this to be the case.
But if anyone is aware of someone willing to hire based on this kind of ability signal ("if I can pass an interview at Google..."), I would appreciate a pointer.
(I had thought the classifieds posts might be more appropriate for this, but they do not appear to be a going concern.)
My understanding is that some percentage of candidates pass the hiring committee but are for some reason not chosen by any teams during team matching. I'm not sure why that would happen - you may have had borderline interview performance and/or some other red flag. Or you may have just been unlucky with timing or something else. Google hiring is a huge impersonal machine at the entry level so there is lots a randomness I would guess.
What role and level was the interview for?
The level was L3. I am not aware that I was applying for any role in particular, though of course it's possible that I was doing so without realizing it.
I'm not sure what the question means? I was applying for an entry-level position.
In the past I would have said I had more of a problem with not getting past the interview stage. (For example, I have feedback from TripleByte telling me that, in their opinion, I did a great job on the take-home project they offered as an alternative to interviewing, but they can't move forward with me because they can only take candidates who will look good in an interview.)
Now I seem to have bigger problems getting interviews, which obscures whether the problems getting past interviews are still there.
The last time I was hired, I didn't provide a resume at all; I figured it could only hurt my position.
I can claim about three years of relevant or semi-relevant experience over the last ~12 years. I generally provide my resume; I didn't do it that time because by the time anyone actually asked for it, the final in-person interview was already scheduled.
Google had my resume before they even arranged the phone screen, though.
I recently wrote down what I know about caste: https://bsravanin.substack.com/p/caste-unlike-race
It got me talking more about this with close friends, but... if anyone can explain what jati means, or has good suggestions for essays to read, or has strong opinions about casteism in India (and other parts of the world), I would appreciate it.
It sounds to me like caste is a lot more analogous to social class in western societies than to race. It's damn near invisible to outsiders and taboo to discuss even among insiders, but it's a complicated system of discrimination that everyone participates in whether they like it or not.
As a white guy from Europe, it feels weird to have an opinion on this topic, but if I can reason by analogy... sometimes the situation is very different from one place to another, one cultural bubble to another, city versus village. So I am going to assume that what you described reflects the situation you find yourself in, but other people can have dramatically different experience.
My example of difference between city and village in Slovakia would be religion. In a big city, almost no one cares. Many people are atheists; and most of the believers are the kind that only visits the church once in a few months. Religion is almost not a topic; many people have no idea about their classmates or colleagues.
Now go to a village, preferably somewhere near the border with Poland, and the population is divided to Catholic majority and Protestant minority, who often hate each other. (Maybe you are like "wtf is the difference?". Exactly. Two groups of Jesus worshipers, each of them believing the other group will go to hell, because they do something slightly differently. Plus some historical baggage of religious wars, etc.) They do not kill each other anymore - that was a few centuries ago - but if your child marries someone from the other group, you try to prevent it, and sometimes you simply break contact with the child afterwards. Sometimes the atheist cousin living in a big city is the only person still talking to both branches of the family, because ironically they both tolerate him for not belonging to the *other* side.
You also can't tell the difference between a Catholic and a Protestant by looking at them. But in a village, everyone knows perfectly who you are. You either visit the same church every Sunday, or you don't. Plus there is gossip. Everyone knows everything about everyone. -- On the other hand, city is anonymous; the random people on the street know nothing about you. What you reveal is up to you.
Which is different from race, because you do not have the option to hide the color of your skin. Then the entire country is de facto a village for you. So perhaps the caste is different from race in a city, but similar in a village. Maybe for the poor people who spend their whole lives in a village, there is no difference.
I have seen the *Article 15* movie https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10324144/ and as far as I know it is based on reality https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncL76OIjfj8 except for the artistic license that made a few unrelated cases happen near the same protagonist.
There is a Wikipedia page on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste-related_violence_in_India which seems quite bad. I had to remind myself that India is the size of 1/2 Europe, and seeing a compilation of hate crimes from a half of Europe would also make a horrible list. Yet, looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_Europe and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_racial_violence_in_the_United_States maybe I am unfair, but the Indian list looks more like "50 people killed here, 20 people killed there", the European list (in recent decades) more like "a Swedish man motivated by racism attacked people at a school in Trollhättan with a sword, killing four", and the American list (in recent decades) more like "police killed a black man, riots burned down a town". Then again, Europe had its huge killings during WW2.
I guess my point is that it is different, but maybe comparable. I felt like the last part of your article put too much emphasis on the author who identifies as a Communist and Marxist and had a terrorist uncle. Perhaps the author is disproportionally famous in USA, but that doesn't make the problem any less real.
> On the other hand, city is anonymous; the random people on the street know nothing about you. What you reveal is up to you.
> Which is different from race, because you do not have the option to hide the color of your skin. Then the entire country is de facto a village for you. So perhaps the caste is different from race in a city, but similar in a village.
That's not a difference. You're attributing aspects to racial difference that aren't there. But being Korean is a big deal in Japan, and you can be fired if somebody learns that you're Korean when they thought you were Japanese. There is no visual distinction, and generally no cultural one either. Being from a different race that is visually identical doesn't mean you're not from a different race.
Indian castes are large groups of people that have been endogamous for thousands of years. That is also the definition of "races"; the concepts are not different things.
He's comparing caste to race in the U.S. To an American, Japanese and Koreans are plainly the same race because they look the same.
> To an American, Japanese and Koreans are plainly the same race because they look the same.
This is not true; we're already seeing colleges start to separate out different types of Asians for admission preference/dispreference purposes. Filipinos now get to be "disadvantaged" (given preferences) while Japanese and Koreans continue to receive dispreference. But an American can't tell the difference between a Filipino and a Japanese any more than they can tell the difference between a Japanese and a Korean.
Okay, but for most Americans, I think the difference between Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese, say, is more-or-less invisible. And that works out okay, since after a couple generations in the US, everyone tends to kind-of mix together and just be an American kid with somewhat darker skin and slightly different facial features.
Brown Pundits might be an interesting resource, if you have not come across them before: https://www.brownpundits.com/
Thank you for sharing. Read some random things by Razib, but hadn't heard of this blog before.
He has a very good substack and does wonderful interviews on his personal podcast (both called Unsupervised Learning)
Thanks for sharing this, Sravan. I've been wanting to learn about caste from an Indian without an axe to grind for a long time, but I (American white guy) haven't ever felt satisfied by the answers I received, and I suspect my questions have been a little offensive. While there are some similarities with US racial issues, I think you're correct in highlighting that they're not really parallel or analogous processes.
The response I've heard when I've mentioned caste to Indians in the US is basically "Caste? That doesn't really matter much any more". ... But it's instructive that everyone I've talked to was a brahmin studying in the US. Certain white conservatives here might give similar answers when asked about US racism.
Thank you. I read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annihilation_of_Caste, but not the full text and response. I will check it out.
Thoughts / comments / feedback on the following analogy / chain of thoughts:
A) production ML models typically have a predictive component and a loss function
B) the predictive component generates predictions from signals, the loss function says 'how much it matters' that a given prediction was correct or incorrect
C) the 'predictive component' is something like a 'map of the space', and the loss function says something like 'where do we ~actually~ want to go' (edit: i think 'utility function' is what i want here)
D) if we squint at a humans and think of them as ML models, the utility function encodes our value systems; these represent some mapping between world states and how we appraise them
E) less wrong / ssc / ea / rationalist community promotes a series of norms / values which pertain _mostly_ to the internal structure of the ML model and how it _ought_ to update based upon evidence, and how it _ought_ to evaluate (i.e. predict) various choices, but not details such as 'this aspect of the loss function, as it pertains to the territory represented by the map, is more important than this other aspect' (i.e. this part of the territory is more important than this other part)
F) there aren't modern materialist movements devoted to helping people improve the quality of their loss functions
G) such a movement might be useful and would fit naturally into the EA / SSC / Less wrong community
H) such a movement might also be risky and dangerous because it would look something like a religion (in that it might end up promoting a set of values about acting in the world)
I) a loss function could be considered more or less correct, given some pre-existing definition of 'correctness', but in some sense, asking 'is there a correct loss function for a human being' is roughly equivalent to asking 'is there a correct human moral system' ?
J) we might skip the bootstrap problem by reframing the question in 'I' as: "are there loss functions which allow my predictive model to more rapidly converge on stable, net-positive valences?"
K) a positive answer to that last problem might look something like wireheading yourself. To avoid wireheading, we might use something like 'coherent extrapolated volition', so 'is there a loss function which satisfies the constraints in J, yet which gives rise to behavior that my current loss function also evaluates as being a desirable way for me to act in the world now'
L) at some point all of this starts to look so much like 'the search for moral truth' that it's reasonable to believe at least some aspect of historical religions can be understood in these ML terms: religions act as claims about correct loss functions
> F) there aren't modern materialist movements devoted to helping people improve the quality of their loss functions
It sounds like you are referring to "utility functions" or "terminal values". I'm not sure what "quality" means. I think that lots of people tend to (1) not really think about what their terminal values are or should be, and (2) get in the habit of obeying their intuition - their system 1 - but intuition isn't based on careful thought and often makes decisions that system 2 analysis would find flawed.
> G) such a movement might be useful and would fit naturally into the EA / SSC / Less wrong community
But doesn't EA do just that? Ideas like Peter Singer's drowning child are meant to suggest what our terminal values should be (by using logic to extrapolate from our built-in moral intuition) and how to "optimize" to honor those values.
I think EA comes the closest here, but to me it feels much more like "being rational in the pursuit of some value system that you shouldn't look too much in detail at"
in other words, they're using a not-really-well-thought out, debated, explored, nuanced, definition of good (i.e. saving lives, or maybe something like 'quality adjusted life years') and then running forward with figuring out how to maximize that. I'm not saying "hey that's bad," so much as arguing that i think the question of "what should our terminal values be" needs a lot more investigation.
Scott wrote some post once talking about people in EA who were saying ' but think of the suffering of all the insects', for example. When we say 'the greatest good for the greatest number', do we ~mean~ anything by good there, other than simply 'not dying'? Is there a territory there?
That sounds right, except I wonder if you're seeing a lack of nuance in the *average* of people's values in the EA movement, and mistaking that for "no one cares to look too closely at this philosophy" which I would disagree about.
I sometimes think about how we tend to use one standard for humans (QALYs which heavily favors length of life) and another for other animals (average pleasantness of experience, which ignores length entirely).
There are of course practical reasons to do the second thing--asking factory farms to give chickens long and pleasant lives is a non-starter. Separately from that, though, my axioms lead me to believe quality of life is more important than length, although life length is a big deal for humans in ways it is not for animals: our early lives are unpleasant (if my baby crying is any guide) so a long and healthy life can potentially increase average pleasantness; we plan for the far future, we dwell on how soon we will die, we think back to loved ones we've lost, and in general care, in the present, a lot about time that isn't the present; and last but not least, a human's instrumental value to other humans tends to increase with life length.
So, as an EA I have a fairly nuanced philosophy around this stuff, but EA is a fairly big tent and it seems impractical to share that nuance to everyone else, let alone get everybody to agree on it.
I think this is a central idea in David Hume's work. He says action is always governed by belief and desire operating together. He thinks belief is governed by rationality, but desire is not.
I suspect that reason *doesn't* provide as much uniqueness for our epistemology as many Humeans think, and that there should be a greater symmetry between our treatment of values and evidence.
THANKS - this is exactly what i'm looking for. I can see that the 'loss function' is the wrong function, it's the _utility_ function i'm thinking of. And i think my question boils down to "it seems the lesswrong / scc takes 'my utilty function' as a kind of given blackbox instead of something a person can and should optimize'
>H) such a movement might also be risky and dangerous because it would look something like a religion (in that it might end up promoting a set of values about acting in the world)
In what sense do you mean that this is risky and dangerous? As in, we could accidentally a cult like with Leverage? Or as in, people could get arrested (for what?)?
i dunno what 'Leverage' refers to, but yes, the latter
it seems to me like EA/SSC/LessWrong is i this weird space of like, sort of being a religion, except the only values we expressly advocate have to do with the integrity of internal models
EA being something of an exception
Leverage was discussed in point 28 here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-october
Could you elaborate on what you think people could get arrested *for*? AIUI, at least in the West, starting a new religion isn't illegal.
ahhh, shoot, i meant 'the former'
leverage sounds exactly like the kind of risk i had in mind
Somewhat disagree on E). There are very strong belief in EA/rat communities, such as: that all human life is valuable, that all humans are equally valuable, that animal suffering matters, that borders are meaningless, that nationalism is a scam, that war is always bad, that more population is always better, but abortions are also good, that gay rights are important, that the rights of the individual cannot be superseded by the needs of the society, etc. etc.
It starts from the most basic introductions. Whenever anyone starts explaining EA, they give the example of africans and malaria nets, which is very reasonable, but also holds implicit the belief that african lives hold the same value to me as the lives of people from my country. (And if you make the obvious follow-up that the effective altruism logic can be applied for different value systems, *you're missing the point*)
On F) - literally every single religion or cultural movement comes with their own "loss functions" under your definition.
Overall, I don't understand why you're forcing this metaphor.
You don't need to believe that African lives are worth EXACTLY as much as every other life in order for the marginal life saved for a dollar to be more effective than elsewhere. As long as it's sufficiently easy to save a life, that can overwhelm other margins.
Since you brought up abortion, in Freakonomics Levitt writes that rather than treating it as a binary if someone thought of abortion as fractionally bad then the very large numbers of abortions required to prevent one homicide (by his theory) could still overwhelm that. That's the kind of logic I'm thinking of above.
> (And if you make the obvious follow-up that the effective altruism logic can be applied for different value systems, *you're missing the point*)
I knew *exactly* the type of pointless nitpicking I'd provoke.
EA seems like the one exception here, but it comes down to this:
> if you make the obvious follow-up that the effective altruism logic can be applied for different value systems, *you're missing the point*
There's a HUGE difference between saying "we should be consistent in using rationality to evaluate choices in terms of moral values" and "here is the specific set of values we should use," and what EA seems to do is lean _very heavily_ into the latter, while claiming to be all about the former.
So there's a bit of a motte and bailey going on. If you try to poke at the underpinnings - like, how do you choose _which_ values system to use EA on, i find that people generally reject _that_ question as meaningless.
>There are very strong belief in EA/rat communities, such as: that all human life is valuable, that all humans are equally valuable, that animal suffering matters, that borders are meaningless, that nationalism is a scam, that war is always bad, that more population is always better, but abortions are also good, that gay rights are important, that the rights of the individual cannot be superseded by the needs of the society, etc. etc.
I think I missed a memo somewhere, since I disagree with at least three of those and two of them contradict each other.
Me too.
On the other hand, he thinks Russian borders are very important.
It's a very good point, and underappreciated. I love borders. Borders is what stops us from killing each other, because we can agree you live over there, on that side of the border, and do whatever crazy ass thing you want, and I live here, on this side of the border, and I don't have to put up with your crazy. (Nor you with mine.)
If there were no borders, if we all had to act and think and move the same, we'd have to fight it out, and it would be bloody and miserable. Good fences make good neighbors, as a poet no doubt long forgotten said.
Right. It was hard enough to get from a system of hitting each others heads in reciprocally to some kinds of rules of laws and it paid out. However fine you think your law is, it's not universal. A state is not necessarily a nation but common law. If things go well, people who don't like their local laws can leave to a different place. People who don't like laws at all have to go into business.
Perhaps you *should* remember that poem. It starts off "Something there is that doesn't love a wall". The "Good fences make good neighbors" is the voice of the relatively unthinking neighbor.
I've read it and pondered it, and I daresay I understand far better, if you think it's as sophomoric as that. It helps to understand what "a wall" represents in Vermont, which I do, having lived there a spell.
It's the thing you put up at the edge of your field to get the stones out of the way so you can plow. Yes. And Frost doesn't really come down on one side or the other. But the voice of the neighbor saying "Good fences make good neighbors" is portrayed as relatively unthinking.
Moreover, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/150774/robert-frost-mending-wall emphasizes the ambivalence of the poem, and Frost's nuanced attitude to the subject.
For most ML systems, one uses the canonically correct choice of loss function, (log-)likelihood- because the model doesn't just predict an output, but rather a distribution on outputs. Most other loss functions derive from this by assuming a particular distribution on the output- for example mean squared error corresponds to a Gaussian predictive distribution's log likelihood.
For intuition on this choice, see:
https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2016/06/01/how-to-assign-partial-credit-on-an-exam-of-true-false-questions/
ok, i think i'm confusing this with 'utility function'
if i change that, does the reasoning still hold?
EA could be a Global Political Party ?
how does a "Global Political Party" work?
I'm building Global Government.
Planet Earth DAO - Global Government - Interplanetary ID System (Universal Suffrage)
check it out,
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hTouBeE_ZG2doi_EVjj5Pp-J2dDP8W0xofP3fLGqXcQ/edit
linktr.ee/joannapicetti
planetarycouncil.org/
Global government is a terrible idea and will remain so until space travel is cheap enough for people to easily escape your compulsory benevolence.
If you're 'building global government', I think you'll find large numbers of people who are certain that what you are doing is pernicious and detrimental to every human being on the planet.
No, I'm not going to check it out, either.
No, I won't.
double negation is an affirmation ;)
I note by your Twitter that you use a very silly icon, I would hope that is meant humourously but I can't be sure, too much "uwu" going on there.
May I ask why the Korean name of Venus? Do you claim to come from Venus, represent Venus, or that Venus is the ideal that Earth should strive to emulate?
Also, when was the election held to appoint you to the Planetary Council? I do not recall casting my vote in that, and certainly not for you.
Everyone has the right to be an idiot on the Internet, so if you want to play at being a cyborg girl who is the ruler of the global government as part of the intergalactic federation of planets, go you Lady Venus.
yes, Agriculture is also a global issue to be addressed by a Global Governance.
RE: Carrick Flynn, I'm not surprised. He ran on "I'm a local boy" but the problem was, he wasn't local enough. He'd never held any sort of political office, and his message boiled down to "Vote for me, send me off to the Big City, and I will work on - preventing pandemics".
That's nice, but what are you going to do for me? By contrast, the winner was someone who already holds office in the Oregon House of Representatives and has a track record voters can look at. She's from a union family, so that gives her a big connection to the local and wider Democratic Party:
"Andrea’s experience is what sets her apart in a crowded primary field. She doesn’t just hold progressive values – she has delivered progressive victories. She’s worked as a US congressional aide and policy advisor to three Members of Congress including Senator Harry Reid, Congressman Pete Stark, and Congresswoman Darlene Hooley. After serving as a congressional staffer for over a decade, Andrea became an advocate for unions, environmental groups, and reproductive rights organizations like the Oregon Environmental Council, NARAL Pro-Choice Oregon, Planned Parenthood Advocates of Oregon, SEIU Local 49, SEIU Local 503, Pineros Y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (PCUN), and more. She also served on the Oregon League of Conservation Voters Board for over 8 years."
Over on r/TheMotte, I had a look at the new congressional district that was carved out and which both parties are hoping to take in order to be first and hold on to it. It is constituted from the following:
"(1) Polk County - votes Republican. A mix of agriculture and education (Western Oregon University is a major employer). So he'll probably take the college/city votes. Is that enough?
(2) Yamhill County - Republican leaning. Again, agriculture, wine and education as above, again, he'll probably take the college votes.
(3) Marion County - Democrat, but just about. Has switched between the Republican and Democrat candidate in the last four presidential elections. Economy runs on agriculture and "government". Again, he'll probably take Democrat votes but will that be enough?
(4) Clackamas County - ooh, whoever edited the Wikipedia article does not like the knuckledraggers living here: "In contrast with the more liberal and cosmopolitan Multnomah County to the north, and the more corporate Washington County to the west, some citizens of Clackamas County have espoused a blue-collar, yet conservative political outlook of the backlash mold described by Thomas Frank. It was the headquarters of the Oregon Citizens Alliance, which has worked to pass a number of homophobic initiatives" 'Homophobic', oh my! But it leans Democrat, all the same.
(5) Washington County - very Democratic since the 90s, and besides the usual agricultural economy, has many electronics and computer companies located there such as Intel and Epson, as well as Nike. If he's going to get votes, this is the place.
But he's not the only Democratic candidate running for selection, and maybe Oregonians will go for someone more established that they know, rather than a new guy who is getting headlines about all the big-money outsiders backing him."
And that's what happened. Andrea Salinas (white Hispanic) is the local politician who got the nod despite all the outside money that came flooding in for Flynn. And *because* it was outside money, that's where he fell down. If I'm a winegrower or logger from one of those counties, and I see all these headlines about "big rich guys from something called EA are pouring money into Flynn's campaign", my instinctive reaction is "what are they gonna do for me?" and I'll vote for someone who I think will do something for me.
Also, it looks like Flynn just got outplayed on politics; there seem to have been immediate complaints about his campaign by the rivals from the get-go. That doesn't mean he did anything wrong, just that the old stagers know how the sausage is made.
What was Salinas' message?
"In Congress, she will fight for a $15 minimum wage, paid family and medical leave, and an even bigger social safety net for our communities."
What was Flynn's message?
"With the correct government interventions, it is possible for us to never have a serious pandemic again. I will champion these measures."
I see he's revamped his campaign website to emphasise 'growing the economy', etc. but up to recently that was his big message. Parish pump politics - that's what you can't beat. $15 an hour for the workers of Oregon versus something something committees something.
Here's what a local paper has to say about it:
https://oregoncapitalchronicle.com/2022/05/20/oregon-primary-election-results-provide-a-lesson-in-party-politics/
"Carrick Flynn, running in the Democratic primary, had almost no local contacts or organized support, was known before the campaign hardly at all locally and showed no distinctive issues or talking points. But his candidacy was supported by money – mountains of it, amounts most House candidates would never dream of.
A cryptocurrency billionaire contributed millions to a pro-Flynn political action committee, and a national Democratic PAC added in with more – totaling $12.2 million according to the most recent campaign finance reports. Flynn did not control that PAC money, but the funds spent on his behalf were enough to cast a deep shadow over the funding of all the other eight candidates.
The leading conventional candidate in that primary, Andrea Salinas, was well funded by usual standards but brought to bear only a fraction as much. Pro-Flynn ads (and toward the end, anti-Salinas ads) swamped the district. Salinas did however have plenty of endorsements, a strong campaign organization and some familiarity with the district through work in the legislature and in advocacy organizations. Voters heard a message appealing to the Democratic base."
Not to mention if you say your big issue is you're going to do pandemic preparation *right* that conveys two negative messages: (1) this is all going to happen again (yuck!) not long from now, and (2) the idiots who did the preparation *this* time are all idiots. You can get away with the latter message when you're running for President, but when you're a kid running for your first office *as a Democrat* and your implicit message is *the Democrats who run your state* totally fucked this up, you come across as more than a little full of yourself, and that doesn't work super well at the local level for your first race, even if you're trying to flip a district, and much less so if you're trying to assume the mantle of the local governing ideology.
Yeah, he's a first timer trying to persuade voters from what are largely rural counties with a few big city/university spots to vote for him. He may or may not win the techie vote on a platform of EA, pandemic prevention, and cleaning up Congress, but for the farmers and blue-collar workers, what does that translate into on the ground?
The national party seems to have been behind him, which is interesting, but which may be more down to the fact that he managed to attract very big name donors and it's always a good idea to be on good terms with very big name donors. I don't know what the local party thought of him, and since the people went for Salinas instead, they know what bread they want buttered, by whom, and how much butter per slice.
If Flynn intends to stick in politics instead of giving up after this and heading off for some think-tank job, then he needs to put in the hours and the slog to build up a local base so potential constituents know who he is and what he's about, and what he intends to do for them in particular.
> If Flynn intends to stick in politics instead of giving up after this and heading off for some think-tank job...
Think-tanks are politics, just not electoral politics. Think-tanks help decision-makers understand 1) what issues ought to be addressed and 2) what the various options are (presumably within the limits of each group's Overton window). They can have immense influence. Recall how President Trump outsourced his list of possible judicial appointments to the originalists at the Federalist Society.
If EAs want to influence the Democratic Party, building a reputation as the most effective number-crunchers on issues like healthcare might be more effective than spending a large amount of money on elections.
One problem there is that there is no shortage of wonks and think-tanks affiliated with the Democratic Party. I wonder if this is why some EAs felt it was so important that Flynn be elected.
How about the Republican Party?
Or better still, how about a genuinely non-partisan think tank that tries hard to stay neutral and contribute good ideas to both sides of politics?
Sure, it's not going to solve everything on its own, but it seems like an intrinsically good idea with maximal appeal.
I’m a lifelong vegetarian, and I just got diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. Most diabetic cookbooks seem to be about dieting/losing weight, which I don’t need to do (I could stand to put on about 10 pounds right now).
Does anyone have a good recommendation for a vegetarian low-carb cookbook that still has recipes with actual calories? Thanks.
Since you're a vegetarian, not a vegan, you have a lot of really good options. I don't have a good cookbook to recommend, but I'd look into Asian ones or into books about breakfast if I was you.
I'd like to recommend this website: https://thewoksoflife.com/ . Vegetarian recipes are here: https://thewoksoflife.com/category/recipes/vegetarian/ . In some non-vegetarian recipes, you can use tofu or fake meat instead of meat. Where noodles are involved, you can use shirataki noodles; there are also other low carb noodles that I haven't tried.
Oh, also Nancy Lebovitz has a recipe just for you in this open thread.
How important is Glycaemic Index? I recall people around here talking about how barley bread gets digested slower, so the same amount of carbs results in lower but wider spike in blood sugar levels compared to wheat bread.
The magic words you are looking for are "vegitarian keto", not because keto is magic, just because vegetarian keto dies replace carbs with fat or protein, and fat has more calories per bite than carbs.
Type 1 is not Type 2 and your doctor should have explained this to you. Very different causes and on average opposite effects (most Type 1 diabetics struggle to gain weight until they get their levels under control by taking insulin) The diabetic cookbooks are aimed at Type 2, who do generally need to lose weight, not you.
Laurels Kitchen - it's vegan, not vegetarian, and while I disagree with their veganism, it's my go to book for cooking veggies. Their rattitollie is amazing. They emphasize bread a lot but that's not the only food covered.
Thanks, I’ll check it out
Type 1? Then you've probably got immune system problems. It's type 2 where you're most likely overweight. If you're on insulin, then you need to WATCH, not limit, your carbs, and really make sure your insulin intake matches your carb intake.
Your request makes me think that you're type 2, which you can handle by really controlling your carbs. If so, check what baked potato does to your blood sugar. That's reported to be less problematic than most starches.
If you are going to try this by controlling carbs, then I recommend stir-frys, with lots of Napa Cabbage, mushrooms, nuts, tofu, etc. You can very that a lot by shifting the ingredients and spices around. The problem is it doesn't keep well. What was good last night is repulsive by breakfast. Nuts are good. I can't recommend a good cook book, but it's pretty easy to handle this if you've got access to a good grocery store. The problem is that the stuff doesn't keep well, you expect to make lots of trips. Oat bran is good if you want baked stuff. But most of this only applies if you are type 2, and not using drugs to control your insulin levels (or at least only using metformin). I don't think type 1 can be controlled by diet.
I’m still not at the point where my doctors are giving me total control of my insulin, so if I went out and, say, ate a pack of oreos, I’d probably drive my blood sugars through the roof. My understanding is that even once you’re experienced with dosing insulin, it’s a bad idea to go crazy with carbs, because if you mistime your dose, or misdose, you can seriously screw up your blood sugars. And I’m a guy who really likes my breads and desserts, so I figure that if I can cut other things easily, I’ll have more carbs left in my buffer to use on other stuff
You've got to be really careful to BALANCE your carbs vs. your insulin. Even those who have lived with insulin for years tend to get it wrong occasionally, and can go unconscious. If that happens you better hope someone notices in time to get you to an emergency room. I don't have direct experience with that, but I've got a couple of friends who do. So far they're alive, but there have been a couple of close calls. One time one of them only survived because his girlfriend decided to visit, and he'd been dealing with it for over a decade.
That said, yes, it's always a good idea to limit your carb intake, but it's not the way diabetes type 1 is controlled. But if you ate a pack of oreos, you'd have a really hard time calculating how much insulin to take. I can't really say more than that, because I've no direct experience, but I know you don't need to be as strict as I do. (Diabetes 2, unmedicated, because of a bad reaction to meds. So I need to be really strict about carbs.)
Sorry you're going through this. I try to keep low card + minimal meat, one thing that's really helped me is nuts, hemp seeds, and oils. I get most of my calories from fat, and plant-based fats like that seem to work the best.
I'd really value some feedback on my book review entry (Surface Detail by Iain M Banks) from anyone who read it. My best guess is that either it was too long or that I didn't do a good enough job justifying the choice of book in the text, since fiction generally didn't do well in the contest - but I'd really like to know if the writing itself was incompetent / boring, whether there were any specific sections that didn't work, and whether my self-assessment of my review is accurate.
https://readsomethinginteresting.com/acx/66
Also, since nobody else seems to have started one, perhaps this can be a general 'discuss my non-winning review' thread - I'll try and read and comment on any review anyone posts below if others are also looking for more detailed feedback on their own work.
I enjoyed your review! Ranked it higher than 3 of the finalists, equal to 6 of them, and only ranked 3 of the finalist reviews higher than yours. No prior knowledge of the book you reviewed or its author - haven’t read much science fiction in a long time. Having read all of the entries, I agree with Scott: there were just a lot of really good ones! And subject matter does count for a lot: 100% of the finalists are non-fiction.
It's true, there was a lot to like! I enjoyed 'The Future of Fusion' as well, but liked some of the other finalists even more. 'Consciousness and the Brain' was my favorite, followed by 'The Dawn of Everything' (EH review) and 'The Righteous Mind' (BW review). Funny enough, of those which didn't make the finals, 'The Dawn of Everything' (BW review) and 'The Righteous Mind' (E review) were also pretty high up in the my rankings. My favorite which didn't make the finals (aside from mine, of course - '1587: A Year of No Significance') is 'Now It Can Be Told', about the military guy who spearheaded the Manhattan Project (probably I'm a little more interested in history than most ACX fans.) Cheers!
I liked your writing, rated it highly. (7/10, making it a 5th-8th place among the 60-something I've read.) My main problem with it was, it wasn't a review.
There's a formula I've come to expect of SSC/ACX-style reviews of books. You start with the content, presenting a summary of the books' arguments as faithfully as possible. Then, you examine them critically, raising every doubt and question you can think of, and describe how the book itself deals with them and what your independent research and/or experience tells you about their validity. Then, and only then, you situate the book in the wider epistemic context, including using it as a springboard for your own musings.
You did not do any of that. You started with a pre-committed thesis, then expanded on it even before getting to the book itself. By the point you did get to the book, it was firmly in the context of elaborating your larger argument, essentially preventing me, the reader, from forming an impression of the book separate from it. (The reverse is also true, I'm not sure I agree with some of your assertions, but you made it harder for me to argue with them by submerging them in the context of Culture, a series I mostly haven't read (yet?). I can only assume someone who's never heard of Banks at all would have an even harder time following your argument.)
That's really interesting - thank you for the feedback. It never really occurred to me that people would have an expectation of what a review might look like because all the reviews are so different, but you're completely right that structurally the book-review bit actually comes at the end. I would never have even thought about this without your feedback, really appreciate it!
I do have some feedback on your review, if you want it (caveat that i did not rank reviews for the contest, so I don't have a good grasp yet of the field this year)
* Overall I enjoyed the read and it spurred some thoughts about fictional utopias. But you asked for ideas on improvement, so:
* I agree that choosing a fiction book probably increased the difficulty. I notice that I tend to expect to Learn Something About a Nonfiction Topic when I read the reviews, so a fiction review might be swimming upstream.
* The second sentence is off-puttingly self-abasing, ("why should I like this if the author isn't enthusiastic about it?"). I get the instinct but better to just fake your way through that awkward feeling.
* I found it all easy to follow and understand, and I think you're a competent writer, although I am a sci fi reader and a Iain Banks fan, so maybe background familiarity is required.
* I think a more clear thesis statement (maybe something about the Culture's place in fictional utopias) & signposting that at the beginning & re-organizing around that statement & trimming to about 80% of the length would have helped. I enjoyed a lot of the material about other fictional utopias, but I think making it clear from the beginning what the point was would make it go down easier. I also note that this advice is a bit in tension with how I usually read the book reviews, ie., I like many that don't have clear thesis statements, but I think I want one here because you're reviewing a fiction book so your analysis / conclusions have to do more heavy lifting than in some reviews. (Relatedly, when I first read it, I really enjoyed the use of ship names as headers . . . but on reflection, I'm wondering if that contributed to the feeling others had of lack of organization, because they're not really doing the heavy lifting on signposting that headers would usually do).
* I enjoyed it and I enjoyed thinking about Culture for a while, so thanks for writing!
And if we're having Thoughts about Culture time, the topic of your review did hit on my biggest issue, which is that I can't buy that the Culture is a utopia, although I get the impression Banks wants us to reach that conclusion. As I recall, the books are all pretty focused on members of Contact or Special Circumstances (or people drafted into being ad hoc members) and can be read to suggest that everyone else is sort of doing a lot of jockeying for position and social climbing, but otherwise leading a life that is fairly meaningless compared to the "real" work the protagonists are doing. I think I could absolutely buy that living in a post-scarcity spaceship etc was utopian, but it would require describing a lot of aspects of the normal experience that Banks has no interested in (people able to spend unlimited time with friends, developing relationships that deepen over decades and centuries, creating works of art and discussing them with friends, inspiring one another, doing all this and knowing that yourself and your loved ones aren't threatened by poor health, jail, the need to perform drone-like labor, etc.).
Thanks so much for the thoughtful feedback. And I definitely agree Banks wants us to think of Culture as a utopia - I think he works hard to present the opposite case in the interest of intellectual honesty, but I think he stops short of really thoroughly fisking it because he is more interested in presenting how much BETTER it is than what we have currently. A lot of people think _Look to Windward_ is the best Culture novel for this reason, because it is basically just 90% ordinary Culture people having conversations in the context of recreational trips, and then the remaining 10% a little detective mystery sideshow.
I read it, and liked it, and hoped it would get in because I was interested in the discussion that would ensue. But for a reader who hasn't read or isn't interested in the politics of The Culture books, I can see why they wouldn't find it compelling.
But since we're discussing the politics of The Culture, let's discuss the politics of The Culture. I'm always puzzled as to why people describe The Culture as left-wing. In foreign policy terms it's somewhere between neoconservative and downright imperialist; the central foreign policy debate of The Culture seem to be "To exactly what extent should we use our overwhelming military force to impose our superior civilisation on people less morally sophisticated?" which is basically the same central foreign policy debate as the Bush administration.
In terms of domestic policy, The Culture is an absolute aristocracy ruled by a heirachy of princes, dukes and earls... excuse me, GSVs, LSVs and GCUs, while the common masses are denied any meaningful agency. The aristocracy is of course perfectly entitled to rule on the basis of their superior breeding and intelligence. Class mobility is of course completely impossible. The underclass is, at least, all alike in their level of deprivation... except perhaps for the few kept as Very Special Pets by the ruling class (ie Contact and Special Circumstances agents). Anyway, none of this sounds like a left-wing utopia to me, but maybe I don't understand leftism very well.
I think this might be the perennial problem that the words 'left' and 'right' don't really mean anything when transplanted outside the context of modern politics. From a modern perspective, the Culture is incredibly socially permissive and free (which map onto classical left-wing politics), but also very individualistic and has aggressive foreign policy justified by an appeal to the moral correctness of Culture politics (which map onto classically right-wing politics). I don't have masses to add here except to say that your criticism of the hypocrisy of the Culture's foreign policy as it pertains beyond the way we choose to describe it seems spot on to me, and it is probably the biggest failing of the Culture that Banks doesn't properly grapple with (maybe in _Excession_, with the Affront?)
Your second point is very interesting to me though. The Minds don't actually quite map onto Princes / Dukes / Earls etc because Princes are just people in whom we invest political power, whereas GSVs are specialist Minds in which the Culture invests both political power and more conventional firepower. I'm not sure the concept of aristocracy as you use it quite translates across to a world where Princes actually are significantly more powerful than their Dukes / Earls etc and therefore don't need to rely on them for patronage. I wonder also if the concept quite maps when ordinary citizens don't really 'rely' on GSVs for protection and other state functions (although obviously people live on GSVs, exit rights are a core concept in the Culture so the relationship isn't quite like the relationship between citizens and a Prince).
In the books there is some evidence that the Minds don't function as a strict aristocracy as you describe. _Excession_ and _Hydrogen Sonata_ both feature groups of Minds trying to reach a conclusion to some conflict, and multiple different ships are involved in the process without an obvious hierarchy except those imposed by the ships themselves. I note in _Hydrogen Sonata_ the GSV 'Empiricist' is roundly condemned by the coordinating group when it makes a careless mistake leading to the destruction of another Mind, and the OU 'Mistake Not...' is given a very high degree of freedom to pursue its objectives despite being a smaller class of ship.
I think what people mean when they say the Culture is left wing is that it doesn't have obvious hierarchies. As you correctly point out (as do I in my review) that isn't quite the same thing as *no* hierarchies. In general I think this line of thought it an interesting one to pursue in a critique of anarcho-leftism; does this solution actually remove hierarchies or does it just make those hierarchies less legible?
Really interesting food for thought - thank you!
Thanks for your response. I'd say you're probably reading too much into my offhand comparison of various ship types to various aristocratic ranks; that wasn't really the part I wanted to emphasise; I wanted to emphasise the vast gulf between Minds and common people.
Haven't you heard that neoconservativism was forged by former Trotskyists? Admittedly, many belonged to a right-communist faction that allied with left-communist Trotskyists over their shared dissidence from orthodox Stalinism, but Stalin is the one who advocated "socialism in one country" instead of focusing on the exporting of revolution (not that it stopped him from being a de facto imperialist).
Iain Banks is one of my favorite SF authors and I really liked you review. I did not find it too long, but I like long texts in general and I love Iain Banks so...
I really loved you classification of utopias, which I would have liked to be longer in fact. Very interesting, and totally relevant for discussing Banks novels. I also loved, of course, the use you made of the ships'names.
The only thing I found a bit off putting was the "pathetic" at the begining. Please do not describe yourself like that! Ah, and I kind of expected you to open with Musk paying hommage to Banks with the names of SpaceX drones, as it was I think a natural hook to present Banks to rationalist readers but it appears only briefly and a bit late.
Anyway, thank you for this review. I need to reread some of these Culture books!
Not pertaining to your review, but can you explain the point of the cannibal island interlude in Consider Phlebas? That's really the only thing I remember from that book, and simply because it was truly baffling why it was even in the book.
Relatedly, one thing that put me off of Banks is that in the three Culture books I read (Phlebas, Player of Games, Use of Weapons) there's always this really random moment where someone gets raped "on-screen" and it has 0 relevance to the plot or anything. The cannibal island style asides are easily the weakest part of the books, and bring up bad memories of Piers Anthony and other rape-fetish authors
That was my exact reaction when I read Consider Phlebas. The best explanation that I have come up with, is that the shuttle waiting to rescue the cannibals is how Horza sees the Culture: ignoring the evil on their footsteps because they might get upset if they looked too closely. But Froolows explanation sounds reasonable
Yeah that bit is very weird. I've got a sort of vaguely literary explanation below, but it also seems relatively possible to me that there is no real explanation and Banks just wrote it because he wanted to. I'll talk through the 'he did it just for the craic' position first, because it is what I reckon the actual explanation is:
When _Consider Phlebas_ was published people mostly thought of Banks as primarily a 'serious' author. He might have been somewhat unsure his experimental shift to the sci-fi genre was going to go down well with reviewers / the public and so wanted to get all his mad ideas down in one place because he didn't know if he'd get another chance at it. Banks *really* likes body horror, as anyone who has read _Wasp Factory_ will tell you, so it might just have been that he had some especially grotesque body horror stuff he wanted to write and couldn't think of a way to get a 'cannibal island' into any other setting.
The literary purpose for the scene is more debatable. One possible explanation is as follows:
Probably the key theme in _Consider Phlebas_ is in regards to whether life's meaning comes from traditional values versus whether we construct meaning for ourselves (primarily through technology). This is quite unsubtly drawn in the overarching narrative which is literally a war between the techno-optimistic Culture and a group of militant religious fanatics, the Idirans. However it also crops up in quite a few of the other little vignettes like for example the high-stakes card game of Damage, where (again very unsubtly) human players must pit their basic biological instincts against technological manipulation of their emotions, up to and including a technologically-induced urge to kill oneself (competing against the 'traditional' human desire not to do that).
In this context, the cannibal island functions as a significant rebuke to Horza's worldview (Horza is the shapeshifting spy protagonist who fights for the pro-tradition Idiran side). Horza believes that the Culture will eventually ossify and remove an important measure of 'human-ness' from humans in the pursuit of describing its own values, and therefore fights for the Idirans who he thinks will eventually rationalise away their bellicose and expansionist religion and leave just the vibrant traditional measures of meaning in its place.
Cannibal Island is, however, an example of a religious society which has gone utterly off the deep end; everyone is starving, their prophet is insane and they all live on a world which is going to be destroyed down to its component atoms in just a few days. Horza has to confront the fact that there are some ways of deriving meaning which are entirely unacceptable to him, and that traditional sources of value like religion can produce grotesque excesses of these unacceptable outcomes.
I'd liken it to the same argument made in Three Worlds Collide (https://robinhanson.typepad.com/files/three-worlds-collide.pdf), in the sense that Cannibal Island adds a new position to the religious-Idiran / technological-Culture dichotomy which profoundly affects Horza's philosophical stability, except in _Consider Phlebas_ the extremely degenerate society is the last one to be discovered so the character's reaction to the discovery is quite different.
Quite a thoughtful reply, thanks! Guess I should go read Player of Games, then...
I'm an culture series reader, but mostly I love Player of Games and found pluses and minuses in the other books.
I like the idea of the Culture series setting, but other than Player of Games I haven't always found the plots fun. I like the world building and the ambience mostly.
I think your essay was really long, but I think I'm spoiled by Scott's essay standards which is a really high mark. I've never read surface detail and I don't really want to get into that horrifying tradeoffs like you mentioned in the plot summary.
I like my Sci Fi and Fantasy a bit lighter toned. I've been burned out on heavy, dark settings (which the Culture series can touch on but not usually so on the nose) so I don't think I would like Surface Detail and maybe that affected my opinion of the piece.
I love Banks, so I went to have a look, and I agree with some of the comments you've received above. There were some interesting ideas, but there was one problem which put me off: an interest in having Banks jockey for position with other books. Several sections felt like you were trying to prove that Banks books could win in some sci-fi Top Trumps, and therefore is good. This is deadly dull and wrong. I suppose when you're a grand old person of literature, you do get to pronounce who is as good as who, and make toplists. And kids do it. But for those of us in the middle, the reason to read Banks isn't because he scores three points higher than [insert other author].
Sorry, this is a bit of a negative comment. There was a bunch of good stuff in your review as well (in great need of being edited into a coherent sequence). But these "ranking" elements seemed really offputting to me, and I think by far the biggest thing you can do to improve this piece would be to cut all of that stuff out.
That's great feedback, thank you. I think it sounds like I failed really badly to communicate what I was trying to do there, but there's a decent chance that's because you're exactly right and the reason the 'ranking' bits didn't work was because I was just being defensive about Banks
Also obviously very delighted to interact with another Banks fan :)
I've never read any Banks, and thus didn't read your entire review but I did appreciate you providing a reading order:
https://imgur.com/a/J91zeeD
That does make me wonder why your starting review is of Surface Detail rather than Player of Games, which starts your order.
I myself have recently been reviewing a number of classic scifi novels on my blog, including an "anarchist left-wing [ambiguous] utopia":
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2022/02/26/the-dispossessed/
_Player of Games_ is much more of a 'traditional' novel with an exciting and plot-driven story, and therefore could be made significantly worse if I revealed plot twists (plus there's a bit less directly relevant utopian content, because it takes place mostly on an alien planet). _Surface Detail_ is more philosophical, so I'd be doing less harm by spoiling it (plus there's a bit more directly relevant utopian content)
I really enjoyed the blogpost you linked and I'm setting off the read the entire series. I'm glad I didn't know about it before I wrote mine, it is a much more tightly written critique of a utopia!
I remember being disappointed by Surface Detail as a philosophical book; mostly because the whole idea of simulated hells was very interesting to me, but the book refuses to even give the pro-hell side a hearing.
I have enjoyed your review a lot. I rated it 8/10, and I this is the second-highest rating that I gave to any review of a fiction book, after Golem XIV. That puts in into the top 15-25% for me. (I have read >3/4 of the reviews by now, and will go on reading the remaining ones, too.)
I may have been the perfect target group for your review. I generally know about the Culture novels, but not in detail (my partner has read them all, I have read one). So I started out with some base curiosity about the Culture setting. That might work less well for someone who either knows the series very well, or has never heard of it.
I like your style of writing and found a lot of your analysis to the point. The review was not too long for me, because I had the impression that you have to tell enough interesting stuff throughout the review.
The reason why it did not go even higher for me (finalist level) has more to do with the topic than with your writing. I very much aim to maximize my knowledge of the world. Your review did give me some interesting insights about sci-fi utopias, but that has a hard time competing with some of the really eye-opening textbook and pop-science finalists that are around.
Thank you, that's really helpful feedback and I'm glad you enjoyed it. I think you're right that doing well in the contest probably required more careful thought about what exactly I would be reviewing (i.e. increasing people's knowledge about the world is more worthwhile than talking about sci-fi utopias) so it is useful to know that the writing was of a worthwhile quality even though it was eclipsed by other (really excellent) nonfiction reviews. Thank you once again!
OK, I waded through every word.
First, yes, it is too long, but "too long" here really means "insufficiently organized." Nobody complains about the length of "The Lord of The Rings," because it is incredibly tightly organized -- you can readily imagine Tolkien polishing the prose for 10 years, shifting an article from here to there. So the first thing you would need to do to improve it is step back and consider the piece as a whole. It's an essay, not a novel. You need to plan out about 2-3 main points, maximum (and just 1 is even better) that you want to get across, and ensure that the writing from start to finish drives at that goal. Take a look at each section: does it advance your point? Introduce it, explain it, buttress it, derive its consequences? If not -- if it just says interesting stuff that isn't germane to where you're going -- out it goes. When you achieve that at the section level, descend to the paragraph. Is each paragraph necessary? Can you see how it's advancing the point? If not, dump it. And on to the sentence, and, if you have the stomach, to the individual word. That would improve things tremendously.
Second (to switch to the positive for a moment), the writing at the sentence level is quite good. You are clearly a master of English, and your words and sentences flow smoothly. You are clearly not writing to impress, or snipe, or defend, you're just trying to inform, and that earnest competence is manifest in each sentence. A really good skill to have. (You basically just need a superb editor, and also to think about what the big points are you're trying to make.)
Third, I fear your writing comes *too* easily, because it's easy for you to wander off into arcana that only someone who has already read the books would easily grok. There's discussions of all kinds of concepts using jargon that just went right by me, whoosh, because I've never read the books. I fear you forget your reader some times, don't feel him hovering over your shoulder, because the words flow too easily and quickly, like you are talking to yourself, or a good friend who shares your enthusiasm. The one suggestion I can make here is: do something to slow down your words. If you're writing on a computer, write on paper, with a pencil (or a pen, if you want to go hard core). Forcing the words to come more slowly, and with more effort, may help you measure them (the words) in a more miserly fashion, and with more awareness of the reader. Think of it as distilling your first rush of thoughts into something more potent, because more concentrated.
Fourth, please do ask yourself *what* you are trying to say. The overall theme seems to be "we can explore ideas about utopia by reading novels, and also these ideas seem cool to me, but they have some problems." Pick one of those! Argue why fiction might be more helpful than just thinking about what laws to draft. Talk about *why* one (or maybe two) of the ideas in these books seem cool to you. Or talk about how one (or maybe two) idea seems cool at first but on reflection you can see it has problems.
I hope this doesn't seem hard. I emphasize that you have the building blocks there, an easy way with words and the ability to make sense. Your writing just seems a little immature, in a sense, like it needs time and weathering to become better -- perhaps much better. My broadest advice is: (1) become your own most brutal editor, or enlist someone else in it, someone who will push you to question whether you need each word, each sentence; and (2) focus, figure out the most important thing you want to say, and drive that home. Most writing conveys zero ideas well, or interestingly, so if you can aspire to just one -- that is a big win. Two...well, save it for your first bestseller. Best of luck
I mean LotR is famously considered too long by tons of people...
And? Rap is preferred over Mozart by tons of people, too, and some other tons prefer MILFs on OnlyFans to, say, an evening with Austen.
Amateurs 😁
I still have great fondness for a series of posts from 2011 where a guy decides to finally read "The Lord of the Rings" even though, y'know, it is like fifty years old. So ancient, such a tome from the dim and distant past.
He ends up liking it. It's great fun to read his progress, though I would warn for a lot of online enthusiasm of the time (lots of CAPITALS and catchphrases). It's always heart-warming to see someone succumbing to the power of the One Ring - wait, no, I mean good fantasy writing. Yes, that's it, nothing else involving Dark Lords intended. The parts where he's anticipating what is going to happen next, and everyone who already knows the book is going "oh ho ho ho" are very enjoyable.
http://markreads.net/reviews/2011/12/mark-reads-the-fellowship-of-the-ring-chapter-1/
This is amazing feedback, I so appreciate that you've taken such a long time to read a (very long) review and then draft such comprehensive comments
Could I ask a little more about your first point on "insufficiently organised"? I was really pleased with the structure of the essay when I bulleted it out, so this is an area where my self-criticism is clearly lacking because I wouldn't have spotted this without your feedback. I think you are suggesting that it is not automatically true that an argument which is clear and organised when written down as one-sentence bullet points will retain that clarity when each bullet point is inflated to paragraph length - and that therefore the solution is to cut at both the paragraph and structure level to try and make sure clarity is preserved. Have I understood that correctly? Or is it that you think the argument was likely never clear, and that cutting ruthlessly is the best way to force yourself to organise your thoughts better?
Yes, it's possible the bullet point organization got swamped when it was expanded. That can happen, and indeed it can so easily happen that when I talk to people about writing I usually recommend strongly *against* an outline. I rarely think they're useful, because they too often substitute for good writing, or kill it by nailing it down too much, like trying to paint on a deadline.
The organization of good writing has to be organic, it has to imbue each paragraph and sentence. There should at each point be a sense of forward motion. (The sure signs of failure in this regard is when the tyro finds himself writing "anyway as I was saying" or "let's recap where we are" or something of this nature. If you have to summarize what you just said, you didn't say it very well even to your own ears.)
So my actual advice, which may be worth exactly what you're paying for it, is to *not* do an outline. Just write the first draft of the essay, stream it out as it comes to mind. This has two advantages: first, you do not forestall any spontaneous emergence of wit, or an elegant turn of phrase, or some fascinating little point, by consciously laboring to hit some particular bullet point. Second, you may discover as you write that what you really want to write changes. You find what you planned to say sounds tedious once you get into it, or that something you thought tangential really grabs your attention. Writing focusses your thoughts, but when thoughts come into focus, they can sometimes be different than you thought they were when they were in partial shadow -- so let them out, get them down on the page as raw material, after all your unique thoughts are all you really have to give.
Once you've done that, *then* go over it with a critical eye. What am I really saying here? What do I most want people to understand? When it's on the page in front of you, all the words written, no longer just a collection of vaguish thoughts, it's easier to do that dissection, bore in on what's important.
And once you know what's important, you can start editing, cutting, and re-organizing so that it shines through. Anyway, my two kopeks.
Thank you once again. I can only reiterate that I'm hugely grateful you've spent so much time offering me such stellar advice, and that I plan to implement all your suggestions next time I have something of value to write about. Enormously appreciated.
"you can readily imagine Tolkien polishing the prose for 10 years, shifting an article from here to there"
You would think, but if you read his letters which mention the process - and the sixth volume of "The History of Middle-earth" series, titled 'The Return of the Shadow' - it was a very slow and laborious process where he didn't really know where he was going. He was writing it in between his work as an academic, at the urging of Allen and Unwin who wanted a sequel to "The Hobbit", and there were amazing changes as he went along.
BIG SPOILER: At the very start, it was a direct sequel to "The Hobbit" so everyone involved were Hobbits. Including Aragorn, who started off as a wandering Hobbit nicknamed "Trotter" (because he had wooden feet, because his feet had been burned off when he was tortured in Mordor). At a certain point Tolkien went "No, this is not working" and tried a couple of changes before scrapping Trotter all together and creating Strider, the Man.
Whom he still had not much idea about who he was, or what he was doing. He sent the installments as he wrote them to his son Christopher who was in the Royal Air Force during the war, keeping him up to date on progress (which was very slow).
The letters are full of things like the following:
"A new character has come on the scene (I am sure I did not invent him, I did not even want him, though I like him, but there he came walking into the woods of Ithilien): Faramir, the brother of Boromir – and he is holding up the 'catastrophe' by a lot of stuff about the history of Gondor and Rohan (with some very sound reflections no doubt on martial glory and true glory): but if he goes on much more a lot of him will have to be removed to the appendices — where already some fascinating material on the hobbit Tobacco industry and the Languages of the West have gone."
So yeah, a combination of hit-and-miss inspiration and a lot of slogging along until the story reached a point where it started to flow.
Now, as to your book review: yeah, it was good. It was about a Culture novel. It was interesting - but not really enough to vote for as a finalist. I wasn't familiar with that novel so it told me about it, but it didn't make me want to read the book. I have read some of the Culture books and while I liked them well enough, I don't like the worldbuilding enough to be captivated by it (I don't think the Culture is such a paradise as on the surface it seems) so you would have a hard job making me go "I must read this!"
Thank you for the feedback (and the interesting facts about Tolkien I didn't know)
I'm glad it wasn't my review that put you off Banks!
I agree with others that your review worked best if the reader had some knowledge of the Culture and/or other books in the series. Banks is an interesting author and the way he switched between 'literary' fiction and SF as Iain Banks and Iain M. Banks respectively may indeed have contributed to the problems you mention with American publication.
His first novel, "The Wasp Factory", is literary fiction and definitely went hard (not revealing any spoilers for those who haven't read it yet) and of his other literary or 'proper' fiction books, I loved "The Bridge". Of his not-really-but-sorta Culture-set novels, I liked "Feersum Endjinn", mostly because of the sheer cheekiness of the ending.
The Culture as such I don't like, and that may be down to the gulf between his politics and mine. The Culture, on the surface, is a great place to live. Who wouldn't want to live there? Post-scarcity luxury! You can do and be anything you want (within the limitations of being only a mere human and not a Mind)!
I think that beneath the shiny veneer, there is a rotteness at the heart of the Culture. It's an authoritarian dictatorship, and it doesn't much matter if we argue if it is a fascist or a communist one (I lean towards fascist despite the Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism of life as it appears to be in the Culture), and I don't trust it. And I think the less shiny bits poke through in places despite Banks' political views, because he was a writer, and that honesty to the craft meant that the flaws were there as well as the glossy, shiny, waxy red coat of the apple.
So yes, your review was enthusiastic, but I have too visceral a "no, thanks" response to the Culture for it to persuade me to read that particular novel.
"Sadly, I find Banks is almost unknown even amongst people that would consider themselves moderately well-read science fiction enthusiasts (this is especially true amongst American science fiction enthusiasts, where there seems to have been some sort of issue with Banks’ UK-based publisher I can’t get to the bottom of such that Banks wasn’t properly marketed in the US – a bit like Terry Pratchett, but to a much more significant extent and much less to do with the non-translatability of British humour).
The idea of this review is to focus on one element of Banks’ work which most distinguishes it from science fiction of the same period but which – to my knowledge – has not been given a high level of analysis anywhere to date, and which I think will particularly entice the sort of person who reads ACX to pick up the series (I assume if you are familiar with the series you don’t need any further enticing and are already skipping to the ‘arguing about your favourite ship name in the comments’ phase of discussing the novels)."
The two paragraphs above I've quoted directly from your review, and show one of the problems I had reading it. They are actually just sentences - very very long ones. It does make following your train of thought quite difficult at times, though otherwise your writing is quite readable. I would add that the review itself is also very long, and for people who aren't already fans of the Banks or the Culture series, that maybe is another problem. I would have recommended pruning the whole thing ruthlessly, and finding all the sentences that are more than a hundred words long and breaking them up.
I'm a fan of Iain Banks (The Player of Games is one of my favourite books) but I don't consider myself a rationalist. As your review was looking at a Banks book through a rationalist lens this also put me off, but I'd stress that this is my issue not yours - after all, you wrote the review for a rationalist blog!
I didn't realize Pratchett was unpopular in the US. I'm an American and was a fan as a kid.
Is he? That's quite a surprise. I've known loads of Americans who know him and love him.
I'm responding to Anteros, who claimed Pratchett was like Banks in being untranslateably British.
Thank you so much - really appreciate the comments. Reading those sentences through your eyes I can absolutely see what you mean, but would have been totally oblivious otherwise, so the criticism is really valuable to me!
Yeah I agree that sentence length is something that's a bit of an issue. It's something I struggle with in my own writing. Trying to mix in short sentences takes effort but I think helps a lot.
The secret is not to be afraid of periods. If you're doing a good job, your reader isn't going to wander off when you release him for a moment. Indeed, it's just a chance for him to take a sip of coffee and tap his forehead thoughtfully at the last thing you said.
...although, that said, there is a style that just drops commas everywhere, and between proceeds with sufficient languor that the reader is sort of wafted along, an doesn't notice how many lines have passed by without a full stop. But you need impeccable timing to pull this off.
Thank you so much - I really appreciate how long it must have taken you to closely read the essay and give feedback here (especially because you've started rather a lively discussion upthread which must be occupying a lot of your time too!). It is also very kind to give such immediately actionable advice for me - I'll definitely try everything you've suggested here.
Just updated this https://pathfindings.substack.com/p/young-blood-old-monsters-and-rejuvenated?s=w - with thanks to:
1. Dave Simonds for kind permission to use his cartoon (originally in The Economist, 2017)
2. Prof. Consuelo Borras Blasco, University of Valencia, for graciously agreeing to be interviewed and giving corrections and encouragement
3. The Good Lady @Deiseach of this parish, for alerting me to Mary Elizabeth Braddon's 1869 gothic sci-fi in which our heroine employs a progressive doctor to keep her in wonderfully wicked health through blood transfusions from young women (who sicken and die, natch).
The premise of that gothic novel sounds similar to the Italian horror film "I Vampiri".
+1 for 'of this parish'
You're entirely welcome, it's when you mentioned current science/wishful thinking around the notion of blood from the young to rejuvenate the old or extend their lives that the idea went "bing!" (shove off, Microsoft, not your Bing) about "Oh that's Good Lady Ducayne which is more pertinent to this topic than vampires in general".
Lady Ducayne is reliant on the medical science of her day, and hoping to find even more up-to-date modern doctors with the latest cutting-edge research, for exactly this project. So it fitted like a glove!
"Promising candidates for therapeutic interventions include oxytocin, the ‘love hormone’ that plays a complex role in signalling and is known to decline with age. Combined with already approved drugs called ALK-5 inhibitors, which effectively ‘reawaken’ stem cells in the tissues of mice and humans, injections of oxytocin in mice appear to promote regeneration of brain, muscle and liver."
I wonder about that, is it that oxytocin is associated with pregnancy and thus a high level of it in the blood puts the system into "reset for reproductive years" mode? Though this wouldn't have the same effect on male mice, so who knows what is going on there?
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2014.00001/full
If you have never seen Newton's Pendulum in action, but would like to, I present to you:
Newton's Pendulum (Gangnam Style)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB7KUGdP7wI
Considerably better than i expected
I didn't know you could do so many things with a Newton's Cradle!
I wasn't expecting to be impressed by this, yet here we are.
freaking brilliant!
It's very unfortunate communities like this haven't developed any norms against the political '-isms' and '-phobias' (racism, sexism, transphobia, ableism, fatphobia) when they have developed norms against 'lazy swipes'. Perhaps they're not exactly the same thing, but they're certainly bad for very similar reasons. Racism is of course the most egregious of the lot based on a comibination of how meaningless the word is and the political weight it carries. Given how meaningless the word is, I don't think its use can possibly be justified on a good faith basis. I don't see how it serves any good faith purpose at all.
It's become nothing but a bludgeon used to silence one's political opponents (which includes people merely stating salient empirical facts, and increasingly those facts spoken by well-meaning, good faith liberal-mninded people). It doesn't convey any meaningful information about that person, it never progresses any debate or brings anyone colser to the truth. It's a modern day equivalent of proclaiming somebody is a "heretic". And yet, on ACT and adjacent communities, I see people uncritically using it, as if it were a useful and meaningful term, when its not. There ought to be a norm that basically says you should say what you you're alleging in plain terms. Instead of saying "So and so is a racist", it should be "so and so believes [heritable differences explains racial outcome differences/black people aren't disproportionately the victim of police violence/doesn't hire black people in his business/hates black people]".
See the stupidly broad range of things that "racist" can mean to people? See why using one extremely powerful word to describe all of these vastly different views can be problematic? "Racism" rolls off the tongue better than any of those things, but since the word has been reduced to a slur, convenience is no justification for its continued usage. Even "so-and-so hates black people" is ripe for abuse, because the people who use 'racism' excessively will claim that acknowledging some empiricaly true facts represents hating black people, but at least this makes it more plainly obvious when its being used abusively ("really? Acknowedging that 'hands up don't shoot' was a lie means that literally *hate* black people?"). I've even seen people on here use the term "scientific racism", with the obvious implication that any scientific pursuit that has as it's empirical finding a fact that contradicts egalitarian ideology is necessary *incorrect*. This is just wildly anti-science in a way that even anti-vaxism isn't.
"Racism" is used to silence dissent and foster hatred of political foes. Nothing more.. Maybe its use was justifiable once upon a time, but now there's no good faith basis for its use.
And the same is largely true of all the other isms and phobias. I saw somebody angrily proclaim that a new pubilc building design was "ableist!" for not incorporating sufficient disabled access. Ableist! She didn't just say, "this building design doesn't accomodate disabled persons adequately", no it's "ableist". What is the point of that word other than trying to make its target look evil and/or stupid?
If nothing else, if you don't see what I'm saying, then it should be opposed because it's the quickest way to alienate anyone who isn't part of your tribe. I'm sure the overwhelming majority of people believe that building should be designed to accomodate the disabled, even if that increased the cost of construction. But for a lot of people, they hear somebody bleating on about "ableism", and they reasonably assume that the person saying it is an unstable asshole and their claims are probably some SJW nonsense. Even if *you* think that they shouldn't do this and should care about "ableism", or look past this partisan language and see the real issue at play, what matters is what they're actually going to do.
Scott has touched on something *similar* in 'Against Murderism', but huge numbers of ACT commentors either haven't read it or don't agree with it.
I might not be looking hard enough, but ACX seems to use these as thought-terminating cliches *a lot* less than the 'net in general.
True. And most of the time someone use them, they explain what exactly they mean.
I completely misread your opening. I assumed you were pointing out the way that this community doesn't have any norms against racism, sexism, fatphobia, etc. But after a few paragraphs, I realized that you were *actually* saying a very *different* thing, which is that this community doesn't have any norms against *identifying* things as racism, sexism, fatphobia, etc.
It seems to me that it's important to have norms against the underlying wrongs, and it can often be valuable to label such wrongs correctly. If the labels are used incorrectly though, they can be problematic.
"Has no meaning?" It's certainly a broad term and specification would help if you're trying to have a more detailed conversation, but the word "racism" does describe a common instinct: the drive to categorize humans based on physical appearance and broad lineage and then establish or justify status hierarchies between these categories.
This instinct seems to be responsible for an immense amount of human suffering throughout history and I suspect it's a pretty resilient neural pathway linked to some hard-wired instincts. That means it will have to be regularly identified and stigmatized in each generation.
While many of the abuses of the term that you bring up are bothersome (particularly to people in this community), I'm just not seeing anything on the same scale as the harm that's been done by endorsing or accepting racism. My guess is that societies with a concept of "racism" (even an imprecise one) and strong stigmas against it are likely to be much better places to live than societies that don't use the word or concept "racism" because it is too broad.
No, it has no meaning. Vast swathes of the uses of the term today have absolutely nothing to do with the definition you gave. That's the entire problem!!
>This instinct seems to be responsible for an immense amount of human suffering throughout history and I suspect it's a pretty resilient neural pathway linked to some hard-wired instincts. That means it will have to be regularly identified and stigmatized in each generation.
So basically, you want to stigmatize objective empirical facts if they contradict your political ideology?
I support this as an example of a virtue of precision. If there are confusing terms which gear level isn't clerly understood by the people you talk with, it's better to taboo them and explain the phenomena in more words. I don't think that requires a new norm for specific words. It's a general principle to be as clear and as preciese as possible, when trying to explain things and cross the inferential distances.
Can you give a concrete example of what you mean by this? Because as it stands, your post reads like "Man, why can't I be racist about minorities? I have FACTS and SCIENCE to back me up! This place is supposed to be all about FACTS and SCIENCE!"
And I say that as someone who does believe that 'racist', 'transphobe' etc. have been weaponised into general terms of ridicule and scorn meaning nothing more than "you are a political opponent" or "you don't believe the things I believe" or simply "you are bad and evil".
"I've even seen people on here use the term "scientific racism", with the obvious implication that any scientific pursuit that has as it's empirical finding a fact that contradicts egalitarian ideology is necessary *incorrect*. This is just wildly anti-science in a way that even anti-vaxism isn't."
I know what *I* mean by "scientific racism" and it's "Here I (or rather, the cherry-picked studies I'm using) demonstrate that blacks are our natural inferiors and should be treated as such legally, morally and in all other ways". I've seen crap of that nature and I don't agree with it. All too often Richard Lynn is trotted out with his bullshit, shoddy, 'work' on IQ. I know his material on Irish average national IQ is bollocks, I have no reason to believe him about the Trobriand Islanders or Senegalese or anyone else.
But he's a fan fave of those who indulge in "scientific racism" - 'look, Lynn says the [ethnic minority of such and such a nation] have a mean IQ of 85, Science has proved my point!"
>I know what *I* mean by "scientific racism" and it's "Here I (or rather, the cherry-picked studies I'm using) demonstrate that blacks are our natural inferiors and should be treated as such legally, morally and in all other ways". I've seen crap of that nature and I don't agree with it. All too often Richard Lynn is trotted out with his bullshit, shoddy, 'work' on IQ.
To be fair, while such people certainly exist, you don't have to look very far to find HBD proponents who *don't* advocate treating any group as inferior, but simply advocate for not *expecting* all groups to have comparable outcomes if we treat all *individuals* fairly according to their abilities. Russell Warne, for example, reads very much as someone who would strongly prefer it if HBD were false, but is simply persuaded on the strength of the evidence that some form of it appears to be true. And regarding Lynn, it seems to be fairly widely agreed that his work on the IQ of nations is not ready for primetime, but that unless we can actually secure funding for the massive costs of IQ tests on adequately large, properly randomised population samples, it is a sort of rough-and-ready better-than-nothing approximation that shouldn't be taken too seriously. Indeed, Warne had this to say on the topic back in 2020: https://russellwarne.com/2020/07/19/thoughts-on-low-national-iqs-intellectual-disability-and-data-quality/?fbclid=IwAR3Augd2ONBr73hEcGI_o6J_OYFkf9CRn3diPTozTwScva819klN0gI5Hs8
(1) Yes, the idea that there are population differences and that this may mean disparate outcomes once all the unfavourable elements have been stripped out, but this does not mean we regard that population as having fewer to no human, natural and legal rights is the ideal. The trouble is that HBD has gotten a stinking name, in part from those fiercely opposed to the very notion of genetic differences, but also in part because of those who are all "now is the time to implement the plan of cleansing the genetic pool, and by that I mean, and here is the science to back me up".
(2) The trouble is that Lynn's work *is* being treated seriously, for whatever value of "serious" you place on "quoted in newspaper articles". But also online posts, of the kind very frequent with the "HBD is true, cleanse the human gene pool" types. And if you look into it, his work is shoddy (and that's being kind). Too much "There haven't been any IQ tests done on the Penguin Islanders, but in 1938 a series of tests were performed on the Kangaroo Peninsula natives, and they're pretty much the same population if you take a very broad approach to it, so I'm going to presume the Kangaroo tests fit the Penguin people and claim that they have a mean IQ of 55 and three-quarters" fudging of data.
Yet he's very fine-grained when it comes to Southern Irish versus Northern Irish versus Scots versus Welsh versus North of England versus London IQ scores, no "they're all the same population pretty much"! His work has so much political bias behind it that I can't take it seriously, and it annoys me when I see it quoted as the gospel on IQ test results.
>but this does not mean we regard that population as having fewer to no human, natural and legal rights is the ideal.
Almost no HBD advocates are doing this. What they're saying is that it's not white people's fault that black people have worse socioeconomic outcomes, so piss off with these anti-white narratives and policy proposals.
"What they're saying is that it's not white people's fault that black people have worse socioeconomic outcomes"
The problem is, sometimes it was/is white people's fault. Racism is a thing, the ill-effects of slavery and colonialism are things. And I would throw in - and this applies for all races and countries - socially liberal attitudes that were intended in the best way but encouraged detrimental behaviour, and is now encoded as "you can't criticise X, it's Their Culture and saying anything bad about it is racism".
Which is how you get the Smithsonian putting up displays about Whiteness that then have to be taken down after they list such traits as "hard work" are Whiteness (and hence privileged and oppressive).
https://www.aei.org/op-eds/theres-some-truth-in-those-bizarre-charts-about-whiteness/
Yes, those are the noble hippies of the group. Most people who have a strong political attachment to HBD don't care about what they think, frankly. They care that they can add their work to a little folder labeled "proof my ethnic group should rule the world". I would even go so far as to suggest your framing is, being kind, the result of the famed rationalist myopia of what the world looks like beyond the rationalist space. You seem to be trying to suggest that the race-supremacist types are a small minority, while people like Lynn and Warne speak for the masses. This is probably true in rationalist circles, but certainly isn't true once you look at the people who believe in race science who AREN'T rationalists.
Nope, completely, utterly wrong.
What actually happens is this:
Egalitarians: White people being RACIST is why there's black white inequality and we need reparations and affirmative action and to brainwash schoolkids into thinking that they're "privileged" for being white
HBDers: That's wrong, these differences can be explained in terms of heritable differences in intelligence and other behavioral traits
It's political self defense. Nobody gets off on feeling smarter than black people, we just want to not be held responsible for their problems and ideally would just want to not live around them. Nobody is basing a political ideology on wanting to feel superior, and consider how COMPLETELY ABSURD it would be for them to do this while consistently advocating for the fact that jews and asians are SMARTER than them.
You already can choose to not live around them. Move to Montana or Wyoming or North Dakota or Utah and seeing a black person will be like seeing a polar bear. What you mean is "I don't want to live in the same country as them, want to make them not live here anymore, and will deliberately turn my brain off after that statement so I can ignore the whys and wherefores because they aren't compatible with my self-concept."
As for absurdity I find your entire ideology absurd, so insisting that you must be taken seriously by me won't work.
Different bubbles, I guess - most of the people who I've read who are HBD proponents don't strike me as frothing nazis - although some of them are undoubtedly somewhat weird people ... but then you probably *need* to be pretty weird to want to investivate this subject at a high level, much like you would have needed to be pretty weird to be an atheist a few centuries ago.
But in any case, the truth or falsity of any given HBD claim is what it is - if we live in a universe where some claims that ethnonarcissists can make hay out of are actually true, then our only realistic choices are to figure out how to live with that knowledge and treat people fairly in light of it, or engage in permanent censorship of the topic - and the latter option will certainly make it look as if you've got something to hide.
Well the thing about most HBD claims, as Deiseach points out, is that they're based on not very good, politically-motivated research (I believe Lynn lumps the staggering genetic diversity of Africa into two or three groups while slicing like 8 groups out of the objectively far less diverse British Isles- groups that just so happen to align with how a 19th-century race scientist would classify the people of Britain and whose results would confirm the superiority of the noble Arian-descended Anglo race over the insidious Negroidal Hibernian, with their obsession with potatoes and tendency towards theft, alcoholism, and Popery). IF HBD claims were true, we'd have to grapple with them, but the blunt fact is that there's not a lot of reason to believe they're true unless you fetishize the shape of scientific research, which I don't. Yes, you can plea that there's a catch-22 there, where most people won't fund HBD research because they think HBD research is false and morally repugnant. At some point, evolution was in the same place- and so is the Flat Earth. Like both of those, you will need to fight for a seat at the table.
I think Lynn's research is pretty widely considered shoddy, including by serious HBD people. Maybe instead of arguing against the weakest evidence, you might engage with the strongest?
Racial differences in average IQ in the US (and I think other first-world countries) are well-established, based on decades of evidence. These differences are big enough to have a big real-world impact, and they basically predict a lot of what we see in the world. There's not any real question about whether those differences exist, though the cause of the differences is an open research question.
Similarly, there are differences in disease prevalence across racial groups that are big enough to matter for how doctors diagnose and treat members of different groups.
In some sense, it's amazing that this works at all, because racial groups are these insanely broad and fuzzy things that basically come down to which continent most of your ancestors came from. (It's probably the least surprising it works for American Indians, but even there, you're talking about folks whose ancestors populated the Americas like 12-15 thousand years ago, so lots and lots of generations of wildly different cultures and environments.) And yet, at least in a US context, it does work surprisingly well.
Something I have always found amusing (in a cosmic sort of way) is that those who advocate for race science jump immediately from "These people have below-average IQ" to "Therefore, they're incapable of developing/maintaining civilization" (usually trivially-untrue: The Great Mosque of Djenne might be made of mud, but so are the brownstones that line the streets of British towns, and I know which one is more impressive) and then "therefore, they have inferior moral significance compared to (speaker's chosen Type-A Heroic Race) and we don't have to treat them like real people"- when this is totally nonsensical to me. The thing that makes humans morally valuable isn't their IQ score, and I suspect that most of them wouldn't advocate that we treat a member of their race with a mild intellectual disability the way they advocate for their racial inferiors to be treated.
Also funny to me is that they usually have some excuse as to why, say, the Ashkenazim or Han shouldn't be allowed to run the world as the races with the highest IQ, which really does put the lie to this modern form of race science. When their score is lower than mine, it proves they're my genetic inferior. When their score is higher than mine, this proves they're cheating or are soulless bio-automata.
>The Great Mosque of Djenne
Was not built by subsaharan africans, and is not maintained properly by subsaharan africans.
>when this is totally nonsensical to me
Its also a complete and utter strawman. The left kept telling us that white people are to blame for black underachievement, we're saying that this is false. THAT'S IT.
>Also funny to me is that they usually have some excuse as to why, say, the Ashkenazim or Han shouldn't be allowed to run the world as the races with the highest IQ, which really does put the lie to this modern form of race science.
"Allowed to run the world" - What the hell does this even mean?
You're engaging with hysterical, bad faith strawman positions you have completely fabricated.
>When their score is lower than mine, it proves they're my genetic inferior. When their score is higher than mine, this proves they're cheating or are soulless bio-automata.
The nazis dismissed IQ as a valid concept because it undermined their belief that Jews go ahead by cheating. So congratulations, you're siding with Hitler on this one.
Godwin's Law. This is the last reply you get from me. Frankly, I shouldn't even have started- it's clear by your breathless, outraged style of commentary that actual communication can't happen here. Have a nice life.
>When their score is lower than mine, it proves they're my genetic inferior. When their score is higher than mine, this proves they're cheating or are soulless bio-automata
I think that's a bit of a strawman. The argument I've seen is that while a whole society organised by the highest IQ populations will have a better standard of living than one organised by lower IQ populations, there is also the question of ... I guess let's call it ethnic nepotism - that people have perfectly understandable Darwinian incentives for favouring members of their own ethnic group, and there's no reason to presuppose that a Chinese/Ashkenazi run society wouldn't serve the interests of Chinese/Ashkenazi people ahead of whatever other populations they may rule over, in which case those other populations may reasonably prefer to be ruled by people more like themselves even if at a lower level of civilisational complexity.
Of course, if you can find someone who takes that view, but *also* advocates for Europeans recolonising Africa, or for white Americans taking on the permanent White Man's Burden of raising the level of civilisation of African-Americans (as opposed to just letting people voluntarily self-segregate and let everyone find their own natural level of civilisational complexity) then I will happily join you in noting the hypocrisy.
...unless they are proposing to raise the level of civilisation of African-Americans by some sort of eugenics program that would actually bring their average IQ up to the level of white or even Asian Americans, in which case I guess that would be non-hypocritical, but may have its own issues.
Firstly, "Darwinian incentives" is laughably reductionist and that strain of evolutionary psychology belongs in a museum alongside a phrenological diagram illustrating the Mongoloid's tendency towards deceit and opium addiction. Like many such theories, it reveals more about the theorist than what he describes.
The people who I am criticizing view Africans (and frankly everyone who isn't a European, and more specifically of the same claimed European ethnicity as them) as a pest, somewhere between locusts and wild dogs (although they wouldn't be so articulate in their expression, merely muttering something about alleged theft of jobs, crime rates, welfare queens, and rape), and would like to INVOLUNTARILY segregate the Europeans and everyone else, preferably giving the non-Europeans the worst bits of the country and quietly hoping they'll just die off. This is when they aren't more honest with themselves and admit they want to either ship them back to "where they belong" (ignoring that their families may have lived here for many generations, or in the case of Native Americans pre-date the earliest colonists by many centuries) or want to segregate them into the ground.
I hope you can stretch your enlightened Type-A Heroic Race intellect to understand how that might be objectionable to those of us born with the highly un-Darwinian evolutionary defect of basic human empathy.
Maybe try engaging with a higher quality of thinker in this area? I mean, yes, you can find dumb/crazy/evil/ideologically blinded people arguing for any position, but I don't think you get any smarter by engaging with them.
For example, Charles Murray, Razib Khan, Greg Cochran, and Steve Sailer are pretty smart and serious people who approach the world at least partly from an HBD frame. None of them think nonwhites are subhuman or destined to forever be carriers of water and hewers of wood, or want to segregate the country by race or any of that stuff.
I feel like you are in approximately the position of someone who judges progressivism by the craziest exemplars dug up and retweeted by Ben Shapiro or something. Those ideas may be good or bad, but you won't learn which by only reading their dumbest and craziest advocates.
I am familiar with those thinkers, and I have some measure of intellectual respect for them. However, as I emphasize once again- the people interested in HBD and who make HBD a notable part of their politics are not going to be people who think like them. They are going to be people like Richard Spencer and the people who saw him as a thought leader (or rejected him as a federal agent) and who think that racial caricature memes are a vital part of online discourse. Regardless of whether or not you like these people, they make up the body of people in the "HBD" space, not your virtuous examples. Just like you can find dumb/crazy/evil people in every movement, I can also produce noble, virtuous, polite people for every movement. I can probably produce a person in the top quarter of kind human beings who will argue that Hitler should have won WWII or that consensual sexual relations between a 9-year old and a 40-year old should be legal. I've judged the argument, and I think that "HBD" might have some merit to it, but the merit it has in a truism- yes, different humans are different- that's trivial, most people understand that. So what do you want DONE about it?
Fair enough, I guess we've just been reading different HBD bloggers for the most part. Though even the ones that do strike me as more alt-rightish than dispassionate-scientistish (I guess I'm mostly thinking of the Those Who Can See blog) do make the argument from genetic interests for restricting the importation of not just a low-IQ underclass but also a high-IQ but genetically non-aligned overclass. In any case, I'm not making the strong claim that it is true, but I don't see that it is so easy to dismiss. It is simply an extension of the logic of kin selection - individuals can be expected to care most about those who share the most genes with them, from siblings/children, to first cousins, nieces and nephews, more distant extended family, clan, tribe, nation etc. At any rate, most human for most of history have been fanatically ethnocentric by the standards of contemporary left-liberalism, so it would not surprise me at all if there was something adaptive about it.
Also, given the whole 'white liberals are the only major American ethno/political demographic to have *less* warmth for their own ethnic group than for others' thing - assuming this is reasonably accurate - https://twitter.com/ZachG932/status/1074524252638982144 - I would want to at least be wary that you might not be wrong, despite your sarcasm, about 'basic human empathy' for all humans equally being an evolutionary defect, in the sense that if you develop it, you are likely to be outcompeted by those who lack it (with appropriate caveating that too much ethnicentrism surely has its own costs too, presumably in things like enabling corruption, reducing free exchange of ideas that would make your polity more competitive etc.)
Either way, no matter how distasteful and hateful some of the proponents of HBD may be, that doesn't offer even the slightest shred of evidence against any given HBD claim being true. We need to be able to decouple if we want to arrive at an accurate understanding of reality. And, of course, in the parts of the internet where the sober HBD proponents hang out, I see far more fanatical hatred directed *against* HBD proponents, than by HBD proponents against any other group. I just don't think 'how many fanatical haters line up on this side of the argument' is good evidence for or against the argument in any direction.
"most human for most of history have been fanatically ethnocentric by the standards of contemporary left-liberalism"
Tell me, what exactly is your history background? I want to know because this statement is actively psychotic if you have a non-trivial familiarity with history. Yes, people had strong ingroup biases, but what that ingroup WAS varied greatly and rarely resembled the nice, clean, late-19th-century-geopolitical-boundary-following categories asserted by race scientists. There were certainly groups like the Mongols and Romans that had a strong ethnic character to their empire (but even then we find contradictory evidence- the contempt Romans reserved for the very genetically-distinct Gallic and Germanic people was fractional to the contempt they reserved for other varieties of Italians - the classic "narcissism of small differences" in action) but other nations show very different models. The HRE was primarily predicated on common religion, as was the Ottoman Empire (although even there, you see tolerance for other Abrahamic faiths to a degree that would outrage the modern Hanbali-addled Islamic nation-states), and the various Chinese dynasties were generally far more concerned about your filial piety and payment of tax than your creed or ethnicity (yes, there were the Four Persecutions, but frankly it was historically notable because usually Emperors didn't give a shit about your religion, and thus the actions of the Three Wu's and Suizong are abnormal- and even here, we see a wide variety of reasons for these persecutions, three of which don't align well with a theory that these religious persecutions were a cipher for ethnic cleansings.) Once again, this whole "kinship bias" thing smacks of 19th-century race science of the Social Darwinistic variety. If you want to bite the bullet and say "Yes, I think Social Darwinism is objectively correct", go ahead, but I don't think you want to because you seem invested in making me believe that you're actually a nice and kind person.
Evolution is a Molochian force (to borrow Scott's parlance) and I see no reason why I should elevate the morally-repugnant things it spits out as noble. Do you believe humanity should try and be more than what evolution wants us to be, or do you think we're just slaves to our genetic directives?
Right, since I have neither the ability nor temperament to debate whether race science is accurate with you on the level of an expert geneticist, I'll just cut to what I can discuss. Let's say I accept your assertions that 1) there are insurmountable genetic differences between the races and 2) all the races are engaged in a war of all against all in which there can only be one victor. What do you imagine people DOING with this information that they are not already doing? You mention people "self-segregating to the level of their interest"- people already do this. Since we're hurling charts at each other, here's one from me: https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1529066744496660480
Despite what people might SAY about being oikophobic (that's the word the modern race scientists like to use, right? Sounds much more scientific than "race traitor"), people still gravitate towards association with their own race, with non-whites being more likely to be friends with people of other races than whites, even as we see trends overall towards more "xenophilic" association. This certainly suggests that my own belief (that despite differences in culture and maybe even genetics between races people can expand their kin-group to include people who look very different from them) is right, AND that your belief (That if you let people freely associate some number will naturally segregate) is also right. People are selecting their level of segregation, and over time the number of people who want to self-segregate is decreasing. So I'd imagine you want something beyond that, but I don't want to put words in your mouth.
I'm really not sure I've ever seen someone labelled a racist or other type of -ist on this blog. Probably because of the norm of commenting in good faith.
Oh I dunno. Having people say "He/She/You are a racist!" right up front means I get to stop listening to them after hearing or reading only four words. I like that efficiency. If it took people four or five paragraphs to fully unroll the crazy in their head, that might be an additional 5-10 minutes lost.
I feel the same way about criticisms of people's ideas that hinge on the letters they use to spell the words they use to express their ideas. I know immediately that this person is making some shallow point that very likely amounts to nothing more than them justifying their knee jerk emotional reaction to something. I sometimes wonder what would happen if you scrambled text through a synonym randomizer of some kind so that they can't react in this way.
You certainly have a point. However I'm torn on this, because it's useful to have a shorthand for "your views are an embarrassment, created out of primitive tribalism and shared exclusively by really close-minded people, and you should reconsider them on these grounds alone". The problem is that its use is getting out of hand.
In related news, I really like the recent "living rent free in your head" meme which 4chan and its satellite communities use to ridicule pointless hatred, and I'd love to have more of this kind of memetic vaccine in the water supply.
So HBD proponents by and large aren't "racist" then.
It is absolutely *used* as a slur
No, it's absolutely *not* as good as any. It carries almost no informational content, it used as a slur against people to silence them, and "racially prejudiced attitudes" is absolutely NOT a good definition of "racism" as used by the American left today.
I think you're wrong about woke, which some practitioners still use un-ironically and positively. I also think you're wrong about CRT. There's a whole fight where people who don't like some of the changes in classroom teaching since they were kids slap CRT onto as a label, then find the most egregious corners of things that are actually CRT and tie those things to the changes they don't like, in an (increasingly successful) attempt to drown the whole thing.
CRT has a meaning and a set of scholarship. I don't agree with all of it and a lot of it is damned off-putting. But teaching that the Civil War was fought over slavery, and that the South fired the first shots, instead of the Civil War being fought over states rights, being the fault of the Fire-Eaters and the Abolitionists (who were the real villains), and oh by the way slavery was bad and all but not *that* bad because lots of people had it tough back then is *not* CRT. It's just more accurate history.
I'm not a CRT supporter. But I am anti the anti-CRT crowd, because I think they fall pretty much exclusively into fighting against things I support that have dick-all to do CRT.
Lots of the anti-CRT bills mention the 1619 project by name, and "Slavery was the cause of the Civil War" is a central point of the K-5 curriculum suggestions. Whereas the first POV was what I learned in small town southeastern Missouri in the 1980s. The shift is presumably what's pissing people off.
Or, if not, here are the 10 key concepts. They seem pretty reasonable to me. Based on past experience I assume you yourself are pretty anti-CRT. Pick one. 8 maybe?
The key concepts, in order, are:
1. Slavery, which Europeans practiced before they invaded the Americas, was important to all colonial powers and existed in all North American colonies.
2. Slavery and the slave trade were central to the development and growth of the colonial economies and what is now the United States.
3. Protections for slavery were embedded in the founding documents; enslavers dominated the federal government, Supreme Court and Senate from 1787 through 1860.
4. “Slavery was an institution of power,” designed to create profit for the enslavers and break the will of the enslaved and was a relentless quest for profit abetted by racism.*
5. Enslaved people resisted the efforts of their enslavers to reduce them to commodities in both revolutionary and everyday ways.
6. The experience of slavery varied depending on time, location, crop, labor performed, size of slaveholding and gender.
7. Slavery was the central cause of the Civil War.
8. Slavery shaped the fundamental beliefs of Americans about race and whiteness, and white supremacy was both a product and legacy of slavery.
9. Enslaved and freed people worked to maintain cultural traditions while building new ones that sustain communities and impact the larger world.
10. By knowing how to read and interpret the sources that tell the story of American slavery, we gain insight into some of what enslaving and enslaved Americans aspired to, created, thought and desired.
The 1619 project is trivially propaganda and full of historical inaccuracies.
>2. Slavery and the slave trade were central to the development and growth of the colonial economies and what is now the United States.
This is false. Slavery severely retarded America's economic development.
>4. “Slavery was an institution of power,” designed to create profit for the enslavers and break the will of the enslaved and was a relentless quest for profit abetted by racism.*
That's weird. That's really really weird. Were Africans who actually enslaved these people (or their ancestors) in the first place "racist" too? Were they, what, raising money for their community centre rather than earning a profit?
>8. Slavery shaped the fundamental beliefs of Americans about race and whiteness, and white supremacy was both a product and legacy of slavery.
This is completely false. The behavior of freed slaves is what determined attitudes to race. Blacks in the north who were freed before the civil war were treated much better than those freed after, and its entirely because the type of person to secure freedom before the civil war was very different than those who were freed by Lincoln and were treated better based on their better behavior.
>As for what you were taught in a small town in the middle of deep South literally forty years ago
Late eighties. More like 35. And Missouri is hardly the Deep South. It was a border state that stayed in the Union.
>I fail to see how that all by itself damns attempts to get race-baiting out of education today.
Acknowledging that black people existed and talking about history from their point of view is hardly race-baiting.
Topline: The key concepts I quoted were from a different framework listed next to the 1619 project when I googled 1619 project curriculum. The 1619 project has some good stuff in it, but also more egregious stuff than I realized, including the spurious claim about the revolution which you site. (Though you overstate it. It's cited as *a* cause, not *the* cause.)
>The 1619 Project saying that slavery caused the Civil War is not why the 1619 Project bothers most of its opponents, and you know that. So you're already deep in the hole.
Even so, I don't really believe this. If you look at that essay, The Idea of America, the one that's included in the lesson plan (assuming I haven't found the wrong thing again), that's not at all a central theme. It's a throwaway line in an essay who's central thrust is going through various important moments and looking at them from a black, rather than white, point of view. And I think that's really valuable.
America is the story of an intrepid people fleeing tyranny and difficult conditions in the old countries and hacking out a new and great civilization in the new world, and lighting a great beacon of freedom and opportunity to the world while we do it. That's the story I was taught, and it's a true story.
But it's not complete. It's true from one POV. Even with the admitted wart, that essay is a nice look at what America looks like from the POV of some of her deepest rooted citizens. Citizens whose story we don't usually tell. And it's not a pretty picture, but it's *also* a true story.
In the past few years it's become popular to teach a more complete narrative about our history. And yes, *that* is what I think anti-CRT people are really objecting to. That's what I think the effect of the anti-CRT bills will be, and that's what I think the effect is supposed to be.
And, to loop it back to the original point, whether I'm right or you're right, it's not CRT. People who don't like these changes have dragged CRT out of the obscure and obtuse legal theory classes, chained it to this debate, and then complained CRT being taught in elementary schools. And then passed laws against CRT in schools. And then accused me and mine of Motte and Bailey tactics when we splutter that we don't know what their talking about, because nobody's doing that.
> we do need a snappy word to sum up racially prejudiced attitudes and "racism" is as good as any
I disagree, I think that "racism" needs to be split into at least half a dozen different words to cover the various different meanings that the word has.
Sadly you are probably right, though John Nerst has given it a good shot - https://everythingstudies.com/2018/11/16/anatomy-of-racism/ - as has BJ Campbell - https://hwfo.substack.com/p/the-five-confusing-definitions-of?s=r
Do we get a word for people who do the same for white people (i.e. the thing that is vastly more common and completely accepted by major american institutions)?
I mean, just say "anti-black". It's more transparent, and its much clearer what it means and when its being abused.
It should be noted that *this* community doesn't use "racism" to mean e.g. "knowing and stating true facts (the murder rate among blacks is way higher than among whites)" (quoting None of the Above) except in reference to other communities that act this way.
Given that, the word "racism" retains more of its meaning here. However, I like to promote the word "prejudice" instead, because if someone seems to have an unreasonable dislike of hispanics, maybe it's that ze doesn't like their accent, or their English skills, or their culture, rather than their skin color. Someone who seems to dislike all black people might still like Denzel Washington, suggesting that maybe what they really hate is "ebonics". Often it's unclear if a person making suspicious statements is even prejudiced, but certainly "prejudice" is a bigger tent that is more likely to be correct.
A nuanced view will take in the idea that prejudice or racism isn't all one thing. My grandfather believed in the separation of the races. He believed that God made the birds and the fish, and nothing was wrong with either one, but they weren't meant to marry or have kids together.
He also cried like a baby at the end of the movie Glory. "Well, he sure showed that his boys could fight."
He was a good and kind man. And he was a racist.
The hard thing about the word "racism" is that it has about ten commonly-used and incompatible meanings.
For example, you might call the guys walking around in Klan robes burning a cross at a rally racists, and you might also call the policeman who tends to frisk black kids a little more readily than white kids (perhaps because of experience about who carries illegal weapons/drugs, perhaps because of stereotypes) a racist, and you might also call a politician who opposes affirmative action programs racist.
Those are all ways the word is commonly used, and yet they are completely different--the anti-affirmative-action politician isn't burning crosses in anyone's yard, and neither is the policeman who engages in racial profiling. And by contrast, the Klansmen probably couldn't give you a very coherent argument against affirmative action and may well only object to it because they think members of the wrong race are getting the admissions boost.
Similarly, you might be called racist for knowing and stating true facts (the murder rate among blacks is way higher than among whites), or for advocating for a whites-only separatist homeland. A policy might be called racist because it explicitly discriminates against blacks (like tons of laws did in the past), but it might also be called racist because it has a disparate impact on blacks relative to whites without any explicit consideration of race.
Because if this, when someone refers to some person, idea, policy, etc. as racist, I always want to figure out which of the many incompatible meanings they intend. And I think it is very common in political argument to strategically use the ambiguity in the definition--I call you racist for accurately citing crime statistics in hopes of creating the association between your use of those statistics and the guys in Klan robes.
>Well, either you have to recognize that the misuse of a label associated with a concept doesn't, by itself, invalidate the concept,
It's not that's its misused. It's that there isn't a coherent, accepted definition of "racism" at all. There's no concept to be invalid because there's no singular "concept" here at all.
You're substituting your own definition of racism and assuming that this is the "correct" one, which totally misses the point of the word being a problem in the first place.
>u have to apply the same scrutiny to more right-wing concepts and argue that it doesn't matter if the individuals who originally coined "cultural marxism", "human biodiversity" or "great replacement" had a point — in practice the majority of people who use these terms are insane and wrong.
Okay, that's a lazy outgroup swipe, plain and simple. Like seriously, everyone in your political outgroup is "insane and wrong"?
But again, the problem is not that the terms are misused. Everybody knows what it meant by "human biodiversity", and its not used as a slur. It always mean heritable differences within and between human populations that affect physiology and behavior. You can disagree with the concept, but there's zero ambiguity to this term, and its not used as a way of silencing people you disagree with.
>Otherwise it's just you saying "my outgroup's ideological constructs are emotional and dumb whereas my ingroup's ideological constructs are rational and smart".
No, that's you doing that. YOU'RE the only one here calling the outgroup dumb. The whole point is that racism does not have a singular, coherent definition and it is therefore bad faith and/or irresponsible to use it considering the power it has.
Also, "racism" has broad institutional support as a concept. If somebody is branded "racist", they will be fired from most major coproations, universities, media organisations. Calling somebody a "cultural marxist" is already seen as stupid and has no real world implications because people in power by and large do not accept its validity. So "racism" is a much more dangerous and powerful word.
I'm happy to bite that bullet and say that buzzwords should be tabooed more generally in high quality discussion spaces like this one, though I recognise that it makes posting take more effort.
I would argue such tabooing is pointless because of the euphemism treadmill: the kind of person who will raise objections for months about people calling individuals who see other races as their race's inferiors "racist" will not stop merely because you switch to using the term "race-based prejudice"- they will instead (rightly) point out that "race-based prejudice" is a longform way to say "racism" and demand that word be tabooed as well. And so on with "ethnic discrimination" and so on and so forth.
Bluntly, the goal of such semantic games is not to actually improve dialogue, it's to tie people down in debates over semantics instead of the actual content (see the left-wing kooks arguing that we shouldn't use the term "walkable cities" because it would offend the disabled) and to taboo the topic itself.
Of course, Brett S could be engaging in good faith! But I've seen this kind of maneuver in left-wing circles too many times to not notice the pattern as it forms, and the only person I know of whose made wide, sweeping declarations of racism was myself when I was particularly pissed off over politics and had too much to drink (and even then, that was at the Right as a whole and not this site), and thus can't really buy OP's declaration as coming from a place of real concern instead of a troll's concern.
>I would argue such tabooing is pointless because of the euphemism treadmill: the kind of person who will raise objections for months about people calling individuals who see other races as their race's inferiors "racist"
The overwhelming majority of people called "racist" are not described by this, THATS THE ENTIRE POINT.
If that's ALL racism ever meant, it wouldn't be a problem at all in the first place! The point is precisely that the term "racist" describes these people, as well as people who oppose affirmative action, avoid black neighborhoods because of the higher crime rate, or believe that the data show blacks are no more likely than whites to be the victims of police force once you control for relevant factors.
These are all vastly different things, and using the term "racist" to describe them
>see the left-wing kooks arguing that we shouldn't use the term "walkable cities" because it would offend the disabled
That's not even remotely analogous. It's absolutely clear what "walkable cities" means, and its not used a slur to shout down political opponents.
i agree that within this community that kind of communication doesn't really seem to gain traction
but i think the community is HUGE and status is largely illegible in here unless you've been here a while and start learning some names
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/he-was-a-world-renowned-cancer-researcher?s=r I dont know about the epistemic status so cannot vouch for that.
If any part of this is true, a scientist - well renowned, nobel-tipped, and talented scientist - can't find work because of the dynamics of how grants and studies play out today. If the story is false, it still feels like he wasn't given due process.
My two cents on this, FWIW.
There are two claims in the opposing narratives that I disagree with:
On one hand, no one is an irreplaceable genius. Especially in a messy experimental science like bio where everything is done by a big community. An individual can have an outstanding (and recognized and rewarded) contribution to the community, but you shouldn't preserve them at the expense of the community's 'scientific health' (research standards, training pipeline, reputation etc.)
Is expelling Sabatini overall healthy for the community? I'm torn on that. If you read the report, you see that the allegations are not some nebulous rumors - it's very clear he led a very 'un-American', bro-team, highly sexualized lab culture. That includes travelling alone with your undergrad to a conference and telling her sexual stories, which is... holy shit.
He's not a sexual predator, however - he didn't assault or harass anyone. And the lab culture was OK for most of his trainees (students and postdocs) - many of them, including women, did well for themselves and support him. I had a commander just like that in my first Army job and most of the women who served with me, including my best friend, remember him overall fondly - simultaneously as an amazing leader and creepy bastard.
For a few trainees the culture was damaging, which is horrible but unfortunately not unusual or restricted to sexualized environments.
I don't think clamping down on unusual lab cultures, even those like Sabatini's, and upholding homogeneity is healthy for the scientific community (and if I ever get an academic position I will probably have an equally weird and unamerican - though not sexually so - lab environment), but it can be healthy for specific institutions.
Overall, I think it's great that the report came out - everyone associating with him, including potential trainees, should know what they're getting into. It's also legit for Whitehead and MIT to decide they're willing to sacrifice some science to not have this on their campus. They're big and prestigious enough to take the hit and have thousands of other trainees and hundreds of other labs, plus reputations, to think about. It's also equally legit for some other institution to decide they are absolutely ok with this kind of lab culture on *their* campus.
As for protecting trainees - I have a lot of thoughts about how we should make them much less dependent on the PI, give them non-PI mentorship and support (from e.g. thesis chair), and normalize changing labs even in years 2-3-4 in a way that lets people preserve as much of their work as possible. But that's for another time.
No one is an irreplaceable genius, but there are some people who are *way* more productive than others in science, just as in many other fields. If we as a society push a lot of the super-productive, super-insightful people out of science, we're going to be a lot poorer as a result.
I mean, I don't think it's a stretch to say that if Einstein or Newton had been stillborn, it would have taken many more years for the scientific community to work out important bits of how the universe works. While it's easy to overstate the lone-genius theory of the world, there really are very smart and insightful and driven people who really do push a lot of progress in the world, and if you make it impossible for them to do science, then a lot less science will get done.
IMO, this is one of the reasons why it's such a big win to make sure that women, Jews, nonwhites, LGBT folks, etc. are welcome in science. Keeping Katalin Karikó out of science because she's a woman would have meant going without mRNA vaccines today. But the same thing applies to brilliant people who are socially awkward, or have weird ideas/beliefs, or whatever.
Was it on here we had a discussion about romance in the workplace? I think this is a good example of why it's a bad idea. I don't know who is in the right or in the wrong, but this is yet another example of "it is never 'just a fun, no-strings fling' whatever *you* may think".
If I'm being mean about the accuser, then the guy is old enough to have known better. A 29 year old woman is not banging a 50 year old man because he's just such a virile hunk of studliness. If the attributes quoted here are true (really big name in the field, potential Nobel winner) than the woman was trying to hitch her wagon to a star. When he still regarded it as just a fling and indeed showed signs of possibly dumping her (getting involved with another woman), then she turned vengeful.
If I'm being mean about the accused, he was a randy old goat who was thinking with his dick, not his big brain. You don't bang co-workers, and that includes people working in the same place who are on the level below you, even if they aren't directly working under you. The rest of it same as above: the woman was looking for benefits for her career and social status from her association with him, he didn't provide what she expected, revenge.
This article in the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/03/nyregion/david-sabatini-nyu-harassment.html) includes a few more details of the accusations against Sabatini than Weiss included in her Substack article.
True but not the whole story, there were definitely some pretty shady things going on at the Sabatini lab (including both sexual and scientific misconduct).
In my view both of them are to blame.
Where can we read about allegations of scientific misconduct there? I had not heard of this before.
https://forbetterscience.com/2020/01/29/david-sabatini-tormented-by-steaming-turds/
https://forbetterscience.com/2020/11/23/mtor-conclusions-not-affected/
(for example)
Even though he's a hothead I would fully agree with Sabatini's crude characterization of the worth of those particular critiques. Peurile and sterile sniping, at best.
Things went completely to hell under Rafael Reif. Thank God he's going. And, yeah, what happened to Sabatini is an incredible embarrassment, the more so as *at the very same time* MIT was squiring Jeff Epstein around campus *in secret* so they could get some of that sweet sweet $$$ without pissing off the people on campus who knew he'd been credibly charged with molesting and trafficking underage girls. Reif claims he didn't know about Epstein, despite his signature on a number of documents related to the gift, and to the special provisions for letting him come on campus incognito, so to speak - oh gosh I just sign whatever they put in front of me, never read a thing - but who believes that I cannot imagine. How MIT ended up with such a terrible and ethically bankrupt leader is one of the big mysteries, right up there with the Trinity.
If you read any source besides the substack article things look very different. I myself was indignant until I did some Googling and realized the story was much more complex than was presented. If you just ignore the Knouse aspect there was *still* some incredibly inapporpriate behavior in that lab and specifically from Sabatini.
I don't agree, and I did read other sources of course. If you have one that you think is particular persuasive, I'd be glad to get a pointer to it. My overall read is: (1) Sabatini is an arrogant, brilliant, and hot-tempered narcissist, thinks the world revolves around him because he has the best ideas in the room...which he actually does, almost all the time. But I don't read a shred of deceit nor genuine misogyny in him, and given the number of female colleagues and students who passionately supported him, I find the proposion that he belongs in the same category as an Epstein genuinely offensive, an unforgiveable degradement of the language of evil.
(2) I have a much lower opinion of Knouse. Suggesting a 29-year-old PI at MIT -- a cutthroat environment if there ever was one -- was some innocent little girl to be "groomed" by a predator is so farcical it makes you wonder what other snakes dwell in her head. She was in early middle age, slept around, and clearly needed validation in a ton of ways, both physical, emotional, and scientific. She reads almost like a borderline personality. It seemed like she was pretty excited to hook up with Sabatini -- not, I think, as any crass career move, but probably just because she liked the drama and glamor -- and then he got bored and moved on, and...well, hell hath no fury.
(3) My opinion of the MIT Administration is, as I said above, lowest of all. These people don't even have personal passions or hobgoblins in the head as a defense, they were just cynically using people left and right.
Like what?
By the way, that these two events (Sabatini and Epstein) are *connected* is admittedly a little on the paranoid side, but not so much that it passeth all understanding. Remember O.J. Simpson vowing to "find the real killer?" Harvey Weinstein saying he was going to really smash the NRA after his own shit hit the fan? Like that. After Epstein came to light, the people with stained hands in the MIT Administration were going to *make sure* everyone was 100% clear on how righteously severe they were on anything that hinted of sexual no-nos. Yes. mistakes may have been made -- honest, understandable mistakes, you understand -- we knew nothing! -- but we are *totally* on the side of the angels, you betcha, yes sir, and how.
Speaking of E.H., his recent Harper's article is a good corrective for conservatives who think they have a monopoly on accusing the powerful of using COVID as an excuse to increase their authoritarian power: https://justinehsmith.substack.com/p/is-everything-political?s=r
This is a bit beside the point of the article, but alas, I have to say that i am left a bit saddened by hearing that anglo analytic philosophy has moved away from metaphysics towards sociopolitics.
I will always prefer a good argument about gunk
Never heard of this person but did find the post quite interesting. I have had the same exact issue with political spectrum tests as described, even down to the questions and nuanced answers.
I actually meant to link to his Harper's article, not the para-post about it, although they are good to read together to see what motivated the Substack post: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/06/permanent-pandemic-will-covid-controls-keep-controlling-us/
This article is truly atrocious. Just pure masturbation from an total asshole. Sorry if this sounds dismissive, but there isn't actually a coherent argument in here to argue against.
"I really don’t think the America I take to be “real” —founded on genocide and slavery; sustained by greater brute force and glossier propaganda than anything the second-tier global powers have been able to conjure; belovèd by me like an imperfect parent, only because it’s the place that shaped me, but in fact not one iota better or worse than any other empire in human history—"
Oh boy! This sounds like a reasonable person whose opinions I'm interested in hearing and definitely not an oblivious, obnoxious, partisan hack who serves no purpose but to preach to their tribe!
What exactly make you condemn this as not reasonable? The stuff about not being one iota better or worse sounds weird to me, but aren't genocide, slavery, brute force and propaganda plainly true?
Not even remotely
Would you mind actually explaining what you disagree with?
Nope.
The part about "not one iota better or worse" is of course absurd.
The rest of the text feels motte-and-bailey-ish to me. Is the author saying that America is sustained *exclusively* by brute force, or that America is sustained by many things but brute force *also* happens to be a part of the toolkit? Etc.
<meta>It saddens me how knowledge of the motte-bailey fallacy can lead to automatically suspecting anybody of committing it, just due to them not being 100% preciese with words. This gives a whole new dimension to partisanship and uncharitable reading.</meta>
My reading is that America is sustained *to an substantial extent* by brute force. In a sense that if USA had significantly less brute forse, it and the balance of powers in whole world would've been noticebly different. Is it a controversial take?
Is any country not sustained by brute force? (Maybe Vatican City?)
If the guy wanted to make a point about how all governments are morally suspect then I'd be right there with him. But if he wants to use universal sins to dump on one particular country then that's just silly.
Some countries are sustained brutal force to a *significantly less substantial extent*. And I believe the foundational assumption is that the less brutal fource is sustaining the country the better all things being equal.
He makes a point that all empires are morally suspect to a nearly same degree. That's what "not being one iota better or worse" is about. This line is still questionable, but it's definetely not an isolated demand for rigor.
So the defense of the assertion reduces to a tautology? "If the balance of power over the course of history were different, the course of history would be different...because the balance of power would be different?"
This is my general thought as well and over the last ~decade have become much more comfortable with the idea. I do still roll my eyes a bit when someone says/writes something like Smith did, even if I don't disagree. I guess it comes from a "is it necessary to say that" feeling.
Keep in mind that the motivation for that post was that his Harper's article apparently caused him to be pegged as a conservative by its progressive readers. It seems that he wanted to demonstrate just how left wing many of his thoughts really were.
You may call it sanewashing or steelmanning if you want. For me it's just not trying to imagine things that the author say and reading with basic charitability rather than being offended because it's something your outgroup may say without even engaging with the point.
He says it was *founded* on "genocide" and "slavery" then *sustained* through "brute force". Though you may disagree on the degree to which these forces played in the founding of America they did play a role. And America has used brute force to sustain itself either though military action, covert means, or police action against its own citizens.
Nope.
The same phrase that I'm unhappy about, claims that USA is just as bad as other empires. I fail to see how you can perseive it as an isolated demand for rigor.
Well spotted , Sir
consistently awed and delighted to hear new things about just how _weird_ Wittgenstein was as a person: http://people.soc.cornell.edu/swedberg/Wittgenstein%27sVisittoIthaca.pdf
Last week's New Yorker has an interested article on Wittgenstein: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/05/16/how-queer-was-ludwig-wittgenstein
Ha, saw you post this on twitter this morning and now see it here. First time that kind of cross over has happened to me.
What exactly did you find so _weird_ about him in this article, besides eating the same food?
Seems like a long but interesting article, if you or anybody whos read it could share some of the anecdotes in the comments I would appreciate it.
If anyone has time for a really short and terribly unscientific survey (no market research, I promise), I'd love you to fill out https://forms.gle/RSkx4ujp1F6vkrVn8.
First part of an explanation and first evaluation of results is to be found here: https://dasklaus.tumblr.com/post/685355874413379584/
Ah, nice. I like the interspersing of the explanation with the responses.
I think I agree that "emotion" is kind of a broad umbrella of concepts, sufficiently so that it can't be made concrete. I wonder if there are any two people whose concepts of emotion are entirely non-overlapping, if there is some intersection which could be thought of as "minimal mutually agreed upon emotion"
Looking forward to more!
Good news then, there is a lot more! Getting through allll the answers to the third question: https://dasklaus.tumblr.com/post/685542884304388096/explaining-and-analyzing-the-terribly-unscientific
Done. Very interesting. Please let us know what, if anything, you glean from the responses.
I took the survey, and encourage other people to do the same. Very quick. For me, rewarding.
I also filled it and am also curious
Filled it out and now want to understand the purpose -- please post an explanation at some point. You’ve struck my curiosity
I'll reply in a week or so, then! Thanks.
Do you mean you'll reply here, or on next week's open thread?
First part of an explanation and first evaluation of results is to be found here: https://dasklaus.tumblr.com/post/685355874413379584/
I'll reply here. No need to keep an eye out for it. Anyone who wants to get the notification from substack can just put a comment.
That's what I'll do then.
First part of an explanation and first evaluation of results is to be found here: https://dasklaus.tumblr.com/post/685355874413379584/
An interesting thing about "The Society Of The Spectacle" by Debord is that Baudrillard became much more famous than Debord by just repeating Debord's ideas in "Simulacra and Simulation".
I feel I should say something stronger against Baudrillard, Debord, and the entire dialectical school of philosophy. I have little respect for the early Church fathers of the 2nd through 5th centuries, or for the medieval scholastics; but both groups at least made arguments and engaged with their intellectual opponents point-by-point in logical discussion.
Debord and Baudrillard, by contrast, are dialecticians. Plato introduced the term "dialectic", by which he meant dialogue between two people. But that's not how it's used today. The practice descends from Plato, but more from his mythological mode of "argumentation", which was to spin fabulous tales about creation, Atlantis, reincarnation, the history of love, or The Cave, and then pretend these fairy tales were arguments that applied to real life.
Rousseau, I think, re-invigorated the mythological method and the storytelling method. Hegel and Marx turned it to something with some semblance of logic, but a very poor semblance; more of a camouflage to conceal that they were still just spinning tales. They did not engage with counter-arguments; they did not use data to support their claims (though Engels wrote down masses of data in Kapital, it's only data to validate their claims that bad things happen, never data to validate their proposed solution). Freud followed the same mode of reasoning, telling just-so stories, but never considering alternative explanations, nor testing the predictions of his theories.
In France, Voltaire and other *philosophes* clung to the method of debate and of empirical observation, although they used anecdotes rather than large samples of random data. They engaged with the opposing view and made counter-arguments. But somewhere between the French Revolution and the 20th century, reasoned argumentation receded from continental philosophy. French philosophers like Camus, Sartre, and Derrida, and fellow-travellers like Lacan and Barthes, preferred to tell stories.
[Footnote 1 below on exceptions to this.]
Continental philosophy developed a special flowery style, which is something like a refined, more-elegant, more French version of Puritan and Baptist fire-and-brimstone preaching. What matters is not reason, but emotional resonance, poetry, beautiful style, and a tantalizing obscurity and ambiguity which gives readers the pleasure of always feeling that they're on the verge of discovering what the sentence actually means.
20th-century continental epistemology relies on the notion of what Derrida called "the discourse", which is not an /argument/ in the old-fashioned sense of arguing that some fact is true in the external world, because objective truth and the external world were out of fashion. "The discourse" is just a family tree of texts and speeches which refer to each other. There is no need, Derrida says, to consider anything beyond the discourse, since no discourse can possibly refer to anything outside the discourse. So trying to support an argument with data is not only unnecessary, but naive. The discourse is only about the discourse. That which is repeated most-often is not merely /assumed/ to be true; it's true within the discourse /by definition/, because it has become the center of the discourse. Being repeated is thus the equivalent of "proof" in continental philosophy.
Debord and Baudrillard are both part of this tradition. <edit@5pm May 25>They seldom support their claims with evidence from reality.</edit> Baudrillard begins *Simulacra And Simulation* by presenting "evidence" drawn from Jorge Luis Borges stories. Fiction is considered valid evidence in continental philosophy because it can be part of the discourse.
For another example, just minutes before I began typing this, I was listening to an audio recording of Debord's "Comments on the Society and the Spectacle". In one chapter, he complains that, because of the media, the 20th century has seen the end of the division of labor -- that everyone can do everything, that any person's views on any subject are taken seriously by the mere fact that the media transmits them.
This resonates with our experience of reporters interviewing movie stars to learn their opinions on politics. But is it more true than false? Is it not true, rather, that jack-of-all trades were more common in the past? Before the 19th century, it was extremely common for intellectuals to have wide-ranging interests and to be seen as authorities in many different fields. Debord doesn't even provide true anecdotes to support his claims; he makes up his own anecdotes.
Then in the very next chapter, Debord complains about over-specialization in the 20th century, again with no data and no anecdotes. He doesn't even notice that this directly contradicts his claim in the previous chapter that labor in the 20th century is under-specialization, let alone worry about what could be *good* if specialization and lack of specialization are both bad. Logical thought like that is foreign to 20th-century continental philosophers.
<edit>But I agree with Jack's distinction below, that Debord was complaining about an over-specialization which does seem to exist; and complaining not about under-specialization in general, but specifically about accepting fame in one field as validation of someone's opinion in other fields.</edit>
My opinion is that, while clearly there's some need to convince people that continental philosophy is a burning pile of garbage that needs to be extinguished, we should not treat it with respect. Reading it and talking about it risks spreading it further. It has evolved to be catchy and repeatable. As a sweeping but useful over-generalization, there is no need to read any of it, except to recognize it and to debunk it. That entire field of philosophy renounced every method of reasoning that leads to correct results; the number of truths it finds can be relied on to be at the level of chance.
[1] Sartre did write a big impenetrable book, *Being and Nothingness*, using argument; but the tiny bit of it that I read seemed illogical; and it's based on the writings of Heidegger, which are incoherent and even ungrammatical.
Foucault did use examples and lots of data, but I'm skeptical of its provenance and selection. The only data of his which I investigated was his central piece of evidence for his book on the history of madness: the medieval practice of exporting madmen from a city by putting them on a "ship of fools" and sending them all off into the sea. He provided several references to specific incidents. But every 20th-century source I can find on the subject says that the ship of fools is a myth and never happened.
I suspect Foucault may have been more like Chomsky, who uses lots of references, but considers only those which agree with him to be reputable, and dismisses everyone who disagrees with him as unscholarly thralls of US imperialism. For instance, in Chomsky's writings in support of the Viet Cong in North Vietnam, and of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, he relied on a combination of government news agencies, reports from foreigners who had been taken on show tours by government propaganda agencies, and the writings of ideological allies who had rarely or never been to Cambodia. He scorned interviews of eye-witnesses as unscholarly and unreliable, and dismissed respectable news media outlets on the grounds that news services in Europe or America were just serving up government propaganda. In this way he managed to deny the atrocities done in North Vietnam and in Cambodia for years after most leftists had conceded those issues.
Well, I can't support burning books, but I do support ignoring or de-canonizing some books. I think that sifting through continental philosophy for the wheat is mostly a waste of time, because the chaff-to-wheat ratio is too high. It just grants those works a high social status they don't deserve. Hundreds of books criticizing Hegel and Marx seem to have accomplished little, and may have helped bring them both into the center of cultural discourse today.
Also, your reply just convinced me that my criticism re. under- and over-specialization was unfair.
Re. "Point being, just because someone doesn't use lots of data, doesn't mean that they don't have anything valuable or useful to say about the world. " Yeah, I don't mean quite that, but I see how it sounds like I'm saying that. In fact, I just came back here now to delete my previous comment savaging Debord, because, as I get further into "Comments on the Society of the Spectacle", I find myself agreeing with an important part of Debord's basic claim. Steel-manned, that part might be that, above some threshold, correlations between the narratives of different media outlets are self-reinforcing, and thus the media ends up dictating a single narrative divorced from corrections by empirical reality. Also, some of his comments, like his scorn of McLuhan, reveal an important split with post-modernism that made me rethink dismissing him as "yet another 20th-century French philosopher." Also, I feel like my treatment of Foucault was a bit like Chomsky quickly dismissing people for disagreeing with him.
Also, I found 3 places where Debord used specific examples to support his point:
- that democracy and history began in the same time (5th century BCE) and place (Athens); in support (I think) of the claim that erasing history will destroy democracy
- a West German revolutionary who in 1978 was (maybe; unclear) denied political asylum on the grounds that critiquing society is social and not political action; I forget what this was supposed to demonstrate
- an incident involving Dr. Achambu (sp?) in Poitier (sp?) in 1984; in support of the claim that "it can also happen that an innocent suspect confesses to a crime he did not commit, simply because he is impressed by the logic of an informer who turns on him, to believe that he's guilty".
But these are separated by lots of groundless claims, which are sometimes fantastic, like his claim that weather predictions are manipulated by capitalists to maximize economic gains from tourism, or his claim that children are now being taught to program computers before they know how to read. And Debord is still guilty of never, ever considering other possible explanations for anything.
So I still wouldn't recommend that most people read Debord or Foucault. Both have some useful insights; but both exaggerate them and spin them out into paranoid conspiracy theories pinned unjustly on their opponents. I think both have done more harm than good.
I think Debord's attempts to blame the Spectacle on capitalism are wrong; "the society of the spectacle" describes better most other societies from history, especially those most strongly opposed to free thought and free trade: Sparta, the European Middle Ages, imperial China, communist Russia and China, and academia today.
Not if you already read and understood Debord. Debord and Baudrillard say basically the same thing as far as I recall. Debord is the better writer, but that's not saying much. People who take either of them seriously tend to become paranoid conspiracy theorists who believe society is completely corrupt, and that you need to take the red pill and see the malicious masters pulling all the strings of our fake puppet-show reality. Michael Vassar would probably recommend taking a dose of LSD and reading Baudrillard. I would not. I think that even if he's right about some things, his grand narrative is historicist, apocalyptic, dogmatic, hopeless, and unhelpful.
Another Bayesian brain / predictive processing example, this time with music:
“The ‘Mysterious Melody’ illusion was discovered and first published by Deutsch in *Perception and Psychophysics*, 1972. This musical brain teaser shows how our knowledge of a piece of music can have a profound influence on how we hear it. Suppose you play a well-known tune such that all the note names (C, D, E, and so on) are correct, but the tones are distributed haphazardly among three different octaves. If people are given no clues as to what the tune might be, they find it very difficult to identify. But once they know what to listen for, the melody becomes easy to follow.
“The ‘Mysterious Melody’ illusion provides a striking example of ‘top-down processing’, or the use of previously acquired knowledge, in sound perception.”
http://deutsch.ucsd.edu/psychology/pages.php?i=207
(h/t Matt Voglewede)
I can't follow the scrambled melody even after hearing the unscrambled version. Am I weird?
I had to play the music several times on a piano while listening to the scrambled version, before I could convince myself they were in fact the same notes. Now I can hear the scrambled melody, but it isn't easy or automatic.
Same here. At best it doesn't sound too offensive if I hum the original melody with it...
Same. Can’t hear a thing. And I’m fairly musical and pretty good at identifying melodies.
Only the very ending of the scrambled melody 'sounded' like the one I was supposed to be hearing, after learning what it was. I'm bad at identifying music, so that may be part of it; people who can recognise what "C, D and E" are may do a lot better.
I wonder if people who have more musical training or less do better? I played an instrument for many years, and I almost felt like my top-down expectations were being overwritten by the way I know those notes are moving in the wrong directions/amounts. Clocking note movement was a skill that I had to train for, so I wonder if it affects non-musicians differently?
I'm not exactly a great musician but I have played a couple of instruments for a couple of years, sing reasonably well and can read sheet music, and I really can't, there's no progression I can follow, the notes are just too far apart.
It a tonal version of the “what song am I tapping out?” thing.
It's obvious if you already know, and is in fact completely opaque if you don't: the illusion is the pattern matching we do that makes us think that now we can actually hear the song, when in fact we're just primed to it and could probably pick it out of white noise in that state.
What I'd be interested in seeing is whether you can easily fool people by sticking some wrong notes (say, swap a C for a G) in the scrambled version of the melody.
I wonder if being primed to hear "oh, that's whatever" makes us hear it as whatever. I feel as if, had the unscrambled version been "Pop Goes The Weasel", it would be as easy to hear the scrambled version as "oh, that's what it is".
Same 😢
Looking for advice and commentary on a design for a new prediction market model. I think it should be possible to design prediction markets that play nice with Kelly bets, and I've come up with a concept that improves handling for Kelly bets, allows for much higher leverage, and allows the market to automatically track your preferred betting algorithm. The big cost is complexity, of course. Here's my writeup:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AB3oRxjDpvx0qSVFf1l7q_DKSpAFk1qjrJB5ED8Dnto/edit?usp=sharing
Can you recommend an effective course of action to eliminate aging? What NGOs do exceptionally well in that regard? Thanks a lot in advance :)
To /eliminate/ aging? I can recommend an effective course, if you have a few billion dollars and at least 20 years. The key problem at this point, IMHO, is the math-phobic culture of the NIH and of molecular biology. People are still trying to find "anti-aging drugs". That's hopeless. Trying to stop aging by injecting a few drugs, each with a single target, with measurements and drug administration on a time scale measured in days, is like trying to repair a computer with a sledgehammer. Not to mention that the ubiquitous use of relational databases instead of semantic networks in bioinformatics makes the necessary juggling of a large hierarchy of probabilistic inferences impossible.
We need anti-aging scientists who are willing to phrase anti-aging intervention as a machine learning problem. That means that you define the phenotype you wish to achieve or preserve, and you /trust your ML system to figure out how to do it/. That trust in machines is completely lacking in biological research. Everybody still insists on having humans study each and every function of each and every protein / miRNA / epigenetic marker / binding site / etc., relying mostly on humans writing and reading papers to communicate information. That's not gonna cure aging. Humans should work on a level of abstraction above that of individual protein-protein, protein-DNA, or RNA-DNA interactions.
This might begin with ML analysis of high-throughput experimental data, to estimate what information is needed to model genomic networks, and what minimum capabilities would be necessary to use those networks to maintain cellular and genomic stability indefinitely. Researchers must study how the performance of the cellular systems which provide these capabilities degrades with demand; cellular operations compete for resources, and we need to know how much spare capacity cells have to work with in terms of intracellular space, DNA transcription, siRNA production, protein production, protein transport, protein degradation, etc., without triggering cancer or progeria. I also recommend basic research into the cytoskeleton, a crucial structural and transport system which has been neglected due to how the NIH funds research. We're also probably going to need bioinformatics for determining a person's original genome (and making any obviously good corrections to it), and better ways of generating stem cells with that genome, and of implanting them into their niches. There are many other obvious "first" steps, and promising approaches to test; Aubrey de Gray wrote a book full of them.
The intermediate stages would likely involve intelligent robotic systems which used cell simulators to autonomously devise and conduct experiments 24 hours a day (similar systems have existed for over 10 years now, but are unpopular, probably because scientists find them threatening; when biologists say "lab automation" they nearly always mean computer control of high-throughput experiments designed by humans).
Deployment in vivo might involve groups of plasmids which, collectively, continually took measurements, made computations, and then made interventions to restore a youthful equilibrium, using mechanisms such as siRNA, histone modifications, and the production of transcription factors, on a timescale of minutes. It might also be necessary to edit or epigenetically modify the human genome in vivo, to decouple different parts of enormous, overly-general genetic networks such as the the mTOR and FOXO3A systems (these are internal regulatory sledgehammers that make shockingly crude adjustments to the expression levels of dozens or hundreds of proteins).
Hey Phil, thanks so much for your comment here (and all of them down below - the Art thread was an interesting spinoff :) ). Took me a while to get back - sorry for the delay in my response. If you could keep it real simple for me - imagine we have $100M (not a few billions to work with but still a meaningful starting point), what would be your next 10 action items in reality?
If you have money to invest in anti-aging research, Aubrey de Grey (@aubreydegrey on Twitter) would like to talk to you. He's worth talking to.
Well... I didn't keep it real simple; I wrote a 4500-word document ( https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ojuNaO3vvEedDIH7kPSzxTFe_J0Mha1FR4Cgx0BFGpg/edit# ) giving an overview of anti-aging research and my opinions on the different approaches.
Giving a list of my next 10 action items without that overview would be misleading, because my action items are a mix of what is most-important and what is neglected. I boldfaced most of them in that document. They are:
- Human mitochondrial DNA contains two copies of the 13-base-pair sequence ACCTCCCTCACCA, which often causes the 4977-base-pair "human common deletion" in mitochondrial DNA during replication. Changing a few base pairs in one of these repeats to functionally-equivalent ones (they're both in coding regions) could therefore prevent many cases of diseases of aging. One obvious project is thus to create transgenic mice with mtDNA that won't suffer the common deletion. (Mice have a different 13-bp common deletion, which has similar effects.)
- Use math to figure out how to fix aging with the tools we already have. The effects of aging are all different types of physical damage that must be repaired or replaced, and so each effect needs an entirely different mechanism of intervention, and often a different mechanism based on cell type. Additionally, the causes behind each aging phenotype are only partly and imperfectly known. Targeting the molecular effects of aging thus requires on the order of 100 massive research projects. But given a short list of modalities of intervention that we already kinda-sorta know how to do, such as drugs, diet, gene therapy, and monoclonal antibodies, we can try to come up with a minimal set of interventions which would collectively ameliorate aging. There are more details on that in the gdoc.
- Import genes from one species to another, or use them as models for protein engineering. Obvious projects include:
-- replacing mammalian genes for the electron transport chain with ones from birds or bats
-- adding antioxidant genes from birds, bats, or naked mole rats to (other) mammals
-- using the nuclear genes from species which encode our mitochondrial genes in their nuclear DNA as models for allotopic expression (moving mitochondrial genes into nuclear DNA)
-- more details on this in the gdoc
- Destroy or down-regulate pathways which age us in the course of responding to evolutionary constraints which no longer constrain us, i.e.:
-- Pathways that motivate us to eat are too highly activated for modern life. (Minus or Bonus: You'd have to cure anorexia in order to safely modulate these pathways.)
-- Muscle tissue is so metabolically expensive that the body aggressively destroys it when it isn't used. This endless alternation between (and overlapping of) anabolism and catabolism may be the primary cause of misfolded proteins and their aggregates, ROS production, autophagic disorder, stem cell depletion, sarcopenia, the clonal expansion of DNA with large deletions (because short DNA reproduces faster than long DNA), and mitochondrial malfunction. There's a huge potential upside here, and nobody is working on this except for people trying to regulate myostatin; and they're not interested in aging. Besides, we've had treatments to alleviate muscular dystrophy by suppressing myostatin for over 20 years now, and none of them have ever been used due to "safety" concerns, even though MD victims rarely live past their 20s.
- I've wanted for decades to simply get a bunch of long-lived mouse strains from Jackson labs, cross them to get many different combinations of longevity mutations, and then see how long they live. Most longevity mutations affect the mTOR pathway, so I expect their results are not additive. Finding that other mutations are also not additive with mTOR-affecting mutations would suggest that they also hit the mTOR pathway. I never did because, as a private individual, I can't buy mice from The Jackson Lab (it's easier to legally buy machine guns than to buy lab mice!); and because the transgenic strains have several different background strains, making cross-breeding much more difficult to do and to interpret. It seems to me that I recall someone is finally doing this experiment, but I've forgotten who.
- Develop a framework for the development of complex bioinformatics programs, including:
-- An easy-to-use replacement for relational databases which can keep track of all of the evidence used in inferring a proposition, and compute a probability distribution from it.
-- An alternative architecture to pipelined systems.
-- Massive parallelism, using more GPUs than CPUs.
-- A plug-and-play agent-based methodology, so that the resolution of models or the accuracy of algorithms can be scaled up or down, or pipelined as a progressive filter, to increase speed and reduce memory requirements. This isn't just neglected in bioinformatics; it's neglected in programming methodology. (More info in the gdoc.)
- Cell simulators. People are working on this, but I'm not aware of any sufficiently ambitious projects. IMHO we need a Human Cell Simulator Project with at least hundreds of millions of dollars in funding. This isn't one of the first 10 steps; it's just huge and hugely important.
- Politics and culture:
-- Hire someone to write a book about how many Americans the FDA kills every year.
-- Found a small publishing house to specialize in novels in which old people are main characters, and aren't used to argue that aging is all in the head, or to advocate resignation towards death. They don't even need to read slush if they can incentivize pre-readers and editors at other publishers, and agents, to forward them manuscripts which they like, but don't want to publish due to having old protagonists (which are widely seen in most genres other than "cozy mystery" as unviable).
Do you actually have money to spend or invest?
> That means that you define the phenotype you wish to achieve or preserve
er, how would you get the training data for this?
> intelligent robotic systems which used cell simulators
Supercomputers aren't powerful enough to simulate single cells, so I guess "simulator" refers to simulating 'in vivo' in vitro...
One important type of training data would be to measure the level of expression of every gene, at short time intervals. This can be done with RNA microarrays or with exome sequencing. This can also be done experimentally, applying an intervention to be tested to the cell and then monitoring gene expression over time afterwards. There are other types of data to gather, as I mentioned above when writing on omics. The easiest kind of intervention for plasmids to accomplish is to regulate the expression of individual genes up or down, which is why I think first of gene expression data. But other data, like lipidomics and measurements of nutrients, mitochondrial abundance and membrane potential, ATP, and free radicals, would provide important clues about the organism's state. Those are unfortunately more-difficult to measure.
There are already cell simulators. They don't simulate every protein or molecule. Many are quite crude, treating the cell as a homogeneous bag of chemicals and proteins with instantaneous diffusion. But those were originally designed to run on a single CPU from the previous century. You simulate to the resolution you have computational power for. Spatially-detailed simulation is very parallelizable, so I'm not overly worried about that. GPUs now cost about 10 cents apiece. Cells have tens or hundreds of millions of proteins, so you could dedicate one CPU to every protein in a cell for just millions or tens of millions of dollars. And that would be overkill.
"It might also be necessary to edit or epigenetically modify the human genome in vivo, to decouple different parts of enormous, overly-general genetic networks such as the the mTOR and FOXO3A systems (these are internal regulatory sledgehammers that make shockingly crude adjustments to the expression levels of dozens or hundreds of proteins)."
Oh, I absolutely want to see this done on animal studies to see how catastrophically wrong it can go. If anything is an example of Chesterton's Fence, "I think I can do better than evolution" here is it. Yes, evolution is a horrible kludge. But also yes, biology is complicated and interconnected in ways we don't fully realise. "Well I'll just strip out the carburettor since I'm sure the engine will work fine without it" is not the way to go about this.
I understand your instinct, but the particulars of how the mTOR and FOXO3A networks work strongly suggest that we'll need to break them up to prevent aging. When I said they're "shockingly crude", that's misleading in that the details of regulation are incredibly complicated, but correct in that they can be approximated as being just one bistable network, which has one stable state in which mTOR and other genes responsible for growth, high metabolism, energy use, and reproduction (including everything from the cell cycle to sexual activity) are activated, and another stable state in which the FOXO transcription factors and stress-response genes are activated, increasing DNA repair, lipofuscin clearance, and apoptosis, inducing hibernation or dauer, reducing immune response, and lowering metabolic rate. Permanent activation of FOXO3A and repression of mTOR after maturity might greatly reduce aging, but would make you weak, tired, sick, and asexual.
This network is ancient and evolutionarily conserved; it's found in every animal, and even in yeast. It presumably evolved because bistability is easy to evolve, whereas I can't think of a single case of tristability that exists at the molecular or even the cellular level [EDIT: Hormesis within a cell can be tristable.] I expect that the basic network evolved to use nutrient levels to decide when to turn the cell cycle on and off, and all sorts of activities that should correlate with high or low nutrient levels were then tacked onto the network, like dauer, hibernation, immune response, muscle growth, dominance behavior, and sexual activity.
But you shouldn't have to reduce muscle growth, sexual arousal, and immune response just to do some DNA repair or clear some lipofuscin. These networks tie together all sorts of mechanisms just because they all correlate, directly or indirectly, with nutrient levels. It's a fatal design that was easy to evolve.
As we no longer starve to death regularly, it no longer makes sense to use a network that turns our anti-aging mechanisms off when nutrient levels are low. Or does it?
One predictable catastrophe that might result from breaking up these networks is that we might then activate all these systems at the same time, and this might overload our cells' capacity in many different ways. For example, the administration of too much siRNA to a cell clogs the siRNA machinery, which is used largely to prevent cancer. Therefore, high doses of siRNAs induce cancer. That's why I said we need to study the maximum capacity of all our cellular processes.
You have explained beautifully why some scientists (and also me, if you count phd students) don't want to have anything to do with machine learning. I couldn't care less for a black box that tells me how to intervene to accomplish X if I have to trade not understanding how the world works. If I did care for it i would have become an engineer.
(Alas, I am a physicist. What i do is pretty pointless anyway and yet people want to introduce machine learning even here)
I care little about living forever if I have to live forever in a world where we have diluted all things that make life worth living, such as science and (with dall e) art. ("But photography did not kill art" - yeah, no, ever seen a modern art museum? Photography definitely massacred art)
Edit : ok guys and gals, you convinced me about art.
As to photography massacring art, I disagree. If photography invalidated art, artists could have just adopted photography as a new tool. It was the stupid spiritualism of Theosophists and other late-19th-century Platonists that destroyed art. Their rebellion was against representation in general.
The problem was that they believed Plato's silly arguments that representation is mere re-presentation, inherently impure and corrupt, and can't communicate anything new. As Platonists, they believed that the use of a single consistent viewpoint in space and time, and of logical and causal relations between objects, to tell an original story, was theoretically impossible. They believed that all art was nothing but the depiction of, or pointing to, eternal Platonic Forms, and therefore was necessarily non-re-presentational. They were attempting to restart the process of divining the eternal Platonic Forms and finding new, abstract icons to symbolize them. They believed that Art-with-a-capital-A must communicate with the viewer not in any ordinary materialist re-presentational way, but by the artist opening up a connection to a spiritual world of Platonic essences, and drawing something which would inspire the viewer with the same transcendental intuition of essence.
This is never taught anymore (see Evans 2014 for a brief explanation of why it has been suppressed), but is clear if you read the writings of Plato (especially the Meno and the parts in the Republic about poetry), and compare them with the writings of the original modern artists, e.g., Gauguin, Matisse, Kandinsky, Gleizes, Mondrian, or Malevich (see some of the references below). Highlight every occurence of "essence", "nature", "form", "ideal", "idea", "reality", "spirit", "pure", "absolute", "universal", "eternal", "timeless", "pre-existing", "higher", and "truth". Also look up the influence of theosophy on modern art, and count what fraction of the first modern artists were raised Catholic or Russian Orthodox.
Art was never destroyed; it was just forced out of academia and museums. But I would rather not even use the word "art"; Platonists have done so much damage with that word that we'd be better off without it. The logocentric assumption that the existence of the word "art" implies there is a Platonic essence of Art-with-a-capital-A, which specifies the One True Essence of Art; and that the business of artists is therefore to dialectically discover that essence, and expunge the art world of everything not matching that description; is totalitarian and stupid. I don't want to say that modern and post-modern art isn't art; I just want modernists and post-modernists to stop insisting that nothing else is.
Rina Arya (ed), 2014. Contemplations of the Spiritual in Art. Oxford & Bern: Peter Lang.
Michael Evans, 2014. "Out of Nothing : Painting and Spirituality." In Arya 2013 p. 77-96.
Albert Gleizes, 1922 (or 1923); transl 2000. La Peinture et ses lois (Painting and Its Laws). London: Francis Boutle.
Albert Gleizes & Jean Metzinger, 1912. "Cubism." In Harrison & Wood 1992, p. 187-196.
Charles Harrison & Paul Wood, eds., 1992. Art in Theory. Oxford: Blackwell.
Hans L.C. Jaffé (translator), 1971. De Stijl. NYC: H.N. Abrams.
Wassily Kandinsky, 1911; transl. Michael Sadler 2008. Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Floating Press.
Henri Matisse, 1908. Notes of a Painter (Notes d’un Peintre). In (Matisse & Flam 1978): 32-40.
Henri Matisse; transl. Jack Flam 1973; Dutton edition 1978. Matisse on Art. NYC: Dutton.
Piet Mondrian (Dutch "Mondriaan"), 1917. Neoplasticism in Painting (Dutch: De niewu beelding in de schilderkunst, literally "the new representation in painting"), 1. Introduction. (Dutch: "1. Inleiding"). De Stijl 1(1): 2-6. Translated in (Jaffé 1971 p. 36-39).
Piet Mondrian 1936, transl. 1993. Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art, part 2. In (Holtzman 1993), quoted at https://arthistoryproject.com/artists/piet-mondrian/the-collected-writings-of-piet-mondrian .
Wikipedia. "Piet Mondrian." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piet_Mondrian
This might just be me being under the weather, but this made absolutely no sense. "Modern art" (a term that is completely useless) is bad because... something something, it was all made by neo-Platonists and started experimenting with abstract forms?
As someone actively involved in the art world, what you're describing doesn't resemble the art world at all except in the form of a fever dream. I assure you that there's probably like two people who think like that last paragraph you shot out and no more- the overwhelming majority of artists believe that art is a highly subjective and personal experience, not some quest to manifest the One True Art.
The last time I felt this level of alienated confusion listening to someone talk about something I know from the inside was when my (mentally unstable, Protestant) neighbor cornered me when I was a kid and asked me if my (Catholic) mother had stolen her cat as a blood offering to Mary, before launching into a Chick-esque homily about how I needed to repent and leave the Catholic church because it was a Satanic cult that invented atheism, homosexuality, and Islam.
I'm not talking about what people say today. I was writing about why modern artists did what they did more than 100 years ago. I gave you a long list of references. If you read them and still don't believe that modern art is Platonist, I'll discuss it with you them.
Right, so what do you mean by "modern art"? Once again, I will repeat that the term "modern art" is a useless word. Do you mean works produced today, or works produced in the late 19th to early 20th centuries, or everything between those two eras and inclusive of them?
The world works on many different levels. I'm talking, for example, about a bioinformatician who uses large correlation matrices from time-sequence exome sequencing experiments, in order to reconstruct a gene-regulation network which produces the same correlations. That bioinformatician will have a much better grasp on how gene regulation works than would a molecular biologist studying exactly how hemoglobin binds oxygen. A neuroscientist identifying the basins of attraction in the olfactory bulb which correspond to different smells will have a much better grasp on how the brain constructs categories, and thus on what concepts mean and how words work, than would a neuroscientist who studies neurotransmitters.
Would you say that Newton "didn't know how the world worked" because he didn't understand the electromagnetic interactions that make collections of atoms act like solid bodies? Would you say Edward Jenner was an "engineer" because he didn't know how viruses replicate?
By your standards, you will /never/ know how the world works; or, if you do find out, you'll never know that you know. There always might be levels beneath your theory that you cannot yet discern. In my opinion, the more-abstract levels are more interesting, and more beautiful, than particle interactions. But that's why I'm not a physicist.
I think you misunderstand my point. I totally agree with you regarding emergence and yes, probably fundamental physics is not even the most interesting one (but qft is quite nice anyway).
What I meant to say is that I am very scared that the moment we have neural networks science will become superfluous. Will we still care about understanding the moment in which a neural network understand in our place? Or we will just buy its answer, without caring why said answer is true?
Ah. Well, a neural network is just one way of solving optimization problems (and machine learning isn't just neural networks). In terms of freeing the analyst from having to personally inspect all of the datapoints, it isn't qualitatively different from using regression to find the linear model that minimizes least-squared error, or principal component analysis and k-nearest-neighbor clustering to solve classification problems. If I do a regression analysis to ask whether strict gun laws reduce homicide, and get an answer, it doesn't really make sense to say that, because I didn't compute all of the prediction errors by hand, I don't care why that answer is true. I know why that answer is true. I know what the dataset is and how I gathered it, and what I mean when I say that data gives that answer. That's still true if you use a neural network instead of regression.
> I know [...] what I mean when I say that data gives that answer. That's still true if you use a neural network instead of regression
This is true in a very literal sense: “that data gives that answer” means “that answer is the output of the regression/neural network”.
But it seems harder to understand the meaning of a neural network’s output, compared to a regression’s. They’re both optimization problems, but what is optimized is much clearer in one case.
(Not arguing about the original subject of using tools to understand the world, I think I mostly agree with you there. But tools can be more powerful and still allow you to reach less understanding.)
If you live in the Western US, I'd advise going to Omega Mart, House of Eternal Return, or Convergence Station before you try to close the book on art. We've started to graduate from the kiddy pool in terms of Art, is all. The museums can't contain real Art anymore.
Good modern art isn't in modern art museums. But ever browsed around DeviantArt, or artsy Tumblr, or any webcomic-hosting site? There are as many people doing great, non-abstract work as ever, in a bewildering variety of styles. It's just not the stuff that gets shown off much in museums anymore, but so what?
There's a book called Diaspora by Greg Egan, that I quite like. Early on in the book, when the main character is quite young, they're studying and learning maths, reinventing things for themself because that's far more interesting than simply being told the (long since discovered) solutions. It's well understood that it might take millenia or even longer to get tot the knowledge frontier, but that's fine because everyone is immortal (or close enough; I don't know if they have a plan to outlive the stars)
We're surrounded by art! A single AAA game has more sculpture in it than any museum. Visual media has become nearly commoditised -- you can get an illustration or painting of whatever you want for ridiculously cheap.
Art hasn't disapeared, it's just been abstracted one level up: illustration and sculpture is used in service of stories or games, but art-as-a-transcendent-experience is thriving.
Modern art is just a series of status symbols, made available to the public.
I'll take an intermediate position: Photography massacred art for a century (art barely survived in the niches of surrealists and S.F. book illustrators). But then came photoshop et al. and art was rebirthed.
BTW, hat tip to the wardens of traditional art: the presidential portraitist and the court illustrators
Agreed!
What I think we have lost is architecture as art. This place was a *carpet factory*, built with hundreds of dedicated craftspeople, just because they could: they wanted to build something beautiful (and, in a rare victory for planning systems being useful, satisfy the bureaucrats)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Templeton_On_The_Green
https://markusstrasser.org/extracting-knowledge-from-literature/ is a really interesting dive into trying to build a similar system in biomedical science. tl;dr - it doesn't work, even if you throw in all the PDBs and KEGGs in the world.
I don't think we are anywhere close to building a complete systems biology model of any eukaryotic cell, let alone an organism, we can barely simulate a mycoplasma for a short time. ML won't help if we don't have the data to ground its predictions in reality.
I've also worked in extracting knowledge from medical journal articles, on a system the NIH is developing called SemRep. It's pretty good, but its developer doesn't like to let anybody use it, and doesn't want to use machine learning or logical inference.
But I didn't write anything about trying to extract data from journal articles. I wrote "high-throughput experimental data" and "intelligent robotic systems which used cell simulators to autonomously devise and conduct experiments". PDB and KEGG are just the kind of manually-curated databases I'm complaining about. They're cool, and very valuable as gold standards for validating ML systems. But I think we have a better chance of curing aging with massive amounts of uncertain, poorly-curated, but homogenous data (not compiled from dozens of different sources) than with a small amount of labor-intensive, highly-curated data.
We're still not very good at reconstructing genetic networks or at cell simulation, but I think we're limited by questionable math. In the case of genetic network reconstruction, people always throw away the "noisy" data, without considering the likelihood that most of the data of an evolved system is in that "noise". Biologists always want to respond to inaccuracy by throwing away more data, in the false hope that using only the "purest" data will give better answers. This works with man-made systems, because in intelligently engineered systems, each mechanism operates through a small number of deliberate causal interactions. (It also works in natural systems like avalanches, or accidentally-made man-made systems like language, which have power-law distributions of size or causal importance, but it would take too long to explain why I don't think gene networks are such systems.)
There's no good reason to assume it will work in reconstructing an evolved genetic regulatory network. I've never seen a study that showed the full distribution of the fold-reduction (or fold-amplification) by which other genes modulate a single gene's expression. (You could probably estimate that distribution from the raw data of full-exome sequencing time series experiments.) If that distribution is normal (which seems to me like a good guess), then throwing away all regulators less than 2 or 3 standard deviations above the mean (which most people do) throws away most of what you're looking for.
(Also, we arguably just haven't got enough full-exome time-series data, nor enough hybrid omics data, e.g., genomic, metabolomic, lipidomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic data for the same sample.)
Another common problem is that, instead of computing the expected information content of a judgement (e.g., that this protein is a kinase), or at least the expected value of a judgement, bioinformaticians are always using receiver operating curves; or worse, false positives and false negatives; or worse (and what we always did at JCVI), just counting false positives and ignoring false negatives. Information theory is rare in bioinformatics today.
Another is that they're always trying to stuff things into discrete categories (or worse, true and false) so they can throw away those nasty probability distributions and use fast pipelined systems instead of complicated ones with bidirectional propagation of probabilities. This is largely because high-throughput on big data seems to require the speed of relational databases, and relational databases don't let you store probabilities of conclusions as functions of the probabilities of the inputs. The ubiquitous use of pipelines is itself yet another problem. This is not an easy problem to solve, but nobody's even trying.
That's an interesting approach, though right now fully automating an experimental pipeline sounds like pure science fiction. I'll grant you that the homogenity of such a dataset alone would be an incredible boon, as right now bioinformatics is gated not necessarily by scarcity of data as by its heterogenity (comparing any -omics data from GEO is pointless unless it was done with the exact same protocol, and probably the exact same lab).
I'd say the CS aspects are the easiest part, and the fully autonomous robot experimenter sounds more like a governmental Project Manhattan than something done with startup funding. On the other hand pulling this off correctly eliminates so many problems - run all experiments in standarized microfluidic environments, have the whole thing hermetically sealed and disinfected... You'd require a human in the loop to provide fresh reagents and microfluidic chips and remove spent ones, I suppose.
Sounds like you're saying you could've saved IBM's Watson Health.
IIRC, Watson is (or was, when I was briefed on it at the Naval Research Labs) mostly old-school symbolic, rule-based AI systems joined together with duct tape. It's labor-intensive, and not very amenable to large data matrices or massively parallel computing. I think Watson's approach could work for medical applications, but not for curing aging. And I don't know if machine learning and big matrices would work well in medicine.
But AI in medicine isn't really a technical problem. We had expert systems that outperformed doctors at diagnosis in the 1980s. The bottlenecks for AI in medicine have always been doctors, government regulation, insurance companies, and the general human distrust of computers.
Also, Wikipedia says IBM sold Watson Health in January for a billion dollars, so it might not need saving.
Thanks for your insights. They make me think that AI will largely fail in medicine. Medicine is human problem, not a technical problem. In most cases diagnosis and treatment plan is easy. Today even patient could do this part themselves with the help of an app. The hard part is to actually convince patients to follow the treatment plan. People are not very rational by nature and when encountering disease they have even more worries and distrust. Doctors' task is to convince patients to take a certain medicine and not to take a certain medicine (both equally important).
The question is whom you can trust? Even with highly powerful AI you will need a strict regulations around it to ensure that people are not sold snake oil solutions. A lot of people will be professionally engaged in medicine to navigate these regulations.
"They make me think that AI will largely fail in medicine. Medicine is human problem, not a technical problem. In most cases diagnosis and treatment plan is easy."
But AI has repeatedly shown to do diagnosis not just competently, but *better*. Maybe this isn't the bottleneck, but better diagnosis and treatment plans cannot make things worse. If waht you're saying is true, then all it means is that doctors should leave the diagnosis and treatment plans to computers, and they should focus on the human side of things.
I am operating with the model that improving the current medicine will be providing only marginal gains. Diagnostics are correct in about 95% of cases. Improving remaining 5% will not cause a revolution.
For example, diabetes. It is very rare nowadays to misdiagnose it (even a simple fasting glucose test will give you correct diagnose in 99% of cases) and treatment is usually appropriate. Most issues are caused by patient non-adherence and cost of treatment (semaglutide is relatively expensive compared to metformin). Navigating these issues is hard and require human input.
It seems that most AI solutions are being applied in cancer therapeutics but the gains are very marginal. Even if we cured all cancer miraculously, the life expectancy in the UK increase by 2 years only. In comparison, Latvia needs to increase life-expectancy by 6 years to reach the current UK level. While AI solutions could and should be part of it, it really is a society wide problem how to make people to chose better lifestyle and adhere to medical care.
I think that Scott is right that spending money on better political causes can ultimately give the best returns (his recent failure notwithstanding). That would especially be true in less developed world.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/how-ibm-watson-overpromised-and-underdelivered-on-ai-health-care
Also see:
https://www.statnews.com/2018/07/25/ibm-watson-recommended-unsafe-incorrect-treatments/
Oh. Those are paywalled, so I can't read them past the first page. I'm a little suspicious that the second one is non-quantitative ("Watson recommended unsafe treatments" doesn't say how often it did that, or whether it recommended more unsafe treatments than doctors did). But I don't really have the time to read them now, so that's okay.
You can find both by a little googling, but if it's not worth your time to do that, it's even less worth my time to do it for you, right? Anyway, now you know there's a respectable opinion out there to the contrary (I linked the original articles so you would see these are not fly-by-night randos with a blog.)
I just read Blum and Blum's very recent paper, A theory of consciousness from a theoretical computer science perspective: Insights from the Conscious Turing Machine (CTM) https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2115934119
I might be fooling myself, but it seems to me that their CTM architecture might actually provide a solution to the hard problem of algorithmically conjuring consciousness from a machine. It also seems like it would be both buildable and testable. And yet, as far as I can tell, no one is even playing around with this approach, far less working seriously on implementing it.
So please feel free either to tell me what I'm missing here -- or else to get as excited about this as I am!
This appears to be a kitchen sink kind of model. I also found the presentation quite difficult to follow. Reference 49 is slightly clearer, with less extraneous waffle, but my initial impression is still quite negative: eminent older scientists weighing in about stuff outside their core competence. There might be an interesting model in there but only glimmers of it are visible to me through the verbiage, and I think this work comes across half-baked. I hope they work on a succinct presentation of the model and results aimed at a more specialist audience, but I suspect the model is so complex that few results can be proved rigorously, and there isn't really interest in models of stuff without results in AI or CS.
What aspect of the paper did you find exciting?
Well, even though the authors explicitly state that they're 'not looking to model the [human] brain', I think their model, even with all its simplifications, does in fact hew quite closely to my intuition of how the human brain actually works and what it does. In support of this, it may be somewhat pat, but I like how easily the CTM can accommodate eg blindsight with a couple of tweaks, and eg how it accounts for our impression of free will.
Plus and in particular, to me the CTM is unique in its ability to plausibly capture something very like the slippery emergence of consciousness. The heart of it, in section 3, being --
'We propose that CTM as a whole feels conscious, as the term is normally understood, as a consequence in part of the fact that the Model of the World processor views the "CTM" in its models of the world as conscious and that this view is broad-cast to all processors. Here, "CTM" is a simple learned representation of the much more complex CTM.'
Agreed. On re-reading this looks like a successful way to formalize the global workspace point of view. It doesn't seem to have extraneous moving parts yet still seems to capture some interesting phenomena of consciousness. My initial reading was too grumpy. Thanks for highlighting this work!
(Pretty antiphysicalist paper.) Just skimmed it so I may not have completely understood it.
>Our view is that consciousness is a property of all properly organized computing systems, whether made of flesh and blood or metal and silicon.
I don't buy functionalism, this is a pretty big assumption. At the end, consciousness is a physical and biological phenomenon and it must be explained in terms of physics and biology. Physical phenomena are not algorithms, they are described by algorithms. If I have a perfect simulation of fire, that's not real fire even if i cannot distinguish simulated measurements from real measurements. At the same time a simulation of the brain may or may not be conscious - we just don't know. This is the thing they should be arguing against but they don't do it.
Indeed their "processors" are quite implicit and kinda magical, aren't they? They are pretty much where the "magic" (read: not yet understood physics) of qualia happens and yet nowhere in the paper they explain them, they are just assumed. All this model seems to me compatible with a physicalist understanding in which the processors are the neural correlates of consciousness and qualia; lacking a purely informational description of these processors, they offer no justification that they could be made of silicon and that consciousness could emerge from a purely computational process. The model kinda try to explain what becomes conscious but not how.
Again, i may have misunderstood their point.
"I don't buy functionalism, this is a pretty big assumption. At the end, consciousness is a physical and biological phenomenon and it must be explained in terms of physics and biology."
I think assuming that functionalism is false (which is what you're doing in asserting that consciousness is a physical and biological phenomenon) is at least as big an assumption as assuming that it's true.
Meh, so long as all known examples of conscious being are made up of meat i would say that the empirical evidence is on the side of physicalism
But anyway that's beside the point. The model doesn’t offer any good justification, it should provide an example in favour of functionalism but it's really convincing only if you already accept it. It seems quite circular to me.
Well, that's what I was expecting. I don't think we're at all near explaining subjectivity.
Isn’t that kind of like saying that “flight is a biological phenomenon” a century or so ago?
Or, to say it the other way around, pretty much everything technological did not exist 50k years ago, which means there are innumerable examples of stuff where “all examples are biological” was true for thousands or millions of years and then it became false in a relatively short time window. I’d say that should lower our confidence on that kind of argument.
I have never said that you cannot have a non-organic conscious system. Flight is a physical phenomenon and to fly we have replicated the same physical phenomena.
What I meant to say is that consciousness is physical, not a result of information processing, therefore mere information processing (as in this model) may not be not enough, you need to replicate the same physical phenomena that give origin to consciousness.
Pretty much like an airplane replicate the same physical phenomenon that give origin to flight
Edit: Put it differently. The physical substrate (may) matter (pun not intented). Doesn’t need to be meat, could be something else. For flight the physical substrate definitely matter: doesn't need to be a bird, could be an airplane, but you cannot fly on a computer simulating a plane.
Functionalism says that the physical substrate doesn't matter for consciousness, provided you process the correct information. That's what we don’t know and I am arguing against
Edit2: just as an example, if you accept functionalism you need to accept that the "china brain" actually perceive qualia in the same way an actual brain does. Which. Well.
This is pretty close to my PoV, but I see the matter as more of asynchronous parallel vs synchronous parallel computation. It might take the former to generate our qualia by the way of contrast of intermediary activation states. So we might be able to extract cognitive algorithms out of our organic architecture and even build GAI with that but it wouldn't have any qualia unless you were imitating biological 'hardware' to compute it on.
Well, “physical substrate may matter” is a sentence with a complicated range of meanings, for both flight and consciousness.
Things that fly can be made out of paper, (dead) wood, plastic, metal, and all sorts of other things. If you allow flight in other kinds of atmospheres, I think in theory we could make flying things out of almost anything, including even plasma for some kind of stretched definitions of flying. (Degenerate matter is probably stretching it too far, though. It might work for very low & short flights very close to neutron star surfaces, but a submarine is probably closer to “flying” than anything in those conditions.) I would argue that it is reasonable to describe this situation as “substrate doesn’t matter”; not in the sense that you don’t need any, but that you can use almost anything for it.
(On a different but related note, it’s also interesting is that most things we can make that fly do so using methods very different from how the organic things fly. It’s not that it’s impossible to build flight machines with the flapping-wing method, it’s just way harder and has all sort of disadvantages. If we made non-organic consciousness, it might also work very differently, and our current intuitions would be about as accurate as Aristotle’s were about rocket flight.)
Now, this is an analogy, not a proof. In as much as this analogy holds, it should mean that consciousness might work on any kind of substrate, including silicon. And yes, even the “china brain”, though it would “perceive qualia in the same way an actual brain does” the same way a meticulously-constructed human-powered construct that mimics a sparrow, in an environment with gravity and atmosphere chosen very carefully to scale such that the construct actually flies would “navigate air currents in the same way an actual sparrow does”.
Which, yeah, I guess if you would watch a zoomed out and accelerated video would look the same, assuming the human that powered it didn’t die too soon.
(I’ve no idea if the scaling factors required would allow multiple wing flaps in a lifetime. I’m almost sure they wouldn’t allow anything resembling a Turing-test–passing conversation during a life-time in the “chinese brain” experiment, either, and as-sure-as-I-could-be that it wouldn’t allow qualia-level simulation. But that’s a different discussion.)
Anyway, I’m not actually sure we‘re disagreeing. I agree that consciousness is physical, but information processing is also physical. You seem to disagree with the second statement, and I don’t quite get what you mean. You need to do stuff with matter to process information.
For consciousness it *might* be significant that the matter is flesh rather than silicon. But as far as I can tell we have lots of examples of other processes where this is not true, and I can’t think of any evidence that would support consciousness being in a different class.
I was going to use the same example..
To me, any argument that reduces to “p-zombies can exist”, has lost the argument. Or rather, it's been reduced to an instance of a debate with a that I'm no longer interested in rehashing.
Which won't stop me, of course:
Perfectly simulated fire can't burn real me, but it can definitely (as in, by definition) burn simulated me, can definitely cause perfectly simulated third degree burns, and definitely cause simulated me to emit perfectly simulated screams of agony.
And if those screams occur in simulated me for the same reasons as they would in real me, then either either simulated screams are caused by real suffering (ie, simulated consciousness is still real), or real screams are causally disconnected from real suffering (ie, real conciousness isn't real).
Ok so first of all, that's not even what a p zombie is. A p zombie is a physical system which is identical to a brain yet does not have consciousness. A brain and the physical system that simulate a brain are completely different - one is made of meat and the other is made of silicon. That the pattern of electrons in the silicon oxide layers encode in some way the informational properties of the brain doesn’t meant that "inside the simulation " they are the same thing. There is no such thing as the inside of a simulation, it's just a way we conceptualize it.
Information does not really exist, not in the same way matter exists. It exist in the same way numbers exist, encoded in a system but completely indifferente to the physics of said systems.
So no, I totally disagree that the simulated screams happen for the same reasons. At the physical level, the physical causes are completely different. Then, at some abstract level, one is encoded in the other.
Then again, it may very well be that consciousness is not a physical but an informational property. In that case, the simulation would be conscious. But that is up to empirical study (that I have no idea how to conduct. All experiments i can think of will answer that a computer is not conscious), not armchair philosophy.
Fair enough. If you don't buy functionalism -- which I take to mean that you rule out the possibility that a mind might be substrate independent -- then it follows that the CTM model, by definition, isn't going to work for you.
Fwiw though, I don't think it's the LTM processors themselves that are 'magical', rather it's the architecture that they're part of that brings the magic; as the authors put it, it's the 'CTM as a whole [that] feels conscious.'
Of course, whether consciousness really would emerge from the CTM is unknown at this point. I gather that you think it wouldn't, but to me it seems that it might. And it would certainly be worth experimentally investigating by building one of these puppies and seeing what happens.
You won't hear from me that we shouldn't make an experiment!
I've never been able to understand the argument of perfect simulation of X not being actually X. If the simulation of X is perfect it behaves like X in every way. How can something behave like fire in every way, while not being fire?
Playing chess is a physical phenomena, in the end. That doesn't prevent us from making programs that can play chess. And whether a program possess a chess playing ability is a question of algorithm, that it executes. Why won't the same be the case for consciousness?