I've seen a theory that mass shooters are likely to not have grown up with a father in the house. I don't find this plausible, but I suppose it should be checked.
I got as far as checking the Columbine shooters and confirming that both grew up with fathers in the house.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's statistically more likely that mass shooters, like all criminals, have a variety of "screwed up family" risk factors, but this one doesn't seem to be much of a slam dunk.
If we find out what matters, we can at least stop wasting our time with interventions that don't work. My bet is that the effects of no father are swamped by the effects of an abusive father.
A theory that was common for a while but that I haven't seen lately is that mass shooters were on anti-depressants.
"The effects of no father are swamped by the effects of an abusive father."
Eh. The level of abuse that would have a socially negative impact are probably far outside the limits set by CSP. And besides, the most common failure mode for fathers is not abuse but neglect, followed by abuse of the wife/mother.
Lack of a father has long been acknowledged by societies as contributing to the failure of young men. It is true that attacking children is a rather spectacular extreme, but even more garden variety nerdowell is more common in fatherless men.
My spidey sense doubts that simply because if that were true, someone would have put their finger on it by now.
Thinking back to Columbine - 1999 - I guess SSRIs were being deployed by then but still if it were a reliably common thread, it would have ginned up more interest with theorists than FPS games or rock music lyrics.
Imagine the US map on cork board covered with pins connected by red thread. Now what do these events all have in common? The shooters were all medicated with Prozac!
A fair number of people have "put their finger" on SSRIs or other adolescent psychiatric meds as a major cause for spree killing. Nobody has really substantiated that with rigorous scientific study, but why would they? This field is as politicized as climatology, but not nearly as well funded. Anybody doing research in the area is rewarded not for the accuracy or insightfulness of their work, but for the extent to which it reinforces the political position of their tribe (or the tribe of their professional peer group).
So it's mostly going to be "It's the guns, stupid, and anybody proposing a theory other than too many guns is obviously a shill for the NRA and should be run out of town", with a modest side order of "it's obviously not the guns, that's hoplophobic nonsense - here's a non-gun theory that's kind of plausible, so lets accept and boost it uncritically". If there's anybody doing actual good science in the area, they're going to be hard to find.
Well, maybe Gary Kleck, but he's one guy and I don't *think* he's done a deep dive into spree killings yet.
Did you see Ross Douthat’s compromise proposal in ‘that terrible newspaper’ today?
Putting a bit more scrutiny on folks 18-25 purchasing firearms. Asking for a couple of adult references during that age range and possibly a peek at their social media.
Probably not enough for the Left and way too much of a burden for the live and breath Second Amendment crowd.
Does anyone have any advice for managing ADHD? I don’t like the side effects of adderall, I don’t that Modafinil more than once a week because of tolerance. I’m also a nicotine user, which helped at the beginning but I’m kicking the habit now.
I would really love a non-chemical alternative, but nothing has worked for me. I’m kind of half hoping that someone here will propose some crazy underground therapy that will help (cbt-based therapy for adhd did little for me)
I recently switched from chrome browser to vivaldi. I'm liking it quite a bit so far! I don't know a lot about the development behind such things, but I'm loving how much control I have over it. It's got the ad blocking of firefox, the privacy protection of duckduckgo, and the tab stacking and backend of chrome! I highly recommend it!
Did the vaccines give enough benefit to outweigh the costs? Same for masks, and for various isolation/"lockdown" etc.?
Were the signatories of the Great Barrington declaration *all* crazy or were some of them reputable researchers who were shouted down instead of being engaged?
To what extent did the disinformation come from politicians and the media amplification, and to what extent from the CDC, WHO, Fauci, etc.?
If we could send a time capsule back to ourselves in January 2020, what advice would we give ourselves? And the bad thing is, there is not consensus on what that would be, is there? Many people would send "Buy masks, don't worry too much because a vaccine will be developed, take it plus multiple boosters, stay home." Others would send "Eat right, get into a healthy weight, don't take the jab, ignore the hysteria if possible, protect the vulnerable."
Clearly the situation has become highly politicized. Each side accuses the other, and in both cases the accusations seem to have some merit. One side ignores the science while shouting "Believe the science", the other spins out into conspiracy theory. There doesn't seem to be a sane in-between place, or even a sane place elsewhere.
On January 1, 2020, the correct move was "China, go into lockdown for six weeks. Rest of world, close borders to China for six weeks". We could easily have eradicated the virus at that point if only we'd overreacted too soon rather than overreacting too late.
On January 31, 2020, the correct move was more like "Six week lockdown for the entire world until the virus is eliminated". The cost of this would have been unthinkable at the time, but of course would have been much better than the months of rolling on-and-off lockdowns that we instead got over the years.
Given that COVID has numerous animal reservoirs, and appears freely able to jump species, how exactly would eradication work in this hypothetical? Are you assuming that all the mice, bats etc in China also respect the lockdown?
Covid has been locally eradicated in quite a few geographies, quite a few times (China, Taiwan, each state of Australia, New Zealand). It always came back, but as far as I know all outbreaks have been traced to leaky quarantine for humans arriving from abroad, and never to animal reservoirs.
> Who is "we" and how are "we" going to make China cooperate? For that matter, how are "we" going to make the people screaming that a travel ban on China was racist cooperate?
I don't know, the scenario I'm responding to involves going backwards in time to tell people what to do. So I guess I use my status as a time traveller from two and a half years in the future to get people to listen to my advice.
If that doesn't work then I guess I'm still just some random jerk on the internet whose policy advice will get ignored anyway.
> Why not ask for a magical pony that farts vaccines as well, if we're asking for straightforwardly impossible things?
"Gaslighting" is one of those relative neologisms that I'd like to banish from the English language. (And I'm pretty sure it will go away soon.)
The original meaning was something very specific: to lie to someone about the past for the specific purpose of making them doubt their own sanity. This is apparently something that happened in a play once. I'm not sure if it happens in real life.
But recently it seems to have just expanded its meaning out to just encompass "lying" or even just "being wrong".
This has been bugging me soooo much. I'll go a step further though, and say that I think it's not just lying about the past: it's manipulating objective reality for the purpose of claiming such manipulation did not occur in order to make someone doubt their sanity.
Applied to the case at hand: unless the Red or Blue tribe created Covid for the sole purpose of claiming it doesn't exist, then no gaslighting happened here. And as daft as both sides are, I'm pretty sure that's a claim that can't be leveled at either.
> If we could send a time capsule back to ourselves in January 2020, what advice would we give ourselves?
"Buy masks, meet people outdoors, eat right, be fit, take the vaccine and boosters. Talk to your friends and relatives before the conspiracy theories reach them, but be prepared that 50% of them will laugh at you; don't waste your time arguing, it is futile."
From my perspective, the middle ground is to keep meeting your friends, but to do so outdoors, with masks if unvaccinated. There is absolutely no need to isolate yourself socially; just take reasonable precautions.
Similarly, you should eat right and try to stay fit even in non-pandemic situations; cardiovascular problems are killing people all the time, covid is just one more reason.
The actual difficulties are: your job or school, where you can be forced to spend a lot of time with many people in unventilated place maskless. Try to work from home and homeschool your kids for a year or two, but these options are not available for everyone.
Shut down MSNBC, CNN and Fox along with social media. Maybe find a way to reanimated Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. Yeah and maybe Robin McNeal too.
Vaccines were highly beneficial, at very low cost beyond the loss of social trust when we tried to make the vaccines mandatory. Masks as implemented were close to useless, and probably destroyed more public trust than the vaccine mandates. Lockdowns as implemented were *slightly* useful, but came at a massive cost including probably more loss of public trust than vaccine and mask mandates combines.
The signatories of the Great Barrington declaration were not all crazy.
Disinformation came from all of the sources you name, feeding into each other. And there was a separate strain of disinformation from grassroots activists, though that fed into right-wing politicians and media, so take your pick.
With a retro-time capsule and some reason to believe it would be believed, send back "the folks at Moderna and BionTech have already(*) developed vaccines that are safe and effective; start producing and distributing them as soon as possible. And have them develop boosters for new variants as they emerge. J&J and AstraZenica will have less-good but still useful vaccines in a bit, if you can't ramp up mRNA production fast enough. If you can find any N95 respirators, those are useful in high-threat environments. Virus spread is mostly aerosol, mostly in noisy crowded spaces. Here are some tips for treatment of severe cases. Otherwise don't sweat it, there's not really much more you can do, but you'll muddle through OK."
*Maybe* I'd tell people it was cooked up in a Chinese lab, just to get them to stop tearing apart their neighbors over it. But that would be risky in other ways, so probably not.
* Depending on what day of January 2020 you send it back to
I think the balance of the evidence is heavily against you on masks - mask mandates did in fact result in statistically significant reductions in hospitalisations and deaths. A quick google turned up
but virtually no studies suggesting that mask mandates don't help (the only one I found, although I freely admit I didn't look hard, was https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8395971/, which is so weak as to be basically meaningless).
I don’t believe any of these studies. Epidemiology as a field is way too politicized to be trusted and there is too much tribal loyalty and groupthink. I am certain the conclusions of those studies were predetermined before any data was collected. Cargo cult science the lot of it.
I am probably moving the goalpost, but does statical significance tell us whether the benefit is worth the cost?
And this is the conclusion, which depends on what we take as credible evidence and who we trust. But what is actually credible and who is trustworthy is a large part of the problem, maybe the entire problem.
What should I have done in January 2020 to arrive at the correct solution quickly without receiving a time capsule? Or better, what should I do the next time there is a pandemic or other emergency?
How do we suppress BS without suppressing inquiry?
Wait? Conclusions are almost always more reliable if you wait until you have better data.
I mean, seriously, one thing that surprised me about this pandemic was the sizeable fraction of people who wanted reliable answers *right now* and were (1) willing to imbue expert opinion with far more certainty than it had, than even the experts themselves thought it had, and (2) who became enraged when this or that opinion proved wrong, or this or that intervention didn't work, or didn't work as well as was hoped.
Shit happens. The future is inherently unpredictable, and the future of things about which we have only limited knowledge -- pandemic viral disease being right up there -- is *really* unpredictable. Nevertheless, experts are called upon to make guesses, and politicians are called upon to make decisions. They probably mostly do the best they can, and it's completely inevitable that a solid 8 times out of 10 they'll get it wrong. It's a freaking miracle they get it right at all, ever.
Now if the big lesson learned is for us all to have some God-damned humility, from top to bottom -- if experts hedge their opinions more, and the people expect fewer certainties, and politicians shrug their shoulders a lot more and say "We dunno what to do, but we'll try this thing because it might work, and we will zealously collect data as we go along so we can turn it around, call it off, or try something else if it doesn't, and we'll be sharing that data with you so people can alert us if we miss something" --- that would be fantastic, really inspiring.
But if the "lesson" learned is "We need to throw all these experts and politicians out, and get a brand new set of experts and politicians who will tell us a fresh new set of lies about how certain they are about what to do" that would be sad indeed. That would be evidence that we've failed to learn the most important lesson of all.
"Now if the big lesson learned is for us all to have some God-damned humility, from top to bottom -- if experts hedge their opinions more, and the people expect fewer certainties, and politicians shrug their shoulders a lot more ..."
Well said! Our biggest problem is people saying "Here is the answer" when they _should_ be saying "I don't know" or "Here is our current best guess - and it is likely to change as we get more data."
I think the best process here can be summed up in four words: "Trust the Blue Tribe".
Masks, vaccines and lockdowns all work; masks and vaccines were definitely worthwhile and in most cases lockdowns probably were. Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin don't help (unless you already have malaria or parasitic worms). The virus almost certainly didn't escape from a lab. Covid is not a hoax, and is worth taking seriously. The boring, blue-coded, expert-advised positions are almost always correct.
When you say "Trust the Blue Tribe", I need to make sure I know what you are talking about.
Are you talking about the Blue Tribe leaders during January/February 2020, who were saying things like "Travel bans on people from China is based on racism, we shouldn't be afraid of travelers from China."
Or are you talking about the leaders of the Blue Tribe of March-to-May 2020, who were in favor of lockdowns, in favor of blocking all international flights, in favor of mask-wearing, and against large public events?
Or are you talking about the Blue Tribe leaders in June 2020, who were in favor of large public events, as long as those events were protests against racism?
Hard disagree on lockdowns, soft disagree on masks. I think 18 months of `remote schools' (including kindergartens) probably destroyed way more QALYs than it saved, and that too was a blue tribe policy.
That is where I started, but obviously I am not comfortable with it. My most charitable interpretation of what you’re saying is that the errors and suppression engaged in by the blue tribe were minor and forgivable. If so, I want a process for figuring that out. Just trusting them as a blanket solution would not have been disastrous for me personally, this time. But at best the system is showing signs of strain.
Ultimately, you need a way to judge how much you trust the existing domain experts. Because it is practically impossible to become overnight an expert yourself, especially in a topic that is already politically sensitive, therefore almost everything you read online is disinformation.
My heuristic is to trust people who had an interest in given topic before it became cool, and who are not "professional contrarians". In case of covid, I happen to have a biochemist and a retired doctor in my family, so I was able to ask them.
If you try to educate yourself, the important thing is to get the background knowledge right, before you jump to the politically sensitive topic. For example, you may want to learn the basic things about DNA and evolution as such, before you jump to the question whether covid was created in a lab. Similarly, you may want to become familiar with the history of vaccination and the existing types of vaccines, before you start expressing strong opinions on the safety of covid vaccine.
Solid background education will allow you to dismiss most conspiracy theories as obviously false, which means you will burn less social capital when asking the experts you trust about the rest.
According to random news I see online, Russia has already lost 30 000 soldiers in Ukraine. But also, they have transferred over 200 000 Ukrainian children to Russia, to be reeducated and raised as patriotic Russian citizens.
This made me think: what if the true reason for this war has always been solving the demographic curve of Russia? Conquering the entire Ukraine would have worked too, but this also accomplishes the strategic goal.
200,000 children would be a drop in the bucket in a country of 144 million.
The birth rate in Russia is 1.5 per woman according to Google, so every generation is ~108 million births. I don't think a 0.2% increase in your birth rate is worth going to war over.
Conquering all of Ukraine might actually be enough people to be visible - 44 million people - but then you're conquering both old and young people, so it's not really solving your demographic curve.
In 2018, Russia had approx 25 million kids under 15 years old. 0.2m would be hear 1% increase. They had yearly birth rate of 10.7 births per / 1000 population = 1.5 million per year. 200,000 extra kids is sizeable one-time bump in the yearly rate.
One-time, meaning that it's not going to have anything but the most marginal impact. I mean, Russia could certainly try to improve their birth-rates but becoming a nation that literally launches invasions of other countries to steal their children, but not only is that so cartoonishly evil that you'd have a hard time selling that in a fantasy novel, it'd also be a good way to make sure everyone on that long, long border of yours makes "destroying your government" their top foreign issue.
TFR is expressd in children per woman *per lifetime* so I think you need to divide that 108 million births by the ~75 years of a lifetime, giving you ~1.4 million/year, against which +200,000 is no longer trivial.
However I agree this is unlikely to be Putin's goal. A far more plausible reason for kidnapping and rearing Ukrainian kids as right-thinking Russian would be resettle them in the Donbas and along the Azov Coast to draw those regions closer and more reliably into the Russian orbit. One would guess that Russophilia in, say, Mariupol has taken a serious long-term hit among those old enough to know who fired the missile that blew babushka to bloody shreds while she was hanging out the wash. Could help to compensate with some fresh young thinking uncompromised by bitter (or any) experience. The thinking is a little grandiose, but not unheard of: the Nazis ran a very similar program in Ostland circa 1941-44.
Yeah, but I would expect most children are accompanied by their relatives. If they would separate them and put parents in some gulag or whatever, in their tens of thousands, I think we would have heard more about it. In general, we have quite good sources about what is happening in Russia proper (as opposed to Russian occupied parts of Ukraine), actually.
150000 children for adoption is another thing that definitely sounds fake.
The claim was "to be reeducated and raised as patriotic Russian citizens", not "to be adopted". In some cases, because their parents are already patriotic Russian citizens who happened to live in Ukraine before the war and fled eagerly to Russia. In the rest, I expect if those families are not repatriated at the end of the conflict, the parents will be told that either they will raise their children as patriotic Russian citizens, or someone else will. And most will go along with it.
But as far as I know, there is so far zero indication that Russian authorities intend to force these people to stay in Russia even after the war. Certainly it is possible, but purely hypothetical at this point
Apparently the adult women were not forced very hard to remain in Russia when the above account was written, but leaving is not a cakewalk either if you don't have money or documents, and according to that article they are not easily available [to people in camps].
Isn’t the fact that they forced (at least some large number of) them into Russia some indication? If I kidnap you and and tie you down in my hypothetical basement, is there really no indication that I intend to keep you there the day after tomorrow?
> Russia maintains one of the world's most liberal immigration policies; anyone who works in Russia for five years and develops fluency in the Russian language can become a citizen, provided they have not committed a crime. Almost anyone who is hired by a Russian firm can stay in the country and work indefinitely. This reflects a policy change, in response to declining birth rates, on the part of the government of Vladimir Putin from the more restrictive policy enacted after the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union.
> Russian-language native-speakers, those married to Russian citizens, highly-qualified specialists, businessmen and refugees are eligible for a simplified immigration procedure. It allows gaining citizenship in 3 years (instead of 5 under the standard procedure) or sometimes skipping temporary or permanent residency.
Playing Devil's Advocate, here are some reasons one might want to become a Russian citizen:
- free universal healthcare (in a country that used to kill doctors for saying that covid is real, but still);
No, not really. But a dictator like Putin can think much more long term than democratically elected governments. In my opinion, the following theory explains Russia's actions best:
Putin's main goal is to restore Russia to super power status and to that end he has pursued mainly three projects during his presidency. The first was to stabilize and then expand the Russian economy to catch up with the west; the second was to turn around Russian demographics; the third was to reform and reinvigorate the Russian army.
After more than 20 years his record was dismal. While the economy (pre-Ukraine invasion) has been stable and living standards higher than when he came into office, it has remained highly dependent on oil and gas. Also, it has not caught up with the west since the great recession in spite of reform efforts, especially during the Medwedew interlude.
Likewise, in spite of financial incentives to have children and conservative to reactionary social and cultural politics, Russian demographics have never reached the replacement rate during his tenure and any temporary success there was has leveled off by now.
The army was the only success he could really point to before the invasion - now it has turned out that it was in part a Potemkin village.
So in the light of his failed ambitions he is thinking about the long game: a necessary precondition to become a super power since at least world war II has been a large population. Based on that even a relatively low GDP per capita like China's grants one super power status.
Ukraine offers some of the most valuable land in this regard with its fertile soils having the potential to support a large population.
Putin can no longer achieve his goals and he has no idea how to get Russians to have more children. But he can ensure that Russia will have the potential to achieve them - not in 10, 20 or even 30 years. But in 50 to 70 years, when nobody will care about the 2022 Ukraine war anymore. Then a Russia with 300 million people and a newly emerging economy could be a force to reckon with.
So he wants both the land and the population of Ukraine.
Depending on how successful Russia will end up being in this war, I would expect to see large scale resettlements of people, similar to Stalin's deportations. I would expect that some of the highest fertility populations such as the Chechnyans will be given land in Ukraine. And ethnic Ukrainians will be deported to Siberia or wherever (and their children "reeducated").
Luckily, it looks like Russia will have to downsize its plans for Ukraine significantly.
The idea that Russia demographic is bottlenecked in food supply sound really weird to me. I can see this being the case in Civilization game but not in real modern world.
Two things about that: firstly, I am trying to provide a rationale for Putin's/Russia's actions - it does not necessarily have to be true in the "real modern world". I think that Putin and especially the Russian nationalists view the world in a way that is indeed in some respects more akin to a game of civilization than the "real modern world" the West perceives (a view that probably also has its flaws).
There is also a historical predecessor of this view: China's one-child policy was explicitly enacted with the limitations of domestic food production in mind (see e.g. here https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12263480/).
Secondly, to steel man the importance of agriculture: the slowdown of population growth in developed and (to a lesser extent) emerging economies post World War II is very much a historic exception. For most of history humanity has been in the Malthusian trap and arguably many developing countries (or often, unfortunately, rather "non-developing countries") still are. Check out the charts here: https://ourworldindata.org/yields-vs-land-use-how-has-the-world-produced-enough-food-for-a-growing-population. In Subsahara-Africa agricultural yield can barely keep up with population growth. Continued malnutrition, food insecurity and a dependence on imports is the result - a severe impediment to economic development. In such a situation everyone is to preoccupied with bare survival to build any human capital. Meanwhile the major economies that managed to achieve a high degree of economic development increased their agricultural production far beyond population growth. If you want to convert population growth into economic might agriculture is crucial.
Putin does not know why population growth has slowed in Russia or what could undo it. But he might just bet that, just like Scott argues in "Meditations on Moloch", that the "real modern world" is the "dream time" and it might be about to end, at least for Russia. Its major economic assets, oil and gas, were going to become worthless in the next 10 to 30 years due to of global decarbonization and an alternative is not in sight. Its arms industry was not going to keep up with the West either and the number of young Russian fighting men was dwindling by the year. So the choice was - in his mind - to gradually lose the great power game in the medium term; or to play his aces while he can still use them. This would merely accelerate the inevitable downfall of Russia's economy; but it would increase its long term potential immensely.
Hi Scott. Do you know what is up with Silexan? The link in your original essay no longer goes to anything.
I had ordered some to give it a try, and well at least there was a placebo effect so I tried reordering it and received something else, called Calm24 from a company called Natura instead.
The packaging says each caplet contains 500mg of ‘cold macerated lavender oil’.
It seems like Amazon might still have the original product with a pack of two 30 count soft gels for 42 bucks so it would seem there has been a jump from 12 to 21 dollars for a two week supply.
I’m not going into lavender withdrawal or anything just a bit confused.
Edit: A bit more annoyance. I tried to set up a return of the stuff I just got from Natura and ran into ‘this product can’t be returned’
Further Edit:
This is meant more of a heads up than a serious question. Of course there is no way for Scott to know what is happening here.
Is the Axial Age an actual thing that happened, or is it mere cherry picking of events? And in case it's real, what may have case such a temporal clustering of philosophical-religious innovation?
I think the silk road was already a thing in 500 BC, so maybe ideas were going back and forward with commerce? Or maybe this was a period of heightened conflicts at the steppe boundary which has catalyzed empire formation?
I hadn't heard of the "Axial Age" idea before, but I just looked it up and is feels contrived to me. The core idea sounds like that most major modern religions/spiritual traditions (Abrahamic religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Zoroastrianism, and the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition) have their roots in a roughly 500 year period of 800-300 BC.
My first objection is that lumping the Abrahamic religions together is questionable: while Judaism does form the foundation for Christianity and Islam, both have enormous differences from Judaism and from one another, and they date to the first and seventh centuries AD respectively.
Next, the rooting of Judaism, Hinduism, and Zoroastrianism in the proposed Axial Age seems arbitrary. All three developed from poorly-attested roots in the second millennium BC, and the internal scriptural narratives that are the main attributions for a specific identifiable founder of the religions don't give dates anywhere near the proposed Axial Age: tradition implies Moses would have lived around 1300 BC, give or take a century or two, and the timings of both the life of Zoroaster and the events of the Bhagavad Gita are vague and ambiguous with estimates anywhere from ~1000-3000 BC. I'm guessing the Axial Age theory is using the building of the Second Temple (516 BC) for Judaism, the founding of the Achaemenid Persian Empire in 648 BC, and the establishment of the Hindu Synthesis around 300 BC. While these are all significant events, they're debatable as key "founding moments" for the respective traditions.
To the extent that there was something going on in the proposed period, I suspect the secret ingredient was the reemergence of urbanization, literacy, and long-distance trade in the Mediterranean region following the Late Bronze Age Collapse and the ensuing Dark Age. I know less about what was going on in India and China around that time period, but I get the impression that both also had very significant periods of reurbanization, state consolidation, and growth of trade (although from a much less drastic baseline than that of post-Bronze Age Europe and the Middle Easy) during that 500 year time span.
Perhaps the culmination of the shift from oral language to (substantially) symbolic language. That was a long, gradual process but it really flowered in that period 800 to 200 BC. I think it’s really easy to underestimate the significance of that transition.
What do you mean by oral vs symbolic language? It sounds like a roundabout way of saying "talking" and "writing", but you sound like you're using the terms as technical jargon that I'm unfamiliar with.
No, but I am trying to emphasize the profound difference between human culture that completely relies on the spoken word for all information transactions (in the broadest possible sense), and one where lots of information resides in written (symbolic) form.
“Talking” and “writing” are perfectly accurate but a bit casual for the point I want to make.
I have not heard of the Axial Age (and therefore don't think Scott has written about it). However, I am currently reading Paper by Mark Kurlansky and there is a good amount of overlap in the time periods described in the first part of Paper. I wonder what impact writing and new technologies such as papyrus had on this period. Kurlansky does mention a significant amount of trade and exchange of ideas happening between China and the Middle East around this time period. Writing could have accelerated the exchange of ideas especially around philosophy and religion.
Anyone else learning to code as an adult whilst working full-time in an unrelated STEM field?
What resources, tips, learning habits, etc. would you recommend?
I've enrolled in a 10-week Python course - partly for the sake of learning itself, and partly for the ability to spin up some basic code to run alongside numerical modelling and CAD programs I used for work. I'm sticking to the script and using Anaconda / Spyder / Jupyter.
I learned some coding high school, but the MATLAB and R I use every day now was learnt "on the job" for biochemistry simulations, and image/data analysis. I don't know if the way I'm doing it is optimal (I learn very deeply but narrowly, just what I need to get my stuff to work).
A piece of advice I think I can give is to remember that automating routine stuff is much more valuable than it seems - even in the unlikely scenario that you don't end up saving any time at all in the long run (cause you do it really fast manually compared to how long it took to automate, only small batches, ended up not using, whatever), you got a valuable addition to your toolbox. I was lazy at first about automating image file management when I had small experiments with a few images, but now I know how to make R handle thousands of files across directories.
Otherwise, completely agree with Unsigned Integer's comments, especially 2 and 3. Re: testing/monitoring I like to do it myself (e.g. insert little printouts into functions to let me know how variables change while they're running).
Have fun! You are doing a kind magic trick when you code. Creating a useful artifact without paying for or ordering any physical parts. Your building materials are your own thoughts. It’s really a kick if you stop to think about for a moment. Notice at no time do your fingers leave your hands. ;)
Don’t get discouraged when things take you a lot longer to learn or do than you think it should. Programmers are notorious for exaggerating how quickly they can learn or accomplish something. If someone says it takes a month to learn X, then you should reasonably expect it to actually take 5 months.
Have an actual project to learn alongside and motivate yourself. Having a real deadline helps too!
Not necessarily 'coding' in the same way but I lied that I knew how to use R at work because I was feeling threatened by a new employee. I was likely to have one file transferred to them because they had experience in using R.
I then spent most of my free time and late nights learning R using some tutorials, troubleshooting my actual work through frenzied searches of stackexchange questions, etc.
I will second having an actual project, and add that learning how to Google about a programming question effectively will take you 80% of the way to knowing what you need to complete most projects.
My number one tip is to remove pride from the equation. You are not better or worse than the computer, and the computer does not think it's better or worse than you. Humility usually means not believing that you're better than everyone else, but in the context of programming, it means being able to handle wading into in a universe where pride does not exist. (Many good programmers have too much pride, and adopting this form of humility does not guarantee that you'll be a good programmer, but I've found that my students who approach learning to program with this kind of humility do well, and the ones who don't do badly.)
My second tip is that, the deeper you get into programming, the more you may feel that you don't actually know how to do anything. It's important to move past that feeling, and realize that everything is just a little bit of learning away, and the more you learn, the easier everything else will be to learn, so just... keep going. If you're not sure how to do a big project, start with the parts you do know how to do, and then build from there. Don't fall into the trap of "I could never be enough of a programmer to do X". As long as you can write code, you can do anything. (Eventually.)
My third tip is that almost all code sucks, and if you know HOW your code sucks, that's GOOD, because that means you learned from writing it!
Last, and far more actionably, play a Zachtronics game. Any Zachtronics game will do, but I think SHENZHEN I/O, SpaceChem, and Infinifactory are particularly good for this. They help cultivate the necessary patience, humility, and logical thinking, and especially help reinforce the principles of "just keep building" and "learn one thing at a time". Don't feel bad if you can't finish them, or even can't progress very far; I've been programming for 24 years, I've written compilers, device drivers, games, servers, OS kernels, physics simulations, avionics*, and just about everything else, yet Infinifactory's the only Zachtronics game I was able to finish… and not for lack of trying, either. :)
By any chance can anyone point me to studies on what the language center(s) of the human brain are doing during dreaming? Google Scholar isn't turning up anything about my specific question.
Some of the popular science articles — which may actually be popular pseudoscience articles — say that the language centers of our brains are mostly off-line during dreaming and that we're not really hearing language, rather we just have the illusion of hearing language in our dreams. Deirdre Barrett PhD from Havard seems to be the designated expert that the popular science press goes to for dream questions, but I can't find any publications by Barrett regarding language in dreams. But she seems to be the source of the claim that our language centers offline during dreams, and that's why we aren't supposed to be able to read in our dreams (she does qualify it in a quote by saying "most people" can't read in their dreams).
The reason I ask is that I had an interesting dream the other night. I was playing ngau-ngau (which is a popular gambling card game in Hong Kong), and all the people sitting around the table were speaking Cantonese. I could understand part of their conversation—especially numbers and swear words—but a lot of their conversation was opaque to me. This wasn't surprising to me, because when I lived in HK, I developed rudimentary conversational skills in Cantonese, but there were frequently words I couldn't understand and I would have to ask what they meant.
Upon waking, though, what struck me about this dream was that if I were *not* really "hearing" language in my dream, why couldn't I either (a) understand all of their conversation, or (b) understood none of their conversation? Full disclosure, I don't know how to play ngau-ngau either, but I wasn't really playing—rather I was just sitting at the table with the players as they smoked, joked, laughed, and swore (and spat).
As for Barrett's claim that I shouldn't be able to read in dreams, after a lifetime of active dreaming, I have been able to "teach" myself to read in dreams. But I'm only reading at about a 1st Grade level right now. "See Spot Dream. Dream, Spot, dream!" I can't decode complex words or phrases that show up on printed material in my dreams. So no reading the latest articles in Nature Dreaming for me.
Anecdotally, I regularly see text in my dreams, but it's barely coherent, often shifting on the page or screen, locally meaningful but drifting randomly between topics. Some of the smaller text-based neural networks, such as GPT-2, remind me very much of this dream text. Years ago when I learned about Markov chains I was also struck by the dreamlike nature of the text they produce.
On a few occasions I've had anxiety dreams full of nonsense javascript.
Some people often talk in their sleep, and say things that make sense within the dream that they're having, so I think people have language. But as far as reading, I've many times read text while in a dream, but the text always sounds like a first- or second-order Markov model of language, mostly grammatical but not making sense. This may be a selective effect, in that I usually remember only what I was dreaming less than a minute before waking up; and the process of waking up may disrupt the text.
Surely everybody hears speech in their dreams, or we would know we were dreaming. If the Language Centre is offline then clearly it’s not the only way to “hear”.
"But she seems to be the source of the claim that our language centers offline during dreams, and that's why we aren't supposed to be able to read in our dreams (she does qualify it in a quote by saying "most people" can't read in their dreams)."
Well then I'm not "most people" because just last night I had an involved dream which included me reading a very long column of text, including illustrations, so my brain is doing *something* there.
Also, I have had dreams where I (or the person who is 'me' in the dream) or another person is speaking another language, and I realise that is going on.
This is a very interesting question, if you are hearing people speaking in your dreams, what does it mean 'no you're *imagining* you are hearing them speak'? Are language centres closed down or do some signals sneak through?
Well, that's a given! ;-) But I was wondering if our industrious PET scan researchers have looked at brain activity of people in REM sleep and seen low activity in the speech center of the brain? After changing my search terms, I came across this meta analysis. The summary says: "Results show that quiescent regions are confined to the inferior and middle frontal cortex and to the inferior parietal lobule." Inferior frontal area is Broca's which in the past was associated with the processing of speech and language.
But then I came across a press release from University of Wisconsin, that claims we dream during REM and non-REM sleep, and there's a certain area that's active when we're dreaming. And that the sections associated with understanding language (not Broca's area) are are active when people report hearing speech in their dreams...
>>> For example, dreams associated with hearing speech triggered activity in Wernicke’s areas on the left side of the cerebral cortex, which is involved in language perception and understanding.
“This suggests that dreams recruit the same brain regions as experiences in wakefulness for specific contents,” lead author Dr. Francesca Siclari says. “This also indicates that dreams are … not ‘inventions’ or ‘confabulations’ that we make up while we wake up.”
<<<
So what we've got is a bunch of tenuous correlations...
(Trigger warnings: psychiatry, long text, Germany, vitriol, badly cascaded section titles, shortages of charity towards the wardens).
In my (limited, Germany-centric, 3rd person) experience, involuntary commitment into clinical psychiatry is best seen as a Moloch-powered soul-crushing machine. While not all encounters with psychiatric clinics end badly, and some might in fact be beneficial, the possibility of landing on the conveyor belt running straight towards the soul mill always exist.
= TL;DR =
Involuntary commitment is a very real threat to any patient of clinical psychiatry, and can make your life worse for a very long time. Never go willingly into any unit with a locked door. They will lie freely, so lie to them in turn if you have any symptoms of psychosis. Do not expected to be treated like an adult(ish) human. For Germany, have a living will naming a trustworthy, rabidly anti-psychiatric friend as a guardian. For the hearing, get a fighter lawyer. If any of your jailors break the law, press criminal charges.
= How psych ward is different from other wards =
If you are naive like me, you might think that a psychiatric ward is like a bone ward, only it is for treating psychic illnesses instead of fractures. Of course, you read/saw "one flew over the cookoo nest", but that was the dark ages. Today, unthinkable. As the late Danton would say: "Ils n’oseront pas!" They would not dare. Yes, there is an anti-psychiatric movement, but then again, there are tons of movements devoid of any substance, why should they be any different?
If you are admitted to a cancer ward with a life expectancy of less than a year without treatment, and form the opinion that you do not want to be treated, you will generally be free to leave against medical advise after signing some forms. Your personal autonomy trumps any amount of outcome difference, end of story.
Contrast that to psychiatry. The moment you walk through the door, your autonomy is in jeopardy. After all, any objection you might have to the proscribed treatment could well be a symptom of your mental illness instead of your will.
If it was the other way round, with the psychiatrists respecting patient autonomy and the oncologists routinely violating it, that would be bad enough, but workable. Human rights issues aside, treating cancers should well work without the patients compliance. Biopsies and CT/MRI images could still be taken (perhaps using a sedative), surgeries would be unaffected, patients might have to be prevented from removing chemotherapy IVs, but otherwise, treatment efficiency should not suffer too much.
They way it is, instead, is horrible. Most psychic illnesses can not be diagnosed based on physical findings, so one is stuck observing the patient for diagnosis instead. Some symptoms will be deducible without any patient cooperation whatsoever, but for most, one will have to rely on the patient to self-report them. In fact, I would be hard pressed to name a field more reliant on patient cooperation for diagnosis.
= How the spectre of involuntary commitment poisons doctor patient relationships =
In a normal doctor patient relationship, this would be no issue. Opioid addictions aside, a patient generally has no incentive to lie to their orthopedist about the presence or absence of joint pain. Their goals align.
A psychiatrist (or psychologist) working within a system permitting involuntary commitment, however, is never just a physician or therapist. They also occupy the position of a kind of attorney general who will have to decide on whether the case warrants bringing in a judge to lock the patient up. If that happens (and the judge agrees -- which he generally will, trusting the expert opinion of the psychiatrist, as there are no physical criteria fit to be used as evidence), our psychiatrist will wear the hat of the prison warden as well when working in a "secure unit" (a very newspeak term itself, as even the short term security provided to the de facto prisoners of mental institutions is very debatable).
The system will only work as long as the patient is unaware of the stakes or (rightly or wrongly) convinced that their symptoms do not warrant commitment.
(continued below, this ended up being part 1 out of 3).
There are a few steps you can take to safeguard your agency while interacting with clinical psychiatry. In particular, there are legal tricks, verbal tactics and strategic considerations when picking a clinic.
== Due process ==
In Germany, a commonly used form of involuntary commitment is the BGB §1906. Here, rather than the court ordering the institutionalization, the court appoints a legal guardian who has the power to have his ward committed, subject to court approval. The thing is, whether you are committed or not is entirely up to your legal guardian. You can specify a legal guardian in an advance decision. Ideally, someone who would rather see you dead than committed. The very worst legal guardian might be an elderly relative with lots of trust in authorities, medical or otherwise.
For the hearing with the judge, get a lawyer. Strike that. Get an attack dog lawyer. You do not want someone seeing them as the guardian of due process over a sad but necessary procedure, you want someone willing to go the extra mile to convince the judge of your sanity. Lawyers making their living suing doctors seem like a good start. Bonus points if you can get a Scientology lawyer, as people in that cult really do not like psychiatry.
People making their living locking up others are treading on thin ice, legally. Find out the relevant maximum time they can keep you without a judge. They went a minute over it? Press criminal charges.
== Verbal tactics ==
The unspoken Miranda warning: anything you tell a mental health care professional can and will be used in an attempt to have you involuntarily committed. Tread carefully.
As I mentioned, the staff will operate on simulacrum level 2, e.g. saying whatever they belive will make you do the stuff they want you to do with minimum fuzz, irregardless of truth. Take a leaf from their book. Lie to them, preferably by omission. Remember, their main triggers are suicidality and psychosis. Admitting to suicidality is subject to tradeoffs: it might cost you months of your freedom, but save your life.
Going through the hell of a secured station for psychosis medication might make sense in some extreme situations. I mean that in roughly the way I would say "selling a kidney for 20$ might make sense in some extreme situations". You are constantly hallucinating being devoured by spiders all the time and there is no Soteria or open station which could give you an anti-psychotic? Probably go for it. You sometimes feel people are following you or the moon talks to you? Not worth it.
If you do not want a psychosis treatment, admitting to anything which can be pattern matched against psychosis is inexcusable. Even pre-Snowden, you might reasonably believe that the NSA probably listens in on most phone calls. But if you mention that, you are lost. Any belief which a committee of elderly statesmen could not unanimously agree on is too controversial to mention. Do not talk about religion, Bayes, surveillance, your role-playing characters, climate change, politics, free will, self-harm, violence, drug use, porn, video games. If hard pressed, admit to owning a bicycle and sometimes being a bit sad. Communicate as you would with a literal-minded extraterrestrial, do not rely on a shared basis of common sense or an understanding of irony. Jokingly referring to your doctors as "my fellow reptiloids" will fail in the worst way imaginable.
Think about it this way: you will present a mask of a reasonably well adjusted person eventually. Doing so now instead of later will save all involved a lot of time, and will prevent you from being fucked up by anti-psychotics and forcibly addicted to tranquilizers.
= Strategic considerations: choosing the right place =
Generally, the further your health care provider is from a secure unit, the safer you are from ending up in it. Being an outpatient is safer than being an inpatient. Being an outpatient seeing an independent psychiatrist is safer than being an outpatient at a psychiatric hospital. Being an inpatient at some clinic where the next secure unit is far away is safer than being one where the secure unit is conveniently downstairs.
In Germany, there are two kinds of hospitals: general hospitals -- which have to take cases -- and specialized (e.g. university) hospitals. When interaction with psychiatry, avoid the latter. As mentioned, the secure stations of general hospitals have to take any new cases, e.g. disoriented persons picked up by the police while they were wandering through the traffic. This means that there is a constant inflow of new patients competing for a limited amount of beds, and one can get released simply by being (or appearing) more sane than the other patients. On the other hand, university hospitals do not have this constant pressure and are thus much more likely to keep you until your 'treatment' is complete.
= Last resort: Getting out by any means =
There is a fine balance between the harm done by staying in the secure unit and the harm the legal system might inflict upon you for breaking some laws while escaping (especially if they send you to forensic psychiatry instead of prison), so I would strongly advise against violence, arson or hostage taking, which will likely mean a longer stay.
They trust you enough to let you go for a walk sometimes? Great, abuse their trust just like they abused yours.
Escape.
You have outside help? Get creative. The security is generally not prison style, so you might get some contraband items in.
While threatening others is a legal offense, pointing a razor blade to your own throat is much less objectionable. Unlike prison, they also pretend to be about helping you, so if you convince whoever is on door access shift at 4:00 am that by the count of ten, you are going to get your blood all over their nice clean white walls unless that door is opened might just conclude that the latter outcome is preferable to the former from a patient health point of view.
== Moral considerations ==
A Singerian Utilitarian myself, I hold think that patient autonomy is of great importance. The obvious way to deal with a patient with a firm death wish is to offer an assisted suicide, not making their lives hell on earth.
I think the prerequisites to a stay in a locked psych unit should be:
* a violent crime
* a regular criminal conviction with a prison sentence, just as any sane offender would get for the same crime
* the court offering the convict the option to spend their sentence in psych unit instead
* the convict accepting that offer (until they decide to opt out again and go to prison)
Even for criminal cases involving criminally incompetent offenders, this is not how it is done in Germany e.g. in StGB §63 [1]: I am not a lawyer, but from my reading, there is no automatic expiry date on the commitment to forensic psychiatry with regard to the crime in question: go to court for battery, get locked up for life. Furthermore, StGB §63 is just the tip of the iceberg: besides federal BGB §1906, the psychiatry laws of the Laender (states) generally allow mentally ill people to be locked up if they are deemed a danger to public safety. Pre-Crime in action.
Of course, this is ripe for abuse, and abused it is. Gustl Mollath [2] was commited to psychiatry for seven years for offenses which probably would not have warranted a prison sentence of equal length (Possibly to shut him up about inconvenient allegations of tax evasion.)
See also Günter Wallraff, "13 unerwünschte Reportagen" (13 undesired reports) from 1969. In one of those, he was in a psych ward, disguised as a dangerous alcoholic. At the end, his wife gets him out. It would have sufficed for her to say that she felt threatened by him, and he'd have stayed there for years. http://www.irwish.de/PDF/Wallraff/Wallraff-13_unerwuenschte_Reportagen.pdf
They treat the suicidal patients *a lot* better than the psychotics, to the point where it can be an overall good thing. I wasn't forced to take any medications (they'd probably have forced me to take antidepressants, but they didn't change the regimen I was already willingly taking; on the other hand, when they offered me benzos/fentanyl and I said no, they respected that decision). The psychotic patients get no such mercy; the nurses ask them nicely to take their pills, and if they refuse the nurses forcibly inject them.
To the second question: Depends. Roughly, if they are committed against their will, there needs to be a meeting with a doctor within 24 hours and also the confirmation by a jugde within 48 hours. The latter also potentially decides on a medication against the will of the patient.
The details are regulated by a mixture of national law and law in each of the 16 regional states. My superficial reading says forced medication is possible, if it reduces the reasons that led to commitment (posing a threat to oneself or to others) and only if it's like 'really necessary'. My uninformed guess is, it's mostly the doctor who decides.
Not an expert, just based on some very basic reading. Links or additional info if interested.
The staff of a secure station will operate on Simulacrum Level 2 [0] exclusively. When moving a patient to that station, they will not tell them: "You are psychotic or a danger to yourself / to others and we will lock you up", but they will 'suggest' moving you to the 'protected station' 'for the weekend'. (Protip: this is your cue to go for a toilet break. Do not grab your stuff, just go and hide somewhere non-obvious. They will hardly start a big manhunt for a missing patient. Personally, I would always prefer answering for battery in criminal court to a week in secure ward, but YMMV.)
In my experience, there are two kinds of patients you find on "protected stations (as locked stations are euphemized in Germany): the involuntary ones and the non-voluntary ones. The only difference is the fact that the latter group has not yet realized they are trapped, but are under the illusion of voluntariness. The former group, either waiting for a judge or committed by court already, of course, are under no such illusions. (This becomes obvious when looking at the situation from an accounting point of view: A night in a locked-up psych ward is more expensive than a night in an open psych ward. The only reason to put a patient in a locked ward is to (try to) prevent them from harming themselves or others. If you can justify billing the insurer, but you can't justify keeping the patient there against their will, you were just defrauding the insurer.)
Naturally, forcible psychiatry wards are not conductive to mental health. In the best case, they are boring as hell, in the worst case, they are hell on earth. The patients who get committed to these stations are, by and large, not the ones with the most resilient psyches. Take a person who is somewhat functioning in their familiar home environment (perhaps with frequent trips into nature, support from friends or some other coping mechanisms) and declare them incompetent, deny them their coping mechanisms and lock them up in a ward full of other people with various mental health issues. Chances are they will lose their cool. Success! The psychiatrists were right all along, that person is clearly unstable.
Secure psychiatry is mostly patient storage. The chief objective is that at the end of the day, you still have as many warm bodies as you had at the start of the day. Options for talk therapy will be severely limited compared to non-secure facilities -- which is just as well, as I do not consider the Stockholm syndrome an acceptable basis for psychotherapy. Long term outcomes are generally not tracked. Retrospective patient approval or the lack thereof is also not tracked.
Committed patients are, in general, not treated as adult human beings. A person stating something a staff member finds unlikely might be told to 'stop telling lies', which generally constitutes a faux pas in civil society. This is probably natural as it would be difficult to deny basic agency to people regarded as adult human beings. Of course, denying patient autonomy is a one way road, as they will generally still be held responsible for their actions, a patient who stabbed another person would just be committed forensically instead of going to prison, and any small infractions will be sanctioned by loss of privileges and the like.
There are two places in a hospital where informed consent is not an important. One is the morgue, the other is the locked psych ward. After all, if your patient is not consenting in the first place, why waste time informing them? Naturally, nicer staff members may still be informing patients about procedures on a FYI basis, but the need to convince the patient of anything is just not there.
= Medication =
Medication will take place. For those unfortunate enough to be diagnosed (correctly or otherwise) with a variant of schizophrenia, this will include anti-psychotics, formerly marketed as "pharmacological lobotomy". Credit where credit is due, these are still a marked improvement over that procedure. In many cases antidepressants are on the menu as well. Locked up people will get unruly eventually, but that is what benzodiazepines are for. In fact, benzodiazepines, if responsibly used, might be very helpful for lots of mental health issues. Unless you happened to become addicted to them, perhaps to keep you from pounding at the door while you are locked up.
Naturally the patient is not consulted (or informed) about their medication or any side effects. In my experience, this creates a general aversion towards psychopharmaca that goes along very nicely with their new aversion to mental health institutions and professionals.
= "Curing" patients (or Es gibt nur einen Weg in die Freiheit) =
Eventually, the patient is released as 'cured'. While I have to concede that there are probably patients where the anti-psychotics managed to suppress the hallucinations, I postulate that there are many which basically were just taught to conform to whatever expectations their psychiatrist had. I am sure the psychiatrists are aware of that problem, but less sure what they can do about it. If the only had people committed who were screaming all the time because they hallucinated spiders eating their flesh, a lack of screaming might be a hard to fake indication of improvement. But as long as you have people committed based on voluntary statements about suicidal ideation or their (pre-Snowden) idea that the NSA is listening to their phone calls, it would seem difficult to judge if your intervention was any more effective than simply locking them up until they realized conformity was their only path to freedom.
= A hell created by Moloch =
While it might be helpful to view ones captors as akin to Dr. Mengele to keep aware of the fundamentally adversarial nature of their relationship, I do not believe that the people running 'secured' units are generally evil. Rather, I believe their incentives are simply not aligned to the long term interests of their patients. Suicides on hospital grounds are probably the worst, especially if they failed to have the patient committed. They are probably treating lots of obviously psychotic patients and tend to pattern match based on that. "Any person will have beliefs and behaviours which seem totally weird to most others" is probably not their favorite prior. They will obviously have a more favorite view of the benefit/cost ratio of involuntary commitments, either due to first person insight I lack or as a necessity of doing their job. They will probably not systematically track long term heath outcomes.
Maybe someone can tell me whether this makes sense, or can even do the math:
It occurred to me there is a population-based factor in the observation that technological advance was (before about 1970) exponential even after being adjusted for population.
People have approached that comparison with the unspoken assumption that the way to do it looks something like this:
population doubling time =~ 40 years
tech doubling time =~ 20 years
therefore technology's exponential increase is too high to be accounted for by population
therefore tech has accelerating returns
This comparison assumes that the technology output from N people at time t, tech(N,t), is simply N*tech(1,t), so that tech advances are proportional to population. But this overlooks the fact that tech(N,t) is in reality not a function, but a probability density function (pdf).
My first instinct was to instead test whether tech(N,t) can be written just as a function of N, tech(N), under the supposition that that would mean tech production doesn't depend on pre-existing tech, and so tech has no accelerating returns. This turns out not to work as a test, for tricky semantic reasons I don't want to get into. For now I'm going to write tech(N,t) as tech(N), even though this is not strictly correct.
We observe only a sampling of tech(N), and computing the average of that sample will never give the expected value of tech(N), because it's very skewed. The pdf tech(1) is even more skewed; so we can't compare E(tech(N)) to E(tech(1)) just from observed data without a theoretical adjustment for the observations we never observe. Even if the expected value E(tech(N)) = N * E(tech(1), it would still be the case that we would almost certainly always OBSERVE tech(N) > N * tech(1).
The probability distribution for tech output from 1 person is almost certainly given by a power law of the form p(x) = cx^(-a), a > 1. That would imply that the pdf for tech(1) has much more of its mass in, say, the top 1% of possible observations, than does tech(20), because of black swans. If a < 3, Variance(tech(N)) is infinite, so most of its mass is in parts of the PDF that we never see. If a < 2, the expected value E(tech(N)) is also infinite, which we can interpret as meaning that *all* of its mass is concentrated in parts of the distribution that we never see.
In other words, E(tech(N)) = N * E(tech(1)) doesn't imply that median(tech(N)) = N*median(tech(1)), and so we can't just say that the fact that tech doubling time is less than the population doubling time implies that the output of individuals isn't constant. We have to find out how much of the observed difference can be attributed to the greater skewedness of the probability distribution function (pdf) p(tech(1,t)).
median(tech(N,t)) would still grow faster than N * median(tech(1,t)). But I haven't done the math to figure out how much faster. It may help to know that median(p(x)) = c*2^(1-a).
Going back to the original comparison of population and tech doubling times, we should expect that we'll observe a faster tech doubling time *even if there are no increasing returns to technology*. This is because if we measure the sum of the importances of all tech advances per decade, these measurements won't approximate the expected sum, but will be better approximated as proportional to the significance of the most-significant single advance we happen to snag in our sample. And this significance will (I think) increase exponentially with population.
If I've understood you correctly, I might summarize your argument as: individual contributions to tech are heavy-tailed, so that usually statistical tests for averages don't give meaningful results, and so the "force multiplier" hypothesis for tech growth is unfounded.
If it's true that individual contributions are heavy-tailed, then the growth of tech over time should look "jumpy" rather than smooth. The jumps should be more frequent as population increases. If there's no "force multiplier", then the frequency of jumps should be proportional to population, and the size of the jumps should be identically distributed.
To test your hypothesis, I would look at the growth of tech over time, and see if the differences tech(T_i) - tech(T_i-1) are heavy-tailed. In particular, you'd want to verify it's not lognormal--which is what I'd expect if tech growths smoothly.
(As for the stuff about medians, I couldn't make the connection how that relates to tech doubling time.)
Though it will be harder than that, since I don't suppose that there are /no/ increasing returns to tech. I expect there are increasing returns, but would like to adjust the exponent gotten from historical data for the effect of a (hypothesized) long-tailed distribution of individual returns. Perhaps the first thing would be to try to study the distribution of innovations by individuals in some isolated fields, such as chess, which don't have great synergism with the development of science and tech in general.
But there's little chance that I'll get around to doing that; certainly not this year.
What do people here think of a referendum (either national or state-by-state)? If voters were asked:
"What is the maximum number of weeks into pregnancy that an elective abortion should be allowed?"
then sorting the results and picking the median value gives a length such that half the electorate
thinks it is too long (too lenient) and half the electorate thinks it is too short (too stringent).
It has the advantage that:
It is a direct choice by the voters.
It is a reasonably concrete choice, unlike e.g. picking coefficients in a tax code polynomial.
It has reasonably simple consequences. At most, educating voters about the timeline is reasonably straightforward
and less controversial than the overall issue. ("Typical first heartbeat at N weeks. Typical first neuron at M weeks. Typical viability at...")
Aggregating a one-parameter choice like this with monotonic consequences doesn't get into voting paradoxes.
My _personal_ preference is to allow abortion at any point. Roe v. Wade (which is slightly more restrictive than that) struck me as a reasonable _policy_ - but, unfortunately, Alito is correct that neither "privacy" nor "abortion" nor "bodily autonomy" is in the text of the constitution. I, personally, would prefer to add constitutional amendments specifically protecting all three, but that isn't going to happen.
I'm not sure how what you describe differs from the ordinary legislative process, i.e. what would indeed start happening if Roe were overturned (except it wouldn't happen at the national level, because, assuming Harry Blackmun's reasoning were rejected, the Constitution does not give Congress the power to regulate abortion).
Granted, often bills are passed in the legislature, so the question is being asked of the voters indirectly -- they are asked to vote for representatives who are then asked the direct question "How many weeks?" -- but people are pretty used to pressing their legislators on specific issues that concern them, and in many states (e.g. California) the initiative allows the people to pass laws directly if they choose.
Yes, my hope is that phrasing it as "How many weeks?" at the level of the voters would bypass some of the winner-take-all steps in the current process (or in yes/no referenda) and would be more amenable to picking a compromise that most people could live with.
Well, interesting. And if the results you get are a Gaussian, it might work.
But part of the problem here is that they might *not* be a Gaussian, but instead a horrible double peak, with one peak at 0 and another at 40 weeks. That is, it might be that the key underlying disagreement is whether abortion can be regulated *at all* by the state. Some people feel the state has no God-damned business butting in, and other people think *not* having rules on it is as insane as having no rule against burning down buildings for the insurance money ('It's a private decision between a man and his insurance company.")
If that's the case, then neither would accept any kind of compromise in the middle, for the same reason the mother could not accept Solomon's compromise.
I don't think this is actually true. Activists tend to cluster at the 0 or 40 weeks position (at least in their rhetoric), but I think most pro-life and pro-choice voters are much more moderate.
IMO, the fundamental political problem with both abortion and gun control is that everyone (largely correctly) sees the goal of the people trying to restrict abortion/guns as an eventual ban. That is, when someone proposes some commonsense restrictions on abortions or guns, most people on the other side assume that this is an incremental step toward the world where abortions/guns are in practice nearly impossible to get.
Maybe on the pro-choice side. I have yet to meet someone who calls himself "pro life" who thinks it's possible to compromise on murder before 16 weeks, but not after -- on account of that's how they see it.
And, sure, pro-choicies might well see a slippery-slope slip-sliding their way when pro-lifers advocate for this or that "reasonable" restriction on abortion, just as the AR-15 owners look squinty at a proposal to build a long-gun registry or something. But how does that work for the other side? Do pro-lifers see a a push to carve out an exception for rape and incest as the camel nose under the tent, next stop it will be Abortions To Go at every Love's Truck Stop? Doesn't seem entirely plausible.
That is, there may be less symmetry in the motivations and bugbears of the two sides than you assume. The fact that they oppose each other should not by itself be persuasive that they are mirror images across the board.
The fact that Texas's law did _not_ have rape or incest exceptions makes me suspect that there were pro-life activists pushing against such exceptions (since a lot of previous state laws have had such exceptions).
I am indeed hoping that there are a lot of moderates. I have no data - I've seen various polls, but they have generally been phrased as yes/no questions. (Admittedly, my own preference is at an extreme, 40 weeks, but I would really like to see the shape of the curve.)
The obvious pitfall is that voters will not answer the question realistically and will simply choose the upper or lower bounds, hoping to drag the overall average either up or down. (I realise you said median, but try re-explaining the difference to three hundred million people.)
Well, unless half+epsilon choose either the upper or lower bounds, they will just push the median into somewhere in the set of people who chose someplace inside the limits of those bounds. Median does have the advantage that the odds of being the person who winds up setting the final number improve if one can anticipate the median and choose close to it, rather than at an extreme. :-)
As an outsider, I think 'give this decision back to the states' is the best of a bad lot. Some states are going to be ultra-liberal, some are going to be very conservative. If the ultra-liberals are breaking out in hives at the thought of having conservative restrictions on abortion, why can't they imagine that conservative states are also coming out in a rash at the idea of having ultra-liberal terms imposed on them?
Let California legalise free abortion for all genders from the age of ten with no need for parental consent and you can abort/euthanise the 'products of conception' up to the moment before you cut the umbilical cord. Let Texas or Florida only allow "rape, incest, and physical threat to the life of the mother". California doesn't have to live under Texas law, and the price of that is that they don't get to impose California law on Texas.
Fight the rest of it out at the national level and see if you can get Congress to pull together some law specifically about abortion, rather than leaving it up to the Supreme Court to pull out emanations of penumbras.
I'm blue in the face quoting the Guttmacher Institute, but their data from 2016 says:
"88% of abortions occurred in the first 12 weeks. Two-thirds [so 66%?] occurred at 8 weeks or earlier.
Medication abortions accounted for 39% of all abortions in 2017, up from 29% in 2014."
So never mind what limits are in place permitting abortion up to X weeks of pregnancy, the actual practice is 'early abortion and medical, not surgical, abortion is increasingly being used'.
I think setting limits on "up to this stage of pregnancy", going by when women are getting abortions, would be a lot earlier than the current 24 weeks or viability, whichever is earlier.
Many Thanks! I'm agnostic on whether the law should be handled at the federal or state level. I agree that the "emanations of penumbras" were very unfortunate. SCOTUS is not a legislature, and I prefer it to stick to the text of the constitution.
I _suspect_ that the views of the electorate are less extreme (on either end) than the views of the legislators (at either the state or federal level). Elections in the usa are (with a few exceptions) winner-take-all contests - which is why I'd rather see a question phrased as choosing a time limit, rather than a binary decision, put to the voters.
It is even possible that electorate has less divergent views from region to region than their representatives suggest. Perhaps a national compromise might be possible.
I view the shift to earlier and medical, rather than surgical, abortions as a positive development - both as being less hazardous and less contentious.
BTW, the Texas law is actually a bit more extreme than your description of it: It doesn't have a rape or incest exception.
Once Blackmun's reasoning is rejected by the Supreme Court, if it is, then Congress has no power to legislate on the subject of abortion. It would belong to the States vice the Tenth Amendment.
That said, Congress could certainly attempt to *blackmail* the states into passing uniform laws on abortion, the way they blackmailed the states into all passing a 55 MPH highway speed limit in the 70s. When you control such a vast amount of spending, which can materially impact state budgets, such things are plausible. But I think abortion is so fraught that this is unlikely to work in practice.
Did it? I did not know that. On checking it out in oyez I see apparently they squarely said *compelling* commerce via the Commerce Clause is right out -- is that what you mean? If so, that is indeed a welcome step.
Congress only lacks that power if the Court say it lacks that power. And this Court has been specifically assembled for this purpose (outlawing abortion). It wouldn't surprise me even a little bit to see them uphold a national abortion ban, at which point everyone who is nodding along about the wisdom of states rights will be nodding along at the clear duty of congress to protect the rights (including to life) of all its citizens, born and unborn. Someone around here likes to say that it's just a matter of whose ox is gored. I think that's likely true.
Maybe my cynicism is unwarranted. That would be nice.
I wouldn't call it cynicism so much as partisanship. But if you have joined the ranks of those who deeply distrust government power because it has the potential for abuse by all-too-fallible human beings -- welcome! We have jackets!
And now you can start voting to reduce government power every chance you get, and start insisting on social problems being solved at the most local level possible, and as much as possible privately, person-to-person, by persuasion and consensus -- and not by force of law, or at worst by the opinion of 5 old farts in black robes being imposed on every soul in the land.
As it currently is, nobody is happy. I agree that this is such a live-wire topic that both sides are unlikely to compromise. But if it goes back to "each state sets its own laws" then after a while things might have cooled down enough to look at settling law at the federal level. And if it goes to the states, then the pro-choice majority states can be assured that they will not be living under the Handmaid's Tale.
Right. I'm just saying it cannot be done at the Federal level. The Constitution certainly does not explicitly grant Congress the power to regulate abortion, and if the reasoning of Roe is overturned by the Supreme Court, then they will have rejected the proposition that Congress has some implicit power via the Bill of Rights, too. What's left?
a) If we have the bad luck that the distribution of preferences is strongly bimodal, it is perfectly possible that it is bimodal _within_ states, as well as nationally. Alternatively, it is perfectly possible that winner-take-all elections amplify small differences, and there is a unimodal distribution of preferences with only small regional variations. I'd love to see actual data.
b) The commerce clause is a loophole that one can metaphorically drive a truck through (and there has been a _lot_ of traffic through it). In terms of precedent: There is a _huge_ amount of regulation of medicine that has been done at the national level, from the FDA and the (grr) DEA and Medicare to the fact that there are such things as prescription-only drugs and such things as licenses to practice medicine.
(a) Certainly it's very likely to be pretty bimodal within states. It already is. It was before Roe. It's kind of a bimodal issue: if you think abortion is murder, you're not going to settle for anything less than making it available only in extreme cases. If you think it's not such a big deal, maybe just a little regretful, like chickens raised on factory farms at 40 cm^2/bird, then you will insist on pretty broad access, but you might (being human) recoil at late term Kermit Gosnell kind of stuff, and be OK with drawing a line around 12-16 weeks. So the bimodalism I expect will be (1) you better have a damn good reason, life or death kind of stuff, and (2) sure whatever to around 12-16 weeks, and after that not allowed but we aren't going to prosecute too hard.
(b) Let us not exaggerate. There's a lot of regretful regulation by the Feds under the dubious banner of the Commerce Clause, but at the least, it's pretty much all commerce of one kind or another, with the exception arguably being drugs as you point out -- but drugs *do* in fact cross state lines, all the time (just ask the LAPD where the crack and weed in South Central comes from), and their successful interdiction[1] probably *is* something impossible to do without some kind of national-level coordination and policy setting. Now I'd be the first to agree Raich was wrongly decided, but we've kind of made our peace this last century with the Feds regulating dangerous drugs, hence the DEA and FDA[2].
That does *not* say the Supreme Court or the broader Republic would be OK with the Feds suddenly getting into the criminal law game. It's never happened before. We do not look to Congress to write laws on murder and arson or insurance fraud, we expect our own state to do that, and I would be surprised if people (especially state legislatures) changed their minds about that, and doubly surprised if a Supreme Court that threw out Roe would accept an even flimsier end run around the Tenth Amendment.
The best chance for Congress to legislate on abortion is (or was if it's drawing to a close) during the Roe era, when there is Supreme Court precedent that says an individual right to abortion is discoverable in the Fourteenth Amendment -- which, conveniently, specifically also grants to Congress the power to enforce it (the Amendment). Congress could have passed uniform national legislation on abortion any time in the past 40 years and had a decent case for it being upheld by the Supreme Court, provided it passed all the Roe tests. They did not. I daresay they dared not, and dare not. The people who grind their teeth at the lack of a public option in Obamacare, or (on the other side) those who are infuriated that the Department of Education still exists, can testify to the inherent pusillanimity of Congress.
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[1] Hypothetical successful interdiction might be better phraseology, I do not mean to imply it could happen in practice.
[2] Medical licenses are issued by states, and while you can expedite your license in a second state to some degree for about half the states, if memory serves, each state retains the right to sole jurisdiction over medicine practiced within it.
Well, whether Congress has the power to legislate on it is arguable. To most intents and purposes, Congress has been legislating on a wide variety of things beyond its explicit constitutional powers. In the case of at least medically induced abortions (as opposed to surgical): Well, the pharmaceuticals used almost always cross state lines, so the interstate commerce clause can (reasonably legitimately) be cited.
At least it would be a _legislative_ process, not, as Deiseach cited, SCOTUS finding "emanations of penumbras".
I doubt very much whether even the most enthusiastic Commerce Clause expander could write a plausible argument for how that gives Congress the power to regulate abortion. And I doubt even more that the Supreme Court would uphold such a travesty.
The current SCOTUS has a justice that thinks a law mandating that everyone purchase broccoli is silly but not unconstitutional. And Wickard already states that literally every action or lack of action is covered under the commerce clause.
Yup, that sounds plausible to me. The constitution is not supposed to prevent any and all ill-considered things that a legislature might do. I actually find it very weird that judges sometimes pass judgement on whether a law serves a "compelling state interest". Isn't that second-guessing the legislature's decision making?
No they don't. I already said elsewhere that there is a colorable case to be made for that legislation *as long as Roe is upheld* because Roe rooted an individual right to abortion in the Fourteenth Amendment, which also gives Congress the power to enforce the Amendment. It's all fair and square -- as long as a Constitutional right to abortion rooted in the Fourteenth Amendment exists.
What I *said* is that if the Supreme Court explicitly rejects Roe's reasoning, and says there is, in fact, no individual right to abortion, in the Fourteenth Amendment or anywhere, then nobody is going to discover a power of Congress to legislate on the subject in the Commerce Clause. Or, more precisely, that while I'm sure some enthusiasts will propose it, there is zero chance the current (or I suspect almost any forseeable) Supreme Court will buy that logic.
In other words, this legislation is *only* plausible if Roe is upheld. If Roe is struck down, it's not worth the heavy linen paper on which it's carefully engrossed.
Edit: a skeptic might wonder what the *purpose* of the bill was, then, if it was (1) void if Roe were struck down, and (2) superfluous were Roe upheld. The answer is that it serves the same purpose as the many votes the Republicans held to repeal Obamacare during the period when there was zero chance of such a bill actually passing. Bread and circuses. Or as the late colorful Senator Moynihan put it, boob bait for bubbas.
> Why can't they imagine that conservative states are also coming out in a rash at the idea of having ultra-liberal terms imposed on them?
I'm sure they can imagine that just fine. I think the left position here goes something like:
1) The consequences are sufficiently awful that we need to pull out all the stops and fight dirty if we have to.
2) Those Republican bastards have been fighting dirty ever since Trump got in, and if they don't care about the rules, why should we?
As for leaving it up to states – if my next door neighbor is a mean father then ultimately I can't do much more than talk to him about it, but if he's an abusive one then I would feel obliged to intervene. Live and let live is valuable to a point but I think most people have a line – if you think the other side is (a) literally murdering babies or (b) forcing women into dangerous violations of their bodily autonomy, then I can see why you might not feel able to simply tend your own garden.
(I do admire your attempt at finding a new compromise position. My guess is that most pro-life folks aren't sensitive to where the line is drawn, but maybe I'm just failing to understand the position. I also agree with you that this seems like a matter for Congress, but I think both sides are fully committed to outcomes over process at this point.)
I realize that this probably doesn't matter to your point at all, but I will point out for the sake of accuracy that many of the trigger laws lined up for a Roe overturn at this point (including a piece of federal legislation that will emerge from its holding-pattern subcommittee as soon as Roe overturns and the R's think they can slam it through) would outlaw abortion in all cases, even rape, incest, and life of the mother (but not life of the child), and could be reasonably interpreted as also outlawing the morning-after pill, IUD, and other forms of contraception that function by preventing implantation instead of conception.
Given your religious views, I wouldn't be surprised if this only strengthens your support for these laws, but there you have it.
"as also outlawing the morning-after pill, IUD, and other forms of contraception that function by preventing implantation instead of conception"
Well well well, and here was I being assured for years by the pro-choice side that there were no forms of contraception that were also abortifacients.
Though I suppose if you shove through re-definitions of when a pregnancy begins to "when implantation happens", it's not an abortion if implantation never happened.
Yeah, I do have religious objections, but for American civil law on a secular basis, I can see exemptions being put in - except that the pro-choice side keep changing their terms. e.g. "silly conservatives, there aren't any abortifacient contraceptives!/oh no, if Roe is overturned, then the abortifacients will be banned!" and "silly pro-lifers, if you want to reduce abortions, then encourage more contraception use!/oh no, if Roe is overturned, every woman who has sex will be forced to undergo pregnancy!"
So they're not abortifacient until they are, and contraception works until it doesn't.
"This drug/treatment is not an abortifacient" and "Religious people will call this drug an abortifacient even though it does different things from the drugs that are actually used in abortions and cannot terminate an ongoing pregnancy" are not actually contradictory statements. Religions can define an abortion however they want, regardless of how doctors define it.
(Also, from what I've read, the morning-after pill works by preventing ovulation, not implantation, so I'm not even sure this is true? Not that it matters - all that matters is if legislators *think* it's an abortifacient, and our legislators think some pretty silly things at times.)
As for "contraception works until it doesn't," yeah, that's true, just like seatbelts work until they don't. If you said we should get rid of seatbelts because they don't 100% prevent all fatal car crashes, people would call you an idiot, but apparently the idea that contraception can't be that important because it doesn't 100% prevent unwanted pregnancies makes perfect sense to you.
(Also, can we get less of this "writing what your imagined opponents say in a mocking tone of voice" schtick? It's really annoying and usually doesn't represent what anyone in the thread has actually said to you.)
"The term conception commonly refers to "the process of becoming pregnant involving fertilization or implantation or both".[28] Its use makes it a subject of semantic arguments about the beginning of pregnancy, typically in the context of the abortion debate."
If you look at how pregnancies are studied, treated, and classified in other mammals, the start of the pregnancy is conception, the joining of sperm and egg genomes. (It is not uncommon for different species (such as horses) to have a period of days to weeks where the embryo is merrily going through rapid cell division and growth before implanting. In these animals, as with all others, a new life has absolutely started, may yet fail, and the mothers body is amping up to bring the neonate to full term.) It is only in humans, for the specific purpose of legitimizing the deliberate termination of that new life, that implantation is considered the start of pregnancy. (The deliberate choice part is in the historical record of the scientific terminology.)
Sigh. Reread what I quoted. The _word_ conception refers to "the process of becoming pregnant involving fertilization or implantation or both". It appears to me that "fertilization" and "implantation" seem to be terms with less ambiguity and contention.
BTW, calling fertilization "a new life" is wrong. Both unfertilized egg cell and sperm cell can e.g. hydrolyze ATP to power metabolic processes. If you want to call something "new" at that event, I suggest something like "a new full genome".
My own view is that talking about human "life" is pointless. Almost every cell in your or my body is alive, has human DNA, even (because of copying errors), has unique DNA. The politically important question is where the thing has developed enough that calling it a person and considering its rights are reasonable.
Personally, I'm rather fond of Robert Heinlein's comment:
“Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best, he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear his shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house.”
They aren't abortifacients unless you define life as beginning the very second of fertilization. At which point, if you're a religious person, you'll have to square that with 2/3rds of fertilized eggs naturally failing to implant. To quote the words of my old pastor "God doesn't send a soul into the world to exist for 6 hours and then burn".
As a traditionalist yourself, I'm surprised you aren't willing to compromise at the quickening, given that until recently that was when the Church itself said the soul entered the body. Instead, you go with the mechanistic, materialistic definition of humans being a bunch of meat, and when that meat splits off from its spawner meat and begins new division, that's when it's now a new human.
Everything else you've said is more of the same tribal drum-beating you've been engaging in since the ruling was announced and thus beneath both of our dignity.
God historically sent a large fraction of human souls to exist for no more than six months (postnatal), so it's hardly obvious that six hours is out of the question. If you believe in God and souls in the first place, then you pretty much have to believe that He is up for harvesting a lot of souls very early. If you believe in God and souls and not discretionary infanticide, then you pretty much have to believe that *only* God gets to harvest those souls.
It's still possible to believe that the soul attaches some time after conception, but it isn't logically required.
It isn't "logically required", but it was (and in deeply religious countries STILL IS) the norm to consider the soul to be placed in the body at some point post-conception (usually around the 4-6 month mark). This is the norm even in countries like Iran, which is usually used as the poster child for "repressive religious state that forces everyone to abide by a certifiably insane doctrine". The conception doctrine is a very recent development that bluntly is based on a materialistic understanding of what a human is.
But your logic lesson isn't even particularly relevant to my point. I hope you get some pleasure from being a pedant, at least.
I'm referring to her statement that boils down to "I'd be willing to compromise, but because the pro-choice movement isn't a monolith, oh well, guess we just have to crush each other" and her general flattening of nuanced arguments to try and make them look hypocritical (yes, if you want less abortions you should promote more contraception. This is not contradictory with the idea that outlawing all abortion will cause real harm to women.)
I think it's actually very fair to Deiseach to suggest they're usually above bad faith argumentation. I could state some very UNFAIR things I'd say if I was feeling uncharitable to Deiseach, but I won't.
"Everything else you've said is more of the same tribal drum-beating you've been engaging in since the ruling was announced and thus beneath both of our dignity."
You should patent that mind-reading technology of yours, you'd make a fortune.
Please give links to the texts of specific laws that you find concerning. I have seen multiple cases where people are lumping together laws that ban ' with laws that ban y and laws that ban z - all in different states! - as "all these states are banning x, y, and z!!!!" to get excessively worked up.
Like the "if this goes through, then next they will go after contraception, and then interracial marriage, and then gay rights, and then civil rights!" list of Bad Things which I have seen wafted about online.
Re SCOTUS, Alito listed the cases that established the legality of contraception, gay rights, gay marriage rights, and interracial marriage rights - then said that his current opinion didn't attack them, but also said that they were not derived from the text of the constitution. Personally, I'd prefer to have all of them explicitly protected by legislation, but that is not the current situation.
When it comes to the various states, I can't give specific links right now, mostly because I'm enjoying what I can of my memorial day, but I'm well aware that in my state at least popular sentiment in the Republican base supports the text of this federal legislation, with a radical core being opposed to even fairly mundane forms of contraception.
That in particular is a completely vacuous bit of legislation, which if passed would have no practical effect at all. It defines no crimes, it prohibits nothing, it appropriates and directs no money.
In short, it directs the Executive to do -- nothing at all. It's a "sense of Congress" kind of statement, meant (one supposes) to encourage states to broaden their definitions of "murder" to include unborn children (which they already generally do anyway) right back to the moment of conception (which they most certainly do not).
I completely disagree. If it's passed, federal laws about murder and medical euthanasia suddenly apply to abortions as well, and once again, you can then stretch your hand back to the moment of conception to argue that anti-implantation contraceptives apply the same way. This can and will be argued if it is passed, with success in at least one state, and I will bet money on it if you're so inclined. For a specific bet:
-Contingent on Roe v. Wade being overturned AND the Life at Conception Act being passed, there will be an attempt within 4 years at federally outlawing abortion; that this attempt will not have any carve-outs for rape, incest, or life of mother; and that this attempt will successfully clear any section of the legislative process that has a supermajority of Republicans (absolutely passing if the R's control both parts of Congress and have an R President).
-And then, as a long-odds bet, contingent on THAT law passing, at least one state will pass legislation outlawing IUDs, Plan B, and any other contraceptive that functions partially or wholly by preventing implantation of a fertilized egg within 2 years of the passing of the abortion ban.
I think that nearly everyone is ignoring the fact that what's at stake isn't whether abortion should be legal, but whether its legality should be determined at the state or at the federal level.
I think that the desire to resolve every disagreement at the federal rather than at the state level is (A) stupid, short-sighted, anti-Enlightenment, and anti-American, regardless of your politics, and (B) the main force driving America towards civil war.
Agreed. The more decisions that must apply to everyone, the more things there are to fight over as a function of disagreements around the decisions. Smaller groups, fewer disagreements, more decisions you can make without tearing thigs apart.
I think people who default to national level decision making are underestimating the range of preferences and how those relate to region, as well as slipping into "You have to do things my way, barbarians!" thinking. That latter bit especially is what drives towards social and political splits.
I tend to lean towards resolving most questions at the federal level. The nation is vastly more tightly interconnected than it was in the 1700s, in terms of economics, transportation of both people and goods, and communications.
Yeah, there is always a tradeoff between consistency and home rule, but the ability to account for local special cases in home rule seems to me to be pretty implausible for most issues at this point. For instance, in theory states control traffic laws. In practice, could you imagine what would happen if half the states said "red=stop, green=go" and the other half said "red=go, green=stop"?
Also, for abortion in particular, a good chunk of the divide is more nearly urban/rural than state-to-state.
You can either believe in the rule of the 50%+1 over the 50%-1, or you can believe that government gains it's legitimacy from the consent of the governed. Not both though. By defaulting to a rule by the central government, you're advocating for the former.
On a practical level, you do know that traffic laws aren't set at the federal level? Some states ban U-turns, some cities ban right on red, the usage of a solid green as a yield for left turners, all of that in completely inconsistent.
And yet, everyone knows that Bostonians are the worst drivers.
"You can either believe in the rule of the 50%+1 over the 50%-1, or you can believe that government gains it's legitimacy from the consent of the governed. Not both though. By defaulting to a rule by the central government, you're advocating for the former. " WTF??? The difference between state and federal governments is only a difference in the _degree_ of centralization. A executive ruling over 20 million people is almost as unreachable for the average person as an executive ruling over 300 million people.
On a practical level, most of the states' power over e.g. traffic laws is illusory. They can make tiny changes, but, as I said earlier in this subtree, if half the states said "red=stop, green=go" and half said "red=go, green=stop" it would create chaos. As a practical matter, even where states _nominally_ control the laws, they are usually _not_ sovereign.
"WTF??? The difference between state and federal governments is only a difference in the _degree_ of centralization. "
Not quite. Or rather, tangential to my point.
If I do not consent to my city/county/state government, I can get away from them (though CA and NY are working to prevent this). If I do not consent to my Federal government, I may be able to get away from them but it's not guaranteed. Reducing states to convenient ways of directing mail is an additional step to "stfu and cope, minorities."
I concede that it is less difficult to escape from a state government than from the federal government. As I've mentioned in other comments in this subthread, moving a household to another state is a PITA, even when doing it on one's own terms, rather than fleeing some draconian state legislation.
Also, as I've mentioned elsewhere in this subthread, while _some_ state legislation differs significantly from state to state (as is the case for abortion), for _many_ state powers, states typically adopt some template uniform code, in which case the relevant legislation is _effectively_ national, even though it is nominally under state control.
States certainly can change their traffic signals so that green means stop and eggplant means go. And there's squat the Federal government could do about it.
But you might want to recall that state legislatures are not *entirely* stocked with idiots. They recognize the challenges of having laws different from their neighbors, and in fact a great deal of unsung labor is done by lawyers, national academies, and state legislature staffers trying to balance the desiderata of uniformity against whatever the unique wishes of the states' voters might be.
In the case of commercial and traffic codes, this results in so-called Uniform Codes being drawn up, which are models that some group of legal beagles think can be adapted more or less as-is by states, so they can align with other states in one easy step.
"But you might want to recall that state legislatures are not *entirely* stocked with idiots." Grated - though the proportion seems remarkably high much of the time...
Yes, some of the Uniform Codes are pretty much slapped into place, and this is necessary for the USA to be a functional nation. It is a different procedural mechanism than Congress passing a federal law, but the end result is very similar. Which is why I called much of states' sovereignty illusory. A large chunk of what states' rights advocates passionately defend doesn't really exist, and wouldn't exist even if Congress never passed a single new law.
No, because not every disagreement can be equated with slavery vs. no slavery. "Don't resolve everything at the federal level" does not equal "Don't resolve anything at the federal level." Morality doesn't mean compiling a list of context-free rules. Context always matters. We must make judgements, not just follow rules.
Also, note that the dispute over slavery did lead to civil war. Judging that stopping slavery is worth fighting a civil war does not imply that stopping (or keeping) abortion, or gun control, or anything else we're arguing over now, is worth fighting a civil war.
In that case, can you give a reason that abortion laws should be resolved at the state level, but slavery (or segregation, which did *not* lead to civil war when it was ended at a federal level) should not be? Your original post didn't actually give a reason, you just made a general statement that not *everything* should be handled at the state level. What makes abortion like speed limits, rather than like segregation?
I can give a reason to people who believe that aborting a fetus isn't murder: Disallowing abortions in a state isn't nearly as bad, morally, as allowing slavery in a state. To be forced to carry a fetus to term isn't as bad as being forced to labor all day, every day, for your entire life, in inhuman conditions for people who can abuse you, sell your family somewhere far away, and are given the power of life and death over you, and may just let you starve to death once you're too old to work (as the Romans did). Nor is getting pregnant something entirely beyond one's control, as is being enslaved. Also, it's considerably easier for a pregnant woman to get on a bus to a state that allows abortions, than for a slave to escape to a free state. I don't mean here to invoke the full familiar moral narrative; I realize many people will jump on my statement that getting pregnant isn't beyond one's control as if I were using it in the same way as do people who think that statement in itself justifies banning abortions. But I must mention it, because it is an important factor distinguishing the banning of abortion from slavery.
To people who think abortion *is* murder, I would argue that the primary guiding principle of the US Constitution is the belief that no one person, and no group that isn't at least a 2/3 majority, should get their way entirely (although one could argue that the electoral college defeats this principle). But I think this argument wouldn't convince any of those people, because the same metaphysics which lead to demanding that a bright line be drawn between human and non-human, thus making fetuses count equal to adults in any moral calculus, also lead to demanding a bright line between good and evil, right and wrong, and to believing that to tolerate "evil" is to be evil.
In fact, I think that both sides in the abortion debate share that metaphysics. "Silence is violence" is another symptom of such a metaphysics. The difference is that one side draws the human / non-human boundary at birth, while the other draws it at conception. Both sides believe the American system of {legislating morality at the level of the state, at a lower level, or not at all} is evil.
The same metaphysics also leads to statements like your initial question, which I have encountered many times before, and also in forms with different terms taking the place of "abortion"; and associate with the view that moral reasoning is made using a set of context-free rules over universally-quantified variables, so that any statement about the morality of criminalizing something at the federal level is one of the form "P(X) => immoral(X)", and thus applies equally to slavery.
Consider another example: criminalizing marijuana. Last I heard, marijuana is still illegal at the federal level; some states just don't enforce it. If we must apply a uniform policy to all issues, and abortion should be resolved at the federal level, then so should criminalizing marijuana. So, in fact, should everything; there would be no need for state legislatures, only state bureaucracies.
"Not as bad as slavery" strikes me as a pretty low bar to clear. Like, Jim Crow laws aren't as bad as slavery, are they? Is being forced to go to a black-only school better or worse than being forced to carry a pregnancy to term? Probably black men and white women have different answers to that question. What principle can you use to draw the line?
Also, "we should only make it a federal issue if you think it's a really really bad thing" seems pretty exploitable by the people who think that abortion is literally a holocaust of dead babies.
I mean, if preventing people from being enslaved is worth dying and killing for; then, so should preventing innocent children from being murdered right?
Indeed, I would argue that NOT having federal legislation RE: the legality of slavery is what led to the ACW. I hate to risk pattern-matching here, but it wouldn't surprise me if, the way things are going, there's a civil conflict in America known as the Abortion War at some point.
IMHO, we didn't have federal legislation on the legality of slavery because, at the time the Constitution was written, the South would probably have won a civil war. Leaving it up to the states was the best thing even an abolitionist could have done.
Congress only had the power to legislate on slavery to the extent it was granted the power somewhere in Article I (or the Bill of Rights). The Founders knew this, and were careful to include a provision saying the importation of slaves (which was clearly within Congress' purview) could not be banned before 1808. And indeed Congress prohibited the importation of slaves on 1 January 1808.
The Interstate Slave Act was also clearly within the Commerce Clause, so long as one considered a slave property, or at least by the Full Faith And Credit clause. It was also within Congress's power to prohibit slavery in the Territories, since they weren't yet states. And these things were more than enough grist to stoke passions, with the northern states hating the former and the southern states the latter.
But Congress only acquired the power to prohibit slavery *within* states by the Fourteenth Amendment, which is why the Civil Rights Act of 1866 (passed *after* the Thirteenth Amendment but before the Fourteenth) was repassed in 1870 after the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified.
And something worth noting is that for similar reasons the Emancipation Proclamation only freed slaves in the rebel states under military command -- as far as Lincoln could Constitutionally reach -- and the slaves in e.g. Maryland had to wait until Maryland amended its constitution in 1864. Those in Delaware and Kentucky had to actually wait for the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in late 1865.
It wouldn't surprise me if the losing side (whichever that ends up being) does some terrorism. It would be a huge surprise to me if we had two actual armies fighting each other like we had in the actual Civil War.
I certainly hope that you are right on the latter point. Gettysburg was bad enough. Reenacting it with the addition of fission-fusion-fission bombs would be unfortunate.
I'm no oracle. It's just that it seems like an issue where either side is very much unwilling to compromise in the current political climate, even more so than normal, and which has already been shown to instigate extreme and violent behavior even in less polarized times.
I think the most-contentious issue isn't abortion, which isn't a big issue to all rural people, just to the very Christian. The really dangerous issue is gun control. If Congress tries to make people turn in their AR-15s, there will be war.
A meaningful US Civil War could only be fought if you can meaningfully split the US armed forces. So you'd basically need (a) some meaningful number of states decide to secede and take their fair share of the armed forces with them, and (b) the armed forces decide to go along with this.
But realistically I think the precedent has been set already that states of the USA aren't allowed to secede. There's no strong appetite among any part of public for "Let's do what the Confederacy did 150 years ago but this time let's get it right!" And besides, if 50 years of Roe vs Wade wasn't enough to (even come close to) precipitation secession from the anti-abortion states then I can hardly see how what comes next would be.
While I was an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins while Girard was on the faculty and eventually came to read Violence and the Sacred when the English translation came out (1977), I have never been a Girardian. But I had been in the orbit of Richard Macksey when I was at Hopkins, and Macksey had worked closely with Girard in the (in)famous structuralism conference that took place in the Fall of 1966. Consequently I had heard Girard lecture on mimetic desire and the logic of sacrifice and it stuck with me.
A couple of years or so ago I decided to watch Stephen Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), which I had not seen when it first came out. I thought it was a pretty decent film and that was then. Then, for some reason or another – boredom, who knows? – I decided to watch it again, and again. I took notes. I watched Jaws 2, which was not directed by Spielberg. It wasn’t nearly so good either, too diffuse and it lacked a character comparable to Quint in the original. I just barely made it through Jaws 3 and simply gave up on Jaws 4 at about 40 minutes in.
So, I asked myself, why is the original so much better than the sequels? As soon as I’d asked the question, that pesky light-bulb over my head started blinking like mad: sacrifice! mimetic desire! Girard!
I'm trying to follow your reasoning about Quint being a sacrifice to end the cycle of mimetic desire, but have some difficulties.
A) Isn't Quint / the shark a lot like Ahab / the White Whale? But Ahab is in no way a sacrifice, and there is no mimetic desire in Moby Dick. What's the template for Moby Dick?
B) You present a narrative in which Quint is a sacrifice, but at the end, you say that narrative was broken when Quint destroyed the radio, which was before his death. How, then, can Quint be a sacrifice?
A) Well, sure, Quint is somewhat modeled on Ahab, but Jaws IS a different story and Quint is put to different use in this one. Moreover, my Spideysense is telling me that Ahab IS a sacrificial victim, but this isn’t the place to work it out.
Some considerations: 1) Ahab certainly wasn’t the only one after Moby Dick, just the most persistent one. 2) Think of the whaling industry as a whole, all these men after all these whales. Remember, whaling was a major industry at the time; whale oil lighted people’s homes and buildings – which ended in the wake of the oil strike in Titusville, PS. Moreover, as Mark Andreesen has pointed out, whaling voyages are the prototype for venture capital. Everyone was after the Big One, but that’s $$$, not vengeance. So Ahab’s possession is a perversion of whaling, as an industry. That’s not yet an argument, but it’s material to work with.
B) When Quint broke the radio he broke a contract, not a narrative. The narrative is about Quint and Amity, and that’s still ongoing. Brody indicated the link between Amity & the shark earlier in the film when he told the mayor “You’re the mayor of Shark City.”
From my essay: “In smashing the radio Quint had abrogated the implicit contract he had worked out with Brody and Hooper and the more formal one he had worked out with the town. He is no longer acting as an agent of the town, if he ever was. He has declared himself to be a law unto himself. Myth-logic has transmuted the conflict between Amity and the shark into a conflict primarily between one person, Quint, and the shark. Moreover, in the realm of myth-logic, Amity and the shark became one being, Shark Town. Thus, in killing Quint the shark in effect acts as the agent of Amity/Shark Town. Quint has become a sacrificial victim, a scapegoat.”
Quint is paradoxically both an insider and an outsider, the ideal sacrificial victim. He’s a long-term resident of the town, working in a nautical business. He thus stands in contrast to the newcomers who are after him – the sheriff and Hooper – but also the tourists who flood the town each summer. So he can easily stand as a representative of the town. But he’s also a disagreeable loner who resents the town and feels superior to it.
Re. A, I hadn't thought about the whaling industry as a whole. But Ahab is breaking with the industry, not representing it; there are passages which point out that what Ahab is doing isn't profitable. To use that line of thought, I'd have to read Moby Dick as a defense of venture capitalism. That seems a priori unlikely to have been Melville's intent (though I am committing the intentional fallacy).
Re. B, I was thinking about the penultimate paragraph, which includes this: "Midway through the movie myth-logic transmuted a story about a community in crisis into one about men adventuring on a shark hunt. Yes, we know that the hunt was undertaken to serve Amity. But that’s only knowledge. The emotional force of the Amity bond began transforming when the Orca put out to sea and was cut when Quint destroyed the radio."
That seems to say that story began to replace the mimetic-desire narrative with an adventure story when the Orca put out to sea, and that this transformation was complete when Quint destroyed the radio. So the story was no longer about mimetic desire, nor about the community at all, when Quint died.
Mimetic desire is one thing, sacrifice another, though they are related. You can have the first without the second, but second presupposes the first.
Yes, the bond between Amity and Quint began weakening when the Orca went to sea. After all, he’d made a deal with the town to kill the shark. Don’t know whether there was a signed contract, but there certainly was an understanding. THAT’s what began to weaken when Quint got onto his home turf, as it were. At the same time the mythic/symbolic link between Amity and the shark, Shark City, strengthened. And that’s what killed Quint. He was in effect sacrificed to atone for the town’s greed and callousness.
In a way you could say that Spielberg’s genius in this film was turning a sea-adventure yarn into a story of sacrifice.
I think my difficulty is that we're working with different understandings of what a sacrifice is. I would say a sacrifice to atone for the town's actions must be someone the town loves, or else there's no atonement in it. I also don't think sacrifice must involve mimetic desire. Most examples of sacrifice from history, religion, and mythology that I can think of aren't resolutions to mimetic conflict. The most-important sacrifice myth in Western history, as well as the clearest (thanks to 2000 years of arguing over the causation behind the efficacy of that sacrifice), is that of Jesus, and it isn't a resolution to mimetic conflict; it's a payment of someone else's debt.
Peter Benchley wrote both the book and the first script for the movie. Carl Gottlieb and Spielberg both changed it during production, but Spielberg said he changed it because the mechanical shark wasn't reliable, so his changes presumably consisted of reducing the shark's visibility ( https://ew.com/article/2011/06/08/steven-spielberg-jaws-interview/ ). So perhaps whatever was so satisfying in the movie was already in the book.
If that’s your conception of sacrifice, then we’re going to have to disagree. I note that that’s not how Girard understands sacrifice, which is what I’m arguing in the essay. Note that I’m quoting him as using the word “lynching.” As an extreme example, think about ritual sacrifice among the Aztecs, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_culture
Yes, Benchley wrote the book and the initial script. But the movie is very different from the book and we have to assume that that’s because Spielberg wanted it that way. I’ve not read the book, but judging from what I’ve read about both book and movie in Wikipedia and what I’ve read from other critics, here are some of the important differences: 1) In the book, the Mafia owns a lot of land in Amity and don’t want its value to drop, so the beaches stay open. Not in the movie. 2) Both the sheriff and his wife are natives of Amity, but he’s middle class and she’s upper class. In the movie they’re both out-of-towners. 3) Hooper has an affair with the wife. Not in the movie. 4) Quint is not so important in the book as in the movie.
In particular, 5) the Indiana speech doesn’t exist in the book, but it is a major scene in the movie. Several people were involved in writing that speech. But the final version was written by Robert Shaw, the actor who played the role of Quint.
“Spielberg said he changed it because the mechanical shark wasn't reliable...” That’s about showing the shark in scenes and says nothing about any of the other changes I mentioned.
You have to be in their stable of writers to post. Every Monday the feature posts from that stable. The other six days they have link posts. When their stable runs low, they issue an open call for people to apply. If selected you'll be assigned a Monday slot, once every four weeks.
A few months ago, our project won an ACX grant to try to pursue a potentially far-reaching idea of spellchecking genomes with genetic editing. We are looking for a genetic editing expert to help in an advisory capacity, or potentially even join the core team.
This summer program is held in America too and called Sparc. They only select 30 srudents a year. My son applied in 11th grade. Didn't get in, but he thoroughly enjoyed answering their application questions - lots of interesting puzzles, I think, he said. None of the college essay type stuff like "If you were a tree which tree would you be?" :)
What's the EA line on blood donations? I'm particularly interested in platelets since that's what the Red Cross has been hounding me about lately, but it's a bit more burdensome than normal donations so I'm curious how the benefits compare.
Speaking purely to the medical value rather than financial, as I'm from the UK where we can't be paid to donate:
My understanding is that O- blood is most valuable for whole blood donation, and AB+ the most valuable for platelet donation. If you're AB you'll probably give more value with platelets, and A is almost as good. (Search 'universal donor' and 'universal donor plasma' for the details).
If you're type O you will definitely be more valuable as a whole blood donor.
(Source: uneducated layman with no relevant credentials)
I'm type O. The main thing seems to be that you can donate platelets every seven days, whereas if you donate blood you need two months of recovery before you can again.
Hmm - for platelets, is that once a week if you donate uniformly across a full year? Back when I was donating platelets (2013) there was sufficient red blood cell loss from e.g. head space in the centrifuge that the effective limit was closer to once every two weeks. ( Now my primary care physician has me on low dose aspirin, so I still donate whole blood but can't donate platelets. )
I'm not sure exactly how often the limit is- I think it's seven days but in practice the limiting factor is my willingness so I haven't paid close attention.
Disappointed not to have been a finalist this year after my surprise people's choice awards victory in 2021, but I think ACX readers are just generally more interested in a quasi-political memoir like Orwell's Down and Out then in a surreal, navel-gazing essay on luxury cruising, so I can't say I'm exactly surprised. That said I think the DFW Cruise Essay is of much greater immediate import to most readers of ACX, given that most of us are middle-class westerners with far too much time on our hands.
Enjoyed your review a lot & am now experiencing my customary sadness that DFW is not writing about these times. I miss him so much I daren’t read Infinite Jest again, which is stupid but one day I may tease out what I’m getting at.
I enjoyed this review and ranked it higher than some of the eventual finalists. I like your writing a lot, but DFW comes across as completely insufferable - I found myself skipping over the tedious DFW quotes to get to the far more interesting Whimsi stuff. This really didn't make me want to read the original, so in that respect the review was very successful, but may not have been what you were going for.
I also didn't quite get if you were trying to tell me about an essay you enjoyed or draw a particular lesson from that essay - the reviews which I rated higher were much more focused on one argument (my review was a complete spaghetti of arguments so I'm in a glass house throwing stones here!)
I've only ever skimmed the DFW essay, but it struck me as just boring (albeit well-written) classism.
There's nothing middle-class Americans hate more than people of slightly lower social class than them who have more money than them, so there's a huge market for writings that skewer this segment of people.
I honest don't think there's any skewering going on here. DFW is making a inquiry in good-faith, attempting to understand how and why all the other cruisers are having so much 'fun' and why he personally finds that 'fun' repels him so much. He writes openly admiring things about many of his fellow cruisers, and at no point sneers at class-markers, except in humorous and pretty much benign asides (such as when he notices that everyone taking part in the engine room tour is a thick-wristed, wraparound sunglasses wearing, ex-military type white male over 40).
I think a full reading of the essay would change your mind. DFW was anything but a boring classist. He spent much of his life living in rural Illinois, by choice.
It became a sign of an intelligent man to hate cruises these days. If it so, then I'm proud to be as stupid as possible, because I love ships and cruising. Whether it was Mediterranean, or fjords of Norway, or North Sea, I came back each day to my cabin, tired to the bone from walking, seeing, enjoying all the sights and places so unlike my home city, big though it is. I don't know a better way to travel - a new port each day, and yet in between you get to sleep in a very comfortable bed, and eat delicious food. I've tried international bus tours, and there is just no comparison. And I love ships, and water, seas and rivers. Frankly, if I had enough time, I'd take a ship everywhere I could instead of flying - flying is boring, stressful and cramped. Trains are only a bit better and private car is far more work than one should undertake during a vacation. If I were a millionaire, I'd be the one with his own mega-yacht and I would live on it, circumstances permitting. And wear a boater hat, just to spite the fashion.
And company - cruise ships provide interesting company! I guess this have to do with the fact that I'm not from America or Europe, and they sit people by language. Our pensioners don't often go on cruises, and neither do people who just want to lay beside a pool all day - cruises cost too much for that. So there is a selection bias favouring people who actually like to travel and visit new places. and have interesting experiences, despite the cost. I heard all kinds of stories at the dinner tables of cruise ships!
And I even like the evening entertainment most of the time, but I have to admit that this is mostly because my musical tastes coincide with boomers'. As long as the orchestra plays songs from old movies and musicals, I'm happy.
So, this essay, it maybe has some relevance to "middle-class westerners with far too much time on our hands", but my sincerest hope is for the health of the cruising industry, so it continue to serve me from time to time.
As a form of transportation, I don't think cruises are even comparable to planes, trains, and the rest, being so spacious and basically designed as a destination in themselves. That said, I sincerely hope you read DFW's essay, as it's examining the luxury cruise more as a social phenomenon representative of deeper cultural trends, rather than attempting to evaluate it on its own terms.
I wonder if your previous entry, in 2021, had shorter sentences. This review's entire first paragraph is a single complex sentence. I understand it but it's not pleasant to read.
I like to slip into the style of whatever writer I'm reviewing from time to time, as a kind of homage. DFW was a big fan of page-spanning sentences, so guilty as charged I guess.
I’m working on studying up on AI and AI alignment and I’m looking for book recommendations. I just finished Superintelligence and Human Compatible. What should I tackle next?
Okay, so there is the subreddit, Discord, bulletin board and of course the open threads like this one. Can you tell me, what of those you use for what? How are they/ is your focus there different or similar?
I still read the bulletin board from time to time, and was resident there until Scott opened. It's much more right-wing, and since they lost the benefits of Scott as moderator, often pretty nasty. (The people there would disagree.)
Even so, a lot of those right-wingers are interesting, and it's probably worthwhile to keep up with what people who really disagree with you are thinking. They also have a good Ukraine war thread which I find useful as a place to go to figure out what's happening over there. I've been visiting a lot more often since the war kicked off.
Discord is a way to chat back and forth with one or multiple people and use both text and images to do so. You can have Discord open on the desktop at the same time as whatever game and communicate back and forth while playing. It can be in real time or close to it with a lot of participants.
Why? Hmm. I have never looked at the ACX channel. The only ones I've seen are Roblox-related or "personal Discord servers." The Roblox ones have people spamming various giveaways, some of which are scams. ACX has no points economy, doesn't give away ACX-Bucks in-game, but I think some people use Discord for other things and just like it, and having an ACX Discord means you can just click over to it easily from whatever other thing you were doing on Discord without having to log into anything else or go through email or substack. It may also trend younger-age.
It also probably simulates a verbal discussion more accurately due to the speed.
i just read the bulletin board (and rarely comment). It has a flavour of the old comments section from SSC, which is unsurprising since most of the commenters emigrated from the SSC open threads. Much more feisty, argumentative and in-depth than the comments here, and also less overtly rationalist which suits me. A fair amount of CW stuff which might put some people off.
I was wondering, how well we know Autism to say it is not, as a diagnosis category, the 21st century version of hysteria?
I was at a family function with a distant cousin who is a nonverbal autist and I realized he has quite different symptoms and traits than the usual high-functional cases we see. Is there a common link that connects the lighter to the more severe cases, or are we perhaps putting different diseases together into one giant diagnosis pile?
The approach in treating it as a spectrum comes from the observation that often, the severe cases exhibit the same kind of symptoms as the mild ones, and then some, and/or the symptoms are more severe. There are also 'syndromic' cases where autistic symptoms are present as part of a larger disorder like tuberous sclerosis (which is monogenic, caused by mutation in one of TSC1/2 genes), which makes the case that these symptoms are all the result of a common etiology in brain development.
Both high and low functioning autism (my partner is HFA and we observe all of these) often involve some or all of:
- Difficulties in intuitively perceiving social contexts and cues. Often, LFAs are just helpless while HFAs are intelligent enough to cover it with masking, which results in them being consciously aware of things that NTs do unconsciously.
- Difficulties in sensory habituation, i.e. "tuning out" persistent smells, noises, tactile sensations etc. Also comes with texture-related picky eating. An LFA may get angry and even violent from an inside tag on a shirt that they don't know what to do with, while an HFA would just be unable to think of anything else until they cut it out.
- Self-stimulation, or stimming. Forcing a tactile input on yourself to drown out everything else. In LFA in can get self harming (e.g. beating your head) and happens more often, in HFA usually reserved to sensory overwhelm situations and is usually milder like rubbing your face or wrapping a blanket very tight.
- Difficulty in adapting to routine breaking/need for a rigid routine. Here too, if for example the sequence of things you do when waking up is perturbed even a bit, an LFA may break down in a tantrum while an HFA may just get anxious and have executive trouble.
- Hyperfixation. In LFA can take the form of actual fixation on an object/process to the exclusion of everything else, in HFA the stereotypical deep diving into very specific interests.
- Difficulties in emotional regulation: adapting your emotions and their intensity to the context, forcing yourself to calm down, etc.
LFA also comes with general intellectual disability and language acquisition problems, which make dealing with the above much harder.
I will shill, as always, my favorite review on the subject - autism as a disorder of prediction
Which postulates that what all the autistic symptoms have in common is overall weaker top-down predictive input (for example, sensory habituation is your brain predicting downwards a continuous sensory input identical to what your senses receive so that the error propagating back is zero, and you stop perceiving the input). This also causes the anxiety of an unpredictable, "magical" world, and the way they deal with it is forcing predictable input - stimming, rigid routines, fixation on a thing you know well, etc.
Wow that makes a lot of sense! Your descriptions of LFA vs HFA symptoms made me realize that they're not that different and in fact may lie on a gradient. I'll also read the article you posted, it seems very insightful
I also want to note that there are predictions made by this model that Pawan Sinha and others have been carefully testing for the past 8 years. I recently heard a talk he gave where he described some borne-out predictions. For example how autists' hands and stance move when they need to catch a ball: NT's predict where the ball will go, move their hands there, and then adjust a little bit as needed. Autists have trouble doing that - they just move their hands really fast to the ball at the last moment.
There's also work being done on the brain circuitry level - Earl Miller (also at MIT) has a good candidate for the physical substrate of predictive processing in the prefrontal cortex: gamma (high-freq) oscillations carrying sensory info inside lower PFC levels are selectively dampened by alpha/beta (low freq) oscillations coming from higher levels/rest of the brain. He's got a postdoc working to see if this pathway is perturbed in autism models, I'm anxious to hear what comes out of it :)
Hysteria as a diagnosis was very clearly a result of a lack of scientific knowledge, sexism, and "girl stuff is yucky". It never had the large scientific backing that Autism currently has. It not unusual in medicine to start with one big pile of symptoms, name the pile, develop diagnostic tools, then over time hone down the symptoms or break up the pile into multiple disorders. I don't think this is a bad thing or an indictment of the original diagnoses and tools. Its part of the scientific process.
Oh, there's definitely that too, although I don't know how prevalent and if it's actually a source of much underdiagnosis. The three high-functioning autists I know are all female (including my partner) and they're all annoyed that the public perception and even diagnosis are very male-centered.
For example, girls have to learn to navigate complex social situations at a much earlier age, so high-functioning autistic girls often get very good at masking, to the extent that from the outside they don't seem to have any social problems at all. No social problems? No autism diagnosis.
In the end I wondered if it was a misdiagnosis, because even though he was nonverbal and had some quirks he was very sociable, and not at all averse to human contact (hugs, etc)
There are a bunch of different diagnostic instruments. The Autism Behavior Checklist is one of the most commonly used for children, with "57 questions in five general categories of symptoms": sensory, relating, body & object use, language, and social & self-help (from the Springer page describing the instrument).
There's another one I've seen used which breaks it down into 3 categories, something like self-help, communication, and one that boils down to idiosyncractic and all-consuming interests.
So potentially your cousin scores high on enough other things that his functioning at the "social" level doesn't drop his score too much.
Or he may have gone through years of therapy that have included things like learning to smile at other people and giving & receiving hugs. Maybe they increase his dose of a medication when he goes into party situations. They may be surrounding him with as much tenderness as possible so he doesn't develop additional aversion to people.
Autism may indeed be several overlapping things but there is probably also a lot of behind-the-scenes management going on. This sounds awful but it matches what I've seen.
Realizing that communication is a thing that can & should happen - not everyone realizes that. That's one of the core areas of autism. No impulse to send messages from self to other in almost any form, speech, sign, drawing, tapping, etc. or receive messages from others. Different levels of autism may have the impulse to communicate but in different ways or about different things, with varying levels of conceptualization of the other party as a person. Or being overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data transferred in the communication process.
Sometimes the activities of daily living stuff just isn't perceived as necessary - the hygiene, housekeeping, grocery shopping, scheduling side of life.
Nobody really understands what autism is, but I don't think the word "spectrum" necessarily means that. One could easily say that obesity is a spectrum; you can be a little bit obese, or extremely obese, or anything in between. I don't see any reason a psychiatric condition couldn't be like that.
Not my project, but I found a guy doing microgrants for chaotic projects. It’s at https://www.pandemonium.capital/ if anyone is interested, I think it’s a fun idea
In the spirit of doing low status things with high potential, I am working on a site to allow commissioning of fringe erotica and am looking to hire a second web developer.
The idea is to build a place where people with niche interests can post bounties for specific stories. In my time moonlighting as an erotic author, I've noticed a lack of good sites to do freelance erotic writing work. I think the reason for this is that most people think porn is icky, so despite there being a huge market for extremely niche content, the platforms currently available are pretty abysmal. This is our opportunity.
We're currently in beta and can pay a junior-level wage, with senior-level equity. If you're a web developer who wants to join a fully remote startup, please reach out at https://www.outfoxstories.com/blog/careers/
As with my other startups, I began this project with the goal of generating wealth to put towards alignment research.
Is "generating wealth to put towards alignment research" still high-priority? My impression is that there's a ton of money relative to talent in this area right now.
I'm much less sure this is the right thing to do than I was a few years ago for that reason, but there are a few reasons to keep going down this path.
Quickly summarised, if we're successful here, we'll come out the other side with experience growing and running organisations (and proof of our competence at it) and a significant amount of starting capital with no strings attached. Shifting that into building a new alignment organisation in 2023 or 2024 could have more of an impact than trying to apply for grants to work directly on alignment today, especially given I don't have particularly strong skills in direct alignment research myself.
I guess you could say it's not just a money thing, but also a way or learning skills that I think will be useful, and generating money that doesn't need to go through grant bottlenecks seems like a useful alternative to supplant the current system.
I am not sure of anything here! It definitely does seem like a reasonable thing to attempt though, responding one by one:
"Are you sure that your startup is the best way to raise money for alignment research?"
It's a way of generating revenue where there seems to be a gap in the market, sure! It's also an area with low downsides, because it doesn't hinder anything anybody else is doing in alignment.
"Will researchers want grants from you? How do you plan on allocating and distributing the money in practice? Are the skills you'll develop from this website really transferrable to funding scientific research, since you don't have experience in the alignment field?"
The plan is to establish an alignment organisation directly, either internal to the company, or as a secondary not for profit. The skills in running and growing an organisation should certainly crossover, and having another independent project working on alignment certainly seems useful. Given there are already many grants, working outside the grant system seems like a sensible way to hedge our bets. I'll also be much more confident in my own abilities to do this if I manage to succeed in the startup space. If I were to instead straight up risk money other people have put towards alignment on my own unproven skills, the downside would be greater, as well as the upside being smaller.
"How will your startup start making money so quickly, when most startups (even ones like Uber) are unprofitable for the first several years?"
Uber's actually an example of a startup that was deliberately blitzscaling using VC money as a moat. Many startups are profitable quickly, and many which are not are still sold to a larger company within two years of launch. We actually already have revenue on the site (in beta now), so I'm taking a larger risk with more of my own money to speed up progress by hiring. Ideally we'd hire people who weren't working directly on alignment anyway!
I'm also not confident at all this will succeed, I simply think it's worth the time to pursue, because the potential upsides are significantly greater than what I could contribute to alignment in other areas, and it certainly looks like we need to take risky bets. I also have a significant background in startups, so it's an area where I may have a good comparative advantage, compared with working at an alignment org, or trying to start something independently today.
I think your problem there is that dress it up as erotica all you like, potential customers will be looking for porn, and porn is about "get to the action as fast as possible". So are you going to write erotica, or is it "yeah, gimme a side of guy with 12" cock, blonde with 52DD tits, this list of kinks, hold the mushy stuff"?
The more developed writing generally goes under fanfiction and that is (1) characters the consumers of such content already know, like, and have particular views about and (2) it's all done for free. There are commissions for art work and so on, but in general the bulk of content is free.
So asking people to pay for content on an unproven site is where you are going to fall between two stools; porn and fanfic, where you may end up displeasing both sets of potential customers ("I commissioned a story and they wasted pages on talking about feelings and describing the whole set-up"/"I commissioned a story and they didn't get the characters I described right; if I wanted PWP I would have stuck with AO3").
If you can write decent erotica, I wish you well, but it's a crowded market and how will you stand out as "we provide good writing as well as hot action to your specifications"?
It's true I have little idea how large this market is. I'm basing my guess off my audience as an author requesting very specific things in my stories, and being willing to pay for them. A platform that enables that in an easier, safer way than just sending payments and trusting the author is a step up from what is currently happening, so I think it has potential. I'm definitely not going after the traditional porn customers, or the fanfic customers.
Of course, maybe there are only a very small number of people keen on that, and we'll have trouble finding them, but it's worth a try. I expect we'll need to iterate a bunch to find the sweet spot between 'I want this particular author to write more' or 'I want to see more of this series' and 'I want this very specific scene to be written out'.
Yes, a website that handles payments for erotic authors to take commissions would be useful. A concern in this area is that payment processors are not fond of allowing payments for adult content, so the niche author has a risk of either losing access to the platform or to their account, depending on whichever Paypal/etc. decides to crack down on. Stability in this area would be huge, though I see you do use Paypal and Payoneer, which don't have the best track records in this area. (I had to close my Patreon for this reason, when they added limits on niche adult content. Speaking of which, I can't find an acceptable content policy on your site...)
I don't know what your specific plans for the site are but I logged in and looked around it does seem to want some thought for artist-commissioner relations. It is likely that people will want to commission specific artists and that specific artists would want to advertise availability for commissions, for example; also it should go without saying that people might want to create direct commissions privately, or for those who want to use the crowdfunding feature, at least in an unlisted way. It does not look like one can even send direct messages yet. (Are tags browsable either?)
If you haven't already I would suggest checking out existing/larger comparable sites, both for important features and to see what existing communities are doing or are in need of in regards to commissions. Nifty was mentioned elsewhere in thread, but it's a very old-school site with not much in the way of social features. My prototypical example is sofurry dot com, also a site of long standing particularly oriented towards furry work—originally writing only, but also other artwork—it includes several community features including a market of its own for people to post commission requests / availability.
"I'm definitely not going after the traditional porn customers, or the fanfic customers."
Then who is your potential customer base? Casual customers will buy a book, or watch a movie, for their hit of erotica. If you want to draw in, say, the romance novel readers to get a customised story to their specs, then you will need to market to them to get over "but I can just get the next book from my favourite author, why would I pay a stranger to write something for me?" objections.
I do think it will be a niche market, but it sounds a fascinating project. I also think you are going to hit the problem between "good writing, more interested in being proper literature" and "porn" where you will have to come down on one side or the other.
The Black Lace imprint (published by Virgin Books) started in 1993 as "erotica by and for women", steamier and more directly about sex than romance novels of the time. It stopped in 2009, then relaunched again in 2012 and I don't know how it's been doing since. You seem to be aiming for the same general idea - erotic but well-written. I have no idea how you'll do but let us know!
I broadly agree! I'd say it's more trying to hit that niche of "Man, I really want to read a story about a woman getting turned into a puddle. There just aren't enough puddle woman stories out there nowadays" (and other requests like it). I have no idea how many people are willing to pay to see their specific requests turn into decent-quality, 3000 word stories, but that's the risk we're taking!
I'll post a retrospective in six months time, haha.
The reason for this is that porn is highly regulated and against TOS of most services. Hell, some services don't even let swimsuit stores on if the pictures are too revealing. If you want to do this you'll need to find hosts, payment processors, etc that will work with you. They'll probably charge higher fees but at least they won't terminate you for doing porn. Or you can try and do the plausible deniability thing like OnlyFans. "What, we're just a platform for creators that allows some adult content! Definitely not a porn site who needs all those regulations, no sir."
Even erotic fiction? I can understand the regulation of certain branches of the industry, certainly, to prevent exploitation and potential CSA situations, but if you're just writing something that's basically a Harlequin Romance novel with more explicit language I don't see why that would need to be more regulated than, say, alcohol purchases or lottery tickets.
I'm not a legal expert on such things. But I'd expect most companies take a "shoot first, ask questions later" approach. Now, of course, you can do it anyway. Just be aware you're going to run into some issues like that.
It's true a lot of sites have weird and arbitrary rules about what is and isn't allowed in terms of erotic or titillating content, but I don't think it usually runs up to the level of payment processors engaging in blind-fire terminations unless some troll engages in truly heinous behavior (sending false claims of CP to the processor and the like). Not to say that arbitrary censorship for erotica doesn't happen, but usually PP aren't the failure point there from what I've seen looking into it. And once again, I suspect it will be harder to whip up a censorious stink around erotic fiction, as that's something different from clip or film-style porn of both the live and animated varieties.
Have you looked into Yuletide? It's a fanfic gift economy system for fans to commission stories with rare settings/combinations of characters, and people can be very specific about what they want.
It's obviously not quite what you're doing, but it might have some useful structures.
I have seen Nifty! There's definitely plenty of good work out there, I do think there's a gap in connecting people who want to write with people that have requests though. Plus Nifty is not the most user friendly site in the world, the fact that it is successful despite that gives me hope there's potential for a new company here.
Everyone says the next crypto winter is here (and I agree). If you’re a person working on a blockchain project, what’s your plan for the immediate future?
Hiring on Blockchain projects hasn't been any worse than the general tech freeze, ime. It's actually been better than most tech. There's still a huge demand for a relatively small pool of devs.
But my pov is from engineering and the engineering part was always on more solid footing. Blockchain really is useful and interesting! But a lot of the uses are kind of dubious, if I'm honest.
What do you see as the future of the space in the next few years? What that’s currently available strikes you as the most useful and least dubious application?
Something I've always found odd is that problems where blockchain actually would be a good solution, for example certificate transparency in the TLS/CA system, seem to work just fine without it (yes there's hashes and append-only legers, but it's not blockchain).
That's because when you only want some of the features bundled together in the blockchain package, then the system design can be greatly simplified. (Just as if you don't need all of ACID then NoSQL can be faster than a traditional DBMS, or if you don't care about low variance in social outcomes then an individualist stance can outperform socialism.)
So, I made a prediction (and lost) that cryptocurrency was not going to be the main use of Blockchain in ten years ten years ago. So, y'know, I'm not exactly Nostradamus over here. I expect there's a big regulatory fight coming. The professional-managerial class has already decided blockchain is haram based on the spontaneous rants I've seen on Twitter from people ranging from Roman historians to journalists covering Russia. On the other hand, the crypto people have a lot of money and popular support. And Republicans have been getting weirdly pro-crypto in the past few years and their political star is on the rise right now. So we'll see.
The most dubious application are shit/memecoins that are pumped and dumped by people doing what are straight up Blue Sky/Rug Pull schemes while avoiding the SEC. The most useful application is getting around the antiquated American banking system's cyberinfrastructure. I might be biased because I hate it. But it shouldn't take three days for a transaction to settle or 15% to transfer money to Honduras or wherever. Of course, that doesn't strictly require crypto. The entire US banking system could overhaul its own systems. But they won't. Because they're an oligopoly protected by copious regulation with little competition.
The most dubious application are shit/memecoins that are pumped and dumped by people doing what are straight up Blue Sky/Rug Pull schemes while avoiding the SEC. The most useful application is getting around the antiquated American banking system's cyberinfrastructure
> these are the same picture.
more seriously, is "getting around the banking system" just crypto or is there a different system i am unaware of?
No, they're not. Getting around outdated software used by banks and getting around regulatory bodies like the SEC are entirely different things. The fact you think they're the same is strange to me.
Estimates say 21% of all US adults own or trade crypto. While we don't have full numbers the demographics skew young and disproportionately minority. Which makes sense if you think about crypto's use cases. Which most people, including most critics, don't.
I take it you work more on the financial side of things? Any thoughts on the scriptable side, smart contracts, applications, games? Is that going anywhere interesting in your opinion or is it dead-ending?
> The most dubious application are shit/memecoins that are pumped and dumped by people doing what are straight up Blue Sky/Rug Pull schemes while avoiding the SEC. The most useful application is getting around the antiquated American banking system's cyberinfrastructure. I might be biased because I hate it. But it shouldn't take three days for a transaction to settle or 15% to transfer money to Honduras or wherever. Of course, that doesn't strictly require crypto. The entire US banking system could overhaul its own systems. But they won't. Because they're an oligopoly protected by copious regulation with little competition.
I mean if a less worse way to electronically transfer money were to come about I would be super excited. As you say the chief barrier there seems to be regulatory; from a mere technical perspective sending bits from one database to another has been a solved problem for decades.
I do finance and (as you can personally attest) real estate stuff. But I do dabble in gaming a bit because it's a hobby. And art because I do make art.
I think smart contracts and applications will be integrated into the broader ecosystem. Blockchain has its uses and I think in the future you'll see it as an equal choice with more traditional competitors. A lot of ecosystems have a few choices like this. For example, SQL vs NoSQL vs (now) Blockchain. Or server vs serverless vs whatever. It will have its specific use cases and will increasingly remain within them. I can name specific examples but I'm being kind of broad. To take one, escrow seems well suited to it.
The cultural market is harder to predict. NFTs might be a fad but I think these things tend to stick around. If people want to own ape images that's not really any different than owning oil paintings. I think games likewise are going to start to integrate blockchain as a way to get around the pain of multiplayer needing massive centralized servers. Someone is going to make a blockchain powered MMO eventually and I think it'll be as successful as the game part deserves. But as I said, not super confident on any of this.
Anyway, I'm stopping at three paragraphs but I have more to say. Happy to drill down on any specifics.
Oh, also, I'm resisting my fintech the banks need to get up and start innovating or we need regulatory reform to disrupt them rant.
Cool, thanks. I'd be interested in digging into the specifics. My background is in game development and engineering, and my current day job for the last 7 months has been writing deep dive data-based analysis pieces on all the major blockchain games for Naavik, a major consultancy in the space.
I've also done some private consulting on the side and witnessed a lot of fundraising deals and behind the scenes stuff. Take that with the grain of salt that my experience is just one perspective among many, and here's my take:
I'm incredibly confused by what the value add of blockchain is supposed to amount to in this particular space.
In terms of being a database, it feels like the most inefficient implementation possible for storing any significant amount of data. This performance art video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJSW7Rprio) echoes my sentiments on the subject. If blockchain is supposed to provide any sort of distributed compute or storage functionality, it's setting an incredibly low bar for performance and costs on all metrics, because of its insistence on particular technological commitments.
In terms of being an ownership record, it feels like it's not grappling with the fact that ownership is a bundle of rights, and the way those rights get expressed ultimately boils down to law whether we like it or not -- witness the legal limbo of Seth Green's new cartoon based on his bored Ape, now that his Ape NFT has been "stolen." The space started out talking about how smart contracts obviated the need for dumb contracts, but every time there's a dispute when a smart contract fulfills its programming to the letter and that's not what one of the parties "meant" to happen, someone winds up running to the local magistrate and demands they give them their thing back, and this invites regulatory scrutiny.
I've written extensively about the contradictions of the Axie Infinity project in particular, but the icing on the cake there is trusting $625 million in assets behind a single point of failure, getting socially engineered by North Korea in what amounts to perhaps the second-greatest heist in all of human history. The fact that this was even POSSIBLE boggles my mind.
Then there's the oracle problem. The vast majority of applications and games in this space depend on calling out to trusted third party services to tell them anything that exists outside of the magic circle of the blockchain itself. This fundamentally undermines the promise that players will "truly own their assets." Blockchains typically just store a number, and the thing the player actually cares about is dependent on an embodiment on a centralized server. A classic example is a game asset whose power gets rebalanced, which has an immediate effect on their real world price.
NFTs as "tickets to the metaverse" seem built on a fundamentally broken business model. Players and investors pay a single large up front fee in exchange for ... something. Ill defined as it is, the other salient feature is that much of it is supposed to be delivered by other third party app developers, and the incentive structure for those devs to participate in providing VIP services for a tiny clientele with high expectations seems undercooked. Actual yacht clubs and country clubs in the real world fund themselves on recurring membership fees.
"Play-to-earn" has been revealed to be a simple ponzi and is bursting, the former advocates of it have already moved to rebrand it as "play AND earn," admitting that only some players will be able to cash out. "
But the big fundamental contradiction to me, is that Blockchain was originally about three major promises:
1. Distributed
2. Trustless
3. Irreversible
Many of the applications I see are quite happy to throw away the first two to some degree by inserting all sorts of centralized trusted services into the middle, leaving the users with nothing but the third. And I'm not convinced the third is even a feature most normies actually want. I hate big evil banks as much as the next guy, but the killer feature of a big evil bank is that they can occasionally reverse a fraudulent transaction.
By contrast, many modern blockchain apps and games are now dependent on trusted centralized services, but ALSO are still just blockchain-y enough that when North Korea steals $625 million there's absolutely nothing anybody can do about it.
And then there's the UX. The UX is terrible, and everyone knows it. But I'm not convinced the onboarding can get better, because I feel like the UX troubles of blockchain are to at least a certain degree a natural outgrowth of the tradeoff cost of achieving what Blockchain is supposed to be about -- achieving distributed trustless byzantine consensus in the face of untrusted actors.
If we're going to make people trust centralized services anyways, then what is the point of lugging all the rest of it along with us, what is the benefit? The whole point of the tradeoff was to accomplish this one hard thing, and if we're not even doing that anymore, why pay the cost?
I've found a few blockchain game projects that have plausibly sustainable business models, and most of them are just straight up gambling games like Zed Run where most players know they will probably lose money (Gambling is "sustainable" in the sense that it is as old as human history).
Composability projects like Loot have mostly failed to gain any attention for a variety of academic reasons I can get into separately.
There are a few "fully on-chain" games like Dark Forest that evade the oracle problem and are therefore legitimately interesting, but have yet to demonstrate what being on the blockchain achieves that couldn't be accomplished in other simpler ways.
Every project I've found has incredibly low Daily Active Users and engagement numbers, the main exception being Axie Infinity, who achieved their stats only by paying their players to pay, and now that the money has dried up they are crashing hard.
Everything I've seen and investigated paints one of the bleakest pictures I've seen in any field I've ever studied.
I'm curious to hear the community's opinion on this; in 10-20 years (in Western countries), what do you forecast the percentage of people who self-identify as LGBT be? Is the real number above 20% as more people feel comfortable self-identifying, or is this recent polling data aberration and it will go back down to closer to 10%.
I think it would make sense to break "LGBT" out into "L", "G", "B" and "T" and track those separately, rather than pretending they are all somehow one thing.
Almost certainly will go down over time to less than 5%—the amount of nonheterosexuality by pattern of behavior is a lot lower than identification, and a lot of alternative sexual behavior is opportunistic, not dictated by ironclad orientation.
While I'm sure some currently identifying as nonheterosexual will identity as heterosexual by age 30, a 4x reduction is so large so as to make your argument literally incredible to me.
The "B" part of LGBT can be (particularly for women) a zero-cost signal for those that want to signal some combination of wokeness, hipness, or whatever, or to gain access to a support community. It doesn't strike me as at all implausible that such signalling could be ~3x greater than actual LGBT behavior. And I believe that breaking down the 20% self-identification for Gen Z shows that the largest gains by far have been in "B" and fancy-pronouns-but-not-surgery-or-hormones variety of "T", which is consistent with this theory.
And none of this takes away from the fact that there's still a significant population of people who truly are L, G, B, or T by any standard and whose rights need to be protected in a way that a simplistic "they're all fakers" won't do.
I don’t specify how much time this will take, because I don’t claim to know; I’m making a simple argument that sexual identification will regress over time to the historical mean.
It wouldn’t surprise me if identification was sticky within generations. “Queer,” “bi,” and “pan” are labels that one can wear without consequence indefinitely while not significantly behaving differently than a garden-variety heterosexual.
You mean right now in the West? Because I can imagine it would be the opposite in societies hostile to alternative sexualities.
Also, it is entirely possible to not be completely straight yet only engage in straight sexual behaviour because as the default social option it's just far easier. Sexuality is about attraction, not behaviour. Plenty of people who aren't asexuals never engage in sexual behaviour at all (monks/nuns, people with extreme social anxiety, people who are extremely unattractive to potential partners etc)
> and a lot of alternative sexual behavior is
>opportunistic, not dictated by ironclad
> orientation.
Couldn't a similar statement be made about heterosexual behavior? As stated above, many people who are not 100% hetero may only engage in heterosexual sex due to a combination of social factors.
“right now in the west” Yes, I meant this in direct response to the idea that gen Zs were identifying 20%+ nonheterosexual. I make no such claim about societies where this is not the case.
“a similar statement be made about heterosexual behavior” No, I don’t think so, not in the quantities we’re seeing. I think the best estimate of the base rate of pure or predominantly heterosexual orientation is 90%+, maybe 95, and pure homosexual orientation being vanishingly rare, maybe 1-2%, predominantly homosexual being maybe another 2-3%. If you have a populace which is almost entirely wired for heterosexuality, but there’s no real penalty for homosexuality, you’ll see much more opportunistic or social behavior that strays from base orientation on the heterosexual side purely by the numbers.
Like, if let’s say 5% of primary heterosexuals will opportunistically behave homosexually, and 5% of homosexuals the same, then there’s much much more opportunistic homosexuality than opportunistic heterosexuality—more opportunistic homosexuals than primary homosexuals!
I was not referring to opportunistic heterosexual behaviour by homosexuals but rather to the fact that the lack of homosexual behaviour is often driven by social factors as much as biology, even when homosexuality is not frowned upon. Simply because most people don't have that many sexual partners, and given that are likely to settle for the default option society programs you for. So judging by your behaviour they would be 100% heterosexual but they may actually be also attracted to the same sex to some degree; they just never happened to act on it.
“Sexuality is about attraction, not behavior” I don’t really agree with this. On the margins there may be some people who are entirely repressed/oppressed, but in our society I think that orientation must be defined by behavior. A woman who identified as bisexual, says she experiences attraction to women, yet somehow ends up with a string of serious boyfriends and never anything but some flirtations with women is heterosexual.
Likewise, a man who identifies as Not Gay but primarily has sex with men—a very common type, many such cases—is homosexual.
Defining sexuality by attraction leads you to weird places where all kinds of people attain sexualities they never practice because the mental phenomenon of attraction is subjective, and there’s no reliable or rigorous way to detect attraction.
Then you're going to run into very strange sample size effects. Like a whole army of desperately horny asexuals. Who suddenly instantly convert into hetero or homosexuals the second they finally find a (hopefully) willing sexual partner.
I agree that if you go with self-reporting, you will run into some different strange effects, like the ones you described. People don't always accurately assess their attraction and also do not always truthfully report their assessments. Furthermore, the attraction itself may be driven by factors that are not purely biological, especially in females. That said, we do use self-reporting to assess other things, such as presence and degree of depression or pain severity.
Sexual behaviour and sexual attraction are different things; I guess it comes down, as it so often does, to the matter of definition.
This is the tricky space between "it is now socially acceptable to come out" and "it is not alone socially acceptable, you gain precious social credit points for coming out" where increasing numbers fall into that area of "people who would have been in the closet a generation ago" and "hopping aboard the latest trend".
Why wouldn't you? And don't forget the "+" which is covering a lot of ground here for "I'm not cis het, I am not the oppressor, I'm one of the oppressed" young people.
And it's not even lying about identity; you can be non-binary and still have a feminine name and look like a woman, and have a small national TV piece done about your choice not to wear ear rings:
If you're young, if you're unsure, if you don't feel you really fit the model of what you are supposed to be (a not very feminine in looks or interests girl, a not very masculine in looks or interests boy), then previously you might be called a tomboy or regarded as a little odd. Now you have a ready-made category to slot into, that comes with guaranteed protection and communities that will support and praise and celebrate you.
And yes, real persecution still exists. But even in my own town, there was a big to-do about flying the correct new inclusive trans rainbow flag outside the offices of the town council - a to-do *in favour of*, not *against*. That's not really 'actively hostile' for anyone wanting to identify as one of the easier identities to adopt (coming out as gay or lesbian probably is still the biggest change as that requires you to commit to something that isn't easily shrugged off once you've grown past the use for it).
Conversion therapy is a rare and localized thing. Large, welcoming LGBT support groups are a widespread and common thing. And people frequently express beliefs they don't actually (or at least initially) hold, to secure membership in a supportive community - even if the community is not a majority and is not universally loved. See e.g. any religion and/or cult.
As a current trans woman who was first a gay man half a decade ago, yea no not at all.
Among the community of queer people you get some status, and among your peers and young people you get a little status.
I have received only indifference or mild displeasure from institutions, neutrality from about a quarter of the population and active dislike from half. It has undoubtedly made it harder to be hired and promoted.
I'm in the US.
If I could be cis, in either direction, and not subject to this, I'd take it in a heartbeat.
It would be interesting to disambiguate sexual orientations from gender orientations, for want of a better word, as there's certainly been an increase in the population identifying as some version of T. If you take a wide enough definition of "T-ish", that includes me, and that's at least partly for social reasons: in many of my circles, it is now a useful way to convey information about my likes and dislikes to others.
And "I'm bi/I'm non-binary" is a safe way to experiment with "I'm not boring old cis het, I'm funky and with it some variety of queer!" for The Youth, particularly if they are raised with "cis het is the heternormative patriarchy which is Oppressive and Wrong, the 99 flags of Pride are all fun and progressive and much better things to be!"
How much of it sticks is another matter. Some people will genuinely experiment before settling on 'an identity', some people will follow the crowd, some people will come out as 'this really is me'.
I think you're going to end up with a large subculture that identifies as LGBTQ and has some amount of kinky and homosexual experiences before the majority settle into heterosexual monogamy while still identifying as bisexual or whatever. And that's fine.
If I were still a writer I'd write a story about one such fellow. A man who was transgressive and kinky in his youth and ended up marrying a similar woman and has now ended up as a banker for JP Morgan where his differences are celebrated. And about the inner conflict of it all. It'd be a fascinating character study. Especially if you could resist the urge to sneer or pity him.
Yes, but in "woke-left" (for lack of a better word) circles, personally wanting something is Not Done. If you personally want something to happen, it must be framed as you being a noble champion of a greater cause.
It's hard to predict. I'd say that at present, there's a smallish culture which is strongly pro-LGBTQ+, a larger culture which is strongly anti-, and the majority that isn't hugely engaged.
So it might be a question of the size of the two cultures.
Now that I think about it, I'm not even sure whether LGBTQ+ will exist as a category 20 years from now.
It's possible that eroding the gender binary will have an effect if it happens, which it well might.
At this point, presenting as a man, a woman, or a non-binary person can have a lot of emotional charge, which why (many) people get so emotionally involved with how they or other people present themselves.
In theory, there could be people who feel strong sex dysphoria-- they would want the hormones and operations, but not care whether they kept their birth gender. In fact, a few such people might exist, and I'm not hearing about them.
I actually know one! A biologically female friend of mine (in her 40s) had sex reassignment surgery in her 20s and has been on T and basically entirely looks like, presents as, and behaves as a man, but pointedly identifies as a woman and is totally okay with her birth gender. Obviously she confuses a lot of people, but she doesnt bother correcting anyone on anything.
Shes certainly the only one I know or have heard of though. So there arent very many, at least in standard queer circles. The intersex community may have more.
LGBTQ is different from handedness. If it's trendy to declare yourself "non-binary", and it doesn't require any changes in your behaviour, a lot of people will do it. No one will identify as a southpaw if they're a righty, that's just horribly inconvenient.
It's not even suggesting that Gen Z's are "lying". LGBT is a lot more nebulous than handedness. Most people are somewhere along the Kinsey spectrum. Whether you choose to incorporate that as part of your identity is largely a social question, while handedness seems a lot more binary.
>No one will identify as a southpaw if they're a righty, that's just horribly inconvenient.
25% of Major League Baseball players are left handed. Given that this is an area where putting up with the inconvenience of switching your handedness I wonder what we could learn from this. There are a lot of complications, of course. But it could give us some additional data.
We actually have a lot of such data but in the other directions. Many societies made it very inconvenient and sometimes even dangerous to be left-handed, and people had been forced to switch handedness.
It is now generally regarded as a traumatizing experience to force people to change their dominant hand, and is frowned upon. It's still slightly more convenient to be right-handed since the majority of the population is, and everything is optimized for that, but that doesn't outweigh the massive inconvenience of retaining yourself to use the other hand, so nearly 100% of lefties don't.
Interesting. When I worked in Hong Kong in the 90s, the consulting company I worked for, INS, hired a bunch of network engineers (I was one of them) for this HK project. Out of 33 network engineers working on the project, 16 were lefties (I was one of them). In HK they were still promoting right-handedness in kids, so left-handedness tended to invoke surprise and comments among the Hong Kong yan. We were all staying in the same hotel, and it was the woman who checked people into the hotel fitness center who brought it to my attention first. When I signed in, she said, "Oh you must work for INS". There were hundreds of workers from other companies staying at this hotel working on the same project, so I asked her how she knew. "You're signing in with your left hand. All you INS workers are left-handed."
Afterward, I did a survey, and 16 out of 33 of us were lefties. And I found that the leftie dominance in the profession to be true as I moved on to other jobs — up until the early 2000s when the Cisco's CCIE certification became an easy way for people to get better salaries (thus attracting a lot of righties to the profession). ;-)
Have they retained themselves or are lefties overrepresented there due to the advantage left-handedness offers, much the same way tall people are vastly overrepresented in the NBA?
To my understanding it is the overrepresentation due to the advantage. The book "The Sports Gene" covers it, if I am remembering correctly (it's been a long while since I read it, so add salt to taste.) Many sports that rely on direct interaction with an opponent along with instant processing of "this subtle movement means I need to do this thing without having to think about it" have benefits for lefties when arm/hand movements are the key. I do medieval martial arts, and lefties really take some getting used to as the shots come from different angles around your shield, etc. What is really hilarious though is watching two lefties fight each other, as they tend to have even less experience so you can see them actively thinking about what to do like new fighters instead of acting more instinctively. If having one lefty in your group is uncommon, having two to practice against each other is rare, and so really highlights just how strange it is for them, even though it is just like two right handed people fighting in reverse. I always found that interesting, how much of what we do is subconscious and gets broken in a strangely novel situation.
Pride Month, Pride marches, it's all fun and celebration and who (unless they're a hermit crab like me?) wouldn't want to be part of that? If you're some variety of "I'm pan" or "I'm non-binary" or whatever, you get to wave the flag and march along in the parade and have people cheer you, rather than standing on the outskirts watching the floats pass you by with all the happy, beautiful people having fun.
I would argue that sexuality is a spectrum between 100% homosexual and 100% heterosexual (a la the Kinsey scale), and therefore such a percentage is dependent fully on social attitudes towards where the line between bisexuality and "heteroflexibility" is drawn.
What complicates the above are my social progressive peers' obsessions with hierarchies of microlabels--they clearly don't subscribe to the postmodernist rejection of labels that was dogma on the Left as recently as a decade ago.
Completely random tangent: when I was developing a stable of RPG NPCs and I wanted to shorthand their sexuality, I developed something that I think works better than the Kinsey scale: I expressed their attraction to males, and their attraction to females separately in two 1-5 scales: 1 = "essentially no attraction," 5 = "thirsty for them all the time." So this allows you to express asexuality-style low-libido, and hypersexuality-style high-libido, and you might have, like a man who's attracted to males 4, females 2, and identifies as homosexual, while someone else might be males 2, females 2 and identifies as bisexual, but they're equally attracted to females.
Kinsey scale is silly. Better would be a 2D space, with one axis being gynophilic/gynophobic and the other being androphilic/androphobic. Asexuals at the origin, extreme bisexuals in the upper right, prudes in the lower left, and the caricature fratbros and man-hating womynists in the other two corners.
If the axes were not extended to repulsion (which, to my mind, seems a bit different from absence of attraction), then the quadrant in your space from the asexuals to the extreme bisexuals looks to me like a 2D space with the Kinsey scale on one axis and total libido level at right angles to it - then rotate the coordinate axes by 45 degrees.
I think repulsion needs to be a part of understanding sexuality. Some people seem to be literally repelled by the idea of coming into contact with particular genital types. These people can be a problem at orgies.
Ok. I mostly wanted to focus on the near-equivalence of the two representations, differing just by a coordinate axis rotation.
"These people can be a problem at orgies." While I haven't, unfortunately, had the opportunity to attend an orgy, I have viewed filmed ones, and I do find it somewhat obnoxious that the men present have a tendency to spend so much effort avoiding touching each other that the event seems to collapse into an assortment of separate couples who happen to be in the same room.
If you do the same for several other gender-related categories, you end up with the Genderbread Man (googling this term should bring up the model I mean).
I made a similar model. In general I find that gynosexuality and androsexuality are much more natural and useful categories than hetero and homo. It doesn't require to know what gender you are and allow to focus one one thing at a time, it draws the category borders, uniting people who are attracted to the similar things, rather than different.
I bet you literally can picture lots of things that are much more awkward. If not, I don't know, consider the possibility that you're aphantasic.
My games are pretty tame and don't contain any more sexual content than, like, the existence of romantic/sexual relationships in the world (but not portrayed).
"gay" as something you can *be* is a relatively modern invention.
The earliest similar thing i know of is social circles of men engaging in "sodomy" in 17th century italian city states.
But the historical mean, as you say, is just people doing their thing and depending on time and circumstance being seen as some shade of normal, excentric, unmanly or sinners against god and nature.
So i get the thing of some not "counting" as much. I think there will either be a crunch and only some will survive as "real" things, or there will be further dilution and people just wont bother to categorize into sub-sub-sub-niches.
I'm setting up a new VC fund in Prospera that focuses on "stranded technologies" that are hard to realise somewhere else: https://infinitafund.com/
If you're working on a startup in fintech, healthcare, edtech or proptech, check out the conferences I'm organising this year.
To give you a few examples:
- We're building a tokenised real estate marketplace for new construction, because well... we can get building permits there
- We can do human trials there for gene therapies to collect FDA-auditable data, to expedite the approval process
- If you want to set up a new bank or insurance, or anything really ... you don't need to convince the government to give you a license, you need to convince a liability insurance
You tell Airbnb in 2008: how do you expect to offer a better service than hotels? This can only result in illegal hosting services for human trafficking ...
"We can do human trials there for gene therapies to collect FDA-auditable data, to expedite the approval process"
Well, whoever could have seen this coming? Does the new government that broke the former contract know about this, or have you greased the proper palms this time round?
Exploiting the local people for fun and profit because we can pay off the government to ignore things like human rights. This is why I don't like your charter city.
Assuming that "human trials" means "exploiting local people for fun and profit" is close to the least charitable take possible. Why is this your assumption and what makes you think it's a reasonable one?
Yeah, I did feel it might be de trop to compare it to a video game, but yes.
Exact impression it gives off.
'Come live in our private totalitarian-but-done-fun fiefdom, what could possibly go wrong, especially when a new government has come in and torn up the contract we signed with the previous government, ha ha ha ha ha! But no, honestly, there aren't any pesky laws and regulations going to stop you going full-on Victor Frankenstein if that's what shakes your tree! We've got lots of empty units, please for the love of God sign up!'
Because the entire point of Prospera is to be outside laws and regulations save those it sets out in its own charter. Couple that with the change of government which saw the favourable climate for Prospera change, and now we're getting advertising for "set up in our lovely private fiefdom where no outside local laws apply, so you are free of all that red tape!" which is both slightly desperate in tone and also alarms me with its selling point and appeal being "no laws!", and that's where I get my assumption; if you're going to do red tape-free human trials, you will need a pool of human test subjects, and if you're doing it in a country like Honduras, the nearest available subjects are the locals.
'Red tape free' to me signals 'they can't sue you if you injure or kill them', hence exploitation.
Let's hope this founder has many, many friends to carry out all the trials on.
So this is the most safe gene therapy possible, so safe the founder is confident that he can test it out on his friends, who he is going to bring from the US to Prospera to do it.
If it's so safe, why not do these trials in the US?
Regulations and barriers to testing? So you ship them off to a place where there are no regulations and barriers, which still sounds exploitative to me.
And that is before getting into it that if it's all a cosy little arrangement between the founder and his friends (they must be *really* good friends), then who can trust the data is what they claim it is? This sounds like Theranos Mark II.
Though I am glad you won't be taking a leaf out of the IVF industry's book and using developing world locals as cheap resources.
Check out some of Scott's articles (e.g. Prospectus on Prospera, Adumbrations Of Aducanumab), then you'll understand some of the problems they're trying to solve better.
No need to assume the worst. They're trying to do better, and it's worth a try if you understand that the status quo has a lot of problems.
"Trying to do better" is a laudable goal - that like charity, covers a multitude of sins.
"Data collected by me from trials run on my six/ten/twenty friends" - and how many friends does this guy have, who are all willing to be human guinea pigs? - does not sound sufficiently rigorous to convince the FDA. It does sound like the snake oil merchants who set up 'stem cell clinics' and the likes.
You see, my problem with this is two-fold. First, there are all too many con-men and chancers out there who run this exact "truly scientific science backs our results" scams to part the desperate and the rich from their money, we've discussed this on here with the ionised blood thing.
Second, setting up somewhere whose main selling point is "no outside state regulations" again sounds to me like laetrile clinics:
This person intends to run controlled clinical trials? Great! But it's going to need more than "The founder of the company is bringing his friends from the US to do the trials" to meet those standards.
From what I gather (correct me if I'm wrong), this particular proposal isn't about Prospera proper. Instead, it involves a gene-therapy surgery for late-stage arthritis that is already being provided by Dr. Glenn Terry, orthopedic surgeon and founder of the GARM clinic in the nearby city of Roatan. This treatment is, of course, not FDA approved, although promotional material sketchily claims it is "IRB-approved" (they offer no link nor documentation). See https://garmclinic.com/
From Niklas's descriptions of the trial elsewhere in the thread, it appears that Dr. Terry has convinced some of his friends and family members with arthritis to fly down to his clinic and undergo the presumably lucrative surgery. You can take Terry at his word that this is an innocent way to save money on the way to FDA approval; personally, I find the practice of recruiting friends and family into a study evaluating his surgical moneymaker to be, at best, *morally iffy* and probably quite a bit worse than that.
As to the scientific merits of the treatment, I honestly cannot say. Terry is obviously a very accomplished surgeon, but a (very) quick look on google scholar yielded no evidence that he previously did research on gene therapies.
Ah, botheration. If this is the same guy, then looking at his website *does* give off very strong snakeoil emanations:
"Do you have an athletic injury, arthritis, chronic pain, spinal issues, autoimmune disorder, diabetes, COPD, or post-Covid lung damage? Do you want the latest in anti-aging treatments? We can help you feel better and live better!"
Yes, a guy with a qualification and specialising in sports medicine is going to work on COPD and diabetes? And how will they do this? Stem cells, of course!
ViraPressTM is a natural dietary supplement for improving the immune system. Each serving contains bovine serum glycoproteins, crystalline maltose disaccharide and magnesium vegetable stearate. Each bottle contains 60 servings.* *Disclaimer: The statements and information contained in this website have not been evaluated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The products featured in this website are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease."
This is sounding more and more like the "dodgy Harley Street clinic" 'Private Eye' magazine covered in the "misuse of charity umbilical cord donations" article.
Well, now I can add "Roatan stem cell clinic" to "Mexican laetrile clinics".
I looked it up and there does seem to be legitimate research into stem cells and Type II diabetes, BUT:
"Where I live, the council wanted to make some sensible changes to a roundabout to improve pedestrian safety, and local residents fought it tooth and nail"
Where I live, much high density housing is being built against the wishes of local residents. (And much of the objection is to parking provision. why would the future be a place of EV s rather than renewed public transport?)
I don't know what your objection to green belts is, because the article you linked is paywalled. A standard argument against the argument that green belts prevent expansion is that you can build whole new towns instead expanding existing ones.
Rebalancing the South East and the rest of the country could help. Are you assuming it fails?
Well, that's kind of nuanced, which helps me agree with it, but it's not quite against the green belt. The argument that green belts are bad for.the environment seems to boil down to farmland being.bad, but no one wants to get rid of all farmland.
I think the more important argument against green belts that it prevents development next to public transport hubs within easy commuting distance to cities, which ends up meaning people live/build even further out (out past the green belt) so end up with longer, more polluting commutes. City dwellers have much lower carbon footprints than people in rural areas (because the density of cities means less driving + denser housing needs less heating) and green belts restrict the growth of cities, meaning fewer people move from rural to city.
Difficult to believe EVs will take over the auto market that fast. If the UK is anything like the US, it would require roughly a doubling of the electrical infrastructure -- generating and transmission equipment, not to mention hundreds of thousands of new charging stations -- and those things usually take a long time. If the US started today and were willing spend tens of $billions per year, and jettison all the usual environmental impact review and community input, it could probably just barely manage to bring on line the necessary new generating and transmission capacity in the 28 years available.
Even if the UK is carbon-neutral (or even carbon-negative) by then, it's hard for me to imagine that India and China are, so I can't see global warming being reversed by then
I agree with a lot of the article, but not that UK will be debating what temperatures they should target, because they will have such a small influence on global temperatures
Given that rolling blackouts are expected for late 2022 (due to gas powered generation for base load demand replacing coal, nuclear power plants have not been replaced, and storage for gas was sold off and decommissioned, all while gas has become scarce and expensive), rolling blackouts in 2050 seems like a likely scenario. Unfortunately it's quite easy to sketch dystopian visions of the future so I'll stop.
I can't say I agree with you about people living until they're 150. The number of people living beyond 115 hasn't gone up for quite a few decades. To a first approximation it has always been zero, and I don't think that's going to change much - are you imagining some new technology that stops people ageing?
There's another reason there won't be anybody who is 150 in 2050 - if there were, they would have to be 122 today, and there are no 122 year olds in the world today.
In order to have lived beyond 115, a person would have to have been born by 1907 reached nominal retirement age by 1972. If there are medical technologies that might significantly increase lifespan at the high end but were invented after 1972, then our hypothetical individual is *very* unlikely to have taken advantage of them unless they quickly became mainstream enough to be covered by Medicare + modest supplemental coverage. The population of Lost / Greatest Generation wealthy technophile early adopters may be too small to have been seen in the data yet.
Alternately, they all faked their deaths in the late 20th century, when the paperwork for creating fictitious new identities was still reasonably tractable :-)
If you are born in 2050 and are going to live to 150+, you are well beyond any reasonable timeline for biological immortality - by 2200 I expect us to have mostly solved human biology in one way or another.
If that seems excessive, compare our current understanding of biology with the one we had in 1872, and that's not even considering the internet, next-generation sequencing, and the upcoming AI revolution.
Yeah this is a fair point, perhaps I was too ambitious. Maybe I should have said 'people born in 2050 are likely to live to 150+' as I do think aging research will lead to significant breakthroughs.
I think that you're underselling how many buildings will be new and not old, or renovated. Certainly, it's not hard to find 30 year old buildings around here, but it's also not hard to find buildings that are <10 years old. I assume this is *less* true in the UK than here, but that new buildings *exist*. After all, the London skyline looks like this: https://i.insider.com/587f91c6dd08959a4e8b4579?width=1000&format=jpeg&auto=webp
I don't know where you live, but "most places will not see major new development (at least where it replaces old) and the most visible addition to major cities will be a few new skyscrapers" seems the safest bet you can make. Note how in your picture the skyscrapers peter out quickly.
At least you have realised that 2050s Britain will not be hugely different from now, due to the constraints about cities having so much build environment already in place, and that circumstances won't be hugely different.
Where I differ with you is:
(1) AI as the Magic Fairy Godmother. I appreciate that you envisage white-collar jobs being the ones getting replaced this time, rather than blue-collar jobs. I think you don't estimate how much of a social effect this will have. You do have something about it, but I think the changes will be much deeper and more destructive.
"The destruction of vast numbers of jobs by AI will make the creation of jobs both very politically popular and more politically feasible (because AI will increase growth and concentrate profits, giving more tax revenue)."
I agree that governments, faced with rising unemployment amongst the middle-class, will be casting around for "new employment opportunities! green new jobs!" but with as much success as all the current "this new scheme will create jobs for the newly out of work" schemes. As for tax revenue, there will be even more laws trying to close loopholes on stashing away multinationals' increased by AI profits, and multinationals hiring tax lawyers and accountants to find new loopholes. There may be some increase in tax revenue, but I don't expect it to be enough to cover all the new jobs required.
(2) Farmland - small farmers increasingly go to the wall, large agri-business will be the model.
"Breakthroughs in artificial meat will mean we could free up large amounts of farmland, but farmers will want subsidies to keep farming and keep it preserved it how it is. Environmentalists will want to be left to fall fallow and re-wilded. As more re-wilding occurs and less land is used for farming (thanks to improved yields, some vertical farming and artificial meat) they’ll be debates over the re-introduction of ever more and larger fauna. Think bears."
Nope. Agree about the subsidies, the exit from the EU has meant that subsidies are being phased out up to 2024. What the UK government will do to replace them is the next thing, which is why I see small farms dependent on subsidies folding. Less land will not be used for farming, because of food security:
"In 2020, the UK imported 46% of the food it consumed."
That is not going to be made up by artificial meat, and improved yields depend heavily on fertilisers and crop-breeding to be more productive.
"Phosphate rock is the only large-scale source of phosphorus, an essential element for plant growth and an important chemical fertiliser. The UK has no phosphate reserves and relies on imports; Exploitable reserves of phosphate rock have increased since 1995. At the same time, some regions, including the UK, have reduced their use of phosphate rock as a fertiliser while increasing agricultural production. Many countries are also in the process of making more efficient use of phosphate rock, which could reduce the demand for this type of fertiliser."
Post-Brexit, the UK government is talking about cheap imports from abroad to feed Britain, but that means (a) further eroding the farmer base in Britain (b) being dependent on no foul-ups or delays in supply chains.
You're not going to see bears re-introducted into Britain, you are going to see more monoculture in vast fields for big factory farming businesses.
(3) Flying cars.
No way. Think of traffic currently in London. Now replace that with the sky full of vehicles. You won't have cheap, fast travel that means you can pop over to the Continent on half an hour's notice, you are going to have commuter traffic jams stacked four high in the sky.
Besides, the guy whose book you reference on this is full of magic thinking:
"The potential capabilities of mature nanotech are mind-blowing. The incredible speed alone would dramatically lower the price of literally every physical product. Hall estimates that the entire capital stock of the US—“every single building, factory, highway, railroad, bridge, airplane, train, automobile, truck, and ship”—could be rebuilt in a week. And nanotech would allow materials with extreme properties, such as the strength of diamond, to be used for everyday manufacturing and construction.
The possibilities are straight out of science fiction. The “space pier”, a set of towers a hundred kilometers tall with a magnetic accelerator to shoot payloads into orbit, saving the fuel required to escape Earth’s gravity well and bringing down launch costs by three orders of magnitude. Or the “Weather Machine”, a fleet of quintillions of centimeter-sized balloons floating in the stratosphere, made of nanometer-thick diamond, with remote-controlled mirrors that can reflect light or allow it to pass through, forming a “programmable greenhouse gas” that can regulate temperature and direct solar energy. And of course, affordable flying cars.
...And indeed, we’re going to need lots more energy if we’re ever going to get nanotech manufacturing, regular space travel, and of course flying cars. In fact, a good explanation for technological stagnation is that the only technological revolution of the last 50 years, computing, was the only one that didn’t need more power than could be provided by the technology of the 1970s.
Where will all this energy come from? It could come from solar: the amount of power reaching the Earth from the Sun is some 10,000 times greater than the current power requirements of humanity. Of course, it’s hard to harness in practice, owing to cloud cover and pesky inconveniences such as nighttime, but that’s nothing a well-placed fleet of a quintillion remote-controlled aerostats in the stratosphere couldn’t handle."
Nuclear! seems to be the watch-word for supplying increasing energy demands, and *if* the government demonstrated that it could build and maintain nuclear power plants, I'd believe it. But at present? Hinkley Point C is the only one currently under construction and it's on budget over-runs and two years late (yes, the pandemic didn't help). The energy company owner is owned by the French, and the price for electricity generated has been negotiated to provide maximum profit for the owners not the consumers:
"EDF has negotiated a guaranteed fixed price – a "strike price" – for electricity from Hinkley Point C of £92.50/MWh (in 2012 prices), which will be adjusted (linked to inflation – £106/MWh by 2021) during the construction period and over the subsequent 35 years tariff period. The base strike price could fall to £89.50/MWh if a new plant at Sizewell is also approved. High consumer prices for energy will hit the poorest consumers hardest according to the Public Accounts Committee.
In July 2016, the National Audit Office estimated that due to falling energy costs, the additional cost to consumers of 'future top-up payments under the proposed HPC CfD had increased from £6.1 billion in October 2013, when the strike price was agreed, to £29.7 billion'. In July 2017, this estimate rose to £50 billion, or 'more than eight times the 2013 estimate'."
Now maybe by the time it finally becomes operational, the increase in energy prices will make this rate look moderate. Or maybe they'll hike the price up in line with 'current energy pricing'.
"you are going to have commuter traffic jams stacked four high in the sky." - The beauty of the sky is you don't have to stick to roads, and you can have many layers of traffic, that's the essence of what makes flying cars so useful. The thinking in 'Where's my flying car' probably does sound magical today. But wouldn't the prospect of astronauts landing on the moon have sounded magical to someone in the 1930s? Electricity & computers would have been magic once, we no longer think of them as such. With sufficient advances the magical becomes the possible. There's no reason to think that will stop happening. The future with it's AI breakthroughs is far more productive than today, so much more things becomes possible.
They need more energy than cars - about 1,000 horsepower. Which is approx. a supercar today. We'd need more abundant energy than we have today, but I think that's entirely possible in the future.
Yes, astronauts landing on the moon sounded fantastical in the 1930s, but flying cars didn’t sound fantastical in the 1970s or 1980s because people back then expected the rate of change of aviation technology to continue or accelerate. It stagnated.
Who says? Wernher von Braun, the guy who designed the rocket that did get men to the Moon, supposedly joined the Spaceflight Society at the TH Berlin when he enrolled in 1930, and started immediately experimenting with liquid-fueled rockets. Wikipedia claims he told August Piccard in 1930 that he personally planned on traveling to the Moon.
It's not? "fantasy" != "not real"? That's an interesting argument. But anyway, I can replace it if you like with the assertion that in the 1930s I think people did not think going to the Moon was fantastical, either. We're not talking about the 1880s here, Jules Verne era. People had seen airplanes, submarines, the Atlantic had been crossed twice by airplane already. Science had already demonstrated (via radioactivity, and some early nuclear transmutations) that unbelievable power lay in the atom -- if it could be unlocked, somehow, and "hard" science fiction of the era was full of "atomic" rockets and what not. Let's not forget Von Braun's "Spaceflight Society," which was not an asylum but a serious academic bunch.
I think a rmore reasonable reading of the times was that people thought going to the Moon was possible, but difficult, perhaps quite frivolous and economically irresponsible, and wouldn't be likely to happen for a good half century at least. Von Braun and his ilk were unusual in thinking it could be done within 20 years, not 50, and *should* be done, for either prescient military reasons or odd Elon Musk manifest destiny type of reasons.
We landed astronauts on the moon. We never got the moon colonies of popular SF which went along with the flying cars. I think that's the takeaway here.
It's interesting to ask what would have had to be different to get us long-term lunar colonies. My guess is that the driver here was entirely politics--let a butterfly flap its wings a little differently in 1950, and we never go to the moon or we end up building a long-term colony up there and so do the Russians, as prestige projects.
But I think you can't get large-scale human presence in space unless someone finds a way to either make it pay--either economically, militarily, or in some cultural/religious/values way. As long as it's just a political prestige project, it can't ever become self-sustaining or anything. If there had been some valuable resource discovered on the moon by the Apollo astronauts, we might have a large and continuing space presence today.
"But I think you can't get large-scale human presence in space unless someone finds a way to either make it pay--either economically, militarily, or in some cultural/religious/values way."
Agreed.
In a way, the case for _human_ presence in space is worse now than in the 1970s. Robotics has advanced greatly since then. I suspect that asteroid mining and/or solar power satellites will eventually happen, but I'd bet against large-scale human presence in either - or possibly even _any_ on-site humans.
I think you're right that housing won't change very much, for the most part. But wrong in the implication that the entire built-up environment won't look distinguishably different.
I think roads and street-furniture are much more malleable than buildings, and will change significantly.
In your comparison year of 1992, bright red phone-boxes were ubiquitous. Now, they are essentially absent. In their stead we now have more boxes for services like broadband and cell-towers.
Within the last couple of years in cities, electric hire scooters are becoming widespread. Hired driverless cars are likely to cover much of the rest of urban travel. Many fewer people will need to have their own car, and together this will have a big effect on roads - affecting road markings and signage, parking infrastructure etc.
It's a good point about car ownership and parking. Self-driving eliminates the need for ownership in urban areas, so they'll probably be less parking, but maybe more traffic.
Why does self-driving eliminate the desire for ownership? I don't follow that. If that were true, then wouldn't taxis and buses and the tube -- already pretty thick on the groun in the urban core -- have already eliminated the desire for ownership?
Why would adding "self-driving" to the attributes of taxis change the outcome considerably? If it turned out to be possible to make very reliable software and upgrade and maintain it cheaply (and without needing to upgrade the hardware at the rate people have to buy new smartphones), then I can see self-driving lowering the cost of a taxi service, at least to the extent of the cost that is taxi-driver wages (presumably it does nothing for the cost of fuel, maintenance, and capital depreciation). So that's an argument that taxi service might become cheaper, let us say by 50-75% if we assume driver wages are a big part of the cost.
But if a taxi were on average 1/4 the cost it is today, I'm not sure this would convince everyone to do without a car even in the city. Some, yes, but nearly everybody seems a stretch. Some major disadvantages would remain, mostly that it's not necessarily immediately available when you want one. You have to assume that the owners of a self-driving car fleet would optimize its revenue generation, which means if renting it to *you* right now isn't the highest return they can get, you'll have to wait while they send it on a more lucrative hire.
One assumes the equilibrium would look like air travel today: if you book 4 hours in advance, or pick weird times to travel, et cetera, then you get the best rates, and if you want an auto-taxi to pick you up right *now* despite traffic delays and it being rush hour and you in an out of the way location, then you'll pay premium for the convenience, like people pay for last minute business class flight. There's definitely a market for this kind of service, but it's difficult to see it completely displacing the privately-owned automobile.
It doesn't necessarily eliminate the /desire/, it eliminates the /need/.
I think you, Carl, and also Michael below are thinking specifically about taxi services, when I was thinking more about short-term hire.
The additional advantage of a driverless car in this context is you don't need to learn to drive and get a licence.
If you don't have or want a car, historically you might still have learnt how to drive "just in case". In the future, other options will be available. At the point where you need a car for a few days, you'll be able to hire one, and it'll drive itself.
Taxis and busses will still exist. Some people will still have cars.
But my thinking is that many UK cities (and large towns) will increasingly follow the continental model, and prioritise light traffic (bicycles, scooters etc). Once this reaches a critical threshold, I expect it to escalate.
Still not really following this. You can *already* hire a care for a few days when you want one. Whatever depression that caused in urban car ownership, it stabilized long ago. The only thing I see being added here is that you can *also* not bother getting a driver's license -- assuming you plan to be an urban dweller, or otherwise always within reach of cars for hires at all important points in your life.
And again, that's kind of already possible for true urban denizens. Yes, you can't hire a car, but you can take taxis and busses, and get along, if you really see getting a license as a major bother. But...how many people actually do? Maybe it's different in England, but in the US getting a drivers' license is about as arduous as maybe learning to play pinochle. Takes a few weeks of study/practice until you don't embarass yourself, and then you stand in line for a while, answer an easy multiple choice test, and get your photo taken. Ding! You're a legal driver.
The continential model to which you refer seems a bit restricted to major European cities. Outside of the cities, the car is alive and well in Europe, in my observation. I wouldn't say Europeans own cars like Americans, of course -- 3 cars per household or 1.5 per driver, whichever is greater, one of which is an SUV big as an MRAP that can comfortably seat the infield of a baseball team -- but they don't really seem to be embracing the 100% car-free life out in the banlieues.
Car ownership here isn't the rite of passage I understand it to be in the US. Maybe passing the driving test is a bit harder here? Not sure. Certainly I found getting driving lessons an expensive bother. I'm not sure why you think I'm saying no-one will have a car. I said fewer would, and more journeys would be by light vehicle (bike, electric bike or scooter)
I think the latter point is more important for my argument. In the last couple of years many cities here have been trialing electric scooter and/or bike hire services. Given the number I see being ridden around, these trials seem to be working.
Also, many cities have a congestion problem. Given the much higher density of bikes & scooters over cars, both in transit and storage, it's not hard to see councils gradually prioritising light transport. It's not unreasonable to expect people to use these more as they become increasingly convenient. Thus, my prediction, that the roads will change to suit. This is in line with how many European cities already are, so I don't think it's a big stretch. The availability of driverless cars only helps this along, because it makes it easier for people with rare but essential car journeys to justify not having a car. It's well-recognised that people who own a car tend to use it even for short journeys, so this helps.
But I'd still expect the transition even in the absence of driverless cars; electric scooters (and bikes) are the technology driving the trend.
Also, a parent would probably be much more comfortable having a robot ferry their 12 year old to & from soccer practice than they would be if there was an unknown adult driving the car.
Well....speaking *as* a parent, although my kids are all older than 12 now, I would say...no way! Last thing I'd do. I have far less trust in a 50,000 line program than I do in a human being, particularly an older and experienced human being. I've had to reboot my phone and laptop too many times when memory management just crapped out because somewhere in that vast nest of complex code somebody forgot to balance his malloc()s and free()s. No way I'm putting my flesh and blood in charge of a rigid but exceedingly complex algorithm, written by an altogether fallible team of humans who will have no personal skin in the game, and that cannot detect or compensate for its own internal logic error in real time.
Perhaps more subtly, it's my experience that the key skill in driving is -- anticipating what other drivers will do. The better you can do this, the safer you are. (Which is why drivers continue to improve in safety up until the infirmities of old age start compromising eyesight too far, and you don't peak at the age of fastest reflex and quickest thinking, in your twenties.) The hard part of driving is building an accurate and reliable model of human driver behavior, so you can figure out what all the mobile traffic menaces are going to do. The actual control of Newtonian mechanics and obstacle detection is by comparison trivial, the easy parts of the task that any 5-year-old or trained chimp could probably do just fine.
So would I trust anybody's consumer-grade economical $79.99 program that purports to have the "mental" model of other drivers that a taxi driver with 250,000 miles and 10 years under his belt has? No way.
The extent to which self-driving cars mean the death of car ownership is *vastly* overstated by people who just dislike car ownership and are eager to believe that it will soon be obsolete.
There's lots of value to owning your own car in a self-driving world: you can leave your stuff in it; it's always available to you without a queue; you can get something tailored to your needs.
The downside of car ownership in a self-driving world is cost. In a world where self-driving cars are highly utilized, you can divide their cost significantly by the other people who use them. However, note a few things:
1. Electric cars work against the logic of high-utilization. They need to be parked for large amounts of the day to charge.
2. The greater the utilization of a ride-sharing service, the less convenient the service is.
3. Consider the extent to which your model of a world with self-driving vehicles in it is a *richer world*, and to what extent people already overpay for their vehicles (how many $70k luxury sedans and SUVs and pickup trucks are sold when there's an honestly pretty comparable $15k used vehicle out there?)
I would expect mature self-driving tech to push the world mildly in the direction of renting rides, but car ownership to still be quite common, particularly for families.
Right. How self-driving cars effect ownership is probably largely a matter of the cost and convenience of whatever robot uber service ends up being available. If it becomes convenient and cheap enough, it basically becomes an ideal form of public transit--I just show up at a street corner, get picked up by the robot car and taken to my destination, and don't need to worry about a garage or car payment. If it remains expensive or slow or hard to get at times, then there will be more reason for me to want a car.
Probably this doesn't get rid of much car ownership in rural areas or even relatively sparsely-populated suburbs, but it may in cities and more dense suburbs, where land costs for a garage are higher and quick availability of a car on demand is more consistent.
Note that one point of the cost-convenience tradeoff space for self-driving cars is that you can potentially own a car and rent a spot in a communal garage (potentially even one that's more efficient than current garages, where the cars play tetris to park and unpark), that's nearish you, but not incredibly near, so you summon your car and it arrives 10 minutes later, then when it drops you off at home (or work), it goes and parks itself.
Which could make a wealthy urbanite more likely to own a car than today, when the cost of the car isn't a big deal, but an attached garage is impossible, and an unattached garage is too inconvenient.
The problem with high-utilization for car-sharing is that most people want to use their cars at the same time. People with weird schedules can likely get a sweet deal, though.
Can someone comes up with a way to use autonomous cars at night? There might be something there.
By night I meant like 1am-6am when just about everyone is asleep. Is there something useful a fleet of cars up for hire could do when people are asleep?
Like moving mini-shipping containers en masse? I'm thinking out loud here.
My concern is that my country has been very much going down a path of:
"Ban old things to force people to use new ones."
Gasoline powered cars will be illegal here at the end of the decade for example. Horses are illegal to keep in the city now, so you can't replace your ICE car with a horse and buggy unless you're rich enough to move out to the country. You're being forced onto electric.
I expect them to do the same with self driving cars in a few years. Either as an environmentalist argument. "You don't need a car when you're not driving it, it's wasteful and hurts the planet!" or a safety one "why should you be allowed to risk other people's lives on the road by personally driving your vehicle?"
Once that switch has happened, I then expect them to push for, not an outright ban on personal ownership; but sky high licensing fees to disincentivize private car ownership, and to make up for the reduced revenue from gasoline taxes.
Self driving rented cars also eliminate a lot of autonomy. Presumably you'll need a smartphone, an app, and an account to use them. And all it will take is one journalist calling up the company running it and saying "Would you like to comment for an article about why you allow Soandso to use your cars? Is your company aware of Soandso's opinions on X controversial matter?" to severely curtail your mobility.
While it may be a concern, I don't think it's going to be a significant factor in adoption of self-driving cars in the UK for three reasons.
1) I don't think cancel culture is as widespread here. Privacy rules and expectations are different.
2) It only really applies if there is a single point of failure - a monoply supplier. I doubt many people are calling round the 20 or so local taxi firms to try to stop them taking a particular fare.
3) It's a fully general argument against every service, including things people already do, like renting property, having bank accounts, car servicing arrangements etc. It might be one more target, but it's not a unique and novel susceptibility people will have to consider before electing to order a ride.
Furthermore, I think your assumptions about needing a smartphone, app and account are erroneous. You might need that /now/, but I expect not in future.
Re: 2 and 3, I don't know if you're familiar with "Operation Chokepoint" in the US. Banks (and other service providers IIRC) were approached by regulators saying "[undesirable industry/person] is often associated with [criminality]. If you continue to do business with them, we will need to subject you to a higher level of scrutiny than you are operating under now." I have no idea if Her Majesty's Government would be willing to use such tactics, but it worked "well" here.
That is certainly possible in principle. I would think the same would be possible today to a considerable extent. E.g. trying to get cancelled people on the TSA's no-fly list. Has that been happening?
My mother inherited some exurban land in a town she has never lived in (USA). It's in a spot with a nice view and is clearly destined to be subdivided for 3 or 4 houses. But neighboring homeowners don't want their views blocked and were politically connected enough to block her previous application for subdivision 15 years ago. She hasn't done anything since except pay taxes on it - she has an ugh field about dealing with the issue but also refuses to sell it for cheap just to get rid of it.
How can I help her sell it? I figured it's probably an issue for a knowledgeable local agent, but how do I find one capable of handling it well? Am I looking for a real estate agent, a developer, some kind of specialist lawyer, or something else?
Land with or without houses is at this moment still selling at ludicrous prices. The bubble will correct fairly soon. Get an agent, get it on the market, take the money and let someone else develop it.
Check out realtor.com - look for agents offering or just closed on contracts for comparable lots in a price range you like, and hit them up.
Most real estate agents will be familiar with land sales. If you want you can increase the value by pre-doing the paperwork. Otherwise you might just want to cash out and let the developer fight with the neighbors.
Second on finding a good real estate agent. In CA at least, fights over subdivisions and new buildings can be very difficult and it doesn't sound like you and your mother have any special skills or knowledge of how to navigate that.
I think you're looking for a real estate agent with experience in this kind of land. A developer would be the person that your agent would try to sell it to. A real estate lawyer or land use attorney wouldn't do the selling so much as help you manage all of the complicated land use requirements around subdividing and developing the land. In fact, if your mom wants to try again to subdivide the land and sell off smaller parcels, a land use attorney might be able to help her do that by negotiating with the planning department in the jurisdiction the land is in.
Take this with a grain of salt; I'm a landscape architect and I don't specifically work in real estate, though I'm much more familiar with the development process than your average bear.
So? If a soldier is shot on the battlefield and dies of his wounds the next day at a backline medical tent, he still was clearly killed by enemy action from that battle
The NYT (much) later corrected their original story to reflect that the officer died from entirely unrelated issues and suffered no injuries during the riot.
The fact that their "source" for the claim of murder has not been outed/discredited means either it doesn't actually exist, or that the NYT is fine with a source lying to them and wants to keep them around.
Yea, the the latter is pretty much my guess. The NYT is hardly even going through the motions of being an actual newspaper where reporters investigate and write stories about what happened at this point.
I recently broke up with my ex-girlfriend, who has BPD. She was doing a bit better when she was me, but has fallen back into pretty deep depression in the past weeks. This morning she called me completely down, saying she knows for sure she can't handle live alone. Her intense therapy starts this september, but she hinted at not being able to survive for that long. She has had suicidal ideation before, never an attempt.
Now she asked if I could meet up this week. I have no idea what to do. I don't want to be cold to her and want to be supportive and kind, but I also don't want a sort of continued dependency. Anyone with a background in psychology/psychiatry or similar experiences who could give me some advice?
Thanks to everyone giving empathy and advice. Very much listened to and appreciated. Especially the warnings about setting boundaries/concrete limits to my support were very necessary I think. I contacted her support network, and yesterday she put an enormous amount of pressure on me to come by, threatening with all kind of things, but I didn't give in. It was awful and very hard, but I think I made the right call.
I’m sure you did. Another thing you should hear: this is the right move for her, the high-percentage move, regardless of the consequences. Things can always go wrong, but that doesn’t mean you should regret setting boundaries and removing yourself from blackmail. God save you.
I've been in a very similar situation and succumbed to being there for them for a long time after our break up. What eventually made me take a step back and cut contact was realizing that there was always something, always some reason, for them to need my help. It was never going to end, that was going to be my life until the day either of us died. And I was miserable. They were too. We were both miserable and nothing was actually improving. Me being there for them was a stop-gap measure at best and actively harmful at worst, because while I was there they had less incentive to develop good coping strategies.
I wish I'd taken this advice earlier, before my own mental health deteriorated enough that at times I actually thought I would be happy if they went ahead and killed themselves (followed by enormous amounts of guilt). Alas. I mention this to illustrate that sometimes you need to hit rock bottom to obtain some momentum to climb out of the hole.
(I'm doing great nowadays and as far as I know my ex-partner is still alive, although I have no idea about their mental state.)
You mention that there will be intense therapy starting in September, and maybe this makes it feel like you could "sacrifice" yourself until then, and then it would stop. It would not stop. Therapy is good but it's not magical. As long as she has you, she will lean on you.
Assuming you have no desire to ever get back together, I would suggest gently but firmly transferring her into the arms of her actual support network. That is, call her parents, siblings, and/or closest friends, tell them exactly what you’ve told us, and, if necessary for her safety, agree to meet her but actually have them show up.
Under no circumstance should you carry on caring for her if you intend to vacate the relationship, not even if she’s suicidal; obviously you should give her as much aid as a stranger might give (lifesaving aid, keeping her from immediate peril), but she cannot demand and should not receive your personal service, for your sake, because you are not a slave and should not work for blackmail, and for her own, because she deserves the aid of people who care about her and want to be around her forever.
I'm reasonably sure that the idea isn't to rebuild the relationship or to heal her mental problems. It's about living with more intensity, or possibly the advice is a troll which gives bad advice which sounds cool. Or possibly the idea is that hypothetically great sex is fun for some people to write about.
Magical Healing Cock only works as a trope in fanfiction. She's mentally distressed, they are no longer together, and he is no longer willing to be the one constantly picking her back up and gluing her back together. One bout of great sex is not going to fix her to be able to manage independently.
I can't quite work out whether you're inviting me to sneer and snigger at Deiseach, whom I like and respect, or telling me I sound autistic or like an AI.
Son: Father, who rides that ridge yonder?
Father: That be Cinco-Sam, spewing lameass meanspirited parodies.
Dieseach: Yes, from his Magical Healing Cock, which only works as a trope in fanfiction.
Gaggle of 15 year old fanfiction-loving gay kids: OMG he's so fucking hot.
And who are you, O lover of Great Literature and Psychological Sexual Healing?
"ARIAN Bagheri Pour Fallah is an author, media and performance artist. Responding to the prevalence of algorithms in contemporary art and culture, ARIAN’s work emphasizes, in lieu of known taxonomies of fine arts and new media, character (ethos) and hermeneutical tools exclusive to man. ARIAN’s idiosyncratic use of emergent technologies including yet not limited to machine learning, metamaterials and extended reality (XR), within the context of performance art especially, is known for challenging computational ethics, while his informational reconfigurations of strictly physical matter, from textile to land, continue to circumvent tenets of conceptual art. ARIAN has given speeches at international conferences held at University of Virginia, Goldsmiths, University of London, among others, and is published by MIT Press and Cambridge University Press, respectively."
Well, I suppose you *could* be more pretentious about being An Artiste if you tried... plenty of technobabble buzzwords but hey, at least you didn't mention blockchain technology!
"For our first news article, we are delighted to announce that ‘The Singing Tree in the Midst of the Garden I,’ a modular-medium sculpture by RecitMusic.art founder and director, ARIAN Bagheri Pour Fallah, is currently on display as part of Ars Electronica 2021 Garden London / Zurich.
The work features an idiosyncratic take on land art making an equally unique use of blockchain technology, and is one of the 30 fragments constituting the site-specific artwork, Man in the Sound of God (Mensch im Klang Gottes), designed by Arian while Artist-in-Residence at the Stiftung Künstlerdorf Schöppingen, earlier this year."
The irony of telling me to assume less while you make the staggeringly, dramatically incorrect assumption that I don’t read, or read “great literature” is absolute. And you assume I don’t read because I don’t agree that he should keep screwing his suicide-threatening ex?
No thanks, hard pass on the rest of your opinions.
I wish that you would develop the smallest amount of intellectual humility. It would suit you more than believing that the drugs and that thesaurus make you an expert on human nature. One day, worms will eat you just like buzzards will eat me.
I used to be an avid follower of Scott's blogs 1-1.5 years ago, randomly got reminded of this blog again today and was wondering what happened that led to me not following the blog for more than a year slowly. I glanced at the posts, and found a lot less of them to be interesting to me. I wonder if interests changed for me or Scott started writing about different things.
I feel that Scott is trying to write in a way that's simpler, less personal, more widely accessible.. His writing became less weird than during the Unsong era. It is less detailed and there are fewer literary refences. For that reason I am enjoying it less. On the other hand, I think I may also trust his opinions more now.
Not sure. I think this is probably just life: like friendships, a relationship with a columnist you read may eventually fade as you, him, or both grow in different directions.
I’ve been reading Scott from the beginning, but I’ve never agreed with him on everything (or even most things?), I’ve just thought he was a wise, well-spoken dude with wide interests, whose opinion I liked to hear. I don’t think you grow out of that.
Yeah I think I definitely agree with him a lot less (it was like when I started reading him and Yudkowsky in my first year of undergrad I literally accepted their views as infallible lol) but after graduating and doing a whole lot of maturing (not nearly enough tbh), I've started to move away from the hyper-rational rhetoric in general. But Scott still had some really amazing culture pulse point pieces, which went against the grain in unpredictable ways and made you think about stuff differently, but now it seems a lot less thought provoking.
With the recent news about the infant formula shortage, I wanted to highlight a little-known issue: soy infant formula contains high levels of phyto-estrogens which may disrupt reproductive development. If you're worried about BPA, genestein is an even greater endocrine disruptor. You can read more here: https://denovo.substack.com/p/risks-of-soy-infant-formula
(I should note, eating soy is fine unless you're an infant and get 100% of your diet from it)
This might delight Scott and anyone who appreciates his answer to Job: Stephen Wolfram's concept of the Ruliad https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/11/the-concept-of-the-ruliad/ is roughly the same idea, but mathematical not theological. It is a kind of hypergraph of all possible states and all possible transitions between all states from all possible starting conditions. "The full ruliad involves taking the infinite limits of all possible rules, all possible initial conditions and all possible steps." Wolfram claims that for some fundamental mathematical reason this has to exist! But we only see the tiny part of it that we happen to inhabit.
So, basically Tegmark's mathematical universe hypothesis but described in an even lamer way.
(The hypothesis *itself* is not that ridiculous -- in fact, Gary Drescher's description of it in one of the last chapters of _Good and Real_ pretty much convinced me of it. But most descriptions of it make it sound a lot sillier than it actually is.)
Also, it's not Scott's answer to Job -- one says that all logically possible *good* universes exist, the other says that all logically possible universes exist whether good or bad.
It clearly exists as a mathematical object, to the extent that any mathematical object "exists". But saying it exists as a *physical* object seems like a very bold claim! From a quick skim, it looks like his argument is roughly
- when you push the Copernican insight that humanity is not special as far as it can go, you get the ruliad
- it has some of the high-level physical properties we'd expect.
At the risk of stating the obvious, you won't do it by using the part of your brain that likes saying things like "most optimal".
You can't get there by using the analytic part of your brain, just as you can't catch a ball by mentally sitting there and calculating the correct angles for your shoulder, wrist and elbow joints. To catch a ball, you think about catching the ball, and your instincts move your hand to the right place.
You have to silence the analytic part of your brain. When I was single, I discovered that alcohol would do the trick, but only in a very narrow (Balmer peak) window, drunk enough to stop overthinking but not drunk enough to be, well, drunk.
Be hot. Don't not be hot. If you have standards, be much hotter than you think you need to be to meet those standards, the weirder the standards ("I want a gf that likes going to experimental noise rock concerts") the more being hot will help you find that specific someone.
But really. Work out, get your style nailed down, have your finances and professional life in order, be happy with yourself and know what you want. You know the path, just follow it. Be an attractive force in the universe.
Are you certain that the standards are actually correct would be the first thing to do. I don't know your level of experience but it seems that a lot of people (at least in my surroundings) have an ideal type before having their first gf, and then they throw these standards away very fast.
A somewhat basic example is the guy who wants the tall blondes and end up very happy with the short brunettes.
As for the rest of the question, I have strictly no idea apart from visiting places/getting into social situations where you met the people with your standards. What are theses places is up to you to find out.
1) Personal Quality. Namely, how attractive/desirable you are, how much effort you put in, how god your profile is, etc. Usually there are some low hanging fruit to be picked here.
2) Volume. How many women are you actually meeting/asking out. I think most people I’ve met who can’t get a girlfriend are having volume problems. Go join new activities/go to parties/work your social network.
3) Standards. If you drop your standards low enough, you’ll be able to get a girlfriend
This. Different points are the bottleneck for different people, but the kind of nerds that frequent the comments here are probably failing most on volume - I know I had very few hobbies where I met new people and all those hobbies skewed heavily male.
Dating apps are unironically effective here, though finding the right one is important. My experience was that all the apps functioned roughly the same way from a UX standpoint, but they had radically different userbases - I was interested in noone on Tinder, got no messages on Bumble, but had great success on OKCupid.
I don't think I've ever encountered any real-world problem to which that's a remotely reasonable approximation -- so, I'd be *able* to immediately tell the difference between the n-th best and the (n+1)-th best with no uncertainty but not actually *give a damn about* the difference between the 2nd best and the absolute worst?
The secretary problem is very relevant for e.g. hunting for an apartment or a house, which most people will (hopefully) do at least once in their lifetime.
So you only care about the probability that you're getting the best apartment in town and you're indifferent between getting the 2nd best and getting the absolute worst?
IIRC the standard solution to the secretary problem is rejecting the first n offers (with n ~ 7?) then accepting the first one that's better than the first n. That's roughly what I did and it served me well.
Wolfram is still being invited to give speeches? Geez, that guy practically defines the category of underachiever. Rarely has someone of such young promise ultimately achieved so little, unless it be Harlan Ellison as a writer.
Hard to be more wrong than this. Wolfram is arguably the greatest scientist of his generation. Not only is Wolfram Language a marvelous technology that's way beyond every other programming language in many ways, not only is WolframAlpha the world's greatest calculator and the basis of Siri and Alexa, not only is Wolfram's physics project one of the most exciting developments of our time, Wolfram's essays and books and livestreams are wonderfully well-done and informative for scientific and lay audiences alike.
Now, Wolfram has a big ego. So what? He's a genius.
Wolfram has a reputation as a megalomaniacal bore, yet in my experience gives great talks and has fascinating work. I particularly enjoy his conversations with Lex Fridman:
I don't know enough to fully judge his work on its merits (as in, how fanciful it is, or standard ideas presented as novel and game-changing) - but it certainly sounds like he's on to something. Regardless, I am glad he's invited to give speeches / do interviews, b/c I enjoy listening!
The former is definitely a very nice product. I very much appreciated Mathematica, once upon a time, it was far more powerful than its predecessors (e.g. Macsyma) and I found it quite useful in certain niche applications -- basically checking horribly complicated algebra calculations.
And had Wolfram stuck to improving and streamlining Mathematica, e.g. working on methods of input that didn't require you to become familiar with a zillion Mathematica functions -- something a little more intuitive, and visual -- as well as improving its programming abilities, so it didn't get obsoleted by Python and R, then he would have been a very solid engineering leader, a position well worth respect and more than nearly all of us achieve.
But that's not my impression of what he wanted to do, he wanted to be a freaking Newton, an intellectual giant who would upend the philosophical world, and grubbing around being a Tim Cook refining and optimizing was too boring. So he hared off after assorted philosophical string theories, weird shit that was uniformly unprovable and so detached from scientific utility or engineering reality that it served as little more than a starting point for intellectual wankery (granted of the finest threadcount quality).
And Mathematica feels a little orphaned, and seems destined to remain one of the triumphs of the 90s, slowly losing relevance (e.g. to Python and R). Wolfram Alpha remains an amusement, so far as I can tell, useful for teenagers cheating on their calculus homework but not much else.
> Wolfram Alpha remains an amusement, so far as I can tell, useful for teenagers cheating on their calculus homework but not much else.
It's good for more than just CAS stuff. You can do calculations with datetimes, for instance. These would otherwise be fiddly, but it's natural using WA. The applications are niche, but it's nice when you can use it.
> So he hared off after assorted philosophical string theories, weird shit that was uniformly unprovable and so detached from scientific utility or engineering reality that it served as little more than a starting point for intellectual wankery (granted of the finest threadcount quality).
The meta-hypothesis (AFAICT) is that realistic physical universes can emerge from simple discrete dynamical systems. Arguably, a lot of fundamental physics is "simple" (see Maxwell's equations, the Schrödinger equation, Minkowski spacetime), but not obviously discrete. The nice thing about discrete dynamical systems is that you can check them one-by-one. Since fundamental physics is "simple", and the dynamical systems he's considering are also "simple", a search for one dynamical system matching the other seems like it might succeed. I think that's a summary of what he's doing. And he's doing it on his own dime without taxpayer grants, so hats off to him. Also, most ideas in fundamental physics are going to fail, so a let's-brute-force-try-every-discrete-system approach doesn't seem any more doomed than the rest, at least to me.
Yeah, I don't disagree WA can do some nifty stuff here and there. It's definitely an interesting experiment. But as a product I find it a niche curio, not revolutionary, and not an essential component of...well, anything. I might try it once in a while, but you could not get me to pay for it, not even a modest monthly sum. I don't see it as even in the same class as broadly enabling advancements like the PCR, CRISPR-Cas9, or STM, or as broadly foundational as the COBE measurements or the theory of the Higg's mechanism.
I've no objection to Wolfram trying his hand at a GUT, and he's unquestionably a smart guy so who knows what might happen? But as I said, given where he *started from* -- the guy matriculated at St. John's at 17, got a PhD from Caltech at 20, and was appointed to their faculty at 21! He published papers on chromodynamics when he was 18! -- the lack of anything even in the category of the above is suprising. As I said, he started incredibly strong, and then turned kind of...much more ordinary. Not nearly as amazing as his early promise.
AIUI Mathematica started out as a side-project from his "real" work in physics, but it then grew into a successful business. And I'd argue that Wolfram Alpha is exactly a "method of input that didn't require you to become familiar with a zillion Mathematica functions -- something a little more intuitive, and visual"! It doesn't score so well on programmability, though. I think the real obstacle to Mathematica becoming universally dominant was its closed nature - people want their science to be open rather than locked away in a walled garden, no matter how beautiful.
Maybe. These are deep and murky psycho-social-economic waters, and I'm a tyro at swimming therein. If I reflect on my own experience...I was a very early user of Mathematica, I actually started using it when it was still beta, and at first I was indeed deeply impressed. I used it for a bunch of annoying algebra problems at various points. It would not have troubled me to pay the few hundred dollars it cost to own it, once it went on sale -- had I felt it important enough. I don't think in those days we worried much about proprietary code -- remember *everything* was proprietary in those days. You paid for your hardware, you paid for your OS, you paid for your compiler and every library.
Why didn't I keep using it? This is hard to pin down. It was stunningly broad, but how often did I need to do a Taylor series expansion of an elliptical function or ask for the 40th coefficient in the expansion of (a+b)^100? I mean, it was mind-blowing that it *could* do such things -- I never met *any* part of math that it didn't execute masterfully, and this on 1980s hardware -- but in a practical sense I didn't really have much need of that. Integrals I couldn't figure out from Gradstein and Ryzhik I just resigned to computation. I ended up turning to Numerical Recipes more often than I fired up Mathematica. It could graph things very nicely, but it was slow, and for just fiddling around I started using gnuplot instead, which was lightning fast, and then along came R.
I dunno, it feels sort of like it tried to do too many things, and a bunch of speedy and lighter weight tools took its place. There may be part of what you say in that one disadvantage of Mathematica is that its workings were opaque, and if you were trying to do something novel, solve some new integral equation you'd come up with or something, it was hard to be certain you knew what it was doing when it gave you this answer or that. You'd have to work out all the tricky math yourself, just to be sure you were certain of it, and then Mathematica wasn't adding much more than proofing your own work. Valuable, up to a point, but that's what graduate students are for, also.
I first encountered Mathematica a bit later, as a high-schooler in the 1990s - I learned of the existence of whole fields of maths from reading the manual, but never really used it for much (it makes high-school homework problems trivial). When I studied undergraduate maths we had a short course in doing computer algebra with Maple (which struck me at the time as overall less consistent than Mathematica), but then I specialised in areas where computer algebra systems were less useful and never got comfortable with either system. Nowadays I code professionally, and sometimes use Jupyter notebooks (inspired by Mathematica notebooks) for work or personal coding projects. I'm actually pretty conflicted about this - it's nice to be able to embed graphs and images in my REPL, and to iterate on definitions, but (especially in an imperative language like Python) it's very easy to get yourself tied in a knot with the non-linear execution model of notebooks. I feel like if the computing world as a whole was going to take one thing from Mathematica, it shouldn't have been the notebook interface, and surely better high-interactivity environments are possible.
Other than being closed-source, Mathematica had some other problems. Off the top of my head:
- It's weird if you're already used to most mainstream programming languages. Apart from the superficial stuff like using square brackets for function arguments, the execution model is based on term-rewriting, and I struggled to get my head round the functional style used for a lot of library functions (this is probably less of a barrier now that functional programming is more widespread).
- It's expensive. Yes, there are "hobby" and "student" licenses, and if you're using it day-to-day at your job then your employer should cover it, but I can download Python and Jupyter for free right now and start playing (or even use them with no setup required on Kaggle or Google Colab, though those are more recent developments). Developer ecosystems have network effects, and you get network effects through hobbyists and beginners being able to try out your tools in as low-commitment a way as possible.
- Sad to say, probably most people don't need symbolic algebra all that much? I'm a software developer with a PhD in mathematics working on a project that involves traditional engineering and AI, and I've had to do algebra or calculus maybe a dozen times in the last couple of years - and for most of my previous industry jobs, that number would have been zero. The poor integration between SymPy and NumPy doesn't matter if you only need the latter.
Yeah that is weird. I mean, we spend all this time in school learning algebra and calculus, and then...it turns out that factoring polynomials or finding indefinite integrals of random combinations of trig functions doesn't happen very much in real life, even when you end up in math-heavy fields.
I never used Maple, except maybe once or twice, so I've forgotten what it looked like. In college I used macsyma on a Multics machine, so that was my earlier experience, and no question that Mathematica was far better.
Yes, I agree a better interactive model was needed, that was part of what I said above -- I wish Wolfram had put that big brain of his to work on *that* problem. We still don't communicate well with sophisticated apps, it's basically not super different from....well, BASIC. 100 PRINT "HELLO WORLD\n" Surely there must be a better way[1]. But what? NLP seems like it opens the door a crack, maybe we could talk to the computer? Sketch stuff? I don't know. But this seems like the question he (Wolfram) was in a good place to tackle. But aside from Wolfram Alpha, which seems half-hearted to me, I would not say he did. I think it would've been a better use of his time than seeing if the Standard Model can be rewritten as a big set of Game of Life glider guns or something.
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[1] I hate mice. Worst invention ever, except for the narrow category of artists and people who program for the pre-literate.
Yes, early on he was amazing. Both the DV and A,DV anthologies were ground-breaking, although I'm not sure they wear that well any more -- a fair amount comes across now as fatuous 60s self-congratulation, which admittedly didn't grate when I first read it because I was young and smug also. And although he hated what they did to it for some reason, "City on the Edge of Forever" is one of the best pieces of TV story-telling ever.
But that's kind of my point. He started off amazing, everyone predicted he would be some kind of sf god, and then...poof, kaput. Just kind of burned out and faded away. Very strange.
He wrote an interesting book about his experience with "City on the Edge of Forever", describing his frustration at the demands placed on him and his sense of betrayal at how the insiders (mainly D.C. Fontana) tampered with his story and later (mainly Roddenberry) publicly maligned his original story. It sounds like it was a very bad experience for him, and my heart went out to him.
Then he gives his original script, which was just amazingly worse than what was finally filmed. The character he felt was the best character he ever wrote, and who was completely excised from the filmed script, is deeply two-dimensional and completely unnecessary to the plot.
The filmed script did have a few hacky bits that I thought Fontana should have been good enough to avoid -- the best example is Edith's starry-eyed speech in the soup kitchen predicting spaceships; Blish's alternative speech in his short-story-ization was a lot better, but as I recall that wasn't from Ellison's version either.
I lost all respect for 80,000 hours when one of their main examples of their philosophy in action is some crypto millionaire who donated to the Biden campaign. No, really.
So, not somebody who put in the work to create a socially beneficial career, and not somebody who has used the proceeds of their "career" to donate to effective altruistic causes (unless I'm very much mistaken, in which case I have lost all respect for EA as well).
> in which case I have lost all respect for EA as well
I don't understand this. Do you mean "unless political donations are considered EA, in which case I've lost respect for EA", or "unless he has made conventional EA donations which I don't know about, in which case I've lost respect for EA because they're terrible at marketing", or something else?
Wow, I would take the Straussian view on why SBF donated is to send the message "please let me guide crypto policy for the US govt". That, or SBF is hopelessly confused on how the US Federal budget works and lacks the humility to realize the long term implications of whether the donkey or elephant octogenarian in office is impossible to predict.
> The place I could be most useful to him is — I don’t think Biden’s ever going to put much thought into it — but if [the administration] is ever looking for like an expert on crypto regulation ... He’s obviously an incredibly busy guy and I would really like to meet him — but also don’t want him to have to meet me in some senses, unless I or he had some reason to think that it would be valuable.
But I think his actual motivation is what he says it is - he's a classic earn-to-give EA, and he's decided that since he's now in a position to donate in much larger chunks, politics has become an interesting donation target. And yes, he probably *is* confused on how the US Federal budget works - most people are, and he's new at this! Also, nobody ever became a billionaire (particularly not at the age of 28) by being humble :-)
Given his posting history on here, he means "If EA is willing to associate with the 'woke-left' or anyone who associates with the 'woke-left', they're now contaminated in my eyes and thus I have no respect for them."
Brett S has a bit of a bee in his bonnet about wokism and how the words "racism" and "prejudice" are so awful anyone who uses them should be exiled from the rationalist community (to the point where I've rarely seen him post about anything else), so I'd imagine this is just a further manifestation of that.
Ah, thanks! Weird to see SBF described as "woke-left" after the whole "pandemics are a smokescreen, Carrick Flynn is really a stalking horse for the sinister billionaire crypto techbro who's funding him" screwup...
Based on what I've seen, Brett S has a, to put it politely, expansive definition of "woke-left". To put it less politely, he seems to be a big believer in purity politics.
I'm looking into seeing a therapist for the first time ever. I found a guy who's close and takes my insurance. Seems altogether like a good fit for me but he's Jewish (former rabbi) and I'm an Atheist (raised Jewish). I'm worried that I'll present a problem like "I feel like my life is meaningless" and the conversation will drift towards "have you tried believing in god?" like it always does when I talk to theists. Is this a valid concern to have or am I being dumb and not respecting his professional credentials?
Religious therapists deal with many clients who have lost their faith and any good therapist will know how to work with their clients personal beliefs without imposing their own.
Can you ask him about this? "I'm worried that as a former rabbi you'll bring up religion or attempt to proselytise me, and as an atheist that's a major turn-off: is this likely to happen?" He wants a good therapeutic alliance almost as much as you do.
If he's a former rabbi, he's probably accustomed to Jewish atheists. Being honest at the start about "no, really, god stuff is not for me" will benefit you both; you won't have to dodge it at a later time and he'll know what paths to avoid.
Competent therapists do not try to push their religious or political views on their patients (or their taste in music, books, etc.). They are unlikely ever even to express those views, as they are not relevant to the task, which is to help you. If you express your concern politely, in the way pozorvlak put it, it's a perfectly reasonable thing to say. If the therapist has a negative reaction to that perfectly reasonable concern of yours you should ditch him at once.
Yes, everything that Eremolalos just said. My partner is a therapist in training, and she devotes enormous energy to not imposing her views on her patients, or even indicating what those views are. Pushing religion on you, especially after you've asked a therapist not to, would be a huge no-no.
Thanks for your input. What does your partner do when the client expresses a personal axiom that goes against your partner's beliefs? Putting subjectivity aside, I would find it hard to give genuine advice to someone who was starting from a place I would never find myself in.
It's something the training teaches you to do (google "bracketing"), though in extreme cases a therapist might refer a client elsewhere if they feel they're not able to serve the client. My partner also says that if you're not comfortable seeing a former rabbi as a therapist that's fair enough, but see what professional body he's signed up with and what training he's had - his professional body would likely take a very dim view of proselytisation.
(Also, therapy is generally not about giving advice - that's more of a coaching thing)
I think in the most extreme cases of that the standard practice is to refer to a different therapist - I'd be shocked to hear of one proselytising ever.
Every time you have a conversation with a person who believes in God, it drifts towards your lack of religious belief? Either you’re exaggerating or you’re having some pretty heavy conversations. I’ve had casual chats with priests and even they don’t do this, much less your average once a week church/temple attender.
Er, from context I assume Ethan means "whenever he talks to theists *about his existential angst/general dissatisfaction with life*", not "whenever he talks to theists for any reason whatsoever".
> If there’s other research on which parts of the brain are / aren’t reinforceable, or how to run your thoughts on one kind of architecture vs. the other, please let me know.
There was some discussion in the comments of that post or another one if I recall correctly. Scott's post seems to be confused about the distinction between cues and reinforcers. Anyways,
Reinforcement learning in the brain by Yael Niv
"This is perhaps not so surprising, as converging lines of evidence suggest that animals and humans have a number of parallel decision-making systems at their disposal, only a subset of which are dopamine dependent. Key to identifying these different systems is the fact that a certain behavior (for instance, simple lever-pressing by a rat) can have wholly different characteristics in different situations: early in training this behavior can show flexibility and sensitivity to changes in the task or in the animal’s motivational state, while the same lever-pressing behavior can become inflexible and slow to adapt to any change after considerable training. The amount of training is not the only determinant of the degree of flexibility of learned behavior, but the link between over-training and the folk psychological notions of ‘‘habits’’ has bestowed upon the inflexible form of behavior the name ‘‘habitual responding’’, while the more flexible instrumental actions are called ‘‘goal-directed.’’ To complicate matters further, some forms of behavior seem wholly inflexible in that they are innately specified reactions to learned predictions. These fall into the class of Pavlovian responses, and it is not clear whether they are also driven by two types of value predictions: flexible outcome-specific predictions (similar to those underlying goal-directed instrumental behavior), and less flexible general affective predictions (as in habitual instrumental behavior)."
Any explanation of this sort is going to amount to oversimplifying a much more complex process, but....
My view: Reinforcement begins with a conditioning process which appears to involve the prefrontal cortex, then there's a conditioned relation which follows basic model-free reinforcement, and then the occipital lobe and brain stem are using a pavlovian process to respond to cues in the environment. So it's sort of three systems, but they're interdependent of one another. All responses involve the Pavlovian system; including the reinforcement responses. Pavlovian relations use only the Pavlovian system. Novel operant relations result in Type 2 responding. And previously trained relations are governed by Type 1 responding.
I would like to launch a (brand new?) theory about why human females develop breasts at puberty, while other primates only have visibly enlarged breasts when they breastfeed. I have written it down on my blog here:
- Our early ancestors probably were rather similar to the chimpanzee and had a mating system rather similar to that of the chimpanzee.
- Chimpanzee females go in and out of estrus, which is highly visible as swollen, red genitalia. Our ancestors probably had detectable periods of estrus too, like most animals.
- Chimpanzee males hold a strong preference for mating with females who are already mothers. Being an ape mother is difficult and first-time mothers often fail, so chimpanzee males prefer more experienced females.
- Except for the fact that chimpanzee males prefer somewhat older females, they aren't especially selective. Being promiscuous animals they want most females and they compete ferociously for the alpha position in order to get them.
- Humans obviously took another path. Presumably that happened gradually among our ancestors, so males started to invest in females and their children little by little, while females still did most of the work.
- When our male ancestors started to invest in their children, it was important for them to get as much value as possible for their investment. They needed to carefully select the females who could bring them children with the least investment possible. So they searched for females who seemed to be as self-reliant as possible. When more stable unions between males and females developed, males also benefited from unions with females who were capable of giving birth frequently.
- Among chimpanzees, birth spacing varies greatly among individuals and depends at least in part on the female's nutritional status. After having a child, chimpanzee mothers only return to estrus when they are able to reach a positive energy balance after the strains of pregnancy and lactation.
- Unusually well-nourished chimpanzee mothers return to estrus when their child is less than two years old. By that time they still have milk-filled breasts, as chimpanzees don't wean their children totally until the age of 4 or 5 years. Less well-nourished chimpanzee mothers don't return to estrus before they finish breastfeeding, because they can't afford to be pregnant and breastfeed simultaneously. So they only mate when they have flat, milk-free breasts.
- That way, estrus combined with big breasts showed that a female was both able to feed herself rather well and that she could give birth frequently. In the pool of estrus females, males had every reason to choose the big-breasted ones.
- Males supported estrus females who had big breasts more than flat-chested females. That gave females who happened to store fat in their breasts an advantage, because males couldn't easily spot the difference between breasts big from lactation and breasts big from fat storage.
- In response to females' development of fat-breasts, males needed to look for the even bigger fat-and-milk breasts. In response to which females developed even bigger fat-breasts beyond the point of impracticality.
- This happened a very long time ago, but there hasn't been enough evolutionary pressure to undo the process completely since. A mutation that among other things contributes to smaller breasts has increased in frequency independently among East Asians and Native Americans during the last 35 000 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ectodysplasin_A_receptor This suggests that there could indeed have been an evolutionary pressure to reduce breast size after more recent human mating systems made breast-size reproductively irrelevant.
Chimps' closest relatives are bonobos, which have a radically different mating strategy: bonobos of both sexes are pansexual and extremely promiscuous. Our ancestors are as likely to have been bonobo-like as chimp-like, and may well have been something else entirely.
Yes, the bonobos are an interesting case. Just like in humans, bonobo females (probably) evolved away from easily detectable estrus: While chimpanzee females have a genital swelling one out of four weeks, bonobo females have the same kind of swelling three out of four weeks. That's a bit like human females: "Normal" for three out of four weeks, menstruation for one week or so.
Still, I think that bonobos are a less likely model for the common ancestor than the common chimpanzee. In his book Bonobo, primatologist Franz de Waal points out that the bonobo evolved in a very special habitat: The gorilla-free rainforest south of the Congo River. About 2.5 million years ago, the Congo River went dry or at least small enough for apes to cross. Gorillas couldn't live in such a dry environment. Being leaf-eaters, they need moist forests. Chimpanzees are able to live in much drier environments. So when the climate became wetter again, there were no gorillas left to fill the forests.
This opened up new opportunities for the local proto-bonobo population: Living in a dense forest with lots of gorilla food but no gorillas, they could live in much denser groups than chimpanzees. This allowed females to form coalitions against males, which gave bonobos their famous female dominance patterns.
Franz de Waal cautions against assuming that our ancestors were like the bonobos because bonobos developed in a very specific environment (gorilla-free rainforest), while pre-human ancestors are thought to have lived on the much coarser savanna, where they needed to live even less densely than the chimpanzees. I side with Franz de Waal on this issue.
You're entirely right. They seek females who are self-reliant or who are able to extort goods and services from other sources than the males themselves.
I don't know about "extort"-- I think some of the aid is pretty good mutual exchange and some of it stabilized status which could be viewed as extortion.
Chimps are hierarchical animals. "Extortion" is probably not the most suitable word for most situations, but if some females are able to feed themselves better than others that is likely to have something to do with status hierarchies. Not only chimps, but primates in general have such hierarchies among females. Sarah Hrdy describes that well in her books about primate females.
That was my first thought too. A few points to consider:
-Human breasts don't store milk, it is produced on demand, so size only denotes how much fat is stored in the breast. (A tiny bit might be stored, but that seems contentious; see next point.)
-The swelling due to pregnancy/breastfeeding is comparatively minimal relative to the range of every day size differences. That is, one might notice a woman is pregnant or breastfeeding based on her breasts being slightly enlarged from her normal size, but comparing two women and using breast size to guess which is more likely pregnant or breast feeding without knowing their normal size is impossible.
-Breasts not going down in size when not utilized for feeding suggests they have a purpose that is always on, e.g. signaling sexual maturity.
-Humans not having external signs of estrus do not signal sexual maturity thereby, so need another signal. In essence "You don't know if I am in estrus, but you can tell I am sexually mature."
The supposition that early humans had the same 'males preferred older adult females' which shifted significantly to 'males prefer younger adult females' needs more support. An easier to support hypothetical is no preference.
Also, not all human cultures have the same modesty taboos about tits. Butt modesty is more universal.
At least there is a logical explanation for a shift from MILF-preference to youth preference: If males have only one child with the same partner, they prefer someone mature and competent. If males have several children with the same partner, they prefer someone with as many potential children as possible left in her. So youth preference presumably came with primitive forms of marriage.
This subject rests on speculation in itself because it is about things that happened an awfully long time ago. The best I, or anyone else for that matter, are going to produce are educated guesses rather than wild guesses.
The idea of the chimpanzee as a model for the common ancestor is not mine. I got it from primatologist Richard Wrangham and his book Demonic Males. He has some rather interesting arguments why our common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos about 5 million years ago probably looked like a chimpanzee and possibly behaved like a chimpanzee too. So when I made up my own theory, I didn't make my first assumption up from my own logical operations. I just aped a primatologist.
Even today, cultures from warm climates often don't wear enough clothes to squeeze their breasts together. And cultures from colder climates tend to cover the entire chest, hiding the cleavage.
>When our male ancestors started to invest in their children, it was important for them to get as much value as possible for their investment. They needed to carefully select the females who could bring them children with the least investment possible. So they searched for females who seemed to be as self-reliant as possible. When more stable unions between males and females developed, males also benefited from unions with females who were capable of giving birth frequently.
Okay, but why not just try and impregnate everyone and only pair with the highest quality women you had sex with?
Females will only have sex with you if you show a credible proof that you will spend ressources on them and their spawn.
Runaway sexual selection has given them a big brain capable of performing acausal decision theory : the only way for the simulation of you in your wife's brain to be faithful is for yourself to be the kind of person who will remain faithful.
Wasn't that exactly what they did? (and what many human males do until this day?)
Males tried to invest as little as possible when they invested, because they wanted to keep as much resources as possible for casual mating and other good investment opportunities.
I still think the age-indication hypothesis is important, but it doesn't explain everything. Why would we need an extremely conspicuous organ to signal youth, if _faces_ do it just fine (and attractive women have obviously neotenic faces).
I think the important question is why honest age-indication would benefit females. Why would females develop a feature that reveals that they have passed their prime? What would be in it for them? Honest age indication seems to benefit prospective partners much more than the females themselves.
The females are trying to fake it while males are trying to discern (kinda like a GAN, if you think about it). So the equilibrium settles on hard to fake signals like sagging breasts, skin texture and so on.
Yes, exactly! (Reading Wikipedia to learn what a GAN is)
There is one strange thing with the sagging breasts: A certain, rather significant percentage of females have droopy breasts in their early teens, when there was zero time for them to sag. (I know this because as a teenager, I was legally required to shower with other girls in an institution called school.)
That makes me think that maybe droopy breasts were the most common when breasts evolved. Later, when marriage and youth preference took over, girls with explicitly youthful breasts were favored, which made them more common. But they weren't favored enough to completely outcompete girls with droopier breasts. So both kinds still exist.
Maybe breast tissue can only resist gravity for so long. The physical world is part of the situation, not just what might be evolutionarily advantageous.
Yup. And that's a big problem for females until this day: Breasts ARE rather honest indicators of age and breastfeeding history. As no good countermeasure to that has evolved in females, plastic surgeons and clothing companies make good money from it.
I don't dispute at all that the male preference for youthful breasts has an evolutionary origin. The only thing I dispute is the idea that permanent female breast tissue would have developed out of nothing in order to advertise youth to males.
Females were selected on features that benefitted them and their descendants. Not on features that benefitted males around them more than themselves.
I'm for the idea of multilevel selection in humans, but I think a very important part of selection takes place on the level of the individual. Which means that the evolution of the female body needs to be seen from the female perspective.
When it comes to sexual selection, the evolution of the female body has to be seen from the male perspective. And vice versa, in all animals. Signalling fertility and the decline in fertility is evolution’s way of doing this.
Yes and no. The evolution of the look of the female body is indeed about male desire. But the evolution of the actual anatomy of females is about which females succeeded in a game were all tricks were allowed. For example, that's why I assume that since males desired the look of milk-filled breasts, females with that look were selected for. But from the female perspective, fat was cheaper than a flow of milk, so female interests came to decide the content.
Sort of, but I think that's semantically questionable.
It's definitely the case that some people /have been/ lucky to date - 1% of the population are in the luckiest centile.
But I think that calling someone "lucky/unlucky" often has connotations not just of "they have been lucky to date", but of "they are more likely than 50/50 to get heads the next time they flip a fair coin", and in that sense being lucky isn't a thing (although having a biased coin obviously is).
It's a good point. People often believe that "you make your own luck" meaning good habits, hard work, etc., give you good odds of having success in the long run, and therefore many will assume that people in bad situations likely got there through bad habits, etc. Yet as you point out, some people authentically have bad luck in spite of everything. I have in mind things like career problems, legal problems, relationship problems more than bad health, which usually appears more like bad luck than does the former.
Unless you know someone well, it's hard to judge whether one is a victim of sheer bad luck or not. It reminds me of being in high school when everyone I knew smoked weed, yet only one guy repeatedly got in legal trouble for it. This guy simply lacked a certain common sense about what situations were safe for weed smoking, but he believed he was extremely unlucky, since he continually got busted for doing for what nearly everyone was doing.
If one behaves slightly more recklessly than others, the behavioral pattern may not be obvious to an observer, but after 10,000 coin flips, so to speak, that person is likely to end up with a lot more tails than heads. But a merely unfortunate person can also end up with the same results--misfortune which is likely compounded by the fact many will assume such a person must have a character flaw explaining his fate.
_The Luck Factor_ is about people who see themselves as very lucky or very unlucky. Based on one experiment (do people notice what else is in a newsletter if they're told to count ads?), it seems as though "luck" has a lot to do with noticing what's around you rather than being extremely focused on getting tasks right. I don't know whether there's been further study or experimentation.
Larry Niven riffed on this idea in the Ringworld series. In his world reproduction is restricted to selected groups. One is the winners of Earth's Birthright Lottery. In theory someone descended from a series of these winners has been selected by the evolutionary advantage of luck.
I recall a sly joke in the series where a character thinks about testing for luck by flipping a slice of buttered bread to see which side hits the floor.
I've long thought that religious experiences are on a continuum with psychosis. When I was a Christian, I occasionally asked other believers what they meant when they said that God spoke to them, and for some it's an actual voice.
TBC, I don't think this level of psychosis (if it is that) is automatically harmful.
I've had minor mystical experiences myself, and they were positive. I didn't believe that they had supernatural explanations, which probably helps.
Cause the tariffs aren't set high enough and there's too much regulatory red tape.
Put a $20 tariff on your ordinary stamped stainless steel can opener and someone should start making them in the states. Of course; that presumes you still have enough entrepreneurs willing to try stuff and you haven't killed everyone's ambition through regulation.
As others said, most straightforward approach is to make the US more like the countries with manufacturing jobs right now where labor is chap and competitive for labor-intensive manufacturing. Either make Americans work more for smaller pay in cheaper to build factories, or get people who will do that instead.
Alternatively one could try to make automation more efficient. There are empirical research results that the companies who utilize the most automation grow more and hire more than their competition. See link: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2022/01/22/economists-are-revising-their-views-on-robots-and-jobs which links to research papers. This suggests an alternative option, to compete with doubling don on the advantage of having more automation.
Suppose the cited results are true and globally applicable: the company A with the best automation does better than company B with 2nd rate automation on metrics like revenue, growth and thus also number of employees (because A grows faster than B and has increasing market share). Then it is important for a country that attempts to create as many automated manufacturing jobs as possible to have more many companies like A and as few as possible companies like B.
High tariffs could be counterproductive if it allows industrialists in your country get lazy and not develop and improve their processes to be globally competitive. On the other hand, it is not good either if your companies start dwindling if foreign competition can sell more of the better product at cheaper price.
edit. Additionally, subsidizing automation can be also a mistake: The industrialist may buy the most shiny technological toy that impresses the bureaucratic procedure handing out the subsidies instead of developing the most profitable technological toy.
The problem with "work more for less pay" is the rest of the cost of living. Trying to find somewhere to rent, or buy a house, or pay your utility bills, or fill your car with petrol so you can get to your job are not charged on "okay we'll charge you the poverty price".
Bring down the cost of living to the same as in those overseas countries and sure. Otherwise you will not get people to work the jobs that are supposed to be "good jobs" as in the past. Maybe we're gone past the days of "good jobs for blue-collar workers" but that is a different problem.
I don't know where you are working now or in what field, but would you take your own advice? Cut your wages in half for the same cost of living?
I hoped people could read between the lines that I was not endorsing the objective "make the US more like the countries with manufacturing jobs right now" exactly for that reason.
I like much more the "improve and increase amount of automation" solution I mapped out in more detail, but I have no idea what would be a good government policy to encourage it.
Probably the best way is to foster the internal markets that nurture competitive corporations that embrace automated production. Maybe judiciously applied temporary protective tariffs against too good foreign competition could work, if you can make your industrialists behave as if they were not there.
you are wrong and missing the point. it's not about impoverishing workers at all — it's about bringing in laborers from abroad instead of just paying those same laborers to make stuff for you abroad. in fact it makes those workers quite a bit richer.
But it’s not, is it. Countries with large numbers of people involved in manufacturing were never the poorest countries in the world, but often the countries with the highest wages.
The US has more manufacturing now than it did in the 1970s and 1980s, or indeed, any other time in history.
There is no way to bring back "manufacturing jobs" and it is the wrong goal anyway.
Increasing manufacturing is by facilitating more and more automation. We produce a lot of high value and heavily automated products in the US; the more you can automate, the better it is to build in the US and EU, because you are closer to the final destination of your products and your workers are of higher quality.
The way you get rich is by automating. You want low automation, low value manufacturing to be overseas, as that way, you don't have the poor people who are working those low productivity jobs in the US.
> you don't have the poor people who are working those low productivity jobs in the US.
Well, you'll still have poor people, they'll just be in shitty service jobs or completely cut off the job market. The drop in middle class jobs has led to an increase of both high paying, but also low paying ones.
Wages aren't actually stagnating. The whole "stagnant wages" thing is because people were using a measure of COL as a measure of inflation (CPI is a COL, which is why "wages have been stagnant", when in real life, of course, people just increase quality of life when their wages go up, so COL goes up with wages).
Wages have, in real terms, approximately doubled since 1970, which is why houses increased by more than 60% in size and everything else became more plentiful, abundant, and higher quality.
The Republicans are fundamentally correct that a lot of this is that people who can work are choosing not to due to more generous welfare, though some of it is also that, because people are more affluent, they can also afford to retire earlier.
My dad, for instance, probably could have worked for a few more years with his Parkinson's before it got to the point where he couldn't, but it had progressed to the point where he wouldn't be able to do his previous job. As such, he went out on disability because of how the disability laws work now - he was unable to do his job due to disability.
My mom retired early because she and my dad have enough money that they didn't have to work until retirement age.
Moreover, there's no actual drop in the middle class; a significant fraction of "middle class" people are just upper middle class now. We have wider income variance because we have wider productivity variance.
Low end people are better off because we have a better safety net. Everyone else is going up, but high end people are going up the fastest because the high end of productivity increases is, well, high.
Also, productivity increases aren't even across the economy; some jobs have seen much better productivity increases than others.
The number of poor people is going down and absolute poverty is going down.
It seems to me that there's a nearly unquenchable market for service jobs. And by that I mean butlers, valets, maids, footmen, et cetera. The economics of service jobs has changed over the past hundred years, but if we really reach a point where automation has made the top 10% incredibly rich but the bottom 90% fairly useless, then I can easily imagine a world where the remaining 10% of first-order useful people each have an average of nine servants to manage their house and personal affairs.
Sounds to me like much of the bottom 90% in that world would be useful, whereas you'd end up with a lot of n+ generations with wealth who are the "fairly useless" part of society.
People sometimes present this as an argument against automation being a problem (not saying that you're presenting it like that). But feudalism with robots sounds like a pretty awful future to me.
The main problem is first-world labour costs. So I'd declare a Special Economic Zone (I'm thinking maybe Texas south of San Antonio?) with no minimum wage, borders open to the rest of the world, unions illegal, and all other employment-related laws repealed.
If you can pay your factory workers two bucks an hour then there's good reasons to build your factory in the USA.
Labour costs aren’t e everything. Labour costs in China are much higher than sub Saharan Africa. Germany has a large manufacturing service. Also while the libertarian dream of impoverishing the masses (which by the way is a Marxist prediction for capitalism - so well done of proving then right) is a bonus for investors it’s not so great for workers.
To bring manufacturing back to the US, the country needs highly skilled tradesmen and engineers, learning their trade in apprentice systems, and university systems. A strong unionised workforce would be useful as well.
Can your factory workers live on two bucks an hour? That is the problem. And if they can't, then they don't consume products. So you have to export all your fridges and washing machines, because there is no way your own workers can afford them, and you better hope other countries pay their workers more than two bucks an hour so they can buy your products.
Seems like this defeats the purpose. We can bring *production* here with automation. There's no reason to bring large numbers of *jobs* if they don't pay well or impact American workers.
Why would you want to outlaw imports? That would be like me saying I'm outlawing plumbers from my house. (I'm not a plumber.) What possible reason would I have for doing that? Congratulations to me! There's now a thriving domestic plumbing sector in my house! All plumbing problems are fixed in-house with no need to import labor! The only difference now is I'm paying too much for substandard plumbing.
And if your goal was to increase the amount of plumbing work available in your house, you would have succeeded.
Also, you can build a self sufficient economy without external imports fairly easily on the millions of people level that most countries are at. Would it be as rich in GDP as a globalized country? No. Might there be other advantages? Possibly.
So we are going to impoverish (in the sense of making less rich) the country to achieve the *possibly* advantageous goal of becoming "self-sufficient" so that a few hundred thousand people can be overpaid to produce items that can be more efficiently and cheaply produced elsewhere? I also would like to be paid more than what the market is willing to pay me. Let's get some industrial policy going to help me achieve that--at the expense of all the rest of you, of course.
Please remember that the top level comment is asking "Let's say your goal was to bring back manufacturing jobs in large numbers to the United States. (Putting aside whether or not that's a worthwhile goal.).
I'll happily talk about if it's worthwhile elsewhere; but the point here is "How do we increase the number of *JOBS* in manufacturing." not overall GDP, not economic freedom, not manufacturing output, just the number of jobs.
When will we get to the point where most people can afford IVF? Or might you mean majority IVF among people who can afford it? At what point do governments (or even just one government) start supplying IVF?
I'm not very convinced by this video, so be warned: I am going through this one and criticising it strongly, and I mean "yeah I don't believe him that it happened exactly that way".
"Content notice for mention of physical violence against a child, and generally depressing stuff about the extinction of early inquisitive thought-process and the breaking apart of family"
I wonder about that. For instance, he includes this snippet in the replies to comments:
"My brother and I were lumbered with a bizarre myth when we were born. Doctors told our parents that being identical twins we’d always lag behind other children — twice the brains meant half the intelligence."
When was he born when this happened? Where was he born? He has an English accent, I'm assuming he's English, I never heard of doctors saying that twins would be half as intelligent as single babies. Now, having looked this up, apparently there *are* studies showing twins have slightly lower IQs than singletons, so it's possible that our man here was indeed one of the 1950s Aberdeen cohort study:
"Participants: 9832 singletons and 236 twins born in Aberdeen between 1950 and 1956.
Results: At age 7, the mean IQ score of twins was 5.3 points lower (95% confidence interval 1.5 to 9.1) and at age 9, 6.0 points lower (1.7 to 10.2) than that of singletons in the same family. Adjustment for sex, mother's age, and number of older siblings had little effect on these differences. Further adjustment for birth weight and gestational age attenuated the IQ difference between twins and singletons: the difference in mean IQ was 2.6 points (-1.5 to 6.7) at age 7 and 4.1 points (-0.5 to 8.8) at age 9.
Conclusions: Twins have substantially lower IQ in childhood than singletons in the same family. This effect cannot be explained by confounding due to socioeconomic, maternal, or other family characteristics, or by recruitment bias. The reduced prenatal growth and shorter gestations of twins may explain an important part of their lower IQ in childhood."
But again, that's not "half the intelligence" and *unless* there was some difficulty with the birth, I can't see doctors telling parents "tough luck, twins are going to be way dumber than normal babies".
The rest of it, so far, sounds like normal atheist story: "I was a very smart kid, at a young age I started questioning the doctrines I was being taught, adults couldn't handle this and reacted badly".
I also wonder if he was in some tiny splinter sect; he uses "Yahweh" which is not normal usage, so it's either "tiny weird sect where we referred to God as Yahweh" or more likely, the common Internet Atheist trope where they seem to think using "Yahweh" is some Epic Pwning The Christians. 'O hai did U kno Ur god is Old Testament which is Yahweh so Y U say God not Yahweh for real name? checkmate, theists!' He also does the "Jesus sounds like Cheeses so Imma use Cheeses all the time what a thigh-slapper how smart am I? Very Smart!" bit which is juvenile, so I can't get a read on his age: is he 20? 50? (What is with that weird floating baby? But that's personal taste, maybe he doesn't find it creepy).
Also, I'm not too far in yet but equating "my parents made me go to church" with abuse and Stockholm Syndrome? As though no child was ever made to do something they didn't want to do, by parents, in a secular context? "We're going to visit Aunt Sue and Uncle Bob next Saturday" "I hate Aunt Sue's house! She never lets me play or have fun, I have to sit quiet and behave, I don't want to go!" "Tough, we're going and you *will* behave". "This is child abuse, you are Stockholm Syndroming me!"
(As you may gather, I'm not too impressed).
Uh-huh, now I've got to the physical abuse bit. So a parent picked him up from school, he said some smart-alec remark about "Did Cheeses have a stammer?" (I don't know why he'd pick that as an 'innocent question') and pow! Slammed face-first into a brick wall and told "don't blaspheme".
Anyway, he is now getting older and getting more committed in his faith (such as it is). Then we get the Classic Atheist Moment - he met a teacher! who spurred him on to question his beliefs! and the whole house of cards came tumbling down!
(Funnily enough, I find Atheist Deconversion Stories follow the same general patterns as Christian Conversion Stories, just in mirror images: I believed/didn't believe this thing all my life, I met an influential authority figure who made me think and use my brain and question what I had accepted uncritically up to then, and then I didn't believe/believed new thing).
Fair enough, when I was eleven I did the same thing - but it wasn't at the behest of anyone else, I started wondering why I believed what I believed and was it just swallowing what I had been told and if I had been born in different circumstance would I believe differently? I came out of that still convinced of my Catholicism, Mr Trees came out of it convinced that Christianity was for the birds and Big Brain Thinking was the way to go.
Okay, now he's trotting through the usual Atheist Disproof Texts (I am amused by his continuing shock at the "sordid truth of Noah's Ark"). And now he's onto Hell and how it's moronic and the entire system is unfair and you can't divide up people into good and bad because no matter where you pick one person over another it would be between two people with a virtually identical moral score.
I feel that if he had to judge between a torture-rape murderer and a doctor who volunteers in Médecins Sans Frontières he would *not* come out with "oh goodness me, how can I tell which of them is slightly more naughty than the other?" and he has no problem throwing around terms like barbaric and genocide etc. when discussing incidents in the Bible. However, let us continue!
So now he thinks he is the first entire person ever to discover atheism. Mm-hmm. He doesn't describe going to a particularly strict religious school (even if they did have the Christian Union at lunch time), he's met this wonderful new teacher who is all about "direct evidence and use your brain" and he boasts in his notes about how super-duper smart he and his brother are. But he can't read up about belief and non-belief anywhere? There are no encylopaedias or libraries around him? In all his exploration of faith and belief and religion, he never heard anything around him from anyone about non-belief?
"We scored consistently ahead of our age in reading and vocabulary. A head teacher once chastised our parents for helping with our work — she didn’t believe we knew the words we used. She then had to eat her own. In our 11+ exams, we both got 99% and were accused of copying each other. We were cleared when it was discovered we got different answers wrong — oh, and took the exams in different rooms. I could go on. Have a think what it’s like for naturally bright children to be repeatedly suspected and accused instead of encouraged. No surprise I later learned to coast in school — performing to an average level to blend in.
The water cycle wasn’t part of the formal curriculum until around age 8. But my interest in clouds led me to find out about it sooner. I know — unbelievable isn’t it."
So when he's not yet 8 he can independently find out about the water cycle but in all his investigating into religion from the age of 11+, he never even stumbles across the word "atheism". He can be aware of Allah and Vishnu as competing gods, but he was so "cocooned in Christianity" he had no idea atheism existed.
In 20th century England.
Let's keep going! So he and his brother are now secret atheists, but they agree to keep pretending for their parents, "go to church, take communion" (and again, here I am puzzled; if they are mainstream Protestants, by the use of communion, then they are not the hardline head-to-brick-wall zealots he presents; if they are small splinter denomination, they will not use a term like 'communion' because that is Romish superstition). If he's Church of England, which I strongly suspect, *nobody* is bashing their kid's face against a wall for blasphemy; you can be functionally atheist and a bishop in that denomination! EDIT: see below for my change of mind on this.
Okay, early teens them tell their parents they don't believe in God; this doesn't go down well, they get the choice of "church or punishment", they choose punishment.
What horrors of the Inquisition await them?
"All kinds of prohibitions, confiscations and gratuitous labours".
So basically "If you're not going to church on Sunday morning, you don't get to lie around in bed, get up and do chores"?
When the various "strategies" don't work, then the parents resort to "sneering contempt, name-calling and aping". Yeah, if I had 13 year old kid who started lecturing me about how they were so much smarter than me, I'd tell them to knock it off instead of going "oh wow, so smart, so better than me".
So things go on and they grow up and eventually there's live and let live. But I now understand why the floating baby: it really is Baby's First Atheism.
EDIT: They might have been Jehovah's Witnesses, there are a couple of videos about JWs on his Youtube channel. That would explain some elements of his video, the emphasis on "Yahweh" over "Jehovah":
"Jehovah's Witnesses emphasize the use of God's name, and they prefer the form Jehovah—a vocalization of God's name based on the Tetragrammaton."
Since they are a small splinter group, relatively speaking, there would be a greater emphasis than Church of England on doctrines, etc. so he would be exposed to more mandatory church going, Scripture reading, and specific idiosyncratic doctrines.
I took the 11+ and I’m certain you never receive your score. I certainly didn’t. The 11+ was used to filter kids into grammar schools (for conventionally brighter students) or comprehensive school. You were just told whether you passed or not.
These videos are from several years back, so that may be part of it; I think this guy has some axes to grind with his family (he has videos up about abusers and that his mother was a narcissist etc.) so we're getting a highly-coloured version of his past. Also the subjective element is being presented as objective (the icon of the floating child to represent him - he's the innocent little creature who was fooled and abused and crushed in his intellectual curiosity; there's one video where he does a run though his childhood experiences of being raised Christian and it does the whole 'every adult in this looks sinister and menacing, I am the innocent normal-looking child who is being oppressed' thing).
I am sceptical and rather suspicious of his recounting because I have a close family member who went into therapy (they have some genuine problems, this is not self-indulgence on their part) and is now coming out with 'memories' of their childhood that are (1) highly coloured rewriting of the past, so Mr. Trees' visual accounts of his 'abusive' childhood immediately reminded me of this and (2) physically could not have happened the way they said. (I'm not blaming the therapist on this, though it reminds me of the whole 'recovered memories' controversy; I think it's that my family member got a lot of psychological practical methodology dumped on them about 'such and such a reaction develops due to this and that in childhood' and they immediately glommed onto this as "yes! this explains it all! I must have been abused!" and they recast memories to fit in with the new narrative).
When I challenge them on this, it's "oh you weren't there". When I tell them that for many of these alleged events, I *was* there, it's "oh you were in another room". They have their new, reconstructed version of the past to explain why things turned out the way they did (and they are the victim of it all) and any challenges get explained away or met with "you're jealous/angry/lying" or aggression or bursting into tears. Since the accused parties are dead with ten years, there's nothing but "it's my word that I remember this correctly" and, as I said, some of it literally could *not* have happened as they say it happened.
Mr. Trees reminds me *very* much of all this, so I am subjectively reacting on the same level back at him - I don't believe you. Which is unfair, since I don't know him, maybe his family life was as bad as he makes out - but it's details like "doctors told my parents we'd be idiots since we were twins, but we turned out ultra-smart, so smart the headmistress accused us of cheating on tests since we scored so high" that don't ring true.
Woo-hoo! In another video, he quotes from Colonel Ingersoll's atheistical lectures, to reference Chesterton. I've never seen an Ingersoll quote in the wild, I had to go looking him up when I read the reference in Chesterton. 19th century polemics for the win, huh?
Everyone I know with complex chronic medical issue, myself included, views doctors as largely useless. They're something like 10-20 years behind the cutting edge, most of the time, and doing your own research is immensely valuable.
Alternative medicine is definitely too credulous, and 90% of their idea go nowhere, but they are more likely to be willing to try some new development.
Personally, I think you'll get more useful ideas from the alternative sphere, but you have to do a *lot* of your own research on the options presented. Conventional doctors are script pads - go in knowing what you want after extensive research, and get a script that enables you to buy it legally and/or have health insurance cover some of the cost.
I think there is just a wide range of expertise and ability among doctors.
My wife has an amazing migraine doctor/clinic, very up-to-date with research and trying lots of new things and such, and they've had a huge positive impact on her life. On the other hand, when my stepfather got covid this year, his primary care doctor wanted to put him on azythromycin, which is wrong enough that he knew it was wrong.
Hope you SF rats are watching Steph Curry do his magic from outside tonight. Hey Steph, put that mouth guard back in your mouth!
Oh, from that distance it should be 4 pointer!
I've seen a theory that mass shooters are likely to not have grown up with a father in the house. I don't find this plausible, but I suppose it should be checked.
David French says we should reduce abortions by not maligning single motherhood and I feel so much angst I'm not sure how to phrase it.
I got as far as checking the Columbine shooters and confirming that both grew up with fathers in the house.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's statistically more likely that mass shooters, like all criminals, have a variety of "screwed up family" risk factors, but this one doesn't seem to be much of a slam dunk.
If we find out what matters, we can at least stop wasting our time with interventions that don't work. My bet is that the effects of no father are swamped by the effects of an abusive father.
A theory that was common for a while but that I haven't seen lately is that mass shooters were on anti-depressants.
"The effects of no father are swamped by the effects of an abusive father."
Eh. The level of abuse that would have a socially negative impact are probably far outside the limits set by CSP. And besides, the most common failure mode for fathers is not abuse but neglect, followed by abuse of the wife/mother.
Lack of a father has long been acknowledged by societies as contributing to the failure of young men. It is true that attacking children is a rather spectacular extreme, but even more garden variety nerdowell is more common in fatherless men.
My spidey sense doubts that simply because if that were true, someone would have put their finger on it by now.
Thinking back to Columbine - 1999 - I guess SSRIs were being deployed by then but still if it were a reliably common thread, it would have ginned up more interest with theorists than FPS games or rock music lyrics.
Imagine the US map on cork board covered with pins connected by red thread. Now what do these events all have in common? The shooters were all medicated with Prozac!
A fair number of people have "put their finger" on SSRIs or other adolescent psychiatric meds as a major cause for spree killing. Nobody has really substantiated that with rigorous scientific study, but why would they? This field is as politicized as climatology, but not nearly as well funded. Anybody doing research in the area is rewarded not for the accuracy or insightfulness of their work, but for the extent to which it reinforces the political position of their tribe (or the tribe of their professional peer group).
So it's mostly going to be "It's the guns, stupid, and anybody proposing a theory other than too many guns is obviously a shill for the NRA and should be run out of town", with a modest side order of "it's obviously not the guns, that's hoplophobic nonsense - here's a non-gun theory that's kind of plausible, so lets accept and boost it uncritically". If there's anybody doing actual good science in the area, they're going to be hard to find.
Well, maybe Gary Kleck, but he's one guy and I don't *think* he's done a deep dive into spree killings yet.
Did you see Ross Douthat’s compromise proposal in ‘that terrible newspaper’ today?
Putting a bit more scrutiny on folks 18-25 purchasing firearms. Asking for a couple of adult references during that age range and possibly a peek at their social media.
Probably not enough for the Left and way too much of a burden for the live and breath Second Amendment crowd.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/01/opinion/school-shootings-gun-reform.html?referringSource=articleShare
Does anyone have any advice for managing ADHD? I don’t like the side effects of adderall, I don’t that Modafinil more than once a week because of tolerance. I’m also a nicotine user, which helped at the beginning but I’m kicking the habit now.
I would really love a non-chemical alternative, but nothing has worked for me. I’m kind of half hoping that someone here will propose some crazy underground therapy that will help (cbt-based therapy for adhd did little for me)
...have you tried bullet journaling?
I recently switched from chrome browser to vivaldi. I'm liking it quite a bit so far! I don't know a lot about the development behind such things, but I'm loving how much control I have over it. It's got the ad blocking of firefox, the privacy protection of duckduckgo, and the tab stacking and backend of chrome! I highly recommend it!
I feel like both the red and blue tribes have been trying to gaslight me on covid. Do we have enough reliable data now to push back?
On which particular part of the gaslighting?
Any of it.
Did the vaccines give enough benefit to outweigh the costs? Same for masks, and for various isolation/"lockdown" etc.?
Were the signatories of the Great Barrington declaration *all* crazy or were some of them reputable researchers who were shouted down instead of being engaged?
To what extent did the disinformation come from politicians and the media amplification, and to what extent from the CDC, WHO, Fauci, etc.?
If we could send a time capsule back to ourselves in January 2020, what advice would we give ourselves? And the bad thing is, there is not consensus on what that would be, is there? Many people would send "Buy masks, don't worry too much because a vaccine will be developed, take it plus multiple boosters, stay home." Others would send "Eat right, get into a healthy weight, don't take the jab, ignore the hysteria if possible, protect the vulnerable."
Clearly the situation has become highly politicized. Each side accuses the other, and in both cases the accusations seem to have some merit. One side ignores the science while shouting "Believe the science", the other spins out into conspiracy theory. There doesn't seem to be a sane in-between place, or even a sane place elsewhere.
On January 1, 2020, the correct move was "China, go into lockdown for six weeks. Rest of world, close borders to China for six weeks". We could easily have eradicated the virus at that point if only we'd overreacted too soon rather than overreacting too late.
On January 31, 2020, the correct move was more like "Six week lockdown for the entire world until the virus is eliminated". The cost of this would have been unthinkable at the time, but of course would have been much better than the months of rolling on-and-off lockdowns that we instead got over the years.
Given that COVID has numerous animal reservoirs, and appears freely able to jump species, how exactly would eradication work in this hypothetical? Are you assuming that all the mice, bats etc in China also respect the lockdown?
Covid has been locally eradicated in quite a few geographies, quite a few times (China, Taiwan, each state of Australia, New Zealand). It always came back, but as far as I know all outbreaks have been traced to leaky quarantine for humans arriving from abroad, and never to animal reservoirs.
Also all your examples are islands. (Except China whose numbers I don’t believe)
Omicron is believed to have come from mice
> Who is "we" and how are "we" going to make China cooperate? For that matter, how are "we" going to make the people screaming that a travel ban on China was racist cooperate?
I don't know, the scenario I'm responding to involves going backwards in time to tell people what to do. So I guess I use my status as a time traveller from two and a half years in the future to get people to listen to my advice.
If that doesn't work then I guess I'm still just some random jerk on the internet whose policy advice will get ignored anyway.
> Why not ask for a magical pony that farts vaccines as well, if we're asking for straightforwardly impossible things?
We've already got a time machine!
"Gaslighting" is one of those relative neologisms that I'd like to banish from the English language. (And I'm pretty sure it will go away soon.)
The original meaning was something very specific: to lie to someone about the past for the specific purpose of making them doubt their own sanity. This is apparently something that happened in a play once. I'm not sure if it happens in real life.
But recently it seems to have just expanded its meaning out to just encompass "lying" or even just "being wrong".
Thank you, thank you, a thousand times thank you.
This has been bugging me soooo much. I'll go a step further though, and say that I think it's not just lying about the past: it's manipulating objective reality for the purpose of claiming such manipulation did not occur in order to make someone doubt their sanity.
Applied to the case at hand: unless the Red or Blue tribe created Covid for the sole purpose of claiming it doesn't exist, then no gaslighting happened here. And as daft as both sides are, I'm pretty sure that's a claim that can't be leveled at either.
1944 film
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslight_(1944_film)
That's a joke wikipedia page, there was never such a film.
Maybe so. It’s a pretty elaborate joke if it is. IMDB says you can rent it for 3 dollars and has a trailer for it.
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0036855/
> If we could send a time capsule back to ourselves in January 2020, what advice would we give ourselves?
"Buy masks, meet people outdoors, eat right, be fit, take the vaccine and boosters. Talk to your friends and relatives before the conspiracy theories reach them, but be prepared that 50% of them will laugh at you; don't waste your time arguing, it is futile."
From my perspective, the middle ground is to keep meeting your friends, but to do so outdoors, with masks if unvaccinated. There is absolutely no need to isolate yourself socially; just take reasonable precautions.
Similarly, you should eat right and try to stay fit even in non-pandemic situations; cardiovascular problems are killing people all the time, covid is just one more reason.
The actual difficulties are: your job or school, where you can be forced to spend a lot of time with many people in unventilated place maskless. Try to work from home and homeschool your kids for a year or two, but these options are not available for everyone.
tongue in cheek.
Shut down MSNBC, CNN and Fox along with social media. Maybe find a way to reanimated Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. Yeah and maybe Robin McNeal too.
Vaccines were highly beneficial, at very low cost beyond the loss of social trust when we tried to make the vaccines mandatory. Masks as implemented were close to useless, and probably destroyed more public trust than the vaccine mandates. Lockdowns as implemented were *slightly* useful, but came at a massive cost including probably more loss of public trust than vaccine and mask mandates combines.
The signatories of the Great Barrington declaration were not all crazy.
Disinformation came from all of the sources you name, feeding into each other. And there was a separate strain of disinformation from grassroots activists, though that fed into right-wing politicians and media, so take your pick.
With a retro-time capsule and some reason to believe it would be believed, send back "the folks at Moderna and BionTech have already(*) developed vaccines that are safe and effective; start producing and distributing them as soon as possible. And have them develop boosters for new variants as they emerge. J&J and AstraZenica will have less-good but still useful vaccines in a bit, if you can't ramp up mRNA production fast enough. If you can find any N95 respirators, those are useful in high-threat environments. Virus spread is mostly aerosol, mostly in noisy crowded spaces. Here are some tips for treatment of severe cases. Otherwise don't sweat it, there's not really much more you can do, but you'll muddle through OK."
*Maybe* I'd tell people it was cooked up in a Chinese lab, just to get them to stop tearing apart their neighbors over it. But that would be risky in other ways, so probably not.
* Depending on what day of January 2020 you send it back to
I think the balance of the evidence is heavily against you on masks - mask mandates did in fact result in statistically significant reductions in hospitalisations and deaths. A quick google turned up
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0252315
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01394-0
https://www.publichealthontario.ca/-/media/Documents/nCoV/COVID-WWKSF/2022/03/wwksf-mask-mandates-population-level-outcomes.pdf?sc_lang=en
https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2021.01072
but virtually no studies suggesting that mask mandates don't help (the only one I found, although I freely admit I didn't look hard, was https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8395971/, which is so weak as to be basically meaningless).
I don’t believe any of these studies. Epidemiology as a field is way too politicized to be trusted and there is too much tribal loyalty and groupthink. I am certain the conclusions of those studies were predetermined before any data was collected. Cargo cult science the lot of it.
I am probably moving the goalpost, but does statical significance tell us whether the benefit is worth the cost?
And this is the conclusion, which depends on what we take as credible evidence and who we trust. But what is actually credible and who is trustworthy is a large part of the problem, maybe the entire problem.
What should I have done in January 2020 to arrive at the correct solution quickly without receiving a time capsule? Or better, what should I do the next time there is a pandemic or other emergency?
How do we suppress BS without suppressing inquiry?
I am tied in a knot.
I may have been unclear. I am less interested in the conclusions than the process of getting to a conclusion reliably.
Wait? Conclusions are almost always more reliable if you wait until you have better data.
I mean, seriously, one thing that surprised me about this pandemic was the sizeable fraction of people who wanted reliable answers *right now* and were (1) willing to imbue expert opinion with far more certainty than it had, than even the experts themselves thought it had, and (2) who became enraged when this or that opinion proved wrong, or this or that intervention didn't work, or didn't work as well as was hoped.
Shit happens. The future is inherently unpredictable, and the future of things about which we have only limited knowledge -- pandemic viral disease being right up there -- is *really* unpredictable. Nevertheless, experts are called upon to make guesses, and politicians are called upon to make decisions. They probably mostly do the best they can, and it's completely inevitable that a solid 8 times out of 10 they'll get it wrong. It's a freaking miracle they get it right at all, ever.
Now if the big lesson learned is for us all to have some God-damned humility, from top to bottom -- if experts hedge their opinions more, and the people expect fewer certainties, and politicians shrug their shoulders a lot more and say "We dunno what to do, but we'll try this thing because it might work, and we will zealously collect data as we go along so we can turn it around, call it off, or try something else if it doesn't, and we'll be sharing that data with you so people can alert us if we miss something" --- that would be fantastic, really inspiring.
But if the "lesson" learned is "We need to throw all these experts and politicians out, and get a brand new set of experts and politicians who will tell us a fresh new set of lies about how certain they are about what to do" that would be sad indeed. That would be evidence that we've failed to learn the most important lesson of all.
"Now if the big lesson learned is for us all to have some God-damned humility, from top to bottom -- if experts hedge their opinions more, and the people expect fewer certainties, and politicians shrug their shoulders a lot more ..."
Well said! Our biggest problem is people saying "Here is the answer" when they _should_ be saying "I don't know" or "Here is our current best guess - and it is likely to change as we get more data."
I think the best process here can be summed up in four words: "Trust the Blue Tribe".
Masks, vaccines and lockdowns all work; masks and vaccines were definitely worthwhile and in most cases lockdowns probably were. Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin don't help (unless you already have malaria or parasitic worms). The virus almost certainly didn't escape from a lab. Covid is not a hoax, and is worth taking seriously. The boring, blue-coded, expert-advised positions are almost always correct.
When you say "Trust the Blue Tribe", I need to make sure I know what you are talking about.
Are you talking about the Blue Tribe leaders during January/February 2020, who were saying things like "Travel bans on people from China is based on racism, we shouldn't be afraid of travelers from China."
Or are you talking about the leaders of the Blue Tribe of March-to-May 2020, who were in favor of lockdowns, in favor of blocking all international flights, in favor of mask-wearing, and against large public events?
Or are you talking about the Blue Tribe leaders in June 2020, who were in favor of large public events, as long as those events were protests against racism?
Hard disagree on lockdowns, soft disagree on masks. I think 18 months of `remote schools' (including kindergartens) probably destroyed way more QALYs than it saved, and that too was a blue tribe policy.
That is where I started, but obviously I am not comfortable with it. My most charitable interpretation of what you’re saying is that the errors and suppression engaged in by the blue tribe were minor and forgivable. If so, I want a process for figuring that out. Just trusting them as a blanket solution would not have been disastrous for me personally, this time. But at best the system is showing signs of strain.
I’ve no intelligent input here but want to register my empathy with this question.
Ultimately, you need a way to judge how much you trust the existing domain experts. Because it is practically impossible to become overnight an expert yourself, especially in a topic that is already politically sensitive, therefore almost everything you read online is disinformation.
My heuristic is to trust people who had an interest in given topic before it became cool, and who are not "professional contrarians". In case of covid, I happen to have a biochemist and a retired doctor in my family, so I was able to ask them.
If you try to educate yourself, the important thing is to get the background knowledge right, before you jump to the politically sensitive topic. For example, you may want to learn the basic things about DNA and evolution as such, before you jump to the question whether covid was created in a lab. Similarly, you may want to become familiar with the history of vaccination and the existing types of vaccines, before you start expressing strong opinions on the safety of covid vaccine.
Solid background education will allow you to dismiss most conspiracy theories as obviously false, which means you will burn less social capital when asking the experts you trust about the rest.
Hear hear!
According to random news I see online, Russia has already lost 30 000 soldiers in Ukraine. But also, they have transferred over 200 000 Ukrainian children to Russia, to be reeducated and raised as patriotic Russian citizens.
This made me think: what if the true reason for this war has always been solving the demographic curve of Russia? Conquering the entire Ukraine would have worked too, but this also accomplishes the strategic goal.
200,000 children would be a drop in the bucket in a country of 144 million.
The birth rate in Russia is 1.5 per woman according to Google, so every generation is ~108 million births. I don't think a 0.2% increase in your birth rate is worth going to war over.
Conquering all of Ukraine might actually be enough people to be visible - 44 million people - but then you're conquering both old and young people, so it's not really solving your demographic curve.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia
In 2018, Russia had approx 25 million kids under 15 years old. 0.2m would be hear 1% increase. They had yearly birth rate of 10.7 births per / 1000 population = 1.5 million per year. 200,000 extra kids is sizeable one-time bump in the yearly rate.
One-time, meaning that it's not going to have anything but the most marginal impact. I mean, Russia could certainly try to improve their birth-rates but becoming a nation that literally launches invasions of other countries to steal their children, but not only is that so cartoonishly evil that you'd have a hard time selling that in a fantasy novel, it'd also be a good way to make sure everyone on that long, long border of yours makes "destroying your government" their top foreign issue.
TFR is expressd in children per woman *per lifetime* so I think you need to divide that 108 million births by the ~75 years of a lifetime, giving you ~1.4 million/year, against which +200,000 is no longer trivial.
However I agree this is unlikely to be Putin's goal. A far more plausible reason for kidnapping and rearing Ukrainian kids as right-thinking Russian would be resettle them in the Donbas and along the Azov Coast to draw those regions closer and more reliably into the Russian orbit. One would guess that Russophilia in, say, Mariupol has taken a serious long-term hit among those old enough to know who fired the missile that blew babushka to bloody shreds while she was hanging out the wash. Could help to compensate with some fresh young thinking uncompromised by bitter (or any) experience. The thinking is a little grandiose, but not unheard of: the Nazis ran a very similar program in Ostland circa 1941-44.
What is the source for the 200 000 to-be-reeducated children? Honestly it sounds fake
The UN says that 971,000 Ukrainian refugees ended up in Russia, so 200,000 children isn't unreasonable - I would expect that refugees are going to have a high proportion of women and children. https://data.unhcr.org/en/situations/ukraine/location?secret=unhcrrestricted
This article from April says Ukrainian officials say over 150,000 Ukrainian children ended up in the Russian adoption system, although it admits it's based on limited information: https://www.euractiv.com/section/europe-s-east/news/vulnerable-ukrainian-children-at-risk-of-illegal-adoption/
Yeah, but I would expect most children are accompanied by their relatives. If they would separate them and put parents in some gulag or whatever, in their tens of thousands, I think we would have heard more about it. In general, we have quite good sources about what is happening in Russia proper (as opposed to Russian occupied parts of Ukraine), actually.
150000 children for adoption is another thing that definitely sounds fake.
The claim was "to be reeducated and raised as patriotic Russian citizens", not "to be adopted". In some cases, because their parents are already patriotic Russian citizens who happened to live in Ukraine before the war and fled eagerly to Russia. In the rest, I expect if those families are not repatriated at the end of the conflict, the parents will be told that either they will raise their children as patriotic Russian citizens, or someone else will. And most will go along with it.
But as far as I know, there is so far zero indication that Russian authorities intend to force these people to stay in Russia even after the war. Certainly it is possible, but purely hypothetical at this point
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/forced-evacuation-ukraine-mariupol-russia/
Apparently the adult women were not forced very hard to remain in Russia when the above account was written, but leaving is not a cakewalk either if you don't have money or documents, and according to that article they are not easily available [to people in camps].
Isn’t the fact that they forced (at least some large number of) them into Russia some indication? If I kidnap you and and tie you down in my hypothetical basement, is there really no indication that I intend to keep you there the day after tomorrow?
Do you know what Ukraine's prewar demographics looked like? Did they have more young people per capita than Russia?
The tfr was one of the lowest in the world.
More information from Wikipedia:
> Russia maintains one of the world's most liberal immigration policies; anyone who works in Russia for five years and develops fluency in the Russian language can become a citizen, provided they have not committed a crime. Almost anyone who is hired by a Russian firm can stay in the country and work indefinitely. This reflects a policy change, in response to declining birth rates, on the part of the government of Vladimir Putin from the more restrictive policy enacted after the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union.
> Russian-language native-speakers, those married to Russian citizens, highly-qualified specialists, businessmen and refugees are eligible for a simplified immigration procedure. It allows gaining citizenship in 3 years (instead of 5 under the standard procedure) or sometimes skipping temporary or permanent residency.
Playing Devil's Advocate, here are some reasons one might want to become a Russian citizen:
- free universal healthcare (in a country that used to kill doctors for saying that covid is real, but still);
- free education;
- sex ratio men : women = 86 : 100.
No, not really. But a dictator like Putin can think much more long term than democratically elected governments. In my opinion, the following theory explains Russia's actions best:
Putin's main goal is to restore Russia to super power status and to that end he has pursued mainly three projects during his presidency. The first was to stabilize and then expand the Russian economy to catch up with the west; the second was to turn around Russian demographics; the third was to reform and reinvigorate the Russian army.
After more than 20 years his record was dismal. While the economy (pre-Ukraine invasion) has been stable and living standards higher than when he came into office, it has remained highly dependent on oil and gas. Also, it has not caught up with the west since the great recession in spite of reform efforts, especially during the Medwedew interlude.
Likewise, in spite of financial incentives to have children and conservative to reactionary social and cultural politics, Russian demographics have never reached the replacement rate during his tenure and any temporary success there was has leveled off by now.
The army was the only success he could really point to before the invasion - now it has turned out that it was in part a Potemkin village.
So in the light of his failed ambitions he is thinking about the long game: a necessary precondition to become a super power since at least world war II has been a large population. Based on that even a relatively low GDP per capita like China's grants one super power status.
Ukraine offers some of the most valuable land in this regard with its fertile soils having the potential to support a large population.
Putin can no longer achieve his goals and he has no idea how to get Russians to have more children. But he can ensure that Russia will have the potential to achieve them - not in 10, 20 or even 30 years. But in 50 to 70 years, when nobody will care about the 2022 Ukraine war anymore. Then a Russia with 300 million people and a newly emerging economy could be a force to reckon with.
So he wants both the land and the population of Ukraine.
Depending on how successful Russia will end up being in this war, I would expect to see large scale resettlements of people, similar to Stalin's deportations. I would expect that some of the highest fertility populations such as the Chechnyans will be given land in Ukraine. And ethnic Ukrainians will be deported to Siberia or wherever (and their children "reeducated").
Luckily, it looks like Russia will have to downsize its plans for Ukraine significantly.
The idea that Russia demographic is bottlenecked in food supply sound really weird to me. I can see this being the case in Civilization game but not in real modern world.
Two things about that: firstly, I am trying to provide a rationale for Putin's/Russia's actions - it does not necessarily have to be true in the "real modern world". I think that Putin and especially the Russian nationalists view the world in a way that is indeed in some respects more akin to a game of civilization than the "real modern world" the West perceives (a view that probably also has its flaws).
There is also a historical predecessor of this view: China's one-child policy was explicitly enacted with the limitations of domestic food production in mind (see e.g. here https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12263480/).
Secondly, to steel man the importance of agriculture: the slowdown of population growth in developed and (to a lesser extent) emerging economies post World War II is very much a historic exception. For most of history humanity has been in the Malthusian trap and arguably many developing countries (or often, unfortunately, rather "non-developing countries") still are. Check out the charts here: https://ourworldindata.org/yields-vs-land-use-how-has-the-world-produced-enough-food-for-a-growing-population. In Subsahara-Africa agricultural yield can barely keep up with population growth. Continued malnutrition, food insecurity and a dependence on imports is the result - a severe impediment to economic development. In such a situation everyone is to preoccupied with bare survival to build any human capital. Meanwhile the major economies that managed to achieve a high degree of economic development increased their agricultural production far beyond population growth. If you want to convert population growth into economic might agriculture is crucial.
Putin does not know why population growth has slowed in Russia or what could undo it. But he might just bet that, just like Scott argues in "Meditations on Moloch", that the "real modern world" is the "dream time" and it might be about to end, at least for Russia. Its major economic assets, oil and gas, were going to become worthless in the next 10 to 30 years due to of global decarbonization and an alternative is not in sight. Its arms industry was not going to keep up with the West either and the number of young Russian fighting men was dwindling by the year. So the choice was - in his mind - to gradually lose the great power game in the medium term; or to play his aces while he can still use them. This would merely accelerate the inevitable downfall of Russia's economy; but it would increase its long term potential immensely.
Actually, they seem almost the same:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ukraine_population_pyramid_1.1.2021.png
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Russian_population_(demographic)_pyramid_(structure)_on_January,_1st,_2022.png
Hi Scott. Do you know what is up with Silexan? The link in your original essay no longer goes to anything.
I had ordered some to give it a try, and well at least there was a placebo effect so I tried reordering it and received something else, called Calm24 from a company called Natura instead.
The packaging says each caplet contains 500mg of ‘cold macerated lavender oil’.
It seems like Amazon might still have the original product with a pack of two 30 count soft gels for 42 bucks so it would seem there has been a jump from 12 to 21 dollars for a two week supply.
I’m not going into lavender withdrawal or anything just a bit confused.
Edit: A bit more annoyance. I tried to set up a return of the stuff I just got from Natura and ran into ‘this product can’t be returned’
Further Edit:
This is meant more of a heads up than a serious question. Of course there is no way for Scott to know what is happening here.
So Scott is the invisible hand of the market? :)
500% jump in demand for lavender oil capsules, economists baffled 😁
It's the Scott Effect in action, he must only use this power for great good!
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/31/science/asteroids-algorithm-planetary-defense.html?
Using somewhat old astronomical data to find asteroids and their orbits. A lot of computation in the cloud.
Is the Axial Age an actual thing that happened, or is it mere cherry picking of events? And in case it's real, what may have case such a temporal clustering of philosophical-religious innovation?
I think the silk road was already a thing in 500 BC, so maybe ideas were going back and forward with commerce? Or maybe this was a period of heightened conflicts at the steppe boundary which has catalyzed empire formation?
Has scott ever written on the subject?
Not sure if this will address your question directly, but John Vervaeke discusses the Axial Age in his long lecture series 'The Meaning Crisis'. Might have some thoughts you'd find interesting here in the second lecture: https://youtu.be/aF9HeXg65AE?list=PLND1JCRq8Vuh3f0P5qjrSdb5eC1ZfZwWJ&t=2505
Oh, thanks!
I’ve read a bit about it and to me it falls in the ‘interesting coincidence’ category.
I hadn't heard of the "Axial Age" idea before, but I just looked it up and is feels contrived to me. The core idea sounds like that most major modern religions/spiritual traditions (Abrahamic religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Zoroastrianism, and the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition) have their roots in a roughly 500 year period of 800-300 BC.
My first objection is that lumping the Abrahamic religions together is questionable: while Judaism does form the foundation for Christianity and Islam, both have enormous differences from Judaism and from one another, and they date to the first and seventh centuries AD respectively.
Next, the rooting of Judaism, Hinduism, and Zoroastrianism in the proposed Axial Age seems arbitrary. All three developed from poorly-attested roots in the second millennium BC, and the internal scriptural narratives that are the main attributions for a specific identifiable founder of the religions don't give dates anywhere near the proposed Axial Age: tradition implies Moses would have lived around 1300 BC, give or take a century or two, and the timings of both the life of Zoroaster and the events of the Bhagavad Gita are vague and ambiguous with estimates anywhere from ~1000-3000 BC. I'm guessing the Axial Age theory is using the building of the Second Temple (516 BC) for Judaism, the founding of the Achaemenid Persian Empire in 648 BC, and the establishment of the Hindu Synthesis around 300 BC. While these are all significant events, they're debatable as key "founding moments" for the respective traditions.
To the extent that there was something going on in the proposed period, I suspect the secret ingredient was the reemergence of urbanization, literacy, and long-distance trade in the Mediterranean region following the Late Bronze Age Collapse and the ensuing Dark Age. I know less about what was going on in India and China around that time period, but I get the impression that both also had very significant periods of reurbanization, state consolidation, and growth of trade (although from a much less drastic baseline than that of post-Bronze Age Europe and the Middle Easy) during that 500 year time span.
Perhaps the culmination of the shift from oral language to (substantially) symbolic language. That was a long, gradual process but it really flowered in that period 800 to 200 BC. I think it’s really easy to underestimate the significance of that transition.
the birth of Duality, maybe.
What do you mean by oral vs symbolic language? It sounds like a roundabout way of saying "talking" and "writing", but you sound like you're using the terms as technical jargon that I'm unfamiliar with.
No, but I am trying to emphasize the profound difference between human culture that completely relies on the spoken word for all information transactions (in the broadest possible sense), and one where lots of information resides in written (symbolic) form.
“Talking” and “writing” are perfectly accurate but a bit casual for the point I want to make.
I have not heard of the Axial Age (and therefore don't think Scott has written about it). However, I am currently reading Paper by Mark Kurlansky and there is a good amount of overlap in the time periods described in the first part of Paper. I wonder what impact writing and new technologies such as papyrus had on this period. Kurlansky does mention a significant amount of trade and exchange of ideas happening between China and the Middle East around this time period. Writing could have accelerated the exchange of ideas especially around philosophy and religion.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-61609689
Using AI to improve tennis play.
Has Scott ever written an update opinion on Mark Cuban's Cost Plus Drugs effort? Is it providing a lot of utility? Is he missing key drugs?
I don't have the answers (though it looks like they are trying to get to 1000 drugs by the end of the year: https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/health/how-mark-cubans-online-pharmacy-plans-to-make-medications-affordable/2807435/). I am just amazed that he actually called it "Mark Cuban's Cost Plus Drug Company". Of the "comically named billionaire hobby companies" this easily beats out Musk's BORING company.
Hey Scott, check out this Language Log post if you haven't seen it already. It's about the origins of the name Moloch and there is surely some kabbalistic fun to be had: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=54844#more-54844
Anyone else learning to code as an adult whilst working full-time in an unrelated STEM field?
What resources, tips, learning habits, etc. would you recommend?
I've enrolled in a 10-week Python course - partly for the sake of learning itself, and partly for the ability to spin up some basic code to run alongside numerical modelling and CAD programs I used for work. I'm sticking to the script and using Anaconda / Spyder / Jupyter.
I learned some coding high school, but the MATLAB and R I use every day now was learnt "on the job" for biochemistry simulations, and image/data analysis. I don't know if the way I'm doing it is optimal (I learn very deeply but narrowly, just what I need to get my stuff to work).
A piece of advice I think I can give is to remember that automating routine stuff is much more valuable than it seems - even in the unlikely scenario that you don't end up saving any time at all in the long run (cause you do it really fast manually compared to how long it took to automate, only small batches, ended up not using, whatever), you got a valuable addition to your toolbox. I was lazy at first about automating image file management when I had small experiments with a few images, but now I know how to make R handle thousands of files across directories.
Otherwise, completely agree with Unsigned Integer's comments, especially 2 and 3. Re: testing/monitoring I like to do it myself (e.g. insert little printouts into functions to let me know how variables change while they're running).
Have fun! You are doing a kind magic trick when you code. Creating a useful artifact without paying for or ordering any physical parts. Your building materials are your own thoughts. It’s really a kick if you stop to think about for a moment. Notice at no time do your fingers leave your hands. ;)
What’s not to like?
Don’t get discouraged when things take you a lot longer to learn or do than you think it should. Programmers are notorious for exaggerating how quickly they can learn or accomplish something. If someone says it takes a month to learn X, then you should reasonably expect it to actually take 5 months.
Have an actual project to learn alongside and motivate yourself. Having a real deadline helps too!
Not necessarily 'coding' in the same way but I lied that I knew how to use R at work because I was feeling threatened by a new employee. I was likely to have one file transferred to them because they had experience in using R.
I then spent most of my free time and late nights learning R using some tutorials, troubleshooting my actual work through frenzied searches of stackexchange questions, etc.
I will second having an actual project, and add that learning how to Google about a programming question effectively will take you 80% of the way to knowing what you need to complete most projects.
My number one tip is to remove pride from the equation. You are not better or worse than the computer, and the computer does not think it's better or worse than you. Humility usually means not believing that you're better than everyone else, but in the context of programming, it means being able to handle wading into in a universe where pride does not exist. (Many good programmers have too much pride, and adopting this form of humility does not guarantee that you'll be a good programmer, but I've found that my students who approach learning to program with this kind of humility do well, and the ones who don't do badly.)
My second tip is that, the deeper you get into programming, the more you may feel that you don't actually know how to do anything. It's important to move past that feeling, and realize that everything is just a little bit of learning away, and the more you learn, the easier everything else will be to learn, so just... keep going. If you're not sure how to do a big project, start with the parts you do know how to do, and then build from there. Don't fall into the trap of "I could never be enough of a programmer to do X". As long as you can write code, you can do anything. (Eventually.)
My third tip is that almost all code sucks, and if you know HOW your code sucks, that's GOOD, because that means you learned from writing it!
Last, and far more actionably, play a Zachtronics game. Any Zachtronics game will do, but I think SHENZHEN I/O, SpaceChem, and Infinifactory are particularly good for this. They help cultivate the necessary patience, humility, and logical thinking, and especially help reinforce the principles of "just keep building" and "learn one thing at a time". Don't feel bad if you can't finish them, or even can't progress very far; I've been programming for 24 years, I've written compilers, device drivers, games, servers, OS kernels, physics simulations, avionics*, and just about everything else, yet Infinifactory's the only Zachtronics game I was able to finish… and not for lack of trying, either. :)
*(okay, that one was in Kerbal Space Program)
By any chance can anyone point me to studies on what the language center(s) of the human brain are doing during dreaming? Google Scholar isn't turning up anything about my specific question.
Some of the popular science articles — which may actually be popular pseudoscience articles — say that the language centers of our brains are mostly off-line during dreaming and that we're not really hearing language, rather we just have the illusion of hearing language in our dreams. Deirdre Barrett PhD from Havard seems to be the designated expert that the popular science press goes to for dream questions, but I can't find any publications by Barrett regarding language in dreams. But she seems to be the source of the claim that our language centers offline during dreams, and that's why we aren't supposed to be able to read in our dreams (she does qualify it in a quote by saying "most people" can't read in their dreams).
The reason I ask is that I had an interesting dream the other night. I was playing ngau-ngau (which is a popular gambling card game in Hong Kong), and all the people sitting around the table were speaking Cantonese. I could understand part of their conversation—especially numbers and swear words—but a lot of their conversation was opaque to me. This wasn't surprising to me, because when I lived in HK, I developed rudimentary conversational skills in Cantonese, but there were frequently words I couldn't understand and I would have to ask what they meant.
Upon waking, though, what struck me about this dream was that if I were *not* really "hearing" language in my dream, why couldn't I either (a) understand all of their conversation, or (b) understood none of their conversation? Full disclosure, I don't know how to play ngau-ngau either, but I wasn't really playing—rather I was just sitting at the table with the players as they smoked, joked, laughed, and swore (and spat).
As for Barrett's claim that I shouldn't be able to read in dreams, after a lifetime of active dreaming, I have been able to "teach" myself to read in dreams. But I'm only reading at about a 1st Grade level right now. "See Spot Dream. Dream, Spot, dream!" I can't decode complex words or phrases that show up on printed material in my dreams. So no reading the latest articles in Nature Dreaming for me.
Maybe Andrea Moro's chapter here would be of interest:
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-07296-8?code=d4e0ae14-25c2-4892-88cc-fd5ee16e618b&page=2
Anecdotally, I regularly see text in my dreams, but it's barely coherent, often shifting on the page or screen, locally meaningful but drifting randomly between topics. Some of the smaller text-based neural networks, such as GPT-2, remind me very much of this dream text. Years ago when I learned about Markov chains I was also struck by the dreamlike nature of the text they produce.
On a few occasions I've had anxiety dreams full of nonsense javascript.
Weird. I was having trouble writing a C# method in a dream last night. It wasn’t because I couldn’t read.
Some people often talk in their sleep, and say things that make sense within the dream that they're having, so I think people have language. But as far as reading, I've many times read text while in a dream, but the text always sounds like a first- or second-order Markov model of language, mostly grammatical but not making sense. This may be a selective effect, in that I usually remember only what I was dreaming less than a minute before waking up; and the process of waking up may disrupt the text.
There's an old blog by the wife of a very vocal sleep talker:
https://sleeptalkinman.blogspot.com
"The bagels have declared independence. The bakery is up in arms! There's a giant flour cloud enveloping everything. Don't trust the macaroons."
And as I said elsewhere, Markov chain text is what most of my dream-English reads like. Not much in the way of grammar or topic coherence.
Surely everybody hears speech in their dreams, or we would know we were dreaming. If the Language Centre is offline then clearly it’s not the only way to “hear”.
Or the "am I dreaming" bit is also offline.
"But she seems to be the source of the claim that our language centers offline during dreams, and that's why we aren't supposed to be able to read in our dreams (she does qualify it in a quote by saying "most people" can't read in their dreams)."
Well then I'm not "most people" because just last night I had an involved dream which included me reading a very long column of text, including illustrations, so my brain is doing *something* there.
Also, I have had dreams where I (or the person who is 'me' in the dream) or another person is speaking another language, and I realise that is going on.
This is a very interesting question, if you are hearing people speaking in your dreams, what does it mean 'no you're *imagining* you are hearing them speak'? Are language centres closed down or do some signals sneak through?
What it means is they don’t really understand the brain.
Well, that's a given! ;-) But I was wondering if our industrious PET scan researchers have looked at brain activity of people in REM sleep and seen low activity in the speech center of the brain? After changing my search terms, I came across this meta analysis. The summary says: "Results show that quiescent regions are confined to the inferior and middle frontal cortex and to the inferior parietal lobule." Inferior frontal area is Broca's which in the past was associated with the processing of speech and language.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16186026/
But then I came across a press release from University of Wisconsin, that claims we dream during REM and non-REM sleep, and there's a certain area that's active when we're dreaming. And that the sections associated with understanding language (not Broca's area) are are active when people report hearing speech in their dreams...
>>> For example, dreams associated with hearing speech triggered activity in Wernicke’s areas on the left side of the cerebral cortex, which is involved in language perception and understanding.
“This suggests that dreams recruit the same brain regions as experiences in wakefulness for specific contents,” lead author Dr. Francesca Siclari says. “This also indicates that dreams are … not ‘inventions’ or ‘confabulations’ that we make up while we wake up.”
<<<
So what we've got is a bunch of tenuous correlations...
Scott's recent article on the Hearing Voices Movement ( https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/in-partial-grudging-defense-of-the ) convinced me to post a wall of text I had previously drafted with regard to involuntary commitment to psychiatry.
Involuntary commitment (and how to avoid it)
(Trigger warnings: psychiatry, long text, Germany, vitriol, badly cascaded section titles, shortages of charity towards the wardens).
In my (limited, Germany-centric, 3rd person) experience, involuntary commitment into clinical psychiatry is best seen as a Moloch-powered soul-crushing machine. While not all encounters with psychiatric clinics end badly, and some might in fact be beneficial, the possibility of landing on the conveyor belt running straight towards the soul mill always exist.
= TL;DR =
Involuntary commitment is a very real threat to any patient of clinical psychiatry, and can make your life worse for a very long time. Never go willingly into any unit with a locked door. They will lie freely, so lie to them in turn if you have any symptoms of psychosis. Do not expected to be treated like an adult(ish) human. For Germany, have a living will naming a trustworthy, rabidly anti-psychiatric friend as a guardian. For the hearing, get a fighter lawyer. If any of your jailors break the law, press criminal charges.
= How psych ward is different from other wards =
If you are naive like me, you might think that a psychiatric ward is like a bone ward, only it is for treating psychic illnesses instead of fractures. Of course, you read/saw "one flew over the cookoo nest", but that was the dark ages. Today, unthinkable. As the late Danton would say: "Ils n’oseront pas!" They would not dare. Yes, there is an anti-psychiatric movement, but then again, there are tons of movements devoid of any substance, why should they be any different?
If you are admitted to a cancer ward with a life expectancy of less than a year without treatment, and form the opinion that you do not want to be treated, you will generally be free to leave against medical advise after signing some forms. Your personal autonomy trumps any amount of outcome difference, end of story.
Contrast that to psychiatry. The moment you walk through the door, your autonomy is in jeopardy. After all, any objection you might have to the proscribed treatment could well be a symptom of your mental illness instead of your will.
If it was the other way round, with the psychiatrists respecting patient autonomy and the oncologists routinely violating it, that would be bad enough, but workable. Human rights issues aside, treating cancers should well work without the patients compliance. Biopsies and CT/MRI images could still be taken (perhaps using a sedative), surgeries would be unaffected, patients might have to be prevented from removing chemotherapy IVs, but otherwise, treatment efficiency should not suffer too much.
They way it is, instead, is horrible. Most psychic illnesses can not be diagnosed based on physical findings, so one is stuck observing the patient for diagnosis instead. Some symptoms will be deducible without any patient cooperation whatsoever, but for most, one will have to rely on the patient to self-report them. In fact, I would be hard pressed to name a field more reliant on patient cooperation for diagnosis.
= How the spectre of involuntary commitment poisons doctor patient relationships =
In a normal doctor patient relationship, this would be no issue. Opioid addictions aside, a patient generally has no incentive to lie to their orthopedist about the presence or absence of joint pain. Their goals align.
A psychiatrist (or psychologist) working within a system permitting involuntary commitment, however, is never just a physician or therapist. They also occupy the position of a kind of attorney general who will have to decide on whether the case warrants bringing in a judge to lock the patient up. If that happens (and the judge agrees -- which he generally will, trusting the expert opinion of the psychiatrist, as there are no physical criteria fit to be used as evidence), our psychiatrist will wear the hat of the prison warden as well when working in a "secure unit" (a very newspeak term itself, as even the short term security provided to the de facto prisoners of mental institutions is very debatable).
The system will only work as long as the patient is unaware of the stakes or (rightly or wrongly) convinced that their symptoms do not warrant commitment.
(continued below, this ended up being part 1 out of 3).
(continued, part 3)
= Avoiding involuntary commitment =
There are a few steps you can take to safeguard your agency while interacting with clinical psychiatry. In particular, there are legal tricks, verbal tactics and strategic considerations when picking a clinic.
== Due process ==
In Germany, a commonly used form of involuntary commitment is the BGB §1906. Here, rather than the court ordering the institutionalization, the court appoints a legal guardian who has the power to have his ward committed, subject to court approval. The thing is, whether you are committed or not is entirely up to your legal guardian. You can specify a legal guardian in an advance decision. Ideally, someone who would rather see you dead than committed. The very worst legal guardian might be an elderly relative with lots of trust in authorities, medical or otherwise.
For the hearing with the judge, get a lawyer. Strike that. Get an attack dog lawyer. You do not want someone seeing them as the guardian of due process over a sad but necessary procedure, you want someone willing to go the extra mile to convince the judge of your sanity. Lawyers making their living suing doctors seem like a good start. Bonus points if you can get a Scientology lawyer, as people in that cult really do not like psychiatry.
People making their living locking up others are treading on thin ice, legally. Find out the relevant maximum time they can keep you without a judge. They went a minute over it? Press criminal charges.
== Verbal tactics ==
The unspoken Miranda warning: anything you tell a mental health care professional can and will be used in an attempt to have you involuntarily committed. Tread carefully.
As I mentioned, the staff will operate on simulacrum level 2, e.g. saying whatever they belive will make you do the stuff they want you to do with minimum fuzz, irregardless of truth. Take a leaf from their book. Lie to them, preferably by omission. Remember, their main triggers are suicidality and psychosis. Admitting to suicidality is subject to tradeoffs: it might cost you months of your freedom, but save your life.
Going through the hell of a secured station for psychosis medication might make sense in some extreme situations. I mean that in roughly the way I would say "selling a kidney for 20$ might make sense in some extreme situations". You are constantly hallucinating being devoured by spiders all the time and there is no Soteria or open station which could give you an anti-psychotic? Probably go for it. You sometimes feel people are following you or the moon talks to you? Not worth it.
If you do not want a psychosis treatment, admitting to anything which can be pattern matched against psychosis is inexcusable. Even pre-Snowden, you might reasonably believe that the NSA probably listens in on most phone calls. But if you mention that, you are lost. Any belief which a committee of elderly statesmen could not unanimously agree on is too controversial to mention. Do not talk about religion, Bayes, surveillance, your role-playing characters, climate change, politics, free will, self-harm, violence, drug use, porn, video games. If hard pressed, admit to owning a bicycle and sometimes being a bit sad. Communicate as you would with a literal-minded extraterrestrial, do not rely on a shared basis of common sense or an understanding of irony. Jokingly referring to your doctors as "my fellow reptiloids" will fail in the worst way imaginable.
Think about it this way: you will present a mask of a reasonably well adjusted person eventually. Doing so now instead of later will save all involved a lot of time, and will prevent you from being fucked up by anti-psychotics and forcibly addicted to tranquilizers.
= Strategic considerations: choosing the right place =
Generally, the further your health care provider is from a secure unit, the safer you are from ending up in it. Being an outpatient is safer than being an inpatient. Being an outpatient seeing an independent psychiatrist is safer than being an outpatient at a psychiatric hospital. Being an inpatient at some clinic where the next secure unit is far away is safer than being one where the secure unit is conveniently downstairs.
In Germany, there are two kinds of hospitals: general hospitals -- which have to take cases -- and specialized (e.g. university) hospitals. When interaction with psychiatry, avoid the latter. As mentioned, the secure stations of general hospitals have to take any new cases, e.g. disoriented persons picked up by the police while they were wandering through the traffic. This means that there is a constant inflow of new patients competing for a limited amount of beds, and one can get released simply by being (or appearing) more sane than the other patients. On the other hand, university hospitals do not have this constant pressure and are thus much more likely to keep you until your 'treatment' is complete.
= Last resort: Getting out by any means =
There is a fine balance between the harm done by staying in the secure unit and the harm the legal system might inflict upon you for breaking some laws while escaping (especially if they send you to forensic psychiatry instead of prison), so I would strongly advise against violence, arson or hostage taking, which will likely mean a longer stay.
They trust you enough to let you go for a walk sometimes? Great, abuse their trust just like they abused yours.
Escape.
You have outside help? Get creative. The security is generally not prison style, so you might get some contraband items in.
While threatening others is a legal offense, pointing a razor blade to your own throat is much less objectionable. Unlike prison, they also pretend to be about helping you, so if you convince whoever is on door access shift at 4:00 am that by the count of ten, you are going to get your blood all over their nice clean white walls unless that door is opened might just conclude that the latter outcome is preferable to the former from a patient health point of view.
== Moral considerations ==
A Singerian Utilitarian myself, I hold think that patient autonomy is of great importance. The obvious way to deal with a patient with a firm death wish is to offer an assisted suicide, not making their lives hell on earth.
I think the prerequisites to a stay in a locked psych unit should be:
* a violent crime
* a regular criminal conviction with a prison sentence, just as any sane offender would get for the same crime
* the court offering the convict the option to spend their sentence in psych unit instead
* the convict accepting that offer (until they decide to opt out again and go to prison)
Even for criminal cases involving criminally incompetent offenders, this is not how it is done in Germany e.g. in StGB §63 [1]: I am not a lawyer, but from my reading, there is no automatic expiry date on the commitment to forensic psychiatry with regard to the crime in question: go to court for battery, get locked up for life. Furthermore, StGB §63 is just the tip of the iceberg: besides federal BGB §1906, the psychiatry laws of the Laender (states) generally allow mentally ill people to be locked up if they are deemed a danger to public safety. Pre-Crime in action.
Of course, this is ripe for abuse, and abused it is. Gustl Mollath [2] was commited to psychiatry for seven years for offenses which probably would not have warranted a prison sentence of equal length (Possibly to shut him up about inconvenient allegations of tax evasion.)
[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/simulacrum-levels
[1] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__63.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustl_Mollath
See also Günter Wallraff, "13 unerwünschte Reportagen" (13 undesired reports) from 1969. In one of those, he was in a psych ward, disguised as a dangerous alcoholic. At the end, his wife gets him out. It would have sufficed for her to say that she felt threatened by him, and he'd have stayed there for years. http://www.irwish.de/PDF/Wallraff/Wallraff-13_unerwuenschte_Reportagen.pdf
My experience, as a twice-inmate in Australia:
They treat the suicidal patients *a lot* better than the psychotics, to the point where it can be an overall good thing. I wasn't forced to take any medications (they'd probably have forced me to take antidepressants, but they didn't change the regimen I was already willingly taking; on the other hand, when they offered me benzos/fentanyl and I said no, they respected that decision). The psychotic patients get no such mercy; the nurses ask them nicely to take their pills, and if they refuse the nurses forcibly inject them.
I'm glad you're still with us.
How long do people typically spend in a psych hospital per commitment in Germany?
Do committed psych patients have a legal right to refuse medication?
To the second question: Depends. Roughly, if they are committed against their will, there needs to be a meeting with a doctor within 24 hours and also the confirmation by a jugde within 48 hours. The latter also potentially decides on a medication against the will of the patient.
The details are regulated by a mixture of national law and law in each of the 16 regional states. My superficial reading says forced medication is possible, if it reduces the reasons that led to commitment (posing a threat to oneself or to others) and only if it's like 'really necessary'. My uninformed guess is, it's mostly the doctor who decides.
Not an expert, just based on some very basic reading. Links or additional info if interested.
Thanks for this.
Good summary of my thoughts on the matter, and why I refuse to see mental health professionals.
(continued pt.2)
= Life in a locked psych station =
The staff of a secure station will operate on Simulacrum Level 2 [0] exclusively. When moving a patient to that station, they will not tell them: "You are psychotic or a danger to yourself / to others and we will lock you up", but they will 'suggest' moving you to the 'protected station' 'for the weekend'. (Protip: this is your cue to go for a toilet break. Do not grab your stuff, just go and hide somewhere non-obvious. They will hardly start a big manhunt for a missing patient. Personally, I would always prefer answering for battery in criminal court to a week in secure ward, but YMMV.)
In my experience, there are two kinds of patients you find on "protected stations (as locked stations are euphemized in Germany): the involuntary ones and the non-voluntary ones. The only difference is the fact that the latter group has not yet realized they are trapped, but are under the illusion of voluntariness. The former group, either waiting for a judge or committed by court already, of course, are under no such illusions. (This becomes obvious when looking at the situation from an accounting point of view: A night in a locked-up psych ward is more expensive than a night in an open psych ward. The only reason to put a patient in a locked ward is to (try to) prevent them from harming themselves or others. If you can justify billing the insurer, but you can't justify keeping the patient there against their will, you were just defrauding the insurer.)
Naturally, forcible psychiatry wards are not conductive to mental health. In the best case, they are boring as hell, in the worst case, they are hell on earth. The patients who get committed to these stations are, by and large, not the ones with the most resilient psyches. Take a person who is somewhat functioning in their familiar home environment (perhaps with frequent trips into nature, support from friends or some other coping mechanisms) and declare them incompetent, deny them their coping mechanisms and lock them up in a ward full of other people with various mental health issues. Chances are they will lose their cool. Success! The psychiatrists were right all along, that person is clearly unstable.
Secure psychiatry is mostly patient storage. The chief objective is that at the end of the day, you still have as many warm bodies as you had at the start of the day. Options for talk therapy will be severely limited compared to non-secure facilities -- which is just as well, as I do not consider the Stockholm syndrome an acceptable basis for psychotherapy. Long term outcomes are generally not tracked. Retrospective patient approval or the lack thereof is also not tracked.
Committed patients are, in general, not treated as adult human beings. A person stating something a staff member finds unlikely might be told to 'stop telling lies', which generally constitutes a faux pas in civil society. This is probably natural as it would be difficult to deny basic agency to people regarded as adult human beings. Of course, denying patient autonomy is a one way road, as they will generally still be held responsible for their actions, a patient who stabbed another person would just be committed forensically instead of going to prison, and any small infractions will be sanctioned by loss of privileges and the like.
There are two places in a hospital where informed consent is not an important. One is the morgue, the other is the locked psych ward. After all, if your patient is not consenting in the first place, why waste time informing them? Naturally, nicer staff members may still be informing patients about procedures on a FYI basis, but the need to convince the patient of anything is just not there.
= Medication =
Medication will take place. For those unfortunate enough to be diagnosed (correctly or otherwise) with a variant of schizophrenia, this will include anti-psychotics, formerly marketed as "pharmacological lobotomy". Credit where credit is due, these are still a marked improvement over that procedure. In many cases antidepressants are on the menu as well. Locked up people will get unruly eventually, but that is what benzodiazepines are for. In fact, benzodiazepines, if responsibly used, might be very helpful for lots of mental health issues. Unless you happened to become addicted to them, perhaps to keep you from pounding at the door while you are locked up.
Naturally the patient is not consulted (or informed) about their medication or any side effects. In my experience, this creates a general aversion towards psychopharmaca that goes along very nicely with their new aversion to mental health institutions and professionals.
= "Curing" patients (or Es gibt nur einen Weg in die Freiheit) =
Eventually, the patient is released as 'cured'. While I have to concede that there are probably patients where the anti-psychotics managed to suppress the hallucinations, I postulate that there are many which basically were just taught to conform to whatever expectations their psychiatrist had. I am sure the psychiatrists are aware of that problem, but less sure what they can do about it. If the only had people committed who were screaming all the time because they hallucinated spiders eating their flesh, a lack of screaming might be a hard to fake indication of improvement. But as long as you have people committed based on voluntary statements about suicidal ideation or their (pre-Snowden) idea that the NSA is listening to their phone calls, it would seem difficult to judge if your intervention was any more effective than simply locking them up until they realized conformity was their only path to freedom.
= A hell created by Moloch =
While it might be helpful to view ones captors as akin to Dr. Mengele to keep aware of the fundamentally adversarial nature of their relationship, I do not believe that the people running 'secured' units are generally evil. Rather, I believe their incentives are simply not aligned to the long term interests of their patients. Suicides on hospital grounds are probably the worst, especially if they failed to have the patient committed. They are probably treating lots of obviously psychotic patients and tend to pattern match based on that. "Any person will have beliefs and behaviours which seem totally weird to most others" is probably not their favorite prior. They will obviously have a more favorite view of the benefit/cost ratio of involuntary commitments, either due to first person insight I lack or as a necessity of doing their job. They will probably not systematically track long term heath outcomes.
Maybe someone can tell me whether this makes sense, or can even do the math:
It occurred to me there is a population-based factor in the observation that technological advance was (before about 1970) exponential even after being adjusted for population.
People have approached that comparison with the unspoken assumption that the way to do it looks something like this:
population doubling time =~ 40 years
tech doubling time =~ 20 years
therefore technology's exponential increase is too high to be accounted for by population
therefore tech has accelerating returns
This comparison assumes that the technology output from N people at time t, tech(N,t), is simply N*tech(1,t), so that tech advances are proportional to population. But this overlooks the fact that tech(N,t) is in reality not a function, but a probability density function (pdf).
My first instinct was to instead test whether tech(N,t) can be written just as a function of N, tech(N), under the supposition that that would mean tech production doesn't depend on pre-existing tech, and so tech has no accelerating returns. This turns out not to work as a test, for tricky semantic reasons I don't want to get into. For now I'm going to write tech(N,t) as tech(N), even though this is not strictly correct.
We observe only a sampling of tech(N), and computing the average of that sample will never give the expected value of tech(N), because it's very skewed. The pdf tech(1) is even more skewed; so we can't compare E(tech(N)) to E(tech(1)) just from observed data without a theoretical adjustment for the observations we never observe. Even if the expected value E(tech(N)) = N * E(tech(1), it would still be the case that we would almost certainly always OBSERVE tech(N) > N * tech(1).
The probability distribution for tech output from 1 person is almost certainly given by a power law of the form p(x) = cx^(-a), a > 1. That would imply that the pdf for tech(1) has much more of its mass in, say, the top 1% of possible observations, than does tech(20), because of black swans. If a < 3, Variance(tech(N)) is infinite, so most of its mass is in parts of the PDF that we never see. If a < 2, the expected value E(tech(N)) is also infinite, which we can interpret as meaning that *all* of its mass is concentrated in parts of the distribution that we never see.
In other words, E(tech(N)) = N * E(tech(1)) doesn't imply that median(tech(N)) = N*median(tech(1)), and so we can't just say that the fact that tech doubling time is less than the population doubling time implies that the output of individuals isn't constant. We have to find out how much of the observed difference can be attributed to the greater skewedness of the probability distribution function (pdf) p(tech(1,t)).
median(tech(N,t)) would still grow faster than N * median(tech(1,t)). But I haven't done the math to figure out how much faster. It may help to know that median(p(x)) = c*2^(1-a).
Going back to the original comparison of population and tech doubling times, we should expect that we'll observe a faster tech doubling time *even if there are no increasing returns to technology*. This is because if we measure the sum of the importances of all tech advances per decade, these measurements won't approximate the expected sum, but will be better approximated as proportional to the significance of the most-significant single advance we happen to snag in our sample. And this significance will (I think) increase exponentially with population.
If I've understood you correctly, I might summarize your argument as: individual contributions to tech are heavy-tailed, so that usually statistical tests for averages don't give meaningful results, and so the "force multiplier" hypothesis for tech growth is unfounded.
If it's true that individual contributions are heavy-tailed, then the growth of tech over time should look "jumpy" rather than smooth. The jumps should be more frequent as population increases. If there's no "force multiplier", then the frequency of jumps should be proportional to population, and the size of the jumps should be identically distributed.
To test your hypothesis, I would look at the growth of tech over time, and see if the differences tech(T_i) - tech(T_i-1) are heavy-tailed. In particular, you'd want to verify it's not lognormal--which is what I'd expect if tech growths smoothly.
(As for the stuff about medians, I couldn't make the connection how that relates to tech doubling time.)
Though it will be harder than that, since I don't suppose that there are /no/ increasing returns to tech. I expect there are increasing returns, but would like to adjust the exponent gotten from historical data for the effect of a (hypothesized) long-tailed distribution of individual returns. Perhaps the first thing would be to try to study the distribution of innovations by individuals in some isolated fields, such as chess, which don't have great synergism with the development of science and tech in general.
But there's little chance that I'll get around to doing that; certainly not this year.
That's a good idea. The stuff about medians was to explain the idea topeople who aren't familiar with heavy-tailed distributions.
I think there’s a huge number of assumptions there, from beginning to end.
Re Alito et. al. overturning Roe v. Wade
What do people here think of a referendum (either national or state-by-state)? If voters were asked:
"What is the maximum number of weeks into pregnancy that an elective abortion should be allowed?"
then sorting the results and picking the median value gives a length such that half the electorate
thinks it is too long (too lenient) and half the electorate thinks it is too short (too stringent).
It has the advantage that:
It is a direct choice by the voters.
It is a reasonably concrete choice, unlike e.g. picking coefficients in a tax code polynomial.
It has reasonably simple consequences. At most, educating voters about the timeline is reasonably straightforward
and less controversial than the overall issue. ("Typical first heartbeat at N weeks. Typical first neuron at M weeks. Typical viability at...")
Aggregating a one-parameter choice like this with monotonic consequences doesn't get into voting paradoxes.
My _personal_ preference is to allow abortion at any point. Roe v. Wade (which is slightly more restrictive than that) struck me as a reasonable _policy_ - but, unfortunately, Alito is correct that neither "privacy" nor "abortion" nor "bodily autonomy" is in the text of the constitution. I, personally, would prefer to add constitutional amendments specifically protecting all three, but that isn't going to happen.
I'm not sure how what you describe differs from the ordinary legislative process, i.e. what would indeed start happening if Roe were overturned (except it wouldn't happen at the national level, because, assuming Harry Blackmun's reasoning were rejected, the Constitution does not give Congress the power to regulate abortion).
Granted, often bills are passed in the legislature, so the question is being asked of the voters indirectly -- they are asked to vote for representatives who are then asked the direct question "How many weeks?" -- but people are pretty used to pressing their legislators on specific issues that concern them, and in many states (e.g. California) the initiative allows the people to pass laws directly if they choose.
Yes, my hope is that phrasing it as "How many weeks?" at the level of the voters would bypass some of the winner-take-all steps in the current process (or in yes/no referenda) and would be more amenable to picking a compromise that most people could live with.
(fixed typo)
Well, interesting. And if the results you get are a Gaussian, it might work.
But part of the problem here is that they might *not* be a Gaussian, but instead a horrible double peak, with one peak at 0 and another at 40 weeks. That is, it might be that the key underlying disagreement is whether abortion can be regulated *at all* by the state. Some people feel the state has no God-damned business butting in, and other people think *not* having rules on it is as insane as having no rule against burning down buildings for the insurance money ('It's a private decision between a man and his insurance company.")
If that's the case, then neither would accept any kind of compromise in the middle, for the same reason the mother could not accept Solomon's compromise.
I don't think this is actually true. Activists tend to cluster at the 0 or 40 weeks position (at least in their rhetoric), but I think most pro-life and pro-choice voters are much more moderate.
IMO, the fundamental political problem with both abortion and gun control is that everyone (largely correctly) sees the goal of the people trying to restrict abortion/guns as an eventual ban. That is, when someone proposes some commonsense restrictions on abortions or guns, most people on the other side assume that this is an incremental step toward the world where abortions/guns are in practice nearly impossible to get.
Maybe on the pro-choice side. I have yet to meet someone who calls himself "pro life" who thinks it's possible to compromise on murder before 16 weeks, but not after -- on account of that's how they see it.
And, sure, pro-choicies might well see a slippery-slope slip-sliding their way when pro-lifers advocate for this or that "reasonable" restriction on abortion, just as the AR-15 owners look squinty at a proposal to build a long-gun registry or something. But how does that work for the other side? Do pro-lifers see a a push to carve out an exception for rape and incest as the camel nose under the tent, next stop it will be Abortions To Go at every Love's Truck Stop? Doesn't seem entirely plausible.
That is, there may be less symmetry in the motivations and bugbears of the two sides than you assume. The fact that they oppose each other should not by itself be persuasive that they are mirror images across the board.
The fact that Texas's law did _not_ have rape or incest exceptions makes me suspect that there were pro-life activists pushing against such exceptions (since a lot of previous state laws have had such exceptions).
I _have_ seen active arguments from e.g. GOP Ohio state representative Jean Schmidt against an exception for rape: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/04/29/ohio-rape-bill-opportunity/ . She wasn't reported as explicitly using the camel nose argument, though.
I am indeed hoping that there are a lot of moderates. I have no data - I've seen various polls, but they have generally been phrased as yes/no questions. (Admittedly, my own preference is at an extreme, 40 weeks, but I would really like to see the shape of the curve.)
The obvious pitfall is that voters will not answer the question realistically and will simply choose the upper or lower bounds, hoping to drag the overall average either up or down. (I realise you said median, but try re-explaining the difference to three hundred million people.)
Well, unless half+epsilon choose either the upper or lower bounds, they will just push the median into somewhere in the set of people who chose someplace inside the limits of those bounds. Median does have the advantage that the odds of being the person who winds up setting the final number improve if one can anticipate the median and choose close to it, rather than at an extreme. :-)
As an outsider, I think 'give this decision back to the states' is the best of a bad lot. Some states are going to be ultra-liberal, some are going to be very conservative. If the ultra-liberals are breaking out in hives at the thought of having conservative restrictions on abortion, why can't they imagine that conservative states are also coming out in a rash at the idea of having ultra-liberal terms imposed on them?
Let California legalise free abortion for all genders from the age of ten with no need for parental consent and you can abort/euthanise the 'products of conception' up to the moment before you cut the umbilical cord. Let Texas or Florida only allow "rape, incest, and physical threat to the life of the mother". California doesn't have to live under Texas law, and the price of that is that they don't get to impose California law on Texas.
Fight the rest of it out at the national level and see if you can get Congress to pull together some law specifically about abortion, rather than leaving it up to the Supreme Court to pull out emanations of penumbras.
I'm blue in the face quoting the Guttmacher Institute, but their data from 2016 says:
https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/induced-abortion-united-states
"88% of abortions occurred in the first 12 weeks. Two-thirds [so 66%?] occurred at 8 weeks or earlier.
Medication abortions accounted for 39% of all abortions in 2017, up from 29% in 2014."
So never mind what limits are in place permitting abortion up to X weeks of pregnancy, the actual practice is 'early abortion and medical, not surgical, abortion is increasingly being used'.
I think setting limits on "up to this stage of pregnancy", going by when women are getting abortions, would be a lot earlier than the current 24 weeks or viability, whichever is earlier.
Many Thanks! I'm agnostic on whether the law should be handled at the federal or state level. I agree that the "emanations of penumbras" were very unfortunate. SCOTUS is not a legislature, and I prefer it to stick to the text of the constitution.
I _suspect_ that the views of the electorate are less extreme (on either end) than the views of the legislators (at either the state or federal level). Elections in the usa are (with a few exceptions) winner-take-all contests - which is why I'd rather see a question phrased as choosing a time limit, rather than a binary decision, put to the voters.
It is even possible that electorate has less divergent views from region to region than their representatives suggest. Perhaps a national compromise might be possible.
I view the shift to earlier and medical, rather than surgical, abortions as a positive development - both as being less hazardous and less contentious.
BTW, the Texas law is actually a bit more extreme than your description of it: It doesn't have a rape or incest exception.
Once Blackmun's reasoning is rejected by the Supreme Court, if it is, then Congress has no power to legislate on the subject of abortion. It would belong to the States vice the Tenth Amendment.
That said, Congress could certainly attempt to *blackmail* the states into passing uniform laws on abortion, the way they blackmailed the states into all passing a 55 MPH highway speed limit in the 70s. When you control such a vast amount of spending, which can materially impact state budgets, such things are plausible. But I think abortion is so fraught that this is unlikely to work in practice.
*Sebelius* reduced the power of the government to force things via spending.
Did it? I did not know that. On checking it out in oyez I see apparently they squarely said *compelling* commerce via the Commerce Clause is right out -- is that what you mean? If so, that is indeed a welcome step.
Congress only lacks that power if the Court say it lacks that power. And this Court has been specifically assembled for this purpose (outlawing abortion). It wouldn't surprise me even a little bit to see them uphold a national abortion ban, at which point everyone who is nodding along about the wisdom of states rights will be nodding along at the clear duty of congress to protect the rights (including to life) of all its citizens, born and unborn. Someone around here likes to say that it's just a matter of whose ox is gored. I think that's likely true.
Maybe my cynicism is unwarranted. That would be nice.
I wouldn't call it cynicism so much as partisanship. But if you have joined the ranks of those who deeply distrust government power because it has the potential for abuse by all-too-fallible human beings -- welcome! We have jackets!
And now you can start voting to reduce government power every chance you get, and start insisting on social problems being solved at the most local level possible, and as much as possible privately, person-to-person, by persuasion and consensus -- and not by force of law, or at worst by the opinion of 5 old farts in black robes being imposed on every soul in the land.
Ditto. It's always about state's rights- until it isn't, at which point the argument was magically never about state's rights in the first place.
As it currently is, nobody is happy. I agree that this is such a live-wire topic that both sides are unlikely to compromise. But if it goes back to "each state sets its own laws" then after a while things might have cooled down enough to look at settling law at the federal level. And if it goes to the states, then the pro-choice majority states can be assured that they will not be living under the Handmaid's Tale.
Right. I'm just saying it cannot be done at the Federal level. The Constitution certainly does not explicitly grant Congress the power to regulate abortion, and if the reasoning of Roe is overturned by the Supreme Court, then they will have rejected the proposition that Congress has some implicit power via the Bill of Rights, too. What's left?
a) If we have the bad luck that the distribution of preferences is strongly bimodal, it is perfectly possible that it is bimodal _within_ states, as well as nationally. Alternatively, it is perfectly possible that winner-take-all elections amplify small differences, and there is a unimodal distribution of preferences with only small regional variations. I'd love to see actual data.
b) The commerce clause is a loophole that one can metaphorically drive a truck through (and there has been a _lot_ of traffic through it). In terms of precedent: There is a _huge_ amount of regulation of medicine that has been done at the national level, from the FDA and the (grr) DEA and Medicare to the fact that there are such things as prescription-only drugs and such things as licenses to practice medicine.
(a) Certainly it's very likely to be pretty bimodal within states. It already is. It was before Roe. It's kind of a bimodal issue: if you think abortion is murder, you're not going to settle for anything less than making it available only in extreme cases. If you think it's not such a big deal, maybe just a little regretful, like chickens raised on factory farms at 40 cm^2/bird, then you will insist on pretty broad access, but you might (being human) recoil at late term Kermit Gosnell kind of stuff, and be OK with drawing a line around 12-16 weeks. So the bimodalism I expect will be (1) you better have a damn good reason, life or death kind of stuff, and (2) sure whatever to around 12-16 weeks, and after that not allowed but we aren't going to prosecute too hard.
(b) Let us not exaggerate. There's a lot of regretful regulation by the Feds under the dubious banner of the Commerce Clause, but at the least, it's pretty much all commerce of one kind or another, with the exception arguably being drugs as you point out -- but drugs *do* in fact cross state lines, all the time (just ask the LAPD where the crack and weed in South Central comes from), and their successful interdiction[1] probably *is* something impossible to do without some kind of national-level coordination and policy setting. Now I'd be the first to agree Raich was wrongly decided, but we've kind of made our peace this last century with the Feds regulating dangerous drugs, hence the DEA and FDA[2].
That does *not* say the Supreme Court or the broader Republic would be OK with the Feds suddenly getting into the criminal law game. It's never happened before. We do not look to Congress to write laws on murder and arson or insurance fraud, we expect our own state to do that, and I would be surprised if people (especially state legislatures) changed their minds about that, and doubly surprised if a Supreme Court that threw out Roe would accept an even flimsier end run around the Tenth Amendment.
The best chance for Congress to legislate on abortion is (or was if it's drawing to a close) during the Roe era, when there is Supreme Court precedent that says an individual right to abortion is discoverable in the Fourteenth Amendment -- which, conveniently, specifically also grants to Congress the power to enforce it (the Amendment). Congress could have passed uniform national legislation on abortion any time in the past 40 years and had a decent case for it being upheld by the Supreme Court, provided it passed all the Roe tests. They did not. I daresay they dared not, and dare not. The people who grind their teeth at the lack of a public option in Obamacare, or (on the other side) those who are infuriated that the Department of Education still exists, can testify to the inherent pusillanimity of Congress.
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[1] Hypothetical successful interdiction might be better phraseology, I do not mean to imply it could happen in practice.
[2] Medical licenses are issued by states, and while you can expedite your license in a second state to some degree for about half the states, if memory serves, each state retains the right to sole jurisdiction over medicine practiced within it.
Well, whether Congress has the power to legislate on it is arguable. To most intents and purposes, Congress has been legislating on a wide variety of things beyond its explicit constitutional powers. In the case of at least medically induced abortions (as opposed to surgical): Well, the pharmaceuticals used almost always cross state lines, so the interstate commerce clause can (reasonably legitimately) be cited.
At least it would be a _legislative_ process, not, as Deiseach cited, SCOTUS finding "emanations of penumbras".
I doubt very much whether even the most enthusiastic Commerce Clause expander could write a plausible argument for how that gives Congress the power to regulate abortion. And I doubt even more that the Supreme Court would uphold such a travesty.
The current SCOTUS has a justice that thinks a law mandating that everyone purchase broccoli is silly but not unconstitutional. And Wickard already states that literally every action or lack of action is covered under the commerce clause.
Yeah, there's some dead wood there. I regret RBG, not because she was a staunch leftie, but because she was sharp as a tack.
Yup, that sounds plausible to me. The constitution is not supposed to prevent any and all ill-considered things that a legislature might do. I actually find it very weird that judges sometimes pass judgement on whether a law serves a "compelling state interest". Isn't that second-guessing the legislature's decision making?
For _pharmaceutical_ abortions, it is no more of a stretch than the FDA and DEA were. Drugs cross state lines. They are certainly interstate commerce.
49 senators disagree with you. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/senate-abortion-bill-vote-womens-health-protection-act-supreme-court-draft-opinion-roe-v-wade/
The bill failed - but I haven't heard many voices claiming that it was outside of Congress's power.
No they don't. I already said elsewhere that there is a colorable case to be made for that legislation *as long as Roe is upheld* because Roe rooted an individual right to abortion in the Fourteenth Amendment, which also gives Congress the power to enforce the Amendment. It's all fair and square -- as long as a Constitutional right to abortion rooted in the Fourteenth Amendment exists.
What I *said* is that if the Supreme Court explicitly rejects Roe's reasoning, and says there is, in fact, no individual right to abortion, in the Fourteenth Amendment or anywhere, then nobody is going to discover a power of Congress to legislate on the subject in the Commerce Clause. Or, more precisely, that while I'm sure some enthusiasts will propose it, there is zero chance the current (or I suspect almost any forseeable) Supreme Court will buy that logic.
In other words, this legislation is *only* plausible if Roe is upheld. If Roe is struck down, it's not worth the heavy linen paper on which it's carefully engrossed.
Edit: a skeptic might wonder what the *purpose* of the bill was, then, if it was (1) void if Roe were struck down, and (2) superfluous were Roe upheld. The answer is that it serves the same purpose as the many votes the Republicans held to repeal Obamacare during the period when there was zero chance of such a bill actually passing. Bread and circuses. Or as the late colorful Senator Moynihan put it, boob bait for bubbas.
> Why can't they imagine that conservative states are also coming out in a rash at the idea of having ultra-liberal terms imposed on them?
I'm sure they can imagine that just fine. I think the left position here goes something like:
1) The consequences are sufficiently awful that we need to pull out all the stops and fight dirty if we have to.
2) Those Republican bastards have been fighting dirty ever since Trump got in, and if they don't care about the rules, why should we?
As for leaving it up to states – if my next door neighbor is a mean father then ultimately I can't do much more than talk to him about it, but if he's an abusive one then I would feel obliged to intervene. Live and let live is valuable to a point but I think most people have a line – if you think the other side is (a) literally murdering babies or (b) forcing women into dangerous violations of their bodily autonomy, then I can see why you might not feel able to simply tend your own garden.
(I do admire your attempt at finding a new compromise position. My guess is that most pro-life folks aren't sensitive to where the line is drawn, but maybe I'm just failing to understand the position. I also agree with you that this seems like a matter for Congress, but I think both sides are fully committed to outcomes over process at this point.)
Many Thanks!
I realize that this probably doesn't matter to your point at all, but I will point out for the sake of accuracy that many of the trigger laws lined up for a Roe overturn at this point (including a piece of federal legislation that will emerge from its holding-pattern subcommittee as soon as Roe overturns and the R's think they can slam it through) would outlaw abortion in all cases, even rape, incest, and life of the mother (but not life of the child), and could be reasonably interpreted as also outlawing the morning-after pill, IUD, and other forms of contraception that function by preventing implantation instead of conception.
Given your religious views, I wouldn't be surprised if this only strengthens your support for these laws, but there you have it.
"as also outlawing the morning-after pill, IUD, and other forms of contraception that function by preventing implantation instead of conception"
Well well well, and here was I being assured for years by the pro-choice side that there were no forms of contraception that were also abortifacients.
Though I suppose if you shove through re-definitions of when a pregnancy begins to "when implantation happens", it's not an abortion if implantation never happened.
Yeah, I do have religious objections, but for American civil law on a secular basis, I can see exemptions being put in - except that the pro-choice side keep changing their terms. e.g. "silly conservatives, there aren't any abortifacient contraceptives!/oh no, if Roe is overturned, then the abortifacients will be banned!" and "silly pro-lifers, if you want to reduce abortions, then encourage more contraception use!/oh no, if Roe is overturned, every woman who has sex will be forced to undergo pregnancy!"
So they're not abortifacient until they are, and contraception works until it doesn't.
"This drug/treatment is not an abortifacient" and "Religious people will call this drug an abortifacient even though it does different things from the drugs that are actually used in abortions and cannot terminate an ongoing pregnancy" are not actually contradictory statements. Religions can define an abortion however they want, regardless of how doctors define it.
(Also, from what I've read, the morning-after pill works by preventing ovulation, not implantation, so I'm not even sure this is true? Not that it matters - all that matters is if legislators *think* it's an abortifacient, and our legislators think some pretty silly things at times.)
As for "contraception works until it doesn't," yeah, that's true, just like seatbelts work until they don't. If you said we should get rid of seatbelts because they don't 100% prevent all fatal car crashes, people would call you an idiot, but apparently the idea that contraception can't be that important because it doesn't 100% prevent unwanted pregnancies makes perfect sense to you.
(Also, can we get less of this "writing what your imagined opponents say in a mocking tone of voice" schtick? It's really annoying and usually doesn't represent what anyone in the thread has actually said to you.)
Conception seems to be something of a disputed term:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertilisation#Humans
Says:
"The term conception commonly refers to "the process of becoming pregnant involving fertilization or implantation or both".[28] Its use makes it a subject of semantic arguments about the beginning of pregnancy, typically in the context of the abortion debate."
If you look at how pregnancies are studied, treated, and classified in other mammals, the start of the pregnancy is conception, the joining of sperm and egg genomes. (It is not uncommon for different species (such as horses) to have a period of days to weeks where the embryo is merrily going through rapid cell division and growth before implanting. In these animals, as with all others, a new life has absolutely started, may yet fail, and the mothers body is amping up to bring the neonate to full term.) It is only in humans, for the specific purpose of legitimizing the deliberate termination of that new life, that implantation is considered the start of pregnancy. (The deliberate choice part is in the historical record of the scientific terminology.)
Sigh. Reread what I quoted. The _word_ conception refers to "the process of becoming pregnant involving fertilization or implantation or both". It appears to me that "fertilization" and "implantation" seem to be terms with less ambiguity and contention.
BTW, calling fertilization "a new life" is wrong. Both unfertilized egg cell and sperm cell can e.g. hydrolyze ATP to power metabolic processes. If you want to call something "new" at that event, I suggest something like "a new full genome".
My own view is that talking about human "life" is pointless. Almost every cell in your or my body is alive, has human DNA, even (because of copying errors), has unique DNA. The politically important question is where the thing has developed enough that calling it a person and considering its rights are reasonable.
Personally, I'm rather fond of Robert Heinlein's comment:
“Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best, he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear his shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house.”
They aren't abortifacients unless you define life as beginning the very second of fertilization. At which point, if you're a religious person, you'll have to square that with 2/3rds of fertilized eggs naturally failing to implant. To quote the words of my old pastor "God doesn't send a soul into the world to exist for 6 hours and then burn".
As a traditionalist yourself, I'm surprised you aren't willing to compromise at the quickening, given that until recently that was when the Church itself said the soul entered the body. Instead, you go with the mechanistic, materialistic definition of humans being a bunch of meat, and when that meat splits off from its spawner meat and begins new division, that's when it's now a new human.
Everything else you've said is more of the same tribal drum-beating you've been engaging in since the ruling was announced and thus beneath both of our dignity.
God historically sent a large fraction of human souls to exist for no more than six months (postnatal), so it's hardly obvious that six hours is out of the question. If you believe in God and souls in the first place, then you pretty much have to believe that He is up for harvesting a lot of souls very early. If you believe in God and souls and not discretionary infanticide, then you pretty much have to believe that *only* God gets to harvest those souls.
It's still possible to believe that the soul attaches some time after conception, but it isn't logically required.
It isn't "logically required", but it was (and in deeply religious countries STILL IS) the norm to consider the soul to be placed in the body at some point post-conception (usually around the 4-6 month mark). This is the norm even in countries like Iran, which is usually used as the poster child for "repressive religious state that forces everyone to abide by a certifiably insane doctrine". The conception doctrine is a very recent development that bluntly is based on a materialistic understanding of what a human is.
But your logic lesson isn't even particularly relevant to my point. I hope you get some pleasure from being a pedant, at least.
I think you are being unfair to Deiseach here. Suggesting handing the decision back to the states is hardly "tribal drum-beating"
I'm referring to her statement that boils down to "I'd be willing to compromise, but because the pro-choice movement isn't a monolith, oh well, guess we just have to crush each other" and her general flattening of nuanced arguments to try and make them look hypocritical (yes, if you want less abortions you should promote more contraception. This is not contradictory with the idea that outlawing all abortion will cause real harm to women.)
I think it's actually very fair to Deiseach to suggest they're usually above bad faith argumentation. I could state some very UNFAIR things I'd say if I was feeling uncharitable to Deiseach, but I won't.
"Everything else you've said is more of the same tribal drum-beating you've been engaging in since the ruling was announced and thus beneath both of our dignity."
You should patent that mind-reading technology of yours, you'd make a fortune.
Please give links to the texts of specific laws that you find concerning. I have seen multiple cases where people are lumping together laws that ban ' with laws that ban y and laws that ban z - all in different states! - as "all these states are banning x, y, and z!!!!" to get excessively worked up.
Like the "if this goes through, then next they will go after contraception, and then interracial marriage, and then gay rights, and then civil rights!" list of Bad Things which I have seen wafted about online.
Those are indeed extrapolations, rather than current legislation. In the case of contraception, Jacky Eubanks is indeed a GOP candidate who does propose banning it: https://www.salon.com/2022/05/21/ban-all-birth-control-says-endorsed-candidate_partner/
Re SCOTUS, Alito listed the cases that established the legality of contraception, gay rights, gay marriage rights, and interracial marriage rights - then said that his current opinion didn't attack them, but also said that they were not derived from the text of the constitution. Personally, I'd prefer to have all of them explicitly protected by legislation, but that is not the current situation.
Here's the federal legislation, which is the most directly concerning to me: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/99/text
When it comes to the various states, I can't give specific links right now, mostly because I'm enjoying what I can of my memorial day, but I'm well aware that in my state at least popular sentiment in the Republican base supports the text of this federal legislation, with a radical core being opposed to even fairly mundane forms of contraception.
That in particular is a completely vacuous bit of legislation, which if passed would have no practical effect at all. It defines no crimes, it prohibits nothing, it appropriates and directs no money.
In short, it directs the Executive to do -- nothing at all. It's a "sense of Congress" kind of statement, meant (one supposes) to encourage states to broaden their definitions of "murder" to include unborn children (which they already generally do anyway) right back to the moment of conception (which they most certainly do not).
I completely disagree. If it's passed, federal laws about murder and medical euthanasia suddenly apply to abortions as well, and once again, you can then stretch your hand back to the moment of conception to argue that anti-implantation contraceptives apply the same way. This can and will be argued if it is passed, with success in at least one state, and I will bet money on it if you're so inclined. For a specific bet:
-Contingent on Roe v. Wade being overturned AND the Life at Conception Act being passed, there will be an attempt within 4 years at federally outlawing abortion; that this attempt will not have any carve-outs for rape, incest, or life of mother; and that this attempt will successfully clear any section of the legislative process that has a supermajority of Republicans (absolutely passing if the R's control both parts of Congress and have an R President).
-And then, as a long-odds bet, contingent on THAT law passing, at least one state will pass legislation outlawing IUDs, Plan B, and any other contraceptive that functions partially or wholly by preventing implantation of a fertilized egg within 2 years of the passing of the abortion ban.
I think that nearly everyone is ignoring the fact that what's at stake isn't whether abortion should be legal, but whether its legality should be determined at the state or at the federal level.
I think that the desire to resolve every disagreement at the federal rather than at the state level is (A) stupid, short-sighted, anti-Enlightenment, and anti-American, regardless of your politics, and (B) the main force driving America towards civil war.
Agreed. The more decisions that must apply to everyone, the more things there are to fight over as a function of disagreements around the decisions. Smaller groups, fewer disagreements, more decisions you can make without tearing thigs apart.
I think people who default to national level decision making are underestimating the range of preferences and how those relate to region, as well as slipping into "You have to do things my way, barbarians!" thinking. That latter bit especially is what drives towards social and political splits.
I’m inclined to agree with you.
I tend to lean towards resolving most questions at the federal level. The nation is vastly more tightly interconnected than it was in the 1700s, in terms of economics, transportation of both people and goods, and communications.
Yeah, there is always a tradeoff between consistency and home rule, but the ability to account for local special cases in home rule seems to me to be pretty implausible for most issues at this point. For instance, in theory states control traffic laws. In practice, could you imagine what would happen if half the states said "red=stop, green=go" and the other half said "red=go, green=stop"?
Also, for abortion in particular, a good chunk of the divide is more nearly urban/rural than state-to-state.
You can either believe in the rule of the 50%+1 over the 50%-1, or you can believe that government gains it's legitimacy from the consent of the governed. Not both though. By defaulting to a rule by the central government, you're advocating for the former.
On a practical level, you do know that traffic laws aren't set at the federal level? Some states ban U-turns, some cities ban right on red, the usage of a solid green as a yield for left turners, all of that in completely inconsistent.
And yet, everyone knows that Bostonians are the worst drivers.
"You can either believe in the rule of the 50%+1 over the 50%-1, or you can believe that government gains it's legitimacy from the consent of the governed. Not both though. By defaulting to a rule by the central government, you're advocating for the former. " WTF??? The difference between state and federal governments is only a difference in the _degree_ of centralization. A executive ruling over 20 million people is almost as unreachable for the average person as an executive ruling over 300 million people.
On a practical level, most of the states' power over e.g. traffic laws is illusory. They can make tiny changes, but, as I said earlier in this subtree, if half the states said "red=stop, green=go" and half said "red=go, green=stop" it would create chaos. As a practical matter, even where states _nominally_ control the laws, they are usually _not_ sovereign.
"WTF??? The difference between state and federal governments is only a difference in the _degree_ of centralization. "
Not quite. Or rather, tangential to my point.
If I do not consent to my city/county/state government, I can get away from them (though CA and NY are working to prevent this). If I do not consent to my Federal government, I may be able to get away from them but it's not guaranteed. Reducing states to convenient ways of directing mail is an additional step to "stfu and cope, minorities."
I concede that it is less difficult to escape from a state government than from the federal government. As I've mentioned in other comments in this subthread, moving a household to another state is a PITA, even when doing it on one's own terms, rather than fleeing some draconian state legislation.
Also, as I've mentioned elsewhere in this subthread, while _some_ state legislation differs significantly from state to state (as is the case for abortion), for _many_ state powers, states typically adopt some template uniform code, in which case the relevant legislation is _effectively_ national, even though it is nominally under state control.
States certainly can change their traffic signals so that green means stop and eggplant means go. And there's squat the Federal government could do about it.
But you might want to recall that state legislatures are not *entirely* stocked with idiots. They recognize the challenges of having laws different from their neighbors, and in fact a great deal of unsung labor is done by lawyers, national academies, and state legislature staffers trying to balance the desiderata of uniformity against whatever the unique wishes of the states' voters might be.
In the case of commercial and traffic codes, this results in so-called Uniform Codes being drawn up, which are models that some group of legal beagles think can be adapted more or less as-is by states, so they can align with other states in one easy step.
Here's the uniform traffic code:
https://trid.trb.org/view.aspx?id=367972
Here's the uniform commercial code:
https://www.uniformlaws.org/acts/ucc
"But you might want to recall that state legislatures are not *entirely* stocked with idiots." Grated - though the proportion seems remarkably high much of the time...
Yes, some of the Uniform Codes are pretty much slapped into place, and this is necessary for the USA to be a functional nation. It is a different procedural mechanism than Congress passing a federal law, but the end result is very similar. Which is why I called much of states' sovereignty illusory. A large chunk of what states' rights advocates passionately defend doesn't really exist, and wouldn't exist even if Congress never passed a single new law.
wouldn't this read the same in the 1850s for s/abortion/slavery/
Sure, and also in the 1970s about speed limits.
speed limits were driving us towards civil war?
No, because not every disagreement can be equated with slavery vs. no slavery. "Don't resolve everything at the federal level" does not equal "Don't resolve anything at the federal level." Morality doesn't mean compiling a list of context-free rules. Context always matters. We must make judgements, not just follow rules.
Also, note that the dispute over slavery did lead to civil war. Judging that stopping slavery is worth fighting a civil war does not imply that stopping (or keeping) abortion, or gun control, or anything else we're arguing over now, is worth fighting a civil war.
In that case, can you give a reason that abortion laws should be resolved at the state level, but slavery (or segregation, which did *not* lead to civil war when it was ended at a federal level) should not be? Your original post didn't actually give a reason, you just made a general statement that not *everything* should be handled at the state level. What makes abortion like speed limits, rather than like segregation?
I can give a reason to people who believe that aborting a fetus isn't murder: Disallowing abortions in a state isn't nearly as bad, morally, as allowing slavery in a state. To be forced to carry a fetus to term isn't as bad as being forced to labor all day, every day, for your entire life, in inhuman conditions for people who can abuse you, sell your family somewhere far away, and are given the power of life and death over you, and may just let you starve to death once you're too old to work (as the Romans did). Nor is getting pregnant something entirely beyond one's control, as is being enslaved. Also, it's considerably easier for a pregnant woman to get on a bus to a state that allows abortions, than for a slave to escape to a free state. I don't mean here to invoke the full familiar moral narrative; I realize many people will jump on my statement that getting pregnant isn't beyond one's control as if I were using it in the same way as do people who think that statement in itself justifies banning abortions. But I must mention it, because it is an important factor distinguishing the banning of abortion from slavery.
To people who think abortion *is* murder, I would argue that the primary guiding principle of the US Constitution is the belief that no one person, and no group that isn't at least a 2/3 majority, should get their way entirely (although one could argue that the electoral college defeats this principle). But I think this argument wouldn't convince any of those people, because the same metaphysics which lead to demanding that a bright line be drawn between human and non-human, thus making fetuses count equal to adults in any moral calculus, also lead to demanding a bright line between good and evil, right and wrong, and to believing that to tolerate "evil" is to be evil.
In fact, I think that both sides in the abortion debate share that metaphysics. "Silence is violence" is another symptom of such a metaphysics. The difference is that one side draws the human / non-human boundary at birth, while the other draws it at conception. Both sides believe the American system of {legislating morality at the level of the state, at a lower level, or not at all} is evil.
The same metaphysics also leads to statements like your initial question, which I have encountered many times before, and also in forms with different terms taking the place of "abortion"; and associate with the view that moral reasoning is made using a set of context-free rules over universally-quantified variables, so that any statement about the morality of criminalizing something at the federal level is one of the form "P(X) => immoral(X)", and thus applies equally to slavery.
Consider another example: criminalizing marijuana. Last I heard, marijuana is still illegal at the federal level; some states just don't enforce it. If we must apply a uniform policy to all issues, and abortion should be resolved at the federal level, then so should criminalizing marijuana. So, in fact, should everything; there would be no need for state legislatures, only state bureaucracies.
Slavery can include forced pregnancy and birth plus all of its other abuses, so it's logically worse than forbidding abortion.
"Not as bad as slavery" strikes me as a pretty low bar to clear. Like, Jim Crow laws aren't as bad as slavery, are they? Is being forced to go to a black-only school better or worse than being forced to carry a pregnancy to term? Probably black men and white women have different answers to that question. What principle can you use to draw the line?
Also, "we should only make it a federal issue if you think it's a really really bad thing" seems pretty exploitable by the people who think that abortion is literally a holocaust of dead babies.
I mean, if preventing people from being enslaved is worth dying and killing for; then, so should preventing innocent children from being murdered right?
Indeed, I would argue that NOT having federal legislation RE: the legality of slavery is what led to the ACW. I hate to risk pattern-matching here, but it wouldn't surprise me if, the way things are going, there's a civil conflict in America known as the Abortion War at some point.
IMHO, we didn't have federal legislation on the legality of slavery because, at the time the Constitution was written, the South would probably have won a civil war. Leaving it up to the states was the best thing even an abolitionist could have done.
Congress only had the power to legislate on slavery to the extent it was granted the power somewhere in Article I (or the Bill of Rights). The Founders knew this, and were careful to include a provision saying the importation of slaves (which was clearly within Congress' purview) could not be banned before 1808. And indeed Congress prohibited the importation of slaves on 1 January 1808.
The Interstate Slave Act was also clearly within the Commerce Clause, so long as one considered a slave property, or at least by the Full Faith And Credit clause. It was also within Congress's power to prohibit slavery in the Territories, since they weren't yet states. And these things were more than enough grist to stoke passions, with the northern states hating the former and the southern states the latter.
But Congress only acquired the power to prohibit slavery *within* states by the Fourteenth Amendment, which is why the Civil Rights Act of 1866 (passed *after* the Thirteenth Amendment but before the Fourteenth) was repassed in 1870 after the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified.
And something worth noting is that for similar reasons the Emancipation Proclamation only freed slaves in the rebel states under military command -- as far as Lincoln could Constitutionally reach -- and the slaves in e.g. Maryland had to wait until Maryland amended its constitution in 1864. Those in Delaware and Kentucky had to actually wait for the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in late 1865.
If by "South" you mean states that still had slavery at the time the Constitution was written, then the South was a lot bigger then.
It wouldn't surprise me if the losing side (whichever that ends up being) does some terrorism. It would be a huge surprise to me if we had two actual armies fighting each other like we had in the actual Civil War.
I certainly hope that you are right on the latter point. Gettysburg was bad enough. Reenacting it with the addition of fission-fusion-fission bombs would be unfortunate.
Do countries with access to WMDs use them in civil wars?
I'm no oracle. It's just that it seems like an issue where either side is very much unwilling to compromise in the current political climate, even more so than normal, and which has already been shown to instigate extreme and violent behavior even in less polarized times.
There are extremists on each side but too many people are fine being in the mushy middle for there to be a war.
I think the most-contentious issue isn't abortion, which isn't a big issue to all rural people, just to the very Christian. The really dangerous issue is gun control. If Congress tries to make people turn in their AR-15s, there will be war.
A meaningful US Civil War could only be fought if you can meaningfully split the US armed forces. So you'd basically need (a) some meaningful number of states decide to secede and take their fair share of the armed forces with them, and (b) the armed forces decide to go along with this.
But realistically I think the precedent has been set already that states of the USA aren't allowed to secede. There's no strong appetite among any part of public for "Let's do what the Confederacy did 150 years ago but this time let's get it right!" And besides, if 50 years of Roe vs Wade wasn't enough to (even come close to) precipitation secession from the anti-abortion states then I can hardly see how what comes next would be.
A Girardian reading of Stephen Spielberg’s JAWS.
While I was an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins while Girard was on the faculty and eventually came to read Violence and the Sacred when the English translation came out (1977), I have never been a Girardian. But I had been in the orbit of Richard Macksey when I was at Hopkins, and Macksey had worked closely with Girard in the (in)famous structuralism conference that took place in the Fall of 1966. Consequently I had heard Girard lecture on mimetic desire and the logic of sacrifice and it stuck with me.
A couple of years or so ago I decided to watch Stephen Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), which I had not seen when it first came out. I thought it was a pretty decent film and that was then. Then, for some reason or another – boredom, who knows? – I decided to watch it again, and again. I took notes. I watched Jaws 2, which was not directed by Spielberg. It wasn’t nearly so good either, too diffuse and it lacked a character comparable to Quint in the original. I just barely made it through Jaws 3 and simply gave up on Jaws 4 at about 40 minutes in.
So, I asked myself, why is the original so much better than the sequels? As soon as I’d asked the question, that pesky light-bulb over my head started blinking like mad: sacrifice! mimetic desire! Girard!
And so I worked out a Girardian reading of the film: Shark City Sacrifice: A Girardian reading of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. I figure there must be someone around here who'd be interested in such an animal, so here's the link, https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2022/02/shark-city-sacrifice-a-girardian-reading-of-steven-spielbergs-jaws.html
I'm trying to follow your reasoning about Quint being a sacrifice to end the cycle of mimetic desire, but have some difficulties.
A) Isn't Quint / the shark a lot like Ahab / the White Whale? But Ahab is in no way a sacrifice, and there is no mimetic desire in Moby Dick. What's the template for Moby Dick?
B) You present a narrative in which Quint is a sacrifice, but at the end, you say that narrative was broken when Quint destroyed the radio, which was before his death. How, then, can Quint be a sacrifice?
BTW, 3QD is now looking for new writers: https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2022/05/3-quarks-daily-is-looking-for-new-monday-columnists-10.html
A) Well, sure, Quint is somewhat modeled on Ahab, but Jaws IS a different story and Quint is put to different use in this one. Moreover, my Spideysense is telling me that Ahab IS a sacrificial victim, but this isn’t the place to work it out.
Some considerations: 1) Ahab certainly wasn’t the only one after Moby Dick, just the most persistent one. 2) Think of the whaling industry as a whole, all these men after all these whales. Remember, whaling was a major industry at the time; whale oil lighted people’s homes and buildings – which ended in the wake of the oil strike in Titusville, PS. Moreover, as Mark Andreesen has pointed out, whaling voyages are the prototype for venture capital. Everyone was after the Big One, but that’s $$$, not vengeance. So Ahab’s possession is a perversion of whaling, as an industry. That’s not yet an argument, but it’s material to work with.
B) When Quint broke the radio he broke a contract, not a narrative. The narrative is about Quint and Amity, and that’s still ongoing. Brody indicated the link between Amity & the shark earlier in the film when he told the mayor “You’re the mayor of Shark City.”
From my essay: “In smashing the radio Quint had abrogated the implicit contract he had worked out with Brody and Hooper and the more formal one he had worked out with the town. He is no longer acting as an agent of the town, if he ever was. He has declared himself to be a law unto himself. Myth-logic has transmuted the conflict between Amity and the shark into a conflict primarily between one person, Quint, and the shark. Moreover, in the realm of myth-logic, Amity and the shark became one being, Shark Town. Thus, in killing Quint the shark in effect acts as the agent of Amity/Shark Town. Quint has become a sacrificial victim, a scapegoat.”
Quint is paradoxically both an insider and an outsider, the ideal sacrificial victim. He’s a long-term resident of the town, working in a nautical business. He thus stands in contrast to the newcomers who are after him – the sheriff and Hooper – but also the tourists who flood the town each summer. So he can easily stand as a representative of the town. But he’s also a disagreeable loner who resents the town and feels superior to it.
Re. A, I hadn't thought about the whaling industry as a whole. But Ahab is breaking with the industry, not representing it; there are passages which point out that what Ahab is doing isn't profitable. To use that line of thought, I'd have to read Moby Dick as a defense of venture capitalism. That seems a priori unlikely to have been Melville's intent (though I am committing the intentional fallacy).
Re. B, I was thinking about the penultimate paragraph, which includes this: "Midway through the movie myth-logic transmuted a story about a community in crisis into one about men adventuring on a shark hunt. Yes, we know that the hunt was undertaken to serve Amity. But that’s only knowledge. The emotional force of the Amity bond began transforming when the Orca put out to sea and was cut when Quint destroyed the radio."
That seems to say that story began to replace the mimetic-desire narrative with an adventure story when the Orca put out to sea, and that this transformation was complete when Quint destroyed the radio. So the story was no longer about mimetic desire, nor about the community at all, when Quint died.
Mimetic desire is one thing, sacrifice another, though they are related. You can have the first without the second, but second presupposes the first.
Yes, the bond between Amity and Quint began weakening when the Orca went to sea. After all, he’d made a deal with the town to kill the shark. Don’t know whether there was a signed contract, but there certainly was an understanding. THAT’s what began to weaken when Quint got onto his home turf, as it were. At the same time the mythic/symbolic link between Amity and the shark, Shark City, strengthened. And that’s what killed Quint. He was in effect sacrificed to atone for the town’s greed and callousness.
In a way you could say that Spielberg’s genius in this film was turning a sea-adventure yarn into a story of sacrifice.
I think my difficulty is that we're working with different understandings of what a sacrifice is. I would say a sacrifice to atone for the town's actions must be someone the town loves, or else there's no atonement in it. I also don't think sacrifice must involve mimetic desire. Most examples of sacrifice from history, religion, and mythology that I can think of aren't resolutions to mimetic conflict. The most-important sacrifice myth in Western history, as well as the clearest (thanks to 2000 years of arguing over the causation behind the efficacy of that sacrifice), is that of Jesus, and it isn't a resolution to mimetic conflict; it's a payment of someone else's debt.
Peter Benchley wrote both the book and the first script for the movie. Carl Gottlieb and Spielberg both changed it during production, but Spielberg said he changed it because the mechanical shark wasn't reliable, so his changes presumably consisted of reducing the shark's visibility ( https://ew.com/article/2011/06/08/steven-spielberg-jaws-interview/ ). So perhaps whatever was so satisfying in the movie was already in the book.
If that’s your conception of sacrifice, then we’re going to have to disagree. I note that that’s not how Girard understands sacrifice, which is what I’m arguing in the essay. Note that I’m quoting him as using the word “lynching.” As an extreme example, think about ritual sacrifice among the Aztecs, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_culture
Yes, Benchley wrote the book and the initial script. But the movie is very different from the book and we have to assume that that’s because Spielberg wanted it that way. I’ve not read the book, but judging from what I’ve read about both book and movie in Wikipedia and what I’ve read from other critics, here are some of the important differences: 1) In the book, the Mafia owns a lot of land in Amity and don’t want its value to drop, so the beaches stay open. Not in the movie. 2) Both the sheriff and his wife are natives of Amity, but he’s middle class and she’s upper class. In the movie they’re both out-of-towners. 3) Hooper has an affair with the wife. Not in the movie. 4) Quint is not so important in the book as in the movie.
In particular, 5) the Indiana speech doesn’t exist in the book, but it is a major scene in the movie. Several people were involved in writing that speech. But the final version was written by Robert Shaw, the actor who played the role of Quint.
“Spielberg said he changed it because the mechanical shark wasn't reliable...” That’s about showing the shark in scenes and says nothing about any of the other changes I mentioned.
How did you submit the article to 3 Quarks? I see no info on their website about how to submit articles.
You have to be in their stable of writers to post. Every Monday the feature posts from that stable. The other six days they have link posts. When their stable runs low, they issue an open call for people to apply. If selected you'll be assigned a Monday slot, once every four weeks.
Thanks!
A few months ago, our project won an ACX grant to try to pursue a potentially far-reaching idea of spellchecking genomes with genetic editing. We are looking for a genetic editing expert to help in an advisory capacity, or potentially even join the core team.
Please reach out to us at at spellcheckhealth@icloud.com if this sounds interest to you - thanks!
I emailed you about this the last time you posted it, and got no response.
This summer program is held in America too and called Sparc. They only select 30 srudents a year. My son applied in 11th grade. Didn't get in, but he thoroughly enjoyed answering their application questions - lots of interesting puzzles, I think, he said. None of the college essay type stuff like "If you were a tree which tree would you be?" :)
What's the EA line on blood donations? I'm particularly interested in platelets since that's what the Red Cross has been hounding me about lately, but it's a bit more burdensome than normal donations so I'm curious how the benefits compare.
Speaking purely to the medical value rather than financial, as I'm from the UK where we can't be paid to donate:
My understanding is that O- blood is most valuable for whole blood donation, and AB+ the most valuable for platelet donation. If you're AB you'll probably give more value with platelets, and A is almost as good. (Search 'universal donor' and 'universal donor plasma' for the details).
If you're type O you will definitely be more valuable as a whole blood donor.
(Source: uneducated layman with no relevant credentials)
I'm type O. The main thing seems to be that you can donate platelets every seven days, whereas if you donate blood you need two months of recovery before you can again.
Hmm - for platelets, is that once a week if you donate uniformly across a full year? Back when I was donating platelets (2013) there was sufficient red blood cell loss from e.g. head space in the centrifuge that the effective limit was closer to once every two weeks. ( Now my primary care physician has me on low dose aspirin, so I still donate whole blood but can't donate platelets. )
I'm not sure exactly how often the limit is- I think it's seven days but in practice the limiting factor is my willingness so I haven't paid close attention.
donate plasma and donate the money to ea charities probably
For anyone interested, I've just posted my non-finalist book review contest entry, on David Foster Wallace's famous cruise essay: https://whimsi.substack.com/p/book-review-a-supposedly-fun-thing?s=w
Disappointed not to have been a finalist this year after my surprise people's choice awards victory in 2021, but I think ACX readers are just generally more interested in a quasi-political memoir like Orwell's Down and Out then in a surreal, navel-gazing essay on luxury cruising, so I can't say I'm exactly surprised. That said I think the DFW Cruise Essay is of much greater immediate import to most readers of ACX, given that most of us are middle-class westerners with far too much time on our hands.
Enjoyed your review a lot & am now experiencing my customary sadness that DFW is not writing about these times. I miss him so much I daren’t read Infinite Jest again, which is stupid but one day I may tease out what I’m getting at.
Thanks! I feel the same, and I found the biography 'Every Love Story is a Ghost Story' really cathartic.
I enjoyed this review and ranked it higher than some of the eventual finalists. I like your writing a lot, but DFW comes across as completely insufferable - I found myself skipping over the tedious DFW quotes to get to the far more interesting Whimsi stuff. This really didn't make me want to read the original, so in that respect the review was very successful, but may not have been what you were going for.
I also didn't quite get if you were trying to tell me about an essay you enjoyed or draw a particular lesson from that essay - the reviews which I rated higher were much more focused on one argument (my review was a complete spaghetti of arguments so I'm in a glass house throwing stones here!)
I've been a fan of DFW and of this essay of his for some time, and enjoyed reading your thoughts on it. Thanks.
Thank you!
I've only ever skimmed the DFW essay, but it struck me as just boring (albeit well-written) classism.
There's nothing middle-class Americans hate more than people of slightly lower social class than them who have more money than them, so there's a huge market for writings that skewer this segment of people.
I honest don't think there's any skewering going on here. DFW is making a inquiry in good-faith, attempting to understand how and why all the other cruisers are having so much 'fun' and why he personally finds that 'fun' repels him so much. He writes openly admiring things about many of his fellow cruisers, and at no point sneers at class-markers, except in humorous and pretty much benign asides (such as when he notices that everyone taking part in the engine room tour is a thick-wristed, wraparound sunglasses wearing, ex-military type white male over 40).
I think a full reading of the essay would change your mind. DFW was anything but a boring classist. He spent much of his life living in rural Illinois, by choice.
It became a sign of an intelligent man to hate cruises these days. If it so, then I'm proud to be as stupid as possible, because I love ships and cruising. Whether it was Mediterranean, or fjords of Norway, or North Sea, I came back each day to my cabin, tired to the bone from walking, seeing, enjoying all the sights and places so unlike my home city, big though it is. I don't know a better way to travel - a new port each day, and yet in between you get to sleep in a very comfortable bed, and eat delicious food. I've tried international bus tours, and there is just no comparison. And I love ships, and water, seas and rivers. Frankly, if I had enough time, I'd take a ship everywhere I could instead of flying - flying is boring, stressful and cramped. Trains are only a bit better and private car is far more work than one should undertake during a vacation. If I were a millionaire, I'd be the one with his own mega-yacht and I would live on it, circumstances permitting. And wear a boater hat, just to spite the fashion.
And company - cruise ships provide interesting company! I guess this have to do with the fact that I'm not from America or Europe, and they sit people by language. Our pensioners don't often go on cruises, and neither do people who just want to lay beside a pool all day - cruises cost too much for that. So there is a selection bias favouring people who actually like to travel and visit new places. and have interesting experiences, despite the cost. I heard all kinds of stories at the dinner tables of cruise ships!
And I even like the evening entertainment most of the time, but I have to admit that this is mostly because my musical tastes coincide with boomers'. As long as the orchestra plays songs from old movies and musicals, I'm happy.
So, this essay, it maybe has some relevance to "middle-class westerners with far too much time on our hands", but my sincerest hope is for the health of the cruising industry, so it continue to serve me from time to time.
As a form of transportation, I don't think cruises are even comparable to planes, trains, and the rest, being so spacious and basically designed as a destination in themselves. That said, I sincerely hope you read DFW's essay, as it's examining the luxury cruise more as a social phenomenon representative of deeper cultural trends, rather than attempting to evaluate it on its own terms.
I read that and liked it a lot.
Thank you!
I wonder if your previous entry, in 2021, had shorter sentences. This review's entire first paragraph is a single complex sentence. I understand it but it's not pleasant to read.
I like to slip into the style of whatever writer I'm reviewing from time to time, as a kind of homage. DFW was a big fan of page-spanning sentences, so guilty as charged I guess.
I got this. It worked
Thank! My personal favorite, which is stylistically in total contrast to the cruise essay, is 'E Unibus Pluram', about irony in American television.
I’m working on studying up on AI and AI alignment and I’m looking for book recommendations. I just finished Superintelligence and Human Compatible. What should I tackle next?
Maybe this textbook: https://www.deeplearningbook.org/
Since you're probably mostly in RL this course is good as well: https://spinningup.openai.com/en/latest/
RL?
Reinforcement learning
👍
The alignment problem by Brian Christian is my favorite non-technical book in the area.
Okay, so there is the subreddit, Discord, bulletin board and of course the open threads like this one. Can you tell me, what of those you use for what? How are they/ is your focus there different or similar?
I still read the bulletin board from time to time, and was resident there until Scott opened. It's much more right-wing, and since they lost the benefits of Scott as moderator, often pretty nasty. (The people there would disagree.)
Even so, a lot of those right-wingers are interesting, and it's probably worthwhile to keep up with what people who really disagree with you are thinking. They also have a good Ukraine war thread which I find useful as a place to go to figure out what's happening over there. I've been visiting a lot more often since the war kicked off.
Thanks!
Discord is a way to chat back and forth with one or multiple people and use both text and images to do so. You can have Discord open on the desktop at the same time as whatever game and communicate back and forth while playing. It can be in real time or close to it with a lot of participants.
Why? Hmm. I have never looked at the ACX channel. The only ones I've seen are Roblox-related or "personal Discord servers." The Roblox ones have people spamming various giveaways, some of which are scams. ACX has no points economy, doesn't give away ACX-Bucks in-game, but I think some people use Discord for other things and just like it, and having an ACX Discord means you can just click over to it easily from whatever other thing you were doing on Discord without having to log into anything else or go through email or substack. It may also trend younger-age.
It also probably simulates a verbal discussion more accurately due to the speed.
Thanks!
i just read the bulletin board (and rarely comment). It has a flavour of the old comments section from SSC, which is unsurprising since most of the commenters emigrated from the SSC open threads. Much more feisty, argumentative and in-depth than the comments here, and also less overtly rationalist which suits me. A fair amount of CW stuff which might put some people off.
Thanks!
I was wondering, how well we know Autism to say it is not, as a diagnosis category, the 21st century version of hysteria?
I was at a family function with a distant cousin who is a nonverbal autist and I realized he has quite different symptoms and traits than the usual high-functional cases we see. Is there a common link that connects the lighter to the more severe cases, or are we perhaps putting different diseases together into one giant diagnosis pile?
The approach in treating it as a spectrum comes from the observation that often, the severe cases exhibit the same kind of symptoms as the mild ones, and then some, and/or the symptoms are more severe. There are also 'syndromic' cases where autistic symptoms are present as part of a larger disorder like tuberous sclerosis (which is monogenic, caused by mutation in one of TSC1/2 genes), which makes the case that these symptoms are all the result of a common etiology in brain development.
Both high and low functioning autism (my partner is HFA and we observe all of these) often involve some or all of:
- Difficulties in intuitively perceiving social contexts and cues. Often, LFAs are just helpless while HFAs are intelligent enough to cover it with masking, which results in them being consciously aware of things that NTs do unconsciously.
- Difficulties in sensory habituation, i.e. "tuning out" persistent smells, noises, tactile sensations etc. Also comes with texture-related picky eating. An LFA may get angry and even violent from an inside tag on a shirt that they don't know what to do with, while an HFA would just be unable to think of anything else until they cut it out.
- Self-stimulation, or stimming. Forcing a tactile input on yourself to drown out everything else. In LFA in can get self harming (e.g. beating your head) and happens more often, in HFA usually reserved to sensory overwhelm situations and is usually milder like rubbing your face or wrapping a blanket very tight.
- Difficulty in adapting to routine breaking/need for a rigid routine. Here too, if for example the sequence of things you do when waking up is perturbed even a bit, an LFA may break down in a tantrum while an HFA may just get anxious and have executive trouble.
- Hyperfixation. In LFA can take the form of actual fixation on an object/process to the exclusion of everything else, in HFA the stereotypical deep diving into very specific interests.
- Difficulties in emotional regulation: adapting your emotions and their intensity to the context, forcing yourself to calm down, etc.
LFA also comes with general intellectual disability and language acquisition problems, which make dealing with the above much harder.
I will shill, as always, my favorite review on the subject - autism as a disorder of prediction
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1416797111
Which postulates that what all the autistic symptoms have in common is overall weaker top-down predictive input (for example, sensory habituation is your brain predicting downwards a continuous sensory input identical to what your senses receive so that the error propagating back is zero, and you stop perceiving the input). This also causes the anxiety of an unpredictable, "magical" world, and the way they deal with it is forcing predictable input - stimming, rigid routines, fixation on a thing you know well, etc.
Wow that makes a lot of sense! Your descriptions of LFA vs HFA symptoms made me realize that they're not that different and in fact may lie on a gradient. I'll also read the article you posted, it seems very insightful
I also want to note that there are predictions made by this model that Pawan Sinha and others have been carefully testing for the past 8 years. I recently heard a talk he gave where he described some borne-out predictions. For example how autists' hands and stance move when they need to catch a ball: NT's predict where the ball will go, move their hands there, and then adjust a little bit as needed. Autists have trouble doing that - they just move their hands really fast to the ball at the last moment.
There's also work being done on the brain circuitry level - Earl Miller (also at MIT) has a good candidate for the physical substrate of predictive processing in the prefrontal cortex: gamma (high-freq) oscillations carrying sensory info inside lower PFC levels are selectively dampened by alpha/beta (low freq) oscillations coming from higher levels/rest of the brain. He's got a postdoc working to see if this pathway is perturbed in autism models, I'm anxious to hear what comes out of it :)
Hysteria as a diagnosis was very clearly a result of a lack of scientific knowledge, sexism, and "girl stuff is yucky". It never had the large scientific backing that Autism currently has. It not unusual in medicine to start with one big pile of symptoms, name the pile, develop diagnostic tools, then over time hone down the symptoms or break up the pile into multiple disorders. I don't think this is a bad thing or an indictment of the original diagnoses and tools. Its part of the scientific process.
A related question would be whether, if autism is in fact one "thing", it presents differently enough in women that we greatly under-diagnose it.
Oh, there's definitely that too, although I don't know how prevalent and if it's actually a source of much underdiagnosis. The three high-functioning autists I know are all female (including my partner) and they're all annoyed that the public perception and even diagnosis are very male-centered.
For example, girls have to learn to navigate complex social situations at a much earlier age, so high-functioning autistic girls often get very good at masking, to the extent that from the outside they don't seem to have any social problems at all. No social problems? No autism diagnosis.
I believe it has something to do with known genetic markers.
What different traits did you observe?
In the end I wondered if it was a misdiagnosis, because even though he was nonverbal and had some quirks he was very sociable, and not at all averse to human contact (hugs, etc)
There are a bunch of different diagnostic instruments. The Autism Behavior Checklist is one of the most commonly used for children, with "57 questions in five general categories of symptoms": sensory, relating, body & object use, language, and social & self-help (from the Springer page describing the instrument).
There's another one I've seen used which breaks it down into 3 categories, something like self-help, communication, and one that boils down to idiosyncractic and all-consuming interests.
So potentially your cousin scores high on enough other things that his functioning at the "social" level doesn't drop his score too much.
Or he may have gone through years of therapy that have included things like learning to smile at other people and giving & receiving hugs. Maybe they increase his dose of a medication when he goes into party situations. They may be surrounding him with as much tenderness as possible so he doesn't develop additional aversion to people.
Autism may indeed be several overlapping things but there is probably also a lot of behind-the-scenes management going on. This sounds awful but it matches what I've seen.
Realizing that communication is a thing that can & should happen - not everyone realizes that. That's one of the core areas of autism. No impulse to send messages from self to other in almost any form, speech, sign, drawing, tapping, etc. or receive messages from others. Different levels of autism may have the impulse to communicate but in different ways or about different things, with varying levels of conceptualization of the other party as a person. Or being overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data transferred in the communication process.
Sometimes the activities of daily living stuff just isn't perceived as necessary - the hygiene, housekeeping, grocery shopping, scheduling side of life.
Nobody really understands what autism is, but I don't think the word "spectrum" necessarily means that. One could easily say that obesity is a spectrum; you can be a little bit obese, or extremely obese, or anything in between. I don't see any reason a psychiatric condition couldn't be like that.
Not my project, but I found a guy doing microgrants for chaotic projects. It’s at https://www.pandemonium.capital/ if anyone is interested, I think it’s a fun idea
Is this just art for people who don’t like the word “art”?
In the spirit of doing low status things with high potential, I am working on a site to allow commissioning of fringe erotica and am looking to hire a second web developer.
The idea is to build a place where people with niche interests can post bounties for specific stories. In my time moonlighting as an erotic author, I've noticed a lack of good sites to do freelance erotic writing work. I think the reason for this is that most people think porn is icky, so despite there being a huge market for extremely niche content, the platforms currently available are pretty abysmal. This is our opportunity.
We're currently in beta and can pay a junior-level wage, with senior-level equity. If you're a web developer who wants to join a fully remote startup, please reach out at https://www.outfoxstories.com/blog/careers/
As with my other startups, I began this project with the goal of generating wealth to put towards alignment research.
Is "generating wealth to put towards alignment research" still high-priority? My impression is that there's a ton of money relative to talent in this area right now.
I'm much less sure this is the right thing to do than I was a few years ago for that reason, but there are a few reasons to keep going down this path.
Quickly summarised, if we're successful here, we'll come out the other side with experience growing and running organisations (and proof of our competence at it) and a significant amount of starting capital with no strings attached. Shifting that into building a new alignment organisation in 2023 or 2024 could have more of an impact than trying to apply for grants to work directly on alignment today, especially given I don't have particularly strong skills in direct alignment research myself.
I guess you could say it's not just a money thing, but also a way or learning skills that I think will be useful, and generating money that doesn't need to go through grant bottlenecks seems like a useful alternative to supplant the current system.
I am not sure of anything here! It definitely does seem like a reasonable thing to attempt though, responding one by one:
"Are you sure that your startup is the best way to raise money for alignment research?"
It's a way of generating revenue where there seems to be a gap in the market, sure! It's also an area with low downsides, because it doesn't hinder anything anybody else is doing in alignment.
"Will researchers want grants from you? How do you plan on allocating and distributing the money in practice? Are the skills you'll develop from this website really transferrable to funding scientific research, since you don't have experience in the alignment field?"
The plan is to establish an alignment organisation directly, either internal to the company, or as a secondary not for profit. The skills in running and growing an organisation should certainly crossover, and having another independent project working on alignment certainly seems useful. Given there are already many grants, working outside the grant system seems like a sensible way to hedge our bets. I'll also be much more confident in my own abilities to do this if I manage to succeed in the startup space. If I were to instead straight up risk money other people have put towards alignment on my own unproven skills, the downside would be greater, as well as the upside being smaller.
"How will your startup start making money so quickly, when most startups (even ones like Uber) are unprofitable for the first several years?"
Uber's actually an example of a startup that was deliberately blitzscaling using VC money as a moat. Many startups are profitable quickly, and many which are not are still sold to a larger company within two years of launch. We actually already have revenue on the site (in beta now), so I'm taking a larger risk with more of my own money to speed up progress by hiring. Ideally we'd hire people who weren't working directly on alignment anyway!
I'm also not confident at all this will succeed, I simply think it's worth the time to pursue, because the potential upsides are significantly greater than what I could contribute to alignment in other areas, and it certainly looks like we need to take risky bets. I also have a significant background in startups, so it's an area where I may have a good comparative advantage, compared with working at an alignment org, or trying to start something independently today.
I think your problem there is that dress it up as erotica all you like, potential customers will be looking for porn, and porn is about "get to the action as fast as possible". So are you going to write erotica, or is it "yeah, gimme a side of guy with 12" cock, blonde with 52DD tits, this list of kinks, hold the mushy stuff"?
The more developed writing generally goes under fanfiction and that is (1) characters the consumers of such content already know, like, and have particular views about and (2) it's all done for free. There are commissions for art work and so on, but in general the bulk of content is free.
So asking people to pay for content on an unproven site is where you are going to fall between two stools; porn and fanfic, where you may end up displeasing both sets of potential customers ("I commissioned a story and they wasted pages on talking about feelings and describing the whole set-up"/"I commissioned a story and they didn't get the characters I described right; if I wanted PWP I would have stuck with AO3").
If you can write decent erotica, I wish you well, but it's a crowded market and how will you stand out as "we provide good writing as well as hot action to your specifications"?
It's true I have little idea how large this market is. I'm basing my guess off my audience as an author requesting very specific things in my stories, and being willing to pay for them. A platform that enables that in an easier, safer way than just sending payments and trusting the author is a step up from what is currently happening, so I think it has potential. I'm definitely not going after the traditional porn customers, or the fanfic customers.
Of course, maybe there are only a very small number of people keen on that, and we'll have trouble finding them, but it's worth a try. I expect we'll need to iterate a bunch to find the sweet spot between 'I want this particular author to write more' or 'I want to see more of this series' and 'I want this very specific scene to be written out'.
Yes, a website that handles payments for erotic authors to take commissions would be useful. A concern in this area is that payment processors are not fond of allowing payments for adult content, so the niche author has a risk of either losing access to the platform or to their account, depending on whichever Paypal/etc. decides to crack down on. Stability in this area would be huge, though I see you do use Paypal and Payoneer, which don't have the best track records in this area. (I had to close my Patreon for this reason, when they added limits on niche adult content. Speaking of which, I can't find an acceptable content policy on your site...)
I don't know what your specific plans for the site are but I logged in and looked around it does seem to want some thought for artist-commissioner relations. It is likely that people will want to commission specific artists and that specific artists would want to advertise availability for commissions, for example; also it should go without saying that people might want to create direct commissions privately, or for those who want to use the crowdfunding feature, at least in an unlisted way. It does not look like one can even send direct messages yet. (Are tags browsable either?)
If you haven't already I would suggest checking out existing/larger comparable sites, both for important features and to see what existing communities are doing or are in need of in regards to commissions. Nifty was mentioned elsewhere in thread, but it's a very old-school site with not much in the way of social features. My prototypical example is sofurry dot com, also a site of long standing particularly oriented towards furry work—originally writing only, but also other artwork—it includes several community features including a market of its own for people to post commission requests / availability.
"I'm definitely not going after the traditional porn customers, or the fanfic customers."
Then who is your potential customer base? Casual customers will buy a book, or watch a movie, for their hit of erotica. If you want to draw in, say, the romance novel readers to get a customised story to their specs, then you will need to market to them to get over "but I can just get the next book from my favourite author, why would I pay a stranger to write something for me?" objections.
I do think it will be a niche market, but it sounds a fascinating project. I also think you are going to hit the problem between "good writing, more interested in being proper literature" and "porn" where you will have to come down on one side or the other.
The Black Lace imprint (published by Virgin Books) started in 1993 as "erotica by and for women", steamier and more directly about sex than romance novels of the time. It stopped in 2009, then relaunched again in 2012 and I don't know how it's been doing since. You seem to be aiming for the same general idea - erotic but well-written. I have no idea how you'll do but let us know!
I broadly agree! I'd say it's more trying to hit that niche of "Man, I really want to read a story about a woman getting turned into a puddle. There just aren't enough puddle woman stories out there nowadays" (and other requests like it). I have no idea how many people are willing to pay to see their specific requests turn into decent-quality, 3000 word stories, but that's the risk we're taking!
I'll post a retrospective in six months time, haha.
I do wonder how large a market you will get for erotic fiction based on Greek myths, but it is certainly a unique attempt!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arethusa_(mythology)
The reason for this is that porn is highly regulated and against TOS of most services. Hell, some services don't even let swimsuit stores on if the pictures are too revealing. If you want to do this you'll need to find hosts, payment processors, etc that will work with you. They'll probably charge higher fees but at least they won't terminate you for doing porn. Or you can try and do the plausible deniability thing like OnlyFans. "What, we're just a platform for creators that allows some adult content! Definitely not a porn site who needs all those regulations, no sir."
>porn is highly regulated
Even erotic fiction? I can understand the regulation of certain branches of the industry, certainly, to prevent exploitation and potential CSA situations, but if you're just writing something that's basically a Harlequin Romance novel with more explicit language I don't see why that would need to be more regulated than, say, alcohol purchases or lottery tickets.
I'm not a legal expert on such things. But I'd expect most companies take a "shoot first, ask questions later" approach. Now, of course, you can do it anyway. Just be aware you're going to run into some issues like that.
It's true a lot of sites have weird and arbitrary rules about what is and isn't allowed in terms of erotic or titillating content, but I don't think it usually runs up to the level of payment processors engaging in blind-fire terminations unless some troll engages in truly heinous behavior (sending false claims of CP to the processor and the like). Not to say that arbitrary censorship for erotica doesn't happen, but usually PP aren't the failure point there from what I've seen looking into it. And once again, I suspect it will be harder to whip up a censorious stink around erotic fiction, as that's something different from clip or film-style porn of both the live and animated varieties.
You think wrong. Banned from Stripe (for example) is:
"Pornography and other mature audience content (including literature, imagery and other media) depicting nudity or explicit sexual acts."
https://stripe.com/legal/restricted-businesses
I'd suggest you look into the regulatory environment more.
Ouch! That is a loooong list of forbidden businesses.
Huh. Guess I'm wrong (although I've never even heard of Stripe before).
Have you looked into Yuletide? It's a fanfic gift economy system for fans to commission stories with rare settings/combinations of characters, and people can be very specific about what they want.
It's obviously not quite what you're doing, but it might have some useful structures.
I haven't seen that one, I'll check it out. Thank you!
I have seen Nifty! There's definitely plenty of good work out there, I do think there's a gap in connecting people who want to write with people that have requests though. Plus Nifty is not the most user friendly site in the world, the fact that it is successful despite that gives me hope there's potential for a new company here.
Everyone says the next crypto winter is here (and I agree). If you’re a person working on a blockchain project, what’s your plan for the immediate future?
Hiring on Blockchain projects hasn't been any worse than the general tech freeze, ime. It's actually been better than most tech. There's still a huge demand for a relatively small pool of devs.
But my pov is from engineering and the engineering part was always on more solid footing. Blockchain really is useful and interesting! But a lot of the uses are kind of dubious, if I'm honest.
What do you see as the future of the space in the next few years? What that’s currently available strikes you as the most useful and least dubious application?
Something I've always found odd is that problems where blockchain actually would be a good solution, for example certificate transparency in the TLS/CA system, seem to work just fine without it (yes there's hashes and append-only legers, but it's not blockchain).
That's because when you only want some of the features bundled together in the blockchain package, then the system design can be greatly simplified. (Just as if you don't need all of ACID then NoSQL can be faster than a traditional DBMS, or if you don't care about low variance in social outcomes then an individualist stance can outperform socialism.)
So, I made a prediction (and lost) that cryptocurrency was not going to be the main use of Blockchain in ten years ten years ago. So, y'know, I'm not exactly Nostradamus over here. I expect there's a big regulatory fight coming. The professional-managerial class has already decided blockchain is haram based on the spontaneous rants I've seen on Twitter from people ranging from Roman historians to journalists covering Russia. On the other hand, the crypto people have a lot of money and popular support. And Republicans have been getting weirdly pro-crypto in the past few years and their political star is on the rise right now. So we'll see.
The most dubious application are shit/memecoins that are pumped and dumped by people doing what are straight up Blue Sky/Rug Pull schemes while avoiding the SEC. The most useful application is getting around the antiquated American banking system's cyberinfrastructure. I might be biased because I hate it. But it shouldn't take three days for a transaction to settle or 15% to transfer money to Honduras or wherever. Of course, that doesn't strictly require crypto. The entire US banking system could overhaul its own systems. But they won't. Because they're an oligopoly protected by copious regulation with little competition.
The most dubious application are shit/memecoins that are pumped and dumped by people doing what are straight up Blue Sky/Rug Pull schemes while avoiding the SEC. The most useful application is getting around the antiquated American banking system's cyberinfrastructure
> these are the same picture.
more seriously, is "getting around the banking system" just crypto or is there a different system i am unaware of?
No, they're not. Getting around outdated software used by banks and getting around regulatory bodies like the SEC are entirely different things. The fact you think they're the same is strange to me.
Wait are there crypto people that *aren’t* professional-managerial class?
Estimates say 21% of all US adults own or trade crypto. While we don't have full numbers the demographics skew young and disproportionately minority. Which makes sense if you think about crypto's use cases. Which most people, including most critics, don't.
Do we have a full and detailed breakdown of what the returns each of those various classes have had over the last few years from investing in crypto?
I take it you work more on the financial side of things? Any thoughts on the scriptable side, smart contracts, applications, games? Is that going anywhere interesting in your opinion or is it dead-ending?
> The most dubious application are shit/memecoins that are pumped and dumped by people doing what are straight up Blue Sky/Rug Pull schemes while avoiding the SEC. The most useful application is getting around the antiquated American banking system's cyberinfrastructure. I might be biased because I hate it. But it shouldn't take three days for a transaction to settle or 15% to transfer money to Honduras or wherever. Of course, that doesn't strictly require crypto. The entire US banking system could overhaul its own systems. But they won't. Because they're an oligopoly protected by copious regulation with little competition.
I mean if a less worse way to electronically transfer money were to come about I would be super excited. As you say the chief barrier there seems to be regulatory; from a mere technical perspective sending bits from one database to another has been a solved problem for decades.
I do finance and (as you can personally attest) real estate stuff. But I do dabble in gaming a bit because it's a hobby. And art because I do make art.
I think smart contracts and applications will be integrated into the broader ecosystem. Blockchain has its uses and I think in the future you'll see it as an equal choice with more traditional competitors. A lot of ecosystems have a few choices like this. For example, SQL vs NoSQL vs (now) Blockchain. Or server vs serverless vs whatever. It will have its specific use cases and will increasingly remain within them. I can name specific examples but I'm being kind of broad. To take one, escrow seems well suited to it.
The cultural market is harder to predict. NFTs might be a fad but I think these things tend to stick around. If people want to own ape images that's not really any different than owning oil paintings. I think games likewise are going to start to integrate blockchain as a way to get around the pain of multiplayer needing massive centralized servers. Someone is going to make a blockchain powered MMO eventually and I think it'll be as successful as the game part deserves. But as I said, not super confident on any of this.
Anyway, I'm stopping at three paragraphs but I have more to say. Happy to drill down on any specifics.
Oh, also, I'm resisting my fintech the banks need to get up and start innovating or we need regulatory reform to disrupt them rant.
Cool, thanks. I'd be interested in digging into the specifics. My background is in game development and engineering, and my current day job for the last 7 months has been writing deep dive data-based analysis pieces on all the major blockchain games for Naavik, a major consultancy in the space.
I've also done some private consulting on the side and witnessed a lot of fundraising deals and behind the scenes stuff. Take that with the grain of salt that my experience is just one perspective among many, and here's my take:
I'm incredibly confused by what the value add of blockchain is supposed to amount to in this particular space.
In terms of being a database, it feels like the most inefficient implementation possible for storing any significant amount of data. This performance art video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJSW7Rprio) echoes my sentiments on the subject. If blockchain is supposed to provide any sort of distributed compute or storage functionality, it's setting an incredibly low bar for performance and costs on all metrics, because of its insistence on particular technological commitments.
In terms of being an ownership record, it feels like it's not grappling with the fact that ownership is a bundle of rights, and the way those rights get expressed ultimately boils down to law whether we like it or not -- witness the legal limbo of Seth Green's new cartoon based on his bored Ape, now that his Ape NFT has been "stolen." The space started out talking about how smart contracts obviated the need for dumb contracts, but every time there's a dispute when a smart contract fulfills its programming to the letter and that's not what one of the parties "meant" to happen, someone winds up running to the local magistrate and demands they give them their thing back, and this invites regulatory scrutiny.
I've written extensively about the contradictions of the Axie Infinity project in particular, but the icing on the cake there is trusting $625 million in assets behind a single point of failure, getting socially engineered by North Korea in what amounts to perhaps the second-greatest heist in all of human history. The fact that this was even POSSIBLE boggles my mind.
Then there's the oracle problem. The vast majority of applications and games in this space depend on calling out to trusted third party services to tell them anything that exists outside of the magic circle of the blockchain itself. This fundamentally undermines the promise that players will "truly own their assets." Blockchains typically just store a number, and the thing the player actually cares about is dependent on an embodiment on a centralized server. A classic example is a game asset whose power gets rebalanced, which has an immediate effect on their real world price.
NFTs as "tickets to the metaverse" seem built on a fundamentally broken business model. Players and investors pay a single large up front fee in exchange for ... something. Ill defined as it is, the other salient feature is that much of it is supposed to be delivered by other third party app developers, and the incentive structure for those devs to participate in providing VIP services for a tiny clientele with high expectations seems undercooked. Actual yacht clubs and country clubs in the real world fund themselves on recurring membership fees.
"Play-to-earn" has been revealed to be a simple ponzi and is bursting, the former advocates of it have already moved to rebrand it as "play AND earn," admitting that only some players will be able to cash out. "
But the big fundamental contradiction to me, is that Blockchain was originally about three major promises:
1. Distributed
2. Trustless
3. Irreversible
Many of the applications I see are quite happy to throw away the first two to some degree by inserting all sorts of centralized trusted services into the middle, leaving the users with nothing but the third. And I'm not convinced the third is even a feature most normies actually want. I hate big evil banks as much as the next guy, but the killer feature of a big evil bank is that they can occasionally reverse a fraudulent transaction.
By contrast, many modern blockchain apps and games are now dependent on trusted centralized services, but ALSO are still just blockchain-y enough that when North Korea steals $625 million there's absolutely nothing anybody can do about it.
And then there's the UX. The UX is terrible, and everyone knows it. But I'm not convinced the onboarding can get better, because I feel like the UX troubles of blockchain are to at least a certain degree a natural outgrowth of the tradeoff cost of achieving what Blockchain is supposed to be about -- achieving distributed trustless byzantine consensus in the face of untrusted actors.
If we're going to make people trust centralized services anyways, then what is the point of lugging all the rest of it along with us, what is the benefit? The whole point of the tradeoff was to accomplish this one hard thing, and if we're not even doing that anymore, why pay the cost?
I've found a few blockchain game projects that have plausibly sustainable business models, and most of them are just straight up gambling games like Zed Run where most players know they will probably lose money (Gambling is "sustainable" in the sense that it is as old as human history).
Composability projects like Loot have mostly failed to gain any attention for a variety of academic reasons I can get into separately.
There are a few "fully on-chain" games like Dark Forest that evade the oracle problem and are therefore legitimately interesting, but have yet to demonstrate what being on the blockchain achieves that couldn't be accomplished in other simpler ways.
Every project I've found has incredibly low Daily Active Users and engagement numbers, the main exception being Axie Infinity, who achieved their stats only by paying their players to pay, and now that the money has dried up they are crashing hard.
Everything I've seen and investigated paints one of the bleakest pictures I've seen in any field I've ever studied.
Genuinely, sincerely, what am I missing?
There's this chart on left-handedness over time, showing that after left-handedness became accepted in the population, the rates grew until it stabilized at approximately 12% (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E5KIFQ9VcAIjrP5?format=png&name=4096x4096)
Previously, I assumed we had already reached the steady equilibrium rate for LGBT identification (at approx 10%), but seems according to this Gallup poll, LGBT identification for Gen Zers is twice the rate as for millennials (at 21.8%). https://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Production/Cms/POLL/nbzubdv9nkelneda6cfb6q.png
I'm curious to hear the community's opinion on this; in 10-20 years (in Western countries), what do you forecast the percentage of people who self-identify as LGBT be? Is the real number above 20% as more people feel comfortable self-identifying, or is this recent polling data aberration and it will go back down to closer to 10%.
I think it would make sense to break "LGBT" out into "L", "G", "B" and "T" and track those separately, rather than pretending they are all somehow one thing.
Yep. Especially considering the letters that keep getting tacked on and on and on and on...
Almost certainly will go down over time to less than 5%—the amount of nonheterosexuality by pattern of behavior is a lot lower than identification, and a lot of alternative sexual behavior is opportunistic, not dictated by ironclad orientation.
While I'm sure some currently identifying as nonheterosexual will identity as heterosexual by age 30, a 4x reduction is so large so as to make your argument literally incredible to me.
The "B" part of LGBT can be (particularly for women) a zero-cost signal for those that want to signal some combination of wokeness, hipness, or whatever, or to gain access to a support community. It doesn't strike me as at all implausible that such signalling could be ~3x greater than actual LGBT behavior. And I believe that breaking down the 20% self-identification for Gen Z shows that the largest gains by far have been in "B" and fancy-pronouns-but-not-surgery-or-hormones variety of "T", which is consistent with this theory.
And none of this takes away from the fact that there's still a significant population of people who truly are L, G, B, or T by any standard and whose rights need to be protected in a way that a simplistic "they're all fakers" won't do.
My experience of the LGBT community from the inside is very much in line with this.
I don’t specify how much time this will take, because I don’t claim to know; I’m making a simple argument that sexual identification will regress over time to the historical mean.
It wouldn’t surprise me if identification was sticky within generations. “Queer,” “bi,” and “pan” are labels that one can wear without consequence indefinitely while not significantly behaving differently than a garden-variety heterosexual.
>The amount of nonheterosexuality by pattern of
> behavior is a lot lower than identification
You mean right now in the West? Because I can imagine it would be the opposite in societies hostile to alternative sexualities.
Also, it is entirely possible to not be completely straight yet only engage in straight sexual behaviour because as the default social option it's just far easier. Sexuality is about attraction, not behaviour. Plenty of people who aren't asexuals never engage in sexual behaviour at all (monks/nuns, people with extreme social anxiety, people who are extremely unattractive to potential partners etc)
> and a lot of alternative sexual behavior is
>opportunistic, not dictated by ironclad
> orientation.
Couldn't a similar statement be made about heterosexual behavior? As stated above, many people who are not 100% hetero may only engage in heterosexual sex due to a combination of social factors.
“right now in the west” Yes, I meant this in direct response to the idea that gen Zs were identifying 20%+ nonheterosexual. I make no such claim about societies where this is not the case.
“a similar statement be made about heterosexual behavior” No, I don’t think so, not in the quantities we’re seeing. I think the best estimate of the base rate of pure or predominantly heterosexual orientation is 90%+, maybe 95, and pure homosexual orientation being vanishingly rare, maybe 1-2%, predominantly homosexual being maybe another 2-3%. If you have a populace which is almost entirely wired for heterosexuality, but there’s no real penalty for homosexuality, you’ll see much more opportunistic or social behavior that strays from base orientation on the heterosexual side purely by the numbers.
Like, if let’s say 5% of primary heterosexuals will opportunistically behave homosexually, and 5% of homosexuals the same, then there’s much much more opportunistic homosexuality than opportunistic heterosexuality—more opportunistic homosexuals than primary homosexuals!
I was not referring to opportunistic heterosexual behaviour by homosexuals but rather to the fact that the lack of homosexual behaviour is often driven by social factors as much as biology, even when homosexuality is not frowned upon. Simply because most people don't have that many sexual partners, and given that are likely to settle for the default option society programs you for. So judging by your behaviour they would be 100% heterosexual but they may actually be also attracted to the same sex to some degree; they just never happened to act on it.
“Sexuality is about attraction, not behavior” I don’t really agree with this. On the margins there may be some people who are entirely repressed/oppressed, but in our society I think that orientation must be defined by behavior. A woman who identified as bisexual, says she experiences attraction to women, yet somehow ends up with a string of serious boyfriends and never anything but some flirtations with women is heterosexual.
Likewise, a man who identifies as Not Gay but primarily has sex with men—a very common type, many such cases—is homosexual.
Defining sexuality by attraction leads you to weird places where all kinds of people attain sexualities they never practice because the mental phenomenon of attraction is subjective, and there’s no reliable or rigorous way to detect attraction.
Then you're going to run into very strange sample size effects. Like a whole army of desperately horny asexuals. Who suddenly instantly convert into hetero or homosexuals the second they finally find a (hopefully) willing sexual partner.
I agree that if you go with self-reporting, you will run into some different strange effects, like the ones you described. People don't always accurately assess their attraction and also do not always truthfully report their assessments. Furthermore, the attraction itself may be driven by factors that are not purely biological, especially in females. That said, we do use self-reporting to assess other things, such as presence and degree of depression or pain severity.
Sexual behaviour and sexual attraction are different things; I guess it comes down, as it so often does, to the matter of definition.
In 1994 the NYT reported 'Sex Survey of American Men Finds 1% Gay'. Has it increased 10 to 20 fold since then?
This is the tricky space between "it is now socially acceptable to come out" and "it is not alone socially acceptable, you gain precious social credit points for coming out" where increasing numbers fall into that area of "people who would have been in the closet a generation ago" and "hopping aboard the latest trend".
"Why would you want to identify as LGBT?"
Why wouldn't you? And don't forget the "+" which is covering a lot of ground here for "I'm not cis het, I am not the oppressor, I'm one of the oppressed" young people.
Grab a flag, come march in the big parade!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4vHegf3WPU
And it's not even lying about identity; you can be non-binary and still have a feminine name and look like a woman, and have a small national TV piece done about your choice not to wear ear rings:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Gr78THojrU
If you're young, if you're unsure, if you don't feel you really fit the model of what you are supposed to be (a not very feminine in looks or interests girl, a not very masculine in looks or interests boy), then previously you might be called a tomboy or regarded as a little odd. Now you have a ready-made category to slot into, that comes with guaranteed protection and communities that will support and praise and celebrate you.
And yes, real persecution still exists. But even in my own town, there was a big to-do about flying the correct new inclusive trans rainbow flag outside the offices of the town council - a to-do *in favour of*, not *against*. That's not really 'actively hostile' for anyone wanting to identify as one of the easier identities to adopt (coming out as gay or lesbian probably is still the biggest change as that requires you to commit to something that isn't easily shrugged off once you've grown past the use for it).
And has that person gained or lost status among their immediate peer group as a result of this "tons of harassment"?
Conversion therapy is a rare and localized thing. Large, welcoming LGBT support groups are a widespread and common thing. And people frequently express beliefs they don't actually (or at least initially) hold, to secure membership in a supportive community - even if the community is not a majority and is not universally loved. See e.g. any religion and/or cult.
The existence and celebration of people declaring themselves "non-binary" kinda undermines that last paragraph.
Being LGBT of some flavour is a fast track to promotion in many organizations, and a very good way to signal "belonging" in a woke space.
Or a cabinet position.
As a current trans woman who was first a gay man half a decade ago, yea no not at all.
Among the community of queer people you get some status, and among your peers and young people you get a little status.
I have received only indifference or mild displeasure from institutions, neutrality from about a quarter of the population and active dislike from half. It has undoubtedly made it harder to be hired and promoted.
I'm in the US.
If I could be cis, in either direction, and not subject to this, I'd take it in a heartbeat.
It would be interesting to disambiguate sexual orientations from gender orientations, for want of a better word, as there's certainly been an increase in the population identifying as some version of T. If you take a wide enough definition of "T-ish", that includes me, and that's at least partly for social reasons: in many of my circles, it is now a useful way to convey information about my likes and dislikes to others.
Identifying as versus really? Identifying as - yeah, 20% or more. The whole "gay until graduation" thing has been around since the 90s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesbian_until_graduation
And "I'm bi/I'm non-binary" is a safe way to experiment with "I'm not boring old cis het, I'm funky and with it some variety of queer!" for The Youth, particularly if they are raised with "cis het is the heternormative patriarchy which is Oppressive and Wrong, the 99 flags of Pride are all fun and progressive and much better things to be!"
How much of it sticks is another matter. Some people will genuinely experiment before settling on 'an identity', some people will follow the crowd, some people will come out as 'this really is me'.
I think you're going to end up with a large subculture that identifies as LGBTQ and has some amount of kinky and homosexual experiences before the majority settle into heterosexual monogamy while still identifying as bisexual or whatever. And that's fine.
If I were still a writer I'd write a story about one such fellow. A man who was transgressive and kinky in his youth and ended up marrying a similar woman and has now ended up as a banker for JP Morgan where his differences are celebrated. And about the inner conflict of it all. It'd be a fascinating character study. Especially if you could resist the urge to sneer or pity him.
Maybe I'm the weird one, but I've got no desire to "celebrate", nor even hear about, any aspect of my coworkers' sex lives.
Amen.
That's part of the pathos, isn't it?
I would be willing to bet on homosexual monogamous as the second largest group.
Probably. And a few will end up in more exotic relationships. Others will end up single. So it goes.
hoping for 50%+
Why?
Look at their little bio attached to their profile pic. That explains it.
Shot-in-the-dark guess: personal desire for large dating pool being masked as selfless desire to reduce human population due to neo-Malthusian theory.
Personal desire for a larger dating pool sounds far more noble to me than population elimination to be honest...
Yes, but in "woke-left" (for lack of a better word) circles, personally wanting something is Not Done. If you personally want something to happen, it must be framed as you being a noble champion of a greater cause.
Uncharitable and just not true.
It's hard to predict. I'd say that at present, there's a smallish culture which is strongly pro-LGBTQ+, a larger culture which is strongly anti-, and the majority that isn't hugely engaged.
So it might be a question of the size of the two cultures.
Now that I think about it, I'm not even sure whether LGBTQ+ will exist as a category 20 years from now.
It's possible that eroding the gender binary will have an effect if it happens, which it well might.
At this point, presenting as a man, a woman, or a non-binary person can have a lot of emotional charge, which why (many) people get so emotionally involved with how they or other people present themselves.
In theory, there could be people who feel strong sex dysphoria-- they would want the hormones and operations, but not care whether they kept their birth gender. In fact, a few such people might exist, and I'm not hearing about them.
I actually know one! A biologically female friend of mine (in her 40s) had sex reassignment surgery in her 20s and has been on T and basically entirely looks like, presents as, and behaves as a man, but pointedly identifies as a woman and is totally okay with her birth gender. Obviously she confuses a lot of people, but she doesnt bother correcting anyone on anything.
Shes certainly the only one I know or have heard of though. So there arent very many, at least in standard queer circles. The intersex community may have more.
LGBTQ is different from handedness. If it's trendy to declare yourself "non-binary", and it doesn't require any changes in your behaviour, a lot of people will do it. No one will identify as a southpaw if they're a righty, that's just horribly inconvenient.
It's not even suggesting that Gen Z's are "lying". LGBT is a lot more nebulous than handedness. Most people are somewhere along the Kinsey spectrum. Whether you choose to incorporate that as part of your identity is largely a social question, while handedness seems a lot more binary.
>No one will identify as a southpaw if they're a righty, that's just horribly inconvenient.
25% of Major League Baseball players are left handed. Given that this is an area where putting up with the inconvenience of switching your handedness I wonder what we could learn from this. There are a lot of complications, of course. But it could give us some additional data.
We actually have a lot of such data but in the other directions. Many societies made it very inconvenient and sometimes even dangerous to be left-handed, and people had been forced to switch handedness.
It is now generally regarded as a traumatizing experience to force people to change their dominant hand, and is frowned upon. It's still slightly more convenient to be right-handed since the majority of the population is, and everything is optimized for that, but that doesn't outweigh the massive inconvenience of retaining yourself to use the other hand, so nearly 100% of lefties don't.
Interesting. When I worked in Hong Kong in the 90s, the consulting company I worked for, INS, hired a bunch of network engineers (I was one of them) for this HK project. Out of 33 network engineers working on the project, 16 were lefties (I was one of them). In HK they were still promoting right-handedness in kids, so left-handedness tended to invoke surprise and comments among the Hong Kong yan. We were all staying in the same hotel, and it was the woman who checked people into the hotel fitness center who brought it to my attention first. When I signed in, she said, "Oh you must work for INS". There were hundreds of workers from other companies staying at this hotel working on the same project, so I asked her how she knew. "You're signing in with your left hand. All you INS workers are left-handed."
Afterward, I did a survey, and 16 out of 33 of us were lefties. And I found that the leftie dominance in the profession to be true as I moved on to other jobs — up until the early 2000s when the Cisco's CCIE certification became an easy way for people to get better salaries (thus attracting a lot of righties to the profession). ;-)
I've read that lefties are also overrepresented among astronauts.
Have they retained themselves or are lefties overrepresented there due to the advantage left-handedness offers, much the same way tall people are vastly overrepresented in the NBA?
To my understanding it is the overrepresentation due to the advantage. The book "The Sports Gene" covers it, if I am remembering correctly (it's been a long while since I read it, so add salt to taste.) Many sports that rely on direct interaction with an opponent along with instant processing of "this subtle movement means I need to do this thing without having to think about it" have benefits for lefties when arm/hand movements are the key. I do medieval martial arts, and lefties really take some getting used to as the shots come from different angles around your shield, etc. What is really hilarious though is watching two lefties fight each other, as they tend to have even less experience so you can see them actively thinking about what to do like new fighters instead of acting more instinctively. If having one lefty in your group is uncommon, having two to practice against each other is rare, and so really highlights just how strange it is for them, even though it is just like two right handed people fighting in reverse. I always found that interesting, how much of what we do is subconscious and gets broken in a strangely novel situation.
Pride Month, Pride marches, it's all fun and celebration and who (unless they're a hermit crab like me?) wouldn't want to be part of that? If you're some variety of "I'm pan" or "I'm non-binary" or whatever, you get to wave the flag and march along in the parade and have people cheer you, rather than standing on the outskirts watching the floats pass you by with all the happy, beautiful people having fun.
I would argue that sexuality is a spectrum between 100% homosexual and 100% heterosexual (a la the Kinsey scale), and therefore such a percentage is dependent fully on social attitudes towards where the line between bisexuality and "heteroflexibility" is drawn.
What complicates the above are my social progressive peers' obsessions with hierarchies of microlabels--they clearly don't subscribe to the postmodernist rejection of labels that was dogma on the Left as recently as a decade ago.
Completely random tangent: when I was developing a stable of RPG NPCs and I wanted to shorthand their sexuality, I developed something that I think works better than the Kinsey scale: I expressed their attraction to males, and their attraction to females separately in two 1-5 scales: 1 = "essentially no attraction," 5 = "thirsty for them all the time." So this allows you to express asexuality-style low-libido, and hypersexuality-style high-libido, and you might have, like a man who's attracted to males 4, females 2, and identifies as homosexual, while someone else might be males 2, females 2 and identifies as bisexual, but they're equally attracted to females.
Kinsey scale is silly. Better would be a 2D space, with one axis being gynophilic/gynophobic and the other being androphilic/androphobic. Asexuals at the origin, extreme bisexuals in the upper right, prudes in the lower left, and the caricature fratbros and man-hating womynists in the other two corners.
Misanthropes in the lower left?
If the axes were not extended to repulsion (which, to my mind, seems a bit different from absence of attraction), then the quadrant in your space from the asexuals to the extreme bisexuals looks to me like a 2D space with the Kinsey scale on one axis and total libido level at right angles to it - then rotate the coordinate axes by 45 degrees.
I think repulsion needs to be a part of understanding sexuality. Some people seem to be literally repelled by the idea of coming into contact with particular genital types. These people can be a problem at orgies.
Ok. I mostly wanted to focus on the near-equivalence of the two representations, differing just by a coordinate axis rotation.
"These people can be a problem at orgies." While I haven't, unfortunately, had the opportunity to attend an orgy, I have viewed filmed ones, and I do find it somewhat obnoxious that the men present have a tendency to spend so much effort avoiding touching each other that the event seems to collapse into an assortment of separate couples who happen to be in the same room.
> These people can be a problem at orgies
Oh man don't get me started!
If you do the same for several other gender-related categories, you end up with the Genderbread Man (googling this term should bring up the model I mean).
I made a similar model. In general I find that gynosexuality and androsexuality are much more natural and useful categories than hetero and homo. It doesn't require to know what gender you are and allow to focus one one thing at a time, it draws the category borders, uniting people who are attracted to the similar things, rather than different.
I bet you literally can picture lots of things that are much more awkward. If not, I don't know, consider the possibility that you're aphantasic.
My games are pretty tame and don't contain any more sexual content than, like, the existence of romantic/sexual relationships in the world (but not portrayed).
"gay" as something you can *be* is a relatively modern invention.
The earliest similar thing i know of is social circles of men engaging in "sodomy" in 17th century italian city states.
But the historical mean, as you say, is just people doing their thing and depending on time and circumstance being seen as some shade of normal, excentric, unmanly or sinners against god and nature.
So i get the thing of some not "counting" as much. I think there will either be a crunch and only some will survive as "real" things, or there will be further dilution and people just wont bother to categorize into sub-sub-sub-niches.
I'm setting up a new VC fund in Prospera that focuses on "stranded technologies" that are hard to realise somewhere else: https://infinitafund.com/
If you're working on a startup in fintech, healthcare, edtech or proptech, check out the conferences I'm organising this year.
To give you a few examples:
- We're building a tokenised real estate marketplace for new construction, because well... we can get building permits there
- We can do human trials there for gene therapies to collect FDA-auditable data, to expedite the approval process
- If you want to set up a new bank or insurance, or anything really ... you don't need to convince the government to give you a license, you need to convince a liability insurance
i am still waiting for the analogue to the "not real communism" argument.
Why do you expect to build a better polity than the V.O.C. ; East India Trading; or similar ventures?
How about a different analogy?
You tell Airbnb in 2008: how do you expect to offer a better service than hotels? This can only result in illegal hosting services for human trafficking ...
"We can do human trials there for gene therapies to collect FDA-auditable data, to expedite the approval process"
Well, whoever could have seen this coming? Does the new government that broke the former contract know about this, or have you greased the proper palms this time round?
Exploiting the local people for fun and profit because we can pay off the government to ignore things like human rights. This is why I don't like your charter city.
Assuming that "human trials" means "exploiting local people for fun and profit" is close to the least charitable take possible. Why is this your assumption and what makes you think it's a reasonable one?
Quite possibly because Prospera's sales pitch is increasingly starting to sound like Rapture.
Yeah, I did feel it might be de trop to compare it to a video game, but yes.
Exact impression it gives off.
'Come live in our private totalitarian-but-done-fun fiefdom, what could possibly go wrong, especially when a new government has come in and torn up the contract we signed with the previous government, ha ha ha ha ha! But no, honestly, there aren't any pesky laws and regulations going to stop you going full-on Victor Frankenstein if that's what shakes your tree! We've got lots of empty units, please for the love of God sign up!'
"Why is this your assumption?"
Because the entire point of Prospera is to be outside laws and regulations save those it sets out in its own charter. Couple that with the change of government which saw the favourable climate for Prospera change, and now we're getting advertising for "set up in our lovely private fiefdom where no outside local laws apply, so you are free of all that red tape!" which is both slightly desperate in tone and also alarms me with its selling point and appeal being "no laws!", and that's where I get my assumption; if you're going to do red tape-free human trials, you will need a pool of human test subjects, and if you're doing it in a country like Honduras, the nearest available subjects are the locals.
'Red tape free' to me signals 'they can't sue you if you injure or kill them', hence exploitation.
The law code of Prospera is 3.500 pages. Hardly "no laws".
three and a half pages of laws hardly seems like a lot
I'm European
In words: three-thousand-five-hundred
Your own special little laws for your own special little city. And you wonder why this entire project sounds like something out of BioShock?
I mean ... there are 10.000s of special little cities existing in the world, and probably hundreds of thousands throughout history.
What makes you automatically presume this one is the worst possible, dystopian version of all?
Would you have said the same thing about the founding of the US in 1776 or the independence of Hong Kong in 1948?
What makes you think that's what's happening?
The founder of the company I'm thinking of is bringing his friends from the US to do the trials, not locals.
The product is the most safe possible gene therapy that exists, where no side effects on humans or animals have been found in the last 23 years.
Let's hope this founder has many, many friends to carry out all the trials on.
So this is the most safe gene therapy possible, so safe the founder is confident that he can test it out on his friends, who he is going to bring from the US to Prospera to do it.
If it's so safe, why not do these trials in the US?
Regulations and barriers to testing? So you ship them off to a place where there are no regulations and barriers, which still sounds exploitative to me.
And that is before getting into it that if it's all a cosy little arrangement between the founder and his friends (they must be *really* good friends), then who can trust the data is what they claim it is? This sounds like Theranos Mark II.
Though I am glad you won't be taking a leaf out of the IVF industry's book and using developing world locals as cheap resources.
Check out some of Scott's articles (e.g. Prospectus on Prospera, Adumbrations Of Aducanumab), then you'll understand some of the problems they're trying to solve better.
No need to assume the worst. They're trying to do better, and it's worth a try if you understand that the status quo has a lot of problems.
"Trying to do better" is a laudable goal - that like charity, covers a multitude of sins.
"Data collected by me from trials run on my six/ten/twenty friends" - and how many friends does this guy have, who are all willing to be human guinea pigs? - does not sound sufficiently rigorous to convince the FDA. It does sound like the snake oil merchants who set up 'stem cell clinics' and the likes.
You see, my problem with this is two-fold. First, there are all too many con-men and chancers out there who run this exact "truly scientific science backs our results" scams to part the desperate and the rich from their money, we've discussed this on here with the ionised blood thing.
Second, setting up somewhere whose main selling point is "no outside state regulations" again sounds to me like laetrile clinics:
https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/cam/hp/laetrile-pdq
This person intends to run controlled clinical trials? Great! But it's going to need more than "The founder of the company is bringing his friends from the US to do the trials" to meet those standards.
You seem to be presuming the worst.
Have you read Scott's post that I referred to?
As you say, it's at Fyre Festival levels of actualisation versus shiny prospectus, which makes me even more sceptical.
From what I gather (correct me if I'm wrong), this particular proposal isn't about Prospera proper. Instead, it involves a gene-therapy surgery for late-stage arthritis that is already being provided by Dr. Glenn Terry, orthopedic surgeon and founder of the GARM clinic in the nearby city of Roatan. This treatment is, of course, not FDA approved, although promotional material sketchily claims it is "IRB-approved" (they offer no link nor documentation). See https://garmclinic.com/
From Niklas's descriptions of the trial elsewhere in the thread, it appears that Dr. Terry has convinced some of his friends and family members with arthritis to fly down to his clinic and undergo the presumably lucrative surgery. You can take Terry at his word that this is an innocent way to save money on the way to FDA approval; personally, I find the practice of recruiting friends and family into a study evaluating his surgical moneymaker to be, at best, *morally iffy* and probably quite a bit worse than that.
As to the scientific merits of the treatment, I honestly cannot say. Terry is obviously a very accomplished surgeon, but a (very) quick look on google scholar yielded no evidence that he previously did research on gene therapies.
Ah, botheration. If this is the same guy, then looking at his website *does* give off very strong snakeoil emanations:
"Do you have an athletic injury, arthritis, chronic pain, spinal issues, autoimmune disorder, diabetes, COPD, or post-Covid lung damage? Do you want the latest in anti-aging treatments? We can help you feel better and live better!"
Yes, a guy with a qualification and specialising in sports medicine is going to work on COPD and diabetes? And how will they do this? Stem cells, of course!
https://garmclinic.com/treatments/
"REGENERATIVE MEDICINE & STEM CELL TREATMENTS"
Treat Type II diabetes with stem cells!
vhttps://garmclinic.com/2021/09/28/stem-cell-therapy-for-type-ii-diabetes-at-garm-clinic-in-roatan/
He'll also sell you his own range of supplements:
"Virapress
$70.00
ViraPressTM is a natural dietary supplement for improving the immune system. Each serving contains bovine serum glycoproteins, crystalline maltose disaccharide and magnesium vegetable stearate. Each bottle contains 60 servings.* *Disclaimer: The statements and information contained in this website have not been evaluated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The products featured in this website are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease."
This is sounding more and more like the "dodgy Harley Street clinic" 'Private Eye' magazine covered in the "misuse of charity umbilical cord donations" article.
Well, now I can add "Roatan stem cell clinic" to "Mexican laetrile clinics".
I looked it up and there does seem to be legitimate research into stem cells and Type II diabetes, BUT:
https://www.genengnews.com/news/type-2-diabetes-patients-can-benefit-from-stem-cell-transplants/
(1) Patients need to be non-obese and have the disease for less than 10 years
(2) The results are short term reductions, so you probably need to have ongoing treatments
(3) You can't come off your meds completely
Scott wrote a fantastic piece about it here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/prospectus-on-prospera
I wrote about my predictions for Britain in the 2050s (excitingly Tyler Cowen shared it on Marginal Rev) https://medium.com/@bobert93/a-very-british-2050s-1c75782e790b . Feedback welcome
"Where I live, the council wanted to make some sensible changes to a roundabout to improve pedestrian safety, and local residents fought it tooth and nail"
Where I live, much high density housing is being built against the wishes of local residents. (And much of the objection is to parking provision. why would the future be a place of EV s rather than renewed public transport?)
I don't know what your objection to green belts is, because the article you linked is paywalled. A standard argument against the argument that green belts prevent expansion is that you can build whole new towns instead expanding existing ones.
Rebalancing the South East and the rest of the country could help. Are you assuming it fails?
Here is a good summary of the arguments against the green belt: https://citymonitor.ai/government/we-need-rethink-green-belt-639
Well, that's kind of nuanced, which helps me agree with it, but it's not quite against the green belt. The argument that green belts are bad for.the environment seems to boil down to farmland being.bad, but no one wants to get rid of all farmland.
I think the more important argument against green belts that it prevents development next to public transport hubs within easy commuting distance to cities, which ends up meaning people live/build even further out (out past the green belt) so end up with longer, more polluting commutes. City dwellers have much lower carbon footprints than people in rural areas (because the density of cities means less driving + denser housing needs less heating) and green belts restrict the growth of cities, meaning fewer people move from rural to city.
Difficult to believe EVs will take over the auto market that fast. If the UK is anything like the US, it would require roughly a doubling of the electrical infrastructure -- generating and transmission equipment, not to mention hundreds of thousands of new charging stations -- and those things usually take a long time. If the US started today and were willing spend tens of $billions per year, and jettison all the usual environmental impact review and community input, it could probably just barely manage to bring on line the necessary new generating and transmission capacity in the 28 years available.
Even if the UK is carbon-neutral (or even carbon-negative) by then, it's hard for me to imagine that India and China are, so I can't see global warming being reversed by then
So... you agree with the article?
> This decreases the salience of climate change as an issue in the UK, although
> climate change globally is not solved as many countries are not yet carbon neutral.
I agree with a lot of the article, but not that UK will be debating what temperatures they should target, because they will have such a small influence on global temperatures
I guess maybe the debate will be only at an academic level. I think you are right that it won't be something the UK is able to have a major impact on.
Given that rolling blackouts are expected for late 2022 (due to gas powered generation for base load demand replacing coal, nuclear power plants have not been replaced, and storage for gas was sold off and decommissioned, all while gas has become scarce and expensive), rolling blackouts in 2050 seems like a likely scenario. Unfortunately it's quite easy to sketch dystopian visions of the future so I'll stop.
I can't say I agree with you about people living until they're 150. The number of people living beyond 115 hasn't gone up for quite a few decades. To a first approximation it has always been zero, and I don't think that's going to change much - are you imagining some new technology that stops people ageing?
There's another reason there won't be anybody who is 150 in 2050 - if there were, they would have to be 122 today, and there are no 122 year olds in the world today.
In order to have lived beyond 115, a person would have to have been born by 1907 reached nominal retirement age by 1972. If there are medical technologies that might significantly increase lifespan at the high end but were invented after 1972, then our hypothetical individual is *very* unlikely to have taken advantage of them unless they quickly became mainstream enough to be covered by Medicare + modest supplemental coverage. The population of Lost / Greatest Generation wealthy technophile early adopters may be too small to have been seen in the data yet.
Alternately, they all faked their deaths in the late 20th century, when the paperwork for creating fictitious new identities was still reasonably tractable :-)
If you are born in 2050 and are going to live to 150+, you are well beyond any reasonable timeline for biological immortality - by 2200 I expect us to have mostly solved human biology in one way or another.
If that seems excessive, compare our current understanding of biology with the one we had in 1872, and that's not even considering the internet, next-generation sequencing, and the upcoming AI revolution.
Yeah this is a fair point, perhaps I was too ambitious. Maybe I should have said 'people born in 2050 are likely to live to 150+' as I do think aging research will lead to significant breakthroughs.
I just checked and the number of people currently alive who are older than 115 is one.
I think that you're underselling how many buildings will be new and not old, or renovated. Certainly, it's not hard to find 30 year old buildings around here, but it's also not hard to find buildings that are <10 years old. I assume this is *less* true in the UK than here, but that new buildings *exist*. After all, the London skyline looks like this: https://i.insider.com/587f91c6dd08959a4e8b4579?width=1000&format=jpeg&auto=webp
I don't know where you live, but "most places will not see major new development (at least where it replaces old) and the most visible addition to major cities will be a few new skyscrapers" seems the safest bet you can make. Note how in your picture the skyscrapers peter out quickly.
At least you have realised that 2050s Britain will not be hugely different from now, due to the constraints about cities having so much build environment already in place, and that circumstances won't be hugely different.
Where I differ with you is:
(1) AI as the Magic Fairy Godmother. I appreciate that you envisage white-collar jobs being the ones getting replaced this time, rather than blue-collar jobs. I think you don't estimate how much of a social effect this will have. You do have something about it, but I think the changes will be much deeper and more destructive.
"The destruction of vast numbers of jobs by AI will make the creation of jobs both very politically popular and more politically feasible (because AI will increase growth and concentrate profits, giving more tax revenue)."
I agree that governments, faced with rising unemployment amongst the middle-class, will be casting around for "new employment opportunities! green new jobs!" but with as much success as all the current "this new scheme will create jobs for the newly out of work" schemes. As for tax revenue, there will be even more laws trying to close loopholes on stashing away multinationals' increased by AI profits, and multinationals hiring tax lawyers and accountants to find new loopholes. There may be some increase in tax revenue, but I don't expect it to be enough to cover all the new jobs required.
(2) Farmland - small farmers increasingly go to the wall, large agri-business will be the model.
"Breakthroughs in artificial meat will mean we could free up large amounts of farmland, but farmers will want subsidies to keep farming and keep it preserved it how it is. Environmentalists will want to be left to fall fallow and re-wilded. As more re-wilding occurs and less land is used for farming (thanks to improved yields, some vertical farming and artificial meat) they’ll be debates over the re-introduction of ever more and larger fauna. Think bears."
Nope. Agree about the subsidies, the exit from the EU has meant that subsidies are being phased out up to 2024. What the UK government will do to replace them is the next thing, which is why I see small farms dependent on subsidies folding. Less land will not be used for farming, because of food security:
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/united-kingdom-food-security-report-2021/united-kingdom-food-security-report-2021-contents
"In 2020, the UK imported 46% of the food it consumed."
That is not going to be made up by artificial meat, and improved yields depend heavily on fertilisers and crop-breeding to be more productive.
"Phosphate rock is the only large-scale source of phosphorus, an essential element for plant growth and an important chemical fertiliser. The UK has no phosphate reserves and relies on imports; Exploitable reserves of phosphate rock have increased since 1995. At the same time, some regions, including the UK, have reduced their use of phosphate rock as a fertiliser while increasing agricultural production. Many countries are also in the process of making more efficient use of phosphate rock, which could reduce the demand for this type of fertiliser."
Post-Brexit, the UK government is talking about cheap imports from abroad to feed Britain, but that means (a) further eroding the farmer base in Britain (b) being dependent on no foul-ups or delays in supply chains.
You're not going to see bears re-introducted into Britain, you are going to see more monoculture in vast fields for big factory farming businesses.
(3) Flying cars.
No way. Think of traffic currently in London. Now replace that with the sky full of vehicles. You won't have cheap, fast travel that means you can pop over to the Continent on half an hour's notice, you are going to have commuter traffic jams stacked four high in the sky.
Besides, the guy whose book you reference on this is full of magic thinking:
"The potential capabilities of mature nanotech are mind-blowing. The incredible speed alone would dramatically lower the price of literally every physical product. Hall estimates that the entire capital stock of the US—“every single building, factory, highway, railroad, bridge, airplane, train, automobile, truck, and ship”—could be rebuilt in a week. And nanotech would allow materials with extreme properties, such as the strength of diamond, to be used for everyday manufacturing and construction.
The possibilities are straight out of science fiction. The “space pier”, a set of towers a hundred kilometers tall with a magnetic accelerator to shoot payloads into orbit, saving the fuel required to escape Earth’s gravity well and bringing down launch costs by three orders of magnitude. Or the “Weather Machine”, a fleet of quintillions of centimeter-sized balloons floating in the stratosphere, made of nanometer-thick diamond, with remote-controlled mirrors that can reflect light or allow it to pass through, forming a “programmable greenhouse gas” that can regulate temperature and direct solar energy. And of course, affordable flying cars.
...And indeed, we’re going to need lots more energy if we’re ever going to get nanotech manufacturing, regular space travel, and of course flying cars. In fact, a good explanation for technological stagnation is that the only technological revolution of the last 50 years, computing, was the only one that didn’t need more power than could be provided by the technology of the 1970s.
Where will all this energy come from? It could come from solar: the amount of power reaching the Earth from the Sun is some 10,000 times greater than the current power requirements of humanity. Of course, it’s hard to harness in practice, owing to cloud cover and pesky inconveniences such as nighttime, but that’s nothing a well-placed fleet of a quintillion remote-controlled aerostats in the stratosphere couldn’t handle."
Nuclear! seems to be the watch-word for supplying increasing energy demands, and *if* the government demonstrated that it could build and maintain nuclear power plants, I'd believe it. But at present? Hinkley Point C is the only one currently under construction and it's on budget over-runs and two years late (yes, the pandemic didn't help). The energy company owner is owned by the French, and the price for electricity generated has been negotiated to provide maximum profit for the owners not the consumers:
"EDF has negotiated a guaranteed fixed price – a "strike price" – for electricity from Hinkley Point C of £92.50/MWh (in 2012 prices), which will be adjusted (linked to inflation – £106/MWh by 2021) during the construction period and over the subsequent 35 years tariff period. The base strike price could fall to £89.50/MWh if a new plant at Sizewell is also approved. High consumer prices for energy will hit the poorest consumers hardest according to the Public Accounts Committee.
In July 2016, the National Audit Office estimated that due to falling energy costs, the additional cost to consumers of 'future top-up payments under the proposed HPC CfD had increased from £6.1 billion in October 2013, when the strike price was agreed, to £29.7 billion'. In July 2017, this estimate rose to £50 billion, or 'more than eight times the 2013 estimate'."
Now maybe by the time it finally becomes operational, the increase in energy prices will make this rate look moderate. Or maybe they'll hike the price up in line with 'current energy pricing'.
Re: "multinationals hiring tax lawyers and accountants to find new loopholes."
If AI was highly successful, that would be "multinationals purchasing/renting/building tax and accounting AIs to find new loopholes" :-)
That will definitely be the next iteration; competing AI to outdo each other on getting/dodging tax!
Yup!
"you are going to have commuter traffic jams stacked four high in the sky." - The beauty of the sky is you don't have to stick to roads, and you can have many layers of traffic, that's the essence of what makes flying cars so useful. The thinking in 'Where's my flying car' probably does sound magical today. But wouldn't the prospect of astronauts landing on the moon have sounded magical to someone in the 1930s? Electricity & computers would have been magic once, we no longer think of them as such. With sufficient advances the magical becomes the possible. There's no reason to think that will stop happening. The future with it's AI breakthroughs is far more productive than today, so much more things becomes possible.
What are the energy requirements for flying cars? How much noise do they make?
I'm not saying they'll never happen, but we'll need answers to those questions.
They need more energy than cars - about 1,000 horsepower. Which is approx. a supercar today. We'd need more abundant energy than we have today, but I think that's entirely possible in the future.
Yes, astronauts landing on the moon sounded fantastical in the 1930s, but flying cars didn’t sound fantastical in the 1970s or 1980s because people back then expected the rate of change of aviation technology to continue or accelerate. It stagnated.
What sounds unrealistic to the uninformed public isn't all that great a gauge of what's actually unrealistic given existing technology, though.
Meaning? Are we getting flying cars or not? I was promised them in the 80s.
Flying cars are at least a possibility, but I've got some bad news about warp drive and ansibles....
Who says? Wernher von Braun, the guy who designed the rocket that did get men to the Moon, supposedly joined the Spaceflight Society at the TH Berlin when he enrolled in 1930, and started immediately experimenting with liquid-fueled rockets. Wikipedia claims he told August Piccard in 1930 that he personally planned on traveling to the Moon.
Sounding fantastical isn’t the same as sounding impossible.
It's not? "fantasy" != "not real"? That's an interesting argument. But anyway, I can replace it if you like with the assertion that in the 1930s I think people did not think going to the Moon was fantastical, either. We're not talking about the 1880s here, Jules Verne era. People had seen airplanes, submarines, the Atlantic had been crossed twice by airplane already. Science had already demonstrated (via radioactivity, and some early nuclear transmutations) that unbelievable power lay in the atom -- if it could be unlocked, somehow, and "hard" science fiction of the era was full of "atomic" rockets and what not. Let's not forget Von Braun's "Spaceflight Society," which was not an asylum but a serious academic bunch.
I think a rmore reasonable reading of the times was that people thought going to the Moon was possible, but difficult, perhaps quite frivolous and economically irresponsible, and wouldn't be likely to happen for a good half century at least. Von Braun and his ilk were unusual in thinking it could be done within 20 years, not 50, and *should* be done, for either prescient military reasons or odd Elon Musk manifest destiny type of reasons.
We landed astronauts on the moon. We never got the moon colonies of popular SF which went along with the flying cars. I think that's the takeaway here.
Yup. And this December it will be 50 years since the last footprint was left on the moon.
It's interesting to ask what would have had to be different to get us long-term lunar colonies. My guess is that the driver here was entirely politics--let a butterfly flap its wings a little differently in 1950, and we never go to the moon or we end up building a long-term colony up there and so do the Russians, as prestige projects.
But I think you can't get large-scale human presence in space unless someone finds a way to either make it pay--either economically, militarily, or in some cultural/religious/values way. As long as it's just a political prestige project, it can't ever become self-sustaining or anything. If there had been some valuable resource discovered on the moon by the Apollo astronauts, we might have a large and continuing space presence today.
"But I think you can't get large-scale human presence in space unless someone finds a way to either make it pay--either economically, militarily, or in some cultural/religious/values way."
Agreed.
In a way, the case for _human_ presence in space is worse now than in the 1970s. Robotics has advanced greatly since then. I suspect that asteroid mining and/or solar power satellites will eventually happen, but I'd bet against large-scale human presence in either - or possibly even _any_ on-site humans.
Interesting.
I think you're right that housing won't change very much, for the most part. But wrong in the implication that the entire built-up environment won't look distinguishably different.
I think roads and street-furniture are much more malleable than buildings, and will change significantly.
In your comparison year of 1992, bright red phone-boxes were ubiquitous. Now, they are essentially absent. In their stead we now have more boxes for services like broadband and cell-towers.
Within the last couple of years in cities, electric hire scooters are becoming widespread. Hired driverless cars are likely to cover much of the rest of urban travel. Many fewer people will need to have their own car, and together this will have a big effect on roads - affecting road markings and signage, parking infrastructure etc.
Also the new-urbanist movement catching on. (google something like 'Amsterdam 1970s vs today') More bike lanes, more trams etc.
It's a good point about car ownership and parking. Self-driving eliminates the need for ownership in urban areas, so they'll probably be less parking, but maybe more traffic.
Why does self-driving eliminate the desire for ownership? I don't follow that. If that were true, then wouldn't taxis and buses and the tube -- already pretty thick on the groun in the urban core -- have already eliminated the desire for ownership?
Why would adding "self-driving" to the attributes of taxis change the outcome considerably? If it turned out to be possible to make very reliable software and upgrade and maintain it cheaply (and without needing to upgrade the hardware at the rate people have to buy new smartphones), then I can see self-driving lowering the cost of a taxi service, at least to the extent of the cost that is taxi-driver wages (presumably it does nothing for the cost of fuel, maintenance, and capital depreciation). So that's an argument that taxi service might become cheaper, let us say by 50-75% if we assume driver wages are a big part of the cost.
But if a taxi were on average 1/4 the cost it is today, I'm not sure this would convince everyone to do without a car even in the city. Some, yes, but nearly everybody seems a stretch. Some major disadvantages would remain, mostly that it's not necessarily immediately available when you want one. You have to assume that the owners of a self-driving car fleet would optimize its revenue generation, which means if renting it to *you* right now isn't the highest return they can get, you'll have to wait while they send it on a more lucrative hire.
One assumes the equilibrium would look like air travel today: if you book 4 hours in advance, or pick weird times to travel, et cetera, then you get the best rates, and if you want an auto-taxi to pick you up right *now* despite traffic delays and it being rush hour and you in an out of the way location, then you'll pay premium for the convenience, like people pay for last minute business class flight. There's definitely a market for this kind of service, but it's difficult to see it completely displacing the privately-owned automobile.
It doesn't necessarily eliminate the /desire/, it eliminates the /need/.
I think you, Carl, and also Michael below are thinking specifically about taxi services, when I was thinking more about short-term hire.
The additional advantage of a driverless car in this context is you don't need to learn to drive and get a licence.
If you don't have or want a car, historically you might still have learnt how to drive "just in case". In the future, other options will be available. At the point where you need a car for a few days, you'll be able to hire one, and it'll drive itself.
Taxis and busses will still exist. Some people will still have cars.
But my thinking is that many UK cities (and large towns) will increasingly follow the continental model, and prioritise light traffic (bicycles, scooters etc). Once this reaches a critical threshold, I expect it to escalate.
Still not really following this. You can *already* hire a care for a few days when you want one. Whatever depression that caused in urban car ownership, it stabilized long ago. The only thing I see being added here is that you can *also* not bother getting a driver's license -- assuming you plan to be an urban dweller, or otherwise always within reach of cars for hires at all important points in your life.
And again, that's kind of already possible for true urban denizens. Yes, you can't hire a car, but you can take taxis and busses, and get along, if you really see getting a license as a major bother. But...how many people actually do? Maybe it's different in England, but in the US getting a drivers' license is about as arduous as maybe learning to play pinochle. Takes a few weeks of study/practice until you don't embarass yourself, and then you stand in line for a while, answer an easy multiple choice test, and get your photo taken. Ding! You're a legal driver.
The continential model to which you refer seems a bit restricted to major European cities. Outside of the cities, the car is alive and well in Europe, in my observation. I wouldn't say Europeans own cars like Americans, of course -- 3 cars per household or 1.5 per driver, whichever is greater, one of which is an SUV big as an MRAP that can comfortably seat the infield of a baseball team -- but they don't really seem to be embracing the 100% car-free life out in the banlieues.
Car ownership here isn't the rite of passage I understand it to be in the US. Maybe passing the driving test is a bit harder here? Not sure. Certainly I found getting driving lessons an expensive bother. I'm not sure why you think I'm saying no-one will have a car. I said fewer would, and more journeys would be by light vehicle (bike, electric bike or scooter)
I think the latter point is more important for my argument. In the last couple of years many cities here have been trialing electric scooter and/or bike hire services. Given the number I see being ridden around, these trials seem to be working.
Also, many cities have a congestion problem. Given the much higher density of bikes & scooters over cars, both in transit and storage, it's not hard to see councils gradually prioritising light transport. It's not unreasonable to expect people to use these more as they become increasingly convenient. Thus, my prediction, that the roads will change to suit. This is in line with how many European cities already are, so I don't think it's a big stretch. The availability of driverless cars only helps this along, because it makes it easier for people with rare but essential car journeys to justify not having a car. It's well-recognised that people who own a car tend to use it even for short journeys, so this helps.
But I'd still expect the transition even in the absence of driverless cars; electric scooters (and bikes) are the technology driving the trend.
Also, a parent would probably be much more comfortable having a robot ferry their 12 year old to & from soccer practice than they would be if there was an unknown adult driving the car.
Well....speaking *as* a parent, although my kids are all older than 12 now, I would say...no way! Last thing I'd do. I have far less trust in a 50,000 line program than I do in a human being, particularly an older and experienced human being. I've had to reboot my phone and laptop too many times when memory management just crapped out because somewhere in that vast nest of complex code somebody forgot to balance his malloc()s and free()s. No way I'm putting my flesh and blood in charge of a rigid but exceedingly complex algorithm, written by an altogether fallible team of humans who will have no personal skin in the game, and that cannot detect or compensate for its own internal logic error in real time.
Perhaps more subtly, it's my experience that the key skill in driving is -- anticipating what other drivers will do. The better you can do this, the safer you are. (Which is why drivers continue to improve in safety up until the infirmities of old age start compromising eyesight too far, and you don't peak at the age of fastest reflex and quickest thinking, in your twenties.) The hard part of driving is building an accurate and reliable model of human driver behavior, so you can figure out what all the mobile traffic menaces are going to do. The actual control of Newtonian mechanics and obstacle detection is by comparison trivial, the easy parts of the task that any 5-year-old or trained chimp could probably do just fine.
So would I trust anybody's consumer-grade economical $79.99 program that purports to have the "mental" model of other drivers that a taxi driver with 250,000 miles and 10 years under his belt has? No way.
The extent to which self-driving cars mean the death of car ownership is *vastly* overstated by people who just dislike car ownership and are eager to believe that it will soon be obsolete.
There's lots of value to owning your own car in a self-driving world: you can leave your stuff in it; it's always available to you without a queue; you can get something tailored to your needs.
The downside of car ownership in a self-driving world is cost. In a world where self-driving cars are highly utilized, you can divide their cost significantly by the other people who use them. However, note a few things:
1. Electric cars work against the logic of high-utilization. They need to be parked for large amounts of the day to charge.
2. The greater the utilization of a ride-sharing service, the less convenient the service is.
3. Consider the extent to which your model of a world with self-driving vehicles in it is a *richer world*, and to what extent people already overpay for their vehicles (how many $70k luxury sedans and SUVs and pickup trucks are sold when there's an honestly pretty comparable $15k used vehicle out there?)
I would expect mature self-driving tech to push the world mildly in the direction of renting rides, but car ownership to still be quite common, particularly for families.
Right. How self-driving cars effect ownership is probably largely a matter of the cost and convenience of whatever robot uber service ends up being available. If it becomes convenient and cheap enough, it basically becomes an ideal form of public transit--I just show up at a street corner, get picked up by the robot car and taken to my destination, and don't need to worry about a garage or car payment. If it remains expensive or slow or hard to get at times, then there will be more reason for me to want a car.
Probably this doesn't get rid of much car ownership in rural areas or even relatively sparsely-populated suburbs, but it may in cities and more dense suburbs, where land costs for a garage are higher and quick availability of a car on demand is more consistent.
Note that one point of the cost-convenience tradeoff space for self-driving cars is that you can potentially own a car and rent a spot in a communal garage (potentially even one that's more efficient than current garages, where the cars play tetris to park and unpark), that's nearish you, but not incredibly near, so you summon your car and it arrives 10 minutes later, then when it drops you off at home (or work), it goes and parks itself.
Which could make a wealthy urbanite more likely to own a car than today, when the cost of the car isn't a big deal, but an attached garage is impossible, and an unattached garage is too inconvenient.
The problem with high-utilization for car-sharing is that most people want to use their cars at the same time. People with weird schedules can likely get a sweet deal, though.
Can someone comes up with a way to use autonomous cars at night? There might be something there.
Cars go out at night to collect any packages waiting for you at a distribution centre?
And the obvious; making them available as cabs and pizza delivery vehicles.
By night I meant like 1am-6am when just about everyone is asleep. Is there something useful a fleet of cars up for hire could do when people are asleep?
Like moving mini-shipping containers en masse? I'm thinking out loud here.
My concern is that my country has been very much going down a path of:
"Ban old things to force people to use new ones."
Gasoline powered cars will be illegal here at the end of the decade for example. Horses are illegal to keep in the city now, so you can't replace your ICE car with a horse and buggy unless you're rich enough to move out to the country. You're being forced onto electric.
I expect them to do the same with self driving cars in a few years. Either as an environmentalist argument. "You don't need a car when you're not driving it, it's wasteful and hurts the planet!" or a safety one "why should you be allowed to risk other people's lives on the road by personally driving your vehicle?"
Once that switch has happened, I then expect them to push for, not an outright ban on personal ownership; but sky high licensing fees to disincentivize private car ownership, and to make up for the reduced revenue from gasoline taxes.
Self driving rented cars also eliminate a lot of autonomy. Presumably you'll need a smartphone, an app, and an account to use them. And all it will take is one journalist calling up the company running it and saying "Would you like to comment for an article about why you allow Soandso to use your cars? Is your company aware of Soandso's opinions on X controversial matter?" to severely curtail your mobility.
While it may be a concern, I don't think it's going to be a significant factor in adoption of self-driving cars in the UK for three reasons.
1) I don't think cancel culture is as widespread here. Privacy rules and expectations are different.
2) It only really applies if there is a single point of failure - a monoply supplier. I doubt many people are calling round the 20 or so local taxi firms to try to stop them taking a particular fare.
3) It's a fully general argument against every service, including things people already do, like renting property, having bank accounts, car servicing arrangements etc. It might be one more target, but it's not a unique and novel susceptibility people will have to consider before electing to order a ride.
Furthermore, I think your assumptions about needing a smartphone, app and account are erroneous. You might need that /now/, but I expect not in future.
Re: 2 and 3, I don't know if you're familiar with "Operation Chokepoint" in the US. Banks (and other service providers IIRC) were approached by regulators saying "[undesirable industry/person] is often associated with [criminality]. If you continue to do business with them, we will need to subject you to a higher level of scrutiny than you are operating under now." I have no idea if Her Majesty's Government would be willing to use such tactics, but it worked "well" here.
That is certainly possible in principle. I would think the same would be possible today to a considerable extent. E.g. trying to get cancelled people on the TSA's no-fly list. Has that been happening?
Advice needed:
My mother inherited some exurban land in a town she has never lived in (USA). It's in a spot with a nice view and is clearly destined to be subdivided for 3 or 4 houses. But neighboring homeowners don't want their views blocked and were politically connected enough to block her previous application for subdivision 15 years ago. She hasn't done anything since except pay taxes on it - she has an ugh field about dealing with the issue but also refuses to sell it for cheap just to get rid of it.
How can I help her sell it? I figured it's probably an issue for a knowledgeable local agent, but how do I find one capable of handling it well? Am I looking for a real estate agent, a developer, some kind of specialist lawyer, or something else?
Thanks for any tips!
Land with or without houses is at this moment still selling at ludicrous prices. The bubble will correct fairly soon. Get an agent, get it on the market, take the money and let someone else develop it.
Check out realtor.com - look for agents offering or just closed on contracts for comparable lots in a price range you like, and hit them up.
Most real estate agents will be familiar with land sales. If you want you can increase the value by pre-doing the paperwork. Otherwise you might just want to cash out and let the developer fight with the neighbors.
Second on finding a good real estate agent. In CA at least, fights over subdivisions and new buildings can be very difficult and it doesn't sound like you and your mother have any special skills or knowledge of how to navigate that.
I think you're looking for a real estate agent with experience in this kind of land. A developer would be the person that your agent would try to sell it to. A real estate lawyer or land use attorney wouldn't do the selling so much as help you manage all of the complicated land use requirements around subdividing and developing the land. In fact, if your mom wants to try again to subdivide the land and sell off smaller parcels, a land use attorney might be able to help her do that by negotiating with the planning department in the jurisdiction the land is in.
Take this with a grain of salt; I'm a landscape architect and I don't specifically work in real estate, though I'm much more familiar with the development process than your average bear.
An essay wondering if we've hit a tipping point in complexity:
https://thecounterpoint.substack.com/p/pandemic-lesson-2-the-complexity?s=w
You left out the war on Ukraine. Other than that, seems pretty reasonable to me.
I expect that even intelligence increase wouldn't help-- people would generate complexity faster than it could be resolved.
Police officers at the capitol on Jan 6 did kill four people, maybe they're just confused.
Why don't the suicides count?
Because:
a) My statement you objected to was "police offices at the capitol on Jan 6 killed four people" Which is apparently an undercount.
b) It indicates that the USCP is staffed with people disproportionately likely to use lethal force to solve problems.
So? If a soldier is shot on the battlefield and dies of his wounds the next day at a backline medical tent, he still was clearly killed by enemy action from that battle
The NYT (much) later corrected their original story to reflect that the officer died from entirely unrelated issues and suffered no injuries during the riot.
The fact that their "source" for the claim of murder has not been outed/discredited means either it doesn't actually exist, or that the NYT is fine with a source lying to them and wants to keep them around.
Yea, the the latter is pretty much my guess. The NYT is hardly even going through the motions of being an actual newspaper where reporters investigate and write stories about what happened at this point.
I recently broke up with my ex-girlfriend, who has BPD. She was doing a bit better when she was me, but has fallen back into pretty deep depression in the past weeks. This morning she called me completely down, saying she knows for sure she can't handle live alone. Her intense therapy starts this september, but she hinted at not being able to survive for that long. She has had suicidal ideation before, never an attempt.
Now she asked if I could meet up this week. I have no idea what to do. I don't want to be cold to her and want to be supportive and kind, but I also don't want a sort of continued dependency. Anyone with a background in psychology/psychiatry or similar experiences who could give me some advice?
Thanks to everyone giving empathy and advice. Very much listened to and appreciated. Especially the warnings about setting boundaries/concrete limits to my support were very necessary I think. I contacted her support network, and yesterday she put an enormous amount of pressure on me to come by, threatening with all kind of things, but I didn't give in. It was awful and very hard, but I think I made the right call.
I’m sure you did. Another thing you should hear: this is the right move for her, the high-percentage move, regardless of the consequences. Things can always go wrong, but that doesn’t mean you should regret setting boundaries and removing yourself from blackmail. God save you.
Does BPD stand for Bipolar Disorder or Borderline Personality Disorder here? Different recommendations depending.
I'm sorry you're going through this.
I've been in a very similar situation and succumbed to being there for them for a long time after our break up. What eventually made me take a step back and cut contact was realizing that there was always something, always some reason, for them to need my help. It was never going to end, that was going to be my life until the day either of us died. And I was miserable. They were too. We were both miserable and nothing was actually improving. Me being there for them was a stop-gap measure at best and actively harmful at worst, because while I was there they had less incentive to develop good coping strategies.
I wish I'd taken this advice earlier, before my own mental health deteriorated enough that at times I actually thought I would be happy if they went ahead and killed themselves (followed by enormous amounts of guilt). Alas. I mention this to illustrate that sometimes you need to hit rock bottom to obtain some momentum to climb out of the hole.
(I'm doing great nowadays and as far as I know my ex-partner is still alive, although I have no idea about their mental state.)
You mention that there will be intense therapy starting in September, and maybe this makes it feel like you could "sacrifice" yourself until then, and then it would stop. It would not stop. Therapy is good but it's not magical. As long as she has you, she will lean on you.
Good luck.
Assuming you have no desire to ever get back together, I would suggest gently but firmly transferring her into the arms of her actual support network. That is, call her parents, siblings, and/or closest friends, tell them exactly what you’ve told us, and, if necessary for her safety, agree to meet her but actually have them show up.
Under no circumstance should you carry on caring for her if you intend to vacate the relationship, not even if she’s suicidal; obviously you should give her as much aid as a stranger might give (lifesaving aid, keeping her from immediate peril), but she cannot demand and should not receive your personal service, for your sake, because you are not a slave and should not work for blackmail, and for her own, because she deserves the aid of people who care about her and want to be around her forever.
I think this is pretty much spot on.
That’s a very hard situation and I’m sorry you and her have to go through it.
I am not a professional and I hope one can give you some good advice; I can only tell you what I’ve done and seen done:
Does she have an additional support network you can contact with her for extra help over the coming months? Therapist, friends, siblings, parents?
Forget love and making love here. Coercive suicide threats are one of the most un-loving things a partner or a former partner can deal out.
I'm reasonably sure that the idea isn't to rebuild the relationship or to heal her mental problems. It's about living with more intensity, or possibly the advice is a troll which gives bad advice which sounds cool. Or possibly the idea is that hypothetically great sex is fun for some people to write about.
Magical Healing Cock only works as a trope in fanfiction. She's mentally distressed, they are no longer together, and he is no longer willing to be the one constantly picking her back up and gluing her back together. One bout of great sex is not going to fix her to be able to manage independently.
MOD DECISION: Banned for this comment.
Oh good. Are you comments going to end here too? Because I sure hope they do.
I can't quite work out whether you're inviting me to sneer and snigger at Deiseach, whom I like and respect, or telling me I sound autistic or like an AI.
Son: Father, who rides that ridge yonder?
Father: That be Cinco-Sam, spewing lameass meanspirited parodies.
Dieseach: Yes, from his Magical Healing Cock, which only works as a trope in fanfiction.
Gaggle of 15 year old fanfiction-loving gay kids: OMG he's so fucking hot.
Oh, I'm *nowhere* near as cuddly and social an animal as a bonobo.
And especially for you: the drugs don't work, they just make you worse
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToQ0n3itoII
And who are you, O lover of Great Literature and Psychological Sexual Healing?
"ARIAN Bagheri Pour Fallah is an author, media and performance artist. Responding to the prevalence of algorithms in contemporary art and culture, ARIAN’s work emphasizes, in lieu of known taxonomies of fine arts and new media, character (ethos) and hermeneutical tools exclusive to man. ARIAN’s idiosyncratic use of emergent technologies including yet not limited to machine learning, metamaterials and extended reality (XR), within the context of performance art especially, is known for challenging computational ethics, while his informational reconfigurations of strictly physical matter, from textile to land, continue to circumvent tenets of conceptual art. ARIAN has given speeches at international conferences held at University of Virginia, Goldsmiths, University of London, among others, and is published by MIT Press and Cambridge University Press, respectively."
Well, I suppose you *could* be more pretentious about being An Artiste if you tried... plenty of technobabble buzzwords but hey, at least you didn't mention blockchain technology!
"For our first news article, we are delighted to announce that ‘The Singing Tree in the Midst of the Garden I,’ a modular-medium sculpture by RecitMusic.art founder and director, ARIAN Bagheri Pour Fallah, is currently on display as part of Ars Electronica 2021 Garden London / Zurich.
The work features an idiosyncratic take on land art making an equally unique use of blockchain technology, and is one of the 30 fragments constituting the site-specific artwork, Man in the Sound of God (Mensch im Klang Gottes), designed by Arian while Artist-in-Residence at the Stiftung Künstlerdorf Schöppingen, earlier this year."
Ooops, oh well....
Bizarre advice that seems like it was given by someone who did not read the request.
The irony of telling me to assume less while you make the staggeringly, dramatically incorrect assumption that I don’t read, or read “great literature” is absolute. And you assume I don’t read because I don’t agree that he should keep screwing his suicide-threatening ex?
No thanks, hard pass on the rest of your opinions.
Well drat, that torpedoes my plans to change my avatar to the Goddess of Catal Hoyuk (and the resemblance is *so* striking!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seated_Woman_of_%C3%87atalh%C3%B6y%C3%BCk
I think the man made it clear he doesn't want to be in a relationship with her anymore.
Do you think you know better than him about the relationship he was in?
That's how he makes it his last day on Earth.
I wish that you would develop the smallest amount of intellectual humility. It would suit you more than believing that the drugs and that thesaurus make you an expert on human nature. One day, worms will eat you just like buzzards will eat me.
I used to be an avid follower of Scott's blogs 1-1.5 years ago, randomly got reminded of this blog again today and was wondering what happened that led to me not following the blog for more than a year slowly. I glanced at the posts, and found a lot less of them to be interesting to me. I wonder if interests changed for me or Scott started writing about different things.
I feel that Scott is trying to write in a way that's simpler, less personal, more widely accessible.. His writing became less weird than during the Unsong era. It is less detailed and there are fewer literary refences. For that reason I am enjoying it less. On the other hand, I think I may also trust his opinions more now.
Not sure. I think this is probably just life: like friendships, a relationship with a columnist you read may eventually fade as you, him, or both grow in different directions.
I’ve been reading Scott from the beginning, but I’ve never agreed with him on everything (or even most things?), I’ve just thought he was a wise, well-spoken dude with wide interests, whose opinion I liked to hear. I don’t think you grow out of that.
Yeah I think I definitely agree with him a lot less (it was like when I started reading him and Yudkowsky in my first year of undergrad I literally accepted their views as infallible lol) but after graduating and doing a whole lot of maturing (not nearly enough tbh), I've started to move away from the hyper-rational rhetoric in general. But Scott still had some really amazing culture pulse point pieces, which went against the grain in unpredictable ways and made you think about stuff differently, but now it seems a lot less thought provoking.
Scott wonders the same thing:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-do-i-suck
Wow, this is actually really neat, I enjoy how he has retained the ability to self-reflect so charmingly
With the recent news about the infant formula shortage, I wanted to highlight a little-known issue: soy infant formula contains high levels of phyto-estrogens which may disrupt reproductive development. If you're worried about BPA, genestein is an even greater endocrine disruptor. You can read more here: https://denovo.substack.com/p/risks-of-soy-infant-formula
(I should note, eating soy is fine unless you're an infant and get 100% of your diet from it)
This might delight Scott and anyone who appreciates his answer to Job: Stephen Wolfram's concept of the Ruliad https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/11/the-concept-of-the-ruliad/ is roughly the same idea, but mathematical not theological. It is a kind of hypergraph of all possible states and all possible transitions between all states from all possible starting conditions. "The full ruliad involves taking the infinite limits of all possible rules, all possible initial conditions and all possible steps." Wolfram claims that for some fundamental mathematical reason this has to exist! But we only see the tiny part of it that we happen to inhabit.
So, basically Tegmark's mathematical universe hypothesis but described in an even lamer way.
(The hypothesis *itself* is not that ridiculous -- in fact, Gary Drescher's description of it in one of the last chapters of _Good and Real_ pretty much convinced me of it. But most descriptions of it make it sound a lot sillier than it actually is.)
Also, it's not Scott's answer to Job -- one says that all logically possible *good* universes exist, the other says that all logically possible universes exist whether good or bad.
It clearly exists as a mathematical object, to the extent that any mathematical object "exists". But saying it exists as a *physical* object seems like a very bold claim! From a quick skim, it looks like his argument is roughly
- when you push the Copernican insight that humanity is not special as far as it can go, you get the ruliad
- it has some of the high-level physical properties we'd expect.
https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-have-a-path-to-the-fundamental-theory-of-physics-and-its-beautiful/#why-this-universe-the-relativity-of-rules
Given a set of desired standards, what's the most optimal way to find a girlfriend?
At the risk of stating the obvious, you won't do it by using the part of your brain that likes saying things like "most optimal".
You can't get there by using the analytic part of your brain, just as you can't catch a ball by mentally sitting there and calculating the correct angles for your shoulder, wrist and elbow joints. To catch a ball, you think about catching the ball, and your instincts move your hand to the right place.
You have to silence the analytic part of your brain. When I was single, I discovered that alcohol would do the trick, but only in a very narrow (Balmer peak) window, drunk enough to stop overthinking but not drunk enough to be, well, drunk.
Also /r/nofap to get your hormones sorted out.
It really depends on what the standards are, imo.
Be hot. Don't not be hot. If you have standards, be much hotter than you think you need to be to meet those standards, the weirder the standards ("I want a gf that likes going to experimental noise rock concerts") the more being hot will help you find that specific someone.
But really. Work out, get your style nailed down, have your finances and professional life in order, be happy with yourself and know what you want. You know the path, just follow it. Be an attractive force in the universe.
In short develop De. https://www.britannica.com/topic/de
Are you certain that the standards are actually correct would be the first thing to do. I don't know your level of experience but it seems that a lot of people (at least in my surroundings) have an ideal type before having their first gf, and then they throw these standards away very fast.
A somewhat basic example is the guy who wants the tall blondes and end up very happy with the short brunettes.
As for the rest of the question, I have strictly no idea apart from visiting places/getting into social situations where you met the people with your standards. What are theses places is up to you to find out.
You have three levers you can pull.
1) Personal Quality. Namely, how attractive/desirable you are, how much effort you put in, how god your profile is, etc. Usually there are some low hanging fruit to be picked here.
2) Volume. How many women are you actually meeting/asking out. I think most people I’ve met who can’t get a girlfriend are having volume problems. Go join new activities/go to parties/work your social network.
3) Standards. If you drop your standards low enough, you’ll be able to get a girlfriend
This. Different points are the bottleneck for different people, but the kind of nerds that frequent the comments here are probably failing most on volume - I know I had very few hobbies where I met new people and all those hobbies skewed heavily male.
Dating apps are unironically effective here, though finding the right one is important. My experience was that all the apps functioned roughly the same way from a UX standpoint, but they had radically different userbases - I was interested in noone on Tinder, got no messages on Bumble, but had great success on OKCupid.
wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem
I don't think I've ever encountered any real-world problem to which that's a remotely reasonable approximation -- so, I'd be *able* to immediately tell the difference between the n-th best and the (n+1)-th best with no uncertainty but not actually *give a damn about* the difference between the 2nd best and the absolute worst?
The secretary problem is very relevant for e.g. hunting for an apartment or a house, which most people will (hopefully) do at least once in their lifetime.
So you only care about the probability that you're getting the best apartment in town and you're indifferent between getting the 2nd best and getting the absolute worst?
IIRC the standard solution to the secretary problem is rejecting the first n offers (with n ~ 7?) then accepting the first one that's better than the first n. That's roughly what I did and it served me well.
Ditch that set of standards is the most optimal way. If somethings not working try something else.
Wolfram is still being invited to give speeches? Geez, that guy practically defines the category of underachiever. Rarely has someone of such young promise ultimately achieved so little, unless it be Harlan Ellison as a writer.
Hard to be more wrong than this. Wolfram is arguably the greatest scientist of his generation. Not only is Wolfram Language a marvelous technology that's way beyond every other programming language in many ways, not only is WolframAlpha the world's greatest calculator and the basis of Siri and Alexa, not only is Wolfram's physics project one of the most exciting developments of our time, Wolfram's essays and books and livestreams are wonderfully well-done and informative for scientific and lay audiences alike.
Now, Wolfram has a big ego. So what? He's a genius.
What have you done with your life, sir?
He’s criticised Wolfram. What have you done?
Wolfram has a reputation as a megalomaniacal bore, yet in my experience gives great talks and has fascinating work. I particularly enjoy his conversations with Lex Fridman:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ez773teNFYA
- https://lexfridman.com/stephen-wolfram-2/
- https://lexfridman.com/stephen-wolfram-3/
I don't know enough to fully judge his work on its merits (as in, how fanciful it is, or standard ideas presented as novel and game-changing) - but it certainly sounds like he's on to something. Regardless, I am glad he's invited to give speeches / do interviews, b/c I enjoy listening!
I'm confused. What about Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha?
The former is definitely a very nice product. I very much appreciated Mathematica, once upon a time, it was far more powerful than its predecessors (e.g. Macsyma) and I found it quite useful in certain niche applications -- basically checking horribly complicated algebra calculations.
And had Wolfram stuck to improving and streamlining Mathematica, e.g. working on methods of input that didn't require you to become familiar with a zillion Mathematica functions -- something a little more intuitive, and visual -- as well as improving its programming abilities, so it didn't get obsoleted by Python and R, then he would have been a very solid engineering leader, a position well worth respect and more than nearly all of us achieve.
But that's not my impression of what he wanted to do, he wanted to be a freaking Newton, an intellectual giant who would upend the philosophical world, and grubbing around being a Tim Cook refining and optimizing was too boring. So he hared off after assorted philosophical string theories, weird shit that was uniformly unprovable and so detached from scientific utility or engineering reality that it served as little more than a starting point for intellectual wankery (granted of the finest threadcount quality).
And Mathematica feels a little orphaned, and seems destined to remain one of the triumphs of the 90s, slowly losing relevance (e.g. to Python and R). Wolfram Alpha remains an amusement, so far as I can tell, useful for teenagers cheating on their calculus homework but not much else.
> Wolfram Alpha remains an amusement, so far as I can tell, useful for teenagers cheating on their calculus homework but not much else.
It's good for more than just CAS stuff. You can do calculations with datetimes, for instance. These would otherwise be fiddly, but it's natural using WA. The applications are niche, but it's nice when you can use it.
> So he hared off after assorted philosophical string theories, weird shit that was uniformly unprovable and so detached from scientific utility or engineering reality that it served as little more than a starting point for intellectual wankery (granted of the finest threadcount quality).
The meta-hypothesis (AFAICT) is that realistic physical universes can emerge from simple discrete dynamical systems. Arguably, a lot of fundamental physics is "simple" (see Maxwell's equations, the Schrödinger equation, Minkowski spacetime), but not obviously discrete. The nice thing about discrete dynamical systems is that you can check them one-by-one. Since fundamental physics is "simple", and the dynamical systems he's considering are also "simple", a search for one dynamical system matching the other seems like it might succeed. I think that's a summary of what he's doing. And he's doing it on his own dime without taxpayer grants, so hats off to him. Also, most ideas in fundamental physics are going to fail, so a let's-brute-force-try-every-discrete-system approach doesn't seem any more doomed than the rest, at least to me.
[edit: Removed some questionable fluff.]
Yeah, I don't disagree WA can do some nifty stuff here and there. It's definitely an interesting experiment. But as a product I find it a niche curio, not revolutionary, and not an essential component of...well, anything. I might try it once in a while, but you could not get me to pay for it, not even a modest monthly sum. I don't see it as even in the same class as broadly enabling advancements like the PCR, CRISPR-Cas9, or STM, or as broadly foundational as the COBE measurements or the theory of the Higg's mechanism.
I've no objection to Wolfram trying his hand at a GUT, and he's unquestionably a smart guy so who knows what might happen? But as I said, given where he *started from* -- the guy matriculated at St. John's at 17, got a PhD from Caltech at 20, and was appointed to their faculty at 21! He published papers on chromodynamics when he was 18! -- the lack of anything even in the category of the above is suprising. As I said, he started incredibly strong, and then turned kind of...much more ordinary. Not nearly as amazing as his early promise.
He also seems very obsessed with claiming priority and originality on things where he may or may not have been prior or original.
AIUI Mathematica started out as a side-project from his "real" work in physics, but it then grew into a successful business. And I'd argue that Wolfram Alpha is exactly a "method of input that didn't require you to become familiar with a zillion Mathematica functions -- something a little more intuitive, and visual"! It doesn't score so well on programmability, though. I think the real obstacle to Mathematica becoming universally dominant was its closed nature - people want their science to be open rather than locked away in a walled garden, no matter how beautiful.
Maybe. These are deep and murky psycho-social-economic waters, and I'm a tyro at swimming therein. If I reflect on my own experience...I was a very early user of Mathematica, I actually started using it when it was still beta, and at first I was indeed deeply impressed. I used it for a bunch of annoying algebra problems at various points. It would not have troubled me to pay the few hundred dollars it cost to own it, once it went on sale -- had I felt it important enough. I don't think in those days we worried much about proprietary code -- remember *everything* was proprietary in those days. You paid for your hardware, you paid for your OS, you paid for your compiler and every library.
Why didn't I keep using it? This is hard to pin down. It was stunningly broad, but how often did I need to do a Taylor series expansion of an elliptical function or ask for the 40th coefficient in the expansion of (a+b)^100? I mean, it was mind-blowing that it *could* do such things -- I never met *any* part of math that it didn't execute masterfully, and this on 1980s hardware -- but in a practical sense I didn't really have much need of that. Integrals I couldn't figure out from Gradstein and Ryzhik I just resigned to computation. I ended up turning to Numerical Recipes more often than I fired up Mathematica. It could graph things very nicely, but it was slow, and for just fiddling around I started using gnuplot instead, which was lightning fast, and then along came R.
I dunno, it feels sort of like it tried to do too many things, and a bunch of speedy and lighter weight tools took its place. There may be part of what you say in that one disadvantage of Mathematica is that its workings were opaque, and if you were trying to do something novel, solve some new integral equation you'd come up with or something, it was hard to be certain you knew what it was doing when it gave you this answer or that. You'd have to work out all the tricky math yourself, just to be sure you were certain of it, and then Mathematica wasn't adding much more than proofing your own work. Valuable, up to a point, but that's what graduate students are for, also.
I first encountered Mathematica a bit later, as a high-schooler in the 1990s - I learned of the existence of whole fields of maths from reading the manual, but never really used it for much (it makes high-school homework problems trivial). When I studied undergraduate maths we had a short course in doing computer algebra with Maple (which struck me at the time as overall less consistent than Mathematica), but then I specialised in areas where computer algebra systems were less useful and never got comfortable with either system. Nowadays I code professionally, and sometimes use Jupyter notebooks (inspired by Mathematica notebooks) for work or personal coding projects. I'm actually pretty conflicted about this - it's nice to be able to embed graphs and images in my REPL, and to iterate on definitions, but (especially in an imperative language like Python) it's very easy to get yourself tied in a knot with the non-linear execution model of notebooks. I feel like if the computing world as a whole was going to take one thing from Mathematica, it shouldn't have been the notebook interface, and surely better high-interactivity environments are possible.
Other than being closed-source, Mathematica had some other problems. Off the top of my head:
- It's weird if you're already used to most mainstream programming languages. Apart from the superficial stuff like using square brackets for function arguments, the execution model is based on term-rewriting, and I struggled to get my head round the functional style used for a lot of library functions (this is probably less of a barrier now that functional programming is more widespread).
- It's expensive. Yes, there are "hobby" and "student" licenses, and if you're using it day-to-day at your job then your employer should cover it, but I can download Python and Jupyter for free right now and start playing (or even use them with no setup required on Kaggle or Google Colab, though those are more recent developments). Developer ecosystems have network effects, and you get network effects through hobbyists and beginners being able to try out your tools in as low-commitment a way as possible.
- Sad to say, probably most people don't need symbolic algebra all that much? I'm a software developer with a PhD in mathematics working on a project that involves traditional engineering and AI, and I've had to do algebra or calculus maybe a dozen times in the last couple of years - and for most of my previous industry jobs, that number would have been zero. The poor integration between SymPy and NumPy doesn't matter if you only need the latter.
Yeah that is weird. I mean, we spend all this time in school learning algebra and calculus, and then...it turns out that factoring polynomials or finding indefinite integrals of random combinations of trig functions doesn't happen very much in real life, even when you end up in math-heavy fields.
I never used Maple, except maybe once or twice, so I've forgotten what it looked like. In college I used macsyma on a Multics machine, so that was my earlier experience, and no question that Mathematica was far better.
Yes, I agree a better interactive model was needed, that was part of what I said above -- I wish Wolfram had put that big brain of his to work on *that* problem. We still don't communicate well with sophisticated apps, it's basically not super different from....well, BASIC. 100 PRINT "HELLO WORLD\n" Surely there must be a better way[1]. But what? NLP seems like it opens the door a crack, maybe we could talk to the computer? Sketch stuff? I don't know. But this seems like the question he (Wolfram) was in a good place to tackle. But aside from Wolfram Alpha, which seems half-hearted to me, I would not say he did. I think it would've been a better use of his time than seeing if the Standard Model can be rewritten as a big set of Game of Life glider guns or something.
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[1] I hate mice. Worst invention ever, except for the narrow category of artists and people who program for the pre-literate.
I frequently use Wolfram Alpha for my work and for private purposes, and I know other people who do the same.
Yes, early on he was amazing. Both the DV and A,DV anthologies were ground-breaking, although I'm not sure they wear that well any more -- a fair amount comes across now as fatuous 60s self-congratulation, which admittedly didn't grate when I first read it because I was young and smug also. And although he hated what they did to it for some reason, "City on the Edge of Forever" is one of the best pieces of TV story-telling ever.
But that's kind of my point. He started off amazing, everyone predicted he would be some kind of sf god, and then...poof, kaput. Just kind of burned out and faded away. Very strange.
I was also a big fan of early Ellison.
He wrote an interesting book about his experience with "City on the Edge of Forever", describing his frustration at the demands placed on him and his sense of betrayal at how the insiders (mainly D.C. Fontana) tampered with his story and later (mainly Roddenberry) publicly maligned his original story. It sounds like it was a very bad experience for him, and my heart went out to him.
Then he gives his original script, which was just amazingly worse than what was finally filmed. The character he felt was the best character he ever wrote, and who was completely excised from the filmed script, is deeply two-dimensional and completely unnecessary to the plot.
The filmed script did have a few hacky bits that I thought Fontana should have been good enough to avoid -- the best example is Edith's starry-eyed speech in the soup kitchen predicting spaceships; Blish's alternative speech in his short-story-ization was a lot better, but as I recall that wasn't from Ellison's version either.
I lost all respect for 80,000 hours when one of their main examples of their philosophy in action is some crypto millionaire who donated to the Biden campaign. No, really.
So, not somebody who put in the work to create a socially beneficial career, and not somebody who has used the proceeds of their "career" to donate to effective altruistic causes (unless I'm very much mistaken, in which case I have lost all respect for EA as well).
If you mean SBF, he's donated much more to other causes, he just gave to Biden too.
I think wokeism teaches bad mental habits. One of them is assuming that anything associated with something bad is equally bad.
A quick Google doesn't show up an exhaustive list of SBF's donations, but it looks like his political donations are a fairly small fraction of his overall donations, most of which go to more conventional EA causes. He talks about his reasons for making political donations in this interview, which you may find interesting: https://www.vox.com/recode/2021/3/20/22335209/sam-bankman-fried-joe-biden-ftx-cryptocurrency-effective-altruism
> in which case I have lost all respect for EA as well
I don't understand this. Do you mean "unless political donations are considered EA, in which case I've lost respect for EA", or "unless he has made conventional EA donations which I don't know about, in which case I've lost respect for EA because they're terrible at marketing", or something else?
Wow, I would take the Straussian view on why SBF donated is to send the message "please let me guide crypto policy for the US govt". That, or SBF is hopelessly confused on how the US Federal budget works and lacks the humility to realize the long term implications of whether the donkey or elephant octogenarian in office is impossible to predict.
Well, in that interview he does say
> The place I could be most useful to him is — I don’t think Biden’s ever going to put much thought into it — but if [the administration] is ever looking for like an expert on crypto regulation ... He’s obviously an incredibly busy guy and I would really like to meet him — but also don’t want him to have to meet me in some senses, unless I or he had some reason to think that it would be valuable.
But I think his actual motivation is what he says it is - he's a classic earn-to-give EA, and he's decided that since he's now in a position to donate in much larger chunks, politics has become an interesting donation target. And yes, he probably *is* confused on how the US Federal budget works - most people are, and he's new at this! Also, nobody ever became a billionaire (particularly not at the age of 28) by being humble :-)
Anyone who is not confused is probably delusional.
Given his posting history on here, he means "If EA is willing to associate with the 'woke-left' or anyone who associates with the 'woke-left', they're now contaminated in my eyes and thus I have no respect for them."
Brett S has a bit of a bee in his bonnet about wokism and how the words "racism" and "prejudice" are so awful anyone who uses them should be exiled from the rationalist community (to the point where I've rarely seen him post about anything else), so I'd imagine this is just a further manifestation of that.
Ah, thanks! Weird to see SBF described as "woke-left" after the whole "pandemics are a smokescreen, Carrick Flynn is really a stalking horse for the sinister billionaire crypto techbro who's funding him" screwup...
Based on what I've seen, Brett S has a, to put it politely, expansive definition of "woke-left". To put it less politely, he seems to be a big believer in purity politics.
I'm looking into seeing a therapist for the first time ever. I found a guy who's close and takes my insurance. Seems altogether like a good fit for me but he's Jewish (former rabbi) and I'm an Atheist (raised Jewish). I'm worried that I'll present a problem like "I feel like my life is meaningless" and the conversation will drift towards "have you tried believing in god?" like it always does when I talk to theists. Is this a valid concern to have or am I being dumb and not respecting his professional credentials?
Religious therapists deal with many clients who have lost their faith and any good therapist will know how to work with their clients personal beliefs without imposing their own.
Can you ask him about this? "I'm worried that as a former rabbi you'll bring up religion or attempt to proselytise me, and as an atheist that's a major turn-off: is this likely to happen?" He wants a good therapeutic alliance almost as much as you do.
I'm worried being this blunt might might be too antagonistic or make me seem too closed-minded?
If he's a former rabbi, he's probably accustomed to Jewish atheists. Being honest at the start about "no, really, god stuff is not for me" will benefit you both; you won't have to dodge it at a later time and he'll know what paths to avoid.
No, I think it's a reasonable worry and a reasonable boundary to set early.
Competent therapists do not try to push their religious or political views on their patients (or their taste in music, books, etc.). They are unlikely ever even to express those views, as they are not relevant to the task, which is to help you. If you express your concern politely, in the way pozorvlak put it, it's a perfectly reasonable thing to say. If the therapist has a negative reaction to that perfectly reasonable concern of yours you should ditch him at once.
Thanks for clearing this up :)
Yes, everything that Eremolalos just said. My partner is a therapist in training, and she devotes enormous energy to not imposing her views on her patients, or even indicating what those views are. Pushing religion on you, especially after you've asked a therapist not to, would be a huge no-no.
Thanks for your input. What does your partner do when the client expresses a personal axiom that goes against your partner's beliefs? Putting subjectivity aside, I would find it hard to give genuine advice to someone who was starting from a place I would never find myself in.
It's something the training teaches you to do (google "bracketing"), though in extreme cases a therapist might refer a client elsewhere if they feel they're not able to serve the client. My partner also says that if you're not comfortable seeing a former rabbi as a therapist that's fair enough, but see what professional body he's signed up with and what training he's had - his professional body would likely take a very dim view of proselytisation.
(Also, therapy is generally not about giving advice - that's more of a coaching thing)
I think in the most extreme cases of that the standard practice is to refer to a different therapist - I'd be shocked to hear of one proselytising ever.
Every time you have a conversation with a person who believes in God, it drifts towards your lack of religious belief? Either you’re exaggerating or you’re having some pretty heavy conversations. I’ve had casual chats with priests and even they don’t do this, much less your average once a week church/temple attender.
Er, from context I assume Ethan means "whenever he talks to theists *about his existential angst/general dissatisfaction with life*", not "whenever he talks to theists for any reason whatsoever".
Thanks, you have the right interpretation. Liam does not.
Thanks for the passive-aggressive ‘Er’. Very constructive.
It wasn't intended as passive-aggressive.
Depends on how former I suppose. An ex priest in my family is a militant atheist.
Yeah I'd bet on an ex-rabbi being less into God than most, because he had every opportunity to just keep being a rabbi.
Good point. Maybe our views line up more than I thought.
Did anyone give an answer to the request at the end of Motivated Reasoning As Mis-applied Reinforcement Learning post (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/motivated-reasoning-as-mis-applied?s=r):
> If there’s other research on which parts of the brain are / aren’t reinforceable, or how to run your thoughts on one kind of architecture vs. the other, please let me know.
?
There was some discussion in the comments of that post or another one if I recall correctly. Scott's post seems to be confused about the distinction between cues and reinforcers. Anyways,
Reinforcement learning in the brain by Yael Niv
"This is perhaps not so surprising, as converging lines of evidence suggest that animals and humans have a number of parallel decision-making systems at their disposal, only a subset of which are dopamine dependent. Key to identifying these different systems is the fact that a certain behavior (for instance, simple lever-pressing by a rat) can have wholly different characteristics in different situations: early in training this behavior can show flexibility and sensitivity to changes in the task or in the animal’s motivational state, while the same lever-pressing behavior can become inflexible and slow to adapt to any change after considerable training. The amount of training is not the only determinant of the degree of flexibility of learned behavior, but the link between over-training and the folk psychological notions of ‘‘habits’’ has bestowed upon the inflexible form of behavior the name ‘‘habitual responding’’, while the more flexible instrumental actions are called ‘‘goal-directed.’’ To complicate matters further, some forms of behavior seem wholly inflexible in that they are innately specified reactions to learned predictions. These fall into the class of Pavlovian responses, and it is not clear whether they are also driven by two types of value predictions: flexible outcome-specific predictions (similar to those underlying goal-directed instrumental behavior), and less flexible general affective predictions (as in habitual instrumental behavior)."
http://www.ccnss.org/ccn_2013/materials/pdf/botvinick/NivMathPsych09.pdf
Any explanation of this sort is going to amount to oversimplifying a much more complex process, but....
My view: Reinforcement begins with a conditioning process which appears to involve the prefrontal cortex, then there's a conditioned relation which follows basic model-free reinforcement, and then the occipital lobe and brain stem are using a pavlovian process to respond to cues in the environment. So it's sort of three systems, but they're interdependent of one another. All responses involve the Pavlovian system; including the reinforcement responses. Pavlovian relations use only the Pavlovian system. Novel operant relations result in Type 2 responding. And previously trained relations are governed by Type 1 responding.
Thank you! I tried reading all the comments on the post I liked but I think I missed that one.
It looks like I have some reading to do before I understand the paper but from your description it sounds promising :)
Also sorry about slow reply
Why do women have breasts?
I would like to launch a (brand new?) theory about why human females develop breasts at puberty, while other primates only have visibly enlarged breasts when they breastfeed. I have written it down on my blog here:
https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/why-do-women-have-breasts
A summary of the theory:
- Our early ancestors probably were rather similar to the chimpanzee and had a mating system rather similar to that of the chimpanzee.
- Chimpanzee females go in and out of estrus, which is highly visible as swollen, red genitalia. Our ancestors probably had detectable periods of estrus too, like most animals.
- Chimpanzee males hold a strong preference for mating with females who are already mothers. Being an ape mother is difficult and first-time mothers often fail, so chimpanzee males prefer more experienced females.
- Except for the fact that chimpanzee males prefer somewhat older females, they aren't especially selective. Being promiscuous animals they want most females and they compete ferociously for the alpha position in order to get them.
- Humans obviously took another path. Presumably that happened gradually among our ancestors, so males started to invest in females and their children little by little, while females still did most of the work.
- When our male ancestors started to invest in their children, it was important for them to get as much value as possible for their investment. They needed to carefully select the females who could bring them children with the least investment possible. So they searched for females who seemed to be as self-reliant as possible. When more stable unions between males and females developed, males also benefited from unions with females who were capable of giving birth frequently.
- Among chimpanzees, birth spacing varies greatly among individuals and depends at least in part on the female's nutritional status. After having a child, chimpanzee mothers only return to estrus when they are able to reach a positive energy balance after the strains of pregnancy and lactation.
- Unusually well-nourished chimpanzee mothers return to estrus when their child is less than two years old. By that time they still have milk-filled breasts, as chimpanzees don't wean their children totally until the age of 4 or 5 years. Less well-nourished chimpanzee mothers don't return to estrus before they finish breastfeeding, because they can't afford to be pregnant and breastfeed simultaneously. So they only mate when they have flat, milk-free breasts.
- That way, estrus combined with big breasts showed that a female was both able to feed herself rather well and that she could give birth frequently. In the pool of estrus females, males had every reason to choose the big-breasted ones.
- Males supported estrus females who had big breasts more than flat-chested females. That gave females who happened to store fat in their breasts an advantage, because males couldn't easily spot the difference between breasts big from lactation and breasts big from fat storage.
- In response to females' development of fat-breasts, males needed to look for the even bigger fat-and-milk breasts. In response to which females developed even bigger fat-breasts beyond the point of impracticality.
- This happened a very long time ago, but there hasn't been enough evolutionary pressure to undo the process completely since. A mutation that among other things contributes to smaller breasts has increased in frequency independently among East Asians and Native Americans during the last 35 000 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ectodysplasin_A_receptor This suggests that there could indeed have been an evolutionary pressure to reduce breast size after more recent human mating systems made breast-size reproductively irrelevant.
Chimps' closest relatives are bonobos, which have a radically different mating strategy: bonobos of both sexes are pansexual and extremely promiscuous. Our ancestors are as likely to have been bonobo-like as chimp-like, and may well have been something else entirely.
Yes, the bonobos are an interesting case. Just like in humans, bonobo females (probably) evolved away from easily detectable estrus: While chimpanzee females have a genital swelling one out of four weeks, bonobo females have the same kind of swelling three out of four weeks. That's a bit like human females: "Normal" for three out of four weeks, menstruation for one week or so.
Still, I think that bonobos are a less likely model for the common ancestor than the common chimpanzee. In his book Bonobo, primatologist Franz de Waal points out that the bonobo evolved in a very special habitat: The gorilla-free rainforest south of the Congo River. About 2.5 million years ago, the Congo River went dry or at least small enough for apes to cross. Gorillas couldn't live in such a dry environment. Being leaf-eaters, they need moist forests. Chimpanzees are able to live in much drier environments. So when the climate became wetter again, there were no gorillas left to fill the forests.
This opened up new opportunities for the local proto-bonobo population: Living in a dense forest with lots of gorilla food but no gorillas, they could live in much denser groups than chimpanzees. This allowed females to form coalitions against males, which gave bonobos their famous female dominance patterns.
Franz de Waal cautions against assuming that our ancestors were like the bonobos because bonobos developed in a very specific environment (gorilla-free rainforest), while pre-human ancestors are thought to have lived on the much coarser savanna, where they needed to live even less densely than the chimpanzees. I side with Franz de Waal on this issue.
As I understand it, primate mothers give each other help with child-rearing generally speaking. (Possibly not true for low-status females.)
Males might be selecting for females who are getting help from other females, not for self-reliance.
You're entirely right. They seek females who are self-reliant or who are able to extort goods and services from other sources than the males themselves.
I don't know about "extort"-- I think some of the aid is pretty good mutual exchange and some of it stabilized status which could be viewed as extortion.
Chimps are hierarchical animals. "Extortion" is probably not the most suitable word for most situations, but if some females are able to feed themselves better than others that is likely to have something to do with status hierarchies. Not only chimps, but primates in general have such hierarchies among females. Sarah Hrdy describes that well in her books about primate females.
You will probably enjoy Lindybeige's ideas on that puzzle:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKb3vkdTHbU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcrxNBlqrbM
From skimming yours, and half-remembering what he was on about, I think his ideas go more towards some odd fertility-signalling game theory direction.
That was my first thought too. A few points to consider:
-Human breasts don't store milk, it is produced on demand, so size only denotes how much fat is stored in the breast. (A tiny bit might be stored, but that seems contentious; see next point.)
-The swelling due to pregnancy/breastfeeding is comparatively minimal relative to the range of every day size differences. That is, one might notice a woman is pregnant or breastfeeding based on her breasts being slightly enlarged from her normal size, but comparing two women and using breast size to guess which is more likely pregnant or breast feeding without knowing their normal size is impossible.
-Breasts not going down in size when not utilized for feeding suggests they have a purpose that is always on, e.g. signaling sexual maturity.
-Humans not having external signs of estrus do not signal sexual maturity thereby, so need another signal. In essence "You don't know if I am in estrus, but you can tell I am sexually mature."
The supposition that early humans had the same 'males preferred older adult females' which shifted significantly to 'males prefer younger adult females' needs more support. An easier to support hypothetical is no preference.
Also, not all human cultures have the same modesty taboos about tits. Butt modesty is more universal.
At least there is a logical explanation for a shift from MILF-preference to youth preference: If males have only one child with the same partner, they prefer someone mature and competent. If males have several children with the same partner, they prefer someone with as many potential children as possible left in her. So youth preference presumably came with primitive forms of marriage.
Sorry, but biology is too weird to rest on logic chains. You're going to need actual data.
This subject rests on speculation in itself because it is about things that happened an awfully long time ago. The best I, or anyone else for that matter, are going to produce are educated guesses rather than wild guesses.
The idea of the chimpanzee as a model for the common ancestor is not mine. I got it from primatologist Richard Wrangham and his book Demonic Males. He has some rather interesting arguments why our common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos about 5 million years ago probably looked like a chimpanzee and possibly behaved like a chimpanzee too. So when I made up my own theory, I didn't make my first assumption up from my own logical operations. I just aped a primatologist.
And if males are expected to invest in childraising, they have an incentive to choose a mate with no children from a previous partner.
Exactly! Youth preference and virginity preference come together.
Desmond Morris suggests they look like butts when partially wrapped up. Thus becoming a sexual symbol.
I would not assume that early humans wore enough clothes for this to matter.
Sexual selection can be very fast acting compared to natural selection.
Even today, cultures from warm climates often don't wear enough clothes to squeeze their breasts together. And cultures from colder climates tend to cover the entire chest, hiding the cleavage.
except when emphasising the chest. Obviously a bosom is a sex symbol, so that must have some sexual selection attributes.
Western culture sometimes emphasizes the chest by showing cleavage. Do you know of any other cultures who do so (not counting people imitating us)?
>When our male ancestors started to invest in their children, it was important for them to get as much value as possible for their investment. They needed to carefully select the females who could bring them children with the least investment possible. So they searched for females who seemed to be as self-reliant as possible. When more stable unions between males and females developed, males also benefited from unions with females who were capable of giving birth frequently.
Okay, but why not just try and impregnate everyone and only pair with the highest quality women you had sex with?
Females will only have sex with you if you show a credible proof that you will spend ressources on them and their spawn.
Runaway sexual selection has given them a big brain capable of performing acausal decision theory : the only way for the simulation of you in your wife's brain to be faithful is for yourself to be the kind of person who will remain faithful.
Wasn't that exactly what they did? (and what many human males do until this day?)
Males tried to invest as little as possible when they invested, because they wanted to keep as much resources as possible for casual mating and other good investment opportunities.
This makes a lot of sense, yeah.
I still think the age-indication hypothesis is important, but it doesn't explain everything. Why would we need an extremely conspicuous organ to signal youth, if _faces_ do it just fine (and attractive women have obviously neotenic faces).
I think the important question is why honest age-indication would benefit females. Why would females develop a feature that reveals that they have passed their prime? What would be in it for them? Honest age indication seems to benefit prospective partners much more than the females themselves.
The females are trying to fake it while males are trying to discern (kinda like a GAN, if you think about it). So the equilibrium settles on hard to fake signals like sagging breasts, skin texture and so on.
Yes, exactly! (Reading Wikipedia to learn what a GAN is)
There is one strange thing with the sagging breasts: A certain, rather significant percentage of females have droopy breasts in their early teens, when there was zero time for them to sag. (I know this because as a teenager, I was legally required to shower with other girls in an institution called school.)
That makes me think that maybe droopy breasts were the most common when breasts evolved. Later, when marriage and youth preference took over, girls with explicitly youthful breasts were favored, which made them more common. But they weren't favored enough to completely outcompete girls with droopier breasts. So both kinds still exist.
Maybe breast tissue can only resist gravity for so long. The physical world is part of the situation, not just what might be evolutionarily advantageous.
Yup. And that's a big problem for females until this day: Breasts ARE rather honest indicators of age and breastfeeding history. As no good countermeasure to that has evolved in females, plastic surgeons and clothing companies make good money from it.
I don't dispute at all that the male preference for youthful breasts has an evolutionary origin. The only thing I dispute is the idea that permanent female breast tissue would have developed out of nothing in order to advertise youth to males.
Because they didn’t develop it? Evolution did. To signal they were past their prime…
Females were selected on features that benefitted them and their descendants. Not on features that benefitted males around them more than themselves.
I'm for the idea of multilevel selection in humans, but I think a very important part of selection takes place on the level of the individual. Which means that the evolution of the female body needs to be seen from the female perspective.
When it comes to sexual selection, the evolution of the female body has to be seen from the male perspective. And vice versa, in all animals. Signalling fertility and the decline in fertility is evolution’s way of doing this.
Yes and no. The evolution of the look of the female body is indeed about male desire. But the evolution of the actual anatomy of females is about which females succeeded in a game were all tricks were allowed. For example, that's why I assume that since males desired the look of milk-filled breasts, females with that look were selected for. But from the female perspective, fat was cheaper than a flow of milk, so female interests came to decide the content.
If you can use it to predict a second round of coin-flips better than chance, sure.
Sort of, but I think that's semantically questionable.
It's definitely the case that some people /have been/ lucky to date - 1% of the population are in the luckiest centile.
But I think that calling someone "lucky/unlucky" often has connotations not just of "they have been lucky to date", but of "they are more likely than 50/50 to get heads the next time they flip a fair coin", and in that sense being lucky isn't a thing (although having a biased coin obviously is).
I feel like this is a small point in a larger theory, no? What is the larger theory?
It's a good point. People often believe that "you make your own luck" meaning good habits, hard work, etc., give you good odds of having success in the long run, and therefore many will assume that people in bad situations likely got there through bad habits, etc. Yet as you point out, some people authentically have bad luck in spite of everything. I have in mind things like career problems, legal problems, relationship problems more than bad health, which usually appears more like bad luck than does the former.
Unless you know someone well, it's hard to judge whether one is a victim of sheer bad luck or not. It reminds me of being in high school when everyone I knew smoked weed, yet only one guy repeatedly got in legal trouble for it. This guy simply lacked a certain common sense about what situations were safe for weed smoking, but he believed he was extremely unlucky, since he continually got busted for doing for what nearly everyone was doing.
If one behaves slightly more recklessly than others, the behavioral pattern may not be obvious to an observer, but after 10,000 coin flips, so to speak, that person is likely to end up with a lot more tails than heads. But a merely unfortunate person can also end up with the same results--misfortune which is likely compounded by the fact many will assume such a person must have a character flaw explaining his fate.
_The Luck Factor_ is about people who see themselves as very lucky or very unlucky. Based on one experiment (do people notice what else is in a newsletter if they're told to count ads?), it seems as though "luck" has a lot to do with noticing what's around you rather than being extremely focused on getting tasks right. I don't know whether there's been further study or experimentation.
Hmm... I find that hard to believe.
Larry Niven riffed on this idea in the Ringworld series. In his world reproduction is restricted to selected groups. One is the winners of Earth's Birthright Lottery. In theory someone descended from a series of these winners has been selected by the evolutionary advantage of luck.
https://larryniven.fandom.com/wiki/Teela_Brown
I recall a sly joke in the series where a character thinks about testing for luck by flipping a slice of buttered bread to see which side hits the floor.
I suspect people who believe in astrology, healing crystals or The Secret have low intelligence. Dumb people more easily believe dumb things.
OTOH, the person who invents their own superstitions is a different case.
I've long thought that religious experiences are on a continuum with psychosis. When I was a Christian, I occasionally asked other believers what they meant when they said that God spoke to them, and for some it's an actual voice.
TBC, I don't think this level of psychosis (if it is that) is automatically harmful.
I've had minor mystical experiences myself, and they were positive. I didn't believe that they had supernatural explanations, which probably helps.
> companies just pay the tariffs and pass the costs on to the consumer
Isn't this precisely how tariffs are supposed to work? Artificially make imports more expensive so consumers will choose the low cost national option
Cause the tariffs aren't set high enough and there's too much regulatory red tape.
Put a $20 tariff on your ordinary stamped stainless steel can opener and someone should start making them in the states. Of course; that presumes you still have enough entrepreneurs willing to try stuff and you haven't killed everyone's ambition through regulation.
It also assumes that it's worth having Americans do this low value work, which it isn't.
As others said, most straightforward approach is to make the US more like the countries with manufacturing jobs right now where labor is chap and competitive for labor-intensive manufacturing. Either make Americans work more for smaller pay in cheaper to build factories, or get people who will do that instead.
Alternatively one could try to make automation more efficient. There are empirical research results that the companies who utilize the most automation grow more and hire more than their competition. See link: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2022/01/22/economists-are-revising-their-views-on-robots-and-jobs which links to research papers. This suggests an alternative option, to compete with doubling don on the advantage of having more automation.
Suppose the cited results are true and globally applicable: the company A with the best automation does better than company B with 2nd rate automation on metrics like revenue, growth and thus also number of employees (because A grows faster than B and has increasing market share). Then it is important for a country that attempts to create as many automated manufacturing jobs as possible to have more many companies like A and as few as possible companies like B.
High tariffs could be counterproductive if it allows industrialists in your country get lazy and not develop and improve their processes to be globally competitive. On the other hand, it is not good either if your companies start dwindling if foreign competition can sell more of the better product at cheaper price.
edit. Additionally, subsidizing automation can be also a mistake: The industrialist may buy the most shiny technological toy that impresses the bureaucratic procedure handing out the subsidies instead of developing the most profitable technological toy.
Yes. Higher productivity = higher efficiency, because there's less overhead costs.
You're better off automating as much as is economically feasible, because that minimizes costs and maximizes benefits.
It also leads to cheaper products, as scaling up production drives down costs, which makes everyone richer because products cost less.
The problem with "work more for less pay" is the rest of the cost of living. Trying to find somewhere to rent, or buy a house, or pay your utility bills, or fill your car with petrol so you can get to your job are not charged on "okay we'll charge you the poverty price".
Bring down the cost of living to the same as in those overseas countries and sure. Otherwise you will not get people to work the jobs that are supposed to be "good jobs" as in the past. Maybe we're gone past the days of "good jobs for blue-collar workers" but that is a different problem.
I don't know where you are working now or in what field, but would you take your own advice? Cut your wages in half for the same cost of living?
I hoped people could read between the lines that I was not endorsing the objective "make the US more like the countries with manufacturing jobs right now" exactly for that reason.
I like much more the "improve and increase amount of automation" solution I mapped out in more detail, but I have no idea what would be a good government policy to encourage it.
Probably the best way is to foster the internal markets that nurture competitive corporations that embrace automated production. Maybe judiciously applied temporary protective tariffs against too good foreign competition could work, if you can make your industrialists behave as if they were not there.
Increase immigration and get rid of the minimum wage to the point where our labor market can be competitive internationally.
That’s literally insane. No country gets rich by impoverishing it’s workers. Utter insanity.
you are wrong and missing the point. it's not about impoverishing workers at all — it's about bringing in laborers from abroad instead of just paying those same laborers to make stuff for you abroad. in fact it makes those workers quite a bit richer.
Nobody ever claimed it was a good idea, it's just an answer to the question of "how to bring back manufacturing jobs to the US".
But it’s not, is it. Countries with large numbers of people involved in manufacturing were never the poorest countries in the world, but often the countries with the highest wages.
The US has more manufacturing now than it did in the 1970s and 1980s, or indeed, any other time in history.
There is no way to bring back "manufacturing jobs" and it is the wrong goal anyway.
Increasing manufacturing is by facilitating more and more automation. We produce a lot of high value and heavily automated products in the US; the more you can automate, the better it is to build in the US and EU, because you are closer to the final destination of your products and your workers are of higher quality.
The way you get rich is by automating. You want low automation, low value manufacturing to be overseas, as that way, you don't have the poor people who are working those low productivity jobs in the US.
Do you really think China is low value manufacturing? Read Tim Cook on China.
> you don't have the poor people who are working those low productivity jobs in the US.
Well, you'll still have poor people, they'll just be in shitty service jobs or completely cut off the job market. The drop in middle class jobs has led to an increase of both high paying, but also low paying ones.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/02/19/technological-unemployment-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/
Wages aren't actually stagnating. The whole "stagnant wages" thing is because people were using a measure of COL as a measure of inflation (CPI is a COL, which is why "wages have been stagnant", when in real life, of course, people just increase quality of life when their wages go up, so COL goes up with wages).
Wages have, in real terms, approximately doubled since 1970, which is why houses increased by more than 60% in size and everything else became more plentiful, abundant, and higher quality.
The Republicans are fundamentally correct that a lot of this is that people who can work are choosing not to due to more generous welfare, though some of it is also that, because people are more affluent, they can also afford to retire earlier.
My dad, for instance, probably could have worked for a few more years with his Parkinson's before it got to the point where he couldn't, but it had progressed to the point where he wouldn't be able to do his previous job. As such, he went out on disability because of how the disability laws work now - he was unable to do his job due to disability.
My mom retired early because she and my dad have enough money that they didn't have to work until retirement age.
Moreover, there's no actual drop in the middle class; a significant fraction of "middle class" people are just upper middle class now. We have wider income variance because we have wider productivity variance.
Low end people are better off because we have a better safety net. Everyone else is going up, but high end people are going up the fastest because the high end of productivity increases is, well, high.
Also, productivity increases aren't even across the economy; some jobs have seen much better productivity increases than others.
The number of poor people is going down and absolute poverty is going down.
Lots of people are only never going to be smart enough to design or even repair the robots. There needs to be employment for them.
It seems to me that there's a nearly unquenchable market for service jobs. And by that I mean butlers, valets, maids, footmen, et cetera. The economics of service jobs has changed over the past hundred years, but if we really reach a point where automation has made the top 10% incredibly rich but the bottom 90% fairly useless, then I can easily imagine a world where the remaining 10% of first-order useful people each have an average of nine servants to manage their house and personal affairs.
Sounds to me like much of the bottom 90% in that world would be useful, whereas you'd end up with a lot of n+ generations with wealth who are the "fairly useless" part of society.
People sometimes present this as an argument against automation being a problem (not saying that you're presenting it like that). But feudalism with robots sounds like a pretty awful future to me.
I agree with you, i just don't expect most of these jobs to be particularly well payed or satisfying. Or non-alienating, for that matter.
The main problem is first-world labour costs. So I'd declare a Special Economic Zone (I'm thinking maybe Texas south of San Antonio?) with no minimum wage, borders open to the rest of the world, unions illegal, and all other employment-related laws repealed.
If you can pay your factory workers two bucks an hour then there's good reasons to build your factory in the USA.
Labour costs aren’t e everything. Labour costs in China are much higher than sub Saharan Africa. Germany has a large manufacturing service. Also while the libertarian dream of impoverishing the masses (which by the way is a Marxist prediction for capitalism - so well done of proving then right) is a bonus for investors it’s not so great for workers.
To bring manufacturing back to the US, the country needs highly skilled tradesmen and engineers, learning their trade in apprentice systems, and university systems. A strong unionised workforce would be useful as well.
Can your factory workers live on two bucks an hour? That is the problem. And if they can't, then they don't consume products. So you have to export all your fridges and washing machines, because there is no way your own workers can afford them, and you better hope other countries pay their workers more than two bucks an hour so they can buy your products.
Seems like this defeats the purpose. We can bring *production* here with automation. There's no reason to bring large numbers of *jobs* if they don't pay well or impact American workers.
We cannot bring production here with just automation! What makes you think that’s true? We’re a long ways out from automating all manual labor away
Move the maquiladoras a bit further north?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maquiladora
Outlaw various types of automation in factories to make them less productive and outright outlaw various imports.
Why would you want to outlaw imports? That would be like me saying I'm outlawing plumbers from my house. (I'm not a plumber.) What possible reason would I have for doing that? Congratulations to me! There's now a thriving domestic plumbing sector in my house! All plumbing problems are fixed in-house with no need to import labor! The only difference now is I'm paying too much for substandard plumbing.
And if your goal was to increase the amount of plumbing work available in your house, you would have succeeded.
Also, you can build a self sufficient economy without external imports fairly easily on the millions of people level that most countries are at. Would it be as rich in GDP as a globalized country? No. Might there be other advantages? Possibly.
So we are going to impoverish (in the sense of making less rich) the country to achieve the *possibly* advantageous goal of becoming "self-sufficient" so that a few hundred thousand people can be overpaid to produce items that can be more efficiently and cheaply produced elsewhere? I also would like to be paid more than what the market is willing to pay me. Let's get some industrial policy going to help me achieve that--at the expense of all the rest of you, of course.
Please remember that the top level comment is asking "Let's say your goal was to bring back manufacturing jobs in large numbers to the United States. (Putting aside whether or not that's a worthwhile goal.).
I'll happily talk about if it's worthwhile elsewhere; but the point here is "How do we increase the number of *JOBS* in manufacturing." not overall GDP, not economic freedom, not manufacturing output, just the number of jobs.
That's a fair point and I'll concede it. But I was also responding to your point that there are possibly benefits to enacting this policy.
This would just cripple the economy.
Everything is about trade-offs.
That would... definitely do it.
Mos def
When will we get to the point where most people can afford IVF? Or might you mean majority IVF among people who can afford it? At what point do governments (or even just one government) start supplying IVF?
Isn't IVF provided by the government in countries with national healthcare of some kind?
I'm not very convinced by this video, so be warned: I am going through this one and criticising it strongly, and I mean "yeah I don't believe him that it happened exactly that way".
"Content notice for mention of physical violence against a child, and generally depressing stuff about the extinction of early inquisitive thought-process and the breaking apart of family"
I wonder about that. For instance, he includes this snippet in the replies to comments:
"My brother and I were lumbered with a bizarre myth when we were born. Doctors told our parents that being identical twins we’d always lag behind other children — twice the brains meant half the intelligence."
When was he born when this happened? Where was he born? He has an English accent, I'm assuming he's English, I never heard of doctors saying that twins would be half as intelligent as single babies. Now, having looked this up, apparently there *are* studies showing twins have slightly lower IQs than singletons, so it's possible that our man here was indeed one of the 1950s Aberdeen cohort study:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16299014/
"Participants: 9832 singletons and 236 twins born in Aberdeen between 1950 and 1956.
Results: At age 7, the mean IQ score of twins was 5.3 points lower (95% confidence interval 1.5 to 9.1) and at age 9, 6.0 points lower (1.7 to 10.2) than that of singletons in the same family. Adjustment for sex, mother's age, and number of older siblings had little effect on these differences. Further adjustment for birth weight and gestational age attenuated the IQ difference between twins and singletons: the difference in mean IQ was 2.6 points (-1.5 to 6.7) at age 7 and 4.1 points (-0.5 to 8.8) at age 9.
Conclusions: Twins have substantially lower IQ in childhood than singletons in the same family. This effect cannot be explained by confounding due to socioeconomic, maternal, or other family characteristics, or by recruitment bias. The reduced prenatal growth and shorter gestations of twins may explain an important part of their lower IQ in childhood."
But again, that's not "half the intelligence" and *unless* there was some difficulty with the birth, I can't see doctors telling parents "tough luck, twins are going to be way dumber than normal babies".
The rest of it, so far, sounds like normal atheist story: "I was a very smart kid, at a young age I started questioning the doctrines I was being taught, adults couldn't handle this and reacted badly".
I also wonder if he was in some tiny splinter sect; he uses "Yahweh" which is not normal usage, so it's either "tiny weird sect where we referred to God as Yahweh" or more likely, the common Internet Atheist trope where they seem to think using "Yahweh" is some Epic Pwning The Christians. 'O hai did U kno Ur god is Old Testament which is Yahweh so Y U say God not Yahweh for real name? checkmate, theists!' He also does the "Jesus sounds like Cheeses so Imma use Cheeses all the time what a thigh-slapper how smart am I? Very Smart!" bit which is juvenile, so I can't get a read on his age: is he 20? 50? (What is with that weird floating baby? But that's personal taste, maybe he doesn't find it creepy).
Also, I'm not too far in yet but equating "my parents made me go to church" with abuse and Stockholm Syndrome? As though no child was ever made to do something they didn't want to do, by parents, in a secular context? "We're going to visit Aunt Sue and Uncle Bob next Saturday" "I hate Aunt Sue's house! She never lets me play or have fun, I have to sit quiet and behave, I don't want to go!" "Tough, we're going and you *will* behave". "This is child abuse, you are Stockholm Syndroming me!"
(As you may gather, I'm not too impressed).
Uh-huh, now I've got to the physical abuse bit. So a parent picked him up from school, he said some smart-alec remark about "Did Cheeses have a stammer?" (I don't know why he'd pick that as an 'innocent question') and pow! Slammed face-first into a brick wall and told "don't blaspheme".
Anyway, he is now getting older and getting more committed in his faith (such as it is). Then we get the Classic Atheist Moment - he met a teacher! who spurred him on to question his beliefs! and the whole house of cards came tumbling down!
(Funnily enough, I find Atheist Deconversion Stories follow the same general patterns as Christian Conversion Stories, just in mirror images: I believed/didn't believe this thing all my life, I met an influential authority figure who made me think and use my brain and question what I had accepted uncritically up to then, and then I didn't believe/believed new thing).
Fair enough, when I was eleven I did the same thing - but it wasn't at the behest of anyone else, I started wondering why I believed what I believed and was it just swallowing what I had been told and if I had been born in different circumstance would I believe differently? I came out of that still convinced of my Catholicism, Mr Trees came out of it convinced that Christianity was for the birds and Big Brain Thinking was the way to go.
Okay, now he's trotting through the usual Atheist Disproof Texts (I am amused by his continuing shock at the "sordid truth of Noah's Ark"). And now he's onto Hell and how it's moronic and the entire system is unfair and you can't divide up people into good and bad because no matter where you pick one person over another it would be between two people with a virtually identical moral score.
I feel that if he had to judge between a torture-rape murderer and a doctor who volunteers in Médecins Sans Frontières he would *not* come out with "oh goodness me, how can I tell which of them is slightly more naughty than the other?" and he has no problem throwing around terms like barbaric and genocide etc. when discussing incidents in the Bible. However, let us continue!
So now he thinks he is the first entire person ever to discover atheism. Mm-hmm. He doesn't describe going to a particularly strict religious school (even if they did have the Christian Union at lunch time), he's met this wonderful new teacher who is all about "direct evidence and use your brain" and he boasts in his notes about how super-duper smart he and his brother are. But he can't read up about belief and non-belief anywhere? There are no encylopaedias or libraries around him? In all his exploration of faith and belief and religion, he never heard anything around him from anyone about non-belief?
"We scored consistently ahead of our age in reading and vocabulary. A head teacher once chastised our parents for helping with our work — she didn’t believe we knew the words we used. She then had to eat her own. In our 11+ exams, we both got 99% and were accused of copying each other. We were cleared when it was discovered we got different answers wrong — oh, and took the exams in different rooms. I could go on. Have a think what it’s like for naturally bright children to be repeatedly suspected and accused instead of encouraged. No surprise I later learned to coast in school — performing to an average level to blend in.
The water cycle wasn’t part of the formal curriculum until around age 8. But my interest in clouds led me to find out about it sooner. I know — unbelievable isn’t it."
So when he's not yet 8 he can independently find out about the water cycle but in all his investigating into religion from the age of 11+, he never even stumbles across the word "atheism". He can be aware of Allah and Vishnu as competing gods, but he was so "cocooned in Christianity" he had no idea atheism existed.
In 20th century England.
Let's keep going! So he and his brother are now secret atheists, but they agree to keep pretending for their parents, "go to church, take communion" (and again, here I am puzzled; if they are mainstream Protestants, by the use of communion, then they are not the hardline head-to-brick-wall zealots he presents; if they are small splinter denomination, they will not use a term like 'communion' because that is Romish superstition). If he's Church of England, which I strongly suspect, *nobody* is bashing their kid's face against a wall for blasphemy; you can be functionally atheist and a bishop in that denomination! EDIT: see below for my change of mind on this.
Okay, early teens them tell their parents they don't believe in God; this doesn't go down well, they get the choice of "church or punishment", they choose punishment.
What horrors of the Inquisition await them?
"All kinds of prohibitions, confiscations and gratuitous labours".
So basically "If you're not going to church on Sunday morning, you don't get to lie around in bed, get up and do chores"?
When the various "strategies" don't work, then the parents resort to "sneering contempt, name-calling and aping". Yeah, if I had 13 year old kid who started lecturing me about how they were so much smarter than me, I'd tell them to knock it off instead of going "oh wow, so smart, so better than me".
So things go on and they grow up and eventually there's live and let live. But I now understand why the floating baby: it really is Baby's First Atheism.
EDIT: They might have been Jehovah's Witnesses, there are a couple of videos about JWs on his Youtube channel. That would explain some elements of his video, the emphasis on "Yahweh" over "Jehovah":
"Jehovah's Witnesses emphasize the use of God's name, and they prefer the form Jehovah—a vocalization of God's name based on the Tetragrammaton."
Since they are a small splinter group, relatively speaking, there would be a greater emphasis than Church of England on doctrines, etc. so he would be exposed to more mandatory church going, Scripture reading, and specific idiosyncratic doctrines.
I took the 11+ and I’m certain you never receive your score. I certainly didn’t. The 11+ was used to filter kids into grammar schools (for conventionally brighter students) or comprehensive school. You were just told whether you passed or not.
These videos are from several years back, so that may be part of it; I think this guy has some axes to grind with his family (he has videos up about abusers and that his mother was a narcissist etc.) so we're getting a highly-coloured version of his past. Also the subjective element is being presented as objective (the icon of the floating child to represent him - he's the innocent little creature who was fooled and abused and crushed in his intellectual curiosity; there's one video where he does a run though his childhood experiences of being raised Christian and it does the whole 'every adult in this looks sinister and menacing, I am the innocent normal-looking child who is being oppressed' thing).
I am sceptical and rather suspicious of his recounting because I have a close family member who went into therapy (they have some genuine problems, this is not self-indulgence on their part) and is now coming out with 'memories' of their childhood that are (1) highly coloured rewriting of the past, so Mr. Trees' visual accounts of his 'abusive' childhood immediately reminded me of this and (2) physically could not have happened the way they said. (I'm not blaming the therapist on this, though it reminds me of the whole 'recovered memories' controversy; I think it's that my family member got a lot of psychological practical methodology dumped on them about 'such and such a reaction develops due to this and that in childhood' and they immediately glommed onto this as "yes! this explains it all! I must have been abused!" and they recast memories to fit in with the new narrative).
When I challenge them on this, it's "oh you weren't there". When I tell them that for many of these alleged events, I *was* there, it's "oh you were in another room". They have their new, reconstructed version of the past to explain why things turned out the way they did (and they are the victim of it all) and any challenges get explained away or met with "you're jealous/angry/lying" or aggression or bursting into tears. Since the accused parties are dead with ten years, there's nothing but "it's my word that I remember this correctly" and, as I said, some of it literally could *not* have happened as they say it happened.
Mr. Trees reminds me *very* much of all this, so I am subjectively reacting on the same level back at him - I don't believe you. Which is unfair, since I don't know him, maybe his family life was as bad as he makes out - but it's details like "doctors told my parents we'd be idiots since we were twins, but we turned out ultra-smart, so smart the headmistress accused us of cheating on tests since we scored so high" that don't ring true.
Woo-hoo! In another video, he quotes from Colonel Ingersoll's atheistical lectures, to reference Chesterton. I've never seen an Ingersoll quote in the wild, I had to go looking him up when I read the reference in Chesterton. 19th century polemics for the win, huh?
Maybe, but that's only a slight over-reaction to the issue of people wasting their entire life savings on snake oil.
Everyone I know with complex chronic medical issue, myself included, views doctors as largely useless. They're something like 10-20 years behind the cutting edge, most of the time, and doing your own research is immensely valuable.
Alternative medicine is definitely too credulous, and 90% of their idea go nowhere, but they are more likely to be willing to try some new development.
Personally, I think you'll get more useful ideas from the alternative sphere, but you have to do a *lot* of your own research on the options presented. Conventional doctors are script pads - go in knowing what you want after extensive research, and get a script that enables you to buy it legally and/or have health insurance cover some of the cost.
I think there is just a wide range of expertise and ability among doctors.
My wife has an amazing migraine doctor/clinic, very up-to-date with research and trying lots of new things and such, and they've had a huge positive impact on her life. On the other hand, when my stepfather got covid this year, his primary care doctor wanted to put him on azythromycin, which is wrong enough that he knew it was wrong.
+1. Your local doctors are a medical equivalent of the outsourced tech support hotline.
What kinds of complex chronic medical issues are you referencing here?