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.
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/viwiMQLM