1036 Comments

If you really had the time machine, it could definitely be both. It just occurred to me the other day that most fiction is more concerned with travel to the past and back than travel to the future and back.

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https://www.facebook.com/groups/2332427903704805/permalink/3355824498031802/

Analogies with AGI timeline estimates are left as an exercise for the reader.

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Are all of these things not pretty clearly all things that fall under the umbrella of online speech policing? Whether the mobs are directly involved, or if someone resigns before it gets that far, or because he or she thinks it MIGHT get that far, it's all kind of the same catalyst. It would probably be useful to limit this category to forms of career/personal life wrecking that have only existed for the past ~10 years. Your boss might have fired you in 1992 for streaking on tv at a baseball game (lol) but wouldn't for making racial jokes at the office because of a different set of social norms prevailed at that time. The specific set of norms that have existed for the past few years are clearly somewhat distinct from what came before.

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This makes a lot of sense to me.

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It's definitely possible that, say, everyone the Roman Senate was richer than anyone in classical Greece, but the top 5% of Greeks were richer than the top 5% of Romans.

I dunno about the Greek reputation for knowledge being the result of Roman superfandom. Wouldn't the Romans naturally have tooted their own (Latin speaking) culture even more?

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"It's definitely possible that, say, everyone the Roman Senate was richer than anyone in classical Greece, but the top 5% of Greeks were richer than the top 5% of Romans." This is I think probably what historians would mostly agree with, at least if you count only citizens. There were a lot more slaves per capita in the Classical Greece than in the Roman Empire, though. Also as an aside, I think women probably had more freedom in the Roman Empire, complicating the picture further.

Roman elite considered it a matter of prestige to know "Greek learning", somewhat similar like it is now prestigious to attend Ivy League university. E.g. Cicero studied philosophy in Athens. Marcus Aurelius was so thoroughly hellenized that he wrote what is basically his own personal diary (Meditations) in Greek.

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I suppose they could have tooted their own culture even more, but they didn't. The greatest work of Roman literature is fanfiction of the greatest work of Greek literature.

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I've noticed a huge improvement in my mental and physical health and chess rating after switching multivitamins 3 days ago (from Pure Encapsulations O.N.E to 2/3 of the recommended dose of Alive Max3)

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If, as Buddhists say, all life is suffering, and your goal should be to avoid reincarnation, why aren't they donating lots of money to help Yog Sothoth devour ALL the galaxies? If there's no life in the universe, there's no suffering. Is this a reductio ad absurdum of Buddhist doctrine?

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Yog Sothoth is a fictional entity invented by H.P. Lovecraft as part of his "Cthulhu mythos" strange fiction writing in the early 1900s; presumably the Buddhists are in contact with deities who actually exist.

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It's also a hypothetical and a reference to this post by Scott: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/moral-costs-of-chicken-vs-beef

I hope you get my drift.

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I get you; in that case, it's reductio ad absurdum. If we're that opposed to existence itself, we've gone way beyond suffering or harm reduction, and we're really critiquing the decision of the gods and Buddhas to create the cosmos to begin with.

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Yes, it's about per capita wealth. What I found most interesting about it was that the richest Greeks were much richer than the richest Romans (assuming the analysis is correct). The richest Romans were vastly wealthier than the richest peoples in any medieval European society.

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The article argues that ordinary people were better off in Classical Greece than the Roman Empire. And that Greece had more people with enough wealth to become philosophers. But the impression I've had from other sources is that Rome had a small number of individuals with truly outrageous wealth, richer than any Greek, perhaps richer than anyone else in the world except for their own Emperor. So the Empire could plausibly have had higher per capita wealth, which the vast majority of citizens never saw.

As a side note, I think the Greek reputation for knowledge was largely the Romans' doing. The Greeks happened to be the first literate culture to influence Italy, which gave them a lot of prestige in the eyes of Italians. Then the peoples of the Empire imitated the Romans by reading Greek books.

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https://rafaelrguthmann.substack.com/p/on-the-prosperity-of-different-periods

Did anyone else read this article? Tyler Cowen linked to it recently. In a nutshell, the idea is that while the Roman Empire was extremely rich compared to all of the other pre-modern societies (up through about 1700), Ancient Greece (pre-Roman conquest) was significantly richer. Evidence provided includes the size of house and lower population density in classical Greek towns, the high wages paid to unskilled Greek laborers and soldiers, and of course Ancient Greece's status as THE center of learning in the entire ancient world. Pretty cool article, and seemed plausible.

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But unless I am missing something, this is about per capita income/wealth. There were far more people in the Roman Empire than in the Classical Greece. And I think than when people say things like "Roman Empire was extremely rich compared to all of the other pre-modern societies", they mean aggregate wealth.

Few people would claim that being an average inhabitant of the Roman Empire meant being extremely rich by premodern standards, I think.

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Does anyone find the notion of time travel to the future more interesting than time travel to the past? I haven't encountered a lot of people who do. It seems like humans are almost universally more interested in making their past selves rich using knowledge from the present than using knowledge from the future to make their present or "near future" selves rich. I wonder if this is a failure of imagination on all of our parts (not being able to envision the future in fine detail, we are more bored by it).

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Why is it an either/or? If you plan to go back in time with advanced technology, make a quick stop by the far future first so the tech you're bringing back is *even more advanced*!

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founding

Make a quick stop in the far future and get yourself arrested for petty larceny, unlicensed time-meddling, lèse-majesté, tax evasion, crimes against veganity, or some offense as yet unconceived? I'm not sure I'd bet on the far future just handing out technology to passing time-travellers.

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In essence, both of these are the same though: whether you technology-share from 2230 to 2020 or from 2020 to 1810, you're going to end up with a society that has iterated on 2020 technology for 200 years. This will be complicated by an adjustment period, but that's going to be true of both: we're just as unused to 2230 technology as the 1810 people will be to 2020 technology.

Past-travel also lets you erase/reroll any problems you already know about that have happened in that time: if fusion was up and running in 1870 and resource concerns are completely different, maybe you skip a couple of world wars. There are probably similar problems from 2020 to 2230, but you don't know about those, and you probably erase those too by pushing the tech tree forward.

Also, if you travel to the past and share your own technology, you return to a time that's already incorporated those changes smoothly: you're probably not going to stick around in 1810 to help develop it, so whoever you hand it off to does all the hard work and you advance your home tech by however much. If you take 2230 technology back to 2020, you're probably going to stay in 2020 and have to live through the adaptation period.

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That's a very different take from my usual assumptions.

I always assumed you live in the past once you've gone back. Since there you'd be a super important person who has changed the world, where in your own original time, everything has changed from what you grew up with and no one you knew in your own timeline was ever even born; after introducing computers and modern electricity to the 1810's, going back to 2020 would present all the same problems as going to 2200.

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If you live in the past, you might be famous and important, but you're accepting a strict downgrade in technology: you're only bringing back the stuff you have in the present, and it'll take time, possibly your whole lifetime, to incorporate it into society and improve upon it. And you still wouldn't know anyone personally, at best you'd know a few famous figures from history classes (and you might be changing the timeline enough that they aren't important anymore).

If you live in the upgraded present, you could still be super important since you led to the current level of technological development (assuming you're ok with knowledge of time travel being available, and realistically they should have it already since you had it in original 2020) and you'd also get all the benefits of living in a more advanced society.

Maybe you just live 20-50 years ahead of where you introduced the technology to get the best of both worlds: still should be well known, technology won't have advanced far enough to leave you in the dust, but will still be notably better than what you have. But there are a bunch of tradeoffs there and different people might have different preferences.

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Mmm, that last suggestion does sound like a sweet spot. Go back to 1800, introduce the tech, tell them you'll check in once every ten years to see how things are progressing, pop ahead to 1810, check in, see if you want to stay, rinse and repeat?

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You could also consider going to 1810, staying till 1811, then jumping to 1820, staying till 1821, and so on, so that you have a year to adapt to each technology improvement successively. Do that for 10 years, you'll have a constant flow of new and interesting-but-not-overwhelming technology, not feel wildly out of place, and still be 100 years ahead technologically.

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At least part of it is agency; if I go back in time with modern tech and knowledge, I get to act like a demi-god in many ways. (Imagine walking up to the Imperial Roman palace, shooting any guards who try to stop you, killing the emperor and declaring yourself Caesar. Or showing up with insulin and penicillin and healing sick people as if by magic.) If you want to disguise yourself and blend in, you can research what to wear, how to talk, ect.

If I travel forwards in time; I'm some backwards technophobe who doesn't understand anything, is wearing period clothes from the past, and I don't even have an implanted RFID microchip to unlock the door to the coffee shop.

Sure, if I could somehow steal some technology and bring it back with me I might be able to come back to the present and do the whole "demi-God" thing, but first I have to steal the technology and sneak it back with me. The future society probably doesn't want me messing up their whole timeline, so they'll likely try to stop me. Maybe I can grab a bunch of open source academic papers from 2200, but I'll still have to get access to their computer systems somehow.

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If you don't plan to return back, I would expect the future to be better. In the past, you can enjoy being Caesar for a short time, and then the lack of antibiotics will kill you. During that short time you will miss the internet and other luxuries of modern life. (Just imagine: being Caesar, but not being able to post about it on social networks.)

On the other hand, if the future has some social support system, at least on the level of providing housing and food for the homeless, you will get to enjoy at least the cheapest of those awesome things that will be invented centuries later. That category may include more than we imagine. But you will have low social status, of course, unless being a time traveller gives you some prestige.

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Jun 30, 2022·edited Jun 30, 2022

Well I'm taking antibiotics back with me if I'm going back. I don't really like the social network sites, and if I'm Caesar, I don't need them. Anyone I want to talk to is coming to live at court.

I'd much rather have the agency and status of controlling the whole world than the luxuries of a future social safety net. (Like, I literally cannot imagine a world so good to it's bottom 10% that it would outweigh the status of being emperor of Rome with an Armalite rifle and antibiotics.)

If you can imagine such a thing, please write a short story about it or describe it. Because... it's beyond me.

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Jun 30, 2022·edited Jun 30, 2022

Okay, maybe not quite beyond me.

It would be better to live in a world where even the poorest person could afford a private interstellar FTL spacecraft and there was a 99.999999% effective dating app.

I would take that world over being Caesar, I suppose.

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Have you read the Culture novels? I'd take being a random nobody citizen of the Culture over being an Emperor in humanities past, at least from a hedonistic perspective (I would strongly consider the potential to bootstrap humanity's advancement, at the cost of actually having to do hard work myself).

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I'm confused by people who think all immigration restriction is deontologically immoral on libertarian priors. Jointly owned land (e.g., public roads) is still owned and hence it would be trespassing to enter it without express or implied permission from the owner (i.e., the government as the corporate entity representing all the citizens who jointly own it)

Thought experiment: Suppose 100 farmers individually own sovereign freehold farms. Clearly each of them has the individual right to keep trespassers off of his individual property. Now suppose these 100 farmers band together for mutual defense of their respective individual rights. IE they form a government. Suppose the contractual terms of joining the union require giving the union partial ownership of all your land, and delegating the right to eject trespassers. The delegated right to eject trespassers from jointly owned land would clearly give the union the right to restrict immigration. If sovereign individuals couldn't contractually agree to band together into a union with the right to restrict who else can enter/join the union, that would be a very serious violation of their freedom of association.

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Parrhesia pointed me to this objection to SMTM's chemical hunger: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7iAABhWpcGeP5e6SB/it-s-probably-not-lithium#fnrefpcialf566oj

Which is great, and you should read it if you've read SMTM's Chemical Hunger, but leaves me with an interesting problem: I'm writing a series on this, and this post is basically what my last post was going to be (but much better than what I would have done).

I'm sort of at a loss now for how to continue the series - how lame is it to make a post that says "just go read this!"?

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I'm really interested in the chemical hunger hypothesis. I'd love to see more people investigating. Even if you end up just stating that you agree with everything in that lesswrong post, I still want to see it, because it's great to have more than one person confirm the data.

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https://www.residentcontrarian.com/p/smtms-chemical-hunger-iii-scooped

That's probably about as much as I'm going to go from here. I found most of Natália's arguments pretty strong, but ended up hitting it more from a "where does this leave us" angle.

I'm doing that for a few reasons, but the main one is there's just so many places even a casual person can poke holes in ACH (as demonstrated by many, including me) that I'm not sure there's any huge reason to trust them on any of it.

I've been trying to be clear that I don't necessarily think this means that chemical contaminants are ruled out, but I think SMTM are committed to the idea of it (and of breaking new, exciting ground) in a way that makes them less-than-careful. At the very least I'd say anybody reading them has good reason to verify, source by source, if what they are claiming is backed up by anything.

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Just because someone else already did it, and (possibly) did it better, doesn't mean you can't still do it. If you feel like you have something to say, why not post it?

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I'm going to post *something*, probably today. But very honestly this person beat the hell out of what I can do on the quant side right now. Me trying to "outdo" them is about as likely as it is to introduce error as it is to help.

I'm mostly interested in amplifying them a bit and mentioning some more qual stuff, I think.

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I remember reading an article awhile back which was called something like "The undefinability of computer largeness". It was essentially a parody of the claim that since there is no exact definition of intelligence, that it makes no sense to talk about intelligent machines and is impossible to make an intelligent machine. The article then took the same argument and applied it to computer largeness and came to absurd results.

I can't seem to find this article though, does anyone know what I am talking about?

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On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines

https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.10987

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Enthusiasts, when streaming data mining operations do you use a cloud storage solution or found an open source way for storing teras?

I'm building some standardized architecture solutions but don't want to immediately pay monthly billing fees to CSPs...

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For people anywhere near software engineer hiring, how has the game changed for you since the market crashed? Easier? Same?

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The market crashed? When?

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A month or so ago, depending on how you think about it? Note this is very specifically a tech market crash, but it's been affecting hiring/firing in some significant ways. I had a soft job offer evaporate overnight, the company I work for dumped a bunch of people and froze hiring on some other classifications, etc.

I'm far from an expert here, but the biggest difference for a lot of companies seems to be that capital is drying up, and so a lot of companies that thought they could rely on endless funding are scrambling. Some companies weren't built that way and seem to be having a lot less trouble, which makes it hard for me to make any confident statements about how wide-spread this is.

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My anecdotal experience: It's gotten harder to get a job if you're new to mid level software engineer. Seniors and above continue to be in high demand though not as high as before. Still, high end people are still getting poached and all that. Salaries have gone up across the board but especially for seniors. I think this is partly inflation and partly the increased demand for high end talent.

There's less interesting work. But there's a nearly never ending number of standard issue corporations who will soak up the talent. Software engineers don't like working for Wells Fargo or the NBA or Kellogs. But those companies definitely hire software engineers. And they tend to pay somewhat above market rate to compensate for the fact the work is boring and non-prestigious.

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Thank for this. The existence of my job is very closely connected to engineers-are-hard-to-hire, so I'm trying to get a bead on this. I *strongly* suspect my current job will go away this week/month (although I might very well be wrong) for crash-related reasons, and so "did my job stop existing at my current company, or everwhere?" is becoming an increasingly relevant question for me.

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A lot of companies are talking about cutting operational expenses. On the other hand, what's fat to one company is key to another. If you think your job is going away I'd start looking now. There's always work to be done and iirc you're a specialist writer so demand for that isn't crashing.

Also, if you feel comfortable, you can also have a frank conversation with your boss. They might lie to you and say you're definitely staying when you're not. They might also not be willing to bend. But if you're on the chopping block and willing to talk about it you can get some minor accommodation. Advanced warning and maybe some time to find a new place to work.

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I'm kind of specialized - not as much as I'd like. Essentially I manage the potential-employee facing image of the company, and there's parts of that I'm better at than others. If I were a purely technical writer in a way that was more common, I don't think I'd worry as much (but I'd also probably make less,).

Frank conversations will be hard right now. As bad as this sounds, "stay under the radar" is a valuable chip to give up lately; people who aren't perceived to be doing very well are perceived to be doing very bad in a binary sense. I did go to HR to ask some basic questions about the changes that have me worried, but they essentially turtled up in a legally defensible way - I don't think they actually knew.

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Entirely possible that they don't know. But if they're not making the cuts in a determined way and they're reliant on funding that's a sign it's a sinking sip.

I'd still keep searching. You might want to look into expanding into recruiting and marketing copywriting. Neither of those are going away. There's always marketplaces looking to onboard people or companies looking to recruit at least some senior types. And to be honest the seniors are harder to get anyway.

Seriously, I know some companies with millions in revenue that are just senior software recruiters. They barely even deal with entry level and make their money recruiting for third parties.

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So, I got offered a new job, quite interested in it, but they want me to take a Meyers Briggs Personality Test and a Four Tendencies Quiz first.

They said "there's no right or wrong answers" but they're using this as a screening tool; so clearly there are.

What are recruiters looking for with these tests?

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There's no telling for sure, but it seems likely they are trying to use it as a rough IQ proxy. They might be worried you are an ESFJ and thus not (statistically) able to figure out how to open doors, or whatever.

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Jul 3, 2022·edited Jul 3, 2022

I always wondered if some Myers-Briggs types are just a polite category for normies.

I think I never met a person I'd consider interesting who wasn't clustered in a particular half of Myers-Briggs. Perhaps the other half thinks the same.

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I don't know if it's IQ they're using, so much as trying to filter out "undesirable" personality types. I never heard of the Four Tendencies Quiz, and looking it up gives me:

"One of the daily challenges of life is: “How do I get people—including myself—to do what I want?” The Four Tendencies framework makes this task much easier by revealing whether a person is an Upholder, Questioner, Obliger, or Rebel."

So clearly an employer would prefer someone who is an Upholder rather than a Rebel (e.g. if the question of forming a union in a non-union company comes up) and they would much rather someone who is stable and undramatic rather than a flakey type who might cause problems.

If they're dumb or not can be worked out at interview, you don't want to call the trouble-making dramatist for interview, turn them down for the position, and then have them badmouthing your business all over social media as discriminatory and bigoted. "Just because I am neurodivergent, this backwards company refused to offer me the job for which I am well qualified!" type of tweets that get passed around as gospel truth and the company can't very well come back with "in fact, this person didn't get the job because they are crazy as a bag of weasels".

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Well, sending it in. Got ESTP-T, which... seems perhaps less than ideal for the heavy equipment operator position they're offering.

Still a little worried about the dishonesty though. Don't see any way that "no right or wrong answers" could be a true statement.

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Well, it's *technically* true that on a personality test, there are no right or wrong answers. Some people are of a happy disposition, some people are more serious. There is no 'right or wrong' there.

But yeah, they're going to be screening for a particular personality type - the same way that if this was a sales position, they're not going to pick the person whose ideal job would be librarian and likes to spend time in solitary hobbies or long walks alone.

That's not bad in itself, but it would be nice if they were more honest. Then again, if they *were* more honest about "we are looking for this, this and this quality in a potential employees", the exact kind of aggrieved trouble-making personality they are trying to screen out (amongst other things) would be likely to make a fuss about "this is discrimination against me and I am going to file a complaint!" https://work.chron.com/file-complaint-against-employers-unfair-hiring-practice-9846.html

Looking up your MB type, I see that:

https://www.verywellmind.com/estp-extraverted-sensing-thinking-perceiving-2795986

"ESTP: The Persuader (Extraverted, Sensing, Thinking, Perceiving)

People with this personality type are frequently described as outgoing, action-oriented, and dramatic. ESTPs are outgoing and enjoy spending time with a wide circle of friends and acquaintances. They are interested in the here-and-now and are more likely to focus on details than taking a broader view of things.

People with this personality type are logical. When making decisions, they place a higher value on objectivity rather than personal feelings. ESTPs don't like to be pinned down by excessive planning. Instead, they like to improvise and keep their options open."

That's pretty good, maybe not the immediate type for heavy equipment operator, but you're a good workplace fit in that you will get on with co-workers, be practical, and do the job in front of you with enough flexibility to respond to changes in circumstances that make the previous plan/schedule outdated.

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Update: they were being completely honest. The possibility that we didn't consider was that this wasn't being used as a screening tool but as a sorting tool. They had already decided to hire me (labour market conditions meant that they had multiple openings and would hire someone only to have that person turn down the job for a better offer, so they weren't going to turn up their nose over a personality test) and were using this to determine who best to assign me to work with.

Loving the new job. Work crazy hours and haven't had time to read the blog let alone comment.

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I mean, I'm ISTJ and this says amongst other things:

"ISTJs also place a great deal of emphasis on traditions and laws. They prefer to follow rules and procedures that have previously been established. In some cases, ISTJs can seem rigid and unyielding in their desire to maintain structure."

I bet you would never have guessed that from the content I post 😁

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I can never remember what my letter classification is, but the place I have taken the test classifies it as the debater, and says something that paraphrases roughly to:

"You are a dick who argues with people for no reason at all. People find this confusing, and it is of limited use. Why are you like this?"

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Username checks out.

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I could probably justify some sort of way where "there aren't right or wrong answers, your personality isn't a crime, but we won't let you use cranes as an extrovert" isn't a direct lie, but yeah, they are implying that this doesn't matter and if it didn't they wouldn't care.

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Looks like Turkey is dropping its objections to Finland and Sweden joining NATO.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/28/politics/joe-biden-g7-nato/index.html

Anybody think there's another way this might get scuttled? And if not, what are the implications?

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It might be scuttled if Swedish parliament refuses to enact some legislation on which Turkey conditions its approval (basically, selling out the Kurds). See their joint memorandum here: https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_197342.htm?selectedLocale=en. Finland, which is far more important in military terms, is probably in the clear, unless they would "wait" in solidarity with Sweden.

Main implication seems to be that chances of any Russian military "shenanigans", in the Baltic region would be drastically reduced, and in the case of the outright war between NATO and Russia it improves NATO position.

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The main implication is that whatever the end result of the Ukrainian war, Putin has failed in his proclaimed goal of stopping NATO's expansion.

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Just like Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union doing more to spread communism into Eastern Europe than anything Stalin could have achieved without the second World War.

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Finland significantly increases the combat power of NATO by joining, (hundreds of thousands of reservists available to throw into a war.) Sweden brings one of NATO's biggest weapon suppliers "In House.".

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Jun 28, 2022·edited Jun 28, 2022

After taking in the book review contest entry's on fusion predictions, maybe some here would be interested in contributing to forecasts on fusion?

There are a bunch of questions on it on Metaculus. One of them is on fusion ignition (https://www.metaculus.com/questions/3727/when-will-a-fusion-reactor-reach-ignition/). Unfortunately IMO the resolution criterion is not ideal, as there seems to be no scientific consensus on what fusion ignition means precisely in different experimental settings.

I have tried to lay out some of the problems in a comment (https://www.metaculus.com/questions/3727/when-will-a-fusion-reactor-reach-ignition/#comment-95884), but I am a total lay person in this area. Contributions of people with expertise would be highly valuable in getting us better forecasts on fusion. Likewise editing the Wikipedia article on fusion ignition would be very useful in disseminating knowledge on this topic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_ignition?wprov=sfla1).

Fusion has the potential to be a major game changer for the future of humankind, so the quality of forecasts could have a major impact!

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Just chipping in to say that the new look (of the ASC) is better than the old look. Let's counter negativity bias :-)

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Me too! I didn't even notice until you pointed it out; it just felt right.

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I like the new color and font better than the previous ones as well.

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Yep, much better. The clinical black on white was so bleak.

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Agreed. It's much more easy on the eye now.

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Yep, I like these color experiments, too!

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Also, no one (caveat: I have not read all comments, so perhaps someone did) seems to have noticed that font in the posts has changed. And new font is better.

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Strong vote against the blue background. It makes me not want to read at all.

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I don't like it either. What the site needs to improve aesthetically are margins, but that doesn't appear to be an option

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Strong supporting agreeing vote. I really loathe the blue color and it causes eyestrain after a couple of minutes. It's fine to do the standard black on white.

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Looking for a book to help someone who is having trouble with a change in work setting: She has a science Ph.D., and recently left academics for industry. New work setting is less friendly & collegial, much more corporate and competitive, with people who don't find ways to toot their own horn failing to get promotions or even respect. Her actual skills are fine -- she's not having any trouble with the work tasks themselves. I think a high-quality self-help book is what's called for. She is a gentle soul, and is not going to go for "learn how to be a shark too" kind of stuff. She needs something more moderate than that. Anyone know of anything?

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I'd go with Musonious Rufus, Lecture's and Fragments. Your friend sounds more like a Stoic than an Epicurean.

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Is there a hardware analog of neurons? I had a student job in an entomology lab where trichogrammas - tiny wasps, smaller than this bit of punctuation ‘.’ - were being tested as an alternative to pesticides. They like to eat the egg mass of European corn borers.

Per Wikipedia they have no more than 10,000 neurons yet they have fairly complex behavior. The males aggressively seek mates and they all are able to find the correct food for example. I’m wondering how 10,000 neurons would translate to computer hardware.

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Yes, there is the field of neuromorphic chip design. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromorphic_engineering

They are still quite a bit away from mass markets. The promising thing about them is that they consume several orders of magnitude less energy than transistor-based hardware.

And of course, there are lots of simulations of neural networks in normal hardware, not just the simple ones that are used in machine learning. The complexity of the neurons ranges all the way from simple switches to complex 3D-shape structures with detailed modelling of their synapses, axons and even ion channels.

By the way, the neuroscientific mainstream has moved away from considering neurons as simple units that just add up incoming signals (leaky integrate-and-fire). The more modern perspective is that the dendrites are already mini-computers performing non-trivial operations (e.g., coincidence detection). So even a single neuron might already be considered as a mini-computer.

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Thanks for the info and the link.

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San Fransicko review made me think about polarization, political narratives, silencing and toxoplaxma of rage, once again.

It's interesting how people keep saying that the left silences uncomfortable truths and then, as example of such truths, proceed to say things which I, as a frequent leftist media consumer, is very well familiar with. Homeless people commiting crimes and taking drugs which contributes to their homelessness is one of such unimpressive revelation. Go listen to the activists for the rights of mentally ill. They will tell you how non-neurotypical people are more vulnerable to various bad outcomes, including drug use and poor economical conditions which can lead to homelessness and that's why we need more awareness, better social programs, universal health care, yadda yadda. On the other hand, some people are definetely being silenced and cancelled. So what's going on?

The answer, I think, is that people are usually opposed not for the ideas themselves, but for the narrative that is being pushed. Due to polarization, there are two Overton windows and you have to choose which one to fit in and which one you are against. Pick your side of the culture war. Either you appeal to progressives or to conservatives.

If the author just wanted to promote Amsterdam's model he didn't really need to attack housing first approach nor mainstream narrative. Indeed, mainstreem narrative assumes Amsterdam's model to be an example of harm reduction. Shellenberger had to define terms differently in order to oppose it! He could have easily talked in the framework of "housing first but not only". How mainstream ideas are mostly correct but can use some improvements. But he choosed not to, because he wanted to appeal to the different tribe and promote a different narrative.

And of course these dynamics are self sustaining. Talking about left censorship is a standard beat, while appealing to the red tribe up to the point where I struggle to see it as anything more than just pure signalling. And no surprise that I struggle, because left leaning people get inoculated from the idea of them shutting debates, seeing again and again how such claims are used in bad faith. And such situation is memetically advantageous for both narratives. Both leftists and rightists can this way ignore criticism and preserve their beliefs even if they are not correlated with reality.

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You're strawmanning. I'm not aware of anyone who denies the basic issues of homelessness in big cities. What I am aware of is Democrats who will deny their policy preferences have anything to do with the prevalence of homelessness and Republicans who insist they do. Republicans don't say that Democrats deny that their cities have issues. They say that Democrats deny that their policies lead to outcomes like the ones you see in (for example) San Fransisco.

To take what I think is a fairly non-partisan example: It's like how NIMBYs claim their preferences don't lead to higher housing costs. No one is denying the fact of higher housing costs. They're denying that their policy preferences are the cause. Now imagine if NIMBYs had a very shouty activist class that has a tendency to socially shun and morally abhor people who disagree with them.

That's what Republicans are claiming. Democrats do X which causes Y and then they insist that X does not cause Y because they a priori like X. But they don't have good arguments so they shout down the opposition.

Whether that's true I can't say. But your counter is not a counter to what they're actually saying. What you say in your second paragraph would be seen as a deflection tactic, something they often bring up as what they call liberal cope. "Y isn't caused by X. It's caused by not being X enough! X cannot fail, X can only be failed!"

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It seems that you missed my point to a degree where it started looking as a strawman version of yours. I wasn't actually trying to counter anything. I just observed that what people are saying - silencing of ideas - isn't what is actually happening - narrative is being opposed while the same ideas can be expressed without much pushback and even with endorsement. And how this situation is memetically favourable for both narratives as they can continue to exist without much challange, after all claims to be silenced and censored is an opportunity to dismiss criticism as instance of such silencing.

I used the idea of causality between drug use/mental illness and homelessness as an example of idea which is alledgedly opposed by mainstream but actually being talked about just in a different context. I didn't claim that republicans claim that democrat claim that their cities have no issues.

It's well known that people usually blame outgroup for all the bad outcomes and credit ingroup for all the good ones. The question whether in every individual instance it's actually true the the outgroup is at fault is the important one. The fact that people can dismiss the question without even exploring it is part of the problem, I'm trying to pinpoint.

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There is pretty serious disagreement. The right sees homeless as driven directly by blue state/blue city policies. For example, lack of policing or nuisance laws come up a lot in right wing discourse. Or what they'd term socialist housing policy. Or any number of things.

The pure attribution to deinstitutionalization, seeing it as solely a mental health crisis, is the left wing point of view. It's the equivalent of how the left agrees with the right that mass shooters are mentally disturbed but doesn't see that as a primary driver.

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Strongly agree with this. I find talk of cancel culture or whatever to be so banal and often much more telling about the person making the accusation than what incident they are labeling as cancel culture.

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"There is no such thing as cancel culture, and if it happens to you, you deserved it" school of thought?

I was somewhat dubious of "cancel culture" as being A Thing (there have always been idiots trying to get people in trouble) but the more I read pieces that went "Cancel culture? *ostentatious yawning and performance of supreme boredown and ennui* I'm sorry, what were we talking about?" from people on the side alleged to be engaging in it, the more I started to think it was indeed happening.

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No I am not from that school of thought (though there are instances where the "cancelled" could have easily avoided it).

My biggest issue with "Cancel Culture" is that it doesn't seem to have any precise meaning.

Personally, I trace its origins back to Justine Sacco and #HasJustineLandedYet which was clearly an innocent person being unjustly targeted by an Internet mob. To me that was disgusting.

But today cancel culture seems to mostly mean disagreeing with someone until they feel bad about it. And often the presumed victim benefits from the "cancelling" by either dominating social media or turning it into some political or financial win.

There are still innocent people that are targeted by internet mobs but this is a small fraction of "Cancel Culture" and is rarely what people are referring to or thinking about.

If we can agree on a definition of cancel culture then maybe I'll start being sympathetic to the argument that it's a "culture" at all. Until then I'll have to take each instance on its own and make a judgement based on the facts of each incident.

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"But today cancel culture seems to mostly mean disagreeing with someone until they feel bad about it. And often the presumed victim benefits from the "cancelling" by either dominating social media or turning it into some political or financial win."

Possible selection bias: You are more likely to hear about those who succeeded to translate being cancelled into some kind of profit, than about those who didn't.

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Yeah, most people lack the savvy to turn these lemons into lemonade, and mostly just take a big personal financial hit.

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Do we really need a super rigorous definition? I think using it as a catchall term for "the tendency of internet mobs to wreck people's lives via coordinated smear campaigns on social media over perceived offensive statements" is good enough.

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But that isn't how the term is used the vast majority of the time.

Here are the 4 of the top 5 articles I get when I search for "cancel culture" in google news (the Dakota Johnson one is repeated in the top 5):

Piers Morgan says Michael Vaughan is a victim of 'cancel culture at its worst'

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/sportsnews/article-10964979/Piers-Morgan-Michael-Vaughan-cancel-culture-victim-resigning-racism-claims-backlash.html

A former cricketer and current TV commentator is accused by a current cricketer of racism. The commentator quits his job but denies the racism. There is no coordinated smear campaign, this guy is rich, his life is not ruined, and he has a famous person coming to his defense.

Dakota Johnson Struggles With Cancel Culture: 'Horrifying, Heartbreaking and Wrong'

https://movieweb.com/dakota-johnson-cancel-culture/

Famous actress thinks cancel culture is bad and talks about the Johnny Depp/Amanda Heard trial.

Rowan Atkinson Says Cancel Culture Is Hurting Comedy: ‘Every Joke Has a Victim’

https://www.indiewire.com/2022/06/rowan-atkinson-cancel-culture-comedy-1234735202/

Famous actor with a new Netflix show says some dumb stuff during a press junket about how he can't make jokes (but apparently can make a comedy show?).

The Other Cancel Culture: How a Public University Is Bowing to a Conservative Crusade

https://www.propublica.org/article/idaho-crt-boise-state-university

Conservative legislatures are pushing state universities to curb speech they don't like. I find this reprehensible but doesn't meet your definition at all.

The rest of the first page is more of the same.

If people truely did mean "the tendency of internet mobs to wreck people's lives via coordinated smear campaigns on social media over perceived offensive statements" then I would be right there with you. But "cancel culture" hasn't meant just that for many years now.

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Perhaps it's the implied threat of an angry twitter mob that's the problem, the mob doesn't have to come out all that often for people to feel their thoughts should be shared in private.

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Okay, we could insert the words "attempt to" in front of "wreck people's lives" into my definition then. These celebrities get in trouble over these things when they start trending on Twitter.

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Yeah, it's pure gaslighting.

"Of course I'm not an emotionally abusive boyfriend. What even is emotional abuse, anyway? Have you considered that maybe you're making me behave this way?"

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Pretty ironic, that the exact same argument can be used for the previous level of recursion.

Of course I'm not a bigot. What even being bigot means this days, anyway? I'm just being cancelled for no reason and these people are the real bigots!

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Yes, I'm sure if you only held beliefs that would not put your career, livelihood, access to the internet / bank account / payment processors, safety, or life in jeopardy if expressed publicly, then you would find the whole discussion pretty boring.

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I hold plenty of beliefs that would not go over very well with many people in my life. However, I don't go around spouting them when it's not appropriate or when the potential downside outweighs the upside.

I can't see any reason to get in a debate at work about abortion or a similar subject. I don't go on social media and run my mouth off just to get in fights with people. If I go to a bar and start insulting people and get beat up, is that cancel culture?

Very few people face these consequences unless they are engaging in some unnecessary behavior. And considering the previous president of the United States gloated about sexually assaulting women, I am not sure what behavior is out there that people can't come back from.

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Why is it bad arguing? Before polarization hit hard, people were finding middle ground and focusing on the things in coomon instead of differences as a standard strategy to cooperate.

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Pleased to see people actually testing humans against the new bars for "intelligence" some people are rolling out for AI, like understanding conditional hypotheticals and following trains of logic with more than a couple of moving parts.

I wonder if some of the discussion around "human level intelligence" among AI people is distorted by the fact that AI people mostly interact with unusually intelligent humans? Once you've spent a while chatting to your HR department about why a contract is not what was originally promised when the job was offered, you'll very quickly find out how many humans don't remotely reach this level.

Not sure what the implications of this are, but maybe that AI is further up the scale than we thought already, but also progressing more slowly along it. Could actually be good from an AI risk perspective? Might just be that I'm really pissed at HR right now so can't really think clearly myself?

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Slow people make a lot of the same mistakes the AI does. Hell, I do the same mistakes when I'm tired. I'm reminded of the imperfect way children and GPTs learn to count and do math, and I think it should be extrapolated to all rigorous thought.

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My lord ACX is blue now why is it blue?

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Easier on the eyes IMO.

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Jun 27, 2022·edited Jun 28, 2022

A question regarding the overturning of Roe v Wade: in general, it seems sketchy and undemocratic that laws can be created by an unelected judiciary (even worse, one full of lawyers!)

But can a country truly be called democratic if, after 50 years, its elected officials haven't written a broadly popular judicial opinion into law? If this is ok, wouldn't executives and legislators always prefer to do nothing, leaving everything up to the judiciary?

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This poll says 56% oppose 2nd trimester abortions, which are mandated to be legal by roe, so if a slim majority also support roe they are probably confused about what roe is. https://www.suffolk.edu/news-features/news/2022/06/22/14/25/suffolk-poll-shows-most-voters-not-informed-on-abortion-facts

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>it seems sketchy and undemocratic that laws can be created by an unelected judiciary

That was the problem with Roe and why many "pro-choice" constitutional scholars disagreed with Roe despite being "pro-choice" themselves. Roe invalided the law of all 50 states and created a new law. The judiciary isn't supposed to create laws ever. It's simply not their role. Even RGB, the progressive icon, said that Roe went too far and should have simply ruled the Texas law in question unconstitutional and left it at that. The courts sole purpose is to say what is and is not Constitutional. A terrible law that no one likes or agrees with may be Constitutional and a law everyone on both sides loves and supports may not be Constitutional. We need to better educate people on this. Many debates on this topic are simply unreadable because of a fundamental ignorance as to the purpose of the court in the first place.

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> That was the problem with Roe

Yes. But in reality, the judiciary does create laws all the time, and I don't think it's completely a bad thing - it forces policymakers to think through the consequences of the laws they create on the legal system. The next thing I want to learn about is the way the Bill of Rights works in America - paradoxically, judiciaries kind of seem better behaved in countries without one.

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Maybe its just an issue with the language used, but SCOTUS rulings do not create laws. The law has to exist before SCOTUS will hear a case on it (among many other things needed). So in this case, all they are saying in Dobbs is that the MS law is valid and by extension Roe and Casey are not (but there is no associated law with Roe at the federal level).

Anyway, I completely agree with your second point and it points to a more general failure of the Democratic Party. Democrats have spent the past 50 years since Roe largely expecting it to exist, while Republicans have spent all that time focusing their base on a few issues and working at the state level to take advantage of the opportunity they had with Dobbs. The Democrats should have been spending all the time getting laws passed at the local level but that requires accepting incrementalism which they have largely rejected.

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I'm frustrated with the persistent diligence with which the legislature cedes power by cravenly pawning as much responsibility as it can off to other branches of government, but of all the things I'd hold against them, "not writing a broadly popular judicial opinion into law" isn't one.

It's true that court-created rights and practices like the Miranda warning would be more secure if, in addition to being established in our jurisprudence, they were also set down into statute. That really only has value, though, if the court overturns them, which is like a .001% chance of ever occurring for any court-created rule. Given that the legislative process is (very) not zero-cost, it seems completely rational to me for the legislature spend its efforts on other business, rather than spend limited resources retreading and codifying ground already covered by the courts.

If a court pulls back on a popular court-created right or practice, the legislature can always just deal with it when it happens, which seems a much more efficient use of its time than trying to codify everything prophylactically in hopes of catching the small number of things later courts might change their mind on.

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I think you’re making a valid point in that legislators have a tendency to punt difficult issues and let the judiciary field the ball. It’s politically the smart move. You can solemnly declare the matter is settled law and it’s out of your hands, or rail against an activist judiciary that is tying your hands

I t will be able interesting to see what happens now that the court has punted it back.

A dog chases a firetruck, but what the hell happens when the dog catches it?

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Do you happen to know how binding pre-nup contracts are? I’ve been trying to imagine a framework other than traditional marriage per se in which childbearing could be agreed upon and then legally enforceable (possibly with some type of health exception.) I know it sounds a bit evil but I think some parts of society have become accustomed to pregnancy as a condition that’s reversible at any time. Not all aspects of life can be tapped out of at any time; marriage doesn’t prevent abortion, so what would? Is there an enforceable non-abortion contract (with financial or other penalties for breaking it)?

I’m sympathetic to the argument that Ds never put a law through congress in part so they could keep using it for fundraising.

From what I’ve seen of the polls, “most” people want it to be legal & obtainable before 12 weeks, and after that, rare.

Becoming a mother is indescribable (I am one.) Going into it one does not and cannot know what one is in for. That type of experience doesn’t mesh well with all choices all the time. Sometimes you just have to “bear” it. I suspect that people who have seen or experienced this have never been comfortable with abortion of a healthy fetus past viability; however given the activism, being seen as pro-conservative/pro-christian was seen as bad, so a disincentive.

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Jun 29, 2022·edited Jun 29, 2022

I honestly don't see how you can do this. Even marriage has now been divorced from childbearing (see the arguments during marriage equality campaigns everywhere that 'no it doesn't matter if same-sex couples can't have kids themselves, marriage isn't about having kids anymore, straight couples use contraception and abortion and some choose never to have kids'), and the prevalent social attitude that we are seeing expressed in the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court decision that childbearing is a horrible burden which is nearly inevitably fatal to the woman (if it doesn't literally kill her, it will destroy her life, and abortion is way safer than delivering a baby) shows how you can't make this stick.

Any more than expectations of indissoluble marriage can be made to stick: yes, when I exchanged vows "until death do us part" I meant it then, but that was then and people change over time, and besides that's only metaphorical nowadays. I'm getting a divorce and if you don't like it, tough, that's why we have no-fault divorce.

So you'd be struggling with "sure, when I signed the contract I intended to get pregnant some day, but now you are demanding I have a baby and it just doesn't suit me right now, or I don't feel ready, or I've changed my mind about having kids, and you can't force me to do this".

Seriously, if you want to have a child, then don't mess about with pre-nuptial agreements or contracts about "five years from now". If both of you are willing, then try to get pregnant *now*. Don't put it off, because "some undefined time" will never happen. Or one or both of you might change your minds (which would be awkward if there *was* a legally enforceable document that you both had to become parents). If you feel you are ready to have a kid, do it today.

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There is definitely a sort of bottleneck in terms of how society creates the next generation. Is it inevitable that every final decision on birth is made by an individual acting in an individual capacity? (Usually a female person with her “own” choice.)

That may be inevitable. Because yes, short of surrogacy contracts (which I have not seen), there is no social or legal way to compel birth. The ending of RvW has been characterized as forced birth by some, but I think more accurately it’s forcing a reckoning with recreational sex.

I’ve never liked the feeling that a very important goal of mine would be arbited(!) by another individual. It just suddenly hit hard that for males, the goal of reproduction is controlled by the decision of another individual in a way that isn’t paralleled if genders are reversed (due to sperm donation and banking). Technology and surrogacy are making progress on this but it’s expensive.

I think those “herbal teas to prevent cramps” from ancient times were probably a very useful habit. Basically taking an herbal abortifacient at every menstrual cycle if one did not want a baby right then. I know they don’t always work and can make people sick but something like that makes sense to me in general. So I’m even sympathetic to the female desire/need to be the arbiter. About halfway through though I think a lot of people would quit if they could because pregnancy can be miserable. That’s when the “team” of society is supposed to provide help and support. I know I wasn’t prepared for the arrival of a little being that didn’t let me sleep and also somehow lived in the core of every unresolved fear. I think nobody really is. It’s an initiation. To me, I want there to be an event horizon such that if you cross that, you’re committed to making every effort to continue with the pregnancy (barring medical problems.) But there is no such consensus and maybe there never will be. Does that feel like a brick wall to the male? It might. How to conduct oneself to get voluntary and consistent alignment of one’s partner with one’s reproductive goals?

Maybe it was ever thus.

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Not a law expert, but I suspect that most if not all Western democracies would not allow it. It could raise incredibly difficult issues if a man (and... the government) forced a woman to give birth against her will, in most of the ways I can imagine that happening.

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It might be similar to a surrogacy contract and in that sense it makes sense that most Western democracies would not allow it. If someone agreed ahead of time it is not “forced birth” in the same way.

I was today years old when I realized how much this puts the man at the mercy of the woman. If there’s no legal way to get certainty, and personal certainty depends on the person and how they feel at the time, there’s every incentive to just compete to influence the woman’s feelings at any given moment. I understand a little better why some men say they don’t care about abortion. It makes no sense to care about an outcome they can’t control. Because even a seemingly committed partnership could unravel at any time. And then how can men and women take each other seriously in the workplace, when the minute you clock out it’s back to competing for the continued access to the female. Is this really heterosexuality? I even did this for years and did not see this side of it. I have to teach my sons how not to wind up creating abortions (someday I hope to have grandchildren ) and this is dismal. Unfortunately the answer may be something like marry a conservative girl and buy her everything she needs. Not what I expected. My naïveté!

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Marg: Pre-nups are a state by state thing. Some states give them wide latitude other states cock a snook at them. As a general rule, in Anglo-American law, contracts are about money and property. The baseline enforcement mechanism for contracts is a judgement for money damages, which may or may not be something you really want. And penalties unrelated to the economic values at stake are generally unenforceable.

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I think you might be confusing what the branches of government do here?

Also, ask yourself what a democratic abortion vote would have looked like 1972 when Roe v Wade was passed and would the original ruling itself be essentially judicial activism?

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Well, exactly. To paraphrase my question - judicial activism seems bad, but what if it's also what the people want?

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Then the people can encourage their representatives to amend the constitution in a way that updates the powers of the court.

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To put it differently again: is it necessarily a failure of the legislature when judicial activism is popular?

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Yes, it is. In the same way that it would be a failure of parenting if you only fed your kids the kind of sweet junk food they preferred to boring old vegetables.

If the people have been cheering on judicial activism when the decisions were going in the direction they liked, they haven't a leg to stand on when judicial activism starts making decisions they don't like. "When the referee rules in my favour, he's sensible and only following the rules; when he rules in your favour, he's biased and should be dismissed" is something even sports fans realise is not a workable way to run a game, even if it's understandable why they feel that way about their team.

If the legislature can't or won't do its job but leaves it to judges, then why have a legislature?

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Is/are there ACX in-person meetup groups in NYC? Or did the existing OB/LW group take its/their place?

Has anyone been attending the OB/LW group meetings? I just went to my first one in ... over a decade or something crazy. The meetup was fun!

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Has it changed to #e2edfc? I'm sure it was greener earlier. How about loading each time with a randomly generated background in the range #e0e0e0 to #ffffff and we can all vote on it?

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It did change, and this is a lot better in my opinion

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How about different background colors to different types of articles? Green = open thread, yellow = book review, red = culture wars, blue = nerdy stuff, purple = fiction...

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Substack does not have that functionality. A few more years of substack development and we'll be in 2003 and maybe that will be a possibility.

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I didn't notice a background color until the last two posts I've looked at. I assume it was plain white before.

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I was puzzled by that sudden background color change. In fact I was worried that I was seeing the non-subscriber view — and that I had been logged out or somehow my account had been deactivated. After checking my account, I saw that nothing had changed. But then I went looking for some sort of profile setting that I could have changed by accident. Then, I started to wonder if it had always had a light-blue background, and I had misremembered the white background. Talk about over-thinking things!

But thanks for confirming my reality!

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It was. Recent change, Scott's trying to restore a bit of the SSC feel.

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SSC was blue? I remember it as white.

Anyway, I was a little surprised by the change to pale blue. It might improve legibility, I'm not sure.

And I wouldn't mind different pastel backgrounds for different sorts of posts.

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White, but with blue side and top bars I believe.

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For those who are interested, Yann LeCun has posted A Path Towards Autonomous Machine Intelligence, https://openreview.net/forum?id=BZ5a1r-kVsf

Abstract: How could machines learn as efficiently as humans and animals? How could machines learn to reason and plan? How could machines learn representations of percepts and action plans at multiple levels of abstraction, enabling them to reason, predict, and plan at multiple time horizons? This position paper proposes an architecture and training paradigms with which to construct autonomous intelligent agents. It combines concepts such as configurable predictive world model, behavior driven through intrinsic motivation, and hierarchical joint embedding architectures trained with self-supervised learning.

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Jun 27, 2022·edited Jun 27, 2022

I was referring to Melvin's comment "Would a six-month lockdown of gay men be justified?" Perhaps I just misunderstand the phrasing, but lockdown doesn't sound like a guideline to me.

As for governmental advisory or information, I am much more open to that. But I am very skeptical that the advice to remain abstinent for six months would be taken serious. Not at the current (low) level of personal threat and with milder and probably more effective options available (disease detection, contact tracing, vaccination). Also, the benefits are doubtful; a voluntary "lockdown" suffers from the free-riders problem, and there is no guarantee that enough people would comply to contain the disease.

EDIT: Sigh, the reply system is broken. This was supposed to be a reply to a post by Acymetric, but that post seems to be gone.

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I’ve noticed a few ‘orphaned’ replies lately. Perhaps things are coded so if we respond to a deleted comment it is put at the top level.

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Yes possibly, but then the comment is usually still visible as "deleted", right?

In my case, it's even weirder. I got an email notification that someone replied to my comment (including the text and author of the reply). I hit "reply" in the email and wrote my reply, but then Acymetric's comment was not appearing anywhere, and my answer ended up at top level.

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Usually it is. I’ve been on the other side of this providing a ‘hot fix’ for a use case not covered in the spec. A hot fix has a way of breaking things in a new way.

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I want to complain again about the difficulty of finding the parents/context when linked to a specific comment. For example, in the discussion of the color change, someone linked to this comment by Scott: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-230/comment/7376659

But as far as I can tell there's no actual way to get from there to the comment he was replying to. The "Return to thread" link just goes back to the full comments of the post.

In short: Substack please fix your shit.

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I suspect the "return to thread" feature just (mostly) silently/invisibly fails and then spits you out into the full comments as a default.

And I suspect that ACX is almost uniquely stressing Substack's commenting features!

I still wish they would 'fix their shit', but I sympathize with (probably) how hard that really is, so I'm more inclined to ask nicely :)

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I believe that's true. When you click the link, the URL includes an ID tag meant to scroll you to the comment in question. I think what's happening is that the threads are long enough that most of the comments don't actually load on the initial page load, so it fails to find the target comment and just takes you to the top of the page.

And for what it's worth: I do this sort of thing professionally, so I do have a pretty good idea how hard it would be to fix: assuming a codebase I'm familiar with (and the languages I work with, etc), I'd expect to be able to solve this by myself in an afternoon. And I don't consider myself especially competent.

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That's definitely the kind of thing I'm imagining being wrong too!

I think I maybe have a slightly different perspective on why/how this is (or might be) hard to fix. _Assuming_ everything you do, the actual code changes are probably pretty minor, e.g. basically better { error handling / retry logic }.

But there _might_ be good reasons why they, apparently, opted to just load all of the comments instead of attempting to retry loading the data to jump to a specific one, e.g. they've checked/tested and it's 'better' for users (or better for them from the perspective of Substack) to load _something_ sooner than wait for the 'correct' content to finish loading.

But – in my experience – the work at the point where your assumptions are true is the _easy_ part. The hard part is, e.g. prioritizing this relative to all of the other work, navigating tradeoffs between assigning work to those who will be most efficient versus those who could stand to learn about the relevant part of the codebase, or whomever is assigned the work discovering that in fact _no one_ is currently familiar with the relevant part of the codebase!

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Literally saw this because I was trying to view a sub-thread and instead Substack sent me to the global convo. So, silver lining?

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Is there much in the way of empirical evidence that a skincare routine leads to better aesthetic outcomes in later years? Used to have acne when I used cleaning products, since I switched to rinsing with cold water I have none, and get complimented all the time. Intuitively I can make the connection that "moisturizing" could help, but I'm not convinced a chemical cocktail would necessarily outperform lots of water intake, a good diet and avoiding excess sun exposure, in the long-run.

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Jul 3, 2022·edited Jul 3, 2022

Isotretinoin helps with acne, the rest is snake oil.

IME - back when I still suffered from acne - bad skincare (e.g. washing your face with regular soap) is way worse than none. Perhaps for certain people there is no skincare that isn't bad, in this sense.

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founding

I came across an interesting 'thread' somewhere where the 'pro skincare' person/people were arguing that, while, yes, most skincare products are very similar, there are certain kinds/categories that _are_ in fact effective.

I did learn, as someone with 'bad' skin, that a good way to test any new product is to only use on one part of one's face/skin. I'd take photos on my phone, e.g. every day, whereas in the Before Times I'd have had to either write down text notes on paper, or type up notes on my computer. I guess I _could_ have taken photos (and then have them developed), but it's certainly easier to document this kind of thing with a phone almost always in my pocket!

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Empiricism in that area does have some caveats.

https://xkcd.com/700/

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Once upon a time (~6 months ago), somebody left a comment somewhere on ACX saying they were looking for work as a data/software person in corporate research. But the plot twist is, I now want to talk to a data/software person about corporate research.

If you fit this description, please let me know. Alternatively, if you are routinely scraping ACX comments and tagging them in a searchable way using ML... uh, maybe I should just talk to you.

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Jun 27, 2022·edited Jun 27, 2022

Can someone give me a just-the-facts summary of the impact of the Dobbs v. Jackson decision, with minimal editorializing, and emphasis on any points that are not likely to be covered by the standard culture-war hot-takes? Bonus points for Georgia- or Atlanta-specific information.

(context: I live in GA, don't particularly want kids, and am trying to determine whether I need to examine the fallout of the decision *right now* or can afford to wait until things settle before deciding if/what to do about it. I don't trust standard news sources to tell me what is useful information over whatever makes the punchiest story.)

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founding

What do you imagine you would need to do *right now*, and why? If you're not currently pregnant, and you're not careless/inobservant enough that you could plausibly discover tomorrow that you are four months pregnant, then I don't see anything that couldn't be handled by waiting until you hypothetically discover you are (1-2 months) pregnant and figuring out then what to do about it.

It's possible that the answer would then be, "take a week's 'vacation' in New York on short notice", which would be annoyingly disruptive to be sure but probably less so than "relocate permanently to New York right now, just in case".

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Because the majority of abortions are pill-based these days, and the AG and FDA have come out strong that FDA approved medications cannot be banned by states from being prescribed and fulfilled by mail, the impact on anyone with any degree of education/sophistication/money is going to be minimal. If you know you want an abortion, and you have a few hundred dollars in emergency funds, this will not impact you at all. The impact is going to be on the stupid/unsophisticated/poor/indecisive.

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> am trying to determine whether I need to examine the fallout of the decision *right now* or can afford to wait until things settle before deciding if/what to do about it.

If you're not pregnant *right now* then I'm sure you can afford to wait.

Whatever happens it's extremely unlikely that any state will be able to prevent or punish people who cross state lines for abortions. So as long as you can afford to take a quick interstate trip there's no need to worry.

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Jun 27, 2022·edited Jun 27, 2022

GA had a law to ban abortions after 6 weeks that was rejected initially on hitting federal courts.

That decision was appealed, but the appeal was delayed until after Dobbs was decided. As a result, the odds are GA has a 6-week ban within the next year.

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This isn't wrong, but it understates how soon, and with how high a degree of certainty, the 6-week ban is likely to go into effect.

What will happen now is that the 11th Circuit will enter an order vacating the judgment below and dissolving the injunction against enforcement of the law. That's likely to happen on a timeline of days or weeks at most.

The 6-week ban is a validly enacted Georgia statute, so nothing more needs to happen for it to take effect, and at that point there would be no legal obstacle to Georgia proceeding to enforce it.

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Others may do a better job of this but the high level TLDR as I see it is that states (and the Federal government, if it wants) can now freely regulate abortion as they see fit with minimal scrutiny from federal courts.

A Federal abortion rights law, Federal abortion ban, or anything in between seems unlikely to be forthcoming in the immediate term, so for now if you're looking for a "how this would affect me" kind of analysis you really look at your own state and what abortion laws it has or is likely to pass.

https://www.ajc.com/news/georgia-news/abortion-in-georgia-here-is-whats-currently-legal-and-not/DN5AHUQQLNFJTP4RZ6UTA3BULI/

Not a GA Attorney or expert on Georgia abortion law, but it sounds like at the moment Georgia law allows abortion within 20 weeks of gestation, and since Georgia does not currently have a "trigger law" that would change that automatically, the question for your situation would be "what is the GA government likely to do now that it's hands are pretty freed up on abortion?"

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The new background colour is making the site take noticeably longer to load, including when expanding comments.

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Just now, when I visited this page I noticed the unusually long load time and mentally commented on the ridiculousness of it. I wouldn't have physically commented on it if I hadn't seen your comment, but to provide a datapoint: this was my experience.

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author

I'm not noticing this and it doesn't make sense to me; can someone who knows more about web design confirm whether this is a thing that can happen?

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It would be ridiculously unlikely, it is just case of degraded performance accidentally happening at the same time.

I can imagine such custom style screwing with caches but that would be really ridiculous.

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founding

That doesn't make sense to me either and I'm a web developer (tho not particularly 'design' focused).

I would bet at long odds that this isn't the culprit of whatever Rachael is observing.

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I only briefly took a look but it doesn't look like the color is changing it. What IS taking a long time is loading all the comments including Substack's call to get the unread comments per account.

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I'm seeing the same comments loading slowly issue.

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Yes, I've had the sense that comments/pages are taking longer to load for weeks now.

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I'm sure someone could manage to make it be the case that a bgcolor would increase site load time, but... you'd have to do something impressively stupid to manage it. A solid bgcolor like this should not meaningfully affect performance of a site even if you're loading the site on a potato.

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The only plausible idea I have is custom style screwing cache handling.

(but I am not expecting this at all!)

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Something new with the turquoise background on the site today?

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Scott is trying a new background color. Discussed a bit in earlier comments.

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I've been reading up a lot on the other contentious Supreme Court case that was published last week.

In the case of New York State Rifle and Pistol Association vs. Bruen, many organizations sent briefs supporting the action of striking down the law.

Among those organizations: many legal-aid agencies and minority-rights associations argued that the New York law about concealed-carry had a severely-disproportionate effect on minorities. A huge number of those arrested for illegal gun possession in New York were either Black or Latino. The lawyers of the Bronx Defenders, Brooklyn Defenders Services, and the Legal Aid Society all argued that gun rights were a 'legal fiction' for minorities under that law.

The opinion of the Supreme Court barely mentioned this factor.

Do you think that the racial-impact factors should have been considered in deciding this case?

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No, but only because it wasn't argued. I think that there absolutely is space for such a ruling, but to get the best one out of the court, full arguments by both sides should be made.

Don't worry, California is doubling down on the "good moral character" part of thier system, and that is probably very vulnerable to this kind of analysis. You know, because their origin is the same as the poll tax or the other Jim Crow era laws targeting free black citizens

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I thought about this issue on and off for several days...which probably makes me late to reply.

This issue can be hard to discuss for two separate reasons:

A. The kind of racial-impact disparity seen in the prosecutions of gun-related crimes is the kind of disparity that often results in cries of racism, with a possible side-order of Remake/TransformIntoAntiRacist/Defund the agencies involved.

B. Per comments in another Open Thread recently: laws about posession/use of firearms are a weird exception to the general progressive/liberal idea that rules should be reduced where possible, and people are generally good and can be trusted to do the right thing.

Maybe I'm not representing this point accurately, but the gist of the discussion was that conservatives generally have a lower opinion of human nature than progressives/liberals, and that therefore people should expect conservatives to be in favor of strict laws about things like firearms (which are easy to use/misuse with catastrophic results), and progressives ought to be more relaxed.

The facts on the ground are that politicians in dense urban areas tend to be in favor of strong restrictions on firearms. These politicians are usually liberal/progressive.

Anyway, in the specific of racial minorities who are over-represented among those charged for carrying guns illegally, there might be several factors:

1. They were not intent on committing a crime, likely have no criminal record, but were discovered when the cops detected the weapon somehow. (Investigating an event inside the home, discovering the gun while interviewing them as a witness to some other crime, or finding the gun while hassling the person for being Poor-and-Minority...)

2. The person was likely intent on committing a crime with the gun, or had committed a related crime that is harder to prove. The Police got lucky and discovered the gun, and can prove that this person didn't have a license (or had a previous conviction for something which makes it illegal to possess a gun).

Both kinds of cases are likely to come to court as 'person illegally possessing a gun', and possibly with no other charges files.

The typical conservative (or even libertarian) would want to require Police to go easy on case 1, but would like the Police to go hard on case 2.

The typical progressive or liberal is more likely to say that case 1 is sad, but the problem can be fixed by reducing the number of guns in circulation, thus reducing scenarios like case 2.

I think the court case pushes the State and City of New York in a direction of making permits-to-carry much easier to acquire. This would help many poor people in case 1 to explore the option of getting an official permit-to-carry. This appears to be a better option than having to decide between not carrying a firearm in an area where they feel it might be needed, and risking discovery by the Police of a firearm carried without a permit.

In my opinion, the ruling indirectly helps many of the poor/minority people, without the ruling hinging on their racial or economic status.

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Alito actually did bring this up during the oral arguments at the SC.

Probably not relevant in the legal opinion that was handed down because they decided that everyone’s rights were being infringed.

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I'm not an American and was trying to understand what difference the Roe v Wade overturning makes, but it's very difficult to get a clear picture.

Like, it would be nice to see something that tells me what percentage of American women of child bearing age are likely to have - no access to abortion at all, and what percentage have access till what gestational age e.g what percentage till 6, till 12, 18, 24 weeks etc.

I would have thought this should be the most basic statistic that anyone who wants to understand the impact of this ruling would want to look at first. Yet, it's nowhere to be found. Anyone here have any idea?

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Guttmacher Institute for your abortion news needs. I won't say they're complete, and they have a slant since they are pro- the whole 'reproductive justice' thing, but they are the only easily accessible site I've found doing this kind of research:

https://www.guttmacher.org/

https://www.guttmacher.org/news-release/2022/abortion-after-roe-new-comprehensive-map-tracks-abortion-policies-and-statistics

The next time you hear someone going on about "abortion for rape/incest", this was the site gave me information on reasons for abortions. The survey is very dated (it comes from 2005), but it was something like 1% of abortions carried out for rape, 0.5% for incest:

https://www.guttmacher.org/journals/psrh/2005/reasons-us-women-have-abortions-quantitative-and-qualitative-perspectives

"The reasons most frequently cited were that having a child would interfere with a woman's education, work or ability to care for dependents (74%); that she could not afford a baby now (73%); and that she did not want to be a single mother or was having relationship problems (48%). Nearly four in 10 women said they had completed their childbearing, and almost one-third were not ready to have a child. Fewer than 1% said their parents' or partners' desire for them to have an abortion was the most important reason. Younger women often reported that they were unprepared for the transition to motherhood, while older women regularly cited their responsibility to dependents."

https://www.guttmacher.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/tables/370305/3711005t2.pdf

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Which shows that the best pro-life policy is probably a policy of support for single mothers in particular and child rearing in general.

I'd really like an "effective pro-life movement".

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Yeah, imagine if pro-lifers had actually created centers for counseling pregnant women that provided resources for adoption and single parenting.

Oh wait... https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-attacks-on-crisis-pregnancy-centers-janes-revenge-abortion-roe-v-wade-violence-destroyed-11655653644

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Exactly. The solution to 'childhood poverty' should not be "let's kill the poor kids before they can be born!"

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"Childhood poverty" is a euphemism for "poor people having children."

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Wow now, let's not let the mask slip off our soft eugenics program. Can't be having that.

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Surely the best pro-life policy is to prevent unwanted children from being conceived at all?

Pill plus condom should be industry standard for premarital sex.

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I mostly agree, but in practice easy access to contraception does not seem to really help with abortions - well at least pill and condoms are readily accessible in our countries and the number of abortions does not seem to go down.

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The number of abortions in the US at least has been steadily declining for a couple decades. I'd probably blame that on contraception

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It has ? Well that's a good news. Yay for contraception I guess.

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I would be happy to see some of my tax money spent on *free* condoms and pills... but the question is how many people are too stupid to use them properly, or simply don't care.

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But don't you know that won't work at all? Seriously, if I believed the hysteria I'm seeing online about this, there is no such thing as contraception, every woman who has sex is going to get pregnant, and only for abortion they'd be popping out babies every year.

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If you have regular sex during all your childbearing years, even with contraception, there’s a significant probability you will get pregnant at some point. Just think of the volume of the sex a person has over 30 fertile years, and all it takes is one unwanted pregnancy to drastically alter a woman’s life against her will. It’s like being a safe driver who drives for decades and gets in a fender bender once. We don’t moralize against that driver. Women need the tools to manage their health and well-being without the handcuffs of evangelical Christian morals.

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>If you have regular sex during all your childbearing years, even with contraception

Somebody, somewhere, needs to tell pro choicers how much sympathy they lose when they use the sexual freedom thing in an argument.

Like somebody should show them The Sympathy Bar in real time, as it drops menacingly ever closer to 0, after every appeal to The Right To Be A Slut. There has to be a better way to argue for unrestricted abortion.

>without the handcuffs of evangelical Christian morals

You give Christians way too much credit, they are neither the first ones to discover the curious fact that sexual promiscuity is a repulsive and devaluing way of living, nor do they have a monopoly on living by that fact even if they were the ones who discovered it.

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> Just think of the volume of the sex a person has over 30 fertile years

This varies a lot by person.

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If a driver killed someone to avoid the consequences of his fender bender, I think most people would moralise against him, and rightly so.

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Jun 27, 2022·edited Jun 27, 2022

I'm pretty sure that condom + 1 of the several options of female birth control reduce even the long term aggregate risk of pregnancy to negligible levels. Any single method alone can fail (although the "correctly used" failure rates are significantly lower than the "real world" failure rates), but two together are _very_ unlikely (especially if one of them is a low-maintenance method like an IUD or implant).

Now, I'm personally pro-choice and against the recent ruling (on a whole host of grounds), but I don't think that "Long term aggregate pregnancy risk is too high" is a good argument against it.

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You gotta examine the rational behind the prime movers of the forced birth movement (if I may be allowed to slant the name).

The majority of the push for restricting reproductive freedom is from evangelical Christians; who are less concerned with welfare and more concerned with morality.

The problem isn't that 'children are being killed', it's that moral norms are being violated.

Rewarding single mothers with support goes directly against the goals of the forced birth movement, which is to enforce moral behavior.

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The tone of your comment seems to be precisely tuned for maximal good faith debate, well done.

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Can we also condemn the forced liver cirrhosis movement? Just because I drink a bottle of whiskey a day, it's not fair that the medical establishment force me to have a bad liver instead of giving me a new one every year!

Imagine the horror of doing a thing which will produce a particular result. and then that result happens! I should be free to jump off cliffs and not have gravity pull me down!

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The consequence of not foraging for berries or hunting game is starving to death, yet I haven't done either and I'm doing fine.

The very point of technology is to shield people from consequences they don't like.

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A straightforward reading of the analogy would imply that each woman should be given only a single chance to abortion during her entire lifetime, which is... actually a novel opinion to consider.

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Jun 27, 2022·edited Jun 27, 2022

Before the Roe-v-Wade case was decided in 1973, different States had different laws about abortion. Some forbade it entirely (including Texas, the state that 'Jane Roe' lived in when she filed her lawsuit).

The Roe-v-Wade case claimed that the U.S. Consititution forbade such restrictions on abortions. A later case, Planned-Parenthood-vs-Casey, changed the limits of what was Constitutionally allowed. (Roe used a trimester-standard, while PP-vs-Casey used a viability-standard. )

The Dobbs case overruled both. It appears to state that the various States could put limits on abortion if the legislatures chose to.

Of interest: the Mississippi law that was challenged and upheld in the Dobbs case forbade abortions after the 15th week of gestation. Many others nations have laws of similar strictness on abortion. What laws are you familiar with in your part of the world?

EDIT: the Wiki page on the Dobbs case has a map of the apparent limitations on abortion in various States. It's a little hard to link that up to percentages-of-population-affected, but it is a start.

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Talking about the Mississippi law, or other sub-second trimester bans, as existing law is kind of silly. A lot of red states were trying to pass laws that would push abortion restrictions to the limit of post-Roe jurisprudence, now that there is no Roe to push against they will probably go the whole hog as fast as possible.

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Red state politicians have never previously had to care about the differences in popularity of a complete ban vs a 6 week ban vs a first-trimester ban, and were free to virtue-signal for primary points by being HARD ON ABORTION.

I expect there will be a lot of compromise in practice and very few complete bans.

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This doesn’t track with the “life begins at conception” rationale claimed by anti-abortion advocates. What evidence do we have that there is a willingness to compromise?

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