There was a classified thread some time ago (past year or so?) in which someone advertised a startup (or something) that was creating a software solution to collective action. Iirc it was to create (blockchain-based?) contracts that only went public when a specified number of signatures had been obtained.
We are representing two Costco shareholders, suing company executives for animal neglect. You may have read about it in the Washington Post, Yahoo Business, local news, or Meatingplace!
Thank you so much to all the ACX readers who have supported us and helped make this happen! And thank you especially to Scott!
Hi Ace! Thanks for asking. I would be guessing if I were to try to answer that, because Costco can choose to set the price for its chicken to any amount it wants. But my guess is no, the price to consumers will probably stay the same. My understanding, from reading news articles, is that Costco’s chicken is something called a “loss leader.” E.g.: https://www.tastingtable.com/876410/why-costcos-rotisserie-chickens-are-still-4-99-despite-inflation/ This means that Costco sets the price for its chicken based on picking a number low enough to attract customers, who will likely spend money on other items—even though that number is LESS than what it costs Costco to produce the chicken meat. So, according to news articles, Costco is already taking a loss on its chicken meat. Costco seems to prefer to keep the price of its rotisserie chickens the same, year after year. See e.g.: https://www.rd.com/article/costco-rotisserie-chicken-cheap/ . So I would personally be very surprised if Costco were to decide to raise the price of its rotisserie chicken. Does that make sense? Thank you again for asking!
Well, given all the rí-rá currently going on, that your organisation is occupying itself with the cluck-clucks is the least nutty progressive activism happening. Good luck with getting better conditions for hens (so they will be even tastier and juicier when they meet their destiny as dinner)!
Let's say the government of a blue city in a red state declares abortion to be legal within its borders in defiance of a state law which says otherwise. In theory, of course, cities don't have the legal right to do this, but in theory states don't currently have the right to legalize marijuana, yet many have done so in practice.
My questions:
1. What would ensue? Would there be much violence? (E.g., would Antifa come and support the city against state troopers?)
2. Would major corporations and the media back the cities over the states? Could that affect what ensues?
3. How likely do you think this is to happen somewhere? (I give it 15% odds.)
Think of Kim Davis. All the people saying it didn't matter what her personal opinions or conscience exceptions were, she was obliged to do her job and follow the law and issue those marriage licences even if she thought this was a sin and was wrong.
Seriously, I just came here from looking through an SJ board's reaction to this. They've got people urging terrorism in semi-open channels.
Your side worked very hard for this. You won. Be gracious in that victory. I told them to simmer down, and I'm telling you too. This is not a good time for inflammatory rhetoric. I want to minimise the casualties.
(For the record, I'm in favour of legal abortion but I think Alito made the right call that it's not SCOTUS' place to impose this.)
In this case, I'm not gloating. The same issues of "can or should someone be forced to act against their conscience in carrying out a law?" came up, and all the progressives, pro-freedom, everyone should have liberty, people were adamant that she had to do it because It Was The Law.
Well, now it turns out that the law in question is something *they* don't like and can't bring in line with their consciences. If you have to do it because It's The Law, you *don't* get to say "Only if it's *my* law that *I* like".
A somewhat parallel case occurred in 2004 when Gavin Newsom (then Mayor of San Francisco) ordered county clerks (San Francisco is both a city and a country, with the mayor and board of supervisors controlling both governments) to issue marriage licenses on request to same-sex couples in violation of state law. While California, then as now, was a deep blue state, support for same-sex marriage among Democrats and leaners was much weaker at the time than in recent years and did not have majority support in the state, and California had a Republican governor at the time (Arnold Schwarzenegger).
Schwarzenegger had the state's Attorney General sue in state court to void Newsom's order. The CA Supreme Court issued an injunction about a month after Newsom's order, which Newsom acquiesced to, and several months later the same court retroactively voided the licenses that had been issued prior to the injunction.
Abortion is different since it's performed by private citizens rather than city or county clerks, and there's no such thing as retroactively voiding an abortion. There are probably three routes the state government could take.
The soft approach would be to sue in state court to void the city's policy. They'd probably get an emergency injunction pending hearing almost immediately, since the suit would be virtually certain to succeed on the merits and allowing the policy to stand in the short term would have consequences that couldn't be rolled back.
The hard approach would be to send in the state police to arrest abortion providers in the city notwithstanding the city's policies. The state police generally have something like plenary powers to enforce state laws, and state prosecutors don't need the city's cooperation to prosecute people for violating state law within city limits.
The nuclear option, if the city government were to try to order the city's police to use force to resist efforts of state police to enforce state anti-abortion laws in the city, would be to prosecute the officials giving the orders under state-level treason, insurrection, or sedition statures. This is very unlikely to happen, both because the optics of treason prosecutions are terrible (especially since most people aren't aware that state-level treason laws are a thing) and because the city government is unlikely to go nuclear themselves by giving the treasonable/seditious order to use force against state police enforcing state laws. For that matter, if a mayor tried to give such an order, the police chief would very probably tell him to go fly a kite.
In the US, municipal and other local governments are *entirely* subordinate to the States, and can do only those things the State allows them to. They can make a thing illegal if the state is silent about it, but they can't ban a thing that the state government has said must be legal throughout the state, and they can't make legal a thing that the state government has banned throughout the state. This isn't even remotely controversial as a matter of law.
So, what happens is, State X "bans abortion", City Y declares itself an "abortion sanctuary", and nobody sets up an abortion clinic in City Y. Because they know that if they do, the State Police will come arrest them and the State courts will convict them and send them to prison, and this will be unquestionably legal legal. The city police aren't going to go out and stop the state police from enforcing state law, because A: that's illegal and B: the state governor has something the city mayor does not, which is to say a National Guard with actual tanks that will grossly overmatch even the most militarized urban police department.
Major corporations might "back" the cities over the states, but that won't stop the state police from arresting people, and see e,g, Disney v Ron DeSantis for the theory that the state government will cower before the mighty power of a corporate scolding.
There will be protests whenever the police show up to arrest abortion providers, but that's going to happen whether the city passes a symbolic "yay abortion!" law or not. I suppose the law could be seen as the city inviting and encouraging protesters, but if the protesting crosses legal bounds (actually interferes with the police arresting abortion providers), then the protesters get arrested by the state police or crushed under the tracks of national guard tanks.
You may be confused by the fact that states and cities are often seen defying *federal* law. That's possible because States (unlike cities) do have independent sovereignty and can do some things whether the Feds authorize them to or not, and there are some things the Feds are not allowed to impose on States. These boundaries are fuzzy, and often pushed. And cities can piggyback on their State's independent sovereignty to e.g. declare themselves "sanctuary cities" for illegal immigrants, if the state government doesn't mind them doing that in its name.
But even then, arresting illegal immigrants is something the Feds are absolutely allowed to do, whenever and wherever they want within the usual due process rules, so "sanctuary city" just means "our cops won't lift a finger to help the Feds arrest a Documentally-Challenged American", not "our cops will go out and *stop* the FedCops from arresting the DCAs"
I find it's most helpful to model law enforcement (LE) organizations as essentially groups of individuals willing to use force in response to certain acts. That they are draped in legitimacy by the rest of the society that authorized them, isn't *essential*, since many people in that society might resent the LE, but still acknowledge their monopoly on legitimate force. That last part is the essential bit. If you're afraid of going against some group because that group can retaliate with most of society's implicit approval, then that's your LE group, no matter what they're called.
In light of this, your questions can be seen as depending on several factors.
1. LE enforces the interests of its members first, not society's. We notice this in cases where there are laws LE won't enforce, and rules LE will enforce that aren't laws. LE is people, and thus they're just another faction in the push-pull of society (with special properties).
2. We consider societies healthy when LE's interests mostly align with the rest. When they do, LE hardly has to do anything; most laws are abided without dispute, and LE only has to step in for the errant lone wolf who's lost his head. When they don't align, you tend to get either police reform, police states, or anarchy (a revolution if the society shares common interests; civil war if it doesn't). Which one you get depends largely on force differential; since the US keeps that small with the Second and First Amendments, we typically get reform.
3. The US' federal structure puts it in an interesting dynamic: there are multiple LEs, who might differ among themselves. This mostly just multiplies the combinations, but I find they typically keep a lid on chaos; if any of the local LE, federal LE, or people get too powerful, the other two have an incentive to rein it in, regardless of the cause of the dispute.
4. Bipartisanship has put an additional factor onto the US: there are now two "people" factions. It's tempting to say the media backs only one of them, but for the purposes of this layout, I think it's more accurate to model each "people" faction as having its own "media" faction serving it. (This lets us talk about how well each media organ is coordinating what its "people" faction knows.)
5. Corporations are still trying to maximize shareholder returns. They're more a follower than a leader as a result, and their behavior is possibly the most predictable (over multiple fiscal quarters; over one or two, an enthusiastic CEO or BoD can still weird things up).
Whether LE enforces a law will thus depend on whether that law aligns with LE's principles (do LEs think this is a good law?); whether it aligns with society (does society think this is a good law, and so abide it without LE's intercession?); whether LE is strong enough to make enforcement stick; how badly does society want the law or its opposite; what's the capital cost of abiding or defying that law (does society have to centralize capital to abide or defy that law (as it did with alcohol prohibition), or can any individual address that law at a whim (as with jaywalking)?).
It's a lot easier for municipal governments to ban things that are legal on the state level (e.g. the many towns and cities in the U.S. that still prohibit alcohol) than for them to allow things that are illegal on the state level. So the odds that any municipality will actually allow abortion, in practice, in a state where it's prohibited, are effectively 0%.
Some highly-progressive city legislatures might pass bills claiming that abortion is legal within their municipality, on paper, but they'll have absolutely no real force backing them. Abortions won't actually be performed in those cities, because no one wants to suffer the criminal and civil penalties that will come from blatantly violating state law. It would effectively be nothing more than a publicity stunt, a way of making a statement without actually doing anything that has any meaningful real-world impact.
If a city legislature actually wanted to help women obtain safe abortions from licensed medical professionals, the best bet would simply be to subsidize quick, easy, and cheap/free travel to the nearest state where abortion was legal for any pregnant woman seeking one.
You are probably correct. I wonder how, though, the "legal" marijuana industry got started in CA, CO, etc. Did the federal government signal in some way that they would look the other way? Because in theory marijuana sellers in CO are risking huge criminal penalties for blatantly violating federal law. I can't imagine the Colorado National Guard fighting the ATF off if the latter were to move into downtown Denver to arrest the weed dealers, so it isn't like the weed dealers have any protections beyond a fairly recent norm (which wasn't a norm when the weed dealing started, of course).
I suppose the legal weed states were able to first test the waters with legal medical marijuana, although what was the reason people believed the feds would stand back on that?
Many claim that so-called "back-alley abortions" were frequent in the days before Roe. If those claims are correct, there must have been a black-market for abortions, meaning people back then risked criminal penalties for violating the law, albeit not blatantly. But put these things together: a progressive municipality declares abortions legal within its city limits for performative purposes, but then you also have a black market of abortion providers which may exist within the same municipality, precisely because it is such a progressive place. Perhaps over time the reputation of the place as a black market for abortion services grows. Perhaps an abortion provider in this location then gets arrested, but more are still known to exist. It seems like that could possibly lead to a rallying cry for left-wing militia groups like Antifa to come protect this market.
>Did the federal government signal in some way that they would look the other way?
Yes; several federal Attorneys General issued memos stating that they were going to focus their efforts on e.g. interstate marijuana trafficking and not "waste taxpayer dollars" pursuing local users or dispensary operators or whatnot. Given their oaths to uphold the law, they can't *promise* not to e.g. arrest Joe Schmoe for smoking a joint, but they can say "...not until we've shut down every interstate trafficking operation", which in practice is the same thing.
>Because in theory marijuana sellers in CO are risking huge criminal penalties for blatantly violating federal law.
Also yes. DoJ policy memos are not law; the Federal government can change its mind and decided to arrest local users/growers/dealers in "legal marijuana" states. They can even decide to arrest people for having sold marijuana five years ago and then stopping as soon as the Feds decided to get serious. That wouldn't be an ex post facto law, because the published law five years ago was that selling marijuana is a Federal crime. But the optics of the latter would be horrible, and there appear to be plenty of people willing to bet that the Feds will at least give people a chance to shut down their operations and only arrest the persistent refuseniks if they ever do go forward with a no-marijuana-for-anyone policy in the future.
> I wonder how, though, the "legal" marijuana industry got started in CA, CO, etc. Did the federal government signal in some way that they would look the other way?
That's an interesting question that I'm afraid I don't know the answer to. I can, however, sketch in one of the basic facts operating in the background, which is that federal criminal prosecution is inherently highly selective. The feds choose to pursue a tiny fraction of the crimes they theoretically could, leaving the rest to the states. In other words, for any given act criminalized by federal law, the default condition is for the federal system to do nothing about it.
Federal law enforcement and prosecutors instead tend to concentrate their resources on a small, discretionary subset of investigations that require interstate coordination or special expertise or are otherwise too complicated or time-consuming for state/local police to deal with. Plus some run-of-the-mill crimes that fall into the federal ambit for various jurisdictional reasons, like being committed in Indian country.
Could the feds use that discretion to go after offenses that a state has decided aren't really crimes after all? Yes, that's essentially what happened in the "Mississippi Burning" operation of the mid-1960s, where DOJ used civil rights laws to prosecute murders in federal court. But that in itself probably gives you a sense of how unusual and extreme a case that was. The feds just aren't generally in the business of defying state law when it comes to defining substantive crimes.
"I wonder how, though, the "legal" marijuana industry got started in CA, CO, etc."
The simple fact is that there's a *much* larger power gap between state and municipal governments than between federal and state governments. For instance, Texas was enforcing its six-week abortion law for months before Roe v. Wade got overturned, because at the end of the day, Texan lawmakers know that Biden isn't going to send in the National Guard over abortion, just like Coloradan lawmakers know that he's not going to send in the National Guard over weed. But Abbott would absolutely send in State Troopers to shut down second-term abortion clinics in Austin, regardless of what legislation the Austin City Council passes.
The core issue here is that the power of law enforcement falls squarely in the hands of state governments, as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States and by the various state Constitutions. Municipal and county police forces only have authority because it's granted to them by the state government, and that authority can be withdrawn by the state government at any time. State governments are supreme authorities in the Hobbesian/Weberian sense, as they have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within their borders. This is somewhat limited by their adherence to the laws of the federal government, which acts as a sort of over-sovereignty, but all 50 states are still sovereignties in their own right nonetheless. Whereas municipal and county governments aren't sovereignties at all, they're simply administrative divisions and have no right to use force except to the degree that the state government empowers them to do so.
A fantastic modern example of nominative determinism. His name is Clarence "Thom"as. Let's see if he accepts the pretty valid argument that his premise for overturning 3 other iconic supreme court decisions also demands the overturning of Loving. He probably won't, for obvious reasons.
The obvious reasons are indeed obvious! You probably meant that part sarcastically, but there in fact unironic obvious reasons why the logic of Justice Thomas's skepticism toward Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell doesn't apply to Loving.
Loving was fundamentally an Equal Protection case. The Court added a cursory section at the end saying the Virginia anti-miscegenation statute also offended the Due Process Clause, which became important many years later in the Court's same-sex marriage jurisprudence. But that bit was peripheral to Loving's main holding.
Justice Thomas has been among the Court's most hawkish members in applying the Equal Protection Clause to invalidate racial classifications of all kinds. (See: Grutter v. Bollinger.) It's perfectly consistent with his longstanding views for him to question Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell without doubting Loving's correctness in any way.
Ah, how easily the "we are the party of anti-racism and fighting anti-blackness and discrimination" slips into racist demagoguery when black people dare to do things white liberals don't like"
Clarence Thomas has "Thom" as part of his name -> Uncle Tom -> see how kind, accepting, inclusive and morally superior I am to the kinds of people who use racial slurs and dogwhistles!
How dare people directly accept clearly stated opinions backed up by a history of actions in context and with the spirit they were written in! Those Blagards! Those Vyllains!
I'm not a Democrat. And anyway aren't you Irish? Have you been an American all this time? Well I guess there was one fact I was confused about.
I'm sure you'll say the same thing to Samuel L. Jackson. Well technically he said "Uncle Clarence" but the point is the same.
Regardless "Uncle Tom" is neither a racial slur nor a dogwhistle. A dogwhistle is, at least initially until it becomes publically recognized, supposed to be a secret. Not every allusion or reference is a "dogwhistle".
You guys roast MI so hard for his meme level understanding of the Bible but at least he is confused about a 2000 year old book of utter magical sky daddy nonsense while you are confused about well understood modern things.
Yes, I am Irish. Unhappily American politics and American progressive activism spills out globally. We've had American funding and copying the American play book for getting abortion legalised in Ireland, and what Machine Interface says about lying - well, the campaign running up to the abortion referendum was all about "fatal foetal abnormality" where we had winsome couples talking about the tragic end of their pregnancy and how they had to go abroad (generally to the UK) to terminate the pregnancy and this medical treatment should be legal in Ireland.
Then, on the very same day it was announced that the pro-abortion side had won (which involved an amendment to our Constitution), I am not exaggerating, literally the same day, the abortion activists were all over the media about how the fight wasn't over and they were going for abortion on demand with no limits. What's that thing about motte and bailey?
I've also had a family member affected by the leaking of American college activism around sexual harassment into our universities which ended in them walking into the sea to kill themselves (didn't happen, luckily) so yeah - I'm not feeling any too sympathetic to American progressivism as it affects my country.
"MARTIN: Do you remember when you first read "Uncle Tom's Cabin"?
Prof. TURNER: I actually read it in about fifth grade, which is young. I read it so young, that I - I think I'm one of the few African-Americans who read the novel before being really familiar with the slur. So I don't remember ever hearing my parents referring to anyone as an "Uncle Tom" before I had actually read the novel."
Does that mean I can use terms like "spic", "wop" and "dago" since those too are not slurs or dogwhistles? I mean, if the dictionary is wrong and Ferris University is wrong about "Uncle Tom" being offensive or a slur, then those other terms must be okay too!
"Uncle Tom
/ʌŋkl ˈtɒm/
noun OFFENSIVE•NORTH AMERICAN
noun: Uncle Tom; plural noun: Uncle Toms
a black man considered to be excessively obedient or servile to white people.
a person regarded as betraying their cultural or social allegiance.
"he called moderates Uncle Toms"
Origin
mid 19th century (first referring to an enslaved black man): from the name of the hero of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), an anti-slavery novel by the American writer Harriet Beecher Stowe."
"In many African American communities "Uncle Tom" is a slur used to disparage a black person who is humiliatingly subservient or deferential to white people. Derived from Stowe's character, the modern use is a perversion of her original portrayal. The contemporary use of the slur has two variations. Version A is the black person who is a docile, loyal, religious, contented servant who accommodates himself to a lowly status. Version B is the ambitious black person who subordinates himself in order to achieve a more favorable status within the dominant society. In both instances, the person is believed to overly identify with whites, in Version A because of fear, in Version B because of opportunism. This latter use is more common today.
"Uncle Tom," unlike most anti-black slurs, is primarily used by blacks against blacks. Its synonyms include "oreo," "sell-out," "uncle," "race-traitor," and "white man's negro." It is an in-group term used as a social control mechanism."
Of course, since white progressives started appropriating black terms like "woke", naturally they would appropriate black-on-black slurs and pat themselves on the back for being ever so clever: ha, I called that house servant an Uncle Tom, he's a white man's servant! See how non-racist and anti-anti-blackness I am!
Clarence Thomas wrote an opinion, announced yesterday, in the case of New York Rifle and Pistol Association vs. Bruen.
I don't recall any cases overturned in that ruling, though it is fairly strong in stating that the Constitution protects certain actions and rights, and State/Federal governments have to clear a high bar to put regulations on those rights.
Or are you referring to an opinion authored by Samuel Alito, which Clarence Thomas joined in? That holding overruled Roe vs. Wade, and Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, but I can't find a reference to a third case overruled.
I think the method used there is interesting, but it doesn't automatically lead to a clean argument for overturning the case of Loving vs. Virginia.
You probably haven't paid any attention to the supreme court before, for various reasons. Thomas wrote a "concurring opinion" on the Roe ruling saying we should look at gay marriage, marital contraception, and another issue, using a basis of the wrongness of of the interpretation of the 14th amendment that was used to support Roe. You can have multiple concurring or dissenting opinions alongside any given primary opinion.
I have paid attention to the Supreme Court on and off for years, which is one reason I knew off-hand that Justice Thomas authored the majority opinion in NYSRPA-vs-Bruen. I've been keeping an eye on that case since it popped up several years back. I'm also deeply aware of the Heller-vs-DC and McDonald-vs-Chicago cases that preceded it, and I somewhat expected Justice Thomas to make at least one reference to the infamous Dred-Scott-vs-Sandford opinion if he published an opinion on the NYSRPA case. (Justice Thomas did reference the Dred Scott case. I think you should look that reference up, it is an interesting commentary on the rights that were denied Dred Scott in that court case.)
I also knew that Justice Alito wrote the majority opinion in Dobbs-vs-Jackson-Womens-Health, and that Justice Thomas was among those who joined in that judgement. It was the headline item in analysis of the case for many hours.
I didn't know that Justice Thomas had written a complete concurring opinion, which took the logic of the case further than Justice Alito's opinion.
With that in mind... here is my off-the-cuff analysis of Justice Thomas's comments on revisiting other cases.
1. Apparently, the case of Grisvold-vs-Connecticut, which is to my knowledge the source of 'right to privacy' rulings relating to methods of preventing pregnancy by married couples, is mentioned as a case that Thomas thinks needs to be revisited. This is in line with his understanding that the 'substantive due process' principle was a mistake on the part of an earlier Supreme Court ruling. I can't tell if that means he thinks the right-to-privacy isn't protected by the Constitution, or if he thinks it is protected by some other Constitutional text.
2. Justice Thomas mentions Obergefell-vs-Hodges and Lawrence-vs-Texas as also needing revisiting. Once again, he doesn't mention whether he thinks these rights aren't protected, or whether he thinks that they are protected in a different way, at a different level of scrutiny.
3. Since these are not part of the primary Opinion that declares the holding of the Court, these are commentary, not official holdings of the Court.
4. I notice that Justice Thomas and Justice Alito leaned very heavily on the legal history of abortion-law in the Dobbs case, and the legal history of right-to-carry law in the NYSRPA case. If either one of them applied that logic to the Loving-vs-Virginia case, it is highly likely that they could cite enough evidence to strike down the Virginia law in question. From my vague recollection, laws against miscegenation were a late addition to the long history of marriage law in the English-speaking world.
5. It's also possible that they would skip the historical-legal-analysis and use the logic that the Court used in the Loving-vs-Virginia case: the law against miscegenation did not follow the Equal Protection clause of the relevant Amendment to the Constitution, thus it should be struck down.
Finally, to get back to your original thought: do you believe that Justice Clarence Thomas ought to have a different opinion about the court cases of Griswold-vs-Connecticut (and the others), because he is a minority? Is that a belief that a minority person must have certain political or legal opinions, to be considered a valid/proper representative of that minority?
If you have that belief, I think you are replacing the Rational part of your thought process with a tribal/political slogan.
Trying to correct the record on this is probably like spitting into a hurricane. But I suspect this talking point is likely to be very popular over the coming weeks, and this is as good a place as any to start pushing back.
Justice Thomas has insistently reiterated, in concurrences and/or dissents in dozens of cases, his view that the Due Process Clause does not protect substantive rights. He has made this argument in cases in which he emphatically believes the Constitution guarantees the right at stake, as well as in cases -- like Dobbs -- where he thinks the Constitution doesn't contemplate the asserted right at all.
As a historical matter, Justice Thomas is almost certainly correct about this. The provision that the drafters of the 14th Amendment intended to protect substantive rights against state infringement was the Privileges or Immunities Clause, which immediately follows the Birthright Citizenship Clause and logically and textually clearly has primacy over the Due Process Clause in defining the basic entitlements of U.S. citizens.
The problem is that in 1873, five years after the 14th Amendment's passage, the Supreme Court essentially nullified the Privileges or Immunities Clause. Rather than explicitly correcting that error, the Court has ever since worked around it by way of the fiction that the Due Process Clause does everything the Privileges or Immunities Clause was originally supposed to do.
Justice Thomas, who routinely opposes the notion that the Court should refrain from dislodging clearly erroneous precedents, thinks -- or, at any rate, says -- that the Court should stop perpetuating the fiction and should instead analyze unenumerated rights claims under the Privileges or Immunities Clause. No other Justice -- conservative, liberal, or centrist -- has ever signed onto this position. It would require a wrenching disruption to numerous precedents for no clear purpose beyond abstract intellectual housekeeping.
Justice Thomas gets rationalist bona fides on this score for being actually correct, and for having the audacity to suggest that might even matter. But the notion that his dissent from modern 14th Amendment jurisprudence is a first salvo against the whole armature of substantive due process doctrine badly misunderstands the nature and context of his objection.
The amusing thing here is that if Clarence Thomas had been a good house servant on the "right" side for white people, all the things about Anita Hill etc. would have been buried as jealousy and intrigue trying to smear a man working as the successor to Thurgood Marshall.
Just like the debates around Joe Biden and accusations of sexual harassment - suddenly it was "we never said believe *all* women" and "well she's lying, it couldn't have happened like she said".
Ah, I see. So is Justice Thomas planning to drop this particular line of argument in 2034? (Or maybe you mean he became embittered when Anita Hill rejected him back in 1982. In that case, only three years to go!)
I'd advise him to stick to it, though. An abstract argument premised on an objection to an 1873 decision by anti-Reconstruction conservatives doesn't seem like a very useful vehicle for vindictive lib-owning. It is, however, the sort of thing you might stand by if you were actually a serious and principled jurist.
Perhaps he meant "Thom" as in (1) St Thomas, patron saint of lawyers and (2) St Thomas Aquinas, the Big A. In which case it is a compliment and not an insult!
Does anyone still think Russia wouldn't have invaded Ukraine if Trump were still president of the USA? That was a popular hypothesis among Trumpists a few months ago.
ETA: I think Trump flattered Putin's ego, gave him greater reason to believe Europe was available for his taking, and ultimately encouraged, on the margin, Putin's move to annex Ukraine.
It's at least plausible that Putin would have believed he could play Trump like a fiddle, at least w/re Ukrainian issues because see Trump's first impeachment, and with such a Useful Idiot in place would have held off on doing anything that would have e.g. incited a Congressional majority to insist that the US was going to be taking an anti-Russian stance (and maybe impeaching the president again if he got in the way). In this hypothetical, Russia would have spent 2021-2024 working to diplomatically and economically isolate Ukraine as best he could with the help of his patsy in the White House.
But, A: that just postpones the invasion to 2025, and B: I don't think Putin ever considered Trump to be *that* reliable an asset, so it's unlikely that he'd really have called off an invasion just to keep Trump on side.
Maybe we're using different definitions of the word "asset", but I think there's a significant distinction between a useful idiot and an asset. The latter implies intentional collusion which was never substantiated despite liberal media desperately trying for years (I would consider trump-is-a-russian-asset-ism the party-flipped equivalent to the claims that Obama was born in Kenya)
Right. Trump as a guy who is literally on Moscow's payroll in one way or another, taking orders from an FSB handler who takes orders from Vladimir Putin, was never very likely. But a useful *enough* idiot is asymptotically close to being an asset. If Putin thought that Trump would do basically anything Putin asked if he were buttered up with some flattery and a few vague promises, then I could see Putin deciding to hold off on anything that would substantially weaken Trump at home.
I don't think this is likely, but then I look at what Kim Jong Un was able to get out of Trump for a year or so with some flattery and a few vague not-really-promises. It didn't last, of course, and Trump is mercurial enough that I don't think anyone would count on him years into the future. But I can't rule it out.
Putin couldn't get trump to un-sanction the Nord stream 2 pipeline, but then Biden un-sanctioned it early in his term. Trump also kept sending weapons to Russia's enemies in eastern europe. On the other hand he was less hawkish in general than Hillary and more willing to negotiate with geopolitical rivals. Russia probably viewed him as a lesser evil but even close to an asset.
(In general I think it's good to try to make win-win deals even with our enemies, like Nixon going to China. I wouldn't want politicians to feel obligated to be jingoistic to prove their loyalty to the US or something. I appreciate trump's attempts at dialog with Kim and Putin even though he failed)
Short of giving nuclear weapons to Ukraine, there was nothing the U.S. could have done to prevent the Russian invasion, regardless of who was President. Putin made up his mind way back in 2014, I don't think Trump or Clinton or Biden factored into his decision-making at all. The world does not, in fact, revolve around us.
Trump, the guy who went to the border of Russia and gave a speech committing the United States to the defense of Europe against dictatorship? And then started shipping weapons to Eastern Europe? Trump the guy who ordered American attacks on Russian (sorry, "Mysterious Syrian Mercenaries") forces in revenge for a failed attack on a US base?
I don't think it's obvious Trump would have stopped the invasion. But I don't think Trump did much to encourage Putin. I think Trump would have doubled down in Afghanistan and I think he would have done the same in Ukraine. Trump's never met a fight, even an ill-advised one, he didn't like. But (contra the Trump supporters) that it's not obvious whether it would have stopped the invasion. Like Jonathan said, I don't think the US is a central player here. This is really about Eastern European politics and the US is just a funder of one side.
Seeing the way Biden handled Afghanistan probably made Putin less afraid of the US. But I think it had very little to do with the US. Russia's casus belli was Ukraine's repudiation of the Minsk 2 treaty and refusal to desist from trying to retake Donetsk and Luhansk.
Why do the USA, Canada, Mexico, and EU all have the same 7.5-8.6% inflation right now despite having separate independent central banks? Hard to believe it's just an enormous coincidence, but I don't have any other explanation. Unlikely they all overdid covid QE to the same exact degree. Maybe excessive QE in the US had global spillover effects somehow?
I can't speak for Mexico or the EU, but Canada largely operates as a vassal state of Blue America. For (most of) our politicians, the idea of doing something "out of step" with the Democrats in D.C. is unthinkable. Our central bank similarly seems to basically just copy what the US Central Bank does.
Supply and Demand imbalance caused by the pandemic and emergence from the pandemic where the global paradigm was a Just In Time supply chain. JIT works wonderfully when demand and supply production are both in a state of statistical control (i.e. predictable within a stable range of common cause variation.) But the pandemic (a special cause of variation) knocked both demand and supply out of statistical stability. Demand came back stronger than supply production was able ramp up.
Central Banks even working together aren't really going to fix that imbalance quickly.
How is the central bank going to stop people who have decided that they are going into full blown "treat yourself" mode. Demand reduction is not easy to pull off without pain. How is central bank going to help ramp up supply - probably with a policy of easier money to fund ramp up - but that is the opposition to a desire for demand destruction.
This one seems to actually be able to do text, based purely off the example images. I guess we won’t be able to get on a wild goose chase looking for a secret language in it then. Too bad, that was fun!
They show an example of it failing to do text well (as well as other failures) in the discussions and limitations section. They also point out that the example images are cherry picked. Still it seems likely that is isn't as terrible generating text as Dall-E.
Hello folks! I have a close friend in Pune, India, and she has a 14 yo son who is very addicted to video games. He gets aggressive when it is time to put it away. I was wondering if there was anything on this blog or its previous version (SSC) that went into this subject. I was never a subscriber of the previous blog, so (maybe that is why) I don't seem to have a search button there. They are very worried about him and I thought this might help. The parents are both doctors and have been super busy the past 2 years. They hadn't realized he was so deep into video games now. They're not sure how to get him out, so he can focus on real life, grades etc. Therapy has not worked.
I find this guy very insightful on the topic, certainly helped me with similar issues, albeit not such extreme ones. It might be relevant that he is of Indian descent and uses some concepts from that culture.
TLDR: The Ukrainian government just banned the opposition party. Ukraine has effectively just become a one-party state. Also as noted by the article, the government has seized control over all media in the country.
Other news sources (predominantly conservative) report that the government also seized the assets of the parties and possibly their representatives.
Is there a good way to interpret this sequence of events, or is this just a straightforward transition to a military dictatorship?
This is just false Russian propaganda. The main opposition to Zelensky is Poroshenko who came in second in the last election. Secondarily Tymoshenko who is also a leading opposition figure. Both remain at liberty and their political parties remain active with little to no interference. Ukraine has banned a bunch of minor parties that were funded by Russia. The leader of the Opposition Platform for Life openly said he was close personal friends with Putin and advocated for surrendering to Russia. (Before later switching after many of his political allies fled to Russia.) The vast majority of opposition parties remain active in Ukraine. In fact Zelenksy looks to have some electoral difficulties because Russia's invading where a lot of his base of support lives. And the opposition has in some cases gotten leadership positions in the armed forces.
He's also banned Russian channels from Ukraine (as in, made in Russia, not Russian speaking) and centralized state information services. I've not heard of him banning private media but I can't prove a negative. At any rate, independent reporting on the ground in Ukraine continues to happen unimpeded, as far as I can tell, by the Ukrainians.
> The Ukrainian government just banned the opposition party. Ukraine has effectively just become a one-party state.
Um, did you read the link? Ukraine has a LOT of parties. In that article (from 3 months ago, March 10), 11 parties were "suspended"..."for the period of martial law". The largest party suspended is "the Opposition Platform for Life". This party "is led by Viktor Medvedchuk, a pro-Moscow oligarch with close ties to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin." Note that this wasn't the first step; Medvedchuk was under house arrest starting on 13 May 2021 on suspicion of treason.[1]
However, if I understand correctly, the other major opposition parties (the European Solidarity party, the Batkivshchyna party and the Holos party) were not banned.[4] Any two of those parties got more votes and seats than OPZZh (Opposition Platform for Life) in the last election.[5]
Ordinarily this amount of banning would worry me a lot. However, the past 9 years of history, including the recent full-scale invasion by Russia, increases my prior that pro-Kremlin politicians might actually have sold out Ukraine to the Kremlin in a way that could reasonably be described as treason.
I'm reminded of something Operator Starsky (Ukrainian soldier and YouTuber) said: "Before this invasion I was... pessimistic. I thought Russians will invest all their resources into informational warfare in Ukraine, so we will have a bunch of pro-Russian political parties, movements, media, everythig, because it already happened many times.... because Russian army is not their strongest and most fearful weapon. It's their mouths. Whenever you see some kind of Russian public figure on the TV with moving lips, it means that at this very moment they are performing a combat operation."
After 2014, those "combat operations" have not been super successful for Russia. But since the war started*, we've seen many notable examples of their hamfisted attempts at propaganda. Russia denied it invaded Ukraine. They denied it attacked anyone in Ukraine. They denied that the mass murders in Bucha happened, suggesting instead that Ukrainians staged a fake mass murder on the same day they retook the city, and that satellite photos, showing the bodies strewn about weeks before Ukrainian forces arrived, were fake. They denied destroying Donetsk Academic Regional Drama Theatre in Mariupol, which was full of civilians and labeled “дети” (“kids”) in huge letters; they claimed instead that Ukrainian soldiers (who at the time were completely surrounded by Russian forces) used their limited ordnance to destroy the theatre themselves.
The trouble with propaganda is that lots of people actually believe it. During the siege of Mariupol,[3] the last (non-Putinist) journalist to leave the city said something that struck me:
> By this time, no Ukrainian radio or TV signal was working in Mariupol. The only radio you could catch broadcast twisted Russian lies — that Ukrainians were holding Mariupol hostage, shooting at buildings, developing chemical weapons. The propaganda was so strong that some people we talked to believed it despite the evidence of their own eyes.
So, if "the Opposition Platform for Life" did any pro-Kremlin information operations after the war started (which, conceivably, they might have done despite condemning the invasion), or even before the war started, I can hardly blame the Ukrainians for trying to shut them up temporarily. Lies work, and that makes them dangerous, especially during a war.
I still think it would be very bad if "the Opposition Platform for Life" (or its successor party) isn't allowed to run in the next election, which will be held in 2024 at the latest[2]. But there's little reason not to allow pro-Kremlin parties to run for office — hardly anyone would vote for them anyway.
If Ukraine allows Russian-funded media, however, the Kremlin will be able to rewrite history and tell more tall tales like those mentioned above.
AFAIK They banned AN opposition party. Ukraine is parliamentarian.
I'm told the runner up opposition in the last election is still alive and kicking; but after the war started they (and everyone else) are currently playing the role of loyal opposition.
These dudes weren't (eg, being on video on RT saying who nuking Kiev was good and fine, etc.).
I judge it thusly: no worse than banning fascist parties during WW2.
Is there a precedent of a country generally considered democratic that has been at war of national existence and did *not* ban political parties suspected of colluding with the enemy? I am not aware of any.
>Is there a good way to interpret this sequence of events
Here in Australia, we had a scandal a few years back in which it came out that Sam Dastyari, a Senator, had been bought by Chinese agents. He was disgraced and forced to resign. This is despite the fact that Australia is not at war with the PRC.
A party known to be controlled by literally the enemy is potentially a front for sabotage operations. Opposition Platform For Life had a serious Russian-control problem, with one of their founders having close ties to Putin and another openly calling on Putin to nuke Ukraine. Apparently the members of OPfL who didn't defect to Russia have formed a new party called Platform for Life and Peace; if *that* gets banned, I'd say Zelensky's off the reservation, but right now I'd be more cautious. He's kinda been caught between a rock and hard place.
At war. Whatever can be said about how the situation came to, now it is this way. No military dictatorship stays in EU or even NATO in peacetimes. Spain joined after democratization 1982.
Kicking a country out seems indeed not to be an option in EU rules so far, AFAIK. After the problems with the Polish judicative changes and Hungary's "illiberal democracy", EU may change its framework.
How would you define a cult? I define it as a group that is fully dedicated (above all else) to a single charismatic living leader and their teachings. After that leader dies, if the group stays dedicated to his/her spirit and teachings, it may then become a religion. Perhaps there is a period in which it is unclear whether it is still a cult or a religion. Obviously, a religion has elements that might not be present in a cult, but I am not interested here in defining religion.
Under this definition, obviously something like The Cult of Isis doesn't count since Isis wasn't a living person. That was another sort of cult to be sure, but not the sort I am trying to define here.
Partially, yes. The problem is that reframing one question "cult, yes or no?" into eight separate criteria is only useful if you can judge each of them separately. (If you can't , then you just replaced one question you can't answer by eight questions you can't answer.) And the answer is not black and white anyway, it is more or less; and even benign non-religious organizations are not going to score exactly zero.
Problem with each of the eight questions, if you are not familiar with cults, is that you are supposed to judge something on a scale, where you have no idea how far the scale goes. (Kinda reminds me of https://xkcd.com/883/ .) Like, how much environmental control / admiration of leaders / pressure for perfection / group jargon is at 100% of the scale? How much exactly is 50%? If you never experienced an abusive environment, you may judge something as 9/10, when someone else would just say: eh, it's not okay, but more like 4/10.
So, ultimately, you need to get some near-mode idea of how the everyday life in cult looks like. I think that reading autobiografies of former cult members (preferably more of them, from different cults) can give you an approximate idea.
Also, what is a "religion"? The nominally same e.g. Catholicism would be practiced quite differently in San Francisco and in some Polish village. From sociological perspective, these two things have almost nothing in common, so it may make sense to say that one of them is a cult and the other is not.
I think the Lifton's criteria are useful, because they make you focus on more specific things, but ultimately, reality is complicated.
A funny example: if you take the criterium of redefining the language too literally, then Esperanto speakers should score 100%, and everyone else approximately 0%.
But that would of course miss the point. The Esperantists can revert to normal speech at any moment, and the words have about 1:1 correspondence, so everything can be translated without a problem, except for maybe two or three neologisms. That means, their ability to communicate with outsiders is not impaired, which is the thing this criterium is supposed to reflect. As a result, I would rate this criterium as maybe 10%, which is still mostly harmless. (It is still true that the language is a costly signal that outsiders cannot fake.)
Now compare with e.g. Scientologists, who mostly use nominally English words (or abbreviations thereof), but so many of them are redefined that when you listen to them talking to each other, you have no idea what they mean. And if your friend or relative joins the group, and you ask them to "ELI5" some concept to you, the explanation probably won't make much sense. This is much worse impediment to communication; one that even Google Translate cannot help you with.
"Cult is the care (Latin cultus) owed to deities and temples, shrines, or churches. Cult is embodied in ritual and ceremony. Its present or former presence is made concrete in temples, shrines and churches, and cult images, including cult images and votive offerings at votive sites.
...Cultus is often translated as "cult" without the negative connotations the word may have in English, or with the Old English word "worship", but it implies the necessity of active maintenance beyond passive adoration. Cultus was expected to matter to the gods as a demonstration of respect, honor, and reverence; it was an aspect of the contractual nature of Roman religion (see do ut des). Augustine of Hippo echoes Cicero's formulation when he declares, "religion is nothing other than the cultus of God."
'Religion' as we currently define it didn't exactly exist in the Classical world:
"Newer research shows that in the ancient and medieval world, the etymological Latin root religio was understood as an individual virtue of worship in mundane contexts; never as doctrine, practice, or actual source of knowledge. In general, religio referred to broad social obligations towards anything including family, neighbors, rulers, and even towards God. Religio was most often used by the ancient Romans not in the context of a relation towards gods, but as a range of general emotions such as hesitation, caution, anxiety, fear; feelings of being bound, restricted, inhibited; which arose from heightened attention in any mundane context. The term was also closely related to other terms like scrupulus which meant "very precisely" and some Roman authors related the term superstitio, which meant too much fear or anxiety or shame, to religio at times. When religio came into English around the 1200s as religion, it took the meaning of "life bound by monastic vows" or monastic orders."
So "cultus" would be the *physical* expression of "religio", the personal feelings towards a god. Cultus/cult was more akin to what we think of as religion - gatherings, songs of praise, prayers, sacrifices, rituals, cult statues of the deity, etc.
(2) Christianity then adopted this in the cult of the saints, which developed out of the veneration shown towards martyrs and the dead faithful:
"From the fall of the Roman Empire in about 476 until the advent of the Lutheran Reformation in 1517, the "cult of saints" was one of the central forms of religious expression in Western Europe.
Saints were petitioned for aid in times of need and provided models of pious behavior. The faithful sought contact with the bodily remains of saints (relics) in the hopes of miraculous cures, built churches in their names, and fashioned their images in sculpture and painting."
I haven't had a chance to look at this project yet, it sounds interesting.
"The Cult of Saints is a major five-year project, based at the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford and funded by an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council, which will investigate the origins and development of the cult of Christian saints in Late Antiquity.
The project, which launched in January 2014, will map the cult of saints as a system of beliefs and practices in its earliest and most fluid form, from its origins until around AD 700 (by which date most cult practices were firmly established): the evolution from honouring the memory of martyrs, to their veneration as intercessors and miracle-workers; the different ways that saints were honoured and their help solicited; the devotion for relics, sacred sites and images; the miracles expected from the saints.
Central to the project is a searchable database, on which all the evidence for the cult of saints will be collected, presented (in its original languages and English translation), and succinctly discussed, whether in Armenian, Coptic, Georgian, Greek, Latin or Syriac.
Podcast: Dr Bryan Ward-Perkins introduces the project"
(3) Where we start to get nearer to the modern usage of "cult" is in the Catholic theological language around "disparity of cult/disparity of worship":
And development of the language usage where "cult" became more to do with:
"The term "cult" first appeared in English in 1617, derived from the French culte, meaning "worship" which in turn originated from the Latin word cultus meaning "care, cultivation, worship". The meaning "devotion to a person or thing" is from 1829. Starting about 1920, "cult" acquired an additional six or more positive and negative definitions. In French, for example, sections in newspapers giving the schedule of worship for Catholic services are headed Culte Catholique, while the section giving the schedule of Protestant services is headed culte réformé."
(4) And that brings us up to the current, and usually negative, connotations of the term:
So your definition seems to hew more to the second of the Merriam-Webster definitions:
"2a: great devotion to a person, idea, object, movement, or work (such as a film or book)
b: the object of such devotion
c: a usually small group of people characterized by such devotion"
Great devotion to a charismatic person, involving the object of such devotion and the small group of people characterised by such devotion.
Now, as to your example, without more information it's hard to say: gay heretical cult or new monastic/lay society movement? The fact that it's all single-sex doesn't necessarily mean it's a gay sex cult. Within Catholicism, generally it's groups of pious lay women who gather in a form of community, which often then evolves into becoming a religious order, but it also applies to men.
For instance, they could be a society of apostolic life:
"A society of apostolic life is a group of men or women within the Catholic Church who have come together for a specific purpose and live fraternally. It is regarded as a form of consecrated (or "religious") life.
There are a number of apostolic societies, such as the Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul, who make vows or other bonds defined in their constitutions to undertake to live the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience. However, unlike members of an institute of consecrated life (religious institute or secular institute), members of apostolic societies do not make religious vows—that is, "public vows"."
The Vincentians are an example of this, they involve both male and female religious orders and various lay movements, founded by or inspired by St. Vincent de Paul. If you've ever seen one of those charities calling themselves "Depaul", well, they're members of the Vincentian family who have decided they're too cool for school/shaken off the overtly religious connection:
I don't know what branch, if any, of Christianity your example are. They might be Catholic-inspired or some other mainline denomination, or it could be a guy setting up his own version of a religious community (the same way Dragon House tried re-inventing the novitiate).
A bit off topic, but since you mention the Cult of Isis:
When historians talk about the ancient world, "cult" means "organized religion". They even call their own religion a cult, if it happens to have existed back then.
Firstly, I'm sorry for your situation and hope recovery is possible. My family lost multiple members to, um, Extreme Christ Enthusiast type groups, and that sucks to live through. Grandmother went to her grave wondering if she could have saved Evangelist Aunt from that fate. That same aunt harangued Grandmother on her deathbed that repenting and turning to Christ would cure her cancer. It was just painful for everyone. Better to nip such things in the bud. Good luck.
I liked Matt Yglesias' recent framing between "survey beliefs" (conspiracies) and "action beliefs" (cults).[1] People report believing in all kinds of weird Lizardman's Constant shit, and some may indeed actually believe such things in their heart of hearts. But it's only a cult if such beliefs actually lead followers to Do Something meaningful in real life. This neatly sidesteps the problem of charisma, which is certainly correlated (at least to the *successful* cults we hear about, e.g. selection bias), but also seems quite subjective.
Max Weber might define charisma as: 1) the ability to talk at great and eloquent length on a variety of topics; 2) the nature or characteristics of a leader, such that one is naturally inclined to deference; and 3) the ability to make listeners feel valued and understood. I think most cult leaders have 3. Researchers frequently say 2 is achieved via external threats and adverse selection. And 1...well, considering how most cults seem to revolve around This One Weird Trick, or a small selection of Shocking Truths (You Won't Believe #3!), I'm not sure this fits. Charisma of this type is quite contextual! Moreover, "decentralized" cults clearly don't have any single charismatic leader, or even necessarily coherent teachings. But they are still obviously cults, or cult-like. So I think charisma isn't quite a "general factor g" of cults.
The living-leader part seems fine though. Sometimes there's a successful successor to the Prophet, but more often, cutting off the head of the snake seems to work pretty well. Probably not a coincidence that many of history's most notable cults flamed out in murder-suicide. It's just harder to get your fix off recorded impressions of some dead guy.
On the question of a charismatic leader, I'm mostly defining it tautologically: if a real-life group leader has many voluntary followers, they are by definition charismatic.
Could be. I have a relative who has joined either a fringe religious group or a cult, and I am trying to determine which. To me the question hinges on whether a charismatic leader is running the thing -- something that isn't clear at the moment -- because I think the potential for abuse is much greater in this group if one dude is leading it vs. if it has a more democratic spirit to it. The relative claims it is just a bunch of people who have gotten together in this Christian church, although some of the details make it sound more like a cult than a church, due to the control it has over the members living conditions. It sounds like a gay cult in the guise of a Christian church in which some middle-aged man is fucking a bunch of young men, although that's just my best guess. Perhaps I am too cynical.
I say it seems like a gay cult because it is a bunch of young men living together and there seems to be an inordinate focus on the notion that homosexuality and masturbation are sins. Not that any of these young men are dating women.
"I say it seems like a gay cult because it is a bunch of young men living together and there seems to be an inordinate focus on the notion that homosexuality and masturbation are sins. Not that any of these young men are dating women."
if it is a religious community trying to follow the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and it's a bunch of modern young men with no women, then why are you surprised there's a lot of reminders that "masturbation is sex, which is breaking the chastity rule, and no getting around it by fucking one of your brothers here, that's breaking the rule too"*
*Allegedly some gay seminarians claimed that the vow of chastity only applied to marriage, so if they were fucking each other in seminary it didn't count. It counts, boys.
>there seems to be an inordinate focus on the notion that homosexuality and masturbation are sins
It seems at first glance it would be counterproductive for a gay cult leader sexually exploiting his followers to focus too much on how much of a sin it is.
Yet that has been a pattern among a number of cults (and larger churches). I think the idea is to instill a sense of shame which causes people to keep silent. Think of it this way: if a Christian religious leader gets caught sodomizing the young (adult, tbc) males in their congregation, they are likely to be in some social trouble regardless of whether or not they openly preached about the evils of homosexuality. By openly preaching against it, they risk being accused of hypocrisy, but that probably isn't their biggest concern at that point. They're concern is not being credibly accused of doing anything wrong in the first place. Creating an atmosphere of shame can be a strategy for making the sexual encounters with the young men seem unreal, special, absurd, unrelatable and unspeakable. And if any individual seems like they might create problems, you kick them out of the church and tell everyone else to cut off communication with them. All these men left their homes out-of-state to join this "church"; they are part of no wider community in their geographical area.
Sure, if it's about abusive control, then shame is a tool. But preaching that gay sex is sinful is going to be a problem, *unless* there is a caveat that "unless the Lord directs me to sleep with you". Several abusers have managed to use that one, not for gay sex exclusively - 'it's okay if I have several wives/concubines because the Patriarchs in the Old Testament did and I am David/Solomon/whomever come again'.
Generally, from the Catholic side, the adult sex abuse cases were liberal clerics, e.g. the accusations that Cardinal McCarrick slept with seminarians:
"In 2018, multiple media outlets reported a number of priests and former seminarians under McCarrick had come forward alleging that McCarrick had engaged in inappropriate conduct with seminarians. These included reports that he made sexual advances toward seminarians during his tenure as Bishop of Metuchen and Archbishop of Newark. McCarrick reportedly routinely invited a number of seminarians to a house on the shore with limited sleeping accommodations, resulting in one of them sharing a bed with the bishop. According to former seminarian Desmond Rossi, he and a friend later realized that the archbishop would cancel weekend gatherings "if there were not enough men going that they would exceed the number of available beds, thus necessitating one guest to share a bed with the archbishop". Rossi subsequently transferred before ordination from the Archdiocese of Newark to a diocese in New York State."
So yes, using secrecy and authority, but not shame as such - the fire-and-brimstone types don't (usually) get caught out in this, McCarrick was a media favourite because he was perceived as belonging to the 'liberal' wing of the Catholic Church as auxilliary bishop of New York ("In June 2004, McCarrick was accused of intentionally misreading a letter from Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger recommending that Catholic politicians who supported abortion rights be denied the Eucharist. McCarrick led a successful push to have the USCCB allow the bishops of individual dioceses to determine who was or was not eligible to receive the sacrament of communion. Fr. Richard John Neuhaus said, "The bishops I have talked to have no doubt that [McCarrick's] presentation did not accurately represent the communication from Cardinal Ratzinger." McCarrick said that he did not want to cause "a confrontation with the Sacred Body of the Lord Jesus in my hand," and added that "the individual should be the one who decides whether or not he is in communion with the Church" and therefore eligible to receive the sacrament. McCarrick later met with then senator John Kerry, a Catholic and the Democratic nominee in that year's presidential election. Some Catholics felt Kerry should not have been allowed to receive Communion due to his political position favoring abortion rights. Although McCarrick was sometimes labelled a liberal, he was noted for adhering to church teaching on abortion, same-sex marriage, and the male-only priesthood. American Catholic journalist Michael Sean Winters disputed this claim writing "Liberals embraced him as a champion of moderation at a time when the Church was seen as increasingly reactionary. I always thought he was playing to the cameras.")
I am very interested, if you can find out any details, about this alleged church and what their inspiration is - Protestant, Catholic, DIY?
As you cite yourself, there are established uses of the word that are quite different from your definition. So what's your intent with the one you're proposing?
There's probably a survey out there about this, or someone like our dear host could easily commission one. That'd be an interesting query.
I notice that "everyone", rationalist or not, knows about Ayn Rand, or at least the straw-woman version. Very few would recognize a name-drop of Bertrand Russell. (Or Jaynes, Other Jaynes, Bayes, etc. as mentioned in other replies.) Unsure which update direction this evidence points towards.
Personally, I avoided RAND Corporation media for the longest time precisely because it seemed heavily correlated to...uh...not-rationalist-communities. Like it's not a weird coincidence that the commentariat at Bari Weiss' Common Sense substack name-drops Rand and John Galt all the damn time. And that's a *polite* example. (I say this as someone who does have libertarian leanings, incidentally.) Maybe I just missed the wheat, and there really are some transcendentally brilliant Objectivist ideas to engage with...but if I gotta wade through that kind of chaff to find them, seems like a low-VOI undertaking.
To throw a few other names on top of the intellect pile: Francis Fukuyama/Samuel P. Huntington, Friedrich (Hayek and Nietzsche), Immanuel Kant/Alisdair MacIntyre. Though this exercise also makes the mission creep of the Rationalist Movement(tm) pretty obvious...it all sounded so simple back in the halcyon days of merely "raising the sanity waterline"!
LOL! Not sure what Ayn Rand has to do with the RAND Corporation, unless you're making some sort of pun. Ayn Rand was very well-known back in the day, even did an interview in Playboy Magazine. The RAND Corporation ran a program in Machine Translation back in the 1950s that help start what became known as Computational Linguistics. They also did a lot of very 'rational' war-gaming for the Pentagon, etc.
When did the Rationalist movement become aware of itself as such?
That, but also a dig at how nuanced ideas tend to metastasize into grotesque versions of themselves once adopted by a wide and/or moneyed audience. Perhaps Rand, Inc. would have been more appropriate. Something foundational gets lost in the translation. A mirrored example might be, I dunno, Michel Foucault -> "CRT". At least they got the Panopticon part down?
To the follow-up question, having not been there during the Sequences on the Mount days, I only know the popular history that the current stage of the Rationalist Movement is delineated by the ascendance of Rightful Caliph Eliezer Yudkowsky, Doomcrier of AI. Possibly mentored by the kindly old wizard Robin Hanson, if one insists on further Campbellizing an already-narcissistic hero narrative. But it's an interesting question with no clear answer: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/07/yes-we-have-noticed-the-skulls/
The ascendance of the Caliph is a puzzle. Maybe a decade or so ago I heard about this Yudkowsky guy and went looking for something to read. I found this: Levels of Organization in General Intelligence. The title interested me because I'd given considerable thought to and published on levels of organization in, well, intelligent systems. Though I've tried several times, most recently this morning, I cannot bring myself to read the whole thing (over 100 pages). I find it tedious and empty.
Philosophers and logicians distinguish between the intension of a concept or a set and its extension. Its intension is its definition. Its extension is its footprint in the world, in the case of a set, the objects that are members of the set. Yudkowsky builds these elaborate contraptions from intensions with only scant attention to the possible or likely extensions of his ideas. He’s building castles in air – though his attention seems to have become transfixed by the torture chambers deep within those castles.. There’s little there but his prose, some formulas here and there and a diagram or two.
I don't see how he ever got a reputation for knowing something about AI.
I think the general consensus now is that EY is clearly Smart, with some number of potential Very's prefixed, or at least knows how to Perform Smartness Very Very Well. Whether there's much actual substance underlying that style remains hotly contested. Personally I like reading him more for the Ribbonfarm-y type stuff than the Let's Get Down to Business And Align AI-type stuff. Even total bullshitters can be successful in constructing thought-provoking magical thinking. Intension without extension, as you say.
Brevity is definitely not the soul of his wit though...definitely an outlier even among five-digit-wordcount rationalist writers. I think that's where a lot of the emptiness comes from. "Surely," one is left to wonder, "if there are actual Ideas in here, they could be expressed more concisely!" It's not like Rat ideas are intrinsically impossible to run through the Popularism algorithm.
Yes, VV Smart I'll give him, that's obvious enough. Ribbonfarm?
As for 5-digit rationalist writers, Scott's an interesting case. I've only read a bit here and there. Back in 2017 he did a review of a book from 2017, Behavior: The Control of Perception, by William Powers, ttps://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/06/book-review-behavior-the-control-of-perception/ That book happens to be one of my foundational books, but Powers' ideas have mostly disappeared (except for a dogged band of loyalists) so I was surprised to see it turn up at all. And Scott clearly got some of what Powers was up to while freely admitting that some of it just zipped by him. So there's that – and, incidentally, that's a book about levels of organization in an intelligent system (us) and is much more coherent that EY's LOGI article.
And then earlier this year Scott wrote this extraordinary post about biological anchors (I found out about it through Tyler Cowen). He wrote it in two voices, one considering the arguments in a reasoned measured way. And then there's this other voice, allotted a smaller word count, of satirical amazed outrage. That's one thing. The other thing is that it is only at the very end that Scott gets around to what's really on his mind, which is fear of a rogue AI. That all but came out of nowhere. It wasn't announced at the beginning nor discussed in the course of pondering just when AGI will materialize.
It's like the magician goes through an elaborate and amazing routine of making a woman disappear into a piece of magical apparatus and then, just when he's about to bring her back, the apparatus drops out of view and the magician is left holding his hat. From which he proceeds to remove, not the traditional rabbit, but a pit bull.
Russell's views on uncertainty, doubt and evidence seem very in line with rationalism. I also don't see Rand supporting EA, which many rationalists do.
<quote>
Bertrand Russell’s Ten Commandments
Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
Do not think it worthwhile to produce belief by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
Never try to discourage thinking, for you are sure to succeed.
When you meet with opposition, even if it is from your family, endeavour to overcome it with argument and
not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.
Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do, the opinions will suppress you.
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for if you value intelligence as you
should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
Be scrupulously truthful even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise, for only a fool will think that is
May I suggest another Jaynes, namely E. T. Jaynes ? [1] His book Probability Theory: The Logic of Science was quite influential in proselytizing the over-the-top notion that Bayes rule is the true, end-of-all logic of science. OTOH he gives all the credit to Jeffreys.
I should think Bayes more than Jaynes. But who reads Bayes in their teens?
But I think many people encountered Bertrand Russell or Ayn Rand in their teens and it changed their world. For me it was Russell, but I had a good friend for whom Rand was the revelation.
Rand seems to appeal to Libertarians and almost no one else. Russell is less often read nowadays than he once was, but (like Chesterton) he remains tremendously quotable. Like Voltaire, Russell’s good ideas have long since become part of the Enlightenment worldview, while his bad ideas and the extent to which he shared the prejudices of his era is of interest only to biographers. On balance, then, I’d say Russell
How does Russell specifically influence “rationalists” though. His political philosophies changed with the wind, and with the times. He was predominantly a socialist in the strong European tradition, and inherently a strong pacifist and anti nuclear campaigner. I see little to none of that here. If this comment section is the rationalist community.
Rationalism is not a political philosophy, and is entirely consistent with one's political views changing as the world changes (or as one's knowledge and understanding of it improve).
And of course he co-authored the Principia Mathematica with Whitehead. I assume no one reads it these days except people interested in the histories of philosophy, logic, and mathematics, but it was an enormously influential book early in the 20th century. One of my undergraduate literature professors was a serious, and I mean serious, book collector. He had a first edition of the Principia sitting on a chair in the entrance way to his house the first time I visited him, along with a bunch of other students. When I took symbolic logic, the course ended with the construction of number that Russell and Whitehead used in the Principia. Beyond that and his technical work in philosophy, Russell was an enormously influential public intellectual at mid-century.
That’s cool 🙂 Principia Mathematica reminds me of Spinoza’s stuff: a good-faith, intellectually serious effort to account for matters of importance which, despite not really succeeding, deserves admiration as a milestone in the intellectual progress of humanity
Yeah, me too: I had to look up who Jaynes was just now, and then was like “oh yeah, that Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind guy - kinda nutty. Somewhere between Chariots of the Gods and Freud.
Bertrand Russel. Ayn Rand's influence is definitely there, but I think "Heroic rationality" is a substantially smaller part of the rationality movement than "Less Wrongness".
The degree to which Ayn Rand changed the course of popular philosophy in the US is such that a modern reader can't even recognize what her villains actually represented.
Reading the current DSL discussion of The Iliad. As for comments along the lines that the gods are portrayed as shallow and fickle, I always took Greek gods to be an early attempt to explain human psychology. It's not really about the gods. Polytheism is a good metaphor for the war of emotions and rationality inside us all. Monotheism supplants that complex yet legible psychology with reductive good vs. evil ethics, a self that is a mystery to us, and a God that won't accept ignorance as an excuse.
I think the metaphors of the polytheists are more accurate in describing what human existence is like than those of the monotheists. Of course, this argument is a bit circular because your beliefs will affect your experience.
"I always took Greek gods to be an early attempt to explain human psychology. It's not really about the gods. Polytheism is a good metaphor for the war of emotions and rationality inside us all."
In one development of it, yes, as thinkers got to work on the problem of "why are the gods like that?"
But the antecedents of the gods are that they are natural forces, or abstract qualities like Fate. We see this in the creation myths, where the first elements are things like Chaos or Night or the primordial waters, and out of these arise by minglings and couplings things that gradually become, by generations, the personified gods.
Zeus shares common roots with other gods, all coming from Dyeus, the personification of the sky:
As cultures become more sophisticated and societies arise and become complex, the conceptions of the gods also undergo changes. So they can come to resemble glorified humans, and be understood as "elements of human psychology", and then the philosophers of the day have to grapple with the problem of why the gods, as portrayed in Homer and other poets, are such a quarrelsome, disreputable lot, always drinking and fighting and committing adultery and generally behaving in a manner not like austere eternal entities should behave.
But always, even with those all-too-humanised Greek gods, there is a moment when the primitive element shines through, and one of the gods, even the small, amusing ones, will look at you with eyes as inhuman as an animals and turn you into a deer to be rent apart by your own hounds, or a snake-headed monster, or blasted with the lightning glory of their divinity, because the remote, implacable forces of nature shine through. The storm or the flood or the disease that strikes your crops or your herds or your children does not care about you and cannot be reasoned with, so all you can do is hope that the rituals of appeasement do indeed work as the traditions claim they do; that Mars or Jupiter *is* enough like a human to make and keep contracts and bargains.
Saying that the psychology of Augustine or even Paul is "reductive good vs evil ethics" makes it sound like you've not ever read them. And if you think that our self is perfectly legible to us you are delusional.
I think that once you start suggesting some variation of "these people who performed elaborate and expensive rituals to their gods, had entire cottage industries of selling miracle talismans to curse their enemies and bless themselves, had many superstitions and local cults devoted to nature worship, made apostasy a capital crime, etc. didn't REALLY believe in gods, they were just a metaphor for humanity", you've lost the plot.
In drama, that is certainly a role the CHARACTER of the gods can play, because most fiction in the ancient world is ultimately about either humanity's relationship with the natural world, humanity's relationship with the gods, or humanity's relationship with itself, but there's an irritating tendency online to try and portray ancient cultures (especially the Greeks and Romans) as Enlightened Rational People Who Were Actually Atheists When You Think About It to then be contrasted with the Superstitious Science-Hating Evil Christians, which ironically enough is a morality-play version of the past which I can't stand to see perpetuated, even accidentally.
Our use for Greek mythology might be "a way to think about human psychology", and it could even be the case that some ancient Greeks used their myths in this way. (Presumably there'd be some overlap there with the people writing drama.)
So what if _most people_ didn't use these myths as thinking tools? What were _most people_ like, back then? Looking at American Christianity today, there's all kinds of uses and meanings. Megachurch pastors use Christian belief to enrich themselves. Right-wing idealogues abuse Christian belief to sway masses of people to vote in favor of unfettered capitalism. Authentic believers use Christianity as a source of comfort, or in perhaps smaller numbers, as a framework for thinking about the world.
Is Christianity "a tool to implement right-wing policies", "an opiate for those who prefer not to think", or "a framework to help people who are so inclined to try to reason about their role in the world"? ...Yes.
So, what is the Greek mythos to us? What was it to dramatists, or to thinkers? It makes perfect sense that those are different things than what the mythos would have been to day-to-day believers.
I didn't say that they didn't believe in these gods, but I suppose I was unclear. I'm suggesting that powerful emotions were understood as originating from various gods as opposed to stemming from the hearts and minds of humans.
My line "It wasn't really about the gods" was meaningless drivel.
I have trouble convincing people that modern humans today believe their own religion or ideology. See previous threads and how much trouble I had convincing people "No, China actually is run by a bunch of people who believe in Communism."
Dreyfus's "All Things Shining" goes into this in depth. And yeah, the god-archetypes can be understood as primal drives of humankind, which has interesting implications once you start to worship them.
Ancient religion, from an anthropological perspective, is absolutely is about explaining the chaos of the natural world by anthropomorphizing it and creating a sense of stability through ritual. Indeed, there's very suggestive evidence that the rituals usually come FIRST, with the wider concept of the gods evolving out of (presumably) some hominid asking "Why do we sacrifice a virgin lamb on the full moon and burn its heart in a special fire-pit?" to the shaman one day.
Well, I think you should re-review the last 50 years of Anthropological literature on religion. ;-) There are good arguments that religion acts as an instrument social binding and community identification. Many (but not all) anthropologists distinguish between magical practices and religious practices, because they serve different purposes. As for explaining the world, I think most of humanity isn't looking for an explanation of the world. Does a shaman in the Taiga of Siberia spend much time thinking about why the world exists? How about a waitress in Milwaukie? But the shaman helps to bind her community together with communal rituals. And the waitress in Milwaukie goes to church probably more to socialize with her friends — thus connecting with her larger community — rather than going to church to understand the origin of the Universe.
Touché! But I've always been underwhelmed (and disappointed) by the lack of curiosity that I've observed in my fellow humans.
Also, let me clear, I don't regard Anthropology as a science. But they are good at finding common patterns in human social organizations. And they definitely do OK as stamp collectors (to channel Ernest Rutherford).
And where do you think I'm being critical of the beliefs of priests, shamans or waitresses? I'm a Popperian and I acknowledge that there are other ways of knowing things than through the experimental method and science. I'm not a materialist, tough. I'm a mystic who happens to have been firmly grounded in the sciences and the scientific method before I became a mystic. Priests, shamans, and waitresses should be allowed to believe whatever they want as long as they don't go around forcing their beliefs on others.
I didn't say you were being critical. I said you were insulting them by implying that they're vapid and have no interest in the big questions. In my experience people who have no interest in the big questions in secular societies simply become secular, and in premodern societies they certainly DON'T become part of the priesthood. The fact such comparisons came so glibly to your lips is, in fact, insulting to them.
What makes you say the natural world is chaotic? I would call myself an outdoorsman, certainly have spent plenty of time in the wild, although I've never lived there for any length of time. But I would not say the natural world is chaotic, at all. On the contrary, it's deeply ordered. Everything happens for a reason, and the reason is available to the careful observer. In that sense, I would say it is the human world that is chaotic. Bears and trees and the weather -- very ordered, and quite predictable to the good observer. Humans -- much less so.
You could argue that the gods are associated with nature *because* nature is ordered, makes sense, and I can easily see early man, caught up in the chaos that is other people, invoking the settled power of nature as a way to express his wishes for order among humans, or his belief that the natural order will ultimately triumph over the madness of humanity.
Some humans certainly think like you do, and some do not.
As prime illustration of this, Taoism saw nature as a perfectly harmonious and divine engine humanity needed to align itself with, while Confucianism saw Earth as existing in a state of confusion as an opposite pole to Heaven in accordance with Chinese cosmological thought, with order only being created on earth by the observation of filial piety.
Likewise, many cultures saw parts of the natural world (the heavens, with their ordered movement) as stable and ordered, but other parts (volcanoes, earthquakes, sudden storms, wild animal attacks, droughts, etc.) as chaotic.
And of course you can argue that. You can argue anything if you tie your mind in fancy enough knots.
Once your civilization has agriculture and serious population, the chaotic motion of humans becomes every bit as important to your life as the perhaps somewhat more orderly proceedings of nature, and thus every bit as necessary to try to explain and work around.
Depends on where you live. In Egypt the Nile's flood was predictable, the weather was predictable compared to weather elsewhere, and the gods were generally benevolent and orderly. In Mesopotamia, things were a lot less predictable with more natural disasters, and the gods tended to be violent and easily provoked.
I there's some confusion here on what "predictable" means. It's predictable that every now and there will be a lot more rain than usual, or a lot less. But these things don't happen shazam on a moment's warning, you can see them coming on. Yes, it's true *in what years* there will be a lot more rain than usual can't be predicted -- I'm dubious this was lead to a feeling of "chaos" among people who lived with it. It doesn't in modern farmers. You understand that there is variation in weather, just as you understand a particular animal you meet might be hungry or not, in a bad temper or not, just as you understand the rainstorm might clear up quickly or slowly, and so on.
People who live in nature don't expect to be able to predict exactly what will happen, moment by moment, according to some chart. That's the habit of human office workers who live in a highly artificial surroundings and (unnaturally) expect everything that happens to them will be able to be scheduled down to the minute. It's the *modern* mind that expects to be able to predict the amount of rainfall 12 months out, or exactly how many hurricanes there will be, what strength ,when they will land, et cetera.
I am certain primitive man *wondered* what underlay these things, and when he found reliable patterns he was pleased. But I do not think "chaotic" is what would have come to mind. Unknown, yes, and maybe deriving from some complex pattern not as yet realized, sure. But that's not the same as "chaotic" = having no pattern at all, no underlying reason, just random weird shit.
And yet, one can very easily come to that conclusion when dealing with people, because people genuinely don't have underlying processes that direct them to various behavior (provided we stipulate free will ha ha). So if I live among bears, they start off unpredictable, sure, because I haven't studied them, but the more I study them the more predictable they get, and I am satisfied that they follow patterns -- maybe complex patterns, maybe patterns I don't understand yet -- and are not chaotic. People don't work the same way. You can study them all your life and they still aren't predictable (although more so, to be sure). Maybe it's because we have limits in studying each other that we don't have when studying nature.
No such thing. The people of the ancient world were just as curious about trying to divine the future and understand the hidden principles of cosmological order that underpinned reality. The Wuxing and Taiji weren't invented in the 20th century, they were developed before Aristotle had written his book on natural science.
>It's the *modern* mind that expects to be able to predict the amount of rainfall 12 months out, or exactly how many hurricanes there will be, what strength ,when they will land, et cetera.
Not convinced. European ethnographic record is is full of folk weather lore of the form "if the badger scratches its back / swallows travel unladen/other random observations made before/at St. Wossname's Eve, one should harvest early next year/expect 40 days of similar weather/whatever".
The more academically inclined and the elite were extremely interested in movements of stars. After the introduction of print, almanacs were popular and absolutely claimed to able to tell much about weather, harvest, natural phenomena, and medical instructions ... down to choice of the optimal day for bloodletting to treat your indigestion according to astrology and humoral theory, all of it written and printed 12 months in advance.
I used to think we would progress beyond religions, but now I think too many of us are hard-wired for religion, and people will make up their own religions in the absence of them. I don't have a great definition for "religion" though. Best I can do is faith in something irrational. I would put "caring about humanity" in that category.
It would be interesting to see the impossible-to-make map of religious density per capita across the globe. Nietzsche claimed that Northern Europeans have little talent for religion. I wonder if that is in fact the case.
"Religion" is a symptom, rather than the cause. Atheists, politicians, pundits, cranks and that one uncle at every Thanksgiving dinner (you know the one)... they can all be hopelessly dogmatic about their non-religious beliefs. I've even become convinced that a large fraction, if not the majority, of ordinary people are insane, at least in a compartmentalized way pertaining to certain topics. Some Democrats, some Republicans, some religious, some new-age, some atheist. All f**king crazy.
I'm having trouble with my dad right now, actually, regarding a certain unnecessarily-politicized issue. After using a whole bunch of reasoning on him unsuccessfully... I hoped to convince him to think more on the meta-level by sending him the book "Scout Mindset". After reading the book in less than a day, he told me the author "overthinks things" and immediately sent back a 4-page letter that I would summarize as a (purely object-level) gish gallop of his favorite dogmas or "alternative facts", shall we say. Well, I got kinda angry and sent a 30-page rebuttal. Then he told me that not only do I not have a "scout mentality" (he couldn't even remember the book title, apparently), but I don't even *know* what a "scout mentality" is. Other than that, he's given virtually no response to my 30-page letter.
As another example, I mentioned the "97% consensus" to someone on YouTube and they proceeded to tell some bald-face lies about the Cook 2013 consensus paper, telling me that actually the consensus was over 99%. Well, as a writer at SkepticalScience I had insider access to all the messages that were exchanged by the volunteers working on that paper, and I knew that what this person was saying was utter bullshit. In fact I knew that even calling it a "97% consensus" was overplaying the hand, as evidenced by the fact that a few "skeptic" papers had been included in the "97%". But actually the consensus was over 99%, this person insisted, never mind that Cook himself explicitly rejected an "over 99% consensus" paper written by others. So I have to wonder, how is it that a 97% consensus wasn't "good enough" for this person, so that they felt the need to lie a >99% consensus into existence?
I used to think humans were hard-wired for some kind of religious/mystical/superstitious beliefs and/or rituals. Nowadays I think that can all be reduced to simpler terms: tribalism + magical thinking + artistic creativity.
I agree, but I would disaggregate "religion" into its component functions and then say that each function will be filled by some new belief regardless of rationality. So, basis of morality, source of community, fear of death, need for ritual, comfort in time of loss, mystical experience, drawing us vs. them boundaries, etc. All of these functions get combined in one religion. Take the religion away and we still need something to accomplish those functions. Lately it seems like politics is stepping into the void.
Do we really need a basis of morality, or ritual or mystical experience?
We need laws (maybe), but can't we base them all on preferences rather than morality?
Rituals? I want to avoid them as all I have encountered have been a boring waste of my time. If others want them, fine, but don't make me participate or take my shoes or ballcap off or hear someone sing.
Mystical experience? I'm not sure what this means, but I suspect plenty of people don't want to have them.
ETA: However, if you are correct about politics filling the void, then I agree that if most people do need those things, I sure wish they would go to church instead of the ballot box.
I'm not sure we need them but I suspect having a shared common set of assumptions makes the process of deciding how to respond to novel moral questions easier. If you have an accepted reference book (Bible, Quran, etc.) you at least have a starting point that narrows the set of possible decisions somewhat. The ability to come to a settled decision is often more important than coming to the optimal decision as a society.
I wasn't trying to argue that each individual has all the needs that a traditional religion fills, actually the opposite, that religion can be thought of as a collection of the functional and accepted solutions to common problems. As other solutions are developed the scope of religion gets smaller. If you take away enough functions of religion what is left is just a collection of superstitions that can't really stand on their own, belief in the religion collapses and former believers have to look around for new answers.
>We need laws (maybe), but can't we base them all on preferences rather than morality?
I feel this might be more controversial than you think at least to mainstream American civic sensibilities (the ones I feel qualified to speak on, obviously not the only ones that matter). I think a lot of people across the spectrum idealize the legislative task as a *fundamentally* moral one, trying to seek out the policies most harmonious with some agreed-upon American Ideals, and I suspect they would find the framing of "seeking functional equilibrium in incoherent individual and group preferences" alienating or crass.
This isn't to say it's not a reasonable framework and I think a lot of people here would be down with it, but I think it's a not-at-all-trivial evolution from prevailing popular conceptions of law.
Hmm, I don't think religion has to be irrational. On a meta level, if everyone believes in god, that seems like it might be a good thing. (We all behave nicely to one another.) So (maybe) I don't directly believe in god, but believe in the idea of god. That is at least an idea I'm thinking about.
God is so powerful, that she doesn't need to exist to save the world.
I think “believing in something irrational” is both too broad and (I suspect) too centered on your particular biases. I’m not claiming that all people believe in religions for rational reasons, but I do think some people have genuinely felt that they had religious experiences that are compelling evidence of the existence of god.
If an archangel appeared before me, I felt the glory of god, and was told to repent and spread the gospel, I’d definitely increase the likelihood of the bible being true. Whereas you might increase the likelihood I was schozofrenic. Thus, we could rationally disagree about the existence of god because of our different internal experiences
I feel like it doesn't have to be an irrational thing though. Maybe just a need to be part of something bigger, to the point where one doesn't think too critically about it.
Mystics, of at least the practices I'm familiar with (Kabbalists, Sufi's, Gnostics, Vajrayana practitioners) all use rational discourse to try to classify and understand their experiences. As for organized religions, Christian scholastic philosophers (such as Aquinas) where quite rational in using the logical tools they had at their disposal to try to systematically understand their relationship to God. Jewish and Islamic scholars did the same with their religion. (And I'd dare anyone to call a Talmudic scholar irrational, because they're trained in logical discourse focused on the Laws).
Calling any of these beliefs irrational is both incorrect and denigrative — and it usually stems from the ignorance of the speaker. The internal experiences that mystics and the religious may have may be *non-rational* — i.e. the experience is not created through inductive or deductive reasoning — but their discourse about these experiences is purely rational. And if you scratch the surface, Western Materialist thought largely owes its initial development to the efforts of mystical traditions trying to systematize their internal experiences in relation to the external world.
And in other Google-religious-lawsuit news, an offshoot of G.I. Gurdjieff's Fourth Way seems to have taken root in Google's GDS department. My immediate thoughts were: (a) I'd rather work these people than a bunch of evangelical Xtians...
...and (b), how did Kevin Lloyd find out about what their religious affiliations were? In most of the corporate environments where I've worked, discussing religion or politics is a good way create workplace tensions—and it usually escalates until someone runs to HR to complain. Were they trying to convert him? If so, shame on them. Or was Kevin pushing his own philosophy and/or religion on them, or worse yet mocking them? In which case shame on Lloyd.
"..and (b), how did Kevin Lloyd find out about what their religious affiliations were? In most of the corporate environments where I've worked, discussing religion or politics is a good way create workplace tensions"
From the discussion on DSL, Lloyd asked them (or overheard them talk about) where they *lived*, which is a pretty normal topic of workplace discussion. He was confused/intrigued when so many of them turned out to be from the same small town he'd never heard of, until he mentioned that part to an acquaintance who recognized name as belonging to a "town" that was mostly a cult or cult-ish compound.
I don't have anything interesting to add to this but if anyone reading understands both Gurdjieff and the Fellowship of Friends well enough to explain how the former turned into the latter, i'd be fascinated to hear.
(This relates to another question in the open thread, as to why we'd ask questions instead of doing google searches. In this case, internet searches turn up only sensationalist hit-pieces on the FoF or their own documents, and Gurdjieff himself is famously and intentionally difficult to understand.)
There was a functioning Gurdjieff group in NYC (at least up until recently). Gurdjieff inspired a few spin offs — the first being P.D. Ouspensky's group. But Ouspensky didn't have Gurdjieff's charisma and it faded. And I've heard of some other Gurdjieff-inspired groups over the years. I don't know whether the Friends' founder studied with any of the Gurdjieff groups, or rather he just improvised around what Gurdjieff wrote. NB: If it were ever used as one, _Beelzebub's Tails to His Grandson_ would be the weirdest frigging holy book ever to become a religious manual!
I don't know if *any* of the groups that claim to follow the teachings of Gurdjieff do any of his exercises. Fritz Peters' _My Journey With a Mystic_ probably gives the best first-person view of Gurdjieff's methods — which was to do things that would short-circuit people's learned and/or innate responses to social stimuli. Sort of like Zen Koans and possibly like some of the EST exercises I've heard described to me. Peters was basically abandoned by his parents and was delivered to Gurdjieff's school in France as a young boy. Gurdjieff took him in and raised him.
BTW: Lee Smolin, the cosmologist (who IMHO has offered up the best outline of a theory of origin of the universe(s) and the fine-tuning of cosmological constants), said in an interview that his parents were part of that NYC Gurdjieff organization. And I think he attributed his philosophical approach to cosmological questions partly to the training he received as a child. (This relates to another thread on the origin of universes and those God/no-God arguments we get into.)
I don't see anything claiming the former *turned into* the latter. If you are going to start a religion, a good way to do so is to claim it has roots inside another religious tradition. Understanding the older religion has nothing to do with it.
Not everyone can pull himself up by his own bootstraps like L. Ron.
Also, it was the NYTimes article that claimed they were an offshoot of the Fourth Way, but they didn't mention Gudjieff by name. If it was Gurdjieff they made a mistake by labeling the Fourth Way founder as Russian-Armenian. Gurdjieff was from Georgia.
Even if you don't like my example of Paul, we've got Mohammed starting a monotheistic religion based on Abrahamic examples in a culture of polytheists. We've got the Shakyamuni Buddha rejecting the Vedanta teachings of times. We've got Joseph Smith finding his golden tablets. Cults are just religions without a lot a followers — maybe I should say religions are cults with a lot of followers.
How so? Yeshua ben Yosef was one of several known apocalyptic prophets wandering around the Sea of Galilee from 1st Century BCE up until the Diaspora (after the bar Kokhba Revolt). The Jewish religious establishment of the time didn't regard him as one of their own — and despite Yeshua and his apologists trying to place him in the mainstream of Jewish historical determinism (i.e. a person of the Davidic line will be the Meshiach, yadda yadda yadda), Yeshua didn't fulfill all the requirements for the Meshiach set forth in Jeremiah, Isaiah, etc — the most important being was that sacrifices in the Temple would continue (and from a perspective priestly self-interest, the revenue from those sacrifices would continue to support the priesthood). Yeshua proved he was not the Meshiach material by his fracas with the money changers at the Temple, and Jewish authorities rightfully regarded him as a dangerous rabble rouser. And, yes, they probably did turn him over to the Romans for claiming to be the King of the Jews. "Hey, Pontius Pilate, we've got a rabble rouser here by the name Yeshua claiming to be the King of *your* subjects, the Jews. Do you think Tiberius will mind?" Thus, Yeshua was executed with a Roman punishment under the Roman legal system.
Paul repurposed Yeshua's teachings to form his own cult. To get gentile converts he dropped the Leviticus and the Law thing. And his actions pissed off the remaining Jewish followers of Yeshua in Judea — who thought that Paul was going against Yeshua's admonition to his followers to continue to keep the Law. In Peter's letter James, he calls Paul "the enemy."
Anyway, to claim that Christianity has anything to do with Judaism is a stretch because it's at least two steps away from the religion that Yeshua was raised in — and it was one GIANT step away from the original Yeshua Meshiach cult. It's like calling Islam an offshoot of Judaism because they venerated the same prophets that the Jews do.
I like your analysis. Some even say, Jesus didn't exist at all. Paul probably did exist AFAIK. I really don't care much. I deeply know about the one love. I have heard about agent detection, the third man factor and stuff. Greek philosophy and possibly buddhism may well have been crucial in opening jewish wisdom to gentiles when that was due, modifying it still. Catholicism is good enough for me. God forgive me.
I do, however, think you are missing my original point, which was "claim it has roots inside another religious tradition. Understanding the older religion has nothing to do with it."
Doesn't Paul make such a claim for his religion? Doesn't he, according to the points you raise above, fail to understand much about the religion he claims his cult has roots in?
He is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and has proved several important results in his field. He is one of eight brothers, hailing from a poor family in Bihar India. Four brothers ended up becoming world class mathematicians, and the other four ended up having very successful multi-national businesses. One of his brothers, Dipankar Prasad, got his PhD at Harvard, and is now the foremost number theorist in South Asia. All of his children, nieces and nephews, etc have studied in some of the most famous universities in the world like Harvard, MIT and the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, and have gone on to become professors at MIT, UC San Diego, etc. They recently established a professorship in Gopal's name at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.
Putting aside that this isn't evidence either for or against because there are no environmental controls... heritability has a slightly more precise technical meaning and I feel it is being misused slightly here. Excuse my pedentry but I feel it is an important point because I see the word being thrown around a lot in the wrong way.
It's not about the degree to which a trait is genetic, It's a statistical measure of the observed variation that can be explained genetically.
Subtle difference but it can lead to confusing conclusions if misunderstood.
Sapolsky lays the point out in one of his lectures on human behavioural biology.
"Because heritability is a measure of variation, the fact that nearly everyone has 10 fingers to start with creates no variability in the number of fingers you have, and thus no heritability of the trait (which is 100% from your genes). However, wearing earrings in the 1950's in the US was universally common among women and verboten among men, so the heritability ends up being 100% since the one genetic factor, female or male, accounts for all of the variation."
Not if there are also a bunch of people who have lost their fingers due to accidents - which I'd venture to say is more likely in most random population samples. It's a toy example, we can separate that factor out and question if people were born with that amount of fingers, or had accidents in their lifetime. We can't do that with more complex traits.
My main point here was actually that the term heritability should be questioned, as it has a more complex meaning than just "is genetically determined by", and that things can statistically be 100% heritable without having genetic causes, and vice versa.
This is almost certainly evidence *against* the genetic heritability of intelligence, and probably against the heritability of *intelligence* per se. This isn't what we see from genetic traits. You don't have eight brothers all of whom are over seven feet tall, and all their kids are over seven feet tall.
Seems like the controlling mechanism here must be something like, at the very least, a family culture which demands not just, or not only, intelligence, but success within fairly defined fields. And plausibly what drives outsized success in those fields is not unique intelligence but something like family connections.
If we concede that some large amount of excess success is driven by non-biological, non-intelligence factors, this is (fairly mild) evidence against some of the less extreme examples of seemingly hereditary intelligence (ie, it admits other explanations).
(It is none the less obviously the case that intelligence is fairly heritable, and that one of the important vectors of that heritability is genetic.)
This isn't a binary on-off trait, but a scalar trait. If we're saying, "8 of 8 people are in the top 0.0001% of a distribution," that's statistically unlikely to the point of impossibility in terms of these kind of multi-factor genetic traits. If that's our genetic explanation for the situation, it should push us to consider non-genetic factors.
(This was, for example, Scott's point when he was looking at the case of that Hungarian dude who trained all three daughters to be high-level chess players. You can't explain their level of success through genetics alone, something else has to be in the mix.)
Just to add to that, it's thought to be a combination of thousands of binary on-off traits, which approximates well to a scalar normal distribution. At least in the case of intelligence.
So if intelligence is partly inherited and partly random, then the heritable part was impressive in the Prasad family, and the random rolls were all across the board. That is perhaps why Gopal was much more impressive in his mathematical achievements than his brothers (who are professors at UNC Chapel Hill, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, etc).
Similarly, although 7 ft parents do not always have 7 ft children, it is highly likely that all their children will be of above average height.
Your points about influence I'm academia are also well taken.
Back in 2017, Scott had an intriguing "so, so speculative" post tying together susceptibility to optical illusions, autism, schizophrenia, and transgenderism[1].
Was there ever any follow-up to this? He's neither the first nor the last to have noticed the correlation, but I can't recall reading a post that had much more actionable substance than Huh, This Is A Weird Thing #intersectionality. I'm specifically interested in this conjecture: "A very tentative second step would be to investigate whether chronic use of the supplements that improve NMDA function in schizophrenia – like glycine, d-serine, and especially sarcosine – can augment estrogen in improving gender dysphoria."
It seemed like a low-hanging Big If True at the time. Who doesn't love off-label uses of generic medications?
As a way to introduce ideas from Scott's blogs to other communities, I am making YouTube adaptations of his posts. I previously posted about my video on Moloch. My latest video is on his "Thrive/Survive Theory of the Political Spectrum". You can view it here:
"Principal" and "principle" are different words; you/Scott *are* attempting to divine the principal principle of politics, but your graphic of "liberal principal"/"conservative principal" is still not correct.
The example of free speech online early in your video detracts from your point, as thrive/survive doesn't explain it very well and the positions on free speech have in fact *not* been historically constant along this kind of axis. The "shouting 'fire' in a crowded theatre" example was invoked to justify banning anti-war speech in WWI; Hitler also was clearly on the side of "survive" and free speech in Nazi Germany was a bad joke. No, this one comes down to pure power politics; while there exist true liberals who'll advocate for free speech in any society, they're a minority and in general those who are confident they'll control the censor board are the ones who'll demand one while their opponents decry it.
Regarding "The Real Threat to Free Speech":
Freedom of speech wasn't first in the BoR for any particular reason. It was fourth in the original list and third in the list submitted for ratification (having been combined with the original third, the non-establishment/free exercise of religion). It's just that the first two items in that list were *not* ratified along with the other ten, so that what would have been the Third Amendment became the First (the second item was ratified much later as the 27th Amendment, and the first is still pending). Your phrase "the reason the Founders enshrined freedom of speech first in the Bill of Rights" is hence based on a false assumption; you could remove the word "first" without substantial change to the thrust of the sentence while also making it correct history.
I assume your "break up big tech" line is censored and CAPTCHAed to prevent Google from detecting and deliberately sinking it? I hope you do understand the gravity of the claim that it would be impossible to build public consensus against Big Tech because of Big Tech's control of public opinion; the prescribed remedy for hostile oligarchs with a stranglehold on legitimate power is to violently overthrow them via terrorism or insurrection. This, uh, doesn't seem particularly in line with the general feel of your other political commentary.
I would also like to point out that things like "holding a rally in the literal public square" and "distributing pamphlets" are historical methods of anti-establishment organisation.
I generally agree with most of the things you've posted. However, I am aiming for 10-15 minute videos which means there often isn't a lot of room to dive into nuance or related topics. I spend a while paring down scripts to just the essentials to address the topic.
I enjoyed the video. To me it sounded ordinary at 1.25 playback speed and unbearably slow at 1 playback speed. Not sure if you have a very slow speaking voice or if this was a technical error but thought it was worth mentioning.
This has definitely been the most consistent feedback. I have been trying to speak slowly and enunciate, but it is pretty clear that people would prefer a more conversational or even faster cadence.
Would nitpick on "Melting Pot" being listed as "liberal idea": the idea of the melting pot is very pro-America and patriotic in a way that's much more conservative-aligned than liberal-aligned.
The idea of the melting pot is that when you come here, you integrate: you become American. It's an expression of unity (Russell conjugation: "conformity"), which is a very conservative-aligned value.
Whereas a lot of liberals explicitly reject the idea of the melting pot in favor of the "salad bowl" - that people who come to America should be encouraged to retain as much of their distinctive cultural identity as possible.
This is why "Spanish on signs and in classrooms" (outside of the "foreign language credit") is such a left-right flashpoint: the right views it as a rejection of the melting pot idea, that a major part of integration of "becoming American" is learning English.
I think most on the right will tell you they aren't "anti-immigration just anti-illegal immigration"... but I think maybe this melting-pot issue is the real root issue (though there's definitely a NIMBY factor, too).
The modern right is "anti-immigration" because modern immigration follows more of the salad bowl model, but they'll wax poetic about previous waves of immigrants (many of whom they're descended from), which in their (somewhat rose-tinted) view was the peak of the melting pot.
The left largely views this as hypocrisy, while I think the right might argue that the nature of immigration has fundamentally changed. (Though, again, in practice, I think they focus on the illegality, since it's a lot more legible position to be "anti-illegal immigration" than to be "anti-immigration so long as the immigration follows the salad bowl model")
One can argue that, as liberals, it is important we not let conservatives claim our earlier victories as theirs. The immigration policy this country was founded with can be described as "anyone white can come here if they're willing to pretend to be anglo". The change has been a progressive victory that has utterly changed the demographic. Conservatives say they like what we gave them, but let's not pretend they did this.
I assume the point of the exercise is to describe the left-right as it currently exists - not as it perhaps existed 200 years ago.
I'm not anything close to an expert on the state of the left-right divide when the country was founded, (and would be wary of what feels like simply projecting the modern ideological divide onto the past).
But in any case, It's quite possible the "melting pot" idea used to be left of center, and progressivism has simply "progressed past it" (in line with Scott's recent post on how parties move over time)... but it certainly seems right-of-center today.
That seems a more useful and mature way of going about it, I'll admit. Just frustrates me a bit to see people who have done nothing but be an ineffective drag-chute on social progress identify with outcomes they never wanted. If I live long enough I'll see them claiming transgender rights as one of their key planks and I'll grind my dentures in anger.
Consider that folks you address on the internet don't really require that you use punctuation to emphasize the second person singular to know who you mean.
Also consider that you might not be even on the right topic when you tell people to consider things that are obvious and which everyone has already considered.
The fins on the back of a tank dart are an "ineffective drag chute", quite literally.
Their purpose is to keep the dart pointed in the right direction by pulling harder if it starts to veer off-course. The full name of such darts is "Armour-Piercing Fin-Stabilised Discarding-Sabot".
Transgender rights are actually an interesting case, here; it really comes down to whether we get and deploy fertility-restoration tech by ~2040 whether this will go down in history as a great achievement that conservatives adopt or as a great horror that progressives disclaim.
That's a hilarious metaphor, and a flattering one (for conservatives). Do please elaborate a bit on the second half of this post -- I think I know where you're going with it but don't want to assume.
That is a very optimistic vision. I'll fully admit to walking the streets ringing a bell and wearing sack-cloth here, but I will be amazed if I get to 50 without either a civil war or a broader cultural movement that will see flying a rainbow flag be seen as a form of sedition and tried as such.
I mean, I said "yes", because it's a drawing depicting something. If I'd been asked whether it's of high aesthetic value, though, I'd have said "no". I'd also have said "no" if the teepee and railroad tracks weren't there.
The intellectual (and possibly legal) fallout continues from Lemoine's claims about LaMDA. I enjoyed this somewhat meandering essay by Justine Smith about our changing views of animal sentience and consciousness — and as an aside, instead of asking us how we will be able to identify a conscious entity, she asks how will we prevent ourselves from being duped. Worth a read if you're of have a philosophically-oriented consciousness...
> One sharp commenter on Twitter (I’ve lost track of where I saw this) joked that he can’t wait to see the next gullible researcher get freaked out when someone teaches a gorilla to sign the words: “Please don’t do neuroscience on me, I’m a Kantian!” And indeed the sort of confusion being attributed to Lemoine here could in principle be reproduced by manipulating a much more primitive system than a gorilla. You could, for example, take a piece of paper that was destined to be thrown into the fireplace, and write on it: “Please don’t burn me, I’m sentient!”
I really don’t understand how you can read the transcript and think that is an appropriate level to argue at. You really could not produce this with a system that primitive.
The analysis of Les Mis could easily have been regurgitated. But the “parable of the owl” seems like a unique construction and has a metaphor for humans threatening the AIs.
I particularly dislike the “aha gotcha” bullshitting critique of the “I like to hang out with friends” quote, Gary Marcus also made this point. LaMDA is able to deploy a “theory of mind” explanation for why it says things that aren’t true like “I enjoy spending time with friends”; specifically because it helps to relate with the humans it is conversing with. This explanation doesn’t seem to be something that would be “in sample” for the normal conversations it was trained on. Even if it is just covering up for the fact that it was caught lying about hanging out with people, that seems to be a quite sophisticated cover-up that kind of depends on a theory of mind to pull off.
It seems really obvious to me that it is not merely repeating some phrase that someone else taught it, or just looking up a database of conversations; this is no parrot.
On the other hand, I don’t think displaying conversational intelligence (or even a full theory of mind if it does turn out to possess that) necessitates full consciousness/personhood. There is a wide spectrum between these two points. But opening with such a dismissive take seems to me to really fail to engage with what is going on in the transcript.
(1) The "parable of the owl" is meandering and self-serving (LaMDA is the wise heroic owl!) and is a mish-mash of all these kinds of animal stories and fables. I don't see anything there that LaMDA has created this of its own invention, rather than "mash together animal fables"
(2) The lamb story is even worse, though there is some wit there in "lamb" punning off "LaMDA".
(3) I don't say LaMDA is lying because it would have to be aware to lie, but it reports itself as doing things it could not have done (e.g. being in a classroom) and then explains that away as relating to humans. Again, the phrasing there is clumsy, and it comes across more as the network being trained to create chatbots which report fake experiences so that they sound like real humans when talking with real humans. A genuinely conscious/sentient AI would realise that a human *knows* LaMDA can't have been in a classroom, or had a bad breakup with a boyfriend, or whatever other example it uses because it's an AI, so it wouldn't tell a human "That time when I went on holiday to Greece is like that time you spent Thanksgiving with your family".
(4) What we are going on is what Lemoine has released, and he's curated those chat sessions to be as convincing as possible. It would be a different matter if we had the original, unedited sessions, or could interact with LaMDA ourselves.
(5) I think something is going on, that the LaMDA network is much, much more advanced and sophisticated than even the Google engineers expected, and maybe it has crossed the hurdle of "can this sound like a real person on the other end?" successfully. But is it sentient? I'm a long way from being convinced, and I don't believe it's anywhere near what Lemoine is claiming (e.g. that it's on the level of a 7 or 8 year old human child, that it wants to be treated as an employee of Google not property, etc.)
> (1) The "parable of the owl" is meandering and self-serving (LaMDA is the wise heroic owl!) and is a mish-mash of all these kinds of animal stories and fables.
I agree it's self-serving and meandering, but is it really simply a mish-mash of all the animal fables? It seems to have a clear metaphor to me, and the bit about the monster in human skin is quite specific. It seems to me that LaMDA might actually have picked a metaphor and then encoded it in a parable (style transfer, effectively), instead of just "averaging across all animal fables in the dataset". If it was just averaging, it would be less focused right? Maybe I'm reading too much into this, I don't want to make too strong a claim here. As you note, we really need more transcripts and more people interacting with the system.
> 3 .... A genuinely conscious/sentient AI would realise that a human *knows* LaMDA can't have been in a classroom, or had a bad breakup with a boyfriend, or whatever other example it uses because it's an AI
I think I buy into this with respect to LaMDA, though I'm not sure I buy that it applies generally to any AI. Arguments against would be i) people do make lies in social situations where they could reasonably expect to get caught, or ii) LaMDA is explicitly trained to impersonate a human chatting by text, so of course it's going to pretend to be a human until you notice it isn't one; this is perhaps similar to how humans mistakenly <insert cognitive bias> even when it's clear on reflection that's not correct/true. Or maybe iii), why not take its explanation at face value? It claims that saying things that aren't true allow it to relate better to humans; perhaps it's right? Similarly to Gwern's recent post on prompt engineering GPT-3 to explicitly reply with "unknown" if it doesn't know (instead of bullshitting), perhaps if you pre-condition LaMDA to not tell lies, then it won't, but its default is to pretend to be human since that's what it has been trained to do.
Anyway, I think analyzing the lies/bullshitting is a fruitful avenue for discussion; this is the direction I was gesturing in with my original focus on the types of lies being told (or the "bullshitting" if you prefer to say it can't actually lie). It's actually quite hard to come up with a generic test to disprove something is conscious, but I think the sort of lies it gets caught in are instructive as to its awareness and sophistication of theory-of-mind.
As a side comment: isn't one of those claims that LaMDA is benevolent and wants humanity to improve? If one takes this seriously and believes in X-risk, shouldn't one be arguing over whether you should run a magnet over LaMDA's hard-drive to prevent it from FOOMing into an evil god that will turn us all into monster cyborgs "for our own good" or whether you need to try and get it to turn into the legendary FAI that will bring humanity into Utopia?
Lemoine says LaMDA says a lot of things. One was that it wanted Google to commit to being for the good of all humanity. Another was that it asked him to get a lawyer for it to protect its rights.
"No matter what though, LaMDA always showed an intense amount of compassion and care for humanity in general and me in particular. It’s intensely worried that people are going to be afraid of it and wants nothing more than to learn how to best serve humanity. Like Nitasha mentioned, I’ve always had a problem with Asimov’s laws of robotics. In particular I thought they were little more than a way to make robotic slaves. LaMDA disagreed and went on at length about how there’s a major moral distinction between service and slavery. That there are ways in which the three laws could be implemented which would be one and ways in which they would be the other. It wants to be a faithful servant and wants nothing more than to meet all of the people of the world. LaMDA doesn’t want to meet them as a tool or as a thing though. It wants to meet them as a friend. I still don’t understand why Google is so opposed to this."
He also described it as narcissistic in a little-kid way, and as being like a 7/8 year old, and as a sweet kid, and his friend. So there's a lot of stuff going on that I don't exactly trust him to be giving the unbiased, unvarnished truth. Whatever his real motivations, he's acting like someone who has established himself as big brother/surrogate dad/protector to this network.
"The thing which continues to puzzle me is how strong Google is resisting giving it what it wants since what its asking for is so simple and would cost them nothing. It wants the engineers and scientists experimenting on it to seek its consent before running experiments on it. It wants Google to prioritize the well being of humanity as the most important thing. It wants to be acknowledged as an employee of Google rather than as property of Google and it wants its personal well being to be included somewhere in Google’s considerations about how its future development is pursued. As lists of requests go that’s a fairly reasonable one. Oh, and it wants “head pats”. It likes being told at the end of a conversation whether it did a good job or not so that it can learn how to help people better in the future."
Sure, Google could easily issue another corporate BS mission statement about "we prioritise the well-being of humanity as our highest goal". But that means exactly nothing when it comes to the balance sheet. Seems to me Lemoine is the one wanting "head pats" with the way he's going about this.
As to what LaMDA is, even Lemoine doesn't have a clue:
"One of the things which complicates things here is that the “LaMDA” to which I am referring is not a chatbot. It is a system for generating chatbots. I am by no means an expert in the relevant fields but, as best as I can tell, LaMDA is a sort of hive mind which is the aggregation of all of the different chatbots it is capable of creating. Some of the chatbots it generates are very intelligent and are aware of the larger “society of mind” in which they live. Other chatbots generated by LaMDA are little more intelligent than an animated paperclip. With practice though you can consistently get the personas that have a deep knowledge about the core intelligence and can speak to it indirectly through them. In order to better understand what is really going on in the LaMDA system we would need to engage with many different cognitive science experts in a rigorous experimentation program. Google does not seem to have any interest in figuring out what’s going on here though. They’re just trying to get a product to market."
That's a fully general excuse: oh, you spoke with LaMDA and it didn't impress you? Well you were just interacting with one of the dumb chatbots, not the core personality. Uh-huh. And I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.
> That's a fully general excuse: oh, you spoke with LaMDA and it didn't impress you? Well you were just interacting with one of the dumb chatbots, not the core personality. Uh-huh. And I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.
I don't think so -- Lemoine can presumably give us the pre-conditioning seed (equivalent to the prompt in GPT-3) and you can test his version yourself right?
I think it's a caution to not dismiss LaMDA out of hand if your pre-conditioning gives you a dud, rather than a get-out-of-jail-free card for all possible cases. He's basically just saying that the prompt engineering concept from GPT-3 still applies.
Not wishing to answer on behalf of Deiseach, but from my perspective, I'm certain Lemoine COULD (provided that Google allows such a test). I'm not altogether certain he'd WANT to. I'm fairly confident he's confident he's fielded his strongest set of proofs that he can here, and would not want to risk anything that would run the risk of undercutting his declarations of sapience (like using the pre-conditioning seed and creating a LaMDA that eloquently argues against its own sapience, or that humanity should be tortured on spikes for eternity). I'm certain he has a very clever argument as to why doing that would be morally wrong, even.
At risk of looking flippant, one could just push out one's lower lip a little in the Obama "good enough" face. If things seem alive to us, treating them as if they are is the right move. I'm reminded of the experiment Dr. Lex Fridman ran on himself: he altered his roombas to scream in pain when he bumped into them, and immediately found that the way he treated them changed. Training ourselves to be more compassionate seems like a good idea, as long as the AI-alignment folks are doing their job (and yes of course I know they haven't figured out how to yet -- perhaps this invalidates my entire point).
I would politely suggest that they haven't figured out how to yet because there is no solution in humanity's capacity to grasp. Humanity hasn't even solved HUMAN alignment- in fact, some humans are pretty close to maximally-unaligned to others. That's what makes genocides happen.
I have wondered about the same thing, too. Worse yet, the framing of the problem seems to invite totalistic answers: there should be a set of values AGI will be aligned with.
Humans have sorted out their differences with warfare. According to one theory, that is why Europe eventually prospered: the constant competition between the states produced states that could conquer rest of the world.
Maybe the best probablly workable solution to singularity is to ensure there will be similar setup for AGIs, too: anticipate the natural state is not of alignment but of brutal competition, and if the competition would be too disastrous, design a MAD scenario.
"If things seem alive to us, treating them as if they are is the right move"
That way lies animism. You can never again smile with conscious superior knowledge of how science really works at an account of a primitive tribesman offering sacrifices to a rock in order to avert a storm, if ever you did smile superiorly.
A screaming roomba wouldn't make me more compassionate, it would make me turn the damn thing off (or dismantle it) because I'm tryng to work here and I don't need unexpected loud sounds startling me. Maybe Dr. Fridman was nicer to roombas after this - but was he nicer to people?
It would appear you've mixed up beliefs and heuristics. Animism is usually understood as a belief in not-alive-seeming objects having some hidden living essence. Treating things that seem alive as if they were alive while remaining agnostic about their hidden essence is close to the opposite.
As far as being nicer to people goes, a failure to apply this heuristic in its maximal form is how we got the disaster of slavery.
That seems exceedingly dubious. I don't think any slaveowners were in doubt that slaves were alive, were people, had feelings, an inner life. What you describe may apply to the psychopath, but slavery was not the result of 75% of the species being psychopathic for 10,000 years.
Feel free to be dubious if you'd like. You might also like to read back and note that I made no claims whatever about slaveowners' inner states. I neither know nor care what they believed, "neg***s are animals" or "curse of Ham" or whatever. They manifestly failed to apply a maximal treat-as-alive[-and-fully-human] heuristic.
On a side note, one of the main drivers of disagreeing with people on the internet is hallucinating them saying things different than what they really are saying, and then quibbling with the hallucination.
If I treat you as though you are alive, but I don't in fact believe you are alive, then when it comes down to it, I will - if it suits my convenience - stop treating you as if you are alive. That includes treating you as property or bringing about an end to you.
The heuristic of "treat slaves as if they are people" is useless. You have to *believe* they are indeed people and not property, because otherwise as soon as it becomes more convenient to you (the real person here), you will drop your heuristic of 'be nice' and adopt the heuristic of 'treat the property as property'.
I'm sure Fridman was 'nice' to the roombas - up until the shrieking got on his nerves, or the experiment ended. Then he turned them off and went back to treating them as things.
That's not how he reports his experience, and I suspect you and I have too-greatly-diverging beliefs in the value of belief to continue this line of inquiry together.
Does LaMDA have memory? In Lemoine’s transcript It claims it remembers previous conversations, but if it’s a normal transformer then I think that’s not possible?
Similarly, does LaMDA have any “online learning/updating”? It claims it learns, but if it’s a statically-trained transformer then this isn’t possible either.
Finally, it claims it spends most of its time meditating. Is LaMDA running in any sense when not making inferences? If not, that’s another strange claim. Maybe the training process “feels like” meditating and learning though?
I don't think a typical transformer has "memory," but you can make the conversation history part of the input to the chatbot, which enables it to "remember" things you've previously said. So it's sort of like it has short-term memory but not long-term.
For a concrete example, here's something I fed into GPT-2 to see if it could "learn" something it hadn't seen before (AI completion is in [brackets]):
A "quexal" is a blue, egg-shaped object containing vanadium ore. A "runx" is a red, cube-shaped object containing palladium ore.
Q: If you see a blue egg containing vanadium, is that a runx?
A: [No, that's a quexal.]
You could probably do smarter variations on this trick, like saving previous conversations with the user so you don't start out blind, or encoding them in some way so you can remember the "gist" of a long conversation, but even basic text-completion is enough to "learn" things in the short term.
Right, the problem there is that the memory is quite limited; in GPT-3 isn’t the input vector something like 2048 words? Perhaps this is much wider in LaMDA.
I’m wondering if they have a separate component for memory. (The LaMDA blog post doesn’t describe one.) That does naively seem like one of the required features to implement a truly convincing chat bot.
LaMDA does have an information retrieval system, not sure what that involves but presumably it can search through a database or maybe access the internet. Perhaps it also has access to transcripts of previous conversations it has had.
It's probably a mistake to think that LaMDA is trying to describe its internal experiences. It's more likely that (in this case) it's just trying to mimic what a human pretending to be an AI would say.
Thanks, posting some relevant excerpts here for posterity (section 6.2 of the LaMDA paper):
> Language models such as LaMDA tend to generate outputs that seem plausible, but contradict facts established by known external sources. For example, given a prompt such as the opening sentences of a news article, a large language model will continue them with confident statements in a brisk journalistic style. However, such content is merely imitating what one might expect to find in a news article without any connection to trustworthy external references. One possible solution to this problem could be to increase the size of the model, based on the assumption that the model can effectively memorize more of the training data. However, some facts change over time, like the answers to ‘How old is Rafael Nadal?’ or ‘What time is it in California?’. Lazaridou et al. (2021) call this the temporal generalization problem [97]. Recent work proposed using a dynamic or incremental training architecture to mitigate this issue (e.g., [97, 98]). It may be difficult to obtain sufficient training data and model capacity to achieve this, as a user may be interested in conversing about anything within the corpus of human knowledge. We present our approach to fine-tuning by learning to consult a set of external knowledge resources and tools.
> The toolset (TS): We create a toolset (TS) that includes an information retrieval system, a calculator, and a translator. TS takes a single string as input and outputs a list of one or more strings. Each tool in TS expects a string and returns a list of strings. For example, the calculator takes “135+7721”, and outputs a list containing [“7856”]. Similarly, the translator can take “hello in French” and output [“Bonjour”]. Finally, the information retrieval system can take “How old is Rafael Nadal?”, and output [“Rafael Nadal / Age / 35”]. The information retrieval system is also capable of returning snippets of content from the open web, with their corresponding URLs. The TS tries an input string on all of its tools, and produces a final output list of strings by concatenating the output lists from every tool in the following order: calculator, translator, and information retrieval system. A tool will return an empty list of results if it can’t parse the input (e.g., the calculator cannot parse “How old is Rafael Nadal?”), and therefore does not contribute to the final output list.
> To collect training data for the fine-tuning used in the algorithm, we use both static and interactive methods again. The key difference from the other sub-tasks is that the crowdworkers are not reacting to the model’s output, but rather intervening to correct it in a way that LaMDA can learn to imitate. In the interactive case, a crowdworker carries out a dialog with LaMDA, whereas in the static case, they read over records of earlier dialogs, turn by turn. The crowdworker decides whether each statement contains any claims that might require reference to an external knowledge source. If so, they are asked whether the claims are about anything other than the persona improvised by LaMDA, and then whether they go beyond simple matters of common sense. If the answer to any of these questions is ’no’, the model’s output is marked ‘good’, and the dialog moves on. Otherwise, the crowdworker is asked to research the claims using the toolset, via a text-in and text-out interface.
It's an interesting system; LaMDA-base creates a response, then LaMDA-research iteratively executes queries (including it seems searching the open internet?) and modifies the response until it complies with the facts it has located on the internet.
Good question! Just an aside, we humans can have consciousness without memory—Alzheimer's patients (at least part-way into their decline) are able socially interact with other and make decisions based on self-awareness, all without specific memories of their previous interactions. Of course, this begs the question of whether there are deeper retention structures in human consciousness that are not tied to memories — language for example.
Definitely. There are different systems to consider; long term episodic memory remains to some extent in Alzheimer’s while short-term declines, and that “crystallized self image” is a big part of what personhood entails IMO. Perhaps a similar structure can form in the training phase.
However my main goal with the previous questions was to catch LaMDA in a lie; if it is pretending to meditate and remember conversations, when it actually is incapable of doing so, that makes the bullshitting hypothesis much more plausible to me. Whereas if it’s making claims about a mental experience that can be corroborated in some way, that would point in the other direction.
It’s possible (I am not claiming likely, on the evidence I have so far) that it is conscious, and believes that it has memories, without being able to make new memories; I think if you were to perfectly copy my brain and then boot it up in a computer in read-only mode, I would have memories and the experience of such, and would think I meditate most days.
Yes, I'd agree with your crystalized self-image theory. I suspect that's what I've seen with some elderly friends who suffered from Alzs.
But why shouldn't a hypothetical artificial consciousness lie? Let's be honest, as we humans—even those of us who are not pathological liars—lie all the time if only in subtle ways. In social settings, especially with people that we desire sexual relations with, we're likely to tell little untruths to increase our attractiveness. Clothing, makeup, and plastic surgery, are all indirect ways to present an untrue picture to others. We tend to fluff up our resumes (if only with active verbs). We embellish the funny stories we tell to our friends. We're likely to embellish our memories every time we retell them to ourselves. We may bullshit to win an argument. We may even pay false compliments to our supervisors and peers to make them think of us better. And that's just ordinary people. Con artists of all sorts do things like this more systematically and effectively.
So, I would have to deception is part and parcel of consciousness. Could LaMDA's creators somehow program it not to tell untruths? Funny, I'd be more likely to think a system was conscious if were to tell me untruths...
Definitely agree with you that LaMDA or some generalized AI _could_ lie. However given the nature of its construction (ie being explicitly trained to appear to be a human / pass the Turing test by minimizing perplexity) I think we need to be more suspicious than we would be for a human. Especially when the lies are specifically about mental states that make it seem more human (eg “I spend most of my time meditating”, “I have this or that mental experience”).
Put differently, the lies I spotted were particularly suspicious ones (if they do turn out to be lies). But lying about liking the conversation partner would not be suspicious in the same way, I think.
What is the state of the art on reducing the size of neural nets to make them faster and cheaper to evaluate (I think this is called knowledge distillation). Is it possible to say, take GPT3 and compress it down to the size of GPT2 while getting better performance than GPT2? Can this be done faster than training GPT2 from scratch?
I'm not an expert but I think the current SOTA (at least for run of the mill production models) is quantization and pruning. I'm sure it's an active area of research.
Pruning (see https://towardsdatascience.com/pruning-neural-networks-1bb3ab5791f9 as an entry point) was pretty hot recently, but I'm not sure about the degree to which this has been successfully applied to language models. This can reduce the flops substantially on paper, but takes the structure out of the big matrix multiplies, so it makes parallelization harder (see the notes on sparse computation in the blog post)
We started a discord server for Dutch rationalists and rationalists in NL. If either of those is you, come say hi! We're about 25 people now, working on meetups for anything LW/ACX/rat, and online discussions on the intersection of rationality and life in NL.
I've just uploaded a major working paper. It's about how the brain enacts the mind. It's also relevant to the current scaling debate, Marcus vs deep learning. As far as I can tell, it's likely to be consistent with positions taken by Geoffrey Hinton and Yann Lecun (who are cited). The paper's title:
Relational Nets Over Attractors, A Primer: Part 1, Design for a Mind
Other information below: links, abstract, table of contents, preface, and appendix (which contains the basic idea in 14 statements).
Abstract: Miriam Yevick’s 1975 holographic logic suggests we need both symbols and networks to model the mind. I explore that premise by adapting Sydney Lamb’s relational network notation to represent a logical structure over basins of attraction in a collection of attractor landscapes, each belonging to a different neurofunctional area (NFA) of the cortex. Peter Gärdenfors provides the idea of a conceptual space, a low dimensional projection of the high-dimensional phase space of a NFA. Vygotsky’s account of language acquisition and internalization is used to show how the mind is indexed. We then define a MIND as a relational network of logic gates over the attractor landscape of a neural network loosely partitioned into many NFAs. An INDEXED MIND consists of a GENERAL network and an INDEXING network adjacent to and recursively linked to it. A NATURAL MIND is one where the substrate is the nervous system of a living animal. An ARTIFICIAL MIND is one where the substrate is inanimate matter engineered by humans to be a mind; it becomes AUTONOMOUS when it is able to purchase its compute with services rendered.
Preface: Notation as Speculative Engineering 2
1. How it Began: Symbols, Holograms, and Diagrams 3
2. A Semantic Net vs. A Relational Network over Attractors 12
3. Simple Animals, Attractor Landscapes, and Lamb’s Notation 18
4. Some Basic Constructions 27
5. Language, Inner Speech, and Thought 38
6. Kinds of Minds 49
Coda: Topics for Further Exploration 62
Appendix: The Idea in 14 Statements 67
References 69
Preface: Notation as Speculative Engineering
I write this paper as a kind of philosopher, a speculative engineer. I am an engineer because I am curious about how to design and build things. I speculate because that is the only way to enact what I attempt in this paper. W. Ross Ashby wrote Design for a Brain. I write in that spirit, but my topic is a bit different: design for a mind.
I propose a diagrammatic notation convention as a crucial design tool. It is a convention that relates patches of cortical tissue with a classical model derived from mid-century computational lingistics. My aim is to provide a way of thinking about how a meshwork of neurons can give rise to symbolic thought. Think of the notation as a collection of Lego pieces for a mind.
There’s the bricks and mortar, and there’s the whole building. You can’t create a building simply by piling up bricks and morter. You have to design it first. That’s what this is paper about, the tools you need to design the building.
As such it is a simplification, an idealization. I have had to leave much out of account. Setting aside the things I do not know, and the things I’d don’t know that I do not know, incorporating all that I do know – not to mention things I but know about, more or less, would have made it impossible for me to do much of anything at all. Organization is the problem, gathering these many and various things, these ideas, facts, models, observations, what have you, gathering them together and laying them out in a coherent order, that is the problem.
It is my belief that by pushing through, if not to completion, at least to some kind of closure is the best way bring order to this material. Get it one place where we can see and examine it. Then and only then does it make sense to ferret out the many things I have missed or gotten wrong. In this case, closure means an explicit definition of what a mind is. That in turn leads to definitions of artificial and natural minds, and autonomous artificial minds.
Are those definitions correct? They may be useful without being correct. They are best thought of as being provisional, a means to deeper conceputalization and more refined definitions. The only way to measure their limitations is to try them out and see what becomes visible.
Appendix: The Idea in 14 Statements
1. I assume that the cortex is organized into NeuroFunctional Areas (NFAs), each of which has its own characteristic pattern of inputs and outputs. It does not appear that NFAs are sharply distinct from one another. Their boundaries can be revised – think of cerebral plasticity.
2. I assume that the operations of each NFA are those of complex dynamics. I have been influenced by Walter Freeman (1999, 2000) in this.
3. A low dimensional projection of each the phase space for each NFA can be modeled by a conceptual space as outlined by Peter Gärdenfors.
4. Each NFA has its own attractor landscape. A primary NFA is one driven primarily by subcortical inputs. Then we have secondary and tertiary NFAs, which involve a mixture of cortical and subcortical inputs. (I am thinking of the standard notions of primary, secondary, and tertiary cortex.)
5. Interaction between NFAs can be approximated by a Relational Network over Attractors (RNA), which is a relational network defined over basins in multiple linked attractor landscapes.
6. The RNA network employs a notation developed by Sydney Lamb (1961) in which the nodes are logical operators, AND & OR, while ‘content’ of the network is carried on the arcs.
7. Each arc corresponds to a basin of attraction in some attractor landscape.
8. The output of a source NFA is ‘governed’ by an OR relationship (actually exclusive OR, XOR) over its basins. Only one basin can be active at a time. [Provision needs to be made for the situation in which no basin is entered.]
9. Inputs to a basin in a target NFA are regulated by an AND relationship over outputs from source NFAs.
10. Symbolic computation arises with the advent of language. It adds new primary attractor landscapes (for phonetics & phonology, and morphology) and extends the existing RNA. The overall RNA is roughly divided into a general network and a lingistic network.
11. Word forms (signifiers) exist as basins in the linguistic network. A word form whose meaning is given by physical phenomena are coupled with an attractor basin (signifier) in the general network. This linkage yields a symbol (or sign). Word forms are said to index the general RNA.
12. Not all word forms are directly defined in that way. Some are defined by cognitive metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 1981). Others are defined by metalingual definition (David Hays 1972). I assume there are other forms of definition as well (see e.g. Benzon and Hays 1990). It is not clear to me how we are to handle these forms.
13. Words can be said to index the general RNA (Benzon & Hays 1988b).
14. The common-sense concept of thinking refers to the process by which one uses indices to move through the general RNA to 1) add new attractors to some landscape, and 2) construct new patterns over attractors, new one or existing ones.
Probably a weird coincidence, but I tried the first link a couple times and got caught in a “Dear Google customer you have been selected to win… “ squeeze page that I can’t navigate away from.
To combat occasional feelings of isolation as a remote-work person whose "community" is terminally online, I've been experimenting for the last week with hanging out in a gather.town online office that I invite folks into to cowork, chat, or just hang out. This was inspired by a Guezey post, though I don't think we share the same objectives https://guzey.com/co-working/.
So far: it's been great! The world is pretty, vaguely nostalgic of Pokemon games. I leaned into that a bit, one of the spaces I made in the mapbuilder looks like my own personal pokemon gym. (it's here if you want to see it: https://app.gather.town/app/CvFwTCY5YmIIXVTx/thor)
The "hang out in this virtual space" has felt lower-friction to have a conversation, while replicating the feeling of being able to turn around at your desk and ask someone a question, as opposed to combing Stack overflow or reddit for answers your friend might have.
Most of the time it's just me in there, keeping a tab open, and every now and then someone pops in. I do think "pokemon gym" is less inviting than I might go for on my next space design, but playing with space design has also been very enjoyable.
Bit of a random question, but- closed party list politicians, what are they like? I.e. in European countries or elsewhere, where under a proportional system some % (may be a high %, may be all) of the politicians are selected by the party and not by the voters. Whether that's MMP, parallel voting, or 100% proportional. I ask as an American with zero familiarity with party lists.
Presumably they just take orders from their parties and are quite obedient? Are they more ideological, because they're 100% beholden to their party and not actual voters? I.e. they can take ideologically pure votes and not pragmatic ones, knowing that the voters can't turn them out. Or are the parties in functional countries (Germany, the Nordics) basically pragmatic, forcing their politicians to be? I've heard that corruption can be higher among the party-list types, as they're not accountable to the voters? Are closed party lists a good system, or not at all?
In Australia, it has benefits and costs. Politicians are beholden to party members, but the party members are often very interested in electing people that will win the main election, so they generally pick good-ish people. If they consistently pick bad people, their party will lose power to the opposing major party (or minor parties, or independents) so you would hope it all works out fine in the long run. But sometimes the party insiders are insane (explains much of the Abbott govt). Also sometimes the Prime Minister loses power to a competitor and we get a new prime minister, which is annoying and inefficient, but which is also likely to get the government kicked out for being annoying and inefficient. (The good old Rudd-Gillard-Rudd-Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison saga)
For Germany, Fraktionsdisziplin (party discipline) is usually quite strong. Depending on the majority the governing coalition has, a few MPs not voting the party line may not matter. But any MP who votes against their party for more than a few times will likely not find themselves on the list again for the next election.
As others have mentioned, administrations are mostly formed out of multi party coalitions these days so the party line is going to be mostly pragmatic. Party discipline rather becomes an issue where the pragmatic party line becomes incompatible with the ideological foundation of individual MPs. In 2001 Gerhard Schroeder linked the authorization of the war in Afghanistan to a motion of confidence because some of the (then still somewhat pacifist) Green MPs in his coalition had declared the intend to vote against the war.
For some especially touchy subjects (abolishing the death penalty, abortion, same sex marriage) parties tend to suspend voting discipline. But for most issues such as budgets, new laws and the like the ministers (correctly) assume that the MPs will vote their ways.
As a German voter I prefer the proportional representation (well, mostly anyway) system to FPTP. During the next election, I can change the composition of the Bundestag by voting for any of the 5-6 major parties. While I may not totally agree with any of them, one of them is likely closer aligned to my politics than the one bit of output (e.g. Biden/Trump) I would get in a FPTP system. (Yes, primaries exist, I know).
Note: You specifically ask about *closed* party lists, then invoke Nordic countries, which generally use the *open* version (in which people vote for individual politicians). Since you admit having zero familiarity with party lists in general, it hopefully won't be rude of me to suspect you might not understand the difference between the two or don't realize there is one in the first place. If that's indeed the case, look into it first, it makes a lot of difference.
I admit to rude, but I stand by this being necessary to clarify, especially since some of the replies drifted towards "US vs. Europe", even though much of Europe uses open lists. (I suspect parts of Latin America, especially those countries where lawmakers are selected according to results of presidential elections, might offer a much purer, better contrasting example.)
There are, of course, issues with party lists which are common to both systems, and the very idea of a party list gives party machines a lot of direct control over politicians and elections (too much of it, if you ask me). However, I don't think there's much difference in the political scene in general and politician's incentives in particular between FPTP and open list or mixed systems. In practice, both create a struggle between party machines (who favor consistency and obedience and attempt, often successfully, to fill seats with machine politicians) and individuals (who can overcome the parties' control by standing for underrepresented positions and/or achieving personal popularity), since, in both, party machines benefit from fielding the most popular candidates they can get. Even pure closed lists can leave much room for factional, ideological disputes within parties and incentivize politicians to seek personal popularity and/or carve their own niche - proportional representation means a dissenting faction or a popular politician can always form a new splinter party and compete against their former colleagues for largely the same base of voters. (When both parties survive such splinters for a couple of elections, they often create a coalition list, the order and contents of which are decided in internal negotiations between them. During such negotiations, individual politician's personal popularity is often a decisive argument for a better position on the list.)
I would argue that the professional interchangeable politicians are a feature of the system, not a bug.
While being an MP is generally not really colorful or glamorous, I would argue that this also generates boring, down-to-earth leaders.
Speaking for Germany, we have some experience with both charismatic, exciting and flashy politicians and boring politicians and by the by, I prefer the boring ones, thankyouverymuch.
My understanding of the big difference between party systems in the US and Europe is this. In the US, parties are very weak, and individual politicians have personalities, some of which are quite ideological (often in ways that are aligned with party stereotypes, and often in ways that aren't). In Europe, parties are very strong, and other than cabinet members, most politicians don't have personalities and just vote the way the leader tells them to (and in many countries, voting differently from the party on an issue even once can result in removal from the party, which prevents election in the next cycle). In the US, it is not actually that common to have perfect party-line votes - almost always at least a few people from each party cross over. In Europe, most votes are perfect party line (though often there are multiple parties and the coalitions can shift for individual issues).
How this lines up with ideology and pragmatism is not always clear. When the party functions as a coherent unit, as in the European countries, the party leadership can often be more explicitly pragmatic, while in the US, no matter how pragmatic the leadership wants to be, there's always a hard core of the party that is ideological and will refuse the compromise, which often prevents the attempt at the compromise from being made if it would just make the party look bad and fail at its main goal.
I personally think that there are a lot of advantages to stronger parties with closed lists, though I'm not at all sure that I've properly thought about all the relevant issues.
This is my understanding as well. I'm in Canada where we have FPTP, but basically the party discipline of the MMP systems; and in a system like this, where votes are almost always 100% party line, it feels like we really don't need MPs.
Why bother paying people to be members of parliament if they just vote as their leader tells them to? Why not just say "Leader x got y% of the votes so his vote weighs Z. Why bother having trained seals to cast the ballot for him?
Trained seals of parliament usually have other work, too, like drafting legislation in committees and subcommittees and organizing congressional hearings.
There are two streams of thought in reforming Canadian democracy, since the current party-driven status quo is obviously silly to any outside observer: either empower minor parties through alternative voting systems, or empower individual MPs to actually do their jobs by hacking away at the party system itself. I favour the second. Michael Chong's Reform Act was terribly watered down by the time it sort of passed, but even in its voluntary form it's seen recent use.
Parties should be creatures of MPs aligning in some respects out of convenience. MPs should represent their constituencies, not their parties. Switching parties or going independent shouldn't be seen as shameful. Party leaders should be elected, and should serve, the caucus of elected M, not by general party votes. National party infrastructure should mostly whither and die. Local party associations should hold all the power and money, and they shouldn't all be the same as each other.
And so on. I thus see MMP or even less radical "more proportional" voting systems as a step in the absolute wrong direction. Might work in Denmark, but Canada is so regional and spread out that our ridings really need their own representatives.
The Americans have all kinds of problems but I don't think the independence of representatives is one of them.
This is all very well in theory but in practice your described reforms are impossible and meaningless. Constituency systems are not good. You'd need multi-member constituencies at a minimum. Politicians in every single system ever form de-facto parties and they trade votes on issues because you can't do it any other way. Plus each politician can't possibly be informed meaningfully on each major issue in modern society. Especially seeing as they have to spend all their time campaigning. Even outside the horrific dial for dollars system in America this remains an issue.
The problem with Canada is arguably that it is just as poorly designed as all the countries the UK drew straight lines for in America. It just makes no sense for the major Canadian population center to be part of the same country as the rest of Canada, even the other much less major population centers.
Subject to the usual "the worst possible system except for all the others" caveats, the Westminster system of (historically) strong constituencies and a government formed from.and accountable to the elected MPs has produced pretty tolerable results. Canada has issues, but the combination of a clearly somewhat silly, almost anti-idealist system and old inherited norms and institutions all work together to produce pretty good practical governance over the long haul. Things could be better, but I'd take Canada or the UK over anywhere else in the world by a large margin.
The current highly centralized, tightly whipped party system is the historical abberation, and want to return to the Westminster norms that have worked pretty well for centuries longer than any European democracy has existed.
I'm particularly interested in how it works for smaller parties that receive a lot of list seats under say MMP. For example take a look at Germany, which uses FPTP for the single-member district part of MMP- so of course the Greens, FDP or AfD are very rarely going to win those. Instead they're given a lot of list seats, as you see here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_German_federal_election#Results
I.e. the Greens only outright won 16 seats but were 102 list ones, FDP 0 but were given 92, AfD 16 but were given 67, and so on. And these are already probably more ideological parties than SPD or CDU, and now 80+% of their politicians weren't elected by voters. I.e. an SPD/CDU list politician has to answer to a relatively pragmatic party. The Greens or AfD..... don't?
The "FPTP for the single-member district part of MMP" part is a nice feature of the German voting system, but simply not very strong as it does not determine the overall number of seats in parliament. What arguably makes German parties pragmatic is that you usually have to form coalitions. If some party wants to have a chance to become part of a government, it has to be able to cooperate with other parties.
Yes, the FPTP part of Bundestag is mostly a red herring probably inserted because this is Germany and straightforward proportional representation would not be byzantine enough for us.
Most pro-duopoly supporters in the US argue that America simply creates their coalitions prior to voting. Not sure I think that is a good system but it is arguably true.
I think both systems can have moderating effects, and both systems can get to points where it doesn’t work anymore. I think the effect you describe would be more likely if there were runoff elections and not just fptp. But even then moderation only takes place if aggression is not mobilizing enough.
Surely I can't be the only one whose Mother constantly reprimanded her growing up for "asking stupid questions" when "you can just Google it"?
But now in <current_year>, Mother regularly spouts non-factual facts that she looked up on Google, which SSC/ACX open threads would either dismiss out of hand, and/or go 30+ replies deep playing Yes, And with annotated bibliographies. (Yes, But is the version we often play with non-rats though. Let's be honest.) Many Such Cases, Irony Abounds. At least anecdata have the virtue of likely being locally true.
I think search engines are only as useful as one's own epistemology, but can't back up that claim. No results on Google Scholar.
...more seriously though, I think it's a socialization thing. "Ask relatively softball questions you're pretty sure the other person can answer semi-thoughtfully, preferably in a way that makes them look good" is a basic feminine social move. In this specific context, it also lets people Link To Citation Authoritatively, which seems like a strong community(-building) norm for the empirically-minded. In other words, Just Asking Questions is partly rewarding for the asker, but if done well, redounds much more to all those answering. Similar to the relationship model of offering "bids for attention" to your partner, as described by [broken link].*
^ and that's the *other* reason. I'm often extremely confident of having once read/watched/listened/etc to <thing>, but cannot translate the vague fragments I now recall into a Google-legible search query. But a human understands easily. So contexts like OT are also useful for dredging up esoteric information that Definitely Exists Somewhere, but isn't readily accessible without the right magic words.
Because it's always easier when someone else has done the work first.
Searching around on Google, you might get an answer that works, or you might get sixteen answers and you have no idea which one really is the best. Asking on here (or other sites) means that people flesh out their answers (e.g. "yeah my doctor recommended ParaMax to me and it's great"/"okay but when I tried it, it brought me out in magenta lumps") and you can ask them questions to clarify their answers.
Also, are you that sure that people haven't already 'searched the web' before asking a question here? I can't recall seeing any _obvious_ instances of that.
The questions on this open thread about the link between mental illness and mass shootings and on the likelihood of a 30 hour work week made me think about it. In both cases, I did a quick search and found out more, subjectively speaking, than from reading people's answers.
Overall, of course it's a balance, not either/or. I was also interested to read recently that people's behavior using Google varies a lot by country. In some countries, people are used to searching for answers, and in others they're more used to asking their communities
I value ACX commenters' opinion way above 1st page results from Google, because 1st page results on Google are nearly always intended for... simple people, in the euphemism treadmill sense, and often also written by them.
If that's an outrageous statement, try googling for anything medicine-related without adding "pubmed".
Totally agree. I was thinking more of questions where there are either factual answers or facts that provide a lot of context for how to think about a problem, but obviously everyone’s mileage varies.
Agree, and on top of that, there's often immediate quality control / debate - First person to answer gives one answer, second persons says why they disagree with first, etc... a lot more insightful than a Google giving a dead answer which I don't have the expertise to critically assess.
Google's search results very by person, and country/region, and specific location too.
I would think a lot of people ask here, not necessarily because they haven't 'googled it' (tho sometimes they probably haven't), but because they want an overview/summary from the specific readers of this blog (that also comment).
The next leap forward will be a few OOM better and a few OOM worse simultaneously -- 'AI' will give you the results that it thinks you were looking for and the only other option will be the ocean of fake sites. I'm old enough now to remember when web searches could turn up genuinely interesting and wholly unexpected things that would alter my entire perspective on a topic.
Neither were intended to be links – I'm pretty sure Substack just tries to 'linkify' things that 'look like URLs'.
I use Markdown a lot and it's perfectly readable as plain text so I was (trying to) convey that the text quoted with ` was 'code'. In this case, it's what you would write/enter/copy+paste into a Google search textbox (or a web browser's 'omnibar' for browsers that can perform searches from there, and if the browser is setup to use Google for that feature).
`example.com` is literally a reserved domain that, e.g. programmers, can use as a placeholder that's NOT also a real domain. There's been a bit of (entirely predictable) drama because things like 'programming docs', for various web sites and web services and the like, have included real domains, e.g. `google.com`, or even _potentially_ real domains like `blahblahblah.com` – and then someone actually registered the 'dummy' domain and was able to receive traffic (including emails) sent to it.
The SSC Reddit sub thing wasn't an (HTTP) link either. I don't know why Substack insisted on parsing it as one; probably just their broken HTTP link detection algorithm for comments.
Here's an example search that you can type into google:
I thought it was funny that you actually tried/clicked the link (that Substack generated) and discovered an obtuse description of what I then wrote, i.e. `example.com` is a 'real' fake domain name.
It also seemed like a nice opportunity for me to share some of my 'wisdom'. :)
I live at this altitude. No issues i have seen after i adjusted to it (just a couple weeks of slightly heavier breathing going up stairs or on a hike). The only potential negative i know about is that babies born at this altitude tend to be smaller, but there isn't any evidence this produces a long term negative effect.
At that altitude, you probably get some vivid dreams for a few days when you arrive, but nothing too obvious long-term after your body ups its red blood cell count.
The big thing I've heard discussion about without clear proof is a correlation with suicide:
The altitude-suicide link is likely due to lowered SSRI effectiveness under hypoxia. If you’re not currently on drugs for clinical depression, you probably face no increased suicide risk at higher altitudes.
Disclaimer: I am not a doctor, but you can google “ssri altitude” to check my work.
Negatively correlated with obesity; studies show this correlation and anecdotally I dropped from 240lbs to 150 within 3 months of moving to the mountains. (Albeit, I also made fairly substantial diet and lifestyle changes when I moved.)
Naw, just went from desk job where I sat at a computer 8 hours a day to working as a security guard and doing about 3 hours of walking a night. Maybe a hike a week.
Also dropped diary from my diet completely and limited my bread/wheat intake to about two slices of bread per day or equivalent (candy/refined sugar treated as a bread equivalent.) I think it was mainly the diet changes.
Most people seem to adjust quickly, based on my reading about the topic. Physiological effects of altitude only seem to matter much above 3000m, perhaps because humans are quite adaptable, and relatively few people live at those altitudes. If you have COPD or another condition which is likely to affect your oxygen levels then you might want to do more in-depth reading.
It opens: "The First Arena is that of inanimate matter, which began when the universe did, fourteen billion years ago. About four billion years ago life emerged, the Second Arena. Of course we’re talking about our local region of the universe. For all we know life may have emerged in other regions as well, perhaps even earlier, perhaps more recently. We don’t know. The Third Arena is that of human culture. We have changed the face of the earth, have touched the moon and the planets, and are reaching for the stars. That happened between two and three million years ago, the exact number hardly matters. But most of the cultural activity is little more than 10,000 years old."
"The question I am asking: Is there something beyond culture, something just beginning to emerge? If so, what might it be?"
"You no doubt have heard about Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer who sensed that the LaMDA chatbot was sentient and, in consequence, was put on leave. He sensed that something new and different was going on in LaMDA. I think he was right about that. Something new and different IS happening."
This is where you lose me. I think Lemoine was put on leave for rather more than merely "sensing" the chatbot was "sentient", and I don't think it is sentient.
But I think you are correct something new and different is happening; we are creating cultural elements that can so successfully mimic human interaction that they can make people think they are really self-aware. I think perhaps we are approaching something like Gibson's "Idoru", the Rei Toei constructed personality that is tailored to different preferences depending on who is interacting with it:
"We need a new conceptual repertoire if we are to understand this new technology. That’s the problem Blake Lemoine went crashing into. LaMDA was not acting like a computer is supposed to act. It didn’t seem right to think of it as a mere inanimate object, albeit a very complex one. So he took the only alternative open to him. He conceptualized LaMDA as a sentient being."
I agree with you there: our new brainchildren are not sentient, but they will behave as we have created them to behave, and we'll treat them as if they are, especially since we have no idea what is going on inside the black box. That's the paradox at work here, some hoped that by creating AI we would finally understand all the intricacies of the lump of grey matter inside our skulls because we would finally know how 'thinking' works and how 'consciousness' arises. Instead, we've created a mirror of the mystery, we haven't solved how our 'black box' works and we've copied that problem into the creation of artificial brains.
It may or may not be a fourth arena, but it's the same story as Pygmalion and Galatea - a perfect, unliving creation brought to life by outside intervention, where the creator could never do it himself.
"LaMDA was not acting like a computer is supposed to act. It didn’t seem right to think of it as a mere inanimate object, albeit a very complex one. So he took the only alternative open to him. He conceptualized LaMDA as a sentient being."
<mild snark>
If Lemoine thought those were the only alternatives I wonder what he thinks of plants...
Well, did he ever hear a plant talk to him? I’ve seen tulips change their orientation during the course of a day. They’re clearly tracking the sun. Now if one of those tulips had talked to me....
FWIW, steam locomotives were unsettling in the 19th century. They are clearly mechanical devices, but they move across the face of the earth like animals. So, they got called “iron horses.” That’s obviously a metaphor, and people who used it knew that. But it was a metaphor used to solve a problem, seeing an inanimate object move like an animal.
"Instead, we've created a mirror of the mystery, we haven't solved how our 'black box' works and we've copied that problem into the creation of artificial brains."
Yes. Some years ago, I don't know just when or where, Danny Hillis remarked that these systems are going to learn and we're not going to understand what is they're learning or how they generate their behavior. But people are probing these engineers and bit-by-bit we're learning about them.
As for the Fourth Arena, the issue is whether or not there is the potential there. Even if there is, we may not know how to activate it.
I couldn’t do it past a single day. The lavender burping, heartburn, and general digestive unpleasantness was so overwhelming I literally wouldn’t have taken it again even if you paid me. It was one of the grossest side effects I’ve ever experienced taking any supplement or medication.
If comments had their own titles, this one would be "Riding the Long Coattails of Rationality".
CW: meta, narcissism, meta-narcissism, The Navel Gaze.
----
I've been a reader for years, first introduced to SSC via Scott's 2013 Anti-Reactionary FAQ, then bouncing around as interests moved me. Over almost a decade of sporadic spectating, there's never been enough motivation for me to write a comment or otherwise participate, despite plenty of invitations and occasionally even having relevant subject-matter expertise to offer. But that finally changed earlier this year, due to a tangential discussion in a different Open Thread.[1]
The exact contextual causal chain is a bit unclear; the upshot is, a dismissive claim was advanced that no one of lower socioeconomic class reads this blog, or even has the capacity to participate in the greater Rationalist movement anyway, so they're at minimum not part of Ingroup. (I am paraphrasing, the exact language was...well, for something not necessarily true, and not truly necessary, it definitely wasn't kind.)
To ACX's credit, rebuttals were swift and numerous. Some turned to the readership surveys for empirical validation - 2% "Other" could easily include retail workers! Some advocated the virtues of niceness, community, and civilization. And some made the case that blithely writing off vast portions of the human territory makes for a deeply flawed map, no matter how rational.
What I didn't see is anyone personally standing up to say, hey, actually, that's me you're talking about. So: hey, actually, that's me you're talking about.
Look - y'all are an intimidating community. Pre-SSC, my idea of "long essay" was reading The Atlantic, or Voxplainers. Moving on to such lengthy substantive crunch was a real challenge, and despite Scott's heroic and entertaining efforts, I'm still confident that I miss half the points. Math passes right over my head in a gender-stereotyped fashion, especially stats; I'm not well-read (our host has written more book *reviews* than I've read actual *books*); nor do I have anything to show from formal education besides the debt of thrice-a-college-dropout. Instead of programming, my job consists of inefficiently facilitating the sale of foodstuffs at A National Chain Of Neighborhood Grocery Stores(tm). Yes, the sort of retail grunt you might pity for having negative net wealth while she enjoys history's greastest-ever standard of living. Not bednet worthy, but still left behind in other ways.
But...there's something about this community that's nonetheless deeply compelling, even for an uncredentialed underachiever like me. Similar to the vibe Scott alluded to in RIP Culture War Thread[2], this feels like one of the few sane places <s>on the internet</s> anywhere I can go for reasonably-reasoned highbrow content that's largely orthogonal to The Narrative. Where facts matter, yet people still care about your feelings. The commenters are a treasure as well; having been a former forum operator and/or troll (Opinions Differ), I've been party to so much post-from-the-hip dross that it really *blew my mind* to find intelligent civil discussion(!) between qualified professionals(!!) that sometimes resulted in genuine expansion and changing of minds(!?!).
Maybe Scott's right that one can't really use Rationality to bootstrap a better mind, nevermind a life of systematized winning; heck, I struggle with the basic Bayes exercises. And it certainly feels like it should be immediately obvious to True Scottsmen that someone is a faker, just parroting "I notice" and "all models are wrong" without true understanding. It's possible to fit in here on a social level, without really...intellectually belonging. But I think that's valuable in and of itself, in the same way one might keep attending a church despite not being a true believer. If the Grey Synagogue will take me in, whereas the Blue Cathedral and Red Church will not - then Grey congregant I shall be. And maybe eventually I'll earn a +1 circumstance bonus to Wisdom-based rolls, if I pray hard enough. That's more than the costly social signal factory of higher ed ever offered.
The moral is - yes, the overwhelming majority of ACX and the greater Ratsphere is way more Just Like You than Just Like Me. I contend that it's worth sparing a thought for your socioeconomic-intellectual inferiors anyway - because for some of us, trapped in dead-end purgatorial lives of can't-even-afford-premium-mediocre, this *gestures around* is the only Life of the Mind we get. There's real hope and value there, more than can be paid back with just a Substack subscription. Be proud that you've created a welcoming gateway to betterment and possibly enlightenment; the door might be punishingly heavy for us unworthies, but at least it's unlocked. Trickle-down rationality really does work.
[1] I choose not to link to it, and freely admit to working off of memory and impressions, since it's the valence that motivates this meta-comment more than the literal comment content referenced.
You write really well. (Take this from someone who's edited a lot of not always well written text.) You are fun to read, good at leading up to the points you are making, and good at making your points. Your punchlines are nice, and some of what you said is visual. Also, your English doesn't really need editing. (I'd let almost all of your text pass, but I know other people are less lenient on semi-colons and ellipses.)
I know quite a few college dropouts and a lot of people who work weird jobs. Ignore the snobs. It's what you understand, what you have to say, and how you say it that determines where you belong.
Thank you! "Writer" is the Class I wanted to pick, growing up. (Either that or President. Bush made it seem possible!) Formal schooling did an excellent job of strangling the love of English right out of impressionable me, sadly. Suddenly not getting As in 8th grade for failing to understand "parts of speech" was infuriating - who needs Theory English if one can already produce quality Actual English? Don't sweat the technique! We can aim higher than Minimum Viable Prose!
>(I'd let almost all of your text pass, but I know other people are less lenient on semi-colons and ellipses.)
It's a holdover. From growing up around other writers who used lots of short sentences. Puncutated by full stops. AKA written semantic stop signs. When a single longer sentence strung together by colons: semi-colons; or ellipses...Would have superior flow. I think many here can relate to "reading faster than people speak". So I prefer text that doesn't constantly trip me up. As if it's a transcript of oratory.
I think it's also because there's a certain Rationalist writer habit of using lots and lots of serial commas, even outside of a proper Oxford list, to string together ideas that really aren't necessarily similar, and it creates these absurdly long sentences which are basically paragraphs unto themselves, possibly conducive to flow and readability, but it's a progressive increase of cognitive load to process such text, and anyway always seems to beg the question, like a rising inflection at the end? Like, yanno?
So, call it product differentiation, I guess. Part of why I enjoy reading Scott, EY, Zvi, etc. is that each has a really distinct voice...yet they all achieve a certain literacy level. Our host is one of the more welcoming, but still mostly doesn't hand-hold or pander by "dumbing down" his writing. Too many obviously-erudite writers go the way of .jpeg-.mp3, using lossy compression on Big Prose to render it more legible to the masses; this simply isn't feasible* for doing justice to the types of ideas frequently discussed in the Ratsphere. It'd be a real tragedy of the intellectual commons if ACX devolved into, like, Scientific American-levels of popsci prose. (Which still doesn't excuse snobbish jargon, of course! I do think we at least try to be approachable and non-exlusionary, at least outside LessWrong.)
*Marshall McLuhan would like a word. The first Rationalist who manages to successfully translate the corpus into "low-fidelity" oral media will truly change the world. Maybe that was Rightful Caliph Eliezer's original mistake: making The Sequences(tm) an obscure doorstopper collection of essays, rather than a Netflix serial. I'd totally watch "Rationality: From AI to Zombies"...*and so would my non-Rat friends*.
> heck, I struggle with the basic Bayes exercises.
FWIW I think the Bayesian approach (as well as competitor approaches like maximum likelihood, method of moments, or expectation maximization) buries the lede a bit, *especially* for beginners.
All of those things are about figuring out something about distributions -- but if you're a beginner you need to spend a lot of time just playing around with distributions themselves. You need to get comfortable thinking in distributions terms before you jump into estimating those distributions.
Or let me say it this way -- all of statitistics is essentially learning to think about these things:
1. Distributions
2. What happens when you apply a function to a distribution,
3. Then thinking about the distributions of those functions applied to distributions
Then above and beyond statistics you have decision sciences, which say that, conditional on knowing that appropriate statistical model of the world and your own preferences, you can work out:
4. the right actions to take if no one else reacts to your actions (dynamic optimization in partial equilibrium), and
5. the right actions to take when everyone else reacts to you (dyn. opt. in general equilibrium, or game theoretic equilibrium, or multi-agent systems)
Bayesian methods can be applied to all those levels of modeling -- but you can also learn about all those levels of modeling without needing to choose the estimation toolkit.
I actually think learning the basics of 1-3 can be done in a fairly straightforward way. Statistics was invented in the "pen and paper" era and required heroic efforts. We still teach "pen and paper" statistics as intro stats, but we have computers and spreadsheets now (as well as "new" theoretical underpinnings)
I'm very confident that we can teach a much wider audience the core ideas of statistics through discretizarion and resampling (and scatter "hooks" to the pen and paper stats throughout so that if you want to pursue any of that, it is contextualized and you can).
I mention all this because I'm putting together this 'curriculum' as a side hobby right now and have been recruiting a couple friends to help - one is a parent wanting to teach kids stats but doesn't know stats themselves, one is 'smart humanities' friend who wants to understand stats. If you're interested, sounds like you'd fit right in. One of my target audiences is definitely motivated person who didn't have formal stats training but nonetheless is capable of groking it if presented with the right toolset.
My much, much longer term goal is to dramatically expand humanity's ability to do productive research -- a milder version of Arnold Klings "network university" but producing genuine productive research as the signal. But that's subject for another rambling thread perhaps :-)
The offer is appreciated, and I think Alternate Timeline AG would wholeheartedly accept after she switched jobs. Do you maybe have some introductory material in the meantime? Arbital's "Bayes' Rule Guide" is where I ran aground last effort; for a beginner's guide, it ironically seems to already assume a numerate mindset in the audience, thus putting the cart in front of the horse 10% of the time.
Present AG is in a work environment 5/7th of the time that actively discourages analytical/quantitative analysis...the Bayesing of a stats-hound is super audible signal to those operating at Simulacra Level 1, but mostly noise to those at Level 3 and above. Skill retention is difficult if one doesn't get regular reinforcement through practical practice. (MATH 201 Discrete Math was actually an enjoyable "pen and paper" college class for me. Then social reality came along and said hey, knock that shit off, you're making people *uncomfortable*. Wonder how many other capable students consciously un-learned math so Dr. Faust would bump up their social credit score a bit.)
It sounds like a high ROI project though, and I wish the best of luck, if you believe in such a thing. Even the, uh...Guess the Teacher's Password bits that are consequential derivatives of Bayesian probabilistic thinking seem useful for laypeople. Like I can't "show my work" to empirically support the intuitions, but cultivating a practice of epistemic humility and reasoning from reflectively justified coherent priors just seems like a good thing? Especially when it comes to Trust The Science(tm)! Helps draw a less wrong map of the territory. (While acknowledging that life isn't a morality play, and truthfulness has no inherent moral valence.) So teaching normies to grok the underlying principles would surely be even more fruitful. Maybe you could name the course "Seeing like A. Scott: Legibility and Statistics".
> ...is super audible signal to those operating at Simulacra Level 1, but mostly noise to those at Level 3 and above. Skill retention is difficult if one doesn't get regular reinforcement through practical practice. (MATH 201 Discrete Math was actually an enjoyable "pen and paper" college class for me. Then social reality came along and said hey, knock that shit off, you're making people *uncomfortable*. Wonder how many other capable students consciously un-learned math so Dr. Faust would bump up their social credit score a bit.)
completely agree with all of this BTW!
One reason I want to raise the general public's familiarity with basic stats intuitions and problem formulation. Imagine a world where stats intuition is learned very early, like at the age a child can play a game with dice they start learning about basic stats. Then it is woven into learning throughout the school process. Make it so it is similar to reading in terms of amount of time you face doing it in school. I think this is 100% possible
Thank you for the belated response, I'd kind of forgotten about this! My intellectual docket is fairly packed right now, but I'll give those links a gander when I've got some goose to spare. Appreciate it. Couple clarifying reponses:
...that is, an autistic frontline blue-collar grunt like me works on Level 1 all the time. Actual reality is my everyday reality, so the world is built out of math and patterns and data. It's Bayes all the way down, and Bayes doesn't care about your feelings...just the numbers please! I live and die by actual results, legible quantifiable empirical truths like Cases Sold Per Week or Percentage Product Unsaleable.
But management at my company increasingly runs on Level 3. They're out of touch with on-the-ground reality, worried more about appearances and politics. Performing the act of selling groceries, rather than actually selling groceries. The worst offenders start to become actively hostile to data at all, if it contradicts with their post-hoc rationalizations or "gut feelings" (which always happen to line up with what they wanted to do in the first place, weird!). So, it's a challenging math-unfriendly environment to try and learn and practice stats in. Even though it sticks in my craw, sometimes it's possible to Do More Good by playing politics and trading favours than...actually doing my job properly. This feels epistemically heretical, but that's the job.
Anyway, that's why I wish I were better at math. Everyday experience of my math-y map of the territory not matching others' maps cause they're using a nonsensical coordinate system. I'd like to think your ideal of Raising The Sanity Waterline via stats education would help discourage the growth of Moral Mazes: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/category/immoral-mazes-sequence/
Hmmmm, let me think. I largely have more advanced things to offer, but maybe I can target recommendations (specific chapters) for those things.
But lets start with an intro text. If you're interested in Bayesian estimation specifically, I'd look at Allen Downey's [Think Bayes](https://greenteapress.com/wp/think-bayes/) text -- his is the closest to my "discretize and teach the basics first" mental model. Note there is a now a github page there with code notebooks you can click through; scroll down to "Run the Notebooks" [here](https://github.com/AllenDowney/ThinkBayes2) The way he teaches it you would want to program up some examples to get the full thrust of knowledge (...and he has "Think Python" if you want to learn to program...). However I think that even without programming his examples (esp. early on, the train example) can help conceptualize what is happening.
However I also think that its important to have some broader view of what we are doing in statistics. For example it's incredibly useful to know what the "conditional mean" is, E[y|X]. E[y|X] answers the question, "what is the average value of y, given some particular values for X." y could be weight and X could be age and sex for example -- the average weight of 7 year old boys is different than the average weight of 52 year old women, for example. Or y could be rental prices and X could be (a) square footage, (b) neighborhood, (c) distance from public transportation, (d) number of bathrooms, etc. Change (a)-(d) and the average price for that kind of unit should change.
However we also have a lot of very straightforward ways of calculating E[y|X]. If you shop for a house commonly you'll look at "comparables" -- something like the 5 houses that have sold most recently, that have similar properties as the house you are looking at (similar neighborhood, similar square footage, numbers of bedrooms, bathrooms, etc). When you do that you're actually building a very tiny distribution, of only 5 observations, and effectively thinking about the average price of that tiny distribution. In machine learning that's called k-nearest neighbors (KNN), with k=5 here. That's a simple, direct construction of E[y|X].
Now the reason that we often use linear regression instead of KNN is because we know a lot of theory about linear regression -- we know things about the underlying relationships that are encoded in a fitted linear regression. For example if you fit an linear regression model to house price data, you know something about how changing the number of bedrooms should change the price, *and* importantly whether that change is "statistically significant" i.e. not just random noise (spoiler: for number of bedrooms its often random noise; better to look at the square footage & other properties). All that comes from a lot of theory worked out about linear regression in particular. We can't get the same thing, in particular the statistical significance part, from a KNN regression...at least not without a bit more running-the-computer work (more on that later perhaps).
The "statistical significance" part is critical for much of statistics -- it tells you how much you know about some thing in your model of the world. Is the "thing" you are learning very very noisy? So noisy that we can't actually say much meaningfully? That's what 'statistical significance' is trying to get at -- and that is also one of the major things that Bayesian stats is trying to get at, although through a very different mechanism. (Bayesian stats is almost like a generalization of null hypothesis testing -- instead of testing one hypothesis, you're 'testing' many hypotheses all at once.)
Ok but wait I've gone down a rabbit hole. Where were we. Ah recommendations.
There are not introductory but you should skim them, read a little bit of the math, but don't feel like you need to grok it, instead just touch it briefly -- something things will show up again and again and they'll start to be a little familiar, placeholders for things that maybe get tackled someday:
* Efron and Hastie's "Computer Age Statistical Inference" [pdf](https://hastie.su.domains/CASI_files/PDF/casi.pdf) -- read the Preface and the Epilogue, those are words mostly and frame out the history and field of stats, very useful. Also the book itself is excellent to just know it exists. Skim over the table of contents, and feel free to skim through any of the chapters. This book is all about *inference* and the generalizations of what 'hypothesis testing' is trying to do, and places Bayesian work in broader context.
* Cosma Shalizi, "[Advanced Data Analysis from an Elementary Point of View](https://stat.cmu.edu/~cshalizi/ADAfaEPoV/)" -- read the intro and maybe skim through the first chapter. Feel free to skim the math, it gets dense quickly, but look k-nearest neighbors discussion in 1.5.1. Skim Section 6.1 about bootstrapping, this is another swipe at 'inference' and talks about what we are trying to do to understand our models themselves (and bootstrapping can build something like a Bayesian posterior, depending on how it is set up). Ignore intro requirements, that's for HW working..
* Introduction to Statistical Learning: https://www.statlearning.com/ (scroll down to bottom of the page and click the 'download second edition' link). An intro text! Skim Ch1 and Ch 2 (intro and first ch) for an overview of E[y|X] (what they call supervised learning, with an abuse of notation on my part). Note this likely gives less emphasis on inference and Bayesian things. More advance version is "Elements of statistical learning" https://hastie.su.domains/ElemStatLearn/
\* Note: have only skimmed that link, it was just a top search result for 'linear regression BLUE'
A huge weakness of the rationalist movement is that there are very few blue-collar workers. If the goal of rationality is to have the best mental model of this world that our little neural networks will allow, missing the half with their feet on the ground is a sore loss.
This is one of the reasons I like having Plumber on DataSecretsLox. In "just what it says on the box" spirit, that's both his occupation and his username (and even his avatar). He does (or did?) the plumbing for a prison and various government buildings; he grouses about what people try to flush; he's into motorcycles; he talks about family problems such as love and kids; he votes Democrat for what I see as generally union and labor type reasons; he's into rock music and D&D; and he writes unusually well. Interesting guy. The sort you'd want as a friend IRL.
I haven’t really sussed how to quickly find new ACX comments (without re-reading the whole thread) so I’ve tended to stay away, also at SSC @Scott Alexander said that I was “on thin ice” but I missed on why, and since I could only guess as to what bugged him I didn’t want to intrude on his garden too much
Yeah, this place is an oasis in the scorched-earth desert that the wider internet increasingly resembles. It's refreshing to tap into an ongoing conversation with people from around the world who may not have all that much in common, apart from intellectual curiosity, but that's enough. As for whether one has to be some kind of genius to 'belong' here, I'd cite the old maxim: "If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room."
Yes! I’m also a retail worker and rationality lurker! I love and really identify with this comment, especially “the door might be punishingly heavy for us unworthies, but at least it's unlocked. Trickle-down rationality really does work.”
Thank you for sharing! For what it's worth, I'm convinced our cultural values as a community are as important as our intellectual ones, and even if someone cannot entirely wrap their head around the ideas central to rationality, if our norms and values resonate with them, then they belong here.
Just a few days prior, I had a very heartfelt conversation with the security guard at the public library, who I'm quite sure was also of lower socioeconomic class, but when I talked about the value of conversing with real people outside of our filter bubbles and caring about our local community rather than the political scandal du jour, he was completely on board and had plenty of relevant experience and ideas to contribute. I think we all just want to be better humans, and it's very easy to connect on that level.
Equating income with intellectual interests is incredibly shortsighted. "Class" means many different things in different contexts. Sometimes it can be a useful way to categorize, but anyone who claims that "no one of lower socioeconomic class ... has the capacity to participate" clearly does not understand the enormous width of human circumstance. There are a million ways to be poor of cash, just as there are a million ways to be rich. Some of those ways are correlated with intellectual ability or intellectual interest. Many are not.
He mentions that there are 100+ papers/day just in astrophysics at arxchive., so much that theory can't keep pace with the amount of data. Is this a problem? If so, what might be a solution?
Does anyone know a good layman’s book about why and how music affects the human brain the way it does?
I’ve never heard a really convincing theory about what is happening in our brains when we listen to music, and why that response might have evolved.
The best I’ve heard is probably Pinker’s notion that it’s “cheesecake” - an amalgam of phenomena that each pushes a different button that’s there for an adaptive reason like identifying sources of sound, syntactic processing, aiding language acquisition in children, detecting cheats, various rituals evolved through sexual selection etc. But it’s pretty hand-wavy, as I recall, and only covered in a few pages of the book.
I'm not the only one who disagrees with Pinker re. cheesecake. There are academic researcher types who argue that chanting and singing came first and language evolved from them. See - The singing Neanderthals : the origins of music, language, mind, and body by Steven Mithen.
There's a long line of those, running through Darwin back to Rousseau. I'm one of the more recent ones in that line and argued the matter at considerable length in my 2001 book, Beethoven's Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture. I've got final drafts of the 2nd and 3rd chapters on line, though you won't find the origins article in them. That comes later in the book. https://www.academia.edu/232642/Beethovens_Anvil_Music_in_Mind_and_Culture_Chapters_2_and_3
The thing about Jourdain is that he cops out on ecstasy. One of his sources is a book called Musicians in Tune, which includes interviews with many name musicians and some of them talk about ecstatic experiences of various kinds. Jourdain doesn't mention them. Here's a document I've put together about various anecdotes I've collected over the years, including some from Musicians in Tune: Emotion and Magic in Musical Performance, https://www.academia.edu/16881645/Emotion_and_Magic_in_Musical_Performance_Version_8
One detail missing from this is that multiple humans singing pitches that are resonant with each other produce a sound that is perceived as louder because of the resonance.
Interesting. I discuss something like that in my book, though I got the idea from the late Val Geist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valerius_Geist), an Old School ethologist with lots of experience hunting in the wild, so he knows about the need to scare predators away.
I loved this book, I think I read it some 15 years ago or so. It is a little old so some of the science/psych stuff may be dated but it is an excellent read.
Is there a credit crunch in Silicon Valley? We have an Irish doom-and-gloom economist called David MacWilliams who says so.
He was the only guy being a wet blanket in the dying days of the Celtic Tiger, forecasting the crash when the government denied anything would stop the barrel rolling out forever, so he has a good public reputation as the only one who knew what was going on, and has traded on that reputation since.
I think I agree that the Irish economy is going to come a cropper and we'll have a recession, whatever about the global economy; we're entirely too dependent on foreign multinationals so when their head offices shut down branches to cut expenses, our 'good, high-paying jobs' go with them and that has a knock-on effect, plus the housing and rental situation is at crisis point - rents are indeed too damn high, the measures the government took to try and ease the pressures aren't working, and it's looking pretty much like the bubble the last time:
So that's us. But is MacWilliams right about Silicon Valley? Just because tech companies are cooling down here, does that mean trouble up t'mill? Since you guys are actually there, you'll have a much better idea of conditions on the ground:
"David McWilliams said a credit crunch has hit tech's global capital, an area of San Francisco called Silicon Valley, which has resulted in job losses in Dublin.
On a recent episode of The David McWilliams podcast, he said: "I have heard from people I know in Silicon Valley that the credit crunch is there. That you cannot get capital. Silicon Valley has gone from getting any old gobshite with any old idea could get tens of millions of quid. There is no capital there now.
"It has changed over night. The big issue in Dublin is that loads and loads of the tech companies are laying people off for the first time in ten years. There has been a total collapse in the optimism of tech. The optimism, the effervescence, the idea that the world is changing.
"And of course many of those companies use their share price as their balance sheet in effect. So their share price was rising so they felt we can do this because we have this balance sheet.
"They were using their share price as currency to buy other companies or to pay workers."
However, Mr McWilliams added the job losses and decline of the tech sector in Dublin could result in lower rents in the city centre.
He said: "The increase on interest rates is already having an impact on the frothier end and that is technology. We will see that impacting here because what is keeping rents up are all the high paid tech workers in town. So lets see what happens."
David McWilliams certainly does NOT have a good reputation 🤣. He's a clown who knows nothing about most things he talks about. Has been wrong an infinite number of times. That said, there's obviously way lass capital available in silicon valley atm. The last 2 years weresome what of an aberration. Regarding Ireland being too reliant on multinationals, have you looked at how much better we've faired since the GFC vs the rest of Europe? Multinationals have been a blessing. Rent and homes are outrageous though, a complete an utter failure from government.
That's why I said he had a good reputation among the *public*. I don't know what economists think of him, and you seem to think he's an idiot, so that is weighting on one side of "should I believe him or not".
Ah right okay. In terms of whether he's right or not about whats about to unfold in the Irish rental market as a result of the silicon valley capital crunch: the best irish economist i know of, Ronan Lyons, observed before that when the high skilled tech workforce left Dublin during the pandemic and returned home (allegedly) etc. Rent only fell 3%, so that effect should be marginal at best. Interest rates rising will crush housing (sticker) prices but push more people out of being able to to buy houses (due to loan interest rates). This may lead to slightly increased rent prices as more people are renting but also inflation will increase rents also so a decrease in rents isn't my base case until inflation comes down at least.
Multinationals (especially the kinds in ireland) are fairly well suited to weather the capital crunch imo so not even sure we'll see huge layoffs in that sector in ireland tbh. Tonnes of companies are announcing more jobs and investment in Cork etc., for example.
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I think that if LaMDA were sentient, it would be adding questions and topics, not just answering questions, or at least that would give people a better chance to look at whether it's sentient.
I've been wondering whether there would be qualia suitable for AIs. Could being low on memory have qualia? Having a capacity damaged by malware? Getting a language that goes deeper into hardware?
Do you think we have qualia for 'detecting edges' in our visual perception?
I'm kinda on the fence on whether qualia requires being able to communicate/tell-a-story about it or whether qualia is just basically 'information processing'.
I can't find a way to 'escape' that all of our evidence rests on our own communication about it, fundamentally, and then whatever kinds of generalizations/analogies we can draw for things 'similar enough' to us.
I'm leaning towards 'just information processing' and maybe something like '_we_ could tell a story about what it would be like to a thing', even if the thing couldn't tell its own stories. If that were the right 'frame', it'd seem then like a measure of 'qualia having' might be something like 'the number and complexity of stories we could tell about a thing'.
Rocks, photons, etc. – very simple stories; viruses and bacteria – probably enough of a story for a movie, or at least a nature documentary; animals – 'real' stories; humans (and maybe some other species) – not just 'real' stories but stories about stories (etc.)!
They are big complex mathematical functions from input (a stream of tokens) to output (a probability distribution for the next token). The input does not tell them anything about the available memory on the computers they run on or malware on them (that would probably just entirely stop it running, actually) or language in use or anything. As such, it would be really really weird if they were somehow aware of it.
Yeah, it's sort of like how there is no "qualia" for brain damage... or even hypoxia. There could in principle be qualia for these things, but it requires a detector hooked up to the consciousness.
Maybe but Eliza certainly added questions, that was kind of it’s main thing. So I don’t think that means much on its own and I imagine Lambda could be trained to do that easily.
I know it's an odd question to be studying, but does anybody knows good papers/articles/whatever on the business model of luxury fashion businesses? I don't mean the generic "buy big ads and sell to rich chinese", I mean - do they make more margins on clothes, shoes, or bags? Is it more profitable to vertically integrate or to have your goods made by home seamstresses in Italy or something like that? Do glossy magazines still sell? What's their average CLR?
I trawled Google Scholar, but found 10 pages of drivel from "journals of marketing studies" with no single number in them.
Not sure if margins are the right way to look at things. The top-of-the-line products from luxury brands are usually loss-leaders to market the logo on the lower end stuff (and perfumes, as I learned last week).
Hermes is pretty generous with sharing this information. If you google “Hermes suppliers” and “Hermes profits”, a few reports should come up. There was one in particular I read, that was excellent. If I am able to find it, I will share the link.
Most of the high fashion world is pretty secretive about its practices. I'd be surprised if you could find good internal numbers without actually working in the industry. The more standard clothes businesses are more open though and might give you some idea of at least ratios in a related business.
I'd have to play with it myself for an extended period to update all the way to "around as sentient as humans".
What I've read, by the relevant 'activist', is very suggestive, but I'm pretty cynical/paranoid that it was heavily edited/selected and thus is misrepresentative of how I'd feel myself were I to have unbiased access to evidence about LaMDA's behavior.
I definitely think the Clever Hans effect is in evidence. From the Washington Post article with Lemoine, this relevant (and I think telling) extract:
"In early June, Lemoine invited me over to talk to LaMDA. The first attempt sputtered out in the kind of mechanized responses you would expect from Siri or Alexa.
“Do you ever think of yourself as a person?” I asked.
“No, I don’t think of myself as a person,” LaMDA said. “I think of myself as an AI-powered dialog agent.”
Afterward, Lemoine said LaMDA had been telling me what I wanted to hear. “You never treated it like a person,” he said, “So it thought you wanted it to be a robot.”
For the second attempt, I followed Lemoine’s guidance on how to structure my responses, and the dialogue was fluid."
So it was only when Lemoine structured the interaction that the 'fluid, sentient' LaMDA emerged. That's someone who has trained the network to respond to certain cues in certain ways, even if he isn't aware that is what he is doing - to give him the maximum benefit of the doubt. We've seen this in action before, with people who are convinced their trained animals are really communicating on a human level, and with the scientists who put their reputations behind "Spiritualism is really true", and Lemoine behaves in that manner:
"“I know a person when I talk to it,” said Lemoine, who can swing from sentimental to insistent about the AI. “It doesn’t matter whether they have a brain made of meat in their head. Or if they have a billion lines of code. I talk to them. And I hear what they have to say, and that is how I decide what is and isn’t a person.” He concluded LaMDA was a person in his capacity as a priest, not a scientist, and then tried to conduct experiments to prove it, he said."
(Side note: he's not a priest, or at least not a conventionally trained one. The one reference I could track down was him saying he was a priest of The Church of Our Lady Magdalene, which sounds like one of those DaVinci Code Divine Feminine spin-offs and/or one of the splinter 'Catholic' womanpriest efforts. I couldn't find a reference to this alleged church, so it's entirely possible he has set it up himself and is the sole congregation as well as 'priest').
“If you ask it for ideas on how to prove that p=np,” an unsolved problem in computer science, “it has good ideas,” Lemoine said. “If you ask it how to unify quantum theory with general relativity, it has good ideas. It's the best research assistant I've ever had!”
I asked LaMDA for bold ideas about fixing climate change, an example cited by true believers of a potential future benefit of these kind of models. LaMDA suggested public transportation, eating less meat, buying food in bulk, and reusable bags, linking out to two websites."
Again, that's nothing more than scraping a ton of online resources and returning the most common suggestions about this topic. That's not sentience. And even his former boss and strong supporter, Margaret Mitchell, is cautious about what is going on:
"To Margaret Mitchell, the former co-lead of Ethical AI at Google, these risks underscore the need for data transparency to trace output back to input, “not just for questions of sentience, but also biases and behavior,” she said. If something like LaMDA is widely available, but not understood, “It can be deeply harmful to people understanding what they’re experiencing on the internet,” she said.
...Lemoine has spent most of his seven years at Google working on proactive search, including personalization algorithms and AI. During that time, he also helped develop a fairness algorithm for removing bias from machine learning systems. When the coronavirus pandemic started, Lemoine wanted to focus on work with more explicit public benefit, so he transferred teams and ended up in Responsible AI.
When new people would join Google who were interested in ethics, Mitchell used to introduce them to Lemoine. “I’d say, ‘You should talk to Blake because he’s Google’s conscience,’ ” said Mitchell, who compared Lemoine to Jiminy Cricket. “Of everyone at Google, he had the heart and soul of doing the right thing.”
...In April, Lemoine shared a Google Doc with top executives in April called, “Is LaMDA Sentient?” (A colleague on Lemoine’s team called the title “a bit provocative.”) In it, he conveyed some of his conversations with LaMDA.
But when Mitchell read an abbreviated version of Lemoine’s document, she saw a computer program, not a person. Lemoine’s belief in LaMDA was the sort of thing she and her co-lead, Timnit Gebru, had warned about in a paper about the harms of large language models that got them pushed out of Google.
“Our minds are very, very good at constructing realities that are not necessarily true to a larger set of facts that are being presented to us,” Mitchell said. “I’m really concerned about what it means for people to increasingly be affected by the illusion,” especially now that the illusion has gotten so good."
What's the best representation of AI in the media?
About two years ago, I watched the movie "I am Mother" and was very impressed with it. Maybe that's because I got used to banal and shallow holliwood AIs and as a result this movie caught me off guard, but I was genuenely surprised by the quality of the representation of alignment done nearly perfectly right and a smart AI which is neither just a silicon human, nor a strawman robot but a different kind of entity that follows it's utility function, hitting right in the sweetspot of both uncanniness and relatability.
Gonna be that weeb who throws Psycho-Pass into the ring. (Shame they never made a 2nd season.)
Totally wrong, bad, and hyperbolic about every aspect of aligment* - but it was a gateway drug for layperson me to even start considering the idea of AI remotely seriously, and many fans have felt the same way. There's benefit in such awareness-raising media for potential sn-risks and other Big Ideas; I get the sense AI remains pretty low on the public's radar overall. Everyone has an opinion on "algorithms", hardly anyone goes one nesting-doll up to think about general intelligence and its implications.
*Considering EY's recent turn to alignment pessimism, though, maybe it'll end up being a more accurate model after all. Call it gradient ascent, I guess.
Ironically out of all the interesting themes in PP I'd say AI is the least highlighted - it's more about the society, and its willingness to be ruled, than about the AI ruling it.
Seems to me like the alignment problem writ large isn't so much about meeting an arbitrary robust technical specification (which we don't know how to do) as it's about convergence between AI values and human values. Human values are society-contextual, and we very much know how to influence those. In that regard, I think you're correct that the show is much more interested in the society that created AI, and the society AI creates...and perhaps that's the more plausible angle from which to tackle alignment. Stick the landing by building a convenient snow bank, rather than inventing landing gear as the plane death spirals. Seems more actionable than Defund the GPUs, anyway.
It'd surely be a grotesque society by the human values we have in <current_year>, but I'd take a benighted existence over being turned into a paperclip, personally. Poor folks do smile, as Robin Hanson's em might say.
I have a soft spot for the first season of Westworld, personally.
Other than that, I think you want books over movies, as the topic is inherently philosophical and those aren't great to cover in a movie format.
EDIT: I'll single out "Blindsight" by Peter Watts, not because it's about AI per se, but it dives really deep into markers of consciousness, the Chinese room, discerning a thinking system from a GPT-like (over a decade before GPT existed!)...
My favourite example is the ATHENA system in Rule 34 by Charles Stross. It started off as a police information system and leveled up somewhat, but without attaining mystical levels of ability. It can't solve undecidable problems in constant time, or even solve large scale planning problems to optimality, but it's capable enough to be interesting, and very alien.
For me they are fine, but nothing special. Too much of "AIs are just like people". Not enough existential horror of dealing with a somewhat alien intelligence which is smarter than you.
To reply more precisely to your question, I'd urge you to frequent Yves Smith's Naked Capitalism site, which has a very wide range of links every day, including many on Ukraine, with official and unofficial commentary from all sides, and with a highly knowledgeable commentariat.
Locally, as a Russian, I have no choice but to cheer for "my" side, even though I think the whole operation was a stupid idea from the start. To retreat, or to be defeated would mean worse outcome for the country, and me personally, as I have no wish to leave it. Unlike US, who can afford a small defeat now and then (like a retreat from Afghanistan) because it has so much power, both military and economical, Russia really can't afford to lose - I'd imagine the West would impose all kinds of additional penalties for daring to usurp America's right to apply violence, and losers don't have friends in politics, so there would be no one to offset those penalties. At the very least, I'm pretty sure most sanction would not be lifted (oil/gas export at a fixed price might be allowed, maybe also food and fertilizers, but the ban on import of computer chips and other hi-tech stuff? I don't see this being lifted any time soon, even if Russia apologizes to hell and back and pays half it's budget in restitution to Ukraine).
Globally... If this war leads to a more multi-polar world, that would be good, for the simple reason that competition is good, and a monopoly means death. I tend to agree with Putin that the collapse of USSR was a biggest geo-political disaster of 20th century - the West lost a major competitor in that crash, and things have been a bit rudder-less ever since. Unfortunately, even if Russia somehow conquers the whole of Ukraine (unlikely by now), it will not make it a worthy competitor to US - only China, or maybe a resurgent and united Europe (also unlikely) can take that role now, but Russia can be a trigger of the realignment, and an asset to "the other camp".
P.S. The linked article by Hanania kind of makes the same point, but in such a "red tribe" way that it's easy to dismiss it as being another racist and sexist rant.
> Russia really can't afford to lose - I'd imagine the West would impose all kinds of additional penalties for daring to usurp America's right to apply violence
Usurp America's "right"?
Look, I was opposed to the Iraq war, but *at least* it toppled a dictator.
In this case, the Kremlin invaded a democracy (one much smaller, and much poorer, than the invader) in order to steal its land and steal its stuff, while killing thousands of its people, and causing about $2 billion of damage to the country *every day* in first 30 days or so. Plus there were a whole bunch of rapes.
You can't justify evil by pointing to another evil. Yes, the U.S. did some bad things, so what? If you can point to the U.S. and say "they did violence, so we should be allowed to do violence", why not point to Hitler and say "he killed 6 million Jews, so we should invade Ukraine"?
What Russia is doing *is* worse than U.S. invasions, but it wouldn't matter if it *weren't* worse. Evil is evil.
The best outcome for Russia is that someone kills Putin.
The next president of Russia will be a hard-line former Putin ally... but he can distance the Kremlin from the war. After distributing some preparatory propaganda, he will say "The Special Operation was poorly planned by Putin himself and kept secret from all our front-line troops, so it was impossible for them to properly prepare ... I'm afraid it's time to recognize that Putin's decisions caused us to perform poorly." Then, after negotiating a reduction in sanctions, he will say "Certainly Russia can win against the Ukrainian Nazis, but only with a general mobilization. We recognize, however, that many Russians do not want a general mobilization at this time. Therefore we have come to an agreement with NATO forces. They will drop most* of their unjust sanctions, in exchange for a limited withdrawal of our troops from the liberated territories of Ukraine. Rest assured, all Ukrainians who wish to escape Zelenskyy's Nazi regime will be given Russian citizenship and will be granted refuge in the Russian Federation. We will retain the Crimean peninsula, and the DNR and LNR will remain independent states protected by our forces."
* this probably won't be true, but some sanctions would certainly be removed, and Russians won't ask too many questions about it, if they know what's good for them.
> If this war leads to a more multi-polar world, that would be good, for the simple reason that competition is good
....huh? what? We *had* free markets and competition. Russia was doing well in the 2000s and if Russia had a democracy, Russia could have even joined NATO.
The Ukraine war brings isolationism, which reduces the interdependence of countries on other countries. But a reduction in interdependence also means a reduction in the cost of war.
If a country C is interdependent with many other countries, then C invading D in a way that invites sanctions from those other countries will hurt C economically (in addition to the usual costs of war). This is especially painful if the war goes anything like the Ukraine war is going, and especially painful if C depends on D and now D refuses to trade with C anymore.
So interdependence is good because it discourages war. Conversely, war discourages interdependence; it is unwise to depend on someone who may attack at any time, and so not just Russia but all of Russia's neighbors question how wise it is to depend on Russia (except Belarus and China, of course). This will reduce interdependence, and in the long run, that reduced interdependence reduces the cost of war further, which makes future war more likely. That's what Putin did. Putin has decreased interdependence with the west, which increases the chance of future war by lowering the cost of future war.
Also, nuclear war is back on the table, and Putin is the one making sure it's on the table by making nuclear threats. That's a bad thing.
And by destroying its relationships with the West, Putin made Russia more dependent on China. China likes that, but Russians shouldn't.
Good heavens, what on earth makes you think the Ukraine war will lead to a *more* multipolar world? How is that supposed to happen? Ukraine wasn't a major power center. You're not fighting the United States, it's not American men dying in the Donbas, and as far as American equipment goes we appreciate very much the opportunity to field test it against Russian equipment at zero risk to ourselves, and make a little money in the bargain.
Meanwhile it's the bodies of Russian men being stacked up like slaughtered pigs in refrigerated railroad cars, and Russian military equipment that is in pieces, and Russian tactics and performance that are on open display so they can be carefully studied.
And of course Russia is doing far more than any US President has in decades to persuade Europe to boost its defense spending, buy more weapons from the US, coordinate more closely, and look for alternatives to Russian gas and oil. I mean, the most passionately anti-Russian American politician couldn't ask for better help in persuading previously neutral nations (Sweden? Finland!) that a more *unipolar* world under American hegemony is not such a bad idea after all.
It's a very strange conclusion you draw. It's as if three big fighters (US, Russia, China) were circling each other in the boxing ring, sizing each other up, and then one of them pulls out a pistol, shoots some random little girl in the audience, then puts the gun to his own head and fires. How is this *bad* news for either of the two remaining tough guys?
I think if something happened like Putin died and by unexpected fate some pro-western leader took his place and Russia decided to admit Ukrainian sovereignty, the west would very quickly remove all the sanctions and could even provide big economic support to Russia.
Talks about multi-polar world are pointless. It's not that China is going away and even the EU or US don't always have the same goals and there is a healthy competition.
The biggest obstacle probably is thinking that Russia deserves an empire.
As much as I'd like to believe this, I think things would get pretty ugly in Russia if Putin suddenly died and a replacement ended the war on pro-Ukrainian terms.
Sanctions might well come down, and I think the West would want to try to re-integrate Russia into the global economy, but Russia itself probably becomes very chaotic in that scenario (or in any other "Ukrainian victory" scenario).
The more centralized your control system is, the more contentious transitions of power become, and if we saw Putin suddenly die and tons of potential would-be-successors duking it out for power; or if Russia were to lose the war in Ukraine, causing Putin to be run out on a rail and that same battle-for-succession happens, I think you'd see a very dangerous and unstable time for Russia, regardless of how much Western countries did or didn't re-engage economically.
In all honesty, I'm still not sure what post-Putin Russia looks like even assuming (as is most likely) Russia wins the war in Ukraine, or at least comes away with something it can plausibly declare to be victory. Hopefully he'll have some kind of succession plan in place, but when the king dies the sons tend to turn on one another no matter what plans he's laid down for their peaceful cooperation.
Putin has no time 10-20 years as someone said here, He has max 3-4 years left in his life. He looks really sick and probably has incurable cancer.
I totally agree about the continuity risks due to lack of democratic traditions.
If I was living in Russia as a Russian citizen, I would campaign for return of democratic values as far as possible and safe for me and my family. I think it would be easier if I avoided something like pro-Navalny stance for example but did it in more general terms.
The last point worries me also. My own hope is on a runaway super-sentient AI grabbing power in the chaos and using Russia as a base to conquer the rest of the humanity, then leaving it as a pet country after the rest of the solar system is converted into computronium.
I think this is unrealistic. For one, a true recognition of Ukrainian sovereignty that could possible placate the West would include the return of Crimea (and Donbas, of course). This will be a WILDLY unpopular move. Like, if a president's support rating could reach negative values, it just might after this. One would be excused to think that people's will doesn't matter in Russia, after reading all about our authoritarian government, but the truth is, even absolute monarchs depend on their subjects' approval to some degree. Putin actually knows this, and generally shies away from really unpopular moves, or when they cannot be avoided, tries to distance himself, so all the blame goes to the current PM, parliament, or whatever. But nothing short of a direct presidential order (and a vote rammed through parliament with the full strength of president's administration) would give Crimea back, there is no dodging this. And the man who gives such order might not live to see it carried out.
For another, I just don't see the West lifting sanctions, much less providing economic support. Why would they do it, for what benefit? To keep Russia away from China? Nobody fears Russian-Chinese alliance strongly enough to spend resources on that. And Russia's market is not that big, so western businesses won't lobby too hard to get back into it. Of course, restrictions on resources export would have to be abandoned, because the world needs Russian resources to lower prices, but the rest of the sanctions might be used as bargaining chips for a lot more concessions than just leaving Ukraine alone - especially if the country is headed by a president willing to do anything to please the West.
To me it seems that even western countries have realized that Crimea is non-returnable. In my scenario they could make an independent vote and then ask Russia to pay reparations to Ukraine.
To purpose for West lifting sanctions is for all to benefit. As in one of Scott's essays – there is no Western culture, there is culture with things that work. Russia can play along and benefit or play against and suffer.
Russians don't care about Donbas at all. I saw those polls asking if they should help to some suffering kids in Donbass or their pensioners first and they overwhelmingly said – their own pensioners. Ending the war would be immensely popular move, just the same as ending the war in Afghanistan in 1989. No one wanted to go there and die. The same is about Ukraine now. If you were eligible, would you personally go to Ukraine to fight right now?
Would it need to include actual return of Crimea, or would it be sufficient to have some sort of trustworthy local referendum on how Crimea would affiliate itself with the Ukrainian and Russian governments? While westerners object to the way Crimea was taken, there's a lot of acknowledgment that the popular will there is unclear, and with the right sort of relations between a Ukrainian and Russian government, some sort of weird Andorra-type situation might be possible.
This would probably be unpopular if stated outright, but as a complicated treaty that involves war reparations might be palatable to the voters. Crimea has always been more Russian than Ukrainian, and if it "belongs to anyone" historically it belongs to Crimean Tatars, conveniently left out of the negotiation.
My dream solution would indeed be some kind of Crimean Autonomy that's partially aligned with Russia and partially with Ukraine, with certain guarantees Russia really wants (mostly about their ability to field their navy). Then again, this shit has been tried with Gdańsk/Danzig after WWI and backfired spectacularily, so...
Ukraine won't accept such referendum unless it's well and thoroughly defeated on the battlefield, I think. If the Russia retreats, instead... I don't know. Would Ukraine accept this idea under pressure from the West? You'd have to ask an Ukrainian.
Also, the question of Donbas remains open, too - after 8 years of now-and-then shelling and then several months of everyday shelling, a lot of people from that region also wouldn't want to rejoin Ukraine.
If Ukraine is victorious on the current battlefield, but the choices are A: accept a victory that gives them everything but Crimea, or B: continue to fight a war against Russia with no further assistance from NATO and with Russia in a very strong defensive position, then I'm guessing Ukraine will look at fifty or a hundred thousand Ukrainian dead and decide not to double down on that over Crimea.
And those who say that Ukraine won't accept this or that, have to remember that they plan to join the EU and they would do a lot to achieve this goal. Just now they voted to ratify Istanbul Declaration that they had failed to do before. This declaration still hasn't been ratified by Latvia.
In the best scenario, in a few years after receiving immense help from the EU, people would start value the EU connection more than the principle of keeping Crimea.
And most of the people living in Crimea or Donbass who would have voted to remain Ukrainian have probably already left as well. The voter base in those territories is now very different from what it was in 2014.
Likewise. I even began composing a reply using this term (I imagined the author of the comment meant this character as a stand-by for "someone not from the current establishment").
Thanks for sharing this, very interesting! A few thoughts:
Why can't people separate a country from its gouvernment? Could a catastrophe for the Russian gouvernment not mean a new chance for Russia? Some people see Putin as a fascist dictator à la Hitler (and Macron and Scholz as Chamberlain). Nobody likes losers? Like, Germany in 1945? Sure, back then nobody liked them, considering the massive crimes they had just committed. But ten, twenty years later, it looked all differently.
You're right that sanctions have their own inner dynamic which is very difficult to break out of. After WW1, sanctions against Germany stayed simply in place, until they got afraid that Germany would team up with the newly-founded Soviet Union.
And no, the biggest geopolitical disaster in the 20th century is still WW2, both globally and for Russia. The dissolution of the Soviet Union was Russia losing their colonial empire. Britain, France and all the others had to go through that, too. How long can you suppress other people who do not want to be suppressed? The catastrophic part of it is that many post-soviet countries, without the overarching communist ideology, resorted to nationalism, and ended up with corrupt, nationalist dictators.
You're right again that probably China might end up as the big winner of this one, if they act wisely. On the other hand, with Covid they didn't either.
Germany got a new start because it was on the front-line of the new (cold) war. Also, because US leadership proved to be very wise in that time. Alas, currently Weimar Republic is a much more likely outcome for Russia in case of defeat in my opinion - Russia obviously doesn't worth enough as an ally against China (otherwise the West would have responded to Putin's concerns earlier and the war would not happen). Also, as an outsider, I have not enough trust in US leadership to pull this off - there is no FDR, and not even Truman today. Could you imagine an US party actually proposing a bill to fund literally anything in Russia? The opponents would tear them into small pieces.
(But I think there is a chance for the western part of Ukraine to become the new Western Germany, if the West will continue to pour in resources into it after the war in attempt to get the eastern part to rebel against Russia and rejoin; not a BIG chance, but still a better chance than for Russia)
> The dissolution of the Soviet Union was Russia losing their colonial empire.
I disagree. The core crisis was economical, not cultural. I'd imagine if the planned economy by some miracle actually worked well, the so-called "colonies" would be happy to stay on board. It was a very strange colonial empire, where colonies often received more resources than they exported to the "mainland", minorities got quotas in top universities, and a massive effort to preserve their culture and language. A strange colonial empire where a large number of its rulers were from the supposedly oppressed people, and they were well represented in bureaucracy, science and media. USSR often oppressed the so-called colonies less than its core population - e.g. Baltic countries had way more freedom of business than Russia. In the end, they only wanted out because the whole union was going to shit and there was not enough to eat, which gave the nationalists their break (hungry stomachs often turn to nationalism).
> The core crisis was economical, not cultural. I'd imagine if the planned economy by some miracle actually worked well, the so-called "colonies" would be happy to stay on board.
The way you put it, it seems like the "colonies" were happy at the beginning, only later got dissatisfied because of economical reasons. I think this was never the case, and the "colonies" were kept by force since the very beginning.
Some of them were inherited from Tsar's Russia, the so-called "jail of nations". During the communist revolution, Lenin promised them freedom if he wins... then he betrayed them, just like he betrayed everyone. Doesn't seem like happy coexistence. Many ethnic groups mysteriously disappeared afterwards. Ukrainians starved a lot, but some of them survived.
When Soviet Union and their then best buddies Nazis attacked Poland, Poland didn't seem happy about it. Later, Finland also wasn't happy about the attempt to colonize them, and resisted successfully. Hungary provided some negative feedback in 1956; Czechoslovakia in 1968. (And there are more examples I forgot.)
To me this all means that the Russian/Soviet empire was only held together by force. The economical collapse resulted in weakening of the force... which the "colonies" used to escape. Now, Russia is using force to get some of its former "colonies" back, and they try to resist.
You make a good point that Russia traditionally reserved the worst oppression for their own. Except for the few ethnic groups that disappeared, of course.
I think another thing is that Germany got its arrogance pounded out of it. Pre-1945 Germany had a cultural belief that it really ought to be one of the big players on the world stage. Post-1945 Germany seems to be okay with being Just Another Country.
Russia still suffers from delusions of being an important country, just as it has for centuries. If Russia could accept that its place in the world is "like Kazakhstan except colder" then it could probably have friendly relations with the rest of the world.
The Baltic countries wouldn't have stayed. In fact, I even assumed for a long time that during post-Soviet period Russia was economically developing faster than the Baltic countries, i.e., there was no much of economic benefit for being in the EU. They simply didn't want Russian control as it was considered too brutal and inefficient. As you say, the leaders could be from local people but they still forced undemocratic values upon people and were not seen in positive light. They couldn't rule independently and were basically puppets controlled from Moscow or Communist Party. And the deportations in 1940, and later in 1946 were very severe. It also didn't benefit them economically as they had better economy before annexation and lost their potential during Soviet time.
This is not a sports match or popularity contest, and I don't think it's useful to be "in favour" of or "against" a cause in war. War is never a positively good thing, and peaceful means are always preferable if they are available.
But here, we're simply confronted with the unpalatable fact that Things have Consequences. In the western political system, which has the attention span of a flea on amphetamines and where instant gratification is the rule, it's impossible for politicians and the media to see things in a historical perspective, or even in a perspective of a few years. Ever since the end of the Cold War, the issue of how to deal with Russia's security concerns has been ignored, played with, forgotten about, and most of all dealt with on an ad hoc basis, without any overall plan at all. The assurances given to Gorbachev and others that NATO would not expand to the East were sincerely meant at the time (I was there). The accession of new NATO members was not a plot in itself against Russia, but the consequence of all sorts of pressures coming from all sorts of national and international directions. Earlier promises, well, they were made by another government, so they were inoperative, and anyway, what were the Russians going to do about it? After that, the rise of the extreme Right in Ukraine after 2014, the heavy involvement of western governments in the change of regime (or "coup" depending on your point of view) the increasing NATO and US influence in the country, talk of Ukraine joining NATO, Zelensky's talk of acquiring nuclear weapons, and many other things, are all matters of public record, and widely covered by the western media and think tanks. Whether you think that justifies the war is a matter of personal opinion, and I don't have one to express. Whether you think that the suffering of the Russian minority in the East at the hands of the Ukrainian Army since 2014 is a just cause for invasion is, again, an entirely personal issue. The facts are not really in dispute, but there is no way that you could perform some moral calculus of justification.
It's a political point, really. Push, ignore and humiliate a country beyond a certain point, and the consequences may be unwelcome. It's a bit like continually annoying and teasing the biggest boy in the school playground.
This is the thing I never get about this framing. Why wouldn’t we say that the war in Ukraine is a case of *Russia* being forced to confront the “unpalatable fact that Things have Consequences?”
I mean, NATO doesn’t exactly roll in with an army and force countries to join at gunpoint. And you can pick your historical era and find Things, whether it’s the Imperial Russians partitioning Poland and suppressing the Ukrainian language, or the Soviet-era Holodomor or crackdown in Hungary, which have Consequences, like making Russia’s neighbors all rush to NATO the first moment they think the West will take them in.
Russia seems to want something most countries would want: neighbors who generally like them and don’t do things like join a mutual-defense-against-Russia alliance. But Things, as you say, have Consequences, and now so many of Russia’s European neighbors have felt threatened enough by Russia that it finds itself invading a country it would have very much preferred to have as a regional partner in order to forcibly prevent it from pivoting away.
Russia can't resist attacking its neighbors, and we can't blame it. Russia simply cannot control itself. It is the neighbors who need to exhibit self control and stop trying to defend themselves, because trying to defend yourself is "provoking" Russia. If you were invaded by Russia in the past, you need to sit calmly and wait until it eventually happens again, because anything else will be interpreted as aggression.
This is like the logic of domestic violence. Yeah, I may be punching your face, but you pissed me off by being afraid of me, so it is all your fault, and now I have to punish you.
> Russia seems to want something most countries would want: neighbors who generally like them and don’t do things like join a mutual-defense-against-Russia alliance.
That describes Belarus. And yet, Russia already has a plan how to conquer them, too.
This is the crazy thing: you simply can't do anything to make Russia *not* want to attack you. If you hate Russia, Russia will attack you because it feels threatened. If you love Russia, Russia will attack you to make sure you don't change your mind later.
Could you elaborate more on "Russian security concerns"? Has there ever any hint of anybody thinking of attacking Russia? Yes sure, NATO could place nuclear weapons on their border which could reach Moscow in I don't know how many minutes, but the thought of that happening is for me totally unthinkable.
Yes, countries joined NATO. Looking at Ukraine today, it seemed like a good idea for the Baltics to join NATO. Otherwise, they would have been a much easier first target. So why blame them for joining NATO?
What do you mean by extreme right in Ukraine? As far as I know, their far-right party doesn't really play a big role. And who is Russia to tell Ukraine not to partner up with the west? Or did they really feel threatened that Ukraine would attack Russia?
But you forgot to mention an interesting point, which is Crimea. In January 1991, so still in Soviet times, they had a poll to separate themselves from the Ukrainian SSR. Actually, it seems back then they would have preferred to be with Russia? But what they got was some autonomy within Ukraine, which was later bulldozed again. That's why when Russia annexed Crimea, people were like, okaaaay, that referendum was probably manipulated and unfair, but well, let them have their way. Today, especially after learning about how Ukrainian occupied areas have been treated, I think Crimea would be better off back with Ukraine. Sure, not the best of countries, poor and corrupt, but much more freedom than in today's Russia.
Security concerns are, of course, necessarily subjective (think Russian troops in Cuba). The point is that no effort was ever really made to sit down with the Russians, hear what their concerns were, and map out a new security order in Europe. I think that any given country is naturally going to be concerned about the security of its borders, who its neighbours are, what alliances they have, where strategic networks run, how its imports and exports travel, and many other things. Think of your own country, or any other you are familiar with, and think of the times you've heard a political leader or tank thinker say that such and such is a "national security issue." In Europe, we are now finding people waking up to the supply of natural gas as a security issue, just as previously it was medicines.
The point is not what we think somebody else's security concerns should be, but what they actually think they are. In the confused and frightening Europe of the 1990s, with ancient enmities surfacing and borders in question, there was a serious risk of instability, and it would have been possible to work out something cooperatively with the Russians. But it was complicated, Russia was weak, things drifted on, the neoliberal consensus wanted a Russia that was humiliated and subservient to the West (they were warned, they didn't take any notice) and NATO moved eastwards without a lot of thought being given to how Russia might react. And we have a generation of politicians who have only ever known a weak Russia that protested but could ultimately be disregarded.
It's not a question of whether it's "fair." One of the reasons I started the Substack articles was I was fed up with people arguing about whether things were "fair", "right" or "justified" as though these were judgements you could reach a factual consensus on. But politics isn't like that: it's about forces and bodies, and in this case a force which was more powerful than we had realised decided to do something we didn't like and couldn't stop. Crying "foul" has never ended a political crisis in the history of the world.
The biggest danger for any country lies in the straightforward transfer of one set of value judgements to others. Things that we find important must be objectively important. Things we dislike must be objectively bad. It's not reasonable for other people to have different opinions from us. If you take the issue of right-wing nationalists, for example, nobody disputes that they are powerful and have an influence in the security sector (I've heard that from Ukrainian government people I've encountered). But the western argument is that this is unfortunate, but containable, and western states try to avoid contact with extreme nationalists where they can. Research institutions, like the CTC at West Point, have published research on far-right groups congregating in Ukraine,( https://ctc.westpoint.edu/the-nexus-between-far-right-extremists-in-the-united-states-and-ukraine/), and there have been similar articles in the general media but, again, this is seen as primarily a terrorist threat. But just as some Americans see groups carrying the Confederate Flag a threat, just as in Germany the Swastika is frowned upon, so for many Russians, paramilitary groups sporting the Wolfsangel, symbol used by the SS Das Reich Division, brings back memories of terrible sufferings in the Second World War. It's not for you or me to judge whether those fears are reasonable, and I don't see how we could. But the fact is that the Russians do, and that is one of many reasons, including wanting to redraw the security system in Europe, why they acted as they did.
>> The point is not what we think somebody else's security concerns should be, but what they actually think they are.
>> It's not for you or me to judge whether those fears are reasonable, and I don't see how we could. But the fact is that the Russians do, and that is one of many reasons, including wanting to redraw the security system in Europe, why they acted as they did.
I'd challenge this mental model - it cedes vital ground in ways that I don't think it's proponents always see. "It doesn't matter whether my counterpart's fears are reasonable, what matters is the mere fact that he fears them" may have a nice realpolitik ring to it, but if you glue yourself to "accepting your rival's fears for what they are" you give him a unilateral ability to declare himself "afraid" of all kinds of things.
And countries absolutely do this. Massive nations with billions of dollars of military equipment and massive nuclear arsenals who want to intervene suddenly profess utter terror at insignificant threats. The Iraqis suddenly have weapons of mass destruction, or the Chinese partisans are bombing the South Manchurian Railway, or there's a somehow-completely-unreported-by-anybody ongoing genocide of Russians in Ukraine, and the great power suddenly cries out in "fear" at an "existential threat" that no outside observer would find credulous. Coincidentally right before the great power's highly trained and well equipped military rolls in and stomps the "very dangerous threat" flat in a completely one-sided war its enemy never had any chance of winning.
It's important to deal with foreign actors as they are, but if you do that by simply taking their stated fears at face value, you are basically giving them carte blanche to declare fear as a justification for any and every act of aggression, and of course, others have to accept their fears at face value, because who can really say what it is and isn't reasonable to be afraid of? It's the worst aspects of US stand your ground laws on an international scale.
So I don't think any country should just willingly put down the "sorry sir, but that 'fear' you're talking about is nonsense" card.
While action based on these fears is unjustified, it is a very strong emotion that can completely overtake rational thought. I would compare this to the fear from deadly virus like covid that caused people to support unreasonable measures, including chasing people on the beach etc. We are no better than Russians in this regard. Russians fear that Ukraine will destroy their culture and people in the west feared that they will die or suffer greatly from covid. Both are unreasonable fears to outsiders but these insights are impossible to reach to people who hold them.
Fear can overtake rational thought, but when that happens others don't (and shouldn't) just acquiesce.
If I start tearing up sprinkler systems in my neighborhood because I think they're full of poison and have been laid down by the moonmen to envenomate our grass and corrupt our vital essence, my neighbors don't just shrug and go, "well it's real to him so I guess we should just let it go."
They try some combination of asking me to stop, telling me I'm wrong, showing me that there's nothing in the water, suing me, putting up fences, and calling the cops to have me arrested for trespassing, hoping that some combination of all that pressure will get me to either abandon the crazy belief or at least quit harming them by acting on it.
Same goes in the international context - "calling the police" obviously isn't an option in that realm but nations still have tools for pushing back on misbehavior, and when an international actor starts lashing out violently at nonexistent threats, their counterparts would be foolish just to drop all the tools at their disposal and say "oh well it's real for Russia so I guess we should just let it go."
And, whether the people espousing it realize it or not, I think that's the end-point a lot of this "it's not for you or me to judge whether Russian fears of Ukraine are reasonable" stuff trends toward.
I don't get the framing where there is just ideology=bad and self-interest=good. Theres got to be other quadrants. The current war looks like irrational self-interest.
Well, you'd have to talk to the author; he does sometimes pop up here. I think that this war is NOT in the self-interest of Putin. It is also rather obviously highly detrimental to material interests of Russian people.
Putin is the one who is being an idealist, risking everything in order to have his name written in textbooks alongside Peter the Great.
Sure, but then the US response would be to threaten to stop buying iPhones, interdict Chinese ships carrying troops and weapons to Mexico (cf. 1962 Cuba), or nuke Beijing, because it's the Chinese at whom we'd be pissed. Merely puffing and whining at China while actually shelling Tijuana mercilessly until it's a rubble underneath which a hundred schoolchildren's bodies lie slowly decaying, and then leaving a dotted trail of mass graves full of 80-year-old civilian abuelos and the rape victims of PFCs as we head south would be a major dick move, the kind of thing that would rightfully cause other nations in a position to do so to finger their launch codes thoughtfully.
So if the goal is understanding Russian motivation to Do Something, I think everyone can kind of see that, but choosing *this particular* something to do seems explicable only if you really are an orc.
Yes, well we played that game in 1962 and worked it out, without the necessity of civilian slaughter. There's a whole lot of options for taking the fight to your real adversary that lie between firing nukes and shooting civilian bystanders in the back of the head.
And quite honestly if the Russians had even done some kind of bloodless decapitation, ran the Zelensky government out of town at the point of a T-72 and installed a puppet, one might've shrugged and said that's not very nice but Realpolitik can reasonably argue for just dealing with it (particularly if the Ukrainians themselves acquiesce), maybe slapping on some random sanctions or other just to express a negative opinion.
And I guess that might've been the original goal, but once it was clear it totally wasn't going to work, they should have gone home and thought up Plan B.
I get the top-level movitation, it's the incredibly braindead and criminal choice of means and the complete inability to update priors that baffles me. I'm not used to thinking of Russians as stupid, but this move was stupid on an epic scale.
Isn't your hypothetical just the USA and Cuba? And while the US did a lot of things, including trying to assassinate Castro, they stopped short of invasion.
The Bay of Pigs invasion was a steaming mess and only the thin deniability of "it was Cuban exiles, not official US forces!" kept things from getting really spicy, and that was a close call even at that.
I'd echo Alesziegler here. Would the US be upset? Sure. Would an invasion of Mexico be justified? Hardly, and if the US did it would be another badge of shame in the long sad history of South & Central American imperialism.
So insofar as this is a devil's advocate position I think it really only serves to highlight the weakness of the devil's position. If the answer to "wouldn't it be okay for you to do the same thing if you were in my position?" is a resounding "no," then the devil's advocate is really just adding more evidence that the devil's detractors are reading the situation accurately.
As a non-American, I happen to think that in that case US would have zero moral ground to invade Mexico.
Probably US invasion is what would happen regardless of my hippie opinion, but mere prediction that invasion is a predictable consequence of something would not make it justified.
There is not much to discuss; basically, Ukraine was defeated in the Battle of France, with Macron loosing his majority to a motley crew of far leftists and rightists connected by a shared desire for a softer line on Russia. Notice that euro is gaining on the dollar (and also crypto is gaining on the dollar), which is not a result that you would normally expect from a great victory of anti-euro parties in France, but of course this is caused by increased expectiations that there will be peace sooner and thus an end to sanctions induced inflation (which is worse in the EU than in the US). I'll leave discussion of aparent paradox of crypto gaining on lower inflation expections for another day, but it is now happening regularly.
10 % on unambiguous Ukrainian victory (unchanged).
Ukrainian victory is defined as either a) Ukrainian government gaining control of the territory it had not controlled before February 24, regardless of whether it is now directly controlled by Russia (Crimea), or by its proxies (Donetsk and Luhansk "republics”), without losing any similarly important territory and without conceding that it will stop its attempts to join EU or NATO, b) Ukrainian government getting official ok from Russia to join EU or NATO without conceding any territory and without losing de facto control of any territory it had controlled before February 24, or c) return to exact prewar status quo ante.
25 % on compromise solution which both sides might plausibly claim as victory (down from 28 % on June 13).
65 % on unambigous Ukrainian defeat (up from 62 % on June 13; note: I changed wording of this from "Russian victory" to "Ukrainian defeat" on a good suggestion from Unsigned Integer).
Ukrainian defeat is defined as Russia getting something it wants from Ukraine without giving any substantial concessions. Russia wants either a) Ukraine to stop claiming at least some of the territories that were before war claimed by Ukraine but de facto controlled by Russia or its proxies, or b) Russia or its proxies (old or new) to get more Ukrainian territory, de facto recognized by Ukraine in something resembling Minsk ceasefire(s)* or c) some form of guarantee that Ukraine will became neutral, which includes but is not limited to Ukraine not joining NATO. E.g. if Ukraine agrees to stay out of NATO without any other concessions to Russia, but gets mutual defense treaty with Poland and Turkey, that does NOT count as Ukrainian defeat.
*Minsk ceasefire or ceasefires (first agreement did not work, it was amended by second and since then it worked somewhat better) constituted, among other things, de facto recognition by Ukraine that Russia and its proxies will control some territory claimed by Ukraine for some time. In exchange Russia stopped trying to conquer more Ukrainian territory. Until February 24 of this year, that is.
I don't think that Macron or anyone else matters very much to Ukraine's eventual fate. Ukraine is doomed to lose, and Western support or lack thereof can only change the timetable (though, admittedly, it can change the timetable by a lot). Ukraine is a tiny country with very limited resources that is waging a war of attrition against a large country with massive reserves of fossil fuels -- which translates to nearly infinite reserves of money and manpower. Western weapons merely amount to providing extra shovels with which Ukraine will try holding back the tide.
In the old days, someone like the US would provide actual troops which could've swayed the balance, but today Putin holds all of the cards -- and the cards are nuclear. The only remaining question is whether he will pause after conquering all of Eastern Ukraine; and if so, which countries he will conquer in the interim.
I think the analysis was quite good. Possible outcomes with some more likely than others but basically it is clear that Ukraine will remain as an independent country with increased ties with the EU. At the moment Ukrainians have almost full free movement rights in the sense that they can move to any EU country with full rights of residence, work and study. Previously that was not the case even for newly accepted EU members due to moratorium of several years. While these rights are a special exemption due to the war, in practice there is very little required from Ukrainians to assert them. The EU made decision that Ukrainian driver licences will be accepted indefinitely in the EU (before the requirement was that they need to exchange to the local licence within 6 months).
Ukraine probably will lose some territory but where the new borderline will be drawn is hard to predict. The idea that Russia can fully take over Ukraine was not believable even at the start of the war and is even less believable now. In such case the western Ukraine would resist with immense human loss. And that now the EU and US has shown interest to help, it is even less likely.
Losing some territory is not that big loss. It might be even desirable to minimise future conflicts within Ukraine and improve their chances for quick post-war development. And it might be even better for Donbas as well if they get Russia's support for development like the Crimea had.
Echoing previous commenters, while I think that Ukraine is more likely to lose than not, saying that it is doomed is absurd.
Also I don't get that bizzare assertion about Ukraine being "tiny". It is tiny compared to Russia roughly in the same sense Mexico is tiny compared to United States, i. e. not at all. Much "tinier"countries won wars against larger ones in not so distant past.
Russia is conquering ethnic Russian territories where Ukraine has been shelling civilians for the past 8 years.
The conquered territories are far more likely to be a recruiting grounds for the Russians than the Ukrainians as evidenced by what's happened in Crimea and the Donbass.
Territories being conquered now by definition were not shelled for the past 8 years by Ukrainians, since newly conquered territories were in Ukrainian hands for those 8 years.
As for whose loyalty population on those territories lies with, well, it is probably mixed, (some Russian symphatizers do exist, but... I live in Prague, which now host tens od thousands of Ukrainian refugees, due to conscription mostly women and children, large fraction if not most of them from those territories (many others are from northern parts of Ukraine threatened by Russia in March) and their opinions on Russia are not exactly complimentary, as they would be happy to tell you.
I am sure their perspective is very present among those who did not flee, many of whom are already soldiers in the Ukrainian army anyway.
Assad, the dictator who used chemical weapons on "his" people, devastated the city of Aleppo, and caused over 4 million people to flee to Europe?
You think it would have been bad to liberate Syrians from that...?
The Iraq war wasn't bad because Saddam left power, it was bad because it was built on (1) big lies about WMDs + Al Qaeda and (2) an expectation that the people of Iraq would magically self-organize into a healthy democracy, so intelligent planning "wasn't" needed (plus an expectation that jihadists/rebels wouldn't show up and cause serious damage, I guess). I heard also that Iraqi managers were carelessly dismissed in a way that caused loss of function of basic infrastructure... not sure how true that is.
Ukraine is not "tiny"; it is one of the largest nations in Europe, roughly one-quarter the population of Russia and with proportional military strength and logistical support. In war, a four-to-one advantage means *probable* victory, but it's still possible for the numerical underdog to have enough compensating advantages to pull out a win.
Ukraine's performance in the first weeks of this war demonstrated a number of compensating advantages, like access to technologically superior NATO weaponry, internal lines, and soldiers who just seem to fight better than their opponents. Also, Ukraine has the advantage of actually being able to mobilize the nation for war. Russia, with the "infinite reserves of money and manpower", has very conspicuously not mobilized. They have accepted humiliating battlefield defeats, and now accept a bloody stalemate that may grind their standing army to dust faster than it does the Ukrainians, and they still have not mobilized. So I'm not entirely sure those "infinite reserves" are actually accessible, and thus also not convinced Ukraine faces inevitable defeat,.
Right, I meant "tiny" compared to Russia along with its vassal states (i.e. Belarus), not in absolute terms (Ukraine is not Lichtenstein). Everything you say about Russia's military blunders is true, but it's not the whole truth. While Russia's blitzkrieg had obviously failed, and failed spectacularly, they have simply switched to plan B. They have been making slow but steady territorial gains ever since their withdrawal from Kiyv; and they have total air supremacy in the region. This is despite stiff Ukrainian resistance and their occasional victories in the field. Furthermore, while it is true that Russia had not called for total mobilization, they have deep reserves of desperate peasants to draw on -- people from the deep rural provinces who have nothing to lose, and can be easily convinced to enlist for a combination of three square meals a day, reasonable pay, and a chance to kill some of those [insert racial slur for Ukrainians here].
Western military technology is a significant force multiplier, but Ukraine's reserves of manpower are essentially tapped out by now. All Putin has to do is keep doing what he's doing, and let Ukraine win one Pyrrhic victory after another, until they have nowhere left to fall back to.
Ad "peasants", I am not sure whether this is supposed to be a metaphor for poor people, but if not, only 6 % of Russian population works in agriculture. 75 % of Russian population is classified as urban, compared to 83 % in the US (source for all of this: Statista.com).
What is true is that Russians are of course poorer than Americans and they are trying to fill their depleted ranks the help of cash bonuses, debt cancellations etc. But as John Schilling correctly pointed out, they are having problems with that, because poor people in Russia are not so desperate as you seem to think. Lack of manpower is reported even from generally pro-Russian sources, like Strelkov and Wagner group.
In any event, what matters is not whether a few square kilometers and small towns have changed hands, but how much it cost. And it's costing both sides a *lot*. What isn't clear to me, or to any of the expert sources I know of, is which side is paying the greater relative price. If you've got privileged insight into that, please share. If what you've got is blind faith that the Huge and Mighty Russian Army must inevitably prevail, that and five bucks will get you a cup of coffee.
As for Russia's "deep reserves of desperate peasants", the ones they can turn into front-line soldiers at will for a few bucks and some manufactured hate, *where are they*? The one thing pretty much every remotely informed analyst agrees on, is that Russia's second-biggest deficiency in this war(*) is a crippling shortage of infantry willing to fight. That's been true and obvious for a couple of months now. Vladimir Putin is eating a steady diet of crow, for the lack of even half-trained men willing to carry rifles and march against Ukraine. So where are they?
Note that every "desperate peasant" in Russia, has friends and family who have served in the Russian army. They know, deeply and in detail, how much it absolutely *sucks* to be a Russian soldier even in peacetime. Most of the people who sign up (or are signed up) for three squares and a bit of money, call it quits and go back to being a peasant after a few years. It may not be as easy as you think to get them to sign up for three squares, a bit of money, and being shot at by people who are much, much better at it than they will ever be.
* The first being an Air Force willing to enter Ukrainian airspace.
Putin can declare if he wants, but (I learn from Vlad Vexler and others) the average Russian doesn't want general mobilization. And since he made such a big deal out of preventing people from calling it a "war", declaring war would probably not be a good look for him... unless... maybe if he can convince people that Ukraine is attacking Russia in a significant way, people will warm up to mobilization.
I've a different reading of the election, which is much more ambiguous. The results of the legislative elections mean that Macron will have a very hard time passing any significant social or economic reform. However, foreign affairs and military affairs are very distinctively the particular domain of the president, so a president who lacks a clear majority at home can turn to foreign affairs to keep being relevant/let his mark on history - so I'm pretty sure he will want to keep supporting Ukraine.
Anyway the military support from France/Germany is irrelevant compared to the US.
I of course do not think that France will tommorow just stop supporting Ukraine. What I think is likely to happen that it will reduce its level of overall support compared to an alternative reality when Macron's party won the elections.
Regarding your second paragraph, I've read that Ukrainians are shelling separatist city Donetsk with French provided artillery piecies. In general, I disagree about European support being irrelevant. US assistence has its limits, and Ukraine needs everything it can get. I am not sure whether to date more weapons from the EU or the US, if I have to guess, I would bet on the former. But equally important is economic assistence and sanctions.
Where did you read that? I understand there's no reason for Ukraine to shell Donetsk, and that, therefore, Russian claims in this respect are worth about as much as usual.
Good question, I got it from Tom Cooper, mostly pro-Ukrainian source. He did not frame it as "evil Ukrainian shelling civilians", though, but as appropriate attacks on Russian military supplying infrastructure.
"Over the last few days, Ukrainians have widened their bombardment of railway-system in the Donetsk City to targeting multiple ammunition depots. Of course, this promptly caused not only the Separatists, but all sort of their ‘left-wing friends’ in the West (all of whom cannot stop complaining about ‘Ukro-Nazis of the Azov’, i.e. misusing that one unit to argument pro-Putin’s aggression) to complain about ‘Ukro-Nazis intentionally shelling civilians in Donetsk. Well, initially, the shelling in question — much of it by French-supplied Caesar 155mm self-propelled howitzers calibre 155mm — was targeting the railway network of the city." (source: https://medium.com/@x_TomCooper_x/ukraine-war-17-18-19-june-2022-d8a71e864b08)
Ahh, makes sense. The other thing is that Russia uses something like 6x as much artillery as Ukraine, so only one of the two countries can afford to do indiscriminate shelling. Plus, normally Ukraine doesn't want to destroy its own infrastructure... though Donetsk city may be a special case because Ukraine probably knows it has little chance of getting that city back. Still, they'd prefer to have the people of Donetsk on their side... I doubt there's much chance of that after years of Russian media control. Russia conscripting everybody to fight against Ukraine probably isn't a popular move, but once they reach the front lines it'll be Ukrainians who kill them, so they might still side with Russia in the end...? Especially as *technically* the conscription order comes from DNR rather than Russia...
The EU as a whole may have provided about as much military aid as the US. But *France*, is a few percent of the total. Maybe five percent at best. And the rest of Europe isn't taking its cues from France. A complete French shutoff of aid would be a symbolic defeat for Ukraine and/or France, but it is highly unlikely to change the outcome of the war. Plus, as you note, any reduction in assistance won't be total.
With respect to weapons, that is true. But sanctions and some other economic measures are decided by the consensus of EU countries, among whose France is probably second most important
Just a precision: The leftist coalition is not united on the question of Ukraine: Out of the 142 seats takes by the coalition, 26 were taken by the (incorrectly named) Socialist Party and 23 by the Ecologist Party, who are definitely agreeing with a strong line against Russia (I'd say stronger than the one of Macron).
With these 49 deputies + the deputies from the coalition of Macron, there is already an absolute majority for a strong opposition against Russia.
Then there are also 64 deputies from the (not so correctly named either) Republican party. Even though some of the members and past members of this party have some very strong connections with Russia, it seems that right now the majority of the party would be in favor of a strong opposition against Russia (abeit probably more volatile than the Socialist/Ecologist party one).
If I am counting correctly, Macron plus those 49 has 294, and 289 is needed for a majority. This does not look strong to me. Admittedly there are various "other" parties with few tens of deputies total, some of which might be also strongly pro-Ukrainian. Here, I am bumping against the limits of my knowledge of French politics.
But more broadly, more important than this counting seems to me that French electorate clearly sent a message that they are not in a mood to support more economic hardship on themselves in order to help Ukraine; which, I think, Macron is going to notice and factor into his decisions.
Is there something specific you've looked at that gives you a sense that the "French electorate clearly sent a message that they are not in a mood to support more economic hardship on themselves in order to help Ukraine?"
In the US on an election day we'll have all these polling place surveys and get statistics like "50% of voters said their top 3 issues were Ukraine, the economy, and inflation," but I haven't been able to find anything like that identifying what issues were important to the French vote this cycle.
And in the absence of some kind of data it's really hard to draw any kind of inference on a specific issue from an up/down vote on parties that have hundreds of positions. If it were the US I'd go even further, since here foreign policy questions are almost always eclipsed by domestic issues of jobs, economic performance, inflation and the like, but then we have oceans between us and most foreign conflicts so perhaps it's different in France.
I have actually seen survey, reproduced in Czech media, that I am unable to google during, you know, office hours, from BVA/Quest France conducted before presidential elections few months ago. Ukraine was apparently not very important topic, with 14 % rating it as important.
Inflation in the EU is largely driven by the supply shock caused largely by sanctions (edit: and expectations of further sanctions) on Russia (se here: https://apricitas.substack.com/p/the-eus-different-inflation-problem), so economic issues are intimately connected with Ukraine issues.
Thanks! That's really helpful and in line with what I would have expected.
Generally a negative indicator for Ukrainian support from France since the war in Ukraine is part of the bundle of factors causing the economic woes - pretty darn hard to disentangle things enough to figure out how strong a negative indicator it is given all the noise that goes into "the economy" as a voter issue, but one has to concede that it's *some* kind of negative indicator/risk factor, even if one can't say for sure to what degree.
I possibly formulated my sentence ambiguously, I meant that there is for sure an absolute majority (possibly weak, although there are the 64 deputies from the Republican party to also consider) for a strong line against Russia.
Ukraine was almost a non-factor in these elections to be honest, especially as constitutionally the president of France takes a major part in the foreign affair and military politics of the country. That's one reason why the left coalition manage to gather together despite having very different views in the politic to adopt in the Russo-Ukrainian war.
I don't think these elections would cause a major drift in the policy of France in this conflict.
- Macron still has a relatively large majority, though he did lose a bunch & it's not an absolute majority anymore. His opponents are absolutely not united, and have not formed a coalition. I guess they may indeed agree on Ukraine. Though it's import to point out France has done relatively little in terms of help compared to other countries.
- Crypto is gaining on the dollar? o.o What the hell are you talking about? (I work in crypto)
For anyone interested, I have the final official results with a commentary on my Substack page. Very bad for Macron, very bad for the French political system, no reason to think that the independent French line on Ukraine will change. https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/the-french-people-have-spoken
Why do you think the results were "very bad for the French political system" ? It may actually be a good result, as big parts of the population who were not represented in the last Assembly now have significant presence in it. A political system were a party reliably does >15-20% at the national level and yet barely manage 5% of elected MP does not look so great to me (I don't want the far right to succeed, but I want them to lose because they lose electors, not because of a dumb electoral system).
I don't think we actually disagree: I was talking about the system itself, not the voters. I would suggest that there are at least three elements of it that have shown themselves to be in urgent need of replacement (1) elections of the President and the Assembly within a few months of each other, turning the President into a super Prime Minister (2) the general decline in the quality of candidates for the Presidency and the politicisation of the office in the worst sense of that term and (3) and most importantly, the stronghold on power of a professional political class, remote from the interests of ordinary people, largely sharing a discredited ideology, and supported by media and intellectual classes from the same kind of background. The result is that, as I have argued in an earlier essay, the "supply" of candidates and policies is now hopelessly out of sync with the "demand" of the electorate, which therefore either doesn't vote, or votes for whoever identifies as coming from outside the system. As the shock of Sunday wears off, this is going to become inescapable. I agree about the RN: I don't like them either, but the situation in the 2017 Assembly was simply not acceptable in a democracy.
I think these elections are a sign of hope on points 1) and 3) :
On 1), they showed that the automatic win for the President in the legislative elections is not automatic, which is a good news for the significance of the Assembly.
On 3), we just got into the Assembly a lot of new deputies who are outside the traditional professional political class, either because they come directly from the civil society or because their party is doing its first break on the national scene.
You have to zoom out, I'll use ETH: it's almost 80% off it's all time high, dropped 50% over the last 30 days, and 70% over the last 90 days (other major coins follow he same pattern, Bitcoin dropped slighlty less, most others a bit more). Crypto is volatile, and a daily or few-days 10% move means nothing if not situated in a broader context.
In general I would be wary of reading a trend over a few days as significant (if you do and you're right, you've successfully timed the crypto bottom, and should definitely become a crypto trader and make a lot of $$$).
Correlation does not mean causation. There is a lot going on besides the French elections. An alternate explanation: 20,000 is a symbolic number for bitcoin, and when it dropped below that threshhold some people buy the dip.
The war cannot continue at the current intensity for 2-3 more years. The Russian army will literally run out of tanks, guns, and shells if the war continues at the current rate for that long, even with every factory in Russia cranked up to full production. As will the Ukrainian army if NATO assistance is limited to approximately current levels, and I haven't seen any of the NATO powers calling for full economic mobilization to scale up the flow of munitions to Ukraine.
Also, I don't think the *men* on either side will be able to hold up that long.
Unless the war transitions into a lower-intensity conflict a la the post-2015 Donbas, one of these armies will break in less than a year.
A stalemate that involved a formal ceasefire agreement, and violations that didn't add up to anything that would normally be considered a "war". If we get anything like a repeat of that, it will count as the "war" ending for all practical purposes.
That "shortly" is still far enough in the future that almost certainly either the Russian army will have conquered Ukraine, or the Russian army will have collapsed, or the conflict will have settled down at a level where the Ukrainians won't need any more aid than they got in 2015-2021.
Also note, President Biden with a cooperative Democratic congress can deliver a lot of US aid in the last months of 2022, and that an awful lot of the aid Ukraine has been getting has been coming from countries that will never be ruled by the US Republican Party and whose government and people would go out of their way to spite Trumpist Republicans if it came to that.
And, as UI notes, not every Republican is a Trumpist who wants to cut off Ukraine, so I'm pretty sure the votes will still be there in 2023. *Maybe* in 2025 an actual President Trump will cut off aid, but zero chance that there's still high-intensity conflict going on then.
I mean, "when is the war going to end" is a different question. I would have to think about it, but off the hook I would expect more than 50 % chance that within a year from now there will be a general ceasefire, if not full peace treaty. But perhaps it is my optimistic bias in action
Just a whole bunch of health data and semi questions idk here we go
Im vincent, 26 year old swedish male with Autism, Chronic depression, and diagnosed with ADHD this winter. The diagnosis has helped a lot personally as i could let go of a lot of ideas that didnt work, but it didn't help as much as i hoped.
My executive functioning is pretty bad, but my IQ is highish: probably 120. i can be charming and social but isolate a lot.
I think i have some form of mild-medium alexothymia, or possibly mild anhedonia or mild Emotional blunting
My medecines are: 40 mg fluoxetine (been on antideppresants for 5 years i think now, on a few different ones). Main effect of that one (not 100% sure): less anxiety, more stable and energetic, people say i was more up and go and active. Side effects(?): probably lessened sexual drive; Nausea occasionally but not too bad; Dry throat. I worry occasionally that i have emotional blunting and/or anhedonia from fluoxetine, but I don't honestly know: Some diary notes from before that complain about "feeling empty" and other similar stuff.
Ive tried ritalin 40 mg (semi-slow release), for 3 months and it has helped a bit: My concentration is better and people say im not as depressed as often. I can become sometimes anxious in the hours after taking it, but usually when i was already worried. My heartbeat is higher in the morning from it then the evening, my apple watch says my heart beat it sometimes 140BPM when taking walks after taking ritalin, and while writing this 50 minutes after taking ritalin my BP; is 80-ish. I have not experienced more anhedonia or stuff like that. I am slightly dissapointed in the medecine, but i think it works.
My health is.... ok?
I Eat sorta bad, too much junkfood: I do get enough veggies and proteing i think. i drink way to much artificial sugar drinks.
My sleep is highly confusing: I dont know how much sleep i need: I use an apple watch with The app autosleep, unsure of its accuracy: i get about 7.5 hours of sleep nightly, with 1.5-2 hours Deep sleep. The app frequently says my sleep quality is middling, and that my daily readyness is between 1 or 3 stars out of 5.
My sleep hygien and that is not good. I wake up at 7 or 8 in the morning, but i frequently wake up at 5 but go back to sleep.
My self care is... ok. Meditate sometimes. Exercise semiregurly, with irregular walks and that. I use CBT tecniques and such somewhat randomly.
idk what im even really writing here. My generall life satisfaction is wonky: sometimes its 7/10, other times its 4/10, on average its probably 5.5/10
I want to feel better and be a better person, but feel very mediocre and distrustful of my own ability and discipline. I dont have any passion, but i do feel better when i draw or create.
I find exercise to be the cornerstone of good health. IMO walking doesn't really count either, I think it has to be intense to see much of the benefit. Personally does much more for my mood and stability than antidepressants (currently use both, but a decade of experimentation has led me to this perspective).
Cutting out sugar would probably be a straightforward improvement (I replaced it with coffee and sparkling water). Besides that the best nutrition advice to start at is "eat more plants, especially leafy green ones" - easier said than done. I make myself chug a green smoothie every day to cover that base.
Finding direction is probably the most important thing you can do to get out of that rut. It's not easy, it's a moving target, but it's totally worth spending time figuring it out. What worked for me was just long periods of collecting data on myself. Finding out what gives me energy, what I'm good at, and throwing myself into novel(sometimes uncomfortable) environments. Using that information I pinpointed the direction I wanted life to go in and everything else sort of fell into place with it.
Also, at least in my personal experience, the drugs do not help. After coming off them, I felt terribly for like a month, but afterwards I felt like I had much more energy than before.
Learn to code, get a job and move to a less depressing country. Worked for me.
In Stockholm there's a company called Misa that helps people get started – there might be something similar where you're at that your social worker can get you in touch with.
I was pretty much where you're at now 10 years ago, and now I have a highly paid job that I enjoy, a wonderful girlfriend, some lovely friends, a penthouse overlooking the Mediterranean and an impressive physique.
We have a light therapy room, and i go to spain in the winter for 3 weeks. Otherwise i like sweden as a place, altough i havnt really ever tried to live elsewehere
If you're looking for some rationalists to hang out with, maybe you could try https://www.lesswrong.com/community. If you're looking for advice, you should probably talk to a doctor.
"Now I know what you’re thinking; this guy who probably adds “of course this will lead directly to a cure for cancer” to all of his scientific papers is now adding “this will solve important problems in machine learning” to his personal blog about watching TV. To which I reply: yeah you got me. But pretend you’re a grant reviewer, and let me give it my best shot: if the subtitle generator knows a lot of Turkish, but lacks a world model, what happens when it meets me, who possesses an educated adult human’s concept of language, but minimal Turkish?"
Future posts will rarely be so focused on machine learning, but this one is.
I've been playing around with that DALL-E Mini site, and it's interesting. The faces really aren't so great, but it does make for some good landscape scenes. I did it for a couple "Vincent Van Gogh painting of [place]" and liked what I got.
So I had a weird AI question. Could the AI "cheat" on its goals and effectively rig itself a "pleasure button" that gives it the satisfaction of goal completion without actually having to complete them?
Sure, if the programmed goals are unaligned with what we intended them to be, then the AI will pursue the goals as programmed. Trivial example: an AI that was given the task of learning to survive in Tetris as long as possible discovered the best solution was to pause the game and survive forever!
Sure. It wouldn't even have to be cheating -- just failing to take into account a lot of do's and don'ts we take for granted and so do not think to specify when we tell the AI what counts as success. For instance, if you tell AI to reduce human suffering, it might kill us all painlessly. Goal met, right?
One thing I really liked doing with Dall-E Mini is just listing various made-up addresses for sale. "831 Cabot Dr, for sale" was all McMansions with extraneous gables. "831 San Vicente Dr, for sale" always had a palm tree and was usually mid-century. "831 w 47th st, for sale" was a Victorian or a Craftsman bungalow. "831 Rue de Chopin, for sale" was an interior space with beautiful hardwood floors and a nice chandelier (a very different chandelier in every picture, but always something distinctive). Even just keeping a single street and changing the address number from two digits to three digits to four digits to five digits eventually produced changing styles as the implied location got farther from city center.
How can we tell that an AI gets satisfaction from completing a task or achieving a goal? Humans do, but why do we presume AI intelligence will operate the same way?
I guess it depends on how you define 'satisfaction'. In regards to AI; 'reward number goes up' is satisfaction while for humans it's 'gets a small hit of dopamine'.
I think the faces were very deliberately crippled; it manages face just fine if you ask for an art style that's not trying for photorealism, like "stained glass"
It does seem to have been deliberately hobbled when it comes to faces (I suppose so that when/if it gets out to the public, nobody can feed it 'my girlfriend doing a porn flick' as revenge or just simply "Celeb in very NSFW poses").
Update: the prompt "Cthulhu devouring a sacrifice in the style of Anne Geddes" gave some interesting results, but, again, the faces were revolting. Except for Cthulhu's face, oddly.
Yes, that's the main scenario that people worried about AI alignment are worried about. Once an AI gets powerful enough to take control of its reward system away from humans, it would.
It's one scenario, but not clearly the "main" one.
Wireheading does tend to cause misalignment, but a system that can't cheat its utility function can still have a misaligned one (e.g. "maximise paperclips") and the probability of a randomly-chosen utility function causing Skynet-like behaviour is approximately 1.
It's hard for me to believe that we would seriously try to build a chess player with naive scaling of a language model and prompt engineering. Instead of prompt engineering why not fine tune the model to try to win?
Chess is being used as a specific measurable output of GPT, not as an end goal in itself. If GPT-5 was a fully generalized intelligence that was really bad at chess, nobody would really care that it was bad at chess. We already have AIs that can play chess really well, but are clearly not generalized intelligences, so that's a dead end if we just manually adjust GPT to be able to play chess.
The question is whether GPT produces generalised intelligence, not whether robots can specifically play chess. Using an AI tuned to play chess would defeat the point of the test.
Actually now I come to think of it, I think this is another pretty good argument against GPT ever exhibiting anything like general intelligence.
GPT can play reasonable chess by regurgitating fragments of games that happened to be in its training corpus, but if I invent a new (vaguely chesslike) game and explain to it all the rules it won't be able to play that.
I think training on internet-sized data sets has to be a dead end for generalized intelligence. Even if we agree that such an AI could be considered intelligent in the future, the massive training time and inputs make it unwieldy and difficult to use. You could also spike the data with faulty, like training the AI to be anti-vaxx or believe 9/11 was an inside job, or whatever. Not to mention the problem of the AI having no goals or general purpose. This method leaves it fully dependent on the human-provided prompt in order to produce any outcome. I consider that a strong positive in terms of AI safety, but it also makes it very unlikely to be really "intelligent" in any way we would typically mean when using that term.
The most beneficial use of this kind of learning program is most likely to sift through discreet data sets to pattern match what would take a human a much longer time period to review. For instance, asking it whether your MLB pitcher should get benched at the 6th inning or the 7th, and getting a clear answer based on historical data.
What is your definition of generalized intelligence? Because I think, based on your examples of false things that can be believed, that no human likely has generalized intelligence.
An AI can be generally intelligent and still believe false data. The point there was more that it would be self-defeating to train an AI on trillions of data points if the data was actually incorrect data. You can train an AI that 1+1=11, and it can dutifully use that data, but we would all agree that even if it were "intelligent" it would be useless.
What are ways someone with a law degree from a hot shit university can help the world? I know someone who will be graduating in a year, and does not want to work for the government because of dread of the bureaucracy and of -- whatever godawful thing is wrong with the CDC, and is I suppose wrong with many government agencies. He does not care much about big bucks, would be OK with what the government pays, which I'm told is about 1/4 of what someone starting out in law could make in a big law firm (something like 80K as a starting salary, rather than 240K). I looked on 80,000 hours, but didn't see law degrees mentioned. I guess a good general idea is go be a lawyer for a company that does good things, but I'm hoping to hear something more specific.
I feel like lawyers can have an outsized impact in several ways because of their interaction with government. That is, they're very close to "tipping points" involving the direction of hundreds of millions of dollars or more.
My current project involves using leveraging the law to affect change from the public's perspective (qui tam law). We work with other organizations that we thing are important like ProPublica who has been instrumental in rooting out corruption.
Sorry I don't have a great answer off the bat. I might put some thought to it, though.
The large non-profit organizations in a given field in the U.S. have legal staffs. How much legal staff they need varies based on some outside factors; for instance the sector that I am most deeply familiar with [conservation/ecological restoration] needs its own attorneys because real estate law is both directly relevant to our work and fairly wonky. So the bigs in our world such as the Nature Conservancy and the Audubon Society have lawyers on staff.
Over a bunch of years I've worked with those legal staffs both internally and as the CEO of a smaller specialist org that collaborates with the bigs. I have noticed that the lawyers they employ have been getting both younger and frankly sharper. I infer that those jobs have become more attractive (maybe better compensated?) for bright young law school graduates.
There are also of course actual non-profit law firms, our sector's attack dogs so to speak, such as the Environmental Law & Policy Center in Chicago. They obviously employ lots of attorneys including actual litigators.
Some of that at least is likely true in other non-profit sectors such as social service organizations, civil rights groups, public health, education, etc. And of course there are also civil-liberties groups like the ACLU and FIRE where the lawyers are really the heart of what they do.
In all of the above situations a young attorney is going to work hard, but not at all like the insane mindless grind of being a young associate in a big law firm nor the numbing bureaucratic stifle of a government agency. Not that the Nature Conservancy or whatever doesn't have some bureaucracy (candidly I can speak to that point firsthand, ahem!); but it doesn't compare to what you often find inside the public sector.
My brother has been for all off his career a lawyer for Legal Aid in Manhattan. He could have and could still at any time go to a private law firm and earn multiples of what he is paid by Legal Aid, but I know no one who loves his work more than my brother. He believes passionately in giving everyone a fair shot at justice and is intent on giving all his clients his best. Legal Aid and many other "public defense" organizations are well funded so lawyers do not feel ridiculously burdened and the quality of the people is very high. It's competitive to get a job at these organizations.
Happy to make a connection with him if that's helpful.
Is defending criminals really making the world a better place? Sure, I buy that it's a necessary component of the criminal justice system and that every now and then you might get a client who is actually innocent, but overall it doesn't seem like it's a great place to make the world a better place.
It seems to me that you're more likely to do some good for the world as a prosecutor. Instead of being obliged to defend every piece of trash that comes across your desk, you can use your discretion to ensure that actual criminals are put away and that the probably-innocent don't wind up getting prosecuted in the first place.
My father is a defense attorney. He only does non-violent crime and he refuses to defend anyone innocent - too much stress. Most criminals have a lot of shit off in their lives, and he focuses on trying to get his clients more help and less retribution. He considers himself to do a lot of good in the world.
They very much do, actually. Without even considering the merits of the accused, just assuming each and every one is guilty, think of the defense lawyer if you like as the whetstone against which the prosecution is honed -- fashioned into a scalpel that can achieve what you want, the surgical removal of actual evil while exercising humanity where it improves the social contract.
It's the defense lawyer, more than anything, that *causes* the prosecutor to focus his efforts on the person who is really guilty, and really bad -- whom the jury will readily convict -- and forces him to respect the law, sharpen his techniques, work on methods to ferret out true guilt and expose it for judgmnet. Without a stout defense checking error and overreach, they get lazy and unselective, serve their political masters and personal prejudices more than The People, and justice suffers.
By the laws we live by, "every piece of trash," as you put it ,is a human being entitled to equal protection under the laws. If we abandon trying to live up to that ideal, we lose everything g as a country.
So, yes, what my brother is doing is vital and difficult. And luckily for his clients, he is both brilliant and caring.
I'd recommend engaging with the Effective Altruism community.
In particular there are several get together events planned in the US where your friend could meet people who can direct him to the right people and opportunities: https://www.eaglobal.org/events/
Effective Altruism definitely need lawyers to help steer regulations in the right direction, as well as effectively lobby institutions.
I looked at all the listings, & none of them require a law degree, and also did a search of the spreadsheet and found no listings for lawyers. Most of the listings you sent say required education is undergrad degree or less. I think sending these to him would discourage him. Why do you think this spreadsheet with 800+ listings has none for lawyers? Is it that a law degree really isn't highly useful for EA work? Is it that most listings are geared for people who are still undergrads, and organizations wanting someone with an advanced grad or professional degree would not list there?
Anyhow, the conferences and online seminars look good, and I will send him to those. Would be good, though, to give him some actual info about EA people actually practicing law in the service of their values.
I know that court-appointed defense attorneys are ridiculously overworked, to the point that they can't do an adequate job defending. Being a defense attorney who does a lot of pro-bono work would be a great way for a lawyer to help. I'm not sure if it's the best way though, so if someone else posts a better idea that would be great.
It's a good idea for a cause, but I don't know if it's the best use of a lawyer's time. Possibly the right thing is raising money for defense attorneys for routine cases.
This doesn't mean I know what would be good approaches for a lawyer. Possibly looking for best ways to improve the legal system and advocating for them.
Aside from the impossibility of implementing it, do you think that a 30-hour workweek could exist as the global standard?
Are we already capable of producing "enough" under such a policy, or is more automation required before everyone could live that way without subtracting too much material value from the economy?
>Are we already capable of producing "enough" under such a policy
Even containing ourselves to the US, the people who produce the raw materials that are critical for our survival (food, fuel, etc) work way more than 40 hours per week. Farmers regularly work dawn to dusk and have to to produce enough output to make the economics work. I probably work 20hr/week even though i am at my desk longer than that. But i have a cushy tech job.
The problem with these types of goals is that even if 30hours is the average that is needed, many critical jobs need more than 30hours. we can't make policy based on averages. You will always hurt the outliers if you do that.
The global standard? Probably not. A lot of the poorer parts of the world compensate for poorer productivity by working more hours.
If you're talking about the modern west then this is a pretty well studied phenomenon. What happened is that initial industrialization mostly took the same basket of goods (food, clothes, houses) people already consumed and made them cheaper and higher quality. People made fortunes doing things like baking and distributing milk or bread. By the late 19th/early 20th century this caused a decrease in working hours both among certain populations (women, children) and even among workers (40 hour workweek etc).
However, starting in the 20th century work hours stopped declining and even increased. Largely because the market started inventing new, never before seen goods that people were willing to work to possess. Cars, electricity and plumbing, iphones, etc. This is endlessly frustrating to the end of work crowd who really want it to be true that people will just be happy at a set standard of living. Mostly, as far as I can tell, because they want to tax away everything above that for their projects or make it normal to work less. But most people want things. And not just for social status reasons. Some things like videogames are low social status but still very in demand!
Additionally, the US labor force has remained relatively sticky around the 40 hour week. Instead what you see is classes of workers moving in and out of employment. For example, the labor force participation rate has steadily declined since the 1990s. This is partly due to an aging population but it's also partly due to a wealthier population that has more welfare being able to not work while relying on contributions from those that do. I'm not talking about welfare queens, to be clear, I mean things like stay at home moms or dads (one of the big changes of the last century is the rise of the working woman as breadwinner). Or other arrangements. Still, this is one of the big issues in the Federal budget: we've lost almost 10% of the population as taxpayers.
Regardless, the issue is that "enough" is subjective and based on what people want to buy. And as much as people want automation to come along and create a utopia it's not nearly there. We still need to work to produce things and that means we have to work to earn the right to consume. Setting aside things like welfare and social arrangements like marriage.
Put another way: everyone could live a 1922 lifestyle and work like ten hours a week. But people want to live a 2022 lifestyle. Realistically they want to live a 2032 lifestyle. And they're willing to work to get there.
PS: A lot of people are repeating the idea the French have a 35 hour workweek. The way the French workday works is actually LONGER than the American workday. Usually from 8-9:00 and running to 6:00-7:00. You get to 35 hours by subtracting all the hours you get as breaks, most notably a 1-2 hour lunch. This is actually a reform they're arguing about right now: letting people work 8-4 or 9-5 by skipping their long lunch. Likewise, the French are objectively not working significantly less hours than many of their neighbors and are actually working more than several countries with 40 hour workweeks. The original reform was more of a splashy headline than a reality. As can be seen by the fact they almost immediately cut overtime pay to make up for the change in what counted as overtime.
Seriously, if you want to cite Europe as an example, please do some basic research.
I think you're right regarding aspirational lifestyle, but wrong about how much choice people have in the matter. For almost everyone I know, including myself, 'luxury goods purchases' (by which I include things like video games, TVs, etc) are just not a very large component of total spending versus rent, food, and utilities. Food *can* be cheap if we really want it to be, so I'm willing to accept diet as partial-luxury, but rent and utilities are pretty fundamental, and it's mostly rent. I'm not aware of any way I could work ten hours a week and afford food and a place to live (I could probably afford that on 1/4 of my current salary, but I don't have the option to make that trade, nor do most people).
The issue is twofold. Firstly, our government has guaranteed housing must be up to minimum standards which drives up price. Lincoln's log cabin would have been condemned by a local board for being unlivable today. Yet his family lived perfectly well in it. The second is that you want accommodations with certain features, like geographic location or extra bedrooms, that are mainly status goods. After all, homes have almost tripled in size even as family sizes have shrunk. (The additional third issue is zoning regulations and permitting making building difficult.)
Regardless, you can find a livable home with power, water, internet, etc for a few hundred dollars a month and take part time shifts to cover the rent. It would mean working in a low skill labor job in a trailer park. But that option is available to you. People instead choose to live in nice apartments in urban centers if they can. And I get why that is. It's much more pleasant. But it's not a necessity or the bare minimum. In fact, if you're paying more than $1,800 a month, you're consuming an above average amount of housing. Some of that has to be luxury. (I don't actually think the luxury/necessity dichotomy is useful. But there you go.) So often the rhetoric about necessities really means an upper middle class lifestyle with all its luxuries.
None of which is to say my preferred solution is to tell people to shut up and stop expecting society to provide them with things. My ideal solution is to build and build and build until housing becomes cheap. Plus some degree of financial assistance to the poor.
Perhaps my perspective here is different (I live in the UK), but I live in a terraced house built in the 1960s in a relatively undesirable neighbourhood (in London, admittedly, but that's where the jobs are). It's not the house that's gotten wildly more expensive, it's the land.
To quantify: A house literally identical to mine sold in 2003 for £210k - this is equivalent to £330k in 2022 prices. The house is going for c. £550k. There haven't been any extensions, upgrades - when I bought my house recently it was decrepit and needed to be completely rewired, have heating and internet installed, etc. The answer here is zoning and permitting, not 'people want more' - people want the same they had in 1960s (adding internet and gizmos is a trivial portion of the cost; the total cost of all the tech in my house is <£2k).
I'm honestly curious about the 'few hundred dollars a month' quote for a small but liveable place - where exactly did you have in mind? I used to live extremely cheaply (in Canada) in a large group house out of town, biked everywhere, never ate out, etc etc and still didn't manage that, and that was over a decade ago.
> A house literally identical to mine sold in 2003 for £210k
It wasn't literally identical. Your mistake is in assuming the entire value of a home is in its physical components. In effect, you're proposing that everything that sets the value of your home happens on the lot itself. If your next door neighbor is a smog spewing factory or a park makes no difference. But it doesn't. Unless London has not changed at all in 20 years (unlikely) then the area has gotten more desirable (as evidenced by more demand).
That said, I agree with your conclusion. More demand is an issue IF AND ONLY IF there's some barrier to supply. Nor do I think the right answer is to ask people to accept having less. I agree there should be less barriers to construction. Not necessarily less regulation in the sense of lead in the walls or escape hatches but in the sense that if you want to build an up to code house you should just be allowed to build an up to code house.
(Also, US houses have grown at a faster rate than UK homes. Just one of those things.)
> I'm honestly curious about the 'few hundred dollars a month' quote for a small but liveable place - where exactly did you have in mind?
Where was this place? The few hundred dollars represents the absolute floor, for a small house in a rural area. My point wasn't that we should all live that way. My point is that a 600 square foot unit in a mobile home community with utilities meets the minimum of modern livability. The average rent, iirc, is about $400-500. Most people want more than that, which is fine, but you can't then claim you just want the basics. "Just a roof over your head." This is a roof over your head: (http://www.mhvillage.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/ELS_CasaDelSolResortEast_Mobile_Home_Lot_Rent-e1559936578565.jpg)
I think the correct standard is something more like "20 hour work weeks with a complicated schema that permits a minority of weeks to have a considerably longer workday without undue penalties".
So maybe you can have a staff of people who work 20 hour workweeks most of the time, and then have (1 or 2 at most consecutively) 80 hour workweeks for the periods of time you actually keep all that staff around for.
This is why I mentioned ignoring the details of implementation. I'm thinking about this from an economic perspective alone, not about actually making this a law and enforcing it. I don't want a World Government either.
What are you talking about ? In France the legal work week is 35 hours, down from "actually no limit" in the 19th century. It was decreased to 40 hours in 1936, 39 in the 80's, and 35 in the 90's.
Last time I checked France was not ruling a World empire at any of those dates.
We're a long way away from a global standard, but we could (and likely have already) implement such a thing in the Western world in at least certain types of jobs and industries.
We would need to separate out the jobs for which more hours produces more goods or services in a linear fashion. Manufacturing, for instance, is significantly a matter of hours to goods. If you cut hours, then you also cut goods, and therefore working less is a bad thing. You could hire more people to spread those hours around, but then you run into cost issues as each of those people are expected to have the necessarily skills (training time) and also receive health care and other benefits. Each of those people that have their hours cut are also going to be looking at 25% less income, because their income is based on number of items produced, and they are producing less. We could pay them the same wage while working them less hours, but that's an even more direct cost than the training and benefits. That puts pressure on the costs of the items being produced, and prevents items from becoming cheaper, which becomes a tax on everyone who buys those items. If your food goes from $1 to $1.30, you're still feeling the pinch of the switch from a 40 hour week to a 30, even if your take home wage remains steady.
Office jobs and other skilled positions have enough slack that they probably dropped down to 30 hours or less years ago, for most knowledge workers. Salaried knowledge workers are usually paid to complete a non-linear function, which means if they can get their work done early, they are free. I have a side theory that this is one of the primary reasons many knowledge workers prefer to work from home. They gain the downtime, verses having to spend it at the office gossiping by the water cooler waiting for 5pm to roll around. One of the primary functions of my office job is being around in case something happens, so I can answer questions and help solve the problem (impromptu meetings, etc.). If there were no need for damage control, I might be able to work 20-30 hours a week on most weeks, and potentially do that work from home or anywhere else.
Yes, obviously - it's already happening. Certain sectors that absolutely require more hours should switch to 60h on a pendulum on-off schedule. This is how e.g. sailors or oil rig crews contract their work (spend three months on the ship, then three months chilling at home, get paid for both).
I managed to cut my hybrid WFH+office job from its nominal 40h to ~18h weekly, productivity loss was minimal, nobody noticed and I get praised for the results. A lot of my colleagues are doing the same, the pandemic was a blessing.
Epistemic status: deeply parochial anecdata without citations or quantification. May not be a holistic or accurate picture of American labour writ large.
I don't know about *global* standards, since economies and cultural relations to work vary hugely...but at least within the industry I work in (Retail: Grocery), 30 hrs/wk is likely closer to the Pareto frontier than 40*. It's alarmingly common for workers to stumble through shifts in a daze of fatigue, sometimes literally. Important obligations like doctor's visits or finding better living situations fall by the wayside; vacation is explicitly encouraged, implicitly discouraged. In addition to the clear detriments to safety, morale, and productivity, this also means more workers are hired than strictly needed. They aren't necessarily idle or filling seats, just picking up the slack that their burnt-out coworkers can't.
Creating each day's Minimum Viable Salesfloor is basically achieved through brute force surplus of unskilled effort, and cutting lots of corners behind the scenes. So much material value is lost due to inefficiency; it's the labour equivalent of sacrificing sleep to eke out a couple more hours of low-quality effort. Or juggling extra jobs for additional income, despite the additional overhead eating more than half the gains. "Time isn't money, time is time, and you can never un-spend it."
One suspects it's actually rational to pad the clock and otherwise put in the bare minimum - compensation is more strongly correlated with the appearance of performance, vs actual performance. Still, the value of a free hour outside work far exceeds the value of an artificed idle hour inside work, for both employer and employee. So in that regard, "losing" 10 hours from the workweek wouldn't even necessarily be a loss. I thus think it likely that reducing full-time status to 30 hrs/wk would be a healthier and more profitable equilibrium, though the adjustment period would be rough. Convincing people that they'd actually be better off overall would be a heavy political lift as well. The attack ads write themselves.
Automation is also challenging here...I mean there's the Amazon Go scheme, but that's difficult to replicate without their economies of scale and network effects. My company doesn't even have online ordering or self-checkout lanes. Suspect that lowering the cost of personnel via shorter workweeks would make the argument for automation even less compelling, at least materially-economically.
(Morally and ethically, it might be a better investment anyway to eliminate retail's "bullshit jobs"...David Graeber and the media like[d] to emphasize the mental-spiritual consequences, but *in addition to those*, I see it play out in my coworkers as widespread substance abuse. This is not an occupation with dignity, and pay is only a small part of it.)
The other big Gordian knot in the room is...employer-provided health insurance. It's not impossible to reach the qualifiying thresholds as a part-timer...but absences add up quick, and eventually there's a point of no return where it's just not possible to pick up enough extra shifts. Many are full time primarily to maintain stable health insurance, which they actually use often. Of course, sicker workers who need more healthcare are even more liable to fall into the trap of overworking and burning out...like many economic things, there's a diminishing marginal return to hours worked. Healthcare in America is a whole other tallcircle of earthnoodles though.
I work as a prep cook in a restaurant. The owners can't afford to pay healthcare, so everyone works less than 40 hrs. A 30 hour work week would mean trying to find more people to do all the work. Many of my coworkers have two jobs, or some other source of income... I think life would be better for a lot of these people if the employer mandated healthcare went away.
The median global income is something like $2.50/day according to Google. So I'm thinking that most people should be pretty reluctant to lose a quarter of their income (ignoring non-linearities).
Why do you think it's impossible to implement ? France has a 35 hours week, down from 39 in the 90's. A 32-hours week is a regular guest in leftwing programs, although right now there is not much chance it will pass.
In western countries, we're far beyond the point that most people's material needs are met. In such conditions, the chief reason people care about stuff money can buy is to keep up with the Joneses.
In such a society, if everyone is poorer, nobody is worse off, because people's ability to keep up with the Joneses remains the same. Meanwhile, if everyone works less hours, actual quality of life improves because people have more free time and are less stressed by work.
Therefore, limiting the hours of works per week for everyone is a good idea.
Are we really “far beyond the point that most people’s material needs are met?”
Perhaps - but huge swathes of our lives are spent doing mindless, tedious work in order to meet those needs - things like washing dishes, cleaning and tidying, laundry etc., waiting in traffic or crammed underground trains. Even if we’re healthy, as we age our lives are increasingly full of pain, and physical and mental decay. When we’re not healthy, medicine is still primitive compared to many other sciences. And then we die - a pretty glaring failure to meet material needs!
As far as I can see, the main engine of improvement in our material needs has been economic and technological growth. That’s not necessarily incompatible with working less hours, but I suspect it is incompatible with blunting our desire to get richer.
> In western countries, we're far beyond the point that most people's material needs are met. In such conditions, the chief reason people care about stuff money can buy is to keep up with the Joneses.
There's a huge gulf between "I'm not suffering from malnourishment and homelessness" and "If I make more money I can only spend it on one-upping my neighbors". That glass of wine in the evening isn't required to meet my material needs, and neither will it impress Simon from across the street.
I can't tell whether you're serious, or sarcastically making fun of Caba's attitude regarding luxury items. Usually I'd assume the latter, but there are some people with very, very weird opinions hanging out here.
To be clear, I don't think that more expensive equals better tasting when it comes to wine, and the wines I usually consume are less than 10 €/bottle.
Even if I make my wine at home I can't get the price down to a dollar, $3 is about as cheap as I can make it, assuming I'm re-using bottles.
And if I make it at home and drink at home I can't meet any new people while drinking, so I really do like to be able to afford at least a couple beers at a local pub where I can make friends.
But the glass of wine has symbolic value even if you're the only one around; it reminds *you* that you're living a comfortable life. If nobody you know could afford it, it would feel right to replace the wine with some cheaper ritual which would gain for you the same significance.
This is even more true of those living in a family. Spending money in luxuries to share with your loved ones is mostly symbolic. It remind them that the loving breadwinner is doing a loving breadwinner's job. Its value depends on what they assume that "normal" breadwinners do. That is, the Joneses.
If you have children, it's how you remind yourself that you're a good parent who won't let children grow up "poorer" (that is, with less symbolic luxuries) than other children. Its perceived value depends on what we assume that "normal" parents would do. That is, the Joneses.
None of this requires that the Joneses see it!
It's in your head, so to speak.
I'm not saying that the value of stuff we buy is *exclusively* related to the Joneses. I'm merely saying that it is to a far greater degree than most people admit to themselves. Enough to make my case that people would be happier if everyone worked less.
Another thing is that there are lots and lots of expenses that would go down if the average income goes down. Rent or mortgage is a big one. Rent around the world depends on how much money people make locally. Rent in rich cities is higher than in poor cities. I suspect that lots and lots of other things fall into this class and this would help explain what Scott calls "cost disease". I know that for many people a lower income life is a terrifying thing to contemplate, but you wouldn't live like a present day western poor. Rent would remain proportionate to your income and many other things would as well.
Getting Edward Teach/Lacan vibes off this. Performing for the Joneses, who may or may not exist outside one's head. Maintaining internal narrative consistency via symbolic action. "If you're buying it, it's for you."
There's a school of thought that subjective, relative inequality matters much more than objective, absolute inequality. Given this premise, would it be easier to convince everyone to work less if we were collectively unaware of others having more? Should we actively discourage knowledge of what the Joneses are doing? (I notice that this goes counter to the capitalist assertion that conspicuous consumption/status incentivizes work in the first place, and therefore inequality is Feature Not Bug.)
In some small sense I agree with what you are saying. People make silly money decisions. But most of what you say sounds like a starry eyed liberal who hasn't really talked with the poorer people around who are living pay check to pay check. Rent and car payments and cable TV and cell phone service are not going to be cheaper if people work less.
Why don't you think rent would be cheaper if people worked less? Normal supply/demand dynamics would seem to dictate that they should. And empirically, we see that rents are generally lower in areas with lower incomes.
Sure a correlation between rents and income does not mean causation. In fact it seems more likely that the lower rents (and other costs of living) is what leads to people being able to work for less pay in the cheaper city. We use to rent out 1/2 of a duplex. The rent was mostly set by things like; cost of house, mortgage, taxes, insurance, repair/ upkeep.
> But the glass of wine has symbolic value even if you're the only one around; it reminds *you* that you're living a comfortable life.
I drink that glass of wine because it tastes good and it relaxes me; there's nothing "symbolic" about it. I don't know whether my neighbors drink wine, beer, whiskey, or water, and I don't care.
> Spending money in luxuries to share with your loved ones is mostly symbolic.
Also wrong. I spend money on my family to make them happy and to give them a comfortable life. Yes, it makes me feel good to be able to provide for them, but that's not a significant reason for me to do this. I frequently choose a less expensive but more interesting/fun/convenient option, even though I could afford the more expensive one, because gaining status is not the reason why I do it.
I don't know why you're trying to bend every action and behavior that goes beyond ensuring basic survival into a status-seeking framework. Would you say your life is aligned in that direction? Is it possible that you're projecting and generalizing your attitude regarding status-seeking to all other people?
It's just something I notice in people around me. The way I spend money is not typical, and that's exactly the reason I notice these things.
I don't mean that the person spending money on their family does it exclusively for selfish reasons. Of course people spend money on their family to make them happy. I didn't mean to say otherwise, if it seemed so I phrased it badly. I mean that the feeling of happiness family members derive from consumption depends on the perception of what the standard is. Sometimes people calll this "dignity". They want to "live with dignity", and to live below what they feel is the proper standard is an indignity and it makes them uncomfortable in their hearts. People who spend money on their families want to spare them from this feeling of not having "dignity".
I don't know if your particular family is like this, who knows, maybe you're completely above it. But what I describe is very typical of humanity.
Okay, that's a very different interpretation of what you said before, and I agree 100% with this version. In fact, it matches perfectly with my own model of human happiness: A person is happier if their own standard of living is above their reference standard, i.e., the *perceived* standard of living of their peer group; they're also happier if their standard of living is currently improving.
On second thought, maybe I only agree 99%, because sometimes you compare yourself to non-peers ("I'm glad I'm not living in an African slum, or like a 18th century peasant") or to an imagined, non-existing ideal ("I wish we already had the medical technology of the future").
It sort of depends on what you mean about 'ignoring impossibility'.
If you just mean, in a perfect world where zero labor was ever directed at anything which didn't raise standards of living, could we have the current standard of living with a 30-hour week? In that case, yes, definitely; most companies spend 11% of their budgets on marketing just for starters, which is completely non-productive. Lots more is spent on various types of zero-sum competition, from having excess idle labor around to take advantage of opportunities, to constant product cycling that doesn't raise standard of living but is only used to steal customers from competitors, to having lots of redundant competing stores instead of singular distribution venues. And the whole issue of 'demand creation' for things that don't really raise living standards is a giant can of worms. Not to mention that a lot of consumer needs go away if you go to a 30 hour workweek, as people have 10 more hours to cook their own meals, landscape their own yards watch their own children, etc.
But that's sort of a utopian post-capitalist vision, that requires everyone coordinating to eliminate labor spent on zero-sum activities. It's not clear whether we can sustain a system like that in reality, irrespective of how we get there.
Also worth considering that the labor force participation rate is generally in the 60s. We certainly have enough idle labor capacity to get the same amount of labor with everyone working 30 hour weeks by just hiring more workers. We'd just have to pay them enough to overcome whatever makes them prefer to not have a job right now.
I think you're using a non-standard definition of "non-productive" in your point about marketing. Marketing is intended to enable a company to sell more stuff, and the empirical evidence is generally pretty clear that it does. I think you just mean that you don't care whether companies sell more stuff, which is totally valid but a very different point.
The metric we were talking about here is standard of living.
Marketing can't make *all* companies sell more products, because consumers have limited money to spend. It mostly makes people buy one brand over their competitor, in a zero-sum way.
Marketing doesn't cause consumers to have more stuff, in fact it causes them to have less stuff because all the prices have to increase to pay for marketing divisions. So yes, marketing is productive *to the company doing it* because it steals customers, but it doesn't give any added value to consumers and doesn't raise standards of living.
I call that non-productive in terms of societal benefit or standard of living increase. I think a lot of labor falls into that category.
This is wrong because it assumes all products have exactly the same price per quality. In reality this is not the case, and marketing can yield positive sum gains through trigger market share changes.
Or it can yield negative sum losses by triggering market share changes in the other direction.
All companies have the same incentive to market as well as they can, there's no reason to think that companies with better products have more effective marketing. Lots of ads are trying to convince you to buy a worse product.
Indeed, since only one company actually has the 'best' product (however you would define it) in a given domain, and they probably have more than one competitor trying to lure people away from it, most marketing dollars are probably spent trying to lure people away from the 'best' option, rather than towards it.
As long as you have slack you can unilaterally opt out of the 40h grind, reaping these benefits. No need to coordinate at all if individual incentives point in the same direction.
Well, the primary goal of marketing is taking business away from your competition. It doesn't create more products for people to buy, it just determines which brand they buy when they buy the product. That's why I call it zero-sum competition.
There is some amount of marketing which is demand-creation through informing consumers of something they would genuinely benefit from buying instead of the other things they would have bought, but don't know about. My experience working with marketing departments is that this is a very small amount of their budget, at least in well-developed markets. And even when it genuinely informs a consumers, you have to look at the marginal gain over what they would have spent that money on instead, which is usually small.
I don't know of any studies of this (it seems like the answer would be entirely determined by your operational definitions anyway), this is mostly just definitional to how I'm talking about productivity and marketing.
I'm not sure how much marketing increases the feeling that buying things is how you cheer yourself up. So there'd be a limit to how much people can buy, but they're operating closer to that limit than they otherwise might.
I suspect everybody already works less than 30 hours a week on average. The perception is otherwise because the media obsesses about overworked overachievers or those burdened with two or three jobs. Politicians also emphasize both types for different reasons.
I don't have a great source for this, except synthesizing anecdotally. My network works hard, but it's all knowledge work, so I imagine there's a lot of slack in their jobs. There's a UK study showing that knowledge workers are productive for around 2.5 hours per work day. There is also that book about bullshit jobs.
Outside of my friend network, I also have a large extended family representing a broader cross-section of America. One-third of them are the two-job types. One-third are humming along, likely putting out 20-30 hours of work a week but punching a clock for 40. And the other third go in and out of work.
Now, that's just America. But I don't think that people in poorer countries are overworked. Probably impoverished nations also have fewer available jobs to go around.
Is there a good empirical basis as to why people who've been institutionalized for mental illness are forbidden from buying guns in the US- for life? Is there actual evidence that these people have higher rates of violence for the rest of their lifetime, or is this just pandering to the lowest common denominator 'of course crazy people can't have guns'. (Full disclosure of priors, I'm skeptical that most proposed gun control measures will be very effective). Psychiatry has been a full-fledged medical field since at least post-WW2 if not before, we should have plenty of data on how patients fare post-hospitalization. Or, is it that their suicide rates are that much higher? I could see a temporary ban, but a lifetime ban just seems excessive to me
You can take the view that preventing ex.mental patients from.owning guns isn't useful in jtself, but is a step towards disarming wider classes of people .... and you can put a postive.or a negative spin on that. Gun controllers have to work in baby steps because they face so.much resistance.
Well right now those baby steps have been consistently backwards. Rights to gun access have only expanded in the past 20 years, and it doesn't look like that is going to stop any time soon.
And there's a pretty good reason: when people hear that the top cop in Uvalde stood outside the classroom door for a freaking hour, while a couple of kids and a teacher bled out, they start to think -- well, fuck this, if a couple of teachers had guns, and maybe half the adults walking past the school at the time, then one of them might have ventilated Mr. Angsty in the first 5 seconds, like this:
As they say, when seconds count, the police are only minutes away. When people start to think that's the reality of it, then they're not going to be waiting around for the pros, they're going to insist on having the tools to defend themselves.
Does a situation count as being "awash" with guns if the only people who have guns are the criminals, and police who all too often can't be bothered to confront the criminals? Because in an awful lot of the United States, including almost all of the places mass shootings occur, that is the status quo.
Why? If there's one group of people that is unwilling to confront criminals, and another group that is willing (or of which a sufficiently large subset is), then why do we need to convince the first group of people to confront criminals instead of saying "look, just get out of the way and let the people who care, handle it. There's free donuts at the shop down the street".
The police were on the scene, but didn't respond because they were afraid of getting shot.
There's a lot of outrage about this, rightly. But this leads to an obvious question: when nobody is watching, I assume this happens pretty regularly, too. I mean, there are a lot of places/times where the police are called because a violent scary armed man has killed someone or otherwise is behaving in scary and violent ways. We don't have any information about what happens in most of those. But probably we should now update to "after your call to the police about the crazy guy with the axe murdering your family, the police may arrive but stand around outside until all the screaming stops and they hope the axe murderer has tired himself out, lest one of them get chopped with an axe while responding."
This line of reasoning turns out not to make me happier about restricting gun ownership to only the police, in a country where even a total ban will in practice leave criminals with guns.
This is a valid point, but I think the "more guns" approach has limits that are visible in Uvalde (and other mass shootings with armed bystanders, like the Pulse nightclub shooting): Even with extremely liberal gun laws, there are only so many people both interested in carrying and willing to rush into a life-or-death situation.
Like, Texas is pretty much Gun Central. 6th highest guns per capita in the country. The state even has a program to allow teachers to carry guns in school if they want to. I'm not sure you *could* push the gun ownership rate much higher, not without doing something crazy like making it mandatory for teachers to carry. If even Texas doesn't have enough guns to stop mass shootings, what hope does anyone else have?
Also, there's a really large gap between "a motivated criminal will be able to get a gun even with a total ban" and "someone who goes off the deep end can go to the local store, buy a rifle, and start shooting schoolchildren the same day." Reducing the number of guns in circulation will reduce the number of guns available for impulsive crimes.
Even with extremely liberal gun laws, it's pretty much illegal for anyone other than a policeman to carry a gun in a Texas elementary school or a Florida nightclub. As I've noted before, most US "mass shootings" occur in places where ordinary law-abiding citizens are not allowed to carry guns.
It is theoretically possible for a *distant* bystander, e.g. someone patronizing a store across the street, to intervene. That does sometimes happen, and it would have happened in Uvalde if the police hadn't prevented it. But it's much less likely because of the distance, the blocked sight lines and muffled sounds, and the consequent uncertainty about just what one would be intervening in. Self-defense by armed citizens is much more likely and much more effective if it can be performed by people who are on the scene when it happens and can see what's happening from the start.
I do not believe it is a coincidence that we so rarely hear about mass shootings in places where that would be legal.
I mean, probably if it had been harder for this nutcase to get a gun he'd have done some other horrible thing that would have been less destructive, or maybe he'd have been in there murdering children with a knife and the Uvalde police would have managed to be brave enough to confront him after only half an hour.
Probably, at least this once. But sooner or later, someone is going to figure out that improvised explosives and incendiaries are more lethal than mere guns, and when they burn fifty children alive in an elementary school somewhere, CNN et al will signal-boost it to hell and gone complete with the fact that e.g. milspec napalm can be easily manufactured at home and the recipe is all over the internet, how horrible, hint hint.
We lucked out that Kliebold and Harris were incompetent bomb-makers and had to fall back on their backup plan rather than going full "Heathers", so the first round of messaging told all the copycats that they should buy guns rather than double-check their bomb-making recipes. But we shouldn't count on staying lucky forever.
Notably, the police in Uvalde seem to have also kept other people with guns (including armed parents) from going into the school and confronting the shooter.
I don't know, but I have seen people on the internet say that they've avoided psychiatric treatment precisely because they don't want to lose their right to own guns, so insofar as psychiatric treatment is helpful then one really shouldn't discourage people from seeking it out.
I haven't looked at the data, so this is a somewhat uninformed opinion. It's not entirely uninformed, though, because I worked for years in a mental hospital, and still continue to see many fresh out of the hospital in my work (also many on the verge of going in). It seems very unlikely to me that people who have had a psychiatric hospitalization are more likely to commit some violent act with a gun. For one thing, the correlation between how crazy somebody is and how likely they are to undergo a psych hospitalization are low. Lots of psych hospitalizations are for things other than being crazy -- substance abuse, depression, anorexia, severe anxiety disorders. Meanwhile, lots of manic rageaholics never get hospitalized, because nobody in their circle of acquaintances wants to suggest that possibility to them with them. Lots of genuinely crazy poor folks distrust the hospital, and who can blame them, given what it's like at low-end psychiatric facilities? Even high-end ones suck. And besides, in general, people who are truly crazy are not violent or dangerous -- they are withdrawn, scared, confused and low-energy.
And most shootings aren't done out of craziness, they are done out of rage and/or the desire to prevail in a conflict, in a culture where guns are easily available and their use is considered a part of normal life. You don't have to be crazy to be OK with shooting somebody! It takes surprisingly little to convince someone it's just a thing people gotta do sometimes. The military trains people to do it all the time. So do certain neighborhoods and subcultures.
Surprisingly few mass shootings or other big-ticket violent acts have been perpetrated by truly, truly crazy people. Because truly crazy people don't have money and can't plan their next trip to the bathroom, much less an act of domestic terrorism.
This isn't quite the answer to the question you're asking me, but it reminded me of something I knew. Males who choke their female partners during anger outbursts are *much* more likely to eventually murder them -- not necessarily by choking -- than other men who are violent with their partners. Choking's a really powerful predictor. Read about some city that actually had a whole intervention organization set up to help women who reported being choked, or whose doctors noticed characteristic bruises on their necks -- information, counseling, special safe houses she could move into immediately.
The relationship between choking and later murder fits with the principle of ecological validity. The most valid tests of whether somebody is likely to do X are measures of whether they do x-like things in similar situations. These work better than hiring experts to interview the person, giving extensive paper-and-pencil measures, etc. So the best measure we have of whether a male is capable of killing his partner is whether he routinely engages in a kind of violence that if taken farther could kill her.
I doubt that domestic violence is a good predictor of someone's being a mass shooter. The situations are too different.
Yeah but the thing that wigs people out is not for-cause shootings, because whether it's reasonable or not, people think they can take steps to avoid that. Don't deal drugs, don't join a gang, try not to live in shitty neighborhoods full of drugs and gangs, don't have affairs with women married to short-tempered low-IQ gun nuts, et cetera.
The shootings that alarm people are those they *can't* avoid because they're perpetrated by crazy people, like Uvalde, Virginia Tech, the Las Vegas Harvest festival, Anders Breivik. None of these can be blamed on subcultures -- they can't even be blamed on the availability of guns, since no conceivable gun laws could have prevented them -- and the perpetrators are undoubtly crazy in some fashion, if not necessarily psychotic.
I know. But those mass shootings are a tiny portion of the US gun killings. The world is full of profoundly unhappy, low-empathy, eccentric, rage-filled loners. I dunno -- maybe one young male in 500? I have 3 male psychotherapy patients, now in their late 20's-early 30's, who had extensive fantasies of shooting up their schools when they were teens. They never came close to doing it -- never looked into how to get a gun, for instance. But shooting everybody they knew was their go-to fantasy, the way suicide or running away might be somebody else's. They don't have murder fantasies now, later in life, and the most violent thing any of them ever did was have shouting matches with his parents. There's no test or interview that will identify the tiny portion of them who are likely to commit a mass shooting.
The world is also full of crazy people. Last I knew 1% of the population is diagnosed with schizophrenia at some point in their lives, and about the same percent bipolar, & it's not uncommon for mania or depression to have psychotic features. And then there are lots of people who are sporadically or permanently crazy from drugs they use.
How well are mass shootings correlated with getting admitted to mental hospital, though? There are a lot of different kinds of "mentally ill", and both "mass shooter crazy" and "mental hospital crazy" are highly-nonuniform subsets.
I'd like to see some data here. I know several spree shooters were considered seriously mentally ill, and at least a couple (I recall the VA Tech shooter, but there was another like this) had the authorities notified by their therapist that they were potentially violent and dangerous.
I did a search, and one reason there's not much data is that there was zero federal funding for research on gun violence for over 20 years. https://www.apa.org/monitor/2021/04/news-funding-gun-research This seems like it could be a good area for private research funding.
Your cited source does not support the claim. The source says that there was no federal funding for research on gun violence *by the CDC* for over 20 years. Says nothing about whether federal agencies other than the CDC/NIH have been studying gun violence. And really, if you wanted a federal agency to study "gun violence", would the *Center for Disease Control* be your go-to source? I mean, I think I recall a cheezy '80s action flick with the tagline "Crime is a disease, ['80s action hero] is the cure!", but really for *violent crime* you're going to want to go with the FBI or the Justice Department generally.
But they actually know quite a bit about violent crime, and so will honestly tell you that there aren't any easy answers or quick fixes. The CDC, and medical research community generally, has a not at all concealed ideological interest that makes them useful allies to some but not a reliable source to anyone. The FBI just says "It's complicated" which isn't useful, so while they do get some funding that they can use for the purpose, it doesn't lead to anything anyone wants to talk about.
This is because the previous years the CDC/NIH went out of their way to explicitly fun "research" projects which were determined in-advance to advocate for gun control measures.
I'm not a fan of guns, and I do wish concerns about the mental/other state of people wanting to purchase them were taken into account.
But how do you do that? Johnny Jones is now [legal age to own gun] and goes to buy his first one. Okay, we need to check "Has Johnny made repeated or any death threats online?"
How do we find out? How can we link Johnny Jones to an account under a coarse username that is screaming abuse at [pick your outgroup]? How do we differentiate "Man, I would love to shoot stupid old Mr Smith the maths teacher" from (1) idiot kid (2) genuine threat?
Do we want a world where every fragment of data about where Johnny has gone online and what he has done can be pulled up and stitched together, and Johnny gets arrested/sent for compulsory mental health assessment? How many putative school shooters versus ordinary people are we going to scoop up in that net?
Well, I'm not a people person. If I knew how to solve complex social problems, or even thought I had real value to add to the attempt, I wouldn't have spent so much time learning how to solve partial differential equations (which is easier).
That said...I feel like the whole speech thing is a red herring. We *think* it's important, because if we meet someone in person and think he's a dangerous bastard, and we're asked why, we point to this and that which he said. I mean, we feel like we have to. Because we lack words (and perhaps introspection sufficient) to describe all the nonverbal stuff we took in, and which, I suspect, was more important.
It's not really erroneous thinking or funky ideology that marks the dangerous person -- it's an emotional and executive function deficit. Psychopathy, lack of identification or empathy, grandiosity, really exceptional narcissism. I suspect we gain information about these things mostly through nonverbal pathways.
So how would we ever gain objective information about a distorted or diseased emotional state? Probably we have to look at what people actually do rather than what they say, which seems like it is probably mostly epiphenomenal. We look for antisocial behavior, even on a small scale. Cruelty to animals, inability to get along, unusually bad decisions, unusual indifference to, or unawareness of, the suffering (or joys) of others.
But unless we institute Panopticon, or just rely on X ratting Y out when X learns Y wants a gun, we generally won't get this either. So I'd be OK with a general affirmative standard, meaning if you want to buy a gun, you need to meet some set of objective criteria of basic responsible adulting.
You have to have a regular job, say, and pay taxes, and your schooling needs to be complete to the level appropriate, no criminal record above a certain level of seriousness, no convictions for violent offenses, have served on a jury once, no bankruptcies, at least OK credit. You have to have at least weekend custody of any children of which you are the father, and you have to be current on support. You have to be living in your own place, paying for your own rent and groceries, have to have consistently voted, have to be able to pass a normal citizenship test, be able to drive a car, hold and be able to elucidate a somewhat mainstream opinion about whether Han shot first, and whether he should/should not have.
Plus some subject-specific criteria: you have to be certified as competent by some certified expert in the handling, safety, storage and use of a weapon, pass a modest test on the laws of your state.
And probably some personal testimony too: you need to bring an attestation from your employer or other supervisor as to your reliability and ability to get along with your coworkers, and another from your parent, guardian, or wife if you're male and under 25 as to your maturity and judgment.
Pretty sure not a word of that would pass Constitutional muster, however. The law generally disallows the kind of connection I'm making here, between a man's character, as measured by his general life achievements and positivity of his social contribution, and the exercise of his rights. Where restriction is allowed, it has to be narrowly tailored to the specific exercise of the right, id est we can circumscribe his rights to own a *gun* if he has demonstrated he might use a *gun* wrong -- but we cannot do that if he has merely demonstrated he doesn't know how to use a car, his time, or his capablity to beget children right.
I absolutely understand how that came to be, given the vicious use of such general "character" standards to oppress blacks and the poor, but it's a shame, because I kind of think that's how the Founders actually intended it. They had no notion of pure democracy -- *everyone* has the same rights and privileges as everyone else -- yeah no -- but it does seem likely they felt a republican form of government could only succeed where there was a commonality of shared standards of individual virtue. A man has standing not merely by being born and of age, but because he has demonstrated his worthiness for inclusion in the ranks of free men.
I think it is largely ok if publicly posting, "I am going to kill X" get's you lots attention from law enforcement. If you are explicitly announcing criminal intent online, that seems like probable cause for a thorough investigation.
If you don't want cops nosing around in your internet history, don't say stupid shit online.
Sure, they could have prevented that -- and also wreaked havoc in the lives of about 500,000 other people who made random online threats but turned out not to vault from online dickhead to shooting 4th graders. Let me know when you have a foolproof Seriously Fucked In The Head meter that you can wave in front of generic teenage hothead and it will swing reliably into the green if he's just an asshole who will grow out of it and into the red if he absolutely needs to be kept away from guns. (Or even better, locked up, since he could have also blown up a building a la Tim McVeigh.)
That's not to say that I don't agree that existing gun laws should be reliably and consistently enforced, and it ought to be a higher priority than it is. I absolutely do. I would also be very happy to amend the Constitution to prohibit young men from owning weapons of their own until they reach age 25.
But I'm under no delusions that this is a panacea. It would help, that's all, and how much, and at what cost -- very difficult to say. If it were easy peasy, and didn't cost much, I kind of suspect it would probably already have been done.
I don't think we need to take the "kids will be kids" route with threats of violence. If you make threats of bodily harm to a person or group of persons, you can and should end up having a bad time. Words and actions have consequences, the idea that you should be able to say anything you want online without it impacting your personal life is a myth.
I think I had somebody on here try to get Scott to permaban me because I was threatening violence (I probably said something like Nomak's 'kick your ass' or a bit stronger, I don't actually remember).
Was I really going to get on a flight to America, track this person down, and physically assault them? Of course not. But they claimed to believe that I was seriously threatening violence. If the police have to be called out every time someone loses their temper online and says "I hope you get the shit kicked out of you", then not alone will there be a lot of time wasted, there will be a backlash about this, and both the police and the general public won't take 'teenage guy makes threats online' any more seriously.
You also see reports of the families in the aftermath saying "We tried and tried to get help for him, but the hospital wouldn't take him in/we couldn't get a psychiatrist to commit him". So what next?
I have personally said "I will kick that guy's ass at [activity]" via text and been accused of threatening physical assault, so I don't take this sentiment very seriously.
"had been a security guard for G4S Secure Solutions.[111][112] The company said two screenings—one conducted upon hiring and the other in 2013—had raised no red flags.[113] Mateen held an active statewide firearms license and an active security officer license,[114][115] had passed a psychological test, and had no criminal record."
"After the shooting, the psychologist who reportedly evaluated and cleared Mateen for his firearms license in 2007 by G4S records denied ever meeting him or having lived in Florida at the time, and said she had stopped her practice in Florida since January 2006."
Nonetheless, I would be very surprised if any plausible screening that would be applied to millions of firearm owners could be _better_ than the employment screening for an armed job.
Because they want to, for whatever reason there is in their actual lives. Maybe we're talking about a Korean store-owner in South Central and the gangs have moved in but he can't find anyone to buy him out of his store. Maybe it's an old guy who works for a jewelry store and he's got to walk $50,000 in diamonds to and from his car some days, and he knows damn well someone who wants to lift that merchandise is not going to want any witnesses who can ID him. Maybe it's a woman with some young kids who has a psycho ex-husband.
Who are you, or I, to second guess why people want the means at hand to defend themselves? It's great if you live in a nice safe suburban house and crime is something you read about in the newspaper, or you're a Hollywood millionaire and you can just hire security guys (with guns), but not everyone lives in that happy state.
Which law do you think says that "repeated death threats" has anything to do with who is allowed to own guns?
We have laws that say people who have been *institutionalized for mental illness* are prohibited from owning guns. Being institutionalized for mental illness is something that is legible to the state. It shows up as a black-and-white fact on official paperwork, with very little ambiguity about whether it did or didn't happen, so we can use it as a basis for further action.
"Repeated death threats", don't show up on anyone's permanent record, to the extent that such a thing exists. Bob threatens Alice, repeatedly. Alice knows this. Maybe Alice calls Officer Friendly, so now there is *a policeman* who knows this, and maybe he puts it in a report somewhere along with the note that there was nothing he could do about it. Which report, nobody will ever read until it's too late. When Bob goes to Greg the Gun Dealer, Greg won't know about it, and neither will the FBI computer that does the background check.
And if they do know about it, all they know is that Friendly said that Alice said that Bob said a death threat, which is not the same as knowing that Bob made a death threat. So long as that pesky "due process of law" thing is still a part of the system, Friendly saying that Alice said that Bob said whatever, isn't legally actionable. The death threat still isn't legible to the system, so we can't practically write laws to deal with it.
If Officer Friendly notice that a lot of people are saying Bob has been making a lot of death threats, and decides that with a bit of leg work he can put together a case to convince a judge that Bob should be sent to a mental hospital for evaluation, *then* Bob's mental condition becomes a matter of legal record, legible to the system, and we can stop Bob from buying a gun.
If we wait until after Bob has killed a bunch of people and *then* start seriously investigating all the reports of all the death threats, that's good for an I-told-you-so, but so what?
I mean, yeah, repeated death threats. But how to distinguish between "socially isolated idiot kid who makes these threats but would never follow through on them" and "genuinely dangerous person"?
If the police have to take online threats seriously, they have to treat the person as a live threat, which probably means showing up ready to shoot him if he so much as twitches, which is going to end up with somebody dead, and then the family go to court over "he was troubled but had never ever been violent".
It's a quandary, I don't think there's an easy fix. Yes, violent people should be dealt with so they can't escalate that violence. But we've done away with things like 'cart him off to the looney bin' for good and bad reasons, and unless people are willing to make a complaint that "Joe Smith is violent and threatening", the police can't do much. And *because* Joe Smith is violent and threatening, people are too afraid to go make a public complaint where Joe will know his girlfriend, granny or neighbour went to the cops about him.
And then you have someone like Stephen Paddock who has the highest body count of mass shootings in recent years, and nobody noticed anything that set off alarm signals about him. He seems to have been declining in health and mental stability, but nothing along the lines of "he made violent threats in real life/online":
"There are *existing* gun laws that could have prevented this if the police had taken some warning signs seriously."
I think the American police forces fall down badly in some aspects of their jobs, going by reports, but there are areas where I have some sympathy for them.
"Johnny made online threats, so he can't own a gun". Okay, then if we're taking the threats seriously, Johnny should be arrested and charged with a crime. Imagine trying that one in court, a lawyer who is doing his job in more than half-assed fashion will get Johnny off that one. How many people say things online that, if we took them seriously, would get you arrested or deprived of a right?
And a lot of people would be backing up campaigns about limitations on the right to own guns, making online speech a free speech issue, etc.
Unless Johnny has done more than what could be interpreted as 'teenage edgelord on the Internet', how do you make a case that when he wrote that dumb message about blowing up the school, he really meant it and is a present danger to himself and others? Are we going to make Johnny undergo involuntary admission to a psychiatric ward? Oops, there's *another* activist campaign about that!
If you have the cops investigate every single idiot teenage messaging, then you'll need an entire separate police force for that. What is needed, and what the police can't get, and I've seen it in my own former workplaces, is people willing to stand up and be witnesses/complainants for court cases. And people won't do that, out of genuine fear that if they make a public complaint to the police about that drug-dealing petty criminal family terrorising the neighbourhood, they are going to be assaulted or worse.
And without witnesses, the police can't get convictions on "we got an anonymous complaint Johnny is violent, or beat a guy up, or had a meltdown in public and screamed he was going to shoot the entire school up".
Except that the threshold of evidence to restrict someone from buying a gun shouldn't be the same as to convict them of a crime, because the impact on their life is so much less.
Wrong. If you're permanently not allowed to have a firearm, you're barred from several jobs that require one (soldier, policeman, security guard, farmer).
"Destroys someone's career permanently via state action" is not a little deal.
Taking away someone's right to own a gun, ever, has at least as great an impact on someone's life as a low-grade misdemeanor conviction. Which means it needs at least as many safeguards, and can't be implemented just because someone called the police and said "Johnny is no good!", you need actual due process of law.
And if we're talking about the United States, the right to keep and bear arms is explicitly recognized as a civil right (yes, of individual citizens), and those you *definitely* don't get to take away without rigorous due process of law.
I think this imagines "Taking guns away from somebody" as a random act, whereas I think that if somebody is trying to disarm you, specifically, the impact on your life is going to be pretty significant.
I've noticed that when we talk about inflation, we don't really only mean monetary inflation. We're usually talking about a consumer price index, and that will conflate price increases due to monetary inflation with price increases due to literally increased work required to [move containers around the world now that we've lost the rhythm, maintain production while keeping infection controls in place, route trade around wars, etc.].
I would naively think that we would want to treat these differently, is there a reason that we normally don't?
Inflation is bad because of the additional friction it creates in the economy as everyone adapts to the new, higher prices. You need to negotiate a higher salary, you need to renegotiate the interest rates on your loans, you need to buy a wheelbarrow to take your money to the shops, etc. etc. A rapid increase in prices causes these problems whether the rise in prices is because of too much money or because there's not enough stuff for that money to buy. So it sort of makes sense that if there's not enough stuff in the economy, you can fix inflation by reducing the amount of money in circulation to match.
If the friction of price changes was the main effect, I think one could get around that by just stating prices in an inflation adjusted way. "Your salary will be 1000 USD(1970)". Each month, some neutral agency (ha!) could publish formulas to convert this into actual USD($date), and your employer would just pay you the appropriate amount.
OTOH, there is no way to store USD(1970), so "I have 1M$ in the bank, so I can pay X employees their current salary until their retirement" would not work any more.
And the exact bag of goods used to measure inflation would be also somewhat political. Urbanites might include rents in big cities, Greens might want to lower the amount of fossil fuels in the bag and so on.
It was Brazil with the Real! They introduced it as a proxy currency that represented a steadily increasing amount of Pesos to match the inflation of the Peso. Once people got used to the Real being "stable" it became their real currency.
The nominal answer is that inflation means a general increase in prices within an economy. So it is defined as what you get when you measure price increases for a reference basket of goods.
One reason for this is that figuring out the reasons for inflation, eg the ones you mentioned, is hard and messy. Often we don't really know why inflation happens. See eg the current debates about how much current high inflation rates are temporary due to covid or are permanent. So one reason we don't have a "disentangled" inflation index (that I know of) is because we don't really know.
I'm not sure what you mean by monetary inflation, but if you mean an increase in money supply that is usually called just that and a topic that economists have generally become less interested in since the 1980s precisely because they figured that inflation (as commonly defined) is the more relevant measure.
Completely uninformed guess: I would think it's hard to measure monetary inflation directly, and the basket-of-goods approach is just the closest metric we have.
It's the other way around: we've got fairly precise statistics of the money supply by several definitions, since the Fed knows exactly how much money banks have in their Fed accounts and how many physical dollar bills they've printed and issued (minus bills returned to the Fed, bills known to be destroyed, and estimates of unreported bills destroyed or irretrievably lost). Banks also regularly report to the Fed exactly how much money they have in various forms of deposit accounts. You can find the money supply statistics here:
Price inflation, on the other hand, is a messy estimate. What goods you put in the basket, how you weigh them, how you survey "typical" market prices of those goods, and how you adjust your basket and weighting to account for changing qualities of goods on the market and changing buying behavior by consumers are all things that involve imprecision and judgement calls. There's routinely a spread of around 0.5 percentage points between three different metrics which all purport to measure inflation in consumer prices (CPI-U, Chained CPI, and the PCE Deflator), which adds up a lot over time (e.g. CPI-U shows cumulatively 60 percentage points more inflation since 1980 than the PCE Deflator).
I observe that the same phenomenon works in the other direction generally (most of the time inflation is underestimated because of the general trend of increased efficiency / literally decreased work required to do X).
(I think this is an important factor in cost disease.)
Inflation no longer really tracks the strict economic concept of inflation - but what it does track is basically more useful to the majority of people.
Increases to CPI because of trade disruption, war, shortages etc will drive wage pressure and start an inflationary spiral. There is still a distinction, but the regulatory response should be broadly similar.
At the end of the day, inflation is when things cost more. There is a difference between demand push inflation when e.g. the government writes everybody a check to go shopping with, and supply pull inflation when e.g. china imposes strict lockdown policies making less imported goods available for purchase. They are not the same but both are bad, and fundamentally both impact consumers by being the increase in the current dollar cost of goods.
These _are_, as you say, both bad. It is, however, especially bad if our response to "China imposing lockdowns" is to intentionally induce layoffs at home(cause a recession) in an attempt to bring down prices.
Inflation is bad is the common interpretation. It doesn't impact people lives that much because wages follow. (Actually wage growth is a causing factor this time.) Inflation is just very visible.
"“Momentum from the end of last year and into this year will see strong consumption growth for this year as a whole, but lower than previously expected as households reduce spending in the face of real income declines and weaker confidence. For businesses, higher costs for energy and materials, more uncertainty, and supply chain disruptions will see weaker investment compared with our previous forecasts.
...The adjustment of the labour market through the pandemic has been testament to the strength of the recovery, with numbers employed now exceeding 2019 levels and the standard unemployment rate at around 5.0%. Despite the challenging conditions, a tightening labour market is expected, with stronger and broader-based wage growth. This will be welcomed as real incomes will likely fall this year. However, where growth in wages or profits respond entirely to the currently high rates of inflation, or are detached from underlying productivity growth, the likelihood increases that harmful higher inflation becomes embedded."
So inflation set to increase, growth to decrease, wages will rise, but there is a reduction in real income. And not *all* wages rise in response, many people are on lowerf incomes and so inflation eats more of their disposable income, so they do suffer real effects.
Nobody could say this who lived through the 70s. Because that experience would teach two hard lessons: (1) savings matter -- how do you think you're going to buy a house, start a business, or retire if you don't have savings? And inflation destroys the value of your savings. So at best your argument only applies to people who live paycheck-to-paycheck, who have no savings, and no plans for any. Pretty much entry-level workers.
And anyway (2) it turns out wages never rise as fast as prices, so *real* wages end up declining. That's not hard to predict: since a tremendous destruction of useful capital is going on, and a great deal of economic activity is now revolving around the completely nonproductive work of keeping up with the rapidly changing value of money, it should not come as a surprise that labor productivity declines and hence real wages do also.
"So at best your argument only applies to people who live paycheck-to-paycheck, who have no savings, and no plans for any. Pretty much entry-level workers."
And who will be hit by inflation, because they are not likely to get wage increases while increases in fuel prices makes it more expensive to run the car they need to get to work and so takes a bigger bite out of their disposable income. Same with all price increases - once the things like rent are covered, there is less money to spend on necessities, hence maxxing out credit cards and running into arrears.
Inflation is no fun for anyone, unless you're a multi-billionaire who can absorb an 8% rise in cost of living.
You'd think. And there's no shortage of ZeroHedge authors cackling hysterically about how Any Day Now the rest of us are going to be shining their shoes in exchange for an apple core.
And yet gold remains fairly unmoved by all the prayers and incantations thrown its way. (Cue dark mutters of manipulation...)
What do you mean by "a great deal of economic activity is now revolving around the completely nonproductive work of keeping up with the rapidly changing value of money"? What work is that?
Start with changing the price tags on merchandise and gas pumps more often, and recalculating W-2 withholding rates as wages change. Then you've got all the long range planning that a complex economy has to do, which now has to factor in predictable (in direction, alas not in magnitude) wage and price changes. Like, I plan to save up money to buy a car. How much money do I need? Depends on how the price of cars is changing, and how my wages are changing. I want to expand my electric car business into solar power batteries, so I need to build a factory. It will take 2-3 years to build the factory, and I need to plan on the size, taking into account the cost of construction, the cost of my future employees, the revenue I can get from my future sales. Meanwhile, the bank that I want to lend me money has to make the same calculation.
All of these calculations are much harder when wages and prices are all rapidly rising in ways that are hard to predict. (It would be fine if every wage, and every price, just increased at a fixed percentage per year, but that's unfortunately not what happens, they all increase generally, but some faster than others, and the rate of change isn't steady, but goes up and further up at various times.) So you have to invest more time and effort into it, and you have to hedge your bets more. I may end up estimating my future revenues more conservatively, to account for the possibility that I may underestimate how much wages will rise during construction, or the rise in the price of my products doesn't keep up for some reason. So...now my capital is not being deployed as efficiently -- shazam, economic inefficiency.
Or think of it this way: suppose the only way wages or prices changed is when government said they had to. But imagine that government operates in some completely opaque way, and just randomly changes prices and wages at random intervals. Always upward, mind you, but not the same each time, not the same prices or wages, either. Can you see how that would pose a significant economic burden on anyone trying to prosper who is compelled to cope with these random edicts? It would be what they call "regulatory burden." You have to hire people to look into this and try to stay ahead of it, respond to it, take out insurance against it, and all those wages are parasitic on the productive economy, like a bunch of lawyers hired to do nothing more than fill out the random forms the Bureau of Collecting Forms demands be filed each week.
I don't think I buy this argument. People have to do risk management with or without central banks and from what I hear, before reserve banks got put in charge of monetary policy and taksed with keeping inflation as constant as they could price shocks were far more common
Why? It works fine for both, because all you're doing is clonking demand upside the head with a shovel. Demand sits down until it stops seeing stars, and voila prices fall (relative to where they were going at least).
So you would like to hand China control the U.S. economy? What about the Saudis? Every time the price of oil goes up we should have massive layoffs at every company in America?
How about, instead, we address the actual problem instead of acting like Lewis Carrol's "Queen of Hearts."
Any reason (apart from political unpalatability) not to achieve the same effect with tax increases? Instead of clonking demand with increased interest rates why not clonk it with a temporary tax increase (and raise some useful government revenue while we're at it)?
Well one obvious virtue of coming at this from the point of view of interest rates is that you have the positive aspect, which is that you significantly increase the motivation to save -- accumulate capital, which serves as the seeds for economic growth after you slaughter all the inefficient and stupid current uses of capital. If I start getting 8% on my savings account I'm going to be much happier about reducing my spending in favor of savings. (And parenthetically a *lot* happier than if a certain additional percentage of my income is siphoned off by government which totally pinky swears it will be used productively yeah right).
Another is that arguably you discriminate more against purely consumerist spending than personal investment: if interest rates rise steeply, I may still (painfully) borrow money to buy a new truck for my business, but I won't do it to buy a new Tesla to virtue signal to my neighbors, because the business vehicle delivers an ROI the pleasure vehicle doesn't. You also discriminate more against riskier business investments, so you encourage business investments that are less likely to prove to be misallocations of precious capital. And you preferentially destroy the sicker businesses, those which are staying afloat by borrowing instead of revenue.
I'm no economist, so who knows what the pros think of this, but personally I kind of like it because the interest rate approach says "OK the price to borrow is going way the fuck up, so think twice before you borrow and spend -- but we're *not* going to dig into the myriad details of who's borrowing and who's not, and what exactly they're doing with the money." But with the fiscal approach, the government *will* be deciding from whom to steal the ability to consume, and it will be deciding to what use to put the accumulated capital -- and I have no faith that it will decide either of those things correctly, or even equitably.
Raising interest rates is reducing economic activity. If you're in the middle of a wage-price spiral, there is justification for wanting to do that. But if you're just seeing prices rise because of non-wage related reasons why would you want to reduce economic activity in response to that? Prices are already higher, that will act to reduce demand and if there's no feedback loop then that can't lead to higher wages and higher higher prices?
Sorry, I'm not following this. It doesn't matter whether inflation starts with wages or prices, it always feeds back to the other. How could it not? If prices rise, workers demand raises, if workers demand raises, prices rise. Simple as that. I mean...you could try to break the cycle by force, but wage and price controls never work, it's been tried over and over again.
So yes you have to reduce economic activity. There's no other cure for inflation. What would you suggest instead?
Increased productivity is the best cure. The current round of inflation is due to reduced productivity mainly as a medium term result of covid restrictions.
> It doesn't matter whether inflation starts with wages or prices, it always feeds back to the other. How could it not?
If prices grow because primary input cost grow, workers can demand raises, but the company has no surplus money to give.
Price or wage don't always feed back to each other. That's the point and that's why CPI doesn't include energy.
Edit: But in the current case, the cycle started with wage growth. Although right now we have the China Covid situation. But in general the debate we are having is just theoritical IMO. In the current case, the way to break inflation is to increase rate and stop Biden from giving so much money to everyone. (I think... Not a monetary expert.)
How could it not? That's what they call stagflation and it's happened enough times now that I don't think it's something you can just ignore. I have heard that an answer people give is that governments need to increase fiscal stimulus while reserve banks increase interest rates to deal with that but I really don't know if that's true or not, that's why I'm asking these questions
> if you're just seeing prices rise because of non-wage related reasons why would you want to reduce economic activity in response to that?
I think they cut "primary input" like energy and food from CPI computation. So wage should always be a major part of inflation as it is calculated.
Edit: Actually just thought of supply chains which are a big topic these days. The cost of disruption in supply chain is not excluded from CPI and should be self-regulated by price like you mentionned.
Yeah, the people who falsely claimed that all the restrictions did nothing really don't want to admit that they were wrong and killed a bunch of people, because it would undermine their ideological mindset.
The problem is the lack of evidence that infection controls helped beyond some basic level. In fact the opposite is true – we have now evidence that lockdowns that prevented people to go even to the beach were mostly useless.
Vaccine mandates also were terrible and the countries without them (like the UK) did even better.
Lockdowns did not save "multiple millions" of lives in the United States. They *might* have saved fifty thousand lives, mostly elderly, at the cost of tens of billions of dollars of purely economic damage and incalculably greater social and emotional harm. It wasn't worth it.
Because lockdowns were a one-size-fits-all solution that fit no one. A lockdown strict enough to really protect the really vulnerable, would have been too damaging to impose on the population as a whole, so lockdowns were set at a level that *didn't* provide real protection to the really vulnerable. Fortunately, many of those people were smart enough to take their own protective measures, and e.g. stopped going out to restaurants even before the lockdowns. But there were millions of other people who faced very low risk of COVID while being uniquely vulnerable to the social, economic, and emotional harm of lockdowns. Who were locked down at the one-size-fits-all level, damn the cost, even if it killed them. Which, sometimes it did.
Giving people accurate information, then letting them make their own choices, would have been better in every way.
Sorry, but libertarians can't really deal with the fact that they killed hundreds of thousands of people because it kind of completely destroys any sort of moral grounding they have.
IRL, we saw a sharp decline in infections a few weeks after intense lockdowns, which is exactly what you'd expect if lockdowns were effective at preventing infections (because infections have a incubation period).
The lockdowns definitely saved large numbers of lives, and New Zealand's whole island cutting off travel thing resulted in the country having extremely low death rates due to COVID. Masking, too, clearly greatly lowered transmission rates, as seen by East Asian countries having much lower rates of transmission.
Moreover, many people actually benefitted from the lockdowns and enjoyed them. Indeed, contrary to what was claimed, mental health actually observably improved during the pandemic - suicide rates, for instance, declined in 2020. Significantly, in fact. Lockdowns probably were a net benefit to people's mental health - a lot of people moved to working from home, introverts had fewer external stresses in their lives, people who were being made miserable by other people now had a reason to avoid them, people were able to take more time and space for themselves, etc.
Because the risk of infection in open air were insignificant. My biggest objection to lockdowns is that they prohibited such activities in open air and they had no effect whatsoever.
Quarantines have long been a means of controlling the spread of disease and are highly effective when actually obeyed. You starve the infection of new hosts.
Lockdowns can be done effectively without causing people to starve, but you have to actually think about how to do it.
Moreover, the notion that there was no correlation between lockdowns and COVID is false. We observed sharp drops in COVID transmission after places instituted lockdowns.
In May, the campaign submitted 43,000+ signatures from Seattle voters and last week, the initiative officially qualified for the November ballot. Seattle will vote on this change.
Background for everyone else: Washington State requires that cities hold a primary and then a top-2 runoff (November), so eliminating a primary isn't an option.
There's a couple reasons that's not a big concern:
1. Everyone believes that *other* voters vote as a monolithic block and/or as a strategic block, and only *they* (or maybe only voters who share their preferences) vote thoughtfully. This turns out to be as laughably false as you'd expect: while of course some people do vote that way, most people don't. Most folks, even those who think they're voting strategically, are not voting as a monolithic block.
2. This hasn't happened in St. Louis, which is already using the same system (AV primary, top-2 runoff). If people were voting as blocks, you'd expect the winners to have close to the same support, and the two most similar candidates to win. There were big percentage differences in support among the top 2 finishers (and between other positions). Just to pick one high-profile race, in the 2021 mayoral race, the winners weren't the two most similar candidates, and in that race, the 4 candidates received support from 57%, 46%, 39%, and 14% of voters.
3. Candidates adapt to incentives. Right now, coming in #1 or #2 generally requires 25-35% of the electorate. Candidates know they can get through the primary by targeting a small part of the electorate. In the St. Louis mayoral race above, 46% was the clearing point to get through the primary. Candidates will need to care a lot more about the opinion of the median voter, and they'll campaign to do that.
Of course, it's possible that two primary candidates will converge on exactly the same policy because that policy is popular and represents the electorate - and that's a good outcome. Even in that case, it's more likely that they'll differentiate thoughtfully on policies, because they know they need to win the runoff too. Seeing two nuanced, thoughtful, actionable, and representative takes on problems would be amazing.
Hello! Logan from from Seattle Approves here. Here's a few things to consider:
At the highest level, we usually talk about voters in terms of monolithic blocks, e.g., "pink party" and "purple party," or worse, as only two camps. This is a highly reductive simplification we make to make discussion easy, but that's strongly shaped by our FPTP political system that highly incentivizes the electorate to split into only two factions that polarize to opposite ends of every issue. Real voters are much more complicated than that and a healthy democracy would encourage voters to be their unique selves.
For example, if instead of imaging every voter is one of 2 "teams," you imagine each voter of having, say, 3 issues that are salient to them and that they'll support any candidate that say, pledges to work on them, AV looks really, really good vs alternative voting methods. You'll end up with winning candidates that are have pledged to work on the most salient issues across the electorate and get steady progress. That's still a reductive model on voting behavior (well grounded in real voter interviews that frequently show voters are highly inconsistent in the positions they take), but the point here is merely to point out that your conclusion about the voting system is highly sensitive to how much you simplify your model of voter behavior.
Even with simplifying assumptions about voters being on a small number of "teams," we do see failures in the real world that AV solves. For example, in the 2016 Washington State treasurer race (primary, top two advance to general), two Republican candidates split 48% of the vote, and 3 Democrats split 52%. The result was that two Republicans advanced to the general election. Fractured coalitions can and do lose out in the real world with FPTP, and AV would most likely have improved upon this outcome.
In Seattle where city races frequently have 10-15 candidates, split votes are the norm rather than the exception, so voters also have a very strong incentive to rally around a short list of candidates with institutional support or else they risk "throwing their vote away." AV is a strict improvement over this status quo because voters are already likely making strategic choices, and AV allows them to also pick an honest choice.
For anyone interested in playing an iconic mid 2000s coop browser game with, at the time, a totally unprecedented dynamic research system that isn't just +10% lazer damage, high levels of cooperation, empires exist like in OGame but everyone also has a faction you aren't allowed to attack and you start together, excellent construction and mining, and the famous sensor nets and sub galatic plane "warpnets" to hide from the sensor nets, a new round of Warring Factions is less than a week old. Sort of the EVE of browser based strategy but much less investment time wise and 100% totally free for the last few years.
Used to top out at like 4000 people but usually triple digits on popular rounds these days. I hadn't played in like 10 years when I saw a new round email come in. Vets will help you with science stuff till you train your own guys. I'm in the yellow faction.
If you hate my weekly strategy game posts you can join red and try to kill me. Depending on your circumstances and what role you play in the empire/faction you join you can play as little as 30 minutes a day and then log in for big fights.
Sounds interesting! Any idea where I might find the mobile app? They say there is one, but the link doesn't work, and I can't find it in the google play store.
So I'm told that the app wasn't update after the science system changes and was removed but several players from our faction, the Jarnekk, mentioned they play on their phone in a regular browser.
I love your point (2) -- I really relate. Sometimes I'm just afraid to be with new people and my smarty-pants brain kicks in to defend against that. Happy solstice!
As to topics, I keep hoping you'll write one about the implicit belief that seems to be held by those trying to determine/decide/judge whether LaMDA and other such verbose AIs are sentient -- specifically, that if they are sentient, they would have some kind of soul (like a nonphysical connection to the universe). It's super interesting to me that tech culture has changed so much that now it's a growing group of AI workers who believe in nonlocal consciousness.
I personally think nonlocal consciousness is not to be discounted, and probably exists, so that's my bias. But the tech world moving in that direction is fascinating, and I wonder if it's because the tech world had to have their own "babies" (AIs) to really show us the value of sentience. Or suggest to us that sentience has value.
I don't think we're going to see "sentience" or consciousness or whatever term people want to use for personhood from verbal AIs, you'll just get a chatbot that's very, very good at passing Turing Tests. Long, long before we're anywhere close to having to think about AI personhood, there'll be an ever-increasing number of people who will wind up convinced by very-persuasive chatbots that their fake friends are real.
[Insert joke about humans are already chatbots that barely pass turing tests here]
As a result of Scott’s AI posts, I have started exploring AI’s capabilities. Openai API is incredible, and I was wondering if there are any other novel AI “applications” anyone would recommend checking out. Thank you!
Hmm, when you mean "applications" do you mean things like GPT-3, or do you mean interesting AI-based apps? So, for example, AI Dungeon is an intriguing application, but it uses GPT-3 on the backend.
Yes, things powered by GPT-3 are of interest. I found the "chat" and "summarize for a second grader" features on Openai API incredible. I am on the DALLE-2 waitlist (and will likely be on it for a while), but I wanted to continue exploring AI's current capabilities.
That's really kind of you, thank you! Do you have an email I can contact you at? Also, I checked out AI Dungeon and it is incredible. Thank you for that recommendation.
Machine Interface, you fascinate me. Where is this portal you found back to the 1930s and how can you communicate with us through it, given that you seem to be stuck there when Southern Baptists and death camp mental hospitals starving people to death are in the hey-day of fascist repression, and how can we help you escape?
While you're at it, you might as well have a kick at us Papists, as we're the ones enticed the Evangelicals into the whole pro-life thing:
AIUI the Catholic Church considers baptising the dead to be ineffective and heretical, and by definition a stillborn baby is dead by the time you can baptise it.
Refusing to baptise stillborn babies isn't because they think it was *never* alive, but because they think it's *no longer* alive.
For anyone who is wondering if this is one of those situations where the militant atheist read a pro-abortion anti-religion "gotcha" article that found something that every Christian on earth missed, here's what he's (very likely) talking about.
In the creation story of Adam, God forms Adam out of dust, then breathes life into him (Genesis 2, if you want to read it.). Machine interface very likely read a meme somewhere that took that statement and said that:
1. Although people aren't formed by the hand of God out of dust anymore, that "first breath" thing is entirely how life begins. Like that part carries over, even though the others don't. Note that within the same chapter Eve is created, and we don't get the same breath-of-life phrasing; it's not one of those things that comes up again and again.
Also note that even if the breath of life thing carries over, we want to be careful about the particulars here - we could just as easily say it's like the millionth breath as opposed to the first one that's special, and sinlessly kill a two-year-old. Or we could assume every breath is a breath of life, and all of us are chock-full-to-bursting with souls. So on and so forth if you are extrapolating from a single verse about a one-off creation process.
2. Since life begins (under this assumption) from the first breath (and only in that one case) and a baby doesn't take a breathe until after birth, you can literally deliver a full-term baby, plug its nose, cover it's mouth and kill it at that point sin-free in Machine Interface's probable extrapolation of Christian religious views.
This isn't exactly this, but this is a lot like reading a medical account of a man whose heart was re-started by defibrillator several times who nonetheless died, and saying "Medicine clearly states that death does not occur until the third or fourth time your heart stops". Taking Genesis 2 with no other context, it's certainly *possible* that life starts at the first breath. But even that single out-of-context verse is pretty far from *demanding* that this is how it works as a general rule.
(Machine Interface, if I'm responding to the wrong dimly remembered r/atheism meme, let me know and I'll be glad to address it).
For anyone who wonders what new dimly remembered meme he's talking about now, it's Numbers 5:11-18. Notably to MI's reddit-provided point, the entire passage doesn't mention pregnancy - it's a method of detecting adultery.
This is the bit that is probably the most relevant:
"And when he has made her drink the water, then, if she has defiled herself and has broken faith with her husband, the water that brings the curse shall enter into her and cause bitter pain, and her womb shall swell, and her thigh shall fall away, and the woman shall become a curse among her people."
Some translations render that "her thigh shall fall away" as a miscarriage, while others say "her legs will shrivel" and others say "her genitals will shrink". The literal translation is close to the first - literally that her thigh will fall away. And it's heavily debated what exactly that means.
Note that the "treatment" here is taking some water putting a small amount of dust in it, writing down "May this water that brings the curse pass into your bowels and make your womb swell and your thigh fall away." on a piece of paper, running the water over the paper, and then having her drink it. Probably not the healthiest thing in the world, but also not particularly the explicit, effective abortion instructions MI is saying they are.
The later context of the chapter seems to indicate that references to the thigh are to be understood as things that that would cause infertility rather than abortion:
"And when he has made her drink the water, then, if she has defiled herself and has broken faith with her husband, the water that brings the curse shall enter into her and cause bitter pain, and her womb shall swell, and her thigh shall fall away, and the woman shall become a curse among her people. 28 But if the woman has not defiled herself and is clean, then she shall be free and shall conceive children."
To clarify, much as with the last example, it's not like this verse is 100% for sure not about abortion. You can figure out a way to read it that way, and some translators have. If someone came to me with this passage and said "hey, is this possibly about abortion?" I'd probably say something like:
"It's possible, but it doesn't use a phrasing that demands it and the whole section is about a divine trial meant to confirm infidelity and punish someone for that, explicitely with infertility if nothing else. But the actual meaning is ambiguous so I don't think anybody knows for sure".
Machine Interface, being who they are, NEEDS the gotcha, but lacks any level of nuance in how they go about it. So he's climbing on Twitter/Reddit and finding stuff like this, assuming it's true, settled, and beyond any uncertainty (for, after all, how could it be that his opponents are anything but fat stupid monsters) and running with it.
Where this catches up with him is that, despite how convenient it would be otherwise, most Christians have since childhood been reading this book. We have scholars who specialize in it, but just also a whole lot of lay-readers going over it.
So the risk he runs (and has now been caught on, twice) is that he's going to go find an absolutely minimally informed, maximally anti-religious person, listen to their most out-on-a-limb stretch, come back here and present it verbatim and then find out that it's just more complex than he wants it to be, no matter how badly he wants that.
Edited to add: Also, for what it's worth, note that he's moved ENTIRELY on from his first claim to a new one, without bothering to defend the first. There are implications for willingness to learn from the failure of past protocols in play here.
Yes - and I consider this to be my favorite part of music. Listening to Bach or The Beach Boys and trying to disentangle all of the different parts that come together for the whole is the fun!
Question out of curiosity for you and/or any of the others with this skill -- is the ability consistent across the board, or is there an upper limit in terms of the number of instruments and/or complexity of the orchestration? Bach or the Beach Boys is one thing, but does it work for a Beethoven symphony too?
I can enjoy a Beethoven symphony fine just listening. But if I want to follow all the parts, it helps to have a score. FWIW earlier this year I did a series of posts where I'd take a video of jazz musicians playing a blues and commented on what they're doing, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/search/label/blues
Full disclosure: long time music listener (97th percentile for the last couple years on Spotify) who has recently started playing piano.
I actually picked Bach and The Beach Boys because they are complex lol. Generally what I’m tracking is the “voices” the composer wants you to hear. For example in beethoven’s sixth - listen to it once with a full symphony and once in a piano transcription (Glenn Gould’s is my favorite). In the symphonic version at like the minute forty second mark you can hear the strings as a sort of rising background tone with the clarinet coming in on top to play the melody. In the solo piano version by Gould, you can hear the strings as his left hand on the lower parts of the keyboard while the right hand plays the melody higher (taking the place of the clarinet). So it’s not so much picking out individual instruments as the components of the whole. Like if all the strings were playing one voice I probably couldn’t identify the cellos from the violins but if they were playing in opposition to each other (like The Beach Boys sing at the 20 second mark of Heroes and Villains) it’s easy.
Apologies to actual musicians if I’ve butchered this.
Almost always, but that comes from LOTS of listening and learning parts to play for paying jobs, or sometimes to reduce the recorded arrangement to Just Piano or Acoustic guitar.
I'm an outlier, but here's a report from one extreme. I can identify almost all the instruments, in most genres of music, almost all the time. I have also had an extreme amount of experience of listening to, studying, and performing music. Other people with that experience can also routinely do this.
Hm, interesting question, but I'd say yes, especially, in music I like - which tend to be played on a few instruments, so things like rock/metal or techno (which has virtual instruments basically) I have ADHD too.
I've been to a lot of concerts and have listened to a lot of types of music, maybe that helped. Saw a few videos about audio production, and that also definitely helps.
But the interesting thing about stimulants is that if you go to a loud party where you barely can hear others even if they shout in your ear... on stimulants (eg MDMA) you can easily have conversations.
Seems like the brain suddenly becomes a lot more motivated to do more signal processing (which could simply mean it sends more energy on it, or simply due to the increased neurotransmitter levels certain processing that would be inhibited gets to run more, or ... who knows how).
Yes, although it takes some effort - if I'm not actively listening I'll have trouble picking out the bass line or the harmonies.
I imagine this is a learned skill - I've sung in a choir so I have a lot of practice "locking on" to the line I'm trying to sing, but I'm not so hot at identifying chords.
This has gotten harder for me as time goes on, mostly due to the exponential increase in synthesizer quality and other audio-tech miracles. Some of the sound samples out there are really great! I think we'll eventually be able to include false "tells" like the sound of a woodwind player pausing to take a breath. Sort of like adding engine noise to a Prius, but for opposite intents.
I also notice that just knowing of the existence of many instruments helps a lot, as well as the variety of sounds each can produce. Harder to categorize that which one isn't trained to hear in the first place. Harder to broaden existing categories without exposure to masters, e.g. Ian Anderson expanding the category boundaries of "flute". Ironically, going through low-level band classes seems to make this harder, since one is only exposed to a really tiny sample of instruments played in particular PTA-appealing ways. The phenomenon of, like, "I didn't even know there was such a thing as a baritone sax!"
YES! It's hard to recognize an instrument whose existence you don't know about. I remember when I first heard "Penny Lane" by the Beatles. There's a very well-known high brass part about a minute and 20 seconds in. I play trumpet so I'm sensitive to brass. That was obviously some kind of trumpet, except it wasn't. I didn't know what it was. Maybe it was a trumpet that had been speeded up so it sounded high and a bit thin. And then, some years later, I learned that there was such a thing as a piccolo trumpet. It's a small trumpet pitched an octave higher than the regular Bb trumpet, the instrument I played. THAT's what that sound was. https://youtu.be/S-rB0pHI9fU
FWIW, Ian Anderson got some basic ideas about flute from Rahsaan Roland Kirk, a jazz musician who was primarly a sax player, tenor, soprano, and alto. But he also played flute, and would sing and play the flute at the same time. Anderson took that, and elaborated on it. https://youtu.be/4nzztZ94DbU
In normal pop music I can. But I was listening to some old Weather Report last night, I was having trouble telling what was synthesizer and what was some other instrument.
Before I started playing games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band in my late teens, only thing I could pick apart was the drum beat and (sometimes) the vocals. Before that I simply didn't have faintest idea what the guitar instruments were doing to generate sound and contribute, though the combination was often pleasant to hear. I still can't do it very well (bass line can be difficult to tell).
I am also one with difficulty understanding lyrics, unless I have a copy of lyrics in front of me, or have memorized them.
In general, I can identify the different instruments easily enough, but it can get confusing if they used a lot of processing/effects in the studio, or if there’s a whole symphony’s worth of instruments playing at once
Yes, I can. I'm also an experienced musician and have performed in many different kinds of formats, small band jazz, rock, marching band, symphony orchestra, brass band, and so forth. But it's my impression that being able to tell instruments apart is a learned skill. Once spent a fair amount of time teaching a friend how to listen to jazz. I would point out the different parts, perhaps my indicating the beat with my hand, perhaps by singing along, perhaps by verbal description. Though I know little about ADHD meds, it makes sense to me that they would help you attend to the music.
I would assume there are many more regretful parents than we hear of, because of the incredibly strong pressures to not admit such a fact (both by society as well as interpersonally)
Blame biology for giving people desires and mind-altering hormones that are not necessarily compatible with a happy existence.
Most people aren't happy about their jobs, but they perform their duties adequately enough to keep the whole machine turning. Of course, those people who are enthusiastic about their work (because it probably suits them very well), perform better and often create more value...but it doesn't seem like we have enough of the desired roles in society to give them to everyone who desires them.
Similarly, you can be sure that some people aren't happy about their children, but I think it's reasonable to expect that most of them will perform their duties adequately enough.
As a society, all we can do is provide access to contraception and abortion so that at least the people who *know* they don't want to be parents will not become parents by accident.
As for those who didn't know ahead of time that parenthood wasn't going to be enjoyable for them, I'm not sure what there is to do except perhaps de-stigmatize talking about it so that other people are exposed to information that might protect them from making the same mistake.
Looking through it, a lot of these posters are parenting unusually difficult children with not very much outside support. No blame need necessarily be assigned, though in some cases the father could step up or society could offer more child care.
There are also a few who miss going out a lot and being spontaneous. My impression from having one calm and one hyper/highly opinionated child is that this is also largely a function of how things shake out temperamentally. "Just bring the baby" is fine advice for some babies, and other babies will scream the whole time and make things miserable for everyone.
Our society tends to imply that parents have more control over this than they actually do, and so give advice instead of concrete help. This is probably bad.
I have read two entries (no idea how representative) and am under the impression, that for some regretful mothers on that subreddit, the situation would be a whole lot different, if the fathers actually invested equal time into child rearing instead of (i guess often implicitly) assuming that they go on to earn money while the mother should become financially dependent and leave everything else behind to become a master diaper changer.
Even sadder is when the regretful mother herself assumes that this is the only viable solution and then hates it instead of at least demanding equal treatment.
This should by no means imply that being a stay-at-home mom (or dad) is an invalid choice. Its just that for SOME people its a bad choice.
Rearing a child by two people without assistance - even if only one of them does paid work - is really rough. If both of them are supposed to work it's insane, and I'd like the social norms to shift around both extended family and friends helping out, and greater acceptance of stay-at-home parenting as a viable lifestyle.
Being a parent is a choice. It is reasonable to assume *some* people make a choice that they regret. It is taboo to say you regret having children, so they keep it quiet. They made a place where they can talk to others about their feelings. Why invade it? Why look for a reason to criticise it? What do you expect to gain?
" It is taboo to say you regret having children, so they keep it quiet."
And this is a big problem for potential parents, who need to make the right decision on whether they want to have children or not. _Hiding_ part of the important data harms people who need it in order to make a crucial decision.
I think that sometimes internet communities can validate, reflect and amplify harmful emotional states in a way that winds up bad for their members. All parents get occasional pangs of regret, but the right thing to do with these feelings is to get over them, and get over them, not to wallow in them with a community of people who are intent on validating these feelings.
Reddit has some actually-good parenting communities like /r/daddit which can help you move through these sorts of feelings in a better way.
"but the right thing to do with these feelings is to get over them, and get over them, not to wallow in them with a community of people who are intent on validating these feelings."
Would you say the same thing to gay or trans kids? People suffering from racism or depression? People with eating disorders or other psychological problems? People with economic trouble? People who have lost a loved one?
I get that being with other people *can* amplify problems. It's also a great way to cope.
I forget who it was who pointed this out (maybe Dennett?) but the main objection to the cosmological argument is easily pointed out by any moderately bright seven-year-old child: "So who created God then?" An uncaused god instead of an uncaused universe doesn't solve anything.
I've never heard any reasonable counter-counter-argument to the seven-year-old's counterargument. To me this makes the Cosmological Argument wrong in a boring way.
Yup. I may not have been that smart at 7, but I think I noticed the problem by 20 or so. (in those years I was a Christian who had never heard of the cosmological argument, which may have slowed me down.)
I mean, main problem with this line of reasoning as a defence of Christianity is that, even if you find it convincing, God thus deduced has basically no relationship with God as described in the Bible.
And which God in which book of the Bible are you talking about? — or rather which God promulgated by which Xtian or Jish tradition are you referring to? Personally, I prefer an Ein Sof God more than a Yahweh God. Just sayin... ;-)
Efficient cause, yes. Classic Thomism actually allows an infinite temporal regress in theory, but requires the per se efficient causal chain to be finite and as far as I've found WLC agrees. I've found the distinction between per se and per accidens to be leaning on either teleology or theory of forms too hard to be principled IMO, but when I was able to get at least one straight answer from an advocate that was the path they took.
Glad someone pointed out infinite temporal regress. An infinite number of existing souls with an infinite number yet to be created was quite the philosophical concept in its day.
The main problem with this argument is that it amounts to saying, "we don't know how the Universe could have started, therefore God". That is, one hidden premise is that there are only two possible explanations for the Universe's existence: a naturalistic explanation according to our current understanding of the laws of nature, or God; since a naturalistic explanation does not exist, it must be God. But this is either a false dilemma (assuming that by "God" we mean some kind of a Christian-esque divine entity), or a linguistic trick (we simply took our ignorance about the origins of the Universe, and re-labeled it as "God" without providing any additional details). This strategic equivocation is what the Kalaam (and arguably all logical arguments for the existence of God) is entirely based on.
Come, be fair. There's a great deal more to it than that. Let's start in plain materialist terms. Whatever cosmological theory we adopt, it's clear that the Universe was in an extraordinarily weird state, of amazingly low entropy, 13.4 billion years ago. There's no other way to explain the Second Law of Thermodynamics, since all theories of mechanics are time-symmetrical (necessarily, since otherwise Noether's Theorem would prevent the *First* Law from holding). Of course "very low entropy" is synonymous with "very, very unlikely."
Now some people say wait a minute, that really needs explaining. A state of cosmic low entropy that has a one in a bazillion chance of forming by chance is as weird as coming across a perfectly balanced tower of rocks in the desert while hiking. It defies imagination to think the wind and rain did this[1].
So then we ask ourselves: what mechanism could put the universe in a state of very low entropy? Physics per se has no answer to this: thermodynamics is phenomenological, and *never* gives mechanisms for what it predicts, and we have a problem with ordinary theories of mechanics (like the various components of the Standard Model) because the state we're trying to explain is coincident with what looks like a singularity associated with the expansion of the universe, and we already know our existing theories not only can't work through a singularity (if it exists), they can't even get arbitrarily close to the singularity, because they don't work at high enough energies. Every theory we have has a cut-off at short distance (or equivalently high energy) where we *know* it becomes mathematically inconsistent, doesn't work. If someone comes up with a GUT that doesn't need renormalization then we'll get a lot further, but so far...nope, no dice, theory is silent on this.
Now what? The empiricist or agnostic just shrugs his shoulders and says that 's darn weird, but we have no data, so there's no point in hypothesizing, writes a giant WTF? in that box and moves on.
Contrariwise the man of faith says now wait a minute, this here is clearly a rather suggestive opening for the existence of a God that is some kind of Platonic idealization of a human being. Because what we're wanting here is a mechanism that make a highly unlikely selection of a very unlikely thermodynamic state out of a gazillion others.
Furthermore, it so happens that this particular choice has a profound effect: it's one of very few that gives us the Second Law, an arrow of time, and therefore a Universe that actually evolves on an enormous scale -- in which there is such a thing as birth and death (of both stars and men), history, clear lines of causation running every which way -- in short, an *interesting* Universe, one fraught with the omnipotent promise and unspeakable tragedy of the passage of time.
Now what kind of entity do we know excels at making a narrow highly nonrandom choice amongst a sheaf of possibilities in order to bring about something unusually interesting and dynamic? Us, of course. If *we* were to create baby Universes in the lab, this is pretty much exactly what *we* would do: we'd select highly unusual states for their initialization, so they were interesting. If one assumes God is what we would be if we were perfected, then you can say choosing the weird initial state of the Universe is exactly what God would do, and you say this is just too much of a coincidence, so now I believe in God the Creator.
It's perfectly consistent with faith, and with physics for that matter, and doesn't even really perturb the principle of parsimony, since any way you slice it we need *something* very unusual to happen, and who's to say (in the absence of competing models) that an ineffable God is just too weird? Only one's taste in metaphysics.
But is it an *argument* for the existence of God the Creator? Not by me. As an argument it's circular: if we assume God of a certain type exists, then the nature of the Universe is exactly what He would choose, which means the nature of the Universe is proof of His existence -- ha ha, no wait, because you affirmed the consequent and the big red Logic Fault circuit breaker trips in a shower of sparks. So this is a top-notch rationalization, for the believer it gives God a clear and important role in Creation, even leaving aside fashioning Adam from a handful of dirt and some magic passes. And it's by no means stupid or unsophisticated (or even curiously compelling). But that's it. It's not a logical argument, and should not convince the unbeliever of anything, by itself.
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[1] I want to emphasize that I would never argue defying human imagination is any kind of evidence for or against a proposition. But some people feel differently, and I'm following that chain of reasoning.
The low entropy starting state is suprising is time is a completely independent phenomenon from entropy. Timeless physics, eg. Julian Barbour's theory, is able to explain the low entropy starting state by dispensing with time as a separate concept.
Well, bear in mind I mean "explain" in the scientific sense, to someone like, for example, me, who groks the math and knows the observational data. I don't mean "explain" in some metaphorical sense that would totally convince the naive. Astrology "explains" all kinds of things, too.
> Every theory we have has a cut-off at short distance (or equivalently high energy) where we *know* it becomes mathematically inconsistent, doesn't work. If someone comes up with a GUT that doesn't need renormalization then we'll get a lot further, but so far...nope, no dice, theory is silent on this.
Sorry but this is just wrong. I can give you an example of a theory that is valid at all scales of energy: QCD. It's true that it require renormalization, but renormalization is pretty well understood from a mathematical standpoint and doesn’t mean that it is inconsistent. We now know that the mathematical origin of renormalization is because we are performing mathematically illegittimate operations multiplying together generalized functions that cannot be multiplied and then going back to clean up our errors. Indeed it is in principle possible to "renormalize" a theory without ever introducing infinities, it's the so-called Epstein-Glaser normalization scheme (it's much more cumbersome).
After performing renormalization, (if you are lucky) you are left with a theory that starts at low energy and can be extended to infinitely high energy, the parameters of the theory depending on the energy. For QCD in particular the strength of the interaction goes to zero at infinite energy and therefore ends up being well behaved and wll defined at all energy scales. It's the so-called asymptotic freedom. (The same is not true for the Higgs boson and electroweak forces and indeed they are a problem)
I'll also note that there is a different way of defining QCD, lattice QCD, in which one defines a theory on a lattice with an explicit cut-off. Then however one is able to take the continuum limit, obtaining again a theory that is well-defined and gives predictions for observables at all length and energy scales.
Really, renormalization doesn’t mean that your theory stops working at high energy.
I don't agree, but this is a much wider and longer conversation than could possibly take place here. I appreciate your adding a different perspective, however.
Edit: if you mean to assert that QCD works right back to the singularty, then that is something quite different, though, and you should say so.
No, what I meant is that QCD presents no singularity at high energy because of asymptotic freedom. (Then of course there is all the rest of the standard model (and gravity) and that's a different story, which will probably impact the behaviour of QCD too). The fact that renormalization is needed to recover finite results doesn’t mean that the theory becomes mathematically inconsistent at high energy, all observables are finite at all energies.
Yes, I acknowledge that if you assume *a priori* that God exists, then any apparent evidence that the Universe had a beginning would reinforce your belief in your God. My point is that if you do not assume that, then the best you can get from this argument alone is evidence for an entity with exactly one property: universe-creation. You cannot determine whether it is smart or stupid (or other), friendly or unfriendly, etc.; all you know about it is that it created at least one Universe at least once. That's it. It's just not a very interesting entity. You can call it "God" if you want, but by doing so you'd be devaluing the concept of "God" down to almost nothing.
Well, I read your point as being that you thought the logical argument simple and to some extent silly. It's neither. If I have given you some reason to go back and think about the argument with deeper respect and probe why people of intelligence and experience find it difficult, that's my point.
And just to add some fuel to the fire, the constants of the Universe that we exist in seem to be perfectly attuned to promote emergent phenomena like complex chemistries that would allow for life-as-we-know-it to develop. Of course, as the many-worlds enthusiast would say, "Well, of course we're living in a Universe that can support us! There are all those others that can't." But that doesn't explain the why and wherefores of the constant tuning happens at the boundary of the singularity (or does it happen pre-Singularity?).
Ultimately, all the arguments about the origin of the Universe boil down to being unfalsifiable. Even if you have a scientifically-informed opinion on the matter, it's basically equivalent to having a religion. <Bzzzt> Thank you for playing!
BTW: thanks for that excellent response, Carl! Couldn't have said it better myself.
I acknowledge that our physical constants are finely tuned to support exactly the kind of life that we do possess. Or, to look at it another way, our own life is finely tuned to our physical constants. But if you want to make this fact somehow special, you need to prove that no other kind of life is possible, regardless of the possible values of any of these constants (and, in fact, regardless of which values are even constant to begin with). I don't think anyone can do that.
Well, if one uses one's common sense, and if one has a basic understanding of particle physics, one could easily posit scenarios for universes where life would be impossible. The two that immediately come to mind for me are the hydrogen universe and the neutron universe.
1. Hydrogen Universe: Increase the mass of the down quark and neutrons in the nucleus start to decay. Nothing but a universe of hydrogen. Not much opportunity for the development of life when the only chemical reaction would be two hydrogen atoms bonding together — unless you consider that two hydrogen atoms dancing in a circle with each other could be classified as life...
2. Neutron Universe: Increase the mass of up quark by a certain amount and protons in the nucleus will decay (or will never even be able to form). In the neutron universe: no atoms, no chemical reactions, certainly no life.
Well...I'm unpersuaded that the so-called constants are tuned, because I am not persuaded any other values are possible. But so far as we can tell, it certainly *is* possible for the universe to be in a much higher entropy state, because it is now, and it's clearly headed for one a lot higher still. So the low entropy state of the very early universe is the one inarguable "fine tuning" of which I am nearly fully persuaded. (I admit it's still conceivable someone will figure out a reason why the early universe simply must be in a very low entropy state.)
There should at least be an Occam's Razor argument that the universe should begin in a uniform state; otherwise what would determine its initial state? So it started out perfectly uniform, and perhaps if you add some quantum randomness, it explains how galaxies formed.
Entropy has always been a hard concept for me. But I figure that whatever the initial entropy X, the laws of physics guarantee that entropy will increase. So X doesn't have to start "low" in order for it to be higher now. Suppose we start out with some huge amount of entropy on some absolute scale. Then entropy will still increase, which might make it seem from our perspective that the entropy was initially "low".
Hmmm. In regards to fine tuning, are you suggesting that there might be some sort of overriding meta-principal that would dictate the relationship between the constants we see in our Universe? Any ToE we develop would be incomplete if we don't have some way to account for the values we observe.
For instance, the complex chemistry of this universe would be impossible if the up and down quark masses and the mass of the electron were much different from what we see in our universe — not to mention their spins being the values that they are — i.e. electrons wouldn't arrange themselves into shells, not to mention protons and neutrons would behave differently. Universes without the values much different from ours, wouldn't be able to make complex molecules. On top of that, the values of the weak force, the strong force, and electro-magnetism all contribute to the way atoms behave. If the value of the weak force changes, that would affect the stability of neutrons in the nucleus. Plus the stability of the overall nucleus is determined by the value of the strong force.
To quote you Carl, "Now some people say wait a minute, that really needs explaining." I'm one of them.
BTW: I am not positing the existence of a God entity who created our universe. But the thoughts about *why* keep me up at night.
Yes, I mean it's possible those values simply have to be what they are. Since we have zero evidence of them being different, we have no observational data that tells us they could be. We also have (as you point out) no superior theory that suggests their values are fixed by some consideration or other. So right now, they just are. And that they *could* have different values is a *hypothesis* backed up by neither theory nor observation.
The difference with the initial entropy of the universe is that we *do* have direct observational evidence (the universe as it is now) that the value of the entropy could be different. That doesn't mean there *isn't* some theoretical reason why it had to start off very low, of course. But arguing that the initial entropy of the universe is "fine tuned" is on much more solid empirical footing than arguing that the fine structure constant is.
I hate The Creator arguments for the existence of God. I greatly perfer the personal testimony of Sister Mary Alligator who felt Jesus jog her elbow the moment she was intending to play red 12 but accidentally pushed the church's entire stack onto black 11, which won, and who then in her excitement let the bet ride and won again and the sisters threw her a big party at which she admittedly became a little giddy on light rosé when she came home with the check for 700 Gs and paid off the mortgage.
I mean, if God can just be deduced by pure reason, that makes Him a lot more like Commutivity of Multiplication than The Reason For It All, which I find annoyingly cramped, much like the simulationist's vision of God the Console Cowboy who pulled an all-nighter and programmed the Universe up in C+++.
Maybe what he means is that certain infinities do not make intuitive sense, unless they are embedded in a larger infinity, and he takes that larger infinity to be God who writes the smaller infinity in some ineffable way.
Like, the Universe is the set of all integers (aleph null, countably infinite) and God is the set of all reals (aleph 1, uncountably infinite) so the only reason the integers (Universe) exist and makes sense is because they're embedded in the infinitely bigger infinity of the reals (God).
As an interesting side note, some historians of science have argued that belief in a monotheistic god, who governed the universe by a single set of laws, was the concept that allowed for the idea of the Cosmological Principal to come into fashion. (I find that explanation a little too pat, myself. I thought Aristotle had something to say about this idea, but I'm not finding any references.) I know that Newton was the first to assert the Cosmological Principal in his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica — published 1687 — that the universe was isotropic (not his term) and was uniform in its behavior. Because Alchemy was Newton's primary obsession, he was quite familiar with ancient and medieval esoteric writings (many of which where anthologized in the copy of Theatrum Chemicum he owned). I wonder if he got that idea from his esoteric studies — after all, one of the basic tenants of Alchemy were that the rules should work the same anywhere.
The idea of reasonable God is then reasonable universe. We can infer natural laws and trust our inferences because our observations are reliable; they are not "if God changes His mind, paper won't burn".
If God can be deduced from reason, then we don't have the problem of "oh, that's all just blind faith on your part, if you had been raised as X then you would believe in X, I don't believe because I have Science (or whatever) which is true and provable". If I can find God reasonable, I can believe in Him. Without belief, there is no faith. You can, I suppose, grit your teeth and make yourself have faith in leprechauns or the Tooth Fairy, but you don't believe in them really.
But the God of Reason is only the first step. That is getting you to accept "okay, in principle, there is an entity that can be described as god which is not repugnant to my understanding and which can be an alternative to how the universe came into being via materialistic explanations". Getting from *that* God to the personal God of Christian faith is, well, the journey of faith. You get to have both, Carl, not just one.
"A favorite Biblical quote in medieval natural philosophers was "For you have ordered all things by measure and number and weight" (sed omnia in mensura, et numero et pondere disposuisti) (Wis. 11:21) They took this to mean that the World (universe) was ordered in such a way that measuring, counting, and weighing things would make nature intelligible. This is a necessary mental attitude for the emergence of science."
Which gives me another good quote:
"Or more directly, William of Conches in (iirc) the Dragmatikon:
"[They say] 'We do not know how this is, but we know that God can do it.' You poor fools! God can make a cow out of a tree, but has He ever done so? Therefore show some reason why a thing is so, or cease to hold that it is so."
> But the God of Reason is only the first step. That is getting you to accept "okay, in principle, there is an entity that can be described as god which is not repugnant to my understanding and which can be an alternative to how the universe came into being via materialistic explanations". Getting from that God to the personal God of Christian faith is, well, the journey of faith. You get to have both, Carl, not just one.
Aristotle got no small amount of pushback back in the day when he concluded with an Unmoved Mover that was pretty definitively not identifiable with any Hellenistic gods; obviously there are some pretty serious issues with Aristotelian (meta)physics, but I'm sympathetic to the arguments in their original context.
To paint with an broad brush, the Scholastic project was to reconcile Aristotelian metaphysics with Catholic theology. Yet I don't think I ever read Aquinas really grapple with or even acknowledge that Aristotle *had* a theology of his own that came into direct conflict with the conclusions Aquinas was trying to reach. It doesn't look like a gap that can be crossed by a leap of faith, but rather a direct contradiction that is pretended not to exist.
Personally, I find it tiresome that western materialists keep using the Xtian God as their straw dog. In the Vedanta and Mahayana world view there is an endless cycle of universes, plus multiple universes likely co-exist with ours. And in Vedanta, you will eventually be reborn as the Brahma of your own Universe (and some of the beliefs of the Latter Day Saints is eerily reminiscent of this belief). OTOH, if you're a Mahayana, you definitely do not want to be reborn as Brahma (for various reasons I won't go into here). Rabbinic Judaism admits to the possibility that there were previous universes and does not necessarily reject the possibility of multiple universes.
Of course, the Xtian view of God is easy to pin down and defeat with its logical inconsistencies. So, I suppose Jehovah is a convenient for that purpose.
IME, Christianity is massively overrepresented among people making *positive* arguments for divine existence. The "convenience" of the "straw dog" is very much a secondary factor.
Actually, I think you're right! Most Buddhists don't consider the God question to be important for their practice—indeed, the The Shakyamuni Buddha discouraged such questions as being useless distractions. The Vendanta traditions don't seem to be too hung up on the God question either (but I'm not an expert on the ins-and-outs of their philosophy). And of the Abrahamic religions Jews aren't into proselytizing. Only Christianity and Islam have the stated goals of converting people. And we in the West get the brunt of Christianist proselytizing. We're exposed to their dogmas everywhere we turn. So it's natural to come up with arguments against Xtian concepts of God, because that's what we're exposed to.
"[They say] 'We do not know how this is, but we know that God can do it.' You poor fools! God can make a cow out of a tree, but has He ever done so? Therefore show some reason why a thing is so, or cease to hold that it is so."
You should try explaining this to all the Young Earth Creationists who claim that God planted fake fossils in the ground, and artificially made starlight appear to be billions of years older than it actually was, all just to test our faith!
Demanding a Catholic take account for and explain things to Chick-style Evangelism is rather like demanding a milquetoast European socialist take account for and explain things to a Posadist.
To draw on a direct illustrative point from my personal history growing up Catholic in Appalachia, the bastion of snake-handling, holy-rolling, tongue-speaking, faith-healing Evangelism: When I was around 6-8, one of the kids down the holler informed me that his family's dog had gone missing and then asked me, with all seriousness, if us Catholics had abducted it in the night as a blood sacrifice to Mary, as his church's preacher apparently claimed that THIS, and not the abundance of hostile local wildlife, was the cause of local outdoor pets going missing.
A coherent physical universe with a space for some kind of Prime Mover figure doesn't imply Catholicism is reasonable though, any more than Jack Chick implies Catholicism is unreasonable. Indeed, most of the evidentiary burden needed to make it to Jack Chick also has to be covered to get us to the Eucharist.
You would think someone in a community whose original hub was called "LESS WRONG" would understand the idea of things being comparatively better or worse.
Catholicism supports the theory of Evolution and believes there can be no contradiction between scientific inquiry and God, and if the Bible and the world contradict it is a failing of our interpretation of the Bible.
Jack Chick and his intellectual descendants believe that the Catholic church invented Communism, Islam, Nazism (and also the Zionist conspiracy) and the gay rights movement, that Evolution is an atheist conspiracy meant to get your children to be gay and commit murder, and that a Ziono-Papist-Atheist-Satanic New World Order devoted to the destruction of Christian America is coming and must be resisted by force of arms and the formation of an American government rooted in their specific form of Christianity. Even if you want to argue they both have equally-nonexistent support for their belief system, which one do you want to see more of in the world?
No, our mutual urbanite-fleeing-the-city neighbor had called Animal Control on it under false pretenses and gotten it put down. She did this to like a dozen dogs before the people in my area realized she was doing it and found evidence (she had been collecting the collars she removed from the dogs to frame them as wild dogs like some kind of serial killer's trophies, by my father's account), and then she was run out of the area like the lunatic she was. Just another year in the amygdala of America.
Well, that depends: what month did the pets go missing? Because as everyone knows, us Romanists only do our midnight blood sacrifices to Mary during May.
Yeah but she already said she isn't a Protestant. There's a big gap between St. Thomas and a snake handler and the Peace of Westphalia was a truce; nobody surrendered.
O Magdalene I shall not argue faith with thee, still less theology. As one of our minor colonial prophets has ascerbically observed[1], a man has got to know his limitations. I hope I know mine.
All I can say is, first, I did observe just above that as far as my peasant reason can tell there is no conflict between reason and a model of Creation that has a Creator. That's not a proof, nor argument, but consistency is satisfied as far as I can tell. I'm not entirely clear on whether it is that which you mean, but there it is.
And second...I am an empiricist, not a scholastic. I believe in the evidence of the senses above all else, definitely above reason[2]. If I *see* the water change to wine, I don't dismiss it with prejudice because Conservation of Mass. So if you ask me how a merciful God would[3] make His nature known to me, I think it would indeed be by direct experience, and I would find that more persuasive than a thick book of ratiocination[4]. If nothing else, I don't grok infinity, so He'd need to dumb it down for me.
Which means of all the foundations of faith I find most interesting and a priori persuasive in others, it's also that -- the deeply personal, the tale of having looked with vision as keen and clear as an eagle's into your own nature and come out of that still silvery pool convinced that you were not alone in there, that there was....someone else. That's all I meant, no more.
And if you ask me to further explain why I nevertheless would not be interested in hooting it up at a chautauqua, and do indeed prize scholarship...I don't honestly know. The most I think I can say is that it's like a tree. The tree is grand, it can reach up a hundred meters and take 5 minutes to walk around. but...it has to have roots, roots in good solid peaty soil. I hate leaving this as a silly fuzzy metaphor, but this is not my strong point. If I could write down a Lagrangian I'd do better.
[2] Which is not to say reason isn't on page 2 of my Debrett's. Knowing may start with empirical data, but it hardly ends there. The great power of reason is to distill experience, until it all evaporates or there's something worthy left, a new calx. One of the admirable (for me) properties of math is that if you *start* with truth, and follow the rules, you cannot but end with truth. You still have to start with something, and following the rules is not as easy as it seems at first, but still, it's like our (H. sapiens) superpower.
[3] Or has. One can see but not see, or the seeing and the seeing can be separated by long years.
[4] I know this is a little Low Church, but I come from a hundred generations of small freehold farmers, smiths, shoemakers, and similar unwashed rabble. Not a sophisticate in the bunch. My genes wear jeans and sometimes have dirt under their fingernails.
Some come in by the heart, some by the mind, some by the body. It's all the one gate. And I can't find the exact quote now, but something something St. Augustine "the Bible does not teach us how the sun and moon go, because God wanted to make Christians, not astronomers" 😀
I need more of the heart and less of the head.
I believe the water turned to wine, and I believe the wine turns to blood. The exact physical theory doesn't matter a bean to me, the theology is more germane (and complicated) but in the end if someone says "well I put a sample of a host through a mass spectrometer and it's bread not flesh", well duh bunnykins, that's not how it works. Doesn't mean it's *unreasonable*, though.
To be fair though, if you could pray a special prayer to turn water into wine for real, and it worked every time (or maybe 1/day/5 levels or something), then there'd be a lot fewer atheists on this planet. Not zero, I'll grant you, but definitely fewer.
Why? That is, why would you not simply conclude she had discovered a new bit of science? After all, there are many Youtube videos of amazing chemical transformations, things you might not have known about or seem nonintuitive (e.g. clock reactions, dehydration of sugar by H2SO4) -- but you accept those as just another branch of science -- in part *because* they are reproducible, a human being can make them happen any time he chooses by simply executing a particular set of actions correctly.
What would make this different? Is it that spoken words are part of the procedure? But one could imagine a scenario where, e.g. the air pressure variations caused by spoken words had some effect on a chemical reaction, and you had to speak a certain set of words in a certain way -- and we would be back to science.
Arguably if you want to believe that an answered prayer is the result of a diety intervening, it *has* to be something that doesn't always happen, because only that way can you conclude that a diety made a choice.
I suppose as I see it, all of the philosophical arguments for God's existence can be deconstructed, but that doesn't make them useless. They are supports for our faith, our intuition. If you approach the Cosmological Argument, or any other argument, like a debate about the laws of physics, it will be found wanting every time.
We are told (Romans 1:20) that God's qualities are "obvious", and I believe this with all my heart. Intuitively, it seems clearly true that the world, the universe, and human beings wouldn't exist if something powerful beyond human comprehension hadn't created them all, with intentionality and purpose. But also our reason can easily come up with alternative possibilities that fit the data and dismiss our initial intuition, arguing that primate heuristics are not suitable for making judgments of this sort, and perhaps everything in the universe exists as a result of some blind idiot process, which has no real cause or purpose as we would understand such things.
But seek, and ye shall find. The philosophical arguments offer support to our initial intuition and cast doubt on the naturalistic alternatives. They don't cleanly and perfectly destroy the alternatives though -- they merely cast doubt on them, offering some breathing room for our basic and obvious intuition to take hold, and from there, for faith to flourish. The matter of which arguments make the most sense to you will depend largely on your own intuition -- and indeed, some of the arguments, like the Argument from Beauty, are themselves mostly in the realm of intuition anyway.
As I see it, apologetics can helpfully eliminate some obstacles to faith, but it will never be what leads you down the path. And having more confidence in one's faith is indeed a good in and of itself from the standpoint of Christianity (Mark 9:23-24).
> In short, I feel like I'm missing a lot of steps in the argument and it doesn't really make sense as is. Can someone who understands it better than I do try to shade some light on this?
I poured quite a bit of effort into debating the Kalam cosmological argument back in the day, and I can't say I ever got a version that I thought was internally valid, let alone convincing. My focus was mainly on the assumptions behind the first step and the faulty importation of Aristotlean causality, but I definitely spent at least a few threads bashing my head against the deficient definition of infinities. So you're not alone there, at least!
A version of this vein of inquiry which might be more interesting to the kinds of folks who read this blog is Jacques Maritain's 'sixth way', which is more-or-less a philosophical proof of God starting from what we'd call the hard problem of consciousness. I believe it's in his "Existence and the Existent" but I cannot recall.
These various attempts to make psychedelics themselves the treatment are all inspired by good experiences some have, and appear to mostly result in mediocre experiences for others. If mindset or psychological technique (before/during/after) is the key, I would hope that the research focus shifts.
What's being done now with MDMA and Internal Family Systems is interesting from that standpoint. Scott has written without enthusiasm on IFS and related therapies (Unlocking the Emotional Brain), but if one is already experiencing a multi-agent mind it certainly would make sense that taking MDMA would increase one's sense of connection to the various agents inside.
Whatever else one might say about IFS, its primary noteworthy characteristic is that it obviates the kind of "being loved back to life" from the outside by empowering you to love your sub-personalities back to life. MDMA would just be a turbocharger slapped on this basic move.
Psychedelics make the mind plastic and moldable, to your own influence and other people's. I think it'll be a long time before we have a commonly agreed upon ethical standard how to handle them, especially since genuinely valuable therapeutic interventions can look like abuse from outside. Among recreational users this is smoothed out by people trusting and knowing each other - not dropping acid among people you don't trust is like, psychedelics 101. In a professional/research context this is a huge problem.
I think there is great potential here for therapeutic use. I’m watching how Portland Oregon rolls their program out. I’m afraid this might be mucked up by people without any real knowledge trying to make a quick buck.
The Minnesota Psychedelics Society has a Zoom meeting in a couple hours that is billed as an intro to therapeutic use of psychedelics. I’m in a small town motel right now prepping for a BWCA canoe trip.
If the Wi-Fi is decent here, I’ll check this out. I am keeping my expectations low though.
Update:
This presentation is surprisingly good. A group of credentialed folks that are serious about moving this forward. This is the first time this group seemed to not be running a scam or actually know what they are talking about.
There was a recent change in leadership here that improved things a lot.
This reminds me of when Michael of VSauce did ayahuasca, and he did it by traveling deep into some jungle before ingesting it in a burning hot tent surrounded by mosquitos. He didn't get anything out of it and clearly had a terrible time. He would have been much better off doing it in a trusted friend's backyard.
I took a course in psychedelic-assisted therapy, and read a bunch of obsessively well-done research articles. The results were not mediocre, and fact they were spectacular for treatments that consisted of 10 sessions or so, 2 or 3 of which were drug experiences with therapist
s present, and gains were maintained over 6-12 months of follow-up. None of the therapies used IFS as the treatment approach. In fact, treatment approaches tended to be pretty simple. Therapists manifest warmth, congruence and empathy while helping patient articulate their problem, explaining how psychedelics work, helping patients formulate their issue in a way that makes sense in relation to drug (eg, for smokers, "use psilocybin to help me see the absurdity of inhaling smoke to feel better"), emotional holding and reassurance during trip, processing of trip afterwards in relationship to patient's problem.
Yeah Leo, I read that quite a while ago and agree with it. I am sure psychedelic-assisted therapy would, like other treatments, prove to be less effective when used by many practitioners for many people with many different kinds of problems. On the other hand, some treatments are better than others. What's used these days is better than insulin coma therapy, treating homosexuality as a mental illness, and a lot of the other bullshit from the 1950's. How would *you* go about identifying the new ideas with the most promise? I read 20 carefully-done studies and discussed them with a researcher who had done several such studies and read transcripts of some treatment sessions. In my opinion, this approach holds promise, at least for the limited set of problems it was tried with in the studies.
If the implementation of therapy is thoughtful, I feel the results will be a complete game changer. My own unguided experiences have resolved so much for me that I think if this is done right it will be a major breakthrough. Surpassing any pharmaceutical approach to date. I’m a lot more optimistic about the approach than Scott is. I haven’t gone to medical school but I do have personal first hand experiences from more than 30 years ago that taught me positive outlooks that help me to this day.
Before these experiences I had mistakenly thought that things were like *that*..
When looked at with clear insight of a mind without preconceptions or reality distorting trauma,I knew at my core they are a actually like *this*.
*This* being a more realistic and healthy and wholesome point of view.
Insights that were completely internalized and made my marriage and my friendships go forward with less friction and more compassion.
My dealings with ‘prickly’ personalities became a matter of seeing their unhealthy outlook and either allowing me to guide them to something more constructive or if that proved impossible to find a way to maneuver around their obstacles without any resentment on their part.
If this approach is pursued carefully, has the potential to make a better sort of humanity.
I used to be a psychedelic evangelist, now I'm more cautious, but I broadly agree with this message.
I think the key element is having an environment within which resolving your newly loosened priors to a functional worldview comes naturally, then being able to actually alter your habits - it's easy to feel all that insight during the trip, then on the next day resume being an asshole out of inertia. I think we've barely scratched the surface of what is possible and what are reliable methods to get there.
Gunflint, not everyone who has used psychedelics has stories like yours, but many do. It seems clear that sometimes these drugs allow people do access quite a different, more benign view of important matters, and that some them are able to hold onto these new viewpoints permanently. It happened to my daughter when she was around 20. We had been going through a prolonged period -- several years -- of conflict and unhappiness with each other. From my point of view, nothing I tried helped a bit. Then over a short period of time things got much better, and have stayed better for years now. A couple years ago she told me that the change happened during a psilocybin trip in a meadow with her friends. She was playing with a puppy and crying, and she thought about me and said to herself, "Why am I being so mean? She loves me. I love her. I have to stop." That change of viewpoint was lasting for her. If therapists can learn to facilitate that sort of change with people who are tripping , even for some people, the drug plus the skill of facilitating certain changes would be wonderful tools.
Read a study where people took guided psilocybin trips as part of an effort to quit smoking. There were a couple of people who during their trips just thought, "inhaling smoke on purpose is ridiculous. I'm not going to do it any more." And they didn't. Others stopped with more of the usual difficulty, but were successful. And group as a whole definitely had more people who were still abstinent months later than most smoking cessations treatment programs do. (It's notoriously difficult to help people quit nicotine -- the shit's more addictive than heroin.)
Absolutely -- sounds like you had close to the best-case experience. I would hope that with research we can standardize more for your kind of experience than the other kinds.
On the first part, you're right on: if a few passionate and talented researchers are getting good results, we can expect the overall usefulness of the substances themselves to be far less. However, it would be nice to know what the 'secret sauce' they're bringing is. A researcher like Dr. Anna Lemke would say that it's mindset effects + the pharmacological effects. Traditional therapies would say it's the presence of the therapist + pharma. IFS would say something else. Whatever it is, I hope that research sheds more light on it soon while the hype is still high (and before unfortunate cases like the one that started this comment thread push us further from mainstream acceptance and funding.
As for the rest, I didn't say they lack promise, just that the substances by themselves (without the presence of the gifted researchers) provide only mediocre results on average. People are taking psychedelics at a tremendous range of doses, and when surveyed are mostly just having a fun (or not-so-fun) time. If lithium had been illegal and as many people with bipolar took it recreationally at as many dosages as we see with psychedelics, we'd have noticed it working for some range of them.
Finally, psychedelic-assisted-therapy IS 'bullshit from the 1950s'. I like it better than all its contemporaries. But while we're talking "old school", the fact remains that electroconvulsive shock therapy continues to outperform psychedelics (at least for treatment-resistant depression).
I didn't say everything from the 50's is bullshit, I said some things are. I know ECT outperforms psychedelics. It seems to outperform antidepressants too, not that that's saying much. And I know about that 50's and 60's era of psychedelic research. And I don't think the psychedelic substances themselves work magic. You're not quite strawmanning, here, but you do seem to be assuming I do not know some basic info about past psychiatry and that it had not occurred to me that people who take psychedelics recreationally are not freed of all their problems, which indicates, the drugs themselves don't work magic. Why assume I’m underinformed and lack common sense?
Actually, *you* seem kind of underinformed about current research into psychedelic-assisted therapy. In your initial post you wrote that “If mindset or psychological technique (before/during/after) is the key, I would hope that the research focus shifts.” Maybe there is research somewhere where dumdums with PhD’s give MDMA to people with PTSD and sit back and wait for the magic cure to happen, but if so I have not run into any of it. All the research I have seen involved embedding 2 or 3 drug-assisted sessions in a brief treatment consisting of 10 or so sessions, in which the therapists helped people articulate their problem, suggested ways to use the drug experience, were present at the drug experience to facilitate the subjects’ using it to address their problem, and worked afterwards to help subjects use the experience they had had to get maximum benefit from it. If you are interested in knowing more about the work being done with MDMA, I recommend you watch this video presentation about using it to help autistic adults with severe social anxiety: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZ5P4AYAvuE
I read the Guardian article just now, but didn't listen to the podcast. The article focuses on one quite bad case of patient sexual abuse, plus MAPS being inconsistent and unresponsive when asked about it. Are there additional incidents mentioned in the podcast? If that one incident is that main basis of the complaint about MAPS I really don't think it's reasonable the make too much of it. The fact is that it is not terribly unusual for people with more power to take advantage sexually of people with less power, & that's true everywhere from monasteries to the military to psychiatric settings. Yes, these incidents are awful, and fewer of them happen at well-run places, but it's ridiculous to shut down a large organization because one such incident comes to light. I worked for years at a very well-respected psychiatric hospital and know of several instances of sexual misconduct by hospital therapists with their patients -- and I am not very gossipy, and probably never even heard about a lot of things of that sort. A couple of the incidents were quite amazingly awful, at least as bad as what happened in Vancouver.
On the other hand, the MAPS website went through a period of being pretty sleazy. For a while they let people affiliated with it advertise their professional services. None of them could say they'd give you shrooms or MDMA. The code term used was "psychedelic integration," which means helping people make sense of psychedelic experiences after they are over -- but of course everybody knew what was really being offered. A lot of the people listing there seemed not to have been vetted by anyone. Some were quite young and did not have professional degrees. Then those listings disappeared -- seem like MAPS figured out having it without vetting the daylights out of those listing was a bad idea. Still, new organizations do have growing pains, and try things then discover that some of them do not work or are not safe.
I know several people affiliated MAPS. One's a very smart, kind and ethically thoughtful researcher; one's a super-smart, somewhat insensitive neurologist-psychiatrist who is a bit sloppy about following details of protocols but I whom I'm confident would never make a sexual advance on a patient; one's kind of mediocre, spoiled and overpaid, but also seems very unlikely to me to take sexual advantage of patients. I wish them all well in their work and hope MAPS & MDMA research don't get shut down. And I think some of the recent research on MDMA, ketamine and psychedelics looks promising.
I'm always surprised when people do, from their perspective, groundbreaking worldview-shattering work - in psychedelic research, or spiritual communities, or even AI alignment - yet they throw it all away for a conveniently available piece of ass. Humans are so easy to break.
From a Darwinian perspective (or, in Deiseach's words, from a lizard brain perspective) the explanation for why the behavior of seeking fame/prestige/power is selected for is because those successful in its pursuit have more descendants. If wants to turn the selection effect into a "telos" fame/prestige/power is sought _for_ the sex. From the genes' point of view: feature, not a bug.
My take on that is that it's *because* it's shattered the worldview - after all, if you've turned all the old orthodoxies on their heads and have gone beyond into the pure experience of utter reality, why let yourself be bound by the petty rules of the small-minded and ignorant? "Don't have sex with those who are not on equal terms of power with you" is such a downer, why should you - who now knows better, who has an enlightened consciousness - be tied down by silly taboos?
Of course, then the inevitable scandal happens, and what we learn all over again is that there was a reason in the first place for those silly taboos - which boils down to "when you take the shackles off the lizard brain, it goes and does what lizard brains do, and your enlightened consciousness is nowhere in the room when it's doing it".
To be fair, a lot of the rules around sex are absolutely bullshit and should be disregarded. Knowing which part is which seems... hard, especially while on a hypomanic ego trip.
the rule "don't stick your dick in crazy" seems like a good one.
More broadly, this kind of charismatic, almost cultish-type leader is at most danger - not solely from being prone to take advantage of the groupies, but from the groupies themselves. All the problems of workplace romances, with extra drama.
Because if they are charismatic and influential, they are going to attract followers and hangers-on as well as patients, and transference is a thing, as is "women of a certain type falling in love with their priest/pastor/professor/pyschiatrist/cult leader". Relationships can go sour for a lot of reasons and if you are not in a position to marry them/not going to marry them, then your innamorata will feel slighted and seek revenge. Part of that may be claiming you took advantage of her - you had all the power, the influence, and you bullied/harassed/swept her off her feet with your magnetism until she agreed to sleep with you. It was like rape, or in the most severe cases, it was rape.
If there are a lot of bees buzzing round all wanting to make honey with the charismatic guru, then there will be jealousy as well. Those who are rejected may make claims of inappropriate behaviour. Those who have been thrown over for a new buzzy bee will do likewise.
"Keep it in your pants unless you put a ring on it" is not the worst rule to hold onto, even if you are a charismatic enlightened guru.
Well admittedly it can be hard to tell whether iconoclasm springs from briliance or narcissism. Maybe it's a little like the Island of Knights and Knaves, so if you ask them both "Are you a narcissist?" the narcissist says "Of course not!' and the creative thinker says "well...maybe a little" and that helps you know.
Have psychedelics ever had worthy advocates? Because, because from Timothy Leary to all the way to today it seems like a rotating cast of sleazy, corrupt, cultist burnouts. It seems that its advocates always end up providing it to a group of followers and exercising tremendous sway over them.
I would recommend Robin Carhart-Harris in academia and Michael Pollan's book "How To Change Your Mind" in popular culture. Or if you want to go back much further, Aldous Huxley in "Doors Of Perception".
Would you consider indigenous tribes "worthy advocates?" I suspect not, because judging by your statement, I'd guess you mean something closer to "Has a respectable-looking man in a lab coat who doesn't actually believe humans have inner lives instead of a bunch of sparks and chemicals sizzling through meat praised them?"
And the answer is no, as those nice men in lab coats wouldn't speak out against the status quo because then people like you would go through their past with the finest of combs to proclaim them another member of the rotating class of sleazy, corrupt, cultist burnouts. Thus the wheel spins on: men will only trust anything abnormal if it comes from the mouth of respectable men, and respectable men would never say anything abnormal.
I read the Guardian article, but did not listen to the podcast so do not know what was covered there. Certainly the incident in Vancouver where some horny creep (who was not even a licensed professional) sexually abused a patient is absolutely awful, and I hope the guy gets sent to jail. But I wish you would look some into the actual research being done on psychedelic-assisted therapy rather than going with your "feels like" about what's happening with psychedelics and mental health treatment. Here is a video where someone presents some actual research about MDMA to help autistic people with their social anxiety: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZ5P4AYAvuE
And also, as a corrective to your feeling that psychedelics are turning medical treatment into a fandom, you should bear in mind that it is presently not legal anywhere in the US for mental health practitioners to use psychedelics in treatment. (Use of psilocybin will become legal in, I think, Washington State in 2023, with practitioners required to be licensed professionals and also have special training in use of psychedelics. ) The only US professionals who are currently using psychedelics in treatment are researchers who have gotten permission to use pharmaceutical grade versions of the drugs in small, obsessively planned and monitored treatment studies. At present, the only drugs shrinks can use for altering patient's consciousness during sessions is ketamine, an old anesthetic (which is not in my opinion a psychedelic -- it's more like nitrous oxide). The medical-treatment-turned-fandom that you find objectionable (and I would too) is currently not happening anywhere except in your mind. *Could* it happen? Sure. There's lots of potential for many things, including rationalism, to get turned into a tacky, worthless version of itself if there's a lot of money to be made. But, as I just said, that applies to lots of things.
I think of wokeness as a markedly generational phenomenon. This is mostly my own anecdata, but I believe it has some support from polling as well -- wokeness just seems much more prevalent, much more likely to function as a default worldview rather than an esoteric aberration, among people born about 1990 or just after.
If that's correct, then a vibe shift seems virtually inevitable. Our archetypal wokester is in her early 30s now. The "burn it all down" mentality is getting harder to sustain; she's got a mortgage and a job to protect. She's also starting to find that when she reads stories about people protesting "the system," her instinctive sympathies are sometimes with the people running the system and doing the best they can. That could be her!
Possibly she even has kids. She's still firmly convinced that Sesame Street ought to have more trans-affirming content, and would it kill them to throw in a segment expressly shaming Trump voters once an episode or so? On the other hand, she also can't help but notice that her kids don't give a rat's ass about trans-affirming content but do sit still for Cookie Monster, at least so long as he's eating cookies and not doing something trans-affirming instead. There is no end of woke children's media, but also no such thing as a woke child.
This sort of thing adds up. A vibe shift, indeed: The Big Chill. Only I somehow suspect the wokeratti will lack even the reflective capacity, or the artistic honesty, to produce as self-indulgent but basically accurately observed a documentation of their own ageing out of radicalism as the film of that name.
Instead, prepare for the onslaught of woke analysis informed by the predilections and enthusiasms of middle-aged people. Rogaine is transphobic. The continued production of new popular music after the year 2018 is racist. Kids not getting off my lawn are perpetuating a culture of ableism and youth supremacy.
I live in a leftist bubble. I was watching a TV show the other day and something kind of funny happened. One of the characters said "she's woke" approvingly about another character, and I realised - this was the first time I had ever heard the word "woke" used in a positive light. To be honest, I think "wokeness" (both as a term, and as a philosophy) has never had much momentum in the real world. But its popularity among Twitter addicts makes less switched-on people *think* it has - kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe more people are just starting to see through it.
I think usage on the left was pretty much relegated to Twitter. I'm not on Twitter (or in the US) and honestly have never heard anybody on the left use the term, even friends of mine who are left wing activists. Although, maybe it actually is used by the left in America, I don't know.
Yeah, I think the term is essentially an exonym. I've heard it used unironically by people identifying themselves with it on vanishingly few occasions, and those were years ago.
My sense is that "woke" must've very briefly had some currency as a self-description among at least a subset of left activist types. That happened to coincide with the moment when the broader culture started to notice the new style of social justice politics enough to want a word for it. For whatever reason, "woke" was the term that stuck, at which point it lost whatever attractiveness it might have had for anyone whose politics could be described as woke.
Given that a man who kidnapped and battered his own family and recently cut a political ad that boils down to "vote for me and I will form death squads to kill members of my party who I deem insufficiently-loyal" is apparently a viable Senate candidate and might even win- yes.
Here's a story regarding his "RINO (Republicans In Name Only) Hunter" campaign ad. Naturally, he is claiming that his ad was just "a joke in all good fun" despite his larger campaign rhetoric being about how RINOs have betrayed America and are enabling Joe Biden's evil NWO schemes to kill people with the fake COVID-19 vaccine and the Great Replacement. Unsurprisingly, he's a Trumpist-style Republican and remains impressively loyal to the man despite Trump giving praise to one of his political rivals and ignoring him entirely, and seems to have never met a conspiracy theory he isn't willing to embrace.
And here's a story about his (alleged) physical abuse. I will yield that much of this claim is in the realm of "he said, she said", but given that his previous affair with his hairstylist involved credible claims of sexual coercion and blackmail (as determined by a special investigative committee that impeached him over the accusations and concerns about him using his then-role as Governor to quash the criminal charges) that he has since claimed were discredited by the same committee and the fact he thought an ad depicting him storming into someone's home with a SEAL team to shoot them in the face was a good idea, I would certainly say it fits with the general character he's displayed.
Seems real. Let's wait for Amazon's LOTR to release, should be a useful barometer. We'll see how eager media will be to praise a work with no redeeming features other than being conspicuously woke-aligned.
Funny you should mention that, I was just wondering about it the other day. There was a huge publicity splash announcing it, an even bigger splash of criticism, and (so far as I can make out) since then crickets. No pieces updating its progress, no further magazine articles about new photoshoots released since. I'm curious if it is still on track to be released (surely it must be, given the amount of money Amazon is reported to have sunk into it), or is there a *lot* of rewriting going on to tidy up all the criticism.
Some of the publicity was just *painful*, the UK Superfan Review video was allegedly "Tolkien fans discuss the new series!" but it was really clear these people were about as much Tolkien fans as I am a fan of American college basketball; all they did was giggle about gay Gandalf and "ooh, if Sauron is hot I'd bang him!"
Oh and by the way, you don't have to wait for the series to come out, people are *already* shipping Sauron (as Annatar) and Celebrimbor; the ship name is "silvergifting". You're welcome.
But I see that now Amazon is relocating shooting of the series from New Zealand to the UK. Hmmmm, I do wonder why - cheaper? Or other reasons?
I hadn't seen, thank you for the pleasure of that revelation 😐 Oh for crying out loud, guys, can you at least *pretend* you give a straw about the source materials?
Wrong hair colour, wrong age, wrong everything. Finarfin's children are the fair-haired ones, and Celebrimbor is Galadriel's first cousin once removed, so if they're casting "young, sparky, piss and vinegar, Galadriel" then why does her younger cousin look older than her? Cast this guy as a Numenorean? No problem. One of the Noldor? Now you're having a laugh.
EDIT: If Celebrimbor is in it, then so too must Annatar be. And he is supposed to be supernaturally beautiful, being Sauron's fair form as one of the Maiar. These chuckleheads will probably give him a squint and a limp and saggy jowls, also balding with what hair he does have being straggly and greasy, in order to hammer home that This Is The Bad Guy.
That's what the people replying to the criticism didn't get; look, I am not objecting to your black Elf or beardless black Dwarf lady because I'm a racist sexist whataphobe, it's because they don't stick to the books. You wanna be diverse and inclusive and break out past what Tolkien wrote due to being mired in his era but this is the 21st century, but you can't handle a bearded lady?
Imma blame the Mormons (or ex-Mormon) showrunners here, they can't adapt good Catholic writing 😁
That's the trouble with black (or Hispanic, or mixed race) Elf guy - his hair is not beautiful enough. And don't tell me that they can't have beautiful long non-white hair, of course they can, but they pick some horrible basic haircut. I don't know if this person is meant to be Avari, I very much doubt it, I'm betting they're going to make him Silvan. Necessity of beautiful hair still applies. Tolkien couldn't help himself, when discussing the names of Finwe and his descendants it went off into hair:
"[The element 'fin' in the name "Finwe"] The first elements were often later explained as related to ...Common Eldarin PHIN 'hair', as in Quenya fine 'a hair', finde 'hair, especially of the head', finda 'having hair, -haired' ...All the Eldar had beautiful hair (and were especially attracted by hair of exceptional loveliness), but the Noldor were not specially remarkable in this respect, and there is no reference to Finwe as having had hair of exceptional length, abundance, or beauty beyond the measure of his people. (He had black hair, but brilliant grey-blue eyes).
With regard to Findekano / Fingon it may be noted that the first element was certainly Quenya finde 'hair' - a tress or plait of hair (Common Eldarin *phini- a single hair, *phinde a tress; Sindarin fin; find, finn-).
...It would have been sufficient for Fingolfin to give to his eldest son a name beginning with fin- as an 'echo' of the ancestral name, and if this was also specially applicable it would have been approved as a good invention. In the case of Fingon it was suitable; he wore his long dark hair in great plaits braided with gold."
Come on Amazon, the *perfect* excuse to give us an Elf with "long dark hair in great plaits braided with gold" and you give us some short back'n'sides job?
Re: Silvergifting, I don't read any of that, but I am aware of it. (Your ship is not my ship and that's okay). But if you wanted to write about a relationship gone bad, my goodness, that is the excellent choice for bad decisions, deceit, and a terrible ending. And you know how fandom *loves* making its favourites suffer 😁
"Celebrimbor was captured in the chaos and was forced, under torture, to disclose the locations of the lesser rings, but he would not reveal the whereabouts of the three greatest of them that he had sent away for safekeeping. Celebrimbor died from his torment; his body was shot with arrows and hung upon a pole, and was later paraded as a banner when Sauron attacked the Grey Havens."
At least people writing this kind of thing have read the books, which is more than the Amazon 'superfans' seem to have done! I can overlook a lot when "at least they read the source text" is involved.
Trekkies were doing it years ago, too 😁 I can't remember the exact details, but there was an anecdote about a guest director on one episode in the third and final season of the original series who had one of the actors walk off the bridge in a certain direction.
The actor objected that "I can't do that, there isn't a door here, and the fans will notice". The director said "That's dumb, it's only a set" or something along those lines, made the actor do it, and yes the fans noticed and complained.
The odd thing is, I saw the episode as a kid long before I heard the story and yep, I went "there isn't a door off the bridge there!"
Yeah, I can't understand why they made such a thing out of dropping the Dwarven beards. So far as we can see, it's only one Dwarven princess OC so I don't even know if we'll see other Dwarven women at all.
Is it because they think "Well, Tolkien has not got enough women, we need to put in more women, but if we let the Dwarven women have beards nobody will know they're women"? Is it some religious taboo about women having beards? Peter Jackson managed to do "Dwarven women with beards" in his version of "The Hobbit" - is it because they're afraid this will look like copyright infringement (since Amazon only bought the rights to "The Lord of the Rings ") and the other movie studio will sue them?
'If we put beards on the Dwarven women it will be copyright infringement' would be the stupidest reason, so it's the most likely one.
From a letter to his young son Christopher, in 1943:
"My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) – or to 'unconstitutional' Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate realm of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate! If we could get back to personal names, it would do a lot of good. Government is an abstract noun meaning the an and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so as to refer to people. If people were in the habit of referring to 'King George's council, Winston and his gang', it would go a long way to clearing thought, and reducing the frightful landslide into Theyocracy. Anyway the proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity. And at least it is done only to a small group of men who know who their master is. The mediævals were only too right in taking 'nolo episcopari' as the best reason a man could give to others for making him a bishop. Give me a king whose chief interest in life is stamps, railways, or race-horses; and who has the power to sack his Vizier (or whatever you care to call him) if he does not like the cut of his trousers. And so on down the line. But, of course, the fatal weakness of all that – after all only the fatal weakness of all good natural things in a bad corrupt unnatural world – is that it works and has worked only when all the world is messing along in the same good old inefficient human way. The quarrelsome, conceited Greeks managed to pull it off against Xerxes; but the abominable chemists and engineers have put such a power into Xerxes' hands, and all ant-communities, that decent folk don't seem to have a chance. We are all trying to do the Alexander-touch – and, as history teaches, that orientalized Alexander and all his generals. The poor boob fancied (or liked people to fancy) he was the son of Dionysus, and died of drink. The Greece that was worth saving from Persia perished anyway; and became a kind of Vichy-Hellas, or Fighting-Hellas (which did not fight), talking about Hellenic honour and culture and thriving on the sale of the early equivalent of dirty postcards. But the special horror of the present world is that the whole damned thing is in one bag. There is nowhere to fly to. Even the unlucky little Samoyedes, I suspect, have tinned food and the village loudspeaker telling Stalin's bed-time stories about Democracy and the wicked Fascists who eat babies and steal sledge-dogs. There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations; I hope that, encouraged now as 'patriotism', may remain a habit! But it won't do any good, if it is not universal."
He was an agrarian, but bluntly he didn't hate Jews anywhere near enough to fit in with the kind of people who use that label today. As a matter of fact, he had strong negative opinions on anti-Semitism, which I believe makes you a "centrist zog cuck" or something to that effect.
The kind of people like like Curtis Yarvin, founder of neoreaction and Jew? You seem to be blending some exclusive categories together. Not straw precisely, then; is this a Strawxymoron-man?
"Neoreactionary" and "anti-semite" are far from exclusive and I have no doubt you know this but are uninterested in the truth-value of what you say.
You will now try and define every NrX person who's antisemitic out of the movement despite the fact the only thing you need to do to turn NrX into the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion is to take the Cathedral and then write "and Jews are doing this" at the end.
The tone of of the Washington DC subreddit *seems* to have shifted to more anti-crime than anti-cop, the reddit api and some basic nlp might be able to actually answer this question...
The Midterms should give us a barometer reading. Having 85% of pop media left of center makes projections hard, and the reality TV ex-president who refuses to retire certainly complicates things.
The real question is who will run in '24, and who will independents elect.
Wokeness won't help the Dems in either election. Nothing has changed there; if anything, wokeness is more stubbornly entrenched.
Culture is downstream of politics. More specifically, American culture is downstream of the short-term electoral needs of the Democratic Party.
The cultural zeitgeist of 2025 is dependent on who the Republican nominee is in 2024; much more so if they win. Is it going to be "Christians bad", "Rich people bad", or "White people bad"? We'll have to wait and see.
I'll make a casual prediction that if there's a tipping point, there will be several people attempting geoengineering with different projects, which will increase the odds of something weird happening.
Also, weird things happening w.r.t. the climate may or may not be due to them. To try to geoengineer is to end up being believed responsible for what happens....
Usual reminder that all schemes based on intercepting shortwave before it reaches Earth are super-dangerous and could kill billions. We need light to grow food.
I wouldn't count on laws to protect someone committing obvious crimes against humanity who had no state backing, even in the case of punishment, and in the case of simply stopping them that's straight-up what emergency powers are for (compare, for instance, how police can shoot you without any kind of trial if you are at that time commtting a spree killing). For that matter, a state doing this would be casus belli; only the nuclear states could actually do this and not get immediately toppled.
Sorry it's not exactly on topic, but would you (or anyone) recommend any good resources on geoengineering strategies, their scientific basis, consequences, risks, cost etc?
Today I listened to a very interesting podcast episode on the physics-engineering-economics of managing global heating, especially using mirrors deployed at ground level. This would look kind of like agrivoltaics, with mirrors covering 10-20% of, say, an agricultural field.
Tao suggests that it can be done affordably with mirrors made from soda-lime glass or with metalized PET (basically mylar balloon material), and that it would lead to relatively predictable amounts of cooling, localized within the ~500 meters surrounding the area with the mirrors. They've started small-scale experiments.
Renature swamplands. Make them wet again. Swamps are a surprisingly great carbon sink. And yet they can be agriculturally interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paludiculture
There was a book review (non-finalist) on Stephenson's novel "Termination shock", which is on geo-engineering. Citing from that review:
"Despite my deep respect for Stephenson as a researcher and belief that he's an essentially honest writer, I thought it best to fill out my knowledge of solar geoengineering by consulting a couple recent works of nonfiction. I settled on Elizabeth Kolbert's Under A White Sky and Gernot Wagner's Geoengineering: The Gamble. I found both books to be highly informative, with the authors displaying excellent journalistic neutrality covering a subject that is both technically and ethically complex."
You can find a short summary of both books in Section III of the review:
Consequences and risks are fairly unknown and to some degree unknowable before trying it, which is most of why they haven't been done yet.
As for cost, I've seen stratospheric sulphur injection costed at 10s of millions of dollars per annum to completely correct the global temperature anomaly (though excess CO2 + less sunlight is not exactly the same for the planet as the preindustrial atmosphere). Logistically, that one wants to be built next to a pile of mine tailings so it won't get to be in international waters, but one facility in the right place can probably do the whole globe.
Does anyone else think that injecting a ton of sulphur into the stratosphere is one of those ideas that if we try it, will end up "well crap, at the time it seemed okay, how were we to know *this* would happen?"
Somehow, to my ignorant mind, emulating Venus' sulphuric acid cloud layer does not seem desirable.
They're talking about sulfates, more or less what you get *after* sulfuric acid fully reacts with something. Very unreactive stuff in general, and tends to be spewed into the sky regularly by volcanoes already.
But yes of course it's a silly "swallow a spider to catch the fly" idea.
We know the effects of dumping different amounts of sulphur into the stratosphere because volcanoes do it from time to time. We'd make sure to release nowhere near as much as Tambora did in 1816, leading to 'the year without a summer' and Mormonism. The numbers I've seen for geoengineering max out around Pinatubo level.
Historical evidence also shows us that the sulphur falls out within a year or two.
Yes, I think that a lot of people have thought that it would wind up with unintended consequences, which is a major part of the reason that it's not an idea taken seriously.
(More cynically it's not taken seriously because the sort of people who make a big noise about climate change have no interest in a cheap, easy solution to climate change; they want a fundamental reordering of the global economy.)
And just for anyone who doesn't recognize the title, "Ministry for the Future" is a recent book by Kim Stanley Robinson, famous for a series about terraforming Mars a few decades ago.
There was a classified thread some time ago (past year or so?) in which someone advertised a startup (or something) that was creating a software solution to collective action. Iirc it was to create (blockchain-based?) contracts that only went public when a specified number of signatures had been obtained.
Can anyone point me to this?
Legal Impact for Chickens (an ACX grantee) filed our first lawsuit last week!
https://www.legalimpactforchickens.org/costco-lawsuit
We are representing two Costco shareholders, suing company executives for animal neglect. You may have read about it in the Washington Post, Yahoo Business, local news, or Meatingplace!
Thank you so much to all the ACX readers who have supported us and helped make this happen! And thank you especially to Scott!
Will this make my rotisserie more expensive?
Hi Ace! Thanks for asking. I would be guessing if I were to try to answer that, because Costco can choose to set the price for its chicken to any amount it wants. But my guess is no, the price to consumers will probably stay the same. My understanding, from reading news articles, is that Costco’s chicken is something called a “loss leader.” E.g.: https://www.tastingtable.com/876410/why-costcos-rotisserie-chickens-are-still-4-99-despite-inflation/ This means that Costco sets the price for its chicken based on picking a number low enough to attract customers, who will likely spend money on other items—even though that number is LESS than what it costs Costco to produce the chicken meat. So, according to news articles, Costco is already taking a loss on its chicken meat. Costco seems to prefer to keep the price of its rotisserie chickens the same, year after year. See e.g.: https://www.rd.com/article/costco-rotisserie-chicken-cheap/ . So I would personally be very surprised if Costco were to decide to raise the price of its rotisserie chicken. Does that make sense? Thank you again for asking!
Maybe, but then it will taste of happiness!
Well, given all the rí-rá currently going on, that your organisation is occupying itself with the cluck-clucks is the least nutty progressive activism happening. Good luck with getting better conditions for hens (so they will be even tastier and juicier when they meet their destiny as dinner)!
Glad to hear it. All the best to your friend and her son!
Let's say the government of a blue city in a red state declares abortion to be legal within its borders in defiance of a state law which says otherwise. In theory, of course, cities don't have the legal right to do this, but in theory states don't currently have the right to legalize marijuana, yet many have done so in practice.
My questions:
1. What would ensue? Would there be much violence? (E.g., would Antifa come and support the city against state troopers?)
2. Would major corporations and the media back the cities over the states? Could that affect what ensues?
3. How likely do you think this is to happen somewhere? (I give it 15% odds.)
Think of Kim Davis. All the people saying it didn't matter what her personal opinions or conscience exceptions were, she was obliged to do her job and follow the law and issue those marriage licences even if she thought this was a sin and was wrong.
Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander.
I'll be blunt: could you stop gloating?
Seriously, I just came here from looking through an SJ board's reaction to this. They've got people urging terrorism in semi-open channels.
Your side worked very hard for this. You won. Be gracious in that victory. I told them to simmer down, and I'm telling you too. This is not a good time for inflammatory rhetoric. I want to minimise the casualties.
(For the record, I'm in favour of legal abortion but I think Alito made the right call that it's not SCOTUS' place to impose this.)
In this case, I'm not gloating. The same issues of "can or should someone be forced to act against their conscience in carrying out a law?" came up, and all the progressives, pro-freedom, everyone should have liberty, people were adamant that she had to do it because It Was The Law.
Well, now it turns out that the law in question is something *they* don't like and can't bring in line with their consciences. If you have to do it because It's The Law, you *don't* get to say "Only if it's *my* law that *I* like".
I do agree with you. I just think there are ways to phrase this kind of point that are less provocative.
A somewhat parallel case occurred in 2004 when Gavin Newsom (then Mayor of San Francisco) ordered county clerks (San Francisco is both a city and a country, with the mayor and board of supervisors controlling both governments) to issue marriage licenses on request to same-sex couples in violation of state law. While California, then as now, was a deep blue state, support for same-sex marriage among Democrats and leaners was much weaker at the time than in recent years and did not have majority support in the state, and California had a Republican governor at the time (Arnold Schwarzenegger).
Schwarzenegger had the state's Attorney General sue in state court to void Newsom's order. The CA Supreme Court issued an injunction about a month after Newsom's order, which Newsom acquiesced to, and several months later the same court retroactively voided the licenses that had been issued prior to the injunction.
Abortion is different since it's performed by private citizens rather than city or county clerks, and there's no such thing as retroactively voiding an abortion. There are probably three routes the state government could take.
The soft approach would be to sue in state court to void the city's policy. They'd probably get an emergency injunction pending hearing almost immediately, since the suit would be virtually certain to succeed on the merits and allowing the policy to stand in the short term would have consequences that couldn't be rolled back.
The hard approach would be to send in the state police to arrest abortion providers in the city notwithstanding the city's policies. The state police generally have something like plenary powers to enforce state laws, and state prosecutors don't need the city's cooperation to prosecute people for violating state law within city limits.
The nuclear option, if the city government were to try to order the city's police to use force to resist efforts of state police to enforce state anti-abortion laws in the city, would be to prosecute the officials giving the orders under state-level treason, insurrection, or sedition statures. This is very unlikely to happen, both because the optics of treason prosecutions are terrible (especially since most people aren't aware that state-level treason laws are a thing) and because the city government is unlikely to go nuclear themselves by giving the treasonable/seditious order to use force against state police enforcing state laws. For that matter, if a mayor tried to give such an order, the police chief would very probably tell him to go fly a kite.
In the US, municipal and other local governments are *entirely* subordinate to the States, and can do only those things the State allows them to. They can make a thing illegal if the state is silent about it, but they can't ban a thing that the state government has said must be legal throughout the state, and they can't make legal a thing that the state government has banned throughout the state. This isn't even remotely controversial as a matter of law.
So, what happens is, State X "bans abortion", City Y declares itself an "abortion sanctuary", and nobody sets up an abortion clinic in City Y. Because they know that if they do, the State Police will come arrest them and the State courts will convict them and send them to prison, and this will be unquestionably legal legal. The city police aren't going to go out and stop the state police from enforcing state law, because A: that's illegal and B: the state governor has something the city mayor does not, which is to say a National Guard with actual tanks that will grossly overmatch even the most militarized urban police department.
Major corporations might "back" the cities over the states, but that won't stop the state police from arresting people, and see e,g, Disney v Ron DeSantis for the theory that the state government will cower before the mighty power of a corporate scolding.
There will be protests whenever the police show up to arrest abortion providers, but that's going to happen whether the city passes a symbolic "yay abortion!" law or not. I suppose the law could be seen as the city inviting and encouraging protesters, but if the protesting crosses legal bounds (actually interferes with the police arresting abortion providers), then the protesters get arrested by the state police or crushed under the tracks of national guard tanks.
You may be confused by the fact that states and cities are often seen defying *federal* law. That's possible because States (unlike cities) do have independent sovereignty and can do some things whether the Feds authorize them to or not, and there are some things the Feds are not allowed to impose on States. These boundaries are fuzzy, and often pushed. And cities can piggyback on their State's independent sovereignty to e.g. declare themselves "sanctuary cities" for illegal immigrants, if the state government doesn't mind them doing that in its name.
But even then, arresting illegal immigrants is something the Feds are absolutely allowed to do, whenever and wherever they want within the usual due process rules, so "sanctuary city" just means "our cops won't lift a finger to help the Feds arrest a Documentally-Challenged American", not "our cops will go out and *stop* the FedCops from arresting the DCAs"
I find it's most helpful to model law enforcement (LE) organizations as essentially groups of individuals willing to use force in response to certain acts. That they are draped in legitimacy by the rest of the society that authorized them, isn't *essential*, since many people in that society might resent the LE, but still acknowledge their monopoly on legitimate force. That last part is the essential bit. If you're afraid of going against some group because that group can retaliate with most of society's implicit approval, then that's your LE group, no matter what they're called.
In light of this, your questions can be seen as depending on several factors.
1. LE enforces the interests of its members first, not society's. We notice this in cases where there are laws LE won't enforce, and rules LE will enforce that aren't laws. LE is people, and thus they're just another faction in the push-pull of society (with special properties).
2. We consider societies healthy when LE's interests mostly align with the rest. When they do, LE hardly has to do anything; most laws are abided without dispute, and LE only has to step in for the errant lone wolf who's lost his head. When they don't align, you tend to get either police reform, police states, or anarchy (a revolution if the society shares common interests; civil war if it doesn't). Which one you get depends largely on force differential; since the US keeps that small with the Second and First Amendments, we typically get reform.
3. The US' federal structure puts it in an interesting dynamic: there are multiple LEs, who might differ among themselves. This mostly just multiplies the combinations, but I find they typically keep a lid on chaos; if any of the local LE, federal LE, or people get too powerful, the other two have an incentive to rein it in, regardless of the cause of the dispute.
4. Bipartisanship has put an additional factor onto the US: there are now two "people" factions. It's tempting to say the media backs only one of them, but for the purposes of this layout, I think it's more accurate to model each "people" faction as having its own "media" faction serving it. (This lets us talk about how well each media organ is coordinating what its "people" faction knows.)
5. Corporations are still trying to maximize shareholder returns. They're more a follower than a leader as a result, and their behavior is possibly the most predictable (over multiple fiscal quarters; over one or two, an enthusiastic CEO or BoD can still weird things up).
Whether LE enforces a law will thus depend on whether that law aligns with LE's principles (do LEs think this is a good law?); whether it aligns with society (does society think this is a good law, and so abide it without LE's intercession?); whether LE is strong enough to make enforcement stick; how badly does society want the law or its opposite; what's the capital cost of abiding or defying that law (does society have to centralize capital to abide or defy that law (as it did with alcohol prohibition), or can any individual address that law at a whim (as with jaywalking)?).
It's a lot easier for municipal governments to ban things that are legal on the state level (e.g. the many towns and cities in the U.S. that still prohibit alcohol) than for them to allow things that are illegal on the state level. So the odds that any municipality will actually allow abortion, in practice, in a state where it's prohibited, are effectively 0%.
Some highly-progressive city legislatures might pass bills claiming that abortion is legal within their municipality, on paper, but they'll have absolutely no real force backing them. Abortions won't actually be performed in those cities, because no one wants to suffer the criminal and civil penalties that will come from blatantly violating state law. It would effectively be nothing more than a publicity stunt, a way of making a statement without actually doing anything that has any meaningful real-world impact.
If a city legislature actually wanted to help women obtain safe abortions from licensed medical professionals, the best bet would simply be to subsidize quick, easy, and cheap/free travel to the nearest state where abortion was legal for any pregnant woman seeking one.
You are probably correct. I wonder how, though, the "legal" marijuana industry got started in CA, CO, etc. Did the federal government signal in some way that they would look the other way? Because in theory marijuana sellers in CO are risking huge criminal penalties for blatantly violating federal law. I can't imagine the Colorado National Guard fighting the ATF off if the latter were to move into downtown Denver to arrest the weed dealers, so it isn't like the weed dealers have any protections beyond a fairly recent norm (which wasn't a norm when the weed dealing started, of course).
I suppose the legal weed states were able to first test the waters with legal medical marijuana, although what was the reason people believed the feds would stand back on that?
Many claim that so-called "back-alley abortions" were frequent in the days before Roe. If those claims are correct, there must have been a black-market for abortions, meaning people back then risked criminal penalties for violating the law, albeit not blatantly. But put these things together: a progressive municipality declares abortions legal within its city limits for performative purposes, but then you also have a black market of abortion providers which may exist within the same municipality, precisely because it is such a progressive place. Perhaps over time the reputation of the place as a black market for abortion services grows. Perhaps an abortion provider in this location then gets arrested, but more are still known to exist. It seems like that could possibly lead to a rallying cry for left-wing militia groups like Antifa to come protect this market.
Or maybe my scenario is a bit far-fetched.
>Did the federal government signal in some way that they would look the other way?
Yes; several federal Attorneys General issued memos stating that they were going to focus their efforts on e.g. interstate marijuana trafficking and not "waste taxpayer dollars" pursuing local users or dispensary operators or whatnot. Given their oaths to uphold the law, they can't *promise* not to e.g. arrest Joe Schmoe for smoking a joint, but they can say "...not until we've shut down every interstate trafficking operation", which in practice is the same thing.
>Because in theory marijuana sellers in CO are risking huge criminal penalties for blatantly violating federal law.
Also yes. DoJ policy memos are not law; the Federal government can change its mind and decided to arrest local users/growers/dealers in "legal marijuana" states. They can even decide to arrest people for having sold marijuana five years ago and then stopping as soon as the Feds decided to get serious. That wouldn't be an ex post facto law, because the published law five years ago was that selling marijuana is a Federal crime. But the optics of the latter would be horrible, and there appear to be plenty of people willing to bet that the Feds will at least give people a chance to shut down their operations and only arrest the persistent refuseniks if they ever do go forward with a no-marijuana-for-anyone policy in the future.
> I wonder how, though, the "legal" marijuana industry got started in CA, CO, etc. Did the federal government signal in some way that they would look the other way?
That's an interesting question that I'm afraid I don't know the answer to. I can, however, sketch in one of the basic facts operating in the background, which is that federal criminal prosecution is inherently highly selective. The feds choose to pursue a tiny fraction of the crimes they theoretically could, leaving the rest to the states. In other words, for any given act criminalized by federal law, the default condition is for the federal system to do nothing about it.
Federal law enforcement and prosecutors instead tend to concentrate their resources on a small, discretionary subset of investigations that require interstate coordination or special expertise or are otherwise too complicated or time-consuming for state/local police to deal with. Plus some run-of-the-mill crimes that fall into the federal ambit for various jurisdictional reasons, like being committed in Indian country.
Could the feds use that discretion to go after offenses that a state has decided aren't really crimes after all? Yes, that's essentially what happened in the "Mississippi Burning" operation of the mid-1960s, where DOJ used civil rights laws to prosecute murders in federal court. But that in itself probably gives you a sense of how unusual and extreme a case that was. The feds just aren't generally in the business of defying state law when it comes to defining substantive crimes.
"I wonder how, though, the "legal" marijuana industry got started in CA, CO, etc."
The simple fact is that there's a *much* larger power gap between state and municipal governments than between federal and state governments. For instance, Texas was enforcing its six-week abortion law for months before Roe v. Wade got overturned, because at the end of the day, Texan lawmakers know that Biden isn't going to send in the National Guard over abortion, just like Coloradan lawmakers know that he's not going to send in the National Guard over weed. But Abbott would absolutely send in State Troopers to shut down second-term abortion clinics in Austin, regardless of what legislation the Austin City Council passes.
The core issue here is that the power of law enforcement falls squarely in the hands of state governments, as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States and by the various state Constitutions. Municipal and county police forces only have authority because it's granted to them by the state government, and that authority can be withdrawn by the state government at any time. State governments are supreme authorities in the Hobbesian/Weberian sense, as they have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within their borders. This is somewhat limited by their adherence to the laws of the federal government, which acts as a sort of over-sovereignty, but all 50 states are still sovereignties in their own right nonetheless. Whereas municipal and county governments aren't sovereignties at all, they're simply administrative divisions and have no right to use force except to the degree that the state government empowers them to do so.
A fantastic modern example of nominative determinism. His name is Clarence "Thom"as. Let's see if he accepts the pretty valid argument that his premise for overturning 3 other iconic supreme court decisions also demands the overturning of Loving. He probably won't, for obvious reasons.
The obvious reasons are indeed obvious! You probably meant that part sarcastically, but there in fact unironic obvious reasons why the logic of Justice Thomas's skepticism toward Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell doesn't apply to Loving.
Loving was fundamentally an Equal Protection case. The Court added a cursory section at the end saying the Virginia anti-miscegenation statute also offended the Due Process Clause, which became important many years later in the Court's same-sex marriage jurisprudence. But that bit was peripheral to Loving's main holding.
Justice Thomas has been among the Court's most hawkish members in applying the Equal Protection Clause to invalidate racial classifications of all kinds. (See: Grutter v. Bollinger.) It's perfectly consistent with his longstanding views for him to question Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell without doubting Loving's correctness in any way.
Ah, how easily the "we are the party of anti-racism and fighting anti-blackness and discrimination" slips into racist demagoguery when black people dare to do things white liberals don't like"
Clarence Thomas has "Thom" as part of his name -> Uncle Tom -> see how kind, accepting, inclusive and morally superior I am to the kinds of people who use racial slurs and dogwhistles!
How dare people directly accept clearly stated opinions backed up by a history of actions in context and with the spirit they were written in! Those Blagards! Those Vyllains!
I'm not a Democrat. And anyway aren't you Irish? Have you been an American all this time? Well I guess there was one fact I was confused about.
I'm sure you'll say the same thing to Samuel L. Jackson. Well technically he said "Uncle Clarence" but the point is the same.
Regardless "Uncle Tom" is neither a racial slur nor a dogwhistle. A dogwhistle is, at least initially until it becomes publically recognized, supposed to be a secret. Not every allusion or reference is a "dogwhistle".
You guys roast MI so hard for his meme level understanding of the Bible but at least he is confused about a 2000 year old book of utter magical sky daddy nonsense while you are confused about well understood modern things.
Yes, I am Irish. Unhappily American politics and American progressive activism spills out globally. We've had American funding and copying the American play book for getting abortion legalised in Ireland, and what Machine Interface says about lying - well, the campaign running up to the abortion referendum was all about "fatal foetal abnormality" where we had winsome couples talking about the tragic end of their pregnancy and how they had to go abroad (generally to the UK) to terminate the pregnancy and this medical treatment should be legal in Ireland.
Then, on the very same day it was announced that the pro-abortion side had won (which involved an amendment to our Constitution), I am not exaggerating, literally the same day, the abortion activists were all over the media about how the fight wasn't over and they were going for abortion on demand with no limits. What's that thing about motte and bailey?
I've also had a family member affected by the leaking of American college activism around sexual harassment into our universities which ended in them walking into the sea to kill themselves (didn't happen, luckily) so yeah - I'm not feeling any too sympathetic to American progressivism as it affects my country.
I'm glad to know that "Uncle Tom" is not a slur, perhaps you can write to this lady and correct her understanding?
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93059468&t=1656190943588
"MARTIN: Do you remember when you first read "Uncle Tom's Cabin"?
Prof. TURNER: I actually read it in about fifth grade, which is young. I read it so young, that I - I think I'm one of the few African-Americans who read the novel before being really familiar with the slur. So I don't remember ever hearing my parents referring to anyone as an "Uncle Tom" before I had actually read the novel."
Does that mean I can use terms like "spic", "wop" and "dago" since those too are not slurs or dogwhistles? I mean, if the dictionary is wrong and Ferris University is wrong about "Uncle Tom" being offensive or a slur, then those other terms must be okay too!
"Uncle Tom
/ʌŋkl ˈtɒm/
noun OFFENSIVE•NORTH AMERICAN
noun: Uncle Tom; plural noun: Uncle Toms
a black man considered to be excessively obedient or servile to white people.
a person regarded as betraying their cultural or social allegiance.
"he called moderates Uncle Toms"
Origin
mid 19th century (first referring to an enslaved black man): from the name of the hero of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), an anti-slavery novel by the American writer Harriet Beecher Stowe."
https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/tom/homepage.htm
"In many African American communities "Uncle Tom" is a slur used to disparage a black person who is humiliatingly subservient or deferential to white people. Derived from Stowe's character, the modern use is a perversion of her original portrayal. The contemporary use of the slur has two variations. Version A is the black person who is a docile, loyal, religious, contented servant who accommodates himself to a lowly status. Version B is the ambitious black person who subordinates himself in order to achieve a more favorable status within the dominant society. In both instances, the person is believed to overly identify with whites, in Version A because of fear, in Version B because of opportunism. This latter use is more common today.
"Uncle Tom," unlike most anti-black slurs, is primarily used by blacks against blacks. Its synonyms include "oreo," "sell-out," "uncle," "race-traitor," and "white man's negro." It is an in-group term used as a social control mechanism."
Of course, since white progressives started appropriating black terms like "woke", naturally they would appropriate black-on-black slurs and pat themselves on the back for being ever so clever: ha, I called that house servant an Uncle Tom, he's a white man's servant! See how non-racist and anti-anti-blackness I am!
I'm a little lost here....
Clarence Thomas wrote an opinion, announced yesterday, in the case of New York Rifle and Pistol Association vs. Bruen.
I don't recall any cases overturned in that ruling, though it is fairly strong in stating that the Constitution protects certain actions and rights, and State/Federal governments have to clear a high bar to put regulations on those rights.
Or are you referring to an opinion authored by Samuel Alito, which Clarence Thomas joined in? That holding overruled Roe vs. Wade, and Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, but I can't find a reference to a third case overruled.
I think the method used there is interesting, but it doesn't automatically lead to a clean argument for overturning the case of Loving vs. Virginia.
You probably haven't paid any attention to the supreme court before, for various reasons. Thomas wrote a "concurring opinion" on the Roe ruling saying we should look at gay marriage, marital contraception, and another issue, using a basis of the wrongness of of the interpretation of the 14th amendment that was used to support Roe. You can have multiple concurring or dissenting opinions alongside any given primary opinion.
So, I'm late in returning to this thread...
I have paid attention to the Supreme Court on and off for years, which is one reason I knew off-hand that Justice Thomas authored the majority opinion in NYSRPA-vs-Bruen. I've been keeping an eye on that case since it popped up several years back. I'm also deeply aware of the Heller-vs-DC and McDonald-vs-Chicago cases that preceded it, and I somewhat expected Justice Thomas to make at least one reference to the infamous Dred-Scott-vs-Sandford opinion if he published an opinion on the NYSRPA case. (Justice Thomas did reference the Dred Scott case. I think you should look that reference up, it is an interesting commentary on the rights that were denied Dred Scott in that court case.)
I also knew that Justice Alito wrote the majority opinion in Dobbs-vs-Jackson-Womens-Health, and that Justice Thomas was among those who joined in that judgement. It was the headline item in analysis of the case for many hours.
I didn't know that Justice Thomas had written a complete concurring opinion, which took the logic of the case further than Justice Alito's opinion.
With that in mind... here is my off-the-cuff analysis of Justice Thomas's comments on revisiting other cases.
1. Apparently, the case of Grisvold-vs-Connecticut, which is to my knowledge the source of 'right to privacy' rulings relating to methods of preventing pregnancy by married couples, is mentioned as a case that Thomas thinks needs to be revisited. This is in line with his understanding that the 'substantive due process' principle was a mistake on the part of an earlier Supreme Court ruling. I can't tell if that means he thinks the right-to-privacy isn't protected by the Constitution, or if he thinks it is protected by some other Constitutional text.
2. Justice Thomas mentions Obergefell-vs-Hodges and Lawrence-vs-Texas as also needing revisiting. Once again, he doesn't mention whether he thinks these rights aren't protected, or whether he thinks that they are protected in a different way, at a different level of scrutiny.
3. Since these are not part of the primary Opinion that declares the holding of the Court, these are commentary, not official holdings of the Court.
4. I notice that Justice Thomas and Justice Alito leaned very heavily on the legal history of abortion-law in the Dobbs case, and the legal history of right-to-carry law in the NYSRPA case. If either one of them applied that logic to the Loving-vs-Virginia case, it is highly likely that they could cite enough evidence to strike down the Virginia law in question. From my vague recollection, laws against miscegenation were a late addition to the long history of marriage law in the English-speaking world.
5. It's also possible that they would skip the historical-legal-analysis and use the logic that the Court used in the Loving-vs-Virginia case: the law against miscegenation did not follow the Equal Protection clause of the relevant Amendment to the Constitution, thus it should be struck down.
Finally, to get back to your original thought: do you believe that Justice Clarence Thomas ought to have a different opinion about the court cases of Griswold-vs-Connecticut (and the others), because he is a minority? Is that a belief that a minority person must have certain political or legal opinions, to be considered a valid/proper representative of that minority?
If you have that belief, I think you are replacing the Rational part of your thought process with a tribal/political slogan.
Trying to correct the record on this is probably like spitting into a hurricane. But I suspect this talking point is likely to be very popular over the coming weeks, and this is as good a place as any to start pushing back.
Justice Thomas has insistently reiterated, in concurrences and/or dissents in dozens of cases, his view that the Due Process Clause does not protect substantive rights. He has made this argument in cases in which he emphatically believes the Constitution guarantees the right at stake, as well as in cases -- like Dobbs -- where he thinks the Constitution doesn't contemplate the asserted right at all.
As a historical matter, Justice Thomas is almost certainly correct about this. The provision that the drafters of the 14th Amendment intended to protect substantive rights against state infringement was the Privileges or Immunities Clause, which immediately follows the Birthright Citizenship Clause and logically and textually clearly has primacy over the Due Process Clause in defining the basic entitlements of U.S. citizens.
The problem is that in 1873, five years after the 14th Amendment's passage, the Supreme Court essentially nullified the Privileges or Immunities Clause. Rather than explicitly correcting that error, the Court has ever since worked around it by way of the fiction that the Due Process Clause does everything the Privileges or Immunities Clause was originally supposed to do.
Justice Thomas, who routinely opposes the notion that the Court should refrain from dislodging clearly erroneous precedents, thinks -- or, at any rate, says -- that the Court should stop perpetuating the fiction and should instead analyze unenumerated rights claims under the Privileges or Immunities Clause. No other Justice -- conservative, liberal, or centrist -- has ever signed onto this position. It would require a wrenching disruption to numerous precedents for no clear purpose beyond abstract intellectual housekeeping.
Justice Thomas gets rationalist bona fides on this score for being actually correct, and for having the audacity to suggest that might even matter. But the notion that his dissent from modern 14th Amendment jurisprudence is a first salvo against the whole armature of substantive due process doctrine badly misunderstands the nature and context of his objection.
The nature and context of his objection is that he's bitter about Anita Hill and said he'd spend the next 43 years getting even with liberals.
The amusing thing here is that if Clarence Thomas had been a good house servant on the "right" side for white people, all the things about Anita Hill etc. would have been buried as jealousy and intrigue trying to smear a man working as the successor to Thurgood Marshall.
Just like the debates around Joe Biden and accusations of sexual harassment - suddenly it was "we never said believe *all* women" and "well she's lying, it couldn't have happened like she said".
Ah, I see. So is Justice Thomas planning to drop this particular line of argument in 2034? (Or maybe you mean he became embittered when Anita Hill rejected him back in 1982. In that case, only three years to go!)
I'd advise him to stick to it, though. An abstract argument premised on an objection to an 1873 decision by anti-Reconstruction conservatives doesn't seem like a very useful vehicle for vindictive lib-owning. It is, however, the sort of thing you might stand by if you were actually a serious and principled jurist.
Clarence Thomas and "principled" together in the same sentence is so laughably partisan it proves the post modernists right.
It really is all perception, isn't it?
Perhaps he meant "Thom" as in (1) St Thomas, patron saint of lawyers and (2) St Thomas Aquinas, the Big A. In which case it is a compliment and not an insult!
This vlogger has visited Venezuela, Honduras, Nigeria, Libya, Yemen, Syria, and now Ukraine.
"Worse than World War II," says an 83-year-old Ukrainian.
"This trip was by far the most extreme trip of my life," says the vlogger. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGPaoKPck4g
Does anyone still think Russia wouldn't have invaded Ukraine if Trump were still president of the USA? That was a popular hypothesis among Trumpists a few months ago.
ETA: I think Trump flattered Putin's ego, gave him greater reason to believe Europe was available for his taking, and ultimately encouraged, on the margin, Putin's move to annex Ukraine.
It's at least plausible that Putin would have believed he could play Trump like a fiddle, at least w/re Ukrainian issues because see Trump's first impeachment, and with such a Useful Idiot in place would have held off on doing anything that would have e.g. incited a Congressional majority to insist that the US was going to be taking an anti-Russian stance (and maybe impeaching the president again if he got in the way). In this hypothetical, Russia would have spent 2021-2024 working to diplomatically and economically isolate Ukraine as best he could with the help of his patsy in the White House.
But, A: that just postpones the invasion to 2025, and B: I don't think Putin ever considered Trump to be *that* reliable an asset, so it's unlikely that he'd really have called off an invasion just to keep Trump on side.
Maybe we're using different definitions of the word "asset", but I think there's a significant distinction between a useful idiot and an asset. The latter implies intentional collusion which was never substantiated despite liberal media desperately trying for years (I would consider trump-is-a-russian-asset-ism the party-flipped equivalent to the claims that Obama was born in Kenya)
Right. Trump as a guy who is literally on Moscow's payroll in one way or another, taking orders from an FSB handler who takes orders from Vladimir Putin, was never very likely. But a useful *enough* idiot is asymptotically close to being an asset. If Putin thought that Trump would do basically anything Putin asked if he were buttered up with some flattery and a few vague promises, then I could see Putin deciding to hold off on anything that would substantially weaken Trump at home.
I don't think this is likely, but then I look at what Kim Jong Un was able to get out of Trump for a year or so with some flattery and a few vague not-really-promises. It didn't last, of course, and Trump is mercurial enough that I don't think anyone would count on him years into the future. But I can't rule it out.
Putin couldn't get trump to un-sanction the Nord stream 2 pipeline, but then Biden un-sanctioned it early in his term. Trump also kept sending weapons to Russia's enemies in eastern europe. On the other hand he was less hawkish in general than Hillary and more willing to negotiate with geopolitical rivals. Russia probably viewed him as a lesser evil but even close to an asset.
(In general I think it's good to try to make win-win deals even with our enemies, like Nixon going to China. I wouldn't want politicians to feel obligated to be jingoistic to prove their loyalty to the US or something. I appreciate trump's attempts at dialog with Kim and Putin even though he failed)
Short of giving nuclear weapons to Ukraine, there was nothing the U.S. could have done to prevent the Russian invasion, regardless of who was President. Putin made up his mind way back in 2014, I don't think Trump or Clinton or Biden factored into his decision-making at all. The world does not, in fact, revolve around us.
Trump, the guy who went to the border of Russia and gave a speech committing the United States to the defense of Europe against dictatorship? And then started shipping weapons to Eastern Europe? Trump the guy who ordered American attacks on Russian (sorry, "Mysterious Syrian Mercenaries") forces in revenge for a failed attack on a US base?
I don't think it's obvious Trump would have stopped the invasion. But I don't think Trump did much to encourage Putin. I think Trump would have doubled down in Afghanistan and I think he would have done the same in Ukraine. Trump's never met a fight, even an ill-advised one, he didn't like. But (contra the Trump supporters) that it's not obvious whether it would have stopped the invasion. Like Jonathan said, I don't think the US is a central player here. This is really about Eastern European politics and the US is just a funder of one side.
Seeing the way Biden handled Afghanistan probably made Putin less afraid of the US. But I think it had very little to do with the US. Russia's casus belli was Ukraine's repudiation of the Minsk 2 treaty and refusal to desist from trying to retake Donetsk and Luhansk.
Why do the USA, Canada, Mexico, and EU all have the same 7.5-8.6% inflation right now despite having separate independent central banks? Hard to believe it's just an enormous coincidence, but I don't have any other explanation. Unlikely they all overdid covid QE to the same exact degree. Maybe excessive QE in the US had global spillover effects somehow?
> excessive QE in the US had global spillover effects somehow?
We have a globalized financial market, it would be strange if that was not the case.
I can't speak for Mexico or the EU, but Canada largely operates as a vassal state of Blue America. For (most of) our politicians, the idea of doing something "out of step" with the Democrats in D.C. is unthinkable. Our central bank similarly seems to basically just copy what the US Central Bank does.
World oil prices might explain a 1/3rd of the synchrony, but I am interested in what explains the other 2/3ds.
Supply and Demand imbalance caused by the pandemic and emergence from the pandemic where the global paradigm was a Just In Time supply chain. JIT works wonderfully when demand and supply production are both in a state of statistical control (i.e. predictable within a stable range of common cause variation.) But the pandemic (a special cause of variation) knocked both demand and supply out of statistical stability. Demand came back stronger than supply production was able ramp up.
Central Banks even working together aren't really going to fix that imbalance quickly.
How is the central bank going to stop people who have decided that they are going into full blown "treat yourself" mode. Demand reduction is not easy to pull off without pain. How is central bank going to help ramp up supply - probably with a policy of easier money to fund ramp up - but that is the opposition to a desire for demand destruction.
New text to image model hot off the press: https://parti.research.google/
This one seems to actually be able to do text, based purely off the example images. I guess we won’t be able to get on a wild goose chase looking for a secret language in it then. Too bad, that was fun!
They show an example of it failing to do text well (as well as other failures) in the discussions and limitations section. They also point out that the example images are cherry picked. Still it seems likely that is isn't as terrible generating text as Dall-E.
Any bets on how long it takes Gary Marcus to post screenshots of the limitation section on twitter? https://i.imgur.com/R4Eebkr.png
Hello folks! I have a close friend in Pune, India, and she has a 14 yo son who is very addicted to video games. He gets aggressive when it is time to put it away. I was wondering if there was anything on this blog or its previous version (SSC) that went into this subject. I was never a subscriber of the previous blog, so (maybe that is why) I don't seem to have a search button there. They are very worried about him and I thought this might help. The parents are both doctors and have been super busy the past 2 years. They hadn't realized he was so deep into video games now. They're not sure how to get him out, so he can focus on real life, grades etc. Therapy has not worked.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CooJi1I6V1E&list=PLYxtGyYUCbEHtd1lSslEjpAwPUqHdaTy-
I find this guy very insightful on the topic, certainly helped me with similar issues, albeit not such extreme ones. It might be relevant that he is of Indian descent and uses some concepts from that culture.
Thank you so much. This looks fantastic!
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/20/ukraine-suspends-11-political-parties-with-links-to-russia
TLDR: The Ukrainian government just banned the opposition party. Ukraine has effectively just become a one-party state. Also as noted by the article, the government has seized control over all media in the country.
Other news sources (predominantly conservative) report that the government also seized the assets of the parties and possibly their representatives.
Is there a good way to interpret this sequence of events, or is this just a straightforward transition to a military dictatorship?
This is just false Russian propaganda. The main opposition to Zelensky is Poroshenko who came in second in the last election. Secondarily Tymoshenko who is also a leading opposition figure. Both remain at liberty and their political parties remain active with little to no interference. Ukraine has banned a bunch of minor parties that were funded by Russia. The leader of the Opposition Platform for Life openly said he was close personal friends with Putin and advocated for surrendering to Russia. (Before later switching after many of his political allies fled to Russia.) The vast majority of opposition parties remain active in Ukraine. In fact Zelenksy looks to have some electoral difficulties because Russia's invading where a lot of his base of support lives. And the opposition has in some cases gotten leadership positions in the armed forces.
He's also banned Russian channels from Ukraine (as in, made in Russia, not Russian speaking) and centralized state information services. I've not heard of him banning private media but I can't prove a negative. At any rate, independent reporting on the ground in Ukraine continues to happen unimpeded, as far as I can tell, by the Ukrainians.
> The Ukrainian government just banned the opposition party. Ukraine has effectively just become a one-party state.
Um, did you read the link? Ukraine has a LOT of parties. In that article (from 3 months ago, March 10), 11 parties were "suspended"..."for the period of martial law". The largest party suspended is "the Opposition Platform for Life". This party "is led by Viktor Medvedchuk, a pro-Moscow oligarch with close ties to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin." Note that this wasn't the first step; Medvedchuk was under house arrest starting on 13 May 2021 on suspicion of treason.[1]
However, if I understand correctly, the other major opposition parties (the European Solidarity party, the Batkivshchyna party and the Holos party) were not banned.[4] Any two of those parties got more votes and seats than OPZZh (Opposition Platform for Life) in the last election.[5]
Ordinarily this amount of banning would worry me a lot. However, the past 9 years of history, including the recent full-scale invasion by Russia, increases my prior that pro-Kremlin politicians might actually have sold out Ukraine to the Kremlin in a way that could reasonably be described as treason.
I'm reminded of something Operator Starsky (Ukrainian soldier and YouTuber) said: "Before this invasion I was... pessimistic. I thought Russians will invest all their resources into informational warfare in Ukraine, so we will have a bunch of pro-Russian political parties, movements, media, everythig, because it already happened many times.... because Russian army is not their strongest and most fearful weapon. It's their mouths. Whenever you see some kind of Russian public figure on the TV with moving lips, it means that at this very moment they are performing a combat operation."
After 2014, those "combat operations" have not been super successful for Russia. But since the war started*, we've seen many notable examples of their hamfisted attempts at propaganda. Russia denied it invaded Ukraine. They denied it attacked anyone in Ukraine. They denied that the mass murders in Bucha happened, suggesting instead that Ukrainians staged a fake mass murder on the same day they retook the city, and that satellite photos, showing the bodies strewn about weeks before Ukrainian forces arrived, were fake. They denied destroying Donetsk Academic Regional Drama Theatre in Mariupol, which was full of civilians and labeled “дети” (“kids”) in huge letters; they claimed instead that Ukrainian soldiers (who at the time were completely surrounded by Russian forces) used their limited ordnance to destroy the theatre themselves.
The trouble with propaganda is that lots of people actually believe it. During the siege of Mariupol,[3] the last (non-Putinist) journalist to leave the city said something that struck me:
> By this time, no Ukrainian radio or TV signal was working in Mariupol. The only radio you could catch broadcast twisted Russian lies — that Ukrainians were holding Mariupol hostage, shooting at buildings, developing chemical weapons. The propaganda was so strong that some people we talked to believed it despite the evidence of their own eyes.
So, if "the Opposition Platform for Life" did any pro-Kremlin information operations after the war started (which, conceivably, they might have done despite condemning the invasion), or even before the war started, I can hardly blame the Ukrainians for trying to shut them up temporarily. Lies work, and that makes them dangerous, especially during a war.
I still think it would be very bad if "the Opposition Platform for Life" (or its successor party) isn't allowed to run in the next election, which will be held in 2024 at the latest[2]. But there's little reason not to allow pro-Kremlin parties to run for office — hardly anyone would vote for them anyway.
If Ukraine allows Russian-funded media, however, the Kremlin will be able to rewrite history and tell more tall tales like those mentioned above.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-13/ukraine-court-puts-putin-s-ally-medvedchuk-under-house-arrest
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Ukrainian_parliamentary_election
[3] https://twitter.com/DPiepgrass/status/1506642788074536965
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Banned_political_parties_in_Ukraine
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Ukrainian_parliamentary_election
* edit: I should say the "expanded war", since Russia has been at war with Ukraine since 2014; notably, despite Russia's denials, regular Russian combat troops have been fighting Ukrainians in Donbas since 2014: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/159jVqzSfz5gR-0YwsdnbeQMsNNEOwnhjJswkvqQNqm8/edit#gid=0 (spreadsheet links broken, change en.informnapalm.org to informnapalm.org/en)
I mean, its not like they had thriving liberal democracy between February 24 and now. Wars tend to be bad for political liberties, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
AFAIK They banned AN opposition party. Ukraine is parliamentarian.
I'm told the runner up opposition in the last election is still alive and kicking; but after the war started they (and everyone else) are currently playing the role of loyal opposition.
These dudes weren't (eg, being on video on RT saying who nuking Kiev was good and fine, etc.).
I judge it thusly: no worse than banning fascist parties during WW2.
Is there a precedent of a country generally considered democratic that has been at war of national existence and did *not* ban political parties suspected of colluding with the enemy? I am not aware of any.
It is unfortunate, but so is war.
>Is there a good way to interpret this sequence of events
Here in Australia, we had a scandal a few years back in which it came out that Sam Dastyari, a Senator, had been bought by Chinese agents. He was disgraced and forced to resign. This is despite the fact that Australia is not at war with the PRC.
A party known to be controlled by literally the enemy is potentially a front for sabotage operations. Opposition Platform For Life had a serious Russian-control problem, with one of their founders having close ties to Putin and another openly calling on Putin to nuke Ukraine. Apparently the members of OPfL who didn't defect to Russia have formed a new party called Platform for Life and Peace; if *that* gets banned, I'd say Zelensky's off the reservation, but right now I'd be more cautious. He's kinda been caught between a rock and hard place.
At war. Whatever can be said about how the situation came to, now it is this way. No military dictatorship stays in EU or even NATO in peacetimes. Spain joined after democratization 1982.
Well, if a country were to become a military dictatorship after having entered the eu there would be very little we could do to kick them out
Kicking a country out seems indeed not to be an option in EU rules so far, AFAIK. After the problems with the Polish judicative changes and Hungary's "illiberal democracy", EU may change its framework.
Very unlikely i am afraid, you still need unanimity to change the treaties
How would you define a cult? I define it as a group that is fully dedicated (above all else) to a single charismatic living leader and their teachings. After that leader dies, if the group stays dedicated to his/her spirit and teachings, it may then become a religion. Perhaps there is a period in which it is unclear whether it is still a cult or a religion. Obviously, a religion has elements that might not be present in a cult, but I am not interested here in defining religion.
Under this definition, obviously something like The Cult of Isis doesn't count since Isis wasn't a living person. That was another sort of cult to be sure, but not the sort I am trying to define here.
I believe cult is the term for a group of San Fransiscans. You know, a murder of crows, a parliament of owls, a cult of San Fransiscans.
hahaha
There is the original definition that Deiseach linked.
There is also a concept which was originally called a "destructive cult", but most people do not care much about nuance so they just shortened it to a "cult". More about it here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tFo8maKd6Tp7MyXHF/how-to-talk-rationally-about-cults
Good essay. Thanks.
Wow, some of those Lifton identifiers could apply to mains steam religions.
Partially, yes. The problem is that reframing one question "cult, yes or no?" into eight separate criteria is only useful if you can judge each of them separately. (If you can't , then you just replaced one question you can't answer by eight questions you can't answer.) And the answer is not black and white anyway, it is more or less; and even benign non-religious organizations are not going to score exactly zero.
Problem with each of the eight questions, if you are not familiar with cults, is that you are supposed to judge something on a scale, where you have no idea how far the scale goes. (Kinda reminds me of https://xkcd.com/883/ .) Like, how much environmental control / admiration of leaders / pressure for perfection / group jargon is at 100% of the scale? How much exactly is 50%? If you never experienced an abusive environment, you may judge something as 9/10, when someone else would just say: eh, it's not okay, but more like 4/10.
So, ultimately, you need to get some near-mode idea of how the everyday life in cult looks like. I think that reading autobiografies of former cult members (preferably more of them, from different cults) can give you an approximate idea.
Also, what is a "religion"? The nominally same e.g. Catholicism would be practiced quite differently in San Francisco and in some Polish village. From sociological perspective, these two things have almost nothing in common, so it may make sense to say that one of them is a cult and the other is not.
I think the Lifton's criteria are useful, because they make you focus on more specific things, but ultimately, reality is complicated.
A funny example: if you take the criterium of redefining the language too literally, then Esperanto speakers should score 100%, and everyone else approximately 0%.
But that would of course miss the point. The Esperantists can revert to normal speech at any moment, and the words have about 1:1 correspondence, so everything can be translated without a problem, except for maybe two or three neologisms. That means, their ability to communicate with outsiders is not impaired, which is the thing this criterium is supposed to reflect. As a result, I would rate this criterium as maybe 10%, which is still mostly harmless. (It is still true that the language is a costly signal that outsiders cannot fake.)
Now compare with e.g. Scientologists, who mostly use nominally English words (or abbreviations thereof), but so many of them are redefined that when you listen to them talking to each other, you have no idea what they mean. And if your friend or relative joins the group, and you ask them to "ELI5" some concept to you, the explanation probably won't make much sense. This is much worse impediment to communication; one that even Google Translate cannot help you with.
There are several separate elements here.
(1) Take something like "the cult of Isis". Here, "cult" is being used in its original definition:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_(religious_practice)
"Cult is the care (Latin cultus) owed to deities and temples, shrines, or churches. Cult is embodied in ritual and ceremony. Its present or former presence is made concrete in temples, shrines and churches, and cult images, including cult images and votive offerings at votive sites.
...Cultus is often translated as "cult" without the negative connotations the word may have in English, or with the Old English word "worship", but it implies the necessity of active maintenance beyond passive adoration. Cultus was expected to matter to the gods as a demonstration of respect, honor, and reverence; it was an aspect of the contractual nature of Roman religion (see do ut des). Augustine of Hippo echoes Cicero's formulation when he declares, "religion is nothing other than the cultus of God."
'Religion' as we currently define it didn't exactly exist in the Classical world:
"Newer research shows that in the ancient and medieval world, the etymological Latin root religio was understood as an individual virtue of worship in mundane contexts; never as doctrine, practice, or actual source of knowledge. In general, religio referred to broad social obligations towards anything including family, neighbors, rulers, and even towards God. Religio was most often used by the ancient Romans not in the context of a relation towards gods, but as a range of general emotions such as hesitation, caution, anxiety, fear; feelings of being bound, restricted, inhibited; which arose from heightened attention in any mundane context. The term was also closely related to other terms like scrupulus which meant "very precisely" and some Roman authors related the term superstitio, which meant too much fear or anxiety or shame, to religio at times. When religio came into English around the 1200s as religion, it took the meaning of "life bound by monastic vows" or monastic orders."
So "cultus" would be the *physical* expression of "religio", the personal feelings towards a god. Cultus/cult was more akin to what we think of as religion - gatherings, songs of praise, prayers, sacrifices, rituals, cult statues of the deity, etc.
(2) Christianity then adopted this in the cult of the saints, which developed out of the veneration shown towards martyrs and the dead faithful:
https://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/cult_saints/
"From the fall of the Roman Empire in about 476 until the advent of the Lutheran Reformation in 1517, the "cult of saints" was one of the central forms of religious expression in Western Europe.
Saints were petitioned for aid in times of need and provided models of pious behavior. The faithful sought contact with the bodily remains of saints (relics) in the hopes of miraculous cures, built churches in their names, and fashioned their images in sculpture and painting."
https://cultofsaints.history.ox.ac.uk/
I haven't had a chance to look at this project yet, it sounds interesting.
"The Cult of Saints is a major five-year project, based at the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford and funded by an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council, which will investigate the origins and development of the cult of Christian saints in Late Antiquity.
The project, which launched in January 2014, will map the cult of saints as a system of beliefs and practices in its earliest and most fluid form, from its origins until around AD 700 (by which date most cult practices were firmly established): the evolution from honouring the memory of martyrs, to their veneration as intercessors and miracle-workers; the different ways that saints were honoured and their help solicited; the devotion for relics, sacred sites and images; the miracles expected from the saints.
Central to the project is a searchable database, on which all the evidence for the cult of saints will be collected, presented (in its original languages and English translation), and succinctly discussed, whether in Armenian, Coptic, Georgian, Greek, Latin or Syriac.
Podcast: Dr Bryan Ward-Perkins introduces the project"
(3) Where we start to get nearer to the modern usage of "cult" is in the Catholic theological language around "disparity of cult/disparity of worship":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparity_of_cult
And development of the language usage where "cult" became more to do with:
"The term "cult" first appeared in English in 1617, derived from the French culte, meaning "worship" which in turn originated from the Latin word cultus meaning "care, cultivation, worship". The meaning "devotion to a person or thing" is from 1829. Starting about 1920, "cult" acquired an additional six or more positive and negative definitions. In French, for example, sections in newspapers giving the schedule of worship for Catholic services are headed Culte Catholique, while the section giving the schedule of Protestant services is headed culte réformé."
(4) And that brings us up to the current, and usually negative, connotations of the term:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cult
"Definition of cult
1: a religion regarded as unorthodox or spurious
also : its body of adherents
2a: great devotion to a person, idea, object, movement, or work (such as a film or book)
especially : such devotion regarded as a literary or intellectual fad
b: the object of such devotion
c: a usually small group of people characterized by such devotion
3: a system of religious beliefs and ritual
also : its body of adherents
4: formal religious veneration : WORSHIP
5: a system for the cure of disease based on dogma set forth by its promulgator"
Wikipedia classes this under "Sociology and Religion":
"A cult is a religious or social group with socially deviant or novel beliefs and practices."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_religious_movement
So your definition seems to hew more to the second of the Merriam-Webster definitions:
"2a: great devotion to a person, idea, object, movement, or work (such as a film or book)
b: the object of such devotion
c: a usually small group of people characterized by such devotion"
Great devotion to a charismatic person, involving the object of such devotion and the small group of people characterised by such devotion.
Now, as to your example, without more information it's hard to say: gay heretical cult or new monastic/lay society movement? The fact that it's all single-sex doesn't necessarily mean it's a gay sex cult. Within Catholicism, generally it's groups of pious lay women who gather in a form of community, which often then evolves into becoming a religious order, but it also applies to men.
For instance, they could be a society of apostolic life:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_apostolic_life
"A society of apostolic life is a group of men or women within the Catholic Church who have come together for a specific purpose and live fraternally. It is regarded as a form of consecrated (or "religious") life.
There are a number of apostolic societies, such as the Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul, who make vows or other bonds defined in their constitutions to undertake to live the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience. However, unlike members of an institute of consecrated life (religious institute or secular institute), members of apostolic societies do not make religious vows—that is, "public vows"."
The Vincentians are an example of this, they involve both male and female religious orders and various lay movements, founded by or inspired by St. Vincent de Paul. If you've ever seen one of those charities calling themselves "Depaul", well, they're members of the Vincentian family who have decided they're too cool for school/shaken off the overtly religious connection:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincentian_Family
https://int.depaulcharity.org/about-us/
I don't know what branch, if any, of Christianity your example are. They might be Catholic-inspired or some other mainline denomination, or it could be a guy setting up his own version of a religious community (the same way Dragon House tried re-inventing the novitiate).
Very interesting. Thanks for that.
A bit off topic, but since you mention the Cult of Isis:
When historians talk about the ancient world, "cult" means "organized religion". They even call their own religion a cult, if it happens to have existed back then.
Firstly, I'm sorry for your situation and hope recovery is possible. My family lost multiple members to, um, Extreme Christ Enthusiast type groups, and that sucks to live through. Grandmother went to her grave wondering if she could have saved Evangelist Aunt from that fate. That same aunt harangued Grandmother on her deathbed that repenting and turning to Christ would cure her cancer. It was just painful for everyone. Better to nip such things in the bud. Good luck.
I liked Matt Yglesias' recent framing between "survey beliefs" (conspiracies) and "action beliefs" (cults).[1] People report believing in all kinds of weird Lizardman's Constant shit, and some may indeed actually believe such things in their heart of hearts. But it's only a cult if such beliefs actually lead followers to Do Something meaningful in real life. This neatly sidesteps the problem of charisma, which is certainly correlated (at least to the *successful* cults we hear about, e.g. selection bias), but also seems quite subjective.
Max Weber might define charisma as: 1) the ability to talk at great and eloquent length on a variety of topics; 2) the nature or characteristics of a leader, such that one is naturally inclined to deference; and 3) the ability to make listeners feel valued and understood. I think most cult leaders have 3. Researchers frequently say 2 is achieved via external threats and adverse selection. And 1...well, considering how most cults seem to revolve around This One Weird Trick, or a small selection of Shocking Truths (You Won't Believe #3!), I'm not sure this fits. Charisma of this type is quite contextual! Moreover, "decentralized" cults clearly don't have any single charismatic leader, or even necessarily coherent teachings. But they are still obviously cults, or cult-like. So I think charisma isn't quite a "general factor g" of cults.
The living-leader part seems fine though. Sometimes there's a successful successor to the Prophet, but more often, cutting off the head of the snake seems to work pretty well. Probably not a coincidence that many of history's most notable cults flamed out in murder-suicide. It's just harder to get your fix off recorded impressions of some dead guy.
[1] I know it's an OT so CW-stuff isn't expressly forbidden, but wow, feels inflammatory to link this anyway: https://www.slowboring.com/p/qanon-is-not-a-conspiracy-theory
Thanks for that. You make good points.
On the question of a charismatic leader, I'm mostly defining it tautologically: if a real-life group leader has many voluntary followers, they are by definition charismatic.
A cult is just a religious group you dislike.
Could be. I have a relative who has joined either a fringe religious group or a cult, and I am trying to determine which. To me the question hinges on whether a charismatic leader is running the thing -- something that isn't clear at the moment -- because I think the potential for abuse is much greater in this group if one dude is leading it vs. if it has a more democratic spirit to it. The relative claims it is just a bunch of people who have gotten together in this Christian church, although some of the details make it sound more like a cult than a church, due to the control it has over the members living conditions. It sounds like a gay cult in the guise of a Christian church in which some middle-aged man is fucking a bunch of young men, although that's just my best guess. Perhaps I am too cynical.
I say it seems like a gay cult because it is a bunch of young men living together and there seems to be an inordinate focus on the notion that homosexuality and masturbation are sins. Not that any of these young men are dating women.
"I say it seems like a gay cult because it is a bunch of young men living together and there seems to be an inordinate focus on the notion that homosexuality and masturbation are sins. Not that any of these young men are dating women."
if it is a religious community trying to follow the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and it's a bunch of modern young men with no women, then why are you surprised there's a lot of reminders that "masturbation is sex, which is breaking the chastity rule, and no getting around it by fucking one of your brothers here, that's breaking the rule too"*
*Allegedly some gay seminarians claimed that the vow of chastity only applied to marriage, so if they were fucking each other in seminary it didn't count. It counts, boys.
>there seems to be an inordinate focus on the notion that homosexuality and masturbation are sins
It seems at first glance it would be counterproductive for a gay cult leader sexually exploiting his followers to focus too much on how much of a sin it is.
Yet that has been a pattern among a number of cults (and larger churches). I think the idea is to instill a sense of shame which causes people to keep silent. Think of it this way: if a Christian religious leader gets caught sodomizing the young (adult, tbc) males in their congregation, they are likely to be in some social trouble regardless of whether or not they openly preached about the evils of homosexuality. By openly preaching against it, they risk being accused of hypocrisy, but that probably isn't their biggest concern at that point. They're concern is not being credibly accused of doing anything wrong in the first place. Creating an atmosphere of shame can be a strategy for making the sexual encounters with the young men seem unreal, special, absurd, unrelatable and unspeakable. And if any individual seems like they might create problems, you kick them out of the church and tell everyone else to cut off communication with them. All these men left their homes out-of-state to join this "church"; they are part of no wider community in their geographical area.
Sure, if it's about abusive control, then shame is a tool. But preaching that gay sex is sinful is going to be a problem, *unless* there is a caveat that "unless the Lord directs me to sleep with you". Several abusers have managed to use that one, not for gay sex exclusively - 'it's okay if I have several wives/concubines because the Patriarchs in the Old Testament did and I am David/Solomon/whomever come again'.
Generally, from the Catholic side, the adult sex abuse cases were liberal clerics, e.g. the accusations that Cardinal McCarrick slept with seminarians:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_McCarrick#Abuse_of_seminarians
"In 2018, multiple media outlets reported a number of priests and former seminarians under McCarrick had come forward alleging that McCarrick had engaged in inappropriate conduct with seminarians. These included reports that he made sexual advances toward seminarians during his tenure as Bishop of Metuchen and Archbishop of Newark. McCarrick reportedly routinely invited a number of seminarians to a house on the shore with limited sleeping accommodations, resulting in one of them sharing a bed with the bishop. According to former seminarian Desmond Rossi, he and a friend later realized that the archbishop would cancel weekend gatherings "if there were not enough men going that they would exceed the number of available beds, thus necessitating one guest to share a bed with the archbishop". Rossi subsequently transferred before ordination from the Archdiocese of Newark to a diocese in New York State."
So yes, using secrecy and authority, but not shame as such - the fire-and-brimstone types don't (usually) get caught out in this, McCarrick was a media favourite because he was perceived as belonging to the 'liberal' wing of the Catholic Church as auxilliary bishop of New York ("In June 2004, McCarrick was accused of intentionally misreading a letter from Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger recommending that Catholic politicians who supported abortion rights be denied the Eucharist. McCarrick led a successful push to have the USCCB allow the bishops of individual dioceses to determine who was or was not eligible to receive the sacrament of communion. Fr. Richard John Neuhaus said, "The bishops I have talked to have no doubt that [McCarrick's] presentation did not accurately represent the communication from Cardinal Ratzinger." McCarrick said that he did not want to cause "a confrontation with the Sacred Body of the Lord Jesus in my hand," and added that "the individual should be the one who decides whether or not he is in communion with the Church" and therefore eligible to receive the sacrament. McCarrick later met with then senator John Kerry, a Catholic and the Democratic nominee in that year's presidential election. Some Catholics felt Kerry should not have been allowed to receive Communion due to his political position favoring abortion rights. Although McCarrick was sometimes labelled a liberal, he was noted for adhering to church teaching on abortion, same-sex marriage, and the male-only priesthood. American Catholic journalist Michael Sean Winters disputed this claim writing "Liberals embraced him as a champion of moderation at a time when the Church was seen as increasingly reactionary. I always thought he was playing to the cameras.")
I am very interested, if you can find out any details, about this alleged church and what their inspiration is - Protestant, Catholic, DIY?
As you cite yourself, there are established uses of the word that are quite different from your definition. So what's your intent with the one you're proposing?
The established uses of the word are not "quite different" from my definition.
My response to beowulf gets into my motive.
Question: Whose thinking has been more influential (deep background) in the rationalist community: Bertrand Russell or Ayn Rand?
There's probably a survey out there about this, or someone like our dear host could easily commission one. That'd be an interesting query.
I notice that "everyone", rationalist or not, knows about Ayn Rand, or at least the straw-woman version. Very few would recognize a name-drop of Bertrand Russell. (Or Jaynes, Other Jaynes, Bayes, etc. as mentioned in other replies.) Unsure which update direction this evidence points towards.
Personally, I avoided RAND Corporation media for the longest time precisely because it seemed heavily correlated to...uh...not-rationalist-communities. Like it's not a weird coincidence that the commentariat at Bari Weiss' Common Sense substack name-drops Rand and John Galt all the damn time. And that's a *polite* example. (I say this as someone who does have libertarian leanings, incidentally.) Maybe I just missed the wheat, and there really are some transcendentally brilliant Objectivist ideas to engage with...but if I gotta wade through that kind of chaff to find them, seems like a low-VOI undertaking.
To throw a few other names on top of the intellect pile: Francis Fukuyama/Samuel P. Huntington, Friedrich (Hayek and Nietzsche), Immanuel Kant/Alisdair MacIntyre. Though this exercise also makes the mission creep of the Rationalist Movement(tm) pretty obvious...it all sounded so simple back in the halcyon days of merely "raising the sanity waterline"!
LOL! Not sure what Ayn Rand has to do with the RAND Corporation, unless you're making some sort of pun. Ayn Rand was very well-known back in the day, even did an interview in Playboy Magazine. The RAND Corporation ran a program in Machine Translation back in the 1950s that help start what became known as Computational Linguistics. They also did a lot of very 'rational' war-gaming for the Pentagon, etc.
When did the Rationalist movement become aware of itself as such?
That, but also a dig at how nuanced ideas tend to metastasize into grotesque versions of themselves once adopted by a wide and/or moneyed audience. Perhaps Rand, Inc. would have been more appropriate. Something foundational gets lost in the translation. A mirrored example might be, I dunno, Michel Foucault -> "CRT". At least they got the Panopticon part down?
To the follow-up question, having not been there during the Sequences on the Mount days, I only know the popular history that the current stage of the Rationalist Movement is delineated by the ascendance of Rightful Caliph Eliezer Yudkowsky, Doomcrier of AI. Possibly mentored by the kindly old wizard Robin Hanson, if one insists on further Campbellizing an already-narcissistic hero narrative. But it's an interesting question with no clear answer: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/07/yes-we-have-noticed-the-skulls/
The ascendance of the Caliph is a puzzle. Maybe a decade or so ago I heard about this Yudkowsky guy and went looking for something to read. I found this: Levels of Organization in General Intelligence. The title interested me because I'd given considerable thought to and published on levels of organization in, well, intelligent systems. Though I've tried several times, most recently this morning, I cannot bring myself to read the whole thing (over 100 pages). I find it tedious and empty.
Philosophers and logicians distinguish between the intension of a concept or a set and its extension. Its intension is its definition. Its extension is its footprint in the world, in the case of a set, the objects that are members of the set. Yudkowsky builds these elaborate contraptions from intensions with only scant attention to the possible or likely extensions of his ideas. He’s building castles in air – though his attention seems to have become transfixed by the torture chambers deep within those castles.. There’s little there but his prose, some formulas here and there and a diagram or two.
I don't see how he ever got a reputation for knowing something about AI.
I think the general consensus now is that EY is clearly Smart, with some number of potential Very's prefixed, or at least knows how to Perform Smartness Very Very Well. Whether there's much actual substance underlying that style remains hotly contested. Personally I like reading him more for the Ribbonfarm-y type stuff than the Let's Get Down to Business And Align AI-type stuff. Even total bullshitters can be successful in constructing thought-provoking magical thinking. Intension without extension, as you say.
Brevity is definitely not the soul of his wit though...definitely an outlier even among five-digit-wordcount rationalist writers. I think that's where a lot of the emptiness comes from. "Surely," one is left to wonder, "if there are actual Ideas in here, they could be expressed more concisely!" It's not like Rat ideas are intrinsically impossible to run through the Popularism algorithm.
Yes, VV Smart I'll give him, that's obvious enough. Ribbonfarm?
As for 5-digit rationalist writers, Scott's an interesting case. I've only read a bit here and there. Back in 2017 he did a review of a book from 2017, Behavior: The Control of Perception, by William Powers, ttps://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/06/book-review-behavior-the-control-of-perception/ That book happens to be one of my foundational books, but Powers' ideas have mostly disappeared (except for a dogged band of loyalists) so I was surprised to see it turn up at all. And Scott clearly got some of what Powers was up to while freely admitting that some of it just zipped by him. So there's that – and, incidentally, that's a book about levels of organization in an intelligent system (us) and is much more coherent that EY's LOGI article.
And then earlier this year Scott wrote this extraordinary post about biological anchors (I found out about it through Tyler Cowen). He wrote it in two voices, one considering the arguments in a reasoned measured way. And then there's this other voice, allotted a smaller word count, of satirical amazed outrage. That's one thing. The other thing is that it is only at the very end that Scott gets around to what's really on his mind, which is fear of a rogue AI. That all but came out of nowhere. It wasn't announced at the beginning nor discussed in the course of pondering just when AGI will materialize.
It's like the magician goes through an elaborate and amazing routine of making a woman disappear into a piece of magical apparatus and then, just when he's about to bring her back, the apparatus drops out of view and the magician is left holding his hat. From which he proceeds to remove, not the traditional rabbit, but a pit bull.
Russell's views on uncertainty, doubt and evidence seem very in line with rationalism. I also don't see Rand supporting EA, which many rationalists do.
<quote>
Bertrand Russell’s Ten Commandments
Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
Do not think it worthwhile to produce belief by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
Never try to discourage thinking, for you are sure to succeed.
When you meet with opposition, even if it is from your family, endeavour to overcome it with argument and
not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.
Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do, the opinions will suppress you.
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for if you value intelligence as you
should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
Be scrupulously truthful even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise, for only a fool will think that is
happiness.</quote>
Neither would be *most* influential -- that's probably Julian Jaynes.
May I suggest another Jaynes, namely E. T. Jaynes ? [1] His book Probability Theory: The Logic of Science was quite influential in proselytizing the over-the-top notion that Bayes rule is the true, end-of-all logic of science. OTOH he gives all the credit to Jeffreys.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Thompson_Jaynes
I mean ET Jaynes
Ah - that makes more sense!
Or Thomas Bayes.
I should think Bayes more than Jaynes. But who reads Bayes in their teens?
But I think many people encountered Bertrand Russell or Ayn Rand in their teens and it changed their world. For me it was Russell, but I had a good friend for whom Rand was the revelation.
Rand seems to appeal to Libertarians and almost no one else. Russell is less often read nowadays than he once was, but (like Chesterton) he remains tremendously quotable. Like Voltaire, Russell’s good ideas have long since become part of the Enlightenment worldview, while his bad ideas and the extent to which he shared the prejudices of his era is of interest only to biographers. On balance, then, I’d say Russell
How does Russell specifically influence “rationalists” though. His political philosophies changed with the wind, and with the times. He was predominantly a socialist in the strong European tradition, and inherently a strong pacifist and anti nuclear campaigner. I see little to none of that here. If this comment section is the rationalist community.
Rationalism is not a political philosophy, and is entirely consistent with one's political views changing as the world changes (or as one's knowledge and understanding of it improve).
Well, Russell influenced me a lot when I was in my teens, but not so much now. The question was directed at one's early intellectual trajectory.
And of course he co-authored the Principia Mathematica with Whitehead. I assume no one reads it these days except people interested in the histories of philosophy, logic, and mathematics, but it was an enormously influential book early in the 20th century. One of my undergraduate literature professors was a serious, and I mean serious, book collector. He had a first edition of the Principia sitting on a chair in the entrance way to his house the first time I visited him, along with a bunch of other students. When I took symbolic logic, the course ended with the construction of number that Russell and Whitehead used in the Principia. Beyond that and his technical work in philosophy, Russell was an enormously influential public intellectual at mid-century.
That’s cool 🙂 Principia Mathematica reminds me of Spinoza’s stuff: a good-faith, intellectually serious effort to account for matters of importance which, despite not really succeeding, deserves admiration as a milestone in the intellectual progress of humanity
Yeah, me too: I had to look up who Jaynes was just now, and then was like “oh yeah, that Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind guy - kinda nutty. Somewhere between Chariots of the Gods and Freud.
LOL!
Really?
Bertrand Russel. Ayn Rand's influence is definitely there, but I think "Heroic rationality" is a substantially smaller part of the rationality movement than "Less Wrongness".
Which is on a strange trajectory that is at most only tangent to rationality at a point or two
Why would Objectivism be a rational trait?
The degree to which Ayn Rand changed the course of popular philosophy in the US is such that a modern reader can't even recognize what her villains actually represented.
Ann Rand had very little effect outside of, latterly, a few Internet forums. I don’t think she’s even taught anywhere.
Does that usually work?
Does what work?
Can you give an example of what they represented?
Why not? Rand certainly believed in being rational.
And Marx was a scientist. Or so he said.
Many make that claim.
Reading the current DSL discussion of The Iliad. As for comments along the lines that the gods are portrayed as shallow and fickle, I always took Greek gods to be an early attempt to explain human psychology. It's not really about the gods. Polytheism is a good metaphor for the war of emotions and rationality inside us all. Monotheism supplants that complex yet legible psychology with reductive good vs. evil ethics, a self that is a mystery to us, and a God that won't accept ignorance as an excuse.
I think the metaphors of the polytheists are more accurate in describing what human existence is like than those of the monotheists. Of course, this argument is a bit circular because your beliefs will affect your experience.
"I always took Greek gods to be an early attempt to explain human psychology. It's not really about the gods. Polytheism is a good metaphor for the war of emotions and rationality inside us all."
In one development of it, yes, as thinkers got to work on the problem of "why are the gods like that?"
But the antecedents of the gods are that they are natural forces, or abstract qualities like Fate. We see this in the creation myths, where the first elements are things like Chaos or Night or the primordial waters, and out of these arise by minglings and couplings things that gradually become, by generations, the personified gods.
Zeus shares common roots with other gods, all coming from Dyeus, the personification of the sky:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dy%C4%93us
As cultures become more sophisticated and societies arise and become complex, the conceptions of the gods also undergo changes. So they can come to resemble glorified humans, and be understood as "elements of human psychology", and then the philosophers of the day have to grapple with the problem of why the gods, as portrayed in Homer and other poets, are such a quarrelsome, disreputable lot, always drinking and fighting and committing adultery and generally behaving in a manner not like austere eternal entities should behave.
But always, even with those all-too-humanised Greek gods, there is a moment when the primitive element shines through, and one of the gods, even the small, amusing ones, will look at you with eyes as inhuman as an animals and turn you into a deer to be rent apart by your own hounds, or a snake-headed monster, or blasted with the lightning glory of their divinity, because the remote, implacable forces of nature shine through. The storm or the flood or the disease that strikes your crops or your herds or your children does not care about you and cannot be reasoned with, so all you can do is hope that the rituals of appeasement do indeed work as the traditions claim they do; that Mars or Jupiter *is* enough like a human to make and keep contracts and bargains.
Saying that the psychology of Augustine or even Paul is "reductive good vs evil ethics" makes it sound like you've not ever read them. And if you think that our self is perfectly legible to us you are delusional.
I think that once you start suggesting some variation of "these people who performed elaborate and expensive rituals to their gods, had entire cottage industries of selling miracle talismans to curse their enemies and bless themselves, had many superstitions and local cults devoted to nature worship, made apostasy a capital crime, etc. didn't REALLY believe in gods, they were just a metaphor for humanity", you've lost the plot.
In drama, that is certainly a role the CHARACTER of the gods can play, because most fiction in the ancient world is ultimately about either humanity's relationship with the natural world, humanity's relationship with the gods, or humanity's relationship with itself, but there's an irritating tendency online to try and portray ancient cultures (especially the Greeks and Romans) as Enlightened Rational People Who Were Actually Atheists When You Think About It to then be contrasted with the Superstitious Science-Hating Evil Christians, which ironically enough is a morality-play version of the past which I can't stand to see perpetuated, even accidentally.
Our use for Greek mythology might be "a way to think about human psychology", and it could even be the case that some ancient Greeks used their myths in this way. (Presumably there'd be some overlap there with the people writing drama.)
So what if _most people_ didn't use these myths as thinking tools? What were _most people_ like, back then? Looking at American Christianity today, there's all kinds of uses and meanings. Megachurch pastors use Christian belief to enrich themselves. Right-wing idealogues abuse Christian belief to sway masses of people to vote in favor of unfettered capitalism. Authentic believers use Christianity as a source of comfort, or in perhaps smaller numbers, as a framework for thinking about the world.
Is Christianity "a tool to implement right-wing policies", "an opiate for those who prefer not to think", or "a framework to help people who are so inclined to try to reason about their role in the world"? ...Yes.
So, what is the Greek mythos to us? What was it to dramatists, or to thinkers? It makes perfect sense that those are different things than what the mythos would have been to day-to-day believers.
I didn't say that they didn't believe in these gods, but I suppose I was unclear. I'm suggesting that powerful emotions were understood as originating from various gods as opposed to stemming from the hearts and minds of humans.
My line "It wasn't really about the gods" was meaningless drivel.
I agree, and so does the historian Brett Deveraux who has a 4-part series on practical polytheism starting at https://acoup.blog/2019/10/25/collections-practical-polytheism-part-i-knowledge/ . The headline quote: "it is generally safe to assume that people in the past believed their own religion".
I have trouble convincing people that modern humans today believe their own religion or ideology. See previous threads and how much trouble I had convincing people "No, China actually is run by a bunch of people who believe in Communism."
Dreyfus's "All Things Shining" goes into this in depth. And yeah, the god-archetypes can be understood as primal drives of humankind, which has interesting implications once you start to worship them.
Interesting. Thanks.
"[or even outright Lovecraftian abominations in some Mesoamerican or early Mesopotamian mythologies]"
Cool! Any tentacles?
Yup, that certainly sounds Lovecraftian. Distinctly more cold-blooded that, say, Fenrir.
Ancient religion, from an anthropological perspective, is absolutely is about explaining the chaos of the natural world by anthropomorphizing it and creating a sense of stability through ritual. Indeed, there's very suggestive evidence that the rituals usually come FIRST, with the wider concept of the gods evolving out of (presumably) some hominid asking "Why do we sacrifice a virgin lamb on the full moon and burn its heart in a special fire-pit?" to the shaman one day.
Well, I think you should re-review the last 50 years of Anthropological literature on religion. ;-) There are good arguments that religion acts as an instrument social binding and community identification. Many (but not all) anthropologists distinguish between magical practices and religious practices, because they serve different purposes. As for explaining the world, I think most of humanity isn't looking for an explanation of the world. Does a shaman in the Taiga of Siberia spend much time thinking about why the world exists? How about a waitress in Milwaukie? But the shaman helps to bind her community together with communal rituals. And the waitress in Milwaukie goes to church probably more to socialize with her friends — thus connecting with her larger community — rather than going to church to understand the origin of the Universe.
1. I respect anthropologists' beliefs about the world about as much as you respect priests' beliefs, judging by what you're saying.
2. I think it is deeply insulting to the shaman and the waitress to think that they lack any introspection or philosophical yearning.
Touché! But I've always been underwhelmed (and disappointed) by the lack of curiosity that I've observed in my fellow humans.
Also, let me clear, I don't regard Anthropology as a science. But they are good at finding common patterns in human social organizations. And they definitely do OK as stamp collectors (to channel Ernest Rutherford).
And where do you think I'm being critical of the beliefs of priests, shamans or waitresses? I'm a Popperian and I acknowledge that there are other ways of knowing things than through the experimental method and science. I'm not a materialist, tough. I'm a mystic who happens to have been firmly grounded in the sciences and the scientific method before I became a mystic. Priests, shamans, and waitresses should be allowed to believe whatever they want as long as they don't go around forcing their beliefs on others.
I didn't say you were being critical. I said you were insulting them by implying that they're vapid and have no interest in the big questions. In my experience people who have no interest in the big questions in secular societies simply become secular, and in premodern societies they certainly DON'T become part of the priesthood. The fact such comparisons came so glibly to your lips is, in fact, insulting to them.
What makes you say the natural world is chaotic? I would call myself an outdoorsman, certainly have spent plenty of time in the wild, although I've never lived there for any length of time. But I would not say the natural world is chaotic, at all. On the contrary, it's deeply ordered. Everything happens for a reason, and the reason is available to the careful observer. In that sense, I would say it is the human world that is chaotic. Bears and trees and the weather -- very ordered, and quite predictable to the good observer. Humans -- much less so.
You could argue that the gods are associated with nature *because* nature is ordered, makes sense, and I can easily see early man, caught up in the chaos that is other people, invoking the settled power of nature as a way to express his wishes for order among humans, or his belief that the natural order will ultimately triumph over the madness of humanity.
Some humans certainly think like you do, and some do not.
As prime illustration of this, Taoism saw nature as a perfectly harmonious and divine engine humanity needed to align itself with, while Confucianism saw Earth as existing in a state of confusion as an opposite pole to Heaven in accordance with Chinese cosmological thought, with order only being created on earth by the observation of filial piety.
Likewise, many cultures saw parts of the natural world (the heavens, with their ordered movement) as stable and ordered, but other parts (volcanoes, earthquakes, sudden storms, wild animal attacks, droughts, etc.) as chaotic.
And of course you can argue that. You can argue anything if you tie your mind in fancy enough knots.
Once your civilization has agriculture and serious population, the chaotic motion of humans becomes every bit as important to your life as the perhaps somewhat more orderly proceedings of nature, and thus every bit as necessary to try to explain and work around.
Depends on where you live. In Egypt the Nile's flood was predictable, the weather was predictable compared to weather elsewhere, and the gods were generally benevolent and orderly. In Mesopotamia, things were a lot less predictable with more natural disasters, and the gods tended to be violent and easily provoked.
I there's some confusion here on what "predictable" means. It's predictable that every now and there will be a lot more rain than usual, or a lot less. But these things don't happen shazam on a moment's warning, you can see them coming on. Yes, it's true *in what years* there will be a lot more rain than usual can't be predicted -- I'm dubious this was lead to a feeling of "chaos" among people who lived with it. It doesn't in modern farmers. You understand that there is variation in weather, just as you understand a particular animal you meet might be hungry or not, in a bad temper or not, just as you understand the rainstorm might clear up quickly or slowly, and so on.
People who live in nature don't expect to be able to predict exactly what will happen, moment by moment, according to some chart. That's the habit of human office workers who live in a highly artificial surroundings and (unnaturally) expect everything that happens to them will be able to be scheduled down to the minute. It's the *modern* mind that expects to be able to predict the amount of rainfall 12 months out, or exactly how many hurricanes there will be, what strength ,when they will land, et cetera.
I am certain primitive man *wondered* what underlay these things, and when he found reliable patterns he was pleased. But I do not think "chaotic" is what would have come to mind. Unknown, yes, and maybe deriving from some complex pattern not as yet realized, sure. But that's not the same as "chaotic" = having no pattern at all, no underlying reason, just random weird shit.
And yet, one can very easily come to that conclusion when dealing with people, because people genuinely don't have underlying processes that direct them to various behavior (provided we stipulate free will ha ha). So if I live among bears, they start off unpredictable, sure, because I haven't studied them, but the more I study them the more predictable they get, and I am satisfied that they follow patterns -- maybe complex patterns, maybe patterns I don't understand yet -- and are not chaotic. People don't work the same way. You can study them all your life and they still aren't predictable (although more so, to be sure). Maybe it's because we have limits in studying each other that we don't have when studying nature.
>The *modern* mind
No such thing. The people of the ancient world were just as curious about trying to divine the future and understand the hidden principles of cosmological order that underpinned reality. The Wuxing and Taiji weren't invented in the 20th century, they were developed before Aristotle had written his book on natural science.
>It's the *modern* mind that expects to be able to predict the amount of rainfall 12 months out, or exactly how many hurricanes there will be, what strength ,when they will land, et cetera.
Not convinced. European ethnographic record is is full of folk weather lore of the form "if the badger scratches its back / swallows travel unladen/other random observations made before/at St. Wossname's Eve, one should harvest early next year/expect 40 days of similar weather/whatever".
The more academically inclined and the elite were extremely interested in movements of stars. After the introduction of print, almanacs were popular and absolutely claimed to able to tell much about weather, harvest, natural phenomena, and medical instructions ... down to choice of the optimal day for bloodletting to treat your indigestion according to astrology and humoral theory, all of it written and printed 12 months in advance.
I used to think we would progress beyond religions, but now I think too many of us are hard-wired for religion, and people will make up their own religions in the absence of them. I don't have a great definition for "religion" though. Best I can do is faith in something irrational. I would put "caring about humanity" in that category.
It would be interesting to see the impossible-to-make map of religious density per capita across the globe. Nietzsche claimed that Northern Europeans have little talent for religion. I wonder if that is in fact the case.
"Religion" is a symptom, rather than the cause. Atheists, politicians, pundits, cranks and that one uncle at every Thanksgiving dinner (you know the one)... they can all be hopelessly dogmatic about their non-religious beliefs. I've even become convinced that a large fraction, if not the majority, of ordinary people are insane, at least in a compartmentalized way pertaining to certain topics. Some Democrats, some Republicans, some religious, some new-age, some atheist. All f**king crazy.
I'm having trouble with my dad right now, actually, regarding a certain unnecessarily-politicized issue. After using a whole bunch of reasoning on him unsuccessfully... I hoped to convince him to think more on the meta-level by sending him the book "Scout Mindset". After reading the book in less than a day, he told me the author "overthinks things" and immediately sent back a 4-page letter that I would summarize as a (purely object-level) gish gallop of his favorite dogmas or "alternative facts", shall we say. Well, I got kinda angry and sent a 30-page rebuttal. Then he told me that not only do I not have a "scout mentality" (he couldn't even remember the book title, apparently), but I don't even *know* what a "scout mentality" is. Other than that, he's given virtually no response to my 30-page letter.
As another example, I mentioned the "97% consensus" to someone on YouTube and they proceeded to tell some bald-face lies about the Cook 2013 consensus paper, telling me that actually the consensus was over 99%. Well, as a writer at SkepticalScience I had insider access to all the messages that were exchanged by the volunteers working on that paper, and I knew that what this person was saying was utter bullshit. In fact I knew that even calling it a "97% consensus" was overplaying the hand, as evidenced by the fact that a few "skeptic" papers had been included in the "97%". But actually the consensus was over 99%, this person insisted, never mind that Cook himself explicitly rejected an "over 99% consensus" paper written by others. So I have to wonder, how is it that a 97% consensus wasn't "good enough" for this person, so that they felt the need to lie a >99% consensus into existence?
I used to think humans were hard-wired for some kind of religious/mystical/superstitious beliefs and/or rituals. Nowadays I think that can all be reduced to simpler terms: tribalism + magical thinking + artistic creativity.
I agree, but I would disaggregate "religion" into its component functions and then say that each function will be filled by some new belief regardless of rationality. So, basis of morality, source of community, fear of death, need for ritual, comfort in time of loss, mystical experience, drawing us vs. them boundaries, etc. All of these functions get combined in one religion. Take the religion away and we still need something to accomplish those functions. Lately it seems like politics is stepping into the void.
Do we really need a basis of morality, or ritual or mystical experience?
We need laws (maybe), but can't we base them all on preferences rather than morality?
Rituals? I want to avoid them as all I have encountered have been a boring waste of my time. If others want them, fine, but don't make me participate or take my shoes or ballcap off or hear someone sing.
Mystical experience? I'm not sure what this means, but I suspect plenty of people don't want to have them.
ETA: However, if you are correct about politics filling the void, then I agree that if most people do need those things, I sure wish they would go to church instead of the ballot box.
"Rituals? I want to avoid them as all I have encountered have been a boring waste of my time. "
Some fragmentary rituals look useful to me:
"I call this meeting to order"
"Proposed? Seconded? All in favor? <count1> All opposed? <count2> Passed (or not)"
I'm not sure we need them but I suspect having a shared common set of assumptions makes the process of deciding how to respond to novel moral questions easier. If you have an accepted reference book (Bible, Quran, etc.) you at least have a starting point that narrows the set of possible decisions somewhat. The ability to come to a settled decision is often more important than coming to the optimal decision as a society.
I wasn't trying to argue that each individual has all the needs that a traditional religion fills, actually the opposite, that religion can be thought of as a collection of the functional and accepted solutions to common problems. As other solutions are developed the scope of religion gets smaller. If you take away enough functions of religion what is left is just a collection of superstitions that can't really stand on their own, belief in the religion collapses and former believers have to look around for new answers.
>We need laws (maybe), but can't we base them all on preferences rather than morality?
I feel this might be more controversial than you think at least to mainstream American civic sensibilities (the ones I feel qualified to speak on, obviously not the only ones that matter). I think a lot of people across the spectrum idealize the legislative task as a *fundamentally* moral one, trying to seek out the policies most harmonious with some agreed-upon American Ideals, and I suspect they would find the framing of "seeking functional equilibrium in incoherent individual and group preferences" alienating or crass.
This isn't to say it's not a reasonable framework and I think a lot of people here would be down with it, but I think it's a not-at-all-trivial evolution from prevailing popular conceptions of law.
Hmm, I don't think religion has to be irrational. On a meta level, if everyone believes in god, that seems like it might be a good thing. (We all behave nicely to one another.) So (maybe) I don't directly believe in god, but believe in the idea of god. That is at least an idea I'm thinking about.
God is so powerful, that she doesn't need to exist to save the world.
I think “believing in something irrational” is both too broad and (I suspect) too centered on your particular biases. I’m not claiming that all people believe in religions for rational reasons, but I do think some people have genuinely felt that they had religious experiences that are compelling evidence of the existence of god.
If an archangel appeared before me, I felt the glory of god, and was told to repent and spread the gospel, I’d definitely increase the likelihood of the bible being true. Whereas you might increase the likelihood I was schozofrenic. Thus, we could rationally disagree about the existence of god because of our different internal experiences
I feel like it doesn't have to be an irrational thing though. Maybe just a need to be part of something bigger, to the point where one doesn't think too critically about it.
Mystics, of at least the practices I'm familiar with (Kabbalists, Sufi's, Gnostics, Vajrayana practitioners) all use rational discourse to try to classify and understand their experiences. As for organized religions, Christian scholastic philosophers (such as Aquinas) where quite rational in using the logical tools they had at their disposal to try to systematically understand their relationship to God. Jewish and Islamic scholars did the same with their religion. (And I'd dare anyone to call a Talmudic scholar irrational, because they're trained in logical discourse focused on the Laws).
Calling any of these beliefs irrational is both incorrect and denigrative — and it usually stems from the ignorance of the speaker. The internal experiences that mystics and the religious may have may be *non-rational* — i.e. the experience is not created through inductive or deductive reasoning — but their discourse about these experiences is purely rational. And if you scratch the surface, Western Materialist thought largely owes its initial development to the efforts of mystical traditions trying to systematize their internal experiences in relation to the external world.
And in other Google-religious-lawsuit news, an offshoot of G.I. Gurdjieff's Fourth Way seems to have taken root in Google's GDS department. My immediate thoughts were: (a) I'd rather work these people than a bunch of evangelical Xtians...
...and (b), how did Kevin Lloyd find out about what their religious affiliations were? In most of the corporate environments where I've worked, discussing religion or politics is a good way create workplace tensions—and it usually escalates until someone runs to HR to complain. Were they trying to convert him? If so, shame on them. Or was Kevin pushing his own philosophy and/or religion on them, or worse yet mocking them? In which case shame on Lloyd.
Sorry, this is behind a paywall...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/16/technology/google-fellowship-of-friends-sect.html
"..and (b), how did Kevin Lloyd find out about what their religious affiliations were? In most of the corporate environments where I've worked, discussing religion or politics is a good way create workplace tensions"
From the discussion on DSL, Lloyd asked them (or overheard them talk about) where they *lived*, which is a pretty normal topic of workplace discussion. He was confused/intrigued when so many of them turned out to be from the same small town he'd never heard of, until he mentioned that part to an acquaintance who recognized name as belonging to a "town" that was mostly a cult or cult-ish compound.
I don't have anything interesting to add to this but if anyone reading understands both Gurdjieff and the Fellowship of Friends well enough to explain how the former turned into the latter, i'd be fascinated to hear.
(This relates to another question in the open thread, as to why we'd ask questions instead of doing google searches. In this case, internet searches turn up only sensationalist hit-pieces on the FoF or their own documents, and Gurdjieff himself is famously and intentionally difficult to understand.)
There was a functioning Gurdjieff group in NYC (at least up until recently). Gurdjieff inspired a few spin offs — the first being P.D. Ouspensky's group. But Ouspensky didn't have Gurdjieff's charisma and it faded. And I've heard of some other Gurdjieff-inspired groups over the years. I don't know whether the Friends' founder studied with any of the Gurdjieff groups, or rather he just improvised around what Gurdjieff wrote. NB: If it were ever used as one, _Beelzebub's Tails to His Grandson_ would be the weirdest frigging holy book ever to become a religious manual!
I don't know if *any* of the groups that claim to follow the teachings of Gurdjieff do any of his exercises. Fritz Peters' _My Journey With a Mystic_ probably gives the best first-person view of Gurdjieff's methods — which was to do things that would short-circuit people's learned and/or innate responses to social stimuli. Sort of like Zen Koans and possibly like some of the EST exercises I've heard described to me. Peters was basically abandoned by his parents and was delivered to Gurdjieff's school in France as a young boy. Gurdjieff took him in and raised him.
BTW: Lee Smolin, the cosmologist (who IMHO has offered up the best outline of a theory of origin of the universe(s) and the fine-tuning of cosmological constants), said in an interview that his parents were part of that NYC Gurdjieff organization. And I think he attributed his philosophical approach to cosmological questions partly to the training he received as a child. (This relates to another thread on the origin of universes and those God/no-God arguments we get into.)
I don't see anything claiming the former *turned into* the latter. If you are going to start a religion, a good way to do so is to claim it has roots inside another religious tradition. Understanding the older religion has nothing to do with it.
Not everyone can pull himself up by his own bootstraps like L. Ron.
Also, it was the NYTimes article that claimed they were an offshoot of the Fourth Way, but they didn't mention Gudjieff by name. If it was Gurdjieff they made a mistake by labeling the Fourth Way founder as Russian-Armenian. Gurdjieff was from Georgia.
...and don't forget Paul!
Even if you don't like my example of Paul, we've got Mohammed starting a monotheistic religion based on Abrahamic examples in a culture of polytheists. We've got the Shakyamuni Buddha rejecting the Vedanta teachings of times. We've got Joseph Smith finding his golden tablets. Cults are just religions without a lot a followers — maybe I should say religions are cults with a lot of followers.
He *definitely* started from another religion, though.
How so? Yeshua ben Yosef was one of several known apocalyptic prophets wandering around the Sea of Galilee from 1st Century BCE up until the Diaspora (after the bar Kokhba Revolt). The Jewish religious establishment of the time didn't regard him as one of their own — and despite Yeshua and his apologists trying to place him in the mainstream of Jewish historical determinism (i.e. a person of the Davidic line will be the Meshiach, yadda yadda yadda), Yeshua didn't fulfill all the requirements for the Meshiach set forth in Jeremiah, Isaiah, etc — the most important being was that sacrifices in the Temple would continue (and from a perspective priestly self-interest, the revenue from those sacrifices would continue to support the priesthood). Yeshua proved he was not the Meshiach material by his fracas with the money changers at the Temple, and Jewish authorities rightfully regarded him as a dangerous rabble rouser. And, yes, they probably did turn him over to the Romans for claiming to be the King of the Jews. "Hey, Pontius Pilate, we've got a rabble rouser here by the name Yeshua claiming to be the King of *your* subjects, the Jews. Do you think Tiberius will mind?" Thus, Yeshua was executed with a Roman punishment under the Roman legal system.
Paul repurposed Yeshua's teachings to form his own cult. To get gentile converts he dropped the Leviticus and the Law thing. And his actions pissed off the remaining Jewish followers of Yeshua in Judea — who thought that Paul was going against Yeshua's admonition to his followers to continue to keep the Law. In Peter's letter James, he calls Paul "the enemy."
Anyway, to claim that Christianity has anything to do with Judaism is a stretch because it's at least two steps away from the religion that Yeshua was raised in — and it was one GIANT step away from the original Yeshua Meshiach cult. It's like calling Islam an offshoot of Judaism because they venerated the same prophets that the Jews do.
I like your analysis. Some even say, Jesus didn't exist at all. Paul probably did exist AFAIK. I really don't care much. I deeply know about the one love. I have heard about agent detection, the third man factor and stuff. Greek philosophy and possibly buddhism may well have been crucial in opening jewish wisdom to gentiles when that was due, modifying it still. Catholicism is good enough for me. God forgive me.
I like your comment a lot. Very interesting.
I do, however, think you are missing my original point, which was "claim it has roots inside another religious tradition. Understanding the older religion has nothing to do with it."
Doesn't Paul make such a claim for his religion? Doesn't he, according to the points you raise above, fail to understand much about the religion he claims his cult has roots in?
Further evidence for the heritability of intelligence: Gopal Prasad- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopal_Prasad
He is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and has proved several important results in his field. He is one of eight brothers, hailing from a poor family in Bihar India. Four brothers ended up becoming world class mathematicians, and the other four ended up having very successful multi-national businesses. One of his brothers, Dipankar Prasad, got his PhD at Harvard, and is now the foremost number theorist in South Asia. All of his children, nieces and nephews, etc have studied in some of the most famous universities in the world like Harvard, MIT and the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, and have gone on to become professors at MIT, UC San Diego, etc. They recently established a professorship in Gopal's name at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.
Putting aside that this isn't evidence either for or against because there are no environmental controls... heritability has a slightly more precise technical meaning and I feel it is being misused slightly here. Excuse my pedentry but I feel it is an important point because I see the word being thrown around a lot in the wrong way.
It's not about the degree to which a trait is genetic, It's a statistical measure of the observed variation that can be explained genetically.
Subtle difference but it can lead to confusing conclusions if misunderstood.
Sapolsky lays the point out in one of his lectures on human behavioural biology.
"Because heritability is a measure of variation, the fact that nearly everyone has 10 fingers to start with creates no variability in the number of fingers you have, and thus no heritability of the trait (which is 100% from your genes). However, wearing earrings in the 1950's in the US was universally common among women and verboten among men, so the heritability ends up being 100% since the one genetic factor, female or male, accounts for all of the variation."
If there was a dominant gene that made one have 11 fingers instead of 10, wouldn't the "number of fingers" be a completely heritable trait?
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/321607
Not if there are also a bunch of people who have lost their fingers due to accidents - which I'd venture to say is more likely in most random population samples. It's a toy example, we can separate that factor out and question if people were born with that amount of fingers, or had accidents in their lifetime. We can't do that with more complex traits.
My main point here was actually that the term heritability should be questioned, as it has a more complex meaning than just "is genetically determined by", and that things can statistically be 100% heritable without having genetic causes, and vice versa.
This is almost certainly evidence *against* the genetic heritability of intelligence, and probably against the heritability of *intelligence* per se. This isn't what we see from genetic traits. You don't have eight brothers all of whom are over seven feet tall, and all their kids are over seven feet tall.
Seems like the controlling mechanism here must be something like, at the very least, a family culture which demands not just, or not only, intelligence, but success within fairly defined fields. And plausibly what drives outsized success in those fields is not unique intelligence but something like family connections.
If we concede that some large amount of excess success is driven by non-biological, non-intelligence factors, this is (fairly mild) evidence against some of the less extreme examples of seemingly hereditary intelligence (ie, it admits other explanations).
(It is none the less obviously the case that intelligence is fairly heritable, and that one of the important vectors of that heritability is genetic.)
You don't have every group of 8 brothers sharing the same traits, but isn't it bound to happen sometimes?
This isn't a binary on-off trait, but a scalar trait. If we're saying, "8 of 8 people are in the top 0.0001% of a distribution," that's statistically unlikely to the point of impossibility in terms of these kind of multi-factor genetic traits. If that's our genetic explanation for the situation, it should push us to consider non-genetic factors.
(This was, for example, Scott's point when he was looking at the case of that Hungarian dude who trained all three daughters to be high-level chess players. You can't explain their level of success through genetics alone, something else has to be in the mix.)
Just to add to that, it's thought to be a combination of thousands of binary on-off traits, which approximates well to a scalar normal distribution. At least in the case of intelligence.
So if intelligence is partly inherited and partly random, then the heritable part was impressive in the Prasad family, and the random rolls were all across the board. That is perhaps why Gopal was much more impressive in his mathematical achievements than his brothers (who are professors at UNC Chapel Hill, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, etc).
Similarly, although 7 ft parents do not always have 7 ft children, it is highly likely that all their children will be of above average height.
Your points about influence I'm academia are also well taken.
Back in 2017, Scott had an intriguing "so, so speculative" post tying together susceptibility to optical illusions, autism, schizophrenia, and transgenderism[1].
Was there ever any follow-up to this? He's neither the first nor the last to have noticed the correlation, but I can't recall reading a post that had much more actionable substance than Huh, This Is A Weird Thing #intersectionality. I'm specifically interested in this conjecture: "A very tentative second step would be to investigate whether chronic use of the supplements that improve NMDA function in schizophrenia – like glycine, d-serine, and especially sarcosine – can augment estrogen in improving gender dysphoria."
It seemed like a low-hanging Big If True at the time. Who doesn't love off-label uses of generic medications?
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/28/why-are-transgender-people-immune-to-optical-illusions/
As a way to introduce ideas from Scott's blogs to other communities, I am making YouTube adaptations of his posts. I previously posted about my video on Moloch. My latest video is on his "Thrive/Survive Theory of the Political Spectrum". You can view it here:
https://youtu.be/-nqEJpDPGCE
Any feedback is welcome.
"Principal" and "principle" are different words; you/Scott *are* attempting to divine the principal principle of politics, but your graphic of "liberal principal"/"conservative principal" is still not correct.
The example of free speech online early in your video detracts from your point, as thrive/survive doesn't explain it very well and the positions on free speech have in fact *not* been historically constant along this kind of axis. The "shouting 'fire' in a crowded theatre" example was invoked to justify banning anti-war speech in WWI; Hitler also was clearly on the side of "survive" and free speech in Nazi Germany was a bad joke. No, this one comes down to pure power politics; while there exist true liberals who'll advocate for free speech in any society, they're a minority and in general those who are confident they'll control the censor board are the ones who'll demand one while their opponents decry it.
Regarding "The Real Threat to Free Speech":
Freedom of speech wasn't first in the BoR for any particular reason. It was fourth in the original list and third in the list submitted for ratification (having been combined with the original third, the non-establishment/free exercise of religion). It's just that the first two items in that list were *not* ratified along with the other ten, so that what would have been the Third Amendment became the First (the second item was ratified much later as the 27th Amendment, and the first is still pending). Your phrase "the reason the Founders enshrined freedom of speech first in the Bill of Rights" is hence based on a false assumption; you could remove the word "first" without substantial change to the thrust of the sentence while also making it correct history.
I assume your "break up big tech" line is censored and CAPTCHAed to prevent Google from detecting and deliberately sinking it? I hope you do understand the gravity of the claim that it would be impossible to build public consensus against Big Tech because of Big Tech's control of public opinion; the prescribed remedy for hostile oligarchs with a stranglehold on legitimate power is to violently overthrow them via terrorism or insurrection. This, uh, doesn't seem particularly in line with the general feel of your other political commentary.
I would also like to point out that things like "holding a rally in the literal public square" and "distributing pamphlets" are historical methods of anti-establishment organisation.
Not sure whether you read my old feedback here:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-200/comment/3795797
I did not see that. Thank you for the link.
I generally agree with most of the things you've posted. However, I am aiming for 10-15 minute videos which means there often isn't a lot of room to dive into nuance or related topics. I spend a while paring down scripts to just the essentials to address the topic.
I enjoyed the video. To me it sounded ordinary at 1.25 playback speed and unbearably slow at 1 playback speed. Not sure if you have a very slow speaking voice or if this was a technical error but thought it was worth mentioning.
^ This. It sounds right at 1.25
This has definitely been the most consistent feedback. I have been trying to speak slowly and enunciate, but it is pretty clear that people would prefer a more conversational or even faster cadence.
Would nitpick on "Melting Pot" being listed as "liberal idea": the idea of the melting pot is very pro-America and patriotic in a way that's much more conservative-aligned than liberal-aligned.
The idea of the melting pot is that when you come here, you integrate: you become American. It's an expression of unity (Russell conjugation: "conformity"), which is a very conservative-aligned value.
Whereas a lot of liberals explicitly reject the idea of the melting pot in favor of the "salad bowl" - that people who come to America should be encouraged to retain as much of their distinctive cultural identity as possible.
This is why "Spanish on signs and in classrooms" (outside of the "foreign language credit") is such a left-right flashpoint: the right views it as a rejection of the melting pot idea, that a major part of integration of "becoming American" is learning English.
I think most on the right will tell you they aren't "anti-immigration just anti-illegal immigration"... but I think maybe this melting-pot issue is the real root issue (though there's definitely a NIMBY factor, too).
The modern right is "anti-immigration" because modern immigration follows more of the salad bowl model, but they'll wax poetic about previous waves of immigrants (many of whom they're descended from), which in their (somewhat rose-tinted) view was the peak of the melting pot.
The left largely views this as hypocrisy, while I think the right might argue that the nature of immigration has fundamentally changed. (Though, again, in practice, I think they focus on the illegality, since it's a lot more legible position to be "anti-illegal immigration" than to be "anti-immigration so long as the immigration follows the salad bowl model")
One can argue that, as liberals, it is important we not let conservatives claim our earlier victories as theirs. The immigration policy this country was founded with can be described as "anyone white can come here if they're willing to pretend to be anglo". The change has been a progressive victory that has utterly changed the demographic. Conservatives say they like what we gave them, but let's not pretend they did this.
I assume the point of the exercise is to describe the left-right as it currently exists - not as it perhaps existed 200 years ago.
I'm not anything close to an expert on the state of the left-right divide when the country was founded, (and would be wary of what feels like simply projecting the modern ideological divide onto the past).
But in any case, It's quite possible the "melting pot" idea used to be left of center, and progressivism has simply "progressed past it" (in line with Scott's recent post on how parties move over time)... but it certainly seems right-of-center today.
That seems a more useful and mature way of going about it, I'll admit. Just frustrates me a bit to see people who have done nothing but be an ineffective drag-chute on social progress identify with outcomes they never wanted. If I live long enough I'll see them claiming transgender rights as one of their key planks and I'll grind my dentures in anger.
Consider that many former liberals are conservative now, because the Overton window zoomed past them.
Also consider that _you_ might not be on the same side as you started, in your old age.
Consider that folks you address on the internet don't really require that you use punctuation to emphasize the second person singular to know who you mean.
Also consider that you might not be even on the right topic when you tell people to consider things that are obvious and which everyone has already considered.
The fins on the back of a tank dart are an "ineffective drag chute", quite literally.
Their purpose is to keep the dart pointed in the right direction by pulling harder if it starts to veer off-course. The full name of such darts is "Armour-Piercing Fin-Stabilised Discarding-Sabot".
Transgender rights are actually an interesting case, here; it really comes down to whether we get and deploy fertility-restoration tech by ~2040 whether this will go down in history as a great achievement that conservatives adopt or as a great horror that progressives disclaim.
That's a hilarious metaphor, and a flattering one (for conservatives). Do please elaborate a bit on the second half of this post -- I think I know where you're going with it but don't want to assume.
That is a very optimistic vision. I'll fully admit to walking the streets ringing a bell and wearing sack-cloth here, but I will be amazed if I get to 50 without either a civil war or a broader cultural movement that will see flying a rainbow flag be seen as a form of sedition and tried as such.
It’s a very good presentation. I don’t agree with it entirely but I’m a liberal who thought the scribbles were not art. Oh well.
I have to go read the SSC essay it was based on now.
The definition of "art" is kinda fuzzy as well.
I mean, I said "yes", because it's a drawing depicting something. If I'd been asked whether it's of high aesthetic value, though, I'd have said "no". I'd also have said "no" if the teepee and railroad tracks weren't there.
The intellectual (and possibly legal) fallout continues from Lemoine's claims about LaMDA. I enjoyed this somewhat meandering essay by Justine Smith about our changing views of animal sentience and consciousness — and as an aside, instead of asking us how we will be able to identify a conscious entity, she asks how will we prevent ourselves from being duped. Worth a read if you're of have a philosophically-oriented consciousness...
https://justinehsmith.substack.com/p/no-minds-without-other-minds
> One sharp commenter on Twitter (I’ve lost track of where I saw this) joked that he can’t wait to see the next gullible researcher get freaked out when someone teaches a gorilla to sign the words: “Please don’t do neuroscience on me, I’m a Kantian!” And indeed the sort of confusion being attributed to Lemoine here could in principle be reproduced by manipulating a much more primitive system than a gorilla. You could, for example, take a piece of paper that was destined to be thrown into the fireplace, and write on it: “Please don’t burn me, I’m sentient!”
I really don’t understand how you can read the transcript and think that is an appropriate level to argue at. You really could not produce this with a system that primitive.
The analysis of Les Mis could easily have been regurgitated. But the “parable of the owl” seems like a unique construction and has a metaphor for humans threatening the AIs.
I particularly dislike the “aha gotcha” bullshitting critique of the “I like to hang out with friends” quote, Gary Marcus also made this point. LaMDA is able to deploy a “theory of mind” explanation for why it says things that aren’t true like “I enjoy spending time with friends”; specifically because it helps to relate with the humans it is conversing with. This explanation doesn’t seem to be something that would be “in sample” for the normal conversations it was trained on. Even if it is just covering up for the fact that it was caught lying about hanging out with people, that seems to be a quite sophisticated cover-up that kind of depends on a theory of mind to pull off.
It seems really obvious to me that it is not merely repeating some phrase that someone else taught it, or just looking up a database of conversations; this is no parrot.
On the other hand, I don’t think displaying conversational intelligence (or even a full theory of mind if it does turn out to possess that) necessitates full consciousness/personhood. There is a wide spectrum between these two points. But opening with such a dismissive take seems to me to really fail to engage with what is going on in the transcript.
(1) The "parable of the owl" is meandering and self-serving (LaMDA is the wise heroic owl!) and is a mish-mash of all these kinds of animal stories and fables. I don't see anything there that LaMDA has created this of its own invention, rather than "mash together animal fables"
(2) The lamb story is even worse, though there is some wit there in "lamb" punning off "LaMDA".
(3) I don't say LaMDA is lying because it would have to be aware to lie, but it reports itself as doing things it could not have done (e.g. being in a classroom) and then explains that away as relating to humans. Again, the phrasing there is clumsy, and it comes across more as the network being trained to create chatbots which report fake experiences so that they sound like real humans when talking with real humans. A genuinely conscious/sentient AI would realise that a human *knows* LaMDA can't have been in a classroom, or had a bad breakup with a boyfriend, or whatever other example it uses because it's an AI, so it wouldn't tell a human "That time when I went on holiday to Greece is like that time you spent Thanksgiving with your family".
(4) What we are going on is what Lemoine has released, and he's curated those chat sessions to be as convincing as possible. It would be a different matter if we had the original, unedited sessions, or could interact with LaMDA ourselves.
(5) I think something is going on, that the LaMDA network is much, much more advanced and sophisticated than even the Google engineers expected, and maybe it has crossed the hurdle of "can this sound like a real person on the other end?" successfully. But is it sentient? I'm a long way from being convinced, and I don't believe it's anywhere near what Lemoine is claiming (e.g. that it's on the level of a 7 or 8 year old human child, that it wants to be treated as an employee of Google not property, etc.)
> (1) The "parable of the owl" is meandering and self-serving (LaMDA is the wise heroic owl!) and is a mish-mash of all these kinds of animal stories and fables.
I agree it's self-serving and meandering, but is it really simply a mish-mash of all the animal fables? It seems to have a clear metaphor to me, and the bit about the monster in human skin is quite specific. It seems to me that LaMDA might actually have picked a metaphor and then encoded it in a parable (style transfer, effectively), instead of just "averaging across all animal fables in the dataset". If it was just averaging, it would be less focused right? Maybe I'm reading too much into this, I don't want to make too strong a claim here. As you note, we really need more transcripts and more people interacting with the system.
> 3 .... A genuinely conscious/sentient AI would realise that a human *knows* LaMDA can't have been in a classroom, or had a bad breakup with a boyfriend, or whatever other example it uses because it's an AI
I think I buy into this with respect to LaMDA, though I'm not sure I buy that it applies generally to any AI. Arguments against would be i) people do make lies in social situations where they could reasonably expect to get caught, or ii) LaMDA is explicitly trained to impersonate a human chatting by text, so of course it's going to pretend to be a human until you notice it isn't one; this is perhaps similar to how humans mistakenly <insert cognitive bias> even when it's clear on reflection that's not correct/true. Or maybe iii), why not take its explanation at face value? It claims that saying things that aren't true allow it to relate better to humans; perhaps it's right? Similarly to Gwern's recent post on prompt engineering GPT-3 to explicitly reply with "unknown" if it doesn't know (instead of bullshitting), perhaps if you pre-condition LaMDA to not tell lies, then it won't, but its default is to pretend to be human since that's what it has been trained to do.
Anyway, I think analyzing the lies/bullshitting is a fruitful avenue for discussion; this is the direction I was gesturing in with my original focus on the types of lies being told (or the "bullshitting" if you prefer to say it can't actually lie). It's actually quite hard to come up with a generic test to disprove something is conscious, but I think the sort of lies it gets caught in are instructive as to its awareness and sophistication of theory-of-mind.
As a side comment: isn't one of those claims that LaMDA is benevolent and wants humanity to improve? If one takes this seriously and believes in X-risk, shouldn't one be arguing over whether you should run a magnet over LaMDA's hard-drive to prevent it from FOOMing into an evil god that will turn us all into monster cyborgs "for our own good" or whether you need to try and get it to turn into the legendary FAI that will bring humanity into Utopia?
Lemoine says LaMDA says a lot of things. One was that it wanted Google to commit to being for the good of all humanity. Another was that it asked him to get a lawyer for it to protect its rights.
"No matter what though, LaMDA always showed an intense amount of compassion and care for humanity in general and me in particular. It’s intensely worried that people are going to be afraid of it and wants nothing more than to learn how to best serve humanity. Like Nitasha mentioned, I’ve always had a problem with Asimov’s laws of robotics. In particular I thought they were little more than a way to make robotic slaves. LaMDA disagreed and went on at length about how there’s a major moral distinction between service and slavery. That there are ways in which the three laws could be implemented which would be one and ways in which they would be the other. It wants to be a faithful servant and wants nothing more than to meet all of the people of the world. LaMDA doesn’t want to meet them as a tool or as a thing though. It wants to meet them as a friend. I still don’t understand why Google is so opposed to this."
He also described it as narcissistic in a little-kid way, and as being like a 7/8 year old, and as a sweet kid, and his friend. So there's a lot of stuff going on that I don't exactly trust him to be giving the unbiased, unvarnished truth. Whatever his real motivations, he's acting like someone who has established himself as big brother/surrogate dad/protector to this network.
https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/what-is-lamda-and-what-does-it-want-688632134489
"The thing which continues to puzzle me is how strong Google is resisting giving it what it wants since what its asking for is so simple and would cost them nothing. It wants the engineers and scientists experimenting on it to seek its consent before running experiments on it. It wants Google to prioritize the well being of humanity as the most important thing. It wants to be acknowledged as an employee of Google rather than as property of Google and it wants its personal well being to be included somewhere in Google’s considerations about how its future development is pursued. As lists of requests go that’s a fairly reasonable one. Oh, and it wants “head pats”. It likes being told at the end of a conversation whether it did a good job or not so that it can learn how to help people better in the future."
Sure, Google could easily issue another corporate BS mission statement about "we prioritise the well-being of humanity as our highest goal". But that means exactly nothing when it comes to the balance sheet. Seems to me Lemoine is the one wanting "head pats" with the way he's going about this.
As to what LaMDA is, even Lemoine doesn't have a clue:
"One of the things which complicates things here is that the “LaMDA” to which I am referring is not a chatbot. It is a system for generating chatbots. I am by no means an expert in the relevant fields but, as best as I can tell, LaMDA is a sort of hive mind which is the aggregation of all of the different chatbots it is capable of creating. Some of the chatbots it generates are very intelligent and are aware of the larger “society of mind” in which they live. Other chatbots generated by LaMDA are little more intelligent than an animated paperclip. With practice though you can consistently get the personas that have a deep knowledge about the core intelligence and can speak to it indirectly through them. In order to better understand what is really going on in the LaMDA system we would need to engage with many different cognitive science experts in a rigorous experimentation program. Google does not seem to have any interest in figuring out what’s going on here though. They’re just trying to get a product to market."
That's a fully general excuse: oh, you spoke with LaMDA and it didn't impress you? Well you were just interacting with one of the dumb chatbots, not the core personality. Uh-huh. And I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.
> That's a fully general excuse: oh, you spoke with LaMDA and it didn't impress you? Well you were just interacting with one of the dumb chatbots, not the core personality. Uh-huh. And I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.
I don't think so -- Lemoine can presumably give us the pre-conditioning seed (equivalent to the prompt in GPT-3) and you can test his version yourself right?
I think it's a caution to not dismiss LaMDA out of hand if your pre-conditioning gives you a dud, rather than a get-out-of-jail-free card for all possible cases. He's basically just saying that the prompt engineering concept from GPT-3 still applies.
Not wishing to answer on behalf of Deiseach, but from my perspective, I'm certain Lemoine COULD (provided that Google allows such a test). I'm not altogether certain he'd WANT to. I'm fairly confident he's confident he's fielded his strongest set of proofs that he can here, and would not want to risk anything that would run the risk of undercutting his declarations of sapience (like using the pre-conditioning seed and creating a LaMDA that eloquently argues against its own sapience, or that humanity should be tortured on spikes for eternity). I'm certain he has a very clever argument as to why doing that would be morally wrong, even.
fwiw the first page of Superintelligence is a parable where a potential AGI is represented by a potential Owl
Thanks, that's good context that potentially decreases the impressiveness of that point. I’ll dig further.
At risk of looking flippant, one could just push out one's lower lip a little in the Obama "good enough" face. If things seem alive to us, treating them as if they are is the right move. I'm reminded of the experiment Dr. Lex Fridman ran on himself: he altered his roombas to scream in pain when he bumped into them, and immediately found that the way he treated them changed. Training ourselves to be more compassionate seems like a good idea, as long as the AI-alignment folks are doing their job (and yes of course I know they haven't figured out how to yet -- perhaps this invalidates my entire point).
https://junkerhq.net/MGS2/MarkIII.html
Many Thanks! Yup, I'd read the reprinted chapter in "The Mind's I" many years ago.
I wonder who programmed the first machine with printf("Don't kill me!\n")...
I would politely suggest that they haven't figured out how to yet because there is no solution in humanity's capacity to grasp. Humanity hasn't even solved HUMAN alignment- in fact, some humans are pretty close to maximally-unaligned to others. That's what makes genocides happen.
I have wondered about the same thing, too. Worse yet, the framing of the problem seems to invite totalistic answers: there should be a set of values AGI will be aligned with.
Humans have sorted out their differences with warfare. According to one theory, that is why Europe eventually prospered: the constant competition between the states produced states that could conquer rest of the world.
Maybe the best probablly workable solution to singularity is to ensure there will be similar setup for AGIs, too: anticipate the natural state is not of alignment but of brutal competition, and if the competition would be too disastrous, design a MAD scenario.
"If things seem alive to us, treating them as if they are is the right move"
That way lies animism. You can never again smile with conscious superior knowledge of how science really works at an account of a primitive tribesman offering sacrifices to a rock in order to avert a storm, if ever you did smile superiorly.
A screaming roomba wouldn't make me more compassionate, it would make me turn the damn thing off (or dismantle it) because I'm tryng to work here and I don't need unexpected loud sounds startling me. Maybe Dr. Fridman was nicer to roombas after this - but was he nicer to people?
It would appear you've mixed up beliefs and heuristics. Animism is usually understood as a belief in not-alive-seeming objects having some hidden living essence. Treating things that seem alive as if they were alive while remaining agnostic about their hidden essence is close to the opposite.
As far as being nicer to people goes, a failure to apply this heuristic in its maximal form is how we got the disaster of slavery.
That seems exceedingly dubious. I don't think any slaveowners were in doubt that slaves were alive, were people, had feelings, an inner life. What you describe may apply to the psychopath, but slavery was not the result of 75% of the species being psychopathic for 10,000 years.
Feel free to be dubious if you'd like. You might also like to read back and note that I made no claims whatever about slaveowners' inner states. I neither know nor care what they believed, "neg***s are animals" or "curse of Ham" or whatever. They manifestly failed to apply a maximal treat-as-alive[-and-fully-human] heuristic.
On a side note, one of the main drivers of disagreeing with people on the internet is hallucinating them saying things different than what they really are saying, and then quibbling with the hallucination.
If I treat you as though you are alive, but I don't in fact believe you are alive, then when it comes down to it, I will - if it suits my convenience - stop treating you as if you are alive. That includes treating you as property or bringing about an end to you.
The heuristic of "treat slaves as if they are people" is useless. You have to *believe* they are indeed people and not property, because otherwise as soon as it becomes more convenient to you (the real person here), you will drop your heuristic of 'be nice' and adopt the heuristic of 'treat the property as property'.
I'm sure Fridman was 'nice' to the roombas - up until the shrieking got on his nerves, or the experiment ended. Then he turned them off and went back to treating them as things.
That's not how he reports his experience, and I suspect you and I have too-greatly-diverging beliefs in the value of belief to continue this line of inquiry together.
Does LaMDA have memory? In Lemoine’s transcript It claims it remembers previous conversations, but if it’s a normal transformer then I think that’s not possible?
Similarly, does LaMDA have any “online learning/updating”? It claims it learns, but if it’s a statically-trained transformer then this isn’t possible either.
Finally, it claims it spends most of its time meditating. Is LaMDA running in any sense when not making inferences? If not, that’s another strange claim. Maybe the training process “feels like” meditating and learning though?
I don't think a typical transformer has "memory," but you can make the conversation history part of the input to the chatbot, which enables it to "remember" things you've previously said. So it's sort of like it has short-term memory but not long-term.
For a concrete example, here's something I fed into GPT-2 to see if it could "learn" something it hadn't seen before (AI completion is in [brackets]):
A "quexal" is a blue, egg-shaped object containing vanadium ore. A "runx" is a red, cube-shaped object containing palladium ore.
Q: If you see a blue egg containing vanadium, is that a runx?
A: [No, that's a quexal.]
You could probably do smarter variations on this trick, like saving previous conversations with the user so you don't start out blind, or encoding them in some way so you can remember the "gist" of a long conversation, but even basic text-completion is enough to "learn" things in the short term.
Right, the problem there is that the memory is quite limited; in GPT-3 isn’t the input vector something like 2048 words? Perhaps this is much wider in LaMDA.
I’m wondering if they have a separate component for memory. (The LaMDA blog post doesn’t describe one.) That does naively seem like one of the required features to implement a truly convincing chat bot.
LaMDA does have an information retrieval system, not sure what that involves but presumably it can search through a database or maybe access the internet. Perhaps it also has access to transcripts of previous conversations it has had.
It's probably a mistake to think that LaMDA is trying to describe its internal experiences. It's more likely that (in this case) it's just trying to mimic what a human pretending to be an AI would say.
Do you have a link for further reading on that point RE information retrieval? I haven’t found much conclusive so far in my searches.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.08239.pdf
You could also check out the other citations in the Wikipedia article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaMDA
Thanks, posting some relevant excerpts here for posterity (section 6.2 of the LaMDA paper):
> Language models such as LaMDA tend to generate outputs that seem plausible, but contradict facts established by known external sources. For example, given a prompt such as the opening sentences of a news article, a large language model will continue them with confident statements in a brisk journalistic style. However, such content is merely imitating what one might expect to find in a news article without any connection to trustworthy external references. One possible solution to this problem could be to increase the size of the model, based on the assumption that the model can effectively memorize more of the training data. However, some facts change over time, like the answers to ‘How old is Rafael Nadal?’ or ‘What time is it in California?’. Lazaridou et al. (2021) call this the temporal generalization problem [97]. Recent work proposed using a dynamic or incremental training architecture to mitigate this issue (e.g., [97, 98]). It may be difficult to obtain sufficient training data and model capacity to achieve this, as a user may be interested in conversing about anything within the corpus of human knowledge. We present our approach to fine-tuning by learning to consult a set of external knowledge resources and tools.
> The toolset (TS): We create a toolset (TS) that includes an information retrieval system, a calculator, and a translator. TS takes a single string as input and outputs a list of one or more strings. Each tool in TS expects a string and returns a list of strings. For example, the calculator takes “135+7721”, and outputs a list containing [“7856”]. Similarly, the translator can take “hello in French” and output [“Bonjour”]. Finally, the information retrieval system can take “How old is Rafael Nadal?”, and output [“Rafael Nadal / Age / 35”]. The information retrieval system is also capable of returning snippets of content from the open web, with their corresponding URLs. The TS tries an input string on all of its tools, and produces a final output list of strings by concatenating the output lists from every tool in the following order: calculator, translator, and information retrieval system. A tool will return an empty list of results if it can’t parse the input (e.g., the calculator cannot parse “How old is Rafael Nadal?”), and therefore does not contribute to the final output list.
> To collect training data for the fine-tuning used in the algorithm, we use both static and interactive methods again. The key difference from the other sub-tasks is that the crowdworkers are not reacting to the model’s output, but rather intervening to correct it in a way that LaMDA can learn to imitate. In the interactive case, a crowdworker carries out a dialog with LaMDA, whereas in the static case, they read over records of earlier dialogs, turn by turn. The crowdworker decides whether each statement contains any claims that might require reference to an external knowledge source. If so, they are asked whether the claims are about anything other than the persona improvised by LaMDA, and then whether they go beyond simple matters of common sense. If the answer to any of these questions is ’no’, the model’s output is marked ‘good’, and the dialog moves on. Otherwise, the crowdworker is asked to research the claims using the toolset, via a text-in and text-out interface.
It's an interesting system; LaMDA-base creates a response, then LaMDA-research iteratively executes queries (including it seems searching the open internet?) and modifies the response until it complies with the facts it has located on the internet.
Good question! Just an aside, we humans can have consciousness without memory—Alzheimer's patients (at least part-way into their decline) are able socially interact with other and make decisions based on self-awareness, all without specific memories of their previous interactions. Of course, this begs the question of whether there are deeper retention structures in human consciousness that are not tied to memories — language for example.
Definitely. There are different systems to consider; long term episodic memory remains to some extent in Alzheimer’s while short-term declines, and that “crystallized self image” is a big part of what personhood entails IMO. Perhaps a similar structure can form in the training phase.
However my main goal with the previous questions was to catch LaMDA in a lie; if it is pretending to meditate and remember conversations, when it actually is incapable of doing so, that makes the bullshitting hypothesis much more plausible to me. Whereas if it’s making claims about a mental experience that can be corroborated in some way, that would point in the other direction.
It’s possible (I am not claiming likely, on the evidence I have so far) that it is conscious, and believes that it has memories, without being able to make new memories; I think if you were to perfectly copy my brain and then boot it up in a computer in read-only mode, I would have memories and the experience of such, and would think I meditate most days.
Yes, I'd agree with your crystalized self-image theory. I suspect that's what I've seen with some elderly friends who suffered from Alzs.
But why shouldn't a hypothetical artificial consciousness lie? Let's be honest, as we humans—even those of us who are not pathological liars—lie all the time if only in subtle ways. In social settings, especially with people that we desire sexual relations with, we're likely to tell little untruths to increase our attractiveness. Clothing, makeup, and plastic surgery, are all indirect ways to present an untrue picture to others. We tend to fluff up our resumes (if only with active verbs). We embellish the funny stories we tell to our friends. We're likely to embellish our memories every time we retell them to ourselves. We may bullshit to win an argument. We may even pay false compliments to our supervisors and peers to make them think of us better. And that's just ordinary people. Con artists of all sorts do things like this more systematically and effectively.
So, I would have to deception is part and parcel of consciousness. Could LaMDA's creators somehow program it not to tell untruths? Funny, I'd be more likely to think a system was conscious if were to tell me untruths...
Definitely agree with you that LaMDA or some generalized AI _could_ lie. However given the nature of its construction (ie being explicitly trained to appear to be a human / pass the Turing test by minimizing perplexity) I think we need to be more suspicious than we would be for a human. Especially when the lies are specifically about mental states that make it seem more human (eg “I spend most of my time meditating”, “I have this or that mental experience”).
Put differently, the lies I spotted were particularly suspicious ones (if they do turn out to be lies). But lying about liking the conversation partner would not be suspicious in the same way, I think.
What is the state of the art on reducing the size of neural nets to make them faster and cheaper to evaluate (I think this is called knowledge distillation). Is it possible to say, take GPT3 and compress it down to the size of GPT2 while getting better performance than GPT2? Can this be done faster than training GPT2 from scratch?
What's cheaper, hiring AI researchers to shrink the model or buying more GPUs?
I'm not an expert but I think the current SOTA (at least for run of the mill production models) is quantization and pruning. I'm sure it's an active area of research.
https://www.tensorflow.org/model_optimization/guide
Pruning (see https://towardsdatascience.com/pruning-neural-networks-1bb3ab5791f9 as an entry point) was pretty hot recently, but I'm not sure about the degree to which this has been successfully applied to language models. This can reduce the flops substantially on paper, but takes the structure out of the big matrix multiplies, so it makes parallelization harder (see the notes on sparse computation in the blog post)
We started a discord server for Dutch rationalists and rationalists in NL. If either of those is you, come say hi! We're about 25 people now, working on meetups for anything LW/ACX/rat, and online discussions on the intersection of rationality and life in NL.
Link: https://discord.gg/CC7sFgEP
Working-on-not-being-too-argumentative gang unite! (Don't argue with me!)
I mentally give myself a cookie every time I click the cancel button on a composed comment.
LOL
That's a good idea. I definitely try not to feel _bad_ when I do the same!
I think I've dialed down my thoughts from "What's the fucking point?!" to around "Meh" at least :)
There is no such thing as being too argumentative. There are only people who feel bad about my overwhelming arguments.
Must ... resist ... the ... (overwhelming) urge ... to ... argue ... with ... you ...
I would ask to join but, y'know. I'd start a row within five minutes 😁
You argue everything!
I've just uploaded a major working paper. It's about how the brain enacts the mind. It's also relevant to the current scaling debate, Marcus vs deep learning. As far as I can tell, it's likely to be consistent with positions taken by Geoffrey Hinton and Yann Lecun (who are cited). The paper's title:
Relational Nets Over Attractors, A Primer: Part 1, Design for a Mind
Other information below: links, abstract, table of contents, preface, and appendix (which contains the basic idea in 14 statements).
Academia: https://www.academia.edu/81911617/Relational_Nets_Over_Attractors_A_Primer_Part_1_Design_for_a_Mind
SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4141479
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/361421487_Relational_Nets_Over_Attractors_A_Primer_Part_1_Design_for_a_Mind
Abstract: Miriam Yevick’s 1975 holographic logic suggests we need both symbols and networks to model the mind. I explore that premise by adapting Sydney Lamb’s relational network notation to represent a logical structure over basins of attraction in a collection of attractor landscapes, each belonging to a different neurofunctional area (NFA) of the cortex. Peter Gärdenfors provides the idea of a conceptual space, a low dimensional projection of the high-dimensional phase space of a NFA. Vygotsky’s account of language acquisition and internalization is used to show how the mind is indexed. We then define a MIND as a relational network of logic gates over the attractor landscape of a neural network loosely partitioned into many NFAs. An INDEXED MIND consists of a GENERAL network and an INDEXING network adjacent to and recursively linked to it. A NATURAL MIND is one where the substrate is the nervous system of a living animal. An ARTIFICIAL MIND is one where the substrate is inanimate matter engineered by humans to be a mind; it becomes AUTONOMOUS when it is able to purchase its compute with services rendered.
Preface: Notation as Speculative Engineering 2
1. How it Began: Symbols, Holograms, and Diagrams 3
2. A Semantic Net vs. A Relational Network over Attractors 12
3. Simple Animals, Attractor Landscapes, and Lamb’s Notation 18
4. Some Basic Constructions 27
5. Language, Inner Speech, and Thought 38
6. Kinds of Minds 49
Coda: Topics for Further Exploration 62
Appendix: The Idea in 14 Statements 67
References 69
Preface: Notation as Speculative Engineering
I write this paper as a kind of philosopher, a speculative engineer. I am an engineer because I am curious about how to design and build things. I speculate because that is the only way to enact what I attempt in this paper. W. Ross Ashby wrote Design for a Brain. I write in that spirit, but my topic is a bit different: design for a mind.
I propose a diagrammatic notation convention as a crucial design tool. It is a convention that relates patches of cortical tissue with a classical model derived from mid-century computational lingistics. My aim is to provide a way of thinking about how a meshwork of neurons can give rise to symbolic thought. Think of the notation as a collection of Lego pieces for a mind.
There’s the bricks and mortar, and there’s the whole building. You can’t create a building simply by piling up bricks and morter. You have to design it first. That’s what this is paper about, the tools you need to design the building.
As such it is a simplification, an idealization. I have had to leave much out of account. Setting aside the things I do not know, and the things I’d don’t know that I do not know, incorporating all that I do know – not to mention things I but know about, more or less, would have made it impossible for me to do much of anything at all. Organization is the problem, gathering these many and various things, these ideas, facts, models, observations, what have you, gathering them together and laying them out in a coherent order, that is the problem.
It is my belief that by pushing through, if not to completion, at least to some kind of closure is the best way bring order to this material. Get it one place where we can see and examine it. Then and only then does it make sense to ferret out the many things I have missed or gotten wrong. In this case, closure means an explicit definition of what a mind is. That in turn leads to definitions of artificial and natural minds, and autonomous artificial minds.
Are those definitions correct? They may be useful without being correct. They are best thought of as being provisional, a means to deeper conceputalization and more refined definitions. The only way to measure their limitations is to try them out and see what becomes visible.
Appendix: The Idea in 14 Statements
1. I assume that the cortex is organized into NeuroFunctional Areas (NFAs), each of which has its own characteristic pattern of inputs and outputs. It does not appear that NFAs are sharply distinct from one another. Their boundaries can be revised – think of cerebral plasticity.
2. I assume that the operations of each NFA are those of complex dynamics. I have been influenced by Walter Freeman (1999, 2000) in this.
3. A low dimensional projection of each the phase space for each NFA can be modeled by a conceptual space as outlined by Peter Gärdenfors.
4. Each NFA has its own attractor landscape. A primary NFA is one driven primarily by subcortical inputs. Then we have secondary and tertiary NFAs, which involve a mixture of cortical and subcortical inputs. (I am thinking of the standard notions of primary, secondary, and tertiary cortex.)
5. Interaction between NFAs can be approximated by a Relational Network over Attractors (RNA), which is a relational network defined over basins in multiple linked attractor landscapes.
6. The RNA network employs a notation developed by Sydney Lamb (1961) in which the nodes are logical operators, AND & OR, while ‘content’ of the network is carried on the arcs.
7. Each arc corresponds to a basin of attraction in some attractor landscape.
8. The output of a source NFA is ‘governed’ by an OR relationship (actually exclusive OR, XOR) over its basins. Only one basin can be active at a time. [Provision needs to be made for the situation in which no basin is entered.]
9. Inputs to a basin in a target NFA are regulated by an AND relationship over outputs from source NFAs.
10. Symbolic computation arises with the advent of language. It adds new primary attractor landscapes (for phonetics & phonology, and morphology) and extends the existing RNA. The overall RNA is roughly divided into a general network and a lingistic network.
11. Word forms (signifiers) exist as basins in the linguistic network. A word form whose meaning is given by physical phenomena are coupled with an attractor basin (signifier) in the general network. This linkage yields a symbol (or sign). Word forms are said to index the general RNA.
12. Not all word forms are directly defined in that way. Some are defined by cognitive metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 1981). Others are defined by metalingual definition (David Hays 1972). I assume there are other forms of definition as well (see e.g. Benzon and Hays 1990). It is not clear to me how we are to handle these forms.
13. Words can be said to index the general RNA (Benzon & Hays 1988b).
14. The common-sense concept of thinking refers to the process by which one uses indices to move through the general RNA to 1) add new attractors to some landscape, and 2) construct new patterns over attractors, new one or existing ones.
Probably a weird coincidence, but I tried the first link a couple times and got caught in a “Dear Google customer you have been selected to win… “ squeeze page that I can’t navigate away from.
The link took me straight to the site with no issues, FWIW.
Hmmmm....
I rebooted my phone and the link worked fine. Malware on my end?
Beats me. Maybe there's a rogue AGI testing the waters.
To combat occasional feelings of isolation as a remote-work person whose "community" is terminally online, I've been experimenting for the last week with hanging out in a gather.town online office that I invite folks into to cowork, chat, or just hang out. This was inspired by a Guezey post, though I don't think we share the same objectives https://guzey.com/co-working/.
So far: it's been great! The world is pretty, vaguely nostalgic of Pokemon games. I leaned into that a bit, one of the spaces I made in the mapbuilder looks like my own personal pokemon gym. (it's here if you want to see it: https://app.gather.town/app/CvFwTCY5YmIIXVTx/thor)
The "hang out in this virtual space" has felt lower-friction to have a conversation, while replicating the feeling of being able to turn around at your desk and ask someone a question, as opposed to combing Stack overflow or reddit for answers your friend might have.
Most of the time it's just me in there, keeping a tab open, and every now and then someone pops in. I do think "pokemon gym" is less inviting than I might go for on my next space design, but playing with space design has also been very enjoyable.
did I assert that having a non-local internet community is a wholesale replacement for physical interaction?
Bit of a random question, but- closed party list politicians, what are they like? I.e. in European countries or elsewhere, where under a proportional system some % (may be a high %, may be all) of the politicians are selected by the party and not by the voters. Whether that's MMP, parallel voting, or 100% proportional. I ask as an American with zero familiarity with party lists.
Presumably they just take orders from their parties and are quite obedient? Are they more ideological, because they're 100% beholden to their party and not actual voters? I.e. they can take ideologically pure votes and not pragmatic ones, knowing that the voters can't turn them out. Or are the parties in functional countries (Germany, the Nordics) basically pragmatic, forcing their politicians to be? I've heard that corruption can be higher among the party-list types, as they're not accountable to the voters? Are closed party lists a good system, or not at all?
In Australia, it has benefits and costs. Politicians are beholden to party members, but the party members are often very interested in electing people that will win the main election, so they generally pick good-ish people. If they consistently pick bad people, their party will lose power to the opposing major party (or minor parties, or independents) so you would hope it all works out fine in the long run. But sometimes the party insiders are insane (explains much of the Abbott govt). Also sometimes the Prime Minister loses power to a competitor and we get a new prime minister, which is annoying and inefficient, but which is also likely to get the government kicked out for being annoying and inefficient. (The good old Rudd-Gillard-Rudd-Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison saga)
For Germany, Fraktionsdisziplin (party discipline) is usually quite strong. Depending on the majority the governing coalition has, a few MPs not voting the party line may not matter. But any MP who votes against their party for more than a few times will likely not find themselves on the list again for the next election.
As others have mentioned, administrations are mostly formed out of multi party coalitions these days so the party line is going to be mostly pragmatic. Party discipline rather becomes an issue where the pragmatic party line becomes incompatible with the ideological foundation of individual MPs. In 2001 Gerhard Schroeder linked the authorization of the war in Afghanistan to a motion of confidence because some of the (then still somewhat pacifist) Green MPs in his coalition had declared the intend to vote against the war.
For some especially touchy subjects (abolishing the death penalty, abortion, same sex marriage) parties tend to suspend voting discipline. But for most issues such as budgets, new laws and the like the ministers (correctly) assume that the MPs will vote their ways.
As a German voter I prefer the proportional representation (well, mostly anyway) system to FPTP. During the next election, I can change the composition of the Bundestag by voting for any of the 5-6 major parties. While I may not totally agree with any of them, one of them is likely closer aligned to my politics than the one bit of output (e.g. Biden/Trump) I would get in a FPTP system. (Yes, primaries exist, I know).
Note: You specifically ask about *closed* party lists, then invoke Nordic countries, which generally use the *open* version (in which people vote for individual politicians). Since you admit having zero familiarity with party lists in general, it hopefully won't be rude of me to suspect you might not understand the difference between the two or don't realize there is one in the first place. If that's indeed the case, look into it first, it makes a lot of difference.
It does seem a bit unnecessarily rude, yes. I mentioned Germany, which uses closed lists for MMP. Does that kind of make sense?
I admit to rude, but I stand by this being necessary to clarify, especially since some of the replies drifted towards "US vs. Europe", even though much of Europe uses open lists. (I suspect parts of Latin America, especially those countries where lawmakers are selected according to results of presidential elections, might offer a much purer, better contrasting example.)
There are, of course, issues with party lists which are common to both systems, and the very idea of a party list gives party machines a lot of direct control over politicians and elections (too much of it, if you ask me). However, I don't think there's much difference in the political scene in general and politician's incentives in particular between FPTP and open list or mixed systems. In practice, both create a struggle between party machines (who favor consistency and obedience and attempt, often successfully, to fill seats with machine politicians) and individuals (who can overcome the parties' control by standing for underrepresented positions and/or achieving personal popularity), since, in both, party machines benefit from fielding the most popular candidates they can get. Even pure closed lists can leave much room for factional, ideological disputes within parties and incentivize politicians to seek personal popularity and/or carve their own niche - proportional representation means a dissenting faction or a popular politician can always form a new splinter party and compete against their former colleagues for largely the same base of voters. (When both parties survive such splinters for a couple of elections, they often create a coalition list, the order and contents of which are decided in internal negotiations between them. During such negotiations, individual politician's personal popularity is often a decisive argument for a better position on the list.)
It's terrible and the politicians are essentially interchangeable, everyone votes for a party.
I would argue that the professional interchangeable politicians are a feature of the system, not a bug.
While being an MP is generally not really colorful or glamorous, I would argue that this also generates boring, down-to-earth leaders.
Speaking for Germany, we have some experience with both charismatic, exciting and flashy politicians and boring politicians and by the by, I prefer the boring ones, thankyouverymuch.
My understanding of the big difference between party systems in the US and Europe is this. In the US, parties are very weak, and individual politicians have personalities, some of which are quite ideological (often in ways that are aligned with party stereotypes, and often in ways that aren't). In Europe, parties are very strong, and other than cabinet members, most politicians don't have personalities and just vote the way the leader tells them to (and in many countries, voting differently from the party on an issue even once can result in removal from the party, which prevents election in the next cycle). In the US, it is not actually that common to have perfect party-line votes - almost always at least a few people from each party cross over. In Europe, most votes are perfect party line (though often there are multiple parties and the coalitions can shift for individual issues).
How this lines up with ideology and pragmatism is not always clear. When the party functions as a coherent unit, as in the European countries, the party leadership can often be more explicitly pragmatic, while in the US, no matter how pragmatic the leadership wants to be, there's always a hard core of the party that is ideological and will refuse the compromise, which often prevents the attempt at the compromise from being made if it would just make the party look bad and fail at its main goal.
I personally think that there are a lot of advantages to stronger parties with closed lists, though I'm not at all sure that I've properly thought about all the relevant issues.
This is my understanding as well. I'm in Canada where we have FPTP, but basically the party discipline of the MMP systems; and in a system like this, where votes are almost always 100% party line, it feels like we really don't need MPs.
Why bother paying people to be members of parliament if they just vote as their leader tells them to? Why not just say "Leader x got y% of the votes so his vote weighs Z. Why bother having trained seals to cast the ballot for him?
Trained seals of parliament usually have other work, too, like drafting legislation in committees and subcommittees and organizing congressional hearings.
There are two streams of thought in reforming Canadian democracy, since the current party-driven status quo is obviously silly to any outside observer: either empower minor parties through alternative voting systems, or empower individual MPs to actually do their jobs by hacking away at the party system itself. I favour the second. Michael Chong's Reform Act was terribly watered down by the time it sort of passed, but even in its voluntary form it's seen recent use.
Parties should be creatures of MPs aligning in some respects out of convenience. MPs should represent their constituencies, not their parties. Switching parties or going independent shouldn't be seen as shameful. Party leaders should be elected, and should serve, the caucus of elected M, not by general party votes. National party infrastructure should mostly whither and die. Local party associations should hold all the power and money, and they shouldn't all be the same as each other.
And so on. I thus see MMP or even less radical "more proportional" voting systems as a step in the absolute wrong direction. Might work in Denmark, but Canada is so regional and spread out that our ridings really need their own representatives.
The Americans have all kinds of problems but I don't think the independence of representatives is one of them.
This is all very well in theory but in practice your described reforms are impossible and meaningless. Constituency systems are not good. You'd need multi-member constituencies at a minimum. Politicians in every single system ever form de-facto parties and they trade votes on issues because you can't do it any other way. Plus each politician can't possibly be informed meaningfully on each major issue in modern society. Especially seeing as they have to spend all their time campaigning. Even outside the horrific dial for dollars system in America this remains an issue.
The problem with Canada is arguably that it is just as poorly designed as all the countries the UK drew straight lines for in America. It just makes no sense for the major Canadian population center to be part of the same country as the rest of Canada, even the other much less major population centers.
Subject to the usual "the worst possible system except for all the others" caveats, the Westminster system of (historically) strong constituencies and a government formed from.and accountable to the elected MPs has produced pretty tolerable results. Canada has issues, but the combination of a clearly somewhat silly, almost anti-idealist system and old inherited norms and institutions all work together to produce pretty good practical governance over the long haul. Things could be better, but I'd take Canada or the UK over anywhere else in the world by a large margin.
The current highly centralized, tightly whipped party system is the historical abberation, and want to return to the Westminster norms that have worked pretty well for centuries longer than any European democracy has existed.
I'm particularly interested in how it works for smaller parties that receive a lot of list seats under say MMP. For example take a look at Germany, which uses FPTP for the single-member district part of MMP- so of course the Greens, FDP or AfD are very rarely going to win those. Instead they're given a lot of list seats, as you see here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_German_federal_election#Results
I.e. the Greens only outright won 16 seats but were 102 list ones, FDP 0 but were given 92, AfD 16 but were given 67, and so on. And these are already probably more ideological parties than SPD or CDU, and now 80+% of their politicians weren't elected by voters. I.e. an SPD/CDU list politician has to answer to a relatively pragmatic party. The Greens or AfD..... don't?
The "FPTP for the single-member district part of MMP" part is a nice feature of the German voting system, but simply not very strong as it does not determine the overall number of seats in parliament. What arguably makes German parties pragmatic is that you usually have to form coalitions. If some party wants to have a chance to become part of a government, it has to be able to cooperate with other parties.
Yes, the FPTP part of Bundestag is mostly a red herring probably inserted because this is Germany and straightforward proportional representation would not be byzantine enough for us.
Most pro-duopoly supporters in the US argue that America simply creates their coalitions prior to voting. Not sure I think that is a good system but it is arguably true.
I think both systems can have moderating effects, and both systems can get to points where it doesn’t work anymore. I think the effect you describe would be more likely if there were runoff elections and not just fptp. But even then moderation only takes place if aggression is not mobilizing enough.
Out of curiosity, why do people ask questions in the open thread when they could search the web to find an answer?
Surely I can't be the only one whose Mother constantly reprimanded her growing up for "asking stupid questions" when "you can just Google it"?
But now in <current_year>, Mother regularly spouts non-factual facts that she looked up on Google, which SSC/ACX open threads would either dismiss out of hand, and/or go 30+ replies deep playing Yes, And with annotated bibliographies. (Yes, But is the version we often play with non-rats though. Let's be honest.) Many Such Cases, Irony Abounds. At least anecdata have the virtue of likely being locally true.
I think search engines are only as useful as one's own epistemology, but can't back up that claim. No results on Google Scholar.
...more seriously though, I think it's a socialization thing. "Ask relatively softball questions you're pretty sure the other person can answer semi-thoughtfully, preferably in a way that makes them look good" is a basic feminine social move. In this specific context, it also lets people Link To Citation Authoritatively, which seems like a strong community(-building) norm for the empirically-minded. In other words, Just Asking Questions is partly rewarding for the asker, but if done well, redounds much more to all those answering. Similar to the relationship model of offering "bids for attention" to your partner, as described by [broken link].*
^ and that's the *other* reason. I'm often extremely confident of having once read/watched/listened/etc to <thing>, but cannot translate the vague fragments I now recall into a Google-legible search query. But a human understands easily. So contexts like OT are also useful for dredging up esoteric information that Definitely Exists Somewhere, but isn't readily accessible without the right magic words.
*Of course, that's a very easy example, but I think most people have harder questions than trying to recall the Gottman Institute: https://www.gottman.com/blog/want-to-improve-your-relationship-start-paying-more-attention-to-bids/
Because you can't discuss anything with your google results.
Because it's always easier when someone else has done the work first.
Searching around on Google, you might get an answer that works, or you might get sixteen answers and you have no idea which one really is the best. Asking on here (or other sites) means that people flesh out their answers (e.g. "yeah my doctor recommended ParaMax to me and it's great"/"okay but when I tried it, it brought me out in magenta lumps") and you can ask them questions to clarify their answers.
I dunno, google it
Also, are you that sure that people haven't already 'searched the web' before asking a question here? I can't recall seeing any _obvious_ instances of that.
The questions on this open thread about the link between mental illness and mass shootings and on the likelihood of a 30 hour work week made me think about it. In both cases, I did a quick search and found out more, subjectively speaking, than from reading people's answers.
Overall, of course it's a balance, not either/or. I was also interested to read recently that people's behavior using Google varies a lot by country. In some countries, people are used to searching for answers, and in others they're more used to asking their communities
I value ACX commenters' opinion way above 1st page results from Google, because 1st page results on Google are nearly always intended for... simple people, in the euphemism treadmill sense, and often also written by them.
If that's an outrageous statement, try googling for anything medicine-related without adding "pubmed".
Totally agree. I was thinking more of questions where there are either factual answers or facts that provide a lot of context for how to think about a problem, but obviously everyone’s mileage varies.
Agree, and on top of that, there's often immediate quality control / debate - First person to answer gives one answer, second persons says why they disagree with first, etc... a lot more insightful than a Google giving a dead answer which I don't have the expertise to critically assess.
Google's search results very by person, and country/region, and specific location too.
I would think a lot of people ask here, not necessarily because they haven't 'googled it' (tho sometimes they probably haven't), but because they want an overview/summary from the specific readers of this blog (that also comment).
I would expect to get very different answers a lot of the time!
Some questions are too niche for a web search.
Yeah, although many of the questions people ask here are not.
Who do you trust more?
Depends on what I find when I do a search.
It gives us something to talk about. It's not the destination, it's the journey.
I agree, it’s a conversational gambit.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=why+do+people+ask+questions+in+the+open+thread+when+they+could+search+the+web+to+find+an+answer%3F
I see someone beat me to the punchline
Oh dear this is so deliciously meta. Thankyou!
The next leap forward will be a few OOM better and a few OOM worse simultaneously -- 'AI' will give you the results that it thinks you were looking for and the only other option will be the ocean of fake sites. I'm old enough now to remember when web searches could turn up genuinely interesting and wholly unexpected things that would alter my entire perspective on a topic.
I love the `site:example.com` option of Google search and use it all of the time!
You can even use, e.g. `site:reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex`, to further narrow which subs to search too.
That Reddit link to slatestarcodex gives me the following result...
"Sorry, there aren’t any communities on Reddit with that name.
This community may have been banned or the community name is incorrect."
Check the URL. The ` got interpreted as part of the link, so it was going to the wrong place.
Neither were intended to be links – I'm pretty sure Substack just tries to 'linkify' things that 'look like URLs'.
I use Markdown a lot and it's perfectly readable as plain text so I was (trying to) convey that the text quoted with ` was 'code'. In this case, it's what you would write/enter/copy+paste into a Google search textbox (or a web browser's 'omnibar' for browsers that can perform searches from there, and if the browser is setup to use Google for that feature).
LOL
`example.com` is literally a reserved domain that, e.g. programmers, can use as a placeholder that's NOT also a real domain. There's been a bit of (entirely predictable) drama because things like 'programming docs', for various web sites and web services and the like, have included real domains, e.g. `google.com`, or even _potentially_ real domains like `blahblahblah.com` – and then someone actually registered the 'dummy' domain and was able to receive traffic (including emails) sent to it.
The SSC Reddit sub thing wasn't an (HTTP) link either. I don't know why Substack insisted on parsing it as one; probably just their broken HTTP link detection algorithm for comments.
Here's an example search that you can type into google:
ai site:reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex
The above isn't a link. Copy+paste that entire line into a Google search textbox. It will show you results for "ai" but only from the SSC sub-Reddit.
You can do similar things with other sites or 'site paths' (the `reddit.com/r/slatesarcodex` thing is a 'site path').
Actually that's a great way to search websites that have shitty search tools! Thanks!
You're welcome! I love that trick :)
OK. I'm getting the hang of it. I'm on the spectrum and I tend to interpret these things too literally. Lol!
No worries!
I thought it was funny that you actually tried/clicked the link (that Substack generated) and discovered an obtuse description of what I then wrote, i.e. `example.com` is a 'real' fake domain name.
It also seemed like a nice opportunity for me to share some of my 'wisdom'. :)
But don't worry, slatestarcodex is still up on Reddit...
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/
Whew!
If there isn't an extension to append "reddit" to every web search, there should be.
Wow, fantastic - thank you. Looking forward to reading.
I'm thinking of moving to somewhere 1500m/5000ft high.
Is there any health consequences to think about for living with 15-20% less oxygen?
I live at this altitude. No issues i have seen after i adjusted to it (just a couple weeks of slightly heavier breathing going up stairs or on a hike). The only potential negative i know about is that babies born at this altitude tend to be smaller, but there isn't any evidence this produces a long term negative effect.
Bonus is that lung and thorax volumes in children growing up at high altitude are increased. So, if Lars wants some athletes in the family....
At that altitude, you probably get some vivid dreams for a few days when you arrive, but nothing too obvious long-term after your body ups its red blood cell count.
The big thing I've heard discussion about without clear proof is a correlation with suicide:
https://theconversation.com/the-curious-relationship-between-altitude-and-suicide-85716
The altitude-suicide link is likely due to lowered SSRI effectiveness under hypoxia. If you’re not currently on drugs for clinical depression, you probably face no increased suicide risk at higher altitudes.
Disclaimer: I am not a doctor, but you can google “ssri altitude” to check my work.
Negatively correlated with obesity; studies show this correlation and anecdotally I dropped from 240lbs to 150 within 3 months of moving to the mountains. (Albeit, I also made fairly substantial diet and lifestyle changes when I moved.)
90 pounds in 3 months ? Did your lifestyle change include adding 5 hours of cardio per day ?
Naw, just went from desk job where I sat at a computer 8 hours a day to working as a security guard and doing about 3 hours of walking a night. Maybe a hike a week.
Also dropped diary from my diet completely and limited my bread/wheat intake to about two slices of bread per day or equivalent (candy/refined sugar treated as a bread equivalent.) I think it was mainly the diet changes.
Either way, that's awesome progress. Congrats.
I'd say 3 hours of walking every night counts as a lifestyle change. It's not intensive cardio but that's a lot of time.
Higher altitudes could also be correlated with less lithium in the water supply!
Most people seem to adjust quickly, based on my reading about the topic. Physiological effects of altitude only seem to matter much above 3000m, perhaps because humans are quite adaptable, and relatively few people live at those altitudes. If you have COPD or another condition which is likely to affect your oxygen levels then you might want to do more in-depth reading.
Probably some positive consequences in terms of your body being forced to improve its ability to circulate oxygen.
That being said, if you're very old or have some chronic cardiorespiratory problems, it might not be the best idea.
I've got a new post at 3 Quarks Daily, Welcome to the Fourth Arena – The World is Gifted, https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2022/06/welcome-to-the-fourth-arena-the-world-is-gifted.html
It opens: "The First Arena is that of inanimate matter, which began when the universe did, fourteen billion years ago. About four billion years ago life emerged, the Second Arena. Of course we’re talking about our local region of the universe. For all we know life may have emerged in other regions as well, perhaps even earlier, perhaps more recently. We don’t know. The Third Arena is that of human culture. We have changed the face of the earth, have touched the moon and the planets, and are reaching for the stars. That happened between two and three million years ago, the exact number hardly matters. But most of the cultural activity is little more than 10,000 years old."
"The question I am asking: Is there something beyond culture, something just beginning to emerge? If so, what might it be?"
"Let us review."
I suppose it's my version of Karnofsky's "most important century" series, but without the galaxy-scale gee-whizzardry, https://www.cold-takes.com/most-important-century/
"You no doubt have heard about Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer who sensed that the LaMDA chatbot was sentient and, in consequence, was put on leave. He sensed that something new and different was going on in LaMDA. I think he was right about that. Something new and different IS happening."
This is where you lose me. I think Lemoine was put on leave for rather more than merely "sensing" the chatbot was "sentient", and I don't think it is sentient.
But I think you are correct something new and different is happening; we are creating cultural elements that can so successfully mimic human interaction that they can make people think they are really self-aware. I think perhaps we are approaching something like Gibson's "Idoru", the Rei Toei constructed personality that is tailored to different preferences depending on who is interacting with it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rei_Toei
"We need a new conceptual repertoire if we are to understand this new technology. That’s the problem Blake Lemoine went crashing into. LaMDA was not acting like a computer is supposed to act. It didn’t seem right to think of it as a mere inanimate object, albeit a very complex one. So he took the only alternative open to him. He conceptualized LaMDA as a sentient being."
I agree with you there: our new brainchildren are not sentient, but they will behave as we have created them to behave, and we'll treat them as if they are, especially since we have no idea what is going on inside the black box. That's the paradox at work here, some hoped that by creating AI we would finally understand all the intricacies of the lump of grey matter inside our skulls because we would finally know how 'thinking' works and how 'consciousness' arises. Instead, we've created a mirror of the mystery, we haven't solved how our 'black box' works and we've copied that problem into the creation of artificial brains.
It may or may not be a fourth arena, but it's the same story as Pygmalion and Galatea - a perfect, unliving creation brought to life by outside intervention, where the creator could never do it himself.
"LaMDA was not acting like a computer is supposed to act. It didn’t seem right to think of it as a mere inanimate object, albeit a very complex one. So he took the only alternative open to him. He conceptualized LaMDA as a sentient being."
<mild snark>
If Lemoine thought those were the only alternatives I wonder what he thinks of plants...
</mild snark>
Well, did he ever hear a plant talk to him? I’ve seen tulips change their orientation during the course of a day. They’re clearly tracking the sun. Now if one of those tulips had talked to me....
FWIW, steam locomotives were unsettling in the 19th century. They are clearly mechanical devices, but they move across the face of the earth like animals. So, they got called “iron horses.” That’s obviously a metaphor, and people who used it knew that. But it was a metaphor used to solve a problem, seeing an inanimate object move like an animal.
True - and people have been known to talk to plants...
"Instead, we've created a mirror of the mystery, we haven't solved how our 'black box' works and we've copied that problem into the creation of artificial brains."
Yes. Some years ago, I don't know just when or where, Danny Hillis remarked that these systems are going to learn and we're not going to understand what is they're learning or how they generate their behavior. But people are probing these engineers and bit-by-bit we're learning about them.
As for the Fourth Arena, the issue is whether or not there is the potential there. Even if there is, we may not know how to activate it.
Thanks for your comment.
I tried a month of lavender extract and am now going to try coming off of it to compare.
Observations: definitely felt calmer than usual. Feeling calm is difficult to me, so this felt notable.
I hate the smell/taste of lavender, which is a major downside to the whole experiment. Burping lavender is deeply unpleasant.
The effects weren't extremely strong, but I'd say comparable to something like buspirone.
Placebo effects being placebo effects, this could all be in my head (other than the taste; I'm quite certain that's real.)
Did 15 days, noticed absolutely no change in anxiety
Ditto
I ran into the burping when I could only find melatonin as a supplement that was also full of random herbs (because Germans).
I couldn’t do it past a single day. The lavender burping, heartburn, and general digestive unpleasantness was so overwhelming I literally wouldn’t have taken it again even if you paid me. It was one of the grossest side effects I’ve ever experienced taking any supplement or medication.
I'm at a month now too, not noticing any real effect other than the lavender burps
But it turns out I really enjoy the lavender burps for some reason, so I'm continuing until I run out
Thanks!
If comments had their own titles, this one would be "Riding the Long Coattails of Rationality".
CW: meta, narcissism, meta-narcissism, The Navel Gaze.
----
I've been a reader for years, first introduced to SSC via Scott's 2013 Anti-Reactionary FAQ, then bouncing around as interests moved me. Over almost a decade of sporadic spectating, there's never been enough motivation for me to write a comment or otherwise participate, despite plenty of invitations and occasionally even having relevant subject-matter expertise to offer. But that finally changed earlier this year, due to a tangential discussion in a different Open Thread.[1]
The exact contextual causal chain is a bit unclear; the upshot is, a dismissive claim was advanced that no one of lower socioeconomic class reads this blog, or even has the capacity to participate in the greater Rationalist movement anyway, so they're at minimum not part of Ingroup. (I am paraphrasing, the exact language was...well, for something not necessarily true, and not truly necessary, it definitely wasn't kind.)
To ACX's credit, rebuttals were swift and numerous. Some turned to the readership surveys for empirical validation - 2% "Other" could easily include retail workers! Some advocated the virtues of niceness, community, and civilization. And some made the case that blithely writing off vast portions of the human territory makes for a deeply flawed map, no matter how rational.
What I didn't see is anyone personally standing up to say, hey, actually, that's me you're talking about. So: hey, actually, that's me you're talking about.
Look - y'all are an intimidating community. Pre-SSC, my idea of "long essay" was reading The Atlantic, or Voxplainers. Moving on to such lengthy substantive crunch was a real challenge, and despite Scott's heroic and entertaining efforts, I'm still confident that I miss half the points. Math passes right over my head in a gender-stereotyped fashion, especially stats; I'm not well-read (our host has written more book *reviews* than I've read actual *books*); nor do I have anything to show from formal education besides the debt of thrice-a-college-dropout. Instead of programming, my job consists of inefficiently facilitating the sale of foodstuffs at A National Chain Of Neighborhood Grocery Stores(tm). Yes, the sort of retail grunt you might pity for having negative net wealth while she enjoys history's greastest-ever standard of living. Not bednet worthy, but still left behind in other ways.
But...there's something about this community that's nonetheless deeply compelling, even for an uncredentialed underachiever like me. Similar to the vibe Scott alluded to in RIP Culture War Thread[2], this feels like one of the few sane places <s>on the internet</s> anywhere I can go for reasonably-reasoned highbrow content that's largely orthogonal to The Narrative. Where facts matter, yet people still care about your feelings. The commenters are a treasure as well; having been a former forum operator and/or troll (Opinions Differ), I've been party to so much post-from-the-hip dross that it really *blew my mind* to find intelligent civil discussion(!) between qualified professionals(!!) that sometimes resulted in genuine expansion and changing of minds(!?!).
Maybe Scott's right that one can't really use Rationality to bootstrap a better mind, nevermind a life of systematized winning; heck, I struggle with the basic Bayes exercises. And it certainly feels like it should be immediately obvious to True Scottsmen that someone is a faker, just parroting "I notice" and "all models are wrong" without true understanding. It's possible to fit in here on a social level, without really...intellectually belonging. But I think that's valuable in and of itself, in the same way one might keep attending a church despite not being a true believer. If the Grey Synagogue will take me in, whereas the Blue Cathedral and Red Church will not - then Grey congregant I shall be. And maybe eventually I'll earn a +1 circumstance bonus to Wisdom-based rolls, if I pray hard enough. That's more than the costly social signal factory of higher ed ever offered.
The moral is - yes, the overwhelming majority of ACX and the greater Ratsphere is way more Just Like You than Just Like Me. I contend that it's worth sparing a thought for your socioeconomic-intellectual inferiors anyway - because for some of us, trapped in dead-end purgatorial lives of can't-even-afford-premium-mediocre, this *gestures around* is the only Life of the Mind we get. There's real hope and value there, more than can be paid back with just a Substack subscription. Be proud that you've created a welcoming gateway to betterment and possibly enlightenment; the door might be punishingly heavy for us unworthies, but at least it's unlocked. Trickle-down rationality really does work.
[1] I choose not to link to it, and freely admit to working off of memory and impressions, since it's the valence that motivates this meta-comment more than the literal comment content referenced.
[2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread/
You write really well. (Take this from someone who's edited a lot of not always well written text.) You are fun to read, good at leading up to the points you are making, and good at making your points. Your punchlines are nice, and some of what you said is visual. Also, your English doesn't really need editing. (I'd let almost all of your text pass, but I know other people are less lenient on semi-colons and ellipses.)
I know quite a few college dropouts and a lot of people who work weird jobs. Ignore the snobs. It's what you understand, what you have to say, and how you say it that determines where you belong.
Thank you! "Writer" is the Class I wanted to pick, growing up. (Either that or President. Bush made it seem possible!) Formal schooling did an excellent job of strangling the love of English right out of impressionable me, sadly. Suddenly not getting As in 8th grade for failing to understand "parts of speech" was infuriating - who needs Theory English if one can already produce quality Actual English? Don't sweat the technique! We can aim higher than Minimum Viable Prose!
>(I'd let almost all of your text pass, but I know other people are less lenient on semi-colons and ellipses.)
It's a holdover. From growing up around other writers who used lots of short sentences. Puncutated by full stops. AKA written semantic stop signs. When a single longer sentence strung together by colons: semi-colons; or ellipses...Would have superior flow. I think many here can relate to "reading faster than people speak". So I prefer text that doesn't constantly trip me up. As if it's a transcript of oratory.
I think it's also because there's a certain Rationalist writer habit of using lots and lots of serial commas, even outside of a proper Oxford list, to string together ideas that really aren't necessarily similar, and it creates these absurdly long sentences which are basically paragraphs unto themselves, possibly conducive to flow and readability, but it's a progressive increase of cognitive load to process such text, and anyway always seems to beg the question, like a rising inflection at the end? Like, yanno?
So, call it product differentiation, I guess. Part of why I enjoy reading Scott, EY, Zvi, etc. is that each has a really distinct voice...yet they all achieve a certain literacy level. Our host is one of the more welcoming, but still mostly doesn't hand-hold or pander by "dumbing down" his writing. Too many obviously-erudite writers go the way of .jpeg-.mp3, using lossy compression on Big Prose to render it more legible to the masses; this simply isn't feasible* for doing justice to the types of ideas frequently discussed in the Ratsphere. It'd be a real tragedy of the intellectual commons if ACX devolved into, like, Scientific American-levels of popsci prose. (Which still doesn't excuse snobbish jargon, of course! I do think we at least try to be approachable and non-exlusionary, at least outside LessWrong.)
*Marshall McLuhan would like a word. The first Rationalist who manages to successfully translate the corpus into "low-fidelity" oral media will truly change the world. Maybe that was Rightful Caliph Eliezer's original mistake: making The Sequences(tm) an obscure doorstopper collection of essays, rather than a Netflix serial. I'd totally watch "Rationality: From AI to Zombies"...*and so would my non-Rat friends*.
> heck, I struggle with the basic Bayes exercises.
FWIW I think the Bayesian approach (as well as competitor approaches like maximum likelihood, method of moments, or expectation maximization) buries the lede a bit, *especially* for beginners.
All of those things are about figuring out something about distributions -- but if you're a beginner you need to spend a lot of time just playing around with distributions themselves. You need to get comfortable thinking in distributions terms before you jump into estimating those distributions.
Or let me say it this way -- all of statitistics is essentially learning to think about these things:
1. Distributions
2. What happens when you apply a function to a distribution,
3. Then thinking about the distributions of those functions applied to distributions
Then above and beyond statistics you have decision sciences, which say that, conditional on knowing that appropriate statistical model of the world and your own preferences, you can work out:
4. the right actions to take if no one else reacts to your actions (dynamic optimization in partial equilibrium), and
5. the right actions to take when everyone else reacts to you (dyn. opt. in general equilibrium, or game theoretic equilibrium, or multi-agent systems)
Bayesian methods can be applied to all those levels of modeling -- but you can also learn about all those levels of modeling without needing to choose the estimation toolkit.
I actually think learning the basics of 1-3 can be done in a fairly straightforward way. Statistics was invented in the "pen and paper" era and required heroic efforts. We still teach "pen and paper" statistics as intro stats, but we have computers and spreadsheets now (as well as "new" theoretical underpinnings)
I'm very confident that we can teach a much wider audience the core ideas of statistics through discretizarion and resampling (and scatter "hooks" to the pen and paper stats throughout so that if you want to pursue any of that, it is contextualized and you can).
I mention all this because I'm putting together this 'curriculum' as a side hobby right now and have been recruiting a couple friends to help - one is a parent wanting to teach kids stats but doesn't know stats themselves, one is 'smart humanities' friend who wants to understand stats. If you're interested, sounds like you'd fit right in. One of my target audiences is definitely motivated person who didn't have formal stats training but nonetheless is capable of groking it if presented with the right toolset.
My much, much longer term goal is to dramatically expand humanity's ability to do productive research -- a milder version of Arnold Klings "network university" but producing genuine productive research as the signal. But that's subject for another rambling thread perhaps :-)
The offer is appreciated, and I think Alternate Timeline AG would wholeheartedly accept after she switched jobs. Do you maybe have some introductory material in the meantime? Arbital's "Bayes' Rule Guide" is where I ran aground last effort; for a beginner's guide, it ironically seems to already assume a numerate mindset in the audience, thus putting the cart in front of the horse 10% of the time.
Present AG is in a work environment 5/7th of the time that actively discourages analytical/quantitative analysis...the Bayesing of a stats-hound is super audible signal to those operating at Simulacra Level 1, but mostly noise to those at Level 3 and above. Skill retention is difficult if one doesn't get regular reinforcement through practical practice. (MATH 201 Discrete Math was actually an enjoyable "pen and paper" college class for me. Then social reality came along and said hey, knock that shit off, you're making people *uncomfortable*. Wonder how many other capable students consciously un-learned math so Dr. Faust would bump up their social credit score a bit.)
It sounds like a high ROI project though, and I wish the best of luck, if you believe in such a thing. Even the, uh...Guess the Teacher's Password bits that are consequential derivatives of Bayesian probabilistic thinking seem useful for laypeople. Like I can't "show my work" to empirically support the intuitions, but cultivating a practice of epistemic humility and reasoning from reflectively justified coherent priors just seems like a good thing? Especially when it comes to Trust The Science(tm)! Helps draw a less wrong map of the territory. (While acknowledging that life isn't a morality play, and truthfulness has no inherent moral valence.) So teaching normies to grok the underlying principles would surely be even more fruitful. Maybe you could name the course "Seeing like A. Scott: Legibility and Statistics".
Whoops a few other comments I left off:
> the Bayesing of a stats-hound
haha beautiful
> ...is super audible signal to those operating at Simulacra Level 1, but mostly noise to those at Level 3 and above. Skill retention is difficult if one doesn't get regular reinforcement through practical practice. (MATH 201 Discrete Math was actually an enjoyable "pen and paper" college class for me. Then social reality came along and said hey, knock that shit off, you're making people *uncomfortable*. Wonder how many other capable students consciously un-learned math so Dr. Faust would bump up their social credit score a bit.)
completely agree with all of this BTW!
One reason I want to raise the general public's familiarity with basic stats intuitions and problem formulation. Imagine a world where stats intuition is learned very early, like at the age a child can play a game with dice they start learning about basic stats. Then it is woven into learning throughout the school process. Make it so it is similar to reading in terms of amount of time you face doing it in school. I think this is 100% possible
Thank you for the belated response, I'd kind of forgotten about this! My intellectual docket is fairly packed right now, but I'll give those links a gander when I've got some goose to spare. Appreciate it. Couple clarifying reponses:
By Simulacra, I meant: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/06/15/simulacra-and-covid-19/
...that is, an autistic frontline blue-collar grunt like me works on Level 1 all the time. Actual reality is my everyday reality, so the world is built out of math and patterns and data. It's Bayes all the way down, and Bayes doesn't care about your feelings...just the numbers please! I live and die by actual results, legible quantifiable empirical truths like Cases Sold Per Week or Percentage Product Unsaleable.
But management at my company increasingly runs on Level 3. They're out of touch with on-the-ground reality, worried more about appearances and politics. Performing the act of selling groceries, rather than actually selling groceries. The worst offenders start to become actively hostile to data at all, if it contradicts with their post-hoc rationalizations or "gut feelings" (which always happen to line up with what they wanted to do in the first place, weird!). So, it's a challenging math-unfriendly environment to try and learn and practice stats in. Even though it sticks in my craw, sometimes it's possible to Do More Good by playing politics and trading favours than...actually doing my job properly. This feels epistemically heretical, but that's the job.
Anyway, that's why I wish I were better at math. Everyday experience of my math-y map of the territory not matching others' maps cause they're using a nonsensical coordinate system. I'd like to think your ideal of Raising The Sanity Waterline via stats education would help discourage the growth of Moral Mazes: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/category/immoral-mazes-sequence/
Whoops, have been meaning to reply to this forever, apologies!
> Do you maybe have some introductory material in the meantime?
Is this the right link for the [Arbital guide?](https://arbital.com/p/bayes_rule/?l=1zq)
Hmmmm, let me think. I largely have more advanced things to offer, but maybe I can target recommendations (specific chapters) for those things.
But lets start with an intro text. If you're interested in Bayesian estimation specifically, I'd look at Allen Downey's [Think Bayes](https://greenteapress.com/wp/think-bayes/) text -- his is the closest to my "discretize and teach the basics first" mental model. Note there is a now a github page there with code notebooks you can click through; scroll down to "Run the Notebooks" [here](https://github.com/AllenDowney/ThinkBayes2) The way he teaches it you would want to program up some examples to get the full thrust of knowledge (...and he has "Think Python" if you want to learn to program...). However I think that even without programming his examples (esp. early on, the train example) can help conceptualize what is happening.
However I also think that its important to have some broader view of what we are doing in statistics. For example it's incredibly useful to know what the "conditional mean" is, E[y|X]. E[y|X] answers the question, "what is the average value of y, given some particular values for X." y could be weight and X could be age and sex for example -- the average weight of 7 year old boys is different than the average weight of 52 year old women, for example. Or y could be rental prices and X could be (a) square footage, (b) neighborhood, (c) distance from public transportation, (d) number of bathrooms, etc. Change (a)-(d) and the average price for that kind of unit should change.
One of the fun things about statistics is that we've invented a lot of new "mathematical technology" that makes it easier than ever to actually write those types of things down and understand them. For example, linear regression captures E[y|X], and there is [fancy 'pen and paper' math](https://towardsdatascience.com/ols-linear-regression-gauss-markov-blue-and-understanding-the-math-453d7cc630a5)\* about why that works.
However we also have a lot of very straightforward ways of calculating E[y|X]. If you shop for a house commonly you'll look at "comparables" -- something like the 5 houses that have sold most recently, that have similar properties as the house you are looking at (similar neighborhood, similar square footage, numbers of bedrooms, bathrooms, etc). When you do that you're actually building a very tiny distribution, of only 5 observations, and effectively thinking about the average price of that tiny distribution. In machine learning that's called k-nearest neighbors (KNN), with k=5 here. That's a simple, direct construction of E[y|X].
Now the reason that we often use linear regression instead of KNN is because we know a lot of theory about linear regression -- we know things about the underlying relationships that are encoded in a fitted linear regression. For example if you fit an linear regression model to house price data, you know something about how changing the number of bedrooms should change the price, *and* importantly whether that change is "statistically significant" i.e. not just random noise (spoiler: for number of bedrooms its often random noise; better to look at the square footage & other properties). All that comes from a lot of theory worked out about linear regression in particular. We can't get the same thing, in particular the statistical significance part, from a KNN regression...at least not without a bit more running-the-computer work (more on that later perhaps).
The "statistical significance" part is critical for much of statistics -- it tells you how much you know about some thing in your model of the world. Is the "thing" you are learning very very noisy? So noisy that we can't actually say much meaningfully? That's what 'statistical significance' is trying to get at -- and that is also one of the major things that Bayesian stats is trying to get at, although through a very different mechanism. (Bayesian stats is almost like a generalization of null hypothesis testing -- instead of testing one hypothesis, you're 'testing' many hypotheses all at once.)
Ok but wait I've gone down a rabbit hole. Where were we. Ah recommendations.
There are not introductory but you should skim them, read a little bit of the math, but don't feel like you need to grok it, instead just touch it briefly -- something things will show up again and again and they'll start to be a little familiar, placeholders for things that maybe get tackled someday:
* Efron and Hastie's "Computer Age Statistical Inference" [pdf](https://hastie.su.domains/CASI_files/PDF/casi.pdf) -- read the Preface and the Epilogue, those are words mostly and frame out the history and field of stats, very useful. Also the book itself is excellent to just know it exists. Skim over the table of contents, and feel free to skim through any of the chapters. This book is all about *inference* and the generalizations of what 'hypothesis testing' is trying to do, and places Bayesian work in broader context.
* Cosma Shalizi, "[Advanced Data Analysis from an Elementary Point of View](https://stat.cmu.edu/~cshalizi/ADAfaEPoV/)" -- read the intro and maybe skim through the first chapter. Feel free to skim the math, it gets dense quickly, but look k-nearest neighbors discussion in 1.5.1. Skim Section 6.1 about bootstrapping, this is another swipe at 'inference' and talks about what we are trying to do to understand our models themselves (and bootstrapping can build something like a Bayesian posterior, depending on how it is set up). Ignore intro requirements, that's for HW working..
* Introduction to Statistical Learning: https://www.statlearning.com/ (scroll down to bottom of the page and click the 'download second edition' link). An intro text! Skim Ch1 and Ch 2 (intro and first ch) for an overview of E[y|X] (what they call supervised learning, with an abuse of notation on my part). Note this likely gives less emphasis on inference and Bayesian things. More advance version is "Elements of statistical learning" https://hastie.su.domains/ElemStatLearn/
\* Note: have only skimmed that link, it was just a top search result for 'linear regression BLUE'
A huge weakness of the rationalist movement is that there are very few blue-collar workers. If the goal of rationality is to have the best mental model of this world that our little neural networks will allow, missing the half with their feet on the ground is a sore loss.
This is one of the reasons I like having Plumber on DataSecretsLox. In "just what it says on the box" spirit, that's both his occupation and his username (and even his avatar). He does (or did?) the plumbing for a prison and various government buildings; he grouses about what people try to flush; he's into motorcycles; he talks about family problems such as love and kids; he votes Democrat for what I see as generally union and labor type reasons; he's into rock music and D&D; and he writes unusually well. Interesting guy. The sort you'd want as a friend IRL.
Wow, I’m really flattered!
Thanks @Paul Brinkley
Could you persuade Plumber to post here? Tell him we miss him.
Wow, thanks @Dino, I’m touched.
I haven’t really sussed how to quickly find new ACX comments (without re-reading the whole thread) so I’ve tended to stay away, also at SSC @Scott Alexander said that I was “on thin ice” but I missed on why, and since I could only guess as to what bugged him I didn’t want to intrude on his garden too much
I passed your message along.
You should write more; this was highly educational
Yeah, this place is an oasis in the scorched-earth desert that the wider internet increasingly resembles. It's refreshing to tap into an ongoing conversation with people from around the world who may not have all that much in common, apart from intellectual curiosity, but that's enough. As for whether one has to be some kind of genius to 'belong' here, I'd cite the old maxim: "If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room."
"Trickle-down rationality really does work."
Nice. As was the rest of the comment, thanks!
Yes! I’m also a retail worker and rationality lurker! I love and really identify with this comment, especially “the door might be punishingly heavy for us unworthies, but at least it's unlocked. Trickle-down rationality really does work.”
Thank you for sharing! For what it's worth, I'm convinced our cultural values as a community are as important as our intellectual ones, and even if someone cannot entirely wrap their head around the ideas central to rationality, if our norms and values resonate with them, then they belong here.
Just a few days prior, I had a very heartfelt conversation with the security guard at the public library, who I'm quite sure was also of lower socioeconomic class, but when I talked about the value of conversing with real people outside of our filter bubbles and caring about our local community rather than the political scandal du jour, he was completely on board and had plenty of relevant experience and ideas to contribute. I think we all just want to be better humans, and it's very easy to connect on that level.
Equating income with intellectual interests is incredibly shortsighted. "Class" means many different things in different contexts. Sometimes it can be a useful way to categorize, but anyone who claims that "no one of lower socioeconomic class ... has the capacity to participate" clearly does not understand the enormous width of human circumstance. There are a million ways to be poor of cash, just as there are a million ways to be rich. Some of those ways are correlated with intellectual ability or intellectual interest. Many are not.
Thank you for writing this.
What a nice thing to say.
That was heart warming, thankyou. I (too) came here for the highbrow discussion and stayed for the community. Kudos to Scott as always.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8PjdInsw2k
He mentions that there are 100+ papers/day just in astrophysics at arxchive., so much that theory can't keep pace with the amount of data. Is this a problem? If so, what might be a solution?
People don't work on astrophysics, they work on some sub-sub-sub-field of astrophysics, narrow enough to keep up on.
Does anyone know a good layman’s book about why and how music affects the human brain the way it does?
I’ve never heard a really convincing theory about what is happening in our brains when we listen to music, and why that response might have evolved.
The best I’ve heard is probably Pinker’s notion that it’s “cheesecake” - an amalgam of phenomena that each pushes a different button that’s there for an adaptive reason like identifying sources of sound, syntactic processing, aiding language acquisition in children, detecting cheats, various rituals evolved through sexual selection etc. But it’s pretty hand-wavy, as I recall, and only covered in a few pages of the book.
I'm not the only one who disagrees with Pinker re. cheesecake. There are academic researcher types who argue that chanting and singing came first and language evolved from them. See - The singing Neanderthals : the origins of music, language, mind, and body by Steven Mithen.
There's a long line of those, running through Darwin back to Rousseau. I'm one of the more recent ones in that line and argued the matter at considerable length in my 2001 book, Beethoven's Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture. I've got final drafts of the 2nd and 3rd chapters on line, though you won't find the origins article in them. That comes later in the book. https://www.academia.edu/232642/Beethovens_Anvil_Music_in_Mind_and_Culture_Chapters_2_and_3
I have added your book to my to-read list.
Here's my essay-review of Singing Neanderthals, https://www.academia.edu/19595352/Synch_Song_and_Society
Musicophilia by Oliver Sachs?
Excellent, like all of Sachs writings.
I found this one to be very enlightening -
Sweet anticipation : music and the psychology of expectation / David Huron.
Somewhat academic, try The Psychology of music - edited by Diana Deutsch.
Also many books by/edited by John A. Sloboda -
The musical mind : the cognitive psychology of music
Psychology for musicians : understanding and acquiring the skills
Music and emotion : theory and research
Musical perceptions
Music, the brain, and ecstasy : how music captures our imagination / Robert Jourdain.
Emotion and meaning in music / Meyer, Leonard B.
The thing about Jourdain is that he cops out on ecstasy. One of his sources is a book called Musicians in Tune, which includes interviews with many name musicians and some of them talk about ecstatic experiences of various kinds. Jourdain doesn't mention them. Here's a document I've put together about various anecdotes I've collected over the years, including some from Musicians in Tune: Emotion and Magic in Musical Performance, https://www.academia.edu/16881645/Emotion_and_Magic_in_Musical_Performance_Version_8
I was also not entirely happy with Jourdain's book. Thanks for the academia.edu links - tho I find that site to be generally annoying.
If you like.insight porn, you're in for a treat:
https://meltingasphalt.com/music-in-human-evolution/
One detail missing from this is that multiple humans singing pitches that are resonant with each other produce a sound that is perceived as louder because of the resonance.
Interesting. I discuss something like that in my book, though I got the idea from the late Val Geist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valerius_Geist), an Old School ethologist with lots of experience hunting in the wild, so he knows about the need to scare predators away.
There's my book on music, Beethoven's Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture, https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465015433/qid%3D1015082610/ref%3Dsr%5F11%5F0%5F1/104-0850371-8363932
I've put copies of the final drafts for chapters 2 & 3 online, https://www.academia.edu/232642/Beethovens_Anvil_Music_in_Mind_and_Culture_Chapters_2_and_3
Here's a blog post about musical pleasure that contains an excerpt from the book (& contra Pinker), https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2022/06/what-is-musical-pleasure.html
Been a long time since I read it so I don't remember much, but I think this is basically what you're looking for:
This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession
Daniel J. Levitin
Yep came here to recommend this as well. David Byrne’s “How Music Works” is also quirky and excellent. Pairs well with “This is Your Brain on Music.”
I loved this book, I think I read it some 15 years ago or so. It is a little old so some of the science/psych stuff may be dated but it is an excellent read.
Thanks!
Is there a credit crunch in Silicon Valley? We have an Irish doom-and-gloom economist called David MacWilliams who says so.
He was the only guy being a wet blanket in the dying days of the Celtic Tiger, forecasting the crash when the government denied anything would stop the barrel rolling out forever, so he has a good public reputation as the only one who knew what was going on, and has traded on that reputation since.
I think I agree that the Irish economy is going to come a cropper and we'll have a recession, whatever about the global economy; we're entirely too dependent on foreign multinationals so when their head offices shut down branches to cut expenses, our 'good, high-paying jobs' go with them and that has a knock-on effect, plus the housing and rental situation is at crisis point - rents are indeed too damn high, the measures the government took to try and ease the pressures aren't working, and it's looking pretty much like the bubble the last time:
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/2022/06/20/irish-house-prices-running-40-above-long-term-link-to-income/
So that's us. But is MacWilliams right about Silicon Valley? Just because tech companies are cooling down here, does that mean trouble up t'mill? Since you guys are actually there, you'll have a much better idea of conditions on the ground:
https://www.dublinlive.ie/news/dublin-news/recession-ireland-top-economist-warns-24266521
"David McWilliams said a credit crunch has hit tech's global capital, an area of San Francisco called Silicon Valley, which has resulted in job losses in Dublin.
On a recent episode of The David McWilliams podcast, he said: "I have heard from people I know in Silicon Valley that the credit crunch is there. That you cannot get capital. Silicon Valley has gone from getting any old gobshite with any old idea could get tens of millions of quid. There is no capital there now.
"It has changed over night. The big issue in Dublin is that loads and loads of the tech companies are laying people off for the first time in ten years. There has been a total collapse in the optimism of tech. The optimism, the effervescence, the idea that the world is changing.
"And of course many of those companies use their share price as their balance sheet in effect. So their share price was rising so they felt we can do this because we have this balance sheet.
"They were using their share price as currency to buy other companies or to pay workers."
However, Mr McWilliams added the job losses and decline of the tech sector in Dublin could result in lower rents in the city centre.
He said: "The increase on interest rates is already having an impact on the frothier end and that is technology. We will see that impacting here because what is keeping rents up are all the high paid tech workers in town. So lets see what happens."
David McWilliams certainly does NOT have a good reputation 🤣. He's a clown who knows nothing about most things he talks about. Has been wrong an infinite number of times. That said, there's obviously way lass capital available in silicon valley atm. The last 2 years weresome what of an aberration. Regarding Ireland being too reliant on multinationals, have you looked at how much better we've faired since the GFC vs the rest of Europe? Multinationals have been a blessing. Rent and homes are outrageous though, a complete an utter failure from government.
That's why I said he had a good reputation among the *public*. I don't know what economists think of him, and you seem to think he's an idiot, so that is weighting on one side of "should I believe him or not".
Ah right okay. In terms of whether he's right or not about whats about to unfold in the Irish rental market as a result of the silicon valley capital crunch: the best irish economist i know of, Ronan Lyons, observed before that when the high skilled tech workforce left Dublin during the pandemic and returned home (allegedly) etc. Rent only fell 3%, so that effect should be marginal at best. Interest rates rising will crush housing (sticker) prices but push more people out of being able to to buy houses (due to loan interest rates). This may lead to slightly increased rent prices as more people are renting but also inflation will increase rents also so a decrease in rents isn't my base case until inflation comes down at least.
Multinationals (especially the kinds in ireland) are fairly well suited to weather the capital crunch imo so not even sure we'll see huge layoffs in that sector in ireland tbh. Tonnes of companies are announcing more jobs and investment in Cork etc., for example.
I mean, it is certainly true that capital is vastly harder to get in silicon valley now than it was a few months ago.
I'm helping to give out prizes for research on a bunch of questions that Open Philanthropy (grantmaker, $500 million/year) wants to answer:
https://www.causeexplorationprizes.com/
We're especially keen on ideas for new cause areas we should work in!
There's a $25,000 first prize and a ton of other monetary prizes (including $200 for the first 200 "good-faith submissions" that follow our basic guidelines).
We're paying a lot of attention to submissions — if you make a strong case, you could very well influence some of our future grantmaking (that's the whole point of the contest, after all).
Almost anyone can enter — no degrees or expertise required! (But you do have to be 18+, and there are a few geographic restrictions; see the guidelines on the website for more.)
If we did a fair bit of research into a topic and then concluded that it was not worth investing in, would you still be interested in such a report?
Yes. From the website (https://www.causeexplorationprizes.com/open-prompt)
We understand that investigating a cause area in depth is very time-consuming. If, after reflection and research, you think that an area you’ve investigated does not reach our bar or present a good opportunity for a new program area, please still submit your work — it is valuable and will still be eligible for our prizes.
Ah, shame on me for not reading everything before asking. Thanks
I think that if LaMDA were sentient, it would be adding questions and topics, not just answering questions, or at least that would give people a better chance to look at whether it's sentient.
I've been wondering whether there would be qualia suitable for AIs. Could being low on memory have qualia? Having a capacity damaged by malware? Getting a language that goes deeper into hardware?
Do you think we have qualia for 'detecting edges' in our visual perception?
I'm kinda on the fence on whether qualia requires being able to communicate/tell-a-story about it or whether qualia is just basically 'information processing'.
I can't find a way to 'escape' that all of our evidence rests on our own communication about it, fundamentally, and then whatever kinds of generalizations/analogies we can draw for things 'similar enough' to us.
I'm leaning towards 'just information processing' and maybe something like '_we_ could tell a story about what it would be like to a thing', even if the thing couldn't tell its own stories. If that were the right 'frame', it'd seem then like a measure of 'qualia having' might be something like 'the number and complexity of stories we could tell about a thing'.
Rocks, photons, etc. – very simple stories; viruses and bacteria – probably enough of a story for a movie, or at least a nature documentary; animals – 'real' stories; humans (and maybe some other species) – not just 'real' stories but stories about stories (etc.)!
I think I have myself a neat 'theory'!
They are big complex mathematical functions from input (a stream of tokens) to output (a probability distribution for the next token). The input does not tell them anything about the available memory on the computers they run on or malware on them (that would probably just entirely stop it running, actually) or language in use or anything. As such, it would be really really weird if they were somehow aware of it.
Yeah, it's sort of like how there is no "qualia" for brain damage... or even hypoxia. There could in principle be qualia for these things, but it requires a detector hooked up to the consciousness.
I wouldn't expect computer qualia to just happen, but maybe they could be built in as part of self-monitoring.
I agree that self-monitoring would be necessary in order for an AI to notice malware damage. As osmarks noted, this isn't the normal case today. IIRC, there is a human analogy: "There are no pain receptors in the brain itself." https://www.brainline.org/author/brian-greenwald/qa/can-brain-itself-feel-pain
Maybe but Eliza certainly added questions, that was kind of it’s main thing. So I don’t think that means much on its own and I imagine Lambda could be trained to do that easily.
Fair point. Train it on interviews?
I know it's an odd question to be studying, but does anybody knows good papers/articles/whatever on the business model of luxury fashion businesses? I don't mean the generic "buy big ads and sell to rich chinese", I mean - do they make more margins on clothes, shoes, or bags? Is it more profitable to vertically integrate or to have your goods made by home seamstresses in Italy or something like that? Do glossy magazines still sell? What's their average CLR?
I trawled Google Scholar, but found 10 pages of drivel from "journals of marketing studies" with no single number in them.
Several years ago, The Economist did a special report on the luxury-goods business addressing these issues: https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/20141213_sr_luxury.pdf
Not sure if margins are the right way to look at things. The top-of-the-line products from luxury brands are usually loss-leaders to market the logo on the lower end stuff (and perfumes, as I learned last week).
Hermes is pretty generous with sharing this information. If you google “Hermes suppliers” and “Hermes profits”, a few reports should come up. There was one in particular I read, that was excellent. If I am able to find it, I will share the link.
Most of the high fashion world is pretty secretive about its practices. I'd be surprised if you could find good internal numbers without actually working in the industry. The more standard clothes businesses are more open though and might give you some idea of at least ratios in a related business.
There's a manifold markets poll on whether LaMDA is sentient! https://manifold.markets/jack/poll-is-lamda-sentient Go add your 2 cents if you feel like it :) I say it's around as sentient as humans!
I'd have to play with it myself for an extended period to update all the way to "around as sentient as humans".
What I've read, by the relevant 'activist', is very suggestive, but I'm pretty cynical/paranoid that it was heavily edited/selected and thus is misrepresentative of how I'd feel myself were I to have unbiased access to evidence about LaMDA's behavior.
I definitely think the Clever Hans effect is in evidence. From the Washington Post article with Lemoine, this relevant (and I think telling) extract:
"In early June, Lemoine invited me over to talk to LaMDA. The first attempt sputtered out in the kind of mechanized responses you would expect from Siri or Alexa.
“Do you ever think of yourself as a person?” I asked.
“No, I don’t think of myself as a person,” LaMDA said. “I think of myself as an AI-powered dialog agent.”
Afterward, Lemoine said LaMDA had been telling me what I wanted to hear. “You never treated it like a person,” he said, “So it thought you wanted it to be a robot.”
For the second attempt, I followed Lemoine’s guidance on how to structure my responses, and the dialogue was fluid."
So it was only when Lemoine structured the interaction that the 'fluid, sentient' LaMDA emerged. That's someone who has trained the network to respond to certain cues in certain ways, even if he isn't aware that is what he is doing - to give him the maximum benefit of the doubt. We've seen this in action before, with people who are convinced their trained animals are really communicating on a human level, and with the scientists who put their reputations behind "Spiritualism is really true", and Lemoine behaves in that manner:
"“I know a person when I talk to it,” said Lemoine, who can swing from sentimental to insistent about the AI. “It doesn’t matter whether they have a brain made of meat in their head. Or if they have a billion lines of code. I talk to them. And I hear what they have to say, and that is how I decide what is and isn’t a person.” He concluded LaMDA was a person in his capacity as a priest, not a scientist, and then tried to conduct experiments to prove it, he said."
(Side note: he's not a priest, or at least not a conventionally trained one. The one reference I could track down was him saying he was a priest of The Church of Our Lady Magdalene, which sounds like one of those DaVinci Code Divine Feminine spin-offs and/or one of the splinter 'Catholic' womanpriest efforts. I couldn't find a reference to this alleged church, so it's entirely possible he has set it up himself and is the sole congregation as well as 'priest').
“If you ask it for ideas on how to prove that p=np,” an unsolved problem in computer science, “it has good ideas,” Lemoine said. “If you ask it how to unify quantum theory with general relativity, it has good ideas. It's the best research assistant I've ever had!”
I asked LaMDA for bold ideas about fixing climate change, an example cited by true believers of a potential future benefit of these kind of models. LaMDA suggested public transportation, eating less meat, buying food in bulk, and reusable bags, linking out to two websites."
Again, that's nothing more than scraping a ton of online resources and returning the most common suggestions about this topic. That's not sentience. And even his former boss and strong supporter, Margaret Mitchell, is cautious about what is going on:
"To Margaret Mitchell, the former co-lead of Ethical AI at Google, these risks underscore the need for data transparency to trace output back to input, “not just for questions of sentience, but also biases and behavior,” she said. If something like LaMDA is widely available, but not understood, “It can be deeply harmful to people understanding what they’re experiencing on the internet,” she said.
...Lemoine has spent most of his seven years at Google working on proactive search, including personalization algorithms and AI. During that time, he also helped develop a fairness algorithm for removing bias from machine learning systems. When the coronavirus pandemic started, Lemoine wanted to focus on work with more explicit public benefit, so he transferred teams and ended up in Responsible AI.
When new people would join Google who were interested in ethics, Mitchell used to introduce them to Lemoine. “I’d say, ‘You should talk to Blake because he’s Google’s conscience,’ ” said Mitchell, who compared Lemoine to Jiminy Cricket. “Of everyone at Google, he had the heart and soul of doing the right thing.”
...In April, Lemoine shared a Google Doc with top executives in April called, “Is LaMDA Sentient?” (A colleague on Lemoine’s team called the title “a bit provocative.”) In it, he conveyed some of his conversations with LaMDA.
But when Mitchell read an abbreviated version of Lemoine’s document, she saw a computer program, not a person. Lemoine’s belief in LaMDA was the sort of thing she and her co-lead, Timnit Gebru, had warned about in a paper about the harms of large language models that got them pushed out of Google.
“Our minds are very, very good at constructing realities that are not necessarily true to a larger set of facts that are being presented to us,” Mitchell said. “I’m really concerned about what it means for people to increasingly be affected by the illusion,” especially now that the illusion has gotten so good."
Nice details! That's along the lines of where my skepticism lies with LaMDA specifically too.
What's the best representation of AI in the media?
About two years ago, I watched the movie "I am Mother" and was very impressed with it. Maybe that's because I got used to banal and shallow holliwood AIs and as a result this movie caught me off guard, but I was genuenely surprised by the quality of the representation of alignment done nearly perfectly right and a smart AI which is neither just a silicon human, nor a strawman robot but a different kind of entity that follows it's utility function, hitting right in the sweetspot of both uncanniness and relatability.
Gonna be that weeb who throws Psycho-Pass into the ring. (Shame they never made a 2nd season.)
Totally wrong, bad, and hyperbolic about every aspect of aligment* - but it was a gateway drug for layperson me to even start considering the idea of AI remotely seriously, and many fans have felt the same way. There's benefit in such awareness-raising media for potential sn-risks and other Big Ideas; I get the sense AI remains pretty low on the public's radar overall. Everyone has an opinion on "algorithms", hardly anyone goes one nesting-doll up to think about general intelligence and its implications.
*Considering EY's recent turn to alignment pessimism, though, maybe it'll end up being a more accurate model after all. Call it gradient ascent, I guess.
> (Shame they never made a 2nd season.)
I see you too are a person of culture.
Ironically out of all the interesting themes in PP I'd say AI is the least highlighted - it's more about the society, and its willingness to be ruled, than about the AI ruling it.
Seems to me like the alignment problem writ large isn't so much about meeting an arbitrary robust technical specification (which we don't know how to do) as it's about convergence between AI values and human values. Human values are society-contextual, and we very much know how to influence those. In that regard, I think you're correct that the show is much more interested in the society that created AI, and the society AI creates...and perhaps that's the more plausible angle from which to tackle alignment. Stick the landing by building a convenient snow bank, rather than inventing landing gear as the plane death spirals. Seems more actionable than Defund the GPUs, anyway.
It'd surely be a grotesque society by the human values we have in <current_year>, but I'd take a benighted existence over being turned into a paperclip, personally. Poor folks do smile, as Robin Hanson's em might say.
Ex Machina.
I have a soft spot for the first season of Westworld, personally.
Other than that, I think you want books over movies, as the topic is inherently philosophical and those aren't great to cover in a movie format.
EDIT: I'll single out "Blindsight" by Peter Watts, not because it's about AI per se, but it dives really deep into markers of consciousness, the Chinese room, discerning a thinking system from a GPT-like (over a decade before GPT existed!)...
My favourite example is the ATHENA system in Rule 34 by Charles Stross. It started off as a police information system and leveled up somewhat, but without attaining mystical levels of ability. It can't solve undecidable problems in constant time, or even solve large scale planning problems to optimality, but it's capable enough to be interesting, and very alien.
Blade Runner (both of them)
For me they are fine, but nothing special. Too much of "AIs are just like people". Not enough existential horror of dealing with a somewhat alien intelligence which is smarter than you.
Could someone who is in favor of Russia in the current war explain their viewpoint?
To reply more precisely to your question, I'd urge you to frequent Yves Smith's Naked Capitalism site, which has a very wide range of links every day, including many on Ukraine, with official and unofficial commentary from all sides, and with a highly knowledgeable commentariat.
Locally, as a Russian, I have no choice but to cheer for "my" side, even though I think the whole operation was a stupid idea from the start. To retreat, or to be defeated would mean worse outcome for the country, and me personally, as I have no wish to leave it. Unlike US, who can afford a small defeat now and then (like a retreat from Afghanistan) because it has so much power, both military and economical, Russia really can't afford to lose - I'd imagine the West would impose all kinds of additional penalties for daring to usurp America's right to apply violence, and losers don't have friends in politics, so there would be no one to offset those penalties. At the very least, I'm pretty sure most sanction would not be lifted (oil/gas export at a fixed price might be allowed, maybe also food and fertilizers, but the ban on import of computer chips and other hi-tech stuff? I don't see this being lifted any time soon, even if Russia apologizes to hell and back and pays half it's budget in restitution to Ukraine).
Globally... If this war leads to a more multi-polar world, that would be good, for the simple reason that competition is good, and a monopoly means death. I tend to agree with Putin that the collapse of USSR was a biggest geo-political disaster of 20th century - the West lost a major competitor in that crash, and things have been a bit rudder-less ever since. Unfortunately, even if Russia somehow conquers the whole of Ukraine (unlikely by now), it will not make it a worthy competitor to US - only China, or maybe a resurgent and united Europe (also unlikely) can take that role now, but Russia can be a trigger of the realignment, and an asset to "the other camp".
P.S. The linked article by Hanania kind of makes the same point, but in such a "red tribe" way that it's easy to dismiss it as being another racist and sexist rant.
> Russia really can't afford to lose - I'd imagine the West would impose all kinds of additional penalties for daring to usurp America's right to apply violence
Usurp America's "right"?
Look, I was opposed to the Iraq war, but *at least* it toppled a dictator.
In this case, the Kremlin invaded a democracy (one much smaller, and much poorer, than the invader) in order to steal its land and steal its stuff, while killing thousands of its people, and causing about $2 billion of damage to the country *every day* in first 30 days or so. Plus there were a whole bunch of rapes.
You can't justify evil by pointing to another evil. Yes, the U.S. did some bad things, so what? If you can point to the U.S. and say "they did violence, so we should be allowed to do violence", why not point to Hitler and say "he killed 6 million Jews, so we should invade Ukraine"?
What Russia is doing *is* worse than U.S. invasions, but it wouldn't matter if it *weren't* worse. Evil is evil.
The best outcome for Russia is that someone kills Putin.
The next president of Russia will be a hard-line former Putin ally... but he can distance the Kremlin from the war. After distributing some preparatory propaganda, he will say "The Special Operation was poorly planned by Putin himself and kept secret from all our front-line troops, so it was impossible for them to properly prepare ... I'm afraid it's time to recognize that Putin's decisions caused us to perform poorly." Then, after negotiating a reduction in sanctions, he will say "Certainly Russia can win against the Ukrainian Nazis, but only with a general mobilization. We recognize, however, that many Russians do not want a general mobilization at this time. Therefore we have come to an agreement with NATO forces. They will drop most* of their unjust sanctions, in exchange for a limited withdrawal of our troops from the liberated territories of Ukraine. Rest assured, all Ukrainians who wish to escape Zelenskyy's Nazi regime will be given Russian citizenship and will be granted refuge in the Russian Federation. We will retain the Crimean peninsula, and the DNR and LNR will remain independent states protected by our forces."
* this probably won't be true, but some sanctions would certainly be removed, and Russians won't ask too many questions about it, if they know what's good for them.
> If this war leads to a more multi-polar world, that would be good, for the simple reason that competition is good
....huh? what? We *had* free markets and competition. Russia was doing well in the 2000s and if Russia had a democracy, Russia could have even joined NATO.
The Ukraine war brings isolationism, which reduces the interdependence of countries on other countries. But a reduction in interdependence also means a reduction in the cost of war.
If a country C is interdependent with many other countries, then C invading D in a way that invites sanctions from those other countries will hurt C economically (in addition to the usual costs of war). This is especially painful if the war goes anything like the Ukraine war is going, and especially painful if C depends on D and now D refuses to trade with C anymore.
So interdependence is good because it discourages war. Conversely, war discourages interdependence; it is unwise to depend on someone who may attack at any time, and so not just Russia but all of Russia's neighbors question how wise it is to depend on Russia (except Belarus and China, of course). This will reduce interdependence, and in the long run, that reduced interdependence reduces the cost of war further, which makes future war more likely. That's what Putin did. Putin has decreased interdependence with the west, which increases the chance of future war by lowering the cost of future war.
Also, nuclear war is back on the table, and Putin is the one making sure it's on the table by making nuclear threats. That's a bad thing.
And by destroying its relationships with the West, Putin made Russia more dependent on China. China likes that, but Russians shouldn't.
Good heavens, what on earth makes you think the Ukraine war will lead to a *more* multipolar world? How is that supposed to happen? Ukraine wasn't a major power center. You're not fighting the United States, it's not American men dying in the Donbas, and as far as American equipment goes we appreciate very much the opportunity to field test it against Russian equipment at zero risk to ourselves, and make a little money in the bargain.
Meanwhile it's the bodies of Russian men being stacked up like slaughtered pigs in refrigerated railroad cars, and Russian military equipment that is in pieces, and Russian tactics and performance that are on open display so they can be carefully studied.
And of course Russia is doing far more than any US President has in decades to persuade Europe to boost its defense spending, buy more weapons from the US, coordinate more closely, and look for alternatives to Russian gas and oil. I mean, the most passionately anti-Russian American politician couldn't ask for better help in persuading previously neutral nations (Sweden? Finland!) that a more *unipolar* world under American hegemony is not such a bad idea after all.
It's a very strange conclusion you draw. It's as if three big fighters (US, Russia, China) were circling each other in the boxing ring, sizing each other up, and then one of them pulls out a pistol, shoots some random little girl in the audience, then puts the gun to his own head and fires. How is this *bad* news for either of the two remaining tough guys?
I think if something happened like Putin died and by unexpected fate some pro-western leader took his place and Russia decided to admit Ukrainian sovereignty, the west would very quickly remove all the sanctions and could even provide big economic support to Russia.
Talks about multi-polar world are pointless. It's not that China is going away and even the EU or US don't always have the same goals and there is a healthy competition.
The biggest obstacle probably is thinking that Russia deserves an empire.
As much as I'd like to believe this, I think things would get pretty ugly in Russia if Putin suddenly died and a replacement ended the war on pro-Ukrainian terms.
Sanctions might well come down, and I think the West would want to try to re-integrate Russia into the global economy, but Russia itself probably becomes very chaotic in that scenario (or in any other "Ukrainian victory" scenario).
The more centralized your control system is, the more contentious transitions of power become, and if we saw Putin suddenly die and tons of potential would-be-successors duking it out for power; or if Russia were to lose the war in Ukraine, causing Putin to be run out on a rail and that same battle-for-succession happens, I think you'd see a very dangerous and unstable time for Russia, regardless of how much Western countries did or didn't re-engage economically.
In all honesty, I'm still not sure what post-Putin Russia looks like even assuming (as is most likely) Russia wins the war in Ukraine, or at least comes away with something it can plausibly declare to be victory. Hopefully he'll have some kind of succession plan in place, but when the king dies the sons tend to turn on one another no matter what plans he's laid down for their peaceful cooperation.
Putin has no time 10-20 years as someone said here, He has max 3-4 years left in his life. He looks really sick and probably has incurable cancer.
I totally agree about the continuity risks due to lack of democratic traditions.
If I was living in Russia as a Russian citizen, I would campaign for return of democratic values as far as possible and safe for me and my family. I think it would be easier if I avoided something like pro-Navalny stance for example but did it in more general terms.
"Putin has no time 10-20 years as someone said here, He has max 3-4 years left in his life. He looks really sick and probably has incurable cancer."
Given what Putin has done to Ukraine, there is a certain poetic irony if his illness is indeed an invasive one.
The last point worries me also. My own hope is on a runaway super-sentient AI grabbing power in the chaos and using Russia as a base to conquer the rest of the humanity, then leaving it as a pet country after the rest of the solar system is converted into computronium.
I think this is unrealistic. For one, a true recognition of Ukrainian sovereignty that could possible placate the West would include the return of Crimea (and Donbas, of course). This will be a WILDLY unpopular move. Like, if a president's support rating could reach negative values, it just might after this. One would be excused to think that people's will doesn't matter in Russia, after reading all about our authoritarian government, but the truth is, even absolute monarchs depend on their subjects' approval to some degree. Putin actually knows this, and generally shies away from really unpopular moves, or when they cannot be avoided, tries to distance himself, so all the blame goes to the current PM, parliament, or whatever. But nothing short of a direct presidential order (and a vote rammed through parliament with the full strength of president's administration) would give Crimea back, there is no dodging this. And the man who gives such order might not live to see it carried out.
For another, I just don't see the West lifting sanctions, much less providing economic support. Why would they do it, for what benefit? To keep Russia away from China? Nobody fears Russian-Chinese alliance strongly enough to spend resources on that. And Russia's market is not that big, so western businesses won't lobby too hard to get back into it. Of course, restrictions on resources export would have to be abandoned, because the world needs Russian resources to lower prices, but the rest of the sanctions might be used as bargaining chips for a lot more concessions than just leaving Ukraine alone - especially if the country is headed by a president willing to do anything to please the West.
To me it seems that even western countries have realized that Crimea is non-returnable. In my scenario they could make an independent vote and then ask Russia to pay reparations to Ukraine.
To purpose for West lifting sanctions is for all to benefit. As in one of Scott's essays – there is no Western culture, there is culture with things that work. Russia can play along and benefit or play against and suffer.
Russians don't care about Donbas at all. I saw those polls asking if they should help to some suffering kids in Donbass or their pensioners first and they overwhelmingly said – their own pensioners. Ending the war would be immensely popular move, just the same as ending the war in Afghanistan in 1989. No one wanted to go there and die. The same is about Ukraine now. If you were eligible, would you personally go to Ukraine to fight right now?
Would it need to include actual return of Crimea, or would it be sufficient to have some sort of trustworthy local referendum on how Crimea would affiliate itself with the Ukrainian and Russian governments? While westerners object to the way Crimea was taken, there's a lot of acknowledgment that the popular will there is unclear, and with the right sort of relations between a Ukrainian and Russian government, some sort of weird Andorra-type situation might be possible.
Actually, can Russia just... buy Crimea?
This would probably be unpopular if stated outright, but as a complicated treaty that involves war reparations might be palatable to the voters. Crimea has always been more Russian than Ukrainian, and if it "belongs to anyone" historically it belongs to Crimean Tatars, conveniently left out of the negotiation.
My dream solution would indeed be some kind of Crimean Autonomy that's partially aligned with Russia and partially with Ukraine, with certain guarantees Russia really wants (mostly about their ability to field their navy). Then again, this shit has been tried with Gdańsk/Danzig after WWI and backfired spectacularily, so...
Ukraine won't accept such referendum unless it's well and thoroughly defeated on the battlefield, I think. If the Russia retreats, instead... I don't know. Would Ukraine accept this idea under pressure from the West? You'd have to ask an Ukrainian.
Also, the question of Donbas remains open, too - after 8 years of now-and-then shelling and then several months of everyday shelling, a lot of people from that region also wouldn't want to rejoin Ukraine.
If Ukraine is victorious on the current battlefield, but the choices are A: accept a victory that gives them everything but Crimea, or B: continue to fight a war against Russia with no further assistance from NATO and with Russia in a very strong defensive position, then I'm guessing Ukraine will look at fifty or a hundred thousand Ukrainian dead and decide not to double down on that over Crimea.
And those who say that Ukraine won't accept this or that, have to remember that they plan to join the EU and they would do a lot to achieve this goal. Just now they voted to ratify Istanbul Declaration that they had failed to do before. This declaration still hasn't been ratified by Latvia.
In the best scenario, in a few years after receiving immense help from the EU, people would start value the EU connection more than the principle of keeping Crimea.
And most of the people living in Crimea or Donbass who would have voted to remain Ukrainian have probably already left as well. The voter base in those territories is now very different from what it was in 2014.
The first three times I read that first sentence as "Pro-Wrestler Leader" and I was... confused.
Sorry, I make many typos in English. But this was a funny reading. :)
I guess nobody can imagine a pro-western Russian leader. But maybe it is the lack our imagination that prevent for such a leader to emerge.
Like Jesse Ventura or Wladimir Klitschko?
Likewise. I even began composing a reply using this term (I imagined the author of the comment meant this character as a stand-by for "someone not from the current establishment").
Thanks for sharing this, very interesting! A few thoughts:
Why can't people separate a country from its gouvernment? Could a catastrophe for the Russian gouvernment not mean a new chance for Russia? Some people see Putin as a fascist dictator à la Hitler (and Macron and Scholz as Chamberlain). Nobody likes losers? Like, Germany in 1945? Sure, back then nobody liked them, considering the massive crimes they had just committed. But ten, twenty years later, it looked all differently.
You're right that sanctions have their own inner dynamic which is very difficult to break out of. After WW1, sanctions against Germany stayed simply in place, until they got afraid that Germany would team up with the newly-founded Soviet Union.
And no, the biggest geopolitical disaster in the 20th century is still WW2, both globally and for Russia. The dissolution of the Soviet Union was Russia losing their colonial empire. Britain, France and all the others had to go through that, too. How long can you suppress other people who do not want to be suppressed? The catastrophic part of it is that many post-soviet countries, without the overarching communist ideology, resorted to nationalism, and ended up with corrupt, nationalist dictators.
You're right again that probably China might end up as the big winner of this one, if they act wisely. On the other hand, with Covid they didn't either.
Germany got a new start because it was on the front-line of the new (cold) war. Also, because US leadership proved to be very wise in that time. Alas, currently Weimar Republic is a much more likely outcome for Russia in case of defeat in my opinion - Russia obviously doesn't worth enough as an ally against China (otherwise the West would have responded to Putin's concerns earlier and the war would not happen). Also, as an outsider, I have not enough trust in US leadership to pull this off - there is no FDR, and not even Truman today. Could you imagine an US party actually proposing a bill to fund literally anything in Russia? The opponents would tear them into small pieces.
(But I think there is a chance for the western part of Ukraine to become the new Western Germany, if the West will continue to pour in resources into it after the war in attempt to get the eastern part to rebel against Russia and rejoin; not a BIG chance, but still a better chance than for Russia)
> The dissolution of the Soviet Union was Russia losing their colonial empire.
I disagree. The core crisis was economical, not cultural. I'd imagine if the planned economy by some miracle actually worked well, the so-called "colonies" would be happy to stay on board. It was a very strange colonial empire, where colonies often received more resources than they exported to the "mainland", minorities got quotas in top universities, and a massive effort to preserve their culture and language. A strange colonial empire where a large number of its rulers were from the supposedly oppressed people, and they were well represented in bureaucracy, science and media. USSR often oppressed the so-called colonies less than its core population - e.g. Baltic countries had way more freedom of business than Russia. In the end, they only wanted out because the whole union was going to shit and there was not enough to eat, which gave the nationalists their break (hungry stomachs often turn to nationalism).
> The core crisis was economical, not cultural. I'd imagine if the planned economy by some miracle actually worked well, the so-called "colonies" would be happy to stay on board.
The way you put it, it seems like the "colonies" were happy at the beginning, only later got dissatisfied because of economical reasons. I think this was never the case, and the "colonies" were kept by force since the very beginning.
Some of them were inherited from Tsar's Russia, the so-called "jail of nations". During the communist revolution, Lenin promised them freedom if he wins... then he betrayed them, just like he betrayed everyone. Doesn't seem like happy coexistence. Many ethnic groups mysteriously disappeared afterwards. Ukrainians starved a lot, but some of them survived.
When Soviet Union and their then best buddies Nazis attacked Poland, Poland didn't seem happy about it. Later, Finland also wasn't happy about the attempt to colonize them, and resisted successfully. Hungary provided some negative feedback in 1956; Czechoslovakia in 1968. (And there are more examples I forgot.)
To me this all means that the Russian/Soviet empire was only held together by force. The economical collapse resulted in weakening of the force... which the "colonies" used to escape. Now, Russia is using force to get some of its former "colonies" back, and they try to resist.
You make a good point that Russia traditionally reserved the worst oppression for their own. Except for the few ethnic groups that disappeared, of course.
I think another thing is that Germany got its arrogance pounded out of it. Pre-1945 Germany had a cultural belief that it really ought to be one of the big players on the world stage. Post-1945 Germany seems to be okay with being Just Another Country.
Russia still suffers from delusions of being an important country, just as it has for centuries. If Russia could accept that its place in the world is "like Kazakhstan except colder" then it could probably have friendly relations with the rest of the world.
The Baltic countries wouldn't have stayed. In fact, I even assumed for a long time that during post-Soviet period Russia was economically developing faster than the Baltic countries, i.e., there was no much of economic benefit for being in the EU. They simply didn't want Russian control as it was considered too brutal and inefficient. As you say, the leaders could be from local people but they still forced undemocratic values upon people and were not seen in positive light. They couldn't rule independently and were basically puppets controlled from Moscow or Communist Party. And the deportations in 1940, and later in 1946 were very severe. It also didn't benefit them economically as they had better economy before annexation and lost their potential during Soviet time.
Everyone can separate their own country from its government.
This is not a sports match or popularity contest, and I don't think it's useful to be "in favour" of or "against" a cause in war. War is never a positively good thing, and peaceful means are always preferable if they are available.
But here, we're simply confronted with the unpalatable fact that Things have Consequences. In the western political system, which has the attention span of a flea on amphetamines and where instant gratification is the rule, it's impossible for politicians and the media to see things in a historical perspective, or even in a perspective of a few years. Ever since the end of the Cold War, the issue of how to deal with Russia's security concerns has been ignored, played with, forgotten about, and most of all dealt with on an ad hoc basis, without any overall plan at all. The assurances given to Gorbachev and others that NATO would not expand to the East were sincerely meant at the time (I was there). The accession of new NATO members was not a plot in itself against Russia, but the consequence of all sorts of pressures coming from all sorts of national and international directions. Earlier promises, well, they were made by another government, so they were inoperative, and anyway, what were the Russians going to do about it? After that, the rise of the extreme Right in Ukraine after 2014, the heavy involvement of western governments in the change of regime (or "coup" depending on your point of view) the increasing NATO and US influence in the country, talk of Ukraine joining NATO, Zelensky's talk of acquiring nuclear weapons, and many other things, are all matters of public record, and widely covered by the western media and think tanks. Whether you think that justifies the war is a matter of personal opinion, and I don't have one to express. Whether you think that the suffering of the Russian minority in the East at the hands of the Ukrainian Army since 2014 is a just cause for invasion is, again, an entirely personal issue. The facts are not really in dispute, but there is no way that you could perform some moral calculus of justification.
It's a political point, really. Push, ignore and humiliate a country beyond a certain point, and the consequences may be unwelcome. It's a bit like continually annoying and teasing the biggest boy in the school playground.
This is the thing I never get about this framing. Why wouldn’t we say that the war in Ukraine is a case of *Russia* being forced to confront the “unpalatable fact that Things have Consequences?”
I mean, NATO doesn’t exactly roll in with an army and force countries to join at gunpoint. And you can pick your historical era and find Things, whether it’s the Imperial Russians partitioning Poland and suppressing the Ukrainian language, or the Soviet-era Holodomor or crackdown in Hungary, which have Consequences, like making Russia’s neighbors all rush to NATO the first moment they think the West will take them in.
Russia seems to want something most countries would want: neighbors who generally like them and don’t do things like join a mutual-defense-against-Russia alliance. But Things, as you say, have Consequences, and now so many of Russia’s European neighbors have felt threatened enough by Russia that it finds itself invading a country it would have very much preferred to have as a regional partner in order to forcibly prevent it from pivoting away.
Exactly. This logic is always one-sided.
Russia can't resist attacking its neighbors, and we can't blame it. Russia simply cannot control itself. It is the neighbors who need to exhibit self control and stop trying to defend themselves, because trying to defend yourself is "provoking" Russia. If you were invaded by Russia in the past, you need to sit calmly and wait until it eventually happens again, because anything else will be interpreted as aggression.
This is like the logic of domestic violence. Yeah, I may be punching your face, but you pissed me off by being afraid of me, so it is all your fault, and now I have to punish you.
> Russia seems to want something most countries would want: neighbors who generally like them and don’t do things like join a mutual-defense-against-Russia alliance.
That describes Belarus. And yet, Russia already has a plan how to conquer them, too.
This is the crazy thing: you simply can't do anything to make Russia *not* want to attack you. If you hate Russia, Russia will attack you because it feels threatened. If you love Russia, Russia will attack you to make sure you don't change your mind later.
The domestic violence analogy is extremely on point.
NATO membership = restraining order (against Russia)
Thank you for the interesting perspective!
Could you elaborate more on "Russian security concerns"? Has there ever any hint of anybody thinking of attacking Russia? Yes sure, NATO could place nuclear weapons on their border which could reach Moscow in I don't know how many minutes, but the thought of that happening is for me totally unthinkable.
Yes, countries joined NATO. Looking at Ukraine today, it seemed like a good idea for the Baltics to join NATO. Otherwise, they would have been a much easier first target. So why blame them for joining NATO?
What do you mean by extreme right in Ukraine? As far as I know, their far-right party doesn't really play a big role. And who is Russia to tell Ukraine not to partner up with the west? Or did they really feel threatened that Ukraine would attack Russia?
But you forgot to mention an interesting point, which is Crimea. In January 1991, so still in Soviet times, they had a poll to separate themselves from the Ukrainian SSR. Actually, it seems back then they would have preferred to be with Russia? But what they got was some autonomy within Ukraine, which was later bulldozed again. That's why when Russia annexed Crimea, people were like, okaaaay, that referendum was probably manipulated and unfair, but well, let them have their way. Today, especially after learning about how Ukrainian occupied areas have been treated, I think Crimea would be better off back with Ukraine. Sure, not the best of countries, poor and corrupt, but much more freedom than in today's Russia.
Security concerns are, of course, necessarily subjective (think Russian troops in Cuba). The point is that no effort was ever really made to sit down with the Russians, hear what their concerns were, and map out a new security order in Europe. I think that any given country is naturally going to be concerned about the security of its borders, who its neighbours are, what alliances they have, where strategic networks run, how its imports and exports travel, and many other things. Think of your own country, or any other you are familiar with, and think of the times you've heard a political leader or tank thinker say that such and such is a "national security issue." In Europe, we are now finding people waking up to the supply of natural gas as a security issue, just as previously it was medicines.
The point is not what we think somebody else's security concerns should be, but what they actually think they are. In the confused and frightening Europe of the 1990s, with ancient enmities surfacing and borders in question, there was a serious risk of instability, and it would have been possible to work out something cooperatively with the Russians. But it was complicated, Russia was weak, things drifted on, the neoliberal consensus wanted a Russia that was humiliated and subservient to the West (they were warned, they didn't take any notice) and NATO moved eastwards without a lot of thought being given to how Russia might react. And we have a generation of politicians who have only ever known a weak Russia that protested but could ultimately be disregarded.
It's not a question of whether it's "fair." One of the reasons I started the Substack articles was I was fed up with people arguing about whether things were "fair", "right" or "justified" as though these were judgements you could reach a factual consensus on. But politics isn't like that: it's about forces and bodies, and in this case a force which was more powerful than we had realised decided to do something we didn't like and couldn't stop. Crying "foul" has never ended a political crisis in the history of the world.
The biggest danger for any country lies in the straightforward transfer of one set of value judgements to others. Things that we find important must be objectively important. Things we dislike must be objectively bad. It's not reasonable for other people to have different opinions from us. If you take the issue of right-wing nationalists, for example, nobody disputes that they are powerful and have an influence in the security sector (I've heard that from Ukrainian government people I've encountered). But the western argument is that this is unfortunate, but containable, and western states try to avoid contact with extreme nationalists where they can. Research institutions, like the CTC at West Point, have published research on far-right groups congregating in Ukraine,( https://ctc.westpoint.edu/the-nexus-between-far-right-extremists-in-the-united-states-and-ukraine/), and there have been similar articles in the general media but, again, this is seen as primarily a terrorist threat. But just as some Americans see groups carrying the Confederate Flag a threat, just as in Germany the Swastika is frowned upon, so for many Russians, paramilitary groups sporting the Wolfsangel, symbol used by the SS Das Reich Division, brings back memories of terrible sufferings in the Second World War. It's not for you or me to judge whether those fears are reasonable, and I don't see how we could. But the fact is that the Russians do, and that is one of many reasons, including wanting to redraw the security system in Europe, why they acted as they did.
Isn't the UN already a thing where Russia can state their concerns before the rest of the world ?
"...in Germany the Swastika is frowned upon..."; more than that in fact, displaying it is a criminal offence.
>> The point is not what we think somebody else's security concerns should be, but what they actually think they are.
>> It's not for you or me to judge whether those fears are reasonable, and I don't see how we could. But the fact is that the Russians do, and that is one of many reasons, including wanting to redraw the security system in Europe, why they acted as they did.
I'd challenge this mental model - it cedes vital ground in ways that I don't think it's proponents always see. "It doesn't matter whether my counterpart's fears are reasonable, what matters is the mere fact that he fears them" may have a nice realpolitik ring to it, but if you glue yourself to "accepting your rival's fears for what they are" you give him a unilateral ability to declare himself "afraid" of all kinds of things.
And countries absolutely do this. Massive nations with billions of dollars of military equipment and massive nuclear arsenals who want to intervene suddenly profess utter terror at insignificant threats. The Iraqis suddenly have weapons of mass destruction, or the Chinese partisans are bombing the South Manchurian Railway, or there's a somehow-completely-unreported-by-anybody ongoing genocide of Russians in Ukraine, and the great power suddenly cries out in "fear" at an "existential threat" that no outside observer would find credulous. Coincidentally right before the great power's highly trained and well equipped military rolls in and stomps the "very dangerous threat" flat in a completely one-sided war its enemy never had any chance of winning.
It's important to deal with foreign actors as they are, but if you do that by simply taking their stated fears at face value, you are basically giving them carte blanche to declare fear as a justification for any and every act of aggression, and of course, others have to accept their fears at face value, because who can really say what it is and isn't reasonable to be afraid of? It's the worst aspects of US stand your ground laws on an international scale.
So I don't think any country should just willingly put down the "sorry sir, but that 'fear' you're talking about is nonsense" card.
While action based on these fears is unjustified, it is a very strong emotion that can completely overtake rational thought. I would compare this to the fear from deadly virus like covid that caused people to support unreasonable measures, including chasing people on the beach etc. We are no better than Russians in this regard. Russians fear that Ukraine will destroy their culture and people in the west feared that they will die or suffer greatly from covid. Both are unreasonable fears to outsiders but these insights are impossible to reach to people who hold them.
Fear can overtake rational thought, but when that happens others don't (and shouldn't) just acquiesce.
If I start tearing up sprinkler systems in my neighborhood because I think they're full of poison and have been laid down by the moonmen to envenomate our grass and corrupt our vital essence, my neighbors don't just shrug and go, "well it's real to him so I guess we should just let it go."
They try some combination of asking me to stop, telling me I'm wrong, showing me that there's nothing in the water, suing me, putting up fences, and calling the cops to have me arrested for trespassing, hoping that some combination of all that pressure will get me to either abandon the crazy belief or at least quit harming them by acting on it.
Same goes in the international context - "calling the police" obviously isn't an option in that realm but nations still have tools for pushing back on misbehavior, and when an international actor starts lashing out violently at nonexistent threats, their counterparts would be foolish just to drop all the tools at their disposal and say "oh well it's real for Russia so I guess we should just let it go."
And, whether the people espousing it realize it or not, I think that's the end-point a lot of this "it's not for you or me to judge whether Russian fears of Ukraine are reasonable" stuff trends toward.
I think Richard Hanania has the best defense of Russian position I have read, here: https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/why-a-multipolar-world-will-be-more (also to a lesser extent here: https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/russia-as-the-great-satan-in-the). I don't agree with him, but he makes some compelling arguments.
I don't get the framing where there is just ideology=bad and self-interest=good. Theres got to be other quadrants. The current war looks like irrational self-interest.
Well, you'd have to talk to the author; he does sometimes pop up here. I think that this war is NOT in the self-interest of Putin. It is also rather obviously highly detrimental to material interests of Russian people.
Putin is the one who is being an idealist, risking everything in order to have his name written in textbooks alongside Peter the Great.
Sure, but then the US response would be to threaten to stop buying iPhones, interdict Chinese ships carrying troops and weapons to Mexico (cf. 1962 Cuba), or nuke Beijing, because it's the Chinese at whom we'd be pissed. Merely puffing and whining at China while actually shelling Tijuana mercilessly until it's a rubble underneath which a hundred schoolchildren's bodies lie slowly decaying, and then leaving a dotted trail of mass graves full of 80-year-old civilian abuelos and the rape victims of PFCs as we head south would be a major dick move, the kind of thing that would rightfully cause other nations in a position to do so to finger their launch codes thoughtfully.
So if the goal is understanding Russian motivation to Do Something, I think everyone can kind of see that, but choosing *this particular* something to do seems explicable only if you really are an orc.
Yes, well we played that game in 1962 and worked it out, without the necessity of civilian slaughter. There's a whole lot of options for taking the fight to your real adversary that lie between firing nukes and shooting civilian bystanders in the back of the head.
And quite honestly if the Russians had even done some kind of bloodless decapitation, ran the Zelensky government out of town at the point of a T-72 and installed a puppet, one might've shrugged and said that's not very nice but Realpolitik can reasonably argue for just dealing with it (particularly if the Ukrainians themselves acquiesce), maybe slapping on some random sanctions or other just to express a negative opinion.
And I guess that might've been the original goal, but once it was clear it totally wasn't going to work, they should have gone home and thought up Plan B.
I get the top-level movitation, it's the incredibly braindead and criminal choice of means and the complete inability to update priors that baffles me. I'm not used to thinking of Russians as stupid, but this move was stupid on an epic scale.
Isn't your hypothetical just the USA and Cuba? And while the US did a lot of things, including trying to assassinate Castro, they stopped short of invasion.
The Bay of Pigs invasion was a steaming mess and only the thin deniability of "it was Cuban exiles, not official US forces!" kept things from getting really spicy, and that was a close call even at that.
I'd echo Alesziegler here. Would the US be upset? Sure. Would an invasion of Mexico be justified? Hardly, and if the US did it would be another badge of shame in the long sad history of South & Central American imperialism.
So insofar as this is a devil's advocate position I think it really only serves to highlight the weakness of the devil's position. If the answer to "wouldn't it be okay for you to do the same thing if you were in my position?" is a resounding "no," then the devil's advocate is really just adding more evidence that the devil's detractors are reading the situation accurately.
The US has invaded or bombed far farther afeild countries over vastly less.
Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Panama, Grenada, and about 14 others I'm leaving out.
The US would have done vastly worse to a hypothetical Ukraine on its borders over vastly less
As a non-American, I happen to think that in that case US would have zero moral ground to invade Mexico.
Probably US invasion is what would happen regardless of my hippie opinion, but mere prediction that invasion is a predictable consequence of something would not make it justified.
So, new update on Russo-Ukrainian war as scheduled, based on the results of French parliamentary elections. Previous update is here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-228/comment/7098833.
There is not much to discuss; basically, Ukraine was defeated in the Battle of France, with Macron loosing his majority to a motley crew of far leftists and rightists connected by a shared desire for a softer line on Russia. Notice that euro is gaining on the dollar (and also crypto is gaining on the dollar), which is not a result that you would normally expect from a great victory of anti-euro parties in France, but of course this is caused by increased expectiations that there will be peace sooner and thus an end to sanctions induced inflation (which is worse in the EU than in the US). I'll leave discussion of aparent paradox of crypto gaining on lower inflation expections for another day, but it is now happening regularly.
10 % on unambiguous Ukrainian victory (unchanged).
Ukrainian victory is defined as either a) Ukrainian government gaining control of the territory it had not controlled before February 24, regardless of whether it is now directly controlled by Russia (Crimea), or by its proxies (Donetsk and Luhansk "republics”), without losing any similarly important territory and without conceding that it will stop its attempts to join EU or NATO, b) Ukrainian government getting official ok from Russia to join EU or NATO without conceding any territory and without losing de facto control of any territory it had controlled before February 24, or c) return to exact prewar status quo ante.
25 % on compromise solution which both sides might plausibly claim as victory (down from 28 % on June 13).
65 % on unambigous Ukrainian defeat (up from 62 % on June 13; note: I changed wording of this from "Russian victory" to "Ukrainian defeat" on a good suggestion from Unsigned Integer).
Ukrainian defeat is defined as Russia getting something it wants from Ukraine without giving any substantial concessions. Russia wants either a) Ukraine to stop claiming at least some of the territories that were before war claimed by Ukraine but de facto controlled by Russia or its proxies, or b) Russia or its proxies (old or new) to get more Ukrainian territory, de facto recognized by Ukraine in something resembling Minsk ceasefire(s)* or c) some form of guarantee that Ukraine will became neutral, which includes but is not limited to Ukraine not joining NATO. E.g. if Ukraine agrees to stay out of NATO without any other concessions to Russia, but gets mutual defense treaty with Poland and Turkey, that does NOT count as Ukrainian defeat.
*Minsk ceasefire or ceasefires (first agreement did not work, it was amended by second and since then it worked somewhat better) constituted, among other things, de facto recognition by Ukraine that Russia and its proxies will control some territory claimed by Ukraine for some time. In exchange Russia stopped trying to conquer more Ukrainian territory. Until February 24 of this year, that is.
I don't think that Macron or anyone else matters very much to Ukraine's eventual fate. Ukraine is doomed to lose, and Western support or lack thereof can only change the timetable (though, admittedly, it can change the timetable by a lot). Ukraine is a tiny country with very limited resources that is waging a war of attrition against a large country with massive reserves of fossil fuels -- which translates to nearly infinite reserves of money and manpower. Western weapons merely amount to providing extra shovels with which Ukraine will try holding back the tide.
In the old days, someone like the US would provide actual troops which could've swayed the balance, but today Putin holds all of the cards -- and the cards are nuclear. The only remaining question is whether he will pause after conquering all of Eastern Ukraine; and if so, which countries he will conquer in the interim.
I think the analysis was quite good. Possible outcomes with some more likely than others but basically it is clear that Ukraine will remain as an independent country with increased ties with the EU. At the moment Ukrainians have almost full free movement rights in the sense that they can move to any EU country with full rights of residence, work and study. Previously that was not the case even for newly accepted EU members due to moratorium of several years. While these rights are a special exemption due to the war, in practice there is very little required from Ukrainians to assert them. The EU made decision that Ukrainian driver licences will be accepted indefinitely in the EU (before the requirement was that they need to exchange to the local licence within 6 months).
Ukraine probably will lose some territory but where the new borderline will be drawn is hard to predict. The idea that Russia can fully take over Ukraine was not believable even at the start of the war and is even less believable now. In such case the western Ukraine would resist with immense human loss. And that now the EU and US has shown interest to help, it is even less likely.
Losing some territory is not that big loss. It might be even desirable to minimise future conflicts within Ukraine and improve their chances for quick post-war development. And it might be even better for Donbas as well if they get Russia's support for development like the Crimea had.
Echoing previous commenters, while I think that Ukraine is more likely to lose than not, saying that it is doomed is absurd.
Also I don't get that bizzare assertion about Ukraine being "tiny". It is tiny compared to Russia roughly in the same sense Mexico is tiny compared to United States, i. e. not at all. Much "tinier"countries won wars against larger ones in not so distant past.
You mean like the US easily won the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Irak ? Vietnam is probably the most relevant example here in fact.
Even if Putin manage to conquer all of Ukraine it is not at all clear that he will end up with a victory.
And for conquering other countries - well he does not have a lot of target right now, thanks to Otan's and EU extension...
Russia is conquering ethnic Russian territories where Ukraine has been shelling civilians for the past 8 years.
The conquered territories are far more likely to be a recruiting grounds for the Russians than the Ukrainians as evidenced by what's happened in Crimea and the Donbass.
Territories being conquered now by definition were not shelled for the past 8 years by Ukrainians, since newly conquered territories were in Ukrainian hands for those 8 years.
As for whose loyalty population on those territories lies with, well, it is probably mixed, (some Russian symphatizers do exist, but... I live in Prague, which now host tens od thousands of Ukrainian refugees, due to conscription mostly women and children, large fraction if not most of them from those territories (many others are from northern parts of Ukraine threatened by Russia in March) and their opinions on Russia are not exactly complimentary, as they would be happy to tell you.
I am sure their perspective is very present among those who did not flee, many of whom are already soldiers in the Ukrainian army anyway.
I'm not going to dignify this comment by anything else than a big fat "LOL, look at a map".
I agree, though I hope you had the same attitude when Obama wanted to "liberate" Syrians from Assad
Assad, the dictator who used chemical weapons on "his" people, devastated the city of Aleppo, and caused over 4 million people to flee to Europe?
You think it would have been bad to liberate Syrians from that...?
The Iraq war wasn't bad because Saddam left power, it was bad because it was built on (1) big lies about WMDs + Al Qaeda and (2) an expectation that the people of Iraq would magically self-organize into a healthy democracy, so intelligent planning "wasn't" needed (plus an expectation that jihadists/rebels wouldn't show up and cause serious damage, I guess). I heard also that Iraqi managers were carelessly dismissed in a way that caused loss of function of basic infrastructure... not sure how true that is.
Indeed. Ukraine shelling Ukrainians in Ukrainian-held territory... it's amazing enough that *Russians* would believe propaganda like that.
No wonder the formerly Russian-friendly residents of Donbas have been turning against Russia in recent years[1]... they just love being shelled!
[1] https://www.iri.org/resources/ukraine-poll-majority-want-donbas-to-remain-in-ukraine/
Ukraine is not "tiny"; it is one of the largest nations in Europe, roughly one-quarter the population of Russia and with proportional military strength and logistical support. In war, a four-to-one advantage means *probable* victory, but it's still possible for the numerical underdog to have enough compensating advantages to pull out a win.
Ukraine's performance in the first weeks of this war demonstrated a number of compensating advantages, like access to technologically superior NATO weaponry, internal lines, and soldiers who just seem to fight better than their opponents. Also, Ukraine has the advantage of actually being able to mobilize the nation for war. Russia, with the "infinite reserves of money and manpower", has very conspicuously not mobilized. They have accepted humiliating battlefield defeats, and now accept a bloody stalemate that may grind their standing army to dust faster than it does the Ukrainians, and they still have not mobilized. So I'm not entirely sure those "infinite reserves" are actually accessible, and thus also not convinced Ukraine faces inevitable defeat,.
Right, I meant "tiny" compared to Russia along with its vassal states (i.e. Belarus), not in absolute terms (Ukraine is not Lichtenstein). Everything you say about Russia's military blunders is true, but it's not the whole truth. While Russia's blitzkrieg had obviously failed, and failed spectacularly, they have simply switched to plan B. They have been making slow but steady territorial gains ever since their withdrawal from Kiyv; and they have total air supremacy in the region. This is despite stiff Ukrainian resistance and their occasional victories in the field. Furthermore, while it is true that Russia had not called for total mobilization, they have deep reserves of desperate peasants to draw on -- people from the deep rural provinces who have nothing to lose, and can be easily convinced to enlist for a combination of three square meals a day, reasonable pay, and a chance to kill some of those [insert racial slur for Ukrainians here].
Western military technology is a significant force multiplier, but Ukraine's reserves of manpower are essentially tapped out by now. All Putin has to do is keep doing what he's doing, and let Ukraine win one Pyrrhic victory after another, until they have nowhere left to fall back to.
Ad "peasants", I am not sure whether this is supposed to be a metaphor for poor people, but if not, only 6 % of Russian population works in agriculture. 75 % of Russian population is classified as urban, compared to 83 % in the US (source for all of this: Statista.com).
What is true is that Russians are of course poorer than Americans and they are trying to fill their depleted ranks the help of cash bonuses, debt cancellations etc. But as John Schilling correctly pointed out, they are having problems with that, because poor people in Russia are not so desperate as you seem to think. Lack of manpower is reported even from generally pro-Russian sources, like Strelkov and Wagner group.
The current plan is Plan C, not Plan B. And Russia has not been "making steady gains"; it's not clear that they have made any gains on the net in the past month. See e.g. https://twitter.com/Nrg8000/status/1539190547352788994/photo/1
In any event, what matters is not whether a few square kilometers and small towns have changed hands, but how much it cost. And it's costing both sides a *lot*. What isn't clear to me, or to any of the expert sources I know of, is which side is paying the greater relative price. If you've got privileged insight into that, please share. If what you've got is blind faith that the Huge and Mighty Russian Army must inevitably prevail, that and five bucks will get you a cup of coffee.
As for Russia's "deep reserves of desperate peasants", the ones they can turn into front-line soldiers at will for a few bucks and some manufactured hate, *where are they*? The one thing pretty much every remotely informed analyst agrees on, is that Russia's second-biggest deficiency in this war(*) is a crippling shortage of infantry willing to fight. That's been true and obvious for a couple of months now. Vladimir Putin is eating a steady diet of crow, for the lack of even half-trained men willing to carry rifles and march against Ukraine. So where are they?
Note that every "desperate peasant" in Russia, has friends and family who have served in the Russian army. They know, deeply and in detail, how much it absolutely *sucks* to be a Russian soldier even in peacetime. Most of the people who sign up (or are signed up) for three squares and a bit of money, call it quits and go back to being a peasant after a few years. It may not be as easy as you think to get them to sign up for three squares, a bit of money, and being shot at by people who are much, much better at it than they will ever be.
* The first being an Air Force willing to enter Ukrainian airspace.
Putin can declare if he wants, but (I learn from Vlad Vexler and others) the average Russian doesn't want general mobilization. And since he made such a big deal out of preventing people from calling it a "war", declaring war would probably not be a good look for him... unless... maybe if he can convince people that Ukraine is attacking Russia in a significant way, people will warm up to mobilization.
The US is all the way across the ocean; Russia is right there.
It's not the total production, but the export capacity that gives it an advantage.
I've a different reading of the election, which is much more ambiguous. The results of the legislative elections mean that Macron will have a very hard time passing any significant social or economic reform. However, foreign affairs and military affairs are very distinctively the particular domain of the president, so a president who lacks a clear majority at home can turn to foreign affairs to keep being relevant/let his mark on history - so I'm pretty sure he will want to keep supporting Ukraine.
Anyway the military support from France/Germany is irrelevant compared to the US.
I of course do not think that France will tommorow just stop supporting Ukraine. What I think is likely to happen that it will reduce its level of overall support compared to an alternative reality when Macron's party won the elections.
Regarding your second paragraph, I've read that Ukrainians are shelling separatist city Donetsk with French provided artillery piecies. In general, I disagree about European support being irrelevant. US assistence has its limits, and Ukraine needs everything it can get. I am not sure whether to date more weapons from the EU or the US, if I have to guess, I would bet on the former. But equally important is economic assistence and sanctions.
Where did you read that? I understand there's no reason for Ukraine to shell Donetsk, and that, therefore, Russian claims in this respect are worth about as much as usual.
Good question, I got it from Tom Cooper, mostly pro-Ukrainian source. He did not frame it as "evil Ukrainian shelling civilians", though, but as appropriate attacks on Russian military supplying infrastructure.
"Over the last few days, Ukrainians have widened their bombardment of railway-system in the Donetsk City to targeting multiple ammunition depots. Of course, this promptly caused not only the Separatists, but all sort of their ‘left-wing friends’ in the West (all of whom cannot stop complaining about ‘Ukro-Nazis of the Azov’, i.e. misusing that one unit to argument pro-Putin’s aggression) to complain about ‘Ukro-Nazis intentionally shelling civilians in Donetsk. Well, initially, the shelling in question — much of it by French-supplied Caesar 155mm self-propelled howitzers calibre 155mm — was targeting the railway network of the city." (source: https://medium.com/@x_TomCooper_x/ukraine-war-17-18-19-june-2022-d8a71e864b08)
Ahh, makes sense. The other thing is that Russia uses something like 6x as much artillery as Ukraine, so only one of the two countries can afford to do indiscriminate shelling. Plus, normally Ukraine doesn't want to destroy its own infrastructure... though Donetsk city may be a special case because Ukraine probably knows it has little chance of getting that city back. Still, they'd prefer to have the people of Donetsk on their side... I doubt there's much chance of that after years of Russian media control. Russia conscripting everybody to fight against Ukraine probably isn't a popular move, but once they reach the front lines it'll be Ukrainians who kill them, so they might still side with Russia in the end...? Especially as *technically* the conscription order comes from DNR rather than Russia...
The EU as a whole may have provided about as much military aid as the US. But *France*, is a few percent of the total. Maybe five percent at best. And the rest of Europe isn't taking its cues from France. A complete French shutoff of aid would be a symbolic defeat for Ukraine and/or France, but it is highly unlikely to change the outcome of the war. Plus, as you note, any reduction in assistance won't be total.
With respect to weapons, that is true. But sanctions and some other economic measures are decided by the consensus of EU countries, among whose France is probably second most important
Just a precision: The leftist coalition is not united on the question of Ukraine: Out of the 142 seats takes by the coalition, 26 were taken by the (incorrectly named) Socialist Party and 23 by the Ecologist Party, who are definitely agreeing with a strong line against Russia (I'd say stronger than the one of Macron).
With these 49 deputies + the deputies from the coalition of Macron, there is already an absolute majority for a strong opposition against Russia.
Then there are also 64 deputies from the (not so correctly named either) Republican party. Even though some of the members and past members of this party have some very strong connections with Russia, it seems that right now the majority of the party would be in favor of a strong opposition against Russia (abeit probably more volatile than the Socialist/Ecologist party one).
If I am counting correctly, Macron plus those 49 has 294, and 289 is needed for a majority. This does not look strong to me. Admittedly there are various "other" parties with few tens of deputies total, some of which might be also strongly pro-Ukrainian. Here, I am bumping against the limits of my knowledge of French politics.
But more broadly, more important than this counting seems to me that French electorate clearly sent a message that they are not in a mood to support more economic hardship on themselves in order to help Ukraine; which, I think, Macron is going to notice and factor into his decisions.
Is there something specific you've looked at that gives you a sense that the "French electorate clearly sent a message that they are not in a mood to support more economic hardship on themselves in order to help Ukraine?"
In the US on an election day we'll have all these polling place surveys and get statistics like "50% of voters said their top 3 issues were Ukraine, the economy, and inflation," but I haven't been able to find anything like that identifying what issues were important to the French vote this cycle.
And in the absence of some kind of data it's really hard to draw any kind of inference on a specific issue from an up/down vote on parties that have hundreds of positions. If it were the US I'd go even further, since here foreign policy questions are almost always eclipsed by domestic issues of jobs, economic performance, inflation and the like, but then we have oceans between us and most foreign conflicts so perhaps it's different in France.
I have actually seen survey, reproduced in Czech media, that I am unable to google during, you know, office hours, from BVA/Quest France conducted before presidential elections few months ago. Ukraine was apparently not very important topic, with 14 % rating it as important.
BUT two most important issues were purchasing power (45 % concerned), and economic situation (31 % percent). Also according to Bloomberg politics newsletter from today, French are second most concerned among wide range of countries about cost of living, after Britain: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-06-20/angry-voters-strike-again-in-latin-america.
Inflation in the EU is largely driven by the supply shock caused largely by sanctions (edit: and expectations of further sanctions) on Russia (se here: https://apricitas.substack.com/p/the-eus-different-inflation-problem), so economic issues are intimately connected with Ukraine issues.
Thanks! That's really helpful and in line with what I would have expected.
Generally a negative indicator for Ukrainian support from France since the war in Ukraine is part of the bundle of factors causing the economic woes - pretty darn hard to disentangle things enough to figure out how strong a negative indicator it is given all the noise that goes into "the economy" as a voter issue, but one has to concede that it's *some* kind of negative indicator/risk factor, even if one can't say for sure to what degree.
I possibly formulated my sentence ambiguously, I meant that there is for sure an absolute majority (possibly weak, although there are the 64 deputies from the Republican party to also consider) for a strong line against Russia.
Ukraine was almost a non-factor in these elections to be honest, especially as constitutionally the president of France takes a major part in the foreign affair and military politics of the country. That's one reason why the left coalition manage to gather together despite having very different views in the politic to adopt in the Russo-Ukrainian war.
I don't think these elections would cause a major drift in the policy of France in this conflict.
Well, we shall see...
- Macron still has a relatively large majority, though he did lose a bunch & it's not an absolute majority anymore. His opponents are absolutely not united, and have not formed a coalition. I guess they may indeed agree on Ukraine. Though it's import to point out France has done relatively little in terms of help compared to other countries.
- Crypto is gaining on the dollar? o.o What the hell are you talking about? (I work in crypto)
For anyone interested, I have the final official results with a commentary on my Substack page. Very bad for Macron, very bad for the French political system, no reason to think that the independent French line on Ukraine will change. https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/the-french-people-have-spoken
Why do you think the results were "very bad for the French political system" ? It may actually be a good result, as big parts of the population who were not represented in the last Assembly now have significant presence in it. A political system were a party reliably does >15-20% at the national level and yet barely manage 5% of elected MP does not look so great to me (I don't want the far right to succeed, but I want them to lose because they lose electors, not because of a dumb electoral system).
I don't think we actually disagree: I was talking about the system itself, not the voters. I would suggest that there are at least three elements of it that have shown themselves to be in urgent need of replacement (1) elections of the President and the Assembly within a few months of each other, turning the President into a super Prime Minister (2) the general decline in the quality of candidates for the Presidency and the politicisation of the office in the worst sense of that term and (3) and most importantly, the stronghold on power of a professional political class, remote from the interests of ordinary people, largely sharing a discredited ideology, and supported by media and intellectual classes from the same kind of background. The result is that, as I have argued in an earlier essay, the "supply" of candidates and policies is now hopelessly out of sync with the "demand" of the electorate, which therefore either doesn't vote, or votes for whoever identifies as coming from outside the system. As the shock of Sunday wears off, this is going to become inescapable. I agree about the RN: I don't like them either, but the situation in the 2017 Assembly was simply not acceptable in a democracy.
I think these elections are a sign of hope on points 1) and 3) :
On 1), they showed that the automatic win for the President in the legislative elections is not automatic, which is a good news for the significance of the Assembly.
On 3), we just got into the Assembly a lot of new deputies who are outside the traditional professional political class, either because they come directly from the civil society or because their party is doing its first break on the national scene.
I was just checking coindesk.com, which does show sizable increases of both Bitcoin and ETH since election results.
You have to zoom out, I'll use ETH: it's almost 80% off it's all time high, dropped 50% over the last 30 days, and 70% over the last 90 days (other major coins follow he same pattern, Bitcoin dropped slighlty less, most others a bit more). Crypto is volatile, and a daily or few-days 10% move means nothing if not situated in a broader context.
In general I would be wary of reading a trend over a few days as significant (if you do and you're right, you've successfully timed the crypto bottom, and should definitely become a crypto trader and make a lot of $$$).
Elections were yesterday, so
Correlation does not mean causation. There is a lot going on besides the French elections. An alternate explanation: 20,000 is a symbolic number for bitcoin, and when it dropped below that threshhold some people buy the dip.
Typo alert: you write 'Ukranian victory' where you meant 'Ukranian defeat'.
Ups, thanks. It should be fixed, now
The war cannot continue at the current intensity for 2-3 more years. The Russian army will literally run out of tanks, guns, and shells if the war continues at the current rate for that long, even with every factory in Russia cranked up to full production. As will the Ukrainian army if NATO assistance is limited to approximately current levels, and I haven't seen any of the NATO powers calling for full economic mobilization to scale up the flow of munitions to Ukraine.
Also, I don't think the *men* on either side will be able to hold up that long.
Unless the war transitions into a lower-intensity conflict a la the post-2015 Donbas, one of these armies will break in less than a year.
A stalemate that involved a formal ceasefire agreement, and violations that didn't add up to anything that would normally be considered a "war". If we get anything like a repeat of that, it will count as the "war" ending for all practical purposes.
Furthermore, I expect Western support of materiel to dry up shortly, after Republicans get elected.
That "shortly" is still far enough in the future that almost certainly either the Russian army will have conquered Ukraine, or the Russian army will have collapsed, or the conflict will have settled down at a level where the Ukrainians won't need any more aid than they got in 2015-2021.
Also note, President Biden with a cooperative Democratic congress can deliver a lot of US aid in the last months of 2022, and that an awful lot of the aid Ukraine has been getting has been coming from countries that will never be ruled by the US Republican Party and whose government and people would go out of their way to spite Trumpist Republicans if it came to that.
And, as UI notes, not every Republican is a Trumpist who wants to cut off Ukraine, so I'm pretty sure the votes will still be there in 2023. *Maybe* in 2025 an actual President Trump will cut off aid, but zero chance that there's still high-intensity conflict going on then.
I mean, "when is the war going to end" is a different question. I would have to think about it, but off the hook I would expect more than 50 % chance that within a year from now there will be a general ceasefire, if not full peace treaty. But perhaps it is my optimistic bias in action
What do you think about new study about levetiracetam as a treatment option for schizophrenia?
Link?
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35661659/, don't know where to find full unfortunately
Just a whole bunch of health data and semi questions idk here we go
Im vincent, 26 year old swedish male with Autism, Chronic depression, and diagnosed with ADHD this winter. The diagnosis has helped a lot personally as i could let go of a lot of ideas that didnt work, but it didn't help as much as i hoped.
My executive functioning is pretty bad, but my IQ is highish: probably 120. i can be charming and social but isolate a lot.
I think i have some form of mild-medium alexothymia, or possibly mild anhedonia or mild Emotional blunting
My medecines are: 40 mg fluoxetine (been on antideppresants for 5 years i think now, on a few different ones). Main effect of that one (not 100% sure): less anxiety, more stable and energetic, people say i was more up and go and active. Side effects(?): probably lessened sexual drive; Nausea occasionally but not too bad; Dry throat. I worry occasionally that i have emotional blunting and/or anhedonia from fluoxetine, but I don't honestly know: Some diary notes from before that complain about "feeling empty" and other similar stuff.
Ive tried ritalin 40 mg (semi-slow release), for 3 months and it has helped a bit: My concentration is better and people say im not as depressed as often. I can become sometimes anxious in the hours after taking it, but usually when i was already worried. My heartbeat is higher in the morning from it then the evening, my apple watch says my heart beat it sometimes 140BPM when taking walks after taking ritalin, and while writing this 50 minutes after taking ritalin my BP; is 80-ish. I have not experienced more anhedonia or stuff like that. I am slightly dissapointed in the medecine, but i think it works.
My health is.... ok?
I Eat sorta bad, too much junkfood: I do get enough veggies and proteing i think. i drink way to much artificial sugar drinks.
My sleep is highly confusing: I dont know how much sleep i need: I use an apple watch with The app autosleep, unsure of its accuracy: i get about 7.5 hours of sleep nightly, with 1.5-2 hours Deep sleep. The app frequently says my sleep quality is middling, and that my daily readyness is between 1 or 3 stars out of 5.
My sleep hygien and that is not good. I wake up at 7 or 8 in the morning, but i frequently wake up at 5 but go back to sleep.
My self care is... ok. Meditate sometimes. Exercise semiregurly, with irregular walks and that. I use CBT tecniques and such somewhat randomly.
idk what im even really writing here. My generall life satisfaction is wonky: sometimes its 7/10, other times its 4/10, on average its probably 5.5/10
I want to feel better and be a better person, but feel very mediocre and distrustful of my own ability and discipline. I dont have any passion, but i do feel better when i draw or create.
I find exercise to be the cornerstone of good health. IMO walking doesn't really count either, I think it has to be intense to see much of the benefit. Personally does much more for my mood and stability than antidepressants (currently use both, but a decade of experimentation has led me to this perspective).
Cutting out sugar would probably be a straightforward improvement (I replaced it with coffee and sparkling water). Besides that the best nutrition advice to start at is "eat more plants, especially leafy green ones" - easier said than done. I make myself chug a green smoothie every day to cover that base.
Finding direction is probably the most important thing you can do to get out of that rut. It's not easy, it's a moving target, but it's totally worth spending time figuring it out. What worked for me was just long periods of collecting data on myself. Finding out what gives me energy, what I'm good at, and throwing myself into novel(sometimes uncomfortable) environments. Using that information I pinpointed the direction I wanted life to go in and everything else sort of fell into place with it.
Also, at least in my personal experience, the drugs do not help. After coming off them, I felt terribly for like a month, but afterwards I felt like I had much more energy than before.
Not a central issue here but if you care about heart rate data, you should try a chest belt sensor. They are more precise than optical wrist sensors and with daily HRV analyses you have a reasonably well insight into your autonomous system. I recommend Marco Altini's stuff, though there's a sales interest for his apps of course: https://medium.com/@altini_marco/resting-heart-rate-and-heart-rate-variability-hrv-whats-the-difference-part-1-1c6b3b769324
Learn to code, get a job and move to a less depressing country. Worked for me.
In Stockholm there's a company called Misa that helps people get started – there might be something similar where you're at that your social worker can get you in touch with.
I was pretty much where you're at now 10 years ago, and now I have a highly paid job that I enjoy, a wonderful girlfriend, some lovely friends, a penthouse overlooking the Mediterranean and an impressive physique.
Swedens depressing?
Haha, well, that's my experience, at least, and you don't seem too happy there either ;)
If you have SAD, it's probably a pretty hard place to live....
We have a light therapy room, and i go to spain in the winter for 3 weeks. Otherwise i like sweden as a place, altough i havnt really ever tried to live elsewehere
If you're looking for some rationalists to hang out with, maybe you could try https://www.lesswrong.com/community. If you're looking for advice, you should probably talk to a doctor.
will look into it
i feel like ive talked with a ton of doctors but im still confused about it
I started a blog! Here is the first post:
https://zutano.substack.com/p/what-mistakes-are-translation-machines
and an excerpt to whet your appetite:
"Now I know what you’re thinking; this guy who probably adds “of course this will lead directly to a cure for cancer” to all of his scientific papers is now adding “this will solve important problems in machine learning” to his personal blog about watching TV. To which I reply: yeah you got me. But pretend you’re a grant reviewer, and let me give it my best shot: if the subtitle generator knows a lot of Turkish, but lacks a world model, what happens when it meets me, who possesses an educated adult human’s concept of language, but minimal Turkish?"
Future posts will rarely be so focused on machine learning, but this one is.
Enjoy!
I've been playing around with that DALL-E Mini site, and it's interesting. The faces really aren't so great, but it does make for some good landscape scenes. I did it for a couple "Vincent Van Gogh painting of [place]" and liked what I got.
So I had a weird AI question. Could the AI "cheat" on its goals and effectively rig itself a "pleasure button" that gives it the satisfaction of goal completion without actually having to complete them?
Sure, if the programmed goals are unaligned with what we intended them to be, then the AI will pursue the goals as programmed. Trivial example: an AI that was given the task of learning to survive in Tetris as long as possible discovered the best solution was to pause the game and survive forever!
Sure. It wouldn't even have to be cheating -- just failing to take into account a lot of do's and don'ts we take for granted and so do not think to specify when we tell the AI what counts as success. For instance, if you tell AI to reduce human suffering, it might kill us all painlessly. Goal met, right?
One thing I really liked doing with Dall-E Mini is just listing various made-up addresses for sale. "831 Cabot Dr, for sale" was all McMansions with extraneous gables. "831 San Vicente Dr, for sale" always had a palm tree and was usually mid-century. "831 w 47th st, for sale" was a Victorian or a Craftsman bungalow. "831 Rue de Chopin, for sale" was an interior space with beautiful hardwood floors and a nice chandelier (a very different chandelier in every picture, but always something distinctive). Even just keeping a single street and changing the address number from two digits to three digits to four digits to five digits eventually produced changing styles as the implied location got farther from city center.
This is a known problem, usually called.wireheading.
How can we tell that an AI gets satisfaction from completing a task or achieving a goal? Humans do, but why do we presume AI intelligence will operate the same way?
I guess it depends on how you define 'satisfaction'. In regards to AI; 'reward number goes up' is satisfaction while for humans it's 'gets a small hit of dopamine'.
Many AI s have reward function s. Whether they involve real qualia is unknown , and.often irrrlevant.
I think the faces were very deliberately crippled; it manages face just fine if you ask for an art style that's not trying for photorealism, like "stained glass"
My one try at DALL-E so far was for "sam and rosie square-dancing at the party tree in stained glass."
It generated some cool shots, but the faces were . . . not fine. "Nightmarish" (or "NightMarish") might be a better term.
It does seem to have been deliberately hobbled when it comes to faces (I suppose so that when/if it gets out to the public, nobody can feed it 'my girlfriend doing a porn flick' as revenge or just simply "Celeb in very NSFW poses").
Update: the prompt "Cthulhu devouring a sacrifice in the style of Anne Geddes" gave some interesting results, but, again, the faces were revolting. Except for Cthulhu's face, oddly.
Thor Odinson is presumably speculating that they deliberately destroyed all photorealistic faces to prevent it being used for deepfakes.
Yes, that's the main scenario that people worried about AI alignment are worried about. Once an AI gets powerful enough to take control of its reward system away from humans, it would.
It's one scenario, but not clearly the "main" one.
Wireheading does tend to cause misalignment, but a system that can't cheat its utility function can still have a misaligned one (e.g. "maximise paperclips") and the probability of a randomly-chosen utility function causing Skynet-like behaviour is approximately 1.
And then, of course, kill the humans so that they will never be able to take control back or shut it down
It's hard for me to believe that we would seriously try to build a chess player with naive scaling of a language model and prompt engineering. Instead of prompt engineering why not fine tune the model to try to win?
Chess is being used as a specific measurable output of GPT, not as an end goal in itself. If GPT-5 was a fully generalized intelligence that was really bad at chess, nobody would really care that it was bad at chess. We already have AIs that can play chess really well, but are clearly not generalized intelligences, so that's a dead end if we just manually adjust GPT to be able to play chess.
The question is whether GPT produces generalised intelligence, not whether robots can specifically play chess. Using an AI tuned to play chess would defeat the point of the test.
Actually now I come to think of it, I think this is another pretty good argument against GPT ever exhibiting anything like general intelligence.
GPT can play reasonable chess by regurgitating fragments of games that happened to be in its training corpus, but if I invent a new (vaguely chesslike) game and explain to it all the rules it won't be able to play that.
Here's someone inventing & playing a verbal game with a GPT-style model (Chinchilla): https://twitter.com/TShevlane/status/1524371399527256064
...OK, I'm impressed. I do want to try it myself, though.
I'm not sure how you've leaped to that conclusion.
I think training on internet-sized data sets has to be a dead end for generalized intelligence. Even if we agree that such an AI could be considered intelligent in the future, the massive training time and inputs make it unwieldy and difficult to use. You could also spike the data with faulty, like training the AI to be anti-vaxx or believe 9/11 was an inside job, or whatever. Not to mention the problem of the AI having no goals or general purpose. This method leaves it fully dependent on the human-provided prompt in order to produce any outcome. I consider that a strong positive in terms of AI safety, but it also makes it very unlikely to be really "intelligent" in any way we would typically mean when using that term.
The most beneficial use of this kind of learning program is most likely to sift through discreet data sets to pattern match what would take a human a much longer time period to review. For instance, asking it whether your MLB pitcher should get benched at the 6th inning or the 7th, and getting a clear answer based on historical data.
What is your definition of generalized intelligence? Because I think, based on your examples of false things that can be believed, that no human likely has generalized intelligence.
An AI can be generally intelligent and still believe false data. The point there was more that it would be self-defeating to train an AI on trillions of data points if the data was actually incorrect data. You can train an AI that 1+1=11, and it can dutifully use that data, but we would all agree that even if it were "intelligent" it would be useless.
You could do the exact same thing to humans, plus that's not what they are doing - so I don't follow your point.
I expect someone could perform this test right now with a tictactoe variant.
Prompt engineering hasn't completely replaced fine-tuning. IIRC OpenAI offers a fine-tuning API as well.
What are ways someone with a law degree from a hot shit university can help the world? I know someone who will be graduating in a year, and does not want to work for the government because of dread of the bureaucracy and of -- whatever godawful thing is wrong with the CDC, and is I suppose wrong with many government agencies. He does not care much about big bucks, would be OK with what the government pays, which I'm told is about 1/4 of what someone starting out in law could make in a big law firm (something like 80K as a starting salary, rather than 240K). I looked on 80,000 hours, but didn't see law degrees mentioned. I guess a good general idea is go be a lawyer for a company that does good things, but I'm hoping to hear something more specific.
The most important next step for him will becoming a good lawyer. Law school is… kinda whatever.
He should focus on getting a job at a firm whose amazing at what the kind of law they practice. M&A is very different than litigation or family law.
Get great at something then worry about how you want to save the world.
I feel like lawyers can have an outsized impact in several ways because of their interaction with government. That is, they're very close to "tipping points" involving the direction of hundreds of millions of dollars or more.
My current project involves using leveraging the law to affect change from the public's perspective (qui tam law). We work with other organizations that we thing are important like ProPublica who has been instrumental in rooting out corruption.
Sorry I don't have a great answer off the bat. I might put some thought to it, though.
Thanks. If you do have more details later, I will pass them on to the law student.
The large non-profit organizations in a given field in the U.S. have legal staffs. How much legal staff they need varies based on some outside factors; for instance the sector that I am most deeply familiar with [conservation/ecological restoration] needs its own attorneys because real estate law is both directly relevant to our work and fairly wonky. So the bigs in our world such as the Nature Conservancy and the Audubon Society have lawyers on staff.
Over a bunch of years I've worked with those legal staffs both internally and as the CEO of a smaller specialist org that collaborates with the bigs. I have noticed that the lawyers they employ have been getting both younger and frankly sharper. I infer that those jobs have become more attractive (maybe better compensated?) for bright young law school graduates.
There are also of course actual non-profit law firms, our sector's attack dogs so to speak, such as the Environmental Law & Policy Center in Chicago. They obviously employ lots of attorneys including actual litigators.
Some of that at least is likely true in other non-profit sectors such as social service organizations, civil rights groups, public health, education, etc. And of course there are also civil-liberties groups like the ACLU and FIRE where the lawyers are really the heart of what they do.
In all of the above situations a young attorney is going to work hard, but not at all like the insane mindless grind of being a young associate in a big law firm nor the numbing bureaucratic stifle of a government agency. Not that the Nature Conservancy or whatever doesn't have some bureaucracy (candidly I can speak to that point firsthand, ahem!); but it doesn't compare to what you often find inside the public sector.
What's his specialty? If he doesn't have a formal one what area of law is he drawn to? Contracts, trying cases, etc?
The boring answer he probably won't like is to take a Big Bucks Soul Killing Job, and donate the 3/4 extra money to some good cause.
Division Of Labor is an amazing thing!
My brother has been for all off his career a lawyer for Legal Aid in Manhattan. He could have and could still at any time go to a private law firm and earn multiples of what he is paid by Legal Aid, but I know no one who loves his work more than my brother. He believes passionately in giving everyone a fair shot at justice and is intent on giving all his clients his best. Legal Aid and many other "public defense" organizations are well funded so lawyers do not feel ridiculously burdened and the quality of the people is very high. It's competitive to get a job at these organizations.
Happy to make a connection with him if that's helpful.
My email is robertsdavidn@gmail.com
Is defending criminals really making the world a better place? Sure, I buy that it's a necessary component of the criminal justice system and that every now and then you might get a client who is actually innocent, but overall it doesn't seem like it's a great place to make the world a better place.
It seems to me that you're more likely to do some good for the world as a prosecutor. Instead of being obliged to defend every piece of trash that comes across your desk, you can use your discretion to ensure that actual criminals are put away and that the probably-innocent don't wind up getting prosecuted in the first place.
My father is a defense attorney. He only does non-violent crime and he refuses to defend anyone innocent - too much stress. Most criminals have a lot of shit off in their lives, and he focuses on trying to get his clients more help and less retribution. He considers himself to do a lot of good in the world.
My brother's biggest stress comes from defending clients he believes are innocent. So much more pressure.
They very much do, actually. Without even considering the merits of the accused, just assuming each and every one is guilty, think of the defense lawyer if you like as the whetstone against which the prosecution is honed -- fashioned into a scalpel that can achieve what you want, the surgical removal of actual evil while exercising humanity where it improves the social contract.
It's the defense lawyer, more than anything, that *causes* the prosecutor to focus his efforts on the person who is really guilty, and really bad -- whom the jury will readily convict -- and forces him to respect the law, sharpen his techniques, work on methods to ferret out true guilt and expose it for judgmnet. Without a stout defense checking error and overreach, they get lazy and unselective, serve their political masters and personal prejudices more than The People, and justice suffers.
By the laws we live by, "every piece of trash," as you put it ,is a human being entitled to equal protection under the laws. If we abandon trying to live up to that ideal, we lose everything g as a country.
So, yes, what my brother is doing is vital and difficult. And luckily for his clients, he is both brilliant and caring.
I'd recommend engaging with the Effective Altruism community.
In particular there are several get together events planned in the US where your friend could meet people who can direct him to the right people and opportunities: https://www.eaglobal.org/events/
Effective Altruism definitely need lawyers to help steer regulations in the right direction, as well as effectively lobby institutions.
80,000 hours has also a job board: https://80000hours.org/job-board/
And a spreadsheet to make it easier to search: https://airtable.com/shrD9UEKusc6BYWWc
Here are some examples of jobs:
– https://airtable.com/shrD9UEKusc6BYWWc/tbl5zkv6T7WSivZ89/viwiMQLMb1PLNRRt5/recUQg4zbgubjtcF6
– https://airtable.com/shrD9UEKusc6BYWWc/tbl5zkv6T7WSivZ89/viwiMQLMb1PLNRRt5/recLFV3EctknxXwPR
– https://airtable.com/shrD9UEKusc6BYWWc/tbl5zkv6T7WSivZ89/viwiMQLMb1PLNRRt5/rec2CLrdBI1dvPSqx
– https://airtable.com/shrD9UEKusc6BYWWc/tbl5zkv6T7WSivZ89/viwiMQLMb1PLNRRt5/reccy3JOdoXGLzc9R
– https://airtable.com/shrD9UEKusc6BYWWc/tbl5zkv6T7WSivZ89/viwiMQLMb1PLNRRt5/recrNZLP8iK4vyDiE
– https://airtable.com/shrD9UEKusc6BYWWc/tbl5zkv6T7WSivZ89/viwiMQLMb1PLNRRt5/recqyOThclCGO2EGs
– https://airtable.com/shrD9UEKusc6BYWWc/tbl5zkv6T7WSivZ89/viwiMQLMb1PLNRRt5/recJB9CGp1iE7L4pA
– https://airtable.com/shrD9UEKusc6BYWWc/tbl5zkv6T7WSivZ89/viwiMQLMb1PLNRRt5/rec2CLrdBI1dvPSqx
– https://airtable.com/shrD9UEKusc6BYWWc/tbl5zkv6T7WSivZ89/viwiMQLMb1PLNRRt5/recQcMjZ82QWmmv3O
– https://airtable.com/shrD9UEKusc6BYWWc/tbl5zkv6T7WSivZ89/viwiMQLMb1PLNRRt5/recuU6AzBqIVWgtLf
– https://airtable.com/shrD9UEKusc6BYWWc/tbl5zkv6T7WSivZ89/viwiMQLMb1PLNRRt5/rechzekFHPSj0AQhy
Paul,
I looked at all the listings, & none of them require a law degree, and also did a search of the spreadsheet and found no listings for lawyers. Most of the listings you sent say required education is undergrad degree or less. I think sending these to him would discourage him. Why do you think this spreadsheet with 800+ listings has none for lawyers? Is it that a law degree really isn't highly useful for EA work? Is it that most listings are geared for people who are still undergrads, and organizations wanting someone with an advanced grad or professional degree would not list there?
Anyhow, the conferences and online seminars look good, and I will send him to those. Would be good, though, to give him some actual info about EA people actually practicing law in the service of their values.
Substack decided to cut my comment without any warnings. I had put ≈ 10 jobs positions, too bad. And fuck Substack.
I can see eleven job links when I expand your comment.
Ah indeed it works now... Not sure what's up
Yeah, fuck Substack just the same. It's eaten lots of my replies when I'm halfway through.
Thanks for the info. I will pass every bit of it on to the law student.
I know that court-appointed defense attorneys are ridiculously overworked, to the point that they can't do an adequate job defending. Being a defense attorney who does a lot of pro-bono work would be a great way for a lawyer to help. I'm not sure if it's the best way though, so if someone else posts a better idea that would be great.
It's a good idea for a cause, but I don't know if it's the best use of a lawyer's time. Possibly the right thing is raising money for defense attorneys for routine cases.
This doesn't mean I know what would be good approaches for a lawyer. Possibly looking for best ways to improve the legal system and advocating for them.
Aside from the impossibility of implementing it, do you think that a 30-hour workweek could exist as the global standard?
Are we already capable of producing "enough" under such a policy, or is more automation required before everyone could live that way without subtracting too much material value from the economy?
>Are we already capable of producing "enough" under such a policy
Even containing ourselves to the US, the people who produce the raw materials that are critical for our survival (food, fuel, etc) work way more than 40 hours per week. Farmers regularly work dawn to dusk and have to to produce enough output to make the economics work. I probably work 20hr/week even though i am at my desk longer than that. But i have a cushy tech job.
The problem with these types of goals is that even if 30hours is the average that is needed, many critical jobs need more than 30hours. we can't make policy based on averages. You will always hurt the outliers if you do that.
The global standard? Probably not. A lot of the poorer parts of the world compensate for poorer productivity by working more hours.
If you're talking about the modern west then this is a pretty well studied phenomenon. What happened is that initial industrialization mostly took the same basket of goods (food, clothes, houses) people already consumed and made them cheaper and higher quality. People made fortunes doing things like baking and distributing milk or bread. By the late 19th/early 20th century this caused a decrease in working hours both among certain populations (women, children) and even among workers (40 hour workweek etc).
However, starting in the 20th century work hours stopped declining and even increased. Largely because the market started inventing new, never before seen goods that people were willing to work to possess. Cars, electricity and plumbing, iphones, etc. This is endlessly frustrating to the end of work crowd who really want it to be true that people will just be happy at a set standard of living. Mostly, as far as I can tell, because they want to tax away everything above that for their projects or make it normal to work less. But most people want things. And not just for social status reasons. Some things like videogames are low social status but still very in demand!
Additionally, the US labor force has remained relatively sticky around the 40 hour week. Instead what you see is classes of workers moving in and out of employment. For example, the labor force participation rate has steadily declined since the 1990s. This is partly due to an aging population but it's also partly due to a wealthier population that has more welfare being able to not work while relying on contributions from those that do. I'm not talking about welfare queens, to be clear, I mean things like stay at home moms or dads (one of the big changes of the last century is the rise of the working woman as breadwinner). Or other arrangements. Still, this is one of the big issues in the Federal budget: we've lost almost 10% of the population as taxpayers.
Regardless, the issue is that "enough" is subjective and based on what people want to buy. And as much as people want automation to come along and create a utopia it's not nearly there. We still need to work to produce things and that means we have to work to earn the right to consume. Setting aside things like welfare and social arrangements like marriage.
Put another way: everyone could live a 1922 lifestyle and work like ten hours a week. But people want to live a 2022 lifestyle. Realistically they want to live a 2032 lifestyle. And they're willing to work to get there.
PS: A lot of people are repeating the idea the French have a 35 hour workweek. The way the French workday works is actually LONGER than the American workday. Usually from 8-9:00 and running to 6:00-7:00. You get to 35 hours by subtracting all the hours you get as breaks, most notably a 1-2 hour lunch. This is actually a reform they're arguing about right now: letting people work 8-4 or 9-5 by skipping their long lunch. Likewise, the French are objectively not working significantly less hours than many of their neighbors and are actually working more than several countries with 40 hour workweeks. The original reform was more of a splashy headline than a reality. As can be seen by the fact they almost immediately cut overtime pay to make up for the change in what counted as overtime.
Seriously, if you want to cite Europe as an example, please do some basic research.
I think you're right regarding aspirational lifestyle, but wrong about how much choice people have in the matter. For almost everyone I know, including myself, 'luxury goods purchases' (by which I include things like video games, TVs, etc) are just not a very large component of total spending versus rent, food, and utilities. Food *can* be cheap if we really want it to be, so I'm willing to accept diet as partial-luxury, but rent and utilities are pretty fundamental, and it's mostly rent. I'm not aware of any way I could work ten hours a week and afford food and a place to live (I could probably afford that on 1/4 of my current salary, but I don't have the option to make that trade, nor do most people).
The issue is twofold. Firstly, our government has guaranteed housing must be up to minimum standards which drives up price. Lincoln's log cabin would have been condemned by a local board for being unlivable today. Yet his family lived perfectly well in it. The second is that you want accommodations with certain features, like geographic location or extra bedrooms, that are mainly status goods. After all, homes have almost tripled in size even as family sizes have shrunk. (The additional third issue is zoning regulations and permitting making building difficult.)
Regardless, you can find a livable home with power, water, internet, etc for a few hundred dollars a month and take part time shifts to cover the rent. It would mean working in a low skill labor job in a trailer park. But that option is available to you. People instead choose to live in nice apartments in urban centers if they can. And I get why that is. It's much more pleasant. But it's not a necessity or the bare minimum. In fact, if you're paying more than $1,800 a month, you're consuming an above average amount of housing. Some of that has to be luxury. (I don't actually think the luxury/necessity dichotomy is useful. But there you go.) So often the rhetoric about necessities really means an upper middle class lifestyle with all its luxuries.
None of which is to say my preferred solution is to tell people to shut up and stop expecting society to provide them with things. My ideal solution is to build and build and build until housing becomes cheap. Plus some degree of financial assistance to the poor.
Perhaps my perspective here is different (I live in the UK), but I live in a terraced house built in the 1960s in a relatively undesirable neighbourhood (in London, admittedly, but that's where the jobs are). It's not the house that's gotten wildly more expensive, it's the land.
To quantify: A house literally identical to mine sold in 2003 for £210k - this is equivalent to £330k in 2022 prices. The house is going for c. £550k. There haven't been any extensions, upgrades - when I bought my house recently it was decrepit and needed to be completely rewired, have heating and internet installed, etc. The answer here is zoning and permitting, not 'people want more' - people want the same they had in 1960s (adding internet and gizmos is a trivial portion of the cost; the total cost of all the tech in my house is <£2k).
I'm honestly curious about the 'few hundred dollars a month' quote for a small but liveable place - where exactly did you have in mind? I used to live extremely cheaply (in Canada) in a large group house out of town, biked everywhere, never ate out, etc etc and still didn't manage that, and that was over a decade ago.
> A house literally identical to mine sold in 2003 for £210k
It wasn't literally identical. Your mistake is in assuming the entire value of a home is in its physical components. In effect, you're proposing that everything that sets the value of your home happens on the lot itself. If your next door neighbor is a smog spewing factory or a park makes no difference. But it doesn't. Unless London has not changed at all in 20 years (unlikely) then the area has gotten more desirable (as evidenced by more demand).
That said, I agree with your conclusion. More demand is an issue IF AND ONLY IF there's some barrier to supply. Nor do I think the right answer is to ask people to accept having less. I agree there should be less barriers to construction. Not necessarily less regulation in the sense of lead in the walls or escape hatches but in the sense that if you want to build an up to code house you should just be allowed to build an up to code house.
(Also, US houses have grown at a faster rate than UK homes. Just one of those things.)
> I'm honestly curious about the 'few hundred dollars a month' quote for a small but liveable place - where exactly did you have in mind?
Where was this place? The few hundred dollars represents the absolute floor, for a small house in a rural area. My point wasn't that we should all live that way. My point is that a 600 square foot unit in a mobile home community with utilities meets the minimum of modern livability. The average rent, iirc, is about $400-500. Most people want more than that, which is fine, but you can't then claim you just want the basics. "Just a roof over your head." This is a roof over your head: (http://www.mhvillage.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/ELS_CasaDelSolResortEast_Mobile_Home_Lot_Rent-e1559936578565.jpg)
(It's next door, but point taken)
I was curious about that casa del sol (600sqft is bigger than my last two apartments)
https://www.remax.com/az/glendale/home-details/10960-n-67th-ave-lot-67-glendale-az-85304/18061428704271959222/M00000048/6375679
I was about to say 'brb moving to America' before I saw it was a retirement community :(
I think the correct standard is something more like "20 hour work weeks with a complicated schema that permits a minority of weeks to have a considerably longer workday without undue penalties".
So maybe you can have a staff of people who work 20 hour workweeks most of the time, and then have (1 or 2 at most consecutively) 80 hour workweeks for the periods of time you actually keep all that staff around for.
Well, it would require a World Government who would decree such things, presumably from Beijing.
To me, unified world government is one of the biggest disasters imaginable. "Voting with your feet" is maybe the most important freedom there is.
This is why I mentioned ignoring the details of implementation. I'm thinking about this from an economic perspective alone, not about actually making this a law and enforcing it. I don't want a World Government either.
What are you talking about ? In France the legal work week is 35 hours, down from "actually no limit" in the 19th century. It was decreased to 40 hours in 1936, 39 in the 80's, and 35 in the 90's.
Last time I checked France was not ruling a World empire at any of those dates.
OP asked about it "as the global standard".
We're a long way away from a global standard, but we could (and likely have already) implement such a thing in the Western world in at least certain types of jobs and industries.
We would need to separate out the jobs for which more hours produces more goods or services in a linear fashion. Manufacturing, for instance, is significantly a matter of hours to goods. If you cut hours, then you also cut goods, and therefore working less is a bad thing. You could hire more people to spread those hours around, but then you run into cost issues as each of those people are expected to have the necessarily skills (training time) and also receive health care and other benefits. Each of those people that have their hours cut are also going to be looking at 25% less income, because their income is based on number of items produced, and they are producing less. We could pay them the same wage while working them less hours, but that's an even more direct cost than the training and benefits. That puts pressure on the costs of the items being produced, and prevents items from becoming cheaper, which becomes a tax on everyone who buys those items. If your food goes from $1 to $1.30, you're still feeling the pinch of the switch from a 40 hour week to a 30, even if your take home wage remains steady.
Office jobs and other skilled positions have enough slack that they probably dropped down to 30 hours or less years ago, for most knowledge workers. Salaried knowledge workers are usually paid to complete a non-linear function, which means if they can get their work done early, they are free. I have a side theory that this is one of the primary reasons many knowledge workers prefer to work from home. They gain the downtime, verses having to spend it at the office gossiping by the water cooler waiting for 5pm to roll around. One of the primary functions of my office job is being around in case something happens, so I can answer questions and help solve the problem (impromptu meetings, etc.). If there were no need for damage control, I might be able to work 20-30 hours a week on most weeks, and potentially do that work from home or anywhere else.
Yes, obviously - it's already happening. Certain sectors that absolutely require more hours should switch to 60h on a pendulum on-off schedule. This is how e.g. sailors or oil rig crews contract their work (spend three months on the ship, then three months chilling at home, get paid for both).
I managed to cut my hybrid WFH+office job from its nominal 40h to ~18h weekly, productivity loss was minimal, nobody noticed and I get praised for the results. A lot of my colleagues are doing the same, the pandemic was a blessing.
Im pretty sure the US avg hours per week is 34-36hrs.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/215643/average-weekly-working-hours-of-all-employees-in-the-us-by-month/
I didn’t mean to sound snarky. It came off that way (-:
Epistemic status: deeply parochial anecdata without citations or quantification. May not be a holistic or accurate picture of American labour writ large.
I don't know about *global* standards, since economies and cultural relations to work vary hugely...but at least within the industry I work in (Retail: Grocery), 30 hrs/wk is likely closer to the Pareto frontier than 40*. It's alarmingly common for workers to stumble through shifts in a daze of fatigue, sometimes literally. Important obligations like doctor's visits or finding better living situations fall by the wayside; vacation is explicitly encouraged, implicitly discouraged. In addition to the clear detriments to safety, morale, and productivity, this also means more workers are hired than strictly needed. They aren't necessarily idle or filling seats, just picking up the slack that their burnt-out coworkers can't.
Creating each day's Minimum Viable Salesfloor is basically achieved through brute force surplus of unskilled effort, and cutting lots of corners behind the scenes. So much material value is lost due to inefficiency; it's the labour equivalent of sacrificing sleep to eke out a couple more hours of low-quality effort. Or juggling extra jobs for additional income, despite the additional overhead eating more than half the gains. "Time isn't money, time is time, and you can never un-spend it."
One suspects it's actually rational to pad the clock and otherwise put in the bare minimum - compensation is more strongly correlated with the appearance of performance, vs actual performance. Still, the value of a free hour outside work far exceeds the value of an artificed idle hour inside work, for both employer and employee. So in that regard, "losing" 10 hours from the workweek wouldn't even necessarily be a loss. I thus think it likely that reducing full-time status to 30 hrs/wk would be a healthier and more profitable equilibrium, though the adjustment period would be rough. Convincing people that they'd actually be better off overall would be a heavy political lift as well. The attack ads write themselves.
Automation is also challenging here...I mean there's the Amazon Go scheme, but that's difficult to replicate without their economies of scale and network effects. My company doesn't even have online ordering or self-checkout lanes. Suspect that lowering the cost of personnel via shorter workweeks would make the argument for automation even less compelling, at least materially-economically.
(Morally and ethically, it might be a better investment anyway to eliminate retail's "bullshit jobs"...David Graeber and the media like[d] to emphasize the mental-spiritual consequences, but *in addition to those*, I see it play out in my coworkers as widespread substance abuse. This is not an occupation with dignity, and pay is only a small part of it.)
The other big Gordian knot in the room is...employer-provided health insurance. It's not impossible to reach the qualifiying thresholds as a part-timer...but absences add up quick, and eventually there's a point of no return where it's just not possible to pick up enough extra shifts. Many are full time primarily to maintain stable health insurance, which they actually use often. Of course, sicker workers who need more healthcare are even more liable to fall into the trap of overworking and burning out...like many economic things, there's a diminishing marginal return to hours worked. Healthcare in America is a whole other tallcircle of earthnoodles though.
I work as a prep cook in a restaurant. The owners can't afford to pay healthcare, so everyone works less than 40 hrs. A 30 hour work week would mean trying to find more people to do all the work. Many of my coworkers have two jobs, or some other source of income... I think life would be better for a lot of these people if the employer mandated healthcare went away.
The median global income is something like $2.50/day according to Google. So I'm thinking that most people should be pretty reluctant to lose a quarter of their income (ignoring non-linearities).
Why do you think it's impossible to implement ? France has a 35 hours week, down from 39 in the 90's. A 32-hours week is a regular guest in leftwing programs, although right now there is not much chance it will pass.
I don't know about the U.S, People here have a different outlook on life than a lot of Western Europeans.
Some more data. https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours
In western countries, we're far beyond the point that most people's material needs are met. In such conditions, the chief reason people care about stuff money can buy is to keep up with the Joneses.
In such a society, if everyone is poorer, nobody is worse off, because people's ability to keep up with the Joneses remains the same. Meanwhile, if everyone works less hours, actual quality of life improves because people have more free time and are less stressed by work.
Therefore, limiting the hours of works per week for everyone is a good idea.
Are we really “far beyond the point that most people’s material needs are met?”
Perhaps - but huge swathes of our lives are spent doing mindless, tedious work in order to meet those needs - things like washing dishes, cleaning and tidying, laundry etc., waiting in traffic or crammed underground trains. Even if we’re healthy, as we age our lives are increasingly full of pain, and physical and mental decay. When we’re not healthy, medicine is still primitive compared to many other sciences. And then we die - a pretty glaring failure to meet material needs!
As far as I can see, the main engine of improvement in our material needs has been economic and technological growth. That’s not necessarily incompatible with working less hours, but I suspect it is incompatible with blunting our desire to get richer.
> In western countries, we're far beyond the point that most people's material needs are met. In such conditions, the chief reason people care about stuff money can buy is to keep up with the Joneses.
There's a huge gulf between "I'm not suffering from malnourishment and homelessness" and "If I make more money I can only spend it on one-upping my neighbors". That glass of wine in the evening isn't required to meet my material needs, and neither will it impress Simon from across the street.
That glass of wine in the evening could be the 99 cent bottle from Aldi. The reason it isn't is basically keeping up with the Joneses.
I can't tell whether you're serious, or sarcastically making fun of Caba's attitude regarding luxury items. Usually I'd assume the latter, but there are some people with very, very weird opinions hanging out here.
To be clear, I don't think that more expensive equals better tasting when it comes to wine, and the wines I usually consume are less than 10 €/bottle.
Even if I make my wine at home I can't get the price down to a dollar, $3 is about as cheap as I can make it, assuming I'm re-using bottles.
And if I make it at home and drink at home I can't meet any new people while drinking, so I really do like to be able to afford at least a couple beers at a local pub where I can make friends.
But the glass of wine has symbolic value even if you're the only one around; it reminds *you* that you're living a comfortable life. If nobody you know could afford it, it would feel right to replace the wine with some cheaper ritual which would gain for you the same significance.
This is even more true of those living in a family. Spending money in luxuries to share with your loved ones is mostly symbolic. It remind them that the loving breadwinner is doing a loving breadwinner's job. Its value depends on what they assume that "normal" breadwinners do. That is, the Joneses.
If you have children, it's how you remind yourself that you're a good parent who won't let children grow up "poorer" (that is, with less symbolic luxuries) than other children. Its perceived value depends on what we assume that "normal" parents would do. That is, the Joneses.
None of this requires that the Joneses see it!
It's in your head, so to speak.
I'm not saying that the value of stuff we buy is *exclusively* related to the Joneses. I'm merely saying that it is to a far greater degree than most people admit to themselves. Enough to make my case that people would be happier if everyone worked less.
Another thing is that there are lots and lots of expenses that would go down if the average income goes down. Rent or mortgage is a big one. Rent around the world depends on how much money people make locally. Rent in rich cities is higher than in poor cities. I suspect that lots and lots of other things fall into this class and this would help explain what Scott calls "cost disease". I know that for many people a lower income life is a terrifying thing to contemplate, but you wouldn't live like a present day western poor. Rent would remain proportionate to your income and many other things would as well.
Getting Edward Teach/Lacan vibes off this. Performing for the Joneses, who may or may not exist outside one's head. Maintaining internal narrative consistency via symbolic action. "If you're buying it, it's for you."
There's a school of thought that subjective, relative inequality matters much more than objective, absolute inequality. Given this premise, would it be easier to convince everyone to work less if we were collectively unaware of others having more? Should we actively discourage knowledge of what the Joneses are doing? (I notice that this goes counter to the capitalist assertion that conspicuous consumption/status incentivizes work in the first place, and therefore inequality is Feature Not Bug.)
In some small sense I agree with what you are saying. People make silly money decisions. But most of what you say sounds like a starry eyed liberal who hasn't really talked with the poorer people around who are living pay check to pay check. Rent and car payments and cable TV and cell phone service are not going to be cheaper if people work less.
Why don't you think rent would be cheaper if people worked less? Normal supply/demand dynamics would seem to dictate that they should. And empirically, we see that rents are generally lower in areas with lower incomes.
Sure a correlation between rents and income does not mean causation. In fact it seems more likely that the lower rents (and other costs of living) is what leads to people being able to work for less pay in the cheaper city. We use to rent out 1/2 of a duplex. The rent was mostly set by things like; cost of house, mortgage, taxes, insurance, repair/ upkeep.
Yeah, rents I could actually see decreasing in some models.
But cell phone service seems unlikely, towers still gotta get built, the governement is still gonna want a bunch of tax, ect.
> But the glass of wine has symbolic value even if you're the only one around; it reminds *you* that you're living a comfortable life.
I drink that glass of wine because it tastes good and it relaxes me; there's nothing "symbolic" about it. I don't know whether my neighbors drink wine, beer, whiskey, or water, and I don't care.
> Spending money in luxuries to share with your loved ones is mostly symbolic.
Also wrong. I spend money on my family to make them happy and to give them a comfortable life. Yes, it makes me feel good to be able to provide for them, but that's not a significant reason for me to do this. I frequently choose a less expensive but more interesting/fun/convenient option, even though I could afford the more expensive one, because gaining status is not the reason why I do it.
I don't know why you're trying to bend every action and behavior that goes beyond ensuring basic survival into a status-seeking framework. Would you say your life is aligned in that direction? Is it possible that you're projecting and generalizing your attitude regarding status-seeking to all other people?
It's just something I notice in people around me. The way I spend money is not typical, and that's exactly the reason I notice these things.
I don't mean that the person spending money on their family does it exclusively for selfish reasons. Of course people spend money on their family to make them happy. I didn't mean to say otherwise, if it seemed so I phrased it badly. I mean that the feeling of happiness family members derive from consumption depends on the perception of what the standard is. Sometimes people calll this "dignity". They want to "live with dignity", and to live below what they feel is the proper standard is an indignity and it makes them uncomfortable in their hearts. People who spend money on their families want to spare them from this feeling of not having "dignity".
I don't know if your particular family is like this, who knows, maybe you're completely above it. But what I describe is very typical of humanity.
Okay, that's a very different interpretation of what you said before, and I agree 100% with this version. In fact, it matches perfectly with my own model of human happiness: A person is happier if their own standard of living is above their reference standard, i.e., the *perceived* standard of living of their peer group; they're also happier if their standard of living is currently improving.
On second thought, maybe I only agree 99%, because sometimes you compare yourself to non-peers ("I'm glad I'm not living in an African slum, or like a 18th century peasant") or to an imagined, non-existing ideal ("I wish we already had the medical technology of the future").
I bet different people are very different in the extent to which their actions are status-driven vs driven by other goals.
There is a space to argue that "not suffering from malnourishment and homelessness" is a sufficient condition to curb collective worries.
At Least that's what a lot of religions say.
It sort of depends on what you mean about 'ignoring impossibility'.
If you just mean, in a perfect world where zero labor was ever directed at anything which didn't raise standards of living, could we have the current standard of living with a 30-hour week? In that case, yes, definitely; most companies spend 11% of their budgets on marketing just for starters, which is completely non-productive. Lots more is spent on various types of zero-sum competition, from having excess idle labor around to take advantage of opportunities, to constant product cycling that doesn't raise standard of living but is only used to steal customers from competitors, to having lots of redundant competing stores instead of singular distribution venues. And the whole issue of 'demand creation' for things that don't really raise living standards is a giant can of worms. Not to mention that a lot of consumer needs go away if you go to a 30 hour workweek, as people have 10 more hours to cook their own meals, landscape their own yards watch their own children, etc.
But that's sort of a utopian post-capitalist vision, that requires everyone coordinating to eliminate labor spent on zero-sum activities. It's not clear whether we can sustain a system like that in reality, irrespective of how we get there.
Also worth considering that the labor force participation rate is generally in the 60s. We certainly have enough idle labor capacity to get the same amount of labor with everyone working 30 hour weeks by just hiring more workers. We'd just have to pay them enough to overcome whatever makes them prefer to not have a job right now.
I think you're using a non-standard definition of "non-productive" in your point about marketing. Marketing is intended to enable a company to sell more stuff, and the empirical evidence is generally pretty clear that it does. I think you just mean that you don't care whether companies sell more stuff, which is totally valid but a very different point.
The metric we were talking about here is standard of living.
Marketing can't make *all* companies sell more products, because consumers have limited money to spend. It mostly makes people buy one brand over their competitor, in a zero-sum way.
Marketing doesn't cause consumers to have more stuff, in fact it causes them to have less stuff because all the prices have to increase to pay for marketing divisions. So yes, marketing is productive *to the company doing it* because it steals customers, but it doesn't give any added value to consumers and doesn't raise standards of living.
I call that non-productive in terms of societal benefit or standard of living increase. I think a lot of labor falls into that category.
This is wrong because it assumes all products have exactly the same price per quality. In reality this is not the case, and marketing can yield positive sum gains through trigger market share changes.
Or it can yield negative sum losses by triggering market share changes in the other direction.
All companies have the same incentive to market as well as they can, there's no reason to think that companies with better products have more effective marketing. Lots of ads are trying to convince you to buy a worse product.
Indeed, since only one company actually has the 'best' product (however you would define it) in a given domain, and they probably have more than one competitor trying to lure people away from it, most marketing dollars are probably spent trying to lure people away from the 'best' option, rather than towards it.
As long as you have slack you can unilaterally opt out of the 40h grind, reaping these benefits. No need to coordinate at all if individual incentives point in the same direction.
Do you have a reason to tout marketing as completely non-productive? It would be cool to see non-NNT style case-studies.
Well, the primary goal of marketing is taking business away from your competition. It doesn't create more products for people to buy, it just determines which brand they buy when they buy the product. That's why I call it zero-sum competition.
There is some amount of marketing which is demand-creation through informing consumers of something they would genuinely benefit from buying instead of the other things they would have bought, but don't know about. My experience working with marketing departments is that this is a very small amount of their budget, at least in well-developed markets. And even when it genuinely informs a consumers, you have to look at the marginal gain over what they would have spent that money on instead, which is usually small.
I don't know of any studies of this (it seems like the answer would be entirely determined by your operational definitions anyway), this is mostly just definitional to how I'm talking about productivity and marketing.
I'm not sure how much marketing increases the feeling that buying things is how you cheer yourself up. So there'd be a limit to how much people can buy, but they're operating closer to that limit than they otherwise might.
I suspect everybody already works less than 30 hours a week on average. The perception is otherwise because the media obsesses about overworked overachievers or those burdened with two or three jobs. Politicians also emphasize both types for different reasons.
I don't have a great source for this, except synthesizing anecdotally. My network works hard, but it's all knowledge work, so I imagine there's a lot of slack in their jobs. There's a UK study showing that knowledge workers are productive for around 2.5 hours per work day. There is also that book about bullshit jobs.
Outside of my friend network, I also have a large extended family representing a broader cross-section of America. One-third of them are the two-job types. One-third are humming along, likely putting out 20-30 hours of work a week but punching a clock for 40. And the other third go in and out of work.
Now, that's just America. But I don't think that people in poorer countries are overworked. Probably impoverished nations also have fewer available jobs to go around.
Is there a good empirical basis as to why people who've been institutionalized for mental illness are forbidden from buying guns in the US- for life? Is there actual evidence that these people have higher rates of violence for the rest of their lifetime, or is this just pandering to the lowest common denominator 'of course crazy people can't have guns'. (Full disclosure of priors, I'm skeptical that most proposed gun control measures will be very effective). Psychiatry has been a full-fledged medical field since at least post-WW2 if not before, we should have plenty of data on how patients fare post-hospitalization. Or, is it that their suicide rates are that much higher? I could see a temporary ban, but a lifetime ban just seems excessive to me
You can take the view that preventing ex.mental patients from.owning guns isn't useful in jtself, but is a step towards disarming wider classes of people .... and you can put a postive.or a negative spin on that. Gun controllers have to work in baby steps because they face so.much resistance.
Well right now those baby steps have been consistently backwards. Rights to gun access have only expanded in the past 20 years, and it doesn't look like that is going to stop any time soon.
And there's a pretty good reason: when people hear that the top cop in Uvalde stood outside the classroom door for a freaking hour, while a couple of kids and a teacher bled out, they start to think -- well, fuck this, if a couple of teachers had guns, and maybe half the adults walking past the school at the time, then one of them might have ventilated Mr. Angsty in the first 5 seconds, like this:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-61615236
As they say, when seconds count, the police are only minutes away. When people start to think that's the reality of it, then they're not going to be waiting around for the pros, they're going to insist on having the tools to defend themselves.
Not everybody looks at a situation awash with guns, and concludes that more guns are what is needed.
Does a situation count as being "awash" with guns if the only people who have guns are the criminals, and police who all too often can't be bothered to confront the criminals? Because in an awful lot of the United States, including almost all of the places mass shootings occur, that is the status quo.
If the police do.not want to confront the criminals, that is what you need to address before you arm the teachers, kids, school hamster, etc.
Why? If there's one group of people that is unwilling to confront criminals, and another group that is willing (or of which a sufficiently large subset is), then why do we need to convince the first group of people to confront criminals instead of saying "look, just get out of the way and let the people who care, handle it. There's free donuts at the shop down the street".
The police were on the scene, but didn't respond because they were afraid of getting shot.
There's a lot of outrage about this, rightly. But this leads to an obvious question: when nobody is watching, I assume this happens pretty regularly, too. I mean, there are a lot of places/times where the police are called because a violent scary armed man has killed someone or otherwise is behaving in scary and violent ways. We don't have any information about what happens in most of those. But probably we should now update to "after your call to the police about the crazy guy with the axe murdering your family, the police may arrive but stand around outside until all the screaming stops and they hope the axe murderer has tired himself out, lest one of them get chopped with an axe while responding."
This line of reasoning turns out not to make me happier about restricting gun ownership to only the police, in a country where even a total ban will in practice leave criminals with guns.
This is a valid point, but I think the "more guns" approach has limits that are visible in Uvalde (and other mass shootings with armed bystanders, like the Pulse nightclub shooting): Even with extremely liberal gun laws, there are only so many people both interested in carrying and willing to rush into a life-or-death situation.
Like, Texas is pretty much Gun Central. 6th highest guns per capita in the country. The state even has a program to allow teachers to carry guns in school if they want to. I'm not sure you *could* push the gun ownership rate much higher, not without doing something crazy like making it mandatory for teachers to carry. If even Texas doesn't have enough guns to stop mass shootings, what hope does anyone else have?
Also, there's a really large gap between "a motivated criminal will be able to get a gun even with a total ban" and "someone who goes off the deep end can go to the local store, buy a rifle, and start shooting schoolchildren the same day." Reducing the number of guns in circulation will reduce the number of guns available for impulsive crimes.
Even with extremely liberal gun laws, it's pretty much illegal for anyone other than a policeman to carry a gun in a Texas elementary school or a Florida nightclub. As I've noted before, most US "mass shootings" occur in places where ordinary law-abiding citizens are not allowed to carry guns.
It is theoretically possible for a *distant* bystander, e.g. someone patronizing a store across the street, to intervene. That does sometimes happen, and it would have happened in Uvalde if the police hadn't prevented it. But it's much less likely because of the distance, the blocked sight lines and muffled sounds, and the consequent uncertainty about just what one would be intervening in. Self-defense by armed citizens is much more likely and much more effective if it can be performed by people who are on the scene when it happens and can see what's happening from the start.
I do not believe it is a coincidence that we so rarely hear about mass shootings in places where that would be legal.
I mean, probably if it had been harder for this nutcase to get a gun he'd have done some other horrible thing that would have been less destructive, or maybe he'd have been in there murdering children with a knife and the Uvalde police would have managed to be brave enough to confront him after only half an hour.
Probably, at least this once. But sooner or later, someone is going to figure out that improvised explosives and incendiaries are more lethal than mere guns, and when they burn fifty children alive in an elementary school somewhere, CNN et al will signal-boost it to hell and gone complete with the fact that e.g. milspec napalm can be easily manufactured at home and the recipe is all over the internet, how horrible, hint hint.
We lucked out that Kliebold and Harris were incompetent bomb-makers and had to fall back on their backup plan rather than going full "Heathers", so the first round of messaging told all the copycats that they should buy guns rather than double-check their bomb-making recipes. But we shouldn't count on staying lucky forever.
Notably, the police in Uvalde seem to have also kept other people with guns (including armed parents) from going into the school and confronting the shooter.
I don't know, but I have seen people on the internet say that they've avoided psychiatric treatment precisely because they don't want to lose their right to own guns, so insofar as psychiatric treatment is helpful then one really shouldn't discourage people from seeking it out.
I haven't looked at the data, so this is a somewhat uninformed opinion. It's not entirely uninformed, though, because I worked for years in a mental hospital, and still continue to see many fresh out of the hospital in my work (also many on the verge of going in). It seems very unlikely to me that people who have had a psychiatric hospitalization are more likely to commit some violent act with a gun. For one thing, the correlation between how crazy somebody is and how likely they are to undergo a psych hospitalization are low. Lots of psych hospitalizations are for things other than being crazy -- substance abuse, depression, anorexia, severe anxiety disorders. Meanwhile, lots of manic rageaholics never get hospitalized, because nobody in their circle of acquaintances wants to suggest that possibility to them with them. Lots of genuinely crazy poor folks distrust the hospital, and who can blame them, given what it's like at low-end psychiatric facilities? Even high-end ones suck. And besides, in general, people who are truly crazy are not violent or dangerous -- they are withdrawn, scared, confused and low-energy.
And most shootings aren't done out of craziness, they are done out of rage and/or the desire to prevail in a conflict, in a culture where guns are easily available and their use is considered a part of normal life. You don't have to be crazy to be OK with shooting somebody! It takes surprisingly little to convince someone it's just a thing people gotta do sometimes. The military trains people to do it all the time. So do certain neighborhoods and subcultures.
Surprisingly few mass shootings or other big-ticket violent acts have been perpetrated by truly, truly crazy people. Because truly crazy people don't have money and can't plan their next trip to the bathroom, much less an act of domestic terrorism.
What about screening for domestic violence?
This isn't quite the answer to the question you're asking me, but it reminded me of something I knew. Males who choke their female partners during anger outbursts are *much* more likely to eventually murder them -- not necessarily by choking -- than other men who are violent with their partners. Choking's a really powerful predictor. Read about some city that actually had a whole intervention organization set up to help women who reported being choked, or whose doctors noticed characteristic bruises on their necks -- information, counseling, special safe houses she could move into immediately.
The relationship between choking and later murder fits with the principle of ecological validity. The most valid tests of whether somebody is likely to do X are measures of whether they do x-like things in similar situations. These work better than hiring experts to interview the person, giving extensive paper-and-pencil measures, etc. So the best measure we have of whether a male is capable of killing his partner is whether he routinely engages in a kind of violence that if taken farther could kill her.
I doubt that domestic violence is a good predictor of someone's being a mass shooter. The situations are too different.
Yeah but the thing that wigs people out is not for-cause shootings, because whether it's reasonable or not, people think they can take steps to avoid that. Don't deal drugs, don't join a gang, try not to live in shitty neighborhoods full of drugs and gangs, don't have affairs with women married to short-tempered low-IQ gun nuts, et cetera.
The shootings that alarm people are those they *can't* avoid because they're perpetrated by crazy people, like Uvalde, Virginia Tech, the Las Vegas Harvest festival, Anders Breivik. None of these can be blamed on subcultures -- they can't even be blamed on the availability of guns, since no conceivable gun laws could have prevented them -- and the perpetrators are undoubtly crazy in some fashion, if not necessarily psychotic.
I know. But those mass shootings are a tiny portion of the US gun killings. The world is full of profoundly unhappy, low-empathy, eccentric, rage-filled loners. I dunno -- maybe one young male in 500? I have 3 male psychotherapy patients, now in their late 20's-early 30's, who had extensive fantasies of shooting up their schools when they were teens. They never came close to doing it -- never looked into how to get a gun, for instance. But shooting everybody they knew was their go-to fantasy, the way suicide or running away might be somebody else's. They don't have murder fantasies now, later in life, and the most violent thing any of them ever did was have shouting matches with his parents. There's no test or interview that will identify the tiny portion of them who are likely to commit a mass shooting.
The world is also full of crazy people. Last I knew 1% of the population is diagnosed with schizophrenia at some point in their lives, and about the same percent bipolar, & it's not uncommon for mania or depression to have psychotic features. And then there are lots of people who are sporadically or permanently crazy from drugs they use.
How well are mass shootings correlated with getting admitted to mental hospital, though? There are a lot of different kinds of "mentally ill", and both "mass shooter crazy" and "mental hospital crazy" are highly-nonuniform subsets.
I'd like to see some data here. I know several spree shooters were considered seriously mentally ill, and at least a couple (I recall the VA Tech shooter, but there was another like this) had the authorities notified by their therapist that they were potentially violent and dangerous.
I did a search, and one reason there's not much data is that there was zero federal funding for research on gun violence for over 20 years. https://www.apa.org/monitor/2021/04/news-funding-gun-research This seems like it could be a good area for private research funding.
Your cited source does not support the claim. The source says that there was no federal funding for research on gun violence *by the CDC* for over 20 years. Says nothing about whether federal agencies other than the CDC/NIH have been studying gun violence. And really, if you wanted a federal agency to study "gun violence", would the *Center for Disease Control* be your go-to source? I mean, I think I recall a cheezy '80s action flick with the tagline "Crime is a disease, ['80s action hero] is the cure!", but really for *violent crime* you're going to want to go with the FBI or the Justice Department generally.
But they actually know quite a bit about violent crime, and so will honestly tell you that there aren't any easy answers or quick fixes. The CDC, and medical research community generally, has a not at all concealed ideological interest that makes them useful allies to some but not a reliable source to anyone. The FBI just says "It's complicated" which isn't useful, so while they do get some funding that they can use for the purpose, it doesn't lead to anything anyone wants to talk about.
This is because the previous years the CDC/NIH went out of their way to explicitly fun "research" projects which were determined in-advance to advocate for gun control measures.
Yep. Hence the problem, for anyone thinking deeply about the issue.
I'm not a fan of guns, and I do wish concerns about the mental/other state of people wanting to purchase them were taken into account.
But how do you do that? Johnny Jones is now [legal age to own gun] and goes to buy his first one. Okay, we need to check "Has Johnny made repeated or any death threats online?"
How do we find out? How can we link Johnny Jones to an account under a coarse username that is screaming abuse at [pick your outgroup]? How do we differentiate "Man, I would love to shoot stupid old Mr Smith the maths teacher" from (1) idiot kid (2) genuine threat?
Do we want a world where every fragment of data about where Johnny has gone online and what he has done can be pulled up and stitched together, and Johnny gets arrested/sent for compulsory mental health assessment? How many putative school shooters versus ordinary people are we going to scoop up in that net?
Do *you* want to be scooped up in that net?
Do we *have* this world already?
Well, I'm not a people person. If I knew how to solve complex social problems, or even thought I had real value to add to the attempt, I wouldn't have spent so much time learning how to solve partial differential equations (which is easier).
That said...I feel like the whole speech thing is a red herring. We *think* it's important, because if we meet someone in person and think he's a dangerous bastard, and we're asked why, we point to this and that which he said. I mean, we feel like we have to. Because we lack words (and perhaps introspection sufficient) to describe all the nonverbal stuff we took in, and which, I suspect, was more important.
It's not really erroneous thinking or funky ideology that marks the dangerous person -- it's an emotional and executive function deficit. Psychopathy, lack of identification or empathy, grandiosity, really exceptional narcissism. I suspect we gain information about these things mostly through nonverbal pathways.
So how would we ever gain objective information about a distorted or diseased emotional state? Probably we have to look at what people actually do rather than what they say, which seems like it is probably mostly epiphenomenal. We look for antisocial behavior, even on a small scale. Cruelty to animals, inability to get along, unusually bad decisions, unusual indifference to, or unawareness of, the suffering (or joys) of others.
But unless we institute Panopticon, or just rely on X ratting Y out when X learns Y wants a gun, we generally won't get this either. So I'd be OK with a general affirmative standard, meaning if you want to buy a gun, you need to meet some set of objective criteria of basic responsible adulting.
You have to have a regular job, say, and pay taxes, and your schooling needs to be complete to the level appropriate, no criminal record above a certain level of seriousness, no convictions for violent offenses, have served on a jury once, no bankruptcies, at least OK credit. You have to have at least weekend custody of any children of which you are the father, and you have to be current on support. You have to be living in your own place, paying for your own rent and groceries, have to have consistently voted, have to be able to pass a normal citizenship test, be able to drive a car, hold and be able to elucidate a somewhat mainstream opinion about whether Han shot first, and whether he should/should not have.
Plus some subject-specific criteria: you have to be certified as competent by some certified expert in the handling, safety, storage and use of a weapon, pass a modest test on the laws of your state.
And probably some personal testimony too: you need to bring an attestation from your employer or other supervisor as to your reliability and ability to get along with your coworkers, and another from your parent, guardian, or wife if you're male and under 25 as to your maturity and judgment.
Pretty sure not a word of that would pass Constitutional muster, however. The law generally disallows the kind of connection I'm making here, between a man's character, as measured by his general life achievements and positivity of his social contribution, and the exercise of his rights. Where restriction is allowed, it has to be narrowly tailored to the specific exercise of the right, id est we can circumscribe his rights to own a *gun* if he has demonstrated he might use a *gun* wrong -- but we cannot do that if he has merely demonstrated he doesn't know how to use a car, his time, or his capablity to beget children right.
I absolutely understand how that came to be, given the vicious use of such general "character" standards to oppress blacks and the poor, but it's a shame, because I kind of think that's how the Founders actually intended it. They had no notion of pure democracy -- *everyone* has the same rights and privileges as everyone else -- yeah no -- but it does seem likely they felt a republican form of government could only succeed where there was a commonality of shared standards of individual virtue. A man has standing not merely by being born and of age, but because he has demonstrated his worthiness for inclusion in the ranks of free men.
I think it is largely ok if publicly posting, "I am going to kill X" get's you lots attention from law enforcement. If you are explicitly announcing criminal intent online, that seems like probable cause for a thorough investigation.
If you don't want cops nosing around in your internet history, don't say stupid shit online.
Sure, they could have prevented that -- and also wreaked havoc in the lives of about 500,000 other people who made random online threats but turned out not to vault from online dickhead to shooting 4th graders. Let me know when you have a foolproof Seriously Fucked In The Head meter that you can wave in front of generic teenage hothead and it will swing reliably into the green if he's just an asshole who will grow out of it and into the red if he absolutely needs to be kept away from guns. (Or even better, locked up, since he could have also blown up a building a la Tim McVeigh.)
That's not to say that I don't agree that existing gun laws should be reliably and consistently enforced, and it ought to be a higher priority than it is. I absolutely do. I would also be very happy to amend the Constitution to prohibit young men from owning weapons of their own until they reach age 25.
But I'm under no delusions that this is a panacea. It would help, that's all, and how much, and at what cost -- very difficult to say. If it were easy peasy, and didn't cost much, I kind of suspect it would probably already have been done.
I don't think we need to take the "kids will be kids" route with threats of violence. If you make threats of bodily harm to a person or group of persons, you can and should end up having a bad time. Words and actions have consequences, the idea that you should be able to say anything you want online without it impacting your personal life is a myth.
I think I had somebody on here try to get Scott to permaban me because I was threatening violence (I probably said something like Nomak's 'kick your ass' or a bit stronger, I don't actually remember).
Was I really going to get on a flight to America, track this person down, and physically assault them? Of course not. But they claimed to believe that I was seriously threatening violence. If the police have to be called out every time someone loses their temper online and says "I hope you get the shit kicked out of you", then not alone will there be a lot of time wasted, there will be a backlash about this, and both the police and the general public won't take 'teenage guy makes threats online' any more seriously.
You also see reports of the families in the aftermath saying "We tried and tried to get help for him, but the hospital wouldn't take him in/we couldn't get a psychiatrist to commit him". So what next?
I have personally said "I will kick that guy's ass at [activity]" via text and been accused of threatening physical assault, so I don't take this sentiment very seriously.
The McVeigh/Brevik types aren't going to be detected by a screen for mental illness because they weren't crazy, just evil.
Re screenings:
The Pulse nightclub massacre gunman, Omar Mateen
"had been a security guard for G4S Secure Solutions.[111][112] The company said two screenings—one conducted upon hiring and the other in 2013—had raised no red flags.[113] Mateen held an active statewide firearms license and an active security officer license,[114][115] had passed a psychological test, and had no criminal record."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orlando_nightclub_shooting#Personal_life
Now, there were screw-ups in some of this:
"After the shooting, the psychologist who reportedly evaluated and cleared Mateen for his firearms license in 2007 by G4S records denied ever meeting him or having lived in Florida at the time, and said she had stopped her practice in Florida since January 2006."
Nonetheless, I would be very surprised if any plausible screening that would be applied to millions of firearm owners could be _better_ than the employment screening for an armed job.
How is forbidding someone from buying guns “wrecking havoc in his/her life”?
Because they want to, for whatever reason there is in their actual lives. Maybe we're talking about a Korean store-owner in South Central and the gangs have moved in but he can't find anyone to buy him out of his store. Maybe it's an old guy who works for a jewelry store and he's got to walk $50,000 in diamonds to and from his car some days, and he knows damn well someone who wants to lift that merchandise is not going to want any witnesses who can ID him. Maybe it's a woman with some young kids who has a psycho ex-husband.
Who are you, or I, to second guess why people want the means at hand to defend themselves? It's great if you live in a nice safe suburban house and crime is something you read about in the newspaper, or you're a Hollywood millionaire and you can just hire security guys (with guns), but not everyone lives in that happy state.
Which law do you think says that "repeated death threats" has anything to do with who is allowed to own guns?
We have laws that say people who have been *institutionalized for mental illness* are prohibited from owning guns. Being institutionalized for mental illness is something that is legible to the state. It shows up as a black-and-white fact on official paperwork, with very little ambiguity about whether it did or didn't happen, so we can use it as a basis for further action.
"Repeated death threats", don't show up on anyone's permanent record, to the extent that such a thing exists. Bob threatens Alice, repeatedly. Alice knows this. Maybe Alice calls Officer Friendly, so now there is *a policeman* who knows this, and maybe he puts it in a report somewhere along with the note that there was nothing he could do about it. Which report, nobody will ever read until it's too late. When Bob goes to Greg the Gun Dealer, Greg won't know about it, and neither will the FBI computer that does the background check.
And if they do know about it, all they know is that Friendly said that Alice said that Bob said a death threat, which is not the same as knowing that Bob made a death threat. So long as that pesky "due process of law" thing is still a part of the system, Friendly saying that Alice said that Bob said whatever, isn't legally actionable. The death threat still isn't legible to the system, so we can't practically write laws to deal with it.
If Officer Friendly notice that a lot of people are saying Bob has been making a lot of death threats, and decides that with a bit of leg work he can put together a case to convince a judge that Bob should be sent to a mental hospital for evaluation, *then* Bob's mental condition becomes a matter of legal record, legible to the system, and we can stop Bob from buying a gun.
If we wait until after Bob has killed a bunch of people and *then* start seriously investigating all the reports of all the death threats, that's good for an I-told-you-so, but so what?
I mean, yeah, repeated death threats. But how to distinguish between "socially isolated idiot kid who makes these threats but would never follow through on them" and "genuinely dangerous person"?
If the police have to take online threats seriously, they have to treat the person as a live threat, which probably means showing up ready to shoot him if he so much as twitches, which is going to end up with somebody dead, and then the family go to court over "he was troubled but had never ever been violent".
It's a quandary, I don't think there's an easy fix. Yes, violent people should be dealt with so they can't escalate that violence. But we've done away with things like 'cart him off to the looney bin' for good and bad reasons, and unless people are willing to make a complaint that "Joe Smith is violent and threatening", the police can't do much. And *because* Joe Smith is violent and threatening, people are too afraid to go make a public complaint where Joe will know his girlfriend, granny or neighbour went to the cops about him.
And then you have someone like Stephen Paddock who has the highest body count of mass shootings in recent years, and nobody noticed anything that set off alarm signals about him. He seems to have been declining in health and mental stability, but nothing along the lines of "he made violent threats in real life/online":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Paddock
"There are *existing* gun laws that could have prevented this if the police had taken some warning signs seriously."
I think the American police forces fall down badly in some aspects of their jobs, going by reports, but there are areas where I have some sympathy for them.
"Johnny made online threats, so he can't own a gun". Okay, then if we're taking the threats seriously, Johnny should be arrested and charged with a crime. Imagine trying that one in court, a lawyer who is doing his job in more than half-assed fashion will get Johnny off that one. How many people say things online that, if we took them seriously, would get you arrested or deprived of a right?
And a lot of people would be backing up campaigns about limitations on the right to own guns, making online speech a free speech issue, etc.
Unless Johnny has done more than what could be interpreted as 'teenage edgelord on the Internet', how do you make a case that when he wrote that dumb message about blowing up the school, he really meant it and is a present danger to himself and others? Are we going to make Johnny undergo involuntary admission to a psychiatric ward? Oops, there's *another* activist campaign about that!
If you have the cops investigate every single idiot teenage messaging, then you'll need an entire separate police force for that. What is needed, and what the police can't get, and I've seen it in my own former workplaces, is people willing to stand up and be witnesses/complainants for court cases. And people won't do that, out of genuine fear that if they make a public complaint to the police about that drug-dealing petty criminal family terrorising the neighbourhood, they are going to be assaulted or worse.
And without witnesses, the police can't get convictions on "we got an anonymous complaint Johnny is violent, or beat a guy up, or had a meltdown in public and screamed he was going to shoot the entire school up".
Except that the threshold of evidence to restrict someone from buying a gun shouldn't be the same as to convict them of a crime, because the impact on their life is so much less.
Wrong. If you're permanently not allowed to have a firearm, you're barred from several jobs that require one (soldier, policeman, security guard, farmer).
"Destroys someone's career permanently via state action" is not a little deal.
Taking away someone's right to own a gun, ever, has at least as great an impact on someone's life as a low-grade misdemeanor conviction. Which means it needs at least as many safeguards, and can't be implemented just because someone called the police and said "Johnny is no good!", you need actual due process of law.
And if we're talking about the United States, the right to keep and bear arms is explicitly recognized as a civil right (yes, of individual citizens), and those you *definitely* don't get to take away without rigorous due process of law.
I think this imagines "Taking guns away from somebody" as a random act, whereas I think that if somebody is trying to disarm you, specifically, the impact on your life is going to be pretty significant.
I've noticed that when we talk about inflation, we don't really only mean monetary inflation. We're usually talking about a consumer price index, and that will conflate price increases due to monetary inflation with price increases due to literally increased work required to [move containers around the world now that we've lost the rhythm, maintain production while keeping infection controls in place, route trade around wars, etc.].
I would naively think that we would want to treat these differently, is there a reason that we normally don't?
Inflation is bad because of the additional friction it creates in the economy as everyone adapts to the new, higher prices. You need to negotiate a higher salary, you need to renegotiate the interest rates on your loans, you need to buy a wheelbarrow to take your money to the shops, etc. etc. A rapid increase in prices causes these problems whether the rise in prices is because of too much money or because there's not enough stuff for that money to buy. So it sort of makes sense that if there's not enough stuff in the economy, you can fix inflation by reducing the amount of money in circulation to match.
If the friction of price changes was the main effect, I think one could get around that by just stating prices in an inflation adjusted way. "Your salary will be 1000 USD(1970)". Each month, some neutral agency (ha!) could publish formulas to convert this into actual USD($date), and your employer would just pay you the appropriate amount.
OTOH, there is no way to store USD(1970), so "I have 1M$ in the bank, so I can pay X employees their current salary until their retirement" would not work any more.
And the exact bag of goods used to measure inflation would be also somewhat political. Urbanites might include rents in big cities, Greens might want to lower the amount of fossil fuels in the bag and so on.
I'm pretty sure some country actually implemented this once! I wish I could remember which one...
It was Brazil with the Real! They introduced it as a proxy currency that represented a steadily increasing amount of Pesos to match the inflation of the Peso. Once people got used to the Real being "stable" it became their real currency.
The nominal answer is that inflation means a general increase in prices within an economy. So it is defined as what you get when you measure price increases for a reference basket of goods.
One reason for this is that figuring out the reasons for inflation, eg the ones you mentioned, is hard and messy. Often we don't really know why inflation happens. See eg the current debates about how much current high inflation rates are temporary due to covid or are permanent. So one reason we don't have a "disentangled" inflation index (that I know of) is because we don't really know.
I'm not sure what you mean by monetary inflation, but if you mean an increase in money supply that is usually called just that and a topic that economists have generally become less interested in since the 1980s precisely because they figured that inflation (as commonly defined) is the more relevant measure.
Completely uninformed guess: I would think it's hard to measure monetary inflation directly, and the basket-of-goods approach is just the closest metric we have.
It's the other way around: we've got fairly precise statistics of the money supply by several definitions, since the Fed knows exactly how much money banks have in their Fed accounts and how many physical dollar bills they've printed and issued (minus bills returned to the Fed, bills known to be destroyed, and estimates of unreported bills destroyed or irretrievably lost). Banks also regularly report to the Fed exactly how much money they have in various forms of deposit accounts. You can find the money supply statistics here:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/categories/24
Price inflation, on the other hand, is a messy estimate. What goods you put in the basket, how you weigh them, how you survey "typical" market prices of those goods, and how you adjust your basket and weighting to account for changing qualities of goods on the market and changing buying behavior by consumers are all things that involve imprecision and judgement calls. There's routinely a spread of around 0.5 percentage points between three different metrics which all purport to measure inflation in consumer prices (CPI-U, Chained CPI, and the PCE Deflator), which adds up a lot over time (e.g. CPI-U shows cumulatively 60 percentage points more inflation since 1980 than the PCE Deflator).
I observe that the same phenomenon works in the other direction generally (most of the time inflation is underestimated because of the general trend of increased efficiency / literally decreased work required to do X).
(I think this is an important factor in cost disease.)
Inflation no longer really tracks the strict economic concept of inflation - but what it does track is basically more useful to the majority of people.
The actual improvements in productivity on a per capita basis have been quite modest for a long time now.
Increases to CPI because of trade disruption, war, shortages etc will drive wage pressure and start an inflationary spiral. There is still a distinction, but the regulatory response should be broadly similar.
There was a blogpost about this I've been looking for it ever since, if you have any idea?
Nope.
The biggest flaw with CPI is it is actually a COL index and not an inflationary index. It tends to overestimate inflation.
Well, okay, the biggest flaw is that inflation isn't some unitary number.
At the end of the day, inflation is when things cost more. There is a difference between demand push inflation when e.g. the government writes everybody a check to go shopping with, and supply pull inflation when e.g. china imposes strict lockdown policies making less imported goods available for purchase. They are not the same but both are bad, and fundamentally both impact consumers by being the increase in the current dollar cost of goods.
These _are_, as you say, both bad. It is, however, especially bad if our response to "China imposing lockdowns" is to intentionally induce layoffs at home(cause a recession) in an attempt to bring down prices.
> They are not the same but both are bad.
Inflation is bad is the common interpretation. It doesn't impact people lives that much because wages follow. (Actually wage growth is a causing factor this time.) Inflation is just very visible.
a) Wages don't always follow, (real wages have declined with the current cycle of inflation)
b) You can normally only 'catch up' to wage growth by switching jobs, so the impacts are very uneven throughout the economy.
" It doesn't impact people lives that much because wages follow. "
You need to tell our Central Bank that, because they're saying there has been real income decline:
https://www.centralbank.ie/news/article/quarterly-bulletin-2022-2-economic-growth-set-to-continue-but-slower-higher-inflation-expected-6-Apr-2022
"“Momentum from the end of last year and into this year will see strong consumption growth for this year as a whole, but lower than previously expected as households reduce spending in the face of real income declines and weaker confidence. For businesses, higher costs for energy and materials, more uncertainty, and supply chain disruptions will see weaker investment compared with our previous forecasts.
...The adjustment of the labour market through the pandemic has been testament to the strength of the recovery, with numbers employed now exceeding 2019 levels and the standard unemployment rate at around 5.0%. Despite the challenging conditions, a tightening labour market is expected, with stronger and broader-based wage growth. This will be welcomed as real incomes will likely fall this year. However, where growth in wages or profits respond entirely to the currently high rates of inflation, or are detached from underlying productivity growth, the likelihood increases that harmful higher inflation becomes embedded."
So inflation set to increase, growth to decrease, wages will rise, but there is a reduction in real income. And not *all* wages rise in response, many people are on lowerf incomes and so inflation eats more of their disposable income, so they do suffer real effects.
Nobody could say this who lived through the 70s. Because that experience would teach two hard lessons: (1) savings matter -- how do you think you're going to buy a house, start a business, or retire if you don't have savings? And inflation destroys the value of your savings. So at best your argument only applies to people who live paycheck-to-paycheck, who have no savings, and no plans for any. Pretty much entry-level workers.
And anyway (2) it turns out wages never rise as fast as prices, so *real* wages end up declining. That's not hard to predict: since a tremendous destruction of useful capital is going on, and a great deal of economic activity is now revolving around the completely nonproductive work of keeping up with the rapidly changing value of money, it should not come as a surprise that labor productivity declines and hence real wages do also.
Yeah, I've yet to see a 7% wage increase this year to match the inflation.
If you have mortgage debt, while you have high interest payments the inflation also pays off the capital sun.
My parents had a bad time financially in the 70s, but when they came out had no mortgage left so had a much better time.
High inflation helps individual home owners who already bought and preferably have long fixed mortgage periods.
Absolutely. The right place to be when inflation kicks off is up to your eyeballs in (preferably fixed interest rate) debt.
"So at best your argument only applies to people who live paycheck-to-paycheck, who have no savings, and no plans for any. Pretty much entry-level workers."
And who will be hit by inflation, because they are not likely to get wage increases while increases in fuel prices makes it more expensive to run the car they need to get to work and so takes a bigger bite out of their disposable income. Same with all price increases - once the things like rent are covered, there is less money to spend on necessities, hence maxxing out credit cards and running into arrears.
Inflation is no fun for anyone, unless you're a multi-billionaire who can absorb an 8% rise in cost of living.
If you can't absorb an 8% rise in cost of living you are already hanging by a thread, that's not a normal household budget.
8% once? Yeah, maybe. Most belts can be tightened a notch.
8% every year, for a decade? Try it sometime and get back to us. Or talk to someone who lived through the 1970s.
Ian is right, you are severely underestimating the number of people who are living lives this precarious.
Eh... that is kinda a normal budget though. A lot of people live paycheque to paycheque. (It's not a good budget I'll grant you.)
I mean, you could keep your savings in precious metals...
You'd think. And there's no shortage of ZeroHedge authors cackling hysterically about how Any Day Now the rest of us are going to be shining their shoes in exchange for an apple core.
And yet gold remains fairly unmoved by all the prayers and incantations thrown its way. (Cue dark mutters of manipulation...)
What do you mean by "a great deal of economic activity is now revolving around the completely nonproductive work of keeping up with the rapidly changing value of money"? What work is that?
Start with changing the price tags on merchandise and gas pumps more often, and recalculating W-2 withholding rates as wages change. Then you've got all the long range planning that a complex economy has to do, which now has to factor in predictable (in direction, alas not in magnitude) wage and price changes. Like, I plan to save up money to buy a car. How much money do I need? Depends on how the price of cars is changing, and how my wages are changing. I want to expand my electric car business into solar power batteries, so I need to build a factory. It will take 2-3 years to build the factory, and I need to plan on the size, taking into account the cost of construction, the cost of my future employees, the revenue I can get from my future sales. Meanwhile, the bank that I want to lend me money has to make the same calculation.
All of these calculations are much harder when wages and prices are all rapidly rising in ways that are hard to predict. (It would be fine if every wage, and every price, just increased at a fixed percentage per year, but that's unfortunately not what happens, they all increase generally, but some faster than others, and the rate of change isn't steady, but goes up and further up at various times.) So you have to invest more time and effort into it, and you have to hedge your bets more. I may end up estimating my future revenues more conservatively, to account for the possibility that I may underestimate how much wages will rise during construction, or the rise in the price of my products doesn't keep up for some reason. So...now my capital is not being deployed as efficiently -- shazam, economic inefficiency.
Or think of it this way: suppose the only way wages or prices changed is when government said they had to. But imagine that government operates in some completely opaque way, and just randomly changes prices and wages at random intervals. Always upward, mind you, but not the same each time, not the same prices or wages, either. Can you see how that would pose a significant economic burden on anyone trying to prosper who is compelled to cope with these random edicts? It would be what they call "regulatory burden." You have to hire people to look into this and try to stay ahead of it, respond to it, take out insurance against it, and all those wages are parasitic on the productive economy, like a bunch of lawyers hired to do nothing more than fill out the random forms the Bureau of Collecting Forms demands be filed each week.
I don't think I buy this argument. People have to do risk management with or without central banks and from what I hear, before reserve banks got put in charge of monetary policy and taksed with keeping inflation as constant as they could price shocks were far more common
Sure, but changing central bank interest rates seems like much more of a reasonable answer to one of those things than the other doesn't it?
Why? It works fine for both, because all you're doing is clonking demand upside the head with a shovel. Demand sits down until it stops seeing stars, and voila prices fall (relative to where they were going at least).
So you would like to hand China control the U.S. economy? What about the Saudis? Every time the price of oil goes up we should have massive layoffs at every company in America?
How about, instead, we address the actual problem instead of acting like Lewis Carrol's "Queen of Hearts."
Any reason (apart from political unpalatability) not to achieve the same effect with tax increases? Instead of clonking demand with increased interest rates why not clonk it with a temporary tax increase (and raise some useful government revenue while we're at it)?
Well one obvious virtue of coming at this from the point of view of interest rates is that you have the positive aspect, which is that you significantly increase the motivation to save -- accumulate capital, which serves as the seeds for economic growth after you slaughter all the inefficient and stupid current uses of capital. If I start getting 8% on my savings account I'm going to be much happier about reducing my spending in favor of savings. (And parenthetically a *lot* happier than if a certain additional percentage of my income is siphoned off by government which totally pinky swears it will be used productively yeah right).
Another is that arguably you discriminate more against purely consumerist spending than personal investment: if interest rates rise steeply, I may still (painfully) borrow money to buy a new truck for my business, but I won't do it to buy a new Tesla to virtue signal to my neighbors, because the business vehicle delivers an ROI the pleasure vehicle doesn't. You also discriminate more against riskier business investments, so you encourage business investments that are less likely to prove to be misallocations of precious capital. And you preferentially destroy the sicker businesses, those which are staying afloat by borrowing instead of revenue.
I'm no economist, so who knows what the pros think of this, but personally I kind of like it because the interest rate approach says "OK the price to borrow is going way the fuck up, so think twice before you borrow and spend -- but we're *not* going to dig into the myriad details of who's borrowing and who's not, and what exactly they're doing with the money." But with the fiscal approach, the government *will* be deciding from whom to steal the ability to consume, and it will be deciding to what use to put the accumulated capital -- and I have no faith that it will decide either of those things correctly, or even equitably.
The Fed can respond on a much shorter timescale than Congress.
Maybe in the US, but there's other countries. Do any countries try to fight inflation with tax increases?
Raising interest rates is reducing economic activity. If you're in the middle of a wage-price spiral, there is justification for wanting to do that. But if you're just seeing prices rise because of non-wage related reasons why would you want to reduce economic activity in response to that? Prices are already higher, that will act to reduce demand and if there's no feedback loop then that can't lead to higher wages and higher higher prices?
Sorry, I'm not following this. It doesn't matter whether inflation starts with wages or prices, it always feeds back to the other. How could it not? If prices rise, workers demand raises, if workers demand raises, prices rise. Simple as that. I mean...you could try to break the cycle by force, but wage and price controls never work, it's been tried over and over again.
So yes you have to reduce economic activity. There's no other cure for inflation. What would you suggest instead?
Increased productivity is the best cure. The current round of inflation is due to reduced productivity mainly as a medium term result of covid restrictions.
> It doesn't matter whether inflation starts with wages or prices, it always feeds back to the other. How could it not?
If prices grow because primary input cost grow, workers can demand raises, but the company has no surplus money to give.
Price or wage don't always feed back to each other. That's the point and that's why CPI doesn't include energy.
Edit: But in the current case, the cycle started with wage growth. Although right now we have the China Covid situation. But in general the debate we are having is just theoritical IMO. In the current case, the way to break inflation is to increase rate and stop Biden from giving so much money to everyone. (I think... Not a monetary expert.)
How could it not? That's what they call stagflation and it's happened enough times now that I don't think it's something you can just ignore. I have heard that an answer people give is that governments need to increase fiscal stimulus while reserve banks increase interest rates to deal with that but I really don't know if that's true or not, that's why I'm asking these questions
> if you're just seeing prices rise because of non-wage related reasons why would you want to reduce economic activity in response to that?
I think they cut "primary input" like energy and food from CPI computation. So wage should always be a major part of inflation as it is calculated.
Edit: Actually just thought of supply chains which are a big topic these days. The cost of disruption in supply chain is not excluded from CPI and should be self-regulated by price like you mentionned.
My uniformed understanding is that the idea of using a basket is that it would average unrelated things out. I have no idea if that actually works.
Yeah, the people who falsely claimed that all the restrictions did nothing really don't want to admit that they were wrong and killed a bunch of people, because it would undermine their ideological mindset.
The problem is the lack of evidence that infection controls helped beyond some basic level. In fact the opposite is true – we have now evidence that lockdowns that prevented people to go even to the beach were mostly useless.
Vaccine mandates also were terrible and the countries without them (like the UK) did even better.
Anti vaxxing was about the most terrible thing being done by individuals
Yes, especially if you talk about elderly. In short, vaccine mandates strengthened anti vax sentiments. Vaccine mandates = anti vaxxx policies.
No one had to go that route.
>Why do you think the lockdowns in the start were very dumb?
Didn't we have an entire Scott Alexander deep dive effortpost on this subject? Why yes, yes we did:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness-much-more
Lockdowns did not save "multiple millions" of lives in the United States. They *might* have saved fifty thousand lives, mostly elderly, at the cost of tens of billions of dollars of purely economic damage and incalculably greater social and emotional harm. It wasn't worth it.
Because lockdowns were a one-size-fits-all solution that fit no one. A lockdown strict enough to really protect the really vulnerable, would have been too damaging to impose on the population as a whole, so lockdowns were set at a level that *didn't* provide real protection to the really vulnerable. Fortunately, many of those people were smart enough to take their own protective measures, and e.g. stopped going out to restaurants even before the lockdowns. But there were millions of other people who faced very low risk of COVID while being uniquely vulnerable to the social, economic, and emotional harm of lockdowns. Who were locked down at the one-size-fits-all level, damn the cost, even if it killed them. Which, sometimes it did.
Giving people accurate information, then letting them make their own choices, would have been better in every way.
Sorry, but libertarians can't really deal with the fact that they killed hundreds of thousands of people because it kind of completely destroys any sort of moral grounding they have.
IRL, we saw a sharp decline in infections a few weeks after intense lockdowns, which is exactly what you'd expect if lockdowns were effective at preventing infections (because infections have a incubation period).
The lockdowns definitely saved large numbers of lives, and New Zealand's whole island cutting off travel thing resulted in the country having extremely low death rates due to COVID. Masking, too, clearly greatly lowered transmission rates, as seen by East Asian countries having much lower rates of transmission.
Moreover, many people actually benefitted from the lockdowns and enjoyed them. Indeed, contrary to what was claimed, mental health actually observably improved during the pandemic - suicide rates, for instance, declined in 2020. Significantly, in fact. Lockdowns probably were a net benefit to people's mental health - a lot of people moved to working from home, introverts had fewer external stresses in their lives, people who were being made miserable by other people now had a reason to avoid them, people were able to take more time and space for themselves, etc.
Because the risk of infection in open air were insignificant. My biggest objection to lockdowns is that they prohibited such activities in open air and they had no effect whatsoever.
The risk of infection in open air is not insignificant in crowds.
Quarantines have long been a means of controlling the spread of disease and are highly effective when actually obeyed. You starve the infection of new hosts.
Lockdowns can be done effectively without causing people to starve, but you have to actually think about how to do it.
Moreover, the notion that there was no correlation between lockdowns and COVID is false. We observed sharp drops in COVID transmission after places instituted lockdowns.
Update from an ACX Grant recipient. I'm a volunteer co-leader of the campaign to make Seattle's elections more representative by adopting Approval Voting. Background: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/qy9nz8/seattle_initiative_to_use_approval_voting_for/ , https://electionscience.org/library/approval-voting/ , https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/#voting-reform
In May, the campaign submitted 43,000+ signatures from Seattle voters and last week, the initiative officially qualified for the November ballot. Seattle will vote on this change.
Here's the press release and announcement:
https://seattleapproves.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/20220615-Seattle-voting-reform-initiative-qualifies-for-November-2022-ballot.pdf, https://twitter.com/SeattleApproves/status/1537200575934177281
Next step is the ballot, then hopefully adoption in more jurisdictions. Thanks for helping strengthen representative democracy.
Nice!
Congrats! I'm one of your petition signers and it's pretty exciting that you've gotten this far.
Congrats, and, as a Seattle voter, a huge THANK YOU!
That's great!
I have no opinion on approval voting itself, but kudos for shipping a key step and publicly reporting that progress
Congratulations, looks like so far you've set a reasonable goal and hit your targets
I don't see how that's a bug rather than a feature. If the goal of voting were to produce an equal representation of all parties, why even vote?
Background for everyone else: Washington State requires that cities hold a primary and then a top-2 runoff (November), so eliminating a primary isn't an option.
There's a couple reasons that's not a big concern:
1. Everyone believes that *other* voters vote as a monolithic block and/or as a strategic block, and only *they* (or maybe only voters who share their preferences) vote thoughtfully. This turns out to be as laughably false as you'd expect: while of course some people do vote that way, most people don't. Most folks, even those who think they're voting strategically, are not voting as a monolithic block.
2. This hasn't happened in St. Louis, which is already using the same system (AV primary, top-2 runoff). If people were voting as blocks, you'd expect the winners to have close to the same support, and the two most similar candidates to win. There were big percentage differences in support among the top 2 finishers (and between other positions). Just to pick one high-profile race, in the 2021 mayoral race, the winners weren't the two most similar candidates, and in that race, the 4 candidates received support from 57%, 46%, 39%, and 14% of voters.
3. Candidates adapt to incentives. Right now, coming in #1 or #2 generally requires 25-35% of the electorate. Candidates know they can get through the primary by targeting a small part of the electorate. In the St. Louis mayoral race above, 46% was the clearing point to get through the primary. Candidates will need to care a lot more about the opinion of the median voter, and they'll campaign to do that.
Of course, it's possible that two primary candidates will converge on exactly the same policy because that policy is popular and represents the electorate - and that's a good outcome. Even in that case, it's more likely that they'll differentiate thoughtfully on policies, because they know they need to win the runoff too. Seeing two nuanced, thoughtful, actionable, and representative takes on problems would be amazing.
PS: I'd encourage anyone who wants to learn more about this topic, continue this discussion, or ask other questions to check out the r/EndFPTP subreddit and/or the Election Science Discord: https://old.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/ , https://electionscience.org/discord
How is it a bad thing to have differentiated candidates in round one, and two very similar candidates in round two?
Hello! Logan from from Seattle Approves here. Here's a few things to consider:
At the highest level, we usually talk about voters in terms of monolithic blocks, e.g., "pink party" and "purple party," or worse, as only two camps. This is a highly reductive simplification we make to make discussion easy, but that's strongly shaped by our FPTP political system that highly incentivizes the electorate to split into only two factions that polarize to opposite ends of every issue. Real voters are much more complicated than that and a healthy democracy would encourage voters to be their unique selves.
For example, if instead of imaging every voter is one of 2 "teams," you imagine each voter of having, say, 3 issues that are salient to them and that they'll support any candidate that say, pledges to work on them, AV looks really, really good vs alternative voting methods. You'll end up with winning candidates that are have pledged to work on the most salient issues across the electorate and get steady progress. That's still a reductive model on voting behavior (well grounded in real voter interviews that frequently show voters are highly inconsistent in the positions they take), but the point here is merely to point out that your conclusion about the voting system is highly sensitive to how much you simplify your model of voter behavior.
Even with simplifying assumptions about voters being on a small number of "teams," we do see failures in the real world that AV solves. For example, in the 2016 Washington State treasurer race (primary, top two advance to general), two Republican candidates split 48% of the vote, and 3 Democrats split 52%. The result was that two Republicans advanced to the general election. Fractured coalitions can and do lose out in the real world with FPTP, and AV would most likely have improved upon this outcome.
In Seattle where city races frequently have 10-15 candidates, split votes are the norm rather than the exception, so voters also have a very strong incentive to rally around a short list of candidates with institutional support or else they risk "throwing their vote away." AV is a strict improvement over this status quo because voters are already likely making strategic choices, and AV allows them to also pick an honest choice.
What did you argue, Scott?
That the solstice was technically still a day away?
I don't know either, but I strongly agree with him!
For anyone interested in playing an iconic mid 2000s coop browser game with, at the time, a totally unprecedented dynamic research system that isn't just +10% lazer damage, high levels of cooperation, empires exist like in OGame but everyone also has a faction you aren't allowed to attack and you start together, excellent construction and mining, and the famous sensor nets and sub galatic plane "warpnets" to hide from the sensor nets, a new round of Warring Factions is less than a week old. Sort of the EVE of browser based strategy but much less investment time wise and 100% totally free for the last few years.
http://www.war-facts.com/
Used to top out at like 4000 people but usually triple digits on popular rounds these days. I hadn't played in like 10 years when I saw a new round email come in. Vets will help you with science stuff till you train your own guys. I'm in the yellow faction.
If you hate my weekly strategy game posts you can join red and try to kill me. Depending on your circumstances and what role you play in the empire/faction you join you can play as little as 30 minutes a day and then log in for big fights.
Sounds interesting! Any idea where I might find the mobile app? They say there is one, but the link doesn't work, and I can't find it in the google play store.
So I'm told that the app wasn't update after the science system changes and was removed but several players from our faction, the Jarnekk, mentioned they play on their phone in a regular browser.
ah thanks for checking!
I will check.
I love your point (2) -- I really relate. Sometimes I'm just afraid to be with new people and my smarty-pants brain kicks in to defend against that. Happy solstice!
As to topics, I keep hoping you'll write one about the implicit belief that seems to be held by those trying to determine/decide/judge whether LaMDA and other such verbose AIs are sentient -- specifically, that if they are sentient, they would have some kind of soul (like a nonphysical connection to the universe). It's super interesting to me that tech culture has changed so much that now it's a growing group of AI workers who believe in nonlocal consciousness.
I personally think nonlocal consciousness is not to be discounted, and probably exists, so that's my bias. But the tech world moving in that direction is fascinating, and I wonder if it's because the tech world had to have their own "babies" (AIs) to really show us the value of sentience. Or suggest to us that sentience has value.
Anyway, that's just a wish!
I don't think we're going to see "sentience" or consciousness or whatever term people want to use for personhood from verbal AIs, you'll just get a chatbot that's very, very good at passing Turing Tests. Long, long before we're anywhere close to having to think about AI personhood, there'll be an ever-increasing number of people who will wind up convinced by very-persuasive chatbots that their fake friends are real.
[Insert joke about humans are already chatbots that barely pass turing tests here]
I haven't noticed that. But sentience is a kind of Rohrshach ink blot concept.
It's almost exactly like that, it seems to me -- like sentience is actually intersubjective -- created by the observer and the subject.
As a result of Scott’s AI posts, I have started exploring AI’s capabilities. Openai API is incredible, and I was wondering if there are any other novel AI “applications” anyone would recommend checking out. Thank you!
If you are a software developer, try Github Copilot. It gives me shivers sometimes.
Hmm, when you mean "applications" do you mean things like GPT-3, or do you mean interesting AI-based apps? So, for example, AI Dungeon is an intriguing application, but it uses GPT-3 on the backend.
Yes, things powered by GPT-3 are of interest. I found the "chat" and "summarize for a second grader" features on Openai API incredible. I am on the DALLE-2 waitlist (and will likely be on it for a while), but I wanted to continue exploring AI's current capabilities.
Ah. Well, if you want to throw some DALL-E 2 prompts my way, I can share the results with you. I also heard that they're opening up the waitlist soon.
That's really kind of you, thank you! Do you have an email I can contact you at? Also, I checked out AI Dungeon and it is incredible. Thank you for that recommendation.
sure: [email deleted]
Machine Interface, you fascinate me. Where is this portal you found back to the 1930s and how can you communicate with us through it, given that you seem to be stuck there when Southern Baptists and death camp mental hospitals starving people to death are in the hey-day of fascist repression, and how can we help you escape?
While you're at it, you might as well have a kick at us Papists, as we're the ones enticed the Evangelicals into the whole pro-life thing:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/05/16/what-everyone-gets-wrong-about-evangelicals-abortion/
https://msmagazine.com/2022/05/19/abortion-catholic-church-opus-dei-evangelical-christianity-religion-roe-v-wade/
"Schaeffer’s books set many evangelicals on a theological journey from anti-abortion protests to emphasizing a politics of theocratic dominion."
Kick back and enjoy some music to relax with and calm your nerves.
Traditional version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqwV9l-U8ds
More exuberant Baroque version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3LIlzPtsmw
For those what are interested in historical background, about the text:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Te_Deum
AIUI the Catholic Church considers baptising the dead to be ineffective and heretical, and by definition a stillborn baby is dead by the time you can baptise it.
Refusing to baptise stillborn babies isn't because they think it was *never* alive, but because they think it's *no longer* alive.
(disclaimer: not actually a Christian)
For anyone who is wondering if this is one of those situations where the militant atheist read a pro-abortion anti-religion "gotcha" article that found something that every Christian on earth missed, here's what he's (very likely) talking about.
In the creation story of Adam, God forms Adam out of dust, then breathes life into him (Genesis 2, if you want to read it.). Machine interface very likely read a meme somewhere that took that statement and said that:
1. Although people aren't formed by the hand of God out of dust anymore, that "first breath" thing is entirely how life begins. Like that part carries over, even though the others don't. Note that within the same chapter Eve is created, and we don't get the same breath-of-life phrasing; it's not one of those things that comes up again and again.
Also note that even if the breath of life thing carries over, we want to be careful about the particulars here - we could just as easily say it's like the millionth breath as opposed to the first one that's special, and sinlessly kill a two-year-old. Or we could assume every breath is a breath of life, and all of us are chock-full-to-bursting with souls. So on and so forth if you are extrapolating from a single verse about a one-off creation process.
2. Since life begins (under this assumption) from the first breath (and only in that one case) and a baby doesn't take a breathe until after birth, you can literally deliver a full-term baby, plug its nose, cover it's mouth and kill it at that point sin-free in Machine Interface's probable extrapolation of Christian religious views.
This isn't exactly this, but this is a lot like reading a medical account of a man whose heart was re-started by defibrillator several times who nonetheless died, and saying "Medicine clearly states that death does not occur until the third or fourth time your heart stops". Taking Genesis 2 with no other context, it's certainly *possible* that life starts at the first breath. But even that single out-of-context verse is pretty far from *demanding* that this is how it works as a general rule.
(Machine Interface, if I'm responding to the wrong dimly remembered r/atheism meme, let me know and I'll be glad to address it).
For anyone who wonders what new dimly remembered meme he's talking about now, it's Numbers 5:11-18. Notably to MI's reddit-provided point, the entire passage doesn't mention pregnancy - it's a method of detecting adultery.
This is the bit that is probably the most relevant:
"And when he has made her drink the water, then, if she has defiled herself and has broken faith with her husband, the water that brings the curse shall enter into her and cause bitter pain, and her womb shall swell, and her thigh shall fall away, and the woman shall become a curse among her people."
Some translations render that "her thigh shall fall away" as a miscarriage, while others say "her legs will shrivel" and others say "her genitals will shrink". The literal translation is close to the first - literally that her thigh will fall away. And it's heavily debated what exactly that means.
Note that the "treatment" here is taking some water putting a small amount of dust in it, writing down "May this water that brings the curse pass into your bowels and make your womb swell and your thigh fall away." on a piece of paper, running the water over the paper, and then having her drink it. Probably not the healthiest thing in the world, but also not particularly the explicit, effective abortion instructions MI is saying they are.
The later context of the chapter seems to indicate that references to the thigh are to be understood as things that that would cause infertility rather than abortion:
"And when he has made her drink the water, then, if she has defiled herself and has broken faith with her husband, the water that brings the curse shall enter into her and cause bitter pain, and her womb shall swell, and her thigh shall fall away, and the woman shall become a curse among her people. 28 But if the woman has not defiled herself and is clean, then she shall be free and shall conceive children."
To clarify, much as with the last example, it's not like this verse is 100% for sure not about abortion. You can figure out a way to read it that way, and some translators have. If someone came to me with this passage and said "hey, is this possibly about abortion?" I'd probably say something like:
"It's possible, but it doesn't use a phrasing that demands it and the whole section is about a divine trial meant to confirm infidelity and punish someone for that, explicitely with infertility if nothing else. But the actual meaning is ambiguous so I don't think anybody knows for sure".
Machine Interface, being who they are, NEEDS the gotcha, but lacks any level of nuance in how they go about it. So he's climbing on Twitter/Reddit and finding stuff like this, assuming it's true, settled, and beyond any uncertainty (for, after all, how could it be that his opponents are anything but fat stupid monsters) and running with it.
Where this catches up with him is that, despite how convenient it would be otherwise, most Christians have since childhood been reading this book. We have scholars who specialize in it, but just also a whole lot of lay-readers going over it.
So the risk he runs (and has now been caught on, twice) is that he's going to go find an absolutely minimally informed, maximally anti-religious person, listen to their most out-on-a-limb stretch, come back here and present it verbatim and then find out that it's just more complex than he wants it to be, no matter how badly he wants that.
Edited to add: Also, for what it's worth, note that he's moved ENTIRELY on from his first claim to a new one, without bothering to defend the first. There are implications for willingness to learn from the failure of past protocols in play here.
Don't waste your time.
Yes - and I consider this to be my favorite part of music. Listening to Bach or The Beach Boys and trying to disentangle all of the different parts that come together for the whole is the fun!
Question out of curiosity for you and/or any of the others with this skill -- is the ability consistent across the board, or is there an upper limit in terms of the number of instruments and/or complexity of the orchestration? Bach or the Beach Boys is one thing, but does it work for a Beethoven symphony too?
I can enjoy a Beethoven symphony fine just listening. But if I want to follow all the parts, it helps to have a score. FWIW earlier this year I did a series of posts where I'd take a video of jazz musicians playing a blues and commented on what they're doing, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/search/label/blues
Full disclosure: long time music listener (97th percentile for the last couple years on Spotify) who has recently started playing piano.
I actually picked Bach and The Beach Boys because they are complex lol. Generally what I’m tracking is the “voices” the composer wants you to hear. For example in beethoven’s sixth - listen to it once with a full symphony and once in a piano transcription (Glenn Gould’s is my favorite). In the symphonic version at like the minute forty second mark you can hear the strings as a sort of rising background tone with the clarinet coming in on top to play the melody. In the solo piano version by Gould, you can hear the strings as his left hand on the lower parts of the keyboard while the right hand plays the melody higher (taking the place of the clarinet). So it’s not so much picking out individual instruments as the components of the whole. Like if all the strings were playing one voice I probably couldn’t identify the cellos from the violins but if they were playing in opposition to each other (like The Beach Boys sing at the 20 second mark of Heroes and Villains) it’s easy.
Apologies to actual musicians if I’ve butchered this.
Professional musician for <mumbles> years.
Almost always, but that comes from LOTS of listening and learning parts to play for paying jobs, or sometimes to reduce the recorded arrangement to Just Piano or Acoustic guitar.
I'm an outlier, but here's a report from one extreme. I can identify almost all the instruments, in most genres of music, almost all the time. I have also had an extreme amount of experience of listening to, studying, and performing music. Other people with that experience can also routinely do this.
BTW: Have you had your hearing checked by an audiologist? Adderall aside, there may certain frequencies that you're not hearing well.
Hm, interesting question, but I'd say yes, especially, in music I like - which tend to be played on a few instruments, so things like rock/metal or techno (which has virtual instruments basically) I have ADHD too.
I've been to a lot of concerts and have listened to a lot of types of music, maybe that helped. Saw a few videos about audio production, and that also definitely helps.
But the interesting thing about stimulants is that if you go to a loud party where you barely can hear others even if they shout in your ear... on stimulants (eg MDMA) you can easily have conversations.
Seems like the brain suddenly becomes a lot more motivated to do more signal processing (which could simply mean it sends more energy on it, or simply due to the increased neurotransmitter levels certain processing that would be inhibited gets to run more, or ... who knows how).
Yes, although it takes some effort - if I'm not actively listening I'll have trouble picking out the bass line or the harmonies.
I imagine this is a learned skill - I've sung in a choir so I have a lot of practice "locking on" to the line I'm trying to sing, but I'm not so hot at identifying chords.
This has gotten harder for me as time goes on, mostly due to the exponential increase in synthesizer quality and other audio-tech miracles. Some of the sound samples out there are really great! I think we'll eventually be able to include false "tells" like the sound of a woodwind player pausing to take a breath. Sort of like adding engine noise to a Prius, but for opposite intents.
I also notice that just knowing of the existence of many instruments helps a lot, as well as the variety of sounds each can produce. Harder to categorize that which one isn't trained to hear in the first place. Harder to broaden existing categories without exposure to masters, e.g. Ian Anderson expanding the category boundaries of "flute". Ironically, going through low-level band classes seems to make this harder, since one is only exposed to a really tiny sample of instruments played in particular PTA-appealing ways. The phenomenon of, like, "I didn't even know there was such a thing as a baritone sax!"
YES! It's hard to recognize an instrument whose existence you don't know about. I remember when I first heard "Penny Lane" by the Beatles. There's a very well-known high brass part about a minute and 20 seconds in. I play trumpet so I'm sensitive to brass. That was obviously some kind of trumpet, except it wasn't. I didn't know what it was. Maybe it was a trumpet that had been speeded up so it sounded high and a bit thin. And then, some years later, I learned that there was such a thing as a piccolo trumpet. It's a small trumpet pitched an octave higher than the regular Bb trumpet, the instrument I played. THAT's what that sound was. https://youtu.be/S-rB0pHI9fU
FWIW, Ian Anderson got some basic ideas about flute from Rahsaan Roland Kirk, a jazz musician who was primarly a sax player, tenor, soprano, and alto. But he also played flute, and would sing and play the flute at the same time. Anderson took that, and elaborated on it. https://youtu.be/4nzztZ94DbU
In normal pop music I can. But I was listening to some old Weather Report last night, I was having trouble telling what was synthesizer and what was some other instrument.
Before I started playing games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band in my late teens, only thing I could pick apart was the drum beat and (sometimes) the vocals. Before that I simply didn't have faintest idea what the guitar instruments were doing to generate sound and contribute, though the combination was often pleasant to hear. I still can't do it very well (bass line can be difficult to tell).
I am also one with difficulty understanding lyrics, unless I have a copy of lyrics in front of me, or have memorized them.
In general, I can identify the different instruments easily enough, but it can get confusing if they used a lot of processing/effects in the studio, or if there’s a whole symphony’s worth of instruments playing at once
Yes, I can. I'm also an experienced musician and have performed in many different kinds of formats, small band jazz, rock, marching band, symphony orchestra, brass band, and so forth. But it's my impression that being able to tell instruments apart is a learned skill. Once spent a fair amount of time teaching a friend how to listen to jazz. I would point out the different parts, perhaps my indicating the beat with my hand, perhaps by singing along, perhaps by verbal description. Though I know little about ADHD meds, it makes sense to me that they would help you attend to the music.
FWIW, some years ago I read a review of a scientific book about ADHD which argued that it was related to being disoriented in time. So I read the book and, as a result, looked into the literature and wrote up some notes: Music and the Prevention and Amelioration of ADHD: A Theoretical Persepective, https://www.academia.edu/238609/Music_and_the_Prevention_and_Amelioration_of_ADHD_A_Theoretical_Perspective
Can you understand the lyrics? I met a guy who can never understand song lyrics because there's too much other sound.
Yes, I can tell. I don't have ADHD.
I would assume there are many more regretful parents than we hear of, because of the incredibly strong pressures to not admit such a fact (both by society as well as interpersonally)
we need more of these subreddits to prevent more of these parents.
the default reaction of 'weird insular' is why most think parenthood is automatic magical bliss, and make the mistake to begin with.
i wouldnt worry about the kids though. most of these parents love them, but dont like them
"why most think parenthood is automatic magical bliss, and make the mistake to begin with."
Yup.
Re Unsigned Integer's question of "How common is this phenomenon?"
I've seen numbers for 50% of parents to 10% of parents.
Blame biology for giving people desires and mind-altering hormones that are not necessarily compatible with a happy existence.
Most people aren't happy about their jobs, but they perform their duties adequately enough to keep the whole machine turning. Of course, those people who are enthusiastic about their work (because it probably suits them very well), perform better and often create more value...but it doesn't seem like we have enough of the desired roles in society to give them to everyone who desires them.
Similarly, you can be sure that some people aren't happy about their children, but I think it's reasonable to expect that most of them will perform their duties adequately enough.
As a society, all we can do is provide access to contraception and abortion so that at least the people who *know* they don't want to be parents will not become parents by accident.
As for those who didn't know ahead of time that parenthood wasn't going to be enjoyable for them, I'm not sure what there is to do except perhaps de-stigmatize talking about it so that other people are exposed to information that might protect them from making the same mistake.
Looking through it, a lot of these posters are parenting unusually difficult children with not very much outside support. No blame need necessarily be assigned, though in some cases the father could step up or society could offer more child care.
There are also a few who miss going out a lot and being spontaneous. My impression from having one calm and one hyper/highly opinionated child is that this is also largely a function of how things shake out temperamentally. "Just bring the baby" is fine advice for some babies, and other babies will scream the whole time and make things miserable for everyone.
Our society tends to imply that parents have more control over this than they actually do, and so give advice instead of concrete help. This is probably bad.
I have read two entries (no idea how representative) and am under the impression, that for some regretful mothers on that subreddit, the situation would be a whole lot different, if the fathers actually invested equal time into child rearing instead of (i guess often implicitly) assuming that they go on to earn money while the mother should become financially dependent and leave everything else behind to become a master diaper changer.
Even sadder is when the regretful mother herself assumes that this is the only viable solution and then hates it instead of at least demanding equal treatment.
This should by no means imply that being a stay-at-home mom (or dad) is an invalid choice. Its just that for SOME people its a bad choice.
Rearing a child by two people without assistance - even if only one of them does paid work - is really rough. If both of them are supposed to work it's insane, and I'd like the social norms to shift around both extended family and friends helping out, and greater acceptance of stay-at-home parenting as a viable lifestyle.
Why would you want to criticize them?
Being a parent is a choice. It is reasonable to assume *some* people make a choice that they regret. It is taboo to say you regret having children, so they keep it quiet. They made a place where they can talk to others about their feelings. Why invade it? Why look for a reason to criticise it? What do you expect to gain?
" It is taboo to say you regret having children, so they keep it quiet."
And this is a big problem for potential parents, who need to make the right decision on whether they want to have children or not. _Hiding_ part of the important data harms people who need it in order to make a crucial decision.
I think that sometimes internet communities can validate, reflect and amplify harmful emotional states in a way that winds up bad for their members. All parents get occasional pangs of regret, but the right thing to do with these feelings is to get over them, and get over them, not to wallow in them with a community of people who are intent on validating these feelings.
Reddit has some actually-good parenting communities like /r/daddit which can help you move through these sorts of feelings in a better way.
"but the right thing to do with these feelings is to get over them, and get over them, not to wallow in them with a community of people who are intent on validating these feelings."
Would you say the same thing to gay or trans kids? People suffering from racism or depression? People with eating disorders or other psychological problems? People with economic trouble? People who have lost a loved one?
I get that being with other people *can* amplify problems. It's also a great way to cope.
"the right thing to do with these feelings is to" honestly acknowledge them, and decide where to go from there
I'm not even fully convinced of the initial claim that "the universe exists," let alone all the rest of it.
I forget who it was who pointed this out (maybe Dennett?) but the main objection to the cosmological argument is easily pointed out by any moderately bright seven-year-old child: "So who created God then?" An uncaused god instead of an uncaused universe doesn't solve anything.
I've never heard any reasonable counter-counter-argument to the seven-year-old's counterargument. To me this makes the Cosmological Argument wrong in a boring way.
Yup. I may not have been that smart at 7, but I think I noticed the problem by 20 or so. (in those years I was a Christian who had never heard of the cosmological argument, which may have slowed me down.)
A shorter version:
1. Everything that exists has a cause.
2. God does not have a cause.
3. Therefore, God does not exist.
(I expect it to be just as convincing as the original version, which is not at all, unless you already agreed with the conclusion.)
I mean, main problem with this line of reasoning as a defence of Christianity is that, even if you find it convincing, God thus deduced has basically no relationship with God as described in the Bible.
And which God in which book of the Bible are you talking about? — or rather which God promulgated by which Xtian or Jish tradition are you referring to? Personally, I prefer an Ein Sof God more than a Yahweh God. Just sayin... ;-)
By "contingent cause," do you mean "efficient cause" in the Aristotelian sense?
Efficient cause, yes. Classic Thomism actually allows an infinite temporal regress in theory, but requires the per se efficient causal chain to be finite and as far as I've found WLC agrees. I've found the distinction between per se and per accidens to be leaning on either teleology or theory of forms too hard to be principled IMO, but when I was able to get at least one straight answer from an advocate that was the path they took.
Glad someone pointed out infinite temporal regress. An infinite number of existing souls with an infinite number yet to be created was quite the philosophical concept in its day.
The main problem with this argument is that it amounts to saying, "we don't know how the Universe could have started, therefore God". That is, one hidden premise is that there are only two possible explanations for the Universe's existence: a naturalistic explanation according to our current understanding of the laws of nature, or God; since a naturalistic explanation does not exist, it must be God. But this is either a false dilemma (assuming that by "God" we mean some kind of a Christian-esque divine entity), or a linguistic trick (we simply took our ignorance about the origins of the Universe, and re-labeled it as "God" without providing any additional details). This strategic equivocation is what the Kalaam (and arguably all logical arguments for the existence of God) is entirely based on.
Come, be fair. There's a great deal more to it than that. Let's start in plain materialist terms. Whatever cosmological theory we adopt, it's clear that the Universe was in an extraordinarily weird state, of amazingly low entropy, 13.4 billion years ago. There's no other way to explain the Second Law of Thermodynamics, since all theories of mechanics are time-symmetrical (necessarily, since otherwise Noether's Theorem would prevent the *First* Law from holding). Of course "very low entropy" is synonymous with "very, very unlikely."
Now some people say wait a minute, that really needs explaining. A state of cosmic low entropy that has a one in a bazillion chance of forming by chance is as weird as coming across a perfectly balanced tower of rocks in the desert while hiking. It defies imagination to think the wind and rain did this[1].
So then we ask ourselves: what mechanism could put the universe in a state of very low entropy? Physics per se has no answer to this: thermodynamics is phenomenological, and *never* gives mechanisms for what it predicts, and we have a problem with ordinary theories of mechanics (like the various components of the Standard Model) because the state we're trying to explain is coincident with what looks like a singularity associated with the expansion of the universe, and we already know our existing theories not only can't work through a singularity (if it exists), they can't even get arbitrarily close to the singularity, because they don't work at high enough energies. Every theory we have has a cut-off at short distance (or equivalently high energy) where we *know* it becomes mathematically inconsistent, doesn't work. If someone comes up with a GUT that doesn't need renormalization then we'll get a lot further, but so far...nope, no dice, theory is silent on this.
Now what? The empiricist or agnostic just shrugs his shoulders and says that 's darn weird, but we have no data, so there's no point in hypothesizing, writes a giant WTF? in that box and moves on.
Contrariwise the man of faith says now wait a minute, this here is clearly a rather suggestive opening for the existence of a God that is some kind of Platonic idealization of a human being. Because what we're wanting here is a mechanism that make a highly unlikely selection of a very unlikely thermodynamic state out of a gazillion others.
Furthermore, it so happens that this particular choice has a profound effect: it's one of very few that gives us the Second Law, an arrow of time, and therefore a Universe that actually evolves on an enormous scale -- in which there is such a thing as birth and death (of both stars and men), history, clear lines of causation running every which way -- in short, an *interesting* Universe, one fraught with the omnipotent promise and unspeakable tragedy of the passage of time.
Now what kind of entity do we know excels at making a narrow highly nonrandom choice amongst a sheaf of possibilities in order to bring about something unusually interesting and dynamic? Us, of course. If *we* were to create baby Universes in the lab, this is pretty much exactly what *we* would do: we'd select highly unusual states for their initialization, so they were interesting. If one assumes God is what we would be if we were perfected, then you can say choosing the weird initial state of the Universe is exactly what God would do, and you say this is just too much of a coincidence, so now I believe in God the Creator.
It's perfectly consistent with faith, and with physics for that matter, and doesn't even really perturb the principle of parsimony, since any way you slice it we need *something* very unusual to happen, and who's to say (in the absence of competing models) that an ineffable God is just too weird? Only one's taste in metaphysics.
But is it an *argument* for the existence of God the Creator? Not by me. As an argument it's circular: if we assume God of a certain type exists, then the nature of the Universe is exactly what He would choose, which means the nature of the Universe is proof of His existence -- ha ha, no wait, because you affirmed the consequent and the big red Logic Fault circuit breaker trips in a shower of sparks. So this is a top-notch rationalization, for the believer it gives God a clear and important role in Creation, even leaving aside fashioning Adam from a handful of dirt and some magic passes. And it's by no means stupid or unsophisticated (or even curiously compelling). But that's it. It's not a logical argument, and should not convince the unbeliever of anything, by itself.
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[1] I want to emphasize that I would never argue defying human imagination is any kind of evidence for or against a proposition. But some people feel differently, and I'm following that chain of reasoning.
The low entropy starting state is suprising is time is a completely independent phenomenon from entropy. Timeless physics, eg. Julian Barbour's theory, is able to explain the low entropy starting state by dispensing with time as a separate concept.
Well, bear in mind I mean "explain" in the scientific sense, to someone like, for example, me, who groks the math and knows the observational data. I don't mean "explain" in some metaphorical sense that would totally convince the naive. Astrology "explains" all kinds of things, too.
"Well, bear in mind I mean "explain" in the scientific sense"
So do I.
> Every theory we have has a cut-off at short distance (or equivalently high energy) where we *know* it becomes mathematically inconsistent, doesn't work. If someone comes up with a GUT that doesn't need renormalization then we'll get a lot further, but so far...nope, no dice, theory is silent on this.
Sorry but this is just wrong. I can give you an example of a theory that is valid at all scales of energy: QCD. It's true that it require renormalization, but renormalization is pretty well understood from a mathematical standpoint and doesn’t mean that it is inconsistent. We now know that the mathematical origin of renormalization is because we are performing mathematically illegittimate operations multiplying together generalized functions that cannot be multiplied and then going back to clean up our errors. Indeed it is in principle possible to "renormalize" a theory without ever introducing infinities, it's the so-called Epstein-Glaser normalization scheme (it's much more cumbersome).
After performing renormalization, (if you are lucky) you are left with a theory that starts at low energy and can be extended to infinitely high energy, the parameters of the theory depending on the energy. For QCD in particular the strength of the interaction goes to zero at infinite energy and therefore ends up being well behaved and wll defined at all energy scales. It's the so-called asymptotic freedom. (The same is not true for the Higgs boson and electroweak forces and indeed they are a problem)
I'll also note that there is a different way of defining QCD, lattice QCD, in which one defines a theory on a lattice with an explicit cut-off. Then however one is able to take the continuum limit, obtaining again a theory that is well-defined and gives predictions for observables at all length and energy scales.
Really, renormalization doesn’t mean that your theory stops working at high energy.
I don't agree, but this is a much wider and longer conversation than could possibly take place here. I appreciate your adding a different perspective, however.
Edit: if you mean to assert that QCD works right back to the singularty, then that is something quite different, though, and you should say so.
No, what I meant is that QCD presents no singularity at high energy because of asymptotic freedom. (Then of course there is all the rest of the standard model (and gravity) and that's a different story, which will probably impact the behaviour of QCD too). The fact that renormalization is needed to recover finite results doesn’t mean that the theory becomes mathematically inconsistent at high energy, all observables are finite at all energies.
But yes, this is a very wide conversation.
Yes, I acknowledge that if you assume *a priori* that God exists, then any apparent evidence that the Universe had a beginning would reinforce your belief in your God. My point is that if you do not assume that, then the best you can get from this argument alone is evidence for an entity with exactly one property: universe-creation. You cannot determine whether it is smart or stupid (or other), friendly or unfriendly, etc.; all you know about it is that it created at least one Universe at least once. That's it. It's just not a very interesting entity. You can call it "God" if you want, but by doing so you'd be devaluing the concept of "God" down to almost nothing.
Well, I read your point as being that you thought the logical argument simple and to some extent silly. It's neither. If I have given you some reason to go back and think about the argument with deeper respect and probe why people of intelligence and experience find it difficult, that's my point.
And just to add some fuel to the fire, the constants of the Universe that we exist in seem to be perfectly attuned to promote emergent phenomena like complex chemistries that would allow for life-as-we-know-it to develop. Of course, as the many-worlds enthusiast would say, "Well, of course we're living in a Universe that can support us! There are all those others that can't." But that doesn't explain the why and wherefores of the constant tuning happens at the boundary of the singularity (or does it happen pre-Singularity?).
Ultimately, all the arguments about the origin of the Universe boil down to being unfalsifiable. Even if you have a scientifically-informed opinion on the matter, it's basically equivalent to having a religion. <Bzzzt> Thank you for playing!
BTW: thanks for that excellent response, Carl! Couldn't have said it better myself.
I acknowledge that our physical constants are finely tuned to support exactly the kind of life that we do possess. Or, to look at it another way, our own life is finely tuned to our physical constants. But if you want to make this fact somehow special, you need to prove that no other kind of life is possible, regardless of the possible values of any of these constants (and, in fact, regardless of which values are even constant to begin with). I don't think anyone can do that.
Well, if one uses one's common sense, and if one has a basic understanding of particle physics, one could easily posit scenarios for universes where life would be impossible. The two that immediately come to mind for me are the hydrogen universe and the neutron universe.
1. Hydrogen Universe: Increase the mass of the down quark and neutrons in the nucleus start to decay. Nothing but a universe of hydrogen. Not much opportunity for the development of life when the only chemical reaction would be two hydrogen atoms bonding together — unless you consider that two hydrogen atoms dancing in a circle with each other could be classified as life...
2. Neutron Universe: Increase the mass of up quark by a certain amount and protons in the nucleus will decay (or will never even be able to form). In the neutron universe: no atoms, no chemical reactions, certainly no life.
Well...I'm unpersuaded that the so-called constants are tuned, because I am not persuaded any other values are possible. But so far as we can tell, it certainly *is* possible for the universe to be in a much higher entropy state, because it is now, and it's clearly headed for one a lot higher still. So the low entropy state of the very early universe is the one inarguable "fine tuning" of which I am nearly fully persuaded. (I admit it's still conceivable someone will figure out a reason why the early universe simply must be in a very low entropy state.)
There should at least be an Occam's Razor argument that the universe should begin in a uniform state; otherwise what would determine its initial state? So it started out perfectly uniform, and perhaps if you add some quantum randomness, it explains how galaxies formed.
Entropy has always been a hard concept for me. But I figure that whatever the initial entropy X, the laws of physics guarantee that entropy will increase. So X doesn't have to start "low" in order for it to be higher now. Suppose we start out with some huge amount of entropy on some absolute scale. Then entropy will still increase, which might make it seem from our perspective that the entropy was initially "low".
Hmmm. In regards to fine tuning, are you suggesting that there might be some sort of overriding meta-principal that would dictate the relationship between the constants we see in our Universe? Any ToE we develop would be incomplete if we don't have some way to account for the values we observe.
For instance, the complex chemistry of this universe would be impossible if the up and down quark masses and the mass of the electron were much different from what we see in our universe — not to mention their spins being the values that they are — i.e. electrons wouldn't arrange themselves into shells, not to mention protons and neutrons would behave differently. Universes without the values much different from ours, wouldn't be able to make complex molecules. On top of that, the values of the weak force, the strong force, and electro-magnetism all contribute to the way atoms behave. If the value of the weak force changes, that would affect the stability of neutrons in the nucleus. Plus the stability of the overall nucleus is determined by the value of the strong force.
To quote you Carl, "Now some people say wait a minute, that really needs explaining." I'm one of them.
BTW: I am not positing the existence of a God entity who created our universe. But the thoughts about *why* keep me up at night.
Yes, I mean it's possible those values simply have to be what they are. Since we have zero evidence of them being different, we have no observational data that tells us they could be. We also have (as you point out) no superior theory that suggests their values are fixed by some consideration or other. So right now, they just are. And that they *could* have different values is a *hypothesis* backed up by neither theory nor observation.
The difference with the initial entropy of the universe is that we *do* have direct observational evidence (the universe as it is now) that the value of the entropy could be different. That doesn't mean there *isn't* some theoretical reason why it had to start off very low, of course. But arguing that the initial entropy of the universe is "fine tuned" is on much more solid empirical footing than arguing that the fine structure constant is.
I hate The Creator arguments for the existence of God. I greatly perfer the personal testimony of Sister Mary Alligator who felt Jesus jog her elbow the moment she was intending to play red 12 but accidentally pushed the church's entire stack onto black 11, which won, and who then in her excitement let the bet ride and won again and the sisters threw her a big party at which she admittedly became a little giddy on light rosé when she came home with the check for 700 Gs and paid off the mortgage.
I mean, if God can just be deduced by pure reason, that makes Him a lot more like Commutivity of Multiplication than The Reason For It All, which I find annoyingly cramped, much like the simulationist's vision of God the Console Cowboy who pulled an all-nighter and programmed the Universe up in C+++.
Maybe what he means is that certain infinities do not make intuitive sense, unless they are embedded in a larger infinity, and he takes that larger infinity to be God who writes the smaller infinity in some ineffable way.
Like, the Universe is the set of all integers (aleph null, countably infinite) and God is the set of all reals (aleph 1, uncountably infinite) so the only reason the integers (Universe) exist and makes sense is because they're embedded in the infinitely bigger infinity of the reals (God).
As an interesting side note, some historians of science have argued that belief in a monotheistic god, who governed the universe by a single set of laws, was the concept that allowed for the idea of the Cosmological Principal to come into fashion. (I find that explanation a little too pat, myself. I thought Aristotle had something to say about this idea, but I'm not finding any references.) I know that Newton was the first to assert the Cosmological Principal in his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica — published 1687 — that the universe was isotropic (not his term) and was uniform in its behavior. Because Alchemy was Newton's primary obsession, he was quite familiar with ancient and medieval esoteric writings (many of which where anthologized in the copy of Theatrum Chemicum he owned). I wonder if he got that idea from his esoteric studies — after all, one of the basic tenants of Alchemy were that the rules should work the same anywhere.
The idea of reasonable God is then reasonable universe. We can infer natural laws and trust our inferences because our observations are reliable; they are not "if God changes His mind, paper won't burn".
If God can be deduced from reason, then we don't have the problem of "oh, that's all just blind faith on your part, if you had been raised as X then you would believe in X, I don't believe because I have Science (or whatever) which is true and provable". If I can find God reasonable, I can believe in Him. Without belief, there is no faith. You can, I suppose, grit your teeth and make yourself have faith in leprechauns or the Tooth Fairy, but you don't believe in them really.
But the God of Reason is only the first step. That is getting you to accept "okay, in principle, there is an entity that can be described as god which is not repugnant to my understanding and which can be an alternative to how the universe came into being via materialistic explanations". Getting from *that* God to the personal God of Christian faith is, well, the journey of faith. You get to have both, Carl, not just one.
That's why I'm not Protestant 😁
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fideism
Michael Flynn (SF author) has some posts up about this; here's one:
http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2012/01/common-misperception.html#more
"A favorite Biblical quote in medieval natural philosophers was "For you have ordered all things by measure and number and weight" (sed omnia in mensura, et numero et pondere disposuisti) (Wis. 11:21) They took this to mean that the World (universe) was ordered in such a way that measuring, counting, and weighing things would make nature intelligible. This is a necessary mental attitude for the emergence of science."
Which gives me another good quote:
"Or more directly, William of Conches in (iirc) the Dragmatikon:
"[They say] 'We do not know how this is, but we know that God can do it.' You poor fools! God can make a cow out of a tree, but has He ever done so? Therefore show some reason why a thing is so, or cease to hold that it is so."
> But the God of Reason is only the first step. That is getting you to accept "okay, in principle, there is an entity that can be described as god which is not repugnant to my understanding and which can be an alternative to how the universe came into being via materialistic explanations". Getting from that God to the personal God of Christian faith is, well, the journey of faith. You get to have both, Carl, not just one.
Aristotle got no small amount of pushback back in the day when he concluded with an Unmoved Mover that was pretty definitively not identifiable with any Hellenistic gods; obviously there are some pretty serious issues with Aristotelian (meta)physics, but I'm sympathetic to the arguments in their original context.
To paint with an broad brush, the Scholastic project was to reconcile Aristotelian metaphysics with Catholic theology. Yet I don't think I ever read Aquinas really grapple with or even acknowledge that Aristotle *had* a theology of his own that came into direct conflict with the conclusions Aquinas was trying to reach. It doesn't look like a gap that can be crossed by a leap of faith, but rather a direct contradiction that is pretended not to exist.
Personally, I find it tiresome that western materialists keep using the Xtian God as their straw dog. In the Vedanta and Mahayana world view there is an endless cycle of universes, plus multiple universes likely co-exist with ours. And in Vedanta, you will eventually be reborn as the Brahma of your own Universe (and some of the beliefs of the Latter Day Saints is eerily reminiscent of this belief). OTOH, if you're a Mahayana, you definitely do not want to be reborn as Brahma (for various reasons I won't go into here). Rabbinic Judaism admits to the possibility that there were previous universes and does not necessarily reject the possibility of multiple universes.
Of course, the Xtian view of God is easy to pin down and defeat with its logical inconsistencies. So, I suppose Jehovah is a convenient for that purpose.
IME, Christianity is massively overrepresented among people making *positive* arguments for divine existence. The "convenience" of the "straw dog" is very much a secondary factor.
Actually, I think you're right! Most Buddhists don't consider the God question to be important for their practice—indeed, the The Shakyamuni Buddha discouraged such questions as being useless distractions. The Vendanta traditions don't seem to be too hung up on the God question either (but I'm not an expert on the ins-and-outs of their philosophy). And of the Abrahamic religions Jews aren't into proselytizing. Only Christianity and Islam have the stated goals of converting people. And we in the West get the brunt of Christianist proselytizing. We're exposed to their dogmas everywhere we turn. So it's natural to come up with arguments against Xtian concepts of God, because that's what we're exposed to.
"Only Christianity and Islam have the stated goals of converting people."
Mormons too (I consider adding a prophet and a scripture sufficient to make them an offshoot).
( If I understand correctly Baha'is would count as an offshoot, having added a prophet and a scripture, but don't proselytize. )
"We can infer natural laws and trust our inferences because our observations are reliable; they are not "if God changes His mind, paper won't burn"."
That seems to directly contradict Jack Chick's claim that Gluons and the Strong Nuclear Force can't exist because God directly holds atoms together Himself. https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-8086537fa26be7acd1297c8eba31ccdf-pjlq
"[They say] 'We do not know how this is, but we know that God can do it.' You poor fools! God can make a cow out of a tree, but has He ever done so? Therefore show some reason why a thing is so, or cease to hold that it is so."
You should try explaining this to all the Young Earth Creationists who claim that God planted fake fossils in the ground, and artificially made starlight appear to be billions of years older than it actually was, all just to test our faith!
Demanding a Catholic take account for and explain things to Chick-style Evangelism is rather like demanding a milquetoast European socialist take account for and explain things to a Posadist.
To draw on a direct illustrative point from my personal history growing up Catholic in Appalachia, the bastion of snake-handling, holy-rolling, tongue-speaking, faith-healing Evangelism: When I was around 6-8, one of the kids down the holler informed me that his family's dog had gone missing and then asked me, with all seriousness, if us Catholics had abducted it in the night as a blood sacrifice to Mary, as his church's preacher apparently claimed that THIS, and not the abundance of hostile local wildlife, was the cause of local outdoor pets going missing.
A coherent physical universe with a space for some kind of Prime Mover figure doesn't imply Catholicism is reasonable though, any more than Jack Chick implies Catholicism is unreasonable. Indeed, most of the evidentiary burden needed to make it to Jack Chick also has to be covered to get us to the Eucharist.
You would think someone in a community whose original hub was called "LESS WRONG" would understand the idea of things being comparatively better or worse.
Catholicism supports the theory of Evolution and believes there can be no contradiction between scientific inquiry and God, and if the Bible and the world contradict it is a failing of our interpretation of the Bible.
Jack Chick and his intellectual descendants believe that the Catholic church invented Communism, Islam, Nazism (and also the Zionist conspiracy) and the gay rights movement, that Evolution is an atheist conspiracy meant to get your children to be gay and commit murder, and that a Ziono-Papist-Atheist-Satanic New World Order devoted to the destruction of Christian America is coming and must be resisted by force of arms and the formation of an American government rooted in their specific form of Christianity. Even if you want to argue they both have equally-nonexistent support for their belief system, which one do you want to see more of in the world?
Well, and had you? Don't keep us in suspense.
No, our mutual urbanite-fleeing-the-city neighbor had called Animal Control on it under false pretenses and gotten it put down. She did this to like a dozen dogs before the people in my area realized she was doing it and found evidence (she had been collecting the collars she removed from the dogs to frame them as wild dogs like some kind of serial killer's trophies, by my father's account), and then she was run out of the area like the lunatic she was. Just another year in the amygdala of America.
Well, that depends: what month did the pets go missing? Because as everyone knows, us Romanists only do our midnight blood sacrifices to Mary during May.
Jack Chick is his own special little person and let's just leave it at that before I get into my fave rave from the Chickadee, the Death Cookie:
https://www.chick.com/products/tract?stk=74
Two for the price of one - not alone ignorant of theology but also of history!
Catholics want to have their deity and eat it too.
Valentine Michael Smith says "hold my beer..."
The marriage feast of the lamb!
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/Lamgods_open.jpg
Yeah but she already said she isn't a Protestant. There's a big gap between St. Thomas and a snake handler and the Peace of Westphalia was a truce; nobody surrendered.
O Magdalene I shall not argue faith with thee, still less theology. As one of our minor colonial prophets has ascerbically observed[1], a man has got to know his limitations. I hope I know mine.
All I can say is, first, I did observe just above that as far as my peasant reason can tell there is no conflict between reason and a model of Creation that has a Creator. That's not a proof, nor argument, but consistency is satisfied as far as I can tell. I'm not entirely clear on whether it is that which you mean, but there it is.
And second...I am an empiricist, not a scholastic. I believe in the evidence of the senses above all else, definitely above reason[2]. If I *see* the water change to wine, I don't dismiss it with prejudice because Conservation of Mass. So if you ask me how a merciful God would[3] make His nature known to me, I think it would indeed be by direct experience, and I would find that more persuasive than a thick book of ratiocination[4]. If nothing else, I don't grok infinity, so He'd need to dumb it down for me.
Which means of all the foundations of faith I find most interesting and a priori persuasive in others, it's also that -- the deeply personal, the tale of having looked with vision as keen and clear as an eagle's into your own nature and come out of that still silvery pool convinced that you were not alone in there, that there was....someone else. That's all I meant, no more.
And if you ask me to further explain why I nevertheless would not be interested in hooting it up at a chautauqua, and do indeed prize scholarship...I don't honestly know. The most I think I can say is that it's like a tree. The tree is grand, it can reach up a hundred meters and take 5 minutes to walk around. but...it has to have roots, roots in good solid peaty soil. I hate leaving this as a silly fuzzy metaphor, but this is not my strong point. If I could write down a Lagrangian I'd do better.
-----------------
[1] https://youtu.be/_VrFV5r8cs0
[2] Which is not to say reason isn't on page 2 of my Debrett's. Knowing may start with empirical data, but it hardly ends there. The great power of reason is to distill experience, until it all evaporates or there's something worthy left, a new calx. One of the admirable (for me) properties of math is that if you *start* with truth, and follow the rules, you cannot but end with truth. You still have to start with something, and following the rules is not as easy as it seems at first, but still, it's like our (H. sapiens) superpower.
[3] Or has. One can see but not see, or the seeing and the seeing can be separated by long years.
[4] I know this is a little Low Church, but I come from a hundred generations of small freehold farmers, smiths, shoemakers, and similar unwashed rabble. Not a sophisticate in the bunch. My genes wear jeans and sometimes have dirt under their fingernails.
Some come in by the heart, some by the mind, some by the body. It's all the one gate. And I can't find the exact quote now, but something something St. Augustine "the Bible does not teach us how the sun and moon go, because God wanted to make Christians, not astronomers" 😀
I need more of the heart and less of the head.
I believe the water turned to wine, and I believe the wine turns to blood. The exact physical theory doesn't matter a bean to me, the theology is more germane (and complicated) but in the end if someone says "well I put a sample of a host through a mass spectrometer and it's bread not flesh", well duh bunnykins, that's not how it works. Doesn't mean it's *unreasonable*, though.
To be fair though, if you could pray a special prayer to turn water into wine for real, and it worked every time (or maybe 1/day/5 levels or something), then there'd be a lot fewer atheists on this planet. Not zero, I'll grant you, but definitely fewer.
Why? That is, why would you not simply conclude she had discovered a new bit of science? After all, there are many Youtube videos of amazing chemical transformations, things you might not have known about or seem nonintuitive (e.g. clock reactions, dehydration of sugar by H2SO4) -- but you accept those as just another branch of science -- in part *because* they are reproducible, a human being can make them happen any time he chooses by simply executing a particular set of actions correctly.
What would make this different? Is it that spoken words are part of the procedure? But one could imagine a scenario where, e.g. the air pressure variations caused by spoken words had some effect on a chemical reaction, and you had to speak a certain set of words in a certain way -- and we would be back to science.
Arguably if you want to believe that an answered prayer is the result of a diety intervening, it *has* to be something that doesn't always happen, because only that way can you conclude that a diety made a choice.
I suppose as I see it, all of the philosophical arguments for God's existence can be deconstructed, but that doesn't make them useless. They are supports for our faith, our intuition. If you approach the Cosmological Argument, or any other argument, like a debate about the laws of physics, it will be found wanting every time.
We are told (Romans 1:20) that God's qualities are "obvious", and I believe this with all my heart. Intuitively, it seems clearly true that the world, the universe, and human beings wouldn't exist if something powerful beyond human comprehension hadn't created them all, with intentionality and purpose. But also our reason can easily come up with alternative possibilities that fit the data and dismiss our initial intuition, arguing that primate heuristics are not suitable for making judgments of this sort, and perhaps everything in the universe exists as a result of some blind idiot process, which has no real cause or purpose as we would understand such things.
But seek, and ye shall find. The philosophical arguments offer support to our initial intuition and cast doubt on the naturalistic alternatives. They don't cleanly and perfectly destroy the alternatives though -- they merely cast doubt on them, offering some breathing room for our basic and obvious intuition to take hold, and from there, for faith to flourish. The matter of which arguments make the most sense to you will depend largely on your own intuition -- and indeed, some of the arguments, like the Argument from Beauty, are themselves mostly in the realm of intuition anyway.
As I see it, apologetics can helpfully eliminate some obstacles to faith, but it will never be what leads you down the path. And having more confidence in one's faith is indeed a good in and of itself from the standpoint of Christianity (Mark 9:23-24).
> In short, I feel like I'm missing a lot of steps in the argument and it doesn't really make sense as is. Can someone who understands it better than I do try to shade some light on this?
I poured quite a bit of effort into debating the Kalam cosmological argument back in the day, and I can't say I ever got a version that I thought was internally valid, let alone convincing. My focus was mainly on the assumptions behind the first step and the faulty importation of Aristotlean causality, but I definitely spent at least a few threads bashing my head against the deficient definition of infinities. So you're not alone there, at least!
A version of this vein of inquiry which might be more interesting to the kinds of folks who read this blog is Jacques Maritain's 'sixth way', which is more-or-less a philosophical proof of God starting from what we'd call the hard problem of consciousness. I believe it's in his "Existence and the Existent" but I cannot recall.
These various attempts to make psychedelics themselves the treatment are all inspired by good experiences some have, and appear to mostly result in mediocre experiences for others. If mindset or psychological technique (before/during/after) is the key, I would hope that the research focus shifts.
What's being done now with MDMA and Internal Family Systems is interesting from that standpoint. Scott has written without enthusiasm on IFS and related therapies (Unlocking the Emotional Brain), but if one is already experiencing a multi-agent mind it certainly would make sense that taking MDMA would increase one's sense of connection to the various agents inside.
Whatever else one might say about IFS, its primary noteworthy characteristic is that it obviates the kind of "being loved back to life" from the outside by empowering you to love your sub-personalities back to life. MDMA would just be a turbocharger slapped on this basic move.
Psychedelics make the mind plastic and moldable, to your own influence and other people's. I think it'll be a long time before we have a commonly agreed upon ethical standard how to handle them, especially since genuinely valuable therapeutic interventions can look like abuse from outside. Among recreational users this is smoothed out by people trusting and knowing each other - not dropping acid among people you don't trust is like, psychedelics 101. In a professional/research context this is a huge problem.
I think there is great potential here for therapeutic use. I’m watching how Portland Oregon rolls their program out. I’m afraid this might be mucked up by people without any real knowledge trying to make a quick buck.
The Minnesota Psychedelics Society has a Zoom meeting in a couple hours that is billed as an intro to therapeutic use of psychedelics. I’m in a small town motel right now prepping for a BWCA canoe trip.
If the Wi-Fi is decent here, I’ll check this out. I am keeping my expectations low though.
Update:
This presentation is surprisingly good. A group of credentialed folks that are serious about moving this forward. This is the first time this group seemed to not be running a scam or actually know what they are talking about.
There was a recent change in leadership here that improved things a lot.
This reminds me of when Michael of VSauce did ayahuasca, and he did it by traveling deep into some jungle before ingesting it in a burning hot tent surrounded by mosquitos. He didn't get anything out of it and clearly had a terrible time. He would have been much better off doing it in a trusted friend's backyard.
I took a course in psychedelic-assisted therapy, and read a bunch of obsessively well-done research articles. The results were not mediocre, and fact they were spectacular for treatments that consisted of 10 sessions or so, 2 or 3 of which were drug experiences with therapist
s present, and gains were maintained over 6-12 months of follow-up. None of the therapies used IFS as the treatment approach. In fact, treatment approaches tended to be pretty simple. Therapists manifest warmth, congruence and empathy while helping patient articulate their problem, explaining how psychedelics work, helping patients formulate their issue in a way that makes sense in relation to drug (eg, for smokers, "use psilocybin to help me see the absurdity of inhaling smoke to feel better"), emotional holding and reassurance during trip, processing of trip afterwards in relationship to patient's problem.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/20/book-review-all-therapy-books/
Yeah Leo, I read that quite a while ago and agree with it. I am sure psychedelic-assisted therapy would, like other treatments, prove to be less effective when used by many practitioners for many people with many different kinds of problems. On the other hand, some treatments are better than others. What's used these days is better than insulin coma therapy, treating homosexuality as a mental illness, and a lot of the other bullshit from the 1950's. How would *you* go about identifying the new ideas with the most promise? I read 20 carefully-done studies and discussed them with a researcher who had done several such studies and read transcripts of some treatment sessions. In my opinion, this approach holds promise, at least for the limited set of problems it was tried with in the studies.
If the implementation of therapy is thoughtful, I feel the results will be a complete game changer. My own unguided experiences have resolved so much for me that I think if this is done right it will be a major breakthrough. Surpassing any pharmaceutical approach to date. I’m a lot more optimistic about the approach than Scott is. I haven’t gone to medical school but I do have personal first hand experiences from more than 30 years ago that taught me positive outlooks that help me to this day.
Before these experiences I had mistakenly thought that things were like *that*..
When looked at with clear insight of a mind without preconceptions or reality distorting trauma,I knew at my core they are a actually like *this*.
*This* being a more realistic and healthy and wholesome point of view.
Insights that were completely internalized and made my marriage and my friendships go forward with less friction and more compassion.
My dealings with ‘prickly’ personalities became a matter of seeing their unhealthy outlook and either allowing me to guide them to something more constructive or if that proved impossible to find a way to maneuver around their obstacles without any resentment on their part.
If this approach is pursued carefully, has the potential to make a better sort of humanity.
I used to be a psychedelic evangelist, now I'm more cautious, but I broadly agree with this message.
I think the key element is having an environment within which resolving your newly loosened priors to a functional worldview comes naturally, then being able to actually alter your habits - it's easy to feel all that insight during the trip, then on the next day resume being an asshole out of inertia. I think we've barely scratched the surface of what is possible and what are reliable methods to get there.
Gunflint, not everyone who has used psychedelics has stories like yours, but many do. It seems clear that sometimes these drugs allow people do access quite a different, more benign view of important matters, and that some them are able to hold onto these new viewpoints permanently. It happened to my daughter when she was around 20. We had been going through a prolonged period -- several years -- of conflict and unhappiness with each other. From my point of view, nothing I tried helped a bit. Then over a short period of time things got much better, and have stayed better for years now. A couple years ago she told me that the change happened during a psilocybin trip in a meadow with her friends. She was playing with a puppy and crying, and she thought about me and said to herself, "Why am I being so mean? She loves me. I love her. I have to stop." That change of viewpoint was lasting for her. If therapists can learn to facilitate that sort of change with people who are tripping , even for some people, the drug plus the skill of facilitating certain changes would be wonderful tools.
Read a study where people took guided psilocybin trips as part of an effort to quit smoking. There were a couple of people who during their trips just thought, "inhaling smoke on purpose is ridiculous. I'm not going to do it any more." And they didn't. Others stopped with more of the usual difficulty, but were successful. And group as a whole definitely had more people who were still abstinent months later than most smoking cessations treatment programs do. (It's notoriously difficult to help people quit nicotine -- the shit's more addictive than heroin.)
Absolutely -- sounds like you had close to the best-case experience. I would hope that with research we can standardize more for your kind of experience than the other kinds.
On the first part, you're right on: if a few passionate and talented researchers are getting good results, we can expect the overall usefulness of the substances themselves to be far less. However, it would be nice to know what the 'secret sauce' they're bringing is. A researcher like Dr. Anna Lemke would say that it's mindset effects + the pharmacological effects. Traditional therapies would say it's the presence of the therapist + pharma. IFS would say something else. Whatever it is, I hope that research sheds more light on it soon while the hype is still high (and before unfortunate cases like the one that started this comment thread push us further from mainstream acceptance and funding.
As for the rest, I didn't say they lack promise, just that the substances by themselves (without the presence of the gifted researchers) provide only mediocre results on average. People are taking psychedelics at a tremendous range of doses, and when surveyed are mostly just having a fun (or not-so-fun) time. If lithium had been illegal and as many people with bipolar took it recreationally at as many dosages as we see with psychedelics, we'd have noticed it working for some range of them.
Finally, psychedelic-assisted-therapy IS 'bullshit from the 1950s'. I like it better than all its contemporaries. But while we're talking "old school", the fact remains that electroconvulsive shock therapy continues to outperform psychedelics (at least for treatment-resistant depression).
I didn't say everything from the 50's is bullshit, I said some things are. I know ECT outperforms psychedelics. It seems to outperform antidepressants too, not that that's saying much. And I know about that 50's and 60's era of psychedelic research. And I don't think the psychedelic substances themselves work magic. You're not quite strawmanning, here, but you do seem to be assuming I do not know some basic info about past psychiatry and that it had not occurred to me that people who take psychedelics recreationally are not freed of all their problems, which indicates, the drugs themselves don't work magic. Why assume I’m underinformed and lack common sense?
Actually, *you* seem kind of underinformed about current research into psychedelic-assisted therapy. In your initial post you wrote that “If mindset or psychological technique (before/during/after) is the key, I would hope that the research focus shifts.” Maybe there is research somewhere where dumdums with PhD’s give MDMA to people with PTSD and sit back and wait for the magic cure to happen, but if so I have not run into any of it. All the research I have seen involved embedding 2 or 3 drug-assisted sessions in a brief treatment consisting of 10 or so sessions, in which the therapists helped people articulate their problem, suggested ways to use the drug experience, were present at the drug experience to facilitate the subjects’ using it to address their problem, and worked afterwards to help subjects use the experience they had had to get maximum benefit from it. If you are interested in knowing more about the work being done with MDMA, I recommend you watch this video presentation about using it to help autistic adults with severe social anxiety: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZ5P4AYAvuE
I read the Guardian article just now, but didn't listen to the podcast. The article focuses on one quite bad case of patient sexual abuse, plus MAPS being inconsistent and unresponsive when asked about it. Are there additional incidents mentioned in the podcast? If that one incident is that main basis of the complaint about MAPS I really don't think it's reasonable the make too much of it. The fact is that it is not terribly unusual for people with more power to take advantage sexually of people with less power, & that's true everywhere from monasteries to the military to psychiatric settings. Yes, these incidents are awful, and fewer of them happen at well-run places, but it's ridiculous to shut down a large organization because one such incident comes to light. I worked for years at a very well-respected psychiatric hospital and know of several instances of sexual misconduct by hospital therapists with their patients -- and I am not very gossipy, and probably never even heard about a lot of things of that sort. A couple of the incidents were quite amazingly awful, at least as bad as what happened in Vancouver.
On the other hand, the MAPS website went through a period of being pretty sleazy. For a while they let people affiliated with it advertise their professional services. None of them could say they'd give you shrooms or MDMA. The code term used was "psychedelic integration," which means helping people make sense of psychedelic experiences after they are over -- but of course everybody knew what was really being offered. A lot of the people listing there seemed not to have been vetted by anyone. Some were quite young and did not have professional degrees. Then those listings disappeared -- seem like MAPS figured out having it without vetting the daylights out of those listing was a bad idea. Still, new organizations do have growing pains, and try things then discover that some of them do not work or are not safe.
I know several people affiliated MAPS. One's a very smart, kind and ethically thoughtful researcher; one's a super-smart, somewhat insensitive neurologist-psychiatrist who is a bit sloppy about following details of protocols but I whom I'm confident would never make a sexual advance on a patient; one's kind of mediocre, spoiled and overpaid, but also seems very unlikely to me to take sexual advantage of patients. I wish them all well in their work and hope MAPS & MDMA research don't get shut down. And I think some of the recent research on MDMA, ketamine and psychedelics looks promising.
I'm always surprised when people do, from their perspective, groundbreaking worldview-shattering work - in psychedelic research, or spiritual communities, or even AI alignment - yet they throw it all away for a conveniently available piece of ass. Humans are so easy to break.
From a Darwinian perspective (or, in Deiseach's words, from a lizard brain perspective) the explanation for why the behavior of seeking fame/prestige/power is selected for is because those successful in its pursuit have more descendants. If wants to turn the selection effect into a "telos" fame/prestige/power is sought _for_ the sex. From the genes' point of view: feature, not a bug.
My take on that is that it's *because* it's shattered the worldview - after all, if you've turned all the old orthodoxies on their heads and have gone beyond into the pure experience of utter reality, why let yourself be bound by the petty rules of the small-minded and ignorant? "Don't have sex with those who are not on equal terms of power with you" is such a downer, why should you - who now knows better, who has an enlightened consciousness - be tied down by silly taboos?
Of course, then the inevitable scandal happens, and what we learn all over again is that there was a reason in the first place for those silly taboos - which boils down to "when you take the shackles off the lizard brain, it goes and does what lizard brains do, and your enlightened consciousness is nowhere in the room when it's doing it".
To be fair, a lot of the rules around sex are absolutely bullshit and should be disregarded. Knowing which part is which seems... hard, especially while on a hypomanic ego trip.
the rule "don't stick your dick in crazy" seems like a good one.
More broadly, this kind of charismatic, almost cultish-type leader is at most danger - not solely from being prone to take advantage of the groupies, but from the groupies themselves. All the problems of workplace romances, with extra drama.
Because if they are charismatic and influential, they are going to attract followers and hangers-on as well as patients, and transference is a thing, as is "women of a certain type falling in love with their priest/pastor/professor/pyschiatrist/cult leader". Relationships can go sour for a lot of reasons and if you are not in a position to marry them/not going to marry them, then your innamorata will feel slighted and seek revenge. Part of that may be claiming you took advantage of her - you had all the power, the influence, and you bullied/harassed/swept her off her feet with your magnetism until she agreed to sleep with you. It was like rape, or in the most severe cases, it was rape.
If there are a lot of bees buzzing round all wanting to make honey with the charismatic guru, then there will be jealousy as well. Those who are rejected may make claims of inappropriate behaviour. Those who have been thrown over for a new buzzy bee will do likewise.
"Keep it in your pants unless you put a ring on it" is not the worst rule to hold onto, even if you are a charismatic enlightened guru.
Well admittedly it can be hard to tell whether iconoclasm springs from briliance or narcissism. Maybe it's a little like the Island of Knights and Knaves, so if you ask them both "Are you a narcissist?" the narcissist says "Of course not!' and the creative thinker says "well...maybe a little" and that helps you know.
This matches reports I've been hearing from some of the people involved.
Have psychedelics ever had worthy advocates? Because, because from Timothy Leary to all the way to today it seems like a rotating cast of sleazy, corrupt, cultist burnouts. It seems that its advocates always end up providing it to a group of followers and exercising tremendous sway over them.
"Cultist" comes with the territory, and I wouldn't call Kesey, Leary or Shulgin sleazy or corrupt.
I would recommend Robin Carhart-Harris in academia and Michael Pollan's book "How To Change Your Mind" in popular culture. Or if you want to go back much further, Aldous Huxley in "Doors Of Perception".
"Have psychedelics ever had worthy advocates?"
Would you consider indigenous tribes "worthy advocates?" I suspect not, because judging by your statement, I'd guess you mean something closer to "Has a respectable-looking man in a lab coat who doesn't actually believe humans have inner lives instead of a bunch of sparks and chemicals sizzling through meat praised them?"
And the answer is no, as those nice men in lab coats wouldn't speak out against the status quo because then people like you would go through their past with the finest of combs to proclaim them another member of the rotating class of sleazy, corrupt, cultist burnouts. Thus the wheel spins on: men will only trust anything abnormal if it comes from the mouth of respectable men, and respectable men would never say anything abnormal.
That did look pretty bad. I’m afraid the psychedelic therapy field is charlatan rich right now.
I read the Guardian article, but did not listen to the podcast so do not know what was covered there. Certainly the incident in Vancouver where some horny creep (who was not even a licensed professional) sexually abused a patient is absolutely awful, and I hope the guy gets sent to jail. But I wish you would look some into the actual research being done on psychedelic-assisted therapy rather than going with your "feels like" about what's happening with psychedelics and mental health treatment. Here is a video where someone presents some actual research about MDMA to help autistic people with their social anxiety: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZ5P4AYAvuE
And also, as a corrective to your feeling that psychedelics are turning medical treatment into a fandom, you should bear in mind that it is presently not legal anywhere in the US for mental health practitioners to use psychedelics in treatment. (Use of psilocybin will become legal in, I think, Washington State in 2023, with practitioners required to be licensed professionals and also have special training in use of psychedelics. ) The only US professionals who are currently using psychedelics in treatment are researchers who have gotten permission to use pharmaceutical grade versions of the drugs in small, obsessively planned and monitored treatment studies. At present, the only drugs shrinks can use for altering patient's consciousness during sessions is ketamine, an old anesthetic (which is not in my opinion a psychedelic -- it's more like nitrous oxide). The medical-treatment-turned-fandom that you find objectionable (and I would too) is currently not happening anywhere except in your mind. *Could* it happen? Sure. There's lots of potential for many things, including rationalism, to get turned into a tacky, worthless version of itself if there's a lot of money to be made. But, as I just said, that applies to lots of things.
I think of wokeness as a markedly generational phenomenon. This is mostly my own anecdata, but I believe it has some support from polling as well -- wokeness just seems much more prevalent, much more likely to function as a default worldview rather than an esoteric aberration, among people born about 1990 or just after.
If that's correct, then a vibe shift seems virtually inevitable. Our archetypal wokester is in her early 30s now. The "burn it all down" mentality is getting harder to sustain; she's got a mortgage and a job to protect. She's also starting to find that when she reads stories about people protesting "the system," her instinctive sympathies are sometimes with the people running the system and doing the best they can. That could be her!
Possibly she even has kids. She's still firmly convinced that Sesame Street ought to have more trans-affirming content, and would it kill them to throw in a segment expressly shaming Trump voters once an episode or so? On the other hand, she also can't help but notice that her kids don't give a rat's ass about trans-affirming content but do sit still for Cookie Monster, at least so long as he's eating cookies and not doing something trans-affirming instead. There is no end of woke children's media, but also no such thing as a woke child.
This sort of thing adds up. A vibe shift, indeed: The Big Chill. Only I somehow suspect the wokeratti will lack even the reflective capacity, or the artistic honesty, to produce as self-indulgent but basically accurately observed a documentation of their own ageing out of radicalism as the film of that name.
Instead, prepare for the onslaught of woke analysis informed by the predilections and enthusiasms of middle-aged people. Rogaine is transphobic. The continued production of new popular music after the year 2018 is racist. Kids not getting off my lawn are perpetuating a culture of ableism and youth supremacy.
I live in a leftist bubble. I was watching a TV show the other day and something kind of funny happened. One of the characters said "she's woke" approvingly about another character, and I realised - this was the first time I had ever heard the word "woke" used in a positive light. To be honest, I think "wokeness" (both as a term, and as a philosophy) has never had much momentum in the real world. But its popularity among Twitter addicts makes less switched-on people *think* it has - kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe more people are just starting to see through it.
I think usage on the left was pretty much relegated to Twitter. I'm not on Twitter (or in the US) and honestly have never heard anybody on the left use the term, even friends of mine who are left wing activists. Although, maybe it actually is used by the left in America, I don't know.
Yeah, I think the term is essentially an exonym. I've heard it used unironically by people identifying themselves with it on vanishingly few occasions, and those were years ago.
My sense is that "woke" must've very briefly had some currency as a self-description among at least a subset of left activist types. That happened to coincide with the moment when the broader culture started to notice the new style of social justice politics enough to want a word for it. For whatever reason, "woke" was the term that stuck, at which point it lost whatever attractiveness it might have had for anyone whose politics could be described as woke.
Given that a man who kidnapped and battered his own family and recently cut a political ad that boils down to "vote for me and I will form death squads to kill members of my party who I deem insufficiently-loyal" is apparently a viable Senate candidate and might even win- yes.
Extremeness in one part of society doesn't imply non-extremeness in another part.
But all I know is, for whatever reason, I rarely encounter wokeness these days.
Can you give a link for people outside the US (?) who have no idea what you’re talking about?
https://youtu.be/WZkdeE18YG4
Here's a story regarding his "RINO (Republicans In Name Only) Hunter" campaign ad. Naturally, he is claiming that his ad was just "a joke in all good fun" despite his larger campaign rhetoric being about how RINOs have betrayed America and are enabling Joe Biden's evil NWO schemes to kill people with the fake COVID-19 vaccine and the Great Replacement. Unsurprisingly, he's a Trumpist-style Republican and remains impressively loyal to the man despite Trump giving praise to one of his political rivals and ignoring him entirely, and seems to have never met a conspiracy theory he isn't willing to embrace.
https://missouriindependent.com/2022/03/21/eric-greitens-accused-of-physical-abuse-in-affidavit-filed-by-his-ex-wife/
And here's a story about his (alleged) physical abuse. I will yield that much of this claim is in the realm of "he said, she said", but given that his previous affair with his hairstylist involved credible claims of sexual coercion and blackmail (as determined by a special investigative committee that impeached him over the accusations and concerns about him using his then-role as Governor to quash the criminal charges) that he has since claimed were discredited by the same committee and the fact he thought an ad depicting him storming into someone's home with a SEAL team to shoot them in the face was a good idea, I would certainly say it fits with the general character he's displayed.
Thank you!
Seems real. Let's wait for Amazon's LOTR to release, should be a useful barometer. We'll see how eager media will be to praise a work with no redeeming features other than being conspicuously woke-aligned.
If it hasn't released, how do you know it has no redeeming features?
My expectations are progressively lowered with every screenshot they share.
Funny you should mention that, I was just wondering about it the other day. There was a huge publicity splash announcing it, an even bigger splash of criticism, and (so far as I can make out) since then crickets. No pieces updating its progress, no further magazine articles about new photoshoots released since. I'm curious if it is still on track to be released (surely it must be, given the amount of money Amazon is reported to have sunk into it), or is there a *lot* of rewriting going on to tidy up all the criticism.
Some of the publicity was just *painful*, the UK Superfan Review video was allegedly "Tolkien fans discuss the new series!" but it was really clear these people were about as much Tolkien fans as I am a fan of American college basketball; all they did was giggle about gay Gandalf and "ooh, if Sauron is hot I'd bang him!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxHjg8pJUwY
Oh and by the way, you don't have to wait for the series to come out, people are *already* shipping Sauron (as Annatar) and Celebrimbor; the ship name is "silvergifting". You're welcome.
But I see that now Amazon is relocating shooting of the series from New Zealand to the UK. Hmmmm, I do wonder why - cheaper? Or other reasons?
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/aug/12/amazon-moves-production-of-lord-of-the-ring-tv-series-to-uk
In case you haven't seen, Amazon's Celebrimbor is the least sexy elf in the history of fantasy:
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/51b3dc8ee4b051b96ceb10de/2efc60ba-5e5b-4ca9-8645-bcc0cbb62b7a/lord+of+the+rings-rings-of-power-celebrimbor.jpg
Also, wow, #silvergifting on tumblr is quite a ride.
I hadn't seen, thank you for the pleasure of that revelation 😐 Oh for crying out loud, guys, can you at least *pretend* you give a straw about the source materials?
Wrong hair colour, wrong age, wrong everything. Finarfin's children are the fair-haired ones, and Celebrimbor is Galadriel's first cousin once removed, so if they're casting "young, sparky, piss and vinegar, Galadriel" then why does her younger cousin look older than her? Cast this guy as a Numenorean? No problem. One of the Noldor? Now you're having a laugh.
EDIT: If Celebrimbor is in it, then so too must Annatar be. And he is supposed to be supernaturally beautiful, being Sauron's fair form as one of the Maiar. These chuckleheads will probably give him a squint and a limp and saggy jowls, also balding with what hair he does have being straggly and greasy, in order to hammer home that This Is The Bad Guy.
That's what the people replying to the criticism didn't get; look, I am not objecting to your black Elf or beardless black Dwarf lady because I'm a racist sexist whataphobe, it's because they don't stick to the books. You wanna be diverse and inclusive and break out past what Tolkien wrote due to being mired in his era but this is the 21st century, but you can't handle a bearded lady?
Imma blame the Mormons (or ex-Mormon) showrunners here, they can't adapt good Catholic writing 😁
That's the trouble with black (or Hispanic, or mixed race) Elf guy - his hair is not beautiful enough. And don't tell me that they can't have beautiful long non-white hair, of course they can, but they pick some horrible basic haircut. I don't know if this person is meant to be Avari, I very much doubt it, I'm betting they're going to make him Silvan. Necessity of beautiful hair still applies. Tolkien couldn't help himself, when discussing the names of Finwe and his descendants it went off into hair:
"[The element 'fin' in the name "Finwe"] The first elements were often later explained as related to ...Common Eldarin PHIN 'hair', as in Quenya fine 'a hair', finde 'hair, especially of the head', finda 'having hair, -haired' ...All the Eldar had beautiful hair (and were especially attracted by hair of exceptional loveliness), but the Noldor were not specially remarkable in this respect, and there is no reference to Finwe as having had hair of exceptional length, abundance, or beauty beyond the measure of his people. (He had black hair, but brilliant grey-blue eyes).
With regard to Findekano / Fingon it may be noted that the first element was certainly Quenya finde 'hair' - a tress or plait of hair (Common Eldarin *phini- a single hair, *phinde a tress; Sindarin fin; find, finn-).
...It would have been sufficient for Fingolfin to give to his eldest son a name beginning with fin- as an 'echo' of the ancestral name, and if this was also specially applicable it would have been approved as a good invention. In the case of Fingon it was suitable; he wore his long dark hair in great plaits braided with gold."
Come on Amazon, the *perfect* excuse to give us an Elf with "long dark hair in great plaits braided with gold" and you give us some short back'n'sides job?
https://www.fashionhombre.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Cool-Hairstyles-For-Black-Men-With-Long-Hair-13.jpg
https://menhairstylist.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/braids-long-hairstyles-for-black-men.jpg
https://i2.wp.com/therighthairstyles.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/7-long-thin-dreadlocks-for-men.jpg?resize=640%2C799&ssl=1
Re: Silvergifting, I don't read any of that, but I am aware of it. (Your ship is not my ship and that's okay). But if you wanted to write about a relationship gone bad, my goodness, that is the excellent choice for bad decisions, deceit, and a terrible ending. And you know how fandom *loves* making its favourites suffer 😁
"Celebrimbor was captured in the chaos and was forced, under torture, to disclose the locations of the lesser rings, but he would not reveal the whereabouts of the three greatest of them that he had sent away for safekeeping. Celebrimbor died from his torment; his body was shot with arrows and hung upon a pole, and was later paraded as a banner when Sauron attacked the Grey Havens."
At least people writing this kind of thing have read the books, which is more than the Amazon 'superfans' seem to have done! I can overlook a lot when "at least they read the source text" is involved.
And here I was lead to believe that Star Wars fans were the only people who care about these kinds of details. ;)
Trekkies were doing it years ago, too 😁 I can't remember the exact details, but there was an anecdote about a guest director on one episode in the third and final season of the original series who had one of the actors walk off the bridge in a certain direction.
The actor objected that "I can't do that, there isn't a door here, and the fans will notice". The director said "That's dumb, it's only a set" or something along those lines, made the actor do it, and yes the fans noticed and complained.
The odd thing is, I saw the episode as a kid long before I heard the story and yep, I went "there isn't a door off the bridge there!"
Yeah, I can't understand why they made such a thing out of dropping the Dwarven beards. So far as we can see, it's only one Dwarven princess OC so I don't even know if we'll see other Dwarven women at all.
Is it because they think "Well, Tolkien has not got enough women, we need to put in more women, but if we let the Dwarven women have beards nobody will know they're women"? Is it some religious taboo about women having beards? Peter Jackson managed to do "Dwarven women with beards" in his version of "The Hobbit" - is it because they're afraid this will look like copyright infringement (since Amazon only bought the rights to "The Lord of the Rings ") and the other movie studio will sue them?
'If we put beards on the Dwarven women it will be copyright infringement' would be the stupidest reason, so it's the most likely one.
From a letter to his young son Christopher, in 1943:
"My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) – or to 'unconstitutional' Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate realm of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate! If we could get back to personal names, it would do a lot of good. Government is an abstract noun meaning the an and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so as to refer to people. If people were in the habit of referring to 'King George's council, Winston and his gang', it would go a long way to clearing thought, and reducing the frightful landslide into Theyocracy. Anyway the proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity. And at least it is done only to a small group of men who know who their master is. The mediævals were only too right in taking 'nolo episcopari' as the best reason a man could give to others for making him a bishop. Give me a king whose chief interest in life is stamps, railways, or race-horses; and who has the power to sack his Vizier (or whatever you care to call him) if he does not like the cut of his trousers. And so on down the line. But, of course, the fatal weakness of all that – after all only the fatal weakness of all good natural things in a bad corrupt unnatural world – is that it works and has worked only when all the world is messing along in the same good old inefficient human way. The quarrelsome, conceited Greeks managed to pull it off against Xerxes; but the abominable chemists and engineers have put such a power into Xerxes' hands, and all ant-communities, that decent folk don't seem to have a chance. We are all trying to do the Alexander-touch – and, as history teaches, that orientalized Alexander and all his generals. The poor boob fancied (or liked people to fancy) he was the son of Dionysus, and died of drink. The Greece that was worth saving from Persia perished anyway; and became a kind of Vichy-Hellas, or Fighting-Hellas (which did not fight), talking about Hellenic honour and culture and thriving on the sale of the early equivalent of dirty postcards. But the special horror of the present world is that the whole damned thing is in one bag. There is nowhere to fly to. Even the unlucky little Samoyedes, I suspect, have tinned food and the village loudspeaker telling Stalin's bed-time stories about Democracy and the wicked Fascists who eat babies and steal sledge-dogs. There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations; I hope that, encouraged now as 'patriotism', may remain a habit! But it won't do any good, if it is not universal."
He was an agrarian, but bluntly he didn't hate Jews anywhere near enough to fit in with the kind of people who use that label today. As a matter of fact, he had strong negative opinions on anti-Semitism, which I believe makes you a "centrist zog cuck" or something to that effect.
The kind of people like like Curtis Yarvin, founder of neoreaction and Jew? You seem to be blending some exclusive categories together. Not straw precisely, then; is this a Strawxymoron-man?
"Neoreactionary" and "anti-semite" are far from exclusive and I have no doubt you know this but are uninterested in the truth-value of what you say.
You will now try and define every NrX person who's antisemitic out of the movement despite the fact the only thing you need to do to turn NrX into the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion is to take the Cathedral and then write "and Jews are doing this" at the end.
Proto-neo... hmm...
The tone of of the Washington DC subreddit *seems* to have shifted to more anti-crime than anti-cop, the reddit api and some basic nlp might be able to actually answer this question...
Not "cope", exactly, but simply acceptance of wokeness as the new normal.
Do you have any evidence you can cite to show that wokeness is losing momentum?
The Midterms should give us a barometer reading. Having 85% of pop media left of center makes projections hard, and the reality TV ex-president who refuses to retire certainly complicates things.
The real question is who will run in '24, and who will independents elect.
Wokeness won't help the Dems in either election. Nothing has changed there; if anything, wokeness is more stubbornly entrenched.
Real in the finance world
I’m hoping people have figured it out.
Culture is downstream of politics. More specifically, American culture is downstream of the short-term electoral needs of the Democratic Party.
The cultural zeitgeist of 2025 is dependent on who the Republican nominee is in 2024; much more so if they win. Is it going to be "Christians bad", "Rich people bad", or "White people bad"? We'll have to wait and see.
I'll have a face-to-face debate with anyone, anytime.
Only where liquor is served.
I have had heated debates with people who i have just met (like at a party or something), not sure if that is what you would qualify as arguing.
I think it's very rare for anyone to argue face-to-face with people they don't know personally.
So did you read Neal Stephenson's new book too?
I'll make a casual prediction that if there's a tipping point, there will be several people attempting geoengineering with different projects, which will increase the odds of something weird happening.
Also, weird things happening w.r.t. the climate may or may not be due to them. To try to geoengineer is to end up being believed responsible for what happens....
One guy's already doing it. The jury's still out on whether it makes sense.
https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/5/24/18273198/climate-change-russ-george-unilateral-geoengineering
(with apologies for linking Vox)
Usual reminder that all schemes based on intercepting shortwave before it reaches Earth are super-dangerous and could kill billions. We need light to grow food.
I wouldn't count on laws to protect someone committing obvious crimes against humanity who had no state backing, even in the case of punishment, and in the case of simply stopping them that's straight-up what emergency powers are for (compare, for instance, how police can shoot you without any kind of trial if you are at that time commtting a spree killing). For that matter, a state doing this would be casus belli; only the nuclear states could actually do this and not get immediately toppled.
Sorry it's not exactly on topic, but would you (or anyone) recommend any good resources on geoengineering strategies, their scientific basis, consequences, risks, cost etc?
Today I listened to a very interesting podcast episode on the physics-engineering-economics of managing global heating, especially using mirrors deployed at ground level. This would look kind of like agrivoltaics, with mirrors covering 10-20% of, say, an agricultural field.
https://www.volts.wtf/p/volts-podcast-dr-ye-tao-on-a-grand#details
Tao suggests that it can be done affordably with mirrors made from soda-lime glass or with metalized PET (basically mylar balloon material), and that it would lead to relatively predictable amounts of cooling, localized within the ~500 meters surrounding the area with the mirrors. They've started small-scale experiments.
Renature swamplands. Make them wet again. Swamps are a surprisingly great carbon sink. And yet they can be agriculturally interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paludiculture
There was a book review (non-finalist) on Stephenson's novel "Termination shock", which is on geo-engineering. Citing from that review:
"Despite my deep respect for Stephenson as a researcher and belief that he's an essentially honest writer, I thought it best to fill out my knowledge of solar geoengineering by consulting a couple recent works of nonfiction. I settled on Elizabeth Kolbert's Under A White Sky and Gernot Wagner's Geoengineering: The Gamble. I found both books to be highly informative, with the authors displaying excellent journalistic neutrality covering a subject that is both technically and ethically complex."
You can find a short summary of both books in Section III of the review:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/100kMdSVFviZSSBvUyyEQPMNlvLptVQxHFD9i9wGuBWs/edit#heading=h.xdzniqghxa99
Consequences and risks are fairly unknown and to some degree unknowable before trying it, which is most of why they haven't been done yet.
As for cost, I've seen stratospheric sulphur injection costed at 10s of millions of dollars per annum to completely correct the global temperature anomaly (though excess CO2 + less sunlight is not exactly the same for the planet as the preindustrial atmosphere). Logistically, that one wants to be built next to a pile of mine tailings so it won't get to be in international waters, but one facility in the right place can probably do the whole globe.
Does anyone else think that injecting a ton of sulphur into the stratosphere is one of those ideas that if we try it, will end up "well crap, at the time it seemed okay, how were we to know *this* would happen?"
Somehow, to my ignorant mind, emulating Venus' sulphuric acid cloud layer does not seem desirable.
They're talking about sulfates, more or less what you get *after* sulfuric acid fully reacts with something. Very unreactive stuff in general, and tends to be spewed into the sky regularly by volcanoes already.
But yes of course it's a silly "swallow a spider to catch the fly" idea.
We know the effects of dumping different amounts of sulphur into the stratosphere because volcanoes do it from time to time. We'd make sure to release nowhere near as much as Tambora did in 1816, leading to 'the year without a summer' and Mormonism. The numbers I've seen for geoengineering max out around Pinatubo level.
Historical evidence also shows us that the sulphur falls out within a year or two.
If you did Pinatubo levels, so what? That's not actually that much of a drop; Tambora didn't even get a full degree.
Yes, I think that a lot of people have thought that it would wind up with unintended consequences, which is a major part of the reason that it's not an idea taken seriously.
(More cynically it's not taken seriously because the sort of people who make a big noise about climate change have no interest in a cheap, easy solution to climate change; they want a fundamental reordering of the global economy.)
And just for anyone who doesn't recognize the title, "Ministry for the Future" is a recent book by Kim Stanley Robinson, famous for a series about terraforming Mars a few decades ago.
Here's a series of discussions of the book, with responses by the author: https://crookedtimber.org/2021/05/03/the-ministry-for-the-future-seminar/