I'm looking for an NLP program that can match pronouns in a sentence to the noun they refer to. I don't need anything else, just that. Does anyone know if there's one available that's not too expensive?
This look wonderful, thank you. Do you know of one that can also match up the verbs? For example:
"Amy walks to the store for Nancy and buys her a flower, which she appreciates."
In this sentence, "walks" and "buys" are both being carried out by Amy, while "appreciates" is being carried out by Nancy.
(Out of curiosity I just tested this sentence in neuralcoref and it incorrectly believes that "she" is referring to Amy. Seems to do pretty well with sentences I didn't intentionally design to be difficult though.)
I knew Ukraine wasn't about to lose any major cities, but after hearing bad news about Ukraine for awhile, my confidence that they would take back territory in the next year (on net) fell to 60%. Now it's back to ~88%. [edit: err... make that 80%]
Why? the last two weeks of tweets & retweets by @TrentTelenko, who predicted both that Russia would invade #Ukraine and fail to take over the whole country, and who knows tons of military trivia. I don't know if Trent is holding back any info that reduces Ukraine's chances, but he offers quite a barrage of good signs.
Here I focus on facts I didn't know before, but at the end I'll have some bonus facts that are also instructive.
*Edit* (June 10): very bad news today lowers my confidence all the way down to 60%[1].
- Larger quantities of artillery shells are being sent to Ukraine than I thought: https://twitter.com/Osinttechnical/status/1530038089799946240 Edit: somehow I misinterpreted the number "208,000 155mm rounds allocated for Ukraine" from the U.S.; the number felt bigger than it is, though still higher than I knew about before. Google/Bing wouldn't tell me how many shells Russia is using, but I seem to recall somebody claiming Russia uses 30,000 shells per day and Denys Davydov saying Russia fires 20 shells for every shell fired by Ukraine. It should be noted though that much of Russia's artillery is imprecise and slow to configure (basically 'Uragan and Smerch' is lousy, see https://twitter.com/noclador/status/1531012132975910912, and by contrast I've seen some impressive videos of precise Ukrainian artillery). It seems like the Russians have just dumped a lot of their shells indiscriminately on cities until Ukraine has "nothing left to defend", and the spread-out shelling patterns on Ukrainian trenches also demonstrate low precision. As Small Wars Journal noted in 2020 (discussing 2015), "Ukrainians claimed that for every salvo they fired, they received 10 to 15 salvos in return". So it's not entirely clear that Ukraine will get as much gear as they need, and I have to suspect I'm missing some info that is favorable to Russia. On the other hand Russia doesn't seem to use its artillery effectively and I don't think I weighted partisan/guerilla fighting enough. Overall I'm reducing my confidence to 80%.
- Early signs Russia is running low on equipment seem to have been confirmed by more recent signs (the partial retaking of Severodonetsk and Zelensky's visit to Lysychansk) that Ukrainians in Donbas are not on the verge of collapse: https://twitter.com/PhillipsPOBrien/status/1530828743832440832 (that's in addition to Russia's deployment of old T-62s and Ukraine knowing about this in advance, as if you needed more confirmation of their good intel https://twitter.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1529517640053661699) BTW: Russia has lost far more tanks than heavy artillery, but artillery is their weapon of choice. However, when RU runs short on tanks and BMPs, I expect it'll be easier for Ukrainian footsoldiers to advance despite that artillery, especially as their numbers increase.
- *Before* Ukraine's apparent offensive north of Kherson stalled out, @TrentTelenko judged it to be a "shaping operation" rather than a real offensive, which would make the "stall" something to be expected. https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1531814609908383744
- Russian losses should mainly be infantry, and their losses are so large that Trent thinks they've "hit a wall"—their infantry is nearly gone after accounting for both dead and wounded. Supporting evidence: RU deployed 25 BTGs to Severodonetsk and is still failing there. https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1533491373604802561
There is one thing I don't get about Trent: he evidently takes the Ukrainian claim for Russian troops KIA (30,500 dead) at face value, to reach a conclusion that Russia has taken 79,000 casualties with 80% being infantry. I'm not sure why one would trust that 30K number, but on the flip side he uses a low ratio of wounded to killed on the RU side, as compared to what is typical in wars, so maybe it balances out, almost.
[1] June 10: the reported casualty rate has risen to ~150 Ukrainian soldiers killed per day. This is probably higher than Russia's casualty rate and certainly higher than the rate of losses for Russian nationals. Since Ukraine is mostly in a defensive posture, this should not be happening. In fact, I've decided that even though I earn minimum wage (and can't get a tax deduction for Ukrainian charities), I will donate $1000 today. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/10/ukraine-casualty-rate-russia-war-tipping-point ... June 30: I suspect Ukraine's high casualty rate is related to the continuing artillery imbalance, in which Russia just has far more shells with which to bomb Ukraine. I can only hope that Ukraine's rapid failure around Lysychansk is more about Ukraine trying to reduce casualties than about Ukrainian forces "collapsing".
A counterpoint is the coverage from "War in Ukraine" that is more pessimistic for Ukraine.[1]
A problem with this source (like so many other sources) is that they don't report where they are getting their information from. Although they're probably pro-Ukraine, I know that in one case they said that the Russians has destroyed a third of Ukraine's M777 artillery, and they had a whole segment of the show about this topic[2], but this is just a Russian distortion: a *Russian* source said "The Armed Forces of Ukraine are losing a third of the M777 howitzers transferred from the United States in battles with Russian artillerymen, said Deputy Defense Minister of Ukraine Denis Sharapov", and I couldn't find any non-Russian sources saying this. I did find sources indicating that about one third of m777 had been damaged from *firing too quickly*, and so had to be repaired.
Similarly I've decided that while Trent Telenko is a very knowledgeable and useful source, he is too biased toward optimism in Ukraine's favor.
This report is also interesting[1]. Key takeaways:
• Americans genuinely deserve to be proud of this: the USA is giving more aid to Ukraine than ALL European countries combined... despite the fact that the EU has a much larger population than the U.S.!
• Total support from the US is about €42.7 billion, over half of which is military aid; the rest of the world combined is giving almost the same amount.
• Well over half of committed military aid has been delivered (figure 7). This tells me that we should be able to tell in the next couple of months whether that aid is enough to allow Ukraine to stop Russian advances and take back territory. I'm guessing they need a little more time for training. Edit: this is misleading, see below.
• Other democracies near Russia also give outsized donations. Destroying Russian weapons of death in Ukraine isn't just the right thing to do — it also bolsters the security of other countries in the region, and will allow refugees to return home from these countries, which also generally took in the most refugees.
Edit: I am confused about something though. The figure 7 chart shows about €4.2 billion committed military aid from USA, but one of the main-page charts[1] shows about €24 billion committed military aid from USA! I am asking them about this and they seem responsive[2]. Most likely the remaining €19.8 billion is undelivered aid, in which case Ukraine is far from having the hardware it needs.
Yes, the Ukrainian army is clearly having a tough time of it. Unfortunately we don't have the same level of insight into the Russian army. That they can't make more than the most minor advances with all the numbers and firepower they have brought to bear, suggests that things are going very poorly indeed on their side - but which army is closest to breaking is unknowable, until it happens.
I'm not even going to try to predict this one beyond saying it's basically a coin toss.
God, I hope. If the Ukraine war ends favorably for Russia I expect that my country will be a candidate for next on the chopping block. Here's to optimism. Cheers!
As you may or may not be aware, there's currently a market on Manifold for whether anyone will take you up on your ban appeals process. As prediction markets tend to do, this creates an incentive for someone to get banned from your blog.
You're one of my favorite writers, so I'd prefer to not actually say anything inappropriate in your comments section, and would appreciate it if you just banned me without that being necessary. :)
In a sense, Michael Shellenberger getting 95000 votes (with only "50%" of ballots in) is a triumph. Jesus only needed twelve, Shellenberger has literally thousands of times more support.
In a more practical sense, fourth place is the second loser. And 3% of the vote is a country mile away from the 15% obtained by the second-place finisher.
Thomas Carlyle, who in life was extremely dismissive of Spirtualism, was made to go through his paces in the afterlife, where he had completely changed his views - according to this book, "What Spiritualism Really Is, By Thomas Carlyle In the Spirit-World, And Through the Impressional Brain of Dr. WM. J. Bryan" written by a doctor in 1919.
Apart from this example of how you can be made to say anything once you're dead, it's why the starry-eyed ideals around AI and Transhumanism don't impress me that much. Spirtualism, too, denied it was a religion; it was nothing like those musty, hoary old relics. You didn't have to take anything on faith. Spiritualism could be examined and tested, it produced results, and reproducible results. Eminent and respectable people like doctors and scientists backed it. This wasn't pie-in-the-sky based on texts from thousands of years ago, you too could go to a séance today and have independent confirmation of contact with the dead.
So faint demurrals of "but we're nothing like a religion, we never demand you take anything on faith!" are not that convincing to me about the latest New Scientific Wonderment.
Isn't there a big difference between a starry-eyed ideal and a belief system? Transhumanism might be moral or immoral, plausible or implausible, but it's an ideal, not a set of truth statements. It does not claim that human-machine hybrids already exist, but that they would be desirable. Spiritualism and religion makes claims about the existence of supernatural entities in the here and now.
That's true. It is also reasonable to at least sort-of include a guess that transhuman modifications will become feasible as part of the set of ideas considered to be in transhumanism. ( Yeah, fuzzy, I know. )
"the starry-eyed ideals around AI and Transhumanism don't impress me that much. Spirtualism, too, denied it was a religion; it was nothing like those musty, hoary old relics. You didn't have to take anything on faith. Spiritualism could be examined and tested, it produced results, and reproducible results. "
Yes, you have a good point. (re AI) There is always a worry about whether existing results are being extrapolated beyond what the algorithms can actually deliver. To mangle a traditional line: "The hype we have always with us" :-)
- Brains are sometimes surprisingly flexible. Maybe just adding more neurons will work.
- Brains have lots of anatomically distinct regions (order of 180?). If those didn't provide some advantage why did evolution select for them? Is it _really_ possible to match human capabilities without explicitly coding the equivalent of each of those regions?
Lighting the Ivermectin data on fire and seeing if the smoke cures Covid seems likely to provide identical results as any of the more statistics based tests.
Yes Ref, no matter what test you choose the signal of benefit will always be there. Scott’s gotta choose a statistical method sooner or later, may as well choose G M-K’s. It will show a signal of benefit as well then we can finally put it to bed, IVM works, just like Scott said in his article
'Meta-study demonstrates that dry-smoke inhalation delivers more of active ingredient than wet-steam, aerosol via inhaler, or sticking it up your jumper!'
(Belated) Congratulations to Scott on this title, which was apparently fully decodable (once I found the referenced piece) without reading the article:
"Current Affairs' Marxist Critique Of Toddler Show Blippi Isn't Marxist Enough"
(My reading: the anti-industrialism and the white cringe strike me as fundamentally at odds with Marxist thought, suggesting that Robinson is just name-dropping Marx for leftist cred rather than actually being Marxist.)
Considering Wikipedia lists Nathan Robinson in its "American Anti-Communists" category and he considers that to be an accurate label for himself, he's very obviously not an actual Marxist, no.
Abortions are being performed up to six weeks, not any later than that. The number of abortions performed in Texas has been about cut in half, but many women are leaving the state (if they can) or taking mail-order abortion pills (though there are new laws restricting the pill as well). https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/06/upshot/texas-abortion-women-data.html
Of course, others are unable to access abortion and are being forced to carry their unwanted pregnancies to term.
A couple of other side effects: some pharmacies are afraid of getting sued under the bounty law, and therefore are refusing to sell miscarriage treatments (since the medicines used post-miscarriage and for abortion are the same). Wait times for abortion clinics in nearby states (and not-that-nearby states) are rising due to the influx of patients from Texas, forcing some women to get abortions later in their pregnancies. And ironically, some women are getting abortions that they might have ultimately decided not to get under a less restrictive law, because they legally only have 1-2 days to make a decision after finding out that they're pregnant, so they're pressured into making a snap decision without having time to explore any alternatives.
All that said, I'm not aware of any bounties being paid out. The threat of them seems to be enough.
TracingWoodgrains, late of r/TheSchism which is a spin-off of a spin-off of the SSC reddit site, did a similar stunt with persuading LibsofTikTok that there was an agenda to get furrydom (furriness?) taught in elementary school. Again, this was a hoax, and an extremely detailed one:
That one was way more controversial when he informed the various disapora about it on r/TheMotte etc. He did *too* good a job and became the story, not just reported on it.
Don't believe everything you read on social media, especially when rationalists/rationalist-adjacent people of this parish may be involved!
The bounty hunters subreddit was a joke, sure, but, like... Texas *did* pass a law that allowed civilians to sue those involved in abortions, correct? What effect did that have?
I just use my (mostly cotton) shirt to clean off the dirt about 1-2 times a day when i notice them getting dirty. When i get a bunch of gunk or dirt on them i clean em with a microfiber cloth. Maybe once every 6 months i'll actually run them under water and carefully clean them.
Been doing this for ~10 years now and it works just fine.
Don't use a microfiber cloth if you value having scratch-free glasses. The correct way to clean glasses is simple: with soap and water. First, wash your hands thoroughly. Then gently rinse any grime / particulates off with just the stream of water. Last, if there's any oils / fingerprints / smudges left, lather up some more soap on your fingers and gently clean them off the lenses. You can shake off 80% of the water, and the rest will evaporate within minutes, leaving your glasses perfectly clear.
Modern glasses are 99% likely to be made from materials that won't corrode (plastic, titanium, aluminum, etc), and this method avoids the micro-scratches which are an inevitable part of rubbing them with a cloth. The cloth, microfiber or not, is packed with microscopic particulates that are substantially harder than the polycarbonate modern glasses are almost always made of, and especially harder than the various coatings the lenses almost always have applied.
Long ago, I would use a microfiber cloth like I'd been told, and invariably my glasses would be a scratched up mess within a year. Since developing this method, my glasses have been crystal clear and scratch free for years at a time. The last time I was in, my optometrist referred to the state of my lenses as "remarkable", given their age.
Yes, this is why I pay extra and wait long times to get lenses made of genuine optical glass. Whoever sold the general public on polycarbonate lenses should get the Nobel Prize in Marketing. Far cheaper and easier to manufacture, and don't last as long, pretty much a massive boost to the profit margin. Freaking brilliant, in a sort of evil twisted way.
This is a sign that either you insufficiently broke down any oils with soap, or that your water contains quite a lot of non-water stuff - like calcium, that dries as visible deposits.
Has anyone here read Erik Hoel's The Revelations? I found Kierk Soren to be a really interesting character. I'd like book recommendations with main characters like Kierk Soren.
One more thing, any advise and book recommendations for a 23 year old that's about to embark on his intellectual journey? Thanks.
I know nothing about Erik Hoel or this novel; but there absolutely must be a connection to the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. You don't hit on that name by accident. Kierkegaard's books are really good, but hard to understand right if you don't have a pretty deep background in philosophy.
Read The Republic. Everybody should read The Republic.
Find some poetry that you genuinely like. Like, it gives you pleasure to read it. Go deep into that genre/form/movement/school.
Erik Hoel is a fantastic writer. He has a substack publication called The Intrinsic Perspective.
Haha, I noticed that as well. Tried searching 'Kierk Soren' one time on Google and the first result was Søren Kierkegaard. I'll try and check him out despite my shallow background in philosophy.
Thanks. I'll check it out.
Regarding the poetry advice, it's been difficult. Do you have any anthologies that I can check out? Thanks.
Hmmm, I was introduced to most of the poetry that I love either at school, or pulling random books off the shelf at Barnes & Noble, or poetry collections my parents kept on the bookshelf when I was a kid. It looks like you want an anthology. You can often get old editions of textbooks for cheap. For instance: https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?isbn=9780393979206&n=100121503&cm_sp=mbc-_-ISBN-_-used
Thanks for the Great Books list. A lot of homework for me, when I`ll be finished with the sagas. Laxness may be overdue for me. I would expect the English translation to be much better than the German after my experiences with Mikael Niemi, though the German translator for Icelandic surely is not the one they hired for Finnish-Swedish texts. I just suspect a general pattern. Are there any other minority language speakers here who also saw better English translations of foreign texts than those to their language?
I can't help with your first issue. As for book recommendations, there are lots of literary canons out there. Don't skip The Brothers Karamazov, Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake. Get into Shakespeare. My personal hints would be the Maqroll novels by A. Mutis, Musil's Man without Qualities and Amos Oz.
Well, I did, once. At least I thought so. Just checked my fine bilingual and commented edition, there's a bookmark at page 19. Maybe I stopped there. It's some years ago...
Thanks a lot. I've read some Houllebecq. I don't know if you have read The Elementary Particles, that book is astounding, as well as riveting. I have plans to reread it. An unforgettable reading experience for me, I'd say.
I have a question about where the reasonable deductions that can be made about how AI inputs are related to outputs ends and the "black box" of artificial intelligence begins. I often see posts about AI where the author sort of resigns themself to believing that AI is an impenetrable black box while also making reasonable deductions about why it is behaving in a certain way. I would love some clarity/links to papers about why the consensus is that most of what is happening is opaque and not something that can be understood through the development of the field. I would also love links to any papers or books about like meta-AI studies. I don't mean Meta the company but rather the AI equivalent to meta-physics.
I've asked this question myself for a while now, albeit in slighly different terms, while trying to find how to classify computers in the intelligence/consciousness space.
We're pretty sure computers aren't conscious and do not take explicit decisions to piss us off, yet I'm hearing a lot of people using peculiar words to describe them. Specifically, "the computer do not *want* to do what I ask" or "my computer didn't *listen* to me".
All anthropomorphism apart, I found the words used to be pretty insightful about how we think about computers and systems in general.
A rule of thumb I use for myself is the percieved complexity of a system. If a system is simple enough for someone to be able to hold it in their mind without issue, then there are no intelligence involved.
If a system is too complex to have a complete grasp on it, because (for instance) of too many moving parts, then it's considered intelligent. This is the case for our brain: it is a physical process going through a tremendous amount of neurons and subtle connections, and we consider ourselves intelligent. Our brain cannot grasp our brain.
It seems to me that we classify as "intelligent" any system complex enough to not be trivialized by our own brain. According to this definition, people used to some systems will end up trivializing them, therefore stripping them of their intelligence.
If we apply this definition to neural networks, I'd say your NN is AI as soon as you give up on the idea of understanding their insides. As Kindly stated, we haven't yet grasped why specific weights on specific neurons encode the recognition of dogs. Most people in the AI field aren't interested in finding out how it works, but rather to find empirical configurations producing better results than other configurations (at least that was the case during my PhD).
Part of the source of this belief is the understanding that neural networks behave in this way. Even just with image recognition, we have trouble figuring how all the various weights encode the essence of what a dog looks like.
I've found it depends a lot on the area - in China where many were banned, people from all of them gathered around the ones that existed and cooperated. Where many thrive, they compete more, but usually competing in who does more charity, has more members, throws more parties, things like that.
I'm in Rotary club, and looking to connect to those in other groups, thanks for reaching out. You can find me on nesicdusan.com for LinkedIn and we can connect from there.
Some Free Masons do look down on Catholics. Don’t worry about it. Just stupid snobbery from these fellas that imagine themselves enlightened. As if. Bigotry is a pretty reliable signal for ignorance.
Hangover from Continental Freemasonry, which was vehemently anti-clerical (which meant anti-Catholic) and pro-freethinking, which in the 18th century meant dressing up and pretending to carry out Genuine Mystical Secret Oriental Occult Ceremonies.
The occult ceremonies bit was also what pissed off the Church. So it was associated with magic and revolutions, not popular with the status quo.
English Freemasonry was a bit different and developed into more of a fraternal/benevolent organisation (and jokes about if you wanted a promotion in the police, you should join the Masons) though the Secret Wisdom bit still lingered on, e.g. references in ghost (ish) stories by H.G. Wells. From the story "The Inexperienced Ghost":
"Complicated series of gestures and passes with the hands. That's how he had come in and that's how he had to get out again. Lord! what a business I had!"
"But how could any series of passes——" I began.
"My dear man," said Clayton, turning on me and putting a great emphasis on certain words, "you want everything clear. I don't know how. All I know is that you do—that he did, anyhow, at least. After a fearful time, you know, he got his passes right and suddenly disappeared."
"Did you," said Sanderson, slowly, "observe the passes?"
…He stood up without heeding me, took the middle of the hearthrug, and faced me. For a moment he regarded his feet thoughtfully, and then for all the rest of the time his eyes were on the opposite wall, with an intent expression. He raised his two hands slowly to the level of his eyes and so began. .
Now, Sanderson is a Freemason, a member of the lodge of the Four Kings, which devotes itself so ably to the study and elucidation of all the mysteries of Masonry past and present, and among the students of this lodge Sanderson is by no means the least. He followed Clayton's motions with a singular interest in his reddish eye. "That's not bad," he said, when it was done. "You really do, you know, put things together, Clayton, in a most amazing fashion. But there's one little detail out."
"I know," said Clayton. "I believe I could tell you which."
"Well?"
"This," said Clayton, and did a queer little twist and writhing and thrust of the hands.
"Yes."
"That, you know, was what he couldn't get right," said Clayton. "But how do you——?"
"Most of this business, and particularly how you invented it, I don't understand at all," said Sanderson, "but just that phase—I do." He reflected. "These happen to be a series of gestures—connected with a certain branch of esoteric Masonry—— Probably you know. Or else—— How?" He reflected still further. "I do not see I can do any harm in telling you just the proper twist. After all, if you know, you know; if you don't."
"I know nothing," said Clayton, "except what the poor devil let out last night."
"Well, anyhow," said Sanderson, and placed his churchwarden very carefully upon the shelf over the fireplace. Then very rapidly he gesticulated with his hands.
"So?" said Clayton, repeating.
"So," said Sanderson, and took his pipe in hand again.
"Ah, now," said Clayton, "I can do the whole thing—right."
…Well—the simple fact before us could very well wait our convenience; there was no hurry for us to comprehend. It lay there for an hour; it lies athwart my memory, black and amazing still, to this day. Clayton had, indeed, passed into the world that lies so near to and so far from our own, and he had gone thither by the only road that mortal man may take. But whether he did indeed pass there by that poor ghost's incantation, or whether he was stricken suddenly by apoplexy in the midst of an idle tale—as the coroner's jury would have us believe—is no matter for my judging; is just one of those inexplicable riddles that must remain unsolved until the final solution of all things shall come. All I certainly know is that, in the very moment, in the very instant, of concluding these passes he changed, and staggered and fell down before us-dead!
As far as I’m aware, it’s the Catholic church that forbids masonic membership. There’s nothing against Catholicism in freemasonry--we’re open to all religions, as long as you believe in a higher power.
I come from a family of Catholics, albeit non-practicing anymore, so I certainly have nothing against them! I like the KoC and would love to connect with anyone involved there too. Different groups, more-or-less similar missions.
Yeah the Masons were totally open to letting me join. I understand the Church’s ban but I’m hoping the Pope revisits that sooner or later. The Masons seem to have pretty much let go to the anticlericalism at this point. The deistic aspects are pretty pro-forma.
Really depends org to org, and I can only speak for the masons.
Membership in masonry requires that you be 18, male, and believe in a supreme being. If that disqualifies you there are other orgs that might fit the bill, depending on which part disqualified you haha.
The generic answer in masonry is “to be one, ask one.” Ideally you find someone who is already a mason and ask them. If you don’t know any or are new to the area like I was, you usually will have to email your local lodge, which you should be able to find pretty easily online. There are over 300 lodge in my home state of Virginia. Process for joining usually involves meeting with a few members so they can make sure you’re not crazy, getting a few to sign your petition, then they vote on your admission.
But yes, most members are on the older side and membership has been declining pretty rapidly. But honestly I think that just means it’s ripe for a new generation to step in and take over for a while, maybe make some changes. Pretty perfect opportunity if you ask me.
Activities differ lodge to lodge. Some are better than others. But masons tend to lean heavily into the theatrical and ceremonial side of things. Lots of esoteric talk about King Solomon and geometry and all that.
Get in contact with a lodge or two in your area; while you can't participate in the ceremonies until you're initiated, most would love to have you come to Festive Board (drinks and/or meal held either pre- or post- meeting). If you're able to socialize with strangers easily, you'll find out whether you fit in fairly quickly.
Not really. Only “advice” would be that every lodge can be quite different. And there are no rules that say which lodge you have to belong to. So shop around! See which group of guys you mesh with the best. The r/freemasonry subreddit can actually be pretty useful for newcomers.
My wife was recently diagnosed with gestational diabetes and put on a low glycemic index diet. As far as I can tell the major risk of gestational diabetes is high birth weight but the literature all seems to suggest that high birth weight is a positive predictor of outcomes such as IQ all the way up to about 12lbs (our baby is only predicted to be at ~66th percentile of birth weight which is far below that). Is there a reason why you should want to treat the gestational diabetes and reduce the birth weight or is this just a way to make the obstetrician's life easier during the delivery?
I wouldn't fuck with it. My last kid was born to mom with GD, and she went to heroic efforts to control it, but he was still born a bit premature, had his sugar crash immediately after birth, and got jaundice. All quite treatable, and he's right as rain 18 years later, but who needs that stress?
Personally I'd say if you're considering running *any* kind of health risk for maybe possibly a few IQ points you're misinformed as to the priorities. Birth is a massive physical stress on both mother and child, even in the 21st century, and the list of things that can go drastically wrong in a flash with lifelong consequences is sobering. Give them both every advantage you can, however small. What you want is a healthy normal baby and a mom that bounces back in a day or two. If you can have both of these, take the money and run, give praise to your deity of choice, and be glad you aren't among the ~1 in 33 families for which the outcome is sad in some way or another.
I have a four and a half month old baby and a wife who had Gestational Diabetes. I did a pretty deep dive on this topic about 8 months ago but between the time and the sleep deprivation between now and then I can't cite how I got to these conclusions. Carbs seem to pretty directly correlate to birth weight which also correlated with IQ - goodness etc. But... high blood sugar damages a bunch of things and is more likely to get you a baby with an iffy pancreas and/or other things (nerves?). Resulting in a higher risk of obesity and (more than you would expect from the increased obesity) diabetes. I think there was also an increase in other health risks.
I think this was the most recent good study on the topic and it recommends a much higher carbohydrate threshold than historical recommendations (>175g/day) https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/13/8/2599
I don't remember all of why, but I thought they were too aggressive and concluded that a floor of 100g/day of carbs and a ceiling of about 200. We also switched to only complex carbs so she could eat more of them without spiking her blood sugar as much.
One of the issues with a low carb diet is that it has higher risks for nutritional issues, use a high quality prenatal and this issue should be moot. I used Life Extension because I respect the way they do research and update their formulas to reflect new findings (I'm not affiliated but I regularly buy their multivitamins and fish oil).
My baby was born at 6 lbs flat and one day after the cutoff to be early. He was small enough that the birth was not terribly damaging to his mother. He's now 3rd percentile for height, 8th percentile for weight, 35th percentile for head size, and 1 - 3 months ahead on basically all his milestones (and amazingly delightful in every way).
Thanks, that's useful additional context. One of my concerns reading through some of the gestational diabetes literature is that a lot of the papers control for birth weight in their models, which is a classic example of conditioning on a collider. i.e. if you control for an outcome of the diabetes you get a (badly calculated) version of the unmediated effect only, when what you want is the total effect (i.e. the effect that goes via any pathway including birth weight). So I'm a bit worried that the literature might be giving a misleading view on this.
Having diabetes isn't nice. Is the alternate plan to just not treat the diabetes and let the blood sugar run wild? She's gonna be pretty miserable doing that.
There's a large continuum between let the blood sugar run wild and tightly control it by cutting out almost all simple carbs.
Her original diagnosis was only barely over the diagnostic criteria (and wouldn't have met the criteria used 15 years ago). At the moment we have been controlling it very well with diet (i.e. her blood sugar readings look like someone without diabetes) but the baby has gone from 76th to 66th percentile size in that time which does raise the question is whether we're actually doing the right thing by controlling it as closely as we are. The doctors seem happy about the size decrease but I'm concerned about whether those recommendations are reliable given the literature on the positive effects of birth weight. The BMJ piece suggests ~0.5 IQ points per additional 100g birthweight (including in normal weight babies).
Well, the baby getting stuck is suboptimal for both kid and mom. Besides that, gestational diabetes is a pathologic process, not well understood in humans for experiment - blocking reasons which are probably pretty obvious. As said lower down, don't fret but do get the GD as under control as possible.
Quoting my wife, who has had GD: "High birth weight, in the abstract, is good because it's better than low birth weight. Low birth weight is correlated with a whole bunch of negative things (and often a result of smoking or poor nutrition during pregnancy). But HBW associated with GD is itself correlated with a risk of diabetes later in the child's life. Bottom line, don't focus on/obsess over birth weight, but do get the GD under control."
I would add that, in my wife's particular case, she found a bizarre magic-bullet cure for all her problems (constipation, anemia, hyperglycemia, swelling) by switching to an all-red-meat diet. Basically she subsisted off pure beef for a while. YMMV, only one data point, etc, but the effect was striking and essentially overnight. The child of that pregnancy (our third) was almost a pound heavier at birth and is now on track to be the tallest of our kids as an adult, but also totally healthy. None of our kids is anything like overweight; the elder two are rather skinny, like me.
Most pregnancy studies are pretty problematic but it looks to me like birth weight effects continue on into normal weight as well as just being about avoiding low birth weight. e.g. this sibling study published in BMJ of birth weight on IQ within the normal weight range:
Given the recommended amounts of vitamins pregnant women are supposed to take having such an unbalanced diet seems like a v bad idea. Except for iron I guess.
I wonder how we changed psychologically in the last hundred years or so due to mass empathy, caused by mass media. Before radio, TV and internet, the only emotions we came into contact with were our own and those of the people around us. Of course there were books and group gatherings, but nothing like now, where you get bombarded with other people's - real and fictional - emotions. And those generate empathy; a scary movie wouldn't be scary without empathy. So all day I 'feel' other people's emotions, from my friends on Facebook to fictional drug dealers in the Ozarks. Does anybody know if there has been anything written about how that changed us?
There were, of course, newspapers before radio, TV and internet, where you could read about the real-life sufferings of someone you didn't know.
But old-style newspaper articles tended to be much more "just the facts" while modern newspaper articles seem designed to weaponise our empathy against us, always starting with the "human interest" part of the story before talking about the big picture.
The obvious difference is that in pre-mass media days, you interacted very frequently and profoundly with your neighbours and your extended family. In a community of five hundred people, you would probably know nearly everyone by sight, and almost all of you would spend nearly all your time interacting with each other - at Church for example. Moreover, many of you would be related or would have known each other for decades, so the level of empathy *as you experienced it in everyday life* would have been a lot higher than anything you find today.
Which seems... unhealthy to me. I've been happier since I joined a church, started building those real world connections as well as I'm able to approximate in the 21st century and ditched youtube.
I think you're selling pre-mass-media short. The appeal of theatre and opera was certainly running on empathy, to hew as close to your modern examples as possible; but beyond that, I think you'd be wrong to dismiss prose and even oral storytelling out of hand.
You're probably right about the appeal of pre-mass-media. However, I doubt it can compare to modern mass media in terms of volume and accessibility. Storytelling and prose definitely appeal to empathy, often on a deeper level than other media. But if I spend 20 minutes on the internet, the sheer number of viewpoints and emotions I am asked to empathize with, is a completely different experience, I think.
Say that I'm a woman on the curvier side. I'm happy with my breasts and hips but would like to slim down my waist a bit once or twice a month during parties and formal events. It looks like shapewear/corsets would be the thing I need, but it's a jungle out there. There's plenty of low-cost, low-quality (I assume) trash. The most vocal corset people seem to be BDSM cultists, not average gals that want to look a bit thinner sometimes. Thus me asking here.
Does anyone have a good beginners guide to shapewear? What are some quality brands that I can trust? Should I just bite the bullet and get a >$400 corset (money is not an issue anyway) and try to avoid getting sucked in by the vortex of "tight lacing" and "waist training" that seem to make up 95% of online corset discussion?
There is a quite big historical fashion community who discuss corsets in a very sensible and realistic way. In general, they all stress that a historical corset that fits your body should not be uncomfortable. So I guess wearing such a corset once in a while should not be a problem.
The difference between historical corsets and contemporary fashion/sexy underwear corsets is that historical corsets are used solely to achieve a specific body shape, they are never to be seen. Contemporary fashion corsets on the other hand are made to be seen, so they are not designed for changing your body shape/silhouette most efficiently.
The question is probably, what exact shape/silhouette you want to achieve. There are some videos that compare the effect of different historical corsets (https://youtu.be/PSvy8N61YnI and https://youtu.be/ZzKUI0TwgFM). Without knowing what kind of clothes you wear exactly, it's hard to recommend anything specific.
For buying corsets, I think the best strategy is to find someone on Etsy who makes historical corsets, and to discuss with them what you want.
All of her corsets are custom made for your exact measurements, and she works with every client individually to ensure you're getting exactly what you need. She only uses high quality materials so they last a lifetime.
Thanks for the recommendations, but these designs seem very goth/burlesque/bdsm (e.g. the name). I just want something slimming to wear under my regular clothes. I guess she can make those as well though...
You could opt for a bodysuit. Keeps things tight and contained, but not as severely as a corset. Relatively inexpensive. You'd wear it under your clothing of choice, can be found in various colors including beige. If you're new to these and want to test the waters it is probably a good place to start.
As an informal information source, I would recommend The Lingerie Addict's articles on corsetry. I used to be really Into Corsets (from a fashion perspective as well as a history perspective) and skimming through a couple of their articles again, they're consistent with my knowledge. They also seem to acknowledge that there's a midpoint between "cheap fashion corset" and "tightlacing down ten inches" which, hopefully, will address your needs. Here's an article that might be useful: https://www.thelingerieaddict.com/2014/09/much-spend-corset.html
They mention specific brands, including Orchard Corset, which is the only one of those mentioned that I've personally bought from and that I have known other people to wear. I agree with the writer's assessment that it's a good balance between "cheap corset that has no real shaping" and "expensive corset for everyday wear."
I have no problem with buying a quality corset to use infrequently. I just have a hard time finding information about the use pattern I envision: most corset people seem to only talk about everyday wear, tight lacing etc. Where's the guide for "how to wear a corset infrequently"?
For the last two years, I've been doubting myself and spending a ridiculous amount of time finding the most optimal career path for me. My conclusion is that all roads lead to Software Engineering.
I plan to work on AI safety in the long term, but first, I need to start my career and focus on earning enough financial freedom.
The fastest route to getting a well-paid job in the IT field is learning Full Stack Web Development, so I'm doing that through The Odin Project.
About me: 123 IQ score (Raven's 2). Asperger's. 99th percentile for Extraversion, 98th Openness, 31st Conscientiousness (understandmyself.com). English level C1.
Here in France many people go to Switzerland to earn more. The cost of living there is roughly twice of what it is in France, but you earn at least 3 times as much. You end up with way more disposable income, and can always move to a cheaper country once you have "enough". I'm sure lots of people do the same with their current country and the US.
Every piece of advice like this misses the point that it is hard as an Argentinian to get a Visa or permission to live and work in those places.
I mentioned Australia and New Zealand not because they are the best countries to move to in general but because, in my context, those are the most cost-effective targets (they give away a lot of Visas to Argentina).
Thanks, though; I appreciate that you try to help me. Have a good day!
Look for US contracts for high hourly rates, but avoid living in the US. If you're a contractor, you don't need US residency for anything. If you need a US-based corporation to sign you onto contracts, you can find folks (like me) with companies that'll subcontract you (for a little bit off the top).
As a New Zealander currently in the UK partially for financial reasons, probably New Zealand is probably a fairly bad place to earn enough money to be able to focus on something without regards to money, certainly the the general opinion of people was that if you wanted to make money moving to Australia was a good way to do that. Admittedly I haven't checked the numbers or been in an environment where people talked about this for about 5 years now.
That said if you're intending to move somewhere cheaper after being a general software engineer NZ might work. If you're intending to get paid for doing AI safety I have no idea what the chances of you being able to do that from Australia of NZ are.
Agreed - New Zealander in the USA here. There's a reason all of NZ's college graduates are fleeing the country: the cost of living is steep, and jobs don't pay well (plus you'd be earning NZD).
Who’s tried Kalshi, the new prediction market using dollars? It looks like they devoted the time and effort to get regulatory approval. I’m enjoying it somewhat, although I find the set of actual markets a bit dull (e.g., the closing value of the S&P 500, inflation, Biden approval ratings).
I've tried it but lost interest after a while due to the markets not being very interesting or active. I find metaculus to be higher quality despite their markets not involving real money.
Can we get a SlateStarCodex deep dive into this? Collab or otherwise? I wanna see the data for the top 10/20/40/80 instead of just top 20. Maybe genre breakdowns?
My quick take is that these industries have just gotten better at making hits. Movies in the 70s were, for the most part, bad. Bad technically, artistically, etc. We only remember the good ones. This is the same for books, music, games, tv, etc. Most media is still shit, but the professional class (big studios, big authors, etc) is really really good at it.
Also they double down on their successes. If a movie costs 10s of millions to make, seems like you would rather make a sequel than an uncertain original. This shouldn't be too surprising.
I think it might also be useful to just see what fraction of total sales are to franchises. There's at least a hypothetical possibility that we have a growing long tail of one-off games with a few franchises competing for the top 100 slots, which make up less and less of total sales each year. (It's also possible that nothing like that is going on.)
I believe this is covered in the tweets and posts somewhere. Big hits make up an increasing percentage of all revenue/sales even as the overall market expands.
Perhaps this is not the community for it. But if you are feeling like something is missing in your life, I recently converted from atheism to Catholicism, and I am happy to answer questions if anyone is interested in learning more about it.
Looks like a snake, has no crosses or crucifixes anywhere, and has an extremely creepy statue of Jesus (looks like he's being blown up) as the centerpiece.
Do you "genuinly" believe in God? Did you before converting? I've personally thought about it (not exactly conversion since I'm technically already Catholic, but being more active) and my lack of faith stopped me. I've asked a few people about it and for them belief in God is not even a question, they believe, full stop. Is this a common thing, to struggle with faith and belief?
Other question, what did you get from it. You don't mention that in your message. The basic interpretation of your message would be that you felt like something was missing from your life and you don't feel that anymore, but that wasn't explicit and I don't want to assume too much.
A few others: For how long have you been converted? Do you feel like you belong in the community? Are the benefits you get (if you get any) mostly "local" (going to the church, seeing people) or not (would you still get most of those benefits if you didn't engage in the community)?
>Do you "genuinly" believe in God? Did you before converting? I've personally thought about it (not exactly conversion since I'm technically already Catholic, but being more active) and my lack of faith stopped me.
Yes, I do now. I did not before. I think if you don't struggle with "the mystery of faith" at least a little bit you're probably not being honest with yourself. I certainly did and do. If your main hurdle is the "belief in God" part I would suggest reading this:
...and then reading Feser's book "Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide" if you are interested in a more specific scientific/philosophical discussion. Once you find yourself in a place where you think "Ok, maybe God could be real, I'm not sure" - try going to Mass. Try saying a prayer, out loud, for something you or someone else desparately needs. You will feel very silly and awkward doing this - you'll feel like an imposter. But try it anyway and see what happens.
>Other question, what did you get from it.
I had measurable improvements in my physical and mental health; I lost weight and feel happier. After I was baptized I felt electric, like I had tons of energy even though it was midnight. I obviously feel like my parish is a great community and I've met a lot of very interesting people. As I mentioned below, when I was converting I prayed for something very specific in a crisis situation and received it.
I also feel challenged in my day to day life because Catholicism places demands on me. For example, I used to walk past transient panhandlers and ignore them. Now I feel I can't really just do that. Of course just giving money to every panhandler in a major American city isn't going to solve poverty, but I try to engage on other levels - buying lunch, etc. I simply think about poverty and the poor a lot more than I used to - the Church doesn't let me just think about myself. Also, I have a source of authority I can trust - which is invaluable in a low trust age. After seeing how poorly the CDC/FDA had handled COVID, I was hesitatint about getting a booster - but my priest encouraged us all to do it, so I did. Basically, I now have a source of authority in my life which constantly challenges me to do better and holds me accountable when I don't. Obviously many people in modern society consider this to be basically fascism, but I think it's valuable and something a lot of people lack in their daily lives. We all have a lot of rights, but Catholicism challenges me to remember my duties too.
> For how long have you been converted?
I started a year ago and was baptized on Easter - RCIA takes a long time.
> Do you feel like you belong in the community? Are the benefits you get (if you get any) mostly "local" (going to the church, seeing people) or not (would you still get most of those benefits if you didn't engage in the community)?
Absolutely. As for the benefits of spiritual life, I think they are both personal (see above) and communal. For example I just met someone at church who would be a great professional connection for me if I needed one (I don't).
> I think if you don't struggle with "the mystery of faith" at least a little bit you're probably not being honest with yourself.
I'm not sure what you mean by this.
> If your main hurdle is the "belief in God" part I would suggest reading this:
Here's what I think about it:
"The universe as created with intent which explains why it looks like a created thing" I can code generated art that comes from randomness and see beauty in it. I don't think intent has anything to do with beauty, or rather, I don't think intent is necessary for something to look ordrerly, law-bound or beautiful.
"Humans were fashioned which is why they are special" This one I struggle a bit with. Humans do feel special compared to every other animals.
"Signs of a higher order of reality" I don't understand what this one is supposed to be. I've seen a few strange things but the majority of those strange things happened when I was on the lookout for strange things. Some others were linked to some parts of my life. I find it relatively natural that those things come and go. For example, during a few months, I had the impression to see my cat (which is at my parent's house, not my appartment) everywhere in my appartment. Some people see/hear hallucinations all the time (visual snow for example, and there are things that are way wilder). Do these things have any meaning? I'm not sure. I certainly don't feel like they need to. Sometimes things just are.
Skipping some parts as I don't see many argument. "In fact, the very notion of scientific progress — our long track record of successful efforts to understand the material world — doubles as evidence that our minds have something in common with whatever mind designed the universe." I doubt that it's a reasonable argument. I'm personally colorblind. If I list the colors I see in a picture, for some reason all those colors will be colors that are visible to me. Because I'm the one seeing them. To see that there are colors that I missed, because I can't see them, I would need something else. In fact, it's impossible for me to prove that all of this is not a giant prank with enough resources just to make me believe I see less colors than other people. Considering that we never talked and exchanged with a non human on their views on the universe, it's normal that the universe fits our views.
The claim that religious experience happen as much as before is made without any statistics backing it up. It might be that even more people have religious experiences than before, or way less. There's nothing here except quoting a few people. It's easy to find people that went through the opposite process, from religion to atheism.
"Psychic phenomenons still happen" Two things. First "psychic" is a label that we put on it that basically means "we can't explain it", just like magic. If you can do it, it's not magic. That doesn't say anything about the nature of the thing, about how and why it happens. Second thing, again no statistics. Is the demand for mediums bigger than in the 19th century? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, the article is inconclusive.
All in all, that article is unconvincing for me.
> Once you find yourself in a place where you think "Ok, maybe God could be real, I'm not sure"
I'm already in that place.
> try going to Mass. Try saying a prayer, out loud, for something you or someone else desparately needs. You will feel very silly and awkward doing this - you'll feel like an imposter. But try it anyway and see what happens.
I've done it. I've been to the Mass many times in fact. I even said a few words for my brother's wedding. And sometimes there is a something that I can feel. But this something has absolutely nothing to do with God for me. Just like every time I'm in a church, I feel something. But it's not about the church itself. It's about the people. Whether God is real or not, people have assembled here, often for centuries, sometimes for more than 500 years, to celebrate something together. They've built those beautiful buildings. That's something to me. But the same can be said of pretty much anything. Religion/faith can make people do beautiful things, just like love for your family or animals or seashells or anything. You could explain that "love" as some kind of mystical power than humans have, but the jump from this to being a Catholic just doesn't compute for me.
> Obviously many people in modern society consider this to be basically fascism, but I think it's valuable and something a lot of people lack in their daily lives.
I think that's a bit reductive. One of the challenges of modern society is that you have most of the time all of the information you need to make a decision, it's just very hard work. Finding a source of authority can also be a way to not have to do this hard work. In fact, I think a lot of movements in modern society points to people looking for ways to not have to think. Modern politics is a big one. That's of course not to question your personal choices, but just to give an opposite point of view/explanation.
Thanks for sharing all of that and answering my questions! I wish you the best in your journey.
I think it means at some point everyone feels like Job, like God abandoned them. Everyone looks at an obligation demanded of them and feels it is too hard, too crazy. I feel this way about the Church's teachings on abortion. It is a source of ambivalence for me. I don't reject it, but I wrestle with it.
> One of the challenges of modern society is that you have most of the time all of the information you need to make a decision, it's just very hard work. Finding a source of authority can also be a way to not have to do this hard work.
This is true, but I also think that doing all this work from scratch makes you more likely to be wrong. Very smart theologians have worked on these issues for 2,000 years, why reinvent the wheel yourself? Are you really going to do it better? Probably not.
>I'm already in that place.
If you are open to it, I'd really suggest Feser's book about Aquinas for you. I feel like you already have all of the pieces, but his work really ties all these things together to explain why Catholicism is true and correct way better than I ever could.
To take your programming example: Yes, the program makes random, beautiful things because you made it do that. The program was made with a telos, which guides it towards an end. The element of randomness doesn't change the underlying telos. You have DNA which caused you to develop with certain features - arms, legs, etc. Sure, an element of your development is random. But your telos still exists, we have scientific proof of it.
I will also pray for your return to full communion with the Church.
"Very smart theologians have worked on these issues for 2,000 years, why reinvent the wheel yourself?"
Yeah, _mostly_ people do just rework old arguments.
Occasionally, things _do_ change. Prior to Darwin and (ironically) Mendel, the watchmaker argument for the existence of an intelligent creator god was a perfectly respectable intellectual position. Not any more.
You may be interested to know that Catholics do not subscribe to creationism! The Thomistic argument for the existence of God rests on different premises.
> I've asked a few people about it and for them belief in God is not even a question, they believe, full stop.
It might be interesting to explore deeper what *exactly* they believe in.
I suspect that for many people it is more or less: "there is a supernatural intelligent force that created the world and the afterlife... and I have no specific reason to assume that the description in the Bible is wrong, except for the specific bits that seem weird or inconvenient for me". Which is basically social conformity.
I suspect that for you it would be more like: "is it possible that all the statements, especially the weird and inconvenient ones, are literally true?" which is much higher bar.
> I've asked a few people about it and for them belief in God is not even a question, they believe, full stop.
Probably yes for nerds, no for people who do not think about things too much.
Non-nerds may have a crisis of faith if they want to hang out with two social groups that have mutually incompatible beliefs, or if their religious group opposes in near-more something that they are (e.g. homosexuality) or they can't give up (e.g. extramarital sex).
> I suspect that for many people it is more or less: "there is a supernatural intelligent force that created the world and the afterlife... and I have no specific reason to assume that the description in the Bible is wrong, except for the specific bits that seem weird or inconvenient for me". Which is basically social conformity.
It could be, but I very much doubt it. That's not how the people I hang with tend to think.
How do you deal with doctrine that you have to accept, created by people much less smart than yourself and kept by institutional inertia?
Personally I'd like to have a spiritual community of some sort, but all the churches around and _especially_ the Catholic Church look like a sad parody of what such a community could look like.
I think you and I simply have totally different epistemological views. I think the accumulated wisdom of everyone who lived and built our civilization over the last 2,000 years far exceeds my own. “Inertia” might also be called “tradition” which the ancients abided by for a reason.
"accumulated wisdom of everyone who lived and built our civilization over the last 2,000 years"
Wisdom is a tricky thing.
Some experience accumulated a 1000 years ago is still valid, some has been invalidated by later changes. Almost anything that could be said about war, beyond "it kills people", in 0 AD would be grossly wrong now. Hiroshima was not a sword fight. The scale and speed of the weapons has changed by orders of magnitude, and that MATTERS.
The platonic solids still are what they were. Most of human biology still is what it was - except medicine is now far more useful and actually gives us options we didn't have.
The whole scale of human action is different. That the CO2 from power plants in the northern hemisphere may melt enough of Antarctica to flood part of Bangladesh is not a possibility that people in 0 AD, or even 1800 AD, dealt with.
I don't think Catholic theology denies most of this. The Church's opposition to war has grown in response to the increased destructive power of weaponry, the Church opposes the death penalty because modern tools of law enforcement and effective incarceration make it unnecessary, there's a lot of theological work being done about stewardship and the enviornment, and so on.
The part that doesn't change are the basic insights about human nature and ethics - for example, the fact that everyone has a right to life. The fact that the telos of sex is reproduction. The fact that all men are born free. The application of principles can and must change with circumstances, but certain truths are universal and eternal.
The "unchanging" parts all look to me like politics, as unconvincing, unsupported, and subject to dispute as any party's platform. Oh, that's funny - re "born free" the RCC itself has waffled on slavery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_slavery "others, including the influential Thomas Aquinas, argued the case for slavery subject to certain restrictions."
Ah, the shifting winds of politics...
The platonic solids _are_ still there.
Human biology is still mostly constant (mostly with medicine changing)
Unfortunately, I grew up in a Catholic family and rejected religion in my teens, because the "accumulated wisdom" on display among the clergy amounts to spewing hate and diddling kids. I still have to deal with a significant part of my country that wishes to return to the Middle Ages, and votes accordingly.
I think there is something genuinely valuable in the Catholic tradition, but Catholicism as practiced is not good at teaching it to followers.
I think it says a lot about the power of the tradition that even people who have significant antipathy towards it such as yourself still see something good in it.
Sure thing, but as a Catholic you're not allowed to cherry-pick (the entire point, as you mentioned in a different thread). So you have to take the whole package, which for me is too distasteful to do.
Then again, perhaps as a new convert you can avoid the pitfalls of societies in which the religion is entrenched. There used to be a time when people went to be eaten by lions in peace because they believed in Christ, after all...
I'll simply say that I very much reject the idea that any part of Western civilization - including 18th century Britain - isn't build on a Catholic foundation.
Obviously the neolithic revolution predates Christ's arrival; I won't pretend to know a lot about it. But it is interesting that it first happened right in the exact same part of the world where Jacob's descendants later lived.
Not OP but also Catholic: None of the above, I will be the version of me that God wills me to be which I don't think I will ever fully be on Earth but that I try to become closer to every day.
To be more concrete it will likely be a post purgatory version of me and how time works in purgatory is not clear to me,it might be that asking how old I would be is like asking what the angles of the color blue add up to.
If I'm being honest, I do not. I try to comply, but I also attend confession and pray for forgiveness.
One of the reasons I think Catholicism is true is because it is very hard. It would be very convenient if God was cool with me doing all the things I personally want to do at any given time, but He is not. He has set out a set of commandments and I am expected to keep them. If I'd just wanted a community I would have become a Unitarian.
On a philosophical level, I also think the Church's sexual teachings are being proven correct with the passage of time. One of the most difficult and unpopular, for example, is birth control. Yet the telos of sex is obviously reproduction, and there seems to be a looming demographic crisis brewing as sex has become totally divorced from that.
"there seems to be a looming demographic crisis brewing as sex has become totally divorced from that."
No. Generally speaking, the demographic transition, slowed population growth, has made our problems a bit more tractable, not more difficult. We've overrun a number of resource limits (the one getting the most attention is, of course, the ability of the atmosphere to absorb CO2 without too much rise in greenhouse effects - but there are others as well (e.g. peak phosphorus)). Setting up parts of the economy and government programs to require permanent exponential growth was always a terrible idea. Ponzi schemes are doomed from the moment they are conceived. They are guaranteed to fail, the only question is when.
This argument would be more credible to me if we were actually on track for a stable population rather than collapse in secular Western societies. TFR isn’t leveling off at replacement so that population growth slows and stops - it’s way below replacement. Less than 1.0 in some Asian countries.
Yes, it is lower than replacement. I don't consider this catastrophic. It isn't dropping to zero. If TFR stayed at 1.0 for three generations, we'd drop from almost 8 billion people to 1 billion people. We had a thriving civilization at 1 billion people. All the triumphs of the 19th century: The periodic table, electromagnetism, evolution, happened with that population.
I'm picking 1 billion because it has been estimated that a 1st world standard of living can be maintained sustainably at around that population.
I expect that, given the 90 years or so that this shrinkage would take, there are plausible things that could be done to make raising children a less lousy deal, possibly raising the TFR back to 2.1 and stabilizing the population at 1 billion: The housing stock need not evaporate - if it is maintained as the population shrinks, this could become less of a constraint to potential parents. Perhaps the economy could be managed to make employment more stable again, and force fewer people into the precariat.
More speculatively, we might have artificial wombs, and be able to circumvent the maternal morbidity and mortality that we still have. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_complications_of_pregnancy Also speculatively, perhaps medicine will be able to push human lifespan considerably higher over the next 90 years. Taking 18 years to raise a child looks like less of a chunk of one's life if lifespans were say 160 years rather than 80.
(And other things may happen, e.g. AGI, that might moot all of this)
Population both grows *and* shrinks exponentially, unfortunately, like any other process in which dx/dt ~ x. Like a pandemic wave. It comes on fast, surprising human instincts and causing panics, and it recedes just as fast, also surprising human instincts. Doubtless when the population of Easter Island starting falling the inhabitants thought they had plenty of time to turn it around -- right up until the moment it abruptly dawned on them they didn't.
Or to put it another way, countries are generally finding it *even harder* to turn population change from below replacement to replacement than they did turning it from above replacement to below. That does not bode well. We are a social species, if we accidentally overshoot your 1 billion mark because there's too much inertia, and end up with 100 million scattered over the entire globe I doubt modern society can be maintained. There just wouldn't be enough people in most locations to enjoy the efficiencies of specialization. (The sophisticated suburban county in which I live would be reduced to 4000 inhabitants, basically the size of a medieval town). We would all have to become much more generalist, like people who live in remote locations or survivalists. There would be none of this being one of the few thousand who can afford to specialize in tinkering with machine-learning programs or trying to design boosters that could reach Mars directly, while billions of others keep the wheels turning and the lights on. One would expect progress to drastically slow, or stop.
Why? It seems obvious to me that if someone comes up to you and says “hey, I have this religion, and it just so happens to tell you exactly what you want to hear about truth, life, and the nature of God” that they are lying. This is how a lot of Evangelical Protestantism seems to me.
That has no bearing on perceived difficulty of strict adherence.
It's funny you say that about Protestantism, considering it was borne out of a sentiment that the Church doctrine was not following the Bible closely enough in many respects. You might enjoy reading The Reformation by Diarmaid MacCulloch, very well written.
I used to look at Evangelicals with that line similarly, but now I figure that it is how God is reaching them, and so it is true, for them - at least where they hear Him clearly.
"One of the reasons I think Catholicism is true is because it is very hard." Ha! Try not eating bacon and cutting a part of your penis! Or fasting for a month a year. Or self-flagellating! You guys have it sweet!
My understanding of confession is that it's not supposed to be a get out of jail free card. Your sins are forgiven if you genuinely repent them and try not to commit them again.
But if you treat the confession booth like a car wash with no intention of changing your behaviour, your sins won't be forgiven.
As for the effect of Catholic doctrine on birth rates, I note that the birth rate in Ireland is 1.7 children per woman, in Italy it's 1.27 and in Spain it's 1.24. The Catholic prohibition of birth control doesn't seem to be doing any good in preserving the population of nominally-Catholic countries.
I definitely try not to treat confession as a car wash - I do try to adjust my behavior, and I won't take communion if I'm not in a state of grace. Do I always succeed? No. It is very hard to adjust one's own behavior after spending a long time doing pretty much whatever you want. But priests go to death row and take confession from murderers, so I hold out hope for my own soul.
It is true the church has not yet succeeded in arresting declining birth rates, but you do see higher birth rates among Catholics who regularly attend mass anywhere you look - Ireland has higher mass attendance than Italy. More to the point, I think the Church's argument about the telos of sex (which is ancient) has been proven correct: we separated sex from reproduction; and now we are staring down major social and economic problems.
Are you happy with the CC's stance on safe sex and condoms in Africa? Are you going to simply go "well they should all practice chastity and those who don't, yeah, might get AIDS"?
In retrospect I think I made an error even entertaining the premise of the “secondary harm” argument here. Sin destroys the sinner. This isn’t the same as saying that people who get AIDS “deserve it” (they do not, we are all broken) but rather to point out that the harms which flow from sin (STDs, etc.) can in no way ever be attributed to the Church’s doctrine. If there was no sexual sin, there’d be very few STD cases of any kind.
The Church does not consider sex a necessity the way breathing, eating, and defecating are, and regards those who *do* put sex in that same can't-live-without-it-for-a-moment category as thinking like little more than animals, unable to master themselves or their urges.
Hence, they are indeed comfortable with saying yes, in some circumstances chastity is the best and simplest (and certainly the cheapest) solution to the problems of STDs, the strife and tension produced by sexual jealousy, and the stress of unexpected pregnancy.
Your moral judgment would rest on a sounder footing if there *were* no other way to prevent AIDS. But that is not the case. So your beef with the Church, ironically, mirrors their beef with you: both of you believe that the *method* of preventing AIDS the other advocates has sufficiently bad side-effects in the practical real world that it should be rejected.
The question wasn't posed to me but as I have got christened to be catholic last year maybe you like to know my reasons, too. Having grown up in anticlerical surroundings, I was spiritually interested in my teens and thought I really had a choice of religions or ideologies. As I couldn't grok Hegelian philosophy I gave up on marxism and thought mahayana buddhism, especially zen, might be the path for me. After decades of karate practice and maybe one decade of zazen practice I took a postgraduate university course concerning intercultural spirituality, whatever that may be. I still felt apart from people with my buddhist approach, though I live in a pretty liberal city. I had the impression denomination really can't matter much (one love), so I went to join the religion that has shaped my culture, the original version, of course. As an old punk rocker I also like that catholicism is mainly associated with child abuse and corruption in these parts, wouldn' t feel at home in a club with a good reputation.
This is the compressed version, but still very long.
My interest started with Catholic art and jurisprudence, which I regarded as being excellent. I was also impressed with how many leadership figures the church produced In America, we have a Catholic President, Speaker of the House, and six of nine Supreme Court justices. I was also very impressed with the writing of Catholic public intellectuals including Liz Bruenig and Ross Douthat, and with the vast network of Catholic schools and hospitals which have educated/cared for/employed many people I care about or know. I had grown up in an area with a lot of stereotypical Evangelical Bible thumping, which I always regarded as dumb and backwards and intolerant. So I wondered why so many smart/successful people were Catholics, and why so much great work had come from the community in a very secular age.
This got me thinking about theism more generally and about Catholicism specifically. The benefits of belonging to a religious community are well-known (better mental health, physical health, etc.) but (contrary to what my Brother in Christ Evesh suggests below) I wasn't really sold on God being real and I wasn't going to join the community and just pretend. Someone suggest I read Edward Feser's book "Aquinas: A Beginnier's Guide" which I did. Feser's defense of God's existence is basically a response to modern critics of Aquinas Five Proofs, and revolves heavily around Telos. I found it persuasive, and suggest the book for anyone else who is interested (although I will say it is not an easy read). At this point Catholicism seemed like the default choice since 1) the only persuasive defense of theism I have ever read was authored by Catholics and 2) the Church fathers literally compiled the Bible, so the Protestant idea of "read and decide for yourself" seems silly to me. I was still considering Orthodoxy and Judaism, however.
Once I started looking into attending Mass, I had a several experiences which I consider to be instances where God specifically moved things in my life. These were not like, visions or whatever, but rather instances where things seemed to be lining up just so. The very first time I prayed for an intercession, I received it in a very dramatic fashion which I can't address at length here. I considered the possibility that these were all confirmation bias or random chance, but there were enough of them in such a short period of time that it sure doesn't seem like it.
It was a marginal choice on my part. Had I not had the specific experiences I had, I would have definitely looked into it more. I will say I appreciate the hierarchical nature of Catholicism. If the Pope did something really wild and I stopped believing he was infallible I’d look at Orthodoxy again.
I think this discussion (like many similar ones) gets complicated because there are at least three issues that are quite distinct but often mixed together. We can express them as a series of possible statements.
- I believe that religion X is true, and that it provides a complete and correct explanation of the creation and meaning of the world and of this life and the afterlife.
- I believe that the broad tradition of religion X is etc. etc. but I find version Y of it be be more soundly based and convincing.
-I have a generally religious outlook, and I find religion X to be the most intellectually and aesthetically satisfying.
-I don't have strong religious feelings, but I find that I get benefit from religion X and I prefer its moral and philosophical stance to that of others.
-I'm an agnostic and I judge religions by essentially humanist criteria. I don't think they are literally true.
I'm an atheist, and judge religions by how far their doctrine corresponds to my opinions. God is frequently wrong.
There are others, but you get the point. Essentially you have to decide whether you see religion as (a) literally true - and this is not the same thing as biblical literalism (b) sort of true in the symbolic sense and useful socially, appearing in different guises in different places or (c) just another human intellectual construct, to be judged as you would any other philosophy or ideology.
Unless you decide which you believe, it's hard for two people to have a productive conversation.
0. Thank you for doing this! I imagine it might take some courage - though perhaps it says more about me :)
1. You've been (reasonably, given this argument) considering other alternatives such as Judaism. Yet strictly at most one of them could be true, by their own lights. Isn't it an argument against the entire line of reasoning?
2. All of this is weirdly "I'm betting on the more successful god/ the deity with the most successful people". Isn't the entire concept frowned upon by various religions? I know there's quite some stuff in the Old Testament against this very line of argument - the Jewish god is not to be worshiped *because* he's "better than others" (To be fair, there's a bit of that when, say, Moses duels the Egyptian priests and beats them - but Elija's challenge on mount Carmel paints an entirely different picture. Hey, I'm not the one who expects to find divinely consistent properties in the text!).
3. Also, are Catholics across the globe so very successful? I'd suggest asking the current Pope how his home congregation in the slums of Argentina is doing. OK, I'm a bit snarky, Catholics and religious people in general are heavily over-represented among the poor. There are good reasons - but not ones that necessarily favor your arguments.
4. So if tomorrow you discover a religion whose followers are doing somewhat better in some statistical outcomes sense, you're changing the entire world-view?
5. Relatedly, what was your prior for yourself being susceptible for such spiritual experiences? Do you think it unlikely that you might undergo them again if ever you go on another spiritual adventure?
>You've been (reasonably, given this argument) considering other alternatives such as Judaism. Yet strictly at most one of them could be true, by their own lights. Isn't it an argument against the entire line of reasoning?
Not really, since Judaism and Catholicism overlap quite a bit in their doctrinal claims. If either is true, quite a large chunk of the other one is true as well, especially as compared to the backdrop of atheism. (That doesn't mean the differences are theologically unimportant, or in any way negotiable from the perspective of an adherent; but it does mean that that a specific piece of evidence for J is not necessarily a coincidence if C is true, and vice versa.) There is quite a lot of common ground. For example, if a Jew has an experience of God while praying in the synagogue, then unless that experience was somehow specifically anti-Christian, there is no particular reason why a Catholic would need to deny its validity, while an atheist would have to.
Of course, there are historical reasons for this overlap. SInce Christianity is a claimed fulfilment of Judaism, you should think of their relation as being sort of like Newtonian Gravity and General Relativity. The latter extends the former, but still accepts nearly all the claims of the former---at least in appropriate contexts and with a somewhat recontextualized interpretation. (This analogy is still viable if you think Judaism is correct: just imagine an alternative science where Einstein was wrong because there actually is absolute space or whatever; or perhaps consider a more controversial extension like string theory.) These theories agree about a bunch of things, and have some commonalities in their justifications.
>Yet strictly at most one of them could be true, by their own lights. Isn't it an argument against the entire line of reasoning?
Not necessarily - I sort of feel like we make choices along these lines all the time in our daily lives. I can only vote for Party A or Party B, and one party's policy is probably objectively better than the other. Could I be wrong? Sure, but I make an informed choice.
>All of this is weirdly "I'm betting on the more successful god/ the deity with the most successful people"
I think this is not quite the correct account of my decision making process. Rather, I looked at a group of people who had great success and noticed the success appeared to be connected to their culture and value system. Then I investigated the basis of that value system. I think it's logical to conclude that if a certain value system regularly produces good collective outcomes for a community, that system might be rooted in something important and good and true.
Catholics are overrepresented among the poor because the Church works very hard to help the poor. Catholicism is, in many ways, anti-meritocratic and anti-capitalist. It is rooted in the common good, not individual gain. The great works of Catholicism are sometimes material, but are also aesthetic and ethical and legal and social.*
I would actually say that, relative to everything else, Jews probably achieve greater collective success as a people than Catholics when you consider the history of discrimination, etc. I considered Judaism, and I probably would have looked into it further if I had not immediately had the specific spiritual experiences I had. I will say that while I've heard plenty of atheistic and Islamic attacks on Christianity, I have never heard a credible Jewish account of who Jesus was if he was not divine. I'm sure there's some scholarship out there, but modern Jews seem to just ignore the question since they aren't too interested in converting others.
>Relatedly, what was your prior for yourself being susceptible for such spiritual experiences? Do you think it unlikely that you might undergo them again if ever you go on another spiritual adventure?
I had spent my whole life being very skeptical of such experiences and was very surprised when they occurred. I think the odds of them happening at all were very low, and so the odds of them happening again would be even lower. It would be an interesting test though - walk into a synagogue and see if anything happens.
The analogy to parties doesn't seem compelling at all, to me. Religions (mostly) don't claim to be just a set of policies to live a good life. Their claim is to represent a certain Truth (and incidentally, possibly to condemn those who fail to recognize it to eternal torture, but let's not quibble ;) ). Not unlike Sauron, "they do not share power" - you can't shop around. Judaism is certainly not OK with you weighing "eh, on the whole, I might have more mystical profundity there but more socio-economic success there, guess I'll go for Catholicism in the end". It's not even very much OK with you choosing Judaism on those grounds! (though of course that's a somewhat sweeping statement). Would you say the standard Catholic position is different? Sure seems that Catholicism wasn't very forgiving of alternatives, historically. Alas - it seems that parties are now trying to replicate this property...
Re: Jesus - If we don't presuppose anything religious to start with, why is the position "he was possibly some dude, or possibly a conglomeration of some dudes" reasonable? He could quite possibly be a very impressive dude. I could imagine someone in the future looking at, say, Penn or Da Vinci and not quite believing what they were up to without divine explanations, and for that matter Mohammad left his mark on the world. But unless we're presupposing a religious answer, why is there a puzzle for Judaism to solve in Jesus?
Catholicism and poverty - I'm not necessarily up for a debate about your point, but let it be said that in my view your claim that "Catholics are overrepresented among the poor because the Church works very hard to help the poor" is very much not supported by facts. Suppose I do engage you on this point and commonly agreed-upon statistics prove that in fact Catholicism and its presence are not a great predictor of development across the globe, and perhaps that the simple explanation is that poor people are desperate for what religion (in particular, Catholicism) offers without gaining by it - supposing all this, would that change your world-view? Do you agree that a negative answer is devastating to your success-related argument (though not to your personal experiences)?
"that system might be rooted in something important and good and true." - one
https://francisquinn.substack.com/p/newcombs-paradox-and-metaphysics?s=w
I'm looking for an NLP program that can match pronouns in a sentence to the noun they refer to. I don't need anything else, just that. Does anyone know if there's one available that's not too expensive?
Hugging face has a library called neuralcoref. It uses spacy and is free
This look wonderful, thank you. Do you know of one that can also match up the verbs? For example:
"Amy walks to the store for Nancy and buys her a flower, which she appreciates."
In this sentence, "walks" and "buys" are both being carried out by Amy, while "appreciates" is being carried out by Nancy.
(Out of curiosity I just tested this sentence in neuralcoref and it incorrectly believes that "she" is referring to Amy. Seems to do pretty well with sentences I didn't intentionally design to be difficult though.)
I knew Ukraine wasn't about to lose any major cities, but after hearing bad news about Ukraine for awhile, my confidence that they would take back territory in the next year (on net) fell to 60%. Now it's back to ~88%. [edit: err... make that 80%]
Why? the last two weeks of tweets & retweets by @TrentTelenko, who predicted both that Russia would invade #Ukraine and fail to take over the whole country, and who knows tons of military trivia. I don't know if Trent is holding back any info that reduces Ukraine's chances, but he offers quite a barrage of good signs.
Here I focus on facts I didn't know before, but at the end I'll have some bonus facts that are also instructive.
*Edit* (June 10): very bad news today lowers my confidence all the way down to 60%[1].
- Key M270 and M142 MLRS systems (which can threaten Russian supply lines to Izyum) are being sent to Ukraine (I heard this already but it's good to have confirmation, plus Trent says it's a "game changer" https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1531822945911328768): https://twitter.com/noclador/status/1531012132975910912
-- Ukraine is even getting quality stuff from Germany: https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1533576265847955456 (Germany still drags its heels though https://twitter.com/visegrad24/status/1534615136467550209)
-- "80 Russian artillery pieces have been destroyed with less than 12 Caesar SPH in a few days" https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1534291040357830656
-- Spain to supply 40 KMW Leopard 2A4 MBTs: https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1534341808687308800
. -- Update: Ukraine WON'T get enough ammo for their new long-range GMLRSs: https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1537131753441214465
- Larger quantities of artillery shells are being sent to Ukraine than I thought: https://twitter.com/Osinttechnical/status/1530038089799946240 Edit: somehow I misinterpreted the number "208,000 155mm rounds allocated for Ukraine" from the U.S.; the number felt bigger than it is, though still higher than I knew about before. Google/Bing wouldn't tell me how many shells Russia is using, but I seem to recall somebody claiming Russia uses 30,000 shells per day and Denys Davydov saying Russia fires 20 shells for every shell fired by Ukraine. It should be noted though that much of Russia's artillery is imprecise and slow to configure (basically 'Uragan and Smerch' is lousy, see https://twitter.com/noclador/status/1531012132975910912, and by contrast I've seen some impressive videos of precise Ukrainian artillery). It seems like the Russians have just dumped a lot of their shells indiscriminately on cities until Ukraine has "nothing left to defend", and the spread-out shelling patterns on Ukrainian trenches also demonstrate low precision. As Small Wars Journal noted in 2020 (discussing 2015), "Ukrainians claimed that for every salvo they fired, they received 10 to 15 salvos in return". So it's not entirely clear that Ukraine will get as much gear as they need, and I have to suspect I'm missing some info that is favorable to Russia. On the other hand Russia doesn't seem to use its artillery effectively and I don't think I weighted partisan/guerilla fighting enough. Overall I'm reducing my confidence to 80%.
- Early signs Russia is running low on equipment seem to have been confirmed by more recent signs (the partial retaking of Severodonetsk and Zelensky's visit to Lysychansk) that Ukrainians in Donbas are not on the verge of collapse: https://twitter.com/PhillipsPOBrien/status/1530828743832440832 (that's in addition to Russia's deployment of old T-62s and Ukraine knowing about this in advance, as if you needed more confirmation of their good intel https://twitter.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1529517640053661699) BTW: Russia has lost far more tanks than heavy artillery, but artillery is their weapon of choice. However, when RU runs short on tanks and BMPs, I expect it'll be easier for Ukrainian footsoldiers to advance despite that artillery, especially as their numbers increase.
- There are indications Russian casualty rates are higher than Ukraine while Ukraine mobilizes faster: https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1532823278699663360
- Russian artillery is manpower-heavy, lowering Russian efficiency: https://twitter.com/noclador/status/1528024733983424512 (see also https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1530567969889300482)
- Unconfirmed good news for Ukraine https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1530027464990277650
- Unconfirmed advanced cancer and assassination plot for Putin: https://twitter.com/Archer83Able/status/1532367395964309504
- Apparent Russian tank losses are confirmed accurate: https://twitter.com/partizan_oleg/status/1526199389764874240 (a loss rate dramatically higher than that of Ukraine https://twitter.com/Lee__Drake/status/1529870039167315969)
- *Before* Ukraine's apparent offensive north of Kherson stalled out, @TrentTelenko judged it to be a "shaping operation" rather than a real offensive, which would make the "stall" something to be expected. https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1531814609908383744
- Russian losses should mainly be infantry, and their losses are so large that Trent thinks they've "hit a wall"—their infantry is nearly gone after accounting for both dead and wounded. Supporting evidence: RU deployed 25 BTGs to Severodonetsk and is still failing there. https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1533491373604802561
-- Related tweets on Severodonetsk: (1) UA tactical advantage: height https://twitter.com/Osinttechnical/status/1533249952809463809) (2) LNR is out of troops: https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1533556977674117122
-- Related 🧵: 'I think the" Culminating Point" for Russian offensive operations in Ukraine is almost upon us.' https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1534291035924340736
-- Related: "Ghost Troop" corruption means Russia had less soldiers than it thought https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1534700521633857536
-- Followup 🧵: https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1534700516843864065
- And some minor evidence.
-- Ukrainians are more motivated and produce new hardware that Russia possibly wouldn't (https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1533516137992007681 https://twitter.com/UAWeapons/status/1532816735996346370)
-- Russian 122mm MLRS destroyed close to the front (https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1533521893969612800)
-- Ukraine still attacking snake island (https://twitter.com/raging545/status/1534248225632358401)
- And a little counterevidence: https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1534412330330636289
- "Butcher of Syria" General Dvornikov seems to have been fired, suggesting that Putin was unhappy with Russia's performance and is trying a useless "Hail Mary" https://euroweeklynews.com/2022/06/05/putin-has-relieved-general-alexandr-dvornikov-as-commander-in-ukraine/
Plus here's some stuff I already knew:
- Russia still loses Generals ocasionally: https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1533518405042589697 https://twitter.com/anders_aslund/status/1533523990312099845
- More bad tactics from Russia https://twitter.com/mdmitri91/status/1532689797269045248
- Some pro-Russian milbloggers are changing their tune https://twitter.com/mdmitri91/status/1533505067881533441
Bonuses:
- a long 🧵 on the history of Russian political and strategic goals in Ukraine: https://twitter.com/John_A_Ridge/status/1529262545521020928
- partisan/guerilla warfare is another point in Ukraine's favor, e.g. https://twitter.com/cliffordlevy/status/1533934971722817542
- the most important bonus: powerpoint videos by Perun: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCC3ehuUksTyQ7bbjGntmx3Q/featured
- Forecasts from understandingwar.org have been pretty consistently optimistic for Ukraine, and pretty consistently correct too
- Fun fact: Russia is happy to starve third-worlders to death if it hurts Ukraine. Let's hope Ukraine wins quickly! https://twitter.com/vcdgf555/status/1533557914954178560
- Fun fact: visual representation of estimated density of Russian BTGs (via uawardata.com): https://twitter.com/HN_Schlottman/status/1533917743375859712
- Anyone know where to get English versions of these POW videos? The ones English ones I have seen have been fantastically entertaining. https://www.youtube.com/c/VolodymyrZolkin/videos
There is one thing I don't get about Trent: he evidently takes the Ukrainian claim for Russian troops KIA (30,500 dead) at face value, to reach a conclusion that Russia has taken 79,000 casualties with 80% being infantry. I'm not sure why one would trust that 30K number, but on the flip side he uses a low ratio of wounded to killed on the RU side, as compared to what is typical in wars, so maybe it balances out, almost.
[1] June 10: the reported casualty rate has risen to ~150 Ukrainian soldiers killed per day. This is probably higher than Russia's casualty rate and certainly higher than the rate of losses for Russian nationals. Since Ukraine is mostly in a defensive posture, this should not be happening. In fact, I've decided that even though I earn minimum wage (and can't get a tax deduction for Ukrainian charities), I will donate $1000 today. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/10/ukraine-casualty-rate-russia-war-tipping-point ... June 30: I suspect Ukraine's high casualty rate is related to the continuing artillery imbalance, in which Russia just has far more shells with which to bomb Ukraine. I can only hope that Ukraine's rapid failure around Lysychansk is more about Ukraine trying to reduce casualties than about Ukrainian forces "collapsing".
Ugh, okay, Trent Telenko is uh ... wow. I am dumbfounded that he didn't pick up on this video being obviously fake. Kudos that he owned up to the mistake, at least. https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1542604260420067328
It's also clear he was wrong about Russian forces being close to exhaustion.
A counterpoint is the coverage from "War in Ukraine" that is more pessimistic for Ukraine.[1]
A problem with this source (like so many other sources) is that they don't report where they are getting their information from. Although they're probably pro-Ukraine, I know that in one case they said that the Russians has destroyed a third of Ukraine's M777 artillery, and they had a whole segment of the show about this topic[2], but this is just a Russian distortion: a *Russian* source said "The Armed Forces of Ukraine are losing a third of the M777 howitzers transferred from the United States in battles with Russian artillerymen, said Deputy Defense Minister of Ukraine Denis Sharapov", and I couldn't find any non-Russian sources saying this. I did find sources indicating that about one third of m777 had been damaged from *firing too quickly*, and so had to be repaired.
Similarly I've decided that while Trent Telenko is a very knowledgeable and useful source, he is too biased toward optimism in Ukraine's favor.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P23DCGiChbU
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sepZO-bYSnk
This report is also interesting[1]. Key takeaways:
• Americans genuinely deserve to be proud of this: the USA is giving more aid to Ukraine than ALL European countries combined... despite the fact that the EU has a much larger population than the U.S.!
• Total support from the US is about €42.7 billion, over half of which is military aid; the rest of the world combined is giving almost the same amount.
• Well over half of committed military aid has been delivered (figure 7). This tells me that we should be able to tell in the next couple of months whether that aid is enough to allow Ukraine to stop Russian advances and take back territory. I'm guessing they need a little more time for training. Edit: this is misleading, see below.
• Other democracies near Russia also give outsized donations. Destroying Russian weapons of death in Ukraine isn't just the right thing to do — it also bolsters the security of other countries in the region, and will allow refugees to return home from these countries, which also generally took in the most refugees.
• Also worth noting that more generally, aid delivered lags far behind aid committed: https://twitter.com/DPiepgrass/status/1537234675369816064
Edit: I am confused about something though. The figure 7 chart shows about €4.2 billion committed military aid from USA, but one of the main-page charts[1] shows about €24 billion committed military aid from USA! I am asking them about this and they seem responsive[2]. Most likely the remaining €19.8 billion is undelivered aid, in which case Ukraine is far from having the hardware it needs.
[1] https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-support-tracker/?cookieLevel=not-set
Tweeted: https://twitter.com/DPiepgrass/status/1537222054344175618
[2] https://twitter.com/DPiepgrass/status/1537445028670283781
Yes, the Ukrainian army is clearly having a tough time of it. Unfortunately we don't have the same level of insight into the Russian army. That they can't make more than the most minor advances with all the numbers and firepower they have brought to bear, suggests that things are going very poorly indeed on their side - but which army is closest to breaking is unknowable, until it happens.
I'm not even going to try to predict this one beyond saying it's basically a coin toss.
God, I hope. If the Ukraine war ends favorably for Russia I expect that my country will be a candidate for next on the chopping block. Here's to optimism. Cheers!
What is "the AK47 of paintball guns" and what is "the AR15 of paintball guns"?
As you may or may not be aware, there's currently a market on Manifold for whether anyone will take you up on your ban appeals process. As prediction markets tend to do, this creates an incentive for someone to get banned from your blog.
You're one of my favorite writers, so I'd prefer to not actually say anything inappropriate in your comments section, and would appreciate it if you just banned me without that being necessary. :)
https://manifold.markets/EnopoletusHarding/will-so-much-as-a-single-banned-pos
> Market Manipulator (Banned)
> You're one of my favorite writers
There you go, running your mouth off again
In a sense, Michael Shellenberger getting 95000 votes (with only "50%" of ballots in) is a triumph. Jesus only needed twelve, Shellenberger has literally thousands of times more support.
In a more practical sense, fourth place is the second loser. And 3% of the vote is a country mile away from the 15% obtained by the second-place finisher.
We've had a discussion before about spiritualism, so here is an article from the Public Domain Review:
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/what-spiritualism-really-is
Thomas Carlyle, who in life was extremely dismissive of Spirtualism, was made to go through his paces in the afterlife, where he had completely changed his views - according to this book, "What Spiritualism Really Is, By Thomas Carlyle In the Spirit-World, And Through the Impressional Brain of Dr. WM. J. Bryan" written by a doctor in 1919.
Apart from this example of how you can be made to say anything once you're dead, it's why the starry-eyed ideals around AI and Transhumanism don't impress me that much. Spirtualism, too, denied it was a religion; it was nothing like those musty, hoary old relics. You didn't have to take anything on faith. Spiritualism could be examined and tested, it produced results, and reproducible results. Eminent and respectable people like doctors and scientists backed it. This wasn't pie-in-the-sky based on texts from thousands of years ago, you too could go to a séance today and have independent confirmation of contact with the dead.
So faint demurrals of "but we're nothing like a religion, we never demand you take anything on faith!" are not that convincing to me about the latest New Scientific Wonderment.
Isn't there a big difference between a starry-eyed ideal and a belief system? Transhumanism might be moral or immoral, plausible or implausible, but it's an ideal, not a set of truth statements. It does not claim that human-machine hybrids already exist, but that they would be desirable. Spiritualism and religion makes claims about the existence of supernatural entities in the here and now.
That's true. It is also reasonable to at least sort-of include a guess that transhuman modifications will become feasible as part of the set of ideas considered to be in transhumanism. ( Yeah, fuzzy, I know. )
"the starry-eyed ideals around AI and Transhumanism don't impress me that much. Spirtualism, too, denied it was a religion; it was nothing like those musty, hoary old relics. You didn't have to take anything on faith. Spiritualism could be examined and tested, it produced results, and reproducible results. "
Yes, you have a good point. (re AI) There is always a worry about whether existing results are being extrapolated beyond what the algorithms can actually deliver. To mangle a traditional line: "The hype we have always with us" :-)
Now, the existing results are what they are, and have exceeded what some skeptics expected to be possible with no change in architecture (Scott describes the cycle in https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/my-bet-ai-size-solves-flubs?s=r).
I know that I don't know:
- Brains are sometimes surprisingly flexible. Maybe just adding more neurons will work.
- Brains have lots of anatomically distinct regions (order of 180?). If those didn't provide some advantage why did evolution select for them? Is it _really_ possible to match human capabilities without explicitly coding the equivalent of each of those regions?
edit: boosted brain region count: https://theconversation.com/mapping-the-brain-scientists-define-180-distinct-regions-but-what-now-62972
Looks like a pretty tough way to read 230 pages. One buck plus 10 cents postage in 1920?
Why don’t you ask Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz which test is best to do on the Ivermectin data then do that test?
Lighting the Ivermectin data on fire and seeing if the smoke cures Covid seems likely to provide identical results as any of the more statistics based tests.
Yes Ref, no matter what test you choose the signal of benefit will always be there. Scott’s gotta choose a statistical method sooner or later, may as well choose G M-K’s. It will show a signal of benefit as well then we can finally put it to bed, IVM works, just like Scott said in his article
'Meta-study demonstrates that dry-smoke inhalation delivers more of active ingredient than wet-steam, aerosol via inhaler, or sticking it up your jumper!'
(Belated) Congratulations to Scott on this title, which was apparently fully decodable (once I found the referenced piece) without reading the article:
"Current Affairs' Marxist Critique Of Toddler Show Blippi Isn't Marxist Enough"
(My reading: the anti-industrialism and the white cringe strike me as fundamentally at odds with Marxist thought, suggesting that Robinson is just name-dropping Marx for leftist cred rather than actually being Marxist.)
Robinson has never claimed to be a Marxist. The association between the two is Scott's invention.
Robinson did name-drop Karl Marx in the article, so I wouldn't call it "Scott's invention".
(Article here: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/08/the-dead-world-of-blippi )
Considering Wikipedia lists Nathan Robinson in its "American Anti-Communists" category and he considers that to be an accurate label for himself, he's very obviously not an actual Marxist, no.
There are, I am afraid, very few actual marxists around these days. Expecially in the leftist side of the world
Freddie de Boer self-describes as a Marxist.
Well, I didn't say there aren't any at all
What's the current status of abortions in Texas? Are abortions still being performed? Are bounties being paid out?
Abortions are being performed up to six weeks, not any later than that. The number of abortions performed in Texas has been about cut in half, but many women are leaving the state (if they can) or taking mail-order abortion pills (though there are new laws restricting the pill as well). https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/06/upshot/texas-abortion-women-data.html
Of course, others are unable to access abortion and are being forced to carry their unwanted pregnancies to term.
A couple of other side effects: some pharmacies are afraid of getting sued under the bounty law, and therefore are refusing to sell miscarriage treatments (since the medicines used post-miscarriage and for abortion are the same). Wait times for abortion clinics in nearby states (and not-that-nearby states) are rising due to the influx of patients from Texas, forcing some women to get abortions later in their pregnancies. And ironically, some women are getting abortions that they might have ultimately decided not to get under a less restrictive law, because they legally only have 1-2 days to make a decision after finding out that they're pregnant, so they're pressured into making a snap decision without having time to explore any alternatives.
All that said, I'm not aware of any bounties being paid out. The threat of them seems to be enough.
The "Texas abortion bounty hunters" was an operation by r/Drama. They set out to make a bait site, and they succeeded:
https://tracingwoodgrains.medium.com/how-one-tight-knit-circle-of-internet-troublemakers-convinced-professional-journalists-they-were-ac05459aa4c5
TracingWoodgrains, late of r/TheSchism which is a spin-off of a spin-off of the SSC reddit site, did a similar stunt with persuading LibsofTikTok that there was an agenda to get furrydom (furriness?) taught in elementary school. Again, this was a hoax, and an extremely detailed one:
https://www.reddit.com/r/theschism/comments/uenyis/how_i_convinced_libs_of_tiktok_to_publish_a_false/
That one was way more controversial when he informed the various disapora about it on r/TheMotte etc. He did *too* good a job and became the story, not just reported on it.
Don't believe everything you read on social media, especially when rationalists/rationalist-adjacent people of this parish may be involved!
The bounty hunters subreddit was a joke, sure, but, like... Texas *did* pass a law that allowed civilians to sue those involved in abortions, correct? What effect did that have?
> the studies aren’t homogenous
Not homogenous, "from the same origin", or not homogeneous, "of the same kind"?
Yes, but it is common to drop the extra 'e' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homogeneity_and_heterogeneity#Etymology_and_spelling
After a decade of being glasses-free after LASIK, I need glasses again (I can still see 20/20, but I need prism correction and blue-light blocking).
It is strange that I have forgotten things like "how do I keep glasses clean".
How do I keep glasses clean?
I wash them with water and wipe it with a towel. Never had a scratch I could see.
I just use my (mostly cotton) shirt to clean off the dirt about 1-2 times a day when i notice them getting dirty. When i get a bunch of gunk or dirt on them i clean em with a microfiber cloth. Maybe once every 6 months i'll actually run them under water and carefully clean them.
Been doing this for ~10 years now and it works just fine.
Don't use a microfiber cloth if you value having scratch-free glasses. The correct way to clean glasses is simple: with soap and water. First, wash your hands thoroughly. Then gently rinse any grime / particulates off with just the stream of water. Last, if there's any oils / fingerprints / smudges left, lather up some more soap on your fingers and gently clean them off the lenses. You can shake off 80% of the water, and the rest will evaporate within minutes, leaving your glasses perfectly clear.
Modern glasses are 99% likely to be made from materials that won't corrode (plastic, titanium, aluminum, etc), and this method avoids the micro-scratches which are an inevitable part of rubbing them with a cloth. The cloth, microfiber or not, is packed with microscopic particulates that are substantially harder than the polycarbonate modern glasses are almost always made of, and especially harder than the various coatings the lenses almost always have applied.
Long ago, I would use a microfiber cloth like I'd been told, and invariably my glasses would be a scratched up mess within a year. Since developing this method, my glasses have been crystal clear and scratch free for years at a time. The last time I was in, my optometrist referred to the state of my lenses as "remarkable", given their age.
Yes, this is why I pay extra and wait long times to get lenses made of genuine optical glass. Whoever sold the general public on polycarbonate lenses should get the Nobel Prize in Marketing. Far cheaper and easier to manufacture, and don't last as long, pretty much a massive boost to the profit margin. Freaking brilliant, in a sort of evil twisted way.
I'm now imagining that a Nobel Prize for Marketing would consist of a lit stick of dynamite.
Not using a microfiber cloth is strange, i've been using them for many years and i've never once had it scratch my glasses, not even a bit.
I second the superiority of soap and water (personally I use tissues soaked in them) over microfiber
I've found that when my glasses get wet and it evaporates, it leaves obvious, visible residue.
This is a sign that either you insufficiently broke down any oils with soap, or that your water contains quite a lot of non-water stuff - like calcium, that dries as visible deposits.
You don't. Fortunately you'll start having floaters soon, and dirty glasses will be the least of your problems.
Microfiber cloth in your back pocket ?
Scott, where did you get your characterization of Shellenberger?
From his Rogan clip?
That's not the last word, but neither is it an error.
Hello everyone.
Has anyone here read Erik Hoel's The Revelations? I found Kierk Soren to be a really interesting character. I'd like book recommendations with main characters like Kierk Soren.
One more thing, any advise and book recommendations for a 23 year old that's about to embark on his intellectual journey? Thanks.
I've read some of it, but I feel like too much of its effort is going into sounding literary-ish, to the detriment of flow and readability.
I know nothing about Erik Hoel or this novel; but there absolutely must be a connection to the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. You don't hit on that name by accident. Kierkegaard's books are really good, but hard to understand right if you don't have a pretty deep background in philosophy.
Read The Republic. Everybody should read The Republic.
Find some poetry that you genuinely like. Like, it gives you pleasure to read it. Go deep into that genre/form/movement/school.
If you want to be well-read in the Western canon, you can't do better than the Great Books list from St. John's College: https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/undergraduate/great-books-reading-list
Erik Hoel is a fantastic writer. He has a substack publication called The Intrinsic Perspective.
Haha, I noticed that as well. Tried searching 'Kierk Soren' one time on Google and the first result was Søren Kierkegaard. I'll try and check him out despite my shallow background in philosophy.
Thanks. I'll check it out.
Regarding the poetry advice, it's been difficult. Do you have any anthologies that I can check out? Thanks.
> Find some poetry that you genuinely like. Like, it gives you pleasure to read it. Go deep into that genre/form/movement/school.
Is there something like compilations of different styles of poetry with "what to read next" and explanations to find something that you like?
Hmmm, I was introduced to most of the poetry that I love either at school, or pulling random books off the shelf at Barnes & Noble, or poetry collections my parents kept on the bookshelf when I was a kid. It looks like you want an anthology. You can often get old editions of textbooks for cheap. For instance: https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?isbn=9780393979206&n=100121503&cm_sp=mbc-_-ISBN-_-used
Thanks for the Great Books list. A lot of homework for me, when I`ll be finished with the sagas. Laxness may be overdue for me. I would expect the English translation to be much better than the German after my experiences with Mikael Niemi, though the German translator for Icelandic surely is not the one they hired for Finnish-Swedish texts. I just suspect a general pattern. Are there any other minority language speakers here who also saw better English translations of foreign texts than those to their language?
I can't help with your first issue. As for book recommendations, there are lots of literary canons out there. Don't skip The Brothers Karamazov, Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake. Get into Shakespeare. My personal hints would be the Maqroll novels by A. Mutis, Musil's Man without Qualities and Amos Oz.
Ulysses is good but has anyone actually read Finnegans Wake?
Well, I did, once. At least I thought so. Just checked my fine bilingual and commented edition, there's a bookmark at page 19. Maybe I stopped there. It's some years ago...
I’ve tried. Never made it very far.
Thanks a lot.
Get into Shakespeare on stage, if at all possible. The read version isn't the same.
Thanks a lot. I've read some Houllebecq. I don't know if you have read The Elementary Particles, that book is astounding, as well as riveting. I have plans to reread it. An unforgettable reading experience for me, I'd say.
I have a question about where the reasonable deductions that can be made about how AI inputs are related to outputs ends and the "black box" of artificial intelligence begins. I often see posts about AI where the author sort of resigns themself to believing that AI is an impenetrable black box while also making reasonable deductions about why it is behaving in a certain way. I would love some clarity/links to papers about why the consensus is that most of what is happening is opaque and not something that can be understood through the development of the field. I would also love links to any papers or books about like meta-AI studies. I don't mean Meta the company but rather the AI equivalent to meta-physics.
I've asked this question myself for a while now, albeit in slighly different terms, while trying to find how to classify computers in the intelligence/consciousness space.
We're pretty sure computers aren't conscious and do not take explicit decisions to piss us off, yet I'm hearing a lot of people using peculiar words to describe them. Specifically, "the computer do not *want* to do what I ask" or "my computer didn't *listen* to me".
All anthropomorphism apart, I found the words used to be pretty insightful about how we think about computers and systems in general.
A rule of thumb I use for myself is the percieved complexity of a system. If a system is simple enough for someone to be able to hold it in their mind without issue, then there are no intelligence involved.
If a system is too complex to have a complete grasp on it, because (for instance) of too many moving parts, then it's considered intelligent. This is the case for our brain: it is a physical process going through a tremendous amount of neurons and subtle connections, and we consider ourselves intelligent. Our brain cannot grasp our brain.
It seems to me that we classify as "intelligent" any system complex enough to not be trivialized by our own brain. According to this definition, people used to some systems will end up trivializing them, therefore stripping them of their intelligence.
If we apply this definition to neural networks, I'd say your NN is AI as soon as you give up on the idea of understanding their insides. As Kindly stated, we haven't yet grasped why specific weights on specific neurons encode the recognition of dogs. Most people in the AI field aren't interested in finding out how it works, but rather to find empirical configurations producing better results than other configurations (at least that was the case during my PhD).
Part of the source of this belief is the understanding that neural networks behave in this way. Even just with image recognition, we have trouble figuring how all the various weights encode the essence of what a dog looks like.
I don't have anything so formal as a paper to link to, but here is an AI StackExchange post I found: https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions/1479/do-scientists-know-what-is-happening-inside-artificial-neural-networks This is about ways that we can try to peek inside the ANN black box, which can give you an idea of how opaque that box really is. You may be interested in the links in some of the answers.
Any fellow Freemasons here? Or anyone involved in civic/service/fraternal orders or clubs? Would love to connect!
I've been a member of lodges in Canada and Australia; three years removed from being WM of my current lodge.
Hey Jeff! I'm in the US, but would love to connect anyway. My email is brandon.quintin@outlook.com
There's an Odd Fellows meeting house near my work; do all of these fraternal organizations compete, or is there general cooperation?
I've found it depends a lot on the area - in China where many were banned, people from all of them gathered around the ones that existed and cooperated. Where many thrive, they compete more, but usually competing in who does more charity, has more members, throws more parties, things like that.
Some people are members of multiple organizations, depending on how much free time they have haha.
Odd fellows are pretty rare! Hard to find active odd fellows groups.
I'm in Rotary club, and looking to connect to those in other groups, thanks for reaching out. You can find me on nesicdusan.com for LinkedIn and we can connect from there.
Thanks! I’ll reach out!
Currently joining Knights of Columbus, but I think that may make us enemies.
Some Free Masons do look down on Catholics. Don’t worry about it. Just stupid snobbery from these fellas that imagine themselves enlightened. As if. Bigotry is a pretty reliable signal for ignorance.
In fairness to Masons, my Deacon also told me not to join. So the antipathy runs both ways...
Hangover from Continental Freemasonry, which was vehemently anti-clerical (which meant anti-Catholic) and pro-freethinking, which in the 18th century meant dressing up and pretending to carry out Genuine Mystical Secret Oriental Occult Ceremonies.
The occult ceremonies bit was also what pissed off the Church. So it was associated with magic and revolutions, not popular with the status quo.
English Freemasonry was a bit different and developed into more of a fraternal/benevolent organisation (and jokes about if you wanted a promotion in the police, you should join the Masons) though the Secret Wisdom bit still lingered on, e.g. references in ghost (ish) stories by H.G. Wells. From the story "The Inexperienced Ghost":
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Story_of_the_Inexperienced_Ghost
"Passes," said Clayton.
"Passes?"
"Complicated series of gestures and passes with the hands. That's how he had come in and that's how he had to get out again. Lord! what a business I had!"
"But how could any series of passes——" I began.
"My dear man," said Clayton, turning on me and putting a great emphasis on certain words, "you want everything clear. I don't know how. All I know is that you do—that he did, anyhow, at least. After a fearful time, you know, he got his passes right and suddenly disappeared."
"Did you," said Sanderson, slowly, "observe the passes?"
…He stood up without heeding me, took the middle of the hearthrug, and faced me. For a moment he regarded his feet thoughtfully, and then for all the rest of the time his eyes were on the opposite wall, with an intent expression. He raised his two hands slowly to the level of his eyes and so began. .
Now, Sanderson is a Freemason, a member of the lodge of the Four Kings, which devotes itself so ably to the study and elucidation of all the mysteries of Masonry past and present, and among the students of this lodge Sanderson is by no means the least. He followed Clayton's motions with a singular interest in his reddish eye. "That's not bad," he said, when it was done. "You really do, you know, put things together, Clayton, in a most amazing fashion. But there's one little detail out."
"I know," said Clayton. "I believe I could tell you which."
"Well?"
"This," said Clayton, and did a queer little twist and writhing and thrust of the hands.
"Yes."
"That, you know, was what he couldn't get right," said Clayton. "But how do you——?"
"Most of this business, and particularly how you invented it, I don't understand at all," said Sanderson, "but just that phase—I do." He reflected. "These happen to be a series of gestures—connected with a certain branch of esoteric Masonry—— Probably you know. Or else—— How?" He reflected still further. "I do not see I can do any harm in telling you just the proper twist. After all, if you know, you know; if you don't."
"I know nothing," said Clayton, "except what the poor devil let out last night."
"Well, anyhow," said Sanderson, and placed his churchwarden very carefully upon the shelf over the fireplace. Then very rapidly he gesticulated with his hands.
"So?" said Clayton, repeating.
"So," said Sanderson, and took his pipe in hand again.
"Ah, now," said Clayton, "I can do the whole thing—right."
…Well—the simple fact before us could very well wait our convenience; there was no hurry for us to comprehend. It lay there for an hour; it lies athwart my memory, black and amazing still, to this day. Clayton had, indeed, passed into the world that lies so near to and so far from our own, and he had gone thither by the only road that mortal man may take. But whether he did indeed pass there by that poor ghost's incantation, or whether he was stricken suddenly by apoplexy in the midst of an idle tale—as the coroner's jury would have us believe—is no matter for my judging; is just one of those inexplicable riddles that must remain unsolved until the final solution of all things shall come. All I certainly know is that, in the very moment, in the very instant, of concluding these passes he changed, and staggered and fell down before us-dead!
Then there’s Herman Hesse’s take on an Eastern enlightenment secret society
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_to_the_East
Oh boy. I don’t know what to tell you. Two benevolent orders that despise each other. I’d avoid them both.
As far as I’m aware, it’s the Catholic church that forbids masonic membership. There’s nothing against Catholicism in freemasonry--we’re open to all religions, as long as you believe in a higher power.
I come from a family of Catholics, albeit non-practicing anymore, so I certainly have nothing against them! I like the KoC and would love to connect with anyone involved there too. Different groups, more-or-less similar missions.
Yeah the Masons were totally open to letting me join. I understand the Church’s ban but I’m hoping the Pope revisits that sooner or later. The Masons seem to have pretty much let go to the anticlericalism at this point. The deistic aspects are pretty pro-forma.
Okay. I stand corrected. :)
Really depends org to org, and I can only speak for the masons.
Membership in masonry requires that you be 18, male, and believe in a supreme being. If that disqualifies you there are other orgs that might fit the bill, depending on which part disqualified you haha.
The generic answer in masonry is “to be one, ask one.” Ideally you find someone who is already a mason and ask them. If you don’t know any or are new to the area like I was, you usually will have to email your local lodge, which you should be able to find pretty easily online. There are over 300 lodge in my home state of Virginia. Process for joining usually involves meeting with a few members so they can make sure you’re not crazy, getting a few to sign your petition, then they vote on your admission.
But yes, most members are on the older side and membership has been declining pretty rapidly. But honestly I think that just means it’s ripe for a new generation to step in and take over for a while, maybe make some changes. Pretty perfect opportunity if you ask me.
Activities differ lodge to lodge. Some are better than others. But masons tend to lean heavily into the theatrical and ceremonial side of things. Lots of esoteric talk about King Solomon and geometry and all that.
I've been thinking about it.Might just take the plunge this summer.Any advice?
Get in contact with a lodge or two in your area; while you can't participate in the ceremonies until you're initiated, most would love to have you come to Festive Board (drinks and/or meal held either pre- or post- meeting). If you're able to socialize with strangers easily, you'll find out whether you fit in fairly quickly.
Not really. Only “advice” would be that every lodge can be quite different. And there are no rules that say which lodge you have to belong to. So shop around! See which group of guys you mesh with the best. The r/freemasonry subreddit can actually be pretty useful for newcomers.
Awakening the Ancestors - a sci-fan-fic pastoral pastiche in 7 movements, submitted for EA Post Prize #1: The World in 2072 (it didn't win) - how many references can you spot? https://pathfindings.substack.com/p/awakening-the-ancestors?s=w
Pregnancy advice question.
My wife was recently diagnosed with gestational diabetes and put on a low glycemic index diet. As far as I can tell the major risk of gestational diabetes is high birth weight but the literature all seems to suggest that high birth weight is a positive predictor of outcomes such as IQ all the way up to about 12lbs (our baby is only predicted to be at ~66th percentile of birth weight which is far below that). Is there a reason why you should want to treat the gestational diabetes and reduce the birth weight or is this just a way to make the obstetrician's life easier during the delivery?
I wouldn't fuck with it. My last kid was born to mom with GD, and she went to heroic efforts to control it, but he was still born a bit premature, had his sugar crash immediately after birth, and got jaundice. All quite treatable, and he's right as rain 18 years later, but who needs that stress?
Personally I'd say if you're considering running *any* kind of health risk for maybe possibly a few IQ points you're misinformed as to the priorities. Birth is a massive physical stress on both mother and child, even in the 21st century, and the list of things that can go drastically wrong in a flash with lifelong consequences is sobering. Give them both every advantage you can, however small. What you want is a healthy normal baby and a mom that bounces back in a day or two. If you can have both of these, take the money and run, give praise to your deity of choice, and be glad you aren't among the ~1 in 33 families for which the outcome is sad in some way or another.
There are many reasons why you want to control gestational diabetes.
Adverse health effects of uncontrolled maternal diabetes include:
-Shoulder dystocia (baby gets stuck, can lead to broken shoulder, oxygen deprivation)
-Greater risk of early preterm delivery
-Hypoglycemia(can't regulate blood sugar when born)(this is a common reason for full term babies to be in the NICU)
-Baby lung hypoplasia (baby can't breathe right)
-Baby has hypocalcemia (baby can get seizures)
-Baby more likely to have jaundice
I have a four and a half month old baby and a wife who had Gestational Diabetes. I did a pretty deep dive on this topic about 8 months ago but between the time and the sleep deprivation between now and then I can't cite how I got to these conclusions. Carbs seem to pretty directly correlate to birth weight which also correlated with IQ - goodness etc. But... high blood sugar damages a bunch of things and is more likely to get you a baby with an iffy pancreas and/or other things (nerves?). Resulting in a higher risk of obesity and (more than you would expect from the increased obesity) diabetes. I think there was also an increase in other health risks.
I think this was the most recent good study on the topic and it recommends a much higher carbohydrate threshold than historical recommendations (>175g/day) https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/13/8/2599
I don't remember all of why, but I thought they were too aggressive and concluded that a floor of 100g/day of carbs and a ceiling of about 200. We also switched to only complex carbs so she could eat more of them without spiking her blood sugar as much.
One of the issues with a low carb diet is that it has higher risks for nutritional issues, use a high quality prenatal and this issue should be moot. I used Life Extension because I respect the way they do research and update their formulas to reflect new findings (I'm not affiliated but I regularly buy their multivitamins and fish oil).
My baby was born at 6 lbs flat and one day after the cutoff to be early. He was small enough that the birth was not terribly damaging to his mother. He's now 3rd percentile for height, 8th percentile for weight, 35th percentile for head size, and 1 - 3 months ahead on basically all his milestones (and amazingly delightful in every way).
Thanks, that's useful additional context. One of my concerns reading through some of the gestational diabetes literature is that a lot of the papers control for birth weight in their models, which is a classic example of conditioning on a collider. i.e. if you control for an outcome of the diabetes you get a (badly calculated) version of the unmediated effect only, when what you want is the total effect (i.e. the effect that goes via any pathway including birth weight). So I'm a bit worried that the literature might be giving a misleading view on this.
Having diabetes isn't nice. Is the alternate plan to just not treat the diabetes and let the blood sugar run wild? She's gonna be pretty miserable doing that.
There's a large continuum between let the blood sugar run wild and tightly control it by cutting out almost all simple carbs.
Her original diagnosis was only barely over the diagnostic criteria (and wouldn't have met the criteria used 15 years ago). At the moment we have been controlling it very well with diet (i.e. her blood sugar readings look like someone without diabetes) but the baby has gone from 76th to 66th percentile size in that time which does raise the question is whether we're actually doing the right thing by controlling it as closely as we are. The doctors seem happy about the size decrease but I'm concerned about whether those recommendations are reliable given the literature on the positive effects of birth weight. The BMJ piece suggests ~0.5 IQ points per additional 100g birthweight (including in normal weight babies).
Well, the baby getting stuck is suboptimal for both kid and mom. Besides that, gestational diabetes is a pathologic process, not well understood in humans for experiment - blocking reasons which are probably pretty obvious. As said lower down, don't fret but do get the GD as under control as possible.
Quoting my wife, who has had GD: "High birth weight, in the abstract, is good because it's better than low birth weight. Low birth weight is correlated with a whole bunch of negative things (and often a result of smoking or poor nutrition during pregnancy). But HBW associated with GD is itself correlated with a risk of diabetes later in the child's life. Bottom line, don't focus on/obsess over birth weight, but do get the GD under control."
I would add that, in my wife's particular case, she found a bizarre magic-bullet cure for all her problems (constipation, anemia, hyperglycemia, swelling) by switching to an all-red-meat diet. Basically she subsisted off pure beef for a while. YMMV, only one data point, etc, but the effect was striking and essentially overnight. The child of that pregnancy (our third) was almost a pound heavier at birth and is now on track to be the tallest of our kids as an adult, but also totally healthy. None of our kids is anything like overweight; the elder two are rather skinny, like me.
Most pregnancy studies are pretty problematic but it looks to me like birth weight effects continue on into normal weight as well as just being about avoiding low birth weight. e.g. this sibling study published in BMJ of birth weight on IQ within the normal weight range:
https://www.bmj.com/content/323/7308/310.full?casa_token=GZxhLtd1x7wAAAAA%3AuQbq_vHAsjCCmrpzgSfh4m7uTlGRobirug5kKvf0N_wdS1H1_3xghjqJoiHbJtW-ZiOWnEcXYjo
Given the recommended amounts of vitamins pregnant women are supposed to take having such an unbalanced diet seems like a v bad idea. Except for iron I guess.
Several months ago there was a bounty announcement for a compilation of Robin Hansons best blog posts: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QaDwBio8MLqRvTREH/usd10k-bounty-read-and-compile-robin-hanson-s-best-posts
Does anybody know if that resulted in anything?
I wonder how we changed psychologically in the last hundred years or so due to mass empathy, caused by mass media. Before radio, TV and internet, the only emotions we came into contact with were our own and those of the people around us. Of course there were books and group gatherings, but nothing like now, where you get bombarded with other people's - real and fictional - emotions. And those generate empathy; a scary movie wouldn't be scary without empathy. So all day I 'feel' other people's emotions, from my friends on Facebook to fictional drug dealers in the Ozarks. Does anybody know if there has been anything written about how that changed us?
There were, of course, newspapers before radio, TV and internet, where you could read about the real-life sufferings of someone you didn't know.
But old-style newspaper articles tended to be much more "just the facts" while modern newspaper articles seem designed to weaponise our empathy against us, always starting with the "human interest" part of the story before talking about the big picture.
The obvious difference is that in pre-mass media days, you interacted very frequently and profoundly with your neighbours and your extended family. In a community of five hundred people, you would probably know nearly everyone by sight, and almost all of you would spend nearly all your time interacting with each other - at Church for example. Moreover, many of you would be related or would have known each other for decades, so the level of empathy *as you experienced it in everyday life* would have been a lot higher than anything you find today.
So maybe the main difference would be that now more/most of your empathy is spent on strangers and fictional characters.
Which seems... unhealthy to me. I've been happier since I joined a church, started building those real world connections as well as I'm able to approximate in the 21st century and ditched youtube.
I think you're selling pre-mass-media short. The appeal of theatre and opera was certainly running on empathy, to hew as close to your modern examples as possible; but beyond that, I think you'd be wrong to dismiss prose and even oral storytelling out of hand.
You're probably right about the appeal of pre-mass-media. However, I doubt it can compare to modern mass media in terms of volume and accessibility. Storytelling and prose definitely appeal to empathy, often on a deeper level than other media. But if I spend 20 minutes on the internet, the sheer number of viewpoints and emotions I am asked to empathize with, is a completely different experience, I think.
Say that I'm a woman on the curvier side. I'm happy with my breasts and hips but would like to slim down my waist a bit once or twice a month during parties and formal events. It looks like shapewear/corsets would be the thing I need, but it's a jungle out there. There's plenty of low-cost, low-quality (I assume) trash. The most vocal corset people seem to be BDSM cultists, not average gals that want to look a bit thinner sometimes. Thus me asking here.
Does anyone have a good beginners guide to shapewear? What are some quality brands that I can trust? Should I just bite the bullet and get a >$400 corset (money is not an issue anyway) and try to avoid getting sucked in by the vortex of "tight lacing" and "waist training" that seem to make up 95% of online corset discussion?
There is a quite big historical fashion community who discuss corsets in a very sensible and realistic way. In general, they all stress that a historical corset that fits your body should not be uncomfortable. So I guess wearing such a corset once in a while should not be a problem.
The difference between historical corsets and contemporary fashion/sexy underwear corsets is that historical corsets are used solely to achieve a specific body shape, they are never to be seen. Contemporary fashion corsets on the other hand are made to be seen, so they are not designed for changing your body shape/silhouette most efficiently.
The question is probably, what exact shape/silhouette you want to achieve. There are some videos that compare the effect of different historical corsets (https://youtu.be/PSvy8N61YnI and https://youtu.be/ZzKUI0TwgFM). Without knowing what kind of clothes you wear exactly, it's hard to recommend anything specific.
For buying corsets, I think the best strategy is to find someone on Etsy who makes historical corsets, and to discuss with them what you want.
I guess I've been overestimating how outfit-independent corsets are. I guess there's no magic "look good in every situation bullet" then. :(
I can personally recommend this corsetiere: https://www.asphyxiacouture.com/corsets
All of her corsets are custom made for your exact measurements, and she works with every client individually to ensure you're getting exactly what you need. She only uses high quality materials so they last a lifetime.
Thanks for the recommendations, but these designs seem very goth/burlesque/bdsm (e.g. the name). I just want something slimming to wear under my regular clothes. I guess she can make those as well though...
You could opt for a bodysuit. Keeps things tight and contained, but not as severely as a corset. Relatively inexpensive. You'd wear it under your clothing of choice, can be found in various colors including beige. If you're new to these and want to test the waters it is probably a good place to start.
The pro corset people say that shapewear only smooths. But I guess they're biased. Spanx seems to be the gold standard, is it a good lace to start?
It's a decent brand I hear, but plus size stores also have some, e.g. - https://www.penningtons.com/on/demandware.store/Sites-Penningtons_CA-Site/default/Search-Show?q=bodysuit
I think you'll be pleased with one, even if you do opt for a corset eventually.
edit: btw, if you or anyone knows of a source for plus-size lingerie worth checking out, I would like to know :/
As an informal information source, I would recommend The Lingerie Addict's articles on corsetry. I used to be really Into Corsets (from a fashion perspective as well as a history perspective) and skimming through a couple of their articles again, they're consistent with my knowledge. They also seem to acknowledge that there's a midpoint between "cheap fashion corset" and "tightlacing down ten inches" which, hopefully, will address your needs. Here's an article that might be useful: https://www.thelingerieaddict.com/2014/09/much-spend-corset.html
They mention specific brands, including Orchard Corset, which is the only one of those mentioned that I've personally bought from and that I have known other people to wear. I agree with the writer's assessment that it's a good balance between "cheap corset that has no real shaping" and "expensive corset for everyday wear."
I have no problem with buying a quality corset to use infrequently. I just have a hard time finding information about the use pattern I envision: most corset people seem to only talk about everyday wear, tight lacing etc. Where's the guide for "how to wear a corset infrequently"?
Hi! I'm 20 years old and from Argentina.
For the last two years, I've been doubting myself and spending a ridiculous amount of time finding the most optimal career path for me. My conclusion is that all roads lead to Software Engineering.
I plan to work on AI safety in the long term, but first, I need to start my career and focus on earning enough financial freedom.
The fastest route to getting a well-paid job in the IT field is learning Full Stack Web Development, so I'm doing that through The Odin Project.
About me: 123 IQ score (Raven's 2). Asperger's. 99th percentile for Extraversion, 98th Openness, 31st Conscientiousness (understandmyself.com). English level C1.
Any advice?
Hi David, not sure if you've seen this from Alexey Guzey, but might be useful in your situation... https://guzey.com/personal/what-should-you-do-with-your-life/
Yep, I did. But thanks tho.
Work on moving to the US.
Australia and New Zealand seem like better options.
How? The USA seems to be the best place for a well paid job in IT.
Yep, but it's much harder to get a Visa there being Argentinian; also, it's not cheap country to live, and my goal is to save money.
Here in France many people go to Switzerland to earn more. The cost of living there is roughly twice of what it is in France, but you earn at least 3 times as much. You end up with way more disposable income, and can always move to a cheaper country once you have "enough". I'm sure lots of people do the same with their current country and the US.
Every piece of advice like this misses the point that it is hard as an Argentinian to get a Visa or permission to live and work in those places.
I mentioned Australia and New Zealand not because they are the best countries to move to in general but because, in my context, those are the most cost-effective targets (they give away a lot of Visas to Argentina).
Thanks, though; I appreciate that you try to help me. Have a good day!
Look for US contracts for high hourly rates, but avoid living in the US. If you're a contractor, you don't need US residency for anything. If you need a US-based corporation to sign you onto contracts, you can find folks (like me) with companies that'll subcontract you (for a little bit off the top).
As a New Zealander currently in the UK partially for financial reasons, probably New Zealand is probably a fairly bad place to earn enough money to be able to focus on something without regards to money, certainly the the general opinion of people was that if you wanted to make money moving to Australia was a good way to do that. Admittedly I haven't checked the numbers or been in an environment where people talked about this for about 5 years now.
That said if you're intending to move somewhere cheaper after being a general software engineer NZ might work. If you're intending to get paid for doing AI safety I have no idea what the chances of you being able to do that from Australia of NZ are.
Agreed - New Zealander in the USA here. There's a reason all of NZ's college graduates are fleeing the country: the cost of living is steep, and jobs don't pay well (plus you'd be earning NZD).
Who’s tried Kalshi, the new prediction market using dollars? It looks like they devoted the time and effort to get regulatory approval. I’m enjoying it somewhat, although I find the set of actual markets a bit dull (e.g., the closing value of the S&P 500, inflation, Biden approval ratings).
I've tried it but lost interest after a while due to the markets not being very interesting or active. I find metaculus to be higher quality despite their markets not involving real money.
I'm in the same boat as you - it's enjoyable, but rather dull compared to something like Polymarket's markets.
https://twitter.com/a_m_mastroianni/status/1521133090638282752
Can we get a SlateStarCodex deep dive into this? Collab or otherwise? I wanna see the data for the top 10/20/40/80 instead of just top 20. Maybe genre breakdowns?
My quick take is that these industries have just gotten better at making hits. Movies in the 70s were, for the most part, bad. Bad technically, artistically, etc. We only remember the good ones. This is the same for books, music, games, tv, etc. Most media is still shit, but the professional class (big studios, big authors, etc) is really really good at it.
Also they double down on their successes. If a movie costs 10s of millions to make, seems like you would rather make a sequel than an uncertain original. This shouldn't be too surprising.
I think it might also be useful to just see what fraction of total sales are to franchises. There's at least a hypothetical possibility that we have a growing long tail of one-off games with a few franchises competing for the top 100 slots, which make up less and less of total sales each year. (It's also possible that nothing like that is going on.)
I believe this is covered in the tweets and posts somewhere. Big hits make up an increasing percentage of all revenue/sales even as the overall market expands.
Perhaps this is not the community for it. But if you are feeling like something is missing in your life, I recently converted from atheism to Catholicism, and I am happy to answer questions if anyone is interested in learning more about it.
What do you make of the Paul VI audience hall? (https://www.reddit.com/r/evilbuildings/comments/priegy/popes_audience_hall_wich_looks_like_a_snake_head/)
Looks like a snake, has no crosses or crucifixes anywhere, and has an extremely creepy statue of Jesus (looks like he's being blown up) as the centerpiece.
Isn't the snake thing just an artefact of the fish-eye lens being used? Those two "eyes" are on opposite walls.
Lol yeah, that one could have been done better.
Do you "genuinly" believe in God? Did you before converting? I've personally thought about it (not exactly conversion since I'm technically already Catholic, but being more active) and my lack of faith stopped me. I've asked a few people about it and for them belief in God is not even a question, they believe, full stop. Is this a common thing, to struggle with faith and belief?
Other question, what did you get from it. You don't mention that in your message. The basic interpretation of your message would be that you felt like something was missing from your life and you don't feel that anymore, but that wasn't explicit and I don't want to assume too much.
A few others: For how long have you been converted? Do you feel like you belong in the community? Are the benefits you get (if you get any) mostly "local" (going to the church, seeing people) or not (would you still get most of those benefits if you didn't engage in the community)?
>Do you "genuinly" believe in God? Did you before converting? I've personally thought about it (not exactly conversion since I'm technically already Catholic, but being more active) and my lack of faith stopped me.
Yes, I do now. I did not before. I think if you don't struggle with "the mystery of faith" at least a little bit you're probably not being honest with yourself. I certainly did and do. If your main hurdle is the "belief in God" part I would suggest reading this:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/14/opinion/sunday/faith-religion.html
...and then reading Feser's book "Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide" if you are interested in a more specific scientific/philosophical discussion. Once you find yourself in a place where you think "Ok, maybe God could be real, I'm not sure" - try going to Mass. Try saying a prayer, out loud, for something you or someone else desparately needs. You will feel very silly and awkward doing this - you'll feel like an imposter. But try it anyway and see what happens.
>Other question, what did you get from it.
I had measurable improvements in my physical and mental health; I lost weight and feel happier. After I was baptized I felt electric, like I had tons of energy even though it was midnight. I obviously feel like my parish is a great community and I've met a lot of very interesting people. As I mentioned below, when I was converting I prayed for something very specific in a crisis situation and received it.
I also feel challenged in my day to day life because Catholicism places demands on me. For example, I used to walk past transient panhandlers and ignore them. Now I feel I can't really just do that. Of course just giving money to every panhandler in a major American city isn't going to solve poverty, but I try to engage on other levels - buying lunch, etc. I simply think about poverty and the poor a lot more than I used to - the Church doesn't let me just think about myself. Also, I have a source of authority I can trust - which is invaluable in a low trust age. After seeing how poorly the CDC/FDA had handled COVID, I was hesitatint about getting a booster - but my priest encouraged us all to do it, so I did. Basically, I now have a source of authority in my life which constantly challenges me to do better and holds me accountable when I don't. Obviously many people in modern society consider this to be basically fascism, but I think it's valuable and something a lot of people lack in their daily lives. We all have a lot of rights, but Catholicism challenges me to remember my duties too.
> For how long have you been converted?
I started a year ago and was baptized on Easter - RCIA takes a long time.
> Do you feel like you belong in the community? Are the benefits you get (if you get any) mostly "local" (going to the church, seeing people) or not (would you still get most of those benefits if you didn't engage in the community)?
Absolutely. As for the benefits of spiritual life, I think they are both personal (see above) and communal. For example I just met someone at church who would be a great professional connection for me if I needed one (I don't).
> I think if you don't struggle with "the mystery of faith" at least a little bit you're probably not being honest with yourself.
I'm not sure what you mean by this.
> If your main hurdle is the "belief in God" part I would suggest reading this:
Here's what I think about it:
"The universe as created with intent which explains why it looks like a created thing" I can code generated art that comes from randomness and see beauty in it. I don't think intent has anything to do with beauty, or rather, I don't think intent is necessary for something to look ordrerly, law-bound or beautiful.
"Humans were fashioned which is why they are special" This one I struggle a bit with. Humans do feel special compared to every other animals.
"Signs of a higher order of reality" I don't understand what this one is supposed to be. I've seen a few strange things but the majority of those strange things happened when I was on the lookout for strange things. Some others were linked to some parts of my life. I find it relatively natural that those things come and go. For example, during a few months, I had the impression to see my cat (which is at my parent's house, not my appartment) everywhere in my appartment. Some people see/hear hallucinations all the time (visual snow for example, and there are things that are way wilder). Do these things have any meaning? I'm not sure. I certainly don't feel like they need to. Sometimes things just are.
Skipping some parts as I don't see many argument. "In fact, the very notion of scientific progress — our long track record of successful efforts to understand the material world — doubles as evidence that our minds have something in common with whatever mind designed the universe." I doubt that it's a reasonable argument. I'm personally colorblind. If I list the colors I see in a picture, for some reason all those colors will be colors that are visible to me. Because I'm the one seeing them. To see that there are colors that I missed, because I can't see them, I would need something else. In fact, it's impossible for me to prove that all of this is not a giant prank with enough resources just to make me believe I see less colors than other people. Considering that we never talked and exchanged with a non human on their views on the universe, it's normal that the universe fits our views.
The claim that religious experience happen as much as before is made without any statistics backing it up. It might be that even more people have religious experiences than before, or way less. There's nothing here except quoting a few people. It's easy to find people that went through the opposite process, from religion to atheism.
"Psychic phenomenons still happen" Two things. First "psychic" is a label that we put on it that basically means "we can't explain it", just like magic. If you can do it, it's not magic. That doesn't say anything about the nature of the thing, about how and why it happens. Second thing, again no statistics. Is the demand for mediums bigger than in the 19th century? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, the article is inconclusive.
All in all, that article is unconvincing for me.
> Once you find yourself in a place where you think "Ok, maybe God could be real, I'm not sure"
I'm already in that place.
> try going to Mass. Try saying a prayer, out loud, for something you or someone else desparately needs. You will feel very silly and awkward doing this - you'll feel like an imposter. But try it anyway and see what happens.
I've done it. I've been to the Mass many times in fact. I even said a few words for my brother's wedding. And sometimes there is a something that I can feel. But this something has absolutely nothing to do with God for me. Just like every time I'm in a church, I feel something. But it's not about the church itself. It's about the people. Whether God is real or not, people have assembled here, often for centuries, sometimes for more than 500 years, to celebrate something together. They've built those beautiful buildings. That's something to me. But the same can be said of pretty much anything. Religion/faith can make people do beautiful things, just like love for your family or animals or seashells or anything. You could explain that "love" as some kind of mystical power than humans have, but the jump from this to being a Catholic just doesn't compute for me.
> Obviously many people in modern society consider this to be basically fascism, but I think it's valuable and something a lot of people lack in their daily lives.
I think that's a bit reductive. One of the challenges of modern society is that you have most of the time all of the information you need to make a decision, it's just very hard work. Finding a source of authority can also be a way to not have to do this hard work. In fact, I think a lot of movements in modern society points to people looking for ways to not have to think. Modern politics is a big one. That's of course not to question your personal choices, but just to give an opposite point of view/explanation.
Thanks for sharing all of that and answering my questions! I wish you the best in your journey.
>I'm not sure what you mean by this.
I think it means at some point everyone feels like Job, like God abandoned them. Everyone looks at an obligation demanded of them and feels it is too hard, too crazy. I feel this way about the Church's teachings on abortion. It is a source of ambivalence for me. I don't reject it, but I wrestle with it.
> One of the challenges of modern society is that you have most of the time all of the information you need to make a decision, it's just very hard work. Finding a source of authority can also be a way to not have to do this hard work.
This is true, but I also think that doing all this work from scratch makes you more likely to be wrong. Very smart theologians have worked on these issues for 2,000 years, why reinvent the wheel yourself? Are you really going to do it better? Probably not.
>I'm already in that place.
If you are open to it, I'd really suggest Feser's book about Aquinas for you. I feel like you already have all of the pieces, but his work really ties all these things together to explain why Catholicism is true and correct way better than I ever could.
To take your programming example: Yes, the program makes random, beautiful things because you made it do that. The program was made with a telos, which guides it towards an end. The element of randomness doesn't change the underlying telos. You have DNA which caused you to develop with certain features - arms, legs, etc. Sure, an element of your development is random. But your telos still exists, we have scientific proof of it.
I will also pray for your return to full communion with the Church.
"Very smart theologians have worked on these issues for 2,000 years, why reinvent the wheel yourself?"
Yeah, _mostly_ people do just rework old arguments.
Occasionally, things _do_ change. Prior to Darwin and (ironically) Mendel, the watchmaker argument for the existence of an intelligent creator god was a perfectly respectable intellectual position. Not any more.
You may be interested to know that Catholics do not subscribe to creationism! The Thomistic argument for the existence of God rests on different premises.
Thanks for the explanation and sharing your point of view. I'll read the book you recommanded, it seems interesting.
> I've asked a few people about it and for them belief in God is not even a question, they believe, full stop.
It might be interesting to explore deeper what *exactly* they believe in.
I suspect that for many people it is more or less: "there is a supernatural intelligent force that created the world and the afterlife... and I have no specific reason to assume that the description in the Bible is wrong, except for the specific bits that seem weird or inconvenient for me". Which is basically social conformity.
I suspect that for you it would be more like: "is it possible that all the statements, especially the weird and inconvenient ones, are literally true?" which is much higher bar.
> I've asked a few people about it and for them belief in God is not even a question, they believe, full stop.
Probably yes for nerds, no for people who do not think about things too much.
Non-nerds may have a crisis of faith if they want to hang out with two social groups that have mutually incompatible beliefs, or if their religious group opposes in near-more something that they are (e.g. homosexuality) or they can't give up (e.g. extramarital sex).
> I suspect that for many people it is more or less: "there is a supernatural intelligent force that created the world and the afterlife... and I have no specific reason to assume that the description in the Bible is wrong, except for the specific bits that seem weird or inconvenient for me". Which is basically social conformity.
It could be, but I very much doubt it. That's not how the people I hang with tend to think.
Why did you convert?
How do you deal with doctrine that you have to accept, created by people much less smart than yourself and kept by institutional inertia?
Personally I'd like to have a spiritual community of some sort, but all the churches around and _especially_ the Catholic Church look like a sad parody of what such a community could look like.
I think you and I simply have totally different epistemological views. I think the accumulated wisdom of everyone who lived and built our civilization over the last 2,000 years far exceeds my own. “Inertia” might also be called “tradition” which the ancients abided by for a reason.
"accumulated wisdom of everyone who lived and built our civilization over the last 2,000 years"
Wisdom is a tricky thing.
Some experience accumulated a 1000 years ago is still valid, some has been invalidated by later changes. Almost anything that could be said about war, beyond "it kills people", in 0 AD would be grossly wrong now. Hiroshima was not a sword fight. The scale and speed of the weapons has changed by orders of magnitude, and that MATTERS.
The platonic solids still are what they were. Most of human biology still is what it was - except medicine is now far more useful and actually gives us options we didn't have.
The whole scale of human action is different. That the CO2 from power plants in the northern hemisphere may melt enough of Antarctica to flood part of Bangladesh is not a possibility that people in 0 AD, or even 1800 AD, dealt with.
I don't think Catholic theology denies most of this. The Church's opposition to war has grown in response to the increased destructive power of weaponry, the Church opposes the death penalty because modern tools of law enforcement and effective incarceration make it unnecessary, there's a lot of theological work being done about stewardship and the enviornment, and so on.
The part that doesn't change are the basic insights about human nature and ethics - for example, the fact that everyone has a right to life. The fact that the telos of sex is reproduction. The fact that all men are born free. The application of principles can and must change with circumstances, but certain truths are universal and eternal.
The "unchanging" parts all look to me like politics, as unconvincing, unsupported, and subject to dispute as any party's platform. Oh, that's funny - re "born free" the RCC itself has waffled on slavery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_slavery "others, including the influential Thomas Aquinas, argued the case for slavery subject to certain restrictions."
Ah, the shifting winds of politics...
The platonic solids _are_ still there.
Human biology is still mostly constant (mostly with medicine changing)
lol im not gonna argue about ethics with a dude who thinks the Holocaust was a moral nonevent
That's a fair heuristic.
Unfortunately, I grew up in a Catholic family and rejected religion in my teens, because the "accumulated wisdom" on display among the clergy amounts to spewing hate and diddling kids. I still have to deal with a significant part of my country that wishes to return to the Middle Ages, and votes accordingly.
I think there is something genuinely valuable in the Catholic tradition, but Catholicism as practiced is not good at teaching it to followers.
I think it says a lot about the power of the tradition that even people who have significant antipathy towards it such as yourself still see something good in it.
Sure thing, but as a Catholic you're not allowed to cherry-pick (the entire point, as you mentioned in a different thread). So you have to take the whole package, which for me is too distasteful to do.
Then again, perhaps as a new convert you can avoid the pitfalls of societies in which the religion is entrenched. There used to be a time when people went to be eaten by lions in peace because they believed in Christ, after all...
That's true. I guess I see the defects as being defects of execution, not defects of doctrine.
That's approximately when Jesus was alive. Even prior to that, basically everyone was a theist of some kind.
"It seems very probable that had christians not existed, some other hebrew sect would have become dominant in the Roman Empire; "
I've read claims that the most viable rival was Mithraism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithraism
I'll simply say that I very much reject the idea that any part of Western civilization - including 18th century Britain - isn't build on a Catholic foundation.
Obviously the neolithic revolution predates Christ's arrival; I won't pretend to know a lot about it. But it is interesting that it first happened right in the exact same part of the world where Jacob's descendants later lived.
When you go to heaven, which version of you will experience it? The 1 year old? The 10 year old? The 90 year old? All of them at once?
“When” assumes a lot!
Not OP but also Catholic: None of the above, I will be the version of me that God wills me to be which I don't think I will ever fully be on Earth but that I try to become closer to every day.
To be more concrete it will likely be a post purgatory version of me and how time works in purgatory is not clear to me,it might be that asking how old I would be is like asking what the angles of the color blue add up to.
How do you manage the sex parts?
If I'm being honest, I do not. I try to comply, but I also attend confession and pray for forgiveness.
One of the reasons I think Catholicism is true is because it is very hard. It would be very convenient if God was cool with me doing all the things I personally want to do at any given time, but He is not. He has set out a set of commandments and I am expected to keep them. If I'd just wanted a community I would have become a Unitarian.
On a philosophical level, I also think the Church's sexual teachings are being proven correct with the passage of time. One of the most difficult and unpopular, for example, is birth control. Yet the telos of sex is obviously reproduction, and there seems to be a looming demographic crisis brewing as sex has become totally divorced from that.
"there seems to be a looming demographic crisis brewing as sex has become totally divorced from that."
No. Generally speaking, the demographic transition, slowed population growth, has made our problems a bit more tractable, not more difficult. We've overrun a number of resource limits (the one getting the most attention is, of course, the ability of the atmosphere to absorb CO2 without too much rise in greenhouse effects - but there are others as well (e.g. peak phosphorus)). Setting up parts of the economy and government programs to require permanent exponential growth was always a terrible idea. Ponzi schemes are doomed from the moment they are conceived. They are guaranteed to fail, the only question is when.
This argument would be more credible to me if we were actually on track for a stable population rather than collapse in secular Western societies. TFR isn’t leveling off at replacement so that population growth slows and stops - it’s way below replacement. Less than 1.0 in some Asian countries.
Yes, it is lower than replacement. I don't consider this catastrophic. It isn't dropping to zero. If TFR stayed at 1.0 for three generations, we'd drop from almost 8 billion people to 1 billion people. We had a thriving civilization at 1 billion people. All the triumphs of the 19th century: The periodic table, electromagnetism, evolution, happened with that population.
I'm picking 1 billion because it has been estimated that a 1st world standard of living can be maintained sustainably at around that population.
I expect that, given the 90 years or so that this shrinkage would take, there are plausible things that could be done to make raising children a less lousy deal, possibly raising the TFR back to 2.1 and stabilizing the population at 1 billion: The housing stock need not evaporate - if it is maintained as the population shrinks, this could become less of a constraint to potential parents. Perhaps the economy could be managed to make employment more stable again, and force fewer people into the precariat.
More speculatively, we might have artificial wombs, and be able to circumvent the maternal morbidity and mortality that we still have. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_complications_of_pregnancy Also speculatively, perhaps medicine will be able to push human lifespan considerably higher over the next 90 years. Taking 18 years to raise a child looks like less of a chunk of one's life if lifespans were say 160 years rather than 80.
(And other things may happen, e.g. AGI, that might moot all of this)
Population both grows *and* shrinks exponentially, unfortunately, like any other process in which dx/dt ~ x. Like a pandemic wave. It comes on fast, surprising human instincts and causing panics, and it recedes just as fast, also surprising human instincts. Doubtless when the population of Easter Island starting falling the inhabitants thought they had plenty of time to turn it around -- right up until the moment it abruptly dawned on them they didn't.
Or to put it another way, countries are generally finding it *even harder* to turn population change from below replacement to replacement than they did turning it from above replacement to below. That does not bode well. We are a social species, if we accidentally overshoot your 1 billion mark because there's too much inertia, and end up with 100 million scattered over the entire globe I doubt modern society can be maintained. There just wouldn't be enough people in most locations to enjoy the efficiencies of specialization. (The sophisticated suburban county in which I live would be reduced to 4000 inhabitants, basically the size of a medieval town). We would all have to become much more generalist, like people who live in remote locations or survivalists. There would be none of this being one of the few thousand who can afford to specialize in tinkering with machine-learning programs or trying to design boosters that could reach Mars directly, while billions of others keep the wheels turning and the lights on. One would expect progress to drastically slow, or stop.
> One of the reasons I think Catholicism is true is because it is very hard.
This makes it seem like you're trolling.
Why? It seems obvious to me that if someone comes up to you and says “hey, I have this religion, and it just so happens to tell you exactly what you want to hear about truth, life, and the nature of God” that they are lying. This is how a lot of Evangelical Protestantism seems to me.
That has no bearing on perceived difficulty of strict adherence.
It's funny you say that about Protestantism, considering it was borne out of a sentiment that the Church doctrine was not following the Bible closely enough in many respects. You might enjoy reading The Reformation by Diarmaid MacCulloch, very well written.
I’m aware of the Protestant complaints. I just think they forget who actually compiled the current Bible.
I used to look at Evangelicals with that line similarly, but now I figure that it is how God is reaching them, and so it is true, for them - at least where they hear Him clearly.
Many are very fine people. But I do hope they all come home.
"One of the reasons I think Catholicism is true is because it is very hard." Ha! Try not eating bacon and cutting a part of your penis! Or fasting for a month a year. Or self-flagellating! You guys have it sweet!
"self-flagellating" Hmm... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flagellant includes _both_ Martin Luther _and_ Peter Damian (in the RCC) amongst flagellants.
My understanding of confession is that it's not supposed to be a get out of jail free card. Your sins are forgiven if you genuinely repent them and try not to commit them again.
But if you treat the confession booth like a car wash with no intention of changing your behaviour, your sins won't be forgiven.
As for the effect of Catholic doctrine on birth rates, I note that the birth rate in Ireland is 1.7 children per woman, in Italy it's 1.27 and in Spain it's 1.24. The Catholic prohibition of birth control doesn't seem to be doing any good in preserving the population of nominally-Catholic countries.
I definitely try not to treat confession as a car wash - I do try to adjust my behavior, and I won't take communion if I'm not in a state of grace. Do I always succeed? No. It is very hard to adjust one's own behavior after spending a long time doing pretty much whatever you want. But priests go to death row and take confession from murderers, so I hold out hope for my own soul.
It is true the church has not yet succeeded in arresting declining birth rates, but you do see higher birth rates among Catholics who regularly attend mass anywhere you look - Ireland has higher mass attendance than Italy. More to the point, I think the Church's argument about the telos of sex (which is ancient) has been proven correct: we separated sex from reproduction; and now we are staring down major social and economic problems.
Are you happy with the CC's stance on safe sex and condoms in Africa? Are you going to simply go "well they should all practice chastity and those who don't, yeah, might get AIDS"?
In retrospect I think I made an error even entertaining the premise of the “secondary harm” argument here. Sin destroys the sinner. This isn’t the same as saying that people who get AIDS “deserve it” (they do not, we are all broken) but rather to point out that the harms which flow from sin (STDs, etc.) can in no way ever be attributed to the Church’s doctrine. If there was no sexual sin, there’d be very few STD cases of any kind.
The Church does not consider sex a necessity the way breathing, eating, and defecating are, and regards those who *do* put sex in that same can't-live-without-it-for-a-moment category as thinking like little more than animals, unable to master themselves or their urges.
Hence, they are indeed comfortable with saying yes, in some circumstances chastity is the best and simplest (and certainly the cheapest) solution to the problems of STDs, the strife and tension produced by sexual jealousy, and the stress of unexpected pregnancy.
Your moral judgment would rest on a sounder footing if there *were* no other way to prevent AIDS. But that is not the case. So your beef with the Church, ironically, mirrors their beef with you: both of you believe that the *method* of preventing AIDS the other advocates has sufficiently bad side-effects in the practical real world that it should be rejected.
It doesn’t really matter if I’m happy with it.
Why Catholicism? Not intended as a criticism but you had a choice of religions or ideologies and I'm curious why you chose that one specifically.
The question wasn't posed to me but as I have got christened to be catholic last year maybe you like to know my reasons, too. Having grown up in anticlerical surroundings, I was spiritually interested in my teens and thought I really had a choice of religions or ideologies. As I couldn't grok Hegelian philosophy I gave up on marxism and thought mahayana buddhism, especially zen, might be the path for me. After decades of karate practice and maybe one decade of zazen practice I took a postgraduate university course concerning intercultural spirituality, whatever that may be. I still felt apart from people with my buddhist approach, though I live in a pretty liberal city. I had the impression denomination really can't matter much (one love), so I went to join the religion that has shaped my culture, the original version, of course. As an old punk rocker I also like that catholicism is mainly associated with child abuse and corruption in these parts, wouldn' t feel at home in a club with a good reputation.
This is the compressed version, but still very long.
My interest started with Catholic art and jurisprudence, which I regarded as being excellent. I was also impressed with how many leadership figures the church produced In America, we have a Catholic President, Speaker of the House, and six of nine Supreme Court justices. I was also very impressed with the writing of Catholic public intellectuals including Liz Bruenig and Ross Douthat, and with the vast network of Catholic schools and hospitals which have educated/cared for/employed many people I care about or know. I had grown up in an area with a lot of stereotypical Evangelical Bible thumping, which I always regarded as dumb and backwards and intolerant. So I wondered why so many smart/successful people were Catholics, and why so much great work had come from the community in a very secular age.
This got me thinking about theism more generally and about Catholicism specifically. The benefits of belonging to a religious community are well-known (better mental health, physical health, etc.) but (contrary to what my Brother in Christ Evesh suggests below) I wasn't really sold on God being real and I wasn't going to join the community and just pretend. Someone suggest I read Edward Feser's book "Aquinas: A Beginnier's Guide" which I did. Feser's defense of God's existence is basically a response to modern critics of Aquinas Five Proofs, and revolves heavily around Telos. I found it persuasive, and suggest the book for anyone else who is interested (although I will say it is not an easy read). At this point Catholicism seemed like the default choice since 1) the only persuasive defense of theism I have ever read was authored by Catholics and 2) the Church fathers literally compiled the Bible, so the Protestant idea of "read and decide for yourself" seems silly to me. I was still considering Orthodoxy and Judaism, however.
Once I started looking into attending Mass, I had a several experiences which I consider to be instances where God specifically moved things in my life. These were not like, visions or whatever, but rather instances where things seemed to be lining up just so. The very first time I prayed for an intercession, I received it in a very dramatic fashion which I can't address at length here. I considered the possibility that these were all confirmation bias or random chance, but there were enough of them in such a short period of time that it sure doesn't seem like it.
Purely out of curiosity, what made you discard Orthodoxy? I'm Orthodox and wonder what it looks like to a rat-adjacent inquirer.
It was a marginal choice on my part. Had I not had the specific experiences I had, I would have definitely looked into it more. I will say I appreciate the hierarchical nature of Catholicism. If the Pope did something really wild and I stopped believing he was infallible I’d look at Orthodoxy again.
I think this discussion (like many similar ones) gets complicated because there are at least three issues that are quite distinct but often mixed together. We can express them as a series of possible statements.
- I believe that religion X is true, and that it provides a complete and correct explanation of the creation and meaning of the world and of this life and the afterlife.
- I believe that the broad tradition of religion X is etc. etc. but I find version Y of it be be more soundly based and convincing.
-I have a generally religious outlook, and I find religion X to be the most intellectually and aesthetically satisfying.
-I don't have strong religious feelings, but I find that I get benefit from religion X and I prefer its moral and philosophical stance to that of others.
-I'm an agnostic and I judge religions by essentially humanist criteria. I don't think they are literally true.
I'm an atheist, and judge religions by how far their doctrine corresponds to my opinions. God is frequently wrong.
There are others, but you get the point. Essentially you have to decide whether you see religion as (a) literally true - and this is not the same thing as biblical literalism (b) sort of true in the symbolic sense and useful socially, appearing in different guises in different places or (c) just another human intellectual construct, to be judged as you would any other philosophy or ideology.
Unless you decide which you believe, it's hard for two people to have a productive conversation.
0. Thank you for doing this! I imagine it might take some courage - though perhaps it says more about me :)
1. You've been (reasonably, given this argument) considering other alternatives such as Judaism. Yet strictly at most one of them could be true, by their own lights. Isn't it an argument against the entire line of reasoning?
2. All of this is weirdly "I'm betting on the more successful god/ the deity with the most successful people". Isn't the entire concept frowned upon by various religions? I know there's quite some stuff in the Old Testament against this very line of argument - the Jewish god is not to be worshiped *because* he's "better than others" (To be fair, there's a bit of that when, say, Moses duels the Egyptian priests and beats them - but Elija's challenge on mount Carmel paints an entirely different picture. Hey, I'm not the one who expects to find divinely consistent properties in the text!).
3. Also, are Catholics across the globe so very successful? I'd suggest asking the current Pope how his home congregation in the slums of Argentina is doing. OK, I'm a bit snarky, Catholics and religious people in general are heavily over-represented among the poor. There are good reasons - but not ones that necessarily favor your arguments.
4. So if tomorrow you discover a religion whose followers are doing somewhat better in some statistical outcomes sense, you're changing the entire world-view?
5. Relatedly, what was your prior for yourself being susceptible for such spiritual experiences? Do you think it unlikely that you might undergo them again if ever you go on another spiritual adventure?
>You've been (reasonably, given this argument) considering other alternatives such as Judaism. Yet strictly at most one of them could be true, by their own lights. Isn't it an argument against the entire line of reasoning?
Not really, since Judaism and Catholicism overlap quite a bit in their doctrinal claims. If either is true, quite a large chunk of the other one is true as well, especially as compared to the backdrop of atheism. (That doesn't mean the differences are theologically unimportant, or in any way negotiable from the perspective of an adherent; but it does mean that that a specific piece of evidence for J is not necessarily a coincidence if C is true, and vice versa.) There is quite a lot of common ground. For example, if a Jew has an experience of God while praying in the synagogue, then unless that experience was somehow specifically anti-Christian, there is no particular reason why a Catholic would need to deny its validity, while an atheist would have to.
Of course, there are historical reasons for this overlap. SInce Christianity is a claimed fulfilment of Judaism, you should think of their relation as being sort of like Newtonian Gravity and General Relativity. The latter extends the former, but still accepts nearly all the claims of the former---at least in appropriate contexts and with a somewhat recontextualized interpretation. (This analogy is still viable if you think Judaism is correct: just imagine an alternative science where Einstein was wrong because there actually is absolute space or whatever; or perhaps consider a more controversial extension like string theory.) These theories agree about a bunch of things, and have some commonalities in their justifications.
>Yet strictly at most one of them could be true, by their own lights. Isn't it an argument against the entire line of reasoning?
Not necessarily - I sort of feel like we make choices along these lines all the time in our daily lives. I can only vote for Party A or Party B, and one party's policy is probably objectively better than the other. Could I be wrong? Sure, but I make an informed choice.
>All of this is weirdly "I'm betting on the more successful god/ the deity with the most successful people"
I think this is not quite the correct account of my decision making process. Rather, I looked at a group of people who had great success and noticed the success appeared to be connected to their culture and value system. Then I investigated the basis of that value system. I think it's logical to conclude that if a certain value system regularly produces good collective outcomes for a community, that system might be rooted in something important and good and true.
Catholics are overrepresented among the poor because the Church works very hard to help the poor. Catholicism is, in many ways, anti-meritocratic and anti-capitalist. It is rooted in the common good, not individual gain. The great works of Catholicism are sometimes material, but are also aesthetic and ethical and legal and social.*
I would actually say that, relative to everything else, Jews probably achieve greater collective success as a people than Catholics when you consider the history of discrimination, etc. I considered Judaism, and I probably would have looked into it further if I had not immediately had the specific spiritual experiences I had. I will say that while I've heard plenty of atheistic and Islamic attacks on Christianity, I have never heard a credible Jewish account of who Jesus was if he was not divine. I'm sure there's some scholarship out there, but modern Jews seem to just ignore the question since they aren't too interested in converting others.
>Relatedly, what was your prior for yourself being susceptible for such spiritual experiences? Do you think it unlikely that you might undergo them again if ever you go on another spiritual adventure?
I had spent my whole life being very skeptical of such experiences and was very surprised when they occurred. I think the odds of them happening at all were very low, and so the odds of them happening again would be even lower. It would be an interesting test though - walk into a synagogue and see if anything happens.
*edited to clarify a point
Thank you again for the answers.
The analogy to parties doesn't seem compelling at all, to me. Religions (mostly) don't claim to be just a set of policies to live a good life. Their claim is to represent a certain Truth (and incidentally, possibly to condemn those who fail to recognize it to eternal torture, but let's not quibble ;) ). Not unlike Sauron, "they do not share power" - you can't shop around. Judaism is certainly not OK with you weighing "eh, on the whole, I might have more mystical profundity there but more socio-economic success there, guess I'll go for Catholicism in the end". It's not even very much OK with you choosing Judaism on those grounds! (though of course that's a somewhat sweeping statement). Would you say the standard Catholic position is different? Sure seems that Catholicism wasn't very forgiving of alternatives, historically. Alas - it seems that parties are now trying to replicate this property...
Re: Jesus - If we don't presuppose anything religious to start with, why is the position "he was possibly some dude, or possibly a conglomeration of some dudes" reasonable? He could quite possibly be a very impressive dude. I could imagine someone in the future looking at, say, Penn or Da Vinci and not quite believing what they were up to without divine explanations, and for that matter Mohammad left his mark on the world. But unless we're presupposing a religious answer, why is there a puzzle for Judaism to solve in Jesus?
Catholicism and poverty - I'm not necessarily up for a debate about your point, but let it be said that in my view your claim that "Catholics are overrepresented among the poor because the Church works very hard to help the poor" is very much not supported by facts. Suppose I do engage you on this point and commonly agreed-upon statistics prove that in fact Catholicism and its presence are not a great predictor of development across the globe, and perhaps that the simple explanation is that poor people are desperate for what religion (in particular, Catholicism) offers without gaining by it - supposing all this, would that change your world-view? Do you agree that a negative answer is devastating to your success-related argument (though not to your personal experiences)?
"that system might be rooted in something important and good and true." - one